Dr Roger Watson reports on how Roman Catholic leaders have ventured into climatism wilderness by trusting the wrong proponents. His Daily Sceptic article is The Vatican’s Green Gospel. Excerpts in italics with my bold and added images.
Under Pope Francis and now Leo the Catholic Church has drunk deeply
of the climate Kool-Aid. It’s about time it quit the pseudo-scientific
scaremongering and got back to saving souls.
How the Roman Catholic Church moved from its great commission to save souls to its current obsession with saving the planet is not clear. But it is obvious that the hierarchy of the Church has drunk deeply of the climate change Kool-Aid and, and while it would be unfair to say that it has abandoned saving souls, its mission has certainly drifted considerably into an area which is not exactly within its area of expertise. Wherever it is getting its advice on climate change from, it is most definitely listening to the wrong people.
The problem, as some Catholics see it, is demonstrated amply in a column in the September issue of Middlesbrough Diocesan Catholic Voice – known locally as the Voice – which is distributed to and through parish churches in the Middlesbrough Catholic Diocese. It is always with trepidation that I take a copy from the pile at the back after Sunday Mass.
The Voice, while it contains useful diocesan information, dates of events and news from the parishes, almost always has at least one article which, for me, is an ‘occasion of sin’ as to read it conjures up thoughts which are far from Christian. My only justification being that this is engendered by reading content that is far from Christian. Inevitably, if we do not have a report on the oxymoronic concept of the Diocesan LGBT Masses it will be an article on the so-called climate emergency.
Blessed are the carbon conscious
The September issue of Middlesbrough Diocesan Catholic Voice contains an article by Sir John Battle, former Labour MP for Leeds West and a minister in the Blair government titled ‘Stop taking a climate change gamble’. A Roman Catholic and made a Knight Commander of the Order of St Gregory by Pope Benedict XVI – who clearly didn’t get everything right – Sir John hinges his argument on the gambling industry and the obvious love of gambling among the British people.
The first quarter of the article, on the popularity of gambling and its possibility of easy returns for one’s money, is rather tenuously linked to the gamble that we are taking over climate change. This expectation of quick profit is blotting out people’s minds to the realities of what we can do to mitigate the damage of global warming.
The customary superlatives are used to support his argument. Thus “wildfires rage” across Europe and “devastating floods” hit Bangladesh. Never mind that the fires in Europe were almost certainly deliberately causedby arsonists and that there have been floods in Bangladesh for as long as anyone can remember. Add to that the news that, far from melting, the polar caps are increasing in size, the polar bears and penguins are thriving and coral reefs are growing. The facts must not stand in the way of a good argument.
After all, there is a “scientific consensus” on the issue and
“daily news reports of worldwide extreme climatic events”. So, it must be true.
Sins of emission
Sir John explains that the much bandied Net Zero mantra“does not mean producing zero emissions but rather taking action to reduce emissions as much as possible”. If so, then why call it ‘Net Zero’ and why does the UK have a target of Net Zero by 2050? According to the University of Oxford’s Net Zero Centre, Net Zero means “balancing the greenhouse gases put into the air with an equal amount taken back out”. That is a subtlety I have never heard any of the zero carbon fanatics explain on BBC Radio 4 Today programme.
Sir John refers to the “merchants of doubt”, pointing the finger at Big Carbon (not Sir John’s description) who have “financial interests” in not reducing our use of hydrocarbon sources. This leads people to doubt anything untoward will happen to them because of climate change due to the gambling mentality referred to in the initial paragraphs of his article. These “powerful vested interests” – spoken like a true socialist Sir John – then try to shift the blame on to consumers and society. But the consumers in turn think ‘why bother?’ when places like China and America carry on emitting greenhouse gases like there is no tomorrow.
Having seemingly criticised Big Carbon and such vested interests in trying to offload their responsibilities for the planet onto the little people, Sir John then quotes arch climate catastrophist Gabriel Winslow-Yost, who reckons climate change to be a “crime” and that we are all “implicated”. Winslow-Yost, clearly a lover of dramatic prose, says, “car rides and plane trips, coffees and burgers, heating and cooling and clothing are paid for in blood, contributing every moment to the suffering and destruction global warming brings”. My goodness, but he sounds like he’d be a regular hoot on a night out, doesn’t he?
The catechism of climate change
As if to give his article some theological clout he quotes Pope Leo who “insists” that climate change is “a scientific reality and a moral responsibility”. I think you’ll find, Pope Leo, that you are wrong on both counts there. Laudato Si’, the late Pope Francis’s execrable encyclical letter, is quoted twice, including his ridiculous exhortation to “ecological conversion”. We Catholics had all hoped for better from Pope Leo, but he seems to have fallen for the climate change catastrophe agenda as much as anyone, referring to concepts such as “environmental justice” and how it is part of the Church’s mission to “promote human dignity, peace and care for creation”.
It is hard to know what lies behind all this nonsense being spouted by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and by senior Catholics who should know better. Are they – as I fear they might be – genuine believers in the climate change catastrophe? Perhaps they are trying to be ‘relevant’ and ‘relatable’ by addressing topical concerns in a vain attempt to fill the pews. If so, why would that work? If people want to hear scientific social justice based gobbledygook, there is always the Anglican Church, the BBC or the Guardian.
The Catholic Church rightly encourages Christians to be good stewards of creation, but has that stewardship begun to eclipse salvation? Reducing carbon emissions seems to be a greater priority than reducing sin. The Church’s unique mission is to proclaim the Gospel, administer the sacraments and prepare souls for eternity. If it chooses to become just another voice in the chorus of climate activism, it should not be surprised if people conclude that it has become more interested in saving the planet than in saving the souls of the people who inhabit it.
File this under “They Have No Shame.” Desperate to regain momentum for Agenda 2030, activists’ new meme is that costs of living are rising because of global warming/climate change. It’s an obvious attempt to deflect from Greenflation due to the so-called “Energy Transition” and to blame realists who dissent from “consensus Climate Science.” Here’s the study from MIT disciples: Why climate change is costing U.S. households hundreds of dollars a year. Excerpts in italics with my bolds,
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., April 7, 2026 – As extreme weather becomes more frequent, climate-related costs are creeping into everyday expenses, adding hundreds of dollars a year to U.S. household expenses. From higher insurance premiums to rising utility bills and disaster-related income losses, climate change contributes to expenses at a time when Americans are already worried about rising food and energy costs. While their list of climate-related expenses is not exhaustive, the researchers found that climate change is already costing U.S. households between $400 and $900 a year, on average. In some places, the burden is far higher: in around 10% of U.S. counties, annual climate-related costs exceed $1,300 per household.
Coauthor Catherine Wolfram:
“A lot of the ways in which we discuss climate now are kind of abstract and in the future — maybe these impacts happen in 2050 or 2100 — but we really wanted to emphasize that this is already occurring and it’s having negative financial implications for households.”
Energy expenses are one important driver in household climate costs.
To estimate the growing household costs of energy from increased use, production disruption, and damage to electric companies’ infrastructure, the researchers compared energy use in 2020 to 2024 with that of 1981 to 1990. Recently, more utility companies have been increasing their rates in response to wildfires and hurricanes, either to fund recovery or to mitigate future damage.
Insurance costs represent another piece of households’ growing financial burden.
The researchers estimate climate change contributed to an average $360 increase in homeowners’ insurance premiums between 1990 and 2023. In some cases, households may be hit twice: by rising utility bills and higher insurance premiums at the same time.
Government climate-related costs are passed on to households
These typically include having to pay to repair schools, roads, bridges, and airports after natural disasters. They found that the annual average per household cost from these expenses from 2017 to 2021 was nearly $150. Other costs, including higher home prices in lower-risk areas and rising food prices from crops damaged during disasters, are likely contributing as well, but are outside the study. Migration costs could also play a role, as people move away from areas experiencing more frequent disasters.
