Society in General

Fast Track to Poverty: Green Energy

Posted on by Ron Clutz

At his blog, Matt Ridley explains How the Green Energy Transition Makes You Poorer.
Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Crony capitalism at work

A leaked government analysis has found that Net Zero could crash the economy, reducing GDP by a massive 10% by 2030. Yet the spectacular thing about this analysis is that it expects this to happen not if Net Zero fails—but if it succeeds. In effect, it is saying that if the government really does force us to give up petrol cars, gas boilers, foreign holidays, and beef, then there would be perfectly workable things left idle, such as cars, boilers, planes, and cows. Idling—or stranding—your assets in this way is an expensive economic disaster.

Even more intriguing was the government’s economically illiterate response to the leak. A spokesman said: “Net zero is the economic opportunity of the twenty-first century, and will deliver good jobs, economic growth and energy security as part of our Plan for Change.”

Do they really think that economic growth is the same thing
as spending money? Because it isn’t.

Imagine the government saying that it is going to require the entire population to throw out all their socks and buy new ones by next Thursday. Under the logic it espouses for Net Zero, this would result in a tremendous burst of economic growth. Think of all the jobs created in the sock industry and the shops! They would be better off. Ah, but you, the consumer, would be poorer. You would have as many socks as before but less money. This is the broken window fallacy, explained by Frédéric Bastiat nearly 200 years ago: going around breaking windows makes work for glaziers but does not create growth.

Net Zero is a project to replace an existing set of technologies with another set of technologies: power stations with wind farms, petrol cars with electric cars, gas boilers with heat pumps, plane trips in the sun with caravan trips in the rain, cows with lentils. The output from these technologies is intended to be the same: electricity, transport, holidays, food.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that these new technologies and activities require exactly as much money to build and run as the old ones. What have you gained? Less than nothing because you have retired existing devices early, losing the latter half of their lives. It would be like replacing all the socks in your drawers long before they needed replacing but with identical socks. Does that make you richer? No, poorer.

If the new technologies are more efficient than the old ones, fine. LED light bulbs use about 90% less electricity than incandescent bulbs did. So yes, it does make sense to throw out your old bulbs before they expire, stranding those assets, to save electricity and money. Is the same true of a wind farm or a heat pump? No, they are demonstrably more expensive and less reliable at producing the same electricity than the devices they are replacing. They are worse, not better.

That’s why they need subsidies. We have spent £100 billion so far subsidising “green” energy in the past few decades, money we could have spent on something else: tax cuts, for example. So, the green energy transition has made us poorer, not richer. It has given us the most expensive electricity in the entire developed world.

It has made some people richer, for sure. Dale Vince, an eco-tycoon, has made a fortune out of building unreliable energy. So have lots of fat cats in the City of London, lots of big landowners in the Highlands of Scotland, and lots of manufacturers in China. I have lost count of the number of times wealthy people have told me I am wrong to criticise the unreliable energy industry because “my son Torquil’s fund has done rather well.”

Net Zero crony capitalism is efficient at one thing:
transferring money from poor people to rich people.

This government has forgotten that its job is not to champion the interests of producers, but consumers. So did the last government, though Kemi Badenoch’s speech on Tuesday showed a welcome return to thinking about consumers. Electricity is not an end in itself; it is a means to an end, an essential input allowing us to do the one and only thing that does, really does, represent growth—achieving more output with less input.

Right now, the Net Zero transition is doing the very opposite.

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Climate Crisis Talk Obscures Reality

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Edward Ring writes at American Greatness Challenging the Climate Crisis Narrative.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The climate crisis narrative ignores real issues like
poor infrastructure and overpopulation, pushing costly policies
that hurt economies while failing to improve resilience.

According to the United Nations, “Climate change is a global emergency that goes beyond national borders.” From the World Economic Forum, “Urgent global action must be taken to reduce emissions and safeguard human health from the multi-pronged negative impacts of climate change globally.”

From every multinational institution in the world, we hear the same message. From the World Bank, “The world is battling a perfect storm of climate, conflict, economic, and nature crises.” From the World Health Organization, “Between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, and heat.”

A major problem with all this unanimity over this “emergency” is the fact that for at least half of all people living in Western nations in 2025, the UN, WEF, WHO, and World Bank have no credibility. We don’t want to “own nothing and be happy” as our middle class is crushed. We don’t want the only politically acceptable way to maintain national economic growth to rely on population replacement. And with only the slightest numeracy, we see apocalyptic proclamations as lacking substance.

Top Ten Causes of Death Globally 2021

For example, while 250,000 “additional deaths per year” is tragic, worldwide estimates of total deaths are not quite 70 million per year. These “additional deaths” constitute a 0.36 percent increase over that baseline, just over one-third of one percent. Not even a rounding error.

Source NASA

Similarly, an alarmist prediction from NASA is that “Antarctica is losing ice mass (melting) at an average rate of about 150 billion tons per year, and Greenland is losing about 270 billion tons per year, adding to sea level rise.” Let’s unpack that a bit. A billion tons is a gigaton, equivalent in volume to one cubic kilometer. So Antarctica is losing 150 cubic kilometers of ice per year. But Antarctica has an estimated total ice mass of 30 million cubic kilometers. Which means Antarctica is losing about one twenty-thousandth of one percent of its total ice mass per year. That is well below the accuracy of measurement. It is an estimate, and the conclusion it suggests is of no significance.

One may wonder about Greenland, with “only” 2.9 million cubic kilometers of ice, melting at an estimated rate of 270 gigatons per year. But that still yields a rate of loss of less than one one-hundredth of one percent per year, which is almost certainly below the ability to actually gauge total ice mass and total annual ice loss.

What about sea level rise? Here again, basic math yields underwhelming conclusions. The total surface area of the world’s oceans is 361 million square kilometers. If you spread 420 gigatons over that surface (Greenland and Antarctica’s melting combined), you get a sea level rise of not quite 1.2 millimeters per year. This is, again, so insignificant that it is below the threshold of our ability to measure.

These fundamental facts will turn anyone willing
to do even basic fact-checking into a cynic.

What’s really going on? We get at least a glimpse of truth from the above quotation from the World Bank, where they ascribe the challenges of humanity to several causes: “climate, conflict, economic, and nature crises.” There’s value in the distinctions they make. They list “nature crisis” as distinct from “climate,” and at least explicitly, “climate” is not cited as resulting from some anthropogenically generated trend of increasing temperatures and increasingly extreme weather. They just say “climate.”

Which brings us to the point: Conflict and economic crises are far bigger sources of human misery, and we face serious environmental challenges that have little to do with climate change and more to do with how we manage our industry, our wilderness, and our natural resources. And we are face “climate” challenges even when catastrophic climate events have nothing to do with any alleged “climate crisis.”

A perfect example of how the climate “crisis” narrative is falsely applied when, in fact, the climate-related catastrophe would have happened anyway is found in the disastrous floods that devastated Pakistan in 2022. Despite the doomsday spin from PBS (etc.), these floods were not abnormal because of “climate change.” They were an abnormal catastrophe because in just 60 years, the population of that nation has grown from 45 million to 240 million people. They’ve channelized their rivers, built dense new settlements onto what were once floodplains and other marginal land, they’ve denuded their forests, which took away the capacity to absorb runoff, and they’ve paved thousands of square miles, creating impervious surfaces where water can’t percolate. Of course, a big storm made a mess. The weather didn’t change. The nation changed.

The disaster story repeats everywhere. Contrary to the narrative, the primary cause is not “climate change.” Bigger tsunamis? Maybe it’s because coastal aquifers were overdrafted, which caused land subsidence, or because previously uninhabited tidelands were settled because the population quintupled in less than two generations, and because coastal mangrove forests were destroyed, which used to attenuate big waves. What about deforestation? Perhaps because these nations have been denied the ability to develop natural gas and hydroelectric power, they’re stripping away the forests for fuel to cook their food. In some cases, they’re burning their forests to make room for biofuel plantations, in a towering display of irony and corruption.

In California, our nation’s epicenter of climate crisis fearmongering and the subsequent commercial opportunism, the emphasis on crisis instead of resilience has led to absurd policies. Instead of bringing back the timber industry to thin the state’s overgrown forests, the governor mandates exclusive sales of EVs by 2035. Instead of responsibly drilling oil in California’s ample reserves of crude, California imports 75 percent of its oil, and its economy still relies on oil for half the energy that the state consumes.

Worldwide, these mistakes multiply. Biofuel plantations consume half a million square miles in order to replace a mere two percent of transportation fuel. A mad scramble across every continent to increase mining by an order of magnitude to meet the demand for raw materials to manufacture batteries, wind turbines, and solar panels. Denial of funds for natural gas development in Africa, condemning over a billion people to ongoing energy poverty.

Simple truths are obscured by the climate crisis narrative. We need to rebuild our infrastructure for climate resilience because much of it is over a century old, at the same time as the US population has tripled. Floods and hurricanes cause more damage because there are more people, and more of them live in areas that have always been hit by floods and hurricanes.

The truths are as endless as they are repressed. We can’t possibly lift all of humanity into a middle-class lifestyle without at least doubling energy production worldwide, and we can’t possibly accomplish that while also reducing our use of coal, oil, and gas. Renewables aren’t renewable (here’s a must-read on that topic). Offshore wind is an environmental disaster, as is biofuel, as is the explosion of totally unregulated mining to feed the renewables industry. On the other hand, extreme environmental laws and regulations are harming economic growth, freedom, and, in no small irony, the innovation and investment that would give us the wealth we need to better protect the environment. And the prevailing economic, environmental, and cultural challenge in the world is not the climate but crashing birthrates among developing nations at the same time as the population of the world’s most undeveloped nations continues to explode exponentially.

We need climate resilience in order to properly protect a global population that has quadrupled to 8 billion in just the last century, spreading to every corner of the earth. That goal would be easier if once-trusted global institutions would allow for honest debate and practical infrastructure development. Instead, they continue to spew transparently misleading climate crisis propaganda, adhering to a mission that can only be described as repressive on all fronts—culturally, economically, and environmentally.

 

Climate-Obsessed Pols Blew Canada’s Opportunity

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Jamie Sarkonak summarizes the bogus start to Canada Federal elections in his National Post article Liberals pledge to make Canada a superpower after years of preventing it.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

A tattered Canadian flag is shown on top of a building in downtown Calgary on Friday, Jan. 17, 2025 where the U.S. Consulate is located. Photo by Jim Wells/Postmedia

 

Sunday’s edition of the Financial Times included the oft-made observation that Canada is brimming with potential, and the oft-made conclusion that this country would be much better off if it simply developed its God-given gifts.

The article, Unlocking Canada’s Superpower Potential by Tej Parikh, made the bullish case for this country’s future prospects: Canada is geographically huge and loaded with natural resources — on paper, at least, it has the makings of an actual global superpower.

“‘Canada absolutely has potential to be a global superpower,’  but the nation has lacked the visionary leadership and policy framework to capitalise on its advantages.”

