Opinion
Clerico: Wildfires Surged Due to Forest Management and Grid, Not Climate
“The reason that wildfires really reached a crescendo in the last 10 years, in my opinion, is not because of climate change, it's because of things like forest management, it's because of the way we've constructed our electrical grid, sort of more acute, self-i…”
Opinion
Clerico: Regulators, not utilities, block wildfire infrastructure investments
“And so there's sort of this, I think, ill-informed narrative that the utilities don't want to spend the money.
They actually love to spend the money and they would die to spend that money.
The issue is the regulators and the ratepayer advocates that basically …”
Opinion
Clerico: Electric bills must rise to reflect California wildfire risk
“The cost of energy generation is sort of artificially low right now.
It does not reflect the risks of wildfire.
And so it probably means that electric bills need to go up, particularly in sort of high fire risk areas to fund a lot of this capex.”
Insight
Clerico: Prescribed burning creates asymmetric job risks for California fire chiefs
“If you're a local burn boss or fire chief and you want to do a prescribed fire, You know, it is the right thing to do, but it's kind of risky. If it escapes, if it burns someone's property, if you start the next, you know, Palisades fire, you know, you're gonn…”
Insight
Clerico: Palisades Water Failed From Plumbing Depressurization, Not Supply Shortage
“The water issues were related to there's three, one million gallon tanks as houses burned down, the plumbing opens. If you've got like a five eighth or half inch plumbing connection into a house, that's going to run at 20 or 30 gallons a minute. You have 500 o…”
Insight
Clerico: Regulated utilities profit by marking up CapEx 15% to ratepayers
“If, you know, PG&E spends five billion dollars undergrounding lines or upgrading transmission lines,
They get to mark that up by 15% and pass that through to ratepayers.
They love it.
That's how they make money.”
Assertion Partly supported
Clerico: 98% of Climate Capital Goes to Mitigation, Only 2% to Resilience
“You know, I think if you look at climate capital that's deployed, 98% of it goes into what's called mitigation. So reducing CO two, two percent of it goes into resilience and adaptation.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Clerico: Permitting conservation logging on 170-acre parcel took three years
“So I own a 170 acres of Timber. It's Douglas fir and redwood timber. Sarah's been there. And we did, I wanted to do treatment on that land. It hadn't been treated in a long time, and we wanted to log parts of it with a conservation strategy. It took three year…”
Assertion Partly supported
Clerico: U.S. Forest Service spends 40% of budget, $250M, on planning
“The US Forest Service, I saw a stat, they spend 40% of their budget, which is about two hundred fifty million dollars a year on planning, right?”
Assertion Supported
Clerico: Utilities Cause 11% of Ignitions but 50% of Wildfire Damage
“So utilities cause about 11% of ignitions, but those ignitions cause 50% of the damage.”
Opinion
Clerico: Free-market insurance rules should drive homeowner wildfire hardening
“To me, the real answer, which I think is harder, but probably the real answer is actually to have the insurance companies create an actual free market for the insurance companies where they can say, I will only insure your house if you do these things, right, …”
Assertion Partly supported
Clerico: Forest Fuel Density Has Tripled Over the Last Century
“The first, and in my opinion, the most important one is just that fuel density or force density is, has increased Three times since you know, really in the last hundred years.”
Assertion Contradicted
Clerico: Paradise voted down stricter fire building codes during rebuilding
“When the city went to rebuild, there was an opportunity to pass, you know, more significant building codes at the local level, and that was voted down because it was seen as sort of too expensive and too restrictive for people to build. So Paradise largely got…”
Assertion Contradicted
Clerico: Cal Fire Budget Is Roughly Triple the US Forest Service's
“Cal Fire's budget is, I think, about triple what the US Forest Service budget is.”
Assertion Supported
Clerico: Undergrounding Power Lines Costs $3M to $4M per Mile
“You know, undergrounding can cost three to four million dollars a mile, and so that, you know, manifests in, in larger electrical rates.”
Assertion Supported
Clerico: California Reinsurance Costs Have Doubled or Tripled Over 5 to 10 Years
“The cost of reinsurance in California has at least doubled, maybe tripled over the last five or 10 years.”
Prediction Open · timeframe Jan 2035
Clerico: Firefighting drones will perform rapid wildfire attacks within a decade
“So in my opinion, I think over the next five to 10 years, we will see exactly what you're talking about drones to do rapid initial attack. So you see you know, you get an ignition that's detected from a camera or satellite. And drones are pre-positioned can ge…”
Assertion Supported
Clerico: Oregon sheriff arrested a US Forest Service worker over prescribed burn
“You know, there's very famous case up in Oregon where a local Republican sheriff arrested a U S forest service employee for doing a prescribed burn”
Insight
Clerico: Only weather changes, oceans, or massive retardant drops stop large wildfires
“Honestly, I think three things stop large wildfires. The weather changing, the ocean, or really large, massive aircraft dropping, you know, jets dropping huge amounts of retardant. You can't drop huge amounts of retardant in neighborhoods. It's too destructive…”
Opinion
Clerico: Wildfires are an overlooked national security threat to critical infrastructure
“You know, I actually think there's a really big national security issue here around wildfire that doesn't really get talked about, but like, you know, okay, one thing to do to a neighborhood, but what about a military base? You know, what about a nuclear power…”
Assertion Supported
Clerico: Florida conducts 2 to 3 million acres of prescribed burns annually
“Florida does two to three million acres a year of prescribed burning.”
Assertion Partly supported
Clerico: WUI housing units have increased by ~46% since 1980
“And if you look at growth of housing units in the WUI and the wild and urban interface, it's increased by like 46% since 1980.”
