Rationing Electricity, A/C, and Heat

A lot of humans have died from heat exposure, in freezing temperatures, in wilderness, in war trenches, frozen on Mt. Everest, marching in war convoys, marching to concentration camps, inside concentration camp barracks, in gulags in subzero temperatures, submerged in icy water, in crashes on mountain tops or jungles, hiking, mountain climbing, and many other horrible conditions.

Angel, a Jew sent to Auschwitz in Nazi Germany, witnessed an entire ward freeze to death overnight, without beds, heat, and food. She alone survived with an old man because she spent all night trying to warm him up, rubbing his hands, legs, face, and neck. When the sun came up, there was an eerie silence around them, they were surrounded by frozen corpses. Nobody should suffer such inhuman conditions.

Nobody should suffer extreme heat or freeze to death in their homes because they cannot afford heat or air conditioning from whatever source or because they cannot pay their utility bills.

Nobody should be forced by the global elites’ U.N. Agenda 2030 to achieve “net zero” emissions by setting their furnaces to a high of 60 degrees Fahrenheit in winter and their air conditioners to 80+ F degrees in summer.

There was nothing positive about the installation of Smart Meters around the globe starting ten years ago. They are more expensive than traditional meters, don’t last long, the cost per kWh per customer has increased dramatically, it spies on each household without a search warrant, it cuts off power to homes during high demand in the coldest or hottest days of the year, sell the data it collects to third parties, bombards homes with radiation every 12 seconds, and it causes health issues in sensitive customers when the smart meter is attached directly to the home.

The Telegraph has reported on February 8, 2022, that “Smart meters are to automatically send energy suppliers half-hourly updates on their customers’ power use in a revolutionary move that will allow ‘surge pricing’ in millions of households’ bills.”

The energy regulator Ofgem will be granted legal powers in May to charge customers at peak times more for electricity usage and customers must “opt in.”

Smart Meters were first introduced as “opt in” but became mandatory quickly and people had to fight in courts to be able to ‘opt out.’ Claimed price savings and convenience from the installation of Smart Meters never materialized. It only benefitted the utilities because it did not have to store excess capacity for times when the demand was higher. The “surge pricing” is also described as saving customers money whereby said customers would use electricity at times when the charges are lower. https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/smart-meter-overhaul-to-open-gates-for-e2-80-98surge-pricing-e2-80-99/ar-AATDUJ6?ocid=uxbndlbing

Customers who live in old homes, use outdated appliances, need electricity around the clock for life-saving devices or more heat will be penalized, and will pay much higher prices on fixed incomes.

Might such individuals who live on fixed incomes and who might have their power cut off for lack of payment freeze in their own homes or die of heat strokes? It has happened certainly in the U.S. and elsewhere during extremely cold winters and very hot summers.

Imagine millions of electric cars, all trying to charge at the same time during the night, and the large economy also pulling electricity from the grid during those times. What exactly would happen to the grid? It will certainly crash, resulting in unnecessary deaths from freezing, heat strokes, or the inability to use life-saving devices.

Imagine so much deforestation to meet the cardboard boxes and paper bags demand that people would be unable to find sufficient wood to heat their homes.

Imagine the prices of home heating fuel escalating due to the anti-fossil fuel policies of western administrations around the world who harmonize their globalist policies to dispense with fossil fuels by 2050.

Imagine being unable to obtain the necessary electricity from solar panels and wind turbines to supply large economies and the population. How many will freeze to death or die of heat strokes due to such idiotic and unworkable socialist regime policies?

It seems that we are not willing to learn from history, not just our own, but the history of other socialist regimes run by the Communist Party into the ground.

Even before the harsh winter of 1984-85, the socialist regime in my former country was not prepared to deliver adequate levels of energy supplies to the people. Winters had power shortages, heat, sudden and arbitrary electricity, water, and hot water cutoffs, and rationing of gasoline at the pumps.

Private cars were banned on the roads, heat to apartments, buildings, and factories was cut in half, in hopes to save energy at the expense of the people. It did not just create misery all around, but it caused so much unnecessary illness and death by freezing. Babies died in incubators in hospitals when electric plugs were pulled to save energy.

Former Ambassador David B. Funderburk wrote in his book, Pinstripes and Reds, that in the winter of 1984-85 “reports indicated that one of every three babies born in hospitals in Romania during the winter of 1984-85 either died or was born severely ill and deformed.” (p. 80)

The extreme cold and snow were gone by April 1985, but private cars were still banned from the roads and highways in order to save on fossil fuels. The lack of energy, heat, and food killed a lot of very young and old people that infamous winter.

Are we willing to suffer such death by freezing and famine in our former land of plenty because the country is run by a socialist globalist cabal intent on destroying the U.S. and bringing it into the dark ages? How much anemic light and darkness, and cold in winter are you willing to tolerate in our stores and homes? And for that matter, how many people are willing to sacrifice who will die in summertime from excessive heat without the benefit of air conditioning, refrigeration, and the electricity that runs them?

 

 

Russia’s Veto Saved the Fossil Fuels for Now

In the 1980s, the environmentalists believed that using paper grocery bags harms the environment by excessive deforestation, so they moved in the direction of replacing the paper grocery bags with plastic ones. It made sense, plastic bags made from petroleum by-products were certainly cheaper and more plentiful.

