Political Foibles

Why Shut Down US gov climate websites

Posted on by Ron Clutz

July news is full of reports decrying the shuttering of federal government climate websites with headlines like these:

Top Website for Crucial U.S. Climate Information Goes Dark, Scientific American

Nation’s top climate science assessments removed from federal websites, UPI

Major climate change reports are removed from US websites, Los Angeles Daily News

etc., etc. etc.

Part of the missing context is this July 7 report:

Agencies plan to decommission hundreds of .gov websites following GSA review

Thomas Shedd, commissioner of GSA’s Technology Transformation Services, directed
agencies to eliminate the “low-hanging fruit” of unnecessary federal websites.

In an analysis led by the General Services Administration, the 24 largest departments and agencies inventoried more than 7,200 total websites. Documents obtained by Federal News Network show agencies plan to eliminate 332 of those websites — less than 5% of their total web presence.

According to documents obtained by Federal News Network, Thomas Shedd, commissioner of GSA’s Technology Transformation Services, said the “low-hanging fruit” of websites to cut include standalone sites for agency blogs, photo galleries and forums that would be housed elsewhere.

GSA also directed agencies to eliminate sites for events or initiatives that haven’t been relevant for a number of years, as well as standalone sites for “niche topics or working groups.”

Climate Doctrine Promoted at NASA, NOAA and Climate.gov

NASA

2024 is the Warmest Year on Record Climate change • Climate change refers to long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns. Human activities have been the main driver of climate change, primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas. January 10, 2025.

Scientists have concluded the warming trend of recent decades is driven by heat-trapping carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases. In 2022 and 2023, Earth saw record increases in carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels, according to a recent international analysis. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased from pre-industrial levels in the 18th century of approximately 278 parts per million to about  420 parts per million today.

NOAA

Richard Spinrad NOAA Administrator in 2023 NOAA Budget Summary

The next decade is a critical time to address the climate crisis. We have a small window to shift to a carbon neutral economy and hold climate impacts in check. With increased climate funding, we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to advance climate services across the nation. To that end, NOAA’s climate ready nation initiative will target investments to address climate risks and build climate resilience, especially in our most vulnerable communities.

Climate.gov program manager Rebecca Lindsey 

What evidence exists that Earth is warming and that humans are the main cause?

We know this warming is largely caused by human activities because the key role that carbon dioxide plays in maintaining Earth’s natural greenhouse effect has been understood since the mid-1800s. Unless it is offset by some equally large cooling influence, more atmospheric carbon dioxide will lead to warmer surface temperatures. Since 1800, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased from about 280 parts per million to 410 ppm in 2019. We know from both its rapid increase and its isotopic “fingerprint” that the source of this new carbon dioxide is fossil fuels, and not natural sources like forest fires, volcanoes, or outgassing from the ocean.

Finally, no other known climate influences have changed enough to account for the observed warming trend. Taken together, these and other lines of evidence point squarely to human activities as the cause of recent global warming.

Agencies Aligned with Politicians In Power

2024 presidential candidates on climate change

Democrat Joe Biden

In a campaign speech Biden said, “We passed the biggest investment in history to combat climate change, because I believe climate change is the only existential threat we have. I mean that in a literal sense. Not a joke. If we don’t get it under control, we will have mortgaged not only the next generation, but mortgaged humanity. I believe that with every fiber of my being.” [source, as of 2023-09-28]

Democrat Kamala D. Harris

Harris’ campaign website said, “As President, she will unite Americans to tackle the climate crisis as she builds on this historic work, advances environmental justice, protects public lands and public health, increases resilience to climate disasters, lowers household energy costs, creates millions of new jobs, and continues to hold polluters accountable to secure clean air and water for all.” [source, as of 2024-09-09]

However, Voters Backed a Change in Priorities

Republican Ron DeSantis

DeSantis’ campaign website said he would, “Withdraw from Paris Climate Accords, Global Methane Pledge, and all ‘Net Zero’ commitments. Eliminate ESG regulations and prohibit government accounts and pensions from using ESG. […] Repeal Biden rules targeting gas stoves, furnaces, and appliances. Streamline the environmental review process for energy and infrastructure projects. Work with states to reduce time and duplication in permitting. Prevent abusive litigation by environmental groups and defund ideological activism.” [source, as of 2023-12-19]

Republican Donald Trump

Trump’s campaign website said, “President Trump will once again exit the horrendously unfair Paris Climate Accords and oppose all of the radical left’s Green New Deal policies that are designed to shut down the development of America’s abundant energy resources, which exceed any country’s in the world, including Russia and Saudi Arabia. […] President Trump will immediately stop all Joe Biden policies that distort energy markets, limit consumer choice, and drive-up costs on consumers, including insane wind subsidies, and DoE and EPA regulations that prevent Americans from buying incandescent lightbulbs, gas stoves, quality dishwashers and shower heads, and much more.” [source, as of 2023-12-21]

Summary

No surprise that “elections have consequences.”  A change in leadership means a change in political doctrine and priorities, and in this case, reopening the file on natural as well as human contributions to weather and climate fluctuations and what to do about it.

Climatists Deny Natural Warming Factors

 

 

 

EU Far-Left Lose Control of Zero Carbon File

Posted on by Ron Clutz

The news comes from euronews Patriots break cordon sanitaire to seize climate file in European Parliament. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Sample of Headlines:

Far-Right Patriots Take Lead on EU Climate Target Talks, Devdiscourse

EU lawmakers reject attempt to curb far right’s sway on climate talks, Reuters

Far-Right Patriots for Europe Gain Unprecedented Influence Leading EU Parliament Negotiations on 90% 2040 Climate Target. deepnews

The far right’s climate power grab, Politico Europe

PANIC IN BRUSSELS: Globalists Tremble as Patriots for Europe Group Will Lead Negotiations on the EU’s Climate ‘Target’, Ditch ‘Climate Fanaticism’ and Suicidal Policies. Gateway Pundit

Note: I had to search high and low to find an article without the adjective “far-right” attached to the coalition Patriots for Europe, who have gained control to lead the next round of negotiations regarding EU climate and energy policies.  As the articles explain there are EU politicians on the left, centrist and right; so the leftists attempt to denigrate their opponents by referring to them as “far-right”. Meanwhile the centrists failed to do their job (being the “cordon sanitaire”), to prevent the right from power over the Environmental (or any) agenda.

