Tag Archives: #ClimateActivists

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Will Bunch really, really, really hates Joe manchin!

Will Bunch is a hard-left columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, a newspaper which is located in, to no one’s surprise, Pennsylvania. Joe Manchin is the senior United States Senator representing West Virginia. Though the two states do share part of their borders, West Virginia is not Pennsylvania, and Pennsylvania is not West Virginia. The distinguished Mr Bunch, however, does not seem to understand that.

In the long hot summer of climate change, how can Joe Manchin justify his love for fossil fuels?

by Will Bunch | Tuesday, August 22, 2023

In 2012, the government website for the NASA space agency — on its climate change page — published an article with this simple, search-engine friendly headline: “Could a hurricane ever strike Southern California?” The answer was a barely qualified “no.”

“The interesting thing is that it really can’t happen, statistically speaking,” Bill Patzert, an oceanographer and climatologist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, said at the time. “The odds are infinitesimal — so small that everyone should just relax. Like 1 in 1,000. Of course, there’s always a chance.” Unlike the Atlantic and its warming Gulf Stream waters, California’s cold coastal currents are tropical-storm killers. At least they used to be.

There’s a long section here that follows — Mr Bunch angrily wrote — or at least I so judge him to have been angry, given all the internet screaming he did using boldfaced words, boldfaced words that I left in place — in which he attempts to persuade his readers that global warming climate change means that we’re doomed, we’re all doomed!

At any rate, I’ve deleted some of that, but you can read Mr Bunch’s writing in full if you follow the embedded link.

Then there is West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin — nominally a Democrat, arguably the most powerful player on Capitol Hill in the 2020s, and a profile in cowardice.

I’ve written a lot about Manchin in this space because he’s such a frustrating figure. A relic of the bygone era when West Virginia’s coal miners and rural poor were solidly Democratic, his party colleagues in Washington — especially the Biden administration — must bend over backwards to appease Manchin, since his seat would certainly go GOP if he weren’t around. But Manchin’s shtick — centered on his personal clout, as well as growing the coal-millionaire bank account that funds his Maserati and his yacht — is morally unjustifiable in a time of climate crisis.

LOL! I’m pretty sure that Mr Bunch would hate libertarian Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY4) even more, but Mr Massie’s home is off-the grid, using solar cells, and he drives a plug-in electric Tesla. 🙂 But Mr Bunch is just spittle-flecking mad that Senator Manchin drives a Maserati and has a yacht, though I haven’t heard much from him about former Senator and Secretary of State, and now President Biden’s ‘climate tsar’ John Kerry, who has private jets and owned a yacht which he berthed in Rhode Island rather than his home state of Massachusetts to avoid paying “roughly $500,000 in taxes,” though he later tried to sell it.

Manchin’s act is also a complicated one. This time last year, after rebuffing Biden on climate legislation for nearly two years, he surprised political observers by relenting and voting to pass the Inflation Reduction Act. The law includes $369 billion for efforts to curb greenhouse-gas pollution, promoting clean power plants and electric cars. Maybe Manchin understood that Biden and the Democrats needed a pre-election achievement in 2022 to keep a narrow hold on the Senate, which is the basis of the West Virginian’s clout. That mission accomplished, this dying-coal-state senator is doing everything within his power to undermine the bill he voted for, and climate action generally.

LOL! One would think that a writer with as long experience as Mr Bunch would realize that writing “this dying-coal-state senator” could, and should, be read as stating that the Senator was dying, not what he meant, that the “coal state” was dying. “This senator from a dying coal state” would have been much clearer.

Manchin has gone so far as to accuse the Biden administration of a “radical climate agenda” and suggested he could join with Republicans to undo the Inflation Reduction Act, or at least some of its key provisions. The devil is in the details, and according to an in-depth report last weekend from the Washington Post, Manchin is opposing a critical reappointment to the agency that regulates pipelines and threatening to block Biden appointees to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department.

For a whole lot of people, including a lot of West Virginians, President Biden’s climate agenda is radical. Senator Manchin is the only Democrat who has won a statewide race recently, and with his seat due up for election again in 2024, he has found himself well behind in the polls against the probable Republican nominee, current Governor Jim Justice, another ‘coal baron’. Now is definitely not the time for Mr Manchin to go against the beliefs of the majority in his home state.

Mr Bunch is right that the coal industry is dying, but it isn’t dead, and it is still important in the Mountain State. In 2018, Senator Manchin won re-election over Patrick Morrisey by 290,510 (49.57%) to 271,113 (46.26%), in a race in which Libertarian nominee Rusty Hollen took 24,411 votes, 4.17%, numbers greater than Mr Manchin’s margin of victory over Mr Morrisey.

In 2020, President Trump beat Joe Biden 545,382 (68.62%) to 235,984 (29.69%) in West Virginia, Mr Trump’s second strongest state in that election. Mr Manchin, I would remind Mr Bunch, represents West Virginia, not Pennsylvania.

More, if Mr Bunch’s position represents anyone other than himself, it represents the city of Philadelphia, not the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. In 2020, Joe Biden carried the Keystone State by 80,555 votes, 3,458,229 (50.01%) to 3,377674 (48.84%), but only because he carried Philadelphia 603,790 (81.44%) to 132,740 (17.90%), a margin of 471,050 votes. Without Philly, President Trump would have carried the Keystone State 3,244,935 (52.56%) to 2,854,439 (46.23%).

Manchin has spoken of passing his love of the outdoors to his 10 grandchildren, so why is he fighting to make it too hot to even go outside? Does a man whose ego seems to relish his frequent TV appearances care that he’ll be remembered for making the Earth uninhabitable for his grandkids, and ours? Because 100 years from now, the textbooks will portray Manchin and other men who enabled the fossil fuel industry as this millennium’s monsters of history.

