How To Think Like A New York Progressive

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  • To judge from many of the comments on this site, a substantial number of readers have difficulty understanding the sophisticated modes of thinking of the New York progressive. Looking at New York’s official progressive orthodoxy in action, these readers often see illogic and inconsistencies that seem to make no sense at all.

  • And yet, despite the apparent internal contradictions, the New York progressives themselves generally achieve near or even complete unanimity as to many of the important policies that they seek to implement. How does this work?

  • We need to take a deeper look. So I thought for today it would be useful to examine some recent policies touted by the progressive crowd, to see what insights we can glean about exactly how they think about the world.

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"More And More Severe Storms": When Can We Declare This Hypothesis To Be Definitively Falsified?

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"More And More Severe Storms": When Can We Declare This Hypothesis To Be Definitively Falsified?

  • You know the mantra: Human caused climate change, driven by burning fossil fuels and adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, causes an increase in the frequency and severity of major storms, like hurricanes.

  • When major hurricanes come along, as they regularly do, the promoters of this mantra immediately claim an ability to “attribute” the storm and/or its intensity to the ongoing human-caused warming.

  • For example, last October we had Hurricane Melissa, a Category 5 storm that struck Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. As soon as Melissa had passed, an organization calling itself World Weather Attribution promptly came out with an analysis blaming the storm and its intensity on “climate change.” From the AP, November 6, 2025:

  • Melissa was one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes to make landfall and brought destructive weather to Jamaica, Haiti, Dominican Republic and Cuba, causing dozens of deaths across the Caribbean. . . . The rapid analysis by World Weather Attribution found that climate change increased Melissa’s maximum wind speeds by 7% and made the rainfall near the center of the storm 16% more intense. The scientists also wrote that the temperature and humidity in which the storm intensified were made six times more likely due to climate change compared to a pre-industrial world.

  • Perhaps that seemed plausible at the time. But this year the mantra that human-induced climate change is the main cause of destructive hurricanes has run into a small problem.

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For Some Reason, New York's Rent Regulations Don't Seem To Be Keeping Rents Low

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  • New York City has one of the most expensive housing markets in the country among large cities, and maybe even the most expensive by some measures. By contrast to most other parts of the country, the majority of housing units here are rented rather than owner-occupied.

  • Latest data from Zillow.com gives a city-wide average rent (across all apartment sizes and types) of $3650. In Manhattan, according to this New York Post piece from August 12 (citing data from the Corcoran brokerage firm) the average rent has hit $6,655 per month.

  • According to the politicians in power, the reason for these high rents is that greedy landlords are taking advantage of the tenants. To deal with these greedy landlords, we have had rent regulations in place in various forms since World War II; but after some reforms in the 1990s, by the 2010s those were gradually diminishing in significance. By 2019 a slight majority of the rental apartments, about 1.1 million, were outside the regulation system, with just under 1 million apartments rent-regulated.

  • Then, in 2019, the State Legislature came under full control of the Democrats (after decades of partial Republican control), and the new majorities immediately set out to put the greedy landlords in their place.

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Energy Affordability: An IQ Test For New Yorkers That They Will Very Likely Fail

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  • Here in New York, our very-light-weight Governor Kathy Hochul is running for re-election. To her slight credit, she has noticed that New York is a high cost state, not the least for cost of energy, and that New Yorkers are upset about that.

  • New Yorkers are right to be upset about the cost of energy. According to this chart from the federal EIA containing most recent data for July 2026, the average price of electricity to the ultimate consumer in New York for that month was 29.9¢/kWh, compared to a national average of 18.31¢/kWh; and New York’s cost had increased more than 14% from 26.22¢/kWh in July 2025, versus a 4.9% increase in the national average over last year’s 17.45¢/kWh. New Yorkers are also right to be upset because the premium they pay for electricity is mostly to entirely the consequence of intentional government policies that drive up the cost.

  • What’s crazy is that Governor Hochul has decided to make “energy affordability” a theme of her campaign. The reason that is crazy is that at the same time that Hochul claims she favors more “affordability,” she also brags about maintaining and expanding the very policies that have caused the excess costs.

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Mao Zedong Was A Monster

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Mao Zedong Was A Monster

  • The 50th anniversary of the death of Mao Zedong has just passed. (He died on September 9, 1976.).

  • I did not see large amounts of commentary about Mao on the occasion of the anniversary, but everything that I did see was either neutral or positive, with the majority being praise. And as I looked around for any commentary I could find from around the date of the anniversary, most of what I found is again praise.

  • How could that be? This man was a monster.

  • Certainly, the death toll for which Mao was responsible was a large multiple of anything ever attributed to Hitler, and also a multiple (although a smaller one) of the carnage committed by Stalin. Does any self-respecting person give effusive praise of either of those two? And if not to them, then why to Mao?

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Rescission Of Carbon Emissions Standards For Power Plants: The Litigation Begins

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  • In what may be a world record for turnaround time, the litigation has already begun over the recent rescission by EPA of its carbon emission standards for fossil-fuel fired power plants.

  • As reported here on September 17, on that date the EPA finalized its rescission of what were called its “Carbon Pollution Standards” for electric power plants. (EPA’s September 17 action did not rescind all of the Carbon Pollution Standards for power plants, but only those for existing power plants and major overhauls of existing plants; the standards for new plants remain in effect for now, although in its rescission action EPA gave strong hints that those will also soon be ended.). By the end of that very day, September 17, a Petition had been filed in the DC Circuit seeking review of the regulatory action. Here is a copy of the Petition. The Petitioners are the American Lung Association, American Public Health Association, Clean Air Council, Clean Wisconsin, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

  • The Petition is a short two-page document that simply asks for “review” of EPA’s action, and does not say anything about the grounds for the request.

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