Next Up: Humphrey's Executor

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  • Back in November, I attended the annual convention of the Federalist Society in Washington. If you should want to understand the constitutional law issues confronting this country after a century of corruption of our institutions by the progressive movement, I would highly recommend that you start attending these annual events as well.

  • Last November’s convention took place on the 14th to 16th of the month — in other words, just over a week after Donald Trump had been elected to serve another term as President.

  • One of the panels that I attended on November 15th had the title “What Is the Future of Administrative Law?” I’ve provided a link there where you can actually watch the panel if you have the time and inclination. There was a great group of presenters that included the likes of Paul Clement (pre-eminent Supreme Court advocate), Judge Naomi Rao (of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals), and perhaps most notably, Professor Philip Hamburger of Columbia Law School (author of the book “Is Administrative Law Unlawful?” — probably the most important constitutional law book of this century so far).

  • During the audience question part of the program, someone asked, what do you see as the next big issues that will be decided by the Supreme Court? One of the panelists (I think it was Hamburger) answered, “ I think Humphrey’s Executor will be reconsidered.”

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It's Time To Purge The Climate Scam From The Federal Websites

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  • On November 12, 2024 — a week after the election — I had a post titled “Ideas For An Incoming Trump Administration: Climate And Energy Edition.” The first subject covered in that post was “Communications.” I stated there:

  • [C]hanging the communications of the prior administration should be an easy and obvious first priority. However, the Trump people notably did a poor job on this subject the first time out. The subject of climate and energy is pervasive through the websites of dozens of federal agencies.

  • I had followed the EPA website in particular during the first Trump term, and it had been little changed even a year after Trump took office.

  • This time around, Trump and his people are doing a far better job of hitting the ground running on many issues. That is notably true in the area of climate and energy communications:

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How To Rescind The Endangerment Finding In A Way That Will Stick

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  • As discussed in my previous post, one of President Trump’s first-day Executive Orders — the one entitled “Unleashing American Energy” — directed a reconsideration of EPA’s so-called “Endangerment Finding” (EF) of 2009. The EF is the EPA regulatory action where it claimed to determine that CO2 and other “greenhouse gases” qualify as “pollutants” under the Clean Air Act because they are a “danger to public health and welfare.” President Trump’s January 20 EO directs that EPA, within 30 days, submit “recommendations to the Director of OMB on the legality and continuing applicability of the Administrator’s findings.”

  • Since the EF is the foundation underlying all the Biden-era regulations restricting and suppressing fossil fuels, you can be sure that any attempt to eliminate it will be met with a full-bore litigation attack from the forces of the crazy left.

  • Can the EF really be rescinded in a way that will stand up to these attacks?

  • Absolutely, it can.

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The Endangerment Finding: It Looks Like Trump 2.0 Will Be Much More Fun Than Trump 1.0

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  • The first couple of days of the new Trump administration have seen the President sign a blizzard of Executive Orders. These provide more material than a humble solo blogger like myself can ever comment on comprehensively.

  • So I’ll just have to start with one particular item that I am deeply familiar with: the EPA’s so-called Endangerment Finding of December 2009.

  • I have seen differing counts of the number of Trump’s first-day EOs. ABC News here counts 42.

  • One of the most consequential has the title “Unleashing American Energy.” There is a large amount of important material in this EO. In overall summary, it directs the reversal of all of the Biden administration efforts to restrict and suppress the production and development of America’s energy resources.

  • But one provision, I would argue, is important above all the rest. That is Section 6(f), which directs a reconsideration of the so-called Endangerment Finding (EF) of December 2009.

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Report: How Did The Biden Administration Do On Solving "Climate Change"?

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  • We are now in the last hours of the Biden Administration. Today the Bidenauts complete four full years in office.

  • And as we all know, their number one priority from the day they took office was to address what they called the “climate crisis” (or sometimes, the “profound climate crisis”). Famously, after lavishly promising on the campaign trail to address and solve the crisis, newly-installed President Biden then issued multiple Executive Orders on the subject in his early days in office, most notably this one from January 27, 2021. He promised an “all of government” approach, with every department and agency explicitly tasked to make addressing the climate crisis central to their mission. In the following years, Biden proposed and then pushed through Congress legislation containing hundreds of billions of dollars worth of subsidies and tax benefits for so-called “renewable energy,” said to be the solution to the climate crisis through replacing carbon-emitting fossil fuels with clean and green wind and solar substitutes.

  • To remind you of the level of the promises that were made, consider the preamble of that January 2021 EO, which had the title “Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad”:

  • The United States and the world face a profound climate crisis.  We have a narrow moment to pursue action at home and abroad in order to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of that crisis and to seize the opportunity that tackling climate change presents.  Domestic action must go hand in hand with United States international leadership, aimed at significantly enhancing global action.  Together, we must listen to science and meet the moment.

  • With Biden now leaving office, this is an appropriate moment to take a look at exactly what “progress” has been made toward the promised reductions in emissions. The answer is, any emissions reductions have been so tiny as to be almost imperceptible.

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The Energy Storage Fiasco -- How Soon Will It Be Abandoned?

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  • Energy from the wind and the sun — they’re clean and green and free. OK, there’s the small problem of intermittency. But clearly the intermittency problem can easily be solved with a few batteries to store some power for the occasional calm nights.

  • Or is that solution really so easy? Regular readers here will know that I wrote an energy storage Report, titled “The Energy Storage Conundrum,” published by the GWPF back in December 2022. After some straightforward calculations based on elementary-school-level arithmetic, that Report concluded that the amount of storage needed was so large, and the costs so completely unaffordable, that energy storage was totally infeasible as a way to make wind and solar work as the main power sources for an electricity grid.

  • Calculations set forth in that Report concluded that the amount of energy storage needed to enable a predominantly wind/solar grid to get through a year without hitting a blackout was in the range of 500 to 1000 hours of average electricity usage. Keep that range in mind for the rest of this post.

  • Paying no attention whatsoever to my warnings, and not troubling themselves to do any simple arithmetic of their own, the states of New York and California have chosen to forge ahead with plans for predominantly wind/solar grids backed up by batteries. Multiple years into the project, neither state is anywhere near to building 1% of the energy storage that would be needed to make their fantasy systems work. But even in these very early stages, they have both blundered into an additional and unanticipated problem: catastrophic fires.

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