The Kim Strassel interview at WSJ is Energy Secretary Chris Wright on Resetting the Climate Debate.  Below in italics is a transcript from the closed captions with my bolds and added images.

The Department of Energy’s new climate report is making waves, offering a fresh look at the alarmist claims pushed by special-interest groups and prior administrations. The report’s five scientists lay out data showing that while climate change is real, it isn’t the threat suggested by media or the climate lobby. On this episode of All Things, Energy Secretary Chris Wright takes Kim Strassel through the findings, including the upsides of warming, the minimal economic effects of climate change, the limits of U.S. policy actions and the lack of evidence that climate is related to the frequency or intensity of extreme weather.

KS:  Tell us why you commissioned that report.

CW: The climate chain is a real physical phenomenon. It’s scientifically fascinating. It is a truly global issue. But you know there’s certain facts and data about it. There’s certain implications about it. And most everything I hear in the media, in the news from politicians, from protesters when I speak at universities, they’re just so unaware of the basics of what is climate change.

And and to give one example there, you hear these kids, I’m choking, I’m coughing on so much carbon pollution, you know. And look, the Clean Air Act was about real pollutants that do make you cough, that are toxic, that do have, you know, acute human impacts in local concentrations. As for carbon dioxide, I say it’s like oxygen and water, H2O, CO2 is one of the three most critical molecules for life on Earth. It is the essential life giving plant food that makes our life possible.

So it does absorb infrared radiation. So we can have a real dialogue about too much of it or too little of it. which is actually I think a bigger risk. But you know calling it a pollutant is just nuts.

KS: So let’s go through some of the big takeaways of it because I think people would be amazed that it’s not what they hear in the media every day. One important thing that I think is is notable and I’ll just say it at the the top is that you know that no one in this entire report is denying that the climate is changing. We all agree that it’s changing. It’s always changing in some way.

One thing that might surprise people was that some aspects of a changing climate can actually be good. Because you only ever hear about the apocalyptic points. But the report goes into some detail about how this can be better for agricultural production. It also talks about throughout history, cold has been a much greater threat to human health than heat. More people die from cold every year.

It might also surprise people that we still don’t know the extent to which humans really affect the climate.  I would like you to talk about that because that’s going to be really confusing to some folks out there because all they hear is, the consensus is that humans are causing massive damaging climate problems. That’s what you constantly get from the media refrain on this. How do you put those through things? How do you explain that to folks who might be surprised with what this report says compared to what they have heard non-stop for more than a decade now?

CW: Of course everyone says that, Republican politicians, Democratic politicians, the media everywhere because that’s what they hear. But it shows they don’t actually read, and of course, why would people read these giant bureaucratic clunky reports from intergovernmental panel on climate change, the IPCC that you hear about? The problem with the IPCC is actually the layers of reporting. There’s the report that’s by the scientists, and then there’s the release or the summary for policy makers as they call it in the IPCC world that’s written by politicians and it is striking there are things in the summary for policy makers just directly contradictory to the science actually in the reports themselves.

And the biggest thing there that everybody hears is that weather, extreme storms are getting stronger and more frequent and the damage of this is taking an increasing toll on society and hence we’re in a climate emergency. None of that is true and none of that is clear in the intergovernmental panel on climate change reports. These are the reports written by people that have dedicated their life to climate change.

If you thought ah you know it’s a real thing but it’s not that big of a deal, you’re not going to spend your whole life as an author of an IPCC report. It’s sort of self- selecting for the people most interested in climate change. They’re honest scientists, for the large majority of them, but they’re the most interested in this thing. Maybe they think it’s the most important thing, the most exciting to them.

In these IPCC reports, there’s the collection of data on extreme weather: hurricanes, no increase in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes. floods, droughts, no increase in the frequency or intensity of them. The only the only meaningful extreme weather event that shows a trend and it’s not a huge trend is tornadoes and it’s downward. There’s like 50% less extreme high energy tornadoes today than 50 years ago. We don’t know why but you know that one’s sort of a favorable trend.

Most all of them have variations from year to year. Some of them have decadal oscillations. So they they go through phases of stronger and weaker but none of them show a scary upward trend. And my punch line, if you look at the deaths from extreme weather, they’ve just declined like a stone throughout the last hundred years, including in the last 20 or 30 years. So your risk of dying from extreme weather is the lowest we’ve ever had data on.

But yet 20% of kids report nightmares about fears of climate change. Like, how do those go together? And that’s despite the fact that we have much greater populations in a lot of these areas that are hit.

And that’s all useful information out there as well about not conflating the economic damage of a of a storm with meaning that it’s actually a bigger or worse storm. It just might mean that there were more things in its path to actually get wrecked. And people conflate those things too often with really sloppy consequences for the science.

KS: In the broader debate, if you look at many areas of science, for example we’ve been studying physics for millennia. There’s a been a lot of work done and a lot of people coming up with theories and then them getting knocked down. And we crawl our way forward but we have gained a pretty good understanding of many things in nature. Still climate science is new in the grand scheme of things, kind of in its infancy and we’re still learning a lot. Is that an accurate statement?

CW: Oh yeah. Look, it’s an incredibly complicated system. This is a tightly coupled, chaotic system. And you know, best exemplified by weather forecasts. We get better at weather forecasts now. 50 years ago, maybe you could have a reasonable projection out four or five days. Today, it’s closer to two weeks. There’s people in the AI world telling me we can do a reasonable projection all the way out to a month today. I’ve never seen that, but that is a claim of massive advanced computing going out a month. That’s just how complicated these phenomenon are.

