The Brief

In 1995, a leading group of scientists convened by the United Nations declared that they had detected a “human influence” on global temperatures with “effectively irreversible” consequences. In the coming decades, 99.9 percent of scientists would come to agree that burning fossil fuels had disrupted the Earth’s climate.

Yet almost 30 years after that warning, during the hottest year on Earth in 125,000 years, people are still arguing that the science is unreliable, or that the threat is real but we shouldn’t do anything about climate change. Conspiracies are thriving online, according to a report by the coalition Climate Action Against Disinformation released last month, in time for the U.N. climate conference in Dubai. Over the past year, posts with the hashtag #climatescam have gotten more likes and retweets on the platform known as X than ones with #climatecrisis or #climateemergency.

By now, anyone looking out the window can see flowers blooming earlier and lakes freezing later. Why, after all this time, do 15 percent of Americans fall for the lie that global warming isn’t happening? And is there anything that can be done to bring them around to reality? New research suggests that understanding why fake news is compelling to people can tell us something about how to defend ourselves against it.

People buy into bad information for different reasons, said Andy Norman, an author and philosopher who co-founded the Mental Immunity Project, which aims to protect people from manipulative information. Due to quirks of psychology, people can end up overlooking inconvenient facts when confronted with arguments that support their beliefs. “The more you rely on useful beliefs at the expense of true beliefs, the more unhinged your thinking becomes,” Norman said. Another reason people are drawn to conspiracies is that they feel like they’re in on a big, world-transforming secret: Flat Earthers think they’re seeing past the illusions the vast majority don’t.

The annual U.N. climate summits often coincide with a surge in misleading information on social media. As COP28 ramped up in late November, conspiracy theories circulated claiming that governments were trying to cause food shortages by seizing land from farmers, supposedly using climate change as an excuse. Spreading lies about global warming like these can further social divisions and undermine public and political support for action to reduce emissions, according to the Climate Action Against Disinformation report. It can also lead to harassment: Some 73 percent of climate scientists who regularly appear in the media have experienced online abuse.

Part of the problem is the genuine appeal of fake news. A recent study in Nature Human Behavior found that climate change disinformation was more persuasive than scientific facts. Researchers at the University of Geneva in Switzerland had originally intended to see if they could help people fend off disinformation, testing different strategies on nearly 7,000 people from 12 countries, including the United States, India, and Nigeria. Participants read a paragraph intended to strengthen their mental defenses — reminders of the scientific consensus around climate change, the trustworthiness of scientists, or the moral responsibility to act, for example. Then they were subjected to a barrage of 20 real tweets that blamed warming on the sun and the “wavy” jet stream, spouted conspiracies about “the climate hoax devised by the U.N.,” and warned that the elites “want us to eat bugs.”

The interventions didn’t work as hoped, said Tobia Spampatti, an author of the study and a neuroscience researcher at the University of Geneva. The flood of fake news — meant to simulate what people encounter in social media echo chambers — had a big effect. Reading the tweets about bogus conspiracies lowered people’s belief that climate change was happening, their support for action to reduce emissions, and their willingness to do something about it personally. The disinformation was simply more compelling than scientific facts, partly because it plays with people’s emotions, Spampatti said (eliciting anger toward elites who want you to eat bugs, for example). The only paragraph that helped people recognize falsehoods was one that prompted them to evaluate the accuracy of the information they were seeing, a nudge that brought some people back to reality.

Conspiracy theorists protest at busy roundabout in the village of Martlesham in Suffolk, England, Sept. 18, 2022.

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The study attempted to use “pre-bunking,” a tactic to vaccinate people against fake news. While the effort flopped, Norman said that doesn’t mean it shows “inoculation” is ineffective. Spampatti and other researchers’ effort to fortify people’s mental defenses used a new, broader approach to pre-bunking, trying to protect against a bunch of lines of disinformation at once, that didn’t work as well as tried-and-true inoculation techniques, according to Norman.

Norman says it’s crucial that any intervention to stop the spread of disinformation comes with a “weakened dose” of it, like a vaccine, to help people understand why someone might benefit from lying. For example, when the Biden administration learned of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin’s plans to invade Ukraine in late 2021, the White House began warning the world that Russia would push a false narrative to justify the invasion, including staging a fake, graphic video of a Ukrainian attack on Russian territory. When the video came out, it was quickly dismissed as fake news. “It was a wildly successful attempt to inoculate much of the world against Putin’s preferred narrative about Ukraine,” Norman said.

For climate change, that approach might not succeed — decades of oil-funded disinformation campaigns have already infected the public. “It’s really hard to think about someone who hasn’t been exposed to climate skepticism or disinformation from fossil fuel industries,” said Emma Frances Bloomfield, a communication professor at the University of Nevada, Los Vegas. “It’s just so pervasive. They have talking heads who go on news programs, they flood media publications and the internet, they pay lobbyists.”

