Climate Finance

Why Your Energy Bill is So High (Kathryn Porter)

Posted on by Ron Clutz

A part of Battle of Ideas Festival 2025 was the above presentation explaining plainly why UK energy has become so expensive. For those who prefer reading, below is a transcript with my added bolds and images.

Why are our electricity bills so high? We’re told as Craig referenced that it’s all the fault of gas. Now this argument is going to come to somewhat crashing reality in the next year. I was just checking the prices now and from yesterday’s close we’re now 87 percent down from the highs in 2022.  Now has anybody seen an 87 percent reduction in their bills, hands up, anybody? Oh that’s a huge shock. Next year gas analysts expect that the gas price will return to its long-term average pre-2021.

So the gas crisis actually began in the autumn of 2021, about six months before the invasion of Ukraine and it was to do with the recovery from COVID.  Basically during COVID demand for gas fell because industrial activity dropped, a lot of upstream production was shut in and it takes time to bring that back, you can’t just turn on the tap in most cases, it requires quite a bit more work than that. So there was a delay in bringing that production back online and when you have more demand than you’ve got supply then prices go up and then Putin took advantage of this in the following February and well we all know what happened then.

Since then in the upstream sector they’ve been busy bringing new LNG, liquefied natural gas projects, on stream.  By the end of this year there’ll be enough new LNG to fully replace all of Russian gas and sometime next year we’re expecting the global gas market to go back into length. So there’ll be more supply globally than there is demand and prices are expected to fall. In fact the only reason why Miliband could possibly deliver the 300 pound reduction in bills would be because of gas prices falling.

Unfortunately I think he’s going to more than offset that with higher subsidy costs. So the first thing is that gas is not expensive and really for 25 years we had very low and very stable gas prices. Gas was cheap, in fact the cheapness of gas was what enabled the energy transition to even begin. I wrote a report earlier in the year about the cost of renewables, if you do a chart that shows the wholesale price of gas, the wholesale price of electricity and then the domestic price of electricity what you find is that the wholesale gas price was low and stable until 2021.

The wholesale electricity price was basically the wholesale gas price plus a little bit which is what you’d expect and then the domestic price was the wholesale price of electricity plus a little bit. And again you’d expect that you buy a wholesale, you pay for it to be delivered to your house, you’ve got to pay the supplier some money for you know doing the admin for that, they want to take a bit of profit, there’s some taxes, that’s what you’d expect.

Figure 4 – International Domestic Electricity Prices (p per kWh). UK has the highest domestic electricity prices in the IEA.

But from 2006 this relationship started to break down and what we saw was a steep increase in what households were paying despite a flat trajectory for wholesale prices. Why was this? It was because we were adding on policy costs. We’re subsidizing renewables, we started using suppliers to do all sorts of other social programs, wealth redistribution, literally the warm homes discount is suppliers.  They phone up the department for work and pensions and they find out which of their customers are eligible and then they calculate how much that discount is going to cost and then they add on an admin fee and then they spread that cost out across all our other customers.

They take money from one group of customers to give to another. This is wealth redistribution, it’s not the job of private companies. The energy company obligation, we’ve heard about that in the news this week where I think the National Audit Office has written a report saying how inefficient it is, how low quality the work is.  Well guess what, energy companies are not experts in construction. They are being expected to engage in sub contracts to companies that will come in and install insulation and similar things in your home. They don’t know anything about this, this isn’t part of their core business.

Typically as wind and solar power share of supply increases, distribution and transmission costs rise sharply.

It’s a hugely inefficient thing to expect suppliers to do and the cost of all that is added to bills.  The smart meter rollout, we’re the only country in the world that expects suppliers, retailers, to install network equipment in people’s homes. Everyone else got the network companies to do it, you know, duh.  And what’s even worse is that the supply business was created within the Utility Act 2000. It was the final part of unbundling the energy system and almost immediately both the governments and the regulators started telling everyone that suppliers were greedy profiteers that couldn’t be trusted.

And then they expressed shock that nobody wants these greedy profiteers who can’t be trusted to install devices in their home that would give the greedy suppliers that can’t be trusted lots of information about how they’re using electricity and gas and potentially enable them to change your prices remotely, put you onto prepayment tariffs remotely and do all sorts of other stuff remotely, potentially without your permission.  And they were just kind of shocked that people didn’t want to do that. So the whole market is completely dysfunctional.

Now, when we come to the real costs and the real reasons that our bills are so high has to do with renewables.  When we build renewable generation, we have to provide a big subsidy. Now, a lot of people think, well, the wind and the sun are free. And this is true. Wind energy and solar energy is free. But the equipment needed to turn that energy into electricity is not free. That’s actually pretty expensive.

Now, imagine that we only had renewables on our grid. And when you’re setting prices, normally, the price at which you sell your goods is linked to your short run marginal operating cost, which for wind and solar is close to zero. Essentially, you’d be giving it away.  How are you going to recover your capital costs for that expensive equipment if you have to give away your products? You’re never going to be able to do it. So basic economic theory will tell you that renewables will never be built without subsidies. They are always going to require subsidies because you will never be able to recover the capital costs to selling the electricity at the short run marginal operating cost of that electricity.

So we give subsidies to renewables. And that subsidy is higher than the cost of generating electricity with gas. So the argument about gas pushing your bills up is nonsense. These subsidies are higher than the cost of generating electricity with gas. And the way the new subsidies work is that the generators are guaranteed a fixed price, and they receive that by selling that electricity in the market. And then if that’s lower than this fixed price, they get a top up.

And it’s a one for one relationship. If you lower the wholesale price of electricity by one pound, you increase the subsidy cost by one pound. And the subsidies are added to our bills. They come straight out of our pockets. So when people say, oh, we’ve got to get off gas, we’ve got to stop marginal pricing. People talk about marginal pricing as if we’re some weird outlier in the world markets doing this strange marginal pricing thing, taking the most expensive form of generation to set the price.

Every deregulated power market in the world sets the electricity price through marginal pricing. In fact, most commodity markets do the same thing. This isn’t weird. It’s completely normal.

And if you decided to change price formation to lower the wholesale price, your bill will stay the same. You’re just moving money in different buckets around the bill. Now the bit that says wholesale price will go down, and the bit that says policy costs will go up. But the amount you pay will stay the same. And so this is the whole misinformation that we have.

The other issues with renewables are you’ve got to pay for backup. They have low energy density, so you need a lot more wires to connect them. A good sized gas power station, 800 megawatts. If you wanted an equivalent size wind farm, you need 60 turbines. So that’s 60 times more wires. But to get the same amount of electricity over the year, because your wind is only working about a third of the time compared with about 86% of the time for gas, you need something like 150 times the wires. You need 150 turbines.

All that gets added onto your bills. The cost of backup to make sure you’ve got generation available when it’s not windy and sunny, that goes straight onto the bill.  And the real-time balancing cost, where you’re having to even out the impact of clouds and gusts of wind, all goes on the bill. And so this is why our bills are so high.

Net Zero is Dead, Carney Still Pushing It

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Gwyn Morgan reports on nonsense in Canada in his Financial Post article Net zero is dead. Why is Carney still pushing it?. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The PM did abolish the consumer carbon tax,
though only by shifting it to businesses.

Delegates at the first World Climate Conference held in 1979 adopted a declaration calling on governments to “foresee and prevent man-made changes to the climate that might be adverse to the well-being of humanity.” It was, in effect, a declaration of war against the oil and gas industry.

At the time, I was the president of a Calgary-headquartered oil and gas company that I had co-founded, as well as volunteer-president of our industry’s public communication vehicle, the Independent Petroleum Association of Canada. My industry colleagues were reluctant to take on the global climate elite, but I believed doing so was vital to the future of our industry, which was the bedrock of western Canada’s economy. My public commentary was, of course, condemned as evidence that I was only out to save the oil and gas industry.

