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Category Archives: burning behavior

PG&E Pleads Guilty To Murder – Closes docket for the Camp Fire for criminal charges

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Does that mean they will stop the Blackouts after the winds reach 40 miles an hour? Does that mean they will go out of business? Or does that mean they will become a nice reasonable caring utility company committed to the community of central California? I got my doubts about the last but we shall see in a year for sure.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-23/pge-pleads-guilty-to-84-counts-of-manslaughter-over-paradise-fire

California

PG&E pleads guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter over Camp fire

By Joseph Serna,

Matt Hamilton
March 23, 2020
4:54 PM

In a federal filing Monday permanently documenting its role in causing California’s deadliest wildfire, Pacific Gas & Electric announced it has pleaded guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter for the 2018 Camp fire in the Northern California town of Paradise.

PG&E, in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, said it reached the settlement with the Butte County district attorney’s office on March 17. Under the deal, PG&E said prosecutors won’t pursue further criminal charges, an outcome that disappointed some utility watchdogs.

This is the second time PG&E’s guilt has been established in a wildfire legal proceeding. In 1997, a Nevada County jury found the utility guilty of causing a fire three years earlier that burned a dozen homes.

But while this chapter of PG&E’s role in the Camp fire is over, the plea‘s implications for other utilities is less clear, said Shon Hiatt, an associate professor of management and organization at USC’s Marshall School of Business.

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Go there and read. Please Think. More next week.

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Could Coronavirus Save The Planet – Well it certainly has reduced pollution

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Oil prices are actually at an all time low as supplies are on at an all time high. This article argues however that the oil corporations are so big that they will just diversify as climate change looms larger. In the end they will sell worthless reserves off to unregulated startup oil companies and oil will become like drugs.Those startups will function like drug cartels function today. Selling oil to those addicted to oil. Pretty picture? NO. Our future. Maybe.

PS – this is an enormously loooooog read.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/shell-climate-change.html?utm_campaign=nym&utm_source=tw&utm_medium=s1?utm_source=digg

Business

Shell Is Looking Forward

The fossil-fuel companies expect to profit from climate change. I went to a private planning meeting and took notes.

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We think democracy is better,” said the jet-fuel salesperson. “But is it? In terms of outcomes?”

In a conference room overlooking the gray Thames, a group of young corporate types tried to imagine how the world could save itself, how the international community could balance the need for growth with our precarious ecological situation. For the purposes of our speculative scenarios, everything except for carbon was supposed to be up in the air, and democracy’s track record is mixed.

A graph from Chinese social media showing how many trees the country is planting — a patriotic retort to the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg — had a real effect on the room. Combine that with the Chinese state-led investment in clean-energy technology and infrastructure and everyone admired how the world’s largest source of fossil-fuel emissions was going about transition. That’s what the salesperson meant by “outcomes”: decarbonization.

Regional experts from sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East–North Africa also entertained the democracy question, pointing to Iraqi disillusionment with voting and economic growth in Rwanda under Paul Kagame (“He’s technically a dictator, but it’s working”). The China expert said the average regional Communist Party official is probably more accountable for his or her performance than the average U.K. member of Parliament, a claim no one in the room full of Brits seemed to find objectionable. The moderator didn’t pose the question to me, the American expert, presumably because our national sense of democratic entitlement is inviolable.

Go there and read and read and read. More next week.

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Climate Change Is Speeding UP – Those pesky Feedback Loops l

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Only speculated on several years ago. Feedback Loops are things that speed up or slow down climate change. The two that concern us here are the most obvious, clouds and ice shrinkage. The more water in the atmosphere the more clouds and the hotter the earth – the more water. But the killer one is, ice is very very reflective. What replaces it it is not and in the case of “dark” water, it is incredibly absorptive. The question has always been when would they kick in? I always said we would know when it was too late. Here we are.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-03/climate-models-are-running-red-hot-and-scientists-don-t-know-why?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Climate Models Are Running Red Hot, and Scientists Don’t Know Why

The simulators used to forecast warming have suddenly started giving us less time.