Bloomfield argues that disinformation sticks for a reason, and that simply telling the people who fall for it that there’s a scientific consensus isn’t enough. “They’re doubting climate change because they doubt scientific authorities,” Bloomfield said. “They’re making decisions about the environment, not based on the facts or the science, but based on their values or other things that are important to them.”

While political identity can explain some resistance to climate change, there are other reasons people dismiss the evidence, as Bloomfield outlines in her upcoming book Science v. Story: Narrative Strategies for Science Communicators. “In the climate change story, we’re the villains, or at least partially blameworthy for what’s happening to the environment, and it requires us to make a lot of sacrifices,” Bloomfield said. “That’s a hard story to adopt because of the role we’re playing within it.” Accepting climate change, to some degree, means accepting inner conflict. You always know you could do more to lower your carbon footprint, whether that’s ditching meat, refusing to fly, or wearing your old clothes until they’re threadbare and ratty.

By contrast, embracing climate denial allows people to identify as heroes, Bloomfield said. They don’t have to do anything differently, and might even see driving around in a gas-guzzling truck as part of God’s plan. It’s a comforting narrative, and certainly easier than wrestling with ethical dilemmas or existential dread.

Protesters march after a demonstration near Heathrow Airport west of London, Aug.20, 2007.

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Those seeking to amplify tensions around climate change or spread doubt, such as fossil fuel companies, social media trolls, and countries like Russia and China, get a lot of bang for their buck. “It’s a lot easier and cheaper to push doubt than to push certainty,” Bloomfield said. Oil companies including Shell, ExxonMobil, and BP spent about $4 million to $5 million on Facebook ads related to social issues and politics this year, according to the Climate Action Against Disinformation report. To sow doubt, you only need to arouse some suspicion. Creating a bullet-proof case for something is much harder — it might take thousands of scientific studies (or debunking hundreds of counterarguments one by one, as Grist did in 2006).

The most straightforward way to fight disinformation would be to stop it from happening in the first place, Spampatti said. But even if regulators were able to get social media companies to try to stop the spread of conspiracy theories and falsehoods, dislodging them is a different story. One promising approach, “deep canvassing,” seeks to persuade people through nonjudgmental, one-on-one conversations. The outreach method, invented by LGBTQ+ advocates, involves hearing people’s concerns and helping them work through their conflicted feelings. (Remember how accepting climate change means accepting you might be a tiny part of the problem?)

Research has shown that deep canvassing isn’t just successful at reducing transphobia, but also that its effects can last for months, a long time compared to other interventions. The strategy can work for other polarizing problems, too, based on one experiment in a rural metal-smelting town in British Columbia. After convincing several local governments across the West Kootenay region to shift to 100 percent renewable energy, volunteers with the nonprofit Neighbors United kept running into difficulties in the town of Trail, where they encountered distrust of environmentalists. They spoke to hundreds of residents, listening to their worries about losing jobs, finding common ground, and telling personal stories about climate change like friends would, instead of debating the facts like antagonists. A stunning 40 percent of residents shifted their beliefs, and Trail’s city council voted in 2022 to shift to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050.

Both facts and stories have a place, Bloomfield said. For conservative audiences, she suggests that climate advocates move away from talking about global systems and scientists with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — a “nameless, faceless, nebulous group of people” — and toward local matters and people they actually know. Getting information from friends, family, and other trusted individuals can really help.

“They’re not necessarily as authoritative as the IPCC,” Bloomfield said. “But it helps you connect with that information, and you trust that person, so you trust that information that they’re resharing.”

Insurance is a social contract. When you sign up with State Farm or Allstate for home insurance, you confirm your membership in a community — your money will go to fix someone else’s burned or flooded home, and their money will in turn support yours. We let insurance companies sell policies on a private market, and we elect or appoint government officials to oversee that market to protect the interests of homeowners.

That’s how it’s supposed to work, but that’s not how it worked for Lynn McIntyre.

When McIntyre’s mother died in 2022, she willed McIntyre her longtime house in the “Alphabets,” a charming neighborhood not far from the coast in western Los Angeles. McIntyre and her daughter had only lived there for a year when her insurance company, Liberty Mutual, withdrew her fire coverage. She couldn’t find another private company to cover the home’s fire risk, so she enrolled in the California FAIR Plan, a state-backed “insurer of last resort,” paying another $5,000 a year in addition to her regular home insurance from Liberty.

After the Palisades Fire raged through the Alphabets in early 2025, McIntyre’s small bungalow was still standing. But it was full of smoke and ash that had crept in through vents and windows, and her belongings were stained beyond recognition by smoke. When she filed a claim with the FAIR Plan, the plan adjusters told her she was out of luck. They would pay for a temporary apartment, but nothing else.

Lynn McIntyre stands in front of her damaged home in the Alphabet Streets. McIntyre’s home suffered extensive smoke damage during the Palisades Fire, but the California FAIR Plan offered her almost no rebuilding assistance.

