Place Your Bet On The Future Of Energy: U.S. Or China

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Place Your Bet On The Future Of Energy: U.S. Or China

  • The first eight months of the second Trump administration have seen a sea change in energy policy.

  • Previously, under Biden, the federal government had undertaken a blowout of hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies and incentives for so-called “renewable” energy sources, while simultaneously implementing dozens of regulations and restrictions to suppress the production and use of fossil fuels. President Trump has now reversed all of that.

  • However, please take note of an important distinction: although Trump and Congress have zeroed out nearly all subsidies and tax credits for wind and solar generation and for grid-scale batteries, they have not enacted comparable subsidies and incentives for fossil fuels. Instead, all sources of energy production now must stand or fall without subsidies, based on their ability to fulfill customer demand and to generate profit. All sources of energy are now on equal footing, and without subsidies.

  • Meanwhile, over in China, billions of dollars in subsidies have flowed for many years into developing the ability to produce the infrastructure for a wind/solar/storage energy system — things like polysilicon, solar panels, solar cells, wind turbine blades, wind turbine nacelles, and battery cells. As a result, China has become completely dominant in the world in manufacturing these and many related items.

  • So who is making the better energy bet?

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Two Takes On The Progress Of New York's Energy Transformation

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Two Takes On The Progress Of New York's Energy Transformation

  • In the real world, the climate scam is rapidly falling apart, along with the related government-subsidized schemes for worldwide energy transformation. So how should New York react? After all, we claim to have the ultimate program of “climate leadership” for showing everyone else how easy it is to do this energy transformation thing. We’ve started with mandating under our Climate Act an electricity system having 70% of its generation from “renewables” by 2030 (a mandate known as “70 x 30”). The deadline for 70 x 30 is now just over four years away.

  • So, is this really happening?

  • Fortunately, our Public Service Commission has just come out with a Report with the long title “NEW YORK STATE DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC SERVICE SECOND CLCPA [Climate Act] INFORMATIONAL REPORT ON OVERALL IMPLEMENTATION OF THE CLIMATE LEADERSHIP AND COMMUNITY PROTECTION ACT, WITH CORRECTIONS,” bearing a date of September 23, 2025. Today, I will take a look at that to see what we can learn about New York’s progress toward its goals.

  • Separately, a different bureaucracy called the New York State Energy Planning Board a couple of months ago (July 25) issued something called the 2025 Draft Energy Plan for the state. I had a post discussing that document back on August 11 (“New York’s Official Energy Plan Is No Plan”). That Draft Energy Plan then became subject to a period for public comment, so I took the opportunity to submit my Comment on September 25.

  • Let’s say that the PSC’s Report and my Comment on the Energy Plan are two very different takes on the progress toward New York’s energy transformation.

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The Case Of Bolsonaro: What They Had In Mind For Trump

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  • Donald Trump is now President of the United States for a second term, having survived an unprecedented campaign of lawfare that has included no fewer than four criminal prosecutions, two state and two federal, brought during the four years that he was out of office. All were brought by highly partisan Democratic Party prosecutors.

  • The four prosecutions of Trump are all now essentially dead.

  • However, much of the process of killing off these prosecutions has occurred either since Trump’s re-election, or only because of the fortuity of Trump getting enough appointments to the Supreme Court during his first four years in office to have an effective majority on that Court.

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Do Not Give Up The High Ground On Freedom Of Speech!

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  • The four years of the Biden presidency were a terrible low point for the protection of freedom of speech in the U.S. A web of government agencies and allied NGOs sprang up with remarkable rapidity to identify and ban disfavored speech, almost always of conservatives.

  • As just a few examples: the White House itself pressured social media platforms to suppress disfavored speech on politically sensitive topics like Covid and climate change; the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency collaborated with universities and NGOs like the Stanford Internet Observatory to get disfavored speech banned or suppressed; the Department of Homeland Security formed a Disinformation Governance Board to coerce social media companies to suppress speech deemed “disinformation”; and the FBI conducted wide-ranging investigations of Republican politicians and organizations.

  • The entire enterprise got the accurate nickname of the Censorship Industrial Complex.

  • This was an extremely important issue that drove many voters to Trump. After Trump was elected, we had every reason to expect that efforts like those of the prior administration to coerce the suppression of opponents’ speech of would come to an end. And, for the most part, they have.

  • However, the past week has seen two bad unforced errors on the freedom of speech front by high-ranking members of the Trump administration:

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Comment Filed In Support Of EPA's Repeal Of The 2009 Endangerment Finding

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  • Yesterday, along with two excellent colleagues, I submitted a Comment to EPA on the subject of the proposed and pending repeal of the so-called Endangerment Finding of 2009.

  • The Endangerment Finding (EF) is the absurd regulatory action by which the Obama-era EPA purported to find that the trace gas carbon dioxide (CO2) constitutes a “danger” to human health and welfare as it accumulates in the atmosphere from the current level of about 0.04%, to perhaps 0.05% or maybe even (the horror!) 0.06% by some time later this century.

  • The EF is then the basis for all the subsequent regulatory initiatives by the Obama and Biden administrations to regulate and suppress the production and use of hydrocarbon fuels. These initiatives have included things like rules to force the closure of all coal and natural gas power plants by some time in the 2030s; mileage rules for automobiles that would ratchet up over time until no gasoline-powered car could comply (also by some time in the 2030s); restrictions on oil and gas leases on federal lands; blocking the construction of pipelines; and even regulations that have made it so that dishwashers and washing machines don’t work very well any more.

  • Here is a link to our Comment.

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At The Columbia Academic Freedom Council Conference

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  • On Saturday (September 13) something called the Columbia Academic Freedom Council held a day-long conference here in New York. The Council used the event to hand out awards to some 23 recipients.

  • Each of the recipients had not only been punished or ostracized somehow for speaking out as a dissenter from the groupthink of academia, but had also fought back in some way.

  • The day’s program was organized into a series of panels, where each panel’s members were award recipients who got to tell their stories. The recipients included some prominent academics from elite institutions, but also some from less-well-known places, including some from community colleges and high schools.

  • The entire program was some 10 hours long. I was able to stay for about half of it. In many cases I was familiar with the story of the award recipient, but in many others I was not. I thought readers might be interested in the personal stories from a sample of some of the more and less prominent recipients.

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