Relieving US Grid from Wind and Solar Risks

 

Gary Abernathy reports on progress securing the U.S. grid from the load of entanglements from adding wind and solar power supplies.  His Empowering America article is Climate Science is Not the Law in the U.S.  Exerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

While not everyone is on board with President Trump’s “America First” philosophy, its importance when it comes to energy is brought into sharp focus when considering where the U.S. would be if it capitulated to the whims of global organizations like the United Nations or obeyed the verdicts of world courts.

The frightening attitudes of believers in global rule were recently on display courtesy of a New York Times opinion piece headlined “Climate Science is Now the Law,” penned by three writers who are all part of something called the Center for International Environmental Law. In their article, the authors claim, “The science on climate change has long been settled. Now the law is, too.”  [See post: ICJ Issues Biased Advice on Climate Change]

At about the same time that the International Court of Overstep was issuing its decree for nations to kneel at the feet of the wind and solar gods, the Trump administration took another giant leap in its race to reverse Biden’s disastrous energy policies. On July 7, the Energy Department unveiled its “Report on Evaluating U.S. Grid Reliability and Security,” as required under President Trump’s April executive order to examine the topic.  DOE reported:

“This methodology equips DOE and its partners with a powerful tool to identify at-risk regions and guide federal interventions to prevent power outages, accelerate data center deployment, and ensure the grid keeps pace with explosive load growth driven by artificial intelligence and reindustrialization.”

Rather than follow international directives and judgments to rid itself of energy sources like natural gas, which is necessary to power technology, manufacturing and the coming AI data centers, the DOE is, fortunately, doing the exact opposite. Among the biggest DOE findings:

    • If current plant retirement schedules and incremental additions remain unchanged “most regions will face unacceptable reliability risks within five years.”
    • Radical change is necessary because otherwise, the magnitude of projected demand from AI data centers and other manufacturing “cannot be met with existing approaches to load addition and grid management.
    • The coal and gas plant retirements previously planned by 2030 “could lead to significant outages when weather conditions do not accommodate wind and solar generation.”
    • Even with plans to replace 104 gigawatts of plant retirements with 209 gigawatts of new generation by 2030, “only 22 (gigawatts) come from firm baseload generation sources,” meaning that “the model found outage risk in several regions rises more than 30-fold.” (A gigawatt is equal to 1 billion watts.)

In other words, replacing firm baseload sources like natural gas with alternative sources like wind or solar is not an apples-for-apples proposition, since “renewables” put the grid at greater risk. Establishing arbitrary end dates for our most affordable and reliable energy sources is both illogical and reckless.

On the heels of the international court’s irresponsible and (thankfully) unenforceable decree, and the DOE’s astute recommendation to do the opposite of what the court prescribed, came a story from Reuters declaring that the Trump administration’s actions to end or curtail Biden-era subsidies and credits for “renewables” are, fortunately, having an impact.  Boom fades for US clean energy as Trump guts subsidies

“Singapore-based solar panel manufacturer Bila Solar is suspending plans to double capacity at its new factory in Indianapolis. Canadian rival Heliene’s plans for a solar cell facility in Minnesota are under review. Norwegian solar wafer maker NorSun is evaluating whether to move forward with a planned factory in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And two fully permitted offshore wind farms in the U.S. Northeast may never get built,” the news agency reported.

These are among the major clean energy investments now in question after Republicans agreed earlier this month to quickly end U.S. subsidies for solar and wind power as part of their budget megabill, and as the White House directed agencies to tighten the rules on who can claim the incentives that remain.

The key provision in the new law is the accelerated phase-out of 30% tax credits for wind and solar projects: it requires projects to begin construction within a year or enter service by the end of 2027 to qualify for the credits. Previously the credits were available through 2032.

The policy changes have also injected fresh doubt about the fate of the nation’s pipeline of offshore wind projects, which depend heavily on tax credits to bring down costs. According to Wood Mackenzie, projects that have yet to start construction or make final investment decisions are unlikely to proceed.

Two such projects, which are fully permitted, include a 300-megawatt project by developer US Wind off the coast of Maryland and Iberdrola’s 791 MW New England Wind off the coast of Massachusetts.
Neither company responded to requests for comment.

President Trump is putting America first and leading an energy renaissance that should be in full bloom on our nation’s 250th birthday on July 4, 2026. It’s difficult to imagine a greater Independence Day gift to the American people than freedom from the cold, dark landscape that would result from following the directives of global agencies and the rulings of international courts.

Postscript: Saving U.S. Farmland from Transmission Lines

Robert Bryce adds the canceling of transmission lines dedicated to wind and solar power in his blog article Transmission Unplugged.

From Missouri and Colorado to Germany and Spain,
high-voltage transmission projects are being stopped by
fierce local opposition, soaring costs, and permitting delays.

The Grain Belt Express project aimed to carry wind-generated electricity from Kansas to the Indiana-Illinois border. Map credit: grainbeltexpress.com

Invenergy neglected to mention that if the project gets built, it will saddle ratepayers with about $500 million in costs to integrate the power it will be delivering into grids on the eastern end of the line. In other words, Invenergy wants to build a merchant high-voltage transmission line and force its way onto the US electric grid. But it doesn’t want to pay any of the costs that its project will impose on the system. Furthermore, Grain Belt Express has faced fierce opposition in Missouri for more than a decade. Earlier this month, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey announced a civil investigation into Invenergy for its “misleading claims and a track record of dishonesty” about the project.