But it wasn’t just my responsibility as an industry leader that called me to challenge that World Climate Conference declaration. I knew that extremely hot temperatures had been occurring long before that first Kyoto conference. For example, in the 1920s European immigrants settled in the verdant grasslands of southeastern Alberta. Some of those hopeful settlers were my wife’s grandparents. A decade later, rain stopped falling and temperatures soared as high as 43 C. Hot, dry winds blew precious topsoil away, spawning choking dust storms. The “Dirty Thirties” had arrived. Starving settlers turned to eating rabbits, gophers and anything else edible they could scrounge. Parents took their kids to school in blinding dust storms, clutching fencelines and breathing through bandanas. And the wind kept blowing through the long, cold Alberta winters. Contrary to net-zero zealots’ rhetoric, half of Canada’s 20 hottest days pre-dated that 1979 World Climate Conference.

World Climate Change Conferences continued during the 1980s and 1990s, each featuring more alarmist rhetoric than the last. At the 1997 conference in Japan, 37 industrialized countries adopted the “Kyoto Protocol,” which committed them to reducing green-house gas emissions to five per cent below 1990 levels by 2012. The war on fossil fuels was on in earnest, and it was destined to escalate to ridiculous heights. At the 2012 conference in Qatar, the rich countries committed to reducing emissions by at least 18 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020.

The naivety of those targets is breathtaking. Countries accounting for over half of global emissions, including China, Russia and India, continued their rapid growth without constraint. Virtually all other Asian, Middle Eastern and South American nations had no intention of playing the Kyoto game. Their emissions were going nowhere but up.

The 22nd climate conference was held in Morocco in November 2016, a year after Canadians elected the Trudeau government. In keeping with the new prime minister’s zealous embrace of the cause, environment minister Catherine McKenna led a delegation of 225, one of the largest among the 100 countries assembled. That cost taxpayers a lot in emissions-spewing flights!

Imagine our delegation’s shock when, just 24 hours after the conference opened, they heard the soon-to-be 45th U.S. president, Donald Trump, declare that man-made global warming was a “big hoax” promulgated by China and other countries wanting to steal American jobs.

With all the major players sidelined, who was left to save the planet from climate Armageddon? Just the EU, Japan and Australia, with a combined emission share of 15 per cent. And Canada, adding our minuscule 1.6 per cent. But futility didn’t deter the Trudeau government from saddling Canadians with carbon taxes and taxpayer-funded wind and solar power subsidies in pursuit of its “net-zero” holy grail.

Now we have a new prime minister who is trying to appear less committed to the net-zero mission. But the transformation of the UN Secretary General’s “special envoy on climate action and finance” has been less than biblical. True, one of his first actions on taking power was to remove the despised consumer carbon tax. But that was largely sleight-of-hand, moving the tax out of public view onto beleaguered businesses already struggling with Trump tariffs.

Meanwhile, the foundations of the net-zero emissions religion are crumbling rapidly. In 2021, Microsoft founder Bill Gates wrote a pro-carbon tax book entitled “How to Avoid a Climate Change Disaster.” But four years later, in a letter published on the eve of the most recent UN COP conference, he advised, “too many resources are focused on emissions and the environment. More money should go toward improving lives and curbing disease and poverty.” And he called out the “doomsday view” of climate change, urging world leaders to make a strategic pivot and focus on issues that “have the greatest impact on human welfare.”

Net-zero fatigued Canadians should be asking their prime minister, “Why are you weakening our already struggling economy with carbon taxes and wasting taxpayer money subsidizing wind farms when it will make no perceptible difference to the global climate?”  He owes them an answer.

 

Davos Ditches Climate, Focuses on Economy

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Ward Clark reports the course correction in his RedState article Davos Ditches Climate: Elites Now Eyeing Economy Instead.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Turns out that concern for mankind’s effect on the global climate isn’t much of a concern at Davos this year. It is, after all, the meeting of the World Economic Forum, not the World Climate Forum – the United Nations already has a forum for climate change, and it drew a lot of ignoring this year, too. This year in Davos, Switzerland, though interest in all things climate seemed to be nearing an all-time low.

A recent article at Climate Change News discussing this week’s 2026 World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, Switzerland worries that climate change is no longer a high priority for the attending global elites, while also attempting to reassure readers that the topic hasn’t disappeared entirely. It is true that climate change is dropping on the list of elites’ concerns, but it is not a bad thing. The attendees’ concerns are still wildly out of step with the concerns of average people who are impacted the most by the policies discussed and pushed at Davos.

The article, titled “Ahead of Davos, climate drops down global elite’s list of pressing concerns,” was written before the Davos event kicked off Monday, January 19, and focuses on a survey conducted by the WEF’s Global Risks Perception Survey of “experts” and leaders in advance of the meeting. This year, the survey found that for the first time in years, “climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss have dropped down an international ranking of short-term concerns for high-profile business leaders, academics, and politicians,” as priorities shifted towards more concern over “economic risks like geoeconomic confrontation, economic downturn, inflation, and asset bubbles bursting.” (See the graph, below, from the WEF).

That’s a novel notion. An economic forum worried about economics.

Oh, the climate can have an effect on economics; there’s little doubt about that. A real humdinger of a climate crisis, like a major volcanic eruption, can have dramatic effects on everything from agriculture to fisheries, and if people can’t eat, they have little time to worry about anything other than keeping their belly buttons from rubbing a hole in their backbones.

As far as possible reasons for the shift, a polling form often used by the WEF found that this year the general run of citizens – you know, the people who elect a lot of the “elites” at Davos – are a lot more worried about the price of eggs than their carbon footprints.

Personally, I’d prefer to think that people are just figuring it out. Unless a government is willing to go full Great Britain and tell the subjects – the Brits, we remind you, are not citizens, not as we think of the word – and say, “You’ll have your electric cars and heat pumps, and you’ll bloody well like it or else,” then people just aren’t seeing the point.   Giving up the gas stove, the SUV, and the comfortable, gas-heated home, just to keep the Earth’s mean temperature from rising by a degree and a half over the next century? Plenty of regular folks aren’t buying the hype. They just don’t see what the big worry is, and the people at Davos must be wetting their fingers and holding them aloft, because it sure seems like they know which way the wind is blowing.

That’s a good thing.

 

 

A German Sees WEF Itself Suffer Great Reset

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Thomas Kolbe reports on a major turnabout in his American Thinker article Hour of the Opponents in Davos.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Machiavelli is dead, long live freedom.

Wednesday was the day of the opponents at the annual World Economic Forum gathering in Davos. Donald Trump and Argentina’s Javier Milei tore apart the WEF agenda. One declared globalism as officially failed, the other wielded an intellectual-ethical scalpel through the decayed body of the establishment.

Norwegian Børge Brende has been the chairman of the World Economic Forum since last year. He took over after a heated internal personnel debate from the WEF’s founder, Klaus Schwab, who for decades dominated the agenda of this shadowy institution for political will-shaping.

Schwab did so with undeniable success. The WEF has become an ideological melting pot of European politics, from which socialist concepts long proven costly in blood and failure continue to resurface — now repackaged as morally renewed, dressed in green.

Whether it’s the EU’s climate-socialist agenda, peculiar ideas like the 15-minute city to restrict individual mobility, or digital control currencies designed to make hidden capital controls palatable — the WEF has always been a source of centralist fantasies of political power.

Fleet of Teslas at WEF Forum

Take the vision of the digital identity of the new global citizen, who no longer exists as an individual but as a managed dataset — this too originates in Davos think tanks. Every person would possess a centralized, supranational digital existence where financial behavior, health status, and political reliability are consolidated into a controllable unit. The culmination of the “transparent citizen,” the final chapter of individual dignity and freedom.

Mobility, nutrition, housing — all are turned into moral tests. The CO2 footprint replaces personal judgment; deviation is social misconduct. Davos has grown in the haze of its control fetish into the symbol of a leadership claim by a detached pseudo-elite.

Hour of the Antagonists

Informal political organizations like the WEF live on media presence. Continuous coverage is their lifeblood, which makes inviting the most powerful political figures — like U.S. president Donald Trump or South America’s rising star, Argentina’s Javier Milei — practically inevitable.

Brende, Schwab, and the roughly one thousand invited guests
surely anticipated what the appearance of the two might bring.
And they were not disappointed.

