We’re Not Prepared for This

“There’s no number of helicopters or trucks that we can buy, no number of firefighters that we can have, no amount of brush that we can clear that will stop this.”

Good Morning!

Here are today’s highlights:

• California was already experiencing a home-insurance crisis.

• Ami Kassar’s client needs a loan but doesn’t want to use his home as collateral.

• The head of an accounting firm finds that AI requires more—not fewer—employees.

• Will this be “the biggest headline-making nonevent” in marketing history?

LOS ANGELES

We’re not prepared for this: “These years of fire have also initiated a set of arguments about its driving factors — to what extent the new disaster landscape is the result of climate conditions or fuel buildup from decades of fire suppression and to what extent building and population patterns have pushed more people into the path of fire. At times like this, for better or for worse, those arguments and their policy implications feel less urgent than the sheer scale of the wreckage and the simple and obvious lesson: We are not prepared. ‘There’s no number of helicopters or trucks that we can buy, no number of firefighters that we can have, no amount of brush that we can clear that will stop this,’ Eric Garcetti, then the mayor of Los Angeles, told me in 2019. ‘The only thing that will stop this is when the Earth, probably long after we’re gone, relaxes into a more predictable weather state.’” READ MORE