With all the hoopla about EV being the future of public transit, let’s have a roundup how this experiment is working out.

Canada

Electric buses are a disaster for every Canadian city that tries them

Jamie Sarkonak catalogs the Canadian experience in his National Post article with the subtitle: Regina is just the latest city to report problems with unreliable battery-powered transit. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The news slipped out during Regina city council’s Monday budget hearing, when transit union president Sukhwinder Singh was asked whether electric buses have impacted costs.

Aside from being more expensive to run — defeating their original purpose of saving on gas money — Singh said they were “not for the Saskatchewan weather.” He added that four buses had to be pulled off the line and re-charged the previous Friday, as they had fallen to 15 per cent battery. “I’m not in favour of electric buses at all,” he said.

“For the winter, their battery dies very quickly, and they can just run for two, three hours, that’s all. The buses weren’t good for the summer either, because the charge couldn’t reliably last.”

And over in Saskatoon, city council has been trying to grow the electric fleet. It’s unclear why: city staff have warned that electric buses can’t last a full day of service on one charge, and that it takes 1.2 electric buses to replace a single diesel bus.

This was always a predictable outcome, particularly since Edmonton already wasted millions on the same kind of failed project. In 2018, back when climate was the issue du jour, the city came up with a plan to spend $43 million on electric buses.

Fast forward to today and Edmonton has 60 of these buses in its fleet of 1,000. In December 2023, it was reported that only one quarter of these were in working order due to a range of problems. The company that built them, Proterra, filed for bankruptcy. Edmonton joined in on the bankruptcy proceedings, claiming that it was owed $82 million for the bus fiasco. Edmonton lawyers claimed:

“None of the buses have ever achieved 328 km on a single charge,” and “On average, the bus range has been approximately 165 km in the winter and, at best, 250 km in warmer weather.”

These same lessons are learned again and again. In 2022, the feds and the government of Manitoba helped Winnipeg purchase 40 electric buses, which the city claimed would drive for “10 to 15 hours.” Earlier trials in Winnipeg showed that heating the cabin resulted in “performance losses”; adding a diesel heater limited those losses to 20 per cent or less. In extreme cold, electric bus batteries lost as much as 25% of their capacity, and snow increased energy usage by an additional 15%. The city’s first electric buses began operating over the summer; it remains to be reported how their first winter is going.

Finally, Toronto, which also started its electric bus journey in 2017, is also reporting failure. A city report from July buries the unflattering figures under a deluge of emissions-reduction statistics: from the beginning, these buses had shorter ranges than diesel units, which renders them unusable for many existing bus routes. And because of their finicky charging requirements and limited range, the electric buses “face challenges in responding to emergency subway closures, route diversions, and other unexpected events.”

The Magic School Bus

In 2021, Quebec mandated that all new school buses purchased in the province be electric as part of a goal to electrify 65 per cent of its bus fleet by 2030.

in September 2025, 1,200 Lion electric school buses were abruptly withdrawn from Quebec roads, prompting renewed criticism of the provincial government’s approach to electrification — and of its decision to give one local company a virtual monopoly.  Many school bus routes in Quebec remained cancelled following the government’s decision to pull all Lion buses out of service after a bus in Montreal caught fire last week.  Lion has sent instructions to school bus operators for the required inspections and repairs, apparently related to possible wiring issues. Three Lion buses have caught fire in the last year, though nobody has been injured and the buses’ batteries were not involved.

Andrew Jones, a Montreal-area school bus operator, said he has since cancelled orders for 20 new Lion buses, and has ordered diesel buses instead. He said:

“The eight Lion buses I already own are unreliable, in part because when they break down, it can take weeks to get the necessary parts or technicians from Lion.” “We’re subject to waiting on them 100 per cent of the time.”

United States

Electric buses are sitting unused in cities across the US; here’s why

FoxBusiness reports: Cities coast-to-coast grappling with broken-down e-buses that cannot be fixed

Between the federal government, states and municipalities, untold billions in taxpayer dollars have been spent adding electric buses to transit fleets across the U.S. in an effort to reduce carbon emissions.

