While Nonsense Reigns

He’s at your door. The eighteen-year-old neighbor boy your sons used to play with is smiling brightly at you with a clipboard in his left hand. He explains, that under the new energy act he is here to check your thermostat and record your last utility bill. Hesitant, but unwilling to be unpleasant, you let him in, guide him to your thermostats and make a photocopy of your last utility bill. Smiles abound, thanks and cordiality marks this transaction without incident. It is 105 degrees on that July day. You notice while cooking dinner that it seems uncomfortably hot. You go to the thermostat and see that it has been changed from 72 degrees to 82. “Why that such and such”, you think, resetting your thermostat back to 72.

It is August 12, and a more modest 98 degrees today. Someone knocks on your door. This time you see a technician standing there with a toolbox clothed in overalls with a strange green embroidered symbol on his chest. He hands you his card with the Department of Energy Conservation Services over arching the name Frank Whittle. You don’t know this guy, he is less polite than your eighteen-year-old pesky neighbor and explains that he has twenty houses to do and is in a hurry. You seem to remember now, that notice you got in the mail late in July.

Three hours later, the ‘Frank’ man is gone. You are now part of the “smart” power grid. It’s getting hot again while you cook dinner. This time when you try to reset the thermostat you can’t. You notice that a small button like device is connected to the outside of your thermostat, and another module about the size of a matchbox is attached to your phone. That night you are so hot you can only go to sleep with the sheets on and then only when the night breeze picks up around midnight.

It is now winter. You live in a northwestern alpine climate. A cold snap has conspired in January to bring temperatures down to fifteen degrees below zero. Here go the blankets. Your children are all knocking one by one on your bedroom door telling you that they are cold. Every blanket you have is piled onto them, including the sleeping bags normally reserved for camping. You notice a fog emanating from your mouth as you breath. Checking your thermostat, just for kicks and giggles, because after all, you haven’t been able to control your own thermostat for over 5 months now, you are astonished to see the temperature is only 48 Degrees. The Thermostat in the master bedroom is a more comfortable 60 degrees but it is more insulated near the center of the house. The thermostat in the master bedroom has the button on it. The other thermostat has no ‘button’.

It is April; the bills have been mounting on your office desk. An annual vehicle registration bill punctuates your expectations for having an extra $500.00 towards summer vacation with an incredible 300% disappointment in the bill. The bill is for $1,800.00.

Your oldest son is furious. He wants to use his own car to go to work, but you can’t afford to register it and gasoline prices have skyrocketed. You try reminding him who he voted for, explaining the hardship the new conservation legislation has caused everyone and that you will drop him off down at the bus depot an hour and a half before he needs to be at work. He doesn’t seem to care what you say. He just vents incessantly, adding that he will be missing a date with his girlfriend.

OPEC now supplies 50% of the nation’s oil. The government seems almost gleefully eager to shut down new oil exploration. For the fifth month in a row OPEC has maintained an unchecked embargo on the United States. Oil imports shrink and gas prices soar to a staggering $12.00 a gallon. But, like every thing else in the news these days, the only thing you hear is how gluttonous and excessive you are as an American consumer.

The current administration in Washington DC seems more concerned with carbon trading and green energy incentives for anything not oil, not coal, not nuclear and not convenient.

“Global Warming”: The billboards by the highway are rife with pictures of scorching deserts, wayfaring polar bears and rotting fish on some nondescript shore. Your misery index is high and assurances that you are saving the world are low.

Large sporting events have been targeted by the government as leaving too large of a carbon footprint. As a result, the Super Bowl is only 1/3 full that year and riots breakout in the parking lot stadium over the high price of parking permits.

Headline: San Diego shipping container from Mexico found with traces of plutonium daughter isotopes.

Wednesday, June 6, 2012: The neighbor fellow who tagged you last year as an energy hog, is seen driving a brand new hybrid. It seems that government conservation officers are moving on up in the world. You stopped being friends with him last winter when he reported you for using an old kerosene heater in your home.

Headline: Construction for a wind farm in Kansas was stopped after a tornado destroyed 83 10-megawatt rotor towers. The president promises emergency funding to revive the 20 billion dollar project.

Headline: A man selling firewood on a San Francisco road side is arrested and given a three-year prison sentence. (His children go to Child Protective Services and then on for Foster Care.)

You vaguely recall hearing in a high school science class that life could not exist with out carbon dioxide.

“Carbon Trading” becomes a mainstream “industry,” becoming the first time in history that an “industry” is described as being something that is ‘not made’ or ‘serviced’ and can also be traded in the stock market.

Headline: Al Gore’s Private Jet gets stranded for two days due to a snow storm in Chicago.

Headline: Despite claims of 60% thermal conversion efficiency, General Electric loses a permit for a new power plant in Virginia because it proposes using coal from two nearby mines. Brownouts, blackouts and the daily news nags remind everyone that conservation is “everyone’s” business.

A bill passes the house and senate, amending the constitutional amendment for two presidential terms and extending the office term limits of president to four terms.

The World Economic Summit tries to convene in a secret resort in Switzerland. The U.S. President is rushed out by the secret service, riots break out and the summit is cancelled.

A Secret Service agent ‘takes one’ (bullet) for the president during a press conference. The agents name is not reported in the news.

Headline: Somali pirates kill over 800 passengers on a vacation cruise when their ransom demands are not met. A bright member of the press mentions that none of the pirated ships to date have been from an Islamic state. A UN spokesman replies emphatically that pirate activities are merely a symptom of desperate poverty conditions in the third world.

Christmas: December 25, 2014, New York City and Lower Manhattan, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington DC are all leveled simultaneously by coordinated nuclear detonations approximating two megatons each. There were no ICBM alerts, and no warnings of any kind. Twelve million Americans are dead. Twenty million more will die in the next few months. News is scarce. No one is claiming the office of President. Marshal law is declared by a U.S. air force general. Quarantines are enforced near the blast sights resulting in 30 million more human deaths due to disease and starvation.

The Midwest and northwestern states form a new provisional protectorate. UN troops flit about nervously in and out of the larger towns. It becomes a popular sport for snipers to pick them off in their convoys, raiding their supplies and leaving their helmets atop the fence posts.

A U.S. peace treaty signed in 2010 with Iran gave them enough time to finish building several modern nuclear devices. Threats to several other nations are rumored to have come from Iran, alluding of like consequences. No one really knows if Iran even exists anymore. Radio Bands are dominated by the military and news comes down largely from these sources.

Your last can of Spam is finished without ceremony. Your family is just too tired to even mumble a complaint. You are carrying your youngest on your shoulders down a long highway. You’ve lost more weight than you thought you ever could. Your wife stopped crying weeks ago. Your water is getting low and you hope your family can make it to the next town before nightfall.

I wouldn’t want to have to live through all this.

Nonsense has its price.

Milton