The EPA’s revocation of the 2009 endangerment finding shifts the burden of proof from federal agencies to state capitals. Governors who declared climate emergencies must now demonstrate with regional data that rising carbon dioxide (CO2) endangers their residents. Wisconsin cannot meet that burden.
In 2019, Wisconsin declared climate change a crisis requiring the state’s electricity to be carbon-free by 2050, citing worsening extreme weather as justification. Since then, the state has spent $6 billion on renewable infrastructure while residents pay 15% more for electricity than the Midwest average.
A new report by the Weiss Energy Policy Institute analyzed 130 years of Wisconsin climate data and found that as atmospheric CO2 rose 45%, Wisconsin experienced 63% fewer days over 90°F,heatwaves 71% shorter in duration, powerful tornadoes down 70%, and significant drought decline since 1894.
This isn’t just absence of evidence, it’s negative correlation.
As CO2increased, climate extremes decreased.
In addition to the improving climate, the report also notably found that rural Wisconsin’s average temperature has not changed since 1894. Urban areas, on the other hand, have warmed about 2.2°F since the late nineteenth century. The report finds that this urban warming is nearly entirely due to the Urban Heat Island effect from concrete and development, not CO2. In many measurable ways, Wisconsin’s climate has become more conducive to human flourishing over the past century.
Even if CO2 were causing harm, Wisconsin’s ability to adapt
to climate change far surpasses its ability to influence it.
The Badger State’s 2023 carbon emissions were 22% below its peak of 110 million metric tons in 2005. Despite its reduction, annual global emissions have increased by over 100 times Wisconsin’s entire annual emissions over the same period. In fact, in 2023, Wisconsin’s carbon emissions made up less than 0.25% of the global total.
While CO2 has not endangered residents of Wisconsin,
the climate-based policies have.
Residential electricity prices continue climbing even as household consumption falls. In fact, Xcel Energy and Alliant Energy have requested cumulative rate hikes approaching 19% over the next two years. Some in Waukesha County are already facing “dramatically higher” energy bills, double from just months earlier. Under Wisconsin’s current policies, this is sure to continue. In fact, Wisconsin is hurtling toward an energy crisis. The latest long term reliability assessment projects the state will enter “high-risk” territory for blackouts by 2028.
This economic burden stems from poor energy policies. Current leadership has forced coal plants into early retirement, blocked critical natural gas infrastructure, mandated carbon targets over grid reliability, vetoed consumer protections against appliance bans, and weaponized the permitting process to strangle traditional energy development.
For example, the state’s climate policies prevented a gas-fired plant that would have brought $1 million in annual tax revenue and 350 construction jobs to northern Wisconsin last year. Its initial permits expired while waiting for more permits.
In the face of unprecedented new energy demand, Wisconsin’s grid might have been able to absorb the new data centers and industrial growth if it weren’t already stressed by climate policy. But solar cannot replace coal megawatt-for-megawatt. In order to replace reliable coal with solar, while maintaining the same reliability, nearly twenty times the capacity must be installed. That means ratepayers pay to build and maintain thousands of acres of solar panels and pay to keep backup plants on standby for when those panels underperform.
Even overturning the carbon mandate won’t be enough to save the grid, because the current regulatory system was not built to accommodate surging industrial demand without punishing ratepayers. Wisconsin lawmakers need to save residents from footing the bill for data center infrastructure by utilizing free markets and private capital rather than heavy-handed subsidies.
This market-oriented solution for Wisconsin is called Consumer-Regulated Electricity (CRE). It allows privately financed utilities to generate and sell power directly to large customers through voluntary contracts, operating independent of the regulated grid. This creates a parallel pathway for new industrial demand, protecting residential ratepayers while giving Wisconsin a competitive advantage over other Midwest states. It attracts industrial capital without subsidies or forcing costs onto families.
The revoked endangerment finding forces a reckoning: will Wisconsin continue its expensive and dangerous energy transition, or will it examine the actual data? New evidence suggests the state should:
♦ rescind its zero-carbon mandate, ♦ restore reliable baseload power to the legacy grid, and ♦ pass Consumer-Regulated Electricity legislation to let private capital serve new industrial demand without burdening ratepayers.
Combined with removing carbon mandates from the legacy grid,
these reforms position Wisconsin a bright energy future.
In the 21st century, affordable and reliable power separates flourishing societies from struggling ones. Wisconsin cannot prove CO2 harms, but its climate policies are already bringing on an energy crisis. Other states that built climate mandates on the endangerment finding should audit their climate data. The burden of proof has shifted to state capitals, and the evidence may not support the mandates.
Twenty years after Al Gore’s apocalyptic movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” the Trump administration has put the final nail in the coffin of the lie that scared a generation into believing the planet was about to explode in flames if they kept using fossil fuels.
