The above is a screenshot from USAspending.gov. You can click on it to make it easier to read.
Update on Questions From Last Week
Dave Mertz has heard back that the Forest Service will answer the questions he posed last week. So we can look forward to that.
Suggestions for the Forest Service in Communicating
I’d put out a table that shows the agreements thus far, and how much has been obligated over what time period. Once specific agreements for each project are approved, I’d have each funded project with a project description, how much money, timeline, and accomplishments when they are finished, located somewhere they can easily be searched (not USAspending.gov). (the above link is to American Forests, which appears to be $50 mill for Urban and Community Forestry, which also appears to be already obligated, that’s also the screenshot above). It would be great to have maps also for specific projects, so we can see where the $ are going. I’m sure Congressionals and others will be curious. Maybe like the GAOA site.
My Apology to the Forest Service and to Dave Mertz:
I’d like to apologize to Forest Service folks and Dave Mertz. When Dave and I were working up our list of questions, I added:
(4) Are the Keystone Agreements being used to avoid Federal Acquisition Regulations and federal hiring difficulties?
It wasn’t until I read it in his post that I realized how it might have come across as their ill intent, which I never meant. I meant it in a broader sense (which I could have expressed more clearly) “are there specific aspects of the FARs and hiring that make it difficult to fulfill the intent of Congress in the BIL and IRA?” Now, I haven’t heard about contracting, but I continue to hear about issues with USAJobs and the Albuquerque Service Center. On the other hand, vast infusions of money are probably not best used with temporaries, so perhaps the real question is about contracting vs. grants and agreements.
My intent was to see if there were obstacles that could be removed in order to proceed with success in meeting the goals of IRA and BIL, and maybe use that Congressional energy to make some fixes of a generally positive nature beyond BIL and IRA, but maybe that’s a question for Congress to ask. Or maybe they should have asked before sending the money out. Or maybe they realize that Federal hiring and contracting are cans of worms that they don’t want to get involved with. Easier to send out the money and hope for the best. Gee, I sound a little like Andy.
What I Think About All This
Partners are very important and can be critical to the Forest Service carrying out its mission. This is nothing new, about 15 years ago I recall a Region 2 Regional Foresters Honor Awards banquet with a video entirely composed of the Regional Forester (Rick Cables) talking about “partners” and “partnerships”. The SERAL project on the Stanislaus, as we covered here, was successful due to master agreements with the County and others.
As I said about SERAL partnerships, “Various master agreements, including with the County, enabled finances to be transferred and work to be done without federal hiring or FARs difficulties. Counties and others can hire locally, so that issues like housing affordability may be less pressing.”
It makes perfect sense, in my view, for the Forest Service to have larger scale agreements so that each Forest doesn’t have to reinvent the grant-making wheel. Also, because of the temporary nature of BIL and IRA, the Forest Service couldn’t actually add people. And these agreements provide handy ways to stash the funding so that Congress can’t get it back (at least that’s how it appears).
Still, two things raise questions for some of us.. transparency and accountability, and that’s what the rest of our questions were about. Some of us are also curious about whether work contracted versus granted have to follow the same rules and have the same degree of oversight and accountability. Folks with differing perspectives are equally curious about this, as we shall see in the E&E News story.
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While I was exploring the USAspending.gov website, I looked under the contracts tab by accident and found an $89.4 million contract to Sierra Tahoe Environmental Management, LLC. for stewardship work on the Plumas. So large-scale contracts are also possibilities. As one Anonymous pointed out, though, both contracting and grants and agreements shops might be overwhelmed by the influx of funding.
Air quality publication HouseFresh analyzed NIFC data from 2023 and ranked the causes of wildfires by number of occurrences. Of the recorded fires, 72.6 percent were directly caused by humans.
The bulk of last year’s wildfires were caused by debris burning and open burning, resulting in 1,302 wildfires. That is an increase from the 1,120 fires started by debris and open burning in 2022. Equipment and vehicle use, power generation/transmission/distribution, and arson were the next listed causes of wildfires in 2023 at 507, 390, and 364 respectively.
