YouSaid · the spoken record

Bill Clerico

lines on the record: 36
first: 2025-01-23
most recent: 2025-01-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“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? What about a nuclear power plant? And not just sort of the sensitivity of these sites, but also like, you know, it's one thing to have three or four fires, but what if there were 30? And so at what point does the system get overwhelmed? And it doesn't require all that much to do that. And so I think, you know, taking the national security aspect of this seriously to me is incredibly important. And I think we're just not. There's a part of me that unfortunately waits for the day that that's going to be something really significant.”
2025-01-23 · No Priors · What Can We Do About Wildfires? With Convective Capital’s Bill Clerico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Aggressive restrictions on where homes can be built and how they are built. I think there would also be just a lot more surveillance. Like, can you, if you can detect fires quickly, you can respond more quickly. So I think that's probably another big one. Those are at least the two things that come to mind for me. Yeah, being much more restrictive on how people build.”
2025-01-23 · No Priors · What Can We Do About Wildfires? With Convective Capital’s Bill Clerico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Honestly, I think three things stop large wildfires. The weather changing, the ocean, or really large massive aircraft dropping jets, dropping huge amounts of retardant. You can't drop huge amounts of retardant in neighborhoods. It's too destructive and disruptive. So you can't do that. The ocean is pretty far away from some of these fires. It stopped it in the Palisades, but I think it's a lot of structure defense and it's riding out the weather change.”
2025-01-23 · No Priors · What Can We Do About Wildfires? With Convective Capital’s Bill Clerico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What if you offered a fast track approval if the home, you know, maybe you don't change the building code, but if the home met a higher standard, then you would fast track approval. You get two week approval instead of six-month approval. I'm not sure what the approval process is in LA here in San Francisco. It's years. But if we could offer incentives for people to rebuild safely, that feels like good use of time and taxpayer dollars.”
2025-01-23 · No Priors · What Can We Do About Wildfires? With Convective Capital’s Bill Clerico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd probably just defensible space. There's sort of this concept of zone zero, which is the first five feet around your structure. That should be clear of any flammable materials. It is not in most houses. There's landscaping and azalea bushes or whatever. But if you can remove that, that has a pretty significant impact on your home's propensity to burn. Probably the next thing would just be a good water source so that again, it can be attractive for a fire department to actually defend your home. But if you have defensible space and a good water source, you're in the top quartile.”
2025-01-23 · No Priors · What Can We Do About Wildfires? With Convective Capital’s Bill Clerico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The forests are going to burn. We can do it on our terms, or they can do it on their terms. But that's the message I think we need to sort of get through. And unfortunately, Wildfire is just infrequent enough that people forget. You know, it's sort of like we're going to put this fire out like we're going to, there'll be a shift in the El Ni ⁇ o La Ni ⁇ a pattern. LA will get a bunch of rain next year. We'll be dealing with mudslides. We'll think about other stuff. And then it'll be in six years from now. We have another one of these incidents, right? And so how do we sustain that? You know, I think that's like the really hard part. Part of what I'm trying to figure out is how do we create a cultural movement around more timber, more fuel management, and make that easier and just sort of part of who we are.”
2025-01-23 · No Priors · What Can We Do About Wildfires? With Convective Capital’s Bill Clerico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want to create like Smokey the Bear 2.0, which is instead of talking about putting out wildfires and like how does Smokey become an advocate for more firefire, for healthy fire, for controlled burns. But like, I think unless we can really make that point to people, the behavior won't change. I think politicians ultimately just do what people want them to do. Florida's figured it out. California has not. And it's not just a red blue thing. 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 is deeply unpopular to light things on fire next to people's properties unless it's done sort of rightly and with this sort of with this right approach. So that's why I'm like personally pretty focused on how do we change hearts and minds around prescribed fire and teach people that it can be safe and that it's essential. And if we don't do that, like we're just going to be picking some new politician to blame the next time something burns.”
