Being climate-wise requires our being ‘sound-climate-policy implementation-smart’

Experts have declared 2024 the hottest year on record and for the first time in recorded history, the average temperature of air at the Earth’s surface had gone above 1.5 degrees Celsius, the rise being 1.5 degrees C higher than what was present average-surface-air-temperature-wise at the time the Industrial Revolution took effect in 1750.

I look at what the situation with the fire devastation in southern California is and can’t help but wonder if the state’s key decision-makers and influencers are seeing the forest for the trees.

Just today I learned that the Advanced Clean Fleet rule that the CalEPA Air Resources Board had both established and been on the books, is now out the window, in a manner of speaking. The Advanced Clean Fleet mandate is a laudable program that, had it remained in effect, would in 2036, have banned the sale of diesel trucks in state. Set to go into effect in state by 2042, meanwhile, was a requirement for bigger trucking concerns to have their current fossil-fuel-powered medium- and heavy-duty rigs converted to those that run on hydrogen and electricity. The purpose of such mandate was to help ensure the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions outputted to the atmosphere.

In light of the fact that the southern California wildfires have so far burned-to-the-ground thousands of structures (homes, businesses and more) as well as upended the lives of people numbering in tens of thousands and causing the deaths of 25, then, in this day and age what with the rise in surface-air temperature and parched conditions and blowing winds all having a compounding effect on the fire and its spread, where is the wisdom in the state abandoning the Advanced Clean Fleet and other similar rules? Just for the record, I heard in one report that at one point as many as 150,000 people had been under mandatory evacuation orders.

Turning now to energy, although it’s still early on in the investigation into what may have sparked the southern California fires, I heard one person’s take — accompanied by on-camera video footage showing a fire at the base of an electric-grid transmission tower located up on a hillside in a Pacific Palisades neighborhood — on what he believes ignited this fire. So far, as far as I know, there has been no official determination or declaration as to how the blaze in question started.

Now I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself, but if this one fire is, in fact, what started this whole south-coast-region conflagration, and it was begun due to, say, a live, downed power line, such could indicate a problem with the infrastructure itself.

Should this prove to be the case, I would ask the question as to why, as a society, more and more electricity users aren’t at the same time self-reliant electricity producers, either via the incorporation at the home, business site, what-have-you of on-site, independent, solar-photovoltaic arrays or windmill generators or perhaps even both. Adopting one or both approaches, whether you believe in climate change and/or global warming or not, the way I see it, such makes sense from a practical point of view. And, that is my take.

It also happens to be my belief that so-called “undergrounding” of power lines to lower the risk of fire being sparked from, say, a downed live power line, here again, where such is in effect, this action makes sense.

— Alan Kandel

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