Members of the European Parliament attend a session to vote on legislation to cut import duties for U.S. products in Brussels, March 26, 2026. (Yves Herman/Reuters)
Even as Democratic activists in the U.S. cool to the cause of climate alarmism, environmentalism maintains its political and economic grip on policymakers on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Years into a cost-of-living crisis, why is the European Union still so green?
It may be easy to dismiss this as a case of fanaticism: Sure, American progressives may perhaps not have been truly sincere when they proclaimed their faith in the upcoming apocalypse and the gospel of Greta Thunberg, but maybe her fellow Swedes — and other Europeans — are true believers?
While “sincere” environment activists may be a more common breed in Europe, that does not explain the actions of policymakers and civil servants — technocrats who know for a fact that the “climate transition” was sold to voters by giving disproportionate publicity to worst-case scenarios, rather than the more likely, less catastrophic, and less headline-grabbing scenarios outlined by the likes of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Instead, one must first understand that the EU is a slow-moving beast. The legislative process is complicated and sluggish, with 27 countries and an often-equal number of different viewpoints all struggling to be heard. The rules of the union mean that a third of the countries are able to veto most legislation, and in some cases, unanimity is required. Passing the European Green Deal in the first place required truly draconian efforts of political willpower and coordination, and reversing or altering the deal would hardly be any easier.
Making matters worse, the EU has driven past every conceivable off-ramp, events that would have allowed it to change course while saving face. Mere months after the European Green Deal was unveiled, the Covid-19 pandemic went on to turn the world upside down. Mass unemployment and government borrowing followed. At this point, the EU could have cited the pandemic as an excuse as to why climate goals had to be postponed, and some money earmarked for green projects instead used towards health-care or furlough programs.
The next “off-ramp” was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. With Europe suddenly needing to provide aid to Ukraine and rearm itself, policymakers could have made the case that the original timeline of the Green Deal was no longer feasible. Shortly thereafter, inflation would hit double digits in many EU member states, once again providing an excellent “excuse” to cancel a Green Deal that was negotiated in the bygone Zero Interest-Rate Policy (ZIRP) era, and whose ambitious goals assumed that this era would never end.
Now, policymakers are truly stuck with a project that virtually ensures the EU won’t see much of the global, energy-intensive AI boom, as prohibitive electricity prices cause data centers and tech firms to choose other locations. As slow and complicated as the legislative process in the EU is, that alone cannot explain why none of the off-ramps were taken.
It is also, as it so often is in politics, about power. Environmentalism is a convenient ideology for those who wish to transfer power to the state, as it provides justification for the state’s expansion. In Europe, however, environmentalism is chiefly not used to transfer power from the voters to the state, but from the states to the European Union. For a supranational organization whose founding treaty infamously states that it is to strive to be an “ever-closer union,” hardly any excuse for centralization is ever passed by.
It may be easy to dismiss this as a case of fanaticism: Sure, American progressives may perhaps not have been truly sincere when they proclaimed their faith in the upcoming apocalypse and the gospel of Greta Thunberg, but maybe her fellow Swedes — and other Europeans — are true believers?
While “sincere” environment activists may be a more common breed in Europe, that does not explain the actions of policymakers and civil servants — technocrats who know for a fact that the “climate transition” was sold to voters by giving disproportionate publicity to worst-case scenarios, rather than the more likely, less catastrophic, and less headline-grabbing scenarios outlined by the likes of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Instead, one must first understand that the EU is a slow-moving beast. The legislative process is complicated and sluggish, with 27 countries and an often-equal number of different viewpoints all struggling to be heard. The rules of the union mean that a third of the countries are able to veto most legislation, and in some cases, unanimity is required. Passing the European Green Deal in the first place required truly draconian efforts of political willpower and coordination, and reversing or altering the deal would hardly be any easier.
Making matters worse, the EU has driven past every conceivable off-ramp, events that would have allowed it to change course while saving face. Mere months after the European Green Deal was unveiled, the Covid-19 pandemic went on to turn the world upside down. Mass unemployment and government borrowing followed. At this point, the EU could have cited the pandemic as an excuse as to why climate goals had to be postponed, and some money earmarked for green projects instead used towards health-care or furlough programs.
The next “off-ramp” was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. With Europe suddenly needing to provide aid to Ukraine and rearm itself, policymakers could have made the case that the original timeline of the Green Deal was no longer feasible. Shortly thereafter, inflation would hit double digits in many EU member states, once again providing an excellent “excuse” to cancel a Green Deal that was negotiated in the bygone Zero Interest-Rate Policy (ZIRP) era, and whose ambitious goals assumed that this era would never end.
Now, policymakers are truly stuck with a project that virtually ensures the EU won’t see much of the global, energy-intensive AI boom, as prohibitive electricity prices cause data centers and tech firms to choose other locations. As slow and complicated as the legislative process in the EU is, that alone cannot explain why none of the off-ramps were taken.
It is also, as it so often is in politics, about power. Environmentalism is a convenient ideology for those who wish to transfer power to the state, as it provides justification for the state’s expansion. In Europe, however, environmentalism is chiefly not used to transfer power from the voters to the state, but from the states to the European Union. For a supranational organization whose founding treaty infamously states that it is to strive to be an “ever-closer union,” hardly any excuse for centralization is ever passed by.
It may be easy to dismiss this as a case of fanaticism: Sure, American progressives may perhaps not have been truly sincere when they proclaimed their faith in the upcoming apocalypse and the gospel of Greta Thunberg, but maybe her fellow Swedes — and other Europeans — are true believers?
While “sincere” environment activists may be a more common breed in Europe, that does not explain the actions of policymakers and civil servants — technocrats who know for a fact that the “climate transition” was sold to voters by giving disproportionate publicity to worst-case scenarios, rather than the more likely, less catastrophic, and less headline-grabbing scenarios outlined by the likes of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Instead, one must first understand that the EU is a slow-moving beast. The legislative process is complicated and sluggish, with 27 countries and an often-equal number of different viewpoints all struggling to be heard. The rules of the union mean that a third of the countries are able to veto most legislation, and in some cases, unanimity is required. Passing the European Green Deal in the first place required truly draconian efforts of political willpower and coordination, and reversing or altering the deal would hardly be any easier.
Making matters worse, the EU has driven past every conceivable off-ramp, events that would have allowed it to change course while saving face. Mere months after the European Green Deal was unveiled, the Covid-19 pandemic went on to turn the world upside down. Mass unemployment and government borrowing followed. At this point, the EU could have cited the pandemic as an excuse as to why climate goals had to be postponed, and some money earmarked for green projects instead used towards health-care or furlough programs.
The next “off-ramp” was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. With Europe suddenly needing to provide aid to Ukraine and rearm itself, policymakers could have made the case that the original timeline of the Green Deal was no longer feasible. Shortly thereafter, inflation would hit double digits in many EU member states, once again providing an excellent “excuse” to cancel a Green Deal that was negotiated in the bygone Zero Interest-Rate Policy (ZIRP) era, and whose ambitious goals assumed that this era would never end.
Now, policymakers are truly stuck with a project that virtually ensures the EU won’t see much of the global, energy-intensive AI boom, as prohibitive electricity prices cause data centers and tech firms to choose other locations. As slow and complicated as the legislative process in the EU is, that alone cannot explain why none of the off-ramps were taken.
The video player is currently playing an ad.
It is also, as it so often is in politics, about power. Environmentalism is a convenient ideology for those who wish to transfer power to the state, as it provides justification for the state’s expansion. In Europe, however, environmentalism is chiefly not used to transfer power from the voters to the state, but from the states to the European Union. For a supranational organization whose founding treaty infamously states that it is to strive to be an “ever-closer union,” hardly any excuse for centralization is ever passed by.
It may be easy to dismiss this as a case of fanaticism: Sure, American progressives may perhaps not have been truly sincere when they proclaimed their faith in the upcoming apocalypse and the gospel of Greta Thunberg, but maybe her fellow Swedes — and other Europeans — are true believers?
While “sincere” environment activists may be a more common breed in Europe, that does not explain the actions of policymakers and civil servants — technocrats who know for a fact that the “climate transition” was sold to voters by giving disproportionate publicity to worst-case scenarios, rather than the more likely, less catastrophic, and less headline-grabbing scenarios outlined by the likes of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Instead, one must first understand that the EU is a slow-moving beast. The legislative process is complicated and sluggish, with 27 countries and an often-equal number of different viewpoints all struggling to be heard. The rules of the union mean that a third of the countries are able to veto most legislation, and in some cases, unanimity is required. Passing the European Green Deal in the first place required truly draconian efforts of political willpower and coordination, and reversing or altering the deal would hardly be any easier.
Making matters worse, the EU has driven past every conceivable off-ramp, events that would have allowed it to change course while saving face. Mere months after the European Green Deal was unveiled, the Covid-19 pandemic went on to turn the world upside down. Mass unemployment and government borrowing followed. At this point, the EU could have cited the pandemic as an excuse as to why climate goals had to be postponed, and some money earmarked for green projects instead used towards health-care or furlough programs.
The next “off-ramp” was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. With Europe suddenly needing to provide aid to Ukraine and rearm itself, policymakers could have made the case that the original timeline of the Green Deal was no longer feasible. Shortly thereafter, inflation would hit double digits in many EU member states, once again providing an excellent “excuse” to cancel a Green Deal that was negotiated in the bygone Zero Interest-Rate Policy (ZIRP) era, and whose ambitious goals assumed that this era would never end.
Now, policymakers are truly stuck with a project that virtually ensures the EU won’t see much of the global, energy-intensive AI boom, as prohibitive electricity prices cause data centers and tech firms to choose other locations. As slow and complicated as the legislative process in the EU is, that alone cannot explain why none of the off-ramps were taken.
The video player is currently playing an ad.
It is also, as it so often is in politics, about power. Environmentalism is a convenient ideology for those who wish to transfer power to the state, as it provides justification for the state’s expansion. In Europe, however, environmentalism is chiefly not used to transfer power from the voters to the state, but from the states to the European Union. For a supranational organization whose founding treaty infamously states that it is to strive to be an “ever-closer union,” hardly any excuse for centralization is ever passed by.
It may be easy to dismiss this as a case of fanaticism: Sure, American progressives may perhaps not have been truly sincere when they proclaimed their faith in the upcoming apocalypse and the gospel of Greta Thunberg, but maybe her fellow Swedes — and other Europeans — are true believers?
While “sincere” environment activists may be a more common breed in Europe, that does not explain the actions of policymakers and civil servants — technocrats who know for a fact that the “climate transition” was sold to voters by giving disproportionate publicity to worst-case scenarios, rather than the more likely, less catastrophic, and less headline-grabbing scenarios outlined by the likes of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Instead, one must first understand that the EU is a slow-moving beast. The legislative process is complicated and sluggish, with 27 countries and an often-equal number of different viewpoints all struggling to be heard. The rules of the union mean that a third of the countries are able to veto most legislation, and in some cases, unanimity is required. Passing the European Green Deal in the first place required truly draconian efforts of political willpower and coordination, and reversing or altering the deal would hardly be any easier.
