September 08, 2025

Watching The End Game Of New York's Climate Madness Begin To Play Out

September 08, 2025/ Francis Menton

As I have written many times, with New York’s fantasy “net zero” energy plans, it is not a question of whether they will fail, but only when and how.
The Democrats, who dominate state politics, and their environmentalist allies, are firmly committed to the impossible. Thus, they are caught in a trap of their own making, and from which there is no good escape. The fact that they are caught in this trap is obvious to anyone with basic arithmetic skills, but almost all of our politicians and environmentalists lack those.
However, a small handful of them are starting to sense the impending crash. This makes for amusing interplay.
The state’s Climate Act of 2019 directs hostility to fossil fuels on all fronts.

September 02, 2025

"Stupidest Litigation" Update

September 02, 2025/ Francis Menton

Suppose you had decided that the most important issue facing our planet was saving it from the possibility that some trace gas in the atmosphere, currently constituting about 0.04% of the air, might increase to 0.05%, or maybe even (oh no!) to 0.06%. What’s your strategy?
If you think like an environmentalist, the answer is simple: foment a barrage of civil lawsuits by states and municipalities against major oil companies, each seeking many billions of dollars in damages.
The chance that such a strategy could ever have any measurable impact on the composition of the atmosphere is zero. However, with enough lawsuits from enough deep-pocketed plaintiffs, you could form an unstoppable juggernaut. Eventually you could coerce some gigantic settlement. Riches will be yours! It’s the American way.
And thus we have the Manhattan Contrarian series on what I have called the “stupidest litigations” in the country. . . .

August 17, 2025

August 17, 2025/ Francis Menton

It was back in 2021 that I started to ask which country or U.S. state would be the first to hit the “Green Energy Wall.”
It has long been obvious to anyone who looks at the situation that the fantasy of a fully de-carbonized energy system, with everything run on electricity generated by intermittent wind and sun, could never happen.
But what would be the limiting condition that would put a stop to the madness? Would it be confronting the absurd costs of grid-scale battery storage? Or perhaps a string of blackouts caused by insufficient backup of the wind and solar generation?
Here in New York, we are starting to see some push back from politicians on the fantasy green energy transition, but the source may be the last thing you would have predicted.

August 11, 2025

August 11, 2025/ Francis Menton

It was in July 2019 that New York State adopted its Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act. Our Legislature and Governor (it was Andrew Cuomo at the time) had officially designated us as the climate “leader,” here to show the unsophisticated rubes and provincials in the rest of the country how a small application of political will could transform our electricity system from majority fossil fuels in 2019 to 70% “renewables” by 2030 and 100% “zero-carbon” by 2040.
Now six years into the eleven available to meet the 2030 mandate, we actually get less of our electricity from zero-carbon sources than we did in 2019.
The reason is that the large (2 GW) Indian Point nuclear plant was forced to close under pressure from environmentalists, to be replaced by two natural gas plants of approximately the same total capacity.
Meanwhile the vision of massive amounts of power from the wind and sun has barely gotten off the ground; and in particular the vision of vast offshore wind capacity has essentially died with the withdrawal of federal support by the Trump administration.

August 08, 2025

August 08, 2025/ Francis Menton

Here in New York City, in the grip of the hysterical climate cult, we are undertaking a massive transformation of our energy system without anyone in authority having done the simple arithmetic to check whether the plans have any chance of succeeding. A big theme of this blog has been pointing out the obvious problems that mean that these “net zero” schemes can never work.
But maybe it’s not really important whether they will ever work or not. Maybe the real point is just to spend a lot of (somebody else’s) money to show that you, somehow, “care.”
A very similar scenario is now playing out in the closely related category they are calling climate “resiliency.” The word means getting ready for the impending climate armaggedon. The armaggedon isn’t coming, of course, but we will anyway spend vast sums supposedly to show we are “doing something” about the problem.
Whether the scheme in question might actually work is beside the point.

August 06, 2025

August 06, 2025/ Francis Menton

After a few decades in the wilderness, it looks like the skeptics are now suddenly prevailing in the climate wars.
I have long said that this would inevitably happen, and that it was only a question of time, because the laws of physics and economics would inevitably prevail. But what I didn’t know was how much time it would take — perhaps a few years, or maybe many decades. It’s much like North Korea. Their non-functioning communist system will inevitably collapse — but when?
Much credit for the sudden reversal in the climate struggles goes to President Trump. But it is also true that the climate scam was always a house of cards, subject to falling as soon as a critical mass of people started testing its foundations.
And I don’t mean to suggest that the climate wars are totally over. Too many people have been making too big living off the scam, and have too much invested to give up easily. And so I continue, along with dedicated colleagues, to do my part to help get this beast killed deader than dead.