Government making us use play-like energy forms will consign us to a cold, dark future

 Per the Washington Free Beacon:

President Joe Biden's aggressive climate regulations targeting fossil-fuel-fired power plants will create widespread electric grid instability and lead to mass blackouts impacting millions of Americans, according to a recent studycommissioned by North Dakota's state government.

The research, conducted in May by the firm Always On Energy Research, concluded that the Environmental Protection Agency's recently finalized regulations are not technologically feasible and will foreseeably lead to the retirement of coal power generation units. Intermittent and weather-dependent green energy sources, such as wind and solar, will replace such retired generators, leading to unreliable conditions, the study found.

The study largely echoes concerns that have been voiced by the U.S. grid watchdog, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation; regional grid operators; and power utility companies. Four regional grid operators that oversee the infrastructure supplying power for 154 million Americans warnedafter the EPA regulations were first proposed last year that grid reliability would "dwindle to concerning levels" under the regulations. The Edison Electric Institute, the lead industry group representing U.S. electric companies, in late May joined a lawsuit that challenged the EPA's finalized regulations.

"Biden's Green Agenda is shutting down baseload power and is rapidly destabilizing our electrical grid. Electricity costs are up 30% under Biden already," North Dakota governor Doug Burgum (R.) told the Washington Free Beacon in a statement. "Prices will continue to skyrocket if he's re-elected as real power demand increases dramatically for the first time in decades—for chip manufacturing and new foundational industries like AI."

Burgum, a member of the North Dakota Industrial Commission, which commissioned the study, added that Biden's regulatory regime will reduce power supplies, leading to "higher prices AND less reliability."

There's a dive into some numbers so we can compare and contrast:

Solar panels, for example, produce just 25 percent and wind turbines produce 34 percent of their listed capacity, according to the Energy Information Administration. Coal and natural gas plants, meanwhile, respectively produce 49 percent and 54 percent of their listed capacity.

Factoring in that disparity, Always On Energy Research concluded the grid across the majority of the Midwest would experience nearly 9 million megawatt hours of unserved load, leading to blackouts costing tens of billions of dollars.

"The EPA power plant rule is exactly the wrong thing to be doing for grid reliability right now," Paige Lambermont, a research fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told the Free Beacon. "To be intentionally closing and, essentially, banning the facilities that are keeping the grid functioning while, at the same time, in other ways, encouraging the penetration on the grid of things like wind and solar that are making the grid less reliable is going to have incredibly poor aftereffects."

Nationwide, natural gas plants generated roughly 43 percent of total electricity produced in 2023 while coal plants generated another 16 percent, according to additional Energy Information Administration data. By comparison, wind power generated 10 percent of total electricity in the United States, and solar produced less than 6 percent.

But let's not conclude on a note of making this the main point.

The main point is that government has no effing business getting between producers and consumers of energy and limiting the two parties' options as they desire to come to an agreement - that is, a transaction. 

The pointy-headed overlords don't think we have the individual capacity to make decisions that serve our own best interests. 

The EPA will make the lights flicker, cost us an arm and a leg, and greatly erode the second most precious thing we have as human beings (after our lives): our freedom.

 

 

A package like Caitlin Clark is of course going to bring up their stuff

 https://www.catholicleague.org/bigoted-attack-on-caitlin-clark/spoils the party for those who wanted someone with some intersectionality bona fides to be he hone to astronomically boost WNBA ticket sales:

Clark is a white heterosexual Irish Catholic with a boyfriend. 

And she's serious about the Catholic part:

Clark’s Catholic faith is important to her. In 2018, she gave an interview to the Des Moines Register about her time at Dowling Catholic High School. “We get to live our faith every day. Dowling starts every day with prayer and ends every day with prayer. This is a big reason why Dowling has such a special culture and is such a special place to go to school.”

That will never do for the identity politics militants:

“The View” co-host Sunny Hostin argues that “There is a thing called white privilege. There is a thing called tall privilege, and we have to acknowledge that… I do think that she is more relatable to more people because she’s white, because she’s attractive, and unfortunately, there still is that stigma against the LGBTQ+ community. Seventy percent of the WNBA is black. A third of the players are in the LGBTQ+ community and we have to do something about that stigma in this country.”

WNBA player A’ja Wilson claims that racism is buoying Caitlin Clark’s success. “I think a lot of people may say it’s not about black and white, but to me, it is.”

Atlantic sports writer and former ESPN commentator Jamele Hill claims, “We would all be very naive if we didn’t say race and her sexuality played a role in her popularity….”

Mike Freeman, a columnist for USA Today, contends it was a moral outrage that Clark received a shoe deal while none of the black WNBA players had a similar sponsorship offer. He maintains that it “shows how black women are being ignored in a league that they dominate.” He went on to say, “What so much of this comes down to is a lack of respect for the black women of the WNBA.”

In an effort to dismiss Clark’s potential, former WNBA player Sheryl Swoopes says that Clark is overrated because she played in college for five years, was a 25-year-old and could easily dominate the opposition, and took over 40 shots a game. When critics pointed out that Swoopes was factually wrong on all of these claims, she responded to the blowback by saying, “For people to come at me and say that I made those comments because I’m a ‘racist’, like, first of all, black people can’t be racist.”

Once again, nothing happens in post-American vulture without getting an ideological charge. 

 

 

 

Once in a while, something goes right in this world

 This:

Israeli forces rescued four hostages held by Hamas since October in a raid in Gaza on Saturday that Palestinian officials said killed more than 200 people, one of the single bloodiest Israeli assaults of the eight-month-old war.

The hostage rescue operation and an intense accompanying air assault took place in central Gaza's al-Nuseirat, a densely built-up and often embattled area in the conflict between Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian territory's ruling Islamist group.

The Times of Israel called it 

one of the most daring, complex, high-risk yet successful operations amid the war against Hamas, rescuing four hostages alive from the terror group’s captivity in the Gaza Strip. The mission was conducted in broad daylight and in an area where Israeli forces had not previously operated.

About civilian misfortune, the IDF had this to say:

The IDF acknowledged that it killed Palestinian civilians amid the fighting, but it placed the blame on Hamas for holding hostages and fighting in a dense civilian environment.

“We know about under 100 [Palestinian] casualties. I don’t know how many of them are terrorists,” IDF Spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said in a briefing with journalists, reported by Reuters.

Yeah, it behooves us to cast a gimlet eye on Hamas-supplied figures:

The proportion of Palestinian women and children being killed in the Israel-Hamas war appears to have declined sharply, an Associated Press analysis of Gaza Health Ministry data has found, a trend that both coincides with Israel’s changing battlefield tactics and contradicts the ministry’s own public statements.

The trend is significant because the death rate for women and children is the best available proxy for civilian casualties in one of the 21st century’s most destructive conflicts. In October, when the war began, it was above 60%. For the month of April, it was below 40%. Yet the shift went unnoticed for months by the U.N. and much of the media, and the Hamas-linked Health Ministry has made no effort to set the record straight.

But it's not like there are a lot of unopinionated people in Gaza:

Palestinian support for Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza remains high, according to a Palestinian poll released on March 20. That support has increased since the Iran-backed terrorist group attacked Israel on October 7. The poll, published by the Ramallah-based non-profit Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, also indicates that Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas and his faction have grown even more unpopular since the war in Gaza started.

I'll reiterate: all this agony could come to an end yet this afternoon if Hamas would do two things: release the hostages and dismantle itself.