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Oceans too:

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Cheerful article. :(

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This is unusually detailed reporting for Vox. A really good (though terrifying) article.

Follow up here:

Holy shit, everyone should read these articles. They’re fascinating (and horrifying) for how they detail the interaction between the utility, regulators, communities, lawmakers, public stewards, and etc.

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Also:

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So…

Nursing homes, emergency rooms, police stations, and fire stations scrambled for backup generators.

They should already have generators. I mean loss of power, you’d be lucky if you even got 24 hours notice for that.

Again, California is not alone. A 2018 study in PNAS found that, between 1990 and 2010, the WUI was “the fastest-growing land use type in the conterminous United States.” This is happening in lots of states.

Don’t know about CA but here, there is too much freaking resistance to building up instead of out. When you keep building out, you get further into areas where fires are more prone to happen. And while I know there is resistance to denser housing from say some of the older generations, the younger groups seem to ask for it but can’t get it because apartments and condos cost so much less.

It’s weird to see this being referring as rolling blackouts too because… they had those before when it was not controlled.

Certainly not downplaying the harm caused here, at all. it’s unfortunate, but it can also happen, unexpectedly, at any time. It sounds like we need more generations in more places and also, PG&E needs to up their grid/system for sure.

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It’s a very good article, thanks. And, of course, no one could have predicted that a for-profit utility would take the money customers paid for maintenance and use it instead to funnel $4.5 billion to shareholders as dividends.

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Looks like France is considering building more nuclear after all:

France intends to shut down about 15 aging reactors before 2030, says Jessica Lovering, a nuclear researcher at Carnegie Mellon. So building six reactors wouldn’t necessarily increase the share of electricity produced by nuclear plants across the nation, particularly as demand increases in the coming years.

Meanwhile, some energy experts noted that France committed just this summer to become carbon neutral by 2050. That’s across the economy, meaning the country will need to slash climate pollution not simply from the electricity sector but in agriculture, transportation, and heavy industry as well. So officials likely want to avoid losing emissions-free electricity at this point. In addition, nuclear plants produce heat that can be used to drive crucial industrial processes.

Seems like they are considering it because it’s too hard to meet emissions goals while drastically scaling back nuclear.

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On a similar note

6166

I’m sure that goes treble for the PG&E shutdowns.

6167

The team forgot that 55 percent of all historically emitted carbon got absorbed by the oceans, not the land, and so underestimated the total amount of carbon by about one half.

They overestimated carbon uptake by trees, and suggested putting trees where they’ve never been, or where they’d actually make the planet hotter (by darkening planetary albedo over icy, more reflective terrain). They didn’t take into account that the ecosystems where they wanted to plant trees already sequestered carbon. And so on.

“We’re not talking about small errors here. We’re talking about a huge difference in the total amount of carbon you could sequester,” says Carla Staver, an ecologist at Yale University.

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They teach this in basic biology and oceanography courses. I find it hard to believe a team can… forget that.

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I mean it is a complex interaction.

The fact is that, yes, oceans absorb atmospheric carbon. However if you are trying to increase the rate of atmospheric carbon absorption, it does not follow that the ratio would remain fixed.

Where that value is important would be, does the increase in atmospheric carbon absorption by terrestrial sources cause a release of carbon from oceanic ones. And I have no idea.

But it is not immediately apparent to me that if current carbon absorption rates are 100x, and planting more trees causes an additional 20x carbon to be absorbed, what the ocean effect would be.

6170

Well yeah, they don’t go into it that much in these courses but the idea that someone forgot… well I focused on the forgot part although the comments don’t actually use the word forgot, as it turns out.

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6172

It’s incredible to me that there are powerful forces on Earth that are doing their utmost to ensure our own destruction. I used to think that conservative parties will too gradually change with the environmental reality, and that the fight will be between necessary action and piss weak incrementalism.

Instead, they are only getting more hostile in the face of reality. It is happening in Australia too, the conservative prime minister recently said he wants to make it illegal for consumers to boycott/pressure companies on environmental grounds, and to criminalise protests and civil disobedience. I am starting to come around to this notion, which a popular group is spreading, that the defining dichotomy of the twenty first century is between rebellion and extinction.

6173

Really, it’s the same class war it has always been. The wealthy are betting that climate change isn’t really going to harm them, and they are getting with everyone else’s futures.

6174

Amazing Twitter thread. This is how the world ends: not with a bang but a crinkle.

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If someone other than Trump wins in 2020, the next president could get back in the deal in just 30 days

So you’re telling me there’s a chance!

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Flip side

History will damn us for this madness

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He still hasn’t done that? He announced it years ago.