Beet L. Jooz

As previewed last night, PG&E Corp., California's largest (bankrupt) utility, began shutting off power Wednesday to an unprecedented 3 million people in Northern California in the face of hot, windy weather that raises the risk of wildfires. While the high winds are forecast to subside by late Thursday, the company will undertake extensive inspections of its equipment before turning electricity back on, meaning outages could persist into next week. More than 3 million people may be eventually affected, based on city estimates and the average household size. The economic impact may reach $2.6 billion.

Half a million homes and businesses in Northern California have already lost power as PG&E orchestrates the biggest-ever intentional power shutoff to keep its lines from sparking blazes. The company was scheduled to shut service to another 234,000 customers in cities including Berkeley and Oakland at noon local time, but told city and county officials that those cutoffs will instead start Wednesday evening. Strong, dry winds that heighten the risk of wildfires are picking up later than forecast, the company said.

According to Bloomberg, never before have California utilities intentionally cut power to so many people for their own safety - and never has a shutoff affected such major metropolitan areas, even as the city of San Francisco and Silicon Valley appear spared. The undertaking is key to fairly new strategy by PG&E for preventing power lines from sparking another deadly - and costly - conflagration.

“This is unprecedented in terms of what all of us are facing as a community,” PG&E Vice President Sumeet Singh said at a media briefing Tuesday night. “We are doing everything we can to minimize the impact on our customers’ lives.”

The shutoff was scheduled to occur in three phases, eventually affecting almost 800,000 homes and businesses, including in the San Francisco Bay Area and Napa County. The next phase will include parts of Alameda, Contra Costa, Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties, among others. The utility will also turn off 21,800 customers in Mendocino and Calaveras counties who didn’t lose power during the first stage.

After that, PG&E will weigh a third one for the southernmost portions of its service area, affecting 42,000. In all, about 15% of the utility’s customers may go dark.

The bankrupt Pacific Gas & Electric, which announced the deliberate outage, is working to prevent a repeat of a catastrophe last November in which faulty power lines it owned were determined to have sparked California’s deadliest wildfire in modern history. California Gov. Gavin Newsom said the “frustration that Californians feel as they deal with the impacts of these power outages is warranted,” but that safety was the main concern.

“The biggest threat looks to be today and continuing into the day tomorrow,” Marc Chenard, a senior branch forecaster with the U.S. Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland, said of the fire risk.

“Our first priority is to protect people and to ensure that communities are safe,” the governor said in a statement.

In last year’s inferno, 86 people died and a town called Paradise was virtually destroyed. PG&E has been found responsible for dozens of other wildfires in recent years, too. This is peak wildfire season in California.

With large portions of the San Francisco Bay area set to be affected - including cities such as Oakland, Berkeley and San Jose - the shutdowns are a test for a densely populated region that’s the hub of the U.S. technology industry.

“Extremely critical” fire conditions were expected in parts of Northern California Wednesday, and in Southern California around Los Angeles county Thursday, the National Weather Service said. PG&E said the severe weather incident prompting its precautionary shutoffs — hot, dry conditions and winds gusting at up to 70 mph (110 kph) — was expected to last through mid-day Thursday in northern and central California.

Near Los Angeles, Edison International’s Southern California Edison utility said it was also considering cutting power to almost 174,000 homes and businesses. Sempra Energy’s San Diego Gas & Electric warned that it could shut power to about 30,000 customers within the next two days.

The outages already affecting regions such as the Napa Valley wine country could last up to a week in some places. There was some last minute good news: PG&E briefly put off the next round of unprecedented blackouts across Northern California for a few hours on Wednesday after weather forecasts took a turn for the better. However, they were still expected to kick in later in the day.

The turn in weather forecasts hasn’t yet changed how many customers are set to lose power according to Bloomberg. Utilities in the Los Angeles and San Diego areas were also warning of service cuts.

While the city of San Francisco is not affected by the intentional shutoff - after all the locals have to be able to see when they are about to walk into human shit - much of the surrounding Bay Area could go dark, including parts of Silicon Valley.  A prolonged outage threatens to roil the region’s economy by disrupting workers and everyday life.

