August 27, 2025

The Humiliation Of Letitia James -- And Of The New York Legal Establishment

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

Green Energy Wall Coming Into Focus In New York?

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.

June 26, 2025

June 26, 2025/ Francis Menton

OK, I know that all you smug people out there in the hinterlands are now snickering at me behind my back because I’m about to get stuck with one Zohran Mamdani as the Mayor of my city.
Probably, you have already read enough about this guy to know just how crazy and ignorant he is. If you haven’t yet studied up, here is a small sample of his stated positions: free transit buses for all, free childcare for all children 6 weeks to 5 years old, city-owned grocery stores, a rent freeze on all regulated apartments, vast expansion of city-owned subsidized housing (building on the success of NYCHA!), “cracking down” on landlords, plus some kind of a mental health intervention corps to intervene with violent criminals in lieu of police, all of this to be paid for by “taxes on big corporations and the wealthiest New Yorkers.” And of course, “globalize the intifada.” This guy founded the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at Bowdoin College.
And don’t get the idea that he doesn’t mean it.

June 24, 2025

June 24, 2025/ Francis Menton

In case you missed it, here is New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s breathless announcement from yesterday: “Governor Hochul Directs New York Power Authority to Develop a Zero-Emission Advanced Nuclear Energy Technology Power Plant.”
Does something here seem like it doesn’t quite fit? Yes, it was just four years ago, in April 2021, that New York completed the forced closure of the two perfectly functional Indian Point nuclear plants, with combined generating capacity of about 2 GW, for no other reason than relentless opposition from environmentalists and NIMBYs. And yet now the Governor is saying that the plan is to start over and build a new nuclear plant at some unspecified place.
Before getting to a few of the problems, let’s start with some of the excited language from the Governor’s press release: