RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-epa-threatens-to-turn-out-the-lights-electricity-generation-energy-grid-natural-gas-coal-co2-a5ca4d77?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Imagine flipping a light switch and not knowing if the lights will come on. Normally unthinkable. But the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed power-plant rules would destabilize the energy grid, resulting in less-reliable electric service.

The EPA’s aggressive standards require all coal-fired power plants to use a new and still-tricky technology called carbon capture and storage, or CCS, to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions 90% by 2035, or begin co-firing with natural gas. In addition, natural-gas-fired plants must capture 90% of emissions by 2035 using CCS or switch almost entirely to hydrogen by 2038. The only other option for both: shut down.

These nascent technologies simply won’t get the job done in the next few years. CCS is used at only one commercial power plant in North America. The only U.S. coal plant to implement CCS successfully closed in 2020 for economic reasons.

CCS holds great promise, but there are significant operational and economic hurdles to its widespread deployment. The Biden administration recently acknowledged that building and using CCS faces many of the same permitting and regulatory problems plaguing other energy infrastructure

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/15/yes-democrats-are-coming-for-your-favorite-appliances/

Back in January, an official in the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission let slip that the Biden administration was coming after Americans’ gas stoves.

There was an immediate, huge public backlash. In response, Joe Biden and his lackeys took to the media circuit saying the claim was a lie, MAGA-created fake news – the administration had no intention to ban gas stoves. The media fawningly parroted Biden, et al.’s claims that Republicans were lying about gas stoves – take a chill pill, your gas stoves are safe, said the media.

Weeks later, events proved that it was Biden and the Democrats who were lying when, with little attention paid to it by the media, the administration published energy efficiency and emission rules that banned the sale of all but the most expensive gas stoves. And, going further, the Biden administration has allowed cities and states to impose their own bans on gas hook ups and appliances.

If only the White House had stopped there it would have been bad enough, but it didn’t!

In the run up to the gas stove ban, and subsequent to it, the Biden administration has unleased the biggest, most comprehensive, strictest regulatory onslaught ever on home appliances. As the Washington Times documents, “President Biden’s green energy goals have resulted in an array of new efficiency rules for a slew of household appliances,” including microwaves, air purifiers, and even toothbrush chargers. Also among the appliances soon to be regulated out of existence or fundamentally altered are, gas furnaces, air conditioners, lightbulbs, refrigerators, clothes washers, and gasoline- and diesel-powered cars.

How bad will the impact on consumer choice be? Only about 4% of stoves currently on the market would remain for sale under Biden’s new rules. And, the new washing machine regulations would remove 98% of existing top loading machines from the market. Do you like your microwave to have an internal light and a clock? Too bad, because those features use too much energy according to Biden’s “ban ’em-all” cronies at the U.S. Department of Energy. Pick your favorite appliance and watch it disappear from the market under Biden’s new rules.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/16/paper-or-plastic-the-fanatics-tell-us-we-cant-have-either/

The Biden administration and the Democratic regime that rules California and other states are so busy banning things that it’s hard to keep up with what’s allowed, what isn’t and what won’t be tomorrow or next year. Much of the black list is made up of high-profile targets, such as gasoline-powered automobiles, diesel engines, gas stoves and plastic straws. But the prohibitionists work in small ways too, and it all adds up.

Scolds and eco-temperance harpies never rest, their eyes always on the lookout for another modern convenience to outlaw. Having successfully interdicted single-use plastic bags in at least eight states, they’re now aiming for their only reasonable replacements: paper bags.

“Paper can’t be a solution to plastic waste,” says the headline of a recent story posted on Canada’s CTV News site. New Jersey enacted a paper bag ban last year, the first in the country, because, well, that’s just what blue states and cities do now: satisfy the deranged urges of petty tyrants.

The CTV story is as agenda-driven as any NPR article in the U.S. Various “experts,” “researchers” and activists screech and nag about “deforestation and forest degradation,” “increased pressure on the world’s forests” (caused by the plastic bag bans they have demanded), and “a really critical moment” in which “we need to take steps to keep forests standing.” One insisted that consumers have to “rethink and reorient themselves towards a reusable mind frame.”

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/05/10/us-has-had-a-historic-winter-as-all-western-states-have-seen-record-snowfall/

The western US has had an historic winter. From record-breaking cold spells to unprecedented amounts of snow, this has been a memorable cold season – and one that runs counter to the prophecies of the AGW party.

Starting with the cold – and according to data from the warmth-addicted NOAA – the US has set 7 all-time low temperature records so far this year (through April 24) compared to just one heat record, while 321 monthly lows have fallen in April alone (also through April 24) compared to 66 heat records.

Highest April 1st snow cover recorded this year

Regrading snow, in the official books going back to 2001, the largest area ever covered with snow/ice in the western US at the beginning of April so far was 2019’s 1,030,820 sq km, but this year that figure was far exceeded, with satellite imagery showing that more than 1,149-960 sq km of the West was covered with snow and ice on 1 April.

