Facing $17B in Fire Damages, a CEO Blames Climate Change
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Re: Facing $17B in Fire Damages, a CEO Blames Climate Change
#2Bloomberg should hire writers that know how to proofread their writing: "He’s proposed a bill that would lesson utilities’ exposure to damages from fires, citing climate change."
That tends to "lesson" their credibility.
Re: Facing $17B in Fire Damages, a CEO Blames Climate Change
#3Hmmm... data in the article isn’t that compelling. You’d need to go back decades to see if recent fires are out of the norm.
Re: Facing $17B in Fire Damages, a CEO Blames Climate Change
#4If she's blaming climate change, doesn't that make PG&E culpable? IIRC the majority of their power is generated from natural gas (at least since they shut down San Ohnofre and planned closure of Diablo Canyon), not to mention what the "G" stands for.
Re: Facing $17B in Fire Damages, a CEO Blames Climate Change
#5Novel, but likely ultimately to fail. IIUC, the CEO is claiming liability to PG&E is negated by the overall affect of climate change. That would likely have to be argued in court but that undertaking sounds quite massive, and would require a tremendous amount of science. What I think is really going on here is that she's trying to find someone else to take the blame, financially, and probably pushing the state to indemnify PG&E. A novel idea, but I think a court would rule this an act of God and tell PG&E that's what its insurance is for.
Re: Facing $17B in Fire Damages, a CEO Blames Climate Change
#6Anthropogenic climate change is a real and significant threat to the current state of our planet. That being said...
It is likely a fairly minor player in the uptick in major wildfires over the past few decades. That is more due to mismanagement of forests, and a "zero tolerance" policy towards fires allowing a huge build up of fuel loads.
Re: Facing $17B in Fire Damages, a CEO Blames Climate Change
#7Hmmm... data in the article isn’t that compelling. You’d need to go back decades to see if recent fires are out of the norm.
There's a lot of data on this subject. BuzzFeed News recently had an article about how fires have changed over the past decades: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/california...
And for the HackerNews-y type, they even made all the data and R code for the visualizations publicly available: https://buzzfeednews.github.io/2018-07-wildfire-trends/
It is hard to pin the increase on any one cause - it's a confluence of factors. Here's a perspective piece by a few well regarded experts: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/07/californ...
One of those experts is Daniel Swain, who has an excellent Twitter account which posts a lot more data: https://twitter.com/Weather_West
Re: Facing $17B in Fire Damages, a CEO Blames Climate Change
#8Novel, but likely ultimately to fail. IIUC, the CEO is claiming liability to PG&E is negated by the overall affect of climate change. That would likely have to be argued in court but that undertaking sounds quite massive, and would require a tremendous amount of science. What I think is really going on here is that she's trying to find someone else to take the blame, financially, and probably pushing the state to ind…
She isn't setting this up as a court case. She's trying to manufacture enough political cover for the governor and various other cronies to plausibly save her firm from its self-imposed predicament. They can pass any law they want, if the voting public is confused enough.
Re: Facing $17B in Fire Damages, a CEO Blames Climate Change
#9PG&E has is not trimming vegetation back sufficiently. It is an infrastructure expense that is easy to defer -- for a while.
In the Sonoma County fires, trees contacting power lines and either catching on fire directly, or causing a short leading to a transformer explosion sparked a lot of fires. Of course, 100kph winds will cause the fuel to burn wicked fast. I saw a photo of a melted cast metal BBQ grill after the Sonoma fire. A fire that hot is hard to fight in any circumstances.
As far as climate change, goes... well, maybe? We had five years of drought, followed by a very wet winter. I have property in the Sierra foothills. With dry, drought-stressed trees interspersed with a few drought-killed trees, there was a lot of standing "hot" fuel. The wet winter caused the grasses to grow like mad the next year -- by late summer, when the grass was dormant and tinder-dry, there was a lot of "cool" ground-fuel to spread fire. Some idiot drove through tall grass and the hot catalytic converter lit the grass, leading to the Detwieler fire, which burned over the top of my property -- most of which burned cool (I lost a few trees, and a 60 year old not-historical-at-all outhouse... some of my neighbors were not nearly so lucky.)
Back to PG&E maintenance practices, there was a tree that fell on a power line near my property taking a power for a short service stretch, luckily it didn't spark any more fire on the mountain.
PG&E can whine about climate change, but bottom line, they need to be much more diligent about vegetation control. It doesn't take a PhD to understand how some wind and a dry branch can cause a whole lot of trouble.
Re: Facing $17B in Fire Damages, a CEO Blames Climate Change
#10PG&E has is not trimming vegetation back sufficiently. It is an infrastructure expense that is easy to defer -- for a while. In the Sonoma County fires, trees contacting power lines and either catching on fire directly, or causing a short leading to a transformer explosion sparked a lot of fires. Of course, 100kph winds will cause the fuel to burn wicked fast. I saw a photo of a melted cast metal BBQ grill after the…
PG&E needs to be doing a better job and California should consider bringing back its logging industry.
I get burning wood isn’t the cleanest energy source but dead trees are going to burn no matter what. I’d rather someone harvest it and burn it in a controlled environment rather than it rage uncontrollably.