The following links are just news items and opinions that pass my desk throughout the week. I don’t necessarily support or advocate any of the items, they are just interesting reads.
PG&E bills to soar nearly $400 a year in 2024 in ‘biggest rate case’ California ratepayer group has ever seen – Millions of California households served by Pacific Gas and Electric Co. will pay about $384 more in 2024 for utilities to help the company prevent wildfires and meet rising demands for electricity. That amounts to about $32.50 more per month for average residential customers, according to PG&E.
The California Public Utilities Commission approved the increase Thursday, ending a years-long debate over how much more PG&E customers must pay to help the embattled utility — which caused a catastrophic explosion in 2010 and major wildfires in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2021 — modernize its infrastructure, primarily to be more safe.
The 2024 increase will be followed by a much smaller rise of $4.50 per month in 2025. Average bills are expected to decrease by $8 per month in 2026, the company said.
The CPUC’s five commissioners voted unanimously to approve the plan, over the objections of PG&E customers who urged them to consider the financial hardship of families struggling to pay utility bills. Read More > in the San Francisco Chronicle
California facing eletrical transformer troubles as new homes continue to be built – California is facing a new energy crisis, and this time, it could impact the state’s goal of building more than 2 million new homes by 2030.
As new homes are built in California, there’s more need for electrical transformers that provide power to neighborhoods — but right now, they’re in short supply.
A U.S. Government Accountability Office report shows the transformer shortage is a nationwide problem that could cause large-scale power outages, especially following a disaster.
The report says there’s just one company in the U.S. that makes the steel needed to build transformers, and it recommends federal energy officials address the shortage.
The problem is expected to get worse as energy efficiency standards are increased. Read More > at CBS Sacramento
Oakland pro sports dead at 63 as A’s abandon East Bay, ending era of titles and fun – Oakland professional sports, which spent more than six decades producing world championships, colorful characters and memorable moments, essentially died Thursday. They were 63.
By approving the Oakland Athletics’ proposed move to Las Vegas, Major League Baseball owners delivered the final, jarring blow to major pro sports in the East Bay’s most populous city. First, the Golden State Warriors returned across the bay to San Francisco in 2019. Then the Oakland Raiders bolted for Las Vegas in 2020.
And now, barring a collapse of the A’s stadium deal in Las Vegas, the baseball team will also abandon the Coliseum complex, once the hub of triumphant Bay Area franchises, for the southern Nevada desert. The A’s will play in Oakland at least one more season while owner John Fisher attempts to build a new ballpark near the Las Vegas Strip.
This unprecedented triple exodus has left fans crestfallen and angry. Oakland pro sports lived an eventful, exhilarating life, winning 10 championships — four each by the Warriors and A’s, two by the Raiders — and 11 if you include Rick Barry and the Oaks capturing the American Basketball Association title in 1969.
Beyond success on the scoreboard, Oakland teams played with panache. MLB stolen-base king Rickey Henderson danced off first base, making opposing pitchers and catchers quiver. Kenny Stabler flung passes to Fred Biletnikoff tiptoeing along the sideline. Stephen Curry lofted long, majestic 3-point shots over exasperated defenders.
All the while, fans created a distinctive home-field or home-court advantage. Long before Fisher decimated the A’s roster, the Coliseum buzzed with electricity for big baseball games. The Black Hole, home to countless costumed Raiders loyalists, overwhelmed visiting NFL teams. Warriors crowds roared like few others in the NBA, thirsty for entertaining basketball.
Oakland sports fans were engaged, passionate and diverse. Read More > in the San Francisco Chronicle
11 of the 25 most expensive U.S. ZIP codes are in the Bay Area. Here’s where – The Bay Area, with its million-dollar views and multimillion-dollar enclaves, has kept its status as the most expensive metropolitan area in the United States.
The region’s ZIP codes make up 37 of the top 100 most expensive ZIP codes in the country, according to a new 2023 ranking by real estate data company PropertyShark that examined median home sales prices.
“The two biggest reasons Bay Area housing stands above the rest of the country are high incomes and limited homes,” said Orphe Divounguy, senior economist at Zillow. “There have not been enough homes built in the Bay Area to keep up with demand, which is true in much of the country but made worse in the Bay Area because there isn’t a whole lot of space available to build. That dynamic where demand is greater than supply has led buyers to compete for what’s available. And because there are a lot of high earners living in the Bay Area, there is extra heft behind those bidding wars.”
