Thoughts On A Sunday

There’s no doubt the ‘official’ summer season has started. Traffic coming into New Hampshire has been heavy since Thursday evening. Grocery stores have been seeing a higher than usual number of customer visits since Wednesday, at least according to some of the cashiers I talked to yesterday morning. Local traffic was very heavy most of the day yesterday, particularly at our town’s public boat ramps and docks. The line of vehicles hauling boats to the ramps for launching stretched out between the road to the ramps and the nearby state highway. This is nothing unusual as we see this almost every Memorial Day weekend.

The local restaurants were much busier than they were last weekend, not that it surprises anyone. It will be like this until after Labor Day. Then and only then will we get our restaurants back. At least the seasonal restaurants are now open to help take up some of the load.

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As if we need any more proof the Greens hate us, there’s this example (by way of Instapundit) via the Wall Street Journal (paywalled) covering the side effects of Green policies on our electrical supply.

One of the incredibly stupid and avoidable side effects is New York’s actions which will ensure blackouts.

One state that hasn’t learned from California’s green-energy folly is New York. A new state regulation will force 627 megawatts of gas and oil “peaker” plants—which can rapidly ramp up to provide power in a pinch—to shut down this year. That’s enough to power 470,000 homes. This year’s state budget requires the New York Power Authority to retire all peaker plants by 2030. New York plans to compensate by building more offshore wind farms, but they face permitting challenges and don’t provide reliable power.

One does not replace peaker plants used to fill the capacity gap when demand spikes with wind turbines. Wind turbines won’t fill the role of peaker plants for a number of reason, the two biggest being wind is not dispatchable and is not stable.

Wind doesn’t work when there is no wind blowing, so how will wind farms be able to take up the load when there’s no wind?

Power output can vary from moment to moment as wind speed varies and wind direction changes. It takes time to adjust wind turbines to compensate for the changes in speed and direction which can add to grid instability.

Then there’s Texas, an energy ‘giant’ state suffering from the nonsensical Green policies.

Texas last summer narrowly averted a power outage by leaning on businesses to curtail operations. The state has since added enough solar to power about 200,000 homes. But demand has grown by even more, and the sun doesn’t shine at night. NERC forecasts a 19% probability of a grid emergency at 8 p.m. Do Texans feel lucky?

Power plants are being shut down and, in general, being replaced by nothing...just as the Greens want.

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Speaking of Greens, they are why we can’t have infrastructure.

California’s high-speed electric train has burned through nearly $10 billion, far more than its original $9 billion bond, without building a single mile of track.

Where did that money go?

$1.3 billion was spent on environmental impact clearances.

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Every time presidents make a pitch for an infrastructure bill, they visit the Brent Spence Bridge over the Ohio River for a photo op.

“Mr. McConnell, help us rebuild this bridge,” Obama declared with his back to the bridge. “Help us rebuild America.

After Obama, Trump came to the bridge, and more recently Biden claimed that his infrastructure bill, which spent nearly three quarters of a billion on electric cars, and little on infrastructure, would finally fix the bridge. Over $10 million has been spent on environmental impact studies going back 18 years to explain why nothing much was being done about the bridge.

--snip--

In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, $5 million was needed to fund an environmental impact study to build a new bridge, another $5 million to consider building a bridge in Mission, Texas. The current status of that bridge is unclear. After wasting millions and years on environmental impact studies, projects often never move forward due to changing finances or circumstances.

The endless environmental studies drain massive amounts of taxpayer money. For example, the Yeager Airport in Central West Virginia needed a $5.6 million grant for its environmental impact study. And the sheer scale of taxpayer money stolen by the green industry is not being tracked.

Millions, if not billions of dollars spent on endless environmental studies that never seem to come to any conclusions, or worse, end up requiring further “study” which costs more millions/billions. In the mean time needed infrastructure is stalled, in some cases cause far more environmental degradation that the new infrastructure would have reduced or eliminated. The same is true of much needed electrical infrastructure, particularly in light of the need to double or triple both the average and peak capacity in order to support all the EVs the Greens have been ramming down our throats.

Yet we’ll still spend billions of taxpayer dollars on even more environmental studies that will resolve nothing, no infrastructure will be built, or if it eventually is, it will cost many times the original project cost, and will not meet the needs it was originally designed to meet.

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Just when I thought MSNBC couldn’t sink any lower, they prove me wrong.

Their latest bit of journalistic malpractice?

Demanding Republicans denounce a story that doesn’t exist.

The latest bit of fake news to come out of Florida was that teenager Amanda Gorman’s 2020 Inauguration poem was banned from a school library when the reality was it was moved to the middle school section for “vocabulary” reasons. Not that MSNBC Deadline: White House host Nicolle Wallace cared. She teamed up with twice failed Georgia Democratic gubernatorial nominee and election denier Stacey Abrams and PoliticsNation host Al Sharpton on Friday to decry the fact that Republicans have not denounced a story that doesn’t exist.

During their conversation, Wallace mourned to Abrams, “But to take a poet and a poem that should be held up across partisan lines and demonize the piece itself and the creator of it, I mean understand from reporting this week it was one parent that complained, but I have not seen one Republican defend Amanda Gorman or her poem.”

Then they had perpetual sore loser Stacy Abrams comment on the story that wasn’t a story which just made things worse.

So much for journalistic integrity. But then, what did we expect from a morally bankrupt and ethically deficient ‘news’ organization?

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee where the summer season has started, the Greens are in hiding (for now), and where preparations for Memorial Day continue unabated.