This post incorporates two dimensions of climate science reporting: firstly what and who are involved in the production, and secondly what the Trump administration might do to achieve a more balanced result. A recent article exposes the process by which the US National Climate Assessment (NCA) has been produced while ensuring that true believers control the content. Brent Scher writes at Daily Wire Meet The Government Consultants Raking In Millions To Spread Climate Doom. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
The government is outsourcing the ‘crown jewel’ of
climate change research to liberal climate consultants.
More than three decades ago, Congress launched an initiative called the U.S. Global Change Research Program. Today, it spends billions of dollars a year empowering liberal climate scientists to spread climate change doom.
The government group says its role is to provide the “scientific foundation to support informed decision-making across the United States” on climate change. It’s done so by producing five National Climate Assessment reports, which are considered the “crown jewel” of climate research.
Despite taking funding from at least ten separate government agencies, producing the report seems to be the group’s sole function. The most recent iteration — published in 2023 and still prominently showcased on its government website — warns that “severe climate risks to the United States will continue to grow.” The next report is due out in the next couple of years, according to E&E News.
The National Climate Assessment is not simply an intellectual exercise, but rather one that carries real policy might. Congress and agencies use it to justify regulations and funding decisions, and states and cities across the country lean on it as the non-partisan scientific foundation for their own climate action plans. In summary, it is the scientific bedrock for directing policy at all levels of government towards liberal climate change goals.
While the U.S. Global Change Research Program states on its website that it has a budget of $4.95 billion in 2025, it only lists two full-time employees. So, who’s getting paid to put the massive and consequential report together?
Sources familiar with past iterations of the National Climate Assessment say the work is largely outsourced to a group called ICF, a massive government contractor that has an active contract to work on the report. The Daily Wire identified at least one active contract from NASAfor ICF to “support” the U.S. Global Change Research Program. ICF is set to be paid millions of dollars during the Trump administration to “assist the nation and the world to understand, assess, predict, and respond to human-induced and natural processes of global change.”
The contract was first announced in June 2021, and described as a $34 million, five-year contract to help with the National Climate Assessments. Only $18 million has been paid out, according to the government spending database. But with another assessment on deck and ICF under contract for another year, the additional $16 million could be disbursed in the next year.
A climate scientist who has worked on the National Climate Assessment
in the past says ICF runs the show, virtually controlling
the entire U.S. Global Change Research Program.
“By providing all staff for the USGCRP, a federal agency, the ICF exerts undue influence over the global change narrative and priorities presented by the federal government,” said the official, who requested anonymity to discuss the work. “The ICF, through the USGCRP, exerts an undue influence on the production of the National Climate Assessment every four years. With the exception of its Executive Director and the Director of the National Climate Assessment, the ICF supplies all staff associated with the USGCRP.”
ICF takes in far more in government contracts than its active $34 million from NASA. An analysis of federal spending data found that the consulting firm rakes in hundreds of millions of dollars each year through federal contracts, and took in over $2 billion during the Biden administration.
The consulting firm is likely aware that the scope of its government work could be slashed during Trump’s term, and so are investors. Its stock price was at $171 a share days ahead of last November’s election, but has since cratered to just $77 a share, the lowest it had been since the last time Trump was president. (Yes, the stock price fell before the current market volatility caused by tariffs).
Houston Keene, a former journalist who now leads a government transparency organization, argues that unnamed government consultants shouldn’t be paid millions to chart the nation’s climate policy.
“The public deserves an honest assessment from the government on the state of climate science,” Keene said. “That requires an objective, nonpartisan author who does not have financial interests in the outcome. ICF appears to be none of these things.”
“There can be no proper assessment with scientific integrity when a clearly partisan and financially conflicted activist organization is holding the pen,” he said.
A top Trump administration official, Russell Vought, has signaled that he wanted to exert more oversight over the next climate assessment. Vought runs the powerful Office of Management and Budget, and has openly stated that he wants to make deep cuts to “woke and weaponized” spending.
Vought has specifically called out the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s report, arguing that the bureaucrats who write it end up with outsized power over government action. He’s called for an investigation of the political leanings of the contractors that assemble the report.
Stuart Levenbach alarmed scientists years ago when he attempted
to meddle with a congressionally mandated climate report
Stuart Levenbach was tapped last month by administration officials to serve as associate director for natural resources, energy, science, and water in the Office of Management and Budget.
The previous time President Donald Trump was in the White House, Levenbach attempted to tone down the summary conclusions of the National Climate Assessment, a wide-ranging report that relies on the contributions of hundreds of researchers to assess how global warming is transforming the United States.
Scientists say Levenbach tried to downplay climate risks in the fourth installment of the report, which comes out every four years or so. In that edition, Levenbach was concerned especially with the higher greenhouse gas emissions assumptions the report partially relied on and sought to soften the language of the report’s summary, the scientists say.
“He was the one that tried to slow it down to the point of it not coming out,” said Don Wuebbles, a climate scientist at the University of Illinois who has worked on all five previous National Climate Assessments.
Levenbach’s delay tactics were ultimately unsuccessful, and the fourth installment of the report was released in 2018 on the day after Thanksgiving.
In response to questions from Politico’s E&E News, a Trump administration official with the Office of Management and Budget described the scientists’ concerns as “fake news.”
The National Climate Assessment is based on a range of emissions scenarios, including those that are not worst-case scenarios. The fourth version of the reportconcluded the country was not on track to cut carbon dioxide emissions at a pace to avoid some of the worst consequences of climate change.
At the time, Levenbach’s role at NOAA carried more weight than usual because the agency was operating without a permanent administrator, and did so for the entire first Trump presidency. Reached for comment, OMB spokeswoman Rachel Cauley did not deny that Levenbach tried to alter the report, but she criticized how it was put together.
“The assessment was riddled with the worst case scenario and the authors weren’t transparent about it,” she said in a statement.”
Levenbach is joining OMB at a time when its director, Russ Vought, wants to suppress climate science throughout the federal government and increase Trump White House oversight over the next installment of the National Climate Assessment, which is due out in 2026 or 2027.
Levenbach’s appointment to a powerful White House role with oversight of the nation’s scientific endeavors comes at a time when the administration is preparing a possible challenge to the endangerment finding, a bedrock ruling which considers greenhouse gases a danger to public health and is a foundation of climate regulations.
A recent article at the Washington Free Beacon, titled “Great News for Humanity: Depressed Liberals Are Increasingly Suicidal Due to ‘Climate Anxiety,’ Study Finds,” takes a humorous approach (black humor, to be sure) to discussing a study that found liberals are increasingly suffering from climate anxiety and depression, leading the climate-anxious to refrain from having children and even contemplating and, in some cases, committing suicide. The article makes light of it, but it is a widely reported trend. Since climate change does not threaten human existence or flourishing, and extreme weather is not worsening, their fears and anxiety are unjustified by the actual state of the climate. Unfortunately, climate alarm has been foisted upon people, especially on children and mentally unwell adults, despite evidence indicating climate change is not anything to be alarmed about.
The Washington Free Beacon reports:
“Negative psychological responses related to the observed and anticipated impacts of climate change, such as climate anxiety, eco-anxiety and climate-related guilt have … emerged as a potential risk factor for poor mental health and suicide-related behaviors,” the authors wrote last month in Nature Medicine. “International surveys show that concern about climate change is associated with feelings of despair, hopelessness, anger, frustration and guilt, especially among younger populations.”
The findings of this study, published in Nature, are not unique. Other research has come to similar conclusions: a study conducted by Save the Children found that 70 percent of kids they surveyed struggle with what they dubbed “climate anxiety,” as discussed in this Climate Realism post. Other surveys show similarly sad results.
Each time these results are presented, the media and the researchers involved frame the story as climate change and its impacts are causing fear and anxiety, and the lack of action is causing deep feelings of hopelessness and despair for people worried about climate change. Yet it is the false tales that the media, politicians, and green interest groups are telling about climate change motivating anxiety and mental distress, not the actual conditions of the planet.
For instance, in the media coverage of the Save the Children survey, the UK website Future Net Zero implies that without immediate societal scale action, the present generation of children “stand to inherit a deeply unequal world,” and that their terror is “warranted.”
Likewise, articles from The Hill and The Conversation discussing a study attributing adult PTSD to climate change assert that climate change is impacting people through increased wildfires and other disasters. This is false, the framing of their research is built on falsehoods.
Climate change is not causing worsening weather disasters. Data show that not only are events likewildfires not increasing, but the number of all climate-related deaths are declining because of improvements to infrastructure, healthcare, technology, and yes, better climatic conditions. (See figure below)
The real reason so many impressionable people are depressed and anxious about climate change is because the media and governments relentlessly push and promote false and alarming misinformation and fake news about extreme weather and climate change. It is no wonder that children are afraid, when their teachers are telling them that the world will end in short order unless dramatic global reforms are made. When people don’t see the supposedly climate saving reforms being made, they are left hopeless and despondent. But it is an unnecessary misery – there has never been a safer time period for humans to live in.
The Washington Free Beacon made light of the situation, but it is no laughing matter. Children in particular are being traumatized by adults in their lives over the climate issue. Climate change is not harming mental health, but climate alarmism, built on falsehoods, hysteria, and hyperbole, certainly is.
A recent post by The Hill, “Disaster as Trump’s energy policy totally disregards climate change,” claims that President Donald Trump is implementing “irrational and profoundly destabilizing energy policies” by prioritizing traditional energy and deprioritizing renewables, leading to increases in weather disasters. This is false on all fronts.