2025-01-23 · No Priors · What Can We Do About Wildfires? With Convective Capital’s Bill Clerico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think that is investing in the infrastructure and a real serious look at fuel management on the outskirts. There's no reason there shouldn't be a really significant fuel project around these towns and communities. And in Lake Tahoe during the Kaldor fire, there was a lot of fuel management done, which actually saved South Lake Tahoe, a lot of people think. So that can really work. It's actually really not that expensive. It just requires sort of like the political will to do it. So things like that, I think, are essential.”
2025-01-23 · No Priors · What Can We Do About Wildfires? With Convective Capital’s Bill Clerico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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? And actually use market forces to drive behavior.”
2025-01-23 · No Priors · What Can We Do About Wildfires? With Convective Capital’s Bill Clerico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a good question, and there's probably a little bit less in my area of expertise. But certainly after large fire incidents, there's cleanup that's needed. And a lot of, there are a number of chemicals from firefighting chemicals, from housing, all this, this is kind of nasty stuff that needs significant cleanup. I do think we should seize this as an opportunity to rebuild the right way, right? Like the Palisades is a beautiful place. People are going to want to live there. We should build in a safe way. And there's going to be pushback. A lot of these houses were not.”
2025-01-23 · No Priors · What Can We Do About Wildfires? With Convective Capital’s Bill Clerico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Honestly, homeowners should invest in that themselves, in my opinion. You know, I have my place up in Mendocino. I've got probably 20 gallons of barricade gel. And, you know, if there's ever an issue, I'm going to spray my house down. And so I think that's part of it. Some of the large insurers actually have private services that will come do structured defense. One of the issues here in LA was it just happened so quickly that there wasn't time for those folks to sort of get there. But there are solutions like that. And the departments themselves have those capabilities as well, you know, to do that. And so yes, and I think there's a little bit of, you know, there's no reason someone shouldn't have 20 gallons of that stuff in an applicator and a fire pump in their garage if they're living in the wild in urban interface.”
2025-01-23 · No Priors · What Can We Do About Wildfires? With Convective Capital’s Bill Clerico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're working on that. I think there'll be more to come in that arena. On drone specifically, the sort of capabilities of drones to lift sufficient payload plus regulations around beyond visual line of sight operations have just not been sufficient, I think, for the last, you know, for many years. I think that has very recently changed. The regulations have changed. The drones themselves are just a lot more capable now and can carry a lot more. Our ability to do swarming. 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 or preposition can get there very quickly before the fire has a chance to grow. Or drones that do structure protection and defense to go fan out and spray a bunch of houses and you avoid the road and access issues that we saw earlier and you avoid the water issues because they're carrying stuff with them too. So I think that will be a big tool in the toolkit over the next.”
2025-01-23 · No Priors · What Can We Do About Wildfires? With Convective Capital’s Bill Clerico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This Exodus has changed their view, now allows the cost of reinsurance to be factored in, now allows forward-looking models to be used for the first time. There's a bunch of restrictions on it still, but it sort of took market failure to kind of correct that behavior. Because by the way, that's an elected position. And generally is a position that is highly influenced by consumer groups that want to just keep rates low. And so we've sort of choked rates so low that we broke the system. And so now it's kind of reorienting. And a lot of those policies have moved to the fair plan, which is this subsidized insurance plan of last resort or to what's called the non-admitted market, which is basically the unregulated market, which is what stand, which one of our companies participates in, right? Non-admitted policies, which are not subject to those sort of pricing regulations.”
