In 2023, State Farm Insurance warned “Californians to stop living and building in high wildfire-risk zones”. With the bourgeoisie at the helm, we are heading towards a future where climate crises are increasingly commonplace. That statement from State Farm perfectly encapsulates the bourgeoisie’s attitude towards climate change: “please ignore how our mode of production is destroying the planet and instead focus on what you as an individual can do to avoid the coming climate crisis.”

The Human Cost

The 2025 Southern California wildfires wreaked havoc across the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake. Over 15,000 structures were destroyed, 28 lives were tragically lost, and more than 200,000 residents were forced to evacuate their homes. Climate scientists are most likely correct in their evaluations of the direct mechanical cause of the fires. Those being extended drought, high temperatures, cuts in funding for the Los Angeles County Fire Department (LACFD), the Santa Ynez Reservoir being empty for repairs, and irregularly high Santa Ana Winds. These conditions combined to create this human tragedy.

As wildfire survivors begin the daunting task of rebuilding, many homeowners turn to their fire insurance policies. But the very foundation of these policies is now threatened by the escalating climate crisis.

The Economic Reality of Ecological Collapse

According to an investigation into homeowners’ insurance by the senate, “No matter how the data is analyzed, the bottom line is unequivocal: across the United States, there is a clear correlation between non-renewal rate and climate risk”. Non-renewal is when an insurance company voluntarily drops a policyholder. What this means is that as the bourgeoisie’s relentless plunder of the Earth’s people and resources is causing the climate to degrade, the risk of climate related disasters is growing so high that the economic viability of these insurance policies is coming into question.

This process was occurring in the lead-up to the 2025 LA Wildfires, it was reported that in May of 2024 State Farm cancelled policies for 74,000 homes in a single month, 2,000 of which were located in LA neighborhoods hit by the fire, and that “it wouldn’t issue new home policies in the state.” This process isn’t exclusive to State Farm, as in 2023 insurance companies dropped 1.72% of Californian homeowners.

In 1988, California passed Proposition 103, which instituted price controls for insurance premiums in CA, including for fire insurance. By all accounts Prop. 103 has been effective at keeping the premiums low, for example premiums in Pacific Palisades were lower than 97% of ZIP Codes in the US.

California also instituted the California Fair Access to Insurance Requirements (FAIR Plan) in 1968, which guarantees access to fire insurance for homeowners who cannot find policies on the market. According to a 2020 investigation statewide, 2.5% of homes have FAIR Plan policies, while in high fire risk areas that rate increases to 20.4%. During the period from 2020 to 2024 total FAIR Plan premiums for commercial properties rose by almost 500% and residential properties by 200%.

Before this year’s wildfires CA’s FAIR Plan was already being described as a ‘ticking time bomb’. In 2024 the President of CA’s FAIR Plan stated that “We are one event away from a large assessment”. This reflects a general breakdown in the business model behind fire insurance. A VP at an insurance company describes how "Insurers need randomness, If it’s always the same folks who are targeted, you need to charge them an astronomical premium”.

The bourgeoisie’s reckless destruction of the environment has transformed climate crises from being inconsistent to being regular. It is to be seen whether these policies California has put in place to moderate the anarchy of capitalist production will be capable of weathering these contradictions.

While insurance companies acknowledge the economic realities of the climate crisis by raising fire insurance premiums, they simultaneously have a history of funding organizations that deny its existence. Until 2012 State Farm was the largest individual contributor to the Heartland Institute, an organization notorious for its spreading of climate change denial. They only stopped funding the institute, not because they had a change of heart but instead because the institute released a tone-deaf billboard that year with a picture of the Unabomber saying: “I still believe in global warming, do you?”

Penal Firefighters

One third of the firefighters involved in the 2025 CA Wildfires were prisoner volunteers who earned a paltry daily sum of $5.80 to $10.24. They also earned credits towards their sentences and ‘valuable career training’ (Learning to accept dangerous work, under poor conditions, for terrible pay is apparently valuable training for surviving as a proletarian). This is overseen by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s Conservation (Fire) Camps Program (CDCR). In 2024 California voters rejected Proposition 6 which would have outlawed forced prison labor and the CDCR prison firefighters’ program.

A 2019 investigation revealed that California prisons “have, on average, three times the murder rate of the country overall and twice the rate of all American prisons”. As Matthew Han, who spent nine years in CDCR Prisons, explained, “the conditions in California prisons are so terrible that fighting wildfires is a rational choice. It is probably the safest choice as well”. Given these appalling conditions, it’s clear that participation in the CDCR’s Fire Camps Program isn’t voluntary.

California’s Proposition 6 was a commendable effort to locally abolish the exception within the 13th Amendment that permits slavery for incarcerated individuals. A National Institute of Justice study revealed a 44% recidivism rate within three years of release, climbing to roughly 83% after nine years. This reflects the chronic inability of American capitalism to re-proletarianize the lumpen. So long as prisoners constitute a readily available and exploitable labor pool, there remains a financial incentive to maintain their status as an exploited underclass. This weakens the fighting capacity of the proletariat as a whole and its ability to organize effective resistance.

The alienation and poverty that proletarians must live through is what drives them to crime in the first place. Incarcerated proletarians who fight California’s yearly wildfires are twice damned by bourgeoisie domination. First, the conditions of their lives have driven them to become lumpen, robbing them of the scarce dignity afforded to proletarians. Then, while incarcerated and isolated, they are compelled to ‘voluntarily’ fight the fires literally caused by capitalism’s acceleration of ecological collapse.

Overcoming the Climate Crisis

The question at hand is whether there is any revolutionary potential within the environmentally minded left. What will break first, the planet or the Green’s slavish belief in reform? The 1.6°C threshold was surpassed in 2025. Will the inevitable failure of the Paris Agreement’s 2°C target finally jolt reformists from their complacency? Or must millions perish from climate-driven famine and escalating climate disasters before their illusions are shattered? How far will the avarice of commodity production have to sink humanity before the Green’s realize reform has failed, and that it is only through the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisie that the work to save the planet can even begin.