Green Swindle Loses Again: EV Automaker Runs Out Of Juice

Energy News Beat

Nikola, a hydrogen-electric semi-truck maker, filed Chapter 11 after a spectacular market collapse.

With news of another green company going under, the green industry would never have fully developed if the federal government had not chosen winners and losers. [emphasis, links added]

It’s another victim of the climate change cult.

Nikola, a hydrogen-electric semi-truck company, filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy this week after a spectacular collapse in market value.

Riding high on the Democrats’ loudly touted Green New Deal, investors flocked to Nikola when the company went public in June 2020, with the company’s market value jumping to $27 billion, putting it higher than Ford — even though Nikola had yet to sell a single vehicle.

But green was the future, or so Democrats and the Biden administration insisted, and investors jumped on board the green dream gravy train, fearful of being left behind.

The trouble is that this green dream train suffered from the same limits that plague all EVs. They cost too much and fail to deliver on the promised results.

To be fair, Nikola, whose founder was Trevor Milton, was found guilty of fraud in 2022.

Nikola’s commercial depicting the company’s new semi-truck was infamously rigged. The truck depicted was, in fact, empty of any batteries and was rolled downhill in a deceitful effort to portray it as pulling a load.

The ad included the caption: “The Nikola Hydrogen Electric trucks will take on any semi-truck and outperform them in every category: weight, acceleration, stopping, safety and features — all with 500-1,000 mile range!” But that was never true.

Furthermore, Nikola delivered fewer than 500 of its initially reported orders of 14,000 heavy trucks. It also struggled with development problems. In 2023 the company had to recall 209 trucks over electric battery fire issues.

Meanwhile, the price tag on these trucks was $351,000, nearly twice the price of an internal combustion engine (ICE) truck.

To make matters worse, the sale price was half of the truck’s production cost. Even with Nikola buyers getting a $40,000 tax credit from Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, Nikolas was still far more costly than ICE trucks.

Another problem that plagued the company was the lack of an established hydrogen refueling network nationwide.

Ann Rundle, vice president for electrification and autonomy for truck market forecaster ACT Research, observed, “How do you expect somebody to adopt that truck if there wasn’t a practical way to fuel it?”

In the end, the reality of free market forces finally caught up to Nikola. CEO Steve Girsky admitted, “Like other companies in the electric vehicle industry, we have faced various market and macroeconomic factors that have impacted our ability to operate.”

Translation: We couldn’t survive in a free market.

Nikola joins a growing number of failed EV companies, including Fisker Inc., Lordstown Motors, and Last Electric Mile Solutions, who have gone under in the last couple of years.

And if it weren’t for a $6 billion bailout from Joe Biden’s Energy Department, Rivian Automotive would have been added to the list.

If the EV industry is going to survive and grow, it needs to do so on its merit. It will need to compete in the free market without relying on handouts and favorable regulations from the government, artificially juicing its existence.

Furthermore, if EVs are the future, they must innovate well beyond their current limited capabilities. If they do so, they will win over the market.

Read more at Patriot Post

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NY’s Net Zero Dream Unravels As Utopian Climate Plans Face Lawsuit Woes

Energy News Beat

Everything about New York’s vision for a net zero economy is unraveling, and its utopian climate plans have only gotten worse.

nyc sun july
Back at the beginning of the year, I had a post titled “New York On The March To Climate Utopia.” The post took note that everything about New York State’s vision for a zero-emissions economy and for “climate leadership” was in the process of falling apart.

Its contracts for vast offshore wind farms to replace fossil fuel generation had either been completely canceled (the majority) or rebid at much higher and uneconomic prices (the minority).

Its two contracted facilities to produce “green” hydrogen to back up the intermittent wind and solar had run into financial difficulties and were likely to fail.

Its one big contracted high-capacity transmission line to bring the imaginary upstate wind and solar electricity to downstate markets had also been canceled, without stated reason but almost certainly because of unworkable economics. …

In the few short weeks since that post, you would think that it would be almost impossible for the situation of New York’s utopian climate plans to have gotten any worse.

But in fact, the situation has gotten worse — much, much worse.

On January 20, President Trump was inaugurated, and he immediately went to work dismantling federal support and subsidies for “green” energy.

By this January 20 Executive Order, Trump “temporarily” withdrew all of the Outer Continental Shelf from leasing for wind power projects.

That appears to nix most, although perhaps not all, of New York’s offshore wind plans. (Although the pause in leasing is said to be “temporary,” there is no commitment that the leasing will ever resume.).

Also on January 20, Trump signed another Executive Order titled “Unleashing American Energy.” That one, in Section 7, ordered an immediate halt to all disbursements of subsidies to “green” energy projects under the Inflation Reduction Act or Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act:

All agencies shall immediately pause the disbursement of funds appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (Public Law 117-169) or the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (Public Law 117-58), . . . and shall review their processes, policies, and programs for issuing grants, loans, contracts, or any other financial disbursements of such appropriated funds for consistency with the law and the policy outlined in section 2 of this order.

New York was likely relying on receiving many billions of dollars under these Acts to prop up its wind, solar, transmission, and green hydrogen schemes.

Again, the pause from this EO is only “temporary” but in all likelihood, these funds will never come back during the Trump presidency, if ever.

Meanwhile, New York State’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act of 2019 (Climate Act) remains on the books.

That statute commands the complete restructuring of New York’s energy economy to reach “net zero” greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, with a most immediate first deadline of 70% of electricity generation from “renewables” by 2030.

They never had a credible plan to achieve that, but they pretended they were going to do most of it with the big offshore wind buildout. Now that that is dead, they don’t even have a fake plan.

And also meanwhile, New York City’s statute known as Local Law 97 also remains on the books.

That’s the statute that mandates that all residential buildings over 25,000 square feet convert to electric heat by 2030 — the same year that the State’s Climate Act mandates 70% of electricity generation from “renewables,” of which the large majority can only come from non-existent wind and solar.

Thus we have the city mandating a huge increase in electricity demand by 2030 at the same time that the state is mandating the dismantling of our existing reliable electricity generation with no credible plan to replace it.