It was, with gentle vagueness, a condemnation of the federal Liberal government and what is now being called Canada’s “lost decade”: a period of 10 years in which the current government ratcheted up onerous environmental and Indigenous-consultation requirements and, where ministerial approvals are concerned, delayed decisions, all geared at keeping undeveloped parts of Canada in their natural state.

Terms like “circular economy” and “just transition” are the Liberal synonyms for this no-growth agenda, which has delivered us a fraction of a percentage of GDP growth per capita from 2014 to the end of 2024 — a time period in which peer countries have managed double-digits.

For anyone who missed out on all the bad governance robbing Canadians of superpower prosperity, this brief video exposes the crimes against the citizenry.  For those who prefer reading, I provide below a transcript from the closed captions.

Transcript

This is Alberta the fourth largest Province and home to about 4.6 million people. It ranks third in GDP just behind Quebec and first in GDP per capita primarily off the back of oil and gas extraction. While its discovery in the first half of the 20th century has brought Canada riches, for reasons from political to economic it never reached its full potential as an energy superpower, and Canadians as a whole lose out. We’ll be diving into how its energy policies have evolved and the path it is on whether for natural gas, nuclear, hydrogen and more.

Canada has the third largest proven oil reserves and by most estimates in the top 20 in terms of natural gas reserves. It is a top 10 producer of oil and gas, meaning it is engaged in extracting processing and supplying of these resources for domestic production.

Natural Gas

For natural gas exports it is in the top six, all of which goes to the US via pipelines. To export across water requires Investments to build liquid natural gas or LNG facilities to cool the gas into a liquid state in a process called liquefaction. In 2024 the the first export terminal will finally be completed in Kitimat BC called LNG Canada with gas coming through the coastal gas tank pipeline set to complete after 5 years of construction and a price tag that jumped from 6.6 billion to 14.5 billion.

But don’t expect other facilities to be constructed anytime soon. On February 9th 2022, 2 weeks before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the federal and Quebec governments rejected approval of an LNG plant in Saguenay that would have allowed for the export of Western Natural Gas to European markets.

They cited increased greenhouse gas emissions
and lack of social responsibility.

While most of the natural gas is located in Northern Alberta and BC in the Montney formation, there is also gas in the Atlantic provinces. However New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Nova Scotia have all banned the process of fracking used for shale gas development over safety fears, thereby losing out on tens of billions of economic potential. Ironically the same provinces import a lot of natural gas extracted from the US through the process of fracking, Quebec also has natural gas resources but in April 2022 banned all oil and gas extraction in the province.

This means not only are pipelines from western Canada rejected from going through Quebec, natural gas extraction and export facilities in these provinces have been rejected as well. The demand if not met by Canada will be filled by other countries that might not share the same values nor care about the environment, with the jobs, millions in royalties and taxes going elsewhere. Since 2011, of the 18 proposed LG export projects including five on the East Coast. only the Kitimat project has proceeded with the others being cancelled, blocked or abandoned.

While the US in the same time frame has built seven LG facilities, five more under construction and approved 15, enabling them to go from a net importer to a top three exporter in the world. Australia has 10 LG facilities with the majority built in the 2010s helping to satisfy energy demand from Asian countries and to help them move away from coal. Qatar too has benefited greatly from extracting its resources as European countries look for alternatives to Russian gas.

These three countries have all signed decades-long deals to supply natural gas. Yet when Japan, South Korea, and Germany showed interest in Canadian LG, the Prime Minister said, “There has never been a strong business case.” While critics point out that natural gas is a fossil fuel contributing to greenhouse gas emissions, it emits 40% less than coal and 30% less than oil.

Nuclear Energy

We can’t talk about energy policy without mentioning nuclear, because it does not emit greenhouse gases while being a reliable source of energy, not dependent on the wind blowing or the sun shining. Currently nuclear supplies 58% of Ontario’s electricity needs and 15% Nationwide with all but one of the 19 nuclear reactors. The one located outside of Ontario is in New Brunswick. No new reactors have been completed since 1993. Meanwhile coal is still used to generate 6% of Canada’s electricity needs despite the country having the third largest uranium reserves, the fuel needed for reactors.

But on September 19th 2023, Canada did reach a $3 billion deal to finance nuclear power . . .in Romania. In fairness this deal does support the export of made in Canada Candu style reactors. An industry in which historically Canada has been a leader. Any discussion should include nuclear, as one of the trends in the nuclear industry is small modular reactors or SMRs which should be easier to manufacture and transport enabling its use in remote regions.

Hydrogen

Another Trend that the federal government has prioritized in the 2023 budget relates to hydrogen. 16.4 billion has been allocated over 5 years for “clean” Technologies and “clean” hydrogen tax credits, which are subsidies for costs in setting up equipment to produce green hydrogen. When the German Chancellor Olaf Schultz arrived in Canada in August 2022 asking for LNG, Canada instead offered green hydrogen created by wind turbines generating electricity to perform electrolysis by splitting water to produce hydrogen. It is both inefficient and expensive to produce green hydrogen meaning there is little business case for it without subsidies, since more than 99% of hydrogen is currently produced using fossil fuel. While green hydrogen will likely play a role in industrial processes, such as replacing coal used in steel production or creating ammonia in fertilizer production, its role in transportation is likely negligible. Furthermore using hydroelectricity, nuclear or natural gas to create hydrogen plays into Canada’s strengths in a way that solar or wind does not, as we’ll see shortly.

Solar and Wind

A big part of Canada’s net zero emissions by 2050 plan involves solar and wind energy, yet one of the biggest beneficiaries of that shift would be China given its dominance in the Clean Energy Solution space, whether solar panels, wind turbines or EVS. From the mineral extraction to the processing, refining and Manufacturing, there is much demand for critical minerals like copper cobalt nickel lithium and Rare Earth elements chromium zinc and aluminum. China owns stakes in many mines around the world including Canadian ones extracting these minerals to control the supply chain. According to 2022 data from the International Energy Agency, their share of refining is 35% for nickel, 60% for lithium, 70% for Cobalt and a whopping 90% for Rare Earth.

This dependence on one country means the power to squeeze Supply or raise prices at any moment, which is a big reason why on August 16th 2022 the Biden Administration signed the ironically named Inflation Reduction Act which provides 369 billion of funding for clean energy projects. The intention is to not only reshore to the US but also Near shore or Friend shore to allies like Canada, Whether in mining of critical minerals to manufacturing.

Canada acted decisively a few months later in the same year to force
three Chinese companies to sell their stakes in Canadian mining companies
. . . Oh wait just kidding.

In all seriousness the country and especially Quebec can play a role in the supply chain so long as projects can be approved in a timely manner which really is the underlying theme of this video. Having these minerals also incentivizes battery and auto manufacturing companies to invest in factories, helped massively by subsidies of course. 13 billion over 10 years is what took Volkswagen to commit to a battery plant in Southern Ontario. Likewise 15 billion in subsidies was committed for a Stellantis LG battery plant in Windsor and other projects like this. That’s a lot of money with these two subsidy awards not expected to break even for 20 years according to the Parliamentary budget office. And that’s if these Legacy auto companies like Stellantis and Volkswagen will be relevant by that time.

That’s the kind of energy policy decisions made in Canada in recent times,
and why we haven’t leveraged our natural resources into Superpower.

Mark Carney’s Climate Obsession Worse than Trudeau’s

The future of Canada’s badly governed energy sector is further threatened by replacing Trudeau with Carney. Terry Newman explains in his National Post article Mark Carney’s climate obsessions will put Trudeau to shame.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Don’t trust his pledge to turn Canada into an energy superpower

For all of Carney’s supposed superior knowledge of the world and markets, the art of provincial negotiations and incentives for private investment in natural resources appears to have already escaped his grasp. There’s evidence to suggest this is because, at heart, Carney is likely to be a fully fledged ESG prime minister (ESG being short for environmental, social, and governance principles being imposed on business).Unfortunately, everything Carney’s said and done up until this point suggests not only that he’d fail to unite Canadian provinces to create this energy super-economy, but that’s he’s not actually interested in doing so in the first place.The Liberal party may have a new face, but Carney’s insistence on keeping an emissions cap and industrial carbon tax in place — both products of Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government — doesn’t invoke much confidence in his energy superpower plan.

Since the Liberals came to power in 2015, they implemented the Impact Assessment Act, which slowed approvals, the federal industrial carbon pricing system (2018) and the oil and gas emissions cap (slated for 2026) — all with the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the oil and gas sector to net zero by 2050.

Since 2015, many projects have been stalled or cancelled, including the Northern Gateway Pipeline (cancelled by government in 2016, citing a federal ban on tanker traffic and Indigenous opposition); the Energy East Pipeline (cancelled by the company in 2017, citing regulatory hurdles and low oil prices); Pacific NorthWest LNG (cancelled in 2017 due to market conditions and regulatory delays); the MacKenzie Valley Pipeline (cancelled in 2017 due to low gas prices and regulatory uncertainty); Énergie Saguenay LNG (cancelled in 2021, rejected by Quebec government over emissions concerns, not challenged by the federal government); Bay du Nord Offshore Oil (shelved in 2022, citing high costs and regulatory uncertainty); Teck Frontier Mine (cancelled in 2020, amid climate policy debates); and the Keystone XL Pipeline (cancelled 2021, due to failure to secure a U.S. permit and Canadian regulatory costs).

The only thing that’s changed about the Liberal party is the addition of Carney, and his record suggests that he will be driven by climate policy, at least as much as the Liberals have been, and potentially much more so. He was, not so long ago, the United Nations’ special envoy on climate action and finance and he founded and co-chaired the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), resigning on Jan. 15, the day before he threw his hat into the Liberal leadership race.

These roadblocks long predate Carney’s ascension, and he has yet to explain how the Liberal government suddenly has either the ability or desire to address them.

Where’s the evidence Carney will be less stringent on energy projects and, therefore, better for the Canadian economy than his predecessor? If anything, especially given his longstanding ESG obsessions, all evidence appears to point to the contrary — that Mark Carney could be even more dedicated to strangling Canada’s resource economy than Trudeau.

Beware: Flawed Energy Assumptions Incite Delusional Scenarios

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Mark P. Mills and Neil Atkinson blow the whistle on projections written in International Energy Agency’s (IEA) latest report, the World Energy Outlook.  Below is the announcement of the report findings, key exhibits and Executive summary, excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images. Link to full study at the end.

Overview

Industry players consider the International Energy Agency’s signature annual report, the World Energy Outlook, to contain highly credible analyses. However, a new critique from the National Center of Energy Analytics experts finds the IEA’s latest scenarios on future oil demand to be problematic and potentially, dangerously wrong. 

“When it comes to policy or investment planning, there is a distinction with a critical difference when it comes to what constitutes a “forecast” (what is likely to happen) versus a “scenario” (a possibility based on assumptions). The challenge is not in determining whether the scenarios are completely factual per se, but instead whether they are factually complete,” wrote the authors in their report.

The most widely reported WEO scenario is that the world will see peak oil demand by the early 2030s. NCEA co-authors Mark P. Mills and Neil Atkinson believe that this conclusion is a prima facie case; minimally, the IEA should include business as usual (BAU) scenarios, not those based on all “high cases” or unrealistic possibilities.

