Summary of Katherine Blunt's California Burning

Summary of Katherine Blunt's California Burning PDF Author: Everest Media,
Publisher: Everest Media LLC
ISBN:
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 33

Get Book Here

Book Description
Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 On November 8, 2018, a transmission tower in Northern California firestorm-like conditions, killing 20 people. #2 Transmission towers, like highways, must be kept separate from one another and from the insulators that support them. If the space between them becomes too small, electricity can jump from wire to wire or wire to tower in a lightning-like strike. #3 Transmission towers, like highways, must be kept separate from one another and from the insulators that support them. If the space between them becomes too small, electricity can jump from wire to wire or wire to tower in a lightning-like strike. #4 Transmission towers, like highways, must be kept separate from one another and from the insulators that support them. If the space between them becomes too small, electricity can jump from wire to wire or wire to tower in a lightning-like strike.

Summary of Katherine Blunt's California Burning

Summary of Katherine Blunt's California Burning PDF Author: Everest Media,
Publisher: Everest Media LLC
ISBN:
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 33

Get Book Here

Book Description
Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 On November 8, 2018, a transmission tower in Northern California firestorm-like conditions, killing 20 people. #2 Transmission towers, like highways, must be kept separate from one another and from the insulators that support them. If the space between them becomes too small, electricity can jump from wire to wire or wire to tower in a lightning-like strike. #3 Transmission towers, like highways, must be kept separate from one another and from the insulators that support them. If the space between them becomes too small, electricity can jump from wire to wire or wire to tower in a lightning-like strike. #4 Transmission towers, like highways, must be kept separate from one another and from the insulators that support them. If the space between them becomes too small, electricity can jump from wire to wire or wire to tower in a lightning-like strike.

California Burning

California Burning PDF Author: Katherine Blunt
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 059333065X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Get Book Here

Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER 2022 Winner of the Golden Poppy Award for Nonfiction (California Independent Booksellers Alliance) A revelatory, urgent narrative with national implications, exploring the decline of California’s largest utility company that led to countless wildfires — including the one that destroyed the town of Paradise — and the human cost of infrastructure failure Pacific Gas and Electric was a legacy company built by innovators and visionaries, establishing California as a desirable home and economic powerhouse. In California Burning, Wall Street Journal reporter and Pulitzer finalist Katherine Blunt examines how that legacy fell apart—unraveling a long history of deadly failures in which Pacific Gas and Electric endangered millions of Northern Californians, through criminal neglect of its infrastructure. As PG&E prioritized profits and politics, power lines went unchecked—until a rusted hook purchased for 56 cents in 1921 split in two, sparking the deadliest wildfire in California history. Beginning with PG&E’s public reckoning after the Paradise fire, Blunt chronicles the evolution of PG&E’s shareholder base, from innovators who built some of California's first long-distance power lines to aggressive investors keen on reaping dividends. Following key players through pivotal decisions and legal battles, California Burning reveals the forces that shaped the plight of PG&E: deregulation and market-gaming led by Enron Corp., an unyielding push for renewable energy, and a swift increase in wildfire risk throughout the West, while regulators and lawmakers pushed their own agendas. California Burning is a deeply reported, character-driven narrative, the story of a disaster expanding into a much bigger exploration of accountability. It’s an American tragedy that serves as a cautionary tale for utilities across the nation—especially as climate change makes aging infrastructure more vulnerable, with potentially fatal consequences.

California Burning

California Burning PDF Author: Katherine Blunt
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593330668
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Get Book Here

Book Description
A revelatory, urgent narrative with national implications, exploring the decline of California’s largest utility company that led to countless wildfires — including the one that destroyed the town of Paradise – and the human cost of infrastructure failure Pacific Gas and Electric was a legacy company built by innovators and visionaries, establishing California as a desirable home and economic powerhouse. In California Burning, Wall Street Journal reporter and Pulitzer finalist Katherine Blunt examines how that legacy fell apart—unraveling a long history of deadly failures in which Pacific Gas and Electric endangered millions of Northern Californians, through criminal neglect of its infrastructure. As PG&E prioritized profits and politics, power lines went unchecked—until a rusted hook purchased for 56 cents in 1921 split in two, sparking the deadliest wildfire in California history. Beginning with PG&E’s public reckoning after the Paradise fire, Blunt chronicles the evolution of PG&E’s shareholder base, from innovators who built some of California's first long-distance power lines to aggressive investors keen on reaping dividends. Following key players through pivotal decisions and legal battles, California Burning reveals the forces that shaped the plight of PG&E: deregulation and market-gaming led by Enron Corp., an unyielding push for renewable energy, and a swift increase in wildfire risk throughout the West, while regulators and lawmakers pushed their own agendas. California Burning is a deeply reported, character-driven narrative, the story of a disaster expanding into a much bigger exploration of accountability. It’s an American tragedy that serves as a cautionary tale for utilities across the nation—especially as climate change makes aging infrastructure more vulnerable, with potentially fatal consequences.

