Ole Humlum published his annual summary The State of the Climate 2025 Global and Arctic Based on Real Observations*.  Synopsis below with my bolds and added images.

Abstract

Real observations show a slight decrease of global temperature in 2025 compared with the previous ten years. Some stations in the Arctic show warming, but most are fairly stable. The Arctic Ocean is cooling to considerable depth, while the tropical and Antarctic oceans have a slight surface warming. The sea level trend is not changing as IPCC model data indicate. The Arctic September sea ice varies but its area has the last 4 years been much larger than modelled by the IPCC. The average snow cover on the Northern Hemisphere is fairly constant during the last 50 years. The number of tropical cyclones varies, but with no clear trend. The integrated cyclonic energy shows some periodic variations, but no trend. Global precipitation has almost zero trend. The global cloud cover decreased from 64 % to 61 % from 1985 to 2020. At the same time the global temperature increased 0.7 °C, suggesting a possible relation. The observed sequence: first warming the of the sea surface, then the deeper sea, atmosphere and land suggests that the Sun is the source of warming, modulated by clouds, and there is no manmade climate catastrophe in the foreseeable future.

1. Introduction

The United Nations Secretary General, António Guterres on July 27, 2023, declared: The era of global boiling has arrived. We have a huge climate crisis. There is a good reason to study the available climate data to see if that is true. In the following we will compare data for 2025 with previous years and look for trends of this claimed extreme warming and accompanying weather extremes. We found no sign of a coming climate crisis.

Before I started this survey, I asked my helpful AI to make some images illustrating a) Changing
Climate, b) Natural climate change, and c) Good climate change and d) Man made climate change.
The pictures are shown on the next page.

They give a good idea of what the public is told about climate and climate change and that mankind is destroying it, as stated by the UN Secretary General. In this extended abstract I present a short status for the atmospheric and ocean temperatures, sea level, sea ice, sea level, snow, wind and storms, precipitation and global cloud cover.

My talk can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch v=85puIDVyBgc. Monthly updates of climate data are available at my website: http://www.climate4you.com.

2. Atmospheric temperatures

The average change is -0.24 °C and is more a sign of cooling than warming. A warning: The use of just one number, the average change in global temperature, hides the fact that our planet has various temperature regions which may show a different change than the average. In 2025 we observe that the Southern Africa has cooled 3.4°C, while Greenland and Northeast Canada have warmed 3.0 °C. The use of averages tends to hide important details.

3. Ocean temperatures

The general impression of the global sea temperatures is that they follow the radiation pattern of the Sun, with a maximum surface temperature in Equator regions and colder water towards the poles. At the deep bottom of both Polar Oceans we find, to our surprise, permafrost regions.

If we look at data for the Argo Ocean temperature surveys for the oceans from 0 to 1900 m depth, from 2004 to 2021, we find that the average temperature of the global oceans has increased from 6.42 to 6.47 °C. However, if we look at different oceans: the Circum-Arctic oceans are cooling, while the Circum-Equator oceans are warming – but only near the surface level. The CircumAntarctic oceans show warming down to 500 m. This is illustrated in Figure 4.

Much is still to be learned about the oceans! We should focus on local and regional values instead
of global averages and should not overinterpret published values.

4. Sea level

The satellite observations refer to a global model of the sea surface of the oceans. It is far more relevant to study the traditional sea level observations in coastal areas where people live. An important measuring station is Korsør in Denmark, which is in a geologically very stable area with no uplift or sinking. Measurements since 1897 in Figure 5, shows a linear trend of +0.83 mm/year. This means an estimated sea level rise of about 10 cm in 2150.

5. Sea iceThe future of the Arctic Sea ice is rather serious according to the last IPCC report. Some scenarios
predict practically ice-free conditions in September from 2050 as shown in Figure 7. But observations show that for the last 4 years the sea ice area has been considerably higher than forecasted
by the models.

[Note: See the linked paper for Humlum’s point on Snow, Wind and Storms, and Global Precipitation, all of which show unalarming trends.]

8. Cloud cover – and a few reflections

If all clouds were suddenly removed, then our planet would gain about 17 W/m2 in solar radiation
and become warmer. In the period 1982-2019 we have observed a decrease in cloud cover from
64 % to 61 %. This means that the Earth has received significantly more solar radiation. This may
well be the main explanation for the observed temperature increase of about 0.7 °C during this
period, as shown in Figure 11.

Climate scientists admit that they cannot model the cloud cover in a reliable way. It is simply not possible to trustworthy model small scale phenomena as evaporation and condensation, for use in global climate models.

There are many additional parameters that may act on the cloud cover. For instance, if we study the changes in the Earth’s rotation, which we measure as the length of the day, we find that it was 2 milliseconds longer in 1980 than it is today. The faster rotation mirror decreasing cloud cover and decreasing humidity. Thus, it is therefore entirely possible that these parameters in some ways are related. Much is still to be learned about global cloud cover.

8.1 Some reflections

The principal question was this: Are we currently in a climate crisis?
1. The observed average global air temperature change during the last 40+ years is about
+0.16°C per decade. If unchanged, the additional average global air temperature increase
by year 2100 will be about +1.15°C. However, part of the temperature increase reported may be caused by administrative changes, and the real future increase may therefore be smaller.

2. Tide gauges along coasts indicate a typical global sea level increase of about 1-2 mm/yr.
Coastal sea level change rate last 100 year has essential been stable, but with periodic variations. If unchanged, global sea level at coasts will typically increase 8-16 cm by year 2100, although many locations in regions affected by glaciation 20,000 years ago, will experience a relative sea level drop.

3. Since 2004 the global oceans above 1900 m depth have on average warmed about 0.037°C
(do not overinterpret). The maximum warming (about 0.2 °C, 0-100 m depth) mainly affects oceans near Equator, where incoming solar radiation is at maximum.

If we look at the Earth’s climate on geological time scales of millions of years, it is surprisingly
stable. In most periods it is stable and warm – about 25 oC on average, and in some periods, it is
about 10 degrees colder, as we observe now. It seems that the planet has a thermostat that keeps
the climate between these limiting temperatures. Today, our planet is well situated in between
these limits, and there is no reason to think that we are in a climate crisis.

8.2 Nature provides us with simple answers

In a simple way, observed data shows us what really controls the global air temperature. We just need to use our common sense and examine the sequence of temperature changes. Measurements (Figure 12) tell us that the global temperature signal originates at the ocean surface. Two weeks later the signal is recorded by satellites in the lower atmosphere. The land surface air temperature also follows the ocean surface temperature with a delay of two months, and 20 months later the signal is recorded in the ocean at 200 m depth. This sequence was first described by Humlum et al. (2012) and demonstrates the key role for ocean surface temperature in controlling atmospheric temperatures.

The hypothetical CO2 temperature signal originates in the upper troposphere, and – if dominant –
we would see the signal in the satellite data from the lower atmosphere, before we see the signal
arriving at the ocean surface. Measurements show that the opposite is the case (Figure 12). To the
degree CO2 influences atmospheric temperatures, its effect is clearly subordinate in relation to
other influences.

9. Climate Change: importance of oceans

I have two overall conclusions and one suggestion for what should be the future main climate
research focus:

1. Observed data do not support the notion of a climate crisis but reveals many and partly
recurrent natural variations.
2. Ocean surface temperature controls the atmospheric temperature.

