The climate house of cards is collapsing, as became clear last week at the IPCC meeting in Ethiopia. The climate narrative has never had any substance, and now that the flow of funding is being cut off, there will soon be nothing left, says Wim Röst, Chair of the Clintel Board.
What exactly did we just see happening in Ethiopia? The IPCC, the UN Climate Panel (a self-appointed organisation), was meeting there with representatives from 195 countries to prepare for what was supposed to be a major UN climate summit in 2028. In principle, a new IPCC assessment report (the seventh) was to be produced prior to that summit, but there was no funding and no agreement, not even on the report’s publication date.
Google AI Mode described the conclusion of the summit in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, as follows:
“An unprecedentedly fierce political battle raged throughout the week over the timeline for the seventh major climate report (AR7).
♦ Proponents of urgency (including European countries and island states): Want the report to be fully completed by 2028 at the latest. This is crucial to serve as the scientific basis for the important UN climate summit (Global Stocktake) in that same year.
♦ Opponents (including Saudi Arabia, China, India and Russia): Called for a delay until 2029. Officially, they argue that poorer countries need more time to contribute, but behind the scenes it is believed that this is an attempt to reduce the political pressure on the fossil fuel industry.
As IPCC decisions must be taken by full consensus, the outstanding issues regarding the timeline and the budget could not be resolved. The meeting will resume at a yet-to-be-determined date, as soon as possible, to continue the discussion.”
As long as there is still some money left, there will undoubtedly be a follow-up, and 195 delegations will once again fly to a central location to solve ‘the enormous climate problem’ that is ‘entirely caused by fossil fuels’.
This year’s Gulf crisis demonstrated that we cannot do without ‘fossil fuels’. Iran’s blocking of shipping lanes brought the supply of oil and gas ‘to a standstill’, resulting in massive price rises and shortages. Countries such as India, Pakistan and Bangladesh had to use their scarce energy supplies for purposes other than fertiliser production. Their urea plants use natural gas as a raw material to produce the nitrogen-based fertiliser that is indispensable to their agriculture. Without this fertiliser, their agricultural production collapses, with immediate consequences for food prices and food security for tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people.
To enlarge, open image in new tab.
Numerous other factories that rely on ‘fossil fuels’ to produce essential goods also ran into difficulties, and the least of the consequences was massive price rises. In such a situation, the poorest countries and the poorest populations are left behind, and this quickly amounts to a few billion people.
The Gulf War brought to light the utter impossibility of ‘Net Zero’. This is the deeper context of the current conflict within the IPCC. What was being pursued is completely impossible, quite apart from the widespread doubts about its necessity. No one can ignore it any longer: actually, stopping the production of all fossil fuels means nothing other than a ‘Zero Economy’.
And that is why the climate house of cards is now collapsing.
This is the fifth and final post of a series to alert readers to a compilation of the scientific and economic case against the claims of IPCC supporters and anti-fossil fuel activists. David Stockman provides the evidence and the arguments against the IPCC policy framework in a series of five essays published at International Man under the title The GreenMageddon and What It Means for You. I have stated the five themes he develops in his essays, along with some excerpts and images to illustrate the main points. Here is the Fifth theme overview and discussion.
5. GreenMageddon is no hyperbole. It’s is the virtually certain outcome of attempting to purge CO2 emissions from a modern energy system and economy that literally breathes and exhales fossilized carbon.
Indeed, the very idea of converting today’s economy to an alternative energy respiratory system is so far beyond rational possibility as to defy common sense. Yet that is exactly where the COP26 powers that be and their megaphones in the MSM are leading us.
In Truth, Green Energy is Overrated and Supplies Little of the Energy We Use
In the first place, it needs be understood that the climate change advocates essentially lie about how much “green energy” we now use and therefore the scope for energy supply system displacement of fossil fuels which would be required to get to net zero CO2 emissions by 2050.
For instance, it is commonly claimed that 12% of US primary energy consumption (2020) is accounted for by “renewables”, implying that we are off to a decent start in eliminating the fossil fuel dependency of the system.
Actually, no—not even close. That’s because “renewables” and green energy defined as solar and wind are not remotely the same thing.
According to DOE, the US consumed 11.6 quads (quadrillion BTUs) of renewables in 2020, but 7.3 quads or 63% of that was accounted for by old-style non-fossil fuels including:
Hydroelectric: 2.6 quads;
Wood: 2.5 quads;
Biofuels: 2.0 quads;
Geothermal: 0.2 quads
Of course, there is nothing wrong with these non-fossil fuels and in some cases they can be quite efficient. But they are not part of the “green solution” to displace some or all of the 73 quads of fossil fuels consumed in 2020 because most of these sources are tapped out or not desirable to expand.
We have already seen, for instance, that hydroelectric—which was a favorite of the New Deal back in the 1930s—was tapped out long ago. Up to 80% of the long rivers in the US are already damned, and environmentalists haven’t permitted a new major hydroelectric project in decades. In fact, hydro-electric output of 291 billion kWh in 2020 was well below the peak level of 356 billion kWh recorded in 1997 and was even exceeded by the 304 kWh generated way back in 1974.
Nor do we hear the Climate Howlers beating the tom-toms for the original source of modern BTUs— more wood combustion! Actually, theyadvocate the opposite: Massive tree-planting as “offsets” to carbon emissions.
Likewise, most of the 2.0 quads attributable to biofuels is accounted for by ethanol produced from fermented corn. Yet any material increase in ethanol consumption—via higher mandated blending with gasoline—would likely wreck most of the IC engines on the highways, while turning the vast food production expanses of Iowa and Nebraska into fuel farms.
Finally, consider the implicit lesson in the small amount of consumption—0.2 quads—attributable to geothermal energy. As it happens, geothermal electricity is about as close to a perfect source of renewable energy as you can get, as one analysts recently noted, but there is a huge catch:
So why isn’t there more of it?
