Why is California Blaming Wildfires on a Small Percentage of Downed Power Lines? (Part I)

By -- November 13, 2019 5 Comments

“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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Judith Curry: One Plus the Truth ….

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- October 30, 2019 3 Comments

“Climatology is becoming an increasingly dubious science, serving a political project… the policy cart is leading the scientific horse.”

– Judith Curry, City Journal, Winter 2019.

MasterResource has followed the science when it comes to climate change by profiling the work of Judith Curry, former head of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology and currently a private researcher. Once in the alarmist camp, she checked her premises post-Climategate and realized that “the cause” was corrupted at the expense of sober science, not to mention public policy.

Previous MasterResource posts on Curry, emphasizing bottom-line quotations, have been:

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CNN Report: China Proudly Going Coal (clean, new generation plants at forefront)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- October 22, 2019 5 Comments

Li Fulong, director of development planning of the National Energy Administration … stopped short of saying China would halt ongoing or future plant constructions. “We have developed clean and efficient coal-fired generating units, that have large capacity, high energy efficiency and low pollution emissions,” he said.

Not only is China’s funding of coal power stations domestically a problem, but a 2019 report … found that Chinese companies were helping or promising to finance at least one in four newly-constructed polluting plants globally. [below]

The article is titled “China struggling to kick its coal habit despite Beijing’s big climate pledges.” Authors David Culver, Lily Lee, and Ben Westcott add to the mainstream confirmation that China is business-as-usual when it comes to coal.

Green-washing by China–they do not want to exit from the Paris climate accord but game it for competitive advantage–seems to be enough for CNN and other pro-regulation outlets to just state the facts and move on.…

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Sierra Club Chickens on Wind Infrasound (deep-six commissioned study)

By Donald Deever -- October 17, 2019 6 Comments

“Please note: Desert Report editors have retracted ‘The Silent Menace’ articles from both the June and September issues; our forthcoming December issue will cover the reasons why.” When the retraction took place during the second week of September, they hadn’t found an official excuse yet that they were comfortable publishing as an explanation….

… the formerly controversial topic of potential infrasound hazards associated with industrial wind turbines had been demonstrated by enough prestigious studies to be harmful beyond any level of doubt. As an environmental tribunal in Ontario, Canada officially explained, the issue was no longer one that questioned the harm but had evolved into a question of the degree of harm that industrial wind turbine–generated infrasound causes.

One of Murphy’s Laws states, “No good deed goes unpunished.” Along those lines, after working without any compensation for months to uncover the most revealing, current scholarly studies, and thought-provoking news reports on the known health hazards associated with infrasound from industrial wind turbines, a two-part series of articles that was written at the Sierra Club’s request was suddenly retracted from one of their club’s magazines.…

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Wind Turbines in Court: What Are the Issues?

By Sherri Lange -- October 3, 2019 32 Comments Continue Reading

China’s Coal Bi-Polarity Expedites the Death of the Paris Agreement

By Vijay Jayaraj -- June 20, 2019 8 Comments Continue Reading

It’s Science Time (Happer-led peer review of climate alarmism long overdue)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- March 19, 2019 6 Comments Continue Reading

Derrick Hollie: Guilty as Charged (Another DeSmogBlog air ball)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- February 13, 2019 2 Comments Continue Reading

Paris Climate Accord Death Spiral Underway (FT article begins the autopsy)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- December 18, 2018 9 Comments Continue Reading

‘Climate Alarmism and Corporate Responsibility’ (2000 essay for today’s debate)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- December 5, 2018 1 Comment Continue Reading