New Federal Dietary Guidelines Somewhat Less Idiotic Than The Previous Versions

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  • Do you think that the U.S. federal government might be a good place to seek reasonable guidance on matters involving science? If so, I question your sanity.

  • In recent years the part of the federal enterprise masquerading as “science” has suffered one debacle after another resulting from acceptance and promotion of pseudoscience, examples being Covid lockdowns and school closures, let alone the entire catastrophic climate change fiasco. Do you remember the CDC ordering (on no authority) a nationwide eviction moratorium (until struck down by the Supreme Court)?

  • And of course, the acceptance of pseudoscience by a federal bureaucracy is somehow inevitably associated with an effort by that bureaucracy to increase its budget and enhance its power to order the American people around.

  • In the area of federal claims based on dubious scientific authority, the Dietary Guidelines emanating from the Department of Agriculture are a prominent instance, although perhaps relatively benign.

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New York Business Community Starting To Wake Up About The Coming Energy Train Wreck

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  • In 2018 New York’s voters suddenly elected a far more left-wing legislature than we had previously had, particularly the State Senate (the Assembly having already been deep in the progressive camp). Taking office in 2019, the new legislators quickly got to work seeing how much destruction they could wreak in a short period of time.

  • One product of their efforts was what we call the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), enacted in July 2019. The point of the CLCPA was to have New York State rescue the climate and save the planet, which supposedly was going to be accomplished by imposing mandates for eliminating hydrocarbon fuels from the energy system of this one little state.

  • It seems that nobody had pointed out to the very earnest legislators that New York represents only a small fraction of 1% of world CO2 emissions, the total elimination of which would barely be noticed in the overall world carbon balance. But the point was not necessarily to make any noticeable impact on world carbon emissions, so much as to show our virtue and our “leadership” by destroying our own wealth as an example to others, or something like that. Of most immediate consequence in the CLCPA were mandates for the electricity system, that 70% of our electricity must come from “renewables” by 2030 (“70x30”) and 100% from “zero-carbon” sources by 2040 (“100x40”).

  • Well, here we are in 2026 — 7 years down and only 4 to go toward the 70x30 mandate — and we have made almost no progress in “de-carbonizing” the electricity system. It is obvious to any thinking person that the 70x30 mandate has become a joke (to the extent that that was not obvious from the outset).

  • But there is the mandate written in black and white in a statute. Is anything to be done?

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Why Don't Global Lower Tropospheric Temperatures More Closely Track Atmospheric CO2 Levels?

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Why Don't Global Lower Tropospheric Temperatures More Closely Track Atmospheric CO2 Levels?

  • The big news in 2025 for the climate scare was that all of a sudden this scare wasn’t such big news any more.

  • We’re talking here about something that all of the right people had agreed for decades was an “existential” threat to humanity. It was supposedly the single most important thing that we all needed to focus on and transform our lives to stop. We only had ten years to “save the planet”; or maybe it was only five. If we failed, we would shortly be inundated by sea level rise, or maybe devastated by floods and droughts, or burned up by wildfires.

  • And then, during 2025, quite rapidly the scaremongering stories became less frequent. Several prominent priests of the climate cult turned apostate (e.g., Bill Gates, Matthew Yglesias). The political push for “net zero” dramatically slowed. Why? There have undoubtedly been many reasons for the shift. Among those have been Trump administration regulatory changes and de-funding of scare-promoting bureaucracies and NGOs, plus the emerging extreme costs and ineffectiveness of the “net zero” energy transition.

  • But here’s another issue that, although I rarely see it mentioned, could play a big role in the ongoing eclipse of the climate cult: The failure of global tropospheric temperatures to closely track the rise in atmospheric CO2.

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Mayor Mamdani: Can You Feel The Excitement?

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Mayor Mamdani: Can You Feel The Excitement?

  • In New York, officials elected in November take office on January 1. And thus, on New Year’s Day 2026, we had the inauguration of our new Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Can you feel the excitement?

  • For myself, not so much. The best I can say is that this too shall pass. Hopefully without too much destruction in the meantime, but we have no assurance of that.

  • And yet it seems that plenty of people really do feel excitement. I’m not making this up

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There Is Much More To The Immigration Issue Than Just The GDP Effect

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  • A couple of years ago, in July 2023, I participated in a debate at the Soho Forum on the subject of immigration. The resolution for the debate was: “Resolved: The U.S. should have free immigration except for those who pose a security threat or have a serious contagious disease.” Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute took the affirmative. I took the negative.

  • Nowrasteh, a Senior Vice President for Policy at Cato, is known as a free immigration absolutist. And to his credit he had some good points to make. The most important one was that nothing increases world GDP so much and so fast as letting poor people immigrate into rich countries. Even working at the lowest-paid jobs in the U.S., their incomes immediately multiply by factors of five or ten or more. How could anyone be against that?

  • At the time of the debate in 2023, the Somali frauds in Minnesota had begun to come to light, but only to those paying close attention.

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The Unreported Story Of Grid Scale Battery Fires

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The Unreported Story Of Grid Scale Battery Fires

  • The geniuses who are planning New York’s energy future think that they can make intermittent wind and solar generators work to power the electrical grid by the simple device of providing some battery storage.

  • The idea is that when there is abundant wind and sun, they can store up the power for use during those calm and dark periods in the winter. How much battery storage will that take? It’s a simple arithmetic calculation, but none of our supposed experts have taken the trouble to crunch the numbers.

  • Nevertheless, without any kind of feasibility study of whether this will work, they soldier forth building large grid-scale battery storage facilities. The battery building program is under way, at least to some degree, and a few such facilities are actually complete and operating out in the rural parts of the state. Meanwhile, there are plans for some much larger such facilities in New York City, including right in some of its most densely-populated sections.

  • Is there any problem with this that we ought to know about?

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