This, in the end, is where Mr Bunch in particular, and the climate activists in general just don’t get it. West Virginia is, as Mr Bunch stated, a poor state, and the people of the Mountain State tend to be a bit more worried about putting food on the table tonight, and keeping a roof over their heads this month, than they are over what the climate will be 100 years from now.

Mr Bunch has a guesstimated net worth of a million bucks, nowhere close to the league of the billionaires against whom he rails, but certainly comfortable enough. If the Biden Administration mandates plug-in electric cars, Mr Bunch can afford one. If the government has to raise taxes to pay for some cockamamie scheme to build more solar and wind plants, Mr Bunch can afford it.

Living here in eastern Kentucky, I can see the things that Mr Bunch cannot. I can see the houses with no dedicated parking spot in which they could safely put an electric car charging station, and I can see the older homes which have older electric service, a 100-amphere breaker panel, which isn’t going to support both the home as it is and a 50-amp, 220-volt electric car charger.

And even that’s generous: our church recently, recently as in this spring, had to replace the electric service for the convent, which was powered by two 40-amp fuse boxes, because we had to replace the heating system, and the older service just wouldn’t support it.

Still, the Inquirer columnist ought to be able to see something of poverty. His newspaper bio states that he has “some strong opinions about what’s happening in America around social injustice, income inequality and the government.” Surely someone so interested in “social injustice (and) income inequality” ought to understand that his hometown is “the ‘poorest’ of the largest U.S. cities, with 23.3% of residents living in poverty, surpassing the next largest poor U.S. city, Houston, by 2.9%.” As the left, including his favored Mayoral candidate, Helen Gym Flaherty, wanted to get everyone changed over to electric heat pumps rather than the gas furnaces so prevalent in Philly’s poorer row home areas, he ought to understand that a whole bunch of city homeowners can’t afford the costs of such a changeover. Surely someone so concerned about “income inequality” ought to realize that in the city’s crowded rowhome neighborhoods, where tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of homes have nothing but on-street parking, that charging their cars is just not something easy and secure.

On May 11th of this year, Mr Bunch published a column entitled On CNN, lying Trump was a late-night comedian for an America I didn’t recognize, and while I care nothing about his column, the title was revelatory, because Mr Bunch told a truth he might not realize, that there is a lot of American that he just doesn’t recognize. Heck, outside of Philly, even including the collar counties, the majority of Pennsylvanians, 52.56%, voted for Donald Trump.

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Our American Revolution began around Boston; now Bostonians are saddled with an authoritarian government that they chose for themselves! Somehow, I lack sympathy for Bostonians, who should have known better.

We have previously reported, several times, on how wealthy New Englanders, people with the money to do what they want, choose to heat their homes and cook their food, and just enjoy the good life, even though the climate activists don’t want people to have that choice. Today’s left appear to be pro-choice on exactly one thing.

Well, it’s one thing when the activists don’t believe that people should have the choices most wish to take, but something else entirely when someone with governing power thinks that way.

‘Barrier To Entry’: Dem Mayor Bans Fossil Fuel Use In New City Buildings, Eyes Residential Buildings Next

Story by Nick Pope • Tuesday, August 1, 2023 • 7:13 PM

Democratic Boston Mayor Michelle Wu signed an executive order Monday banning new construction or renovations of municipal buildings that would use fossil fuels, according to the Boston Herald.

Monday’s executive order is part of Wu’s broader efforts to implement a similar ban on fossil fuel use in new residential buildings, according to the Boston Herald. Wu stated that “Boston will continue using every possible tool” to counter climate change, according to a Monday press release, but a de facto ban on fossil fuel use in new residential developments could impose higher costs, Greg Vasil, CEO of the Greater Boston Real Estate Board, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The potential ban on fossil fuel hookups in the city’s new residential buildings “is going to be a real barrier to entry” for developers “to build what they want to build in Boston” if enacted, Vasil told the DCNF. “It would definitely drive up costs,” Vasil continued, adding that “there’s a desire to satisfy campaign promises without understanding the economic situation.”

And that’s the main point, “a desire to satisfy campaign promises without understanding the economic situation.” Michelle Pewarski[1]Mrs Pewarski, like so many leftist women, does not respect her husband enough to have taken his name, but we at The First Street Journal do not show the same disrespect, and always refer to married … Continue reading is an activist, who understands what she wants to do, but hasn’t the first clue about reality.

Wu won the mayor’s election in November 2021, in part by running on a promise to deliver Boston a “green new deal.” Her administration intends to apply for a Massachusetts state program that will permit ten communities in the state to prohibit gas hookups in new buildings, according to the Boston Herald.

In April, Boston’s city council approved an ordinance which requires new residential buildings in the city to feature electrical wiring that will allow for future conversion to electricity and to connect to solar power, according to the Boston Herald. Wu’s office estimates that around 70% of the city’s overall emissions are attributable to buildings, according to the Monday press release announcing the signing of the executive order.

The latter paragraph notes a policy that makes some sense. It is far less expensive to add the additional wiring to allow a future owner to convert from gas heat, ranges, and water heaters to electric appliances during the construction phase, than to have to add the wiring later during a remodel. When we had a propane — there is no natural gas service this far out in the countryside — water heater installed to replace the on-its-last-legs electric one in 2018, I left the 10-2 wiring for the old water heater in place, though I did disconnect it from the circuit breaker panel. I did remove the wiring for the old electric range, but I did that because it was poorly installed, not because I objected to it being there.

