“My order required that for every one new regulation, two old regulations must be eliminated. But instead of two for one, we have now eliminated nine for one. And we think that, within the next six months, it will be close to twenty for one instead of two for one.”
“[The Paris Climate Accord] is so unfair. It doesn’t kick in for China until 2030. Russia goes back into the 1990s, where the base year was the dirtiest year ever in the world. India, we are supposed to pay them money because they are a developing nation. I said, ‘We’re a developing nation, too.'”
Last week, President Trump delivered a pro-energy speech at the Economic Club of New York in New York City. There was a lot of applause and laughter from the well-heeled, left-of-center audience.
…“Although 92-percent of the reasons for wildfires are non-powerline related, people associate such firestorms with modern technology.”
“Localized, small and mobile natural gas-fueled power plants and generators, coupled with underground power lines, offer the only localized option for safe and reliable electricity. Rooftop solar panels and giant solar and wind farms located in remote desert areas merely increase reliance on transmission lines that have to be routed through wooded areas.”
What often fans the flames of anti-modernism in California is apprehension and hysteria, about risks of modern technology such as nuclear reactor radiation, nuclear bomb firestorms, and, now, new, recurring reverse neutron-bomb-like seasonal firestorms in mountain areas that kill people but leave trees standing (e.g., Paradise Fire, 2018).
Physicist H. W. Lewis’s book Technological Risk points out that fear and risk are not the same.
…“California’s reliance on hydropower and proliferation of remote, centralized renewable energy plants; the mandated environmental mothballing of 19 coastal natural gas power plants located close to customers; redundant transmission lines for green power; and seasonal wind blasts, results in lethal blast-furnace-like wildfires that leave trees alone but incinerate houses.”
“California leaders and opinion-makers must first abandon their blame game and diagnose the problem more clearly than using clichés like ‘global warming,’ ‘Donald Trump,’ ‘greed’ or even ‘not enough clear cutting,’ if they are going to responsibly deal with the dangerous unintended consequences of de-modernizing its electric grid.”
A question arising out of California’s recent wave of wind-fanned wildfires, is why are public officials mainly attributing the cause to downed electric transmission lines that comprise less than ten percent of all the causes of such fires?
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