The principal climate research question therefore is this: What controls the ocean surface temperature? Presumably, the Sun is the key answer, modulated by the global cloud cover.

Bryan Leyland explains the basic mistake threatening society’s energy platform in his article at Climate Depot. Electricity Markets & Engineering Realities.  Text in italics with my bolds and added images.

‘It is telling that while [solar & wind] developers routinely claim their energy is now the cheapest available, they never argue that subsidies are therefore no longer needed’

Ralph Alexander delves into the phony studies by worldweatherattribution.org in his GWPF paper Contorted Science: The Flawed Logic of Extreme Event Attribution.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

London, 24 March. Extreme weather attribution studies are based on flawed logic and generate misleading headlines, according to a new briefing paper from The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). 

In Contorted Science: The Flawed Logic of Extreme Event Attribution, Dr. Ralph B. Alexander argues that studies attempting to link specific heatwaves, hurricanes and floods to human-caused climate change are fundamentally misleading and have been created for legal and political, rather than scientific reasons. 

The paper scrutinises recent high-profile studies by World Weather Attribution and the Grantham Institute. In 2025 alone, World Weather Attribution claimed that 24 of 29 extreme events examined were made more severe or more likely by climate change. 

Alexander shows how such conclusions depend heavily on climate models that struggle to reproduce historical climate patterns and assume scientists can accurately simulate a “natural” climate without human emissions.  

Some key recurring weaknesses are identified within attribution studies: 

• Flawed logic: attribution claims involve “begging the question”, the act of simply assuming the conclusion you are trying to investigate.  
• Statistical practices that inflate headline probability claims while downplaying uncertainty. 
• The neglect of historical records showing comparable extreme events long before modern emissions levels. 

The report traces the growth of rapid event attribution to political frustration with the cautious conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has expressed low confidence in long-term global trends for most types of extreme weather. It recognises the role of a 2012 meeting convened by the Union of Concerned Scientists. The meeting was aimed at strengthening the perceived link between extreme weather and climate change in order to pursue litigation against fossil fuel companies. 

The report’s author, Ralph Alexander, said: 

“Extreme event attribution studies are a blot on science, the hallmarks of which are empirical evidence and logic. Neither feature is central to attribution studies, which were created for legal and political not scientific reasons.”

Harry Wilkinson, Head of Policy at The Global Warming Policy Foundation said: 

“It is disturbing that event attribution studies have got so much traction in the international media, despite their underlying flaws. This is a major scientific scandal.”

Read the full report: Contorted Science: The Flawed Logic of Extreme Event Attribution (pdf)

 

Recent event attribution studies 2025 was no exception to the ever-growing trend of assigning weather extremes to global warming: World Weather Attribution contended that 24 of 29 extreme events studied were made more severe or more likely by climate change, as indicated in Figure 1.7 That is a staggeringly large number, at a time when event attribution methodology is still highly uncertain. To begin with, attribution studies rely on computer climate models that have a dismal track record in predicting the future, or indeed of hindcasting the past. Not only do a majority of the models overestimate the warming rate, but they also wrongly predict a hot spot in the upper atmosphere that is not there, and are unable to accurately reproduce sea surface temperatures and sea-level rise.

But, more importantly, the underlying scientific basis of such studies can be questioned too, as done in a recent series of blog posts by Roger Pielke Jr., a prolific climate writer and former professor at the University of Colorado.

Pielke identifies three ‘tricks’ used in event attribution studies to justify their highly exaggerated
claims.

♦  The first, which he terms ‘attribution inflation,’ arises from mathematical sloppiness. Rounding numbers used in calculating probabilities of a particular extreme event happening, instead of retaining decimal points, can lead to inflated and misleading probabilities.
♦  The second trick, which Pielke calls ‘begging the question’ (a logical fallacy), simply assumes
the conclusion that the study seeks to prove. For example, assuming that every storm is made stronger due to warmer oceans makes it child’s play to conclude that the storm which just happened was made more likely due to climate change.
♦  The third trick, ‘ignoring evidence,’ means just that. The following sections will reveal numerous
examples.

The paper goes on to deconstruct several studies including these examples:

Conclusions

Physicist Friederike Otto, WWA’s chief scientist, has stated:

Unlike every other branch of climate science or science in general, event attribution
was actually originally suggested with the courts in mind.

Apart from WWA, the US National Academies have recently established a committee to ‘examine
current scientific understanding of attribution of extreme weather events and their impacts on climate change, and consider user needs and opportunities to improve attribution science capabilities.’ Nonetheless, the committee intends to focus on the dubious science behind extreme event attribution, and not any legal ramifications.

It remains to be seen whether multiple court cases against fossil fuel companies, based on extreme event attribution, will succeed. Nevertheless, there is already a burgeoning industry of legal activists with a vested interest in exploiting so-called attribution science. By September 2024, it was estimated that 50 lawsuits had been filed by US states, counties and local governments, and about half that number in Europe and other countries.

Extreme event attribution studies are deeply flawed, with fundamental logical and methodological errors – the result of such studies being created for legal and political, not scientific, reasons. The examples presented here, involving heatwaves, hurricanes and floods, are but a few of the proliferating number of mistaken studies appearing in contemporary scientific reports.

 

 

 

Jeff Childers explains some hidden features of the ruling, overlooked by both cheerleaders and detractors, in his blog article Tariff Turnabout.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images. H/T David A.

SCOTUS struck down Trump’s IEEPA tariffs 6-3. He signed a replacement
in 90 minutes. Why this “devastating loss” was actually
a firewall, a machete, and two shields for conservatives.

Within hours of yesterday’s SCOTUS decision, the New York Times had jubilantly published no fewer than eight euphoric top-of-fold stories, and was still going strong. Democrats were sprinting (or racing their wheelchairs) to podiums to issue slaphappy praises for Justices they’ve long been complaining were Trump’s stooges. One of the Times’s tamer stories bore the gleeful headline, “The Supreme Court’s Declaration of Independence.”

The reason progressives were more excited than a new puppy yesterday is that they correctly perceive that President Trump’s tariffs are the economic engine behind America’s booming economy. Stop the tariffs, they reckon, and then the economy will fizzle out— and Trump will become a spent force. It was a good plan. Too bad it failed.

The media’s attention span is measured in picoseconds.
On the other hand, the Supreme Court is playing a long game.

This decision was a gift to the country, wrapped in a leather binder and tied with a bow. I realize that’s a bold claim given all the media’s post-touchdown celebrating, but I will explain why they’re wrong in terms that even Portland, Oregon’s residents can understand.

Far from corporate media’s simplistic analysis, this decision was a firewall, a machete, and two shields— one for President Trump and one for the Court.

In its decision yesterday, the Nation’s Highest Court seemed to hand progressives everything they’d hoped for. It clarified a badly worded trade statute called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA— the legal engine powering most of Trump’s Tariff Dashboard.

Specifically, they noted that the word “tariff” does not appear anywhere in IEEPA. The majority mused that tariffs can’t just be intuited from the loose statutory language like a fortune teller predicting your Aunt Bethanie will soon make a love connection.

