Dr. Bjørn Lomborg and Fraser Institute have published a series of essays with evidence regarding policies intended to mitigate climate change. Excerpts below with links to papers supporting the following conclusions.
Climate Change: A Fact-Based Assessment of Costs, Trade-Offs, and Results is a new multimedia research and educational project by the Fraser Institute in collaboration with Dr. Bjørn Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus. It offers Canadians a data-driven analysis of the real risks posed by climate change, and measures the substantial costs and trade-offs that accompany many climate policies.
Electricity prices across Canada up 88% since 2000,
slowing economic growth and denying
Canadians greater prosperity
The essays include:
Climate Change Is One Policy Concern Among Many: Canadians, like people everywhere, confront a multitude of pressing challenges: soaring housing costs, strained health care, opioid crises, and economic insecurity amid global turbulence. Climate change is undeniably one issue among many—but after years of apocalyptic warnings that the world is about to end, or that rising temperatures signal imminent, irreversible doom, the public is tuning out.
We Are Hyping Up Rising Heat Deaths, but Ignoring Declining Cold Deaths: While rising temperatures explain a 6.0 per cent increase in heat deaths globally, deaths from cold have declined 40 per cent because of rising temperatures.
No, the Planet Is Not on Fire: In the early 2000s, roughly three percent of the world’s land surface burned annually, but by 2022, only 2.17 per cent burned, and in 2025, it was 2.2 per cent.
Are Natural Disasters Increasing Because of Climate Change?: Once we correct for population increases and increased wealth over time, the data show a clear decreasing trend in both human and economic vulnerability from natural disasters, with global average mortality down 6.5 times and economic loss rates declining five times from 1980–1989 to 2007–2016.
Despite Alarmist Claims, We’re Actually Growing More Food Than Ever Before: Since 1990, the average number of children dying from malnutrition has declined dramatically from 6.5 million to 2.5 million each year. The World Health Organization expects the decline to continue—even with climate change—with annual deaths projected to halve once again by 2050.
Wind and Solar Power Are Unreliable and Therefore Expensive: The more a country relies on solar and wind, the higher electricity prices become for both households and businesses. In nations with little or no solar and wind, the weighted average price sits around 16 Canadian cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh). For every additional 10 percentage points of solar and wind in the electricity mix, prices rise by slightly more than three cents.
Electric Cars Do Little for the Climate: Manufacturing EVs generates emissions—especially producing the battery—which requires a large amount of energy, mostly achieved with coal in China. Just as importantly, the carbon footprint of an electric vehicle depends heavily on how the electricity used to charge it is produced.
The Reality of the Energy Transition: Not Happening: Over the past half-century, the global energy produced from oil and coal has doubled, while hydro power has tripled, and gas has quadrupled, all the while there’s been an explosion in the use of nuclear, solar and wind.
Abundant, Affordable Energy Is Key to Economic Growth and Prosperity: A 10 per cent increase in energy prices reduced economic growth by about 0.15 percentage points over the 1960 to 2016 period, and yet, across Canada energy prices have increased 88 per cent nationwide since 2000.
Climate Policy Fixation Blinds Us to Solutions That Actually Improve Human Lives: Instead of reducing emissions in high-income countries, which at best would slow global temperature increases by 0.1 degree Celsius by 2100, people in developing countries would benefit much more from programs to combat diseases, improve nutrition, and improve education.
The response to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s address at the European Parliament in Strasbourg on September 17, a day after European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen opened the door to Canada becoming the EU’s first “associate member”, has reflected and aggravated the public policy and psychology gap between Western Europe and the United States. The federal European institutions began as an admirable attempt by Jean Monnet and others to bury once and for all the profound and sanguinary hostility between the principal European states. These were tariff reductions in the facilitation of cooperation at the economic level, especially between France, Germany and Italy. The original six-nation group, including Benelux, gradually intensified cooperation to a political union and expanded steadily to 28 states, from which the United Kingdom has withdrawn.
It was far from a smooth and constant progress. Several countries required consecutive referendato accede to the goal that was defined as “an ever closer union”, which clearly indicated ultimately a single senior government for all of Western and much of Central Europe. Britain had only voted for a common market and never to have the political institutions that it had developed fairly consistently for nearly 800 years subsumed into the well-intentioned but comparatively untried government machinery of Europe in Brussels. And when finally consulted, the British voted “no”. This was the first major post-Cold War geopolitical abrasion between Europe and America. President Trump offered the British a fast-track into the North American free-trade area, but Theresa May chose to define leaving Europe as in fact confirming its adhesion to it. Boris Johnson was more receptive but too disorganised and preoccupied with resolving the status of Northern Ireland in Europe to address Trump’s invitation, and soon found himself dealing with the irresolute Biden administration.
Trump, like previous Republican presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, saw that a federal Europe was in some measure a revolt against the primacy of the United States in the West, based on the romantic delusion that the European powers, having squandered their world leadership in the world wars and totalitarian movements that Europe inflicted upon the world, could now stand on each other’s shoulders and regain the headship of the planet.American Democratic presidents have tended to view Europe more positively as potentially a welcome equal partner in Western leadership.
Carney has moved Canada past Britain as another important country
purporting to straddle between Europe and the United States.
When he was the governor of the Bank of England, he made short work of any notion of an independent central bank by joining the fear-mongering campaign of the British government to the effect that if Britain seceded from the European Union, grass would grow in the streets of the City of London. Having returned to his native Canada and become prime minister, he won an upset re-election victory for the Liberal Party which under Justin Trudeau had scandalously misgoverned the country as it tumbled down the comparative tables of the world’s most prosperous states, hobbled by an obsession with climate change and generating discontent through excessive but almost entirely legal immigration. (This is a relatively simple matter for Canada since its only substantial land border is with the United States, a country that almost nobody ever flees away from, and illegal entry by sea requires crossing a great ocean.)
The usual anti-American or naïvely globalist organs of the European and British media, such as The Guardian and The Economist, have grappled Carney to their bosoms as someone who validates the beleaguered European project. The United States economy has been growing more than twice as fast as the European Union’s for 20 years, and where Trump has been somewhat bumptious, he has been effective in reducing absurd trade deficits and warning inconstant allies. The principal European powers have floundered and only Italy can now be said to have a serious government. Germany, France and Spain, as well as the United Kingdom, are waiting for firm government from the civilised Right as Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is asserting in Rome.
In Strasbourg, Carney revealed more vividly than he has to
his own countrymen his authoritarian, Davosian leftist biases.
He flattered his audience by rewriting modern history and current economic statistics. Freedom was won in Europe “thanks to the heroism of the European resistance during the war”. Of course, this is rubbish: Europe was liberated by the Americans and British and Canadiansand protected by the United States until the Soviet Union, under the American containment strategy, disintegrated. Europe is wallowing economically and its enfeebled response to the Chinese penetration of more than a third of its hybrid car market is to ask, unsuccessfully, for China voluntarily to restrain its presence to 15 per cent. Anyone, including apparently the majority of the citizens of the major European countries, can see that a sharp policy change is called for, and the insane climate change bugbear is being put to death at last.
Carney did not mention in Strasbourg that Canadian exports to the United States are 10 times as much as its exports to Europe, or that the United States represents more than a third of the entire economy of Canada while Canadian trade represents about 2% of the US economy. In Strasbourg, both speaker and audience were dreaming and to this end Carney quoted Goethe misleadingly and inflicted a number of hollow bucolic metaphors on his listeners topromote the notion of a reciprocal magnetic interest between Canada and Europe. It is a complete fantasy and it will not last long.
Addendum: Commentary from Europe
Also at Brussels Signal, Karl Pfefferkorn writes: An empire built on sand. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.
After the billing and cooing is over, what does the new partnership between Carney and von der Leyen have to offer their respective citizens? The official announcement suggested greater cooperation in defence, artificial intelligence and the provision of energy. Canada, which once earned its own invasion beach at Normandy, has only the ghost of a military these days and can contribute little to Europe’s efforts to deter Russia. In any case, Canada and the major European powers are guided by NATO’s defence planning, and not any EU attempts to supplant it. Carney clearly hopes to claim a share of Europe’s defence spending bonanza as a preferred partner, but has far less expertise and capacity to offer than the UK, which despite these attributes has yet to earn equal access to the EU’s common defence funds.
Neither Canada nor the EU has sired artificial intelligence companies capable of challenging China or the United States. Cooperation between also-rans is not likely to benefit either. Given their governing tendencies, they are far more likely to cooperate in suffocating their nascent AI industries through overregulation.
Canada does have immense energy resources, but lacks the infrastructure to supply much of it to Europe. Canadian pipelines run west to the Pacific in the service of Asian markets, or east to Ontario, by way of the United States. Any help solving Europe’s energy problems will require the construction of oil and gas loading facilities on Canada’s Atlantic coast, in violation of the environmental orthodoxies espoused by Carney’s Liberal Party. Canada’s oil resources are concentrated in the Alberta oil sands, which are the dirtiest and most carbon intensive of fossil fuels. Large-scale imports of Canadian oil will require a significant relaxation if not the outright abandonment of the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism.
Carney is reluctant to reveal his country’s most attractive
quality to the EU: a potential net payer into EU coffers.
If Canada can be lured into a bespoke arrangement, complete with new sinecures in Brussels for civil servants desperate to escape Ottawa, she will pay at least as much as Norway, which remits over half a billion dollars a year for its EEA status. Good for EU finances, but what will Canada get in exchange? Relaxed work rules and membership in the Erasmus study programme will benefit young Canadians, but visa reciprocity will also lure ambitious Europeans toward greater opportunities in North America. Industrial tariffs are already minimal under the CETA agreement, and there is no chance the EU will open the Single Market to increased Canadian agricultural imports.
None of this will offset the risks of alienating Canada’s biggest market, the United States. The prosperity of 40 million Canadians is dependent on the trade surplus they run with 340 million American consumers. Canadian industry is comprehensively integrated into the American market in everything from car parts to advertising. The EU cannot offer anything close to a replacement should the US retaliate against any Canadian deal with Europe.
Carney walked away from a good trade offer from Washington in a fit of performative hubris, preferring to risk the economic well-being of his people for the accolades of his European peers.
Given her fraught relations with the White House, Ursula von der Leyen sees little downside in her flirtation with Carney. She is empire-building, not in the old way of territorial conquest, but in the post-modern sense of attaining greater elite regard. The average Commission bureaucrat hopes to make the EU into a workable federal state, but von der Leyen sees it as a citadel of self-regarding virtue for affluent Western elites besieged by angry populists. Granting titles of privilege to loyal servants like Carney elevates her office to the status of a royal court in the realm of the global elect, an objective far more important than the tawdry material needs of factory workers in Duisburg or coal miners in Silesia.
Her neglect of the sources of Europe’s prosperity and her failure
to mobilise the resources of the Commission in their service
will expose her true achievement: an empire built on sand.
Dr Roger Watson reports on how Roman Catholic leaders have ventured into climatism wilderness by trusting the wrong proponents. His Daily Sceptic article is The Vatican’s Green Gospel. Excerpts in italics with my bold and added images.
Under Pope Francis and now Leo the Catholic Church has drunk deeply
of the climate Kool-Aid. It’s about time it quit the pseudo-scientific
scaremongering and got back to saving souls.
