Climate Initiatives

Alimonte Strikes Down Climate Alarms (Again)

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Gianluca Alimonti, MS Physics, professor and senior researcher, University of Milan

Chris Morrison reports at Daily Sceptic Retracted by Nature, Traduced by Michael Mann – Gianluca Alimonti is Back and He’s Taking No Prisoners.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

I’m calling it the ‘Revenge of Alimonti’. In 2023 a group of activists including ‘hockey stick’ inventor Michael Mann, Attribution Queen Frederike Otto and Marlowe Hood and Graham Readfearn from AFP and the Guardian respectively managed to get a paper led by Professor Gianluca Alimonti retracted by Nature because it had spoken the obvious truth that there was little scientific evidence that extreme weather events were getting worse.

It was the high point of ‘settled’ science, a time when it was acceptable
to trash the cherished free speech principles of the scientific process.

But as the Net Zero fantasy starts to collapse and most of the shonky science backing it is facing increasing ridicule, Alimonti 2 is back, bigger and better. In his latest paper on the non-existent climate ‘crisis’, he shows there has been no statistically worsening trends of climate impacts. Indeed there have been many improvements in humans adapting to whatever nature has thrown at them

The publication of the paper is well timed. It should be pinned on the wall of every climate reporting room in mainstream media, starting with the hopelessly biased BBC. Perhaps not the Guardian though, sadly a lost cause beyond redemption. In considerable but easily understood detail, the paper debunks many of the extreme weather claims that remain the mainstay of grossly misleading climate science reporting.

The new Alimonti blockbuster shows it is not difficult to find all the relevant climate data, while the education needed to understand it relies mainly on an ability to read words and comprehend numbers. This climate paper is not breaking new barriers of scientific understanding, rather it is a work of investigation and compilation from freely available sources, many of them to be found in the published output of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Most extreme weather events are not getting worse, with or without human involvement, whatever alarmists from the climate comedy turn Jim ‘jail the deniers’ Dale to the BBC say. Inconveniently, the IPCC says more or less the same thing.

There is of course no climate ‘crisis’ or ‘emergency’, or at least not one that is evident from current scientific observations. Compared to recent historical experience, the current climate is relatively benign. Slightly warmer, more carbon dioxide leading to higher biomass and no increase in most types of bad weather. The fear of some sort of ‘crisis’, usually prophesised for an ulterior purpose, is ubiquitous in human history. Hysteria rises and falls dramatically, sometimes over long sustained periods, and in the case of climate this is displayed by an interesting graph compiled by Alimonti.

Google searches for climate ‘crisis’ and ‘emergency’ reveal two recent hysteria peaks, namely at the time of the Al Gore agitprop film An Inconvenient Truth featuring the infamous Michael Mann temperature hockey stick, and the Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion-led lunacy at the turn of the current decade.

Professor Alimonti proposes a data-focused toolkit to cut through the hype around a ‘climate crisis’. Instead of the alarmism, it is suggested that clear trackable metrics such as economic damages and health effects are tied to the key climate trends and events. Analysing these metrics shows no strong worsening trends. Any adaption plans for a changing climate should be based on real evidence, not one-size-fits-all panic.

The Article is Quantifying the climate crisis: a data-driven framework using response indicators for evidence-based adaptation policies.  Synopsis below from excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Defining the Concept of ‘Climate Crisis’ Through Measurable Indicators

The paper proposes an analytical approach to the concept of climate crisis through a set of objective, measurable Response Indicators (RINDs), such as environmental anomalies, socio-economic and health impacts, driven by Climate Impact Drivers (CIDs) defined in IPCC AR6. By shifting the focus from subjective interpretations to a quantifiable metrics, this approach provides a critical framework for assessing the situation in an analytical manner. Policymakers can use these indicators to design targeted interventions that address specific environmental changes, ensuring that actions are data-driven and aligned with scientific evidence. This definition avoids alarmism while promoting practical, evidence-based solutions.

Climate Impact Drivers (CIDs)

Climate Impact Drivers (CIDs) are physical climate system conditions (e.g. means, events, extremes) that affect an element of society or ecosystems and are thus a priority for climate information provision. Depending on system tolerance, CIDs and their changes can be detrimental, beneficial, neutral or a mixture of each across interacting system elements, regions and society sectors. Each sector is affected by multiple CIDs and each CID affects multiple sectors. A CID can be measured by indices to represent related tolerance thresholds. (IPCC-AR6-WG1, Citation2021, p. 1770)

The latest IPCC AR6 process led to the development of 7 CID types (heat and cold, wet and dry, wind, snow and ice, coastal, open ocean, and other) and 33 distinct CID categories (CID, Citation2022): they are summarised in Table 12.12 (IPCC-AR6-WG1, Citation2021, p. 1856) which also presents CID emergence in different time periods based on multiple methods as provided by recent literature.

Table 12.1 | Overview of the main climatic impact-driver (CID) types and related CID categories with a short description and their link to other chapters where the underlying climatic phenomenon and its associated essential climate variables are assessed and described. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/chapter/chapter-12/#12.2

As shown in Table 12.12, most of the CIDs do not exhibit significant changes before the end of the XXI century even in the most pessimistic RCP8.5 scenario. It is important to note that the RCP8.5 scenario does not represent a typical ‘business-as-usual’ projection but serves instead as a high-end, high-risk scenario while the RCP4.5 scenario is approximately in line with the upper end of aggregate NDCs (Nationally Determined Contributions) emissions levels (Hausfather & Peters, Citation2020; IPCC-AR6-WG1, Citation2021, p. 250; IPCC-AR6-WG3, Citation2022, p. 317) as also confirmed by a recent JRC report (Keramidas et al., Citation2025): our analysis will thus focus on the observation of CIDs time series and not on future scenarios.

Examples of CIDs

Floods

Hurricanes

Response indicators (RINDs)

The number of natural disasters caused by weather-related events (e.g. hurricanes, floods, droughts, wildfires, wet mass movements, storms) can be used as a preliminary climate response indicator.

The number of recorded Meteo-Hydro-Climate disaster events and related deaths since 2000 is shown in figure 6 and no clear trend is found by the MK trend analysis, as reported in Table 1.

Natural Disaster Deaths

Diseases and Injuries

Disasters from Temperatures, Droughts, Wildfires

Discussion

An analytical approach to the ‘climate crisis’ concept based on CIDs and RINDs has been proposed enhancing the IPCC CID-based framework (CID, Citation2022). This approach is still provisional and reliant on some statistical scientific indicators. The initiative aims to move beyond the qualitative use of the term ‘climate crisis’ by establishing a broad, shared, and quantitative methodology. The final goal is to provide a robust, data-driven assessment through updated time series and standardised statistical analysis, supported by interdisciplinary collaboration.

To this end, we emphasise the importance of:

  • – periodic (at least annual) series updates by operational organisations such as FAO, WHO or other international entities that collect and manage time series useful for this purpose;

  • – an alarm criterion based on predefined statistical methodologies (e.g. exceeding specific thresholds, significant trend variations, etc.);

  • – multiscale analysis (global, national, regional). All systems on our planet – from the climate system to ecological and socio-economic systems – can be effectively approached from the global scale down to the microscale. While our work has been developed at a global scale with some exceptions, the analysis can be extended to smaller scales (United Nations Statistics Division, Citation2024).

We must emphasise that impact indicator time series often bear
the signature of adaptation, and that other human factors
tend to outweigh climate factors.

For instance, the influence of climate on conflicts is considered minor compared to dominant conflict drivers (IPCC-AR6-WG2, Citation2022, p. 2428; Mach, Citation2019). Similarly, the human footprint on vector-borne diseases may be more significant than climate change, as evidenced in the twentieth century by the decline in malaria endemicity and mortality despite rising global temperatures (Carballar-Lejarazú et al., Citation2023; Climate Adapt, Citation2022; Rossati et al., Citation2016). The reduction in deaths caused by extreme weather events can partly be attributed to improvements in civil protection systems. These examples demonstrate that adaptation often proves more effective than mitigation.

