September 28, 2023

A Semi-Competent Report On Energy Storage From Britain's Royal Society

September 28, 2023/ Francis Menton

If you want to power our modern economy on intermittent renewables (wind and solar), and also banish the use of power from fossil fuels and nuclear, then the only option remaining to make the grid work reliably is energy storage on a massive scale.
And then it turns out that energy storage on the scale needed is enormously costly — almost certainly so costly that it will in the end sink the entire “net zero” project.
Failure adequately to address the energy storage problem is the fatal defect of nearly all “net zero” plans that are out there.
For an example of a thoroughly incompetent treatment of this problem, you might look at New York’s so-called “Scoping Plan” for its mandated “net zero” transition. This Scoping Plan was issued quite recently in December 2022. As examples of its stunning incompetence, it almost entirely discusses the storage problem in the wrong units (watts versus watt-hours), and regularly posits the imminent emergence of magical “dispatchable emissions-free resources,” that have not yet been invented, to cover the gaps in wind and solar generation. The people who issued this Plan have no idea what they are doing, and are setting up New York for an energy catastrophe some time between now and 2030.
But now along comes a report from Royal Society addressing this energy storage problem in the context of Great Britain.

September 25, 2023

The Bidens: "Stone Cold Crooked" (10) -- How Do You Tell When A Payment To A Pol Is A Bribe?

September 25, 2023/ Francis Menton

A few days ago, on Friday September 22, the federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York indicted the senior Senator from New Jersey, Robert Menendez, for bribery.
A full copy of the indictment can be found at this link at the New York Times. There is also a detailed summary of the charges in a Department of Justice press release here.
The Menendez indictment gives us the opportunity to look at the conduct of Menendez claimed to constitute “bribery” and compare it to some of the well-known conduct of President Biden.
Is there any significant difference here that makes one bribery and the other not?

September 22, 2023

September 22, 2023/ Francis Menton

It’s now more than sixty years since the independence movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s transformed nearly all of sub-Saharan Africa into independent countries.
Hopes soared for a new era of progress and prosperity. But six plus decades on, with essentially no exceptions (maybe Botswana?), the 49 countries of sub-Saharan Africa are about as poor as ever.

The New York Times treats the subject in a big piece by Patricia Cohen a few days ago on September 18. Sorry if this is behind their paywall, but I subscribe to this stuff so that you don’t have to.
In the treatment at the Times, this is just a case of the sad cruelty of nature, an extreme instance of “bad luck.” But we can learn a good deal about the true source of the bad luck by looking at clues that Ms. Cohen and the Times inadvertently drop in the course of their reporting, without even noticing that they are doing it.

September 19, 2023

September 19, 2023/ Francis Menton

The Biden family corruption scandal gets deeper with every passing day. Speaker Kevin McCarthy finally opened an impeachment investigation in the House last week, and now the first hearing in that investigation has been scheduled for September 28 before the House Oversight Committee.
So what is the potential impeachable offense? You will undoubtedly recall, in the context of the two Trump impeachments, the endless semantic contortions that took place trying to shoehorn Trump’s conduct into the vague constitutional catchall of “high crimes and misdemeanors” that might support an impeachment.
Now, with Biden, the conduct at issue goes by various euphemisms like “the family business,” “business dealings with foreign nationals,” “influence peddling,” “selling access,” or maybe just “corruption.” Are these impeachable offenses?
Well, how about “bribery”?

September 16, 2023

September 16, 2023/ Francis Menton

As I have written many times, I don’t think that the federal measure of “poverty” in the United States was originally created with fraudulent intent to deceive the voters.
However, as the measure of poverty has evolved over the years, the thing deemed “poverty” by the statistics no longer bears any meaningful resemblance to what normal people think of as poverty. Rather than measuring anything that might resemble actual physical deprivation, the statistics have evolved into an artifact to manipulate the voters. In a post about a year ago I described what I call the “poverty scam” as follows:
[T]he government cynically manipulates the poverty statistics so that the official measured rate of poverty never goes meaningfully down, no matter how much taxpayer money is spent, thus manufacturing a fake basis to hit up the people for ever increasing funding at regular intervals.
Over the past week or so we have just been treated to the umpteenth iteration of this poverty scam.

September 13, 2023

September 13, 2023/ Francis Menton

In New York, politicians are selling the public a narrative that electricity is going to be the solution to climate change.
We will eliminate all CO2 emissions by banning gasoline-powered cars, banning natural gas infrastructure, banning gas heat in buildings, and banning gas for cooking. All of these are to be replaced with supposedly “green,” emissions-free, alternatives – which in practice consist of only one thing, electricity. We’ve been told that this is how we are going to protect the planet for future generations.
But there is nothing emissions-free about the way electricity is currently generated in New York. About half of our electricity comes now, as it traditionally has, from burning fossil fuels.
New York has announced plans to eliminate those from electricity generation by 2030, but as of now has no realistic plan to replace them. Meanwhile, it is forcing its citizens to convert essential systems like heating to electricity, with no basis to believe that the electricity will be available to prevent people from freezing in the winter only a few years from now.
This is a glaring contradiction, that needs urgently to be addressed before we suffer a self-inflicted catastrophe.