Last week, the Department of Energy gave Polsky some high-amperage clarity from the Trump administration when it canceled a $4.9 billion loan guarantee for the Grain Belt Express that the agency’s Loan Programs Office made last November in the waning days of the Biden administration.

The DOE said it killed the loan deal “to ensure more responsible stewardship of taxpayer resources.”

No Right to a Stable Climate

Judges in high courts are all claiming a “Human Right to a Stable Climate,” as though any court, parliament or government can make it happen.  The latest proclamations come from the International Court of Justice and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ( IACtHR )

The 234-page IACtHR advisory opinion sets out the court’s perspective on the climate emergency and human rights, recognizing that states have legal obligations under international law to protect current and future generations from the impacts of climate change, to take “urgent and effective” action to cut greenhouse gas emissions, to adapt, to cooperate, and to guard against climate disinformation and greenwashing.

Question to perplexity.ai: Could courts’ emphasis on human activity overlook natural climate variability evidence?

Answer: (my bolds) Courts’ emphasis on human activity as the primary driver of recent climate change is based on the strong scientific consensus reflected in assessments by bodies like the IPCC, and courts have generally accepted these conclusions as beyond reasonable dispute when adjudicating climate law cases23. This approach often involves taking “judicial notice” of mainstream climate science, meaning courts regard anthropogenic climate change as an established fact, obviating the need to litigate scientific basics repeatedly23.

However, this legal methodology can, in practice, result in
underweighting evidence of natural climate variability:

  • The dominant legal standard centers on whether human-caused disruptions introduce new or heightened risks to rights, rather than parsing the specific historical roles of natural versus anthropogenic drivers6. Thus, courts sometimes set a lower bar for causal linkage, assuming risks to rights where types of harm are deemed foreseeable consequences of climate change, even if local variability or confounding natural factors exist65.

  • Defense arguments in litigation, such as those in Juliana v. United States, have challenged the ability of current science to disentangle anthropogenic from natural variability (especially for region-specific impacts), but such arguments are usually overruled or considered less compelling compared to the broader trend evidence53.

  • Some court rulings have acknowledged the complexity and multiple contributors to climate outcomes, yet uphold state obligations for mitigation and adaptation, reasoning that even where natural variability exists, the unprecedented pace and scope of human forcing is sufficient to establish state duties under rights frameworks6.

In summary, while courts do not categorically ignore natural climate variability, their emphasis on human activity is guided by prevailing scientific consensus and the precautionary principle. This can lead to less rigorous scrutiny of the full extent of natural variability’s contribution, particularly where the focus is on the foreseeability and scale of rights-endangering risks from ongoing anthropogenic change. Legal recognition of these risks typically does not require natural and human factors to be weighed equallypotentially overlooking specific nuances of natural variability in individual cases653.

Caveat: There are exceptions, and courts have dismissed some claims where causal links to human activity were too indirect or not supported by sufficient evidence, especially in jurisdictions with stricter standards for standing or causation6. However, the overarching trend is to defer to consensus science prioritizing human-driven change as the principal legal concern.

Question to perplexity.ai: Could ignoring natural variability lead to misjudging climate damage extent?
Answer: (My bolds)

Ignoring natural climate variability in assessing climate damage could indeed lead to misjudging the extent and nuances of that damage. Scientific and assessment literature on climate impacts and natural resource damage emphasizes that both natural variability and human-driven climate change influence climate-related hazards and ecosystem responses, and failing to account for natural variability can complicate accurate attribution and magnitude estimation of damage.

Key points synthesized from relevant sources include:

  • Baseline Challenge and Detection Difficulty: Climate change increases variability and the frequency of extreme events such as droughts, floods, and storms, but natural variability also influences these patterns. This complicates establishing a stable baseline for comparison. Ignoring natural fluctuations can lead to an under- or overestimate of true climate-related damages, as it is harder to detect how much harm is caused specifically by human activity versus natural cycles5.

  • Attribution Complexity: Natural variability introduces uncertainty when attributing specific events or damages to human-caused climate change. Explicitly considering natural variability in event attribution studies increases uncertainty ranges but still supports the conclusion that human activity raises the likelihood and severity of some events. Neglecting natural variability risks oversimplifying cause-effect relationships and could distort the assessment of climate risks and damages6.

  • Changing Reference Conditions: The selection of appropriate reference or baseline conditions for assessing injury to natural resources needs to factor in both long-term trends and natural fluctuations altered by climate change. Static references ignoring natural variability may mischaracterize damage extent or recovery needs5.

  • Implications for Risk and Damage Assessment: Failure to incorporate natural variability may lead to misjudging vulnerabilities, underestimating risk likelihoods, and misguided policy decisions. Accurate modeling and impact assessment require analysis frameworks that integrate historical variability alongside anthropogenic warming influences27.

