Tag: Regulation

Cool Comfort Denied: Europe’s War on Air Conditioning

The European Union’s approach is more diffuse but no less consequential. There is no single Brussels air-conditioning law; instead Ecodesign and energy-labelling rules govern which units may be sold, the revised F-Gas Regulation squeezes the refrigerants that make cooling affordable, and the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive places air-conditioning into a wider inspection and certification regime.

From Tilak´s Substack

By Tilak Doshi

In Camden, North London, a homeowner did something that would strike most of the people in the world as entirely unremarkable: he fitted two air conditioning units to the rear of his flat so that his family might sleep more comfortably through a spell of hot weather. Camden Council’s planning enforcement officers thought otherwise. They ordered the units “permanently removed”, ruling that the installation breached the borough’s “cooling hierarchy” policy, and advised the resident to rely instead on open windows and balcony doors. This was no isolated bureaucratic misfire. It happened during a stretch of hot, dry weather of the sort Britain has seen periodically for decades, one that produced some locally exceptional readings elsewhere on the Continent but nothing that anyone who sweated through the summers of 1976 or 2003 would call unprecedented.

What was unusual was the accompanying alleged body count. Researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Imperial College London and the Met Office announced more than 2,700 estimated deaths across England and Wales attributable to the May and June heat, a figure duly repeated across the press as established fact.

As my colleague Ben Pile points out, it was nothing of the sort. The 2,700 figure was not a count of bodies but the output of a statistical model estimating how many deaths would statistically not have occurred at lower temperatures – a hypothesis presented to the public as an observed fact. Britain’s own official mortality statistics show that cold weather kills roughly four times as many people every year as heat does, a detail rarely mentioned by the same commentators demanding ever more urgent climate action. None of this should surprise readers familiar with the modelling habits of Britain’s climate establishment: last year’s equally confident predictions of a heatwave death spike were followed by mortality data that, if anything, declined through the following weeks.

The narrower point worth making is about consumer choice. The same institutions that tout estimated heat deaths to justify accelerating Net Zero are also among the loudest defenders of the planning regime that blocks the one technology already proven, unambiguously, to reduce heat mortality wherever it has been allowed to spread: the ordinary air conditioner. One might expect a policy establishment that spends every summer touting heat-mortality estimates to embrace, without hesitation, that remedy. Instead, Britain and the European Union have spent the better part of two decades constructing precisely the opposite – a regulatory architecture engineered to make it as difficult as possible for ordinary households to own, install and run an air conditioner. This is the energy-efficiency mindset carried to its logical, and thoroughly illogical, conclusion.

The cooling hierarchy

London’s planning rules, inherited from the 2021 London Plan under Mayor Sadiq Khan, instruct developers to minimise reliance on “energy-intensive” cooling wherever possible, and boroughs including Camden and Islington have adopted the doctrine into their own local frameworks. Nationally, England’s building regulations require new-build developers to prove that shading, insulation and ventilation have been exhausted before mechanical cooling is even considered. None of these regulations amount to an outright ban – existing homeowners face no legal bar to fitting a window unit – but the cumulative effect has left Britain with barely three in every 100 homes air-conditioned, against roughly nine in 10 in the United States. Claire Coutinho, the former UK Energy Secretary, called the Camden enforcement action absurd and accused planners of trapping Britain in a self-imposed climate of deprivation – a fair complaint, though one wonders how far her own party’s Net Zero commitments differ from it in kind rather than degree.

Brussels’ thermostat

The European Union’s approach is more diffuse but no less consequential. There is no single Brussels air-conditioning law; instead Ecodesign and energy-labelling rules govern which units may be sold, the revised F-Gas Regulation squeezes the refrigerants that make cooling affordable, and the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive places air-conditioning into a wider inspection and certification regime. Member states have then layered their own restrictions on top.

During the 2022 energy crisis following the start of the Ukraine war, Spain and Italy imposed legal minimum thermostat settings on public and commercial buildings, and this summer, as the current heat dome settled in, the European Commission issued guidance urging households not to set their units below 25°C, noting that every degree colder adds roughly 7% to electricity consumption – advice from Brussels on how cool a citizen may make his own living room.

