The West Coast housing market is metaphorically on fire — with rotting shacks selling for millions. Decades of policies to restrict housing in desirable neighborhoods has pushed prices up — and it has also pushed houses out into more rural, forested areas. As a result, West Coast housing is periodically on fire in the literal sense as well.

A report released Thursday by a group of scholars from the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Community Innovation+ and the nonprofit think tank, Next 10, found that wildfire now threatens the lives and homes of more than a quarter of California’s population, largely due to current housing policies that often make it cheaper to construct homes in at-risk areas.

It’s hard to build in California cities because every new home must pass through a permitting odyssey, facing local reviews and the threat of lawsuits from neighbors. As a result, the report found, in recent decades, one in every two new homes built in California was out at the edge of wildlands, down winding roads, or shaded by towering pines. In other words, current policies are pushing half of all new housing into the path of wildfires. This new housing — everything from inexpensive manufactured homes to mansions perched on hilltops — is always cheaper than the same type of house in a city. As a result, many people seeking more affordable housing have moved into wildfire hazard areas.

“The wildfire issue is intimately coupled with the issue of California’s enormous housing problem,” Robert Olshansky, a lead author of the new report and Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, told Grist. “There’s pressure to build more housing, there’s resistance to putting it in the middle of towns, and there’s less resistance to putting it out on the edges, so that’s where they put it.”

Kelly McKenzie is one of the people who moved into California’s forests in 2018 in search of less expensive housing. The $729,000 her family paid for a house in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada wouldn’t seem affordable in most parts of the country, but it was much cheaper than anything they could have bought in San Francisco, where they lived before. But as fires ripped through the region, her insurance company informed her that the home had become too risky for them, which left McKenzie’s family paying some $5,000 a year to be part of a high-risk insurance pool — much more than they had ever anticipated paying.

“We can afford to pay for it, but it annoys me greatly,” she sighed. “And I know that other people with less money face really difficult decisions.”

Wildfire is exacerbating the housing crisis, and the poorest residents feel the pinch most.

“More and more people are only able to afford housing in high-risk places,” said Katelyn Roedner Sutter, a climate expert for the Environmental Defense Fund and a member of an insurance reform committee organized by California’s Insurance Commissioner. “But housing is not affordable when you can’t afford to insure it.”

The fix seems simple: The report suggests that California should make it easier to build inside cities, while making it harder to build in hazardous wildfire areas. So far, the politics of making such a fix have proven to be complicated. In 2019, California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would have made it harder to build in the most dangerous fire zones, because he worried it would worsen the housing crisis. And many cities have campaigned fiercely against measures that would force them to allow developers to build new homes within their borders.

Still, the wildfires have proven to be such a massive ongoing disaster that lawmakers have no choice but to connect the dots between wildfires in the foothills and zoning ordinances restricting the number of apartment buildings in cities. “There are just so many bills in front of the California legislature now that recognize that all these things are related to each other,” Olshansky said. “Three years ago this wasn’t happening. I sense the political winds — the hot dry political winds, maybe we can say — have changed.”

Last Friday, for example, a working group organized by California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara released a set of proposals to cope with climate risks, including policies that could stop new construction in the most hazardous areas. There’s a clear need to update insurance practices to reflect the reality of climate change. For most of the last half century, the report notes, the insurance industry paid out an average of $100 million per year in fire insurance claims in California. From 2011 to 2018, however, that figure jumped forty-fold to $4 billion per year — due to more intense fires.

Another solution suggested by the report would be for fire-prone communities and nonprofits to buy up vulnerable residential areas and turn them into soccer fields, wetland habitat, or some other form of parkland that would serve as a fire break. At first, that seemed impossible to Olshansky: “When I first heard this I thought, that’s the kind of crazy idea that we come up with at a university but it can’t happen in real life,” he admitted. But the strategy is actually under consideration in the town of Paradise, which burned to the ground in 2018, where local government has a plan to buy lots where houses once stood and create exactly this sort of irrigated parkland buffer.

Put into practice, a mix of these policies would spur building in cities, while creating the possibility of retreat from the most dangerous wildfire areas. It’s not a relocation program Olshansky said, more of a persistent nudge for the coming scores of people likely to lose their homes to fire: “At the moment they get burned, while we are showing compassion and trying to help them rebuild, we should provide them with opportunities to relocate to safer places where they won’t be traumatized by these fires anymore,” he said.

Nathanael Johnson | Contributed

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To save the planet, the world needs to tackle the crises of climate change and species loss together, taking measures that fix both and not just one, United Nations scientists said.

A joint report Thursday by separate U.N. scientific bodies that look at climate change and biodiversity loss found there are ways to simultaneously attack the two global problems, but some fixes to warming could accelerate extinctions of plants and animals.

For example, measures such as expansion of bioenergy crops like corn, or efforts to pull carbon dioxide from the air and bury it, could use so much land — twice the size of India — that the impact would be “fairly catastrophic on biodiversity,” said co-author and biologist Almut Arneth at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.

Policy responses to climate change and biodiversity loss have long been siloed, with different government agencies responsible for each, said co-author Pamela McElwee, a human ecologist at Rutgers University.