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McIntyre, who had worked for years as a real estate broker, spent months battling with 10 different adjusters and dozens of FAIR Plan representatives. It didn’t work. The employees batted her away at every turn, hiring third-party adjusters failed to get her anywhere, and her attorney professed himself confounded by FAIR’s obstinance. Even as most of her neighbors cleared their debris and started building new fire-resilient homes, many of them much larger than their old properties, her old bungalow sat stained with smoke.

It was only in late August, more than 18 months after the wildfire, that she was about to start repairing her home — not with insurance money, but with a nearly $200,000 loan from the federal government that she will someday have to pay back. To make matters worse, FAIR has been trying to cut off her apartment expenses, telling her that power and water have come back online in her area and that she needs to move back home — never mind that her house still has boarded-up windows and a scorched exterior. Meanwhile, Liberty Mutual informed her this summer that they would be canceling her non-fire coverage.

“The next time a fire comes through, I'm just going to light it on fire, because I'm not going to go through this again,” McIntyre said wryly as we stood in her doorway, construction machines rattling at the other houses around us.

An aerial view of reconstruction efforts underway in Pacific Palisades after the Palisades Fire. Many residents of the community lost insurance coverage before the fire, forcing them to enroll in the California FAIR Plan.

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Ensuring that Californians like McIntyre have access to affordable insurance falls to an elected official that many Californians have likely never heard of: the insurance commissioner. The commissioner, one of eight elected state officials in California, regulates the companies that provide fire, home, and auto coverage in the Golden State.

Over the last eight years, the incumbent insurance commissioner presided over what parties on all sides have called a “disaster,” a “crisis” and a “collapse” in the state’s home insurance market. Now, as the current commissioner terms out, two Democratic candidates — Ben Allen and Jane Kim — have emerged claiming they can fix it. These candidates embody a debate in the Democratic Party about the best way to adapt to climate change. Allen, an established legislator representing Pacific Palisades, wants to rebuild the market, and Kim, a left-wing organizer from San Francisco, wants to ditch the idea of a private market altogether.

Whoever wins in November will inherit an insurance system battered by a decade of devastating wildfires, insurers pulling out of the state, and other upheaval. Climate change and decades of poor forest management have turned California’s woodlands into tinderboxes, and the problem will only get worse as the planet continues to warm. The current crisis in the insurance market began with a series of unprecedented wildfires between 2015 and 2020. These fires scorched around 4 million acres and destroyed 35,000 homes, many in areas that had never been known to burn. Insurance companies like State Farm and Farmers had to pay out billions of dollars in claims, enough to negate the profits they had made from writing fire insurance policies over the previous two decades.

The companies believed they were charging Californians far too little, but the price of insurance isn’t elastic like the price of gasoline or paper towels. Insurers have to seek permission from the state insurance commissioner to raise their prices. California was strict about those price hikes, and it blocked insurers’ attempts to pass their post-fire bill onto the state’s homeowners. The insurance industry’s response was to ditch California. They dropped tens of thousands of customers across the state, and companies like State Farm announced they would withdraw from the state altogether and cease writing any new policies.

“There's something broken that so many of us are facing the same issues,” McIntyre said, “and they just think they can just ride roughshod right on over all of us.”

The lack of available insurance is starting to hurt the state’s economy: Around 1 in 7 California realtors said they had a home sale fall through in 2024 due to insurance issues, the state’s FAIR plan ran out of claims money last year, and average premiums could rise by 16% this year. The trend is now spreading out of the most flammable zones, and many homeowners even in low-risk areas are struggling to get insurance.

The outcome of the November election could determine the trajectory of insurance bills for millions of Californians and decide the fate of fire-prone areas around the state. The election will also serve as a bellwether for how voters in the United States want to approach the expensive and difficult process of adapting to a warming world, and whoever wins will have to turn that mandate into a policy that can offer short-term relief. This would be a daunting job under the best of times, and these are not the best of times.

A sign in front of a State Farm insurance office in Pinole, California. State Farm is one of several insurance companies that dropped policies in risky areas following California’s spate of large wildfires.

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The roots of the insurance crisis

The current insurance crisis is new, but its origins are very old. Over the last century, California has built millions of homes in the “wildland-urban interface,” the flammable zone outside the state’s major cities. Developers rushed out into the mountains around Lake Tahoe and the desert hills east of San Diego and built without any thought for fire mitigation, throwing up homes with wooden sidings and flammable fences on crowded lots. These are the areas that are burning up in the state’s recent wildfires, and the areas that insurers are dropping en masse.

This history of unwise development has created a bizarre situation that the scholar Carolyn Kousky has dubbed “a tale of two markets.” Prices ticked up in places that weren’t risky, like wet San Francisco and low-lying Fresno, but the market went haywire in risky areas like Malibu and the High Sierras. Nearly half of all households in high-fire-risk areas lost their insurance between 2018 and 2024. The California FAIR Plan, which was intended as a fringe supplement, became the only option for thousands of homeowners. Since 2018, it has swallowed up a huge share of policies in risky areas, growing from less than 1 to 5% of the market today. In some places, it reached 80% of market share.