Nowhere is the paternalism more explicit than in Switzerland, admittedly outside the EU but instructive all the same. In Geneva, a homeowner seeking a permit for a fixed air-conditioning unit must demonstrate a genuine need for it, and comfort does not qualify; some residents have resorted to producing a doctor’s certificate. Basel-Stadt and Basel-Landschaft go further still, barring residential units outright, while Zurich has in the past refused permission for a care home to run an ageing unit through a heatwave because it fell short of efficiency thresholds. The predictable result, as reporting from the canton shows, is a surge in sales of cheap, inefficient portable units that guzzle more electricity than the fixed systems residents were denied.

The energy-efficiency gap, revisited

The mandatory fuel-economy and appliance standards beloved of the Obama and Biden administrations rest on the presumption of a widespread “energy-efficiency gap”. Careful ex-post studies have repeatedly found that the magnitude of supposedly unexploited, profitable efficiency investments is far smaller than engineering studies claim, and that ordinary households and firms generally know their own circumstances better than a regulator armed with a spreadsheet.

A Mexican Government programme which subsidised the replacement of old refrigerators and air-conditioners on the promise of a 30% energy saving delivered only 7% once the engineers’ ex ante models met actual ex post consumer behaviour. What Europe’s air-conditioning saga adds to this record is a darker variant: rather than merely mandating that appliances be efficient, governments have moved to discourage ownership of the appliance itself, redefining comfort as a vice to be rationed through planning law, cantonal permits and moral suasion.

A recent report from the Consumer Choice Center catalogues the result as a genuine patchwork across all 27 EU states, the UK and Switzerland. Building façade rules, heritage permits, condominium consent thresholds and energy inspections vary so wildly that a consumer moving from Warsaw to Zagreb encounters an entirely different legal universe. The predictable consequence is not less energy use but more disorder: illegal installations have proliferated in the Netherlands because the legitimate route is so onerous, while in Portofino, Italy’s wealthiest town, police mounted a crackdown on illicit units after the mayor spotted one hanging over an alleyway.

None of this looks like careful regulation. It looks like prohibition, with prohibition’s familiar side effects. Red tape, aesthetic objections in conservation areas and the overriding imperative of “climate neutrality” by 2050 have kept effective cooling out of reach for millions. Increasing AC use, we are told, would undermine emissions targets. Better that people suffer than the planet be “harmed” by the very technology that has made hot summers tolerable in America, Japan and much of Asia for decades.

This is the logic of energy efficiency taken to its absurd conclusion.

There is, too, a cultural dimension which no cost-benefit analysis captures. British breakfast television has run segments debating whether using air conditioning is “selfish”. German commentators have coined the term “AC-phobia” to describe a guilt complex around climate that keeps citizens from buying a unit their American or Japanese counterparts would consider unremarkable. In responding to some US journalists and social media influencers criticising and making fun of a sweltering Paris because the city “does not have A/C in every room”, Paris Deputy Mayor Audrey Pulvar recently issued a statement claiming that the US bears a “significant amount of responsibility” for the ongoing heatwave in Europe.

Washington’s different answer

While London’s boroughs draw up “cooling hierarchies” and Geneva’s cantonal officials weigh medical certificates, Washington has taken the opposite path – under an Energy Secretary who has made consumer choice the organising principle of his department. On July 2nd 2026, Secretary Chris Wright announced a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking intended to permanently end federal efficiency mandates governing air conditioners, gas stoves, washing and drying machines, water heaters and refrigerators, rather than merely delaying them as earlier deregulatory notices had done.

Mr Wright put it plainly: “In America, you should be able to choose a dryer that dries clothes on the first try rather than one that takes multiple cycles – unfortunately, past administrations thought otherwise.” For too long, he continued, Americans had paid the price for rules that restricted choice and drove up costs. President Trump had promised to end this nonsense, as one X user posted last year: “[i]t only took 29 years, but Jerry Seinfeld’s complaint about government-mandated, low-flow showerheads was finally taken seriously. Trump signed an EO to make showerheads great again.” Showerheads with greater pressure, washing machines and dishwashers that actually do the job, light bulbs that don’t cost an arm and a leg and plastic straws that don’t fall apart mid-drink make people’s lives easier – and it is common sense, as Secretary Wright would put it.