 Trump, outside his MAGA orbit hardly known as a master orator of refined rhetoric, declared the World Economic Forum agenda officially failed in his own unmistakable way. He mocked European energy policy, spoke openly about the continent’s self-destructive migration policies, and presented an US economic record that made even seasoned technocrats sit up:

♦  5.4 percent growth in the last quarter,
♦  full deregulation of the energy sector, and
♦  a radical downsizing of the federal bureaucracy by 250,000 employees.

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These were blows to the heart of central planners and declared friends of the “big state.” Heavy on main clauses and rich in imagery, Trump dismantled the Davosites’ fantasies of omnipotence one by one. Planning versus growth, moralism versus prosperity, control versus dynamism — every certainty was exposed like a warped political myth.

His ultimate checkmate came with the sober reminder of Europe’s total dependence on the American military apparatus. Those who cannot defend themselves, the unstated message implied, should be cautious in delivering moral lectures. Greenland salutes.

The outraged media response that followed proves one thing: he hit the mark. And, in essence, did nothing less than openly lay out the conditions of this system’s potential capitulation.

Milei Delivers an Ethical Bankruptcy

Where Trump brought a rhetorical sledgehammer, Milei immediately followed with the elegant intellectual foil. The organizers had clearly hoped to tone down the disruption of their feel-good gathering by seating the two opponents consecutively. But the double act only amplified the effect — and the message.

Milei opened with a jarring statement: “Machiavelli is dead.” Its meaning, however, was unmistakable. The politics of public manipulation and technocratic governance, which have become a guiding principle in EU Europe, do not lead to order but to their own crisis. The state, Milei insisted, must be guided by moral principles and make individual liberty the starting point of political action.

This was the maximum confrontation with the WEF agenda.
The gauntlet had been thrown.

He pressed further. One hundred fifty million people, he alleged, had lost their lives in the name of socialism over the past century; the survivors lived in poverty. Justice, he argued, belongs only to free-trade capitalism: voluntary exchange and the absolute respect for property rights, founded on meritocratic values. This is the recipe for a prosperous civilization.

These words carry weight. In two years, Milei literally turned the helm of his nation: he restored Argentina to growth, radically cut the bureaucracy, and brought inflation under control. Who would have expected that intellectual rigor and ethical grounding could one day inhabit the presidency of a nation as significant as Argentina?

Milei also answered the crucial question of our time:
How can the current cultural crisis be overcome?

Only by returning to the sources, he diagnosed — Greek philosophy as the inspiration of thought, Roman law, republican principles, and above all Judeo-Christian values. Together, these civilizational achievements form the recipe for a Western comeback.

Real wages for Argentina’s registered private sector workers reached 107 on the index (base 2023=100) in February 2025, the highest since August 2018, according to the Observatory of Employment and Business Dynamics.

Milei did not miss an opportunity to deliver a late retort to German chancellor Friedrich Merz. A year ago, Merz had called Milei a politician who tramples his own people and promotes a divisive agenda and continues to foster an anti-business climate. For Milei, however, entrepreneurs are precisely those who drive the innovation of a free-market economy. Politics must stop harassing those trying to build a better world.

In this light, Merz and his government are indeed a burden for anyone striving forward in life, living by values, and resisting the rhetorical trap of vulgar WEF-style socialism.

The Turning Point Has Arrived

Trump and Milei are merely the most visible representatives of an increasingly influential conservative turn. Even if the European press still portrays the American president as a deranged villain and destroyer of a socialist utopia, the message he and Milei deliver is gaining traction.

The cultural and economic crisis of our time is above all a crisis of statism and faith in the strong state. Its seductive arts inevitably lead to megalomania and scenarios of submission — with the civilizational fracture we see today as a consequence.

In Argentina and the United States, the repair work is already underway.
The open question is no longer whether a course correction is possible,
but when Europeans will follow the example of these two.

 

Climate Change Economics, Skip the Hysteria (Lomborg)

Posted on by Ron Clutz

For those who prefer reading, below is an excerpted transcript lightly edited from the interview, including my bolds and added images.

Hey everyone, it’s Andrew Klavan with this week’s interview with Bjorn Lomborg.  I met Bjorn, he probably doesn’t remember this, but I met him many, many years ago at  Andrew Breitbart’s house.   Andrew brought Bjorn over to talk in LA and I listened to him talking about all the simple and inexpensive things that could be done to make actual change and do  actual good in terms of climate change, which I think at that point was still global warming.

And you know, we had a small audience, and I asked  the question, well, if these are so such smart, cheap ideas, why don’t politicians do them?  And Bjorn said, well, because that wouldn’t give them  the chance to display their virtue.  And I thought, here’s a man who not only knows about science, but actually knows about human  nature.  And I’ve been following him ever since.

He is a president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s  Hoover Institution, an author of False Alarm and Best Things First, the best writer, I  think, on climate issues and other issues.  Bjorn, it’s good to see you.

Andrew, it’s great to be here.  And I do remember that event, although I remember it for seeing the guy who played on Airplane.  Sorry. So I remember that because it was it’s still one of my favorite movies. It’s one of the greatest movies ever made, I think.  It really is very, very funny.  Yeah.

On a totally different direction.  So I was watching with great approval Donald Trump’s appearance at the United Nations.  I guess it would be when we’re playing this last week.  And he he had this.  I’m just going to read just a little bit of the speech.  He said in the 1920s and the 1930s, they said global cooling will kill  the world.  We have to do something.  Then they said global warming will kill the world.  But then it started getting cooler.   So now they could just call it climate change because that way they can’t miss if it goes  higher or lower, whatever the hell happens.  It’s climate change. It’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion.   Do you agree with that?

So I get where he’s coming from.  And I think there’s some some truth to this.  I mean, Donald Trump always speaks in larger than real life words.   Yes. So it’s not a con job.  There is a problem.   And actually, in some sense, bizarrely, as it may sound, you know, the world is built  all of our infrastructure is built to live at the temperature that we’ve had for the last  hundred or two hundred years.  That’s true in Los Angeles.  That’s true in Boston.  It’s true everywhere in the world.  And so if it gets colder or if it gets warmer, that will be a problem.  So there is an issue here.

But obviously, it’s vastly exaggerated when people then talk about the end of the world.  You may remember that this was one of the favorite terms of Biden, but not just Biden,  but pretty much everyone for the last four years and certainly more as well.  That this is an existential crisis.   There was a recent survey by the OECD, so in all rich countries in the world, where  they found that percent of all people believe that unmitigated climate change, so  climate change we don’t fix, will likely or very likely lead to the end of mankind.  And that, of course, is a very different statement.

There is a problem, that’s true.  It’s not the end of the world.  
But the end of the world is a great way to get funding.

And that’s why people are playing it out.  But it doesn’t make for good policy.  Remember, if you think the end of the world is near, you’re going to throw everything in the kitchen sink at this, which, of course, is what the campaigners would like you to  do. But you will probably waste an incredible amount of resources because you’re just  going to try everything.

Climate change is a problem.  So I disagree with Trump there.  But yes, there is an incredible amount of exaggeration.  And I agree with him there.  So there’s I mean, the climate changes but we’re not living in a glass bubble.  And we’ve even in I don’t know, I guess it was the late 19th century, the Thames in  London froze over and people went skating on it.  It’s so there are these big changes and there have been ice ages, obviously.  How much of this or do we know how much of this is is caused by human beings?  

I have to preface this with saying I’m a social scientist, so I work a lot on  the costs and the benefits of us doing policies against climate change.  I’ve met with a lot of the natural scientists who study all this.  Please don’t do this at home, but I’ve read the UN climate panel report, most of the pages, not all of them.  And it’s incredibly boring, but it’s also very, very informative.  So so I have a reasonably good take on this. And what they tell us is that the majority of the recent warming that we’ve seen is due to climate change.

I have no idea to evaluate that, no way of independently evaluating that is due to  natural climate change or is manmade, due to mankind.  So is it mostly due to us emitting CO from burning fossil fuels?

So there is a significant part of what’s changed over the last century or  thereabouts, which is about two degrees Fahrenheit or one degree Celsius. So that’s something and that’s something we should look at.  But also, we should get a sense of what’s the total impact of this.  Well, actually, climate economics have spent the last three decades trying to estimate:  what’s the total cost of everything that happens with climate change.