How the Roman Catholic Church moved from its great commission to save souls to its current obsession with saving the planet is not clear. But it is obvious that the hierarchy of the Church has drunk deeply of the climate change Kool-Aid and, and while it would be unfair to say that it has abandoned saving souls, its mission has certainly drifted considerably into an area which is not exactly within its area of expertise. Wherever it is getting its advice on climate change from, it is most definitely listening to the wrong people.
The problem, as some Catholics see it, is demonstrated amply in a column in the September issue of Middlesbrough Diocesan Catholic Voice – known locally as the Voice – which is distributed to and through parish churches in the Middlesbrough Catholic Diocese. It is always with trepidation that I take a copy from the pile at the back after Sunday Mass.
The Voice, while it contains useful diocesan information, dates of events and news from the parishes, almost always has at least one article which, for me, is an ‘occasion of sin’ as to read it conjures up thoughts which are far from Christian. My only justification being that this is engendered by reading content that is far from Christian. Inevitably, if we do not have a report on the oxymoronic concept of the Diocesan LGBT Masses it will be an article on the so-called climate emergency.
Blessed are the carbon conscious
The September issue of Middlesbrough Diocesan Catholic Voice contains an article by Sir John Battle, former Labour MP for Leeds West and a minister in the Blair government titled ‘Stop taking a climate change gamble’. A Roman Catholic and made a Knight Commander of the Order of St Gregory by Pope Benedict XVI – who clearly didn’t get everything right – Sir John hinges his argument on the gambling industry and the obvious love of gambling among the British people.
The first quarter of the article, on the popularity of gambling and its possibility of easy returns for one’s money, is rather tenuously linked to the gamble that we are taking over climate change. This expectation of quick profit is blotting out people’s minds to the realities of what we can do to mitigate the damage of global warming.
The customary superlatives are used to support his argument. Thus “wildfires rage” across Europe and “devastating floods” hit Bangladesh. Never mind that the fires in Europe were almost certainly deliberately causedby arsonists and that there have been floods in Bangladesh for as long as anyone can remember. Add to that the news that, far from melting, the polar caps are increasing in size, the polar bears and penguins are thriving and coral reefs are growing. The facts must not stand in the way of a good argument.
After all, there is a “scientific consensus” on the issue and
“daily news reports of worldwide extreme climatic events”. So, it must be true.
Sins of emission
Sir John explains that the much bandied Net Zero mantra“does not mean producing zero emissions but rather taking action to reduce emissions as much as possible”. If so, then why call it ‘Net Zero’ and why does the UK have a target of Net Zero by 2050? According to the University of Oxford’s Net Zero Centre, Net Zero means “balancing the greenhouse gases put into the air with an equal amount taken back out”. That is a subtlety I have never heard any of the zero carbon fanatics explain on BBC Radio 4 Today programme.
Sir John refers to the “merchants of doubt”, pointing the finger at Big Carbon (not Sir John’s description) who have “financial interests” in not reducing our use of hydrocarbon sources. This leads people to doubt anything untoward will happen to them because of climate change due to the gambling mentality referred to in the initial paragraphs of his article. These “powerful vested interests” – spoken like a true socialist Sir John – then try to shift the blame on to consumers and society. But the consumers in turn think ‘why bother?’ when places like China and America carry on emitting greenhouse gases like there is no tomorrow.
Having seemingly criticised Big Carbon and such vested interests in trying to offload their responsibilities for the planet onto the little people, Sir John then quotes arch climate catastrophist Gabriel Winslow-Yost, who reckons climate change to be a “crime” and that we are all “implicated”. Winslow-Yost, clearly a lover of dramatic prose, says, “car rides and plane trips, coffees and burgers, heating and cooling and clothing are paid for in blood, contributing every moment to the suffering and destruction global warming brings”. My goodness, but he sounds like he’d be a regular hoot on a night out, doesn’t he?
The catechism of climate change
As if to give his article some theological clout he quotes Pope Leo who “insists” that climate change is “a scientific reality and a moral responsibility”. I think you’ll find, Pope Leo, that you are wrong on both counts there. Laudato Si’, the late Pope Francis’s execrable encyclical letter, is quoted twice, including his ridiculous exhortation to “ecological conversion”. We Catholics had all hoped for better from Pope Leo, but he seems to have fallen for the climate change catastrophe agenda as much as anyone, referring to concepts such as “environmental justice” and how it is part of the Church’s mission to “promote human dignity, peace and care for creation”.
It is hard to know what lies behind all this nonsense being spouted by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and by senior Catholics who should know better. Are they – as I fear they might be – genuine believers in the climate change catastrophe? Perhaps they are trying to be ‘relevant’ and ‘relatable’ by addressing topical concerns in a vain attempt to fill the pews. If so, why would that work? If people want to hear scientific social justice based gobbledygook, there is always the Anglican Church, the BBC or the Guardian.
The Catholic Church rightly encourages Christians to be good stewards of creation, but has that stewardship begun to eclipse salvation? Reducing carbon emissions seems to be a greater priority than reducing sin. The Church’s unique mission is to proclaim the Gospel, administer the sacraments and prepare souls for eternity. If it chooses to become just another voice in the chorus of climate activism, it should not be surprised if people conclude that it has become more interested in saving the planet than in saving the souls of the people who inhabit it.
File this under “They Have No Shame.” Desperate to regain momentum for Agenda 2030, activists’ new meme is that costs of living are rising because of global warming/climate change. It’s an obvious attempt to deflect from Greenflation due to the so-called “Energy Transition” and to blame realists who dissent from “consensus Climate Science.” Here’s the study from MIT disciples: Why climate change is costing U.S. households hundreds of dollars a year. Excerpts in italics with my bolds,
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., April 7, 2026 – As extreme weather becomes more frequent, climate-related costs are creeping into everyday expenses, adding hundreds of dollars a year to U.S. household expenses. From higher insurance premiums to rising utility bills and disaster-related income losses, climate change contributes to expenses at a time when Americans are already worried about rising food and energy costs. While their list of climate-related expenses is not exhaustive, the researchers found that climate change is already costing U.S. households between $400 and $900 a year, on average. In some places, the burden is far higher: in around 10% of U.S. counties, annual climate-related costs exceed $1,300 per household.
Coauthor Catherine Wolfram:
“A lot of the ways in which we discuss climate now are kind of abstract and in the future — maybe these impacts happen in 2050 or 2100 — but we really wanted to emphasize that this is already occurring and it’s having negative financial implications for households.”
Energy expenses are one important driver in household climate costs.
To estimate the growing household costs of energy from increased use, production disruption, and damage to electric companies’ infrastructure, the researchers compared energy use in 2020 to 2024 with that of 1981 to 1990. Recently, more utility companies have been increasing their rates in response to wildfires and hurricanes, either to fund recovery or to mitigate future damage.
Insurance costs represent another piece of households’ growing financial burden.
The researchers estimate climate change contributed to an average $360 increase in homeowners’ insurance premiums between 1990 and 2023. In some cases, households may be hit twice: by rising utility bills and higher insurance premiums at the same time.
Government climate-related costs are passed on to households
These typically include having to pay to repair schools, roads, bridges, and airports after natural disasters. They found that the annual average per household cost from these expenses from 2017 to 2021 was nearly $150. Other costs, including higher home prices in lower-risk areas and rising food prices from crops damaged during disasters, are likely contributing as well, but are outside the study. Migration costs could also play a role, as people move away from areas experiencing more frequent disasters.
Summary of Costs incurred by households due to climate change
Cost Factor Estimated
Annual Cost
Home insurance premiums
Over $600
Disaster recovery expenses
Varies by region
Increased utility bills
About $35
Health impacts from air quality
Exceeds $100
What They Are Not Telling You
Insurance Companies Making Record Profits Off Climate Change Panic
US property and casualty insurers nearly doubled their earnings between 2023 and last year despite costly extreme-weather events, according to research that highlights the pay-off from several years of rising customer prices.
A survey of companies that account for at least 97 per cent of US property and casualty cover by rating agency AM Best, found that the aggregate after-tax profits of the industry surged to $171bn last year, compared with $92bn the previous year.
Hurricanes, fires and other disasters caused an estimated $320bn of losses around the world in 2024, about a third more than the year before. In the US alone, five big hurricanes as well as other severe storms struck.
However, the data showed insurers more than offset larger losses by increasing premiums. Helen Andersen, an AM Best research analyst, told the Financial Times that the strong earnings figures were the result of “an aggressive push for significant rate and pricing increases” by insurers.
But some consumers — particularly in states historically less affected by wildfires and extreme weather such as hurricanes — have questioned the justification for price rises that have sometimes outstripped inflation.
Unreliable Wind and Solar Power Drives Higher Electricity Bills
EPA Reports US Air is Clean of Unhealthy Pollutants
In this interview, National Post’s Rob Breakenridge speaks with Carleton University business professor Ian Lee about the need for Canadians to accept some of the basic economic realities we’re facing and the potential economic damage from a prolonged trade war. If we’re not careful, Lee warns that we could stumble into a recession or even see capital flight out of the country. For those prefering to read I provide a transcript lightly edited from the captions with my bolds and added images.
RB: Hey folks, I’m Rob Breakenridge for NationalPost.com, and NP comment. Well this unfortunate trade war between Canada and the U.S. has indeed escalated further this week. Canada’s counter tariffs on the U.S. have taken effect and in response the Americans have widened the scope of their own new tariffs on Canadian goods. So Ian Lee, professor at the Sprott School of Business at Carleton University, is joining us for some further thoughts on the impact of this trade war, where this is all going, what Canada’s strategy might possibly be in all of this. Professor Lee, great to have you with us here. IL: My great pleasure. Thanks for inviting me, Rob.
RB: I think a lot of Canadians are looking at this with dismay wondering, you know, how did it get to this point? How did things go so sideways and would it otherwise been a productive trading relationship? Just your thoughts first of all on where we are right now.
IL: It’s almost a tragedy. This is almost a Shakespearean tragedy. I mean I don’t want to become overwrought and over the top but, I’ve been teaching business for 35 years. Before that I was nine years in commercial banking. I’ve lived in this country all my life but I’ve traveled around the world, lived twice in the States on sabbaticals, once in D.C., once in the West Coast just below Silicon Valley. I’ve traveled many, many times across the border because my sister’s an American and I’ve just never seen anything like this.
Our relationship, I mean I’ll say it again, we all know the history, it goes back a quarter of a millennium. It goes back 250 years, way before Confederation. We have the longest border in the world. I won’t even get into the border defended versus undefended. I mean it’s 8,800 kilometers long.It’s stunning. And we have had a pretty good relationship during that time, you know, a few ups and downs. Every now and then Lyndon Johnson got angry at Lester Pearson when he criticized the Vietnam War but by and large it was pretty good. And the trade continues to flow because of the tremendous integration between the two countries and the relationship.
So I’m looking at this and it just seems, I don’t believe that there’s a geopolitical logic to this in the Kissingerian sense. I think that, some emotions have got out of hand, some very unfortunate remarks, yes, and yes, I’m not trying to sugarcoat Donald Trump. I don’t agree with anything he says on tariffs because I support free trade agreements. I supported every free trade agreement since 1988 and free trade agreements take tariffs away. They’re the opposite of tariffs.
But I think that we need to get back to the negotiating table. It’s not going to be easy. It’s going to be hard.Winston Churchill taught us it’s far better to jaw jaw than to war war. War is only the very, very, very last resort. Kissinger taught us that too. So I think there’s been mistakes. Yes, I’m a Canadian so I think more mistakes on the American side but still, I think we have to get back to the table and get back to negotiating because we can’t let this fall apart.
