While reading the December 20, 2016 issue of Forbes, I ran into an article, “The Just 100: America’s Best Corporate Citizens”. It extolled certain companies in a variety of industries for their humane and environmentalist policies.
Further into the issue was a small piece titled, “Giving Big to Change the World”. It identified 10 large donations that go big to “Change the World”. Michael Bloomberg’s $30 million grant to the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, the Donald Graham and William and Karen Ackman’s $50 million contribution to TheDream.US for scholarships to the undocumented, and the David and Lucille Packard Foundation’s handout to The ClimateWorks Foundation to mold a “low-carbon society” are but a few examples.
Both pieces shared space with an article on Silicon Valley’s tech dynamo NIVIDIA and one of its founders, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang. Not uncommon for the Valley’s success stories, the author, Aaron Tilley, celebrated the lavish employee perks and environmentalism that permeates the corporate culture.
((Huang and NIVIDIA)
What’s the point? Colossal corporate America, big philanthropy, and Silicon Valley inhabit “blue” America. By “blue”, I mean bastions of progressivism, modern liberalism, and the Left. The terms are practically synonymous. And “blue” America is toxic to the rest of the country, called “red” America.
Today’s progressivism encompasses a fixation on sexual/melanin-count/ethnic diversity and solipsism (the relativistic libertine individual as the center of all things). It also incorporates environmentalism. Environmentalism isn’t science. It’s ideology. It is a cluster of beliefs at home with progressivism.
People sometimes confuse environmentalism with science, and try to bleach environmentalism of its “ism”. The two are distinct things. Science can depict the heat-trapping properties of CO2. It can’t predetermine policy choices requiring more than “heat-trapping” as a consideration. Filling the gap from fact to decision is environmentalism’s ideological bias to socially engineer a particular definition of the better person and society. The alleged betterment aligns with the prejudices of “blue” America to the detriment of “red” America.
The consequences are a purging of progressives in “red” America as “blue” America’s policy preferences threaten to destroy the livelihoods of many in “red” America. The 2016 election was a clash of the two Americas.
In Salena Zito’s piece in the Washington Examiner (1/29/17), “The Democrats’ diversity challenge”, the Democrats are facing near extinction in “red” America. As Kevin, a longtime Johnstown, Pa., Democrat and Hillary voter, said,
“There is no one who looks like me in the party anymore. Every single thing that is part of my weekly routine is constantly under attack by my own party. I am a gun owner, I am pro-life and I work in the energy sector. That pretty much makes me an enemy of my own party.”
The party is in the process of cannibalizing the more moderate Blue Dogs in its caucus. The faction has shrunk from 44 in 2006 to the 17 of today. The handwriting for the Dogs appeared on the wall in 2006. Joe Lieberman (D) of Connecticut, a classic Blue Dog, lost the party primary to the leftist Ned Lamont. Lieberman won the general running as an independent. Today, the party is the result of the cross-breeding of the Sierra Club, Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. There’s no room for the pro-lifer … or the coal miner.
The party is reflexively Left and increasingly relegated to urban islands, college towns, and the coasts. The collapse of the party in the vast region between the West’s Coast and Cascade Ranges and the western edges of Atlantic coastal plain is recounted in the loss of statehouses, governorships, and federal officeholders in this vast area not normally seen as haunts for the beautiful and trendy people.
The denizens of “blue” America are surprised that a West Virginia coal miner might find the infatuation with low carbon as a threat to the family income. Amazingly, the very thing that the trendy lefties are trying to destroy, coal, along with thousands of livelihoods, may end up rescuing states like California from the self-inflicted blackouts that will strangle those Santa Clara server farms.
You see, that “low-carbon” future may mean a chaotic energy one. “Sustainable” energy really means “variable” energy. Solar and wind don’t track household use. Solar peeks during the day while the ac continues whirring away at night. And, of course, the wind is the wind.
Sorry, there’s no way to store any surplus generated during the day or when the wind is howling. You use or lose it.
To keep energy flowing in the grid at all times during peaks and when lunar radiance has replaced solar, you need the backstop of nuclear, fossil fuels, hydro, and geothermal. But the phobia of climate change, so much in vogue in the blue bubbles, has resulted in a breakdown of the backstop. Blue states like California will feel the pinch.
Natural gas is the backstop. It is preferable not only because it’s cheaper. It’s because the alternatives have been executed (coal), fallen into obsolescence (nuclear), and nature doesn’t cooperate with droughts (hydro) and subsurface volcanism (geothermal).
For the lefty tekkies, coal is evil coal. A coal company exec will be a lonely person in the Santa Clara social circuit. Those coal-fired plants in the blue fiefdoms have long since gone the way of the dodo bird. Obama’s people were trying to exterminate the things nationwide before the Trump train disrupted the endeavor.
That leaves natural gas. Fracking – another thing despised by the activists – has made it cheap, for now. Prices are expected to rise this year. It is transported by pipeline, another thing on the activist hit list.
Storage is limited in a few central locations. If anything should happen to those places, especially in states handcuffed to windmills and solar panels, well, buy a generator, get a gun for protection (do this at least 2 weeks before things go dark), and barricade yourself in your home.
California was warned by FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) of blackouts last year. In 2005, LA’s Aliso Canyon gas storage facility was closed due to a leak. It has only partially reopened. The nearby La Paloma plant will close soon as the direct fallout of the state’s climate change policies. The backstop in Southern California is beginning to be dismantled.
New York, and much of the northeast, has similarly tacked left. Tony Clark, ex-FERC commissioner, said, “The Northeastern states are notorious for policies that de-industrialize their economies. They are nothing if not consistent.” If you lack a graduate degree in computer science, a resume’ chock-a-block full of tekkie employment, and sufficient personal wealth to rise above the over-inflated market, make a mad dash away from the coasts. Rescue yourself from “blue” lunacies.
When the lights start going out, will that sober up Angelinos and those in Manhattan penthouses to a greater appreciation of coal?
“Red” America understands that “blue” America is trying to impose a fantasy. If “blue” America is granted the power to do it, “red” America loses its livelihoods and “blue” America gets to experience “Escape from New York”. Lose, lose. Eh?
2016 was the year red said “no” to blue.
RogerG
Sources:
Forbes, 12/20/16
“The Democrats’ diversity challenge”, Salena Zito, Washington Examiner, 1/29/17, http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/the-democrats-diversity-challenge/article/2613114
“Coal to the rescue”, John Siciliano, Washington Examiner, 1/30/17, http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/coal-to-the-rescue/article/2613181