Society in General | Science Matters

Decoding the Flailing Climate Alarm Story

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.

Background Resources

Why Climate Alarm is Fading (Matt Ridley)

No, WSJ: 9 Reasons Why “Green Energy” Makes Even LESS Sense Today

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.”

US Climate Law Dominoes 2026

Posted on 16 Days Ago by Ron Clutz

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.

The ordinary 90-day window to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review the Maryland Supreme Court’s March 24 decision has passed without fanfare, leaving the dismissals of Baltimore, Annapolis, and Anne Arundel County’s climate lawsuits intact.

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 appeal of 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 challenges from 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 of Rockefeller-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.

Unreliables Made US Power Grid Fragile

Posted on 22 Days Ago by Ron Clutz

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 Saskatchewan^x — 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 customers^xiii 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 power^xx — 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…

No, WSJ: 9 Reasons Why “Green Energy” Makes Even LESS Sense Today

Posted on 26 Days Ago by Ron Clutz

Green Energy is a mirage that retreats as you approach.

Terigi Ciccone wrote an Open Letter to Ed Ballard Re: “Why Green Energy Makes More Sense With Each Price Shock” (WSJ, April 9, 2026). Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Open Letter to Ed Ballard
Re: “Why Green Energy Makes More Sense With Each Price Shock” (WSJ, April 9, 2026)

Dear Mr. Ballard,

I have sent you several detailed emails over the past few years outlining the engineering and economic realities of integrating variable renewable energy (VRE). You have never replied. Your latest column—celebrating the Iran/Hormuz crisis as yet another “proof” that solar-plus-battery is now the rational choice—is the latest example of journalistic cheerleading that substitutes press-release optimism for rigorous system-level analysis. As a power-plant design engineer with decades of hands-on experience specifying dispatchable generation, I write this open letter to correct the record, not in theory, but in the hard language of capital costs, ancillary services, capacity factors, and ecological externalities that your piece airbrushes away.

Your star exhibit is the Philippines’ MTerra Solar project: 3.5 GW solar + 4.5 GWh battery storage, fast-tracked amid LNG shortages, now supposedly delivering 13 hours of power “marginally below” LNG cost. You quote Actis investor Rahul Agrawal: “This is not theory. This is actually happening on the ground now.” Indeed, it is—but the ground truth is far uglier than your narrative admits.

1. Intermittency is not a rounding error; it is the dominant cost driver. Even with batteries, MTerra is engineered for ~12–13 hours of mid-merit output. The remaining 11–12 hours (and any multi-day typhoon-induced lull) still require dispatchable backup. My own peer-reviewed analysis of ancillary-service burdens shows that adding solar and wind to a reliable grid inflates total system costs by 135–235 % once frequency regulation, inertia, voltage support, and ramping are properly valued. The raw LCOE of ~$40/MWh becomes a delivered cost of ~$500/MWh.
See: Terigi Ciccone, “A Narrow Lens on Ancillary Services: Overlooking the Full Costs and Ecological Damage of Solar and Wind Integration”

2. The “phenomenal” price drop in Chinese panels and batteries is a geopolitical trap, not progress. You correctly note falling panel costs, but you fail to mention that China controls ~85% of solar manufacturing and ~80% of the battery supply chain. Swapping Middle-East oil dependence for Beijing’s critical-mineral monopoly and state-subsidized overcapacity is not energy security; it is energy servitude. When those subsidies or export policies shift, the “cheap” becomes expensive overnight.

3. Full-system costing reveals multipliers your LCOE ignores. Economist Bjørn Lomborg has repeatedly documented the same reality using Value-Adjusted LCOE (VALCOE). A peer-reviewed study he cites shows that once reliability and backup are included, wind power becomes 11–12× and solar up to 38–42× more expensive than combined-cycle gas turbines (CCGT).
Bjørn Lomborg, “Why solar and wind power aren’t winning,” Financial Post, 17 April 2024
(Identical findings appear in Lomborg’s “The True Cost of Wind and Solar Energy,” NH Journal, 20 May 2024.)

Figure 4 – International Domestic Electricity Prices (p per kWh). UK has the highest domestic electricity prices in the IEA.

My own comparison of 1 GW reliable output at 99.9 % uptime reaches the same conclusion: onshore wind requires 5.6× and offshore wind 7.2× the capital investment of a CCGT, once overbuild, storage, transmission, and peaker plants are added.
See: Terigi Ciccone, “The Well Hidden and Distorted Costs of Renewables: A Comprehensive Comparison of Wind Power and Combined Cycle Gas Turbine Plant”

Typically as wind and solar power share of supply increases, distribution and transmission costs rise sharply.

4. Academic “System LCOE” literature confirms the same directional truth— Falko Ueckerdt, Lion Hirth, and colleagues introduced System LCOE precisely because standard LCOE is misleading at high VRE penetrations. Their 2013 analysis (and subsequent updates) shows integration/profile costs can equal or exceed generation costs themselves once wind shares exceed ~20 %. At the levels now being forced, those costs become an economic barrier.
Ueckerdt et al., “System LCOE: What are the costs of variable renewables?” Energy 63 (2013) 61–75

5. Ecological and material externalities are catastrophic. Your column is silent on land use (10× that of nuclear or gas for equivalent firm power), avian/bat mortality, 78 million tons of non-recyclable solar waste projected by 2050, and the concrete-steel-copper footprint of batteries that must be replaced every 8–12 years. My third paper tallies these hidden costs in full.
See: Terigi Ciccone, “Revised: Let’s Make Electricity Affordable Again”

Moreover, the raw-material demands are staggering. Utility-scale solar and wind installations consume vastly greater quantities of concrete, steel, copper, silver, rare-earth elements, and other minerals per unit of firm, reliable electricity than any dispatchable source. This triggers massive mining operations with severe habitat destruction, water contamination, and toxic tailings. Manufacturing these components remains overwhelmingly dependent on fossil fuels for the energy-intensive processes of silicon purification, steel smelting, and mineral extraction. In full life-cycle terms, many VRE systems may never recover the total primary energy invested in their construction, installation, maintenance, and eventual replacement—rendering the entire enterprise an energy and cost sink rather than a net contributor.

