Windfall

by McKenzie Funk

  Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles was about to give a press conference. “I’ll bet he’ll be wearing his jacket again,” Chief Sam said. He was right. The mayor stood in front of the microphones wearing a yellow fire jacket just like the one Chief Sam was wearing. He began talking: “I’d just like to say that all the Los Angeles firefighters, all the firefighters . . .”

  “. . . and Firebreak . . . ,” said Chief Sam under his breath.

  “. . . are doing a great job.”

  We stayed for forty-five minutes, soaking up information. As we left, the taqueria’s owner stopped us. “Do you guys want some bottles of water or anything?” he asked. We were all set, George told him.

  We had barely stepped into the parking lot when a woman came running up, begging for help. Suddenly we were all running into the Rite Aid. A girl in line for the register had collapsed. She was lying on the floor, surrounded by a crowd. George kneeled down, speaking to her in Spanish. She was having an asthma attack, he said. He was about to move her when three LAFD firefighters, responding to someone’s 911 call, rushed through the door. Three men in yellow looked at three other men in yellow. There was an awkward pause. “We’re gonna let you guys have it,” George said, and we left to find the fire.

  • • •

  IF FIREFIGHTING CAN be thought of as a rough metaphor for fighting climate change, then public firefighting would be closer to mitigation—cutting emissions for the good of all—while private firefighting would be more akin to adaptation, with individual cities or countries endeavoring to protect their own patches. It is worth remembering that in the case of firefighting we have tried this before.

  The man who gave Britain its first firefighters and the world its first fire insurance was a Puritan preacher’s son who was born with the name If-Jesus-Hadn’t-Died-for-Thee-Thou-Wouldst-Be-Damned Barbon. He later went by Nicholas. In 1666, when he was in his late twenties, the Great Fire of London was lit. It started in a baker’s oven on Pudding Lane—someone overcooked some bacon—and because the baker’s house was made of wood and his neighbors’ houses were made of wood and London had no firemen, it spread easily. People ran in every direction, carting away valuables in horse carriages. “The noise and cracking and thunder of impetuous flames,” wrote one observer, “the shrieking of women and children, the hurry of people, the fall of towers, houses and churches, was like a hideous storm.” Two prisons, eighty-seven churches, and more than thirteen thousand homes, housing seventy thousand of the city’s eighty thousand citizens, were destroyed.

  Economists now remember Nicholas Barbon as one of the world’s first free-market philosophers. His writings were born out of the Great Fire. With so much land now cleared and available for cheap, one of his responses to it was to become a developer—“the leading speculative builder of his generation,” according to the historian Leo Hollis. Barbon’s 1685 pamphlet, An Apology for the Builder, was written to protest Britain’s new building tax and protect his business. It celebrated what happens when people cluster in cities: “Man being Naturally Ambitious, the Living together, occasion Emulation, which is seen by Out-Vying one another in Apparel, Equipage, and Furniture of the House; whereas, if a Man lived Solitary alone, his chiefest Expence, would be Food.” Barbon railed against government meddling and called building “the chiefest Promoter of Trade.” He would have liked Southern California before the crash.

  In 1690, nearly a century before Adam Smith described the invisible hand, Barbon followed up with his most famous work, A Discourse of Trade: “The Native Staple of each Country is the Riches of the Country, and is perpetual, and never to be consumed; Beasts of the Earth, Fowls of the Air, and Fishes of the Sea, Naturally Increase: There is Every Year a New Spring and Autumn, which produceth a New Stock of Plants and Fruits. And the Minerals of the Earth are Unexhaustable; and if the Natural Stock be Infinite, the Artificial Stock that is made of the Natural, must be Infinite.” Barbon believed there were no fundamental limits to supply, no real consequences to growth; man could skim infinitely off the top of nature without being subject to its rules. “This sheweth a Mistake,” he wrote, by those who would commend “Parsimony, Frugality, and Sumptuary Laws, as the means to make a Nation Rich.” What ruined an economy was overregulation. What made an economy great was the demand side—spend, spend, spend, grow, grow, grow—and the more and more a man wanted, the more and more he would receive.