In summary, rigorous climate damage and risk assessments seek to integrate natural variability to improve accuracy and avoid misjudging the scale or cause of damage. While natural variability is not a reason to dismiss anthropogenic climate impacts, acknowledging it refines understanding and strengthens attribution and legal or policy responses.

This nuanced view aligns with the legal and scientific approaches courts rely upon when considering climate damage claims: they defer to comprehensive scientific consensus but remain mindful of uncertainties introduced by natural climate variability.

My Comment:

Not seeing much of that nuance from judges blindly following IPCC nostrums.  The right to a stable climate ignores the fact the modern era is full of both warm and cool periods, including many times without any possible human influence.

A coincidental positive correlation is considered evidence of human causality, ignoring periods of weak or negative correlation.

See Also

Our Weather Extremes Are Customary in History

IPCC Guilty of “Prosecutor’s Fallacy”

How Do We Know Humans Cause Climate Change?

John Stossel Goes Off on Big Green Racketeers

H/T Mark Krebs, who commented:  This 5-minute by the great John Stossel packs a punch. Like me, he’s a recovering environmentalist who is still a conservationist but has become sick and tired of the manner in which huge elitist tax-exempt NGOs have used the cause to empower and enrich themselves.

For those who prefer reading, below in italics is the transcript from closed captions with my bolds and added images.

Climate change. We are seeing the impacts more and more each day.
So, what are you doing about it? Our future is on the line.

You can help save the world, say these environmental groups, just donate!The first thing that comes up on their websites is donate. Donate.

Why is it so important to donate to this fundraiser for Greenpeace?
Because it’s too hot, because it’s too cold, because it rains, because it doesn’t.
So, give us money. Money.

Your gift will help NRDC come to the defense of polar bears.
To get more money they lie. They are facing extinction in this century.
They say polar bears are disappearing. They aren’t.

They claim bees are dying off. Greenpeace set itself a challenge to put a stop to the deaths of thousands of bees. But bees are doing fine.

Environmental groups claim nuclear energy is dirty and dangerous, when it’s better than alternatives.

They call climate change an existential threat. It’s a problem, but not existential.  These scares drive donations.

Science writer Jon Entine.
They always feel that the only way they can talk about environmental issues is to frame it with hysteria, crisis. But they’re not trying to trick people. They believe it.

Sometimes they believe it. But they also recognize that hysteria generates donations and the oxygen for these organizations is money donated by people who think they’re doing good.

So, you give billions to these groups. Insufficient attention has been made to following the money.

Physicist Mark Mills.
The environmental industrial complex actually has more money in the PR game, in the lobbying game, than the real industry. The media portray the activists as plucky underdogs, the little guy. But they’re not.
Greenpeace pulls in more than $400 million a year and they want more.

Our fundraisers are doing street or door fundraising. They pay young people to accost you.
Even if it’s only two or three people each day, knowing that they’re gonna be giving to Greenpeace for a hell of a long time.

Some of your millions in donations to the World Wildlife Fund help pay for its 250,000 sq foot headquarters with, as they proudly put it, a “stunning eight-story, sky-lit atrium.” They call this, “wise use of donated funds.”  Support WWF’s global conservation work. That’s just 40 cents a day.

The Natural Resources Defense Council spends some of your millions on galas with fashion brands and celebrities, who also make ads for them. This is our moment!  Give to the Sierra Club and you can attend their lavish ball here.

The so-called environmentalists are now the big guys, rolling in money.  It’s bad enough that they lie to us and get paid. Worse is the damage they do.  They block progress. They have billions of dollars to not build a thing, but just to oppose building things.

There’s a rich sense of irony there. Irony because while they say they’ll save the bees. Ultimately that donation goes to a lawyer suing someone, preventing you from using gasoline.

Some of your money does go to people cleaning parks or rivers, but groups like the NRDC and Sierra Club spend millions more on lawsuits.

In the past year our legal team has stopped thousands of miles of fossil fuel pipelines and dozens of large power plants.

We have the Sierra Club active in every state, actively suing. A natural gas pipeline that was supposed to span 3 states has been cancelled. Environmentalists sued to stop it.

They sue to stop nuclear power. They even oppose solar projects and wind farms.
It’s that apparatus that’s keeping us from building.

It used to be NIMBY, not in my backyard. Now it’s BANANA.
Build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone.

And unfortunately, what that means is we don’t get the lifestyle that we want.

If you wanted to build a new house, for example, what kind of permits do you have to get?
Who do you have to talk to? Is the Sierra Club gonna sue you for building the wrong thing?

I’m ashamed that I once fell for their scams. Years ago my TV station ran ads promoting my alarmist environmental reporting. Now I realize that what today’s big environmental groups mostly do is stop progress and make lawyers richer.

We invited the groups to come here and explain to me why I’m wrong.  Defend your work.
Not one would agree.

I still want to ask them how they justify making it so hard for people to build anything.
It’s a shame because really when I think about what America could be, what we could be building, we could be so prosperous, so much more prosperous than we are.

See Also:

Time for Billionaires to Fund Climate and Social Realism

Abolishing the Climate Politico-Legal-Media Complex

 

Climate Policies to What End?