So when you come back and report that with this little knob CO2 concentration, you’re going to dial in to a tenth of a degree the temperature at the end of the century. That should be greeted with a lot of skepticism. There’s some reality. It is a warming fact. There’s a bias. There’s an upward average trend. But yeah, this you know attributing this storm, this much damage came from climate change.These are stretching science beyond science and going into science fiction.

There are more items from this report that I think might surprise people. It is very important to broaden this out to a couple other findings that would surprise people One point is that there’s not been so far and they’re not projected to be a lot of negative economic effects from this. And moreover the US’s ability to change global climate is extremely limited. Even if we were to take some very drastic policy measures it would generally have a negligible effect on global climate trends.

And that’s another part of the IPCC reports that not only is never read, but it’s never even talked about. In the past, I put out the summary of what are the economic conclusions of the IPCC authors. They survey all the economic literature on climate change. And yet our current warming trends, the projections are that maybe at the end of this century, we might lose a few tenths of a percent or maybe two, three or four percent per capita income, if we do nothing about climate change by the end of this century.

But in that same model with economic growth projected ahead, we’re about 400% richer than we are today. So, our great great grandchildren might be 400% richer than us or in the worst case, if you take the outer bounds scenarios, well, they might only be 380 or 85% richer than us. I don’t think that qualifies as a climate catastrophe or this disaster meme around something projected to be relatively modest. And even in the words of the climate economists, they’ll say, “Look, climate impacts are nowhere near as important as education policy or trade impacts or efficiencies and other things.” So people studying these things closely, I think, are quite sober and reasonable about them.

The problem is you never hear from them. Only the most extreme ones that made the dramatic, you know, that, you know, the Statue of Liberty is going to be underwater, you know, the people that make the crazy claims, they’re the newsworthy ones. So they’re the ones that are put on TV all the time, but they’re not representative at all of the consensus.

Now consensus does not mean correct, but just the center point of people looking at this. Yeah. That you know their centrist view of climate change is a very slow moving but significant process. Nothing about alarmism, nothing about disaster. You know all the crazy stuff you hear is out of line with mainstream climate science and mainstream climate economics, but not the five authors of this report. They’re just making accessible to the broader public or at least the moderately scientifically inclined public to get in tune with what we think we know about climate change to date. They don’t talk a lot about projections because no one knows the future, but I think we’ve got a hundred years of pretty good data. That’s a good place to start when you’re trying to think how might things be in another 10 or 50 or 100 years.

KS: Yeah. And that’s what I loved about this report. If you go through it, every single statement in there is just common sense and you can’t really disagree with it if you’re looking at the numbers and the data. They really summed up the state of climate science at the moment.

Why I like this report and the way you framed it in your introduction at the beginning is that we as a country and as a member of this globe, we’re always facing myriad problems. And if you don’t have the whole picture, it’s impossible to prioritize which of those to focus on because by the way, we do have limited focus and limited resources to sort of manage some of these to a certain degree.  In your introduction you put that perhaps the world’s greatest problem at the moment is actually energy poverty. And to fix that, to truly lift people up, we need reliable, affordable energy.

CW: And that’s just common sense. And in fact, I would say that’s why President Trump got elected. People were eventually tiring of these kind of alarmist claims that didn’t seem to make much sense. You know, every every 10 years the world’s going to end 10 years from now. And and honestly, unless you’re watching the news, no one would notice climate change if it was not in the news. If I were to change the temperature in the room you’re sitting right now by a couple degrees Fahrenheit over 20 minutes, you wouldn’t even notice it unless you’re very sensitive. I’m not. But that two degrees Fahrenheit, that’s the warming the planet has observed over a century, you know. But if I did it in 10 minutes or 15 minutes, you wouldn’t notice it.

So, President Trump got elected because, you know, 15%, 20% of Americans are struggling to pay their monthly electricity bill. They’re struggling to pay for gasoline to get to work. They’re struggling to start a new business because energy costs and energy connections are more expensive. That’s a problem in the here and now.

And that’s not an unrelated problem. We’ve driven up the cost of energy in the United States and Europe has done it dramatically all in the name of combating climate change. You know, we’re barely tweaking global emissions of greenhouse gases that might lead the planet to be a hundredth of a degree cooler in the year 2100. That’s the potential output if we implement these policies, but yet the short-term impacts are just crushing people’s opportunities and the ability to pay their bills. That’s getting way way off track.

That’s why the American public elected President Trump and maybe why President Trump tapped me. What I want to do is engage the public in this discussion: what do we know about climate change? What do we know about energy systems and how they could change and what kind of trade offs do we want to make? And the more people get exposed to the facts, the more I think people become realistic.

You talked about affordability problems in the United States. Let me just give one other punchline, World Health Organization data. Around two to three million people die every year from indoor air pollution. And that’s because two billion people, a quarter of humanity, cook their daily meals and heat their homes burning wood or dung or agricultural waste indoors. That smoke is just a deadly toxic pollutant that kills millions and crushes the freedom of women and children who gather the wood and spend hours a day over these smoky fires.

That’s an energy crisis we know how to solve. It’s affordable. It’s reliable and massively transformative of lives. But yet we never hear about that. That’s clearly a bigger priority than shaving a few hundreds of a degree off global temperatures three or four generations from now.

