What Can We Do About Wildfires? With Convective Capital’s Bill Clerico

**Elad Gil** (0:06)
All of us, I think, have been pretty horrified by what's happening in LA right now with the big fire. Many of us are worried for friends who've lost homes there and their possessions. And there have been a string of major fires in California and elsewhere. And so today, what we want to discuss on No Priors is, you know, what causes some of these fires? What are technologies to intervene? How should we think about these things more generally? And we're recording this on Thursday, January 9th, in the middle of the day. So obviously, this is a situation that's unfolding hour by hour. It may change by the time this comes out next week. But we're very excited to have Bill Clerico joining us today on No Priors. Bill previously started a company called WePay, which he sold to JP Morgan. And he eventually left us start a fire-focused venture fund. And he's been investing in different technologies and interventions and approaches to deal with wildfires and other things. And so we're very excited to have you today. And I think both Sarah and I have known you for many years. And you've been a prominent member of sort of the tech community. So welcome to No Priors today.

**Bill Clerico** (1:01)
Thanks. Thanks for having me.

**Elad Gil** (1:02)
Maybe we should preface it or sort of take away the objection handling, because I feel like there's two things that people tend to blame these sorts of disasters on. One is they say, it's just climate change. There's nothing we can do and it's impossible to intervene. And then the other approach is to say, well, irrespective of climate, which could impact, you know, frequency of storms or winds or, you know, dryness for fires, we can still intervene in all sorts of ways. And so first, I just love to hear your views on sort of which of those dimensions you land on and how we should think about the conversation in general going forward.

**Bill Clerico** (1:34)
Maybe this is a cop-out answer, but I think it's very much both. You know, certainly longer, hotter, drier fire seasons are in part caused by climate change. That certainly exacerbates conditions for wildfire. But, you know, the reason that wildfires really reached a crescendo in the last 10 years, in my opinion, is not because of climate change. It's because of things like forest management.
It's because of the way we've constructed our electrical grid, sort of more acute self-inflicted wounds. And I think those are the things that are much more immediately addressable. You know, so climate change is what it is. You know, the climate's warming. Certainly, we want to blunt the effects of that over time. But I think we need to think about wildfire in that context. And in that context, there's a lot of things that we can do to impact it.

**Elad Gil** (2:19)
Yeah, one of the things that fascinates me is if you're a strong believer in climate change, then you should actually prepare even more, right? If you're assuming that there'll be more events like this, then you should be building out the infrastructure even more aggressively. And it seems like the opposite has been happening, at least in the state of California and some nearby states, where similarly we've seen sort of these giant fire outbreaks. And so I was hoping maybe what we could start with is just an understanding of, like, what are some of these contributing factors besides climate? And how should we think about them? And how have things changed over the last few decades in terms of what people have done for them?

**Bill Clerico** (2:50)
Happy to go there. Maybe what I'll just say real quickly, though, first is that I think in even the climate investing realm, there's some big changes happening, you know? I think if you look at climate capital that's deployed, 98% of it goes into what's called mitigation, so reducing CO2. 2% of it goes into resilience and adaptation. And I think what we are seeing is the pendulum that is swinging rapidly, where now I think climate and climate investing is very much starting to be inclusive of resilience and adaptation. I think that's a good thing. And I think it sort of acknowledges the reality because I'm sure we should emit less carbon. That would be great.
But we need to deal with everything that's been emitted in the changing climate. And so I think that's a very positive thing. To your question on what else is causing wildfire, I look at it as sort of a couple of factors. The first, in my opinion, the most important one is just that fuel density or forest density has increased three times since really in the last hundred years. Basically, starting in the 1930s, the US Forest Service implemented this policy of what they called maximum suppression. They rolled out this very famous 10 a.m. policy, which meant that you hear about a wildfire, and it's got to be out by 10 a.m. the next morning. That was, I think, very well intended, and it was intended to protect timber and protect towns and cities, and prevent things from getting too big. For a long time, it worked fairly well. You put out the fire quickly, you're good to go. But what happened was these forests, which had regularly burned prior to that, with high frequency but low severity fire, just got denser and denser and denser and denser. Today, they're probably at least three times denser than they were around the turn of the century. Any places, they're far denser than that. Then you layer on top of that the fact that they're dry and that the weather is hotter and all that as well. We've made very little progress in undoing that. If anything, they continue to get denser because we still have this policy of maximum suppression.