The Pacific Pallisades Fire

About growing indoors under climate controlled conditions versus growing outdoors under a merciless sky . . . if I were able to do both, I would do both; just in case.

The more people who grow food indoors, the more will be learned about growing food indoors. I assume this means some kind of greenhousing, among other things. Since glass-shattering hailstorms will be part of the new normal, people doing the greenhouse thing should use panels made of polycarbonate resin which will break into a few tens or hundreds of big easy-to-pick-up pieces under the impact of hail boulders falling from an angry sky. I wouldn’t use glass because glass will shatter into tens of thousands of razor sharp shards, hard to pick up. Maybe use double-layer heat-retentive plastic films, sheets, etc.

I would advise continuing to grow outdoors as well, to try learning how to do it in tomorrow’s unforgiving environment. What kind of trees, shrubs, bushes could survive a hail boulderstorm and recover enough to still produce a survival-relevant amount of food that year? Or at least recover enough to produce a surplus amount of food the year after? What kind of annuals could grow so fast as to produce a little food before the hail boulderstorm? Or could be replanted after the hail boulderstorm and still grow fast enough to produce some food?

My youngest brother was Peace Corps for three years in Batanes Province – Phillipines some years ago. He told me about how that part of Phillipines was a traditional hurricane alley and they had developed crop-types which could grow, mature and set fruit between planting season and hurricane season. And no . . . I couldn’t have any seeds. The Phillipine government was very vigilant about not letting its seed heritage leave the country. Oh well . . .

And here in America . . . work begins on crop plants and growing systems which can maybe survive the coming age of Climate d’chaos decay. For example, corn breeder Dave Christesen has spent several decades working on breeding up a multi-strain corn based on the many surviving legacy corn types from the harshest-climate and shortest-growing-season zones of High Plains America and Canada. He released it some time ago under the name Painted Mountain.
https://www.northfrontierfarms.com/product-page/painted-mountain-corn-seed-2-8-oz-approx-170-kernels

I hope someone is doing this with all the Southwestern Desert corns as well. If they are, they could call it Painted Desert corn.

And if someone came up with a Painted Desert corn, a third group of people could work on crossing Painted Mountain corn with Painted Desert corn to create a Painted Mountain Desert corn. Or maybe a Painted Desert Mountain corn.

And maybe some people are studying mesquite trees to find out which ones grow beans that are really good, as against merely edible.

And stuff like that there.

I’m all for selective plant breeding to produce sturdy stock capable of adapting to morphing environmental conditions.
I’m all for building infrastructure capable of withstanding elements gone wild.
I’m more in favor of a common sense approach to mitigating the extremes through changing every wrong headed political/economic ideology that rules the world. Ha ha. Yeah, right.
Might as well talk about a spiritual revolution, because that’s what it’s going to take. Not going to change the karma of the world through better engineering.
In the meantime maybe stop rampant developments in flood plains, fire zones, deserts and fragile ecologies in general.
Stop the greed heads, the blind attachment and aversion. The fear and hate.
Ok. Never mind. Build a better mouse trap.

If any elites do anything about climate change in the end, it will be the insurance companies, to protect their bottom line.

Or, more likely, as they have been doing now for years, they will simply abandon the markets as the become unprofitable.

Attempts by the governments at state and local levels will fill that gap only temporarily, until they go bankrupt.

And then the only people living in those ZODs (Zone of Destruction) will be the squatters living among the ruins.

The 2017 Tubbs fire in Sonoma and Napa destroyed houses of homes. And it is illustrative of the problem with rebuilding where there are fires. In 1964 The Hanly Fire only destroyed a few dozen homes, as the area it burned was so sparsely settled in 1964. The area was rebuilt and given a fancy name and expensive prices. It’s Fountain Grove now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tubbs_Fire
fast forward:
 [About 1,130 homes have been rebuilt or are under construction, 70% of the units lost in Fountaingrove and the surrounding area, according to Santa Rosa rebuilding data.]
There are 1,364 properties properties in Fountaingrove that have some risk of being affected by wildfire over the next 30 years. This represents 100% of all properties in Fountaingrove.

A building code update added new fireproofing standards for homes in the wildland-urban interface in 2008. Yet, according to the Cal Fire inventory, 56 of the 64 homes built after that year in the Tubbs Fire footprint were destroyed.
https://www.altaonline.com/dispatches/a3778/hot-spot/

@GrimJim,

People attempting to live in the ZODs will create the most creative approaches to survival. Those which work will be selected for. The ZODs will be a very harsh and unforgiving cultural-social Darwin Selection Filter.

Eventually the ZODians will emerge as a new tribe and maybe even craft a new civilization of sorts. Maybe they will even get advanced enough to have a rudimentary division-of-labor economy. If they get to where they could actually need and use currency and/or bills, they could excercise a fine sense of irony and put General Zod on their money.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Zod

@Tc,

The anti-zionist movement has been going to some lengths to at least say that they consider “zionist” and “jew” to be two different things. They even have some jews in the anti-zionist movement to point to for being able to say “it is indeed so”. The more atrocious Israel makes itself in public, the more jews will adopt the position . . . ” I’m sorry. I’m afraid you have me mistaken for someone who still gives a shit about Israel”.
Unless enough people start saying that ” the jews” are “the problem”, That could re-zionise the emerging zio-skeptics all over again. And it could give the Christian Zionists, the Evangelicals, the Rapturaniacs and the Armageddonites a chance to tell the Jews . . . ” You see? We are your only friends.”

