July 12, 2023

CHECC Has Petitioned The DC Circuit For Rehearing As To Its Standing To Challenge The Endangerment Finding

July 12, 2023/ Francis Menton

Here in my retirement, my remaining law practice consists almost entirely of working on one case in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, going by the caption Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council v. EPA. From time to time when there is a development in the case, I will report on it in a post here.
My most recent update on the case was on May 25, when the DC Circuit issued a decision throwing us out on the ground of “standing.” When a case challenges a regulation issued by a government agency, the “standing” doctrine requires that a party bringing the case show some kind of concrete injury from the challenged regulation, which here is EPA’s 2009 determination that CO2 emissions into the atmosphere constitute a “danger to human health and welfare.” Our showing was that the Endangerment Finding forces an onslaught of federal regulations suppressing consumption of fossil fuels; and that policies suppressing fossil fuels have been demonstrated in every jurisdiction that has tried them to lead to large increases in electricity prices.
But the court in its wisdom ruled that the plaintiff electricity consumers were not “directly regulated by the challenged rule,” and that we had “fail[ed] to provide any evidence of injury.”
I titled my May 25 post, in the aftermath of that decision, as “At CHECC We’re Down But Not Out!” And indeed we have now bounced back!

July 10, 2023

New York's ISO Issues A Warning

July 10, 2023/ Francis Menton

Here in New York, we proceed giddily along shutting down our functioning and reliable mostly-fossil-fuel based electricity-generating system, in anticipation of an imminent future of clean and free “renewables.”
After all, our Climate Act (officially, the “Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act of 2019”) has decreed that we must do so. A Climate Action Council — created by the statute and packed with politically-appointed climate activists with next-to-no expertise in how the energy system works — cooks up “Scoping Plans” that direct the little people to go out and create an entirely new energy system on a politically-determined timetable.
And almost nobody so much as raises any questions as to whether this can possibly work.

July 06, 2023

July 06, 2023/ Francis Menton

Just over a year ago, on July 5, 2022, I had a post titled “How To Think Like A Liberal Supreme Court Justice.” The post was occasioned by the then-brand-new issuance (June 30, 2022) of the biggest decision of the Court’s last term, West Virginia v. EPA. Justice Kagan had authored a dissent on behalf of herself and the other two liberal justices (Breyer and Sotomayor).
My post also discussed two other significant decisions of the 2021-22 term where the three liberals had again dissented as a bloc: Alabama Association of Realtors v. HHS and NFIB v. Department of Labor.
And now we have several more big decisions just issued with the same 6-3 voting split (Justice Jackson having replaced Breyer). The most significant is SFFA v. Harvard.
So suppose you want to learn how to think like a liberal Supreme Court justice. If so, I submit that there is no better place to look than the dissents in cases where the three liberal justices dissent as a bloc.

July 03, 2023

July 03, 2023/ Francis Menton

II owe an apology to all readers for the temporarily reduced frequency of posting. I’m currently in Italy on a family vacation. On multiple occasions over the past several years, I have taken family vacations— including to semi-developed places like Russia and Vietnam — without significant effect on my ability to post on the blog. However, the internet service where I currently find myself in Italy is remarkably poor, and not sufficient to support the kind of research it takes to do one of my usual posts. So please have patience. I’ll be back to my usual routine next week.
Meanwhile, let me relay some information that people have sent me.
Greg Wrightstone, Executive Director of the CO2 Coalition, sends along some truly shocking information about ongoing big tech censorship of the climate debate.

June 29, 2023

June 29, 2023/ Francis Menton

The world is currently filled with government-, corporate-, and billionaire-funded organizations advocating for a transformation of the energy system to “clean” and “abundant” renewables.
In my post a week ago, I described the International Energy Agency — a consortium of governments (now 40+ of them, including all the major ones) originally formed in the 70s to combat the OPEC oil embargo of the time, but since transformed into a “a center of advocacy for elimination of fossil fuels from the world’s energy supply.”
For today, here’s another one you may or may not have heard of — the Energy Institute. EI is a London-based advocacy organization set up under the UK charity laws. It appears to receive its funding largely from corporations and wealthy individuals. On its home page, it describes its mission as “creating a better energy future for our members and society by accelerating a just global energy transition to net zero.”
Let’s review the latest from these two groups.

June 26, 2023

June 26, 2023/ Francis Menton

Wind power: It’s clean. It’s free. It’s renewable. Google the subject, and you will quickly find fifty articles claiming that electricity from wind is now cheaper than electricity from those evil, dirty fossil fuels. So why doesn’t some country somewhere get all of its electricity from wind?
In fact, despite now several decades of breakneck building of wind turbines, no country seems to be able to get even half of its electricity from wind when averaged over the course of a year, and no country has really even begun to solve the problem of needing full backup when the wind doesn’t blow.
Well, maybe this project isn’t as easy as the central planners thought it would be. News of the past week brings to light a few more speed bumps on the road to energy utopia.