Blogging the heatwave

It is unbearably hot, to the point where I don't even want to go near a keyboard; hence the blogstinence. But here are some thoughts:

Parts of New York City have been experiencing blackouts for the last two weeks or so; 100,000 people in Queens were without power for 9 days, Staten Island is being hit with roving blackouts, and the local utility is working furiously to avoid another full-scale blackout. As a reminder, this is what that looked like in 2003:



Seen from space, note that huge hole on the East Coast:



So here's my question: why, when we had a catastrophic blackout three years ago, has nothing, or too little, been done to avoid even the possibility of another similar occurence? This town is not some hole in the Alaskan tundra, like the one where your republican government is spending $300 million to build a bridge maybe fifty people will use - we're the center of the national and global economy.

Next question: considering that this country, Europe and Asia are all sweating in the grip of a heat wave, that over 60% of the nation is in a drought, is it not maybe time to give up the semantic games on whether or not global warming is happening, and maybe, you know, begin to address the problem?

Republicans claim to have an energy policy, one that consists of bloating the bottom line of Exxon Mobil still further, and otherwise bitching about the all-powerful Sierra Club, which supposedly stops them from building power plants and the like. That's right, the enviros are more powerful than the entire unified Federal government. So are they also stopping them from investing in the grid, hmmm?

The emerging storyline of election 2006 is the wholesale, catastrophic failure of right-wing governance. Add their "energy policy" into the list.