RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-6-19-in-case-you-think-someone-has-the-answer-to-new-yorks-looming-energy-disaster

In this post last week, I took note that New York’s electric grid system operator, NYISO, has recently issued some clear, if muted, warnings of the impossibility of the energy transition mandated by the state’s 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA). In a November 2023 Report, NYISO stated (deeply buried at page 52) that “DEFRs are needed to balance intermittent supply with demand,” and those DEFRs must be “significant in capacity.” DEFRs are the elusive and not-yet-invented “dispatchable emissions-free resources.” At a conference the following month, NYISO’s VP for System Integration Planning, Zachary Smith, reiterated the need for these DEFRs in large amounts. Smith presented charts quantifying the capacity of DEFRs needed for New York to “balance” its prospective intermittent wind/solar supply as something in the range of 30+ GW. 30 GW is close to the peak electricity demand for the entire state, and is approximately equivalent to the existing capacity of New York’s fleet of natural gas plants, all of which are mandated to be closed by 2040.

So what is the answer to the great DEFR conundrum? New York’s Public Service Commission, operating from its usual playbook, has initiated a proceeding, under the name Proceeding 15-E-0302, to uncover the answer. My New York co-blogger Roger Caiazza calls this the “DEFR Proceeding,” although I don’t find the PSC using that name. Everybody gets to submit their brilliant thoughts and ideas. So far there seem to be well over 22,000 items entered in the docket — more than any human being can ever read.

In just the past few days, some big comments from important players have floated in. On Monday (June 17), a comment appeared on this DEFR docket co-signed by two environmental NGOs, Earth Justice and the Sierra Club. These are two of the very biggest, best funded, and most vociferous advocates of the urgent necessity of an immediate energy transition away from fossil fuels. With their hundreds of millions of dollars of annual revenue and scores of staffers, surely these guys must have found the answer to the DEFR conundrum.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/mayorkas-claims-global-warming-makes-him-better-at-dealing-with-crises/

FEMA, which has been drained by being redirected to deal with Biden’s open borders invasion, needs money to smuggle more migrants around America.

The city government of El Paso, Texas, is busing illegal migrants to the Big Apple on the dime of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Deputy City Manager Mario D’Agostino told the DCNF Monday. The federal agency covers the travel costs of illegal migrants through a grant program.

But, according to the as yet unimpeached Secretary Mayorkas, global warming has prepped him to deal with hurricanes.

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said during an interview with the Associated Press that the U.S. is prepared to go into an intense hurricane and wildfire season, but he did raise concerns about budget shortages.

Mayorkas said that the department is well equipped to deal with hurricanes and other natural disasters this summer, adding that more intense national disasters, partially due to climate change, have allowed the agency to gain experience in dealing with crises.

“As the impacts of climate change have been more and more evident, we have seen and experienced increasing frequency and gravity of extreme weather events,” Mayorkas said.

“Extreme weather events” are much of a myth as FEMA’s competency.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/06/eco-vandals-came-to-stonehenge-they-wont-stop-there/

Environmental stewardship may be a laudable goal, but some radical environmentalists believe their ends justify extreme, damaging means.

Eco-vandals are at it again in England, having launched an attack on the priceless ancient historical site Stonehenge.

Two activists from the radical environmental group Just Stop Oil desecrated the ancient monument with orange powder paint. The site was saved from further attack only by the immediate intervention of another person at the site, who seized their paint equipment.

Just Stop Oil lied on X, formerly Twitter, that this wasn’t a major problem for the historical site because the paint “will soon wash away with the rain, but the urgent need for effective government action to mitigate the catastrophic consequences of the climate and ecological crisis will not.”

No doubt the irony that they likely traveled to the site in carbon-emitting vehicles to spray propellant-filled industrial dyes onto a historical landmark, then recorded the whole thing on a petroleum products–filled camera, is lost on these eco-vandals.

“Stonehenge at solstice is all about celebrating the natural world — but look at the state it’s in! We all have a right to live a life free from suffering, but continued burning of oil, coal and gas is leading to death and suffering on an unparalleled scale,” Niamh Lynch, an Oxford student who participated in the stunt, said in a statement.

The official Stonehenge X account replied to the activists, telling them the site was both protected and environmentally sensitive, and that they should “expect a prison sentence.” Local police have so far arrested two people, likely the two who recorded themselves attacking the site.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/06/18/the-new-hotness-lying-about-climate-change/

There’s a summer heat wave going on, which gives journalists the opportunity to fill up their stories with climate change boilerplate. It no longer matters whether any of it is true. Just the opposite, in fact. If you point out the truth, you’re accused of being a denier.