Mills and Atkinson pinpoint 23 flawed assumptions used in the WEO scenarios to predict future oil demand, including:

  • IEA assumes: Corporate transition policies are real and durable. NCEA counterclaim: Myriad corporations, having earlier proclaimed fealty to “energy-transition” goals, are either failing to meet such pledges or overtly rescinding them.

  • IEA assumes: Transition financing will continue to expand. NCEA counterclaim: Alternative energy projects have become more expensive and difficult to finance, and wealthy nations are increasingly reluctant to gift huge amounts of money to the faster-growing but poorer nations, many of which have governance issues.

  • IEA assumes: China’s actions will follow its pledges. NCEA counterclaim: The scale of China’s role in present and future energy and oil markets requires scenarios that model what China is doing—and will likely do—rather than what China claims or promises.
National Energy Transition Plans

  • IEA’s assumes: The oil growth in emerging markets will be low. NCEA counterclaim: The fact of low demand in some poorer regions—e.g., Africa uses roughly one-tenth the per-capita level in OECD countries—points to the potential for very high, not low, growth in those markets.

  • IEA’s assumption: Governments will stay the course on EV mandates. NCEA’s counterclaim: Recent trends in many countries and U.S. states show policymakers weakening or reducing mandates and subsidies.

Flawed Assumptions Lead to Flawed Conclusions

Listed below is a summary of the flaws in 23 (but far from all) of the assumptions used in the WEO scenarios that are relevant to guessing future oil demand. Meaningful scenarios for planning for future uncertainties should include a range of realistic inputs, not just those that are aspirational.

Assumptions about baseline factors that affect oil forecasts

  1. Assumption: STEPS is a useful baseline.
    Flaw: The baseline scenario, rather than “business as usual,” assumes a future based on countries’ Stated Policies Scenario (STEPS), which not one country is implementing in full.
  2. Corporate transition policies are real and durable.
    Flaw:  Myriad corporations, having earlier proclaimed fealty to “energy-transition” goals, are either failing to meet such pledges or overtly rescinding them.
  3. Higher economic growth is unlikely.
    Flaw: Ignoring the possibility of higher economic growth, based on historical trends and the goals of all nations, leads to scenarios that underestimate future oil demand.
  4. Transition financing will continue to expand.
    Flaw: Alternative energy projects have become more expensive and difficult to finance, and wealthy nations are increasingly reluctant to gift huge amounts of money to the faster-growing but poorer nations, many of which have governance issues.
  5. Efficiency gains and structural changes will lower global demand for energy.
    Flaw: Long-run trends show that energy-efficiency gains make energy-centric products and services more affordable and thus do not reduce, but instead generally stimulate, rising demand.
  6. Solar and wind power are 100% efficient.
    Flaw: The WEO 2024 assertion that “most renewables are considered 100% efficient” contradicts fundamental physics and is, arguably, a silly PR-centric rhetorical flourish.
  7. China’s actions will follow its pledges.
    Flaw: The scale of China’s role in present and future energy and oil markets requires scenarios that model what China is doing—and will likely do, in fact—rather than what China claims or promises.

Assumptions regarding oil’s future

  1. The oil growth in emerging markets will be low.
    Flaw:  The fact of low demand in some poorer regions—e.g., Africa uses roughly one-tenth the per-capita level in OECD countries—points to the potential for very high, not low, growth in those markets.
  2. The EV market share will accelerate.
    Flaw:  Slowing market adoption and retrenchments in automakers’ EV plans or promises are evident, calling for scenarios that model realities that could persist.
  3. Governments will stay the course on EV mandates.
    Flaw:  Recent trends in many countries and U.S. states show policymakers weakening or reducing mandates and subsidies.
  4. China’s EV “success story” leads quickly to lower oil demand.
    Flaw:  Data point to the fact that in the real world, EV sales and gasoline consumption are both rising.

Assumptions about other transportation markets

  1. There will be significant electrification of heavy-duty trucks.
    Flaw:  There is no evidence of market adoption for any fuel option that leads to far higher capital costs and enormous degradation in performance.
  2. There will be significant electrification and fuel alternatives in aviation.
    Flaw:  There are no trends showing non-oil options for even a tiny share of the aviation market, in an industry that forecasts booming demand.
  3. There will be significant electrification and fuel alternatives for ships.
    Flaw:  The only modestly significant change in oil used for global shipping comes from the use of liquefied natural gas, another (and generally more expensive) hydrocarbon.
  4. There will be a rapid decline in oil used for Middle East power generation.
    Flaw:  Despite pledges and pronouncements, the year 2024 saw continued, and even higher, use of oil for electricity generation.
  5. The growth in petrochemicals and plastics will be slow.
    Flaw:  Slower growth is anchored in recycling enthusiasms that markets are not adopting and expectations of new recycling technologies that remain expensive or unproved.
  6. All scenarios lead to peak oil demand by ~2030.
    Flaw:  A WEO core conclusion that “combing all the high cases” leads to “global peaks for oil” by ~2030 is, prima facie, not based on all “high cases” but on unrealistic scenarios.

Assumptions regarding associated industries

  1. The supply of critical minerals will meet transition goals.
    Flaw:  Myriad studies have now documented the fact of a looming shortfall in current and expected production and of the challenges in changing that status quo.
  2. Prices of critical minerals will be low.
    Flaw:  It is fanciful in the annals of economic history to imagine that record-high demands won’t lead to far higher prices for the critical minerals needed to build EVs (as well as for wind and solar hardware).
  3. China won’t exercise minerals dominance as an economic or a geopolitical tool.
    Flaw:  China has already signaled over the past year that it is willing and able to implement export controls, or pricing power on critical minerals, where it holds significant global share.
  4. Oil and gas annual investments are adequate to avoid economic disruptions.
    Flaw:  Current levels of investment are not adequate to meet demands under business-as-usual scenarios, especially when combined with likely decline rates of extant oil fields.
  5. The future decline rate from existing oil fields will continue historical trends.
    Flaw:  The much faster decline rate in output from now-significant U.S. shale fields has altered the global average decline rate, pointing to the need for increasing investments to avoid a shortfall.
  6. OPEC will be a reliable cushion to manage oil-supply disruptions.
    Flaw:  History suggests that scenarios should include alternative possibilities to relying on OPEC to provide a cushion for meeting unexpected shortfalls in production or increases in demand.

Executive Summary: Flawed Assumptions Lead to Dangerous “Forecasts”

For decades, the International Energy Agency (IEA) was the world’s gold standard for energy information and credible analyses. Following the commitment of its member governments to the 2015 Paris Agreement climate accords, the agency radically changed its mission to become a promoter of an energy transition. In 2022, the IEA’s governing board reinforced its mission to “guide countries as they build net-zero emission energy systems to comply with internationally agreed climate goals.”

The IEA’s current preoccupation with promoting an energy transition has resulted in its signature annual report, the World Energy Outlook (WEO), offering policymakers a view of future possibilities that are, at best, distorted and, at worst, dangerously wrong.

The 2024 WEO’s central conclusion, its core “outlook,” has been widely reported as a credible forecast, i.e., something likely to happen: “[T]he continued progress of transitions means that, by the end of the decade, the global economy can continue to grow without using additional amounts of oil, natural gas or coal.”

The WEO itself states that it doesn’t forecast but has scenarios—explorations or models of possibilities, and cautions: “Our scenario analysis is designed to inform decision makers as they consider options…. [N]one of the scenarios should be viewed as a forecast.” Scenarios that usefully “inform” need to be based on realistic possibilities and assumptions. But there is one foundational assumption—one that the IEA has for decades included in its scenarios and that has been banished from the WEO: the possibility of business as usual (BAU).

Instead, the WEO’s baseline scenario now assumes that nations are undertaking their specific energy-transition plans that they promised in order to comply with the 2015 Paris Agreement, i.e., “stated policies scenario” (STEPS). Yet none of the signatories to that Agreement is fully meeting its promises, and most are a long way behind schedule. Believing something that is not true is not just problematic; it meets the definition of a delusion.

It is fanciful to forecast that, over the next half-dozen years, the growth in the world’s population and economy won’t continue a two-century-long trend and lead to increased use of the fossil fuels that today supply over 80% of all energy, only slightly below the share seen 50 years ago. The data show that the global energy system is operating essentially along BAU lines and not only far off the STEPS, but even further away from the more aggressive transition aspirations that the WEO also models.

In this analysis, we focus on highlighting 23 problematic, flawed assumptions that are relevant specifically to the WEO’s oil scenarios and the widely reported “forecast” that the world will see peak oil demand by the early 2030s (see box on pp. 4-5, Flawed Assumptions Lead to Flawed Conclusions). While other scenarios about other energy sources are critical as well, oil remains a geopolitical touchstone and the single biggest source of global energy—10-fold greater than wind and solar combined. At the very least, this analysis points to the need for real-world scenarios in general and, in the case of oil, the much higher probability that demand continues to grow in the foreseeable future and, possibly, quite significantly (below, see Global Oil Demand: Future Scenarios).

Debating the intricacies in flawed assumptions about energy scenarios is no mere theoretical exercise. The IEA’s legacy reputation continues to influence not only trillions of dollars in investment decisions but also government policies with far-reaching geopolitical consequences.

Energy Delusions: Peak Oil Forecasts

 

Greenpeace Punished for Pipeline Vandalism, Look Out Dark Money Agitators

Posted on by Ron Clutz

In his Clash Daily report, Wes Walker connects the dots concerning domestic terrorism after the South Dakota jury verdict Why ENORMOUS Judgment Against Greenpeace Should Have Dem Dark Money In A Cold Sweat.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Outsourcing your malicious behavior is no longer
a get-out-of-consequences-free card

This should be especially bad news for any of the dark-money groups that have quietly been ramping up violence against politically expedient targets — say, Tesla, for example.

What could a North Dakota jury judgment handed down against Greenpeace over a pipeline have to do with dark money politics-for-hire across the country? Quite a lot, actually.

At issue were the pipeline protests in North Dakota like the one where environmental activists cared so DAMNED much about the land that it took a state of emergency and the Army Corps of Engineers to avert an environmental catastrophe:

“Warm temperatures have accelerated snowmelt in the area of the Oceti Sakowin protest camp … Due to these conditions, the governor’s emergency order addresses safety concerns to human life as anyone in the floodplain is at risk for possible injury or death,” said the statement.

However, “the order also addresses the need to protect the Missouri River from the waste that will flow into the Cannonball River and Lake Oahe if the camp is not cleared and the cleanup expedited,” the statement read.

…Just how much waste and trash did the environmentally conscious DAPL protesters leave? “Local and federal officials estimate there’s enough trash and debris in the camp to fill about 2,500 pickup trucks,” reported AP.

Not surprisingly, months-long protests are chosen because they can cause both damage and harm, depending on the group, the tactics, and their intent.

The owner and operator of the pipeline, who lost an enormous contract as a result of their actions, took the protesters to court. They suffered serious financial harm and those who caused it should bear the responsibility for making them whole. Modern notions of protest notwithstanding, that’s how the court system was designed.

