E-mail Diana Diamond About this blog: So much is right — and wrong — about what is happening in Palo Alto. In this blog I want to discuss all that with you. I know many residents care about this town, and I want to explore our collective interests to help ... (More) About this blog: So much is right — and wrong — about what is happening in Palo Alto. In this blog I want to discuss all that with you. I know many residents care about this town, and I want to explore our collective interests to help do the right thing. My goal with this blog is to help the public better understand what really is happening, and more important, how residents living here may be affected by these local decisions. I've been a journalist most of my life, first as a reporter and then managing editor of a Chicago newspaper, followed by a wonderful year at Stanford as a recipient of Knight Journalism Fellowship. I then went to the San Jose Mercury as an editorial writer and columnist. I also worked for the State Bar of California as the first editor in chief of "California Lawyer" magazine, and then spent a decade at Stanford involved in public issues affecting the university. In the late 1990s, I sequentially wrote columns for all three local newspapers here in Palo Alto. Born in a small community on Long Island, I attended Middlebury College, graduated from the University of Michigan, got married, had four boys in four years, and then started working. I moved to Palo Alto in 1979, and have been involved in the community on several nonprofit boards. (Hide)
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Let's see. The City as well as the State is encouraging everyone to buy electric vehicles. Where is all this added electricity coming from? It seems to me that at least once a week we hear of a power outage in Palo Alto due to a long list of things, balloons, downed trees, broken branch limbs, squirrels, geese, gulls, birds, etc. These happen at almost any time of day and any time during the year. How can people charge their EVs without a reliable power source? How can we be so susceptible to power outages and yet the City wants us to give up any other source of power? If the City were to at least put the powerlines underground it would stop some if not most of these outages and that would at least help. Oh some may say it will cost too much. Yet it will cost a similar sum to dig up all the gas lines! Can we please get some common sense. Palo Alto has sadly lost the plot, as they say across the pond. It is evident that Palo Alto can't arrange a piss up in a brewery, to steal another phrase from across the pond.
Does the CC really think many people are going to replace a broken gas water heater with an electric heat pump without the city paying for the electrical upgrade? The permitting process alone is a nightmare in PA.
Yes, change is costly, and I would add one more question to your list. That is, if the city of Palo Alto does not begin to electrify now, what are the potential longterm costs - not only in dollars, but also injuries, diseases and deaths from avoidable increases in the existing global heating? The number of $Billion climate disasters keeps increasing in frequency and intensity, and if they don't happen at home in Palo Alto, we still bear a cost in terms of FEMA response, states of emergency, supply chain delays, etc. On a grand scale, research shows that the cost of climate calming is far less than the cost of future damage under a business as usual model. [ see Web Link
Yes, change is costly, and I would add one more question to your list. That is, if the city of Palo Alto does not begin to electrify now, what are the potential longterm costs - not only in dollars, but also injuries, diseases and deaths from avoidable increases in the existing global heating? The number of $Billion climate disasters keeps increasing in frequency and intensity, and if they don't happen at home in Palo Alto, we still bear a cost in terms of FEMA response, states of emergency, supply chain delays, etc. On a grand scale, research shows that the cost of climate calming is far less than the cost of future damage under a business as usual model. [ see Web Link
We own an EV for local driving but for longer, extended trips we drive a gas-powered vehicle as there is always a gas station within reasonable proximity. On the home front, our barbeque grill runs on propane and is attached to a gas line we had installed specifically for this purpose. We also use a charcoal/wood chip burning Weber kettle for smoking. There is no such thing as an 'electric barbeque' and we will never go fully electric as our Viking stove also runs on gas. If Palo Alto were to enforce all-electric, residential utilities, there will be plenty of disgruntled residents. In the meantime, fire-up that grill (wood or gas) and toss a rib-eye on it.
I look forward to the City paying to remodel our laundry room to make enough room for a city-funded heat-pump water heater. Sadly, that's probably decades away as we just bought a replacement gas water heater recently. This reminds me of the latest CA low-flush toilet fiasco. Just when industry had finally developed a fully-functioning low-flush pressure-assisted toilet that uses only 1.6 gallons per flush, CA (and WA and CO) made it illegal to sell them here and lowered the maximum allowable flush to 1.3 gpf. Thus, people now buy the 1.6 gpf tank outside of California, and have it privately shipped to their CA address. Strangely, it's legal to sell the toilet bowl base in CA (because it does not determine the flush volume). I suspect there are "toilet tank mules" who will supply Californians via Nevada in a less complicated but more expensive way. We in California show our hubris by acting as if we can limit global greenhouse gas levels, when the truth is that as goes China, so goes the world on this.
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