Three weeks ago, at the beginning of May I turned off the heating system in the house. And that was an historically reasonable action. At that point the days were averaging in the high sixties and sometimes breaking into the low eighties. So, hurrah for the end of winter and come on summer!
Well, today after the fourth really cold day in a row I looked at the thermostat and noticed the temperature in the late afternoon was sixty-three degrees. I saw that Camera Girl was wearing an arctic survival suit and the dogs were burrowing into the permafrost layer that had infiltrated the living room.
Being the benign dictator that I am I overrode Camera Girl’s frugal instinct to “just add more layers of clothing until you’re warm” and turned on the heating system and set the thermostat to seventy-two. Global warming; don’t make me laugh.
Now, of course, I’m well aware that in the southwest it’s already in triple digits here and there. But up here where the geniuses of Harvard and Yale hold sway we’re freezing to death but we spend all our time worrying about ice caps melting. But finally, finally, finally all of the nuttiness they enacted to make fossil fuels too expensive to use has come back to bite them on the butt. The governor of Massachusetts has discovered that natural gas prices have skyrocketed! She can’t account for it! And she is demanding that the agencies responsible for regulation of energy companies and those companies themselves immediately lower the consumer cost for natural gas!
Of course, what it means is she will have to reverse the executive orders she put in place to make the prices higher a few years ago. Essentially, she is “shocked, shocked to find out gambling is going on at Rick’s Café Américain. Oh, by the way here are your winnings Madame Governor.”
But I think the biggest shocker will be to those who own and invest in the green new energy companies that Biden rewarded with billions in subsidies and grants. With all that payola shut down there is going to be a lot of unemployed “consultants and lobbyists who will have to figure out a new racket. The real question I have is what happens to all those rooftop solar panels when they stop working in a few years. Do the homeowners have to replace them out of their own pockets? And if they won’t, what exactly happens to them? Will they eventually be covered over with tar paper and shingles? They don’t look like they’ll keep the snow and ice out indefinitely. Will people have to yank them off their roofs and have their roofs patched? And how much will it cost to “recycle” the panels? Who’s going to pay for that, the homeowner?
These are troubling times for the followers of Gaia. The Earth goddess’s disciples are out of power in Washington and even in her most loyal bastions in Germany and Belgium things are not going well. Greta Thunberg has been reduced to chasing after and hectoring her neighbors in Stockholm if they drive automobiles instead of ride bicycles. But the new African immigrants don’t know who she is and they’ve roughing her up a bit. It’s all gotten very sad.