Fast forward to 2021, environmentalist governments in counties like Fairfax, Virginia, moved to replace the plastic bags with paper bags by charging a tax of 5 cents per plastic bag previously given free (included in the price because nothing is free). Furthermore, a fine of $500 will be levied on anyone who dares to leave grass and other yard clippings on curbside in plastic bags other than heavy paper bags.

Fossil fuels have become environmentally and politically such a Democrat hot potato that they have been labeled public enemy number one, including plastics.

What is Fairfax County and other like-minded counties around the nation doing with the 5 cents tax per bag, or 8 cents in other places? Will they fund the bloated Democrat government or their guaranteed basic income schemes? And how is this tax going to solve the manufactured global warming which gave rise to a very lucrative climate change industry and a huge money-maker?

When Amazon and other online retailers run out of places to buy cheap shipping boxes, I wonder which forests are they going to cut down, and can excessive demand for paper and carboard boxes keep up with supply and with tree growth?

The U.N. Security Council moved to vote on December 13, 2021, on a resolution on climate change co-authored by Ireland and Niger, under the guise that adverse climate change can “lead to … social tensions …, exacerbating, prolonging, or contributing to the risk of future conflicts and instability and posing a key risk to global peace, security, and stability.” The concern is that climate change affects more negatively “women, children, ethnic minorities, and the most vulnerable.” Climate Change and Security: Vote on a Resolution*: What's In Blue : Security Council Report

According to the New York Times, “the resolution, which enjoyed wide-ranging support, would have significantly expanded the criteria used by the most powerful U.N. agency to justify intervening in armed conflicts around the world.” Russia Blocks U.N. Move to Treat Climate as Security Threat - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

It is claimed that the U.N. resolution was supported by 100 countries. Twelve of the fifteen Security Council countries signed on, but Russia’s veto blocked its passage. China abstained, and India, with its invited temporary membership status, also declared against the resolution. It is obvious that all three countries have similar interests, the survival of fossil fuels.

The U.S. government has been busy replacing fossil fuels with wind and solar power, doing severe damage to its economy and weakening its position in the world as a superpower. Biden closed the Keystone pipeline on day one and interrupted supply. “Nearly 40% of America’s electricity is produced from natural gas. When gas goes up, so does your electric bill.” Varney on the 'price' of Biden eliminating fossil fuels | Fox Business

The regime stopped giving new drilling permits on federal land and interrupted off-shore drilling. U.S. became again dependent on oil imports.  During President Trump’s administration, America became an oil exporter.

If the U.N. Security Council vote would have been unanimous in favor of the resolution, then members who would fail to take “drastic” measures recommended by “experts” to green their economies immediately, then they would have been considered aggressors against the global governance.

What might have been the expectations to green a country’s economy urgently? To close coal mines, oil derricks, refineries, oil and gas pipelines, and to give up fossil fuels immediately, with huge economic costs and disastrous economic results for that country.

If a country would have refused to comply, then the most intimidating measures against it would have been justifiable, imposing a global dictatorship of the U.N. to save the planet from climate change Armageddon.

So, Russia, China, and India, with one fifth of the world’s land surface and almost half of its population, saved fossil fuels for now. They viewed the manufactured global warming as a political fantasy and the preservation of their economies and of their economic development as most important for their peoples.

The West wants electric cars (they did not do so well recently in one foot of snow stuck for 24 hours on I-95 in Virginia), electric bikes, electric buses, ships, home and business heat and light from solar panels and wind turbines (when the wind blows and the sun shines, otherwise it is cold and dark). China wants coal burning power plants and builds them at high rates. Russia depends on natural gas and pipelines. And India is adding more coal mines.

Biden’s Green New Deal is neither new, nor green, nor a deal, it is a political plan aimed at killing fossil fuels and destroying the American economy that depends on the fossil fuels’ reliability and consistency.

So, the global warming/climate change scheme to enact global governance has been defeated so far. But the grand plan of one world government might still be realized. To achieve it now, the globalists are bringing out the pandemic green passports of Covid vaccination and the social scoring system which is already underway in China and in America.

Restricting movement of the population can be achieved in more ways than just taking away their fossil fuels; the government can cause severe inflation, double gasoline and natural gas prices, make their currency worth less, obstruct the supply chain of necessary goods and food, restrict access to clinics and hospitals, and restrict domestic and international travel. Under draconian Covid-19 lockdown rules, two years after the declared pandemic, Australians cannot travel more than 29 km from home. How Sydney residents can travel more than 5km from home for exercise (msn.com)

Mayor Muriel Bowser of D.C. has already enacted draconian rules that a person must show I.D. and a vaccine card to enter any business in D.C. It is racist to be asked to show I.D. to vote but it is necessary to enter a business.

If you have a green passport, you are not just vaccinated and boostered, but it is proof that you are now a compliant global citizen, and you can be given (by the global government) the privilege to enter buildings, to fly, to travel, to board a ship, to ride a bus, a train, you can use a bank, you can buy or rent a home, you can move from on town to another, and you can attend school. The social scoring system works wonders with population compliance and obedience under the Chinese communist dictatorship.