By taking over legislative work on the European commission’s new 2040 climate target, the Eurosceptic Patriots for Europe will increase its influence over the bloc’s climate policy.

The far-right not far-left Patriots for Europe group will lead negotiations on the EU’s new climate target, MEPs and parliament officials told Euronews, a role that could derail the bloc’s objective to reduce greenhouse emissions by 90% by 2040.

“The Patriots got the climate legislation file,” Iratxe Garcia, the leader of the socialist group told reporters during a press conference on the margins of the plenary in Strasbourg. “They’ve got the rapporteurship… I mean it is the patriots who are going to be the lead negotiators.”

Garcia referred to a recent Commission proposal to amend its EU Climate Law by setting a new target to reduce the EU’s net greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 90% by 2040. It is now up to the parliament and the council to discuss and adopt the text.

Officials say giving the 2040 climate target file to the far-right Patriots for Europe in the Parliament’s Environment, Public Health and Food Safety committee is the result of a complex system of attribution, which gives the large groups control over important files.

The Patriots for Europe is the third largest group in the European Parliament and has 11 full fledged members in the ENVI committee, including from France’s National Rally and Italy’s Lega party.  The group has systematically opposed the EU’s climate policies, with National Rally leader Jordan Bardella calling for the immediate suspension of the EU’s Green deal a few months ago.

It will give the Patriots increasing influence over the EU’s climate policy as rapporteurs are ultimately responsible for recommending a political line on the file.  Though a rapporteur won’t prevent other groups from reaching a deal on the text, he or she could slow down or complicate the legislative work.

The Commission proposal is aimed at reaffirming the bloc’s “determination to tackle climate change” according to the Commission’s website, and “shape the path” to climate neutrality, an objective that is at the heart of the EU’s green deal.

The job represents a breach of the cordon sanitaire – the process through which centrist pro-European groups effectively club together to deny the right-wing fringe top jobs such as presidencies or vice-presidencies of the European Parliament’s committees.

The practice has historically excluded lawmakers from France’s National Rally, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz and Matteo Salvini’s Lega from power roles in the Parliament.

Last October, Bardella and fellow Patriots’ MEP Hungarian Kinga Gál filed a complaint to the European Court of Justice last week against their political groups’ exclusion through the so-called ‘cordon sanitaire’ from leading positions at the European Parliament.

EU Statement to COP23

From Gateway Pundit:

In February, in a meeting in Madrid, Orbán told Europe and the world how things would proceed from now on.

France24 reported:

“’Yesterday we were the heretics. Today we are the mainstream… We are the future’, proclaimed Orban, sharing the stage with other leading extreme-right nationalists including Dutch anti-Islam firebrand Geert Wilders, Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini and former Czech premier Andrej Babis.

Both Orban and Le Pen hailed Trump’s ‘tornado’ as showing the way forward for the EU, which the parties had condemned in a joint statement as riven with ‘climate fanaticism’, ‘illegal immigration’ and ‘excessive regulation’.

‘We’re facing a truly global tipping point. Hurricane Trump is sweeping across the United States’, Le Pen said. ‘For its part, the European Union seems to be in a state of shock’.”

PANIC in Brussels.

Climate Litigants Lackeys for China’s Agenda?

Posted on by Ron Clutz

A Chinese flag flies in front of a coal fired power plant in Tianjin. China has been building many more similar plants. Getty Images

Dan Eberhart writes at Forbes Climate Lawsuits Are Changing The U.S. Energy Industry And China’s Too.  H/T Tyler Durden. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Sen. Ted Cruz has expressed concern in multiple public statements that the American energy security may face a significant threat from a wave of lawsuits claiming to defend a progressive environmental agenda.

On this upcoming Wednesday, Sen. Cruz’s Judiciary oversight subcommittee will hold a hearing to examine how China and America’s climate litigation movement are working in parallel to undermine U.S. energy dominance. These efforts are being carried out under the banner of environmental protection and the clean energy transition, but the real goal is to weaken America’s energy sector and give the advantage to China in global energy and manufacturing markets.

Climate cases brought by plaintiff firms like Sher Edling are supported by a network of well-funded foundations and nonprofits that are unwittingly advancing the strategic interests of America’s adversaries by weakening domestic energy production and increasing our dependence on foreign-controlled supply chains—particularly those dominated by China.

There is growing recognition that this is a national security problem. The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission has warned that the Chinese Communist Party is actively working to “directly and malignly influence state and local leaders to promote China’s global agenda.”

A recent report by national security nonprofit State Armor outlines how China has co-opted elements of the U.S. climate lobby to drive a transition away from fossil fuels. The result is greater U.S. reliance on Chinese-controlled technologies, minerals, and supply chains. China dominates the global markets for lithium, cobalt, solar panels, and battery components. It stands to gain enormously from U.S. policies that force a premature shift away from traditional energy sources.

The report spotlights Energy Foundation China (EFC) which claims to be a nonprofit headquartered in San Francisco. In reality, its staff are mostly based in Beijing, and its operations align closely with the Chinese Communist Party’s interests. EFC has spent millions supporting anti-fossil fuel groups in the United States, including the Rocky Mountain Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council. NRDC was the subject of a 2018 congressional inquiry over whether it should register as a foreign agent due to its ties to China.

