Frank Clemente and Fred Palmer remind us how essential is coal power with their Real Clear Energy article What Coal Did Today. Text is below with my bolds and added images.
Coal has been the material foundation of industrialization, urbanization, modernization and technological development for more than two centuries. The examples are endless. It was coal that propelled the Industrial Revolution in England that spread throughout the world. It was coal that provided the electrification of virtually every society.
Progress of civilization through changing mixes of energy sources.
Coal was the foundational fuel for the electrification of the Tennessee Valley Authority and brought myriad associated benefits to the cities, towns and farms across the entire American landscape. It was coal that powered the Transcontinental Railroad and the steamships that traversed every ocean. Coal produced the steel that enabled the skyscrapers, bridges, hospitals, highways, dams. irrigation systems and power plants. Steel remains the backbone of practically every home, factory, school and hospital.
And it was coal that provided the means to lift millions upon millions out of poverty and extended human existence to enjoy a higher quality of life. It is no coincidence that the U.S. increase in life expectancy from 48 in 1900 to 77 in 2000 was highly correlated with the rise of coal-based electricity. No wonder that the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) identified “electrification” as the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century.
But coal is far more than history. It is a current global reality,
improving the daily lives of billions of people throughout the world.
Consider the continuing role coal plays in the largest urbanizing society in the world—comprising 1.5 Billion people—nearly 20%% of the global population:
India: coal generates 75% of electricity, produces over 80% of steel and the vast majority of cement. India’s urban population is projected to grow by an incredible 400 million people by 2050, resulting in over 900 million living in cities, The World Bank has warned that 50% of the necessary urban infrastructure for 2050 has not yet built. Coal is the sine qua non of that growth.
As a result, India’s installed crude steel capacity of about 180 million metric tons in fiscal year 2025 is set to grow, reaching up to 280 million metric tons by 2035 alone.
And the beat goes on, By 2050, 68% of the world’s population is projected to live in urban areas, adding approximately 2.5 billion people to cities, some 80 million a year, 220,000 each day, 9,000 per hour and 190 new urbanites every single minute 24/7 for 24 years.
Milloy reads AI bias/climate riot act to IBM management at annual shareholder meeting. Here is the media release and audio presentation for the IBM shareholder proposal of the Free Enterprise Project of the National Center for Public Policy Research. The annual shareholder meeting is April 28, 2026. Text of press release below with my bolds and added images.
Press Release: IBM’s AI Model: Garbage In, Garbage Out
Washington, D.C. – At next week’s IBM annual meeting, shareholders will vote on a proposal from the National Center for Public Policy Research’s Free Enterprise Project (FEP) tackling potential bias within the company’s artificial intelligence models.
Proposal 7 (“AI Bias Audit”) requests “a report, within the next year, on the methods used to eliminate bias from the Company’s artificial intelligence (AI) models.”
At the April 28 meeting, FEP Executive Director Steve Milloy will cite climate alarmism as an example of where AI too often gets it wrong:
I am an AI user and it can be a great tool. But AI is subject to what 1950s IBM programmer George Fuechsel called “GIGO” – garbage in, garbage out. The Internet is full of amazing information. It is also full of amazing garbage. AI models often cannot distinguish between the two.
An example of garbage-in, garbage-out AI occurs in the controversial area of global warming and climate change. Here are three hardcore facts about climate:
♦ It cannot be scientifically demonstrated that greenhouse gas emissions have had
any effect on global climate.
♦ Emissions-driven climate models do not work.
♦ No emissions-based apocalyptic climate prediction has ever come true.
Despite these realities, if you query IBM AI on climate, you will get back gloom-and-doom climate hoax dogma. This happens because the Internet has been loaded for decades with bogus climate hoax claims and assumptions that are erroneous garbage.
Milloy believes IBM’s own website is partly to blame for this misinformation:
On IBM’s website, IBM’s chief sustainability officer says, for example, that:
Global warming is “leading to increased flooding, causing heat stroke and destroying farms and livelihoods. Insurance is becoming unaffordable.”
None of that is true. But it is what IBM AI is programmed with. Even IBM staff has been polluted with the climate. It is precisely the sort of garbage that George Fueschsel warned about.
The mindless parroting of climate hoax garbage to governments, businesses and the public has had devastating economic and societal impacts around the world – from wars to inflation to deadly energy failures to energy rationing to crop failures to deindustrialization to lost jobs to wasted taxpayer money to traumatized school children and beyond.
It has been estimated that world has wasted $10 trillion chasing the climate hoax narrative since 2015 alone. The list of harms from the climate hoax is endless. Yet IBM AI has learned the hoax and spreads the climate garbage on to users. Milloy will say:
“While IBM may be great at the computing part of AI, the world actually functions on realities that are often lost in the Internet dumpster,” “Management needs to be much more humble about all this. It needs to take the bias problem seriously. Touchy-feely videos on the IBM website just don’t cut it.”
IBM shareholders can support Proposal 7 by voting their proxies before Tuesday’s meeting.
Jason Isaac and Steve Milloy bring tidings of great joy in 2026 in their Washington Examiner article with the title as above.
Every April, like clockwork, a predictable ritual unfolds. Earth Day rolls around with the same tired apocalyptic sermon from the climate catastrophe cult.
The routine never changes: The planet is dying, humans are to blame, and only surrendering your freedom, your car, and your paycheck to the green elites will save it. Fifty-six years later, they’re still wrong.
The planet is fine. It’s the climate cult that’s cracked.
You’d think after all the busted prophecies, they’d tone it down. Instead, they double down.
Remember when the “experts” said the Arctic would be ice-free by 2013? The ice is still there, just as thick and stubborn as ever.
We were told hurricanes would grow “more frequent and more powerful.” Instead, there were near-normal seasons in 2023 and 2024.
So now they move the goalposts: Every weather event, hot or cold, wet or dry, is “caused by climate change.” It’s not science. It’s superstition plotted on graphs. They said snow would vanish from ski resorts — remember that “End of Snow” panic? Instead, skiers in the Northeast this year were digging out from record blizzards.
The 2023-2024 warming spike was caused by a natural El Nino. When the El Nino ended, the spike ended. February 2026 was cooler, in fact, than February 1998 despite a trillion tons of emissions.
Time after time, the “experts” predict apocalypse. And year after year, Mother Nature refuses to corroborate their stories.
Cleaner Air Than Ever Before
Air Quality – National Summary EPA
Meanwhile, the actual data tell a different story. U.S. air quality today is the cleanest it’s been in 50 years.
My Mind is Made Up, Don’t Confuse Me with the Facts. H/T Bjorn Lomborg, WUWT
Global deaths from natural disasters have plummeted over 90% since the early 20th century. Crop yields worldwide keep hitting records.
Humans are safer, wealthier, and more energy-secure than at any time in history.
The planet isn’t gasping for breath — it’s very healthy.
That’s exactly what George Carlin was getting at in his legendary bit, “The Planet Is Fine.” Over three decades ago, long before “climate anxiety” was a diagnosis, Carlin, perhaps the most famous comedian of his time, saw through the sanctimony.
The planet’s been through ice ages, asteroid strikes, and supervolcanoes — and it’s still spinning. Yet today’s enviroactivists think your SUV is going to do what Mount Tambora couldn’t? Please. Their arrogance is nauseating.
The self-appointed saviors of Earth don’t really care about the planet.
They care about control.
Earth Day has turned into a political holiday — a green May Day for those who want to remake society in their image. Their “solutions” invariably mean more regulation, higher taxes, and fewer choices.
Shut down the power plants, outlaw gas stoves, ban plastic straws while flying private jets to elitist conclaves dressed up as ‘‘climate conferences.”
It’s not about saving Earth. It’s about saving face.
When the predictions fail, the excuse shifts. Sea levels were supposed to swallow Manhattan, but the only thing underwater now is former Vice President Al Gore’s credibility.
Polar bears were “going extinct” until the population hit record highs. Every “climate emergency” gets debunked, but the headlines roll on because fear sells.
Carlin joked that people crave bad news. The legacy media just industrialized it.
And the public is getting wise. Net-zero mandates
are collapsing under their own absurdity.
Europe ran headfirst into the wall of “green reality” and came crawling back to coal and nuclear. Even California’s self-inflicted energy shortages have people asking whether energy policy should be based on cockamamie models or common sense.
The answer should be obvious: If your plan can’t keep the lights on, it’s not saving the planet — it’s sabotaging it.
“Follow the science” is their mantra. Fine.
The science says carbon dioxide is plant food.
The science says climate models have blown past reality for decades. The science says mankind thrives in warmer eras.
None of this fits the narrative, so it gets buried under the next climate scare of the month. The apocalypse never arrives — but the grant money does.
Here’s the part Earth Day activists really hate: The planet isn’t fragile — we are.
Nature doesn’t need our policies, our pledges, or our petitions. It will outlast every last panel discussion in Davos, Switzerland.
So instead of groveling over our collective “climate guilt,” maybe they should celebrate what we’ve actually accomplished: clean air, longer lives, record food production, and energy that works at the flick of a switch.
The planet doesn’t care about your compost bin or your latest electric car mandate. It’s been around for 4.5 billion years, and cooling for the last 485 million years, and it will still be here when the last climate model is rotting on an obsolete hard drive.
It’s humans who need perspective. As Carlin famously said, “The planet is doing great.” The hysterical people who keep screaming that it isn’t are the problem.
Two things happened in February that will change the world. The first is the Iran War.
The second is an event so obscure most Americans don’t even know it happened — the Feb. 12 repeal of the 2009 Endangerment Finding by the Trump Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This decision puts a knife into the kidney of all the major U.S. climate rules made under the Obama and Biden administrations. It was the legal underpinning for the Green New Deal.
Of the two events, the end of the Endangerment Finding is of a greater consequence, yet 21st Century conventional wisdom — curated and gatekept by social media, the most unwise medium ever invented — makes it hard to fit one’s head around this argument. But here goes.
The Iran War is costing about $1-2 billion a day in direct costs,and several times that in indirect costs from higher energy prices across most of Europe and Asia, though less so in the United States, which is increasingly energy independent.
Meanwhile, the 2009 Endangerment is one of those “regulatory state” workarounds when Congress doesn’t pass a law or the Supreme Court passes on a tough decision. This administrative decision is the foundation of ALL modern climate regulation and global climate diplomacy. Its reversal has the Trump administration crowing about the $1.3 trillion in savings over the next decade to American citizens through cheaper automobiles, among other things.
This has made a lot of the right people unhappy.
In an interview with The New York Times, Jody Freeman, director of Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program, who happened to design the Endangerment Finding for the Obama White House, said the Trump administration wants “to not just do what other Republican administrations have done, which is weaken regulations. They want to take the federal government out of the business of regulation, period.”
Speaking as someone who worked at the EPA during the first Trump administration, I know Freeman is wrong. Republicans don’t mind environmental regulation based on good incentives that don’t penalize industries that are politically disfavored through no fault of their own.
But there is a human cost to all regulation that is essentially unpriced,
and it is something Freeman and the Left never acknowledge.
Federal regulation itself was invented by the government to improve human lives — think the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Air Act, or the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act that ended child labor. The problem is that future choices forgone, which economists call opportunity costs, are nearly impossible to quantify and constrain, thereby stifling innovation and invention in almost unfathomable ways.
Consider the following counterfactual.
If the U.S. Supreme Court had made privacy laws stricter in the late 1990s, sharing pictures of strangers without their permission would have been illegal. This would have disincentivized early camera phone makers, Sharp and Sanyo, from including cameras in the first smartphones in the early 2000s and would have slowed or even undermined Apple’s decision to build the iPhone.
Less than 25 years after the first U.S. camera phone was released, the total value of mobile technologies and services globally exceeds $7 trillion, representing more than 6% of global GDP. Much of these trillions of dollars of newly created wealth exists in the share price of Silicon Valley firms, and the retirement savings of nearly 100 million Americans and the U.S. economy writ large.
What the Endangerment Finding did was create a domestic legal predicate
to treat carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act.
That predicate, in turn, allowed Democratic administrations to commit America to the Paris Agreementand the broader U.N. climate regime that the U.S. Senate was fooled into accepting when it passed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992.
It’s quite possible that the global climate regime created under UN sponsorship had a similar effect on energy-intensive industries to that a strict privacy law would have had on smartphones, which became the entry point for billions of people into the digital economy.
And now it’s ending. By undoing the Endangerment Finding, you don’t just repeal a regulation; you repeal the regulatory superstructure that has saddled the United States with trillions of dollars in opportunity costs and billions in explicit costs every year.
Thus, however costly a short conflict with Iran would be, it hasn’t been
nearly as much as the unpriced opportunity costs of
the last 30 years under the UN Climate regime.