For now, Russia, China, and India have saved fossil fuels. I am not sure who or what is going to save a weakened America from its Marxist regime in control in Washington. They are busy printing money for trillion-dollar pet social programs and to finance national debt v. GDP which has reached astronomic proportions (127.61% federal and 141.24% total) at the time of this writing. The military is busy hunting down fictional, Democrat-invented systemic racism. U.S. National Debt Clock : Real Time (usdebtclock.org)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Electricity and Social Emotional Learning for Equity of Woke Warriors

The Roman soldier was not concerned about the fate of the Empire, stretching beyond the administrative reach, the politics of the day, the power and overreach of the patricians, the 600 Senators (senex = old man), the Roman army; soldiers only cared about the pebbles in their shoes because those pebbles caused them pain and discomfort when they marched on campaigns.  They were happy when they were given “pane et circenses,” bread and circuses.  Free gladiatorial performances in the arena kept them placid and pacified with free tokens for plain bread.

The Roman empire was so vast that, when its most important city, Rome, the “Eternal City,” fell in 410 A.D. to Gothic armies camped outside its walls, the world then, devoid of instant communication, took a lengthy gasp. The city that stood unconquered for 800 years fell to Germanic barbarians under the leadership of Alaric the Goth.

St. Jerome, living in Bethlehem, is reported to have said, “When the brightest light on the whole Earth was extinguished, when the Roman empire was deprived of its head, when to speak more correctly, the whole world perished in one city, I was dumb with silence.”

But the western part of the empire lingered on for 66 more years until 476, at the end of which Emperor Romulus Augustus was deposed by his German commanders. But the sacking was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. Citizens had been poisoning themselves with lead for a long time:  Romans drank from lead cups, cooked in lead pots, transported water through lead pipes, and used lead oxide to sweeten their wine, just to name a few of its many uses. Skeletons found around the vast empire exhibited classic evidence of lead poisoning.

Sterility, probably caused by lead, prompted emperors to encourage having more children to stop the population decline. But, poor health, population decline, and indefensible vast borders were just three of the reasons the empire declined and eventually fell.

One Greek historian had remarked almost three hundred years before Rome’s downfall that it had turned “from a kingdom of gold to one of rust and iron.” Our infrastructure today, government, American exceptionalism, and everything that had made America great a long time ago is fast turning into ruin and rust just like Rome, the Eternal City.

Centuries later, humans have not changed that much, they just have better medicine, machines, and transportation. They may not all be soldiers but most only care about their lives, the mundane, sports entertainment, the modern version of “bread and circuses,” and the ability to feed, clothe, shelter, and protect their families. They follow obediently the “government knows best” directives with blind obsequiousness. But the government is made up of little dictators with many faults, inabilities, dishonesty, and lack of vision for generations to come.

The population does not care about politics, the machinations of Washington, D.C., the power grabs, the agendas, the control, and the theft of the nation. They want a home, a car, electricity for heat and air conditioning, medical care, preferably free, dignity, and freedom to live as they please. So, what will happen to their “Shining City on the Hill,” the symbol of their empire? Will it turn to ruin and rust as well?

What is the pebble in the shoe of the 21^st century American woke warriors? It is capitalism and its tool of progress, fossil fuels.

The current woke and delusional generations are determined to destroy their own successful economy and replace it with a disaster promoted under the label of Democrat Socialism and their platform of the Green New Deal.

Democrat Socialism is just a new phrase invented by the left to repackage and sell the old failed socialism model to the ignorant masses.  The Green New Deal is neither Green, nor New, and no Deal, it is just U.N. Agenda 21/2030 retreaded and euphemized to convince the woke voting base that there is an annoying pebble in their shoe and they can regress to a primitive life they’ve never experienced before and go barefoot in order to save the planet from the scourge of humanity.

The old Greenies and the younger Woke Warriors applaud the Green New Deal without giving it a thought where electricity for their Teslas and other electric cars will come from. They just feel instinctively that solar panels and wind turbines will replace the “evil” and “poisonous” fossil fuels” that are killing the planet and the cute little turtles choking on plastic straws, fishing nets, plastic bags, and plastic bottles.

It is so much better to make paper bags and destroy the trees that produce oxygen, trees are so abundant and grow so fast, but, once Bill Gates and Harvard mitigate global warming by spraying chalk in the upper atmosphere to block the harmful rays of the sun, good luck growing anything, including trees.

So where will electricity come from, woke warriors? Where will charging stations for your fully electric cars, millions of them, get their electricity from? From the fairy dust in the atmosphere, the same place where your food will come from once you kill agriculture.  Will you produce enough electricity to sustain our large economy, production, travel, heating, cooling, shopping malls, industry, technology, hospitals, and your ever-increasing electronic gadgets and toys? Will this electricity come from:

-          Wind turbines that only produce a small fraction of electricity when the wind blows at a certain peak speed, turbines that must be manufactured and maintained with help from fossil fuels, turbine blades that are difficult to recycle and must be transported with heavy machinery operated by fossil fuels?

-          Solar panels – the wafers do not last long, must be replaced, produced using fossil fuels, cannot be recycled, are toxic for the environment, and need a lot of land to display, land that is needed for agriculture.  Who needs land to make food when you can eat Bill Gates’ fake meat?

-          Nuclear power plants – none have not been built in this country in quite sometime and the greenies reject the idea of ever building new ones, it is too dangerous to humans and to the environment.

-          Hydroelectric power plants - The environmentalists want to destroy the dams necessary for hydropower, the rivers must flow just like they did centuries ago, unimpeded by man

-          Fossil fuels, oil, and coal - These are dirty words for the woke generation, they are convinced that our current civilization can survive and prosper without them.

