Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Dr. Willie Soon; According to NPR’s Julia Simon, climate change is killing all the trees overhanging power lines which utility companies thought were safe to ignore.
Climate Change Is Killing Trees And Causing Power Outages
September 21, 20215:00 AM ET
JULIA SIMONOn a hill in Oakland, Calif., Igor Lacan looks out from under his Stetson hat at the neighborhood below and begins listing trees.
“Maples to birches to plums to liquid amber,” says Lacan, horticulture adviser for the University of California Cooperative Extension. “A cedar. I see some palms, and then you’ve got a monkey puzzle up here!”
In between the trees is a crisscrossing web of power lines, delivering electricity to the houses below. Lacan works as an adviser for California utilities such as Pacific Gas & Electric, and he says while most of the trees seem to be flourishing, that’s not true for some nearby acacias. He points upward to a spiral of dead bark hanging off an acacia branch.
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According to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, opportunistic fungi are killing these trees. California’s climate change-fueled drought, which has persisted for the better part of two decades, has stressed the trees and made them vulnerable to parasites.
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According to more than a dozen of the country’s largest utilities, branches and trees falling on power lines are a leading source of power outages. Some utilities say that because of factors related to climate change, trees are dying faster than they can reach them on their normal trimming cycles.
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Nina Bassuk, professor of urban horticulture at Cornell University, explains that climate change can kill tree cells through a confluence of stressors. “It’s not like an animal, which dies when you pierce the heart — trees die cell by cell,” she says.
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As climate change leads to more tree mortality and more blackouts, horticulturalists such as Lacan say the solution isn’t to plant fewer trees. It’s to plant different trees that can better endure drought and a hotter climate. Plus, shorter trees, he adds. “There are a number of short tree species that work quite well under those distribution lines.”
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Read more: https://www.npr.org/2021/09/21/1038078093/climate-change-is-killing-trees-and-causing-power-outages
In Australia where our tall Eucalyptus trees are all flammable fuel air bombs, more effort is made to keep power lines clear of trees, because our trees don’t have to be dead to start a major fire. The interesting part of ensuring there is no vegetation next to power lines is it works – even climate change can’t cause dead branches or trees to cut the power and start a fire, if there are no dead branches or trees close enough to fall on the lines.
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There’s three factors at play here:
1) PG&E was lax on tree trimming for decades. They’re catching up now, but it will be a decade or more to catch up.
2) California, Feds, and some local governments make tree trimming impossible. Many electric lines are on public land. If the state prevents them from trimming trees, whose fault is it when those trees cause a fire?
3) There’s too much fuel. Trees contacting lines cause fires everywhere. In California, the excess fuel from decades of land management choices turns these fires into catastrophes.
Quote:”Nina Bassuk, professor of urban horticulture at Cornell University, explains that climate change can kill tree cells through a confluence of stressors. “It’s not like an animal, which dies when you pierce the heart — trees die cell by cell,” she says.”
Sorry hun, Methinks you watch too much trash TV
Animals cells die when they fill up with sugar. There is nothing they can do about it, such is the affinity that sugar has for water.
Thus animals do die ‘cell-by-cell’
It manifests as Auto-immune disease, Cancer, Dementia and, not least, Diabetes
At the very bottom of it all though, plants and animals are stressed and thereafter succumb to pestilence because of One Thing
viz: Poor-quality low-nutrient food
Most folks round here know exactly what I (peta of newark) allude to…
CO2 may cause trees (which power companies thought they could ignore) bring down power lines. CO2 makes plants grow faster. Bigger tree = more branches near power lines.
I like big trees.
Who, in charge of any powerline maintenance would allow anything to encroach on the lines? The level of stupid would be criminal.
Apparently nature acts differently in Cali than anywhere else in the country. In every other state, branches in trees break and die routinely due to weather and other causes. And before they buried the power lines here in my state, the power company would come through every few years and trim back the trees dramatically to make sure the dead branches didnt break off and fall on the power lines. Evidently nature doesnt work that way in CA because tree branches dont break.
i woke up last night to close all my windows against the smoke coming from the “Windy” fire, burning in the South Sierra about 40 miles to the west. This is a lightning caused fire now up over 40,000 acres and basically totally out of control. I’ve watched this fire develop from a few acres, and fear this will become a truly huge devastating fire of hundreds of thousand of acres. And, it didn’t need to happen this way.
This one was obviously “slow walked” on the response. The response was moderated to allow this fire to build. I know this area really well, there are lots of roads and access. The management could have had a thousand fire fighters there in the first week and stuffed it right out. Resources were available from the by then in control Caldor and Dixie fires. But no, there were just a few hundred personnel, fiddling around the edges, as it grew into what? Something that justifies the budgets? Satisfies the ecologists and the policy of “beneficial burning”?
I don’t have answers to those questions but I see a pattern of fire response here. It seems depressingly cynical – let the fire go to 5000 acres then mount a serious, expensive, response. If it goes to plan the fire gets to 20K acres and 10 million dollars is expended. If the gamble goes bad, we get this, a monster fire.
“The interesting part of ensuring there is no vegetation next to power lines is it works”
But that means someone needs to take responsibility. MUCH easier to blame “climate change” than to actually do something about the problem.
If California and the West Coast did not burn every year, government money would dry up. It’s not climate change, etc, IT’S GOVERNMENT HANDOUTS. Plus, Newsom hates you fools that kept him office. I figure stupid has its consequences and this is one. You California and West Coast people LOVE burning to the ground or you’d do something about it. People love that which they never fight against nor take action against, or better yet, keep begging for.