Let’s say Representative Mike Simpson and his liberal allies get their way and remove four dams on the lower Snake River.  The hydropower equation in the northwest will be greatly altered.  Idaho currently ranks fifth in the nation for clean energy, and that’s based on water-spinning turbines to generate electricity.  Simpson may envision the Idaho National Laboratory will step up with small thorium reactors and fill the void.  Can you imagine that happening anytime over the next two decades?

First, the tree-hugging crowd will show up and chant “Hey, hey, ho, ho, nuclear power has got to go.”  News media will shower its fellow travelers with attention.  Then the lawsuits will come from the environmental lobbyists funded by Hollywood actors living in homes the size of shopping malls.

The actors will be banking on wind power piped into southern California from massive turbines in southern Idaho.  We won’t get to share any of the juice generated even as our land is despoiled.  This means we’ll be where much of the rest of the country currently stands.  Always one nasty storm away from blackouts.  The grid in New England nearly collapsed over the Christmas holiday after just a few days of cold weather.  And it has been colder in the region in past winters.

What we need are oil and natural gas.  A few hours before I started writing this story, I saw two pieces in the Wall Street Journal.  One said refining capacity has been greatly reduced in America and the Biden Administration is getting in the way.  We’re down one million barrels a day since Joe Biden took office.  You can’t flip a switch and restore capacity tomorrow.  The second shocker was about the cold weather that reached the Gulf Coast.  It’s hampering shipments of liquefied natural gas.  Biden is going 180 degrees in the wrong direction.

You may favor green energy, and even if it ever becomes feasible for the world’s largest economy, we still need bridge fuels.  How many people died in Buffalo in frosty and dark homes?  Now consider a five-week polar blast across the northern tier of the country (a possibility every winter).  How many tens of thousands of their fellow Americans do the liberals plan to kill?

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LOOK: The most extreme temperatures in the history of every state

Stacker consulted 2021 data from the NOAA's State Climate Extremes Committee (SCEC) to illustrate the hottest and coldest temperatures ever recorded in each state. Each slide also reveals the all-time highest 24-hour precipitation record and all-time highest 24-hour snowfall.

Keep reading to find out individual state records in alphabetical order.

 

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