The Bidens: "Stone Cold Crooked" (8) -- This Is Getting Ridiculous

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  • Beginning in April 2014 — one month after then Vice President Joe Biden became “point man” for U.S. policy in Ukraine — Joe’s son Hunter took a directorship of Ukrainian energy company Burisma at a fee of $83,333 per month, or $1 million per year. Burisma was then strongly suspected of corruption, and within only a few months it came under official investigation, following the appointment in early 2015 of Victor Shokin as Ukraine’s General Prosecutor.

  • Then in late 2015 and early 2016, VP Joe Biden engineered the firing of Shokin by threatening to withhold a billion dollars of U.S. aid, which aid he controlled at that time. Joe later admitted on a widely-viewed video that he threatened to withhold the U.S. aid as the means to get Shokin fired.

  • So was the million per year paid to Hunter a legitimate business transaction, or was it an obvious bribe to Joe to get him to leverage U.S. aid to Ukraine to protect Burisma from the prosecutor?

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Lessons From China On The Planned Economy

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  • It’s hard to learn what’s going on in China, and it’s getting harder. Data series that show anything unfavorable are suppressed or discontinued, and journalists who might write something negative are increasingly unwelcome. But there is every reason to think that China’s forty-year economic boom at the minimum is stalling out, and indeed its economy may be headed for a major crash.

  • The Wall Street Journal has two significant pieces on this subject in the last two days: from yesterday, a long front-page news article with the headline “China’s 40-Year Boom Is Over. What Comes Next?”; and today, a lead editorial “The Electric-Vehicle Bubble Starts to Deflate.” (Both are probably behind the pay wall.).

  • But before discussing those in more detail, let’s review the important background. China’s economy took off in the 1980s when then-leader Deng Xiaoping loosened state controls and allowed a private sector to grow and flourish. Current leader Xi Jinping, who assumed power in 2013, has reversed that policy and increasingly tightened state control and direction of the economy, particularly since his second term began in 2018.

  • Are there any lessons that we in the U.S. and the rest of the West should be learning here?

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The Green Energy Future Is Arriving Faster Than You Think -- Or Not

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The Green Energy Future Is Arriving Faster Than You Think -- Or Not

  • Among the media sources serving as propagandists and cheerleaders for the “green energy transition,” two of the most prominent are the New York Times and Bloomberg News. To get an idea how the “transition” is going, let’s take a look at the latest from those two.

  • From the Times, in this morning’s print edition, we have a feature article that apparently first appeared online a couple of days ago, August 17. The headline is: “The Clean Energy Future Is Arriving Faster Than You Think.” The sub-head continues the excitement: “The United States is pivoting away from fossil fuels and toward wind, solar and other renewable energy, even in areas dominated by the oil and gas industries.”

  • But then Bloomberg News comes out yesterday with an editorial that seems to reach the exact opposite conclusion. Headline: “Net Zero Is Stalling Out. What Now?”

  • So which is it? Is the green energy future arriving “faster than you think,” or “stalling out”? Both can’t be right. Who has the better side of this?

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Annals Of Crazy Climate Litigation: Held v. Montana

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  • Out in the real world, use of fossil fuels continues to grow, and will with 100% certainty continue to do so. In places like India and Africa, people are just getting their first taste of things like cars, computers, and air conditioning. They are not going to turn back.

  • Meanwhile in the fantasy world of the climate cult, it’s only a matter of enough government decrees, subsidies, and maybe a few court orders, and the whole functioning and inexpensive fossil-fuel-based energy system will suddenly be replaced by something yet to be invented.

  • In the court order department, various pie-in-the-sky lawsuits seek to find a judge willing to take the big leap and order the end to fossil fuels. Hey, why not? In 2015 a group of adolescents in Oregon (orchestrated by an environmental zealot group called Our Children’s Trust) brought a case called Kelsey Cascadia Rose Juliana, et al. v. United States, seeking to get a federal judge to decree the end to all use of fossil fuels. In 2017 that case earned a Manhattan Contrarian nomination as the “stupidest litigation in the country.” After two trips to the Ninth Circuit and one to the Supreme Court, that case now finds itself back in the Oregon District Court, where the Biden/Garland Justice Department is once again trying to block it on grounds of justiciability. Even Biden and Garland aren’t this crazy.

  • Yet even as the Juliana case continues to languish, another very similar case has leapt ahead of it, and has gotten the coveted first sweeping anti-fossil-fuels court order. The case is Held, et al. v. Montana.

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Comments From Supporters Of EPA's New Power Plant Rule

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  • My last post highlighted two lengthy comments submitted to EPA by groups of states critical of the agency’s recently-proposed “Power Plant Rule.” (EPA’s official title: “New Source Performance Standards for GHG Emissions from New and Reconstructed EGUs; Emission Guidelines for GHG Emissions from Existing EGUs; and Repeal of the Affordable Clean Energy Rule.” ).

  • The Rule seeks to eliminate, or nearly so, all greenhouse gas emissions from electric power plants, by some time in the 2030s. The comments that I highlighted delve into substantial technical detail, giving serious reasons why EPA’s proposed transformation of the country’s electricity generation system is unlikely to work and poses severe risks to the people’s electricity supply.

  • What about on the other side? Are there any comments on the proposed Rule that are supportive of the Rule, and that even contend that its restrictions on use of fossil fuels to generate electricity should be made more stringent, and/or advanced in time? The answer is that there are many such comments.

  • But how do these supportive comments deal with the problems identified in the critical comments?

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Comments On The Insanity Of EPA's New Power Plant Rule

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  • On May 23, EPA put out its long-expected proposed Rule designed to eliminate, or nearly so, all so-called “greenhouse gas” emissions from the electricity-generation sector of the economy.  The proposal came with the very long title: “New Source Performance Standards for GHG Emissions from New and Reconstructed EGUs; Emission Guidelines for GHG Emissions from Existing EGUs; and Repeal of the Affordable Clean Energy Rule.”  The full document is 672 pages long.   

  • Various not-very-far-off deadlines are set, ranging from as early as 2030 for some changes to coal plants, to at the latest 2038 for the last changes to natural gas plants. 

  • But how exactly is this emissions elimination thing to be accomplished?  Today a substantial majority of U.S. electricity (about 60%) comes from one or the other of those fuels; and it is inherent in the burning of hydrocarbons that you get CO2 as a product.  In all those 672 pages, EPA has only two ideas for how to eliminate the carbon emissions from combustion power plants: carbon capture and storage (CCS), and “green” hydrogen.  Either you must implement one of those two ideas to meet EPA’s standards by the deadline, or you must close your power plant. 

  • But here’s the problem: both of those ideas are, frankly, absurd. 

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