While the housing market nationally has experienced a slowdown, some wealthy, in-demand areas — including in the Bay Area — have seen prices tick up.
“The most exclusive areas in the country are still experiencing growth, defying the overall trend of declining prices,” according to the PropertyShark report.
Atherton’s tony 94027 ranked at the top of the list for the seventh year in a row, with an eye-popping median sales price of $8.3 million, an increase of 5% from last year’s $7.9 million. Read More > in The Mercury News
Full Extent of COVID Fraud Will ‘Never Be Known With Certainty’ – A couple claiming to run a farm that employed dozens of people used fake employee records to get more than $1 million in COVID-19 relief payments when they actually employed no one on a farm that did not exist.
A social media influencer created fake documents to score more than $400,000 in COVID-19 funds meant to help small businesses, then used the money to buy cryptocurrency and gifts for his girlfriend.
A state employee whose job was to stop unemployment benefits fraud helped other fraudsters navigate around fraud prevention systems so they could steal more than $1 million, including federal tax dollars made available to states during the pandemic.
Only now, nearly four years after the federal government approved an unprecedented amount of emergency spending in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, are investigators getting a full picture of all the ways that schemers and thieves raided programs. Congress approved about $4.6 trillion in COVID-19 emergency spending, and so much of it was stolen that auditors now say we’ll likely never have a full accounting of it all.
“When the federal government provides emergency assistance, the risk of payment errors—including those attributable to fraud—may increase because the need to provide this assistance quickly can lead agencies to relax or forego effective safeguards,” the Government Accountability Office (GAO) explained in a new report summing up efforts to recoup stolen funds. “Because not all fraud will be identified, investigated, and adjudicated through judicial or other systems, the full extent of fraud associated with the COVID-19 relief funds will never be known with certainty.”
As Reason has previously reported, auditors believe that about $200 billion was fraudulently disbursed from two programs run by the Small Business Administration (SBA) during the pandemic. That’s about one-sixth of all spending run through the SBA’s Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) program. Additionally, the GAO believes that between $100 billion and $135 billion in federal unemployment funds—provided to states on a temporary basis during the pandemic—were lost to fraud.
One former U.S. attorney has called it “the biggest fraud in a generation.” Read More > at Reason
San Francisco’s APEC Cleanup Hasn’t ‘Fixed’ Its Homelessness Problem – World leaders are descending on San Francisco this week for a meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum. Most of the coverage of APEC thus far has focused less on trade deals and geopolitics and more on the city of San Franciso’s efforts to clean up the streets ahead of the conference.
Headlines in publications both local and international noted the city’s energetic efforts to clear homeless encampments, clean streets, and crack down on drug activity in the downtown conference area. The Daily Mail helpfully published some before and after pictures of newly sparkling streets.
This transformation of a few San Francisco streets has sparked two contradicting criticisms.
Some local homeless advocates complain that the city’s rush to clear encampments before APEC is disrupting the lives of the now-displaced downtown homeless people and straining shelters elsewhere in the city.
On the other hand, you have some mostly online, mostly conservative detractors who are asking why it took a communist dictator coming to town before San Francisco “fixed” its homelessness problem.
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To summarize, there’s the one homelessness problem experienced by the homeless themselves through a lack of housing. Then there’s the other homelessness problem experienced by the public generally through exposure to a bunch of vagrancy and disorderly behavior spilling out into streets because of that lack of homes.
San Francisco’s APEC cleanup did nothing to address the first homelessness problem, which is what the local homeless advocates are complaining about. The city simply moved some homeless people from one area of the city to another. Some have plausibly ended up inside homeless shelters or less visible spots on the street. But, the number of homeless people in the city remains as high as ever.
San Francisco did make some progress on the second homelessness problem by dismantling tent encampments, replacing people on the streets with flower boxes, and creating a heavily policed security cordon covering a few city blocks.
Even still, the city hardly “fixed” its second homelessness problem. It just shifted encampments and vagrant behavior away from the downtown. Read More > at Reason
Sacramento County Sheriff Jim Cooper Chastises Target’s Crime Policy In Weekend Tweet – A growing rift between Target corporate crime policies and law enforcement was highlighted by Sacramento County Sheriff and former Assemblyman Jim Cooper during the weekend, who said that Target has been asking law enforcement not to arrest people in stores despite being called out over multiple crimes occurring inside.
