Over the weekend, the heat, the rolling blackouts and the fires (not to mention the fire tornadoes) converged on top of the pandemic, giving Californians an unpleasant taste of what feels more and more like an inevitable future plagued by layered, climate-change-driven disasters. Gavin Newsom sought to at once soothe those anxieties and hammer state regulators over what he described as a major failure to anticipate the weekend’s surge in energy usage, as Californians blasted their air-conditioners or ran fans to try to keep cool. “You can’t control the weather, but you can prepare,” Mr. Newsom said. “We failed to predict and plan these shortages, and that’s simply unacceptable.”[Read the full story on the blackouts.] Mr. Newsom on Monday demanded an investigation into the outages and released a letter to top state energy regulators in which he said he wasn’t even made aware of the need to shut off power in some areas “until moments before the blackouts started.” He had also declared a state of emergency.

Source: New York Times August 18, 2020 13:18 UTC