In theory, California voters have some influence over their haywire insurance market. Every state has an insurance commissioner, but California is one of around a dozen states where that is an elected position. The fact that it’s elected at all is a testament to the strength of the state’s pro-consumer slant — in 1988, voters who were incensed about high car insurance prices passed a measure that turned it from an appointed position into an elected one.

In practice, this is a job no one should want. The commissioner has the power to approve or deny rate increases, and to police the industry’s compliance with state law. They also oversee the FAIR Plan, the state-backed insurer, which offers limited and expensive coverage to people like McIntyre who can’t get it on the private market. But the commissioner can’t do much else to make private insurers offer coverage or to reduce overall fire risk in wildland areas.

“The insurance commissioner has a lot of power and authority himself or herself that they should use, but the insurance commissioner alone cannot address these challenges,” said Dave Jones, who served as commissioner between 2010 and 2019.

California’s incumbent insurance commissioner Ricardo Lara, right, talks with homeowner Bruce Breslau following a 2024 public hearing in Los Angeles. Lara has faced criticism for failing to prevent private insurance companies from pulling out of risky areas.

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The outgoing commissioner, Ricardo Lara, has been in office for almost the entirety of the state’s fire-induced market collapse. Lara vacillated between cozying up with the insurers or clamping down on them and running the risk that they might flee the state. First he pledged to reject all insurance industry campaign money, then accepted some of that money, then appeared to cover for it by stalling on rate increases, which led insurers like State Farm to drop more policies.

Lara’s attempt at resolving the crisis was to strike a deal with the companies. He allowed them to pass on the cost of their reinsurance (or insurance for insurance companies) to customers, and he also allowed them to use forward-looking catastrophe models to predict future risk, something every other state had already allowed. That would translate to higher rates, and in return the insurers had to commit to writing more policies in the risky fire areas they wanted to abandon. But the deal turned out to be full of loopholes — insurers can meet their mandate without returning to the riskiest areas, and the state FAIR Plan has kept absorbing more market share after the Los Angeles fires in 2025. Lara said in an interview with The New York Times earlier this year that the industry had “bullied” him. (His office declined interview requests, and representatives for the FAIR Plan did not respond to requests for comment.)

The next insurance commissioner

Despite the entrenched nature of the state’s insurance problems, a dozen candidates piled into the election to replace Lara. This led to a crowded primary between four Democrats, five Republicans and two independents; none of the candidates had the funding to run a full statewide campaign, and there was limited public polling. The results were surprising even to the candidates. The top two candidates who advanced to the November runoff were Democrats. In first place with around 27% was Kim, a former San Francisco supervisor and Bernie Sanders ally who had pitched a government-run single-payer program for disaster insurance. In second place was Allen, the state senator who represents the Palisades and is one of the legislature’s foremost experts on insurance.

Allen and Kim agree on a lot. They both believe in simplifying typical insurance policies and forcing companies to be transparent about their spending and investment in fossil fuels. They both believe in beefing up the FAIR Plan so it would cover smoke and other damages, which would have saved McIntyre from months of confusion and delay. They have both vowed to crack down on insurers who delay and nitpick claim payments after disasters. And they have both rejected campaign contributions from the insurance industry.

Where they differ is on the question of how to get people off the FAIR Plan and stabilize the market — in other words, on the fundamental question of the state’s insurance system. Allen believes that if the state allows insurers to raise rates on risky homes, invests to harden homes in vulnerable areas, and takes a data-driven approach to measuring wildfire risk, it can entice insurers back and restore a healthy market. Kim would prefer to discard the market altogether. She proposes creating a state-run public insurance program for all homes and all disasters, replacing private companies and the FAIR Plan. Rather than doling out profits to investors, this program would spend its excess revenue to harden old homes against wildfire. Private insurance companies could still write coverage for burglary and other perils, but the state government would collect all fire insurance and pay out all claims, a model based on similar programs in New Zealand and France.

The philosophical debate in the election is much deeper than a question of state policies or affordability — it’s about whether the private market can protect us against climate change at all.

State Senator Ben Allen hosts a discussion with local leaders and residents to mark 100 days since the Palisades Fire.

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Carlin Stiehl

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Allen believes it can. He decided to run for commissioner after the Palisades Fire scorched a good portion of his district, plunging many of his close friends and acquaintances into a hell of displacement and insurance litigation. (Indeed, many of the Palisades homeowners I met knew him on a first-name basis, including McIntyre, who is supporting him in the election.) Even before that, he had already spent several years leading state legislative committees on insurance, energy, and wildfire risk, making him arguably the most qualified person in the state for the commissioner job.