For several years, Target, like most other retailers in California, has struggled with crime. Stores in urban settings have resorted to using glass cases in the aisles that can only be opened by employees to deter shoplifting. At others, more enhanced forms of security have been developed. Most retail stores, including those other than Target, have also instilled rules that prevent intervention by employees during robberies because of possible problems that can occur, and leaving the matter largely to security or police. And, despite the extraordinary precautions, Target has still closed many stores, primarily in the Bay Area, because of the massive amount of crime.
However, criminals going after Target and the numerous arrests have caused some negative PR for the company. Many with Target, as well as other retail locations, also fear a national backlash when video of people arrested for shoplifted are made public. They also want to avoid shootings or major injuries, such as a security guard shooting and killing a thief who threatened to kill him at a San Francisco Walgreens earlier this year. As a result, many stores have put in policies that don’t allow law enforcement to make arrests in stores.
This policy has met both public and law enforcement backlash. While many members of the public are concerned with possible police brutality when arrested people, many others have said that this is a major way to help deter crime and punish those breaking the law. Law enforcement members have, in turn, pointed out that the policy hinders their efforts in controlling crime and that many criminals operate entirely within the store. Examples of the latter include stealing a product then simply returning it later on, all without stepping foot outside the store where police are. Read More > at the California Globe
Consumers still feel the pinch as Bay Area inflation cools off to slowest pace in more than two years – The inflation rate in the Bay Area, which has crushed consumers beneath the weight of sky-high prices, cooled off in a big way in October, rising at its slowest annual pace in more than two years. But not everyone’s noticed the difference.
“Things are costing me a lot. I’m not seeing much improvement,” said Arnufo Martinez, a San Jose resident.
The consumer price index in the Bay Area rose at an annual rate of just 2.8% in October, according to Tuesday’s report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That marks the slowest rate of annual increase since February 2021, when the region’s inflation rate rose 1.6%. The cooling trend is also welcome news for some consumers shopping for the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, especially with the price of some grocery items leveling off.
Bay Area gasoline prices fell and costs for many kinds of foods eaten at home, including meat, either declined or rose by just a tiny amount, when measured on a yearly basis.
The nationwide inflation rate rose at a yearly pace of 3.2% in October, the federal labor agency reported.
Still, the easing of the pace of increases in Bay Area prices for goods and services provided only cold comfort for several consumers this news organization spoke with Tuesday.
Electricity services — such as those provided by utility behemoths like PG&E — have skyrocketed in cost in the Bay Area, a grim counterpoint to the otherwise hopeful trends in overall inflation, the report shows.
Over the one-year period that ended in October, the cost of electricity provided by a utility like PG&E soared at a pace that was an eye-popping five times faster than the overall Bay area inflation rate. Read More > in The Mercury News
Former St. Louis Fed president says the FOMC still has ‘a ways to go’ on inflation – Former St. Louis Fed President Jim Bullard says the Federal Reserve still has “a ways to go” in fighting inflation and that there is still a risk that prices pick up once again.
Between March 2022 and July 2023, the FOMC enacted a run of 11 rate hikes to take the fed funds rate from a target range of 0.0%-0.25% to 5.25%-5.5%, and inflation has since fallen substantially.
Although markets now believe interest rates have peaked and have begun looking forward to cuts next year, Bullard — who stepped down as head of the St. Louis Fed in August — suggested the central bank’s work is far from over.
“It’s been so far so good for the FOMC. Inflation has come down, core PCE inflation on a 12-month basis down from 5.5% to 3.7% — pretty good but that’s still only halfway back to the 2% target so you’ve still got a ways to go,” he told CNBC’s Joumanna Bercetche on the sidelines of the UBS European Conference in London.
“I think you have to watch the data carefully and it’s very possible that inflation will turn around and go the wrong way.” Read More > at CNBC
Best Way to Extinguish a Flaming Electric Vehicle? Let It Burn – Firefighters called to extinguish an electric-vehicle fire are discovering the surest approach is to stand back and watch it burn.
Electric cars combust differently than their gas-powered counterparts. Firefighters and researchers said EV fires last longer, are harder to put out and have a tendency to reignite.
