THE PSYCHOLOGIST : California surrenders to "fossil fuels"

California surrenders to "fossil fuels"

"Temporary"?

Natural gas is a hydrocarbon, a "fossil fuel"

Richard Lindzen writes:

I think that most of these people realize that there is nothing that the US and Europe can do that will have a discernible impact on climate regardless of what one believes about climate. Under the circumstances, the rational policy would be to do everything possible to increase the wealth of their societies in order to maximize resilience to whatever nature might do for whatever reason. There must be some reason why societies are choosing to do the opposite. Perhaps Fresno thinks that rationality might be preferable – at least in the short run. Maybe they feel that Covid has burdened people about as much as they can tolerate.

California plans to build five temporary natural gas plants to prevent blackouts and one of those plants will be in Fresno County, according to a local lawmaker.

The Department of Water Resources will install five natural gas plant generators at three powerplants in the state, according to the office of Jim Patterson, R-Fresno.

A total of $171.5 million has already been allocated for the implementation, according to the California Department of Finance.

Patterson confirmed news of the plants during a press conference Friday. His office later told The Bee that one of the generators will be installed at Midway Peaking Plant near Mendota in Fresno County.

His office confirmed plants would also be sited in Yuba City in Sutter County and Roseville in Placer County. Two generators will be at Calpine Greenleaf 1 located near Yuba City, Patterson’s office told The Bee late Friday. Two more will be installed at the Roseville Energy Park located near Roseville.

He said the gas-fueled generating plants will consist of a total capacity of 150 megawatts, with 30 megawatts for each unit.

Patterson said his “hunch” is that the state’s use of the plants won’t be temporary, noting that they will be licensed for five years.

The decision to install the five plants has been a result of flawed policies by decision-makers, he said.

“California has been forced to do this because we now have growing demand on a grid that has flattening supplies and that has caused these Flex Alerts,” he said. “Our grid is destabilized because of political decisions.”

From 2009 to 2019, there were two Flex Alerts per year, he said. So far this year alone, he said, the state has had about six Flex Alerts. With high temperatures this year, Californians have been urged to conserve electricity during certain hours.

“Now, as a result of the policies that are coming out of the state Capitol, we are increasingly seeing a grid that is close to being unbalanced,” he said.

Alisha Gallon, a spokeswoman for Patterson’s office, said the office only became aware of the plans through a reporter.

“There have been no official announcements to my knowledge,” she told The Bee. “We have no statement from the Governor or DWR (Department of Water Resources).”

The Department of Water Resources was in the process of procuring, installing and operating the five 30-megawatt generators at the three powerplants, according to an Aug. 10 letter from the California Department of Finance.

“Based on preliminary reporting, Finance has determined that funding for these critical activities must be secured immediately to allow the Department to secure these additional resources for expedited deployment,” the letter reads. “Accordingly, the Director of Finance is allocating $171.5 million from the Disaster Response-Emergency Operations Account.”

The Department of Finance, in the letter, says it has reviewed the information and agrees with the “estimates and need to make an initial allocation to address these immediate needs.”

It’s unclear whether the $171.5 million is just for the initial allocation or the total amount needed.

The Department of Water Resources will began its work related to the generators within 120 days from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s July 30 “state of emergency to safeguard the state’s energy system this summer,” according to the letter.

“Now we see the order that these natural gas plants are going to pop up — and one of them in my area here in the Fresno area,” Patterson told reporters.

He said California has been gambling that it can supply the fifth-largest economy in the world with electricity, primarily from wind and solar energy, which are not available at all times.

https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article253638523.html

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

California surrenders to "fossil fuels"

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