Drone footage shows hundreds of solar panels ripped apart and scattered across farmland after a powerful tornado tore through Wheatfield overnight. Homes in the area also suffered heavy damage as the violent storm carved a path of destruction. Photo credit Joemar Sombero

6. Real-world stress tests expose the fantasy. Philippine typhoons shred solar farms; Florida hurricanes do the same. After every major storm, we see acres of twisted panels and batteries that cannot survive Category 4 winds. Yet the same voices warning about climate risk keep prescribing an energy system that collapses precisely when the weather turns ugly.

7. Ultimately, we are inflicting these enormous costs for no good reason. The entire policy edifice rests on the assumption that anthropogenic CO₂ is the primary driver of dangerous warming. In reality, CO₂’s greenhouse effect is already near saturation in its principal absorption bands; additional emissions yield only minuscule marginal forcing. The true temperature powerhouses on Earth are gravitational auto-compression (the dry adiabatic lapse rate driven by atmospheric mass and pressure) and the dominant water-vapor/latent-heat cycle, which together govern the vast majority of Earth’s energy balance.

We are dismantling reliable, dispatchable power systems, subsidizing
foreign supply chains, and covering productive land in fragile panels
—all to chase a trace-gas tail that cannot wag the climatic dog.

8. Increased atmospheric CO₂ is demonstrably greening the planet. NASA satellite data confirm that rising CO₂ has driven substantial global greening over recent decades. The increase in leaf area is equivalent to twice the size of the continental United States, with CO₂ fertilization responsible for approximately 70 % of this greening across 25–50 % of vegetated lands. Far from harming the biosphere, higher CO₂ levels are enhancing vegetation growth, boosting agricultural yields, and expanding natural habitats worldwide.

9. Humans are not the sole source of rising atmospheric CO₂. As I document in detail in “Revised: Let’s Make Electricity Affordable Again,” natural sources—including volcanic activity, oceanic degassing, and other geological processes—play a far more significant role in the global carbon cycle than the prevailing narrative acknowledges. Attributing nearly all recent increases to human emissions oversimplifies complex geophysical realities and ignores the “Volcanic Vibes” that have shaped atmospheric CO₂ long before industrial civilization.

Mr. Ballard, energy crises do not “hammer home” the virtues of green energy. They expose its fatal engineering defects: zero inertia, negative correlation with demand, dependence on foreign supply chains, and an energy return that fails even basic life-cycle scrutiny. The rational response is an all-of-the-above portfolio anchored by dispatchable, high-capacity-factor sources—modern CCGT, nuclear (including SMRs), and geothermal—with targeted renewables only where they demonstrably lower system cost without compromising reliability.

Your repeated refusal to engage with the peer-reviewed literature or
practicing engineers suggests a commitment to narrative over evidence.

I invite you, once again, to reply—publicly or privately—and defend your claim that solar-plus-battery “makes more sense with each price shock” once full system costs, ecological and material realities, geopolitical risks, and the actual physics and benefits of atmospheric CO₂ are included. Until then, this open letter stands as the record of your April 9 column that you omitted. Let’s bury the narrative. 🔥

Respectfully but firmly,
Terigi Ciccone Ret. Gas Turbine Engineer for power generation and aviation, an independent researcher on climate, Sarasota, Florida, USA

Carney’s Energy Ruse–Pipeline to Nowhere

Posted on July 11 by Ron Clutz

A recent interview exposes how centrist politics and climate obsession corrupt energy investments, in this case to the detriment of Canada. PM Carney is running a charade which will not bode well for Canada, according to this interview of Energy industry expert David Knight Legg by National Post’s Rob Brackenridge. Excerpts from the transcript are below with my bolds and added images. First a reminder of where PM Carney is coming from:

Greetings, folks, I’m Rob Brackenridge for National Post and NP Comment. Alberta has now officially submitted a proposal to the federal government Major Projects Office for a new pipeline to the West Coast. Presumably, that will be fast-tracked by the federal government. We’re expecting that designation of this being in the national interest from the Prime Minister by October. But is all of this enough to really get Canada to where it needs to be, to really fully embrace the opportunity that presents itself and to be that destination for investment and be a global energy superpower?

Well, someone who’s been watching all of this very closely is David Knight Legg. He is a director and an advisor to a number of energy, financial and tech firms, a former principal advisor to Alberta’s premier, former CEO at Invest Alberta Corporation. David, so great to have you with us here. Great to be here, Rob. Great to see you again. Likewise.

It’s been an interesting couple of days. Clearly, the current premier of Alberta has put a lot of work into this, and is trying to pull, I think, the federal government in a much different direction from where it’s been over the past decade. How significant is this milestone, do you think, first of all?

Well, Rob, you know, it’s always hard when you sit outside something as complicated as a negotiation between Ottawa and Alberta, which has skeptics in both their bases, as I’m sure you know. And I had a good conversation with Jason Nixon (Alberta Minister of Finance) last night about it, met the premier briefly. I think it’s really important and I think that it’s not perfect. These deals often aren’t.

But I think one of the testaments to how important it is, is how close it came to being derailed in a variety of ways, just as a little bit of the backstory. And I think that, you know, you sometimes have to take the win that you’ve got. Actually there are a lot of things I’d be critical about. I don’t think it goes far enough.

And I think we have a fundamental problem in a regulatory regime,
which means that governments have to get this involved
in getting basic infrastructure built.

In other countries, you don’t need governments announcing these things. You don’t need a most favored nation status for a project. You have very simple, clean regulations, low taxes, and you allow people to build as long as they meet basic criteria. And I think it’s the absence of that that has become more apparent to more people because of the MOU.

So I think one of the benefits of the MOU has been that it has started a conversation that’s been needed for a long time in Canada over just how hard it’s become to build anything here without official government sanction. And I think that’s a conversation that’s going to continue to persist as this project works its way forward. Yeah, even just the existence of the the major projects office, the Building Canada Act, I mean, it’s a recognition that we have all of this red tape in the way and we create this separate track to try to bypass it. But it just kind of leaves everything else still in place. Right.

So in a way, it’s an acknowledgement that we have that problem, but it doesn’t really address it at the same time. That’s a great that’s a great point. In fact, I think that’s a great way to put it. And that’s actually a conversation that really needs a national conversation that needs to happen.