Sure, the data doesn’t show an increase in the number or intensity of hurricanes or tornadoes or wildfires. Yet every time one or the other strikes, the press robotically connects that event to “climate change.”

Every tornado season, we hear about how climate change is making them more frequent and more deadly. Except the narrative doesn’t align with the facts.

Here’s what National Geographic said about tornadoes: “There is no real evidence that tornadoes are happening more often. A lot more are being recorded now than in 1950, but a closer look at the data shows the increase is only in the weakest category, EF0. There’s been no increase in stronger twisters, and maybe even a slight decrease in EF4s and EF5s.”

The fact that there’s no discernible trend in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes – see the chart below from the Environmental Protection Agency – won’t stop the propagandists in the media from saying that there is. (Note also that the EPA is the biggest propagandist of them all for the “climate crisis” hysteria.)

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/08/our-coming-energy-famine/

Economic change and Biden’s hostility to fossil fuels are setting up an electricity crisis

Most Americans are unaware of a grave danger looming on the horizon: a historic — and entirely self-inflicted — energy-scarcity crisis. The “transition from fossil fuels” presupposes that “clean energy” substitutes will be ready when needed. But while the war on fossil fuels is making real gains, at least in the electricity sector, the effort to deploy renewable substitutes is failing catastrophically. Add soaring demand, and America is facing the worst energy shortfall in its history.

The nation’s grid regulators are already sounding the alarm. “I am extremely concerned about the pace of retirements we are seeing of generators which are needed for reliability on our system,” Willie Phillips, a Biden appointee who chairs the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), testified last year. According to fellow FERC commissioner Mark Christie, a Trump appointee, “The red lights are flashing.”

States in the Midwest are likely to be among the hardest hit. In a February report, Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), a high-voltage transmission system that provides power to 15 states in the central U.S., warned of “urgent and complex challenges to electric system reliability,” citing a “hyper-complex risk environment.” NERC, which oversees electricity supply across North America, expects MISO to face a staggering capacity shortfall of 4.7 gigawatts (GW) — equivalent to above five average-size nuclear-power plants — by 2028.

Realistically, the only way that America could make up the shortfall in electrical capacity would be through a massive increase in the number of coal and natural-gas power plants. Alas, those are primary targets of the Environmental Protection Agency’s new power-plant rule, published in May.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-6-8-the-latest-on-the-federal-war-against-internal-combustion-vehicles

I’m old enough to remember a time when there were serious environmental concerns with internal combustion engine vehicles. NOx and SOx emissions caused a thick layer of brown smog in the atmosphere during calm weather spells in summer and winter; and a layer of black soot would cover the snow along the roadside in the winter. But gradually that all got cleaned up. Today the bona fide serious environmental concerns about internal combustion engines are far in the past. But the war to eliminate them — supposedly on environmental grounds — is just ramping up.

The Biden Administration is all in with the plan to get rid of the ICE car. Why? It seems to have something to do with the non-existent “climate crisis.” Meanwhile, Congress has passed no legislation authorizing the executive agencies to force ICE vehicles off the market. Nor is the Administration honest enough to admit that they are engaged in outlawing the vehicles that 90+% of the people drive.

Instead we get massive and thoroughly dishonest regulations effectively forcing the approaching end of the ICE vehicle without ever directly saying so. All with effective dates far enough into the future that the public will not notice that anything is happening in time for the upcoming election.

Two big new regulations on this subject have just gone final. First, there was EPA’s “Multi-Pollutant Emissions Standards for Model Years 2027 and Later Light- Duty and Medium-Duty Vehicles,” issued on April 18. And then yesterday from the NHTSA (part of the Department of Transportation) we get “Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards for Passenger Cars and Light Trucks for Model Years 2027 and Beyond and Fuel Efficiency Standards for Heavy-Duty Pickup Trucks and Vans for Model Years 2030 and Beyond.” The first is 373 pages in the three-column, single-spaced format of the Federal Register. The second is 1004 pages in standard double-spaced typing.

If you should take the time to read some or all of the 1377 pages of text, don’t expect to find anywhere in all of that an admission that the plan is to suppress and ultimately eliminate the internal combustion car. Instead it’s happy sweet talk about the supposed “health” benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/05/30/climate-hysterics-keep-saying-the-quiet-part-out-loud/

The climate alarmists have a long habit of revealing the true motives behind the global warming scare, and of course they have nothing to do with keeping the sky from catching on fire. In the most recent tacit admission, a college professor suggests that the administration sell the climate crisis to black voters by listing all the green energy government handouts they can avail themselves of.

