There is a lot of anxiety, misconceptions and distortions about Doge, or Department of Government Efficiency. The above interview with members of the team and their leader Elon Musk gives everyone an inside view of what the work is, who is doing it and why, and what is at stake for citizens and taxpayers. For those who prefer reading, below is a transcript lightly edited from the closed captions with my added images. BB is Bret Baier of Fox News and EM is Elon Musk. Baier introduces other participants by name and background.
BB: Thanks for having us and doing this I know there’s a lot of interest in Doge. Let me start with you Elon: What are what are the budgetary savings goals and and how much do you think you’ve achieved so far?
EM: Our goal is to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars. So from a nominal deficit of 2 trillion, it is to cut the deficit in half to 1 trillion. Or looking at it in total federal spending, to drop the federal spending from 7 trillion to Six Trillion. We want to reduce the spending by eliminating waste. And to reduce the spending by 15%, which seems really quite achievable.
The government is not efficient, and there’s a lot of a lot of waste and fraud, so we feel confident that a 15% reduction can be done without affecting any of of the critical government services, and in fact making them better.
BB: I’m going talk to all the guys here about the specifics. But for you what’s the most astonishing thing you found out in this process?
EM: The sheer amount of waste and fraud in the government. It is astonishing, it’s mind-blowing. We routinely encounter wastes of a billion dollars or more just casually. For example, there was a simple survey that was literally a 10 questions survey, that you could do with Survey Monkey costing about $10,000. The government was being charged almost a billion dollars for that. A billion dollars for a simple online survey with questions like: Do you like the national park? And then there appears to be no feedback loop for what would be done with that survey. So the survey would just go for nothing.
BB: You technically are a special government employee and you’re supposed to be 130 days. Are you going to continue past that or what do you think you’re going to do?
EM: Well I think we will have accomplished most of the work required to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars within that time frame.
BB: So in that time frame and and the process is a report at some point?
EM: Not really a report we are cutting the waste and fraud in real time. So every day that passes our goal is to reduce the the waste and fraud by $4 billion a day, every day 7 days a week, and so far we are succeeding.
BB: I’m going to talk of the specifics but there there obviously are Doge critics who are reading all kinds of stuff. Obviously lawmakers on the other side of the aisle are attacking you. And they characterize the approach as: Fire, Ready and then Aim. And how do you approach that, how do you respond to that?
EM: Well I do agree that we actually want to be careful in the cuts, so we want to measure twice if not thrice and cut once. That actually is our approach. They may characterize it as shooting from the hip, but it is anything but that. It’s not say that we make we don’t make mistakes. If we were to approach this with the standard of making no mistakes at all, that would be like saying someone in baseball has got to bat a thousand. That’s impossible, so when we do make mistakes we correct them quickly and we we move on.
BB: Some people say this shouldn’t take a rocket scientist, but Steve Davis you are a rocket scientist. Used to be and now essentially you’re the Chief Operating Officer of Doge day-to-day operations, fair to say. So how did you end up here, what’s the biggest challenge you see?
SD: The reason I’m here, which is probably the same for many, is that I think the goal is incredibly inspiring. I think most of the taxpayers in the country would agree that to have the country going bankrupt would be a very bad thing, and therefore keeping the country from going bankrupt is a good thing. So all of us are willing to kind of put our lives on hold in order to do this. I think the thing that’s special right now is we actually believe there’s a chance to succeed. There’s an Administration that’s supportive and a great cabinet and just a great group that will actually make success a possible outcome. Given the inspiring Mission and given the non-zero chance of success it it was worth doing.
EM: Let me reemphasize that point that the success of Doge is only possible with President Trump and with the outstanding cabinet that he selected. It would be impossible without the support of the president and the cabinet.
BB: But you’re finding the money, I mean it’s big numbers right?
SD: Yeah like Elon said the minimum impulse bit is often a billion dollars. So for example the $830 million which was the online survey. That’s an enormous amount of money that wouldn’t have been found if the Doge team wasn’t working with in that case the Department of Interior. But then taking it one step further Doge then publishes these things on our website for maximum transparency. It would have been impossible for the general public to have seen that. Now anyone can just log into doge.gov anytime and see these payments. They’re not yet in real time, they’re close but they’ll probably be in real time within the next few weeks.
BB: But the process still involves Congress right, at some level?
EM: We try to keep Congress as informed as possible. The law does say that money needs to be spent correctly; it should not be spent fraudulently or wastefully. It’s not contrary to Congress to avoid waste and fraud, it is consistent with the law and consistent with Congress. And we’ve seen actually great support at least from the Republican side of the house and occasionally some Democrats too.
You know it’s nice to see people cross the aisle once in a while. But usually when they attack Doge, they never attack any of the specifics. They’ll say what we’re doing is somehow unconstitutional or illegal or whatever. We’re saying, well which line of the cost savings do you disagree with and they can’t point to any. And we list them all on on doge.gov and and the Doge handle on X. And you’ll see just outrageous things, one outrageous thing after another.
BB: Joe Gebbia, besides Elon you’re one of several billionaires, being co-founder of Airbnb, and you wanted to help out.
JG: I bumped into Anthony Elon probably back in February and they told me something about a mine that dealt with retirement and they said they needed somebody to help out to fix retirement in the government. I loved the challenge so I jumped on board. And it turns out there is actually a mine in Pennsylvania that houses every paper document for the retirement process in the government.
Now picture this giant cave has 22,000 filing cabinets stacked 10 high to house 400 million pieces of paper. It’s a process that started in the 1950s and largely hasn’t changed in the last 70 years. As we dug into it we found retirement cases that had so much paper they had to fit it on a shipping pallet. So the process takes many months and we’re going to make it just some days.
So this will be an online digital process that will take just a few days at most. And I really think you know it’s an injustice to civil servants who are subjected to these processes that are older than the age of half the people watching your show tonight. We really believe that the government can have an Apple Store-like experience: beautifully designed, great user experience, modern systems.
BB: Because right now it’s by hand?
EM: Yes the the retirement process is all by paper literally with people carrying paper and manilla envelopes into this gigantic mine. So they can’t retire more than a certain number every month about 8,000 a month. That’s how we discovered it. We were saying, well let’s encourage voluntary retirement; they said, well the most they could do is 8,000 a month. And even in normal circumstances it can take 6 to 9 months just to just to have your retirement paperwork processed, and they often get the calculations wrong.
So we’re wondering, why would it take so long to retire? Ad they say, well because of the mine. “What do you mean a mine, what’s a mine got to do with retiring?” And that’s where we discovered that all the retirement stuff is done still done by paper in a process that looks identical to what occurred in the 1950s. If you compare a snapshot of the mine when it first started in the 50s to today, it looks the same.
BB: It’s amazing, so how long do you think it’ll take to turn over?
JG: We’re working as fast as we can. Probably next couple months we’ll have this this overhauled, and you know I really think again, why are we subjecting our federal workers to processes that they actually have to go through a training just to retire from the government. There’s a whole training program that people have to go through in order to retire, I think we can do better for them.
BB: Arum Moghaddassi, Doge engineer. You go into these places, one of the more than a dozen engineers, the first people to go into the agencies and view the computer data sets. Tell me what you’re finding, and for people who don’t understand how that process works, explain it for them.
AM: I’ll say the first thing that got me really excited about Doge was learning basically the state of government computers. By some estimates, government costs about hundred billion dollars and it’s funding systems are over 50 years old. In the case of something like Social Security or the IRS the really critical systems are old. They cost a lot of money to maintain and the efforts to improve them are often very delayed. So I thought, I’m a software engineer, maybe that could make a difference here, and that’s really what inspired me at a high level.
BB: There’s a lot of mystery about social security and a lot of words about it. Here’s what Democrats have been saying about: it’s absurd that Elon Musk is trying to eliminate billions of dollars from Social Security. Elon Musk and president Trump have set their sights on cutting Social Security their goal is clear: destroy Social Security from within. You’re in the building, I mean you’re in the computers. What’s happening there, what are you doing?
AM: Yeah it doesn’t line up with my experience on the ground. And I’ll say the two improvements that we’re trying to make to Social Security are helping people that legitimately get benefits, protect them from fraud that they experience every day on a routine basis. And also make the experience better. I’ll give you one example which is at Social Security. One of the first things we learned is that they get phone calls every day of people trying to change direct deposit information. So when you want to change your bank account you can call Social Security. We learned 40% of the phone calls that they get are from fraudsters; 40%, that’s right, almost half.
EM: Yes and they steal from people their Social Security. What happens is they they call in, they claim to be a retiree, then they convince the Social Security person on the phone to change where the money is flowing. It actually goes to some fraudster. This is happening all day, every day. And then somebody doesn’t receive their social security, and it’s because of of all the the fraud loopholes in the Social Security System.
BB: How do you reassure people that what you all are doing is not going to affect their benefit benefits?
EM: No. In fact what what we’re doing will help their benefits. Legitimate people as a result of the work of Doge will receive more Social Security not less. I want to emphasize that as a result of the work of Doge legitimate recipients of Social Security will receive more money not less money. Let the record show that I said this and it will be proven out to be true.
BB: Let’s check back on this in the future. So from Washington post: The Social Security Administration website crashed four times in 10 days this month because the servers were overloaded, blocking millions of retirees and disabled veterans from logging into their online accounts. People freaked out. Is that going to change?
EM: Yes we’re going to make sure that the website stays online.
BB: But I mean is it a result of going in there, something you’re doing?
SD: No no. The amount of issues with the social security system are enormous. As an example there are over 15 million people that are over the age of 120 that are marked as alive in the social security system. That’s an accurate figure. This has been something that’s been identified as a problem. Again it’s a pre-existing problem since 2008 at least from an IG report. So there were some great people working at the Social Security Administration that found this in 2008.
And nothing was done, so that 15 to 20 million Social Security numbers that were clearly fraudulent were floating around. That can be used only for bad intentions, there’d be no way to use those for good intentions. One of the things the Doge team is doing is carefully and and very methodically looking at those and making sure that any fraudulent ones are eliminated.
BB: Brad Smith working at HHS and obviously another element is Medicare and Medicaid. What are you finding?
Brad: Well I’d say there’s a couple things we’re really committed to in our work at HHS. Number one is making sure we continue to have the best biomed research in the world, and number two is making sure what president Trump has said over and over again, that we 100% protect Medicare and Medicaid. But there’s a lot of opportunity.
If I take NIH as an example today, if you’re an NIH researcher and you get a $100 Grant at your University today you get to spend 60 of that and your University spends 40 of that. The policy we’re proposing is that you get to spend 85 of that and your University spends 15. So that’s more money going directly to the scientists who are discovering new cures.
Another example at NIH is today they have 27 different centers that got created over time by Congress. And they’re typically by disease state or body system. There’s 700 different IT systems today at NIH, 700 different IT software systems. They can’t speak to each other so they don’t talk and they have 27 different CIOs. When you think about making great medical discoveries you have to connect the data. But with 27 Chief Information officers and most people are non-technical. So there’s a lot of opportunity which will make science better not worse.
