When I arose, at 7:05 this morning, it was -4.1º Fahrenheit outside. No wind is showing, but there’s a possibility that the anemometer is frozen in place; I’ll tap it loose when I go outside.

I have previously noted that we have backup heat here on the farm, with a propane fireplace, something we installed during our 2018 remodeling project, because our primary heat is an electric heat pump. The thermostat for the fireplace was set at 64º F, so that it would come on if the primary heat failed overnight, but shouldn’t come on as long as the heat pump was engaged. Guess what: even though the primary heat was on and working, the fireplace still came on, which tells me that the heat pump was unable to keep up! Heat pumps work by extracting heat from the atmosphere around the outside condenser, but when there’s not a lot of heat to extract, they lose efficiency.

The southeast is the only area of the country in which the primary heat source for residences is electric heat, something which includes both heat pumps and electric baseboard heating. There are a couple of reasons for that. First, there are large swaths of people living in rural areas, areas in which there are electric lines, but many of which do not have natural gas. We don’t have natural gas on our farm, but got a nice, ugly propane tank installed in 2018.

Second, winters in the southeastern United States can get cold, but are generally milder than in other parts of the country; electric heat, including heat pumps, can normally keep up with the cold. -4.1º F is unusually cold for this area, in which the average January low temperature is 23.0º F.

At 9:10 AM, on a sunny morning, the outside temperature mad it up to a whopping 0.0º F, and, as I type, is now up to 7.7º F at 9:50 AM.

If we didn’t have the propane fireplace, we still would not have frozen to death: the heat pump could probably have kept the house around 60º, despite the winter cold.

But what if we lived in the northeast? Joe Biden and the global warming activists want everyone to depend on electric heat, and at a certain point, heat pumps just can’t keep up. Oh, there are newer, more modern heat pumps, but they cost a lot more. Geothermal heat pumps can always keep up, because they extract heat not from the atmosphere, but from the ground. Sadly, not only do those cost a great deal more money, they also require the land in which to install the ground loops for the heat pumps.

There is, of course, the major problem about which no one talks. Electricity is our most vulnerable-to-the-weather utility. One of the reasons we decided on the propane fireplace is that, when there’s a significant power outage here, it can take a long time to get sparktricity back. Our longest spell was 4½ days, and if you are dependent upon electricity for heating, you have no heat when the power fails. If you watch the Weather Channel, whenever one of the bad winter storms hits, they always have a graphic showing how many “customers” are without power. Our propane fireplace? It uses electricity to power the blower which circulates heat more efficiently, but the thermostat and the off/on controls are battery-powered; when the power fails, the fireplace still works.

Some people do have generators, but you have to think about what a generator can power. In our previous home, which had a heating oil fueled furnace, the system was dependent upon one 110-volt, 20 ampere circuit, something within the capacity of a small generator. But electric heat, of any kind, uses 220 volt circuits, the amperage of which depends upon the type and size of the system. Our heat pump system here has two 220-volt, 50 ampere circuits to power it — one for the unit, and one for the outside condenser — and it takes a fairly substantial home generator to power a system like that.

People like New York Governor Kathy Hochul or President Biden’s so-called ‘climate envoy, John Kerry — who got royally pissed off annoyed when an upstart reporter asked about Mr Kerry’s personal ‘carbon footprint — will always have ways to keep their homes warm in the winter, and they simply aren’t worried about the average person, the people living from paycheck-to-paycheck. There are times when I wonder if the problems of ordinary Americans even penetrate their consciousness, whether they ever realize the effects of their policies.

These are the kind of people you have to kick to the curb on election day.