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From: Sultan Knish <noreply+feedproxy@google.com>
Date: Mon, Mar 1, 2021 at 8:18 AM
Subject: Daniel Greenfield/Sultan Knish articles
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From: Sultan Knish <noreply+feedproxy@google.com>
Date: Mon, Mar 1, 2021 at 8:18 AM
Subject: Daniel Greenfield/Sultan Knish articles
To: <thevanx@gmail.com>
Daniel Greenfield/Sultan Knish articles |  |
| The Blackout Capital of America Sneers at Texas Posted: 01 Mar 2021 12:38 AM PST "Texas thought it could go it alone," Senator Schumer declared on the Lower East Side. "Now Texas is paying the price. I hope they learned a lesson." But Democrats never learn their lesson. And they're never expected to learn.  Texas' decision to go it alone was a whole lot smarter than tying the fates of eight states and two countries to a control room in Akron. An interstate power grid means that a problem in a whole other state or country that you have no control over can leave you in the dark. What was Schumer's response to the 2003 blackout? He blamed President Bush for a "free market" approach of "allowing the states and utility industry to deal with it by themselves". Schumer and the Democrats extracted somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 million to further integrate the power grid across a quarter of the country and parts of Canada. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy hit taking out power, leaving hospitals and residents in the dark. The East River power substation's underground equipment was flooded by a "wall of water", and the explosion that took out power across a large part of Manhattan could be seen for miles. The station is located in the Lower East Side: the location of Schumer's smug taunt to Texas. You might imagine that after all that, Schumer's home city and state would have moved the power substation away from the river. And you clearly don't know New York City. Instead, $1 billion was invested in a "storm hardening program". The goal of the program was to make sure that the underground substation located right by the river in an area that regularly experiences hurricanes won't be flooded because it will now meet current storm surge predictions. The substation was already built to withstand a predicted storm surge of 12.5 feet. Hurricane Sandy's storm surge hit 14 feet. If another hurricane beats the predictions, then Manhattan will be in the dark again because of an underground power substation by the river. But, it's Texas that isn't "learning its lesson". "When I wrote the Sandy bill, $60 billion for New York, we made sure everything was resilient," Schumer claimed. How resilient is it? New York City politicians and media taunting Texas over power failures from the blackout capital of the country (at least the part of it not located in California) is a really poor decision. New York's power grid goes down if someone sneezes or just looks at it the wrong way. Last year, New York's power failure left a quarter of a million in the dark. Senator Schumer knows because he co-wrote a letter berating Con-Ed, and complaining, "we need to know why so many New Yorkers have been left in the dark, both literally and figuratively—a week after the storm—and get New Yorkers' power back on ASAP." Schumer's letter noted that, "people had been trapped inside of their homes with live downed wires for days." These letters are an annual tradition in which Schumer and other New York politicians blast Con-Ed, a relic of the corrupt Democrat Tammany Hall era, and then everything goes back to the way that it was before. Only the dumbest Democrat voters are fooled by the display. Last year, Mayor de Blasio, who can't even wake up on time, proposed a government takeover of Con-Ed. The Socialist never went through with it, but he would be welcome to try since Con-Ed was originally a network of companies controlled by Democrat officials which robbed the city on such a massive scale that its infrastructure was held back behind the rest of America. All of these are part of the legacy that New Yorkers owe to Tammany Hall and the Democrats. The bizarre corrupt shenanigans of the 19th century Democrat gas organizations continue to be a problem because every now and then an explosion happens, like the one that killed 8 people and toppled two buildings in Harlem, because there's a 120-year-old infrastructure of gas pipes under New York City, leaking gas which functions like a ticking time bomb under the streets. After 120 years, New York still hasn't learned its lesson about putting Democrats in power. Con-Ed was formed out of the merger of these companies through a price-fixing agreement. And the occasional blackout, not to mention explosion, is part of the price New Yorkers pay. New York City's power grid remains an ongoing national disaster rivaled only by Puerto Rico. The two years before that witnessed a blackout with an explosion so massive that it turned the sky blue and had Mayor Bill de Blasio's spokesman denying that it was the work of aliens. Planes were forced to land on emergency power because the airport was blacked out A year later, New York City celebrated the anniversary of the '77 blackout which kept the city in the dark for days after a lightning storm and led to the worst rioting and looting in the city until the Black Lives Matter riots last year, with yet another