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A Climate Change with Matt Matern · Climate & Energy · October 2026
The host asks how insurers pulling out of fire zones will change what gets built. Shula, who works on green building, says he likes it when insurers price the risk because that is what changes decisions, and worries about homeowners who can no longer get cover.
…outcome for their community for many years, many years ahead. And it's been a great project. I got to talk about it on National Public Radio recently. It's getting quite a bit of media attention and is a wonderful example of what hopefully all future buildings will look like in the years to come.
…Next question is about insurance pulling out a fire zone and how is that going to reshape what gets built? And it sounds like what you did with the Malibu school really helped so that maybe they can get insurance, whereas some other buildings that are not so well designed are going to be riskier.
Yeah, absolutely. What's kind of crazy about the LA wildfire situation is that we're building back in all the same areas. There's no new regulations preventing building back on any of these sites that burn down. There's also no massive change to prevent these fires happening again in the future. There's nothing new that couldn't cause the same disaster to happen again. Of course, the insurance companies know this and are looking at this. And insurance, I think, is super interesting to look at related to science and market factors, business influences on how we address climate issues. And that's where I sit and want to see that happening. I love when we're able to actually price the risk…
Yeah, I tend to think that it should be waking up more people because it's happening not only in California, but in Florida and other places, probably along the coast and the Gulf of Mexico, as well as on the Atlantic coast where they get hit with a fair number of hurricanes as well. Though it…
Yeah, yeah, I agree. We've seen in New York City, I think it was Hurricane Sandy where they had a lot of flooding that happened. And then they did, I think they were working to build up the seawall around Manhattan to prevent some of that flooding in a similar situation in the future. In Miami…
So you've worked with NASA, Google, LAX, Apple. What do the most ambitious clients ask the rest don't ask? And relatedly, are any of these institutions walking back from commitments that they might have made three, four, five years ago to become net zero? Are they still marching along the path to…