The Unheated Masses

A winter weather event clobbered a large part of the country this past week. Breathlessly dubbed a "bomb cyclone" by meteorologists as interested in marketing themselves as they are in actually sharing the weather with us, the event, which is definitionally a rapid pressure drop above a certain latitude, crippled the heart of the nation, killed several dozen people, resulted in more vehicular accidents than can easily be counted, and generally ground our lives to a near-halt.

It also prompted this exhortation from the local power company in the NYC area

This shortage could be seen coming from miles away.

A few years back, before his arrogance, handsiness, and general misanthropy pried him out of the Governor's Mansion, Dear Leader Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York and heir to a name canonized by progressives because his father made a good speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention, blocked multiple natural gas pipeline projects that would have supplied both the NYC area and New England with copious amounts of the clean and abundant energy source. This followed his fracking ban, which left a good swathe of upstate New York wallowing in economic stagnation when it could have experienced the same boom as northern Pennsylvania has enjoyed from tapping into the Marcellus Shale.

Cuomo was all-in on "greening" New York State, though the fact that he also shut down New York City's greenest and most reliable power source, the Indian Point nuclear power plant exposed him as a political hack rather than a global warming true-believer. He had aspirations to the White House, and so he had to play to the Left's delusions regarding global warming.

Mitigation.

Yes, delusions. Rushing an American state to net-zero is pointless in a world where China, the rest of the BRICS nations, and the developing world have no intention of committing to such economically suicidal folly.

There are far better, more practical, and more cost-effective ways to benefit the environment while also taking care of the state's citizens, and robustly pursuing natural gas extraction and use, to displace dirtier power such as that from coal, checks all the boxes. But, gas has been deemed Bad by the Best-and-Brightest, so political ambitions trump doing right by the people who he served.

So, now, we are being asked to cut back, so that our neighbors don't freeze.

This is par for the course for our “betters.” They seek to impose pain and privation upon us in order to “save the planet.” Neither their remedies nor their actions support the urgency they purport to. If global warming were truly as dire a threat as we’re told, we’d be building nuclear plants like crazy, instead of trying to make wind and solar “happen” by decree, diktat, and proclamation.

As the green follies continue, more shortages are inevitable, and the “please” part of the conservation effort will morph to “thou shalt be cold” rationing. The deaths these will cause will be downplayed and whitewashed, just as Cuomo’s catastrophic decisions regarding nursing homes during the COVID crisis, and the concomitant deaths, have been curated out of the public’s awareness. The suffering, however, will not be abated by the whitewashers (who will in general suffer far less than the unwashed masses), and the dead will be just as dead.

I wonder what the thermostats in the mayor's and governor's homes are set to?

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A post-script: Global warming fanatics won’t like to hear this, but extreme cold is FAR more deadly than extreme heat. Starving people of energy in the winter is (or should be) a crime against humanity, yet that’s exactly what our (generally wealthy) Best-and-Brightest see as the path to their utopian wind-and-solar fantasy. That many of them think the planet is overpopulated may not be a coincidence.

Meanwhile, I’ll re-thump the nuclear drum.

What happens when you drop a foot of snow on a solar panel field?

What happens when you drop a foot of snow on a nuclear power plant?

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Peter.