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A firefighter battles the Creek Fire as it threatens homes in the Cascadel Woods neighborhood of Madera County, Calif., on Monday, Sept. 7, 2020.
Noah Berger/AP
California fires: A tipping point in talking about climate change
I often hear that it’s tough to communicate about climate change because it’s not concrete like, say, poaching.
And I think it’s fair to say that linking events like these to climate change is finally becoming mainstream. It’s just unfortunate that it takes so much death and devastation to get there.
The link: Global warming is sapping moisture from California, which means vegetation is drier and more likely to ignite.
Other side effects include: The fires in California could spark a financial crisis, Reuters reported. At least we know what that’s like.
“Wildfires across the US West are among the sparks from climate change that could ignite a US financial crisis by damaging home values, state tourism, and local government budgets.”
Energy implications: The wildfires are likely to ramp up pressure on utilities and oil companies to decarbonize.
That’s because heatwaves and dry conditions hike up the risk of power outages, either as a preventive measure to avoid sparking wildfires or — as we saw in August — to lower demand on the grid from people running their ACs.
The advantage of solar and batteries is that they can provide people with energy independence. They can also prevent heat-related blackouts from occurring in the first place by offsetting overall electricity demand.
Denise Gray, president and CEO, LG Chem Power
LG Chem
Needless to say, the energy industry faces a reckoning, and it has for a while. We profiled ten executives helming its transformation — from the head of New Energies at Shell to LG Chem’s EV battery czar Denise Gray, who’s pictured above.
What stood out to me: Oil giants will look a lot more like utilities in the coming decades, providing all kinds of power and products. Analysts say that could mean lower returns relative to what oil booms offer.
OPEC Plus reached a historic deal to curb oil production, with Russia and Saudi Arabia chipping in with steep cuts. Here, an oil worker in Russia.
Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters
Oil prices were inching up for months since bottoming out in April. Now they’ve slid back to where they were in June, weighed down by a stalled recovery in fuel demand.
Brent, the international benchmark price, is at about $40 a barrel, down 40% since the start of the year.
Both Shell and BP have said they sell a ton of coffee. It’s easy to forget that they operate massive chains of gas stations around the world, and all of them sell coffee.
Shell, for example, sells 250 million cups a year, my daily intake. 250 million!
(Relative to the big chains, it’s actually not that much. Dunkin says it sold about 2 billion cups in 2017.)
