California’s Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara took the highly unusual step this past week of instituting a one-year moratorium preventing the state’s insurers from refusing to renew their homeowners insurance policies. He did so to ease an affordability crisis when homeowners insurance rates spiked in response to the $24 billion in claims that these insurers had to pay to cover losses from the disastrous fires across California in 2017 and 2018. Heeding constituent calls, Lara aims to protect homeowners who had “been dropped after decades of premium payment and loyalty.” At a minimum, 800,000 homes are covered by the new policy, with more to come.

The insurance companies have loudly protested this move, but to no avail. They suffer collateral damage from catastrophic losses not of their own making. Unfortunately, it is easy to identify the parties responsible for these devastating losses. Start with Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), the heavily regulated public utility company, which recently agreed to a $13.5 billion settlement to be paid for death, personal injury, and property damage claims from the 2017-2018 wildfires. Next is the California legislature, whose ham-handed regulations in the pursuit of “environmental justice” and “diversity and inclusion” have contributed to PG&E’s chronically poor performance. Nonetheless, a strong wall of government immunity for discretionary functions insulates the state treasury from all liability—yet another classic illustration of undue power without correlative responsibility.

The obvious scapegoat for government responsibility and public wrath is global warming. True to form, the New York Times, among others, treats the California nightmare as yet another example of the perils of climate change, without offering a shred of evidence to support that conclusion. In fact, mountains of evidence point in the opposite direction. To most people’s surprise, global temperatures went down in 2017 and 2018. Whether or not part of a trend, the movement undercuts any claim about the short-term effect of global warming. In addition, there has been no substantial change in summertime temperatures in northern California, where the fires raged. Global losses from natural catastrophes from all sources declined from $350 billion in 2017 to $160 billion a year later—a huge drop that cannot be explained by trivial annual changes in global temperature.