California is in the grips of a deadly crisis!
No, not the weeks-long 100-degree-plus temperatures blanketing the state.
Heat waves come and go.
I’m talking about something far more insidious. The state is being strangled to death in the clench of a ‘climate cult.’
All week every Californian with a cellphone has been receiving desperate text messages pleading with them to ‘turn off your appliances’ and turn down their air conditioning.
Governor Gavin Newsom has been sending plaintive pleas thanking us for complying and urging us to continue with the rationing measures.
You see — California’s electricity grid cannot cope with the additional demands put upon it by the hot weather.
Newsom assures us our compliance will ensure that ‘we can get through this together.’
Governor Gavin Newsom (above) has been sending plaintive pleas thanking us for complying and urging us to continue with the rationing measures.
Get through what?
A stretch of hot days in the summer is nothing new, despite Newsom’s false claims of ‘unprecedented’ temperatures.
The last comparable heat wave occurred in 1988. That’s not exactly ancient history.
No, the real reason that California – a state that ranks as the world’s fifth largest economy – cannot power its citizens’ homes is that for years Newsom and far-left Democrats have waged war on energy in the name of fighting climate change.
For them, the only thing that matters is pushing forward, with all the zeal of the religious fanatic, a crazed and irrational anti-energy, anti-human agenda.
Reliable sources of electricity, like gas-burning power stations and nuclear power, have been undermined, while renewable alternatives like wind and solar have been encouraged through regulation and subsidy.
Let’s be clear, the climate is changing, and I have always supported reasonable, balanced policies to address that reality. I also back the sensible use and development of renewables.
But I – and millions of Californians – are not willing to plunge ourselves and our children into hot and dangerous darkness in the pursuit of a vague, self-righteous, ill-conceived crusade that won’t even deliver its stated objectives.
There is zero evidence that California’s self-sacrifice will amount to any meaningful reduction in global warning.
In any case, there has been no long-term increase in heatwave frequency or severity in the U.S. over the last century, and deaths from heatwaves have fallen significantly – mainly because of the increased availability of air conditioning.
All week every Californian with a cellphone has been receiving desperate text messages pleading with them to ‘turn off your appliances’ and turn down their air conditioning.
But the climate cultists are telling us to turn our air conditioning off!
Isn’t that proof that the headlong retreat from reliable energy has gone too far?
Apparently, not for the high priests of the ‘climate crisis’, as they call it.
‘We understand we cannot have the lights go off,’ Siva Gunda, vice chair of the California Energy Commission told The Washington Post. ‘But the fear of these questions being brought up is not a reason to slow down from what we know is morally and societally what we need to do.’
There it is in black and white. It is moral to cripple energy production.
Unbelievably, in the midst of this entirely self-created crisis California is doubling down.
The latest centerpiece is the program to force the electrification of our economy with bans on gas cookers in new homes, and, most famously, banning gas cars by 2035.
Electric vehicles for all!
But in potentially the cruelest and most inept recent edict, Californians with electric vehicles were told not to charge their cars.
To complete the picture of chaos and confusion, Cal Fire Battalion Chief Isaac Sanchez pleaded with people to ignore that command, with parts of the state under wildfire evacuation warnings.
‘We recommend cars are fully charged and ready to go. If that’s your means of evacuation and if you don’t do it, you are unable to evacuate, life safety is a priority. At least it is to us,’ Sanchez told Newsweek. ‘Our priority is always to err on the side of life safety.’
Exactly.
But ‘life’ is not a priority for the demented ‘climate’ zealots who have brought California to this sorry state of affairs.
They have even contributed to the very wildfires which they use as an excuse to push ahead with their agenda.
By forcing utilities like Northern California’s PG&E to spend money on vanity ‘climate’ projects, vital ongoing maintenance work has been neglected.
Time and again, investigations have shown that faulty equipment has been the cause of the most damaging wildfires.
The tragedy of all this – and the warning to the rest of America – is that it is all so unnecessary.
Like America as a whole, California has abundant energy reserves, especially natural gas, which we could be using to reliably power our economy and society while reducing carbon emissions.
Instead, we’re pathetically muddling through with a combination of rationing and the import of far dirtier fossil fuels from some of the world’s worst regimes.
We all shuddered at the revolting spectacle of Biden’s ‘fist-bump of shame’ with Mohammed Bin Salman, the Butcher of Saudi Arabia.
In potentially the cruelest and most inept recent edict, Californians with electric vehicles were told not to charge their cars. To complete the picture of chaos and confusion, Cal Fire Battalion Chief Isaac Sanchez pleaded with people to ignore that command, with parts of the state under wildfire evacuation warnings.
‘Life’ is not a priority for the demented ‘climate’ zealots who have brought California to this sorry state of affairs.
Now the Saudis are throwing it back in Biden’s face with a pledge to cut production instead of increasing it, in order to keep prices high.
It is a truly grotesque abdication of U.S. leadership.
Yet these Democrat politicians have the nerve to claim that their disastrous and shambolic energy policies are somehow to be admired and replicated.
Newsom brags that where California leads, the nation will follow – a sentiment recently echoed by Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and one that should terrify all Americans.
If Democrats in California – or at the national level – really wanted to do that, they would give a massive boost to the most reliable form of clean energy we have, nuclear power.
Instead in California after years of demonization we just saw a grudging reprieve for our last remaining nuclear power station, Diablo Canyon, with zero long-term investment and nothing from Biden but a token commitment.
When you consider the astonishing incoherence and deep destructiveness of the Democrats’ energy policies, you inevitably conclude that they are truly in the grip of a ‘climate’ cult.
Anti-science, anti-human, inconsistent even on its own terms…it is all one giant, self-indulgent exercise in elitist virtue-signaling, and as usual ordinary Americans are left in the dark.
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Read more at DailyMail.co.uk