Officials in Asheville, North Carolina, recently expressed frustration that three of the five e-buses the city purchased for millions in 2018 are now sitting idle due to a combination of software issues, mechanical problems and an inability to obtain replacement parts.

Earlier this month, The Denver Gazette reported two of the four e-buses Colorado Springs’ Mountain Metropolitan Transit acquired in 2021 are not running. They cost $1.2 million a piece, mostly paid for by government grants.

In 2020, The Philadelphia Tribune reported SEPTA’s entire $24 million fleet of Proterras had been pulled out of commission. A spokesperson for the transit agency would not get into the specifics of why the 25 buses – the third-largest fleet of all-electric buses in the U.S. at the time – were put on ice, but suggested the issues might be covered under the manufacturer’s warranty.

Attorneys representing Broward County, Florida, regarding Proterra’s bankruptcy, told the court Broward County purchased 42 buses from Proterra for $54 million, and the first batch only operated for an average of 600 miles before breaking down, while the second batch averaged 1,800. For comparison, the county’s diesel buses average 4,500 between failures, the filing said.

In New York City Battery Drain: MTA Trims New Flyer Electric Bus Order Amid Tech Growing Pains

The MTA will buy 85 fewer electric buses as its manufacturer tries
to sort out a way to keep them in service without breaking down.

MTA officials briefed the board in June on the problems plaguing the five-dozen electric buses the authority currently has in service, which cover only about 2,500 miles on the road before a mechanical breakdown takes them out of service, compared to 8,500 miles for diesel buses.

Officials have previously sounded the alarm in 2025 that the batteries that power the buses overheat or fail hold a full day’s charge, and that electric components that power systems like the air brakes were failing while buses were in service.

International

Electric Buses Are Struggling to Gain Traction Worldwide

Linda Poon provides a global picture in her Pacific Standard article, with this summary:

What prevents cities from adopting electric buses en masse is a mix of
technological, financial, and institutional challenges, according to
reports looking at efforts in 16 cities at various stages of adoption.

With the goal of curbing carbon emissions in mind, municipal leaders all over have pledged to partially, if not fully, replace their city’s fleet with e-buses over the next decades. A number of cities, from large metropolises like Mexico City to more modest ones like Philadelphia, have started pilot tests. One report from World Resource Institute focuses on three major types of barriers.

The cities studied range from Addis Ababa in Ethiopia—where there’s been “no substantial planning” around electric buses—to cities like Philadelphia and Campinas, Brazil, which, respectively, are running a pilot test and expanding its number of e-buses, to successful cases in Shenzhen and the nearby Zhengzhou. They vary geographically, with some in developed nations like Chile and Spain, and other in emerging countries like India.

It means that when cities consider adopting electric buses, they need to understand the power grid upgrades and charging infrastructure required, and challenges associated with that. Failure to do so is the most common mistake, according to Gorguinpour. Many cities just set up their charging stations thinking that things would “work themselves out.”

That’s why he says one of the most overlooked stories from Shenzhen’s experience is the city’s long process in setting up the charging infrastructure to support more than 16,000 electric buses. Each bus has a range of about 124 miles on a single charge of 252 kilowatt hours (KWh). In total, the fleet can eat more than 4,000 megawatt-hours (MWh). For comparison’s sake, 1 MWh is enough to power about 300 homes for an hour. “That’s an insane amount of power required, not to mention real estate,” he says. “And the process to identify what land is available, then to work with the utilities—even just figuring out the optimal location—is a hugely important task, and incredibly challenging.”

That gets into the financial barriers. Cities across the globe often cited higher expenses as the primary challenge to procuring a fleet. While cities that adopt e-buses do end up saving money over the longer term in things like fuel (not to mention the harder-to-quantify value of cleaner air and fewer greenhouse emission), the upfront costs represent significant challenges. In the case studies, the price of a new e-bus ranged between $300,000 and $900,000 per bus, with the report noting that the prices vary dramatically depending on the manufacturer, specifications, and the location of the transit agency. In the United States, an electric bus averages around $750,000, while a conventional diesel bus is around $435,000.