Maybe the social emotional learning standards of equity over academic content now proposed by the “progressive” Department of Education in Virginia will fill the social justice warriors’ plates with food, bring electricity, heat, air conditioning, transportation, and medical care. https://townhall.virginia.gov/L/GetFile.cfm?File=C:%5CTownHall%5Cdocroot%5CGuidanceDocs_Proposed%5C201%5CGDoc_DOE_4780_20210329.pdf

Perhaps the woke generation has it all imagined and resolved – technology will be everything and the news media, social media, and the climate change industrial complex will take care of ALL their basic needs – food, shelter, cars, energy, education, health care, travel, and non-stop virtual entertainment if they obey the ruling elites.

 

 

 

 

 

The Technology of Yesteryear

1950 Leica IIIf-600 series

The world around us is changing vertiginously. It’s not that I am getting older and my perspective has slowed down; technology and the way we live are being fundamentally transformed under our own eyes, but we are too busy to notice.

We seldom ponder how far and how fast technology has forever altered our lives and who we are as people because of it. We have become the automatons we’ve been warned about decades ago when we thought it was just science fiction designed to entertain us. But here we are.

In my six decades on earth, my life went from riding a rickety, smoke-spewing Diesel bus with holes in the floorboard, a bus that took one hour to transport us six miles to grandma’s house, a wagon full of grain or hay pulled by oxen which took me and grandpa to the corn and wheat grinding mill, a pink Pegasus bicycle with a white banana-shaped seat and a basket, and a soot-smelling train that stopped in every little village and took all day to go 100 miles, to fast-speed trains, supersonic airplanes, fast boats, trucks, SUVs, eighteen-wheelers, and fast cars.

And Americans went from wagon trains in the American West, cowboys and settlers who made their slow and deliberate journey through the harsh landscape of the new world, to Ford’s Model T which helped eventually create the vast network of highways and interstates that crisscross America from “sea to shining sea.” With them came freedom, mobility, and a new way of life that cannot be matched anywhere else in history.

But the global elites are socially re-engineering this new-found culture of freedom into a controlled environment that would be given back to nature and re-wilded, while humans will be crowded into huge urban settlements, all with the idea to save humanity from itself, from climate change Armageddon.

From the humble communication beginnings of the telegraph and the beautiful gas-lit streets in Europe, we eventually got electrified, no more candles and oil lamps, but wood-burning stoves and charcoal-burning outdoor pits remained.

People bought rotary-dial phones but service was hard to get and expensive; often four customers were assigned to a line and we had to ask nicely the other three parties to get off the line if we wanted to make an emergency call or to call at all. And we had to listen for the clicks to make sure they were not listening in on our conversation.

The female operator, and it was always a female, would assist us in dialing an international line. We had to wait for hours before she would call with a connection to a number in a country across the Atlantic. And it sounded like the phone cable was swimming underwater and the voices were garbled as if they were drowning in the ocean. The call was very expensive, $10 the first three minutes and then $3 each additional minute, depending on the country called. A loved-one’s voice which did come across thousands of miles of underwater phone cable was very precious. And then one day phone connections were made via satellites deployed into space.

Now phone calls are cheap or free, but most of my relatives, the ones I really cared about, have passed away or are lingering in nursing homes. In 1989, I spent over $1,000 in a three-week period talking to strangers who were taking care of my dying father. I never got a chance to speak to my dad, but I was stuck with a phone bill from South Central Bell that was very hard to pay. As a college student, finishing my doctorate, it was way more than I was making in a month. And my babies needed that money for food and shelter. But, the bill was paid after my Dad passed away. I would give anything to be able to talk to him again.

When my children were small, I could not afford the very expensive camcorders, thousands of dollars, to film my precious babies. Today, a relatively inexpensive smart phone can videotape anything and everything and people take it so for granted. The social media is inundated with selfies and videos from wannabe photographers and videographers.

When the first cell phone came out in the 1990s, they were bulky, grey or black, expensive, often tethered to the car, and the minute-plans were very expensive. Only really well-to-do people could actually afford the luxury of owning one or the service. Within a decade, cell phones got smaller, more colorful, and minute-plans a bit cheaper. It was relatively easy to run up hundreds of dollars in phone bills each month and many people did get in trouble. And then cell phones became smart phones.

In high school, we were taken to a data processing center in my hometown. One large computer occupied an entire building. And they literally got computer bugs, a moth to be exact. Later they sized it down to a very large room.

Desk top computers arrived but were very bulky, and the small screen was green or black and white. It was quite a step up from the Remington typewriters or the IBM Selectric typewriters from college. In a communist country, we had to have special permission from the security police in order to have a Remington typewriter in the home and few were so lucky. We had to give them a written sample so they can identify the specific way our typewriter printed, the strokes of each letter, so they can later isolate us if we published any kind of political materials they deemed unacceptable and anti-communist.

Computer users had to learn so many different computer commands just to do word-processing because nothing interfaced. And the large 8-inch floppy disks, which were used with the floppy drives invented at IBM by Alan Shugart in 1967, filled up fast. The smaller 5.25-inch disk was developed that was used on the first IBM personal computer in August 1981.

I lost twenty pages of my dissertation because I ran out of computer space. Research was cumbersome, we actually did have to go to the library and paid the librarian to run one search at a time for about $28 which often did not yield much usable information, depending on what key words we used, but it sure printed hundreds of cards with perforated holes; if dropped, the cards would be out of order and unusable.

