1/24/2021

Thoughts On A Sunday

Winter temps have returned, with night-time temps in the single digits and day-time temps below 20ºF and wind chills well below zero.

Some may not care for the cold temperatures, but I am not one of them. I’ve been waiting for them to arrive because without them the lake won’t freeze over properly, ice fishing becomes problematic as does the local pond hockey tournament, and one of the annual Winter Carnivals becomes impossible. The colder temperatures also allow snow-making for the ski areas to be more efficient with much finer snow than when it is just below freezing. It also helps keep the existing snow from melting or sublimating away, something that is always important. What we really need is a good Nor’easter like the one we had about a week before Christmas that dumped over three feet of fine, powdery snow. The snow would allow the snowmobile and cross-country trails to be open border to border.

The winter started with a lot of promise...that lasted about a week before warm temperatures and a lot of rain made most of the snow disappear on Christmas Day.

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If we want a preview of what Joe Biden, AOC, and the rest of the Watermelon Environmentalists have in store for us with the hypocritical Green New Deal, then all one needs to do is look to Germany to see what’s in store for us.

Before the days of climate alarmism and hysteria, the job of deciding how to best produce electricity was left to power generation engineers and experts – people who actually understood it. The result: Germany had one of the most stable and reliable power grids worldwide.

Then in the 1990s, environmental activists, politicians, climate alarmists and pseudo-experts decided they could do a better job at generating power in Germany and eventually passed the outlandish EEG green energy feed-in act and rules. They insisted that wildly fluctuating, intermittent power supplies could be managed easily, and done so at a low cost.

Fast forward to today: The result of all the government meddling is becoming glaringly clear: the country now finds itself on the verge of blackouts due to grid instability, has the highest electricity prices in the world, relies more on imports and is not even close to meeting its emissions targets.

--snip--

So what solution does Berlin propose today? You guessed it: more meddling and interference, more outlandish bureaucrat solutions. Included among them are shutting down the remaining baseload coal-fired and nuclear power plants, and relying even more on the power sources that got the country into its current mess in the first place.

And new are restrictions as to when power can be consumed by consumers and industry! Energy rationing and targeted blackouts.

I can hear those who think we should follow Germany's example telling us “Oh, that won’t happen here! We won’t make those mistakes!” But of course they will.

The people making those claims don’t have a clue about how things actually work, what it takes to build, run, and maintain an electrical grid, particularly a stable grid. All they see is ‘free’ energy, choosing to ignore that it is expensive to collect and transmit that free energy and darn near impossible to make it stable and impossible to make it dispatchable (turning it ‘on’, ‘off’, or adjusting it up or down as needed).

There has been plenty of talk about how energy storage will solve the problem, but again those making that claim do not understand the magnitude of what they proposing, have no idea what it will take and what it will cost to create enough storage. All they choose to know is that it as an answer, but not that it isn’t workable. They also choose to ignore how the green energy ‘solutions’ they are pushing have already caused so much damage to the environment and will do so much more should they get their way. The rare earths needed to make all of these solutions work will require more mining to obtain them, one or two orders of magnitude more mining. The mining required will cause widespread damage to the environment.

I could go on and on, but I have written about this more than once over the years.

Do we really want to follow Germany down the same “green” energy dead end road? It certainly appears Slow Joe and AOC do. That should tell us everything we need to know.

One last thing. Here’s a new take on a not-so-old joke:

“What did the Germans use for light before candles?” “Electricity.”

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From the “Just When I Thought They Couldn’t Get Any Stupider” Department comes this from the Pyrite State.

California Congressman Calls For $23 Minimum Wage.

Yet another economic ‘genius’ heard from, one incapable of second-order thinking, meaning that once more the Law of Unintended Consequences will raise its ugly head and will make things even worse for the people this is supposed to help should he get his way.

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Now that the inauguration is over and done with, why is Washington DC still an armed camp?

What makes it worse is that so many of our supposed ‘betters’ have no historical context, have no concept about about how political parties have used false flag operations to paint their opponents as monsters/seditionists/traitors as a means of taking and keeping power. The thing is, if done properly, most of the people won’t even question the narrative even if unassailable evidence that it was a put up job were presented.

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How is CNN still on the air? It seems if they can’t report actual news that they just make it up. One case in point, CNN’s wholly inaccurate and apparently fabricated story about vaccine distribution and the Trump Administration’s lack of a distribution plan and that the Biden Administration would have to “build everything from scratch.”

Still worse than the regime’s blame-shifting is CNN’s eagerness to tell a blatant lie. Even other liberal journalists are taken aback. Sam Stein works for left-wing Politico:

Biden folks are spinning here or trying to lower the bar strategically. There was, indeed, a plan from Trump. I listened in on govs calls on vaccine distribution. The plan had obvious shortcomings. but to say there’s nothing to rework is not true.

If there was no plan before Biden’s handlers took power, how does CNN explain the tens of millions of doses that have already been distributed?

As noted at Fox News,

Biden has called for vaccinating 100 million Americans in the first 100 days of his administration, which would be one million per day. Bloomberg Business data indicates that rate had already been reached as Trump left office.

So Biden says he’s planning to do something the Trump Administration had already achieved, but claimed it had not. Hmm. That sounds familiar. It sounds entirely Biden-like. And CNN has helped support a narrative it knows is totally false.

Like I asked at the beginning, how is CNN still on the air?

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where winter temps have finally returned, it’s wicked cold outside, and where avoiding the wind chill is almost a sport in itself.