The Telegraph reports that in Britain, “Thousands sent eye-watering bills after switching to smart meters”. Mind you those were mostly just mistakes, often resulting in bills of over £1,000. But the UK can now boast of a smart grid run by smart people which means, of course, that it now has some of the most expensive power prices in Europe, still behind Germany but rising fast. Indeed, speaking of a thousand quid, the same Guardian that cheers on the policies causing it also whines that “Average annual energy bill to rise to £1,738 in Great Britain from January”. If only someone was smart enough to figure out why.

Meanwhile of course government to the rescue:

“Millions of pensioners will no longer receive the winter fuel allowance this year after the government decided to means-test the benefit.”

Luckily their parliament recently voted in favour of euthanasia so if granny’s chilly she can just pull the plug figuratively and literally.

As for Australia, the extent to which crisis is the new normal, and we mean policy crisis not the meteorological kind, was emphasized by columnist Aidan Morrison in The Australian:

“One good reason to have a controllable supply of electricity at our disposal is to help us cope with the things that we can’t control – like hot weather. When NSW Premier Chris Minns asked Sydney residents to switch off appliances on Wednesday, he confirmed that the electricity system we’re building won’t do that.”

With reference to Minns’ admission about solar fading just as demand rises:

“It’s staggeringly simple. Our demand for energy doesn’t follow the sun. And now we’re being asked to make it so. There couldn’t be a clearer admission that our living standards are being degraded: we’re being asked to use less of something at the times when we need it most. The efforts to shield the current government’s narrative from such uncomfortable realities has revealed a number of awkward contortions of fact and logic.”

Including particularly the drumbeat of claims from politicians and their journalistic enablers that it’s the climate change that made it happen, not the stupid reliance on unicorn power:

“The first is about the extremity of the weather. In parliament on Wednesday, Energy Minister Chris Bowen provided an update saying NSW is undergoing a ‘lengthy and severe heatwave’. On Wednesday, the highest temperature in Sydney was 38C in Penrith. That’s a hot day, but not extreme. On January 4, 2020, Penrith reached over 48C. Others areas in Sydney mightn’t have noticed that it was a ‘heatwave’ if the media wasn’t harping on the term with the blackout warnings. The CBD only briefly exceeded 30C, reaching 32C at 11am. Tuesday and Thursday in central Sydney were mild days, in the mid-20s.”

The culminating irony, Morrison adds, is that the system’s operators shut down plants for routine maintenance on the theory that summer would hit precisely when the calendar said instead of a week earlier. So all the people hollering that weather has become unpredictable actually imposed suffering and anxiety on the populace by acting in practice as though it had not: “the real failure was assuming that the weather would be more predictable than it was, and mis-planning maintenance.”

Didn’t anyone tell them climate change had… oh, never mind. They’re not listening anyway.