November 09, 2026

Is The "Climate" Agenda Poised For A Comeback In The U.S.?

November 09, 2026/ Francis Menton

In multiple posts over the past year, I have expressed the opinion that the “net zero” climate/energy agenda will have a very hard time reviving at the national level after the devastation inflicted by the second Trump administration and the recent Republican Congress.
Where we are now is that most of the regulatory support for “green” energy has been eliminated — most particularly the so-called “Endangerment Finding,” determining that greenhouse gases “endanger” human health and welfare — and also, Congress (in the OBBB) has zeroed out the subsidies and tax credits that enabled uneconomic wind and solar generators to get built. But could the recent Democratic sweep of Congress change all of that?
Certainly Big Enviro has wasted no time in getting their energy transition demands back in front of the public.

November 06, 2026

There Is No Understanding The Voters

November 06, 2026/ Francis Menton

In general I have faith in the voters to do the right thing, or something relatively close to it. Even though I think that the Democratic Party has gone almost completely nuts, nonetheless in the recent Democratic sweep I think I can see a perspective that sensible voters that might have, and that could have brought about the result, at least as to the congressional races: There was a huge element of Trump fatigue, not necessarily with his policies, but definitely with his demeanor, and his constant pursuit of his own personal interest, from the crypto profiteering, to the pardon free-for-all, to the sale of watches, and much more.
Even if these things do not qualify as prosecutable corruption, voters are completely allowed to take them into account when evaluating his presidency. Some congressional push-back might not hurt.
But then there were the many state and local races, where there was no direct or obvious Trump connection. Democrats also did extremely well in those, including taking (or maintaining) control of numerous governorships, legislatures, and mayor’s offices. In many of those, I can’t come up with any rational explanation for how the voters chose as they did. Maybe you can.

November 02, 2026

November 02, 2026/ Francis Menton

Here in the U.S., with few exceptions, we have a commendable tradition that victorious politicians do not use the criminal justice system to prosecute or otherwise disable their rivals and adversaries.
At the presidential level, before Trump the two most prominent examples against that tradition were the prosecution of Aaron Burr by Thomas Jefferson in 1807, and the prosecution of Eugene Debs by Woodrow Wilson in 1918. Otherwise, our defeated presidential candidates have gone peacefully to retirement.
But then, after Trump was defeated in 2020, that tradition was abrogated in rather spectacular fashion. . . .
Notable about all the Trump prosecutions is how completely flimsy were all the charges against him. The idea was rather transparently to use control of levers of government power to disable the main adversary in the political arena. Meanwhile, the people involved sanctimoniously wrapped themselves in a claim that they were “saving our democracy.”

October 30, 2026

October 30, 2026/ Francis Menton

It must be good to be a black, Muslim woman, the first such to get elected to Congress and, not incidentally, a Democrat and an avowed hater of the United States and of Israel. If you can check all those boxes, then you can commit the most overt and obvious frauds and scams, and the mainstream media will act in lockstep to cover up, suppress and minimize your wrongdoing.
But at some point the brazenness can become too much even for the New York Times. That appears to have happened in the past couple of days in the case of Ilhan Omar, Congresswoman from Minnesota.
Two plus weeks ago, on October 12, federal agents executed a search warrant on Omar’s house in Washington, D.C. The authorities have been rather tight-lipped about the nature of the underlying investigation, but numerous news outlets, both liberal and conservative, have had pieces citing multiple sources (generally anonymous) who indicate that the investigation relates in some way to immigration and/or marriage fraud committed by Omar.
One of those outlets is the New York Times.

October 26, 2026

October 26, 2026/ Francis Menton

On El Hierro Island in Spain, they set out to build an electricity system powered only by wind, with backup from a pumped-storage hydroelectric plant. The relevant statistics for El Hierro are: average electricity demand: 5 MW; nameplate capacity of the wind turbines: 11.5 MW (i.e., 2.3x “overbuild” compared to average usage); storage capacity of the pumped storage system: 70 MWh (i.e., 14 hours of average usage).
The operator of the facility has provided eight years of operating data for the system. I reported on the results in my last post on October 23. In summary, the wind/storage system provided 56% of the island’s electricity use in the best year, and only 35% in the worst year.
During these years, the remainder of the island’s electricity — ranging from 44% in the “best” year for the wind system to 65% in the worst year — has been provided by a diesel generator. The wind/storage system has fallen far short of its stated goal of supplying all the electricity for the island. But at least they have kept the diesel generator around.

October 23, 2026

October 23, 2026/ Francis Menton

In my post several days ago on October 18, I recounted the story of how ignorant Chinese Communist Party ideologues in the late 1950s convinced themselves that they knew how to achieve limitless agricultural production by just ordering each community to produce large, arbitrary amounts of food.
Do you want to double grain production? Then just plant twice as many seeds in the same acreage! The ideologues had no idea how agriculture actually worked in the real world. Within a couple of years, there was widespread famine, probably the largest in world history. Tens of millions died horrible deaths of starvation.
At the end of that post I noted that, here in the West, equally ignorant ideologues were engaged, actually for a few decades now, in ordering up an energy transition to replace electricity generation by fossil fuels with generation mostly by intermittent wind and sun. Today’s energy transition ideologues have a lack of knowledge of how an energy grid works that is comparable to the ignorance of the Chinese ideologues of agriculture. How is this one working out?