Making matters worse, the EU has driven past every conceivable off-ramp, events that would have allowed it to change course while saving face. Mere months after the European Green Deal was unveiled, the Covid-19 pandemic went on to turn the world upside down. Mass unemployment and government borrowing followed. At this point, the EU could have cited the pandemic as an excuse as to why climate goals had to be postponed, and some money earmarked for green projects instead used towards health-care or furlough programs.
The next “off-ramp” was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. With Europe suddenly needing to provide aid to Ukraine and rearm itself, policymakers could have made the case that the original timeline of the Green Deal was no longer feasible. Shortly thereafter, inflation would hit double digits in many EU member states, once again providing an excellent “excuse” to cancel a Green Deal that was negotiated in the bygone Zero Interest-Rate Policy (ZIRP) era, and whose ambitious goals assumed that this era would never end.
Now, policymakers are truly stuck with a project that virtually ensures the EU won’t see much of the global, energy-intensive AI boom, as prohibitive electricity prices cause data centers and tech firms to choose other locations. As slow and complicated as the legislative process in the EU is, that alone cannot explain why none of the off-ramps were taken.
The video player is currently playing an ad.
It is also, as it so often is in politics, about power. Environmentalism is a convenient ideology for those who wish to transfer power to the state, as it provides justification for the state’s expansion. In Europe, however, environmentalism is chiefly not used to transfer power from the voters to the state, but from the states to the European Union. For a supranational organization whose founding treaty infamously states that it is to strive to be an “ever-closer union,” hardly any excuse for centralization is ever passed by.
It may be easy to dismiss this as a case of fanaticism: Sure, American progressives may perhaps not have been truly sincere when they proclaimed their faith in the upcoming apocalypse and the gospel of Greta Thunberg, but maybe her fellow Swedes — and other Europeans — are true believers?
While “sincere” environment activists may be a more common breed in Europe, that does not explain the actions of policymakers and civil servants — technocrats who know for a fact that the “climate transition” was sold to voters by giving disproportionate publicity to worst-case scenarios, rather than the more likely, less catastrophic, and less headline-grabbing scenarios outlined by the likes of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Instead, one must first understand that the EU is a slow-moving beast. The legislative process is complicated and sluggish, with 27 countries and an often-equal number of different viewpoints all struggling to be heard. The rules of the union mean that a third of the countries are able to veto most legislation, and in some cases, unanimity is required. Passing the European Green Deal in the first place required truly draconian efforts of political willpower and coordination, and reversing or altering the deal would hardly be any easier.
Making matters worse, the EU has driven past every conceivable off-ramp, events that would have allowed it to change course while saving face. Mere months after the European Green Deal was unveiled, the Covid-19 pandemic went on to turn the world upside down. Mass unemployment and government borrowing followed. At this point, the EU could have cited the pandemic as an excuse as to why climate goals had to be postponed, and some money earmarked for green projects instead used towards health-care or furlough programs.
The next “off-ramp” was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. With Europe suddenly needing to provide aid to Ukraine and rearm itself, policymakers could have made the case that the original timeline of the Green Deal was no longer feasible. Shortly thereafter, inflation would hit double digits in many EU member states, once again providing an excellent “excuse” to cancel a Green Deal that was negotiated in the bygone Zero Interest-Rate Policy (ZIRP) era, and whose ambitious goals assumed that this era would never end.
Now, policymakers are truly stuck with a project that virtually ensures the EU won’t see much of the global, energy-intensive AI boom, as prohibitive electricity prices cause data centers and tech firms to choose other locations. As slow and complicated as the legislative process in the EU is, that alone cannot explain why none of the off-ramps were taken.
The video player is currently playing an ad.
It is also, as it so often is in politics, about power. Environmentalism is a convenient ideology for those who wish to transfer power to the state, as it provides justification for the state’s expansion. In Europe, however, environmentalism is chiefly not used to transfer power from the voters to the state, but from the states to the European Union. For a supranational organization whose founding treaty infamously states that it is to strive to be an “ever-closer union,” hardly any excuse for centralization is ever passed by.
It may be easy to dismiss this as a case of fanaticism: Sure, American progressives may perhaps not have been truly sincere when they proclaimed their faith in the upcoming apocalypse and the gospel of Greta Thunberg, but maybe her fellow Swedes — and other Europeans — are true believers?
While “sincere” environment activists may be a more common breed in Europe, that does not explain the actions of policymakers and civil servants — technocrats who know for a fact that the “climate transition” was sold to voters by giving disproportionate publicity to worst-case scenarios, rather than the more likely, less catastrophic, and less headline-grabbing scenarios outlined by the likes of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
It may be easy to dismiss this as a case of fanaticism: Sure, American progressives may perhaps not have been truly sincere when they proclaimed their faith in the upcoming apocalypse and the gospel of Greta Thunberg, but maybe her fellow Swedes — and other Europeans — are true believers?
While “sincere” environment activists may be a more common breed in Europe, that does not explain the actions of policymakers and civil servants — technocrats who know for a fact that the “climate transition” was sold to voters by giving disproportionate publicity to worst-case scenarios, rather than the more likely, less catastrophic, and less headline-grabbing scenarios outlined by the likes of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Polish coal miners protest against liquidation of Polish coal mines.
Instead, one must first understand that the EU is a slow-moving beast. The legislative process is complicated and sluggish, with 27 countries and an often-equal number of different viewpoints all struggling to be heard. The rules of the union mean that a third of the countries are able to veto most legislation, and in some cases, unanimity is required. Passing the European Green Deal in the first place required truly draconian efforts of political willpower and coordination, and reversing or altering the deal would hardly be any easier.
Making matters worse, the EU has driven past every conceivable off-ramp, events that would have allowed it to change course while saving face. Mere months after the European Green Deal was unveiled, the Covid-19 pandemic went on to turn the world upside down. Mass unemployment and government borrowing followed. At this point, the EU could have cited the pandemic as an excuse as to why climate goals had to be postponed, and some money earmarked for green projects instead used towards health-care or furlough programs.
Making matters worse, the EU has driven past every conceivable off-ramp, events that would have allowed it to change course while saving face. Mere months after the European Green Deal was unveiled, the Covid-19 pandemic went on to turn the world upside down. Mass unemployment and government borrowing followed. At this point, the EU could have cited the pandemic as an excuse as to why climate goals had to be postponed, and some money earmarked for green projects instead used towards health-care or furlough programs.
The next “off-ramp” was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. With Europe suddenly needing to provide aid to Ukraine and rearm itself, policymakers could have made the case that the original timeline of the Green Deal was no longer feasible. Shortly thereafter, inflation would hit double digits in many EU member states, once again providing an excellent “excuse” to cancel a Green Deal that was negotiated in the bygone Zero Interest-Rate Policy (ZIRP) era, and whose ambitious goals assumed that this era would never end.
Now, policymakers are truly stuck with a project that virtually ensures the EU won’t see much of the global, energy-intensive AI boom, as prohibitive electricity prices cause data centers and tech firms to choose other locations. As slow and complicated as the legislative process in the EU is, that alone cannot explain why none of the off-ramps were taken.
Making matters worse, the EU has driven past every conceivable off-ramp, events that would have allowed it to change course while saving face. Mere months after the European Green Deal was unveiled, the Covid-19 pandemic went on to turn the world upside down. Mass unemployment and government borrowing followed. At this point, the EU could have cited the pandemic as an excuse as to why climate goals had to be postponed, and some money earmarked for green projects instead used towards health-care or furlough programs.
The next “off-ramp” was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. With Europe suddenly needing to provide aid to Ukraine and rearm itself, policymakers could have made the case that the original timeline of the Green Deal was no longer feasible. Shortly thereafter, inflation would hit double digits in many EU member states, once again providing an excellent “excuse” to cancel a Green Deal that was negotiated in the bygone Zero Interest-Rate Policy (ZIRP) era, and whose ambitious goals assumed that this era would never end.
Now, policymakers are truly stuck with a project that virtually ensures the EU won’t see much of the global, energy-intensive AI boom, as prohibitive electricity prices cause data centers and tech firms to choose other locations. As slow and complicated as the legislative process in the EU is, that alone cannot explain why none of the off-ramps were taken.
The next “off-ramp” was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. With Europe suddenly needing to provide aid to Ukraine and rearm itself, policymakers could have made the case that the original timeline of the Green Deal was no longer feasible. Shortly thereafter, inflation would hit double digits in many EU member states, once again providing an excellent “excuse” to cancel a Green Deal that was negotiated in the bygone Zero Interest-Rate Policy (ZIRP) era, and whose ambitious goals assumed that this era would never end.
Now, policymakers are truly stuck with a project that virtually ensures the EU won’t see much of the global, energy-intensive AI boom, as prohibitive electricity prices cause data centers and tech firms to choose other locations. As slow and complicated as the legislative process in the EU is, that alone cannot explain why none of the off-ramps were taken.
And such an excuse was exactly what environmentalism provided: No single EU member can deal with climate change on their own, since none of them contributes to more than 0.7 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The only way to fight this new threat, Brussels explained, was to do it together, under the benevolent direction of your friendly neighborhood eurocrat. Anyone who did not want to see the Swiss Alps underwater had no choice but to go along with the program.
That the EU as a whole only ever contributed 10 to 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions even before the first moves to transition were taken in the 1990s is the type of “inconvenient truth” voters rarely heard when the Deal was passed.
It is now down to less than 6 percent, yet Europe’s
green frenzy continues virtually unabated.
For the EU, the sunk cost has also been far greater than for America. Long before the European Green Deal, the EU made serious — and costly — efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Whereas American emissions wouldn’t peak until 2007, in the EU, they peaked in 1990, after which they have been on a steady decline. Total U.S. emissions were still more than 20 percent higher in 2024 at the end of Biden’s presidency than they had been in Europe in 1990.
Europeans have felt the pain of climate policies in the form of gas prices that (prior to the Iran war) averaged 2 to 3 times what American car owners paid. Higher electricity prices, tied to the shuttering of oil and coal but also nuclear power plants, have prevented air conditioning from taking off in Europe — ironically, this increases the number of Europeans who will suffer and even die as a result of rising global temperatures.
Already, more than 60,000 Europeans die of heat every summer.
More Europeans die from lack of AC than Americans do from gun violence.
Europeans have gritted their teeth and accepted that sacrifice, along with a large chunk of its traditional manufacturing sector — jobs that they were promised would be replaced by roles in “green” manufacturing and other “climate-friendly” industries the EU anticipated dominating on the world stage. That is not how things have turned out.
Instead, China has ascended as a dominating force in green industries
like solar panels and — worse for the EU — batteries and electric vehicles.
Automobile exports are now dropping fast. From 2008 to 2023, over 2.3 million European manufacturing jobs were lost, compared to “only” around 800,000 in the United States during that time period.
There is also no guarantee that lost manufacturing jobs would return and shuttered factories reopen any time soon even if Brussels were to pump the brakes now, much like how the coal mining jobs have so far failed to return despite Donald Trump’s reversal of Biden’s policies (they also declined under his first term).