RB: Right. And obviously with Trump the first time around we’ve managed to get a renegotiated free trade deal, what we refer to as CUSMA. Clearly Trump 2.0 has a different, more aggressive trade policy, a more protectionist trade policy and they’ve doubled down on a lot of those elements. Do you think Canadians and maybe this government were not prepared for that shift or they didn’t see it coming or that we just sort of thought that, okay, we dealt with this already. We weren’t going to have to worry about these issues.
IL: I think so, I think that they were honest mistakes on our side. We didn’t realize that Trump 2.0 was going to be much more aggressive in his second and final term, limited by the Constitution, we know that, older, maybe not, maybe not wiser. But certainly more aggressive in his speeches and comments in that secondcampaign. He was much more bitter twisted, you know, in terms of the way he’d been treated by the Democrats. So I think mistakes were made there. We underestimated, maybe we didn’t do our due diligence. And then I think it was, I believe, it was exacerbated. I’m not trying to blame, put on the blame and, you know, I don’t want to offend Andrew Coyne and have him coming after me or anyone else because he makes these arguments that we’re blaming ourselves.
But I know negotiations, whether it’s in a divorce or in a country to country or labor management, and I’ve certainly been involved in two of those categories, it involves both sides and there’s mistakes on both sides in negotiations and there’s interest in both sides. And I think that we used intemperate language at the beginning, at the very beginning. Yes, he was also, but I don’t think we should have responded.
I have all my life, I just believe that using pejorative language and insults is not the way to get a deal. And so I think that we, you know, we let the tempers and the emotions take charge rather than the logic and the data, the reality of the self-interest in the negotiations. So the U.S. imposed tariffs on Canada, the U.S. has imposed tariffs on most of its trading partners, and that’s sort of the approach now of this administration.
RB: In terms of Canada responding and the impact of counter tariffs, and now we’re at the point where, as we mentioned at the outset, things have really escalated between the tariffs and the retaliation. Do we have a good understanding in this country, Ian, of what it is we’re doingand the cost and the impact of these kinds of policies?
IL:I don’t, and I don’t belong to any political party, I do not donate funds to any political party, I don’t have a dog in this hunt, I don’t consult with any of these organizations, but I certainly have been teaching strategy in the capstone course and the MBA program and dealing, of course, necessarily with Canadian-American trade relations, because they are our largest trading partner and have been pretty well forever, and certainly in the 20th century and going forward.
I think that the emotions have become so raw and so heated that we have neglected to look, with very hard nose, at the results and the cost of this. I quote Stats all the time, and I mean Stats Canada Stats, also World Trade Organization Stats, government Stats of trade relations and so forth. We are one-thirteenth the size of the United States, but there’s another figure I want to throw up because, probably people know that one.
You know, they’re 32 trillion, we’re about 2.2 trillion expressed in U.S. dollars in terms of GDP, so they dwarf us. I mean, Pierre Trudeau taught us that, you know, we’re the mouse, they’re the elephant. But there’s a lot of Canadians who say, well, you know, they really depend on us, or they’re dependent on Canada. And this has been driving me crazy because I knew that wasn’t true. I understand arithmetic. The totality of Canadian exports annually are about 400 billion. And most people say, wow, that’s a huge amount of money. It’s 1.5% of U.S. GDP.
The idea that they are dependent and we can, ”bring them to their knees”
is just a denial of arithmetic.
This doesn’t require calculus.This doesn’t require a doctorate in economics. I really am being blunt here. You know, the U.S., if you look from a slightly different angle very quickly, the U.S. trades less with the outside world in percentage terms. The key point is we have to normalize the data to percentages. We can’t talk absolutes because the U.S. is so huge. In percentage terms, the U.S. trades less with the world than any other OECD country. 85% of American GDP is American companies trading with American companies in California or Illinois or, across the U.S., 15% with the rest of the world. And we’re a subset of that 15%.
So this idea that we can bring them to their knees because they’re completely dependent on Canada is just preposterous nonsense.The U.S. has relations with just about every country in the world because most countries in the world want to deal with the largest economy, the world hegemon. And so we do not have the leverage that many Canadians think we have. And so I think that that belief has caused us to perhaps be much less willing to compromise when it is in our national strategic self-interest to compromise.
RB: And maybe in certain states or certain industries, you know, Kentucky bourbon felt like it was punched in the nose. We can make, you know, little scores or little hits here and there. But in terms of something that’s really going to move the needle in terms of the American economy or overall cost pressures, is there much that Canada can do in that sense?
IL: I believe there is. I keep quoting Kissinger just because I’ve always admired him. He’s brilliant. He was a strategy prof at Harvard for 25 years before Richard Nixon appointed him to the administration and he convinced Richard Nixon that his policy of refusing to recognize the largest population in the world called China, red China, was just a bad thing. And he caused the Americans to finally recognize China, even though it was then and now an adversary.
So to your question, I think that our emotions have put us into a box. Our reaction is completely: How can we punch him back? How hard can we punch him back? We think only in mono response.It’s how much damage they just disrespected me. So how much disrespect back do we give? Instead of thinking much more strategically, don’t get mad, get even type of logic, and saying, well, you know, there’s things that the Americans want from us and there’s things that we want from them. They were at the table. People seem to forget when they say Donald Trump doesn’t want to negotiate with us. You and I’ve been involved with the negotiations, not at the country level, but people only go into negotiations because they want something from the other side. If there’s nothing I want from somebody else, I’m not going to waste my time talking to them.
And the Americans were at the table up until the very day that it broke. So there’s something they want from us. And we can look at the record. We know that China has the United States by the throat on critical minerals. We know they’re deeply interested in critical minerals to reduce their dependency on China. We know that because it’s in every just about every article in Foreign Policy magazine, Foreign Affairs magazine in Washington by very senior former decision makers, Republican and Democrat, military, legal, commercial. There is a unanimity in Washington, they see China as a mortal existential threat.
We think that this is all about the United States and Canada. It is not. This is really part of a much bigger crisis that’s going on, the whole debate over the so-called China shock 2.0. And those incredible, unsustainable balances, 1.4 trillion net exports and the Chinese Communist Party, the ruling Politburo has in their five-year plan a very short time ago, has promised to double their exports and their manufacturing.
So if we thought we had a crisis in the last 10 years with over-exporting by China, we haven’t seen anything yet. And so we are really part of a much larger issue. And we’ve got to recognize that, that they’re what they’ve said to us allegedly on China wasn’t because they were trying to ruin us or absorb us or put us out of business. It’s because they are focused on China. We mistakenly think they’re focused on us. I go frequently to the United States, and they’re not paying attention to us, but they are very, very aware of China and in every sense of the word.
And I’m not trying to demonize China. I’ve been teaching in China for a third of a century every year in an MBA program. And my Chinese students are outstanding. They’re amazing. They’re disciplined. I have great respect for the Chinese nation and the Chinese people.
But there is no question the studies have shown the China problem. The anti-dumping tribunals have ruled this, that China is cheating in terms of industrial subsidies, five times what they are in Europe or Canada or the US. German Chancellor Merz said last week said that the currency is undervalued by 30 percent. And that’s been very deliberate to, again, give them a competitive advantage.
So what I’m saying is we’ve got to step back. We, Canada, we the negotiators and say it’s not all about us.And we got to at least acknowledge the bigger, larger context that we find ourselves in and in returning to the table. And maybe that will temper our views so that we can make some compromises. And I think we’re going to have to make some compromises to return to the table.
I’ll be very blunt. I’ll put supply management right at the top of the list. It’s been on the US Trade Rep’s list report tabled in the Congress for 50 years. Every president since Reagan. I’m not here to defend Trump, I don’t agree with him at all. But this notion is false, that he’s made up all these ideas that he’s demanding compromises on and it’s never been demanded before by the US. Canadians should be downloading and reading the US Trade Rep report for each year for the last 10, 20, 30 years because they’ve been saying the same thing over and over and over and over again.
I’m not saying that justifies it, but at least it gives you a better understanding of where these demands are coming from.The way I like to put it very quickly, Rob, is the only difference, fundamental difference, aside from the fact he’s far more vulgar and he uses all kinds of language that’s just horrible. But Trump didn’t invent these grievances. They’ve been there for since Reagan, by and large.The difference between Trump and past presidents was past presidents said, look, we don’t like it.
Obama said that to the House of Commons. I’m two kilometers from the Parliament Hill in Ottawa. And he came down here. He said, we’ve got these unhappy irritants. We don’t like them, Canada, but you’re a great ally.We’ve been allies forever and ever. So we are not going to push it and and make it into a huge crisis, basically, was what Obama said. And past presidents said that, too.
The difference with Trump was he took the same set of grievances, threw in a few more, and then said, and this is not acceptable and I am going to punish you. That’s the difference between Trump and past American presidents. They knew about all these trade irritants.They’d been there for a very long time. We ignored them and they looked the other way. The difference is Trump said, I’m not looking the other way. In fact, I’m going to punish you.
And so instead of saying he’s trying to break us, rather he’s just trying to get to compromise and meet the demands that they want on these issues that are very important to them. We have to decide which ones are worth dying on a hill for and which ones are not that important. I cannot see any serious argument that potentially risking a new CUSMA for 8000 dairy farmers in Quebec so that we can continue to double the price of milk and dairy to low income and ordinary Canadians is a hill to die on. It is just not worth it.
We should do what the Australians and the New Zealand government did in 2000 when they paid off the farmers in supply management, gave them generous compensations and said we are ending supply. And they did. We’re the only country in the world now with supply management. That’s the kind of strategic thinking that we need instead of this emotionalism that is the name calling and so forth, because we need to get back to the table.
It’s in our strategic self-interest. We have this border. We have 50,000 businesses exporting to the US, most of them SMEs. Many of them are undercapitalized, like all SMEs, and they’re at risk of failing if they get lose access to that market. And so we can’t treat these ordinary Canadians and the people that work there in a such a cavalier fashion, such a callous fashion, and just say, too bad, we’re angry at Trump. And so you’re just going to be roadkill. I think we have to develop a more strategic approach that is more sensitive and more aware of the larger context. And we’ve got to get back to the table.
RB: So if we don’t and I guess it’s unclear at this point which way things are going to go. But if we do dig in our heels and this is prolonged with the American tariffs remaining in place, our counter tariffs remain in place. This will put costs, puts costs and pressure on the Canadian economy. How worried are you about the fallout from this trade?
IL: I have already said and predicted from past experience. When I was at the Bank of Montreal, main office branch, Ottawa, right beside Westbrook, Parliament Hill. And that’s when interest rates went to twenty one percent. So when people complain about interest rates going to five or six, I said, that is a walk in the park. That’s a picnic. I was there when lending mortgage money was at twenty one percent. It was just unbelievable.
Businesses were going down like ten pins.The unemployment rate went to the highest level since the Great Depression. So I lived through that. That was the worst recession since the Great Depression, much worse than 2009 or any recession since. And it was horrible. And so if we lose access to the largest economy in the world and we have so many small businesses. And according to stats can data from this morning, they account for 73 percent of all private sector employment in Canada, then I believe we’re going to go into a recession.