Back in 2022, a group of co-op owners and boards in Queens brought a case in the New York State courts seeking to get the City’s Local Law 97 declared invalid as “pre-empted” by the State’s Climate Act. The case goes by the name Glen Oaks Village Owners, Inc. v. City of New York.

Since it started, the case has been tied up in motions and appeals.

Initially, the trial court (in New York we call that the Supreme Court) dismissed the case, finding no pre-emption. However, the Appellate Division, First Department, reversed and ordered the trial court to consider whether there was pre-emption.

Rather than going back to the trial court, the City decided to try to appeal to the Court of Appeals, our highest court, to get the dismissal reinstated. The case has just concluded briefing in that court.

On Friday, my co-counsel Cam Macdonald and I filed an amicus brief in this case on behalf of a group of parties including some co-op owners and a not-for-profit called New Yorkers for Affordable Reliable Energy.

The amicus brief argues that the Climate Act and Local Law 97 are in irreconcilable conflict because the State, via the Climate Act, has no plan or ability to provide the electricity that would be needed to enable compliance with the City’s Local Law 97.

Here is a quote from our Summary of Argument:

The irreconcilability [of the two laws] arises from the simultaneous mandates in Local Law 97 and the Climate Act. First, Local Law 97 mandates that large residential buildings in New York City convert to electric heat by 2030. Meanwhile, the Climate Act requires that 70 percent come from “renewables,” also by 2030.

The latter mandate requires replacing always-available fossil fuel electrical generation capacity with intermittent wind and solar electricity generation, Wind and solar cannot provide continuous electricity supply. Intermittency threatens buildings that have converted to electric heat with losing heat for extended periods in the dead of winter.

The Climate Act, and a “Scoping Plan” developed under it, contain no credible plan to provide the additional reliable electricity needed to heat all large New York City buildings, as Local Law 97 mandates.

I don’t yet have a link for this amicus brief, but I plan to update this post when a link becomes available.

The Court of Appeals has a chance here to save New York City and its residents from their folly. It may or may not take advantage of the opportunity.

If it takes a pass and reinstates the dismissal of the case, Local Law 97 will still fail within a few years at most. It’s just that, in that scenario, a lot of people stand to get hurt.

Read more at Manhattan Contrarian

 

The post NY’s Net Zero Dream Unravels As Utopian Climate Plans Face Lawsuit Woes appeared first on Energy News Beat.

 

Poll: Voters Skeptical Of Climate Policies, Distrust Claims By Activists, Media

Energy News Beat

A new poll shows skepticism on climate policies, with voters questioning the trustworthiness of activists, media, and astronomical costs.

climate protest 12 years left
Until recently, the U.S. and the rest of the developed world pursued a costly global policy of “net-zero” carbon emissions to battle the supposed ill-effect of climate change. [emphasis, links added]

But President Donald Trump has changed all that by ending the U.S.’ commitment to the global net-zero effort.

Will today’s highly partisan voters support Trump? The latest I&I/TIPP Poll data suggest a high degree of skepticism among many voters over global warming’s threat.

Three-quarters of those responding to the I&I/TIPP Poll agreed there are reasons for “public skepticism toward climate-change policies,” while just over a third of voting-age Americans say they “distrust” the information used to sell previous climate change policies.

For the national online poll, taken from Jan. 29-31, 1,478 adults were first asked:

“How much do you trust the claims made by climate change activists and policymakers?” The poll has a margin of error of +/-2.6 percentage points.

While 50% said they either trust “completely” (20%) or “somewhat” (30%), another 36% said they “completely” (20%) or “somewhat” (16%) distrust claims made by climate activists and politicians.

Once again, political affiliation plays a role in how voters see the issue.

Democrats overwhelmingly say “trust” (67%) over “distrust” (21%) the climate change claims that have been made, but Republicans are more skeptical, with 37% answering “Trust” and a 51% majority answering “Distrust.”

Among independents, responses were somewhere in the middle, at 47% ‘Trust” and 35% “Distrust.”

Trust in the climate claims rises with income. Of those earning $30,000 or less a year, “trust” was 46%; for those at $30,000-$50,000 a year, 47%; for those at $50,000-$75,000 a year, 51%; and those over $75,000, 63%.

A follow-up question asked the following:

“What do you think is the main reason for public skepticism toward climate change policies?”

The responses showed what really concerns people most about the public response to the hypothetical threats of climate change.

Of those responding, 25% cited “Lack of clear, transparent scientific data,” 22% responded “Perceived hypocrisy of leaders and activists,” 17% agreed on “Economic consequences of proposed policies,” and 8% answered “Media exaggeration of climate risks.”

Meanwhile, only 8% said they don’t believe there’s widespread skepticism over climate change scientific claims, while 16% said they weren’t sure.

This is more than a gauge of sentiment about climate change policies in general and the “net zero” policy in particular.

For one thing, talking about making the world “carbon-neutral” by the middle of the century can take place on an abstract plane, but it will have enormous financial and economic consequences unparalleled in human history.

A recent study by the McKinsey Global Institute found:

“Capital spending on physical assets for energy and land-use systems in the net-zero transition between 2021 and 2050 would amount to about $275 trillion, or $9.2 trillion per year on average, an annual increase of as much as $3.5 trillion from today.”

Opponents of such spending argue that’s an enormous expenditure, one that could impoverish billions of people on Earth for no actual provable gain. If you need a comparison, the total global GDP last year, according to Statista, was roughly $110 trillion.

With that in mind, supporters say continued rises in temperatures could bring “severe storms, floods, drought, and wildfire,” along with permanent flooding of current coastal areas.

Americans don’t seem to buy the doom and gloom of such prognostications.

While every natural disaster has partisans claiming it’s caused by human-made CO2 in the air, American voters seem to feel that the message they’re getting through the media, politicians, government bureaucrats, and NGOs is distorted by partisan, lock-step belief in the theory of runaway heating of the atmosphere.

Meanwhile, for nearly half a century the repeated predictions of doom and gloom from CO2-caused global warming “experts” have been stunningly wrong.