When they took to court Greenpeace and the Red Warrior Camp
(who the plaintiff claimed was their proxy)
on exactly this principle, the jury agreed.

After two days of deliberation, the New York Times reported, the jury returned the verdict. Energy Transfer, the owner and operator of the pipeline, filed the lawsuit in North Dakota state court against Greenpeace and Red Warrior Camp, which Energy Transfer claimed was a front for Greenpeace, and three individuals.

The lawsuit alleges that Greenpeace had engaged in a misinformation campaign with mass emails falsely claiming that the Dakota Access Pipeline would cross the sovereign land of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. In court filings, Energy Transfer claimed protesters engaged in a campaign of “militant direct action,” including trespassing on the company’s property, vandalizing construction equipment, and assaulting employees and contractors. —JustTheNews

This comes at a very bad time for violent leftwing activists. For years, the establishment left has been somewhere between indifferent to, or even happy to see violence on the streets, so long as that violence aligns with causes on the political left.

You never hear the kind of breathless language the establishment left uses when describing, for example ‘the Proud Boys’ when they describe, say, Antifa, BLM, Jayne’s Revenge (violent abortion activists), Palestinian Protesters, trans extremists, or (now) anti-Tesla crowds embracing forms of violence ranging from rioting on the streets, storming a building and threatening a young woman inside it, holding universities hostage, or vandalizing/firebombing Christian pro-life institutions, threatening churches, or most recently attacking anyone or anything with a Tesla connection.

The one thing so many of these movements including the current organized attacks against Tesla — have in common is copious amounts of financial backing. Efforts like what we have seen in DOGE, not to mention an FBI interested in prosecuting such crimes instead of helping them raise bail money — will be a game-changer on the investigation side of this problem.

AG Bondi, and those working with her have made it clear that investigating these fire bombings (and the SWAT-ings) will be treating the use of incendiary devices under statutes listing such actions as a federal crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

If the logic of this Greenpeace case is extended to culpability of the Dark Money orgs who have been using third-party agitator groups as arm’s-length shock troops for hire that give them a plausible deniability…

… this North Dakota ruling may set a precedent that says otherwise. One that other groups who have been harmed by political activism over the last number of years might play ‘follow the money’ with in seeking the redress of their harms.

Elon seems to think the breadcrumbs for a lot of the dark money issues will take us back to familiar names like ‘Act Blue’ or ‘Arabella Advisors’. If the early clues at DOGE, and the mayhem unfolding at Act Blue are any indicator, he could be on to something there.

It would take some imaginative thinking to come up with deterrents to a purely mercenary cause-of-the-day agitator group than the twin prongs of drying up the money supply and dropping the perpetrators in a hole where they can be completely forgotten about by society for a decade or two.

And if the feds draw the same inference with criminal culpability
that the jury in North Dakota just did?

Those media establishment types who were publicly giddy about Biden’s use of RICO statutes to take down Trump will soon be choking on their words and looking to bury records of their public statements cheering the Trump team prosecutions.

Low Energy-IQ Politicians, Be Gone!

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Power Density Physics Trump Energy Politics

A plethora of insane energy policy proposals are touted by clueless politicians, including the recent Democrat candidate for US President.  So all talking heads need reminding of some basics of immutable energy physics.  This post is in service of restoring understanding of fundamentals that cannot be waved away.

The Key to Energy IQ

This brief video provides a key concept in order to think rationally about calls to change society’s energy platform.  Below is a transcript from the closed captions along with some of the video images and others added. We know what the future of American energy will look like. Solar panels, drawing limitless energy from the sun. Wind turbines harnessing the bounty of nature to power our homes and businesses.  A nation effortlessly meeting all of its energy needs with minimal impact on the environment. We have the motivation, we have the technology. There’s only one problem: the physics. The history of America is, in many ways, the history of energy. The steam power that revolutionized travel and the shipping of goods. The coal that fueled the railroads and the industrial revolution. The petroleum that helped birth the age of the automobile. And now, if we only have the will, a new era of renewable energy. Except … it’s a little more complicated than that. It’s not really a matter of will, at least not primarily. There are powerful scientific and economic constraints on where we get our power from. An energy source has to be reliable; you have to know that the lights will go on when you flip the switch. An energy source needs to be affordable–because when energy is expensive…everything else gets more expensive too. And, if you want something to be society’s dominant energy source, it needs to be scalable, able to provide enough power for a whole nation. Those are all incredibly important considerations, which is one of the reasons it’s so weird that one of the most important concepts we have for judging them … is a thing that most people have never heard of. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the exciting world of…power density. Look, no one said scientists were gonna be great at branding. Put simply, power density is just how much stuff it takes to get your energy; how much land or other physical resources. And we measure it by how many watts you can get per square meter, or liter, or kilogram – which, if you’re like us…probably means nothing to you. So let’s put this in tangible terms. Just about the worst energy source America has by the standards of power density are biofuels, things like corn-based ethanol. Biofuels only provide less than 3% of America’s energy needs–and yet, because of the amount of corn that has to be grown to produce it … they require more land than every other energy source in the country combined. Lots of resources going in, not much energy coming out–which means they’re never going to be able to be a serious fuel source. Now, that’s an extreme example, but once you start to see the world in these terms, you start to realize why our choice of energy sources isn’t arbitrary. Coal, for example, is still America’s second largest source of electricity, despite the fact that it’s the dirtiest and most carbon-intensive way to produce it. Why do we still use so much of it? Well, because it’s significantly more affordable…in part because it’s way less resource-intensive. An energy source like offshore wind, for example, is so dependent on materials like copper and zinc that it would require six times as many mineral resources to produce the same amount of power as coal. And by the way, getting all those minerals out of the ground…itself requires lots and lots of energy. Now, the good news is that America has actually been cutting way down on its use of coal in recent years, thanks largely to technological breakthroughs that brought us cheap natural gas as a replacement. And because natural gas emits way less carbon than coal, that reduced our carbon emissions from electricity generation by more than 30%. In fact, the government reports that switching over to natural gas did more than twice as much to cut carbon emissions as renewables did in recent years. Why did natural gas progress so much faster than renewables? It wasn’t an accident. Energy is a little like money: You have to spend it to make it. To get usable natural gas, for example, you’ve first got to drill a well, process and transport the gas, build a power plant, and generate the electricity. But the question is how much energy are you getting back for your investment? With natural gas, you get about 30 times as much power out of the system as you put into creating it.  By contrast, with something like solar power, you only get about 3 1/2 times as much power back.

Replacing the now closed Indian Point nuclear power plant would require covering all of Albany County NY with wind mills.

Hard to fuel an entire country that way. And everywhere you look, you see similarly eye-popping numbers. To replace the energy produced by just one oil well in the Permian Basin of Texas–and there are thousands of those–you’d need to build 10 windmills, each about 330 feet high. To meet just 10% of the country’s electricity needs, you’d have to build a wind farm the size of the state of New Hampshire. To get the same amount of power produced by one typical nuclear reactor, you’d need over three million solar panels, none of which means, by the way, that we shouldn’t be using renewables as a part of our energy future. But it does mean that the dream of using only renewables is going to remain a dream, at least given the constraints of current technology. We simply don’t know how to do it while still providing the amount of energy that everyday life requires. No energy source is ever going to painlessly solve all our problems. It’s always a compromise – which is why it’s so important for us to focus on the best outcomes that are achievable, because otherwise, New Hampshire’s gonna look like this.
Addendum from Michael J. Kelly
Energy return on investment (EROI) The debate over decarbonization has focused on technical feasibility and economics. There is one emerging measure that comes closely back to the engineering and the thermodynamics of energy production. The energy return on (energy) investment is a measure of the useful energy produced by a particular power plant divided by the energy needed to build, operate, maintain, and decommission the plant. This is a concept that owes its origin to animal ecology: a cheetah must get more energy from consuming his prey than expended on catching it, otherwise it will die. If the animal is to breed and nurture the next generation then the ratio of energy obtained from energy expended has to be higher, depending on the details of energy expenditure on these other activities. Weißbach et al. have analysed the EROI for a number of forms of energy production and their principal conclusion is that nuclear, hydro-, and gas- and coal-fired power stations have an EROI that is much greater than wind, solar photovoltaic (PV), concentrated solar power in a desert or cultivated biomass: see Fig. 2. In human terms, with an EROI of 1, we can mine fuel and look at it—we have no energy left over. To get a society that can feed itself and provide a basic educational system we need an EROI of our base-load fuel to be in excess of 5, and for a society with international travel and high culture we need EROI greater than 10. The new renewable energies do not reach this last level when the extra energy costs of overcoming intermittency are added in. In energy terms the current generation of renewable energy technologies alone will not enable a civilized modern society to continue!
On Energy Transitions
Postscript

McKitrick: New PM Carney Tried for Years to Defund Canada

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England (BOE), reacts during a news conference at the United Nations COP21 climate summit at Le Bourget in Paris, France, on Friday, Dec. 4, 2015. Photo by Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg

Ross McKitrick writes at National Post Carney to lead Canada after trying for years to defund it.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The soon-to-be prime minister’s plan for net-zero banking
would have devastated the country

Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre is very concerned about financial conflicts of interest that new Liberal leader (and our next prime minister) Mark Carney may be hiding. But I’m far more concerned about the one out in the open: Carney is now supposed to act for the good of the country after lobbying to defund and drive out of existence Canada’s oil and gas companies, steel companies, car companies and any other sector dependent on fossil fuels. He’s done this through the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), which he founded in 2021.

Carney is a climate zealot. He may try to fool Canadians into thinking he wants new pipelines, liquified natural gas (LNG) terminals and other hydrocarbon infrastructure, but he doesn’t. Far from it. He wants half the existing ones gone by 2030 and the rest soon after.

He has said so, repeatedly and emphatically. He believes that the world “must achieve about a 50 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030” and “rapidly scale climate solutions to provide cleaner, more affordable, and more reliable replacements for unabated fossil fuels.” (By “unabated” he means usage without full carbon capture, which in practice is virtually all cases.) And since societies don’t seem keen on doing this, Carney created GFANZ to pressure banks, insurance companies and investment firms to cut off financing for recalcitrant firms.

“This transition to net zero requires companies across the whole economy to change behaviors through application of innovative technologies and new ways of doing business” he wrote in 2022 with his GFANZ co-chairs, using bureaucratic euphemisms to make his radical agenda somehow seem normal.

The GFANZ plan they articulated that year put companies into four categories. Those selling green technologies or engaged in work that displaces fossil fuels would be rewarded with financing from member institutions. Those still using fossil fuels, or have investments in others that do, but are committed to being “climate leaders” and have set a path to net-zero, would also still be eligible for financing, as would those that do business with “high-emitting firms” but plan to reach net-zero targets on approved timelines. Companies that own or invest in high-emitting assets, however, would operate under a “managed phaseout” regime and could even be cut off from investment capital.

What are “high-emitting assets”? Carney’s group hasn’t released a complete list, but a June 2022 report listed some examples: coal mines, fossil-fuel power stations, oil fields, gas pipelines, steel mills, ships, cement plants and consumer gasoline-powered vehicles. GFANZ envisions a future in which the finance sector either severs all connections to such assets or puts them under a “managed phaseout” regime, which means exactly what it sounds like.