But Mayor Pewarski, like so many other of the activists, has no idea what she is doing. The only region of the country in which electricity is the predominant method of heating homes is the southeast, for two reasons:

  1. The propane fireplace that is our secondary heat source.

    With many rural residents living outside of areas served by natural gas, it is far easier and less expensive to get electricity to a house than it is natural gas.

  2. The southeast has generally milder winters, in which electric heat pumps have a better chance of keeping up with heating demand.

In my travels around eastern Kentucky, especially since we added propane to our formerly all-electric home, I notice other homes which have propane tanks, and there are a lot of them. I do not know how many of those houses primarily heat their homes using propane, or how many are like us, using a propane appliance, in our case a propane fireplace, as supplemental heat for really cold days, or backup heat for those times when the power fails.

A cheery fire in our wood stove in Jim Thorpe.

We learned our lesson the hard way! On Christmas Day of 2002, a heavy, wet snow at our house in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, knocked out electric service, and our fuel-oil powered steam boiler, which supplied the radiators, would not work without electricity. Power was restored in approximately 30 hours, but on that cold, snowy day, we couldn’t cook, couldn’t bathe, and it got down to 50º F inside our 1890 Victorian home. We later added a nice wood stove, which did not require electricity to operate, but it sure would have been nice to have had that before we lost sparktricity!

It was early Monday morning, March 12, 2018, when we received five inches of heavy, wet snow, as well as ice, at our farm in Estill County, Kentucky, and we lost electricity, in our all-electric home, sometime before 4:30 AM. No, I’m not relying on memory; I’m actually kind of obsessive about recording things in my At-A-Glance Daily Diary, and I have a whole shelf of them, dating back to 1986, missing only 2001’s, which was lost somehow.

Fortunately, it was 42º F and sunny outside by afternoon, which helped some, but it still got down to 52º F inside the house. My wife, having to work the following day, drove to Lexington to stay at our daughter’s apartment, so she could do something really radical like take a shower in the morning. There was just enough sort-of warm water in the water heater for me to take a quick shower on Tuesday morning. While my wife could leave, I had to stay at home to care for the critters.

Our remodeled kitchen, including the propane range! All of the work except the red quartz countertops was done by my family and me. Click to enlarge.

To make a long story short, we finally got sparktricity back at 4:54 PM on Thursday, March 15th. It had gotten as cool as 37º F inside the house, though warmer in my bedroom, which I heated with sunshine through the window and my own body heat. The high for that day was 58º F, so that helped some. I wonder how bad things would have gotten if we had lost power for 4½ days in mid-January.

We had planned on remodeling all along, because our house was a fixer-upper when we bought it, and Mrs Pico had stated, early on, that she wanted a gas range, but we hadn’t begun the remodel quite yet. That end-of-winter power loss was enough to persuade us that we needed supplemental heat here as well.

We are not wealthy, nor even well-to-do, but at least we are not as poor as many people in eastern Kentucky. Had someone like Mayor Pewarski been in governing authority around here, we would not have had the choice of installing propane utilities to keep us warm in the winter when the temperature gets too low for the heat pump to keep up, or the power knocked out, which can happen for days at a time in rural areas like ours.

The liberals in Boston gave Mrs Pewarski 64% of their votes, and she had made no secret of her support for the cockamamie ‘green new deal,’ so it’s difficult to argue against the notion that they have gotten exactly what they deserve. Perhaps they didn’t know the specifics, didn’t understand that she would use government power to ban future natural gas hookups, but anyone who looks has to know that today’s left are all about force, are all about trying to impose their choices on other people. That this has happened in Boston, the cradle of our liberty, and the area in which our American Revolution began, is just an added insult to the American dream.

References

References
↑1 Mrs Pewarski, like so many leftist women, does not respect her husband enough to have taken his name, but we at The First Street Journal do not show the same disrespect, and always refer to married women by their proper names.
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How wealthy New Englanders fight #ClimateChange A family which showed some sense.

West Roxbury project house, before remodel. Photo by Meg Reinhardt. Click to enlarge.

We have previously noted how the wealthy New England homeowners featured in the Public Broadcasting System’s famous, long-running This Old House series, from areas which gave the large majority of their votes to the Democrats, still love them some fossil fuels. and if the previous sentence seems familiar, it should, because I used it just eight days ago.

Now, yet another house in that show has caught my attention, the 1894 Victorian in the West Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts project, in which architect Derek Rubinoff, his wife Robyn Marder, and their two teenagers, Zach and Aria, went for a full remodel after a call to a painter revealed that the “decades-old cedar clapboards had started to rot,” meaning that the entire exterior would need to be stripped and redone.

While I couldn’t find the cost of the project, realtor.com informs us that, in June of 2023, the median home listing price was $727,000, while the median sales price was only slightly lower, at $720,000.

Noting as we have previously that the global warming climate change activists want to ban gas heating, gas ranges, gas water heaters, and all other gas appliances, to save Mother Gaia, when the series began to run on the Magnolia Network — which I like, but never should have been sold to Chip and Joanna Gaines — I paid close attention, to see if these wealthy New Englanders went along with the proposals for trashing gas appliances for electric.

And, at least in one respect, they tried a little bit. In Season 43, Episode 20 of This Old House, the show’s plumbing and heating expert Richard Trethewey showed us that the family added a heat pump for central air conditioning and heating when it wasn’t too cold outside, but they retained the original gas furnace for the depths of a Massachusetts winter. The kitchen tour, shown in Episode 25, appeared to show — the perspective I had was poor — that the family had opted for an electric, possibly induction, range top. The ovens, separate units on a different wall, could have been either gas or electric.