EM: When I say that our job is tech support I really mean it. Yeah we have to fix the computers: if the computers can’t talk to each other you can’t get research done; if the computers can’t stay online people won’t receive their social security. So we have here a bunch of failing computer systems that are preventing people from receiving their benefits, that are preventing people from accessing needed research resources. Computer systems that are extremely vulnerable to fraud. And we’re fixing it.
BB: Does that include AI, does that include kind of changing the system overall? I guess that’s what people are afraid of: they don’t know what this is all looking like and is it going to affect me in the long term.
EM: It’s going to affect people very positively. The changes that we’re doing here will ensure the solvency of the government of the United States of America. We’re trying to ensure that people do receive their benefits in the future. And you can only receive your benefits if the the country is operating in a in a healthy and competent way.
BB: Anthony Armstrong, Doge office of personnel management, Morgan Stanley Banker M&A guy, you know money and this is a lot of money sloshing around.
AA: There’s a lot of money sloshing around; there’s a lot of money sloshing out the door. If you look at the federal government and the way the workforce works, it’s really a one-way ratchet over decades. It’s only going up, you never take anything away. So that leaves you with duplicative functions, it leaves you with overstaffing and it leaves you with functions in the wrong places.
So a couple of examples of duplicative function. Brad mentioned 27 CIOs, if you had kept going with Brad he probably he would talk about the Communications office. I think you’ve got 40 distinct Communications offices in in HHS. Yeah 40 and that’s not unusual by by the way. And multiple offices like that are not making anyone healthy. This is not about the employees. There’s many many hardworking, well-meaning people who took these jobs. The jobs were out there, they applied for them, they took them and they’re doing what’s there. It’s just that they’re duplicating the efforts of 40 offices. So you’ve got that and you’ve got overstaffing.
A good example of overstaffing would be the IRS having 1,400 people who are dedicated to provisioning laptops and and cell phones. If you join the IRS you get a laptop and a cell phone you’re provisioned. If each of those IRS officers or employees provisioned two employees per day you could provision the entire IRS in a little more than a month. So 12 times a year. It makes no sense why you have would 1400 people whose only job it is to give out a laptop and a phone, when the whole IRS could be handled once a month.
So that doesn’t that doesn’t make any sense and president Trump’s been very clear: scalpel not hatchet. And that’s the way it’s it’s getting done, and once those decisions are made, there’s a very heavy focus on being generous, being caring, compassionate and treating everyone with dignity and respect. If you look at how people have started to leave the government it is largely through voluntary means. There’s voluntary early retirement, there’s voluntary separation payments. We put in place deferred resignation the 8-month severance program. So there’s a very heavy bias towards programs that are long-dated that are generous that allow people to exit and go and get a new job in the private sector.
You’ve heard a lot of news about RIFs, about people getting fired at at this moment in time. Less than 0.15 of the federal Workforce has actually been given a RIF notice, so mostly they’ve selected if they’re leaving. Basically almost no one’s gotten fired is what we’re saying.
BB: Tom Krause, working at Treasury you are having access to the payment system that oversees all the outgoing payments. Essentially those payments were going places we didn’t know where they were going right?
TK: Unfortunately that’s the case. You know as an ex CFO of a big public tech company, really what we’re doing is applying public company standards to the federal government. And it is alarming how the financial operations and financial management is set up today. There actually is really only one bank account that’s used to disperse all monies that go out of the federal government. One bank account that is a big, big one. A couple weeks ago it had $800 billion, but it’s the treasury general account.
When you hear some of my colleagues here talking about fraud, you have to ask: well why is this allowed to happen. At a financial level well it’s actually quite simple but alarming. The treasury up until now and thanks to president Trump we’re fixing this in fact there’s an executive order that he just signed which is protecting America’s bank account because it really is the taxpayers money.
You know we’re changing the culture because the culture has been not a lot of caring and not a lot of commitment to doing what’s right. Relative to financial operations there’s $500 billion dollars of fraud every year, there’s hundreds of billion dollars of improper payments and we can’t pass an audit. The Consolidated financial report is produced by Treasury and we cannot pass it on, we have material weaknesses. That means if I were a public company CFO I would effectively be removed if I couldn’t file financial statements. I couldn’t issue securities of course since we can’t pass an audit.
EM: Right the federal government cannot pass an Audit. It’s impossible in fact. In order to pass an audit you need the information necessary to pass an audit. You need to have the payment codes, you need to have the payment explanation and you need to have a person you can contact to understand why that payment was made. None of those things were mandatory, yeah until just recently. In just the last few weeks we’re serving 580 plus agencies, and up until very recently they effectively could say make the payment and treasury just sent it out as fast as possible, no verification
And so we’re doing what any household would do. But imagine you’re a household with a bank account and everyone has the ATM card connected to that account, everyone has a checkbook on that account. It’s not just your children, not just your parents; it’s your in-laws it’s your extended family, and they all can go to the account and disperse funds no questions asked. No justification, no verification.
BB: Tyler Hassen, Interior Department, you’re a former Oil Company CEO. You’re reviewing contracts before they’re approved for funding, what are you finding?
TH: Well Elon and Steve kind of stole my thunder, but I actually found that customer service survey contract. I actually have an example of one right here, I was able to do this in high school, I found it that bad. I found it on the weekends because under the Biden Administration there was no departmental oversight within the Department of Interior whatsoever, none. We are now reviewing every single contract, every single Grant, and when things come to my attention that don’t make sense I’m bringing then to secretary Burgum. He has been fantastic, he’s a businessman and very supportive of Doge. It’s been wonderful to work with him.
BB: The battle has decades of buildup between government and business, which you guys are. Is that like a train hitting each other, I mean it it seems like it’s pretty disruptive.
EM: Well this is a revolution and it might be the might be the biggest revolution in government since the original Revolution. But at the end of the day America is going to be in much better shape. America will be solvent, the critical programs that people depend upon will work and and it’s going to be a fantastic future. Are we going to get a lot of complaints along the way, absolutely. You know one of the things I learned at PayPal was this: who complains the loudest and with the most amount of fake righteous indignation, the fraudsters, that’s a tell. NGOs that are crazy like the the $2 billion the Stacy AB NGO that basically didn’t exist and suddenly gets $2 billion awarded from the federal government. Why? And there are many cases like that.
BB: I think that most people Common Sense wise would say the Fraud’s got to end. They’re concerned about the 94-year-old grandmother who misses a check or somehow doesn’t get what she’s supposed to get.
EM: Right and what we’re trying to say is actually that the 94-year-old grandmother as a result of Doge’s work is going to get her check. She’s not going to be robbed by fraud like she’s getting robbed today. And the solvency of the federal government will ensure that she continues to receive those Social Security checks. And that Medicare continues to work without which we’re all doomed. The reason we’re doing this is because unless we do it America’s going to go insolvent, we’re going to go bankrupt and nobody’s going to get anything.
BB: Why are you guys all doing it? I mean you can pipe up but it you don’t have to be here, right. I mean you don’t you don’t have to be doing this.
TK: I am blessed with four children, my wife and I, but we have a real fiscal crisis and and this is not sustainable. And what’s worse, for my children and everyone else’s children, we are burdening them with that debt and it’s only going to grow.
BB: There’s not a lot of hierarchy here. You guys are kind of all approaching it in different silos but with the same kind of goal right. This is really Silicon Valley private sector colliding with government.
SD: Yeah exactly we’re headed in a bad path but that the chance of success exists. And just in my head right now is a fairly mundane issue that is very illustrative, namely credit cards. There are in the federal government around 4.6 million credit cards for around 2.3 to 2.4 million employees. This doesn’t make sense. So all the teams have worked on this with the agencies and said: Do you need all of these credit cards; are they being used; can you tell us physically where they are.
BB: I hope they’re getting frequent flyer points.
SD: Actually on a different note the rewards program the federal government has is actually not very good but that’s a whole other negotiation story. But so far the teams have worked together and they’ve reduced it from 4.6 million to to 4.3 million so we’re taking it easy. But clearly there should not be more credit cards than there are people.
BB: Yeah Joe middle level employees, are they seeing a benefit to being empowered by taking out bureaucracy?
JG: I mean absolutely I mean I think what you’re seeing is taking the best of Silicon Valley in the business world and bringing it into the government. We’re bringing the best practices and the best methodologies and people are inspired, especially on the retirement process which I can speak to. They’ve been trying to modernize and get off of paper since early 2000s not very successfully. Every attempt has gone over budget and been cancelled because it was not successful.
And so I showed up and I feel like I’m here because it’s an interesting problem, we can use design to solve it and good engineering, and really create a better experience for everybody.
EM: We’re talking about elementary Financial controls that are necessary for any company to function. If a commercial company operated the way the federal government does, then it would immediately go bankrupt, it would be delisted, and the officers would be arrested. The changes we’re putting in place will enable the federal government to pass an audit. It will enable taxpayers to know where the money is going, and know that their hard-earned tax dollars are being spent well.
One way that the government is defrauded is because the computer systems don’t talk to each other. The fraud comes when someone exploits that Gap to take advantage. For example there were over $300 million of small business administration loans that have been given out to people under the age of 11. Well actually to add up, it’s 300 million under the age of 11, and over 300 million to over the age of 120. Definitely small business loans correct. Yet the oldest American is 114 years old. So it’s safe to say if their age is 115 or above they’re fake or they should be in the book of World Records. And we should not be giving out um loans to babies, yet the youngest recipient of a small business administration loan is a 9-month year old, which is a very precocious baby.
Obviously it was just fraudulent. They are doing terrible things. They actually will see that a kid’s been born, they will steal that kid’s social security number and then take out a loan and and leave that kid with a with a bad credit rating. Terrible Things are being done is what we’re saying and the reason this is happening is because the the two systems are not talking to each other.
AA: So you don’t know at the small business administration that you’re giving a loan to a 9-month-old, which happened in one case, because you’re not cross referencing that with the Social Security Administration data that has birth dates. That very very simple fix eliminates tremendous fraud. And there are multiple systems across the government where the systems are not speaking with one another. Just solving that simple problem would solve a huge amount of fraud.
EM: One of the the key tricks that the fraudsters pull is that they will use the fact that someone is marked as live. Since that social security number is marked as live in Social Security, they then can get disability and unemployment insurance benefits for a dead person because the databases don’t talk to each other. So the person is falsely marked alive in Social Security, so the fraudster can get benefits from a dead person. This is happening all the time at scale.
BB: We didn’t talk about any plans to approach cuts at the Pentagon, you’re in there.
EM: You know the Pentagon has not passed an audit in a very long time. Crazy as it sounds they will lose 20 $30 billion a year and they literally don’t know where it went. Senator Collins was telling me about how she gave the Navy $112 billion for extra submarines and got zero extra submarines. When she held a hearing and asked where did the 112 billion go, they didn’t know.
