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California (again)


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10 minutes ago, B-Man said:

 

Bill McGurn:  An Anti-Asian Proposition:  An Effort to Undo a California Ban on Racial Discrimination Is Floundering.  

 

(If we can win in deep-blue California, we can stop the momentum of identity politics in America.  More info at No on Prop 16.)

 

 

I don't see that happening, but they are also trying to give voting rights back to felons so maybe they are a little worried for the long term.

 

At some point all this radical crap starts to bleed into people's everyday lives and the silent majority (even here) still doesn't like that.

 

 

We also get to vote on weather Uber and Lyft stay in business.  :doh:

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CA to ban all new sales of internal combustion engine cars in CA by 2035

 

In the midst of Mandated blackouts in CA due to an inability to generate or buy enough electricity for the state, Governor Newsom has decided to put much more strain on the power grid by mandating all new cars and trucks to be EVs by 2035.....

 

 

As usual a lefty blames an ism or sketchy 'science' for their policy failures.

 

 

Some history and facts

 

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/policies/legislation/california/subsequentevents.html

 

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/blackout/california/timeline.html

 

In 2011, California passed the Renewables Portfolio Standard setting the mandate at 33 percent renewable energy by 2020. When it became clear that California was nearly there, in 2015, the Legislature moved the bar again and passed SB 350 the “Clean Energy and Pollution Reduction Act of 2015.” SB 350 by Sen. President pro Tem Kevin de Leon (D-Los Angeles), requires the state to procure 50 percent of electricity from renewable energy and double energy efficiency savings by 2030. In 2018, Gov. Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 100, setting a 100 percent clean electricity goal for the state, and issued an executive order establishing a new target to achieve carbon neutrality – both by 2045.

These mandates leave utility companies no wiggle room.

Using more renewable energy causes the entire electricity grid to be unreliable because sun and wind are intermittent and inconsistent.

Only one year after adopting SB 350, the announcement in 2016 from PG&E that it was closing Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant ironically came on the same day there were rolling blackouts in Los Angeles amid sweltering temperatures. PG&E said they planned to replace the loss of the cheap, clean nuclear energy with renewable energy.

 

https://californiaglobe.com/section-2/get-used-to-it-californias-rolling-blackouts-power-outages/

 

https://www.cnn.com/2001/US/05/08/calif.power.crisis.02/

 

https://www.sacbee.com/news/business/article224750505.html

 

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/05/14/californias-government-solely-responsible-for-states-forest-management-and-wildfire-debacle/

 

https://californiapolicycenter.org/environmentalists-destroyed-californias-forests/

 

 

 

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On 9/12/2020 at 10:31 PM, 3rdnlng said:

An invitation to @RealKayAdamsI know that the environment is of utmost importance to you. The following links tell a story about how the kooky environmentalists in California have went about ruining the environment in their state. They want to spend many billions on a bullet train but won't trim the tree branches around electrical lines, clear the dead fall in the forests or cut breaks in the woods to reduce the spread of any fires. In the meantime fires this year have devastated the same amount of land as Connecticut. What are your thoughts?

 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2019/02/25/wildfires-caused-by-bad-environmental-policy-are-causing-california-forests-to-be-net-co2-emitters/#205e90e95e30

 

https://thefederalist.com/2019/10/30/its-not-climate-change-to-blame-for-californias-fires-and-blackouts-its-democrats/

 

https://canadafreepress.com/article/california-wildfires-caused-by-radical-environmentalists-not-climate-change

 

Hi 3rdnlng, yes this is a very important topic that I should review in some depth. My summarized thoughts on the California wildfires topic are that the political right seems overly focused on forest management, the political left seems appropriately focused on climate management, the far right for some reason is fixated on Antifa arsonist management, and I wish everyone would spend a lot more time discussing suburban development management.

 

Have decades of negligent forest management played a role in this year’s wildfires? Absolutely, but only to some extent. Clearing dead wood, implementing controlled burns, creating strategic break lines in forests, trimming branches around electric power lines, and allowing natural fires to run their course during prior decades would have all mitigated the overall crisis in many locations. But in terms of both cost and manpower, it is highly impractical (33 million acres of forest in the state, about 10% of which has currently burned this season) to think these efforts alone could have reduced the wildfire spread and minimized the wildfire risk to levels that Californians would have found tolerable.

 

Climate change, whether man-made or natural, is undoubtedly the root cause of the abnormally strong wildfires this year. California’s measurable drought seasons have lengthened and become drier, warmer, and windier over the years. Statewide vapour-pressure deficits this summer were at all-time highs. August was also the hottest month on record in California. Changes like these have enabled bark beetles to proliferate in larger regions and in additional ways compared to the recent past. So many more tree deaths from the greater desiccation and from the increased bark beetle damage have created a lot more flammable dry wood than was previously found within the forests just decades ago. To be clear, the dramatically increased wildfire activity in California, Washington, and Oregon is not conclusive proof one way or the other of MAN-MADE global climate change. However, the severity of these regional fires and droughts (5 of 10 worst fires ever recorded in California are happening right now), the speed at which these regional changes are happening, and similarly observed wildfire strengthening in other parts of the world like Russia and Australia are all perfectly in line with anthropogenic climate change predictions made in the late 80’s (most prominent: James Hansen Senate testimony in June 1988).