So, what did this family do? Well, they went at least half-way toward meeting the activists’ goals, by adding the heat pump to the system. But, like other New England families who could, they were smart enough to keep a newer, though still existing, natural gas furnace as at least a backup; they were not going suffer a too cold house during a New England winter!

Under Governor Maura Healey, a Democrat, there are proposals for a new statewide building code in which the use of natural gas systems could — not immediately would — be banned in new construction by municipalities, and includes the interesting, and I believe smart, provision that new home construction should be pre-wired for conversion from natural gas to electric appliances should future homeowners want to make a change, without the need for expensive rewiring. It also mandates wiring be put in place for electric automobile charging units, though it does not require that those units be installed.

Mandates? I don’t like them at all. But I do believe that these are simple and relatively inexpensive things a builder should do to increase the value of a new home

When we replaced our already-failing electric water heater with a propane one, I left the wiring in place, just in case it was ever needed in the future, though I disconnected it from the electric panel. I have also said that, were I building homes, I would include the wiring for electric car chargers, because that’s far cheaper to do during construction when the walls are open, than to retrofit such into an existing structure. I have long planned to include such wiring in my garage before I fully enclose the walls, simply to add resale value, because the breaker, wiring, and NEMA 14-50 receptacle just aren’t that expensive.

I can’t complain about the Rubinoff family and how they spent their money. They did add features to the home that would make sense for those worried about global warmingclimate change, but they also showed that they have some actual sense, in maintaining a gas hookup and heating system capable of keeping the place warm when it gets bitterly cold. Considering that they are heating their home the same way we do, a heat pump — which was already in place when we moved here, though the unit had to be replaced after being destroyed in the 2021 flood — but with a propane fireplace for backup when the power fails or it gets too cold outside for the heat pump to keep up, yeah, I believe they have acted wisely. But in wintry New England, the government should never mandate electric-only heating systems.

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How wealthy New Englanders fight #ClimateChange

We have previously noted how the wealthy New England homeowners featured in the Public Broadcasting System’s famous, long-running This Old House series, from areas which gave the large majority of their votes to the Democrats, still love them some fossil fuels.

It was season 43 for This Old House series, and yet another set of wealthy New England homeowners were remodeling, very extensively remodeling an 1880s Cape Cod style home, outside of Concord, Massachusetts. In the 2020 presidential election, Middlesex County, in which Concord is located, gave 617,196 votes, or 71.00% of the total, to former Vice President Joe Biden, and just 226,956 votes, or 26.11%, to President Donald Trump. That was an even stronger margin than the statewide 65.60% to 32.14% margin.

It’s safe to say that Bay Staters are very strongly liberal Democrats.

Season 43 for This Old House came after the COVID-19 panicdemic had mostly waned, and I saw only one person in the series wearing a face mask, telling me that much of the panicdemic restrictions had been removed. episode 13, “Race to the finish,” first broadcast on January 6, 2022 was well after Mr Biden and his liberal environmental and global warming climate change policies were in place.

So, what did these wealthy homeowners in Massachusetts do? In episode 13, we saw an older gas-fired boiler for the heating system replaced by a new, more efficient, but still natural gas fired boiler. Episode 16, “Cinderella Story,” shows how the homeowners had installed a high end, professional gas stove. There was a corner unit gas fireplace briefly shown, as well as a restored wood-burning fireplace more prominently featured. It seems that the wealthy New Englanders who have supported politicians and policies which would deprive the commoners, the working-class, of gas appliances, aren’t quite so eager to sacrifice their own comfort and own lifestyles.

Of course, I do not know how these particular homeowners voted; perhaps they were among the 26.11% of Middlesex County voters smart enough to vote for President Trump rather than the dummkopf from Delaware. But it sure seems that the climate activists are very busy telling people to do as they say, not do as they do.

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The #ClimateChange activists want more people to move to large cities They are pushing 'walkable' neighborhoods and public transportation

A view from our farm; the river is just beyond the trees.

The activists wanting to fight global warming climate change have long said that increased urbanization is part of the solutions they seek:

Huge gains, in terms of reducing harmful gases, can be made by changing how we plan, build, manage and power our cities and towns. Well designed, compact, walkable cities with good public transport greatly reduce our per capita carbon footprint and are key to achieving many of the Sustainable Development Goals of which climate action is a key part.

Good public transportation, huh? We have already noted how a well-funded public transportation system, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Agency, SEPTA, has admitted that they have lost control of the train cars as the heavily Democratic city has lost any semblance of control over crime, drug abuse, and homelessness, and SEPTA’s ridership is still below that before the panicdemic. Having the homeless and the junkies using SEPTA trains and train and subway stations for shelter and shooting galleries will cause decent people to avoid the system.

But there’s another problem with promoting increased urbanization:

The Philly area doesn’t have enough homes available for low- and middle-income buyers

In the Philadelphia metro area, households making $50,000 faced the largest shortage of available, affordable homes for sale, according to the National Association of Realtors and Realtors.com.

by Michaelle Bond | Friday, June 9, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

More than one million homes nationwide were available for sale in late April. But high prices mean that what’s out there doesn’t match what people at various income levels can afford, according to a new report from the nation’s Realtors.

Basically, home listings affordable for middle- and lower-income households are missing. The country needs more homes that households at all income levels can buy to chip away at the problems of low affordability and low housing supply, according to a report that the National Association of Realtors and Realtor.com released Thursday.

“Ongoing high housing costs and the scarcity of available homes continues to present budget challenges for many prospective buyers, and it’s likely keeping some buyers in the rental market or on the sidelines and delaying their purchase until conditions improve,” Danielle Hale, Realtor.com’s chief economist, said in a statement.

The report breaks down the number of homes missing for each income level by comparing the number of listings available in April to the number that would need to be available to accommodate buyers. Realtors said they hope local and federal governments can use their analysis to ease the twin problems of affordability and housing supply.

