One of the problems for the global warming climate change activists is that even those who support their causes and want to see far more renewable and non-carbon dioxide (CO2) emitting power sources seem to want those non-CO2 emitting power sources to burden other people’s lives, not their own. From a subscriber-only article in The Philadelphia Inquirer:
The plan to run an electric power transmission cable from 98 offshore wind turbines to land in Ocean City has drawn local opposition, but also supporters.
Miles of power cables already snake through Ocean City to power its 5,000 households and light its famed boardwalk.
But the plan to run one cable under the beach to bring electricity generated by 98 offshore wind turbines onshore has sparked controversy. City and Cape May County officials, as well as other communities and homeowners, have lined up against it; other homeowners, environmental groups, and unions support it.
Note that: the plan is to run the cable under the beach, not over it. Once built, it would never be seen, save for some necessary maintenance access points.
Emotion is high enough that a virtual public hearing this week on running the cable under public property drew 244 viewers and dozens of commenters.
The Danish wind power company Ørsted has state approvals to build the utility-scale Ocean Wind 1 wind farm and run one of two electric power transmission cables from it under the beach at 35th Street, across the city, and along the bay north of Roosevelt Boulevard Bridge. The line would ultimately connect to a substation at the former B.L. England coal-fired plant on the Great Egg Harbor River in Upper Township, Cape May County.
The cable would run under four parcels totaling little more than a half acre of city-owned property for which the company would pay $200,000 for the “diversion” of public land, which is 13 times its appraised value. A public hearing was required because the land, including the beach, is considered part of the state’s Green Acres program aimed at protecting open space.
Four parcels, totaling less than an acre of city-owned land. Further down:
The proposal has met resistance from some residents who not only object to the cable but to the 850-foot-high turbines they believe will be visible from shore. Some just want the project moved farther out to sea.
However, Suzanne Hornick, of Protect our Coast-NJ, said her group doesn’t want the wind farm “in any way, shape or form.”
NIMBY: Not In My Back Yard!
So, the environmentalists who are wanting us all to drive plug-in electric vehicles — assuming we will be allowed to have personal vehicles at all — and live generally poorer, and who support wind and solar electric generating facilities aren’t so happy when those, in this case, wind-generated power facility, might be built where they might spot the tops of the windmill blades on a clear day, or have any way to get the power generated by such a facility to shore.
TRUFANT, MI — Rural voters delivered a crushing blow to plans for a 375 megawatt wind farm in mid-Michigan, where several local renewable energy ordinances were defeated across three townships and multiple officials were thrown from office for supporting the project.
On Tuesday, Nov. 8, midterm voters resoundingly rejected ordinances enabling the Montcalm Wind project by Apex Clean Energy, a developer attempting to erect 75 turbines on farmland in Montcalm County northeast of Grand Rapids.
I don’t normally use photos from news articles, but this one falls under Fair Use guidelines, as the photo shows a sign which specifically says “Not in My backyard!
Zoning ordinances in Maple Valley, Douglass and Winfield townships were voted down by substantial margins amid growing animosity toward wind and solar energy projects among rural residents in Michigan who see them as a potential threat to health and property values.
A Belvidere Township solar energy ordinance also fell amid the wave of referendums.
Seven township officials in Montcalm County were recalled over their support for the $463 million wind project, which would have generated $118 million for leasing property owners and $80 million for local governments and schools over 30 years, according to an Upjohn Institute report.
Voters recalled Winfield Township supervisor Phyllis Larson, clerk Colleen Stebbins and trustee John Black. Douglass Township supervisor Terry Anderson, clerk Ronda Snyder and trustee Tom Jeppesen were recalled. Maple Valley Township supervisor John Schwandt was recalled.
Voters told the Greenville Daily News on Tuesday that turbines are an “eyesore” and several cited disputed claims about their impact on wildlife such as migrating birds.
There’s more at the original, and this one isn’t behind a paywall like the Inquirer article cited above.
Everybody wants cleaner energy sources, but it seems that most people don’t want to see or hear those cleaner energy sources. Just from where do they believe the electricity will come, fairy dust and unicorn farts? People want cleaner-running cars, but most people want other people to buy the Teslas and Chevy Dolts, not themselves. While electric car sales are increasing, the electric vehicle share of the US market is still just 4.6%. The environmentalists demand sacrifice, but it seems that they want Other People to sacrifice, not themselves!
My good friend and sometimes blog pinch-hitter William Teach pointed me to this article from Nicholas Goldberg in The Los Angeles Times, which can also be found on Yahoo! News to get around the Times paywall:
by Nicholas Goldberg | Thursday, September 22, 2022 | 6:00 AM PDT
Why is the greatest threat to the planet of so little concern to most Americans?