If you have to create an entirely separate bureaucracy to avoid your current bureaucracy, it might be time to reform your current bureaucracy rather than set up a new set of channels and processes that ultimately are privileging things that still require the government to lean in. And it creates a greenhouse for favoritism and, you know, trying to get the attention of the government to trying to do things rather than a level playing field where anybody can come in and innovate and create. And I think as a nation, we’ve got to do better than this.

You know, it just it looks like 1970s style industrial policy rather than a fair, free, open, entrepreneur led marketplace of ideas and and opportunities. And you have to believe that there are really creative ways of thinking about things that would be initiated across Canada right now if the regulations were simple, the taxes were lower and the process was clear. We’re seeing under this prime minister a little bit of slow dismantling of a lot of the Trudeau legacy, which is maybe long overdue and perhaps needs to be expedited to some degree.

But what does it tell us about then the missed opportunity of the last decade and and all of the cost, all that was wasted as we sort of lived and endured under those policies? You know, Rob, I think one of the things that’s really interesting is Mark Carney was the heart of a lot of those policies. And, you know, half of me believes, you know, that’s what makes him the perfect guy to dismantle them because nobody else is going to be as credible with that liberal base as he would be at turning back some of the environmental overreach that’s restricted the ability to build in Canada. On the other hand, I think that there’s this temptation within this Carney government to maintain control over economic development in a way that means that they constantly have their hand on the wheel.

They’re constantly fidgeting with what they can release. And this is problematic because you will never have government sanctioned projects move as fast as projects that are originating in the private sector and originating with people that are, you know, have to make a bottom line work. So I think, you know, the dismantling of the Trudeau era is so important for the country to move forward, but that’s not sufficient. It’s essential, but it’s not enough to actually start to get the economy rolling again. And you saw this in this really odd condo deal that that happened and a lot of these things where there’s a constant attempt to use government money. We don’t have it.

You know, they’re borrowing it to expand the bureaucracy and also to expand the government reach into things like housing, energy. You know, these are sectors that in most countries are managed without the government having to intervene. Yeah.

And it’s interesting because you mentioned the economy, and obviously that’s an impetus. I know there’s provincial federal dynamics. There’s the energy side of things, but there’s just, you know, when you look at the economic challenges Canada is facing right now and how lethargic our economy has been, the global headwinds we’re facing, the trade uncertainty with the United States. If we’ve got economic advantages, if we’ve got strength, I mean, now’s the time to exploit those advantages. Is there a dawning realization, just with everything that we’re facing now, that we have all of this in front of us? I think so.

I think it started with a paper by Stephen Miran who went on to be the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers for the US president back in November 24, when he said the United States should embark on this. This is what the president ended up adopting as formal policy, should embark on a process of integrating its national interests in energy security, military security, and trade security. And immediately they went for Panama. They’re doing deals around the Straits of Malacca. They’re, of course, active in the Straits of Hormuz with Iran, Greenland. They immediately went to taking Venezuelan oil over. I don’t think there’s been enough coverage of that, and that’s one of the things that led to the article that I wrote, which is when the Americans took over the Venezuelan energy supply, the Chinese lost 550,000 barrels of heavy crude, which is chemically identical to what we produce. It opens up an opportunity for us to have a $15 billion a year trade with the Chinese government just on that one replacement supply chain alone. And the idea that we had Northern Gateway effectively blueprinted already, that that’s a 565,000 barrel pipeline that could easily get there.

When you look at why Northern Gateway was ultimately cancelled, it’s a series of just self-imposed rules that have nothing to do with ultimately helping the environment, even though they’re dressed up that way. When you double-click on those rules, they do nothing for the environment, and in some ways they just sort of imagine that Canada can’t do things. We look at a tanker ban and we think the whole world is moving this stuff by tank. Are we the only country incapable of operating shipping and ports in environmentally sensitive areas? We don’t back ourselves enough to figure out that we could still do it as Canadians if they can do it in 50 other countries.

So there’s a lot that I think happened during that Trudeau era that we’re going to have to answer for. And I think we’re starting at least to have the right conversations. And yesterday’s announcement was an important step towards, I think, government saying we need this pipeline. I still dislike the fact they’re putting themselves in the position of being the ones to back it and treating pipelines more like airports or something. That is maybe being realistic about what you do if you do have a kind of very statist government environment. But it would be better if we could go back to a being a nation where free market entrepreneurialism didn’t require a constant government sanction. Yeah, there’s that.

I mean, I think one of the positives here, I mean, with Trans Mountain, we faced a real backlog when it came to the capacity pipeline capacity. Right. So with this, I think there’s the investment, the spinoff that comes with increasing production to fill this pipe and to fill some of the other projects like South Bow or like the Enbridge Mainline expansion, that the expansion, the growth of production is where we could really see a lot of that investment in the economic spinoffs.

How much does that tie into this? Do you think? Look, I think it’s super important. These are supply demand cycles. And the demand side, when you look at Asia, is unprecedented. You know, and so I think that’s a really the point you’re making is critical. I think you could double or we could get to 10 million barrels. Ultimately, there would be no problem in terms of egress and demand.

Almost all the issues related to the investability of that process are tied to issues like whether or not pathways and CCUS (Carbon Capture) is really the most important thing in the world. Or is it more important than some of these commitments to actually produce and supply and ship? And I think that it’s not. You know, our lesson from a lot of the environmental and to the Prime Minister’s credit, he came out and said $200 billion in 10 years of environmental activism from Ottawa produced absolutely nothing of note. It certainly didn’t change the emissions profile of the country in any significant way. In many ways, it harmed the ability for Canada to play a role in reducing global emissions by shipping a lot more of our gas to offset the coal-fired Chinese grid. And so in so many ways, I think there’s been a decade of strategic irrelevance, but also a decade of real economic decline.

And I think this Prime Minister is faced with needing to get over what’s happened in the trade arena. And I think they’re sort of turning a light past the fact that the Americans have said we’re going to do a deal with the Mexicans and not with the Canadians. You know, we’re going to put you guys on this annual review process. Now, a lot of people are saying that’s fine. I don’t think that’s fine. I think that’s an absolute failure to effectively negotiate the past 18 months. And that is starting to put in. I think the Prime Minister is smart enough to know deep down this is a real problem for the country and for him. And when you look at Canada, the Canadian balance sheet of exports, you know that energy is the only place where you’re going to get an immediate return economically on an investment.

