At The New York Krazy Klimate Konference, 2025 Edition

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  • Two years ago, in November 2023, my friend Roger Caiazza and I attended a conference put on by a local news source called City & State. They called their conference the “Clean Energy New York Summit: The Path to Sustainability.” I called it the Krazy Klimate Konference, and I wrote about it in a post on November 18, 2023 titled “At The New York Krazy Klimate Konference.”‍ ‍

  • Last year both Roger and I skipped the Konference, and this year Roger again wisely decided to stay home in Syracuse. But I was morbidly curious as to how this crowd of climate grifters and subsidy farmers would react to the rapid derailment of their gravy train during the first ten months of President Trump’s second term. And for me, the venue was only about a 10 minute subway ride away, at the southern tip of Manhattan. So I rounded up my daughter Jane (who had to trek in from Queens) to accompany me, and off we went.

  • This year they slightly re-titled the Konference to “Energy Infrastructure Summit: New York’s Path to Sustainability.” On the surface, it was remarkably similar to the program of two years ago, and to hear the words of the speakers, it was as if nothing was wrong. But with a little reading between the lines, the changes were big.

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With Zohran Mamdani, Everything That Has Already Failed Is New Again

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With Zohran Mamdani, Everything That Has Already Failed Is New Again

  • Our newly-anointed Mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, vows that he is a Socialist, and that he intends to implement an explicitly Socialist suite of policies. OK, the guy is only 34 years old. He was born on October 18, 1991, just a couple of months before the final collapse of the Soviet Union on the day after Christmas that year. He lacks the personal experience that we senior citizens have of reading every day for decades of the horrors of life in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, or Mao’s China. But could a student really learn so little in fancy schools like Bronx Science and Bowdoin College that he could graduate in the 2010s and not know about this history? Shockingly, yes.

  • So the “Socialist” policies advocated by Mamdani are different, more akin to the standard progressive playbook of a greatly expanded handout state financed by higher income taxes on the high earners. Of the various policies that Mamdani has advocated, the three that I think are most significant in their potential impact on the City are: (1) raising income taxes on high earners, (2) having the City as developer build 200,000 new publicly-owned “affordable” housing units, and (3) “defunding” and/or downsizing the police department.

  • To Mamdani and his twenty- and thirty-something acolytes, all this stuff seems so terribly new and fresh and creative. But the funny thing is that all of these policies have been tried before in New York. They were all implemented well before Mamdani was born, and then reversed by the time he was a little kid. In each case the reversal occurred because the policy had abjectly failed.

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New York At The Green Energy Wall -- What Is The Exit Strategy?

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  • When New York passed its utopian Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act back in 2019, it set mandatory targets for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from the state’s energy consumption. But none of the mandates were scheduled to take effect prior to 2030.

  • The earliest mandates were: 70% of electricity from “renewables” by 2030, and 40% overall reduction in GHG emissions by the same year. (Still more ambitious mandates were also set for 2040, followed by a “net zero” mandate for 2050.). These dates all seemed so terribly far away — plenty of time for somebody to invent some new gizmos in the off chance that new technology might be needed to hit the goal.

  • Our legislators, innumerate to a person, had bought into the fantasy — peddled by lightweight academics like Mark Jacobson and Robert Howarth, and by grifting promoters like the American Wind Energy Association and investment bank Lazard — that wind and solar were now the cheapest way to make electricity. To abolish the evil fossil fuels, all that was needed was some political will.

  • The legislators definitely did not pay the slightest attention to the Manhattan Contrarian.

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The Latest Political Scam -- "Affordability" -- Is Really Taking Off

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  • If you want to run for office as a Democrat, there is a new catchword that you need to make as your main promise: “Affordability.”

  • As anybody paying attention knows, the cry of “affordability” was the central theme that carried the Democrats to victory in all the big races this year, most notably those of Zohran Mamdani for Mayor in New York City, Abigail Spanberger for Governor in Virginia, and Mikie Sherrill for Governor in New Jersey. The same theme also carried two Democrats to victory as Public Service Commissioners in Georgia — the first victories by Democrats in statewide elections for state office in Georgia since 2006.

  • But here is the question: Is the promise of “affordability” by these politicians something that has any prospect of being delivered through their proposed policies? Or are the proposed policies instead more likely to be useless, or even counterproductive, thus making the promise of “affordability” a scam from the outset?

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Update On The Scariest House In Greenwich Village

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Update On The Scariest House In Greenwich Village

  • It was only just over a week ago — Halloween day, actually — that I had a post on the scariest houses in Greenwich Village.

  • As the scariest house of all, I picked the one at 80 Washington Place, which had recently been the alleged site of rigged poker games where wealthy marks had gotten fleeced out of millions of dollars.

  • Today, in a weekly column titled “Gimme Shelter,” the New York Post provides an update on that very house.

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Federal District Judges Running The Executive Branch: Even Justice Jackson Draws A Line

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  • The first nine months of the President Trump’s second term have seen repeated instances of a Federal District Court judge temporarily enjoining some action of the administration, only to have the Supreme Court stay the injunction while the litigation proceeds. Examples of this pattern of events have occurred in cases involving such things as funding rescissions, staff lay-offs, and deportation procedures.

  • A recurring feature of this pattern has been dissents from the three liberal Supreme Court justices — Kagan, Sotomayor and Jackson — who would have left the temporary injunctions in place during the pendency of the litigation.

  • Justice Jackson, in addition to joining other two liberal justices, has also issued several individual dissents strongly criticizing her conservative colleagues for vacating temporary injunctions from District Courts.

  • The question of whether the administration gets enjoined while litigation proceeds, versus an injunction getting issued only at the conclusion of full litigation, is very consequential.

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