Once the U.S. is no longer legally bound at home, it can exit the international framework cleanly. And when America leaves, the dominoes fall in order. Russia, China, India, and Saudi Arabia — none of whom ever believed “the planet is dying” rhetoric anyway — will follow suit. They never saw the climate treaty as anything other than a wealth-transfer mechanism from the West, and now the jig is up for the American Left and the European establishment.
Instead of this transhumanist dystopia, we have the possibility of
returning meaningful heavy industry to the U.S.,
creating over a million good-paying craft jobs,
while still maintaining strong environmental laws.
Indeed, fears of environmental backsliding could be easily remedied by Congress if it were to pass the Affordable, Reliable, Clean Energy Security Act (ARC-ES), introduced in Congress late last year by Rep. Troy Balderson (R-OH). The ARC-ES bill would codify into law clear definitions of key terms like “affordable,” “reliable,” and “clean,” ensuring that investment risks are limited to cost-effective infrastructure projects only.
The bill would help America’s most affordable, reliable, and environmentally-friendly energy sources, including nuclear and natural gas, remain part of the energy mix — a crucial requirement for American households and businesses.
The fact that neither the ARC-ES nor the Endangerment Finding’s reversal of fortune is anywhere in the news tells you everything you need to know about the current state of global journalism.
This is no slight to the news coverage concerning Iran, which is compelling, but all over the place. It just shows how incentives for informing the public in the 21st century about what truly matters in their lives are weak and getting worse. Perhaps one day someone will invent a better medium for information.
William Murray is a former speechwriter for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the past editor of RealClearEnergy from 2015 to 2017, and currently the chief speechwriter for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
The Biden administration’s obsession with climate change has contributed to the housing affordability challenges Americans face today, and there are many harmful green policies that need to be undone. The Trump administration is taking an ax to several of them, and it just received a big boost when a U.S. District Court repealed a measure burdening low-income and first-time home buyers.
Specifically, on March 5th, an Eastern District of Texas decision vacated a 2024 requirement from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) that new homes qualifying for federally-backed mortgages must comply with the 2021 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC). Thankfully, the court in Utah v. HUD found the agency’s actions in violation of the law.
The IECC is a spare-no-expense assault on residential energy use – for example, by requiring far more insulation than makes sense and necessitating costlier appliances. A number of environmental organizations advocated for the IECC’s building code dictates, saying they would ensure that “low-income homeowners and residents are prioritized in a climate-aligned future.”
And mind you, this was HUD – not the Environmental Protection Agency – an agency whose core mission is to make housing more affordable. Yet it was trying to impose these expensive environmental requirements on the very Americans who need federal help to qualify for a mortgage. In fact, over 80% of HUD-backed mortgages have gone to first-time buyers with lower credit scores and smaller down payments than those served by conventional lenders.
Tilak Doshi explains how formerly empirical economists have been captured by climatist ideology, betraying their profession and public trust. His Clintel article is UK economist says high energy prices are ‘good for the climate’. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
[Note: “In the old Soviet Union, the Communists allegedly used the term “useful idiot” to describe Westerners whose naïve political views furthered the Soviet agenda, even though these Westerners didn’t realize that they were being exploited in such fashion. It is in this context that I confidently declare that American economists have been useful idiots for the green socialists pushing extreme climate change policies.” Robert Murphy]
A UK economist recently said the quiet part out loud: high energy prices are ‘good for the climate’. This is not an aberration, says Tilak Doshi, but symptomatic of modern economists. “The barbarians did not storm the gates. The Western elites invited them in, gave them chairs, and asked them to redesign the curriculum.”
When petrol prices rocket because of supply shocks—such as the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the rerouting of oil tankers—one might have expected a discussion of geopolitics, market signals and the obvious supply-side remedies. Of which there has been plenty, some competent and even masterly, some not so competent by “instant expert” talking heads in social and mass media. But a recent article by an economist in The Conversationoffered a solution so perversely tone-deaf it could have been lifted from a Babylon Bee satirical script.
Citing research that a 10 per cent rise in UK petrol prices can cut demand by up to 5 per cent, the piece solemnly declared that “high prices are a way of adjusting consumption to cope with the lower supply.” The subtext was unmistakable: with refined products suddenly scarcer, the proper response is not to produce more fuel if the country were blessed with domestic fossil fuel resources (like the UK) or to import more from sources outside the Strait of Hormuz or both. Instead, the advice from Christoph Siemroth, Senior Lecturer in Economics, University of Essex, is to make what little remains even costlier—so that the hoi polloi drive less, take the bus and hasten the glorious transition to net zero.
Clueless and Insidious
One is reminded of Marie Antoinette’s famous cake remark, betraying aristocratic cluelessness. But The Conversation article is something far more insidious: the capture of economics itself by the green ideology that now rules our institutions from the BBC to the Treasury, from Oxbridge common rooms to the UK Met Office service. The discipline that once stood as the last redoubt against the Frankfurt School’s long march through the social sciences has fallen. Frank Knight, Gary Becker, George Stigler, Milton Friedman et al held the gates against postmodern gibberish for a generation. No longer. The barbarians are inside the citadel, wearing lanyards from the oxymoronically named Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, chanting “sustainability” like a secular rosary.
Consider the elementary logic that every first-year economics student once absorbed before the PPE types at Oxford and Cambridge began their higher education in Gaia worship. When the price of a good rises because of scarcity—whether from a blockade in the Persian Gulf or an OPEC production cut—the signal is unambiguous: produce more, explore more, innovate more. Britain sits atop some of the richest hydrocarbon resources in Europe. North Sea oil and gas reserves are not physically exhausted; they are made economic infeasible in the face of Miliband’s punitive tax rates.
Onshore shale, barely scratched after a decade of regulatory vandalism,
could transform our energy security if the
“precautionary principle” were not treated as holy writ.
Higher prices should, in any sane world, trigger precisely that response: more drilling, more fracking, more investment in refining capacity, more imports of oil and gas from diversified suppliers. Instead, our green economists prescribe the economic equivalent of putting a feverish patient into a sauna. Demand must fall. Prices must stay punishingly high. The suffering is the point.
Taxes
The Conversation piece is exemplary in its genre. Price caps are correctly dismissed as distortionary, leading to physical shortages and queues as a means of rationing. One needs to only remember the long lines at gas stations in the US under Jimmy Carter’s price controls after the 1979 oil price shock.
Roughly 50–55% of the UK retail price for both petrol and diesel currently go to the government as taxes.But fuel duty cuts are rejected because they are untargeted and cost the Exchequer revenue—fuel duty, after all, is nearly 2 per cent of government income, a nice little earner for the net-zero industrial complex.
The preferred remedy? One-off cash transfers to low-income car owners, modelled on Germany’s 2022 gas rebate which provided a temporary fuel tax cut in 2022 to ease soaring petrol and diesel prices during the energy crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The beauty of this, we are told, is that it preserves the “price signal” while letting households “profit” by leaving the car at home. Translation: we will bribe you to stay poor and immobile, all in the name of the planet. Meanwhile, the authors of such wisdom never feel the pinch. They lecture the white van plumber, carpenter or electrician going about his work and the hard-pressed mother doing the school run that their higher fuel bills are a feature, not a bug.
Luxury Beliefs and Intellectual Corruption
These are luxury belief-inspired energy policies which “confer status on the upper class at very little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes”. As Victor Davis Hanson has so often pointed out, leftist policy elites in Democrat-run states suffer little from the consequences of their own policies. The metropolitan elite’s enthusiasm for open borders stops abruptly at the high walls of their own villas (Nancy Pelosi anyone?)
The same applies to energy. Inhabitants of the liberal metropolitan bubble can afford the £12-an-hour parking in Covent Garden, the retrofitted Victorian terrace with an air-source heat pump the size of a small car, and the Tesla whose real environmental cost is buried in Chinese lithium lakes and in artisanal cobalt mines using Congolese child workers. For them, “sustainability” is a lifestyle brand. For the rest of the country—pensioners choosing between heating and eating, hauliers facing bankruptcy, farmers unable to run their tractors—it is economic sadism dressed up as virtue.
Buddhist economist
The historical parallel is instructive. E.F. Schumacher — the “Buddhist economist” — told us, “small is beautiful” and that giant power stations were somehow spiritually corrosive. One wonders what he would make of the fact that a modern combined-cycle gas plant needs to be at least 200 MW to be remotely efficient, or that industrial civilisation runs on economies of scale, not backyard steel furnaces.
Yet today’s green establishment is repeating the Maoist folly in Western drag: decentralised “community energy”, intermittent wind and solar that require massive subsidies and backup gas plants, and an ideological insistence that the optimal size of an economy is whatever fits the carbon budget decreed by “climate modellers” in Exeter or East Anglia. The Soviet Union tried to create the New Soviet Man—selfless, collective-minded, liberated from base material desires. The project failed spectacularly. Its successor is the New Green Man, who measures his carbon footprint, cycles to the vegan restaurant, and cheers when Ed Miliband shuts down another North Sea field. The totalitarian impulse remains; only the Orwellian vocabulary has changed from “proletarian internationalism” to “just transition” and “climate justice”.
The intellectual corruption runs deep. Paul Krugman, a Nobel laureate in trade theory, now produces columns that read like press releases from the Church of Climate. Marginal costs of natural gas? Not so relevant when policy costs—carbon taxes, renewable obligations, network charges, capacity market payments—make up some 60% of your bill. As Kathryn Porter,David Turver and others have documented with forensic clarity, the “energy price crisis” is largely a net-zero policy-induced crisis. The wholesale cost of electricity is only part of the story; the rest is the deliberate layering of green levies and taxes that no classical economist would recognise as market-based. Yet we are told, with straight faces, that the “97 per cent consensus” demands we accept this as settled science. The same consensus, one notes, that once assured us the pause in global temperature increase was impossible, that polar bears were doomed, and that Himalayan glaciers would vanish by 2035.
Tyranny
Rupert Darwall’s Green Tyranny provides an insightful exploration into the origins of the climate industrial complex. The green movement’s roots lie not in empirical ecology but in a Malthusian revulsion against industrial modernity and a quasi-religious yearning for control. What to eat (less meat), how far to travel (fewer flights), what temperature your thermostat may reach (no more than 19°C if Whitehall has its way)—these are not technical questions but moral ones, policed by the new priesthood of economists who have traded the parsimony of Occam’s Razor for the abusive use of the precautionary principle (“better safe than sorry”). Uncertainty is weaponised asymmetrically so that minor or hypothetical risks (e.g., induced seismicity from fracking) trigger regulatory paralysis, while the far larger risks of alternatives are downplayed. The precautionary principle becomes a de-facto veto tool for ideological opposition to hydrocarbons, not genuine risk management.
Homo economicus, the rational maximiser embedded in cultural norms that Adam Smith understood in both The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, has been replaced by Homo Climaticus: a creature whose every decision must be subordinated to the carbon ledger.
The consequences are not abstract. Britain’s energy prices are among the highest in the developed world precisely because we have chosen ideology over geology. While China adds coal-fired capacity equivalent to the entire UK grid every few years and India builds out its fossil infrastructure without apology, the West hectors the Global South about net zero and wonder why BRICS+ nations hedge their “policy commitments” to UN forums such as the COP30 conference in Brazil last year. The multipolar realignment is not just geopolitical; it is energetic. The Rest have noticed that the West’s net-zero experiment is self-inflicted economic suicide. They intend no such folly.
Glimmers of Hope or Barbarians At The Gates?
Yet there are glimmers of hope. The tide is turning, as Matt Ridley explains in his recent Clintel lecture “The Climate Parrot is almost dead.” Mr. Ridley argues that public and political momentum behind the “climate emergency” narrative is weakening. Indeed, public tolerance for green virtue-signalling has limits when the bills arrive. The on-going protests in Ireland over the cost of fuel by farmers, contractors and others have been massive, leading the government to place the army on “standby” as nationwide fuel protests continue to cause significant disruption and threaten critical supplies across the country. The military’s potential involvement comes as blockades outside major fuel depots intensify, prompting a dangerous government shift towards an “enforcement” phase in response to the escalating crisis. There are indications that these protests are spreading to Norway and France, as farmers and truckers there block arterial roads with tractors and trucks.
Populist movements across Europe and the United States are demanding energy realism: all-of-the-above policies that include nuclear, gas, and yes, even beautiful, black coal, where geology and economics dictate. The Chicago School may have been breached, but it is not yet razed. Rigorous economists—those still willing to follow the data rather than the grants—continue to point out that adaptation and technological progress have always outpaced apocalyptic forecasts. The “climate emergency” that justifies Soviet-style rationing by price is, on closer inspection, a political choice, not a scientific imperative.