BB: Are you surprised at some of the legal efforts and some of the judges that have weighed in. There’s about eight or 10 now of these cases that are at least temporary holds and they’re being challenged by the DOJ. Are you surprised by that push back?
EM: Well the DC circuit is notorious for having a a very far-left bias and when you look at the people close to some of these judges, people who are working at these NGOS, they’re the ones getting this money. Does that seem like a system that lacks corruption?
BB: It sounds like corruption to me. Last thing do you guys all see this as a patriotic duty? Is that really what this is about?
TH: It’s essential I do 100%. I was running five businesses in Houston and I left that. I left great people to do this. And my wonderful wife said go for it and here I am. I feel like this is me giving back to the country. If we don’t do this we’re sunk. Unless this exercise is successful the ship of America will sink, that’s why we’re doing it.
BB: Well gentlemen I really appreciate the time today and hopefully it took some of the myth and mystery out of Doge and what’s happening behind the scenes. Thank you. We asked on X your platform for some for some questions and here is uh C. Sperling: Are they happy with the speed at which they’re making changes? Are there any changes they would like to make but haven’t yet?
EM: Well in the context of the government we’re moving like lightning. In the context of what I’m used to moving it’s slower than I’d like. So what seems like incredibly fast action by government standards is slower than I’d like, to be totally Frank. But what we are all making solid progress on a very sort of thorny problem, a tough problem really. It’s kind of like painful hard work to reconcile all of the government databases to eliminate the waste and fraud. These databases don’t talk to each other and that’s really the biggest vulnerability for fraud. Painful as it is, it has to be done and will greatly improve the efficiency of the government systems.
The supposed climate cataclysm consensus is disintegrating under growing pressure from reality. Green energy subsidies, regulations and mandates are crumbling. Greenpeace has been hit with a $667-million judgment for conspiracy, defamation, trespass, and fostering arson and property destruction.
Last year’s “Buy a Tesla – save the planet” placards have been exchanged for “mostly peaceful” protests based on “Torch a Tesla – save our democracy” and infernos of toxic pollution and “carbon” emissions.
Even higher anxiety is battering climate activists from the Lee Zeldin Environmental Protection Agency’s review of EPA’s 2009 “Endangerment Finding” (EF) – the foundation and justification for restrictive Obama and Biden Era standards and regulations on permissible electricity generation, automobiles, furnaces, home appliances and much more. Six Good Reasons to Overturn:
CO2 is the Essence of Life on Earth. Damning it as a Pollutant is absurd and ignorant.
Humans and animals exhale carbon dioxide when they breathe, combustion processes also emit CO2, and during photosynthesis plants absorb CO2 and emit oxygen. More atmospheric CO2 helps plants grow better, faster and with less water. Nearly all life on Earth depends on this process. It’s basic science.
That’s why the Clean Air Act doesn’t include carbon dioxide in its list of dangerous pollutants, along with carbon monoxide, lead, nitrogen dioxide, ground-level ozone, particulates and sulfur dioxide.
But fossil-fuel-hating activists blame CO2 for the alleged “climate crisis” – and in Massachusetts v. EPA the US Supreme Court said EPA could regulate CO2 emissions if the agency found that they “cause or contribute” to “air pollution” that may be “reasonably anticipated” to “endanger public health or welfare.”
The Obama EPA quickly determined that they did and issued an Endangerment Finding that gave the agency effective control over America’s energy, transportation, industries, furnaces and stoves– indeed, over almost every facet of our lives and living standards – to help “fundamentally transform” the nation.
In formulating its decision, EPA did no research of its own, relied heavily on GIGO computer models and outdated technical studies,dismissed the clear benefits of rising atmospheric CO2 levels, and ignored studies that didn’t support its decision. EPA even told one of its own experts (who had offered evidence and analyses contradicting official claims) that “the administration has decided to move forward [on implementing the EF] and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision.”
That alone is a compelling reason for reversing the Endangerment Finding. But other realities also argue convincingly that EPA’s 2009 action should be nullified.
EPA had no authority to convert plant-fertilizing, life-giving carbon dioxide into a dangerous, health-threatening pollutant.
First, Massachusetts v. EPA has been sidelined, rendered irrelevant or effectively reversed.
West Virginia v. EPA (2022) ruled that federal agencies may not violate the “major questions doctrine,” which holds that, in the absence of clear congressional direction or authorization, agencies may not make decisions or issue regulations “of vast economic and political significance.”
The Obama EPA had no clear congressional language or authorization to declare that carbon dioxide is a pollutant that would likely “endanger public health or welfare.” The Supreme Court’s minimal guidance in Massachusetts underscores the absence of congressional intent or direction. The process EPA used in rendering its predetermined finding demonstrates how little actual science played a role. And the enormous significance and impact of the EF decision and subsequent regulations can hardly be disputed.
Similarly, the SCOTUS 2024 ruling in Loper Bright v. Raimondo overturned the court’s 1984 decision in Chevron v. NRDC and ended judicial deference to government agencies (the “Chevron doctrine”). Bureaucrats may no longer devise “reasonable interpretations” of unclear statutory language if those interpretations would significantly expand regulatory powers or inflate private sector costs.
These two decisions mean EPA had no authority to convert plant-fertilizing, life-giving carbon dioxide into a dangerous, health-threatening pollutant.
Natural Climate Forces and CO2 Benefits Were Ignored by EPA 2009 Ruling
Second, reams of post-2009 studies and analyses show that CO2 is hugely beneficial to forests, grasslands and croplands – and that CO2 and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) have not replaced the powerful, complex, interconnected natural forces that have always driven global warming, climate change, ice ages, Little Ice Ages, and extreme weather events. EPA ignored this in 2009.
Others demonstrate that there is no climate crisis, nothing unprecedented in today’s climate and weather, and nothing modern industrialized societies cannot cope with far more easily than our ancestors did.
Human Lives are Sustained by Hydrocarbon Fuels and By-Products
Third, our energy, jobs, living standards, health, welfare, national security and much more depend on fossil fuels – for energy and for pharmaceuticals, plastics and thousands of other essential products that are manufactured using petrochemical feedstocks.
Developing Nations Need and Will Use More Hydrocarbons in Any Case
Fourth, China, India and other rapidly developing nations also depend on fossil fuels – and in fact are increasing their coal and petroleum use every year – to build their industries and economies and improve their people’s health and living standards. They are not about stop doing so to appease those who insist the world faces a climate crisis. That means even eliminating coal, oil, gas and petrochemical use in the United States would have no effect on global GHG emissions.
Primary Threat to Earth Future is Losing Reliable, Affordable Energy
Finally, the primary threats to human and planetary health and welfare come not from using fossil fuels – but from eliminating them, trying to switch to “clean, green, renewable” energy, and no longer having vital petrochemical products.
As Britain and Germany have shown, switching to intermittent, weather-dependent wind and solar energy with backup power raises electricity prices to 3-4 times what average Americans currently pay. Industries cannot compete internationally, millions lose their jobs, living expenses soar, and families cannot afford to heat their homes in winter or cool them in summertime.
Thousands die unnecessarily every year from heatstroke, hypothermia, and diseases they would survive if they weren’t so hot, cold or malnourished.
In poor countries, millions die annually from indoor pollution from wood and dung fires, from spoiled food due to lack of refrigeration, from contaminated drinking water due to the absence of sanitation and treated water, and from diseases that would be cured in modern healthcare systems.
The common factor in all these deaths is the absence of reliable,
affordable energy, largely imposed by climate-focused bureaucrats
who finance only wind and solar projects in poor nations.
Wind and solar power, electric vehicle and grid-backup batteries, and associated transmission lines require metals and minerals mining and processing on unprecedented scales, power-generation facilities blanketing millions of acres of croplands and wildlife habitats, and the disposal of gigantic equipment that breaks or wears out quickly and cannot be recycled.
Reliance on wind, solar and battery power also means blackouts amid heatwaves and cold spells, cars stalled in snowstorms and hurricane evacuations – and thus still more deaths.
A slightly warmer planet with more atmospheric CO2 would be greatly beneficial for plants, wildlife and humanity. A colder planet with less carbon dioxide would significantly reduce arable croplands, growing seasons, wildlife habitats and our ability to feed humanity.
EPA’s 2009 Endangerment Finding ignored virtually all these realities.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s reexamination of that decision
must not repeat that mistake.
A leaked government analysis has found that Net Zero could crash the economy, reducing GDP by a massive 10% by 2030. Yet the spectacular thing about this analysis is that it expects this to happen not if Net Zero fails—but if it succeeds. In effect, it is saying that if the government really does force us to give up petrol cars, gas boilers, foreign holidays, and beef, then there would be perfectly workable things left idle, such as cars, boilers, planes, and cows. Idling—or stranding—your assets in this way is an expensive economic disaster.
Even more intriguing was the government’s economically illiterate response to the leak. A spokesman said: “Net zero is the economic opportunity of the twenty-first century, and will deliver good jobs, economic growth and energy security as part of our Plan for Change.”
Do they really think that economic growth is the same thing
as spending money? Because it isn’t.
Imagine the government saying that it is going to require the entire population to throw out all their socks and buy new ones by next Thursday. Under the logic it espouses for Net Zero, this would result in a tremendous burst of economic growth. Think of all the jobs created in the sock industry and the shops! They would be better off. Ah, but you, the consumer, would be poorer. You would have as many socks as before but less money. This is the broken window fallacy, explained by Frédéric Bastiat nearly 200 years ago: going around breaking windows makes work for glaziers but does not create growth.
Net Zero is a project to replace an existing set of technologies with another set of technologies: power stations with wind farms, petrol cars with electric cars, gas boilers with heat pumps, plane trips in the sun with caravan trips in the rain, cows with lentils. The output from these technologies is intended to be the same: electricity, transport, holidays, food.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that these new technologies and activities require exactly as much money to build and run as the old ones. What have you gained? Less than nothing because you have retired existing devices early, losing the latter half of their lives. It would be like replacing all the socks in your drawers long before they needed replacing but with identical socks. Does that make you richer? No, poorer.
If the new technologies are more efficient than the old ones, fine. LED light bulbs use about 90% less electricity than incandescent bulbs did. So yes, it does make sense to throw out your old bulbs before they expire, stranding those assets, to save electricity and money. Is the same true of a wind farm or a heat pump? No, they are demonstrably more expensive and less reliable at producing the same electricity than the devices they are replacing. They are worse, not better.
That’s why they need subsidies. We have spent £100 billion so far subsidising “green” energy in the past few decades, money we could have spent on something else: tax cuts, for example. So, the green energy transition has made us poorer, not richer. It has given us the most expensive electricity in the entire developed world.
It has made some people richer, for sure. Dale Vince, an eco-tycoon, has made a fortune out of building unreliable energy. So have lots of fat cats in the City of London, lots of big landowners in the Highlands of Scotland, and lots of manufacturers in China. I have lost count of the number of times wealthy people have told me I am wrong to criticise the unreliable energy industry because “my son Torquil’s fund has done rather well.”