By comparison, the average snowpack in the western US at the end of March is 242,000 square miles.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/12/king-joes-ev-stamp-act-wheres-the-outrage/

Where’s the outrage?” implored Bob Dole in 1996, regarding the lack of Clinton administration accountability on Chinese campaign cash, illegally obtained FBI personnel files, and rushing potentially criminal immigrants through naturalization.

Occasioning the reminiscence: the recent EPA mandate to electrify 67% of vehicles in just nine years.

Why so little fuss over King Joe’s Stamp Act: an outrageous, unjustified, immoral, and economy-wide act of taxation without representation, regulation without delegation, and downright despotism? 

After all, the 1765 enactment under George III helped ignite a revolution. Historians highlight the colonials’ belief that being compelled to employ London-produced, tax-stamped paper was not about its ostensible purpose: paying for the continent’s defense. Rather, it was to keep the Americans in their place by sustaining British patronage, privilege, and most of all, power.

Patronage via sops to surplus redcoat officers and mercenaries stationed here. Privilege in suppressing the rise of a professional class through disproportionate levies on lawyers’ and students’ supplies.

And power in undemocratically reinforcing the principle of unrepresentative royal and parliamentary supremacy over elected colonial assemblies. 

Plan an insinuation of British control throughout the economy and culture by taxing everything from legal documents to newspapers, pamphlets, almanacs, and even dice and playing cards – in all, more than 40 categories.

Fast forward to 2023 and the Biden regime’s corrupto-cratic diktat to consign internal combustion engines to history’s junkyard. Like the handiwork of King Joe’s across-the-seas predecessor and his Parliament, the new standards have nothing to do with “fuel economy” (their initial purpose in 1970s, oil embargo-scarred America), climate, or even cars.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-epas-latest-power-grab-power-plant-proposal-clean-air-act-climate-change-emissions-ff0f1890?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

The Biden administration’s new power-plant proposal, announced Thursday by the Environmental Protection Agency, would hobble the natural-gas industry. In the process it would make electricity more expensive, cause more blackouts and brownouts, and force Americans to pay more for less energy.

The proposed rule would require most existing gas- and coal-fired power plants to cut their carbon-dioxide emissions by 90% or more over the next 10 to 15 years—up to 96% for the largest and most heavily used plants. Newly constructed gas plants, as soon as they start up, would immediately have to meet standards based on the most efficient—and most expensive—generating equipment, reaching the same 90%-or-higher reduction over time. These massive cuts assume the use of carbon capture and other, even less proven measures.

This is more than misguided policy. It’s legally dubious, and the agency knows it. But the Biden administration’s urgent goal is shifting how markets allocate capital among types of energy before a potential power shift in Washington next year, with little regard for the longer-term effect on American families and businesses.

Section 111 of the Clean Air Act requires the EPA to consider cost when determining whether a “system of emission reduction” is “adequately demonstrated.” In other words, EPA regulations can’t be too expensive, and must be grounded in technical and market realities. But Thursday’s proposal is based mainly on assumptions that plants will employ carbon capture and hydrogen co-firing—replacing the natural gas the plant was designed to run on with hydrogen gas—which impose exorbitant costs on electricity producers and haven’t yet been used at scale. These technologies are, at best, many years away from viability even with large subsidies under the so-called Inflation Reduction Act. In tacit admission of this reality, the Biden administration’s proposed rule would instead create an incentive for many existing power plants to shut down, allowing those that close by 2032 to avoid any new requirements in the interim.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-cracks-down-on-gas-stoves-furnaces-light-bulbs-dishwasher-energy-342b6514?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Consumer Product Safety Commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. fired a shot heard ’round America in January when he informed the public of his agency’s plans for natural-gas stoves. “This is a hidden hazard,” Mr. Trumka said in an interview with Bloomberg News. “Any option is on the table. Products that can’t be made safe can be banned.”

The comment sparked a strong consumer backlash, forcing the Biden administration to deny that its regulators were doing such a thing. But they most certainly were and still are. The gas-stove kerfuffle is merely one piece in a larger campaign against consumer appliances, all in the service of President Biden’s climate-change agenda. Let’s review the items under federal scrutiny:

• Lighting. Beginning in July, commercial retailers will no longer be able to sell incandescent light bulbs without incurring a significant penalty, thanks to an onerous Energy Department efficiency regulation. Last summer the Biden administration reversed a Trump-era reprieve for the old-fashioned bulbs, adjusting the appliance’s lumens-per-watt threshold beyond what the incandescent technology can meet. As a result, newer LED bulbs will soon be the only game in town. While LEDs are improving, they cost more than incandescent bulbs, don’t work well with most dimmers, and cast a light that some consumers consider unpleasant.