It’s shocking, frankly, that global warming ranks 24th on a list of 29 issues that voters say they’ll think about when deciding whom to vote for in November, according to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Only 30% of voters say they are “very worried” about it and more than two-thirds say they “rarely” or “never” discuss the issue with family or friends.
Actually, some of us see the United States and democratic Europe so willing to engage in a proxy war with Russia, a nation with a strategic nuclear arsenal, with seemingly little thought as to what could happen, as “the greatest threat to the planet”.
How can people be so blithely unconcerned when the clear consensus of scientists is that climate disruption is reaching crisis levels and will result not only in more raging storms, droughts, wildfires and heat waves, but very possibly in famine, mass migration, collapsing economies and war?
Uhhh, with a year-over-year 8.3% inflation rate in August of 2022, on top of August 2021’s year-over-year inflation rate of 5.3%, perhaps Americans are more worried about “collapsing economies” today than they are about such “crisis levels” in fifty or eight years?
Sure, there are some obvious reasons for the apathy: High among them is that fossil fuel companies have spent decades pulling the wool over the eyes of Americans. And Republican politicians have been complicit.
Well, of course it’s all the fault of evil, reich-wing Republicans and greedy fossil fuel companies! But Mr Goldberg, an associate editor and OpEd columnist for the Los Angeles Times, as well as the formerly being the newspaper’s editorial page editor, then changes his theme, and goes strongly toward a more marketing approach to persuade people to get worried about global warming climate change emergency. After pointing out what he sees as the activists’ naïveté in ignoring marketing techniques, he tells us that the only way to sell the activists’ ideas is to consider those who are not already on their side that people are stupid:
Deliver simple messages, for one thing. In general, climate activists lean toward complexity and nuance because they don’t want to patronize or condescend or mislead by oversimplifying to their audiences.
Once you have a simple message, repeat it over and over. Did you know that consumers generally have to see an ad more than half a dozen times before they will be persuaded to buy a product?
Embed facts and data in what (David) Fenton calls “moral stories that tug at the emotions.” Anyone who has ever watched TV ads knows that strategy can make arguments far more powerful.
Talk about what people care about. There’s been too much talk about the effect of climate change on polar bears, and not enough on what it means for humans.
Use language people understand. Research shows, Fenton says, that many people don’t understand the phrases “existential threat” or “net zero” or “climate justice.” They understand what “pollution” is, but not what an “emission” is — which suggests that it might make more sense to use the former term.
That practically drips with condescension: Mr Goldberg is saying that those who aren’t already on the side of the global warming climate change emergency activists just can’t understand.
Still, at the end, he throws at least a little bit of concern that people will have to make “sacrifices”:
Is (Mr Fenton) right when he says the climate problem can be solved in a way that enhances economic prosperity? I hope so; that’d be great. But I worry — and this is just my opinion, not an expert’s analysis — that we’ve waited too long, and that to avoid the worst effects of climate change we are going to have to sacrifice, whether it sells or not. I take the gloomy approach.
Either way, we can all agree there’s an awful lot to be done. And Fenton is certainly right that you can’t mobilize people for war if they don’t know they’re under attack. Public education is obviously a missing piece of the puzzle.
Somehow we need to awaken a nation of sleeping, underinformed and insufficiently motivated citizens and persuade them to rise to the great challenge of modern times. To do that, the unmanipulation process needs to begin in earnest.
Apparently, for Mr Goldberg, those who do not support the global warming climate change emergency activists are victims of ‘manipulation’ by fossil-fuel companies and wicked conservatives, but it’s “unmanipulation” to market to people his ideas.
With a guesstimated annual salary of $88,663, and net worth of $845,000, and a wife, Amy Wilentz — who didn’t respect her husband enough to take his name — who earns a similar salary from The Nation as well as being an English Professor at the University of California at Irvine, perhaps the distinguished Mr Goldberg doesn’t truly understand that working-class Americans might be more concerned with paying the rent, keeping the electricity turned on, and food on the table now than they are in projections of doom fifty and eighty years in the future. With the high inflation rate, with which wage increases have not matched, Americans are poorer, in real terms, than they were two years ago.
Mr Goldberg wrote that he believes that “we are going to have to sacrifice,” but, with his wife’s and his resources, they are not going to have to sacrifice nearly as much as the average American. Whatever sacrifices they will have to make, perhaps fewer dinners at nice restaurants, or having to pay an electrician to install an at-home charging station for a Tesla, won’t be as stressful for them as the sacrifices made by the single mother with two kids left her by a deadbeat ex-boyfriend in Pittsburgh, or the family in eastern Kentucky trying to survive in a poor area in which the coal mines have all closed.