Summary of Costs incurred by households due to climate change
Cost Factor Estimated
Annual Cost
Home insurance premiums
Over $600
Disaster recovery expenses
Varies by region
Increased utility bills
About $35
Health impacts from air quality
Exceeds $100
What They Are Not Telling You
Insurance Companies Making Record Profits Off Climate Change Panic
US property and casualty insurers nearly doubled their earnings between 2023 and last year despite costly extreme-weather events, according to research that highlights the pay-off from several years of rising customer prices.
A survey of companies that account for at least 97 per cent of US property and casualty cover by rating agency AM Best, found that the aggregate after-tax profits of the industry surged to $171bn last year, compared with $92bn the previous year.
Hurricanes, fires and other disasters caused an estimated $320bn of losses around the world in 2024, about a third more than the year before. In the US alone, five big hurricanes as well as other severe storms struck.
However, the data showed insurers more than offset larger losses by increasing premiums. Helen Andersen, an AM Best research analyst, told the Financial Times that the strong earnings figures were the result of “an aggressive push for significant rate and pricing increases” by insurers.
But some consumers — particularly in states historically less affected by wildfires and extreme weather such as hurricanes — have questioned the justification for price rises that have sometimes outstripped inflation.
Unreliable Wind and Solar Power Drives Higher Electricity Bills
EPA Reports US Air is Clean of Unhealthy Pollutants
Lucy Biggers of Free Press interviews US Energy Secretary Chris Wright regarding the paramount role of energy development and access for civil and social wellbeing. For those who prefer reading I provide a transcript lightly edited from the captions with my bolds and added images LB refers to comments from Lucy Biggers and CW to words from Secretary Wright.
LB: Wright has one of the most consequential and least understood jobs in Washington. As Trump’s Secretary of Energy, he oversees the department responsible for shaping America’s energy future, directing billions of dollars in research and development, influencing which technologies are built and scaled, and helping set the policies that will define the country’s energy system for decades to come. Under Wright, the Department of Energy has taken a sharp turn away from the policies of the Biden and Obama administrations.
Instead of a major focus on climate change and a renewables-first agenda that sought to reduce reliance on fossil fuels: “The United States will be 100% clean energy economy with net zero emissions.” Wright has embraced the policy of what he calls energy abundance, an all-of-the-above strategy that prioritizes expanding access to all energy sources, including fossil fuels.
The bet of his administration is that long-term human prosperity depends
not on using less energy, but on producing far more of it.
It’s an approach that has its detractors, but one that the administration has shown it’s not scared to pursue. As a former climate activist who once believed in climate doomerism and now believes this fear-based narrative left out important parts of the story, I sat down with Secretary Wright to understand what an energy abundance mindset looks like in practice and why he believes it offers a better path forward for America and the whole world.
Secretary Wright, welcome to The Free Press. Thank you so much for being here today.
LB: So for people who aren’t familiar with your worldview, can you kind of explain how you think about energy compared to maybe what we see from the news and the mainstream?
CW: Yeah, but if you’re not in the energy business, I totally get why would people know the energy business? It’s complicated and if your energy system works, why would you even worry about it? I’ve just always looked at how does energy impact the quality of your life or anyone’s life? It is the transformative agent that created the modern world. Human life expectancy was 30 years, 20,000 years ago.
Energy Sources and the Rise of Civilization. Source: Bill Gates
Human life expectancy at birth was 30 years, 200 years ago. It was only really the large-scale arrival of coal that gave so much more energy, that made agriculture more efficient, that allowed people to do things. Ultimately, the arrival of oil that allowed the development of modern medicine, well, average life expectancy at birth today is over 70 years.
That’s energy delivering that. Energy delivers the public health benefits that spread to everyone, but not everyone lives a highly energized life. Only about a billion, Lucy, live like you and I and your listeners. We got climate-controlled rooms, we got lights, we take buses and trains and planes and- Running water. Running water. I mean, that stuff’s awesome.
But only about a billion people have that fully energized life. About seven billion people, I’ve met a lot of them, not all seven billion, but I haven’t met one of them that doesn’t want a lifestyle like you and I. The only road from where we are today to that road is just massively more energy. I’ve been all in on more energy my whole life.
LB: When you entered office, what was the state of our energy system based on your predecessors?
CW: The Department of Energy, where I am, didn’t want to touch hydrocarbons, didn’t want to be photoed with anything associated with hydrocarbon. All of their money was wind, solar, and batteries, which is 3% of global energy, about 3.5% of American energy. Then decarbonization things, like if you did carbon capture at a coal plant. You couldn’t talk about coal plants, but they wanted to look at technologies to capture carbon. In fact, they funded a project that was decarb mac and cheese. Like a giant food company that makes mac and cheese, they were giving them grants, tens of millions of dollars to change their process to reduce the CO2 emissions from the production of mac and cheese.
So just crazy. All it meant is if you did that process, like mac and cheese is a little bit more expensive, and they thought, well, people don’t care. They’ll just pay a higher price. What’s the benefit of minute decarbonization? The honest answer to that is zero. Were they shutting down coal plants? Absolutely. The administration, their scoreboard on energy was shutting down as many coal plants as they could have.
In fact, when we got into office, the plans in place and the resource plans for utilities across the country were, over the next five years, to shut down a net 46 gigawatts of generation. So that’s like 40,000 homes. So 100,000 people. I mean, it’s huge. And they’re shutting down firm generation, meaning that it works 24-7 whether or not the wind is blowing or the sun is shining.
We also think the arrival of AI now, and people want to restore manufacturing here, modern manufacturing. We’re going to have robots and automation. So our projections show we need about 100 gigawatts, which is a huge number of additional generation in the U.S. over the next five years. And we inherited plans that were going to be minus 46. So then we’d have to build 150 to get up to our 100. So we thought, well, let’s stop digging the hole first. Then we must only build 100 instead of building 150.
LB:The Trump administration is represented in the media by most of our outlets. The headline, they’re saying, oh, they defunded renewables. Isn’t this so evil? Bring people over to how you see it.
CW: I say energy is just about humans and math. We produce energy to make people’s lives better. And of course, environmental impacts factor into that. Clean air, clean water, beautiful wilderness. We care. If you become wealthy humans, you care about all those things. And so to me, it’s just about doing the math. And as I mentioned, the world has spent $10 trillion on wind, solar, batteries, and the transmission to connect these remote resources. And it’s 3% of global energy.
And if you have high concentrations of renewables, like the countries that have led in this, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Denmark, they have the largest percent of those resources. They have the three most expensive electricity prices in the world. I mean, it is massive. And of course, what it did, for example, in England, it just deindustrialized the country. The government had to step in about a year and a half ago to stop the closure of the last steel furnace in the country.
This is the fifth largest economy in the world. And the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution was not going to make one scrap of steel in their country. You cannot have a modern world without steel, cement, plastics, and fertilizer. Vaclav Smil, the greatest energy scholar of our time, calls them the four pillars of the modern world. We use 20% of energy, global energy, just to produce those four materials. But if you want any of the things you’ve got in your life, you can’t survive without those four materials. But they’re energy intensive to make.
So in the United Kingdom, they have the largest reduction in greenhouse gases. They’re very proud of that. They’ve reduced their greenhouse gas emissions by about 40%. What they don’t tell you is they’ve reduced the total energy production in their country by about 40%. So they’ve just exported all their industry. It used to be in a natural gas powered plant in the Midlands of England. Now its same product is built in a coal fired power plant in China, loaded on a diesel powered ship that ships halfway around the world, delivers it to a dock, and it’s loaded on a truck, and they deliver it to their house. And they call that green. That’s clean and green.
