GOLDEN CRESCENT AND 1000 ISLAND NEWS

  O Canada or no Canada? It’s a momentous question. Canada’s oil-rich province of Alberta is  poised  to hold an independence referendum, perhaps in October. Similar sentiment has been bubbling in Saskatchewan. In Quebec, secession is the perennial dream of millions. Will it be another rupture in the fabric of our era, like Brexit, Donald Trump’s rise or Russia’s Ukraine invasion? Or maybe the opposite? A putative Canadian secession crisis could prove a damp squib, evidence the world is restabilizing itself in a new geopolitical age. The word rupture was recently  given  currency by none other than Canadian Prime Minister  Mark Carney , decrying Donald Trump’s effect on NATO. Never say never but history isn’t a single train rushing down a single track. In fact, a lot has changed since we last  visited  Albertan independence seven years ago. All the news—every bit of it—suggests Canada finding its way back to an even keel. Property values and ...

  Did the far left ever really believe its own rhetoric when it came to climate change? True, when it comes to the positions staked out by any politician on the issues of the day, the age-old question is constantly in the back of everyone’s minds: How much of what they claim to believe is based on heartfelt, core convictions, and how much is due to outside political pressure or geared toward generating contributions? But nowhere is this question more pertinent than when it comes to politicians and their advocacy for climate change. Why? Because  it’s difficult to think of anything that comes close to rivaling the number of government mandates implemented and the amount of taxpayer dollars allocated to reshape society as has happened in the name of climate change. Surely, it wasn’t all based on empty rhetoric and misdirection, was it? Far-left environmental and climate change groups have significantly  increased their political  spending over the years. In turn, elect...

  February 20, 2026 The average residential electric bill impact for two offshore wind farms off Long Island  has increased nearly fivefold since 2019  to an anticipated $3.54 a month, according to state data, fueled by soaring construction costs and new projections for the price of wholesale energy. When former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo first announced Empire Wind and Sunrise Wind farms at a 2019 conference in Manhattan, the state announced the impact on average New Yorkers would be "less than a dollar per month per customer," or "approximately 73 cents." Much has changed since then. Nearly seven years later, amid ongoing challenges to the nascent U.S. offshore wind industry,  the estimate continues to adjust upward,  to $3.54 per month by 2028, when the projects are expected to be producing power, according Marco Padula, director of markets and innovation for the state Department of Public Service, which conducts the price-impact study. The $3.54 is a projected "l...

  New bipartisan bill aims to clear nuclear’s biggest remaining bottleneck The United States could still withdraw from the International Energy Agency if the Paris-based watchdog, considered one of the leading sources of global data and forecasts on energy demand, continues to promote and plan for “ridiculous” net-zero scenarios by 2050. That’s what Secretary of Energy Chris Wright  said on stage  Tuesday at a conference in the French capital. Noting that the IEA was founded in the wake of the oil embargoes that accompanied the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Trump administration wants the organization to refocus on issues of energy security and poverty, Wright said. He cited a recent effort to promote clean cooking fuels for the 2 billion people who still lack regular access to energy — more than 2 million of whom are estimated to die each year from exposure to fumes from igniting wood, crop residue, or dung indoors — as evidence that the IEA was shifting in Washington’s direct...

  02/17/2026 10:00 AM EST   HOCHUL’S CLIMATE STAKES:  Gov. Kathy Hochul has a chance this week to formally propose changes to New York’s 2019 climate law in the budget process. The 30-day amendments to the executive budget due on Thursday are being closely watched for any tweaks to the landmark Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act. The Hochul administration  has been considering proposing changes  to the climate law as part of budget negotiations. The governor herself has publicly called into question the wisdom of the law’s targets given the present-day challenges New York faces. Hochul has some basic political calculus  to do — does she further burnish her credibility with business leaders who have called for changing the law and risk the wrath of the environmental movement? She may well decide that with her political star shining as brightly as ever… and nowhere for environmental activists to go in the primary… that tackling the thorny issue o...