Because there wasn’t much of it to begin with. While renewable energy sources like wind and solar are exploitable to a greater or lesser extent almost everywhere, high-temperature geothermal resources are found only there is a coincidence of high heat flow and favorable hydrology, and…..these coincidences occur only in a few places.
Which Leaves Wind and Solar, Which Leaves a Lot to be Desired
This gets us to the only so-called “renewables” which are actually expandable at scale—-solar and wind. As to the former, it needs be noted that US consumption during 2020 amounted to only 1.2 quads, or less than half of the primary energy supplied by wood (including a small amount of industrial consumption of bio-waste such at pulp mills etc.).
That’s right. After decades of big time subsidies and endless government promotion, solar is still eclipsed by the fuel first used by cavemen!
The problem with wind power, however, is no less prohibitive. In the case of the 3.0 quads of primary energy attributed to wind in 2020, virtually 100% was used by utilities to generate electricity for the grid. Accordingly, only 90% of that wind energy ever makes it to a home, industrial plant or EV auto. The difference is accounted for by BTUs lost in downstream transmission and distribution lines (T&D losses). And when you add the fact that 64% of primary solar consumption was also used by electric utilities and also suffered T&D losses, you get a truly startling fact.
To wit, only 3.4 quads of solar and wind energy actually generated net electrical power to end users in the US economy in 2020.
In turn, that tiny figure represents only 4.9% of the 69.7 quads of net energy from all fuels (after deducting utility system waste from all fuel sources) used by the entire US economy in 2020. Yet even that tiny fraction was an artifact of the massive government subsidies which have been thrown at the two green fuels.
In the case of wind power, for example, there is a Federal subsidy of 2.5 cents per kWh, which happens to represent 69% of the average wholesale price for wind power, plus a 30% investment tax credit for the original installation of wind farm CapEx. Then again, no one charges for the wind—so wind power is massively capital intensive with CapEx representing 70% of lifetime wind power costs, meaning that another 21% of the cost of power is funded by Uncle Sucker.
Green Energy is fraught with obstacles and risks.
Still, the question recurs. How do you get to, say, a 50% replacement of fossil fuels with green energy by 2035, which would be the minimum path to net zero CO2 emissions by 2050—even assuming still more wasteful Joe Biden subsidies than we already have?
In a word, you don’t. That because even a surface investigation takes you smack into the unacknowledged elephant in the green energy room. To wit, the only practical way to deliver wind and solar to the end use sectors of the economy is through massive conversion of green BTUs to electricity and the distribution of them through the leaky power grid.
Needless to say, that process would be fraught with obstacles and risks that the Climate Howlers never even remotely acknowledge. In fact, as we will show below, to convert even 50% of current fossil fuel consumption to wind and solar, would require a near doubling of total primary energy consumption in the utility sector from the 35.7 quads reported for 2020 to nearly 66 quads by 2035.
More crucially, the 10.6% share of utility primary energy or 3.8 quads posted in 2020 for solar and wind would rise to nearly 67% and 44.0 quads by 2035 (see calculations below). That is to say, solar and wind production would have to rise by nearly 12-fold over the next 15 years. And the cost of subsidies to make it happen (including drastically rising retail utility prices to consumers) would be truly staggering
Now, here’s the thing. Given the inherent intermittency and unreliability of solar and wind energy, the electric grid would become dangerously more fragile and subject to brown-outs and blackouts during periods of peak demand and low solar/wind production. That’s because when you take out half or about 11 quads of fossil energy now used by the electric utility industry you are removing baseload capacity which is essentially available 100% of the time, save for scheduled maintenance and very occasional unplanned interruptions.
By contrast, when two-thirds of the grid is powered by solar and wind as we have projected for 2035 under the COP26’s net zero regime, you have fundamentally transformed the nature of the electric power system. There would essentially be no baseload power supply left, meaning that the system would have to be equipped with massive pumped-hydro, compressed air or battery storage facilities to back-fill for no wind or sun days— plus meet time of day and seasonal demand surges, which would get far more severe when nearly the entire economy gets electrified, as further explained below.
The problem, of course, is the production of electrical power so that it can be stored and drawn-down later is inherently inefficient and a BTU waster. That’s especially the case, with pumped storage, the only practical idea for large scale system storage and back-up. Of course, what that solution does is burn a lot of BTUs pumping water uphill to a reservoir—so that the sluice-gates can be opened to regenerate the very same hydroelectric power when needed at a latter date.
Overall, it is estimated that the range of available storage solutions would result in a 10-40% dissipation of the primary green energy supplied to the utility system. So not only would massive costs be incurred to finance power storage, but the loss of BTUs in the storage loading and extraction process would require even more primary green energy capacity to make up for the wasted BTUs!
Thus, if the energy loss owing to storage systems for 32.2 quads of incremental solar and wind conservatively averages 25%, another 8 quads of solar and wind primary capacity would be needed to supply projected 2035 power requirements. That is, by 2035 utility system would need 44 quads of solar and wind or 11.5-times more capacity than its actual green power output in 2020.
For want of doubt, first consider the implications of shifting 50% of fossil fuels used in the transportation sector to solar and wind fueled electrical power production. During 2020, the transportation sector used 24.23 quads of primary energy, of which fossil fuels—petroleum products and natural gas—supplied 22.85 quads or 94% of the total.
It’s also not the half of it. When you switch to EV vehicles and and distribution of 3X more quads of energy through the utility system you are also creating havoc with load management. That’s because travel surges around holidays create peak loads that drastically exceed day-in-and-day-out levels. In the case of air travel, for instance, during a typical year revenue passenger miles in July are equal to nearly 140% of the level for the seasonal low in February.
Just imagine a hot but cloudy and windless July 4th. The normal air-conditioning and commercial demand surge would be over-layed with a huge fleet of EVs on the holiday roads and hitting the charging stations with relentless effect. This year, for instance, an record 47 million travelers hit the road on the July 4th weekend.
