“It’s manifestly silly (and highly polluting) for every fine home to have a generator. It would make more sense to invest those resources in the electrical grid so that it wouldn’t fail in the first place….So time and again, we see the decline of public services accompanied by the rise of private workarounds for the wealthy.”
I read this column by “vaunted” NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff and stared at amazement at the words that stuttered across my eyeballs. What was I missing? How come I could not divine the missing links to how the heck he starts off with one observation and lays blame on something that seems to be totally unconnected? Look, he’s a high priced NY professional journalist and I’m just a ordinary schlub in central New Hampsha – is that it? Or is it because he’s a prominent member of the circle of stratospheric Lefties and I’m just a grassroots Rightist? A “thinker” vs “knuckledragger” (as some on the Left tolerantly call folks like me)? Are we on the Conservative side of the aisle, TEA Party philosophy, just incapable of understanding such lofty sentiments about how the need for generators is totally because some people have too much and the Government won’t take it away from them (reformatted and emphasis mine):
In upper-middle-class suburbs on the East Coast, the newest must-have isn’t a $7,500 Sub-Zero refrigerator. It’s a standby generator that automatically flips on backup power to an entire house when the electrical grid goes out. In part, that’s a legacy of Hurricane Sandy. Such a system can cost well over $10,000, but many families are fed up with losing power again and again. (A month ago, I would have written more snarkily about residential generators. But then we lost power for 12 days after Sandy — and that was our third extended power outage in four years. Now I’m feeling less snarky than jealous!)
More broadly, the lust for generators is a reflection of our antiquated electrical grid and failure to address climate change. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave our grid, prone to bottlenecks and blackouts, a grade of D+ in 2009. So Generac, a Wisconsin company that dominates the generator market, says it is running three shifts to meet surging demand. About 3 percent of stand-alone homes worth more than $100,000 in the country now have standby generators installed…
Every time I see “our”, I just shake my head. So, Conflation #1 – We all own that grid according to St. Nich. Hmmm, last time I knew, the majority of that grid is owned by large publicly owned companies (or, like here in NH, a co-op). Sure, there are some electrical systems that are metropolitan in nature – the city owns it. That means, in THAT case, that “we” own it – but only if you are a resident of that town, yes?
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