April 28, 2025

Have The Intermittent Energy Blackouts Begun?

April 28, 2025/ Francis Menton

Today there have been widespread electricity blackouts across Europe, beginning in Spain and Portugal in the early afternoon (local time), and then spreading to other countries including France, Andorra, Belgium and the Netherlands. Is this related to the increasing penetration of intermittent generation from wind and solar facilities?
For years, many in the climate skeptic community have warned that expansion of intermittent renewable electricity generation on the grid will, sooner or later, lead to frequent blackouts.
The reason for the warning is easy to understand: The grid has some rather exacting operational requirements that the intermittent renewable generation technologies cannot fulfill. Primary among these requirements are, first, minute-by-minute matching of electricity supply with electricity demand and, second, grid-wide synchronization of the frequency of the alternating current. When wind and solar generate provided relatively small portions of the electricity consumed, other generation sources, particularly thermal (fossil fuel) and hydro, would fulfill these requirements.
But as wind and solar come to dominate generation, the problems become much more difficult to solve.

April 26, 2025

Updates On The Collapse Of The Climate Scam

April 26, 2025/ Francis Menton

On April 14 I recorded a podcast with Tom Nelson. He has since posted a slightly edited version on his YouTube site. Go to this link if you would like to watch it — about an hour long. The main subject is the sordid history of EPA’s Endangerment Finding and efforts of people including myself to get it rescinded.
The good news on the Endangerment Finding front is that EPA under new Administrator Lee Zeldin is very much on the job of eliminating the EF. Of course, once it has been rescinded it will face a blizzard of legal challenges. I hope and expect that Zeldin and his team are up to the job of carrying out a rescission that will stick. I offered my suggestions for how to do a rescission that will stand up to challenge in this post from January 26.
Separately, Nelson has made a thing out of compiling a growing list of “Signs That The Climate Scam Is Collapsing.”

April 23, 2025

April 23, 2025/ Francis Menton

Pope Francis passed away two days ago, on Easter Monday. He had been the leader of the Catholic Church for just over 12 years.
He presented himself as a well-intentioned and deeply religious man, none of which I ever doubted. But good intentions are the paving stones of the road to hell. I often tried to find some positive things about Francis so that I could admire him. But unfortunately I think that his overall impact on the world and on the church was overwhelmingly negative.
Thinking that he was working to uplift the poor and downtrodden of the world, Francis accepted all the most destructive prescriptions of the international Left. I’m sorry, but I don’t find that acceptable in a man claiming to be a major religious leader and asserting moral authority to tell others how to lead a good life.
After a century and more of the destructive horrors of socialism, people in major leadership roles in society have a responsibility to learn about that and understand it and not continue to spread it.

April 20, 2025

April 20, 2025/ Francis Menton

In a post on January 28 — a week into President Trump’s second term — I urged that it is time to “purge the climate scam from the federal websites.”
Trump 1.0 did a remarkably poor job of taking control of communications on the climate issue on websites like those of EPA, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Transportation. Are they doing any better this time?
They have definitely taken some significant steps to address this issue here in the early weeks of the new administration. For example, on April 15 the Guardian ran a piece with the headline “Green groups sue Trump administration over climate webpage removals.”

April 17, 2025

April 17, 2025/ Francis Menton

In June 2019, when New York passed its Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), it all seemed so easy.
Back then, everyone knew that “renewables” were cheaper than fossil fuels for making electricity; it was only the nefarious machinations of evil oil and gas companies that stood in the way of an effortless energy transition. New York would assume the mantle of climate leadership to show everyone the way.
And even as recently as December 2022, New York’s path to energy utopia still seemed clear. That’s when the state issued what it called the Final Scoping Plan under the CLCPA, laying out the simple steps to achieve the goal. Just keep putting one foot in front of the other, and by 2030 we would have 70% of our electricity from renewables.
In the just over two years since then, things have fallen apart with remarkable speed.
Yesterday, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum ordered a halt to all construction work on a project called Empire Wind, an offshore wind project located about 20 miles South of Long Island and just East of New York City. This is close to a final stake through the heart of the energy transition program outlined in the Scoping Plan.

April 15, 2025

April 15, 2025/ Francis Menton

Back on February 14, I had a post titled “How Much Of This Has Been Paid For By The U.S. Taxpayer?” The post asked that question about a sample of issues held dear by the Left: migrant caravans, services in the U.S. to illegal aliens, DEI and climate alarm.
Over the intervening weeks it has become clear that the general answer is “a lot of it,” but the details will be slow to emerge. For example, you can go to the website of DOGE and get an endless list of hundreds of contracts and grants that have been reduced or canceled. But they all seem to have legitimate headlines or titles, even if they were wasteful.
How much of this money was getting diverted to an NGO, and from there to another NGO and then another until it ended up funding migrant caravans or pro-Palestinian propaganda or some other such cause. There is very little indication.