New York On The March To Climate Utopia

New York On The March To Climate Utopia
  • In a post a couple of weeks ago on December 21, I observed that the country of Germany appeared to have won the race among all countries and states to be the first to hit the “Green Energy Wall.” Its pursuit of the “renewable” wind and solar electricity fantasy has put it in a spot where regular wind/sun droughts cause huge electricity price spikes, and major industries have become uncompetitive. It has no solution to its dead end, and can go no farther.

  • If Germany has “hit the wall,” what is the appropriate analogy for New York?

  • New York passed its Climate Act with great fanfare in 2019. The Act orders that we are to have a “net zero” energy system by 2050, with interim deadlines along the way. The first serious deadline arrives in 2030, where the official mandate is 70% of electricity generation from “renewables” (aka “70 x 30”). That deadline is now just five years away. Within the past year, all the efforts to move toward the 70 x 30 goal are falling apart, as anybody who had given the subject any critical thought knew that they inevitably would. But nobody in authority has yet been willing to acknowledge that this has turned into a farce.

  • Here’s my analogy: New York is like the cartoon character Wile E. Coyote, who has run off the cliff and is now suspended in mid-air, apparently not knowing what will happen next.

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Solving The MTA's Fare Evasion Problem

Solving The MTA's Fare Evasion Problem
  • This may be a problem that readers outside of New York don’t care much about, but it is symptomatic of important issues in our society.

  • The MTA (Metropolitan Transportation Authority) is the New York State (not City) agency that runs our transit system — subways, buses, and commuter rail lines. To ride the subways and buses, you are supposed to pay the fare on entering the subway system or boarding the bus. The MTA has long had a problem with customers who don’t pay the fare, either evading the turnstiles in the subway or just boarding the bus without paying. During the Covid period, the MTA for some time waived payment of the fares on buses (I never understood why); and then after Covid many people did not resume paying, and the fare evasion rates soared.

  • Over the years since the pandemic, there have been regular news reports about the increase in fare evasion. Most recently, in August of this year, the MTA released the latest data to the news media, and this information was then widely reported in many outlets. The short version is that this is no longer a small problem.

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The Ongoing Erosion Of Welfare Reform In New York

  • When I started this blog back in 2012, we were just coming to the end of 20 years of Republican, or quasi-Republican, New York City mayors (Giuliani and Bloomberg), who also had support from a newly-Republican Congress elected in 1994.

  • One of the great triumphs of that era was welfare reform. The new Republican Congress made reform of welfare a priority, and after their first efforts were vetoed by President Clinton, in August 1996 he signed a compromise bill called the Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act. Among the reforms contained in that Act were time limits and work requirements for welfare recipients.

  • It’s now nearly 11 years since Bloomberg left office, and the goal of minimizing welfare dependency is long gone and forgotten.

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More On The Adams Indictment

  • Does the indictment of Eric Adams represent a bona fide prosecution of a dishonest politician, or is it mainly retribution against a political opponent by a deeply corrupt DOJ and FBI?

  • As several commenters on yesterday’s post noted, we have come to a very sad point when our first thought upon an indictment of a politician is that it may well represent the deep state using its powers to take out a political opponent. But after four years of the deeply politicized Biden-Harris-Garland Justice Department, that’s where we are. And it is entirely appropriate for the citizenry to evaluate the present indictment in light of the DOJ’s conduct throughout the course of this administration.

  • Unlike my usual approach, I wrote the post yesterday immediately after learning about and reading the indictment, and before allowing any time for things to settle down. Today many other voices have weighed in. In this post I’ll consider a few of them.

  • But the bottom line is, there is every reason to believe that this indictment is mostly politically motivated, and has little or nothing to do with fighting real corruption.

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Who Is More Corrupt, Eric Adams Or The Biden-Harris DOJ/FBI?

  • The answer to the question is that it’s not a close call. The Biden-Harris DOJ/FBI is far more corrupt.

  • For the latest evidence, consider the new federal criminal case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Yesterday, a federal grand jury, acting at the behest of the Biden-Harris Department of Justice and FBI, handed down an indictment of Adams. The indictment was then released today. The full text can be found here.

  • Plenty in the Democrat Party media took the occasion to credit the work of the feds and jump all over Adams.

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Somebody Please Tell Kathy Hochul That The Climate Jig Is Up

Somebody Please Tell Kathy Hochul That The Climate Jig Is Up
  • It’s Climate Week here in New York, and you can feel the excitement.

  • The UN General Assembly is in town, and simultaneously something called the “Climate Group” (“Our mission is to drive climate action. Fast.”) is holding some 600 (!) events to promote policies that they somehow believe will “save the planet.”

  • At one of these events yesterday, New York Governor Kathy Hochul showed up to deliver what she probably thought was a significant policy speech. The Governor’s web page describes the speech this way:

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