California Narrowly Dodges Thermostat Police
Proposed law would have allowed government to set your thermostat.
by Jeff Davis
For decades the crazy liberal socialists running California failed to build enough power plants to keep up with the rapidly growing population. A flood of illegal aliens caused the population to swell even faster. The result has been a demand for electricity that sometimes results in brown outs and black outs.
So what is the latest move out of Sacramento? Are they finally going to allow more power plants to be built? Of course not. The California legislature seriously wanted the power to set YOUR thermostat by remote control. The International Herald Tribune reports: “The conceit in the 1960s show The Outer Limits was that outside forces had taken control of your television set. Next year in California, state regulators are likely to have the emergency power to control individual thermostats, sending temperatures up or down through a radio-controlled device that will be required in new or substantially modified houses and buildings to manage electricity shortages.”
Thankfully a massive wave of public protest shut this down, but the mere fact that politicians would even consider granting themselves this much intrusive control on our lives is more than a little alarming.
The Herald Tribune goes on: “The proposed rules are contained in a document circulated by the California Energy Commission, which for more than three decades has set state energy efficiency standards for home appliances, like water heaters, air conditioners and refrigerators. The changes would allow utilities to adjust customers’ preset temperatures when the price of electricity is soaring. Customers could override the utilities’ suggested temperatures. But in emergencies, the utilities could override customers’ wishes. Final approval is expected next month.”
And just who would have defined what constitutes “emergencies?” Needless to say, it won’t be the poor white working slob broiling alive in 110-degree Bakersfield for months on end, or freezing in cold and foggy Arcata in a winter storm trying to keep children in the house warm.
The Herald article notes ” ‘You realize there are times - very rarely, once every few years - when you would be subject to a rotating outage and everything would crash including your computer and traffic lights, and you don’t want to do that,’ said Arthur Rosenfeld, a member of the energy commission. Reducing individual customers’ electrical use - if necessary, involuntarily - could avoid that, Rosenfeld said. ‘If you can control rotating outages by letting everyone in the state share the pain,’ he said, ‘there’s a lot less pain to go around.’ ”
What’s really interesting here is that this new policy is a tacit admission that there will be rolling brown outs and black outs well into the foreseeable future. California’s power grid, like all American infrastructure, is hopelessly antiquated and overloaded, crumbling with ancient equipment and wiring and obsolescent technology and not allowed to expand by crazy liberal socialists. In California energy is gobbled up by millions of illegal aliens, especially in the Los Angeles metropolis. What the state government is saying is that California, which has become virtually unfit for civilized human habitation already, is going to get a lot worse. But I think we all knew that, didn’t we?