This move sits squarely within the broader deregulatory framework established by President Trump’s Executive Order 14,192 of January 31st 2025, “Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation.” That order imposed a “10-for-1” requirement: for every new regulation issued, agencies must identify at least 10 existing ones for repeal, with the explicit goal of driving net regulatory costs significantly below zero in the first year. It is a sharper version of the 2-for-1 rule from Trump’s first term.

Chris Wright’s proposal rewrites the Process Rule that has, under successive administrations, required each new generation of household appliance to be more efficient than the last, and would make it far harder for a future administration to reimpose that ratchet. Wright put the matter in terms any consumer could follow, arguing that Americans deserve the freedom to choose a dryer that works properly on the first cycle rather than one engineered chiefly to satisfy a federal emissions target. Indeed, as Gary Abernathy of CFACT complained, it is high time that the US Government “stop treating us like children, coercing us into buying overpriced ‘energy-efficient’ appliances that don’t do the job!”

Consumer and climate change advocates object that the old mandates saved households on their utility bills each year while reducing emissions. Yet one academic study found that much of the policy analysis on energy efficiency “runs counter to the most rudimentary economic theory and our general sense that we do not live in a world in which people never make sound choices”. If energy efficiency were such a great strategy, would ordinary people need experts in the IEA, the World Bank or McKinsey to tell them how to save money? Is the pavement filled with $20 bills that remain uncollected, “low hanging fruit as it were”? One would think it natural that businessmen and heads of households know how to save money and cut costs as they see fit.

Two enlightenments

The contrast is not merely regulatory; it reflects two distinct inheritances from the Enlightenment itself. America’s founding generation drew on Locke’s conviction that legitimate government exists to secure a citizen’s natural rights to life, liberty and property – a principle Jefferson refashioned in the Declaration of Independence’s promise of an inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. On that reading, state power is a trust granted by consenting individuals for narrow, limited purposes; it is not a warrant for philosopher-kings (or queens), however well-credentialed, to decide how warm a citizen’s living room ought to be.

Continental and British statecraft drew instead on a more paternalistic strand of Enlightenment rationalism characteristic of ‘democratic socialism’ and Fabianism. The post-war EU and UK political elites believed that an educated administrative class could calculate the public good more reliably than the public itself and was entitled to act on that philanthropic calculation. It is this second tradition that produced London’s cooling hierarchies, Brussels’ thermostat guidance and Geneva’s medical certificates: each an expression of the conviction that comfort is too important to be left to the person who has to live with the decision.

Secretary Wright’s Energy Department is reasoning in the older American idiom – that the pursuit of happiness includes the freedom to choose one’s own dryer and one’s own air conditioner, and that the state’s job is to get out of the way of that choice rather than to supervise it.

Europe does not lack the technology, the electricity supply or the wealth to cool its homes. What it lacks is a governing philosophy willing to concede that comfort, like any other good, is for the person paying for it to decide in a free market. A genuinely liberal response would streamline permitting, treat a condenser unit on a balcony as no more of a planning offence than a satellite dish and abandon the pretence that a household which chooses air conditioning over a hand-held fan has failed some test of environmental virtue. In Plato’s Republic, the philosopher king – the ‘expert’ – ruled, and the plebs obeyed. In our liberal democracies, one would have thought, ordinary people run their businesses or their household budgets as they see fit, and energy efficiency is their own business.

There, in the end, is the contrast that matters. London’s borough councils, Brussels’ directorates and Switzerland’s cantons still see no place in their air-conditioning rules for consumer sovereignty; the citizen remains someone to be managed, permitted and, where necessary, ordered to remove what he has already installed.

Consistent with Trump’s counter-revolution in US energy policy, Energy Secretary Chris Wright has been moving in the opposite direction to his European and British counterparts – dismantling the mandates of his predecessors precisely in order to hand the decision back to the household that pays the bill. One tradition traces its authority to a Lockean compact that treats the citizen’s pursuit of happiness as the point of government; the other traces its authority to an expert class that decides on behalf of its hapless citizens.

A version of this article was first published in the Daily Sceptic https://dailysceptic.org/2026/07/20/cool-comfort-denied-europes-war-on-air-conditioning/

Nuclear at 70: Federal Subsidies and Regulation Did Not Work

Sorry for the bad news. But the underlying fact is, nuclear fission is the most complicated, fraught, expensive way to boil water to produce steam to drive electrical turbines.

From Master Resource

By Robert Bradley Jr.

