Endangerment Finding Litigation Update

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  • On February 13 this year, the federal EPA rescinded one of its regulatory actions known as the “Endangerment Finding.” (EF).

  • The EF, originally adopted in 2009 early in the Obama administration, was likely the single most costly and destructive regulatory action ever to spring forth from the administrative state. The EF became the fundamental underpinning for all the subsequent regulations that sought to restrict and ultimately ban use of fossil fuels in the economy — everything from regulations seeking to force closure of power plants, to efforts to mandate only electric cars, to restrictions on drilling and pipelines, and much, much more. The Trump administration is now systematically dismantling all those regulatory wrecking balls.

  • But the opposition has not been idle. Once the rescission became final, the Climate Blob immediately sprang into action with a barrage of lawfare. The first litigation challenging rescission of the EF was filed in the D.C. Circuit on February 18.

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Rolling Blackouts Hit New York

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  • At least since New York passed its Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) back in 2019, it has been clear that trouble has been coming for New York’s electrical grid. The CLCPA effectively prohibits construction of new fossil fuel power plants, even natural gas plants; and the old ones are aging and are forbidden to be replaced or upgraded.

  • Supposedly, lots of wind and solar generators were going to be added to the system. But those have been slow to come and, more importantly, can’t be counted on to generate anything when you need them. In addition, new construction of such things has now been stalled by the end of federal subsidies. At some point the lines of diminishing reliable generation and increasing demand would have to cross.

  • However, here at this website I have held off predicting imminent grid failure. The reason is that I don’t want to be the boy who cried wolf. Our grid operators are competent people, and they have a lot of tricks up their sleeves to hold things together even in difficult circumstances. In a pinch, they can start up every ancient “peaker” plant, and then import some power from PJM, or New England, or even from Canada. Despite New York’s hostile energy environment, they could get lucky and avoid blackouts for at least several more years.

  • So I think it is important to report that on this past July 2 and 3, Con Edison ran out of options and imposed rolling blackouts in parts of the North Bronx and Southern Westchester County.

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New York Court Refuses To Block State's Plan For A "Renewables" Program

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  • For a couple of years now, I have been collaborating with a small group of friends here in New York to see if we can introduce some rationality into the State’s completely insane energy plans. The other three members of our little cabal (Roger Caiazza, Richard Ellenbogen and Constantine Kontogiannis) are a scientist (Caiazza) and two engineers who are knowledgeable about how the electrical grid works.

  • Our efforts have included things like submitting comments on various regulatory proposals, intervening in Public Service Commission proceedings, and even bringing court proceedings to try to block crazy and impossible schemes from taking effect. So far we have scored exactly zero public successes, although we do occasionally receive communications (always confidential and never in writing) from various bureaucrats who say things like “I know you’re right, but I can’t speak up or I will lose my job.”

  • On Monday (July 13) we achieved our latest defeat when a Justice of the Albany County Supreme Court (William Little) issued an Order dismissing a Petition we had filed seeking to overturn a May 2025 Order of the Public Service Commission on the subject of the State’s Renewable Program and Clean Energy Standard.

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"Red Scare"? Actually The Communist Resurgence In The Democratic Party Is Very Real

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  • If you are paying any attention, you will have noticed by now that all of the energy in the Democratic Party at the moment comes from the faction calling itself the Democratic Socialists of America.

  • As I reported in this post on June 24, DSA candidates had just won primaries for three safe-Democrat congressional seats in New York City, as well as eight safe-Democrat state legislative seats in the state, six in New York City plus one in Buffalo. In a ninth race in Syracuse that was still too close to call on June 24, the DSA candidate has since declared victory as well. Most of these districts had incumbent establishment Democrats (still far-left progressives), only one of whom had beaten back the DSA challenge.

  • Since the New York primaries, a DSA-backed candidate has won the a congressional primary in Colorado (defeating a 15 term incumbent), and others are running in August primaries in states including Missouri, Michigan and Wisconsin.

  • The DSA calls itself the “Democratic” Socialists, but is there anything democratic about the form of government they are advocating?

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Battery Storage For Grid Backup: Better Keep Working On It

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  • Advocates of generating electricity mostly with intermittent wind and sun, when challenged on how they would deal with a calm night, are always ready with the obvious answer: energy storage. Just get some batteries, store up excess power from the windy mid-days, discharge as needed, and everything will work out.

  • Unfortunately, the advocates never acknowledge that the problem of making an electrical grid work 24/7/365 with mostly wind and solar generation is much more difficult than just storing power from the day to discharge that night.

  • Both wind and sun are subject to regular “droughts,” just like rain. There can be many consecutive days, or even weeks, of combined low wind and sun; let alone the entire winter has a lack of sun, and both summer and winter have less wind than spring and fall. Calculating how much energy storage will suffice to get through even a year of average wind/sun variability is a straightforward exercise, yielding an answer of as much as 1000 hours of average consumption.

  • Meanwhile, naive politicians (those in New York being Exhibit A) regularly get duped into buying a few hours or tens of hours worth of batteries for grid backup, spending billions of dollars on amounts of storage that will be almost useless for backing up a primarily wind/sun grid.

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What Makes A Person Become A Communist?

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  • This year’s primary season features the rapid ascent within the Democratic Party of the faction going by the name “Democratic Socialists of America.”

  • Despite the gratuitous co-opting of the label “Democratic,” it is by no means clear that the DSA faction would continue open elections once they had achieved enough power to end them. Instead, the DSA adopts the hardest of hard-line socialist positions on every issue.

  • I previously reported in my June 24 post that the DSA candidates in New York had accomplished nearly a clean sweep of all the Democratic Party congressional and state legislative primaries in which they had participated. Since then, a DSA candidate has knocked out a 15-term incumbent progressive Democrat in a safe Democratic district in Colorado. And The Washington Examiner reports on June 25 that DSA candidates have succeeded in some 30 down-ballot primary races in “Oregon, California, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Utah, Maryland,” as well as New York.

  • So who are these people calling themselves “Democratic Socialists”?

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