Of course, that is not a problem for the existing motor fuel supply system. Average demand is about 9 million b/d, but motor fuel stocks range between 220 and 260 million bbls—plus another estimated rolling inventory of 50 million barrels in the tanks of the nation’s 285 million vehicles. So with upwards of 300 million bbls or 33 days of supply in the system, peak load fluctuations are readily absorbed by the system.
Needless to say, electrical power is another breed of cat.
It can’t be stored as produced. As indicated above, production must always meet instantaneous demand or the grid will collapse. The only solution is to store dispatchable electric power in another form—pumped storage reservoirs or batteries, and that’s damn expensive.
Moreover, unlike the vastly de-centralized motor fuel stocks which are efficiently market-driven, creating a massive system-wide dispatchable surplus on the utility grid for peak EV demands would be a daunting task. After all, you would need about 140 million EVs on US roads versus today’s 1.4 million plug-in EVs to displace 50% of motor fuel demand.
Nor is the transportation sector unique. Currently the industrial sector accounts for 22.1 quads (2020) of primary energy demand, of which 19.7 quads are supplied by fossil fuels. Those fossil fuels supply various combustion equipment, IC engine driven power plants and machinery, as well as feed stocks for chemical processing industries.
The story only gets more complicated when you add-in the residential and commercial sector. For instance, the residential sector is already heavily electrified owing to the electrical powering of lights, air conditioning and household appliances. Consequently, while the household sector has primary energy demand of 6.54 quads, it actually uses 11.53 quads counting the 5 million quads of indirect energy consumption supplied through the electrical utility grid.
That is to say, the single most variable energy demand sector—America’s 130 million housing units—-would become virtually all electric. Fully 9.0 quads out of total residential energy demand of 12.0 quads (including current electrical power use) of consumption would be supplied by the electrical grid by 2035.
Would that fact create an even more egregious disconnect between unreliable solar and wind power on the fuel side of the electrical grid and variable demand on the user side?
Most surely it would. And that’s especially true when you add in the last two elements of the supply-demand picture. To wit, the commercial sector is growing at about 0.6% per annum, so by 2035 total primary use would be 5.3 quads and the incremental wind and solar requirement to replace half of current fossil fuels, which currently account for 88% of primary energy demand in the sector, would total 2.9 quads.
Finally, the baseline demand for primary energy in the utility sector itself is about 37.0 quads (2019) and it has not been growing for years. So on a 2035 projection, current fossil and non-fossil sources of utility energy would be as follows before giving account to the displacement shifts estimated above in the four end-use sectors of the economy. And this optimistically assumes no loss of nuclear or hydro capacity in the interim.
On an all-in basis, therefore, the implicit transformation of the utility sector would be staggering, and that would only get you half-way to zero net carbon by 2050. Here is the summary of what would be required in terms of total solar and wind capacity in the utility sector by 2035:
Current solar & wind: 3.8 quads;
transportation sector replacement: +8.5 quads;
residential sector replacement: +3.9 quads;
industrial sector replacement: +12.9 quads;
commercial sector replacement: +2.9 quads;
utility sector replacement: +4.0 quads;
back-up storage: +8.0 quads;
Total Solar & Wind, 2035: 44.0 quads;
Multiple of 2020 level: 11.6X
It goes without saying that the above is an economic train-wreck waiting to happen. You simply don’t go from 3.8 quads of solar and wind after decades of tepid gains to 44.0 quads in less than 15 years. Plain and simply, such a shift would take the US hostage to a centralized utility grid based energy respiratory system that would be dangerously unstable, imbalanced and subject to catastrophic black swan type events.
Summary
No electricity is stored in a grid; supply must match demand at all times, or it must shut down to save itself. Climatists want to electrify everything, especially heating and cars, thereby spiking and complicating demand. Meanwhile the plan is to increase intermittent and remote wind and solar plants, making supply unpredictable. Get ready to be stuck at home, freezing in the dark. That’s GreenMageddon.
Footnote
The diagram at the top indicates many dimensions of modern life that are not discussed in this series of posts. The short video above reminds that fossil fuels yield a plethora of ancillary byproducts that enhance and extend our lives; which will also be taken away by the Green agenda.
Summary of 5 Reasons to Resist GreenMaggedon
1. During the past 600 million years, the earth has rarely been as cool as at present, and almost never has it had as low CO2 concentrations as the 420 ppm level that today’s climate howlers decry.
2. During our Holocene epoch, for the past 11.6 thousand years, earth’s climate has changed often with multiple periods, both warmer and and cooler than the present. The modern warming period since 1850 was preceded by the Medieval, the Roman, and the Minoan warming periods–each was cooler than the previous, and all of them warmer than the present. The last 1.5C of warming has been a boon to human agriculture and civilization, and the next 1.5C is likely to also be beneficial.
3. Climatists weaponize natural events to gain social control for a global agenda. It’s About Power, Not Truth or Humanity.
4. Zero Carbon is suicidal because it requires cutting off essential energy supplies with nothing to replace them. Renewables can not keep pace with increasing electrical demand, let alone replace any baseload thermal power plants with wind or solar generation. Nor will hydro or nuclear power cover the losses from shuttering thermal power plants.
5. GreenMageddon is no hyperbole. It’s is the virtually certain outcome of attempting to purge CO2 emissions from a modern energy system and economy that literally breathes and exhales fossilized carbon.
This post is the fourth of five to alert readers to a compilation of the scientific and economic case against the claims of IPCC supporters and anti-fossil fuel activists. David Stockman provides the evidence and the arguments against the IPCC policy framework in a series of five essays published at International Man under the title The GreenMageddon and What It Means for You. I will state the five themes he develops in his essays, along with some excerpts and images to illustrate the main points. Here is the fourth theme overview and discussion.
