Free Republic

How quickly things change. It was barely more than a year ago that climate activists and federal bureaucrats thought they had maneuvered the internal combustion engine (ICE) automobile to the brink of extinction. ICE vehicles had become like dinosaurs, inferior to their new competitors the EVs, and therefore headed for the scrap heap of history. Customers were flocking to the trendy new EVs, which were seeing rapidly rising sales. And the all-powerful federal bureaucracy was going to give the final push to put ICE vehicles out of their misery. On June 7, 2024 President Biden’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration...

The climate alarmists regularly seize on weather events they believe will help them exploit their narrative. Naturally, they ignore contradictory information. So we see it as our duty to fill in the gaps from time to time. Following are a few examples that show why the global warming story is less scientific theory than conjecture in the service of a political agenda. - Let’s begin in the West Arctic, where the Northwest Passage is experiencing its third-highest level of sea ice extent in the last two decades. In 2009, Al Gore said, with his usual galling listen-to-me certainty, the Arctic...

How quickly things change. It was only two years ago, in 2023, that I was writing posts compiling long lists of quotes from climate activists warning that all assets used for production of coal, oil and gas were about to become obsolete and “stranded.” After all, wind and solar were (supposedly) cheaper and cleaner for generating electricity, which could then power anything and everything. Therefore anyone stupid enough to make further investments in producing fossil fuels would lose everything. Here is one such post from June 2023, and another from February 2023. If you look today, you can still find...

2024, prices jumped 800% at PJM Interconnection, a “traffic controller” part of the grid that provides service in 13 states as well as D.C. .. PJM operates the largest power grid in the U.S., with around 67 million customers—that’s more than 20% of the American population. ... amid a dwindling supply and an increase in demand, “Prices for power plants landed at $269.92 per megawatt-day, compared to $28.92 per megawatt-day” in 2023. ... prices are set to spike again, and the projection for this year is around 20%. If you live in Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey,...

The Biden administration's annual "Resource Adequacy Report" mentioned climate change 17 times. The Trump administration's report doesn't mention it at all. Energy Secretary Chris Wright says the latest report confirms the U.S. electricity grid is on an "unstable and dangerous path." The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) released its annual “Resource Adequacy Report,” earlier this month, and it warns that blackouts are coming if the country carries out the Biden-era plan to retire fossil fuel power plants. That is not sitting well with climate activists. The report's executive summary opens with a declaration that the U.S. possesses “abundant energy sources...

A group of German industrial labor representatives has broken ranks. In an open letter to Chancellor Friedrich Merz, they fiercely criticize Berlin’s climate policy. Will their defiance ignite a firestorm -- or vanish in the memory hole crafted by media gatekeepers? I must admit: after years of bitter disappointment in the fight for rational energy discourse, I view initiatives like this with cautious pessimism. In Germany, climate policy has become the domain of a paternalistic triad -- politics, media, and public compliance. The first casualty? Open debate. The air is thick with passive-aggressive apocalypse. Criticizing the Green Deal is a...

There was a kind of hilarious article last week that I had up in our headlines section. I forget what sort of snarky comment I'd added to the headline for it, but what it boiled down to was pissy progressives packing up and moving to the Netherlands because TRUMP.Number Of 'Trumpugees' Leaving America Continues to RiseA week ahead of a crucial Supreme Court decision which delivered yet another blow to the United States' transgender community on Monday, Grover Wehman-Brown was in the midst of packing ahead of their big move to Europe.Since President Donald Trump's first electoral victory in 2016,...

Even in green energy subsidised Britain, developing renewables does not make economic sense. Why wind farm developers are pulling out at the last minute.. The government aims to generate at least 43GW of offshore wind power (current capacity is 14.7GW) and 95% of all energy from renewable sources by 2030. These targets are now in jeopardy. The cancellation of Hornsea 4 follows a similar decision by Swedish developer Vattenfall, which stopped work on its 1.4GW Norfolk Boreas wind farm in 2023. … Building a wind turbine requires significant amounts of steel, copper and aluminium, all of which doubled or tripled...

What does the future hold as to large additions to heavily subsidized wind and solar electricity generation capacity in the U.S.? For those paying attention, the legislative back-and-forth of the One Big Beautiful Bill, as it made its way through Congress, has been something of a roller coaster ride. At this point, I am betting that the utility-scale wind and solar industries are near the end of their line. This post reports on the latest development, which is an Executive Order signed by President Trump on July 7. But count on the wind and solar subsidy farmers to keep fighting...

On July 4 President Trump signed what everyone is now calling the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” (Doesn’t it cease being a “Bill” when it becomes an “Act”? Not this one, apparently.). The Act is a compendium of dozens of provisions relating to all aspects of the federal budget and taxation. As a result, many summaries that you may have read focus on things like income tax rates and deductions, and other such matters directly relevant to individuals. That leaves some other important subjects of the Act getting short shrift, particularly the provisions dealing with various aspects of the ongoing...

