Tag Archives: #ClimateChange

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I love a green lawn!

This might be a post more suited for The Pirate’s Cove, and I did notify William Teach about the article, but with my nice, brilliantly green lawn, and the whole farm, I just had to write something!

The Suburban Lawn Will Never Be the Same

Homeowners from Las Vegas to Sydney are swapping real grass for artificial turf as climate change forever alters what a normal yard looks and smells like.

By Brian Eckhouse and Siobhan Wagner | Friday, July 8, 2022

The lawn part of the farm. I planted all of the trees myself, and did the brick sidewalk as well.

Judy Dunn moved to her home in the Las Vegas suburbs from Washington state in late 1998, when there was little concern about water levels at nearby lakes. Dunn could nurture the verdant lawn of her dreams in a valley of cacti and sand that developers had recast as an oasis. But then a drought arrived and never left, and now local agencies are fining more residents for wasting water.

For Dunn, the final straw arrived last summer. Lake Mead, historically America’s largest reservoir, plunged to its lowest level since 1937 and the first-ever water cuts were ordered on a Colorado River system that benefits about 40 million people including Dunn. “If we don’t start saving water, we’re not going to have any,” says the 76-year-old.

So, Dunn opted to install an artificial lawn, a choice being made by more and more residents of Southern Nevada—one of the many places that’s getting drier as the planet warms. For some, it’s the cash-for-grass rebates being offered by local water agencies. For others, it’s the realization that the classic lawn is increasingly unsustainable in a time of megadrought. And then there are the residents coaxed into the shift by the water notices or fines.

Well, Las Vegas is in, you know, the desert, with average daily high temperatures reaching 95º F from June 3rd through September 16th, and 105º on July 13th. You move to Vegas, and you get the desert, and desert weather, and desert rainfall.

Beyond the drainage ditch and its too-high weeds is the corn field, another brilliant green part of the farm

For water suppliers worldwide, climate change is raising the stakes. Italy in July declared a state of emergency as water levels in its largest river dropped to the lowest in 70 years. The US Southwest is suffering through the worst drought in over a century. Within the next 30 years, droughts may impact three quarters of the world’s population. While plastic turf poses its own climate challenges, it’s increasingly seen as a viable alternative to real green yards that devour precious water. . . . .

A couple of decades ago, artificial turf was often a thin carpet atop a hard surface—rough on the knees as well as the eyes. Athletes playing on it complained that it wore their legs out. But as the product improved, so did homeowners’ interest. From the US to the UK, artificial grass retailers have seen sales tick up during pandemic lockdowns, when housebound property owners put their money toward home improvements. Indeed, Google Trends shows a worldwide surge in searches for “artificial grass” during the middle of 2020.

I don’t know if it’s still there, because the last time I saw it was the late 1980s, but Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company had, outside their public office, which was not inside the shipyard’s gates, some integrally-colored green concrete where grass would have been expected, by their normal sidewalks! Of course, Newport News got plenty of rain, but this way, the shipyard didn’t have to maintain the grass!

Me? I live in the Bluegrass State, and I’ve got to love all of the rain we get!

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Another problem for Joe Biden’s plan to eliminate all emissions from American electricity production in 13 years.

President Joe Biden and the Democrats, greatly concerned about global warming climate change, have urged an all-electric future for the United States, phasing out fossil fuel usage in transportation by requiring all new vehicles sold by the year 2035 to be zero-emissions, and that electric power generation be zero-emission by the same year. In The Long-Term Strategy of the United States: Pathways to Net-Zero Greenhouse Gas Emissions by 2050, John Kerry, Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, and Gina McCarthy, National Climate Advisor, said[1]The Long-Term Strategy of the United States: Pathways to Net-Zero Greenhouse Gas Emissions by 2050, page 5 of .pdf file.:

    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:

    Ukraine War Drives Up Cost of Wind, Solar Power

    ‘Greenflation’ problems are particularly acute in U.S., where tariffs targeting China helped increase project costs, led to delays before Russian attack

    By Jennifer Hiller and Katherine Blunt | Sunday, March 27, 2022 | 5:30 AM EDT

    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.

Infographic: China Dominates All Steps of Solar Panel Production | Statista 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.

Foreign Policy magazine noted that forced labor is used in much of China’s polysilicon production.

Back to the Journal:

    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.

Since Mr Biden took office, inflation has soared; the February year-over-year inflation rate was 7.9%, while real average hourly earnings decreased by 1.9%. Americans have been getting relatively poorer, and the data for the statistics were gathered before the invasion of Ukraine.

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.

References

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The Patricians just don’t understand how the plebeians live! The elites push policies that will affect the working class in ways the policymakers just can't comprehend

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:

    Pa. electricity prices will be rising by as much as 50% this week. Here’s how you can save.

    Energy charges are set to increase on Dec. 1, reflecting the higher cost to produce electricity. There are ways to save. But beware the risks.

    by Andrew Maykuth | November 28, 2021

    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?

References

References
↑1 The garage/shop is not heated.
↑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.
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What have the #ClimateAction activists done to reduce their own carbon emissions?

