Tag Archives: #ClimateChange

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California wants to close traditional power plants due to #ClimateEmergency Too bad they don't have the wind and solar plants in place to replace them!

The Pyrite State is forcing the closure of a nuclear and some natural gas powered electric power plants, but, surprise, surprise, they don’t have the solar and wind power generating capacity to replace them! From The Wall Street Journal:

    California Scrambles to Find Electricity to Offset Plant Closures

    State contends with coming loss of gas-fired power plants and its last remaining nuclear facility in transition to renewable energy

    By Katherine Blunt | October 16, 2021 | 2:50 PM EDT

    California is racing to secure large amounts of power in the next few years to make up for the impending closure of fossil-fuel power plants and a nuclear facility that provides nearly 10% of the electricity generated in the state.

    The California Public Utilities Commission has ordered utilities to buy an unprecedented amount of renewable energy and battery storage as the state phases out four natural-gas-fired power plants and retires Diablo Canyon, the state’s last nuclear plant, starting in 2024.

    The California Public Utilities Commission has ordered utilities to buy an unprecedented amount of renewable energy and battery storage as the state phases out four natural-gas-fired power plants and retires Diablo Canyon, the state’s last nuclear plant, starting in 2024.

An amusing statement, given the pile-up of container ships of the left coast that can’t be unloaded quickly. Right now, the batteries needed for electric storage are primarily manufactured in Japan, South Korea, and China. President Trump’s Department of Energy “wanted a secure domestic manufacturing supply chain that is independent of foreign sources of critical materials” in place by 2030, but there’s little progress toward that.

    While the companies are moving quickly to contract for power, the California Energy Commission and the state’s grid operator have recently expressed concern that the purchases may not be enough to prevent electricity shortages in coming summers.

    The order requires companies such as PG&E Corp. and Edison International’s Southern California Edison to bring more than 14,000 megawatts of power generation and storage capacity online in the coming years, an amount equal to roughly a third of the state’s forecast for peak summer demand.

    California has already been strained to keep the lights on this year. Wildfires have disrupted power transmission and a severe drought has crimped hydroelectric production throughout the West. Those involved in developing the new energy sources say they anticipate significant challenges in moving fast enough to ensure adequate supplies.

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: ‘Containergeddon’: California Emissions Law Caused the Supply Chain Crisis

“Significant challenges,” huh? Perhaps, just perhaps, they should build whatever new power facilities they intend before they take old ones out of service?

Wildfires and drought are no new things for California; wildfires happen every single year, and drought has been frequent. But even without a drought season, California doesn’t get a lot of rain. Easterners might not really appreciate that. Pennsylvania, for instance, averages 44 inches of rain and 38 inches of snow per year, Massachusetts 49 inches of rain and 47 inches of snow, Kentucky 48 inches of rain and 11 inches of snow, and Georgia 50 inches of rain plus an inch of snow. California gets just 22 inches of rain and 7 inches of snow. Missing three inches of rain is no big deal in the east; in California, it’s a serious problem.

    The state’s dilemma underscores the difficulties of rapidly transitioning to cleaner power resources, as the U.S. and many countries are now pledging to do in response to concerns about climate change. A California law passed in 2018 requires the state to decarbonize its power grid by 2045.

There’s a lot more at the original, but our most liberal state is already feeling the effects of the green policies it wants to impose, and those things have just barely begun.

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Libertarian Republican Thomas Massie drives a Tesla!

This tweet caught my eye:

When Representative Massie (R-KY 4th District) was asked about the time it took, he replied:

Mr Massie is, of course, a free citizen, and I absolutely support his right to choose which vehicle he wishes to drive. But that map shows just what it’s like, because once you get away from the northeast corridor, your stops better be well-planned, or you’re going to run out of sparktricity along the way. If I’m reading that map correctly, and Mr Massie is taking Interstate 64, there are charging stations in Charleston, West Virginia, Huntington, WV, and then the next one is in Lexington. May the Lord help the Distinguished Gentleman from Kentucky if one of his well planned stops is at a Tesla TSLA: (%) station that is out-of-service for some reason.

Charleston and Huntington are not that far apart, roughly an hour along I-64. Mr Massie’s home in Lewis County isn’t that far from Huntington.