“The balance between human and natural fires has almost reversed since 2014, although the trend has not been smooth,” the HouseFresh report said. “The proportion of human-caused wildfires grew significantly in 2015, 2016 and 2020, peaking at 77.2 percent in 2020.”
A person might wonder if some climate modeling of wildfire dollars could be rerouted to understanding the social science of human ignitions and looking at successful interventions?
If you watched the Forest Service budget hearing, a few of the Senators brought up Mass Timber and CLT (cross-laminated timber). The National Museum of Forest Service History had an excellent explanation (with photos) in their newsletter. They are also having an auction until April 15, I’ve bid on a couple of places to stay and there’s other good stuff as well. The below and attached newsletter is reprinted with the permission of the National Museum. I thought this was a great article, so shout-out to the Museum and to Tom Chung! I just excerpted the introduction below, and the article itself is here.
By Tom S. Chung, FAIA, Principal, Leers Weinzapfel Associates
Many of us may have heard of the term “Mass Timber” but are not sure of what it is, although I would say that many, if not all, of us know what a “wood building” is and have been inside one from log cabins to solid heavy timber office buildings to curved wood structured churches. A Mass Timber building is in one sense, simply a wood building that uses large pieces of wood instead of smaller pieces of wood like lumber (2x4s and 2x6s) that we see being used for single family houses and multifamily housing 5 stories tall or less, all over the country for the past sixty plus years.
Mass Timber as the name implies is made of heavier (or larger) pieces of wood and its earliest examples are the solid heavy timber buildings that were built with old growth trees that made possible large cross sections of columns and beams often greater than 1’ x 1’ and more from a single tree trunk just debarked and cut to size.
But Mass Timber today is a highly engineered product that is assembled into even larger building elements with just lumber (2x4s and 2x6s) or even smaller laminations. Unlike
solid heavy timber that relies much on the characteristics of a single tree and a large safety factor since no two trees are the same, mass timber today is much more predictable and precisely engineered to meet the necessary loads with material efficiency. It is also fabricated in a factory in a highly automated way using digital technologies and equipment and assembled on site quickly and quietly, instead of being constructed piece by piece on site with lots of construction time and material waste.
While most civilizations began building with wood, as it was plentiful and easy to shape with simple tools, our modern society and its need to build bigger and taller buildings over the late 19th and 20th centuries in urban centers, coinciding with the results of industrial revolution which began a century earlier resulted in wood being displaced as the main building material by steel and concrete.
Though wood remained throughout the past century as a building material for smaller structures such as single family homes and small multi-family housing, the emergence of mass timber today makes possible the use of wood as a building material previously reserved for steel and concrete, allowing us to build these larger, taller and more complex buildings now in wood, with a renewable building material with less carbon emissions that helps address the building industry’s responsibility towards climate change.
In addition to being a solution to build more responsibly with less carbon footprint, mass timber buildings, unlike light-frame wood construction often expose the wood since it doesn’t need to be covered up by painted white drywall. This allows for the inherent biophilic attributes of wood to be experienced; visually appealing color and grain, the warmth to touch, the fresh pine scented smell with the humidity and moisture regulating properties of mass timber provides a full tactile experience that enrich the daily routines of those who live and work in these buildings.
Products
Among the commercially available products in the mass timber category are Cross-laminated Timber (CLT), Naillaminated Timber (NLT), Dowell-Laminated Timber (DLT), Mass Plywood Panel (MPP), Glue Laminated Timber (GLT) and glulams, Laminated Veneer Lumber (LVL), Laminated Strand Lumber (LSL) and Parallel Strand Lumber (PSL). They range in costs, appearance
and applications.
