Easy to understand, but not easy to implement politically given its status as a powerful club in the environmental movement’s arsenal. But that makes it a perfect target for the new Trump administration. With the fires running wild in Southern California, the California populace (and the American people who will get stuck with a large part of the bill) will begin rethinking policies that have exacerbated the current crisis. Sure there is likely administrative incompetence (e.g., L.A. Mayor), but that likely doesn’t explain the lack of water overall. California has made many decisions over many years to prioritize the environment over people, and prioritizing progressive priorities of how to fix the environment over people. So the favorite whipping boy of the California left is often Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), given that many fires originate with electric transmission lines. But they’re spending billions on clean energy projects and that comes at a cost of spending the money to put many of these lines underground, where wind can’t stir them up.

But at the federal level, the Endangered Species Act (ESA) has been a key roadblock to many resource development projects as well as current usage of property. If you have the unfortunate outcome of having an endangered species found on your land (and known by others), you’ve just effectively lost most of your property rights–the endangered species effectively now owns your property. Months before the current crisis, Donald Trump has correctly been identifying bad policies have limited water availability, specifically pointing at the ESA and the delta smelt, raising the profile of the problem. In the current law, if you have an endangered species on your property, you can’t do anything that might disturb the habitat in a detrimental way to the species. In practice, this precludes development of the land, effectively confiscating the wealth of the property owner–a cost that is not fully captured in our cost benefit analysis. This leads to the unofficial motto in the west: Shoot, Shovel, and Shut Up. Make sure no one else knows about the rare rodent on your property, and make sure no rare rodent ever returns!

So here in short form is the principle of the reform. Instead of telling landowners that endangered species on their property are something to be feared and eliminated before anybody finds out, change the ESA to have taxpayer funds pay landowners for every endangered species that they can document lives on their land. The 2nd Law of Economics is incentives matter–give people an incentive to creatively create habitat which benefits all God’s creatures. Pay them more money the rarer and more important the loss of species will be, and pay them less for less rare. Keep paying small fees for some period of time after a species is no longer endangered to encourage the capital expenditure to create the beneficial habitat in the first place. We understand we sometimes need to pay people to help support the costs of doing the right thing with foster children. Let’s think about God’s creatures the same way. I’m highly confident you’ll have far fewer endangered species and the true social cost (currently hidden by inflicting it on property owners) will be much less.

Or we can continue just having record rainfalls running into the ocean and no new reservoirs being built to capture and people won’t have water to drink or to use to put out fires.