But what Mr Massie has told us, that so many don’t want to acknowledge, is that to make the roughly 475 mile trip, which would take 7 hours in a gasoline powered car, takes two hours longer in his Tesla due to the length of time it takes to recharge the infernal thing.  He is obviously willing to take that extra time — at least, is willing to avoid the idiotic mask mandate aboard commercial airliners  — but people considering electric vehicles need to be aware of this. And the people pushing these vehicles on other people should not only be aware of this, but willing to tell the truth about it.

The truth is in short supply among the left.

 

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The Wall Street Journal notes that professionals who can are leaving cities and moving to the ‘exurbs’ What will this mean for the climate emergency activists who want us all to live in cities with mass transit?

The COVID-19 ‘pandemic’ has hastened a social change that was already happening. People were getting frustrated with the incredible urban density of our major cities, and the ever-increasing crime rates there, along with the problems of trying to bring up children in apartments with no outdoor space. It doesn’t matter how much money you have; bringing up children in your apartment in Central Park West still means that your kids have a long way to go to see things like actual grass and trees. From The Wall Street Journal:

    The ‘Great Reshuffling’ Is Shifting Wealth to the Exurbs

    The flow of white-collar workers to fringe outlying communities could reshape everything from transportation to real estate

    By Laura Forman | Updated: June 25, 2021 | 2:51 PM ET

    White collar workers are trading their expensive lives in the nation’s most densely populated areas for cheaper, greener pastures. Online real estate company Zillow Group calls it the “Great Reshuffling.”

    These moves will reshape transportation, real estate and an emerging fixture of American life: the exurb.

    Fringe outlying communities of major metropolitan regions were prized for their extreme privacy or more affordable housing before the pandemic, but were typically much less wealthy than the denser cities and affluent suburbs they surrounded.

I look at places like Hockessin, Delaware, where it was only a short commute, fewer than ten miles, from downtown Wilmington. While there was some gentrification going on in the city, out in Hockessin, when I lived there, 2000 to 2002, builders were building like mad in developments like Hockessin Green and Hockessin Chase, in part because New Castle County development ordinances restricted the number of homes which could be built on a 100-acre lot. This led to pricier homes built on larger lots, which meant larger lawns on which kids could play. These were things that the execs at MBNA and DuPont wanted.

I’ve had years of cramped up city life, living like a duck in a pen.
All I know that it’s a pity life can’t be simple again.

With the restrictions brought on by COVID-19, telecommuting was put into practice where it could be, and as some urban professionals found that they could do their work from home, it became reasonable to continue that, at least for some days during the week, even as the restrictions were ending. Of course, with the recent surge, there’s more reason for corporations to allow more frequent telecommuting. Add to that reduced office costs, and there can be real reasons why companies which can have workers work from home to allow it to continue, at least for some days during the week.[1]My younger daughter, an IT professional, worked from home for a few months during the shutdowns, and while she continued to be paid and worked, even she would admit that she was less productive while … Continue reading

    The Great Reshuffling will likely make these far-flung exurbs richer and denser. The median household income across U.S. exurbs was $74,573 as of 2019, according to data from The American Communities Project. That likely ticked up over the last year as city dwellers in major job centers such as San Francisco and New York relocated to exurbs for the same or similar salaries. In 2019 the median household income in the San Francisco Bay Area was nearly $115,000 and in the New York metro area it was more than $83,000.

What can you get in New York City on an $83,000 income? Where I live now, you could get a house and acreage and grass and trees; in Manhattan, you’d get a shoebox apartment in a six-story walkup on 96th Street!

2305 Beasley Avenue, Antioch, California.

Really? On February 20, 2020, 2305 Beasley Avenue in Antioch, California, sold for $360,000, and it’s just 1,174 ft², and wasn’t in good shape. It’s in Contra Costa County, the adjacent county to Oakland and Berkeley. I’m ‘familiar’ with the house because it was the one my parents bought when my father got back from Japan after the Korean war, and that’s where I lived up through the second grade.[2]I tend to look up my past residences on real estate sites. Yes, I still recognize the place, even though I haven’t seen it since I was eight years old. The chain link fence is a new addition, … Continue reading It looks pretty rough in the photos, but those were from the site when it was for sale; perhaps the new owners have made some improvements.