So when Carney jokingly suggested it won’t matter if his climate plan drives up costs for steel mills because people don’t buy steel, he could have added that there likely won’t be any steel mills before long anyway. If his work as prime minister echoes his work as GFANZ chair, we can expect steel mills to be phased out, along with cars, gas-fired power plants, pipelines, oil wells and so forth.

Mark Carney, former Co-Chair of GFANZ, accompanied by (from left) Ravi Menon, Loh Boon Chye, and Yuki Yasui, at the Singapore Exchange, for the GFANZ announcement on the formation of its Asia-Pacific (APAC) Network.

GFANZ boasts at length about its members strong-arming clients into embracing net-zero. For instance, it extols British insurance multinational Aviva for its climate engagement escalation program: “Aviva is prepared to send a message to all companies through voting actions when those companies do not have adequate climate plans or do not act quickly enough.”

To support these coercive goals, Carney’s lobbying helped secure a requirement in Canada for banks, life insurance companies, trust and loan companies and others to develop and file reports disclosing their “climate transition risk,” set out by the federal Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI).

The rule, Guideline B-15 on Climate Risk Management, was initially published in 2023 and requires federally regulated financial institutions (other than foreign bank branches) to conduct extensive and costly research into their holdings to determine whether value may be at risk from future climate policies. The vagueness and potential liabilities created by this menacing set of expectations could push Canada’s largest investment firms to eventually decide it’s easier to divest altogether from fossil fuel and heavy industry sectors, furthering Carney’s ultimate goal.

Yet Carney will become prime minister just when Canadians face a trade crisis that requires the construction of new coastal energy infrastructure to ensure our fossil fuel commodities can be exported without going through the United States. He has said he would take emergency measures to support “energy projects,” but I assume he means windmills and solar panels. He has not (to my knowledge) said he supports pipelines, LNG terminals, fracking wells or new refineries. Unless he disowns everything he has said for years, we must assume he doesn’t.

Canadian journalists should insist he clear this up. Ask Carney if he supports the repeal of OSFI’s Climate Risk Management guideline. Show Carney his GFANZ report. Ask him, “Do you still endorse the contents of this document?” If he says yes, ask him how we can build new pipelines and LNG terminals, expand our oil and gas sector, run our electricity grid using Canadian natural gas, heat our homes and put gasoline in our cars if banks are to phase out these activities.

If he tries to claim he no longer endorses it,
ask him when he changed his mind,
and why we should believe him now.

The media must not allow Carney to be evasive or ambiguous on these matters. We don’t have time for a bait-and-switch prime minister. If Carney still believes the rhetoric he published through GFANZ, he should say so openly, so Canadians can assess whether he really is the right man to address our current crisis.

Minefield to Defuse EPA GHG Endangerment Finding

Posted on by Ron Clutz

When first using this image, I was noting how naive were politicians (the Brits, for example) to legislate future CO2 emissions reductions, opening themselves up to lawsuits and legal constraints on policy decisions.  Now the same advice applies to the Trump administration targeting the root of the poisonous tree of climate alarmism.  First the lay of the land from EPA Director Zeldin, in italics with my bolds:

Trump EPA Kicks Off Formal Reconsideration of Endangerment Finding with Agency Partners

EPA Press Office (press@epa.gov)

WASHINGTON – U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the agency will be kicking off a formal reconsideration of the 2009 Endangerment Finding in collaboration with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and other relevant agencies. EPA also intends to reconsider all of its prior regulations and actions that rely on the Endangerment Finding.

Administrator Zeldin: “After 16 years, EPA will formally reconsider the Endangerment Finding.”  “The Trump Administration will not sacrifice national prosperity, energy security, and the freedom of our people for an agenda that throttles our industries, our mobility, and our consumer choice while benefiting adversaries overseas. We will follow the science, the law, and common sense wherever it leads, and we will do so while advancing our commitment towards helping to deliver cleaner, healthier, and safer air, land, and water.”

White House OMB Director Russ Vought: “EPA’s regulation of the climate affects the entire national economy—jobs, wages, and family budgets. It’s long overdue to look at the impacts on our people of the underlying Obama endangerment finding.” 

Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum: “The United States produces energy smarter, cleaner, and safer than anywhere else in the world. To achieve President Trump’s vision for energy dominance, we are prioritizing innovation over regulation to attain an affordable, reliable, clean, and secure energy future for all Americans.”

Energy Secretary Chris Wright:  “The 2009 Endangerment finding has had an enormously negative impact on the lives of the American people. For more than 15 years, the U.S. government used the finding to pursue an onslaught of costly regulations – raising prices and reducing reliability and choice on everything from vehicles to electricity and more. It’s past time the United States ensures the basis for issuing environmental regulations follows the science and betters human lives.”

Transportation Secretary Duffy:  “Thanks to President Trump’s leadership and the hard work of Administrator Zeldin, we are taking another important step toward ushering in a golden age of transportation. The American people voted for a government that prioritizes affordable, safe travel and lets them choose the vehicles they drive. Today we are delivering on that promise, and this will allow the DOT to accelerate its work on new vehicle fuel economy standards that will lower car prices and no longer force Americans to purchase electric vehicles they don’t want.” 

Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Administrator Jeff Clark:  “Since 2009, I’ve consistently argued that the endangerment finding required a consideration of downstream costs imposed on both mobile sources like cars and stationary sources like factories. Under the enlightened leadership of President Trump and Administrator Zeldin, the time for fresh thought has finally arrived.”

In President Trump’s Day One Executive Order, “Unleashing American Energy,” he gave the EPA Administrator a 30-day deadline to submit recommendations on the legality and continuing applicability of the 2009 Endangerment Finding. After submitting these recommendations, EPA can now announce its intent to reconsider the 2009 Endangerment Finding.

When EPA made the Endangerment Finding in 2009, the agency did not consider any aspect of the regulations that would flow from it. EPA’s view then was that the Finding itself did not impose any costs, and that EPA could not consider future costs when making the Finding. EPA has subsequently relied on the Endangerment Finding as part of its justification for seven vehicle regulations with an aggregate cost of more than one trillion dollars, according to figures in EPA’s own regulatory impact analyses. The Endangerment Finding has also played a significant role in EPA’s justification of regulations of other sources beyond cars and trucks.  

Congress tasked EPA under Section 202 of the Clean Air Act with regulating new motor vehicles when the Administrator determines that emissions of an air pollutant endanger public health and welfare. But the Endangerment Finding went about this task in what appears to be a flawed and unorthodox way. Contrary to popular belief, the Endangerment Finding did not directly find that carbon dioxide emissions from U.S. cars endanger public welfare. Instead, the Finding looks at a combination of emissions of six different gases—and cars don’t even emit all six. It then creatively added multiple leaps, arguing that the combined six gases contribute some mysterious amount above zero to climate change and that climate change creates some mysterious amount of endangerment above zero to public health. These mental leaps were the only way the Obama-Biden Administration could come to its preferred conclusion, even if it did not stick to the letter of the Clean Air Act.  

The Endangerment Finding acknowledges and identifies significant uncertainties in the science and assumptions used to justify the decision. In the 16 years since EPA issued the Endangerment Finding, the world has seen major developments in innovative technologies, science, economics, and mitigation. EPA has never before asked for public comment on the implications these developments have had on the Endangerment Finding, but now it will as part of the reconsideration process it intends to undertake. Additionally, major Supreme Court decisions in the intervening years, including Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, West Virginia v. EPA, Michigan v. EPA, and Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA, have provided new guidance on how the agency should interpret statutes to discern Congressional intent and ensure that its regulations follow the law.  

As part of this reconsideration process, EPA will leverage the expertise of the White House Budget Office, including the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and other relevant agencies.  

It is in the best interest of the American people for EPA to ensure that any finding and regulations are based on the strongest scientific and legal foundation. The reconsideration of the Endangerment Finding and EPA’s regulations that have relied on it furthers this interest. The agency cannot prejudge the outcome of this reconsideration or of any future rulemaking. EPA will follow the Administrative Procedure Act and Clean Air Act, as applicable, in a transparent way for the betterment of the American people and the fulfillment of the rule of law.

This was announced in conjunction with a number of historic actions to advance President Trump’s Day One executive orders and Power the Great American Comeback. Combined, these announcements represent the greatest and most consequential day of deregulation in the history of the United States. The overhaul of the Endangerment Finding along with other massive rules represents the death of the Green New Scam and drives a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion. While accomplishing EPA’s core mission of protecting the environment, the agency is committed to fulfilling President Trump’s promise to unleash American energy, lower costs for Americans, revitalize the American auto industry, restore the rule of law, and give power back to states to make their own decisions.

Objections from the usual suspects

“This decision ignores science and the law,” David Doniger, senior strategist and attorney for climate and energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement. “Abdicating EPA’s clear legal duty to curb climate-changing pollution only makes sense if you consider who would benefit: the oil, coal, and gas magnates who handed the president millions of dollars in campaign contributions.”

Vickie Patton, the Environmental Defense Fund’s general counsel, said any move to undo the finding “would be reckless, unlawful, and ignore EPA’s fundamental responsibility to protect Americans from destructive climate pollution. We will vigorously oppose it.”

“They don’t have a winning hand. Having the power to do this doesn’t tell you anything about whether or not what they’re doing makes sense on the merits,” said Joseph Goffman, who ran EPA’s air office during the Biden administration. “They’ve got nothing on the merits.”

Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania dismissed the EPA’s action as “just the latest form of Republican climate denial. They can no longer deny climate change is happening, so instead they’re pretending it’s not a threat, despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that it is, perhaps, the greatest threat that we face today.”

The Pathways and the Risks

Shuting Pomerleau gives insight into activists worries and the possibilities:  Is EPA’s Endangerment Finding at Risk?

If EPA’s endangerment finding is rescinded, it may not have any material impact on the agency’s legal basis for issuing future climate regulations on GHG emissions, since the IRA amended the CAA to grant explicit authority to the agency. Nevertheless, repealing the endangerment finding would likely create chaos and uncertainty for U.S. climate policy.

First, rescinding the endangerment finding would make it much easier for the Trump Administration to repeal the existing EPA GHG emissions regulations because the original legal basis for this authority would no longer exist. Under the Obama and Biden Administrations, EPA has issued several sector-based GHG emissions regulations using the endangerment finding as a legal basis.

Second, repealing the endangerment finding would immediately subject EPA to legal challenges that could last years. Before the dispute could be adjudicated by the courts, there would be considerable confusion and uncertainty over compliance with the existing regulations. This would negatively impact the regulatory environment for businesses, as they need durable and consistent policies to make long-term investment decisions.

From the perspective of policymaking, rescinding EPA’s endangerment finding puts a big question mark on the outlook of U.S. climate policies. Currently, at the federal level, the United States uses a patchwork of policies to mitigate GHG emissions, such as handing out massive clean energy tax subsidies under the IRA and relying on command-and-control EPA regulations. The IRA energy tax provisions will likely be subject to at least partial repeal in an upcoming 2025 reconciliation bill. Even if a future administration seeks to regulate GHG emissions via EPA rulemaking, it would take a long time, and generally such regulations are costly, inflexible, and vulnerable to legal challenges.