“Nuclear fission is the most complicated, fraught, expensive way to boil water to produce steam to drive electrical turbines.”

What U.S. industry is at once the most subsidized and regulated by the federal government? The answer is commercial nuclear power. As a result, the 73-year-old “Atoms for Peace” program represents the most expensive failure (malinvestment) in US business. potholed with uncompleted projects and massive cost overruns with completed projects. Future decommissioning costs will add to this liability.

But hyperbole rules with this technology, and there is always tomorrow. Forget that competitive viability did not emerge in the 1950s or 1960s, and George W. Bush and Joe Biden both failed at their attempted “nuclear renaissance.” Expect the same to result from today’s interventionist energy policy.

A future post will outline the crash attempt by President Trump and DOE secretary Chris Wright to get new nuclear capacity on track. Regulatory streamlining is not enough; taxpayer largesse (grants and loan guarantees) are required. This in itself is a red flag and violation of Free Market 101.

I recently prepared a White Paper for the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), Nuclear Power: A Free Market Approach. I began that historical review with ten points, reproduced below.

Ten Points

  1. Commercial nuclear fission dates from the 1950s, a time when electricity was generated by fossil fuels (80 percent) and hydro (20 percent). Today, nuclear supplies 19 percent of US generation and 10 percent globally. Nuclear fusion remains in the laboratory with little prospect of foreseeable commercialization.
  2. Nuclear power is a government-enabled industry. It emerged from wartime R&D and continued under the postwar “Atoms for Peace” subsidy programs. The Price–Anderson Act of 1957, which capped liability payouts from nuclear accidents, was instrumental.
  3. Rate-base treatment under state-level public utility regulation was a de facto insurance policy for utilities to commit to experimental technology. A “bandwagon effect” occurred after Westinghouse and General Electric offered performance (“turnkey”) guarantees for new reactors, but losses ended the program and transferred risk to owners and ratepayers.
  4. Government subsidies incited multiple technical designs and plant-size escalation in the 1960s, all contributing to cost and construction failures in the next decade.
  5. Activist regulation by the Atomic Energy Commission/Nuclear Regulatory Commission contributed to cost overruns and completion delays. Extensions of the Price-Anderson Act (1966, 1975, 1988, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2024) have kept federal regulators in charge.
  6. Orders for new reactors ended in 1979, the year of the Three Mile Island accident. In response, nuclear utilities engaged in collaborative best practices that have proven effective for safety and reliability.
  7. New subsidies in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 resulted in four new reactors. Two were abandoned during construction, and two entered service after multiple delays and major cost overruns (2023, 2024).
  8. New subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 were designed to keep existing units in operation and encourage new-generation Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). The Trump administration is expanding this Biden administration program with grants, guarantees, and executive orders.
  9. The quest for competitive commercial nuclear power has been long on promises and short on performance. Technological complexity and government policies have resulted in the worst of all worlds, with today’s situation not unlike that of the 1950s.
  10. A free-market approach to nuclear policy would entail the following: Ending governmental research and development in the field. Abolishing public grants and tax preferences for the industry. Halting foreign-loan guarantees. Repealing the Price-Anderson Act in order to privatize safety and insurance regulation. Lifting all antitrust constraints on industry collaboration. Making waste storage the responsibility of waste owners. Removing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the US Department of Energy from civilian nuclear policy.

Sorry for the bad news. But the underlying fact is, nuclear fission is the most complicated, fraught, expensive way to boil water to produce steam to drive electrical turbines. 

I invite any nuclear expert or energy scholar to challenge any of the above points or to reach a different conclusion about imminent competitiveness. After all, I am energy-and-technology neutral, thus not “for” or “against” nuclear fission (or fusion) per se. May the best energies win.

Why Trump‘s ‘Gold Standard’ Executive Order is Essential to Restoring Truth in Science

President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled ‘Restoring Gold Standard Science’ on May 23rd, 2025, aiming to overhaul research-integrity policies and ensure that federal government-sponsored science is “transparent, rigorous and impactful”. The order sparked concern among scientists who fear it could lead to political interference in scientific research and undermine independent scientific inquiry.

From The Daily Sceptic

by Tilak Doshi

President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled ‘Restoring Gold Standard Science’ on May 23rd, 2025, aiming to overhaul research-integrity policies and ensure that federal government-sponsored science is “transparent, rigorous and impactful”. The order sparked concern among scientists who fear it could lead to political interference in scientific research and undermine independent scientific inquiry.

