British Climate Activist Responds To Ponton's UK Wind Power "Reality Check"

April 06, 2023 Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian

Having read Bill Ponton’s very clear “reality check” on the UK’s Net Zero project, you are probably wondering, what are the counter-arguments advanced by the supporters of Net Zero?

After all, the Net Zero thing appears to have near-unanimous support in the UK. There is no significant political party in that country that advocates policies dissenting from the Net Zero program, unless you count the UK Independence Party, which at the moment holds zero seats in a House of Commons of 650 members. The currently-governing Conservative Party is fully on board with the Net Zero program, with the partial exception of a small group of about 50 MPs (out of 355 Tories in the Commons) claiming to be “studying” the issue; and all the various parties to the left of the Conservatives advocate even more extreme, immediate and forceful measures to reduce carbon emissions than those that the Conservatives are pursuing.

So surely there must exist somewhere a lucid explanation of how this Net Zero thing makes sense and how it can work.

A few days ago on GBNews a Conservative MP named Jacob Rees-Mogg conducted an interview with a young lady named Phoebe Plummer. Mr. Rees-Mogg is a somewhat prominent Conservative MP known for having expressed mildly skeptical views about the climate. Rees-Mogg is not a current member of the Cabinet, and thus is technically what is known as a “back bencher,” although he has held cabinet positions in the past. Ms. Plummer is the spokeswoman for the climate activist group known as Just Stop Oil, and is perhaps best known for being one of the protesters who damaged the Van Gogh painting “Sunflowers” in the UK’s National Gallery back in October 2022. The interview resulted in a video of about ten minutes long that is embedded below (if I have done it right). In the interview, Ms.Plummer states the rationale, if you want to call it that, for her position.

 

For those who would rather read than watch a video, I have transcribed below some choice quotes.

Rees-Mogg begins the interview by asking Ms. Plummer how she can reconcile her demand for an immediate halt to carbon emissions with the desire of people to “lead comfortable lives.” The response:

I wonder why you think it’s incompatible to help people with the cost of living crisis and switch to renewables, which are nine times cheaper than fossil fuels. Can you name me one of your viewers who is suffering the consequences of the energy crisis who doesn’t want their energy bills to be nine times cheaper right now?

Rees-Mogg interjects to ask how Plummer proposes to deal with the intermittency issue, where the sun and wind don’t work when it is dark or the wind is calm. Plummer’s answer:

Well, why are we inventing renewable technology? The largest solar farm in the UK was built in six weeks. It takes up to 28 years for any oil to come out of the ground in the North Sea. . . . We already have the capacity to provide so much of our energy from renewables, without any technology needed for storage solutions.

As the word avalanche continues, Rees-Mogg tries a somewhat desperate “But where is this coming from?”, noting that in the depth of the winter when renewables failed, Britain was relying on a combination imports from the EU, coal, and natural gas. Plummer:

Frankly I’m not a scientist. What I’m doing is listening to what all the experts are saying. We’re living in this insane world where the experts aren’t being listened to. The United Nations has called for no new oil and gas. The International Energy Agency has said that we can have no new oil and gas. The IPCC Report, the largest global report on the climate crisis, have all said we can have no new oil and gas. How many more experts need to say it?

Rees-Mogg tries asking what Plummer proposes to do for transport, and how to get goods into supermarkets. Some of the answer:

I’m looking at the world, and we’re living with the effects of the climate crisis today. Right now, people are dying. Children are starving. Families are fleeing their homes. And it’s preventable. We have the solutions.

And on and on. Rees-Mogg asks how to keep up the food supply without fossil fuels and fertilizers derived from them. Plummer:

You know what’s essential for the food supply? Tackling the climate crisis. This year we lost a third of our wheat crop, half of our potato crops. And it’s only going to get worse. We’re heading towards a future where people are going to be fighting over the last loaves of bread. . . . How do you expect to feed the world when our crops are destroyed by droughts, floods, wildfires, storms. .

Those quotes cover about a third of the interview, but the rest is of the same intellectual level, if you want to call it that. Watch the whole thing if you have the patience. Plummer’s spiel is some combination of appeals to authority and fear, with approximately zero understanding of how the world actually works.

I found the video at Paul Homewood’s site Not A Lot Of People Know That. Homewood titles his post “Phoebe Plummer, Spoilt Brat.” Homewood also links to a Daily Mail article of October 10, 2022 for some specifics on Plummer’s educational background:

[Plummer] went to [45,000 pound/yr] St. Mary’s School in Ascot which also taught Prince Edward’s daughter Lady Louise, plus the Duke of Kent’s grandchildren Marina and Amelia and Monaco’s Princess Caroline. Plummer went on to 30,000 pound/yr Mander Portman Woodward College in Kensington, London, named “spoilt brat central” by Vice Magazine in 2006.