But … despite all the over-the-top rhetoric tossing around overheated phrases like “devastating blow” and “major setback,” there was a grenade in the progressive gift basket. The Supremes did not actually say Trump must shut down the Tariff Dashboard. Just the opposite. In fact, in a dissenting opinion that the President loved —Trump read parts of it aloud to reporters at an afternoon presser— Justice Kavanaugh helpfully listed four other statutes Trump could use to keep the Dashboard humming.

Before the ink was dry on the press room briefings —90 minutes after the SCOTUS order issued— Trump signed a new executive order replacing the IEEPA tariffs with Kavanaugh’s suggested alternative statutes. For good measure, Trump used one of the alternatives to impose a temporary 10% across-the-board tariff placeholder, and still had a little time left over to squeeze out a quick Truth Social post only slightly longer than The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.

90 minutes to work up a new executive order? Come on. That was a stage wait.
They obviously had Plan B ready to go without skipping a beat.

We will focus on a key moment from November’s oral arguments that lifts the curtain, letting us see what’s really happening behind the scenes. In paraphrase, at page 69 in the transcript, Justice Gorsuch asked:

If we let THIS president use IEEPA for tariffs, what stops the NEXT president from declaring a climate emergency and taxing gas-powered pickup trucks out of existence?

Here’s the thing: don’t miss this. When Gorsuch asked him about the peril of future presidents, the DOJ’s lawyer —Trump’s lawyer— agreed. If IEEPA allows Trump tariffing, then a future Democrat president could also use it, for whatever insane progressive agenda they felt like, just by declaring a “state of emergency.” Nobody disputed that; everybody agreed.

The Firewall.

And that, as they say, was that. The ambiguously worded statute was a disaster waiting to happen, like handing a chimpanzee a live grenade, or worse, giving a toddler a permanent marker. When they stripped tariffs from IEEPA, Justices Gorsuch, Roberts, and Barrett weren’t betraying  Trump. They were protecting America from the next Democrat president —a Warren or Newsom— declaring a climate emergency and using IEEPA to impose the Green New Deal by fiat.  So they built a firewall.

And so here’s where we are: while the Court slowly considered it, it let President Trump use IEEPA for almost 8 months to get his Tariff Dashboard up and humming. Headline from Fortune, back in January.

But the firewall was just the appetizer.
Now behold the two shields and the machete.

The Shield for Trump.

The three rock-ribbed conservatives, Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh, wrote spirited dissents pre-empting Democrats from complaining that Trump’s use of IEEPA was ‘totally illegal’ and unconstitutional. In other words, three Justices made a forceful, substantive, unqualified case that the President did have tariff authority under IEEPA. Meaning, this was, at worst, a legitimate legal disagreement, and not any lawless power grab.

It neutralized the sting of the majority opinion. Instead of a weaponized decision rebuking Trump as an out-of-control dictator, Democrats got a 6-3 split with a 40-page dissent explaining exactly why the 2025-26 tariffs could have —in good faith— been considered legal. Womp womp.

The dissenters handed Trump an ironclad rhetorical shield
to deflect Democratic criticism over his first eight months of IEEPA tariffs.

The Shield for the Court.

The decision likewise provided SCOTUS cover for new political possibilities. Yesterday’s jubilant headlines praised the Supreme Court’s “independence,” “grit,” and “defiance.” According to corporate media, SCOTUS just handed Trump a “devastating loss.” And President Trump is earning an Oscar playing the wounded victim like nobody’s business. Wall Street Journal, yesterday:

The President vented rage and vexation toward the three conservative Justices who voted against him. Meanwhile, across town, unflappable Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent sang a completely different tune. “Our estimates show that the use of Section 122 authority, combined with potentially enhanced Section 232 and Section 301 tariffs,” the Secretary calmly explained, “will result in virtually unchanged tariff revenue in 2026.”

Across the oceans, foreign countries think nothing will change either. Wall Street Journal headline, this morning:

So the Court earned applause from media midwits —political capital— while not actually harming Trump’s agenda in any way.

The Machete.

The majority’s legal reason for chopping out IEEPA’s tariff power was actually another gift to conservatives— a sharpened machete. Since 2022 or so, the Court has been sharpening a legal rule called the “Major Questions Doctrine” (MQD), which basically says the Executive Branch can’t just ‘read between the lines’ or ‘fill in the gaps’ of statutes, even if they are badly written or ambiguous.

MQD is widely considered a revolutionary tool that could finally clear the ungovernable wilderness of the administrative state— a goal conservatives have longed for since the FDR days.

Even sharper after yesterday’s decision, MQD provides that if a statute doesn’t say something, executive agencies like the EPA or CDC can’t regulate into existence what are essentially new laws. For example, SCOTUS first used the muscular new version of Major Questions to strike down Biden’s OSHA mandate forcing businesses with more than 100 employees to require the jabs.

Had yesterday’s decision swung the other way, had SCOTUS let Trump extrapolate tariffs from IEEPA, it would have undermined the terrific MQD machete, which is one of the Roberts Court’s most important restrictions on future Democrat presidents. After this decision, the MQD is even stronger. Swing away, boys. Chop, chop.

Corporate media has already been calling it “Trump’s Court.” Let’s say the Court planned to rule in the President’s favor on something really big. It might need a loss on the record first, to show the Court isn’t just another rubber stamp on President Trump’s desk. Now consider what else is floating down the SCOTUS pipeline.

Over the next few months, the Court will make several seismic decisions:

• Birthright citizenship— which could forever end birth tourism.
• Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act— which could add up to 27 additional Republican House seats.
• Fed Independence and Firing of Agency Heads— which could give President Trump de facto control of the Federal Reserve.

The birthright case alone could reset the political board. Restricting automatic citizenship to only children of existing citizens would create a “mess,” just like the tariff decision did. And it’s coming The Center Square, yesterday:

The Democrats’ excitement is destined to be short-lived. Soon, it will be even more obvious that Trump’s tariffs are here to stay. But the lasting effects —the firewall against future Democrat presidents, a machete to chop through the administrative state, a shield protecting the next few big Trump wins— will be paying off for generations.

Matthew Lynn reports on the ongoing breakup and reform of global trade practices in his article Ignore the Outrage. Trump’s Trade Revolution Is Working. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

America’s allies complain while quietly backing new U.S. policy.

It’s turning into a familiar ritual. President Trump imposes fresh tariffs, often announced on social media late at night, and within seconds the decision is condemned by officials and politicians from Brussels to Paris, Beijing, Berlin, and London.

There are dramatic warnings about how trade wars benefit no one, accompanied by solemn declarations that Europe will not be bullied, and elegies for the “rules-based order.” The financial press dutifully chronicles the “chaos” and “unpredictability” of American trade policy, while CNN books another expert to explain why it cannot possibly work and the Financial Times runs yet another column about how the United States is only damaging itself.

Then, a few weeks later, buried somewhere on page 17, a different story starts to emerge: Germany has agreed to new defense procurement commitments; France is reconsidering agricultural protections; the European Union is suddenly open to renegotiating its digital services tax. Another trade relationship is quietly restructured, and on terms remarkably favorable to Washington. The opposition, it turns out, is mainly just for show. Behind the scenes a new consensus is starting to emerge.

The Trump administration is quietly building a new global trading system
—it’s just that nobody wants to talk about it.

