Endangerment Finding Litigation Update

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  • On February 13 this year, the federal EPA rescinded one of its regulatory actions known as the “Endangerment Finding.” (EF).

  • The EF, originally adopted in 2009 early in the Obama administration, was likely the single most costly and destructive regulatory action ever to spring forth from the administrative state. The EF became the fundamental underpinning for all the subsequent regulations that sought to restrict and ultimately ban use of fossil fuels in the economy — everything from regulations seeking to force closure of power plants, to efforts to mandate only electric cars, to restrictions on drilling and pipelines, and much, much more. The Trump administration is now systematically dismantling all those regulatory wrecking balls.

  • But the opposition has not been idle. Once the rescission became final, the Climate Blob immediately sprang into action with a barrage of lawfare. The first litigation challenging rescission of the EF was filed in the D.C. Circuit on February 18.

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Rolling Blackouts Hit New York

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  • At least since New York passed its Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) back in 2019, it has been clear that trouble has been coming for New York’s electrical grid. The CLCPA effectively prohibits construction of new fossil fuel power plants, even natural gas plants; and the old ones are aging and are forbidden to be replaced or upgraded.

  • Supposedly, lots of wind and solar generators were going to be added to the system. But those have been slow to come and, more importantly, can’t be counted on to generate anything when you need them. In addition, new construction of such things has now been stalled by the end of federal subsidies. At some point the lines of diminishing reliable generation and increasing demand would have to cross.

  • However, here at this website I have held off predicting imminent grid failure. The reason is that I don’t want to be the boy who cried wolf. Our grid operators are competent people, and they have a lot of tricks up their sleeves to hold things together even in difficult circumstances. In a pinch, they can start up every ancient “peaker” plant, and then import some power from PJM, or New England, or even from Canada. Despite New York’s hostile energy environment, they could get lucky and avoid blackouts for at least several more years.

  • So I think it is important to report that on this past July 2 and 3, Con Edison ran out of options and imposed rolling blackouts in parts of the North Bronx and Southern Westchester County.

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New York Court Refuses To Block State's Plan For A "Renewables" Program

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  • For a couple of years now, I have been collaborating with a small group of friends here in New York to see if we can introduce some rationality into the State’s completely insane energy plans. The other three members of our little cabal (Roger Caiazza, Richard Ellenbogen and Constantine Kontogiannis) are a scientist (Caiazza) and two engineers who are knowledgeable about how the electrical grid works.

  • Our efforts have included things like submitting comments on various regulatory proposals, intervening in Public Service Commission proceedings, and even bringing court proceedings to try to block crazy and impossible schemes from taking effect. So far we have scored exactly zero public successes, although we do occasionally receive communications (always confidential and never in writing) from various bureaucrats who say things like “I know you’re right, but I can’t speak up or I will lose my job.”

  • On Monday (July 13) we achieved our latest defeat when a Justice of the Albany County Supreme Court (William Little) issued an Order dismissing a Petition we had filed seeking to overturn a May 2025 Order of the Public Service Commission on the subject of the State’s Renewable Program and Clean Energy Standard.

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Battery Storage For Grid Backup: Better Keep Working On It

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  • Advocates of generating electricity mostly with intermittent wind and sun, when challenged on how they would deal with a calm night, are always ready with the obvious answer: energy storage. Just get some batteries, store up excess power from the windy mid-days, discharge as needed, and everything will work out.

  • Unfortunately, the advocates never acknowledge that the problem of making an electrical grid work 24/7/365 with mostly wind and solar generation is much more difficult than just storing power from the day to discharge that night.

  • Both wind and sun are subject to regular “droughts,” just like rain. There can be many consecutive days, or even weeks, of combined low wind and sun; let alone the entire winter has a lack of sun, and both summer and winter have less wind than spring and fall. Calculating how much energy storage will suffice to get through even a year of average wind/sun variability is a straightforward exercise, yielding an answer of as much as 1000 hours of average consumption.

  • Meanwhile, naive politicians (those in New York being Exhibit A) regularly get duped into buying a few hours or tens of hours worth of batteries for grid backup, spending billions of dollars on amounts of storage that will be almost useless for backing up a primarily wind/sun grid.

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In France, The Government Tries To Prevent The People From Getting Air Conditioning

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In France, The Government Tries To Prevent The People From Getting Air Conditioning

  • A remarkable feature of governments in Europe is the extent to which they operate explicitly against the interest of their citizens and voters.

  • They give an outward appearance of being democracies, and they hold regular elections, but somehow the people in power are a self-perpetuating political clique that, from all evidence, seems to hold the ordinary working people and voters in complete contempt.

  • Prime examples of operating against the interests of the people include: opening the borders to millions of impoverished migrants who hate the host countries; and imposing a fantasy “energy transition” that drives up the cost of energy and destroys industrial jobs without any measurable effect on the climate.

  • A new example of the hatred of the governing class for the ordinary people has emerged in the past couple of weeks.

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Britain: Time To Go Back To Coal

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Britain: Time To Go Back To Coal

  • Among our “climate leader” jurisdictions, Britain is a serious contender for the top spot. Sure Germany got started earlier than Britain, with the so-called “Energiewende” going back to the 1990s; and upstart American states like California and New York each think that their own hair shirt energy restrictions should qualify them for the number one position.

  • But Britain’s suite of policies in the aggregate is hard to top: mandatory Net Zero goals set by statute; madcap buildout of wind and solar electricity generation; shuttering of generation from coal and natural gas; refusal to permit drilling in the North Sea; complete ban on fracking. The Energy Minister of the current Labour government — Ed Milliband — is as crazed a climate zealot as you can find anywhere. The British have even dynamited coal-fired power stations to be sure that nobody could ever change their minds about this Net Zero thing and try to re-start the plants.

  • Unfortunately for the British, their wind and solar generation facilities seem to be subject to all going quiet at the same time, often inconveniently at the very hottest or coldest times of the year. Building more and yet more of them does not solve the problem. Some call this Britain’s “looming firm generation capacity crisis.”

  • So what’s the answer? How about doing the unthinkable — bring back coal!

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