The problems worsen each other, are intertwined and in the end hurt people, scientists said.

“Climate change and biodiversity loss are threatening human well-being as well as society,” said report co-chair Hans-Otto Portner, a German biologist who helps oversee the impacts group of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Earth’s naturally changing climate shaped what life developed, including humans, but once people in the industrialized world started pumping fossil fuels into the air, that triggered cascading problems, Portner said.

“It’s a high time to fix what we got wrong,” he said. “The climate system is off-track and the biodiversity is suffering.”

There are many measures that can address both problems at once, the report said.

“Protecting and restoring high-carbon ecosystems,” such as tropical forests and peatlands, should be high priority, said co-author Pete Smith, a plant and soil scientist at the University of Aberdeen.

While some climate solutions can increase species loss, scientists said efforts to curb extinctions don’t really harm the climate.

Yunne Shin, director of research at French National Research Institute, said the bulk of measures taken to protect biodiversity will also help curb climate change. While she applauded growing interest in nature-based solutions, she said, conservation measures “must be accompanied by clear cuts in emissions.”

“This report is an important milestone,” said Simon Lewis, chairman of global change science at University College London, who was not part of the report.

“Finally the world’s bodies that synthesize scientific information on two of the most profound 21st century crises are working together,” he said. “Halting biodiversity loss is even harder than phasing out fossil fuel use.”

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America’s new normal temperature is a degree hotter than it was just two decades ago.

Scientists have long talked about climate change — hotter temperatures, changes in rain and snowfall and more extreme weather — being the “new normal.” Data released Tuesday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration put hard figures on the cliche.

The new United States normal is not just hotter, but wetter in the eastern and central parts of the nation and considerably drier in the West than just a decade earlier.

Meteorologists calculate climate normals based on 30 years of data to limit the random swings of daily weather. It’s a standard set by the World Meteorological Organization. Every 10 years, NOAA updates normal for the country as a whole, states and cities — by year, month and season.

For the entire nation, the yearly normal temperature is now 53.3 degrees (11.8 degrees Celsius) based on weather station data from 1991 to 2020, nearly half a degree warmer than a decade ago. Twenty years ago, normal was 52.3 degrees (11.3 degrees Celsius) based on data from 1971 to 2000. The average U.S. temperature for the 20th century was 52 degrees (11.1 degrees Celsius).

The new normal annual U.S. temperature is 1.7 degrees (0.9 Celsius) hotter than the first normal calculated for 1901 to 1930.

“Almost every place in the U.S. has warmed from the 1981 to 2010 normal to the 1991 to 2020 normal,” said Michael Palecki, NOAA’s normals project manager.

Fargo, North Dakota, where the new normal is a tenth of a degree cooler than the old one, is an exception, but more than 90% of the U.S. has warmer normal temperatures now than 10 years ago, Palecki said.

In Chicago and Asheville, North Carolina, the new yearly normal temperature jumped 1.5 degrees in a decade. Seattle, Atlanta, Boston and Phoenix had their normal annual temperature rise by at least half a degree in the last decade.

Charlottesville, Virginia, saw the biggest jump in normal temperatures among 739 major weather stations. Other large changes were in California, Texas, Virginia, Indiana, Arizona, Oregon, Arkansas, Maryland, Florida, North Carolina and Alaska.

New normals are warmer because the burning of fossil fuels is making the last decade “a much hotter time period for much of the globe than the decades” before, said Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald.

For Phoenix, the biggest change in normal came in precipitation. The normal annual rainfall for Phoenix dropped 10% down to 7.2 inches (18.2 centimeters). Rainfall in Los Angeles dropped 4.6%.

At the same time, Asheville saw a nearly 9% increase in rainfall, while New York City’s rainfall rose 6%. Seattle’s normal is 5% wetter than it used to be.

Climate scientists are split about how useful or misleading newly calculated normals are.

Mahowald and University of Oklahoma meteorology professor Jason Furtado said updating normal calculations helps city and regional planners to prepare for flooding and drought, farmers to decide what and when to plant, energy companies to meet changing demands and doctors to tackle public health issues arising from climate change.

But Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann said he prefers a constant baseline such as 1951 to 1980, which is what NASA uses. Adjusting normal every 10 years “perverts the meaning of ‘normal’ and ‘normalizes’ away climate change,” he said in an email.

North Carolina’s state climatologist Kathie Dello said, “It seems odd to still call them normals because 1991-2020 was anything but normal climate-wise.”

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On April 27, a diverse coalition representing tribes, ranchers and conservationists announced strong support of Senate Bill (SB) 332, state legislation that would enable more cultural and prescribed burns. Tribes like the Karuk want to use prescribed fire to protect homes and restore watersheds, much like their ancestors did, and farmers, ranchers and conservationists use fire to manage noxious weeds, restore wildlife habitat and protect biodiversity. In many cases the legal and policy barriers for all of these groups are the same.

According to the bill’s author, Senator Bill Dodd (D-Napa), “California has to work harder to protect our communities from catastrophic wildfire. I’m proud to work with Tribes, conservation groups and ranchers to help our local communities play a larger role in fire management.”

