Welcome to Z-Pack:.your antidote to the 24/7 news cycle. Real knowledge, real quick.

If this is your first Z-Pack, welcome - I'm Zach.

⬇️ Let’s get it

I may be reaching here, but you may have heard nonstop about the tragic fires raging in L.A. _{(you’ve definitely heard about them)}

Whenever there’s a major event, as you know, the rumors and lies start flying around.

Just take a look at this one:

Thank God for Community Notes on X Twitter

So let me be clear (Joe Biden voice), I’m not claiming I know everything about fires, but (1) I know more than the idiot behind that account above, and (2) I really think I locked-in on this one and managed to fish out some helpful insight.

You’ll better understand both these fires and how our country works after this:

1. Yes - climate change is making these kinds of disasters worse, but sometimes natural disasters do just happen (which means we need to get better at prepping!!): lots of my fellow lefties are out here with their Insta posts already about capitalism being incompatible with a clean environment, blah blah blah. Per usual, they’re right about some of this stuff, but not all of it.
   

   Simply put - climate change has definitely made fires worse over the last few decades as it makes areas like California drier, but take the already-dry climate in L.A. plus 80mph (!!!) Santa Ana winds?

   
   A ticking time-bomb.

2. Although this really wasn’t total extreme government neglect, California government is quite the mess: as members of the Z-Pack, y’all already know that sometimes we make laws, rules, and regulations that are good - they fix the problem.

   But other times, we keep outdated, or just straight-up dumb rules, in place, from your corporate office to our national and state government.
   

   For example, groups like the U.S. Forest Service can conduct controlled fire burns, which are super important for preventing larger fires.

   
   But sadly, “it is not uncommon for forests to burn down while the wildfire mitigation plan is being challenged in multi-year court battles,” especially in California, which suffers from a big ole environmental law called the CEQA that anyone can resort to for holding up some project (or even forest management!!). Sure, the CEQA environmental law may not stop that apartment complex or transmission line from being built near your yard, but it’ll be delayed by years for all of the procedural paperwork that has to be filled out for measuring the “environmental impact.”
   
   Because of these kinds of laws, “the US Forest Service spends 40 percent of its budget” just on filling out compliance paperwork, instead of actually being able to manage the forests!!
   
   On top of that (brace yourself), oftentimes when ‘environmental’ organizations use abuse these laws to ‘protect’ some endangered animal from the US Forest Service conducting a controlled burn, the endangered animal or habit is destroyed by a terrible fire!!!!!! _{**im screaming as I type this**}

   Basically, our government has to burn thousands of acres of land a year, but dumb paperwork rules are keeping them from being able to burn the MILLIONS of acres of land that should be burned every year to prevent awful disasters like the L.A. fires.

   And now, Governor Newsom announced his plan to temporarily waive these annoying regulations like CEQA so that homes can be rebuilt faster, but not TOO much so that not TOO much housing is built (?!?!?) - God forbid that happens in California, Gavin!! 🤬

3. Sometimes we (the voters) should not be the ones in charge of making very complicated decisions:
   

   Why do I say this?
   

   Because in 1988, California made it to where insurers couldn’t just adjust their fire insurance against any increased risk (like climate change) on their own..
   

   Any time an insurance company wants to raise rates for automobiles or homes, they have to hold a public hearing so that an elected insurance commissioner can choose to approve the requested rate increase.

   
   This was called Proposition 103.
   

   As you can imagine, if your a locally-elected guy and insurance companies ask you to be the one to increase insurance premiums on your constituents, you don’t really have the incentive to follow that through!
   
   So, faced with the pretty high likelihood of losing insane amounts of money, what did insurance companies do instead of being forced to take on this giant risk?

   
   They stopped serving customers in California!

   And California responded by replacing it with a worse system that couldn’t handle this level of risk exposure.

   Like I mentioned before, we have made mistakes in the past and fixed them. When 2008 happened, we passed some laws to regulate finance so this kind of crisis wouldn’t happen again.

   But now, some people have been sharing concerns about the next American crisis — home insurance.
   
   Fellow Gen-Z’er Kyla Scanlon has been sharing this concern for some time now:

So remember:

• Climate change is real, but there’s only so much we can do with natural disasters that just sometimes happen

• Because of this, we need to prepare better, which is why government regulations can be good OR bad (like in this case).

• Insurance companies are… well, companies. If they’re not making at least a little profit (not much!), they’ll bounce.

Thanks for taking the Pack,

Zach

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