Are smart meters a plot to overthrow the United States?

Are smart meters a plot to overthrow the United States?

Posted: 06 Feb 2012 12:24 AM PST

The New York Times’ Leslie Kaufman and Kate Zernike had some fun over the weekend at the expense of an apparently large number of Americans, including a top presidential contender, who think clean energy is a subversive plot to create a world government led by the United Nations. Many people are merely annoyed by smart meters, bicycle lanes and added home insulation, but these folks say such ideas are seditious.
In 1995, Charles Mackay wrote a gem called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, a history of market bubbles based on misperceptions of reality. Call it what you will, but we are in a period of unusually high erroneousness when it comes to energy and the places it’s produced.
Consider the petro-state of Russia. Over the weekend, tens of thousands of people stood outside in minus-10 degree frost in Moscow in order to inform leader Vladimir Putin that he could not simply presume to swap places with President Dmitry Medvedev. What did Putin hear and see? Treacherous protestors acting under orders from Washington.
The Wall Street Journal’s Alan Cullison explains Putin’s assessment as a campaign strategy. Yet the last six years of history suggest that the former KGB officer does actually perceive a White House plot behind the outbreak of popular uprisings of recent years, including the color revolutions of the former Soviet Union and the Arab Spring. (This delusion extends to Washington, where current and former U.S. officials have informed me with serious brows of their decisive role in the color revolutions; these hands still believe that democracy is exported.)