My first personal computer was an IBM and it cost $5,000. It was a gift from IBM since I was the first teacher in 1990 to impart knowledge to far-away high schools on a fiber-optic network that could communicate two-way instantaneously all over the country. It was called MS Fiber-optic 2000 and it prepared me for both radio and television as I was teaching from a room with half a million dollars-worth of equipment, no students, TV screens filled with classrooms far away, with whom I was instantaneously interacting, and only a technology person present. The companies that sponsored this effort thought that I needed my own computer at home. It was a good thing since I could not have afforded the price tag on my young teacher salary.

In the early 1980s through the 1990s we used VCRs to play movies rented from Blockbuster or Movie Gallery. Sony’s Betamax was in competition with VHS manufacturers such as JVC. The video cassette recorder had its down side as it was sensitive to humidity and temperature changes and could often damage tapes. Moisture or dryness could affect the magnetic tape.

The first cartoon that I taped for my children on our first VCR was “Stanley, the Ugly Duckling,” followed by hundreds of hours of Disney cartoons. Very expensive at first, upwards of $500-700, eventually the typical VCR model price dropped to $50. In time, the VHS blank tapes became rather inexpensive as well and could only record a set number of video hours. The DVD player took off and VCRs became obsolete. The movie rental places survived for a while but most have gone out of business as movies on DVDs became cheaper and cheaper.

There was a lady in Romania who used to translate through 1990 all the American movies smuggled into the country. She would translate the dialog on screen and write the subtitles in Romanian for later viewing in private homes. She did this for so many years because Romanians were not allowed to watch what movies they wanted, only what the communist party censors would allow.

During my teenage years in Romania, if a person owned a cassette recorder, they were really well-off. Prior to that, reel to reel expensive German players were available on the black market, usually smuggled on a cargo ship. When tape recorders/boom boxes became available, people paid huge amounts of money to own one. The audio cassettes made it easy to record music which was not available or forbidden by the communist government. Cassettes were eventually made obsolete by the Sony Walkman, portable radios, CD players, iPods, mp3 players, and the iPhone.

The phonograph, invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison, called later the gramophone, and in the 1940s the record player, is still used today by people who love to collect vinyl records. I have a pretty good collection myself but no record player with the diamond needle to play it on.

My husband gave me a small boom box in 1977. I sold it for $150 so I could pay the tuition I owed to the communist government for high school and two years of college. A very cheap price to pay considering how expensive education was in the west. I should not have had to pay anything at all because all Romanians were guaranteed free education. But it was suddenly no longer free for me because I was marrying an American and somebody else was going to reap the benefits of my education. Some cassette recorders sold for upwards of $300. That is still a lot of money today for many Romanians who earn on the average about $400 a month.

During Ceausescu’s communist regime, people were forced to use strange things as commodity money, cigarettes, cassette players, cassette tapes, soap, shampoo, makeup, panty hose, and other things in short supply, better produced in the west, economically forbidden to the proletariat, or grossly mismanaged by the communist party.

In the late 1970s, I was shocked to find that there was such a thing as an eight-track tape. Very popular in the United States from mid-1960s to late 1970s, it was relatively unknown outside the U.S., U.K., Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Japan. Then it was replaced by the compact cassette tape.

My uncle Ion owned a manual Leica camera with Carl Zeiss lenses. It must have cost him a fortune back then or he traded rationed food for it. Nobody else in the family owned a camera. The photos were black and white, no color film was available. I am grateful because his camera captured a few moments in my early life in communism that otherwise would not have seen the light of day and the special moments would have been forgotten. I never owned a camera myself until I moved to the U.S. and bought a Kodak with disposable flashbulbs and an Instant Polaroid camera.

Today people take for granted the relatively inexpensive digital cameras that are so affordable. Smart phones have become our cameras, computers, compass, maps, weather bulletins, TVs, theaters, typewriters, VCRs, printers, and spying devices that liberate us but have also enslaved generations of young people more than the Bolsheviks of the former Iron Curtain could have ever dreamed of.

Most people now own a smart phone, sharing every snippet of their daily lives with the world on social media, while technology is charging full-speed ahead with Nano-technology that will further alter our lives in ways that even the sci-fi novels and thrillers of the last century could not have ever imagined.

Household goods have made our lives infinitely better, freeing America’s chores and cooking time. Vacuum cleaners, microwave ovens, convection ovens, dishwashers, washing machines, driers, coffee makers, refrigerators, and air conditioners have made life more enjoyable and shortened the time people spent in the kitchen or cleaning. Air conditioners made hot climates more bearable; refrigerators/freezers helped store food and reduced daily trips to the grocery stores significantly.

Push mowers created verdant and well-manicured neighborhoods to the frustration of the U.N.-driven globalists who think that suburbia represent “urban blight” and thus “unsustainable.” They say nothing of the third world slums. Instead of creating a better life and environment for those people, globalists are interested in destroying our middle class suburbia.

Despite all technology, we seem to have reached a paradox of technology affluence, the more gadgets we invent, the busier and more overwhelmed our lives appear to be; it is a paradox of invention overflow and information overload. What was meant to help us has turned into so many choices that people are turning back to the old adage, less is more.

People were afraid to use microwaves in the seventies. Large signs warned shoppers in stores and restaurants that microwaves were in use. Most people were so fearful of getting cancer that many potential buyers did not purchase them for years until they finally became conventional and prices dropped.

