The Green Energy Delusion The current approach to energy and environmental policy isn’t just unsustainable—it has put us on a collision course with reality. Paul Brown

https://quillette.com/2025/03/04/the-green-energy-delusion/

I. Physical Constraints

Energy is not just another commodity. It’s absolutely fundamental to our modern civilisation. Every thing we do—from feeding ourselves to staying warm to manufacturing medicines—requires energy input. And not all energy sources are created equal.

A barrel of oil contains about fifty times more energy than the most advanced viable battery of the same weight. This gap is never going to close significantly. It can’t. The energy a battery can supply is dependent on the flow of electrons between different materials, each of which can provide a certain number of electrons for any given weight. You can improve the battery’s charging time or durability or the number of times it can be charged before it starts to fail, but you can’t change the fundamental composition of the materials available any more than you can change lead into gold.

Batteries, then, are heavy and they’re going to remain that way. This is not a problem for many applications—including phones, laptops, and small household devices. In these cases, the lower energy density isn’t a major drawback since the devices are small and frequently rechargeable, and weight isn’t a limiting factor in their performance. But for things that need energy input to move—cars, trucks, planes—the extra weight creates a cascading series of problems. A heavier vehicle needs more energy to move, which means that it needs bigger batteries, which means adding yet more weight, which means that more energy is needed to move it. Thanks to this weight penalty, electric vehicles often require significantly more raw materials in their construction, and more energy in their day-to-day operation, than their advocates admit.

Aircraft face uniquely stringent weight considerations: every kilogramme of battery reduces payload capacity while, unlike fuel, batteries don’t become lighter during flight. So the reduced payload that would result from using batteries means fewer passengers or less cargo per flight, which in turn means we would need to schedule more flights to move the same number of people or amount of goods. In addition, aircraft combustion engines operate at relatively steady speeds—there’s not much acceleration or deceleration, no sitting in traffic, and no braking from which energy can be recouped. Since there is a direct relationship between weight and range or payload, aircraft are naturally incentivised to be as efficient as possible.

So battery-powered aircraft are unlikely to work well in the foreseeable future—but what about cars? It’s the policy in many developed countries to shift to electric vehicles—in the UK, they’re planning to ban new sales of internal combustion cars from 2035, and in Norway almost 90 percent of new car sales are electric due to carrot-and-stick policies. But from a full-system environmental perspective, this doesn’t make sense. Since not only are there weight penalties—batteries make cars heavier and heavier cars then require even bigger, heavier batteries to move—but there are issues of energy efficiency to take into account.

Will NIH Cuts Boost Public Health—or Destroy It?By David Andorsky and Vinay Prasad

https://www.thefp.com/p/trump-nih-cuts-debate?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Two cancer doctors debate whether Trump’s slashing of billions to the National Institutes for Health will boost public health or destroy it.

During his testimony before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions hearing on Wednesday, Jay Bhattacharya, President Donald Trump’s nominee to run the National Institutes of Health, seemed to side with the president’s plan to cut billions of dollars from the nation’s scientific research budget, most of which is controlled by the NIH.

“I have a background as an economist as well as being a doctor,” Bhattacharya told the committee. This helps him “understand that every dollar wasted on a frivolous study is a dollar not spent. Every dollar wasted on administrative costs that are not needed is a dollar not spent on research. The team I’m going to put together is going to be hyper-focused to make sure that the portfolio of grants that the NIH funds is devoted to the chronic disease problems of this country.”

Some of Trump’s cuts have already been made, including the firing of over 1,000 “probationary” workers, and the blocking of this year’s grants through a bureaucratic loophole. The Trump administration also wants to stop paying indirect costs for building space, expensive equipment, and oversight of medical research, though so far that has been stopped by a judge’s temporary order.

What should we make of these cuts? Are they a sensible way to make medical research even more efficient? Or will they threaten the development of cures that could save millions of lives?

We asked two oncologists we trust to debate this important issue.

The Iranian Regime is Hollowing Out The fall of the Sharia Curtain on the horizon? by Hugh Fitzgerald

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-iranian-regime-is-hollowing-out/

Trump claims he would “prefer” that an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities not happen. But it’s up to Iran. If it refuses to negotiate, as Ayatollah Khamenei now insists, then Israel will have no choice but to attack, and Trump will have no choice but to support and aid the Israelis, by providing both those 30,000-pound bunker buster bombs, as those Massive Ordnance Penetrators, or MOPs, are known, and the bombers big enough to deliver them.

