The American Spectator might not be at the top of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s reading list, but had it been, he would have known that California’s teetering insurance system was just one particularly bad wildfire away from disaster. Sure, he knew that insurers were fleeing the state in the face of its absurd price-control system that doesn’t allow them to price policies to reflect their actual risk, but that knowledge didn’t spur him to make the matter a priority.

In September 2023, I wrote the following on these pages after lawmakers decided to punt on insurance reform rather than take on their anti-corporate allies:

Newsom said the legislative deal “unfortunately fell through and, I say unfortunately, because time is of the essence.” Yet timing wasn’t essential enough for the Legislature, which does have the knack for punting on the state’s truly pressing problems (homelessness, pension debt, failing public schools, etc.) It’s unclear what Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara, who has been chastened for his inaction by some media sources, plans to do about a crisis that he continues to blame on climate change, inflation and everything other than the state’s price controls and inefficient rate-approval system.

Well, over a year later, Lara finally implemented some reasonable reforms that allow insurers to use forward-looking catastrophe models in determining rates rather than relying primarily on past claims. That should have been a no-brainer many years ago for our climate-change-obsessed policymakers. If the future climate is warming, then insurance companies ought to be able to include such warming — and its fire-related risks because of dryness and drought — in their rate making.