January 20, 2022

When The Administrative State Slips Its Constitutional Bonds

January 20, 2022/ Francis Menton

For the past few weeks, everybody’s attention has been focused on the looming demise of President Biden’s legislative agenda. Both the massive social spending bill (going by the Orwellian name “Build Back Better”) and the anti-voter-integrity bill, have now conclusively failed, at least in their most recent forms.
A major part of the Build Back Better monstrosity was the launching of the Green New Deal, with its attendant suppression of the use of carbon-based fuels.
So, at least for now, these things are dead in Congress. But what’s happening over in the Administrative State? That’s where, in Woodrow Wilson’s progressive vision, the “experts” from various fields of endeavor have gathered in the government, unconstrained by the Constitution’s separation of powers, to make the all-important rules for a smoothly running society.
Today there are hundreds of thousands of these “experts” in the bureaucracy. To a person, they appear to believe that the most pressing issue of our era is saving the world from U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide. How do they know that? Obviously, they know it because they are the “experts.”

January 17, 2022

Two More Contributions On The Impossibility Of Electrifying Everything Using Only Wind, Solar And Batteries

January 17, 2022/ Francis Menton

My post on Friday highlighted the work of Ken Gregory, who has attempted to quantify the costs of fully electrifying the U.S. energy system using as sources only wind, solar, and batteries. My post got circulated among my excellent colleagues in the CO2 Coalition, two of whom then provided me with links to their own work on closely-related subjects.
The two pieces are: (1) “How Many km2 of Solar Panels in Spain and how much battery backup would it take to power Germany,” by Lars Schernikau and William Smith, posted January 30, 2021 (revised April 23, 2021) at SSRN; and (2) “On the Ability of Wind and Solar Electric Generation to Power Modern Civilization,” by Wallace Manheimer, published October 7, 2021 in the Journal of Energy Research and Reviews.
Both pieces consider various cost and engineering issues involved in trying to develop a fully solar/battery or wind/solar/battery system to power a modern economy; and both quickly conclude for many reasons that such a project is completely infeasible and will surely fail.

January 14, 2022

January 14, 2022/ Francis Menton

For several years now, advocates of “decarbonizing” our energy system, along with promoters of wind and solar energy, have claimed that the cost of electricity from the wind and sun was dropping rapidly and either already was, or soon would be, less than the cost of generating the same electricity from fossil fuels.
These claims are generally based on a metric called the “Levelized Cost of Energy,” which is designed to seem sophisticated to the uninitiated, but in the real world is completely misleading because it omits the largest costs of a system where most generation comes from intermittent sources. The large omitted costs are those for storage (batteries) and transmission. But as we now careen recklessly down the road to zero emissions, how much will these omitted costs really amount to?
A guy named Ken Gregory has recently (December 20, 2021, updated January 10, 2022) come out with a Report at a Canadian website called Friends of Science with the title “The Cost of Net Zero Electrification of the U.S.A.” A somewhat abbreviated version of Gregory’s Report has also appeared at Watts Up With That here.
Gregory provides a tentative number for the additional storage costs that could be necessary for full electrification of the United States system, with all current fossil fuel generation replaced by wind and solar. That number is $433 trillion.

January 11, 2022

January 11, 2022/ Francis Menton

The big front page story in the New York newspapers the past couple of days has been the fire on Sunday in an apartment building in The Bronx that has killed some 19 people so far — with as many as 30 more in the hospital with life-threatening injuries. This loss of life in a fire is the greatest in New York since a 1990 fire at a nightclub in The Bronx (which killed more than 80).
So what kind of apartment building was this? Is there anything we should know about it? Look up the coverage in the New York Times, and you will learn, unhelpfully, that the building in question was “a 19-story Bronx apartment building” at 333 East 181st St., that went by the name of “Twin Parks North West.” Nothing about how this building came to be built, or by whom.
But if you know anything about The Bronx, you will realize that, outside of the small Riverdale district, there are almost no apartment buildings there that are as tall as 19 stories other than those built with extensive government subsidies.

January 09, 2022

January 09, 2022/ Francis Menton

I thought the whole idea behind getting vaccinated for Covid-19 was to put the societal disruption behind us.
Yes, the vaccines may not be perfect; but then, nothing in this miserable world is perfect. Still, with the vaccines we should surely be able to go back to work, go back to school, hold sporting events and theater and concerts and political rallies and everything else where people gather. And for God’s sake get rid of the masks. Right?
That’s the way it works in Florida. But this is New York. Here, we are engaged in end-stage Covid craziness. Most office work is still suspended, and theater and concerts are 50/50, with endless protocols.
But my favorite is the masking.

January 05, 2022

January 05, 2022/ Francis Menton

About a year ago I had a series of posts covering some of the more audacious deplatformings and cancelations then occurring in the realms of progressive orthodoxy enforcement.
Examples of prominent victims of such conduct cited in my posts of February 22, 2021 and March 4, 2021 included: The Epoch Times (“demonetized” by Google, apparently as a result of relentless criticism of the Chinese Communist Party), Project Veritas (a constant irritant to the Left, shut out by Twitter), Catholic World Report (locked out by Twitter after calling President Biden’s nominee for Assistant Secretary of HHS “a biological man identifying as a transgender woman”), Ryan Anderson (politically incorrect book on transgender issues, “When Harry Became Sally,” suddenly removed from sale at Amazon without explanation), and multiple others.
The takeaway was that the Big Tech censors had lost all sense of constraint, and had decided to see how far they could push the envelope to remove mainstream conservative thought from the public square.
Lack of further posts from myself on this subject should not be taken as an indication that the situation has improved.