I'm not very sympathetic to the, there were a hundred mile an hour winds, not because it's not true, but there's been enough modeling that we know that these kinds of outlier weather events are happening in greater and greater frequency. Remember that crazy apocalyptic video of that exact same part of Southern California in 2018 burning to the ground.

Can we just look at that all of us collectively, because that was six years ago. This is not like it was a distant memory from a hundred years ago. This idea that we were just lollygagging around and got caught off guard by a hundred mile an hour winds to me is completely not an acceptable answer.

We knew in 2018 that these things could happen. We knew across the rest of the United States that these outlier weather events were happening in greater and greater frequency. If you weren't sure, you saw most of the insurance companies try to dump Southern California homes fire coverage three months before this event happened.

So all this data was in the realm of the knowable. And then when you double click and you get into a little bit more of the details, there's a level of incompetence bordering on criminal negligence here that we need to get to the bottom of. So let me just give you a couple of facts in the 1950s, the average amount of timber, so wood that was harvested in California was around 6 billion board feet per year.

In the intervening 70 years that shrank to about 1.5 billion board feet. And so you'd say, okay, well, that's a 75% reduction. We must be making a very explicit stance on conservation. It turns out that that's not entirely true because what it left behind was nearly 163 million dead trees, dead, like gone.

And so you would say, well, those things should have been removed. And the problem is that then there's this California Environmental Quality Act, CEQA, hopefully I'm pronouncing this right. And a whole bunch of these other regulatory policies that limited the ability of local governments and fire management to clear these dead trees and vegetation.

And I think that that's a really big deal. And when you double click on that, here's where you find the real head scratcher, okay? Multiple bills, AB 2330, AB 1951, AB 2639, all rejected by the Democrat controlled legislator or worse vetoed by Governor Newsom that would have exempted these wildfire prevention projects from CEQA and other permitting issues.

Then there were other bills to try to minimize the risk of fires by burying power lines underground. SB 103, as an example, went nowhere, didn't even get to the governor's desk. So I'm just a little bit at a loss to explain these two bodies of data. One is everybody can see that these events are happening.

Southern California lived through this exact type of moment just six years ago. All the bills that are meant to prevent this are blocked or vetoed. This is the ultimate expression of negligence and incompetence. How did these fires start? How did they grow out of control? And again, I think that these wins didn't come out of nowhere in the sense that they caught everybody off guard.

This has happened before. That area has gone through this exact moment. There were laws that were proposed. They were vetoed, okay? So that even if you could have controlled it, then you see certain developers like Rick Caruso who were able to protect the buildings that he was responsible for because he took proactive and protective measures.

Could those proactive and protective measures not be taken more broadly through LA County? Of course they could have. Why were they not? And here, what we're seeing on the screen is Rick Caruso's village. Let me ask a very specific question. Pacific Palisades. How much money, and we know the answer to this, how much money did the government of California spend poorly, as it turns out, on homelessness, it was about $21 billion, and illegal immigrants.

I don't know what the final number is there, but I suspect in the tens of billions. If you reappropriated those dollars to these kinds of protective mechanisms in these areas, what would the outcome have been? Maybe there still would have been a fire. Maybe there would have been damage, but it's hard for me to believe it would have been as bad as it is right now.