Oren Cass writes at Commonplace Who Is Climate Policy For?  Not workers. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

I mostly stopped writing about climate change in 2018, when actual analysis lost all relevance to the increasingly unmoored claims of climate activists. The frequently cited estimates of catastrophic cost, I showed in published reports and congressional testimony, were simply nonsensical. One prominent model relied upon by the EPA predicted that heat deaths in northern cities in the year 2100 would be 50 times higher than they had been in southern cities in the year 2000, despite the northern cities never reaching the temperatures that the southern cities were already experiencing. Another study, published in Nature, predicted that warming would boost Mongolia’s GDP per capita to more than four times America’s. But no one cared; no one was held accountable.

When subsequent research flipped the claims on their head, no one even flinched. Here’s the New York Times, four years apart:

(Technically, the first chart is GDP loss, while the second is heat deaths. But as the Times explained, the main driver of GDP loss in that first chart is heat deaths: “The greatest economic impact would come from a projected increase in heat wave deaths as temperatures soared, which is why states like Alabama and Georgia would face higher risks while the cooler Northeast would not.”) [Note:  Observations actually show a “warming hole” in Southeast US, perhaps due in part to reforestation efforts.]

Discussion of solutions, meanwhile, became entirely performative. So many climate agreements were signed, none had the prospect of substantially shifting the trajectory of global emissions, which is driven overwhelmingly by growth in the developing world. The Biden administration spent four years trumpeting unprecedented investment in fighting climate change. Try to find a comment linking that action to a downward shift in future temperatures or a reduction in any of the purportedly existential harms repeated ad nauseum as the basis for the action. I’ll wait.

The climate lectures had become the equivalent of the parent telling his children to eat their vegetables, because children in Africa are starving.

So now I encounter climate change mostly in the context of discussions about how best to build a policy agenda that serves the interests of American workers, and the working class broadly. Along with the refusal to enforce immigration law and the passion for shoveling hundreds of billions of dollars into a higher education system that fails most young people, the obsession with fighting climate change is a quintessential tradeoff preferred by progressives that they are of course welcome to make, but that cannot be squared with a commitment to working-class interests.

Progressives tend not to appreciate this observation,
or the cognitive dissonance that it triggers.

As I wrote in The Once and Future Worker, “People know how they want society ordered and wish desperately for that same thing to be good for everyone else.” Our 20-year-old texter feels this strongly. Fighting the climate crisis and providing for working families are not mutually exclusive. But the belief in a mythological crisis goes forever unsubstantiated. What is the ongoing devastation of communities that Biden-style policy action will mitigate?

To be clear, when I say mythological crisis, I don’t mean that climate change is a myth. I think climate change is a very serious challenge with which the United States, and the world, must find ways to cope. I’d also like to see us pursuing aggressive public investment in next-generation nuclear technology, and in the industrial precursors to strong electric vehicle supply chains—both of which are smart industrial policy regardless of climate implications.

But in the broader scheme of a century of economic, technological,
and geopolitical changes and challenges, the gradual increase
in global temperatures does not rank high.

This is not my opinion, it is the conclusion of the climate models, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the analyses that attempt to translate these forecasts into economic impacts. Climate change is not one of the top challenges facing working families in America. Solving it, if we could, which we can’t, would do little to move the needle in helping them achieve middle-class security.

But what about the “Green New Deal”? It has “New Deal” right in the title, suggesting a clear commitment to improving economic opportunity! That’s true, as far as it goes. Indeed, we could launch a “Purple New Deal” dedicated to knocking down all buildings that are not purple and replacing them with purple ones, which would also have many jobs associated with it.  Unfortunately, that’s not good economic policy.

What the Green New Deal—and climate policy, generally—attempts to do is shut down the existing energy industry and much of the industrial economy that relies on cheap and reliable energy, and replace it all with new “green” jobs. This should not require saying, but apparently does: Supplanting an existing, robust energy sector and industrial economy that provides a lot of very good jobs outside of our knowledge economy and superstar cities, with a new set of industries that hopes to do the same, does not in fact deliver economic gains.

The stated goal of climate policy is to replace things we already have. Anything new it creates is an attempt to climb back out of a hole it has dug itself. And unfortunately, the new tends to be less good, economically speaking, than the old. That reality in the auto industry is what drove the UAW strike last year.

The best way to understand all this is with a simple hypothetical: Let’s say we didn’t have to worry about climate change. A neat little box sucked greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere for free; problem solved. Would anyone still propose the Green New Deal? No climate change to worry about, you need to propose an agenda to support working families, how high on the list is “spend trillions of dollars shutting down the industrial economy and attempting to replace it with a set of less efficient and unproven technologies in which the United States has a much weaker position”?

It’s nowhere on the list.
Because climate policy does not help the working class.

For whatever reason, the project of decarbonizing the economy captures the progressive mind like no other. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundanceopens with a paragraph about waking up in the year 2050 in a cool bedroom powered by clean energy sources—a bedroom no cooler than the one you would wake up in today. Their abundant future is, first and foremost, not a more abundant one at all—merely one whose energy system they have transformed. Discussing scarcities, they start with, “We say that we want to save the planet from climate change.” When they enthuse that “new technologies create new possibilities and allow us to solve once-impossible problems,” they are thinking first of greenhouse gas emissions. “We worry,” first, “over climate change.” And “this book is motivated in no small part by our belief that we need to decarbonize the global economy.”

