January 23, 2026

Announcing A Live Event In New York: Net Zero And Freedom

January 23, 2026/ Francis Menton

When it comes to using government coercion to force a multi-trillion dollar “net zero” energy transition, many things can go wrong.
At this website I have focused on multiple potential calamities likely to flow from this effort: things like whether the proposed “renewable” wind and solar generators can actually work, whether they can produce sufficient electricity and at the right times, how much energy storage would be needed, the risk of blackouts, and how much all of this would inevitably cost.
My list of potential calamities is far from comprehensive. Here is a huge issue that I have barely touched upon: The threat to human freedom posed by the process of forcing this energy transition.
My friends at Net Zero Watch are now setting out to cure that omission.

January 17, 2026

Suppressing Climate Dissent Cannot Prevent Reality From Asserting Itself

January 17, 2026/ Francis Menton

Here in the U.S., the second Trump administration has largely pulled the plug on the suite of crazy energy policies marching under the banner of “fighting climate change.” But the same is not true in many other advanced-economy countries, for example Germany, Australia and the UK.
Consider the UK. In the 2024 election the voters gave a large parliamentary majority to the left-wing Labour Party. The resulting government has doubled down on the policies of Net Zero, fossil fuel suppression, and generating energy from “renewables.”
Convinced of their own correctness, and indeed righteousness, the government seeks to silence all dissent from its policies, characterizing disagreement as “misinformation” or “climate denial.”
Meanwhile, however, when it comes to actual energy production, reality keeps asserting itself.

December 13, 2025

December 13, 2025/ Francis Menton

I have been writing here for about a decade that wind and solar would inevitably prove to be far more expensive for producing useful electricity than other methods like fossil fuels, nuclear, or hydro.
The reasons are not difficult to understand. Wind and solar, due to intermittency, are not capable of powering a full-time electrical grid on their own. To make the grid capable of fulfilling customer demand 24/7/365, wind and solar require large amounts of additional capital infrastructure — dispatchable back-up generation, energy storage, additional transmission capacity, and more. If wind and solar prove insufficient to eliminate dispatchable back-up generation, then you find yourself running (and paying for) two duplicative systems, when you could have had only one. Energy storage as a potential solution to intermittency turns out to be impossibly expensive. If the only back-up generation you can find that works is powered by fossil fuels, then you haven’t even succeeded in achieving zero carbon emissions in the electricity sector.
And yet we have been, and continue to be, subjected to a constant drumbeat of advocacy claiming that wind and solar are now the cheapest ways to produce electricity. I’ll give you a few examples of that in a moment.
So who is right?

November 28, 2025

November 28, 2025/ Francis Menton

As I have mentioned here on a couple of occasions, I have joined with two colleagues to intervene in the regulatory proceeding where our local electric utility, Con Edison, has made its most recent request for a large rate increase.
My colleagues in this enterprise are Roger Caiazza, who blogs as the Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York, and Richard Ellenbogen, a Cornell-trained engineer who as his day job runs a factory in Westchester County.
After a “deregulation” that took place in the 1990s, Con Edison almost entirely got out of the business of generating electricity, so this case is about the rates for delivery of the electricity, rather than generation. The basis for Con Edison’s request for a rate increase is substantially that it wants to build lots of new infrastructure, like additional cables, substations and transformers, to deliver incremental power to support widespread electrification of vehicles and buildings as part of New York State’s goal of “net zero” greenhouse gas emissions.
That idea might make some sense if there were large amounts of zero-emissions electricity ready to be sent to New York City to be used for electrifying the buildings and vehicles. But in fact it is the opposite: a very large majority of the electricity that Con Edison delivers is generated by natural gas — which means that electrifying buildings and vehicles doesn’t reduce GHG emissions at all, and probably increases the emissions.

August 08, 2025

August 08, 2025/ Francis Menton

Here in New York City, in the grip of the hysterical climate cult, we are undertaking a massive transformation of our energy system without anyone in authority having done the simple arithmetic to check whether the plans have any chance of succeeding. A big theme of this blog has been pointing out the obvious problems that mean that these “net zero” schemes can never work.
But maybe it’s not really important whether they will ever work or not. Maybe the real point is just to spend a lot of (somebody else’s) money to show that you, somehow, “care.”
A very similar scenario is now playing out in the closely related category they are calling climate “resiliency.” The word means getting ready for the impending climate armaggedon. The armaggedon isn’t coming, of course, but we will anyway spend vast sums supposedly to show we are “doing something” about the problem.
Whether the scheme in question might actually work is beside the point.

July 26, 2024

July 26, 2024/ Francis Menton

I frequently write about how the mandates for energy transition that New York has adopted are impossible and irreconcilable in the real world; and therefore it is inevitable that they will have to be abandoned at some point when implementation of the project runs up against physical reality.
Probably the most frequent question that I get asked is, OK, how and when will that occur?
The question is important because for as long as the impossible mandates remain in place they are causing massive ongoing damage to our electricity system and to consumers.