KS: Last question here, I do just want to ask a political question. Those of us who believe in free markets, who want opportunity, abundance, you know, the ability for people to succeed and have more, have understood a long time ago that if the activist climate agenda were imposed from above and government, that’s just an end to most of those free market ambitions. Because in order to to follow the agenda they want, which is total control over what you drive and what you eat and what kind of job you have and what kind of house you live in. You squash that freedom.

And I think a lot of free marketers have nonetheless struggled to know how to engage in these climate wars. For a while they said, “Well, the climate’s not changing.” And then for a while it was like, “It’ll just cost too much.” And then for a while it was, “Well, we’ll just have to do everything all of the above.” You seem to be saying, actually, you want to talk about the science, let’s talk about the science. And what it actually shows is that we don’t need to go down that road of of stripping everything away to control everything given the actual level of what we’re dealing with here. Is that right?

CW: That’s right, Kim. Yeah. And I say two things created the modern world. doubled our life expectancy, you know, created planes, trains, and automobiles and modern medicine. The growth of human freedom, bottom-up social organization or human liberty, and the explosion in affordable energy from the arrival of hydrocarbons. First coal, then oil, then wood, and now the derivative energy sources of hydrocarbons like nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar. You can’t have any of those without abundant hydrocarbons.

And this climate movement opposes both of them. They’re making energy more expensive. They’re trying to get in the way of the main energy source. Hydrocarbons were 85% of global energy when I was born and they’re 85% of global energy today. Turns out it’s hard to change the energy system, but they’re making them more expensive.

And to your point, they’re going back to top-down control. The government’s going to decide what’s virtuous, what car you can buy, how you can heat your home. We’re going to force you to electrically heat your home, which is two to five times more expensive than burning natural gas. And when you heat your home electrically, guess what? The US’s main source of electricity comes from natural gas.

You’re not even changing. You’re not reducing gas consumption. You’re just making it more expensive. But it’s about political control. It’s about reducing human freedom. So, let’s do this. Let’s shine light on all of this on the trade-offs we’re making. And I think Americans will choose a much more reasonable, informed pathway for energy and climate policy going forward.

I’m hugely optimistic. Shining light on this, I think, is going to get us to a much better place.

 

 

Linnea Lueken writes at Climate Realism Stop Promoting Attribution Studies, Associated Press, Europe’s Wildfires Aren’t Worsening.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The Associated Press (AP), via ABC News, claims that climate change is responsible for the intensity of European wildfires in a story titled “Climate change made deadly wildfires in Turkey, Greece and Cyprus more fierce, study finds.” This is false.

Data show no long-term trend of increasing wildfires in any of the countries listed,
and overall global wildfire data shows declining fire extent.

The AP cites a non-peer reviewed report by World Weather Attribution (WWA) to claim that climate change was responsible for necessary conditions, specifically, hot and dry weather, which drove the widespread wildfire outbreaks in Turkey, Greece, and Cyprus, and made them “burn much more fiercely.”

The story and the report it relies upon are suspect from the start. First, as discussed by Climate Realism previously, as a matter of geography the climate of the Mediterranean region is naturally arid, prone to drought, extreme heat, and associated wildfires. Fire helped shape the ecology of the entire region. Some past fires have been huge. For instance, more than 112 years of global warming ago, when global average temperatures were cooler and humans weren’t contributing significantly to atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, the great Thessaloniki fire burned for 13 days. It left more than 70,000 people homeless, and destroyed two-thirds of Greece’s second largest city.

So hot and dry weather is the norm for the Turkey, Greece, and Cyprus,
especially during the summer, rather than being unusual weather conditions.

The AP ignores this fact about the region’s climate. It also did not critically assess WWA. The AP portrays WWA an unbiased “group of researchers that examines whether and to what extent extreme weather events are linked to climate change.” But this is false. The entire reason for WWA’s existence is specifically to “attribute” extreme weather events to human-caused climate change, in part to provide material that can be used in lawsuits filed against governments and the fossil fuel industry. The WWA believes the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s data driven approach to understating the causes of extreme weather is far too cautious when it comes to attribution. WWA produces studies on the assumption that climate change caused or contributed to an extreme event, the only real question being how much more likely was the event to occur, or how much more severe was the event, than it would have been absent human fossil fuel use.

That is the fallacy of affirming the consequent
or assuming what you are attempting to prove.

In this case, WWA claimed the fires were “22% more intense in 2025, Europe’s worst recorded year of wildfires.” This claim is unverified and misleading, at best. The Mediterranean region the AP discusses is not all of Europe, and it was not that regions worst year of wildfires.

It is worth noting that WWA seems to only attribute extreme weather
to climate change, never mild or good weather.

WWA specifically identifies its goal as increasing the “immediacy of climate change, thereby increasing support for mitigation.” Climate Realism has explained at length why single event attribution is scientifically misleading and unreliable at best in past articles, and we’ve specifically refuted flawed WWA reports previously dozens of times, here, here, and here, for example.

This year may well be a record fire year for parts of Europe and Asia, but only a sustained trend of worsening fires would prove that they were driven by climate change.

No such trend exists, globally or in the individual countries mentioned.

Looking at the most recent available data from the joint collaborative project between NASA and the European Space Agency, Copernicus, for each country we can see the wildfire trends are far from consistent.

First we have Turkey:

If anything, this trend shows that wildfires have been trending down since 2009’s peak over Copernicus’ period of record.

Next, Greece:

Again, no real long term consistent trend.

Finally Cyprus:

Again, particularly in the case of yearly burned area, there is no consistent trend in wildfire data for Cypress, and a possible overall decline in the yearly number of fires.

