After a dramatic Christmas Eve and Christmas morning with gusts to 70 mph and intermittent downpours with SFO in “reverse operations” so takeoff go right over B’game, here is the 2pm view of my favorite flooding spot on ECR.
The SamTrans driver knows to change lanes as do most of the other drivers–until it gets dark in a couple of hours. Be safe out there everyone. Only three more years to go until this is fixed……
This is an interesting month in the climate wars with Bill Gates issuing a statement that basically said “nevermind” after years of haranguing us, eight miles of rainforest cut down for a climate conference in Brazil and some of our local governments trying to keep their all-electric “reach codes” on life support. Per the DJ:
After some legal hiccups, cities throughout the region, including San Mateo, are revisiting policies that incentivize use of electric appliances and penalize reliance on gas infrastructure in homes and buildings.
That “legal hiccup” was the Ninth Circuit eviscerating Berkeley’s overreach on natural gas. Our neighboring city to the south is reacting with a revision that
Would require single-family homes, duplexes, townhomes and commercial buildings to install either a heat pump or higher-efficiency air conditioner at the time the original AC unit needs replacement. The potential reach code would also require the addition of electric infrastructure when certain types of renovations are already underway.
Then San Mateo broached a “scoring” system to award points to homeowners for choosing various electric-only options. You would not be wrong to compare that to the CCP’s Social Credit system. At least one councilor has a glimmer of understanding about complexity (i.e. staff time) and costs although it apparently didn’t deter her from plunging ahead.
This is already going to be really complicated to understand, but it’s also an opportunity to really bring our community along because with a number of the other reach codes, there have been real cost issues associated with them, where people thinking the cost was going to be X, and the cost ends up being X plus 50%,” Councilmember Lisa Diaz Nash said.
Here are a few of the costs that get us to X + 50% —or way more–2X, 3X?. Things have gotten even more expensive than when I wrote that five years ago. Some day I would love to see the DJ or the Daily Post survey council members up and down the Peninsula (and County supes) to see if any of them are all-electric. Aside from new construction, I’ll be it’s very very few.
There is a steady drumbeat of bad news for the EV market as manufacturer after manufacturer cuts forecasts, lays off workers, idles battery and car plants while discounting the inventory to offset the loss of the $7,500 taxpayer subsidy. Couple that with half of the country dissing the owner of the most popular EV company and the on-going struggles with keeping chargers in working order and it seems like Waymo is the only real growth in the EV world. Here are some snippets from the news:
The growth rate for new EV sales in the U.S. dropped from 40% in 2023 to about 10% in 2024. In the second quarter of 2025, U.S. sales declined 6.3% year-on-year.
GM plans to lay off more than 3,300 hourly workers at plants across Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee starting in January. Of those, more than 1,700 are being laid off indefinitely, while more than 1,500 are expected to be called back in mid-2026. Ford is moving workers from the plant that makes the electric F-150 Lightning to a nearby factory that makes the more popular—and profitable—gasoline-burning version. Nissan has decided not to offer its Ariya EV as a 2026 model and Honda has halted orders of the electric Acura ZDX, which is manufactured by GM.
Porshe is facing financial decline due to a strategic shift away from rapid EV adoption, resulting in a recent quarterly loss, a profit plunge, and significant one-time costs of about $3.1 billion. This “EV reset” involves pausing new electric models, delaying some launches, and re-evaluating the strategy, driven by cooling EV demand, especially in the luxury segment.
Here in B’game my main interest is in making sure the goofy EV parking rules we see in places like Top Golf don’t proliferate. The whole row of spaces near the front entrance (probably 40 or so) are EV-only as is the front row of the lower parking lot. Why? Who knows? It’s not because of chargers because there ain’t no chargers for many of the spaces. Check it out. Parking discrimination!
I touched on Steven Koonin's book Unsettled three years ago here. It remains an import read for anyone really interested in climate change as opposed to just the media spin on it. The book delves into detail on the metrics, the models and the variability of things we read about as "settled science". Koonin has a piece in the WSJ this week that notes:
There is a disconnect between public perceptions of climate change and climate science—and between past government reports and the science itself. Energy Secretary Chris Wright understands this. It’s why he commissioned an independent assessment by a team of five senior scientists, including me, to provide clearer insights into what’s known and not about the changing climate.
He then nets it out saying Among the report’s key findings:
• Elevated carbon-dioxide levels enhance plant growth, contributing to global greening and increased agricultural productivity.