According to the story, households with a $50,000 income level can afford homes that cost up to $163,440, but if the Philadelphia market is short 3,440 homes listed for sale at that or lower prices, there’s also the obvious question: what can someone buy at those prices? We previously noted the home at 4931 Hoopes Street, listed for $125,000 in April, but down to $75,000 now.

Kitchen at 1829 North Bucknell Street, via zillow.com

For just $69,750, you can buy this 3 bedroom, 1 bathroom 870 ft² fixer-upper at 1829 North Bucknell Street. That’s North Philadelphia, not exactly a great neighborhood!

Now, why did I pick that listing? In December of 2021, we bought a small, detached house, 2 bedrooms, 1 bath, 1,344 ft², with a detached one-car garage, in a small town in Kentucky for $70,000. My nephew and I had to remodel the bathroom and redo the plumbing, but, doing the work ourselves, spent less than $2,000. The house is perfectly neat and clean and livable — and is rented out to my sister-in-law — yet was virtually the same price. What we spent in a small town for a decent, if not modern, house, will buy you an absolute dump in North Philly.

716 West Allegheny Avenue, photo via zillow,com.

$70,000 will buy you this boarded-up, barred-in porch, 1,260 ft² rowhome at 716 West Allegheny Avenue, in the Fairhill neighborhood in the Philadelphia Badlands. Sorry, no interior pictures in the listing. The realtor probably figures that interior photos will scare off more prospective buyers.

114 South Cecil Street, photo via zillow.com.

The story stated that a household with a $50,000 income could afford a home of up to $146,440. For $145,000, you can buy this home at 114 South Cecil Street, in West Philly.

And with all of that, the Philadelphia metropolitan area was one of only four major metropolitan areas — the others being Detroit, Houston, and Cleveland — in which buying a home was less expensive than renting.

The global warming climate change activists want more and more people to move into densely-populated urban areas, and to use public transportation, to reduce CO2 emissions, but one thing is very clear: doing so will make people, especially people at the lower end of the economic spectrum, poorer than ever. Housing prices for even modest homes are hugely inflated, and mortgage interest rates have increased significantly.

It’s really quite simple: the activists live in urban areas, and that is the life they see as their baseline good. Those of us who live out in the sticks are just a bunch of unedumacated rubes. But the activists also have money, and have been able to afford living in the cities, and living reasonably well. They have to be economically secure, simply to have the time to be activist. What they seem unable to grasp is that there are a lot of people living paycheck-to-paycheck, people who can’t afford the inflated urban housing costs.

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Shockingly, our infrastructure is nowhere close to ready for government-mandated plug-in electric vehicles!

Should it really be any surprise that, as politics have pushed ending fossil fuel usage to fight global warming climate change emergency, not everything is proceeding in an orderly manner? From Popular Mechanics:

Giant Wind Turbines Keep Mysteriously Falling Over. This Shouldn’t Be Happening.

The taller the turbine, the more epic the tumble.

  • Turbine failures are on the uptick across the world, sometimes with blades falling off or even full turbine collapses.
  • A recent report says production issues may be to blame for the mysterious increase in failures.
  • Turbines are growing larger as quality control plans get smaller.

by Tim Newcomb | January 23, 2023

Oops! Via National Wind Watch. Click to enlarge.

The taller the wind turbine, the harder they fall. And they sure are falling.Wind turbine failures are on the uptick, from Oklahoma to Sweden and Colorado to Germany, with all three of the major manufacturers admitting that the race to create bigger turbines has invited manufacturing issues, according to a report from Bloomberg.

Multiple turbines that are taller than 750 feet are collapsing across the world, with the tallest—784 feet in stature—falling in Germany in September 2021. To put it in perspective, those turbines are taller than both the Space Needle in Seattle and the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C. Even smaller turbines that recently took a tumble in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Wales, and Colorado were about the height of the Statue of Liberty.

The story continues to tell readers that the manufacturers of these ever-larger turbines — the larger the turbine blades, the more wind energy they can capture — are experiencing all sorts of quality control and manufacturing problems, as these things are being rushed to market, to meet politically ginned-up demand.

The illustration I used? I did a Google search for collapsed wind turbine, and got about 1,250,000 results. Examples abound.

Machinery fails. That’s just a fact of life, modern machinery requires routine maintenance, and things can fail. Structures like wind turbines, set atop tall, slender towers hundreds of feet into the air, catch a lot of kinetic energy, and the wind turbines are designed not just deflect that energy, but to absorb and capture it. That is a tremendous amount of physical stress, on every part: the tower, the blades, the mechanicals inside the turbine housing, and the foundation. Imperfections, cracks in concrete footings, several different things can lead to such failures.

There are other problems, as well:

America is on a fast road to adopting electric cars. Philly is already falling behind.

Charging stations in every cranny of the city will transform public thoroughfares as profoundly as street lights and underground sewers did a century ago.

by Inga Saffron | Saturday, May 20, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

Ever since Henry Ford turned automobiles into a mass market commodity, the parking and fueling of cars have been seen as two distinct activities, carried out at different times, in different places. That’s about to change.

See? I subscribe to the Inquirer so that you don’t have to! I’m not certain why the newspaper would restrict a labeled Opinion article to subscribers only, but it did.

Last month, the Biden administration rolled out new regulations intended to dramatically ramp up the production of electric vehicles and reduce our reliance on the gasoline-powered variety, a major contributor to climate change. The new rules put America on a very fast road to an all-electric future: In just seven years time, 60% of all new cars sold in the United States will have to run on batteries.

And Philadelphia isn’t remotely ready to handle them.