According to Construction Physics (https://substack.com/home/post/p-154569319?source=queue), much what you wrote is wrong, though it echoes conventional wisdom. In
particular, California is experiencing far fewer wild fires than a century ago and it isn’t the type of construction (wood versus masonry) but rather location and lack of density that is the problem.

California has always been prone to fire. In the past, people had sense to build in locations less susceptible to fire and then limit vegetation so fires couldn’t spread. Nowadays, people build in dangerous hills and leave too much natural vegetation versus cleared and non flammable areas (lawns, patios, tennis courts, streets).

I am in the desert of southern California right now, east of Los Angeles. I suspect you simply don’t understand these Santa Ana winds: days of steady 50-100km/hr with gusts to 100-150km/hr. Fighting fire on steep hillsides with dense Mediterranean brush under these conditions is impossible. And winter makes little difference if it is a dry winter.

Some people argue that California needs more prescribed burns. That helps greatly in forested areas in the north which get heavy snow and so are safe to burn in early spring, but prescribed burns are very hard to control in areas like Southern California which are never really wet. And mechanical clearance is difficult on hillsides. The real answer is stop building in those hills and build higher density on the flatlands to compensate.

Also, climate change is real but California is not that strongly affected, according to most models. Mediterranean per se and many Mediterranean-like climate areas (Mexico, Chile, South Africa) are far more strongly affected than California.

So, I’ll agree with Ian’s core thesis about climate zones moving north, & people’s complete inability (esp. the gov’t. & PMC classes) inability to leave the Denial Stage and do anything meaningful to mitigate. The vast majority of “projects” that get thru the corporate/ Chamber of Commerce corruption pipeline to address Climate Change are just to put money in the pockets of either side of the duopoly’s sponsors: either the Dimmies’ Financial and Endless War folks or the Rethug’s Corporate Zionists and Culture War Rage profiteers. Think the Bidet “Anti-Inflation Act” which as best as I recall had little or nothing to do with inflation and was an attempt to screw the Chinese chip industry which (as Ian has thoroughly documented) simply motivated the Chinese to create their own industry and cut “Merica out of the supply chain. Oh, additionally Nancy Pelosi got to insider-trade another couple hundred millions into her giant, Uncle Scrooge Money pile (along with lesser lights.)

One other glaring, galling thing needs to be noted, & some have– just as Pacific Palisades, Malibu etc. was burning to the ground, and the Biden Chickenhawks were throwing the summer victims of the North Carolina floods out onto cold, freezing streets to die, they were grifting Ukraine another $2 Billion to “die to the last Ukrainian” (I am still waiting to see if they’ll start sweeping up the 18-22 year olds, which I expect any day now) plus $8 Billion more for Israel to add to the 35% death toll that I’d estimate is the real # now in Gaza, further annex the West Bank and kill Natives there, as well as carpet-bomb the Shiah in Southern Lebanon. Happy days!!

The corporate media won’t notice, much less report, how while ‘Murican people who fall victim to climate change are essentially being told, as one of the NYC Rapist Cops who (in a case of mistaken identity) taunted Abner Louima while raping him with a toilet plunger, “Shut up and die like a man!!” The .01% are little affected by these disasters, except for profiteering after the fact. They can always fly out of town when a disaster hits, like Li’l Marco did during one of the Florida Hurricanes.
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If neither the Pacific Northwest, VT of NH will work as (partial) Climate refuges, I can still share with others that northern Minnesota is for the most part viable. 5 years into the heavy NorCal fires, summer of 2021, my school district offered older teachers like myself a golden handshake to retire early, just in time from my point of view! I officially retired on June 30, had moved everything, me & my cat, by the first week of August. Since then, Duluth, MN climate disasters have been– smoke from Canada wildfires on 3 occasions; 2 businesses, the big Miller Mall and a small art supply store having ceiling cave-ins from heavy snow the Winter of ’22. However this can only be blamed on negligence as heavy snows here go back to time immemorial, nothing to do with Anthropocene reality. Also a drought the winter of 2021 and nearly no snow, no real snow last winter until one 3 inch storm in Spring. This year we just got our first real snow, about 4 inches this morning.

I pay higher auto maintenance and insurance prices living up here with snow and ice, lotsa potholes, etc. Despite the fact that the experts share (our local one is named Tone Lanzillo, reports in the alternative press on Climate) that we are warming “faster” than most other parts of the globe, that is still relative to the Hibernian frostiness, so changes to the environment, to a puny human subject, might seem more positive than negative. We get a 12 week summer instead of a ten week one, yay!!

