California has an environmental problem. The state is overwhelmingly desert and rain is scarce for 10 months out of the year. Water instead arrives from the mountains. Yet the state legislature and government are allied with environmentalists. They want dams torn down, which means water from the mountains that melts in the spring and summer can't be gathered. Not only do environmentalists now hate dams, their political supermajority has even stalled the water infrastructure improvements voters demanded over 10 years ago, using endless government panel reviews.

Government won't even allow logging of dead trees, clearing dead brush, or creating fire breaks. In Los Angeles during the recent fires, it was discovered that government had shut off water to the fire hydrants built to fight the fires that happen each year. While government mandates that all of the new homes built, or now rebuilt, must install a home sprinkler system.

It's a fiasco but when a fire happens the government blames the electrical utilities they control, who offer a settlement and then the state approves passing the higher costs created by the settlement along to consumers. To pay for the increased fire risk they create and solar panels that only power the state by itself for 9 hours per year, government has increased utility costs 100% while Governor Newsom has been in office.(1)

It is unclear what it would take for California to fix its governance issues. Deficits haven't helped. Statistical tricks and loans push those out to future leaders to get the blame. Fires have not helped, politicians blame climate change rather than their own unwillingness to be as intelligent as natives hundreds of years ago were and create firebreaks.

Perhaps suicide and the harms from smoke - the actual carcinogen, PM₁₀, not the PM_2.5 virtual pollution that California activists manufactured nearly 30 years ago - might be enough to get evidence-based decision-making back in fashion.

A new paper outlines the health impacts of the recent fires in California. We can dismiss indirect effects, like possible delays in health care treatments, because if virtual gains or losses were real anyone outside government would believe that every dollar of taxes government spends really does generate $1.40 in benefits for the economy, rather than creating so much debt that the interest alone on the deficit will pass Medicare spending in 2028.


Credit: 10.1001/jama.2025.10556

In under 30 days, from January 5th to February 1st, 2025, there were 440 more deaths than there should have been, and only 30 were due to the fire itself. What accounts for the rest? No one is getting lung cancer or any other disease from PM_2.5 ever but PM₁₀, actual smog, killed thousands in London during a weather event that kept it at ground level. That is what smoke is. Maps still splash up maps showing 400% more places in red but government and media exaggeration and hyperbole are a likely cause of deaths too. People feel like they are doomed because California government and corporate news stations want that. That increases risk of suicide.

Wlldfires can kill even if you are not near the blaze itself.

What might help prevent it from happening in the future?

Dial back the scaremongering. Not every government mistake can be blamed on climate change but politicians and activists blame everything on anything except their misguided unscientific policies and that makes people feel like they have no control.

California should stop their war on science. They finally abandoned decades of anti-vaccine beliefs, organic food stores no longer advertise measles parties now that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has joined Republicans, but they still use bad epidemiology to rationalize nonsense about everything from food to energy.

Epidemiology can easily be fake but water is real so build the water storage voters demanded by direct referendum because enough don't trust the bulletproof supermajority in power to do anything valuable.

Finally, start logging out dead trees instead of blaming utilities who are banned by law from cutting them down near power lines you ban them from owning.

California only likes science as political agitprop but enough deaths are occurring due to gross denial that citizens should demand change. It won't be in the political party, redistricting years ago jammed Republicans into half their old districts and many left the state under Governor Newsom's chronic economic and cultural malevolence, but it can be that people have simply had enough and demand that their party actually be as pro-science as they claim to be.

NOTE:

(1) Little is likely to change, because there are so few Republicans left that two Democrats will oppose each other to replace him in the 2026 election.