In my podcast with Klein, I asked him whether combatting climate change might represent a tradeoff in his agenda, rather than item one for bringing abundance to America. “For most, certainly, liberals who think about this and have studied this,” he responded, “the decarbonization is just central to the idea of what it would mean for our descendants to live a flourishing life.” Pitched this way, it fits perfectly the ideological template of most neoliberal missteps of the past 30 years: a purported win-win that serves the priorities of highly educated, high-income elites, who then instruct everyone else that the same thing should be their priority too. Like globalization, and unrestricted immigration, and free college.

Fool me once… Climate policy imposes massive costs, and damages the industrial economy, in pursuit of a specific goal: reducing carbon dioxide emissions. And if that’s your goal, that’s fine. Fight for it! Make the case for the tradeoff. But don’t pretend there’s no tradeoff, and certainly don’t tell the people you’re trading off that you’re really doing it for them.

 

See Also 

Eco-Loons War on Productive Working Class

 

Green Schemes Hidden by Greenhushing

Transcript excerpted from captions of  Interview with Bjorn Lomborg What is behind business ‘greenhushing’? [FN refers to comments from FOx News interviewers, BL to Bjorn Lomborg]

FN: From Climate Talk to climate realism. As energy secretary Chris Wright says climate change is a side effect of building the modern world. Banks and businesses seem to be finally getting on board with this. But moving from unrealistic promises, greenwashing lies and environmental fear-mongering, risks some engaging in greenhushing, purposely keeping quiet about sustainability actions.

Our next guest says climate solutions come with their own set of costs [you can read his op-ed excerpted later in this post]. And joining us now, and Brian and I are both huge fans of Bjorn Lomborg’s work. He’s Copenhagen Consensus President. Bjorn, so great to see you.

What are you concerned with in terms of going from greenwashing to then kind of burying what these corporations are doing now?

BL: Well the real problem is for a long time corporations have been saying “Oh we’re going to be so green,” and they got lots of applause and everybody said “Oh this is great in Davos and stuff.” And of course it’s not what businesses mostly should be doing. But now with Trump and everything else, people are realizing, “Oh wait, this is not a good idea.” So they’ve stopped talking about it but they’re still doing a lot of it. And actually a new survey of of about 4,000 sustainability people in these big corporations said, “Yeah we’re going to talk a lot less about it, but we’re still going to do it. We’re actually going to do a little more.”

And that’s troublesome because this is not what businesses should be doing.
They should be in the business of making great products and high profits
.

FN: So there’s a debate out there. You’ve got the CEOs of these companies and the question is: Do they really believe in the green thing or were they just doing it because the social pressure was so strong? And now they’re pulling back because really at the end of the day they agree with you, they just want to run their businesses.

What I hear you saying is in fact the guys running these businesses really are bought into the green agenda and they will do it again when the political environment lets them speak more freely. Is that what you’re saying?

BL: It’s hard to know. I think you’re right a lot of the CEOs are saying, I actually want my business to run and drive a profit. But now they’ve hired so many other people, sustainability experts and everybody else. Of course if that’s your job, you’re pushing for doing more of that. So I think it’s important for businesses to rein in and say:

“Look we’re not going to be doing this anymore, we’re actually going to go back and focus on what we’re good at, namely servicing customers.”

FN: This goes to something else that you’ve written about, that corporations need to focus on creating things profitably, because the environment improves as nations prosper. And the greatest polluter is poverty. We saw with John Kerry here in the United States and him talking to subsaharan Africa about cutting off any funding and financing for them to extract fossil fuels from the earth and thereby bring their nations out of poverty. Keeping nations poor makes the environment worse, rather than allowing them to develop into modern societies.

BL: Absolutely. I wrote two things for Earth Day. First we have to recognize there are environmental problems. And it’s great that we get a better environment, and fundamentally when you get rich you can actually afford to do a lot of this. And as you point out poverty is the biggest polluter, because if you’re poor, you quite frankly have other important issues. So you’ll cut down your rainforest or whatever else you need to do.

Secondly, it also emphasizes as you just pointed out that most nations and especially poor nations need to get out of poverty by doing what we’ve done. They want to have access for a lot more energy and mostly that is going to be fossil fuels. Remember when Russia invaded Ukraine, Europe decided to say “All right we’re not going to go and get any energy from Russia.” But they didn’t say “Oh so we’re going to go all green.” They actually went to Africa to buy up their fossil fuels because we want to keep our living standards. But they simultaneously told the Africans, “But you shouldn’t be using it, you should actually go all green.” That’s just hypocrisy absolutely.

Excerpts from Lomborg op-ed Time to pull the plug on corporate virtue-signaling

The era of being cheered on for every green promise and vow
– regardless of how silly or self-defeating – has come to an end

Climate change is undeniably a real problem which has tangible economic impacts. However, climate solutions also come with their own set of costs, often demanding that businesses and individuals rely on pricier, less dependable energy sources. The decision to balance the expenses of climate policies with the advantages of climate action falls rightly under the responsibility of governments, not profit-driven businesses.