Read rest at Issues & Insights

 

The post Poll: Voters Skeptical Of Climate Policies, Distrust Claims By Activists, Media appeared first on Energy News Beat.

 

The AfD Is Now Germany’s Mainstream

Energy News Beat

How the radical far-right party became the leader of the country’s opposition.

The AfD Is Now Germany’s Mainstream

How the radical far-right party became the leader of the country’s opposition.

By , a Berlin-based journalist.
Alice Weidel, co-leader and chancellor candidate of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), reacts with supporters at AfD headquarters to initial results in snap federal parliamentary elections on February 23, 2025 in Berlin.
Alice Weidel, co-leader and chancellor candidate of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), reacts with supporters at AfD headquarters to initial results in snap federal parliamentary elections on February 23, 2025 in Berlin.
Alice Weidel, co-leader and chancellor candidate of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), reacts with supporters at AfD headquarters to initial results in snap federal parliamentary elections on February 23, 2025 in Berlin. Sean Gallup/Getty Images

When Germany’s election results were announced on Feb. 23 at the packed headquarters of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Berlin, the hall erupted into wild rejoicing. The party’s leadership, among it frontperson Alice Weidel, and hundreds of supporters waving German flags immediately recognized the party’s 21 percent tally as a conspicuous victory—exactly twice its 2021 result—even though the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) won more votes by 8 percentage points, and with this the mandate to form a government.

Despite the fact that Germany’s other parties refuse to govern with it, the AfD—an extremist xenophobic party with ties to neo-Nazis—has definitively broken out of the margins and is positioned squarely at the center of German politics. It is now Germany’s second-strongest party; the largest opposition party in the Bundestag; the favored party of the working class; the no. 1 party in Germany’s eastern states; a darling of the new U.S. administration; and it also boasts representation in the regional legislatures of all but one German state and in the EU parliament, too, where it is buttressed by like-minded allies.

When Germany’s election results were announced on Feb. 23 at the packed headquarters of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Berlin, the hall erupted into wild rejoicing. The party’s leadership, among it frontperson Alice Weidel, and hundreds of supporters waving German flags immediately recognized the party’s 21 percent tally as a conspicuous victory—exactly twice its 2021 result—even though the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) won more votes by 8 percentage points, and with this the mandate to form a government.

Despite the fact that Germany’s other parties refuse to govern with it, the AfD—an extremist xenophobic party with ties to neo-Nazis—has definitively broken out of the margins and is positioned squarely at the center of German politics. It is now Germany’s second-strongest party; the largest opposition party in the Bundestag; the favored party of the working class; the no. 1 party in Germany’s eastern states; a darling of the new U.S. administration; and it also boasts representation in the regional legislatures of all but one German state and in the EU parliament, too, where it is buttressed by like-minded allies.

Perhaps, though, most critically: The election campaign illustrated just how fundamentally the AfD—as a party operating exclusively from opposition rows—can leverage a crude racist populism to swing the country’s political discourse and move rivals in its direction. The AfD’s cudgel was migration, which it wielded ruthlessly to force every other party (save the democratic socialist party, The Left) to harden their positions on the treatment of asylum-seekers, political asylum as such, policing practices, labor migration, and border policies. Every one of those parties paid a price at the urns for their acquiescence. The Left, on the other hand, was the only democratic party to significantly better its 2021 result and outperform the polls.

This applies to the CDU and Germany’s likely next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, too—and will follow them into the chancellery. In response to the AfD’s drumbeat and a series of tragic, violent incidents involving asylum-seekers in Germany, Merz threw caution to the wind in late January, just weeks before the vote, to switch the campaign’s focus from the economy, Merz’s specialty, to migration, the AfD’s bugbear. Merz went so far as to propose a raft of measures restricting migration from the Bundestag floor with the help of AfD votes—a step he and other mainstream politicos pledged they would never take—thus further eroding the anti-AfD “firewall” that the centrist parties vowed to respect.

With eyes wide shut, the CDU walked into a trap that has spelled the marginalization or even disappearance of center-right parties across Europe: By taking up the call of the far right, Europe’s conservatives feed the extremists that voters ultimately deem more authentic or convincing on their own bread-and-butter issues—at the conservatives’ expense. While the CDU captured more votes than the AfD, its 28.5 percent showing counts as its second-lowest ever and several points below its polling before Merz’s controversial maneuver. Like in France, Italy, and the Netherlands, as well as across Central Europe, the center right’s adoption of far-right positions played right into the court of radicals. Election data shows that the CDU and the Social Democrats (SPD) lost voters to the AfD.

The CDU can’t claim a “resounding victory,” concluded ARD, Germany’s public broadcaster. “Instead, it is well above the worst-ever 2021 tally of 24 percent, but far below the 42 percent that Angela Merkel’s CDU captured in 2013. Why is that?” the broadcaster asked. “It’s a combination of the generally difficult situation, the aftereffects of the Merkel era, mistakes made by the CDU leadership, but certainly also competition from the right. … Merz’s goal was not to leave the topic of migration to the AfD. … Did this tactic work? The numbers suggest: probably not.”

“Parties such as the AfD thrive on the longing for authority and security, and the current government [led by SPD] conveyed the opposite,” opined the daily Tageszeitung. “This is where the incessant crisis rhetoric of the right, whose slogans of ‘foreigners out’ offer a simple solution using authoritarian means, catches on,” social psychologist Oliver Decker told the media outlet. The fact that the centrist parties have jumped on the migration issue has not weakened the AfD, but rather legitimized it, he concluded.

[hrthin]

The AfD was born in 2013, not as an extremist party but as an EU-critical collection of nationally minded neoliberal economists who questioned Germany’s role in Europe’s 2009-10 financial crisis and the replacement of the Deutsche mark, Germany’s postwar currency, with the euro. But soon after its founding, the party started creeping to the right—its earliest successes happening in Germany’s eastern states, which have proved its bastion ever since. “Initially, the AfD appealed to older voters who considered themselves conservative but were disenchanted with Merkel,” Rüdiger Maas, the author of bestselling books on Germany, told FP.

