It’s so nice to know that one is a good citizen. Here on the Mississippi we don’t get the extreme cold that folks get just a couple hundred miles north of here. Still, we keep our thermostats at 68° in the daytime and 55° at night downstairs. Upstairs, where we sleep, we turn off the heat altogether at night, since we have two heating and air conditioning units, one for each floor of the house.

Today the outside temperature is hovering in the low thirties, up from a low of 16° early this morning. That’s pretty normal for St. Louis in January, though we have a low of 2° forecast for later in the week. We’ve also had very little snow this winter. At the gym I hear guys talking about how folks here don’t know how to drive in winter weather, just the sort of stuff I used to hear in Texas.

In November Missouri voters approved a ballot initiative requiring “investor-owned electric utilities to generate or purchase electricity from renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, biomass and hydropower with the renewable energy sources equaling at least 2% of retail sales by 2011 increasing incrementally to at least 15% by 2021.” But we’re still going to be primarily dependent on coal for the foreseeable future. It’s too bad.