Eleven months ago a fire ignited outside Pulga California, it raced across the mountains, and by the end of the day the city of Paradise California (and neighboring cities) had been largely destroyed, with several deaths (85 confirmed deaths and one still listed as missing as of September 2019) of…
During a fund-raising trip to California, President Trump issued a series of Tweets announcing the Trump Administration is “revoking California’s Federal Waiver on emissions”. He promised this will decrease car prices, make cars much safer, and increase JOBS for auto-workers. To do this his Administration is flouting over 50 years…
During August 2019, President Trump floated another of his insane-seeming ideas – namely that the USA wants to buy Greenland. It’s the 2000’s and the World Powers don’t go buying territories from each other any longer, do they? We started to dismiss this as another of the crazy ideas that…
Yesterday the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris caught fire and, while it was saved from complete destruction, a question has come up about restoring the building. Where will they get timbers big enough to replace the roof? Those timbers were cut 800+ years ago when Primal Forest was still available,…
Sea level rise is a consequence of climate change that is already hitting coastal towns all around the world. Fifteen years or so ago I recall reading a news report about the disappearance of a few whole islands in the Sunderban Islands in Bangaladesh, and closer to us in the…
It seems the news media never wants to portray Americans as refugees. The press can describe folks in poorer countries as refugees when they’re fleeing a war or something, but I’ve never heard citizens of any rich country like America described as refugees. In the area near Paradise California, thousands…
Paradise California has been destroyed by a massive wildfire and while the news has focused on the devastation in Paradise, there is another story. PG&E is surely to be blamed for starting the fire, because a PG&E power line went down outside of Pulga at the same time. But, why…
The November 8, 2018 wildfire called the Camp Fire destroyed the town of Paradise California. But, it did not destroy the entire town. Some buildings and houses survived the firestorm, but not because of flukes of fate, instead some homeowners prepared ahead of time because they knew about the fire…
Subsequent to the “Camp Fire” which destroyed Paradise California, on November 8, 2018, President Trump blamed California’s forestry policies saying that “There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor,” and Trump threatened to withhold federal payments to…
In 2012 the Obama Administration achieved a major win, with the full endorsement of the automobile industry, to require tighter fuel efficiency standards. The new CAFE Standards would reduce fuel consumption, reducing air pollution, and saving the US Economy zillions of dollars a year in fuel expenditures. Given the friendliness…
While we try to focus on energy and transportation issues on LongTailPipe, the current USA political climate under the President Trump administration has us nervously watching political news. One issue affecting the project of eliminating fossil fuel consumption is the EPA Administrator, Scott Pruitt. Coming from an oil state (Oklahoma),…
The Trump Administration is having its Katrina-moment this week. Katrina being the hurricane that struck New Orleans during the Bush32 Administration, and became the poster-child for both horrible government policy and the cost of ignoring the effects of climate change. We’ll leave the government policy issues to other people who…
Today California Governor Jerry Brown thumbed his nose in the direction of President Trump, and signed legislation extending California’s Cap-and-Trade program and defining certain non-vehicular emissions as air pollutants and toxic air contaminants. Well, he didn’t actually thumb his nose, but by taking this step California is taking a…
Last winter saw alarmingly warm temperatures stretching from the North Atlantic deep into the Arctic. I wrote about this at the time, all through the winter the coast of Norway, in North Scotland, in Iceland, and as far west as Sweden or St. Petersburg Russia, the weather was at or…
An arrest earlier this week in the Dieselgate scandal brings with it validation that upper Volkswagen Group management were indeed aware the company was fraudulently reporting inflated emissions results. At the time the management group claimed the scandal was the work of a few rogue engineers acting on their own. But,…