The east was fertile soil for the increasingly hard-right party: Easterners expressed broad disappointment with unification, which they felt had treated them unfairly and turned them into second-class citizens. The east’s economic transition—a bill footed by the state to the tune of $2 trillion—resulted in rampant unemployment and, to this day, lower wages and living standards for those in the east. (That is, for those who didn’t flee it: Around 3.6 million people left.)

Moreover, the easterners had very little experience with migration, foreign cultures such as Islam, and coexistence with non-Germans. The first nonwhite migrants in the 1990s were often confronted with naked violence; a hard-right neo-Nazi scene flourished and even dominated rural locations. When over a million migrants streamed into Germany from 2015 to 2016, those who settled in the east faced hostility and deep-seated resentment. The AfD radicalized, as did the eastern Germans: above all, the non-college-educated, male, rural-situated, and over-40 voters, who constituted the party’s mainstay.

“From the very beginning, the AfD was a male party that appealed above all to men,” Daniela Rüther, an historian at Bochum University, told FP. “Like every völkische Bewegung (ethnically defined national movement) in German history, it puts the traditional family with its male-led hierarchy at the center of the community. Some of its gender policies are taken directly, one-to-one, from the Nazis.” The fact that the AfD is today led by a (gay) woman in Weidel only appears to be a contradiction, Rüther said. Were the AfD to come to power, she said, Weidel would be sidelined just as the female antagonist of Serena Joy is in the conservative revolution in Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale.

As the AfD entered eastern German legislatures, it simultaneously shed its liberal sensibilities for an ever more hard-right archconservatism. The AfD swung sharply to the far right, adopting ever more radical positions on migration, Islam, the climate crisis, and foreign nationals in Germany, as well as an affinity for President Vladimir Putin’s Russia, latent antisemitism, and a rebuttal of Germany’s self-critical approach to its World War II past.

Its stunning electoral successes, however, first came in response to the refugee crisis. In 2016 and 2017, it stormed into regional legislatures in western Germany and then with tallies above 20 percent in several of the eastern states. In the east, a West German-born fortysomething and former schoolteacher named Björn Höcke gained prominence as the leader of the AfD’s most radical branch, called Der Flügel. Höcke made no bones about his sympathies for the Third Reich and disdain for Western-style democracy. Höcke, for example, referred to the Holocaust memorial in central Berlin as a “monument of shame,” the kind of breach of German taboo that many observers, including relative moderates in the party, thought would disqualify him from German politics. These views attracted the attention of Germany’s intelligence services, which put several of the eastern party branches, including Höcke’s, under surveillance.

On the contrary, Höcke and his allies helped the party chalk up ever larger tallies. In 2019, he led the Thuringia AfD to a 23 percent showing and then five years later to capture 33 percent of the vote—making it Thuringia’s strongest party, another milestone.

[hrthin]

Yesterday, in Thuringia, Höcke took the party to a new record high: a full 38 percent of the vote. So tenuous are the democratic parties’ hold on Thuringia that they agreed last year to govern in a desperate, ungainly coalition of CDU, SPD, and the left-populist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance. But at least the firewall held. Another grim statistic: In the east, it’s no longer old voters who back the party but rather the youngest: One in three male voters under 24 cast their ballot for the AfD. “These young people grew up with the AfD,” Maas explained. “In many cases their parents were the first AfD voters. For them, the AfD was always part of the Bundestag, talk shows, regional politics.” Moreover, Maas said, this generation gets its politics from social media, mostly TikTok, which the far right (and the far left) swamped with their messages.

In yesterday’s poll—as in the June 2024 EU parliament vote—the AfD swept the five eastern states: its bright blue party color standing in stark contrast to the jet black of the western states, the CDU’s color. This is Germany: a country divided between democratic and undemocratic archconservatives. From the AfD’s point of view, a coalition between conservatives and the right makes all the sense in the world. It looks natural in light of the striking overlap, not least on migration. Their voters share similar concerns. But the Christian conservatives remain adamant that it will never happen. “Never again” was the promise of the postwar generation that Germany would never be home to a fascist politics again. As one of the placards at the anti-right demonstrations across Germany earlier this month proclaimed: “Never again is now.”

Paul Hockenos is a Berlin-based journalist. His recent book is Berlin Calling: A Story of Anarchy, Music, the Wall and the Birth of the New Berlin (The New Press).

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Newsom Demands $40B Fire Relief Bailout After Allocating $50M To Fight Trump

Energy News Beat

Newsom is begging for $40B in fire relief after allocating $50M to fight Trump, desperate not to have strings attached to any govt aid.

trump firehouse palisades
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) sent a letter Friday to Congress asking for $40 billion in funding for fire relief — two weeks after signing $50 million in spending to fight the Trump administration on immigration and other policies. [emphasis, links added]

As Breitbart News reported:

“Both bills were passed after a special legislative session called by Newsom after the election to prepare California to lead the opposition to the second Trump administration.

“Newsom and the Democrat-controlled legislature reached a deal to fund the anti-Trump effort even as the Palisades Fire and Eaton Fire were still smoldering in Los Angeles.”

One $25 million bill provides legal help for illegal aliens; another $25 million is to fight other Trump policies in court.

President Joe Biden provided six months’ worth of funding to California before leaving office.

But the rebuild will take years, and Newsom — having launched his assault on Trump — is begging for more.

In a 14-page letter to congressional leaders published by Politico, Newsom promises:

“Make no mistake, Los Angeles will use this money wisely. California will ensure that funds will serve individuals, communities, property owners, and businesses that suffered losses from these deadly fires.”

Newsom made no offer to the federal government in return — no changes in forest management, no changes in water management, no changes in emergency services, and no commitment to drop the $50 million in negative spending.

Ambassador Rick Grenell said last week that there would be “strings” on federal aid. Politico reports that Newsom is desperate not to have strings attached.

This author personally recommended to President Trump that he appoint a “special master” to oversee federal aid to California, along the lines of the September 11th Victims Compensation Fund.

The president accepted the proposal.

Read rest at Breitbart

 

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Biden’s EPA Funneled $20M To Nonprofit Led By Top White House Adviser

Energy News Beat

Biden’s EPA gave $20M to a nonprofit whose CEO applied while on a top White House advisory council, sparking cronyism alarm bells.

biden dazed and confused
In the final weeks of the Biden administration, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) awarded a lucrative environmental justice grant to a left-wing nonprofit whose CEO—LaTricea Adams—personally applied for the taxpayer funding while simultaneously serving as a member of a top White House advisory council. [emphasis, links added]

The Biden EPA announced in December that it selected Young, Gifted & Green to receive a $20 million grant under its so-called Environmental and Climate Justice Community Change Program—the largest grant allowed under the program.

The EPA dished out 105 grants—including the grant to Adams’s Tennessee-based group—totaling $1.6 billion as part of the program after receiving 2,801 applications from groups nationwide, according to internal agency documents reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

The EPA documents also show that Adams was listed as the individual applicant for the grant, which she applied for on behalf of Young, Gifted & Green in late September.

Adams personally applied while serving as a member of former president Joe Biden’s EJAC (EJAC), which was housed at the EPA. She served on the council from March 2021 through the end of the Biden administration.

It remains unclear the extent to which Adams, in her role on the EJAC, advised the EPA on its grantmaking activity or implementation of the Community Change Program.

Young, Gifted & Green did not respond to requests for comment.

But the revelation adds further weight to questions about the Biden administration’s process for doling out grants and whether the administration played favorites when it came to such programs.

Federal officials are generally expected to avoid even the appearance of impropriety when carrying out their duties.

The Free Beacon previously reported that groups whose leaders served on Biden’s EJAC were the recipients of EPA grants totaling hundreds of millions of dollars during the previous administration.

“The deep ties between the Biden-Harris administration, their donors, advisers, and grant recipients are a staggering wake-up call…”

The Young, Gifted & Green grant, though, represents the only known instance in which a council member personally applied for the funding their group ultimately received from the EPA.

The Trump administration has taken aim at both environmental justice programs as part of its energy agenda.

It has also initiated audits of climate spending executed under the Biden administration as part of its efforts to cut government waste and abuse.

“The deep ties between the Biden-Harris administration, their donors, advisers, and grant recipients are a staggering wake-up call,” EPA administrator Lee Zeldin told the Free Beacon in a statement.

“There will be zero tolerance for waste or abuse at EPA under the Trump administration.”

“Being a good steward of American hard-earned tax dollars to protect human health and the environment is my top priority, not following the corrupt example of those who funneled funds through kickbacks and pass-throughs to far-left activists,” Zeldin said.

The EPA’s billion-dollar Environmental and Climate Justice Community Change Program was created by the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act, which Biden signed into law in August 2022.

The purpose of the initiative is to fund local efforts to fight climate change in ways that “benefit disadvantaged communities.”

Young, Gifted & Green said it would use its $20 million grant to finance energy efficiency upgrades in 150 low-income homes in Memphis, Tenn., and support small businesses that seek to install solar panels or replace gas appliances with electric alternatives.

The group added that it would construct new greenspaces.

The size of the EPA grant dwarfs the amount of money Young, Gifted & Green had previously handled. Since it registered as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2020, the group has reported a total revenue of $2.7 million, about 14 percent the size of its EPA grant, according to tax filings reviewed by the Free Beacon.

“These shocking revelations solidify the Biden administration’s legacy as the most corrupt in modern history,” Tom Jones, the executive director of right-leaning watchdog group the American Accountability Foundation, told the Free Beacon.

“While everyday Americans suffered under Bidenflation, rampant cronyism flourished—a disgrace that demands full investigation and accountability and proves once again the necessity for all these grants to be impounded by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) immediately,” Jones continued. “The American people deserve nothing less.”

Read rest at Free Beacon

 

The post Biden’s EPA Funneled $20M To Nonprofit Led By Top White House Adviser appeared first on Energy News Beat.

 

What the U.K. Wants from Apple Will Make Our Phones Less Safe

Energy News Beat

Once a back door to user data exists, everyone will want in.


Argument
An expert’s point of view on a current event.

What the U.K. Wants from Apple Will Make Our Phones Less Safe

Once a back door to user data exists, everyone will want in.

By , a security technologist and lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School.
A boy in Bath, England looks at a smartphone screen on March 16, 2023.
A boy in Bath, England looks at a smartphone screen on March 16, 2023.
A boy in Bath, England looks at a smartphone screen on March 16, 2023. Matt Cardy/Getty Images

Last month, the U.K. government demanded that Apple weaken the security of iCloud for users worldwide. On Friday, Apple took steps to comply for users in the United Kingdom. But the British law is written in a way that requires Apple to give its government access to anyone, anywhere in the world. If the government demands Apple weaken its security worldwide, it would increase everyone’s cyber-risk in an already dangerous world.

If you’re an iCloud user, you have the option of turning on something called “advanced data protection,” or ADP. In that mode, a majority of your data is end-to-end encrypted. This means that no one, not even anyone at Apple, can read that data. It’s a restriction enforced by mathematics—cryptography—and not policy. Even if someone successfully hacks iCloud, they can’t read ADP-protected data.

Last month, the U.K. government demanded that Apple weaken the security of iCloud for users worldwide. On Friday, Apple took steps to comply for users in the United Kingdom. But the British law is written in a way that requires Apple to give its government access to anyone, anywhere in the world. If the government demands Apple weaken its security worldwide, it would increase everyone’s cyber-risk in an already dangerous world.

If you’re an iCloud user, you have the option of turning on something called “advanced data protection,” or ADP. In that mode, a majority of your data is end-to-end encrypted. This means that no one, not even anyone at Apple, can read that data. It’s a restriction enforced by mathematics—cryptography—and not policy. Even if someone successfully hacks iCloud, they can’t read ADP-protected data.

Using a controversial power in its 2016 Investigatory Powers Act, the U.K. government wants Apple to re-engineer iCloud to add a “back door” to ADP. This is so that if, sometime in the future, U.K. police wanted Apple to eavesdrop on a user, it could. Rather than add such a back door, Apple disabled ADP in the U.K. market.