Downward or flat trends can’t honestly be portrayed as increasing trends.

Although global wildfire data also is spotty for long-term trends, what data exists consistently suggest a declining global trend. NASA data shows a global decline in acreage lost to wildfire since 2003.

Extreme weather event attribution studies, produced rapidly
in hours after a natural disaster strikes, aren’t vetted science.

Still, they are eagerly accepted as evidence of climate impacts by the alarmist media. This is absurd when any credible fact checker, editor, or investigative journalist could easily access publicly available data that devastates the climate change linkage at the core of the story. One would hope that the Associated Press’ writers are gullible or naïve, but even taking that charitable view, the lack of basic research is inexcusable for any journalistic outlet. One reason to doubt the charitable belief in how so many false climate tales are spun out of the AP is that the stories are all biased in the same direction of climate alarm – climate change is never not to blame – and that the AP’s climate coverage is specifically funded by foundations and non-profit organizations who have long pushed climate alarm.

Zainab Usman describes the opportunity to reconstruct the effort addressing world poverty and social deprivation in his Foreign Affairs article The End of the Global Aid Industry.  Below is a synopsis of his vision in italics with my bolds and added images.  Following that is a previous post discussing how benevolence can go astray.

USAID’s Demise Is an Opportunity to Prioritize Industrialization Over Charity

Every decade or so, the global aid industry finds that it must transform to survive. During these periods of change, donor countries restructure their aid agencies, shrink or expand their assistance budgets, and lobby for the creation or dissolution of a UN initiative or two. Typically, once the aid industry conforms to the whims of donor countries, the crisis is averted and business continues as usual. Since U.S. President Donald Trump began his second term, the aid industry has found itself at another inflection point. The Trump administration has gutted USAID, the world’s largest development agency, ending 86 percent of its programs, shuttering its headquarters, and terminating nearly all its 10,000 employees. At the same time, the Trump administration has slashed funding for various multilateral initiatives on climate, global health, and education.

Today’s crisis, however, is different from those that came before: this could truly be the end of foreign aid as we know it. For decades, global development—that is, the attempt to improve and save lives of the poor—has been driven mostly by foreign assistance provided by wealthy governments. Some scholars and analysts deride this process as the “aid-industrial complex.” But even advocates of foreign aid have come to see it as an industry, including in their efforts to reform it, which approach its defects as matters of business inefficiency. And now that governments in many rich countries have sharply lurched to the right and taken more skeptical stances on aid, this industry is collapsing. As a result, many charity workers, researchers, and academics will be out of jobs. More important, millions of poor people around the world will suffer.

Proponents of global development now face a choice. They can wait for attitudes in donor countries to shift back toward support for foreign aid at some point in the distant future. Or they can reimagine the entire concept of global development, detaching it from aid and rooting it instead in industrial transformation: helping countries shift from subsistence farming, informal employment, and primary commodity production toward manufacturing and services. In truth, the aid industry was already adrift. Its interventions had become spread too thin and often failed to address the key obstacles that poorer countries faced as they tried to upskill their workers, build energy and transport infrastructure, and access new markets. Raising people out of poverty in Africa, South Asia, and parts of Latin America will not only improve their lives but also allow rich countries to maintain their prosperity by creating new markets, and by now, industrial transformation has a strong track record for improving economies. If proponents of global development do not adjust its methods with the times, it will lose its relevance to rich and poor countries alike.

AID AND ABET?

The foreign-aid industry’s primary commodity is official development assistance (ODA), or money from donors that flows to governments, individuals, or groups in poorer places, either directly—such as through budget support to struggling governments—or through projects run by organizations such as Save the Children, Oxfam, or FHI 360. Governments in rich countries are the primary purveyors of ODA. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), in 2023, governments spent $230 billion on development assistance, compared with $11 billion spent by private foundations. Like any industry, foreign aid has middlemen. But in this business, the middlemen are particularly conspicuous. Third-party entities known as “implementing partners” include international nongovernmental organizations, large private contractors, and consulting firms. If the U.S. government wanted, for example, to distribute fertilizers to small-scale farmers in Bangladesh, they might contract Chemonics, a U.S.-based development contractor, to do it. Indeed, in 2023, Chemonics received the most USAID funds of any of the organization’s contractors: over $1 billion.

To take advantage of network effects and economies of scale, implementing partners cluster around the main sites of production of foreign aid, the capitals of the major donor countries: Berlin, Geneva, London, Paris, Rome, and Washington. As a result, very little aid is distributed by organizations or people in poor countries. In 2020, less than nine percent of U.S. aid was administered by recipient governments or firms based in recipient countries, according to Charles Kenny and Scott Morris, researchers at the Center for Global Development. The visibility of middlemen based in rich countries has long provided fodder to detractors who claim that the aid industry operates inefficiently or even unjustly. There is some truth to this critique. According to an analysis by Devex, a news organization, 47 of USAID’s top 50 contractors are located in the United States.

In the United States, successive Democratic and Republican administrations maintained a broad commitment to foreign aid, although arguments also simmered, even within the industry itself, about the proper goal of aid. Since 2000, when 189 countries agreed to the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, the industry’s main objective has been to reduce poverty; after the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, many governments embraced the idea that, in addition, aid should also be directed toward fighting climate change.