4. Zero Carbon is suicidal because it requires cutting off essential energy supplies with nothing to replace them. Renewables can not keep pace with increasing electrical demand, let alone replace any baseload thermal power plants with wind or solar generation. Nor will hydro or nuclear power cover the losses from shuttering thermal power plants.
Overview
The chart below dramatically underscores why the CO2 witch-hunt is such a deadly threat to future prosperity and human welfare. To wit, even after decades of green energy promotion and huge subsidies from the state, renewables accounted for only 5% of primary global energy consumption in 2019 because:
They are still very un-competitve (high cost) relative to the installed base of fossil, nuclear and hydroelectric energy; and,
They do not really even account for the 5% share reflected in the chart in terms of ability to delivery work to the economy owing to intermittency of wind and solar power and the fact that by convention government scorekeepers gross-up renewables-based electrical power delivered to end-users to account for transmission and distribution (T&D) losses in the electric power grid.
By contrast, the 84% share attributed to oil, natural gas and coal is actually far larger in practical terms as we look into the future. That’s because most of the prime hydro sources have been tapped out long ago and are therefore not a meaningful source of growth. During the last 10 years, for example, US hydro-power output has only increased from 275 billion KWh to 288 billion KWh or by barely 0.24% per annum.
Likewise, nuclear power capacity outside of China stopped growing decades ago due to massive political and regulatory resistance. Germany, for example, is in the process of closing its last nuclear plants from a fleet that once generated 170,000 GW hours annually (2000) and is now generating only 75,000 GW hours, with a zero target by the year 2030. Even in the US, nuclear power remains dead in the water, with annual output rising from 754 billion KWh in 2000 to just 809 billion KWh in 2019.
Beyond that, the Climate Howlers are not talking about a gradual substitution of solar and wind for the three fossil based sources of primary energy as existing plants reach the end of their useful lives over the next 50 years.
To the contrary, zero net CO2 emissions targets for 2050 will require the massive early retirement and dismantlement of perfectly good power plants and tens of millions of internal combustion (IC) engine vehicles.
Closing Functional Power Plants is a Double Loss
The prospect of substituting green power for existing fossil fuel capacity over the next several decades is where the rubber meets the road. But to grasp the full extent of the impending calamity it is necessary to recall that Keynesian GDP accounting inherently obfuscates the true economic cost in a drastically downward direction.
In fact, Keynesian GDP accounting is just the modern iteration of Frederic Bastiat’s famous “broken window fallacy”. Gross capital spending gets added to the total of GDP with no offset for depreciation and asset write-offs. That’s why, we suppose, climate change activists get all giddy about the alleged economic growth benefits and job gains from green investment: They just don’t count all the assets wasted and jobs lost by shutting down efficient coal mines or fossil-fired utility plants.
Nor are we talking about small amounts. To come even close to the utterly ridiculous COP26 target of net zero emissions by 2050 literally tens of trillions worth of fossil-fired power plants, heating units, chemical processing plants and internal combustion engine vehicles would have to be decommissioned and taken out of service long before their ordinary useful economic lives had been reached.
Fossil fuel consumption in the electric power utility sector—the only sector where green energy has even made a dent—-has hardly declined at all.
What happened, instead, is that between 2000 and 2019, US coal and oil-fired generation dropped from 2,090 billion KWhs to 1,004 billion KWhs or by 52%, but that was nearly off-set by a huge jump in natural gas-fired generation. Specifically, natural gas fired output of 601 billion KWhs in 2000 rose to 1,586 billion KWhs by 2019, a gain of 164%. Accordingly, the needle on overall fossil-based generation hardly moved, dropping from 2,691 billion KWhs in 2000 to 2,590 billion KWhs in 2019.
So the question recurs, how in the world do these lame-brains expect to get to zero CO2 emissions from the utility sector when over the last 19-years, the rate of fossil-fired production has declined by a trivial –0.20% per annum.Moreover, as we suggested above regarding the global balances, there is no reason whatsoever to expect any material displacement of fossil-based power production by nuclear or hydro. Combined these two sectors produced 1,097 billion KWhs in 2019, but if anything production is likely to fall in the next several decades.
That’s right. In the last quarter quarter century there has been a grand total of two nuke plants commissioned. This means quite evidently that the nation’s grand total of 94 operating commercial nuclear reactors at 56 nuclear power plants in 28 states are old as the hills— averaging 25-40 years old and heading for decommissioning in the normal course.
The implication cannot be gainsaid. Unless there is a total political reversal with respect to nuclear power, the 809 billion KWHs generated in 2019, which represented nearly 20% of total utility output, will likely be shrinking from normal retirements faster than new plants can be licensed, built and made operational, a process which typically takes well more than a decade.
How Will Growing Demand for Power Be Met?
Finally, there is the matter of growth. Even at the tepid level of GDP growth during the last decade, and despite continued improvements in the efficiency of electrical power use in the US economy, total power output rose from 3,951 billion KWHs in 2009 to 4,127 billion KWhs in 2019, representing a modest 0.44% per annum growth rate.
Then again, a continuation of that modest growth trend—which would be the minimal gain compatible with a continued slow rise in real GDP—would result in total power output requirements of 4,427 billion KWhs by 2035 or 300 billion KWHs more than current levels.
So here’s the skunk in the woodpile. Total solar and wind-fueled power output in 2019 was just 367 billion KWhs or 8.9% of total utility output. That is, it will require the equivalent of fully 82% of current so-called green power production just to supply projected system growth. And that’s to say nothing of replacing nuclear production that is likely to be falling due to retirements and obsolescence or, more importantly, displacing some of the 2,590 billion KWhs of fossil production still in the nation’s electrical power grid.
Let us re-iterate: Unless a large share of that 2,590 billion KWhs of capacity is shuttered, the idea of zero net CO2 emissions is a pipe dream.
