LA Times asks should Americans be forced to face electricity blackouts over ‘climate change’

The Los Angeles Times has recently published a news story questioning whether occasionally blocking Americans' access to electricity would help in fighting the "climate crisis."

"Would an occasional blackout help solve climate change?" reads the headline of the story Thursday by energy staff writer Sammy Roth, who asks "What’s more important: Keeping the lights on 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, or solving the climate crisis?"

Roth specifically cites the heat waves occurring in regions across the country, including Southern California, and references an environmental group's lawsuit against a proposed fossil fuel plant in Glendale, California.

The story includes an attorney for the city arguing the plant is "desperately needed to provide reliable electricity to Glendale’s roughly 190,000 residents and avoid blackouts."

The "dispute," Roth continues, is part of a larger conversation about whether Americans' expectations about their energy supply "should evolve in the name of preventing climate catastrophe."

Using a first-person narrative voice, Roth also writes about such matters: "It’s been on my mind."

He did not respond by publishing time Monday to a request to elaborate on his story.

In 2021, the newspaper, the state's largest, published a story suggesting Americans should perhaps forgo air conditioning during heat waves in the effort to save the earth from the consequences of global warming. 

"Solving climate change will require sacrifices – even if only small ones – for the sake of the greater good," Roth concluded in his article. "Maybe learning to live with more power outages shouldn’t be one of those sacrifices. But at the same time, we might not have a choice."

Summer heat waves and resulting rolling blackout have for years been a national concern.

California has had problems in the past with an unreliable energy grid – as it tries to transition from fossil fuels to such renewable energy sources as wind and solar power, which critics argue are less-reliable alternatives.

Meanwhile, the debate continues about whether record or near-record heats waves like the ones this summer are the result of the emission of greenhouse gases. 

Climate Depot’s Marc Morano argues there is sufficient evidence to suggest a linking.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s data shows the hottest heat waves in the U.S. were in the 1930s, but "80% of our carbon dioxide globally came after 1940," he recently said on the Fox Business Channel.

Phoenix recently had 19 days of temperatures above 110 degrees Fahrenheit.

Morano acknowledged that 2023 could be one of the hottest in recent memory but that 75% of all state temperature records were broken before the 1950s.

According to the New York Post, the hottest recorded temperature in U.S. history was in 1913, when Death Valley reached a scorching 134 degrees.

"This [summer] is not outside the bounds of normal weather, I’m sorry," Morano added.

He also said: "Blackouts are happening globally due to the inhuman climate agenda demanding an end to reliable and affordable fossil fuel energy."

He also pointed to South Africa as an example because of the country's "massive wholesale blackouts nationwide."

U.S. Oil and Gas Association President Tim Stewart, also expressed this idea to Just the News, saying that Roth's article is part of a broader "propaganda war" by the left to "condition the public to think people it is their duty to the State to be miserable, cold and hungry."

“It wasn’t too long ago that even posing a question like this would be considered preposterous even from Democrats," Steward said. "After all – one of the defining problems of Third World countries is the lack of reliable energy infrastructure and supply."

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