"Affordability": Two Theories Of How To Achieve It

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"Affordability": Two Theories Of How To Achieve It

  • “Affordability.” That’s the new political mantra of Democratic politicians. Or maybe it’s one of two mantras, the other being that deporting illegal aliens makes ICE the modern-day “Gestapo.”

  • So, how to achieve “affordability”? There are two approaches, which are essentially opposites of each other. Can they both be right?

  • Approach Number 1 is that the government orders producers not to increase prices, and sometimes also offers handouts of one sort or another to favored constituencies to reduce their effective costs. Approach Number 2 is that the government mostly keeps out of the relationship between producers and consumers, and thereby makes the producers reduce their costs if they want to attract customers.

  • My observation would be that there exists an enormous amount of evidence on this subject, all of which supports that proposition that Approach Number 2 works, while Approach Number 1 is counter-productive. But maybe that’s just me.

  • So there was Mikie Sherrill last week in Newark, getting inaugurated as the new (Democratic) Governor of New Jersey.

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Mann v. Steyn: Finally Ready For Appeal?

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  • Way back in 2012, climate “scientist” Michael Mann, then at Penn State University, sued four defendants for defamation. The four were commentators Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg, who had written blog posts about Mann, and National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, entities which had respectively hosted the Steyn and Simberg posts.

  • The occasion for the Steyn and Simberg posts was that independent investigator Louis Freeh had issued a Report that had castigated Penn State President Graham Spanier for having whitewashed the conduct of the university’s assistant football coach, Jerry Sandusky, in a sex abuse scandal. Steyn and Simberg had compared Spanier’s exoneration of Sandusky to his exoneration two years previously of the university’s star climate science professor, Mann, after the so-called “ClimateGate” emails had shown Mann deeply involved in data manipulation schemes to support the narrative of climate apocalypse.

  • Here we are now in 2026, more than 13 years later. The Mann v. Steyn case has gone through a truly incredible procedural history, including multiple motions to dismiss, two appeals to the D.C. Court of Appeals (different from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals), a certiorari petition to the Supreme Court, a jury trial after remand (in 2024), and a bevy of post-trial motions. I have previously had numerous posts covering this case, including the trial and subsequent developments. My most recent post was this one from March 2025, covering the trial judge’s decisions on most of the post-trial motions.

  • A few days ago, on January 22, the trial judge finally issued a decision that appears to resolve the last of the post-trial motions.

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

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

  • 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.

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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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