Should the U.K. government persist in its demands, the ramifications will be profound in two ways. First, Apple can’t limit this capability to the U.K. government, or even only to governments whose politics it agrees with. If Apple is able to turn over users’ data in response to government demand, every other country will expect the same compliance. China, for example, will likely demand that Apple out dissidents. Apple, already dependent on China for both sales and manufacturing, won’t be able to refuse.

Second: Once the back door exists, others will attempt to surreptitiously use it. A technical means of access can’t be limited to only people with proper legal authority. Its very existence invites others to try. In 2004, hackers—we don’t know who—breached a back-door access capability in a major Greek cellphone network to spy on users, including the prime minister of Greece and other elected officials. Just last year, China hacked U.S. telecoms and gained access to their systems that provide eavesdropping on cellphone users, possibly including the presidential campaigns of both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. That operation resulted in the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency recommending that everyone use end-to-end encrypted messaging for their own security.

Apple isn’t the only company that offers end-to-end encryption. Google offers the feature as well. WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal, and Facebook Messenger offer the same level of security. There are other end-to-end encrypted cloud storage providers. Similar levels of security are available for phones and laptops. Once the U.K. forces Apple to break its security, actions against these other systems are sure to follow.

Read More

A security guard stands at the entrance to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) headquarters on Feb. 3.

A security guard stands at the entrance to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) headquarters on Feb. 3.
A security guard stands at the entrance to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) headquarters on Feb. 3.

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A man wearing a glove covered with red paint leaves a mark over a passport of the Republic of Serbia, as part of an action organized by the Croatian Women’s Network and the Center for Women’s Studies during a protest in front of the Embassy of the Republic of Serbia in Zagreb, Croatia, on Jan. 27.

A man wearing a glove covered with red paint leaves a mark over a passport of the Republic of Serbia, as part of an action organized by the Croatian Women’s Network and the Center for Women’s Studies during a protest in front of the Embassy of the Republic of Serbia in Zagreb, Croatia, on Jan. 27.

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It seems unlikely that the U.K. is not coordinating its actions with the other “Five Eyes” countries of the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand: the rich English-language-speaking spying club. Australia passed a similar law in 2018, giving it authority to demand that companies weaken their security features. As far as we know, it has never been used to force a company to re-engineer its security—but since the law allows for a gag order we might never know. The U.K. law has a gag order as well; we only know about the Apple action because a whistleblower leaked it to the Washington Post. For all we know, they may have demanded this of other companies as well. In the United States, the FBI has long advocated for the same powers. Having the U.K. make this demand now, when the world is distracted by the foreign-policy turmoil of the Trump administration, might be what it’s been waiting for.

The companies need to resist, and—more importantly—we need to demand they do. The U.K. government, like the Australians and the FBI in years past, argues that this type of access is necessary for law enforcement—that it is “going dark” and that the internet is a lawless place. We’ve heard this kind of talk since the 1990s, but its scant evidence doesn’t hold water. Decades of court cases with electronic evidence show again and again the police collect evidence through a variety of means, most of them—like traffic analysis or informants—having nothing to do with encrypted data. What police departments need are better computer investigative and forensics capabilities, not back doors.

We can all help. If you’re an iCloud user, consider turning this feature on. The more of us who use it, the harder it is for Apple to turn it off for those who need it to stay out of jail. This also puts pressure on other companies to offer similar security. And it helps those who need it to survive, because enabling the feature couldn’t be used as a de facto admission of guilt. (This is a benefit of using WhatsApp over Signal. Since so many people in the world use WhatsApp, having it on your phone isn’t in itself suspicious.)

On the policy front, we have two choices. We can’t build security systems that work for some people and not others. We can either make our communications and devices as secure as possible against everyone who wants access, including foreign intelligence agencies and our own law enforcement, which protects everyone, including (unfortunately) criminals. Or we can weaken security—the criminals’ as well as everyone else’s.

It’s a question of security vs. security. Yes, we are all more secure if the police are able to investigate and solve crimes. But we are also more secure if our data and communications are safe from eavesdropping. A back door in Apple’s security is not just harmful on a personal level, it’s harmful to national security. We live in a world where everyone communicates electronically and stores their important data on a computer. These computers and phones are used by every national leader, member of a legislature, police officer, judge, CEO, journalist, dissident, political operative, and citizen. They need to be as secure as possible: from account takeovers, from ransomware, from foreign spying and manipulation. Remember that the FBI recommended that we all use back-door-free end-to-end encryption for messaging just a few months ago.

Securing digital systems is hard. Defenders must defeat every attack, while eavesdroppers need one attack that works. Given how essential these devices are, we need to adopt a defense-dominant strategy. To do anything else makes us all less safe.

Bruce Schneier is a security technologist and lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School. His latest book is A Hacker’s Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society’s Rules, and How to Bend them Back.

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The post What the U.K. Wants from Apple Will Make Our Phones Less Safe appeared first on Energy News Beat.

 

Azerbaijan, Pakistan extend LNG supply deal

Energy News Beat

According to a statement by the Azerbaijani president’s press service, the signed document was exchanged on Monday during the Pakistani Prime Minister’s official visit to Azerbaijan.

Socar’s president, Rovshan Najaf, and Masood Nabi, CEO of Pakistan LNG, exchanged the “amendment agreement no. 1 to the framework agreement for the sale and purchase of LNG cargoes related to master (delivered ex-ship) LNG sale and purchase agreement,” the statement said.

The statement did not provide further information.

In July 2023, the two firms signed a deal under which Azerbaijan offers one shipment of LNG per month, and Pakistan is free to accept or reject the cargo.

According to local media reports, Pakistan’s Economic Coordination Committee (ECC) approved extending the LNG supply agreement for three more years last week.

Pakistan currently imports LNG via two FSRU-based LNG import terminals in Port Qasim.

The country’s first terminal started operations back in 2015 utilizing Excelerate’s FSRU while the second floating LNG import facility uses FSRU BW integrity.