You’re just moving emissions. That’s not reducing emissions.
That’s just impoverishing people and sending jobs out of your country.
There’s roles for solar. Remote African villages to charge cell phones. There’s going to be power in space. We use solar panels in space. So there’s roles for it. But is the world ever going to run on solar panels and wind turbine? Absolutely not. Two reasons of that. England, as I said, has gone so crazy. They’ve tripled their electricity prices. They plummeted their industry. You know what percent of energy in this wind, solar gone wild country? 6% of the primary energy. That’s like the peak. When the sun’s shining and the wind’s blowing perfectly. But they have so much that their total energy is still only 6%. England, that went crazy on this, gets 75% of its energy from oil and natural gas.
You can’t run a country or a modern world. You can run an electricity grid some of the time without them. But electricity is just one slice of energy. In fact, to build solar panels or to build wind turbines or to build batteries are massively hydrocarbon intensity, which is why most of it’s built in China. You need lots of high temperature heat, lots of energy in manufacturing, lots of energy used in the mining of it. And then the materials themselves, they’re made out of hydrocarbons.
LB: Those blades, giant wind turbine, those are oil. I think for most people, the big thing on their mind when it comes to our energy system is climate change in our energy system. So I really want to hear from you. How do you factor in climate change when you’re making decisions?
CW: Yeah. So look, I’ve been fascinated by climate change for 25 years. And the more you look into it, it’s a real thing. We’ve increased atmospheric CO2 concentration from a little less than 0.03% to a little more than 0.04%. 50% increase. So it’s not nothing. It does absorb infrared radiation. It is contributing to the warming of the planet and will continue to for quite some time. So it’s a real issue. It’s just not even remotely close to the world’s biggest problem.
I mean, if you were honest, it wouldn’t make a top 10 list. And so they used to try to sell people fear about: it’s so hot and we’re not going to be able to go outside. It’s so crazy. I mean, if it’s warmed in Fahrenheit 2 degrees over the last 125 years, we can change the room you and I are in by 2 degrees and I wouldn’t even notice. Maybe you might, but I’m not that sensitive. I wouldn’t even notice 2 degrees in like 20 minutes. So 120 years, it’s not nothing, but it’s not that big of a deal.
That turned out to be a tougher sell. So they moved it to extreme weather because hurricanes and tornadoes, these things are terrifying and they are big. But of course, and it’s in the IPCC (intergovernmental panel on climate change) reports, there’s no trends in the increasing in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes, of tornadoes, of floods, of drought. And so then it was about deaths from them.
My Mind is Made Up, Don’t Confuse Me with the Facts. H/T Bjorn Lomborg, WUWT
And of course there is a massive trend there. We went from 500,000 people a year on average dying back in the 1920s from extreme weather globally. That’s massive. Last year, just under 10,000 deaths. So from 500,000 down to 10,000, that’s a 98% decline. And we have four times more people in the world.
So the thing about extreme weather is awesome. Hydrocarbons and great energy have just made life so much safer. And those 10,000 deaths are still tragic. And they’re in low income countries that don’t have modern construction and modern energy to make them robust and safe from that weather. More hydrocarbons, more hydrocarbons are what’s going to save those 10,000 lives. We still have death from extreme weather, not less hydrocarbons in theory to change the weather because it doesn’t.
LB: It will slightly change the rate at which the planet’s warming, but no one noticed that. You hear net zero, I think was this big thing everyone wanted to go for for a while. Explain what are the follies of net zero and the downsides of that.
CW: This comes from the Paris Climate Gathering, this Congress of the parties of the annual climate gathering. And it actually came from activists. This was not a scientific thing. Even in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, they do their own economics. Their own 2050 is a colossally bad idea that the cost to achieve it is something like 10 times the potential benefits and reduce climate damage. William Nordhaus, who won the Nobel Prize on climate economics, did an economic analysis of this, saying you should only reduce greenhouse gas emissions in areas where the cost to reduce them is less than the benefits you gain.
It’s just sort of how we look at everything else in life. I wouldn’t spend $10 for something I valued at 50 cents, but that’s what we do in the climate world. We spend $10 for maybe a quarter or a nickel or a dime of potential benefits. Net zero 2050 is really just a massive human impoverishment program.
LB: And then you have your own 2050 goal, which would be end energy poverty by 2050. Yeah, people want a passionate, aggressive goal.
CW: It’s realistic that we could massively reduce and effectively end energy poverty by 2050. And to give a little color on that, there’s about 2 billion people, a quarter of humanity, that still cook their daily meals and heat their homes or huts burning wood. Could be agricultural waste or dung, but it’s mostly wood indoors, just like all of our ancestors did.
Just like I do when we go camping in the woods when you can build a wood fire. If you’re high on glaciated mountains, you carry propane, you’re in the modern world. But in these 2 billion people that live that way, the World Health Organization estimates 2 to 3 million deaths from the indoor air pollution from burning that, from particulate matter. These are low temperature fires. It’s incomplete combustion. You’ve got smoke and particulates in the air.
That’s why I launched a Bettering Human Lives Foundation to make small loans to businesses that are delivering clean cooking fuels. To me, that is the biggest global energy challenge by far. Climate change isn’t even on the map compared to clean cooking fuels. We can save 2 to 3 million lives a year with technologies we already have today. And as we are customers in Africa, that’s neat. Maybe it’s going to make them live longer, but that’s not their motivation at all. Their motivation is it liberates women. Women do all the manual labor in traditional societies. And if you’re in Africa or South Asia, the women are getting up before the sun is up to gather wood, to start the fire, to cook the morning meals. Then they tamp the fire down. They don’t want to put it out, but they tamp it down so it won’t consume too much wood. They tend to that fire.
And then at the end of the day to cook the evening meal, they’ve got to stoke it back up. They just spend hours over this fire and gathering wood. Pretty much limits their life possibilities. And of course, the children are with them as well. They’re all suffering these health impacts. But for our customers there, it’s about liberation of women. You get a propane cookstove and you open the knob and you light the thing. You can cook. You can leave it on at low level and heat it at night. You can turn it on and off in like a flip of twisting a little knob. It’s just game changing.
I was at an event four or five years ago. There was a COP in Glasgow, COP 21. I don’t know, it was several years ago. 19 of the wealthiest nations in the world, the European nations, the United States, Canada, all pledged that they would no longer lend to the developing world for anything related to hydrocarbons. Think about that. In the United States, all of our countries run on hydrocarbons over 85% of our energy. Even in England, just oil and gas are 75%.
But they thought they were doing a good thing to pledge that they would not help those two billion people that want better lives and longer lives and healthier lives and liberated lives, that they would stand in the way of that. They thought they were proud of that. That was repulsive to me. I aggressively called this out, including the guy who was behind it, who later denied, we didn’t do that. But we did do that.
LB: You look in the US, I think, luckily, we’ve missed out on most of the insanity. But you have California, which I think has doubled down a lot. They have $8 gas in some places. They have the second highest electricity bills in the country. It is crazy what happens in California.
CW: Yeah, California, they used to have similar electricity prices to Florida. Today, they’re more than twice as high as Florida. Just in the last 15 years, this has been driven. Here’s another funny fact. Even though they have way more people than Florida, California produces 20% less electricity than Florida does, but at a way higher cost.
They have declining electricity production. Maybe most telling, they have the highest adjusted poverty rate of any state in the nation. Just because people that make a wage that would be not a bad lifestyle wage in middle America, it’s just very hard to live in California, to pay very high utility bills, to pay very high gasoline, to fill your truck, to go to your job.
