Reading a book on the electrical code makes me realize how much safer newer homes are compared to older homes. And they’re still making buildings a lot safer with the latest revisions of the code. The safety improvements in the building code are not unlike safety standards in automobile industry – they continue to reduce fires and death from shocks – often in very substantial ways.
Energy
How the oil industry pumped Americans full of fake news | Grist
Know Before you Go…..Solar
With the wild proliferation of solar arrays across valuable farm land, scrub land, and pretty near everywhere else, and with solar companies approaching and pressuring farmers to lease or sell, it is important to know the potential ramifications of signing a deal.
Below is an excellent article, which brings up some issues I hadn't previously considered. We have been approached by at least seven or eight companies, so there has been a lot of research done by Northview folks. The solar company reps who call, write, or stop by in pickup trucks don't seem to like that very much.
Matching Water Heater Elements to Solar PV Panels
the 100% Renewable Fascade – CounterPunch.org
It would be easy to believe that this means a great victory for the planet, that the demise of fossil fuels is incoming, that environmentalism has won and that climate change will soon be a thing of the past. Yet the foul smell emerging from tax-dodging transnationals jumping all together into a bandwagon cannot be ignored.
Despite their claims, none of the companies in the RE100 list is actually going to receive all of its energy from renewable sources. The “100% renewable” label is a fasade, a marketing gimmick used by corporations to pretend they are the good guys while their unfettered thirst for profits continues unopposed. This corporate lie is enabled by the abuse of Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) which allow companies to buy their way into “green” without having to change any of their practices.
You just lived through the warmest January on record
For 421 straight months, Earth has been warmer than average.
January 2020 continued where 2019 left off, as the planet's relentless, long-term heating trend — stoked by skyrocketing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations — resulted in the warmest global January on record, according to the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service.
January 2020 squeaked past January 2016 by just fractions of a degree (0.03 Celsius), but it's really the long-term heating trend that's important, not any individual month. Overall, 2019 was the second hottest year on record, 19 of the last 20 years are now the warmest on record, and high-temperature records now absolutely dominate low-temperature records.
Climate Models Are Running Red Hot, and Scientists Don’t Know Why – Bloomberg
There are dozens of climate models, and for decades they’ve agreed on what it would take to heat the planet by about 3Celsius. It’s an outcome that would be disastrous—flooded cities, agricultural failures, deadly heat—but there’s been a grim steadiness in the consensus among these complicated climate simulations.
Then last year, unnoticed in plain view, some of the models started running very hot. The scientists who hone these systems used the same assumptions about greenhouse-gas emissions as before and came back with far worse outcomes. Some produced projections in excess of 5C, a nightmare scenario.
I am pretty sure it was the slogan of Bernie Sanders or maybe Ron Paul "It's Happening [now]!" Or something like that. The future is now as they say.