♦ Data show that weather is not becoming more extreme. ♦ There is no evidence that the growth in wind and solar power has done or can do anything to alter the course of climate change. ♦ Trump’s America First agenda promotes energy dominance, focusing energy reliability and abundant, secure, domestic supplies. Trump’s energy plan is a stabilizing factor in energy costs.
William Becker, a former regional director at the U.S. Department of Energy during the Obama administration, makes many false claims in a rapid-fire fashion in his post in The Hill. For brevity’s sake and as a matter of focus, this Climate Realism post focuses on one segment of his article:
While we can thank fossil fuels for the lifestyles and conveniences most Americans enjoy today, the legacy of their long dominance is the destabilization and degradation of environmental systems critical to life. The atmosphere is one of those systems. Unprecedented weather extremes are the result of dumping fossil-fuel pollution into it. As the dumping continues, weather disasters become more frequent and destructive. The American people have been hit by an average of 23 major weather disasters (those with damages exceeding $1 billion) annually over the last five years, compared to only nine in the previous 45.
Every point Becker made in this statement after the opening clause of the first sentence is false. It is true that we can thank fossil fuels for our lifestyles and not just conveniences but essentials for modern life.
It is false that fossil fuel use is causing unprecedented weather extremes, and that they are becoming more frequent and destructive.
Becker, who currently runs a climate policy lobbying organization, uses a deceptive metric for calculating increasing weather disasters, which looks at the monetary value of losses due to weather. Becker does not attempt to claim that these weather events are becoming more frequent or extreme themselves – because they aren’t. Data on the most common weather extremes like hurricanes and wildfires show no increase, as Climate Realism has covered dozens of times. Instead, Becker cites misleading calculations of billion-dollar price tags from weather damage.
Scientist Roger Pielke, Jr., a professor emeritus at the University of Colorado Boulder, explains the misuse of the “billion dollar disaster” metric as a proof for dangerous climate change. He has called the U.S. National Climate Assessment (NCA) is “a national embarrassment,” for using that misleading metric, explaining that the NCA overestimated the number of disasters by a factor of three by re-counting individual events when they struck multiple states. So, if a hurricane passed through Florida, then into Georgia and South Carolina, the NCA would count this as three separate “billion dollar disasters” – even if the hurricane did not cause a billion dollar in of losses in each state it struck.
In reality, populations have increased in states like California and Florida, which are prone to extreme weather. More infrastructure has been built in susceptible areas, so there is more to annihilate when a storm strikes. To the extent that there has been any rise in billion dollar costs attributable to extreme weather events, as estimated by Becker and the sources he uses, it is due, not to changes in weather, but rather a well-known phenomenon labeled the “expanding bulls-eye effect,” which Climate Realism has discussed dozens of times previously, such as here.
Going further, an analysis from Pielke, Jr. of insurance data presented in another Climate Realism post disputes the claim that the costs of natural disasters, when measured fairly, have risen. Relative to global GDP, the trend in property losses has declined as the Earth has modestly warmed over the last several decades. (See the graph, below)
Graph: Global disaster losses as a proportion of global GDP.
Becker’s additional claim that Trump’s focus on reliable energy rather than intermittent renewables will raise costs and result in less energy security, is as false as his claims about worsening disaster costs. The wind and solar technologies that Becker promotes rely heavily on materials and technologies produced by foreign powers that are not friendly to the United States, like China.
A grid powered by wind and solar is not cheaper than gas, it isn’t even cheaper than nuclear. A study by energy modelers at Always On Energy Research found that wind and solar both suffer from massive costs associated with the overbuilding necessary to overcome the intermittency issue. Load balancing, using battery storage, carries very high costs, as well. These make nuclear less expensive per megawatt hour than existing wind or solar, despite high upfront costs.
Similarly for fossil fuels, full system LCOE show that wind and solar in Texas costs far more per megawatt hour than nuclear, coal (of which the United States has hundreds of years of domestic supply that isn’t dependent on foreign sources), or the cheapest source – natural gas, which is also sourced domestically.
Grid stability is damaged by high penetration of solar and wind and the closure of traditional energy, according to utility companies and federal energy regulators.
Almost every claim made in Becker’s article in The Hill is provably wrong. The post is long on hyperbole and misinformation, but short on facts and data. Real world weather data shows no increase in extreme weather, incidences of weather disasters, or weather disaster costs as a percentage of economic growth. Trump’s reliability focused, America First, energy policy will not harm our energy security or the planet, but it will buttress the United States against the hostile intentions of any foreign government that might use our dependence on them for renewable energy materials and technology to extort economic or geopolitical concessions. It will also allow the U.S. to become energy dominant, a force for good in the world by supplying our abundant domestic energy supplies to allies, especially to developing countries in need of reliable energy sources to bring their populations out of energy poverty.
The post below updates the UAH record of air temperatures over land and ocean. Each month and year exposes again the growing disconnect between the real world and the Zero Carbon zealots. It is as though the anti-hydrocarbon band wagon hopes to drown out the data contradicting their justification for the Great Energy Transition. Yes, there was warming from an El Nino buildup coincidental with North Atlantic warming, but no basis to blame it on CO2.
As an overview consider how recent rapid cooling completely overcame the warming from the last 3 El Ninos (1998, 2010 and 2016). The UAH record shows that the effects of the last one were gone as of April 2021, again in November 2021, and in February and June 2022 At year end 2022 and continuing into 2023 global temp anomaly matched or went lower than average since 1995, an ENSO neutral year. (UAH baseline is now 1991-2020). Then there was an usual El Nino warming spike of uncertain cause, unrelated to steadily rising CO2 and now dropping steadily.
For reference I added an overlay of CO2 annual concentrations as measured at Mauna Loa. While temperatures fluctuated up and down ending flat, CO2 went up steadily by ~60 ppm, a 15% increase.
Furthermore, going back to previous warmings prior to the satellite record shows that the entire rise of 0.8C since 1947 is due to oceanic, not human activity.
The animation is an update of a previous analysis from Dr. Murry Salby. These graphs use Hadcrut4 and include the 2016 El Nino warming event. The exhibit shows since 1947 GMT warmed by 0.8 C, from 13.9 to 14.7, as estimated by Hadcrut4. This resulted from three natural warming events involving ocean cycles. The most recent rise 2013-16 lifted temperatures by 0.2C. Previously the 1997-98 El Nino produced a plateau increase of 0.4C. Before that, a rise from 1977-81 added 0.2C to start the warming since 1947.
Importantly, the theory of human-caused global warming asserts that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere changes the baseline and causes systemic warming in our climate. On the contrary, all of the warming since 1947 was episodic, coming from three brief events associated with oceanic cycles. And in 2024 we saw an amazing episode with a temperature spike driven by ocean air warming in all regions, along with rising NH land temperatures, now dropping below its peak.
Chris Schoeneveld has produced a similar graph to the animation above, with a temperature series combining HadCRUT4 and UAH6. H/T WUWT
March 2025 UAH Temps Yo-yo, Ocean First, Then Land
With apologies to Paul Revere, this post is on the lookout for cooler weather with an eye on both the Land and the Sea. While you heard a lot about 2020-21 temperatures matching 2016 as the highest ever, that spin ignores how fast the cooling set in. The UAH data analyzed below shows that warming from the last El Nino had fully dissipated with chilly temperatures in all regions. After a warming blip in 2022, land and ocean temps dropped again with 2023 starting below the mean since 1995. Spring and Summer 2023 saw a series of warmings, continuing into 2024 peaking in April, then cooling off to the present.
UAH has updated their TLT (temperatures in lower troposphere) dataset for March 2025. Due to one satellite drifting more than can be corrected, the dataset has been recalibrated and retitled as version 6.1 Graphs here contain this updated 6.1 data. Posts on their reading of ocean air temps this month are ahead of the update from HadSST4. I posted recently on SSTs February 2025 Oceans Keep Cool.These posts have a separate graph of land air temps because the comparisons and contrasts are interesting as we contemplate possible cooling in coming months and years.
Sometimes air temps over land diverge from ocean air changes. In July 2024 all oceans were unchanged except for Tropical warming, while all land regions rose slightly. In August we saw a warming leap in SH land, slight Land cooling elsewhere, a dip in Tropical Ocean temp and slightly elsewhere. September showed a dramatic drop in SH land, overcome by a greater NH land increase. 2025 has shown a sharp contrast between land and sea, first with ocean air temps falling in January recovering in February. Then land air temps, especially NH, dropped in February and recovered in March.
Note: UAH has shifted their baseline from 1981-2010 to 1991-2020 beginning with January 2021. v6.1 data was recalibrated also starting with 2021. In the charts below, the trends and fluctuations remain the same but the anomaly values changed with the baseline reference shift.
Presently sea surface temperatures (SST) are the best available indicator of heat content gained or lost from earth’s climate system. Enthalpy is the thermodynamic term for total heat content in a system, and humidity differences in air parcels affect enthalpy. Measuring water temperature directly avoids distorted impressions from air measurements. In addition, ocean covers 71% of the planet surface and thus dominates surface temperature estimates. Eventually we will likely have reliable means of recording water temperatures at depth.
Recently, Dr. Ole Humlum reported from his research that air temperatures lag 2-3 months behind changes in SST. Thus cooling oceans portend cooling land air temperatures to follow. He also observed that changes in CO2 atmospheric concentrations lag behind SST by 11-12 months. This latter point is addressed in a previous post Who to Blame for Rising CO2?
After a change in priorities, updates are now exclusive to HadSST4. For comparison we can also look at lower troposphere temperatures (TLT) from UAHv6.1 which are now posted for March 2025. The temperature record is derived from microwave sounding units (MSU) on board satellites like the one pictured above. Recently there was a change in UAH processing of satellite drift corrections, including dropping one platform which can no longer be corrected. The graphs below are taken from the revised and current dataset.