Sadly, I think that Ms. Plummer’s statements are fairly representative of the arguments put forward in favor of fossil fuel suppression, at least on the few occasions when the advocates of such policy are pressed to support their views. If anyone is aware of a more coherent explanation of how fossil fuel suppression by Western countries makes any sense, I’d be interested to see it.

Goodnight, Poor Harvard!

December 16, 2022 Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian 

Yesterday I got two emails from Harvard University, as I presume all other Harvard alumni also did. There’s big news: the Presidential Search Committee has announced who will become the next President of the University. It’s Claudine Gay, currently Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the largest constituent piece of the institution. She will become President on July 1, 2023, when current President Larry Bacow steps down (after only five years). Have I heard of this person before? More on that in a bit.

But first some of the gushing praise from the official University publicity:

Claudine is a remarkable leader who is profoundly devoted to sustaining and enhancing Harvard’s academic excellence, to championing both the value and the values of higher education and research, to expanding opportunity, and to strengthening Harvard as a fount of ideas and a force for good in the world. . . . As her many admirers know, Claudine consults widely; she listens attentively; she thinks rigorously and imaginatively; she invites collaboration and resists complacency; and she acts with conviction and purpose. . . . Claudine’s own scholarship and teaching have focused on aspects of democracy—political participation, voting behavior, public opinion, and the interplay of race, ethnicity, and politics in America.

And that’s barely a tenth of it. I’m sorry I can’t give you a link to the whole thing; but then, I certainly would not recommend wasting your time reading it.

But where have I come across this name before? Somehow I remembered seeing it on Instapundit, and with a quick search there I find this brief post from April 17, 2022. The link goes to a Substack article by a guy named Chris Brunet, formerly of the Daily Caller, who has gone out on his own at Substack under the name Karlstack. Brunet apparently makes a specialty of exposing corruption in academia, and he is all over the case of Ms. Gay. His April 17, 2022 post has the title “The Curious Case of Claudine Gay.”

The subheading is “She is the common thread in the Epstein, Weinstein, Dominguez, Enos, and Fryer scandals.” That’s quite the list! Is there anything to this?

Before getting to the details of some of those, we should take note of what Gay has been mainly known for during her time in the Harvard administrative bureaucracy, and that is “racial justice initiatives.” For example, there is this article from Harvard Magazine, August 20, 2020, with the title “Claudine Gay Announces Racial-Justice Initiatives.” Brief excerpt:

Claudine Gay, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), announced a series of initiatives to address racial and ethnic equality—including faculty appointments and the addition of an associate dean of diversity, inclusion, and belonging.  “This moment offers a profound opportunity for institutional change that should not and cannot be squandered,” Gay wrote in an email to the campus community. “It is up to us to ensure that the pain expressed, problems identified, and solutions suggested set us on a path for long-term change.” On the academic side, Gay announced a reactivation of the “cluster hire” in ethnicity, indigeneity, and migration that originally launched in October 2019—part of FAS’s response to intense student interest in, and pressure for, teaching and learning in ethnic studies.

It goes on and on from there. Various pieces I am reading yesterday and today also indicate that Ms. Gay’s scholarship, such as it is, focuses on the areas of Critical Race Theory and Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging. No surprise there.

So let’s now consider the case of Ryan Enos, including the role of Ms. Gay in same. Mr. Enos was a recently-tenured young professor at Harvard when in 2018 an anonymous whistleblower (with identity protected under a federal statute) submitted a complaint to Harvard accusing him of fabricating his data for his most important works. Four years later, in early 2022, the whistleblower report was leaked to Brunet, who broke the story in this March 2022 post with the title “EXCLUSIVE: Leaked Report Shows Harvard Professor Fabricated Data.” Brunet provides this link to the whistleblower report, but when I go there I find that it is behind paywall, and on top of that is supposedly “archived,” such that it will take 24-48 hours to retrieve it. So I will go with Mr. Brunet’s description of the contents.

From Brunet’s description, a main focus of the whistleblower complaint was an Enos paper that appeared in 2016 in the American Journal of Political Science, with the title “What the demolition of public housing teaches us about the impact of racial threat on political behavior.” In the paper Enos advanced what he called the “racial threat theory.” From Brunet’s description:

[The ‘racial threat theory’] is closely related to "critical race theory," and attempts to quantify the degree to which white people feel threatened by minorities. To study this, Enos examined the demolition of public housing project in Chicago in the early 2000's and concludes that it resulted in white people voting less conservatively.