So I think he’s still trying to juggle that kind of absolute realism about what works economically with his desire that there still be kind of a signaling effect, at least to his base, that they’re going to take care of the environment. But I’m just not sure when you look at, you know, sitting on the board of an energy company, you look at the costs related to all of these sort of exogenous environmental commitments that Canada is kind of inventing with the hope that it signals environmental commitments. But they’re not really making that big a difference to the planet. And they’re adding extraordinary costs. And they’re often being managed by government bureaucracies that don’t move at the speed of business or commercial interests. So I think it’s an important step.

It’s raising some important conversations. But I think the answers to some of those questions, those conversations are raising are going to take us further down the path of a much more liberalized economy when it comes to energy and hopefully a smaller government, a government that can live within its means federally and provincially. Yeah, I guess that’s the takeaway here, right? I mean, you know, it’s fine to say that this is a positive achievement. This is a project that is worthwhile, but to avoid maybe patting ourselves on the back too much and recognize some of these broader challenges we face, what do you think should be the next step here? Rather than just say, see this major projects office, this approach is working to have more meaningful conversation about taxes, about regulation, about just the whole picture. Is that really where the conversation ought to be going?

Yeah, look, I think you’re doing it right now, Rob. I think that this kind of conversation that you’re initiating is really important because I think that the baseline is that we want this nation to succeed. We want Alberta to succeed. We want Canada to succeed. We know that, and I think we’ve been sort of avoiding the fact that we’ve allowed the economy to decline and we’ve become very, very dependent on the United States as a result of that.

I mean, one of the great ironies of the past decade is that by refusing to build these things that would have taken our energy to Asia and to Europe, we’ve created a much deeper dependency on the U.S. markets in every way and across every category. And that dependency is now starting to really hurt us. And I think Ontario is an especially tough, tough place when it comes to this.

But I think the first step here is to start to lay out the way forward. And one of the obvious things to do is look at other nations and say, how are they creating these things in a way that’s actually getting things done? You look at a place, I’ve been spending some time in the United Arab Emirates, which is home to both Abu Dhabi and Dubai. And they just decided in the middle of this war that the Straits of Hormuz were not secure enough.

And so they’re going to build a pipeline. They’re going to have that pipeline done in under a year. And that’s going to move 1.8 million barrels of oil. And when you hear that, you sort of think, makes sense. But then you think, imagine if Canada said, we’re going to build a pipeline, 1.8 million, we’re going to have it done in a year. And we’re going to get this stuff to China as a result of what happened in Venezuela.

Here’s the burning question for me. Why not? Why can’t we be that nation? Half the people building these infrastructure projects in the UAE are coming from Canada, because we’re the best in the world at these things. But those experts can’t build those things in Canada at that speed, because they’re beholden to a series of rules that are often rooted in what used to feel like benign green commitments.

But now we just realize these are constraints that are doing nothing for the planet. And they’re significantly slowing down our ability to actually build the kind of economic stability and security and growth we need.

And I really like the framing that you gave about this event. Yes, this step is good. But before we start celebrating, let’s consider where does this actually go next? Are we still talking about a five to 10 year build process? Is that real? Why can they build something in a year in the UAE that carries almost twice the amount of oil as what we can build? And if there’s geographic or geological reasons why, that’s fine. But I don’t think that’s the case.

I think a lot of it is that we’ve just grown used to and accustomed to operating in a manner that is second rate. And it doesn’t keep up with the speed of business. And it certainly doesn’t keep up with what’s happening globally in the world of energy security and energy supply.

Funding Country Prosperity and Self-Reliance vs. Climate Mitigation

Posted on July 4 by Ron Clutz

The news from a climatist perspective is reported in the LinkedIn article World Bank and IMF Retreat from Climate Finance Under US Pressure. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

In a significant shift in global financial priorities, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) appear to be scaling back their commitments to climate finance in 2026, likely influenced by pressure from the United States. This development, reported in mid-2025, has sparked concerns among environmental advocates, developing nations, and the business community about its potential to disrupt the global transition to a sustainable economy. Climate finance, which funds projects aimed at mitigating and adapting to climate change, is critical for supporting renewable energy, sustainable infrastructure, and climate resilience initiatives. [ Note: The United States is the largest shareholder of the World Bank, controlling about 16% of voting power. This allows the U.S. to single-handedly block any decision that requires a supermajority, such as extending or replacing the climate financing targets.]

Reorientation Background from US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent

Excerpts from Secretary Bessent IMFC-DC Statement in italics with my bolds and added images.

In recent years, the IMF has suffered from mission creep. Its work has too often extended into areas such as international development, climate change, gender, and social issues, which are disconnected from the institution’s core mandate. To restore its relevance and impact, the Fund must drop these extraneous items and focus on the critical economic work at hand.

As part of the ongoing Comprehensive Surveillance Review (CSR), the IMF is taking important steps to better calibrate the scope of its surveillance and reverse these concerning trends. Through the ongoing Review of Program Design and Conditionality, we expect the IMF to reemphasize a culture focused on achieving successful program outcomes rather than prioritizing inputs, such as the volume of financing provided.

In a more constrained external financing environment, the IMF should promote domestic revenue mobilization, better governance, and policies that support durable, private sector-led growth. Moreover, the IMF, together with the World Bank, must continue its efforts to improve debt data reporting, help build debt management capacity for borrowing countries, restore momentum in debt-restructuring processes, and advance progress under the Common Framework.

The World Bank must maintain focus on its core mission of reducing poverty and increasing economic growth. This means:

♦ Promoting a stronger development agenda focused on country self-reliance by directing resources to the countries most in need for foundational investments that increase productivity and growth and graduating countries from Bank support;
♦ Delivering access to all technologies which can provide abundant, reliable, and affordable energy;
♦ Promoting prudent macroeconomic management and the rule-of-law; and improving development outcomes by proactively seeking to expand competition in procurement.
♦ Striving for greater efficiency, discipline, and accountability so that every dollar delivers more impact.

The Bank must do more to advance developing country access to abundant, affordable, and reliable energy to support economic growth and poverty reduction. Energy abundance sparks economic abundance, and the World Bank should support an all-of-the-above approach to energy technologies—including fossil fuels such as gas, oil, and coal, rather than restrict borrower choice. We call on the Bank to further expand its support for affordable, reliable energy by removing constraints on its support for natural gas and increasing the number of gas projects in the pipeline. We continue to welcome the Bank’s removal of the prohibition on financing nuclear power generation last year. We further welcome the Bank’s leadership in a working group on nuclear energy development with other multilateral development banks. Financing that delivers energy abundance will provide a strong boost to growth, which will also support debt sustainability.