Another example of anthropogenic influence unrelated to climate concerns wildfires: many studies report increases in burned areas linked to a warming climate over recent decades across much of North America. However, the rate of burning sites in the USA in recent decades has been much lower than historical rates across most of the continent, a disparity attributed to aggressive fire suppression and disruption of traditional burning practices (Parks et al., Citation2025). Furthermore, global deforestation trends fit within complex land use patterns where climate plays a secondary role; more specifically, remote sensing data reveal an increase in forest areas at mid-to-high latitudes in the northern hemisphere, while deforestation driven by the expansion of intensive agriculture is observed in subtropical regions (FAO, Citation2022; Pendrill et al., Citation2022; Song et al., Citation2021; Winkler et al., Citation2021).

Most of the time series in Table 1 do not show signs of deterioration. This is important to highlight, as it suggests we still have sufficient time to develop effective and sustainable adaptation policies aimed at enhancing the resilience of socio-economic and environmental systems. For example, in the case of droughts, the use of dry farming techniques, which optimise the exploitation of water resources during periods of scarcity, and the creation of water reservoirs, which can also contribute to renewable energy production and flood mitigation and prevention, can be envisaged. Regarding forest fires, key adaptation measures include the rational management of forest litter, the establishment of firebreaks to prevent the spread of fire, and the maintenance of adequate firefighting services.

Since the observed emergence of most of the CIDs presented in IPCC Table 12.12, and confirmed by the analysed updated time series, as well as most of the RINDs in Table 1 do not exhibit worsening trends, our overall view is that the ‘climate crisis’, as portrayed by many media sources today, is not evident yet.

Nevertheless, it remains extremely important to improve
and standardise monitoring activities and to develop
adaptation strategies based on high-quality data.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Woke and Green Fading Away

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Philip Cross writes at Financial Post Woke and Green are departing the scene.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added image.

2025 may mark the end for such policies as unsubsidized EV sales
collapse and impatience with DEI rises

This year is shaping up as a turning point in restoring sanity to public policy. Nowhere is the change more evident than in attitudes to green energy policies, once the rallying cry for left-wing parties in North America. Support has collapsed for three pillars of green energy advocacy:

♦  building electric vehicles to eliminate our need for oil pipelines and refineries;

♦  using the financial clout of the Net-Zero Banking Alliance to force firms
to eliminate carbon emissions; and

♦  legally mandating the shift from fossil fuels to green energy.

This turning away from green energy policies is reflected in how industrial policy underpinning electric vehicles (EV) has been discredited over the past year. Companies are delaying or abandoning the building of EV assembly and battery plants, mainly because EV sales are slumping following withdrawal of the artificial stimulus of government subsidies in both Canada and the U.S. Walking away from these investments leaves governments on the hook for billions of dollars they rashly pledged in support of EV projects.

In Quebec, Northvolt stopped work on a $7-billion battery plant, electric bus manufacturer Lion Electric filed for bankruptcy, and the Ultium CAM consortium paused plans to expand production of materials for batteries to be used in GM vehicles, which in turn led the giant mining company Vale to cancel plans for a nickel sulfate plant to supply these batteries. In Ontario, Honda delayed $15 billion of investments to build EV assembly plants and supply them with batteries, while Ford postponed its EV assembly plant plans after its EV division posted losses of $12 billion over the past two and a half years. Just last week, GM stopped producing electric delivery vans at its Ingersoll plant due to slack demand that had “nothing to do with tariffs or trade,” according to GM Canada’s president.

As investment in EV and battery plants collapses into full retreat, the outlook for fossil fuel demand improves. The International Energy Agency has reversed course and now projects demand will rise by 2.5 million barrels a day between 2024 and 2030. The under-investment in petroleum refining resulting from our having bought into the narrative that oil was past peak pushed the industry’s capacity utilization rate to 94.1 per cent in July, the highest of any industry in Canada that month. The prospect of demand exceeding capacity spurred the industry to boost investment to over $3 billion last year, double its average over the previous two decades.

The shift in public attitudes to fossil fuels provoked an abrupt about-face in Prime Minister Mark Carney’s stance on energy policy. In 2021 Carney spearheaded the launch of the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, which proposed to use access to credit to push firms to adopt policies that eliminated greenhouse gas emissions. But last month, after the world’s largest banks left it, including Canada’s, the alliance shut down. Even as it did, Carney’s government revived the Keystone XL pipeline proposal to carry Canada’s bitumen to U.S. refineries looking to replace dwindling heavy oil shipments from Mexico and Venezuela.

The tide is also turning against climate-change activists in the legal world. Just last week, a U.S. federal court ruled against claims by a group of young people that the Trump administration’s gutting of green energy initiatives violated their human rights. The court concluded such an important policy issue should be resolved at the ballot box and not in the courts, a precedent we should all hope helps Ontario courts reach the same conclusion in a similar case brought by teenagers.

The setbacks for green energy policies are reflected in disarray among left-wing parties in Canada and the U.S. In the U.S., The New York Times reports, registration of Democratic voters has fallen by two million since last year’s elections, despite high disapproval of Trump’s economic policies. While the radical left rejoices in the candidacy of self-styled Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani for mayor of New York, more centrist Democrats, fearing his radical agenda will hurt the party in next year’s midterm elections, have been slow to endorse him. In Canada, the NDP lost official party status in this spring’s federal election as its vote share plumbed historic lows, revealing the folly of Leap manifesto leaders forcing out Thomas Mulcair as NDP leader in 2017 because they wanted more aggressive opposition to fossil fuels.

Policies such as the Green New Deal are not the left’s only vulnerability. Support for woke social movements such as DEI (“diversity, equity and inclusion”) has also become a liability. A fundamental problem associated with both the green and woke movements is that advocates are so convinced of the righteousness of their causes that they refuse to countenance debate.

Because neither developed arguments that resonated with the public,
that same public is not alarmed to see these policies dismantled.

 

Cal Laws Compell PC Climate Speech, Exxon Sues for Free Speech

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Tim O’Brien explains the climate lawfare in his PJ article Is California Attempting to ‘Suicide’ Big Oil and Write the Suicide Note? Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Sometimes big corporations are their own worst enemies. They say things and do things that at the moment sound good and perhaps win an immediate PR battle, but those same words or positions can come back to bite them later. Such is the case for ExxonMobil. 

Back in 2006, almost 20 years ago, the company’s then-CEO Rex Tillerson told the New York Times that a company report had acknowledged the link between the consumption of fossil fuels and rising global temperatures, saying, “We recognize that climate change is a serious issue.” He then added, “We recognize that greenhouse gas emissions are one of the factors affecting climate change.” 

This massive gesture of appeasement was a major concession, and it awarded a huge victory to climate alarmists. In that same article, the Times suggested that if Tillerson was successful, ExxonMobil would “no longer be the oil company that environmentalists love to hate.” 

Climate Activists storm the bastion of Exxon Mobil, here seen without their shareholder disguises.

How’d that work out? Did they back off of ExxonMobil and other big oil companies as a result? No, they ramped up the pressure so steadily and so heavily that over the years, “climate change” activists led ExxonMobil by the nose. It went full bore into “sustainability,” and it even supports the Paris Agreement, also known as the Paris Climate Accord. 

After years of incremental surrender to the left, the company now finds itself in the position of having to sue the state of California over a pair of 2023 “disclosure laws” that amount to the state mandating what companies can and cannot say about certain climate change matters. 

Last week, the company sued California in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California on claims that Senate Bills 253 and 261 “trumpet California’s message.” The message in question, apparently, is that big oil and other major companies are “uniquely responsible for climate change.” In its lawsuit, Exxon Mobil said it considers this sort of message as “misleading.” The suit challenges both laws on grounds that they are First Amendment violations. The intent of the litigation is to stop these laws from going into effect in 2026. 