When cities decide to implement electric buses, Gorguinpour says the cities focus too much on those upfront costs and not enough on the “life cycle cost.” Or, in the case of Belo Horizonte in Brazil, to get operators on board with full adoption. In some cases—as in Chile’s capital city of Santiago, which has the largest e-bus fleet outside of China—it’s utility companies, not transit agencies, that have stepped up to finance the projects.

Footnote:  And It Is All So Unnecessary

At American Greatness,  Leslie Matthews reviews a new book by geologist Gregory Wrightstone: A Very Convenient Warming. Excerpts with my bolds and added images.

Climate doomerism rests on far shakier ground
than its confidence would suggest.

Few books arrive with a thesis as deliberately provocative as its title. Gregory Wrightstone’s A Very Convenient Warming: How Modest Warming and More CO₂ Are Benefiting Humanity sets out to invert nearly every assumption underlying the modern climate conversation, and it does so armed less with rhetoric than with charts, ice core data, and centuries of documented harvests. A working geologist and executive director of the CO2 Coalition, Wrightstone builds his case on a canvas that stretches from the Carboniferous swamps to next year’s crop yields, and the sheer scale of that canvas is what gives the book its persuasive force.

Rather than opening with alarm, Wrightstone opens with arithmetic. Across the past 600 million years, he calculates, atmospheric CO₂ averaged roughly 2,600 parts per million, nearly seven times the concentration measured today and two and a half times the worst-case scenario the IPCC projects for the year 2100. Framed against that backdrop, today’s 420 parts per million looks less like a crisis and more like a modest recovery from what he calls a long era of carbon starvation, one that bottomed out near 182 parts per million during recent glacial advances, close to the 150 ppm threshold below which most land plants cannot survive at all.

Explaining what drove this decline is where the book’s account of sequestration becomes essential. Two mechanisms did most of the work, by Wrightstone’s reckoning. Roughly 80 percent of removed carbon became calcium carbonate rock, chiefly limestone, precipitated from saturated ocean water or built from the accumulated shells and skeletons of marine life. The remaining 20 percent took a slower, stranger path: algae and, later, lignin-rich trees died and were buried before microbial life had evolved the enzymes needed to decompose them, entombing carbon in what would eventually become coal, oil, and natural gas. Wrightstone leans on this history to reframe fossil fuels themselves, describing coal and oil as nothing more exotic than ancient sunlight, captured by photosynthesis and stored underground until combustion returns it to circulation.

Once that premise is established, the numbers Wrightstone marshals against the “unprecedented CO₂” narrative start to compound. Since the Industrial Revolution, atmospheric concentration has risen roughly 140 parts per million, from about 280 to 420, yet even that increase, he notes, still sits far below the 2,600 parts per million average of Earth’s deeper history and considerably below the levels present during most of the eras when complex life flourished.

If CO₂ truly functioned as the control knob of planetary temperature, as Wrightstone puts it, the geologic record ought to show the two moving in lockstep. Instead, he lines up four separate comparisons, each spanning a different length of time, and each one undercuts the correlation rather than confirming it. Between 1943 and 1976, even as postwar industrial output pushed emissions sharply upward, global temperature fell for 33 consecutive years, a cooling trend severe enough that many scientists of the era were predicting the onset of a new ice age rather than a warming one.

Reaching back further, the Central England Temperature record, the oldest continuous instrumental series in existence, shows roughly the first 250 years of post-Little Ice Age warming occurring while CO₂ levels remained at historic lows. The Medieval Warm Period presents a similar puzzle: comparable warmth occurred with concentrations some 140 parts per million below today’s figure. And looking across the full 8,000 years of the Holocene, Wrightstone finds temperatures gradually declining while CO₂ rose, an inversion he labels the Holocene Conundrum.

None of these four windows, spanning decades on one end and millennia on the other, produces the tight correlation the prevailing narrative would predict. Wrightstone instead points to Pacific Ocean cycles, particularly the El Niño Southern Oscillation, as tracking short-term temperature swings far more closely than carbon dioxide concentration ever does, a pattern he illustrates by charting El Niño events directly against satellite temperature records going back to 1950.

Wrightstone extends this skepticism to the computer models underpinning most climate policy, and here the book turns to harder arithmetic still. Citing the analysis of economist Ross McKitrick and atmospheric scientist John Christy, he reports that the models used in the latest IPCC assessment predicted warming of 0.42 degrees Celsius per decade, while satellite measurements actually recorded 0.17 degrees, an overprediction of roughly two and a half times.