Nail-Laminated Timber or NLT are simply lumber (2xs) nailed together in a one way span between beams to make solid floors and usually require a layer of plywood on top for lateral stability. They are simple to build, do not require expensive factories and are on the less expensive end of mass timber product costs. But since there are nails, they cannot be cut with CNC machines
and are more limiting structurally and architecturally in general. Dowell-laminated Timber or DLT can be seen as an evolution of NLT in that the steel nails were replaced by hardwood dowels so that it could be CNC cut and made in a highly automated factory like other mass timber products. It appears similar to NLT and also spans one-way between beams but also with increased
structural and architectural possibilities at a higher cost.
Glulams, similar to NLT as mass timber products have been around for over eighty years. They have been used mostly as beams and columns (linear elements) and can be seen in many old churches and gymnasiums as large curved or arching elements. But they can also laid flat on their sides and with successive pieces become floor assemblies, similar to NLT or DLT.
In this configuration as floor panels, they are called “GLT.”
Seen often in combination with glulam beams and columns are Cross-laminated Timber or CLT panels It is the most well known and most talked about mass timber product today given its versatility. It was first commercially developed in Europe with factories in Austria, Germany and Switzerland about 25 years ago, then to Canada and now gaining traction in the US over the past 5-7 years. CLT arranges lumber laid flat, with each successive layer in a perpendicular direction such that unlike NLT, DLT or GLT the grain of the wood is oriented in perpendicular directions rather than a single direction. This allows for a greater dimensional stability and a two-way span capability and possibility of being point-supported with just a column and without beams. However, most CLT floor panels are still used as primarily one-way systems in conjunction with beams and columns given the simpler engineering involved and greater spans and column spacing that it enables. But the two-way structural capacity of CLT panels also makes it ideal not only as floor or roof (horizontal) panels but also as wall (vertical) panels. Many buildings utilize CLT in this way as load bearing walls and even as building cores for egress stairs, elevators and mechanical, designed to also take on lateral loads such as wind and seismic loads.
As versatile as CLT but very different in appearance is Mass Plywood Panel or MPP. MPP are simply layers of plywood (usually 4’x8’ and ~1” thick) laminated on top of each other to make thick, wide and longer panels of 8’ x 40’ or greater and from 4” to over 1’ thick, similar to CLT, NLT and DLT. Like CLT, MPP can span in two directions, be point supported with just columns and are dimensionally more stable. It can also be used as floors or walls and take on lateral loads. But unlike CLT in which each layer is made of 2x boards which can be seen, it’s made of plywood and one can see the whole or partial pieces of the 4’x8’ plywood in its appearance.
Although CLT precedes MPP, as plywood preceded CLT and as they both can span in two directions as they have the grain of wood oriented in perpendicular directions, CLT is sometimes referred to as “plywood on steroids.” Similarly, as CLT, like DLT and MPP are made in a highly automated factories with multi-million dollar investments in the production equipment-such as presses, CNC machines, glueing, dowelling, sorting and finger jointing machines with butterfly tables and vaccum lifts-all with associated costs. NLT has been referred to as “poor man’s CLT” given its relatively low cost and low production factors.
Laminated Veneer Lumber (LVL), Laminated Strand Lumber (LSL) and Parallel Strand Lumber (PSL) are veneer or strand-based products with much higher glue to fiber ratio and mainly used for their additional strength properties as compared to lumber, often as columns or beams in conjunction with light frame wood construction where stronger members are needed. Though they can be exposed to view, they are often hidden behind drywall just like light frame wood construction. Though they are technically in the mass timber category, they are less associated with mass timber as they are not used for large floor or wall panels or columns or beams that support them as described earlier with with CLT, NLT, DLT, MPP, GLT and glulams.
Marc Heller has an article about the Keystone Agreements here. I’ll talk about that tomorrow. He didn’t cover many of the questions that Dave Mertz, I and other retirees had. Also interesting (and annoying) that Marc could get answers from the FS and Dave and I (and others who have been asking) could not, after weeks of reaching out to different offices and levels. We had to FOIA to get copies of the agreements themselves, which I’ll attach, also tomorrow.