“If you lose power for five hours, you may have to throw out some milk,” said Michael Wara, director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at Stanford University. “If you lose power for five days, you need to throw anything that’s perishable away, and you are likely eating out of a can.”

Officials in Malibu — the glitzy home to Hollywood stars, which was also struck by last year’s inferno — said power company Southern California Edison had warned of another possible shutoff in areas from late Thursday through Friday.

More than 100,000 customers could lose power across eight Southern California counties, SCE said. Schools and universities closed Wednesday and people stocked up on gasoline, water, batteries and other basics.

“Early indicators are that the campus outage will last up to 48 hours,” said University of California, Berkeley, announcing all classes were canceled. The irony that this is taking place at the West Coast mecca of socialist thought was not lost on anyone.

With frustration rising, California state Sen. Jerry Hill described the mass blackouts as “excessive” in their scale.

“This cannot be something that can be acceptable nor long-term,” Hill told the Los Angeles Times. “This is third world, and we are not,” he added.

Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA in Los Angeles, tweeted that the power shutoffs were “a necessary bad idea in the short term” that shifts the financial costs from the power companies to the public.

As we reported last night, the first part of PG&E power cuts began midnight Tuesday into Wednesday in northern California. It affected more than 500,000 customers there, the utility company said.

The rest of the San Francisco Bay area was to start losing power in waves around noon local time. A possible third phase could take place later in the day farther south.

PG&E said it expected to start turning the power back on Thursday but can only do so after inspecting its equipment for damage, which could take days in some areas.

Unfortunately for customers, PG&E won’t be able to switch the power back on once the winds stop. Crews must inspect every inch of lines to ensure they’re safe to carry electricity again. Cities have warned residents to brace for six days without power. “It’s not just a matter of, ’red flag’s over, I can turn the lights back on,”’ said Gregg Edeson, a utility consultant. “The utility really does have to go out there and look.”

The utility that supplies water to much of the East Bay has rented backup generators for its pumping stations and plants, at a cost of $400,000 for the season. But the fuel to run those generators could cost $75,000 per outage, said Andrea Pook, spokeswoman for the East Bay Municipal Utility District. And the district is still asking customers to conserve water, limiting the need for the generators.

“As an insurance policy, we’re asking customers to be mindful,” she said.

PG&E’s warnings gave residents and businesses time to prepare, said Joe Eto, a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory staff scientist. Many companies, he said, can now have employees work remotely, conducting business through the cloud if needed. And if their own homes go dark, there are other places they can take their laptops to charge up and work.

“Never underestimate the resourcefulness of people under stress,” he said. Then again, this is California...

Enlarge / Man sips a beer. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

To reduce the risk of having a baby with a congenital heart defect, men should avoid drinking alcohol for at least six months prior to fertilization. At least, that’s the claim that researchers made in a press release last week. It's the same claim that multiple news outlets dutifully parroted in startling headlines and stories about the researchers’ study.

The problem is that the researchers’ study does not support that claim. In fact, the question of whether six dry months before fertilization could reduce the risk of congenital heart defects wasn’t addressed in the study. The researchers didn’t even have the data to know if any fathers abstained from alcohol for that long prior to helping form a babby.

It seems that the now-widespread recommendation was merely the researchers’ personal opinions, which were oddly included in the press release and don’t appear to be based on any evidence from their study or otherwise.

Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

As 2018 came to an end, politicians and media pundits insisted that "gun violence" was growing and hitting crisis levels .

While a homicide rate of anything greater than zero is an measure of very-real human misery, it nonetheless turns out that fewer people were murdered in 2018 than in the year before. Moreover, 2018 was the second year in a row during which the homicide rate declined.

According to new homicide statistics released by the FBI last month, the homicide rate in the United States was 5 per 100,000 people. That was down from 5.3 per 100,000 in 2017 and down from 5.4 in 2016. In 2014, the homicide rate in the US hit a 57-year low, dropping to 4.4 per 100,000, making it the lowest homicide rate recorded since 1957.