At the same time, it would take trillions of taxpayer subsidies to lift the current 367 billion KWhs of green power production toward even half of power requirements by 2035, which would exceed 2,200 KWhs. And that simply isn’t going to happen in a month of Sundays.
Worse, Power Output and Reliability Requires Over-Sized Renewables Installations
Moreover, that’s not even the half of it. Green power production, and especially wind which accounted for 4X more output than solar in 2019, ( 295 billion KWhs versus 72 billion KWhs) is highly intermittent based on seasonal patterns and daily wind strength. Nationally, wind plant performance tends to be highest during the spring and lowest during the mid-to late summer, while performance during the winter (November through February) is around the annual median. However, this pattern can vary considerably across regions, mostly based on local atmospheric and geographic conditions.
In a word, to get the same output and reliability as gas or coal-fired base-load plants, green power plants need to be drastically oversized both in terms of maximum output capacity and back-up storage units. As shown below, for most regions of the country, median monthly wind capacity factors range between just 25% and 35%.
Needless to say, low capacity factors mean high all-in costs for electrical energy delivered to the grid. Analysts use a concept to capture this called LCOE (levelized cost of energy), which is the present value of total cost over the lifetime of a plant divided by the cumulative amount of electricity generated over the lifetime.
Accordingly, the cost of funding power output growth plus displacement of substantial amounts of fossil fired production would be staggering. Recent detailed study by the Institute for Energy Research show the LCOE calculations for the range of fuels sources:
LCOE Per Megawatt Hour Of Capacity:
Combined cycle natural gas: $36;
Nuclear: $33;
Hydro: $38;
Coal: $41;
Onshore wind: $85;
Solar PV: $89;
Offshore Wind: $132.
These differentials between conventional and green sources of power generation are clearly staggering and contradict the constant propaganda from the Climate Howlers, who falsely claim that solar and wind are cheaper than existing power sources.
But as we will amplify in the final installment (Part 5), the actual scenario is far more forbidding than even these all-in cost differentials would suggest. That’s because the second part of the green agenda is to convert the nation’s efficient fleet of 285 million IC engine vehicles to electric battery power and 70 million natural gas and oil heated homes to green electricity, among others.
What that will do, of course, is make peak power demand swings on the grid far more extreme—even violent—just as the reliability of a green-powered utility sector falls sharply.
This post is the third of five to alert readers to a compilation of the scientific case against the claims of IPCC supporters and anti-fossil fuel activists. David Stockman provides the evidence and the arguments against the IPCC policy framework in a series of five essays published at International Man under the title The GreenMageddon and What It Means for You. I will state the five themes he develops in his essays, along with some excerpts and images to illustrate the main points. Here is an overview followed by the third theme.
Overview
The geological and paleontological evidence overwhelmingly says that today’s average global temperature of about 15 degrees C and CO2 concentrations of 420 ppm are nothing to fret about. Even if they rise to about 17–18 degrees C and 500–600 ppm by the end of the century, it may well balance or improve the lot of mankind.
After all, bursts of civilization during the last 10,000 years uniformly occurred during the red portions of the graph below. The aforementioned river civilizations—the Minoan, the Greco-Roman era, the Medieval flowering, and the industrial and technological revolutions of the present era. At the same time, the several lapses into the dark ages happened when the climate turned colder (blue).
And that’s only logical. When it’s warmer and wetter, growing seasons are longer, and crop yields are better—regardless of the agricultural technology and practices of the moment. And it’s better for human and community health, too—most of the deadly plagues of history have occurred in colder climates, such as the Black Death of 1344–1350..
Yet, the Climate Crisis Narrative employs two deceptive devices which are contradicted by earth’s climate history:
a. Planetary temperatures have been far higher than today, both long ago (over 600 million years) and recently (last 10,000 years) with no doomsday loop occurring.
b.It is claimed global warming is a one-way street from rising GHGs, when in fact higher CO2 concentrations are a consequence and by-product, not a driver and cause, of the current naturally rising temperatures.
W. J. Davis (2017)
Again, the now “canceled” history of the planet knocks the CO2-driver proposition into a cocked hat. During the Cretaceous Period between 145 and 66 million years ago, a natural experiment provided complete absolution for the vilified CO2 molecule. During that period, global temperatures rose dramatically from 17 degrees C to 25 degrees C—a level far above anything today’s Climate Howlers have ever projected.
Alas, CO2 wasn’t the culprit. According to science, ambient CO2 concentrations actually tumbled during that 80-million-year expanse, dropping from 2,000 ppm to 900 ppm on the eve of the Extinction Event 66 million years ago.
3. Climatists weaponize natural events to gain social control for a global agenda. It’s About Power, Not Truth or Humanity.
You would think that this powerful countervailing fact would give the CO2 witch-hunters pause, but that would be to ignore what the whole climate change brouhaha is actually about. That is, it’s not about science, human health and well-being or the survival of planet Earth; it’s about politics and the ceaseless search of the political class and the apparatchiks and racketeers who inhabit the beltway for still another excuse to aggrandize state power.
Indeed, the climate change narrative is the kind of ritualized policy mantra that is concocted over and over again by the political class and the permanent nomenklatura of the modern state—professors, think-tankers, lobbyists, career apparatchiks, officialdom—in order to gather and exercise state power.
The Obvious Exploitation of Natural Events
Indeed, fabrication of false problems and threats that purportedly can only be solved by heavy-handed state intervention has become the modus operandi of a political class that has usurped near-complete control of modern democracy.
In doing so, however, the ruling elites have gotten so used to such unimpeded success that they have become sloppy, superficial, careless and dishonest. For instance, the minute we get a summer heatwave, these natural weather events are jammed into the global warming mantra with nary a second thought by the lip-syncing journalists of the MSM.
Heatwaves
Yet there is absolutely no scientific basis for all this tom-tom beating. In fact, NOAA publishes a heatwave index based on extended temperature spikes, which last more than 4 days and which would be expected to occur once every 10 years based on the historical data.