They’ve made life really rough in California for low-income people, which has been my passion. What we want energy to do is to lift people up, give them broader life opportunities, longer lives, higher quality lives. Enjoy the wonderful things you and I enjoy, Lucy, and in our own country. California just pedals hard against that. They keep just so many millions of people needlessly in poverty
As he said, on a climate perspective, they don’t even move the needle. California gets a greater percent of its energy from oil and gas than the rest of the country as a whole. 76% of all the energy consumed in California comes from oil and gas. It’s not like they’ve gotten rid of oil and gas. They’ve just made them more expensive. They’ve just made it harder for people to pay their bills. They’re not changing at all global greenhouse gas emissions. The biggest source of electricity, all the money is in the electricity sector. It’s just one sector of energy. But what’s the biggest source of electricity in California? It’s natural gas.
LB: What’s the second biggest source imported from other states? Have you done the numbers or have other people done the numbers? If we were even to go to net zero, say the dream is accomplished, we accomplish this utopia, what is it?
CW: It would prevent 0.1 degrees of warming, maybe, hypothetically. If the US did, yes. I did this. if the whole US went net zero, you wouldn’t quite get to 0.1 degrees C reduction in warming. That’s like a century or more out from here. It’s just nothing. In Colorado, my own state passed a law of it. It wouldn’t even be close to 1,100th of a degree. We couldn’t even measure that difference.
When these states pass these net zero policies, they think they’re saving the climate. All they’re doing is making energy more expensive in their state. Economic activity just moves out of their state. They aren’t even doing the reductions they think they’re doing. Most of it’s just moving emissions from this jurisdiction to that jurisdiction. The atmosphere doesn’t care where the emissions came from.
LB:Offshoring or manufacturing to China and India where these places don’t have the policies that we have. The emissions just move there. Exactly. I would say, yeah, United Kingdom, you could argue their net impact on emissions has been up, not down.
CW: Right, because it’s going to dirtier places. From natural gas manufacturing to coal manufacturing, and then all the massive transport to move the goods back around the world back to the UK. To me, climate change is a real thing. I’m interested in it. The only needle mover so far has been natural gas. If nuclear energy becomes huge, today it’s still less than 5% of global energy, but someday I think it’s going to be 30, 40, 50. It’s going to be a giant percent of global energy. That may be generations from now, but we want to get that ball moving because it can be a giant global energy source.
Wind and solar never can be because they’re very energy intensive to make them. They only work intermittently and they take so much land. They’re only in the electricity sector. All the electricity sector combined around the whole planet delivers 20% of global primary energy. They’re going to top out. You can’t build solar panels and wind turbines without massive hydrocarbons. They’re never going to be meaningful to global energy supply.
Nuclear can be meaningful to global energy supply. It’s just much more energy dense. It works 24-7.
You can get not just electricity, you can get process heat out, which is the biggest and most important form of energy. It’s high temperature process heat to make steel, to make cement, to make aluminum, to make polysilicon, to make plastics, to make all of the materials that make our lives possible.
LB: What is your priority right now as Energy Secretary? Is it grid reliability? Is it affordability? Is it all of the above? What do you think?
CW: It’s all of the above. We better energize our country. People are frustrated because in the Biden administration, electricity prices went up 30% and we didn’t produce any more electricity at the end. We didn’t get any benefit. We just got higher costs. No meaningful movement on greenhouse gas emissions. What we want to do is stop the rise in electricity prices, ultimately see them go down. We want to see a lot of jobs in manufacturing come back to our country. We’re building a new aluminum smelter in the United States. We’re reshoring semiconductor manufacturing.
We’re still going to trade with the rest of the world. All that’s going to happen, but more of this should be built in the United States. With these intelligence factories, data centers, they consume a lot of electricity, but they deliver just massive productivity. They’re going to raise people’s income. They’re going to help us find cures for cancer. They’re going to help us find cures for all sorts of conditions that are death sentences today. Our kids are going to live a longer, healthier life than previous generations because the pace of innovation is going to be unbelievable.
LB: Let’s talk about AI data centers a bit because they seem to be the new enemy number one, kind of like fracking was, I would say, in the 2010s where everyone was freaking out about fracking. Now everyone’s freaking out about AI data centers. They’re guzzling water, electricity. Can you give me the facts on what is the reality of this situation? It’s the same script, the same facts, and the same people, and the same groups. It’s just easy to sell fear, and it’s hard to sell reassurance.
CW:They say they guzzle energy. They’re driving up your electricity prices. The data is actually the opposite. The states with the fastest demand growth with electricity have the best price performance. The states with the fastest rising electricity, like California, Massachusetts, and Maryland, they actually have declining demand for electricity. When you build a new data center, you’ve got to build a new electricity generation together with it, which is what we’re doing right now.
You build more generation than the data center will consume. The data center builders will pre-fund the generation of this. Then we sign these multi-year, three to five-year rate freezes on electricity. I mean, dead in its track, the rise in electricity prices is over. In fact, that’s the start of the pathway. Because they’re adding more to the grid? Because they’re adding more to the grid than they’re going to be consuming from it, and they’re adding reliable, dispatchable sources. The greater percent you have of reliable electricity, the lower your electricity prices are going to have. The more intermittent sources you have, the more kit you have to operate to deliver the same amount of electricity, it’s just more expensive.
LB: You could see places like Apple or Google, these places building these AI data centers, which are private companies, essentially adding to the grid because they need the capacity?
CW:They are doing that today. Google did a great deal in Georgia, signed an agreement up front to build, to invest, to build this new electric generating capacity while they’re building their data center. They got a four-year rate freeze before their data center is even done. Everyone in Georgia that had these huge electricity price rises in the last three, four, five years, they’re not going to have them the next three or four years.
Same thing in Alabama. We did the same thing in Indiana. Now, it’s not statewide yet, but it’s in the regions where these data centers are. The more these data centers go in, the more we’re going to stop all of the rises in electricity. The more we’re going to grow jobs in those areas, particularly blue-collar jobs. By this, making it hard to permit and build stuff in our country, we sent so many of these manufacturing jobs overseas and we stripped our rural communities of a lot of their job base.
This led to opioid and depression and all sorts of social problems, as well as the economic problems.
Data centers and reshoring manufacturing is going to bring
high-paying jobs back to those regions and areas.
In fact, we’re quickly going to go from people struggling, they’ve got good skills, but they can’t find a job. We’re going to have a shortage of people with those skills. I’m going to welcome this because it’s already raising wages and it’s going to get more people in high school to say, hey, maybe I’m good with my hands or I’m super interested in building and repairing things, as most kids are. That’s an awesome career opportunity. I’m going to develop those skills. I’m going to get out of high school and two years later be making $100,000 a year and have a career path to double and triple my income in the next few decades. That’s restoring the American dream to people that don’t live in New York City and are highly successful.
LB: One more thing before we move on from AI data centers is the water. That’s just one thing I hear so much. I believe it’s very overstated, but you’ve seen AOC has a jug of dirty water in Congress. What’s going on with that?
CW: It was the same thing they said with fracking. It’s taking all the water. It’s just complete nonsense. We trotted out the numbers. Golf courses use four times more water than all the fracking in the whole United States. Golf courses use far more water than all the data centers in the United States. In fact, most of the new data centers now are built with these closed-loop cooling systems and they use almost no water. You take these giant data centers. We visited one in Iowa. It’s 600 acres, so almost a square mile, but it’s $55 billion that are being invested in there. 10,000 high-paying jobs. It’s incredibly exciting. That 600-acre data center will use the amount of water equivalent to farming corn on two acres. It’s just a tiny amount of water. The water thing is just, if you can scare people about water, you can scare people. It’s just pure fiction, but it works, but it’s false.
LB: If you’re looking ahead at the energy mix, it’s nuclear, natural gas. What does that mix to you, ideally?