European leaders routinely denounce Trump’s tariffs and “America First” rhetoric with an over-the-top passion that would get them thrown out of drama school. Yet their finance ministers are simultaneously reworking trade agreements in ways that previous American administrations spent decades failing to achieve. The disconnect between the public theater and private reality has become so vast that one might reasonably conclude the confected outrage itself serves a purpose—providing political cover for concessions that would otherwise be impossible to explain to domestic audiences.

A few examples help illustrate what is actually happening. The U.S. has spent years trying to persuade Germany to increase its military spending, to little effect. But over the last 12 months, Germany has ramped up its spending by €80 billion a year. Sure, there is lots of rhetoric about how it will “Buy European” and about how the money will reboot its industrial base. But in reality about 8% of the money will be spent on American kit, including F-35 fighter jets, P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft, and Tomahawk cruise missiles. It doesn’t really matter who makes the boots. It is the high-tech equipment that really counts, and much of that will be American.

It represents a fundamental shift in German industrial policy, and one that the Obama administration campaigned for in vain, that the Bush administration couldn’t extract, and that decades of NATO summits failed to deliver. Trump got it with a few threatening tweets and warnings about auto tariffs.

Or take a look at France. It has long positioned itself as the defender of European agricultural interests against the marauding Americans with their genetically modified crops and chlorinated chicken. Yet the Common Agricultural Policy, that monument to protectionism and subsidy that has distorted global food markets for generations, is suddenly open for discussion. The reason? It isn’t because France’s politicians have realized that laissez-faire economics originated in their own country. It’s because the alternative—restricted access to the American market—is simply too painful to contemplate.

As another example, the European Union’s digital services tax, a key instrument for extracting revenue from American tech giants, is finally being reconsidered. For years, European politicians treated taxing Apple, Google, and Facebook as both economically sensible and morally righteous. Apparently the firms were “not paying their fair share.” National sovereignty required it and consumers had to be protected. It was simply a coincidence that all the companies that were fined happened to be American. But now, faced with credible retaliation from Washington, the whole scheme is back on the table. The rhetoric about tax justice has been dropped, and the policy has changed.

Across the Channel, the British are now open to paying fairer prices for American pharmaceuticals. It turns out the UK’s state-funded health care system, where prescriptions are either free or bear a fixed price, can afford it after all. Over in the Pacific, Japan has agreed to import more American rice, after insisting for years that it was not to their taste, while the government in Tokyo will underwrite $500 billion of investment in the U.S. Even China, the most protected major economy in the world, has loosened  restrictions. Piece by piece, the tectonic plates of trade are shifting.

These aren’t minor tweaks to existing arrangements. They are fundamental shifts in trading relationships, the kind of structural changes that represent genuine victories for American economic interests. Previous administrations, with all their diplomatic finesse and multilateral commitment, couldn’t secure them, while global institutions, with their emphasis on alliance management and consensus building, got nowhere. Trump’s blunt approach has extracted concessions that diplomatic nuance never could.

That has created an uncomfortable situation for the mainstream commentariat. How can you explain that Trump’s crude, bombastic negotiating style might be getting results when you have insisted it can’t possibly work? And how can you explain how the new tariff regime is working when you have insisted that it will backfire spectacularly? The answer, mostly, has been to not explain it at all—to simply to ignore what is actually happening and continue focusing on the rhetoric.

Europe’s Perfect Storm

The basic logic of realigning global trade has always been sound, even if the tactics and Trump’s style make diplomats wince, because the American market remains indispensable to European and Asian economies. America’s economy isn’t just large; it’s uniquely large in ways that genuinely matter. American consumers spend. They buy imported goods in vast quantities. They don’t save like the Germans or the Chinese. The U.S. market is the ultimate destination for any manufacturer who wants to achieve real scale.

European economies, meanwhile, are facing a perfect storm of challenges. Growth has been anemic for over a decade. The long-term demographic outlook is disastrous, with aging populations creating fiscal pressures that make Greek debt levels look quaint. The regulatory environment has become so stifling that European tech entrepreneurship is essentially a global non-factor. And now the EU faces Chinese competition across virtually every industrial sector, from automobiles to renewable energy to advanced manufacturing.

In this context, the idea of being excluded from American markets—
or even facing significant new barriers—is simply unacceptable.

German car manufacturers cannot survive on European sales alone. French agricultural exporters need American buyers. Italian luxury goods have to be in Miami and Los Angeles malls. Likewise, Vietnamese toys and Korean TVs need to be in Walmart. The leverage is all on one side, and it’s not the European or Asian one.

Trump instinctively understands what the Davos set
refused to acknowledge for the last 20 years:
trade imbalances on the scale of the 2010s are unsustainable.

You cannot run perpetual surpluses against a trading partner while simultaneously demanding that partner provide your security guarantee, subsidize your defense, and accept restricted access to your own markets. Eventually, the situation will be reset. And when it does, the party with leverage wins.

This is not a particularly sophisticated insight. It’s basic economics and elementary logic. But it’s an insight that decades of trade policy specialists somehow failed to grasp. They convinced themselves that the existing system was stable because it was familiar, that the American willingness to run massive trade deficits while defending global security could somehow last indefinitely. They mistook a temporary arrangement for a permanent equilibrium.

The old consensus rested on several assumptions, none of which could survive serious scrutiny.

First, that trade imbalances don’t really matter because they’re offset by capital flows. Tell that to the workers in Ohio and Michigan who watched their factories close.
Second, that global peace requires accepting unfavorable economic terms. Tell that to the American taxpayers who fund European defense while European governments spend their money on welfare systems Americans can only dream about.
Third, that only multilateral negotiations can produce legitimate trade agreements. Tell that to the countries that have been perfectly happy to negotiate bilateral deals when it suits their interests.

The mock outrage will continue. European politicians will continue denouncing American unilateralism. The editorial pages will continue lamenting the death of the liberal international order. Think tanks will produce papers explaining why Trump’s approach damages American interests.

None of this changes the underlying truth: European and Asian
governments are restructuring trade relationships on American terms.

The irony is that Trump’s supposedly “chaotic” approach may be producing a more balanced and ultimately more durable global trading system than the old consensus ever delivered. Trade relationships that are obviously unbalanced won’t last. They create political pressures that eventually explode. It is better to address those imbalances directly, even if the process is uncomfortable, than to pretend they don’t exist.

Footnote: About SCOTUS Ruling on Trump Tariffs

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, speaking in Dallas, echoed Trump in saying that the administration is going to rework the administration’s sweeping import taxes under other legal authorities after the Supreme Court’s ruling earlier today.

“This administration will invoke alternative legal authorities to replace the IEEPA tariffs,” he said. “We will be leveraging Section 232 and Section 301 tariff authorities that have been validated through thousands of legal challenges.”

Bessent added that an estimate calculated by the Treasury Department found that using these other authorities will “result in virtually unchanged tariff revenue in 2026.”

The brilliant Colin Brazier returns for a second short film on the cult of Net Zero and how it protects ‘green’ policies from being questioned by stifling debate and cracking down on free speech.  For those preferring to read, below is a transcript with my bolds and added images. H/T Not a Lot of People Know That.

The net zero project didn’t arise from nothing. It was the result of a seismic cultural change in our civilisation. This change reshaped our universities, our media, and even seeks to police our very thoughts.