“I’ll believe ‘carbon pollution’ is dangerous when people like Biden stop putting out so darned much themselves,” William Teach said. Why, I have to ask, don’t the people telling us we must reduce our CO2 output ever do anything to reduce their own? Why wouldn’t someone from the Show Me State, such as Mr Teach’s frequent commenter Elwood P Dowd, want to show us just what and how much he has done, personally, to reduce his own carbon footprint?

What I have done isn’t much: we replaced our light bulbs with LEDs, not to reduce our energy consumption, but because when we bought the place, it had incandescent bulbs that were burning out anyway. In addition, as we remodeled the kitchen, we installed canister lights, and the much lower temperature LEDs are far safer in canister lights.

I installed a clothesline outside, which means that, in decent weather, our bedding and my clothes gets dried using solar and wind power. Admittedly, I did this because my darling bride (of 42 years, 9 months, and 7 days) likes the way the bedding smells after line drying, rather than any concern over global warming climate change, but it still saves on over an hour in the 220-volt, 30-amp electric dryer.

Of course, many of the urbanites who like to lecture us on reducing our CO2 output don’t have yards in which they could install a clothesline, or, if they did, are stuck with homeowners’ associations which won’t permit it. But it is amusing to me that none of them ever seem to even think about it or mention it.

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.

When I added windows, I added double-paned insulated ones; you can see the large windows I installed in our kitchen remodel to the left.

It replaced one much narrower double hung window. I added another window in our living room, along a wall which had only one, and the room needed more light. As I had walls open, I added insulation to exterior walls. When we put in new kitchen appliances, we were buying energy efficient ones.

Perhaps my motives weren’t pure enough for the warmunists — Mr Teach calls them ‘warmists’ in his long-term, daily ‘If All You See‘ posts — but, in the end, my wife and I still did these things, and we’ve spent a considerable amount of money doing so; that kitchen window was over $700 just by itself.

Oil lamp and candles on the kitchen counter. Photo by Dana R Pico, on January 16, 2022, when power was lost due to a snowstorm.

Of course, we also added propane, to a house which was previously all-electric, because when the sparktricity goes out in our end-of-the-line farmhouse, it can be out for several days. I’m sure that has us near the gates of Hell as far as the global warming climate activists are concerned, but, then again, we didn’t freeze when we lost power for 46 hours in the middle of January.

So, what has the man from Missouri done, what has the Hirsute One done, to reduce their carbon footprints (feetprint?) that they tell the rest of us we must do? We already know that Mr Teach’s frequent commenter ‘Hairy’ is keeping his current, fossil-fueled automobile, and has no plans to trade it in for a plug-in electric, but, then again, he has told us he’s in his 70s and doesn’t ever plan on buying another vehicle. Being less than two months from my 69th birthday, I can understand that!

I don’t expect our high-flying government officials like the ‘Climate Tsar’ John F Kerry — a very wealthy man who made his money the old-fashioned way; he married it! — to stop flying around the world in his private jet, a Gulfstream IV, registration number N57HJ. But maybe, just maybe, some of the otherwise regular people advocating all sorts of restrictions on other people could spend a little time telling us what sacrifices they have made, what things they have done, to put their money where their mouths — or keyboards — are.

But at some point, those global warming climate change activists need to do more than just lecture others; they need to lead by example. That so few of them do says a lot about how seriously they take global warming climate.

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Left coasters just don’t understand American politics Mother Jones editors think that Joe Manchin should represent the Democratic party, not his constituents in West Virginia

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.

    The Whole World Is Hating on Joe Manchin

    “He’s a villain, he’s a threat to the globe.”

    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.

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The wealthy love them some fossil fuels!

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 remodeled kitchen; note the gas range. Click to enlarge.

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.

References

References
↑1 The homeowners’ names were given on both the show and the website, so I am not doxxing them.
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The climate activists don’t want you to have a choice! The truth is simple: the American left are pro-choice on exactly one thing

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.

The campaign to ban gas stoves is heating up

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.

I have previously noted that “it seems that everybody wants a gas range.”

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.

Range from the Generation Next house, Newton, MA. Click to enlarge.

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!

Also see: William Teach, Your Fridge Is An Agent Of Climate Catastrophe Or Something

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.

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The left love them some authoritarian government . . . when they are in power

A few days ago, William Teach noted an article from The Business Standard:

    What if democracy and climate mitigation are incompatible?

    The COP framework is ill-matched to solving climate change in a timely fashion because it does not solve the international governance dilemma at its heart

    by Cameron Abadi | Sunday, January 9, 2022 | 11:05 AM

    In the past 14 months, the United States and Germany both held national elections that placed climate change policy squarely at the center of national debate. The fact that two of the world’s five largest economies committed to addressing the world’s most pressing crisis through public discourse followed by public voting was an unprecedented democratic experiment.

    It did not work out as optimists hoped. On the one hand, the victorious parties in both countries vowed to achieve what was necessary to prevent the worst effects of climate change from occurring, in accordance with the international climate agreement unanimously approved in Paris in 2015.