And we have to start saying, is that what we want? And can we afford this after doubling the debt because of the covid support? And now we have doubled it. And when you look at federal provincial municipal debt as a percentage of GDP, we’re at the same level essentially as the French. And that’s not a compliment. And that’s not we’re not doing well. Contrary to what Finance Minister Champagne says, because he just cherry picks the federal debt and doesn’t include all of the debt, which is the normal practice for the international financial institutions.
So my point is, you know, we could be looking at because, of course, we’re going to support these people. Of course, we’re going to have to inject enormous amounts of stimulus.And this comes right after covid. And it’s so unnecessary. And I still don’t see the exit ramp. So we do that. OK, great. So we do that for six months. Now we’re going to do it for another six months, do it for another year. We can’t do that indefinitely into the future. There’s got to be an exit ramp and we can’t just go on and on and on like this.
And that means, in my judgment, that we must return to the table. Yes, make some compromises on the things that are not critical in a national strategic sense and then negotiate a new deal. And it may be only for two years because we think that, after he leaves office, we can negotiate a better deal. OK, I mean, I have no problem with that, but forget this idea that we can just wait him out and suspend the Canadian economy somehow. We’ll just, you know, suspend it, you know, and if you can’t access the U.S. economy for the next two years, the private sector, well, it’ll come back maybe in two years.
You can’t run a country like that. You can’t run a society saying, well, we we think and we hope and we really are counting on maybe perhaps possibly getting a better deal in two or three or four years. We can’t go down that road. We have to deal with the facts as they are on the table.We have to deal with the reality. Pierre Trudeau famously said to govern is to choose to make tough choices. We it’s now the time for leadership in Canada to make tough choices and have a conversation, a blunt adult conversation with the Canadian people, putting facts on the table, telling Canadians they’re 13 times bigger.They are the world hegemon.
No, we’re not going to lie down on the railroad tracks and let them run over us.
But we are going to have compromises to enable our business sector to
prosper because we don’t want to slide into a recession
or something even worse with capital flight.
Rob, very quickly, I know I’m talking too much, but what really terrifies me is the capital flight. And people say and I get emails, well, this this product, a hockey stick or something, we can live with that. And so they try and nibble me in an argument, you know, this little, micro tariff on this product, can we take the hit? That’s not my fear. It’s not the specific tariff of a specific industry or specific product.
My fear is what the KPMG study showed three weeks ago. Forty two percent of manufacturing businesses in this country are actively examining, moving to the States. In the words of the World Bank, that’s called capital flight. And it’s experienced normally, typically in developing third world countries that are massively mismanaged. Argentina has experienced massive capital flight. Russia has been experiencing massive capital flight the last three or four years.
And and when that capital leaves, those factories aren’t coming back.Those businesses aren’t coming back. They’re not going to say two years later, OK, you changed your mind. You figured out your problems in the States. I’ll come back now. Once they go, they’re gone. And that’s the backbone of our country.They employ 16 million of the 20 million Canadians.
The idea that the public sector is going to save us by buying some submarines and some helicopters is just fantasy. We’ve got to have a vibrant private sector.And so that’s why we’ve got to have a much more tough conversation and put some frank data on the table, one of which is that we cannot bring the US to its knees because that we are a tiny part of their economy.
And I’m hoping that Prime Minister Carney has some kind of a fireside chat with Canadians, a la the Roosevelt back in the back in the back in the in the Depression when he had those fireside chats telling everybody how horrible and terrible life was. He didn’t sugarcoat it.He showed leadership. Same with Winston Churchill. You know, yes, he had optimism, but he said these are very, very dark days.I remember him because my late father was a Brit.
They showed leadership in tough times.They didn’t pander to our worst emotions and anger. And so I’m hoping that Prime Minister Carney will show that leadership and have that tough frank talk with Canadians, because something like 75 or 80 percent of Canadians are saying things like don’t give up a thing to the United States.
Well, we don’t give up anything, then we’re not going to have a deal because negotiations involve giving and taking. That’s what negotiations are. And so that’s what we need in this country. And is that kind of that very hard nosed, tough minded conversation with the Canadian people in a fireside chat and not pour gasoline on the raging fire, making it even more inflammatory and inflamed?
RB: Well, we shall see.Professor Lee, really appreciate the insight. Thank you so much for joining us here. Thanks very much, Rob.Thank you. Really appreciate it. Ian Lee, professor of the Sprott School of Business at Carleton University.My name is Rob Breckenridge. Thanks again for joining us here.
Lucy Biggers of Free Press interviews US Energy Secretary Chris Wright regarding the paramount role of energy development and access for civil and social wellbeing. For those who prefer reading I provide a transcript lightly edited from the captions with my bolds and added images LB refers to comments from Lucy Biggers and CW to words from Secretary Wright.
LB: Wright has one of the most consequential and least understood jobs in Washington. As Trump’s Secretary of Energy, he oversees the department responsible for shaping America’s energy future, directing billions of dollars in research and development, influencing which technologies are built and scaled, and helping set the policies that will define the country’s energy system for decades to come. Under Wright, the Department of Energy has taken a sharp turn away from the policies of the Biden and Obama administrations.
Instead of a major focus on climate change and a renewables-first agenda that sought to reduce reliance on fossil fuels: “The United States will be 100% clean energy economy with net zero emissions.” Wright has embraced the policy of what he calls energy abundance, an all-of-the-above strategy that prioritizes expanding access to all energy sources, including fossil fuels.
The bet of his administration is that long-term human prosperity depends
not on using less energy, but on producing far more of it.
It’s an approach that has its detractors, but one that the administration has shown it’s not scared to pursue. As a former climate activist who once believed in climate doomerism and now believes this fear-based narrative left out important parts of the story, I sat down with Secretary Wright to understand what an energy abundance mindset looks like in practice and why he believes it offers a better path forward for America and the whole world.
Secretary Wright, welcome to The Free Press. Thank you so much for being here today.
LB: So for people who aren’t familiar with your worldview, can you kind of explain how you think about energy compared to maybe what we see from the news and the mainstream?
CW: Yeah, but if you’re not in the energy business, I totally get why would people know the energy business? It’s complicated and if your energy system works, why would you even worry about it? I’ve just always looked at how does energy impact the quality of your life or anyone’s life? It is the transformative agent that created the modern world. Human life expectancy was 30 years, 20,000 years ago.
Energy Sources and the Rise of Civilization. Source: Bill Gates
Human life expectancy at birth was 30 years, 200 years ago. It was only really the large-scale arrival of coal that gave so much more energy, that made agriculture more efficient, that allowed people to do things. Ultimately, the arrival of oil that allowed the development of modern medicine, well, average life expectancy at birth today is over 70 years.
That’s energy delivering that. Energy delivers the public health benefits that spread to everyone, but not everyone lives a highly energized life. Only about a billion, Lucy, live like you and I and your listeners. We got climate-controlled rooms, we got lights, we take buses and trains and planes and- Running water. Running water. I mean, that stuff’s awesome.
But only about a billion people have that fully energized life. About seven billion people, I’ve met a lot of them, not all seven billion, but I haven’t met one of them that doesn’t want a lifestyle like you and I. The only road from where we are today to that road is just massively more energy. I’ve been all in on more energy my whole life.
LB: When you entered office, what was the state of our energy system based on your predecessors?
CW: The Department of Energy, where I am, didn’t want to touch hydrocarbons, didn’t want to be photoed with anything associated with hydrocarbon. All of their money was wind, solar, and batteries, which is 3% of global energy, about 3.5% of American energy. Then decarbonization things, like if you did carbon capture at a coal plant. You couldn’t talk about coal plants, but they wanted to look at technologies to capture carbon. In fact, they funded a project that was decarb mac and cheese. Like a giant food company that makes mac and cheese, they were giving them grants, tens of millions of dollars to change their process to reduce the CO2 emissions from the production of mac and cheese.
So just crazy. All it meant is if you did that process, like mac and cheese is a little bit more expensive, and they thought, well, people don’t care. They’ll just pay a higher price. What’s the benefit of minute decarbonization? The honest answer to that is zero. Were they shutting down coal plants? Absolutely. The administration, their scoreboard on energy was shutting down as many coal plants as they could have.
In fact, when we got into office, the plans in place and the resource plans for utilities across the country were, over the next five years, to shut down a net 46 gigawatts of generation. So that’s like 40,000 homes. So 100,000 people. I mean, it’s huge. And they’re shutting down firm generation, meaning that it works 24-7 whether or not the wind is blowing or the sun is shining.
We also think the arrival of AI now, and people want to restore manufacturing here, modern manufacturing. We’re going to have robots and automation. So our projections show we need about 100 gigawatts, which is a huge number of additional generation in the U.S. over the next five years. And we inherited plans that were going to be minus 46. So then we’d have to build 150 to get up to our 100. So we thought, well, let’s stop digging the hole first. Then we must only build 100 instead of building 150.
LB:The Trump administration is represented in the media by most of our outlets. The headline, they’re saying, oh, they defunded renewables. Isn’t this so evil? Bring people over to how you see it.
CW: I say energy is just about humans and math. We produce energy to make people’s lives better. And of course, environmental impacts factor into that. Clean air, clean water, beautiful wilderness. We care. If you become wealthy humans, you care about all those things. And so to me, it’s just about doing the math. And as I mentioned, the world has spent $10 trillion on wind, solar, batteries, and the transmission to connect these remote resources. And it’s 3% of global energy.
And if you have high concentrations of renewables, like the countries that have led in this, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Denmark, they have the largest percent of those resources. They have the three most expensive electricity prices in the world. I mean, it is massive. And of course, what it did, for example, in England, it just deindustrialized the country. The government had to step in about a year and a half ago to stop the closure of the last steel furnace in the country.
This is the fifth largest economy in the world. And the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution was not going to make one scrap of steel in their country. You cannot have a modern world without steel, cement, plastics, and fertilizer. Vaclav Smil, the greatest energy scholar of our time, calls them the four pillars of the modern world. We use 20% of energy, global energy, just to produce those four materials. But if you want any of the things you’ve got in your life, you can’t survive without those four materials. But they’re energy intensive to make.
So in the United Kingdom, they have the largest reduction in greenhouse gases. They’re very proud of that. They’ve reduced their greenhouse gas emissions by about 40%. What they don’t tell you is they’ve reduced the total energy production in their country by about 40%. So they’ve just exported all their industry. It used to be in a natural gas powered plant in the Midlands of England. Now its same product is built in a coal fired power plant in China, loaded on a diesel powered ship that ships halfway around the world, delivers it to a dock, and it’s loaded on a truck, and they deliver it to their house. And they call that green. That’s clean and green.
You’re just moving emissions. That’s not reducing emissions.
That’s just impoverishing people and sending jobs out of your country.
There’s roles for solar. Remote African villages to charge cell phones. There’s going to be power in space. We use solar panels in space. So there’s roles for it. But is the world ever going to run on solar panels and wind turbine? Absolutely not. Two reasons of that. England, as I said, has gone so crazy. They’ve tripled their electricity prices. They plummeted their industry. You know what percent of energy in this wind, solar gone wild country? 6% of the primary energy. That’s like the peak. When the sun’s shining and the wind’s blowing perfectly. But they have so much that their total energy is still only 6%. England, that went crazy on this, gets 75% of its energy from oil and natural gas.