“I think we need someone in this office who really understands climate science, who understands the markets, who understands the legislature,” he said. The Palisades Fire, he said, gave him a “level of understanding from going through the experience that is just different” — he heard about friends trying to itemize vaporized dining room furniture and saw phosphate pollution harming marine mammals in the water off his home in Santa Monica.

Rather than use the insurance commissioner post to push for a major statutory change like Kim’s public fund, Allen speaks about the commissioner as having a poder de convocatoria, a Spanish phrase that translates to “convening power.” He wants to bring together the state agencies and the insurance industry to have a real conversation about reducing fire risk and cajole the state’s market back into existence. He has just passed a bill that offers low-interest loans to homeowners who want to fire-harden their homes. He wants to pursue a sort of grand bargain with the industry, speeding up rate increase decisions while also disciplining the insurers who delay and deny claims.

Kim’s audacious proposal may be gaining more traction than Allen’s proposed compromise. She outperformed Allen in the primary in almost every county, including in his home county of Los Angeles, and given her progressive background, she did fairly well in the rural and red parts of the state. She admits her strong performance is partially “a mystery to me,” but attributes it to the fact that many voters are fed up with the insurance industry.

California insurance commissioner candidate Jane Kim speaks to reporters during a rally in San Francisco. Kim is pitching a single-payer disaster insurance model that would replace the private market for wildfire coverage.

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“There's this sense of immense unfairness, and once we articulate the problem, and then on top of that, actually propose big policy ideas, I think that that resonates,” she told me. We were speaking at a home in San Francisco’s Presidio Heights, where Kim was attending a fundraiser for the radical climate activism group Climate Defiance.

Some experts are skeptical of a government takeover in the style Kim is proposing. Jones, the former insurance commissioner, said the program has two key flaws. First, Kim’s promise to keep insurance affordable could mean keeping prices too low on mansions in fire-prone areas, where homeowners may currently pay premiums that are inadequate to their risk. Second, insurers in California are required to have tens of billions of dollars in extra cash to pay during big loss events, and Kim’s new fund would have to find that money in a state whose public budget is already strained.

“Not only does she not come clean as to where the money's going to come from, if her thought is that it's going to come from the general fund of the state of California, good luck,” said Jones. He pointed out that the model Kim cites in New Zealand is far smaller than California’s, has low coverage limits, and doesn’t cover fires. (Allen described the proposal as “red meat, sugar rush stuff,” and said taxpayers would end up footing the bill if the public plan lost money.)

Kim allows that the legislature might not jump for her public insurance fund, but she has a compromise in her back pocket — one not dissimilar from Allen’s own agenda. Instead of creating a single-payer insurance program that would use profits to fund fire resilience, the commissioner could turn the FAIR Plan into such a program. The plan already pools money from all the state’s big insurers, and Kim could force them to pay an extra fee that would fund hardening for FAIR Plan homes. She returned to this theme when she delivered a stump speech to the activists in the Presidio Heights living room, saying that private companies would never act on their own to reduce the state’s fire risk.

“What the insurance industry does is that they price risk, but they don't actually address it,” she said. If that’s the case, she argues, then the industry shouldn’t be the one charged with keeping Californians safe from climate disasters.

For all their other points of alignment, this question represents the major philosophical disagreement between Allen and Kim. Allen agrees that the industry has not yet acted to reduce California’s enormous fire risk, but he believes that it can fill that role — and he can be the one to make that happen.

“The insurance commissioner is uniquely positioned to bring the insurance to the table … and actually say to the insurance industry, ‘OK, guys, you've got to be a part of the solution here,’” Allen said.

A daunting challenge

The problem for both Kim and Allen is that reducing risk is very difficult.

Take the case of Tony Byers. He is a retired electric utility worker and a longtime resident of Placerville, an old mining town high in the forest-covered hills east of Sacramento. He bought insurance from AAA for years, but the company dropped him after a 2022 fire burned a nearby stretch of the Sierras. State Farm gave him a quote, but then rejected him because it claimed he didn’t have a fire hydrant near his house, even though he did. Byers ended up going with Lemonade, the online insurer, and even paid to have some flammable trees removed at the company’s request, but last year they told him they were leaving California. He ended up on the FAIR Plan, and he now pays $3,400 a year for fire insurance alone, triple what he used to pay. Byers lives at the end of a narrow mountain road, and if he wants to get back on a private insurance plan, he’d likely have to spend tens of thousands of dollars to retrofit his property, which is a lot more than he can afford on a retiree’s budget.

The only people who can opt out of this gauntlet of risk reduction are those who can pay for elite coverage. That was the case for Kevin Roberts, a retired golf course owner who lives in Huntington Palisades, a wealthy neighborhood on the edge of the Palisades Fire burn scar. Roberts likely couldn’t get fire coverage for his two-story Spanish colonial from bigger insurers like State Farm, but years ago a former fraternity brother told him about a company called Chubb that offered boutique insurance at high prices. The company now charges him more than $30,000 a year for his coverage on a “surplus lines” policy that isn’t subject to state regulations. It’s an eye-watering payment, but the company came through with a $2.65 million payout for smoke damage after the fire. Many of the state’s wealthiest homeowners are already on this unregulated market: the number of surplus lines policies in California has doubled over the last four years to around 1.3 million.