If natural variability accounts for even half of the warming actually observed, he notes, the models’ error balloons to a factor of five. He adds that recent estimates of climate sensitivity indicate that the temperature rise expected from a doubling of CO₂ runs as low as 0.5 to less than 1.0 degrees Celsius, well beneath the assumptions baked into most model runs. Further, he cites Nobel laureate John Clauser’s contention that the models systematically underestimate the cooling effect of cloud cover, an error Clauser believes runs nearly twice as strong as the warming attributed to CO₂ itself.

The financial stakes Wrightstone attaches to this modeling gap are considerable. He calculates that achieving net zero emissions would cost roughly $275 trillion between 2021 and 2050, or about $9.8 trillion annually, a full tenth of global GDP. Running those figures through the MAGICC climate model, he finds that even a complete elimination of industrialized nations’ emissions starting in 2010 would avert only 0.28 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100, an outcome he prices at roughly $131 trillion for every tenth of a degree Fahrenheit avoided.

Having questioned both the mechanism and the models, Wrightstone turns to the historical record itself, and here the book’s argument sharpens into its most vivid form. Civilizations, he contends, have consistently suffered during cold periods and flourished during warm ones, a pattern he traces across nearly five millennia. His central illustration is the Greek Dark Ages, ushered in when temperatures across Europe fell 1 to 2 degrees Celsius at the close of the Minoan Warm Period around the thirteenth century B.C. Within roughly a century, the Hittite, Mycenaean, Minoan, and Canaanite civilizations had all collapsed, an episode historian David Kaniewski attributes to abrupt climate change that triggered region-wide crop failures and unsustainable conditions. Trade, art, and architecture receded across the region for four centuries or more, and Wrightstone extends the same pattern forward to the Dark Ages of the fifth through ninth centuries and to the Little Ice Age, both marked by famine and demographic collapse rather than the abundance he associates with the intervening warm periods.

Crucially, the book does not treat warmth above today’s alarm thresholds as theoretical. A 2020 study from the University of Barcelona, led by researcher Isabel Cacho, reconstructed Mediterranean temperatures across the last 2,000 years and identified the Roman period as the warmest stretch of that entire span, with conditions persisting for roughly 500 years. That warming, Wrightstone notes, exceeded the 1.5-degree Celsius threshold the IPCC treats as a point of no return, yet it produced no stagnation whatsoever. Instead, it coincided with the zenith of the Roman Empire and the Han Dynasty, an era so hospitable that olive trees grew in Germany’s Rhine Valley and wine grapes ripened as far north as Hadrian’s Wall, cultivation impossible in either location under today’s cooler climate. Sea level evidence corroborates the reconstruction: Pevensey Castle, once a coastal fortification of the Saxon Shore, now sits 1.5 kilometers inland, the submerged coastline having receded as the planet cooled again during the subsequent Little Ice Age.

Building on that historical foundation, Wrightstone devotes his closing chapters to cataloguing tangible benefits he attributes to rising CO₂ and modest warming. Because carbon dioxide is the essential raw material of photosynthesis, he argues that today’s still comparatively low concentrations continue to constrain plant growth and that recent increases have measurably improved agricultural yields worldwide. On natural disasters, he turns the conventional narrative on its head entirely. Citing direct correspondence with a database manager at the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, he reports that the apparent rise in recorded disasters between the 1970s and late 1990s reflected an expanding global reporting network rather than any actual increase in events, a distortion the organization itself later acknowledged. Once that reporting bias is corrected, the same data show disaster counts declining roughly ten percent since 2000, while global disaster deaths per decade have fallen more than ninety percent, from an average of 54,000 in the 1920s to about 4,500 in the most recent decade covered in the book.