But the whistleblower points out several problems with Enos’s analysis, of which this is the main one:

The main problem with his analysis — among several problems — is that  800+ precincts in Chicago are missing from the data, with no justification given. It is possible/probable that Enos deleted this data by hand.  Many of these deleted precincts are in Republican leaning areas, meaning Enos' conclusions about voting patterns would likely not hold if they had they not been deleted.

And there’s a comparable problem of alleged data falsification in another one of Enos’s articles. So the complaint is facially plausible, and not difficult to investigate. What happened to it? From Brunet’s April 2022 piece:

Rather than investigate this claim, Claudine Gay had the Harvard Committee on Professional Conduct write a dismissal letter with the justification that CPC is not the appropriate unit to investigate, so the report is dismissed.

“Not the appropriate unit to investigate”? In an October 21, 2022 post Brunet comes up with two rather damning things. One is a screenshot of the newly-leaked text of the October 26, 2018 letter from Peter Marsden of Harvard’s Standing Committee on Professional Conduct of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (i.e., Marsden was a subordinate of Gay) to the whistleblower. This is the letter that informed the whistleblower of the dismissal of the complaint. The letter states that the SCPC declines to investigate the allegations of Enos’s misconduct on the grounds that they “do not fall within the purview of the Standing Committee on Professional Conduct.” The second item presented by Brunet is a screenshot of the write-up from the Harvard FAS website describing the function of the SCPC as including “hand[ing] allegations of research misconduct involving FAS investigators.”

Finally, Brunet points out that, upon dismissing the whistleblower complaint, the SCPC did not refer the complaint to any other body that may have had appropriate “purview.” The matter was simply dropped. Brunet concludes (in the October 21 post):

The smoking gun has been leaked. Claudine Gay & Ryan Enos are toast.

I guess he didn’t get that one right. As we now know, less than two months later, Claudine Gay has just been named the next President of Harvard. As far as I can determine, Enos continues in his cushy job as tenured professor, without a blemish on his record.

Let us next consider the case of Harvard Professor Roland Fryer. In 2007 Fryer at age 30 became the youngest African American (and second youngest person) to ever get tenure at Harvard. He was a young superstar, and quickly came to run a large research operation. Brown University economics professor Glenn Loury describes Fryer this.way in a March 2022 Substack post:

Roland Fryer is the most gifted economist of his generation. Not the most gifted black economist of his generation, the most gifted economist of his generation. Period. He was tenured at Harvard at the age of 30, he was awarded the American Economics Association’s John Bates Clark Medal, he received a MacArthur “Genius” grant, his publications appeared in some of the most distinguished journals in the field, and his scholarship was regularly covered in the mainstream media.

Unfortunately, some of Fryer’s research started to reach the “wrong” results. Most famously, in 2016 Fryer published a paper titled “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force.” Here is the main conclusion from the abstract of that paper:

On the most extreme use of force – officer-involved shootings – we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account.

In other words, Fryer’s research was becoming threatening to the racial justice crowd at Harvard, not the least to Claudine Gay.

In 2017 Fryer fired a long-time personal assistant (that is, a secretary rather than a researcher). She then brought allegations of sexual misconduct against Fryer, which consisted of some dozens of statements allegedly made by Fryer over the course of several years, either orally or in text messages, that the complainant found offensive. The allegations went before a Harvard administrative body called the Office for Dispute Resolution, or ODR.

At the end of 2018 ODR issued a 71 page Report on the matter. That ODR Report then became the subject of a long piece in the New York Times on December 14, 2018, and of an equally detailed piece by Stuart Taylor at RealClearInvestigations on January 29, 2019. It is fair to say that the Times piece spins the allegations in a way to be as unfavorable to Fryer as possible, while Taylor is highly critical of the Times and supportive of Fryer.

But whichever take you may have, nothing about these allegations was remotely in the category of, say, a Jeffrey Epstein or a Harvey Weinstein. As Taylor notes, “Fryer . . . has never been accused of making a pass at a subordinate or asking for sex.” Rather, the allegations related to some mild sexual banter or off-color jokes. Read the Taylor piece for much more detail. My favorite of the collection, fairly representative of the whole, is an alleged statement by Fryer that “I learned my negotiating skills trying to get laid in high school.”

Harvard’s ODR dismissed all but six of the allegations against Fryer as either not being credible that they actually occurred, or not offensive. As punishment for the six allegations found credible, ODR recommended that Fryer be required to attend mandatory sensitivity training.

But then ODR’s recommendation went before a committee of Harvard’s highest-ranking administrators for review. Until earlier this year, none of the names of the members of that committee had been made public. But the result of that review was that the punishment for Fryer was changed rather drastically. Instead of some sensitivity training, here’s what he got: two years’ full suspension without pay; his research lab closed; and all his research projects stopped.