The climate alarmists and their entire sector are portraying the laws as requiring basic “climate-related transparency.” 

But if you dig into these laws, it reminds me of that old saying about free speech. It goes like this: “Communist China believes in free speech. So long as you say what the government likes, you can say whatever you want.” That pretty much sums up this situation.

More specifically, ExxonMobil contends that to comply, it would need to
rely on “frameworks that place disproportionate blame
on large companies like ExxonMobil.”

Senate Bill 253

Gov. “Slick” Newsom signed Senate Bill 253 (the Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act) into law in 2023. It requires big companies to disclose a wide range of emissions, and not just the stuff coming out of their industrial pipes and smoke stacks. They’d even have to report “direct and indirect emissions” that would include quantitative measurement of and a cost for employee business travel and product transport. 

I’ve seen some of this type of internal tracking and reporting up close, and it’s ridiculous. It’s all in line with ESG measurements and processes that are inconsistent at best. Just as often, it’s a scoring system built on “Wild A** Guesses.” 

Senate Bill 261

Senate Bill 261 (or the Climate-related Financial Risk Act ) gets even more pointedly at the First Amendment issues at play. This law requires businesses that generate more than $500 million per year to “disclose” the financial impacts and risks they face from climate change, and how they will respond. 

More to the point, ExxonMobil said that if it even tried to comply with this law, it would have to guess on things it can’t even know about in advance. Essentially, it would have to try to predict the future and put those predictions on its own website. 

At the same time, the suit points out that Exxon doesn’t even have
any crude oil or natural gas exploration, production, manufacturing,
transport or refining operations in California. 

On the First Amendment issue, in ExxonMobil’s case, the company is expected to argue that both laws require companies to speak publicly in specific ways. The laws don’t simply mandate that the company disclose factual data on past activities and results, but rather that it must speculate in ways it cannot reasonably and responsibly do. 

This is “compelled speech.” While the First Amendment protects the right to speak, it also protects the right not to have the government force you to speak, or to incorporate the government’s desired message. This is known as the “compelled speech doctrine.” While it is usually described as it pertains to individual rights, there is some history of commercial businesses running into this same issue.

What all of this amounts to is it seems that as industries go, California is attempting to “suicide” Big Oil, and it even wants to write the suicide note for the industry.

World Dodged UN Climate Bullet, thanks to US

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Matthew Boyle breaks the news at Breitbart Mike Waltz Reveals How Trump Killed ‘Global Green Tax’ That Would Have Created ‘U.N. Climate Slush Fund’ at 11th Hour.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

NEW YORK — U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz told Breitbart News exclusively of how President Donald Trump and his cabinet rallied at the 11th hour to thwart globalists from creating a “global green tax” that he argued would have created a “U.N. climate slush fund.”

“They were this close to mandating that we basically have a Green New Deal in our global shipping fleet,” Waltz told Breitbart News on the floor of the U.N. General Assembly in the interview taped on Thursday, Oct. 23. “Eighty percent of our economy is based on trade. It would have been devastating. In fact, it would have added a billion dollars a month to the cost of sending our goods around the world or receiving goods. We got fired up as a cabinet — the EU, Brazil, and others thought this thing was a done deal. We got everybody involved, including the president. He came in off the top ropes, and we defeated that vote. I think we just saved the American consumer a massive, massive — what would have been the first U.N. tax in global history just this past week. So that’s the kind of fighting that we’re doing in the types of these organizations, and the kind of wins that we have to deliver for the American people.”

Waltz further explained that the tax that would have been created would have targeted U.S. ships and forced them either to pay billions in global taxes or go through retrofitting in China to use European-backed power sources — but ultimately this has been stopped. He does expect the globalists who pushed this effort to try again, but he said next time the Trump administration will be even more prepared and will stop it again.

“If we had coal fired, gas fired, oil fired ships, this global organization was going to impose a fine on those shipping companies, of course, and that would have been to the tune of a billion dollars a month globally that would have been passed on to the consumers, obviously,” Waltz said. “That money then would have would have formed a U.N.-run green climate slush fund to the tune of $12 to $15 billion a year that would have turned around and done more and more of this. It really would have been the first global green tax and I think we would have felt it through inflation. We would have felt it on our consumer shelves and it would have been yet another assault on the American oil and gas industry.

Published by European Maritime Safety Agency

“We said there will be consequences if you do this and we laid out what those consequences were. Now, we were accused of being diplomatic gangsters and bullies and what have you. But look, it was they who are being the climate bullies and we’re not going to allow them to do that to our shipping fleet. If it had happened, here was the real secret. The EU was subsidizing all the biofuels that they wanted to push to our ships and the only place we could retrofit our ships were in Chinese ports and shipyards. So this would have been a win for the EU, a win for China, a loss for the United States. We said, ‘We’re not going to have it,’ and we got in there and won.”

So, are they trying again? Of course they’re going to try again. As we came at this, frankly, a little bit last-minute, we won, but we delayed the vote until next year. We’re going to make our position crystal clear, and I don’t think this thing is going to get through now. This is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s what’s happening in these over 80 organizations around the world. What it really amounts to is a climate ideology that is nonsensical. It’s an ideology that just doesn’t make sense. For example, in AI [artificial intelligence], a big piece of that is power. You can’t power AI through wind and solar — you just can’t — and we already know the President’s problems with wind. We already know that the vast majority of solar panels are made where? In China.

But we need an all-of-the-above solution. We need nuclear, we need gas, we need oil, we need coal, and those other renewable forms of energy in order to win. But what we find is even when we reach, say, some kind of trade deal with a country or with the EU, then they try to back door these regulations in favor of them and against us through these international organizations that are often under the U.N. umbrella. That’s why we need fighters in here. I have Tammy Bruce who will be going to the Senate to be the Deputy Ambassador here. We have myself, and we have other members of the team that 100 percent believe in the President’s America first agenda. We’re going to start fighting and blocking and tackling in these organizations.”

Addendum on Biofuels, the worst energy choice, disqualified for “All of the Above”

Put simply, power density is just how much stuff it takes to get your energy; how much land or other physical resources. And we measure it by how many watts you can get per square meter, or liter, or kilogram – which, if you’re like us…probably means nothing to you.

So let’s put this in tangible terms. Just about the worst energy source America has by the standards of power density are biofuels, things like corn-based ethanol. Biofuels only provide less than 3% of America’s energy needs–and yet, because of the amount of corn that has to be grown to produce it … they require more land than every other energy source in the country combined. Lots of resources going in, not much energy coming out–which means they’re never going to be able to be a serious fuel source.  Moreover, it cannibalizes arable land needed for food.

Value of Decarbonizing Pledges? Net Zero.

Posted on by Ron Clutz

There are two reasons why Bill Gates and hundreds of Corporations and many countries are backtracking on commitments to decarbonize.  One is disbelieving the false advertising that the planet is in danger and can be saved by Net Zero efforts. Second is sobering up to the fact that decarbonizing the world is an impossible fantasy.  This post includes content from Gary Abernathy on the first point and some quotes from Vaclav Smil’s recent paper on the second.

  1.  Abernathy writes at Real Clear Energy In practice, ‘Net Zero’ Was Exactly How Much Such Pledges Were Worth.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The public “net zero” pledges by countless corporate and political entities in recent years were always baffling. How could the United States or much of the industrialized world reach “net zero” emissions without destroying modern living?

As a reminder, “net zero” is a term coined to illustrate a goal of “eliminating greenhouse gas emissions produced by human activities, which is accomplished by decreasing global emissions and abating them from the atmosphere,” as defined by Net0.com, a company that describes itself as “the market leader in AI-First Sustainability, enabling governments and enterprises worldwide to enhance their environmental performance and decarbonize profitably.”

Net0 posits that “the global scientific community agrees that to mitigate the most severe impacts of climate change, we must reduce worldwide net human-generated carbon dioxide emissions by approximately 45 percent from their 2010 levels by the year 2030 and achieve net zero emissions by around 2050.”