As a result, what should be a technical debate about emissions and energy has become a moral crusade, one that cannot be questioned. The question is no longer what’s true, but who is allowed to speak.

And when a civilisation can no longer question its beliefs,
it loses its grip on reality, and soon after, its freedom.

The university, home to the most brilliant minds in our country, pursuing the great questions of culture and science courageously, with only one concern, the truth. You could propose any theory you like, provided you did one thing, namely, you defended it, advancing knowledge, not in spite of disagreements, but because of it. Not anymore.

Today, academia has been captured by a new dogma, and one of its most important pillars is climate alarmism. The science, they say, is settled. Franklin Delano Roosevelt once spoke of four freedoms, of speech, of belief, from want, from fear.

But in the climate era, two of those have quietly been removed. The new orthodoxy says even questioning climate policy isn’t just wrong, it’s immoral, it’s denial, it’s disinformation. Dissenters aren’t just thinkers, they are now considered to be heretics.

Remember Climategate? Emails showing top scientists boasting about how to keep sceptical papers out of the scientific literature. The scandal should have shocked academia. Instead, it became a footnote, buried.

Scientists who question the climate narrative pay the price. Careers end, quietly. Offices disappear.

Grants vanish. Roger Pilkey Jr, Judith Currie, Lennart Bengtsson, all punished or othered, not for fraud or failure, but for asking the wrong questions. Search climate sceptic today and you’ll find words like denier, crank, fossil funded.

It’s the oldest trick in politics, delegitimize the opponent, pretend their motives are corrupt. Then you never have to engage with their arguments. Even the great academies have fallen.  A Royal Society fellow recently proposed a meeting on the engineering downsides of net zero. It was blocked, replaced by something less uncomfortable.

The IPCC, supposedly gold standard, is no different. Its reports are political documents presented by diplomats. Their models run hot, their scenarios absurd, their assumptions never tested. But their conclusions are gospel.

One absurd scenario, RCP 8.5, imagines we’ll burn twice the world’s coal reserves. Every alarmist headline you’ve seen is built on it. It’s fantasy, yet it’s still the foundation of climate policy.

This isn’t science anymore. It’s ideology, a movement built on fear, not evidence. And it’s high priests from the universities, the media and the corporations that fund them.

At the Cannes Lyon Festival, once a celebration of selling soap and cars, executives now preach the gospel of net zero. They call themselves the conscience of capitalism. In truth, they’re its new thought police, railroading the world’s advanced economies to immiseration.

At their demand, platforms like YouTube and Pinterest now delete what they call climate misinformation, which means anything that questions the approved line. The internet, once the free marketplace of ideas, has been harnessed to the service of a cult. Think about that.

The same corporations that made billions selling sugar, plastic and petrol now lecture you about morality and decide what you can say online. Unilever sells ice cream. Mars sells chocolate.  Pepsi sells fizzy sugar water. And yet these are the people who claim to be saving the planet by banning your opinions. When Elon Musk took over Twitter, they tried to starve it.

The Global Alliance for Responsible Media, GARM, G-A-R-M, coordinated an ad boycott, driving revenue down 80%. Not because of hate speech, because he let people talk freely. Congress later found GARM guilty of collusion, a cartel of corporations using brand safety as cover to censor the public square.

They called it responsibility. In truth, it was repression.
And the universities applauded.

They’d already surrendered. In the name of climate virtue, they abandoned the scientific method, which depends on doubt. Science advances by asking awkward questions, by tolerating error, by being wrong.

But in the age of net zero, being wrong is a moral crime. The academy has become a church, and the creed is net zero. Meanwhile, outside, a generation raised on the fear of apocalypse acts out the faith.

They glue themselves to paintings, block ambulances, shout, just stop oil. They call it conscience, but it’s a performance art, fully sanctioned by their teachers.

Every civilization needs dissenters. Heretics keep us honest. But in the new moral order, heresy is hate and questioning is denial. A science which can no longer be questioned isn’t really a science anymore, it’s a superstition.

Real people pay the price. While elites moralise, workers lose jobs,
families face blackouts, industries move abroad.
The creed of net zero has turned prosperity into sin.

We are the heirs of the Enlightenment, not the Inquisition. If freedom means anything, it means the right to question, to doubt, to debate. Net zero began as a policy, but it’s become a belief system enforced by bureaucrats, advertisers and academics who’ve forgotten what free thought looks like.

The question is, will we let them decide what we can say, what we can think, even what we can imagine?

 

 

Kathryn Porter deconstructs the zero carbon mantra in the above video The Electrification Delusion. For those who prefer to read, below is a transcript with my bolds and added images.

The starting point that people make is that we have to decarbonize. They take that position without actually having examined the costs and the benefits of doing that. What’s happening is that our emissions are just moving to somewhere else and are increasing as a result.

People say, oh, well, nuclear is expensive. It is, but it’s expensive because we chose to make it expensive. We invented a whole load of rules and regulations around it that actually are not useful and not beneficial.

We started subsidizing wind farms in 1990. If they were economic, they would not require subsidies. You hear people like Dale Vince saying, oh, yeah, we should all have renewables or be so much cheaper.  And I always ask him on social media, if renewables are so much cheaper, why are ecotricity tariffs higher than the price cap? Never once has he responded to that.

LW: Hello and welcome to this special episode of The Skeptic. I’m your host, Laurie Wostel, an associate editor at The Daily Skeptic.

Now, electrification, can the grid cope? Well, that’s the title of a new report by the independent energy consultant and the woman behind WhatLogic, Kathryn Porter. And I’m very pleased to be joined by her today.  So electrification is the big crusade of the policymaking classes, the green blob, as we might call it. Why write this report, Kathryn, and why is it so important for us to know about the impacts of this?

KP: So I was commissioned to write this report. And the brief was to examine what the impact of electrification would be on the British power grid if government targets were met. So, you know, I set out what the targets are. I look at what I think the chances are that they will be met. I look at what the impact on the grid would be if they were met.

I throw in a bit about AI data centres, because although that’s not formally part of electrification, it could have a significant impact on power demand and therefore the state of the grid. And I do a few case studies as well over the European countries. So I looked at Norway, the Netherlands and Germany to see how things are looking there as well.

LW: And so before we get into the specifics of the report, I mean, to begin with, we’re always told, aren’t we, that electrification is going to be this panacea for the economy and the green transition, so-called. Why is it believed to be such an unqualified good?

KP: Well, the starting point that people make is that we have to decarbonise. And they take that position without actually having examined the costs and the benefits of doing that.  So there’s a uniform response to anything that has a carbon content, which is we need to get rid of it. But obviously, not all sources of carbon dioxide are equal. And some of the things that you might do instead could turn out to be more harmful than those carbon emitting activities are in the first place.

LW: So, you know, this is why they’re being promoted the way they are, because there’s been a lack of analysis as to, first of all, the extent to which a thing should be decarbonised. It’s just assumed that it should be. And secondly, that the electrification route isn’t more harmful than the original action was in the first place.  And so with that justification, there are these extremely ambitious targets, even if in some cases they do keep being pushed back. But I suppose outline for us, Kathryn, how far the green zealots want to go.