Big Dirty Money

Big Dirty Money PDF Author: Jennifer Taub
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1984879995
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Get Book Here

Book Description
“Blood-boiling…with quippy analysis…Taub proposes straightforward fixes and ways everyday people can get involved in taking white-collar criminals to task.”—San Francisco Chronicle How ordinary Americans suffer when the rich and powerful use tax dodges or break the law to get richer and more powerful—and how we can stop it. There is an elite crime spree happening in America, and the privileged perps are getting away with it. Selling loose cigarettes on a city sidewalk can lead to a choke-hold arrest, and death, if you are not among the top 1%. But if you're rich and commit mail, wire, or bank fraud, embezzle pension funds, lie in court, obstruct justice, bribe a public official, launder money, or cheat on your taxes, you're likely to get off scot-free (or even win an election). When caught and convicted, such as for bribing their kids' way into college, high-class criminals make brief stops in minimum security "Club Fed" camps. Operate the scam from the executive suite of a giant corporation, and you can prosper with impunity. Consider Wells Fargo & Co. Pressured by management, employees at the bank opened more than three million bank and credit card accounts without customer consent, and charged late fees and penalties to account holders. When CEO John Stumpf resigned in "shame," the board of directors granted him a $134 million golden parachute. This is not victimless crime. Big Dirty Money details the scandalously common and concrete ways that ordinary Americans suffer when the well-heeled use white collar crime to gain and sustain wealth, social status, and political influence. Profiteers caused the mortgage meltdown and the prescription opioid crisis, they've evaded taxes and deprived communities of public funds for education, public health, and infrastructure. Taub goes beyond the headlines (of which there is no shortage) to track how we got here (essentially a post-Enron failure of prosecutorial muscle, the growth of "too big to jail" syndrome, and a developing implicit immunity of the upper class) and pose solutions that can help catch and convict offenders.

Soul of the Grid

Soul of the Grid PDF Author: Arthur O'Donnell
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595293484
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Get Book Here

Book Description
"I felt like we had failed," said director of grid operations Jim Detmers in a pained voice. "In my mind, I pictured people stranded in elevators. I pictured people stranded in stores and checkout lines. All I could think of was the Inconvenience, and I'm sitting here thinking...thinking, what rock did we not look under to maybe prevent this?" As the focal point of an unprecedented power crisis that has tarnished the Golden State, the California Independent System Operator (California ISO) carries the mixed burden of being a disaster survivor. Established to maintain electrical system reliability for the world's fifth-largest economy, California ISO has been both praised and vilified for its efforts amidst the chaos of blackouts, price volatility, political backlash, and market manipulations by Enron and other ruthless competitors. This book chronicles how the California ISO came to be and what happened during its first five years. More importantly, though, this is the story of the people who make up California ISO and give it an identifiable character and culture--its soul. The result is a very human drama that is otherwise unavailable from the regulatory record or media accounts of California's unparalleled power emergency.

Waste

Waste PDF Author: Catherine Coleman Flowers
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1620976099
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Get Book Here

Book Description
The MacArthur grant–winning environmental justice activist’s riveting memoir of a life fighting for a cleaner future for America’s most vulnerable A Smithsonian Magazine Top Ten Best Science Book of 2020 Catherine Coleman Flowers, a 2020 MacArthur “genius,” grew up in Lowndes County, Alabama, a place that’s been called “Bloody Lowndes” because of its violent, racist history. Once the epicenter of the voting rights struggle, today it’s Ground Zero for a new movement that is also Flowers’s life’s work—a fight to ensure human dignity through a right most Americans take for granted: basic sanitation. Too many people, especially the rural poor, lack an affordable means of disposing cleanly of the waste from their toilets and, as a consequence, live amid filth. Flowers calls this America’s dirty secret. In this “powerful and moving book” (Booklist), she tells the story of systemic class, racial, and geographic prejudice that foster Third World conditions not just in Alabama, but across America, in Appalachia, Central California, coastal Florida, Alaska, the urban Midwest, and on Native American reservations in the West. In this inspiring story of the evolution of an activist, from country girl to student civil rights organizer to environmental justice champion at Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative, Flowers shows how sanitation is becoming too big a problem to ignore as climate change brings sewage to more backyards—not only those of poor minorities.

