ON the Guardian website, columnist Gaby Hinsliff tells how she and her family went 12 hours without power when Storm Darragh struck their rural residence. Their central heating, lighting, phone and internet were cut off, and they had to use candles for illumination and chop firewood for warmth.
It was an unpleasant experience and Ms Hinsliff certainly saw the seriousness of the situation in a wider context. ‘As of Monday morning, 100,000 households had gone two nights and counting without power – no joke for the old, frail or ill-prepared,’ she wrote. It also brought home to her how ‘our digitised lives have become quite madly, recklessly vulnerable to a sudden loss of power’.
Her observations were interesting – because they gave us a chilling foretaste of what life will be like if Ed Miliband is allowed to push through his Net Zero insanity with its built-in power cuts.
So for Ms Hinsliff, who presumably supports the Guardian’s obsessive promotion of Mad Ed’s ‘clean energy’ delusions, was it a moment of revelation? As she and her family shivered in flickering semi-darkness, did it occur to her that if Net Zero is the future, it doesn’t work? Did a light bulb (or even a candle) suddenly burn bright inside her head, telling her how crazy it is pursuing a policy that will reverse centuries of human progress and leave us all colder, poorer – and even dead?
Apparently not. Instead, Ms Hinsliff told us that blackouts such as the one she experienced are due to our unpreparedness for ‘shifting weather patterns’ caused by – you guessed it – climate change. Climate change, or man-made global warming, is the default Guardian excuse for anything bad that happens in the world.
Ms Hinsliff’s property was hit by a blackout because power lines were blown down during Storm Darragh. Well, she may be pleased to know that, come the glorious dawn of Net Zero, plenty more power lines will be up – [600 miles more]. The trouble is, they won’t be carrying sufficient electricity to supply us all, because wind turbines and solar panels are unlikely ever to be able to generate enough.
So power cuts won’t be a one-off occurrence providing copy for a Guardian piece. Instead, they’ll be the grim, depressing, everyday norm. However, Ms Hinsliff’s article wasn’t all disappointment. It did contain one helpful hint about what to do as the Miliband Dark Ages descend: Start stocking up on candles and firewood.