Barbarians
Economics was once the most parsimonious of the social sciences, cutting through trite views with marginal analysis and revealed preference. When it abandons that discipline for the higher calling of Gaia worship, it ceases to be economics and becomes propaganda. The article in The Conversation is not an aberration; it is a symptom of a discipline that has exchanged truth for tenure and rigour for righteousness. The barbarians did not storm the gates. The Western elites invited them in, gave them chairs, and asked them to redesign the curriculum.
The corrective will not come from more white papers or behavioural nudges. It will come when voters—those whose lived experience of green policy is higher bills, colder homes, and slower journeys—demand an end to the experiment. Ireland is in tumult as we speak. Energy abundance is not a luxury; it is the foundation of modern civilisation. To pretend otherwise is not sophistication. It is civilisational self-harm. And the bill, as always, lands on the people least able to afford the eco-crucifix.
The above video includes a conversation between Bjorn Lomborg and Scott Bessent at the annual IIF gathering (Institute of International Finance). The introduction by IIF CEO Tim Adams starts about 11 minutes in. For those who prefer reading, below is a lightly edited transcript of comments back and forth, along with some added images. TA refers to Adams, BL to Lomborg and SB to Bessent.
TA: Today we’re going to deepen the discussion with a conversation between Bjorn Lomborg who runs the Copenhagen Consensus and the author how to spend 75 billion to make the world a better place. I’ve had this book on my desk since it was published in 2014. It’s a great publication. If you haven’t read it, you should. I’m sure Bjorn will give you some copies. It really is how do we do development and a cost benefit assessment? How do we get the most bang for our buck? And that conversation is often missed in this town and other capitals. And of course, we’re delighted and honored to have the Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent back today to join us at our spring meetings. So, ladies and gentlemen, please invite to the stage Bjorn and Secretary Scott Bessent.
BJ: Thank you very much. Tim, you kind of took away all our talking points. So, Mr. Secretary, it’s great to have a conversation here today about the World Bank and the IMF here at their spring meeting. The goals of these institutions, of course, is to accelerate global development, drive economic growth, and lift billions of people out of poverty. And these goals remain vitally important. Unfortunately, many development institutions now prioritize Western elite issues like gender, social topics, and climate change over what the world’s poorest people need and want: better education, healthcare, and reliable energy.
Nowhere is this disconnect more clear than in their climate fixation. In the latest year, 48% of the World Bank’s financing went to so-called climate finance, up from 44% the year before, exceeding their own uh 45% target. I suspect the reason why elites are so climate focused is because they correctly see the poor as more vulnerable to climate impacts. But remember, poor people are more vulnerable to every impact. They’re more vulnerable to disease, to hunger, to bad education, to corruption.
The World Bank and the IMF need to get back to making rational priorities. For instance, using cost benefit analysis. As Tim also just mentioned, these organizations used to lead the world in cost benefit analysis. As I’ve argued for a long time, and the reason I think we’re having this conversation now is that we need to scrap these climate targets and get the World Bank and IMF back to their core missions.
In your speech here last year at the IIF, you made this exact point and you called on the World Bank and the IMF to refocus on their core missions. In your view, how has the bank and the fund responded and what more do they need to do?
SB: Well, Bjorn, thank you and good good to be back here a year later to talk a little about a report card for the multilateral banks and to also say that the US leads the G20 this year and I can tell you that our agenda is growth. We believe in the US that the biggest risk to financial stability is a lack of growth.
When I look at the choices that Europe has made unable to follow the Draghy report from Mario Draghy on how to increase growth. The the EU was originally the European Economic Union and it was meant to facilitate trade among the members, make it more seamless, create more prosperity. And it turns out that it’s probably been a hint of the IMF and World Bank. I’m informed by Grace Hopper who was the first female Admiral in the US who was a big fan of it. She has some great sayings. Two of them, one is: The most dangerous words in the English language are “because we’ve always done it that way”. And the second is: “The way to get things done is to get things done.”
And I think we need to step back and look at the IMF and World Bank, their core missions. The IMF I believe the is global financial stability and stabilizing the countries that are in bad equilibriums and getting them back to a sustainable path an economically sustainable path. World Bank is to pull people out of poverty and we cannot have these kinds of elite beliefs get in the way. And I think a lot about this Nature magazine article that came out in April of 2024 that became the guiding principle for so much of the climate beliefs: that GDP was going to be 60% % lower by the turn of the century. So then it was the gospel for 18 months and then it was refuted.
So every everything was based on that. So you know I I don’t think that we can have this kind of short- termism. I think we have to stick with core principles and I do think we we are starting to see at at the World Bank. They are starting to take a tack more for energy abundance and all of the above. They have now gotten on board with nuclear energy. I’m not sure why it ever went away.
And then the IMF, I think, needs to lead by example, probably get rid of their golf course out in Maryland, which I said last year, and focus on global imbalances. Because I can tell you this slow motion buildup of global imbalances after a lack of sustainable growth, it is the the the biggest risk.
The the world cannot take a China with a trillion dollar trade surplus.
BL: And I think you’re absolutely right and one of those points that we we believe somehow that climate is so important that we need to do everything because the nature study that you mentioned that suggests that we could lose 60% of global GDP if we didn’t fix climate change. Which later turned out to be wrong, but of course the point is if that was really true, it should have been rich countries spending rich country money on dealing with climate change. But that’s not what’s happening. It’s mostly rich countries deciding to spend poor people’s money through the World Bank and the IMF badly. And this is not what the the world’s poor are telling us that they want.
So I I had the fortune to work together with Nobel laurate Tom Shelling and he often asked the very simple question, how do you best help poor people? Through development policy or through climate policy? Remember climate policy costs hundreds of trillions of dollars and it shaves off a tiny fraction of a degree in a century’s time. Development policy like avoiding death costs just billions or maybe even just millions of dollars and saves lives right now. And of course that is why development policy often is much much better if you actually want to help poor people.
And of course it also builds much more resilience. Look, a hurricane that hits poor Haiti kills hundreds of people. The same hurricane hitting rich Florida kills virtually no one because prosperity protects people. And so we need to get this conversation back and I think this is exactly where the IMF and the World Bank need to get back to their core missions.
SB: I think it has to be resiliency supply chains. Again, I think you know both the IMF and the World Bank have an important role in understanding this debt loop and downward spiral that many countries are in. Several countries, one in particular, have done the equivalent of a loan to own program. With a lot of these countries there’s a lot of undisclosed debt. There are a lot of tolling arrangements that are unfortunate and I think only the these multilateral banks can effectuate that.
But you know again I do want to congratulate them. The IMF was willing to say this time is different with Argentina and Argentina’s been a fantastic success. They’re accumulating reserves every day as we speak. Tens of millions of people there are being brought out of poverty. The government of Javier Milei, I’m very interested to see it was the poorest elements of Argentine society who voted for him this time around and the young people. So there there’s optimism there. And then you know that the IMF is working on bringing Venezuela back into making it look more like a normal economy, and I think will play a very important role there. And I think the World Bank leadership is back on a good trajectory in terms of energy and unlocking resources for the the very poorest countries.
BL: Yeah. If you don’t mind, I’ll pick you up on that energy point because last October you withdrew the United States from the Green Climate Fund. Because in your words, their goals run contrary to the fact that affordable, reliable energy is fundamental to economic growth and poverty reduction. I think that shows the general point we often forget, how energy really powers modern life. It warms us in the winter, it cools us in the summer, it transports us. I mean, look around this room and I think pretty much everyone is from somewhere else. And this is what energy does. Energy allows us to live better than kings of the past.
Energy really is prosperity. Yet, the climate fixation that we’ve been talking about means that both the World Bank and the IMF pushed for a rapid shift away from fossil fuels and towards renewables and for total ban fossil fuel investment. And I think they need a reality check. There is no transition that taking place globally. We use more renewables, yes, but we also use much more fossil fuels. The world still gets more than 80% of its total energy from fossil fuels. And the decline is so slow that on current trends, we will only get to 0% in 4 to 10 centuries.
Germany has spent famously 700 billion euros on its energy shift since 2002. Electricity prices more than doubled and yet Germany’s energy is still 79% fossil fuels. China produces most of the world’s solar panels, wind turbines and electric cars, but much of this of is produced with coal. China’s energy is still 87% fossil fuel. I would say a Chinese EV is a coal powered vehicle. Much of it is in China and of course especially in some places, for instance India, which are driven enormously on coal, they simply they emit more. But the real point is that poor countries want to get rich like China did. They want to use more energy and much of this will be fossil fuels. They don’t want to copy Germany and they don’t have 700 billion euros to blow on climate policies. So it is just simply hypocritical forcing poor nations into renewables that even rich Germany or China aren’t achieving.
In your IIF speech last year, you call on the World Bank to focus its efforts on expanding developing country access to reliable and affordable energy and you criticized its climate targets. You noted that the IMF devotes disproportionate time and resources on climate even though it’s not part of the fund’s mission. So, what have you seen from the bank and the fund in these areas since your speech? And what more do you expect from them?
SB: Again, as as I said earlier, I think the World Bank is has made a good pivot. They they are now pushing or they are a proponent of nuclear energy. I’m not sure how that wasn’t considered a renewable for for so many years. I mean, if if you look now, France is powering the European energy grid and their their reactors are running the full blast and it’s one of the cleanest. But when you think the Europeans got into this terrible recursive loop because they they decided to turn turn off their nuclear energy. The Germans became more dependent on Russian crude and then the Russians were selling them the crude to finance the war against them.
But you know I do think the World Bank is moving to an all of the above energy process and program and again is getting back to the core mission of lifting people out of poverty. And you know I would just say it’s very good to follow not only what people say but what they do. Bill Gates, who for a long time had pushed this climate agenda, has also changed tack. If you read his recent speeches he believes we’re going to innovate our way out of this. And the Gates Foundation has something like 13 billion of investment in energy innovation. Look no one’s expecting deos machina, one day and everything will be fixed. But in in the US we were going to run out of everything, going to run out of the crude and crude derivatives. And then fracking was invented and now that the the US larger reserves than Saudi and Venezuela.
On the other side, I think the IMF getting back to this message of stability, of monitoring global imbalances and stepping in early. You know I didn’t always agree with Ben Bernanke’s monetary policy, but I always admired Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke because he had a framework. And if you ask him a question, you could almost see him run it through his framework and everything was always consistent. And I think with the IMF and the World Bank the framework needs to always be consistent.
BL: On the Bill Gates point I think really two things stand out. First of all, the innovation point that you just made. I mean this is what has always solved the problem. Tim mentioned the green revolution that we had in the 1970s when we worried about running out of food. Remember, we didn’t fix the problem of the world not having enough food by telling everyone, “I’m sorry. Do you mind not eating as much?” And then we’ll send it down to whoever it is that we worry about. The point was that we innovated a way to generate much more food.
And of course, we’ll do the same thing with climate. We are going to solve big problems through innovation. That’s how we’ve always done it. But I think Bill Gates made another point which is incredibly powerful and useful when you talk about climate change. He said: “For so long we’ve been talking about climate as if the point is to cut carbon emissions or to reach a certain temperature limit. No, the point is to make the world better for humans. And there the question is do we make the world better for humans by cutting carbon emissions by whatever tons? Or do we make it better by for instance making it so small children don’t die or that in school there’s so many other ways we can also do this or that. This of course refers back on the IMF and especially the World Bank on what can be done and there are just so many incredible things that we can do first.
SB: Yeah, again, you know, I think keeping focus on the main thing and not getting distracted by what feels good, it’s convenient, it’s part of the the Davos consensus while much of the Davos consensus seems to have been shattered.
WEF’s Global Risks Perception Survey
BL: Yes. So I want to just take us to our third and and and last point and talk about tradeoffs. Because all international financial institutions need to get back to the core point of tradeoffs. Look,the money that the World Bank spent on a solar panels can’t be invested in healthcare or education. And the world’s poor tell us very clearly not to focus on climate first. When Africans are asked what worries them the most, climate change came almost at the bottom. A vast survey of more than 50,000 Africans across 39 countries found that climate change ranked 31 of 34. The top concerns are not surprising there. It’s unemployment, the economy, health, education, poverty, roads, electricity, hunger, and corruption. And then it goes on for a long time until you get to 31, which is climate change.
When your child might die tonight from a preventable disease, no family cares about shaving a fraction of a degree off global temperatures in a century from now. Elected leaders of poor countries tell us the same thing. In a large survey of low and low middle- income countries, they show climate ranks 12 of 16 issues. Even the World Bank’s own client surveys show climate ranks low. So international financial institutions should compact to focus on their strengths. As you’ve said, the World Bank should focus on poverty reduction and the IMF on macroeconomic stability, but the world’s poor are very clearly saying don’t focus on climate first.
So from your perspective as treasury secretary, how do you view the international financial institutions and their effectiveness in general and the bank and the fund specifically?