You can’t run a country or a modern world. You can run an electricity grid some of the time without them. But electricity is just one slice of energy. In fact, to build solar panels or to build wind turbines or to build batteries are massively hydrocarbon intensity, which is why most of it’s built in China. You need lots of high temperature heat, lots of energy in manufacturing, lots of energy used in the mining of it. And then the materials themselves, they’re made out of hydrocarbons.
LB: Those blades, giant wind turbine, those are oil. I think for most people, the big thing on their mind when it comes to our energy system is climate change in our energy system. So I really want to hear from you. How do you factor in climate change when you’re making decisions?
CW: Yeah. So look, I’ve been fascinated by climate change for 25 years. And the more you look into it, it’s a real thing. We’ve increased atmospheric CO2 concentration from a little less than 0.03% to a little more than 0.04%. 50% increase. So it’s not nothing. It does absorb infrared radiation. It is contributing to the warming of the planet and will continue to for quite some time. So it’s a real issue. It’s just not even remotely close to the world’s biggest problem.
I mean, if you were honest, it wouldn’t make a top 10 list. And so they used to try to sell people fear about: it’s so hot and we’re not going to be able to go outside. It’s so crazy. I mean, if it’s warmed in Fahrenheit 2 degrees over the last 125 years, we can change the room you and I are in by 2 degrees and I wouldn’t even notice. Maybe you might, but I’m not that sensitive. I wouldn’t even notice 2 degrees in like 20 minutes. So 120 years, it’s not nothing, but it’s not that big of a deal.
That turned out to be a tougher sell. So they moved it to extreme weather because hurricanes and tornadoes, these things are terrifying and they are big. But of course, and it’s in the IPCC (intergovernmental panel on climate change) reports, there’s no trends in the increasing in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes, of tornadoes, of floods, of drought. And so then it was about deaths from them.
My Mind is Made Up, Don’t Confuse Me with the Facts. H/T Bjorn Lomborg, WUWT
And of course there is a massive trend there. We went from 500,000 people a year on average dying back in the 1920s from extreme weather globally. That’s massive. Last year, just under 10,000 deaths. So from 500,000 down to 10,000, that’s a 98% decline. And we have four times more people in the world.
So the thing about extreme weather is awesome. Hydrocarbons and great energy have just made life so much safer. And those 10,000 deaths are still tragic. And they’re in low income countries that don’t have modern construction and modern energy to make them robust and safe from that weather. More hydrocarbons, more hydrocarbons are what’s going to save those 10,000 lives. We still have death from extreme weather, not less hydrocarbons in theory to change the weather because it doesn’t.
LB: It will slightly change the rate at which the planet’s warming, but no one noticed that. You hear net zero, I think was this big thing everyone wanted to go for for a while. Explain what are the follies of net zero and the downsides of that.
CW: This comes from the Paris Climate Gathering, this Congress of the parties of the annual climate gathering. And it actually came from activists. This was not a scientific thing. Even in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, they do their own economics. Their own 2050 is a colossally bad idea that the cost to achieve it is something like 10 times the potential benefits and reduce climate damage. William Nordhaus, who won the Nobel Prize on climate economics, did an economic analysis of this, saying you should only reduce greenhouse gas emissions in areas where the cost to reduce them is less than the benefits you gain.
It’s just sort of how we look at everything else in life. I wouldn’t spend $10 for something I valued at 50 cents, but that’s what we do in the climate world. We spend $10 for maybe a quarter or a nickel or a dime of potential benefits. Net zero 2050 is really just a massive human impoverishment program.
LB: And then you have your own 2050 goal, which would be end energy poverty by 2050. Yeah, people want a passionate, aggressive goal.
CW: It’s realistic that we could massively reduce and effectively end energy poverty by 2050. And to give a little color on that, there’s about 2 billion people, a quarter of humanity, that still cook their daily meals and heat their homes or huts burning wood. Could be agricultural waste or dung, but it’s mostly wood indoors, just like all of our ancestors did.
Just like I do when we go camping in the woods when you can build a wood fire. If you’re high on glaciated mountains, you carry propane, you’re in the modern world. But in these 2 billion people that live that way, the World Health Organization estimates 2 to 3 million deaths from the indoor air pollution from burning that, from particulate matter. These are low temperature fires. It’s incomplete combustion. You’ve got smoke and particulates in the air.
That’s why I launched a Bettering Human Lives Foundation to make small loans to businesses that are delivering clean cooking fuels. To me, that is the biggest global energy challenge by far. Climate change isn’t even on the map compared to clean cooking fuels. We can save 2 to 3 million lives a year with technologies we already have today. And as we are customers in Africa, that’s neat. Maybe it’s going to make them live longer, but that’s not their motivation at all. Their motivation is it liberates women. Women do all the manual labor in traditional societies. And if you’re in Africa or South Asia, the women are getting up before the sun is up to gather wood, to start the fire, to cook the morning meals. Then they tamp the fire down. They don’t want to put it out, but they tamp it down so it won’t consume too much wood. They tend to that fire.
And then at the end of the day to cook the evening meal, they’ve got to stoke it back up. They just spend hours over this fire and gathering wood. Pretty much limits their life possibilities. And of course, the children are with them as well. They’re all suffering these health impacts. But for our customers there, it’s about liberation of women. You get a propane cookstove and you open the knob and you light the thing. You can cook. You can leave it on at low level and heat it at night. You can turn it on and off in like a flip of twisting a little knob. It’s just game changing.
I was at an event four or five years ago. There was a COP in Glasgow, COP 21. I don’t know, it was several years ago. 19 of the wealthiest nations in the world, the European nations, the United States, Canada, all pledged that they would no longer lend to the developing world for anything related to hydrocarbons. Think about that. In the United States, all of our countries run on hydrocarbons over 85% of our energy. Even in England, just oil and gas are 75%.
But they thought they were doing a good thing to pledge that they would not help those two billion people that want better lives and longer lives and healthier lives and liberated lives, that they would stand in the way of that. They thought they were proud of that. That was repulsive to me. I aggressively called this out, including the guy who was behind it, who later denied, we didn’t do that. But we did do that.
LB: You look in the US, I think, luckily, we’ve missed out on most of the insanity. But you have California, which I think has doubled down a lot. They have $8 gas in some places. They have the second highest electricity bills in the country. It is crazy what happens in California.
CW: Yeah, California, they used to have similar electricity prices to Florida. Today, they’re more than twice as high as Florida. Just in the last 15 years, this has been driven. Here’s another funny fact. Even though they have way more people than Florida, California produces 20% less electricity than Florida does, but at a way higher cost.
They have declining electricity production. Maybe most telling, they have the highest adjusted poverty rate of any state in the nation. Just because people that make a wage that would be not a bad lifestyle wage in middle America, it’s just very hard to live in California, to pay very high utility bills, to pay very high gasoline, to fill your truck, to go to your job.
They’ve made life really rough in California for low-income people, which has been my passion. What we want energy to do is to lift people up, give them broader life opportunities, longer lives, higher quality lives. Enjoy the wonderful things you and I enjoy, Lucy, and in our own country. California just pedals hard against that. They keep just so many millions of people needlessly in poverty
As he said, on a climate perspective, they don’t even move the needle. California gets a greater percent of its energy from oil and gas than the rest of the country as a whole. 76% of all the energy consumed in California comes from oil and gas. It’s not like they’ve gotten rid of oil and gas. They’ve just made them more expensive. They’ve just made it harder for people to pay their bills. They’re not changing at all global greenhouse gas emissions. The biggest source of electricity, all the money is in the electricity sector. It’s just one sector of energy. But what’s the biggest source of electricity in California? It’s natural gas.
LB: What’s the second biggest source imported from other states? Have you done the numbers or have other people done the numbers? If we were even to go to net zero, say the dream is accomplished, we accomplish this utopia, what is it?
CW: It would prevent 0.1 degrees of warming, maybe, hypothetically. If the US did, yes. I did this. if the whole US went net zero, you wouldn’t quite get to 0.1 degrees C reduction in warming. That’s like a century or more out from here. It’s just nothing. In Colorado, my own state passed a law of it. It wouldn’t even be close to 1,100th of a degree. We couldn’t even measure that difference.
When these states pass these net zero policies, they think they’re saving the climate. All they’re doing is making energy more expensive in their state. Economic activity just moves out of their state. They aren’t even doing the reductions they think they’re doing. Most of it’s just moving emissions from this jurisdiction to that jurisdiction. The atmosphere doesn’t care where the emissions came from.
LB:Offshoring or manufacturing to China and India where these places don’t have the policies that we have. The emissions just move there. Exactly. I would say, yeah, United Kingdom, you could argue their net impact on emissions has been up, not down.
CW: Right, because it’s going to dirtier places. From natural gas manufacturing to coal manufacturing, and then all the massive transport to move the goods back around the world back to the UK. To me, climate change is a real thing. I’m interested in it. The only needle mover so far has been natural gas. If nuclear energy becomes huge, today it’s still less than 5% of global energy, but someday I think it’s going to be 30, 40, 50. It’s going to be a giant percent of global energy. That may be generations from now, but we want to get that ball moving because it can be a giant global energy source.
Wind and solar never can be because they’re very energy intensive to make them. They only work intermittently and they take so much land. They’re only in the electricity sector. All the electricity sector combined around the whole planet delivers 20% of global primary energy. They’re going to top out. You can’t build solar panels and wind turbines without massive hydrocarbons. They’re never going to be meaningful to global energy supply.
Nuclear can be meaningful to global energy supply. It’s just much more energy dense. It works 24-7.
You can get not just electricity, you can get process heat out, which is the biggest and most important form of energy. It’s high temperature process heat to make steel, to make cement, to make aluminum, to make polysilicon, to make plastics, to make all of the materials that make our lives possible.
LB: What is your priority right now as Energy Secretary? Is it grid reliability? Is it affordability? Is it all of the above? What do you think?
CW: It’s all of the above. We better energize our country. People are frustrated because in the Biden administration, electricity prices went up 30% and we didn’t produce any more electricity at the end. We didn’t get any benefit. We just got higher costs. No meaningful movement on greenhouse gas emissions. What we want to do is stop the rise in electricity prices, ultimately see them go down. We want to see a lot of jobs in manufacturing come back to our country. We’re building a new aluminum smelter in the United States. We’re reshoring semiconductor manufacturing.
We’re still going to trade with the rest of the world. All that’s going to happen, but more of this should be built in the United States. With these intelligence factories, data centers, they consume a lot of electricity, but they deliver just massive productivity. They’re going to raise people’s income. They’re going to help us find cures for cancer. They’re going to help us find cures for all sorts of conditions that are death sentences today. Our kids are going to live a longer, healthier life than previous generations because the pace of innovation is going to be unbelievable.
LB: Let’s talk about AI data centers a bit because they seem to be the new enemy number one, kind of like fracking was, I would say, in the 2010s where everyone was freaking out about fracking. Now everyone’s freaking out about AI data centers. They’re guzzling water, electricity. Can you give me the facts on what is the reality of this situation? It’s the same script, the same facts, and the same people, and the same groups. It’s just easy to sell fear, and it’s hard to sell reassurance.
CW:They say they guzzle energy. They’re driving up your electricity prices. The data is actually the opposite. The states with the fastest demand growth with electricity have the best price performance. The states with the fastest rising electricity, like California, Massachusetts, and Maryland, they actually have declining demand for electricity. When you build a new data center, you’ve got to build a new electricity generation together with it, which is what we’re doing right now.
