From THE DAILY CALLER

Audrey Streb
Contributor

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) threw their weight behind an antitrust lawsuit against major asset managers that alleges the firms colluded to tank coal production with their embrace of zero-emissions goals on Thursday morning. 

The lawsuit, led by Paxton and backed by ten other state attorneys general, alleges that BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street collusively used their market power to suppress coal production, thereby burdening consumers by causing the price of coal to skyrocket. The Trump FTC and the DOJ filed a statement of interest on Thursday supporting the attorneys general’s lawsuit, signaling the administration’s view that the firms’ so-called “environmental, social and corporate governance” (ESG) investing may fall afoul of antitrust law.

“These companies allegedly blocked the production of American coal in the name of climate change scaremongering, all so they could take money out of the pockets of American consumers and put it in theirs,” Ferguson continued.

The FTC and DOJ are taking action following Trump’s day-one energy emergency declaration and his April 8 executive order, which directed federal agencies to “encourage and support our Nation’s coal industry to increase our energy supply, lower electricity costs, stabilize our grid, create high-paying jobs, support burgeoning industries, and assist our allies.”

“The President has declared a national energy emergency, and we need competition in coal production now more than ever to help fuel American energy dominance,” said Assistant Attorney General Abigail A. Slater of the DOJ’s Antitrust Division. “American consumers suffer when institutional asset managers use shareholdings in competing companies to orchestrate output reductions.”

BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard are three of the world’s largest asset managers. All three were members of the Net Zero Asset Managers (NZAM) initiative until Vanguard dropped out in December 2022 and BlackRock exited the coalition in January.

The DOJ and FTC’s “support for this baseless case undermines the Trump Administration’s goal of American energy independence,” a BlackRock spokesperson wrote to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “As we made clear in our earlier motion to dismiss, this case is trying to re-write antitrust law and is based on an absurd theory that coal companies conspired with their shareholders to reduce coal production. Forcing asset managers to divest from coal companies will harm their ability to access capital and invest in their businesses and employees, likely leading to higher energy prices.”

“These asset managers, which have been acting as an ESG climate cartel have not only deceived investors but also harmed millions of American families by raising costs and contributing to record inflation,” executive director of Consumers’ Research Will Hild wrote to the DCNF. “Not only does the FTC and DOJ agree that the investments made were driven by a radical, political objective, but go directly against President Trump’s energy goals.”

The White House, the FTC, Paxton’s office, Vanguard and State Street did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.

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From CFACT

By David Wojick

The North American Energy Reliability Corporation (NERC, rhymes with jerk) has just released its 2025 Summer Reliability Assessment (SRA). NERC is a quasi-federal agency under the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC, also rhymes with jerk).

NERC’s mission is to keep America’s grid reliable, which it has clearly failed to do. The nonsensical language in the SRA helps explain this failure. There is a deep fallacy that lets NERC systematically avoid saying how bad things really are.

This fallacy is the dangerously misleading use of the word “normal.” Here is a good example (out of many). Their basic finding is that “all areas are assessed as having adequate anticipated resources for normal summer peak load conditions.”

This sounds very reassuring, as does the whole report. The fallacy is that there is no such thing as “normal” summer conditions for a given day, week, month, or season. They really mean average conditions, and these are rare, not normal.

Here is an analogy to make the point. Suppose I work downtown and eat lunch at a lot of different places. Maybe twice a month I eat at Arby’s. It would be wildly false to say I normally eat at Arby’s since I eat there less than 10% of the time. “Normally” implies most of the time.

In the same way, average weather occurs less than 10% of the time, so it is wildly false to refer to it as normal. Moreover, the weather will often be worse than average as far as stressing the grid goes, sometimes far worse.

So NERC should truthfully say something like this: “All areas are projected to have adequate resources for normal summer conditions, but it is highly likely that conditions will be worse, including far worse.”

This is not reassuring at all, as it clearly calls for caution, which is how bad things really are.

The report assesses projected generating capacity versus demand by dividing the country into 23 different assessment areas. This sounds good, but in every case they use average weather, making the whole show completely unrealistic.

Here is a simple example of what they are ignoring that I happened to live through: Winter Storm Elliot in 2022. I am in the territory of PJM, the biggest US regional transmission operator.

NERC’s Long-Term Reliability Assessment for that year said PJM had a whopping 30% reserve margin based on average weather. Elliot’s bitter cold wiped that margin out, and PJM barely escaped blackout. Nor was Elliot’s cold extreme. Pittsburgh’s low was -5F, while 30 years ago it was -22F.

Summer is just as prone to far-from-average events, and reliability is about these events, not average events. We have lots of weather data and know how to do probabilistic analysis. NERC should be telling us the likelihood of serious grid-stressing events in each of the 23 assessment areas. These would not be happy numbers, and the message would be far from reassuring.

In weather forecasts, a slight chance of severe weather can be the most important forecast. NERC actually waves their hand at such by generically listing some of the things that can go wrong. For example, this: “…above-normal electricity demand, periods of low wind and solar output, and wide-area heat events that disrupt available transfers and generator availability could leave system operators short on supply in at-risk areas.”

Estimating probabilities for bad stuff like this in each assessment area could begin to give us a real reliability assessment. All we have now is page after page of what it will be like if everything is nice.

In addition, their inclusion of solar and wind to meet peak demand is ridiculous. Here is an upfront example under Key Findings: “Meanwhile, growth in solar photovoltaic (PV) and battery storage resources has accelerated with the addition of 30 GW of nameplate solar PV resources and 13 GW of new battery storage. The new solar and battery resource additions are expected to provide over 35 GW in summer on-peak capacity. New wind resources are expected to provide 5 GW on peak.”

Summer peaks are usually heat waves with peak need often between 4 and 6 pm when there is no solar output. Batteries might buy a few hours, but these heat waves are typically multi-day events making batteries worthless. They are also stagnant high-pressure, low-wind events with no wind output.

If NERC is assuming major solar and wind output to meet peak need, their findings are ridiculously unreliable. The combination of using wind and solar with merely average conditions makes this so-called reliability assessment highly misleading at best.

We need a realistic reliability assessment.