Worried about global warming? Soon you’ll be able to worry about it while freezing (or boiling) in the dark. The North American Electric Reliability Council has expressed concern that the US will not have enough electric power capacity to meet demand. This is partly due to the usual structural problem of freeing up production while more tightly regulating the grid along which the production flows (see also railways, telecoms etc). However, the Council points out that one of the problems is that the US isn’t building power plants quickly enough. The elephant in the room here is that, when companies do want to build more power plants to meet this demand (as, for instance, in Texas), environmentalists oppose them. If we are going to avoid summers and winters with blackouts and suffering in years to come, we have to enable power plants to be built quickly and efficiently. As France showed in 2003, heatwaves with no air conditioning are deadly. I hate to say it, but environmentalists who are so concerned about suffering in 50-100 years time seem a tad less concerned about suffering tomorrow.