The UAH dataset includes temperature results for air above the oceans, and thus should be most comparable to the SSTs. There is the additional feature that ocean air temps avoid Urban Heat Islands (UHI). The graph below shows monthly anomalies for ocean air temps since January 2015.
In 2021-22, SH and NH showed spikes up and down while the Tropics cooled dramatically, with some ups and downs, but hitting a new low in January 2023. At that point all regions were more or less in negative territory.
After sharp cooling everywhere in January 2023, there was a remarkable spiking of Tropical ocean temps from -0.5C up to + 1.2C in January 2024. The rise was matched by other regions in 2024, such that the Global anomaly peaked at 0.86C in April. Since then all regions have cooled down sharply to a low of 0.27C in January. In February 2025, SH rose from 0.1C to 0.4C pulling the Global ocean air anomaly up to 0.47C, where it stayed in March.
Land Air Temperatures Tracking in Seesaw Pattern
We sometimes overlook that in climate temperature records, while the oceans are measured directly with SSTs, land temps are measured only indirectly. The land temperature records at surface stations sample air temps at 2 meters above ground. UAH gives tlt anomalies for air over land separately from ocean air temps. The graph updated for March is below.
Here we have fresh evidence of the greater volatility of the Land temperatures, along with extraordinary departures by SH land. The seesaw pattern in Land temps is similar to ocean temps 2021-22, except that SH is the outlier, hitting bottom in January 2023. Then exceptionally SH goes from -0.6C up to 1.4C in September 2023 and 1.8C in August 2024, with a large drop in between. In November, SH and the Tropics pulled the Global Land anomaly further down despite a bump in NH land temps. February showed a sharp drop in NH land air temps from 1.07C down to 0.56C, pulling the Global land anomaly downward from 0.9C to 0.6C. Now that drop is reversed in March with both NH and Global land back to January values, despite another drop in SH land air temps.
The Bigger Picture UAH Global Since 1980
The chart shows monthly Global Land and Ocean anomalies starting 01/1980 to present. The average monthly anomaly is -0.03, for this period of more than four decades. The graph shows the 1998 El Nino after which the mean resumed, and again after the smaller 2010 event. The 2016 El Nino matched 1998 peak and in addition NH after effects lasted longer, followed by the NH warming 2019-20. An upward bump in 2021 was reversed with temps having returned close to the mean as of 2/2022. March and April brought warmer Global temps, later reversed
With the sharp drops in Nov., Dec. and January 2023 temps, there was no increase over 1980. Then in 2023 the buildup to the October/November peak exceeded the sharp April peak of the El Nino 1998 event. It also surpassed the February peak in 2016. In 2024 March and April took the Global anomaly to a new peak of 0.94C. The cool down started with May dropping to 0.9C, and in June a further decline to 0.8C. October went down to 0.7C, November and December dropped to 0.6C. February went down to 0.5C, now back up to 0.6C driven by the bounce in NH land air temps.
The graph reminds of another chart showing the abrupt ejection of humid air from Hunga Tonga eruption.
TLTs include mixing above the oceans and probably some influence from nearby more volatile land temps. Clearly NH and Global land temps have been dropping in a seesaw pattern, nearly 1C lower than the 2016 peak. Since the ocean has 1000 times the heat capacity as the atmosphere, that cooling is a significant driving force. TLT measures started the recent cooling later than SSTs from HadSST4, but are now showing the same pattern. Despite the three El Ninos, their warming had not persisted prior to 2023, and without them it would probably have cooled since 1995. Of course, the future has not yet been written.
Not everyone is aware that the scientists and engineers who made the NASA space program successful disputed the global warming/climate change narrative promoted at the agency by people like James Hansen.
After all the slogan in the NASA workplace was that of Edward Deming, and they were only convinced by the facts rather than feelings or opinions about the future. Many of them formed the Right Climate Stuff Foundation.
In particular Walter Cunningham explained his reasoning in an article In Science, Ignorance is not Bliss. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
NASA has played a key role in one of the greatest periods of scientific progress in history. It is uniquely positioned to collect the most comprehensive data on our biosphere. For example, recently generated NASA data enabled scientists to finally understand the Gulf Stream warming mechanism and its effect on European weather. Such data will allow us to improve our models, resulting in better seasonal forecasts.
NASA’s Aqua satellite is showing that water vapor, the dominant greenhouse gas, works to offset the effect of carbon dioxide (CO2). This information, contrary to the assumption used in all the warming models, is ignored by global warming alarmists.
Climate understanding and critical decision making require
comprehensive data about our planet’s land, sea, and atmosphere.
Without an adequate satellite system to provide such data, policy efforts and monitoring international environmental agreements are doomed to failure. Our satellite monitoring capability is being crippled by interagency wrangling and federal budget issues. As much as a third of our satellites need replacing in the next couple of years.
NASA should be at the forefront in the collection of scientific evidence and debunking the current hysteria over human-caused, or Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). Unfortunately, it is becoming just another agency caught up in the politics of global warming, or worse, politicized science.
Advocacy is replacing objective evaluation of data, while
scientific data is being ignored in favor of emotions and politics.
There are excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations of the Sun and the Earth’s temperature, while scientists can not find a relationship between industrial activity, energy consumption, and global temperatures. But global warming is an issue no longer being decided in the scientific arena.
Saying the Earth is warming is to state the obvious. Since the end of the ice age, the Earth’s temperature has increased approximately 16 degrees Fahrenheit and sea levels have risen a total of 300 feet. That is certain and measurable evidence of warming, but it is not evidence of AGW—human-caused warming.
We can track the temperature of the Earth back for millennia. Knowing the temperature of the Earth, past or present, is a matter of collecting data, analyzing it, and coming up with the best answer to account for the data. Collecting such data on a global basis is a NASA forte. I believe in global climate change, but there is no way that humans can influence the temperature of our planet to any measurable degree with the tools currently at their disposal. Any human contribution to global temperature change is lost in the noise of terrestrial and cosmic factors.
Our beautiful home planet has been warming and cooling for the last 4.8 billion years. Most recently, it has been warming—be it ever so slightly—but there is nothing unusual about it! The changes and rates of change in the Earth’s temperature, just since the Industrial Revolution, have occurred many times in our climatic history. While climate scientists generally agree that the Earth’s temperature is always changing, not many of them would say that humans are responsible for those changes.
None of this is to say there are not legitimate reasons to restrict emissions of any number of chemicals into the atmosphere. We should just not fool ourselves into thinking we will change the temperature of the Earth by doing so.
In a December 2007 Senate report, 400 prominent scientists signed a letter pointing out that climate change was a well-known natural phenomenon, and that adapting to it is far more sensible than attempting to prevent it. Their ranks included experts in climatology, geology, oceanography, biology, glaciology, biogeography, meteorology, economics, chemistry, mathematics, environmental sciences, engineering, physics, and paleo-climatology.
Their message: When changes are gradual, man has
an almost infinite ability to adapt and evolve.
The fearmongers of global warming base their case on the correlation between CO2 and global temperature, even though we cannot be sure which is cause and which is effect.Historically, temperature increases have preceded high CO2 levels, and there have been periods when atmospheric CO2 levels were as much as 16 times what they are now, periods characterized not by warming but by glaciation. You might have to go back half a million years to match our current level of atmospheric CO2, but you only have to go back to the Medieval Warming Period, from the 10th to the 14th Century, to find an intense global warming episode, followed immediately by the drastic cooling of the Little Ice Age.Neither of these events were caused by variations in CO2 levels.
Even though CO2 is a relatively minor constituent of “greenhouse gases,” alarmists have made it the whipping boy for global warming (probably because they know how fruitless it would be to propose controlling other principal constituents, H2O, CH4, and N2O). Since human activity does contribute a tiny portion of atmospheric CO2, they blame us for global warming.
Other inconvenient facts ignored by the activists: Carbon dioxide is a nonpolluting gas, essential for plant photosynthesis. Higher concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere produce bigger harvests.
In spite of warnings of severe consequences from rising seas, droughts, severe weather, species extinction, and other disasters, the U.S. has not been stampeded into going along with the recommendations of the UN Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—so far. Even though evidence supports the American position, we have begun to show signs of caving in to the alarmists.
With scientific evidence going out of style,
emotional arguments and anecdotal data are ruling the day.
The media subjects us to one frightening image of environmental nightmare after another, linking each to global warming. Journalists and activist scientists use hurricanes, wildfires, and starving polar bears to appeal to our emotions, not to our reason. They are far more concerned with anecdotal observations, such as the frozen sea ice inside the Arctic Circle, than they are with understanding why it is happening and how frequently it has occurred in the past.
After warnings that 2007 would be the hottest year on record and a record year for hurricanes, what we experienced was the coolest year since 2001 and, by some measures, the most benign hurricane season in the Northern Hemisphere in three decades.
Even though recent changes in our atmosphere are all within the bounds of the Earth’s natural variability, a growing number of people are willing to throw away trillions of dollars on fruitless solutions. Why do we allow emotional appeals and anecdotal data to shape our conclusions and influence our expenditures with the science and technology we have available at our fingertips?
The situation is complex, but the sad state of scientific literacy in America today is partially to blame for belief in AGW. When a 2006 National Science Foundation survey found 25 percent of Americans not knowing the Earth revolves around the Sun, you know that science education is at a new low and society is vulnerable to the emotional appeal of AGW.
And don’t underestimate the role of politics and political correctness.
The public debate should focus on the real cause of global temperature change and whether we can do anything about it. Is global warming a natural inevitability, or is it AGW—human caused?