Focusing on the Bank’s core mission also means abandoning its distortionary 45% climate finance target, which impedes market efficiency, distorts incentives, and undermines efforts to reduce poverty and spur economic growth. We welcome the coming expiration of the Climate Change Action Plan, and upon its long-overdue expiration, expect the Bank to immediately shift its myopic focus on climate and financing volumes to one that emphasizes high-quality, durable projects rather than shaping and selecting projects to chase arbitrary financing targets that do little to lift people out of poverty. The Bank should turn its attention to whether its investments and the countries they support are resilient to a multitude of shocks, rather than to meeting nonsensical arbitrary targets.

As public institutions, the World Bank and IMF can most clearly demonstrate accountability to their shareholders by ensuring that a sharper focus on their respective core missions is also reflected by restrained budgets. In service of this goal, we are pleased that both institutions have proposed flat real administrative budget growth for the upcoming fiscal year alongside streamlining efforts that will help reverse the mission creep of recent years.

More than eight decades after their creation at Bretton Woods, we must ensure that the international financial institutions remain true to their mandates and fit for purpose. Streamlining policy priorities will allow both the World Bank and IMF to focus limited public resources on effectively fulfilling their core mandates while nimbly responding to crises. The United States will continue to work with Management and staff, as well as other shareholders, to advance these priorities.

UN Chief Demands $1.3 Trillion a Year

Posted on June 24 by Ron Clutz

The news article at Breibart is U.N. Secretary-General Demands $1.3 Trillion a Year to Fight ‘Climate Chaos’. The images below put into perspective the scale of climate money to which Guterres lays claim. Excerpts wtih my bolds and added images.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called for a massive increase in global climate spending, arguing that governments and financial institutions must devote significantly more resources to addressing climate-related challenges. In a special address at London Climate Action Week on Monday, Guterres said that governments must invest more heavily in climate-related initiatives. Guterres said.

“We must do far more to protect people and communities from the here-and-now effects of climate chaos,” Guterres said. “Because even at full speed, we cannot outrun climate change. Its impacts are already here, compounding and cascading.”

Guterres also highlighted Africa’s energy potential while arguing that the continent receives too little investment despite its abundant natural resources. Guterres continued:

“Africa is home to 60% of the world’s best solar resources, 30% of critical minerals, 1/5 of humanity,” “Yet it receives just 2% of global clean energy investment. At the same time, more than 600 million Africans still lack access to electricity. This is unjust and a lost opportunity for Africa and the world.”

The U.N. chief urged wealthy nations to honor previous climate-financing commitments and dramatically increase funding for developing countries over the next decade. Guterres said.

“Developed countries must keep their promises, including support to the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage and the Green Climate Fund. The $300 billion pledged to developing countries must be delivered with concrete steps to mobilize the $1.3 trillion a year by 2035,” “In a world of shrinking aid, we must also unleash the catalytic role of multilateral development banks and the wider development finance system to help fund long-term infrastructure such as grids, mass transit, and water systems.”

Guterres further argued that international lenders should play a larger role in financing infrastructure and climate-related projects around the world.

“Recent reforms and policy decisions have increased the lending capacity of multilateral development banks by 600 to 800 billion U.S. dollars. They must use it aggressively to finance the infrastructure of the future and climate adaptation. They must also adapt their instruments to match the scale and time frame of the challenge, including 50-year finance where needed.”

Waste Example #5: Green Hydrogen Projects–
Absurd, Exorbitant and Pointless

The map above from IEA shows more than 2200 hydrogen fuel projects around the world, intending to replace hydrocarbon fuels to save the planet. They dream of being operational by 2030 claiming that real world obstacles will be overcome if enough taxpayer dollars are thrown at the problems.

A table from Hydrogen Newsletter provides a non-exhaustive but representative catalogue of the major green hydrogen projects that have been cancelled, postponed, or significantly scaled back between 2023 and mid-2025, illustrating the global scale of this market recalibration.

Follow the Money Leaving Wind Farms

Posted on June 16 by Ron Clutz

Boluwatife Remy reveals what many have overlooked, widespread disinvesting in wind power. Not so long ago, the climate feaful were badgering education and religious institutions, among others, to disinvest in hydrocarbons from Big Oil companies. Well, the worm has turned. Remy’s article at benzinga is
Why Shell Is Selling Its Wind Farms—And What It’s Building Instead. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The energy transition was supposed to be the defining corporate story of the 2020s. For Shell (NYSE:SHEL), it has become the story of what the company tried, reconsidered, and is now unwinding at a pace that leaves little room for ambiguity about where management stands.

Bloomberg reported Friday that Shell is preparing to offload a portfolio of offshore wind farms in a transaction expected to generate more than $1 billion. Rothschild and PJT Partners are handling the advisory work, with the formal sale process targeted for 2027. Shell said nothing publicly. What the company has not stayed quiet about, expressed through a long sequence of exits and disposals over the past two years, is the direction it has chosen and the conviction behind it.

This Is Not a One-Off Decision

Anyone tempted to read the Bloomberg report as an isolated portfolio adjustment has not been following what Shell has been doing since Wael Sawan took the chief executive role with an explicit mandate to tighten the company’s strategic focus and restore the return on capital that investors had been pushing for.

The wind exits have been coming in steady succession. Shell walked away from the Atlantic Shores offshore wind project in the United States, absorbing a $1 billion writedown after concluding the numbers no longer worked. It sold its half of the MarramWind floating offshore wind development off Scotland to joint venture partner ScottishPower Renewables and abandoned the CampionWind project it had been developing independently.

Positions in other offshore wind assets across multiple markets have been quietly sold down as each successive review of the business case reached the same conclusion. The explanation attached to each departure has been consistent: the project either fails to meet the company’s return thresholds or no longer fits what Shell believes it does well.

One exit looks like a portfolio decision. A dozen exits
over twenty-four months looks like a verdict.

What Shell Is Building in Place of Wind

The company Sawan is assembling has a narrower and more deliberate focus than the Shell that spent the early 2020s presenting sweeping energy transition commitments to investors and government audiences. Liquefied natural gas trading and upstream oil and gas production are where the strategy now concentrates, businesses where Shell carries genuine competitive advantages built over decades that no amount of capital could quickly replicate elsewhere.