  Watch the excellent 16 minute interview of Porter at this link:         Kathryn Porter On Britain’s Reckless Electrification Strategy   ROBERT BRYCE Kathryn Porter On Britain’s Reckless Electrification Strategy My chat with one of the UK's sharpest energy analysts.   Robert Bryce Feb 20, 2026 ∙ Paid Last month, during the PowerGen conference in San Antonio, I caught up with Kathryn Porter, one of the UK’s sharpest energy analysts. A prominent critic of Britain’s energy policies, we talked about her  recent report on her country’s electrification strategy  and why it is destined to fail. As she notes in the report, Britain’s electric grid will “struggle even to maintain today’s demand reliably, let alone accommodate the 7–10 GW of new load implied by electrification agendas.” I highly recommend you follow her at  watt-logic.com .

  February 16, 2026   by Adrijana Buljan   The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) has closed the state’s fifth offshore wind solicitation, launched in 2024,  without awarding any offshore renewable energy credits (ORECs) . The state agency has also launched a Request for Information (RFI) to inform a potential process through which the state would support the predevelopment of offshore wind projects. NYSERDA closed the offshore wind solicitation on 13 February, saying the reason behind the decision was the current market conditions caused by federal actions. “On February 13, 2026, NYSERDA concluded ORECRFP24-1 without award due to federal actions disrupting the offshore wind market and instilling significant uncertainty into offshore wind project development. That week, NYSERDA launched a Request for Information to gather information from the industry to help address these challenges in a thoughtful and timely manner”,  NYSER...

  The Treasury Department published long-awaited guidance for claiming the clean energy tax credits on Thursday, ending the state of limbo in which project developers have languished since the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed last summer. Well, sort of. Trump’s tax law put new restrictions on many of the clean energy tax credits, limiting eligibility to projects that could prove they had minimal material inputs or oversight from a handful of countries labeled “foreign entities of concern,” i.e. Russia, North Korea, Iran, and, most problematically, China. The problem was that it was hard to suss out exactly how to follow these rules. The Treasury Department would have to provide clarification, or in the parlance of federal tax law, “guidance.” Without this, developers might unintentionally break the rules, get audited, and then owe the government a bunch of money — a risk that financiers are not keen to take. Now, developers have, shall we say, partial guidance. The FEOC rules have...

  Albany, NY  — New York households continue to pay some of the highest electricity prices in the nation, according to  data  from the Empire Center and the U.S. Energy Information Administration.    In November 2025, the average residential electricity price in New York was 26.49 cents per kilowatt-hour, ranking 8th highest in the U.S. and exceeding the national average by 49 percent. Over the past 12 months, electricity prices in New York rose by 7.1 percent, compared to 5.5 percent nationwide.    Average residential natural gas prices were $17.95 per thousand cubic feet, ranking 19th highest nationally and 20 percent above the U.S. average.   Electricity prices in New York have surged since 2019, widening the gap between what New Yorkers pay and the national average.    “Electricity demand and prices are rising nationwide, but New York is seeing costs climb even faster than other states,” said Zilvinas...

  Waiting for the world to end will exhaust you. Democratic zeal for the climate once ran red hot. Catastrophism produced the steam that powered the progressive engine. You may have been a little wobbly on open borders, or you may have been a little unsure about defunding the police. But you never doubted for a moment that the Earth had a fever and human activity was to blame. Now, in the bleak midwinter of Trump and ICE and Ukraine and AI, you’re a little like, eh, do I have to? Still? On Thursday, the Trump administration announced its repeal of the Environmental Protection Agency’s “endangerment finding,” the 2009 determination that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health. It was the legal basis for most federal climate regulation, allowing Washington technocrats to treat carbon dioxide, methane and four other gases as pollutants. The White House trumpeted the repeal as “the single largest deregulatory action in U.S. history.” That sounds right to me. I’m no scientist, b...

  Feb 11, 2026 ∙ Paid “The more storage you have, the more stuff you accumulate.”  – Alexis Stewart While doomscrolling  ZeroHedge  early Friday morning—as one does—we  learn  that  Finland’s foray into the world of wind energy isn’t going well .  Having invested to the point that wind is now the country’s second-largest source of electricity, residents are grappling with reduced supply and skyrocketing prices, with many forced to burn wood just to stay warm. Wind generation has all but  gone dormant  during an epic cold snap, made worse by the decision to skimp on expensive in-blade heating technology that could have minimized ice formation. Even without looking, we guessed that intermittent sources of electricity in Finland must now exceed highly dispatchable ones— a predictable point of pain where stuff begins to break . Sure enough, a quick check of  government data  and the  Statistical Review of World Energy ...