The conflict over AGW has deteriorated into a religious war; a war between true believers in human-caused global warming and nonbelievers; between those who accept AGW on faith and those who consider themselves more sensible and better informed. “True believers” are beyond being interested in evidence; it is impossible to reason a person out of positions they have not been reasoned into.
It doesn’t help that NASA scientist James Hansen was one of the early alarmists claiming humans caused global warming. Hansen is a political activist who spreads fear even when NASA’s own data contradict him.
Warming in the upper atmosphere should occur before any surface warming effect, but NASA’s own data show that has not been happening. Global temperature readings—accurate to 0.1 degree Celsius—are gathered by orbiting satellites. Interestingly, in the 18 years those satellites have been recording global temperatures, they have actually shown a slight decrease in average temperatures.
Hansen is currently calling for a reduction of atmospheric CO2 by 10 percent and a moratorium on coal-fired power plants, while claiming the Bush administration is censoring him. Other so-called scientists are saying the world must bring carbon emissions to near zero to keep temperatures from rising.
In today’s politically correct environment, many are reluctant to dispute the popular wisdom; when they do, they are frequently ignored. When NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, Hansen’s boss and a distinguished scientist in his own right, attempted to draw a distinction between Hansen’s personal and political views and the science conducted by his agency, he was soon forced to back off.
It is the true believers who, when they have no facts on their side, try to silence their critics. When former NASA mathematician Ferenc Miskolczi pointed out that “greenhouse warming” may be mathematically impossible, NASA would not allow him to publish his work. Miskolczi dared to question the simplifying assumption in the warming model that the atmosphere is infinitely thick. He pointed out that when you use the correct thickness—about 65 miles—the greenhouse effect disappears! Ergo: no AGW. Miskolczi resigned in disgust and published his proof in the peer reviewed Hungarian journal Weather. [See: The Curious Case of Dr. Miskolczi]
For nearly a decade now, there has been no global warming. Even though atmospheric CO2 has continued to accumulate—up about 4 percent in the last 10 years—the global mean temperature has remained flat. That should raise obvious questions about CO2 being the cause of climate change.
Instead, AGW enthusiasts are embracing more regulation, greater government spending, and higher taxes in a futile attempt to control what is beyond our control—the Earth’s temperature. One of their political objectives, unstated of course, is the transfer of wealth from rich nations to poor nations or, as the social engineers put it, from the North to the South, which may be their real agenda.
Climate Lemmings
In the face of overwhelming evidence for natural temperature variation, proponents of AGW are resorting to a precautionary argument: “We must do something just in case we are responsible, because the consequences are too terrible if we are to blame and do nothing.” They hope to stampede government entities into committing huge amounts of money before their fraud is completely exposed—before science and truth save the day.
Politicians think they can reverse global warming by stabilizing CO2 emissions with a cockamamie scheme of “cap and trade.” A government entity would sell CO2 allocations to those industries producing it. The trillions of dollars in new taxes and devastation to the economy would be justified by claiming it will lower the temperature of the Earth. This rationalization is dependent on two assumptions: (1) that CO2 is responsible for the cause of changes in the Earth’s temperature, and (2) a warmer Earth would be bad for humanity.
The reality is that atmospheric CO2 has a minimal impact on greenhouse gases and world temperature. Water vapor is responsible for 95 percent of the greenhouse effect. CO2 contributes just 3.6 percent, with human activity responsible for only 3.2 percent of that. That is why some studies claim CO2 levels are largely irrelevant to global warming.
Without the greenhouse effect to keep our world warm, the planet would have an average temperature of minus 18 degrees Celsius. Because we do have it, the temperature is a comfortable plus 15 degrees Celsius. Based on the seasonal and geographic distribution of any projected warming, a good case can be made that a warmer average temperature would be even more beneficial for humans.
For a tiny fraction of the trillions of dollars a cap-and-trade system would eventually cost the United States, we could pay for development of clean coal, oil-shale recovery systems, and nuclear power, and have enough left over to pay for exploration of our solar system.
By law, NASA cannot involve itself in politics, but it can surely champion the role of science to inform politicians. With so many uninformed and misguided politicians ignoring the available science, NASA should fill the void. NASA is synonymous with science. Allowing our priorities to drift away from hard science is tantamount to embracing decadence. NASA will surely suffer; and politicizing science is killing it.
I do see hopeful signs that some true believers are beginning to harbor doubts about AGW. Let’s hope that NASA can focus the global warming discussion back on scientific evidence before we perpetrate an economic disaster on ourselves.
Walter Cunningham, (1932–2023) geophysicist, fighter pilot and Apollo 7 astronaut, who flew the first test flight of the Apollo Program, Apollo 7. In 2010, Cunningham published a short book titled “Global Warming: Facts versus Faith” His editorial was published in the Houston Chronicle on August 15, 2010, Climate change alarmists ignore scientific methods. (When You Don’t Have the Facts, Appeal to Public Opinion). In 2012, he and other former astronauts and NASA employees sent a letter to the agency criticizing its role advocating a high degree of certainty that man-made CO2 is a major cause of climate change while neglecting empirical evidence that calls the theory into question.
The animation shows end of March Arctic ice extents on day 91 over the last 19 years (length of MASIE dataset). Of course central Arctic basins are frozen solid, and the fluctuations are visible on the marginal basins both the Atlantic side (right) and the Pacific (left). Note the higher extents in 2012, followed by lesser ice, then overcome by 2024.
Climatology takes the March monthly average to indicate the annual maximum and September average as the minimum. Dynamically, the Arctic gains and loses ice extents in this pattern:
The values in the chart are the month ending ice extents (last five days average) minus the ice extents at end of the previous month. Thus positive numbers show ice gained each month, negative numbers ice lost in a given month. SII (Sea Ice Index) provides a data file calculating and updating these results since 1980. Note that the peak month of March on average declines very slightly, while the minimum month of September on average gains a little ice extent. Also the greatest average gain of ice is in October and the greatest loss of extent is in July.
Above is a chart of March Monthly averages since 2007. The variability shows, including 2024 well above the 19-year average and 2025 well below.
This graph shows variations of ice extents during March, on average and for some recent years along with 2007. The exceptional extents in 2024 stand out, along with the more typical 2021 and 2007. On average during March the Arctic loses about 400k km2 of ice. 2025 started March at 14M km2, about 900k km2 in deficit, and ended virtually the same 14M, 600k km2 below average on day 90. SII was slightly lower than MASIE for three weeks, then ended about the same.
The table below shows the distribution of ice extents across the Arctic regions.
Region
2025090
Ave Day 090
2025-Ave.
2007090
2025-2007
(0) Northern_Hemisphere
14011379
14617665
-606287
14222916
-211537
(1) Beaufort_Sea
1071001
1070241
760
1069711
1290
(2) Chukchi_Sea
965989
964237
1752
966006
-17
(3) East_Siberian_Sea
1087137
1086266
871
1074908
12229
(4) Laptev_Sea
897845
897098
747
884340
13505
(5) Kara_Sea
885597
920703
-35106
892157
-6560
(6) Barents_Sea
450824
664324
-213500
441970
8854
(7) Greenland_Sea
703578
665146
38433
686312
17266
(8) Baffin_Bay_Gulf_of_St._Lawrence
1350818
1386137
-35320
1217467
133351
(9) Canadian_Archipelago
854878
853269
1609
850127
4751
(10) Hudson_Bay
1260903
1255273
5631
1229995
30908
(11) Central_Arctic
3237488
3234612
2876
3242236.7
-4749
(12) Bering_Sea
593465
711340
-117875
814787.71
-221323
(13) Baltic_Sea
20341
62183
-41842
45896.93
-25556
(14) Sea_of_Okhotsk
628758
836750
-207992
794657
-165899
Overall 2025 Arctic ice is 4% below the 19 year average and 1% below 2007. About half of the 606k km2 deficit is in the Pacific basins of Bering and Okhotsk, typically the first to go to open water. The other major case of early melting is in the Atlantic Barents Sea.
Why is this important? All the claims of global climate emergency depend on dangerously higher temperatures, lower sea ice, and rising sea levels. The lack of additional warming prior to 2023 El Nino is documented in a post Ocean Warms, Land Cools UAH February 2025.
There is a lot of anxiety, misconceptions and distortions about Doge, or Department of Government Efficiency. The above interview with members of the team and their leader Elon Musk gives everyone an inside view of what the work is, who is doing it and why, and what is at stake for citizens and taxpayers. For those who prefer reading, below is a transcript lightly edited from the closed captions with my added images. BB is Bret Baier of Fox News and EM is Elon Musk. Baier introduces other participants by name and background.
BB: Thanks for having us and doing this I know there’s a lot of interest in Doge. Let me start with you Elon: What are what are the budgetary savings goals and and how much do you think you’ve achieved so far?
EM: Our goal is to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars. So from a nominal deficit of 2 trillion, it is to cut the deficit in half to 1 trillion. Or looking at it in total federal spending, to drop the federal spending from 7 trillion to Six Trillion. We want to reduce the spending by eliminating waste. And to reduce the spending by 15%, which seems really quite achievable.
The government is not efficient, and there’s a lot of a lot of waste and fraud, so we feel confident that a 15% reduction can be done without affecting any of of the critical government services, and in fact making them better.
BB: I’m going talk to all the guys here about the specifics. But for you what’s the most astonishing thing you found out in this process?
EM: The sheer amount of waste and fraud in the government. It is astonishing, it’s mind-blowing. We routinely encounter wastes of a billion dollars or more just casually. For example, there was a simple survey that was literally a 10 questions survey, that you could do with Survey Monkey costing about $10,000. The government was being charged almost a billion dollars for that. A billion dollars for a simple online survey with questions like: Do you like the national park? And then there appears to be no feedback loop for what would be done with that survey. So the survey would just go for nothing.