SUPPLY CRISIS

But behind these recent debates lurked a massive shift in the politics and public norms that had allowed the industry to survive. If one sees aid as a form of philanthropy, then rich countries appear as donors and poor ones as beneficiaries. But if one sees aid as an industry, then rich countries appear as sellers and poor ones as buyers. With their development assistance, rich countries are providing a set of projects and institutional norms to achieve a set of expected outcomes: improvements in material conditions in developing countries that will eventually boost their own economies and security—or, failing that, at least a sense on the part of rich countries that they have tried to make a difference.

The role of poor countries is to consume these development projects
in the hope of achieving desired outcomes—or, failing that,
at least a sense that they might be possible someday.

Now this market is experiencing an unprecedented supply crisis. Around the world, people and politicians in the rich countries that had long bought into the basic idea that providing aid is valuable have become skeptical. The aid industry has, for decades, undergone boom and bust cycles resulting from shifts in the domestic politics of donor countries. What is different this time is a deepening disaffection about the prevailing economic model and the aid paradigm associated with it. Since the global financial crisis of 2008, many donor countries have experienced economic stagnation, slow productivity growth, declining competitiveness, and widening inequality. Citizens of rich countries who no longer feel economically secure are questioning why scarce public funds should be devoted to causes abroad when there are needs at home.

This doubt goes beyond the Trump administration. The United States is not the only donor that is cutting foreign aid: in 2024, eight of the top ten donors within the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee reduced their foreign aid budgets and announced their intention to align international development programs more squarely with their national interests—such as by ensuring that development projects use goods and services produced in the donor country. In 2024, Germany, the world’s second-largest bilateral aid donor, announced a $5.3 billion reduction to its foreign-assistance budget. In February, the United Kingdom announced a 40 percent reduction to its aid budget so that it could focus on defense spending. In March 2025, the Netherlands said it would cut 37 percent of its bilateral aid over five years and scale down its financial contributions to some UN agencies.

Many right-leaning voters in rich countries now see foreign aid as wasteful and excessively focused on promoting causes they perceive as linked to the left, such as climate action, gender equality, or democracy promotion. Voters are more dubious of technocrats, policy wonks, and academics committed to foreign aid. Consequently, even left-leaning politicians, such as the Labour government in the United Kingdom, are slashing aid in response to popular sentiment. According to a February 2025 YouGov poll, 65 percent of Britons are in favor of increasing defense spending at the expense of foreign aid.

BLEEDING OUT

The speed and scale of the policy changes make the crisis facing the aid industry existential. Donor governments are fast destroying the industry’s marketplace of actors in irreversible ways. In January, Trump issued an executive order to freeze all U.S. foreign aid, ostensibly so that the secretary of state could review it to make sure that it is aligned with U.S. interests. Within weeks of the order, the world’s largest bilateral development agency, USAID, functionally ceased to exist, and its destruction unleashed a domino effect.

Dozens of small and midsize nongovernmental organizations are folding. Large organizations that implemented projects for USAID, such as FHI 360, Chemonics, and DAI Global, have terminated some country programs, announced the closure of field offices, and laid off hundreds of staffers worldwide. Multilateral organizations are also suffering from U.S. aid cuts. UN agencies such as the International Organization for Migration, the Joint United Nations Program on HIV and AIDS, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and the World Health Organization rely on the United States for 20 to 40 percent of their funding and have been forced to downsize.

GET RICH QUICK

Foreign aid has rapidly become a sunset industry. But that does not mean that rich countries should give up fighting poverty entirely. It is in the interest of wealthy states to reduce the pressure of migration by trying to improve the economies and stability of countries in Africa, Latin America, and South Asia. Therefore, policy experts, intellectuals, activists, philanthropists, and humanitarians must save global development by decoupling it from the aid industry and anchoring it in a strategy of industrial transformation. A country becomes industrialized when it adopts technology that allows it to mechanize and digitize, leading to increases in productivity and the skills of its labor force. Eventually, an industrialized country’s workers shift from subsistence agriculture toward higher-productivity sectors such as electronics, pharmaceuticals, green technologies, and digital services. And closely associated with higher incomes and employment in these modern industries are social changes such as more women working in formal jobs, more girls in schools, and fewer child marriages.

Industrialization has transformed many once poor societies into prosperous ones. Over the course of several hundred years, countries including China, Germany, Japan, Poland, Singapore, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States got rich by industrializing. Today, Thailand and Vietnam are undergoing industrialization thanks to foreign direct investment in manufacturing industries, good connectivity infrastructure, skilled labor, and expanded access to export markets.

Part of the problem with the aid industry is that its benefits have been spread too thinly across a multitude of domains and not focused enough on productivity-enhancing sectors. To this end, advocates of global development should focus on enabling poorer countries to access cheap development financing for targeted investments in sectors that connect people, such as electricity, telecommunications, and mass transit. Development financing must include efforts to stem illicit financial flows. African countries, for example, lose a combined total of about $90 billion every year to elite corruption, illicit capital flight, and tax evasion by multinational corporations. That is more money than the $60 billion of aid that donor governments used to send to the continent annually. Such waste could be reduced if rich countries tightened their regulations on tax havens and offshore financial centers and if the 138 signatories of the global tax treaty—an agreement reached in 2023 that sets a minimum rate of tax for large corporations—accelerated its implementation.

Poorer countries also need a stable trading environment to thrive. They need access to export markets in wealthy countries for goods and services they produce. And decades of evidence shows that neither poor nor wealthy countries ultimately prosper from protectionism or autarky. Firms in rich countries, especially those in rapidly changing fields such as artificial intelligence, batteries, drones, and renewable energy hardware, need to be able to sell to growing markets in Africa, Latin America, and South Asia.