What to Expect Next

EPA to Accept Nominations for Science Boards

EPA Press Office (press@epa.gov)

WASHINGTON – Today, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin announced that a notice will be published in the Federal Register seeking nominations for the Science Advisory Board (SAB) and Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC). Nominations will be accepted for 30 days following publication of the Federal Register notice.

“Reconstituting the Science Advisory Board and Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee are critical to ensuring that the agency receives scientific advice consistent with its legal obligations to advance our core mission of protecting human health and the environment,” said EPA Administrator Zeldin. “I look forward to receiving nominations to build an independent group of advisors to aid the agency’s rulemaking.” 

In January, EPA announced its decision to reset these federal advisory committees
to reverse the politicization of SAB and CASAC under the Biden-Harris Administration.

 

 

 

 

Pushback Against EU World-wide ESG Rules

Posted on by Ron Clutz

As Bloomberg reported, EU is attempting to force climate risk and ESG reporting on the whole world, not just its member nations.  

As trans-Atlantic relations grow increasingly fraught, Europe’s ESG regulations are becoming yet another flashpoint that threatens to sour ties.

The American Chamber of Commerce to the European Union (AmCham EU) says proposed revisions to the bloc’s environmental, social and governance rules don’t adequately protect US interests. The complaint is part of a growing US response to Europe’s ESG framework. Republican lawmakers call the rules “hostile” and warn that America’s jurisdictional sovereignty is at stake, while Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has said he’s willing to consider “trade tools” to retaliate.

The European Commission proposed changes last week that would rein in the scope of two major ESG laws: the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive. However, big international companies with business in the EU would still have to comply.

The upshot is that non-EU companies risk being ensnared by the bloc’s ESG rules, even for products that aren’t sold in the EU, said Kim Watts, senior policy manager for AmCham EU, whose members include Ford Motor Co., Exxon Mobil Corp. and Amazon.com Inc.

AmCham is worried that the EU “is going too far on extraterritoriality,” she said in an interview.

It’s a complaint that’s being backed up in even stronger terms by GOP members of Congress. In a letter sent shortly after the European Commission published its proposed revisions to the bloc’s ESG rules, the US lawmakers wrote to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, warning of the “profound” implications of Europe’s due diligence directive for US businesses.

The lawmakers stated: “CSDDD imposes stringent due diligence requirements on in-scope companies, mandating the evaluation of supply chains to identify, mitigate, and eliminate human rights and environmental abuses as defined by United Nations (UN) and Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) principles.

“Furthermore, US firms will face increased litigation risks and potential enforcement actions from EU member states, with penalties under the Directive reaching up to 5% of a company’s global turnover.

“However, these principles have not been ratified by Congress, raising concerns about the legitimacy of EU enforcement against US companies based on these principles. Additionally, small businesses that supply larger companies will also be affected, even if their operations are solely within the US compliance efforts will require significant resource allocation, diverting funds away from critical areas such as research and development, talent acquisition, and investment.

CSDDD letter to Sec BessentDownload

Climate Scare Based on Lies

Posted on by Ron Clutz

link to video: Prof. William Happer – Climate Scare Is Based on Lies

Transcript in italics with my bolds and added images (HS is interviewer Hannes Sarv, WH is William Happer)

HS: If you read about climate in the newspapers or some talk about climate on television, it will be very, very far from the truth.  We’re told that climate change is a direct consequence of human activity, particularly the burning of fossil fuels.  Year after year, you are seeing the dramatic reality of a boiling planet.

And for scientists, it is unequivocal. Humans are to blame, we’re led to believe the climate is boiling. And the accumulated amount is now trapping as much extra heat as would be released by 600,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding. That’s what’s boiling the oceans.  Which will have disastrous effects.

But is there really a scientific consensus on man-made climate change? Over a thousand scientists dispute the so-called climate crisis. Many of them are high-ranking experts in their fields. Among them, Dr. William Happer, a respected physicist with decades of groundbreaking research, an emeritus professor at Princeton University, and a leading expert in atomic and molecular physics.  He has deep expertise in the greenhouse effect and the role of CO2 in climate change.  Dr.  Happer argues that the role of human activity and CO2 in global warming is based on flawed science and misinterpretations.

“You know, it’s dangerous to make policy on the basis of lies.”

In this interview, we’ll explore the evidence he believes has been overlooked and why it could transform our understanding of climate change.

HS: As we can see, Professor, you are still working daily in your university office. So what is it? Are you consulting younger colleagues or still involved in some research projects?

WH: Well, yes, I try to stay busy and I’m working now with a former student from Canada who’s a professor there now, William van Wijngaarden.  And we’re working now on how water vapor and clouds affect the Earth’s climate, the radiation transfer details of those.

HS:So still very much involved in climate science.

WH: Well, you know, climate is very important. It’s always been important to humanity. It’s not going to change. I think it’s been having hard times the last 50 years because of this manic focus on demonization of greenhouse gases, which have some effect on climate but not very much.

HS: We’re going to absolutely get to that. But I wanted to start from actually, I was listening to one of your speeches and presentations you held back in 2023 at the Institute of Public Affairs. And what really I think resonated with me was that you started from the notion that freedom is important.  And every generation has their own struggle for freedom and freedom is not free. So I actually wanted to start by asking you what is the state, the current state of freedom in your opinion in the world today?

WH: I think it’s really true that every generation has to struggle to maintain freedom, you know, because every generation has lots of people who don’t like freedom, you know. They would like to be little dictators, you know, and that’s always been true if you read history. And it’s not going to change.

And so I think it’s important that we educate our children to recognize that humans are imperfect and there will always be attempts to get dictatorial control over society. And, you know, our founding fathers in America represented recognize that. They just assumed that their fellow Americans would be not very perfect people, you know, with lots of flawed people, and they tried to design a system of government that would work even with flawed people. Some German philosopher put it right, you know, out of the crooked timber of mankind, no straight thing was ever made. So that’s the problem that we will always face.

HS: What about academic freedom in today’s world? I’m not only speaking about climate science, but in general.

WH: Well, you know, I think academia has always had a problem with groupthink, you know, because you’re typically all together in one small community, and your children and wives interact with each other. And so the temptations, the pressures to all think the same are very great. You know, if you don’t think the same, your kids suffer, your wife suffers, and that’s nothing new. It’s always been like that. You know, there’s a famous… American play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? But it’s about this topic and it goes back many, many decades, you know, long before the current woke problems that we’re having in America.

HS:  So as we all know currently, there is a new administration in the United States. So what will happen now? Will the situation, in your opinion, improve or is it just, you know, the challenges are going to remain?

WH: Well, you know, we’ve just elected a new president, and he’s very vigorous and has lots of ideas, and I think that’s a good thing. We’ll see how successful he is. But, you know, our society and our government is designed to be cumbersome and unwieldy. That’s to prevent crazy things from happening too quickly.  And so the president will have to deal with that. And if the Americans support him, if the Congress supports him, he’ll be successful.

HS: Let’s move to climate science. Is there any honest discussion left? It has become so political, in my opinion, that it is really hard to have an open, a normal discussion about it.

WH: Well, I think if you go to a seminar, for example, at Princeton on climate, It’s often pretty good science. It’s not alarmist. But this is professors and students talking to each other. The further you get away from the actual research, the more alarmist and crazy it becomes.

So if you read about climate in the newspapers or listen to some talk about climate on television, it will be very, very far from the truth. And it won’t be the same thing that the professors at universities normally are talking about. But that said, you know, I think there’s been a lot of corruption because of all of the money available. You know, there are huge funds if you do research that supports the idea that there is a climate emergency which requires lots of government intervention. And if you don’t do that, you’re less likely to be funded, you know, you can’t pay your graduate students. So it’s a bad situation. It’s been very corrupting to this branch of science.

HS: Exactly how long has it been going on, this kind of situation?

WH: Well, I think it really got started in the early 90s. I was in Washington at the time as a government bureaucrat, and I could see it getting started. It was being pushed by Senator Al Gore and his allies. There were, at that time, still lots of honest scientists in academia who didn’t go along with all of the alarmism, but they’ve gradually died off and they’ve been replaced by younger people who’ve never known anything except, you know, pleasing your government sponsor with the politically correct research results that they expect.

HS: So basically they are not in a position, if they want to achieve anything in academia or make a career for themselves, they are kind of unable to stay honest even?

WH: They try to be honest, but it’s very difficult because you have to plan to educate your children. You have to maintain your family, and so that means you need money. And the only way to get money is to agree to this alarmist meme that has dominated climate scientists now for several decades.

HS: Of course it affects climate research. So what is the current state, let’s say, the current state of climate research? What’s the quality of it in your opinion?

WH: Well, I think many of the observational programs in climate science are very good. For example, satellite measurements of Earth’s properties, radiation, cloudiness, temperatures, and ground-based observations. They’re often very high-quality work, very useful, and we’re lucky to have them. There are good programs in both Europe and the United States and Japan, and China is becoming quite important nowadays, too.

I think where there’s still huge problems is in computer modeling. I don’t think most computer models mean anything. It’s a complete waste of money, but that’s what’s driving the public perception. So the public is unable to look at model results, which are not alarming at all.  But instead what they see is graphic displays from computer computations which are not tied into observations. So I think the money that’s been spent on computers, and lots of it has been spent, has been mostly wasted.

HS: Let me just understand it correctly because I’ve come to understand that these computer models are something that our current debate or the climate alarm is all based on:  That there’s going to be a warming of how many degrees and then the earth is going to be uninhabitable.  And you’re saying that those models are not things that something like that should be based on.

WH: The Earth is always either warming or cooling. It’s a rare time when it’s got stable temperature. We’re in a warming phase now. But most of the warming is probably a natural recovery from the Little Ice Age when it was much, much colder all over the world. And it began to warm up in the early 1800s.

And it continued to warm, not very fast. No one knows how long this will last. If you look over the last 10,000 years, since the end of the last glacial period, there have been many warmings and coolings similar to the one that we’re in now.

And I think understanding that is quite important, but that understanding has been put back by many, many years because of the sort of crazed focus on greenhouse gases. It’s pretty clear that greenhouse gases don’t have very much to do with these warmings. Nobody was burning fossil fuels in the year 1200-1300 when the poor Greenlanders were frozen out.

They did some pretty good farming in the southern parts of Greenland in the year 1000, the year 1100. Before long, it became just too cold to continue to do that. The same thing happened in parts of my ancestral country of Scotland. You know, you used to be able to farm the uplands of Scotland, which you can’t farm now, it’s too cold. But they’re warming up at some point, maybe you can farm them again. So anyway, the climate is just famous for being unstable.

HS: Let’s talk about those greenhouse gases. Mainly climate change today in mainstream media or by those alarmist politicians, for example, is attributed to carbon dioxide. If someone has not looked into it, this gas might seem to have something even poisonous. What is carbon dioxide? Do we need it?

