CT Blue

So, my wife and I were sitting at our dining room table, bitching and moaning about CL&P’s lousy repair record (according to their website, not a single customer in Groton had gotten power for about a day and a half) when suddenly, a fan went on. It took us several seconds to realize what that meant, at which point there was much rejoicing in the land, or at least our little sliver of it.

Do I take back the black thoughts I directed at CL&P? Not a bit of it. These outages should never be so widespread, nor should CL&P employ fewer line persons now than when Gloria struck. I know I grow old and cranky, but this I remember. In my first year of law school, in December of 1972, I resided with my mother in Hartford. There was odd weather that month. Two or three severe ice storms hit the state and the result, not surprisingly, was a lot of downed power lines. There was much talk about implementing a rather obvious, albeit costly (in the short term) solution: burying the power lines. This, I am informed, is what they do in socialistic Europe. Of course, it never happened. I note as well that the two municipal utilities in our area have returned their service areas to about 100% of service, proving that socialism works in some situations, particularly in the case of natural monopolies, and particularly in the case of natural monopolies for the necessities of life, such as water and electricity. Recall, also, that it was only the municipally owned utilities in California that avoided the worst of the supply manipulation several years back. I’m fairly sure that if we broke up our privately owned utilities into smaller, municipal or regional utilities, anything we lost by losing economies of scale would be gained by the fact that we needn’t generate a profit.

This hurricane has taught us several lessons we won’t learn. Here’s one: Those of us in the reality based world should realize that we have to start pushing back, and pushing back hard against the climate change denialists. Unfortunately, being people who appreciate the truth, we are reluctant to assign the blame for any individual climate event to global warming. It wouldn’t be quite honest. But whether we choose to fight fire with fire, or stick with the truth, we have to be aggressive about making the point that these events are, overall, getting more frequent and more extreme. Unfortunately, it does us no good to do this unless the politicians who get our votes join in, but there’s no chance of that. The Republicans are quite capable of convincing a large percentage of Americans that this country, which is currently borrowing money at an effective interest rate of less than 0% (meaning we can, in essence get money for free), is bankrupt, and they can even get the Democrats to go along with the scam, but the Democrats are incapable of, and not interested in, convincing people that climate change is an imminent threat, despite the facts. I personally have long since given up on the idea that this is merely incompetence on the part of the Democrats. The institutional party has no interest in taking on the corporations. The role of the Democrats is to pay impotent lip service to the desirability of dealing with the issue, but to bemoan the fact that there’s simply nothing they can do, and go on to the next surrender. Republicans, on the other hand, never give up. They’re a bit like those punching bag toys: knock em down, and they come back up, insisting, like the knight in Monty Python, that it’s only a scratch. Eventually, the most extreme position becomes palatable by virtue of endless repetition, and they get what they want.

Ah, but this rant must end. Yes, we are, this time, really on the eve of destruction, but for the moment I can savor the cup of hot tea I’ve been lusting for all week, and look forward to a warm shower tomorrow morning.