March 15, 2023

Countdown To New York's Rendezvous With Energy Impossibility

March 15, 2023/ Francis Menton

The race is on to see who hits the green energy wall of impossibility first. California, Germany and the UK (the “Poseurs”) might seem to have leapt early into the lead positions. But New York is now making a strong sprint to catch and surpass them, so it can be the first to splatter its citizens’ flesh and blood all over the impenetrable barricade.
The Poseurs accumulate vast green progressive virtue credits for ridiculous promises, but their promises all have dates so far in the future that today’s politicians will be long gone when the crash detonates.
Who has sufficiently pure cult adherence to set firm green energy deadlines with real consequences in the here and now? That task has fallen to the true climate heroes here in New York City.

March 12, 2023

Germany's Coming Green Energy "Economic Miracle"

March 12, 2023/ Francis Menton

I’m old enough to remember the German post-World War II “economic miracle.” (Their term was “Wirtschaftswunder.”).
After more than ten years of government direction of the economy under the Nazis, followed by the devastation of the war, Germany after 1945, under economics minister Ludwig Erhard, adopted the model of low taxes and light regulation.
The economy boomed for decades on end.
But Germany then gradually turned away from Erhard’s prescriptions. Today Germany is twenty or so years into the most aggressive green energy “transition” of any country with a large economy, with the government firmly in charge of picking the winners and losers in the energy sector.

March 09, 2023

March 09, 2023/ Francis Menton

A recurring theme here is the utter failure of progressive government social service spending programs to ever make a dent in, let alone solve, the problems they have been created to address.
Whatever the problems may be — poverty, food insecurity, housing, etc., etc. — once massive government spending programs to “solve” them are put in place, the problems never show significant improvement, and more often than not get worse, at least according to official measures, the longer the programs continue and the more is spent.
An extreme case of this phenomenon is the problem of “homelessness” in California.

March 07, 2023

March 07, 2023/ Francis Menton

Often I focus on bureaucratic regulation of energy because the ability to restrict use of energy is the ultimate societal control. Once they have obtained the ability to restrict use of energy, bureaucrats could, if they choose, take away most of our freedom to enjoy life and return us to the income levels of the Stone Age.
Will they stop before going that far, making reasonable tradeoffs to enable the people to flourish economically? Or will they instead pursue environmental purity without concern for the well-being of the populace?
So far all indications are that bureaucracies — and environmental bureaucracies in particular — are utterly incapable of making reasonable tradeoffs. You don’t go into a career as an environmental bureaucrat if you think that your concern for the environment is something that can or should be compromised.

March 03, 2023

March 03, 2023/ Francis Menton

The New Yorker is a magazine that I have barely noticed for decades. It is the epitome of the “New York groupthink” that I mention on my “About” page.
But the current issue has a long (10,000+ words) piece by a guy named Nathan Heller, titled “The End of the English Major,” that I thought might be worth a look. Perhaps here we might find some liberal introspection about how infesting everything you control with racialist and gender obsessions and Critical Race Theory might not be such a great idea.
Who was I trying to kid?

March 01, 2023

March 01, 2023/ Francis Menton

In Chicago on Tuesday, current Mayor Lori Lightfoot lost her bid for re-election.
In a race where only the top two finishers would advance to the final round, Lightfoot finished third, with 17.1% of the vote. Of nine total candidates, the top two vote-getters were Paul Vallas (33.7% of the vote) and Brandon Johnson (20.3%). Those two will now compete in a runoff in April.
The New York Times, which provided those voting data, described Lightfoot in its February 28 report as someone “whose outsider status and promises to enact sweeping reforms propelled her to office four years ago,” but who “saw her popularity plunge as homicides reached generational highs and as Chicago struggled to rebound from the pandemic.”
It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving person.