That repositioning is not unique to Shell. The same reassessment has been running simultaneously across the major integrated oil companies. BP has been selling renewable assets and reorienting capital toward upstream production. Equinor reduced its renewable energy workforce by around 20% while boosting spending on oil and gas. TotalEnergies negotiated an exit from nearly $1 billion in U.S. offshore wind leases and committed the equivalent amount to domestic fossil fuel development instead.

The companies that arrived at the 2021 and 2022 investor days with ambitious clean energy targets have each, at their own pace and with varying degrees of public candor, concluded that those targets were built on assumptions that did not hold.

How Offshore Wind Lost Its Financial Logic

The deterioration in offshore wind economics between 2021 and 2024 was sharper than almost anyone inside the industry publicly acknowledged while it was happening. Construction costs climbed as specialist installation vessels became scarce and supply chains struggled to keep pace with the volume of projects that had been approved simultaneously across European and American markets.

Interest rates moved from near zero to levels that fundamentally changed the math on capital-intensive long-duration infrastructure. Turbine manufacturers, squeezed between fixed-price contracts and rising input costs, ran into serious financial difficulty.

The gap between what projects were expected to cost when developers submitted bids and what actually arrived on the invoice became a recurring crisis.

Contracts got cancelled. Projects got written down.

Governments that had structured power purchase agreements around cost assumptions from a different era found themselves in renegotiations that pleased nobody. The companies carrying the heaviest exposure to offshore wind at the peak of the enthusiasm cycle spent years managing the fallout from decisions that looked reasonable in 2020 and looked considerably less so by 2023.

What This Means for Shell Shareholders

Selling wind farms that are not generating acceptable returns and redirecting the proceeds into businesses that are creates a cleaner financial picture for investors who have been watching Shell carry underperforming assets longer than they would have preferred.

Shell has been among the more aggressive capital returners among the major oil companies, and management has been consistent about treating buyback capacity and dividend sustainability as priorities that outrank maintaining positions in low-return businesses.

The assets being brought to market will find buyers. Infrastructure funds and specialist renewable developers have been steady acquirers of divested offshore wind portfolios throughout this cycle, often able to hold the assets more cheaply than integrated oil companies whose capital costs and return expectations create a structural disadvantage in low-margin infrastructure. Shell selling is not the same as the assets disappearing. It is the assets moving to owners better suited to hold them.

What stays with Shell is the part of the energy business it has decided it is actually good at. For investors, that clarity is worth more than a diversified portfolio of businesses generating mixed returns and requiring constant explanation.

See Also: Wind Power Economic Failure

The Short Lives of Wind Turbines

Disband the Climate Cult Madness (Happer)

Posted on June 13 by Ron Clutz

William Happer calls for a return to climate sanity ASAP in this article from Daily Sceptic The Climate Cult.

The text is an excerpt from Canary in a Climate World: Climate Realism vs. the Net Zero Myth, a newly released book bringing together 38 Climate Canaries from across science, climatology, geology, engineering, economics, medicine, law, journalism, public policy and independent research. The chapter below, by Princeton physicist Professor William Happer, is one of many thought-provoking contributions examining climate science, energy policy, Net Zero and the wider climate debate. My bolds and added images.

Fifty years from now, academic treatises will be written about the climate madness that prevailed when these canary songs were written. I hope the songs will clarify the Zeitgeist of this bizarre interval in the history of human folly.

Many people with inadequate scientific knowledge are convinced that Planet Earth is in mortal danger from global warming due to humans. If Planet Earth were really in great danger from humans, any means to protect it would be justified. Some extremists propose reducing Earth’s eight billion population of people to no more than one billion. How this is to be done has always been a bit vague. Genghis Khan made a good start by slaughtering some 40 million people in the 13th century. In our day, Prince Philip, father of King Charles III of the United Kingdom, opined that: “If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.”

The climate alarmism of our time is a malignant alliance of ignorant fanaticism, like that mentioned above, and opportunism: the lust for power, fame and wealth. Like all fanatical movements, climate alarmism is doing great collateral damage, most notably to the reputation of my own profession of science. Generous research grants from governments and private foundations have created a new discipline of ‘climate science’.

Traditional, rigorous disciplines like atmospheric physics, atmospheric chemistry, meteorology or palaeontology were quick to cash in by renaming themselves with some variant of ‘Centre for Saving the Planet’. They were generously rewarded with research grants, new laboratories, professorships, elections to learned societies, prizes and other tokens of gratitude.

This largess came with strings. If your research did not show that the planet needed to be saved, you would be expelled from the elect. Many credible scientists made no public mention of doubts they had about the party line. But a few refused to accept this new ‘science by consensus’ and remained faithful to the traditional criterion: the validity of a scientific theory is how well its predictions agree with all available observations, and how successfully it predicts previously unobserved phenomena.

In the laconically accurate words of Karl Popper: “One can sum up all this by saying that the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.” By this criterion, climate alarmism is not a scientific theory, since it has made many alarming predictions and none have turned out to be true. Rather climate alarmism is more like astrology or the cargo-cult science described so graphically by Richard Feynman.

Climate alarmism is centred on the dogma is that ‘carbon dioxide is the control knob of Earth’s climate’. This dogma is false, but because of frenzied propaganda for over half a century it is as widely accepted today as was the geocentric universe in the days of Giordano Bruno. In the year 1600, Pope Clement VIII, the Vicar of Christ’s Church of Faith, Hope and Love, had Bruno burnt alive for promoting heliocentrism and other ideas deemed heretical.

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Less than 50 years later, Galileo Galilei barely escaped the same fate by recanting his heretical promotion of heliocentrism — that Earth moves around the Sun, and not vice versa. Galileo, the inventor of the astronomical telescope, knew perfectly well from direct observation that planets moved about the Sun and planetary moons moved around the planets. Supposedly he muttered “eppur si muove” (and yet it moves) as friends, relieved at his acquittal, hustled him away from the inquisition before he could get into more trouble.

Many of the songsters of this collection, especially those from academia, will recall being the targets of fanatical hatred, similar to that experienced by Bruno and Galileo, for suggesting that carbon dioxide is not the control knob of climate.