Yet over the past decade, even major contributors to climate change – such as the fossil fuel industry itself – invested in extraordinary green policies. Five years ago, BP made an astonishing promise to slash its oil and gas production by 40% by 2030, while increasing green energy generation twentyfold and becoming net-zero.

Now, along with other big, Western oil companies,
it has abandoned those farcical green promises and
recommitted to its primary activity: fossil fuels.

No doubt, this U-turn will be lamented by green activists. But the truth is that these promises were always an inefficient way of helping the planet, and very shortsighted for fossil fuel companies. Even after the world has spent $14 trillion on climate policy, more than four-fifths of global energy remains supplied by fossil fuels.

Over the past half-century, fossil fuel energy has more than doubled, with 2023 again setting a new record. Consumers and businesses are crying out for more energy, while competitor state-owned oil companies from the Middle East have continued to provide more fossil fuels. It is a foolish energy company that declares it will supply less energy.

Banks also had a fling with green policies, and have now dumped them, with the six largest U.S. banks leaving the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, and Wells Fargo officially abandoning its goal of achieving net-zero emissions across its financial portfolio by 2050.

In the peer-reviewed journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a study finds that of 1,500 “climate” policies announced around the world, a mere 63, or 4%, produce any reduction in emissions.

While some industries are moving faster than others, there are signs that many companies will just change their language, and not their inefficient climate policies.

As leaders of international organizations and corporations scramble to adapt to an entirely new world, it’s important they go further than just shifts in rhetoric. The era of being cheered on for every green promise and vow – regardless of how silly or self-defeating – has come to an end. Now it’s time for those leaders to get back to business.

Abolishing the Climate Politico-Legal-Media Complex

Linnea Lueken describes the nullification in her Town Hall article The Savaging of the Climate Politico-Legal-Media Complex.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The Trump administration’s crackdown on waste and harmful
policies has given so-called “green” politics a rude awakening.
 

The administration is savaging the climate complex of lobbyists and NGOs, politically connected profiteering companies, and virtue signaling politicians bent on ending fossil fuel use. The greens are on the defensive and have yet been unable to form a cohesive response. For the good of humanity and the planet, let’s hope the disarray continues.

I almost hesitate to talk about this, lest the climate grifters in the media suddenly realize they are spending too much time focusing on tariffs and immigration and are forgetting one of the pillars of the globalist secular religion: climate alarmism. They still seem to be reeling, and it is amazing to see.

Note: The $$$ in the diagram are in 2010 $, not including consultancies and a plethora of NGOs. Likely it is today a multi-trillion dollar industry.

The Trump administration has been systematically ripping apart the politico-legal elements of what Michael Crichton once dubbed the climate “politico-legal-media” complex. This climate-focused approach to environmental extremism was meticulously constructed over the course of decades by previous Republican and Democrat administrations alike. No one else has taken the green scam to task the way Trump is.

Trump immediately rescinded Biden’s EV targets, as well as mandates for solar and wind and heat pumps. He removed the USDA’s website pages dedicated to climate change. He took an axe to Department of Energy (DOE) funding of climate-focused university research, which is still being battled in the courts (maybe this will end the apparent trend of scientists tying everything to climate just to get those grants).

Trump also got rid of the mandated use of paper straws in federal buildings, which is pretty funny.

While the climate-obsessed media were busy bleating about those insults to climate orthodoxy, DOGE tackled the climate slush fund known as USAID. USAID, it turns out, was sending billions of dollars for climate pet projects. Who knows how much of that went to overhead and graft with nothing to show in terms of mitigating climate change.

Interestingly, the extremist group Just Stop Oil closed shop shortly after cuts to USAID began. They claim it is because they have been victorious in keeping UK oil in the ground, but it is likely no coincidence that climate activists and protestors are increasingly finding themselves behind bars as the public tires of disruption and destruction and funding is drying up from governments, sometimes funneled through NGOs.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin also announced that the administration is considering eliminating the greenhouse gas reporting requirements for power plants, and then hit the greens with another major blow. He reiterated to Breitbart News that he intends to look at the carbon dioxide Endangerment Finding – which has been used to craft regulations based on the idea that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses represent a significant threat to human health… despite the fact that they are necessary for life on Earth. This comes after Trump signed an executive order asking the EPA to review the finding. Eliminating it would undercut the basis for all climate related regulations, from restrictions on power plants, to vehicle restrictions and mandates, to appliance restrictions, and beyond.

The end of the Endangerment Finding would be a big blow against
climate alarmism and an even bigger win for freedom.

I could almost feel bad for the greens, except that they have done nothing but suck up our hard-earned cash and increase human misery in the United States and abroad by pushing suicidal and stagnating policies. They fund programs aimed at stopping poorer countries from developing their own resources. They attack farming and endorse restrictions on the kind of appliances and cars average people can buy. They push policies limiting what one can eat and how food is grown, and restrictions on electric power production, all in the name of changing future weather.

This is not to say the Trump administration is anti-environment; to the contrary, under his first term, the EPA focused heavily on streamlining the clean-up of superfund sites. Zeldin is already putting cleanups of superfunds on an accelerated timeline. Trump and his team have reiterated that they are interested in maintaining clean air and water, and preventing wildfires that Democrat policies have worsened.