Pakistan gets most of its supplies under long-term contracts from Qatar, while the country also has a 15-year deal with Italy’s Eni for 0.75 mtpa per year-

Last year, Geneva-based energy trader Gunvor resolved a dispute with Pakistan LNG over issues related to contracted LNG supplies.

Gunvor and Pakistan signed a five-year contract in 2017 for some 0.78 mtpa per year or 12 LNG cargoes per year.

 

The post Azerbaijan, Pakistan extend LNG supply deal appeared first on Energy News Beat.

 

Trump’s New Map

Energy News Beat

ENB Pub Note: This article from the Foreign Policy Research Institute raises several interesting and key points. However, it does not consider President Trump’s commitment to changing the global elite’s path to a one-world government. By being the first “Post Literate,” he has figured out how to communicate directly to voters and his constituents, he can avoid being trapped by the deep state and one-world government elite. The EU, NATO, and the UN are about to determine how much has changed during the Biden Administration’s control. It is not unreasonable to expect President Trump to articulate defunding vast chunks of the UN, and NATO has already pulled out of many globalist organizations. The more corruption, greed, and graft that is discovered by DOGE, you will see an equal and opposite reaction to get away from the corrupt organizations. 

My series with George McMillan covers many of the geopolitical issues surrounding the global land/sea power moves governments make regarding energy and pipelines. You can find hours of material here: https://energynewsbeat.co/george-mcmillian/. 


By , the Robert Strausz-Hupé chair in geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
Donald Trump is seen inside a helicopter at night looking down at a cell phone
Donald Trump is seen inside a helicopter at night looking down at a cell phone
U.S. President Donald Trump looks at his cell phone as Marine One arrives at the White House in Washington on Aug. 9, 2020. Samuel Corum/Getty Images

In a prophetic speech delivered in Brussels in June 2011, then-U.S. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates warned Washington’s European allies that if they did not start paying substantially more for their own security, NATO might one day be a thing of the past. Gates noted that he was only “the latest in a string of U.S. defense secretaries who have urged allies privately and publicly, often with exasperation, to meet agreed-upon NATO benchmarks for defense spending.”

At the time, only five of the 28 members of NATO—Albania, Britain, France, Greece, and the United States—were spending at least 2 percent of their GDP on defense annually, as they had pledged to do in 2006. Unless that situation changed dramatically, Gates said, there would be a “dwindling appetite” to defend Europe among the “American body politic writ large.”

In a prophetic speech delivered in Brussels in June 2011, then-U.S. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates warned Washington’s European allies that if they did not start paying substantially more for their own security, NATO might one day be a thing of the past. Gates noted that he was only “the latest in a string of U.S. defense secretaries who have urged allies privately and publicly, often with exasperation, to meet agreed-upon NATO benchmarks for defense spending.”

At the time, only five of the 28 members of NATO—Albania, Britain, France, Greece, and the United States—were spending at least 2 percent of their GDP on defense annually, as they had pledged to do in 2006. Unless that situation changed dramatically, Gates said, there would be a “dwindling appetite” to defend Europe among the “American body politic writ large.”

Change has come in Europe, but perhaps not fast enough. Today, two-thirds of NATO members meet the 2 percent benchmark. But in light of Russia’s war in Ukraine and U.S. President Donald Trump’s demand that allies ramp up spending to 5 percent, Europe still has a long way to go. Trump has long been derisive of NATO. Last year, he said that he would encourage Russians to “do whatever the hell they want” to any NATO country that doesn’t pay more for its defense. Meanwhile, Vice President J.D. Vance has said that the United States could drop support for NATO if the European Union tries to regulate Elon Musk’s business platforms.

The disagreement over budget allocations points to a more profound issue: Too many Americans, as evinced in the populist rhetoric of Trump and Vance, just do not care deeply about defending Europe anymore.


A man and woman are seen at center as a military parade with soldiers in uniform playing instruments pass by on a cobblestoned street.A man and woman are seen at center as a military parade with soldiers in uniform playing instruments pass by on a cobblestoned street.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and his wife, Jennifer Rauchet, watch a military ceremony in Warsaw on Feb. 14. Omar Marques/Getty Images

The shift in U.S. attitudes toward Europe should not be surprising. NATO has lasted for nearly 80 years. That is a long time in modern history, especially in an era of rapid technological change that has affected information, economics, air travel, migration patterns, and identity itself.

When NATO was founded shortly after World War II, the United States dominated the world with more than half of all global manufacturing capacity. That figure has dwindled to around 16 percent. In the postwar period, it was natural for the United States to both lead and finance the new alliance; after all, European cities were smoking hulks from aerial bombardment, and Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union loomed as a mortal threat to Western Europe. Over the decades, that dynamic evolved. Europe, with its security largely paid for by the United States, built enviable social welfare states where citizens enjoyed the good life. Stalin died, the West achieved detente with the Soviets, and the Soviet Union later collapsed.

NATO survived the decades after the Cold War and the rebirth of Russian imperialism—a period that has included the rise of roiling populism and identity politics in the West—largely because the alliance was led by people who either had a keen memory of World War II and the early Cold War years or grew up with and admired people who did. But that living historical memory is evaporating. In the process, Americans have rediscovered an older, more archaic aspect of their own identity—one that Europeans neglected for too long. Europe has always known that the United States is a continent facing the Pacific as well as the Atlantic, but it has never sufficiently internalized that knowledge to affect its own behavior.

U.S. identity, at least since the early 20th century, has been shaped by two broad phenomena: one geographical and the other Wilsonian. The geographical one seems obvious, but for too many people—especially European elites—it really isn’t.

The temperate zone of North America, which largely comprises the United States, is perfectly apportioned for nationhood, with deep-water ports along the East Coast and routes through the Appalachians to the vast rich soils of the prairie. The water-starved Great American Desert, now known as the Great Plains, arose as a true natural barrier, but a transcontinental railroad was built to carry a population through the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. Geography wrought a cohesive nation separated from the outer world by two oceans, and there was so much going on inside it—with all of its problems and possibilities—that the rest of the world could remain obscure.

