Posted 12/12/2011 05:10:00 PM by Douglas

First off, as someone who has ever had trouble paying their bills, it sucks. I don't revel in anyone's misfortune when they can't provide for themselves. I'm not opposed to a bit of assistance from Uncle Sucker, but when that assistance becomes an entitlement, you get into trouble. Enter the increased cost of heating oil in New England.

Thousands of poor people across the Northeast are bracing for a difficult winter with substantially less home heating aid coming from the federal government.

Imagine that?!? It's going to get cold in New England?!? And this time of year! Who could have ever seen this one coming? But it gets better:

"They're playing Russian roulette with people's lives," said John Drew, who heads Action for Boston Community Development, Inc., which provides aid to low-income residents in Massachusetts.

Right. A game of chance where you bet your life is exactly the same thing as reducing government subsidies for utilities. Exactly. The same. Go on:

Families in New England, where the winters are long and cold and people rely heavily on costly oil heat, are expected to be especially hard hit. Many poor and elderly people on fixed incomes struggle with rising heating bills that can run into thousands of dollars. That can force them to cut back on other necessities like food or medicine.

Wow, it took quite a long time for this hack to trot out the "fixed income" rant. Guess who else is on a "fixed income" besides the elderly and poor? Everyone that works. And again, New England has winters that are long and cold? I'm sure that's the Republican's fault, right? But let's get to the meat of this:

Families can expect to pay, on average, about $3,300 to heat a home with oil this winter in New England, Wolfe said. That's about $500 more than last winter. About half of the region's homes use oil heat.

Holy shit, that's a lot of oil! Here's what I don't get:

I've heard the rant, first hand, I might add, from do-gooding liberals from Manhattan to Portland how the Southern United States is essentially uninhabitable, and no one would live there if there wasn't cheap energy to drive the air conditioners. The South existed before A/C, so it's not a perfect argument, but I can certainly concede that the explosive growth of the sun belt is a result in no small part of the near uniform coverage of pleasantly conditioned indoor space. So here's the rub:

If bubba running his A/C in South Texas is ruining the planet by wasting fossil fuels and causing global warming, how do the yankees get a walk on this one when they get hit by this long, cold, New England winter? They burn $3,300 worth of oil each and every year in their homes, so it would seem that their location choice would be equally, if not more, untenable from a carbon emission standpoint than the South. Yet I've never seen an article like this one where stupid yankees should move to some mythical land where there's a perfect climate and people don't have to expend any energy on climate control.

Why is that? Is global warming only caused by burning fossil fuels in the South? Apparently burning fossil fuels in liberal enclaves, Al Gore's limo and in bussing school children across town for some sociological experiment do not contribute to global warming in the slightest.