“You'll pay more, but if you need them, they'll deliver,” said Roberts.

Neither Byers nor Roberts expressed strong feelings about the insurance commissioner’s election, and indeed, both candidates will face tremendous barriers before they can address the issues that someone like Byers faces in Placerville. That’s because scaling California’s efforts to reduce more than a century of fire risk is one of the most daunting adaptation efforts faced by any place in the United States. The challenge is not just in finding the money to help homeowners who can’t do it themselves, but in figuring out how to reduce risk for millions of old and ill-built homes.

The day after Kim’s fundraiser, I met two employees from North Coast Opportunities, a poverty-fighting organization that serves Lake County, north of San Francisco. The organization is the first to receive money from a $117 million state grant program designed to retrofit whole communities against wildfire. The organization chose to focus on a tight-packed community called Kelseyville, where hundreds of homes cluster on small lots against the side of a windy mountain ridge. As the employees from North Coast drove me through the area, it became clear just how hard it will be to achieve the scaled-up resilience that both Allen and Kim want.

Lake County has an urgent need for this. The mountainous area is among the state’s most vulnerable to wildfire — some 85% of its land area has burned since the turn of the century — and it is also one of its poorest counties. Insurers have abandoned the area en masse, forcing many people onto the FAIR Plan, or causing older homeowners to go without insurance altogether.

The state program is the exact kind of intervention that insurers have long said will induce them to offer more coverage and stop raising rates. The nonprofit can give each participating home in Kelseyville about $70,000 to fund easy tweaks that will stop ignitions — such as removing trees from around homes, replacing vinyl siding with fiber cement, and deconstructing flammable wooden decks. The mitigated houses don’t look much different from the old ones, except for the emptier yards and fresh paint, but even these tiny fireproofing changes required painstaking work. North Coast has had to ask contractors to redo flawed retrofits and cajole local hardware stores into selling fireproof equipment. Many homeowners aren’t interested in participating at all.

“What creates an insurable community is for the whole community to have buy-in,” said Deanna Fernweh, the program manager. “It's changing the mentality, because they're like, ‘Well, we've always done it this way.’” She said she’s cautiously optimistic that companies will come back — insurers have been reaching out to learn more about her work, but they’ve also pushed for full neighborhoods to meet the strictest fire standards.

The project underscores the scale of the challenge the next commissioner will face in reducing fire risk. The project only touches around 300 of the 1,200 eligible homes in the neighborhood, and the grant typically isn’t even enough to do full mitigation on each home. The funding came from the federal government after years of delay. The best possible result is to bring insurers back to just a few streets, a fraction of the risk in Lake County alone. For millions of homeowners who don’t have access to grant funding, resilience is still out of reach.

“A home is only as strong as the weakest link,” said Steve Hawks, a longtime California fire official who is now the director of wildfire at the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety, which develops standards for fire hardening. “If you leave a weak link on the table, a fire of [significant] magnitude can exploit any vulnerability.”

Hawks describes the challenge as “daunting,” and that may be an understatement. Retrofitting a home for fire can cost several times as much as building a new fire-resilient home, and the bill for hardening the millions of homes in California’s fire zones would run to the double-digit billions at least. This money has to come from somewhere, and Allen and Kim both acknowledged that their biggest challenge is to find out where.

This is the irony of the fact that both candidates are appealing to voters by talking about “affordability.” No matter which path one takes through the maze, one arrives at the same conclusion — to fix this crisis will take money, and much of that money will come from the people of California. As Allen says, “risk doesn't disappear, it gets allocated.” The “affordability” challenge in this case is not to help voters keep up with inflation but to pay down a massive debt of risky development that has been accumulating for decades. The challenge is to remake a society that was not designed to be remade.

“I think we’re still at the beginning,” said Holly Sacks, the director of underwriting for Mercury, a California-based insurance company that has committed to remain in the state and to help incentivize risk mitigation. The company is selling in burned places like Paradise and Altadena, but only for hardened homes, and Sacks says it’s one of the only companies doing so. “We are out there, and we don't hear about a lot of other carriers getting out there,” she said. “I think there's still a ways to go … to really make the market more stable.”

The scale of this work is enormous, but the stakes are even larger. When we purchase insurance, we purchase not only the privilege of owning a home or driving a car, but also the privilege of belonging to a community in which all support all. Insurance, as Kim likes to say, is a prerequisite for participating in the economy. A healthy insurance market is also an indication that society can still hold together, that there is no home so vulnerable to the ravages of global warming that the rest of the community can’t afford to protect it.

Of all the things that climate change may take from us, this guarantee might be the most dear.

Incumbent L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and challenger City Councilmember Nithya Raman went head-to-head in a tense, live televised debate Tuesday night.