The dogma that CO₂ is the control knob of Earth’s climate has the ring of plausibility. Similarly, an immobile Earth, with celestial speres rotating around it seemed obvious to Ptolemaic astronomers. CO₂ is a greenhouse gas, that is, a gas that is nearly transparent to shortwave, visible and near-visible sunlight, but partially opaque to the longwave infrared radiation that dumps excess heat from the Earth into the cold darkness of outer space.

Greenhouse gases do little to hinder the heating of the Earth by sunlight, but they readily absorb and re-emit thermal infrared radiation, making it harder for Earth to release thermal radiation directly from its surface to space, and requiring higher temperatures to get rid of the heat than would otherwise be needed if there were no greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

But the most important greenhouse gas is water vapor, H₂O, not CO₂. When the effects of clouds are included, water in all of its phases, vapour, liquid and solid, has a much bigger influence on radiative transfer of heat than CO₂. And radiative transfer is only part of what controls Earth’s climate. Huge amounts of heat are transported by air and ocean currents from the tropics, where maximum sunlight is absorbed, to polar regions, where much more thermal radiation is released to space than is absorbed from the Sun.

Figure 10. This graph is the cloud fraction and is set forth on the left vertical axis. The temperature is on the right vertical axis and the horizontal axis represents the observation year. The information was extrapolated from figures prepared by Hans-Rolf Dubal and Fritz Vahrenholt [37].

In fact, the climate of the Earth has no single control knob, and all theoretical and empirical evidence points to CO₂ being a relatively unimportant factor. The most important influences on Earth’s climate are the Sun and cloud cover. Neither the Sun nor clouds are understood as well as they should be. What understanding we have has been set back at least 50 years by the manic focus on greenhouse gases.

A particular irony of the demonization of CO₂ is that increasing atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ are benefitting life on Earth. Satellite measurements show a clear greening of Earth, especially of arid areas, due to the modest increases in CO₂ that have already occurred. CO₂ really is plant food, one of the three key ingredients of photosynthesis: sunlight, water molecules, H₂O, and CO₂ molecules. More CO₂ has contributed to the agricultural abundance that has characterised the past 50 years.

Parts of the climate alarm establishment have evolved into protection rackets. According to Wikipedia:

A protection racket is racketeering scheme, usually perpetrated by a criminal organisation, that coerces payments on a regular basis from an individual or group in exchange for agreeing to not harm them (or for supposedly ‘protecting’ them). The threat of harm may be indirectly communicated or implied, and it may include violence, robbery, ransacking, arson, vandalism, etc. The payments are called ‘protection money’ or a ‘protection fee’.

Courts of law have been flooded with lawsuits against fossil fuel companies that have supposedly been knowingly killing the planet for years by providing the coal, oil and gas. It does not matter that these fossil fuels have facilitated the most prosperous economy the world has ever known, with ordinary citizens today living like the nobility of past centuries.

Not only businesses, but every citizen of the world is being hectored to pay up for protection against the non-existent threat of human-induced climate change.

Trial lawyers, well-paid expert witnesses, a meretricious mass media and many other hangers-on are benefitting from, or hope to benefit from, this racket.

The huge influxes of research funding for compliant scientists have made it difficult to oppose the fable of a threatened planet. Any scientist who speaks up against the cacophony of nonsense about a climate threat is treated like Dr Thomas Stockmann in Ibsen’s play, An Enemy of the People. Rather than being thanked for discovering that the water of his town’s popular spa is contaminated with deadly disease organisms, Dr Stockman and his family are viciously ostracised by most of the town’s citizens, who are making a good living by promoting the supposed health benefits of the spa.

Climate nonsense will eventually end and will be dumped onto the ash heap of history where it belongs. But the longer the cult goes on, the more damage is done. We should all do what we can to stop the madness as soon as possible.

Why Europe Can’t Quit Climate Alarmism

Posted on June 3 by Ron Clutz

Members of the European Parliament attend a session to vote on legislation to cut import duties for U.S. products in Brussels, March 26, 2026. (Yves Herman/Reuters)

John Gustavsson explains at National Review While America gets richer, Europe doubles down on its failing climate strategy.

Even as Democratic activists in the U.S. cool to the cause of climate alarmism, environmentalism maintains its political and economic grip on policymakers on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Years into a cost-of-living crisis, why is the European Union still so green?

It may be easy to dismiss this as a case of fanaticism: Sure, American progressives may perhaps not have been truly sincere when they proclaimed their faith in the upcoming apocalypse and the gospel of Greta Thunberg, but maybe her fellow Swedes — and other Europeans — are true believers?

While “sincere” environment activists may be a more common breed in Europe, that does not explain the actions of policymakers and civil servants — technocrats who know for a fact that the “climate transition” was sold to voters by giving disproportionate publicity to worst-case scenarios, rather than the more likely, less catastrophic, and less headline-grabbing scenarios outlined by the likes of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Instead, one must first understand that the EU is a slow-moving beast. The legislative process is complicated and sluggish, with 27 countries and an often-equal number of different viewpoints all struggling to be heard. The rules of the union mean that a third of the countries are able to veto most legislation, and in some cases, unanimity is required. Passing the European Green Deal in the first place required truly draconian efforts of political willpower and coordination, and reversing or altering the deal would hardly be any easier.

Making matters worse, the EU has driven past every conceivable off-ramp, events that would have allowed it to change course while saving face. Mere months after the European Green Deal was unveiled, the Covid-19 pandemic went on to turn the world upside down. Mass unemployment and government borrowing followed. At this point, the EU could have cited the pandemic as an excuse as to why climate goals had to be postponed, and some money earmarked for green projects instead used towards health-care or furlough programs.

The next “off-ramp” was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. With Europe suddenly needing to provide aid to Ukraine and rearm itself, policymakers could have made the case that the original timeline of the Green Deal was no longer feasible. Shortly thereafter, inflation would hit double digits in many EU member states, once again providing an excellent “excuse” to cancel a Green Deal that was negotiated in the bygone Zero Interest-Rate Policy (ZIRP) era, and whose ambitious goals assumed that this era would never end.

Now, policymakers are truly stuck with a project that virtually ensures the EU won’t see much of the global, energy-intensive AI boom, as prohibitive electricity prices cause data centers and tech firms to choose other locations. As slow and complicated as the legislative process in the EU is, that alone cannot explain why none of the off-ramps were taken.