It’s easy to think of electric cars as simply old wine in new bottles; all we have to do is just trade in our gas guzzlers for EVs and that will be that. But because EVs now take four to six hours to fully charge, Philadelphia will need tens of thousands of spots where car owners can park and plug in. Providing charging stations in every cranny of the city will transform our public thoroughfares as profoundly as streetlights and underground sewers did a century ago.

Let’s be clear about this: when Inga Saffron, who writes about buildings and design for The Philadelphia Inquirer, tells us that “EVs now take four to six hours to fully charge,” she is writing about 220-volt 40-or-50-amphere at-home chargers. 480-volt commercial charging stations can do so in around an hour, while 110-volt at home units can take longer than the night. Charging times naturally vary based on the charging unit, the age of the vehicle’s battery, and how much charge remained in them when charging began.

Since few Philadelphia car owners have garages or private parking spaces, it seems likely that the city’s future charging network will end up in that public nether land between the curb and sidewalk. Unless the city takes a strong hand in the design and placement of electric chargers, we could soon see a land rush as people claim curb space for ad hoc charger installations, resulting in the same kind of chaos we had with streeteries. And given the amount of street furniture already vying for curb space — traffic signs, mailboxes, bike racks, and Big Bellies — the visual clutter would be extreme.

The “public nether land between the curb and sidewalk”? In many Philly neighborhoods, there is no such thing: the sidewalks extend from the front of the rowhouse right up to the curb. Parking in many of Philadelphia’s cramped, working-class neighborhoods is challenging, with many cars parked on sidewalks, because there’s just nowhere else to park.

South Carlisle Street, Photo via Google Maps, click to enlarge.

According to Zillow, 2543 South Carlisle Street sold for a quarter of a million dollars, $247,000 to be precise, and it had no parking. The photo shows that cars are lined up on one side of South Carlisle, but half of the street has no parking place in front of it at all, and there is no alley parking behind the units. The people on the side of South Carlisle with parking could, I suppose, install charging ports on the fronts of their homes, or perhaps underneath the small sidewalks to right at the curb line, to avoid the trip hazard of a charging cord across the sidewalk, but if you live on the side, the odd-numbered side, without parking, you’re just s(omewhat) out of luck. You might snag a parking place across the street, if you’re lucky, but you won’t be able to install a car charger. And if you did, roving bands of junkies would snag the power cords while you were charging your car overnight, to sell the copper for their next fix.

The good news is that the Kenney administration is finally starting to think about the massive changes that will be necessary once electric cars go mainstream. The Office of Transportation, Infrastructure, and Sustainability hopes to hire an EV specialist before (Mayor Jim) Kenney’s term ends this year, its policy director, Christopher Puchalsky, told me. But that doesn’t mean transportation officials are committed to building a charging network.

“Electric vehicles are an industry problem,” not a city one, Puchalsky said. “We can’t be in a situation again where the city has to accommodate itself to the car.” This time, “we want to make transit a priority.”

Translation: the city will use this to force more people to use SEPTA buses and subways. That may not be a choice a lot of people would like.

The most wryly amusing part of all of this: plug-in electric vehicles are most useful in urban areas, where people have shorter trips, than for those of us out in rural areas, but people in rural areas usually have more garages and other areas in which they can park their cars and safely install chargers for them. 🙂

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You will drive an electric car, and you will like it! Suck it up, buttercup, and do as you are told!

A former co-worker of mine liked to use the expression, when telling someone to do something he didn’t want to do, “and you will like it.” That’s how I see the actions of the Biden Administration to force plug in electric vehicles on American consumers. Do Americans really want them? All-electric vehicles — excluding hybrids — were 5.8% of all new vehicles sold in the US in 2022, up from 3.2% in 2021. At least as of now, buying a plug-in electric vehicle is not something most Americans would like to do.

From The New York Times:

E.P.A. Is Said to Propose Rules Meant to Drive Up Electric Car Sales Tenfold

In what would be the nation’s most ambitious climate regulation, the proposal is designed to ensure that electric cars make up the majority of new U.S. auto sales by 2032.

by Coral Davenport | Saturday, April 8, 2023 | 11:00 AM EDT

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration is planning some of the most stringent auto pollution limits in the world, designed to ensure that all-electric cars make up as much as 67 percent of new passenger vehicles sold in the country by 2032, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Also see: William Teach: Good News: Brandon’s CAFE Standards To Drastically Increase

That would represent a quantum leap for the United States — where just 5.8 percent of vehicles sold last year were all-electric — and would exceed President Biden’s earlier ambitions to have all-electric cars account for half of those sold in the country by 2030.

It would be the federal government’s most aggressive climate regulation and would propel the United States to the front of the global effort to slash the greenhouse gases generated by cars, a major driver of climate change. The European Union has already enacted vehicle emissions standards that are expected to phase out the sale of new gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035. Canada and Britain have proposed standards similar to the European model .

At the same time, the proposed regulation would pose a significant challenge for automakers. Nearly every major car company has already invested heavily in electric vehicles, but few have committed to the levels envisioned by the Biden administration. And many have faced supply chain problems that have held up production. Even manufacturers who are enthusiastic about electric models are unsure whether consumers will buy enough of them to make up the majority of new car sales within a decade.

That last quoted line is the telling one: “Even manufacturers who are enthusiastic about electric models are unsure whether consumers will buy enough of them to make up the majority of new car sales within a decade.” Or, in my former co-worker’s phraseology, you will buy one, and you will like it!

What’s that you say? A plug-in electric car is not really a good choice for you? Suck it up, buttercup, and do as you are told!

Not your choice? I’ve said it many times before: the left are pro-choice on exactly one thing!