CW: Those are the two biggest drivers for sure. If you want to build new generation today, what’s the most cost-effective? I mean, natural gas just hands down. The United States just has a massive amount of natural gas. 20 years ago, we had 1,000 rigs drilling for natural gas in the United States. We were the biggest importer in the world of natural gas. Today, we’re the largest exporter of natural gas in the world. We’ve more than doubled our production, and we have a little over 100 rigs running for natural gas. Think of that efficiency and technology. Just 90% less drilling rigs, massively more production, and just centuries of gas.
I went to MIT to work on fusion energy. That’s going to come too. That’s what powers the stars. It’s so exciting. We’re going to deliver that too. The challenge is going to be just making those machines cheap enough and economic enough that that makes sense to grow it. But humans are ingenious.
I suspect we’ll figure that out. Fusion will be a major energy source. In another generation or two, it’s coming.
LB: You’re prioritizing energy abundance. You’re rejiggering the entire globe around oil. I do think that the work you’re doing is still commando, but it’s not breaking through to the average person yet. I feel like there’s still this feeling of despair, and things are getting worse, and the AID centers are ruining the planet. Do you think there’ll become a point where what you’re doing will become just impossible to ignore?
CW: I think it’ll be during this administration, because I’ve done a lot to engage in dialogues with Democratic senators and Democratic governors. How much do you hear about climate change from Democrats now? Massively less. When you do, it’s the wackos on the far left. The more moderate Democrats, I was shocked to hear them say climate crisis, and we’re going to prevent this. If you met them at a cocktail party dinner, these are normal people. We’re saying just crazy stuff about climate change. We published a paper last summer from the DOE, an overview of climate change by five awesome climate scientists. We’re bringing out the facts that you talk about, Lucy, straight to the politicians in Washington.
Of course, a lot of them are realizing, they may have gone a little too far on that. The New England governors that didn’t want more natural gas to come to New England, all of them say, yeah, we want that pipeline now. We are changing the Overton window of what’s possible in politics permanently.
If crazy AOC becomes president, that pendulum will swing back, but it will not be able to go back to where it was, because it was just so foolish. Too many people are puncturing that bubble. By making energy more expensive and claiming you’re saving the world from climate change, you’re not moving global greenhouse gas emissions, and climate change is a slow moving thing.
We should stop scaring kids, running around with our heads on fire, preventing young people like you from wanting to have children because they think the world’s falling apart. How do we ever make a world a better place by making young people pessimistic and fearful, and wrongly pessimistic and fearful? That’s just crazy town. What we’re trying to do is engage, engage, engage on those dialogues, on those discussions to make people realize energy matters, cost of energy matters to the quality of people’s lives.
The world just needs massively more energy. I’m not an advocate for one energy source or the other. I’m just an advocate for humans and math. The advantages of oil, gas, and coal today are so compelling, but to me, that’s the excitement. Let’s drive nuclear forward. Let’s make it so it is compelling. It can compete and ultimately displace hydrocarbons. The next generation downhole geothermal that I first worked on 30 years ago and then more recently, that is coming. There’s a 400 megawatt, firm, reliable, dispatchable power plant being built in Utah. Gigawatts of new geothermal power will be developed in the Western United States and could ultimately be deployed in the Eastern U.S. in the near future.
Fusion energy’s coming, you know, any new energy innovations and technology, we’re for all of them. We are still researching in our labs on new solar technologies. We’re truly the ones for whatever works, whatever the mass supports. What we’re not for is subsidizing some energy technologies that we know have a low ceiling, making energy more expensive, and trying to strangle the stuff that actually works and is realiable and affordable. We’re just trying to bring common sense and science back. And by doing that, the world is going to be better energized. Economic opportunities are going to grow Costs are going to go down, and people are going to be more optimistic about their futures. The next generation is going to have the greatest world ever. I can’t wait to see it unfold.
LB: So, you think electricity costs are going to come down? You think that will happen?
CW: They’re going to freeze first, which in inflation-adjusted terms is equivalent to coming down. And then 5 to 10 year down, if we continue these policies, you will start to see electricity prices coming down even in nominal terms.
LB: And $2 gas, is that in my future?
CW: It certainly could be. Gasoline prices are going to continue to lower throughout the Trump administration because we’re growing energy production. We’re just bringing common sense back to the processes to deliver gasoline to your house and all that. In inflation-adjusted terms, gasoline will continue to go down meaningfully in percent of your wallet, percent of you pocketbook, which is really what matters. You know, gasoline prices could be near an all-time low by the end of the Trump administration.
Raymond Inauen is creating a series of light-hearted chats about CO2 and climate at his blog World of CO2. These are conversing in plain language apart from technical complexities. An example is above from the first four at the Youtube channel Conrad – The World of CO₂
This is a work in progress and more content is forthcoming, and he is hoping to get suggestions for future videos. Thanks Raymond for opening up a new form of communicating about these matters.
Podcast #423, 8/25/26: Ron Clutz continues a three-part framework on climate change: humans cause warming, warming is dangerous, and government can stop it. He argues observed warming can be explained by post–Little Ice Age recovery plus multidecadal oscillations and solar-orbital effects, and says “alarmists” deny these. He describes a taxpayer-funded “climate scare machine” and cites a Climate Change Business Journal estimate of a $3.4T/year global climate industry. Using Joseph D’Aleo’s materials, he disputes claims about heatwaves, storms, droughts, wildfires, ice loss, ocean acidification, health, and food, then focuses on Arctic sea ice cycles and sea-level model projections versus tide gauges. He stresses climate is local (Köppen zones) and says climate policies are wasteful, ineffective, and harmful, citing project failures, costs, and energy poverty.
Note: Clicking on a red link above will download a pptx presentation file which can be opened in powerpoint or compatible application. Once opened, select the slide show menu and then “from current slide”, which will be the first one. The slides will then be full screen, and some with gif images will display the animations.
You can also view these pptx files online for free at GroupDocsViewer. When the file opens there, click on “Present” for full screen display including animations.
Podcast #423, 8/25/26: Ron Clutz continues a three-part framework on climate change: humans cause warming, warming is dangerous, and government can stop it. He argues observed warming can be explained by post–Little Ice Age recovery plus multidecadal oscillations and solar-orbital effects, and says “alarmists” deny these. He describes a taxpayer-funded “climate scare machine” and cites a Climate Change Business Journal estimate of a $3.4T/year global climate industry. Using Joseph D’Aleo’s materials, he disputes claims about heatwaves, storms, droughts, wildfires, ice loss, ocean acidification, health, and food, then focuses on Arctic sea ice cycles and sea-level model projections versus tide gauges. He stresses climate is local (Köppen zones) and says climate policies are wasteful, ineffective, and harmful, citing project failures, costs, and energy poverty.
Note: Clicking on a red link above will download a pptx presentation file which can be opened in powerpoint or compatible application. Once opened, select the slide show menu and then “from current slide”, which will be the first one. The slides will then be full screen, and some with gif images will display the animations.
You can also view these pptx files online for free at GroupDocsViewer. When the file opens there, click on “Present” for full screen display including animations.
The Davos crowd? European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen didn’t mention the climate even once in her 2026 annual address—unlike in the past.
U.S. voters? Americans rank climate change at number 28 of 30 problems, and according to the Searchlight Institute, voters in battleground states are prioritizing pocketbook issues over climate.
Canada? Prime Minister Mark Carney once championed radical climate policies but now wants to increase oil production.
The Europeans? After worrying intensely about climate change for a decade, they have other things to worry about: sky-high energy prices, low growth and the war in Ukraine. In their latest ranking, climate hit a new decade low.
How about global warming poster child Greta Thunberg? She has moved on to other causes.