Net Zero crony capitalism is efficient at one thing:
transferring money from poor people to rich people.
This government has forgotten that its job is not to champion the interests of producers, but consumers. So did the last government, though Kemi Badenoch’s speech on Tuesday showed a welcome return to thinking about consumers. Electricity is not an end in itself; it is a means to an end, an essential input allowing us to do the one and only thing that does, really does, represent growth—achieving more output with less input.
Right now, the Net Zero transition is doing the very opposite.
The climate crisis narrative ignores real issues like
poor infrastructure and overpopulation, pushing costly policies
that hurt economies while failing to improve resilience.
According to theUnited Nations, “Climate change is a global emergency that goes beyond national borders.” From theWorld Economic Forum, “Urgent global action must be taken to reduce emissions and safeguard human health from the multi-pronged negative impacts of climate change globally.”
From every multinational institution in the world, we hear the same message. From the World Bank, “The world is battling a perfect storm of climate, conflict, economic, and nature crises.” From the World Health Organization, “Between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, and heat.”
A major problem with all this unanimity over this “emergency” is the fact that for at least half of all people living in Western nations in 2025, the UN, WEF, WHO, and World Bank have no credibility. We don’t want to “own nothing and be happy” as our middle class is crushed. We don’t want the only politically acceptable way to maintain national economic growth to rely on population replacement. And with only the slightest numeracy, we see apocalyptic proclamations as lacking substance.
Top Ten Causes of Death Globally 2021
For example, while 250,000 “additional deaths per year” is tragic, worldwide estimates of total deaths are not quite70 million per year.These “additional deaths” constitute a 0.36 percent increase over that baseline, just over one-third of one percent. Not even a rounding error.
Source NASA
Similarly, an alarmist prediction from NASA is that “Antarctica is losing ice mass (melting) at an average rate of about150 billion tons per year, and Greenland is losing about 270 billion tons per year, adding to sea level rise.” Let’s unpack that a bit. A billion tons is a gigaton, equivalent in volume to one cubic kilometer. So Antarctica is losing 150 cubic kilometers of ice per year. But Antarctica has an estimated total ice mass of 30 million cubic kilometers. Which means Antarctica is losing about one twenty-thousandth of one percent of its total ice mass per year. That is well below the accuracy of measurement. It is an estimate, and the conclusion it suggests is of no significance.
One may wonder about Greenland, with “only” 2.9 million cubic kilometers of ice, melting at an estimated rate of 270 gigatons per year. But that still yields a rate of loss of less than one one-hundredth of one percent per year, which is almost certainly below the ability to actually gauge total ice mass and total annual ice loss.
What about sea level rise? Here again, basic math yields underwhelming conclusions. The total surface area of the world’s oceans is 361 million square kilometers. If you spread 420 gigatons over that surface (Greenland and Antarctica’s melting combined), you get a sea level rise of not quite 1.2 millimeters per year. This is, again, so insignificant that it is below the threshold of our ability to measure.
These fundamental facts will turn anyone willing
to do even basic fact-checking into a cynic.
What’s really going on? We get at least a glimpse of truth from the above quotation from the World Bank, where they ascribe the challenges of humanity to several causes: “climate, conflict, economic, and nature crises.” There’s value in the distinctions they make. They list “nature crisis” as distinct from “climate,” and at least explicitly, “climate” is not cited as resulting from some anthropogenically generated trend of increasing temperatures and increasingly extreme weather. They just say “climate.”
Which brings us to the point: Conflict and economic crises are far bigger sources of human misery, and we face serious environmental challenges that have little to do with climate change and more to do with how we manage our industry, our wilderness, and our natural resources. And we are face “climate” challenges even when catastrophic climate events have nothing to do with any alleged “climate crisis.”
A perfect example of how the climate “crisis” narrative is falsely applied when, in fact, the climate-related catastrophe would have happened anyway is found in the disastrousfloods that devastated Pakistanin 2022. Despite the doomsday spin from PBS (etc.), these floods were not abnormal because of “climate change.” They were an abnormal catastrophe because in just 60 years, the population of that nation has grown from 45 million to 240 million people. They’vechannelized their rivers, built dense new settlementsonto what were once floodplains and other marginal land, they’ve denuded their forests, which took away the capacity to absorb runoff, and they’ve paved thousands of square miles, creating impervious surfaces where water can’t percolate. Of course, a big storm made a mess. The weather didn’t change. The nation changed.
The disaster story repeats everywhere. Contrary to the narrative, the primary cause is not “climate change.” Bigger tsunamis? Maybe it’s because coastalaquifers were overdrafted, which caused land subsidence, or because previously uninhabited tidelands were settled because the population quintupled in less than two generations, and because coastal mangrove forests were destroyed, which used to attenuate big waves. What about deforestation? Perhaps because these nations have been denied the ability to develop natural gas and hydroelectric power, they’re stripping away the forests for fuel to cook their food. In some cases, they’re burning their forests to make room for biofuel plantations, in a towering display of irony and corruption.
In California, our nation’s epicenter of climate crisis fearmongering and the subsequent commercial opportunism, the emphasis on crisis instead of resilience has led to absurd policies. Instead of bringing back the timber industry to thin the state’s overgrown forests, the governor mandates exclusive sales of EVs by 2035. Instead of responsibly drilling oil in California’s ample reserves of crude, California imports 75 percent of its oil, and its economy still relies on oil for half the energy that the state consumes.
Worldwide, these mistakes multiply. Biofuel plantations consume half a million square miles in order to replace a mere two percent of transportation fuel. A mad scramble across every continent to increase mining by an order of magnitude to meet the demand for raw materials to manufacture batteries, wind turbines, and solar panels. Denial of funds for natural gas development in Africa, condemning over a billion people to ongoing energy poverty.
Simple truths are obscured by the climate crisis narrative. We need to rebuild our infrastructure for climate resilience because much of it is over a century old, at the same time as the US population has tripled. Floods and hurricanes cause more damage because there are more people, and more of them live in areas that have always been hit by floods and hurricanes.
The truths are as endless as they are repressed. We can’t possibly lift all of humanity into a middle-class lifestyle without at least doubling energy production worldwide, and we can’t possibly accomplish that while also reducing our use of coal, oil, and gas. Renewables aren’t renewable (here’s a must-read on that topic). Offshore wind is an environmental disaster, as is biofuel, as is the explosion of totally unregulated mining to feed the renewables industry. On the other hand, extreme environmental laws and regulations are harming economic growth, freedom, and, in no small irony, the innovation and investment that would give us the wealth we need to better protect the environment. And the prevailing economic, environmental, and cultural challenge in the world is not the climate but crashing birthrates among developing nations at the same time as the population of the world’s most undeveloped nations continues to explode exponentially.
We need climate resilience in order to properly protect a global population that has quadrupled to 8 billion in just the last century, spreading to every corner of the earth. That goal would be easier if once-trusted global institutions would allow for honest debate and practical infrastructure development. Instead, they continue to spew transparently misleading climate crisis propaganda, adhering to a mission that can only be described as repressive on all fronts—culturally, economically, and environmentally.
A tattered Canadian flag is shown on top of a building in downtown Calgary on Friday, Jan. 17, 2025 where the U.S. Consulate is located. Photo by Jim Wells/Postmedia
Sunday’s edition of the Financial Times included the oft-made observation that Canada is brimming with potential, and the oft-made conclusion that this country would be much better off if it simply developed its God-given gifts.
The article, Unlocking Canada’s Superpower Potential by Tej Parikh, made the bullish case for this country’s future prospects: Canada is geographically huge and loaded with natural resources — on paper, at least, it has the makings of an actual global superpower.
“‘Canada absolutely has potential to be a global superpower,’ but the nation has lacked the visionary leadership and policy framework to capitalise on its advantages.”
It was, with gentle vagueness, a condemnation of the federal Liberal government and what is now being called Canada’s “lost decade”: a period of 10 years in which the current government ratcheted up onerous environmental and Indigenous-consultation requirements and, where ministerial approvals are concerned, delayed decisions, all geared at keeping undeveloped parts of Canada in their natural state.
Terms like “circular economy” and “just transition” are the Liberal synonyms for this no-growth agenda, which has delivered us a fraction of a percentage of GDP growth per capita from 2014 to the end of 2024 — a time period in which peer countries have managed double-digits.
For anyone who missed out on all the bad governance robbing Canadians of superpower prosperity, this brief video exposes the crimes against the citizenry. For those who prefer reading, I provide below a transcript from the closed captions.
Transcript
This is Alberta the fourth largest Province and home to about 4.6 million people. It ranks third in GDP just behind Quebec and first in GDP per capita primarily off the back of oil and gas extraction. While its discovery in the first half of the 20th century has brought Canada riches, for reasons from political to economic it never reached its full potential as an energy superpower, and Canadians as a whole lose out. We’ll be diving into how its energy policies have evolved and the path it is on whether for natural gas, nuclear, hydrogen and more.
Canada has the third largest proven oil reserves and by most estimates in the top 20 in terms of natural gas reserves. It is a top 10 producer of oil and gas, meaning it is engaged in extracting processing and supplying of these resources for domestic production.
Natural Gas
For natural gas exports it is in the top six,all of which goes to the US via pipelines. To export across water requires Investments to build liquid natural gas or LNG facilities to cool the gas into a liquid state in a process called liquefaction. In 2024 the the first export terminal will finally be completed in Kitimat BC called LNG Canada with gas coming through the coastal gas tank pipeline set to complete after 5 years of construction and a price tag that jumped from 6.6 billion to 14.5 billion.
But don’t expect other facilities to be constructed anytime soon. On February 9th 2022, 2 weeks before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the federal and Quebec governments rejected approval of an LNG plant in Saguenay that would have allowed for the export of Western Natural Gas to European markets.
They cited increased greenhouse gas emissions
and lack of social responsibility.
While most of the natural gas is located in Northern Alberta and BC in the Montney formation, there is also gas in the Atlantic provinces. However New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Nova Scotia have all banned the process of fracking used for shale gas development over safety fears, thereby losing out on tens of billions of economic potential. Ironically the same provinces import a lot of natural gas extracted from the US through the process of fracking,Quebec also has natural gas resources but in April 2022 banned all oil and gas extraction in the province.
This means not only are pipelines from western Canada rejected from going through Quebec, natural gas extraction and export facilities in these provinces have been rejected as well. The demand if not met by Canada will be filled by other countries that might not share the same values nor care about the environment, with the jobs, millions in royalties and taxes going elsewhere. Since 2011, of the 18 proposed LG export projects including five on the East Coast. only the Kitimat project has proceeded with the others being cancelled, blocked or abandoned.
