Reality pulled the plug from Ottawa to Detroit, from Toledo to Hartford, from Cleveland to New York City. Millions of New Yorkers had to walk across the bridges to the other boroughs to get home. Major cities just flat out shut down. No electricity. No elevator service. No cell phones. No traffic lights. NO NOTHING!

We live in a technological society that is totally dependent on electricity, and it isn't pro- duced by putting forty hamsters on a treadmill. You have to burn coal. You have to use natural gas. You have to tap rolling water for hydroelectricity. You need to build clean, non-polluting nuclear plants.

Americans, in general, are so dumb they just can't imagine not having enough electricity for everything they need to do. The reason California experienced so many energy prob- lems was that the stupid Californians would not allow power plants to be built and thought they could just keep buying electricity from Colorado, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, and even Canada. No! You can't have a massive immigration surge and not expect to use more damned electricity. It's a commodity and, when it gets scarce, the price goes UP.

There's a reason why California doesn't have enough power plants, nor any other state in this great republic of ours. It's called political environmentalism. It goes something like this: The Environmental Protection Agency is so busy levying huge fines on existing and older power plants that there is no incentive to build new ones. It also goes like this: The stupid attorney generals of Eastern states sue Western ones, blaming them for the air quality and crying: "We can't get in compliance with the EPA because you people want to heat your homes and stuff."

If that doesn't stop a power plant, there's the old reliable Endangered Species Act, or there's wetlands regulations. Or the Greens will run around and say that building a power plant anywhere is unfair to the poor people who may live anywhere near it.

Listen up, you dumb Americans! There are over 280 million of us, and all of us, except for those who live in cardboard boxes under a bridge, want to have our air conditioning work in the Summer and our furnaces work in the Winter. We expect the food in our re- frigerator to stay frozen. We expect to turn on our computers, our lights, and, God help us, our television sets.

The latest blackout was a warning that, so long as this nation continues to go along with idiotic and malevolent political environmentalists and their lies about darned near eve- rything, we are going to have more and worse blackouts.

Who needs Islamic terrorists? U.S. national security and the regional security of North America are entirely dependent on safe, reliable, and abundant energy. Maybe 8-14-03 needs to be added to 9-11-01 as a reminder of that? For decades, the political environ- mentalists have been attacking the economic and energy base of the U.S.A. and Canada.

Call it the Californication of America and Canada.

Alan Caruba is a veteran business and science writer, a Public Relations Counselor, Communications Director of the American Policy Center, and Founder of the National Anxiety Center, a clearinghouse for information about media-driven scare campaigns. Caruba writes a weekly column, "Warning Signs," posted on the Internet website of the National Anxiety Center (www.anxietycenter.com). A compilation of his past columns, entitled Warning Signs, is published by Merril Press. In addition to Warning Signs, Caruba is the author of A Pocket Guide to Militant Islam and The United Nations vs. the United States, both of which are available from the National Anxiety Center, 9 Brookside Road, Maplewood, New Jersey, 07040.

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