BB: You technically are a special government employee and you’re supposed to be 130 days. Are you going to continue past that or what do you think you’re going to do?
EM: Well I think we will have accomplished most of the work required to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars within that time frame.
BB: So in that time frame and and the process is a report at some point?
EM: Not really a report we are cutting the waste and fraud in real time. So every day that passes our goal is to reduce the the waste and fraud by $4 billion a day, every day 7 days a week, and so far we are succeeding.
BB: I’m going to talk of the specifics but there there obviously are Doge critics who are reading all kinds of stuff. Obviously lawmakers on the other side of the aisle are attacking you. And they characterize the approach as: Fire, Ready and then Aim. And how do you approach that, how do you respond to that?
EM: Well I do agree that we actually want to be careful in the cuts, so we want to measure twice if not thrice and cut once. That actually is our approach. They may characterize it as shooting from the hip, but it is anything but that. It’s not say that we make we don’t make mistakes. If we were to approach this with the standard of making no mistakes at all, that would be like saying someone in baseball has got to bat a thousand. That’s impossible, so when we do make mistakes we correct them quickly and we we move on.
BB: Some people say this shouldn’t take a rocket scientist, but Steve Davis you are a rocket scientist. Used to be and now essentially you’re the Chief Operating Officer of Doge day-to-day operations, fair to say. So how did you end up here, what’s the biggest challenge you see?
SD: The reason I’m here, which is probably the same for many, is that I think the goal is incredibly inspiring. I think most of the taxpayers in the country would agree that to have the country going bankrupt would be a very bad thing, and therefore keeping the country from going bankrupt is a good thing. So all of us are willing to kind of put our lives on hold in order to do this. I think the thing that’s special right now is we actually believe there’s a chance to succeed. There’s an Administration that’s supportive and a great cabinet and just a great group that will actually make success a possible outcome. Given the inspiring Mission and given the non-zero chance of success it it was worth doing.
EM: Let me reemphasize that point that the success of Doge is only possible with President Trump and with the outstanding cabinet that he selected. It would be impossible without the support of the president and the cabinet.
BB: But you’re finding the money, I mean it’s big numbers right?
SD: Yeah like Elon said the minimum impulse bit is often a billion dollars. So for example the $830 million which was the online survey. That’s an enormous amount of money that wouldn’t have been found if the Doge team wasn’t working with in that case the Department of Interior. But then taking it one step further Doge then publishes these things on our website for maximum transparency. It would have been impossible for the general public to have seen that. Now anyone can just log into doge.gov anytime and see these payments. They’re not yet in real time, they’re close but they’ll probably be in real time within the next few weeks.
BB: But the process still involves Congress right, at some level?
EM: We try to keep Congress as informed as possible. The law does say that money needs to be spent correctly; it should not be spent fraudulently or wastefully. It’s not contrary to Congress to avoid waste and fraud, it is consistent with the law and consistent with Congress. And we’ve seen actually great support at least from the Republican side of the house and occasionally some Democrats too.
You know it’s nice to see people cross the aisle once in a while. But usually when they attack Doge, they never attack any of the specifics. They’ll say what we’re doing is somehow unconstitutional or illegal or whatever. We’re saying, well which line of the cost savings do you disagree with and they can’t point to any. And we list them all on on doge.gov and and the Doge handle on X. And you’ll see just outrageous things, one outrageous thing after another.
BB: Joe Gebbia, besides Elon you’re one of several billionaires, being co-founder of Airbnb, and you wanted to help out.
JG: I bumped into Anthony Elon probably back in February and they told me something about a mine that dealt with retirement and they said they needed somebody to help out to fix retirement in the government. I loved the challenge so I jumped on board. And it turns out there is actually a mine in Pennsylvania that houses every paper document for the retirement process in the government.
Now picture this giant cave has 22,000 filing cabinets stacked 10 high to house 400 million pieces of paper. It’s a process that started in the 1950s and largely hasn’t changed in the last 70 years. As we dug into it we found retirement cases that had so much paper they had to fit it on a shipping pallet. So the process takes many months and we’re going to make it just some days.
So this will be an online digital process that will take just a few days at most. And I really think you know it’s an injustice to civil servants who are subjected to these processes that are older than the age of half the people watching your show tonight. We really believe that the government can have an Apple Store-like experience: beautifully designed, great user experience, modern systems.
BB: Because right now it’s by hand?
EM: Yes the the retirement process is all by paper literally with people carrying paper and manilla envelopes into this gigantic mine. So they can’t retire more than a certain number every month about 8,000 a month. That’s how we discovered it. We were saying, well let’s encourage voluntary retirement; they said, well the most they could do is 8,000 a month. And even in normal circumstances it can take 6 to 9 months just to just to have your retirement paperwork processed, and they often get the calculations wrong.
So we’re wondering, why would it take so long to retire? Ad they say, well because of the mine. “What do you mean a mine, what’s a mine got to do with retiring?” And that’s where we discovered that all the retirement stuff is done still done by paper in a process that looks identical to what occurred in the 1950s. If you compare a snapshot of the mine when it first started in the 50s to today, it looks the same.
BB: It’s amazing, so how long do you think it’ll take to turn over?
JG: We’re working as fast as we can. Probably next couple months we’ll have this this overhauled, and you know I really think again, why are we subjecting our federal workers to processes that they actually have to go through a training just to retire from the government. There’s a whole training program that people have to go through in order to retire, I think we can do better for them.
BB: Arum Moghaddassi, Doge engineer. You go into these places, one of the more than a dozen engineers, the first people to go into the agencies and view the computer data sets. Tell me what you’re finding, and for people who don’t understand how that process works, explain it for them.
AM: I’ll say the first thing that got me really excited about Doge was learning basically the state of government computers. By some estimates, government costs about hundred billion dollars and it’s funding systems are over 50 years old. In the case of something like Social Security or the IRS the really critical systems are old. They cost a lot of money to maintain and the efforts to improve them are often very delayed. So I thought, I’m a software engineer, maybe that could make a difference here, and that’s really what inspired me at a high level.
BB: There’s a lot of mystery about social security and a lot of words about it. Here’s what Democrats have been saying about: it’s absurd that Elon Musk is trying to eliminate billions of dollars from Social Security. Elon Musk and president Trump have set their sights on cutting Social Security their goal is clear: destroy Social Security from within. You’re in the building, I mean you’re in the computers. What’s happening there, what are you doing?
AM: Yeah it doesn’t line up with my experience on the ground. And I’ll say the two improvements that we’re trying to make to Social Security are helping people that legitimately get benefits, protect them from fraud that they experience every day on a routine basis. And also make the experience better. I’ll give you one example which is at Social Security. One of the first things we learned is that they get phone calls every day of people trying to change direct deposit information. So when you want to change your bank account you can call Social Security. We learned 40% of the phone calls that they get are from fraudsters; 40%, that’s right, almost half.
EM: Yes and they steal from people their Social Security. What happens is they they call in, they claim to be a retiree, then they convince the Social Security person on the phone to change where the money is flowing. It actually goes to some fraudster. This is happening all day, every day. And then somebody doesn’t receive their social security, and it’s because of of all the the fraud loopholes in the Social Security System.
BB: How do you reassure people that what you all are doing is not going to affect their benefit benefits?
EM: No. In fact what what we’re doing will help their benefits. Legitimate people as a result of the work of Doge will receive more Social Security not less. I want to emphasize that as a result of the work of Doge legitimate recipients of Social Security will receive more money not less money. Let the record show that I said this and it will be proven out to be true.
BB: Let’s check back on this in the future. So from Washington post: The Social Security Administration website crashed four times in 10 days this month because the servers were overloaded, blocking millions of retirees and disabled veterans from logging into their online accounts. People freaked out. Is that going to change?
EM: Yes we’re going to make sure that the website stays online.
BB: But I mean is it a result of going in there, something you’re doing?
SD: No no. The amount of issues with the social security system are enormous. As an example there are over 15 million people that are over the age of 120 that are marked as alive in the social security system. That’s an accurate figure. This has been something that’s been identified as a problem. Again it’s a pre-existing problem since 2008 at least from an IG report. So there were some great people working at the Social Security Administration that found this in 2008.
And nothing was done, so that 15 to 20 million Social Security numbers that were clearly fraudulent were floating around. That can be used only for bad intentions, there’d be no way to use those for good intentions. One of the things the Doge team is doing is carefully and and very methodically looking at those and making sure that any fraudulent ones are eliminated.
BB: Brad Smith working at HHS and obviously another element is Medicare and Medicaid. What are you finding?
Brad: Well I’d say there’s a couple things we’re really committed to in our work at HHS. Number one is making sure we continue to have the best biomed research in the world, and number two is making sure what president Trump has said over and over again, that we 100% protect Medicare and Medicaid. But there’s a lot of opportunity.
If I take NIH as an example today, if you’re an NIH researcher and you get a $100 Grant at your University today you get to spend 60 of that and your University spends 40 of that. The policy we’re proposing is that you get to spend 85 of that and your University spends 15. So that’s more money going directly to the scientists who are discovering new cures.
Another example at NIH is today they have 27 different centers that got created over time by Congress. And they’re typically by disease state or body system. There’s 700 different IT systems today at NIH, 700 different IT software systems. They can’t speak to each other so they don’t talk and they have 27 different CIOs. When you think about making great medical discoveries you have to connect the data. But with 27 Chief Information officers and most people are non-technical. So there’s a lot of opportunity which will make science better not worse.