Wrightstone writes for a general readership, and the book largely succeeds at making paleoclimatology, carbon cycle chemistry, and climate modeling approachable without collapsing into oversimplification, aided by more than ninety charts drawn from ice cores, historical temperature series, and disaster databases. It should be read, however, with a clear sense of where it comes from. Wrightstone leads an organization explicitly dedicated to challenging the mainstream scientific consensus on climate change, and that mission shapes which studies he foregrounds and which he leaves aside. Still, judged on its own terms, the book assembles a genuinely substantial body of historical and empirical evidence, not merely assertion, for the claim that the relationship between carbon dioxide, temperature, and human flourishing is considerably less settled than the prevailing public narrative admits. For readers weary of forecasts of imminent catastrophe, Wrightstone’s accumulated evidence, spanning 600 million years of geology and two millennia of documented history alike, makes a strong case that climate doomerism rests on far shakier ground than its confidence would suggest.

 

 

 

 

Brabim Karki writes from Nepal about the escalating trade war between these two former allies.  As a citizen of both nations, I have mixed reactions and welcome a disinterested viewpoint.  The article in The Spectator is Trump’s Canada Tariffs Aren’t the Betrayal Ottawa Claims. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Mark Carney says Washington ambushed an ally. But Canada’s
protected markets and dependence on US trade tell a different story.

Every diplomatic breakup produces two stories, and the one Ottawa is telling that Washington ambushed a trusted partner at the negotiating table has already won the sympathy of most of the press. It is a good story. It is also incomplete.

What actually happened last week is that trade talks fell apart because the United States asked Canada to accept terms Canada found uncomfortable, and Canada refused. Prime Minister Mark Carney called the American position “unfair” and “uneconomic.” He may be right that it was tough. He is wrong to suggest that toughness, on its own, is grounds for outrage. The United States has run a trade relationship with Canada for decades that gave Ottawa nearly unrestricted access to the world’s largest consumer market while Canada kept its own protections, most notoriously its dairy supply management system firmly in place. Donald Trump’s blunt framing on social media, “Canada wants the benefits of being a State, without being one,” is crude. It is not wrong.

Trade relationships built on one side’s permanent tolerance
of the other’s protections were never going to last forever.

Trump’s tariffs are not an act of aggression against an ally. They are the predictable consequence of a negotiation in which one side finally stopped accepting asymmetrical terms it had tolerated for years.

The asymmetry Trump is pointing to is real, not invented. Canadian dairy tariffs on U.S. products have run well above 200 percent under the country’s supply management regime, even as Canadian goods flow south with comparatively modest friction. American dairy farmers in Wisconsin and New York have complained about this for a generation, through Republican and Democratic administrations alike. Trump did not manufacture this grievance. He inherited it and, unlike his predecessors, chose to act on it rather than manage it quietly. Carney’s own advisers have not seriously disputed that the tariff wall exists; they have argued only that dismantling it now would be politically costly at home. That is an argument about Canadian domestic politics, not about whether the American complaint is legitimate.

The walkout itself weakens Canada’s position more than it strengthens it. Carney told reporters the American side “asked too much and offered too little,” then pulled his negotiators from Washington and out of what by his own account had been a week of real progress. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer’s account is less charitable: Canada, he said, backed away from terms it had already agreed to. Whichever version proves closer to the truth, walking away rewards Ottawa’s leverage only if the United States needs a deal more than Canada does. It does not. American exports to Canada matter, but Canada sends a far larger share of its own economy south than the reverse. A negotiating partner who breaks off talks from the weaker hand is making a statement, not a strategy.

Canada has spent the past several months hedging toward Beijing, and that context matters more than Ottawa would like to admit. A new trade arrangement with China, cutting tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles in exchange for agricultural access, landed in the middle of a fragile American relationship already strained by years of tariff threats. One can defend Canada’s right to diversify its trading partners. One cannot then act surprised when Washington treats that diversification as evidence that Ottawa is playing both sides, and responds accordingly.

The escalating tariffs on both sides will likely raise costs for consumers in both countries, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is not wrong that supply chains built over 30 years under NAFTA and its successor don’t unwind painlessly. Businesses in Michigan and Ontario alike will feel this fight before their governments do. That is a genuine cost, and it should temper any triumphalism about the tariffs themselves.

