RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/west-virginia-v-epa-ruling-analysis

The Supreme Court saved a crucial decision for the last day of its term, ruling 6–3 in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency that the Clean Air Act does not allow the EPA to move from regulating individual power plants to regulating regional emissions through its interpretation of the Clean Power Plan. The opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, cited the major questions doctrine, according to which Congress must “speak clearly if it wishes to assign to an agency decisions of vast economic and political significance.”

“This decision properly keeps the EPA in its lane and rejects the agency’s efforts to usurp national energy policy from Congress,” Jones Day partner Yaakov Roth, who argued the case in front of the Supreme Court on behalf of the plaintiffs, told me. “It is a very important step toward political accountability and economic certainty” Indeed, the case has far-reaching implications for other agencies that could currently be exceeding their statutory remits. The Securities and Exchange Commission, for example, recently proposed requirements for companies to disclose their exposure to climate risk and to provide details about the climate effects of their operations. Meantime, the National Labor Relations Board is considering making franchise businesses such as McDonald’s accountable for the actions of local franchises. Such rules could find themselves on the wrong side of the Court’s approach, which found the EPA’s rulemaking to be an example of “agencies asserting highly consequential power beyond what Congress could reasonably be understood to have granted.”

The Clean Air Act allows the EPA to set maximum levels of new and existing emissions sources. However, the Clean Power Plan, proposed in 2015 under President Barack Obama, went further. If emissions exceeded the EPA’s requirements, a state, or group of states, would be required to shut down power plants or to install renewable energy sources. The plan was similar to the American Clean Energy and Security Act, introduced by Democratic congressmen Henry Waxman and Edward Markey in 2009, and the American Power Act, introduced by senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman in 2010. Neither bill became law, despite sizeable Democratic majorities in both chambers.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/restoring-a-constitutional-climate-west-virginia-v-epa-supreme-court-john-roberts-neil-gorsuch-11656620882?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

“Congress must give clear commands before the executive branch can write costly rules that tell Americans how to live their lives. The Court is reinvigorating the separation of powers and enhancing liberty in the bargain.”

This has been an historic Supreme Court term, and the Justices kept it going to the end with a major 6-3 decision Thursday (West Virginia v. EPA) reining in the administrative state. The subject was climate regulation but the message should echo across the federal bureaucracy.

The question was whether the Environmental Protection Agency could invoke an obscure statutory provision to re-engineer the nation’s electric grid. Prior to the 2015 Obama rule, the EPA had used the provision only a handful of times to regulate pollutants from discrete sources.

The rule would have effectively required coal and gas-fired generators to subsidize renewables. It was stayed by the Court in 2016 but revived by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals last year. Now the Court is burying it for good, and its legal rationale is especially important.

***

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts relies on the Court’s “major questions” doctrine. This requires courts to look with skepticism when agencies claim “‘in a long-extant statute an unheralded power’ representing a ‘transformative expansion” in its power. That’s what the Obama EPA did.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-6-29-and-the-winner-is-germany

Just over six months ago, in December 2021, I asked the question that was on the tip of the tongue of everybody who follows the subject of the ongoing massive “green” transition to fossil-fuel-free energy. Actually, that’s a lie. The question I asked was not on the tip of the tongue of everybody who follows the subject, or even of most of the people who follow the subject, for reasons that to me are completely inexplicable. The question was : “Which Country Or U.S. State Will Be The First To Hit The Green Energy Wall?”

The candidates that I nominated in that post as potentially the first to hit the “green energy wall” were California, New York, the UK and Germany. At the time, I thought it was obvious that one of those jurisdictions would hit the wall sooner than almost anybody expected. Indeed, I was quite bold in the short time frame that I predicted:

A prolonged period of unfavorable weather (calm and overcast) could cause a serious energy crunch to hit one or both of Germany or the UK as soon as this winter. Or they could get lucky and go another year or two.

