It's Not Easy Being Green

Portland Harbor from South Portland February 2015

Portland Harbor froze over for the first time in thirty-five years. That presents a dilemma for people around the southern Maine area for several reasons. Ice breakers are necessary to keep shipping lanes open. Ferries to the islands get more difficult too, but the hardest thing is explaining how this could happen when you and your fellow greenies — the dominant species around the greater Portland area — have been wailing about the dangers of global warming for decades. The polar ice cap was supposed to have disappeared by now, but locals are looking over their shoulders this winter for fear that ice cap may creep south and take over our state the way it did four times before — and melting the last time only 12,000 years ago. This month will go down at the coldest February on record. 

Poor Adam (From Portland Press Herald)

Adam Souza’s car was destroyed in Portland last weekend when huge ice chunks fell on it from a five-story building. “They told me my insurance doesn’t cover an act of nature,” he said. I have to wonder: what if the car had been submerged by rising ocean waters the greenies predicted? Would he be able to sue oil companies? Would he have been able to insist it was human-caused, and not an act of nature? Other Portland residents are reminded they have to shovel snow off sidewalks in front of their houses, but they wonder where they’re going to put it. Snowbanks are already so high they have to drive halfway onto the street to see if there are any cars coming. Body shops say there are three times more cars with collision damage compared to past winters.

Boston

Then there are the endless stories from other greenies in Boston where winter snows keep piling up and below normal temperatures prevent any of it from melting back. Environmental cassandras like Robert Kennedy Jr and Bill McKibben are still insisting it’s all caused by global warming. “Climate change is a time test,” claims McKibben. “If we don’t act very quickly — well, Boston is getting a taste right now of what a changed climate looks like.” He’s the leading cassandra of the global warming movement and likely will be the last to admit it’s really mass hysteria.

Coo-Coo McKibben

Kennedy, meanwhile, is trying to convince Harvard to divest from fossil fuels to prevent catastrophic global warming. He wants to lead “Heat Week” sit-ins for students to pressure the university. They’re going to have to shovel out some space for the students to sit, unless they want fashion Cambridge’s enormous snow banks into chairs somehow.

Massachusetts

Greenies at the Washington Post are struggling desperately to keep their “climate change” house of cards from collapsing with a recent headline: “What the massive snowfall in Boston tells us about global warming.” They just won’t give up, insisting: “It doesn’t yet for most of us, but sooner or later we’re going to have to get past the idea that global warming and huge amounts of snow are somehow contradictory.” Contradictory? Who would ever think that? Kermit The Frog warned us all a long time ago that it’s not easy being green. These are indeed very difficult times for greenies. As Kermit sang:

When green is all there is to be

It could make you wonder why, but why wonder?

Why Wonder, I am green and it'll do fine, it's beautiful!

And I think it's what I want to be.

Penn State’s Michael Mann, author of the dubious “hockey stick graph” touted by Al Gore, still insists all this snow and cold is indeed caused by global warming: “storm[s] will be feeding off these very warm seas, producing very large amounts of snow as spiraling winds of the storm squeeze that moisture out of the air, cool, it, and deposit it as snow inland.” Warm seas? They don’t appear warm to me when I look out over the ice in Portland Harbor.

Portland from Bug Light Park last week

Scott Peck, a psychiatrist who had some best-selling books back in the 1980s, described the greenie dilemma well: “Our view of reality is like a map with which to negotiate the terrain of life.” He said we construct one in adolescence and try to use it without modification throughout life. It’s tough to admit we’ve been wrong even in the face of overwhelming evidence. “Life is difficult,” he said. To even consider we may be wrong about the way we understand things is hard enough. Admitting it to ourselves and others is even harder. Constructing a new life map is the hardest of all, so most of us never undertake the effort.

Portland Head Light last week

It’s especially hard for the head greenies like President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry, who keep insisting that global warming is more dangerous to us than Islamic terrorism, I mean “extremist violence.”