 

Trump has made several specific comments recently on the California wildfires that demand immediate correction. He keeps blaming liberal politicians and radical environmentalists within the state for forest mismanagement, but about 55% of California’s forests are federal land and about 40% are private, with only about 5% the responsibility of the state. Trump has also pointed out that Texas and parts of Europe have managed to avoid such crazy wildfires, thus proving definitively in his mind that it’s a unique California forest management issue and not a MMGW one. The problem with his logic here is that…well…Texas and Europe inherently have different climates than California, they have very different forest habitat compositions, and this does nothing whatsoever to disprove man-made global warming since no one has ever argued that its effects get applied evenly throughout the planet. Furthermore, I believe Trump referenced an infamous graph from the USDA Forest Service which showed that total annual U.S. burned forest acreage during the 1930’s was multiple times higher than today. The biggest problem with that graph is that the data didn’t distinguish forest wildfires from grassland/range fires or incendiary (i.e., known to be deliberately planned) fires prior to the 1960’s. I really don’t know what else to say to MMGW skeptics since there is never going to be a “smoking gun” piece of evidence in support of (or against) this scientific subfield. This isn’t like proving the law of gravity. At some later point in time, the accumulating evidence of its veracity (or falsehood) will have to outweigh the urge to prove the other political side wrong.

 

I won’t get into any of the Antifa arson allegations. Even if we had definitive proof of them starting so many of these fires, it’s kinda irrelevant to the topic. We’re not discussing the INSTIGATION of the wildfires (be it lightning or human-related activity), but rather the SPREAD of these conflagrations.

 

I assume that I already lost most of the PPP audience with these previous paragraphs, but now here is where I start to lose everyone! The more fundamental problem is unrestrained suburban development, along with its corollary of inadequate urban planning and the much broader corollary of unrestrained capitalism within the context of rapid population growth. My general problems with sprawling suburbia are the amount of habitat destruction they wreak, in terms of total space, as well as the incredible space-inefficient strain they put on our energy grid and on our fossil fuel demands. I would like to see a constructive dialogue on how to make concentrated urban living more palatable, but…yeah…that’s not gonna happen in the year 2020 with the pandemic and the rioting. So let’s return to the specific topic of California. Mother Nature appears to be insisting that this many people shouldn’t be living there. As if this wasn’t apparent enough during the time of Mulholland’s water wars, it’s especially apparent now that suburban boundaries are intruding deeply inland and encroaching into shrublands, pine forests, and all types of forestry ready to burn naturally during California’s lengthy dry seasons.

 

I could go scorched earth (pun intended) on the environmental consequences of laissez-faire capitalism tonight, but I won’t…I’ll only mention that environmental issues (including housing development zones) are way too important and complex for their currently insufficient regulation/oversight and probably shouldn’t be left up to purely democratically elected politicians, either. So at the national level, that is why I’d like to break up the executive branch into smaller branches via the (admittedly difficult) constitutional amendment process. I’d leave some of the 15 executive departments exclusively for the President (Defense, Homeland Security, Justice, Veterans Affairs), but I’d like to siphon off some of the other executive departments’ responsibilities for a fourth “environment branch” (parts of the Interior, Agriculture, Transportation, Energy, HUD, HHS) as well as for a fifth “economics branch” (parts of the Treasury, Commerce, Labor, Education, and maybe even State to pair with the Federal Reserve). For these environment and economics branches, right now I’m thinking primarily along the lines of a panel of tsars a la the Supreme Court, but with term limits. My aforementioned solution would also apply at the state level, of course, under the same federalist system that the three familiar branches currently enjoy. Any disagreements here? No? Wow, really?! Good! Remember: the best solution doesn’t have to be a perfect one or even a good one, but the least crappy one.

 

In addition to the West Coast wildfires topic, the links in your post allude to a bunch of other environmental topics that I covered in the Global Warming Hoax thread (pages 324-334 from April through July). So I won’t be redundant on these positions: man-made climate change is real, solar renewables are good, wind renewables are overrated, fracking is very bad, fossil fuel subsidies should be removed, fossil fuel-motivated American interventionist foreign policy is terrible, many irrational environmentalists push counterproductive bureaucratic regulations, and most Democratic politicians like Pelosi and Newsom and Obama are major climate change hypocrites.

 

The one exception that I don’t think I ever covered is the urban heat island effect on weather stations. For those unfamiliar with the concept, this is the warming effect on weather station instrumentation from the absorbed/re-emitted heat of nearby concrete, asphalt, and bricks. There have been numerous studies of this effect, the most comprehensive being the famous NASA GISS paper published in 2001 which should be easy to find online. Included in it are cross-analyses of temperature data over a 30-year period, using station data both from recently industrialized areas and from still isolated ones. The measured urban heat island effect turns out to be pretty small and practically negligible when seen in full temperature plots. The measured effect is consistent for weather stations throughout the world, including some of the most rapidly industrialized places in China. The specific technique used to isolate and account for these discrepancies in the data is also described in (painful) detail in the paper. One of your three posted internet links references a challenge to this landmark paper from known MMGW skeptic, Anthony Watts, at his “Watts Up With That” website. Watts cherry-picks isolated regional data anomalies here to disprove a global trend, but unfortunately for him, the anomalies he cites at certain U.S. weather stations were debunked years ago as signal processing quirks from diurnal temperature range variations. Climate change skeptics still fixated on the urban heat island issue need to explain the observed temperature changes in the most remote weather stations of the Northern Hemisphere (Russia, Greenland, Canada, Alaska) where the global warming effect is most pronounced. They also need to explain all of the ocean warming data…

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18 minutes ago, RealKayAdams said:

Climate change, whether man-made or natural, is undoubtedly the root cause of the abnormally strong wildfires this year. 

Nope.

 

 

"ALL of this catastrophizing around Climate Change is just a huge DISTRACTION.  Did climate change happen between last year and this year?"  - Actual accredited person, not some wordy internet liberal assclown.

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