    The money stockpiled from leaving pricier areas, coupled with stimulus checks and enforced saving over the last year, are padding the bank accounts of these new movers. Rising credit scores are, in turn, enabling other major purchases such as cars. The new arrivals in the exurbs are finding they need their first or second automobile now that they are located in a more remote part of a metropolitan area. A January survey conducted by Engine Insights on behalf of Xperi DTS found 55% of millennials surveyed said car ownership was more important than ever.

But, but, but, the global warming climate change emergency activists want us to get away from personally owned vehicles, and commute by electric buses and trains. If the Journal story is correct, people are doing the opposite of that, moving into situations where cars are more important to them. Even if you commute by bus or train, odds are that you will need a car to get from your home to the commuter bus stop or train station. And now the ‘millennials,’ the group on which the global warming climate change emergency activists most heavily depend for political support are increasingly seeing personal vehicle ownership as important.

With a two car garage, I suppose the new owners of 2305 Beasley Avenue can install electric vehicle charging stations, and that’s what the urban professionals moving to the ‘exurbs’ are going to need.

But let’s face facts: what the global warming climate change emergency activists want is pretty much diametrically opposed to the American lifestyle and culture.

References

References
↑1 My younger daughter, an IT professional, worked from home for a few months during the shutdowns, and while she continued to be paid and worked, even she would admit that she was less productive while working from home. Too many distractions like puppies and cats and sunshine — her computer was set up on the screened in, northwest facing porch — led to perhaps not as much concentration.
↑2 I tend to look up my past residences on real estate sites. Yes, I still recognize the place, even though I haven’t seen it since I was eight years old. The chain link fence is a new addition, and the windows on the left of the house go to what used to be my bedroom. The old, roll out windows in metal frames have been replaced since I lived there.
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We can’t have a solar park there; it’ll shut down the drive-in theater!

You can’t have your solar park when it’s going to drive out a drive in theater!

When I spotted this on The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website, I was tempted to just forward it to William Teach, since this is more his kind of story than mine. But one photo in there prompted me to use it myself.

Joe Farruggio, the owner of the land that the Mahoning Drive-In sits on, says he believes Greenskies was unfairly bullied away from its plan to build a solar farm on the four-acre property. Photo by Steven M Falk, Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Photographer

Judging by that photo, maybe Greyskies would have been a better name than Greenskies! 🙂

Here’s the story:

A beloved Poconos drive-in theater was set to become a solar-panel farm. Then the fans stepped in.

Hundreds of die-hard fans of the Mahoning Drive-In banded together to convince a green-energy company to withdraw its plan.

By Vinny Vella | July 25, 2021

Virgil Cardamone couldn’t sleep July 13. He obsessed over how to relay the message that everything he and his friends had built over the last six years on a grassy lot in rural Carbon County was in jeopardy.

The next morning, it dawned on him: He would, as he put it “tear his heart open” in a smartphone video broadcast over social media, pleading with hundreds of the regulars at the Mahoning Drive-In to help save the institution.

In the six-minute video, Cardamone laid out the scenario: A green-energy company out of Connecticut had paid to option the land the theater sat on for a solar-panel farm. The local zoning board was going to vote in a few weeks, and the 38-year-old was rallying fans of ‘80s classics, forgotten B-movies, and films everywhere to plead with Greenskies Clean Energy LLC to change its mind.

“The drive-in will never die,” Cardamone said in his sign-off, flicking tears out of his eyes with his thumb. “Mark my words.”

I moved away from what Vinny Vella, the article author, called “tourist darling Jim Thorpe” on July 1, 2017, roughly ten miles from the Mahoning Drive-In, and back to the Bluegrass State, but I’d certainly passed the place, on state route 443, many times. While my wife had taken our kids to see a few movies there, I hadn’t gone myself. Still, it was a local-to-me story; we lived in Jim Thorpe for fifteen years!

Two days and hundreds of emails, Facebook posts, and phone calls later, he posted a second video, announcing, almost in disbelief, that the grassroots campaign had been successful. Greenskies had agreed to pull their plan, and the theater’s landlord had expressed a willingness to sell the four-acre property to Cardamone and his business partners.

“To have the whole entire culture rise up and let them know how much it means to them, for me, I feel this business is invincible, even with all the madness going on,” Cardamone said in an interview last week. “This place is an escape for people, and it’s a celebration of a simpler time.”

