November 21, 2024

A Look At President-Elect Trump's Picks For The Key Energy Policy Positions

November 21, 2024/ Francis Menton

Over the past two weeks, President-elect Trump has engaged in rapid-fire announcements of his picks for the cabinet and other top positions.
Among the announced selections are Trump’s nominees for the three top positions in climate and energy policy: EPA Administrator (Lee Zeldin), Secretary of Energy (Chris Wright), and Secretary of the Interior (Doug Burgum). In this post I will take a first look at these nominees.
Without doubt, these three Trump appointees will be an enormous improvement over the Biden administration functionaries they will replace (EPA Administrator Michael Regan, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland). The three outgoing Bidenauts are all committed fanatic climate warriors, fighting every day to restrict development and use of hydrocarbon fuels, and thus to make America weaker and Americans poorer. Having them in office has been like having the country’s energy policy under the control of a cabal of its worst enemies.
But is there anything about President-elect Trump’s nominees for these positions that we should be at least somewhat concerned about?

November 14, 2024

Are You Even Aware That There Is Another Big UN Climate Conference Going On?

November 14, 2024/ Francis Menton

The overwhelming focus of the environmental movement over the past three decades and more has been the push to eliminate the use of hydrocarbon fuels and transform the world’s energy system into something based on supposedly cleaner wind and sun.
This effort has always been doomed to failure, because energy produced by wind and sun does not work satisfactorily and is wildly too expensive. So it has long been obvious to the well-informed that this whole effort will inevitably go away at some point. But after the desperate cries of crisis and alarm from thousands of activists for decades on end, and after the trillions of dollars government funds invested, how could that possibly occur?
My prediction has long been that at some point the whole thing would just quietly fade away, as if it had never happened.

November 12, 2024

November 12, 2024/ Francis Menton

The arena of climate and energy is sufficiently large that it deserves its own post of ideas for the incoming Trump administration. The Biden people went so far off the rails in this area that there are far more topics than I can cover. I’ll have to stick to some highlights.
Communications.
As I noted in the previous post, changing 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. Let’s just note a few examples:

November 02, 2024

November 02, 2024/ Francis Menton

In a post on October 23, I noted that, during this election cycle, “energy realism” has suddenly become a positive electoral issue for Republicans.
The positive electoral effect comes from pointing out that a forced energy transition increases consumer costs, limits choice, and destroys jobs. Examples cited included President Trump’s use in his campaign in Michigan of the Biden-Harris regulations restricting combustion vehicles, and his use in Pennsylvania of Harris statements that she would ban fracking.
But there is another approach out there to the subject of energy realism, which has been taken up by many Republican candidates and energy think tanks. That approach goes by the name “all of the above.”

October 23, 2024

October 23, 2024/ Francis Menton

For well over two decades, the linked causes of climate alarmism and energy transition have provided their adherents with a powerful upper hand in American politics. For that matter, supporters of those causes have had just as strong, if not a stronger upper hand in the politics of all the countries with advanced economies, whether in the EU, or Canada, Australia, and others.
Here in the U.S., for all this time, almost no politician — even those claiming to advocate generally for smaller government or less regulation — has been willing to push back directly against assertions of “climate crisis,” or against demands for reducing “carbon emissions” or for achieving a “net zero” energy economy via government coercion and massive subsidies. Most Republicans seeking office have been cowed into deflecting and deferring on these issues, if indeed they have not openly gone along with the left’s energy program.
I have long said that this situation can’t last. The reason is that the proposed energy transition is infeasible and can’t possibly work; and the effort to achieve the impossible via government mandates and subsidies would inevitably drive up costs and otherwise impact voters directly in ways they would see.
At some point the voters would react. But when would that occur?

October 18, 2024

October 18, 2024/ Francis Menton

Here in New York we have our own unique and special acronym for how we think we are going to make our future emissions-free electrical grid work with predominantly wind and solar generation. The acronym is DEFR — the “Dispatchable Emissions-Free Resource.”
When the sun goes down and the wind stops blowing in the dead of winter, we will crank up the DEFR to keep us all warm and cozy. There will of course be zero carbon emissions, because by definition the DEFR is “emissions-free.”
Unfortunately nobody is quite sure what this DEFR might be.
There are only a few options. Nuclear could work, but in New York it is completely blocked by regulatory obstruction and the certainty of decades of litigation. Batteries are wildly too expensive and physically not up to the job.
That leaves many green energy advocates grasping at hydrogen as the last remaining option. Granted, we don’t yet have any meaningful production of hydrogen from carbon-free sources. But it seems so simple: just use wind and solar generators to run electrolyzers to make hydrogen from water; then store the hydrogen in some big caverns, and burn it when you need it. No carbon is involved. Problem solved!