Since Israel’s airstrikes on October 26, 2024 that destroyed Iran’s anti-missile systems, Iran has been threatening to wreak a terrible vengeance on the Jewish state. But nearly four months have passed, and Iran has not dared to launch a single missile, rocket, or drone at Israel. Its threats are empty; its boasts those of a miles gloriosus, a braggart warrior. The more it threatens to destroy its enemy, Israel, the more ridiculous Iran becomes in the eyes of the world. More on Iran’s hollow bravado — akin to the frog that puffs itself up to ward off predators — can be found here: “Iran Says Israel, US ‘Cannot Do a Damn Thing’ Against Tehran,” Algemeiner, February 17, 2025:

Iran has claimed that its nuclear program is for civilian purposes rather than building weapons. However, the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), reported in December that Iran had greatly accelerated uranium enrichment to up to 60 percent purity, close to the roughly 90 percent weapons-grade level, at its Fordow site dug into a mountain.

Rafael Grossi, the head of the IAEA, has been warning about Iran’s rush to enrich uranium up to a level just below weapons-grade, a development by the Iranians that only makes sense if they are determined to manufacture nuclear weapons. There is no civilian use for uranium enriched to that level.

Charles Lipson Donald Trump calls for a renewal of American patriotism His message echoed Ronald Reagan’s ‘Morning in America’

https://thespectator.com/topic/donald-trump-calls-renewal-american-patriotism/

Donald Trump’s speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night was the most powerful, rousing and pointed of any presidential address in decades. “America is back… and we are just getting started,” it began, capturing the theme of the night. The address ended with a peroration that his administration would “take up the righteous cause of American liberty” and “fight, fight, fight for a country our citizens’ believe in and deserve.” Our country’s “Golden Age,” he said, ”has just begun.”

Dozens and dozens of applause lines were planted throughout the speech as Trump laid out his ambitious agenda and his accomplishments so far. It was not the dull laundry list of programs most presidents present to Congress.

There was an upbeat coherence to the address. It included plenty of specific proposals, but they were not the focus of the speech. The emphasis was on a renewal of American patriotism — a new “Golden Age” — illustrated by his achievements so far. The leitmotif was his recognition of citizens in the gallery who underscored those themes. They embodied both our country’s virtues and its tragedies, the result of policies gone horribly wrong. He pinned those tragedies on Joe Biden and the Democrats.

The result was a bravura performance for the president, a pep rally for congressional Republicans and a train wreck for the Democrats, who sat glumly in their seats, holding signs up attacking the president and booing his applause lines.

The Democrats’ self-inflicted humiliation began as soon as Trump started. Congressman Al Green, who introduced a bill to impeach President Trump shortly after he took office, rose with a cane in hand and started yelling at the president, refusing to be silent or sit (when asked by House Speaker Mike Johnson) and ultimately had to be removed from the chamber.

The Times, They Aren’t Never A-Changin’

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/03/06/the-times-they-arent-never-a-changin/

Sunday, its largest circulation day of the week, the New York Times ran a lengthy, triple-bylined story intended to stir up fear and anger over the Trump White House’s climate policy. It was no example of civically minded journalism, just another propaganda piece to fuel the global warming tale.

Right from the top, the reporters tell readers that President Donald Trump “has severely damaged the government’s ability to fight climate change, upending American environmental policy with moves that could have lasting implications for the country, and the planet.”

“Could?” That’s what the entire global warming scare is built on, coulds and maybes and possiblies.

Yet the reporters screech that “Mr. Trump has gutted federal climate efforts, rolled back regulations aimed at limiting pollution and given a major boost to the fossil fuel industry.” Let’s not confuse carbon dioxide with pollution, which the alarmists continually do. Just because the federal government has classified CO2 as a “threat to human health and welfare,” that doesn’t mean that it is. As every school kid knows, it’s essential to life.

Naturally we can’t have any boosting of the fossil fuel industry, since it merely provides the cornerstone of modernity and there’s nothing in line, no, not even renewables, to replace it.

