this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2024
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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Wildfire Threats Make Utilities Uninsurable in US West | As wildfire season starts, some utilities are now operating without insurance — and are on the hook if their power lines are linked to a blaze. (www.bloomberg.com)
submitted 4 months ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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Archived copies of the article: archive.today ghostarchive.org web.archive.org

I'll note that as temperatures have risen, fires spread much faster

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[–] ptz@dubvee.org 18 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

As it stands now, utilities have become the “insurer of last resort” when it comes to damage claims from wildfires tied to their equipment, said Emily Fisher, general counsel at the Edison Electric Institute, an investor-owned utility trade group. The industry has become difficult to insure because there isn’t a limit to their potential wildfire liabilities, Fisher added.

Power companies also need to spend billions of dollars to make their infrastructure less prone to start fires, funding fixes such as installing weather monitoring equipment, burying power lines and replacing old poles. “It’s not a sustainable regime,” Fisher said.

It is certainly sustainable, though it may not be as profitable. I'm sorry, but I couldn't care less what the general counsel for an investor-owned utility trade group that only cares about the next quarter's earnings has to say on the matter.