Mr Goldberg is not, like the “great princess” mention by Monsieur Rousseau, saying “Let them eat brioche,” but is suggesting that those who eat cake might occasionally have to eat bread instead. What he misses is that there are those who can only afford bread right now, and the policy proposals of the activists would take that away from them as well.
Those people are already sacrificing under the current economy, something today’s left just really don’t understand. Oh, they say that they are concerned, say that they know and understand, but they simply do not: you cannot understand people who are living paycheck-to-paycheck and concomitantly propose mandatory programs which will make them even poorer.
There has been much mockery of the California’s announcement that, beginning in 2035, only zero-emissions personal new vehicles could be sold in the Pyrite State, followed just a couple of days later by pleas that owners of plug-in electric vehicles not be recharged at home during peak energy use hours, and that was followed by the threat of rolling blackouts, to avoid a major collapse of the state’s power grid. If the power couldn’t be kept on during a heat wave, and people couldn’t recharge their Chevy Dolt’s when there just aren’t that many of them on the roads, how could things be handled if only plug-in electric vehicles could be sold come 2035?
Somehow, in all of that, what Patterico used to call the Los Angeles Dog Trainer managed to use 2,351 words to actually document what all of this means.
It was the sort of bold, climate-focused initiative that California has developed a reputation for — an effective ban on the sale of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035.
Now, as officials seek to fundamentally change California’s automotive culture — thereby reducing its largest source of planet-warming carbon emissions and air pollution — experts say those past initiatives may shed light on whether California’s nation-leading auto plan can work.
In Los Angeles, the dense smog that once smothered the city is regarded today as folklore. At its worst, between the 1950s and 1980s, the caustic haze was so thick that people could see only as far as a city block. It irritated people’s throats and lungs, and gave them bloodshot eyes. Back then, there were more than 200 days with unhealthy air annually, according to the Air Resources Board.
Since that time, there has been tremendous progress toward reducing smog and air pollution, much of it due to cleaner cars. The amount of smog-forming nitrogen oxides has been slashed by more than 50% in the last two decades, substantially improving public health.
But California’s progress in fighting air pollution has stagnated in recent decades, and the state is still home to the worst air pollution in the nation. The South Coast air basin — Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and part of San Bernardino counties — has yet to meet any federal health standards for ozone levels, including the oldest measure enacted in 1979.
“If you’re looking back 70 years, we’ve done a wonderful job,” said Joe Lyou, president of the Coalition for Clean Air. “If you’re looking back over the last decade or two, not so good. And if you’re looking at the legal standards that demand that we provide healthy air for people to breathe, we’re not doing well at all.”
Naturally, I have to cut a lot of the text, to avoid plagiarism and copyright violations, but what follows next is a brief history of the state’s efforts to reduce smog produced by exhaust pipe emissions. It notes that California was the first state to require catalytic converters. Then, in 2006, the silly cap-and-trade system was introduced.
It was in 2002 that I was part of a meeting in which a cap-and-trade proposal was made at the ready-mixed concrete company for which I worked. Because the company used flyash as a pozzolan, or partial cement replacement, it would have carbon ‘credits’ for the Portland cement that was not used. Those credits could be sold to a company which was supposed to reduce its CO2 emissions, but found itself unable or unwilling to spend the money to do so. I saw it for what it was: not the reduction in CO2 emissions, but simply the moving around of money.
One of California’s landmark climate programs, cap-and-trade was initially launched in 2006 with the aim of reducing the state’s greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. It exceeded expectations, and in fact reached the target four years ahead of time.
In 2017, the program was reauthorized with a much more ambitious goal: Slashing greenhouse gas emissions to 40% of 1990 levels by 2030. To get there, the program uses a system of pollution credits that essentially lets large carbon emitters buy and sell unused credits with the aim of keeping everyone at or below a certain total.
Experts say it only sort of worked. While the program has remained a key element of California’s climate strategy, emissions were down about 11% in 2020 — far from the 40% goal. What’s more, that number likely accounts for emissions reductions tied to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This was a point which covered only half the issue. Yes, the panicdemic — no, not a typo, but the word I intended to use, because the biggest effect of COVID-19 was panic — would up reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but only via the mechanism of throwing millions of people out of work.
Despite California’s green reputation, it remains the seventh-highest oil producing state in the nation, extracting about 358,000 barrels per day, according to state data.
However, oil production has been declining for decades, and the California Geologic Energy Management Division, or CalGEM, reported that “more permits have been issued to plug and permanently seal existing wells than to drill new ones since 2019.” The agency issued 564 new well permits in 2021, down from 1,917 in 2020 and 2,665 in 2019.
Some experts said that’s not aggressive enough.
“This transition can’t happen too slowly, because there is a climate crisis, and there are significant public health impacts on frontline communities,” said Bahram Fazeli, director of research and policy at Communities for a Better Environment.