So, you know, there are lots of negatives.  There’ll be more heat waves.  There’ll possibly be stronger storms.  There’s also going to be fewer cold waves, which is actually a good thing.  There’s also going to be CO2 fertilization.  So we’ll have more greenery. You know, if you add all the negatives and all the positives, it become a net negative.  That’s why it’s a problem.  But also get a sense of this.

If you look across all of the studies that we’ve done, we estimate the net negative  impact today is about 0.3% of GDP.  So yeah, a problem, not the end of the world.  And it’s crucial to say, if you look out till 2100 which is sort of the standard  time frame, which is a long time from now, we estimate if we do nothing more about  climate change, so we end up with three degrees Celsius, so about degrees 5.6 Fahrenheit, then the cost will be about to 2 to 3% of global GDP every year.

That’s certainly not nothing.  That’s a lot of trillions of dollars.  But again, it’s 2 to 3%. It’s not, you know, the end of mankind,  It’s not anywhere near a hundred percent.  And this is not me saying this. This is the guy William Nordhaus from Yale university, the only guy to get the  Nobel prize in climate economics.  And Richard Tol one of the most quoted climate economists in the world.  They’ve done separate studies. One to find 2%, the other one to find 3%.  That’s the order of magnitude we’re talking about.  And just for, for added emphasis, remember by then everyone in the world  will be much, much better off.

Just like if you compared people from back in 1925 and until today, the UN on its standard trajectory estimate, the average person in the world by the end of the century will be somewhere around 450% as rich as he or  she is today.  That’s not the US that will.  And you know, people come from Denmark and other rich countries might only be 200%  as rich, but many in Africa and elsewhere will be a thousand percent  richer.  So on average, because of climate change, it will feel like they’re only 435% as rich, which sort of emphasizes, yes, that’s a problem.  I would rather have a world that’s 450% as rich trather than one that’s 435%.  But it’s not the end of the world.

It’s still a fantastically much better world, just a slightly less  fantastically much better world.  And that less money that people will have will mean less money you have to spend, what, shoring up buildings.  And so the way they measure that is actually in equivalence of how much you would need to get compensated to live with the problems.

So we don’t actually look at whether people will fix it or not.  You know, it’s a bit like, if you have a slightly dangerous job, you get more money. And that’s basically a way of saying, but you’ll also have to live with that constant slightly higher risk of dying.  Right.  So we’re compensating you for that.  That’s the, that’s the amount that we’re talking about.  So it’ll feel like you’re only % as rich, although you’ll probably in reality, get all that, that slight extra money to get up to 450%, but then you will also have to live with some problems from climate change.

This week I was arguing with a socialist, lovely guy, but just the  guy who believes that like all money should be redistributed.  And I was pointing out that this was giving a lot of power to the people in  power.  And one of the things I sent him was this article you wrote in the, in the  New York Post, which was exactly the kind of article that makes me angry.  And I mean, it makes me frustrated with our politics. I want to read just a couple of sentences.  Last year, the world spent over $2 trillion on climate policies.  This is Bjorn Lomberg writing in the New York Post.  By 2050 net zero carbon emissions will cost an impossible $27 trillion every year.  So this, this will choke growth, spike energy costs and hit the poor hardest  and still will deliver only 17 cents back on every dollar spent.  Meanwhile, mere billions of dollars could save millions of lives.  I’d like to take this apart a little bit, but to begin with all the stuff that we  are spending this money on, is it doing anything?  Will it have any effect?

It will.  I mean, what, what are we spending money on and what will it do?  So these $2 trillion, that’s sort of the official number from the  International Energy Agency and many others. It’s a very soft number because obviously what goes into all this money,  surprisingly, it’s also all the cost into EVs or electric cars, which  of course gives you a thing that can drive you from place A to B, at least  if it’s been charged.  So, I mean, there are some benefits to this.  It’s also spending on solar panels and wind turbines, which  again, obviously gives you electricity when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. It actually also gives you higher electricity costs all the other  times, because you now need to have backup power for when it’s not shining  or windy,  and that capital is being used less.

So there’s a lot of spending, it’s a very big headline number.  There’s $2 trillion, everyone uses it, but it, but it’s not all that informative,  because the global economy is about a hundred trillion dollars.  It means we’re spending 2% on stuff that we probably wouldn’t have done had we not  been scared witless on climate change.  And that’s a waste.  I mean, remember the total spend on healthcare is perhaps 8%.  The total spend on education globally is about 5%.

These are big numbers.  This is something that could have done a lot of good elsewhere.  But I think the real point here is to say people want to take us to a cost  that’s much, much, much higher.  Remember all the world’s governments, almost all the world’s government now,  not Donald Trump and the US, but most governments have pledged in one form  or another that we’re going to go net zero around 2050 or shortly thereafter.  But nobody looked at what the cost of this will be, which is a little surprising. Because the numbers I’m going to show you suggest  that this one single promise is about a thousand times more expensive than the second costliest policy to which the world has ever committed, which was the Versailles  treaty back in 1919, had Germany actually paid all the money it was supposed to. That cost was about half a trillion dollars  in today’s money, which of course is why Germany never paid it.  But now we’re talking about something that is going to be in the  order of a thousand to two to 3000 times more costly.

Yet nobody’s looked at what the cost will be and what will be the benefits?
There’s no official estimate of this.

So two years ago, a professor from Yale university, Robert Mendelsohn, gathered a lot of really smart climate economists to try to estimate what’s the cost, and what’s the benefit of net zero.  A lot of those really, really smart economists ended up chickening out.  You can understand why it’s a really hard question.  You’re also asking what will happen in the next hundred years and you’re trying to put estimates on it.  At the end of the day, they published a big study published in the journal of climate change economics, which is a period article.

And they had one benefit estimate and three cost estimates.  So this is obviously not great, but it’s the only thing the world has.  And so that gives you a sense of how much will this cost and how much good will do.  If you take the average of these three cost estimates, that gives you $27 trillion in cost per year throughout the 21st century.  That’s where that number comes from.  $27 trillion.  So that’s about a quarter of global GDP right now, because we’re going to be much richer, that is only going to be about 7% of global GDP across the 21st century.  But you know, that’s an enormous cost that’s on the  magnitude of bigger than education, a bit smaller than  healthcare and for everyone in the world, that’s a lot of money.

Now, if this gave you a lot of benefits that might be worthwhile.  I mean, we pay a lot of money for stuff that’s good, but we’ve already  established that even if we could entirely get rid of climate change,  it would only reduce costs by  two to 3%.  So spending 7% to get rid of two to 3% is a bad deal, but unfortunately net zero by 2050 means we’ll only get rid of part of it, right?  Because we’ll already have cost a lot of climate change.  So the net benefit is only about 1% of GDP across the century or about four and a half  trillion dollars.

So there’s a real benefit.  That’s why climate change is real.  There’s a real benefit to net zero, but the benefit is much, much lower than the  cost.  So $4.5 trillion in benefits, $27 trillion in cost every year  in the 21st century, we’ll be paying much, much more than the benefits will generate for the world.  That’s just a bad deal.  There’s no other way to put it.

And the fact that we’re not honest about this and that most people just are not honest about it is one of the reasons why we’re wasting money and  spending it so badly.  The last bit of the quote that you just said was we could do so many other  good things.  Remember, most people in the world are not living in nice countries like the US  or Denmark. Most people are not considering, you know, the biggest problem which of the  many programs and series they want to follow are, am I going to take first or  watch first?  Or, you know, what kind of takeout am I going to have?  They worry about their kids dying from easily curable infectious diseases, not  having enough food, having terrible education, not enough jobs, corruption,  all these other things.  And the truth is we could solve many of these problems, not all of them, but many  of them to save millions of lives at a fraction, a tiny, tiny fraction of this  cost.  So instead of talking trillions, we’re talking billions.

Why is it that we’re so obsessed with spending trillions to do almost no good a  hundred years from now, instead of spending billions and doing a lot of good right  now to avoid people dying from tuberculosis and malaria, avoid  people having terrible education, getting better economies, all these things  that we know work at much lower cost.  That’s my central question to all these feel gooders.  I mean, I know that they want to feel good about themselves, but in some sense, I  would like to believe that they actually want to have done good at the end of the day.