As is evident from the chart below, the only true heatwave spikes we have had in the last 125 years were during the dust bowl heat waves of the 1930s. The frequency of mini-heatwave spikes since 1960 is actually no greater than it was from 1895 to 1935.
Hurricanes
Likewise, all it takes is a good Cat 2 hurricane and they are off to the races, gumming loudly about AGW. Of course, this ignores entirely NOAA’s own data as summarized in what is known as the ACE (accumulated cyclone energy) index.
This index was first developed by renowned hurricane expert and Colorado State University professor William Gray. It uses a calculation of a tropical cyclone’s maximum sustained winds every six hours. The latter is then multiplied by itself to get the index value and accumulated for all storms for all regions to get an index value for the year as shown below for the past 170 years (the blue line is the seven-year rolling average).
That is to say, hundreds of billions of dollars of insurance coverage were then and still is being written with ACE as a crucial input. Yet, if you examine the 7-year rolling average (blue line) in the chart, it is evident that ACE was as high or higher in the 1950s and 1960s as it is today and that the same was true of the late 1930s and the 1880–1900 periods. [See also Bill Gray: H20 is Climate Control Knob, not CO2]
If global warming were generating more hurricanes as the MSM constantly maintains, the increase would be uniform across all of these subregions, but it’s clearly not. Since the year 2000, for example,
the Eastern Caribbean has had a modest increase in both tropical storms and higher-rated Cats relative to most of the past 170 years;
the Western Caribbean has not been unusual at all, and, in fact, has been well below the counts during the 1880–1920 period; and
the Bahamas/Turks & Caicos region, since 2000, has actually been well weaker than during 1930–1960 and 1880–1900
The actual truth of the matter is that Atlantic hurricane activity is generated by atmospheric and ocean temperature conditions in the eastern Atlantic and North Africa. Those forces, in turn, are heavily influenced by the presence of an El Niño or La Niña in the Pacific Ocean. El Niño events increase the wind shear over the Atlantic, producing a less-favorable environment for hurricane formation and decreasing tropical storm activity in the Atlantic basin. Conversely, La Niña causes an increase in hurricane activity due to a decrease in wind shear.
These Pacific Ocean events, of course, have never been correlated with the low level of natural global warming now underway.
The number and strength of Atlantic hurricanes may also undergo a 50- to 70-year cycle known as the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation. Again, these cycles are unrelated to global warming trends since 1850.
Wildfires
As it happens, the same story is true with respect to wildfires—the third category of natural disasters that the Climate Howlers have glommed onto. But in this case, it’s bad forestry management, not man-made global warming, which has turned much of California into a dry wood fuel dump.
But don’t take our word for it. This comes from the George Soros-funded Pro Publica, which is not exactly a right-wing tin foil hat outfit. It points out that environmentalists had shackled federal and state forest management agencies so much so that today’s tiny “controlled burns” are but an infinitesimal fraction of what Mother Nature herself accomplished before the helping hand of today’s purportedly enlightened political authorities arrived on the scene.
“Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres. The state passed a few new laws in 2018 designed to facilitate more intentional burning. But few are optimistic this, alone, will lead to significant change.
We live with a deathly backlog. In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres—an area about the size of Maine—to restabilize in terms of fire.”
Among other proofs that industrialization and fossil fuels aren’t the culprit is the fact that researchers had shown that when California was occupied by indigenous communities, wildfires would burn up some 4.5 million acres a year. That’s nearly six times the 2010–2019 period, when wildfires burned an average of just 775,000 acres annually in California.
Beyond the untoward clash of all of these natural forces of climate and ecology with misguided government forest and shrubland husbandry policies, there is actually an even more dispositive smoking gun, as it were.
To wit, the Climate Howlers have not yet embraced the apparent absurdity that the planet’s purportedly rising temperatures have targeted the Blue State of California for special punishment. Yet when we look at the year-to-date data for forest fires, we find that unlike California and Oregon, the US as a whole is now experiencing the weakest fire years since 2010.
You just can’t go from 2.7 million burned acres in 2010 to 7.2 million acres in 2012, then back to 2.7 million acres in 2014, then to 6.7 million acres in 2017, followed by just 3.7 million acres in 2020—and still argue along with the Climate Howlers that the planet is angry.
National fire data year to date:
On the contrary, the only real trend evident is that on a decadal basis during recent times, average forest fire acreage in California has been slowly rising, owing to the above-described dismal failure of government forest management policies. But even the mildly rising average fire acreage trend since 1950 is a rounding error compared to the annual averages from prehistoric times, which were nearly 6 times greater than during the most recent decade.
Nor is this lack of correlation with global warming just a California and US phenomenon. As shown in the chart below, the global extent of drought, measured by five levels of severity, with brown being the most extreme, has shown no worsening trend at all during the past 40 years.
Global Extent of Five Levels Of Drought, 1982–2012
Public Discourse Contaminated by Imaginary Climate Crisis Notion
This brings us to the gravamen of the case. To wit, there is no climate crisis whatsoever, but the AGW hoax has so thoroughly contaminated the mainstream narrative and the policy apparatus in Washington and capitals all around the world that contemporary society is fixing to commit economic hari-kari.
That’s because, contrary to the phony case that the rise of fossil fuel use after 1850 has caused the planetary climate system to become unglued, there has been a massive acceleration of global economic growth and human well-being. One essential element behind that salutary development has been the massive increase in the use of cheap fossil fuels to power economic life.
The chart below could not be more dispositive. During the pre-industrial era between 1500 and 1870, real global GDP crawled along at just 0.41% per annum. By contrast, during the past 150 years of the fossil fuel age, global GDP growth accelerated to 2.82% per annum–or nearly 7 times faster.
This higher growth, of course, in part resulted from a larger and far healthier global population made possible by rising living standards. Yet, it wasn’t human muscle alone that caused the GDP level to go parabolic, as per the chart below.
