After years of drought, pastures haven’t been producing enough grass to feed cattle. So ranchers have been sending their animals to the slaughterhouse earlier, cutting back herds even as Americans eat more beef. This is sending prices to record highs.

Average ground beef prices in city supermarkets surpassed $6 a pound in June, while the cost of uncooked beef steaks approached $11.50 a pound. Those levels are the highest in a decade, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

The upward march of prices illustrates a phenomenon known as climate inflation, in which droughts, heat waves, floods and wildfires raise prices for everything from home insurance to groceries. While some price hikes are so far proving temporary, others are longer-lasting, like beef, which is expected to stay expensive for at least the next few years.

“This is one indicator of how climate change will affect our food system, and it’s playing itself out in beef right now,” says Ben Lilliston, director of rural strategies and climate change at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit. “You’re seeing it in other commodities, like coffee.”

U.S. beef prices are spiking after years of drought in areas where cattle are raised. In the southwestern U.S. in particular, which includes cattle-producing areas like California’s San Joaquin Valley, drought has exceeded historical expectations over the last quarter-century, says Brad Rippey, a USDA meteorologist.

Scientists have found that global warming’s higher temperatures make droughts more likely to happen in some places and more severe. For example, a 2020 study that examined anomalously dry conditions in the western U.S. and northern Mexico between 2000 and 2018 determined that climate change contributed to nearly half of that drought’s severity.

Drought conditions in the U.S. in recent years were also enhanced by several instances of the naturally-occurring La Niña climate pattern, which tends to leave portions of the U.S. drier than usual, Rippey says.

Ranchers have some options, including feeding their herds alternatives to pasture grass, such as hay. But as dry conditions continue, selling the cattle begins to make more financial sense than buying the expensive feed. U.S. herds have been dwindling for years and are now smaller than ever even as drought conditions have improved.

“The long-term impact is that you have less ability to produce, which is where we find ourselves now after four or five years of this process,” says Derrell Peel, agribusiness professor at Oklahoma State University.

Demand from consumers for beef, meanwhile, has grown, which also contributes to higher prices. That generates a trade-off between cashing in on today’s high prices and holding animals back for breeding — a process that takes years to pay off. A female calf born this year could be sold, entering next year’s beef supply, or it could be bred in 2026 and rear a calf ready for market by roughly 2028. Cattle usually have only one calf at a time, in contrast with other animals like chickens and pigs.

Other factors affecting cattle ranching besides drought include higher interest rates and greater costs for inputs ranging from the cattle themselves to feed and equipment.

Most cattle spend their lives outdoors, exposing the animals to other hallmarks of climate change like extreme heat. High temperatures can affect cattle’s reproductive health and their growth, extending the time and cost of raising animals.

In the highest-emissions scenario, it could get so hot by 2050 that fewer parts of the world will be suitable for cattle production, according to the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.

Another climate change-related threat is also looming: a deadly parasite known as the screwworm, which was long-ago eradicated in the U.S. but has made a resurgence in Mexico. It thrives in warmer climates, and scientists say that climate change could facilitate the fly’s spread.

While the majority of American beef is produced domestically, the U.S. routinely imports young cattle from Mexico to fatten up in American feedlots, says David Anderson, a professor and livestock economist at Texas A&M University. The supply of those cattle, the equivalent of about 4% of U.S. calf production, has been intermittently cut off since November because of the threat the screwworm poses.

“On the margin, that’s a bunch of animals,” he says. “That’s contributing to high prices.”

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And everyone wonders: What happens now? Will people rebuild? When will things get back to normal?

Those of us who have been paying attention over the last few decades also wonder: How long before it happens again?

The New York Times journalist Seth Mydans once described this tension as our region’s “central paradox.” We are, he wrote after a major 1993 wildfire, “caught between fire and flood, beauty and devastation, dread and reckless optimism.”

So many factors helped make our current natural disaster one of the largest in American history: a warming planet, an extremely dry season that followed an extremely wet one, unusually brutish Santa Ana winds, extensive development in places known to catch fire cyclically.

But the more you learn about the natural disasters that strike our foothill and mountain communities, the more you wonder what the hell city planners and politicians were thinking when they zoned so much of it for development in the first place.

Despite the tendentious fingerpointing, no politician in the world — nor fire department, for that matter — could have tamed the hurricane-force winds that grounded firefighting aircraft while flinging devastating embers into neighborhoods where out-of-control fire was previously unthinkable.

