Isn’t it funny that an electric car ran out of juice in West Virginia in the last couple of days? It died about a quarter mile from a Coal Mine. Four Coal Miners, being the good people they are, came out and pushed the car, uphill, to their mine, so the car could recharge.
Isn’t it funny yet sad that Gavin Newsome, Governor, D-CA, is calling for residents to heavily curb use of air conditioning as Cal is in a stage-3 power grid emergency? You aren’t supposed to use larger appliances (no cooking), and can’t charge your electric car. Cal has 40+ state-owned utilities along with PG&E (investor-owned) , but they’ve been so mis-managed for decades that their grid is falling apart (has been for years), rates are continuing to climb faster than the national average, it can’t handle the power demands, and has started countless forest and wildland fires from dilapidated equipment … that has, for the last several summers, poured smoke 1,000 miles away into Colorado, giving us stay-indoors alerts several times each summer due to air quality.
Also ironic and funny – Cal has now passed a law requiring all cars sold to be electric by 2035 (stepping up in quota every few years until at 100%). But their grid can’t charge them.
And while the list of ironies continues, let’s finish with this one for today: In 2020, Trump signed 2 COVID bills, allocating a total of $67.5 Billion to the ESSER (Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief fund), and then Biden signed another $122 Billion for ARP (American Rescue Plan) ESSER funding. This was for a variety of things, including schools’ ability to apply for funding for things like revamped/replaced ventilation systems – including full replacements, and improved filtration. What did many, many school districts do instead? Used funding for things like studies and then implementation of updated curriculums (including CRT – yup, go check that out, it happened…in a lot of districts). But a massive, massive majority did NOTHING to improve infrastructure. The result – well, in Colorado today, along the Denver and just north corridor, older schools sweltered to 91 degrees in classrooms under record heat. Kids are being released early yesterday, today, and most likely tomorrow. Zippo-zilch-nada was granted for upgrades to infrastructure in almost all of these schools. How are your districts faring?