In March 2022 film-maker Rob Montz released a documentary about the Fryer affair at Harvard with the title “Harvard Canceled Its Best Black Professor. Why?” Montz’s documentary, which is only 25 minutes long, was posted at Bari Weiss’s Substack and can be viewed here. Most important for current purposes is that Montz was able to identify two members of the committee that changed Fryer’s punishment from some sensitivity training to effective execution. One of them was Claudine Gay. Montz’s comment (quoted by Brunet here):

Roland’s work represents a mortal threat to some of the most powerful black people at Harvard. Consider Claudine Gay, the daughter of an engineer who went from Exeter, to Stanford, to Harvard, She’s a silky-smooth corporate operator… [her] career and reputation were directly threatened by Roland’s work. [She] got to determine Roland’s punishment. Claudine Gay asked the president of the school to revoke Roland’s tenure. The president declined.

Brunet comments:

This documentary revealed that Harvard's own Title IX office dictated a punishment of “workplace sensitivity training” for Fryer, but Gay overruled them and instead set out to destroy Fryer's career. . . . Gay applied differential treatment to Fryer compared to Enos. Fryer was immediately investigated and aggressively sanctioned, while Enos is still not being investigated four years after credible allegations of falsification and fabrication were made known to Harvard officials, with plenty of evidence, including code to verify them.

The picture emerges of Gay as the enforcer-in-chief of wokist orthodoxy at Harvard. I guess that’s the main qualification for the presidency today.

Oh, and did I mention Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein? They have their own Harvard-related scandals, and Claudine Gay is in the middle of both of them as well. Brunet treats both in this April 2022 post. Epstein, you may recall, was a large donor to Harvard, and in return got himself an office and a telephone at the university. That occurred on the watch of Gay’s predecessor as Dean of FAS, one Michael Smith. Gay’s role was to whitewash the whole thing. Brunet comments:

Claudine Gay allowed Michael Smith to get away scot-free in the Harvard-Epstein ties investigation — she came in and nicely whitewashed it all away. Claudine Gay has Epstein coverup stink on her, and Michael Smith has major Epstein stink on him.

In the Weinstein matter, a Harvard Law professor named Ronald Sullivan for some time served on Weinstein’s defense team. That is, until students complained, and Gay weighed in. (Note that Sullivan, a law professor, was not under Gay’s purview as Dean of FAS.). The Harvard Crimson headline in February 2019 was “FAS Dean Claudine Gay Calls Sullivan’s Response To Student Concerns ‘Insufficient.’”

By the way, Sullivan has also represented Fryer in his ordeal with Harvard. And he is also black. At Claudine Gay’s Harvard, there are the right kind of blacks, and the wrong kind. The wrong kind will be taught to know their place.

The head of the search committee that has made this disastrous decision is one Penny Pritzker. You may recognize her as Obama’s Commerce Secretary, Finance Chair of Obama’s campaigns, and sister of the current Illinois governor. Oh, and also as someone who made a big piece of her fortune selling your confidential personal data without your permission (i.e., TransUnion Credit Bureau).

How The Left Views Administrative Law: A Highlight From The Federalist Society Convention

November 12, 2022/ Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian

You may have seen that the Federalist Society has been holding its annual convention in Washington. I was there on Thursday and Friday. They have recorded all the presentations. If you want to watch some, go to this link and see what interests you.

There was not a lot of moaning about the election results. Rather, the focus was on high-minded issues, mostly of constitutional and administrative law.

I have selected a highlight that you may find interesting. One of the lunchtime panels on Thursday was titled “Render Law Unto Congress and Execution Unto the Executive: The Supreme Court Rebalances Constitutional Power.” Here is the description of the subject of the panel:

The Roberts Court is recasting the administrative state according to its view of the separation of powers. It is giving the President more authority to fire his subordinates and creating a hierarchical executive where the President and his principal officers have more authority over appointments and decision making. It is forcing the legislature to speak clearly when it wants to vest agencies with major powers and expressing interest in reinvigorating limits on some delegations of legislative power. It is strengthening the judiciary’s interpretative role, declining to give as much deference to regulatory interpretations by agencies. Is its view coherent and sound? Should the Court square its vision with a modern government that was formed on different principles? If so, how?