First responders in Franklin, Tenn., faced their first burning EV in September, a Nissan Leaf that ignited while charging outside the car maker’s North America headquarters. They spent hours pouring 45,000 gallons of water on the car, compared with the 500 to 1,000 gallons that fires involving gasoline-powered vehicles usually need, Fire Marshal Andy King said.
It isn’t clear how frequently EV fires take place, but as the cars become a larger part of the American fleet, some fire departments see them as a growing nuisance. Firefighters in Florida’s North Collier Fire Control and Rescue District responded to six last year after a storm surge brought by Hurricane Ian caused saltwater to get into EV battery compartments, which can cause short-circuits.
There are more than 170,000 vehicle fires in the U.S. each year, but the National Fire Protection Association, which uses federal data to track the fires, doesn’t break them out by power source.
Tesla estimates its cars catch fire at a rate much lower than U.S. vehicles overall, and some independent studies have reached similar conclusions about EVs in general. Read More > in The Wall Street Journal
Electric vehicles see value depreciate by nearly 50% in five-year span: Report – Electric vehicles have depreciated in value more in a five-year span than other major vehicle types, but all vehicle types have been able to hold their value better than four years ago, according to a new report.
A report from iSeeCars looked at 1.1 million vehicles sold in the last year, from November 2022 to October 2023, and used historical data to understand how the vehicles’ value will depreciate over the next five years. The results of the analysis found the average depreciation rate is 38.8% for all vehicles, which is a 10.8% improvement from 2019.
The analysis also found that trucks had the best depreciation rate, at 34.8%, with hybrids being close behind at 37.4%, and SUVs finishing in third with a 41.2% depreciation rate. Electric vehicles scored the worst, with a 49.1% depreciation rate over five years, but saw an 18% improvement from 2019.
In the report, iSeeCars notes that it is limited in its ability to track the five-year depreciation of electric vehicles because of how new they are to the market, but says that concerns about battery replacement costs and other incentives have caused the cars to depreciate more than gas-powered vehicles. Read More > in the Washington Examiner
Study: When we see what others do, our brain sees not what we see, but what we expect – When we engage in social interactions, like shaking hands or having a conversation, our observation of other people’s actions is crucial. But what exactly happens in our brain during this process: how do the different brain regions talk to each other? Researchers at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience provide an intriguing answer: our perception of what others do depends more on what we expect to happen than previously believed.
For some time, researchers have been trying to understand how our brains process other people’s actions. It is known, for example, that watching someone perform an action activates similar brain areas compared to when we perform that action ourselves. People assumed these brain regions become activated in a particular order: seeing what others do first activates visual brain regions, then later, parietal and premotor regions we normally use to perform similar actions.
Scientists thought that this flow of information, from our eyes to our own actions, is what makes us understand what others do. This belief is based on measurements of brain activity in humans and monkeys while they watched simple actions, such as picking up a knife, presented in isolation in the lab. In reality, actions don’t usually happen in isolation, out of the blue: they follow a predictable sequence with an end goal in mind, like making breakfast. How does our brain deal with this?
Chaoyi Qin, Frederic Michon and their colleagues, led by Christian Keysers and Valeria Gazzola provide us with an intriguing answer: if we observe actions in such meaningful sequences, our brains increasingly ignore what comes into our eyes, and depend more on predictions of what should happen next, derived from our own motor system.
“What we would do next, becomes what our brain sees,” says Christian Keysers, a senior author of the study and director of the social brain lab in the institute. To arrive at that counterintuitive conclusion, the team, in collaboration with the Jichi Medical University in Japan, had the unique opportunity to measure brain activity directly from the brain of epilepsy patients who participated in intracranial EEG-research for medical purposes.
Such an examination involves measuring the brain’s electrical activity using electrodes that are not on the skull, but under it.
The advantage of this technique is that it is the only technique that allows for directly measuring the electrical activity the brain uses to work. Read More > at Medical Xpress
U.S. Postal Service set to lose $6.5 billion this year – The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is set to report a net loss of $6.5 billion this fiscal year, according to new projections released on Wednesday.
Why it matters: The service was supposed to break even by this year under the 10-year “Delivering for America” plan implemented by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy in 2021 “to achieve financial sustainability.”
- The loss comes after the service said it reported a net income of $56.0 billion last year, though that was primarily from a one-time infusion from the Postal Service Reform Act in April 2022.
- The plan centers on slowing the delivery of some mail and increasing the price of stamps, which USPS has done multiple times in the last couple years.