Now here we are in June 2022, and I think it’s hard to deny that Germany has in fact hit the “green energy wall.” Let’s consider.

First, here is the definition of the “green energy wall” that I gave in the post:

[O]ne or another of [those states or countries] is highly likely to hit a “wall” — that is, a situation where the electricity system stops functioning, or the price goes through the roof, or both, forcing a drastic alteration or even abandonment of the whole scheme.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/06/30/americans-are-collateral-damage-in-dems-insane-war-on-energy/

Maybe the Jan. 6 hearings are, as some assert, really about distracting Americans from the Democrats’ shocking policy failures. How else can one explain the refusal of President Joe Biden and the Democratic Congress to address our ongoing energy crisis?

And, no, it’s no exaggeration to call this a crisis. With consumer prices rising at a four-decade-high of 8.6% in the most recent year-over-year comparison, Americans are watching their standard of living fall fast.

A just-released national survey has found that 83% of U.S. households are cutting their personal spending and travel due to soaring inflation. These cutbacks are being driven almost entirely by energy costs, which have spiked nearly 35% in the past year.

The economic disaster Biden has created is ultimately a result of surging federal spending during the pandemic, foolish Fed policies that poured monetary gasoline onto a raging inflation fire, and the ongoing effort by Biden and the Democrats to punish the very companies that provide our energy, threatening them with smothering regulations, painful taxes and even public shaming.

Things have reached a fever pitch of late, with Democrats’ extremist anti-free-market green wing suggesting, as gasoline prices roar past $5 a gallon and cities across the nation face blackouts, we would all be better off if we just nationalized our oil and gas industry.

For the record, no we wouldn’t.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2022/06/demolishing-infinite-co2-argument-daniel-greenfield/
Bromley’s argument is important and a reminder that this is a manufactured crisis that is being used to massively enrich some investors while impoverishing millions, and that is being used as a vehicle to radically transform society, that claims to have science on its side, when it actually does not.

A crisis requires a perpetual atmosphere of fear and the insistence that things are getting worse and worse all the time.

“We have already poisoned the atmosphere, we have to repair and heal the Earth and the only way to do that is to remove carbon dioxide permanently,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm bizarrely claimed as part of Biden’s ‘Earthshot” to destroy America’s economy and turn the rest of it over to Communist China.

Bud Bromley makes an important point in his analysis of CO2 levels.

As Ron Clutz summarizes, “Those committed to blaming humans for rising atmospheric CO2 sometimes admit that emitted CO2 (from any source) only stays in the air about 5 years (20% removed each year)  being absorbed into natural sinks.  But they then save their belief by theorizing that human emissions are “pulses” of additional CO2 which persist even when particular molecules are removed, resulting in higher CO2 concentrations.  The analogy would be a traffic jam on the freeway which persists long after the blockage is removed.”

“A recent study by Bud Bromley puts the fork in this theory.  His paper is A conservative calculation of specific impulse for CO2.”

 “In the 2 years following the June 15, 1991 eruption of the Pinatubo volcano, the natural environment removed more CO2 than the entire increase in CO2 concentration due to all sources, human and natural, during the entire measured daily record of the Global Monitoring Laboratory of NOAA/Scripps Oceanographic Institute (MLO) May 17, 1974 to June 15, 1991.  Then, in the 2 years after that, that CO2 was replaced plus an additional increment of CO2,” Bromley notes.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/davidhasanyi/2022/06/17/the-democrats-capricious-energy-policy-has-been-a-disaster-n1606007

Democrats have spent decades warning that the United States must stop using the most efficient and affordable energy sources or it will be consumed by heat waves, fireballs and cataclysmic weather events. Every flood, every hurricane — every natural event, really — is now blamed on climate change. We have burdened our children with an irrational dread over their future. Then again, many in The Cult of Malthus won’t even have children.