Yet once the Pacific was reached, there was not one but two coastlines to consider, not to mention the Gulf Coast between Florida and Texas. This opened up great sea lines of communication to both Europe and Asia and enabled a robust trade with the outer world.

Woodrow Wilson sits in a chair holding a letter. Behind him is a desk stacked with books.Woodrow Wilson sits in a chair holding a letter. Behind him is a desk stacked with books.

An undated portrait of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Here is where the other aspect of U.S. identity comes in: Wilsonianism—shorthand for the ideology of seeing the achievement of freedom far beyond U.S. shores as essential to the country’s own security. Although Woodrow Wilson, the 28th U.S. president, failed to bring the United States into an international order following World War I, he created a goal for the country to strive for—just as steamships and aircraft were beginning to bring it into much closer proximity with Europe. It would take World War II and its aftermath, making Washington the world’s preeminent power, to achieve the Wilsonian ideal of establishing a bastion of freedom and democracy in a large part of the European continent.

As obvious and desirable as this all seemed in the postwar years, it was not altogether natural in geographical terms. It required a knowledge of the sacrifices that the United States had made for the sake of a better world, combined with historical kinship based on Washington’s European roots—philosophical roots more than blood and soil ones. This all required reading, something that elites take for granted but shouldn’t. For as eight decades have passed, this tradition can only now be valued through books and education, since the lived memory of the establishment of the Atlantic alliance is gone, just as the Cold War is fading from consciousnesses.

Trump is not an heir to this tradition. He doesn’t really read. He is post-literate—that is, he exists in a world of social media and smartphones but has not immersed himself in the study of narrative history, even superficially.

Thus, he is unappreciative of the postwar saga of the West. NATO is a mere acronym to him, not a connotation of humankind’s largest-ever military alliance, which emerged out of the struggle against Nazi fascism. He likely knows nothing about the Atlantic Charter—signed by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, in August 1941—that laid out an inspiring vision for a postwar world, or about the building of a postwar order by great U.S. diplomats and statesmen, such as Averell Harriman and George Kennan.

The U.S. foreign-policy elite has cut its teeth on such inspirational history. Trump and his followers are likely unfamiliar with much of this. And because of the evolution of technology, he may not be the last president of his kind.

Since Trump is ahistorical, he has only geography to fall back upon. He imagines the United States as a continent existing on its own, and he registers the comparative closeness of such places as Greenland and Panama, which he has vowed to acquire. In Trump’s mind, Greenland and the Panama Canal are organic extensions of the logic of U.S. geography, especially in an age that will likely see more naval activity in the Arctic.

Another factor to consider is that technology has been shrinking geography itself. This is an easy change to miss, since it has been so gradual. Crises in one part of the world can affect crises in other parts as never before. The well-read, historical mind sees this development as a reason for the United States to bolster alliances the world over. But in Trump’s more primitive and deterministic worldview, it is a time to bolster regional spheres of influence in a more claustrophobic world that will be in perpetual conflict.

What Trump seems to have in mind is a greater North America, from the Panama Canal to Greenland, with Canada subservient to the United States. Manifest destiny, according to Trump’s mythology, now begins to complete itself: What once meant conquering the temperate zone of North America from east to west now entails a conquest from north to south. Trump’s attempt to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” says it all.


As for Europe, it is becoming weaker and more divided, threatened by Russia to the east and political turmoil in response to migration from the Middle East and Africa to the south. As I wrote in my 2018 book, The Return of Marco Polo’s World, “[a]s Europe disappears, Eurasia coheres.” Europe, I explained, would eventually merge with a Eurasian power system. The war in Ukraine, which has brought Russia into deeper alliances with China, Iran, and North Korea, has borne this theory out. In today’s smaller world, Europe cannot separate itself from the upheavals of Afro-Eurasia, making it less valuable in Trump’s new map. This is what happens when Wilsonianism dies.

For many years, Europeans have worried about the United States paying too much attention to China and the rest of East Asia. The problem is deeper than that. Trump seems to see China as its own continent and power bloc, much like the United States. The U.S. president might have a trade war with China, or he might not. He might even try to improve relations with Beijing. The point is that China registers in Trump’s view of an Earth divided according to regions—whereas Europe, despite NATO and the European Union, is insufficiently united to amount to much of anything.

Trump also hates elites and their projects, and NATO is the ultimate elite project. Had the alliance’s members taken Gates’s reprimand to heart in 2011 and raised their defense budgets much sooner, Trump might feel differently now. And even if he didn’t, then at least he would not have the weapon of relatively small European defense budgets to use against NATO allies, which would seriously weaken his argument.

Meanwhile, the United States’ first post-literate president signals a challenge that Europe has not faced since Washington came to its rescue in 1941. The Cold War and its aftermath, when the former captive nations of Central and Eastern Europe joined NATO, may loom in the future as a halcyon time.

 

The post Trump’s New Map appeared first on Energy News Beat.

 

PetroChina in first European LNG bunkering op

Energy News Beat

According to a statement by PetroChina International, the 6000-cbm LNG bunkering vessel, Optimus, which is on charter by Dutch LNG supplier Titan, recently sailed from the Gate LNG terminal in Rotterdam to UK’s Portsmouth port to complete the refueling of 2,000 tons of LNG.

These volumes were supplied by PetroChina International London.

PetroChina International said this is the first time the company has carried out the LNG bunkering business in Europe, marking the extension of the value chain to terminal services.

The firm joined forces with Titan for this maiden LNG bunkering operation.

According to PetroChina International, it signed a memorandum of understanding with Titan in December last year.

PetroChina International did not provide further information.

Last month, France’s Brittany Ferries and Titan completed the first LNG bunkering operation in the UK’s Portsmouth port.

Optimus delivered LNG fuel to the E-Flexer class RoPax vessel, Saint-Malo during the operation.

According to its AIS data provided by VesselsValue, Optimus visited the UK port two times in the last month after loading volumes at Gate.

In March 2023, PetroChina International London agreed to book long-term capacity at the Gate LNG import terminal, which is owned by Gasunie and Vopak.

PetroChina International London acquired 2 Bcm per year of regasification and also corresponding storage capacity for a period of 20 years.

 

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