I think it’s much more a question of saying, if I am doing effective policies,  there’s not much money to hand out to friends and to  buy more votes and all that kind of stuff.  Whereas if I am overseeing, you know, an enormous amount of spending on  stuff that doesn’t really matter.  So I can just spend it on whatever.  Then clearly I have a lot more latitude and a lot more opportunity to get  people to like me and to show what a good person I am.  So I think in some sense, it’s just plain politics.  You know, if you’re saying the world is on fire and you’re at  risk.  But  vote for me and I can save your kids.  And it’s only going to cost you 7%.  I can see, you know, why people want to vote for that.  But if you’re saying, look, things are fine and just give me a little bit of  money and I’ll fix the rest of the problems.  It doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, does it?

So, so if, if we were to get to net zero, wouldn’t that cripple poor  countries?  I mean, in other words, it seems to me that people who burn the most fossil fuels  are the people who are building up most and the people who are developing most.  Whereas we’re sort of, we’ve sort of leveled off, haven’t we?

Yes.  So the truth about the $27 trillion is that this is an optimistic  estimate,  sort of assuming that we’re going to be smart.  But I don’t know what the climate future is going to look like.  I don’t think anyone really knows, but we have a good sense that we’re good  at, you know, innovating stuff.  And we know how to get CO2 free energy.  We can do it with nuclear.  We also know we can get some from solar and wind.  We’ll probably have more batteries.  We’ll have lots of things.  I think the world was sort of, you know, stumble through and we’ll be okay.  But the point is we could have been much, much better off.

Does that affect your sense of politics at all?  Oh, of course it does.  And I’m disappointed that half the world would  tend to  dismiss a lot of this because these  are inconvenient facts, With that said though I also  talk about all the incredibly important things we could do in the poor part of  the world. This is not true for most of the world, this is a very  Western, kind of rich world situation where we have this very clear  distinction between right and left.  And, and a lot on the left, I think have sort of gone off on the deep end on some of these things.

For instance, on climate change, which has become this identifying totem,  that they worship, and not in a smart way.  Remember a lot of standard left-wing belief was  about helping the downtrodden, which I perfectly agree with.  And I think a lot of people would agree, we need  to get poor people out of poverty.  That’s a terrible situation and it destroys human dignity and  liberty and all kinds of things.  We should absolutely do something about that.  But the truth is that’s where, you know, seven eighths of the world’s  population is because they know poverty and they want to get out of it.

Although when you go to these events in New York and, and elsewhere, even politicians from Africa and elsewhere, they’ll of course say all the platitudes that come along with getting some funding from rich Western nations.  But in the private cocktail  conversations afterwards,  you know, they don’t  look at Germany and the UK and say: oh yes, deindustrialization and incredibly  high energy costs, that’s what we want. No, they look at China because they want to get rich like China did.

And China of course got rich famously by dramatically  increasing its energy consumption through coal.  At its lowest China’s energy from renewables was 7.5%, and now it’s up to about 11%. So people think, oh China is this green giant, but no it’s not. It gets the vast majority of its energy from coal.  And not surprisingly, because that has been historically the cheap opportunity to drive your economy and development.

 

How Wasteful is Green Energy? Count the Ways

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Waste #1:  Money Spent, Projects Unknown

“Oxfam finds that for World Bank projects, many things can change during implementation. On average, actual expenditures on the Bank’s projects differ from budgeted amounts by 26–43% above or below the claimed climate finance. Across the entire climate finance portfolio, between 2017 and 2023, this difference amounts to US$24.28–US$41.32 billion,” the report states.

“No information is available about what new climate actions were supported and which planned actions were cut. Now that the Bank has touted its focus on understanding and reporting on the impacts of its climate finance, it is critical to stress that without a full understanding of how much of what the Bank claims as climate finance at the project approval stage becomes actual expenditure, it is impossible to track and measure the impacts of the Bank’s climate co-benefits in practice.”

“Oxfam’s report doesn’t suggest funds are missing but points to a transparency issue that makes it difficult to know precisely what the Bank is delivering in terms of climate finance: where it’s going and what it’s supporting.”

Thus, “contrary to claims online,” it’s not missing. It’s just not accounted for! At this point, I’m not sure which is the bigger racket: dubious national or supranational funding of projects that fall loosely under the aegis of purported climate change mitigation, or fact-checking. At least this can be said about fact-checking: It costs a hell of a lot less.

Waste #2:  Money Spent, Projects Dicey

For an idea of how much money is being gambled on Green Energy or “CleanTech” projects here is a chart for North America from The Big Green Machine:

How Risky are these projects? An article at Mish Talk explores the question: How Many More Ridiculous Green Energy Projects Will Fail? Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The answer is all of them, in due time. Here are the latest spectacular failures.

Birds Fry Every Two Minutes

It took 10 years, and hundreds-of-thousands of dead birds, before
the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in California would meet its fate.

Now finally here in 2025 it seems the reckoning has begun. The Las Vegas Review-Journal notes in an editorial that “a major California utility —  Pacific Gas & Electric — announced that it will no longer buy power from the Ivanpah solar plant off Interstate 15 near the Nevada-California border. As a result, two of the plant’s three towers will shut down next year — and the third will probably follow.”

Performance has proven so poor that PG&E has exercised its right to terminate the contract, about which negotiations have been completed; there is no doubt that towers 1 and 3 will cease operations within roughly a year. And it appears to be the case that Edison too wants out: “the utility is in ‘ongoing discussions’ with the project’s owners and the federal government over ending the utility’s contract.”

New Jersey Reaps the Wind, Again

It’s not just solar. Also note that Shell just backed out of a wind-energy project despite huge subsidies.

Another offshore wind development stalled this week off the Jersey shore, making it the latest of three such projects to fail despite generous terms from the state. Energy giant Shell wrote off its 50% stake in Atlantic Shores, choosing to take a $1 billion impairment instead of complete the 2,800 megawatt wind farm. New Jersey’s Board of Public Utilities canceled its request for a wind-energy provider, leaving the unfinished project with no prospective customer.

Ratepayers can rejoice. Atlantic Shores would have charged about three times the market price for the power it generated, according to a review by Whitestrand Consulting. That would have raised electricity rates by 11% for residents and 13% to 15% for businesses, forcing them to overpay by $48 billion over the wind farm’s lifetime.

Waste # 3 A Mountain of Unrecyclable Waste

The Institute for Energy Research notes Broken Windmill Blade Closes Nantucket Beaches

A massive wind turbine blade shattered offshore Massachusetts causing extensive debris, which shut down beaches on Nantucket Island and caused serious concern to fishermen, who worried that the debris could damage their boats. The failure of the massive blade and the resulting debris caused the federal Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement to suspend operations at Vineyard Wind until it could be determined whether the “blade failure” impacts other turbine blades on the development of the offshore wind farm. Power production has been suspended and installation of new wind turbine construction is on hold. And as more green energy trash washes ashore the local town is considering litigation. The facility’s massive wind turbines began sending electricity to the grid this past winter.

Thousands of Old Wind Turbine Blades Pile Up in West Texas Officials in Sweetwater say an out-of-state company has made their town a dump for the seldom-seen trash created by renewable energy.

Wind turbine blades are made from fiberglass, or fiber reinforced plastic, and cannot be recycled. The Biden-Harris administration has not indicated what or who it expects to deal with the mountain of waste that will result when thousands of turbine blades reach the end of their useful lives in 20 to 25 years, or in many cases less. In fact, wind blades are piling up in Texas and Iowa without proper disposal. Massive wind graveyards, for example, have popped up on the outskirts of Sweetwater, Texas. The pile of wind blades covers more than thirty acres, in stacks rising as high as basketball backboards.

Waste #4 Money Spent, Operational Failures

Economic Reality

Let’s return to economic reality.  None of these projects are profitable, even with subsidies. That’s why they fail.  Meanwhile, consumers face monstrous hikes in energy bills to pay for these boondoggles as mounds of unrecyclable garbage piles up in massive wind graveyards.

The Green Machine provides the project categories in colors denoting Batteries, EVs, Solar and Wind.