In a political atmosphere shaming anyone who didn’t join the climate cult – led in the U.S. by the Biden administration and globally by the U.N. – attempting to outdo each other for the most aggressive “net zero” policy was all the rage.

“As of June 2024, 107 countries… had adopted net-zero pledges either in law, in a policy document such as a national climate action plan or a long-term strategy, or in an announcement by a high-level government official,” boasted the United Nations.

“More than 9,000 companies, over 1,000 cities, more than 1,000 educational institutions, and over 600 financial institutions have joined the Race to Zero, pledging to take rigorous, immediate action to halve global emissions by 2030.”

But as politicians know, promises and actions are often unrelated. Most people endowed with even a modicum of common sense and a grade-school understanding of basic science knew that meeting “net zero” goals would require a reduction in the use of our most affordable, effective and reliable energy sources to a degree that would devastate modern economies.

The fact that “net zero” pledges were nothing but a cruel joke was made clear last month in a story by NPR headlined, “Leaders promised to cut climate pollution, then doubled down on fossil fuels.” Most thinking people were as surprised by that headline as by discovering wet water, hot fire or flying birds. It was not necessary to read further. “Of course,” they said to themselves, moving on to the next story.

But there are, sadly, climate cult converts who, in their shock, likely needed more details.

They discovered: “The world is producing too much coal, oil and natural gas to meet the targets set 10 years ago under the Paris Agreement, in which countries agreed to limit climate pollution and avoid the worst effects of global warming,” NPR reported.  The story said:

“A new report, led by the nonprofit research group Stockholm Environment Institute, shows countries plan to produce more than twice the amount of fossil fuels in 2030 than would be consistent with limiting global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).”

For the true believers, here’s the real punch to the gut: “The SEI report shows the 20 most polluting countries, including China, the U.S. and India, actually plan to produce even more fossil fuels than they did two years ago, when the report was last updated.”

Of course, as he did in his first term, President Trump is pulling the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement as he unleashes American industry and works to ensure energy affordability, independence and security for the nation. Legislation to roll back taxpayer subsidies for “renewables” and return to “reliables” has already been passed or introduced in various states and is soon likely to be fortified at the federal level.

After wasting billions of tax dollars on wind and solar subsidies that could have been directed toward schools, healthcare or other real needs, the fever is finally breaking. The world is slowly but surely awakening from the delusions of climate zealots who insisted that we were on the verge of catastrophe with constantly worsening weather disasters.

Just last May, for example, NOAA the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted an “above-normal 2025 Atlantic hurricane season.” And just a few months earlier, PBS NewsHour reported on a study showing that “human-caused climate change made Atlantic hurricanes about 18 miles per hour (29 kilometers per hour) stronger in the last six years.”

The message was clear. More hurricanes.
Stronger hurricanes. This year’s reality so far?

“The 2025 Atlantic hurricane season is the first time in 10 years that a hurricane has not made landfall in the United States through the end of September,” according to American Press. While “hurricane season” extends through November, September is usually the busiest month.

The weather is – and has always been – unpredictable. Severe weather events like hurricanes, tornadoes, monsoons, floods, blizzards and drought have always been with us, and always will. The attempt to demonize humankind for the frequency and severity of the weather has been politically motived and economically disastrous.

“Net zero” pledges are being revealed for the false promises they most often were, designed mainly to win plaudits from the Lecturing Left. For leaders grounded in facts, real-world needs have always meant that no one is easing off the gas.

2. Vaclav Smil’s paper is at Fraser Institute Halfway between Kyoto and 2050.  Overview and keynote section are reprinted below with my bolds and added images.

      Contents
Executive Summary
Introduction
1. Carbon in the Biosphere
2. Energy Transitions
3. Our Record So Far
4. What It Would Take to Reverse the Past Emission Trend
5. The Task Ahead: Zero Carbon Electricity and Hydrogen
6. Costs, Politics, and Demand
7. Realities versus Wishful Thinking
8. Closing Thoughts
Executive Summary

♦  This essay evaluates past carbon emission reduction and the feasibility of eliminating fossil fuels to achieve net-zero carbon by 2050.

♦  Despite international agreements, government spending and regulations, and technological advancements, global fossil fuel consumption surged by 55 percent between 1997 and 2023.  And the share of fossil fuels in global energy consumption has only decreased from nearly 86 percent in 1997 to approximately 82 percent in 2022.

♦  The first global energy transition, from traditional biomass fuels such as wood and charcoal to fossil fuels, started more than two centuries ago and unfolded gradually.

♦  That transition remains incomplete, as billions of people still rely on traditional biomass energies for cooking and heating.

♦  The scale of today’s energy transition requires approximately 700 exajoules of new non-carbon energies by 2050, which needs about 38,000 projects the size of BC’s Site C or 39,000 equivalents of Muskrat Falls.

♦  Converting energy-intensive processes (e.g., iron smelting, cement, and plastics) to non-fossil alternatives requires solutions not yet available for largescale use.

♦  The energy transition imposes unprecedented demands for minerals including copper and lithium, which require substantial time to locate and develop mines.

♦  To achieve net-zero carbon, affluent countries will incur costs of at least 20 percent of their annual GDP.

♦  While global cooperation is essential to achieve decarbonization by 2050, major emitters such as the United States, China, and Russia have conflicting interests.

♦  To eliminate carbon emissions by 2050, governments face unprecedented technical, economic and political challenges, making rapid and inexpensive transition impossible.

7. Realities versus Wishful Thinking

Since the world began to focus on the need to end the combustion of fossil fuels, we have not made the slightest progress in the goal of absolute global decarbonization: emission declines in many affluent countries were far smaller than the increased consumption of coal and hydrocarbons in the rest of the world, a trend that has also reflected the continuing deindustrialization in Europe and North America and the rising shares of carbon-intensive industrial production originating in Asia. As a result, by 2023 the absolute reliance on fossil carbon rose by 54 percent worldwide since the Kyoto commitment. Moreover, a significant part of emission declines in many affluent countries has been due to their deindustrialization, to transferring some of their carbon-intensive industries abroad, above all to China.

A recent international analysis of 1500 climate policies around the world concluded that 63 or 4% of them were successful in reducing emissions.

Denmark, with half of its electricity now coming from wind, is often pointed out as a particular decarbonization success: since 1995 it cut its energy-related emissions by 56 percent (compared to the EU average of about 22 percent)—but, unlike its neighbours, the country does not produce any major metals (aluminum, copper, iron, or steel), it does not make any float glass or paper, does not synthesize any ammonia, and it does not even assemble any cars. All these products are energy-intensive, and transferring the emissions associated with their production to other countries creates an undeservedly green reputation for the country doing the transferring.

Given the fact that we have yet to reach the global carbon emission peak (or a plateau) and considering the necessarily gradual progress of several key technical solutions for decarbonization (from large-scale electricity storage to mass-scale hydrogen use), we cannot expect the world economy to become carbon free by 2050. The goal may be desirable, but it remains unrealistic. The latest International Energy Agency World Energy Outlook report confirms that conclusion. While it projects that energy-related CO2 emissions will peak in 2025, and that the demand for all fossil fuels will peak by 2030, it also anticipates that only coal consumption will decline significantly by 2050 (though it will still be about half of the 2023 level), and that the demand for crude oil and natural gas will see only marginal changes by 2050 with oil consumption still around 4 billion tons and natural gas use still above 4 trillion cubic meters a year (IEA, 2023d).

Wishful thinking or claiming otherwise should not be used or defended by saying that doing so represents “aspirational” goals. Responsible analyses must acknowledge existing energy, material, engineering, managerial, economic, and political realities. An impartial assessment of those resources indicates that it is extremely unlikely that the global energy system will be rid of all fossil carbon by 2050. Sensible policies and their vigorous pursuit will determine the actual degree of that dissociation, which might be as high as 60 or 65 percent. More and more people are recognizing these realities, and fewer are swayed by the incessant stream of miraculously downward-bending decarbonization scenarios so dear to demand modelers.

