April 25, 2024

The FTC Takes Its Turn To Feel The Regulator's Exhilaration

April 25, 2024/ Francis Menton

It’s hard to imagine any job more excruciatingly dull than that of the Washington regulator.
You beaver away for months on end generating 300 or 500 page documents justifying the latest the latest agency finaglings, all of which text needs to be cleared with scores of co-participants via endless meetings and by repeated circulation of marked-up drafts that draw hundreds of inconsistent edits from self-important functionaries. Ugh!

But then, into this miasma of infinite boredom, from time to time, there intrudes a frisson of great excitement. This happens when the agency decides to seize control and transform a large swath of the economy by its own edict.
The latest agency to make its grab for the excitement of the limelight is the FTC.

April 21, 2024

Tracking The Demise Of The U.S. Green Energy Transition

April 21, 2024/ Francis Menton

We’re coming up on three and a half years into the Biden presidency — a presidency which from the outset promised an “all of government” regulatory onslaught to force a transition away from fossil fuels and to “green” energy. And the regulatory onslaught has indeed come forth.
But how about the actual transition in energy use? Not so much.
Let’s have a round-up of some recent data points.

April 15, 2024

April 15, 2024/ Francis Menton

Let’s face it: Central planning of the economy hasn’t worked out so well in many places where it has been tried (e.g., Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea, etc.).
But then, here in New York, we are so much smarter than the dolts who fell on their faces in those backwaters. With utter confidence in our genius, we have embarked upon the total centrally-directed transformation of the economy into “net zero” utopia, via the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act of 2019.
But that project is barely getting under way. It will be a few years before we have enough feedback to judge it a success or failure.
Meanwhile, is there any other significant central planning initiative here in New York that has gotten far enough so that we can judge whether it is succeeding? Yes! — It’s the “Buffalo Billion,” a massive state-subsidized industrial development project in the long-declining Great Lakes port in far Western New York. Let’s get an update.
The summary is, it’s hard to believe how badly wrong this has gone.

April 12, 2024

April 12, 2024/ Francis Menton

By its 2019 Climate Act, New York has officially embarked on a great energy transition to Net Zero by 2050, with statutorily-dictated interim mandates along the way. The first of those mandates is 70% “emissions-free” electricity by 2030, only 6 years from now.
This is far and away the biggest government-directed project that the State of New York has ever undertaken. However, to date, relative to this project there exists no environmental impact statement, no feasibility study, no prototype, and no demonstration project to show how this can be done, let alone any detailed cost analysis to show how much it will cost.
Implementing the enforced energy transition is the responsibility of an alphabet soup of state agencies that makes the federal labyrinth of bureaucracies look simple and rational by comparison.

April 09, 2024

April 09, 2024/ Francis Menton

When I first came upon it, I called it the “stupidest litigation in the country.”
In 2015 a group of adolescents, led on a leash by some activist environmental lawyers, had sued the federal government in the District Court for Oregon. The plaintiffs alleged violation of their fundamental constitutional right to a clean and healthy environment, and sought as remedy a compulsory national plan to “phase out” the use of fossil fuels nationwide plus (why not?) “draw down excess atmospheric CO2 so as to stabilize the climate system and protect the vital resources on which Plaintiffs now and in the future will depend. . . .” I first covered this litigation in a post in December 2017 titled “The Stupidest Litigation In The Country Reaches The Ninth Circuit.”
Why “stupidest litigation”? Because this case seemed to represent the ultimate reductio ad absurdum of the entire idea of courts and of litigation, and indeed an attempt at complete subversion of our three-branch system of government. Just make up a new and sweeping “constitutional right,” find a friendly activist-minded judge, and you can get an order transferring all the significant operations of the legislative and executive branches of the government to a single unelected person operating out of a courthouse in Eugene, Oregon.
Surely, no court would take this seriously.

April 03, 2024

April 03, 2024/ Francis Menton

Throughout the West, the cult of fossil fuel suppression presents itself as an orthodoxy from which no dissent is permitted.
In the U.S., there has been substantial and growing resistance to the enforcement of that orthodoxy, among Republicans in general and particularly from red and energy-producing states.
By contrast, in Europe, there has been little push-back. Somewhere along the line, in country after country, the drive for Net Zero carbon emissions got the backing of an effective all-political-party consensus. In a gigantic political miscalculation, many mainstream center-right conservative parties got fully on board.
That mistake now looks to destroy several of these parties in the major countries.