SB: You know I would also highlight that it’s not a unique survey item among the world’s poorest. Germany instituted very very strict remodeling and rebuild requirements for German households. So you had to spend I can’t remember it was 30 40 50,000 euros to upgrade to a a more green house and they’re all getting voted out. So like probation is not a good motivator. I do think,as I said last year, that we are determined with the multilateral financial institutions the US wants to be in it to win it. We want to be good partners. America first does not mean America alone. And we we want to go back to basics.
These banks were invented around Breton Woods which was post World War II Europe and Asia, and was a unique time in America and it led to incredible prosperity the across the world. So, you know, why can’t we do that again? And why can’t we focus on growth? Like what are the tools? What what what is hindering growth of these economies? Is it the unsustainable debt which is is the IMF concern?
Is it the poor infrastructure, health and hygiene, which is the World Bank role?
Because you know for a time we kind of skipped the foundational elements and tried to jump to something else, kind of luxury beliefs, instead of issues when a government was not able to fund itself or if people were not able to feed themselves. We’ve just got to get back to that. I I think Ajay and Kristalina have have gotten the message and are moving forward in a very very constructive way and I want to congratulate them.
BL: When you have to decide what to do obviously I’m I’m an advocate for cost benefit analysis so I’m going to be saying they should be looking at it. Really, if you think about it, the World Bank and IMF used to be world leaders in cost benefit analysis. And it makes sense if you only have limited money. If you have to think about trade-offs all the time, you have to ask yourself where can we spend scarce resources and do the most good in the world. And this is exactly what cost benefit analysis does for you. It allows you to pick out the really good policies and make it just much more likely that we can actually achieve all these goals that we’re talking about.
The interview above explores a world mostly unknown to middle-aged adults and seniors, a world where young people became convinced the world was doomed because of climate change. Lucy Biggers participated in that world as a skilled influencer, but now is a voice for reason and optimism. For those preferring to read, a transcript is below, lightly edited from the captions, with some added images. MS refers to comments by Maya Sulkin of Free Press. LB refers to Lucy Biggers. H/T Raymond Inauen
Confessions of a Former Climate Activist
MS: Lucy Biggers, head of social media at the Free Press and former climate activist, thank you for being here today. We’re going to talk about why you joined the climate movement, why you left, and what gave you the courage to do so. LB: Thank you so much for having me.
Today we’re going to talk about how you went from being a leader, really, in the climate movement to now being one of its most outspoken critics. So before I knew the Free Press, Lucy, you were fighting to ban plastic straws and you were, you know, homies with AOC. Hey Lucy, I hear you’re doing a video on the Green New Deal and I’m thrilled. What happened to you? How did you get into that movement in the first place?
LB: Yeah, so I spent half of my 20s really in the climate movement and it started about when I was 25. I’m 35 now, so I know I look younger, right? MS: You do really give a lot of Gen Z energy, which we’re going to talk about. Yeah, I cosplay as Gen Z, but I’m actually 35, so that’s important to know the timing.
So in 2015 I was 25 and I worked at this newsroom called NowThis News and I was a video producer there, so I was scrolling all the time on Facebook and sort of the beginning of like the scrolling that we know now and my algorithm was just feeding me up environmental stories and I just kind of bought into the climate movement narrative. Some of the things that first got me into it were just documentaries. Before the Flood, which is a Leonardo DiCaprio film, which now, I think why do I trust Leonardo DiCaprio on this topic, but I watched that.
Josh Fox is a big climate activist who’s done films like Gasland, which now I know are very biased. So it was the documentaries and then even in my feed seeing this thing called the Dakota Access Pipeline protest, which was really big in 2016 and activists would comment, cover Dakota Access Pipeline, cover Dakota Access Pipeline, and so I started covering this protest against a pipeline that was being built in North Dakota. The whole year of 2016 I did that and that was really like when I first got into the movement and then over the years after that I built up my social media following on Instagram, covering things like the Green New Deal, interviewing Greta.
What are the personal choices that you make to be more environmentally friendly? Always like being down on single-use plastics, all the normal ideas that you think of when it comes to like the climate movement, that is what I was pushing and at the peak of it I had 50,000 followers on Instagram, which I say it’s like follower inflation because that’s not that much now, but in 2016 or maybe 2018, that was a lot and yeah so I kind of just gained a persona. I got a lot of support for that and next thing you know I’m just like a gung-ho climate activist pushing all these ideas.
MS: So part of being, as you know, an influencer, especially in political spaces, is that it kind of becomes your identity. I wonder while you’re absorbing this information, you’re reporting on it, what kind of led you to say you know what I’m gonna like make this my life really and attached my face, my reputation to kind of pushing this movement forward?
LB: Yeah so in the 20-teens, climate change was not a topic that was covered by the news a lot. It was a very undercovered story and so I saw an opening where I could really be of service to these other activists who were talking and raising the alarm bells about this and cover it and so I felt like I was on the side of justice where you know the scientists are saying the world’s gonna end in 10 years. Why is nobody talking about this? Like I’m gonna start talking about it and also I will say at that time I was very very left-wing and so I was very progressive and my whole newsroom was like that too.
So we were all like Bernie supporters and like this is why the 20-teens, it’s like really important to put yourself in that mindset of what that ideology was like at the time and now when I reflect on it, I think it was this desire to like do good in the world. Like I wanted to make an impact and I thought I could be of service and at the same time a lot of this ideology that we know now really well as woke stuff and the oppressor versus oppressed mindset was coming into my newsroom.
So now it was not just like oh I’m a Bernie supporter and I want free college. It was like oh if you have white privilege you need to sit down. Like if you’re a cis person you need to sit down and so in my, I’m in my mid-20s looking around the newsroom going I’ve got a lot of like privilege. And so when I’m seeing at the same time these Native Americans saying there’s a Dakota access pipeline going on our reservation and it’s evil and we need help fighting it, I’m like great I can be a really great ally.
And so psychologically in retrospect looking back I think it was this desire to like atone for my privileged position that I had in the world and the way I could atone was by propping up these narratives. So it was very emotional, emotiondriven as well as psychologically driven. And then black and white thinking where it was like the Native Americans in this fighting this pipeline are the good guys and the fossil fuels and the American government and just capitalism in general are the bad guys. And so a lot of that was happening at a subconscious level but that is what first drew me to it and I kind of took it on as an armor and it gave me a lot of accolades within the group of my colleagues and in the movement where it was like wow she’s a great ally, she’s doing so good.
MS: I wonder in addition to the social rewards which we’ll talk more about and I think is really common, what were in that time for you the biggest wins? Like whether they were policy changes or people you got to meet or reforms that were made in that moment what were the things that you were realizing, wow I helped make this happen and I’m so happy I did.
LB: So I keep talking about Dakota access pipeline and I don’t know if people watching this would know what it is but it was like the topic of the time. I remember it. Yeah it was right before Trump got elected. Yeah you were like six. But it was right before Trump got elected. So like this was like the beginning of the modern era now with the Trump derangement syndrome and everything. And so this was actually happening Obama’s last year and I guess I keep bringing that up because that was a huge win for me because I got that issue to have 100 million views on Facebook, the videos that I did.
So there were activist Facebook groups that were getting like zero views and I would put them on the this page and they would get 100 million views and there was a point when like Shailene Woodley went up at an environmental rewards show and she said go to Standing Rock. Don’t just tweet about it. Don’t just feed off of me getting arrested. Go to Standing Rock. I made that go viral. It got tens of millions of views like in a day and people went to Standing Rock which was insane.
I went to Standing Rock. There was a snowstorm. It’s on a reservation and I slept on the floor of a of a casino when I was there because like it was insane. But we all went and it like it was just like anything that we’ve now seen with these movements many times pro-Palestine, BLM, this sort of very emotionally driven black and white thinking movement and that’s what the climate movement was in the 20 teens. And the way that we saw with BLM in 2020 and then pro-Palestine since 2023. And so that was like the example of it and I just got swept up into it and it became part of my identity.
MS: At the peak of this movement, I wonder if you can just tell us what like the core tenets of thinking were.
LB: Yeah so the core tenets would be that the world’s going to end in 10 years unless we basically keep fossil fuels on the ground. It’s American imperialist capitalism’s fault and all of the politicians who aren’t doing anything, they don’t care. They’re bought out by fossil fuel industry. Anyone who raises a question of questioning the narrative, they’re a fossil fuel shill or they’re paid off. It’s not just that we have to save the planet, but it’s that the systems we operate in now are inherently evil. And if we just got rid of them we could live in a utopia where everyone would be living peacefully off of the land and we would have harmony and you know so it’s again like very weird.
The warmth of collectivism. Yes, there’s a lot of communist and Marxist undertones which I think is intentional by the people who are organizing it. But I am just a useful idiot at the time and just going along with it. When you get pulled into a movement like this, you start off by thinking I don’t want plastic in a turtle’s nose to next thing being “Down with the West”. Later you wonder how did I get here? I don’t know but I was drawn in by the emotions of it and now two years later I’m pushing the green new deal with AOC that says like every American deserves a job and we need no more fossil fuels and things that if they actually got enacted would be devastating.
MS: Like you referenced with Israel, Palestine like with BLM a kind of defining feature of all of these movements is one a sense of nihilism but also a lack of questioning and people who question things are often demonized. I wonder if you can first talk about if there were people when you were part of the in crowd that started to question things that were maybe ostracized or if you ever had a moment where you said this is this is starting to get a little bit freaky for me.
LB: I don’t think I ever saw other people questioning it. I think that every time I would step out of line if I would say something like well this doesn’t really make sense you know. When you say it among people who are true believers I would then go home and and my anxiety would spiral. My god they would think am I not a good ally because I said that plastic has a lower carbon footprint than glass. Which is a fact you know and so there be inconvenient facts and if they were brought up in certain contexts I would just feel so insecure leaving a situation where I might have said something outside of the party line.
Mind you, everyone was actually lovely and nice and this was more a self-inflicted thing. It’s not like people were like putting gun to my head to push climate stuff. It was literally a self-imposed thing, an ideology. I look back on it think that my sense of self was sitting on sand and so it was just so would go with the winds of the group. So I didn’t have a solidness inside of myself. What are my core tenant beliefs and so I just was told well you know capitalism is evil and we’re all going to die from climate change unless we do something now. I’m like okay like I’m gonna buy this and and I didn’t have the the confidence in myself to question it and go against the group.
And so whenever I came up with an idea that was contradictory I would just dismiss it. At this time there were people who even quietly were saying like, hey actually I am not so sure if this is true. The science maybe points to other things.
How were those people talked about within the movement? I don’t think those people are even acknowledged or talked about that stuff never broke through. Even now in my research that I do continually in reading books, I’ll learn about something and think: Oh that study that I thought was true, you know 97 percent of scientists agree that climate change is a problem, that has been so thoroughly discredited. But it never broke through to me because again, anyone who questioned it is like a white privileged nut. The white privilege thing is like I you can’t kind of separate it because again if like there was a scientist who say their identity is like a white man maybe a classic white man like trying to hold up the system.
So even though it’s a scientific movement, it really was completely divorced from science. I never looked up the science of it which is so embarrassing. I didn’t know what percentage of the atmosphere was CO2 until 2019 and that was when I realized it’s 0.04 percent, which is not a lot, which is a good thing you should know. Again all these people that I followed were activists documentary films. And I would just watch that one thing and take it as fact you know and then never question it until years and years later.
MS: So you’re deeply ensconced in this and then when is the first time that you look around and think something is going on here and I need to learn more. And then how do you make the the quite courageous decision, especially as your public identity is tied to this thing, to start questioning.
LB: I think that the whole time I was part of the movement I always had doubts. And because as I said, my internal sense of self is built on sand, I would get really triggered or have anxiety when someone would bring something up that might like make me question the foundations of these beliefs around the climate. And even a few months after Dakota Access Pipeline happened, I remember having a few glasses of wine with people like at my apartment and feeling like it’s kind of bullshit. When I was covering the Dakota Access Pipeline I was in the role of an advocate for the climate activists and the Native American activists perspective. So I pushed that message: This pipeline is invasive on our land, and it’s going to destroy our drinking water, and that it can’t go through because of climate change.
It was just the party line of the activists, even though inside I could see that there was a lot of problems with the argument. For one, the fact that when you transport oil over a pipeline it’s actually safer and better for the environment than doing it over trains. Because trains can crash and they have a carbon footprint themselves. I would go onto the pipeline website, and I could see a graph they drew and explained how it was going to go under the river and it would not leak into the drinking water. And so I would see the nuance but I almost felt like that wasn’t my role to show it. I have a forward-facing persona: this is what I mean to say and do and even if I see counter information it’s too much of a headache to even include that. Why would I even go down that line because then people are gonna be questioning my loyalty to the cause.