But a cost is not a refutation. Trade relationships built on one side’s permanent tolerance of the other’s protections were never going to last forever, and someone was eventually going to test whether Canada’s dairy walls and Washington’s patience could coexist indefinitely. Trump tested it. Carney blinked first, then called it an attack.  Alliances endure disagreement. What they cannot survive indefinitely is one partner mistaking the other’s patience for permanent policy.

Canada is about to find out how much of that patience is left.

Dr. Joseph Fournier explains the situation in his Daily Wire article Blame Canada’s Terrible Regulations For Wildfires Ruining America’s Summer.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

It’s a perfect storm of the decline of local lumber industries
and the policies put in place to (mis)manage Canadian forests.

Americans often picture Canada as a vast northern forest — an endless expanse of pristine wilderness. But the truth is far more complex and increasingly relevant to U.S.–Canada policy debates. Eighty‑nine percent of Canada is Crown land, owned by federal or provincial governments. Yet only about 10–12% of that land receives detailed ecological monitoring.  This matters because U.S. trade policy, Canadian conservation policy, and federal herbicide permitting are now combining to reshape North America’s forests in ways few Americans recognize.

Over the past 20 years, Canada’s sawmill and pulp‑and‑paper sectors have entered a steep decline. Statistics Canada and industry reports show that mill closures have accelerated, especially in western Canada, where over 30% of softwood lumber capacity has disappeared. Employment has dropped sharply. Entire forestry towns have hollowed out.

And while multiple factors contribute — mountain pine beetle damage, wildfire losses, transportation bottlenecks — the most overlooked driver is the federal government’s long‑standing approval of spraying Roundup (glyphosate) herbicide across millions of hectares of Crown forests. For decades, glyphosate has been used to kill broadleaf species — birch, aspen, poplar — so that commercially valuable conifers can dominate.

But this practice has consequences. Roundup creates monoculture conifer stands, which are more resin‑rich and significantly more flammable than mixed‑species forests. Instead of diverse, moisture‑retaining ecosystems, Canada is producing vast tracts of single‑age, single‑species pine and spruce — exactly the kind of forests that burn explosively under extreme fire weather.

The result is a continental paradox: Policies meant to “manage” forests
have instead created more combustible landscapes,
contributing to the anomalous rise in total annual area burned.

The deterioration of Canada’s forests is also being accelerated by domestic policy. Rising carbon taxes on diesel and gasoline — critical fuels for logging, hauling, and mill operations — have increased costs across the supply chain. New layers of regulation slow approvals and reduce harvest flexibility. And when pulp mills close, sawmills lose buyers for residual chips and sawdust, further undermining their economics.

But the most consequential impact of this industrial contraction is ecological. Canada’s parklands — where monitoring exists — show a clear trend of rapidly aging boreal forests, with large stands now reaching 70 to 120 years old.

In Alberta’s eastern foothills, provincial parks contain dense, overmature, fuel‑loaded forests primed for high‑intensity wildfire. Decades of fire suppression, beetle kill, drought, and heavy recreational pressure have created extreme fire risk. As Parks Canada itself warns, “the reduction or exclusion of fire as a natural process … leads to increased risk of wildfires.”

The consequences are here. Alberta’s Jasper National Park recently nearly burned to the ground when extreme fire weather collided with decades of fuel accumulation, beetle‑killed forests, a highly vulnerable townsite, and infrastructure failures.

Nonetheless, long‑term fire data tell a more nuanced story.  According to Canada’s National Burned Area Composite and Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre wildfire statistics, forest‑fire frequency has declined since the 1980s. Canada is experiencing fewer fires overall.

What has changed is the total area burned, which had remained relatively moderate for decades but then spiked dramatically in 2023 and again in 2025, producing two of the worst years for fires in modern Canadian history.  These spikes reflect the dangerous combination of aging forests, heavy fuel loads, glyphosate‑driven monoculture, and extreme fire weather — not an increase in ignition frequency.

Meanwhile, federal biodiversity reports show that parks are not experiencing net improvement. Most ecosystems are stable, but among those changing, declines outnumber gains. And crucially, non‑park Crown lands are not monitored at all, meaning there is no empirical basis to claim that conservation designations improve biodiversity.

Yet Ottawa is moving ahead with its flagship 30×30 agenda — a plan
to place 30% of Canada’s land and water under conservation status by 2030.