Climate Rationality

Climate Rationality PDF Author: Jason S. Johnston
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108415636
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 657

Get Book Here

Book Description
Johnston unpacks and critiques the legal, economic, and scientific basis for precautionary climate policies pursued in the United States. In doing so, he reveals an alternative approach to climate change policy that would enable the US to efficiently adapt to a changing climate and radically reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.

Paradise

Paradise PDF Author: Lizzie Johnson
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 059313639X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 449

Get Book Here

Book Description
The definitive firsthand account of California’s Camp Fire, the nation’s deadliest wildfire in a century, Paradise is a riveting examination of what went wrong and how to avert future tragedies as the climate crisis unfolds. “A tour de force story of wildfire and a terrifying look at what lies ahead.”—San Francisco Chronicle (Best Books of the Year) On November 8, 2018, the people of Paradise, California, awoke to a mottled gray sky and gusty winds. Soon the Camp Fire was upon them, gobbling an acre a second. Less than two hours after the fire ignited, the town was engulfed in flames, the residents trapped in their homes and cars. By the next morning, eighty-five people were dead. As a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, Lizzie Johnson was there as the town of Paradise burned. She saw the smoldering rubble of a historic covered bridge and the beloved Black Bear Diner and she stayed long afterward, visiting shelters, hotels, and makeshift camps. Drawing on years of on-the-ground reporting and reams of public records, including 911 calls and testimony from a grand jury investigation, Johnson provides a minute-by-minute account of the Camp Fire, following residents and first responders as they fight to save themselves and their town. We see a young mother fleeing with her newborn; a school bus full of children in search of an escape route; and a group of paramedics, patients, and nurses trapped in a cul-de-sac, fending off the fire with rakes and hoses. In Paradise, Johnson documents the unfolding tragedy with empathy and nuance. But she also investigates the root causes, from runaway climate change to a deeply flawed alert system to Pacific Gas and Electric’s decades-long neglect of critical infrastructure. A cautionary tale for a new era of megafires, Paradise is the gripping story of a town wiped off the map and the determination of its people to rise again.

Sinews of Power

Sinews of Power PDF Author: Yi-Chong Xu
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190279524
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 361

Get Book Here

Book Description
Politics of the State Grid Corporation of China -- Electricity -- From the ministry to a corporation -- Overseeing SGCC: the contested regimes of central agencies -- State Grid Corporation of China -- SGCC in action: as a policy entrepreneur -- SGCC in action: as technology innovator -- SGCC in action: internationalisation

Paradise

Paradise PDF Author: Lizzie Johnson
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0593136403
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 449

Get Book Here

Book Description
The definitive firsthand account of California’s Camp Fire, the nation’s deadliest wildfire in a century, Paradise is a riveting examination of what went wrong and how to avert future tragedies as the climate crisis unfolds. “A tour de force story of wildfire and a terrifying look at what lies ahead.”—San Francisco Chronicle (Best Books of the Year) On November 8, 2018, the people of Paradise, California, awoke to a mottled gray sky and gusty winds. Soon the Camp Fire was upon them, gobbling an acre a second. Less than two hours after the fire ignited, the town was engulfed in flames, the residents trapped in their homes and cars. By the next morning, eighty-five people were dead. As a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, Lizzie Johnson was there as the town of Paradise burned. She saw the smoldering rubble of a historic covered bridge and the beloved Black Bear Diner and she stayed long afterward, visiting shelters, hotels, and makeshift camps. Drawing on years of on-the-ground reporting and reams of public records, including 911 calls and testimony from a grand jury investigation, Johnson provides a minute-by-minute account of the Camp Fire, following residents and first responders as they fight to save themselves and their town. We see a young mother fleeing with her newborn; a school bus full of children in search of an escape route; and a group of paramedics, patients, and nurses trapped in a cul-de-sac, fending off the fire with rakes and hoses. In Paradise, Johnson documents the unfolding tragedy with empathy and nuance. But she also investigates the root causes, from runaway climate change to a deeply flawed alert system to Pacific Gas and Electric’s decades-long neglect of critical infrastructure. A cautionary tale for a new era of megafires, Paradise is the gripping story of a town wiped off the map and the determination of its people to rise again.