With Election Day only three weeks away, the candidates are racing to make their case to voters on major mayoral priorities like homelessness, public safety and the 2028 Olympics.

Here are three takeaways from the hour-long NBC4 and Telemundo 52 debate in Universal City. Each candidate was given about a minute to answer a question, with another 30 seconds each for rebuttals and follow-ups.

What did the candidates say about homelessness?

Bass has repeatedly pointed to a drop in homelessness under her tenure — a trend that faltered this past year, according to the results of the annual homeless count. After two years of declines, homelessness jumped 3.4% in the city of Los Angeles.

During the debate, she acknowledged the recent increase, but pointed to several council districts where homelessness dropped, including Raman’s.

“ The main reason homelessness went down is because our efforts with Inside Safe,” Bass said, crediting the program for removing three large encampments from Raman’s district. Raman represents Council District 4, which stretches from parts of Silver Lake to the Hollywood Hills and Reseda.

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass took shots at her challenger, at one point describing City Councilmember Nithya Raman as " contemptuous of her constituents."

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Inside Safe is Bass’ signature homelessness program that moves people from encampments into motels and interim housing. Raman has criticized the program, arguing it has wasted money and its approach had not changed since it launched nearly four years ago.

“ Under this mayor's leadership, we have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into an incredibly expensive program, Inside Safe, which has been unaccountable to the public, for which she has refused audits," she said. " And it looks exactly the same as it did on day one.”

Both candidates seemed to agree that there needs to be more transparency in the city’s homelessness system.

Bass said the city needs to be in complete control: “ No more joint working with the county.”

Raman said every homelessness dollar needs to be monitored and every service performance tracked to actually respond to Angelenos’ needs.

What did the candidates say about policing?

Raman confirmed during the debate that she wants to replace Jim McDonnell as chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, saying he had lost the trust of Angelenos, especially in response to federal immigration raids.

Asked whether she would replace McDonnell before the 2028 Olympics, Raman didn’t give a timeline. She said it would depend on other factors and decision makers, such as the Police Commission and L.A. City Council.

“ I promise you, Angelenos, I promise you, there is no decision that I will take as your mayor that will put you in danger,” Raman said. “Everything will be done with care, and with the advice of all of the people that are involved in making sure that you are safe as these Olympics approach.”

L.A. City Councilmember Nithya Raman criticized L.A. Mayor Karen Bass' signature homelessness program, Inside Safe, and her administration's response to major fires.

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Bass pressed Raman on the issue, saying the council member doesn’t have “any idea” what it takes to pick a police chief.

“ We are 640 days away from the largest sporting event to ever take place — a major national security event — and if you think that you're gonna find a police chief, you would send the department in disarray by doing that,” Bass said.

Both candidates weighed in on the LAPD’s use of Automated License Plate Readers, otherwise known as ALPRs.

Raman said she’s been “very skeptical” of these kinds of mass surveillance technologies and would want to see hard proof that the data would not be shared with ICE.

Bass said she thinks ALPR’s have a place in crime prevention, but she does not support a renewed contract with Flock, describing the company as “completely uncooperative.”

What did the candidates say about emergency response?

Bass has been heavily criticized for her administration’s response to last year’s Palisades Fire, and she apologized during the debate for not being in L.A. “when my city needed me.” Bass was in Ghana when the fires ignited as part of a Biden administration delegation for the inauguration of the country’s new president.

Bass said the city would be ready to respond to the next catastrophic wildfire, in part under new leadership from Fire Chief Jaime Moore.

“ As a matter of fact, we're preparing for what is a potential Red Flag day this Thursday,” Bass said. “He has already reached out to the state for additional resources. He is planning to pre-deploy in the Palisades and other high-risk fire areas.”

Raman honed in the Palisades Fire, as well as this summer’s Lineage warehouse fire in Boyle Heights, describing both as a “failure” of leadership from the mayor. Raman said she would have handled the Lineage fire differently.

“ I will make sure that our community is met with resources, evacuation support and the information they need in the languages that they need, which this community did not get during these fires,” she said.

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LAist Voter Game Plan guide - Los Angeles mayor

A Los Angeles homelessness planning body voted Tuesday to have L.A. County officials take over the region’s yearly homeless count and handle applying for federal homelessness funds on behalf of the region — two jobs currently held by the embattled L.A. Homeless Services Authority.

The decision by the L.A. Continuum of Care — in a 310-9 vote — comes after the Trump administration sidelined the agency, known as LAHSA, from the federal-facing roles it’s held for decades. It signals a loss of power for LAHSA and a major shift in homelessness oversight for the L.A. area, passing significant control of the region’s homelessness response to L.A. County officials.

The details

If Tuesday’s selections are approved by a federal judge, L.A. County’s Department of Homeless Services and Housing will soon be in charge of conducting the region’s annual point-in-time homelessness tally, instead of LAHSA.