So, the drive-in has been saved, at least for now.

I’m not sure just how much electricity a four-acre solar park would generate. The Nesquehoning Solar Park, off of state route 54 between Nesquehoning and Lake Hauto, for which I supplied some, but not all, of the concrete during its construction, covers, according to its website, 100 acres, and “will generate enough electricity to power 1,450 homes.” At the same efficiency, a four-acre solar park would power roughly 58 homes.

Regardless of that, some drive-in and old film buffs have managed to save the Mahoning Drive-In. What, I have to ask, will the global warming climate change emergency activists say about that? One thing is certain: in the push for ‘renewable’ energy sources, primarily solar and wind power, a lot of acreage is going to have to be taken up for solar panels and windmills, and there will always be pushback from those who don’t want the land used that way, and who object to having their scenic views taken up.

As it happens, we have more than four acres on the farm, and good, sunny, southwestern exposure; it would be perfect for a solar farm. But our best view is to the southwest as well, and there’s no way Mrs Pico would ever consent to spoil it with solar panels.

Photo taken on June 17th, while baling our second crop of hay for the season. The near tree line begins the downslope to the Kentucky River.

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Where there’s ‘heat inequality,’ Joe Biden wants to fight ‘racial injustice’ by making wealthier people poorer, not poor people wealthier

The Seattle Times print edition had a headline which has sparked uncounted internet meme’s, though the article title, when I found it online, was different; it had been updated six days later:

New maps of King County, Seattle show how some communities are harder hit by heat waves

By Evan Bush | June 23, 2021 at 6:30 PM PDT | Updated: June 29, 2021 at 8:30 AM PDT

If this weekend’s heat wave sends temperatures soaring well above 90 degrees in King County as meteorologists expect, some communities are likely to suffer much worse than neighbors mere miles away.

That take-away comes from a new map of temperature data throughout King County collected during a scorching day last July. The map, which was publicized by the county Wednesday, shows how the impacts of heat waves and the effects of climate change depend — even at a small scale — on where you live. Continue reading →

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Don’t chill out so much!

I responded to William Teach’s article Rolling Stone: We’re In An Air Conditioned Nightmare Or Something by noting:

A couple of months ago, on the Weather Channel’s AMHQ, Stephanie Abrams went a bit off script and called Jen Carfagno over to the side of the screen. The camera caught her, in the middle of the show, as having pulled on her puffy coat when she was supposed to be off-camera. I found it amusing.

Of course, the on-camera women on the Weather Channel almost always wear dresses or skirts, and women’s ridiculous shoes, and it seems that bare arms are pretty much called for, not just in the summer, but other seasons as well.

Women working in offices have long complained that office air conditioning is set too low, and there are valid scientific reasons for them to think that, reasons which go beyond the differences in the way men and women dress.

Well, today I saw this amusing retweet by Mrs Carfagno:

Of course, while Mr Wooten is wearing long pants, a shirt, suit coat, socks and men’s dress shoes, Mrs Carfagno is wearing what her network seems to assign as appropriate dress for female anchors. I have noted that the women on the Weather Channel are always dressed up, while many of the men appear with rolled up sleeves, often eschewing a tie, but, of course there’s no sexism involved in any of that! 🙂

Office air conditioning is too cold, women think, and science says they’re right

A new study says that office air conditioning may be biased against women, with temperatures more suitable to the average male of the 1960s.

Aug. 4, 2015, 11:25 AM EDT / Updated July 5, 2017, 12:40 PM EDT / Source: TODAY
By Scott Stump

To all the women bundled in sweaters and blankets in your office air conditioning even though it’s 100 degrees outside: A recent study says that it’s not all in your head. It really IS cold.

As many women bundle up against the arctic air conditioning, their male counterparts one cubicle over have no idea what all the fuss is about. It turns out that science says the office A/C may be biased toward temperatures that more comfortable for men — thanks to a formula from more than 50 years ago.

A 2016 study in the journal Nature Climate Change notes that the temperatures in many office buildings are based on a formula developed in the 1960s that employs the resting metabolic rate of 154-pound, 40-year-old man.

Wait, what? A 40-year-old man weighing just 154 lb, and they thought that was average?