Thus, STAT News – owned by Boston Globe Media, operating as a for-profit media outlet focused on health, medicine and life sciences and funded by Big Pharma and biotech firm ads – claimed that “Trump’s ‘gold standard’ order is a blueprint for politicising science”. According to the New York Times, the executive order puts Trump’s political appointees in charge of vetting scientific research and gives them the authority to “correct scientific information”, control the way it is communicated to the public and the power to “discipline” anyone who violates the way the administration views science.

In an open letter boasting 9,700 signatures (of which 2,700 chose to keep their information private), a group called ‘Stand Up for Science‘ compared President Trump’s executive order to the Lysenko affair – which condemned millions to starvation by conducting bogus genetic research in the Soviet Union – and the ‘science’ of eugenics in state-sponsored programmes in Nazi Germany which led to the genocide of millions of Jews, people with disabilities and homosexuals.

In the no-holds-barred confrontation between President Trump and his detractors, starting even before his first term in office, comparing him to Hitler and Stalin is par for the course and should elicit no surprises among observers. But in a hyperbolic and highly charged political climate, President Trump’s latest executive order may go down as one of the most consequential policy interventions in defence of scientific integrity.

It does not seek to suppress speech, cancel dissidents or blacklist platforms. It does something far more radical: it demands that science — particularly in contested domains like climate change and public health — return to first principles. It insists that government-funded science must meet the highest standards of evidence, transparency and falsifiability. That’s not censorship; it’s scientific sobriety.

Far from undermining science, this order represents a necessary corrective to the pervasive problem of regulatory capture – the process by which regulatory agencies become dominated by the interests of those they are charged with regulating, rather than the public interest. As George Stigler, the Nobel laureate economist, argued in his seminal work on regulatory capture, bureaucracies often serve the interests of the regulated rather than the public good. In areas like climate and health policy, this dynamic has fuelled propaganda masquerading as science, necessitating a return to the philosopher Karl Popper’s gold standard of falsifiability to restore trust and integrity.

The Crisis of Trust in Science

Public trust in science has plummeted in recent years, and for good reason. The executive order cites a “reproducibility crisis” as evidence of a broader malaise. The crisis, also known as the replication or replicability crisis, refers to the growing number of published scientific results that other researchers have been unable to reproduce or verify. Because the reproducibility of empirical results is an essential part of the scientific method, such failures undermine the credibility of theories that build on them and can call into question substantial parts of scientific knowledge.

A 2023 survey by the Pew Research Centre finds the share of Americans who say science has had a mostly positive effect on society has fallen and there’s been a continued decline in public trust in scientists. Overall, 57% of Americans say science has had a mostly positive effect on society, down 16 points since before the start of the coronavirus outbreak. This erosion stems from repeated instances where scientific claims, particularly in climate and health, have been manipulated to serve political ends.

The executive order highlights examples from the Biden administration, such as the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) COVID-19 school-reopening guidance, which was edited by the American Federation of Teachers to discourage in-person learning, leading to detrimental educational outcomes. Through emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the backroom dealings between a powerful government agency and a powerful public sector labour union was exposed by the New York Post.

Regulatory Capture and the Corruption of Science

This example of the corruption of science by regulatory capture crisis is not merely anecdotal. The National Association of Scholars (NAS) notes that the federal government, as the world’s largest funder of scientific research, has “supercharged” the reproducibility crisis by subsidising studies which support reigning narratives, allowing activist bureaucrats to commission research that justifies radical regulations. The result is a scientific ecosystem where truth is subordinated to power, as Stigler’s theory of regulatory capture predicts. When agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) or the National Institutes of Health (NIH) align with corporate, academic or ideological interests, the public suffers.

Regulatory agencies such as the CDC, over time, come to serve the interests of the industries or groups they regulate rather than the public. This dynamic is evident in climate and health policy, where entrenched interests — be they green energy corporations, pharmaceutical giants or activist scientists — shape narratives to secure funding, influence policy or maintain power. In climate science, for instance, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its associated models have been criticised for exaggerating catastrophic scenarios to justify sweeping economic interventions. Dr John Clauser, the 2022 Nobel Physics Laureate, has called the climate emergency narrative a “dangerous corruption of science” that threatens global economies and billions of lives.

