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"While these deaths and injuries are unspeakably tragic, they aren't just tragedies, they're also crimes," said one attorney.
Victims of the deadly wildfires still devastating large swaths of Los Angeles County were joined Thursday by scientists and legal experts at a press conference demanding criminal accountability for the fossil fuel industry over its role in the climate crisis.
"The disasters we are seeing today are not natural. They are crimes," Danielle Levanas, who grew up in Pacific Palisades and whose parents' home was destroyed by the Palisades Fire, said during the press conference attended by Common Dreams. "My elementary and middle school, our rec center, our library, the local community theater, the banks, the post office where we voted, the grocery stores, our favorite restaurants—they have all been taken out."
"How do you communicate the value of your deceased mom's journal from 1981, when she was pregnant with you, or the textiles you collected when you worked in West Africa in your mid-20s, or the boxes of home videos carefully labeled and organized, but not yet digitized, that captured moments with your family you had hoped to one day share with your own kids?" she asked. "Losing that house in some ways feels like losing my mom all over again."
"The severity of these fires has escalated dramatically due to climate change and the actions of Big Oil companies that have exacerbated this crisis."
Sam James, a 24-year-old Santa Monica resident, watched the Palisades Fire rage from her window. James grew up in Altadena, where the Eaton Fire destroyed the homes of her grandfather and other relatives.
"Our roots in Altadena and Pasadena go back to at least 1890, with a legacy of building opportunities for Black generational wealth primarily through home ownership," she explained. "Much of this progress has been destroyed by recent wildfires including the Eaton Fire."
"While we always understood the risks of living in this area, the severity of these fires has escalated dramatically due to climate change and the actions of Big Oil companies that have exacerbated this crisis," James said. "Their reckless pollution and disregard for the environmental impact have directly contributed to climate change and the intensification of natural disasters like these wildfires. They must take responsibility for the harm that they've caused, pay reparations to the affected communities… and take immediate steps to mitigate further damage."
"The science is clear," she added. "We've seen the writing on the walls. Climate change is here, and it's only getting worse. Our communities cannot continue to bear the physical and emotional toll of this crisis caused by the actions of a powerful few. It's time for Big Oil to be held accountable and take real, measurable steps toward a more sustainable future."
Kristina Dahl, vice president of science at Climate Central, told reporters at the news conference that "we are up against a very deep-pocketed fossil fuel industry that has made it very difficult to address the crisis."
However, "California has held corporations accountable for their role in wildfires, and yet much of the financial burden is still falling on taxpayers and ratepayers," she added, "and the companies that are shaping the conditions under which these fires are occurring are largely let off the hook."
Wildfire evacuee Maya Golden-Krasner, the deputy director and senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity's Climate Law Institute, said during the press conference: "Having inflicted as much as—or maybe more than—$250 billion in damages, the LA fires already rank as one of the worst disasters in U.S. history. Yet the fossil fuel polluters who rake in massive profits and have created the conditions for the fires, the floods, and the other disasters have faced no responsibility to pay for the consequences, and that leaves the rest of us stuck with the multibillion-dollar tab."
Golden-Krasner continued:
So one of my and my organization's top priorities this legislative session is to pass a climate superfund bill. The bill is modeled on federal law that requires hazardous waste polluters to clean up their toxic messes and also on California's Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Act. It would make the largest fossil fuel polluters pay a portion of their huge profits to address the climate consequences they helped create and help California adapt to future disasters. Vermont and New York have actually already passed similar bills last year. And in California we're already paying for Big Oil's climate destruction not just with money but with our lives.
"That's why we need our own climate superfund bill, to put billions of dollars in climate costs back on corporate polluters where they belong," she added.
While unable to share details about which state lawmakers will sponsor it or exactly when it will be introduced, Golden-Krasner told reporters that new California climate superfund legislation is likely to be released "within the next few days."
"Please stay tuned for that," she said. "There was a bill last session that made it through three committees in 60 days and the fossil fuel industry pushed really hard against it. So we're hoping that this year folks will come out and support it and we'll be able to pass it."
Noting that "climate change didn't happen out of the blue," attorney and Public Citizen Climate Program Accountability Project director Aaron Regunberg said that "the climate effects driving these fires are the direct and foreseeable—and in fact foreseen—consequences of the actions of a small number of fossil fuel companies that knowingly generated a huge portion of all the greenhouse gasses that caused this crisis and fraudulently deceived the public about the dangerousness of their products specifically in order to block and delay the very solutions that could have avoided these catastrophes."
"What's more, they did all of this with full knowledge of just how lethal their conduct really was, having long predicted that the continued burning of their fossil fuel products would cause, in their own words, 'catastrophic' climate harms," he continued.
"We have a concept in the law for when someone consciously disregards a substantial risk of causing harm to another person," Regunberg said. "That is called recklessness. And that's what we mean when we say that, while these deaths and injuries are unspeakably tragic, they aren't just tragedies, they're also crimes."
"The victims and survivors of climate disasters deserve justice, and fortunately we have mechanisms to give it to them," he stressed. "We have new legislative frameworks like the climate superfund. We have the civil justice system, which is designed to repair harms and compensate those who have been injured."
"The victims and survivors of climate disasters deserve justice, and fortunately we have mechanisms to give it to them."
"And that's exactly what cities and states all across the country including California are seeking with their climate accountability lawsuits, which continue to move forward and just this week overcame another dismissal attempt by Big Oil at the [U.S.] Supreme Court," Regunberg said. "And we also have the criminal justice system, which is designed to protect citizens from harm and hold wrongdoers accountable."
Regunberg last year co-authored a legal memo laying out how local or state prosecutors could bring criminal charges against Big Oil for deaths from extreme heat.