• Complex climate models provide limited guidance on the climate’s response to rising carbon-dioxide levels. Overly sensitive models, often using extreme scenarios, have exaggerated future warming projections and consequences.
• Data aggregated over the continental U.S. show no significant long-term trends in most extreme weather events. Claims of more frequent or intense hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and dryness in America aren’t supported by historical records.
• While global sea levels have risen about 8 inches since 1900, aggregate U.S. tide-gauge data don’t show the long-term acceleration expected from a warming globe.
• Natural climate variability, data limitations and model deficiencies complicate efforts to attribute specific climate changes or extreme events to human CO2 emissions.
• The use of the words “existential,” “crisis” and “emergency” to describe the projected effects of human-caused warming on the U.S. economy finds scant support in the data.
• Overly aggressive policies aimed at reducing emissions could do more harm than good by hiking the cost of energy and degrading its reliability. Even the most ambitious reductions in U.S. emissions would have little direct effect on global emissions and an even smaller effect on climate trends.
We've become immune to throw away lines in lightweight mainstream media articles (looking at you SF Comicle) that toss in "climate change" when talking about anything from insurance rates to hurricanes to endangered salamanders. The seven bullet points above suggest that is at least as dangerous and the changes happening to the climate.
I get a fair amount of "What's up with California?" messages from my East Coast friends. Much of what they are asking about I am unable to explain without a grimace. But the standard closing text is "At least we have nice weather". There is another episode of me with "Mark at the Mic" Lucchesi coming soon. We recorded it last week and as Mark and I were commiserating about some of the same things my Eastern friends poke at, you will get a chance to hear me say "at least we have nice weather".
And we do. I would go so far as to say that being someone who likes things a little on the cool side, we have spectacular weather. We are on track for the coldest first half of summer either since 1965 or in the last thirty years, depending on who one listens to. I love it. Remember. Weather is not climate so draw no conclusions of any kind about that. I love daylight savings time and the Golden Hour before sunset. Here was the sight last night around 7:30 during a spectacular B'game evening.
It's somewhat easy to forget about the Pacific Palisades and Altadena fires and all the others that preceded it in California when we are personally unaffected. It was only four months ago, but it caused me to wonder about how well B'game is set up to deal with something like that? There is a lot of fuel in Mills Canyon and there is at least one large 50-acre tract in Hillsborough that could foreseeably be a starting point. And if the wind were blowing just so…..
It's one thing to assess our resilience to a long-term drought which I did here after reading the City Urban Water Management Plan. That's for drinking, showering, cooking and irrigation. It's something entirely different to consider a conflagration response. The B'game Water Department was kind enough to accommodate my curiosity with a two-hour field tour of our water system. I had some basic understanding from the UWMP, but seeing the network of feeder pipes, distribution pipes, pumps, pressure regulators, tanks, reservoirs, generators and SCADA monitoring was enlightening. Major pieces of the system are all around us. One just might not realize it until pointed out.
Three major pipes bring us the SFPUC feed. They are about a block apart running north-south through the city in the flat lands near ECR. There are six pumping stations, seven water storage tanks (above ground like the one shown below on Rivera) and reservoirs (below grade) that feed ten pressure zones. The history of the system closely tracks the history of the city since development moved up the hill and city water followed along replacing wells. Hence the need for pump–big pumps. The top-most reservoir is on the west side of Skyline Blvd.
Unlike the LA fire when the Santa Ynez Reservoir, with a capacity of 117 million gallons, was out of service due to repairs needed on its cover, ours are more distributed and have some back-up capability. I have a lot of confidence that our staff can move water around to the best of the system's design capability. The question is "would it be enough" if we had a fast-moving multi-acre fire? My best guess–and it's my guess–not any input or comments from staff, is probably not. If Central County Fire rolled three or four trucks and all tapped into nearby hydrants, the system would likely struggle to supply them for very long. Again, that's my layman's guess.
Furthermore, what could we do about it in the absence of a gusher of new money? There's no appetite for higher water rates that are already in an uphill trend. And even if there were, the design improvements are far from obvious. Some of B'game might be ripe for the Zone 0 five-foot vegetation clearance requirement and they probably know who they are. You can look here for the official risk map. In the meantime, let's hope the state figures out a middle ground on insurance and we get lucky. At least it appears the Hetch Hetchy is about 90% full. Here's one place where we keep our portion.
