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| 2016 Presidential Election Results Red= Trump Blue= Clinton |
It necessarily follows that there are not any two regions of the country that are more anti-Trump and undoubtedly convinced that evil Russians somehow colluded to make Trump President.
The liberals in these states are also decidedly anti-fossil fuels. Their view is that anything that comes out of the ground should stay in the ground---coal, oil, natural gas or uranium.
That is why the promise of battery-powered cars are so important to the left. California already has a commitment to see to it that there are 1.5 million "zero emissions" vehicles by 2025. (There are 300,000 on the road today. This is about half of the total electric or hybrid vehicles in the USA.).
A California legislator wants to take it a step further and fully ban the sale of new cars powered by internal combustion engines by 2040.
Of course, Liberal Democrats tend to focus only on that which is "seen" while ignoring those things that are "unseen". It makes things easier. Unfortunately, life is not that simple.
The "unseen" issue is that as you are banning fossil fuel powered cars you need to power them with electricity for which our electrical grid is still dependent, and will continue to be dependent, on these fossil fuels for many years to come. I wrote about all of this last October in "Electric Cars-Seen and Unseen".
Similarly, New Englanders are on the verge of running out of the necessary power to light and heat their homes due to the Liberal Democrats who control the levers of political power in the region,
It got so bad this winter that this anti-Trump region, who is undoubtedly sure that Russian collusion put Trump in The White House, had to turn to Russia for the natural gas to heat and power their homes this winter.
Yes, Russia!
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| Russian LNG delivered in Everett, MA Credit: Forbes.com |
This is despite the fact that one of the largest natural gas fields in America (Marcellus) is only a few hundred miles away from the region and the United States is producing more natural gas than any other country in the world.
What makes all of this even more bizarre is that the natural gas that the Russians supplied is potentially subject to the sanctions that are supposed to be on Russia for interfering in the 2016 election and other matters.
How could this happen?
It is due to the fact that the radical left political power players in these states have blocked the construction of pipelines and other infrastructure to deliver natural gas to their region.
At the same time, many of the regions's aging coal and nuclear plants have been phased out. This is beginning to put a real squeeze on New England's power resources as there is just not renewable and other "clean" energy options to fill the void.
The Washington Examiner recently outlined some of the problems facing New England in a story titled "New England faces "horror story" of expensive power".
New England is struggling to keep the lights on as it pursues aggressive clean energy goals, a dilemma that is so troublesome that the region’s power grid operator warns of blackouts if something doesn’t change.
"I am getting nervous in New England,” said Robert Powelson, a Republican commissioner of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees wholesale power markets, during a recent event hosted by the American Council on Renewable Energy. “It is almost like a horror story.”
The story is complicated, but its impact is not: Residents living in the six New England states face the highest electricity rates in the country, 56 percent above the national average.
The inability to get natural gas to the region during the extended cold period this winter resulted in not only the need to import Russian natural gas, but also required some dual-source power plants to switch back to carbon laden oil. Doing that not only meant more carbon emissions but much higher costs as well.
Of course, who does higher energy costs fall on most heavily? The poor. Those people that the liberal left always states is their first priority.
And what happens when business leaves the region due to high energy costs? Working men and women pay the price for that in lost jobs.
The environmental extremists who block the gas pipelines to protect the planet also don't seem to recognize that importing the natural gas from Russia on gigantic tankers comes at significant environmental cost.
Liberals really don't seem to be able to look beyond what is right in front of them to consider anything that is "unseen."
Even the very liberal Boston Globe does not understand the logic of its political policymakers in a recent editorial, "Our Russian 'pipeline' and its ugly toll."
To build the new $27 billion gas export plant on the Arctic Ocean that now keeps the lights on in Massachusetts, Russian firms bored wells into fragile permafrost; blasted a new international airport into a pristine landscape of reindeer, polar bears, and walrus; dredged the spawning grounds of the endangered Siberian sturgeon in the Gulf of Ob to accommodate large ships; and commissioned a fleet of 1,000-foot icebreaking tankers likely to kill seals and disrupt whale habitat as they shuttle cargoes of super-cooled gas bound for Asia, Europe, and Everett.
On the plus side, though, they didn’t offend Pittsfield or Winthrop, Danvers or Groton, with even an inch of pipeline.
The environmental movement needs a reset, and so does Massachusetts policy. The real-world result of pipeline absolutism in Massachusetts this winter has been to steer energy customers to dirtier fuels like coal and oil, increasing greenhouse gas emissions. And the state is now in the indefensible position of blocking infrastructure here, while its public policies create demand for overseas fossil fuel infrastructure like the Yamal LNG plant — a project likely to inflict far greater near and long-term harm to the planet.
How do you make sense of it all?
You can't.
I don't doubt that at some point the Leftists in the Northeast will be blaming Russia for destroying the permafrost and uprooting the polar bears.
All the while reading the latest issue of The New Republic in their warm home with their Sierra Club and "Feel the Bern" stickers on the bumper of their Prius tucked safely in their heated garage.
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| Credit: BigGreenRadicals.com |
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