WH: Well, first of all, carbon dioxide is at the basis of life on Earth. We live because plants are able to chemically transform carbon dioxide and water into sugar. And a byproduct is the oxygen that we breathe. And so we should all be very grateful that we have carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  You know, life would die without carbon dioxide. If you look over the history of… Life on Earth, carbon dioxide has never been very stable in the atmosphere. There have been times in the past when it’s been much, much higher than today. Life flourished with five times more carbon dioxide than we have today.

And there have been times when it’s been much lower, one-half, one-third, and those were actually quite unpleasant times for life. They were the depths of the last ice ages when carbon dioxide levels dropped to below 200 parts per million, quite low compared to today. We’re at around 400.  So at the depth of the last ice age, it was about half what it is today. In some of the more verdant periods of geological history, it’s been four times, five times what it is today. So the climate is not terribly sensitive to carbon dioxide. It has some sensitivity to it.

More carbon dioxide will make it a little bit warmer. But carbon dioxide is heavily saturated, to use a technical term. You know, there’s so much in the atmosphere today that if you, for example, could double carbon dioxide, that’s 100% increase, you would only decrease the cooling radiation to space by 1%.  So 100% change in carbon dioxide only makes a 1% change in flux. And that’s because of the saturation that I mentioned. And there’s not much you can debate about that. It’s very, very basic physics. It’s the same physics that produces the dark lines of the sun and the stars. So it’s quite well understood.

And so the question is, what temperature change will a 1% change of radiation to space cause? You know, that’s radiation flux, not temperature. And the answer is it will cause an even smaller percentage change of temperature. There’s really no threat from increasing carbon dioxide or any of the other more minor greenhouse gases like methane or nitrous oxide or artificial gases like anesthetic gases. It’s all a made-up scare story.

HS: Where did this scare story come from? Why this fixation on greenhouse gases? If you explain it this way, it seems a bit even absurd to be fixated on these gases all the time.

WH: Well, you know, I’m really good with instruments and differential equations, but I’m not so good at people’s motives. And so I don’t really understand myself exactly how this has happened. I think… There are various motives, some of them fundamentally good. For example, one of the motives has been it’s hard to keep people from fighting with each other, so if we could have a common enemy like a danger to the climate, we could all join forces and defeat climate change, and then we wouldn’t be killing each other off.

So there’s nothing wrong with a motive like that, except that you have to lie.
And so, you know, it’s dangerous to make policy on the basis of lies.

So I don’t know what drives it. It’s a perfect storm of different motives. Lust for power, good motives, lust for peace. All for that. Lust for money. But I’m much more comfortable talking about, as I say, the physics of greenhouse gases and the physics of climate than what drives people.

HS: Yeah, yeah. Well, you have said that this climate change or climate alarmism today is, what was it, you prefer scam, but you are willing to settle with a hoax, is it correct?

WH: Well, this is not too serious, but you know, when someone says hoax, I think of hoax as, to some extent, a practical joke. There’s a certain amount of humor in it. For example, the Piltdown Man was a famous hoax where some brilliant Englishman doctored up a I think it was a chimpanzee skull to make it look like a human skull. And this was not too serious, but lots of learned professors wrote papers about it, you know, and it was all nonsense. But this had no aim to make a lot of money, you know, or to gain power.

It was simply, you know, a great practical joke. That’s a hoax. A scam is different. A scam is where you are deceiving people to enrich yourself, to gain power, you know, and so I think that’s a better description of what’s happening with climate than a hoax. But it’s a small detail, I don’t mind calling it a hoax.

HS: Basically, Professor, there is a lot of money involved in climate change or climate alarmism. Would it be that money is driving this as well or what is your take on that?

Yes, those are trillions of dollars they are projecting.

WH: Well, I think it’s really true that the love of money has been the root of evil as long as humanity has existed. And here we’re talking about trillions of dollars. If you really went to net zero, the economic implications would just be enormous. People would have to lower their standard of living greatly. It would cause enormous damage to the environment. You cover the world with windmills and solar panels. So… And it’s driven by money. Lots of people are making lots of money. So it’s driven by money. It’s driven by power.

And then it’s driven by poor people who fundamentally believe, you know, and that they really have been misled into thinking that there is an emergency. And you have to be sympathetic to them, you know, who wouldn’t want to save the world if the world was in danger? It is not really in danger, but many people are convinced that it’s in danger. But, you know, there’s this old saying, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and we’re on the road to hell with net zero.

HS: Yes. Well, like you already mentioned, this crisis is often said to be linked with, for example, extreme weather events. But I don’t know, is it even clear today that we have more extreme weather events because of the warming that is happening? Or is it so?

WH: Well, if you look at the data, there’s not the slightest evidence that there’s more extreme weather today than there was 50 years ago. Even the IPCC, you know, the UN body does not claim that there is an increase in extreme weather. They say there’s really no hard evidence for that. And in fact, the evidence is that it’s about the same as the weather has always been. In my country, for example, the worst weather we had was back in the 1930s when we had the Dust Bowl and, you know… people migrating from Oklahoma to California, you know, it was a terrible time.  We’ve not had anything like that since.

HS: Of course, always to talk about floods, always to talk about hurricanes. And as I understand as well, the IPCC is not actually in their scientific reports. They are not actually saying that there are more. But they are saying something, right? So the question here is, what do you think?  You have probably looked into them a bit more than I am. So is it solid science what’s in there? Or is it also motivated the IPCC scientific reports, politically motivated, for example?

WH: You know, there’s this saying in the communications business, if it bleeds, it leads. So if you’ve got a newspaper or a television business, you have to look for disasters because that’s what people pay attention to. And so part of the problem has been the mass media, which has to have emergencies, has to have extreme events.  And the fact is usually hidden that there’s nothing unusual about an event. They try to deceive you into thinking that this has never happened.

For example, just yesterday they had four or five inches of snow in Corpus Christi, Texas. That’s a lot of snow for Corpus Christi. But, you know, if you look at the records of Corpus Christi, it’s not unusual every 20, 30 years as it happens. It’s been happening for thousands of years. But most people, you know, they’re not even 20 or 30 years of age, and so they’ve never seen this before. So it seems like the world is changing rapidly in front of their eyes, but it’s not changing really at all.

HS: Yes, they can look at it on the television, then it must be true when they are saying that it’s because of climate change, right? So this is the thing. One particular graph that is always talked about when climate is the issue is the famous Michael Mann hockey stick.

The first graph appeared in the IPCC 1990 First Assessment Report (FAR) credited to H.H.Lamb, first director of CRU-UEA. The second graph was featured in 2001 IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR) the famous hockey stick credited to M. Mann.

WH: The graph is phony, and that’s been demonstrated by many, many people. It’s even different from the first IPCC graphs. It’s a graph of temperature versus time since about the year 2000. you know, about the year zero, you know, from the time of Christ to today.  And what it shows is absolutely no change of temperature until the 20th century when it shoots up like the blade of a hockey stick. So that’s why it’s called the hockey stick curve. So the long, flat… Part of the hockey stick is the unchanging temperature. But that was not in the first IPCC report.

Climate reconstructions of the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ 1000-1200 AD. Legend: MWP was warm (red), cold (blue), dry (yellow), wet

The first IPCC report showed that it was much warmer in Northern Europe and United States, North America, in the year 1000 than it is today. There really was a medieval warm period, which was what allowed the Norse to settle in Greenland. and have a century or two of successful agriculture there. It’s never gotten that warm again since.  It may happen, but the hockey stick curve basically erased that, so it was… It’s like these Orwellian novels. 1984, there was this… They continued to rewrite history, you know, so what was history yesterday was not history today, you know. So it was rewriting the past. There clearly was a warm period.There is evidence from all around the globe that it was much warmer in the year 1000 than today. We still have not gotten as warm as it was then.

HS: Yes, yes, and the warm period, as I understand, was followed by the Little Ice Age. So 19th century, the warming that started then is actually, it started at the end of this Little Ice Age.

Earth is still recovering from the Little Ice Age, which was the coldest period of the past 10,000 years, that ended about 150 years ago.

WH: That’s right, that’s right. For example, that’s very clear if you come to Alaska, And look at the Alaska glaciers. In particular, there’s a famous glacier bay in Alaska which was filled with glaciers in the year 1790 when it was first mapped by the British captain Vancouver. the ice came right out to the Pacific.

And already by 1800, it had receded up into the bay. Some of it was melting by 1800. And by 1850, most of the ice was gone. I’m talking about the 1800s, not the 1900s, not the present time. So it’s pretty clear from Glacier Bay that the warming began around the year 1800.  And it’s just been steadily warming since then.

HS: I have been shown another graph many times which shows a correlation between the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the temperature rise during the last, let’s say, 150-200 years.  Yeah, it’s a correlation, of course, but is there any causation as well? Because you pointed it out as well that there is a warming effect.  Carbon dioxide has a warming effect in the atmosphere, but it’s not leading as I understand.

► Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging 11–12 months behind changes in global sea surface temperature. ► Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging 9.5–10 months behind changes in global air surface temperature. ► Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging about 9 months behind changes in global lower troposphere temperature. ► Changes in ocean temperatures explain a substantial part of the observed changes in atmospheric CO2 since January 1980. ► Changes in atmospheric CO2 are not tracking changes in human emissions.

WH: Yeah, that’s correct. You know, you can estimate past CO2 levels by looking at bubbles in ice cores from Antarctica or from Greenland. And you can also estimate past temperatures by looking at the ratios of oxygen isotopes in the ice and the other proxies. So there are these proxy estimates of past CO2 levels and past temperature.

And they are indeed tightly correlated. When their temperature is high, CO2 levels are high, and temperature is low, CO2 levels are low. But if you look at the time dependence, in every case, first the temperature changes and then the CO2 changes. Temperature goes up, a little bit later CO2 goes up.

Temperature goes down, a little bit later CO2 goes down. So they are indeed correlated, but the cause is not CO2, the cause is temperature. So something makes the temperature change and the CO2 is forced to follow. That’s easy to understand. It’s mostly due to CO2 dissolving in the ocean. The solubility of CO2 is very temperature dependent.

So if the world ocean’s cool, they suck more CO2 out of the atmosphere. And if they warm, more CO2 can come back into the atmosphere. So there’s nothing surprising about that. The only surprise is nobody really knows why the temperature changes, but it’s certainly not CO2 causing it to change because the CO2 follows the change.

HS: It doesn’t precede it. Causes have to precede their effects.  from the same 2023 presentation that I already mentioned, that I listened. And as a member of Jason in 1982, you were one of the authors of a scientific paper that aimed to measure the effects of CO2 to global warming. The first number you got was too small. Then you just arbitrarily increased it.

WH: You’re asking, the key question is how much warming would be caused if you double carbon dioxide. That’s sometimes called the climate sensitivity or the doubling sensitivity. And the first person to seriously try to calculate that theoretically was your neighbor across the Baltic, Svante Arrhenius. He was a Swede and a very good chemist, and he was interested in this problem. He was the first one to really work on it, and his first paper was written in 1896. So the first climate warming paper was 1896 by Arrhenius, and he estimated that doubling CO2 at that time would warm the earth by around six degrees.