MS: Was there a moment before though when you really did think all of this was true?
LB: I could tell even the way I was covering stories, but I wasn’t covering them honestly or fully. It would almost be like an iceberg and I would show the tip of the iceberg and below the iceberg there’d be nuance and complexity. Or maybe part of it would throw cold water on the theory that I was pushing around this stuff. I would just ignore it and I remember always kind of feeling my coverage is so one-sided and it and it kind of hurt my heart a little bit. But again the cost of going against the group and trying to think of standing on my own I was too much to bear. So I’m just gonna put my trust in the group even though I’m seeing these contradictions. Other people know more than me.
MS: Did you just go with the calculus, I’m a vehicle for this movement and therefore I can only show the tip of the iceberg that they deem acceptable because doing otherwise would ostracize me. Or did you still fundamentally believe that, yes there’s all this other stuff that I’m not portraying in what I’m putting out there, but it’s kind of a distraction from the ultimate end which is creating an awareness or momentum behind this.
LB: I think that’s what it is, and I think that activists still do this. It’s like we don’t have time for nuance, we just have to push for the most extreme narrative because this is a fire alarm situation and the planet is going to be destroyed. We don’t have time to think about the downsides of solar and wind, we have to just keep pushing forward because this is existential.
And that was in 2019!
When you subscribe that this is an existential threat and we don’t have time to like look at the details, then we just have to get people to care and to be afraid. Because if they’re afraid they’re going to change their habits. But again the logical thinking was not there. Psychologically I was in such an insecure place with the group think and being in that work environment, the activist environment, that I didn’t use my logical thinking to the end. I would always stop thinking and then give up my autonomy to the group which was saying this this is an existential thing don’t ask questions.
MS: So when does this small hint of doubt are you slipping into something at like a drunk wine night turn you into this complete breakup?
LB: So the timeline is that I was at now this from 2015 to 2021 and so I was there through the COVID stuff too. I was visible, I was an on-camera person the whole time I was there, so the whole world shut down at the peak of COVID. We saw a 17 percent reduction in our carbon emissions with the peak of COVID. And I’m thinking to myself, wait a minute the climate movement wants 100 percent reduction in our carbon emissions. What is it going to extract from our society. We’re literally locked in our home not doing anything and we still have carbon emissions. That was the first moment where I go hold on. I don’t know if I want to live in a world where we have zero carbon emissions because I’m kind of depressed right now at home. This sucks and we have no freedoms and so what does the climate movement mean if you take it to its logical conclusion. No big deal except it’s going to require people to give up their freedoms to lower carbon emissions
So that was one thing and then the other thing was I was very anti-plastic and all of a sudden like the PPEs everywhere the masks the plastic barriers between every table at a restaurant and when you’re checking out your food at the grocery store and I’m like wait a minute I’ve been sweating about single-use plastic straw for the last five years and now we’ve proliferated more plastic in the last few months than I’ve seen in my lifetime and and also looking around we seem like we’re fine it looks like our society was able to absorb that plastic and the world has not ended
That was 2020 and then in 2021 I left my job and so I didn’t really say anything publicly while I was still there because I was in a public role. Then I was at a a non-profit for a year in a behind the scenes role before I came to the free press. I came to the free press end of 2022 I’m behind the scenes now two and a half years and I just started making content this past May. And that was the reason why I went from being behind the scenes that whole time was I was like I’m too afraid, and then my younger son turned one in April and that was when I kind of had a light bulb come back on. And I was like wait a minute like let me reconsider this. Do I really want to go to my grave never talking about the climate stuff that I have issues with, and what actually need to be said about weighing the cost analysis of doing this.
I just made a decision inside myself in May that I was going to make content and so I started making daily content on TikTok in May and then in June I went back to my Instagram where I’d had the following. So that was scarier. I made content there and then from there I’ve just continued to go all year you kind of internally before you go public with this depart from this way of thinking yeah
MS: I wonder if there was any personal confusion or loss of identity you had attached yourself in a public way to something and then even though it was quiet at first walked away right did you have an identity crisis of sorts?
LB: Yes I did because when I was in the climate movement I got my identity from being a good person and from being on the right side of history and so I identified with that. And so good people don’t question the climate movement you know, good people don’t listen to fossil fuel shills or defend fossil fuels, good people don’t question the climate narrative. This identity of being good and I talked a little bit about this idea of atoning right, because everyone’s obsessed with the white privilege and everything. I’m realizing that I’m an oppressor by being a white woman in from America and so I need to atone for my sins by pushing and being part of this movement and that is what makes me good. So if I’m going to leave this I’m no longer going to be seen as good and I’m no longer a good person.
So who am I and then that’s when you have to start doing the work of building up yourself your sense of self and identity in that internal world which again it took me again five years between questioning and leaving that job and then posting this past year.
MS: One thing I think about is like when you’re speaking about COVID and you’re saying we’re producing all this plastic and the world is fine yeah where does like the the agreement on scientific fact kind of end and conspiracy begin? In other words is there an actual downside to producing that much plastic and even if the world will be okay and we can innovate and adapt from it like is that a good thing for us to do, should we still be trying to limit it? Yeah, what are the facts that we should be operating under?
LB: Where I come down on this now is that the traditional environmental movement that was founded in conservation and protecting animals and getting pollution out of our environment is still very solid. But that’s not what the climate movement is. The climate movement is trying to change our energy system from reliable fossil fuels to unreliable solar and taxing us to do it. And getting us to worry about our carbon emissions and all these things.
So it’s very like convoluted, it’s like the demon spawn of environmentalism honestly. Obviously we should always reduce, reuse and recycle like the classic thing we learned in third grade. But that’s not really what the climate movement’s saying. The climate movement’s is guilting you for living a modern life; the climate movement is taxing and over-regulating reliable forms of energy and trying to get us to be dependent on solar and wind which we import those materials from China. The EU now has an energy crisis because of the green movement and so there’s so many negatives about the climate movement that go beyond just conservation and and don’t even get me started on the mental health stuff with the young people.
MS: Well that’s actually what I wanted to ask you about. But first I want to say it also seems like a core tenant actually goes against solutions or innovation. I think about the people that the movement idolizes, and that’s maybe AOC or Greta Thunberg. But they’re very much opposed to someone like Elon Musk for instance who in the creation of EVs has probably made something that’s affordable for people to lower their carbon footprint, whereas most people cannot afford to put solar panels on the top of their house.
LB: Right, part of it is actually anti-innovation, it’s very anti-innovation anti-human and the fact that the 14 year old Greta became the symbol of this movement should have been a red flag for me back in 2018. Why are we idolizing a 14 year old which shows you it’s not a rational movement, it’s an emotional movement. It has spiritual undertones, they’re kind of putting her up as this prophet. Ultimately from being in the movement for so many years, I realized that it’s an anti-human movement. They would say, well we can’t just innovate our ways out of this, we need to be consuming less and we need to not be using so much energy. So it’s we can’t innovate our way out of this, and you’re thinking, well we’ve innovated our way out of every other thing. You know there used to be piles of horse manure in New York City and now we have cars. Right it’s what humans do, we innovate our way out of everything.
But again this movement is like a lot of group think, they always have something to keep you in and keep you depressed about the state of the world. And I will say another thing that woke me up from it is that we naturally work together. You know I’m a very positive optimistic person and I have a lot of energy and enthusiasm for a life, and this is a very negative movement that basically makes you feel guilty for being alive and living a modern human life. As if we can choose when we’re born, as if oh I had a choice over being born in a modern time. And so that was another thing of self preservation for me where my nature was coming up against a very nihilistic movement and I had to get out for self-preservation.
MS: I want to ask you about one of the things that we’ve touched on, the way this doomerism has affected young people especially. My grocery store is in the building where there’s a climate clock above it saying there’s a countdown until everything’s going to implode. I think it’s one in five young people don’t want to have kids because of climate fears. I wonder if the nihilism is core to the movement and how you’ve seen this affect young people especially. Because it seems like this very convenient thing where you can feel like a good person for speaking out about it, but there’s not really anything that you can do. Because at the end of the day the clock is counting down and that’s what it is.
Yeah it’s so nihilistic and that is the thing that pushed me to start talking about this. Because I realized how young people are impacted, the wasted human capital that is happening because of how they’re taught this. You probably were taught it more than I was in school, but when I was in high school in 2006 we watched Al Gore’s movie Inconvenient Truth, and that one day was enough for me to like be freaked out. And I know now it’s even more really part of a the curriculum. Yeah for sure.
Actually one of our co-workers Sasha said to me after seeing one of my videos she was saying,oh my god I loved your video. Even if I didn’t know you, I would have loved seeing one of your videos. Because even when my friends and I are having a good time, there’ll be a pause and someone will say, but the planet’s burning. And I’m thinking, wow, you’re not even activists going anywhere. You just have a subconsciously held belief that you do not question, it is a law that the world is burning. Yeah I think that’s true for most young people. Yes people just assume that the world is burning and that is like common knowledge among younger generations. I don’t think older generations fully realize that.
MS: No it’s actually really random, but I was reporting a story about why young people were getting tattoos so much. And the most common thing all these Gen Z people said to me was: The world is burning. I’m going away, I may as well just get the tattoo I want because like nothing lasts forever. That was their answer.
LB: And these aren’t people who gluing their hands to a highway or covering themselves in paint. These are just normal people and that is the the cohort that I really care about. Because it’s just so sad when people walk through the world believing the world is going to end because of this when it’s so not true.
MS: So what do you think of Greta and AOC? They’re still kind of on this soapbox about maximalist climate doomerism. Why and and what do we make of that?
LB: I actually think they’ve fallen off of it a bit. Honestly AOC doesn’t talk about it as much like she was pushing the Green New Deal in 2019. And it was all about transitioning our electricity to 100% renewable within 10 years and guaranteeing a job for every American, which is hilarious. And then Greta’s gone for the pro Palestine. So they’ve backed off of it but without having a mea culpa, saying I was wrong. I think that’s a problem I had when the life I lived for many years where I had changed all my opinions but I never like corrected the record. So I just kind of faded away and that is also why I have a responsibility to set the record straight. And to counter this fear because I played a part in pushing it.
And we’re seeing the impacts now with these really poorly thought out green policies. Even in New York we know like it’s like electrify the heating here by 2030 and that’s going to cost these small business owners like millions of dollars to electrify apartment buildings or whatever it may be. That’s real world now, working class and middle class people who are now going to be on this bill like or be left to foot the bill for this climate ideology. And it’s really, really destructive even in Africa the World Bank up until a few years ago wasn’t lending to natural gas projects even though natural gas is the cleanest other than nuclear energy. And best way to get people out of poverty is to get them reliable energy. You want to give them natural gas and the world bank wouldn’t fund those projects because of climate change.
MS: Speaking of people like you who have said they were wrong, I’m really astonished by the delta of time between someone saying one thing and another. Especially in the case of Bill Gates who with the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation was funding immense amount of research on climate change. She was very outspoken about it, and then a few months ago he basically said in the New York Times: Actually it’s all fine, this isn’t a real threat. It’s okay everyone, it’s gonna have an impact but it’s not deadly, it’s not the world ending. So I wonder, this is someone who is untouchable whose personal and public life will not really be affected by him changing his mind the way that it was for you. Why is someone like Bill Gates taking so long after we know the science of what is more true now. Why does it take him a decade basically?
LB: Yeah I mean it makes a lot of sense since this whole climate system and all the non-profits and the business models and there’s so many people making money off of this now. So how do you turn that ship, it’s really, really hard. And then you’re around people saying that the consensus is the world ending. So to go against that takes a lot of courage. Just to say for people who don’t know, on my Instagram now I make content that says things like climate change is not dangerous, deaths from natural disasters are down 95 % over the last 100 years. So where’s the emergency here? Some people just like stuff that’s sort of against this common knowledge. And I also get people in my comments saying you’re a fossil fuel shill, this is fake news. It’s just being able to not take every comment so seriously that it like throws me off. Because in the end of the day I’m making the content for the mom who just had a kid and is like really freaked out. And those are the messages I also get saying: Thank you for making your content. I was actually really freaked out about this but I’m not going to worry about this anymore. Again they’re not activists, they’re just normal people and I’m just giving them a signal amongst the noise where they like don’t know what to believe. And I’m ssying, okay I’m just gonna lay out the facts.
MS: It’s something we write a lot about the free press which is like how certain fields academia, medicine, science, the list goes on, has kind of things that are really meant to be rooted in fact, but have completely departed from that. It’s been taken over by an ideology. And maybe it’s naive or too optimistic, but I really do think that each of those things will have a breaking point, or at some point someone will say no, this is not what I signed up for. Do you see what that breaking point might be within the climate movement? Has it already happened?
