So, lessee: Cold. Snow. Crashing conifers. Blackouts. Freezing rain. Have we left anything out?
It was a doozy—at this writing, there is still the equivalent of the population of McMinnville stuck in their dark, cold houses or who are spending money to stay in motels (the ones not yet gobbled up by county chair Vega Pederson’s taste for buying them up to pamper the homeless).
It may not have been Biblical—no frogs or lice—and it couldn’t hold a candle to the Big Blow of 1962 (pre climate change hysteria) which was memorialized as…
…. the most powerful windstorm to strike the Pacific Northwest in the 20th century. Certainly no windstorm since has generated as much widespread devastation as the Big Blow, not even close. Comparisons of peak gusts, where they can be had, tend to put the Big Blow at the top…
No wonder that the coverage of the weather carnage got such a weirdly distant, “it can’t be happening here in our happy little town” treatment from the local press. They couldn’t even come up with a mutually agreed title for the four-day debacle. (Your suggestions appreciated.)
With local pols hyperventilating about people either freezing or frying in their homes, you might think that city commissioner/ mayoral hopeful Carmen Rubio might have goosed up her introspective mayoral candidacy by bleeding off a few of the excess $-millions in the city’s climate fund (which now goes to fattening the city’s bureaucracy) for doing some nick ‘n’ tuck on preparing for the next big storm.
Which brings us to the Oregonian’s clean-up of PGE spokesperson John Farmer’s preachy remark, “The wind is the big culprit right now. That tree branch that people meant to get around to trim comes down and it takes the line with it…” which they promptly chucked down the memory-hole by editing it out of subsequent quotes.
Instead, excuses got bucked up to…
Benjamin Felton, chief operating officer at PGE, said in a statement: “We were proactive in preparations for this storm and secured additional resources, but the extent of the damage due to fallen trees, limbs, debris and ice throughout our service area made it difficult to access the hardest-hit areas and make repairs both big and small.”
His remarks, however, hinted at a bigger story—which the Oregonian, typically, touched upon and then dropped like a hot wire across Skyline Drive.
It was buried in the lumpy verbiage of a Tuesday story with two bylines and just three sources, one being one of our local racial nonprofits big deals…
Rukaiyah Adams…the chief executive officer of the 1803 fund, a nonprofit dedicated to rebuilding the historically Black Albina community in North and Northeast Portland…
…mentioned that…
…her home is in a conservation overlay zone which aims to conserve historical trees and shade cover. She said she isn’t sure if these trees should have previously been cut down, but she does wonder how overlay zones might impact homeowner safety and what the city’s responsibility is to homeowners.
A city spokesperson said he couldn’t answer questions until after the winter storm, but city code for a conservation area appears to indicate trees can be cut down in limited situations, including if the city determines the trees pose an immediate danger.
And the unnamed spokesperson said no more. And, it would appear, was asked no follow-up questions, which might have included…
Just how does the city define “immediate danger?” Crackling noises?
Who makes that determination? Hint: the same people who didn’t check any of those park light-poles that collapsed and cost the city big bucks in a settlement?
Who has to pay for removing the “immediate danger?” Fugetaboutit; you know the answer to that.
We’ll wait breathlessly for that to play out.
In their online storm wrap-up Tuesday afternoon, the O noted that…
Some 50,000 customers remained without power in the Portland area as of 6 p.m. Monday, down from a peak of 160,000 on Saturday, according to Portland General Electric.
…which neglected to note that a second utility, Pacific Power, has been given monopoly hegemony over swathes of Portland (mostly on the unfashionable east side) and which also lost power, as we reported here.1 What about them?
WillyWeek’s staff must have been snowed in; their managing editor, Aaron Mesh doffed his green eyeshade for this…
…in which he managed to interview a grand total of two people.
On the whole, the dinosaur media did what it does best: echo officials and spokespersons and press releases; routine lets-not-get-over-excited stuff.
