September 12, 2025

Two Tragic Deaths, And Some Useful Lessons

September 12, 2025/ Francis Menton

It’s been a very sad few weeks, first with the tragic and senseless murder of Iryna Zarutska on a train in North Carolina on August 22, and now with the assassination of Charlie Kirk in Utah on September 10.
These two killings have suddenly focused the attention of a lot of previously complacent people, and provided some very useful education about the kind of world we live in. But what are the lessons to take away?
One possible lesson is that the world is just irretrievably filled with anger and hate, to the extent that the best that sensible people can do is withdraw into their bunker, keep out of blue states and away from people who follow leftist and woke ideology, stick to a limited circle of family and friends, and avoid dealing with the broader world to the maximum extent possible.
I do not subscribe to that approach.

September 08, 2025

Watching The End Game Of New York's Climate Madness Begin To Play Out

September 08, 2025/ Francis Menton

As I have written many times, with New York’s fantasy “net zero” energy plans, it is not a question of whether they will fail, but only when and how.
The Democrats, who dominate state politics, and their environmentalist allies, are firmly committed to the impossible. Thus, they are caught in a trap of their own making, and from which there is no good escape. The fact that they are caught in this trap is obvious to anyone with basic arithmetic skills, but almost all of our politicians and environmentalists lack those.
However, a small handful of them are starting to sense the impending crash. This makes for amusing interplay.
The state’s Climate Act of 2019 directs hostility to fossil fuels on all fronts.

August 27, 2025

August 27, 2025/ Francis Menton

You have probably seen that last week an appellate court in New York (Appellate Division, First Department) reversed the civil judgment against President Trump where he had been ordered to pay a fine in excess of $450 million to the state of New York.
This case originated during Trump’s first term, as part of then newly-elected New York Attorney General Letitia James’s campaign promise to take down the President.
Today, six plus years later, everything about the case has become an embarrassment and a humiliation for AG James, as well as for other parts of the New York political and legal establishment.

August 17, 2025

August 17, 2025/ Francis Menton

It was back in 2021 that I started to ask which country or U.S. state would be the first to hit the “Green Energy Wall.”
It has long been obvious to anyone who looks at the situation that the fantasy of a fully de-carbonized energy system, with everything run on electricity generated by intermittent wind and sun, could never happen.
But what would be the limiting condition that would put a stop to the madness? Would it be confronting the absurd costs of grid-scale battery storage? Or perhaps a string of blackouts caused by insufficient backup of the wind and solar generation?
Here in New York, we are starting to see some push back from politicians on the fantasy green energy transition, but the source may be the last thing you would have predicted.

August 11, 2025

August 11, 2025/ Francis Menton

It was in July 2019 that New York State adopted its Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act. Our Legislature and Governor (it was Andrew Cuomo at the time) had officially designated us as the climate “leader,” here to show the unsophisticated rubes and provincials in the rest of the country how a small application of political will could transform our electricity system from majority fossil fuels in 2019 to 70% “renewables” by 2030 and 100% “zero-carbon” by 2040.
Now six years into the eleven available to meet the 2030 mandate, we actually get less of our electricity from zero-carbon sources than we did in 2019.
The reason is that the large (2 GW) Indian Point nuclear plant was forced to close under pressure from environmentalists, to be replaced by two natural gas plants of approximately the same total capacity.
Meanwhile the vision of massive amounts of power from the wind and sun has barely gotten off the ground; and in particular the vision of vast offshore wind capacity has essentially died with the withdrawal of federal support by the Trump administration.

June 30, 2025

June 30, 2025/ Francis Menton

Last week I invited readers to get a good laugh out of New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s plan to avert impending energy disaster by green-lighting one nuclear power plant that optimistically might solve 5% of the problem when it is ready to operate in the 2050s.
Now this week brings an even superior farce: A video clip has emerged of our settler-colonialist Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani calling for “seizing the means of production.”
Mamdani’s victory in last week’s Democratic primary has led researchers to dredge up a treasure trove of his old tweets and video clips, each one more ridiculous than the next. An excellent roundup can be found here at Legal Insurrection.
Some choice examples include: “VioIence is an artificial construct"; “Under capitalism, housing is a commodity from which landlords & developers extract huge profits while our communities suffer eviction, foreclosure & displacement.”; “We need to dramatically curtail the power & presence of the NYPD.”; and “[A] statue of Columbus remains in Astoria, in defiance of the values of humanity, empathy & justice that we stand for.”
But my favorite is a clip from a speech Mamdani gave at a Democratic Socialists of America conference in 2021.