Clauser’s critique, echoed by other Nobel laureates like Ivar Giaever and Robert Laughlin, points to the pseudoscientific nature of much climate research. He argues that climate models, which underpin global policy, are based on flawed assumptions and fail to account for natural forces like cloud cover, which he estimates is underestimated by a factor of 100 to 200. These models, far from being falsifiable, are often treated as sacrosanct, with dissenters silenced, as Clauser himself experienced when his IMF talk was abruptly cancelled after he challenged the climate crisis narrative. This is a textbook case of regulatory capture, where the scientific or policy establishments, funded by government grants, suppresses alternative viewpoints to maintain grip on policies preferred by favoured constituencies.

In health policy, the ‘noble lie’ has become a disturbing justification for scientific misconduct. Some activist scientists argue that exaggerating risks or suppressing inconvenient data is acceptable if it ensures public compliance with policies they deem necessary. This was evident during the COVID-19 pandemic when public health officials, backed by pharmaceutical interests, downplayed uncertainties in public health science to push universal mandates. For instance, throughout much of 2020-2022, the CDC and NIH largely ignored or minimised the protective effect of natural immunity from prior infection.

Karl Popper’s Gold Standard: Falsifiability as the Antidote

The antidote to this corruption lies in returning to Karl Popper’s philosophy of science, which defines the gold standard as falsifiability. Popper argued that for a hypothesis to be scientific, it must be testable and capable of being proven false through empirical observation. Popper’s approach demands scepticism and transparency, rejecting claims that cannot be rigorously tested. President Trump’s executive order explicitly embraces this standard, defining “Gold Standard Science” as research that is reproducible, transparent, falsifiable, subject to unbiased peer review and free from conflicts of interest.

In climate science, for example, the IPCC’s reliance on models that continually predict higher temperatures beyond those empirically observed violates Popper’s criterion. Modern doomsayers have been predicting climate and environmental disaster since the 1960s. They continue to do so today. Of course, none of the apocalyptic predictions with due dates as of today have come true. Similarly, in health policy, the refusal to engage with data on vaccine side effects or alternative treatments during COVID-19 reflects a rejection of falsifiability in favour of dogma.

The National Association of Scholars endorses the executive order for committing federal policy to countering the reproducibility crisis, noting that it “places the weight of the federal government on the side of ensuring that scientific research provides true knowledge about the natural world”. By requiring agencies to adopt policies that prioritise falsifiability and transparency, the order aims to dismantle the structures that enable regulatory capture. This is a direct challenge to the entrenched interests — green energy firms, Big Pharma, academic institutions and activist scientists — who benefit from a system that rewards conformity over truth.

Critics of the executive order claim that the order ‘hijacks’ scientific language to undermine rigour. These critics, however, ignore the irony: their defence of the status quo protects a system already captured by ideological and corporate interests. The fear of ‘political interference’ is a red herring when the current system already allows bureaucrats and special interests to manipulate science for their gain. Stigler’s insight reminds us that regulatory capture thrives in the absence of accountability, and the order’s emphasis on transparency and falsifiability is a direct counter to this. The politicised role of state agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy and the Department of Interior in pushing the Biden administration’s green agenda has been widely noted in these pages and elsewhere.

Compare the Situation with the EU

It is instructive to briefly compare President Trump’s efforts at inculcating gold standard science in government-sponsored research with the situation in the Europe Union. Under Ursula von der Leyen’s leadership, the Digital Services Act (DSA), Digital Markets Act (DMA) and AI Act collectively enable the EU Commission to police content on social media platforms like X and TikTok. Posts that contradict ‘authoritative sources’ on issues like climate, COVID-19 or energy transition can be algorithmically demoted, removed or even criminally sanctioned by the EU’s digital commissars.

Von der Leyen defends these draconian steps as necessary to combat disinformation — but what she’s really fighting is narrative pluralism in the marketplace of ideas, since the science is already ‘settled’. A particularly egregious example of the authoritarian approach to the ‘settled science’ was exhibited by the often grinning Jacinda Ardern, who claimed before stepping down as New Zealand’s Prime Minister that her government was the “sole source of truth” in public health issues during the Covid lockdowns. She naturally got rewarded for her Covid response, first with a damehood awarded by Prince William during a ceremony in the UK and then by the United Nations as the ‘Champion for Global Change’ which recognises “extraordinary individuals and organisations whose work embodies the values and purposes of the UN”.