Not so long ago most people had only two television channels to choose from, in our case in black and white, and running mostly communist propaganda. No remote controls to change the channels, viewers had to get up and do it manually. And reception was achieved by rooftop antennas and rabbit ears, often adorned with aluminum foil to improve picture clarity. And TV sets with their huge tubes were encased in large boxes, made from plastic or nicely carved wood like Curtis Mathis sets. By midnight, all stations signed off with a patriotic song. But then color TVs became more affordable and cable companies started offering a variety of newly-minted channels which offered night-owls non-stop television choices. We now have 500 plus channels but we only watch about ten on a regular basis.

What will become yesteryear’s technology in the future?

Climate Change Has Been Tamed

The COP21 was a seminal moment in the history of the planet. The wizards of the Paris conference, reportedly 147 heads of states, their very large entourage, and thousands of delegates and journalists from 195 countries will be remembered as the slickest con-artists ever in the history of humanity.

Paris, the City of Lights, of culture, of learning, of civilization, is a perfect place for such a gathering. Decadent, rich, storied, and romantic, it provides the perfect destination for bureaucrats who avoid poor places like the plague. The elitist choice is always the most luxurious and expensive locales where they can travel, live, eat, drink, and party in style at the expense of the hapless worshippers of Gaia who foot the bill.

These tin pot bureaucrats and their developed world brethren have finally succeeded, through the audacity of persistence, power, pressure, and blatant lies, to fleece seven billion people who willingly gave up their lifestyles and their fortunes in order to save the planet from an impending doom and gloom presumably caused by man alone.

We are so lucky!  We are getting a new life and the assurance from the gods of climate that we will live in balmy weather and glorious climate across the globe, with plenty of water and no harsh weather, only sunshine and blue skies, anytime, anyplace, on a blessed and abundant earth, protecting its most precious inhabitants: wild animals and the elites.

We can now rest assured and with confidence that blizzards and heat waves, tsunamis, tornadoes, hurricanes, droughts, mudslides, and other weather and climate related events are a thing of the past.

The whizzes of the Paris COP21 conference have tamed the climate and we no longer have to fear anything.  The science is settled – all discussions or debates will cease. Deniers will be marginalized, ridiculed, silenced, fired, or jailed if too persistent and annoying.

The seas will no longer rise and flood some obscure pacific island or some city built unwisely below sea level; the oceans will no longer acidify and kill marine life; the fish stocks in rivers will self-replenish, the delta smelt will thrive again once the agricultural industry will be completely destroyed; the globe’s temperatures will no longer rise by 2 degrees because now, we are going to pay through our noses more taxes to the climate lords and their lucrative climate change industry dominated by renewables.

Climate science elites will make sure that our paper money will stop pollution, volcanic activity around the globe and at the bottom of the oceans. The oceanic currents will flow the right way. El Nino will sit with them at the discussion table and will tame and subdue its activity. The sun will cooperate and stop flaring whenever it wants. Everything will now be under the sly control of the bureaucrats at the United Nations who, ever so wise, have no idea how many countries have actually signed this existential and unenforceable proposal. Or is it a gentlemen’s agreement, paraded as a treaty?

The third world nations are already salivating at the prospect of dividing 100 billion each year with more to come in the future. The planet must be 100 percent renewable green in a short time.

We will all be singing kumbaya in our dark and dank caves once all the dams are blown up, the rivers restored to their pristine state, the salmon and other migratory animals and birds will be safe from encroaching development, and the polluting coal power plants will be closed.

Wild animals and birds will have nothing to fear as long as birds avoid flying into the chopping blades of the wind turbines or into the solar panels’ vaporizing heat flux. Animals may have to move away from the constant and maddening thump-thump noise of wind turbines and away from millions of acres of solar panels.

China and India will finally breathe fresh air again. Nuclear power plants will be a thing of the 1970s, replaced by renewable wind and solar power.  Coal mines will be closed, “dirty” coal will no longer provide energy, and cars and planes will rust in place while the elites will whiz by in their expensive solar automobiles and private planes. What a perfectly dystopic planet that will be! Who needs civilization when the animals of the planet will be safe?

The Continuing Saga of Smart Meters

For those of you who have just heard of smart meters, or  have had one placed on your home knowingly or unknowingly, or for those who think that said smart meters are a new development around the world to make it cheaper and easier for you to get electricity, gas and water via the smart grid, think again.

Rationing and control of your usage of electricity, water, and gas,  and a constant incursion into your privacy, are better descriptors of what smart meters are intended to do. A good friend sent me this story about her bizarre problem with experimental smart meters of long ago.

Dominion Virginia Power started a program in the late 1980s. Carol signed their home onto a package which installed a device in their hot water heater. It was promoted as an electricity-saving gadget and it did not cost them anything, on the contrary, they received a $4 a month credit. The device turned the water heater off during peak usage, usually during summer months when demand for air conditioning was highest. This was implemented in order to save the electric company the trouble of having more electricity stored in excess-capacity facilities which are expensive to build.

The Dominion Virginia Power cancelled the program in 1997 because, according to Carol, the device caused innumerable problems and, when these gadgets broke, a regular plumber or electrician could not fix them.  Although the program was terminated long ago, she still received that $4 credit per month because, “if they eliminated said credit, it would be like they were raising our rates because their technology didn’t work. Crazy!”