2025-01-23 · No Priors · What Can We Do About Wildfires? With Convective Capital’s Bill Clerico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And you're using 30 years of historical data to try to price risk, which we all agree has changed significantly over those 30 years and probably will continue to change going forward. And so insurers are looking at their view of this risk and their costs to service that risk versus the rate that they can charge. And they're just like, this is not a business. You know, we can't do this. And there's other issues on top of that too, which is that it's very hard to exit policies once you've written them. The California Fair Plan actually has a surcharge for insurers in the state by market share. So just by writing another policy in the state, you end up carrying more of the fair plan risk as well. And so we've created this like very adverse environment for insurers in the state. And so what's happened predictably is there's been a mass exodus, right? Where they've canceled or non-renewed huge amounts of policies, particularly in high fire risk areas. There's been a minor shift in the last three to six months where the insurance commissioner, because of”
2025-01-23 · No Priors · What Can We Do About Wildfires? With Convective Capital’s Bill Clerico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Insurance rates in the admitted market are regulated, right? And so you have to basically file a rate sheet with the regulator. They say, yep, you're charging an appropriate amount, not too much, not too little, and you go sell that policy out in the market. But you were not allowed in those rate applications to include the cost of reinsurance. And you had to use historical models, not forward-looking models. And so those were like two massive issues because the cost of reinsurance in California has at least doubled, maybe tripled over the last five or ten years. You have a cost that just tripled and you cannot pass it through. I mean, that's like sort of a crazy thing, right?”
2025-01-23 · No Priors · What Can We Do About Wildfires? With Convective Capital’s Bill Clerico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a very rational concern. I guess my argument is that the risk here in California is much higher, right? Like you could have a, if you have a utility line go down in New Jersey where I grew up, you might start a wildfire, but you're not going to, it's not going to see quite the level of catastrophe that we saw. The risk tolerance there is different. And so, and I don't think our rates necessarily reflect that. I think there's also waste in the system. There's crazy requirements to generate a portion of energy from biomass and stuff like that that just is sort of expensive and doesn't really make sense and costs a lot of money. So I think we could reorient to being a lot more efficient, but I think there's, in my opinion, more money that needs to be spent on de-risking the electrical system. Now, I think we could take it from some of the other areas where I think we misspend.”
2025-01-23 · No Priors · What Can We Do About Wildfires? With Convective Capital’s Bill Clerico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 say we don't want the electric bills to go up by too much. And so there's a constant pushback against those investments. And that's kind of what's gotten us to where we are now, where we have a really aging system because there's been this pushback against higher electrical rates. And so, you know, in my opinion, 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.”
2025-01-23 · No Priors · What Can We Do About Wildfires? With Convective Capital’s Bill Clerico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Estimates from Energy Association reports of we're $100 billion behind in, as you said, undergrounding or whatever mitigations. And like it's not as if this is a new issue. The campfire is sort of the prototypical example in California where a hook on a transmission line that was 97 years old failed, causing the line to hit the transmission line and incinerated the city of paradise. And so like how can we have electrical equipment that's 100 years old? It just seems like bonkers. I feel like I'm defending, you know, all the least popular people here, California politicians, and now utilities. But the reality is that utility rates are regulated. And so, you know, for utilities actually love to spend CapEx. Their business models, if PG&E spends $5 billion undergrounding lines or upgrading transmission lines, they get to mark that up by 15% and pass that through to rate payers. They love it. That's how they make money. And so there's sort of this.”
2025-01-23 · No Priors · What Can We Do About Wildfires? With Convective Capital’s Bill Clerico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Particularly before a big wind event, but it can be a big improvement for safety. And then there's undergrounding and things like that as well. But those are very expensive. Undergrounding can cost $3 to $4 million a mile. And so that manifests in larger electrical rates. If you can fix just the utility ignitions or reduce that a lot, that's like 50% of the damage reduced right off the bat. Lightning is probably about a third. And typically lightning causes large acre fires, but less kind of urban interface fires because they can start typically will start further out and there's not much you can do about lightning. So although we have seen some startups that are trying to figure out ways to de-energize large thunderclouds, which is kind of cool. And then there's arson, which is actually a surprising cause of damage. It's at least 10% of ignitions are sort of arson or human cause. I suspect that it's on the rise. I don't have hard data about this, but just from conversations I've had with fire chiefs.”
