STATES, GOVERNMENTS AND THE GREEN BLOB

Texans, I note, are currently shivering and dying as their wind turbines freeze and their solar panels become covered in that cold white stuff that children born in the year 2000 were never going to see (at least according to Doctor David Viner of the ‘Climate Research Unit’ of the University of East Anglia, back then).

Statistics are not yet available for the Texas power outages, but they certainly are for the State of California. California, a coastal state, is blessed with an ideal climate for solar power, and also has an extensive network of wind farms. Home heating is, for obvious reasons, not one of California’s major issues. ‘Progressive’ California politicians have already succeeded in pushing through and establishing one of the ‘Greenest’ electricity-producing infrastructures on the planet. Let’s see how it’s working out... 

 

California’s five largest cities: Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, San Francisco, and Fresno have a combined population of more than 7.7 million people. That’s about 20% of the entire state’s population.

From October 15th, 2017 to December 31st 2019 those cities have experienced 10,417 electricity outages, affecting the equivalent of 11.4 million utility customers, which is more than 20% of the total California blackout events, and more than 20% of the state's customers impacted. Los Angeles alone accounted for 5,787 blackout events affecting the equivalent of 6.4 million utility customers.

Among California’s 25 largest cities, San Bernardino - which had 1,208 blackout events affecting the equivalent of 1.4 million utility customers - experienced the most blackouts on a per capita basis. Using "customers impacted" divided by "population" as a rough approximation of how many times a typical resident experienced a blackout, the average person in San Bernardino experienced more than 6 outages.

Still, that’s nothing compared to some small communities. Each Mill Valley resident experienced 13 blackout events by the same measure, and residents in Sonoma experienced 17. October 2019 was by far the worst month for outages. The 3,683 blackout events represented an 80% increase from a year earlier, and the 7 million customers impacted was a 204% increase. The average duration of all outages was about 46 hours, or nearly two full days. And it's going to get worse as the few remaining fossil-fuel generators are taken out of commission.

As a result, California is now having to import electricity from other, less 'Green' US states. And disabled California customers have been urgently complaining about the extreme difficulties caused to those who rely on a variety of electrically-powered equipment, at home, for their continued well-being and in some cases, survival.

THE GREAT GREEN GOD

This is interesting reading, particularly for a citizen of a country like the UK. A country whose government is to soon ban the installation of gas-fired boilers in all new housing, intends to eliminate all internal combustion-engined vehicles by the year 2030 in favour of battery-powered road transport, and is busily sacrificing all of the UK’s gas, coal and nuclear-fuelled power stations on the altar of the Great Green God. A country 1.7 times smaller in land area than the State of California, but with 25 million more inhabitants, and a somewhat colder climate. Hmmm… what could possibly go wrong?

 

 

As a prime example of the detailed research and rigorous scientific thinking that is currently going into this sea-change in the way a sophisticated First World nation goes about generating the huge amounts of power needed to continue its everyday activities, I give you the Right Honourable Michael Gove MP.

Last April when he was still 'Environment Secretary' (Why does the Environment need a secretary? Who does it write to?), Michael Gove hosted a delegation from the 'Extinction Rebellion' climate pressure group. 14-year-old Felix Ottaway O’Mahoney, their spokesman (..man??) informed Gove that he, his family and his friends were ''in the streets, begging for a future'', because they otherwise faced a future of ''war, famine and mass natural disasters.''

The Minister should of course have immediately replied as I would have done - ''What on earth do you imagine you know about anything at the age of 14? Go away, you spotty little oaf!'' But what the hapless Gove actually said was ''I absolutely agree with you that the scale of action required is significant and the need to accelerate the scale of action for our undertaking is urgent.''

You couldn't make it up. An actual 52-year-old Government minister, supposedly a grown-up human being elected to office by other grown-up human beings, reverently taking advice from a 14-year-old child not allowed to vote because 14-year-olds are universally considered not to be mature enough to exercise responsible judgment. The literal infantilisation of politics, there for all to see. It would be interesting to know what Gove's own constituents think about 'Extinction Rebellion' and all its works. But sadly, no-one is ever going to ask their opinion. Least of all Michael Gove.

GOVERNMENT VEGIFICATION 

Anyway, here’s the latest result of all this rigorous research. The Government’s ‘Behaviour Change’ specialists, personified by their SAGE Committee Behavior Change adviser card-carrying Communist party member Professor Susan Michie, are starting up a new unit designed to ‘nudge’ the UK voters into the correct way of thinking.

The new ‘Behaviour Change and Public Engagement’ team, which is working from inside the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy department, is focused on how to get public buy-in for further emissions cuts, which will be 'targeted at what we eat and how we travel and heat our homes.'

This unit will be headed by someone called Gervase Pouldon , ‘a former environmental journalist and committed vegan’. Could he perchance be the same Gervase Pouldon whom I note used to be listed as an Intern at an organization called ‘chinadialogue’? Chinadialogue, I read, is an ‘independent, non-profit organisation’ based in London and, er, Beijing that focuses on ‘environmental’ issues in China.

Curiously enough, China is a country that is currently engaged in a hell-for-leather energy supply expansion programme involving literally hundreds of coal-fired power stations. Hey ho....

So the Government, not content with telling us what chemicals we must allow them to put in our bodies, now plans to inform us precisely what food they'll permit us to eat, because 'Science'. The farming community, traditional Tory supporters, will find that news quite interesting.

And for those who have been wondering why the latest batch of socially-engineered television adverts includes a substantial increase in those which push the virtues of ‘vegan’ food - now you know.

 

AUBREY