LB: So the climate realist, climate skeptic community has been saying this message since the year 2000. Like there are so many amazing scientists who have been pushed out of their jobs, censored, deplatformed like literally cases against them have been brought up at the universities where they work to like push them out for just saying, you know, climate is not world ending. So, I’m not the first person to say this. That movement has been sort of trying to say this for so long. But before Elon bought Twitter and before Mark Zuckerberg became more based and opened up on the censorship which is less harsh now, these people would just be deplatformed as climate deniers.
Yeah. And so those people have already existed like there’s been scandals for 25 years. And so I think that they are kind of thinking, when is the breaking point? We’ve been trying to say this forever and we are getting ostracized. But the difference is now the censorship has now gone down a bit and it allows my voice to be important in this.
So my videos actually do not get censored on Instagram or Twitter, which they would have 5 years ago, right? And also there’s the scientists who have been saying all this stuff and I read their books. There’s like Patrick Moore who is the head of the Greenpeace. He founded Greenpeace and he’s now like a huge climate skeptic. There’s just so many people to name, but I basically am translating their work that they’ve been saying for years to the online Tik Tok generation. And so I think I think when I talk to them, they say they’re more hopeful than they’ve ever been because of Bill Gates, and the censorship is going down. And then you have Trump and Chris Wright, who’s the Department of Energy, who are just saying like, we’re not dealing with this stuff anymore. We’ve withdrawn from a lot of climate organizations like the IPCC and all these different things like we’re just not in them anymore because the science has been so corrupted. And so everyone’s like thank god this is like finally happened.
So, I think there is a huge turning point, but I do think that there’s like a lack of breaking through to the everyday person who’s not up on it. And again, and then you come across my content and you might just immediately trigger a flag: she’s a climate change denier. She’s a fossil fuel shell, right? Because if you’re still in that group think, you’re dismissing what I’m saying because you just come up with a reason not to trust what I’m saying.
MS: What do the the climate skeptic experts say is actually happening and therefore how we should live our lives accordingly. Do they say buy all the plastic you want, it doesn’t matter? What are they saying?
LB: So I actually spoke to Steve Koonin who is a former energy secretary for President Obama. So this is not like some right-wing person. So I think that’s a really important person to quote and he wrote the book unsettled in that came out in 2022. That just goes into what we know and what is unsettled when it comes to the climate science. He said that we know the planet has warmed 1.3 degrees since 1850. So we know that that is a fact. We are going through a warming period. We also know that we have released CO2 into the atmosphere by burning oil and gas and coal. Now how much of that warming is naturally occurring and how much of it is because of the CO2?
That’s when you now have this debate and that’s okay. There isn’t actually a consensus. Obviously, alarmists are like, “It’s our fault. Everything’s our fault. We’re heading to doom.” But that is not a commonly held belief even among scientists who are still in the space. That’s a media narrative.
Someone like Koonin might say it’s warming. However, that’s not necessarily a factor that would lead to our demise, right? And I will say that warming periods historically, which I’ve just learned in doing more research on this, historically humans flourish during warming periods because you have longer growing seasons. So you can support a population in a city. And the term for this is climate optimum. So that’s actually what geologists and archaeologists and historians would call these periods.
MS: Well, you did one reporting video where you spoke to young people who were at a climate protest, which I loved, and it was quite startling how little they knew about the facts you presented them. But I wonder what you would say to them, or really to the the young people who are saying, “I don’t want to have kids. I don’t want I feel really nihilistic about the future because of this, what do you say to them?”
LB: The number one fact I like to share because it’s just unequivocally true, is that deaths from natural disasters have gone down 99% in the past 100 years. So even with climate change, even let’s say the planet is warming, it’s so scary. Deaths have gone down 99%. So we’re safer than ever. Even with climate change, like we’ve we’ve seen 1.3 degrees of warming, and we’ve seen at the exact same time. It’s almost the exact same chart. Temperatures have gone up, human prosperity, literacy, women’s rights, all of the things. We know this has happened the past 150 years, right? We’ve had this huge boom of prosperity that’s happened during 1.3 degrees of warming. So if climate change was really so dangerous, shouldn’t we see some negative impacts, why is humanity still thriving so much even in the midst of climate change?
And I would also say don’t look at the climate models that say in 10 years the planet’s going to be this, in 30 years it’s going to be that. Those are models that are just computer models. You can put any bit of data in there to get any outcome that you want to prove there’s an apocalypse. And the scientists who do those models are incentivized to find that outcome. And so they’re not solid science. And so I would never base having kids or your future and your outlook on life. Never base it on a computer model.
MS: Lucy, thank you so much for joining me. I learn something new from you every day. So thank you.
LB: Thank you for having me. It was so much fun.
About Heather Exner-Pirot My research focuses on Indigenous and northern economic development, energy security, and resource politics and policy. I am currently the Director of Energy, Natural Resources and Environment at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, a Special Advisor to the Business Council of Canada, and a Research Advisor to the Indigenous Resource Network.
in the brief interview below she explains how Canada has squandered abundance, and is now facing an impending energy crisis. Her recent paper shown above (and linked later below) includes the background research for viewpoints expressed, and presented in the transcript with added bolds and images. JS refers to Jim Csek and HEP to Exner-Pirot.
Does Canada produce enough energy to sustain itself?
JS: British Columbia is now a net importer of electricity. You would think that would be almost impossible. And I remember a couple of years ago when Fortis applied in the Okanagan here to get a peaker plant, an LNG peaker plant, and they were denied and they seem to be going all in on at the time, all in on wind and solar. Now they’re kind of changing their focus to LNG.
The decisions that have been made over the past 10 years in Canada have put us in this place of energy dependence. Do you see light at the end of the tunnel? Do you see that we’re shifting? It’s been a year now with this new BC government, and they said they’re going to build at a speed like never seen before. Yet the NDP seems to be still stuck in its old ways. And we haven’t seen that speed yet.
HEP: No, we haven’t seen that speed. And maybe you saw I wrote a paper on electricity and our impending crisis that just came out last month. So when you say, you know, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, is it is it the light because we’re near death or is there actually some more electricity coming on board? And the one thing I think people don’t appreciate is that Canada’s electricity generation peaked in 2017. And I think everyone knows that we’ve added, I don’t know, six million people since then.
So on a per capita basis, our electricity generation is absolutely in decline. And this is happening as we’re pushing electrification of transportation, electrification of heating. And now we want to electrify everything that takes energy. We want to build more critical minerals production, do more smelting here. That takes electricity. We do not have the electricity to do all the things that we say we’re going to do.
And actually, this week, probably on Wednesday, the prime minister is going to announce a national electricity strategy. We’ll see how serious they are. If it’s all incentives for wind and solar and, you know, intertides from Nova Scotia to Quebec, I will say they’re not very serious. If there’s a lot of funding for nuclear and some carve-outs of the clean electricity regulations, I’ll say that they’re thinking about being serious.
But we’ve had such abundance in this country. In Canada, it always comes down to this, that we had time to squander it. We had way too much time to squander it. And we spent eight or 10 years squandering it. And just now we’re starting to worry. I always say, we’re like the frogs in the boiling water. We’re starting to notice it’s hot. But it’s been getting hot for many years.
And so now the question is, there’s real trade offs, Jim, as you know, in British Columbia, that for three years, actually, you’ve been a net importer of electricity. And now we want to build LNG Canada phase two and Ksi Lisims LNG. And you’re also doing wood fiber and you’re also doing cedar. And there’s also three mines that have been permanent or have expansions. And there’s not enough electricity for all of those things, not to mention all the people. And so it’s crazy that in a place like Kelowna the B.C. regulator is saying no more natural gas for home heating, you know, because we’ll miss our climate targets if we do that.
Meaning that people are being pushed with that scarce electricity for their home heating, whereas Kelowna is a beautiful place, but sometimes it does get to minus 25 occasionally. And that’s the exact time where you need to have enough electricity. And that tends to also be when, you know, when when hydro isn’t performing at its peak. And so we focus so much on sustainability and our electricity system these past 10 years that we really did it at the expense of reliability and affordability. And now it’s backtracking to try to balance those.
But I’ve been saying the next trade off is actually going to be between affordability and reliability. You’ll wish we could choose between sustainability and the other two. The choice you’re going to have to make is between affordability and reliability. And that’s not going to be a pleasant place for Canadians to be.
JS: Do you feel like sometimes you’re in a Monty Python skit when they talk about Canada needs to have an all EV mandate? And you know that there’s not enough electricity to do this. And it’s more of a pipe dream than a pipeline. Like, how do we how do we how do you square those two things? You got to drive EVs, yet there’s not enough electricity even for the stuff we have right now.
HEP: And it’s worse than that, Jim. You know, the the subsidies that went into heat pumps in Atlantic Canada, and Atlantic Canada is a big swing jurisdiction. You know, if the liberals can get can sweep Atlantic Canada, OK, they can get a majority. So that’s a very important jurisdiction for them. And they were on heating oil and heating oil is expensive. And heating oil does suck. They don’t have access to natural gas for some reasons of their own making. And so you do want to get off heating oil.
But they push on all these heat pumps and did nothing on the electricity generation side, and you can’t do one part of the equation. If you’re going to change a quarter of households to heat pumps, then you better think about how much electricity you’re going to need for that. Such that now we’ve had emergency applications from the Prince Edward Island utility and from New Brunswick saying we need a new natural gas generation immediately.
We need to be approved right away. This is an emergency. We already saw the cold snap that we had this year. They had to curtail some industrial use. I mean the utilities performed admirably under very difficult circumstances. But the actual situation in that cold snap was that we were not sending very much to the United States. We were importing from New England electricity produced from heating oil, and curtailing generation. And that can be very dangerous when when most of your households are on heat pumps and you have rotating brownouts. That is a very dangerous situation, actually.
Title is link to publication. Some important excerpts below in italics wtih my bolds.
The electricity abundance and affordability that Canada has enjoyed for decades are ending. Generation is down, exports are now imports, and investment is flat. This comes as electricity is increasingly scarce and its availability a competitive advantage. Canada’s impending electricity shortage is not just an affordability crisis; it is an economic and security one as well.
While electricity policy was largely driven by emissions reductions objectives for the past two decades, adequacy, reliability, and affordability are resurging as priorities. Governments that fail to address the issue will be punished at the ballot box: voters are ratepayers.
This paper has sought to outline the growing crisis in Canadian electricity production, describe the policy trajectory that contributed to this state of affairs, identify shifts in policy direction that Canadians should advocate, and understand how to gauge policy improvement, or lack thereof.
Canada’s electricity surplus diminished because we became complacent and took the resource for granted. The sector now demands our attention, and for the sake of all Canadians, we had better respond intelligently.
Although demand for electricity is growing, the forecasted growth in generation over the next five years is weak and will be accounted for wholly by intermittent renewables, the majority of which will come from wind. While renewables have their place in the energy mix, their power generation fluctuates based on weather and time of day, rather than conforming to electricity demand. This fundamental mismatch creates reliability, stability, and economic challenges for power grids, which are designed for constant, controllable base-load generation (see Sepulveda 2024). In fact, Canada’s Energy Regulator (CER 2025b) is forecasting that dispatchable capacity (i.e., sources of electricity that can adjust according to demand) will decline in Canada by 1.2 per cent by 2030.
In 2016, Canada sent as much as 64 TWh in net electricity exports annually to the US. However, that number has steadily dwindled due to a combination of drought and the growth in domestic demand. Canada became a net importer of electricity for the first time in modern history in Spring 2024. By the end of 2025, Canada had become a regular net importer of electricity (see Figure 5). In 2025 both BC Hydro and Hydro-Québec were net importers – a previously unthinkable outcome.
Introduced by Environment and Climate Change Canada in 2023 and finalized in December 2024, the CER (Clean Energy Regulations) set federal performance standards to achieve a near-zero emissions electricity grid by 2050 (a change from the initial 2035). The regulations set limits on carbon dioxide emissions from almost all electricity generation units that use fossil fuels beginning in 2035, phase out coal-fired generation, and impose strict limits on emissions from natural gas sources. The CER provides compliance options such as emission reductions at source, carbon credit purchases, and direct investment in clean generation projects. While the CER gives incentives for creating infrastructure for renewables and storage, it also introduces higher capital costs, regulatory complexity, and market uncertainty. With large hydro and nuclear projects becoming too expensive for governments and investors to afford, too longterm, or simply unavailable for many jurisdictions, the CER removed the last best source of firm (i.e. always available) power additions available to many jurisdictions: new natural gas-fired generating units.
Canada’s electricity crunch comes just when a surplus could have been directed to productive capacities. An LNG construction boom, increased oil and gas extraction, significant new mines and expansions in BC, Saskatchewan, Ontario, Yukon, Quebec, and Nunavut, and the implementation of a defence industrial strategy all require significant new generation and transmission. Canada will not reach its goals to double non-US exports without more and affordable electricity.