What they’re saying: The service said the loss was in part the result of “the impact of inflation on operating expenses.”
By the numbers: The service’s total operating revenue this year was $78.2 billion, roughly a $321 million or 0.4% decrease from last year.
- Its operating expenses shot up 7.3% compared to last year, hitting $85.4 billion.
- The total volume of mail it handled also dropped, from 127.4 million units to 116.1 million. Read More > at Axios
Any Activity — Even Sleeping — Is Healthier For the Heart Than Sitting. – There is nothing worse for your heart than sitting, a new study confirms.
“The big takeaway from our research is that while small changes to how you move can have a positive effect on heart health, intensity of movement matters,” said study first author Dr. Jo Blodgett, a research fellow with University College London’s Institute of Sport, Exercise & Health.
“The most beneficial change we observed was replacing sitting with moderate to vigorous activity — which could be a run, a brisk walk or stair climbing — basically any activity that raises your heart rate and makes you breathe faster, even for a minute or two,” Blodgett added in a university news release.
However, even standing and sleeping beat sitting when it came to heart health, the study found.
“We already know that exercise can have real benefits for your cardiovascular health and this encouraging research shows that small adjustments to your daily routine could lower your chances of having a heart attack or stroke,” said James Leiper, associate medical director at the British Heart Foundation, which funded the research. “This study shows that replacing even a few minutes of sitting with a few minutes of moderate activity can improve your BMI, cholesterol, waist size and have many more physical benefits.” Read More > at U.S. News & World Report
Triad Weed: How Chinese Marijuana Grows Took Over Rural Maine – Illegal Chinese marijuana grows have taken over much of rural Maine.
The government is either incapable — or unwilling — to do anything about it.
The Maine Wire has identified more than 100 properties that are part of a sprawling network of Chinese-owned sites operating as unlicensed, illicit cannabis growing operations in rural Maine.
According to an unclassified memo from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) obtained by the Maine Wire, the illicit grows are operated by Asian Transnational Criminal Organizations (TCOs).
The properties cover Somerset County, Penobscot County, Kennebec County, Franklin County, Androscoggin County, and Oxford County.
The sites were purchased over the past three years by single adults, primarily from New York and Massachusetts, using cash or financing arranged through a handful of mortgage companies.
The Maine Wire investigation began following the leak of a separate DHS memo that revealed the existence of more than 270 such sites in Maine.
That memo, first reported by Jennie Taer of the Daily Caller News Foundation, offered the first public confirmation of what law enforcement officials have long known, but what neighbors to these properties and legal marijuana entrepreneurs have only suspected.
Namely, that Chinese foreign nationals are exploiting Maine’s lax marijuana laws, the Biden Administration’s immigration policies, and cheap real estate in rural Maine to grow a fortune using exploited illegal alien laborers. Read More > at The Maine Wire
A Scientist Says the Singularity Will Happen by 2031 – There’s at least one expert who believes that “the singularity”—the moment when artificial intelligence surpasses the control of humans—could be just a few years away. That’s a lot shorter than current predictions regarding the timeline of AI dominance, especially considering that AI dominance is not exactly guaranteed in the first place.
Ben Goertzel, CEO of SingularityNET—who holds a Ph.D. from Temple University and has worked as a leader of Humanity+ and the Artificial General Intelligence Society—told Decrypt that he believes artificial general intelligence (AGI) is three to eight years away. AGI is the term for AI that can truly perform tasks just as well has humans, and it’s a prerequisite for the singularity soon following.
Whether you believe him or not, there’s no sign of the AI push slowing down any time soon. Large language models from the likes of Meta and OpenAI, along with the AGI focus of Elon Musk’s xAI, are all pushing hard towards growing AI.
When the concept of AI started first emerged—as early as the 1950s—Goertzel says that its development was driven by the United States military and seen primarily as a potential national defense tool. Recently, however, progress in the field has been propelled by a variety of drivers with a variety of motives. “Now the ‘why’ is making money for companies,” he says, “but also interestingly, for artists or musicians, it gives you cool tools to play with.”
Getting to the singularity, though, will require a significant leap from the current point of AI development. While today’s AI typically focuses on specific tasks, the push towards AGI is intended to give the technology a more human-like understanding of the world and open up its abilities. As AI continues to broaden its understanding, it steadily moves closer to AGI—which some say is just one step away from the singularity. Read More > at Popular Mechanics
New Mosquitos Can Help Beat Malaria – For the first time in 20 years, nine cases of locally acquired malaria have occurred this summer in the United States: seven in Florida, one in Texas, and one in Maryland. The feverish illness is caused by infection through the bites of mosquitoes carrying protozoan parasites.