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Maybe some of you, like me, are old enough to remember the old TV show “Sledgehammer.” His catchphrase was “Trust me, I know what I’m doing.” The problem was, oftentimes, he did
not know what he was doing. I wonder if, with these Keystone Agreements, the Forest Service is asking us to trust them because they know what they are doing. We do know that they are
committing a whole lot of federal dollars through these agreements, and there doesn’t seem to be much transparency.
To be fair, the Forest Service was provided a lot of money through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), and they had to figure out how to utilize that
funding in a short period of time. Were all of these Keystone Agreements a logical way to bank that money and put it to good use later? Maybe so. Or was it a convenient way for the Forest
Service to claim accomplishments and take some of the load off of them? Maybe it was both?
In the interest of finding out more about these agreements, I sent an email with several questions to the Forest Service’s National Partnerships Office. To date, I have not had a response. I would
imagine that a response will need to be cleared by higher-ups, so it may take a while. Here are the questions I asked:
(1) We have obtained copies of the Master Agreements with the various NGOs through FOIAs. We are interested in the details contained in the associated Special Project Agreements (SPA), particularly the financial information. Shouldn’t this information beavailable to the public? We believe it is important to know how the Forest Service is spending federal dollars through these agreements. Do we need to file FOIAs to obtain this information or could it just be available online? If not, why not? We realize there would be some proprietary information that would need to be redacted.
(2) How are accomplishments being tracked through these agreements? Who is providing oversight, Grants and Agreements? The Partnerships Office?
(3) What is the process of awarding the NGOs funding? Do they receive the dollars and then projects are developed? What are the overhead rates of the various NGOs?
(4) Are the Keystone Agreements being used to avoid Federal Acquisition Regulations and federal hiring difficulties?
(5) We are hearing that Forests are having budget difficulties this fiscal year and that it will impact their ability to hire employees. In hindsight, was it wise to put so much funding into the Keystone Agreements rather than into NFS? Could a lot of this funding have been put into IDIQ contracts instead?
(6) Are Keystone Agreement accomplishments being claimed when the funding is awarded rather than when the work is actually accomplished?
I have other questions that I did not bring up. How much funding has already been provided through the various Special Project Agreements? It appears that through these agreements, the
Forest Service still has a number of obligations. These projects are not turnkey. If that is the case, are they really saving the Forest Service that much work? Are they a good bang for the
buck? Do these organizations have the expertise to accomplish this work up to Forest Service standards? Who is ensuring compliance with the associated NEPA documents? Are these
organizations doing some inherently governmental tasks? I could go on.
I would be interested in getting other’s thoughts on all of this. Can you help answer some of these questions? It would be good to hear from you!
This is a case in which maybe our lawyer friends can chime in..or maybe folks from Region 1 know more?
When does the FS simply determine a fine, and when do they litigate (as I think they did with Sierra Pacific in California) for starting wildfires? For example, Sierra Pacific was sued for damages and fees in excess of $1 billion for allegedly causing the fire. Does it depend on the nature of the organization (profit/not for profit?)? The certainty of who started it (as per legitimacy of investigation)? The amount of damage? I guess the questions are “who decides how to proceed and what to charge?” “based on what factors”?
Why did the Chief seem to say (maybe I misunderstood) that it was up to DOJ and he has little control over the decision?
Below is the press release from Tester’s office on the hearing today. Here’s a link to the exchange with Chief Moore. Thanks to Senator Tester’s office for providing this material!
U.S. Senator Jon Tester today pressed U.S. Forest Service (USFS) Chief Randy Moore during a Senate Appropriations hearing, questioning him on the USFS’s decision to stick Vigilante Rural Cooperative, a Montana electric cooperative, with a more than $5 million bill.
Following the Deep Creek Canyon Fire, which occurred in the Helena National Forest in 2021, USFS is seeking to fine Vigilante Rural Cooperative for fire suppression costs. This decision is based on a questionable determination of fault and fails to recognize the potential for this bill to jack up costs for Montana ratepayers. Senator Tester recently called on Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to reverse the fine.