Although there are ambitions to phase out California’s oil and gas production completely — most recently, Gov. Gavin Newsom set his sights on 2045 — there has yet to be an official deadline such as the one for the gas car ban.
Just like the panicdemic, reducing and eventually elimination petroleum production in California doesn’t mean that gasoline and diesel will not be used; it simply means that more of the state’s residents will be thrown out of work. Perhaps Governor Newsom thinks that all of the displaced workers will simply learn to code.
For example, reducing demand without supply could mean California ends up exporting its excess oil, Meng said, while reducing supply too quickly could leave communities that rely on the industry in bad shape. In Kern County, one of the state’s top producing regions, oil and gas extraction provide as much as 20% of the area’s property tax revenue.
A few silly paragraphs then follow concerning “equity,” or the notion that trying to meet the state’s goals must not disproportionately impact disadvantaged racial and ethnic groups.
Then comes the big part.
Although phasing out gas-powered cars is one of the state’s greatest priorities, that alone won’t be enough. Driving habits must change, too, if the state expects to achieve carbon neutrality.
The state climate plan depends on motorists driving at least 12% fewer miles by 2030, and no fewer than 22% by 2045.
How, I have to ask, can the state require people to drive less, when California is the poster child for suburban sprawl?
“Highway building and sprawl go hand in hand,” said Susan Handy, a researcher at UC Davis who has studied strategies to reduce automobile dependence. “That’s true in California, and it’s also true everywhere else. When we built highways, it made it possible to develop farther from city centers than ever before. And now we’re in a situation where we’ve got these sprawling development patterns and it makes it very hard to get around by means other than the car.”
As the state’s population has risen and more cars are on the road, state officials funded highway construction and expansion to ease congestion, which ironically fostered more driving.
The only major significant decreases in miles driven occur during economic downturns and, recently, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 as more people have worked remotely. However, driving has rebounded to pre-pandemic levels.
There you have it: even the very liberal Los Angeles Times has admitted that driving is necessary for the state’s economic health. You cannot reduce the transportation abilities of the people without making people poorer.
The article continues to talk about changing people’s behavior, but let’s face it: that means making them poorer. Public transportation is cited as a replacement, but public transportation is a burden and an inconvenience. You have to leave your home and walk to or drive to, depending upon the distance and weather, the bus or train or subway stop, ride in a smelly, dirty and sometimes unsafe public conveyance to the bus or train or subway stop, hoping that isn’t like the SEPTA station on Allegheny Avenue, and then walk or taxi from that station to where you work. Hope it isn’t raining!
Of course, the state will need multiple thousands and thousands of public car charging stations, and
plans to construct at least 250,000 public vehicle charging stations by the middle of the decade; 10,000 of which should be fast chargers, according to the California Public Utilities Commission.
Uhhh, the “middle of the decade” is almost here! 2025 is less than 2½ years away.
If 240,000 of those public charging stations are not 480-volt “fast chargers”, that means that people would need eight hours to recharge their vehicles. Even the fast charging stations require 45 to 75 minutes to recharge fully a vehicle that is down to 25% of battery capacity.
The state also plans to require landlords of multifamily housing units to provide residents with a means to charge electric cars, though those details are still being worked out.
Really? Great! Now, how can that be done?
There are hundreds of thousands of apartment buildings which have no designated parking for residents; how can landlords get charging stations for such buildings? More, in those “multifamily housing units” which do have designated parking places, requiring landlords to provide electric car charging facilities costs money. The Pyrite State is already one of the most expensive places to live in the country, and half of the state’s 40 million people are renters. If landlords have to plow multiple thousands of dollars into car charging stations for their tenants, rents will have to be raised to cover that cost, and rents are already increasing significantly thanks to Joe’s Bidenflation.
So much of not just California’s, but the global warming activists’ plans nationwide show two very fundamental flaws: they don’t understand economics, and they don’t understand poor people and how they have to live. California has a huge homelessness problem, and major cities which can’t keep people from living and pooping in the streets are going to be impossibly pressed to provide the infrastructure to increase electricity supply and delivery by the amount needed to meet its goals. We have already noted how the Inflation Enhancement Reduction Act’s renewal of tax credit for electric car purchases has been met with electric vehicle prices rising, because economic forces trump the good intentions of liberal legislators. California’s legislators have already voted to keep Diablo Canyon, the state’s last remaining nuclear power plant, open several years longer, because as much as the left hate nuclear power, the state needs the sparktricity.
It doesn’t matter how good or noble or necessary the state’s liberal leaders believe their intentions to be; reality cannot be denied, and what they want California to become is simply not something which can be legislated into existence. Construction takes time, often lots of time, and it takes money, usually lots of money.