More than half a century later, the workforce is much different, but the thermostat isn’t. Half of the workforce is now female, and many of them are wrapping themselves up in blankets to be able to type without shivering. The new study finds that females prefer the average temperature at home and in the office to be 77 degrees, compared to 71.6 degrees for men.

“Women tend to have lower basal metabolic rates, so they tend to burn off energy a lot slower,” Dr. Devi Nampiaparampil of NYU School of Medicine told TODAY. “They actually give off less heat than men, so they tend to be colder.”

Much of the rest of the article is about different office wear for men and women.

Rolling Stone said:

But long before that, the most obvious impact of extreme heat is that it pushes people to turn on – and turn up – their air-conditioning. With cool air, you can feel the chaos within you subsiding. But it comes at a cost: AC sucks up huge amounts of electricity, which strains the grid and increases the risk of blackouts. More electricity also means burning fossil fuels, which means more CO2 pollution (President Biden has promised a 100 percent clean electricity grid by 2035, but that’s still a long way off). In addition, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), the human-made chemicals inside of air-conditioners used to cool the air, are super greenhouse gases, up to 3,000 times more potent than CO2 at trapping heat in the atmosphere. What it comes down to is this: By cooling ourselves off, we risk cooking ourselves to death.

But this poses an interesting question for the global warming climate change emergency activists: since setting the thermostat higher during the summer will save electricity, and the fossil fuels burned to produce it, the activists should be all for it! Hey, ditch those coats and ties for shorts and flip flops!

Not sure how that’ll work out in the C Suite.

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The urban #ClimateChange activists cannot see outside their own little worlds.

I do not watch a lot of network television. My go to networks for TV are the various Discovery Channel networks, primarily HGTV, DIY Network, and Great American Country, and I watch a lot of the home building and home search shows.

Of course, all of the house hunters have their wish lists, but one thing is very consistent: people want gas ranges in their kitchens.[1]If you watch the cooking shows on the Food Channel, as my wife and daughters do, you’ll see that all of them, with the exception of Molly Yeh’s Girl Meets Farm, use gas ranges. But what people want is not what the left want to allow them to have. From The Wall Street Journal:

Battle Brews Over Banning Natural Gas to Homes

Cities are considering measures to phase out gas hookups amid climate concerns, spurring some states to outlaw such prohibitions

passed the first such prohibition in the U.S. in 2019.

The bans in turn have led Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Kansas and Louisiana to enact laws outlawing such municipal prohibitions in their states before they can spread, arguing that they are overly restrictive and costly. Ohio is considering a similar measure.

The outcome of the battle, largely among Democratic-led cities and Republican-run states, has the potential to reshape the future of the utility industry, and demand for natural gas, which the U.S. produces more of than any other country.

Proponents of phasing out natural gas say their aim is to reduce planet-warming emissions over time by fully electrifying new homes and buildings as wind and solar farms proliferate throughout the country, making the power grid cleaner.

There’s more at the original. What people in general want, the left say is bad, bad, bad! for us. One wonders what the municipal government leaders pondering these measures have in their own homes.

My wife and I live in the country; the nearest town is four miles away, and there are no natural gas lines out this far. When we moved in, in July of 2017, the house was total electric: electric heat pump for HVAC, electric water heater, and an electric range.

Come December of 2017, it got unusually cold in the Bluegrass State, with nighttime lows a few degrees below zero, and daytime highs in the teens. Our poor heat pump was running all the time, and the house was still cooler then we would have liked.

In January of 2018 came what the Weather Channel called Winter Storm Hunter, an ice storm which knocked out the power. Where we live, practically at the end of Jackson Energy Cooperative’s service area, it was 4½ days before the sparktricity was restored.

Mrs Pico went to stay with our daughters, who had a nice, warm apartment in Lexington. Me? I had to stay at the farm, to take care of the critters and the water pipes. Fortunately, it was warmed than it had been the previous month, but, by the time we got power back, it was down to 38º F in the house. I spent a lot of time in bed, under the covers and comforter.

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.