Tester began by outlining the magnitude of the fine on the operating revenue of the cooperative: “The Forest Service fined a small electric cooperative in Montana a little over $5 million for a fire in 2021. To put this in perspective, the annual operating revenue for this small cooperative is $15 million. If this isn’t crazy enough, I recently learned that there is not a process in place for the cooperative to appeal this case directly to the U.S. Forest Service.”
Tester continued to specifically note the questionable determination of fault: “While I appreciate the importance of holding folks accountable and I believe in it strongly, I can tell you the jury is still out on whether the cooperative was negligent at all. Put that together, this process seems extremely broken.”
Tester went on to outline the consequences of this fine not just on the cooperative, but on Montana ratepayers: “Chief Moore, you know very well…that fining a cooperative with a $15 million budget, one third of its revenue – a cooperative that’s been around, by the way, for 87 years – would have two outcomes. The cooperative either goes out of business, and folks lose electricity, which is pretty darn critical in the 21st century, or the cooperative has to jack up energy costs on its entire members – because cooperatives are owned by the customer – to cover the bill.”
“Given that the blame for the 2021 fire is disputable,” Tester concluded. “My question to you, Chief Moore, is how the hell did we end up here?”
Tester’s recent letter to Secretary Vilsack can be read HERE.
Pretty sure this isn’t about wildfire risk based on this map.
The Hotshot Wakeup is best at covering this stuff, but we have folks in the media saying that wildfires will get worse, due to climate change.
Meanwhile, we also have the military-industrial complex developing early sensing and unpersonned firefighting helicopters, which conceivably can reduce spread.
We have fire retardant litigation, the EPA working on permits, one fire retardant contract that is under protest and can’t be awarded, and one for more “environmentally friendly” retardant that eats away at the metal in aircraft such that some will not be available for the 2024 fire season.
I’m not sure how scientists can model the climate fingerprint of all that.
We have power companies shutting off power (so conceivably we will have fewer ignitions) although their approaches raise questions (in Colorado the PUC will be investigating), and maybe also have unequal impacts based on socioeconomic conditions.
More than 150,000 Xcel customers lost power because of the intentional shut offs or damaged equipment during the winds that included gusts of nearly 100 mph Saturday into Sunday. As of 10 a.m. Wednesday, the company reported 75 outages affecting 929 customers.
Residents and at least one food bank were forced to toss unrefrigerated food, and several metro Denver schools were closed through Tuesday. Employees at a Boulder wastewater treatment plant had to scramble to make sure raw sewage didn’t flow into Boulder Creek when power was cut to the plant’s two electric substations.
Then there’s this fascinating story from the San Fran Chronicle on for which zip codes State Farm will be non-renewing policies. We can check out the map and see .. whatever it’s about, it’s not about wildfire.
According to the article:
State Farm wrote in state filings that it would not renew policies “that present the most substantial wildfire or fire following earthquake hazards, or that are in areas of significant concentration.”
And probably not about earthquakes. If you go to that link it says:
Last October, Marc Snyder’s insurance company informed him it wouldn’t be renewing his homeowners insurance this year for a reason he had never heard before: density.
The letter from Liberty Mutual said Snyder’s home was “located in a region where the dwellings are considered to be too densely concentrated for us to continue to provide coverage.”
But increasing density is supposed to be good for climate change, and climate change is supposed to be bad for wildfires. That’s what I mean by the circle of life.. California’s policies are to increase density. Anyway, sounds like there will be much work for PUCs and insurance commissions to investigate in terms of maps, and I hope they dig deeply. Perhaps California, as well funded as it is, can figure the insurance/power company conundrum out and let the rest of us know what they find.
Senate Committee Hearing on Budget on now with Chief Randy Moore. If you have questions that you would like to know more about, please put in our comments and we will try to dig deeper. Here’s a link to the Chief’s written testimony.
Sorry this image is so fuzzy, pulled from news video.
This may be of interest to other folks…. dried grass and high winds are nothing new to the Front Range of Colorado. However, after the Marshall Fire, a concern over liability on the part of Xcel Energy may well be new, hence.. preventative as well as accidental outages.
