The Manhattan Contrarian continues to dissect the green energy disaster in New York, pointing to two very serious problems that appear to have eluded the architects of that disaster, perhaps unsurprisingly. They both concern the blithe new orthodoxy that the various shortcomings of wind and solar can be fixed merely by creating “large grid-scale battery storage facilities.” But if they could walk that way… or count… because as he warns, they don’t seem to have done the math on how much storage would be required, which is surely important to the story. Also, there’s the issue of battery fires which they have suppressed not with fire extinguishers but with thought extinguishers. But it ties in, and stay with us here, to a much broader pattern of blasé disregard for obvious realities including, as columnist Lorrie Goldstein notes, that Canada’s new and supposedly improved climate-zealot Prime Minister Mark Carney admits that “Canada is not going to reach our 2030 and 2035 climate targets”. What’s more, Carney must have known it when he ran on meeting them. So did he promise it because he’s dishonest, confused or both?
Now in some sense the Carney story comes straight from the “no duh” file. But if it’s so obvious, why didn’t anybody notice or, if they did, why didn’t they care? In a recent haunting X post on a very different topic, but with broad application, Canadian journalist Chris Selley wrote with guarded optimism that:
“Historians will (hopefully) view this as the period when Canadians and their government(s) realize, to their horror, that some things actually matter.”
And it is extraordinary the degree to which Canada, and many other Western nations, seem to be governed by people who have assumed nothing matters, abetted of course by voters with a similar fatuous attitude. Indeed, having admitted the obvious Carney went on to obscure it with one of his classic pieces of long-winded insubstantiality, blaming “too much regulation, not enough action”, as if regulation were not a form of action. As too often, it makes grammatical sense but no other kind.
Indeed, it makes less than no sense because regulation on climate has been a very common form of action in Canada not some odd substitute for it. Goldstein adds that the $200 billion plus that the Trudeau administration spent:
“funded 149 government programs administered by 13 federal departments to reduce Canada’s annual industrial greenhouse gas emissions to 40% to 45% below 2005 levels by 2030, 45% to 50% by 2035 and net zero by 2050. According to the federally-funded Canadian Climate Institute, Canada’s emissions last year were stalled at 694 million tonnes, the same as in 2023, just 8.5% below 2005 levels.”
Possibly because nobody in government in Canada seems to know how to do much of anything including set goals then monitor achievements and adjust if results are disappointing, including on the supposedly crucial climate file. But if they know they don’t know, they certainly aren’t telling us.
Thus the stinger from Goldstein:
“First, Carney publicly committed to Trudeau’s targets under the United Nations 2015 Paris climate agreement prior to the Liberals’ November budget. Second, Carney must have known Trudeau’s targets were unachievable when Trudeau appointed him to chair his task force on economic growth in September 2024. At that time, Carney was the UN’s special envoy for climate action and finance and co-chair of the corporate Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero emissions globally by 2050. Given that, it’s reasonable to assume Carney has long known Trudeau’s targets were unachievable.”
So why didn’t he tell us? Was he lying, had he not bothered to think it through, or does he have a Kamala-Harris level of difficulty uttering sentences anyone can understand, not as a tactic but as a fundamental intellectual condition? Because he’s just as determined to do some grand and highly expensive thing on climate. And it won’t work either, especially if he can’t even say what it is.
The idea that Carney would sneer at regulation is absurd, especially if you read press releases like “Government announces next steps toward made-in-Canada sustainable investment guidelines” that chose, of all outfits, the Canadian Climate Institute to “establish a robust and independent governance structure to oversee the development of science-based taxonomy criteria and undertake stakeholder engagement.” A plan to plan for a plan, which if anyone could make head or tail of it would involve regulating the financial sector in baroque and pointless ways that make Canada a world leader in polysyllabic vacuity.
If it were just Carney the solution would be obvious, at least to us. But as the Contrarian warns about policy-makers in New York, and so we’re talking governor, members of the state assembly, advisors, activists and a whole host of people, they don’t just not know how many batteries they’d need, or seem to think it matters. They also don’t grasp what would happen if they got them:
“In a post back in March 2024, I reported on the progress of our two ‘climate leader’ states with developing grid-scale battery storage. It turned out that the big problem was that these facilities were subject to large and dangerous fires on a regular basis. In some cases the same facility would catch fire multiple times. That post reported on major fires in California at a site called Valley Center in San Diego County in September 2023, and at another one called Moss Landing south of San Francisco in September 2022. In January 2025, the Moss Landing facility had another major fire.”
Oh dear, right? It matters? Apparently not, because Moss Landing had a history of such fires. Moreover:
“Back here in New York, my March 2024 post reported on no fewer than three major fires at grid battery storage facilities in this state that had taken place during 2023…”
And these are serious fires, that do massive damage and burn for days. If you get one, your storage facility can’t store anything but toxic waste. So why are such things being hailed as a solution not raised as a major problem? After all, it’s not getting better:
“Might you have the idea that these fires are becoming less frequent over time? If so, that’s only because these fires are one of those things — like the Somali welfare fraud in Minnesota — that the liberal media just don’t choose to report. It turns out that the Convergent Energy facility in Warwick, New York had another big fire just last week…. I can’t find any mention of this battery fire at the New York Times or at major media sites like CNN or the major television networks.”
Can’t anybody here play this game? And what happens when they get to try anyway? Including, in the Warwick fire, toxic fumes blowing over densely populated areas including, of all things, “the largest public housing project in the country”.
Carney is a dismal failure in every department.And he's soon flying off to China to be with his master Chairman Xi.I consider Carney like Trudeau to be Communist Party assets.The battery storage fires reports are suppressed by MSM because it doesn't fit their green is good narrative.See where MSM attacks Nick Shirley for boldly reporting Somali welfare fraud in Minnesota for similar reasons.He has caused Gov. Tim Walz to abruptly decide not to run again in the fall.Far as New York State goes,I hear they might be facing fuel rationing this year due to overreliance on renewables.