(Daily Signal)—Years of policy failures, bookended by insufficient preparation in the days leading up to the California wildfires, laid the groundwork for historic destruction, former California state Rep. Mike Gatto says.
“When the history of these fires are written, people will conclude that it was 25% the weather and 75% incompetence and poor management,” the Democratic ex-lawmaker told The Daily Signal at his Palos Verdes, Calif., home.
The fires resulted from a perfect storm of strong winds, overgrown brush, and dry conditions due to a lack of rain for nine months, Gatto said, but poor preparation and slow reaction time from local, city, and state officials, among them Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and Gov. Gavin Newsom, allowed the fire to reach such devastating proportions.
More than 12,000 homes, businesses, schools, and other structures have been destroyed since the fires ignited on Jan. 7. More than 40,000 acres have burned, and at least 24 people have died.
“They just were slow to realize the magnitude and scope and severity of these fires, which resulted in delayed reactions to do certain things,” Gatto said, “whether it’s dispatching certain personnel or making certain requests for different governments to help California.”
Gatto served in the California legislature as a Democrat from 2010 to 2016. He now practices law and serves as a captain in the California Guard.
Part of Gatto’s former district burned in the Eaton fire. He said more than 200 of his and wife’s friends lost their homes.
He criticized elected leaders for dodging responsibility for failures related to the wildfires. While the weather and lack of precipitation is out of anyone’s control, Gatto said people such as Newsom and Bass fail to recognize that “the buck stops with them,” as former President Harry Truman once said.
“I believe in a conception of a government where you do try to take responsibility for the things in your control,” he said. “And those things include everything from response time to making sure that the region is prepared to informing the public of evacuation routes.”
On Jan. 3, four days before the fires started, the National Weather Service issued a warning of a “life-threatening, destructive, widespread windstorm” the afternoon of Tuesday, Jan. 7. Yet Southern California was ill-prepared for the fires.
“When you think about the four days’ warning that we had, I think the question should not be, ‘Gee, how do these different leaders blame other people?’” he said. “But the question for those leaders would be, ‘What would you have done differently during those four days?’”
In hindsight, the government should have posted personnel at evacuation routes, dropped proactive fire retardant on buildings, and removed highly flammable dry brush prior to the fires, he said.
“This is not about Democrats or Republicans,” Gatto said. “This is not about scoring political points. This is about telling the truth. This is about making sure that our society learns from the mistakes that we made, so that this type of thing never happens again.”
The public is desperate for answers about the past week’s epic losses of life and property, but elected officials grandstand through press conferences while those most affected don’t even have the electric power or internet service to tune in.
“It’s not about scoring points. It’s not about showing up at a fire scene and trying to make it look like you care,” Gatto said. “It’s about making the hard decisions about what we need to do as a California society to improve things so that I don’t have to hear about 200 friends of mine who have lost their homes.”
Californians are angry about the crime rates, homelessness crisis, and wildfire management, he said.
“I don’t know if that is going to spark a change with the voters, with the electorate,” he said. “One would have thought that we were starting to see some of that anger in the 2024 elections. So it’s entirely possible that this anger does bleed into 2025.”
Lenient penalties instilled confidence in the criminals who have committed arson, worsening the fires, and looted evacuated homes, Gatto said. Two have been arrested and charged with arson near the wildfires.
“Is it possible that our lenient laws and our lack of ability to do something about the homelessness problem has contributed to these fires?” Gatto mused. “And I think if we’re looking in the mirror, and we’re answering honestly, the answer has to be yes.”
The laws on looting and theft in California have been weak for the past decade, Gatto said, giving criminals the message that such crimes would be tolerated. Though the laws were recently changed, it takes a while for criminals to get the message that crime is unacceptable.
The political angles on the fires are heartbreaking for the former lawmaker and don’t help a grieving public, he said.
“I saw [Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.] tweet that these fires were a reason why climate change, blah, blah, blah,” he said. “I mean, this basin has burned since before there were cars. And one of the worst wildfires was in the 1960s, before people talked about the concept of climate change.”
“The question for officials is, ‘What are you going to do about it?’” he said. “Climate change is not an excuse. It is not something that absolves our officials from good planning and good execution. So, I get very upset when I see people from either side of the aisle use these fires as a way to score political points.”
The scarcity of clean water for wildfire victims is a highlight of the past week’s failures, Gatto said.
“It makes me feel like we’re living in a Third World country,” he said. “My friends in the Altadena area were told that they could not drink their tap water, even if they boiled it, that their tap water was so dangerous that they could not even shower in it.”
While many were able to drive to nearby cities to buy bottled water, elderly people and poor people who don’t have cars couldn’t access drinkable water.
“People did not have drinking water in 2025, in the biggest and wealthiest city in California,” he said. “That is something that to me is just really, really hard for me to accept.”
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