However, the “harmless” transition policies proved costlier, and voters turned out to be less invested in the project than the policymakers believed. On paper, most voters did support the idea of climate transition. But supporting an idea is different from actually paying the price at the pump and in the form of higher utility bills. (And let’s not forget those abominable paper straws.)
Lawmakers in the European Parliament agreed today, Nov. 13, 2025, to dramatic cuts to the EU’s sustainability reporting and due diligence laws, including significant reductions in the number of companies to be covered by the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), and the elimination of the obligation for companies to prepare climate transition plans. The vote, was 382 MEPs in favor and 249 opposed,
After all these sacrifices, few governments in the EU could afford to admit that it was all for nothing. Their position is made even more precarious as this would be the second such embarrassment: After the 2015–16 refugee crisis, most governments across Europe took steps toward restricting immigration, effectively conceding that the parties they had (and continue to) labeled “far-right” had been correct about the challenges caused by rising immigration numbers.
To give the same parties another win and concede that —
much like multiculturalism — climate transition too had turned out
to be a better idea on paper than in practice would simply be too much.
Since the 2008 financial crisis, the U.S. economy has outgrown the economies of Western Europe, creating a growing wealth gap. As Europe continues down the path of chasing green dreams instead of greenbacks, this gap is only likely to continue to grow until the day its leaders are finally forced to admit that their policies only ever ensured future generations would inherit not a cooler planet, but a poorer continent.
Peter Zeihan is a global energy, demographic, and security expert breaking the news about a new tech revolution enhancing extraction of hydrocarbon fuels. For those preferring to read, below is a lightly edited transcript from the video with my bolds and added images.
Hey all, Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Los Angeles on the California coast, and today we’re going to talk a little bit about oil. There have been a couple of technological breakthroughs that I think are worthy of mentioning in the shale era. So ExxonMobil, big company, one of the largest players in the world, produces just under 5 million barrels a day, has basically started mucking around with something called propping, so dial back.
Hydraulic fracturing or fracking is basically how the United States produces 80 percent or more of its crude oil these days, as well as the vast majority of its natural gas. It’s not a fringe technology, it’s the backbone. What you do is you drill down vertically and then you make a horizontal split that goes two, three, four, maybe even five miles, and then you inject water that is laced with sand.
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The water, hydraulics, does not compress under pressure, so it cracks the rock apart, and then the water goes in with the sand and accesses tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny little deposits of petroleum. Then you stop the pumping, and because those tiny pockets of petroleum have now been exposed, they produce a back pressure that pushes the water out, but the sand stays lodged in the cracks, keeping them open so the flow can continue.
The sand is called proppant, and it’s one of
the biggest expenses in a fracking operation.
Well, ExxonMobil has now changed the proppant and is
triggering what is basically the fourth shale revolution.
Backstory for that. First shale revolution is when we figured out how to do this and brought out natural gas. The second shale revolution is when we figured out how to do this to bring out liquid oil. The third is when we built the infrastructure, things like LNG facilities or chemical facilities or refineries, to metabolize all this raw product that we’re now producing. All of that’s done. All that’s in the past.
Fourth revolution is taking the capital and the technological skill sets of the majors like Exxon and applying them for a whole new generation of technology. See, one of the weird things about the shale revolution is when it started, most of the super majors had kind of written off the American oil patch, and we had seen oil output from the United States drop to historical lows.
Well, still in the last century and a half. That meant we had small mom and pops that were doing everything, and they were trying everything they could come up with to get incremental increases, and that’s what generated the first few million barrels a day. Well, as time went on, oil does what oil does, and it rises and it falls and it rises and falls, and so we got a series of busts, and ExxonMobil was able to come in with its better capital position and buy up a lot of the smaller companies. To the point that it and Chevron now dominate the space and collectively produce almost nine million barrels a day.
Now, you apply what Exxon has across its entire value chain, and you get a very different proposition. So for proppant specifically, what we’re talking about today, they went into their refineries and they found waste products, something called petroleum coke, and they were able to manufacture that into a kind of a synthetic sand, if you will. The Proppant is where a lot of experimenting has been going on in a lot of subsectors for the last several years, and you’ve got some pretty expensive stuff that’s called ceramics.
Spherical grains of petroleum coke material are effective in fracking operations in coal seams.
Called ceramics? It is ceramics. Petroleum coke is cheaper than that, more expensive than sand, but its real advantage it’s a lot less dense, maybe 40-50% less dense than sand, which means you can suspend it in the water better, which means it pushes into the formation better, which means it holds open cracks deeper in the formation, and for a small increase in cost using what used to be a waste product, Exxon has seen their numbers increase by 10% to 20% to maybe even 30% in some wells. And that alone changes the math of the shale revolution, because a 10% to 30% increase in output for only a slim investment in what was a waste product, now that’s amazing.
And so the shale revolution is nowhere near done. You’ll hear people
saying that eventually the shale revolution is going to run out,
there’s only so much oil, but that misses the point.
In the pre-shale era, we were able to access about 10%, 9-10% of global energy reserves. There’s a lot down there we don’t have the technology to get to. The shale revolution doubled the percentage of what was accessible within the U.S. space. So we’re talking about 150 years of output, and suddenly we have access to something like that again, and we keep making these incremental increases, like with proppant, that pushes the horizon back even further.
Sheikhs vs. Shale
So the shale revolution continues to set new records for output, adding somewhere between a half a million and a million barrels a day per year, and has now been doing that since 2009. You get a lot of output when you do it for that long. So this year is not the last year of the shale revolution, neither is next year, or the year after, or the year after that, because the numbers keep getting better, the technology keeps pushing further, and the break-even cost for what it takes to get a chunk of oil out in an economically viable way keeps going down.
In the video speech yesterday, Conservative opposition leader Pierre Poilievre brings the receipts damning PM Carney for Canada sliding into economic recession. Transcript below with my bolds and added images.
He’s the only leader in the G7 to have plunged his economy into recession. He’s been Prime Minister for four quarters now. The economy has shrunk in three of those quarters. He’s the only G7 leader who can say that. The economy is smaller today than when Mark Carney became Prime Minister a year ago. He’s the only G7 leader who can say that.
Mark Carney will like to make excuses today, but let me ask him a question. But before I do, I’m going to actually quote back to him something he said to one of you. Mark Carney said to one of the journalists, Rosie, look inside yourself. Well, I’m going to ask Mark Carney to look inside himself, and I’ll ask him directly.
Mr. Carney, if it really is global factors and tariffs that have given Canada the only recession in the G7, why have France, Italy, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States all avoided a recession? They all have the same tariffs and the same global factors, yet none of them, not one, is in recession. Only Mark Carney has the distinction of leading his country into a recession.
Now we know that there will be a lot of excuses today, but excuses will not put food on the dinner table of the 2.2 million people relying on food banks. Excuses will not get the jobs back for the 120,000 people who’ve lost them, as Canada has the second highest unemployment in the G7. Excuses will not allow a young couple to buy a home, as Mark Carney has given Canada the worst housing costs in the G7.
Excuses will not help the mother who is tossing and turning in bed at night wondering how she will make her mortgage payment, as Mark Carney has given Canada the most indebted households anywhere in the G7. By the way, Mark Carney will claim that this is just technical. There’s nothing technical about having an empty stomach because you can’t afford paying the worst food inflation in the G7.
There’s nothing technical about coming home from work and telling your kids that you no longer have a job and that they’re going to have to sell the house because Canada has the second highest unemployment in the G7. That is not technical. It is real. This is a full-blown liberal recession. And it’s not just one or two little data points that cause this, my friends. It is one of many data points that we see today.
For example, in the last few weeks alone, we have fact after fact showing that the liberal economy is collapsing. I’m going to quote from Equifax. Insolvency volumes have increased to levels not seen since 2009, up 19% year over year. Delinquency rates climbed 32% year over year. In the first quarter of this year, insolvency volumes hit a 17-year high, partly due to escalating financial strain on mortgage holders. And one in 1.5 million Canadians missed a minimum debt payment in the first three months of this year alone.
Then there’s the investment numbers, which came out just yesterday. They show that in the first four quarters under this Liberal Prime Minister, Canada saw $1.9 billion of investment flee. That’s $20 billion more than entered our country. That’s a net $20 billion leaving our country to build pipelines, mines, homes, bridges, technology, and other countries for foreign businesses and foreign workers.
Again, we cannot blame foreign factors for that, because the other countries to which that investment fled are facing the same foreign factors. So no more excuses, please. We actually need results. Furthermore, we know that the Prime Minister is fond of doing illusions of action, but here is the core reality. After a year in office, what has really changed in our economic policy? Every anti-development law remains in place, C-69, C-48.
He’s increased the industrial carbon tax six times higher than it was when Justin Trudeau was in office. Home building has actually dropped, and in many provinces the GST still applies to that home building. He’s renamed, not eliminated, renamed the consumer carbon tax, and there are 500 economic projects waiting, some of them for years, just to get through the Liberal bureaucracy permitting system.
Now, we know what won’t fix this. Dazzling speeches at the World Economic Forum, clever-sounding corporate buzzwords, signing fake and unenforceable MOUs in grand halls with stately backdrops, none of these things will reduce costs or boost growth. Announcing projects that were approved many years earlier or making pie-in-the-sky promises like he’s going to double electricity production 25 years from now with no details on how, all of these things are illusions.
They give the impression of action, but in reality, all of the policies of Justin Trudeau remain the same, or they have gotten worse. The deficit has doubled, spending is higher, the only spending that has not gone up is capital spending, precisely the opposite of what Mr. Carney promised. The only way out of this Liberal recession is to reverse the policies that caused it in the first place.
And that is why we are calling for the Prime Minister to get back in the House of Commons next week and introduce a bill to reverse all of the economic policies his party has introduced over the last decade. We don’t need more photo ops, more signing ceremonies, more discussion papers. We need to reverse the Liberal policies that have given Canada the only recession anywhere in the G7.
Conservatives have put forward positive plans to unleash our growth, including a real plan to incentivize the Americans to sign on to tariff-free trade, eliminating capital gains tax on reinvestments in Canada, ending the industrial carbon tax, in fact, cutting taxes on work, energy, home building, and investment, making Canada the fastest place anywhere on earth to get a permit, the freest economy in which to trade, work, invest, and get a return.
Let’s restore the promises of this country where anybody who gets out of bed in the morning can find a terrific job, a job that gives them a great paycheck, that buys affordable food and homes, where our young people can afford to start a family, where our parents can afford to give their children the best start, where our seniors retire in peace and tranquility, and where our economy is truly independent, self-reliant, standing on its own two feet.
That is the mission. Now, let’s turn it into action. Thank you very much. Thank you.
We’ll now take questions from reporters. Please identify yourself and your outlet. One question each.
I can start. Yes, hello, Mr. Poilievre.Laurence Martin from Radio-Canada. It’s an article that just came out this morning. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Trump administration wants vehicles covered by the CIO, so with low or exempt tariffs, to have at least 50% of American content.Is that an acceptable request in your opinion?
No, I have already proposed a positive plan to eliminate all tariffs on cars, which will force manufacturers to produce one car in the United States for each of their customers in the United States, and one in Canada for each of their customers in Canada. That way, we will be able to increase the production of cars in our two countries, massively, to reverse the commercial deficits that both countries have now. So that’s the only way we can eliminate tariffs between Canada and the United States.