Subsidizing Stupid

I don’t want to buy any windmills and I don’t want to buy any solar panels. Most especially though - I don’t want to pay for other people to buy them either. But my government is taking my money and giving it to them. I don’t like that. I don’t like it one bit. If hippie greenies are foolhardy enough to pay more for their heat and electricity because it’s “green,” they’re free to do that. It would be none of my business as long as I didn’t have to pay for their silliness.
 
I don’t want to buy an electric car either - and I don’t want to pay for other people to buy them. But again, my government is taking my money and giving it to people who manufacture those cars - and more of my money to still other people who buy them. I don’t like that. It annoys me greatly.

There are lots of reasons why windmills don’t cut it as a power source, but the biggest is this: calm days. Sometimes the wind doesn’t blow. Sometimes it doesn’t blow for several days running. Ergo, no electricity. Whatever activities require it are not possible until the wind blows again whenever that may be. Sailboats have the same trouble; that’s why they’re only used for recreation now.

Here’s why solar panels don’t cut it: the sun doesn’t shine at night and days are often cloudy. What do we do on calm, cloudy days? We have to use the good old coal, oil, or natural gas generators. We have to keep that whole infrastructure in place and maintained on calm, cloudy days. Hippie greenies haven’t solved those problems and probably never will, but that doesn’t stop them from voting for “green” politicians who siphon money from my pocket to pay for their ridiculous notions.
 
There’s yet another major problem with windmills: When the wind blows hard for a day or two, the power generated - which the electricity utility is forced by government to buy at above-market rates no less - could burn up the whole grid causing extensive, long-term blackouts! Because of this, Maine utility companies have to spend $1.4 billion to beef up transmissions lines against those windmill surges driving up their transmission rates by 19.6% as of July 1, 2012. Transmission costs are about half my total monthly electric bill here in western Maine. In spite of enormous, long-term government subsidies - money from me and you, that is - windmills remain the most expensive way to generate electricity by far, and there’s nothing on the horizon to indicate that will ever change.

I have a generator to use when the grid shuts down, but I don’t want to generate my own power because it’s cheaper and more reliable to buy it from Central Maine Power (CMP). However, even when I send checks to CMP each month, much of that money goes to greenies and their windmills. That’s because CMP is forced by government to buy excess power from their windmills whether it’s needed or not and at inflated price as well! That means self-righteous hippie greenies can buy power at market rates when the wind doesn’t blow - and sell it at above-market rates when it does. This infuriates me.

I don’t want ethanol in my gasoline either, but I cannot buy gasoline that doesn’t contain it. Hippie greenies have forced that on me too. Worse, government is making me pay for ethanol even though it costs more than gasoline - and I get less energy from it. I have to pay for its subsidies in my taxes and I have to pay for it again when I pump it into my gas tank. I know government does dumb things, but I especially hate it when it forces me to cooperate in its stupidity. We’ve known since at least 2005 that it takes at least 29% more energy to produce a gallon of ethanol than you get from it when you burn it. Worse still, it damages small engines like my chainsaws, lawnmowers, four-wheelers, generators, and every other small gasoline engine most of us have. Can we please, please stop this ethanol craziness? Please?

Maine’s Governor LePage is negotiating with Quebec Hydro to buy cheaper, more reliable electricity, but his biggest opponents are the hippie greenies who want to keep their windmill gravy train rolling here. Since the November election, they’re back in control of Maine’s legislature and likely to thwart LePage’s efforts. Greenies love President Obama because he wasted somewhere between $80 billion and $90 billion of taxpayer money on “Green Energy” development, while doing his best to shut down cheaper, more reliable, more dependable sources of energy from fossil fuels.

Looks like I’ll be forced to subsidize all this greenie government foolishness for the next several years at least. Sometimes I wish I were as stupid as they are, because then it wouldn’t all piss me off so much.