It was also due to the fantastic mobilization of intellectual capital and technology. One of the most important vectors of the latter was the ingenuity of the fossil fuel industry in unlocking the massive trove of stored work that Mother Nature extracted, condensed, and salted away from the incoming solar energy over the long warmer and wetter eons of the past 600 million years.
Yes, that dramatic rise in prosperity in generating fossil fuel consumption has given rise to a commensurate increase in CO2 emissions. But contrary to the Climate Change Narrative, CO2 is not a pollutant!
As we have seen, the correlated increase in CO2 concentrations—from about 290 ppm to 415 ppm since 1850—amounts to a rounding error in both the long-trend of history and in terms of atmospheric loadings from natural sources.
As to the former, concentrations of less than 500 ppm are only recent developments of the last ice age, while during prior geologic ages concentrations reached as high as 2400 ppm.
Likewise, the oceans contain an estimated 37,400 billion tons of suspended carbon, land biomass has 2,000-3,000 billion tons and the atmosphere contains 720 billion tons of CO2. The latter alone is more than 20X current fossil emissions (35 billion tons) shown below.
Of course, the opposite side of the equation is that oceans, land and atmosphere absorb CO2 continuously so the incremental loadings from human sources is very small. That also means that even a small shift in the balance between oceans and air would cause a much more severe rise/fall in CO2 concentrations than anything attributable to human activity.
But since the Climate Howlers falsely imply that the “pre-industrial” level of 290 parts per million was extant since, well, the Big Bang and that the modest rise since 1850 is a one-way ticket to boiling the planet alive, they obsess over the “sources versus sinks” balance in the carbon cycle for no valid reason whatsoever.
This post is the second of five to alert readers to a compilation of the scientific case against the claims of IPCC supporters and anti-fossil fuel activists. David Stockman provides the evidence and the arguments against the IPCC policy framework in a series of five essays published at International Man under the title The GreenMageddon and What It Means for You.I will state the five themes he develops in his essays, along with some excerpts and images to illustrate the main points. Here is an overview followed by the second theme.
Overview
The assembled governments of the world meeting in Glasgow for COP26 are fixing to declare war on the backbone of modern economic life and the abundance and relief from human poverty and suffering with which it has gifted the world. We are referring, of course, to its agenda to essentially drive fossil fuels—which currently make up 80% of BTU consumption—from the global energy supply system over the next several decades.
All of this is being done in the name of preventing global temperatures from rising by 1.5 degrees Celsius above “pre-industrial” levels.
But when it comes to the crucial matter of exactly which pre-industrial baseline level, you can see the skunk sitting on the woodpile a mile away. That’s because, as we showed in Part 1, global temperatures have been higher than the present—often by upward of 10–15 degrees Celsius—for most of the past 600 million years!
2. During our Holocene epoch, for the past 11.6 thousand years, earth’s climate has changed often with multiple periods, both warmer and and cooler than the present. The modern warming period since 1850 was preceded by the Medieval, the Roman, and the Minoan warming periods–each was cooler than the previous, and all of them warmer than the present. The last 1.5C of warming has been a boon to human agriculture and civilization, and the next 1.5C is likely to also be beneficial.
Moreover, during the more recent era since the great extinction event 66 million years ago, the decline in temperatures has been almost continuous, touching lower than current levels only during the 100,000-year glaciation cycles of the last 2.6 million years of the Pleistocene ice ages. Not unsurprisingly, therefore, the Climate Howlers have chosen to ignore 599,830,000 of those years in favor of the last 170 years (since 1850) alone.
Still, the juxtaposition of the temperature record of the last 66 million years and the sawed-off charts of the climate alarmists tells you all you need to know: to wit, they have simply banished all the “inconvenient” science from the narrative.
Global Average Temperature Trend, 1850–2018 per the Global Warming Narrative
Needless to say, there is a reason why they start the graphs in 1850, and it is not just because it was the tail-end of the Little Ice Age (LIA), from which low point the temperature trend might well climb upwards for a time as climatic conditions normalized.
Actually, the intellectual deception is far more egregious. To wit, the Climate Howlers want you to believe the absolutely anti-scientific notion that the global climate was in general equipoiseuntil the coal barons and the John D. Rockefeller’s of the mid-19th century set off a dangerous chain of climate dysfunction as they brought the stored solar energy embedded in coal and petroleum to the surface and released its combustion by-products–especially CO2—into the ambient air.
The Risible Myth Of Climate Equipoise
The global warming narrative is the most risible manifestation yet of this leap into self-righteous disregard for evidence, logic, and plausibility. For when you step back from the shrill, sanctimonious narrative that passes for the global warming catechism, the ridiculousness of its central claim that industrial society is destroying the climatic equipoise of the planet is self-evident.
For crying out loud, there has never been equipoise!
What there’s been is 4.5 billion years of wildly oscillating and often violent geologic evolution and climate disequilibrium owing to manifold natural causes, including:
plate tectonics that has sometimes violently impacted climate systems, especially the assembly and breakup of Pangaea between 335 million and 175 million years ago, and the continuous drift of the present-day continents thereafter;
asteroid bombardments;
the 100,000-year cycles of the Earth’s orbital eccentricity (it gets colder when it’s at maximum elongation);
the 41,000-year cycles of the Earth’s tilt on its axis, which oscillates between 22.1 and 24.5 degrees and thereby impacts the level of solar intake;
the wobble or precession of the earth’s rotation which impacts climate over the course of its 26,000 year cycles;
the recent 150,000 year glaciation and inter-glacial warming cycles;
the 1500 year sunspot cycles, where earth temperatures fall during solar minimums like the Maunder Minimum of 1645-1715 at the extreme of the LIA when sunspot activity virtually ceased.
