July 05, 2024

Who Is The Greater "Threat To Democracy"?

July 05, 2024/ Francis Menton

If the imploding Biden campaign, such as it is, has a main theme right now, that theme would appear to be that Donald Trump is a “threat to our democracy.” Or maybe it’s that Trump is “the greatest threat to our democracy.”
Joe seems to repeat that line every time he comes out of the basement to speak. Here’s a short Instagram video issued by the Biden campaign about a week ago with the text “Democracy is on the ballot,” and “Donald Trump is the greatest threat to our democracy.”
But then, Trump served a full four year term as President. He has a record of four years in the office from which we can compile evidence of actions that he took while holding the powers of the presidency that might be viewed as threats to democracy. Biden also has a record as President, now approaching the same length, so we can do the same thing for him.
So which of the two is the greater threat to democracy?

July 02, 2024

The Lawfare Campaign Against Donald Trump Takes Three Big Blows

July 02, 2024/ Francis Menton

In the 235 or so years since our Republic was founded, until now, no ex-President has ever been prosecuted for allegedly criminal acts committed while in office.
This has been a political norm of great consequence. Any such prosecution of an ex-President cannot avoid being inherently problematical, inevitably bringing to a head the conflict between, on the one hand, constraining the President in the exercise of his constitutional duties and, on the other hand, declaring him “above the law.” By far preferable would be for this conflict never to arise, and for the applicable legal rules never to get defined and to remain ambiguous.
You might think that people abrogating a political norm like this, so central to the proper functioning of the Republic, would only do so in the face of the most clear-cut circumstances of obvious and significant statutory violations, crying out for criminal redress. But of course that is not the MO of our current garbage political powers-that-be. Instead, we see broadly-worded criminal statutes that would never be so used against anyone else, twisted out of context in the effort to take down a hated political foe. Now, the Supreme Court has been forced to rule on several issues in these cases, and has come out in unsurprising ways.
During the past week, the lawfare campaign against Trump suffered three major blows from Supreme Court decisions.

June 28, 2024

June 28, 2024/ Francis Menton

The rush of end-of-term decisions from the Supreme Court, not to mention last night’s presidential debate, gives me many more potential topics to write about than I could ever get to.
How to choose? On the subject of the presidential debate, I doubt that I have anything to say that a hundred others have not said in the past 24 hours. So then, which of the latest crop of Supreme Court decisions is the most important?
On that last question, my vote goes to Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. This is the case that has rather emphatically overruled the 1984 case of Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council.

June 25, 2024

June 25, 2024/ Francis Menton

From reading the left-wing media, you know (or think you know) that there is an energy “transition” going on. This is something that must happen as a matter of urgent necessity. Vast government subsidies are being disbursed to assure its rapid success. Fossil fuels are rapidly on the way out, while wind and solar are quickly taking over.
For example, you may well have seen the big piece last August in the New York Times, headline “The Clean Energy Future Is Arriving Faster Than You Think.”
Across the country, a profound shift is taking place . . . . The nation that burned coal, oil and gas for more than a century to become the richest economy on the planet, as well as historically the most polluting, is rapidly shifting away from fossil fuels.
But if you read that piece, or any one of dozens of others from the Times or other “mainstream” sources, what you won’t find are meaningful statistics on the extent to which fossil fuel use is declining, if at all, or the extent to which renewables like wind and solar are actually replacing them.
That’s why the Manhattan Contrarian turns instead to dry statistical data to try to get the real story.

June 23, 2024

June 23, 2024/ Francis Menton

The people pushing the “energy transition” in New York and elsewhere claim a foundation in science, but proceed with religious fervor.
A key element of the playbook is never to engage with people asking legitimate questions, who are generally dismissed out of hand as “deniers.”
But every so often one of the team will break the code of silence, thus giving us some insight into the thought process behind the campaign to transform our energy supply.
In New York, the most important academic guru behind the Climate Act and energy transition is a Cornell professor named Robert Howarth.

June 20, 2024

June 20, 2024/ Francis Menton

In this post last week, I took note that New York’s electric grid system operator, NYISO, has recently issued some clear, if muted, warnings of the impossibility of the energy transition mandated by the state’s 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA).
In a November 2023 Report, NYISO stated (deeply buried at page 52) that “DEFRs are needed to balance intermittent supply with demand,” and those DEFRs must be “significant in capacity.” DEFRs are the elusive and not-yet-invented “dispatchable emissions-free resources.”
At a conference the following month, NYISO’s VP for System Integration Planning, Zachary Smith, reiterated the need for these DEFRs in large amounts. Smith presented charts quantifying the capacity of DEFRs needed for New York to “balance” its prospective intermittent wind/solar supply as something in the range of 30+ GW. 30 GW is close to the peak electricity demand for the entire state, and is approximately equivalent to the existing capacity of New York’s fleet of natural gas plants, all of which are mandated to be closed by 2040.
So what is the answer to the great DEFR conundrum?