The full video of the panel, 1:23:30 in length, can be found at this link. The panel featured four speakers (Nicholas Parrillo of the Yale Law School, Aditya Bamzai of the Virginia Law School, Thomas Griffith, formerly Judge of the DC Circuit, and Sally Katzen of NYU Law School) describing and debating the merits of recent Supreme Court cases that have articulated something called the Major Questions Doctrine as a limit on administrative agency power to promulgate regulations of sweeping import without clear statutory basis. The most important of the cases under discussion was West Virginia v. EPA, the June 30 Supreme Court decision that held that EPA’s Clean Power Plan — a mechanism to shut down all generation of electricity using fossil fuels — exceeded the agency’s authority under the Clean Air Act.

As is typical on Federalist Society panels, the majority were conservative scholars or judges, who thus were generally supportive of the Court’s approach, although offering a variety of perspectives. However, the fourth panelist, in this case Ms. Katzen of NYU, was a die-hard left-winger. It fell to Ms. Katzen to defend the position that EPA was well within its powers under the CAA to promulgate a regulation that would force the closure of all coal power plants in a short period of time, followed in short order by all natural gas power plants over the next decade or so.

In her opening remarks (beginning about the 31 minute mark of the video at the link) Ms. Katzen described Congress as having become a completely dysfunctional institution that has been paralyzed by partisanship and can barely pass a spending bill to keep the government operating, let alone address any serious policy issue with major legislation. Meanwhile, she noted that since adoption of the Constitution the country had become huge, wealthy, and enormously complex. Thus Congress has seen fit to delegate the problems of dealing with the great complexities to specialists and experts in various fields. But now, said Ms. Katzen, her voice dripping with scorn, the Supreme Court has decreed that only the dysfunctional Congress can address the most critical issues facing us. She was particularly critical of the Court having struck down the Clean Power Plan, which in her view was well within the authority granted to EPA under the CAA, as well as being a subject that could only properly be dealt with by people with the necessary expertise, such as the bureaucrats at EPA.

Before reading on, you might consider whether those arguments appear persuasive to you.

After the panelists’ remarks, there was a period for questions from the audience. I managed to maneuver myself into a position to get to the microphone and ask the first question. I’m going to transcribe my question and Ms. Katzen’s response. This begins at 1:04:24 of the video:

Question: Thank you. My name is Francis Menton. My affiliation is Manhattan Contrarian. That’s my blog; many people here may read it. So out there we have the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Air Act basically gives the EPA the authority to regulate “pollutants.” And then a decade or so ago the EPA decided that carbon dioxide was a pollutant. And I guess this question is mainly for Professor Katzen. So carbon dioxide has been declared a pollutant by the EPA. They’re an “expert.” 

Does that mean, could the EPA then, on its own authority, say, well, airplanes all generate carbon dioxide, we hereby say they must be all grounded? Oh, and industry must be ended, that generates carbon dioxide. And 80% of our electricity generation is fossil fuel, generates carbon dioxide. And of course all automobiles, so you can’t drive them any more. Can the EPA do that? Or does that go beyond what they’ve been authorized to do? And if it goes beyond, what is the limiting principle? Do you have one, or are you completely fine with that if EPA does that?

Professor Katzen: I’m not sure I completely followed because there’s a lot of distracting noise out there. But the Congress clearly gave the EPA authority to specify those pollutants that are dangerous and should be regulated, and to set limits for them based on that which is necessary to protect the public health, with an adequate margin of safety and all that. There are standards to be applied. They can’t just say “no cars.” I don’t think that would survive any kind of judicial review.

Me: What’s the standard?

Professor Katzen: (Several seconds delay) The standard as set forth in the Clean Air Act is the scientific basis for levels to be set. That’s not — I’m not an environmental lawyer, and maybe there are others here who could provide the exact terminology. But the EPA is not able to and does not do whatever it has a whim to do when it wakes up in the morning. It bases it normally through rule-making through notice and comment, cost/benefit analysis, scientific determinations, that are subject to the critique and then response by the agency. 

You may not be happy with the answer any more than I was not happy when they stayed the Clean Power Plan in the first place, even though it had not yet gone through the courts. It was an extreme action taken to shut down rule-making in this area. And I thought that was unfortunate that we were never able to develop the kind of record that would enable sensible people to see if the agency was acting within its authority as granted by Congress. 

I am not saying that the organic statute or the authorizing statute is meaningless. It survives. But if it is granted authority, then the agency should be able to use it, even if the pollutant is something that they didn’t think of when they passed the statute, or weren’t aware of when they passed the statute. Any more than under the FCC Act, it was radio, that was in 1933, it was radio, but it was interpreted to mean television. It wasn’t a big step.

It’s too bad this wasn’t a cross examination, because Professor Katzen was trapped, and it would have been fun to keep pressing. The next obvious question would have been:  

“My question was, what’s the limiting principle? You haven’t answered. Please state the limiting principle. Do you have one or not?”