But more, they believe that they can change the culture of the state in ways people do not wish to change. Who wants to take the bus to the grocery store, and have to lug grocery bags back several blocks by hand?
California’s car culture emerged because that was what the people of the Pyrite State wanted. But, then again, the left have never really cared what other people want.
In the 51 years since I left my mother’s house, I have lived in apartments, rented single family homes, an owned half-duplex, an owned single family home, and now, finally, an owned farmhouse on actual farmland. We have exactly one neighboring home, about 100 yards away, as our houses are the only two on a country road down which the Post Office will not deliver, and let me tell you: this is the best way to live. My real neighbors are the deer and opossums, our dogs and cats and chickens, and the unspoiled vista that is our view from our northwest facing screened-in porch.
So it was with some amusement that I read how Jason Peasley thinks we ought to all live in apartment buildings: Continue reading →
Electricity delivers diverse services to all sectors of the American economy. The transition to a clean electricity system has been accelerating in recent years — driven by plummeting costs for solar and wind technologies, federal and subnational policies, and consumer demand. Building on this success, the United States has set a goal of 100% clean electricity by 2035, a crucial foundation for net-zero emissions no later than 2050.
We can affordably and efficiently electrify most of the economy, from cars to buildings and industrial processes. In areas where electrification presents technology challenges — for instance aviation, shipping, and some industrial processes — we can prioritize clean fuels like carbon-free hydrogen and sustainable biofuels.
About those “plummeting costs for solar and wind technologies”? From The Wall Street Journal:
‘Greenflation’ problems are particularly acute in U.S., where tariffs targeting China helped increase project costs, led to delays before Russian attack
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is further driving up the price of renewable-energy projects, which were already facing supply-chain strains and raw-materials increases before the war.
The new pressures, which are hitting two years after the pandemic created bottlenecks for wind and solar developers, are adding to delays for completing many projects.
The Biden administration and other governments around the world have called for speeding the transition to renewable-energy sources to avoid reliance on Russia for oil and gas. But project developers say it might be nearly impossible to move faster in the near term.
Wind and solar development has boomed world-wide in the past decade as a result of rapidly falling costs that made the projects more competitive with traditional sources of power generation such as natural gas and nuclear, as well as growing government pressure to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to combat climate change.
Globally, wind and solar accounted for about 6.4% and 4% of power generation last year, respectively, up from 3.8% and 1.4% five years prior, with further sharp growth projected, according to S&P Global Commodity Insights. The cost of solar generation fell to $45 for a megawatt-hour last year, down from $381 in 2010, S&P estimated. The cost of onshore wind generation, meanwhile, fell to $48 for a megawatt-hour, down from $89 in 2010.
Sounds good so far, but trouble comes with the next paragraph:
But like many other businesses, renewable-energy projects are now being hit by soaring post-invasion prices for key materials such as aluminum and steel, as well as higher transportation costs stemming from higher oil prices, which have surged by more than 50% this year.
The rising costs are particularly acute in the U.S., where many projects were already facing increases in part because of trade tariffs targeting China, a dominant producer of solar cells and other renewable-energy components. A third of U.S. utility-scale solar capacity scheduled for completion in the fourth quarter of 2021 was delayed by at least a quarter and 13% of the projects planned to complete this year have been delayed for a year or canceled, according to a new report from Wood Mackenzie and the Solar Energy Industries Association.
Currently, the People’s Republic of China completely dominates all phases of solar panel production, producing 66% of polysilicon, 78% of all solar cells, and 72% of solar modules. More, 4% of solar cells and 1% of solar modules are produced in the Republic of China, Taiwan, which could be taken over by the People’s Republic any day.
U.S. projects have also faced long wait times to receive necessary approvals to connect new projects to the electric grid, as developers rush to bring wind and solar farms online to capitalize on aggressive state mandates to reduce emissions, overwhelming grid operators. Those delays are adding to uncertainty for project investors.
How, exactly, are we going to pay for this huge power generation transformation, all within 13 years? We’re going to be borrowing money, from Americans, from foreigners, and from China, to send to China, and having to pay back to investors, including Chinese investors.
We could, of course, do something really radical like build solar panel and module plants in the United States, but that will take years and, let’s tell the truth here, it will mean paying American wages, probably American union wages, to American workers, rather than the much lower Chinese wages, to build the solar collection systems, making them more expensive.
As the patricians try to force the plebeians into plug-in electric vehicles, another thought came to me as I got our electric bills: it isn’t just gasoline prices which have increased, but electricity costs as well. From The Philadelphia Inquirer, not exactly an evil reich-wing propaganda site:
Energy costs for electric customers are going up by as much as 50% across Pennsylvania next week, the latest manifestation of across-the-board energy price increases impacting gasoline, heating oil, propane, and natural gas.