The news follows the utilities company’s Sunday prediction that it could take through Monday or longer to restore power to more than 87,000 Xcel customers statewide who were still experiencing outages by 5:45 p.m. on Sunday.
As of Monday morning at 10:25 a.m., over 750 outages were reported by just over 29,000 customers in the Denver area, whereas the Boulder area still saw close to 225 outages affecting roughly 12,000 customers, according to the Xcel electric outage map.
A total of more than 150,000 were impacted by the loss of power — severe weather caused outages for around 100,000 customers, while another 55,000 in six counties had their power shut off by Xcel in an effort to prevent wildfires.
“For the first time in Colorado, Xcel Energy conducted a public safety power shutoff,” said spokesperson Tyler Bryant in a Sunday statement. “While many customers will have service restored later today, with the significant number outages from this weather event, this restoration process will extend into Monday, April 8 and possibly longer for some customers.”
With more than 400 crew members working on restoring power to more than 600 miles of affected lines, the company had addressed the needs of about 63,000 customers by Sunday evening.
Because Xcel changed its system settings during the extreme winds to restrict automatic power restoration, “this safety measure means power outages are likely to last longer than they typically would,” Bryant said.
Since we have both high wind and dried grass in the winter, perhaps electrifying everything is not a very resilient approach? Just a thought. Also, on the app Nextdoor, there was a certain (large) amount of unhappiness with the way this rolled out (although Xcel had its defenders, and lots of appreciation for employees working to get power restored). A critique From one neighbor:
1. Confusing messages sent out before cutting off our power.
2. No map provided in advance that would have helped know if any businesses, friends, neighbors still had power.
3. Outage map provided after power cut off that is just as useless.
4. Automated emails sent after power cut off assuring us that they are working diligently to get the power back on. Which we know they are not.
5. Another automated email sent out asking what we think of the new electricity rate structure.
6. They have now said that people preemptively shut off have lower priority than those who lost power due to the storm 🤦 Hard to think how they could have done this any worse.
Another thought.. a human being might want to review automated emails prior to sending to see if they fit the current situation.
Pacific Gas & Electric cut power to more than 700,000 customers in 34 counties early Wednesday because of high winds. Some households were without electricity for 72 hours, a spokesman said. Southern California Edison shut off electricity to more than 24,000 customers, also starting Wednesday.
The biggest failure, experts and customers alike said, was communication. Residents complained they did not receive adequate notice of the shutdown or no notice at all and could not get on the utilities’ websites.
Lessons learned from the shutdowns are critical because more will take place, experts said.
“I suspect for the next few years these are going to occur,” said Severin Borenstein, faculty director of UC Berkeley’s Energy Institute. “No one involved in this thing thinks it was a one-time event.”
The California Public Utilities Commission on Monday ordered PG&E to take immediate corrective actions, and Gov. Gavin Newsom called on the utility to give residential customers who lost power $100 rebates.
Commission President Marybel Batjer told PG&E it must try to restore power within 12 hours in the future, reduce the size of outages, develop systems to ensure call centers and the website are accessible and develop a “communication structure” with counties and tribal governments so they can respond to emergencies.
“Failures in execution, combined with the magnitude of this … event, created an unacceptable situation that should never be repeated,” Batjer said.
He said the state should create some sort of committee that includes public safety officials, elected officials, utilities and the Public Utilities Commission to make power shut-off calls in the future.
Utilities have sparked fires for decades, but they are now more destructive because of droughts produced by climate change and the movement of people into more remote, highly vegetated regions, experts said.
Southern California Edison’s customers complained the utility failed to give them adequate warning.
They hit the utility with questions about the timing, criticism over lack of immediate notice and outrage over spoiled food, stress-related health effects and fears that trapped cars beneath electric garage doors would leave people stranded in the event of a fire.
“We strive to keep the customer informed always, but we may not be able to depending on circumstances,” said Edison spokesman Robert Villegas.
Anyway, the article has interesting lessons learned and ideas for improvement (that could have helped Xcel) .. but given the warning timeframes, maybe it’s best to be ready for a shutoff, even if you live far from the WUI.