2025-01-23 · No Priors · What Can We Do About Wildfires? With Convective Capital’s Bill Clerico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the first place to start in my mind is the utilities. So utilities cause about 11% of ignitions, but those ignitions cause 50% of the damage. And why is that? It's because the same sort of high wind conditions that cause massive fire and negative fire conditions also cause utility equipment failures and lines to fall and stuff like that. For utilities, there's things that they can do. They can do vegetation management, basically trimming trees along power lines. Our fund has an investment in a company called Overstory that helps utilities prioritize where they're going to trim these trees for sort of maximum effect. There's a neckline of PS or ESPS, which is public safety power shutoffs or enhanced safety power shutoffs. These are basically de-energizing lines in advance of a red flag event, having more sensitive breakers on the circuit so that if there's a short, it de-energizes quickly. They're not very popular with people. People don't like to have their power shut off.”
2025-01-23 · No Priors · What Can We Do About Wildfires? With Convective Capital’s Bill Clerico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Modern building materials on the house itself, tempered glass could be rooftop sprinkler systems, water supplies there for the house of fire department, even things like large driveways really help because you can get fire trucks in and turn around. The fire department, when they come in to triage in these areas, they're quickly looking at a house and they're going to size it up. They're like, can we protect this house? Is it safe for us? And if you can make that house safe for a firefighter, the chance of survival for that house goes way up. And so, you know, thinking about how do we make those homes on the perimeters of our communities really defensible, I think is going to be our best bet.”
2025-01-23 · No Priors · What Can We Do About Wildfires? With Convective Capital’s Bill Clerico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think you need to think about these neighborhoods in sort of layers, and so if your homes are on the outskirts, those homes need to be protected at a much higher rate than the homes on the inside. Because once the fire sort of enters community, it's really not a wildfire anymore. It's called like an urban conflagration. And it's basically houses burning, spreading house to house. It's similar to what happened in Chicago or San Francisco in the early 1900s. Those fires have much different sort of dynamics. They're not really wildfires. And those fires are very difficult to stop once they start. But if you can stop it at the perimeter and not have to, you know, if you can fight the fire out on the outskirts and not have to battle it sort of street to street, to me that's the big, you know, that's what we should all be trying to solve for. On those towns or those houses on the outskirts, it's really aggressive defensible space regulations and enforcement, making sure that you don't have grass and landscaping up to the structures on the house. Modern roofing.”
2025-01-23 · No Priors · What Can We Do About Wildfires? With Convective Capital’s Bill Clerico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In this case, you know, the water in those tanks was a sufficient volume. It was just about the system being depressurized. So, you know, maybe one of the big learnings from this is that the systems need to be built more modularly, right? To be able to shut off neighborhoods in order to be able to preserve the water supply. So again, like I think there'll be a bunch of investigation done and hopefully some learnings emerge from this. I push back a little bit on the blanket if we just had more reservoirs. Like I think this is actually a very acute issue. It's not, you know, we should talk about reservoirs. I think the state of California does mismanage its water broadly. I just don't think it has a lot to do with the Palisades running out of water. I do think we do a terrible job managing our water overall, but I think some of the connections that are being drawn, in my opinion, are a bit tenuous.”
2025-01-23 · No Priors · What Can We Do About Wildfires? With Convective Capital’s Bill Clerico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, certainly water was an issue. There's been a lot of kerfuffle on Twitter where people are claiming that because of the water bill that wasn't acted on, that that somehow was related to this. Yeah, I don't think that is actually true at all. Like really, 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 5-8 or half inch plumbing connection into a house, that's going to run at 20 or 30 gallons a minute. You have 500 of those going. You've got really significant.”
2025-01-23 · No Priors · What Can We Do About Wildfires? With Convective Capital’s Bill Clerico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One, everyone decided to come out of the Palisades at the exact same time, all got on the road, and then abandoned their cars. And so you couldn't actually get engines and trucks into these neighborhoods to actually do structured events. So that was their intent. They were going to go spray down a bunch of houses, but they just couldn't get enough units up there sort of quickly enough”
2025-01-23 · No Priors · What Can We Do About Wildfires? With Convective Capital’s Bill Clerico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you have a large wildfire incident, you know, initially in the initial phase, the fire department does what's called initial attack. So you're going after the wildfire and you're trying to stop it. If you're not successful there, you enter sort of a much more prolonged sort of campaign incident. And typically in these high wind conditions, like the ones we're seeing in Southern California, the fire department usually switches gears to structure defense. So you actually can't suppress these large flame fronts. You know, you can use aircraft, but even that, the physics of it are just kind of too great. So they typically switch to protecting structures. And so they kind of fan out and their protecting structures. A couple things happened here, which made it really difficult.”