    But on the other hand, in neither country can the resulting policies be described as fulfilling that promise.

There’s a lot more at the original. But the two money paragraphs are further down:

    Representatives from the US and German governments say their policies are the result of the necessary compromises demanded by the democratic process. But it is fair to wonder whether that is just another way of restating the problem. . . . .

    Democracy works by compromise, but climate change is precisely the type of problem that seems not to allow for it. As the clock on those climate timelines continues to tick, this structural mismatch is becoming increasingly exposed.

Now comes Talking Points Memo:

    This Supreme Court Case Could Make Or Break The Biden Presidency (And The Planet)

    by Kate Riga | Thursday, January 13, 2022 | 10:29 AM EST

    The Supreme Court will hear a case in February that could decide the future of the Biden presidency — and gut its ability to mitigate climate change in the face of congressional inaction.

    The case, West Virginia v. EPA, centers on the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. Should the Court move to limit what the EPA can do, that, alone, would be incredibly significant.

    But the Court, with its heavily conservative slant, could take the opportunity to go further, slashing the power of federal agencies across the board, a move that would hobble the Biden administration’s ability to enact its climate agenda as well as a long list of other priorities.

    “There is a significant likelihood that how the Court handles this case will affect how much leeway agencies have to interpret authority statutes going forward,” Jonathan Adler, founding director of the Coleman P. Burke Center for Environmental Law at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, told TPM.

    On environmental policy in particular, Congress has been unable or unwilling to pass major legislation for about 30 years, a stasis that has continued even as the dire threat of climate change has become evident. That leaves agencies like the EPA as the only entities available to take up the slack, slowing climate change through their regulatory and rule-making abilities. If the Court limits the EPA’s power to regulate, there are no strong, dependable avenues left on the federal level to make environmental policy.

Here is the fundamental error that the left assume: that because Congress has not passed the legislation they want, Congress has somehow failed to act. No, by not changing the law, Congress have said, in effect, we are happy enough with the laws already on the books.

    Fear of the Court’s potential for aggression here is not mere speculation. Last week’s arguments over a couple of Biden administration vaccine mandates gave the justices ample time to air their skepticism over the exercise of agency power, even in a case concerning health-care facilities where the agency’s congressionally-given authority is fairly explicit.

One thing is abundantly clear: Congress have given up far too much of their power to the executive branch, and mid-level bureaucrats who write ‘regulations’ which Congress would never pass if the members had to do something really radical like actually vote on them. If the President — any President — sometimes seems like a tinpot dictator, it’s because Congress have ceded to the executive too much authority in the first place.

    But the Court could go further, using this case in its quest to limit agency power. One of the tools the conservative justices could use to achieve that is the major questions doctrine, which holds that some issues are of such economic and political significance that the Court will assume that Congress did not intend to delegate that power to the agency unless the statute is specific.

    It’s squishy, and gives the justices significant power to smack down regulations: how do you determine levels of economic and political significance? How do you decide what statutory language is specific enough to count?

    The conservative justices also showed a willingness to approach cases through the lens of this doctrine in the vaccine mandate case last week, many suggesting in their questioning that Congress needed to be much more specific in its conveyance of authority.

Heaven forfend! that the Supreme Court say that it should take an act of Congress, rather than a decree from OSHA, that people would have to accept an injection into their bodies, or lose their jobs!

Do we really want to give to bureaucrats the authority to require the acceptance of a vaccine the long-term effects of which have yet to be tested? Do we really want to give to bureaucrats the authority to completely alter our entire energy production and transportation systems? That’s what Talking Points Memo seems to want, for one simple reason: what they want government to do are things which 535 individual Representatives and Senators would never pass, because they are, in the end, responsible to their constituents, to the actual voters.

If the public don’t want it, it should not be forced on us by government.

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Seen at Wawa

My thanks to William Teach of The Pirate’s Cove, who cross-posted here on the days I was away!

Driving back to Kentucky from the Keystone State on December 23rd, I stopped at the WaWa store on Pennsylvania Route 61, just north of Interstate 78, and saw something I’d never seen, in person, before: the WaWa had six — I think it was six; I didn’t actually count, and should have taken a quick picture, but didn’t — Tesla TSLA: (%) charging stations. This was at 3:45 PM EST.

Also see: William Teach: Climate Cult: Forget The Electric Vehicles You Can’t Afford. People Need To Drive Less

What I didn’t see were any Tesla’s actually being charged there. Oh, one of the charging stations was occupied, but by a mid-1990s, gasoline-engine beater car, using the charging area as a parking space.

Meanwhile, the store’s twelve or so gasoline pump queues, two pumps per queue, were fully occupied, with additional cars lined up to get fuel, and a fuel tanker was unloading gasoline or diesel into the underground storage tanks, because those vehicles are thirsty! I really should have taken pictures, on my phone, or as Sheriff Buford T Justice told his son, “Put the evidence in the car!”

I did pick up two boxes of WaWa coffee in Kuerig-cups for my wife and older daughter for Christmas.