Baby It's Cold Outside

          The thermometer outside my kitchen window read in the mid-20s this morning for the second time this week.  Tomorrow looks like a third.  I really hate this cold. 

          I keep a record of my utility bills, and I see that my last two electricity bills covering the period between 12/23/13 to 2/23/14 show an increase of 25% over the same period last year, 159% over the year before that, and a staggering 333% over the year before that one.  I know it’s been cold, but 333%?

          It occurs to me that huge increases in electricity bills don’t affect everyone equally.  A $160 increase for a family with, say, $4000 a month in household income represents a hit of 4% to the family budget.  For another family living on $2,000 a month, the hit is 8%.  Simple math.  I would venture to say, however, that the hit on the first family is much easier to absorb, relatively speaking, than it is on the family that lives on only $2,000, because the low-income family may already be spending 25% of its income on electricity.  Where is that family going to come up with an extra $160 when it is already living on a much tighter budget?

          According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the cost of electricity has gone up 39% in the last ten years.  How can that be, with all the increases in oil production and the boom in natural gas?  The answer is simple: climate change.

          Here’s how the thinking goes.  The climate is changing (Of course, the climate is changing.  It always has).  Climate change, according to apocalyptic environmentalists, is caused by global warming (Let’s conveniently ignore the fact that, contrary to dire predictions, the temperature of the earth hasn’t increased significantly in 15 years).  And global warming is caused by carbon dioxide (Let’s also ignore that it is absolutely essential to life on this planet, because it is the primary source of the oxygen in the air we breathe.  Not exactly a weapon of mass destruction, as John Kerry claims it is.).  So we have to curb carbon dioxide emissions, especially from coal-fired plants.   

          Now it so happens that coal is the cheapest source of electrical energy, and it accounts for 40% of electricity production in this country.  But the brown shirts of the EPA want to shut down coal-fired plants. So they have issued regulations to prevent new plants from being built and to make it economically unreasonable for old plants to make the changes necessary to satisfy the new emission standards.  It would be so much better, says the EPA, for coal to be replaced by renewable energy sources like solar and wind. The problem is that the cost of energy produced by solar and air is far greater than the cost of energy generated by the coal it is meant to replace.  And solar and wind cannot produce anywhere near the amount of electricity we need.

          President Obama, whose vision is of a fossil fuel-free earth knew exactly what he was saying when he promised us that the cost of electricity would necessarily skyrocket.  Thank you, Mr. President.  But how are we I going to pay our electricity bills?