House Energy and Commerce Committee leaders last year warned that “China has already attempted to influence United States policy and opinion through covert influence and by exploiting perceived societal divisions.” Their letter raised concerns about China-affiliated organizations influencing U.S. energy policy.

Major Focus Areas for U.S. Climate and Energy Funding, 2011–2015. Based on analysis of 2,502 publicly reported grants available as of Spring/Summer 2016 which were distributed between 2011 and 2015 by 19 major foundations making environmental grants totaling $556,678,469. Source:Strategic philanthropy in the post-Cap-and-Trade years: Reviewing U.S. climate and energy foundation funding by Nisbet 2018

A number of foundations have played a role in financing climate litigation efforts nationwide. A decade of litigation that most likely would not have happened without their financial backing. Major donors to this network include some of the largest philanthropic institutions in the country, including the Children’s Investment Fund, MacArthur, Rockefeller, and Hewlett foundations. Yet few of these donors have accounted for the risk of foreign manipulation embedded in the organizations they fund.

The influence campaign also extends into U.S. academic institutions. The National Natural Science Foundation of China, a government-run research entity, has published articles in American journals criticizing fossil fuels and accusing U.S. companies of deceptive practices. One of EFC’s top communications directors previously held a position at that same Chinese foundation.

At the same time, the revolving door between activist nonprofits and government agencies is raising serious ethical and legal questions. Ann Carlson, a senior official in the Biden administration, previously sat on the board of the Environmental Law Institute while also consulting for Sher Edling. This institute has hosted multiple educational events with Chinese organizations on “climate litigation capacity building” aimed at influencing judges and shaping the legal landscape in both countries.

There is no shortage of outside forces fueling this wave of litigation, and Cruz’s subcommittee is well positioned to expose them. The American people deserve transparency about who is bankrolling the litigation assault on domestic energy, and to what end. President Donald Trump’s energy dominance agenda may not be enough to counteract opaque litigation funding that could undermine U.S. energy security. Prior administrations allowed this framework to take hold by ceding policymaking authority to the courts.

China is more than happy to watch Americans tie the economy in regulatory knots while Chinese companies build new coal-fired power plants, locks in oil and gas contracts with OPEC+ members, and consolidates control over clean energy technologies. If this trend continues, Beijing will have a significant advantage when it comes to the energy industry.

US Supremes Rein In Politicized Environmental Reviews

Posted on by Ron Clutz

On May 29, 2025 SCOTUS ruled unanimously that NEPA (National Environmental Protection Act) can no longer be a tool for political activists against development projects.  The report from MSN is US Supreme Court limits environmental reviews in Utah railway ruling.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The U.S. Supreme Court dealt a setback to environmentalists on Thursday by allowing federal agencies to limit the scope of their reviews of the environmental impact of projects they regulate, as the justices bolstered a Utah railway project intended to transport crude oil.

The 8-0 ruling overturned a lower court’s decision that had halted the project and had faulted an environmental impact statement issued by a federal agency called the Surface Transportation Board in approving the railway as too limited in scope. The project was challenged by environmentalists and a Colorado county.

A coalition of seven Utah counties and an infrastructure investment group are seeking to construct an 88-mile (142-km) railway line in northeastern Utah to connect the sparsely populated Uinta Basin region to an existing freight rail network that would be used primarily to transport waxy crude oil.

The case tested the scope of environmental impact studies that federal agencies must conduct under a U.S. law called the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), enacted in 1970 to prevent environmental harms that might result from major projects. The law mandates that agencies examine the “reasonably foreseeable” effects of a project.

The ruling, authored by conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh, was joined by four other conservative justices. The court’s three liberal justices filed a separate opinion concurring in the outcome.

Kavanaugh wrote that agencies need only consider environmental effects of a project at hand and not the “effects from potential future projects or from geographically separate projects,” and that courts must offer agencies “substantial deference” regarding the scope of these assessments.

“NEPA is a procedural cross-check, not a substantive roadblock. The goal of the law is to inform agency decision-making, not to paralyze it,” Kavanaugh wrote.

Background Post: US Supremes Hear Climate Lawfare Case to Stop Oil Railway

IER reports the news from December in article The Supreme Court Takes on a Case Involving the National Environmental Policy Act.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Key Takeaways

1  The Supreme Court has heard a major NEPA case that could affect investment in energy and other infrastructure projects in America.

2  Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado will decide whether permit applicants must anticipate far-flung speculative impacts over which federal agencies have no control.

3  The case involves an 88-mile railway accessing oil production in the Uinta Basin in Utah, allowing expansion of domestic oil production as well as access to essential minerals in the region.

4  Green advocates sued the Surface Transportation Board because it approved without considering alleged but inestimable impacts far from the project.

5  Lower courts have sided with the Greens, who oppose mineral and energy development.

6  SCOTUS is expected to clarify the burdens projects must face to comply with NEPA, which has become a tool of delay and denial by those opposing projects of all kinds in the United States.

7 Congress is also looking at NEPA streamlining as the act has become an impediment to rational development in the United States.
The Supreme Court recently heard a major case, Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado, that will affect the scope of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The case concerns the permitting of a proposed Utah railway that would ship oil from the Uinta Basin, potentially quadrupling its oil production. The 88-mile Uinta Basin Railway would connect the oil fields of northeastern Utah to the national rail network running alongside 100 or so miles of the Colorado River to reach oil refineries on the Gulf Coast.  According to The Hill,  at issue is whether and when upstream and downstream environmental impacts should be considered as part of federal environmental reviews. The company behind the railway and a group of Utah counties appealed a lower court decision to the Supreme Court, arguing that those indirect impacts are beyond the scope of the federal reviews.