Instead, it was pirate media that once again led with hour-by-hour coverage of trees crashing…such as this from wtfportland…
…which gave voice to some grumpiness in the peanut gallery. Over at PDX.Real, the Church-Todd duo dropped in this reminder…
…but later tempered their tone…
It was pirate media that kept the conversation going at a critical moment, assuming your internet connection wasn’t down, although cable seemed to have far fewer outages and 5G worked, somewhat. If there was a community (that favorite word of progressives), it was found in the new media. Uncensored. No “spokespersons,” but people speaking for themselves. Sometimes angrily.
In the dark and cold.
It was also interesting that in all the coverage of the Great Power Failure of 2024, none of the dinosaur media said anything about…
climate change!!!
With every twitch and perturbation of “the weather,” local media loves to stoke the latest hysteria about something quite different, ie., “the climate,” although no one in our newsrooms seems able to make the distinction.
…different thinking on how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions: equity and more education for girls and women, moving towards equalizing the gross domestic product around the world and a radical change in diets and farming practices, among other goals.
Let’s not go into the, well…practicalities, such as…
Won’t more of those empowered females want to drive cars?
Equalizing the economies of, say, Yemen and the US might be a rather heavy lift…
…but, in any event, these were not questions posed by the Oregonian’s credulous reporter. Nor did the reporter/stenographer actually get on the blower to ask anyone to comment. There are different scientific opinions out there, although they’re not allowed past the city limits.
And, by the way, how much did taxpayers spend on this study?
We might also remember, back in the balmy days of early January, that the Oregonian lectured us…
NASA released a report showing strong surface warming (equal to or greater than 4C) in the Antarctic Circle compared to the 1951-1980 average. Where were the thermometers inside the Antarctic Circle in 1951? The failure of these government organizations to report that large sections of the globe had no systematic temperature measurements in 1951 is atrocious, Antarctica is probably the worst example.
And added…
Although instrument data is now widely available, there is no agreed upon standard for measurement or where measurements should be located. Even today, there is no comprehensive standard of how and where to measure temperatures to obtain a global estimate.
There’s another side to the debate—and some of the nay-sayers have Nobel prizes and were presidential advisors and hold actual degrees in this arcane stuff which is almost as tough to understand as this formula2…
…but they carry no water in Portland.
Never fear: Oregon Public Broadcasting, the progressive Pravda, anticipated the recent storm’s falling tree angle and managed to stuff it into its Climate Change Inc. portfolio…
…along with a pitch to the impressionable kiddies…
…and committed breathless, typically one-sided coverage of a true children’s crusade: a lawsuit engineered by the nonprofit Our Children’s Trust, with 21 “youth plaintiffs” suing the feds for…
…violating their Fifth Amendment rights to life, liberty, property, and public trust resources.
We’re pretty sure about that “life/liberty” stuff….but we searched the Constitution for “public trust resources” in vain. As for the nonprofit, they don’t print anything about their finances on their colorful website; but an online check of their form 990 for 2021 (the IRS moves slower than a falling fir) reveals revenue of $2,297,477 and salaries and compensation of $2,763,099. A nonprofit, indeed!
Believe it or not, a federal judge in (you guessed it) Eugene allowed the suit to roll forward to trial…sometime. Hopefully, before the planet either freezes or boils.
I must be one of the over-reacting hysterical types who understand we can both “freeze and fry” in the same year and STILL believe the 96% of scientists who tell us that climate change is real. And that it’s causing weather extremes --- events with huge socioeconomic impacts on populations everywhere. And climate change, specifically the warming of our planet, is largely caused by humans. But hey - it’s just hysteria.
Here’s one of only a million articles I found in two seconds that says we’re right to be concerned. But hey, all the pirate journalists got to make jokes about alternative energy and electric vehicles this past week, so that was fun for them.
