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This is the 30 minute TV version of Jan Jekielek’s interview with Edward Ring. The longer-form version was released on Epoch TV on February 8, 2025.
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“The fires themselves are pretty much out. There’s a few smoldering remains, but the trouble has just begun,” says Edward Ring, director of Water and Energy Policy for the California Policy Center. “It’s going to be very hard to get everything rebuilt in Los Angeles.”
In this episode, Edward Ring talks about the recent devastating California wildfires. How did they originate? Why was the devastation so horrific? Could they have been prevented? What is the scope of the damage? And in the aftermath, what should be done?
Edward Ring: “We don’t know yet how many people died. They don’t know exactly how many homes are destroyed, but it’s well over 10,000 homes that have been just burnt to the ground. You can’t possibly convey this with enough respect to really grasp just how big this tragedy was for people who have gone through it.”
CHAPTER TITLES
0:00:00 – The Aftermath and Challenges of the California Fires
0:01:21 – Rebuilding Efforts and Permit Streamlining
0:04:54 – Assessing the Scope of Devastation
0:07:19 – Investigating the Causes of the Fires
0:10:18 – The Role of Forest Management and Fire Cycles
0:14:36 – Edward Ring’s Perspective on Environmentalism
0:20:11 – Rethinking California’s Sustainability Approach
What Edward Ring found on the ground in LA: “I was invited to the President’s round table and press conference. So I, you know, kind of had a pretty intimate glimpse of not only what’s going on down there, but also the response, at least from the federal government so far. And you know, the first thing I noticed was I couldn’t get an Uber from Los Angeles International Airport to Pacific Palisades. It said no service, and that was my first inkling that something was very different. I ended up getting a taxi. I just gave him the address. We started driving, and we got, I guess, to within about five miles of the destination. And we started seeing burned homes here and there along Sunset Boulevard and, you know, in the foothills of West Los Angeles. And then we started seeing Humvees and military police stationed at intersections. And then we came to a checkpoint where there were a whole bunch of soldiers, and they said, you can’t go any further. So I presented my identification, and they checked with the Secret Service and said, All right, you can go through, but your driver can’t go through. And we ended up getting a motorcycle escort for the driver, and that took us now we go into like the burn scape. I mean, from that point on, everything was burned. And this went for a couple of miles where, you know, on both sides of the road, all you saw was hulks of cars burned out. Hulks, in some cases, melted portions of the car and chimneys, you know, and here and there a tree or a shrub that was just scorched, you know, with no leaves left, just charred branches. So that was, you know, a devastating thing to see.”
About the difficulty of rebuilding burnt down homes in Los Angeles County: “It still takes, on average, about three years to go through the full permit process to build a house in Los Angeles County. So imagine how much more complicated that process is going to be now when not only do you have an avalanche of applications that these agencies are going to receive.”
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