The BESS Failure Incident Database provides a record of costly problems with Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS)

Figure 1. A breakdown of the stationary energy storage failure events from the above table.

EV Boosters reports EV Business Failures Abound

The Chinese electric vehicle (EV) boom has turned into a dramatic shakeout. Around 2018, China had more than 500 EV startups registered. These included everything from serious automotive disruptors to local government-backed ventures that never made it past the prototype phase. What do we mean by “EV startup”? In this context, it includes any newly registered Chinese company involved in the design, development, or production of new energy vehicles (NEVs) — including electric, plug-in hybrid and hydrogen cars. Many were speculative projects, created quickly to benefit from generous state subsidies, often with minimal automotive expertise. While a few had serious ambitions and advanced prototypes, the vast majority never got a vehicle on the road. By 2025, only around 100 of these brands remain active. Analysts from McKinsey predict that by 2030, fewer than 50 Chinese EV companies will survive. This is not just a story of collapse, but also of market maturation, consolidation, and strategic realignment.

SolarInsure Lists the Many Solar Business Failures

Major Solar Bankruptcies as of September 2025 Include:

Waste #5 Green Hydrogen Projects–Absurd, Exorbitant and Pointless

The map above from IEA shows more than 2200 hydrogen fuel projects around the world, intending to replace hydrocarbon fuels to save the planet.  They dream of being operational by 2030 claiming that real world obstacles will be overcome if enough taxpayer dollars are thrown at the problems.  The whole notion is fantastic (in the literal sense) for reasons detailed in a previous post.

Inside the Hydrogen Fuel Project Bubbles

An update on project cancellations comes from Hydrogen Newsletter The Green Hydrogen Reckoning: An Analysis of Project Cancellations

Project Name / Identifier Lead Company / Developer(s) Location  Announced Capacity / Scale Project Status Date of Announcement / Status Change
Arizona Hydrogen Project Fortescue Arizona, USA 80 MW electrolyzer, 11,000 t/yr H2 Cancelled (Post-FID) Jul-25
PEM50 Project Fortescue Gladstone, Australia 50 MW PEM electrolyzer Cancelled (Post-FID) Jul-25
H2OK Project Woodside Energy Oklahoma, USA 60 t/d liquid H2 Cancelled Jul-25
Massena Green Hydrogen Plant Air Products Massena, New York, USA $500M, 35 t/d liquid H2 Cancelled Feb-25
Mississippi Clean Hydrogen Hub Hy Stor Energy Mississippi, USA >1 GW electrolyzer capacity reservation Cancelled Sep/Oct 2024
HyGreen Teesside Project BP Teesside, UK 500 MW green hydrogen Cancelled Mar-25
Australian Renewable Energy Hub BP Australia $36 billion green hydrogen facility Exited Jul-25
Low-Carbon Hydrogen Plant Shell West Coast, Norway Not specified Cancelled Sep-24
Clean Hydrogen to Europe Equinor / Shell Norway to Germany 10 GW blue hydrogen export Scrapped Sep-24
German Steel Plant Conversion ArcelorMittal Germany Two plants, €2.5 billion plan Shelved Jun-25
Global Green Hydrogen Target Iberdrola Global 350,000 tons/yr target Scaled Back Mar-24
Green Hydrogen Production Target Repsol Spain 2.5 GW target Scaled Back Feb-25
Green Energy Hub LEAG Eastern Germany “One of Europe’s largest” Postponed Indefinitely Jun-25
Porvoo Renewable Hydrogen Neste Porvoo, Finland Not specified Withdrew from investment Oct-24
Port Pirie Green Hydrogen Plant Trafigura South Australia, Australia A$750 million Abandoned Mar-25
Queensland Liquefied H2 Plant QLD Gov’t, Kansai Electric, Iwatani Queensland, Australia A$12.5 billion, 200 t/d Funding Pulled 2025
Project Coyote Fortescue British Columbia, Canada $2 billion H2/ammonia facility Cancelled Sep-24

The above table provides a non-exhaustive but representative catalogue of the major green hydrogen projects that have been cancelled, postponed, or significantly scaled back between 2023 and mid-2025, illustrating the global scale of this market recalibration.

World Dodged UN Climate Bullet, thanks to US

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Matthew Boyle breaks the news at Breitbart Mike Waltz Reveals How Trump Killed ‘Global Green Tax’ That Would Have Created ‘U.N. Climate Slush Fund’ at 11th Hour.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

NEW YORK — U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz told Breitbart News exclusively of how President Donald Trump and his cabinet rallied at the 11th hour to thwart globalists from creating a “global green tax” that he argued would have created a “U.N. climate slush fund.”

“They were this close to mandating that we basically have a Green New Deal in our global shipping fleet,” Waltz told Breitbart News on the floor of the U.N. General Assembly in the interview taped on Thursday, Oct. 23. “Eighty percent of our economy is based on trade. It would have been devastating. In fact, it would have added a billion dollars a month to the cost of sending our goods around the world or receiving goods. We got fired up as a cabinet — the EU, Brazil, and others thought this thing was a done deal. We got everybody involved, including the president. He came in off the top ropes, and we defeated that vote. I think we just saved the American consumer a massive, massive — what would have been the first U.N. tax in global history just this past week. So that’s the kind of fighting that we’re doing in the types of these organizations, and the kind of wins that we have to deliver for the American people.”

Waltz further explained that the tax that would have been created would have targeted U.S. ships and forced them either to pay billions in global taxes or go through retrofitting in China to use European-backed power sources — but ultimately this has been stopped. He does expect the globalists who pushed this effort to try again, but he said next time the Trump administration will be even more prepared and will stop it again.

“If we had coal fired, gas fired, oil fired ships, this global organization was going to impose a fine on those shipping companies, of course, and that would have been to the tune of a billion dollars a month globally that would have been passed on to the consumers, obviously,” Waltz said. “That money then would have would have formed a U.N.-run green climate slush fund to the tune of $12 to $15 billion a year that would have turned around and done more and more of this. It really would have been the first global green tax and I think we would have felt it through inflation. We would have felt it on our consumer shelves and it would have been yet another assault on the American oil and gas industry.

Published by European Maritime Safety Agency

“We said there will be consequences if you do this and we laid out what those consequences were. Now, we were accused of being diplomatic gangsters and bullies and what have you. But look, it was they who are being the climate bullies and we’re not going to allow them to do that to our shipping fleet. If it had happened, here was the real secret. The EU was subsidizing all the biofuels that they wanted to push to our ships and the only place we could retrofit our ships were in Chinese ports and shipyards. So this would have been a win for the EU, a win for China, a loss for the United States. We said, ‘We’re not going to have it,’ and we got in there and won.”

So, are they trying again? Of course they’re going to try again. As we came at this, frankly, a little bit last-minute, we won, but we delayed the vote until next year. We’re going to make our position crystal clear, and I don’t think this thing is going to get through now. This is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s what’s happening in these over 80 organizations around the world. What it really amounts to is a climate ideology that is nonsensical. It’s an ideology that just doesn’t make sense. For example, in AI [artificial intelligence], a big piece of that is power. You can’t power AI through wind and solar — you just can’t — and we already know the President’s problems with wind. We already know that the vast majority of solar panels are made where? In China.

But we need an all-of-the-above solution. We need nuclear, we need gas, we need oil, we need coal, and those other renewable forms of energy in order to win. But what we find is even when we reach, say, some kind of trade deal with a country or with the EU, then they try to back door these regulations in favor of them and against us through these international organizations that are often under the U.N. umbrella. That’s why we need fighters in here. I have Tammy Bruce who will be going to the Senate to be the Deputy Ambassador here. We have myself, and we have other members of the team that 100 percent believe in the President’s America first agenda. We’re going to start fighting and blocking and tackling in these organizations.”

Addendum on Biofuels, the worst energy choice, disqualified for “All of the Above”

Put simply, power density is just how much stuff it takes to get your energy; how much land or other physical resources. And we measure it by how many watts you can get per square meter, or liter, or kilogram – which, if you’re like us…probably means nothing to you.