At this point, just two paragraphs in, it’s clear this story is no piece of journalism. It’s agitprop for green nonsense and the Democratic Party’s agenda to run the economy from Washington and blue-state capitals.

Betrayal: Lipstadt’s silence about the Biden administration’s failure on antisemitism Jonathan Tobin

https://www.jns.org/betrayal-lipstadts-silence-about-campus-jew-hatred-under-the-biden-administration/?utm_campaign=Daily%20Syndicate%20Emails&utm_medium=email&_

It turns out that what the country needed most was an antisemitism envoy to the United States and not to the rest of the world. And when the plague of Jew-hatred surged in the streets of American cities and on college campuses, what was also needed was for that envoy not to stand by in silence while the administration she served chose to be neutral about the issue for partisan reasons.

Sadly, that failure will constitute a major part of the legacy of Deborah Lipstadt.

Lipstadt is an eminent Jewish historian whose groundbreaking work on Holocaust denial earned her acclaim in her field. It also led to an important court case in Great Britain where Holocaust denier David Irving unsuccessfully sued her for libel, an ordeal that not only inspired her own book on the subject but also the 2015 movie “Denial” (she was portrayed by Jewish actress Rachel Weisz).

She deserves to be remembered for her scholarship and for writing some excellent books like her 1985 Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933–1945 and the 1993 Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, as well as the 2005 History on Trial: My Day in Court With a Holocaust Denier.

Her recent acknowledgment of the failure of the Biden administration to adequately respond to the explosion of antisemitism under her watch, however, should not be overlooked.

Denouncing Columbia

It was just one sentence in an article she recently wrote in The Free Press that was devoted to explaining why she refused to consider an offer to teach at Columbia University. But in so doing, she buried what should have been the lead.

Hamas prisoner deal to be paid in future dead, warns terror victims’ group head David Isaac

https://www.jns.org/hamas-prisoner-deal-to-be-paid-in-future-dead-warns-terror-victims-group-head/

IDF Lt. Col. (res.) Meir Indor has waged an uphill battle against mass terrorist releases by Israel since 1986, when he founded the Almagor Terror Victims Association.

His latest effort was against the current deal, which saw some 1,900 terrorists, including hardened killers and 274 serving life sentences, released in exchange for 33 Israelis, some of whom were no longer alive.

Indor knows something about fighting terrorism. As an IDF soldier, he was a member of the first unit of mista’arvim, Israeli combat teams that disguise themselves as Arabs to operate undercover within Palestinian populations.

As a civilian, he became an activist in the wake of the Jibril Agreement, a prisoner exchange deal that took place on May 21, 1985. That deal marked the first mass prisoner release by Israel, in which 1,150 security prisoners were exchanged for three Israelis captured during the First Lebanon War.

Those terrorists would become the leaders of the First Intifada, which broke out less than three years later.

JNS spoke with Indor about the dangers of Israel’s approach to hostage agreements.

JNS: How many terrorists who have been released from Israeli jails return to terrorism?

Indor: We don’t have an organized tracking system. The Almagor Terror Victims Association is a voluntary body. Our dream is to establish a research division. But we occasionally receive different numbers from security agencies. There is a report that approximately 80% of released terrorists return to carry out more terror.

Pro-Terror Professors Targeted in Freedom Center’s Fall Campus Campaign Exposing the “Hamas Loyalists” who are teaching terror on our campuses. by Sara Dogan

https://www.frontpagemag.com/pro-terror-professors-targeted-in-freedom-centers-fall-campus-campaign/

Over the past year, headlines in mainstream publications and the legacy media have finally validated what supporters of the Freedom Center have long known—American campuses are awash in a crisis of Jew hatred and Hamas fetishism. From Columbia to UCLA, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison to the University of Texas-Austin, last spring the public witnessed the hostile takeover of campuses by supporters of the genocidal Hamas regime.

Shouting such genocidal slogans as “Globalize the Intifada” and “From the River to the Sea Palestine will be Free” student protestors—aided by radical faculty members and coddled by university administrators—proudly established and defended zones that were effectively declared Judenrein—no-go zones for Zionists and supporters of the world’s only Jewish state.

