Chaparral and grasslands (what that area has) regrow pretty quickly. This isn’t problem of fuel accumulating over decades as has happened in the Sierras. You’d need to be removing vegetation every year, which would also kill off the native plants.

Yes, there’s a history of lower-intensity fire, of the sort which doesn’t threaten structures at scale.

These are places that took relatively minor damage from lower-intensity fires in past years. A lot of places that burned are well into town.

There is some amount of moving people out of the wildland-urban interface that makes sense, but we also need to act by:

• Going ahead with building codes which make buildings more resistant to wind-blown embers from fires which might be a mile or more away
• Ending the use of fossil fuels, so we don’t make the situation worse
• Actively managing vegetation to prevent fuel accumulation where this makes sense.

That’s the thing — it costs the power company less to deploy them than to run their existing system. Even if they feel like charging you more, and have convinced regulators to let them do so.

It’s more that you can’t rely on a single press release or study to reach a definitive conclusion about complex systems. You can get a sense that there’s risk of major problems, but do so without concluding that we’re going to see Doomsday Next Tuesday with absolute certainty.

And those lower prices result in…burning more

Because we don’t have the kind organizing that sparks riots. We have a bunch of nonviolent civil disobedience instead.

Meanwhile, the Republican plan is to get rid of the subsidies for nuclear to give tax cuts to billionaires:

Repeal Title I of IRA ( Excluding: 45Q Carbon Sequestration, 45U Nuclear Power, 45Z Clean Fuels, and EV Tax Credit)

$404.7 billion in 10-year savings

VIABILITY: HIGH / MEDIUM / LOW

• Reducing 45Q, 45U, and 45Z would streamline and reduce government intervention in the energy industry that props up the green energy sector and distorts market competition .

He’s down to backing out of stuff from the LBJ era

Yes, though in practice overall system cost and reliability can be improved by adding wind to the mix.

Yeah, and that’s a very effective way to disable most offices that depend on communication with customers. Impact is very much the same.

That depends a fair bit on how corporate networks are set up. It’s very easy to have a central authentication server that the base station can’t reach anymore, so nobody can connect to the corporate wifi.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t do it either; you get conspiracy theory type answers instead.

The paper makes a very strong point about how people change minds, and it’s not about some personal impact; it’s about gaining distance from an ideological community that denies reality, and then getting useful information from people they trust.

That’s exactly the problem — in the US there’s an extra tariff on larger vehicles, so the manufacturers face less competition and therefore earn greater profits if they only make big vehicles.

The point of not burning gas is to avoid the CO2 released when it burns, and the inevitable leakage of ~3% of the methane from the distribution system. This helps to limit the amount of warming we get, which reduces fire risk.

They are not waiving the building code requirements that make newer structures fire-resistant.

Canceled policy = you’ve got an opportunity to get another one when your current one runs out.

Denied claims are of course a problem.

Failure is indeed possible, though it does look like activism moved the estimates of how hot it’s likely to end up by 2100

I tried it. It produces reasonably accurate results a meaningful fraction of the time. The problem is that when it’s wrong, it still uses authoritative language, and you can’t tell the difference without underlying knowledge.

That’s still not into the realm where I trust it; the underlying model is a language model. What you’re describing is a recipe for ending up with paltering a significant fraction of the time.