In what the White House calls “the largest deregulatory action in American history,” the EPA on Thursday will repeal an Obama-era proclamation that has mandated greenhouse-gas regulations for 17 years,
The 2009 “endangerment finding” has been the primary climate handbrake on American industry, forming the legal justification for increasingly punitive greenhouse-gas regulations.
Rescinding it would “save the American people $1.3 trillion in crushing regulations,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said this week, with the EPA projecting an average saving of $2,400 per vehicle and further savings on farm machinery, soon to be freed from the complex extra circuitry required to restrict emissions.
Yay! It’s about time that common sense returned to energy policy.
During the recent bone-chilling winter storm that hit 200 million Americans across more than 35 states, it wasn’t wind and solar that kept the lights on but fossil fuels.
Fueling US prosperity
According to the Florida Municipal Power Agency, 90% of power generation in the country at the height of the storm was natural gas, coal, nuclear or oil.
Cheap, abundant energy fueled America’s prosperity, but charlatans citing pseudoscience have conspired to send us back to the dark ages with hyperbolic predictions that keep falling apart.
As we keep sailing past the various doomsday deadlines set by climate shucksters from Gore to Greta Thunberg, the public has been waking up to the hoax.
A Gallup poll found in 2024 only 2 percent of Americans cite climate change or the environment as their main concern.
It’s telling that green activists have been relatively silent in the face of a full-scale assault by Trump and his Cabinet on climate shibboleths the past year. He lauded EPA administrator Lee Zeldin and his rapid fire deregulation moves as the administration’s “secret weapon” in his war against the “war on coal.”
“Biden and the radical left wanted to abolish coal,” Trump told the assembled group of coal miners in hard hats and hi-vis vests in the East Room.
“They did everything they could . . . but on Day 1 of this administration I ended the war on coal. We terminated the green new scam and we withdrew from the unfair, one-sided Paris climate deal.”
He also boasted that he has saved 74 coal fired power plants from extinction and announced that the Tennessee Valley Authority has just taken two coal plants off the chopping board.
Meanwhile, buoyed by falling electricity prices, the first American aluminum smelter in 50 years is now slated to be built in Oklahoma.
Net-zero policies adopted by in Europe, Canada and Australia, with their blind reliance on wind and solar, have failed. Add the huge new demand for power by data processing centers underpinning artificial intelligence, and the climate fiction has become impossible to sustain.
Now, policymakers and powerful influencers are hoping they can sidle away from the disastrous decisions they forced on us with false pretenses.
Climate activism out
Billionaire activistBill Gates has renounced climate alarm, declaring quietly last October that climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise” and “the global temperature doesn’t tell us anything about the quality of people’s lives.”
Thank you, Captain Obvious. Maybe there are more pressing problems in the world that we could more usefully spend his money to solve.
On Wall Street, ESG (environment, social and government) stocks have fallen out of favor.
Public disillusionment is happening as the underpinnings of the climate hoax have collapsed.
In congressional testimony last week Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent pointed to the “monumental retraction” of Nature magazine’s infamous paper on “The Economic Commitment of Climate Change” which claimed the cost of global warming would be $38 trillion per year by 2049. It was retracted two months ago because, Nature admitted, the errors were “too substantial for a correction.”
Bessent declared that the repudiation of the influential economic modeling “laid bare the radical left’s apocalyptic hyperbole on climate change . . .
“This fatally fraught paper, with errors far too substantial for correction, has been frequently used and abused to justify bad policymaking around the world, undermining both energy abundance and better living standards.”
These days, when Energy Secretary Chris Wright meets his European and Australian counterparts behind closed doors, they confide to him that he “may be right on the data,” but the public still “feels” climate alarm is real.
As he points out, that’s because they’ve been lied to for a quarter of a century.
The truth hurts, but it’s better than the alternative.
[Top] Comparison of the harmonic empirical global climate model under the SSP2-4.5 scenario with the HadCRUT4.6 record (1850–2021) alongside the burning ember diagrams representing the five primary global Reasons for Concern (RFCs) under low-to-no adaptation scenarios, as reported by the IPCC (2023) AR6. [Bottom] Summary and analysis of the projected impacts and risks of global warming for the 2080–2100 period compared to the climate “thermometer” projections from Climate Action Tracker (2024). Credit: Gondwana Research (2026). DOI: 10.1016/j.gr.2025.05.001
Current global climate models (GCMs) support with high confidence the view that rising greenhouse gases and other anthropogenic forcings account for nearly all observed global surface warming—slightly above 1 °C—since the pre-industrial period (1850–1900). This is the conclusion presented in the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) published in 2021.