But the biggest opportunity is in data centres, and the cost of missing out is not only an economic risk, but a security one as well. Electricity is now being selectively rationed in Canada, with data centres facing enhanced scrutiny. This is a problem because data centres are not only at the forefront of global capital investment, but they are also increasingly integral to national security. They are critical infrastructure, essential for the smooth functioning and productivity of an advanced economy, but they are also drivers of economic and military competitiveness. Reliance on foreign infrastructure to train models, store sensitive datasets, or deploy AI systems makes countries vulnerable in much the same way that relying on competitors or adversaries for oil, natural gas, or critical minerals does.
The fact is that Canada’s principal goal guiding electricity policy for the past two decades has been to reduce emissions. Ensuring reliable and affordable electricity has taken a back seat. When those policies were implemented, there was enough abundance in the system that the normal concerns of regulators and producers could fall into the background. That is no longer the case.
The Carney government, which includes senior advisors and Cabinet members with direct experience in the electricity sector, seems better equipped and motivated to tackle the issue than the previous Liberal government, and at the time of writing had announced the imminent release of a National Electricity Strategy. The extent to which it addresses the nuts and bolts of our current dilemma – that the country must find a way to create the conditions to generate, transmit, and distribute more MW at a lower cost,versus investing public dollars in expensive and politically motivated vanity projects with no business case – will determine if, and how fast, we in Canada can extract ourselves from our electricity deficit.
A part of Battle of Ideas Festival 2025 was the above presentation explaining plainly why UK energy has become so expensive. For those who prefer reading, below is a transcript with my added bolds and images.
Why are our electricity bills so high? We’re told as Craig referenced that it’s all the fault of gas. Now this argument is going to come to somewhat crashing reality in the next year. I was just checking the prices now and from yesterday’s close we’re now87 percent down from the highs in 2022. Now has anybody seen an 87 percent reduction in their bills, hands up, anybody? Oh that’s a huge shock. Next year gas analysts expect that the gas price will return to its long-term average pre-2021.
So the gas crisis actually began in the autumn of 2021, about six months before the invasion of Ukraine and it was to do with the recovery from COVID. Basically during COVID demand for gas fell because industrial activity dropped, a lot of upstream production was shut in and it takes time to bring that back, you can’t just turn on the tap in most cases, it requires quite a bit more work than that. So there was a delay in bringing that production back online and when you have more demand than you’ve got supply then prices go up and then Putin took advantage of this in the following February and well we all know what happened then.
Since then in the upstream sector they’ve been busy bringing new LNG, liquefied natural gas projects, on stream. By the end of this year there’ll be enough new LNG to fully replace all of Russian gas and sometime next year we’re expecting the global gas market to go back into length. So there’ll be more supply globally than there is demand and prices are expected to fall. In fact the only reason why Miliband could possibly deliver the 300 pound reduction in bills would be because of gas prices falling.
Unfortunately I think he’s going to more than offset that with higher subsidy costs. So the first thing is that gas is not expensive and really for 25 years we had very low and very stable gas prices. Gas was cheap, in fact the cheapness of gas was what enabled the energy transition to even begin. I wrote a report earlier in the year about the cost of renewables, if you do a chart that shows the wholesale price of gas, the wholesale price of electricity and then the domestic price of electricity what you find is that the wholesale gas price was low and stable until 2021.
The wholesale electricity price was basically the wholesale gas price plus a little bit which is what you’d expect and then the domestic price was the wholesale price of electricity plus a little bit. And again you’d expect that you buy a wholesale, you pay for it to be delivered to your house, you’ve got to pay the supplier some money for you know doing the admin for that, they want to take a bit of profit, there’s some taxes, that’s what you’d expect.
Figure 4 – International Domestic Electricity Prices (p per kWh). UK has the highest domestic electricity prices in the IEA.
But from 2006 this relationship started to break down and what we saw was a steep increase in what households were paying despite a flat trajectory for wholesale prices. Why was this? It was because we were adding on policy costs. We’re subsidizing renewables, we started using suppliers to do all sorts of other social programs, wealth redistribution, literally the warm homes discount is suppliers. They phone up the department for work and pensions and they find out which of their customers are eligible and then they calculate how much that discount is going to cost and then they add on an admin fee and then they spread that cost out across all our other customers.
They take money from one group of customers to give to another. This is wealth redistribution, it’s not the job of private companies. The energy company obligation, we’ve heard about that in the news this week where I think the National Audit Office has written a report saying how inefficient it is, how low quality the work is. Well guess what, energy companies are not experts in construction. They are being expected to engage in sub contracts to companies that will come in and install insulation and similar things in your home. They don’t know anything about this, this isn’t part of their core business.
Typically as wind and solar power share of supply increases, distribution and transmission costs rise sharply.
It’s a hugely inefficient thing to expect suppliers to do and the cost of all that is added to bills. The smart meter rollout, we’re the only country in the world that expects suppliers, retailers, to install network equipment in people’s homes. Everyone else got the network companies to do it, you know, duh. And what’s even worse is that the supply business was created within the Utility Act 2000. It was the final part of unbundling the energy system and almost immediately both the governments and the regulators started telling everyone that suppliers were greedy profiteers that couldn’t be trusted.
And then they expressed shock that nobody wants these greedy profiteers who can’t be trusted to install devices in their home that would give the greedy suppliers that can’t be trusted lots of information about how they’re using electricity and gas and potentially enable them to change your prices remotely, put you onto prepayment tariffs remotely and do all sorts of other stuff remotely, potentially without your permission. And they were just kind of shocked that people didn’t want to do that. So the whole market is completely dysfunctional.
Now, when we come to the real costs and the real reasons that our bills are so high has to do with renewables. When we build renewable generation, we have to provide a big subsidy. Now, a lot of people think, well, the wind and the sun are free. And this is true. Wind energy and solar energy is free. But the equipment needed to turn that energy into electricity is not free. That’s actually pretty expensive.
Now, imagine that we only had renewables on our grid. And when you’re setting prices, normally, the price at which you sell your goods is linked to your short run marginal operating cost, which for wind and solar is close to zero. Essentially, you’d be giving it away. How are you going to recover your capital costs for that expensive equipment if you have to give away your products? You’re never going to be able to do it. So basic economic theory will tell you that renewables will never be built without subsidies. They are always going to require subsidies because you will never be able to recover the capital costs to selling the electricity at the short run marginal operating cost of that electricity.
So we give subsidies to renewables. And that subsidy is higher than the cost of generating electricity with gas. So the argument about gas pushing your bills up is nonsense. These subsidies are higher than the cost of generating electricity with gas. And the way the new subsidies work is that the generators are guaranteed a fixed price, and they receive that by selling that electricity in the market. And then if that’s lower than this fixed price, they get a top up.
And it’s a one for one relationship. If you lower the wholesale price of electricity by one pound, you increase the subsidy cost by one pound. And the subsidies are added to our bills. They come straight out of our pockets. So when people say, oh, we’ve got to get off gas, we’ve got to stop marginal pricing. People talk about marginal pricing as if we’re some weird outlier in the world markets doing this strange marginal pricing thing, taking the most expensive form of generation to set the price.
Every deregulated power market in the world sets the electricity price through marginal pricing. In fact, most commodity markets do the same thing. This isn’t weird. It’s completely normal.
And if you decided to change price formation to lower the wholesale price, your bill will stay the same. You’re just moving money in different buckets around the bill. Now the bit that says wholesale price will go down, and the bit that says policy costs will go up. But the amount you pay will stay the same. And so this is the whole misinformation that we have.
The other issues with renewables are you’ve got to pay for backup. They have low energy density, so you need a lot more wires to connect them. A good sized gas power station, 800 megawatts. If you wanted an equivalent size wind farm, you need 60 turbines. So that’s 60 times more wires. But to get the same amount of electricity over the year, because your wind is only working about a third of the time compared with about 86% of the time for gas, you need something like 150 times the wires. You need 150 turbines.
All that gets added onto your bills. The cost of backup to make sure you’ve got generation available when it’s not windy and sunny, that goes straight onto the bill. And the real-time balancing cost, where you’re having to even out the impact of clouds and gusts of wind, all goes on the bill. And so this is why our bills are so high.
At the World Prosperity Forum in Zurich—held alongside the World Economic Forum in Davos—climate scientist Anika Sweetland delivers a provocative and deeply personal address that challenges the foundations of modern climate orthodoxy.
Drawing on her own education and professional experience, Sweetland recounts how climate science training fostered fear, despair, and unquestioned consensus rather than open scientific inquiry. She argues that generations of students have been indoctrinated with alarmist narratives that distort climate history, suppress debate, and justify sweeping political and economic control.
In this speech, Sweetland examines:
♦ The psychological impact of climate alarmism on children and students
♦ Media-driven climate narratives and shifting doomsday predictions
♦ Historical climate cycles, ocean dynamics, and orbital forces
♦ The role of international institutions and the concentration of power
♦ Why carbon dioxide is portrayed as a villain—and why she disputes that claim
♦ How climate policy, finance, and governance have become tightly intertwined
Presented as a counterpoint to the centralized, collectivist worldview promoted at Davos, this talk embodies the mission of the World Prosperity Forum: to challenge prevailing narratives, defend sovereignty, and restore open debate on climate, energy, and economic policy. For those who prefer reading, below is a transcription with my bolds and added images.
My name is Annika Sweetland and I trained as a climate scientist and during my time in what was meant to be a world-class education, I learned the world was a fragile system on the brink of collapse and that we were practically doomed. What sets me apart from most climate scientists is this, I’ve realized I was indoctrinated. Going through my old lecture notes now, I see lie after lie after lie, painting a picture that does not and will not ever exist. I was that girl that ticked the box when booking a plane ticket to say yes, I’m willing to pay a higher price to make this an environmentally friendly transaction and offset my carbon emissions.
Airlines saving polar bears, sign me up. But of course the
consensus was always the same, there was nothing
I could really do to solve the climate crisis.
So let me take you through my journey from being a scientist in complete and utter despair to standing here before you today armed with the truth. Today I’m going to be telling you about the realities of climate education, so let’s start at the beginning of the climate merry-go-round, the indoctrination of school children. Do you realize the alleged consequences from climate change are actually similar to those of war? The child’s world is inherently unstable, after all due to extreme sea level rise and extreme weather events, their lives are at risk. But this is what we’re teaching our kids, that the world they live in is no longer a safe and stable environment, that ecosystems are collapsing and their world is on fire. This is an outrage, they promised this is the truth and if they question that narrative the school will write to their parents, no debate allowed. I have been told my whole life that there is impending doom in the form of climate change. It was in the news every day, my teachers schooled me on it, my friends were talking about it, there were even degrees in it.
I can be forgiven for believing it. Why wouldn’t you believe what your teachers are telling you? They’re the ultimate authority at a young age. But the most significant point is this, it is the effect it has on our children.
They are scaring our children with these ghastly stories, they are shaping them to feel powerless because they can’t do anything about it and they are moulding them to be disillusioned and angry because the so-called people in charge don’t appear to be doing anything about it either. This is how you get the Greta Thunbergs of the world, that girl honestly believes her world is burning. Imagine for a second what it truly feels like to believe that.
I was at school in 1999 and this new emergency of global warming made me feel anxious and at that time three percent of school-aged children were diagnosed with anxiety.By 2023 this had escalated to more than 20 percent of school-aged children being diagnosed with anxiety. This is not a coincidence, the psychological impact of this story is crippling children’s mental health and it is simply unacceptable.
It is wrong, it is socially irresponsible and the minute they try and peddle that story on my child, well let me just make this clear, hell will have no fury like a mother who knows the truth and who is also a climate expert. Hell will not have enough fury and this is why I’m angry because I’ve seen the system from within and what I found at university wasn’t a debate, it was a script. So when I call climate change a narrative, I’m not being edgy, I’m being precise.
If you want a quick test for whether something is solid science or nonsense, just look for consistency and this consistency is exactly what’s missing. Firstly, the story keeps on changing. If it were a real story I guess the general facts surrounding it would probably remain the same but in the 60s and 70s the majority of scientists were predicting global warming but if you looked in the newspaper you’d think we’re heading straight into an ice age.
In 1974, Radio Times ran the headline, the ice age cometh. American media followed suit. Every cold weather event was sold as proof that there was an ice age approaching. Sound familiar? It should. It’s how the media still works today. A flood, a heat wave, a storm, completely normal weather, splash it across the front page, call it unprecedented and blame climate change. Everyday weather is rebranded as existential crisis. My point is this, it was never scientists telling the world an ice age was coming, it was the media with their use of selected experts. But why? Let’s dig deeper.