For over 100 years fire suppression policies have led to a dangerous build-up of brush and unhealthy trees. Climate change and increased rural development have dramatically increased the risk of catastrophic wildfires in recent years. In order to incentivize the use of prescribed and cultural burning to fight dangerous wildfires, groups say California must reform its liability laws.

“Prescribed fire is an essential tool for ranchers managing rangelands and controlling invasive weeds, not to mention the part it plays in helping mitigate wildfire,” explains Tony Toso, Mariposa County cattle rancher and California Cattlemen’s Association President. “Currently, it’s nearly impossible to find someone willing to take on the personal liability risks associated with a burn project.”

According to Karuk Natural Resources Director and traditional fire practitioner Bill Tripp, “My ancestors practiced cultural burning for millennia along the Klamath and Salmon Rivers. Low intensity burns at the right time of year reduce wildfire risks in our communities and promote forest health. We must enact policies to enable and encourage rural communities to do this important work.”

“Ramping up the pace and scale of prescribed burning is an important way to fight fire with fire,” said Pamela Flick, California program director for Defenders of Wildlife. “These efforts will succeed only if property owners have better liability protections in order to participate at a meaningful scale. We thank Senator Dodd for leading on this issue and addressing California’s wildfire resiliency in the face of a changing climate and increased fire risk.”

California is currently rolling out its new State-Certified Burn Boss Program, which will certify highly experienced practitioners to plan and lead prescribed burns. Though more rigorous than most other states’ programs, the California certification does not provide the same level of liability relief that other states do. This means California Burn Bosses risk personal liability for damages even when meeting all legal and permit requirements of a project, while their federal and state counterparts enjoy indemnification from their agencies for the same work.

In other words, highly qualified individuals will not be interested in gaining certification unless California can offer better liability protections.

“You can’t expect an individual to take on prescribed fire projects unless they have liability protections. California is simply behind the times when it comes to providing incentives to communities to protect their homes and restore their watersheds,” explains Lenya Quinn-Davidson, Director of the Northern California Prescribed Fire Council.

Currently, SB 332 enjoys support from over 60 organizations from around the state representing a wide range of interests. Opponents include insurance and trial lawyers who financially benefit from the status quo.

California Cattlemen’s Association • Contributed

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DETROIT (AP) — Two Italian managers in Fiat Chrysler’s diesel engine program have been indicted by a federal grand jury in Detroit in a widening case alleging a scheme to cheat on U.S. emissions tests.

The indictments unsealed Tuesday detail allegations of a plot to dupe the Environmental Protection Agency by rigging more than 100,000 diesel Ram pickup trucks and Jeep SUVs to cheat on EPA tests and exceed pollution limits on real roads.

Sergio Pasini, 43, of Ferrera, Italy, and Gianluca Sabbioni, 55, of Sala Bolognese, Italy, each face nine charges including violating the Clean Air Act, wire fraud, and conspiracy to defraud the U.S. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Detroit said neither man is in custody and would not comment when asked if they will be extradited to the U.S.

Both were described by authorities as senior diesel managers with the company.

They join Emanuele Palma, 42, of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, as defendants in the case. He was charged in 2019 but now faces a new 10-count indictment alleging conspiracy, Clean Air Act violations, and that he made false statements to the FBI and the EPA.

In a statement, the Justice Department said the three men had “co-conspirators” in the scheme, indicating that more charges are possible.

All three are accused of purposely calibrating emissions-control software on 3-liter diesel engines so they met nitrogen oxide emissions requirements during EPA test cycles, yet emitted higher pollution while on the road. They referred to the manipulation as “cycle beating,” the statement said.

Messages were left Tuesday seeking comment from Palma’s attorneys. It wasn’t clear if Pasini or Sabbioni have lawyers.

In a statement, Fiat Chrysler, now known as Stellantis after merging with France’s PSA Peugeot, said it’s cooperating in the investigation and referred to previous statements denying that it took part in a deliberate scheme to program the engines to cheat on tests.

Palma, Pasini and Sabbioni also are accused of causing others “to make false and misleading representations to FCA’s regulators about the emissions control functions of the subject vehicles in order to ensure that FCA obtained regulatory approval to sell the subject vehicles in the United States,” the Justice Department statement said.

The cheating helped FCA attain best-in-class fuel economy, making the vehicles more attractive to buyers, prosecutors alleged.

In 2019, Fiat Chrysler agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars, including a $300 million fine to the U.S. government, to settle emissions cheating allegations. Under the deal with the Justice Department and the EPA, the automaker must recall and repair the more than 104,000 out-of-compliance SUVs and pickups. The vehicles were made from 2014 through 2016.

Separately, Fiat Chrysler agreed to pay $280 million to settle lawsuits brought by vehicle owners — leading to payouts of about $2,800 per owner — and will pay $19 million to California to settle similar state regulatory allegations.

Fiat Chrysler has maintained that it didn’t deliberately scheme to cheat emissions tests, and the company didn’t admit wrongdoing.

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