Mr. Carney has given up, and he hasn’t done anything. He’s not at the negotiating table when Mexico is there. And because Mr. Carney is absent, now we’re seeing more dangerous threats compared to our automotive sector. There is no future for our automotive sector without direct and non-tariff access to the United States. That’s why I presented a plan about three months ago to save the automotive sector and to reverse the decline that we’ve seen in Canada for 10 years.
Mr. Carney has done absolutely nothing since then, except make big contradictions. Yesterday, he said that he wants to, and I quote, make America, in his words, great again, after saying that he wanted a break with the United States. So that’s another big failure for Mark Carney, and perhaps that’s one of the reasons why Canada has the only recession among the G7 countries. Yes, well over three months ago, I presented a plan for tariff-free auto trade with the United States, bring back the 1965 auto pact, which would massively increase production in both Canada and the United States, and actually achieve the stated goals of both countries.
Since that time, Mark Carney has been nowhere and done nothing. While the Mexicans are at the negotiating table eating our lunch on auto negotiations, Mark Carney has not shown up for one negotiation so far. The result is that our auto sector is hemorrhaging jobs under his leadership.
In the last 10 years, we’ve lost half of our auto production,
and now we’re losing even more.
But because Mark Carney has done literally nothing to fight for tariff-free trade on autos over the last decade, we’ve lost even more auto jobs, and one of the facts that Statistics Canada reported that led to us being the only country in the G7 in recession is the decline in the auto sector. Yesterday, Mark Carney gave a baffling, confusing, and contradictory speech in which he simultaneously said we need a rupture with the United States, and that we need to make America, in his words, great again. So, his elbows are up and down so fast, he’s doing a rhetorical chicken dance while we lose our auto sector.
Rahim Ahmed from the National Post. Mr. Paliyev, you said that you’ll be campaigning across Alberta for a united Canada. Can you give us an update on any visits that you have scheduled back home in the next few weeks? And are you open to debating folks like Keith Wilson and some of the other prominent Alberta separatists?
We will be back in my home province of Alberta to campaign for a united country, and our message is that all of Canada needs to wrap its arms around Alberta. Let’s ensure that every Albertan knows that Canada loves Alberta, that Canada is Alberta, Alberta is Canada, we need to have a strong united nation right across this country.
And that will mean a stronger province of Alberta, but getting out of the way and off the backs of our energy sector, getting rid of the gun grab, locking up criminals to bring safety to our streets, allowing young Albertans to start families with affordable homes, decentralizing control in the country so that Albertans have more direct decision-making power within their provincial boundaries, that is a positive, optimistic, unifying vision that I will be presenting to all Albertans in all corners of the province.
Mr. Poliev, the Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs is in town today. He said this morning to Anita Anand, the Canadian minister, that if the momentum continues, trade could increase by more than 100% in five years, and that the Chinese market would remain open to Canada, and that it would soon become the largest market in the world. How do you think that will be received in the United States, and what is the risk to Canada?
First of all, Mr. Carney is directly in a conflict of interest. He went to China to receive a loan of $200 million from a bank controlled by the Chinese government a few months before he took office. He still has investments in Brookfield that he wants to expand his business in China. He has already allowed Brookfield to be at the table of discussions and talks by representing Canada. It has never happened that a prime minister sends his company to make talks.
We want a prime minister who defends Canada’s interests and not his company. Obviously, to say that we can replace the United States with China is not realistic when we sell 20 times more to the United States than we sell to China. Perhaps one of the reasons why Canada is the only country in recession among the G7 countries is our bad calculation of Mark Carney, a man who has been wrong on all economic issues for a decade.
He was wrong on the carbon tax, on the plans to keep all oil on the ground, his opposition to pipelines, his support for monetary pressure. He has been wrong on all economic issues for a decade, and we see that he is still wrong on global issues. Do you think China will do anything to make Beijing unhappy? Of course not. He won’t do anything to make Beijing unhappy.
A year after Mark Carney said that China was the single biggest risk to Canada, he claimed that we were going to have a full rupture with the United States in favour of a strategic partnership for a new world order with the dictatorship in Beijing. Of course, Mr. Carney is in a terrible conflict of interest.
He went and got a $200 million loan for his company from a state-backed Chinese bank while he was the economic advisor to Justin Trudeau. That loan is still owed, my understanding is, by Brookfield, which the Prime Minister continues to be invested in. He allowed Brookfield to be at the table for discussions.
Mr. Carney has got to be clear that he should represent Canada’s interests, not his corporation’s interests. Maybe one of the reasons why Canada is the only G7 country in recession right now is because he is miscalculating on trade, just like everything else. He has been wrong on every economic question over the last decade, and Canadians are paying the price.
He was wrong on carbon taxes, wrong on keeping half our oil in the ground, wrong to oppose a pipeline to the Pacific, wrong to support money-printing inflation, and now he is wrong in his trade priorities. We sell 20 times more to the United States than we sell to China. That is just a mathematical fact, and Mark Carney’s Brookfield interests in China will not change that.
We need a Prime Minister who is fighting for our workers in this country. We should have the best economy in the G7, not the worst. In Q3 2025, the economy grew at an annualized rate by 2.6%. We have economists saying that today’s numbers are so nominal that they could be forecasted away and revised away.
Aren’t you jumping the gun a little bit and calling this a full-blown recession? I know that there are a lot of excuses being made for Mark Carney today, and I am not surprised. By the way, which outlet are you with? The Hilltop. Is 2.6% economic growth an excuse, or is that just the numbers? There is no 2.6% economic growth. You are having to go back? How many quarters are you having to go back now? Two quarters. You are having to go back. Let’s get this straight.
There have been four quarters since Mark Carney became Prime Minister. The economy shrunk in three of those four quarters. Canada is the only G7 country for which that is the case. There has now been an entire year of Mark Carney that is recorded in economic data, and the GDP is smaller today than when he took office. That is only true of Canada among G7 countries.
Now there are two back-to-back quarters where the economy shrunk,
which is the literal definition of a recession.
By the way, it is not just that our economy is shrinking quarter after quarter. It is that we have the second highest unemployment in the G7. You think that the 120,000 people that lost their jobs since the beginning of this year call this just a technical recession? No. They call this real job loss. Then you have the delinquency rate that is up 32% year over year at 17-year highs. We have the highest household debt of any country in the G7, the worst housing costs of any country in the G7, and for most of the last year, the worst food price inflation of any country in the G7.
So yes, you are making excuses and trying to hide from the reality that Mark Carney has given Canada the worst economy in the G7. It is time to stop making excuses, not for political reasons. It is time to stop making those excuses because this is people’s lives. Behind these statistics are empty stomachs, empty fridges, and empty bank accounts. Behind these numbers are 120,000 people who have come home to their kids saying, we cannot have you registered for hockey this year. We have to sell our home. I do not know what we are going to do. That is the reality of Mark Carney’s economy, and it is trying to stop covering it up with illusions.
Good afternoon, Pierre. So, Pierre, on national defence, Pierre. I will get your question, but I just have to get this. On national defence, yesterday, CanSec, the conference, concluded, and both of your former colleagues in Aeronautical and Peter McKay sang praise of the government’s shift of national defence policy under Mark Carney’s leadership. What do you make of the shift of that national defence strategy and procurement specifically? And also, do you believe you are losing ground to Mark Carney in an issue like national defence to the progressive conservative flank of your party?
No. What we have seen is a lot of illusions from Mark Carney, a lot of spending on bureaucracy, on procurement, and on consultants. A lot of big corporations will get very rich. The problem is that the money is not reaching the equipment in the hands of the soldiers. We 100% support more military spending, but we want to turn that spending into better equipment and better results for our soldiers, not more expensive bureaucracy, more confusing procurement, and more profits for multinational defence contractors.
So, Pierre, your final validation is that there is influence of Mark Carney’s leadership into the media.
Who can even ask questions? I think it is very troubling. The question for those who could not hear is that Mr. Carney has decided to protect the minister from Beijing by not allowing media to enter the room and only to release state photography of the meeting. That is how things are done in Beijing, and now Mark Carney is importing those methods here. Even one liberal commentator on CBC, Althea Raj, said that Mark Carney has an authoritarian streak.
I would remind him that he is supposed to work for Canadians, not for Beijing, not for Brookfield and its Chinese investments. He should open up and actually take questions from the media, like I am doing here today. By the way, he should actually show up in the House of Commons and answer questions there. We see that Mark Carney cannot take difficult questions because his illusion shatters under any scrutiny, but that is not how Canada works.
We are a free and open democracy, not an authoritarian state. Yes, I find it very disturbing that Mr. Carney forbids the media to take pictures and ask questions. He is trying to import protocols from the regime in Beijing, here in Canada. It is not democratic. There are certain CBC commentators who have noticed that he has an authoritarian streak, and now he is using it to promote Beijing’s dictatorship. I remind Mr. Carney that we are a democracy in Canada.
We work for the Canadian people and not for Beijing’s leaders. We should be willing to talk and trade with China. It is a brilliant civilization with hard-working, decent people, but we have to do so with our eyes open. This is a dictatorship that Mr. Carney himself acknowledged was the biggest threat to Canada only a year ago. Our interests in Canada are in being sovereign, self-reliant, and standing on our own two feet, ensuring that we have full control over our technology, our economy, and our minerals. Never will we be vulnerable to the aggressive instincts of a foreign dictatorship.
We have not proposed that. We think that the government should focus on reducing the cost of government spending. It should unleash free enterprise so that our small businesses, our workers, and our investors can make Canada the richest and most affordable country anywhere on Earth.
First of all, we should allow the savings that come as a result of AI to be passed on to consumers. They should not be inflated away through more money printing. Second of all, we cannot allow the government to use high-tech companies as a surveillance arm of the state. That is why we are fighting against the changes proposed in C-22.
We are very worried about excessive government power for surveillance and for control of the population. We need to have a free and open society where Canadians can use the tools that AI offers to make their lives affordable, empowered, make their paycheques bigger, and their lives less complicated. At the same time, we need to make sure that the government does not abuse that technology for its own control. Thank you very much.
Peter Murphy observes at Washington Examiner The climate change house of cards is finally collapsing. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
The prevailing climate change narrative took a big hit in recent days, as scientists who comprise the United Nations’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are backing away from more outlandish climate predictions for the 21st century.
Extreme forecasts of rising temperatures of 4 to 5 degrees, the scientists wrote in the journal Geoscientific Model Development, “have become implausible.” That means predictions of rapidly growing carbon emissions and higher temperatures, supposedly leading to fast-rising sea levels, floods, crop failures, and even human extinction scenarios, are finally being jettisoned.
This long-standing climate change narrative, always a house of cards designed to scare societies into submission, is collapsing — first gradually, now suddenly, to borrow a phrase from Ernest Hemingway.
Turns out even climate scientists on the U.N. dole have a modicum of self-respect such that they can no longer defend such lunatic predictions that were never plausible from the start.
