Daniel Swain in The Los Angeles Times: REBUILD | REBURN; California spends billions restoring towns charred by wildfire

Gone could be the political and public will to spend hundreds of millions of dollars — with Southern California taxpayers footing a big chunk of the bill — to replace homes and businesses for a small number of people, knowing that it’s all likely to burn down again as extreme heat and drought keep decimating unmanaged forests. “Whatever risk tolerances that we collectively decided were acceptable, for whatever reason, in whatever context, are no longer valid,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA. That’s because Californians built communities and infrastructure “in a particular historical context that no longer exists.”