Background

The case concerns a rail line to support oil development and mineral mining. In 2021, the federal Surface Transportation Board (STB) issued a 3,600-page environmental impact statement to comply with NEPA and approved the rail line. The NEPA mandates that federal agencies assess the environmental effects of projects within their authority. Any major initiative that is managed, regulated, or authorized by the federal government must undergo a NEPA evaluation, a process that can span years and frequently exposes projects to legal challenges.

The STB analyzed the railway’s potential effects on local water resources, air quality, protected species, recreation, local economies, the Ute Indian tribe, and other factors. Environmental groups, however, sued the agency, saying that it failed to examine sufficiently how the railway might affect the risk of accidents on connecting lines hundreds of miles away and to assess emissions in “environmental justice communities” on the Gulf Coast from increased oil shipments, among other supposed shortcomings.

According to the Wall Street Journal editorial board, “a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals panel sided with the plaintiffs and told the STB it must consider the line’s upstream and downstream effects even if they were hard to predict and beyond the control of the agency and developers. This includes the effects of oil shipments on Gulf Coast refiners and their contributions to climate change.” The appeals court ruling found that the federal STB violated the Endangered Species Act and the Interstate Commerce Commission Termination Act when it permitted the project.

Furthermore, the editorial board also explained that lower court judges—those on the D.C. and Ninth Circuits—ignored the Supreme Court’s past rulings and imposed arbitrary permitting requirements with no limiting principle. The STB lacks authority over Gulf Coast refiners and cannot prevent climate change.

Court Rulings Regarding NEPA

The Supreme Court has heard other related cases and held that agencies need not consider indirect and unpredictable impact, most recently in a 2004 case, Department of Transportation v. Public Citizen. In that case, the Supreme Court held that agencies need only analyze environmental impact with “a reasonably close causal relationship” over which they have “statutory authority” and which they can prevent.

In 2020, the Supreme Court green-lit approval for permits for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline after nearly seven years of litigation, but the pipeline was scrapped due to legal delays that raised project costs significantly. It takes an average of 4.2 years to litigate a NEPA challenge, which adds to the four or more years to obtain a federal permit. These delays are what frustrate investment in new projects, slowing job creation and economic expansion in the United States.

A judge struck down a Montana coal mine permit because a federal agency did not consider the climate effects of coal combustion in Asia. Additionally, a 225-mile electric transmission line in Nebraska has been stuck in permitting for 10 years because a lower court invalidated a U.S. Fish and Wildlife permit.

Conclusion

The Supreme Court is tackling a case involving the scope of a federal environmental law, NEPA, that involves a rail line to move oil. In this case, lower courts agreed with environmental groups, who are challenging the government’s permit approval of the rail line. The case is instrumental to the issue of what should be considered when determining potential environmental damages. Congress recognizes that NEPA needs reform as delays over lawsuits have killed projects and dramatically increased their costs and it continues to debate ways to make federal permitting easier and quicker. Until that reform happens, however, Supreme Court Justices need to reign in the environmental limits of NEPA so that needed projects can progress in America.

Adios Socialized Energy, Welcome Free Market Energy

Posted on by Ron Clutz

tippinsights Editorial Board  explains this critical moment in the power struggle over whether the US will have an Energy Sector controlled by Federal diktats or by Market choices. Their article is Adios, Green New Deal. Welcome, Free-Market Energy Independence.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Trump Dismantles the Green Agenda, Embraces Capitalism,
and Launches America’s New Energy Future.

Buried within the 1,100-page bill recently passed by the House of Representatives—the “One Big, Beautiful Bill” that reflects President Trump’s priorities—are several provisions that, if enacted into law, could return the U.S. energy sector to a more capitalistic model.

President Joe Biden, with strong backing from environmental lobbyists and a last-minute defection from West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, pushed through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Bill. These measures allocated billions of dollars in federal credits and loan guarantees to favored industries, all under the banner of environmental protection.

What followed was a Soviet-style industrial strategy in which
a handful of Washington bureaucrats determined
the winners and losers of America’s energy future.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) 2022 contained “Climate and energy investments” of approximately $369 billion over 10 years. These included $270 billion for clean energy tax credits to support wind, solar, geothermal, and other renewables; clean hydrogen production; and carbon capture and storage technologies. Buyers of electric vehicles would get up to a $7,500 tax credit for new EVs and up to a $4,000 tax credit for used EVs (with income and manufacturing origin restrictions). Tax credits and funding for domestic manufacturing of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and critical minerals exceeded $60 billion. Rebates for energy-efficient appliance upgrades, heat pumps, insulation, and home weatherization exceeded $60 billion under the Green Jobs and Environmental Justice banner.

With so much federal money up for grabs, greedy entrepreneurs flocked to risky green energy ventures, largely funded by grants and low-interest loans—funding they likely wouldn’t have secured through private markets. We all remember the Obama-era Solyndra disaster, but Biden’s approach was Solyndra-style investment on steroids.

What was worse, Biden used the vast levers of federal power to kneecap perfectly functioning industries. His administration was especially punitive toward the oil and gas sector: it suspended leases on federal land, blocked vast swaths of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Gulf coasts from new drilling, canceled major pipelines, and imposed regulatory hurdles that made it increasingly difficult for the fossil fuel industry to attract investment capital. As oil prices steadily rose, Biden’s energy strategy relied on tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and urging Saudi Arabia to increase production—an ironic move given his simultaneous efforts to restrict Russian oil exports during the Ukraine war.

President Trump, who campaigned once again on the
“drill, baby, drill” message, has consistently opposed
such government interference in the energy markets.

He has long supported removing regulatory red tape and streamlining the permitting process to allow for increased oil production—lowering domestic prices and boosting exports. In December 2019, under Trump’s administration, the U.S. Energy Information Administration announced that America had become a net exporter of oil for the first time in nearly 60 years.