Our house is a fixer-upper, and we knew that when we bought it. The kitchen was going to be the first remodel project, and my wife wanted, like everyone else, a gas range. Out in the boonies, that meant propane. With the problems of the previous winter, we decided to replace the very old electric water heater with a propane model, and we added a propane fireplace as well.[2]I wanted a wood stove, but my wife vetoed that; too much of a mess, she said. If the power goes out for 4½ days again — and a somewhat nearby neighbor has told me that her power has been out for over a week before — we’ll be warm, able to cook, and have hot water.

Fast forward to early March of this year, and the flooding in eastern Kentucky. The flooding was so bad that the river gauge at Ravenna, the closest one to me, jammed at 38.4 feet, but the level was estimated to have crested at 41.00 ft, topping the worst previous flood, on February 4, 1939, which saw a crest of 39.37 feet. We were more fortunate than some people, in that we did not lose our house,[3]A lot of people around here did lose their homes, so we count ourselves as fortunate. but it was a very near thing: the HVAC system, which is in the crawl space under the house, was flooded and destroyed.

That meant, in early March, no heat.

But, after I stabilized the propane tank, which floated but I had tied in place so it didn’t float down the Kentucky River, as a lot of other people’s tanks had done, I was able to turn the propane back on, and once again, we had heat. The electricity never went out, but the electric HVAC system was totaled.

Were the left to have their way, we’d have suffered through early March without heat.

The left seem unable to think outside of their own comfort zones. When the electricity goes out, the power companies work to restore service in cities first, to get the largest number of people back into service fastest. The city dwellers in San Francisco and Seattle aren’t on the far ends of power lines, and don’t quite see that electric service in rural areas is dependent on long lines, stretched out over poles subject to the weather. They don’t understand how what they want imposes significant burdens on other people.

References

References
↑1 If you watch the cooking shows on the Food Channel, as my wife and daughters do, you’ll see that all of them, with the exception of Molly Yeh’s Girl Meets Farm, use gas ranges.
↑2 I wanted a wood stove, but my wife vetoed that; too much of a mess, she said.
↑3 A lot of people around here did lose their homes, so we count ourselves as fortunate.
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If only the global warming climate change emergency activists understood what they ask

My good friend William Teach of The Pirate’s Cove noted that some climate activists believe they may have to move away from strictly non-violent means to get the change they want. Andreas Malm, author of How to Blow up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire,

absolutely rules out violence that harms people, but he wants the climate movement to include sabotage and property destruction in its plans.

If a natural gas pipeline is sabotaged, in a way in which no one is injured but the gas flow is cut off, I suppose that would meet Mr Malm’s criterion. But, if the flow of gas is cut off, that will mean that people wouldn’t have it available, to what, heat their homes in January, or have electricity for their workplaces and lose their jobs?

Natural gas is part of our infrastructure, something not a consumer item as much as it is a means of modern life.

48% of all homes in the US use natural gas for heat, while only 37% use electricity. Interestingly, the only region in which electricity is the primary source of heat is the Confederacy, in which winters are normally milder.

Today, natural gas piped directly into homes is the dominant source of heating fuel in every region but the South, where more than 60 percent of households used electricity in 2013. The South is also the region that has seen the greatest shift away from coal and toward natural gas for electric power generation.

The Midwest sees the greatest use of natural gas for heating, with more than 65 percent of homes there using gas.

But natural gas use for heating is declining. Every region in the U.S. except for the Northeast is seeing a slight drop in favor of electricity, according to an EIA report released Thursday.

More people may be using electricity for heating instead of natural gas because they may be moving into newer homes that use electricity, and use it more efficiently than older electrically heated homes, according to the EIA.

In the Northeast, the opposite is occurring, with the use of heating oil diminishing there in favor of natural gas. Heating oil is nearly unheard of outside the Northeast, which represents about 80 percent of all U.S. heating oil use.

More than 30 percent of all households in the Northeast used heating oil in 2005. That number dropped to less than 25 percent in 2013. Heating oil stocks have become tight in recent years with several Northeastern states, including New York, requiring heating oil to be marketed with lower sulfur levels.

The woodstove I installed in our house in Jim Thorpe. Not that I had installed, but installed personally. Click to enlarge.

It seems that the liberals in New York and New England love them some heating oil! My previous home, in the southern end of the Poconos, used heating oil, and I later supplemented that with a wood stove. Why? It gets cold there, and the wood stove, not only helping in a house with an older, one-zone system, was a back-up in the event of a power outage. (Heating oil furnaces still depend on electricity to run.)

