A Mini Scorecard For President Trump's First Seven Months of Term Two

  • In Federalist Number 70, one of the most often-cited of the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton famously made his pitch for a strong unitary executive as provided for in the then-proposed Constitution:

  • Energy in the Executive is a leading character in the definition of good government. It is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks; it is not less essential to the steady administration of the laws; to the protection of property against those irregular and high-handed combinations which sometimes interrupt the ordinary course of justice; to the security of liberty against the enterprises and assaults of ambition, of faction, and of anarchy. . . .

  • Our current President Trump carries the concept of “energy in the executive” to an extreme level, undertaking a dizzying array of initiatives, with new ones emerging so rapidly that it is difficult to keep up.

  • Many of Trump’s initiatives have corrected disastrous and destructive policies of the Biden and Obama years. But with so many initiatives, perhaps it is inevitable that some will be misfires; or perhaps Trump lacks a capacity for self-criticism to distinguish his good ideas from the bad ones.

Read More

Green Energy Wall Coming Into Focus In New York?

  • It was back in 2021 that I started to ask which country or U.S. state would be the first to hit the “Green Energy Wall.”

  • It has long been obvious to anyone who looks at the situation that the fantasy of a fully de-carbonized energy system, with everything run on electricity generated by intermittent wind and sun, could never happen.

  • But what would be the limiting condition that would put a stop to the madness? Would it be confronting the absurd costs of grid-scale battery storage? Or perhaps a string of blackouts caused by insufficient backup of the wind and solar generation?

  • Here in New York, we are starting to see some push back from politicians on the fantasy green energy transition, but the source may be the last thing you would have predicted.

Read More

The Pravda Press "Fact Checks" President Trump On D.C. Crime Statistics

Read More

New York's Official Energy Plan Is No Plan

  • It was in July 2019 that New York State adopted its Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act. Our Legislature and Governor (it was Andrew Cuomo at the time) had officially designated us as the climate “leader,” here to show the unsophisticated rubes and provincials in the rest of the country how a small application of political will could transform our electricity system from majority fossil fuels in 2019 to 70% “renewables” by 2030 and 100% “zero-carbon” by 2040.

  • Now six years into the eleven available to meet the 2030 mandate, we actually get less of our electricity from zero-carbon sources than we did in 2019.

  • The reason is that the large (2 GW) Indian Point nuclear plant was forced to close under pressure from environmentalists, to be replaced by two natural gas plants of approximately the same total capacity.

  • Meanwhile the vision of massive amounts of power from the wind and sun has barely gotten off the ground; and in particular the vision of vast offshore wind capacity has essentially died with the withdrawal of federal support by the Trump administration.

Read More

The Climate Cult Takes On "Resiliency" In Manhattan

The Climate Cult Takes On "Resiliency" In Manhattan
  • Here in New York City, in the grip of the hysterical climate cult, we are undertaking a massive transformation of our energy system without anyone in authority having done the simple arithmetic to check whether the plans have any chance of succeeding. A big theme of this blog has been pointing out the obvious problems that mean that these “net zero” schemes can never work.

  • But maybe it’s not really important whether they will ever work or not. Maybe the real point is just to spend a lot of (somebody else’s) money to show that you, somehow, “care.”

  • A very similar scenario is now playing out in the closely related category they are calling climate “resiliency.” The word means getting ready for the impending climate armaggedon. The armaggedon isn’t coming, of course, but we will anyway spend vast sums supposedly to show we are “doing something” about the problem.

  • Whether the scheme in question might actually work is beside the point.

Read More

Comment Submitted On EPA Proposal To Revoke Biden-Era Power Plant Regulations

  • After a few decades in the wilderness, it looks like the skeptics are now suddenly prevailing in the climate wars.

  • I have long said that this would inevitably happen, and that it was only a question of time, because the laws of physics and economics would inevitably prevail. But what I didn’t know was how much time it would take — perhaps a few years, or maybe many decades. It’s much like North Korea. Their non-functioning communist system will inevitably collapse — but when?

  • Much credit for the sudden reversal in the climate struggles goes to President Trump. But it is also true that the climate scam was always a house of cards, subject to falling as soon as a critical mass of people started testing its foundations.

  • And I don’t mean to suggest that the climate wars are totally over. Too many people have been making too big living off the scam, and have too much invested to give up easily. And so I continue, along with dedicated colleagues, to do my part to help get this beast killed deader than dead.

Read More