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There are dozens of climate models, and for decades they’ve agreed on what it would take to heat the planet by about 3° Celsius. It’s an outcome that would be disastrous—flooded cities, agricultural failures, deadly heat—but there’s been a grim steadiness in the consensus among these complicated climate simulations.

Then last year, unnoticed in plain view, some of the models started running very hot. The scientists who hone these systems used the same assumptions about greenhouse-gas emissions as before and came back with far worse outcomes. Some produced projections in excess of 5°C, a nightmare scenario.

The scientists involved couldn’t agree on why—or if the results should be trusted. Climatologists began “talking to each other like, ‘What’d you get?’, ‘What’d you get?’” said Andrew Gettelman, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, which builds a high-profile climate model.

“The question is whether they’ve overshot,” said Mark Zelinka, staff scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.  Researchers are starting to put together a­nswers, a task that will take months at best, and there’s not yet agreement on how to interpret the hotter results. The reason for worry is that these same models have successfully projected global warming for a half century. Their output continues to frame all major scientific, policy and private-sector climate goals and debates, including the sixth encyclopedic assessment by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change due out next year. If the same amount of climate pollution will bring faster warming than previously thought, humanity would have less time to avoid the worst impacts.

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Go there and read. More next week.

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America Wastes More Energy Than It Uses – This is so disturbing that it could kill us

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Think about it. Global Warming is speeding up and this could be why. We are literally consuming ourselves to death with no mechanism to stop it. Should we start singing “Good Night Irene”?

https://digg.com/2020/how-america-uses-its-energy-visualized

WHAT AMERICA RUNS ON

How America Uses Its Energy, Visualized

Digg · Updated:

America is consuming more energy than ever before, according to the Energy Information Administration. With scientists sounding the alarm that we need to reduce our usage of greenhouse gas-intensive fuels soon, it’s interesting to take a look at what sources from which we derive all of our energy.

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory crunched the numbers, looking through data from the EIA, and produced an energy flow chart depicting energy by sector and source — including solar, nuclear, hydroelectric, wind, geothermal, natural gas, coal, biomass and petroleum. See the full-sized image here.

One key takeaway from the energy flow chart is how much energy we waste (labeled in the chart as “rejected energy”), the vast majority of which seemingly comes from fossil fuel sources. The reason why “rejected energy,” the waste heat resulting from the process of electricity generation, occupies such a large part of the system is mostly due to the inefficiency of our current energy systems.

And as you can also see from the chart, despite the dogged efforts of figures like Elon Musk, who has grand ambitions for his solar business, America’s biggest energy product is still petroleum.

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Go there and stare. There is no more to read. More if there is a next week.

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Louisiana Is Drowning In Toxic Pollution – Propublica chronicles it all

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This is kinda funny because my blog is an accumulator blog and these guys are the maximum accumulators. Having lived in New Orleans for 12 years you can smell it, you can taste and there are days when you just should stay inside. Then there is the urban detritus, it rained 110 inches one year and the flooding was horrid. Walking through the water everyday I faced motor oil, gasoline and even used syringes.

https://www.propublica.org/series/polluters-paradise

Polluter’s Paradise

Environmental Impact in Louisiana

The petrochemical industry has grown in Louisiana, with more plants on the way, but the state’s environmental regulations haven’t kept up.

the first Article:

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-oil-companies-avoided-environmental-accountability-after-10.8-million-gallons-spilled

How Oil Companies Avoided Environmental Accountability After 10.8 Million Gallons Spilled

Louisiana still hasn’t finished investigating 540 oil spills after Hurricane Katrina. The state is likely leaving millions of dollars in remediation fines on the table — money that environmental groups say they need as storms get stronger.

by Joan Meiners, The Times-Picayune and The Advocate

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, while stranded New Orleanians flagged down helicopters from rooftops and hospitals desperately triaged patients, crude oil silently gushed from damaged drilling rigs and storage tanks.

Given the human misery set into motion by Katrina, the harm these spills caused to the environment drew little attention. But it was substantial.

