California wildfires show cost of misplaced priorities

Forget climate change. The devastating fires in California should spark an honest debate about policy change.

Rather than prepare for the state’s extreme (but unfortunately predictable) weather variations, elected officials in the Golden State have chosen to ignore tried and true fire-prevention policies. The results are now painfully apparent as at least 24 people have died, hundreds of thousands of people are displaced, and property damage estimates are soaring into the tens of billions of dollars.