• Furnaces. Like stoves, furnaces commit the sin of sometimes running on natural gas. Though ostensibly a fuel-neutral efficiency standard, the Energy Department’s furnace regulation disproportionately burdens gas models relative to electric ones. “The proposed furnace rule has at least as much to do with the Biden administration’s war on natural gas [as] it does with saving energy,” says Mark Krebs, a natural-gas industry consultant, in an interview. The agency is moving ahead with this proposal despite its own analysis that natural gas is less than one-third as expensive as electricity on a per unit energy basis. The final rule could be out soon, and the only gas furnaces likely to survive will be more expensive and harder to install in millions of homes, especially older and space-constrained ones.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/05/net_zero_grid_batteries_alone_would_bankrupt_america_.html

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) cites “the climate crisis” at almost every opportunity. President Biden calls it a greater threat than nuclear war. They and their allies champion “carbon-free” electricity generation by 2035 and nearly fossil-fuel-free energy by 2050.

Achieving “net zero” carbon dioxide emissions will be painless, they assure us. Costs will be so low you’ll need a magnifying glass to see them. Governments merely have to enact mandates, provide subsidies, and the transformation to “clean” energy will just happen. Almost like in a fairy tale.

Here in the real world, however, we would need literally millions of weather-dependent wind turbines, billions of equally unreliable solar panels, millions of half-ton battery modules for vehicles, billions more modules to back up intermittent electricity generation, millions of transformers, and tens of thousands of miles of new transmission lines.

All these technologies must be manufactured from metals, minerals, and petroleum extracted from the Earth, via mining on scales unprecedented in human history.

The dollar costs alone — just for a U.S. transformation — are almost incomprehensible.

Science and policy analyst David Wojick calculated that just the batteries needed to back up wind and solar electricity generation in a “net zero” USA would cost $23-trillion — America’s entire 2021 gross domestic product (GDP) — and probably many times that.

Energy and technology consultant Thomas Tanton found that battery backup to replace current U.S. fossil fuel electricity — and convert vehicles, furnaces, water heaters, and stoves to electricity — would cost at least $29 trillion in initial outlays.

Trillions more would be needed to cover financing, repairs, maintenance, replacements, burying broken and worn-out non-recyclable equipment, and building systems strong enough to survive hurricanes.

Professional engineer Ken Gregory determined that grid-backup battery costs could reach $290 trillion (12.6 times the USA’s 2021 GDP), based on actual 2019 and 2020 hourly intermittent electricity-generation data, rather than annual average data utilized in the other studies.

None of these estimates includes the costs of turbines, panels, transmission lines or transformers.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/08/biden-unleashes-the-regulatory-kraken-and-theres-no-land-in-sight/

In the span of a few weeks, the Biden administration has proposed regulations that would effectively ban gas stoves, force a massive shift to electric cars, sharply raise the cost of dishwashers, increase loan costs for frugal borrowers, regulate puddles as “navigable waters,” and limit hunting and fishing across the country. It will soon release a proposed rule targeting power plants with hugely expensive carbon capture mandates.

This is just the tip of the spear.

As the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Clyde Wayne Crews put it recently, “President Biden is leading an unprecedented expansion of the administrative state. In two years, his administration has imposed 517 regulatory actions with some $318 billion in total costs.”

The newest attack on freedom, Biden’s dishwasher regulation, would require new machines to use 27% less power and 34% less water, making already barely functioning dishwashers virtually useless. (It takes nearly three hours for dishwashers today to “clean” dishes. President Donald Trump tried to loosen these anti-consumer mandates.)

Another rule would eliminate 98% of all top-loading washing machines on the market today. There are new efficiency mandates in the works for everything from microwaves to toothbrush chargers.

“The effort is forcing manufacturers to produce more costly products they say reverse innovation by decades and potentially eliminate thousands of U.S. jobs,” the Washington Times reports.

The Securities Exchange Commission, meanwhile, wants publicly traded companies to disclose the “climate risks” of their operations. The rule “could shift $18.4 billion to consulting firms, lawyers, and data providers,” according to an analysis by Bloomberg Intelligence.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/05/follow_the_science__to_where_.html

The dictum “follow the science” seems to make good sense until you actually follow it to a conclusion that is opposite to that which the “experts” intend you to reach.  We all saw that during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Entire cities were shut down.  Schools and churches were closed.  Enforcement was at times brutal.  In contrast, some states remained open, and the result was that, health-wise, they fared no worse than the states that gutted their economies and violated their citizens’ civil rights.  We are still waiting for apologies.

Another dictum makes a lot more sense: “follow the money.”  While small businesses were starved into ruin, large businesses were allowed to continue operation.  Churches were closed — even their parking lot services were forbidden — but casinos operated night and day.

While “Mister Science” led us astray in important policy decisions, there is another area of science that seems a lot less important, but which has subtle implications that have had pernicious effects for a long time.  It is called the Standard Model of Cosmology, which encompasses theories of how the universe was formed and how nature operates today.  For most of the population, this is Ivy League, ivory tower stuff.  It consists of incomprehensible squiggles on blackboards by (according to stereotype) bespectacled, bearded professors “vith” foreign accents.  They seem too smart to be wrong, but lately, new discoveries are challenging their authority and, by extension, opening criticism of the social policies that affect our daily lives and the future of our grandchildren.

There is a saying that disputes in academia are savage, not because the subject matter is important, but rather because it is trivial.  In that regard, we must ask, how important is the Standard Model of Cosmology?  If it collapses, what else will collapse with it?