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Go there and read at least 15 articles. More next week.

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Go See Broken Ground – The Southern Poverty Law Center’s new Podcast

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This pretty cool and I can’t explain alot more. Listen to one and you will listen to more.

 

https://brokengroundpodcast.org/?utm_source=Digg&utm_medium=Homepage&utm_campaign=Kingston

About Broken Ground

Broken Ground is a podcast by the Southern Environmental Law Center digging up environmental stories in the south that don’t always get the attention they deserve, and giving voice to the people bringing those stories to light. Named a “New & Noteworthy” podcast by Apple for 6 weeks in a row.

Emily Richardson-Lorente

Years of storytelling for public radio and through her award-winning video productions prepared Emily well for crafting podcast-sized stories for Broken Ground. Some podcasts she’s currently listening to include Radiolab, This American Life and On the Media.

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Go there and listen to the 5 episodes. More next week.

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The Darkside Of The Green Revolution – Lithium extraction really messes things up

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I should very quickly say – the way things are done now. The mining industry, as it functions in the past and now, destroys things no matter what it is extracting – gold, lead or lithium. So if we are going to have a real revolution we are going to have to change the entire extraction industry. This point is larger for me than this article implies because capitalism is the problem. We as a society can achieve a carbon negative atmosphere and humans will still threaten the planet because that it what capitalism does – destroys thing. Still you have to start somewhere.

https://logicmag.io/nature/what-green-costs/?utm_source=digg

Issue 9 / Nature

December 07, 2019

What Green Costs

Thea Riofrancos

Deep in the salt flats of Chile lies the extractive frontier of the renewable energy transition.

Clean energy advocates envision an electrified home running on 100 percent renewable energy with a Tesla parked in its garage, solar shingles gleaming on its rooftop, and a smart meter dutifully collecting usage data and uploading it to the cloud. But swim upstream and eventually you arrive at the extractive frontiers of the renewable energy transition.

It was 8:45 am on the first day of the 11th Lithium Supply & Markets Conference in the basement level of the W Hotel in Santiago, Chile. There was no way for me to blend in. “Providence College” on my name tag rendered me a curiosity. Still, I was glad I remembered to wear lipstick and that my backpack had straps that converted it into a tote.

I found an empty seat in the sea of suits, almost all men but of different ages. They hailed variously from China, Australia, Chile, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Argentina. They were market analysts and prospectors; equipment salesmen and regulators; executives, consultants, and peddlers of information in the notoriously opaque world of lithium, a “space,” in Silicon Valley talk, not quite meriting the word “market.”

As I slid into my seat, the chairman of one of the largest lithium companies in the world, with a sordid past in a corrupt privatization process under Augusto Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship, took to the stage. “Mining is the spine of Chile; mining runs through our veins.” I might have been the only person in the room who immediately thought of Eduardo Galeano’s anti-colonial page-turner, Open Veins of Latin America?—?incidentally penned the same year Pinochet came to power, brutally crushing the dream of democratic socialism in Chile. But I don’t think the chairman meant to call to mind the vampiric iconography of global capital. The dead sapping the living; the blood and sweat and tortured landscapes of extraction, especially in its colonial variant.

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Go there and read. More next week, if there is a next week.

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Climate Change Is Like A Paperclip – You can bend it however you like

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According to the Pipeline Companies and many others in or around the Fossil Fuel Industry, Climate Change is ILL DEFINED. If it hadn’t happened in Illinois I would be laughing but now I am close to puking. The world is going to be on fire, literally. They will be saying, “what fire it’s just a little warm”. They said this in front of the Illinois Commerce Commission no less. I think it has become so apparent that the Anthropocene’s purpose is the death of the planet, that they just don’t care what they say anymore. We are doomed – what does it matter. Well it matters to me. They must be held responsible.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-energy-202/2019/11/13/the-energy-202-dakota-access-operators-call-climate-change-undefined-vague-and-ambiguous-in-official-filing/5dcaed9f602ff1184c316408/

The Energy 202: Dakota Access operators call climate change ‘undefined, vague, and ambiguous’ in official filing

By Dino Grandoni
November 13
THE LIGHTBULB

The operators of the Dakota Access pipeline seemed to brush aside concerns about global warming and the effects it may have on their business in an official filing, saying the phrase “climate change” is “undefined, vague, and ambiguous.”