Conclusion: Speaking Truth to Power

President Trump’s executive order on “Gold Standard Science” is not an attack on science but a defence of its core principles. By anchoring federal policy in making scientific research reproducible, transparent and falsifiable, it seeks to liberate science from the clutches of regulatory capture. The order confronts a scientific establishment that, in areas like climate and health, has too often justified policies that serve vested interests over the public good. As scientists such as John Clauser and others have shown, the cost of this corruption is not just economic but existential, threatening the credibility of science itself.

The path forward is clear: federal agencies must adopt rigorous, transparent and falsifiable standards to ensure that science serves truth, not power. Critics may decry the order as political overreach, but their protests defend a system that has already been politicised by entrenched interests. For the sake of the public, the economy and the integrity of science, Trump’s executive order is a necessary step toward restoring trust and accountability. Let us hope it marks the beginning of a new era where science is once again a beacon of truth, not a tool of propaganda.

Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO2 Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.

“Free Market Electricity”

“A free market in electricity would terminate the current provisions of landmark federal statutes, such as the Power Act of 1935, Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978, Energy Policy Act of 1992, Energy Policy Act of 1995, and Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.”

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From Master Resource

By Robert Bradley Jr.

“A free market in electricity would terminate the current provisions of landmark federal statutes, such as the Power Act of 1935, Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978, Energy Policy Act of 1992, Energy Policy Act of 1995, and Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.”

My new AIER primer defines and applies the free-market classical liberal worldview to electricity. This is particularly important because this sound perspective has been both forgotten and misapplied.

Forgotten regarding the criticisms of traditional public utility regulation that emerged in the 1960s; misapplied regarding the current mandatory open access era involving central planning at the wholesale level with ISOs/RTOs.

My major points with quotations follow:

1. Electricity is a free-market product with a clear free market, classical liberal meaning: the separation of government and electricity in all phases and in the whole.

“A free market in electricity is defined as the absence of government ownership, control, or regulation. Electricity and government are separate, apart from legal protection against force or fraud. Government neutrally upholds the enforceability of private contracts and other market norms under the rule of law.”

“… contra government direction and control, from municipal ownership to franchise protection and cost-based rate ceilings (public-utility regulation); to mandatory open access for outside parties (an uncompensated taking); to renewable requirements (the forced energy substitution of wind and solar).”

“Grid electricity was never considered a common-pool resource at odds with definable private property rights and efficient operation. The ‘commons’ theory of governmental organization arose only with the government-mandated open-access transmission, itself a clear violation of private property rights.”

2. Electricity, while having unique qualities, is subject to market forces and does not require government intervention or ownership. The US power sector has a clear free market history for empirical evaluation—and no demonstrable market failure.

“Highly coordinated multiphase operation, evident in petroleum and natural gas (in a free market), was required by the uniqueness of electricity. Governmental franchise protection was not necessary.”

“The market era was characterized by declining rates, expanding usage, and reliable service…. Market-directed integrated operations resulted in unprecedented affordability and continuous, coordinated service.”

3. Electricity is the second-most regulated sector of the U.S. economy today, next to money and banking (outside of the military industrial complex). It is an unholy mix of public utility regulation; government-enabled dilute, intermittent wind and solar; and mandatory open access.

“Today, a growing number of regions are subject to rising power rates, conservation appeals, and service interruptions.”

4. Mandatory open access has introduced its own problems under de facto socialism, particularly pricing for reliability.

“Economic calculation has bedeviled ISO/RTOs…. Some regions have implemented ‘capacity charges’ to reward generators for standby capacity. Others have banked on ‘energy only’ prices, betting that ample capacity would be incited by periodic price windfalls.”

“Consumer welfare and ‘the obligation to serve’ have been lost in the transition to central planning, as well as in the governmental quest for decarbonization. Worse, agency errors … have been protected by sovereign immunity.”

5. Public policy going forward begins with federal deregulation of electricity (state deregulation would need to follow).

“A free market in electricity would terminate the current provisions of landmark federal statutes, such as the Power Act of 1935, Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978, Energy Policy Act of 1992, Energy Policy Act of 1995, and Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.”