While the US in the same time frame has built seven LG facilities, five more under construction and approved 15, enabling them to go from a net importer to a top three exporter in the world. Australia has 10 LG facilities with the majority built in the 2010s helping to satisfy energy demand from Asian countries and to help them move away from coal. Qatar too has benefited greatly from extracting its resources as European countries look for alternatives to Russian gas.
These three countries have all signed decades-long deals to supply natural gas. Yet when Japan, South Korea, and Germany showed interest in Canadian LG, the Prime Minister said, “There has never been a strong business case.” While critics point out that natural gas is a fossil fuel contributing to greenhouse gas emissions, it emits 40% less than coal and 30% less than oil.
Nuclear Energy
We can’t talk about energy policy without mentioning nuclear, because it does not emit greenhouse gases while being a reliable source of energy, not dependent on the wind blowing or the sun shining. Currently nuclear supplies 58% of Ontario’s electricity needs and 15% Nationwide with all but one of the 19 nuclear reactors. The one located outside of Ontario is in New Brunswick. No new reactors have been completed since 1993. Meanwhile coal is still used to generate 6% of Canada’s electricity needs despite the country having the third largest uranium reserves, the fuel needed for reactors.
But on September 19th 2023, Canada did reach a $3 billion deal to finance nuclear power . . .in Romania. In fairness this deal does support the export of made in Canada Candu style reactors. An industry in which historically Canada has been a leader. Any discussion should include nuclear, as one of the trends in the nuclear industry is small modular reactors or SMRs which should be easier to manufacture and transport enabling its use in remote regions.
Hydrogen
Another Trend that the federal government has prioritized in the 2023 budget relates to hydrogen. 16.4 billion has been allocated over 5 years for “clean” Technologies and “clean” hydrogen tax credits, which are subsidies for costs in setting up equipment to produce green hydrogen. When the German Chancellor Olaf Schultz arrived in Canada in August 2022 asking for LNG, Canada instead offered green hydrogen created by wind turbines generating electricity to perform electrolysis by splitting water to produce hydrogen. It is both inefficient and expensive to produce green hydrogen meaning there is little business case for it without subsidies, since more than 99% of hydrogen is currently produced using fossil fuel. While green hydrogen will likely play a role in industrial processes, such as replacing coal used in steel production or creating ammonia in fertilizer production, its role in transportation is likely negligible. Furthermore using hydroelectricity, nuclear or natural gas to create hydrogen plays into Canada’s strengths in a way that solar or wind does not, as we’ll see shortly.
Solar and Wind
A big part of Canada’s net zero emissions by 2050 plan involves solar and wind energy, yet one of the biggest beneficiaries of that shift would be China given its dominance in the Clean Energy Solution space, whether solar panels, wind turbines or EVS. From the mineral extraction to the processing, refining and Manufacturing, there is much demand for critical minerals like copper cobalt nickel lithium and Rare Earth elements chromium zinc and aluminum. China owns stakes in many mines around the world including Canadian ones extracting these minerals to control the supply chain. According to 2022 data from the International Energy Agency, their share of refining is 35% for nickel, 60% for lithium, 70% for Cobalt and a whopping 90% for Rare Earth.
This dependence on one country means the power to squeeze Supply or raise prices at any moment, which is a big reason why on August 16th 2022 the Biden Administration signed the ironically named Inflation Reduction Act which provides 369 billion of funding for clean energy projects. The intention is to not only reshore to the US but also Near shore or Friend shore to allies like Canada, Whether in mining of critical minerals to manufacturing.
Canada acted decisively a few months later in the same year to force
three Chinese companies to sell their stakes in Canadian mining companies
. . . Oh wait just kidding.
In all seriousness the country and especially Quebec can play a role in the supply chain so long as projects can be approved in a timely manner which really is the underlying theme of this video. Having these minerals also incentivizes battery and auto manufacturing companies to invest in factories, helped massively by subsidies of course. 13 billion over 10 years is what took Volkswagen to commit to a battery plant in Southern Ontario. Likewise 15 billion in subsidies was committed for a Stellantis LG battery plant in Windsor and other projects like this. That’s a lot of money with these two subsidy awardsnot expected to break even for 20 years according to the Parliamentary budget office. And that’s if these Legacy auto companies like Stellantis and Volkswagen will be relevant by that time.
That’s the kind of energy policy decisions made in Canada in recent times,
and why we haven’t leveraged our natural resources into Superpower.
Mark Carney’s Climate Obsession Worse than Trudeau’s
The future of Canada’s badly governed energy sector is further threatened by replacing Trudeau with Carney. Terry Newman explains in his National Post article Mark Carney’s climate obsessions will put Trudeau to shame. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Don’t trust his pledge to turn Canada into an energy superpower
For all of Carney’s supposed superior knowledge of the world and markets, the art of provincial negotiations and incentives for private investment in natural resources appears to have already escaped his grasp. There’s evidence to suggest this is because, at heart, Carney is likely to be a fully fledged ESG prime minister (ESG being short for environmental, social, and governance principles being imposed on business).Unfortunately, everything Carney’s said and done up until this point suggestsnot only that he’d fail to unite Canadian provinces to create this energy super-economy, but that’s he’s not actually interested in doing so in the first place.The Liberal party may have a new face, but Carney’s insistence on keeping an emissions cap and industrial carbon tax in place — both products of Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government — doesn’t invoke much confidence in his energy superpower plan.
Since the Liberals came to power in 2015, they implemented the Impact Assessment Act, which slowed approvals, the federal industrial carbon pricing system (2018) and the oil and gas emissions cap (slated for 2026) — all with the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the oil and gas sector to net zero by 2050.
Since 2015, many projects have been stalled or cancelled, including theNorthern Gateway Pipeline (cancelled by government in 2016, citing a federal ban on tanker traffic and Indigenous opposition); theEnergy East Pipeline(cancelled by the company in 2017, citing regulatory hurdles and low oil prices);Pacific NorthWest LNG(cancelled in 2017 due to market conditions and regulatory delays); theMacKenzie Valley Pipeline (cancelled in 2017 due to low gas prices and regulatory uncertainty);Énergie Saguenay LNG (cancelled in 2021, rejected by Quebec government over emissions concerns, not challenged by the federal government);Bay du Nord Offshore Oil (shelved in 2022, citing high costs and regulatory uncertainty); Teck Frontier Mine(cancelled in 2020, amid climate policy debates); and the Keystone XL Pipeline(cancelled 2021, due to failure to secure a U.S. permit and Canadian regulatory costs).
The only thing that’s changed about the Liberal party is the addition of Carney, and his record suggests that he will be driven by climate policy, at least as much as the Liberals have been, and potentially much more so. He was, not so long ago, the United Nations’ special envoy on climate action and finance and he founded and co-chaired the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), resigning on Jan. 15, the day before he threw his hat into the Liberal leadership race.
These roadblocks long predate Carney’s ascension, and he has yet to explain how the Liberal government suddenly has either the ability or desire to address them.
Where’s the evidence Carney will be less stringent on energy projects and, therefore, better for the Canadian economy than his predecessor? If anything, especially given his longstanding ESG obsessions, all evidence appears to point to the contrary — that Mark Carney could be even more dedicated to strangling Canada’s resource economy than Trudeau.
Like all inventions there are weaknesses along with the claimed benefits. Here’s a short list of the things that can go wrong with these new gadgets. The concerns below are listed along with some others in a paper Understanding the Weaknesses of Machine Learning: Challenges and Limitations by Oyo Jude. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.
Introduction
Machine learning (ML) has become a cornerstone of modern technological advancements, driving innovations in areas such as healthcare, finance, and autonomous systems. Despite its transformative potential, ML is not without its flaws. Understanding these weaknesses is crucial for developing more robust and reliable systems. This article delves into the various challenges and limitations faced by ML technologies, providing insights into areas where improvements are needed
Data Quality and Bias
Data Dependency
Machine learning models are highly dependent on the quality and quantity of data used for training. The performance of an ML model is only as good as the data it is trained on. Common issues related to data quality include:
Incomplete Data: Missing or incomplete data can lead to inaccurate models and predictions. Incomplete datasets may not represent the full spectrum of possible inputs, leading to biased or skewed outcomes. Noisy Data: Noise in data refers to irrelevant or random information that can obscure the underlying patterns the model is supposed to learn. Noisy data can reduce the accuracy of ML models and complicate the learning process.
Data Bias
Bias in data can significantly impact the fairness and accuracy of ML systems. Key forms of data bias include:
Selection Bias: Occurs when the data collected is not representative of the target population. For example, if a model is trained on data from a specific demographic group, it may not perform well for individuals outside that group. Label Bias: Arises when the labels or categories used in supervised learning are subjective or inconsistent. Label bias can skew the model’s understanding and lead to erroneous predictions.
Model Interpretability and Transparency
Complexity of Models
Many advanced ML models, such as deep neural networks, are often described as “black boxes” due to their complexity. The lack of transparency in these models presents several challenges:
Understanding Model Decisions: It can be difficult to understand how a model arrived at a specific decision or prediction, making it challenging to diagnose errors or biases in the system. Trust and Accountability: The inability to interpret model decisions can undermine trust in ML systems, particularly in high-stakes applications such as healthcare or criminal justice. Ensuring accountability and fairness becomes challenging when the decision-making process is opaque. Explainability: Efforts to improve model interpretability focus on developing techniques and tools to make complex models more understandable. Techniques such as feature importance analysis, surrogate models, and visualization tools aim to provide insights into model behavior and decisions. However, achieving a balance between model performance and interpretability remains an ongoing challenge.
Generalization and Overfitting
Overfitting
Overfitting occurs when a model learns not only the underlying patterns in the training data but also the noise, resulting in poor performance on new, unseen data. This issue can be particularly problematic with complex models and limited data. Strategies to mitigate overfitting include:
Cross-Validation: Using techniques like k-fold cross-validation helps assess model performance on different subsets of the data, reducing the risk of overfitting. Regularization: Regularization methods, such as L1 and L2 regularization, add penalties to the model’s complexity to prevent it from fitting noise in the training data.
Generalization
Generalization refers to a model’s ability to perform well on unseen data that was not part of the training set. Achieving good generalization is crucial for the practical application of ML models. Challenges related to generalization include:
Domain Shift: When the distribution of the data changes over time or across different domains, a model trained on one dataset may not generalize well to new data. Addressing domain shift requires continuous monitoring and updating of models. Data Scarcity: In scenarios where limited data is available, models may struggle to generalize effectively. Techniques such as data augmentation and transfer learning can help address data scarcity issues.
Comment:
Many similar issues have been raised against climate models, undermining claims their outputs are valid projections of future climate states. For example, the issue of detailed and reliable data persists. It appears that even the AI/ML weather forecasting inventions are dependent on ERA5, which has a record of only ~40 years to use for training purposes. I’m suspending belief in these things for now–new improved black boxes sound too much like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
Disney’s portrayal of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in over his head.
Mark P. Mills and Neil Atkinson blow the whistle on projections written in International Energy Agency’s (IEA) latest report, the World Energy Outlook. Below is the announcement of the report findings, key exhibits and Executive summary, excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images. Link to full study at the end.
