Don's Tuesday column

          THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson    Red Bluff Daily News   8/28/2012

Paying dearly for global warming hysteria

NOTE: Tea Party Patriots will host Republican Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, a dynamic speaker on, and leader for, government reform. Those who’ve heard him raved about him.

It practically leaps out of the envelopes and off the pages of my PG&E bills, especially when compared and contrasted to electricity bills from Central Electric Cooperative, Inc. (CEC) for our Bend, Oregon, home. “It” is the exorbitant cost of electricity charged to residential customers for the dubious privilege of California living (similar costs to businesses surely hurt our economy and unemployment rate).

Have you looked at the breakdown of the rates that apply to your different tiers of usage? They are listed as “Baseline,” “101-130% of Baseline,” and so on up to, if you are staying cool to survive a heat wave, “201-300% of Baseline.” You might think that your “Baseline” is a good deal because those hours have the lowest rate, but that would be wrong thinking. If you pay attention to your bill, you’ll quickly see that you pay from almost 13 cents per kilowatt hour (KWH) to over 34 cents per KWH.

Your effective rate overall will range from, in my case, 18 cents per KWH last month up to 21+ cents per KWH in last summer’s peak. You do see, of course, that as your reasonable needs increase in a straight line, your rates shoot up to make those higher-but-essential KWHs very expensive.

Then I gaze upon the rate – one, single rate – that is charged to us in Bend: 7.33 cents per KWH. Wow! Is your mouth hanging open or do you need to grab a calculator to see what your PG&E bill would be if every last KWH was 7.33 cents. I did; instead of a $204 bill, it would have been about $83, and last summer’s peak bill would have been about $110 instead of $317. I assume that you likewise pay two and a half to almost three times what folks in Bend pay.

I actually called CEC’s business office to see if there were higher rates that kick in, for instance, for someone with a very large, all-electric house with a big air conditioning unit, or two, as well as electric water heater and clothes dryer. Nope, the lady said, that’s the rate. However, there is a flat monthly “Facilities charge” of $11.75, which still leaves the cost a fraction of PG&E’s. Oh, and in the winter (November through March up there), the rate drops to 7.07 cents.

You and I both know why, right? Why cheap, 5 cent per KWH coal-produced electricity is not used. Why literally $10s of millions worth of wind turbines and solar arrays have been built, that cannot produce electricity for less than, I think I’ve previously reported, 30-40 cents per KWH. Yes, by law California utilities can’t buy cheap coal-produced energy; other states can, of course, so we only gouge ourselves via PG&E and AB 32, the CA cap and trade law mandating so-called “renewable” green energy. When, that is, the sun shines and the wind blows.

Moreover, lest we lowly subjects of Sacramento entertain any doubts about the wisdom of such schemes, state and national news reports regularly provide us with selectively massaged global warming/climate change propaganda. On July 11, AP reported “Global warming tied to risk of weather extremes,” and then, on August 1, “Calif. report will guide climate-change decisions.” (Oceans rising; sky falling)

For the alternative arguments to, and refutations of, the warming/alarmist positions, go to “Polecat News and Views” (donpolson.blogspot.com) and click on the “global warming” label. Look up articles: “How Bad Data Contribute to Global Warming Hysteria” (August 21), which uses the Tahoe City area to illustrate the erroneous use of land temperature measurements to drive the warming narrative. “Satellite data show no net warming for as long as such data have been collected, i.e., back to 1979. Ocean measurements show no net warming over that period, either …”

As Anthony Watts (wattsupwiththat.com) has demonstrated, weather station siting has skewed the reported temperatures higher due to, in the case of Tahoe City, proximity to burn barrels, tennis courts and parking lots that didn’t exist decades ago. Gov. Jerry Brown then uses such bogus data to scare monger, via his office’s website, over the supposedly “well documented” global warming impact on Lake Tahoe, as well as how “humanity is getting dangerously close to the point of no return.” (More sky falling).

Rather than admonishing us to “wake up and honestly face the facts,” “moonbeam” Brown should simply look at temperature data from stations located in actual forests or at a forest-located ranger station, which show no warming going back to at least 1949. By the way, Mr. Watts et al found that almost 90 percent of the 1,221 weather stations used by the National Weather Service (NWS), under NOAA, “fail to meet the NWS’s own siting requirements” for distance from artificial heat sources.

“A tornado of misinformation” (7/29) uses NOAA data to prove there are no inordinate spikes of tornado activity. “More from the climatefail files” show “how NPR and other media outlets breathlessly distorted a NASA report on melting ice in Greenland.” In “NASA’s James Hansen’s big cherry pick,” Anthony Watts handily refutes Hansen’s hysterical proclamation that it’s … the … hottest … ever. “Global Climate, the big Picture” asserts a general cooling trend for Northern Europe for 2,000 years, based on Lapland tree rings. There’s more to read.