A Good Time for Gratitude

 

Earlier this month we in Texas got a several day taste of harsh winter – really cold weather with highs in the teens or twenties, lows around zero, and strong winds in West Texas where I live. Much of the rest of the country got worse. It was unpleasant but nothing like what people endured in similar conditions a couple of hundred years ago. For that people should be grateful and grateful specifically to the oil, gas, and coal industries of this country. They deserve gratitude not only for the obvious accomplishment of keeping the power on and the furnaces running throughout the country but for something more general – creating necessary parts of the economic, industrial, and technological environment which has made the modern world with its modern windows, insulated houses, heated cars, snow plows, central heat, nylon shell parkas, and so on possible. I appreciate it, and other throughout the country should too. The fact that they are despised by the greens says something about the greens and a lot about what the greens want and have planned for us.