Long-term global energy forecasts offering numbers for overall demand or supply and for shares contributed by specific sources or conversions are beyond our capability: the system is too complex and too open to unforeseen but profound perturbations for such specificity. However, skepticism in constructing long-term estimates will lessen the extent of inevitable errors. Here is an example of a realistic 2023 forecast done by Norwegian risk management company DNV that has been echoed recently by other realistic assessments. After noting that global energy-related emissions are still climbing (but might peak in 2024 when the transition would effectively begin) it concludes that by 2050 we will move from the present roughly 80 percent fossil/20 percent non-fossil split to a 48 percent/52 percent ratio by 2050, with primary energy from fossil fuels declining by nearly two-thirds but still remaining at about 314 EJ by 2050—in other words, about as high as it was in 1995 (DNV, 2023).

Again, that is what any serious student of global energy transitions would expect. Individual components change at different speeds and notably rapid transformations are possible, but the overall historical pattern quantified in terms of primary energies is one of gradual changes. Unfortunately, modern forecasting in general and the anticipation of energy advances in particular have an unmistakable tendency toward excessive optimism, exaggeration, and outright hype (Smil, 2023b). During the 1970s many people believed that by the year 2000 all electricity would come not just from fission, but from fast breeder reactors, and soon afterwards came the promises of “soft energy” taking over (Smil, 2000).

Belief in near-miraculous tomorrows never goes away. Even now we can read declarations claiming that the world can rely solely on wind and PV by 2030 (Global100REStrategyGroup, 2023). And then there are repeated claims that all energy needs (from airplanes to steel smelting) can be supplied by cheap green hydrogen or by affordable nuclear fusion. What does this all accomplish besides filling print and screens with unrealizable claims? Instead, we should devote our efforts to charting realistic futures that consider our technical capabilities, our material supplies, our economic possibilities, and our social necessities—and then devise practical ways to achieve them. We can always strive to surpass them—a far better goal than setting ourselves up for repeated failures by clinging to unrealistic targets and impractical visions.

 

US Nuclear Power Revival

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Duggan Flanakin writes at Real Clear Energy Data Centers, Trump Spark U.S. Nuclear Revival.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

With a strong push from the Trump White House, for the first time since Three Mile Island, the nuclear energy industry in the U.S. is bullish about its future. It’s about time, given that the average existing U.S. nuclear power plant was built based on 1980s technology.

A major reason for the virtual standstill in nuclear energy development in the U.S. was the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s near-maniacal effort to reassure a skittish public that they would not issue permits to any nuclear power plant that had the potential for public harm.

The shot heard round the world signaling a change in U.S. nuclear energy policy was the summary firing of NRC Commissioner Christopher Hanson, whose divinity school background may have contributed to a perception he viewed his job as more a gatekeeper for regulatory control than a partner in building a U.S. nuclear future.  As Senate Environment and Public Works Committee chair Shelley Moore Capito (R, WV) said,

“For decades, the NRC took too long, cost too much, and did not have a predictable and efficient process to approve new licenses or modernize outdated regulations.” 

Newly installed NRC Chair David Wright has called the Trump directives not “just regulatory reform” but a “cultural transformation that positions the NRC to be a forward-leaning, risk-informed regulator for the future.” The agency’s internal culture is being reshaped into a more efficient and modern agency without sacrificing public safety, Wright said.

Several MEPs (mainly Greens) hold up anti-nuclear posters at the debate.

But it’s not just the NRC that is being transformed. Under presidents from Carter to Biden, nuclear was largely relegated to the closet as the primary focus was the media-driven “green energy” crusade. Wind and solar permits were issued without the cleanup requirements and prepayments mandatory for nuclear and fossil fuel facilities. Nuclear was deemed “dirty.”

The first Trump term was so mangled by political infighting (both intra-party and cross-party) that any real nuclear energy agenda lay buried among the lawsuits. In the interim, however, artificial intelligence made giant leaps and the demand for electric power for fast-growing data centers was exploding. Wind and solar cannot be relied upon by entities dependent upon 24/7/365 power – and nuclear is still viewed as the “cleaner” option vis-à-vis natural gas.

Even before Trump’s reelection, tech giants were busily signing nuclear energy deals to power their data centers. Last September the owner of the long-shuttered Three Mile Island Unit 1 nuclear power plant announced plans to restart operations in 2027, thanks to a 20-year power purchase agreement with Microsoft for a nearby AI data center.

Last October Amazon and Google both announced they would be investing in small modular reactors for AI data centers. Two months later Meta said it planned to follow suit. The amazing thing is the uncertainty that the SMR manufacturers will be able to deliver as quickly and as affordably as the tech giants demand. The simple reason? They have no track record yet. But energy demand is so high that waiting is not an option.

In the last few weeks, what was already a fast train picked up even more speed. On October 16 the U.S. Army unveiled its next-generation nuclear power Janus Program for the deployment of small modular reactors to support national defense installations and critical missions. Commercial microreactor manufacturers will partner with the Army’s Defense Innovation Unit with a goal of an operating reactor by September 30, 2028.

On October 26, Hyundai Engineering & Construction announced a basic design contract with Fermi America to construct four large nuclear reactors on a 8.1-square-mile property outside Amarillo, Texas. The Hyundai-designed AP1000 nuclear reactors will generate 4 GW for the HyperGrid complex, the world’s largest integrated energy and AI campus. The 11-GW project also includes 2 GW from small modular reactors, 4 GW from gas combined cycle plants, and 1 GW from solar and battery storage systems.

The integrated license application for the $500 billion project, the brainchild of former Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Fermi co-founder Toby Neugebauer, is currently under expedited review by the NRC. Meanwhile, Hyundai E&C is working on design tasks and preparations for the main construction phase, with finalization anticipated for an engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) contract by spring 2026.

On October 28, Westinghouse Electric Co. joined Cameco Corporation and Brookfield Asset Management in a new strategic partnership with the U.S. government to accelerate the deployment of nuclear power. The government has committed to construction of at least $80 billion of new reactors using Westinghouse’s nuclear reactor technology to reinvigorate the U.S. nuclear power industrial base.

The government says this partnership will facilitate the growth and future of the U.S. nuclear power industry and the supporting supply chain. The entire project, which will deploy two-unit Westinghouse AP1000 reactors, is expected to create more than 100,000 construction jobs and support or sustain 45,000 manufacturing and engineering jobs across 43 states.

The AP300 SMR is a single-loop, 300-MWe pressurized water reactor that utilizes identical systems to the larger AP1000 reactor.

These are only a sampling of the active and planned contracts for nuclear power plant construction that have sprung out of the unplowed ground with the change in philosophy at the NRC and the White House. All systems are brightly lit green – but obstacles remain in the road.

Even with greatly shortened licensing timeframes, it will take time to complete site designs, obtain permits and licenses, and begin delivering much needed electricity to tech giants and other customers. Yet the biggest problem may be finding enough nuclear fuel at affordable prices to meet the mushrooming demand.

One option, says Curio CEO Ed McGinnis, is recognizing that spent nuclear fuel (including that from nuclear weapons) can safely be turned into fresh usable nuclear fuel and valuable rare metals and materials (like rhodium, palladium, krypton-85, and americium-241).

The Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) recent research and development in the advanced reactor technology space. Source: DOE

U.S. production of uranium oxide in 2024 jumped exponentially to 677,000 pounds from just 50,000 pounds in 2023, and exploration and development activities in 2023 were the highest in a decade. On a down note, anti-nuclear activists have been waging a campaign to shut down the White Mesa Mill in Utah that processes uranium ore – and in the U.S. today only about 5% of nuclear fuel has been processed domestically.

The nuclear fuel conundrum is but one of the obstacles in the path of the massive U.S. nuclear power industry growth that is also a vital component of the growth of AI data centers and other emerging electricity-hungry technologies that are shaping our future. But all systems are go – and that is the giant step that had to be taken first.

