Another Cold Winter Makes Greenies Sweat

When NYC looks like this:

December 27, 2010 (courtesy Woman Honor Thyself).

And Philadelphia looks like this:

December 27, 2010 (courtesy Matt Rourke/AP).

And Raleigh, North Carolina looks like this:

December 27, 2010 (courtesy Jim R. Bounds/AP).

. . . I start reflecting on that great winter reality known as cold.

While a great number of Americans are cold tonight, and many travelers are still uncomfortably stranded due to those annual weather events known as blizzards, I wonder how many of the so-called staunch environmentalists I know would in actual fact prefer to rely on the heat produced by "green" sources instead of the carbon-based sources (derived from actual green vegetable matter) that they are mostly using. Like the rest of us, environmentalists living in cold climes are turning up the heat to keep both themselves and their water pipes from freezing. If they are lucky enough to have a fireplace or a wood stove, you can bet that they are throwing another log on the fire.

Darn. If only the Good Lord hadn't made all life on Planet Earth, both animal and vegetable, carbon based, so that when it goes up in smoke it turns back into carbon and oxygen.

Winters like the ones being experienced in  many of the 48 contiguous states, plus Alaska, are not good arguments for politically correct traffic lights that don't create enough warmth to stay clear of snow:

An LED traffic light covered with snow on a clear day. A traffic light like this might not be at all visible to motorists in a night blizzard.

A planet that hasn't warmed in 15 years and that might be sliding into one of Earth's regularly scheduled mini ice ages is, likewise, not a good argument for erecting energy inefficient wind turbines whose blades literally freeze up in cold weather:

Wind generators in eleven Minnesota cities couldn't handle winter (courtesy Jim Gehrz, Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune). 

For some carbon-averse people, of course, winter is not much of a problem:

Obama chills with a shaved ice dessert while "Holiday" vacationing in Hawaii.

But for others, winter is one giant impediment to their plan to regulate ("real hard") Americans' use of energy to heat their homes, their intention to "tax 'em real hard" for all kinds of carbon consumption, and their determination "make 'em buy permits" to use energy to stay warm, grow food, and make things.  Hear it for yourself:

Van Jones professes to be afraid that Congress will eliminate the Clean Air Act, making it impossible for the EPA to regulate, tax, and carbon-credit Americans out the energy we need to stay alive and--excuse the expression, socialists--prosper.

Eliminating the Clean Air Act--now there's an idea whose season has come.

Thanks for the alert, teresamerica!
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