  More than three hundred years later, in 2005, Maurice “Hank” Greenberg was forced out after thirty-seven years as CEO of AIG, and his aides created a think tank out of whole cloth and installed him as its figurehead. It was part of a larger rehabilitation campaign that would include hiring well-known academics—the dean of MIT’s Sloan School, professors from Wharton and the University of Chicago—to say good things about Greenberg, write papers that underscored his free-market genius, and host conferences that let him be keynote speaker. Its name: the Barbon Institute.

  Today, libertarianism of the kind Barbon prefigured is strongly associated with climate denial. If fixing the problem could entail more government intervention, some would prefer to deny that the problem exists. But as this position becomes ever less tenable, some groups appear to be making a tactical shift: Rather than deny the science, they deny that mandated carbon cuts are the solution. For the intellectual descendants of Barbon the free marketeer, one philosophically consistent stance on climate change is to champion market solutions such as Firebreak—which is to say champion the other response Barbon had to the Great Fire.

  In addition to building his building company, Barbon had built a firefighting company, the Fire Office. One contemporary described it as “servants in livery with badges, who are watermen and other lusty persons.” They were always ready “when any sudden fire happens, which they are very laborious and dexterous at quelling, not sticking in cases of necessity to expose themselves to great hazards.” The Fire Office offered insurance policies for seven, eleven, twenty-one, or thirty-one years—two shillings, six pence per pound of rent for a brick house, twice that for a wooden one, with the services of the lusty watermen included. Barbon signed up more than four thousand clients.

  But the company soon attracted competition: the Friendly Society, the General Insurance Company, the Hand-in-Hand Company. Each brigade had its own uniform—blue coats with red linings, or blue shirts with silver buttons, or yellow pants and silver-buckled shoes—and its own fire marks, metal plaques posted on homes so that everyone would know exactly who should save whom. Whenever part of London burned, the brigades fought so fiercely against one another for water and staging areas that authorities had to impose fines: five shillings for hitting a rival fireman; two shillings, six pence for pouring water on him. It was chaotic and, in fact, inefficient. By the early nineteenth century, the disarray was such that private firefighters were replaced by public firefighters, for whom the only adversary was fire.

  Seen up close, Chief Sam and his men also seemed less efficient than the public crews. Like the exotic financial instruments that had sunk AIG, like so many responses to the effects of carbon emissions, like so many Band-Aids when the cure was to never have gotten hurt in the first place, the Wildfire Protection Unit was a solution so complicated that the root problem had become an abstraction. Public firefighters fought fires. They discovered where they were burning, went there, and tried to put them out. But Chief Sam and his men did something more complex. In real time, using the best communications systems they could afford without cutting into profits, they got clients’ addresses from dispatchers in another state, who had to get them from AIG and Farmers reps in yet another state. They had to figure out where the fire was going. They had to figure out which client addresses were in the way. They had to get to them, even if it meant sneaking across police lines. When they reached an address, and if the house was in fact in danger—a rarity, I was learning—they had to jump out of their trucks, unroll their hoses, spray their Phos-Chek, retr
ieve their hoses, jump back into their trucks, and race to the next threatened address on their list. Unless, that is, the fire had changed course and the list needed to change, too. When that happened, they had to start all over again. The libertarian dream was a logistical nightmare.

  • • •

  THE HOME CHIEF SAM SAVED, the one I can verify myself, was on Andora Avenue in Chatsworth—“Pandora,” he called it, until command straightened out the list. It was ranch-style in the fullest sense: sprawling, with horse stables out back and a twenty-foot American flag up front, set amid a series of equestrian estates in Chatsworth. To reach it, we went against the tide of a full evacuation. Children walked horses and mules down the middle of Topanga Canyon Boulevard. A man in a cowboy hat led a pony half his height. SUVs towing horse trailers clogged intersections. We took a detour down Chatsworth Street and passed more horses being loaded into more trailers, a sports car being loaded into another trailer, a man throwing bags into the trunk of his blue Jaguar, a sign for a missing dog. Public firefighters were nowhere to be seen. The sky was turning yellow. The flames were minutes away.