Overview
Industry players consider the International Energy Agency’s signature annual report, the World Energy Outlook, to contain highly credible analyses. However, a new critique from the National Center of Energy Analytics experts finds the IEA’s latest scenarios on future oil demand to be problematic and potentially, dangerously wrong.
“When it comes to policy or investment planning, there is a distinction with a critical difference when it comes to what constitutes a “forecast” (what is likely to happen) versus a “scenario” (a possibility based on assumptions). The challenge is not in determining whether the scenarios are completely factual per se, but instead whether they are factually complete,” wrote the authors in their report.
The most widely reported WEO scenario is that the world will see peak oil demand by the early 2030s. NCEA co-authors Mark P. Mills and Neil Atkinson believe that this conclusion is a prima facie case; minimally, the IEA should include business as usual (BAU) scenarios, not those based on all “high cases” or unrealistic possibilities.
Mills and Atkinson pinpoint 23 flawed assumptions used in the WEO scenarios to predict future oil demand, including:
IEA assumes: Corporate transition policies are real and durable. NCEA counterclaim: Myriad corporations, having earlier proclaimed fealty to “energy-transition” goals, are either failing to meet such pledges or overtly rescinding them.
IEA assumes: Transition financing will continue to expand. NCEA counterclaim: Alternative energy projects have become more expensive and difficult to finance, and wealthy nations are increasingly reluctant to gift huge amounts of money to the faster-growing but poorer nations, many of which have governance issues.
IEA assumes: China’s actions will follow its pledges. NCEA counterclaim: The scale of China’s role in present and future energy and oil markets requires scenarios that model what China is doing—and will likely do—rather than what China claims or promises.
National Energy Transition Plans
IEA’s assumes: The oil growth in emerging markets will be low. NCEA counterclaim: The fact of low demand in some poorer regions—e.g., Africa uses roughly one-tenth the per-capita level in OECD countries—points to the potential for very high, not low, growth in those markets.
IEA’s assumption: Governments will stay the course on EV mandates. NCEA’s counterclaim: Recent trends in many countries and U.S. states show policymakers weakening or reducing mandates and subsidies.
Flawed Assumptions Lead to Flawed Conclusions
Listed below is a summary of the flaws in 23 (but far from all) of the assumptions used in the WEO scenarios that are relevant to guessing future oil demand. Meaningful scenarios for planning for future uncertainties should include a range of realistic inputs, not just those that are aspirational.
Assumptions about baseline factors that affect oil forecasts
Assumption: STEPS is a useful baseline.
Flaw: The baseline scenario, rather than “business as usual,” assumes a future based on countries’ StatedPolicies Scenario (STEPS), which not one country is implementing in full.
Corporate transition policies are real and durable.
Flaw: Myriad corporations, having earlier proclaimed fealty to “energy-transition” goals, are either failing to meet such pledges or overtly rescinding them.
Higher economic growth is unlikely.
Flaw: Ignoring the possibility of higher economic growth, based on historical trends and the goals of all nations, leads to scenarios that underestimate future oil demand.
Transition financing will continue to expand.
Flaw: Alternative energy projects have become more expensive and difficult to finance, and wealthy nations are increasingly reluctant to gift huge amounts of money to the faster-growing but poorer nations, many of which have governance issues.
Efficiency gains and structural changes will lower global demand for energy.
Flaw: Long-run trends show that energy-efficiency gains make energy-centric products and services more affordable and thus do not reduce, but instead generally stimulate, rising demand.
Solar and wind power are 100% efficient.
Flaw: The WEO 2024 assertion that “most renewables are considered 100% efficient” contradicts fundamental physics and is, arguably, a silly PR-centric rhetorical flourish.
China’s actions will follow its pledges.
Flaw: The scale of China’s role in present and future energy and oil markets requires scenarios that model what China is doing—and will likely do, in fact—rather than what China claims or promises.
Assumptions regarding oil’s future
The oil growth in emerging markets will be low.
Flaw: The fact of low demand in some poorer regions—e.g., Africa uses roughly one-tenth the per-capita level in OECD countries—points to the potential for very high, not low, growth in those markets.
The EV market share will accelerate.
Flaw: Slowing market adoption and retrenchments in automakers’ EV plans or promises are evident, calling for scenarios that model realities that could persist.
Governments will stay the course on EV mandates.
Flaw: Recent trends in many countries and U.S. states show policymakers weakening or reducing mandates and subsidies.
China’s EV “success story” leads quickly to lower oil demand.
Flaw: Data point to the fact that in the real world, EV sales and gasoline consumption are both rising.
Assumptions about other transportation markets
There will be significant electrification of heavy-duty trucks.
Flaw: There is no evidence of market adoption for any fuel option that leads to far higher capital costs and enormous degradation in performance.
There will be significant electrification and fuel alternatives in aviation.
Flaw: There are no trends showing non-oil options for even a tiny share of the aviation market, in an industry that forecasts booming demand.
There will be significant electrification and fuel alternatives for ships.
Flaw: The only modestly significant change in oil used for global shipping comes from the use of liquefied natural gas, another (and generally more expensive) hydrocarbon.
There will be a rapid decline in oil used for Middle East power generation.
Flaw: Despite pledges and pronouncements, the year 2024 saw continued, and even higher, use of oil for electricity generation.
The growth in petrochemicals and plastics will be slow.
Flaw: Slower growth is anchored in recycling enthusiasms that markets are not adopting and expectations of new recycling technologies that remain expensive or unproved.
All scenarios lead to peak oil demand by ~2030.
Flaw: A WEO core conclusion that “combing all the high cases” leads to “global peaks for oil” by ~2030 is, prima facie, not based on all “high cases” but on unrealistic scenarios.
Assumptions regarding associated industries
The supply of critical minerals will meet transition goals.
Flaw: Myriad studies have now documented the fact of a looming shortfall in current and expected production and of the challenges in changing that status quo.
Prices of critical minerals will be low.
Flaw: It is fanciful in the annals of economic history to imagine that record-high demands won’t lead to far higher prices for the critical minerals needed to build EVs (as well as for wind and solar hardware).
China won’t exercise minerals dominance as an economic or a geopolitical tool.
Flaw: China has already signaled over the past year that it is willing and able to implement export controls, or pricing power on critical minerals, where it holds significant global share.
Oil and gas annual investments are adequate to avoid economic disruptions.
Flaw: Current levels of investment are not adequate to meet demands under business-as-usual scenarios, especially when combined with likely decline rates of extant oil fields.
The future decline rate from existing oil fields will continue historical trends.
Flaw: The much faster decline rate in output from now-significant U.S. shale fields has altered the global average decline rate, pointing to the need for increasing investments to avoid a shortfall.
OPEC will be a reliable cushion to manage oil-supply disruptions.
Flaw: History suggests that scenarios should include alternative possibilities to relying on OPEC to provide a cushion for meeting unexpected shortfalls in production or increases in demand.
Executive Summary: Flawed Assumptions Lead to Dangerous “Forecasts”
For decades, the International Energy Agency (IEA) was the world’s gold standard for energy information and credible analyses. Following the commitment of its member governments to the 2015 Paris Agreement climate accords, the agency radically changed its mission to become a promoter of an energy transition. In 2022, the IEA’s governing board reinforced its mission to “guide countries as they build net-zero emission energy systems to comply with internationally agreed climate goals.”
The IEA’s current preoccupation with promoting an energy transition has resulted in its signature annual report, the World Energy Outlook (WEO), offering policymakers a view of future possibilities that are, at best, distorted and, at worst, dangerously wrong.
The 2024 WEO’s central conclusion, its core “outlook,” has been widely reported as a credible forecast, i.e., something likely to happen: “[T]he continued progress of transitions means that, by the end of the decade, the global economy can continue to grow without using additional amounts of oil, natural gas or coal.”
The WEO itself states that it doesn’t forecast but has scenarios—explorations or models of possibilities, and cautions: “Our scenario analysis is designed to inform decision makers as they consider options…. [N]one of the scenarios should be viewed as a forecast.” Scenarios that usefully “inform” need to be based on realistic possibilities and assumptions. But there is one foundational assumption—one that the IEA has for decades included in its scenarios and that has been banished from the WEO: the possibility of business as usual (BAU).
Instead, the WEO’s baseline scenario now assumes that nations are undertaking their specific energy-transition plans that they promised in order to comply with the 2015 Paris Agreement, i.e., “stated policies scenario” (STEPS). Yet none of the signatories to that Agreement is fully meeting its promises, and most are a long way behind schedule. Believing something that is not true is not just problematic; it meets the definition of a delusion.
It is fanciful to forecast that, over the next half-dozen years, the growth in the world’s population and economy won’t continue a two-century-long trend and lead to increased use of the fossil fuels that today supply over 80% of all energy, only slightly below the share seen 50 years ago. The data show that the global energy system is operating essentially along BAU lines and not only far off the STEPS, but even further away from the more aggressive transition aspirations that the WEO also models.
In this analysis, we focus on highlighting 23 problematic, flawed assumptions that are relevant specifically to the WEO’s oil scenarios and the widely reported “forecast” that the world will see peak oil demand by the early 2030s (see box on pp. 4-5, Flawed Assumptions Lead to Flawed Conclusions). While other scenarios about other energy sources are critical as well, oil remains a geopolitical touchstone and the single biggest source of global energy—10-fold greater than wind and solar combined. At the very least, this analysis points to the need for real-world scenarios in general and, in the case of oil, the much higher probability that demand continues to grow in the foreseeable future and, possibly, quite significantly (below, see Global Oil Demand: Future Scenarios).
Debating the intricacies in flawed assumptions about energy scenarios is no mere theoretical exercise. The IEA’s legacy reputation continues to influence not only trillions of dollars in investment decisions but also government policies with far-reaching geopolitical consequences.
Outsourcing your malicious behavior is no longer
a get-out-of-consequences-free card
This should be especially bad news for any of the dark-money groups that have quietly been ramping up violence against politically expedient targets — say, Tesla, for example.
What could a North Dakota jury judgment handed down against Greenpeace over a pipeline have to do with dark money politics-for-hire across the country? Quite a lot, actually.
At issue were the pipeline protests in North Dakota like the one where environmental activists cared so DAMNED much about the land that it took a state of emergency and the Army Corps of Engineers to avert an environmental catastrophe:
“Warm temperatures have accelerated snowmelt in the area of the Oceti Sakowin protest camp … Due to these conditions, the governor’s emergency order addresses safety concerns to human life as anyone in the floodplain is at risk for possible injury or death,” said the statement.
However, “the order also addresses the need to protect the Missouri River from the waste that will flow into the Cannonball River and Lake Oahe if the camp is not cleared and the cleanup expedited,” the statement read.
…Just how much waste and trash did the environmentally conscious DAPL protesters leave? “Local and federal officials estimate there’s enough trash and debris in the camp to fill about 2,500 pickup trucks,” reported AP.
