June 07, 2022

A Small Note Of Optimism In A Sea Of Bad News

June 07, 2022/ Francis Menton

Today is primary day — and recall day — in California. I’m writing this on the East coast before any election returns are in. But there is some modest hope of a slight retreat from the worst excesses of progressivism.
Joel Kotkin — professor at Chapman University out there — weighs in with a June 5 column at Spiked, sounding a small note of optimism. The headline and sub-headline are “America’s great cities are gripped by decline and disorder. Voters have had enough of ‘progressive’ leaders who are presiding over spiralling violence and crime.” Excerpt:
For the past decade, America’s urban centres have been increasingly run by ‘progressive’ activists. Yet today, as US cities reel from collapsed economies, rising crime and pervasive corruption, there’s something of a revolt brewing, the success of which may well determine the role and trajectory of our great urban centres.
Fair enough. But let’s keep some perspective. These are a few modest gains in a sea of bad news.

June 05, 2022

More On Energy Fantasy Versus Reality In Woke-Land

June 05, 2022/ Francis Menton

It’s official: the world is committed to rapidly reducing CO2 emissions. Just look at the the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, or President Biden’s April 22, 2021 press release, or California’s SB 100 climate act, or New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, or Germany’s Energiewende, or the UK’s Net Zero pledge, or any of many other such pledges.
And essentially all of woke corporate America is on board with the program. Consider the tidal wave of so-called “ESG” investing, focused on re-organizing corporate activities to reduce carbon emissions. Super-woke banking giant JP Morgan is leading the charge.
And yet, somehow it just doesn’t seem to be happening.

June 03, 2022

June 03, 2022/ Francis Menton

When President Biden talks, there may or may not be any connection between what he says and the real world. Yes, you need to give every politician some leeway, since most of what any politician says will fall in the general realm of political exaggeration or hyperbole. But even within the disreputable category of politicians, Biden can take the lack of connection with reality to a whole new level.
You may have your own favorite among Biden’s preposterous statements. For me, the very most preposterous is one that he has been repeating over and over for the past several months, namely that his energy plans, including expansion of wind and solar electricity generation together with fossil fuel suppression, will save American families the very specific amount of $500 per year each.
This claim has popped up in multiple places and multiple formulations. One example came in the State of the Union speech back in March, where Biden said, “Let’s cut energy costs for families an average of $500 a year by combatting climate change.”
It’s just not possible for anyone who thinks about the subject for even a few minutes to believe that building more and more wind and solar generation facilities as our primary sources of energy will do anything other than vastly increase the costs of energy for the American people.

May 30, 2022

May 30, 2022/ Francis Menton

Last week I had a post titled “A Chink In The Armor Of The Progressive Administrative State.” The post discussed a recent case out of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, Jarkesy v. SEC, where the Fifth Circuit ruled that an SEC prosecution of Mr. Jarkesy before its own Administrative Law Judge violated the Constitution for, among other things, denying Mr. Jarkesy his right to a jury trial, and giving the SEC unfettered discretion to decide which of its prosecutions can avoid federal District Court jurisdiction.
In the Jarkesy case, a relatively new organization called the New Civil Liberties Alliance played a significant role as amicus. Founded only five years ago (2017) by Philip Hamburger, a constitutional law professor at Columbia Law School, the NCLA has quickly made a big mark for itself in the field of constitutional litigation.
Hamburger was the author of the 2014 book Is Administrative Law Unlawful?, which, although perhaps addressed to a somewhat narrow audience of nerds such as myself, nevertheless has created shock waves in the complacent world of federal bureaucrats who had for decades engaged in rampant unconstitutional practices without effective challenge.

May 26, 2022

May 26, 2022/ Francis Menton

As I’ve been pointing out now for a couple of years, the obvious gap in the plans of our betters for a carbon-free “net zero” energy future is the problem of massive-scale energy storage.
How exactly is New York City (for example) going to provide its citizens with power for a long and dark full-week period in the winter, with calm winds, long nights, and overcast days, after everyone has been required to change over to electric heat and electric cars — and all the electricity is supposed to come from the wind and sun, which are neither blowing nor shining for these extended periods?
Can someone please calculate how much energy storage will be needed to cover a worst-case solar/wind drought, what it will consist of, how long it has to last, how much it will cost, and whether it is economically feasible? Nearly all descriptions by advocates of the supposed path to “net zero” — including the ambitious plans of the states of New York and California — completely gloss over this issue and/or deal with it in a way demonstrating total incompetence and failure to comprehend the problem.
And then suddenly appeared in my inbox a couple of weeks ago a large Report with the title “The Future of Energy Storage: An Interdisciplinary MIT Study.”

May 23, 2022

May 23, 2022/ Francis Menton

The great mission of the early twentieth century Progressives was to transform our constitutional order without ever amending the Constitution itself. The intellectual leader of the movement was Woodrow Wilson. The fundamental idea was to replace the messy and contentious system of separated powers and slow bi-cameral lawmaking with a cadre of supposedly apolitical administrative “experts” who could run the country smoothly and efficiently.
The idea sounded rather benign to most people at the time, and probably still sounds benign to most people today. Who could be against having “experts” to run significant government agencies?
But a hundred-plus years into this project, we have seen cancerous growth of vast administrative bureaucracies, outside the constitutional structure, and exercising great powers, but accountable to no one but themselves — the very antithesis of the constitutional structure that our founders attempted to bequeath to us.
Last week the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans knocked a significant chink in the structure under which many of these agencies operate.