Crypto News: Gridlock amid the fires is LA in one image

A nightmare scenarios is unfolding in Los Angeles with several wildfires burning out of control. Businessweek editor Laura Bliss, a native of the city, writes about the images flooding our screens. Plus: The technological challenges facing Israeli farms in wartime, and how the federal government can add housing using land it already owns. If this email was forwarded to you, click here to sign up.

"It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination," wrote Joan Didion in 1967. "The city burning is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself." If she was right, Angelenos and the world were handed an awful illustration this week of what she considered the region's defining features: the Santa Ana winds and fire.

As of 9 a.m. Wednesday in California, more than 1,000 structures had burned and at least two people were dead in blazes that started less than 24 hours earlier. The fires have consumed thousands of acres and remain out of control as winds blow 60 to 80 mph across the rain-starved city. My messages and news feeds are filled with "the violence and the unpredictability" Didion conjured in her description of Santa Ana fire weather. Many of the apocalyptic images involve another one of LA's most important symbols: cars.

A gridlock of empty Audis and Teslas on Palisades Drive, abandoned by drivers fleeing the fast-encroaching fire. (Eventually giant bulldozers cleared a path.) Two Malibu lifeguard stands, burning like popsicle sticks after flames improbably jumped Pacific Coast Highway. In one photo, taken by my brother from a lookout off Mulholland Drive about 4 p.m. Tuesday, thick clouds of smoke refracted the setting sunlight and magnified the star's appearance, creating an impression I can only compare to the final scene of Lars von Trier's 2011 epic film, Melancholia. (In a more comic movieland moment, the actor Steve Guttenberg appeared on local news Tuesday imploring people to not just abandon their vehicles: "If you leave your car behind, leave the key in there so a guy like me can move your car so that these firetrucks can get up there.")

View from a Mulholland Drive lookout. Photograph by Jonah Bliss

Tens of thousands of people have taken to their cars to find safer ground across the city. Many more will likely follow in the days to come as the wind keeps howling. LA, that California king-size quilt of neighborhoods stitched together by freeways and boulevards, was built for moving across huge spaces.

But that movement only works in ideal, or even idealized, conditions, as the TV footage from these fires shows. Those forsaken sedans and SUVs in the Palisades are a reminder that LA's roads can quickly become inadequate in a disaster, the likes of which are only becoming more common. Clogged roads have been a death sentence in several recent wildfire evacuations, including in Paradise, California, in 2018 and Lahaina, Hawaii, in 2023. Even in normal circumstances, LA's autocentrism fails residents by wasting their time in traffic or neglecting to provide safe alternatives. This is to say nothing of how the car has enabled development of LA's most fire-prone areas, where just last April homeowners were hit with insurance cancellations because of scenarios like the one we're seeing now.

Some change is slowly underway. LA is in the midst of a $120 billion rail transit expansion, and state and local lawmakers are working to build denser housing across the region, in a historic move away from the 20th century model of car-based suburbs. Cars are so ingrained in the city's identity that it may be hard to picture an LA less dependent on driving. But if leaders want to make residents safer from devastating—and inevitable—wildfires, that is one new image to work toward.

Follow the latest updates from Bloomberg News here.

In Brief

Bill Ackman chases a 1,200% profit on a Trump trade that's far from over.
Fed minutes show officials were eager to slow interest-rate cuts.
Chick-fil-A is outsourcing a tedious job that caused countless injured fingers to an automated factory: squeezing lemons.

How GPS Jamming Has Changed Israeli Farms

Itzhik Cohen in a greenhouse on his kibbutz, Adamit. Photographer: Daniel Rolider for Bloomberg Businessweek

When a ceasefire between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah went into effect in late November, 67-year-old Itzhik Cohen was finally able to take in the damage to the fields in Adamit, his kibbutz in a mountainous, windswept area in northern Israel less than a mile from the Lebanese border. The kibbutz's residents were forced to evacuate because of the Hezbollah rocket barrage that began after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks. While some farmworkers were able to access the fields periodically, it wasn't enough to keep the peach orchards from shriveling; they'll need to be uprooted and replaced. The mango crops were consumed by a bacterial infection. A rocket landed in the vineyard, setting off a fire that destroyed years of work. Miles of new greenhouses were overrun with 6-foot-tall weeds. Some neglected groves abutting the border are heavy with ripe avocados, but the farmers missed the export deadline and can only sell them at a loss. Israeli military sappers are still scouring the fields for unexploded ordnance.

Adamit remains mostly abandoned. Cohen says he's concerned that families with young children will never feel safe enough to come back, threatening the community's long-term viability. But his short-term focus is the fields. "This will take five years to rehabilitate," he says, standing in the orchard. By Cohen's estimate, the financial losses from the peaches alone are probably more than $500,000, and that doesn't even include the cost of replanting the trees. He's preparing the kibbutz's claim for compensation for war damages with the government, but he doesn't expect to be made whole.

Israel's Tax Authority says it has received almost 2,000 such requests from farmers seeking compensation for war-related damage. But the rehabilitation of the sector may be impeded by another consequence of the continuing conflict: the Israeli military's jamming of GPS signals. This began after the Oct. 7 attacks, to protect against GPS-guided missiles, rockets and drones. And while Israel has scaled back those efforts after the ceasefire with Lebanon, signals in much of the country remain unreliable. Continued threats from Yemen and Iraq, as well as unrest in Syria, lower the chances that the disruptions will be eased entirely anytime soon.

Around 70% of Israeli farmers use precision-farming technologies, many of which are GPS-dependent. Marissa Newman explains what happens when it's jammed: Israel's Wartime Farmers Are Relearning How to Plow Without GPS

A Bipartisan Idea to Ease the Housing Crisis

Photographer: Hannah Whitaker for Bloomberg Businessweek

Among the more urgent tasks facing Donald Trump now that he's heading back to the White House is answering calls to address the country's housing availability and affordability crisis. First-time and low-income homebuyers are all but shut out of the housing market, foreclosing the opportunity to build wealth and put a down payment on their own American dream.

The Trump campaign offered several policies to address the problem, but the centerpiece was the idea to open up federally controlled public lands for housing construction. It's a particularly attractive idea because it can skirt local red tape, and it has bipartisan support. But if it's going to succeed, the plan has to be oriented toward transforming smaller plots of land within urban areas and on their periphery.

Michael Albertus, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and author of Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn't, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies, writes in an essay for Businessweek about the federal parcels of land within or adjacent to metropolitan areas that could be transformed into housing: The US Government Is Sitting on a Possible Solution to the Housing Crisis

Toward Net Zero

$1 trillion

That's how much the global carbon offset market could be worth by midcentury. World leaders and Wall Street are betting the struggle toward net-zero targets will reignite the troubled trade in carbon offsets.