So let’s put this in tangible terms. Just about the worst energy source America has by the standards of power density are biofuels, things like corn-based ethanol. Biofuels only provide less than 3% of America’s energy needs–and yet, because of the amount of corn that has to be grown to produce it … they require more land than every other energy source in the country combined. Lots of resources going in, not much energy coming out–which means they’re never going to be able to be a serious fuel source.  Moreover, it cannibalizes arable land needed for food.

Bill Gates Returns to Energy Pragmatism

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Alex Epstein reports regarding Bill Gates latest statement downplaying climate doomsterism, and reminds us that he hasn’t changed his mind so much as he is now able to speak freely.  For example, watch this short video of Bill Gates in 2019.

Alex Epstein posted his conversation with Fox News Will Cain: Why Bill Gates is finally rejecting climate catastrophism.  Excerpts in italics with his bolds and my added images.

Will Cain:

Joining us now to continue this conversation is the founder of Center for Industrial Progress, it’s Alex Epstein. Alex, great to see you here today.

I think that, first of all, we should celebrate that Bill Gates has seen the light, has now understood the truth, but that does lead to the question: Why?

Alex Epstein:

It’s a good question, and actually I don’t think Bill’s views have changed much.

I think he’s held the view that he’s saying now, and I think he’s even less of a climate catastrophist and anti-fossil fuel person than he’s letting on now. I think what’s changed—and this is good news—is the cultural, economic, and political environment.

And in particular what we see are, one, the rise of AI and people recognizing that you’re going to need more fossil fuels to provide the reliable electricity—key: reliable electricity—that AI requires.

Number two, you’ve got a government right now that is pro-fossil fuel and very anti-climate catastrophist.

And number three, to the extent I and some others can take credit, I think we’ve advanced the pro-fossil fuel argument that shows that, hey, we do have impact on climate, but the net effect of fossil fuel use is incredibly positive, including on the livability of climate, or safety from climate.

I think those three factors have created an environment where Bill Gates—who I admire in many ways, but is a very calculating guy—where he feels like it’s in his interest to tell more of the truth about this issue than he has in recent years.

Will Cain:

All right, let’s take your three potential explanations for the change of heart for Bill Gates.

Let’s set aside your personal advocacy and persuasion, which I find compelling. And it’s not just you alone, Alex. It’s really most of the thoughtful scientists and thinkers through the last several hundred years have understood the power of fossil fuels and economic growth in helping the vast majority of people across the world.

Maybe that finally broke through to Bill Gates. Maybe he just sees the writing on the wall and understands what’s happening in modern America under President Donald Trump.

But the first is quite interesting: AI and the rise of AI. Does Gates not have significant investment in AI?

Alex Epstein:

Well, he obviously has investments. I mean, every major tech company is taking into account AI, I think validly, whether their current investment level is right or not. It’s key to their future.

But it’s not even that it’s just of interest to his company, although that’s surely a factor. He thinks it’s a big interest to humanity.

But most importantly, all these things, it’s more okay to talk about it. We already knew that the world needed way more energy, but now it’s okay to talk about it.

That’s why all these tech companies who made net zero pledges are suddenly saying, “No, we don’t need net zero”. Nothing changed really in the information environment, but the cultural environment did change.

Will Cain:

Well, I guess I’m just a little skeptical on the sincerity today and yesterday, and when I notice he can mingle his own personal net worth and benefit with that of what is best for humanity.

And if he convinces himself that AI is what’s best for humanity, and AI needs energy to grow, and therefore AI needs fossil fuels, he can convince himself that using fossil fuels is what’s best for humanity. And I think that is a little more in line with what I would suspect to be the motivation of Bill Gates.

Alex Epstein:

It’s definitely true with the broader tech industry. Again, they made “net zero” commitments just a few years ago when Biden was president, when everyone was on to ESG, and then suddenly their views changed and they never really acknowledged it.

Now I’m grateful, guys. Welcome to the party. I’m glad Zuckerberg is here. I’m glad Bezos is here. I’m glad Gates is here. These are people I admire a lot in many ways. I’m glad they’re changing their views.

But maybe stick to the truth this time instead of being so opportunistic and not really explaining how one day you’re “net zero” and then when it conflicts with your business interests, then you’re suddenly, “hey, yeah, let’s use more fossil fuels, we need it for AI”.

I thought you were worried about a climate catastrophe. It turns out there was never a climate catastrophe.

Will Cain:

I’m glad they’re here too, Alex. I just wouldn’t issue them permanent membership yet in the Club of Truth. Alex Epstein, it’s great to have you here on the show today.

See Also:

Energy Realism Marching Ahead

The Reality

Energy sources are additive and symbiotic. Coal, oil, gas, wood, nuclear
and renewables all grew together, they didn’t replace each other.

The Fantasy

Noble Climate Cause Corruption: PIK exemplar

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Thomas Kolbe explains the sordid history in his American Thinker article Potsdam climate researchers under fire. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Critics of climate policy have long pointed to the problematic dominance of politics in climate science. A recent study from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), which systematically exaggerated the economic consequences of climate change, has reignited the debate over scientific standards and political manipulation in the field.

On April 17, 2024, the science journal Nature published a study by PIK researchers Maximilian Kotz, Anders Levermann, and Leonie Wenz. They calculated that global GDP would shrink by 19% by 2050 due to climate change, regardless whether future emissions were reduced. This projection corresponds to an annual output loss of around $38 trillion — an economic apocalypse, given that no society has the resilience to absorb such a dramatic collapse.

A Solution Delivered Alongside the Doom

The authors also provided a ready-made “solution”: according to their math, the costs of climate damage would be at least six times higher than the expenses required to keep global warming below 2°C. The implication is clear:

This was less a scientific exercise than a political directive for policymakers
to accelerate the fight against alleged man-made climate change.

A year later, the material was “corrected” and republished with slightly toned-down results. The timing was not coincidental: peer review — the scientific quality control process — loomed in the background and threatened to spark controversy.

Peer Review Delivers a Devastating Blow

That controversy soon arrived. Three U.S.-based scientists who reviewed the PIK paper identified serious methodological flaws and faulty data — problems that had been known for over a year. According to their report, PIK’s methodology had no scientific foundation. One reviewer wrote: “I have major concerns about the uncertainty and validity of the empirical model they built and used for the forecasts. It would help this study not to follow the often-exaggerated claims found in the literature.” From the Abstract of paper  by Bearpark et al (link in red above):

Kotz, Levermann and Wenz1 (henceforth, KLW) analysed how subnational gross domestic product (GDP) growth responds to year-to-year changes in temperature and precipitation. They reported that if historical relationships continue to hold, global GDP would be lowered by roughly 62% (central estimate) in 2100 under the Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 ‘high emissions’ scenario, an impact roughly 3 times larger than similar previous estimates,2,3. Here we show that (1) data anomalies arising from one country in KLW’s underlying GDP dataset, Uzbekistan, substantially bias their predicted impacts of climate change, (2) KLW underestimate statistical uncertainty in their future projections of climate impacts, and (3) additional data-quality concerns in KLW’s subnational GDP data warrant further investigation. When Uzbekistan’s data are removed and statistical uncertainty is corrected to account for spatial correlations, KLW’s central estimate aligns closely with previous literature and their results are no longer statistically distinguishable from mitigation costs at any time this century.

Such devastating words cast doubt not just on PIK’s work, but on the broader foundations of climate science itself. Yet papers like this are routinely used to justify green transformation policies, with their web of subsidies, NGOs, regulations, and deep intrusions into economic life.

Finance Dragged Into the Climate Matrix

The significance of this critique lies not only in the study’s flaws but also in the murky financing behind it. These alarmist reports are not just shaping public opinion; they are the cornerstone of a new “climate economy.” The goal is to channel capital flows so that state funds and private wealth are merged into politically favored projects — a carefully orchestrated fusion of financial power and ideology.

International organizations and political institutions amplify these narratives, embedding them into economic governance. The “Network for Greening the Financial System” (NGFS) — closely tied to PIK and consisting of central banks and regulators — projects future climate costs and uses them as a basis for political and financial decisions. The European Central Bank relies on such scenarios for stress tests on banks, forcing higher capital buffers and restricting lending — with direct consequences for growth.