  The homeowner was standing at the entrance to her estate, loading her white pickup with the engine running. Her three young daughters sprinted out of the house. All were wearing surgical masks.

  “We’re with AIG, your insurance company,” Chief Sam told the woman.

  “Oh, yay!” she said. “We love you!”

  Chief Sam directed Pump 23 into the driveway: “Back it in! Back it in! Watch out! You guys, get out of the way!” It inched the rest of the way in, and the men unspooled the hose. A hot wind whipped the flag back and forth. We sprinted toward the stables. They began to spray the shrubs behind the white guesthouse, the estate’s first line of defense. Then the walls of the guesthouse itself. The wooden arbor alongside the guesthouse. The corral. The brown tack room. The blue Adirondack chair. The rear deck of the main house. The patio of the main house. The patio furniture’s cushions. The roof and walls and windows facing the brick back courtyard, next to the leaf-choked pool. The wooden furniture at poolside. The roof of the gazebo. The trunk of a palm tree. The roof of the four-car garage.

  Chief Sam ran with the crew the whole time, slinging the hose over his shoulders to get it around corners, shouting directions, pointing. When they did it wrong, he did it for them, wresting away the nozzle and blasting the walls until they dripped. The rush ended after twenty minutes, and we gathered on the lawn, breathing hard.

  A neighbor appeared. She seemed to have mistaken Chief Sam for a public firefighter, and all of us attempted to play along. “You could get right to the fire at the second property down, Tres Palmas,” she said. “They’ve got double gates all the way.”

  “Okay, okay,” Chief Sam said. The air filled with smoke.

  “I’ve got trails in here,” she said. “You can pull all the way in.” She pointed down the street, toward the flames, waiting expectantly.

  “Okay,” Chief Sam said, barely looking at her. “We’ve got more resources coming.”

  SIX

  UPHILL TO MONEY

  WHERE WATER RUNS WHEN IT RUNS OUT

  The offices of the world’s first water-focused hedge fund were down the Pacific coast from Little Tujunga, in the sprawl of greater San Diego, where they overlooked a parking lot near two malls and four Starbucks in a subdivided landscape developers call the Golden Triangle. The neighborhood gets its name from the isosceles pattern of intersecting freeways that bounds it on three sides. It gets its water from the nearby Alvarado Water Treatment Plant, run by San Diego’s Public Utilities Department, which gets its water from the larger San Diego County Water Authority, which gets its water from the yet larger, Los Angeles–dominated Metropolitan Water District, which gets much of its water—in greater proportions during California’s droughts—from the 242-mile Colorado River Aqueduct, which gets its water from a reservoir straddling the Arizona border, Lake Havasu, which gets its water from the fourteen-hundred-mile Colorado River, which gets its dwindling water from thousands of streams, snowfields, lakes, and springs in a drainage basin covering nearly 250,000 square miles across seven western states. Without imported water, the 2.7-million-person San Diego metropolis, like much of Southern California, would be no more capable of supporting people than the coastal desert it once was. It was well after Chief Sam’s fires had been quelled when I visited the region again, at the height of a hot summer in 2010. I got my water that morning from a secretary, who handed me a tiny plastic bottle—Poland Spring, was it?—from the fridge.

  The man I’d come to meet was John Dickerson, the founder and CEO of the sixteen-person Summit Global Management, a former CIA analyst, and the buyer of billions of gallons of water in two vital, desiccating river systems I would spend weeks tracing: the Colorado and Australia’s Murray-Darling. Both systems had experienced unprecedented recent droughts, which scientists tied to climate change. Financial managers like Dickerson, meanwhile, had experienced the opposite: a flood of money. Summit had launched its first water fund in 1999, but “for a long time,” he told me, “I was a voice in the wilderness. We couldn’t get anybody to buy our fund. Then came Al Gore and his stuff, the whole global-warming thing, droughts. Water became the go-to idea.”

