Permitting as Wildfire Risk Accelerator

California’s elected leaders increasingly agree on fuel‑reduction, prescribed burns, and grid hardening as the technical fixes for catastrophic wildfires, but permitting and regulatory review processes routinely delay or block projects. These delays raise both the human toll and the long‑run economic cost of fires because interventions are implemented too late or at inadequate scale. — If permitting is the principal bottleneck, reforming administrative processes is as important as the technical solutions—this reframes wildfire policy from money or science to procedural governance and state capacity.