Newsweek warned governments were unprepared for climate driven food shortages and that planners were ignoring climatic uncertainty and that delay would make the coming crisis impossible to manage. This wasn’t just weather reporting, it was a script to create panic about hunger, global instability, they pull the lever for sympathy, for suffering in poorer countries and even today we see images of flooded villages, failed crops, desperate families, all offered up as proof of climate catastrophe and as justification for sweeping political action, urgent action with no time to consider the consequences.
In 1988, there was a rebranding exercise. The New York Times headline read, global warming has begun, expert tells Senate. I read this article, the evidence rests on five months of slightly warm weather and in climate sciences, a trend takes 30 years to establish, not just a season and worse still was the baseline they chose, 1950 to 1980. This is the very cooling period they had just used to scream ice age.
This is a classic case of data manipulation, you take a cold reference point and everything after that is going to look unusually warm. This was never ever science, there was never ever a global warming trend, it was data manipulated to tell a story. The ice age never came, first wrong prediction, but the story of the ice age, that did its job.
The media succeeded in creating a generation of fearful believers. In a speech to the Royal Society in 1988, Margaret Thatcher talked about the fear that people were feeling, the fear that humans were creating a global heat trap that could lead to climatic instability. This fear was gaslit by an NGO, the National Academy of Sciences, who promised the warming would cause a sea level rise of several feet over the next century.
The following year, another NGO, the UN, went on the record and promised entire nations will be wiped off the face of the earth due to climate change induced sea level rise by 2020. Well, we’re still here aren’t we? Second false prediction, none of this sea level rise has eventuated and it’s exactly the same story they preach today. Extreme sea level rise and climate change refugees are nothing but a myth designed to scare people into whatever policy response is waiting in the wings.
This is the first reason that the man-made climate change story is nothing more than a doomsday tale that has been evolving for the last 60 years. Think about it. These were arguably two of the world’s most powerful organisations. They’d had access to satellite data for 25 years, the best scientists, the most comprehensive data analysis in the world, plus the mainstream media at their fingertips. Was it really a coincidence that their story never came true? We now know that they would have known via satellites that the sea level was always rising steadily at 1.2 inches per decade, just like it does today. Plus, this sea rise actually brings sediment with it and increases the land mass at the same time, therefore rendering it impossible for islands to sink due to sea level rise.
However, because it was never a real story, they were never interested in the real data. They could clearly see that there was no unusual sea level rise, but they intentionally chose to mislead the public and put their fraudulent plan into action. They advised the World Meteorological Organisation, another NGO, to create the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Now, here’s where it gets juicy. The IPCC is structurally identical to the single world government model I was presented with during my studies as a prescriptive solution to climate change. My professors in global governance assured me that a global problem requires a single world government to fix it, and I admit it. I believed them. I respected my professors. Most of them were published authors in respected journals, and I was promised a world-class education.
But the tragedy is this. They were never training scientists.
They were training socialists to enact their agenda.
And it’s been clear to me for a time now that there’s never been a problem with our climate system, just a smoke screen to establish power and create control. Welcome to the only crisis where their solution is always the same. More control, more taxes, and less debate.
Let me make it clear how the IPCC benefits from maintaining and creating generations of climate change believers. To start with, they sit at the very top of the climate change establishment, and when I say establishment, I simply mean a stable network of institutions that fund, credential, and publish the urgency of man-made global warming. Climate finance reached a record-breaking $1.9 trillion in 2023, and last year saw a record $2.2 trillion in clean energy investment.
That’s more than $4 trillion in a couple of years. Think about who are the main winners here. They’re the unelected officials that sit atop the IPCC hierarchy. These are the people selling, building, financing, and certifying the global transition to clean energy. They are making billions.
The financial victims, the United Kingdom is a victim.
Our economy is on the verge of recession after 30 years of big signatory to international climate agreements. What do we have to show for it? Not only are our energy bills the highest in the developed world, but the economy outside of London is closer to that of Bulgaria’s than Germany’s. Today, 18 to 30-year-olds are the first generation to earn less than their parents. We are getting poorer, both relatively and absolutely. My fellow countrymen are suffering, and this also makes me angry. Because of climate policy, because the IPCC says so, we’re not allowed to drill our own gas fields, which will make us completely reliant for others’ gas in the future.
We have the best quality gas in the world, and its exploration has just been made illegal. For existing projects, for every dollar made, the company is taxed upwards of 78 cents due to unnecessary climate taxation. Let’s take a really good look at just how much power the IPCC have created for themselves. They act as a global risk allocation engine. They determine which technologies reduce subsidies, which activities become legally constrained, which investments are encouraged or stranded.
In the UK, we only have four oil refineries left. These are the basic building blocks of the modern industrial economy, but any company that comes in will not make a profit because the taxes are too high. The IPCC is making us poorer, both as nations and as individuals. Recent blackouts across Europe are just a glimpse into the dystopian future which awaits us.
As long as they continue to make us believe that man-made climate change is going to end life as we know it, we will keep filtering trillions of dollars throughout their organisation without questioning a thing. So what can we do? Firstly, I believe that the average person is more than capable of seeing a situation for what it really is. So please, tune in carefully as I seek to disprove the myth of man-made climate change once and for all.
I’ve got you on tenderhooks now, that’s a good thing. You’re still with me. Let’s bust the first myth. More carbon dioxide causes a warmer planet. Here’s the truth. A recent study by arguably two of the world’s leading atmospheric scientists, both Professor Emeritus, one from MIT, one from Princeton, I mean, these guys are not messing around. They have shown that there is a limit to the amount of heat that is able to be trapped by carbon dioxide and they call this the saturation point. We are at 99% of the saturation point. Relatively speaking, no matter how much carbon dioxide we pump into the air, it will not increase our global temperature. It is but a fallacy. Joe Rogan recently had those authors on his podcast, Dr. Linzen and Dr. Happer. Joe Rogan also wants people to stop drinking the Kool-Aid.
Now let’s bust the second myth, that carbon dioxide is bad for the planet. Guess what? Carbon dioxide is actually good for the planet. That’s right, I said it, the truth. Satellite data shows that plant growth has increased significantly over the last 35 years due to increased carbon dioxide. NASA measured a 10% greening of the earth between 2000 and 2020 alone. Meanwhile, at university, I was taught that trees would starve due to climate change.
They intentionally used the word starve to elicit an emotional response. What actually happens is that when there’s more carbon dioxide available, not only do plants grow faster, but they use less water. We know this because commercial greenhouses pump carbon dioxide to 1400 parts per million because it grows the best plants. It’s called carbon dioxide enrichment. Come on. Carbon dioxide enriches the earth.
And the third myth, carbon dioxide has a direct relationship with temperature. Al Gore was the person responsible for demonizing carbon dioxide, and he said carbon dioxide is the highest it’s ever been. It’s just another lie. It’s actually the lowest it’s been in the last 320 million years. Not only that, but some of the highest levels of carbon dioxide occurred during an ice age 340 million years ago, which just proves that carbon dioxide and temperature have no direct link whatsoever.
Of course, in my training, carbon dioxide and its rise or fall could explain everything that happened in our climatic history through some sort of feedback loop or time lag mechanism. And this is the whole basis of their argument. That more carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere, the more the temperature will increase. The most important takeaway from this today is that is a lie. The truth is, the earth is just getting greener, and we are simply uneducated as to why the climate actually changes. Indeed, all of us are completely brainwashed to never question it.
So why do the IPCC have a conflict of interest with the truth? Let’s understand exactly how much power this unelected, undemocratic, unaccountable, non-governmental organization are protecting with their lies. The IPCC produce assessments that 195 governments around the world use as an authoritative reference for climate policy. They use IPCC scenarios to set emissions targets, justify carbon budgets. If countries argue for compensation or climate aid, they cite IPCC risk assessments.
The IPCC projections define which regions are at risk and therefore where the money flows. And what they really don’t want you to know is that the most powerful leverage is in financial markets. IPCC scenarios are used in ESG scoring frameworks,climate stress testing for banks, insurance risk models, central bank climate risk assessments, and investment screening criteria. In practice, this means that a company’s ability to access capital increasingly depends on whether its business model is aligned with IPCC-derived pathways.
They have a monopoly not only on the success of entire countries but on individual business interests. In effect, their projections now sit upstream of policy, regulation, infrastructure, and economic structure. And this here, this is why they carry so much power. This isn’t just undemocratic, it’s anti-democratic. I never voted for them to make these decisions. These are people that cannot be held to account by the electorate and that is an unacceptable structure. It is a socialist, globalist agenda that has been carried out right beneath our noses. And it is the spitting image of the one world government framework that was prescribed in my training.
So, with the whole world relying on their projections, with trillions of dollars on the line, you would think that their utmost priority should be the accuracy of those projections. It’s why the believers say, look at the data, you can’t ignore the data. Well, spoiler alert, the data is doctored, just like it’s always been, just like my textbooks were, just like my lecture notes were, this whole thing is indoctrination.
And here is the proof. Hackers leaked emails from IPCC assessment report authors which exposed them freely discussing their efforts in deleting and manipulating the real data because it didn’t quite fit with their doomsday story.
And I quote, I’ll maybe cut the last few points of the filtered curve as that’s trending down. They needed it to be trending upward to fit with their past projections. Another email says, I’ve just completed Mike’s nature trick to hide the decline. These are real emails between the authors of the IPCC report. There are more than 2000 emails like this showing corrupt behavior and they are still the lead authors today. They are unelected, corrupt and have a conflict of interest with the truth. Trillions of dollars of spending rests on fabricated nonsense.
In the UK, if we don’t allocate our national budget to their satisfaction, we’re taken to court. Most recently, we were taken to the European Court of Human Rights because of failure to adequately prepare for extreme heat and flooding. And this, they say, violates fundamental human rights because we are not protecting people against man-made climate change. It is an outrage. So what can we do? It’s time to reclaim our sovereignty.
And we do this by formally leaving all agreements governed by the climate establishment, repeal the Climate Change Act, withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol, withdraw from the UNFCC, leave the Paris Agreement. America withdrew from all United Nations architecture this month. It’s time for the rest of the world to follow suit.
I can already hear the objections, but if we don’t act, aren’t we doomed? As a climate scientist, let me reassure you. The climate is meant to change and it’s meant to change drastically. It is just its natural state and this is very much like the earth. We are in a natural period of warming called the Holocene. We’re still coming out of the Little Ice Age, which was between 1400 and 1900. Our earth’s climate gets warmer and cooler in 1500 year cycles. There is also an ocean pattern called El Nino Southern Oscillation, (ENSO) which drives huge temperature changes. Most global warming is in fact driven by changes in the ocean currents. Other changes are driven by orbital forcings called milankovitch cycles. These cycles change the position of our planet relative to the sun and historically produce an ice age every 100,000 years. There’s nothing man-made about it. There is only natural climate change.
But training experts that the world will listen to and who will enact their agenda is a crucial part of the IPCC’s strategy to retain control. Well, I’m a climate scientist. I’m an expert. So, listen to me. All man-made climate education in schools has to stop. It is not science. It is consensus which is very different to objective scientific fact.
Teach them natural climate change. Teach them about milankovitch cycles, the El Nino. Do not teach them lies that I have just proven wrong. I don’t want my child to gain an ideology. I want him to gain an education. The next generation must be clever. And for this to happen, they need to be learning factual information.
For anyone out there that has ever felt guilty or afraid due to climate change, I want to reassure you, you are not the problem. We have been brainwashed every day by the media. We are being lied to every day. And if we question it, we’re told we’re crazy. We are told we’re in denial because the climate establishment is afraid.
They will tell you that I’m the extreme one because I don’t believe the world is on fire. They will do everything they can to make us fearful. The world as we know it is ending, burning, boiling, to maintain control, constrain us in regulatory burden, and have us accountable to their courts if we spend our taxpayers money the wrong way.
The climate establishment targeted intelligent people who genuinely loved the environment. They taught us the earth was dying and on the brink of collapse. And I believed it. That is not stupidity. That is programming. Because my university lecturers who I respected and the institution of the university itself assured me this was the latest cutting edge research.
I mean I’m thinking I want my money back at this point. They told you it’s settled. They told you it’s urgent. They told you to comply. Well, I’ve told you what they haven’t. The climate is meant to change. The man couldn’t affect the climate system even if he wanted to. Carbon dioxide is good for the planet and will not increase the temperature any. And both children and university students are being brainwashed to blindly perform and enact their agenda.
Well, I am no puppet. For me, once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. The choice of what to believe is now yours. But the establishment should be afraid because I am a climate scientist who knows the truth. Thank you. Thank you so much. I also just want to thank the Heartland Institute so much for having me speak at the inaugural World Prosperity Forum here in Zurich.
Science Matters 