EM: When I say that our job is tech support I really mean it. Yeah we have to fix the computers: if the computers can’t talk to each other you can’t get research done; if the computers can’t stay online people won’t receive their social security. So we have here a bunch of failing computer systems that are preventing people from receiving their benefits, that are preventing people from accessing needed research resources. Computer systems that are extremely vulnerable to fraud. And we’re fixing it.
BB: Does that include AI, does that include kind of changing the system overall? I guess that’s what people are afraid of: they don’t know what this is all looking like and is it going to affect me in the long term.
EM: It’s going to affect people very positively. The changes that we’re doing here will ensure the solvency of the government of the United States of America. We’re trying to ensure that people do receive their benefits in the future. And you can only receive your benefits if the the country is operating in a in a healthy and competent way.
BB: Anthony Armstrong, Doge office of personnel management, Morgan Stanley Banker M&A guy, you know money and this is a lot of money sloshing around.
AA: There’s a lot of money sloshing around; there’s a lot of money sloshing out the door. If you look at the federal government and the way the workforce works, it’s really a one-way ratchet over decades. It’s only going up, you never take anything away. So that leaves you with duplicative functions, it leaves you with overstaffing and it leaves you with functions in the wrong places.
So a couple of examples of duplicative function. Brad mentioned 27 CIOs, if you had kept going with Brad he probably he would talk about the Communications office. I think you’ve got 40 distinct Communications offices in in HHS. Yeah 40 and that’s not unusual by by the way. And multiple offices like that are not making anyone healthy. This is not about the employees. There’s many many hardworking, well-meaning people who took these jobs. The jobs were out there, they applied for them, they took them and they’re doing what’s there. It’s just that they’re duplicating the efforts of 40 offices. So you’ve got that and you’ve got overstaffing.
A good example of overstaffing would be the IRS having 1,400 people who are dedicated to provisioning laptops and and cell phones. If you join the IRS you get a laptop and a cell phone you’re provisioned. If each of those IRS officers or employees provisioned two employees per day you could provision the entire IRS in a little more than a month. So 12 times a year. It makes no sense why you have would 1400 people whose only job it is to give out a laptop and a phone, when the whole IRS could be handled once a month.
So that doesn’t that doesn’t make any sense and president Trump’s been very clear: scalpel not hatchet. And that’s the way it’s it’s getting done, and once those decisions are made, there’s a very heavy focus on being generous, being caring, compassionate and treating everyone with dignity and respect. If you look at how people have started to leave the government it is largely through voluntary means. There’s voluntary early retirement, there’s voluntary separation payments. We put in place deferred resignation the 8-month severance program. So there’s a very heavy bias towards programs that are long-dated that are generous that allow people to exit and go and get a new job in the private sector.
You’ve heard a lot of news about RIFs, about people getting fired at at this moment in time. Less than 0.15 of the federal Workforce has actually been given a RIF notice, so mostly they’ve selected if they’re leaving. Basically almost no one’s gotten fired is what we’re saying.
BB: Tom Krause, working at Treasury you are having access to the payment system that oversees all the outgoing payments. Essentially those payments were going places we didn’t know where they were going right?
TK: Unfortunately that’s the case. You know as an ex CFO of a big public tech company, really what we’re doing is applying public company standards to the federal government. And it is alarming how the financial operations and financial management is set up today. There actually is really only one bank account that’s used to disperse all monies that go out of the federal government. One bank account that is a big, big one. A couple weeks ago it had $800 billion, but it’s the treasury general account.
When you hear some of my colleagues here talking about fraud, you have to ask: well why is this allowed to happen. At a financial level well it’s actually quite simple but alarming. The treasury up until now and thanks to president Trump we’re fixing this in fact there’s an executive order that he just signed which is protecting America’s bank account because it really is the taxpayers money.
You know we’re changing the culture because the culture has been not a lot of caring and not a lot of commitment to doing what’s right. Relative to financial operations there’s $500 billion dollars of fraud every year, there’s hundreds of billion dollars of improper payments and we can’t pass an audit. The Consolidated financial report is produced by Treasury and we cannot pass it on, we have material weaknesses. That means if I were a public company CFO I would effectively be removed if I couldn’t file financial statements. I couldn’t issue securities of course since we can’t pass an audit.
EM: Right the federal government cannot pass an Audit. It’s impossible in fact. In order to pass an audit you need the information necessary to pass an audit. You need to have the payment codes, you need to have the payment explanation and you need to have a person you can contact to understand why that payment was made. None of those things were mandatory, yeah until just recently. In just the last few weeks we’re serving 580 plus agencies, and up until very recently they effectively could say make the payment and treasury just sent it out as fast as possible, no verification
And so we’re doing what any household would do. But imagine you’re a household with a bank account and everyone has the ATM card connected to that account, everyone has a checkbook on that account. It’s not just your children, not just your parents; it’s your in-laws it’s your extended family, and they all can go to the account and disperse funds no questions asked. No justification, no verification.
BB: Tyler Hassen, Interior Department, you’re a former Oil Company CEO. You’re reviewing contracts before they’re approved for funding, what are you finding?
TH: Well Elon and Steve kind of stole my thunder, but I actually found that customer service survey contract. I actually have an example of one right here, I was able to do this in high school, I found it that bad. I found it on the weekends because under the Biden Administration there was no departmental oversight within the Department of Interior whatsoever, none. We are now reviewing every single contract, every single Grant, and when things come to my attention that don’t make sense I’m bringing then to secretary Burgum. He has been fantastic, he’s a businessman and very supportive of Doge. It’s been wonderful to work with him.
BB: The battle has decades of buildup between government and business, which you guys are. Is that like a train hitting each other, I mean it it seems like it’s pretty disruptive.
EM: Well this is a revolution and it might be the might be the biggest revolution in government since the original Revolution. But at the end of the day America is going to be in much better shape. America will be solvent, the critical programs that people depend upon will work and and it’s going to be a fantastic future. Are we going to get a lot of complaints along the way, absolutely. You know one of the things I learned at PayPal was this: who complains the loudest and with the most amount of fake righteous indignation, the fraudsters, that’s a tell. NGOs that are crazy like the the $2 billion the Stacy AB NGO that basically didn’t exist and suddenly gets $2 billion awarded from the federal government. Why? And there are many cases like that.
BB: I think that most people Common Sense wise would say the Fraud’s got to end. They’re concerned about the 94-year-old grandmother who misses a check or somehow doesn’t get what she’s supposed to get.
EM: Right and what we’re trying to say is actually that the 94-year-old grandmother as a result of Doge’s work is going to get her check. She’s not going to be robbed by fraud like she’s getting robbed today. And the solvency of the federal government will ensure that she continues to receive those Social Security checks. And that Medicare continues to work without which we’re all doomed. The reason we’re doing this is because unless we do it America’s going to go insolvent, we’re going to go bankrupt and nobody’s going to get anything.
BB: Why are you guys all doing it? I mean you can pipe up but it you don’t have to be here, right. I mean you don’t you don’t have to be doing this.
TK: I am blessed with four children, my wife and I, but we have a real fiscal crisis and and this is not sustainable. And what’s worse, for my children and everyone else’s children, we are burdening them with that debt and it’s only going to grow.
BB: There’s not a lot of hierarchy here. You guys are kind of all approaching it in different silos but with the same kind of goal right. This is really Silicon Valley private sector colliding with government.
SD: Yeah exactly we’re headed in a bad path but that the chance of success exists. And just in my head right now is a fairly mundane issue that is very illustrative, namely credit cards. There are in the federal government around 4.6 million credit cards for around 2.3 to 2.4 million employees. This doesn’t make sense. So all the teams have worked on this with the agencies and said: Do you need all of these credit cards; are they being used; can you tell us physically where they are.
BB: I hope they’re getting frequent flyer points.
SD: Actually on a different note the rewards program the federal government has is actually not very good but that’s a whole other negotiation story. But so far the teams have worked together and they’ve reduced it from 4.6 million to to 4.3 million so we’re taking it easy. But clearly there should not be more credit cards than there are people.
BB: Yeah Joe middle level employees, are they seeing a benefit to being empowered by taking out bureaucracy?
JG: I mean absolutely I mean I think what you’re seeing is taking the best of Silicon Valley in the business world and bringing it into the government. We’re bringing the best practices and the best methodologies and people are inspired, especially on the retirement process which I can speak to. They’ve been trying to modernize and get off of paper since early 2000s not very successfully. Every attempt has gone over budget and been cancelled because it was not successful.
And so I showed up and I feel like I’m here because it’s an interesting problem, we can use design to solve it and good engineering, and really create a better experience for everybody.
EM: We’re talking about elementary Financial controls that are necessary for any company to function. If a commercial company operated the way the federal government does, then it would immediately go bankrupt, it would be delisted, and the officers would be arrested. The changes we’re putting in place will enable the federal government to pass an audit. It will enable taxpayers to know where the money is going, and know that their hard-earned tax dollars are being spent well.
One way that the government is defrauded is because the computer systems don’t talk to each other. The fraud comes when someone exploits that Gap to take advantage. For example there were over $300 million of small business administration loans that have been given out to people under the age of 11. Well actually to add up, it’s 300 million under the age of 11, and over 300 million to over the age of 120. Definitely small business loans correct. Yet the oldest American is 114 years old. So it’s safe to say if their age is 115 or above they’re fake or they should be in the book of World Records. And we should not be giving out um loans to babies, yet the youngest recipient of a small business administration loan is a 9-month year old, which is a very precocious baby.
Obviously it was just fraudulent. They are doing terrible things. They actually will see that a kid’s been born, they will steal that kid’s social security number and then take out a loan and and leave that kid with a with a bad credit rating. Terrible Things are being done is what we’re saying and the reason this is happening is because the the two systems are not talking to each other.