Here’s the PSA from Xcel:
Put together an outage kit
Include things like flashlights, batteries, portable chargers, a phone that does not require electricity, a non-electric clock, bottled water, non-perishable food, a manual can opener and a first aid kit
Make sure your computer is protected from surges
Keep devices charged
“Customers who use medical equipment that relies on electrical service should take steps to prepare for extended outages,” Xcel said.
Other things to consider include lighting options for when the power goes out, using a cooler to avoid opening the fridge and using a generator.
“For customers with power outages, you may want to unplug appliances containing electronic components, such as televisions, microwaves, and computers to prevent damage as power is being restored,” Xcel said.
Last year, Sammy Roth wrote a piece on the problem of reliability with regard to tolerating more blackouts during the transition time to solar and wind energy storage technologies.
Of the hundreds of people who responded to my question, most rejected the idea that more power outages are even remotely acceptable — for reasons beyond mere convenience. A former member of the L.A. Department of Water and Power’s board of commissioners wrote that “someone dies every time we have a power outage.” An environment reporter in Phoenix — where temperatures have exceeded 110 degrees for a record 20 straight days — said simply, “Yikes.”
Moura expanded on his skepticism by noting that modern life is more reliant on electricity than ever before.
Those of us lucky enough to have air conditioning depend on it to stay safe during heat waves — which can already kill thousands of people and are only getting more dangerous as fossil fuels warm the planet. Elderly people and individuals with certain health conditions are more vulnerable to heat illness and sometimes need electricity to power their medical equipment, such as ventilators, dialysis machines and motorized wheelchairs. Our refrigerators, cellphones and internet service all depend on reliable electricity.
“It’s not really about keeping the lights on. It’s about keeping people alive,” Moura said.
Two years ago this month, California narrowly avoided rolling outages after wildfire smoke knocked out electric lines that carry large amounts of power from the Pacific Northwest. The state again toed the precipice during a hot spell last September, fending off blackouts only after officials sent out an emergency alert to millions of mobile phones begging people to use less power.
Again and again, I’ve found myself asking: Would it be easier and less expensive to limit climate change — and its deadly combination of worsening heat, fire and drought and flood — if we were willing to live with the occasional blackout?
I received this as an email and copied it, so the links don’t work here. Here’s a link with lots of information. They also have recordings of their recent ScienceX program on genetics. No doubt these will also be recorded.
We’re not done with our discussion of the 21 inch rule.. but it reminded me of the Ochoco and this piece I wrote for the journal The Scientist in 1987. No WordPress then, no TwitX, no Substack so to get one’s views expressed, one had to go through journal gatekeepers. The rich 21 inch rule discussion is an example of why we are all better off. I think y’all will get a hoot out of how prescient I was (or not), and where it didn’t turn out exactly the way I thought. Still, this happens today, and it’s wonderful.
Here’s a link to the article, I reprinted in full below.
Scientific Discussion Should Go Online
Sharon Friedman
Nov 1, 1987
Innovation is the key to success in today’s world, with changes in technology, natural and human- caused changes in the environment and sociopolitical change taking place at an accelerating pace. To innovate successfully, we must take advantage of the natural resource sciences. Millions of dollars can be lost while research is waiting to be published researchers end up doing things that are not effective, or wasting opportunities to do things that are. I suggest that we utilize the new communications technology in order to communicate results in a timely manner, conduct training and reduce instances in which scientists reinvent the wheel.
The Silvanet System
To use silviculture as an example, I suggest development of a statewide or nationwide computer network (call it Silvanet) on which researchers at all levels could exchange information. The network would have four sections: reports, ongoing work, ideas and notes on meetings.
Reports, the equivalent of today’s scientific papers, would include unpublished thesis as, negative results and repetitive studies ones in which a technique is tried on a different species or in a different environment). These three kinds of information are difficult or impossible to obtain under the current system. People who submit reports would be encouraged to add two sections in addition to those included in standard scientific papers: one describing the problems they encountered and their solutions, and a “right brain” section for their feelings about their work for which they have no statistical validation. These sections would be invaluable to others working on the same problems.