In case you missed it, here is New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s breathless announcement from yesterday: “Governor Hochul Directs New York Power Authority to Develop a Zero-Emission Advanced Nuclear Energy Technology Power Plant.” And here is Hochul’s picture of herself making the announcement:Does something here seem like it doesn’t quite fit? Yes, it was just four years ago, in April 2021, that New York completed the forced closure of the two perfectly functional Indian Point nuclear plants, with combined generating capacity of about 2 GW, for no other reason than relentless opposition from environmentalists and NIMBYs. And yet now the...

Now coming into view are the specifics of EPA’s strategy to end the Obama/Biden efforts to strangle the energy sector of the economy in the name of “saving the planet” from climate change. A document released by EPA last week on June 11 lays out the plan for repeal of the absurd (and dangerous) regulation that would have ended use of fossil fuels to generate electricity by some time in the 2030s. This EPA document is particularly interesting for the way it treats — and effectively sidelines — the so-called Endangerment Finding, the 2009 regulatory action that is the basis...

Over the years I have returned repeatedly to the subject of the New York City Housing Authority, or NYCHA. Begun with great optimism prior to World War II, NYCHA expanded rapidly in the 1960s and 70s, until it housed around 500,000 people. The economic model was always pure unmodified socialism — the government owns everything, rents are tied to income (“to each according to his needs”), and any shortfalls in paying costs fall on the taxpayers. But after all, we will save oodles of money because there will be no profits for the evil developers. For a few of my...

Yesterday, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the proposed repeal of the Biden-era’s Clean Power Plan 2.0, which ruled that coal-fired and many new natural gas power plants must capture and store over 90% of their carbon emissions by the 2030s—or shut down by 2040. It’s a costly mandate, resting on shaky legal and technical foundations. Americans would be fortunate to have it repealed. President Biden issued his Clean Power Plan 2.0 after the Supreme Court ruled in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency that President Obama’s Clean Power Plan 1.0 exceeded the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) statutory authority. The Court’s...

New York State has officially ordained the destruction of its electricity system and its economy with a mad dash to energy utopia, as prescribed by a 2019 statute called the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (Climate Act). The Climate Act mandates a completely unachievable 70% of electricity generation from “renewables” by 2030, with even more draconian mandates following in quick succession thereafter. New York City has piled on with its own fantasy energy statute called Local Law 97, mandating, among other things, forced conversion to electric heat by 2030 of most residential buildings over 25,000 square feet. A so-called...

On Thursday (May 22) the House of Representatives passed, by a narrow margin of 215-214, what is referred to as the “Big Beautiful Bill” — a massive compendium of taxing and spending measures that can now seek to avoid the filibuster in the Senate on grounds of being a “budget reconciliation.” The BBB is well over a thousand pages long (go here for full text), and covers a huge range of subjects. Most summaries of the BBB that I have seen never get to the important subject of subsidies for so-called “green” energy — wind turbines, solar arrays, grid-scale batteries,...

Home | Politics Tags: trump | nuclear | license Trump Seeks to Fast-Track Nuclear Licenses, Overhaul Regulatory Agency Trump Seeks to Fast-Track Nuclear Licenses, Overhaul Regulatory Agency (AP) Friday, 23 May 2025 02:57 PM EDT Comment| Print| A A President Donald Trump ordered the nation's independent nuclear regulatory commission to cut down on regulations and fast-track new licenses for reactors and power plants on Friday, seeking to shrink a multi-year process down to 18 months. The requirement was part of a batch of executive orders signed by Trump on Friday that aim to boost U.S. nuclear energy production amid a...

Over at the New York Times today, print edition, there is a big front page article documenting how their side is losing the latest battle in the climate wars. The headline is “U.S. Embraces Climate Denial In Science Cuts.” (online headline somewhat different). Also in the Times today (online version) is a feature called “Quote of the Day.” Today’s “quote of the day,” as selected by the Times, is taken from the “climate denial” article just previously linked. Here it is: “It’s as if we’re in the Dark Ages.”This quote is attributed to one Rachel Cleetus, identified as senior policy...

After four years of energy chaos, President Trump is rebuilding America’s strength by unleashing domestic production and reversing Biden’s global strategic blunders. When Donald J. Trump returned to the White House on January 20, 2025, he inherited a shattered energy policy—and a nation paying the price for four years of willful decline. The American energy sector, which had once been the envy of the world, was left throttled by bureaucracy, sabotaged by ideology, and entangled in a geopolitical trap of our own making. The good news? The war on American energy is over. The bad news? The damage is already...