February 13, 2022

Federal District Court Enjoins Use Of The "Social Cost Of Carbon"

February 13, 2022/ Francis Menton

In the U.S. so far, efforts to enact legislation in Congress to “save the planet” by restricting fossil fuels and transforming our energy economy have gone almost entirely nowhere.
President Obama’s big idea of “cap and trade” legislation died early in his first term and was never resurrected. President Biden’s “Green New Deal” has so far suffered a similar fate. If the Republicans retake even one house of Congress later this year, prospects for legislation on this subject may be dead for many years, if not for good.
Surely, you might think, without any legislative support from the Congress, the Executive Branch has little to no power on its own to effect a multi-trillion dollar total transformation of our energy economy.
Well, you might think that, and you would have the Constitution on your side; but unfortunately for you, the current President and the bureaucracy think otherwise. In their view, “saving the planet” from you having a warm home in the winter is a moral imperative so compelling that it overrides the Constitution and demands that they have the power to make you do as they say in every respect. Only the courts stand in their way.

February 10, 2022

Virginia Withdrawing From The Northeast's Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative

February 10, 2022/ Francis Menton

Here in the mostly-deep-blue Northeast of the U.S., our genius politicians of the Democratic persuasion have determined to save the world — no, make that the “planet” — by greatly increasing the local voters’ cost of energy.
This is the punishment you must bear to atone for your horrible sin of living a comfortable modern lifestyle.
If you live in the Northeast, the mechanism of making you suffer goes under the name of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI. The members of RGGI are all six New England states, plus New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia. Pennsylvania may be in the process of joining (the Democratic Governor is trying to accomplish that over the opposition of the Republican-controlled legislature); but Virginia, with a new Republican Governor, is in the process of trying to exit.
The fight currently going on in Virginia gives insight into the newly competitive political battlefield on the subject of restructuring our energy economy in a supposed effort to stop “climate change.”

February 06, 2022

February 06, 2022/ Francis Menton

In mid-January, the gigantic blowout spending bill going by the Orwellian name of Build Back Better died in the Senate.
Over in the progressive precincts of government and the media, where everyone knows that all human wealth and well-being come entirely from government largesse, it was time to prepare for the bad economic news. Surely, with no massive new government blowout spending and with Omicron surging, the January jobs report would be dismal, likely even showing employment declines.
Therefore, in the run-up to Friday’s jobs report for January, the White House spin machine was in full tornado mode, blaming the impending news of a jobs decline on the virus rather than on the administration’s failed economic policies.

February 04, 2022

February 04, 2022/ Francis Menton

When I began this blog back in 2012, I had already studied up on the “climate change” issue. And I had already come to the conclusions that not only was the science of human-caused catastrophic global warming hogwash, but also that the proposed solution of replacing energy from fossil fuels with the wind and sun could never work at reasonable cost. My first post on the subject was on December 4, 2012.
But at that time there was almost no organized political opposition to the program to “save the planet” by transitioning to “green” energy.
Here in the U.S., the Democrats were unanimous in their plans to replace fossil fuels, and Republicans mostly went along — some enthusiastically, others perhaps trying to slow things down a little. Indeed, when I began the blog, I had only recently attended a fundraiser for Republican candidate Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election (yes, I gave the guy money) where he chose to make his speech mostly about how he would fix the environment by promoting green energy.
And over in Europe it was even crazier, with essentially no major political party in any country taking a position in opposition to the forced elimination of fossil fuels. The so-called “Energiewende” in Germany had kicked off in 2010, with essentially no significant political opposition.

After a long wait, the costs are bubbling to the surface, and the opposition is growing rapidly and headed toward critical mass.

February 01, 2022

February 01, 2022/ Francis Menton

It should be glaringly obvious that, if we are shortly going to try to convert to a “net zero” carbon emissions energy system based entirely on wind, sun and batteries, then there needs to be serious focus on the feasibility and costs of such a system.
The particular part of such a prospective system that needs the most focus is the method of energy storage, its cost and, indeed, feasibility. That part needs focus because, as wind and solar increase their share of generation over 50% of the total, storage becomes far and away the dominant driver of the total costs.
Moreover, there is no clear way to identify some fixed amount of storage that will be sufficient to make such a system reliable enough to power a modern economy without full backup from dispatchable sources. This also should be glaringly obvious to anyone who thinks about the problem for any amount of time.

January 29, 2022

January 29, 2022/ Francis Menton

A couple of posts a week ago at this site on the subject of the enormous storage requirements of a fully wind/solar electricity generation system attracted several commenters who confidently asserted that a fully wind/solar energy generation system will prove cheaper than fossil fuels as soon as it is given a real chance.
I invited those commenters to provide their own detailed calculations of how much storage it would take to get a fully wind/solar electric generation system through a year without fossil fuel backup with real-world weather conditions, but so far none of them have taken up my invitation.
While waiting for to hear from those people, the most serious effort I have seen to estimate the storage requirements and cost of a fully wind/solar/battery electricity system for the United States, with everything electrified, is Ken Gregory’s workup at Friends of Science. Gregory’s estimated cost (rounded) is around $400 trillion.
But meanwhile, the really smart people — or perhaps I should say, the really, really smart people — have a different approach.