2025-01-23 · No Priors · What Can We Do About Wildfires? With Convective Capital’s Bill Clerico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The way we build these communities to recognize that. Again, it's just very unpopular to have profire building codes. And so one of the sad anecdotes was, you know, the city of Paradise was essentially destroyed by the campfire in 2018. City essentially leveled. When the city went to rebuild, there was an opportunity to pass 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 rebuilt with existing building codes. Just rationally doesn't make any sense. But again, it's sort of about these like political wills to get stuff done. So I think that solving the WUI problem, it requires us as a society to think differently about these risks, right? Like you wouldn't build a house on the ocean on the sand without the right type of foundation and floodgates and, you know, or raised house. Yet we go and build houses in these tinder.”
2025-01-23 · No Priors · What Can We Do About Wildfires? With Convective Capital’s Bill Clerico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think this is another sort of interesting California issue, which is just the issue of housing. In California, it's very difficult to build housing in the city. So people build a lot of times it gets built out in what's called the Wilderbank Interface. And if you look at growth of housing units in the Wooi, in the Wild Lurban interface, it's increased by like 46% since 1980. So we've built a tremendous amount of housing stock in these very high risk areas. It's not just the California issue that's across the West, Idaho, Montana, Yellowstone fanboys, all that kind of stuff. And so there's been a tremendous growth of housing in these areas. And I think that's a big part of why wildfires today are much more serious than they were 20 years ago. If you burn a million acres 20 years ago in the woods, you may affect some housing, but it wasn't affecting major cities and neighborhoods. And now as these neighborhoods have been basically built out into the wild number of interface, these fires have much more significant impact. And we haven't really evolved.”
2025-01-23 · No Priors · What Can We Do About Wildfires? With Convective Capital’s Bill Clerico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From it. And there's a deep fear of it. If you're a local burn boss or fire chief and you want to do a prescribed fire, 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 Palisades fire, you're going to lose your job. This sort of risk that's where the risk outweighs the benefit in many cases. And we don't have the kind of cultural history here and the momentum here to just sort of accept that. And so I do think that California is pretty far behind and needs to catch up. I do think our forests are also different. The risk here is far different than in the Southeast. So there's good reason in part for that. But I do think part of it is also political will and having the right leaders that take this seriously.”
2025-01-23 · No Priors · What Can We Do About Wildfires? With Convective Capital’s Bill Clerico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot to unpack there. Maybe I'll start with just some stats. Florida probably didn't realize that there's wildfire in Florida, but there is. Florida does two to three million acres a year of prescribed burning. It's pretty amazing. I mean, they are one of the most advanced states when it comes to doing prescribed fire. California set a goal this year or last year to do 100,000 acres. That was the goal. I'm pretty sure we fell short of that goal. And we want to build our way up to, I think it's a million acres over the course of the next decade. They're very much as a California problem. Now, is that because purely because of our politicians? I think that's part of it, but I do think that part of it is also cultural. Like, you know, Florida, they've been doing this for decades. Culturally, the state embraces it. They accept it. It's popular at the local levels. There's a workforce that's comfortable with it. The public safety agencies are comfortable with it. In California, we've really gotten very far away.”