Professionals who work in global development will need new codes to guide their efforts to support industrial transformation. These may entail creating new rules to regulate the scramble for critical resources that wealthy countries need to manufacture electronics, such as cobalt from the Democratic Republic of the Congo or copper from Zambia. Ethicists and social scientists around the world must help craft rules for the limits of artificial intelligence, drone warfare, and other ways that new technologies directly interface with human societies.

If proponents of global development embrace industrial transformation as their lodestar, they can help lift people out of destitution while avoiding political blowback. If poor countries industrialize, the entire world will benefit. Global development has the best chance of surviving—and delivering results—if it is seen as more than just charity.

From Previous Post Beware the Benevolence Bandwagon

Benevolence is a curious mental or characterological attribute. It is, as the philosopher David Stove observed, less a virtue than an emotion. To be benevolent means—what? To be disposed to relieve the misery and increase the happiness of others. Whether your benevolent attitude or action actually has that effect is beside the point. Yes, “benevolence, by the very meaning of the word,” Stove writes, “is a desire for the happiness, rather than the misery, of its object.” But here’s the rub:

the fact simply is that its actual effect is often the opposite of the intended one. The adult who had been hopelessly ‘spoilt’ in childhood is the commonest kind of example; that is, someone who is unhappy in adult life because his parents were too successful, when he was a child, in protecting him from every source of unhappiness.

It’s not that benevolence is a bad thing per se. It’s just that, like charity, it works best the more local are its aims. Enlarged, it becomes like that “telescopic philanthropy” Dickens attributes to Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House. Her philanthropy is more ardent the more abstract and distant its objects. When it comes to her own family, she is hopeless.

The sad truth is that theoretical benevolence is compatible
with any amount of practical indifference or even cruelty.

You feel kindly towards others. That is what matters: your feelings. The effects of your benevolent feelings in the real world are secondary, or rather totally irrelevant. Rousseau was a philosopher of benevolence. So was Karl Marx. Yet everywhere that Marx’s ideas have been put into practice, the result has been universal immiseration. But his intention was the benevolent one of forging a more equitable society by abolishing private property and, to adopt a famous phrase from Barack Obama, by spreading the wealth around.

An absolute commitment to benevolence, like the road that is paved with good intentions, typically leads to an unprofitable destination.

Just so with the modern welfare state. It doesn’t matter that the welfare state actually creates more of the poverty and dependence it was instituted to abolish. The intentions behind it are benevolent. Which is one of the reasons it is so seductive. It flatters the vanity of those who espouse it even as it nourishes the egalitarian ambitions that have always been at the center of Enlightened thought. This is why Stove describes benevolence as “the heroin of the Enlightened.” It is intoxicating, addictive, expensive, and ultimately ruinous.

The intoxicating effects of benevolence help to explain the growing appeal of politically correct attitudes about everything from “the environment” to the fate of the Third World. Why does the consistent failure of statist policies not disabuse their advocates of the statist agenda? One reason is that statist policies have the sanction of benevolence. They are “against poverty,” “against war,” “against oppression,” “for the environment.” And why shouldn’t they be? Where else are the pleasures of smug self-righteousness to be had at so little cost?

The intoxicating effects of benevolence—what Rousseau called the “indescribably sweet” feeling of virtue—also help to explain why unanchored benevolence is inherently expansionist. The party of benevolence is always the party of big government.

The imperatives of benevolence are intrinsically opposed to
the pragmatism that underlies the allegiance to limited government.

The modern welfare state is one result of the triumph of abstract benevolence. Its chief effects are to institutionalize dependence on the state while also assuring the steady growth of the bureaucracy charged with managing government largess. Both help to explain why the welfare state has proved so difficult to dismantle.

Is there an alternative? Stove quotes Thomas Malthus’ observation, from his famous Essay on the Principle of Population, that “we are indebted for all the noblest exertions of human genius, for everything that distinguishes the civilised from the savage state,” to “the laws of property and marriage, and to the apparently narrow principle of self-interest which prompts each individual to exert himself in bettering his condition.” The apparently narrow principle of self-interest, mind.

Contrast that robust, realistic observation with Robert Owen’s blather about replacing the “individual selfish system” with a “united social” system that, he promised, would bring forth a “new man.”

Stove observes that Malthus’ arguments for the genuinely beneficent effects of “the apparently narrow principle of self-interest” “cannot be too often repeated.” Indeed. Even so, a look around at the childish pretended enthusiasm for socialism makes me think that, for all his emphasis, David Stove understated the case. Jim Carrey and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (and a college student near you) would profit by having a closer acquaintance with the clear-eyed thinking of Thomas Malthus.

We're exposing the American people and the broader scientific community to what actually is in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, not the hyperbolic, summaries for policymakers or media headlines that claim all sorts of crazy stuff! pic.twitter.com/DLXp5aXdgk

— Secretary Chris Wright (@SecretaryWright) August 10, 2025

The place to submit a comment on the report is here:

Federal Register: Notice of Availability: A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate

I summitted the content from my post here:

DOE Climate Team: Twelve Keys in Assessing Climate Change

Gary Abernathy explains how momentum is shifting away from climatists in his Empowering America article The climate change cult is encountering more resistance these days.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The devastating Texas flooding over the July 4 weekend was a natural disaster of immense proportions. The lives lost brought unthinkable heartache for families. Especially difficult to fathom is that so many victims were young children.