So Professor Katzen was completely outraged that the Supreme Court had struck down the Clean Power Plan (“it was an extreme action taken to shut down rule-making in this area”). Yet she couldn’t come up with any reason why, if EPA could force the shut down of all fossil fuel burning power plants, it could not also ban all burning of fossil fuels for airplanes, cars, industry, agriculture, home heat, etc. She flatly asserted “there are standards” without being able to specify any of them. (There are no meaningful standards in the statute that would constrain EPA in these circumstances, if the courts approved the Clean Power Plan.). 

The best she came up with was “notice and comment rule-making,” which is not a standard, but rather a procedure. It can be a time-consuming and burdensome procedure, and may generate thousands or even millions of comments, but at the end of that the EPA can just go ahead and implement the rule it started with and planned to implement all along. When Professor Katzen says that “EPA is not able to and does not do whatever it has a whim to do when it wakes up in the morning,” she is just plain wrong.

If you are wondering what the Clean Air Act may actually have to say on this subject, I would point out that the Act is lengthy and nearly incomprehensible. However, in the West Virginia litigation EPA had to come up with something in the CAA to point to as its authority for promulgating the Clean Power Plan, and the best it could do was Section 111(d) of the Act. Here is the text of that section:

(d) Standards of performance for existing sources; remaining useful life of source

(1) The Administrator shall prescribe regulations which shall establish a procedure similar to that provided by section 7410 of this title under which each State shall submit to the Administrator a plan which (A) establishes standards of performance for any existing source for any air pollutant (i) for which air quality criteria have not been issued or which is not included on a list published under section 7408(a) of this title or emitted from a source category which is regulated under section 7412 of this title but (ii) to which a standard of performance under this section would apply if such existing source were a new source, and (B) provides for the implementation and enforcement of such standards of performance. Regulations of the Administrator under this paragraph shall permit the State in applying a standard of performance to any particular source under a plan submitted under this paragraph to take into consideration, among other factors, the remaining useful life of the existing source to which such standard applies.

(2)The Administrator shall have the same authority—

(A) to prescribe a plan for a State in cases where the State fails to submit a satisfactory plan as he would have under section 7410(c) of this title in the case of failure to submit an implementation plan, and

(B) to enforce the provisions of such plan in cases where the State fails to enforce them as he would have under sections 7413 and 7414 of this title with respect to an implementation plan.

In promulgating a standard of performance under a plan prescribed under this paragraph, the Administrator shall take into consideration, among other factors, remaining useful lives of the sources in the category of sources to which such standard applies.

Make of all that mumbo jumbo what you will. What is certainly not there is any limiting principle or standard that constrains what EPA may do to effectively ban use of fossil fuel energy in all sectors, once it is accepted that EPA can regulate CO2 as a “pollutant.” Instead what is found in that section is blanket authority to EPA to set “standards of performance.” And in the Clean Power Plan EPA has set those “standards” in a way to make all use of fossil fuels in electricity generation non-compliant over time. If the courts allowed EPA to do that under this section, there would be nothing to stop it, if it wanted, from setting “standards” to make fossil fuels non-compliant in other sectors.

Here’s the bottom line: Under a statute that gives EPA general authority to set “standards of performance” with respect to “pollutants,” the progressives (including the liberal wing of the Supreme Court) are totally OK with allowing EPA to declare CO2 a “pollutant” 40 years after the statute was enacted, and then set “standards of performance” to ban CO2 and shut down the entire economy one sector at a time. Fortunately, with our current Supreme Court, we’ll get to see how this plays out in places like Germany and the UK before our federal government can impose it on all of us by executive fiat.

 

 

Great Idea For U.S. Energy Policy: Let's Follow The Example Of Germany!

Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian

As readers here well know, Germany has long sought the mantle of world leader in the march to save the planet by eliminating fossil fuels from the production of energy. This has been the strategy: induce, via large government subsidies and tax credits, the construction of vast amounts of wind turbines and solar panels to generate electricity; and as more of those come online, gradually phase out facilities that use fossil fuels, and also phase out nuclear.

Unfortunately, the Germans have been so blinded by their religious fervor to save the planet that nobody bothered to figure out how much energy storage would be needed to back up these intermittent technologies and keep the grid functioning 24/365 in the absence of fossil fuels and nuclear. Now Germany has an excess of wind and solar facilities that, however, are incapable of providing reliable power on their own; and it has inadequate back-up other than natural gas from Russia. Thus Germany is facing an imminent energy disaster.