2025-01-23 · No Priors · What Can We Do About Wildfires? With Convective Capital’s Bill Clerico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Six times over the course of two years to call for the northern spotted owl. And so like, you know, I think we have this very well intended environmental regulation and policy. But over the decades, it's just become this like morass of regulations, which makes it really hard to do that. And no one has really stepped back and said, okay, what's more important to us? The northern spotlight habitat or inciderating our forest and our towns and cities. And like, can we make a rational trade-off? Because we probably can't have them both, or we probably could, to be honest, but the way the regulations are set, you can't. And so, you know, there's just some really obvious stuff like that that just introduces red tape. And when you introduce red tape, it just adds expense. It slows down. It doesn't happen. Doesn't get done.”
2025-01-23 · No Priors · What Can We Do About Wildfires? With Convective Capital’s Bill Clerico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, for sure. As an example, so I own 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 years and an enormous amount of money, including all kinds of crazy loopholes. Like we had to, I had to hire a contract biologist to come to this property, which was out in the middle of nowhere.”
2025-01-23 · No Priors · What Can We Do About Wildfires? With Convective Capital’s Bill Clerico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because we still have this policy of maximum suppression. And so if we want to undo that density, we need to take that really seriously. There's really two ways to do that. The first is prescribed fire, which is basically using what fire itself under a very prescribed set of conditions to burn these fuels and get them off the landscape. So essentially it's lighting fires in the spring instead of in the summer and managing them. And then the second is timber and sort of what they call mechanical thinning, but basically cutting trees down. And both of those things, I think, are incredibly important, but have been made incredibly difficult by the way we sort of govern ourselves. And they're sort of both actually quite unpopular. I don't think it's quite as simple as saying, oh, it's a single politician that has done it. No one wants a prescribed burn next to their house. No one wants a smoky, you know, a smoky weekend to ruin their weekend in Tahoe. And so.”
2025-01-23 · No Priors · What Can We Do About Wildfires? With Convective Capital’s Bill Clerico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, starting in the 1930s, the US Forest Service implemented this policy of what they called maximum suppression, and they rolled out this very famous 10 a.m. policy, which meant that you hear about a wildfire, and it's got to be out by 10 a.m. the next morning. You know, that was, I think, very well intended, and it was intended to protect timber and protect towns and cities and prevent things from getting too big. And for a long time, it worked fairly well. You brought the fire quickly, you're good to go. But what happened was these forests, which had regularly burned prior to that, you know, with sort of high frequency but low severity fire, just got denser and denser and denser and denser. And so today, they're probably at least three times denser than they were around, you know, the turn of the century. Any places, they're far denser than that. And then you layer on top of that the fact that they're dry and that the weather is hotter and all that as well. And so we've made very little progress in undoing that. And if anything, they continue to get denser.”
2025-01-23 · No Priors · What Can We Do About Wildfires? With Convective Capital’s Bill Clerico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Happy to go there. Maybe what I'll just say real quickly though, first is that I think in even the climate investing realm, there's some big changes happening. I think if you look at climate capital that's deployed, 98% of it goes into what's called mitigation, so reducing CO2. 2% of it goes into resilience and adaptation. And I think what we are seeing is the pendulum that is swinging rapidly, where now I think climate and climate investing is very much starting to be inclusive of resilience and adaptation. I think that's a good thing. And I think it sort of acknowledges the reality because I sure we should emit less carbon. That would be great. But we need to deal with everything that's been emitted in the changing climate. And so I think that's a very positive thing. To your question on what else is causing wildfire, I look at it as, you know, sort of a couple factors. The first, in my opinion, the most important one is just that fuel density or force density has increased three times since really in the last hundred years.”
2025-01-23 · No Priors · What Can We Do About Wildfires? With Convective Capital’s Bill Clerico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe this is a cop out answer, but I think it's very much both. Certainly longer, hotter, drier fire seasons are in part caused by climate change. That certainly exacerbates conditions for wildfire. But the reason that wildfire has 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-inflicted wounds. And I think those are the things that are much more immediately addressable. So climate change is what it is. You know, the climate's warming. Certainly we want to blunt the effects of that over time, but I think we need to think about wildfire in that context. And in that context, there's a lot of things that we can do to impact it.”
2025-01-23 · No Priors · What Can We Do About Wildfires? With Convective Capital’s Bill Clerico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT