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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Europe’s Perfect Storm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Footnote: About SCOTUS Ruling on Trump Tariffs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See Also Synopsis of Porter’s Report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Decision Made First, Justified Later

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

And the agency chose its answer early.

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

Oversight finding:

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

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

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

What the Endangerment Finding Never Confronted

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

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

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

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

The Absurdity of Calling 420 ppm “Unclean Air”

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

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

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

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

Years of Writing, One Conclusion

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

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

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

 

The “Doomsday Clock” which represents how near humanity is to catastrophe moved closer than ever to midnight on Tuesday as concerns grow over nuclear weapons, climate change and disinformation.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which set up the metaphorical clock at the start of the Cold War, moved its time to 85 seconds to midnight, four seconds closer than a year ago.

Wait a Minute! It already went past midnight and nothing happened.

Jordan Peterson explains good reasons not to trust where Carney claims to be heading, contrary to his longstanding commitments and priorities.  The first video explores Carney’s stated principles in contrast to Canadian heritage.  For those who prefer reading I provide a transcript with my bolds and added images.

What Carney’s Background Tells Us About His Future Steps 

So, what do we say about Carney’s experience and his resume? Well, the real question is, what is he aiming at? Right, so he’s got a stellar educational background and this vast experience on the international side. But the question is, what has he concluded from that? And what has he done in consequence? And what is he planning to do in the future? Now, I read Carney’s book Values very, very carefully. And so, the reason I want to walk you through that is because that’s his carefully thought through statement of principles and aims.

And so, it’s useful to take a person at his word on the written side. And so, I think we can derive from values what Carney’s values are, what values he thinks Canadians do and should hold, what we can conclude about what he’s already done for Canada and on the international stage, and where things are headed in the future. And so, now, the first, I’m going to take Carney’s Values book apart in two ways.

The first thing I want to tell you is what he thinks Canadians’ values are. Okay, so he’s setting himself up as an arbiter of the Canadian ethos. And to do that in his book, in the first couple of chapters, and then at the end of the book, he tells us all what makes Canada the country that it is.

And so, we want to delve into that. All right. So, Carney’s conclusion with regards to Canada’s core values are a leftist, utopian, globalist view of the Western tradition.

So, he believes, for example, that the core Canadian values are:
♦   fairness and equity,
♦   resilience and adaptability,
♦   sustainability and responsibility, and
♦   community and cooperation.

Okay, so the first thing I’d like to do, those are all terms that sound positive and that could, in principle, bring people together on the basis of a vision. Fairness and equity, resilience and adaptability, sustainability and responsibility, community and cooperation.

But the first thing I’d like to point out to all of you who are listening is that although Carney claims that those are core Canadian values, that claim is not correct. Those are core globalist, socialist, utopian, net zero promoting environmentalist values.

But the core Canadian values are actually derived from the Judeo-Christian,
Western, broadly Western, and English common law tradition.

And so, I’m going to outline what those are, just so you can see the contrast between those values, which are the true Canadian values, and Carney’s values, which have this patina or aura of high-flown positive emotion, but bear little relationship to the genuine historical reality and do not describe the values that made Canada the wealthy, free, productive, Western democracy that it is.

So, Canada is actually founded on the principles of individual liberty and rights,
the rule of law, equality and justice. And equality there doesn’t mean
equality of outcome, and it doesn’t mean economic equality.

It means equality of value before the law, and equality of opportunity, and responsibility and order. And so, those are values that are very different than the value set that Carney is putting forward. And so, then you might ask, if Carney didn’t derive what he believes Canadian values to be from the historical reality of Canada, from what source did he derive his values? Now, you also might wonder why it’s important to even delve into this.

And well, the first conclusion we could draw is that Carney wouldn’t have written a whole book about values if he didn’t think that it was important to delve into values. And he certainly wouldn’t have written a book revealing his own values if he didn’t think it was important to communicate to Canadians and people around the world what he thinks Canadian values and his values are and should be. So, my focus on values, although I certainly believe, as he does, that values are fundamentally important, I’m focusing on values because that’s the focus that Carney himself chose.

All right, so this is where we can link the facts of his resume to an analysis of his genuine motivations. So, let’s first look in more detail at how Carney translates his core values into the beginnings of policy. All right, so Carney in his book Values outlines his support for three of what I regard as the least credible ideas that have emerged on the international landscape and the intellectual landscape in the last 20 years.

So, first of all, he’s an explicit advocate of the diversity, equity and inclusivity principles that have destroyed the modern universities, that have corrupted our judiciary and our political institutions, and that have allowed the liberals to smuggle, the modern federal liberals, to smuggle in what’s essentially a relatively radical leftist agenda under the guise of classical liberalism. Diversity, inclusivity and equity the DEI holy trinity is a political policy movement predicated on the idea that Western society, and that would include Canada, is a corrupt patriarchy in its essence that marginalizes a variety of groups and purposefully so delegitimizing them, and that the appropriate response to that is to segregate and identify people on the basis of their group identity, and that would include race and sex and gender and all the other isms, all the other ism identities that you may have heard in the last 10 years, to divide people on the basis of those identities and to privilege the marginalized, to bring them to the center.

Now, some of that presumption derives from postmodern philosophy and some of it is essentially Marxist in its orientation, and so Carney’s derivation of Canadian values, when the pedal hits the metal, let’s say, or the rubber hits the road, the manner in which Carney translates his interpretation of Canadian values is the same manner that the radical leftists in the Democratic Party, for example, in the United States translated the same value propositions, and that’s to become an advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusivity, and to assume that human beings should be divided on the basis of their race and their sexual identity and their gender, etc., and that our culture is essentially oppressive at its core.

And so I believe that idea to be discreditable across multiple dimensions of analysis, and it’s certainly the case that it was roundly rejected by the American electorate in the last election cycle. And you can also see that the Democrats themselves in the United States are backpedaling rapidly on the DEI front because they realized that it’s a losing game in the short, medium, and long run. And so the first thing we might note is that when Carney is trying to formulate policy, one of the sets of policies that he put forward include this discreditable and divisive DEI formulation that’s been part and parcel of the maneuvers by intellectuals to tilt the entire political world in a radically revolutionary and leftist direction.

The second video goes into the economic and environmental dimensions of Carney’ vision.

And That’s The Utopian Vision Of Carney 

So, with regards to this promised utopia of a new future, one of the things Carney says, for example, after he talks about the fact that 75% of our fossil fuel resources will have to be left in the ground, is this promised new magical utopia of renewable jobs, especially for places like Alberta. Now, he says that if we unleash innovation in the private sector, that all the problems that are associated with the transition to net zero will somehow be solved.

So, let’s see what’s happened in countries where that’s actually being attempted.

So, I think we should talk about Germany and the UK. So, Germany has been more green, arguably, than Canada, let’s say, for the last 10 years. And they’ve shut off their nuclear plants and they’ve made a transition to renewables.

And so, what’s the consequence of that? Well, one consequence is that German energy prices are now five times as expensive as they are in the US. And then you might say, well, that’s a small price to pay for saving the planet, but then we could take that apart. So, Germany is rapidly de-industrializing and their economy is tanking.

And all the industrial production that they no longer manage is only shifting to other places in the world, like China and India. So, it’s not like it’s going away, it’s just not happening in Germany. And they’re increasingly dependent on renewables, solar and wind.

And Germany isn’t one of the world’s sunniest countries and it’s also susceptible to what they call wind drought. So, there are long periods of time where the solar arrays and the windmills aren’t producing any electricity. And like zero electricity is not very much electricity.

Now, why is that a catastrophe? It’s like, well, do you want your refrigerator on or off or even more to the point, do you want to be able to go to the hospital and make sure that there’s electricity when you’re having emergency surgery, et cetera? And there are signs, for example, that places like Australia that have been moving down the renewable pathway are facing the imminent threat of rolling blackouts. And that could easily happen in places like Germany. Okay, so now the problem with renewables is that we can’t store the energy.

We don’t have the battery technology and the battery infrastructure, not even close. And it’s going to be a long time before we do at least 20 years, maybe longer than that. And so the question is, now, what do you have to do? Because renewable energy is so unreliable.

Sometimes this, like at night, the sun doesn’t shine in case you haven’t noticed and the wind stops blowing. And so then renewable production falls to zero. Now you have to have something to back that up.

And worse, you have to have something of the same size as the entire renewable grid, because otherwise it can’t handle the power demands. And so that means that as you switch to a renewable grid, you have to have another grid in place that has exactly the same capacities and it has to be not renewable. So what that means is that when you build a renewable grid, you build it in addition to the preexisting grid.

And then you might say, well, if the renewable sources aren’t producing energy, you could just turn to nuclear, but there’s a couple of problems with that. First of all, you can’t turn a nuclear power plant on and off quickly, as you might well imagine. And the Germans, for example, scuttled their nuclear plants.

And so what have they done? They’ve turned to coal burning plants. And the Germans don’t burn anthracite, which is high quality coal that doesn’t produce much particulate matter, which is like the dust pollution that would be associated with smog. And they burn lignite, which is low quality coal, and it produces a lot of particulate.

Plus it produces a lot of carbon dioxide. And so what’s happened in Germany after 10 years of green idiocy is that their power prices are five times as expensive. They’re hyper-reliant on places like Russia and the Middle East for their fossil fuel production, not least because Canada was too daft to enter into an agreement with them.

And they pollute more per unit of energy produced than they did 10 years ago. Even if you accept the environmentalist argument that carbon dioxide overproduction is an existential crisis, which it isn’t, and you say, well, something substantial needs to be done to ameliorate the threat, you have to observe that when something substantial has been done, so that’s the creation, let’s say, of a renewable power grid, the consequence is not only that the atmosphere doesn’t improve with regards to carbon dioxide proportion, but that the pollution problem actually gets much worse as well as energy becoming more expensive and unreliable. And so what? That’s what you want Carney to do for Canada.

And for Canada, there’s not a country in the world that’s more dependent fundamentally for its existence on reliable energy, because Canada is uninhabitable without an unbelievably well-developed industrial and energy infrastructure just to keep us alive when it’s 40 bloody below. And then our economy is radically dependent on our natural resource production. Now, it shouldn’t be that dependent on natural resource production because we should be doing value-added investment, for example, refining our fossil fuel resources to a higher degree than we currently do.

Most of that’s done in the United States, and we should do things to ensure that we the proper transition into a technologically driven future. But Carney says absolutely nothing about any of that in his book, Values. And so he just magically hand-waves and says, oh, well, if you unleash the private sector, there’ll be this magical net zero transformation and everyone will have much more productive jobs and the planet will be much greener and we won’t need to rely on fossil fuels.

Well, we don’t just rely on fossil fuels for energy, folks. We rely on fossil fuels to make damn near everything that we make, including our agricultural products. And so you also hear the net zero people claiming that agricultural production has to be slashed radically.

And so you can imagine what that’s going to do to food costs if you haven’t noticed. And part of the reason for that is that the fertilizers that we use, ammonia, for example, are created out of fossil fuels. And so you have no idea how much the entire economy, and so that’s your bread and butter and your house and your heating and your air conditioning and your travel and your vacations and your kid’s future.

That’s all dependent on the fossil fuel economy.

And so Carney, there’s two tacks you can take to Carney. One is either he’s learned that his net zero preoccupation was wrong, which means every single thing he thought while he was being educated and while he had his highfalutin career, every single thing he thought was radically, not only wrong, but the opposite of the truth.

That’s one conclusion. Or he still thinks what he’s always thought, which is certainly what it seems to be in his book, Values. And certainly seems to be the case with his continuing insistence that we have to hit net zero by 2050 and spend $2 trillion doing it.

The alternative conclusion to he was just radically wrong and has learned is that he hasn’t learned a damn thing. And it’s still his fundamental axiomatic presupposition that human being industrial production leading to carbon dioxide overproduction is an existential threat that should be everyone’s top priority for every financial decision that they make and that everything should be secondary to that.

And that implies that his claim to eliminate the carbon tax, for example,
and to move Canada onto a more solid industrial footing in the future is just a lie.

So those are your options. Either he was completely wrong about everything for the last 20 years in the worst direction possible and has learned or that he hasn’t learned a damn thing and is still sticking to exactly what he wrote in his book, Values, in 2021 and exactly what he’s indicated in all of his public pronouncements.

And he’s going to act as if he’s in favor of Canadian economic development,
but he’s going to keep pursuing a net zero agenda
because that’s priority number one.

And he hopes you peasants are too stupid to understand the reality of the situation that’s in front of you. And so that’s going to mean no flights for you and no clothes for you, maybe three changes of clothing per year. Nope, only a short haul flight every three years, for example, a radical reduction in the amount of meat that you eat, a radical reduction in private car ownership.

And you might think, well, that’s paranoid conspiracy theory, but you can go look at the documents of the C40 coalition of the top cities in the world and look at their aims for the next 20 years. And you can decide if they’re on the same side as Carney or whether they’re on your side. And you can draw your own conclusion because if your presumption is that the planet is facing an environmental catastrophe because of carbon dioxide production and that that’s such an emergency that we have to do every possible thing we can with every financial decision, no matter how much it costs to ameliorate it, then there’s no limit whatsoever to the amount of power that you’re willing to expend to make that happen.

And we know what’ll happen because it’s already happened to Germany and the UK and it’s happened to a large degree to Canada. And there’s no reason to assume at all that Mark Carney is a leopard who’s changed his spots. Quite the contrary.

As if the circus at the UN COP in Belem were not enough, Rafael Pinto Borges of Portugal unsparingly exposes the decline of the UN into hypocracy and irrelevance.  His article at European Conservative is The Sad Suicide of the UN.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The United Nations weighed in once more—and, once more, the world rolled its eyes. Immediately after a police raid in Rio de Janeiro that claimed the lives of over one hundred, the UN’s Human Rights Office vehemently denounced Rio de Janeiro’s conservative governor, Cláudio Castro, for what it called a “deadly operation” of  “extreme, lethal consequences”. What it left out is that all of the victims were policemen or narcoterrorists. There were no civilian casualties. Not one.

It didn’t make any difference. This is an institution that has long lost its taste for facts. What drives it now is theatre—ritual condemnation on the altar of human rights, the last moral capital of a useless and toothless bureaucratic colossus with very little discernible use. The UN has its preferential villains: strong states asserting their sovereignty, governments that boldly police their own streets, and leaders that still believe law and order are the lifeblood of civilisation. The Brazilian federal government of left-wing President Lula da Silva, of course, had nothing to do with it; the raid was wholly the brainchild of Rio de Janeiro’s conservative leadership. And that is why, like Hungary when it strives to defend its borders or Poland under the previous PiS government when it tried to shield its sovereignty from wanton, undue EU interference, so too was Rio de Janeiro immediately badmouthed by these faux harbingers of virtue. One hopes that Castro will ignore the UN’s calls to surrender his city to criminal gangs and, instead, continue to hit them hard.

This latest, shameful episode comes to confirm, once again, the moral bankruptcy of the United Nations. The UN has—deservedly—become what it was meant not to become: a pulpit. It is now an international moral church of sorts whose priests sit in Geneva and New York and whose scripture is dictated by the bien-pensant Left. It makes a charade of the very notion of impartiality.

Indeed, in Brazil’s case, it barely seems to notice that Rio’s drug barons are able to control entire slums as feudal fiefdoms; it doesn’t pity the hundreds of thousands of ordinary, innocent people who live under the bloodthirsty tyranny of organised crime. It doesn’t care that this malignant tumour spreads its evil internationally, with the operatives entrenching themselves as a powerful presence in Portugal and elsewhere in Europe as well as poisoning increasing numbers of Europeans with their drugs. More than any other global institution, the UN has now degenerated into an international of wokery: Its nonsense on ‘systemic violence’ and ‘structural racism’ has replaced analysis or common sense.

Moral theatre has done away with moral clarity.

This charade isn’t even hypocritical anymore. Hypocrisy, after all, involves some perception of right and wrong—it might be ugly, but it is not oblivious. The UN, meanwhile, does not even pretend to be a servant of a moral order rooted in law anymore. It serves only the balance of its own internal politics. The bureaucracy survives by condemning only those who it is safe to condemn.

The irony is that the UN was established specifically to avoid this fate. It was meant as a forum for sovereign countries, not as an ultra-politicised court. But sovereignty has become a meaningless word for the UN, captured as it has been by latte-sipping liberal globalists. Those who currently populate the institution speak in the banal Esperanto of Western left-wing midwitery. They seldom have any meaningful political experience. They are alien to reality, and reality is alien to them.

The UN’s condemnation of Brazil is a perfect example of this pernicious catechism. The real Marx, whatever his faults, would have stood up to applaud the destruction of the vile lumpenproletarian hellholes of the Brazilian favela; he would have cheered for the liberation of working-class communities from the iron rule of the drug lords. Engels, similarly, would have condoned Hungary for protecting its working people from the incoming hordes of cheap, socially disruptive labour with which Merkel and those before and after have systematically asphyxiated Europe. The UN’s current mainstream sensitivity is not even classically left-wing; it betrays a mindset that is specifically and unequivocally drawn from modern bourgeois-bohème Western leftism.

Meanwhile, genuine atrocities—the mass slaughter of Christians in Nigeria or Syria, the abominable massacres in Sudan, the rampant gang rule and cannibalism in Haiti, with the UN still failing to fund the mission approved in 2023—continue unabated. They are referred to, if at all, as asterisks to reports written in the language of cowardice. The UN moral vocabulary has become utterly risible.

The price of all this corruption is irrelevance. No serious power finds the UN credible anymore. The Security Council is an opera of vetoes; its resolutions carry no weight at all. Peacekeeping missions fail, humanitarian aid organisations rot in corruption scandals, and the lofty words of the Charter are heard echoing through empty chambers.

If the UN is to survive the coming decades, it will not be through reform but through restoration. It must return to its founding principle: that of an assembly of equal, sovereign states bargaining over their mutual interests and concerns, not as a platform for empty virtue signaling. And if it can’t, it will wither away—perhaps not with a bang, but with a yawn of irrelevance.

And maybe, in the end, that would be the most ethical thing it could do.

 

For those who prefer to read, below is a lightly edited transcript from the closed captions with my bolds and added images.

This is a short story about how the BBC and the UK Parliament turned the opinions of just ten people into the single voice of 66 million. At the centre of this story is our favourite food. Meat production has long bothered the environmental movement and climate campaigners, because it is at the centre of culture, and family and social life.

And this is where green ideology longs to be. Consequently, greens have urged us to give up meat, telling us of the harm done to nature by our diets. They have urged us to cut down, to become vegetarian or vegan. Or to switch to other forms of protein. No thanks! Green attempts to control our diets have been met with resistance.

But UK politicians have now decided to tackle the problem of the public’s lack of interest in the green agenda.
“Dear resident. Dear resident. Dear resident.
You could be one of over 100 people selected to take part in the UK-wide Citizens’ Assembly on how should the UK tackle climate change.” They believe that they can change our behaviour by focusing their interventions on the things which the public will find least unacceptable. Parliament believes that by convening a Climate Assembly, the government, politicians, and civil servants can find out what level of regulation of their lifestyles the wider public will accept.

“The UK government has legally committed to reach Net Zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. To help inform how we’re going to reach Net Zero, 108 members of the public were brought together by the UK parliament in our first ever Citizens’ Assembly on climate change. They discussed the impact of what we eat and how we used the land.”

But what recommendations did the Climate Assembly make? Reduce our meat and dairy consumption by 20-40%, but with no bans or taxes.” The Climate Assembly provided Parliament with this information and it has now been used as the basis for policies. “The fact that you’ve given up time to come here and take this seriously is of the greatest importance.” But what really happened in the Climate Assembly? Did it really recommend that the government should find ways to make us eat less meat?

The findings of the Climate Assembly, which met over six weekends, were published in a 500-page report. The reduction of meat and dairy consumption does appear in the key recommendations of the report, in a section on “what we eat and how we use the land”. But this was not the view of the whole Assembly.

On the weekend during which the Assembly discussed this question, it was divided into three groups, only one of which was tasked with a discussion on “what we eat and how we use the land”. Just 35 Assembly members, out of 108, were in this group. They heard from just one academic’s views on meat, Rosie Green:

“We know that red and processed meat is associated with a number of health conditions. So it’s linked to heart disease, it’s linked to strokes, it’s linked to particular types of cancer, like bowel cancer, and it’s also linked to diabetes.Whereas on the other hand, eating fruit and vegetables is linked to prevention of all those conditions. So if you eat the more fruit and vegetables you eat, there’s less likely you are to suffer from those diseases.”

There was no debate or criticism of these questionable scientific claims made by an academic, who has manifestly strayed into political activism. “Meat will never ever be banned. It will never be banned.” “I don’t like the idea of controlling things at all.”

But the Climate Assembly were not fools. When they were asked to vote on what they believed the government should prioritize from a list of eight options available to them, just 29 per cent chose reducing meat as a priority. It was the second least popular option prioritized by the group. And 29% of 35 just people is ten people.

Nonetheless, the report claimed that ‘assembly members tended to express support for” the idea. On the available evidence, that claim simply isn’t true. The report emphasizes reducing meat and dairy in our diets, despite this underwhelming support for it, because the report was not written by the Assembly itself. It was written by the academic activists and green campaigning organizations that ran the event.

The claim has now been used by politicians and civil servants designing the UK’s climate policies, to meet the Net Zero target. They had already decided that changing people’s diets will be part of the Net Zero agenda. In 2019, The Climate Change Committee produced a report on Net Zero, which proposed interventions to produce behaviour change, including the reduction of meat and dairy consumption.

In their new Net Zero policy report launched last week, the Committee claim that they have incorporated the Climate Assembly’s recommendations in their analysis, including the reduction of meat and dairy consumption.

“The Climate Assembly said they would be happy with a 20 to 40 per cent reduction in meat consumption. We’ve looked really carefully at the Climate Assembly’s recommendations, and actually we were quite engaged in the process as well.  If you take the time to guide people through this, to explain why the changes are needed, to explain the sorts of things that need to happen, they’re really supportive of action. And actually we were surprised how supportive they were of lots of the things that we were thinking of already. What we’ve done is we’ve taken their advice, and we’ve constructed our scenarios to align to it.”

But though these civil servants seem to have enthusiastically embraced what the public think, as represented by what the Climate Assembly seemed to tell them, they have forgotten that the recommendation came from just ten people. The views of these ten people is now at the centre of the Climate Change Committee’s advice to Parliament, which they are almost certain to adopt.

But what the authors of the Climate Assembly report could not ignore, was the Assembly’s insistence that changes to diets should be voluntary, not compulsory. How will the government legislate for voluntary behavioral change? It has turned to the UK’s defacto state broadcaster, the BBC.

The BBC presents itself as a news broadcaster, but this BBC video on meat consumption and climate change shows that it has a role engineering the social values and behavioral changes that government policy requires.

“The average Brit eats meat twice a day. And we’re eating much more protein than we need. Would more of us change our diet, if we knew it was also better for the planet?”

Rather than investigating the claims seemingly produced by the Climate Assembly, but which were just the views of ten of its members, the BBC uncritically reports them. It shows the views of one Assembly member’s concerns about his own meat consumption, and its damaging effect on the environment: a seventeen-year-old boy, who has decided to give up meat.

“After the second weekend of the Assembly I became pescatarian. When I was able to see right there on the graph that beef had a big proportion of higher CO2 emissions than fish, I knew that if I carried on eating beef then I know I’d be making the wrong sort of choice for the environment”.“So Max decided to give up his beloved beef steak…”

And rather than challenging a young person about how he formed such a view of the world, and asking questions about the ideology and one-sided view that was presented to the Climate Assembly, the BBC uses him, to encourage its audience to change their diets and behaviour.

In this way, the BBC, turns ten into 66 million. It forgets the views that many of us may have about politicians’ and civil servants’ designs for our lives and lifestyles for the next decades. The public has once again been excluded from debates about climate policy.

Just in:  Beyond Meat stock tanks to $1 after debt swap deal dilutes company shares

Beyond Meat’s stock collapsed to near $1 a share on Tuesday after the embattled plant-based meat maker finalized a debt exchange deal that handed bondholders hundreds of millions of new shares — effectively wiping out most existing investors.  In the summer of 2019, the stock neared $240 a share — its peak price. Since then, the stock has lost more than 99% of its value.

 

 

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.