In California, the supposedly unthinkable keeps happening.

We have wet falls and winters, followed by hot, dry summers that suck the moisture from the chaparral, which becomes kindling for the fires that are ignited by human activity — sparking power lines, arson, campfires, vehicles, fireworks — then whipped into frenzy by the devilish winds that originate in the deserts and pick up speed as they whoosh through our mountain canyons to the ocean. As it turns out, we live in a place whose weather cycles and topography are a veritable gift to the fire gods.

“Fuel, not ignitions, causes fire,” UC Riverside fire ecologist Richard Minnich once said. “You can send an arsonist to Death Valley and he’ll never be arrested.”

In 2017, another wind-whipped inferno, the Tubbs fire, swept unthinkably through the flat residential neighborhoods that straddled the 101 Freeway in Santa Rosa. Twenty-two people died, and more than 5,600 structures were destroyed, including about 5% of Santa Rosa’s housing stock. It was the most destructive wildfire in California history.

That record stood for just 13 months. The following year, the Camp fire devastated the Northern California town of Paradise, killing 85 people, destroying about 14,000 homes and displacing about 50,000.

Until last week, the Camp fire was believed to be the costliest fire in U.S. history. But its $12.5 billion in damage will be pocket change compared to the eventual tally of the Palisades and Eaton fires. The real estate analytics firm CoreLogic has estimated the damage to insured properties at $30 billion so far. AccuWeather experts estimated that between property damage and economic losses, the tab will be $250 billion to $275 billion.

Over the last 30 years, it’s become a cliché in these moments to turn to the late writer and social critic Mike Davis’ famous 1995 essay “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” republished in his 1998 book, “The Ecology of Fear.” But the essay is an eye-opening primer for anyone who thinks the latest fires are a fluke. In fact, they are a feature of the landscape, exacerbated by our fire suppression practices, and will recur reliably, as they have forever.

The arguments over whether to rebuild, and who should bear the cost of doing so, have also been going on for decades.

In 1993, the Old Topanga fire — one of 26 major wildfires that burned from Ventura County to the Mexican border that year — blazed for 10 days, scorched 18,000 acres, destroyed 359 homes and killed three people. Two years later, then-state Sen. Tom Hayden, who was running for Los Angeles mayor, argued for imposing more restrictive zoning in disaster-prone areas or, failing that, forcing local governments to cover costs.

“Does everybody in California think that American taxpayers are going to subsidize our lifestyle forever, that we can just present them a blank check every time we have a mudslide or a flood?” he asked at the time. “The rest of America has troubles too.”

No wonder he lost his bids for California governor in 1994 and Los Angeles mayor in 1997.

Within five years, I predict, most of the Palisades, Malibu and Altadena will be rebuilt. Memories will fade, insurance rates will rise, life will go on — until the next fire, flood or earthquake.

“We’ve invented a fool’s paradise,” Hayden once complained.

Maybe so. But time after time, we reinvent it too.

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Aiming to both quell soaring prices and bring back firms that have left the Golden State, regulators are proposing sweeping reforms that they believe could revive a competitive insurance market.

While experts agree that the status quo may no longer be sustainable, opinions remain divided on the merits of the proposed changes — which some fear could drive up prices further.

“The situation is hurting consumers badly,” Amy Bach, executive director of the consumer advocacy group United Policyholders, told The Hill.

“It doesn’t feel like it’s going to resolve on its own,” Bach added.

California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara last week called for public input on the final phase of his wildfire modeling regulation, which is many months in the making and has sparked significant debate.

Lara’s strategy would update Proposition 103, a 1988 ballot measure that served “to protect consumers from arbitrary insurance rates and practices” and encouraged a competitive and fair marketplace, according to the Insurance Commission. 

Proposition 103 determined that rate changes could only occur with the authorization of the commissioner, while also establishing a public participation process in which so-called “intervenors” could provide technical input and recover associated costs.

Lara’s office said in a press statement that his update aims to close a loophole in Proposition 103: Insurance firms today can request rates at any level to help compensate for an increased risk of losses but are not required to cover all Californians.

The new regulation, in contrast, would require companies to insure properties in distressed regions at a rate equivalent to 85 percent of the firm’s statewide market share. 