At 5 per 100,000, 2018's homicide rate has been cut nearly in half since the 1970s and the early 1990s when the national homicide rate frequently exceeded nine percent.

The regions with the largest declines were New England and the Mountain west where homicide rates decreased 18 percent and 12 percent, respectively. The only region reporting an increase was the Mid Atlantic region, with an increase of one percent. This was driven largely by an increase in homicides in Pennsylvania.

At the state level, the homicide rate went down in 38 states, and increased in 12.

The states with the lowest homicide rates were South Dakota, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine. The states with the lowest rates were nearly all found in New England and in the West. For additional context, I have graphed US states with Canadian provinces (in red):

Indeed, when we map the states by homicide rate, we can see some clear regional differences:

In American political discourse, it is fashionable to insist that those places with the most strict gun control laws have the least amount of violence.

This position, of course, routinely ignores the fact that large regions of the US have very laissez faire gun laws with far lower levels of violent crime than those areas with more gun regulations. Moreover, if we were to break down the homicide rates into even more localized areas, we'd find that high homicide rates are largely confined to a relatively small number of neighborhoods within cities. Americans who live outside these areas — that is to say, the majority of Americans — are unlikely to ever experience homicide either first-hand or within their neighborhoods.

We can see the lack of correlations between gun control and homicide, for instance, if we compare state-level homicide rates to rankings of state-level gun laws published by pro-gun-control organizations.

For example, using the Giffords Center's rankings of state gun policy, many of the states with the lowest homicide rates (South Dakota, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Utah) are states with the most laissez faire gun policies. The Giffords Center naturally ranks these states the lowest for gun policy, giving Maine and Utah grades of "F" and "D-", respectively, although both states are two of the least violent places in all of North America.

Homicide vs. "Gun Violence"

As is so often the case when dealing with gun statistics put out by pro-gun-control groups, the Giffords Center attempts to fudge the numbers by measuring "gun deaths" rather than homicides. By design, this number includes suicides — which then makes violence rates look higher — while excluding all forms of homicide not involving guns.

Thus, a state with higher homicide rates overall — but with fewer gun homicides — will look less violent than it really is.

Meanwhile, a state with little violent crime, but with relatively high homicide rates, will be counted as a state with many "gun deaths." These nuances are rarely explained in the public debate however, and the term "gun deaths" is just thrown around with the intent of making places with looser gun laws look like they have more crime.

Moreover, the attempt to use suicide to "prove" more guns lead to more suicides is easily shown to be baseless at the international level: the US has totally unremarkable suicide rate even though it is far easier to acquire a gun in the US than many countries with far higher suicide rates.

Mass Shootings

As the total number of homicides in the US has gone down in recent decades, many commentators have taken to fixating on mass shooting events as evidence that the United States is in the midst of an epidemic of shootings.

Mass shootings, however, occur in such small numbers as to have virtually no effect on nationwide homicide numbers.

According to the Mother Jones mass shootings listing, for examples, there were 80 deaths resulting from mass shootings in 2018, or 0.5 percent of all homicides. That was down from the 117 mass-shooting total in 2017, which was 0.7 percent of all mass shootings. And how will 2019 look? So far this year, there have been 66 mass-shooting deaths. On a per-month basis, mass shootings have so far been deadlier in 2019 than in 2018. But we could also note that although there have been 66 mass shooting victims this year, the total number of homicides in Maryland alone fell by 68 from 2017 to 2018.

And then, of course, there is the issue of crime prevention through private gun ownership. Since only averted crimes are not counted in any government statistic, we only know how many homicides occur, but not how many are averted due to the potential victim being armed. Pro-gun-control advocates insist that the number is very low. But, again, there is no empirical evidence showing this. Some gun control activists will point to studies that conclude more homicides occur in areas with more guns. These studies may be getting the causality backwards, however, since we'd expect more gun ownership to result in areas that are perceived to be more crime-ridden.