October 06, 2022

A Comprehensive Roundup Of Official Energy Madness

October 06, 2022/ Francis Menton

At this website, I try to give readers a steady flow of the latest instances of official energy madness, the ongoing efforts of our politicians, bureaucrats, academics and journalists to undermine and destroy the energy infrastructure that is the basis for our prosperity and our comfortable lives.
But if you just read these examples one by one, however outrageous they may be individually, you can lose track of the overall picture. In the big picture, our government, aided and abetted by academics and journalists, is conducting a full scale war on the energy sector of the economy.
Now comes along a guy named Joseph Toomey, who has published a relatively long piece at RealClearEnergy with the title “Energy Inflation Was By Design.”

October 02, 2022

Without Any Demonstration Project Or Feasibility Study

October 02, 2022/ Francis Menton

Essentially the entire developed part of the world is currently embarked on a crash program to eliminate fossil fuels from the energy system of the economy. The program has two main parts: first the suppression of the production and distribution of fossil fuels; and second the construction of large numbers of wind and solar generation facilities to replace them. Both parts of the program are currently underway simultaneously in all advanced countries, as a matter of what we are told is the highest moral urgency.
But will the coming fossil-fuel-free system actually work to provide the energy we need to run our modern economies? There are very substantial reasons to think that big problems are inevitable, the main one being that wind and solar generators don’t produce anything most of the time, and can’t be ramped up on demand at a time of need.
So surely, there must be multiple small to medium-scale demonstration projects around the world showing exactly how this fossil-fuel-free future system can be accomplished, and how much it will cost.

September 28, 2022

September 28, 2022/ Francis Menton

We still have three daily newspapers here in New York — the Times, the Post, and the Daily News. I subscribe to the first two, but not to the Daily News. And I almost never read the Daily News either.
From my occasional encounters, my observation is that the Daily News has completely gone over to wokism, and is just a cut-rate, slimmed-down version of the Times, pushing the progressive narrative on all issues without concern for evidence or facts.
But like the Times, the Daily News can sometimes, undoubtedly inadvertently, shine a bright light on the twisted thinking of the progressive mind. Such was the case with a piece that appeared a few days ago (September 24) . . . .

September 26, 2022

September 26, 2022/ Francis Menton

Canadian climate scientist Dr. Tim Ball passed away on Saturday, September 24. A brief obituary has been posted at the Watts Up With That website.
Ball had a long career as a professor at the University of Winnipeg, although he had been retired for a number of years, and was 83 when he died. Regular readers of this blog will likely recognize Ball as someone who commented here from time to time. I also had sporadic email correspondence from Ball, which was always respectful and informative.
Ball was that rarity of a climate scientist in the world of academia with the temerity and courage to say and repeat that CO2 is a beneficial gas. He would not back down, in a world that rapidly went insane and became increasingly intolerant and hostile to his position.
Notably, Ball did not shy away from calling out the biggest scamsters of the climate hustle, most particularly one Michael Mann. Mann is the professor at Penn State who was the lead creator of the IPCC’s iconic “hockey stick” graph that has been used to sell global warming hysteria to the world for the last 20+ years.
For today I’d like to review the disparate treatments accorded to Ball and Mann by various institutions.

September 24, 2022

September 24, 2022/ Francis Menton

As you may know, the Biden Administration is planning to hold its big “White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health” this coming Wednesday, September 28.
Apparently, we are to believe that “hunger” is and remains a significant problem today in the United States. Thankfully, we have President Biden and his many minions hard at work on the job, with a promise to finally end this scourge of human hunger once and for all. According to the announcement of the conference, “The Biden-Harris Administration has set the goal of ending hunger . . . by 2030.”
But wait a minute — hasn’t hunger in the United States already been ended? I seem to remember multiple prior government promises to end hunger in America, each of them followed by massive funding, and/or increases in prior already-massive levels of funding to achieve the goal.
Are we only now learning that none of these prior efforts worked?

September 21, 2022

September 21, 2022/ Francis Menton

When I was young, the New York Attorney General’s office had a reputation for integrity. But somewhere along the line, the office went completely off the rails.
Eliot Spitzer was elected AG in 1998, and spent his two terms in frightening misuse of the office to further his naked political ambitions, mainly through shaking down financial institutions on the thinnest of pretexts. After eight years improperly using this tactic to keep his name in the headlines, he was then elected Governor; whereupon his successor — Andrew Cuomo — followed the same playbook for one term, and with the same result of becoming Governor. The next guy, Eric Schneiderman, was, if this is even possible, the worst of the three in the category of politicized prosecutions and shakedowns. Mercifully, Schneiderman was forced from office in a sex scandal before he could move up to the governorship.
In the 2018 election, we got a woman named Letitia James. By this time, all pretense that the Attorney General ought to be an impartial law enforcement officer had been long forgotten.