So, why, if we’re on the precipice of this apocalypse, if saving the planet trumps every other concern, is President Joe Biden begging everyone to drill? On the days Democrats aren’t blaming Vladimir Putin for rising gas prices (a cost the president not long ago argued was worth paying for “freedom”), they’re blaming oil companies for profiteering. Wednesday, as the national average hit $5.014 (nearly $2 higher than last year), Biden sent letters to refining companies threatening to once again abuse his executive powers if they do not immediately alleviate high prices — a political appeal to the imaginary “greedflation.”

Biden, who promised a 100% “clean-energy economy” with “net-zero emissions” in a couple of decades, now demands energy companies, already at utilization rates above 90%, invest tens of billions more in new drilling infrastructure, when everyone knows that tomorrow, when prices recede, Democrats are going to go right back to passing laws and regulations that undercut their business. Today, Democrats demand CEOs spend more; tomorrow, they will promise to “hold oil executives accountable” and drag them in front of congressional committees where they will be scolded by economically illiterate windbags.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2022/06/green-doctors-suitable-cases-for-treatment/

On climate, a lot of medicos are out there on the nuttiest end of the doom spectrum. But I had no idea their hysteria could even out-do and embarrass Greenpeace, The Guardian and Tim Flannery’s Climate Council.

Last month three anaesthetists published a peer-reviewed paper in Australasian Anaesthesia  discouraging birthing mothers from using nitrous oxide for pain relief. The trio warn, “While it may be innocuous for the pregnant woman and unborn baby, that is certainly not the case for the environment.”

About 200,000 Australian pregnant women per year choose the help of nitrous oxide.[1] The learned paper wants them to use more climate-friendly pain-killers, and/or epidurals, hypnobirthing, massage, acupuncture, and Tens — elaborate equipment called “Transcutaneous electric nerve stimulator”. They’re all costlier, but hang the expense.

I hasten to add that two of the trio of authors are females, albeit gung-ho for purported planetary healing. Dr Alice Gynther is from Western Health Melbourne and Fiona Pearson from Sunderland Royal Hospital UK. The lone male Forbes McGain of Western Health is a stalwart of Doctors for the Environment Australia (DEA). I’ll chart DEA’s extremism later in the course of my obstetric odyssey.[2]

These three mothers’ helpers write

By educating medical staff and pregnant women about the carbon impact of N2O, ensuring that it is delivered and used as efficiently as possible and considering the use of more carbon-friendly alternatives, we can reduce GHG emissions from the labour ward and help to mitigate the effects of climate change. Ensuring that midwifery, obstetric and anaesthetic staff are aware of the environmental impact of N2O is crucial…

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=93183ec05c

What I call the “energy storage conundrum” is the obvious but largely unrecognized problem that electricity generated by intermittent renewables like wind and sun can’t keep an electrical grid operating without some method of storing energy to meet customer demand in times of low production. These times of low production from wind and sun occur regularly — for example, calm nights — and can persist for as long as a week or more in the case of heavily overcast and calm periods in the winter.

If the plan is to power the entire United States by wind and solar facilities, and if we assume that wind and solar facilities will be built sufficient to generate energy equal to usage over the course of a year, we then need to do a calculation of how much storage would be required to balance the times of excess production against those of insufficient production in order to get through the year without blackouts. The challenge of getting through an entire year could require far more storage than merely getting through a week-long wind/sun drought, because both wind and sun are seasonal, producing much more in some seasons than others.

Previous posts on this blog have cited to several competent calculations of the amount of storage needed for different jurisdictions to get through a full year with only wind and sun to generate the electricity. For the case of the entire United States, this post from January 2022 describes work of Ken Gregory, who calculates a storage requirement, based on the current level of electricity consumption, of approximately 250,000 GWH to get through a year. If you then assume as part of the decarbonization project the electrification of all currently non-electrified sectors of the economy (transportation, home heat, industry, agriculture, etc.), the storage requirement would approximately triple, to 750,000 GWH.