Time will tell if these attacks on the climate cult will prove fatal,
but thus far it has been incredible to witness.

Oh yeah; Happy Earth Day.

 

 

 

Time to Axe the Climate-Industrial Complex

Kevin Mooney makes the urgency case in his Real Clear Energy article Celebrating American Independence With an All-Out Assault on Anti-Constitutional Climate Measures.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Now is the time to double down against the “Climate-Industrial Complex” with accelerated regulatory reforms that will hopefully endure beyond Donald Trump’s second term. Since day one of his new administration, the president has moved quickly to keep his promise to unleash American energy.

This means unraveling climate policies based on specious, unscientific findings that reached an apex with whatever leftist committee was in charge of the Biden White House. The American Energy Alliance, a Washington-based free market advocacy group, has put together a list of 50 Actions the Trump administration and congressional Republicans have taken to maximize America’s energy potential.

Some of the more significant items include EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s decision to revisit the phony 2009 Endangerment Finding that identified CO2 as a pollutant. The finding came about in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court 2007 ruling in Massachusetts v EPA where the high court determined that the agency had the authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act (CAA). The ruling opened the way for the Obama and Biden administrations to lock in a long list of regulations restricting American energy.

The term “Climate-Industrial Complex” is an apt description some commentators have affixed to the vast network of activist groups and unelected administrative agents who have erected an extra-constitutional fourth branch of government all in the name of climate. Only by attacking the very premise of the climate lobby’s regulatory schemes can Team Trump achieve lasting change. Overturning the Endangerment Finding is a big part of that process since it would mean yanking out the edifice of regulations that raise energy prices for consumers and limit their choices. The CO2 Coalition, which includes scientists and researchers from across the globe, has a long list of “Climate Facts” highlighting the benefits of CO2, and it’s role in sustaining life on Earth, while debunking exaggerated claims about global warming. The attack on CO2 is an attack on humanity itself.

Another component of the Trump agenda included in the AEA list is the president’s abrupt move to once again withdraw from the U.N. Paris Climate Agreement and to revoke any financial commitments to the U.S. under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC).

Under the agreement, participating countries pledge to reduce their CO2 emissions through “nationally determined contributions” or NDCs for the ostensible purpose of reducing “global warming.” Trump has long maintained that the international climate agreement “handicaps the U.S. economy” without producing any benefits for the climate or the environment. Right from the beginning, the agreement was crafted with an eye toward constraining America’s economic and military power while giving adversaries like China a free pass. Trump instinctively knew this was case. In his first term, Trump made the critical point that he was “elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.” There’s an undeniable link between Trump’s restoration of an “America First” energy policy and the concept of “No Taxation Without Representation.” Why should U.N. bureaucrats be permitted to raise energy costs on the American people without a straight up and down vote in Congress?

Other notable actions on the AEA list include efforts to eliminate taxpayer funded subsidies for unworkable green energy, and the resumption of export permit applications for new liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects.

Tom Pyle, the AEA president, sums the early days of the Trump’s second term of very nicely in a press statement:

“President Trump has wasted no time fulfilling his promise to unleash our country’s vast resources and undo the reckless policies of his predecessor, beginning with a flurry of executive orders and spending reductions. More recently, his agencies – especially the EPA – have formalized the process of rewriting or eliminating a host of harmful regulations. Congress has also acted with haste by nullifying a host of rules using the Congressional Review Act and has begun the process of eliminating the wasteful Inflation Reduction Act subsidies through the budget and reconciliation process.”

That part about the Congressional Review Act (CRA) deserves some extra attention since the climate lobby is just as potent here domestically in California as it is within the United Nations. In fact, the CRA may be the most viable tool available to prevent Gavin Newsom, the state’s Democratic governor, and likely presidential candidate, from superimposing his climate policy goals on the rest of the country. The CRA is a law passed in the 1990s that enables Congress to overturn final rules issued by federal agencies. Members have 60 days to introduce a joint resolution disapproving of the rule after an agency’s rule is reported to Congress. On the House side, Rep. Kevin Kiley, R-CA, has taken the critical step of introducing a CRA resolution of disapproval to repeal the Biden EPA’s 11th hour move to grant California a waiver for its Advanced Clean Cars II program, which would prohibit the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035.

Under a provision of the Clean Air Act, the EPA is authorized to establish emission standards for new motor vehicles. The agency also has latitude to grant Californiaspecial waiver to impose even more onerous regulations. That’s where the assault on consumer choice comes into play.

Other states are permitted to adopt the California standards and put gas powered cars on the path to extinction. This process is already well underway with 11 states and Washington D.C. adopting the California standards. The CRA could and should be used as a tool to reverse what is essentially a nationwide electrical vehicle mandate compliments of California. But there’s a problem.

Elizabeth MacDonough, the Senate parliamentarian, has joined with the Government Accountability Office (GAO), to make the case that the CRA should not be used to overturn the waiver because it is their view that it is an adjudicatory order, not a rule.

Pyle cuts through the legal gibberish.