Eight Pennsylvania electric utilities are set to increase their energy prices on Dec. 1, reflecting the higher cost to produce electricity. Peco Energy, which serves Philadelphia and its suburbs, will boost its energy charge by 6.4% on Dec. 1, from 6.6 cents per kilowatt hour to about 7 cents per kWh. Energy charges account for about half of a residential bill.
PPL Electric Utilities, the Allentown company that serves a large swath of Pennsylvania including parts of Bucks, Montgomery, and Chester Counties, will impose a 26% increase on residential energy costs on Dec. 1, from about 7.5 cents per kWh to 9.5 cents per kWh. That’s an increase of $40 a month for an electric heating customer who uses 2,000 kWh a month.
Pike County Light & Power, which serves about 4,800 customers in Northeast Pennsylvania, will increase energy charges by 50%, according to the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission.
“All electric distribution companies face the same market forces as PPL Electric Utilities,” PPL said in a statement. Each Pennsylvania utility follows a different PUC-regulated plan for procuring energy from power generators, which explains why some customers are absorbing the hit sooner rather than later, it said.
There’s more at the original.
2022 F-150 charging in a lot nicer garage than I have. It shows you just how much money you have to have to buy one of the fool things. Photo from a Ford sales site. Click to enlarge.
I just got my sparktricity bill, and with most, though not all, of our heating on it, it’s $325.73 for the house and $30.11 for the shop[1]The garage/shop is not heated.. Now, imagine if we were driving plug-in Chevy Dolts, or, for me, a plug-in Ford F-150 Lightning[2]My current vehicle is a 2010 Ford F-150, and it’s an actual work truck; I need a work truck around the farm.: all of the electric charging for the month would be coming in one monthly bill! It will be argued that that might still be a bit less than gasoline, but when a month’s worth of your driving costs comes all at once, that can be quite the shock. Yes, we have the money, and the discipline, to handle that, but when I see these ‘payday loan’ places — and they certainly seem to have metastasized in poor eastern Kentucky — you know that there are a whole lot of people who are not living just paycheck to paycheck, but from paycheck to not quite the next paycheck. Do these people have the money and discipline to save up for that next big electric bill?
We bought a house for my sister-in-law, and got her electric bill — from a different provider — which was $462.80. The house we bought for her is total electric, so that includes the range and water heater, which our bill does not.
Those bills were for February, a cold winter month, so they’ll decrease as spring springs, but I can imagine what it would be like if there were a couple hundred more bucks tacked on to charge electric vehicles. This is something the left, which tell us how wonderful it would be to go all-electric, never consider: Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg have plenty of money, and a big electric bill would, to them, be certainly manageable, but the Patricians just don’t understand the lives, the economics, and the struggles of the working class.
More, it is well known that cold weather decreases both range and charging speed in plug-in electric vehicles. You’ll have to leave your Tesla plugged in longer, and you won’t get as many miles out of it, meaning that it will cost you more in your electric bill to charge your EV in winter, the same time as your heating costs are high.
In 2019, before the panicdemic, the Federal Reserve reported that “Nearly 40 percent of Americans would struggle to cover an unexpected $400 expense, according to a new report by the Federal Reserve — a stark reminder of many people’s financial insecurity even amid solid economic growth.” Yet the people who could handle such an expense are trying to proscribe a ‘solution’ to global warming climate change that would drastically change how the working class would have to handle things . . . if they could at all.
How many Kentuckians, how many working class people, are going to get their electricity shut off because they don’t have the money, or money-management skills, to pay for the plug-in electric vehiclesinto which President Biden and the activists want to force people?
Mother Jones, named after Mary Harris Jones, known as Mother Jones, an Irish-American trade union activist, and socialist advocate, is a far left opinion journal founded in 1976, so the following article they printed is hardly a surprise.
by Oliver Milman | Wednesday, January 26, 2022 | 2:00 AM EST
Within the brutal machinations of US politics, Joe Manchin has been elevated to a status of supreme decision-maker, the man who could make or break Joe Biden’s presidency.
Internationally, however, the Democratic senator’s new fame has been received with puzzlement and growing bitterness, as countries already ravaged by the climate crisis brace themselves for the US—history’s largest ever emitter of planet-heating gases—again failing to pass major climate legislation.
For six months, Manchin has refused to support a sweeping bill to lower emissions, stymieing its progress in an evenly split US Senate where Republicans uniformly oppose climate action. Failure to pass the Build Back Better Act risks wounding Biden politically but the ramifications reverberate far beyond Washington, particularly in developing countries increasingly at the mercy of disastrous climate change.