Biden’s green agenda had another critical flaw: financing. Much of it depended on borrowing from China—ironically benefiting Chinese companies dominating the very industries Biden sought to boost. Since the launch of China’s “Made in China 2025” initiative, Chinese firms—heavily subsidized by their government—have taken over more than 85% of the global rooftop solar panel market. Battery components for solar installations have even higher Chinese market dominance. In effect, Biden borrowed money from China to finance the growth of Chinese companies that sold solar products to U.S. installers.

The new House bill aims to dismantle this entire framework in one stroke.

♦  It eliminates the trading of green credits between corporations;
♦  revokes low-interest green loans, and
♦  entirely phases out subsidies for renewable energy initiatives.

To those who claim this approach is irresponsible, we pose a simple question: How many more decades should the green energy sector rely on government aid to stay afloat? Sustainable energy and transition projects are essential, but they must prove their viability in the open market—just like oil and gas companies do every day. This is classic Adam Smith-style capitalism: let competition and innovation—not government favoritism—determine success.

Trump also supports nuclear power, one of the cleanest
and most efficient methods of generating electricity.

Critics on the Left often call nuclear energy dangerous, but even the most liberal nations—France, Germany, and Japan—have long depended on it. The only significant U.S. nuclear accident, Three Mile Island in the 1980s, did not result in any deaths. Despite Japan’s vulnerability to natural disasters, it maintained a strong safety record until Fukushima. The U.S., by contrast, is less prone to earthquakes or tsunamis, yet Congress and successive administrations have consistently stymied progress on nuclear energy.

This week, Trump signed an executive order that could clear the way for small-scale nuclear plants to begin operations within the next 18 months. These modern reactors, based on cutting-edge American technology, are far safer than their predecessors and are designed to power small cities or neighborhoods rather than entire states. Every aspect of nuclear energy today—from fuel storage to waste disposal—is light-years ahead of where it was decades ago. It’s a national disgrace that despite having world-class nuclear capabilities—including naval reactors and the world’s second-largest nuclear arsenal—our federal policies have hampered the civilian nuclear industry.

By issuing appropriate permitting waivers, Trump aims to unlock this potential, even if a modest federal investment is necessary to overcome ideological resistance from the Left. Energy independence and security should have been the hallmarks of the Obama and Biden administrations. Instead, they catered to the demands of environmental activists and weakened America’s energy position.

We are glad to say that the Green New Deal is dead.

 

Update: Congress Enacting Climate Realism

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Nico Portuondo reports on progress to enact realistic climate laws in his E&E News article Energy and Commerce unveils broad climate law rollbacks.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The House committee’s portion of the Republicans’ big party-line bill
also includes expedited permitting for gas exports and other projects.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee’s section of the Republicans’ party-line megabill includes billions of dollars in clawbacks from a host of Inflation Reduction Act programs.

The legislation — up for markup Tuesday — would affect the Department of Energy’s Loans Program Office, EPA’s Greenhouse Reduction Fund and many other climate law initiatives, according to text released Sunday night.

Chair Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.) said the climate law repeals would add up to $6.5 billion in savings. He said the unobligated balances represented “the most reckless parts of the engorged climate spending in the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.”

“The 2024 election sent a clear signal that Americans are tired of an extreme left-wing agenda that favors wokeness over sensible policy and spurs price increases,” Guthrie said in a Sunday Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Guthrie said the administration “has already reversed President Biden and Democrats’ electric-vehicle mandates and natural-gas export ban; now it’s Congress’s turn.”

Guthrie told committee Republicans on a call Sunday that the overall legislation — including changes to Medicaid — would create more than $900 billion in savings, according to POLITICO.

A committee spokesperson said “the bill specifically rescinds funding leftover from nine of the Biden Administration’s IRA renewable energy and electrification subsidy programs at the Department of Energy — saving taxpayers money and allowing for deficit reduction.”

Department of Energy

The legislation would scrap “the unobligated balance” of IRA funding for the Loans Program Office and money dedicated to transmission projects.

The LPO received over $35 billion from the climate law, while DOE’s Grid Deployment Office got around $3 billion as part from the IRA’s “Transmission Facility Financing” section.

Republicans will also try to rescind IRA funds boosting a number of other DOE programs, including initiatives on advanced vehicle manufacturing, energy infrastructure reinvestment financing, tribal energy loan guarantees and state-based efficiency grants. Those programs, in total, received around $8.3 billion from the climate law.

The committee, however, did not make clear just how much leftover funding is available to repeal after the Biden administration pushed to get as much as possible out the door.

Outside of IRA programs, the legislation would accelerate permitting for infrastructure projects through new fees, something similar to the Natural Resources Committee text and what Democrats have called a pay-to-play scheme.

One Energy and Commerce provision, for example, would allow DOE to automatically deem a potential liquefied natural gas export facility to be in the “public interest” — normally a key regulatory hurdle — if the applicant pays a one-time fee of $1 million.

Another provision would allow other natural gas infrastructure developers to receive an “expedited permitting process” from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission under the Natural Gas Act if the applicants pays $10 million or 1 percent of the project’s projected cost.

The proposal eyes permitting being completed within a year and would exempt projects from certain litigation. A similar timeline and fee would apply to carbon dioxide, oil and hydrogen pipeline permitting.

The legislation would also rescind congressionally appropriated funding outside of the IRA for key DOE programs, including around $401 million from the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy and around $260 million from DOE’s State and Community Energy Programs.

It would grant $2 billion for the department to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a longtime objective of Republicans to shore up the nation’s energy security.

EPA

The bill text confirmed a longtime promise from Energy and Commerce leaders that they would target unobligated balances from the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $27 billion IRA program designed to support clean energy projects particularly in low-income and disadvantaged communities.