Students belonging to Muslim Brotherhood-linked campus organizations including the Muslim Students Association and Students for Justice in Palestine celebrated Hamas’s barbaric October 7 massacre of innocent Israeli Jews and did not shy away from encouraging more bloodshed.

In every aspect of these macabre exhortations for Jewish genocide, these students were encouraged and led by university faculty members, in many cases highly celebrated tenured professors in the world of academia, who have gleefully championed the slaughter, mutilation, and rape of innocents as justified revenge on Israeli “colonizers.”

Determined to expose these Hamas apparatchiks, the Freedom Center published a lengthy and detailed report naming the ten most extreme pro-terror professors as “Hamas Loyalists” and documenting their statements and actions in support of the terrorist regime.

Michael Lachanski, Jonah Davids A Simple Tax-Code Change Would Protect Academic Freedom Donors want their gifts to universities to fund exceptional scholars, not bloated bureaucracies and ideological initiatives.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/tax-code-change-university-donations-scholars-academic-freedom

Every year, donors give billions of dollars to American colleges and universities. Some give for social or sentimental reasons, but most do so because they want to aid exceptional students, faculty, and research. Yet, far too often, these donations disappear into administrative costs and ideological projects that do little to advance real scholarship. At the same time, scholars who challenge the consensus within their fields, or simply hold opinions unpopular with their colleagues, frequently find themselves without support from their department or institution.

It doesn’t have to be this way. A simple change to the tax code—making direct payments to faculty and graduate students tax-deductible, just like donations to universities—could strengthen scholarship, revitalize independent inquiry, and ensure that donors can directly support the people who matter most to our intellectual future.

The practice of institutional control over scholarly funding emerged at a time when direct payments were hard to process, and universities could be trusted to steward academic funding. Neither of these conditions holds today. Consider Amy Wax, a tenured University of Pennsylvania professor who was suspended last September for controversial remarks about race and immigration. Those who admired her teaching and scholarship, with its uncommon conservative perspective, would typically donate to Penn’s Law School, where she teaches. But this same law school has now withdrawn Wax’s research funds, undermined her tenure protections, and constrained her academic freedom. Donations to Penn’s Law School and the University of Pennsylvania were diverted, at least partially, towards the undermining of Wax’s academic freedom via a dubious, ideologically motivated disciplinary process. In this manner, universities can use institutional donations to subvert the viewpoint diversity that donors hope to foster.

Sally Satel Medical Schools’ Botched Pass-Fail Experiment The early results of the United States Medical Licensing Exam’s new grading process are worrisome.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/united-states-medical-licensing-exam-pass-fail-grading

Medical schools and institutions are now among the zealous champions of progressive ideology. Within days of George Floyd’s death in May 2020, the Association of American Medical Colleges demanded that the nation’s medical schools “employ anti-racist and unconscious bias training.” The following year, the American Medical Association called on physicians to “dismantle white supremacy, racism, and other forms of exclusion and structured oppression.” But efforts to enhance diversity among the medical student body—too often by compromising standards of excellence—have long been in place at America’s medical schools, from affirmative action policies to pass-fail grading of courses and clinical rotations.

In a recent Journal of the American Medical Association commentary, however, four Stanford University-affiliated scholars pushed back on these changes—a ripple that suggests a potential academic shift. In their essay, Drs. James Agolia, David Spain, and Jeff Choi, and medical student Allen Green, denounce the “diminishing objectivity” of the residency-admissions process. “We believe that some objective standards are necessary,” they write, “for programs to identify candidates who best fit their program in a fair, consistent, transparent, and efficient fashion.”

Specifically, the authors lament that the United States Medical Licensing Exam made its initial test pass-fail. The USMLE, which all would-be doctors take, is administered in three parts. Step 1 is taken after the second year in medical school to test pre-clinical medical knowledge; Step 2 is taken after the fourth or final year to assess clinical knowledge; and Step 3 is taken after the first year of residency to evaluate clinical decision-making.

The change was several years in the making. The exam’s co-sponsors, the National Board of Medical Examiners and the Federation of State Medical Boards, first recommended making Step 1 pass-fail in 2019. Other groups, including the AMA and AAMC, collaborated in developing the proposal, which was eventually adopted in 2022.