May 01, 2024

The Biden Administration Ever More Delusional On Energy

May 01, 2024/ Francis Menton

Three and a half years into the Biden Administration, and to an ordinary citizen on the ground it might seem like not that much has changed as to energy.
Despite hundreds of government actions and initiative in an all-of-government regulatory onslaught to transform the energy economy, the important things have been remarkable stable. Production of oil and gas are actually up, and prices increases have been relatively modest — far less than one might have anticipated from the extreme regulatory hostility to production.
The percentage of what is called “primary energy” (that is, energy for everything, not just electricity) coming from fossil fuels has remained nearly unchanged. EIA data here for 2022 (latest I can find) show about 79% of U.S. primary energy from fossil fuels, barely changed since Biden took office, and indeed very stable for decades.
Perhaps this situation of stable energy production and consumption results because it reflects what markets and consumers want and need to satisfy their demand for energy. So do you think that the hyperactive regulators might just relax and let the consumers have what they want?

April 09, 2024

The Latest On International Efforts To Save The Planet Through Climate Litigation

April 09, 2024/ Francis Menton

When I first came upon it, I called it the “stupidest litigation in the country.”
In 2015 a group of adolescents, led on a leash by some activist environmental lawyers, had sued the federal government in the District Court for Oregon. The plaintiffs alleged violation of their fundamental constitutional right to a clean and healthy environment, and sought as remedy a compulsory national plan to “phase out” the use of fossil fuels nationwide plus (why not?) “draw down excess atmospheric CO2 so as to stabilize the climate system and protect the vital resources on which Plaintiffs now and in the future will depend. . . .” I first covered this litigation in a post in December 2017 titled “The Stupidest Litigation In The Country Reaches The Ninth Circuit.”
Why “stupidest litigation”? Because this case seemed to represent the ultimate reductio ad absurdum of the entire idea of courts and of litigation, and indeed an attempt at complete subversion of our three-branch system of government. Just make up a new and sweeping “constitutional right,” find a friendly activist-minded judge, and you can get an order transferring all the significant operations of the legislative and executive branches of the government to a single unelected person operating out of a courthouse in Eugene, Oregon.
Surely, no court would take this seriously.

September 16, 2023

September 16, 2023/ Francis Menton

As I have written many times, I don’t think that the federal measure of “poverty” in the United States was originally created with fraudulent intent to deceive the voters.
However, as the measure of poverty has evolved over the years, the thing deemed “poverty” by the statistics no longer bears any meaningful resemblance to what normal people think of as poverty. Rather than measuring anything that might resemble actual physical deprivation, the statistics have evolved into an artifact to manipulate the voters. In a post about a year ago I described what I call the “poverty scam” as follows:
[T]he government cynically manipulates the poverty statistics so that the official measured rate of poverty never goes meaningfully down, no matter how much taxpayer money is spent, thus manufacturing a fake basis to hit up the people for ever increasing funding at regular intervals.
Over the past week or so we have just been treated to the umpteenth iteration of this poverty scam.

September 10, 2023

September 10, 2023/ Francis Menton

Does the federal government do anything noticeable these days other than use its vast taxpayer-supplied resources to grind down and persecute its political enemies?
You already know more that you want to about things like: unprecedented criminal prosecutions against the former President; a Censorship Industrial Complex to bully social media platforms into silencing opponents; and wildly disproportionate prosecutions of J6 protesters.
Here are a couple of examples for today that you may have paid less attention to:

August 19, 2023

August 19, 2023/ Francis Menton

Among the media sources serving as propagandists and cheerleaders for the “green energy transition,” two of the most prominent are the New York Times and Bloomberg News. To get an idea how the “transition” is going, let’s take a look at the latest from those two.
From the Times, in this morning’s print edition, we have a feature article that apparently first appeared online a couple of days ago, August 17. The headline is: “The Clean Energy Future Is Arriving Faster Than You Think.” The sub-head continues the excitement: “The United States is pivoting away from fossil fuels and toward wind, solar and other renewable energy, even in areas dominated by the oil and gas industries.”
But then Bloomberg News comes out yesterday with an editorial that seems to reach the exact opposite conclusion. Headline: “Net Zero Is Stalling Out. What Now?”
So which is it? Is the green energy future arriving “faster than you think,” or “stalling out”? Both can’t be right. Who has the better side of this?

July 06, 2023

July 06, 2023/ Francis Menton

Just over a year ago, on July 5, 2022, I had a post titled “How To Think Like A Liberal Supreme Court Justice.” The post was occasioned by the then-brand-new issuance (June 30, 2022) of the biggest decision of the Court’s last term, West Virginia v. EPA. Justice Kagan had authored a dissent on behalf of herself and the other two liberal justices (Breyer and Sotomayor).
My post also discussed two other significant decisions of the 2021-22 term where the three liberals had again dissented as a bloc: Alabama Association of Realtors v. HHS and NFIB v. Department of Labor.
And now we have several more big decisions just issued with the same 6-3 voting split (Justice Jackson having replaced Breyer). The most significant is SFFA v. Harvard.
So suppose you want to learn how to think like a liberal Supreme Court justice. If so, I submit that there is no better place to look than the dissents in cases where the three liberal justices dissent as a bloc.