Outside of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, the plan would repeal a variety of IRA programs designed to reduce air pollution at schools and ports, reduce emissions from diesel engines and construction materials, and promote carbon monitoring initiatives.

And, as expected, the legislation takes aim at the Inflation Reduction Act’s methane fee. That program is designed to reduce methane leaks from natural gas infrastructure. Congress, through the Congressional Review Act, already repealed EPA regulations implementing the fee.

The legislation would also roll back two regulations on emissions from passenger vehicles. Gone would be the latest corporate average fuel economy, or CAFE, standards issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and EPA’s newest multipollutant emissions standards for model years 2027 and later, requiring significant reductions in greenhouse gas and pollutant emissions from light-duty and medium-duty vehicles.

Republicans went further in their targeting of Biden-era vehicle policies with a proposed repeal of $600 million in grants and rebates to states, municipalities tribes and nonprofits to expand the use of zero-emission vehicles.

See also: 

How To Fix US Energy After Biden Broke It

Battle to Open Closed-Minded Universities

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Research by U.K. politics professor Eric Kaufmann (top left) showed that 80 percent of Canada’s right-leaning academics report a hostile environment for their beliefs. The proportion was the same in the UK and was 70 percent in the U.S. In all three countries, the percentage of “very left” academics reporting hostility towards their beliefs was less than 20 percent.

James Piereson writes at City Journal Trump Is Likely to Win His Fight with Universities.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The administration holds many cards,
and it seems determined to play them all.

The universities have compromised themselves with the alliance they have formed with the Democratic Party and their dependency on taxpayer funds provided by Democrats, Independents, and Republicans alike. Universities should not have let themselves become so attached to any political party or ideological point of view, lest they compromise the intellectual integrity of their institutions or jeopardize the taxpayer funding that they badly need. But that is precisely what has happened at Harvard, Columbia, Northwestern, and other leading institutions. It is something the Trump administration hopes to change.

Trump has said that he wants to use the lever of federal funding to force university leaders to confront several issues: the lack of intellectual diversity on their campuses, with upward of 80 percent of faculty members identifying as liberals or progressives, and less than 2 percent as conservatives; the refusal to enforce race- and gender-blind civil rights laws, and the continued use of preferences in admissions and employment, in violation of the 2023 Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard University; the failure to protect the rights of Jewish students amid demonstrations on campus of anti-Semitism and hatred of Israel; administrative “bloat,” reflected in how college campuses today employ more administrators than professors teaching courses; tuition increases that far outpace inflation, leading to ever more student borrowing and debt underwritten by federal loan programs; and the continued presence of ideological departments and programs on campuses that do not allow for diversity of intellectual approaches.

The Trump administration has tried to influence institutions by freezing payment of federal funds, but there is a more effective way to do this—one less likely to cause mayhem in scientific programs and medical schools and less prone to being overturned by the courts: Trump should use the leverage of prospective grants to induce institutions to abide by federal law and begin reforming their internal operations.

These institutions will come back to the federal government every year with proposals for new funding. The Trump administration is not required to make new awards to these institutions. These can be made on the condition that the institutions are taking concrete steps to reform themselves. If they thumb their noses at Trump, then the administration can decide that grants and contracts that have gone to Harvard, Columbia, and Johns Hopkins in the past might be given in the future to the University of Alabama, Ohio State, or the University of Montana. Such a redistribution of federal funds might even bring about a useful realignment in the scientific prestige of American universities, as some move down and others move up the reputational ladder.

Some of Trump’s goals in regard to higher-education reform are already subsumed under grant participation agreements that institutional representatives must sign before federal departments can sign off on grants and awards. Those agreements oblige recipients to comply with provisions of the Civil Rights Act (1964), the Title IX educational amendments (1972), and other regulations in regard to discrimination by age and handicap status. In light of the Supreme Court decision in the SFFA  v.  Harvard case, along with Trump’s executive orders in regard to civil rights, those agreements oblige recipient institutions to abandon all preference programs, including DEI programs created to advance preferences in university life. More than a few institutional representatives will have a hard time signing these agreements going forward because of lingering preference programs on their campuses. In any case, the administration can supplement those agreements with addenda that include other issues it wants universities to address.

The questions asked of institutional representatives might include:

Does the institution pledge to abide by federal civil rights laws that forbid group preferences in admissions and employment?

Has the institution taken steps to guarantee the rights of Jewish students against attacks arising out of anti-Semitism or hatred of Israel?

What steps has the institution taken to create greater intellectual diversity on its campus?

Has the institution adopted measures to reduce the number of administrators on campus and to eliminate administrative departments that try to enforce group preferences in violation of federal law?

Has the institution limited tuition increases to the level of inflation in order to reduce expenses for students?

These questions should clarify the choice Trump is asking these institutions to make:
either change current practices or forgo federal research funds.

Over the four years of this second Trump administration, such an approach might have genuine and constructive consequences for the operation of American universities. Will Johns Hopkins University spurn $3.3 billion in federal grants next year in order to preserve its DEI bureaucracy? Will NYU give up $879 million in research grants next year in order to maintain its gender studies programs, or programs in the law school that advocate for group preferences? Universities may have to make hard choices between future federal funding and ideological programs currently in place.

This is precisely what liberals, feminists, and other activists did in the 1970s when they forced universities to sign “affirmative action” pledges, which soon turned into agreements to enforce group preferences in faculty hiring and employment. That approach evolved into the campaign for diversity later in that decade, when the Supreme Court ruled that preferences might be used to advance diversity in colleges and universities, and more recently into the DEI crusade that emerged in the wake of the George Floyd incident. That crusade proved to many that the entire enterprise had gone way too far. After five decades, with much academic mischief to show for it, the approach has hit a wall with the Trump administration.

