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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

#31

Post by waterphone »

NDizzle wrote: post #21
dbcurtis wrote: post #9

PG&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…

I came here to make this point, but you made it better than I would have. The Carr fire started in a similar way. A blow out on a trailer tire, and the sparks from the wheel hitting the asphalt started the whole thing. One of the large fires last year was started by a backfire. Seriously. Way back in ancient history, the 90s, I saw 'brush hogs' all over the place in Arkansas keeping the side of the roads neatly trimm…

Commercial logging is not the answer, though mechanical thinning might be to get things back to a natural state before reintroducing a properly balanced fire regime with natural and if necessary prescribed fire.

Re: Facing $17B in Fire Damages, a CEO Blames Climate Change

#32

Post by waterphone »

decebalus1 wrote: post #13
JshWright wrote: post #6

Anthropogenic 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.

> 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. Don't want to sound combative, I'm actually very interested. Do do you have any proof of that?

It's a fairly firmly established fact and widely understood as a major cause within firefighting and forest management circles, including the Forest Service, who is largely responsible for such practices over the past century. The natural fire regime kept forests thinned and healthy with lots of relatively small and low intensity fires that would remove standing dead and the understory while largely keeping the healthy stands intact, with occasional pockets of higher intensity fire that would open up areas in the forest (creating meadows, etc.) and making for natural buffer zones and breaks in the fuel, which further reduced the spread of bigger fires, as well as keeping the forest healthier and reducing disease. Indigenous peoples in the Americas are very well known to have managed forests with prescribed fires for centuries, if not millennia, too.

Climate change is definitely a factor for fires in the southwest as well, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_wildfire_suppressio...

Re: Facing $17B in Fire Damages, a CEO Blames Climate Change

#33

Post by waterphone »

mikec3010 wrote: post #23

I blame firefighting causing forest change. Firefighting causing fuel levels to build up to unprecedented densities. Who put out fires before we started? Nobody. Nature handles that fine herself. But leave it to us to try to "improve" on it.

Fire suppression is a major problem, for sure. But it wasn't all natural in the past, either. Humans have been managing forests through the use of fire for a very long time, setting fires to thin out the understory and make areas more appealing to wildlife they could then hunt, etc., which would in turn make the forest healthier and less prone to megafires.

Re: Facing $17B in Fire Damages, a CEO Blames Climate Change

#34

Post by spollo »

aardvark291 wrote: post #22
tluyben2 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The rest of the world" is a bit of an overreach, but yes, in a lot of countries they are underground. I would say most cable runs above ground worldwide, but I have nothing to base that on besides traveling a lot.

meant to write, "rest of the _civilized_ world". :-) Germany is my main example ... my German friends were astonished when they visited the US to see our rickety electrical infrastructure (among other things).

Do you mean that Germany buries their transmission lines? Or that the neighborhoods are built with buried wires?

Re: Facing $17B in Fire Damages, a CEO Blames Climate Change

#35

Post by shard972 »

alphabettsy wrote: post #14

Ok it’s face it seems the fires are made worse by climate change, but probably caused by poor infrastructure maintenance.

Which to me begs the question, shouldn't companies be doing more maintenance to ensure fires don't get out of control? If you really believe climate change was responsible, why were they asleep at the wheel?

Otherwise it just seems like a blatant attempt to socialize the losses.

Re: Facing $17B in Fire Damages, a CEO Blames Climate Change

#36

Post by jerkstate »

BurningFrog wrote: post #30
jerkstate wrote: post #4

If 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.

If you do the math, I'd guess PG&E's share of the blame is maybe a millionth of a percent.

let's see. PG&E sells 970 billion cubic feet of gas per year [1] and the most recent study I could find pegs the CO2 output of electrical generation at 456 lbs per MWh in 2007 [2] (which is pretty low), and generated or bought about 80 terawatt-hours in 2014 [3]

456 lbs * 80,000,000 megawatt-hours = 36.5 billion lbs CO2 or 1.65 million metric tons from electrical generation/purchased generated power.

Natural gas releases 117 lbs of CO2 per thousand cubic feet [5] so 970 million * 117 lbs = 5.148 million metric tons.

California as a whole emits 359 million metric tons of CO2 per year [4] and PG&E generates 27% of the power in California, 27% of 359 million is 97 million metric tons. PG&E sells products which directly contribute 6.798 million metric tons, or about 7% of what I would consider "their share"

It's honestly lower than I was expecting but still significant.

[1] https://www.pge.com/en_US/safety/how-the-system-works/natura...

[2] http://www.pgecorp.com/corp_responsibility/reports/2007/envi...

[3] http://www.pgecorp.com/corp_responsibility/reports/2015/bu01...

[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_carbo...

[5] https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/co2_vol_mass.php

Re: Facing $17B in Fire Damages, a CEO Blames Climate Change

#37

Post by simongr3dal »

decebalus1 wrote: post #13
JshWright wrote: post #6

Anthropogenic 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.

> 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. Don't want to sound combative, I'm actually very interested. Do do you have any proof of that?

https://youtu.be/Y27lFsPEZ30

Tom Scott made a little 4 minute video about the topic.

Basically by letting the forrest burn more often there would be less fuel available for the next fire.

And when the fires got smaller the biggest of trees in the forrest would also be more likely to survive through the fire.

So in some forrests that’s what they do in some forrests now.

Re: Facing $17B in Fire Damages, a CEO Blames Climate Change

#38

Post by spacehome »

musgrove wrote: post #2

Bloomberg 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.

Enlighten me, what's the typo?

Re: Facing $17B in Fire Damages, a CEO Blames Climate Change

#39

Post by imsofuture »

aardvark291 wrote: post #15
jerkstate wrote: post #4

If 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.

Privatize the profits, socialize the losses...?

Works for banks alright.

Re: Facing $17B in Fire Damages, a CEO Blames Climate Change

#40

Post by DoctorOetker »

mikec3010 wrote: post #24
vixen99 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What uptick? A 2016 study by the Royal Society has shown that 'Global burned area have dropped by about 25 percent over the previous 18 years'. 'Even in California, which for years has wrestled with fire devastation, a study in the International Journal of Wildland Fire found that the number of wildfires burning more than 300 acres per year has been tailing off since a peak in 1980.' Stefan H. Doerr, Cristina Santín.…

That must means more fuel is building up and burning all at once. Fires are an integral part of the forest ecosystem.

it may mean that, it must not.

we should be looking at the full distribution of wildfires year by year, but I'm not a US resident so not very acquainted with looking up what where

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