Carol’s water heater finally broke in October 2015. After a plumber and electrician were called to their home and neither one could fix the problem, her household was out $220 just to have the plumber step in the door. The plumber did come twice, did not charge for the second visit but cautioned that, if he had to come back, the regular $110 service call would apply.

Left with the only option, Carol called the Dominion Virginia Power expert but he could not fix the problem either. The only Dominion Virginia Power repairman who is the expert at fixing this particular gadget issue was busy in Virginia Beach, three and half hours away. By the end of the week, he did make a service call to their house and now Carol and her family have hot water again.

In spite of their ordeal, having to do without hot water for a few days pales by comparison with my experience under the inept communism of my childhood and young adult years when we did not have hot water all summer long and only a couple of hours in the very early morning every day for the rest of the year.  You had to get up at 4 a.m. if you wanted to bathe or wash your clothes or dishes. Worse yet, we did not have any water at all during the day whenever the government decided that we could have it and they could not deliver it. And we did pay our bills on time, we had to, everything was withheld from the paycheck before the working class received meager wages for their labor. But then again, village folks or suburbia did not have any plumbing and running water and many still don’t have it to this day.

Given the trouble and the cost they had to incur, Carol’s family believes that “most of the Virginia power credit $$$ we’ve saved over the years, we spent this weekend to fix the problem this device caused.” The only ray of sunshine for Carol was finding out from the expert that they did not have the new-style smart meter, just its less controllable cousin. Just imagine what other problems the far more sophisticated and expensive new-style smart meter could have caused!

Many people have willingly accepted the smart meter installation because of the sign-on bonuses of $40-$100 offered and the promise of cheaper electricity. As the promises soured, electricity costs skyrocketed even though consumption in many cases declined, and smart meters caused home fires, customers in California have turned to class action lawsuits.

Of course, there is always the “opt-out” option which is available in most states. Utilities are obligated to offer customers this choice. However, it can be expensive in many states, should one decide to keep traditional meters in order to preserve health, privacy, and the ability to purchase truly cheaper electricity.

 

The Climate Change Industry Changes the Energy Market

Countries and companies around the globe have spent trillions of dollars to stop the Earth from warming and the Earth did not get the message, it responded by cooling.  Not to worry, environmentalists who were blatantly wrong and tried to say that cooling is part of global warming, changed their golden goose agenda to climate change. Even though climate change is real, it is called seasons, critics of the climate change industry, of climatism, have been marginalized under the rubric of global warming heretic deniers.

The United Nations came up with a clever scheme to convince the world that the “Four Horsemen of Environmental Apocalypse, overpopulation, resource depletion, pollution, and climate devastation” will annihilate humanity as we know it. The Club of Rome, premier environmental think-tank, consultants to the United Nations, explained how they succeeded:

“The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”

According to Dr. Steve Goreham, with the establishment of U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988, “climatism was born and controlling carbon has become a bureaucrat’s dream.”

World’s leaders, politicians, corporations, universities, and NGOs have been captivated by the climate change industry even though the theory of global warming has failed miserably and all the climate models were proven wrong. They declared war on fossil fuels and waged it with a vengeance at the expense of taxpayers and electricity users.

Suddenly using too much energy derived from coal, oil, and natural gas became a sin even though energy is the driver of global prosperity. Environmentalists have decided to deny the same opportunity for prosperity from cheap fossil fuel energy to millions of citizens of third world nations, forcing them instead into expensive solar and wind energy they cannot afford. Hydrocarbons became the black sheep, and billions and billions in subsidies were spent to make room for renewables.

“It's in our interest - and we wouldn't be able to stop it anyway - for the poorer countries, which only are responsible for about 20 percent of the globe's pollution, to develop, but they should develop according to a different path, a different industrial prescription than we did.”  (Michael Oppenheimer on This Week with David Brinkley, 31 May 1992) http://www.princeton.edu/step/people/faculty/michael-oppenheimer/in-the-news/Correcting-Glenn-Beck-.pdf

Environmental NGOs lectured impressionable students that nobody should be drilling at all because fossil fuels destroy the planet, we should pay $10 per gallon like Europe, use renewables and learn to live modestly on solar and wind,  if we can afford them. If we must return to medieval living to save one of God’s creatures, then we should.  It is getting serious when even the oil producers have bought into climatism.

But environmentalists are not all equal. They want electricity to their smart devices that use more power than a refrigerator. They want tents, shoes, sunglasses, caps, and clothes made from hydrocarbons but they are protesting fossil fuels. They want their Priuses and electric cars but have no idea that the electricity to power them comes from hydrocarbons. Some enviro-denizens are Nimby (Not in My Back Yard) when it comes to unsightly wind turbines. Others are Banana (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything). And yet others are Nope (Not On Planet Earth). There is too much oil, “enough to deep fry the planet.”

Dr. Steve Goreham, Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America, and author of Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism, described the collateral damage from the war on hydrocarbons using Europe as an example of an “energy disaster unfolding.” He said, “there are 487 national climate change laws in 66 nations” and they are hurting the economies of those respective countries.

Europe is a basket case of subsidized and mandated renewables that has resulted in higher electricity rates for customers, causing electricity penury among some of the citizens of Germany. Giving renewables output priority, energy from other sources like nuclear, hydropower, and fossil fuels was scaled back.  Germany shut down nuclear power plants and Germany and France banned hydraulic fracturing. The market for electricity and wholesale prices became dependent on the mercy of weather and wind, regardless of demand.