KP: Well, I mean, they fundamentally want to electrify everything, but they also want us to reduce our consumption.  This tends to be buried in the small print, but you can infer it from the data that are presented. So you have, for example, hidden assumptions within NISO forecasts that suggest we might heat our homes less or travel less. Things that really just don’t have any basis in any sort of evidence and data. Nobody’s ever asked people if they’re willing to travel less or heat their homes less. It was just assumed. Now, NISO has actually rolled back on some of its explicit assumptions in those regards.

But it’s interesting if you look at its future energy scenarios, that it’s not actually consistent across the scenarios on its underlying assumptions of things like comfort levels and distance travelled, which is something of a problem. And it does suggest that the analysis isn’t being done on an equal and fair basis. Certainly when you look at the more recent report they put out in December on the economics of the future energy scenarios, you see them making all sorts of asymmetrical assumptions, very unrealistic cost of capital for things like solar and hydrogen.

They treat the falling behind scenario as a counterfactual when it’s explicitly in the scenarios not a counterfactual. But a lot of the other cost elements are expressed in relation to that scenario rather than on their own basis. It’s just not a fair and even treatment of the analysis.

LW: And then, of course, you have to ask the question, why? Why are they not able to put together a fair and unbiased assessment of cost? And I suppose the answer would be that, well, they can have these grand visions for where we’re supposed to get to. But actually, if you had a proper debate about this, if you really inform the country, you’re going to have to travel less. You’re going to have to heat your home less and so on, then, well, people would start rejecting it.

KP: Yeah, of course. And it would cost more and be less reliable. And also, fundamentally, it might be less good for the environment.

And this is the thing that, you know, one of the worst aspects of it. You look at, for example, the push for renewable generation is making electricity very expensive because this renewable generation is intermittent. You have to create all sorts of backups.  It has low energy density. So it has much higher grid costs than the alternatives, as well as using more land. It requires more wires.

It’s intermittent. So it has much higher balancing costs. And all of that makes energy more expensive.
So what’s the outcome of that expensive energy is we have deindustrialisation. So industrial output moves from Britain, not just and that’s bad, not just in terms of the economic impact, but also the environmental impact, because then stuff is being made in countries that have dirtier energy, higher emissions. And you also incur transportation emissions and shipping sort of low value bulk items like steel bars halfway around the world.

It’s actually an incredibly dumb thing to do. But that is the outcome of our energy policy. And so there’s this blind push for a certain objective. Let’s build lots of renewables. We have to decarbonise. But actually, that’s not what’s happening. What’s happening is that our emissions are just moving to somewhere else and are increasing as a result. In the meantime, we are destroying large swathes of other countries, for example, in South America, where we’re mining a lot of the minerals that we need for these transition technologies. And you need huge amounts of metal for renewables.

But wind only works less than a third of the time. The capacity factor for wind is less than 30 percent. Now, the government has higher numbers, but they’re just not borne out by actual real data. I looked at the capacity factors for the past year. They’re about 28 percent on average. So, you know, you’re consuming all of these financial and natural resources for something that works less than a third of the time.  And there’s never been any debate about whether that’s actually sensible, whether it’s actually environmentally sustainable or not. And there’s just this assumption that because it’s low carbon, everything else is worse. And I don’t believe that.

I think if you really wanted to have a serious effort at decarbonisation, you would be much more serious about nuclear. And people say, oh, well, nuclear is expensive. It is, but it’s expensive because we chose to make it expensive. We invented a whole load of rules and regulations around it that actually are not useful and not beneficial. We should be doing the way South Korea does it, which is faster and vastly cheaper. They’ve built their reactors.  They’ve got eight of them now, four in South Korea, four in UAE, at an average cost of five to six billion U.S. dollars. Hinkley Point is going to cost us about 32 billion pounds. So it’s multiples cheaper to build it the way the Koreans are doing.

We could do it in the same way. Certainly on the nuclear side, there’s a few issues around sort of employment rights that would be a little bit different, but that wouldn’t have that much cost or additional time. They’re also building them in eight and a half years, you know, and we’re taking two decades.
This is just it’s a self-inflicted wound. We don’t have to do it that way. We could do it the same way that they do at the same cost and in the same time frames. We just choose not to. So there’s nothing fundamentally, inherently expensive about nuclear. It’s just the way that we do it.

LW: And Kathryn, why is it working so badly?

Oh, well we create all sorts of unnecessary complexities like the fish disco at Hinkley, for example. EDF has got to spend millions of pounds to prevent the deaths of half a trawler’s worth of fish every year. I mean, that’s insane. In the fishing industry, they throw more than that amount of fish back in the sea every year. Just because it’s being killed as a nuclear site doesn’t mean it’s any different outcome for the fish. And also people are more important than fish.

If you look at what the way they treat worker radiation exposure, each new plant is supposed to have a lower worker radiation exposure level than the last one. And that sounds very nice in theory, you know, continuing improvements. But the old advanced gas cooled reactors that are coming to end of life have lower internal radiation levels than you have outside on the street.

So workers going to work in that plant get more radiation exposure in the car park than they do inside the plant. So then what’s the useful benefit of reducing that exposure further? All it does is create costs and engineering challenges that are difficult to solve and pointless. Because if the workers get more radiation exposure in the car park, then, you know, and they can’t.

It’s just it’s just a nonsense. And it just makes everything expensive because somebody on paper thought, oh, yeah, that sounds great. We’ll have a continuing improvement.  But they don’t think about what it means in real life. And when you think in terms of what it means in real life, you think, no, that doesn’t make any sense and we shouldn’t do it. And so it’s all these types of things that have crept in over the years when nuclear wasn’t a priority.

The nuclear regulator has an objective to reduce deaths from radiation. Well, you can easily do that by closing all your nuclear reactors and not building any new ones. But that kind of defeats the purpose.
So we need to get away from this risk avoidance mindset. We shouldn’t be seeking to avoid risk. We should be seeking to manage risk in an appropriate way. Lowering the radiation inside the plant to a level lower than on the street outside is not sensible.

LW: And to bring us back to the central contradiction here and muddled thinking. I mean, you’ve mentioned that in terms of nuclear and in terms of where the emissions are going, the total amount of them in the world.  But of course, the central one really seems to be that, well, actually, we’re going to be switching over to electricity. We’re going to be electrifying everything, electric cars and all these new technologies at the same time that we’re actually making electricity much, much more expensive. I mean, it’s mad, isn’t it?

KP: It is. We’re making electricity more expensive and less reliable. The cost element is an obvious deterrent to electrifying your heating and transports. And, you know, some of the people who’ve seen my reports, they say, oh, well, I have an electric car and I can charge it at home and it’s way cheaper. Well, well, lucky you. But that’s not the reality for a lot of people. They’re like, oh, yeah, well, I have a heat pump and it works just fine in the winter. Again, lucky you. Right. You probably have a well insulated house. Other people don’t.

So my report looks at what’s correct and true on average, not in specific cases. Anecdotes and data are not the same thing. And unfortunately, too many people critiquing my report are confused between what’s data and what’s an anecdote. And if you look at the data, which is what I do look at in my report, you can see that in most cases it’s more expensive to own an electric car than it is to own a conventional car. And it’s more expensive to own a heat pump than it is to have a gas boiler.