Meanwhile, back here in the U.S., the word is that the Senate Democrats have finally gotten their black sheep Joe Manchin on board with a big “green energy” bill to take the U.S. to its own energy nirvana via a big reduction in carbon emissions. And how will that be done? Basically, we’re now going to follow the strategy of Germany! Lots and lots of tax credits and subsidies to build more and more wind turbines and solar panels, without any serious consideration of what will be needed in the way of storage to provide back-up for the intermittency and build a fossil-fuel-free grid. Is anybody around here paying attention to what is going on in the world?

Let’s check out the latest news from Germany on the energy front. On Wednesday, July 27, the Guardian reported that Russia had reduced the flow of natural gas to Germany via the Nord Stream pipeline to 20% of capacity. It’s still July, and we’re several months from heating season, but Germany is rapidly realizing that its energy jig is up. Just one day later, on July 28, the Guardian had another article reporting that the energy rationing in Germany has already begun:

Cities in Germany are switching off spotlights on public monuments, turning off fountains, and imposing cold showers on municipal swimming pools and sports halls, as the country races to reduce its energy consumption in the face of a looming Russian gas crisis.

Meanwhile, Germany in June adopted an “energy emergency plan” that involves jacking up consumer prices to force less usage:

[A]n energy emergency plan initiated in June enables utility firms to pass on high gas prices to customers. . . . On Thursday, Germany’s government confirmed that a planned gas surcharge on customers could be much higher than previously expected, to save energy companies from going bankrupt in the coming months.

And Spiked on July 27 reports on various other energy rationing measures that Germany is adopting, well in advance of peak energy usage in the winter:

Germany is already having to make drastic cutbacks to energy use. Town councils are dimming or turning off street lights and even traffic lights. Large landlords and housing associations have started turning down the heating on their residents and rationing their hot water. Some local authorities are considering setting up ‘warm rooms’ for elderly people to gather in the winter.

But hang on a second. After more than a decade of a crash program to build wind turbines and solar panels, doesn’t Germany have more than enough of them to supply all of the electricity it could ever possibly use? You would think so, but unfortunately it doesn’t work that way. According to the U.S. Energy Information Agency, in 2020 (latest year given) Germany used 500,000 GWh of electricity, which would mean that its average usage (divide by 8760) was about 57 GW. 

Its peak usage (according to Montel) is about 100 GW. So if it had dispatchable generation resources (fossil fuel, nuclear, hydro) of about 120 GW, Germany should have a more than sufficient 20% margin and plenty of electricity. Instead Germany has vastly more generation capacity, 248 GW (again from the U.S. EIA for 2020). Of that, 54 GW is solar and 62 GW is wind, a total of 116 GW between those two, well more than its entire peak usage, and more than double average usage. But you can’t count on any of it when you need it. The small amount of nuclear (8 GW) is on the way out. So they can’t get rid of the natural gas as backup, and with fracking banned in their own country and also throughout Western Europe, they are left completely dependent on natural gas from Russia.

The price to German households for electricity at the end of 2021 stood at an average of 32.16 cent per KWh, which is before any further recent increases. That is about triple the average U.S. consumer electricity price. For that you get shortages and rationing.

So what is the U.S. energy strategy going to be under the new Senate bill just negotiatied by Manchin and Majority Leader Schumer? The answer is, it’s basically the same as the German strategy. In a few words, massive subsidies and tax breaks to incentivize the construction of vast amounts of wind turbines and solar panels. From E&E Daily, July 28:

Huge win for clean energy. . . . Clean energy tax credits are the centerpiece. Under the deal, existing renewable credits would be extended. After 2025, they would become technology neutral and based on greenhouse gas emissions reductions.

Is there any deeper thinking behind this than just that wind and solar are “clean” so we should build more of them? Doesn’t look like it. So give us a few years of this, and we’ll be right where Germany is: vast excess capacity of wind and solar panels, none of which is there when you need it, and electricity rates tripled to pay for the redundant excess capacity and subsidies to the people who built it. At least so far we have our own natural gas for the backup, but they’re trying to shut that down too.

 

A Look At The Pipeline For Future "Diverse" Tech Workers, Professionals And Corporate Executives

September 11, 2021/ Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian

As we have seen, corporate American has now fully bought in to the mantra that “any racial disparities are the result of racist policies.” See Friday’s post focusing on Google for one example of a company whose “antiracist” training materials use just that language. Essentially every major institution in the country — corporations, professional firms, universities, you name it — is on a mission to get the percentage of minorities in high-paying technical, professional and executive positions up to the percentage that those minorities represent of the population as a whole. That goal particularly applies to African Americans.

