Greenouts

Last week was a blood bath for left-wing digital media outlets. Buzzfeed (recently in the news for another fake-news adventure), Huffington Post, and Yahoo News staff layoffs combined to nearly a thousand. Many took to Twitter to advertise their unemployment, and were met with little sympathy from conservatives who still use the platform. (It seems a lot are there just to troll.) Steven Crowder expressed his heartfelt sympathies but informed them that he has no current openings. Many generally reveled at a dying fake-news industry. Most vicious was the eruption of a "Learn to Code" meme blitz (see Tim Pool, or Black Pigeon Speaks).

During the Obama administration, the response of these same journalists to coal miners laid off by green environmental policies - in areas already hammered by US trade agreements - was to advise them to transition into the technology sector. Reporters were eager to compare the situation to the sharp reduction of farm labor after industrialization. But farmers weren't laid off by edicts from the district.

Learn to code, the miners were told. Whether any given reporter was being genuinely naive, or intentionally condescending, all such reporting dripped with arrogance. To them, all the menial labor is interchangeable. Just go do the jobs those other dirt people do. They betray an ignorance to what coding is. It's a bit like saying, "why don't you miners just all become doctors? There's a shortage of those." (Thanks to the AMA, but they wouldn't understand that either.)

The best part of the meme campaign has been the response of those laid off journalists. Gracefully taking a dose of their own medicine? Of course not. Some have made declarations that telling journalist to learn to code amounts to hate speech, and have demanded Twitter ban all the offenders. As usual, no principle, all righteous indignation. It's fun to watch them go down in flames.

Speaking of coal miners, the Australian state of Victoria laid off its coal miners too. Let's check in and see how they're doing.

Victoria is now an even bigger joke than South Australia, becoming our second blackout state thanks to global warming madness.

Consider: Victoria sits on vast deposits of coal — enough for electricity for hundreds of years.

It also has lots of gas.

Yet last Thursday and Friday it somehow managed to run out of electricity, just like some third-world country. Just like South Australia.

Result: 200,000 homes and businesses had their power cut off without warning. Portland’s smelters and other big electricity users were also paid by government to shut down during the emergency.

Wholesale prices soared as Victoria desperately imported power from Queensland and NSW, which for now still have enough of the coal-fired generators that the Greens and Labor demand we scrap.

Actually third blackout state. Tasmania relies heavily on hydro. During hot summer months, when water levels fall far enough, the rolling blackouts begin. Really we should call them greenouts - power outages directly resulting from green energy policies that mandate volatile energy sources. Luckily, the other countries will see the lessons being learned in South Australia, Victoria, and Tasmania, and make sure not to repeat them. Right?

Germany, one of the world’s biggest consumers of coal, will shut down all 84 of its coal-fired power plants over the next 19 years to meet its international commitments in the fight against climate change, a government commission said Saturday.

The announcement marked a significant shift for Europe’s largest country — a nation that had long been a leader on cutting CO2 emissions before turning into a laggard in recent years and badly missing its reduction targets. Coal plants account for 40% of Germany’s electricity, itself a reduction from recent years when coal dominated power production.

“This is an historic accomplishment,” said Ronald Pofalla, chairman of the 28-member government commission, at a news conference in Berlin following a marathon 21-hour negotiating session that concluded at 6 a.m. Saturday. The breakthrough ended seven months of wrangling. “It was anything but a sure thing. But we did it,” Pofalla said. “There won’t be any more coal-burning plants in Germany by 2038.”

The plan includes some $45 billion in spending to mitigate the pain in coal regions. The commission’s recommendations are expected to be adopted by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government.

Germany, which is mothballing all its nuclear plants on a short timeline, will now start dismantling its coal plants on a more leisurely schedule. The future for Germany is a dependency on North Sea wind and Russian gas. Shall we take a pool as to when the greenouts will begin?