You build more generation than the data center will consume. The data center builders will pre-fund the generation of this. Then we sign these multi-year, three to five-year rate freezes on electricity. I mean, dead in its track, the rise in electricity prices is over. In fact, that’s the start of the pathway. Because they’re adding more to the grid? Because they’re adding more to the grid than they’re going to be consuming from it, and they’re adding reliable, dispatchable sources. The greater percent you have of reliable electricity, the lower your electricity prices are going to have. The more intermittent sources you have, the more kit you have to operate to deliver the same amount of electricity, it’s just more expensive.
LB: You could see places like Apple or Google, these places building these AI data centers, which are private companies, essentially adding to the grid because they need the capacity?
CW:They are doing that today. Google did a great deal in Georgia, signed an agreement up front to build, to invest, to build this new electric generating capacity while they’re building their data center. They got a four-year rate freeze before their data center is even done. Everyone in Georgia that had these huge electricity price rises in the last three, four, five years, they’re not going to have them the next three or four years.
Same thing in Alabama. We did the same thing in Indiana. Now, it’s not statewide yet, but it’s in the regions where these data centers are. The more these data centers go in, the more we’re going to stop all of the rises in electricity. The more we’re going to grow jobs in those areas, particularly blue-collar jobs. By this, making it hard to permit and build stuff in our country, we sent so many of these manufacturing jobs overseas and we stripped our rural communities of a lot of their job base.
This led to opioid and depression and all sorts of social problems, as well as the economic problems.
Data centers and reshoring manufacturing is going to bring
high-paying jobs back to those regions and areas.
In fact, we’re quickly going to go from people struggling, they’ve got good skills, but they can’t find a job. We’re going to have a shortage of people with those skills. I’m going to welcome this because it’s already raising wages and it’s going to get more people in high school to say, hey, maybe I’m good with my hands or I’m super interested in building and repairing things, as most kids are. That’s an awesome career opportunity. I’m going to develop those skills. I’m going to get out of high school and two years later be making $100,000 a year and have a career path to double and triple my income in the next few decades. That’s restoring the American dream to people that don’t live in New York City and are highly successful.
LB: One more thing before we move on from AI data centers is the water. That’s just one thing I hear so much. I believe it’s very overstated, but you’ve seen AOC has a jug of dirty water in Congress. What’s going on with that?
CW: It was the same thing they said with fracking. It’s taking all the water. It’s just complete nonsense. We trotted out the numbers. Golf courses use four times more water than all the fracking in the whole United States. Golf courses use far more water than all the data centers in the United States. In fact, most of the new data centers now are built with these closed-loop cooling systems and they use almost no water. You take these giant data centers. We visited one in Iowa. It’s 600 acres, so almost a square mile, but it’s $55 billion that are being invested in there. 10,000 high-paying jobs. It’s incredibly exciting. That 600-acre data center will use the amount of water equivalent to farming corn on two acres. It’s just a tiny amount of water. The water thing is just, if you can scare people about water, you can scare people. It’s just pure fiction, but it works, but it’s false.
LB: If you’re looking ahead at the energy mix, it’s nuclear, natural gas. What does that mix to you, ideally?
CW: Those are the two biggest drivers for sure. If you want to build new generation today, what’s the most cost-effective? I mean, natural gas just hands down. The United States just has a massive amount of natural gas. 20 years ago, we had 1,000 rigs drilling for natural gas in the United States. We were the biggest importer in the world of natural gas. Today, we’re the largest exporter of natural gas in the world. We’ve more than doubled our production, and we have a little over 100 rigs running for natural gas. Think of that efficiency and technology. Just 90% less drilling rigs, massively more production, and just centuries of gas.
I went to MIT to work on fusion energy. That’s going to come too. That’s what powers the stars. It’s so exciting. We’re going to deliver that too. The challenge is going to be just making those machines cheap enough and economic enough that that makes sense to grow it. But humans are ingenious.
I suspect we’ll figure that out. Fusion will be a major energy source. In another generation or two, it’s coming.
LB: You’re prioritizing energy abundance. You’re rejiggering the entire globe around oil. I do think that the work you’re doing is still commando, but it’s not breaking through to the average person yet. I feel like there’s still this feeling of despair, and things are getting worse, and the AID centers are ruining the planet. Do you think there’ll become a point where what you’re doing will become just impossible to ignore?
CW: I think it’ll be during this administration, because I’ve done a lot to engage in dialogues with Democratic senators and Democratic governors. How much do you hear about climate change from Democrats now? Massively less. When you do, it’s the wackos on the far left. The more moderate Democrats, I was shocked to hear them say climate crisis, and we’re going to prevent this. If you met them at a cocktail party dinner, these are normal people. We’re saying just crazy stuff about climate change. We published a paper last summer from the DOE, an overview of climate change by five awesome climate scientists. We’re bringing out the facts that you talk about, Lucy, straight to the politicians in Washington.
Of course, a lot of them are realizing, they may have gone a little too far on that. The New England governors that didn’t want more natural gas to come to New England, all of them say, yeah, we want that pipeline now. We are changing the Overton window of what’s possible in politics permanently.
If crazy AOC becomes president, that pendulum will swing back, but it will not be able to go back to where it was, because it was just so foolish. Too many people are puncturing that bubble. By making energy more expensive and claiming you’re saving the world from climate change, you’re not moving global greenhouse gas emissions, and climate change is a slow moving thing.
We should stop scaring kids, running around with our heads on fire, preventing young people like you from wanting to have children because they think the world’s falling apart. How do we ever make a world a better place by making young people pessimistic and fearful, and wrongly pessimistic and fearful? That’s just crazy town. What we’re trying to do is engage, engage, engage on those dialogues, on those discussions to make people realize energy matters, cost of energy matters to the quality of people’s lives.
The world just needs massively more energy. I’m not an advocate for one energy source or the other. I’m just an advocate for humans and math. The advantages of oil, gas, and coal today are so compelling, but to me, that’s the excitement. Let’s drive nuclear forward. Let’s make it so it is compelling. It can compete and ultimately displace hydrocarbons. The next generation downhole geothermal that I first worked on 30 years ago and then more recently, that is coming. There’s a 400 megawatt, firm, reliable, dispatchable power plant being built in Utah. Gigawatts of new geothermal power will be developed in the Western United States and could ultimately be deployed in the Eastern U.S. in the near future.
Fusion energy’s coming, you know, any new energy innovations and technology, we’re for all of them. We are still researching in our labs on new solar technologies. We’re truly the ones for whatever works, whatever the mass supports. What we’re not for is subsidizing some energy technologies that we know have a low ceiling, making energy more expensive, and trying to strangle the stuff that actually works and is realiable and affordable. We’re just trying to bring common sense and science back. And by doing that, the world is going to be better energized. Economic opportunities are going to grow Costs are going to go down, and people are going to be more optimistic about their futures. The next generation is going to have the greatest world ever. I can’t wait to see it unfold.
LB: So, you think electricity costs are going to come down? You think that will happen?
CW: They’re going to freeze first, which in inflation-adjusted terms is equivalent to coming down. And then 5 to 10 year down, if we continue these policies, you will start to see electricity prices coming down even in nominal terms.
LB: And $2 gas, is that in my future?
CW: It certainly could be. Gasoline prices are going to continue to lower throughout the Trump administration because we’re growing energy production. We’re just bringing common sense back to the processes to deliver gasoline to your house and all that. In inflation-adjusted terms, gasoline will continue to go down meaningfully in percent of your wallet, percent of you pocketbook, which is really what matters. You know, gasoline prices could be near an all-time low by the end of the Trump administration.
This is the latest and greatest meme to scare the world of climate collapse, and it is gathering momentum and triggering followers. A sanity check is published at climatetippingpoints, despite they also being prone to CO2 Hysteria. The article is Fact-Check: have actuaries predicted that billions will die beyond 2 degrees? Excerpts below with my bolds and added images and comments.
Roger Hallam (the co-founder of climate activist groups like Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil) has widely promoted this, repeatedly stating for example that “the British insurance sector once did an analysis showing that at 3 degrees Celsius of global warming, 4 billion people could die — and at 2 degrees, 2 billion lives could be lost. But that’s not even the full truth — it’s the minimum.” Hallam has also notedthat the trial of some Just Stop Oil activists (which resulted in acquittal) included the court taking “4 billion deaths at 3°C” as an “agreed fact“.
Based on this analysis, Hallam has co-founded a new campaign called ‘4 Billion Dead‘ (4BD), explicitly referencing the 3°C-based number in its name, connecting it to an outlier estimate of 3°C by 2050 (itself based on a linear extrapolation of just the last few years’ warming), and using it as the basis for planning and promoting a new civil disobedience campaign:
So where did these numbers come from then, and are they reliable?
[However, details in the Risk impact matrix give the game away–see below]
Does this confirm then that the Planetary Solvency report is predicting there’ll be 2 billion dead at 2°C or more, and over 4 billion deaths at over 3°C? It may seem like it, but the answer is actuallyno – the numbers in this dashboard and supporting appendix are labelled as illustrative (as flagged above both instances, including on the latter that it is “not a prediction or central scenario“).
This means these are justhypothetical numbers to show how such a dashboard would work, and not empirical predictions or projections based on some underlying analysis. This has been confirmed by speaking to one of this Planetary Solvency report’s authors, who agreed that these numbers aren’t based on a specific scientific analysis (with no associated calculations on death numbers presented in the report’s supplementary material either, unlike for GDP), rather being meant as a hypothetical illustration of a worst-case scenario to measure risk against, to be followed later with more detailed empirical analyses. Critically, the worst-case scenario here is implicitly part of a spread of many potential outcomes at 3°C, rather than 3°C itself being the worst-case scenario with these numbers the expected outcome if it is reached.
This means that even taking this report as it stands (leaving questions around the robustness of the magnitude of these death and GDP numbers to other posts), these numbers cannot be treated as predictions by actuaries (which implies an empirically-grounded expectation of the most likely future resulting from 3°C), in contrast to how they’ve been referred to in the earlier quotes, social media posts, and campaigns. Instead, they can at most be interpreted as (and for clarity should be communicated as) provisional expert ‘guesstimates‘ of a potential worst-case scenario, which was used to test-run a climate risk analysis methodology,
The UK insurance industry has not predicted mass death then, and four billion dead at 3°C is not an agreed fact but a misunderstood hypothetical worst-case scenario awaiting study. Some of the example reactions above could be down to an honest but widespread misreading, given that media outlets at the time reported these numbers like they were empirical estimates and lacked subsequent pushback (e.g.The Guardianarticle in January 2025), and skim-reading the report itself one might miss the “illustrative” labels.
It might be argued by some promoters that presenting this scenario as a prediction made by a respected body anyway is useful for promoting appropriately urgent action, but such misrepresentation runs the risk of fuelling scepticism or fatalism too. [You Think?]
There have been various reports, including some reposted here, about the Climate Crisis narrative losing its grip on the public and leaders. Signs the fad is waning include some advocates like Bill Gates recanting, ESG financiers like Larry Fink backtracking, falling media coverage and closure of some climate units, and the recent admission of implausible climate model scenarios.
Even so, there are still many in its thrall, and it’s important to understand how climate doomster culture took over and continues to demand attention and deference. Garry Rogers provides a brief and insightful analysis of how this happened, and why its influence is rightfully dwindling. His blog article is Why So Many People Fall For The Climate Crisis Narrative. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and some added images.