There was a massive installation of solar panels in Germany even though Germany is not exactly the sunshine state.  Spain decided to use Diesel generation for its solar panels because the solar panel electricity was too expensive, 23 cents per kWh. The ugly wind turbines everywhere produced inefficient and undependable electricity.

Dr. Goreham also mentioned that some countries imported wood from Alabama to burn as electricity generator instead of dirty coal. The Green Revolution has been so expensive for Europeans that subsidies were dropping in every area, followed by layoffs in the renewable industry. The wind industry in the U.S. gets 2.3 cents per kWh in tax credit in order to compete.

Even though IPCC said that “burning biomass is carbon neutral,” the reality is that biofuels release as much or more carbon dioxide than coal does. And the trading of carbon on the carbon markets is failing. People can pay all the carbon footprint taxes in the world and it will not make a bit of difference in the actual CO2 in the atmosphere. It will just make the traders and the companies richer.

Dr. Fred Singer, physicist and emeritus professor of environmental science at the University of Virginia, reminded us that the climate change industry does not take into account the CO2 emissions from operation and maintenance of renewables such as how often these devices must be replaced (solar panels, wind turbines, parts, lubricants), and the transmission costs. Wind and solar power does emit CO2 in the construction process, during the mining of the metals used, lubricants, etc.

Even the President blamed the low GDP on cold weather. Perhaps it is time for global warmists turned climatists to be exposed again.

Honest scientists say that we have enough fossil fuels reserves for centuries of use. In the world’s economy renewables should compete without subsidies, we should worry about the Smart Grid’s vulnerability from hackers, solar flares, and EMPs, we should conserve energy wisely, protect nature sensibly, and let the carbon credits scheme go into the trash bin of expensive hustles.

 

 

 

Are Germany's High Electricity Rates Coming to the United States?

Environmentalists have told us that we must reduce the escalating levels of CO2 or we risk a complete meltdown of our entire global ice cap and massive planetary destruction. Not only is the ice cap 60 percent larger this year but we have been in a cooling period for the past 16 years. Even the United Nation’s expert on global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), had to admit that their computer modeling predicting global warming Armageddon was wrong.

Based on this alarmist erroneous information, most countries have made and are making fundamental changes to the way they live and do business. Germany was one of the first European countries to jump on the wind and solar renewable energy bandwagon, abandoning nuclear power generation after the Fukushima disaster in Japan. Consequently, according to Spiegel Online International, Germans were forced to pay the highest electricity rates in Europe. “Germany’s energy poverty” hit the underprivileged the hardest when “electricity became a luxury good.” Welfare and pension checks were not adjusted to accommodate for higher prices. Over 300,000 Germans a year have their electricity cut off because they cannot afford to pay their electric bills. “Two-thirds of the price increase is due to new government fees, surcharges and taxes.”

The renewable energy is generating so many tax surcharges, Germans can no longer keep up – there is a surcharge to finance the power grids, and collateral damage charges from energy surplus or deficit, depending on the weather and the time of the day.

In winter time, when the wind stops blowing, the coal and oil power plants are fired up to provide electricity, releasing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the maligned carbon dioxide that is so necessary for plant life to thrive.

Wind turbines are turned off if there is too much electricity coming from the grid. But consumers have to pay for the “phantom electricity” the turbines are theoretically generating.

On numerous occasions, Germany pays fees to dump already subsidized green energy. Experts call this "negative electricity prices."

Plants, like ArcelorMittal steel in Hamburg that use up a lot of energy, are asked to shut down production if there is an electricity shortage in order to protect the smart grid. Ordinary electricity customers “are expected to pay to compensate these businesses for lost profits.”

Wind turbines on the offshore wind farms on the island of Borkum in the North Sea are spinning but are not connected to the grid yet – the connection cable won’t be ready until next year. The turbines must be kept running with Diesel fuel in order to prevent rusting.

There are many other hidden costs:

-          the ocean cables – and they are not cheap;

-          a giant yellow electrical socket the size of a building that is supposed to store and transport electricity through the cables at a cost of one billion euros but has a lifespan of 20 years;

-          stopping the entire wind generation operation during high seas;

-          stopping the operation when porpoises and their young are spotted (their hearing might be affected but nobody seems to care if humans are affected by the annoying hum);

-          low demand for electricity in the sparsely populated coastal regions, necessitating the installation of high-voltage power lines which transport electricity to the center and southern regions of Germany with a high population concentration;

-          no incentive for electricity storage because it may cause the smart grid to become unstable.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/high-costs-and-errors-of-german-transition-to-renewable-energy-a-920288.html

For Germany, it all adds up to a disaster in the making and an explosion of electricity prices per kWh, at least 40% or more. For those 300,000 or so Germans who cannot pay their bills annually, it is a cave dwelling existence in the dark.  If we consider Obama administration’s “War on Coal,” coal that generates 49% percent of our electricity, high prices are coming soon to our homes via the drone attached to our houses, the Smart Meter.

I recall my childhood with my grandparents who only lived 5 miles from town but did not have electricity until the mid-1970s. It was very hard reading by an oil lamp. We had to go to bed at sundown. No radio, no TV, no reading in the dark, no reading during the day, too many chores to do, nothing but a primitive lifestyle revolving around planting, weeding, and harvesting crops. We gathered in pitch darkness in the road sometimes and exchanged stories about daily happenings. Must must we go back to this lifestyle and why?