The natural climate change now underway is, therefore, the product of powerful planetary forces that long predated the industrial age and which massively exceed the impact of industrial era emissions. As we indicated in Part 1, that the present conflation of these forces has resulted in a warming cycle is nothing new—warming has happened repeatedly even in modern times. Contrary to the false claims of the Climate Howlers,
Current mildly rising temperatures are in keeping with the historical truth that warmer is better for humanity and most other species, too.
Continued planetary equipoise requires no interventions whatsoever by the state to retard the use of prosperity-fostering fossil fuels or to subsidize and accelerate the adoption of high-cost renewable energy.
So the question recurs. What “pre-industrial” temperature baseline can be picked out of all these eras and all these climate change forces that would be anything but an arbitrary political, not science-based, choice?
After all, the science is agnostic. Mother Earth has weathered every kind of climate disequilibrium at both the colder and warmer ends of the spectrum and, crucially, experienced the eventual release of countervailing forces that took both temperature and CO2 levels back in the other direction.
We think the planet’s climatic resilience is especially evident in the fact that, after five major ice ages, warming forces returned with robust energy until they reversed again, thereby proving there is no doomsday loop that leads in linear fashion to inexorable catastrophe as is embedded in the climate models.
To enlarge, open image in new tab.
As we noted, during the Holocene Optimum, many of the Earth’s great ancient civilizations began and flourished because conditions were especially hospitable for agriculture and the generation of economic surpluses. The Nile River, for instance, had an estimated three times its present volume, indicating a much larger tropical region. In fact, 6,000 years ago, the Sahara was far more fertile than today and supported large herds of animals, as evidenced by the Tassili N’Ajjer frescoes of Algeria.
That is to say, warmer and wetter was far better for mankind than prior bouts of cold.
Indeed, prior to the post-1850 warming, there had been five distinct warming periods (red areas) since the last glaciers with temperatures above current levels. Never, of course, does this chart see the light of day in the mainstream climate change narrative.
Also, during this period, the Vikings established settlements in Iceland and Greenland. Long before the industrial era, Greenland was so warm, wet, and fertile that major colonization occurred after AD 980. At its peak, it included upward of 10,000 settlers, extensive farming, numerous Catholic churches, and a parliament that eventually voted for union with Norway.
Nor was the reversal from the hospitable climate of the Viking era settlements in Greenland merely a regional anomaly has some Climate Howlers have claimed. During the Medieval Warm period, great civilizations flourished in many other areas, which then became uninhabitable.
For instance, a great drought in the American southwest occurred between 1276 and 1299. Grand settlements like those in Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde were abandoned. Tree-ring analysis has identified a period of no rain between 1276 and 1299 in these areas.
Needless to say, these extreme weather perturbations were not caused by industrial activity because there was none, and they occurred during a period when it was getting colder, not warmer!
From 1550 to AD 1850, global temperatures were at their coldest since the beginning of the Holocene 12,000 years ago. Hence the designation of this period as the Little Ice Age (LIA).
Self-evidently, when the LIA finally ended around 1850, global temperatures were at a modern nadir (no wonder the Climate Howlers start their charts in the middle of the 19th century).
Mann’s Attempt to Erase Pre-Industrial Warming
But the significance of this fact goes well beyond cropping the temperature charts at 1850. Actually, in order to erase the above-described oscillations of the modern climate, climate change advocates have actually gone so far as to literally attempt to airbrush them out of existence.
We are referring to what we call the climate “Piltdown Mann,” named for one Michael Mann, a newly minted Ph.D. (1998) who became the International Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) lead investigator and advocate for what famously became the “hockey stick” proof of global warming.
The latter, of course, was the blatant fraud embedded in the image that Al Gore made famous in his propagandistic movie “An Inconvenient Truth” in 2006. Suffice to say, the purpose of the hockey stick was to wipe out all the evidence summarized above.
That is, in lieu of the planet’s long-term and recent severe climate oscillations, the IPCC posited an entirely opposite thesis. Namely, for the pre-industrial millennium before 1900, global temperatures were nearly as flat as a board.
The only problem is that Mann’s graph was as phony as the Piltdown Man itself—the latter famously being confected in England in 1912 and conveniently “discovered” by an amateur anthropologist who claimed it was the missing link in human evolution. At length, it was shown that the fossil was a forgery; it consisted of a modern human cranium and an orangutan jaw with filed-down teeth.
In the case of the graph, Professor Mann and his accomplices at the IPCC doctored the evidence,used misleading data from southwestern US tree rings in lieu of abundant alternative data showing the contrary, and jiggered their computer models to generate pre-specified results.
That is, the models were produced by goal-seeking on the part of Mann and his associates to prove the man-made warming thesis. In essence, this was accomplished by simply pasting modern temperature records showing steady increases on top of a pre-industrial baseline that never happened.
The phony pre-industrial baseline is depicted by the yellow area in the graph for the period 1400–1900. The hockey stick-like eruption of the yellow space after 1900, of course, allegedly depicts the man-made temperature rise since the onset of the hydrocarbon age.
By contrast, the corrected version is in blue. In this version—which comports with the history of climate oscillations cited above—there is no hockey stick because the shaft never happened; it was invented by computer model manipulations, not extracted from the abundant scientific data on which the Mann study was allegedly based.
So the question is answered. The mid-19th century is exactly the wrong baseline from which to measure global temperature change during modern times.
The blue area of the chart, in fact, is the smoking gun that obliterates the whole predicate on which COP26 is being foisted upon the everyday people of the world.
The first graph appeared in the IPCC 1990 First Assessment Report (FAR) credited to H.H.Lamb, first director of CRU-UEA. The second graph was featured in 2001 IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR) the famous hockey stick credited to M. Mann.
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.
This post is the fourth of five to alert readers to a compilation of the scientific and economic case against the claims of IPCC supporters and anti-fossil fuel activists. David Stockman provides the evidence and the arguments against the IPCC policy framework in a series of five essays published at International Man under the title 
