Naive conservatives point to the leftist obsession with electric cars even while the grid is being moved away from reliable energy sources like oil, coal and gas, to fundamentally unreliable ones like wind and solar, and then point to the blackouts in California.
“How is this going to work?” they argue, thinking that they’ve made a convincing point, while fundamentally misunderstanding (as conservatives often do) that they haven’t found a logical weakness, they’ve uncovered the enemy’s plan.
Shoving everything into an unreliable power grid, especially personal transportation, isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. That’s the whole point of electric cars, and the proliferation of always online vehicles that require a power grid and can be remotely shut down. All of this is Cloward-Piven for energy. Failure isn’t just inevitable, it’s the goal.
As the blackouts grow, they will tell you, as I predicted, to shut up and take it for the good of the planet.
A few weeks ago I was at the home of a gentleman who had moved here from South Africa, and he was telling me about how his family had gotten used to blackouts as the normal order of business. Given leftists a chance and we’ll have to “get used to them too”. We’ll know not to bother cooking around 5 PM (don’t bother about gas stoves, they’re being banned as we speak) and not to drive at certain times or go out of the house. Cities will grow dark and criminals will rampage even more lawlessly than usual. Enjoy utopia.
And know, that while Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Pierre Omidyar and other great environmental philanthropists are on their mega-yachts and mansions, you’re sacrificing for the planet.
What’s more important: Keeping the lights on 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, or solving the climate crisis?
First, it’ll be 23 hours a day of power and then 22. The media will compare it to living during the Blitz. We’ll be told to learn to live with it like masks and no bags in supermarkets.
It’s part of a larger conversation about how much blackout risk we consider acceptable in modern society — and whether our expectations should evolve in the name of preventing climate catastrophe.
Again and again, I’ve found myself asking: Would it be easier and less expensive to limit climate change — and its deadly combination of worsening heat, fire and drought and flood — if we were willing to live with the occasional blackout?
Could we get started ditching gas sooner — and save some money — by accepting a few more blackouts for the next few years?
Does that mean we should be willing to accept even a few more hours of blackouts, if it means burning less gas?
After reporting on clean energy for most of the last decade, I’ve increasingly come to the conclusion that solving climate change will require sacrifices — even if only small ones — for the sake of the greater good. Those might include lifestyle changes such as driving less or eating less meat. They might also include accepting that large-scale solar farms will destroy some wildlife habitat, and that rooftop solar panels — despite their higher costs — have an important role to play in cleaning up the grid.
Maybe learning to live with more power outages shouldn’t be one of those sacrifices.
But at the same time, we might not have a choice.
We might not have a choice because the anti-technology luddite left doesn’t intend to give us a choice. They’re forcing us into an unreliable and unworkable ‘clean energy’ grid that they’re now admitting will go down on a regular basis. And from stoves to cars, they’re forcing us to live our entire lives around that grid.
It’s a water empire meant to reduce us to feudalism.
The idea of accepting a less dependable electric grid “is uncomfortable for a lot of people, because they correctly point out you may end up in situations where the wealthier you are, the more you’re able to buy your way out of that reliability problem,” Grubert said. Think rooftop solar panels paired with a battery in the garage, or a backup diesel generator.
That’s why it’s crucial, Grubert said, for government to be ready to protect society’s most vulnerable when it’s hot and the power goes out. That could include investing in a wider network of cooling centers, with transportation to help people get there.
Cooling centers are how the French and other Euros live because they won’t get air conditioning since it’s bad for the planet. Instead, thousands of people die during the summer while public places that are air conditioned open ‘cooling centers’.
This is what the Left wants for us. This is what environmentalism means.
Is it realistic to think that shifting our expectations for “reliability” could help us tackle the climate crisis?
“Reliability”. Shortly it’ll be explained that when the green lefties promised a reliable power grid, they have their own definition of reliable. We need to change our expectations of having the power on.
Families comfortable with 81-degree indoor temperatures, for instance, could get paid to turn up the thermostat a few degrees on the hottest evenings. People with electric cars could be incentivized to charge at a lower cost overnight. Big factories could be required to cut back during stressful moments on the grid.
You may not live in South Africa, but it’s coming to where you live. Here’s a preview of a green clean tomorrow.
The blackouts can strike at any time and then lights, hot water and even major industries vanish into the darkness.
Storing perishable food in the fridge has become a gamble. The meat you buy today may be inedible tomorrow if the rolling blackout arrives and lasts long enough to destroy all the food you cooked.
With rolling blackouts that can last for as long as twelve hours, South Africans have grown used to eating by candlelight and heating water the old-fashioned way. Those who can afford it have been stocking up on generators. But the demand is so high that it can take a month to even obtain a generator.
It’s not just homes and small businesses. Factories and mines are struggling to maintain the country’s industrial base when power can vanish for the entire workday. Traffic lights run off the same power grid and when it goes into ‘load-shedding’ mode, the roads become a snarled maze of honking cars.
This is the ‘green’ future that’s coming if we let leftists run our power.
Car crashes, opportunistic criminals, rotting food, decomposing bodies, bankrupt businesses, and water shortages. Welcome to life under South Africa’s power blackouts.
Last week the grim extent of the outages was laid bare when South Africans were advised to bury dead loved ones within four days.
n a public statement, the South African Funeral Practitioners Association warned that bodies in mortuaries were rapidly decomposing because of the unrelenting electricity outages, putting huge pressure on funeral parlors struggling to process corpses.
Before she died in October 2022, Lis Van Os needed oxygen for 17 hours a day. Her stationary oxygen machine required mains power, making periods of loadshedding extremely stressful, particularly when power did not return as scheduled, her family said.
Her daughter Karin McDonald was forced to explore backup options such as inverters and a back up oxygen mobile tank, which only lasted short periods.
Maneo Motsamai, a domestic worker in Johannesburg, says the outages prevents her from simple tasks such as cooking.
“I boil water to cook mealie meal (maize porridge) and the power goes. I can’t eat, it’s a waste. I can’t cope like that,” Motsamai told CNN.
South Africa is notorious for high crime rates, and loadshedding is making it worse as home security systems fail when the power goes out, giving criminals a field day inside unsecured properties.
Policing also becomes harder, with officers unable to reach crime scenes fast enough due to congestion when traffic lights are off.
Tumelo Mogodiseng, General Secretary of the South African Policing Union (SAPU), describes the load-shedding as “a pandemic.”
He says his members’ lives are now more at risk, with officers unable to see potentially dangerous situations in the darkness, and police stations, many of which don’t have backup power systems, at risk of attack from criminals during blackouts.
Don’t worry folks, every person who dies or lives in the dark is helping to ‘save the planet’.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/get-used-to-living-with-blackouts-to-save-the-planet/