Watermelons: Just Turn Off the Lights, Wisconsin

Wisconsin Energies (WE) announced that they must spend $750 million to install super-scrubbers on their Oak Creek coal burners in order to comply with EPA and Wisconsin "Clean Air" mandates.

Naturally, the watermelons (green outside, Red inside) had a better idea:

"For $750 million you could help people save electricity and avoid all of this pollution in the first place," he said.

Really? How? Turn off ALL the lights? Forget the freezer? Shut off the blower-fan on your furnace?

In a related story, we note that the EPA may "shut off the lights" in ANOTHER 12 Wisconsin counties:

...federal regulators on Thursday proposed even tougher measures that could push more than a dozen new counties out of compliance with pollution laws.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced a proposal to reduce ozone levels by as much as 17% because the agency said current regulations don't adequately protect public health.

Business groups said the proposed regulations would cost billions of dollars annually. They also consider the measures premature because many states, including Wisconsin, haven't met the existing standard for ozone, or smog.

What Wisconsin business really needs: another couple of $billion in regulator-imposed costs.

...business interests have chafed under eastern Wisconsin's current out-of-compliance status on ozone because it has forced manufacturers to buy more expensive pollution control equipment than a comparable company outside the region.

Not to mention PRChina and India, which toss more crap into the atmosphere than most of the West combined (which crap migrates with the wind to the rest of the globe, by the way.)

Meanwhile, DarthDoyle's request to take Eastern Wisconsin out of the EPA's sights is heading into the, ah, ...ozone:

...underscoring Wisconsin's difficulty in trying to comply with the existing law, an air monitoring station in Kenosha County last weekend reported high ozone levels that could threaten eastern Wisconsin's more immediate goal of meeting the current standard for smog.

The monitor hit 84 parts per billion on Sunday and 95 parts per billion on Saturday, according to state Department of Natural Resources figures.

How did THAT happen?

The readings soared as warm weather, little wind and long days of sunlight conspired to trap and heat the volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxide that form ozone.

Forgetting that weather, wind, and sunlight are incapable of "conspiracy", what we have here is called NATURE!

Wisconsin would be out of compliance if a volcano erupted in South Milwaukee, too.

Here's the "Zero Tolerance" crowd, hard at work:

The EPA office in Chicago said last week that a single monitor in any of the eight affected counties in eastern Wisconsin would need only one reading of 83 parts per billion or higher to jeopardize the state's request to be declared in compliance.

Considering the regulations cited above, here's the solution:

WE should fuggedabout the scrubbers.

Instead, WE should spend the $750MM on a series of super-duper-giant fans, place them along the western edge of the EPA non-compliant counties, and turn them on. Blow the pollution (such as it is) to Washington DC, and hope that EPA is forced to evacuate to PRChina. I'm sure that the PRChina oligarchs will be very happy to have them, at the usual pay-rate of 60 cents/day.

We note that neither Sen. Feingold nor Sen. Kohl commented for the JS stories. (Surprise!!)