It was a big number. He didn’t know very much, so it was not a bad number given what he knew at the time. As he learned more, he kept bringing that number down, so the last number he published was about four degrees, and it was still going down.  So the number that we published was three degrees, this little Jason study. So it was only a little bit smaller than Arrhenius’ number. But that was because neither he nor we really knew enough about how the climate works to get a reliable answer.

And I think the only way to really get a reliable answer is from good observations over long periods of time. And we simply don’t have good enough empirical data right now to know what that is. But I’m pretty sure that doubling CO2 by itself is unlikely to cause warming of more than about one degree Celsius. You know, if you do the simplest calculation, you find that answer, it’s a bit less than one degree for doubling CO2.

And so three degrees, four degrees, the only way to get that is with enormous positive feedbacks. And so that’s what these computer models do that we’ve been talking about.  They inject feedbacks in a very obscure way so you can’t figure out what they’ve done. But it’s a supercomputer, so how could it be wrong? It must be right, it’s a computer after all. But nevertheless, it’s giving these absurd positive feedbacks. And most feedbacks in nature are not positive, they’re negative.

There’s even a law called Le Chatelier’s Principle, which is that if you perturb some chemical system or physical system, it has feedbacks. And they try to reduce the perturbation. They don’t try to make it bigger. They try to make it smaller. So climate has turned that completely on its head. It says all feedbacks in climate are positive, and if it’s negative, forget about it. You won’t get your research grant renewed next year if you put that in your proposal. So it’s a mess, and it’s going to take a long time to clean this up.

Of course, if someone is not on the right side of this net zero debate, people are starting calling him names. He’s a climate denier or climate skeptic and so on. But those ad hominem arguments are what are used in the media to shut down the arguments of even scientists.  One of them is that if you’re not a climate scientist, you’re not allowed to talk about climate.  Well, of course, that’s nonsense. Climate is really all physics and chemistry. And so anyone with a good grounding in physics and chemistry can know as much about climate as a climate scientist.

In general, climate scientists are not well educated. When I look at American universities, maybe it’s better in Estonia, but you go to a class and your education consists on how do you organize a petition to your local legislator. So that’s your knowledge as a climate scientist. You don’t have to learn physics, you don’t have to learn chemistry, you don’t have to learn electromagnetics and radiation transfer. You have to learn how to work the political process.  So it’s true that most physicists aren’t very good at that. You know, they’re quite good at physics, but they’re not very good at talking to the Congress or to the president.

HS: Yeah, yeah. So basically, climate science has become something more like a social science in that sense.

WH: Yeah, that’s right. It’s been very heavily politicized. There was something very similar to this in the Soviet Union in the field of biology. There was this Ukrainian agronomist, Lysenko, who… got the ear of the Communist Party and was supported for many decades with just crazy theories about biology, you know, you could grow peaches on the Arctic Circle if you just listen to him.  All sorts of nutty things and that there was no such thing as genes, but he had a lot of political support and so he essentially destroyed biology for a generation in the Soviet Union.  You know if you taught your class about genes, you know, Mendel’s wrinkled peas and smooth peas, you were lucky if you were only fired, you know, you could have been sent to a concentration camp and several people were condemned to death for teaching about genes. And so I think climate science is a lot more like Lysenkoism than it is normal science.

HS: Yes, well, yes, this is something that we should be able to learn from because this was the Stalin era, this was the craziest time period, absolutely. In Eastern Europe we also know a lot about that and it does seem to me as well that Löschenkism is something that is like gaslighting the public and ostracizing renowned scientists, for example, like yourself. This is something that has been done related to climate science. Or how do you feel that? Do you feel that you have been targeted by those activists, activist politicians or not?

WH: I don’t feel any pain. I don’t pay much attention to them because I have very little respect for them. The people that I respect, most of them agree with me. I’ve personally not suffered from it, perhaps just because I don’t pay attention to it. I’m older, I’m retired, so I’m not dependent on government grants.  Younger people could not do this. So people in the middle of their career have a very serious problem because they’ll lose their research funding and they won’t be able to continue their career if they don’t sign up to the alarmist Dogma.

HS: And one of the things how they shut down criticism is simply by stating that 97% of climate scientists are saying that our climate change or global warming, it is anthropogenic and you cannot argue with 97%, can you? What do you think? Is science democracy?

WH: There are some small anthropogenic effects on climate. Any big city, for example, is quite a bit warmer than the countryside. If you go 30 kilometers outside of New York City, it’s cooler. Or any other big city. So those are called urban heat island effects. So it’s clearly caused by people.

But if you look at undisturbed areas far from urban centers, there the climate is doing what it has always done. It’s warmed, it’s cooled, it’s done that many, many times over history. And there’s not the slightest sign of anything different resulting from our generation burning fossil fuels.

My own guess is that fossil fuels may have caused about close to a degree, maybe three-quarters of a degree of warming, but that’s not very much. When I got up this morning, it was minus 10 Celsius. Here in my office, it’s quite a bit warmer. One degree, you can hardly feel it.  My air conditioner doesn’t trip on and off at one degree, so it’s not a dangerous increase in temperature. Saving the planet from one and a half degree of warming is just crazy. Who cares about one and a half degree of warming? It won’t be that much anyway. But if it were, it wouldn’t matter.

HS: If the planet warms a bit, is it actually bad to us?

WH: No, of course it’s not bad. For example, I have a backyard garden, and I would welcome another week or two of frost-free growing season in the fall and in the spring. I could have a better garden, and that’s true over much of the world.  And if you look at the warming, most of the warming is in high latitudes where it’s cold. It’s where you live in Estonia, where I live in New Jersey. It doesn’t warm in India. It doesn’t warm in the Congo or in the Amazon. Even, you know, the climate models don’t predict that. They predict the warming, when it comes, will be mostly at high latitudes near the poles. And that’s where actually the warming will be good, not bad.

HS: One more question about climate science. It is being told to us that there is a consensus on anthropogenic climate change. And my question actually here is that in science, can there be a consensus? What is a consensus in science even?

WH: Well, I think you know very well that science has nothing to do with consensus. Michael Crichton was very eloquent about this. And if you don’t know about his work, you should read it. But he says when someone uses the word consensus, they’re really talking about politics, not science.

Science is determined by how well your understanding agrees with observations. If you have a theory and it agrees with observations, then the theory is probably right. But it’s right not because everybody, all your friends agree with it, it’s because it agrees with observation. You make a prediction and you do an experiment to see whether the prediction is right. If the experiment confirms it, then the theory is probably okay. It’s not okay because everybody agrees with you that your theory is right. And so that’s what the climate scientists are trying to claim, that science is made by consensus. It’s not made by consensus.  There really is a science that is independent of people. There is a reality that could care less what the consensus is. It’s just the way the world works. And that’s real science.

HS: What are your views on energy transition? Should we, you know, stop burning fossil fuels? And why, if so?

WH: Well, of course, we shouldn’t stop burning fossil fuels. We can’t stop, you know. It’s suicide. It’s economic suicide. And more than economic, it’s real suicide. People will die. You know, they tried something like that in Sri Lanka, you know, 15, 20 years ago when the extremist government came in and stopped the use of chemical fertilizer, you know, because it was unnatural. So everyone was supposed to go back to organic farming and the result was that, you know, the rice crop failed, the tea crop failed, you know, the price of food went up, people were starving in the streets. The same thing will happen if we go to net zero.

You can’t run the world without fossil fuels. We’re completely dependent on them, especially for agriculture, but transportation and many other things. There’s nothing bad about them. If you burn them in a responsible way, they cause no harm. They release beneficial carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide really benefits the world. It’s not a pollutant at all.

HS: There is the question of how much longer will fossil fuels last. There is a finite number and for years people have wondered when will they run out and what will we do when we run out of fossil fuels. And so that’s an interesting question that’s worth talking about.

WH: It’s not an immediate problem, but sooner or later it will be a problem. My own guess, we’re talking about a century or two, not decades. But I think our descendants will have to replace fossil fuels, and my guess is that they will make synthetic hydrocarbon fuels.  No one has ever discovered a better fuel than a hydrocarbon, you know. We ourselves, you know, store energy as hydrocarbons. You know, the fat on our belly, you know, that’s a hydrocarbon. You know, so it’s really good, you know. So we can make hydrocarbons ourselves from limestone and water if you have enough energy.

There are ways to do that chemically. And so my guess is that in 200 years, that’s the way energy will be… handled. We’ll make it from inorganic carbon, limestone probably, and we’ll burn it the same way we do today. You know, we’ll make synthetic diesel, we’ll make synthetic gasoline, and continue to use internal combustion engines.  No one’s invented a better engine than an internal combustion engine.

HS: But what about nuclear energy? What are your thoughts on that?

WH: Well, nuclear energy clearly works. It makes electricity, so you can’t run your automobile on nuclear energy unless you’re stupid enough to buy an electric car. So nuclear has had some of the same problems as fossil fuels. There are these ideological foes of nuclear energy And they have two main arguments. The first argument, and one that does worry me, is that it’s not that difficult to change a nuclear commercial enterprise into a weapon. And nuclear weapons really are very, very dangerous.

So that’s one of the oppositions. But the other is completely phony, is that we can’t handle the waste. That’s not a difficult problem, actually.  It’s technically quite easy to handle the waste. For example, at a typical nuclear plant in the United States, there’s a dry cask storage yard, which is not as big as the parking lot. And it’s got a century worth of fuel. It’s perfectly safe. And you could leave it there for several centuries and nothing would happen to it.  So there’s no need to process it. You can let it sit there and, you know, in a hundred years, maybe people will regard it as a useful mine for various materials. So nuclear is fine, and I think it will play an important role for a long time in human affairs.

You know, the big dream has always been fusion, nuclear fusion energy, where you combine deuterium and tritium, you know, and make power. That’s turned out to be much, much harder than we ever thought it would be. But my guess is it’s a problem that  will eventually be solved.

Someone will have a really good new idea about how to do it. If we keep smart people working on it, someone will figure out how to do it. So I’m optimistic about the future for energy. I think humanity is going to do fine if they don’t self-destruct.

HS: Well, Professor, to kind of sum up, I would like to ask you about what is, in your opinion, what are the real problems? As I understand, and I tend to agree with you, climate change currently at least is not a real problem for humanity. But probably there are some. And what is your feeling? What are they?

Well, the problem has always been living together. How do you keep humanity from self-destructing? And that’s why I have some sympathy for the climate alarmists. They thought that having climate as a common enemy would be one way to prevent this. So you have to admit that that’s not such a bad motive.

I don’t think it’s true.  I don’t think it will work. I think it’s worse than nothing. But I guess the question is how do we keep people in a civilized society indefinitely? And As I said, I’m a lot better with differential equations and instruments than I am with this sort of a question. But just speaking personally, I think everybody should have a feeling that they’re doing something significant with their lives. So I think anything we can do in society is to let young people feel like they’re significant and they’re doing something worthwhile and useful it would be good for the whole world.