Living on the grid.

I had fun with the ever-green and anti-carbon fuel Virginian Pilot a day ago.  Richard Fernandez puts it well when he says that  

Modern man is tremendously dependent on the infrastructure to keep him going. Where once the majority of people lived on the farm, and were independent in the short run from civilizational disruptions, modern man lives entirely on the grid. He buys food from the Store, gets his power from the Electric Plug and his protection from the Station House.  What happens if the Store, Electric Plug, Wi-Fi point and Station House ain’t there no more? Even for a couple of weeks?

The Greens love to preen about their concern for the planet, but they are the ones who are most vulnerable to the disruption of the modern grid of energy and services that are so very vulnerable, as a simple windstorm on the East Coast proved.

  The Design Margin is rooted in the notion that life is uncertain; that since things have often collapsed in the past and may collapse again we actually need to have more reserves than we think.  Asteroid strikes, wars and natural calamities happen — and with far more frequency than the space alien invasions that Paul Krugman suggests we prepare against.

Bad times are frequent events.
The idea that the office on the corner will always be able to dispense Government Cheese does not reflect the normal historical experience. Rather it reflects that peculiar period of stability and prosperity which followed the end of the Second World War: the Pax Americana, which the Left hates. Our civilizational attitudes have been formed on the basis of the exception, not the rule.

But though they may hate the Pax Americana, the Greens probably can’t live without it. Can’t live without the Ipods, the connectivity, the store-bought food, the cafe-bought lattes — all the ugly things made by private industry. And by paring down the redundancies in the system as wasteful and unsightly; by reducing the energy reserves of the system in favor of such fairy schemes as windmills and carbon trading the Greens have made the system far less robust than it could have been. Because they are never going to need the Design Margin. Ever. Until they do.

The point I was making earlier, that the people who share the mindset of the Virginian Pilot's editors, don't make the grid go down all at once, they degrade it by preventing its maintenance, prevent its improvement and little by little make what should be minor inconveniences into major catastrophes.  


There would be nothing more instructive to these people than to have their homes and offices experience daily blackout and brownouts, or to lose power altogether.  To have them swelter in the summer and shiver in the winter, walking to work - if there is any market for their product - because the fuel for their cars isn't available and the power plants they despise go offline.  Of course, while we're dreaming, it would only happen to them.  In the real world, the one we live in, their idiocies affect all of us and the disasters that are not on their radar would hurt the innocent as well as the guilty.