“Competition could entail direct rivalry with duplicate facilities, or it could be a single firm maintaining a market against potential rivals. Either way, the private and public costs of government intervention could be bypassed and market signals established.”

US oil giant abandons California after 150 years over ‘harsh’ green policies

One of America’s biggest oil companies is to abandon its headquarters in California amid a backlash against “harsh” green policies.

Chevron on Friday said it would relocate to Houston, Texas, breaking a historic association with the Golden State that stretches back to the 1870s.

MIDLAND, TEXAS – MARCH 11: Oil pumpjacks work in the Permian Basin oil field on March 11, 2022 in Midland, Texas. United States President Joe Biden imposed a ban on Russian oil, the world’s third-largest oil producer, which may mean that oil producers in the Permian Basin will need to pump more oil to meet demand. The Permian Basin is the largest petroleum-producing basin in the United States. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Philip Bratby

How long will it be before BP and Shell follow suit, and leave the UK?

One of America’s biggest oil companies is to abandon its headquarters in California amid a backlash against “harsh” green policies.

Chevron on Friday said it would relocate to Houston, Texas, breaking a historic association with the Golden State that stretches back to the 1870s.

Chevron’s decision follows repeated warnings from bosses that stringent environmental regulations and other moves by the Californian government had made doing business there too difficult.

It is the latest oil company to walk away from the state, while other employers such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX have also relocated following rows with state authorities about new legislation.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/08/02/oil-giant-abandons-california-150-years-harsh-green-policy

Net Zero Watch warns over change to Ofgem role

Amendment to Ofgem’s statutory duties ‘leaves consumers defenceless in the face of green rent-seeking’

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From Net Zero Watch

Amendment to Ofgem’s statutory duties ‘leaves consumers defenceless in the face of green rent-seeking’

Rather than restoring Ofgem as a consumer champion, Rishi Sunak’s government is actually weakening the regulator’s ability to protect consumers against the unreasonable costs of the UK’s poorly designed and extremely expensive climate change policies. This is, quite simply, a deplorable mistake and will store up horrifying problems for future governments, to say nothing of the serious harm it will do to household wellbeing and the competitiveness of UK businesses.

As long ago as 2017, we pointed out that the regulator of the Gas and Electricity Markets (Ofgem) had been systematically transformed from a defender of the energy consumer interest into a supine part of the climate policy delivery mechanism, a point we reinformed in a more recent article (“The Decline and Fall of Britain’s Energy Regulator” 04.02.2020).

Ofgem’s original statutory duty compelled it to promote the interests of existing and future consumers through the promotion of competition. This was a clear and rational objective for a consumer champion. The revisions made in the Energy Act of 2010 redefined these interests to include the consumer interest in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This was dubiously logical, since it is not clear that consumers qua consumers have such interests, and needless since those interests, insofar as they were real, were already represented in the arguments being made for emissions reductions policies by the relevant government departments, DECC and DEFRA at that time.

By prejudging the debate between these interests the revision to the 2010 Act in effect made it very hard for any diligent economist in Ofgem to offers substantive criticism of very high emissions reduction costs.

However, it seems that this was not sufficient for those intent on removing any obstacle to cost increases caused by climate change policy, and Government is now proposing to finish the job begun in the 2010 Act by making it explicitly committed to working towards the delivery of the Climate Change Act of 2008. To be exact, as Ofgem itself reports:

It gives Ofgem a specific net zero mandate to protect existing and future consumers’ interests by supporting “the Secretary of State’s compliance with the duties 1 and 4(1)(b) of the Climate Change Act 2008 (2050 net zero target and five-year carbon budgets)”(“Ofgem welcomes proposed legal mandate to prioritise the UK’s 2050 net zero target”).

Reviewing the history, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Ofgem has been to a degree complicit and under the leadership of Mr Brearley, whose doubtful objectivity in this matter we have discussed in our 2020 article, positively enthusiastic in weakening consumer protection.

Any consumer, whether domestic or industrial, might reasonably ask “What is the point of a regulator such as Ofgem?” From government’s point of view, the point is crystal clear: the existence of a drugged and hypnotised regulator gives the false impression that the consumer interest is balanced against climate policies. The wording of the government amendment in fact shows that Mr Sunak’s colleagues couldn’t care less.