They Call It Conservation

You know all of those enviro activists who are constantly hectoring us about the amount of energy we use (and allegedly waste) here in the profligate United States of America? Well their dreams seem to have come true in western Washington state recently, where hundreds of thousands of residents have been conserving 100% of their usual electricity usage, as their power has been out due to storm damage.

This outage, in turn, has caused many residents to turn to unreliable, unsafe alternatives to keep themselves and their families from freezing at night. Those emergency alternatives, including indoor generators and charcoal grills, have been responsible for up to 100 deaths due to accidental carbon monoxide poisoning. There is a lesson here; when you deprive people of safe, affordale energy the results are going to be bad, and possible deadly. Whether the proximate cause of that deprivation ends up being storm damage or a carbon-cap energy rationing scheme will make little difference.