Free Republic

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...

When my friend Rebecca in Highland Park, NJ, opened her PSE&G gas and electric bill last month, she almost fell out of her seat: It had tripled. It’s now costing her more than $1,000 a month to keep her modest home running. “It’s been creeping up for months, in spite of the fact that nothing about our house has changed,” she told me. “In years past, it was averaging about $300 a month.” “I don’t know how we’re expected to absorb these new bills,” she posted on Facebook. Her neighbor Felix Urman wondered the same as he ticked off his...

Forced electric load reduction and possible rolling blackouts in Maryland. Electric system in crisis. Got Coal?

Energy poverty is quite literally destroying culture in Great Britain, and it's a fate that all societies pursuing a Net Zero agenda face. Among the reasons why this is so is that wind power blows. iv-gpt-300x250_4" class="gpt-ad ad-90 text-center"> Climate madness on stage:A Handel opera canceled because its single wind turbine generated no power in still weatherPrior to cancellation? SIX blackouts through performance, each causing a 15-min restart delayAnd back-up generators couldn't copeOh, bright green future… pic.twitter.com/nIxTNTO6hj— Bjorn Lomborg (@BjornLomborg) July 4, 2025Perhaps, given that this concert was to feature Handel's music, the Opera House should have chosen to be...

The invaluable Mike Rowe pointed me to this article yesterday. Well, not me, exactly. Mike doesn't know me from Adam, but he shared it online with 7 million other people, and I count myself among them. It's a piece in The New York Times--for him, it was the international version with a different headline--that argues that several decisions by various international courts amount to outlawing the extraction and use of fossil fuels. It's hard to argue with their conclusion because I am not an international lawyer, but let's assume that the claim is true, as it appears to be on...

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...