That comment, filed in August with regulators in Illinois, comes as the pipeline’s operators try to more than double the capacity of the crude oil conduit — and as environmentalists still rail against the pipeline that has become a flash point over fossil-fuel infrastructure in the United States. The Obama administration held up the Dakota Access pipeline after months of protests from environmentalists and Native Americans only for President Trump to greenlight the project once taking office in 2017.

The pipeline’s operators are seeking permission from Illinois to add a new pump station to move extra oil in the 1,900-mile pipeline system of which the Dakota Access pipeline is a part.

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Go there and read. More next week.

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California Puts Up With Power Outages Again – When will Government and the Judicial authorities act

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I mean how long does it take for people to put an end to this travesty. The response to dry weather and high winds or either is to shut off the power. Where in any other utilities playbook does it say this? California should take over the utility and run it like a public utility. The share holders should take a bath. Maybe a dime on the dollar.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/california-wildfires/article/PG-E-power-outages-to-hit-nearly-30-000-customers-14849064.php

California Wildfires

PG&E outages: 144,000 Californians without power

Roland Li , Michael Cabanatuan and Carolyn Said

About 48,000 Northern California homes and businesses — equating to about 144,000 people — were without power Wednesday in the latest round of PG&E’s precautionary outages.

The shut-offs affected far fewer people than the ones last month, which at their peak hit close to 3 million Californians. And there’s good news for those weary of blackouts: Rain could arrive in the Bay Area as soon as Tuesday, according to the National Weather Service.

By 5:30 p.m., the utility had given the all-clear to restore power to about 13,000 customers in Shasta, Tehama and Glenn counties, though most of them wouldn’t get their lights back until morning, PG&E officials said.

PG&E expected an all-clear for the remaining 35,000 customers around 2 a.m. Thursday. Power restoration would begin at daybreak, officials said.

PG&E canceled planned shut-offs for an additional 83,000 homes and businesses — affecting about 249,000 people — as conditions improved, making wildfires less likely. Late Wednesday, the utility decided to preserve power for another 9,400 customers in Butte, Yuba, Plumas and Tehama counties; 14,000 customers in those areas had been told to prepare for outages.

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Go there and get outraged over their outages. More next week.

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Pollute Till People Die _ Why does every developing Nation have to go through this

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Pollute till rivers catch fire.(like America) Pollute till people die and slums burn down. (like England) Blow up a Nuclear Power Plant. (like the Soviet Union or Japan) Pollute until thousands die. (like India). But does India Come around after Bhopal. Hell no!

There is this:

https://www.dw.com/en/new-delhi-schools-closed-as-air-pollution-worsens/a-51235841

Then there is this:

DW recommends

Amitav Ghosh: What the West doesn’t get about the climate crisis

The new novel by award-winning Indian author Amitav Ghosh, Gun Island, uses climate change as a backdrop. He tells DW about the different perceptions of the climate crisis in the East and West. (06.11.2019)

India: Delhi restricts car use as toxic smog covers city

Vehicle restrictions have been introduced in and around the Indian capital, New Delhi, as part of an effort to cut soaring levels of air pollution. Private cars will be allowed on the roads on alternate days. (04.11.2019)

India pollution: How a farming revolution could solve stubble burning

Pollution in Delhi has hit record-breaking levels and a farming method, known as stubble burning, was a major contributor. DW’s Catherine Davison went to the countryside to check out what’s being done to stop this trend. (08.11.2019)

New Delhi chokes under blanket of smog

Indian authorities have imposed new restrictions on private cars in the capital to try and bring down pollution levels. The blanket of smog led Delhi’s chief minister to compare the city to a gas chamber. (04

 

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Go there and read and read and read. More next week.

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