And so these are the facts that the data show. And just because for some people, some people, that’s not the case doesn’t mean it’s not true overall. In the same way, if it was genuinely cheaper to have an electric car, don’t you think that people would just go buy electric cars? You wouldn’t need to have subsidies and mandates and penalise car makers for not selling enough electric cars.

Just a couple of days ago, somebody senior at Volkswagen, I think, or Vauxhall, was saying that there’s just no natural demand for electric cars. It’s not a product that people want to buy. They only buy it through compulsion or subsidy. So if electric cars were desirable and cheaper because cost is something that’s obviously a big motivator for people, then you wouldn’t need to have subsidies or compulsion. People would just go and buy this stuff and they don’t.

Look at wind farms. We’re just signing up new subsidies for wind farms that are not only more expensive than the previous ones, but are now going to be for 20 years. We started subsidising wind farms in 1990 and we’re now offering 20 year subsidies after 35 years of subsidising. We’re now going to offer them 20 year subsidies locking in. So that’ll be more than half a century of subsidies for wind farms. If they were economic, they would not require subsidies. Right.

So all of this just makes energy more expensive and less reliable and less appealing for people. It’s very model thinking. And it’s what happens when you put ideology ahead of data.

LW: And so you mentioned the subsidies. We very recently had allocation round seven of the contracts of difference for renewables generation over the coming years. How did that go? Was it looking good for Ed Miliband and his claims to be bringing down energy bills?

KP: No, it’s the exact opposite.  So £94 is where it cleared for offshore wind for 20 year contracts. So last year it cleared £83 for 15 year contracts. So if you were to transpose that £94 onto a 15 year basis, it would probably be around £104. So you should be comparing the £104 with the 83 from last year. Now, last year, Orsted cancelled Hornsea 4, which was the flagship project and by far the biggest volume component of AL6. They cancelled it because £83 wasn’t enough.

They said the economics weren’t good enough. So now you’ve had AL7 coming in at a much, much higher price and for 20 years. So now that’s locking in this high level of cost for 20 years.  So it doesn’t matter what happens to wholesale prices. These wind farms will get guaranteed index linked £94 per megawatt hour for the next two decades or for the two decades after when they open.

LW: And just remind us, how does that compare with gas at the moment?

KP: OK, so the wholesale cost of generating gas in 2025 was £80 per megawatt hour. But although we saw a reduction in gas prices, we saw carbon prices more than doubled. And so carbon prices went from being about 11% of the wholesale price a year ago to now being about 28%. And this is because Keir Starmer wants to harmonise UK and European carbon prices. So they’re almost harmonised now.

But there’s been this huge increase in carbon costs over the past year. As I said, it’s more than doubled.
It was £35 a megawatt hour a year ago and now it’s around 73. So even with all this playing around with the prices, the underlying cost would be considerably cheaper if we were all on gas. The underlying cost would be far cheaper if we were all on gas and didn’t have carbon taxes.

Because the carbon taxes don’t achieve anything. When there was a choice between gas and coal, which was more carbon intensive, you could argue there was some point to it. But there’s no point to it now.
Nobody’s switching to renewables because of carbon taxes. First of all, nobody chooses renewables on their tariff. There’s a small number of 100% so-called 100% green tariffs. They are actually more expensive than the price cap. So you hear people like Dale Vince saying, oh, yeah, we should all have renewables, it’ll be so much cheaper. And I always ask him on social media, if renewables are so much cheaper, why are ecotricity tariffs higher than the price cap? Never once has he responded to that.

LW: Now, Kathryn, you’re, of course, an expert on all this. But was there anything that surprised you as you were carrying out the report that you hadn’t known before?

KP:  I was a little bit surprised at the magnitude of the risk within the generation fleet.  I think everybody knows that we’ve got the advanced gas called reactors will be closing. That’s just under five gigawatts. Now we’ve obviously got Hinkley Point going to open and I think we’ll probably have some new gas generation opening. So that will offset the nuclear closures that we’re going to see.

But nobody’s really talking about the risks of the gas fleet. Now, NISO, the system operator, says that it expects we should have all 32 gigawatts of the existing gas fleet available to run in 2030 under the Clean Power Plan. But it only thinks it’ll run 5% of the time. Now, the trouble with that is that there’s probably about 12 gigawatts of that 32, which is at risk of closing in the next five to seven years. A third of the gas fleet was built in the 1990s. Another third was built in the 2000s.

And a lot of those assets haven’t really had the type of upgrades and so on that would really extend their lives. So these and some of them are showing really degraded reliability. So the idea that you will keep all of these assets on the grid into the next decade just seems a bit far-fetched to me.

And the other problem is that 5% utilization is just not how these assets were designed to be run. They were actually designed to run baseload. So baseload is extremely rare. Nobody really runs baseload for a gas plant now. They do what’s called two-shifting or they don’t run at all. And two-shifting means that they fire up in the morning and then they go off overnight.  Now, if you don’t run your CCGT for a couple of weeks, you start getting all sorts of operational problems with them that are difficult to solve. So the idea that you’re going to take end-of-life assets that were designed to run in a particular way, baseload, and expect them to run only 5% of the time and that they actually will all run when you need them, to me, it’s for the birds. This is just not realistic.

Any old asset is going to have a risk of not turning on when you need it. And when are we going to need it? We’re going to need it on cold winter days when it’s not windy. So in the winter, during our peak demand, there is no contribution from solar at all. It is zero. The sun sets around 4 p.m. Peak demand is at 6 p.m. So there is no sun in the winter peak. And it’s astonishing how few people realize this. And even during the day, it can be almost nothing at lunchtime. But in the evening peak, there is literally nothing because it’s at nighttime. So zero solar contribution to energy security in winter.

Number two, wind can be almost nothing as well. Wind can go down to megawatts. So if you have to meet 50 gigawatts of demand, which we had the other week, it peaks at 51 in the cold weather a couple of weeks ago, and you’ve got no wind and you’ve got no solar, and you’re relying on your old gas power stations that haven’t maybe fired up for a couple of weeks, what are the chances that not enough of them come on when you need them to? And if that happens, we’ll just have blackouts. If we know it’s going to happen, we’ll ration.

And if we don’t know it’s going to happen, it’ll be a blackout. And we saw in Iberia, 11 people died, and that was really benign weather conditions. So I think a winter blackout in Britain, particularly an unscheduled one, would be significantly more dangerous. So my whole report really says that we should not be complacent about these risks. We need to recognise that these assets might close.

And the reality is right now, the lead times for either extending the lives of these plants or replacing them is long, because the supply chains are very constrained. So if you want a new gas turbine, that’s seven to eight years, a new rotor is about five years. Even the equipment that you’d use for major maintenance is about a year and a half to come to site. So we don’t have that much time to act. We need to be ordering this equipment now to be sure that it’ll be in place when we need it.

But nothing’s happening. There isn’t a plan for this. And there are other risks as well. We have risks around our transmission infrastructure and our distribution infrastructure, old equipment on the grid that’s not being replaced at the rate that it potentially needs to be replaced.

We have serious risks with our offshore gas infrastructure where we might have shortages of gas. Now, NISO put out a report in November, actually published the same day of the autumn budget, so it didn’t really get much attention, saying that some of these offshore pipeline systems are at risk of closure because there’s not enough gas going through them. And if that happens, we won’t have enough gas on cold winter days to meet demand unless we do something about it.