The northeast was also the area of our fastest early population growth, and the densely populated northeast has a lot of older, more poorly insulated homes. What the warmunists don’t understand — well, part of what they don’t understand, because, really, they don’t understand much at all — is that it costs money to retrofit an older home with better insulation, and it costs money to change out existing heating systems for newer ones, and that it costs money to do all of the things they want, and the clerk working at the Turkey Hill in downtown Jim Thorpe or the concrete mixer driver living in Brodheadsville can’t afford to just do those things.[1]Mr Teach uses the term ‘warmist’ as a mocking reference to the global warming climate change emergency activists. Given their seeming insistence on government controlling everything and … Continue reading

The warmunists all seem to be the people who are already well off, the people who don’t have to worry about putting food on the table, the people for whom day-to-day survival isn’t quite so guaranteed. Not only are they not poor, they don’t seem to have grown up poor, either, and have no flaming idea what things can be like for those who aren’t well off. It’s easy for them to say that these things can just be done, because they can afford them when they come.

Well, I grew up poor. I know what it’s like to have spent a couple of months without running water because the pipes froze and my mother didn’t have the money to hire a plumber right away. I know what it’s like to have frequent meals of chicken livers, rice and spinach because it’s inexpensive food.

Of course, the warmunists think our homes should be all-electric, because CO2, but when we bought our current home, in eastern Kentucky, it was all-electric. It is a fixer-upper as well, and we knew I’d have to work on it.

My wife wanted a gas stove as we planned the kitchen remodel, which meant, out in the country, propane; there are no natural gas lines out here. But, that first winter here, of 2017-18, before we got to the kitchen remodel, we had what the Weather Channel called Winter Storm Hunter, an ice storm which hit eastern Kentucky. The power went out . . . for 4½ days, in January. Our heat-pump electric heat, which wasn’t all that great anyway during a winter in which we saw temperatures below 10º F, wasn’t going to heat anything without power. Mrs Pico went to Lexington, to stay with our daughters, but I had to stay here, to take care of the house and 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.

It got down to 38º F in the house by the end, and was that warm only due to a couple of sunny days. But, due to this, our remodeling plans changed: not only would we have a propane range, but we changed out the (old) electric water heater for one which used propane, and added a propane fireplace as well. Neither the water heater nor fireplace requires electricity to operate, though there is an electric blower on the fireplace to better circulate the heat. We can use the range top without electricity, though not the oven.

OK, OK, it’s true: I wrote this in a way to show off my mad skillz in remodeling. 🙂 But it is meant to point out that the global warming climate change emergency activists don’t know squat about how people in this country actually live. To say that I have to stop using utilities which use fossil fuels is to say that I have to freeze in the winter if the power goes out. Sorry, not sorry, but I don’t intend to make that sacrifice! To say that everybody has to go all-electric ignores the fact that the 63% of the American people, many of whom could not reasonably afford it, would have to change their heating systems. To say that we have to go to all plug-in electric cars ignores the fact that many (most?) people would not have the ability to charge such vehicles at home, overnight, but would have to spend hours each week just sitting at commercial charging stations.

Showing off another corner of the kitchen.

When you have people like presidential Climate Envoy John Kerry, net worth $250 million, married to Teresa Heinz, net worth $750 million to $1.2 billion, leading the way in global warming climate change emergency activism, you have people who have no flaming idea what it’s like to be poor, what it’s like to live, to use the words of Robert E Howard, with their lives nailed to their spines, who think that everything can and should be just so easy to do, if only we’d make the commitment to do it, because being able to throw money at their problems has never been a problem for them.

That most people can’t just throw money at their problems? That an unexpected $400 emergency expense would be difficult for about 40% of Americans to afford — a figure from before the economic dislocations caused by the reaction to COVID-19 — is something so far outside their paradigm that the warmunists can’t comprehend it? These things simply don’t occur to the activists. We need to stop listening to them.

References

References
↑1 Mr Teach uses the term ‘warmist’ as a mocking reference to the global warming climate change emergency activists. Given their seeming insistence on government controlling everything and forcing people to do as they wish, I’ve changed it to ‘warmunist,’ the etymology of which ought to be obvious.
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Even in oh-so-liberal California, 20% of plug-in electric vehicle owners are trading them back in for gasoline-powered cars

We have previously noted the difficulties that people can encounter with plug-in electric vehicles, and that consumers really aren’t that thrilled with them.