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It is also, as it so often is in politics, about power. Environmentalism is a convenient ideology for those who wish to transfer power to the state, as it provides justification for the state’s expansion. In Europe, however, environmentalism is chiefly not used to transfer power from the voters to the state, but from the states to the European Union. For a supranational organization whose founding treaty infamously states that it is to strive to be an “ever-closer union,” hardly any excuse for centralization is ever passed by.

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While “sincere” environment activists may be a more common breed in Europe, that does not explain the actions of policymakers and civil servants — technocrats who know for a fact that the “climate transition” was sold to voters by giving disproportionate publicity to worst-case scenarios, rather than the more likely, less catastrophic, and less headline-grabbing scenarios outlined by the likes of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Polish coal miners protest against liquidation of Polish coal mines.

Instead, one must first understand that the EU is a slow-moving beast. The legislative process is complicated and sluggish, with 27 countries and an often-equal number of different viewpoints all struggling to be heard. The rules of the union mean that a third of the countries are able to veto most legislation, and in some cases, unanimity is required. Passing the European Green Deal in the first place required truly draconian efforts of political willpower and coordination, and reversing or altering the deal would hardly be any easier.

Making matters worse, the EU has driven past every conceivable off-ramp, events that would have allowed it to change course while saving face. Mere months after the European Green Deal was unveiled, the Covid-19 pandemic went on to turn the world upside down. Mass unemployment and government borrowing followed. At this point, the EU could have cited the pandemic as an excuse as to why climate goals had to be postponed, and some money earmarked for green projects instead used towards health-care or furlough programs.

The next “off-ramp” was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. With Europe suddenly needing to provide aid to Ukraine and rearm itself, policymakers could have made the case that the original timeline of the Green Deal was no longer feasible. Shortly thereafter, inflation would hit double digits in many EU member states, once again providing an excellent “excuse” to cancel a Green Deal that was negotiated in the bygone Zero Interest-Rate Policy (ZIRP) era, and whose ambitious goals assumed that this era would never end.

Now, policymakers are truly stuck with a project that virtually ensures the EU won’t see much of the global, energy-intensive AI boom, as prohibitive electricity prices cause data centers and tech firms to choose other locations. As slow and complicated as the legislative process in the EU is, that alone cannot explain why none of the off-ramps were taken.

It is also, as it so often is in politics, about power. Environmentalism is a convenient ideology for those who wish to transfer power to the state, as it provides justification for the state’s expansion. In Europe, however, environmentalism is chiefly not used to transfer power from the voters to the state, but from the states to the European Union. For a supranational organization whose founding treaty infamously states that it is to strive to be an “ever-closer union,” hardly any excuse for centralization is ever passed by.

And such an excuse was exactly what environmentalism provided: No single EU member can deal with climate change on their own, since none of them contributes to more than 0.7 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The only way to fight this new threat, Brussels explained, was to do it together, under the benevolent direction of your friendly neighborhood eurocrat. Anyone who did not want to see the Swiss Alps underwater had no choice but to go along with the program.

That the EU as a whole only ever contributed 10 to 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions even before the first moves to transition were taken in the 1990s is the type of “inconvenient truth” voters rarely heard when the Deal was passed.

It is now down to less than 6 percent, yet Europe’s
green frenzy continues virtually unabated.

For the EU, the sunk cost has also been far greater than for America. Long before the European Green Deal, the EU made serious — and costly — efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Whereas American emissions wouldn’t peak until 2007, in the EU, they peaked in 1990, after which they have been on a steady decline. Total U.S. emissions were still more than 20 percent higher in 2024 at the end of Biden’s presidency than they had been in Europe in 1990.

Europeans have felt the pain of climate policies in the form of gas prices that (prior to the Iran war) averaged 2 to 3 times what American car owners paid. Higher electricity prices, tied to the shuttering of oil and coal but also nuclear power plants, have prevented air conditioning from taking off in Europe — ironically, this increases the number of Europeans who will suffer and even die as a result of rising global temperatures.

Already, more than 60,000 Europeans die of heat every summer.
More Europeans die from lack of AC than Americans do from gun violence.

Europeans have gritted their teeth and accepted that sacrifice, along with a large chunk of its traditional manufacturing sector — jobs that they were promised would be replaced by roles in “green” manufacturing and other “climate-friendly” industries the EU anticipated dominating on the world stage. That is not how things have turned out.

Instead, China has ascended as a dominating force in green industries
like solar panels and — worse for the EU — batteries and electric vehicles.

Automobile exports are now dropping fast. From 2008 to 2023, over 2.3 million European manufacturing jobs were lost, compared to “only” around 800,000 in the United States during that time period.

There is also no guarantee that lost manufacturing jobs would return and shuttered factories reopen any time soon even if Brussels were to pump the brakes now, much like how the coal mining jobs have so far failed to return despite Donald Trump’s reversal of Biden’s policies (they also declined under his first term).

However, the “harmless” transition policies proved costlier, and voters turned out to be less invested in the project than the policymakers believed. On paper, most voters did support the idea of climate transition. But supporting an idea is different from actually paying the price at the pump and in the form of higher utility bills. (And let’s not forget those abominable paper straws.)

Lawmakers in the European Parliament agreed today, Nov. 13, 2025, to dramatic cuts to the EU’s sustainability reporting and due diligence laws, including significant reductions in the number of companies to be covered by the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), and the elimination of the obligation for companies to prepare climate transition plans. The vote, was 382 MEPs in favor and 249 opposed,

After all these sacrifices, few governments in the EU could afford to admit that it was all for nothing. Their position is made even more precarious as this would be the second such embarrassment: After the 2015–16 refugee crisis, most governments across Europe took steps toward restricting immigration, effectively conceding that the parties they had (and continue to) labeled “far-right” had been correct about the challenges caused by rising immigration numbers.

To give the same parties another win and concede that —
much like multiculturalism — climate transition too had turned out
to be a better idea on paper than in practice would simply be too much.

Since the 2008 financial crisis, the U.S. economy has outgrown the economies of Western Europe, creating a growing wealth gap. As Europe continues down the path of chasing green dreams instead of greenbacks, this gap is only likely to continue to grow until the day its leaders are finally forced to admit that their policies only ever ensured future generations would inherit not a cooler planet, but a poorer continent.

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