The usual critique of solar energy is that the sun doesn't shine all the time–and that's certainly true. But millions of Spaniards, Portuguese and some French people spent hours without any electricity Monday as the over reliance on solar bit them in the culo. You had to read widely to even hear about it in California since the Green agenda doesn't want to talk about these things. The WSJ noted:
Life changed for Spaniards at noon on Monday. With the sun at its peak, the country’s largely solar-powered electrical grid shut down. Mere days before, Spain’s government had announced that its grid had for the first time run entirely on renewable power, with new records set almost daily for solar. Breathless declarations of victory flowed, in service of the government’s promise to phase out reliable nuclear power plants with many years of remaining service life. As in Germany, this promise is now the Spanish politicians’ nightmare.
The Financial Times had some of the numbers that lead to the collapse of the grid:
About 55 percent of Spain's supply was from solar sources when 15 gigawatts of electricity generation disconnected from the grid within just five seconds. Several European experts said Spain appeared to lack enough firm power–readily available, reliable energy supply from sources such as fossil fuels or nuclear that can be reduced or raised–to kick in when the grid's frequency dropped sharply…an oversupply of electricity might have initially caused the problem. Normally, the grid operator would have managed this by asking traditional plants to moderate their output but this was not possible because so few plants were on line. Of the scheduled 26 GW of electricity supply on Monday, just 5GW came from non-intermittent sources.
About a fifth of the country's power normally comes from solar power, but hey, the government wanted to set a new Green record–and they have. Traffic lights, electric trains, home medical equipment, internet access, ATMs—all of it down for hours. My part of B'game was out for 50 hours two years ago during the big storms. We have enough weather and vehicle accident-driven outages without adding more risk by virtue signaling. As the Journal concluded:
Events will inevitably test any electrical system’s limits. A rational system should be designed to handle such events. Spain’s system was engineered politically, not rationally. It’s the latest lesson in how not to make energy policy. Will anyone learn from it?
Lewis Carroll would resonate with current California politics since we are in an Alice in Wonderland upside down world. Just look at how CEQA – the California Environmental Quality Act– has become a hindrance that needs to be dodged. The DJ notes:
Senate Bill 71, sponsored by state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, would extend exemptions for agencies like Caltrain from the California Environmental Quality Act for a myriad of projects. CEQA typically necessitates detailed, often time-consuming, environmental reviews and impact reports. The current exemption is set to sunset in 2030.
“The main interest we have in this bill is that it would remove the current sunset date … for a host of CEQA exemptions for transit projects,” Devon Ryan, officer of government and community affairs at Caltrain, said. “That does implicate a lot of things on the Caltrain-owned corridor, and we would be supportive of the continuation of this exemption.”
They pulled this eleven years ago as covered here. It's not like the rest of the activities and projects on the Caltrain corridor are running so smoothly regardless of CEQA requirements. Just look here. And it's not just Weiner poking at the heretofore revered law. Newsom is doing the same thing in Pacific Palisades and Altadena.
Who would have thought that the "evil developers" would end up being elected politicians?
I'm a night hawk. I've always been a night hawk. Sunlight at 6am, or 7am, or even 8am is just wasted sunlight to me except for what my solar panels catch. Tonight is the blessed arrival of DST–a day I look forward to after the depressing four months and a week of "Standard time". I don't know what is so "standard" about it since it is in place for only a third of the year. Annually we get pronouncements from medical experts about how the change is bad for our health. The Merc has one such view here noting
an increase in car accidents, heart attacks, strokes and potential negative effects on blood pressure and, most obviously, sleep. Martin says these effects make mental health symptoms worse for those with depression and anxiety and make things harder even for those without a mood disorder.
It seems to me most of those effects are a result of the change itself, not the "spring forward". The "fall back" probably does the same. If we were on DST all year, a lot of that would disappear. As for the depression and mood disorders, the late afternoon and early evening light is not accounted for by the experts. Jon Mays at the Daily Journal has weighed in with a preference for standard time all the time, but mostly with a desire to have us just pick one
And it is now more than seven years since 60% of California voters approved a change to permanent daylight-saving time, used in the summer, versus standard time, used in the winter. Proposition 7 was passed by 60% of California voters in what I would call a solid victory. Around 7 million people voted for the change in November 2018.