Now, from good, green, but very, very blue California comes this story:

1 in 5 electric vehicle owners in California switched back to gas because charging their cars is a hassle, new research shows

Dominick Reuter | Friday, April 30, 2021 | 12:41 PM

In roughly three minutes, you can fill the gas tank of a Ford Mustang and have enough range to go about 300 miles with its V8 engine.

But for the electric Mustang Mach-E, an hour plugged into a household outlet gave Bloomberg automotive analyst Kevin Tynan just three miles of range.

“Overnight, we’re looking at 36 miles of range,” he told Insider. “Before I gave it back to Ford, because I wanted to give it back full, I drove it to the office and plugged in at the charger we have there.”

Let’s be clear here: “plugged into a household outlet” here means a standard, 110-volt wall receptacle. Those will never cut it.

Standard home outlets generally put out about 120 volts of power at what electric vehicle aficionados call “Level 1” charging, while the high-powered specialty connections offer 240 volts of power and are known as “Level 2.” By comparison, Tesla’s “Superchargers,” which can fully charge its cars in a little over an hour, offer 480 volts of direct current.

The only practical way to recharge your Chevy Dolt Bolt is if you have a dedicated 24 volt, 50 amp circuit available with which to power your Level 2 charger. As it happens, I have separate electric power in my garage/shop, and the knowledge, skills and tools necessary to add that kind of circuit. Though I do not intend to buy a plug in electric, as I am working on my shop, I’ll install such a circuit simply because it’s easier to do it with the walls still open, and, for me, it would be inexpensive.

I’ve looked at one of my sister’s garage; I could install such a circuit for her there as well, but it would be more complicated. She’s lucky that her favorite brother can do that kind of work.

But what about people who don’t have friends or family who could do that job? That means hiring a real electrician, and that could be well over $1,000, even for a relatively simple installation. If a sub-panel is required, due to the existing electric service in the dwelling, the dollars start to add up.

While I’m not poor myself, I do live in a poor, rural county in eastern Kentucky. While I have good, 200 amp service to my garage/shop, there are plenty, plenty! of homes in this area that have 100 amp service to their poorer homes, and it would not surprise me in the slightest to find some places which still have old 40 or 60 amp fused service rather than circuit breaker boxes.

That difference is night and day, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Energy by University of California Davis researchers Scott Hardman and Gil Tal that surveyed Californians who purchased an electric vehicle between 2012 and 2018.

Roughly one in five plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) owners switched back to owning gas-powered cars, in large part because charging the batteries was a pain in the… trunk, the researchers found.

Of those who switched, over 70% lacked access to Level 2 charging at home, and slightly fewer than that lacked Level 2 connections at their workplace.

They didn’t do their due diligence is what the article is saying. They got caught up with going green without asking the right questions. So much for the liberals being smart!

“If you don’t have a Level 2, it’s almost impossible,” said Tynan, who has tested a wide range of makes and models of PEVs over the years for his research.

Even with the faster charging, a Chevy Volt he tested still needed nearly six hours to top its range back up to 300 miles from nearly empty – something that takes him just minutes at the pump with his family SUV.

This is the part that the left don’t want to talk about. We have had fun with the story about Tesla TSLA: (%) drivers waiting for hours, in a half-mile-long line to top off at a Tesla ‘supercharger’ station. Even at a 480-volt supercharger, it can take more than an hour to fully recharge. And having worked with 480 volt three phase circuitry throughout my career in concrete plants, I’m not 100% certain that the general public ought to be handling them.

There’s more at the original, but it boils down to this: plug-in electric vehicles are a fine second car, useful for tooling around town, perhaps commuting to work, if you have a garage or dedicated, secure parking area in which you can have a Level 2 charging unit installed, and if you have a reliable gasoline-powered primary vehicle.

And that means: if you have plenty of money! You need to have the money to be able to afford an ‘extra’ car, and you need to have the money to afford the residence in which you can have that dedicated charging station. Somehow, some way, the oh-supportive-of-poor-people left just can’t understand that what they think everybody should do is not something that everybody can afford.