For The Future Of EVs, What Policy Is "Stupid"?

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  • Over the past couple of years, I have had several posts here expressing skepticism about whether electric vehicles (EVs) were really the wave of the future. Most recently, I had a post on December 17 noting the rapid decline of EV sales in the U.S. during the fourth quarter of 2025, following the expiration of certain tax credits on September 30.

  • Overall, my take has been that the EV market has been propped up by government subsidies and benefits and, like all businesses dependent on government handouts, would likely shrink drastically (if not completely disappear) without them.

  • For a different take, you might wonder where The New York Times stands on this. Well, I have your answer. Yesterday, they gave over a big chunk of their editorial page to an op-ed by a guy named Bill Saporito, headlined “$25 Billion. That’s What Trump Cost Detroit.”‍ ‍

  • The thesis is that EVs are wondrous products, and that American EVs would be conquering the world, and earning big profits for the automakers, but for a “war” against EVs instigated by President Trump.

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Suppressing Climate Dissent Cannot Prevent Reality From Asserting Itself

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  • 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.

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New York's Ridiculous Energy Policy Way Off The Edge Of The Cliff

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New York's Ridiculous Energy Policy Way Off The Edge Of The Cliff

  • Every time I write about this subject it has gotten yet a little more ridiculous. The background is that back in 2019 New York, both State and City, set themselves targets for “emissions” reductions and energy transformation that are quite literally impossible as a matter of physics, thermodynamics, and cost.

  • And then, just to show who is the boss here, they made the impossible targets mandatory by statute.

  • In the case of New York State, the statute in question is the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA or Climate Act). Among the many requirements of that statute, the most immediate are a mandate for 70% of electricity from “renewables” by 2030 (known as “70x30”), and another mandate for 100% of electricity from “zero emissions” sources by 2040 (“100x40”). I should also mention that the CLCPA in addition contains a deadline of January 1, 2024, for the State Department of Environmental Conservation to issue regulations informing us peasants how these various impossible mandates of the CLCPA were/are going to be achieved. That latter deadline, you will note, has long passed.

  • So here we are, seven years into the CLCPA morass.

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New Federal Dietary Guidelines Somewhat Less Idiotic Than The Previous Versions

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  • Do you think that the U.S. federal government might be a good place to seek reasonable guidance on matters involving science? If so, I question your sanity.

  • In recent years the part of the federal enterprise masquerading as “science” has suffered one debacle after another resulting from acceptance and promotion of pseudoscience, examples being Covid lockdowns and school closures, let alone the entire catastrophic climate change fiasco. Do you remember the CDC ordering (on no authority) a nationwide eviction moratorium (until struck down by the Supreme Court)?

  • And of course, the acceptance of pseudoscience by a federal bureaucracy is somehow inevitably associated with an effort by that bureaucracy to increase its budget and enhance its power to order the American people around.

  • In the area of federal claims based on dubious scientific authority, the Dietary Guidelines emanating from the Department of Agriculture are a prominent instance, although perhaps relatively benign.

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New York Business Community Starting To Wake Up About The Coming Energy Train Wreck

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  • In 2018 New York’s voters suddenly elected a far more left-wing legislature than we had previously had, particularly the State Senate (the Assembly having already been deep in the progressive camp). Taking office in 2019, the new legislators quickly got to work seeing how much destruction they could wreak in a short period of time.

  • One product of their efforts was what we call the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), enacted in July 2019. The point of the CLCPA was to have New York State rescue the climate and save the planet, which supposedly was going to be accomplished by imposing mandates for eliminating hydrocarbon fuels from the energy system of this one little state.

  • It seems that nobody had pointed out to the very earnest legislators that New York represents only a small fraction of 1% of world CO2 emissions, the total elimination of which would barely be noticed in the overall world carbon balance. But the point was not necessarily to make any noticeable impact on world carbon emissions, so much as to show our virtue and our “leadership” by destroying our own wealth as an example to others, or something like that. Of most immediate consequence in the CLCPA were mandates for the electricity system, that 70% of our electricity must come from “renewables” by 2030 (“70x30”) and 100% from “zero-carbon” sources by 2040 (“100x40”).

  • Well, here we are in 2026 — 7 years down and only 4 to go toward the 70x30 mandate — and we have made almost no progress in “de-carbonizing” the electricity system. It is obvious to any thinking person that the 70x30 mandate has become a joke (to the extent that that was not obvious from the outset).

  • But there is the mandate written in black and white in a statute. Is anything to be done?

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Why Don't Global Lower Tropospheric Temperatures More Closely Track Atmospheric CO2 Levels?

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Why Don't Global Lower Tropospheric Temperatures More Closely Track Atmospheric CO2 Levels?

  • The big news in 2025 for the climate scare was that all of a sudden this scare wasn’t such big news any more.

  • We’re talking here about something that all of the right people had agreed for decades was an “existential” threat to humanity. It was supposedly the single most important thing that we all needed to focus on and transform our lives to stop. We only had ten years to “save the planet”; or maybe it was only five. If we failed, we would shortly be inundated by sea level rise, or maybe devastated by floods and droughts, or burned up by wildfires.

  • And then, during 2025, quite rapidly the scaremongering stories became less frequent. Several prominent priests of the climate cult turned apostate (e.g., Bill Gates, Matthew Yglesias). The political push for “net zero” dramatically slowed. Why? There have undoubtedly been many reasons for the shift. Among those have been Trump administration regulatory changes and de-funding of scare-promoting bureaucracies and NGOs, plus the emerging extreme costs and ineffectiveness of the “net zero” energy transition.

  • But here’s another issue that, although I rarely see it mentioned, could play a big role in the ongoing eclipse of the climate cult: The failure of global tropospheric temperatures to closely track the rise in atmospheric CO2.

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