AA: So you don’t know at the small business administration that you’re giving a loan to a 9-month-old, which happened in one case, because you’re not cross referencing that with the Social Security Administration data that has birth dates. That very very simple fix eliminates tremendous fraud. And there are multiple systems across the government where the systems are not speaking with one another. Just solving that simple problem would solve a huge amount of fraud.
EM: One of the the key tricks that the fraudsters pull is that they will use the fact that someone is marked as live. Since that social security number is marked as live in Social Security, they then can get disability and unemployment insurance benefits for a dead person because the databases don’t talk to each other. So the person is falsely marked alive in Social Security, so the fraudster can get benefits from a dead person. This is happening all the time at scale.
BB: We didn’t talk about any plans to approach cuts at the Pentagon, you’re in there.
EM: You know the Pentagon has not passed an audit in a very long time. Crazy as it sounds they will lose 20 $30 billion a year and they literally don’t know where it went. Senator Collins was telling me about how she gave the Navy $112 billion for extra submarines and got zero extra submarines. When she held a hearing and asked where did the 112 billion go, they didn’t know.
BB: Are you surprised at some of the legal efforts and some of the judges that have weighed in. There’s about eight or 10 now of these cases that are at least temporary holds and they’re being challenged by the DOJ. Are you surprised by that push back?
EM: Well the DC circuit is notorious for having a a very far-left bias and when you look at the people close to some of these judges, people who are working at these NGOS, they’re the ones getting this money. Does that seem like a system that lacks corruption?
BB: It sounds like corruption to me. Last thing do you guys all see this as a patriotic duty? Is that really what this is about?
TH: It’s essential I do 100%. I was running five businesses in Houston and I left that. I left great people to do this. And my wonderful wife said go for it and here I am. I feel like this is me giving back to the country. If we don’t do this we’re sunk. Unless this exercise is successful the ship of America will sink, that’s why we’re doing it.
BB: Well gentlemen I really appreciate the time today and hopefully it took some of the myth and mystery out of Doge and what’s happening behind the scenes. Thank you. We asked on X your platform for some for some questions and here is uh C. Sperling: Are they happy with the speed at which they’re making changes? Are there any changes they would like to make but haven’t yet?
EM: Well in the context of the government we’re moving like lightning. In the context of what I’m used to moving it’s slower than I’d like. So what seems like incredibly fast action by government standards is slower than I’d like, to be totally Frank. But what we are all making solid progress on a very sort of thorny problem, a tough problem really. It’s kind of like painful hard work to reconcile all of the government databases to eliminate the waste and fraud. These databases don’t talk to each other and that’s really the biggest vulnerability for fraud. Painful as it is, it has to be done and will greatly improve the efficiency of the government systems.
The supposed climate cataclysm consensus is disintegrating under growing pressure from reality. Green energy subsidies, regulations and mandates are crumbling. Greenpeace has been hit with a $667-million judgment for conspiracy, defamation, trespass, and fostering arson and property destruction.
Last year’s “Buy a Tesla – save the planet” placards have been exchanged for “mostly peaceful” protests based on “Torch a Tesla – save our democracy” and infernos of toxic pollution and “carbon” emissions.
Even higher anxiety is battering climate activists from the Lee Zeldin Environmental Protection Agency’s review of EPA’s 2009 “Endangerment Finding” (EF) – the foundation and justification for restrictive Obama and Biden Era standards and regulations on permissible electricity generation, automobiles, furnaces, home appliances and much more. Six Good Reasons to Overturn:
CO2 is the Essence of Life on Earth. Damning it as a Pollutant is absurd and ignorant.
Humans and animals exhale carbon dioxide when they breathe, combustion processes also emit CO2, and during photosynthesis plants absorb CO2 and emit oxygen. More atmospheric CO2 helps plants grow better, faster and with less water. Nearly all life on Earth depends on this process. It’s basic science.
That’s why the Clean Air Act doesn’t include carbon dioxide in its list of dangerous pollutants, along with carbon monoxide, lead, nitrogen dioxide, ground-level ozone, particulates and sulfur dioxide.
But fossil-fuel-hating activists blame CO2 for the alleged “climate crisis” – and in Massachusetts v. EPA the US Supreme Court said EPA could regulate CO2 emissions if the agency found that they “cause or contribute” to “air pollution” that may be “reasonably anticipated” to “endanger public health or welfare.”
The Obama EPA quickly determined that they did and issued an Endangerment Finding that gave the agency effective control over America’s energy, transportation, industries, furnaces and stoves– indeed, over almost every facet of our lives and living standards – to help “fundamentally transform” the nation.
In formulating its decision, EPA did no research of its own, relied heavily on GIGO computer models and outdated technical studies,dismissed the clear benefits of rising atmospheric CO2 levels, and ignored studies that didn’t support its decision. EPA even told one of its own experts (who had offered evidence and analyses contradicting official claims) that “the administration has decided to move forward [on implementing the EF] and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision.”
That alone is a compelling reason for reversing the Endangerment Finding. But other realities also argue convincingly that EPA’s 2009 action should be nullified.
EPA had no authority to convert plant-fertilizing, life-giving carbon dioxide into a dangerous, health-threatening pollutant.
First, Massachusetts v. EPA has been sidelined, rendered irrelevant or effectively reversed.
West Virginia v. EPA (2022) ruled that federal agencies may not violate the “major questions doctrine,” which holds that, in the absence of clear congressional direction or authorization, agencies may not make decisions or issue regulations “of vast economic and political significance.”
The Obama EPA had no clear congressional language or authorization to declare that carbon dioxide is a pollutant that would likely “endanger public health or welfare.” The Supreme Court’s minimal guidance in Massachusetts underscores the absence of congressional intent or direction. The process EPA used in rendering its predetermined finding demonstrates how little actual science played a role. And the enormous significance and impact of the EF decision and subsequent regulations can hardly be disputed.
Similarly, the SCOTUS 2024 ruling in Loper Bright v. Raimondo overturned the court’s 1984 decision in Chevron v. NRDC and ended judicial deference to government agencies (the “Chevron doctrine”). Bureaucrats may no longer devise “reasonable interpretations” of unclear statutory language if those interpretations would significantly expand regulatory powers or inflate private sector costs.
These two decisions mean EPA had no authority to convert plant-fertilizing, life-giving carbon dioxide into a dangerous, health-threatening pollutant.
Natural Climate Forces and CO2 Benefits Were Ignored by EPA 2009 Ruling
Second, reams of post-2009 studies and analyses show that CO2 is hugely beneficial to forests, grasslands and croplands – and that CO2 and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) have not replaced the powerful, complex, interconnected natural forces that have always driven global warming, climate change, ice ages, Little Ice Ages, and extreme weather events. EPA ignored this in 2009.
Others demonstrate that there is no climate crisis, nothing unprecedented in today’s climate and weather, and nothing modern industrialized societies cannot cope with far more easily than our ancestors did.
Human Lives are Sustained by Hydrocarbon Fuels and By-Products
Third, our energy, jobs, living standards, health, welfare, national security and much more depend on fossil fuels – for energy and for pharmaceuticals, plastics and thousands of other essential products that are manufactured using petrochemical feedstocks.
Developing Nations Need and Will Use More Hydrocarbons in Any Case
Fourth, China, India and other rapidly developing nations also depend on fossil fuels – and in fact are increasing their coal and petroleum use every year – to build their industries and economies and improve their people’s health and living standards. They are not about stop doing so to appease those who insist the world faces a climate crisis. That means even eliminating coal, oil, gas and petrochemical use in the United States would have no effect on global GHG emissions.
Primary Threat to Earth Future is Losing Reliable, Affordable Energy
Finally, the primary threats to human and planetary health and welfare come not from using fossil fuels – but from eliminating them, trying to switch to “clean, green, renewable” energy, and no longer having vital petrochemical products.
As Britain and Germany have shown, switching to intermittent, weather-dependent wind and solar energy with backup power raises electricity prices to 3-4 times what average Americans currently pay. Industries cannot compete internationally, millions lose their jobs, living expenses soar, and families cannot afford to heat their homes in winter or cool them in summertime.
Thousands die unnecessarily every year from heatstroke, hypothermia, and diseases they would survive if they weren’t so hot, cold or malnourished.
In poor countries, millions die annually from indoor pollution from wood and dung fires, from spoiled food due to lack of refrigeration, from contaminated drinking water due to the absence of sanitation and treated water, and from diseases that would be cured in modern healthcare systems.
The common factor in all these deaths is the absence of reliable,
affordable energy, largely imposed by climate-focused bureaucrats
who finance only wind and solar projects in poor nations.
Wind and solar power, electric vehicle and grid-backup batteries, and associated transmission lines require metals and minerals mining and processing on unprecedented scales, power-generation facilities blanketing millions of acres of croplands and wildlife habitats, and the disposal of gigantic equipment that breaks or wears out quickly and cannot be recycled.
Reliance on wind, solar and battery power also means blackouts amid heatwaves and cold spells, cars stalled in snowstorms and hurricane evacuations – and thus still more deaths.
A slightly warmer planet with more atmospheric CO2 would be greatly beneficial for plants, wildlife and humanity. A colder planet with less carbon dioxide would significantly reduce arable croplands, growing seasons, wildlife habitats and our ability to feed humanity.
EPA’s 2009 Endangerment Finding ignored virtually all these realities.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s reexamination of that decision
must not repeat that mistake.