Harvard and other universities are likely to find that they
are fighting a losing battle against the federal government.

Harvard has an endowment of $53 billion, by far the largest among the nation’s universities, but that’s little more than a rounding error in the government’s $7 trillion budget. Here the government negotiates from a strong position because, while federal grants loom large in university budgets, they are only a small fraction of the government’s budget.

The government has other weapons at its disposal. There is the tax exemption, for starters, which, if lost, will mean that schools cannot receive tax-deductible donations.. The government can stop the flow of international students to the schools, a move that would be costly in terms of foregone tuition payments. Trump can also ask Congress to slap a hefty tax on university endowments, another step his administration is already considering. At some point, Harvard and other elite institutions will have to sue for peace rather than continue an argument they cannot win.

In any case, the Trump administration holds many cards in this showdown with the universities, and it seems ready to play them all.

Why Must Repeal Biden’s IRA

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Frank Lasee explains why Republicans Must End Democrats’ IRA Caused Inflation.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The Democrats passed the Orwellian named inflation Reduction Act (IRA) without a single Republican vote. They told us that it would be a $369 billion spending package. In fact, it could cost nearly $5 trillion adding to our debt.

The United States now has a $36.5 trillion national debt,
with a trillion dollars in annual interest payments.

The money for the IRA is all borrowed money. It causes more unnecessary energy spending, driving up electric rates and increasing inflation. This overspending is unsustainable and harmful to the United States; inflation is putting pressure on families’ budgets.

The subsidies in the IRA are incredible. Wind and solar get a 50 percent tax credit to build and a 30 percent subsidy for the electricity they produce. Trump and Congress need to end these subsidies. Not only for wind and solar, but for all the other supposedly green initiatives, like battery factories, electric vehicle manufacturing components, and hydrogen. We simply can’t afford it. 

This “green” borrowing is driving up our electric rates. Because wind and solar power are part-time and intermittent, they cannot provide full-time, keep the lights on all the time electricity generation. They do not replace any natural gas, coal, or nuclear power they just add costs.

It is like a household that has two on demand gas cars that serve their needs. They think they can save money with another car. Because of the 50 percent tax subsidies and propaganda they buy a solar car. 

They find that the solar car doesn’t work the first and last hour of the day, or when it is raining, or cloudy and not at night. The sun isn’t powerful enough. They learn they cannot replace any of their gas cars with the solar car.

So, they buy a wind car that only works the 30 percent of the time the wind blows. They find they can’t get home from their kids’ soccer game or from work because the wind stopped blowing.

Capacity shortfall events – or blackouts – in Southwest Power Pool (SPP) when we modeled EPA’s proposal for carbon mandates, stemming from the agency’s use of 80% or higher capacity values for solar energy.

They are now paying for four cars instead of two. This is exactly what is happening to our electric grid. We are paying for a full-time and part-time electricity production. 

To make matters worse, the way that regional transmission organizations (RTOs) pay for our electricity doesn’t allow us to realize any savings from the heavily subsidized wind and solar generation. 

The industry calls it take and pay. The most expensive form of electricity the RTO purchases is what they pay all electricity providers. This means that there is no savings from wind and solar for electric consumers, only increased costs.

Projected Business Electricity Expenses in California based on increasing commercial rates.

No other industry pays the highest bid price to all suppliers, regardless of what they bid. But that’s what they do in the electric world. We are paying higher electricity rates because of this practice.

This begs for state legislative action to correct this expensive payment scheme. 

Wind and solar further drive up the price of electricity because they require many miles of expensive transmission wires and displace full-time electric generation. Forcing it to run less than it would if they were not on the electric grid.

As natural gas and coal power plants run more part-time, every electron they sell must have a higher price to cover their costs. Their maintenance costs will only increase, too, because they were never designed to run intermittently.

Trump understands that wind and solar drive up the cost of our electricity, particularly offshore wind, which costs five times more than natural gas electricity, and are built in hurricane alley. What could go wrong? The simple answer is to stop subsidizing all electric generation with our borrowed inflation causing tax dollars. And states should end favorable regulations that require the purchase of wind and solar first. 

There are 21 House Republicans that have signed a letter saying they don’t want to repeal the IRA, even though they didn’t vote for it. Because it is fostering wasteful pretend “green” spending in their districts. Clever Democrats have the bulk of the spending going into these Republican districts in order to preserve this green slush fund.

President Trump needs to use his considerable persuasion and political muscle to end this Democrat boondoggle, which adds to our $36.5 trillion national debt.

Frank Lasee is a former Wisconsin state senator and former member of Governor Scott Walker’s administration. The district he represented had two nuclear power plants, a biomass plant and numerous wind towers. He has experience with energy, the environment, and the climate. You can read more energy and climate information at www.truthinenergyandclimate.com which Frank leads.

Trump EO Puts Federal Budgeting on a Zero Base

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Zero-Based Budgeting (ZBB) is a particular approach to managing organizational resources which I have known from previous consulting experience. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist (although Doge has at least one of them) to know that branches of a bureaucracy grow like topsy driven by internal incentives. The game is played by finding a new territory to regulate and add it to the mission scope to justify the added people, dollars and facilities. Managers increase their power, prestige and salaries by adding staff and resources, the bigger the agency budget the better.  As one Doge leader put it, government only ratchets upward, nothing is ever taken away.

Now that the US is the nation with world’s largest debt, there is no option other than to ratchet downward by streamlining and rightsizing focusing on the essentials, and discarding the rest.

What is ZBB method for meeting the desperate need to trim the US federal government. (Source: Investopedia)

How Zero-Based Budgeting (ZBB) Works

ZBB allows top-level strategic goals to be implemented into the budgeting process by tying them to specific functional areas of the organization. Costs can then be first grouped and then measured against previous results and current expectations.

