July 23, 2024

Biden Administration Launches A Great Leap Forward Into Green Energy

July 23, 2024/ Francis Menton

Probably very few readers here are old enough to remember China’s “Great Leap Forward.” You’d have to be my age (73 - born in 1950), or close to it, to remember the GLF from reading about it at the time.
The name “Great Leap Forward” refers to Mao Zedong’s second Five Year Plan, launched in 1958, and intended to catapult China’s economy from backwardness into modernity.
This was to be not just any old central planning project, but a whole new approach designed by the really smart people to correct the mistakes and failures that the Soviet Union had encountered on the road to communism. This time, they were going to get central planning right.
Yesterday the Biden Administration launched a significant new climate initiative with a design that has some remarkable resemblances to the Great Leap Forward. Since most readers probably don’t know how the Great Leap Forward worked out, I’ll save that for the end of the post.

July 20, 2024

The Energy Transition Ain't Happening: Hydrogen In Australia

July 20, 2024/ Francis Menton

These days, there is lots and lots of news about how the supposed “energy transition” is not happening.
There’s so much news on this subject that I could devote this entire blog to that subject alone and have plenty to occupy my time. Expect multiple posts about this topic over the next several weeks.
To whet your appetite, I will take you today to Australia, where we find the latest news on the inevitable collapse of impossible dream of “green” hydrogen as the means to make electricity from wind and sun work.

July 17, 2024

July 17, 2024/ Francis Menton

Before everything got disrupted by the attempt on President Trump’s life, I had written a post last week titled “Big Tech On The Path To Net Zero.”
That post looked at the most recently issued “sustainability” reports from Google, Microsoft and Meta, and noted that all three admit to going rapidly in the opposite direction from “net zero.” As their businesses grow in the direction of power-hungry data centers and AI, they inevitably require large incremental amounts of always-available electricity — the kind of electricity that wind and sun cannot provide. Lacking viable alternatives to fossil fuels, their “emissions” rise.
But, you might ask, how about Amazon and Apple?

July 14, 2024

July 14, 2024/ Francis Menton

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump is not the kind of event that I would normally write about at Manhattan Contrarian. Like many other newsworthy events, it’s not that it’s not important; it’s that I don’t have any special expertise or insights to offer.
But there is one aspect of this attempted assassination that cries out for comment. That is the truly incredible failure of the Secret Service that enabled the shooter to gain access to the vantage point to shoot.

July 11, 2024

July 11, 2024/ Francis Menton

Among the adherents to the cult of climate change, nobody can claim a higher level of sanctimony than the Big Tech behemoths — the likes of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple.
These new economic titans fancy themselves to be totally unlike the dirty and grubby industrial companies of the past, like the steel, automobile or oil producers with their belching smokestacks. Each of these new tech powerhouses loudly proclaims its sacred and unwavering commitment to “net zero” emissions by some early date, typically 2030.
And each of them puts out an annual report documenting its progress toward the rapidly arriving nirvana. Here is Google’s 2024 “Environmental Report”; Microsoft’s “2024 Environmental Sustainability Report”; Meta’s “2023 Sustainability Report”; and Apple’s latest “Environmental Progress Report” (issued October 2023 covering 2022).
But don’t these companies use vast quantities of energy in their operations, not the least for rapidly expanding data centers? Surely, their “emissions” must be increasing.

July 08, 2024

July 08, 2024/ Francis Menton

A reader has reported that he tried to share my July 5 post, “Who Is The Greater ‘Threat To Democracy’?” on Facebook, and Facebook took it down. If any other readers have had a comparable experience with Facebook or other social media entities, I would appreciate it if you would share the experience with me. Use the “CONTACT” link at the top of the blog page.
Meanwhile, as I have thought about that post, I have realized that I barely scratched the surface as to both candidates, and therefore a second post with further elaboration would be appropriate.
Bottom line: the deeper you go into this, the more it is definitive that Biden is by far the worse “threat to democracy.”