Most people think we should stick with daylight saving time year-round, however, I think we should stick with standard time. It’s the actual time and the shift of sunset from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. in the summer is just being greedy. We already get naturally longer days in the summer so why do we need that extra hour? However, I’d be in favor of either as long I didn’t have to go through another time change.
Greedy? Guilty as charged. From longer Spring ski days without flat light on the slopes to the arrival of Music in Parks on weekday evenings to the start of Spring sports for kids, they all benefit from that greedy grab of an hour. Let's face it. A lot of people aren't commuting to an 8am start of the workday five days a week. And if the kids are a little groggy and it doesn't stabilize after permanent DST has been around a while, start the school day 30 or 60 minutes later. At least they will have more time for after school sports instead of playing videogames indoors.
A nice heavy rainy day in B'game is the perfect time to reflect on Not Forgetting about our wildfire risk. Almost three years ago we covered the Emerald Hills fire here. Then came Pacific Palisades and Altadena which has pushed FAIR into the red and will cost all of us a pretty penny in insurance increases. It's one thing to write State Farm or Farmer's a bigger check, it's quite another to lose your home.
The risks are multi-dimensional. How good is our fuel management, particularly up the hill with our neighbors? The state is updating the high-risk maps as part of Newsom's latest revelation that the 5 foot "Zone 0" area next to dwellings needs to be clear of fuel. One has to wonder where he's been for the last five or ten years? You can get a sense of the Hillsborough high-risk area here. Swapping email with the CCFD Chief, I learned
In Hillsborough, the town conducts fuel management on town owned parcels and we have an extensive Wildland Urban Interface inspection program. Inspections are conducted annually and education and enforcement is applied according to the situation.
I know from friends that there have been non-renewals and big increases in insurance rates up there. The insurers have reportedly also used drones to find private parcels that are at high-risk from lack of fuel maintenance and some of that information may even be informing their rates for the neighbors. "It takes a village".
Our water supply is another aspect of preparation. Swapping email with Public Works, I learned
We tap SFPUC system near Magnolia/Trousdale and use its static head to a point near BIS on Trousdale, and from there it is pumped to the Mills Reservoir. From there, it gets gravity fed to Sky View Reservoir, which then serves the hillside area below. On the south side of the City, we pump the water to the Hillside Reservoir located next to the Fire Station 35, which then serves the water to the zone that is above and outside of the SFPUC aqueduct zone. We have four other SFPUC turnouts that we tap into to serve the remaining parts of the City primarily by gravity. Hillsborough has a separate system outside of Burlingame, much of their water supply is pumped to their hills and then served to the residents unlike Burlingame.
A bit more research is in order for the layperson to follow the plumbing described above. It's also a fair question to wonder how up to date the various parts are right now. I asked about how we go about flushing the hydrants? It was a pretty common thing to see when I was a kid, but I can't recall seeing it in B'game. I've must have missed it since Public Works states
Burlingame has proactively invested in a robust capital improvement program to modernize its aging water infrastructure over the past few decades. This includes replacing several miles of water mains and upgrading older fire hydrants with newer models and adding new fire hydrants if needed. These efforts have not only enhanced the City’s water capacity but have also significantly improved fire protection. The hydrant flushing program is active and we rotate the program throughout the City based on water quality parameters. The public may see more at some times than others as needed based on our water quality requirements.
The bottom line is B'game is not one of the eight cities in San Mateo County at the highest risk as shown here. We have a lot of infrastructure. We have maintenance plans. My discussions with a concerned H'borough resident lead me to continue to believe our biggest risk stems from big private parcels up there that may not be on top of fuel management. With all of the eucs up there, the effort described in the Merc about the work at East Bay Parks is something to aspire to here.
East Bay Parks has nearly quadrupled its fuel reduction staff in the past five years to take on the Herculean task of bringing the forest back into order, including the addition of Fuels Reduction Coordinator Givonne Law.
“Eucalyptus is notorious for being a very difficult-to-handle tree. Not only is it very heavy, but there’s generally huge accumulations,” Law said. “A lot of machinery operators out there will see a project like this and will just walk away.”
Law’s task was to thin the forest from more than 750 eucalyptus stems per acre to 150 stems per acre. Her aim, she said, was not to eliminate eucalyptus — despite their oily, flammable properties — but to reconstitute the balance of the forest to allow less dangerous trees such as bay and oak to reestablish themselves.
That works out to about one stem per 300 square feet–a 17 x 17 foot area. A drive through H'borough will easily show areas with more density than that.
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