Bill Gates Returns to Energy Pragmatism

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Alex Epstein reports regarding Bill Gates latest statement downplaying climate doomsterism, and reminds us that he hasn’t changed his mind so much as he is now able to speak freely.  For example, watch this short video of Bill Gates in 2019.

Alex Epstein posted his conversation with Fox News Will Cain: Why Bill Gates is finally rejecting climate catastrophism.  Excerpts in italics with his bolds and my added images.

Will Cain:

Joining us now to continue this conversation is the founder of Center for Industrial Progress, it’s Alex Epstein. Alex, great to see you here today.

I think that, first of all, we should celebrate that Bill Gates has seen the light, has now understood the truth, but that does lead to the question: Why?

Alex Epstein:

It’s a good question, and actually I don’t think Bill’s views have changed much.

I think he’s held the view that he’s saying now, and I think he’s even less of a climate catastrophist and anti-fossil fuel person than he’s letting on now. I think what’s changed—and this is good news—is the cultural, economic, and political environment.

And in particular what we see are, one, the rise of AI and people recognizing that you’re going to need more fossil fuels to provide the reliable electricity—key: reliable electricity—that AI requires.

Number two, you’ve got a government right now that is pro-fossil fuel and very anti-climate catastrophist.

And number three, to the extent I and some others can take credit, I think we’ve advanced the pro-fossil fuel argument that shows that, hey, we do have impact on climate, but the net effect of fossil fuel use is incredibly positive, including on the livability of climate, or safety from climate.

I think those three factors have created an environment where Bill Gates—who I admire in many ways, but is a very calculating guy—where he feels like it’s in his interest to tell more of the truth about this issue than he has in recent years.

Will Cain:

All right, let’s take your three potential explanations for the change of heart for Bill Gates.

Let’s set aside your personal advocacy and persuasion, which I find compelling. And it’s not just you alone, Alex. It’s really most of the thoughtful scientists and thinkers through the last several hundred years have understood the power of fossil fuels and economic growth in helping the vast majority of people across the world.

Maybe that finally broke through to Bill Gates. Maybe he just sees the writing on the wall and understands what’s happening in modern America under President Donald Trump.

But the first is quite interesting: AI and the rise of AI. Does Gates not have significant investment in AI?

Alex Epstein:

Well, he obviously has investments. I mean, every major tech company is taking into account AI, I think validly, whether their current investment level is right or not. It’s key to their future.

But it’s not even that it’s just of interest to his company, although that’s surely a factor. He thinks it’s a big interest to humanity.

But most importantly, all these things, it’s more okay to talk about it. We already knew that the world needed way more energy, but now it’s okay to talk about it.

That’s why all these tech companies who made net zero pledges are suddenly saying, “No, we don’t need net zero”. Nothing changed really in the information environment, but the cultural environment did change.

Will Cain:

Well, I guess I’m just a little skeptical on the sincerity today and yesterday, and when I notice he can mingle his own personal net worth and benefit with that of what is best for humanity.

And if he convinces himself that AI is what’s best for humanity, and AI needs energy to grow, and therefore AI needs fossil fuels, he can convince himself that using fossil fuels is what’s best for humanity. And I think that is a little more in line with what I would suspect to be the motivation of Bill Gates.

Alex Epstein:

It’s definitely true with the broader tech industry. Again, they made “net zero” commitments just a few years ago when Biden was president, when everyone was on to ESG, and then suddenly their views changed and they never really acknowledged it.

Now I’m grateful, guys. Welcome to the party. I’m glad Zuckerberg is here. I’m glad Bezos is here. I’m glad Gates is here. These are people I admire a lot in many ways. I’m glad they’re changing their views.

But maybe stick to the truth this time instead of being so opportunistic and not really explaining how one day you’re “net zero” and then when it conflicts with your business interests, then you’re suddenly, “hey, yeah, let’s use more fossil fuels, we need it for AI”.

I thought you were worried about a climate catastrophe. It turns out there was never a climate catastrophe.

Will Cain:

I’m glad they’re here too, Alex. I just wouldn’t issue them permanent membership yet in the Club of Truth. Alex Epstein, it’s great to have you here on the show today.

See Also:

Energy Realism Marching Ahead

The Reality

Energy sources are additive and symbiotic. Coal, oil, gas, wood, nuclear
and renewables all grew together, they didn’t replace each other.

The Fantasy

Texans, Don’t Mess With Emissions Reductions

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Gregory Wrightstone writes at Lone Star Standard; Texans should stop spending on fake climate crisis.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Boasting that Texas “has built more wind power than any state and is a top contender for the most solar power,” a Texas Tribune article bemoans a decline in federal subsidies for such energy sources and a potential loss of “billions in investments and thousands of jobs.”

Interestingly, the writers focus on business interests of the climate industrial complex and ignore the stated reason for subsidies – to avoid supposed catastrophic global warming. Planetary health – purported to be threatened by industrial emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) – was not even an afterthought in the handwringing over wind and solar financial fortunes.

Regardless, Texans face no such peril and the billions already spent on “green” obsessions in the Lone Star State are for naught. “There is no evidence of a climate crisis in Texas and none can be reasonably expected,” says a report, “Texas and Climate Change,” recently published by the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia.

Both the Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5) and a Texas A&M University report predict harm to Texans from human-induced warming. Climate change is “putting us at risk from climate hazards that degrade our lands and waters, quality of life, health and well-being, and cultural interconnectedness,” according to NCA5.

In contradicting those findings, the CO2 Coalition analyzed data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), NASA, U.S. Department of Agriculture, reports published in peer-reviewed journals and others.

“The temperature in Texas has shown no unprecedented or unusual warming, despite increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide,” says the CO2 Coalition report. “Recent temperatures in Texas are similar to those found more than 100 years ago.”

In fact, the annual number of 100-degree days in Texas has an overall decreasing trend.

While some have claimed a connection between climate change and July’s tragic flooding in central Texas, no scientific basis for such a link exists. Though extreme, the flooding was not a first.

According to Harris County meteorologist Jeff Lindner, the July 4th flood of the Guadalupe River at Kerrville peaked at 34.29 feet, making it the third-highest flood on record for the city. The 2025 flood crest trails the 39.0-foot flood crest from 1932 and the 37.72-foot flood crest from in 1987.

“Over the last 28 years, flash floods, while varying greatly from year to year, have actually been in slight decline,” the CO2 Coalition report found.

Precipitation data from the U.S. Historical Climatology Network indicate that Texas has experienced a very slight increase (1 to 2 inches annually) in precipitation since 1895, which is contrary to the predictions of significant increases in rainfall from climate alarmists. If anything, the modest increase in Texas precipitation should have beneficial effects on the state’s agricultural yields.

As for drought – the primary scourge of crops throughout the world – government data show no discernable trend in the severity of arid spells in Texas, which is a direct contradiction to claims of increasing drought by both the Texas A&M report and NCA5.

Similarly rebutting the fearmongering of alarmists, the CO2 Coalition report found no increasing trends for wildfires, hurricanes and tornadoes.

With respect to tornadoes, the U.S., including Texas, has seen a decades-long decline in the most violent of twisters. The likely reason is a warming Earth – a natural phenomenon following the end of the Little Ice Age – reduces the temperature differentials between regions inside and outside equatorial regions that drive storms.

Like the rest of the world, Texas has experienced record-breaking growth in crop production over the last several decades. This is no coincidence, as research shows every increase of 1 part per million (ppm) in CO2 concentration boosts yields of corn and wheat by 0.4% and 1%, respectively. Based on these metrics, the 140-ppm increase in CO2 since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution has led to increases of 56%, 84% and 140% in corn, soybeans and wheat, respectively.

CO2 is necessary for life on Earth, and reducing emissions of the gas would be harmful to vegetation, including forests, grasslands and agricultural crops.