Certainly, not people in poorer countries. They’re primarily concerned about the necessities of life — health, food and education. According to a recent survey of Africans, climate ranks near the bottom of their priorities, at number 31 of 34. That’s behind unemployment, the economy, health, education, poverty, roads, electricity, hunger, and corruption.
Even media outlets that once peddled climate alarm have backed off. According to a Washington Post analysis, 2025 saw the fewest media mentions of climate change in three years.
What led to this global change of mind? How could so many people
be so worried just a few years ago, and care so much less now?
First, everyone has started to realize that there are many other challenges in the world.
After the end of the Cold War, people claimed that climate change was the last big challenge to fix. That was a common idea at Davos and among many global leaders. Now, everyone recognizes that climate change is just one of many issues: wars, budget deficits, immigration pressures, declining educational achievements, artificial intelligence, and demographic changes are just a few.
Second,you can only cry wolf so many times.
How many “the end is nigh” predictions over the last 50 years?
One peer-reviewed study counted at least 78 specific claims, like when King Charles insisted that the world only had 18 months left to fix climate change. That was in 2019. So, that statement was wrong. And every statement by every well-known climate alarmist that has been resolved by 2026 turned out to be wrong. Not to mention when Al Gore told us in 2008 we only had 10 years left.
Third, climate policies are incredibly expensive and do little.
The world has spent more than 16 trillion dollars to curb climate change, and governments are lookingto spend hundreds of trillions more in the future.
A Science study of 1,500 climate policies in 41 countries across the last two decades showed that only 4% worked. In total, they cut less than a quarter of one percent of total emissions. If a private company had this kind of record, they’d be out of business.
Fourth, the alarmist claims are often blatantly misleading. When you’re told that sea level rise could force 187 million people to move, that claim unrealistically assumes nobody will do anything to address the problem for a century. But when people adapt — for example, by building levies — that number goes down 99.8%.
The Dutch solution to floods: live with water, don’t fight it. The same thing applies to climate change.
We’re constantly told more people will die from heat waves. But nobody ever reveals that the cold kills many more. Right now, warming temperatures actually save lives. And of course, when there’s cheap and reliable power, more people can afford air conditioning. As the US warmed in the 20th century, heat deaths declined significantly, exactly for that reason.
Climate economists have consistently shown that by the end of the century, climate change will cost 2-3% of global GDP. It is a real problem, but nowhere near Armageddon.
In fact, as the UN expects the average person to be 450% richer in 2100, climate change simply means it is going to feel like we’re ‘only’ 435% richer than now. That’s still a much better world — just not quite as good as it could have been.
We still need to fix climate change, but we can do so smarter. Don’t pour trillions into policies that don’t move the needle, but billions into green energy R&D. This will help develop cheap green energy alternatives that can eventually outcompete fossil fuels on price.
Ending the climate panic means our kids won’t be needlessly scared, and neither will we. Being frightened without reason doesn’t lead to smart policies.
Rather, we can start focusing more on the many other pressing problems we need to fix now. Putting the climate panic behind us makes that possible.
I’m Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and author of False Alarm, for Prager University.
There have been various reports, including some reposted here, about the Climate Crisis narrative losing its grip on the public and leaders. Signs the fad is waning include some advocates like Bill Gates recanting, ESG financiers like Larry Fink backtracking, falling media coverage and closure of some climate units, and the recent admission of implausible climate model scenarios.
Even so, there are still many in its thrall, and it’s important to understand how climate doomster culture took over and continues to demand attention and deference. Garry Rogers provides a brief and insightful analysis of how this happened, and why its influence is rightfully dwindling. His blog article is Why So Many People Fall For The Climate Crisis Narrative. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and some added images.
You’ve seen them. Earnest young activists shouting at clouds, gluing themselves to museum walls, and blocking traffic with coroplast signs warning that the world will end in twelve years unless we obey their vision of salvation—complete with windmills, solar panels, and vegan diets. They’re the same people Xing and Instagramming about carbon footprints from their iPhones made in Chinese factories run on sulphur and lignite coal-fired electricity.
It’s easy to dismiss them as naive or misguided, but the uncomfortable truth is this: many of these people are neither stupid nor insane. They are simply caught in a powerful psychological, cultural, and financial machine that has turned “climate change” into a form of religious belief—a doctrine too sacred to question and too profitable to abandon.
Let’s set something straight. I’m not a climate change denier. Climate change is real. The Earth’s climate has always changed. And it always will—human-contributed through emitted greenhouse gas or not.
But the apocalyptic narrative that dominates headlines, policy, and corporate strategy today isn’t just about facts. It’s about framing—about controlling how people think, feel, and act in relation to a deeply complex system they barely understand. And that makes the climate crisis one of the most successful psychological operations in modern history.
In this post, we’ll take a hard look at why so many people have bought in—blindly and without skepticism—to the idea that we’re on the brink of planetary collapse, and that the only solution is top-down control, mass compliance, and the destruction of energy systems that built the modern world.
Some of what I’m going to say may be uncomfortable to some, and I know some
will unsubscribe. But that doesn’t make it untrue, and this needs to be said.
The Climate Crisis as a Religion (aka The Church of Carbon)
First, let’s call it what it is. For a growing number of people—especially in the West (Europe particularly included)—the climate crisis has become a belief system. It functions just like a fundamentalist religion, complete with original sin (industrialization), prophets (Greta, Gore, Gates), sacred texts (IPCC reports), rituals (recycling, carbon offsets), heretics (climate skeptics), and a promised apocalypse for those who fail to convert.
It’s not about science anymore. It’s about meaning. People—especially young people raised in secular cultures—are starving for purpose. They want to feel morally righteous, socially important, and part of a grand, redemptive story. The climate narrative offers all of that in a tidy, emotionally satisfying package. It turns ordinary people into saviors. It makes them matter. You can’t underestimate how powerful that is.
Fear is the Fuel
The second driver is fear. For decades, we’ve been bombarded with doom-laden, global-warming headlines: ice caps melting, oceans rising, hurricanes and tornados worsening, apocalyptical flooding, forests burning, deserts parching… The messaging is relentless—and expertly crafted to trigger our limbic systems. When people are afraid, they don’t reason. They react.
This isn’t new. Back in the 1970s, experts warned of an imminent ice age. Then came acid rain. Then ozone depletion. Each time, the world was supposed to end unless we handed over more power to government, more money to NGOs, and more control to unelected technocrats.
It’s always the same pattern:
Declare a crisis.
Blame human behavior.
Offer a sweeping solution that just happens to consolidate control.
The only difference now is scale. The climate crisis is global,
not regional. And the proposed solutions are systemic, not marginal.
The Collapse of Critical Thinking
But fear alone doesn’t explain the blind belief. There’s another piece of the puzzle: the steady erosion of critical thinking. Schools no longer teach logic, debate, or how to evaluate competing hypotheses. Instead, they promote conformity, activism, and groupthink. You don’t learn how to think. You learn what to think.
By the time students hit university, the programming is complete. Professors reinforce the dogma. Campus culture punishes dissent. Climate change isn’t a topic for exploration—it’s a moral litmus test. Students who question it risk grades, reputation, or worse. Being cancelled.
So, they comply. They absorb. They repeat. And when they graduate into journalism, academia, NGOs, or politics, they carry that unexamined belief system with them—passing it on like gospel.
The Media Echo Chamber
The next layer is media. Legacy outlets like CNN, BBC, CBC, and the New York Times frame climate change in religious terms: “Climate emergency,” “existential threat,” “code red for humanity.” Any nuance is treated as heresy. Any questioning is framed as denialism.
Science itself has been rebranded. Instead of a method of inquiry, it’s now a set of conclusions—conveniently aligned with elite interests. The phrase “The science is settled” is a dead giveaway. No real scientist would ever say that.