Networks, Obfuscation, and Propaganda

Additional funding flows through organizations like Climate Works, which bankrolls both NGFS and PIK while paying for the calculation of key scenarios. This blurring of lines between sponsor and reviewer, between science and political agenda, opens the door to propaganda. Genuine public debate becomes nearly impossible under such conditions of institutionalized opacity.

The end result is soulless landscapes scarred by wind turbines, the shutdown of modern power plants, and intrusive state regulation extending into private households. The energy sector is sacrificed, home ownership turned into an ideological experiment — all justified by the apocalyptic narrative of man-made climate collapse.

The Origins of CO2 Politics

The roots of this orthodoxy can be traced back to 2009, when the Obama administration declared CO2 a “dangerous pollutant” via the EPA’s Endangerment Finding. This politically-driven decision, made without congressional approval, laid the groundwork for carbon pricing, emissions trading, and sweeping regulatory interventions.

Europe embraced the same model, perhaps even spearheaded it. As an energy-poor continent, the EU saw an opportunity: by making fossil fuels expensive and heavily regulated, it could level the playing field and prevent resource-rich competitors from exploiting their natural energy advantages.

Donald Trump briefly broke with this orthodoxy, scrapping central EPA rules, declassifying CO2 as an existential threat, and freeing coal, gas, and oil. It was a signal to the world: growth and sovereignty take precedence over panic-driven climate politics.

Politicized Science

The PIK case highlights the dangers of academia’s fusion with state agendas. The old saying applies: “Whose bread I eat, his song I sing.” It was only a matter of time before such politically tailored studies surfaced.

Just as with government-influenced modeling during the COVID crisis, climate research now faces the urgent task of disentangling politics from science. On the back of the man-made climate narrative, an entire apparatus of subsidies, NGOs, and Brussels bureaucracy has entrenched itself. Untangling this nexus is no longer just a scientific issue — it is a historic necessity.

Footnote On the Failings of PIK GDP Study

Climate study from Potsdam – how questionable forecasts misled politics and business

A controversial climate study by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) is one of the biggest scientific scandals of recent years. Media outlets like “Tagesschau” and “Spiegel” made it headlines in 2024. “Scientifically completely invalid,” economist Richard Rosen declared. However, politicians and the financial world made far-reaching decisions based on the PIK study. The alleged annual economic damage of $38 trillion shaped global debates. (welt: 25.08.25)

The publication of the PIK study by “Nature” lent its brilliance. But internal documents show that all four reviewers reported serious deficiencies. One expert wrote: “The statistical methodology … [has] no scientific basis whatsoever.” Another emphasized that the forecasts seemed “unintuitively large.”

Roger Pielke Jr. calls it a scandal. Incorrect figures have been known for over a year, yet they continue to shape climate policy and financial decisions. Weinkle criticizes that “Nature” has “turned into a doormat.” This is how science loses credibility.

Just a few weeks after publication, Christof Schötz of the Technical University of Munich presented a detailed critique. He made it clear that the results “do not provide the robust empirical evidence required for climate policy.” Nevertheless, Nature suppressed the analysis for months.

Other researchers from Princeton and the Bank Policy Institute responded. Gregory Hopper describes his unsuccessful attempts to submit comments. Rosen described the PIK study as “completely scientifically invalid.” It has since become clear that while the criticism was suppressed, the NGFS continued to use the data. This resulted in massive economic and political damage.

Under pressure, the PIK researchers published a new version. In this “preprint,” they claimed their core findings remained intact. However, they had to swap methods to produce similar results. For Pielke, this is “a tacit admission… that the original analysis is no longer valid.”

Hopper is even more critical of the new version. “The revised climate damage model is even more flawed,” he explains. The statistical problems persist. This demonstrates that science is serving politics here rather than providing objective results.

Killer Climate Lawsuit on Shaky Ground

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Washington Free Beacon reports on shaky case to make climate change a killer First-Of-Its-Kind Lawsuit Blaming Oil Companies for Woman’s Heat-Wave Death Failed to Mention Her Heart Disease. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

‘The diagnosis and likely treatment for it is highly relevant,’
doctor tells Free Beacon

A first-of-its-kind lawsuit accusing some of the nation’s largest oil companies of causing global warming and therefore causing a Washington woman’s 2021 heat-wave death left out one critical detail: she had been diagnosed with heart disease.

Juliana Leon’s death certificate, obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, shows she had been diagnosed with hypertensive cardiovascular disease, a condition that stems from unmanaged high blood pressure and increases the risks of heart failure and sudden cardiac death. The medical examiner for King County, Wash., determined that the condition contributed to her death, meaning it wasn’t the direct cause of death, but made her more vulnerable to it.

The wrongful death lawsuit Leon’s daughter filed earlier this year against oil companies, however, failed to make a single mention of her underlying condition. It instead focused entirely on the direct cause of death: hyperthermia.

The revelation, which has not been reported until now, is relevant because it could explain why Leon succumbed to the high temperatures that hit the Pacific Northwest in June 2021, according to doctors interviewed by the Free Beacon. And it is important too because of the lawsuit’s potentially wide-reaching impact. If successful, the lawsuit could lead to dozens of similar wrongful death suits and even future criminal homicide prosecutions against the oil industry.

The lawsuit—the first instance of a case attempting to put oil companies on the hook for heat-related wrongful death—is part of a coordinated effort nationwide to use the courts to cripple the oil industry and usher in a green energy transition. Activists say such litigation will hold the industry accountable, while critics say it is designed to bankrupt the industry, something that would have devastating economic impacts.

“The main reasons for hyperthermia under these conditions include medications or skin conditions impairing the ability to sweat. People with hypertensive cardiovascular disease are likely to be taking such medicines,” said Jane Orient, the executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons and a clinical lecturer at the University of Arizona College of Medicine.

“I think the diagnosis and likely treatment for it are highly relevant,” she continued. “A body temperature as high as 110 is extremely unlikely without impairment in the body’s temperature-regulating mechanism, at least under the circumstances here. Most people will have dehydration, but not heat stroke, during a heat wave. This lady likely had both.”

Jeffrey Singer, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the founder of a private surgical practice in Arizona, agreed that the diagnosis could be relevant.  Singer told the Free Beacon:

“Having hypertension and its cardiovascular stigmata, depending on severity, might affect a person’s risk of succumbing to hyperthermia. But it’s the hyperthermia that kills,”

Lawyers representing Leon’s estate and daughter did not respond to requests for comment.

Leon died on June 28, 2021, during an extreme heat wave, which ultimately claimed the lives of 100 people in Washington, state data show. According to the wrongful death lawsuit, Leon died in her car after the vehicle’s air conditioning system broke and as outside temperature exceeded 105 degrees Fahrenheit. Her internal temperature rose to 110 degrees Fahrenheit right before she died.

Two weeks earlier, Leon had undergone bariatric surgery, a weight-loss surgery that helps reduce the risk of heart disease and high blood pressure. As a result, she had been on a liquid diet in the two weeks leading up to her death. In fact, Leon died in her car on her drive home from the doctor’s office where she was informed that morning that she may begin to eat soft foods again.

Still, the lawsuit blames seven oil companies for her death, arguing that they knew their products caused global warming decades ago, but continued selling them anyway. The lawsuit states that the 2021 heat wave in the Pacific Northwest wouldn’t have occurred without human-caused global warming.

A study published in the American Meteorological Society’s journal Weather and Forecasting last year found that there is “little evidence” greenhouse gases amplified the heat wave and emphasized that weather forecasts for the event were “highly accurate.” “Global warming may have made a small contribution, but an extreme heat wave, driven by natural variability, would have occurred in any case,” it concluded.  Singer told the Free Beacon:

“You don’t need climate change to have a heat wave. Humans have been experiencing heat spells since the beginning of recorded history,”

The Free Beacon reported last week that an environmental group funded by the powerful Rockefeller Family Fund is quietly steering the wrongful death suit. According to legal filings, Leon’s daughter quietly appointed a climate activist to serve as the agent for her deceased mother’s estate. Those documents were authored by lawyers at the Rockefeller-backed Center for Climate Integrity, a nonprofit leading the coordinated, nationwide plan to “drive divestment” from and “delegitimize” the oil industry through litigation.