A final note on politics here, since others raised the issue, e.g. Seattle. Apart from the rural, neglected Iron Range to the Northwest of here (recently I mistakenly claimed Duluth’s 100 miles as the crow flies– more like 130 or so), Minnesota has a very lefty, populist, “DFL/ “Democratic Farmer-Labor” majority. The Scandinavians are notoriously progressive on social issues for the most part, with the one glaring example being alcohol and recreational drugs. When I got here you could only legally get pot by paying a gov’t. bureaucracy $100+ for an exam, maybe if you got one (the “conditions” to do so were mainly catastrophic, near-death, Parkinsons, Cancer etc.) you’d pay another $100+ annually for the “card” and have medical access, at inflated costs needless to say . . . Although it was “legalized” nearly 2 years ago, there are only 2 dispensaries available on Native Reservations, the nearest one, the Red Lake Reservation in the far NW state is 180 miles and a minimum 3 & 1/2 hour drive each way. Supposedly we (maybe?) might start getting more dispensaries in May, but I wouldn’t hold my breath on that one . . . Also, I was shocked by the anti-alcohol culture up here when I arrived. (Despite the fact there is a great music scene, many bars with music). A century ago, before the Volstead Act, Duluth had a “Purity” division of the police that banned all alcohol consumption, raided people’s homes (a sort of forerunner of the War on Drugs), warned in the local newspaper that any public or private events could be raided on New Years Eve and ALL present (intoxicated or not) would be thrown in jail if there was a drop of liquor anywhere on site. Dancing after midnight on Jan. 1 was also illegal, subject to jailing!! (I’m not making this up; local free weekly has a history column which covered this thoroughly.) Yes, the police themselves named the “Purity Squad”, funny to find Taliban-level prudishness in the West but it was here. Even today the biggest corporations can have only ONE liquor store in any City/ Municipality. (I believe this holds even in the big cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul but haven’t spent enough time there to be 100% sure.)

Slowly, esp. among the youth, these kind of attitudes are changing. Now that I’ve been here over 3 & 1/2 years, I will pronounce that the local culture is kind of dumb and complacent, frankly, with a few exceptions. Someone like Bibi’s BFF Tim Walz is lauded as a compassionate “lefty” (also he lied about having fired on brown people while stationed abroad in his National Guard Unit, had to apologize for it), we have Uber-War Hawk and violent abuser of her staff (throwing staplers at heads, etc., she defended this saying this is how she motivates “excellence” on staff) and Health Care Nazi Amy “No Health Care for You!”) Klobuchar. Walz & the “Muslim” A.G. Keith Ellison made sure State Teachers’ & Nurses’ Pensions invest heavily in the Israeli War industry–(I believe it’s Elbit Systems, could be mistaken. It’s the one that brags its products are “field-tested”, e.g. used to attack, maim & murder Palestinian civilians alongside the occasional actual “terrorist”). Now, if you want to find full on MAGA CHUDs, it is only a 10 minute drive from here to “Superior”, Wisconsin. Okay it is furthest North in the Badger State (& the Dairy Queen State) which makes it “Superior”/ farther north than other towns, but it is an abandoned, decaying Rust Belt City with a very despairing and depressed citizenry as far as I can see. When I drove across Wisconsin living here, I always noticed their premier Cultural Icons: Cheese, Fireworks, Gun Stores, Booze (ok, they’re better than Minnesota on this), Billboards of Innocent Babies, screeching “Protect Life!”– in between visits to the local Gun Dispensary & Fireworks shop, I guess, Memorials to Veterans of Foreign Wars & Cops, and Culver’s Fat Food Emporiums where you must be 250 lbs. or more to enter. (Ok, kidding.)

I shared that my local Unitarian Church drove me out by openly Electioneering for Kop Kamala 2 days before the election, in defiance of their 8 principles, freedom of conscience, etc. ad infinitum, they’d also lauded Genocide Joe when he was in office. As Zappa sang, “Dumb all over, a little ugly on the side.” Truthfully I have tired of the desert-like social culture in what is a Northern rain-forest (apart from the music scene, & I now have Tinnitus from exposure to loud noise in my early-life professions, so these respites are relatively few) here. “Minnesota Nice” is real up to a point, but pretty boring.

I’m planning to head to New Mexico and then Mexico Viejo in the summer/fall if I can pull that off. Canada’s out of the question, Europe Delenda Est (apart from the Russian, Hungarian, Belarus, & Yugoslavian colonies), so we’ll see. If I can’t escape from the Belly of the Beast I’ll stick it out here. Sad when there are so few viable options.

I tried finding the above-article in the NY Times by Mr. Kalmus. It was paywalled. But I found other things based on it or extended forward from it. Here is a Democracy Now interview transcript with Mr. Kalmus. ( In part of the intro to that interview transcript, I read the claim that the NY Times pressure-censored Mr. Kalmus from writing all he wanted to write. I gather he accepted that so as to get something written in The Paper Of Record.

In this interview, he says what I gather the NY Times did not want him to write about in the space they graciously provided him for his Op Ed. Here is the link to the interview.
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/1/10/peter_kalmus_los_angeles_wildfires_climate