blackout. Blackouts are an annual tradition in the blackout capital of America and no lessons are ever learned. Meanwhile New Yorkers pay on average 35 to 40 percent more than the rest of the country. New York has the 8th most expensive electricity in the country while Texas has the 12th cheapest. And New York residential rates shot up 5 times faster than Texas in just the last year. That might be defensible if New York City's power service were at least reliable. It's not. Now that Texas suffered major power failures, New York City politicians and media feel entitled to sneer. For the moment, the tiniest moment, the city's power appears to be in better shape. Except for the power outages that came with the storm and took down power in Brooklyn. It's easy for New York special interests to take cheap shots at Texas because the media may experience blackouts, but it won't blame New York Democrats for them except for political gain. Governor Cuomo was praised by the media while the dead filled New York City nursing homes until the left flank of the Democrats decided that it had a shot at replacing him in the next election. And then, suddenly, the media began reporting on the scandal it had covered up. The Democrats never have to learn any of the lessons from their latest disaster because the only reason the media will ever hold them accountable for any of them is for political gain. Why bother doing a good job running anything if the only metric that matters is political? Had Cuomo stayed to the left of AOC, but killed twice as many seniors, he would have been fine. Had President Trump stayed in the White House, Cuomo would have also been safe. That's why blackouts in New York and California go politically unpunished, but the media is blaming the Texas power failures on Senator Ted Cruz taking his family to Cancun. When the snow is cleared away in Texas, New Yorkers will be getting ready for the city's annual spring and summer blackouts. In '21, these will almost certainly be accompanied with riots. But no one in the media will sneer at New Yorkers or Californians huddling in the dark. Unlike sneering at Texans, there's nothing to be politically gained from such a show of contempt. New Yorkers won't learn their lesson. Not even when it's 120 years in the making. Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
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| "This Warm Winter, Austinites Can Look Out Their Windows And See Climate Change" Posted: 28 Feb 2021 09:46 AM PST "This Warm Winter, Austinites Can Look Out Their Windows And See Climate Change," a headline from Austin's NPR station read last February. "Experts say, people should get used to such sights," the article suggested. It might be a little harder to see those sights from the record-setting snowstorm that just buried Austin.  Now, "low-income people of color" are dying of carbon monoxide poisoning because of a green energy grid with windmills that don't turn, solar panels that don't work under snow, and battery power which holds its charge in freezing temperatures about as well as your phone does. Defying expectations and experts, Austin recorded its lowest temperature in 33 years and its deepest snowfall in 55 years. Warmer winters weren't the future. The future was plowing through 6 inches of snow in a city that was expecting warmer, not colder weather. The experts are back to crediting the snowstorm to 'climate change'. Replacing God with Gaia means that every bit of weather is evidence of man's sinful industrial nature. But up until last year, the Church of Climate Change had been predicting warmer winters and Democrat policymakers in Austin and in Texas cities controlled by the Democrats had counted on it. The Texas Observer had cited the National Climate Assessment, which it described as "the result of three years of work by more than 300 government officials, academics and researchers", telling readers to brace for "prolonged droughts" and "warmer winters". Reports like the Geos Institute's "Hot Enough Yet? The Future of Extreme Weather in Austin, Texas" spread alarmism about the climate of tomorrow. Fear of global warming and expectations of a climate that was hotter and drier helped drive the adoption of green energy. Solar panels and wind turbines seemed like a good idea for a state that was expected to look more like Arizona. And little effort was made to prepare wind turbines for coping with weather conditions that global warming experts had been telling Texans were a thing of the past. "By the end of the century, there might be as few as four freezing nights a year in Austin," was typical of the sort of media pablum that policymakers and many residents had come to absorb. Why bother planning for snowstorms when the future is going to be warm and snowless? The snowstorm that hit Austin wouldn't get a second glance in much of the country. But the difference is that Austin leaders and residents had absorbed the idea that they didn't need to prepare for snow. They had been told, over and over again that the oracle of science had predicted that winters would be warm and that snow was becoming an artifact of the past. Why get ready for a snowstorm that 'science' has told you will no longer be an issue? Green Energy isn't really green. The fundamental shift ushered in by so-called renewables is a move away from 'brown energy' and power supplies based on