Conservatives don't trust Government with our energy

Here is latest private fiasco and good reason why government should be in charge of energy, not stockholders cramming their pockets full of cash instead of buryng electric lines after years of these same incidents.

EAST LANSING, Mich. (AP) - Staring at a sixth day without power in a house as cold as a refrigerator, a frustrated John Johnson finally was able to borrow a generator from a neighbor Friday.

He "never in a million years" thought his tree-lined city neighborhood near Michigan State University would be without electricity this long. But it could be Sunday or even the middle of next week before the power is back after a weekend ice storm that tore off tree limbs and snuffed out lights from Michigan to Maine and into Canada over the Christmas holiday.

"Hopefully, I make it through without any frozen pipes until the (utility) gets in here," said Johnson, 63, as he tried setting up the generator to warm up the house above 40 degrees before giving it back to his neighbor.

Michigan bore the brunt of the storm as nearly 600,000 homes and businesses lost power, and as of Friday afternoon, about 60,000 customers remained in the dark. Maine reported almost 12,000 outages and in eastern Canada, nearly 62,000 still hadn't had their power restored, including 33,000 in Toronto.


(AP) A power line remains down, Thursday, Dec. 26, 2013, in East Lansing, Mich., following a weekend ice...
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Tens of thousands of Michigan residents like Johnson are the unlucky ones still waiting. Some have abandoned their homes to stay elsewhere. Others are riding it out, either by choice - not wanting to leave pets or unattended houses - or because they have nowhere else to go.

Their Christmas plans were ruined or inconvenienced, and now their frustration is boiling over. They know the storm was bad and appreciate the around-the-clock efforts of line crews, but in East Lansing, for instance, residents are questioning the response by the local municipal utility.

"Where's the money going? The money we pay in power bills, the money that they spend to cut these trees down to keep the power lines open doesn't seem to really be working, in my mind," said Jon Irvin, 35. MUST BE A SMART LIBERAL!!

 

gosh.... six whole days. the lesson that should be taken from this affair is that man's efforts come to naught in the face of mother nature, but i wouldn't expect you to have figured this out. yours is the same sort of thinking that lets so many fools believe that if we give our lives over to government they can halt our ever changing climate in its tracks. does anyone in their right mind believe that the state would have the lights turned on any quicker? we've seen their response to natural disasters before and seldom are they quick to rouse themselves, even with the full might of the entire military and trillions of dollars worth of bureaucracy behind them.

 

Government doesn't run anything efficiently. Just ask anyone who has ridden Amtrak. My son did and the air condition went out in his car and the conductor wouldn't allow anyone to move to another car even though they had room. They threw one person off at the next city because he kept complaining of the heat and their refusal of letting people to move to another car.

In Michigan when the wires froze and the lines came down, the electric company got electricians from other states and that wasn't easy to do over the Christmas Holiday to get people to leave their family and go to another state to fix the lines.

I don't know of any electric company that keeps enough people on the payroll to come right in and fix lines after a major catastrophe like that.

When the wall came down between East and West Germany and the two sides became one. West Germany had to rip all government run factories down in the East, as the government never kept them up enough to compete with other European factories. That is what would happen here. We can't even keep our bridges and roads up to par and you think the government will do better running the power companies? No way.

Liberals has the pie in the sky idea that government is the answer to all our problems. Government is the cause of most of our problems.

 

Gosh, you are right. Why wait days when you can wait for months or years. Hurricane Sandy comes to mind.

 

Who was the short sighted fools who forgot to bury the electric cables again this year? Oh, yeah, the con fools!!!

 

Yes, more electric cables that should have been buried by the greedy private sector!!!! Good point!!!

 

And you can point out where this was suggested by government? LOL

 

Obama's plan for utilities.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlTxGHn4sH4

 

It isn't governments power lines that failed again this year.

The German power grid has outages at an average rate of 21 minutes per year.



David Frum

The winds may howl. The trees may fall. But in Germany, the lights stay on.

There's no Teutonic engineering magic to this impressive record. It's achieved by a very simple decision: Germany buries almost all of its low-voltage and medium-voltage power lines, the lines that serve individual homes and apartments. Americans could do the same. They have chosen not to
http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/02/opinion/frum-buried-lines/

 

The government doesn't have any power lines. Who is to say they would bury them? That's damn expensive. If they did, how much more would it soak the customer? Are they going to buy people's property or pay them a fee where they go under their lots or fields?

 

Regulators could also be described as "transformers" or "Variable Switches" if you will...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer

[video=youtube;09-ShjD2fK8]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09-ShjD2fK8[/video]

 

You are right. With the exception of national defense and a few other enumerated functions, conservatives trust government with NOTHING! NOTHING! NOTHING!

 

Want a good example of what happens when government controls energy? Think PEMEX.

 

Think more of this...

[video=youtube;jGQQuaVL0R0]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGQQuaVL0R0[/video]

 

Yep, you pick the wrong country to hang your shell.

 

Because we all know that the country is not American anymore. At least not as it was envisioned.

 

What a chicken (*)(*)(*)(*) thread. Because mother nature knocks the power out, somehow government can run a powegrid better. What a (*)(*)(*)(*)ing joke. And this thread goes back to because some sorry ass mooch wants others to pay his electric bill.

 

Can it be true? Mother Nature is more powerful than Obama? Say it isn't so!

 

OK, Been in serving Mexico for 75 years.

Revenue US $128.671 billion (2012)
Net income US $390 million (2012)
Total assets US $26.1 billion (2012

What happens when private industry controls energy? Think Gulf Oil Spill, Valdez, $5. gallon for you own gas so stockholders don't have to suffer.

 

Yes, a durn shame indeed, but I still trust it over turning the nation over to corporations.

 

Thanks to the corruption and ineptitude of PEMEX, Mexico - a country with huge and easy-to-each oil reserves has to import gasoline.

 

Corporations were doing quite well here before government got involved and thought we could do better if we only started up free trade without any restrictions. People had jobs, good paying jobs and the country was doing well. Now 13 years later, the country that got around in rickshaws and bikes are now the world's biggest producers of automobiles. The have landed a robot on the moon, are ready to launch their first airliner and put up a space station. They have the largest submarine fleet in the world and we have gone from the richest country on earth, to borrowing money off of China to pay our bills. We depend on Russia to launch our astronauts into space and can't find anywhere near the jobs we had. Yes, what we need is government to get more involved.

 

Banchie would like us to have more services run by the government. Kind of like Venezuela.

 

Just as soon as the government gets a web site up and running to sign on to government run energy we can get things rolling.

Once they take over energy, the government then can take over education and fix it since the US is 48th in the world.

 

Yes, I agree. If the US was roughly half the size of Texas and was bombed to rubble in the early forties we may just have decided to put the lines underground during rebuilding.
Fortunately that's not how things happened. Do you have the slightest clue how much it would cost to bury Americas power grid? More than the debt we already have.