No Priors Ep. 98 | With Convective Capital Founder Bill Clerico
Elad Gil (host), Bill Clerico (guest), Sarah Guo (host)
In this episode of No Priors, featuring Elad Gil and Bill Clerico, No Priors Ep. 98 | With Convective Capital Founder Bill Clerico explores fixing Wildfire Disasters: Policy Failures, Tech Solutions, And Market Incentives The episode explores why catastrophic wildfires—particularly the current LA/Palisades fire—have become so frequent and destructive, arguing that policy, forest management, and infrastructure failures matter more in the near term than climate change alone. Bill Clerico explains how a century of aggressive fire suppression, regulatory paralysis, and risky housing expansion into wildland-urban interfaces have created massive fuel loads and exposure. He highlights the roles of utilities, insurance regulation, water and grid infrastructure, and culturally unpopular but necessary tools like prescribed burns and stricter building codes. The conversation closes by examining emerging technologies such as drones, the need for cultural change around “good fire,” and the national security implications of wildfire risk.
Fixing Wildfire Disasters: Policy Failures, Tech Solutions, And Market Incentives
The episode explores why catastrophic wildfires—particularly the current LA/Palisades fire—have become so frequent and destructive, arguing that policy, forest management, and infrastructure failures matter more in the near term than climate change alone. Bill Clerico explains how a century of aggressive fire suppression, regulatory paralysis, and risky housing expansion into wildland-urban interfaces have created massive fuel loads and exposure. He highlights the roles of utilities, insurance regulation, water and grid infrastructure, and culturally unpopular but necessary tools like prescribed burns and stricter building codes. The conversation closes by examining emerging technologies such as drones, the need for cultural change around “good fire,” and the national security implications of wildfire risk.
Key Takeaways
Fuel density from a century of fire suppression is a primary driver.
The 10:00 AM ‘maximum suppression’ policy stopped frequent, low-intensity burns, tripling forest density over ~100 years and creating huge fuel loads that, when combined with hotter, drier conditions, turn fires into uncontrollable megafires.
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Permitting and environmental regulation make effective fuel management painfully slow.
Prescribed burns and mechanical thinning face multi‑year environmental reviews and layers of litigation, so critical fuel-reduction projects can take 4–7+ years just to get approvals, effectively locking in risk.
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Housing in the wildland-urban interface greatly magnifies damage and complexity.
Homes have expanded 40–50% into high‑risk ‘WUI’ zones since 1980; when fires reach these areas, they become urban conflagrations—house-to-house burns—making them far harder to contain and dramatically increasing economic and human costs.
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Utility failures are a small share of ignitions but a huge share of damage.
Around 11% of ignitions come from utilities, yet they account for roughly half of wildfire damage because they occur in the same high‑wind conditions that drive extreme fire behavior; better vegetation management, PSPS events, and equipment upgrades could sharply cut this risk.
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Insurance regulation in California has broken the homeowners’ market.
Regulators historically banned insurers from pricing reinsurance costs or using forward‑looking risk models, forcing them to underprice risk and triggering a mass retreat from the state into the FAIR Plan and non‑admitted markets; only recent rule changes are starting to correct this.
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Defensible space and simple homeowner actions significantly increase survivability.
Clearing the first five feet around a structure (‘zone zero’), modernizing materials (roofing, tempered glass), ensuring a reliable on‑site water source, and even storing fire gels/retardants make homes far more defendable for fire crews.
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Technology like wildfire drones and better surveillance will reshape response.
As payload-capable drones and beyond‑visual‑line‑of‑sight rules mature, we’re likely to see drone swarms for rapid initial attack and structure protection, coupled with better detection systems to catch ignitions early and potentially reduce arson and national security risks.
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Notable Quotes
“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 and the way we've constructed our electrical grid.”
— Bill Clerico
“The forests are gonna burn. We can do it on our terms or they can do it on their terms.”
— Bill Clerico
“We've created this very adverse environment for insurers in the state… we've sort of choked rates so low that we broke the system.”
— Bill Clerico
“Utilities actually love to spend capex… The issue is the regulators and the ratepayer advocates that basically say, ‘We don't want the electric bills to go up by too much.’”
— Bill Clerico
“I want to create Smokey the Bear 2.0… How does Smokey become an advocate for more fire—for healthy fire, for controlled burns?”
— Bill Clerico
Questions Answered in This Episode
How can policymakers redesign environmental and permitting rules so that prescribed burns and thinning are faster and safer without abandoning legitimate ecological protections?
The episode explores why catastrophic wildfires—particularly the current LA/Palisades fire—have become so frequent and destructive, arguing that policy, forest management, and infrastructure failures matter more in the near term than climate change alone. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
What specific incentives or penalties would most effectively push utilities to prioritize wildfire mitigation while keeping rates politically acceptable?
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How far should local and state governments go in restricting where and how people can build in high‑risk wildland-urban interface zones?
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What is the most realistic roadmap for deploying drone-based wildfire response at scale, and who should own and operate that infrastructure?
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How can we build a lasting cultural and political consensus around ‘good fire’ and risk‑based insurance pricing before the next catastrophic event forces change?
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Transcript Preview
(reverb) Welcome to No Priors. (instrumental music plays) All of us, I think, have been pretty horrified by what's happening in LA right now with the big fire. Uh, many of us are worried for friends who've lost homes there and their possessions. And, uh, there have been a string of major fires in California and elsewhere and so today what we wanna 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, uh, 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 and may change by the time this comes out. But we're very excited to have Bill Clerico joining us today on No Priors. Uh, Bill previously started a company called WePay, which he sold to JPMorgan. And he eventually left to 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 Sara and I have known you for many years, and you've been a prominent member of sort of the tech community. So welcome, uh, welcome to No Priors today.
Thanks. Thanks for having me.
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, at first I'd 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.
Maybe this is a cop-out answer, but I think it's, it's very much both. You know, uh, certainly, um, longer, hotter, drier fire seasons are in part caused by climate change. Um, 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, 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, the climate's warming. Um, certainly we wanna blunt the effects of that over time, but I think we need to think about wildfire in that context and, and in that context, there's a lot of things that we can do to, to impact it.
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