“For the 21st century, this range [of future climate scenarios] will be smaller than assessed before,” they wrote. As a way of saving face, their scaling back of climate change doom comes from “[lower] costs of renewables, the emergence of climate policy, and recent emission trends.”
In fact, these scientists, in long-winded, technical jargon, are eating crow. Do they, or anyone else, really believe a few windmills and solar panels scattered about like a handful of microscopic specks on the planet’s landmass — which itself is only 30% of the globe — affected anything?
These longtime scare tactics from the IPCC and its echo chamber of universities, NGOs, and government bureaucracies certainly had their effect, especially on young people. It reminds me of an encounter 18 months ago while attending the U.N. COP29 Climate Summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, as part of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow delegation.
CFACT President Craig Rucker and I took some time to visit the Old City. At this tourist enclave of Baku, we met three American college students from North Carolina who were also attending the conference. We struck up a conversation about climate change.
There was no arguing or acrimony, just a pleasant back-and-forth. Craig explained to them in his affable but thorough manner that the impact of climate change is emphatically not what the U.N. or the outgoing Biden administration claimed. It’s not an “existential threat,” climate doomsday predictions going back nearly 40 years have never panned out, it’s OK to have children, and so on.
Among the three students, one (the male) was not buying it, a second (female) had an unsure, quizzical expression, while the third (female) had a palpable countenance of relief, like the weight of the world was lifted from her. All three had been bamboozled on climate issues for their entire lives, perhaps starting with Saturday morning cartoons, to hypocritical Hollywood actors, corporate grifters seeking government contracts, and charlatan college professors drinking the same Kool-Aid.
With this latest from these IPCC scientists, the prevailing narrative from all these institutions should be coming unglued, as it can no longer withstand the scientific, planetary, and human realities before us.
The North Pole and Antarctica still have massive ice buildup in their respective winters. The Atlantic Ocean will not subsume Miami or the Obamas third (or fourth?) home on the shoreline of Martha’s Vineyard. New technologies like artificial intelligence and military hardware cannot operate now or ever on wind and solar power. Liquefied natural gas is abundant and spreading widely across the globe, courtesy of growing U.S. exports, and carbon-free (assuming it matters) nuclear energy is slowly but inexorably making a comeback.
The higher price of gas due to America’s war with Iran is also a tell. Americans detest gasoline at $4.50 per gallon, Californians hate it even more at $6-plus. This war has an end date, hopefully sooner rather than later, after which global oil markets will flow and gasoline prices will drop. But climate policies for so-called green energy can only survive and expand in a high-priced world of oil and gas, which is where the climate lobby wants it to stay indefinitely.
Except for the most craven, gullible politicians, most of the remaining elected officials are not going to tolerate — and risk blame for — permanently skyrocketing energy prices from imposing climate change energy policies, knowing their current unpopularity with the public.
Of course, the climate change industrial complex, spearheaded by the IPCC, is not going to disappear nor admit they were peddling climate nonsense. The beat will go on, but their credibility and decades of scaremongering under the false flag of “science” should never again be taken seriously.
Regarding that college student from North Carolina who felt enormous relief that climate change was not a threat to her future, I hope millions more will feel likewise as this colossal lie of climate change Armageddon continues to collapse under its own weight.
The plans and intentions are exposed in a Clintel article From the Polycrisis to a World Government. Climate Alarmism is part of a much bigger agenda driven by the UN, says Swedish scientist, author, and musician Jacob Nordangård. What is the real plan behind all this? The Swiss news outlet Transition News spoke with Nordangård. Excerpts below with my bolds and added images.
Transition News: Some believe that the recent crises and the associated profiteering are pure coincidence and that capitalism simply works this way: one thing leads to another, no one is planning a world government. However, in your book “The Digital World Control”, which has just been published in an updated and expanded German and English edition, you clearly demonstrate that some are following a specific plan, with the United Nations at its center. On what sources do you base your research?
Nordangård: I use original sources from the United Nations and all those organizations that prepared the UN’s Pact for the Future. This means, my research is primarily based on the statements of these institutions themselves. I also consult other sources, for example, the World Economic Forum (WEF), which has entered into a partnership with the United Nations.
The official signing of the agreement took place in June 2019, attended by former WEF CEO Klaus Schwab, then-WEF President Børge Brende, UN Secretary-General António Guterres, and UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed. However, the UN and the WEF had already been cooperating prior to this. Mohammed, for example, served on the board of the Young Global Leaders program. This means that the United Nations and the WEF had been closely linked for about a decade before the official partnership.
When I wrote the Swedish edition of this book, I was focused on the UN’s Our Common Agenda. It was only with the release of the Epstein files that I realized how Epstein was deeply involved with some of the key figures of this UN agenda, such as Brende. Jeffrey Epstein was a member of the Trilateral Commission, which was established by David Rockefeller in 1973. Rockefeller brought Epstein into this group and also into the Council on Foreign Relations, another important think tank that primarily shapes American foreign policy.
Currently, the focus is primarily on sex trafficking and the minors involved. But Epstein was important for connecting people. For example, he befriended Brende, the former president of the World Economic Forum, and they discussed how the WEF could take on the role of the United Nations. He was therefore a key figure in these influential networks.
The modern concept of scientific dictatorship can be traced back to H. G. Wells. But Julian Huxley, a friend of Wells, and the Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin also held similar views on technological change and a technological society, a kind of techno-utopia.
The twelve proposals of the United Nations contained in Our Common Agenda was published in 2021 to establish commitments for implementing the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These commitments include, among other things: leave no one behind, build trust, and listen to young people. It all sounds quite reasonable. What does this have to do with a scientific dictatorship or a techno-utopia?
Such plans are always packaged in fine words. But we need to see the plans behind these well chosen words. Let’s take the slogan “Leave no one behind” and look at what the UN’s Our Common Agenda and Pact for the Future actually intend:
It’s about the digitization of more or less everything on this planet,
everything that can be recorded and monitored.
It is a perfectly ordered and controlled system. No one is to be left behind, as everyone must be part of the system. As a precaution, everyone is monitored.
And when “we” say they want to listen to people, according to “our shared agenda”, it’s about learning what people do and think. Not about giving citizens a real say. “We” have a vision and a pact for the future. And “our” plans are to be implemented, so “we” want to know how people react.
Pseudoscience as Religion
But everything is based on “their” science. I consider this to be pseudoscience. It’s not real science, but a political vision sold as science. I taught and researched at the university for many years—science means questioning everything in order to constantly improve. But here, “science”, which is largely based on model calculations and computer simulations, is being instrumentalized as a religion: If people follow “our” path, it leads to paradise; if not, it leads to hell. “We” must therefore convince people to choose the path “we” discuss at the United Nations. “We” have this one great goal.
Our Common Agenda and The Pact for the Future are
based on behavioral design and behavioral science.
This behaviorism is used to steer people in the right direction. This corresponds to totalitarian thinking. It is not a particularly empathetic way of dealing with people, but rather turns them into objects that can be programmed to better conform to the visions of those behind these plans.
And when they say: “We want to listen to young people and work with them,” it basically means that young people are to be steered in a certain direction.
Young people can’t simply express their opinions freely. They are asked: “What do you think of climate policy? Should it be stricter or more lenient?” “I don’t believe in it” is not an acceptable answer. These “facts” must not be questioned. Questionnaires and focus groups serve only to justify the implemented measures.
Why is there such a focus on the year 2030? Because these 15-year plans exist. From 2000 onwards, there was this test run with the Millennium Development Goals until 2015 – few have heard of it or remember it – and the goals were not met. But this time, for the year 2030, everything has gained enormous importance and has been used for propaganda purposes since 2015. However, I suspect that the United Nations will no longer be able to successfully implement the Sustainable Development Goals as they are presented to the public by 2030.
So there will be new goals for 2045 – a crucial milestone. In future scenarios, the project is described as The Great Transition – the aim is to establish a world government by the UN’s 100th anniversary. The period leading up to it is a transitional phase, and we are currently in the first stage of this transformation. 2030 is simply a pivotal year on the path to achieving this goal.
Cyber-biological Systems
How does artificial intelligence (AI) contribute to implementing this one world government? I believe the elites of this world view AI as a perfect system because they previously relied on other people to carry out their orders – that is why totalitarian systems can never last in the long run.
If they use this AI-driven system instead, no one stands in the elites’ way: no one can destroy it from within. They can set rules and regulations and tell the autonomous AI system, the world’s control system, what they want to achieve, and it will be implemented.
From where does this idea that humanity could unite with machines and the financial system actually stem? This too is an old idea and closely linked to transhumanism. Eugenics, with its aim of changing and improving humanity, is part of this. Transhumanism has taken this to a new level by using technology to modify us, integrate us into the system, and digitize us.
This development took place at the beginning of the computer age, especially from the 1990s onward. Like many others, I simply considered it the pipe dreams of a few tech enthusiasts at the time. But now it’s ubiquitous and serves as the foundation of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. These transhumanist ideas found particularly fertile ground at the World Economic Forum.
And in 2019, the United Nations and the WEF entered into this very partnership, enabling the World Economic Forum to support the UN in implementing the 2030 Agenda. This is being achieved using the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, more precisely, cyber-biological systems. In this process, humans, machines, and the financial system are merging. This is a crucial aspect, as it leads to a complete transformation of the old, dying system. We will, therefore, integrate ourselves into the financial system.
From the WEF to an UN 2.0
In 2020, the member states of the United Nations adopted a resolution calling on Secretary-General Guterres to produce a document addressing the following question: How can we create a better, more effective UN that can respond to crises such as a pandemic?
Negotiations then took place, and eleven strategy papers were published. Parts of these were incorporated and supplemented in Our Common Agenda. This agenda is rather concise and only describes the desired goals. In addition, there were policy briefs that are considerably more comprehensive, discussing all topics in detail and developing concrete proposals for achieving the desired goals.
The member states then met to discuss these recommendations and thus develop a document that would serve as a Pact for the Future. There were therefore three successive phases. All states were required to agree to the UN’s Pact for the Future in advance in order to implement it more efficiently.
In 2024 the pact was agreed upon by all member states and adopted by the United Nations and the member states. Russia has stated that it will not implement all points. They intend to follow the points they consider sensible, particularly the digitalization agenda.
A multipolar system with regions is now being prepared. An organization called the Stimson Center has been significantly involved in drafting the recommendations for the UN Pact on the Future and repeatedly emphasizes this future world order with regions.
The geostrategist Zbigniew Brzezinski co-founded the Trilateral Commission with David Rockefeller and served for a time as Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor. In his book “The Grand Chessboard”, he developed proposals for how the American empire should function. His goal was to prepare for and shape a new world in which the United States would no longer be the dominant force, but rather the UN would assume this role: The world’s regions would cooperate under the umbrella of the United Nations—a modernized, effective organization capable of operating efficiently on a global scale and no longer merely an informal circle.
We only need to look back three decades to see that much has already been achieved – people are very adaptable. Here in Sweden, cash is hardly used anymore. Thirty years ago, everyone paid in cash; card payments were uncommon. The so-called pandemic or even wars serve to change systems without much fanfare because people are thinking about other things.