Not surprisingly, months-long protests are chosen because they can cause both damage and harm, depending on the group, the tactics, and their intent.
The owner and operator of the pipeline, who lost an enormous contract as a result of their actions, took the protesters to court. They suffered serious financial harm and those who caused it should bear the responsibility for making them whole. Modern notions of protest notwithstanding, that’s how the court system was designed.
When they took to court Greenpeace and the Red Warrior Camp
(who the plaintiff claimed was their proxy)
on exactly this principle, the jury agreed.
After two days of deliberation, the New York Times reported, the jury returned the verdict. Energy Transfer, the owner and operator of the pipeline, filed the lawsuit in North Dakota state court against Greenpeace and Red Warrior Camp, which Energy Transfer claimed was a front for Greenpeace, and three individuals.
The lawsuit alleges that Greenpeace had engaged in a misinformation campaign with mass emails falsely claiming that the Dakota Access Pipeline would cross the sovereign land of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. In court filings, Energy Transfer claimed protesters engaged in a campaign of “militant direct action,” including trespassing on the company’s property, vandalizing construction equipment, and assaulting employees and contractors. —JustTheNews
This comes at a very bad time for violent leftwing activists. For years, the establishment left has been somewhere between indifferent to, or even happy to seeviolence on the streets, so long as that violence aligns with causes on the political left.
You never hear the kind of breathless language the establishment left uses when describing, for example ‘the Proud Boys’ when they describe, say, Antifa, BLM, Jayne’s Revenge (violent abortion activists), Palestinian Protesters, trans extremists, or (now) anti-Tesla crowds embracing forms of violence ranging from rioting on the streets, storming a building and threatening a young woman inside it, holding universities hostage, or vandalizing/firebombing Christian pro-life institutions, threatening churches, or most recently attacking anyone or anything with a Tesla connection.
The one thing so many of these movements including the current organized attacks against Tesla — have in common is copious amounts of financial backing. Efforts like what we have seen in DOGE, not to mention an FBI interested in prosecuting such crimes instead of helping them raise bail money — will be a game-changer on the investigation side of this problem.
AG Bondi, and those working with her have made it clear that investigating these fire bombings (and the SWAT-ings) will be treating the use of incendiary devices under statutes listing such actions as a federal crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
If the logic of this Greenpeace case is extended to culpability of the Dark Money orgs who have been using third-party agitator groups as arm’s-length shock troops for hire that give them a plausible deniability…
… this North Dakota ruling may set a precedent that says otherwise. One that other groups who have been harmed by political activism over the last number of years might play ‘follow the money’ with in seeking the redress of their harms.
Elon seems to think the breadcrumbs for a lot of the dark money issues will take us back to familiar names like ‘Act Blue’ or ‘Arabella Advisors’. If the early clues at DOGE, and the mayhem unfolding at Act Blue are any indicator, he could be on to something there.
It would take some imaginative thinking to come up with deterrents to a purely mercenary cause-of-the-day agitator group than the twin prongs of drying up the money supply and dropping the perpetrators in a hole where they can be completely forgotten about by society for a decade or two.
And if the feds draw the same inference with criminal culpability
that the jury in North Dakota just did?
Those media establishment types who were publicly giddy about Biden’s use of RICO statutes to take down Trump will soon be choking on their words and looking to bury records of their public statements cheering the Trump team prosecutions.
A plethora of insane energy policy proposals are touted by clueless politicians, including the recent Democrat candidate for US President. So all talking heads need reminding of some basics of immutable energy physics. This post is in service of restoring understanding of fundamentals that cannot be waved away.
The Key to Energy IQ
This brief video provides a key concept in order to think rationally about calls to change society’s energy platform. Below is a transcript from the closed captions along with some of the video images and others added.
We know what the future of American energy will look like. Solar panels, drawing limitless energy from the sun. Wind turbines harnessing the bounty of nature to power our homes and businesses. A nation effortlessly meeting all of its energy needs with minimal impact on the environment. We have the motivation, we have the technology. There’s only one problem: the physics.The history of America is, in many ways, the history of energy. The steam power that revolutionized travel and the shipping of goods. The coal that fueled the railroads and the industrial revolution. The petroleum that helped birth the age of the automobile. And now, if we only have the will, a new era of renewable energy.Except … it’s a little more complicated than that. It’s not really a matter of will, at least not primarily. There are powerful scientific and economic constraints on where we get our power from. An energy source has to be reliable; you have to know that the lights will go on when you flip the switch. An energy source needs to be affordable–because when energy is expensive…everything else gets more expensive too. And, if you want something to be society’s dominant energy source, it needs to be scalable, able to provide enough power for a whole nation.Those are all incredibly important considerations, which is one of the reasons it’s so weird that one of the most important concepts we have for judging them … is a thing that most people have never heard of. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the exciting world of…power density.Look, no one said scientists were gonna be great at branding. Put simply, power density is just how much stuff it takes to get your energy; how much land or other physical resources. And we measure it by how many watts you can get per square meter, or liter, or kilogram – which, if you’re like us…probably means nothing to you.So let’s put this in tangible terms. Just about the worst energy source America has by the standards of power density are biofuels, things like corn-based ethanol. Biofuels only provide less than 3% of America’s energy needs–and yet, because of the amount of corn that has to be grown to produce it … they require more land than every other energy source in the country combined. Lots of resources going in, not much energy coming out–which means they’re never going to be able to be a serious fuel source.Now, that’s an extreme example, but once you start to see the world in these terms, you start to realize why our choice of energy sources isn’t arbitrary.Coal, for example, is still America’s second largest source of electricity, despite the fact that it’s the dirtiest and most carbon-intensive way to produce it. Why do we still use so much of it? Well, because it’s significantly more affordable…in part because it’s way less resource-intensive.An energy source like offshore wind, for example, is so dependent on materials like copper and zinc that it would require six times as many mineral resources to produce the same amount of power as coal. And by the way, getting all those minerals out of the ground…itself requires lots and lots of energy.Now, the good news is that America has actually been cutting way down on its use of coal in recent years, thanks largely to technological breakthroughs that brought us cheap natural gas as a replacement. And because natural gas emits way less carbon than coal, that reduced our carbon emissions from electricity generation by more than 30%.In fact, the government reports that switching over to natural gas did more than twice as much to cut carbon emissions as renewables did in recent years. Why did natural gas progress so much faster than renewables? It wasn’t an accident.Energy is a little like money: You have to spend it to make it. To get usable natural gas, for example, you’ve first got to drill a well, process and transport the gas, build a power plant, and generate the electricity. But the question is how much energy are you getting back for your investment? With natural gas, you get about 30 times as much power out of the system as you put into creating it. By contrast, with something like solar power, you only get about 3 1/2 times as much power back.
Replacing the now closed Indian Point nuclear power plant would require covering all of Albany County NY with wind mills.
Hard to fuel an entire country that way. And everywhere you look, you see similarly eye-popping numbers. To replace the energy produced by just one oil well in the Permian Basin of Texas–and there are thousands of those–you’d need to build 10 windmills, each about 330 feet high. To meet just 10% of the country’s electricity needs, you’d have to build a wind farm the size of the state of New Hampshire. To get the same amount of power produced by one typical nuclear reactor, you’d need over three million solar panels, none of which means, by the way, that we shouldn’t be using renewables as a part of our energy future.But it does mean that the dream of using only renewables is going to remain a dream,
at least given the constraints of current technology. We simply don’t know how
to do it while still providing the amount of energy that everyday life requires.No energy source is ever going to painlessly solve all our problems. It’s always a compromise – which is why it’s so important for us to focus on the best outcomes that are achievable, because otherwise, New Hampshire’s gonna look like this.
Addendum from Michael J. Kelly
Energy return on investment (EROI)The debate over decarbonization has focused on technical feasibility and economics. There is one emerging measure that comes closely back to the engineering and the thermodynamics of energy production. The energy return on (energy) investment is a measure of the useful energy produced by a particular power plant divided by the energy needed to build, operate, maintain, and decommission the plant. This is a concept that owes its origin to animal ecology: a cheetah must get more energy from consuming his prey than expended on catching it, otherwise it will die. If the animal is to breed and nurture the next generation then the ratio of energy obtained from energy expended has to be higher, depending on the details of energy expenditure on these other activities. Weißbach et al. have analysed the EROI for a number of forms of energy production and their principal conclusion is that nuclear, hydro-, and gas- and coal-fired power stations have an EROI that is much greater than wind, solar photovoltaic (PV), concentrated solar power in a desert or cultivated biomass: see Fig. 2.In human terms, with an EROI of 1, we can mine fuel and look at it—we have no energy left over. To get a society that can feed itself and provide a basic educational system we need an EROI of our base-load fuel to be in excess of 5, and for a society with international travel and high culture we need EROI greater than 10. The new renewable energies do not reach this last level when the extra energy costs of overcoming intermittency are added in. In energy terms the current generation of renewable energy technologies alone will not enable a civilized modern society to continue!
The best context for understanding decadal temperature changes comes from the world’s sea surface temperatures (SST), for several reasons:
The ocean covers 71% of the globe and drives average temperatures;
SSTs have a constant water content, (unlike air temperatures), so give a better reading of heat content variations;
A major El Nino was the dominant climate feature in recent years.
HadSST is generally regarded as the best of the global SST data sets, and so the temperature story here comes from that source. Previously I used HadSST3 for these reports, but Hadley Centre has made HadSST4 the priority, and v.3 will no longer be updated. HadSST4 is the same as v.3, except that the older data from ship water intake was re-estimated to be generally lower temperatures than shown in v.3. The effect is that v.4 has lower average anomalies for the baseline period 1961-1990, thereby showing higher current anomalies than v.3. This analysis concerns more recent time periods and depends on very similar differentials as those from v.3 despite higher absolute anomaly values in v.4. More on what distinguishes HadSST3 and 4 from other SST products at the end. The user guide for HadSST4 is here.
Note: When doing monthly updates of HadSST4, it’s typical that values for the previous month or two will appear with slight adjustments. However this time there were scores of changed values scattered throughout the set and all values since 1979. Strangely, the new values were in text format, so I needed to convert them to values in the spreadsheets. Comparing the new and old datasets showed that the changes were mostly in the third decimal, and mostly negative (i.e. the adjusted value lower than the previous one.) Overall, the global average anomaly since 1980 was lower by 0.01C. The charts and analysis below is produced from the current data.
The Current Context
The chart below shows SST monthly anomalies as reported in HadSST3 starting in 2015 through February 2025. A global cooling pattern is seen clearly in the Tropics since its peak in 2016, joined by NH and SH cycling downward since 2016, followed by rising temperatures in 2023 and 2024.
Note that in 2015-2016 the Tropics and SH peaked in between two summer NH spikes. That pattern repeated in 2019-2020 with a lesser Tropics peak and SH bump, but with higher NH spikes. By end of 2020, cooler SSTs in all regions took the Global anomaly well below the mean for this period. A small warming was driven by NH summer peaks in 2021-22, but offset by cooling in SH and the tropics, By January 2023 the global anomaly was again below the mean.