In addition, the proposal would incorporate the state’s first use of “catastrophe modeling,” localized simulations of potential risk based on historical analyses and probabilistic calculations that such events will occur in the future.

Whether relying upon such simulations, also known as “cat models,” would end up lowering or raising consumer rates, however, is a matter of contention.

Those in favor of employing these tools argue that other states have long done so and that proactive efforts to adapt California homes to a changing climate could mitigate risk.

“Over the past several years, the state has put billions toward wildfire mitigation efforts and homeowners have made significant investments in home hardening,” Lara said in a statement.

“This is not accounted for by our existing retrospective, past-focused models for ratemaking,” the commissioner continued. “We want consumers to reap the full benefits of these efforts through modern, forward-looking models on how rates are calculated.”

But others are far less certain that the models would account for such improvements — especially because the technology is often proprietary.

Bach cited catastrophe models as a reason for her muted enthusiasm about Lara’s proposal. Yet she expressed willingness “to let the commissioner’s sustainable insurance strategy go into place.”

“If it doesn’t work, then I guess we go back to the drawing board,” Bach said, expressing approval for the mandatory coverage component of the regulation.

Bach stressed that thus far, she has seen no indication that catastrophe models, when applied to wildfire-prone areas, are accounting for active mitigation efforts in price determinations. She also expressed concern that wildfire models are much newer than those for, say, hurricanes.

“We are nervous,” she continued. “The reality is that prices are so high already, and affordability is so low right now.”

Nonetheless, Bach acknowledged that California’s lack of catastrophe models was contributing to the exodus of insurance companies from the state. Beginning in 2022 and 2023, many big firms stopped offering services to new customers, often citing wildfire risk. 

“The writing was on the wall that cat models are going to come to California, just for practical reasons,” she acknowledged.

“We’re glad at least there’s a quid pro quo — that as a condition of insurers getting to use cat models, they also have to pledge to insure more homes in the areas that have been abandoned,” Bach added.

Harvey Rosenfield, founder of Consumer Watchdog and the author of Proposition 103, decried catastrophe models as “completely unjust, untested and unreliable.”

“Models are cloaked in the guise of technological infallibility, but they are drafted, they’re written, they’re controlled by humans,” Rosenfield told The Hill.

He also argued that their use would violate provisions of the voter-approved Proposition 103, because this would deny consumers their legal right to examine the details of these models.

“Nobody has the power to rewrite Proposition 103 to eliminate its protections,” Rosenfield added.

The applicability of catastrophe models to wildfire risk assessments was one focal point in a June 2024 working paper about the adaptation of insurance markets to a changing climate. Although these models have improved the ability of insurers to gauge wildfire risk, the resultant projections remain “inherently uncertain,” according to the paper, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

“The modern catastrophe models bring a lot of value to insurance pricing and rate setting,” co-author Judson Boomhower, assistant professor of economics at the University of California San Diego School of Social Sciences, told The Hill.

“They give you a much more nuanced view of risk for a given property or a given area,” added Boomhower, who is also a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

That more detailed vantage point, he explained, is more sophisticated than the “backward-looking historical rate-setting methods that insurers have been required to use in California.”

Nonetheless, Boomhower also recognized that catastrophe models “are sort of a black box” due to their proprietary nature and resultant questions of transparency.

“Those are legitimate challenges for regulators to think about, but at a high level, this is the best scientific method for assessing catastrophe risk,” he said.

Boomhower described Florida as “a little bit ahead” of California from this perspective, as the state requires companies to give regulators some insight into how their individual models work.

In the working paper, Boomhower and his colleagues reconstructed pricing formulas used in California by six major insurers — combining data from company-provided premiums with proprietary information from about 100,000 households.

The authors found that following the 2017 and 2018 wildfire seasons, both premiums and the rate of policy cancellations in high-risk areas surged. They also observed increasing reliance on the state’s “quasi-private insurer of last resort” —  called California FAIR —  the basic but expensive property insurance provided when traditional coverage is unavailable.

Among the paper’s key findings was the fact that insurers exhibited “striking variation” in how firms priced wildfire risk, with some only divided the market roughly, at the zip-code-level, and pricing risk at a more granular level — using catastrophe models.

“There’s tons of heterogeneity in wildfire loss risk, even within zip codes or even within neighborhoods,” Boomhower said.

