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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The Scourge -- Or Not -- Of "Ultraprocessed Foods"

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  • “Ultraprocessed foods.” That sounds really bad. In fact, not just really bad, but really, really bad. Bad on a level with, maybe, “assault rifles” or “cis-heteronormativity.”

  • Definitely, with a condemnatory name like that, “ultraprocessed foods” would be something that no sensible person would ever eat, or at least certainly not in large quantities.

  • The term “ultraprocessed foods” has been in usage for a while, but the frequency seems to have exploded everywhere in the past few months. Perhaps that has resulted from the naming of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to be the next Secretary of Health and Human Services. Kennedy has made a thing about proclaiming a health crisis in the U.S., which he asserts is substantially brought about by our “broken food system.” On November 15 — just after President-elect Trump tapped Kennedy to lead HHS in the new administration — The New York Times had a piece outlining Kennedy’s critiques of the “food system.” Number one on the list of Kennedy’s critiques identified by the NYT was “ultraprocessed food.”

  • After reading this, I thought it might be time for me to get on top of what this “ultraprocessed food” stuff might be. Is this something that you need to really be concerned about, or is it just another one of the usual scare tactics of the left to try to take more control of your life?

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The Global Net Zero Financial Cartel, Falling Apart

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The Global Net Zero Financial Cartel, Falling Apart

  • Less than three weeks ago, on December 23, in a post on optimism about the potential demise of the green energy fantasy, I took note that two of the largest U.S. banks had just quit something called the “Net Zero Banking Alliance.” The two were Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo.

  • These two banks, along with many others, including all of the biggest ones, had joined the NZBA as it was getting organized under auspices of the UN back in 2021. NZBA, together with other related groups organized around the same time, aspired to be cartels of financial institutions that would save the planet by starving hydrocarbon fuels of all investment capital, while re-directing the money to the “green” energy transition.

  • Now, shortly after the re-election of Donald Trump, two of the biggest banking giants had decided to exit. Could this be a sign that the zero-carbon green energy fantasy was losing its grip?

  • In the short 19 days since that post, the trickle of resignations from the NZBA and related groups has turned into an avalanche.

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The Most Under-Reported Story Of The Biden Presidency

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  • What was the most under-reported news story during the Biden presidency?

  • In the last week or so, there has been a sudden burst of recognition of the extent to which Democrats and the media worked together to cover up Biden’s progressing cognitive decline. One media figure after another has come forward to call this the “most under-reported” story of the last year or several years. Some examples among many include: CBS correspondent Jan Crawford on December 30 (“That [the most under-reported story] would be, to me, Joe Biden's obvious cognitive decline that became undeniable in a televised debate"); Rolling Stone, December 30 (“Matt Yglesias, Josh Barro, and Mehdi Hasan regret failing to acknowledge Biden’s cognitive decline sooner — and its impact on the 2024 election.”); MSN, January 4 (“Media facing backlash for reporting on Biden’s cognitive decline.”)

  • I agree that this was a very big and very under-reported story during the Biden presidency. But was it the biggest? Not to me.

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