Wars are also being fought locally, like here in Sweden, in my hometown: We have bombings, shootings, and crime. At the same time, this agenda is being implemented: Surveillance cameras have been permitted in public streets for two years now, and they are now installed everywhere.
Two sides of the same coin.
Trump and the Polycrisis of the Superclass
In this context, what purpose do crises such as Covid-19, the energy and food crisis – the polycrisis – serve? These crises serve as a trigger. Because in 2024 something very important was not achieved with the UN’s Pact for the Future: the creation of a so-called emergency platform. Instead, we now find ourselves in this permanent crisis situation, which shows the world that we are unprepared and unable to solve these problems.
These events were considered necessary to introduce
new political measures and gain public approval.
And also the actions of US President Donald Trump are creating even more problems. This, too, is about gaining approval for the new world system in order to push through the emergency platform and a UN 2.0. The current multi-crisis will ultimately help those who developed these plans for modernizing the United Nations to obtain the necessary approval for their implementation.
I call him “Wreck-It Trump” because he’s razing the old structure to the ground. He’s destroying the existing system. The United Nations isn’t functioning as it should, and he’s paving the way for something new. Trump is the perfect candidate for it. Nothing will be left of the old system.
And when he’s finished and his time is up, they can simply take over with this new system. Everyone will then say: “Finally, reason prevails. A new system that will make the world safer again.” It’s not about reforms. It’s about power.
Who are these few who want to control the lives of billions of people? They belong to the superclass, as David Rothkopf calls them in his book. These are oligarchs who control the global financial world and the economy. They can be found, for example, in the World Economic Forum and in philanthropic organizations. I wrote about one of these families, and I show how the climate protection agenda came about and what lies behind it.
Here in Sweden, a family named Wallenberg is very powerful. Like the Rockefellers, they belong to the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission. These are extremely influential networks that shaped the old order and now want to gain control of the new one.
They also bring in people from other regions, such as multi-billionaires from India, South Africa, China, and Japan. This elite seems to think they are the chosen ones. Those who have the potential to be successful, to reach the highest positions of power, and to run successful companies consider themselves better than others.
The superclass comprises several thousand individuals worldwide. And among them, of course, there are hierarchies. Some are higher up. But who really knows who’s at the top?
One of the key players driving this agenda is Johan Rockström, who advised Greta Thunberg. Who is this man? Johan Rockström is an agronomist. He was selected by Bert Bolin for a position at the Stockholm Environment Institute. Bolin, in turn, was the first chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and Rockström succeeded him. He is a key figure in climate policy and now heads the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) outside Berlin.
Previously, Rockström headed the Stockholm Resilience Centre. This center was founded with the goal of developing a system for “planetary boundaries”. This explanatory model is crucial for the worldview of the elites and their control system. Rockström and his network of scientists use it to define what we as human beings are even capable of doing on this planet.
He speaks regularly at the World Economic Forum. Furthermore, he is connected to several highly influential networks that advise not only the wealthy and powerful, but also governments worldwide. These include the Climate Governance Commission (CGC), which recommended, even before the 2024 Summit on the Future of Europe, that the UN General Assembly declare a climate emergency because humanity is exceeding planetary boundaries – of which there are nine.
The emergency platform is intended to serve as a means
of implementing the super-class’ plans worldwide.
Rockström belongs to the elite group of scientists who define our limits and determine how many resources we are allowed to use or what we can eat. He is also a member of the organization EAT which advocates for a transformation of the global food system.
This man is very influential, but he’s just one player. Before him, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber headed the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). He advised Angela Merkel, the European Commission, and even the Pope on climate issues. People like Rockström or Schellnhuber work on this topic until they retire, and then there’s a successor. They certainly play an important role in achieving the goals, but the real power brokers are the philanthropists, the super-rich.
What is Sweden’s role when it comes to creating a world government? Sweden acts, in a sense, as a mouthpiece for these influential forces, including the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Bilderberg Group. My home country assumed this role quite early, in the 1950s, and expanded it in the context of climate research and environmental protection.
Sweden hosted the first UN Conference on the Human Environment in 1972, and numerous key players driving this agenda originate from there. However, they are more or less merely proxies for these influential networks. As previously mentioned, the Wallenberg family largely holds the reins in Sweden and controls many large companies; they are very closely connected to the super-class. They have always had influence over the Swedish government—regardless of whether the Social Democrats or the Moderates are in power.
Furthermore, according to futurologist Graham Molitor, innovations are implemented particularly quickly in Sweden. We seem to simply adopt new technologies without questioning them because we are so progressive .
On the other hand, the Green Party in Sweden achieves about six percent of the vote. But that doesn’t matter. Because, if you look more closely at the climate and environmental agenda, you’ll find that it’s not genuine green policy, but rather digital policy. It doesn’t matter whether the country is governed by right or left leaning parties. When it comes to this global agenda, everyone agrees. The Greens are only the activist arm.
I have examined how these environmental organizations are financed and organized by elite networks to popularize these activists and their actions – ultimately, it’s about controlling the entire population, every single individual. That’s why we need these opposition parties and movements.
I also have a history with the Greens; I experienced all of this firsthand. Therefore, it was quite a shock for me when my research revealed that oil barons like the Rockefellers were behind the environmental movement. They were involved in developing precisely the kind of policies that we as Greens supported.
Via Berlin and Kyiv to Technocracy
What purpose does the climate agenda serve, if oil companies exploit this narrative? The Rockefellers and their philanthropists clearly dictate what “we” want to achieve. The climate agenda originated at a meeting with eugenicists in the 1950s. In 1952, John D. Rockefeller III and Detlev Bronk, then head of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), met to discuss a population control plan. This led to the formation of the Population Council. Roger Revelle also attended the same meeting.
In the 1950s, Revelle made global warming a central concern and an important area of research. He also played a crucial role as an advisor to US President Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s. At that time, there was a project called the Special Studies Project with support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, in turn, was managed by the sons or grandsons of John D. Rockefeller. We have David and John D. III, and Lawrence and Winthrop. These brothers received money from the Standard Oil Corporation – oil money – and considered how they wanted to change the world. They came to the conclusion that science was a good way to transform society, given the scientific collaborations between countries. They themselves had established these collaborations, for example, through the Rockefeller Foundation, by providing funding to universities around the world.
The basic idea was that such problems cannot be solved by any one nation alone. They must be solved, more or less, by an international body. So, on the one hand, we have population control, and on the other hand, the idea of a kind of world authority that has to assume control. The other scientific problems were pandemics and the associated global health problems.
Diseases were recognized as a global lever as early as the 1950s. Everything happens quite openly. Why do so few people engage with this topic? Questioning these things comes at a price. After I uncovered these networks, it was very difficult to keep my job as a university lecturer.
When I defended my doctoral thesis – “Ordo ab Chao: The Political History of Biofuels in the European Union. Actors, Networks and Strategies” – in 2012, my opponent said right at the beginning: “You know, my institution has just received funding from the Rockefeller Foundation.” The chairman of the Club of Rome also tried to prevent my dissertation from being accepted at all.
But what surprised me most was this: I came from the environmental movement myself, but when I tried to warn my fellow activists that these oil companies were involved, some of them got really angry. The more we talked about sustainable development, the more cars and technologies were introduced. Nobody wanted to question that. Universities and environmental organizations alike receive funding from these foundations. In the end, it’s all about the money.
But I continued working as a lecturer after that, first for a few years at Linköping University and then at Stockholm University. But it became increasingly difficult. Because many, especially junior researchers, discovered that I don’t really subscribe to the climate dogma. And that makes you less trustworthy. We don’t want to tolerate such a “climate denier” at “our” institution.
Apparently, it was just one student who googled me and found out I had written a critical paper on climate change; he probably complained to the head of the institute. For me, this was no longer a pleasant working environment.
But after I wrote the book “The Global Coup-Etat” in the first year of the “pandemic” it became unbearable. Mainstream medicine and the Covid-19 mandates could not be criticized. That was morally unacceptable. The fraudulent scheme was more or less evident by March 2020.
In April 2019, I published my book about the Rockefeller family, describing how their plans for the world were to be achieved through the Fourth Industrial Revolution. While researching climate change, I also came across information related to the health sector. So, it was quite easy for me to put these pieces of the puzzle together.
The mainstream media reacted to my publication about the coup by simply considering it extremist at the time. Sweden was, of course, the better place to live during the “pandemic.” But the media stated, “anyone who doubts that is an idiot.” Alternative media outlets reported on my book, which was published in December 2020, and it quickly sold out.
In 2024, the WEF opened the Global Government Technology Center in Berlin. The goal is to build new systems for governance. These will not be controlled by humans, but by an agent AI. Stanley Milgram coined the term “agentic state” – a state in which someone simply follows the wishes and instructions of the authorities.
A white paper from the Global Government Technology Center bears precisely this title: “The Agentic State”. The agentic AI will be the authoritative body, issuing commands and carrying everything out efficiently, and is intended for use in the UN emergency response platform – without humans who could say: “No, I won’t do that.”
Another Global Government Technology Center is located in Kyiv, where these systems can be tested – this is easier to accomplish in a country at war. That’s why many WEF representatives are working with Ukraine.
How should humanity best respond to this technocratic threat? This attempt by the superclass to rebuild the Babylonian Tower will fail. As soon as the last piece of the puzzle is in place, everything will begin to crumble and collapse. Those building this system use lies and every possible manipulation technique to bring people under their total control. And while the truth lags behind, it is catching up. People see through this. The truth will come to light and wash everything away. So they are trying an impossible undertaking.
At the same time, I think such projects are inevitable. There have always been, and always will be, people who strive for power. When this tower collapses, someone will try to rebuild it. But perhaps we have some time in between to better prepare the world for these psychopaths.
AI generated free pik
Jason Isaac report at The Hill Greenpeace’s attempt to swindle US courts just got harpooned. Excerpts in italics wtih my bolds and added images.
The North Dakota Supreme Court just drew a bright line for the rule of law, U.S. sovereignty and the energy infrastructure that keeps our country running. On May 7, the court ruled four to one that Greenpeace International cannot use a Dutch court to nullify what a unanimous American jury already decided.
It is a welcome victory, but the fight against eco-lawfare is far from over.
The case began in 2019, when Energy Transfer sued Greenpeace and other activist groups over the coordinated, sometimes violent campaign waged against the Dakota Access Pipeline. After six years of litigation and a three-week trial, twelve North Dakota jurors unanimously found Greenpeace liable for conspiracy, defamation, defamation per se and tortious interference. The damages exceeded $666 million across the three Greenpeace defendants, with more than $130 million tagged to Greenpeace International alone. The jury heard the evidence and reached its verdict.
That should have been the end of it. It was not.
Two weeks before the North Dakota trial began, after six years of fighting in American courts, Greenpeace International filed a new lawsuit in Amsterdam. The plan was straightforward: ask a Dutch court to declare the North Dakota case “manifestly unfounded and abusive” under a new European Union anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) directive, then use that foreign declaration to erase the verdict and seize Energy Transfer’s assets wherever they could find them. It was a calculated end-run around our judiciary, dressed up in the polite language of European jurisprudence.
