Our Final Objection To Our Local Utility's Rate Increase

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  • If you have been following this blog closely, you know that I have been participating, along with two excellent colleagues, in the rate proceeding of our local utility, Con Edison.

  • A rate proceeding is the mechanism by which a utility goes before a regulatory body, in our case the New York Public Service Commission, seeking to increase the rates charged to consumers. Our purpose in the proceeding has been to object to and disrupt having the ratepayers charged for the building of infrastructure in pursuit of the futile and infeasible “climate” goals of our deluded politicians.

  • One of the rules of these things is that anybody with a genuine interest in the outcome can “intervene” if they want, and participate as a party in the proceedings. That’s how we got ourselves in on the action.

  • And by the same mechanism, multiple parties advocating for the utopian future of “renewable” and “zero emissions” energy also joined up. Among the green energy advocates in the mix were the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Alliance for a Green Economy. And then there was the New York City government, which wants to present itself as an advocate for low consumer rates, but at the same time has enacted its own mandate for electric building heat that can only be implemented with the support of some expensive new infrastructure to be built by Con Edison.

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The Electric Vehicle Collapse: Wow, That Was Quick!

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  • It was less than three years ago — early 2023 — that I was writing about the then-universal government and industry line that electric vehicles (EVs) would soon be taking over the American car market.

  • In April 2022 the Biden Administration had adopted aggressive vehicle mileage standards intended to be achievable only through rapid transition to EVs. Our “climate leader” states, California and New York, had then adopted regulations in August and September 2022, respectively, mandating a phase-out of sales of combustion vehicles, to culminate in 2035, after which only EVs would be allowed.

  • In a post in January 2023, I linked to the websites of Ford and GM, where they both touted their grand plans for rapid conversion of their companies to the manufacture of mostly or entirely EVs. At that time, Ford was claiming that it would “lead America’s shift to EVs,” and would achieve 50% of its sales in that category by 2030. GM bragged about its “path to an all-electric future” by 2035.

  • In a post on February 23, 2023, I expressed skepticism.

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Birthright Citizenship? I Think It's An Open Question

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  • On his first day in office in his second term, January 20, 2025, President Trump issued a collection of Executive Orders. One of those was number 14160, titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.”‍ ‍EO 14160 seeks to do away with the long-standing practice of various U.S. agencies of recognizing U.S. citizenship of anyone born in the United States, even if that person’s parents were not legal residents or otherwise legally in the country at the time of the birth.

  • Following issuance of EO 14160, multiple lawsuits were brought in courts around the country seeking injunctions to compel the government to recognize the citizenship of various individuals born here to illegal aliens. Several courts promptly issued injunctions blocking Trump’s Order, all of them on a nationwide basis as far as I can determine.

  • In June, three of those cases, consolidated under the name Trump v. CASA, came before the Supreme Court on the question of whether a District Court could issue a nationwide injunction to block the Order everywhere. The Supreme Court invalidated the nationwide aspect of the injunctions. However, the Court did not consider the merits of whether President and executive agencies could refuse to recognize citizenship of children born here to illegal aliens.

  • But now there are petitions before the Supreme Court asking it to consider this question of so-called “birthright” citizenship on the merits. The Court is widely expected to take up the issue in its current term. So, what is the right answer?

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Today's IQ Test: Which Is Cheaper To Produce Electricity, Wind/Solar Or Fossil Fuels?

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Today's IQ Test: Which Is Cheaper To Produce Electricity, Wind/Solar Or Fossil Fuels?

  • I have been writing here for about a decade that wind and solar would inevitably prove to be far more expensive for producing useful electricity than other methods like fossil fuels, nuclear, or hydro.

  • The reasons are not difficult to understand. Wind and solar, due to intermittency, are not capable of powering a full-time electrical grid on their own. To make the grid capable of fulfilling customer demand 24/7/365, wind and solar require large amounts of additional capital infrastructure — dispatchable back-up generation, energy storage, additional transmission capacity, and more. If wind and solar prove insufficient to eliminate dispatchable back-up generation, then you find yourself running (and paying for) two duplicative systems, when you could have had only one. Energy storage as a potential solution to intermittency turns out to be impossibly expensive. If the only back-up generation you can find that works is powered by fossil fuels, then you haven’t even succeeded in achieving zero carbon emissions in the electricity sector.

  • And yet we have been, and continue to be, subjected to a constant drumbeat of advocacy claiming that wind and solar are now the cheapest ways to produce electricity. I’ll give you a few examples of that in a moment.

  • So who is right?

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Humphrey's Executor On The Ropes

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  • Can Congress create federal agencies with power to enforce the laws and prosecute crimes, but which agencies are outside the control of the President? In a 1935 decision called Humphrey’s Executor, the Supreme Court held that it could.

  • I first wrote about this subject in a post back in December 2016 titled “Can The Separation Of Powers Of The Federal Government Be Righted?” December 2016 was immediatey after Donald Trump had first been elected President, but before he had taken office. The backdrop of the post was the issue of the extent to which the newly-elected President Trump would be able to gain control over a hostile federal bureaucracy.

  • By 2016, some 80+ years after Humphrey’s Executor, there had come to be some 50 or more commissions and boards in the federal government where the President was restricted by statute from firing the commissioners or members, and thus had limited if any practical ability to direct what the agency would do. My conclusion in 2016 was that, largely because of Humphrey’s Executor, the situation of the constitutional separation of powers in the federal government was a hopeless mess, and that it would be a long time before it could be righted. Sure enough, Trump did not take on this issue during his first term.

  • But here in the first year of Trump’s second term, he has gone directly after this issue.

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Welfare Fraud In Blue Cities: How Pervasive Is The Kleptocracy?

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  • If you keep up with current events at all, it is unlikely that you have missed in the past week the explosion of the Minnesota Somali welfare fraud scandal into the national, and even international, news.

  • Not that the enormous Somali welfare fraud in Minnesota is something new. The bloggers at Powerline, who are based in Minnesota, have been covering the subject since at least 2018. Here is a May 2018 City Journal piece by Scott Johnson (of Powerline), reporting on an investigation of Somali-owned daycare centers in Minneapolis suspected of stealing millions by billing the government for inflated number of enrollees.

  • But things really got going when the pandemic hit in 2020-21. Minnesota became ground zero for Somali fraudsters setting up sites supposedly to feed hungry children, and collecting millions for meals that were never prepared or served. Federal indictments for this fraud — including 47 people charged in the first indictment — began to issue in 2022. Dozens of articles at Powerline have traced the scandal since that time, as the revealed scope of the fraud has gradually gone from the millions to the hundreds of millions, and most recently into the billions of dollars.

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