Drive the Pacific Coast Highway through Malibu right now and you will not find paradise. You will find ruins. Charred foundations. Empty lots where multimillion-dollar beach houses once stood. Eighteen months after the Palisades Fire ripped through the coast, the place still looks like Pompeii after the volcano. And the people who lived there are starting to wonder if California will ever let them come home.
Only a handful of homes along the iconic stretch have broken ground. Out of more than a thousand permits issued for damage, repairs, and debris, just 88 cover new construction. Sixty-one homes are actually being rebuilt. The rest of the beach sits empty while owners stare at the math and walk away.
Matt Greenberg was one of the first to sell. He bought a fixer-upper on the water in 2023, ready to turn it into the dream. Then he met the city. It took more than a year just to get a remodel permit. The approval finally landed the same morning the fire started. That night his house was gone.
“The process to get anything done in the city is just an absolute nightmare. Everything’s slow, expensive, and it takes awhile.”
He had no interest in running that gauntlet again. So he sold. Others are following. Danny Smith lost his beachfront place and is now running for city council. He calls the official numbers “misleading.”
“It’s obvious to the public, you drive in from Malibu to the East and it looks like Pompeii and it’s going to continue to look like death for decades if we don’t speed things up.”
Smith sold too. Uncertainties around septics, sewers, and sky-high costs made the decision for him. He gives Governor Gavin Newsom some credit for the early push to streamline Coastal Commission rules and waive certain environmental reviews. Then the urgency vanished.
“I don’t know where his attention is these days. I think he has bigger political ambitions. We’re still here, and we are not anywhere close to recovery.”
That is the California story in miniature. Flashy emergency declarations when the cameras are rolling. Then the bureaucrats settle back into their chairs and the process grinds on.
The city of Malibu points to its disaster rebuild ordinances, online portals, and dedicated staff. Smith answers that none of it would exist without community outrage forcing their hand.
Carl Randall is one of the few charging ahead. His family has owned the same beach property since 1966. He is building for about $7 million. Most of his neighbors cannot match that number because they were stuck on the California FAIR Plan, the state’s insurer of last resort, which caps coverage at $3 million.
Private carriers fled years ago under the weight of regulations and Proposition 103 rate controls. The result is underinsurance on a massive scale.
Randall calls the permitting fight a battle. Coastal engineers, structural engineers, septic engineers, geotechnical reports, public works reviews. He still managed to cut the usual five-to-six-year timeline down to roughly one year.
Progress, of a sort. Now he stands on the narrow strip beside the highway every day, protecting his crew from traffic while they drill caissons into the earth. He asked the city to push the road back ten feet for safety. They gave him five.
Glenn Dexter’s father built their place in 1959 for $35,000. Today the cost of replacing the seawall alone is enough to make a man think twice about staying. Seawalls can only be worked in narrow seasonal windows. Miss one and you wait another year.
This is what progressive governance produces. Layers of coastal rules, environmental reviews, and insurance mandates that drive private capital out and leave ordinary people—yes, even wealthy ones—trapped. One year after the fires, construction had begun on fewer than 4 percent of destroyed buildings across the broader Los Angeles burn zones.
The same state that lectures the rest of the country about equity cannot clear a path for its own citizens to rebuild after a disaster. The ultra-wealthy will buy the empty lots at a discount. The full-time residents who actually made Malibu a community will be priced or regulated out.
Scripture speaks to the work of restoration. “And they that shall be of thee shall build the old waste places: thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations; and thou shalt be called, The repairer of the breach, The restorer of paths to dwell in” (Isaiah 58:12).
God calls His people to repair what is broken. California’s political class seems determined to keep the breaches open.
Smith believes a real sewer system would help. Residents will vote later this fall on an assessment district. That is one practical step. The larger problem is deeper. As long as Sacramento and the coastal commissions treat property owners as subjects to be managed rather than free people with rights, the ruins will stay.
Malibu will remain a museum of ash and good intentions, a cautionary tale for every state that still thinks more regulation is the answer to every crisis.
The fire is long over. The government-made disaster continues.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