Adding to the grief was the irresponsible blame game that almost immediately arose in the wake of the tragedy. Many on the left couldn’t wait to point fingers at Republicans, from President Donald Trump to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.

Of course, the climate cult again demonized fossil fuels, global warming and other predictable villains from the days of yore (or Gore). The group Climate Central could only contain itself until July 8 before rushing out to hold a press briefing to reiterate its dogma that “climate change drives more extreme weather,” and that the Texas storms were “made more likely and powerful in a warmer climate.”

Leftwing climate groups often accuse anyone who disagrees as being a “climate denier.” But few actually deny that the climate indeed changes, often dramatically. The archeological record makes clear that the earth has warmed, cooled, experienced flooding and undergone a number of other climate-related upheavals through the centuries, long before human activity could be faulted. But groups like Climate Central identify the manmade practice of burning fossil fuels as the modern culprit.

Any brave soul who dares to challenge the extent to which carbon emissions and greenhouse gases impact climate change is shouted down by the cult and buried under an avalanche of “scholarly” papers produced by “the overwhelming majority of the scientific community.”

The good news is that the same day that Climate Central was regurgitating its tried-and-true rhetoric, the New York Times reported (in what it likely considered an expose), “The Energy Department has hired at least three scientists who are well-known for their rejection of the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change, according to records reviewed by The New York Times.”

What seemed frightening to the Times and the indoctrinated left comes as welcome relief for millions of other Americans who believe that the war on affordable and reliable energy sources is based more on politics than science.

The extent to which fewer Americans are being successfully propagandized is made clear by recent polling. On July 11, CNN data analyst Harry Enten told viewers that as early as 1989, 35 percent of Americans were “greatly worried” about climate change, a number that jumped to 46 percent by 2020. But, as Enten admitted with some astonishment, only 40 percent of Americans currently feel “greatly worried” about climate change. The reason for growing public skepticism on climate change is probably because most Americans have wised up to how data can be easily manipulated for political ends.

We know from experience it’s not hard to convince “experts” to sign on to a “consensus” opinion to add gravitas to the cause de jour. Back in 2020, more than 50 former intelligence officials famously signed onto a letter claiming that emails found on Hunter Biden’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” That was not true, and it was later discovered that former CIA Acting Director Michael Morell had drafted the letter to help Joe Biden’s campaign. Everyone else just signed on, their devotion to a particular election outcome apparently outweighing the lack of evidence backing their claim.

Similarly, individual treatises on climate science aren’t authored by hundreds of scientists. Each one is written by, at most, a handful of researchers who then circulate their work and ask others to sign on – giving activists the fodder they need to claim that “the overwhelming majority” of the scientific community is in agreement. In fact, scientific papers being published as authoritative when, in fact, they are not is a growing problem.

“Last year the annual number of papers retracted by research journals topped 10,000 for the first time. Most analysts believe the figure is only the tip of an iceberg of scientific fraud,” according to a 2024 report in The Guardian.

Fortunately, there has always been a segment of the scientific community willing to stand up to the mob and interpret climate data independently. The three scientists hired by the Energy Department and targeted by the Times for expressing skepticism on manmade climate change – physicist Steven E. Koonin, atmospheric scientist John Christy, and meteorologist Roy Spencer – are among the brave.

In decades past, a key tenet of science was to question everything, on the theory that raising doubts and concerns was the best path to the truth. As Dr. Koonin wrote in a Wall Street Journal essay, “Any serious discussion of the changing climate must begin by acknowledging not only the scientific certainties but also the uncertainties, especially in projecting the future.”

Instead of natural disasters serving as excuses to launch attacks and place blame using the same tired, lockstep rhetoric, here’s hoping for a new age of climate enlightenment, led by scientists, journalists and others with the curiosity – and courage – to question everything.

At Real Clear Energy, Ross Pomeroy writes insights from Vaclav Smil An Interview With Vaclav Smil on Small Nuclear Reactors, a Fertility ‘Crisis’, and More.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

There is perhaps no scholar more qualified to dissect the world’s energy systems on a macro scale – from food and agriculture to electricity and fuel – than Vaclav Smil. The 81-year-old Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Manitoba has been researching how humanity has developed, transformed, and used energy for over a half-century. And to our collective benefit, he doesn’t keep what he’s learned to himself. Smil has written fifty books. (His latest was just released in April.)

Smil’s up-to-date and encyclopedic knowledge on humanity’s energy use, coupled with his longevity in the field, make him uniquely positioned to render learned prognostications on the future of Earth’s ever-changing energy, material, and environmental systems. He graciously took the time to answer a few questions for RealClearScience on topics ranging from small nuclear reactors, to climate adaptation, to humanity’s much-debated fertility “crisis.”

RP: Market valuations for small modular reactor companies such as Oklo and Nuscale have ballooned over the past year to roughly $10 billion for each despite the fact that these firms have never built a commercial nuclear reactor. Do you think hype has gotten ahead of reality here? How likely do you think it is that small modular reactors will be deployed in the next decade? What are some open challenges?

VS: This is just the latest (and perhaps the craziest) chapter in an old tale. I heard first about small nuclear reactors more than 40 years ago from Alvin Weinberg (a Manhattan project participant, co-inventor of pressurized water reactor and a director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)). When Congress ended the funding of a liquid metal fast breeder reactor in 1983 (in the wake of the Three Mile Island accident and huge cost overruns for large nuclear plants), ORNL began to promote the idea of small, inherently safe reactors now known as SMRs (small modular reactors).