Meanwhile, dissenting voices—many with serious credentials—are marginalized, shadowbanned, or censored outright. Their data doesn’t fit the narrative. Their views make people uncomfortable. So, they are erased.
And most people? They never notice.They assume if something was true, they’d hear about it. But when every channel is playing the same tune, they don’t realize they’re listening to a carefully curated soundtrack.
Social Conformity and Virtue Signaling
But here’s the deeper truth. Most people don’t believe the climate crisis because they’ve studied the data. They believe it because everyone else does. That’s the power of social conformity. Nobody wants to be the outlier—the one who raises their hand and asks the uncomfortable question. Especially in a culture obsessed with virtue. Believing in the climate crisis is a modern form of moral signaling. You drive a Tesla. You compost. You use a keep-cup. You care. You’re not like those backward Boomer-deniers who love oil and hate penguins.
You’re evolved
You’re ethical
You’re better
That’s what this has become—not a conversation about climate,
but a competition for social status.
And once belief becomes part of your identity, it becomes non-negotiable. Any challenge feels like a personal attack. Facts don’t matter. Feelings do.
Follow the Money
Now let’s talk about power.
The climate industry is worth trillions—yes, trillions of dollars. It’s the perfect grift: a never-ending crisis that justifies endless funding, regulation, and surveillance.
Governments rake in carbon taxes.
Universities secure research grants.
Corporations get ESG ratings and subsidies.
NGOs fundraise on fear.
It’s an entire ecosystem of incentives,none of which reward skepticism or moderation. And when that much money is on the table, the truth becomes secondary to the narrative.
Even energy companies play along. They don’t want to be regulated out of existence, so they slap green labels on their products and talk about “net zero” while quietly hedging their bets. It’s theater. Everyone’s pretending. But the costs are real.
China’s Role in the Global Equation
While the West ties itself in knots trying to decarbonize, one country is playing a different game entirely: China
Beijing talks green, but burns black. Coal remains its dominant energy source, powering steel, manufacturing, and military growth at a staggering scale. As of 2024, China alone consumes over half the world’s coal supply—and shows no sign of slowing down.
They’re not stupid. While we argue over wind farms and carbon credits,
they build aircraft carriers, drones, and power grids.
While we teach kids to fear climate collapse,
they teach theirs to master engineering and geopolitics.
They make the solar panels we install. They mine the rare earths we need. They profit from the very policies we impose on ourselves. And we call that progress.
Weaponized Guilt
So why don’t people wake up?
Because they’ve been trained to feel guilty. Every gas-guzzling SUV trip, every propane-grilled burger, every jet-fueled flight—is framed as a moral failing. You’re killing the planet. You’re harming future generations. You’re part of the problem. It’s exhausting, and it’s effective.
People internalize this guilt. They try to cleanse themselves through ritualistic consumption: reusable straws, oat milk, biodegradable trash bags, canvas totes at the farmer’s market. None of it makes an infatismal sub-fraction of a surface dent in global emissions—but it feels redemptive.
That’s the point. It’s not about fixing the planet. It’s about managing the soul.
The Useful Idiots
Now we come to the crux.
The term “useful idiot” originated in Soviet times. It referred to Western sympathizers who unknowingly supported the goals of a regime they didn’t understand. They weren’t evil—just naive, manipulated, and eager to be on the “right side of history.”
That’s where we are today. Millions of well-meaning people have been seduced by a narrative that exploits their fears, flatters their vanity, and blinds them to the larger game at play. They march, post, and protest—believing they’re saving the world, while unwittingly aiding those who want to dominate it.
They’re not villains. They’re pawns. And when you try to wake-the-wokes, they look at you like you’re the crazy one. Then they viscerally turn on you.
What’s At Stake
Here’s what’s really at stake. If we continue down this path, we don’t just risk economic collapse or energy poverty. We risk civilizational suicide. We are dismantling the very systems—energy, industry, sovereignty—that made the modern world possible.
And we’re doing it not for the planet, but for appearances.
Meanwhile, the nations that reject this ideology are gaining power, leverage, and independence. They’re not afraid to use fossil fuels while experimenting with futuristics. They’re not ashamed of their ambitions. And they’re not held hostage by narratives designed to make them feel guilty for existing.
They’re playing to win. We’re playing to look virtuous. That’s a losing hand.
So, what do we do?
First, stop apologizing. There is no shame in using energy. Civilization runs on it. Human flourishing depends on energy, regardless of how it’s generated. Without it, we return to darkness—literally and figuratively.
Second, think for yourself. Ask questions. Follow incentives. Trace the money. Be skeptical of anything presented as a one-sided moral truth.
Third, reclaim courage. Don’t be afraid to speak the truth, even when it’s unpopular. Especially when it’s unpopular. History doesn’t remember those who went along to get along. It remembers those who stood up, pointed at the naked emperor, and said, “This is madness.”
And finally, understand this: We are not in a climate crisis. We are in a clarity crisis. Clarity—real, hard-won, human clarity—is the first step back to sanity.
The next time someone tells you the world is ending, ask who’s funding the message—and what they’re selling with it. Because if you look closely, you’ll find it’s not about saving the planet. It’s about controlling the people on the planet by getting them to fall for the climate crisis narrative.
Charles MacKay: “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
Roger Pielke Jr. has created a monitor at his THB (The Honest Broker) blog applying scientific and statistical rigor to detection of US Extreme Weather and Climate Change. All the details and methodology are provided in his blog post US Extreme Weather and Climate Change Dashboard.
Overview
The THB US Extreme Weather and Climate Change Dashboard follows the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) framework for detecting a change in climate in the context of internal variability. This dashboard tracks 32 variables associated with 7 types of extremes: heat waves, tornadoes, flooding, drought, winter storms, wildfire, and hurricanes. The site presents data for the full range of data judged to be of sufficient quality for trend analysis, and on each page for each phenomena, users can choose the time frame over which to observe the data. This is ongoing work in progress – Suggestions welcome!
Detecting a change in climate is not the same as spotting a trend in a time series — it’s demonstrating that a trend is unlikely to have arisen from natural internal variability by chance alone. Here that means two things:
♦ First, detecting a trend at IPCC’s stated example threshold of below 10% (via the nonparametric Mann-Kendall test).
♦ Second, because a long, low-noise record can show a statistically significant trend as a result of internal variability, this dashboard adds another check before identifying a detected change: the trend’s magnitude must also be a meaningful share (this site’s threshold: at least 25%) of the variable’s historical variability. A trend can be identified in a time series and still not count as a detected change here for that reason: flooding’s trend, for example, is statistically real (p=0.011) but is only about 4% of its typical week-to-week range, and not at all unexpected.
This combined standard — IPCC’s likelihood criterion plus this site’s
magnitude check on trends — is what “detected change” means.
Each tile above shows a variable’s reliable-trend-window data at a glance and its detected-change verdict — click through to that variable’s phenomenon page for the full interactive chart, an adjustable time window, PNG/CSV downloads, and alternative metrics. Full definitions and caveats are documented on the Methodology page. A side-by-side comparison of how IPCC AR6 has characterized each hazard, and how it compares to this site’s findings, can be found on the Detection & Attribution page.
Detection and Attribution
This dashboard focuses only on detection, following the IPCC’s own framework for detecting a change in climate. The IPCC’s definitions are below (Glossary, AR5/AR6/SR15, “Detection and Attribution”), and are applied throughout this site.
Climate: “The average weather, or more rigorously, the statistical description in terms of the mean and variability of relevant quantities over a period of time ranging from months to thousands or millions of years.”
Climate change: “A change in the state of the climate that can be identified (e.g., by using statistical tests) by changes in the mean and/or the variability of its properties, and that persists for an extended period, typically decades or longer.”