The ongoing work section would be the equivalent of a project proposal, and would alert people to the existence of others working on the same problem. Currently, researchers engaged in a study often don’t know that others are working on the same problem except through chance meetings or conversations. The use of a network would take some of the randomness out of such communications.
People would put their ideas on the system the day they generate them. For example, new hypotheses could be entered on the system, providing an opportunity for people who have data that might bear on the hypothesis to respond. Researchers attending meetings—especially international ones that relatively few can afford to attend— would be encouraged to take notes and put them on the system for other users.
The priority of an idea or a report would be determined by the time of its appearance on Silvanet. From the day it appeared, there would be no barrier to the use of an idea or report. Individuals would be able to comment on each other’s reports, proposals and ideas in a public file. By reading these scientific discussions, criticisms and rebuttals, natural resource workers could develop their critical faculties.
The Advantages
Electronic discussion has several advantages over the traditional varieties. First, one has more time to think before replying and to develop more coherent arguments than in personal conversations. Then, too, personality is less important than when the discussion is face to face. Similarly, the sex, race, socioeconomic class and professional status of the participants may not be known, so that people could respond to ideas rather than stereotypes. Foreign languages are easier to understand in writing than when spoken, allowing discourse between two or more people who possibly could not communicate at all through spoken language. In contrast to phone calls, written electronic discussions can include equations, tables, diagrams and possibly, in the not-too-distant future, photographs.
Since natural resource workers with similar interests are often in widely separate locations, meetings are expensive and often only a small proportion of the total number are able to attend. Meetings become regionalized by geography, resulting in reduced interaction between regions.
Journals can be very useful, but many publish only a small subset of original research and can be slow to transfer vital information. Often, readers would benefit from criticisms of these papers. Electronic communication is not a substitute for meetings or published papers, but could be a powerful addition to them.
How to Do It
The question becomes how to implement such a system. Each natural resource (or other) organization could develop its own network, but information transfer generally is already fairly good within a given organization. This is especially true if the organization has its own electronic mail system, such as the one the USDA Forest Service has successfully implemented throughout the United States. The true value of a network would be to link people who do not get a chance to meet. Therefore, the most logical place would be through a state government or a state university—institutions that often Scientific Discussion Should Go Online already have responsibility for technology transfer for all natural resource organizations within the state. At some point the states could connect their networks into a national, and ultimately international, system.
To illustrate how this would work, let’s take a real-life example. A co-worker of mine employed by a small timber company found some work in physiology that he thought might apply to the problem of selecting trees for a genetics program. He contacted a researcher at the local university, who was not interested in the problem. However, from the standpoint of the economics of his company, it was an important problem. If a statewide Silvanet had existed, he could have put his idea on the system and obtained feedhack from a variety of people, including many with different kinds of experience and interests. He might have decided to pursue the problem further, and requested suggestions and data he could use to test his hypothesis from people on the network. He then would have contacted the state biometrician for help with experimental design and begun to write a proposal to be put on the network. He might have gotten more discussion on the proposal, and located potential collaborators using Silvanet. Finally, the results of the study—whether or not the new technique worked to improve tree selection—would have gone onto the network as a report.
Ultimately it would be best for the network to expand worldwide, perhaps with the industrial countries paying the connection costs for the developing nations. Information on technical issues usually is difficult to obtain in a timely manner in these countries. Scientists in these countries would have the expertise of their colleagues worldwide available at the touch of a keyboard. Scientists in developed countries could assist the developing nations on a timely (same-day) basis, and scientists who are unable to travel for periods of time could also participate. This would expand the talent pool available substantially. Through the establishment of such a system—which would have to include training in the scientific method—we could truly “teach people to fish” instead of “giving them a fish”—in this case, a piece of technical information.
Friedman is a plant geneticist at the Ochoco National Forest, P0. Box 490, Prineville, OR 97754.