In the New York Times piece published over the weekend, Jerel Ezell, a University of California, Berkeley, assistant professor “who studies environmental politics and race,” expressed concern that “politicians often seem to downplay the crisis when courting black communities.”

“Democratic strategists seem to see climate change as a key political issue only for white liberal elites and assume that other groups, like black voters, are either unaware of or apathetic about it.”

So Ezell suggests that rather than appealing to “​​airy calls for solving a global climate crisis,” Democrats should opt for “a sharp message designed specifically for young black Americans that focuses on how the Biden administration is investing in clean energy hubs, green work force development, tax credits for home improvement measures and community grants.”

Or in the words of blogger and law professor Ann Althouse, Democrats need to let black Americans “know there are billions of dollars ‘waiting to be doled out’ to their specific communities.” 

“That’s ‘how much black Americans care’ — they care about the money that might be doled out to them,” Althouse writes. “That’s what it says in the article.”

Sounds as if Ezell practices the soft bigotry of low expectations against his own community.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/05/28/a-sneaky-way-to-end-fossil-fuel/

When candidate Joe Biden promised while on the campaign trail that “we’re going to end fossil fuel,” could anyone have guessed that emptying the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve was part of the plan? Maybe Biden had that in mind all along – enact policies that raise the price of gasoline, dip into the reserves to lower prices for consumers, then finally wring them dry for, putatively, the same reason. That’s one way to get rid of quite a lot of fossil fuel.

The federal Strategic Petroleum Reserve is “the world’s largest supply of emergency crude oil,” says the Energy Department. It was created in 1975 by the Energy Conservation Act, “primarily to reduce the impact of disruptions in supplies of petroleum products and to carry out obligations of the United States under the international energy program.” The oil is stored in underground salt caverns at four sites along the Gulf Coast. Initially planned to hold up to 1 billion barrels of petroleum, the authorized storage capacity, at 714 million barrels, is a bit short of that. Still, says the Energy Department, this “makes it a significant deterrent to oil import cutoffs and a key tool in foreign policy.”

The SPR was never intended to be a political chip, to be tapped into by a president who wants to temporarily push down gasoline prices to gain votes.

Nor was it to be used as a means to end fossil fuels, a Democratic Party dream that would be a long national nightmare for the country.

The Biden administration has authorized two releases from the country’s petroleum reserves. Last week it announced the sale and liquidation of 1 million barrels from the Northeast Gasoline Supply Reserve, established after 2012’s Hurricane Sandy damaged refineries and terminals, and left “some New York gas stations without fuel for as long as 30 days.” The Energy Department says this “solicitation is strategically timed and structured to maximize its impact on gasoline prices, helping to lower prices at the pump as Americans hit the road this summer.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/05/17/bidens-7-5-billion-ev-charger-plan-backfires-spectacularly/

At a Rose Garden event this week, President Joe Biden bragged that “Thanks to my Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, we’re building a network of 500,000 charging stations all across America.”

This is about as believable as the story of his uncle’s cannibalistic demise.

The truth is that Biden’s five-year, $7.5 billion effort to jump-start the development of electric vehicle charging stations is doing the opposite. The money has so far produced only eight new charging stations in two years. The overall growth rate in EV charging stations has slowed since he signed that bill. And earlier this month, Tesla gutted its EV charger efforts, dealing the entire scheme a huge blow.

In other words, this is shaping up to be a massive waste of taxpayer money.

The slow rollout of the Biden-approved EV stations is in part due to cumbersome rules and regulations required to access the money. That’s no surprise.

But it’s actually having a broader negative impact, slowing the growth of EV stations overall.

In the two years before Biden signed that infrastructure bill, the number of EV charging stations grew by roughly 20,000, according to data compiled by the Department of Energy. In the two years since, just 16,000 stations went online, even as EV sales accelerated. The result is that the ratio of charging stations to EVs is about half what it was in 2021. The administration says not to worry, because the buildout will soon take off. We aren’t holding our breath.

But even if the stations do start to roll out, these numbers don’t account for the large number of charging ports that aren’t working at any given time because of communication failures, power outages, software bugs, or other problems with the complicated tech.

A survey by J.D. Power found that almost 21% of drivers using public charging stations reported malfunctions. And when a Wall Street Journal reporter went around to 30 fast-charging stations in the Los Angeles area, she encountered problems at more than 40% of them.