Detection: “The process of demonstrating that climate or a system affected by climate has changed in some defined statistical sense, without providing a reason for that change. An identified change is detected in observations if its likelihood of occurrence by chance due to internal variability alone is determined to be small, for example, <10%.”
Attribution: “The process of evaluating the relative contributions of multiple causal factors to a change or event with a formal assessment of confidence.” This dashboard performs detection only — it does not attempt attribution, which requires separate causal/model-based analysis this project hasn’t undertaken.
Energy in Depth (EID) reports on climate litigation falling cases in the current year, leading up to a major SCOTUS hearing later this year. Most recent article is Maryland’s Climate Lawsuits Quietly Hit a Dead End. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
In 2018, climate activists hailed Baltimore’s lawsuit against energy companies as “the next in a growing wave” of climate liability lawsuits. Eight years later, that wave has crashed in Maryland.
For the climate litigation campaign, that silence is telling. These cases were once promoted as part of coordinated legal strategy to force energy companies to pay for global climate change through local courts. Instead, Maryland’s highest court delivered one of the campaign’s clearest defeats yet – rejecting the lawsuits from top to bottom.
A Major Problem for the National Campaign
Maryland’s final defeat comes at a critical moment. The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear an appealof the Colorado Supreme Court’s refusal to dismiss Boulder’s climate lawsuit. When granting review, the Court also asked the parties to brief whether it has jurisdiction to review the ruling at this stage in the litigation.
The Maryland Supreme Court’s now final decision answers that question.
In the Maryland Supreme Court’s ruling, the justices were explicit about why: they wanted to give SCOTUS:
“the benefit of a high court’s analysis that is different from that expressed by our colleagues on the high courts of Colorado and Hawaii.”
This created a clear split between Maryland’s Supreme Court and state supreme courts in Colorado and Hawaii that ruled against the companies. Now, SCOTUS has clear jurisdiction to review the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling and has an opportunity to put an end to the nationwide lawfare campaign against the U.S. energy industry.
Maryland Double Whammy: Dismissed on Federal Grounds – and State Grounds Too
Writing on behalf of the 6-1 majority, Justice Brynja M. Booth delivered a clean sweep against every theory the climate litigation campaign has thrown at the courts – ruling that these claims fail under federal law, and under state law too.
The court firmly dismissed plaintiffs’ attempts to reframe their sweeping federal claims as local matters, making clear that such claims fall squarely within the domain of federal law:
“We are unpersuaded by the local governments’ myopic view of their claims or their attempt to ignore or minimize the effect that a significant damages award would have on both domestic and international attempts to regulate pollution—matters which are solely within the purview of federal law.” (Emphasis added)
The court was equally clear that local governments lack the basic jurisdictional authority to police global conduct:
“The local governments cannot escape this inescapable conclusion: they are seeking to apply Maryland law to regulate conduct that occurs outside their jurisdictional borders, as well as within the State’s borders. The local governments’ police powers do not extend beyond their respective borders, and certainly do not authorize the policing of global conduct.” (Emphasis added)
But the majority didn’t stop at federal preemption. It ruled that even if federal law didn’t preempt these claims entirely, the plaintiffs still had no case. Their nuisance, trespass, and failure-to-warn theories each failed independently under Maryland state law, leaving plaintiffs with no viable path forward in any court:
“Even if the local governments’ state law claims were not displaced or preempted by federal law, the local governments failed to state legally cognizable claims under state law for public nuisance, private nuisance, trespass, and negligent and strict liability failure to warn.”
The opinion also delivered a direct rebuke to the plaintiffs’ core liability theory: that the production and sale of oil and natural gas is a liability-inducing event:
“No single extraction decision, no single sale of fuel, and no single consumer transaction creates a foreseeable risk of harm to any identifiable person.”
That language echoes warnings from other courts. In South Carolina, a judge dismissed Charleston’s climate lawsuit by flagging the same problem: accepting plaintiffs’ theory would open the door to “boundless” liability.
Climate superfund bills–Retroactive Punishment with a Misnomer Name
Climate superfund bills – which are designed and pushed by the same activists behind the litigation campaign against oil and gas companies – have been introduced in over ten states and signed into law in two, Vermont and New York. These state superfund laws are now facing steep legal challengesfrom industry groups, other state attorney generals, and the Trump administration.
One of the sharpest concerns raised during the panel was the constitutional flaw at the core of these bills: retroactive liability. Climate superfund laws aim to penalize decades of past activity – activity that was lawful and, in many cases, encouraged by government policy. As GMU Professor Donald Kochan explained:
“If every time you lose in court and can’t actually prove that someone is responsible… you just go to the legislature and say, ‘Hey, why don’t you deem them responsible without any proof’—that’s a really dangerous change and shift in our Democratic and Republican values.”
This approach raises due process concerns and opens the door to politicized, retroactive punishment across a range of industries, not just energy.
Experts also pushed back on the “superfund” label, calling it a misleading analogy. The EPA’s original superfund program, also known as CERCLA, pooled funds for cleanup at specific contaminated sites. But, as Kochan pointed out, unlike hazardous waste, climate change is a global issue with no discrete damage sites or direct remediation:
“There’s all kinds of reasons why these are not Superfunds. One is that there’s nothing remediated here… These labels were done for convenience sake, to make it sound like it wasn’t such a deviation from norms to do this kind of thing.”
Instead of remediation, the real purpose seems to be punitive: to create a system of endless liability that ultimately puts fossil fuel companies out of business.
Consumer Costs and Chilling Investment
Even if courts eventually strike these laws down, their economic effects will be felt immediately. C3 Solutions’ Ian Banks noted that companies are already reconsidering development plans in states that have proposed climate superfund laws, and that hesitation impacts consumers:
“These companies are going to have to pay billions of dollars… It’s going to discourage them from continuing to take action in these states. And likely, these costs will get passed on to consumers.”
This dynamic is playing out in real-time in California. As EID Climate previously commented, California’s own climate superfund effort stalled earlier this year after lawmakers raised red flags about affordability and fairness. Still, California has seen a policy-driven exodus of energy companies and infrastructure, contributing to its high gas prices. This outcome suggests that even in deep-blue states, reality catches up to rhetoric when bills come due.
The Role of Attribution Science
One of the pillars supporting climate superfund legislation is a relatively new theory: source attribution science, which claims to link specific weather disasters to individual companies’ historical emissions. Kochan noted that this theory has yet to withstand courtroom scrutiny:
“We’ve not yet gotten to the trial stage in any of these cases… because plaintiffs haven’t yet had to prove traceability, causation, and harm. But when we do, the scientific evidence standards should keep this science out.”
Professor Weinkle, who holds a PhD in Environmental Studies and Public Policy, added that source attribution research is increasingly shaped by litigation and advocacy goals, instead of neutral science – a dynamic that undermines its credibility in policy contexts.
The Writing Was on the Wall
Lawmakers in Maryland have long seen the signs that this climate litigation lacks legal merit. Recognizing this, they pivoted, joining New York and Vermont in pursuit ofRockefeller-funded “climate superfund” efforts that retroactively charge energy companies for the costs of climate adaptation projects.
Even those superfund efforts in Maryland have faced hurdles. Maryland’s own climate superfund bill was downgraded to a study amid bipartisan concern about the impact on energy affordability. That pivot reveals the basic problem. If activists cannot get courts to impose sweeping climate liability through nuisance, trespass, and failure-to-warn claims, they will try to get legislatures to impose the same costs by another name.
But Maryland shows both paths face serious legal, fiscal, and affordability concerns.
Bottom Line: Despite activist promises, Maryland’s climate lawsuits have quietly joined the growing list of failed attempts to bankrupt the U.S. energy industry. The Maryland Supreme Court’s ruling also came at the perfect time, as the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments in Boulder’s similar climate lawsuit.
