July 15, 2026

New York Court Refuses To Block State's Plan For A "Renewables" Program

July 15, 2026/ Francis Menton

For a couple of years now, I have been collaborating with a small group of friends here in New York to see if we can introduce some rationality into the State’s completely insane energy plans. The other three members of our little cabal (Roger Caiazza, Richard Ellenbogen and Constantine Kontogiannis) are a scientist (Caiazza) and two engineers who are knowledgeable about how the electrical grid works.
Our efforts have included things like submitting comments on various regulatory proposals, intervening in Public Service Commission proceedings, and even bringing court proceedings to try to block crazy and impossible schemes from taking effect. So far we have scored exactly zero public successes, although we do occasionally receive communications (always confidential and never in writing) from various bureaucrats who say things like “I know you’re right, but I can’t speak up or I will lose my job.”
On Monday (July 13) we achieved our latest defeat when a Justice of the Albany County Supreme Court (William Little) issued an Order dismissing a Petition we had filed seeking to overturn a May 2025 Order of the Public Service Commission on the subject of the State’s Renewable Program and Clean Energy Standard.

July 13, 2026

"Red Scare"? Actually The Communist Resurgence In The Democratic Party Is Very Real

July 13, 2026/ Francis Menton

If you are paying any attention, you will have noticed by now that all of the energy in the Democratic Party at the moment comes from the faction calling itself the Democratic Socialists of America.
As I reported in this post on June 24, DSA candidates had just won primaries for three safe-Democrat congressional seats in New York City, as well as eight safe-Democrat state legislative seats in the state, six in New York City plus one in Buffalo. In a ninth race in Syracuse that was still too close to call on June 24, the DSA candidate has since declared victory as well. Most of these districts had incumbent establishment Democrats (still far-left progressives), only one of whom had beaten back the DSA challenge.
Since the New York primaries, a DSA-backed candidate has won the a congressional primary in Colorado (defeating a 15 term incumbent), and others are running in August primaries in states including Missouri, Michigan and Wisconsin.
The DSA calls itself the “Democratic” Socialists, but is there anything democratic about the form of government they are advocating?

July 08, 2026

July 08, 2026/ Francis Menton

Advocates of generating electricity mostly with intermittent wind and sun, when challenged on how they would deal with a calm night, are always ready with the obvious answer: energy storage. Just get some batteries, store up excess power from the windy mid-days, discharge as needed, and everything will work out.
Unfortunately, the advocates never acknowledge that the problem of making an electrical grid work 24/7/365 with mostly wind and solar generation is much more difficult than just storing power from the day to discharge that night.
Both wind and sun are subject to regular “droughts,” just like rain. There can be many consecutive days, or even weeks, of combined low wind and sun; let alone the entire winter has a lack of sun, and both summer and winter have less wind than spring and fall. Calculating how much energy storage will suffice to get through even a year of average wind/sun variability is a straightforward exercise, yielding an answer of as much as 1000 hours of average consumption.
Meanwhile, naive politicians (those in New York being Exhibit A) regularly get duped into buying a few hours or tens of hours worth of batteries for grid backup, spending billions of dollars on amounts of storage that will be almost useless for backing up a primarily wind/sun grid.

July 06, 2026

July 06, 2026/ Francis Menton

This year’s primary season features the rapid ascent within the Democratic Party of the faction going by the name “Democratic Socialists of America.”
Despite the gratuitous co-opting of the label “Democratic,” it is by no means clear that the DSA faction would continue open elections once they had achieved enough power to end them. Instead, the DSA adopts the hardest of hard-line socialist positions on every issue.
I previously reported in my June 24 post that the DSA candidates in New York had accomplished nearly a clean sweep of all the Democratic Party congressional and state legislative primaries in which they had participated. Since then, a DSA candidate has knocked out a 15-term incumbent progressive Democrat in a safe Democratic district in Colorado. And The Washington Examiner reports on June 25 that DSA candidates have succeeded in some 30 down-ballot primary races in “Oregon, California, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Utah, Maryland,” as well as New York.
So who are these people calling themselves “Democratic Socialists”?

July 03, 2026

July 03, 2026/ Francis Menton

Over the course of the past week, the Supreme Court has released a group of the most important decisions of this year’s term. Most of those decisions involved the federal government/Trump Administration as a party.
As you probably have seen, the government won the majority of those decisions (ability of President to fire FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, ability of President to end “Temporary Protected Status” for certain migrants, ability of government to refuse to consider asylum applications from those who have not entered the U.S.), but also lost a few (birthright citizenship, ability of President to fire Federal Reserve Board Member Lisa Cook).
Many things about these cases are interesting and worth commenting on, but to me one thing is particularly fascinating: the three “liberal” justices (Kagan, Sotomayor and Jackson) voted as a unified bloc in every case.

June 29, 2026

June 29, 2026/ Francis Menton

A remarkable feature of governments in Europe is the extent to which they operate explicitly against the interest of their citizens and voters.
They give an outward appearance of being democracies, and they hold regular elections, but somehow the people in power are a self-perpetuating political clique that, from all evidence, seems to hold the ordinary working people and voters in complete contempt.
Prime examples of operating against the interests of the people include: opening the borders to millions of impoverished migrants who hate the host countries; and imposing a fantasy “energy transition” that drives up the cost of energy and destroys industrial jobs without any measurable effect on the climate.
A new example of the hatred of the governing class for the ordinary people has emerged in the past couple of weeks.