  For the climate investor, water was the obvious thing. Carbon emissions are invisible. Temperatures are an abstraction. But melting ice, empty reservoirs, lapping waves, and torrential rainstorms are physical, tangible—the face of climate change. Water is what makes it real. After An Inconvenient Truth, during 2007’s record melt in the Arctic Ocean, at least fifteen water mutual funds had launched globally, more than doubling the number in existence. In two years, the amount of money under management ballooned tenfold to $13 billion. Credit Suisse, UBS, and Goldman Sachs hired dedicated water analysts, the latter calling water “the petroleum of the next century” and referring to “major multi-year droughts” in Israel, Australia, and the American West. “At the risk of being alarmist,” Goldman said in a 2008 report, “we see parallels with Malthusian economics.”

  Citigroup’s chief economist, Willem Buiter, would take it further. “I expect to see in the near future a massive expansion of investment in the water sector,” he wrote, “including the production of fresh, clean water from other sources (desalination, purification), storage, shipping and transportation of water. I expect to see pipeline networks that will exceed the capacity of those for oil and gas today. I see fleets of water tankers (single-hulled!) and storage facilities that will dwarf those we currently have for oil, natural gas and LNG. There will be different grades and types of fresh water, just the way we have light sweet and heavy sour crude oil today. Water as an asset class will, in my view, become eventually the single most important physical-commodity based asset class, dwarfing oil, copper, agricultural commodities and precious metals.” It was Etan Bar’s elevator pitch from Israel all over again—if there’s a market for anything, it’s water, because there is no water!—only this time there was real money behind it.

  In his office, Dickerson, in his late sixties, sat in a leather chair next to a window and an old PC, and I sat across his desk from him. The walls had photographs of Alaskan glaciers and Utahan deserts—Dickerson took them himself—and a bookshelf had three copies of An Inconvenient Truth and two of Cadillac Desert, the seminal 1986 book on water and political power in the American West. Its author, the environmental icon Marc Reisner, was a Summit board member before his death in 2000. “There are all these Zen-like things about water,” Dickerson told me. “It’s the most necessary of all commodities. You know, there’s no substitute for it at any price. And we cannot make water. Did you ever think about that, really? Hydrogen and oxygen. You can’t grow it. It’s a substance that is gonna be forever fixed on this planet.”

  Where the water was, already the people often were not. “We still have the exact same amount in our ecosphere,” he continued, “but the ultimate effect
of global warming is that percentage that is freshwater is getting smaller, the percentage that is salt water is getting larger, and the maldistribution of freshwater is getting much more severe.” There were record floods in China, unprecedented droughts in Australia. “We seem to go to these climatic extremes,” he said. The “supply/demand imbalance” for water—fueled by population growth, accelerated by carbon emissions—was only increasing. It was a situation ripe for speculation, except there was no easy way for most investors to get in. “If you’re a mom and pop, sitting in Peoria, so to speak, you can buy wheat futures, pork bellies, oats, orange juice futures,” Dickerson explained, but “oddly enough, not water futures.”

  Summit’s first water fund, which was up 200 percent after its first decade, with $600 million under management, had navigated this roadblock by picking stocks within the convoluted $400 billion field Dickerson termed “hydrocommerce”: the business of storing, treating, and delivering water for use in households, manufacturing, and agriculture. Dickerson’s newer rivals, including funds from Pictet, Terrapin, and Credit Suisse, mostly did the same. They bought shares of builder-operator multinationals such as France’s Veolia, of the tagline “L’environnement est un défi industriel”—“The environment is an industrial challenge”—and Suez, its compatriot and major rival in water treatment and desalination. They bought diggers of ditches, layers of pipelines, and manufacturers of filters, pumps, meters, membranes, valves, and electronic controls. They also bought privatized utilities in cities big and small, though these, despite—or perhaps because of—widespread fear of financialization of water, serviced just 12 percent of the American public, 10 percent of the globe, and they could hike rates only as high as regulators would allow.