A leaked government analysis has found that Net Zero could crash the economy, reducing GDP by a massive 10% by 2030. Yet the spectacular thing about this analysis is that it expects this to happen not if Net Zero fails—but if it succeeds. In effect, it is saying that if the government really does force us to give up petrol cars, gas boilers, foreign holidays, and beef, then there would be perfectly workable things left idle, such as cars, boilers, planes, and cows. Idling—or stranding—your assets in this way is an expensive economic disaster.
Even more intriguing was the government’s economically illiterate response to the leak. A spokesman said: “Net zero is the economic opportunity of the twenty-first century, and will deliver good jobs, economic growth and energy security as part of our Plan for Change.”
Do they really think that economic growth is the same thing
as spending money? Because it isn’t.
Imagine the government saying that it is going to require the entire population to throw out all their socks and buy new ones by next Thursday. Under the logic it espouses for Net Zero, this would result in a tremendous burst of economic growth. Think of all the jobs created in the sock industry and the shops! They would be better off. Ah, but you, the consumer, would be poorer. You would have as many socks as before but less money. This is the broken window fallacy, explained by Frédéric Bastiat nearly 200 years ago: going around breaking windows makes work for glaziers but does not create growth.
Net Zero is a project to replace an existing set of technologies with another set of technologies: power stations with wind farms, petrol cars with electric cars, gas boilers with heat pumps, plane trips in the sun with caravan trips in the rain, cows with lentils. The output from these technologies is intended to be the same: electricity, transport, holidays, food.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that these new technologies and activities require exactly as much money to build and run as the old ones. What have you gained? Less than nothing because you have retired existing devices early, losing the latter half of their lives. It would be like replacing all the socks in your drawers long before they needed replacing but with identical socks. Does that make you richer? No, poorer.
If the new technologies are more efficient than the old ones, fine. LED light bulbs use about 90% less electricity than incandescent bulbs did. So yes, it does make sense to throw out your old bulbs before they expire, stranding those assets, to save electricity and money. Is the same true of a wind farm or a heat pump? No, they are demonstrably more expensive and less reliable at producing the same electricity than the devices they are replacing. They are worse, not better.
That’s why they need subsidies. We have spent £100 billion so far subsidising “green” energy in the past few decades, money we could have spent on something else: tax cuts, for example. So, the green energy transition has made us poorer, not richer. It has given us the most expensive electricity in the entire developed world.
It has made some people richer, for sure. Dale Vince, an eco-tycoon, has made a fortune out of building unreliable energy. So have lots of fat cats in the City of London, lots of big landowners in the Highlands of Scotland, and lots of manufacturers in China. I have lost count of the number of times wealthy people have told me I am wrong to criticise the unreliable energy industry because “my son Torquil’s fund has done rather well.”
Net Zero crony capitalism is efficient at one thing:
transferring money from poor people to rich people.
This government has forgotten that its job is not to champion the interests of producers, but consumers. So did the last government, though Kemi Badenoch’s speech on Tuesday showed a welcome return to thinking about consumers. Electricity is not an end in itself; it is a means to an end, an essential input allowing us to do the one and only thing that does, really does, represent growth—achieving more output with less input.
Right now, the Net Zero transition is doing the very opposite.
The climate crisis narrative ignores real issues like
poor infrastructure and overpopulation, pushing costly policies
that hurt economies while failing to improve resilience.
According to theUnited Nations, “Climate change is a global emergency that goes beyond national borders.” From theWorld Economic Forum, “Urgent global action must be taken to reduce emissions and safeguard human health from the multi-pronged negative impacts of climate change globally.”
From every multinational institution in the world, we hear the same message. From the World Bank, “The world is battling a perfect storm of climate, conflict, economic, and nature crises.” From the World Health Organization, “Between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, and heat.”
A major problem with all this unanimity over this “emergency” is the fact that for at least half of all people living in Western nations in 2025, the UN, WEF, WHO, and World Bank have no credibility. We don’t want to “own nothing and be happy” as our middle class is crushed. We don’t want the only politically acceptable way to maintain national economic growth to rely on population replacement. And with only the slightest numeracy, we see apocalyptic proclamations as lacking substance.
Top Ten Causes of Death Globally 2021
For example, while 250,000 “additional deaths per year” is tragic, worldwide estimates of total deaths are not quite70 million per year.These “additional deaths” constitute a 0.36 percent increase over that baseline, just over one-third of one percent. Not even a rounding error.
Source NASA
Similarly, an alarmist prediction from NASA is that “Antarctica is losing ice mass (melting) at an average rate of about150 billion tons per year, and Greenland is losing about 270 billion tons per year, adding to sea level rise.” Let’s unpack that a bit. A billion tons is a gigaton, equivalent in volume to one cubic kilometer. So Antarctica is losing 150 cubic kilometers of ice per year. But Antarctica has an estimated total ice mass of 30 million cubic kilometers. Which means Antarctica is losing about one twenty-thousandth of one percent of its total ice mass per year. That is well below the accuracy of measurement. It is an estimate, and the conclusion it suggests is of no significance.
One may wonder about Greenland, with “only” 2.9 million cubic kilometers of ice, melting at an estimated rate of 270 gigatons per year. But that still yields a rate of loss of less than one one-hundredth of one percent per year, which is almost certainly below the ability to actually gauge total ice mass and total annual ice loss.
What about sea level rise? Here again, basic math yields underwhelming conclusions. The total surface area of the world’s oceans is 361 million square kilometers. If you spread 420 gigatons over that surface (Greenland and Antarctica’s melting combined), you get a sea level rise of not quite 1.2 millimeters per year. This is, again, so insignificant that it is below the threshold of our ability to measure.
These fundamental facts will turn anyone willing
to do even basic fact-checking into a cynic.
What’s really going on? We get at least a glimpse of truth from the above quotation from the World Bank, where they ascribe the challenges of humanity to several causes: “climate, conflict, economic, and nature crises.” There’s value in the distinctions they make. They list “nature crisis” as distinct from “climate,” and at least explicitly, “climate” is not cited as resulting from some anthropogenically generated trend of increasing temperatures and increasingly extreme weather. They just say “climate.”
Which brings us to the point: Conflict and economic crises are far bigger sources of human misery, and we face serious environmental challenges that have little to do with climate change and more to do with how we manage our industry, our wilderness, and our natural resources. And we are face “climate” challenges even when catastrophic climate events have nothing to do with any alleged “climate crisis.”
A perfect example of how the climate “crisis” narrative is falsely applied when, in fact, the climate-related catastrophe would have happened anyway is found in the disastrousfloods that devastated Pakistanin 2022. Despite the doomsday spin from PBS (etc.), these floods were not abnormal because of “climate change.” They were an abnormal catastrophe because in just 60 years, the population of that nation has grown from 45 million to 240 million people. They’vechannelized their rivers, built dense new settlementsonto what were once floodplains and other marginal land, they’ve denuded their forests, which took away the capacity to absorb runoff, and they’ve paved thousands of square miles, creating impervious surfaces where water can’t percolate. Of course, a big storm made a mess. The weather didn’t change. The nation changed.
The disaster story repeats everywhere. Contrary to the narrative, the primary cause is not “climate change.” Bigger tsunamis? Maybe it’s because coastalaquifers were overdrafted, which caused land subsidence, or because previously uninhabited tidelands were settled because the population quintupled in less than two generations, and because coastal mangrove forests were destroyed, which used to attenuate big waves. What about deforestation? Perhaps because these nations have been denied the ability to develop natural gas and hydroelectric power, they’re stripping away the forests for fuel to cook their food. In some cases, they’re burning their forests to make room for biofuel plantations, in a towering display of irony and corruption.
In California, our nation’s epicenter of climate crisis fearmongering and the subsequent commercial opportunism, the emphasis on crisis instead of resilience has led to absurd policies. Instead of bringing back the timber industry to thin the state’s overgrown forests, the governor mandates exclusive sales of EVs by 2035. Instead of responsibly drilling oil in California’s ample reserves of crude, California imports 75 percent of its oil, and its economy still relies on oil for half the energy that the state consumes.
Worldwide, these mistakes multiply. Biofuel plantations consume half a million square miles in order to replace a mere two percent of transportation fuel. A mad scramble across every continent to increase mining by an order of magnitude to meet the demand for raw materials to manufacture batteries, wind turbines, and solar panels. Denial of funds for natural gas development in Africa, condemning over a billion people to ongoing energy poverty.
Simple truths are obscured by the climate crisis narrative. We need to rebuild our infrastructure for climate resilience because much of it is over a century old, at the same time as the US population has tripled. Floods and hurricanes cause more damage because there are more people, and more of them live in areas that have always been hit by floods and hurricanes.
The truths are as endless as they are repressed. We can’t possibly lift all of humanity into a middle-class lifestyle without at least doubling energy production worldwide, and we can’t possibly accomplish that while also reducing our use of coal, oil, and gas. Renewables aren’t renewable (here’s a must-read on that topic). Offshore wind is an environmental disaster, as is biofuel, as is the explosion of totally unregulated mining to feed the renewables industry. On the other hand, extreme environmental laws and regulations are harming economic growth, freedom, and, in no small irony, the innovation and investment that would give us the wealth we need to better protect the environment. And the prevailing economic, environmental, and cultural challenge in the world is not the climate but crashing birthrates among developing nations at the same time as the population of the world’s most undeveloped nations continues to explode exponentially.
We need climate resilience in order to properly protect a global population that has quadrupled to 8 billion in just the last century, spreading to every corner of the earth. That goal would be easier if once-trusted global institutions would allow for honest debate and practical infrastructure development. Instead, they continue to spew transparently misleading climate crisis propaganda, adhering to a mission that can only be described as repressive on all fronts—culturally, economically, and environmentally.
Similarly for fossil fuels, 
Primary Threat to Earth Future is Losing Reliable, Affordable Energy
Science Matters 