So what are the things we can do about it? One is, well, don’t prematurely close down the North Sea. So if you reverse the ban on drilling and you relax the fiscal regime to make it more accommodating, we could keep producing much more oil and gas than we currently expect. And that would extend the lives of these pipelines.

The other alternative is to put in floating liquefied natural gas regasification terminals. This is what Germany did. You can do it reasonably quickly, but not overnight. It will still take you a couple of years, really, potentially to do that, because even if you’ve got the entry capacity onto the gas network, which we do have at a couple of places around the coast, you still need to build the ship handling. You need to build storage tanks. There’s going to be additional pipe infrastructure that you need to build.

So it’s not something that you can just do just like that overnight. It takes time. And so this is the concern I have, is that we have all of these risks, but we’re not factoring in the time that could be needed to actually address them. And if we run out of time, then we will have an insecure system.

LW: Indeed. And so finally, then, do you think that the political class are waking up to these realities at all?

KP: Well, as for political class, it depends. Right. So you look at the conservatives. Claire Coutinho had a plan to build more gas power stations under the previous conservative government. Labour ditched it. So both the conservatives and reform. And I think realistically, one of those two parties will form the next government. And they both want to take a different approach on net zero, a much more pragmatic approach. And neither of them really, to my understanding, is saying, oh, let’s just, you know, just kill the environment. We don’t care about the environment at all.

What they’re saying is we need a more measured approach and that people are more important. And so it’s counterproductive if you push people into poverty or if you harm them through energy and security and put their lives at risk. These things are not better than the risk that they might face through climate change.
So it has to be a balanced approach that examines the costs and benefits of different types of actions. And the trouble is, at the moment, what we have is an ideology that says that the worst evil that anybody can imagine is carbon dioxide. And that must be removed at all costs.

But this is not correct. It’s not democratic. The public hasn’t ever said that’s what they want. And because this has never been laid out to them. And if you ask people, do they want to do something about the environment? They say yes. But if you ask them how much they’re willing to spend on it, then they say something ridiculous like 10 pounds a year or something completely unrealistic.

So there’s a democratic deficit here. This actually has some commonalities with Brexit or with EU membership, where, you know, there was certainly a section of people that felt that there’d been a democratic deficit there. And this is and I think this is one of the arguments that Nigel Farage makes, that there’s a similar democratic deficit around net zero to what there was around EU membership.

Not that I want to get into the Brexit debate, but when people feel that their views haven’t been sought and that things have been imposed on them and that those things worsen their quality of life, then they tend to get upset about it. And I think that’s why we’re seeing some of the pushback is when people see that their energy is getting more expensive. They can see it’s getting less reliable. They can see they’re being pushed into things they don’t want, like electric cars and heat pumps that will degrade for the most part their quality of life. And nobody ever asked them if that was a good thing.

See Also Synopsis of Porter’s Report

Net Zero and British Grid: Dire Straits (Kathryn Porter)

Dr. Wielicki explains at his blog Irrational Fear  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The most important climate decision in modern U.S. history is quietly being dismantled.

According to reporting by The Wall Street Journal, the Trump administration is moving to repeal the EPA’s 2009 Endangerment Finding — the regulatory keystone that enabled fifteen years of climate rules, vehicle mandates, power-sector controls, and trillions of dollars in compliance costs.

And yet, remarkably, almost no one is talking about the science.

The public conversation is almost entirely about process: whether the repeal will survive legal challenges, whether agencies followed the correct procedures, whether industry benefits too much, and whether courts will intervene. What is missing, again, is a serious discussion of whether the Endangerment Finding was ever scientifically or legally justified in the first place.

That omission is not accidental. It is the defining feature of modern climate policy.

A Decision Made First, Justified Later

The EPA’s Endangerment Finding followed the Supreme Court’s Massachusetts v. EPA decision, which merely allowed greenhouse gases to be considered under the Clean Air Act. It did not require the EPA to declare carbon dioxide a danger to public health or welfare. That judgment was left to the agency.

And the agency chose its answer early.

A recent investigation by the Government Accountability & Oversight Office confirms what many of us suspected at the time: the Endangerment Finding was built around a conclusion that had already been reached. The scientific process that followed was not designed to test whether CO₂ posed an endangerment, but to defend a regulatory outcome deemed politically necessary.

Oversight finding:

“…the Endangerment Finding was treated internally as a ‘decision ready to go,’ with scientific review structured around defending the outcome…”

This is the core argument I laid out in my earlier Irrational Fear piece, “Mr. Zeldin, Will You Rescue America From the EPA’s Climate Fraud?”, where I traced how a single bureaucratic determination metastasized into economy-wide control over energy and mobility. I expanded that case in “Climate Lawfare”, showing how courts later shielded massive climate spending programs rooted entirely in the Endangerment Finding’s authority.

None of this was hypothetical. It was documented.
It was observable. And it was ignored.

What the Endangerment Finding Never Confronted

A genuine scientific assessment of endangerment would have required confronting inconvenient facts. The 2009 finding did not.

It never seriously addressed the role of natural recovery from the Little Ice Age, a period of unusually cold global conditions that peaked well before industrial CO₂ emissions and from which the planet has been rebounding for more than a century. Treating all post-19th-century warming as unprecedented and dangerous required quietly discarding that context.

It also failed to grapple with the net benefits of modest warming to human societies. Cold is far deadlier than heat. Agricultural productivity improves with longer growing seasons. Energy access reduces vulnerability. These realities undermine the simplistic harm narrative embedded in the finding.

Most conspicuously, the EPA excluded the benefits of CO₂ fertilization, despite mounting observational evidence, now overwhelming, that higher CO₂ concentrations have increased global leaf area, improved plant water-use efficiency, and boosted crop yields. Satellite data did not support a story of planetary decline. They supported one of widespread greening.

The Absurdity of Calling 420 ppm “Unclean Air”

Perhaps the most fundamental flaw in the Endangerment Finding is conceptual.

For most of Earth’s history, atmospheric CO₂ levels were not 280 ppm or 420 ppm, but 1,000 to more than 4,000 ppm. Life did not collapse under those conditions. It flourished. Forests expanded. Biodiversity increased. Entire ecosystems thrived.

Against that backdrop, the claim that today’s atmosphere — at roughly 0.04% CO₂ — constitutes “unclean air” collapses under minimal scrutiny. Carbon dioxide is not mercury. It is not sulfur dioxide. It is not lead. It is an essential molecule for life.

This figure shows estimates of the changes in carbon dioxide concentrations during the Phanerozoic. This is not an ideological statement. It is basic chemistry.  The Endangerment Finding required redefining that chemistry to make regulation possible.

Years of Writing, One Conclusion

At Irrational Fear, I have spent years examining these issues from multiple angles: disaster statistics, sea-level records, hurricane data, climate costs, adaptation, and the repeated failure of model projections to match observations. I submitted those findings formally to the EPA in my public comment supporting reconsideration of the Endangerment Finding, drawing directly on hundreds of prior analyses.

The conclusion has remained consistent: the evidence never supported a finding of endangerment.

What has changed is not the data. What has changed is
the legal and political tolerance for pretending otherwise.