April 15, 2024

New York Shows Off Its Expertise In Central Planning: The Buffalo Billion

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 12, 2024

Illustrating The Absurdity Of New York's Energy Transition

April 12, 2024/ Francis Menton

By its 2019 Climate Act, New York has officially embarked on a great energy transition to Net Zero by 2050, with statutorily-dictated interim mandates along the way. The first of those mandates is 70% “emissions-free” electricity by 2030, only 6 years from now.
This is far and away the biggest government-directed project that the State of New York has ever undertaken. However, to date, relative to this project there exists no environmental impact statement, no feasibility study, no prototype, and no demonstration project to show how this can be done, let alone any detailed cost analysis to show how much it will cost.
Implementing the enforced energy transition is the responsibility of an alphabet soup of state agencies that makes the federal labyrinth of bureaucracies look simple and rational by comparison.

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.

April 05, 2024

April 05, 2024/ Francis Menton

I doubt that there are any public schools in the country more completely under the thumb of the teachers unions and the radical Left than the New York City public schools.
With relentless advocacy for more funding and smaller class sizes, the unions and their allies have achieved what may seem like public school utopia: $37.5 billion of funding for 937,000 students in the current school year, which comes to just over $40,000 per student. (By contrast, according to educationdata.org, the average per pupil spending in the U.S. for the 2023-24 year is $13,701, while the state most comparable to New York, Florida, spends just $11,800.).
Yet, for all the spending, our schools somehow achieve sub-par results for the students, and on top of that are consumed with all the standard leftist obsessions, from socialism to “anti-racism” (aka racism) to LGBT and trans rights. Perhaps not surprisingly, some of the districts have started to get some push back from parents on at least some of these issues. To me, the push back seems to be remarkably low key.
Today’s New York Times has an entertaining front-page article on this subject.

April 03, 2024

April 03, 2024/ Francis Menton

Throughout the West, the cult of fossil fuel suppression presents itself as an orthodoxy from which no dissent is permitted.
In the U.S., there has been substantial and growing resistance to the enforcement of that orthodoxy, among Republicans in general and particularly from red and energy-producing states.
By contrast, in Europe, there has been little push-back. Somewhere along the line, in country after country, the drive for Net Zero carbon emissions got the backing of an effective all-political-party consensus. In a gigantic political miscalculation, many mainstream center-right conservative parties got fully on board.
That mistake now looks to destroy several of these parties in the major countries.

March 30, 2024

March 30, 2024/ Francis Menton

I have written a long series of posts, now 32 in number, titled “The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time.” Go to this link if you want to read some or all of those posts.
The fraud in question in those posts is the intentional alteration of pre-existing temperature (or, in one case, sea level) records to create a narrative of dangerous climate change that, without the alterations, lacks support in the raw data. In the most recent post in this series, number 32, I remarked, “No other scientific fraud in world history comes close to this one in scope or significance.”
The climate-data-alteration fraud is hugely significant because the altered data provide the fundamental support for the ongoing multi-trillion-dollar effort of the Left to transform the world energy system, and ultimately the entire world economy. As the least expensive and most reliable forms of energy production get restricted, billions of people stand to see their lives impoverished to the extent of tens of thousands of dollars per year each. Is it remotely possible for any other fraud to come anywhere close to this one in significance?
As unlikely as it may seem, now along comes a second plausible candidate for the title.