The parasites were introduced to the Americas via colonization and the transatlantic slave trade and adapted to local mosquito species. “By 1850 malaria had become established in practically every settlement from New England westward to the Columbia River valley and from the southernmost part of Florida to the inland valleys of California,” wrote the Tulane University parasitologist Ernest C. Faust in 1951. The U.S. Census Bureau reported that in 1850, malaria was responsible for 45.7 out of every 1,000 deaths nationally and 7.8 percent of deaths in the South.
The Communicable Disease Center declared malaria eradicated in this country in 1951. Today that entity, now known as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, typically reports around 2,000 cases of malaria annually contracted by travelers returning to the U.S. from abroad. The World Health Organization estimates that there were nearly 250 million cases and 620,000 deaths from malaria in 2021, concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa.
…”Wouldn’t it be great if scientists could genetically engineer mosquitoes to be immune to the malaria parasite, thus protecting people from that disease?” Nearly 10 years later, a team of biotechnologists associated with the University of California, Irvine; the University of California, Berkeley; and Johns Hopkins University report that they have achieved just that. Read More > at Reason
Iceland, Japan, Russia and Mexico: Why Every Volcano Is Erupting Right Now – Iceland may want to look into changing its name to “Fireland” as officials warn that a volcanic eruption could be imminent on the Nordic island nation.
After experiencing upwards of 20,000 earthquakes since late last month — a rising total that includes the 700 earthquakes recorded between midnight and just before 8 a.m. local time on Tuesday, per CBS News — officials from the Icelandic Met Office warned that an eruption could come at any moment.
“The likelihood of an eruption remains high,” the nation’s weather service explained, noting that “If an eruption occurs, the most likely location will be on the magma intrusion.”
But as nearly 4,000 residents from the southern fishing town of Grindavik evacuate ahead of the possible eruption, Iceland is far from the only nation that has found itself grappling with recent volcanic activity.
On Sunday, Mount Etna began erupting in Sicily, days after Klyuchevskaya Sopka, Eurasia’s tallest active volcano, erupted in Siberia. Meanwhile, a series of undersea eruptions in Japan last month landed the nation a new island roughly 745 miles away from Tokyo.
The number of confirmed volcanic eruptions so far in 2023 may currently stand at 67, per the Smithsonian’s Global Volcanism Program, landing it on the higher range of the 50-70 volcanoes that erupt each year. But even so, 67 pales in comparison to the stats from 2022 and 2021, which respectively boasted 85 and 83 eruptions. Read More > at eBaum’s World
A Look at the Real Greenhouse Gas Emissions Impact of Volcanic Eruptions – One question that many people ask is how much greenhouse gas volcanic eruptions give off. Geologist and climate expert Dr. Matthew Wielicki thoroughly answers this question, looking at emissions data from direct and indirect measurements.
Although, large volcanoes can have emission rates that are equivalent to humans for a short time. For example, Mount St. Helens is estimated to have emitted up to 25 million tonnes of CO2 per hour during the first few hours of its eruption in 1980. This is equivalent to the daily CO2 emissions of a small country like Estonia, for the first few hours of the nine-hour eruption. It is important to note that such eruptions are rather [rare].
….However, looking at the geological record, there have been periods where volcanic activity, especially from super-volcanic eruptions, released massive quantities of GHGs, exceeding all human emissions.
For example, the Central Magmatic Province (CAMP) is a large igneous province (LIP) that formed approximately 200 million years ago. It is one of the largest LIPs on Earth, and it is thought to have been formed by a series of eruptions. The CAMP is estimated to have released between 6.5 and 13.4 trillion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. This is equivalent to approximately 100-200 years of human CO2 emissions at current rates.
In summary: Everyday volcanic activity does not release significant amounts of CO2 when compared with human activity, but one large eruption – especially from a super-volcano – is a greenhouse gas game-changer:
It’s essential to recognize that volcanoes underscore the unpredictable and erratic nature of the climate system, where at any given moment, they have the capacity to disrupt and override all of our collective efforts aimed at controlling GHG concentrations.