As it happens, the article is not a Mother Jones original, but was reprinted from the United Kingdom’s left-wing newspaper, The Guardian, and the Guardian original had a slightly less dramatic headline: “‘He’s a villain’: Joe Manchin attracts global anger over climate crisis: The West Virginia senator’s name is reviled on the streets of Bangladesh and other countries facing climate disaster as he blocks Biden’s effort to curb planet-heating gases”.
One might have thought that an American-based opinion journal like Mother Jones would have had a greater understanding of American politics, but apparently not. You see, the “whole world” is not hating on Joe Manchin, because the people of West Virginia, the ones he represents in the United States Senate, aren’t hating on him. As William Teach of The Pirate’s Cove noted, Senator Manchin is pretty popular in his home state, with 72% of his constituents approving his opposition to President Biden’s ‘Build Back Better’ plans. Mother Jones, headquartered in San Francisco, appears unaware of that fact.
In Senator Manchin’s last campaign, in 2018, the incumbent drew a Democratic primary opponent, Paula Jean Swearengin, a very ‘progressive’ candidate, so ‘progressive’ that, in July 2021, she left the Democratic Party for the far-left People’s Party. West Virginia’s Democrats didn’t think much of Miss Swearengin’s candidacy, giving Mr Manchin 111,589 votes, 69.8% of the total, to Miss Swearengin’s 48,302 votes, 30.2%. West Virginia’s voters knew what they had in Mr Manchin, as he was one of very few Democrats to vote to confirm most of President Trump’s cabinet nominees, yet they still gave him the vast majority of their votes.
Miss Swearengin tried again in 2020, against incumbent Republican Shelley Moore Capito, and was stomped 547,454 (70.28%) to 210,309 (27.00%).
Still, Senator Manchin, who had won statewide elections in 2000 (for Secretary of State), 2004 and 2008 (for Governor), and 2010 and 2012 (for the United States Senate) didn’t have an easy time of it, defeating Republican Patrick Morrisey by the relatively narrow margin of 290,510 (49.6%) to 271,113 (46.3%).
The truth is simple: the voters of the Mountain State are very conservative, and Mr Manchin, who has described himself as a “centrist, moderate, conservative Democrat”, is not only representing the voters of his state the way they would like, but has been true to the way he has described himself to the voters.
It appears that the editors of The Guardian, who, being Brits, believe that candidates represent their party rather than their geographical constituency. The way British elections work, the way a lot of European elections work, such a belief is understandable. But the editors of Mother Jones ought to know better; in the United States, elected officials represent the voters of their geographical districts, and politically educated Americans, a subset which ought to include the magazine’s writers and editors, know this to be true. Mr Manchin does not represent the Democratic Party; he represents West Virginians.
So, no, Mother Jones, the whole world isn’t hating on Joe Manchin. A lot of Republicans aren’t hating on him, and, most importantly, his constituents aren’t hating on him. But that might be too difficult a concept for people in the City by the Bay.
The [ughh!] Magnolia Network is, this Saturday morning, running reruns of This Old House, season 41, originally broadcast in 2019-2020, a major, expensive, remodel of a home in Westerly, Washington County, Rhode Island. Westerly is a beach resort town which in the 2020 election gave 55.6% of its votes to Joe Biden; Washington County as a whole voted 58.57% to 39.20% for Mr Biden.
And what did the obviously wealthy homeowners, in liberal Rhode Island, in a show originally meant for the liberal Public Broadcasting System, choose for this project? One episode shows the installation of a 1,000 gallon underground propane tank, for their heating system, their water heater, their range, and their fireplace.
The homeowners chose comfort, the homeowners chose fossil fuels!
Now, it is entirely possible that Scott and Shayla Adams, the homeowners,[1]The homeowners’ names were given on both the show and the website, so I am not doxxing them. were among the smarter people in Westerly, and voted for President Trump; I have no way of knowing that. But in one of our more liberal states, in very blue New England, we’re seeing reasonably wealthy homeowners eschewing the calls of the global warming climate change activists to go all-electric, and choosing what they believe is the better choice for themselves.
I found this story on my Google reader feed on my iPad on Monday morning, and of course it caught my eye . . . because, due to what the Weather Channel called ‘Winter Storm Izzy,’ ice and heavy wet snow weighed down power lines and tree limbs, and we lost electricity at 8:04 PM EST on Sunday.
Mike Bebernes · Senior Editor · Saturday, January 15, 2022 · 4:56 PM
Over the past three years, dozens of cities across the country have banned natural gas hookups in newly constructed buildings as part of a growing campaign to reduce carbon emissions from homes. The movement scored a major victory last month, when New York City’s outgoing Mayor Bill de Blasio signed into law a ban on gas hookups in new buildings.
