Even Stupider Than The Stupidest Litigation In The Country

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  • I have had several posts on a collection of related cases that I have called “The Stupidest Litigations In The Country.” These are cases where climate hysterics have sued oil and gas producing companies, or the federal government, or both, seeking various extreme punishments ranging from massive damages up to and including an order to end all production of fossil fuels.

  • The asserted grounds vary somewhat from case to case, but a central theme is a claimed constitutional right to a “clean and healthy environment.”

  • My last update on these cases was a post on April 9. A main subject there was the lawsuit of Juliana v. United States, which is one of the cases where the federal government is the defendant and the goal is to require it to force an end to the production of fossil fuels.

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The Campus Kill-The-Jews Riots: Paid Professional Agitators Funded By Democratic Party Big Wigs, Or Well-Meaning Kids?

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The Campus Kill-The-Jews Riots: Paid Professional Agitators Funded By Democratic Party Big Wigs, Or Well-Meaning Kids?

  • Several days ago, after the New York police broke up the kill-the-Jews occupations at Columbia, NYU and other universities, it emerged that close to half of the arrestees were not students or otherwise affiliated with the schools in question.

  • At a news conference on April 30, Mayor Eric Adams adopted the term “professional outside agitators” to describe the main organizers of the protests (“What should have been a peaceful protest, it has basically been co-opted by professional outside agitators.").

  • The protests certainly give an appearance of being well-organized and equally well funded. For example, large numbers of identical newly-ordered tents seem to spring up on almost no notice. Did hundreds of young people on shoestring budgets just happen on their own initiative to place orders from the same website at the same time and all pay with their own money? That seems implausible.

  • But if there is professional organization, who are the organizers? And who is paying them? You would think that this is an issue where the public would have a huge interest in knowing the answer — particularly if the answer should turn out to be that the main sponsors of the protests are also big funders of one of the major political parties. But this is a subject where the sponsors have a strong interest in concealing their role as much as possible, and where uncovering and exposing that role takes some significant effort.

  • And then we have the beyond-ridiculous New York Times.

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The Climate Cult Reacts As Its Political Position Begins To Slip

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  • For two decades and more, the political position of the climate alarm cult in the U.S. and Europe has only seemed to strengthen with time.

  • In the U.S., the Obama and Biden Administrations have both pushed huge regulatory initiatives to restrict use of fossil fuels (with only some modest roll-backs during Trump’s four years); some of the most sweeping restrictions got pushed through just a week ago.

  • Meanwhile, blue states like California and New York have enacted ever-more-extreme restrictions by statute. In Europe, there has been a near all-party political consensus in favor of the “net zero” agenda, notably including even the mainstream conservative parties in the largest countries like the UK and Germany.

  • I have long said that sooner or later a combination of physical reality and cost would stop the “net zero” juggernaut in its tracks.

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The Biden Administration Ever More Delusional On Energy

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  • Three and a half years into the Biden Administration, and to an ordinary citizen on the ground it might seem like not that much has changed as to energy.

  • Despite hundreds of government actions and initiative in an all-of-government regulatory onslaught to transform the energy economy, the important things have been remarkable stable. Production of oil and gas are actually up, and prices increases have been relatively modest — far less than one might have anticipated from the extreme regulatory hostility to production.

  • The percentage of what is called “primary energy” (that is, energy for everything, not just electricity) coming from fossil fuels has remained nearly unchanged. EIA data here for 2022 (latest I can find) show about 79% of U.S. primary energy from fossil fuels, barely changed since Biden took office, and indeed very stable for decades.

  • Perhaps this situation of stable energy production and consumption results because it reflects what markets and consumers want and need to satisfy their demand for energy. So do you think that the hyperactive regulators might just relax and let the consumers have what they want?

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Why Is Israel Singled Out As The Uniquely Hated State?

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  • Around the U.S., and particularly at the most elite college campuses, seemingly smart and well-educated young people keep up their passionate protests in support of the Hamas rapists and murderers and against Israel and Jews generally.

  • The claimed reason for the protests is that Israel is engaged in “apartheid” or “genocide,” or even the ultimate evil, “settler colonialism.” Yet meanwhile, the world is filled with state actors treating their own or neighboring populations in the most appalling ways, far worse than anything that Israel could remotely be accused of, without attracting anything like the passion and vitriol directed at Jews and Israel.

  • Think North Korea, keeping its own population in permanent prison conditions, and often starving; or China, cracking down on all dissent and even confining large sub-populations (e.g., Uyghurs) in slave labor camps; or Azerbaijan, which expelled an entire Christian community of about 150,000 people just a few months ago. These examples, let alone the human rights abuses in places like Iran or Cuba or Venezuela, attract almost no interest from our passionate student demonstrators, not to mention even slight notice from the press or anyone else.

  • How to explain this discrepancy?

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A Shockingly Inept Report From The IEA On Battery Storage Of Energy

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A Shockingly Inept Report From The IEA On Battery Storage Of Energy

  • In my self-designated role critiquing various schemes for total transformation of the world energy system, I get to review large amounts of poor, shoddy, and incompetent work. When people get into advocating for this “energy transition,” the stars regularly align to bring forth the most extreme levels of ineptitude.

  • Start with the fact that the “smartest” people are filled with arrogance and hubris, but are not actually very smart. Add that many innumerate Politics and English majors have flooded into a field that cries out for engineering calculations. Add too that groupthink and orthodoxy enforcement prevent anyone from pointing out obvious flaws. And then throw in a strong dose of religious zealotry that obstructs the intrusion of anything resembling critical thinking. All in all, it’s a prescription for catastrophe.

  • But in a field rife with bad, worse, still worse, and even dangerously incompetent work, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anything as shockingly inept as the Report just out from the International Energy Agency with the title “Batteries and Secure Energy Transitions.”

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