The Wall Street Journal editorial page’s Stephen Moore uses the power outage in DC as a warning about what life would be like if “the greens” seize power.

Environmentalists, you see, aren’t just opposed to pollution and catastrophic climate effects from carbon emissions. According to Moore, they’re all but opposed to electricity, however clean:

Electrical power is the central nervous system of our modern economy and our 21st-century lifestyles, and living without it for a few days reminds us how vulnerable we are to being sent back to a pre-Industrial Age. Yet every initiative by green groups is focused on reducing our access to electrical power—although they never admit that explicitly.

This power outage was caused by a severe thunderstorm from Mother Nature, but I’m convinced that rolling brown outs are coming, thanks to the radical environmental movement that has taken hold of our body politic.

We’ve actually seen that kind of thing before, recall. More than a decade ago, the radicals plunging us into pre-Industrial Age darkness were caught on tape in California:

“Just cut ‘em off. They’re so fucked. They should just bring back fucking horses and carriages, fucking lamps, fucking kerosene lamps.”

That actually wasn’t a treehugger talking. It was an Enron crook manipulating California’s partially deregulated electricity markets into rolling blackouts a decade ago.

Here Moore talks, with no apparent irony, about how liberals think “things were better in the past than they are now”:

There’s one more teachable moment from our three days in the dark. So many Americans—spoon-fed by a “go green” education system and media—live under the delusion that things were better in the past than they are now. Sure the economy is bad, but all we had to do is live for 72 hours without AC, TV, a dishwasher, a hair dryer and Google to appreciate how much progress has been made in the past 20, 30, and 50 years. Today a larger percentage of poor people have access to air conditioning than the average middle-class family did in 1960.

Finally, he says that if fossil fuel-driven climate change turns out to be real, we can just burn more fossil fuel to power as-yet-unknown technology to cool things back down.

Perhaps a really, really Big Ass Fan?

(disclosure: My wife works in industrial energy efficiency)

— Speaking of the WSJ editorial board, The New York Times reports on the backstory behind Rupert Murdoch’s Twitter shots at Mitt Romney (emphasis mine):

They have met only a handful of times. Their lukewarm feelings toward each other stem from their encounter at a meeting of The Journal editorial board in 2007, when Mr. Romney visited to pitch himself as the most capable conservative candidate about two months before the Iowa caucuses.

Romney and Journal staff members who attended said that despite being deeply prepared and animated — particularly on his love for data crunching — Mr. Romney failed to connect with either Mr. Murdoch or The Journal’s editorial page editor, Paul A. Gigot. Instead of articulating a clear and consistent conservative philosophy, he dwelled on organizational charts and executive management, areas of expertise that made him a multimillionaire as the head of his private equity firm, Bain Capital.

At one point, Mr. Romney declared that “I would probably bring in McKinsey,” the management consulting firm, to help him set up his presidential cabinet, a comment that seemed to startle the editors and left Mr. Murdoch visibly taken aback.

Rupert’s not so fond of the consultant types. For that matter, few are.

TAGS: , , , ,

Ryan Chittum , a former Wall Street Journal reporter, is deputy editor of The Audit, CJR's business section. If you see notable business journalism, give him a heads-up at rc2538@columbia.edu.