Thomas Kolbe has written about the collapse of the German economy, something pretty shocking to those of us who remember when the German economy seemed unstoppable. What’s slammed the brakes on that juggernaut is central planning that revolves around the whole Green New Deal theory. Other European countries are doing the same. Spain and Portugal had a catastrophic power outage thanks to their green energy policies, and, in England, people are getting cold and dirty in a very 19th-century way because of the UK’s drive for “Net Zero.”
Had Kamala been elected last year, America would almost certainly have gone down that path, too. As it is, California’s Gavin Newsom is now begging the refineries that he closed to reopen.
Image created using AI.
And it’s not just Crazifornia. According to an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, the policies of New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy (a Democrat, of course) have been disastrous for residents of that state:
Despite flat electricity demand for the past two decades—and some of the lowest energy usage per capita among the 50 states—New Jersey residents pay some of the highest retail power prices in the country. As of April 2025, the Garden State ranked No. 12 in the nation, with prices more than 15% above the U.S. average. This gap has widened further in the wake of the recent decision by the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities to approve an additional 17% to 20% rate increase for most utility customers starting in June.
How in the world did that happen? Well, according to Paul H. Tice, who wrote the WSJ piece, the troubles began in 2017, when Murphy took office. Under his aegis, “New Jersey has shut down all its coal plants, reduced its natural gas-generation capacity, and increased its reliance on intermittent wind and solar power.” Trenton, the state capital (population 91,193), plans to have 100% clean electricity (that is, based on renewables) by 2035. I foresee that Trenton residents will soon be as cold and dirty as the British are.
Just as California invested big in the train to nowhere, and had nothing to show for it, New Jersey has pinned its hopes on offshore windmills. They’ve sucked money out of state coffers, but none have been built, although they’ve managed to overrun costs. New Jersey also dreams of solar power, “even though the state experiences only 94 days with less than 30% cloud cover in an average year.”
Inevitably, New Jersey has had to look elsewhere for energy that actually works, so it’s gone to the Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland regional transmission organization. However, that, too, is subject to green madness. In the last ten years, thanks to green policies, its output has decreased by 20%, largely because it has replaced coal and natural gas resources with (mostly theoretical!) solar and wind energy supplies.
It's to be hoped, though, that New Jersey and California don’t represent the future but are, instead, the last gasp of climate change madness.
One of the indicators that we might have passed peak madness is that China’s major solar firms have fired up to 1/3 of their workforce. This is a big deal because most solar panels (perhaps all?) come from China. And you have to be a conservative to appreciate the irony that Western leftists buy solar panels—which are difficult and expensive to recycle, because they have all sorts of nastiness in them—from China, a country that uses coal to manufacture them.