The county would also take over the responsibility for submitting annual homelessness funding applications for hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, on behalf of the whole region.

Volunteers at the 2023 L.A. homeless count review the map of Westwood prior to heading out.

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The timeline for these responsibilities being fully transferred away from LAHSA is expected to be determined by a federal judge in the coming weeks.

How we got here

LAHSA is the city and county’s joint-powers homelessness authority. In June, HUD suspended the agency from performing its federal-facing responsibilities, citing financial mismanagement. LAHSA sued. In August, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter paused LAHSA’s suspension. He also ordered the L.A. Continuum of Care to run an evaluation process to replace LAHSA in federal roles within 60 days.

The L.A. Continuum of Care is a HUD-recognized group representing homeless services providers, government agencies and community advocates across L.A. County. It’s responsible for choosing the entity that fills these federal roles. The Trump administration’s suspension of LAHSA forced the group to consider alternatives.

L.A. County’s Department of Homeless Services and Housing was the only agency or organization that applied to manage both the homeless count and the region’s yearly application for federal homelessness dollars.

What’s next?

While a report is due to Carter on Tuesday, Oct. 13, the full selection process he ordered is not yet complete. The L.A. Continuum of Care still needs to vote on its final designations for who should succeed LAHSA in two other federal roles: managing a database that tracks unhoused Angelenos and running the system used to match people with shelter and housing. The city of Los Angeles and L.A. County are competing for those roles.

A vote scheduled Oct. 9 was delayed when over 1,000 people overwhelmed the Zoom capacity. It will be rescheduled — no date has been set yet.

The court’s preliminary injunction pausing LAHSA’s suspension is set to expire on Oct. 27.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Hollywood Park, the home of SoFi Stadium, is throwing its financial weight into a campaign to block Inglewood Mayor James Butts’ bid for reelection on Nov. 3, according to campaign finance records.

The Take Back Inglewood campaign is the latest signal that Butts’ ties to SoFi Stadium owner Stan Kroenke are unraveling as the city battles its stadiums over billboard deals and $400 million in infrastructure payments.

Inglewood’s stadium interests have supported Butts politically and financially in past elections, according to reporting from the LA Times, but a spokesperson for the Hollywood Park-funded campaign said stadium officials lost confidence in Butts. 

“The relationship changed because, in their experience, they could no longer trust him to deal with them honestly and fairly,” Shallman said. “Political support isn’t a lifetime contract.” 

Butts fired back in an interview with The LA Local that the campaign is about trying to protect Hollywood Park’s business interests. 

“They believe because they have millions to spend on advertising, they can manipulate the electorate into voting against someone that has changed the entire trajectory and value of our city” the four-term mayor said, adding in a later written statement that his record speaks for itself. 

Since last summer, Inglewood officials and the stadiums have been duking it out in court over the terms of their relationship and the city’s financial deals with billboard operator WOW Media. Judges have ruled in favor of the WOW arrangement, but last month voided the city’s contract with Hollywood Park.

Now, both sides are pouring millions into Inglewood’s election, looking to sway voters. 

A new batch of election finance filings released Monday in response to a public records request from The LA Local show Take Back Inglewood is entirely funded by $750,000 from Hollywood Park. Butts’ own campaign, by comparison, has spent $264,085 this year out of just over $610,000 in total funds.

Elsewhere, the stadium-backed Neighbors for Beautiful Inglewood has spent $3.1 million campaigning for the anti-billboard Measure BB. Inglewood Residents for Stadium Accountability, funded by WOW, has put $2.5 million of its own into trying to block BB and pushing for the ticket tax increase Measure AT.

Fernando Guerra, a Loyola Marymount University political scientist, said the campaign dollars are unsurprising. Inglewood’s place as an international sports and entertainment hub has turned it into a prime place for a contentious, expensive election, Guerra said.

“It’s par for the course when you combine contracts and politics and cities needing to raise revenue,” Guerra said. “The higher the stakes, the more the money that’s going to be spent.”

Butts told The LA Local he sees the stadium campaigns as paternalistic, and that they treat voters as pawns in Hollywood Park’s economic interests.

Shallman countered that the campaign is not tied to the stadium development’s disputes with the city and said Butts has in the past defended the support he received from Inglewood venues. The stadium development, he said, has a natural stake in the race through its employees.

“These aren’t outsiders who parachuted into Inglewood. The venues have invested billions of dollars in the city, created thousands of jobs,” he said. Shallman added that locals have aired their own criticisms of Butts’ leadership.

Butts isn’t without his own allies. Billboard interests have put $80,000 into the mayor’s reelection campaign since January alone, with more coming from real estate firms. Butts said campaign donations don’t influence his decisions as mayor. 

“My decisions are driven by the needs of our community,” Butts said.

Take Back Inglewood isn’t backing any of the five candidates running against Butts, Shallman said, at least for now. 

“They reserve the right to weigh in if they feel the need,” Shallman said. “The key at this stage is to make sure voters are aware of his record.”