Read More > at Legal Insurrection
A wind farm and a marine sanctuary walk into a bar… – It’ll be years before a wind farm rises in the deep waters off California’s Central Coast, but conflicts over the project are already here.
The California coast is playing host to three of the Biden administration’s policy priorities: clean energy, environmental conservation and tribal relations.
Those objectives are colliding with one another in a proposal to create a new marine sanctuary between Morro Bay and the Channel Islands.
The Morro Bay area is important to both wind developers and the tribes. It’s one of only two places where wind developers can connect to transmission lines big enough to accommodate all the power they’re planning to bring in. The developers want the sanctuary to exclude Morro Bay, at least for now, so they can lay cables along the seafloor and potentially locate substations there.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration acknowledged those concerns in an August proposal and carved out a 58-mile pathway for the cables.
At least five tribes don’t like that. To them, the bay, with its prominent round rock, is one of the most sacred sites in the area and links them to their ancestors. They don’t want a carve-out there and have told NOAA as much.
“NOAA is leaving our ocean relatives unprotected and unaccounted for in one of the most important places for all our tribes in the region,” said two Salinan groups, two Chumash groups and a band of Mission Indians in a letter to the agency last month.
Wind developers say the gap at Morro Bay needs to extend even farther south, to Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, so they can also connect to transmission lines there. And they need more certainty they’ll be able to lay cables through the sanctuary, they told NOAA. Otherwise financing for the projects could be at risk, they said in the letter. Read More > at Politico
Wind power industry in moment of reckoning as stocks fall and earnings crumble – Renewable energy firms are mostly suffering a dire earnings season as struggling supply chains, manufacturing faults and rising production costs eat into profits.
With the world trying to transition at pace toward cleaner energy, equipment manufacturers are struggling to keep up with soaring global demand, leading to rising production costs and questions over the economic sustainability of large-scale projects from the industry’s major players.
Manufacturing faults, most notably at Siemens Energy’s wind turbine subsidiary Siemens Gamesa, have emerged as companies race to build turbines at a greater pace and scale.
The problems at Gamesa led Siemens Energy to scrap its profit forecast earlier this year, and last month the company sought guarantees of up to 15 billion euros ($16 billion) from the German government.
German newspaper Handelsblatt reported Monday that the German government will provide 7.5 billion euros in counter-guarantees, while banks involved in discussions will bear 12 billion euros to safeguard the company’s order book.
Specialist wind energy firms are also often finding themselves outbid for seabed licenses by traditional oil and gas players. Should they win a contract, electricity prices are often too low to justify the manufacturing costs, leaving companies looking to their governments in Europe and the U.S. to deliver greater subsidies and restore balance to the market. Read More > at CNBC
Life expectancy for men in U.S. falls to 73 years — six years less than for women, per study – The life expectancy of men in the U.S. is nearly six years shorter than that of women, according to new research published on Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine.
At least partially as a consequence of over 1 million Covid-19 deaths, life expectancy in the U.S. has declined significantly over the past few years, falling from 78.8 years in 2019 to 77 in 2020 and 76.1 in 2022 — undoing over two decades of progress. This puts the country far behind its wealthy peers: Countries such as Japan, Korea, Portugal, the U.K., and Italy all enjoy a life expectancy of 80 years or more. Countries such as Turkey (78.6) and China (78.2) also fare better. This falloff has become a key issue for the Food and Drug Administration.
The picture is especially concerning for men, whose life expectancy is now 73.2 years, compared with women’s 79.1. This 5.9 year gap is the widest between the two genders since 1996.
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The reasons that issues such as suicide or opioid overdose affect men more than women are complex. “There’s a substantial socio-cultural norms component to this data as well in terms of the ways that society views masculinity and the way that men ought to behave,” said Yan. “That has profound effects on care-seeking behaviors,” he said. Whether a man seeks care for mental health issues, for instance, or even goes to routine primary care visits and takes medications, may be impacted by ideas about masculinity.
The analysis doesn’t provide insight into racial and ethnic differences. Yan says it is an area he and his colleagues plan to explore further. “We know that the disparity at baseline between men and women is much higher for Black Americans than it is for white Americans, for instance. And the interplay between gender and race is an important area for further study,” he said. As of 2022, the life expectancy for African American men was 61.5, nearly eight years shorter than for African American women. Read More > at STAT
Romick in Oakley 