Even if Texas could stop emitting CO2, the amount of atmospheric warming averted would be only 0.0093 degrees and 0.0237 degrees by 2050 and 2100, respectively. These changes are negligible and cannot be felt or measured.

If the reason for spending on Texas climate policy were to enrich wind and solar developers, then, yes, lamentations over the demise of subsidies are understandable. However, there is no basis for spending a cent on a fake crisis – and certainly not on technologies that offer no benefit.

Anti-Tornado Tech Better Than Mitigation?

Gregory Wrightstone is a geologist; executive director of the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Va.; author of “Inconvenient Facts: The Science That Al Gore Doesn’t Want You to Know” and “A Very Convenient Warming: How modest warming and more CO2 are benefiting humanity.”

CO2 Coalition Texas Report is here.  My snyopsis is :

No Climate Crisis in Texas

An Insider’s Story How Climatism Subverted Reason

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Mark Keenan explains in his American Thinker article The Climate Creed: How Fear Replaced Science.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

For decades, politicians and pundits have told us that “the science is settled.” Those four words have become a shield for power and a sword against dissent. But real science thrives on inquiry and investigation; not the suppression of it. What has emerged instead is not science at all, but a kind of secular faith — one that demands belief in man-made CO2-induced climate catastrophe and punishes heresy. Yet, many scientists, including scientists that have worked within the climate bureaucracy, know how fragile the claim that “climate change is caused by CO2” really is.

As a former scientist with the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change and later a technical expert for United Nations Environment, I saw firsthand how the modern climate narrative was shaped — not by evidence, but by politics. Uncertainty wasn’t treated as a question to investigate; it was treated as a threat to suppress. Entire careers and institutions came to depend on preserving a preordained conclusion: that carbon dioxide, the same gas that feeds plant life, is destroying the planet.

What began as environmental concern has hardened into climate orthodoxy — a moral creed enforced by bureaucrats, bankers, and media alike. It is a belief system that demands faith rather than understanding, obedience rather than inquiry. None of this means the climate isn’t changing. It means that the conversation about why and how has been systematically narrowed — not by discovery, but by decree.

The Rise of Climate Bureaucracy

By the 1990s, climate science had morphed from an academic discipline into a vast global bureaucracy. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), founded in 1988, became the central authority — linking governments, corporations, and NGOs under a single mission: to define and manage “the problem.”

But the IPCC’s reports were never neutral. The “Summary for Policymakers” — the only section most journalists ever read — was often written before the science was finalized. Conclusions drove the evidence, not the other way around. Scientists who emphasized natural climate drivers such as solar cycles or ocean oscillations were quietly pushed aside. The institution that once claimed to study the climate became invested in proving a single narrative.

The Other Consensus

While the UN promotes its “consensus,” thousands of scientists disagree. In 2019, more than 2,000 experts signed the Climate Intelligence (CLINTEL) Declaration, stating bluntly:

“There is no [CO₂-induced] climate emergency. The geological record shows Earth’s climate has always varied naturally.”

CO2 is not pollution — it is plant food, essential for life and photosynthesis. Yet the UN’s focus on carbon rather than true pollutants such as heavy metals or industrial toxins has diverted environmentalism from its original mission into politics.

I witnessed this distortion firsthand while working within the UN system. My role involved servicing the Pollution Release and Transfer Register Protocol — a multinational agreement that monitors pollutants to air, land, and water. Real pollution exists, and it’s severe. But CO2 is not the problem. Confusing the two has served political and financial ends, not ecological ones.

When Science Becomes Statecraft

The line between scientific advice and political advocacy blurred long ago. Governments needed crisis to justify regulation and taxation. NGOs needed fear to justify funding. And so “consensus science” — a contradiction in terms — entered the lexicon and became the new norm.

Real science advances through dissent and enquiry; consensus is a political construct. But once the term took hold, it became a weapon. Questioning it marked one as a heretic. The language of faith — belief, denial, salvation — replaced the language of analysis. What began as environmental concern hardened into a kind of secular theology: the carbon creed.

Complexity was the enemy. Climate models that showed alarming forecasts were amplified, while those showing uncertainty were ignored. What followed was the moralization of data. The language of faith replaced the language of evidence: belief, denial, salvation, catastrophe. Dissenters weren’t debated — they were denounced. What began as environmental concern hardened into an ideology — one that rewards fear over reason.

Scientists Who Broke Ranks

Many respected scientists have spoken out. Professor John R. Christy, Director of Atmospheric and Earth Sciences, University of Alabama, stated: “The established global warming theory significantly misrepresents the impact of extra greenhouse gases.” MIT’s Richard Lindzen observed, “In Earth’s long history, there’s been almost no correlation between climate and CO₂.” Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner, once with the IPCC, called the carbon narrative “a wonderful way to control taxation and people.” Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore declared the crisis “fake science” hijacked by ideology.

Such voices are rarely heard in mainstream media, not because their credentials lack merit, but because they challenge the most politically valuable story of the century.

The Money Behind the Mandate

Follow the money, and the picture becomes clearer. The financialization of carbon—
through emissions trading, carbon credits, and “green investment” funds
— transformed moral urgency into a trillion-dollar industry.

Governments pour billions into renewable subsidies, enriching banks and corporations far more than benefiting the planet. If the climate crisis were truly existential, would its management really be entrusted to those who profit from it?

In my book Climate CO₂ Hoax – How Bankers Hijacked the Environmental Movement, I detail how the 1992 UN Earth Summit in Rio marked the turning point — when financial elites effectively captured global environmental policy. Reports and whistleblower accounts later suggested that key policies adopted at the summit were drafted without open debate — policies that subordinated national sovereignty to global ‘sustainability’ goals.”

Net Zero: The Mirage of Green Energy

The world’s economies are being restructured around “net zero,” but the irony is glaring. Building the infrastructure for so-called “green energy” — from solar panels to EV batteries — requires massive fossil-fuel use and destructive rare-earth mining.

Electric cars rely on lithium and cobalt extracted through environmentally devastating processes. The energy required to mine and refine these materials often exceeds what the vehicles save over their lifetimes.

In Germany, the green energy transition has turned a once-stable, low-cost energy grid into one of the most expensive in the industrial world. In Ireland, plans to close the coal-fired Moneypoint power station were reversed in 2022 as the government quietly converted it to burn oil instead — an unspoken admission that “renewables” can’t power modern economies.

Silencing Dissent

In this new orthodoxy, questioning the narrative is treated as blasphemy. Scientists who deviate from the CO2 script face censorship, ostracism, and blacklisting. The term “denier” — borrowed from the lexicon of moral condemnation — equates disagreement with depravity, and scepticism with sin

Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado revealed how the IPCC relies on the RCP 8.5 model — one he described as “fantasy land,” completely detached from real-world data. Yet it remains the foundation of global policy and countless policy papers and media headlines.

When truth becomes heresy, science itself collapses.

The Moralization of Carbon

CO2 has been transformed from a molecule into a moral symbol — the embodiment of human guilt. Citizens are told to measure their “carbon footprint” as if it were a sin ledger, redeemable only through “green” consumption. Yet many of these same products — from electric cars to solar infrastructure — depend on the same industrial extraction that environmentalism once opposed.

This framing serves a purpose. Instead of questioning the powerful institutions that profit from pollution and its supposed cure, individuals are encouraged to internalize blame. The message: You are the problem — not the system. It’s an old strategy of control — rule through guilt rather than force.

The Politics of Fear

No ideology survives without fear. Apocalyptic imagery — burning forests, flooded cities, “ticking clocks” — has replaced empirical evidence as the main instrument of persuasion. Yet forest fires and floods are as old as the Earth itself.

Children now grow up believing the planet will collapse before they reach adulthood. Politicians invoke “existential threat” rhetoric to justify sweeping economic and social controls. What was once a challenge to power has become a tool of it.

