The Examiner reports:
Building a case for spending as much as $1 trillion to reinforce the nation’s electric grid, the Obama administration on Monday said that climate change is causing floods, storms and even wildfires that threaten the country’s electricity.
“It is clear that climate change is impacting the grid,” said a top administration official in a media conference call to draw attention to worries that global warming-induced weather could knock out electricity to major portions of the nation. “It’s increasing the frequency and intensity of severe weather events and these include heat waves, floods and also wildfires,” said the official.
Actually, in the case of unobtanium, it’s always nothing…
Drat. Always something. China stockpiled it all of course 🙂
The perpetuum mobile would work if we could just get enough unobtanium grease for the axles.
Which makes him correct in a roundabout way. His anal fixation on ‘renewable” energy (so the perpetuum mobile has been invented after all i guess) is caused by his religious fervor of AGW thus since the electrical grid was not designed to take up the enormous surges and falls of energy that creates it is global warming that causes it to fail.
If you see what i mean 🙂
He thinks it’s “rickety” now, wait until it’s totally reliant on Carbon Crucifix Bird Shredders.
If you like your rolling blackouts, you can keep your rolling blackouts.
The electrical grid probably does need strengthening for different reasons and I’d recommend other methods of financing.
The grid needs beefing up largely because of environmentalist-driven restrictions on new infrastructure like power lines, generation, and distribution. It also needs beefing up because some of the biggest users of electricity have been some of the biggest obstructors of building a robust grid.
Global warming has nothing to do with it.
Gamecock’s suspicions are well-founded. The private sector should strengthen the grid with private funds. If the funding comes from government, it becomes part of redistribution (I know I don’t pay anything like my per-capita share of the income tax) and it becomes highly politicized. Plus the “progressives” have shown a special talent for choosing the least effective way of getting anything done.
He forgot to mention that the greatest threat to the grid comes from ice storms, like the one Illinois had in 1978:
http://www.isws.illinois.edu/pubdoc/RI/ISWSRI-88.pdf
One million people without power for more than 24 hours; many small towns in central Illinois left without power for up to two weeks; hundreds of miles of utility lines had to be rebuilt from scratch because their poles collapsed.
More recently, similar events in Kansas:
http://www.crh.noaa.gov/ict/?n=ks_worse_ice_storms
All caused by witches and heretics.
“Building a case for spending as much as $1 trillion to reinforce the nation’s electric grid”
Reinforce? No. Take ownership.
ROTFLMAO . . . Give us a break. Who does this administration have advising them? Next thing you know they are going to say that the dog ate their homework.