RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/07/is_the_eu_driving_the_first_nails_into_the_green_energy_coffin.html

One of the most obvious effects of the Green Energy movement is that it is profoundly regressive insofar as it returns those nations that embrace it to a pre-modern era. That would be an era that looks pretty in BBC productions but that was, in reality, filthy, disease-ridden, and both very cold and very dark. A recent European Union vote to classify natural gas and nuclear energy as sustainable (i.e., “green”) energy suggests that, having gotten a glimpse into the abyss, pragmatism is beginning to triumph over the mindless “green” ideology that has governed the left for so long.

Germany, which dominates the EU, is also the nation that has made the greatest strides in implementing the “green” agenda. The results of abandoning reliable fossil fuel and replacing it with renewables have been problematic. For some years now, Germany has been facing rolling blackouts and, in 2021, it decided to teach people how to use flowerpots and candles to provide heat during the winter when the electricity is gone:

It’s not just Germany, although it’s been the first and the worst. In early 2021, when a cold snap caused a huge demand for power across Europe, the entire European electrical network almost collapsed. While that specific power outage wasn’t due to problems with renewables, people paying attention to the push to end coal and go to renewables got very worried:

While this event hasn’t been linked to a surge in renewable power, as Europe replaces big coal and nuclear stations with thousands of smaller wind and solar units — just as sectors electrify to reduce emissions — incidents like this will become more frequent.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/07/05/confirmed-again-the-green-agenda-is-taking-us-backward/

All the cool kids say humanity has to abandon fossil fuels and rely on wind and solar for our electricity and battery-operated cars (which remind us of the toys we played with as kids) to get around. It’s the future, they say. So why does it seem more like the past?

Let’s begin with a fascinating “fer instance”: 

“Classic Cars,” says a Motorious headline from late last  month, “Are Greener Than Electric Vehicles.” The story below the headline refers to a study from ​​British insurance company Footman James, which is “refreshing,” says the article’s author, “because it doesn’t talk emotional rage, sticking  instead to the inconvenient facts.”

And what are those facts?

“A classic car notching up the national average of 1,200 miles emits 563kg of CO2 a year. By comparison, a new Volkswagen Golf has a carbon footprint of 6.8 tonnes of CO2 the day it leaves the factory, a figure it would take our average classic 12 years to match.”
“For an electric vehicle, the footprint is even greater. A battery-powered Polestar 2 creates 26 tonnes of CO2 during its production, emissions that would take a typical classic more than 46 years to achieve. By which time, the EV’s cutting-edge lithium-ion battery would have long since lost its ability to hold a charge and been consigned to the nearest recycling facility.”
“Footman James rightly points out that within that 46-year period, the Polestar 2’s battery will need to be replaced, maybe even swapped for a new one twice or more,” writes Steven Symes for Motorious. “And what happens to the battery? Can it really be recycled? The answer for now is no. Meanwhile, the classic car keeps running without contributing significantly to a landfill. But you should feel bad for driving such an awful pollution machine, or so we’re told.”

The narrative says EVs are greener but that’s because the true-believers “just look at tailpipe emissions, behaving as if that’s everything in the equation. They don’t consider pollution generated by the manufacturing process,” says Symes.

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.