June 29, 2026

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

June 29, 2026/ Francis Menton

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.

June 27, 2026

Britain: Time To Go Back To Coal

June 27, 2026/ Francis Menton

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!

October 20, 2025

October 20, 2025/ Francis Menton

It was just a couple of weeks ago — October 3 to be precise — that I reported that the long-running “net zero” political consensus in the UK was finally “crumbling.” In the intervening two-plus weeks, the slow crumbling has turned into a rapid collapse.
The biggest roadblock for opponents of a green energy transition in the UK has been that the Conservative Party, which should have been the natural home of opposition to net zero, has instead long (and foolishly) allied itself with the net zero cause. In June 2019, the Conservatives (under Prime Minister Theresa May) put through an ambitious amendment to enhance the net zero targets of the 2008 Climate Act, and then proceeded to a general election that December where they won a substantial majority of 365 seats (in a parliament of 650).
In subsequent years, a parliamentary faction in the House of Commons called the Net Zero Scrutiny Group struggled to get to about 50 or so Conservative members, who were far outnumbered by the opposing faction of the same party called the Conservative Environment Network. The UK voters had surely demonstrated their climate virtue.
But unfortunately things did not work out quite as they had anticipated.

October 05, 2025

October 05, 2025/ Francis Menton

“Hate speech.” The term calls to mind every sort of vile and disgusting insult and racial and ethnic slur.
Who could possibly be in favor of allowing that? Large numbers of people instinctively assume that hateful statements, particularly those based on racial, religious or ethnic categories, must surely be illegal.
But here in the U.S., such statements in general are not illegal, and not subject to criminal prosecution. A couple of weeks ago, our Attorney General Pam Bondi was recorded on a podcast saying that “We will absolutely . . . go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech . . . . You can’t have that hate speech in the world in which we live.” I, among many others, pointed out that Ms. Bondi had badly mis-stated U.S. law on the subject. Our Supreme Court has drawn a line under the First Amendment that makes almost all “hate speech” constitutionally protected, short of incitement to imminent violence.
If you think that that line might not make sense, consider the alternative. Over in the UK, they have seen fit to criminalize “hate speech.”

October 03, 2025

October 03, 2025/ Francis Menton

Here in the U.S., ever since the push to “de-carbonize” the energy system to “save the planet” from global warming got going in a big way 20 or so years ago, there has always been a critical mass of skeptics strongly pushing back. I count myself among them. Another prominent example is the CO2 Coalition, an organization of about 200 scientists and intellectuals who dissent from the climate orthodoxy. Large portions of our Republican Party — recently approaching near unanimity — have also joined the dissent from climate orthodoxy.
But over in Europe, the same has not been true at all; and it has particularly not been true in the UK. There, at least until very recently, there was a near total consensus across the political spectrum in favor of mandatory reductions in carbon emissions, with an ultimate goal of zero emissions.
Well, let’s take a look at where the UK finds itself today.

July 18, 2025

July 18, 2025/ Francis Menton

How quickly things change.
It was only two years ago, in 2023, that I was writing posts compiling long lists of quotes from climate activists warning that all assets used for production of coal, oil and gas were about to become obsolete and “stranded.” After all, wind and solar were (supposedly) cheaper and cleaner for generating electricity, which could then power anything and everything. Therefore anyone stupid enough to make further investments in producing fossil fuels would lose everything. Here is one such post from June 2023, and another from February 2023.
If you look today, you can still find predictions in 2025 that fossil fuel assets will shortly become “stranded.” (Here is one from Bloomberg from March 6: “Investors Risk $2.3 Trillion of Stranded Fossil Fuel Assets.”). But such predictions are becoming fewer and fewer.
Instead, what looks far more likely is that large portions, if not the entire business, of “renewable” electricity generation from wind and sun is likely to get “stranded.”