The North Dakota Supreme Court saw through it. Justice Jerod Tufte, writing for the majority this month, made the principle clear:
Substance matters, not labels. A claim that requires a foreign court to find an American jury wrong is a collateral attack on that jury, no matter what name the lawyers attach to it.
The court ordered the trial judge to issue a narrowly tailored injunction
blocking Greenpeace from pursuing the parts of its Dutch action
that depend on relitigating what North Dakotans already decided.
The opinion is worth quoting on the point that matters most, The court wrote,:
“ Comity expires when the strong public policies of the forum
are vitiated by the foreign act.”
In plain English, foreign courts get respect when they earn it. A party that races to Amsterdam on the eve of an American trial to undermine the anticipated verdict cannot then demand that American courts politely defer to the foreign proceeding it manufactured.
This is the right ruling. It is also a narrow one.
The injunction applies to one party in one state. Unfortunately, that means Greenpeace can still pursue the parts of its Dutch action that do not require erasing the North Dakota verdict.
Federal courts have not yet weighed in on whether American courts can block foreign collateral attacks on American judgments. And the federal circuits are split on how heavily international comity should weigh against such injunctions. Other state supreme courts have not taken up the question. The next activist group with a domestic loss and a foreign sympathetic forum will try the same play, just with better lawyers and a cleaner record.
And they have plenty of reasons to keep trying. The European Union’s 2024 anti-SLAPP directive was sold as a shield for journalists and dissidents in countries with weak speech protections. In practice, however, it is becoming a sword aimed at American energy companies that win in court. The directive’s “manifestly unfounded” standard invites foreign judges to second-guess the merits of American court verdicts. Article 17 invites damages claims for the offense of having sued. The architecture is custom-built for the exact tactic Greenpeace attempted.
The deeper problem is that the activist legal industry has discovered something useful. When the protests fail, when the defamation campaigns get punished, when the juries refuse to play along, there is always another forum, another court, another friendly jurisdiction willing to entertain the argument that American energy infrastructure is itself a kind of crime.
The point is not to win on the merits. The point is to make building anything in this country so legally treacherous that capital flees and projects die. This strategy will work in proportion to how seriously American courts take it.
The North Dakota Supreme Court took it seriously. Other courts must follow. Congress should pay attention too. American companies operating under American law, sued in American courts and vindicated by American juries should not have to fight the same case all over again in Amsterdam, Brussels, or anywhere else.
A federal statute clarifying the authority of American courts to block foreign collateral attacks on domestic judgments would put the matter beyond doubt. The Trump administration’s commitment to energy dominance demands nothing less.
The stakes are not abstract. Every data center humming with artificial intelligence, every factory bringing jobs back from overseas, every home heated through a North Dakota winter depends on the ability of American companies to build, operate, and defend the infrastructure that delivers reliable energy. Strip away the certainty that an American verdict actually means something, and that infrastructure becomes a much riskier bet. Risk premiums rise. Capital gets scarcer. Projects do not get built.
Greenpeace lost in North Dakota. It lost again on May 7. This is all good. But the rest of the country needs to make sure those losses stick and continue, because the next case is already being drafted somewhere, and the activists who brought us a six-year siege of the Dakota Access Pipeline are not going to take this defeat as a final answer. Neither should we.
What happens after the U.S. Supreme Court makes it harder for agencies to regulate? There are at least a couple of possibilities. Option One: an agency might just stop trying to regulate under that policy. Or Option Two: an agency might seek another path to achieve the same thing. The danger of Option Two may be one of the most important—but underappreciated—of the Court’s decision in Loper Bright, which overruled Chevron deference. My fear is that agencies will not simply give up but instead will lean into what Professor Wendy Wagner has dubbed “the Science Charade.”
Let’s start with some basics. Under Chevron, courts would defer to an agency’s reasonable interpretation of ambiguous statutory language. The idea was that because agencies are more politically accountable than courts and have a better technical grasp of how complex statutory schemes work, when a statute administered by an agency is ambiguous, courts should get out of the way and let the agency act so long as the agency’s resolution of the ambiguity is reasonable. Chevron presented legal and conceptual problems (including why ambiguity should favor the agency rather than regulated parties, who may be punished—sometimes even criminally—for violating the agency’s view of the statute), but also a practical one that goes to the heart of administrative incentives. Because agencies could expand their power by finding ambiguities, agency officials, often responding to political demands, would unsurprisingly stretch to find them so they could pursue aggressive policies that Congress never authorized.
In Loper Bright, the Court essentially said “enough.” Under our Constitution, the legislature makes the law, and courts ensure that the executive stays within the law as written by Congress. After Loper Bright, courts decide the meaning of statutes, even statutes with some ambiguity. As Justice Clarence Thomas has, Article III’s vesting of the “judicial power” in the judiciary “calls for that exercise of independent judgment,” but “Chevron deference precludes judges from exercising that judgment,” thereby “wrest[ing] from Courts the ultimate interpretative authority to ‘say what the law is,’ and hand[ing] it over to the Executive.”
Loper Bright thus should be a welcome development for purposes of respecting the separation of powers, especially if agencies accept the limits of their authority. But there is a danger: What if they don’t? What if the same political dynamic that prompted agencies to stretch statutes in the first place may also prompt agencies to find alternatives to Chevron?
I have recently penned an article about one such alternative: the science charade. Wagner coined the term decades ago to explain an important dynamic within administrative law. As she observed, because judges often defer to agencies on questions of science, “the courts offer agencies strong and virtually inescapable incentives to conceal policy choices under the cover of scientific judgments and citations.” Rather than justifying the agency’s policy choice as a policy choice, agencies instead may dress-up their decisions as compelled by science.
To be sure, there are limits to the science charade. Agencies must engage in reasoned decision-making and justify their conclusions as not arbitrary or capricious. So if agencies push too hard, reviewing courts will sometimes catch on that a regulator’s policy choice has outrun its science. For example, I once worked on a where the National Marine Fishery Service used a “model [that] assumed that salmonids would be exposed to lethal levels of the pesticides continuously for a 96-hour period,” but never explained “why the 96-hour exposure assumption accurately reflected real-world conditions.” The appellate court didn’t buy it—but the district court did. This illustrates how difficult it can be to persuade a court to second-guess an agency’s invocation of science. (I often wonder what would have happened had the Environmental Protection Agency itself not criticized the National Marine Fishery Service’s “unreasonable” assumption.)
The intuition driving Wagner’s theory, thus, is impossible to brush aside. To be clear, I do not claim that agencies do this all the time. When we discuss the administrative state, we often focus on unusual occurrences rather than on an agency’s more banal, bread-and-butter operations. But that does not mean we should not worry about incentives or ignore the risk that unthinkable behavior may become more thinkable if bad incentives are not curbed. Agencies are filled with people who want certain policies. Human nature being what it is, people sometimes respond to incentives. So if the best way to get a policy through is to drape a policy decision in as much science as an agency can credibly muster, shouldn’t we expect regulators sometimes to succumb to the science charade’s temptation?
And that brings me to my thesis: Because agencies can no longer use Chevron to pursue policies that Congress has not allowed, their incentive to use the “science charade” should increase, again, at least at the margins.
As I explain in my article, suppose Congress has authorized an agency to “regulate Chemical X if it harms the public health.” Suppose further that agency officials want to restrict Chemical X because it harms birds, but it is unclear whether it has negative health effects on people. Under Chevron, the agency might have argued that the statute is ambiguous as to whether its authority is limited to protecting human health, so it can use the statute to protect birds, too. Of course, such a strained reading may have worked even before Loper Bright, but now agencies know that this interpretation won’t fly. So instead, the agency may lean into the science charade. Because generalist judges may be more comfortable deferring to scientific analysis than to overt policymaking, agencies may deduce that they should not say “we care about birds,” but instead should overstate what the science says about the effects of Chemical X on human health.
Using the science charade as a substitute for Chevron, may thus
allow them to protect birds under the guise of protecting human health.
This increased incentive to rely on faux science should be alarming for at least two reasons. One, the statute books overflow with delegations that are triggered when certain facts about the world exist—facts that require scientific or technical (e.g., economics) judgments beyond the ordinary experience of judges. Agencies may thus stop scouring the U.S. Code for ambiguities and instead scour it for delegations that kick in if certain scientific findings are made. And two, there is a “boy who called wolf” danger.
Good policy needs good science, but if agencies cannot be trusted,
skeptical courts may erroneously reject agency conclusions
that, in reality, are supported by good science.
Unfortunately, there is no great solution to the science charade. The reason why the charade can work is that judges are not scientists, and even if they have some scientific or other technical training, no one can know everything about everything. Generalist judges are simply not equipped to understand all the technical issues the administrative state presents. Although there are downsides, the best answer might be greater procedural formality in the regulatory process—complete with more extensive cross-examination of agency experts to create a record that may be more understandable to judges. (Of course, the dynamic effect of that prospect may be to dissuade bad science from the get-go.) As I have explained elsewhere, increasing procedural rigor is not costless, which is one reason the administrative state has largely moved away from procedural devices such as cross-examination. But for certain categories of regulatory action, it might make sense to head off bad incentives. Of course, some may argue (presumably, Wagner herself) that such costs are not worth it. But especially given the heightened incentive caused by Chevron’s demise, I’m not so sanguine.
Like most complex systems, the administrative state resists easy answers. It is important to think through incentives and unintended consequences. The Court’s decision to overrule Chevron deference addresses one incentive—the enticement to hunt for statutory language that agencies can claim is ambiguous. But it may have the unintended effect of strengthening the temptation to rely on the science charade. There is no silver-bullet solution; it is important to recognize why agencies act as they do and to create systems to best maximize the benefits of agency expertise while preventing its abuse.
From The Hartwell Paper (2010) A new direction for climate policy after the crash of 2009
On the subject, ‘How to get climate policy back on course’ , A panel of British professors included this observation:
“Climate change was brought to the attention of policy-makers by scientists. From the outset, these scientists also brought their preferred solutions to the table in US Congressional hearings and other policy forums, all bundled. The proposition that ‘science’ somehow dictated particular policy responses, encouraged –indeed instructed – those who found those particular strategies unattractive to argue about the science.
So, a distinctive characteristic of the climate change debate has been of scientists claiming with the authority of their position that their results dictated particular policies; of policy makers claiming that their preferred choices were dictated by science, and both acting as if ‘science’ and ‘policy’ were simply and rigidly linked as if it were a matter of escaping from the path of an oncoming tornado.
In the case of climate modelling, which has been prominent in the public debate, the many and varied ‘projective’ scenarios (that is, explorations of plausible futures using computer models conditioned on a large number of assumptions and simplifications) are sufficient to undergird just about any view of the future that one prefers. But the ‘projective’ models they produce have frequently been conflated implicitly and sometimes wilfully with what politicians really want, namely ‘predictive’ scenarios: that is, precise forecasts of the future.”
An article at Liberty Beacon spills the beans, or IOW, explains how they are letting the oil and gas cat out of the bag: ‘We are talking about energy security for Europe’: Norway doubles down on oil and gas production. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Norway, an energy superpower, which gives it its massive sovereign wealth fund,
is stepping up for itself and Europe. Sensible. Everybody wins.