"Did you know that it's a felony in California to recklessly cause a fire?" he added. "It's involuntary manslaughter to recklessly cause a death. Local prosecutors should consider whether Big Oil's conduct here amounts to violations of these kind of criminal laws."
One observer said it "really feels like the climate crisis is putting the home insurance industry on a fast track to being almost as reviled as the health insurance industry."
As deadly wildfire incinerated more than 1,000 homes and other structures in Los Angeles County this week, insurance companies are sparking outrage for having recently canceled homeowners' policies across California—including in some of the areas hit hardest by the current blazes.
More than 1,000 homes, businesses, and other buildings have burned in the Palisades, Hurst, and Eaton fires—the latter of which has killed two people, The Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday. Fueled by fierce Santa Ana winds and extraordinarily dry conditions, all three fires were at 0% containment as of Wednesday afternoon, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE).
Authorities have issued mandatory evacuation orders for more than 80,000 residents. Los Angeles County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone told reporters Wednesday morning that a "high number of people who didn't evacuate" suffered serious injuries. Hundreds of thousands of area residents are also without power.
CAL FIRE said on Wednesday afternoon that the largest of the three blazes, the Palisades Fire, had burned more than 11,000 acres, while the Eaton Fire had scorched over 10,600 acres and the Hurst Fire topped 500 acres burned. Firefighters battling the Palisades Fire reported hydrants coming up dry.
Amid increased extreme weather events driven by the climate emergency, insurance companies have faced criticism for canceling policies and pulling out of states with elevated wildfire or hurricane risk.
State Farm, one of California's largest insurers, announced last year that it would not renew 30,000 home insurance policies throughout the state—including at least hundreds in areas affected by the current wildfires—explaining that the move was meant to avert a "financial failure" that would "detrimentally impact the entire market."
Other insurance companies have taken similar action, leaving their customers scrambling to find coverage.
Michael DeLong, research and advocacy associate at the Consumer Federation of America, told Common Dreams Wednesday that while climate-driven extreme weather has "made many areas riskier to insure," insurance companies are also canceling policies because "they're trying to take advantage of the situation of rising risks and rising costs to weaken consumer protections."
"They've been waging a campaign against Proposition 103… a ballot initiative that got passed in the late 1980s that, among other things, puts in place a lot of consumer protections about insurance," he added. "This has been a big deal for consumers and it's helped keep rates down. But insurance companies really hate these consumer protections and have been trying to weaken them."
In a Wednesday interview with Common Dreams, Jamie Court, president of the Los Angeles-based group Consumer Watchdog, noted that "under Prop 103, we could challenge rate hikes, and we saved $1 billion by challenging rate hikes that were too high last year."
However, advocates say that California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara's new "sustainable insurance strategy" will make it harder to challenge rates and lacks transparency and public input.
DeLong said Lara is "allowing the net cost of reinsurance to be passed on to consumers."
Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara Reinsurance Regulation To Pump Up Homeowners Rates By 40% Without Guarantees of New Wildfire Coverage! With No Opportunity For Public Input! Read: consumerwatchdog.org/insurance/la... #insurance #InsuranceClaims #california
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— Consumer Watchdog (@consumerwatchdog.bsky.social) January 4, 2025 at 10:49 AM
Reinsurance is an arrangement in which insurance companies transfer risk to another insurer to mitigate damages.
"Until a few weeks ago, California's regulations didn't allow the cost of reinsurance to be passed on to consumers, and now they do," DeLong explained. "So that's probably going to drive up costs for consumers. The commissioner and the department say it's going to make the insurance industry more stable—we're kind of skeptical of that."
"Another reform that he's done is allowing the use of catastrophe models in insurance," DeLong added, referring to a risk management tool that helps insurers assess potential financial impacts of disasters. "Every other state allows insurance companies to use them; California did not until recently. Catastrophe models can be helpful and useful; the problem is that many catastrophe models aren't that good; they're based on inaccurate or incomplete information and they don't have any transparency."
Court also decried the lack of transparency in catastrophe models, which he said "can say anything they want, and then we have to pay the rate." He also criticized Lara's proposal to allow insurers to hike rates in exchange for a purported commitment to cover more properties in wildfire areas.
Lara said last year that "insurance companies will write no less than 85% of their statewide market share in wildfire distressed areas,"
However, Court cautioned that Lara is assuming "that the companies are actually going to increase their footprint in wildfire areas."
"When you look at the details... there are these big loopholes," he said. "Insurance companies have to commit to 85% [wildfire area saturation] within two years—or they can do 5% more than they're doing now. So if they're at 0%, they can go to 5%. This is complete bullshit."
As coverage becomes more difficult to obtain, hundreds of thousands of California homeowners have turned to the state's FAIR Plan, an insurer of last resort, which has more than doubled the number of policies issued since 2020.
"If the FAIR Plan is the only thing you can do, take that," DeLong said. "In the meantime, you can reach out to the Department of Insurance and let them know that you want them to protect consumers and reject excessive rate increases."
"You can also try mitigation measures to reduce risk, like clearing brush around your home, improving your roof so it's a Class A roof, which means it's very difficult to catch on fire, you can take measures to prevent embers from starting fires on your property," he added. "The problem is that all of that costs money, and not everyone may be able to afford that… California has recently started some proposals to provide grants to consumers to undertake these measures, and these should be expanded even more."
"There is some good news," DeLong said. "The California Department of Insurance is working on a public catastrophe model, one that would have opportunities for input from consumers, that would be based on data that's fair and open."
"However, that's going to take at least a couple of years to get off the ground," he added.
Court concurred. "We're a long way away from that, and it's not even going to be something that companies have to use, it's something that would be supplemental," he said of the public model. "I think it's giving lip service, but I think it's the right direction. It just needs to be much more aggressive."