People sitting among billions of dollars of useless, taxpayer-funded mirrors should be the last to start throwing stones. Yet, here Gavin Newsom is, hurling boulders with blind recklessness. Mostly because he knows his followers will hork and clap like the mindless seals they are, no matter how many billions of their own taxes are being wasted in California on worse-than-useless solar scams.
California Governor Gavin Newsom has attacked Donald Trump’s United Nations speech as an “embarrassment and abomination”, after the US president slammed climate change and renewables as a “joke, hoax, con job and scam”.
Feeling a bit seen, are we, Gavin?
The leading Democrat, who has launched a talk-show blitz this week amid rising speculation he will nominate for the presidency ahead of the 2028 election, on Thursday (AEST) accused Mr Trump of being a “fraud”.
Oh, now that’s rich.
Mr Newsom and Mr Albanese lead similar governments leaning in hard on climate change, emissions reduction, electric vehicles, renewables and net zero.
And how’s that working out for them? In Australia, household power bills have risen by an average of 30 per cent. In NSW, bills rose 45 per cent. Further rises of at least 10 per cent are expected by the end of 2025. Resource and energy-rich Australia has some of the most expensive electricity in the world. California has the most expensive electricity of the mainland US states; only Hawaii, isolated by ocean, is more expensive.
And who’s the “fraud”, Gavin? How about the guy who’s sitting on a multi-billion-dollar solar plant that’s about to be shut off after failing to work for the entire decade since it’s been built?
The [Ivanpah Solar Power Facility in California’s Mojave Desert], which features three 459-foot towers and thousands of computer-controlled mirrors known as heliostats, cost some $2.2 billion to build.
Construction began in 2010 and was completed in 2014.
The Obama administration threw $1.6 billion taxpayer dollars at the scheme. His secretary of energy, Ernest Moniz, hailed it as “an example of how America is becoming a world leader in solar energy”.
Instead, it’s a textbook example of fraud and government uselessness and waste.
Now it’s set to close in 2026 after failing to efficiently generate solar energy […]
“Ivanpah stands as a testament to the waste and inefficiency of government subsidized energy schemes,” Jason Isaac, CEO of the American Energy Institute, an American energy advocacy group, told Fox News via statement this past February. It “never lived up to its promises, producing less electricity than expected, while relying on natural gas to stay operational.”
It’s not just a gigantic con on the taxpayer, either. Like wind farms, it’s an even deadlier con on wildlife.
Beams of sunlight are reflected toward one of the solar towers of the Ivanpah solar plant near Primm at the Nevada-California border.
[Birds] get fried “if they fly in the area where the reflection is going up to the tower,” [alternative energy consultant Edward Smeloff] explained.
So, Trump was right and Newsom dead wrong. As dead as California’s wildlife.
Steven Milloy, senior fellow at the Energy & Environmental Legal Institute and former Trump EPA transition team member, agrees.
“No green project relying on taxpayer subsidies has ever made any economic or environmental sense,” he said. “It’s important that President Trump stop the taxpayer bleeding by ending what he accurately calls the Green New Scam.”
If only we had Trump in charge in Australia, instead of Albanese and his moronic sidekick, Boofhead Bowen.
