I met this lady in an airport lobby who was going on about the weather, saying that carbon must be causing it. I shook my head and smiled.
Did you know if you have a plan to study weather change in relation to carbon you could get a government grant for large sums of money? However, you have to study this the way they want it studied. People are getting millions to prove that weather is affected by carbon. So those people are not going to do anything but rage on about it. First they claimed carbon caused the weather heating up and now they claim it causes the changing weather.
No one is funding the opposition on this carbon issue. Some people believe the polar bear were endangered because of the man who made that call saying there would be no ice at the North Pole thus; we had to stop hunting the bear. The Artic ice is 20 percent larger than it ever was in modern days.
One time, centuries ago, people lived in Greenland and grew crops. There hasn’t been anyone there in agriculture in centuries. It is all ice covered. Hey, it must have been warm up there then and the polar bear wasn’t extinct. I’d like to interview the guy who made the polar bear survey, I bet he got a grant for that.
In the 1960s and ‘70s, Congress spent lots of money on grants for conducting research as to why we were having such cold long winters. They had nothing to find, the ocean currents are heating and cooling. They change wind direction, send clouds to places like Boston this winter. Next time they shift and we may be under a more severe winter.
I can recall in the ‘80s when it was so cold that pipes buried underground going to chicken houses froze. We all bought tape heaters for faucets and ran lines above the ground to get the birds water.
What about the hurricanes, where did they go? People said we’d have more and more of them. Katrina was the last real big one. The one in New Jersey missed Florida, but for many years they got seven and eight big ones in Florida. The oceans changed – volcanoes under the ocean do more to change the ocean temperature than carbon.
The current administration was bought off on the okay of an oil pipeline by a political campaign contribution for $100 million. No thought about the jobs we needed. EPA is going to raise your electric bill by their planned carbon reduction by closing down coal plants – only $20-40 a month. It may cause an energy shortage because their plan to switch to natural gas won’t have the reserves like a coal plant has to have in order to stave off a blackout. Last winter we ran every power plant we had and nearly had blackouts.
EPA received lots of letters from rural electric folks about these new regulations. The number of protests is astronomical. I doubt they waver from their plan unless congress stops them. I know lots of people can’t pay any more for power – I hope someone listens. America has coal and enough for 300 years or more. It is economical. We never will have a land as pristine as it was when Lewis and Clark trekked over it for President Jefferson, but our rivers are clean. The air is clean enough.
God bless America, you and your family, Dusty Richards
Editor’s Note: Dusty Richards is the former Vice President of the Ozark Electric Coop and Board Member of the Oklahoma Electric Coop. These are his opinions and not the opinions of these organizations.