Though new laws apply to the entire home, the policy debate often focuses on one room in particular: the kitchen. Gas stoves account for a relatively small share of the emissions released by a typical household, but they’ve become a proxy for a larger fight over how far efforts to curb at-home natural gas consumption in the name of fighting climate change should go.
Natural gas consumption accounts for 80 percent of fossil fuel emissions from residential and commercial buildings, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. One study estimated that New York’s ban on its own would create an emissions reduction comparable to taking 450,000 cars off the road. But the movement has met significant pushback. About 35 percent of U.S. homes use gas for cooking, and surveys show that many people are resistant to switching to an electric or induction range. The gas industry has also launched a massive lobbying campaign that has helped convince 19 Republican-led states to preemptively bar local governments from imposing bans on natural gas.
There’s more at the original.
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.
We did, too. So when we remodeled our kitchen in 2018, we installed what Mrs Pico wanted, a gas — propane in our case, being out in the country beyond natural gas lines — range, replacing the old electric one that came with the house when we bought it.
We had other reasons, as well. Our house was all electric, and our first winter here was miserable. It got colder than usual for a winter in central/eastern Kentucky, and the electric heat pump just wouldn’t keep up very well. Then, when we lost electricity for 4½ days in an ice storm, it was decided: we would not depend just on sparktricity for heat, cooking and hot water. We added a propane fireplace and water heater as well, so if we lose electricity again — and we’re pretty much at the end of the service line, last ones to get service restored out here — we’ll still have heat and hot water and can cook.
Yes, my wife and I remodeled that kitchen all by ourselves, with help from my sisters and, occasionally, a nephew, but no ‘professionals’ were involved. The plumbing, the electrical, the drywall, the floor and backsplash time, the cabinet installation, the wallpaper, the window installation, everything you see — and you can click on the image to enlarge it — with the exception of the red quartz countertop installation was done by us.
Last March we had the floods, and while the flooding did not damage our house, it did trash the HVAC system. It was in the mid-forties in March, and, after a day getting the propane tank back in position — it had floated, but since I had tied it to a tree, didn’t float away — we had heat from our propane fireplace.
And the past few days? The electricity went out at 8:04 PM on Sunday, and wasn’t restored until 5:45 PM on Tuesday. While it got up to around 40º Tuesday afternoon, it was below freezing on Sunday, and on Sunday and Monday nights.
So, what did we have? We had heat, from the propane stove, and we had hot water, from the propane hot water heater, and we even had French toast for breakfast this morning, cooked on the propane stove.
Were it up to the climate activists, we’d have been cold, dirty, and hungry.
Climate change activists see gas bans as a powerful way to reduce the greenhouse gases created by buildings, which account for about 13 percent of total U.S. emissions. They argue that — unlike burgeoning technologies like a green power grid and electric vehicles — clean alternatives to gas heaters, appliances and stoves are readily available to most consumers. Critics of the bans, on the other hand, are skeptical of how much they’ll really reduce emissions, worry about increasing costs for homeowners and argue that market-based solutions will be most effective at promoting a transition to electrified homes.
Thing is, that’s not what people want! In it’s 2018 season, This Old House worked on it’s ‘Generation Next‘ house in Newton, Massachusetts, and the obviously well-to-do homeowners in very, very liberal Massachusetts, in Middlesex County, which gave 71.00% of its votes to Joe Biden, chose natural gas for heating, hot water, and cooking.
Perhaps the homeowners were among the 26.11% of Middlesex County voters who cast their ballots for President Trump!
For my family, gas was the logical choice. We live way out in the country, and when the power goes out, it can be out for a long time. For my older daughter, who bought a 1924 bungalow in Lexington, when her heating system had to be replaced — which was when she bought the place, and we knew it — the choice was also gas, though she didn’t update to a gas range. In the middle of the city, if the power goes out, it’s unlikely to be out for days at a time. A gas furnace can keep a home nice and warm even on the coldest of days, something heat-pump based HVAC systems have trouble achieving.
But if these choices were the logical ones for my family, they were choices the climate activists not only didn’t want us to take, but don’t even want us to have. They want their choices to be our choices, our only choices, because, well because they’re just better than us.
One of the problems for the global warming climate change activists is that even those who support their causes and want to see far more renewable and non-carbon dioxide (CO2) emitting power sources seem to want those non-CO2 emitting power sources to burden other people’s lives, not their own. From a subscriber-only article in The Philadelphia Inquirer:TRUFANT, MI — Rural voters delivered a crushing blow to plans for a 375 megawatt wind farm in mid-Michigan, where several local renewable energy ordinances were defeated across three townships and multiple officials were thrown from office for supporting the project.
There’s more at the original, and this one isn’t behind a paywall like the Inquirer article cited above.
