July 26, 2024

How Will New York's Energy Madness End? The "Don't Do It!" Report

July 26, 2024/ Francis Menton

I frequently write about how the mandates for energy transition that New York has adopted are impossible and irreconcilable in the real world; and therefore it is inevitable that they will have to be abandoned at some point when implementation of the project runs up against physical reality.
Probably the most frequent question that I get asked is, OK, how and when will that occur?
The question is important because for as long as the impossible mandates remain in place they are causing massive ongoing damage to our electricity system and to consumers.

May 07, 2024

The Campus Kill-The-Jews Riots: Paid Professional Agitators Funded By Democratic Party Big Wigs, Or Well-Meaning Kids?

May 07, 2024/ Francis Menton

Several days ago, after the New York police broke up the kill-the-Jews occupations at Columbia, NYU and other universities, it emerged that close to half of the arrestees were not students or otherwise affiliated with the schools in question.
At a news conference on April 30, Mayor Eric Adams adopted the term “professional outside agitators” to describe the main organizers of the protests (“What should have been a peaceful protest, it has basically been co-opted by professional outside agitators.").
The protests certainly give an appearance of being well-organized and equally well funded. For example, large numbers of identical newly-ordered tents seem to spring up on almost no notice. Did hundreds of young people on shoestring budgets just happen on their own initiative to place orders from the same website at the same time and all pay with their own money? That seems implausible.
But if there is professional organization, who are the organizers? And who is paying them? You would think that this is an issue where the public would have a huge interest in knowing the answer — particularly if the answer should turn out to be that the main sponsors of the protests are also big funders of one of the major political parties. But this is a subject where the sponsors have a strong interest in concealing their role as much as possible, and where uncovering and exposing that role takes some significant effort.
And then we have the beyond-ridiculous New York Times.

April 15, 2024

April 15, 2024/ Francis Menton

Let’s face it: Central planning of the economy hasn’t worked out so well in many places where it has been tried (e.g., Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea, etc.).
But then, here in New York, we are so much smarter than the dolts who fell on their faces in those backwaters. With utter confidence in our genius, we have embarked upon the total centrally-directed transformation of the economy into “net zero” utopia, via the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act of 2019.
But that project is barely getting under way. It will be a few years before we have enough feedback to judge it a success or failure.
Meanwhile, is there any other significant central planning initiative here in New York that has gotten far enough so that we can judge whether it is succeeding? Yes! — It’s the “Buffalo Billion,” a massive state-subsidized industrial development project in the long-declining Great Lakes port in far Western New York. Let’s get an update.
The summary is, it’s hard to believe how badly wrong this has gone.

April 09, 2024

April 09, 2024/ Francis Menton

When I first came upon it, I called it the “stupidest litigation in the country.”
In 2015 a group of adolescents, led on a leash by some activist environmental lawyers, had sued the federal government in the District Court for Oregon. The plaintiffs alleged violation of their fundamental constitutional right to a clean and healthy environment, and sought as remedy a compulsory national plan to “phase out” the use of fossil fuels nationwide plus (why not?) “draw down excess atmospheric CO2 so as to stabilize the climate system and protect the vital resources on which Plaintiffs now and in the future will depend. . . .” I first covered this litigation in a post in December 2017 titled “The Stupidest Litigation In The Country Reaches The Ninth Circuit.”
Why “stupidest litigation”? Because this case seemed to represent the ultimate reductio ad absurdum of the entire idea of courts and of litigation, and indeed an attempt at complete subversion of our three-branch system of government. Just make up a new and sweeping “constitutional right,” find a friendly activist-minded judge, and you can get an order transferring all the significant operations of the legislative and executive branches of the government to a single unelected person operating out of a courthouse in Eugene, Oregon.
Surely, no court would take this seriously.

March 24, 2024

March 24, 2024/ Francis Menton

The single biggest problem with the Left’s “climate” agenda is that the proposed response to the alleged crisis — replacement of fossil fuels in the energy system with intermittent wind-and-sun-based electricity generation — is not going to work. This is obvious to anyone who considers the subject seriously for any amount of time.
Yet any mention of this issue has been almost completely banished from the mainstream media, from academia, from government, and from social media. It remains to a few lonely voices (such as, here in New York, myself, Roger Caiazza, and Ken Girardin of the Empire Center) to keep the subject in the public consciousness.
As small and lonely as our voices may be, somehow we must be getting under their skin. We know that because increasingly officialdom feels a need to respond publicly to our criticisms.
But how can they give a plausible response, given that we are absolutely right and a wind-and-sun-based electricity system is never going to work?
Easy! — Just treat the public like morons.

February 25, 2024

February 25, 2024/ Francis Menton

Every year millions of people move from one country in the world to another with the intent to remain permanently in the destination country.
Generally such people then congregate in the destination country among others who have come from the same place of origin. In other words, they form colonies of settlers. According to the normal meanings of the words, they are “settler colonialists.”
So how should these “settler colonialists” be treated upon arrival by their destination countries?
Oddly, the political left has designated some of the settler colonialists as heroes deserving of an enthusiastic welcome replete with lavish taxpayer-funded benefits — free housing (at least temporarily), free medical care, free education for the kids, even cash handouts for food and incidentals; while other settler colonialists have been designated by the same leftists as the ultimate evil.