When asked about their future I have had a simple answer ever since the 1980s. First, I used to say, “give me a call,” then I changed that to “send me an e-mail” once you see such wonders built on schedule, on budget, and in aggregate capacities large enough to make a real difference to a country’s electricity supply (say at least 10% of the total).

US installed power capacity is now about 1.3 TW. Ten percent of that is 130 GW. Hence, even if SMRs were to average 100 MW, the US would need 1,300 of them to matter. If they averaged just 50 MW, then the country would need 2,600 of them. And that’s before we even consider rising electricity use.

Then think of dealing 1,300 or 3,000+ times with public acceptance, siting selections, NIMBY controversies and lawsuits, regulatory requirements, constructions schedules and major cost overruns (all major projects are notoriously prone to that fate). Obviously, that e-mail announcing SMRs making discernible difference, nationally or globally, is not coming during this decade . . . or the next one.

Linnea Lueken writes at American Thinker “Climate Change” means whatever the Left wants it to mean.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

David Zaruk reports at Real Climate Science Climate Activists Sue Oil Industry for Wrongful Death.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Irina Slav explains the shift away from climate virtue in her Oil Price article Corporate World Goes Quiet on Climate Pledges.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

♦  Major companies are quietly scaling back climate language in reports, with firms like American Airlines, GM, and Coca-Cola reducing or removing net-zero and emissions-related content.
♦  Profitability and political headwinds are driving the retreat.
♦  Corporate climate messaging is becoming more cautious, with 80% of executives adjusting their transition narratives and half avoiding net-zero talk entirely.

Companies in various industries are removing climate change and net zero language from their reports, the Wall Street Journal reported this month, lamenting the fact that corporates were “watering down” their commitments in the area. It may be temporary—or it may be the natural thing.

Analysis of the proxy statements of a number of large businesses conducted by the WSJ showed that many of them were, it seems, less willing to discuss climate change and their response to it in as much detail as they were a few years ago. The WSJ suggested it was an about-turn prompted by the energy policies of the Trump administration and the axing of the Inflation Reduction Act.

Companies “implicated” in watering down their climate change language included American Airlines, Kroger, American Eagle Outfitters, and e.l.f. Beauty. Their crime was either reducing the amount of text dedicated to climate change and the respective company’s efforts to counter it or entirely removing such text.

The above are not the only ones that have gone rather general on climate change. Coca-Cola only mentions climate and emissions in general terms and briefly in its latest proxy statement. GM also does not go into a lot of detail on its net-zero efforts, and neither does United Airlines.

Yet there are perfectly respectable reasons for this,
even from a climate activist perspective.

Most of these companies produce separate reports regarding climate change and emission reduction because it is the done thing these days. Indeed, one of them told the WSJ as much. “We periodically adjust the copy used in the company’s external messaging and communications,” a spokesperson for American Eagle Outfitters told the publication. “AEO’s commitment to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions remains unchanged.”

Other comments from the mentioned companies follow the same lines: these businesses have already internalized emission-cutting language and action, and no longer feel the need to talk loudly about it.

And, of course, there’s the Trump factor at work.

The current administration axed billions on subsidies for transition-related businesses. As a result, these businesses are suffering a fate even worse than theirs already was because of:

♦  raw material inflation;
♦  higher borrowing costs that had nothing to do with the Trump admin, and, notably,
♦  pullback from investors that realized they had grossly overestimated the speed, at which their investment in net zero would be returned.

Trump’s policies certainly hurt the coolness aspect of net-zero pledges and pronouncements but it was the lack of promised profits that likely played a bigger part and led to companies toning down these pledges and pronouncements.

“The whole sector — solar, wind, hydrogen, fuel cells — anything clean is dead for now,” one energy transition-focused hedge fund manager told Bloomberg earlier this year. “The fundamentals are very poor,” Gupta, who manages some $100 million, told Bloomberg, adding, “I’m not talking about long term. I’m talking about where I see weakness right now.” Apparently, the long-term outlook for net zero remains bright, but the short term is more problematic.

Yet considerable problems abound not just in the industries directly related to the energy transition, such as it is. Even companies in other industries, such as air travel and cosmetics, are finding it difficult to stick to their pledges—at least without losing a lot of money. Tracking and reporting Scope 3 emissions, for instance, requires substantial resources and carries equally substantial costs. After all, it involves tracking the emissions of an entire supply chain from suppliers to consumers. Many corporations are realizing investing the money, time, and effort in this endeavor may not be worth it, especially with a federal government that does not care about any sort of energy transition at all.

Another thing they are realizing is that, put crudely, emission tracking does not pay—not without a solid subsidy back that is at present absent. It was the Wall Street Journal again that reported how transition-focused startups were folding as Trump axed those subsidies. EV batteries, direct air capture, and even solar power, which was supposed to have become well established, are now suffering the consequences of overhyping. With the benefits that were promised to come from net zero never materializing, unlike costs related to the transition push, could anyone really blame corporate leaderships for removing net-zero language from their reports?

Indeed, a recent survey from the Conference Board that the WSJ cited in its report found that as much as 80% of corporate executives said their companies were “adjusting” their transition narrative—for fear of backlash that has prompted 50% of the respondents to entirely stop talking about net zero. That backlash can hardly be blamed on Trump. It is a natural consequence of the overhyping that never delivered on the promises made. What is happening, then, is a natural process that, one might argue, was even late in coming.