You’ve seen them. Earnest young activists shouting at clouds, gluing themselves to museum walls, and blocking traffic with coroplast signs warning that the world will end in twelve years unless we obey their vision of salvation—complete with windmills, solar panels, and vegan diets. They’re the same people Xing and Instagramming about carbon footprints from their iPhones made in Chinese factories run on sulphur and lignite coal-fired electricity.
It’s easy to dismiss them as naive or misguided, but the uncomfortable truth is this: many of these people are neither stupid nor insane. They are simply caught in a powerful psychological, cultural, and financial machine that has turned “climate change” into a form of religious belief—a doctrine too sacred to question and too profitable to abandon.
Let’s set something straight. I’m not a climate change denier. Climate change is real. The Earth’s climate has always changed. And it always will—human-contributed through emitted greenhouse gas or not.
But the apocalyptic narrative that dominates headlines, policy, and corporate strategy today isn’t just about facts. It’s about framing—about controlling how people think, feel, and act in relation to a deeply complex system they barely understand. And that makes the climate crisis one of the most successful psychological operations in modern history.
In this post, we’ll take a hard look at why so many people have bought in—blindly and without skepticism—to the idea that we’re on the brink of planetary collapse, and that the only solution is top-down control, mass compliance, and the destruction of energy systems that built the modern world.
Some of what I’m going to say may be uncomfortable to some, and I know some
will unsubscribe. But that doesn’t make it untrue, and this needs to be said.
The Climate Crisis as a Religion (aka The Church of Carbon)
First, let’s call it what it is. For a growing number of people—especially in the West (Europe particularly included)—the climate crisis has become a belief system. It functions just like a fundamentalist religion, complete with original sin (industrialization), prophets (Greta, Gore, Gates), sacred texts (IPCC reports), rituals (recycling, carbon offsets), heretics (climate skeptics), and a promised apocalypse for those who fail to convert.
It’s not about science anymore. It’s about meaning. People—especially young people raised in secular cultures—are starving for purpose. They want to feel morally righteous, socially important, and part of a grand, redemptive story. The climate narrative offers all of that in a tidy, emotionally satisfying package. It turns ordinary people into saviors. It makes them matter. You can’t underestimate how powerful that is.
Fear is the Fuel
The second driver is fear. For decades, we’ve been bombarded with doom-laden, global-warming headlines: ice caps melting, oceans rising, hurricanes and tornados worsening, apocalyptical flooding, forests burning, deserts parching… The messaging is relentless—and expertly crafted to trigger our limbic systems. When people are afraid, they don’t reason. They react.
This isn’t new. Back in the 1970s, experts warned of an imminent ice age. Then came acid rain. Then ozone depletion. Each time, the world was supposed to end unless we handed over more power to government, more money to NGOs, and more control to unelected technocrats.
It’s always the same pattern:
Declare a crisis.
Blame human behavior.
Offer a sweeping solution that just happens to consolidate control.
The only difference now is scale. The climate crisis is global,
not regional. And the proposed solutions are systemic, not marginal.
The Collapse of Critical Thinking
But fear alone doesn’t explain the blind belief. There’s another piece of the puzzle: the steady erosion of critical thinking. Schools no longer teach logic, debate, or how to evaluate competing hypotheses. Instead, they promote conformity, activism, and groupthink. You don’t learn how to think. You learn what to think.
By the time students hit university, the programming is complete. Professors reinforce the dogma. Campus culture punishes dissent. Climate change isn’t a topic for exploration—it’s a moral litmus test. Students who question it risk grades, reputation, or worse. Being cancelled.
So, they comply. They absorb. They repeat. And when they graduate into journalism, academia, NGOs, or politics, they carry that unexamined belief system with them—passing it on like gospel.
The Media Echo Chamber
The next layer is media. Legacy outlets like CNN, BBC, CBC, and the New York Times frame climate change in religious terms: “Climate emergency,” “existential threat,” “code red for humanity.” Any nuance is treated as heresy. Any questioning is framed as denialism.
Science itself has been rebranded. Instead of a method of inquiry, it’s now a set of conclusions—conveniently aligned with elite interests. The phrase “The science is settled” is a dead giveaway. No real scientist would ever say that.
Meanwhile, dissenting voices—many with serious credentials—are marginalized, shadowbanned, or censored outright. Their data doesn’t fit the narrative. Their views make people uncomfortable. So, they are erased.
And most people? They never notice.They assume if something was true, they’d hear about it. But when every channel is playing the same tune, they don’t realize they’re listening to a carefully curated soundtrack.
Social Conformity and Virtue Signaling
But here’s the deeper truth. Most people don’t believe the climate crisis because they’ve studied the data. They believe it because everyone else does. That’s the power of social conformity. Nobody wants to be the outlier—the one who raises their hand and asks the uncomfortable question. Especially in a culture obsessed with virtue. Believing in the climate crisis is a modern form of moral signaling. You drive a Tesla. You compost. You use a keep-cup. You care. You’re not like those backward Boomer-deniers who love oil and hate penguins.
You’re evolved
You’re ethical
You’re better
That’s what this has become—not a conversation about climate,
but a competition for social status.
And once belief becomes part of your identity, it becomes non-negotiable. Any challenge feels like a personal attack. Facts don’t matter. Feelings do.
Follow the Money
Now let’s talk about power.
The climate industry is worth trillions—yes, trillions of dollars. It’s the perfect grift: a never-ending crisis that justifies endless funding, regulation, and surveillance.
Governments rake in carbon taxes.
Universities secure research grants.
Corporations get ESG ratings and subsidies.
NGOs fundraise on fear.
It’s an entire ecosystem of incentives,none of which reward skepticism or moderation. And when that much money is on the table, the truth becomes secondary to the narrative.
Even energy companies play along. They don’t want to be regulated out of existence, so they slap green labels on their products and talk about “net zero” while quietly hedging their bets. It’s theater. Everyone’s pretending. But the costs are real.
China’s Role in the Global Equation
While the West ties itself in knots trying to decarbonize, one country is playing a different game entirely: China
Beijing talks green, but burns black. Coal remains its dominant energy source, powering steel, manufacturing, and military growth at a staggering scale. As of 2024, China alone consumes over half the world’s coal supply—and shows no sign of slowing down.
They’re not stupid. While we argue over wind farms and carbon credits,
they build aircraft carriers, drones, and power grids.
While we teach kids to fear climate collapse,
they teach theirs to master engineering and geopolitics.
They make the solar panels we install. They mine the rare earths we need. They profit from the very policies we impose on ourselves. And we call that progress.
Weaponized Guilt
So why don’t people wake up?
Because they’ve been trained to feel guilty. Every gas-guzzling SUV trip, every propane-grilled burger, every jet-fueled flight—is framed as a moral failing. You’re killing the planet. You’re harming future generations. You’re part of the problem. It’s exhausting, and it’s effective.
People internalize this guilt. They try to cleanse themselves through ritualistic consumption: reusable straws, oat milk, biodegradable trash bags, canvas totes at the farmer’s market. None of it makes an infatismal sub-fraction of a surface dent in global emissions—but it feels redemptive.
That’s the point. It’s not about fixing the planet. It’s about managing the soul.
The Useful Idiots
Now we come to the crux.
The term “useful idiot” originated in Soviet times. It referred to Western sympathizers who unknowingly supported the goals of a regime they didn’t understand. They weren’t evil—just naive, manipulated, and eager to be on the “right side of history.”
That’s where we are today. Millions of well-meaning people have been seduced by a narrative that exploits their fears, flatters their vanity, and blinds them to the larger game at play. They march, post, and protest—believing they’re saving the world, while unwittingly aiding those who want to dominate it.
They’re not villains. They’re pawns. And when you try to wake-the-wokes, they look at you like you’re the crazy one. Then they viscerally turn on you.
What’s At Stake
Here’s what’s really at stake. If we continue down this path, we don’t just risk economic collapse or energy poverty. We risk civilizational suicide. We are dismantling the very systems—energy, industry, sovereignty—that made the modern world possible.
And we’re doing it not for the planet, but for appearances.
Meanwhile, the nations that reject this ideology are gaining power, leverage, and independence. They’re not afraid to use fossil fuels while experimenting with futuristics. They’re not ashamed of their ambitions. And they’re not held hostage by narratives designed to make them feel guilty for existing.
They’re playing to win. We’re playing to look virtuous. That’s a losing hand.
So, what do we do?
First, stop apologizing. There is no shame in using energy. Civilization runs on it. Human flourishing depends on energy, regardless of how it’s generated. Without it, we return to darkness—literally and figuratively.
Second, think for yourself. Ask questions. Follow incentives. Trace the money. Be skeptical of anything presented as a one-sided moral truth.
Third, reclaim courage. Don’t be afraid to speak the truth, even when it’s unpopular. Especially when it’s unpopular. History doesn’t remember those who went along to get along. It remembers those who stood up, pointed at the naked emperor, and said, “This is madness.”
And finally, understand this: We are not in a climate crisis. We are in a clarity crisis. Clarity—real, hard-won, human clarity—is the first step back to sanity.
The next time someone tells you the world is ending, ask who’s funding the message—and what they’re selling with it. Because if you look closely, you’ll find it’s not about saving the planet. It’s about controlling the people on the planet by getting them to fall for the climate crisis narrative.
Charles MacKay: “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
Energy in Depth (EID) reports on climate litigation falling cases in the current year, leading up to a major SCOTUS hearing later this year. Most recent article is Maryland’s Climate Lawsuits Quietly Hit a Dead End. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
In 2018, climate activists hailed Baltimore’s lawsuit against energy companies as “the next in a growing wave” of climate liability lawsuits. Eight years later, that wave has crashed in Maryland.
For the climate litigation campaign, that silence is telling. These cases were once promoted as part of coordinated legal strategy to force energy companies to pay for global climate change through local courts. Instead, Maryland’s highest court delivered one of the campaign’s clearest defeats yet – rejecting the lawsuits from top to bottom.
A Major Problem for the National Campaign
Maryland’s final defeat comes at a critical moment. The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear an appealof the Colorado Supreme Court’s refusal to dismiss Boulder’s climate lawsuit. When granting review, the Court also asked the parties to brief whether it has jurisdiction to review the ruling at this stage in the litigation.
The Maryland Supreme Court’s now final decision answers that question.
In the Maryland Supreme Court’s ruling, the justices were explicit about why: they wanted to give SCOTUS:
“the benefit of a high court’s analysis that is different from that expressed by our colleagues on the high courts of Colorado and Hawaii.”
This created a clear split between Maryland’s Supreme Court and state supreme courts in Colorado and Hawaii that ruled against the companies. Now, SCOTUS has clear jurisdiction to review the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling and has an opportunity to put an end to the nationwide lawfare campaign against the U.S. energy industry.
Maryland Double Whammy: Dismissed on Federal Grounds – and State Grounds Too
Writing on behalf of the 6-1 majority, Justice Brynja M. Booth delivered a clean sweep against every theory the climate litigation campaign has thrown at the courts – ruling that these claims fail under federal law, and under state law too.