As a power outage casualty, I returned to this substack expecting this type of article with the usual mocking of climate change as a "leftist" construct, rather than an adult-level discussion of CO2, which traps heat and destabilizes weather with no awareness of political ideologies. By "adult-level" I don't mean what someone reads on a contrarian blog, or some old Limbaugh outtake.
Mr. Cheverton, do you have any understanding of how AGW (anthropogenic global warming, as in man-made) is destabilizing the polar vortex, leading to precisely THESE sorts of storms? No power company could have known this many trees would fall in one event, let alone so densely, as in Beaverton. And suing utility companies for sparking fires likewise ignores why the fires are burning so much hotter now.
This reply will get the usual low-information comments like "Yeah, CO2 may trap heat but the climate's changed before!" (failing to note that we're causing it this time, and ancient periods didn't threaten complex civilizations). Instead of wasting energy on vague bro-science, take the time to actually read articles on the polar vortex without giggling like 12 year-olds and changing the subject to "tax scam!" It makes y'all look as flaky as Transtifa.
Conservatives would have a much better chance of winning elections against progressive crime-coddlers if they'd stop playing dumb with the laws of nature, pretending to have knowledge they don't, and being selectively fine with science until its findings seem to threaten their incomes. Defunding the EPA (Trump's 2016 pitch) is like defunding the police, just with different crimes to protect. Hatred of regulatory authority ties the far left & right together. They don't want to really improve the world, just get their piece of it, or feel righteous.
Remember when the ozone hole was also "fake news" for similar reasons, yet we managed to adapt with different refrigerants? Global warming may not really be solvable, but it can be approached with adult gravitas, not childish denials. Conservatives are supposed to take life as literally as possible, right?
I must be one of the over-reacting hysterical types who understand we can both “freeze and fry” in the same year and STILL believe the 96% of scientists who tell us that climate change is real. And that it’s causing weather extremes --- events with huge socioeconomic impacts on populations everywhere. And climate change, specifically the warming of our planet, is largely caused by humans. But hey - it’s just hysteria.
Here’s one of only a million articles I found in two seconds that says we’re right to be concerned. But hey, all the pirate journalists got to make jokes about alternative energy and electric vehicles this past week, so that was fun for them.
https://climate.nasa.gov/extreme-weather.amp
As a power outage casualty, I returned to this substack expecting this type of article with the usual mocking of climate change as a "leftist" construct, rather than an adult-level discussion of CO2, which traps heat and destabilizes weather with no awareness of political ideologies. By "adult-level" I don't mean what someone reads on a contrarian blog, or some old Limbaugh outtake.
Mr. Cheverton, do you have any understanding of how AGW (anthropogenic global warming, as in man-made) is destabilizing the polar vortex, leading to precisely THESE sorts of storms? No power company could have known this many trees would fall in one event, let alone so densely, as in Beaverton. And suing utility companies for sparking fires likewise ignores why the fires are burning so much hotter now.
This reply will get the usual low-information comments like "Yeah, CO2 may trap heat but the climate's changed before!" (failing to note that we're causing it this time, and ancient periods didn't threaten complex civilizations). Instead of wasting energy on vague bro-science, take the time to actually read articles on the polar vortex without giggling like 12 year-olds and changing the subject to "tax scam!" It makes y'all look as flaky as Transtifa.
Here's a start: https://www.google.com/search?q=climate+change+disrupting+polar+vortex
Conservatives would have a much better chance of winning elections against progressive crime-coddlers if they'd stop playing dumb with the laws of nature, pretending to have knowledge they don't, and being selectively fine with science until its findings seem to threaten their incomes. Defunding the EPA (Trump's 2016 pitch) is like defunding the police, just with different crimes to protect. Hatred of regulatory authority ties the far left & right together. They don't want to really improve the world, just get their piece of it, or feel righteous.
Remember when the ozone hole was also "fake news" for similar reasons, yet we managed to adapt with different refrigerants? Global warming may not really be solvable, but it can be approached with adult gravitas, not childish denials. Conservatives are supposed to take life as literally as possible, right?