Zero-Based Budgeting vs. Traditional Budgeting
Traditional budgeting calls for incremental increases over previous budgets such as a 2% increase in spending. Zero-based budgeting requires a justification of both old and new expenses.

Traditional budgeting also only analyzes new expenditures. ZBB starts from zero and calls for a justification of old, recurring expenses in addition to new expenditures. Zero-based budgeting aims to put the onus on managers to justify expenses. It drives value for an organization by optimizing costs, not just revenue.

What Are the Advantages of Zero-Based Budgeting?

Zero-based budgeting starts from scratch, analyzing each granular need of the company instead of using the incremental budgeting increases found in traditional budgeting. This essentially allows for a strategic, top-down approach to analyze the performance of a given project

Zero-based budgeting offers several advantages, including focused operations, lower costs, budget flexibility, and strategic execution. The highest revenue-generating operations come into greater focus when managers think about how each dollar is spent. Lowered costs may result because zero-based budgeting may prevent the misallocation of resources that can happen over time when a budget grows incrementally.

The way forward is explained in the Executive Order issued April 9, 2025, with this intent:

Section 1. Purpose

In our country, laws are supposed to provide the certainty and order necessary to foster liberty and innovation. Instead, our vast regulatory structure often serves to constrict ordered liberty, not promote it. The United States Code itself is more than 60,000 pages. But unelected agency officials write most of the complex, legally binding rules on top of that, often stretching these statutory provisions beyond what the Congress enacted.

In particular, the previous administration added more pages to the Federal Register than any other in history, with the result that the Code of Federal Regulations now approaches a staggering 200,000 pages. These regulations linger in such volume that serious reexamination seldom occurs.  This regime of governance-by-regulator has imposed particularly severe costs on energy production, where innovation is critical. The net result is an energy landscape perpetually trapped in the 1970s. By rescinding outdated regulations that serve as a drag on progress, we can stimulate innovation and deliver prosperity to everyday Americans.

This order directs certain agencies to incorporate a sunset provision into their regulations governing energy production to the extent permitted by law, thus compelling those agencies to reexamine their regulations periodically to ensure that those rules serve the public good.

How Trump Tariffs Make Economic Sense

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Van A. Mobley explains in his Federalist article Why Comparing Trump’s Tariffs To The Smoot-Hawley Act Is Dishonest.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Trump’s tariffs will work — but they’ll work
even better with the Federal Reserve’s help.

Trump’s tariffs are not designed to encourage Americans to borrow money and maximize their consumption. Nor are they designed to encourage participation in speculative stock market or real estate bubbles. America’s free trade policies encouraged such excesses after the end of the Cold War, and we can’t stand a repeat of the folly. While his critics wrongly invoke the Smoot-Hawley tariff failures of 1930, Trump’s emerging tariff policies, particularly if combined with the appropriate monetary policy, will have much better results and Make America Great Again. 

As Trump’s tariffs are implemented, they will generate revenue for the federal government and encourage investment in atrophied as well as cutting-edge sectors of the American economy. In addition, they will increase the quantity and quality of jobs available for Americans as a whole, will persuade (and are already persuading) our trading partners to adopt fairer and less predatory trading regimes, will arrest a possible slide into recession, and will get our economy moving toward our long-term growth potential of 3 percent (or more) GDP growth per year.

President Trump says “tariff” is one of his favorite words, and historical evidence indicates tariffs work. They worked for the Chinese this century, they worked for the Japanese after World War II, and they worked for the U.S. and Germany in the late 19th century. Back then, American and German growth rates and economic vibrancy radically outstripped the growth rates and economic vibrancy of a free-trading Britain, which, after abandoning its early 19th-century tariffs, adopted the free trade nostrums of David Ricardo and slipped into decline. 

 

One of the few instances when tariffs failed was during the Smoot-Hawley tariff episode at the beginning of the Great Depression. But there are special circumstances surrounding the imposition of the Smoot-Hawley tariffs that the free-traders hesitate to mention. When the United States raised the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, the U.S. was the world’s greatest creditor, and by raising the tariffs, we prevented others from selling us things so they could make money and pay us back. When they didn’t pay us back, it collapsed the global financial system and helped usher in the Great Depression.

Obviously, today the circumstances are reversed. The United States is now the world’s largest debtor. If we can’t pay back our debts, the global financial system will collapse, which would be disastrous for the entire world. 

Trump’s tariff medicine will put us on a diet, help us produce more,
diminish inflation, and position us to manage and decrease our debt.

Thus, Trump’s tariffs are not only good for Americans, but they are also good for everybody else across the world. While the Smoot-Hawley tariffs were bad, Trump’s tariffs are good because the relative financial position of the U.S. vis-à-vis the rest of the world is now reversed. This fact must not be overlooked when assessing the wisdom of Trump’s tariffs versus the folly of Smoot-Hawley. 

Furthermore, as Ben Bernanke, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, taught us, at root, it was not the Smoot-Hawley tariffs that sparked the Great Depression. It was a monstrous policy misstep on the part of the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee. On the eve of the Great Depression, the Fed raised rates and pursued a contractionary monetary policy when it should have cut rates and pursued an expansionary monetary policy. 

Trump’s trade policies are necessary and on target.
The uncertainty lies with the Fed.

How long until Jerome Powell and his companions stop gazing in the rearview mirror and look through the windshield instead? When they do, they will see that inflationary pressures are subsiding and that circumstances call for rate cuts and other expansionary monetary policies. They will cease fighting the last economic war and join the fray in fighting the current one. 

With Trump’s tariffs, America’s future is bright. Realistically, the path forward will be more pleasant if the Fed cuts rates sooner rather than later. 

Van Mobley is a professor at Concordia University Wisconsin.