“Despite misleading reports, the Congressional Review Act is crystal clear: once an agency action is submitted to Congress, it is Congress—and Congress alone—that holds the unassailable power to approve or disapprove that action,” Pyle said in a release:

“The GAO’s role is purely advisory, with no legal authority to block Congress from exercising its constitutional duty. The California waiver, which seeks to impose a nationwide electric vehicle mandate, is a prime example of why the CRA exists: to ensure that Congress retains control over regulatory actions that significantly affect the American public. It is time for Congress to step in and put a stop to California’s electric vehicle mandate. Doing so will protect consumer choice and prevent unelected agencies from dictating the future of American transportation.”

With the 250th anniversary of American independence fast approaching, there is no better way to mark that occasion than by caging the climate lobby’s administrative beast, uprooting California mandates, and restoring Congress to its proper station as a lawmaking body.

Why Must Repeal Biden’s IRA

Frank Lasee explains why Republicans Must End Democrats’ IRA Caused Inflation.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The Democrats passed the Orwellian named inflation Reduction Act (IRA) without a single Republican vote. They told us that it would be a $369 billion spending package. In fact, it could cost nearly $5 trillion adding to our debt.

The United States now has a $36.5 trillion national debt,
with a trillion dollars in annual interest payments.

The money for the IRA is all borrowed money. It causes more unnecessary energy spending, driving up electric rates and increasing inflation. This overspending is unsustainable and harmful to the United States; inflation is putting pressure on families’ budgets.

The subsidies in the IRA are incredible. Wind and solar get a 50 percent tax credit to build and a 30 percent subsidy for the electricity they produce. Trump and Congress need to end these subsidies. Not only for wind and solar, but for all the other supposedly green initiatives, like battery factories, electric vehicle manufacturing components, and hydrogen. We simply can’t afford it. 

This “green” borrowing is driving up our electric rates. Because wind and solar power are part-time and intermittent, they cannot provide full-time, keep the lights on all the time electricity generation. They do not replace any natural gas, coal, or nuclear power they just add costs.

It is like a household that has two on demand gas cars that serve their needs. They think they can save money with another car. Because of the 50 percent tax subsidies and propaganda they buy a solar car. 

They find that the solar car doesn’t work the first and last hour of the day, or when it is raining, or cloudy and not at night. The sun isn’t powerful enough. They learn they cannot replace any of their gas cars with the solar car.

So, they buy a wind car that only works the 30 percent of the time the wind blows. They find they can’t get home from their kids’ soccer game or from work because the wind stopped blowing.

Capacity shortfall events – or blackouts – in Southwest Power Pool (SPP) when we modeled EPA’s proposal for carbon mandates, stemming from the agency’s use of 80% or higher capacity values for solar energy.

They are now paying for four cars instead of two. This is exactly what is happening to our electric grid. We are paying for a full-time and part-time electricity production. 

To make matters worse, the way that regional transmission organizations (RTOs) pay for our electricity doesn’t allow us to realize any savings from the heavily subsidized wind and solar generation. 

The industry calls it take and pay. The most expensive form of electricity the RTO purchases is what they pay all electricity providers. This means that there is no savings from wind and solar for electric consumers, only increased costs.

Projected Business Electricity Expenses in California based on increasing commercial rates.

No other industry pays the highest bid price to all suppliers, regardless of what they bid. But that’s what they do in the electric world. We are paying higher electricity rates because of this practice.

This begs for state legislative action to correct this expensive payment scheme. 

Wind and solar further drive up the price of electricity because they require many miles of expensive transmission wires and displace full-time electric generation. Forcing it to run less than it would if they were not on the electric grid.

As natural gas and coal power plants run more part-time, every electron they sell must have a higher price to cover their costs. Their maintenance costs will only increase, too, because they were never designed to run intermittently.

Trump understands that wind and solar drive up the cost of our electricity, particularly offshore wind, which costs five times more than natural gas electricity, and are built in hurricane alley. What could go wrong? The simple answer is to stop subsidizing all electric generation with our borrowed inflation causing tax dollars. And states should end favorable regulations that require the purchase of wind and solar first. 

There are 21 House Republicans that have signed a letter saying they don’t want to repeal the IRA, even though they didn’t vote for it. Because it is fostering wasteful pretend “green” spending in their districts. Clever Democrats have the bulk of the spending going into these Republican districts in order to preserve this green slush fund.

President Trump needs to use his considerable persuasion and political muscle to end this Democrat boondoggle, which adds to our $36.5 trillion national debt.

Frank Lasee is a former Wisconsin state senator and former member of Governor Scott Walker’s administration. The district he represented had two nuclear power plants, a biomass plant and numerous wind towers. He has experience with energy, the environment, and the climate. You can read more energy and climate information at www.truthinenergyandclimate.com which Frank leads.

Fast Track to Poverty: Green Energy

At his blog, Matt Ridley explains How the Green Energy Transition Makes You Poorer.
Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Crony capitalism at work

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 growthachieving more output with less input.

Right now, the Net Zero transition is doing the very opposite.

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Climate Crisis Talk Obscures Reality

Edward Ring writes at American Greatness Challenging the Climate Crisis Narrative.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

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 the United Nations, “Climate change is a global emergency that goes beyond national borders.” From the World 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 quite 70 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 about 150 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 disastrous floods that devastated Pakistan in 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’ve channelized their rivers, built dense new settlements onto 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 coastal aquifers 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.