Insurers with less sophisticated models seemed to end up with a slew of higher-risk customers and greater-than-expected costs, which the authors dubbed the “winners’ curse.”

Meanwhile, they found that companies using the more granular models tended to attract lower-risk customers. With that in mind, Boomhower projected that there would be “a lot of competition among insurance companies to find the low-risk homes in these designated high-risk areas.”

“There are parts of the state where wildfire risk has increased really rapidly,” he continued. “Those are places where insurance rates probably do need to go up relative to where they’ve been historically, just to reflect the increasing risk.”

To the extent that Proposition 103 has held rates down, Boomhower acknowledged that the proposed updates could end up raising prices.

“On the other hand, that may be what you need to ensure availability in some of those places,” he said.

While the status quo may not be ideal for anyone, Rosenfield stressed his belief that insurance firms might come back to California without a change in regulation — simply because it will be in their financial interest to do so.

“California is the biggest single insurance market in the planet, and they’re just going to come back in and take advantage of that,” he said.

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But just in case, they’re ready to ship from Amazon’s first disaster relief hub focused on wildfires.

The online retailing giant on Thursday, Aug. 22, unveiled the hub — Amazon’s 14th disaster relief hub worldwide and its second in the U.S. — that runs from a warehouse known as a fulfillment center in the Riverside County city of Beaumont.

Stacked among the towering aisles of consumer goods are plastic-wrapped, forklift-movable pallets with gloves, shovels, masks and other supplies — more than 6,000 items in all — that can help those in wildfire-stricken areas.

Using Amazon’s sophisticated logistics network, the hub aims to send supplies anywhere in the country within 72 hours — all on the global retailer’s dime.

According to Amazon, the company since 2017 has donated more than 24 million items worldwide to people affected by more than 160 disasters.

Amazon wants to provide disaster relief “with as much attention to detail, thoroughness and commitment as we do with any Amazon product launch,” said Vidya Sampath, senior product manager with Amazon Disaster Relief.

“This perspective leads us to see those affected by disasters not merely as people who are impacted, but as our valued community who deserves the best of our efforts and our resources.”

The hub operates out of an 860,000-square-foot fulfillment center just off the 10 Freeway, about 25 miles from Amazon’s air hub at San Bernardino International Airport and roughly 40 miles from Ontario International Airport.

Fulfillment centers send packages to Amazon’s “middle mile” network that includes facilities like the San Bernardino air hub. From there, they make their way along what Amazon calls  the “last mile” to customers’ doorsteps.

The hub uses this same network, only instead of fulfilling customer orders, relief supplies go where they’re needed. Nish Mohan, general manager of Amazon’s Beaumont fulfillment center, said the facility can handle normal business and disaster relief at the same time.

Sampath said Amazon coordinates with agencies such as the American Red Cross to make sure the right supplies arrive as quickly as possible and in a way that doesn’t hamper relief efforts. The company routinely seeks feedback from relief agencies to improve its disaster outreach.

Amazon chose Beaumont to house the disaster hub in part because of its proximity to the company’s air and ground transportation network, Sampath said.

Amazon also wanted a location that was close — but not too close — to wildfire-prone areas, Sampath added. It’s the same reason Amazon’s other U.S.-based disaster hub is in Atlanta and not hurricane-prone Florida.

California wildfires are expected to happen more frequently and with greater intensity throughout the year as climate change spurs droughts and high winds combine with hot temperatures to make bone dry vegetation ripe for igniting.

Five of California’s most destructive wildfires on record have happened since 2018, with three of the deadliest occurring since 2017, according to Cal Fire.

Knowing what supplies are available at the hub is useful in a disaster, said Yevette Baysinger, the Red Cross executive director serving San Bernardino County.

“To be able to have the partnership to have access and to know that, within 72 hours, they can actually dispatch the items needed saves so much time,” said Baysinger, who visited the hub Thursday. “To be able to have that ability will allow us to provide the services in a much faster, efficient way to ultimately those that need it.”

Baysinger recalled the difficulty finding supplies during the 2003 Old Fire in San Bernardino County, which killed six and destroyed 192 structures while burning more than 91,000 acres. Back then, it was hard to find shovels, gloves and other equipment to help families find items left behind, she said.

“It really just warms my heart to know that, in the event that we have a major wildfire … we have a partner that can dispatch all of the supplies that the community is going to need in that moment’s notice,” Baysinger added.

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