Yet despite all the pledges and commitments, change occurs at a glacial pace. As Friday’s post reported, the likes of Googe and Facebook, despite seemingly having adopted “diversity and inclusion” as the single most important focus of their operations, have only moved the ratios of black “tech” workers and executives by about a percentage point or two over eight years of reporting data. At Apple, the percentage of black “tech” workers has actually gone down by 2% since 2016. In my own field of major law firms, some fifty years of affirmative action have only brought the percentage of black partners overall to about 2-3%.

Perhaps there is a problem that the pipeline is just not producing a sufficient pool of potential candidates for all major institutions to hire 13% blacks into all high-ranking positions at the same time. The pipeline I’m talking about is the nation’s K-12 schools. Among all of our societal institutions, those K-12 schools are the ones most firmly in the control of the progressive left. Whether it be the administrators, the teachers unions, or the teachers themselves, these are the people who most constantly vociferously accuse the rest of us of being “racists” and “white supremacists.” (Note that the term “white supremacist,” as used by the progressive left, is by no means limited to people of white ethnicity, as California gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder has recently learned.). Surely then, of all institutions, the the very holy and pious K-12 schools have fixed racism by now.

To get an idea how the K-12 schools are doing in fixing racism, let’s look at some data from what’s called the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Since many readers may be unfamiliar with NAEP, let me give some background. NAEP is a Congressionally-sponsored project, administered by the federal Department of Education. The NAEP people call themselves the “nation’s report card.” Supposedly, the goal is to get an idea whether schools in a city or state, or in the nation as a whole, are performing better or worse over time. These are national tests given every two years to a sample of kids in the fourth and eighth grades. The sample is relatively small (e.g., only about 3000 in New York State). The test is not “high-stakes”: no results are reported to individual students, and no life consequences, such as admission to selective schools, depend on the outcome.

NAEP has a level they call “proficient,” which they define as “demonstrat[ing] solid academic performance and competency over challenging subject matter.” If that definition seems unspecific, it may help to learn that when you look at their data nationwide, roughly half the test takers on any given test score at or above the “proficient” level. In other words, although they don’t call it that, it is roughly the mean. For each test administration, results are reported in two categories, math and reading.

Most of the NAEP data is reported only on a state level. However, beginning in 2001 they started specifically testing certain large urban districts in a program called the “Trial Urban District Assessment” or TUDA. The TUDA program started with only 6 districts, but gradually has expanded until it reached 27 in the 2017 and 2019 administrations of the NAEP tests. (The 2021 results have not yet been released.). The cities that are now part of the TUDA include many to most of the large and troubled urban school districts in the country. Among the cities included are New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore, Washington DC, Atlanta, Memphis and Houston.

It turns out that if you dig deep enough through the NAEP website, you can find data for what percentage of the black students scored at or above the “proficient” level in each of these districts and for each of math and reading. So let’s collect some of those data. Remember that overall approximately 50% of the test takers score at or above the “proficient” level. The following data are for eighth grade students designated by NAEP itself as “black,” in the most recent (2019) administration of the test

• New York City: 14% proficient in math (compared to 46% for whites); 14% proficient in reading (again compared to 46% for whites).  
• Los Angeles: 8% proficient in math (compared to 37% for whites); 9% proficient in reading (compared to 41% for whites). 
• Chicago: 15% proficient in math (compared to 56% for whites); 16% proficient in reading (compared to 55% for whites). 
• Detroit: 4% proficient in math (no figure given for whites, presumably because there aren’t enough whites in the school system to get a meaningful result); 5% proficient in reading (again, no figure given for whites) 
• Cleveland: 4% proficient in math (compared to 25% for whites); 10% proficient in reading (compared to 23% for whites). 
• Baltimore: 6% proficient in math (compared to 32% for whites); 10% proficient in reading (compared to 48% for whites).

You get the picture. Note that these are not the results of IQ or “intelligence” tests, but rather are tests of actual learning or achievement. Really, the scores are as much a measure of the success (or failure) of the schools in teaching the kids as they are a measure of the kids themselves.

These are the young people who supposedly will be ready to go to college in 2023, and to come out into starter tech jobs and corporate training programs and law schools in 2027. How many of the 85-96% of them who scored below “proficient” in reading and math in 8th grade are really going turn it around sufficiently to be able to move into these high-end jobs by their early 20s?

The simple truth is that without an education system that produces young black people at an equivalent educational level to young people of other ethnicities, it is never going to be possible for corporate America to get to universal 13% representation of blacks among executives, tech workers, lawyers, doctors, and so forth. As I said in Friday’s post, I would have some sympathy for them if they just had some humility and stopped accusing the rest of us of being racists and white supremacists. For the so-called “educators” in these big-city schools, who run failure factories year after year with no accountability, while fighting any and all potential competition, I have no sympathy at all.