Meanwhile, the Left and the UK look like idiots.
In case of any doubt about Norway’s commitment to maintain – and expand – its production of gas and oil offshore, the energy minister,
“We will develop, not dismantle, activity on our continental shelf.”
This week, to the alarm of environmental campaigners, he announced that three gasfields off the country’s southern coast would reopen by the end of 2028 – nearly three decades after they closed – to meet a shortfall caused by the impact of the war in Ukraine and disruption to supplies from the Middle East.
The decision will help keep gas and oil production at about the 2025 level – which has been stable for almost 20 years – and stay broadly the same for the rest of this decade. Norway has 97 offshore oilfields, three of which came on stream last year, and its Norwegian Offshore Directorate expects “100 and beyond” within the next two years, still producing at least the present level of 2m barrels of oil daily.
The Barents Sea, in the high north, is the new gas and oil frontier – with the prospect of mining for seabed minerals between northern Norway and Greenland, a more distant prospect after initial surveys by the Norwegian Offshore Directorate – an agency of Aasland’s department – showed potential.
“Norwegian offshore production plays an important role in ensuring energy security in Europe,” says Aasland.
“The world, and Europe, will have a need for oil and gas for decades to come and it is crucial that Norway continues to develop its continental shelf to remain a reliable and long-term supplier … and (with) a high level of exploration activity.”
The sector generates vast wealth for Norway, but the decision this week to reopen the Albuskjell, Vest Ekofisk and Tommeliten Gamma gasfields in the North Sea, which were closed in 1998, has received heavy criticism in some quarters. It goes against the advice of the country’s environment agency, and the Socialist Left party accused the government of “greenwashing”.
North Sea oil rigs | Source: GETTY © GB News
Matt Gibson provides additional details at MSN Norway reopens three North Sea gas fields to power millions of homes while UK stalls. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images
Norway plans to revive three mothballed North Sea gas fields as demand in Europe soars. As the UK stalls on developing its side of the basin, with new licences banned and work on two fields frozen because of climate challenges, the Norwegian fields will be opened for the first time in 30 years.
They are believed to contain enough fuel to heat millions of homes and the country says it is vital for European energy security. The gas will be sent by pipeline to Germany with light oil sent to the UK.
The Norwegian government has also said that it is keen to further exploit its resources in the North Sea, the Norwegian Sea and the Barents Sea. It plans to access 70 blocks identified on the seabed. Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said: “Norway’s oil and gas industry is vital to Norway and to Europe.” Energy minister Terje Aasland said: “Norwegian production of oil and gas is an important contribution to energy security in Europe.
“Developing new gas fields allows Norway to maintain high supply levels over the long term. This has become all the more crucial since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the conflict in the Middle East.”
The three fields are run by ConocoPhillips. The company’s European president, Steinar Våge, said: “By utilising existing infrastructure, we can produce substantial resources at low cost, and strengthen gas exports to Europe.”
The UK spent £20b buying oil and gas from Norway last year.
Meanwhile, its domestic output continues to fall.
Offshore operators have complained that it is becoming difficult to work under the current political regime. Drilling at both Rosebank, Britain’s largest untapped oil field, and Jackdaw, a gas field, has been halted after a legal challenge on climate grounds. The decision on whether work can restart rests with energy secretary, Ed Miliband.
The Norwegian fields were closed in 1998. However, thanks to new technology, they have become accessible. They are set to reopen in 2028 and are predicted to be in operation for 20 years. Energy experts suggested that the UK’s offshore industry was being held back by policy.
A spokesman for Offshore Energies UK told the Telegraph:
“The discrepancy in success in the two different regions of the North Sea is not dictated by geology. “It is entirely determined by how respective governments treat oil and gas resources through policy, regulation and taxation.”
Shadow energy minister Claire Coutinho said:
“Norway just announced 70 new blocks of oil and gas exploration, including in the North Sea. “Meanwhile, just over the border on the British side of the North Sea, our Energy Secretary tells us we’ve got nothing left so he has to ban new licences.
“Same basin. Same geology. The difference is political will.”
Apologies to anyone offended by an oilman’s vocabulary.
How to Sue Fossil Fuel Companies Over Climate Change
Power the Future warns of the large scale attack on US energy platform in an article Green Groups’ 600+ Lawsuits Are Driving Up Energy Costs. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
As the Trump Administration meets with oil and gas CEOs to discuss lowering gas prices, there’s a growing question that can’t be ignored: Who is working just as aggressively to stop it?
Green groups have filed over 600 lawsuits targeting energy policies and projects. These efforts are not isolated; they form a coordinated strategy to challenge nearly every aspect of an energy agenda focused on increasing supply and lowering costs.
Organizations like the Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club,
and Earthjustice openly tout their litigation records.
NRDC alone has reported suing the administration more than 160 times, including efforts that helped halt major infrastructure projects like Keystone XL. The Sierra Club has claimed more than 300 cases during Trump’s first term and over 100 additional legal actions in 2025 alone. Earthjustice similarly boasts more than 200 lawsuits.
This is not routine legal oversight; this is a full-scale attack to reshape U.S. energy policy through the courts.
Many of these organizations operate within a broader network of donors, including foreign billionaires like Hansjörg Wyss, whose funding has supported a range of environmental advocacy initiatives. That raises important transparency concerns: if overseas money is helping fuel legal campaigns that influence U.S. energy policy, the public deserves to know.
“The environmental movement has weaponized litigation to deliberately undermine and slow down American energy production at every turn,” said Daniel Turner, Founder and Executive Director of Power The Future. “These groups operate as a well-funded and aggressive adversary to U.S. energy independence, not as some innocent third party simply looking out for nature. While American families and workers suffer from higher energy costs and lost opportunities, these organizations file lawsuit after lawsuit to block responsible domestic development. It’s time to treat them as the serious obstacle they are and shine a light on who is really pulling the strings behind this coordinated campaign against our nation’s energy industry.”
Economist Wayne Winegarden describes the economic damages done by this litiigation in his Forbes article Fossil Fuel Lawsuits Are A Tax On Consumers. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Announcing the state’s lawsuit against energy producers, California AG Rob Bonta claimed it is time to make energy companies pay for “the harm they have caused.” It is one of more than thirty such lawsuits around the country.
As I have argued here, here, and here, these lawsuits are not heroic efforts to safeguard the environment. The filings by cities and state AGs, as well as the dozens of other suits they hope to inspire, will primarily harm families by worsening the affordability crisis that is already harming households across the country. As with any policy that drives up the costs of energy, low- and middle-income families will bear the brunt of the costs.
Of course, harming families and local businesses through higher energy costs is not how the plaintiffs justify their lawsuits. California and other elected officials around the country sell their lawsuits to their local constituents with populist tropes about corporate accountability.
Yet, based on the comments of many of the AGs and plaintiff attorneys, the litigants recognize that one impact from the lawsuits will be higher costs on consumers. For many plaintiffs, imposing larger costs on families and businesses is an intended outcome.
Take comments California’s attorney general made in late April to an environmental group about this litigation. Responding to a questions from the host, he said
“One goal for the litigation is to make oil and gas more expensive as a way to disincentive use of these energy sources and impose billions of dollars in costs that these companies will have to share with their shareholders.”
Higher energy costs harm families’ financial stability. As the Federal Reserve notes, “when gasoline prices increase, a larger share of households’ budgets is likely to be spent on it, which leaves less to spend on other goods and services. The same goes for businesses whose goods must be shipped from place to place or that use fuel as a major input (such as the airline industry). Higher oil prices tend to make production more expensive for businesses, just as they make it more expensive for households to do the things they normally do.”
If the plaintiffs are able to extract a $200 billion settlement from the energy companies, which is much less than what they are asking for, then the price of gasoline would increase by 62-cents a gallon based on my previous analysis relating higher oil prices to higher gasoline costs. That is a more than 17 percent increase in the average price of a gallon of gas as of May 13, 2024.
Further, due to energy’s ubiquitous use, prices would also increase for a wide range of goods such from cell phones to groceries, as well as services, particularly heating and cooling our homes. These higher costs will diminish national economic growth and reduce economic opportunities.
Making matters worse, climate litigation deters companies and investors from allocating their capital toward developing potential clean energy innovations. The deterrent is even larger because technologies that were once heralded as important sources of low-emission energy now face the same serious litigation exposure.
For instance, increasing use of natural gas is an important reason why carbon emissions have been declining over the past twenty years. However, natural gas producers are still targeted in these lawsuits. Given the pollution associated with all energy sources – including solar and wind – the lawsuits send an anti-innovation signal to all potential energy entrepreneurs.
Then there is the lawsuits’ hypocrisy. For example, the California attorney general claims he wants to punish fossil fuel companies because the companies allegedly knew that global climate change was a risk but intentionally hid these risks from the public. But California, the U.S. Government, and governments around the world were also well aware of these risks.
Suing fossil fuel producers for the costs of climate change is economically
damaging, environmentally suspect, and based on dubious claims.
It will also harm families, particularly working families, at a time when they are already struggling with the high cost of living. Ultimately, there are many serious adverse consequences from state and local litigation against traditional energy companies, but no economic upsides should the plaintiffs prevail.
Climate Activists storm the bastion of Exxon Mobil, here seen without their shareholder disguises.
Climate Change Dispatch reports DOJ Sues Minnesota Over State Climate Lawsuit Targeting Energy Companies. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Justice Department argues the state case oversteps federal authority,
seeks to reshape national energy policy.
The complaint, filed Monday, May 4, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, accuses state officials of trying to impose their own climate policies on domestic energy producers in a way the DOJ says burdens national energy development and intrudes on federal authority.
The underlying lawsuit was filed in 2020 by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison against Exxon Mobil, the American Petroleum Institute, Koch Industries, and Koch subsidiary Flint Hills Resources.
Minnesota brought the case under state consumer-protection laws, alleging that the companies engaged in fraud and deceptive business practices by misleading the public about “climate change and the role of fossil-fuel products in climate change.”
That lawsuit remains pending after years of procedural fights over whether it belongs in state or federal court.
Minnesota succeeded in keeping the case in state court in 2024, after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review a lower-court ruling allowing the lawsuit to proceed there.
In its new complaint, the DOJ argues that authority over national energy policy
and major questions involving greenhouse gas emissions rests
with the federal government, not individual states.
The department is asking the court to block Minnesota from pursuing the 2020 lawsuit and prevent the state from bringing similar litigation in the future.
“Climate change lawsuits, like Minnesota’s, artfully plead around federal law while transparently seeking to change national energy policy related to global greenhouse gas emissions and to regulate conduct beyond local borders,” the complaint states.
The federal government’s move to counter climate litigation with its own lawsuit follows an executive order issued last year by President Donald Trump, who directed the DOJ to “take all appropriate action to stop” state lawsuits seeking to “dictate national energy policy.”
Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward said in a statement:
“President Trump promised to unleash American energy dominance, and Minnesota officials cannot undermine his directive by mandating that their woke climate preferences become the uniform policy of our Nation,”
“Imagine an argument so airtight about science so settled
over technology so reliable that you have to use censorship
to make sure nobody gives a dissenting opinion.” @ProctorZ
Science Matters 