Better Than Free

 Let’s have some fun and put a couple of time-honored adages together.

 

First adage:  What goes up must come down.

 

Second adage:  If you think its expensive now, just wait until it’s free.

 

Idiom:  There’s an exception to every rule.

 

Sir Isaac Newton in need of a haircut

The first adage is usually attributed to Sir Isaac Newton regarding his “discovery” of gravity.  Newton learned that, according to legend, apples fell from trees because of gravity.  He was supposedly sitting beneath an apple tree, drinking tea, when an apple fell onto his noggin.  I was just a young lad when all this happened in 1679, and surmise this was a legend, rather than fact.

 

Our second adage is from a writer, P.J. O’Rourke, who was talking about then-president Barack Hussein O’Bama’s idealistic pimping of his Obamacare/Affordable Care Act insurance scam.  O’Bama promised healthcare would be free, but how would it be paid for?  He promised no higher taxes because this plan was so airtight that it would pay for itself.  It didn’t, which is why we are now inundated with countless TV ads for insurance.

 

Not to let a hare-brained idea go to waste, environmentalists have been banging their climate change drums since 1973.  Goading federal, state, and local guvments into spending billions upon billions of dollars on useless projects since then, environmentalists have an expensive itch to soothe: renewable energy.

 

Even private industries have been embarrassed into following suit, by playing the clean energy game – one competition that will have no winner – into “investing” obscene amounts of dollars as a form of “hush money,” not at all unlike Mafia shakedowns of yore.

 

Just as long as the dough keeps flowing, everyone is happy.  Guvments can ignore real changes by simply taxing the masses, corporations can continue with their businesses while passing the bills onto their customers, and the environmentalists can continue gadding about the world carping about pollution with their payoffs.  The only real losers are those who pay the bills.

 

If only we could find a way to make all this free…

 

According to the Tampa Electric Co., Tampa, Florida, they have that solution.  In February 2021, Tampa Electric was seeking a rate increase of what amounted to 18%, to begin switching their electricity to solar power.  Yeah!

 

Tampa Electric CEO Nancy Tower, said, “We know that investments we are planning are necessary to deliver benefits over time.”  Of course they are. 

 

“To continue delivering the value our customers deserve, we must plan for the long term, making investments now that create a better energy future,” she added.

 

It seems as though Tampa Electric is currently on track to generate 14% of its power from solar over the next two-years.  What could possibly go wrong?

 

Ms. Tower never used the words cost-effective, efficient, lower bills, or even cleaner environment.  Those would have been the keynote words to encourage the Florida state utility regulators to approve this rate increase.  Alas, one can now only speculate.

 

Adage one, would make Sir Isaac weep because centuries later, his words have proven to be false.  “What goes up must come down.”

 

Our idiom would certainly be relevant here because “There’s an exception to every rule” does not apply to getting lower utility costs because of renewable energy.

 

Adage two, just as with O’bama’s free healthcare bill, the prices associated therewith can only be expected to rise.  Once again, idiom one is germane to this adage, whose exception is that despite all claims, prices will rise, and dramatically so.  Which leads to another saying.

 

“There’s a sucker born every minute.”