In practice, this means restricting forestry across vast areas as forests age, become fuel‑loaded, and become increasingly prone to extreme fire behavior. By limiting private‑sector utilization, 30×30 will increase fuel loading, exacerbate forest aging, and reduce thinning and harvesting activities that mitigate catastrophic wildfire risk.

For Americans concerned about lumber prices or wildfire smoke drifting south, the lesson is simple. Canada’s forests are increasingly unmanaged, aging, and burning, not because Canadians don’t care, but because the economic and policy frameworks governing those forests are pushing the country toward less active management.

North America needs forestry — not just parks — to remain resilient.

Joseph Fournier, Ph.D., has worked in the energy industry and environmental sciences and is a member of the CO₂ Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. He writes from his family’s ranch east of Calgary.

See Also:

Canada Wildfires: Manage Forests or Lose Them

 

 

 

 

Frank Lasee writes at CFACT on state legislatures acting to block climate lawfare: Shutting the two back doors to Net Zero expenses. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

For years, activists pushing net-zero energy policy have lost where it counts. Voters reject higher power bills. Legislatures refuse to ban natural gas. Congress will not pass a carbon tax, so they moved to the two venues a determined minority can still control: local governments and the courtroom.

CFACT has set out to close both doors to the Green Left.

Working directly with legislative sponsors, we advanced two model bills before ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council’s Energy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force. Both were received warmly by the task force members at their recent meeting in Orlando, Florida (July 22-24), who will now carry them home to their states.

The first, the Energy Producers and Consumers Protection Act, led by Rep. Reagan Paul, Maine, shuts the courthouse door. Across the country, trial lawyers and city attorneys have discovered that if you cannot regulate energy producers out of business, you can try to sue them out of business instead. There are about 40 climate lawsuits around the country right now.

They file public nuisance claims, climate superfund actions, and fraud suits
that ask a single judge to blame one company for global atmospheric
conditions, all over a product that was legal to make and sell.

Our bill ends the game. It sets liability for lawful emissions at zero dollars unless a plaintiff can prove an actual violation of the federal Clean Air Act; it bars local governments from filing or funding these suits; and it prohibits the retroactive climate superfund schemes that states like New York and Vermont have used to hand energy producers enormous bills for products sold legally years ago.

This is not a fringe idea. It builds directly on laws already enacted in Utah, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Tennessee. Our model takes the strongest provisions from each and assembles them into one bill any state can adopt.

The second bill, the Local Government Net Zero Policy Prohibition Act, led by Rep. Thomas Peterson (Utah), shuts the city hall door.

Counties, school districts, and public universities have quietly become
some of the most aggressive climate regulators in the country.

They adopt net-zero targets, write carbon preferences into their purchasing contracts, pay dues to activist consortia like ICLEI and C40 Cities, and commit taxpayer money to programs that make no measurable difference to the global climate while raising costs for the families they serve.

Our bill stops it. Local governments will no longer spend public funds chasing net-zero mandates, and they may no longer join the climate lawsuits described above.  The bill protects real efficiency. Towns can still buy LED streetlights, weatherize buildings, and choose cheaper vehicles. What they cannot do is spend public money for political emissions targets. If it saves money, do it. If it only serves a political goal, do not bill the taxpayer.

Taken together, the two bills form a single strategy. One keeps activists from writing energy policy through the procurement office. The other keeps them from writing it through the courtroom. Both rest on the same principle.

In a self-governing republic, energy policy should be made by the people’s elected representatives in the legislature, not by trial lawyers seeking a payday or by unelected local boards answering to national pressure campaigns.

Every successful climate lawsuit and every local net-zero mandate lands on consumers who never voted for them. Affordable, reliable energy is not a luxury — it is the foundation of every community goal.

The momentum is real. Four states have already enacted versions of the litigation shield, and Florida has led the way on reining in local climate mandates. With these two models now in front of ALEC legislators, the path is open for many more states to follow.

CFACT will keep working with lawmakers to see these bills through. The activists changed venues because they were losing. We intend to make sure they keep losing, in the legislature, in the courtroom, and in city hall alike. This will benefit you by keeping those costs out of your wallet.

 

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’