The New Creed

Modern climate orthodoxy is not science but ideology — a sociopolitical construct — a fusion of fear, money, and power that rewards conformity and punishes doubt. Science must never serve politics. When data becomes dogma, truth dies — and with it, freedom. If we truly wish to “save the planet,” we must first save science itself.

Mark Keenan is a former scientist at the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change and a former Environmental Affairs Officer with United Nations Environment. 

Climate Lawfare Circus Update

Posted on by Ron Clutz

 

What are the most notable climate activists litigation defeats in 2025? Response from perplexity.ai

In 2025, climate activists experienced several major litigation defeats in the United States, especially in their attempts to challenge President Trump’s climate and energy policies at the federal level and to anchor climate protection as a constitutional right.

Key Litigation Defeats

♦  Young climate activists and their legal team from Our Children’s Trust faced a significant setback in federal court in Montana while seeking to block three of President Trump’s executive orders promoting fossil fuels. Despite a previous win at the state level, legal experts indicated that the lack of explicit environmental protections in the U.S. Constitution made success in federal court extremely unlikely, with Judge Dana Christensen leaning toward dismissal of the lawsuit known as Lighthiser v. Trump.​

♦  The Supreme Court declined to hear Juliana v. United States, a long-running youth-led climate lawsuit, ending the federal court battle after a decade. This rejection marked the conclusion of a pivotal effort to make climate protection a constitutional right in the United States, moving activists to seek remedies through international legal bodies instead.​

♦  Multiple states and the federal attorneys argued in Montana that overturning Trump’s orders would undermine the democratic process and risk national energy security. The lack of constitutional language guaranteeing a right to a “clean and healthful environment” at the federal level proved a decisive barrier to the activists’ arguments.​

♦  With federal options closed, activists petitioned the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, alleging U.S. violations of international law for climate harm, but outcomes remain pending and U.S. jurisdiction over international tribunals is limited.​

Landmark Litigation Losses and Developments

Courts have started recognizing corporate responsibilities regarding emissions but continue to hesitate imposing mandatory emission reduction targets, reflecting ongoing legal and evidentiary hurdles for plaintiffs. Notable cases from 2025, such as Milieudefensie v. Shell and Lliuya v. RWE, ultimately resulted in losses for claimants but set significant legal precedents confirming that corporations can, in principle, be held liable for climate harm.​

Climate-washing litigation targeting misleading corporate environmental claims saw a high success rate—over 60% of such cases resulted in court victories for plaintiffs in 2024, according to recent reports summarized in 2025. However, the number of these cases dropped sharply compared to the previous year.​

In the governmental context, landmark litigation sought to enforce national and international climate commitments, referencing human rights and environmental standards. A recent International Court of Justice (ICJ) advisory opinion concluded that states ignoring fossil fuel regulation are committing internationally wrongful acts. While not binding, this opinion is expected to empower future climate litigation and enhance compensation claims for vulnerable nations.​

Procedural and jurisdictional challenges remain. For example, in People v. JBS USA Food Co., a New York court dismissed a case on jurisdictional grounds, highlighting ongoing obstacles to holding companies accountable for generic net-zero marketing claims without robust, actionable plans.​

In high-profile U.S. litigation, a court denied Tyson Foods’ motion to dismiss a greenwashing case, stating that future-looking net-zero claims must be backed by solid evidence and current technology—not just promises of technological advancement.​

What are the key legal reasons defeating climate lawsuits?

The primary legal reasons defeating climate lawsuits include statutory displacement, lack of standing, the political question doctrine, difficulty proving causation, preemption by federal law, and inadequate legal remedies. Courts often find that existing statutes like the Clean Air Act preempt common law claims, making it impossible for plaintiffs to address climate issues through federal court-made legal principles if a federal statute already covers the matter—even if the statute does not offer a complete solution. Additionally, lawsuits face defeat when courts decide that climate policy decisions should be made legislatively rather than judicially, treating them as ‘political questions’ beyond the judiciary’s purview.​

Statutory Displacement
Courts frequently rule that federal environmental statutes, such as the Clean Air Act, preempt or displace claims brought under federal common law. This means plaintiffs cannot use nuisance or other tort claims to address climate harm when statutes exist, limiting the options for federal climate lawsuits.​

Standing and Causation
Many lawsuits are dismissed due to lack of standing, meaning plaintiffs cannot sufficiently show a direct, personal injury caused by the defendant’s actions. Additionally, climate change causation is global and diffuse, making it challenging for plaintiffs to link their harm to a specific company or government action and demonstrate that a court-ordered remedy would meaningfully address the injury.​

Political Question Doctrine
Some courts view wide-scale climate regulation, emission reductions, and related damages as issues that require policy choices reserved for legislative or executive branches, not judicial intervention. This doctrine precludes courts from adjudicating matters they see as inherently political in nature.​

Preemption by Federal Law and Removal to Federal Courts
Efforts by energy companies to move cases from state to federal courts—where precedent is often less favorable to climate plaintiffs—also contribute to the defeat of many lawsuits. The U.S. Supreme Court has expanded the grounds for companies to fight climate lawsuits, making it easier for them to have cases dismissed at the federal level.​

Inadequate Legal Remedies
Courts can find that litigation is not the proper tool for addressing climate change, as tackling global warming requires international cooperation and extensive policy changes—beyond what a court order can achieve. This challenge is reflected in rulings that climate harm is not redressable through the available legal frameworks.​

 

Litigation Updates from Sabin Center

Federal Court Said Puerto Rican Municipalities’ Climate Claims Against Fossil Fuel Industry Were Time-Barred

The court found that there was “overwhelming evidence of public knowledge of articles, reports, and cases making the connection between Defendants and Plaintiffs’ claims” so that by September 2021, four years after the 2017 hurricanes, the plaintiffs knew or should have known both that they suffered injury and also whom to sue.

Maine Federal Court Remanded State’s Climate Case Against Fossil Fuel Defendants to State Court and Granted State’s Motion for Costs and Fees

The court found that the defendants failed to satisfy the requirement for federal officer removal that any action by the defendants under a federal officer’s authority have a sufficient “nexus” to the conduct charged in Maine’s complaint—i.e., the defendants’ acts of “deceiving consumers and the public about climate change.”

Eighth Circuit Said Department of Energy Exceeded Authority with Rule Intended to Incentivize Electric Vehicle Production

The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated a 2024 final U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) rule that changed the methodology for determining the equivalent petroleum-based fuel economy values for electric vehicles (EVs). The rule preserved and then gradually phased out a “fuel content factor” that “artificially inflates” EVs’ fuel economy to increase adoption of EVs.

Wisconsin Federal Court Said Environmental Review Considered Climate Consequences of Land Exchange for Completed Transmission Line

The court concluded that even though the transmission line project had been completed and placed in service in September 2024, on the merits the court rejected arguments that the exchange violated the National Wildlife Refuge System Improvement Act of 1997 and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

Massachusetts Federal Court Said Climate Working Group Did Not Qualify as Exception to Federal Advisory Committee Act but Found that Environmental Groups Did Not Establish Irreparable Harm Warranting Preliminary Injunction

The court denied the environmental group plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction requiring the defendants to provide them with the Climate Working Group records; the court found the plaintiffs’ inability to draw on the records in comments on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed rescission of the 2009 Clean Air Act endangerment finding regarding greenhouse gas emissions did not constitute an irreparable informational injury.

Charleston Elected Not to Appeal Dismissal of Climate Case

August 2025 dismissal of its lawsuit seeking to hold fossil fuel industry defendants liable for the harmful effects of climate change.

The Exception, a wrong and morally hazardous ruling in Montana

Montana Trial Court Awarded Held v. State Youth Plaintiffs Attorney Fees and Costs

The Montana District Court awarded the youth plaintiffs who prevailed on climate change-based Montana Constitution claims against the State of Montana and other State defendants more than $2.8 million in attorney fees and almost $100,000 in additional costs.

See Also:

No Right to Stable Climate in Our Holocene Epoch