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Sen. Barbara Boxer of California delivered a speech in the Senate last week in which she linked global warming to the San Diego wildfires, Darfur, the imminent loss of the world's polar bears and even a poor 14-year-old boy who died from "an infection caused after swimming in Lake Havasu," because its water is warmer. Forget arson. Forget genocide. Forget nature. There is no tragedy that cannot be placed at the doorstep of global-warming skeptics.

READ my lips: economic growth and jobs equals energy use equals carbon emissions.

Almost nonstop, gargantuan 145-ton trucks rumble through China's biggest open-pit coal mine, sending up clouds of soot as they dump their loads into mechanized sorters. 

A world where there's not enough electricity. It is hard to even comprehend a world where you turn the switch and nothing happens. When I lived on a farm in Punjab, India, it used to amuse me. The whole world would go black and the only light in the village was my trusty laptop, with its blue glare. If any family in the village had an Akand Path going on, the sound of the Guru Grant Sahib would be abrubtly cut off as the speaker lost the power. It was amusing to me because it was novell, and almost incomprehensible.

Indians have the festival of Diwali, it is a light festival. There are lights everywhere, every edge you can place lights on, there are little terracotta bowls with mustard oils and wicks of rolled cotton. The brownouts fascinated me, and I used to speculate what would happen if the electricity went out on Diwali. I was assured this would not happen under any circumstance. It did not.

This story I found in the Philladelphia Inquirer this weekend is a view into where life will lead, eventually, if we keep preventing new powerplants from being built. Can you imagine getting up at 2 a.m. to do laundry, just because your washer might have enough electricity for a full cycle?