Then in 2023-24 came an event resembling 2015-16 with a Tropical spike and two NH spikes alongside, all higher than 2015-16. There was also a coinciding rise in SH, and the Global anomaly was pulled up to 1.1°C last year, ~0.3° higher than the 2015 peak. Then NH started down autumn 2023, followed by Tropics and SH descending 2024 to the present. After 10 months of cooling in SH and the Tropics, the Global anomaly came back down, led by NH cooling the last 4 months from its peak in August. It’s now about 0.1C higher than the average for this period. Note that the Tropical anomaly has cooled from 1.28C in 2024/01 to 0.72C as of 2025/2.
Comment:
The climatists have seized on this unusual warming as proof their Zero Carbon agenda is needed, without addressing how impossible it would be for CO2 warming the air to raise ocean temperatures. It is the ocean that warms the air, not the other way around. Recently Steven Koonin had this to say about the phonomenon confirmed in the graph above:
El Nino is a phenomenon in the climate system that happens once every four or five years. Heat builds up in the equatorial Pacific to the west of Indonesia and so on. Then when enough of it builds up it surges across the Pacific and changes the currents and the winds. As it surges toward South America it was discovered and named in the 19th century It iswell understood at this point that the phenomenon has nothing to do with CO2.
Now people talk about changes in that phenomena as a result of CO2 but it’s there in the climate system already and when it happens it influences weather all over the world. We feel it when it gets rainier in Southern California for example. So for the last 3 years we have been in the opposite of an El Nino, a La Nina, part of the reason people think the West Coast has been in drought.
It has now shifted in the last months to an El Nino condition that warms the globe and is thought to contribute to this Spike we have seen. But there are other contributions as well. One of the most surprising ones is that back in January of 2022 an enormous underwater volcano went off in Tonga and it put up a lot of water vapor into the upper atmosphere. It increased the upper atmosphere of water vapor by about 10 percent, and that’s a warming effect, and it may be that is contributing to why the spike is so high.
A longer view of SSTs
The graph below is noisy, but the density is needed to see the seasonal patterns in the oceanic fluctuations. Previous posts focused on the rise and fall of the last El Nino starting in 2015. This post adds a longer view, encompassing the significant 1998 El Nino and since. The color schemes are retained for Global, Tropics, NH and SH anomalies. Despite the longer time frame, I have kept the monthly data (rather than yearly averages) because of interesting shifts between January and July.
To enlarge image, open in new tab.
The graph above is noisy, but the density is needed to see the seasonal patterns in the oceanic fluctuations. Previous posts focused on the rise and fall of the last El Nino starting in 2015. This post adds a longer view, encompassing the significant 1998 El Nino and since. The color schemes are retained for Global, Tropics, NH and SH anomalies. Despite the longer time frame, I have kept the monthly data (rather than yearly averages) because of interesting shifts between January and July. 1995 is a reasonable (ENSO neutral) starting point prior to the first El Nino.
The sharp Tropical rise peaking in 1998 is dominant in the record, starting Jan. ’97 to pull up SSTs uniformly before returning to the same level Jan. ’99. There were strong cool periods before and after the 1998 El Nino event. Then SSTs in all regions returned to the mean in 2001-2.
SSTS fluctuate around the mean until 2007, when another, smaller ENSO event occurs. There is cooling 2007-8, a lower peak warming in 2009-10, following by cooling in 2011-12. Again SSTs are average 2013-14.
Now a different pattern appears. The Tropics cooled sharply to Jan 11, then rise steadily for 4 years to Jan 15, at which point the most recent major El Nino takes off. But this time in contrast to ’97-’99, the Northern Hemisphere produces peaks every summer pulling up the Global average. In fact, these NH peaks appear every July starting in 2003, growing stronger to produce 3 massive highs in 2014, 15 and 16. NH July 2017 was only slightly lower, and a fifth NH peak still lower in Sept. 2018.
The highest summer NH peaks came in 2019 and 2020, only this time the Tropics and SH were offsetting rather adding to the warming. (Note: these are high anomalies on top of the highest absolute temps in the NH.) Since 2014 SH has played a moderating role, offsetting the NH warming pulses. After September 2020 temps dropped off down until February 2021. In 2021-22 there were again summer NH spikes, but in 2022 moderated first by cooling Tropics and SH SSTs, then in October to January 2023 by deeper cooling in NH and Tropics.
Then in 2023 the Tropics flipped from below to well above average, while NH produced a summer peak extending into September higher than any previous year. Despite El Nino driving the Tropics January 2024 anomaly higher than 1998 and 2016 peaks, following months cooled in all regions, and the Tropics continued cooling in April, May and June along with SH dropping. After July and August NH warming again pulled the global anomaly higher, September through January 2025 resumed cooling in all regions, with a slight upward bump in February 2025.
What to make of all this? The patterns suggest that in addition to El Ninos in the Pacific driving the Tropic SSTs, something else is going on in the NH. The obvious culprit is the North Atlantic, since I have seen this sort of pulsing before. After reading some papers by David Dilley, I confirmed his observation of Atlantic pulses into the Arctic every 8 to 10 years.
Contemporary AMO Observations
Through January 2023 I depended on the Kaplan AMO Index (not smoothed, not detrended) for N. Atlantic observations. But it is no longer being updated, and NOAA says they don’t know its future. So I find that ERSSTv5 AMO dataset has current data. It differs from Kaplan, which reported average absolute temps measured in N. Atlantic. “ERSST5 AMO follows Trenberth and Shea (2006) proposal to use the NA region EQ-60°N, 0°-80°W and subtract the global rise of SST 60°S-60°N to obtain a measure of the internal variability, arguing that the effect of external forcing on the North Atlantic should be similar to the effect on the other oceans.” So the values represent sst anomaly differences between the N. Atlantic and the Global ocean.
The chart above confirms what Kaplan also showed. As August is the hottest month for the N. Atlantic, its variability, high and low, drives the annual results for this basin. Note also the peaks in 2010, lows after 2014, and a rise in 2021. Then in 2023 the peak was holding at 1.4C before declining. An annual chart below is informative:
Note the difference between blue/green years, beige/brown, and purple/red years. 2010, 2021, 2022 all peaked strongly in August or September. 1998 and 2007 were mildly warm. 2016 and 2018 were matching or cooler than the global average. 2023 started out slightly warm, then rose steadily to an extraordinary peak in July. August to October were only slightly lower, but by December cooled by ~0.4C.
Then in 2024 the AMO anomaly started higher than any previous year, then leveled off for two months declining slightly into April. Remarkably, May showed an upward leap putting this on a higher track than 2023, and rising slightly higher in June. In July, August and September 2024 the anomaly declined, and despite a small rise in October, ended close to where it began. Now 2025 is starting much lower than the previous year.
The pattern suggests the ocean may be demonstrating a stairstep pattern like that we have also seen in HadCRUT4.
The purple line is the average anomaly 1980-1996 inclusive, value 0.17. The orange line the average 1980-2024, value 0.38, also for the period 1997-2012. The red line is 2013-2024, value 0.67. As noted above, these rising stages are driven by the combined warming in the Tropics and NH, including both Pacific and Atlantic basins.
The oceans are driving the warming this century. SSTs took a step up with the 1998 El Nino and have stayed there with help from the North Atlantic, and more recently the Pacific northern “Blob.” The ocean surfaces are releasing a lot of energy, warming the air, but eventually will have a cooling effect. The decline after 1937 was rapid by comparison, so one wonders: How long can the oceans keep this up? And is the sun adding forcing to this process?
Footnote: Why Rely on HadSST4
HadSST is distinguished from other SST products because HadCRU (Hadley Climatic Research Unit) does not engage in SST interpolation, i.e. infilling estimated anomalies into grid cells lacking sufficient sampling in a given month. From reading the documentation and from queries to Met Office, this is their procedure.
HadSST4 imports data from gridcells containing ocean, excluding land cells. From past records, they have calculated daily and monthly average readings for each grid cell for the period 1961 to 1990. Those temperatures form the baseline from which anomalies are calculated.
In a given month, each gridcell with sufficient sampling is averaged for the month and then the baseline value for that cell and that month is subtracted, resulting in the monthly anomaly for that cell. All cells with monthly anomalies are averaged to produce global, hemispheric and tropical anomalies for the month, based on the cells in those locations. For example, Tropics averages include ocean grid cells lying between latitudes 20N and 20S.
Gridcells lacking sufficient sampling that month are left out of the averaging, and the uncertainty from such missing data is estimated. IMO that is more reasonable than inventing data to infill. And it seems that the Global Drifter Array displayed in the top image is providing more uniform coverage of the oceans than in the past.
USS Pearl Harbor deploys Global Drifter Buoys in Pacific Ocean
Primary Threat to Earth Future is Losing Reliable, Affordable Energy
A perfect example of how the climate “crisis” narrative is falsely applied when, in fact, the climate-related catastrophe would have happened anyway is found in the disastrous floods that devastated Pakistan in 2022. Despite the doomsday spin from PBS (etc.), these floods were not abnormal because of “climate change.” They were an abnormal catastrophe because in just 60 years, the population of that nation has grown from 45 million to 240 million people. They’ve channelized their rivers, built dense new settlements onto what were once floodplains and other marginal land, they’ve denuded their forests, which took away the capacity to absorb runoff, and they’ve paved thousands of square miles, creating impervious surfaces where water can’t percolate. Of course, a big storm made a mess. The weather didn’t change. The nation changed.
The history of America is, in many ways, the history of energy. The steam power that revolutionized travel and the shipping of goods. The coal that fueled the railroads and the industrial revolution. The petroleum that helped birth the age of the automobile. And now, if we only have the will, a new era of renewable energy.
In fact, the government reports that switching over to natural gas did more than twice as much to cut carbon emissions as renewables did in recent years. Why did natural gas progress so much faster than renewables? It wasn’t an accident.
Energy is a little like money: You have to spend it to make it. To get usable natural gas, for example, you’ve first got to drill a well, process and transport the gas, build a power plant, and generate the electricity. But the question is how much energy are you getting back for your investment? With natural gas, you get about 30 times as much power out of the system as you put into creating it. By contrast, with something like solar power, you only get about 3 1/2 times as much power back.
In human terms, with an EROI of 1, we can mine fuel and look at it—we have no energy left over. To get a society that can feed itself and provide a basic educational system we need an EROI of our base-load fuel to be in excess of 5, and for a society with international travel and high culture we need EROI greater than 10. The new renewable energies do not reach this last level when the extra energy costs of overcoming intermittency are added in. In energy terms the current generation of renewable energy technologies alone will not enable a civilized modern society to continue!
The best context for understanding decadal temperature changes comes from the world’s sea surface temperatures (SST), for several reasons:
Science Matters 