Michael S. Regan, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is expected to announce the proposed limits on tailpipe emissions on Wednesday in Detroit. The requirements would be intended to ensure that electric cars represent between 54 and 60 percent of all new cars sold in the United States by 2030, with that figure rising to 64 to 67 percent of new car sales by 2032, according to the people familiar with the details, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the information had not been made public.

Now, how does that work? The most obvious way would be to force manufacturers to produce 60% or more of their new vehicles as plug-in electrics, but production of them does not mean that they would sell in such percentages. What happens if Ford produces 6 million plug-in electric and 4 million internal combustion engine vehicles, but American consumers choose to buy out the 4 million ICE vehicles but only a fraction of the electrics sell? Ford would have to cut the price of the electrics to the bone, perhaps below manufacturing costs. How long can the company sustain such losses?

A 2019 Chevy Dolt Bolt electric vehicle caught fire at a home in Cherokee County, Georgia, on Sept. 13. Source: Cherokee County Fire Department. Click to enlarge.

Electric vehicles have their problems, the most obvious is charging them. If you live in a decent house, with a garage or secure parking space and ample electric service to install a charger, you can recharge overnight. But with urbanization, something the left want to see increase, a lot of people don’t have that garage or secure parking space. Here in the wilds of eastern Kentucky, I’ve seen plenty of homes with just 100 amphere electric service, and while it would be possible to have an electric car charger on one of those, you’d lose the ability to use an electric range or electric heater or clothes dryer while you were charging your Chevy Dolt. The only realistic way to charge at hole is to have 200-amphere electric service installed, and if you don’t have it, that means a licensed electrician to do the work.

Rapidly speeding up the adoption of electric vehicles in the United States would require other significant changes, including the construction of millions of new electric vehicle charging stations, an overhaul of electric grids to accommodate the power needs of those chargers and securing supplies of minerals and other materials needed for batteries.

Rapidly speeding up the adoption of electric vehicles in the United States would require other significant changes, including the construction of millions of new electric vehicle charging stations, an overhaul of electric grids to accommodate the power needs of those chargers and securing supplies of minerals and other materials needed for batteries.

All of which the Biden Administration plans on doing, but all of which also requires that private companies decide to make such investments. Can anyone build a commercial charging station before the electric grid to support it is in place?

It was December of 2021 in which I last stopped at the Wawa at the junction of PA-61 and I-78 in Pennsylvania, where there were six Tesla electric car charging stations, none of which was in use, and twenty-four — if I remember correctly — gasoline pumps, all of which were in use, with a line for next at some of them. Imagine: 24 vehicles not taking 5 to 10 minutes apiece to fuel up and go, but spending 45 to 75 minutes each recharging. It might be great for Wawa, selling more coffee and sandwiches, but perhaps less great for the people having to spend that time there. And if your Tesla is getting near a flat can, and you are stuck in line waiting for a charging station, you might get rather annoyed.

The trips I used to have to make between Pennsylvania and the Bluegrass State? I’m a pretty steady — and perhaps slightly heavy-footed — driver, and could make the trip in around 9½ hours, including one stop for fuel in West Virginia. If rather than my gasoline-powered 2010 Ford F-150 with a 36-gallon fuel tank, I had a 2023 Ford F-150 Lightning, I’d have to make two hour-long charging stops on the 624 mile trip, and I’d still arrive with less than a 50% charge.

The 9½ hour trip just became 11½ hours, if not more. And I’ve had the privilege of paying $60,000+ for the truck! F(ornicate) that!

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28½ hours without power The patricians propose and enact, and the plebeians have to work and pay for it

The propane fireplace that is our secondary heat source.

With some serious windstorms, but no tornadoes, we lost sparktricity at about 3:30 PM on Saturday; it was finally restored at 7:59 PM Sunday. It was dry, sunny and warm enough, about 70º F during the day, but down to 42º F Sunday morning. Because we prepared for this during our 2018 kitchen remodel, we had a propane range, water heater, and fireplace. While the range required electricity to use the oven, the stove-top still worked, albeit we had to use a match to ignite the burners. The water heater and fireplace do not require electricity, though the blower, to better circulate the fireplace’s heat does.

It’s the end of March, and spring, not winter. But losing electricity for thousands of rural customers in what was a windstorm, not snow, not ice, and not a tornado, points out once again that electricity service is our nation’s most vulnerable-to-the-weather utility. Imagine not eastern Kentucky and our relatively mild weather, but upstate New York in the winter:

Fact or fiction: Here’s what NY Gov. Kathy Hochul wants to do with gas stoves

by Jon Campbell | January 26, 2023

By now, you’ve probably seen the headlines, the cable news segments, the social media posts — all about the latest culture war to engulf New York and the nation: the future of gas stoves.

“Out-of-touch politicians and bureaucrats in Albany are moving forward with a BAN on gas cooking stoves,” read a petition from state Senate Minority Leader Rob Ortt, a Republican.

Or on Fox News: “Gov. [Kathy] Hochul, Democrats, if you mess with my gas stove, you’ll get burned.”

The national debate was ignited earlier this month by comments from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, which raised — and later walked back — the possibility of a ban on gas stoves amid growing concerns over research connecting them to childhood asthma. A day later, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul unveiled a plan of her own to crack down on fossil fuels, including a ban on gas hookups in new buildings.

There’s more at the original, and it’s not behind a paywall.

Under Governor Hochul’s proposals, existing buildings with gas ranges and water heaters could keep them, and even replace them with gas appliances when they go bad. But here’s the real kicker:

The second proposal does not apply to gas stoves, according to the governor’s office. Hochul wants to phase in a ban on the sale of new fossil fuel-powered heating equipment in New York, beginning with smaller buildings in 2030 and larger buildings in 2035.