resources that can be mined, to 'green energy' which depends on the weather: on sunshine, on wind, and on tides. Weather is a much less reliable basis for an energy grid than coal, gas, nuclear, or any resource fuel. What happened in Texas isn't extraordinary. It's inevitable. When weather is your energy source, then your power grid depends on the weather. Environmentalists insist that global warming will make the weather more erratic and then propose that the solution is to switch over to power sources that depend on the weather. That an argument so counterintuitive and self-contradictory could have become the basis for a trillion-dollar industry subsidized by taxpayers is a testament to the madness of the elites. The Texas storm laid bare the paradoxes of green energy in swaths of white over every road. The artificial boom of green energy has become another of those bubbles that is too big to fail. The imaginary crisis of global warming requires more subsidies for solar panels and wind turbines. The net effect of injecting more of that 'green energy' into a power grid is to make it less reliable and more prone to failure. The experts try to compensate for that with more solar panels and more wind turbines, and more batteries, while extending the grid even wider, so that there are more failure points, less reliable energy, and higher prices for whatever power you get. This isn't an accident. It's a calculated strategy for lowering power usage by raising prices. And meanwhile the experts, the consultants, and the donor class cash in on the green subsidies. None of this can actually be said out loud. David Ismay, a California lawyer who had been working as the undersecretary for climate change, was forced to resign after he was caught ranting, "60% of our emissions that need to be reduced come from you, the person on your street, the senior on fixed-income. Right now, there is no bad guy left, at least in Massachusetts, to point the finger at and turn the screws on and now break their will, so they stop emitting. That's you. We have to break your will." Green energy's higher energy prices break the public's will to heat and cool their homes, much as higher gas prices break their will to drive to the grocery store, higher car prices make it less likely that the public will buy an SUV instead of a compact car. Don't think of solar panels, wind turbines, and electric cars as an actual solution, but as a way to break the will of the public. And enrich the breakers. After the disaster in Texas, green energy advocates are insisting that the problem wasn't enough 'green energy'. What Texas really needed was more solar panels covered by snow and more wind turbines that wouldn't spin. Not to mention more interdependence with other states. "The infrastructure failures in Texas are quite literally what happens when you *don't* pursue a Green New Deal," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez tweeted. This counterintuitive argument is typical of the counterintuitive arguments for most environmentalist and leftist policies. The defenders of everything from the Soviet Union to police defunding insist that their preferred policy was never implemented in its purest form. The Soviet Union failed to truly eliminate all private property. Crime is only skyrocketing because the police haven't been fully defunded. If Texas had switched entirely to solar panels, no amount of snow would have shut it down. But, as AOC's chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti had said of the Green New Deal, "Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?" Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing." And the economy has been changed by becoming dependent on a green energy bubble. Millions lost power in Texas, as they had previously lost power in California, because the radicals want to change the economy. It's about the political climate, not the actual climate. That's why environmentalist discourse easily shifts from forecasting a new age of warm winters to endless blizzards. The political prophecies of global warming have little to do with science. And they change as rapidly as the weather does, but they rarely keep up with the weather. "Is Texas's Disaster a Harbinger of America's Future?" an article about Austin declaims. Yes, but not for any of the reasons inside the article. Environmentalists have trashed America's industries while promising to replace dirty energy with clean energy. But their energy isn't clean and their finances are even dirtier. The new emerging green energy grid, funded and championed by Democrats at every level of government, is erratic, expensive, and unreliable. Worse still, traditional weather forecasting models are being abandoned for political global warming models that forecast huge environmental changes. And that leaves cities, states, and the entire country unprepared when the weather doesn't follow John Kerry's memo. The weather is apolitical. Rain and snow, sunshine and droughts don't have a manifesto. The Left politicized weather. Now our weather forecasting models have been rebuilt to follow their political predictions. And they're becoming as worthless as Soviet agricultural forecasts. The lesson of Texas is that when you politicize the weather, you won't see the snow coming. Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
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