Greentopia: Population One Million

The end of this first-person account of life in the wake of the recent derecho weather event brought back memories of evacuating Houston for Hurricane Rita, returning there after Hurricane Ike, and living through the recent Back Bay Blackout.

Maybe gratitude has something to do with it. It almost sounds silly, now. But if you're sitting there suffering somehow, large or small - and trust me, people were and still are from this .... The minute it all came back on, when you heard and felt that air conditioning kick on and you knew you could take a hot shower, again - or just go to the refrigerator for a cold drink, or something you wanted to eat? Strange as it may sound to you, there's a gratitude, a beauty in that moment you can only hope to never forget. Imagine that? Hmm. What can I say? It was an experience. Leave it at that. [bold added]

Dan Riehl had it worse than I did in any of those occasions, but I know exactly the kind of relief he's talking about. And this brings up a thought I had after the Back Bay Blackout, prompted by a commenter's observation that I'd been living in a "low carbon/green energy utopia":

I thought more than once during my ordeal -- which is really nothing compared to the kind of world these idiots will achieve if they succeed -- that anyone who celebrates "Earth Day" deserves to do so this way: caught almost completely off-guard at a time definitely NOT of their own choosing, and for an indeterminate amount of time.

Of course, should the Greens succeed, the change would be much more drastic and it would be permanent: There wouldn't be anything open nearby and there would certainly be none of the glorious relief Dan Riehl describes.

Scanning headlines and post titles this morning, I recall someone asking pursuant to the massive power outage that still has a million people in the dark five days later, "Where's Obama?" I also recall some fool attributing this event to "climate change" with the usual false implication that the "green" leftist agenda of central planning is called for immediately. We should really be asking why the papers aren't touting life as it is for this million as the ideal (they imagine) we should be striving for.

That's a rhetorical question, of course.

-- CAV