So, while the Governor would allow people to replace the smaller gas appliances with newer gas appliances, the heating equipment, the part which keeps New Yorkers alive during the Empire State’s brutal winters, could not be replaced with heating oil or gas furnaces. I’ve got a big mental picture of people using their gas ranges to keep from freezing, not exactly the wisest thing to do, but in extremis, people will do what they have to do.

When we lived in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, where winters can be tough, if not as bad as in New York, our heating system was a heating-oil powered steam boiler for radiators. Radiators meant pipes for the steam, as you can see when I was tiling our kitchen floor during a remodel, in the left corner, but the 1890 house did not have forced air heating ducts. If you have to replace your heating system with a heat pump based one, that means the installation of forced air heating ducts, not a fun thing, not an inexpensive thing, and not a nice thing at all in an older, Victorian home such as we had.

But that apparently doesn’t matter to the Governor; she has money and she’ll always be nice and toasty warm, but if you’re one of the working-class, paycheck-to-paycheck plebeians, it’s a big, big deal. Then, when the power fails during a heavy snowstorm in January, as happens with some frequency, well, too bad, so sad, must suck to be you!

Of course, your gas or heating oil furnace also requires electricity, but not as much as an electric heating system. Our heating oil boiler used a single 110-volt, 20 ampere circuit for the ignition and oil pump; a gas forced air system would have a similar demand for the blower motor and ignition. Those could be easily powered by a basic, gasoline-powered generator you can buy from Home Despot.

Our heat-pump based system in our new Kentucky home? It uses two 220-volt, 50 amp circuits, and if you need a backup generator to run that, it’s not going to be a smaller, home-owner type generator!

This is the difference between the patricians and the plebeians: the patricians propose and enact, and then the plebeians have to work and pay for it, and live with the added burdens Our Betters place on us.

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The electricity is out in parts of the Bluegrass State

On Friday, March 3rd, a severe windstorm blew through the Bluegrass State. There was some serious damage in several places, but though we had some pretty high winds near where I live, our farm suffered no damage at all. The road leading to our farm saw some trees downed, and one of the parishioners at our church said that her son had seen the roof blown off of his farm equipment storage shed, but, overall, it wasn’t too bad for us.

Then I saw the tweet screen captured on the right.

We didn’t lose power at the farm. It flickered a time or two, but that was it. We did lose the internet for about half an hour.

When I saw Evelyn Schultz’s tweet, I figured that I’d get a more detailed story from what my best friend used to call the Lexington Herald-Liberal, so I went to their website. Following a real belly-laugh at the website opening, in which a daily, except for Saturday, newspaper had a heading which still said it was March 3rd, which I screen captured here at 8:10 AM EST on Monday, March 6th, I found this one:

Updated: Major power outages persist across Kentucky. KU explains long Lexington outages

By Taylor Six | Sunday, March 5, 2023 | 9:05 PM EST

More than 100,000 customers throughout Kentucky were still without power Sunday evening as a result of a Friday windstorm – which one power company labeled as the third most damaging weather event in 20 years for their services.

According to the Kentucky Utilities website, Friday’s weather impacted more than 300,000 customers across their service area and brought down 2,500 power lines. It also broke more than 230 utility poles. This windstorm ranks behind the 2009 ice storm and the 2008 windstorm in terms of the number of customers affected and total system impact.

“We have every resource responding to this event, including an additional 1,500 resources from other utilities,” KU said on its website.

As of 10:30 a.m. Sunday, 70,000 KU & LGE customers were still without power statewide, according to Daniel Lowry, a spokesman for KU. In Lexington, he said about 38,000 were still without power.

Read more here.

As I have mentioned several times previously, electricity is our most vulnerable-to-the-weather utility. Water, sewer and natural gas utilities are run through underground pipes, but electricity is delivered via overhead wires. Even in the newer subdivisions in which electric lines are buried, power comes to substations via overhead wires.

The propane fireplace that is our secondary heat source. It sure is nice on really cold days.

Now, it’s not that cold this morning; my weather station told me that it was 38.8º Fahrenheit at 8:00 this morning, but it was slightly below freezing yesterday, at 30.1º F. I’m guessing that by Sunday morning, the people without power and who depended on electric water heaters, weren’t able to enjoy hot showers in the morning, weren’t able to have a hot breakfast if they had an electric range, and were pretty heavily bundled up in their own homes if they depend on electricity for heat. That, after all, happened to me in early March of 2018,[1]Working from memory, I have previously said that it was January of 2018, but I recently looked at my 2018 diary, and found out that it was actually March 12-15, 2018. when the sparktricity failed for 4½ days following a heavy snow-and-ice storm. Since we were remodeling anyway, we added a propane range, water heater, and fireplace, so if the power fails again, we’ll still have heat, hot water, and cooked meals.

But remember: the Biden Administration wants people to get rid of natural gas utilities and depend exclusively on electricity, all to fight global warming climate change!

It’s March, and with the arrival of meteorological spring, temperatures aren’t bitterly cold in the Bluegrass State. But winter weather is still persisting in large parts of the United States, in the inland west, the northern midwest, and New England. people in those regions, when the power fails, can face life-threatening conditions. More, it isn’t always spring when the power is down; it can happen at any time, including the depths of winter. What the climate activists want is for people to just plain die, because that would be the result of a multi-day power outage in upstate New York or Minnesota or Denver if the left get their way. The truth is simple: they really don’t give a damn about the people!

References

References
↑1 Working from memory, I have previously said that it was January of 2018, but I recently looked at my 2018 diary, and found out that it was actually March 12-15, 2018.