The court firmly dismissed plaintiffs’ attempts to reframe their sweeping federal claims as local matters, making clear that such claims fall squarely within the domain of federal law:
“We are unpersuaded by the local governments’ myopic view of their claims or their attempt to ignore or minimize the effect that a significant damages award would have on both domestic and international attempts to regulate pollution—matters which are solely within the purview of federal law.” (Emphasis added)
The court was equally clear that local governments lack the basic jurisdictional authority to police global conduct:
“The local governments cannot escape this inescapable conclusion: they are seeking to apply Maryland law to regulate conduct that occurs outside their jurisdictional borders, as well as within the State’s borders. The local governments’ police powers do not extend beyond their respective borders, and certainly do not authorize the policing of global conduct.” (Emphasis added)
But the majority didn’t stop at federal preemption. It ruled that even if federal law didn’t preempt these claims entirely, the plaintiffs still had no case. Their nuisance, trespass, and failure-to-warn theories each failed independently under Maryland state law, leaving plaintiffs with no viable path forward in any court:
“Even if the local governments’ state law claims were not displaced or preempted by federal law, the local governments failed to state legally cognizable claims under state law for public nuisance, private nuisance, trespass, and negligent and strict liability failure to warn.”
The opinion also delivered a direct rebuke to the plaintiffs’ core liability theory: that the production and sale of oil and natural gas is a liability-inducing event:
“No single extraction decision, no single sale of fuel, and no single consumer transaction creates a foreseeable risk of harm to any identifiable person.”
That language echoes warnings from other courts. In South Carolina, a judge dismissed Charleston’s climate lawsuit by flagging the same problem: accepting plaintiffs’ theory would open the door to “boundless” liability.
Climate superfund bills–Retroactive Punishment with a Misnomer Name
Climate superfund bills – which are designed and pushed by the same activists behind the litigation campaign against oil and gas companies – have been introduced in over ten states and signed into law in two, Vermont and New York. These state superfund laws are now facing steep legal challengesfrom industry groups, other state attorney generals, and the Trump administration.
One of the sharpest concerns raised during the panel was the constitutional flaw at the core of these bills: retroactive liability. Climate superfund laws aim to penalize decades of past activity – activity that was lawful and, in many cases, encouraged by government policy. As GMU Professor Donald Kochan explained:
“If every time you lose in court and can’t actually prove that someone is responsible… you just go to the legislature and say, ‘Hey, why don’t you deem them responsible without any proof’—that’s a really dangerous change and shift in our Democratic and Republican values.”
This approach raises due process concerns and opens the door to politicized, retroactive punishment across a range of industries, not just energy.
Experts also pushed back on the “superfund” label, calling it a misleading analogy. The EPA’s original superfund program, also known as CERCLA, pooled funds for cleanup at specific contaminated sites. But, as Kochan pointed out, unlike hazardous waste, climate change is a global issue with no discrete damage sites or direct remediation:
“There’s all kinds of reasons why these are not Superfunds. One is that there’s nothing remediated here… These labels were done for convenience sake, to make it sound like it wasn’t such a deviation from norms to do this kind of thing.”
Instead of remediation, the real purpose seems to be punitive: to create a system of endless liability that ultimately puts fossil fuel companies out of business.
Consumer Costs and Chilling Investment
Even if courts eventually strike these laws down, their economic effects will be felt immediately. C3 Solutions’ Ian Banks noted that companies are already reconsidering development plans in states that have proposed climate superfund laws, and that hesitation impacts consumers:
“These companies are going to have to pay billions of dollars… It’s going to discourage them from continuing to take action in these states. And likely, these costs will get passed on to consumers.”
This dynamic is playing out in real-time in California. As EID Climate previously commented, California’s own climate superfund effort stalled earlier this year after lawmakers raised red flags about affordability and fairness. Still, California has seen a policy-driven exodus of energy companies and infrastructure, contributing to its high gas prices. This outcome suggests that even in deep-blue states, reality catches up to rhetoric when bills come due.
The Role of Attribution Science
One of the pillars supporting climate superfund legislation is a relatively new theory: source attribution science, which claims to link specific weather disasters to individual companies’ historical emissions. Kochan noted that this theory has yet to withstand courtroom scrutiny:
“We’ve not yet gotten to the trial stage in any of these cases… because plaintiffs haven’t yet had to prove traceability, causation, and harm. But when we do, the scientific evidence standards should keep this science out.”
Professor Weinkle, who holds a PhD in Environmental Studies and Public Policy, added that source attribution research is increasingly shaped by litigation and advocacy goals, instead of neutral science – a dynamic that undermines its credibility in policy contexts.
The Writing Was on the Wall
Lawmakers in Maryland have long seen the signs that this climate litigation lacks legal merit. Recognizing this, they pivoted, joining New York and Vermont in pursuit ofRockefeller-funded “climate superfund” efforts that retroactively charge energy companies for the costs of climate adaptation projects.
Even those superfund efforts in Maryland have faced hurdles. Maryland’s own climate superfund bill was downgraded to a study amid bipartisan concern about the impact on energy affordability. That pivot reveals the basic problem. If activists cannot get courts to impose sweeping climate liability through nuisance, trespass, and failure-to-warn claims, they will try to get legislatures to impose the same costs by another name.
But Maryland shows both paths face serious legal, fiscal, and affordability concerns.
Bottom Line: Despite activist promises, Maryland’s climate lawsuits have quietly joined the growing list of failed attempts to bankrupt the U.S. energy industry. The Maryland Supreme Court’s ruling also came at the perfect time, as the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments in Boulder’s similar climate lawsuit.
Kite and Key explain how and why US and Canada electricity is on the brink of blacking out when needed. For those prefering to read, below is a transcript with my bolds and some added images.
Five seconds. That’s about how long you’ve been watching this video. And in 2025, it was also the amount of time it took for 60 percent of the electricity supply in Spain … to vanish from the country’s grid. Which led to 10 hours of darkness — in parts of four countries. It’s a nightmarish scenario — and there’s a good chance that it’s coming to America soon.
Electricity. It’s the backbone of our entire world.
Your house. Your town. Your … excessive enthusiasm for Christmas. We build our lives around the assumption that when we flip a switch, it’ll be there for whatever we need — whether it’s controlling the climate in our homes, refrigerating our food, or just making sure the neighbors can see you’ve portrayed Santa committing a class B felony.
And, when you consider the history, you can see just how quickly we’ve gotten used to this. When Thomas Edison opened America’s first commercial power plant in 1882, it served 59 customers in lower Manhattan.ii By the time another 40 years or so had passed, America’s electricity consumption looked like this:iii
By 1929, the U.S. was generating more power than the rest of the world combined.iv And in the century since, our appetite has only grown. In 2025, the government’s Energy Information Administration reported that the country consumed 14 times more electricity than it had in 1950.v
All of which sounds like a standard story of progress: As the decades pass, and technology evolves, things that once seemed miraculous become so commonplace that we can take them for granted.
But here’s the thing: We should definitely not be taking them for granted. Because the days of assuming we know what’s going to happen when we flip the switch … may be coming to an end.
In 2023, members of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission — the government body that regulates electricity transmission — appeared before a Senate committee with a series of dire warnings.
One of them testified that “We face unprecedented challenges to the reliability of our nation’s electric system.”vi
Another said that “The United States is heading for a very catastrophic situation in terms of reliability.”vii
And then he added “This problem is coming. It’s coming quickly. The red lights are flashing.”viii
And while we don’t like to editorialize here at Kite & Key … that sounds bad.
The data shows that these concerns aren’t exaggerated.
In 2026, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation — the body charged with making sure that the power grid is dependable — warned that nearly half of America’s population was going to be at high risk of rolling blackouts in the next few years.ix
In fact, by the end of the decade every single region of the U.S. and Canada is projected to be at least elevated risk … with the single exception of the Canadian province of Saskatchewanx — which makes sense because Saskatchewan literally has more cows than people.xi
So, if there’s a blackout there … well, you know what happened.
But all of this leads to an obvious question: How does this happen? It’s been almost 150 years since Thomas Edison got the ball rolling and somehow we’re getting worse at this? What’s going on here?
To unravel this mystery, go back to those officials testifying before Congress.
One of them summed up the problem in four words: “The math doesn’t work.”xii
Here’s what he meant by that: In many cases we’re actually losing power — as in, we’ll have less of it in a few years than we do now.
Take, for example, the PJM Interconnection, the country’s largest power grid operator, which serves 65 million customersxiii in 13 states.xiv
In 2023, PJM issued a report estimating that it might lose about 40 gigawatts of electricity — more than 20 percent of its capacity — by the year 2030, thanks to power plant retirements.xv
Which isn’t the end of the world, right? You just bring on new power sources! Which is what they’re doing!
Here’s the problem: The high-end estimate of those new sources … is a little over 30 gigawatts.
In other words, they’re replacing 40 … with 30.
Also known as: “The math doesn’t work.”
And similar situations are happening all over the country.
Why? Well to understand that, we have to understand how the economics of electricity works.
And you might be thinking “But, Kite & Key, that sounds excruciatingly boring.” And it is, dear viewer!
Or at least it would be if you hadn’t chosen the one channel that understands it’s so boring that you have to explain it with the assistance of adorable puppies dressed as economists.
Here’s the way this all goes down: In any given part of the country, you might have lots of potential sources of electricity — natural gas, solar, coal, wind, nuclear. And at any given moment all those sources are selling power at different prices.
Now, the decision as to which one to use is not made by you, the customer. It’s made by the people responsible for coordinating the system, who take bids from electricity producers — sometimes as often as every five minutes — and buy whatever options are cheapest at the time until they’ve got enough power to meet demand. None of which seems crazy — adequate energy at low prices is pretty much what everyone wants.
But here’s where this gets complicated: In some cases … cheap electricity comes with unintended consequences.
Here’s what we mean.
Not all energy sources are created equal.
Map of Diminishing Capacity Values for Major RTOs (Regional Transmission Operators)
Some of them like nuclear and most coal plants are what’s referred to as “baseload power” — they can essentially run all the time.
Others like natural gas plants are “dispatchable,” meaning you can quickly turn them on or off depending on demand.
Then there are sources like wind and solar which are “intermittent” — in other words, you only get power from them when the weather is cooperating.xvi
And this is where the problem creeps in.
In 2024, the government reported that wind, on average, only produces energy about 1/3 of the time.xvii For solar, it was less than 1/4 of the time.xviii By contrast natural gas was around 60 percent and nuclear was at 90 percent.xix
But when wind and solar are working they can be incredibly cheap. In fact, because they’re heavily subsidized by the government, their prices can actually go negative — they can pay the grid to take their powerxx — and still stay in business.
Needless to say, all the other electricity producers … can’t do that.
Which makes them less profitable.
Which leads an increasing number of them to close.
Which leads to a world where we’re increasingly dependent on
electricity sources that literally don’t produce any energy most of the time.
Those 40 gigawatts PJM may lose? Almost all coal or natural gas. The up to 30 gigawatts that will partially replace it? Mostly wind and solar.xxi
Which is the kind of thing that leads otherwise boring bureaucrats from places like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to yell “the red lights are flashing!” at members of Congress.
Because by privileging the energy sources that work the best some of the time
… we’re gutting the energy sources that work the best all of the time
— the ones that actually determine whether you’ll have power.
There’s no doubt that wind and solar are going to be important parts of America’s energy future. But imagining that they can carry the burden of the entire system today is risking disaster.
When wind and solar can’t produce, we rely on sources like nuclear, natural gas, and even coal to keep the lights on.xxii But if we cut out that part of the equation — if we don’t build to ensure resiliency — we’re placing our standard of living on a knife’s edge. And if we get that balance even slightly wrong, well…