Figure 3: CMIP6 GCM ensemble mean simulations spanning from 1850 to 2100, employing historical effective radiative forcing functions from 1850 to 2014 (see Figure 1C) and the forcing functions based on the SSP scenarios 1-2.6, 2-4.5, 3-7.0, and 5-8.5. Curve colors are scaled according to the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) of the models. The right panels depict the risks and impacts of climate change in relation to various global Reasons for Concern (RFCs) (IPCC, 2023). (Adapted from Scafetta, 2024).
Moreover, the GCM projections for the 21st century, produced under different socioeconomic pathways (SSPs), underpin estimates of future climate impacts and guide net-zero mitigation strategies worldwide.
The prevailing interpretation is that only net-zero climate policies can keep future climate change-related damages within acceptable limits. Yet such policies carry extremely high economic and societal costs, making it essential to assess whether these certain and immediate costs are fully justified by the current state of climate science.
On the other hand, a closer examination of observational datasets, paleoclimate evidence, and model performance reveals a more intricate picture—one that merits open discussion among students, researchers, and anyone interested in how climate science is evolving.
My study “Detection, attribution, and modeling of climate change: Key open issues,” published in Gondwana Research, examines several unresolved questions in climate detection, attribution, and modeling. These issues concern the foundations of how past climate changes are interpreted and how future ones are projected, and they matter because climate projections influence decisions that will shape economies and societies for decades. [My synopsis: Scafetta: Climate Models Have Issues. ]
A central theme is natural climate variability. Across the Holocene—the last 11,700 years—the climate system exhibited a Climate Optimum(6,000–8,000 years ago) and repeated oscillations: multidecadal cycles, centennial fluctuations, and millennial-scale reorganizations.
Some longer cycles are well known, such as the quasi-millennial Eddy cycle, associated with the Medieval and Roman warm periods, and the 2,000–2,500-year Hallstatt–Bray cycle. These patterns appear in ice cores, marine sediments, tree rings, historical documents, and in both climate and solar proxy records.
Current GCMs, however, struggle to reproduce the Holocene Optimum and these rhythms. They generate internal variability, but not with the correct timing, amplitude, or persistence. When a model cannot capture the natural “heartbeat” of the climate system, distinguishing human-driven warming from background variability becomes challenging. This is particularly relevant for interpreting the warming observed since 1850–1900, because both the Eddy and Hallstatt–Bray cycles have been in rising phases since roughly the 1600s.
Figure 1. Anthropgenic and natural contributions. (a) Locked scaling factors, weak Pre Industrial Climate Anomalies (PCA). (b) Free scaling, strong PCA Source: Larminat, P. de (2023)
A portion of the post-industrial warming could therefore stem from these long natural oscillations, which are expected to peak in the 21st century and in the second half of the third millennium, respectively.
Another key issue concerns the global surface temperature datasets that serve as the backbone of global warming assessment. These datasets are essential but not perfect.
Urbanization, land-use changes, station relocations, and instrumentation shifts can introduce non-climatic biases. Many corrections exist, yet uncertainties persist. Even small unresolved biases can influence long-term trends.
The study highlights well-known discrepancies: satellite-based estimates of lower-troposphere temperatures since 1980 show about 20–30% less warming than surface-based records, particularly over Northern Hemisphere land areas.
Recent reconstructions based on confirmed rural stations also show significantly weaker secular warming. These differences underscore the need for continued scrutiny of observational records.
Solar and astronomical influences represent another area where science is still evolving. The sun varies in ways not fully captured by the simplified irradiance reconstructions used in many models. Multiple lines of evidence indicate that the climate system responds not only to total solar irradiance but also to spectral variations, magnetic modulation, and indirect effects on atmospheric circulation.
These mechanisms are still under investigation, and their representation in models remains incomplete, even though empirical evidence suggests that they may play a dominant role—potentially more influential than the simple total-solar-irradiance forcing currently implemented.
Moreover, despite ongoing controversy surrounding long-term solar variability, current GCMs are typically forced with solar reconstructions that exhibit extremely low secular variability. This helps explain why these models attribute nearly 0 °C of the observed post 1850–1900 warming to solar changes and simultaneously fail to reproduce the millennial-scale oscillations evident in paleoclimate records.
Direct comparisons between GCM global surface temperature simulations and observations also show that the models do not reproduce the quasi-60-year climatic oscillation associated with the 1940s warming period, and they tend to overestimate the warming observed since 1980. This “hot model” problem has been documented in several studies and appears to affect a substantial fraction of current GCMs.
All of this connects to a key parameter in climate science: equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS). The canonical estimate—around 3 °C for a doubling of CO₂, with a likely range of 2.5–4.0 °C according to the IPCC—derives largely from model-based assessments.
Empirical studies, including those that account more explicitly for natural variability, often suggest lower values, sometimes around 2.2 ± 0.5 °C, or even as low as 1.1 ± 0.4 °C if long-term solar luminosity varies significantly and if additional solar-related mechanisms influence the climate system—mechanisms not included in current models. If ECS is lower than commonly assumed, projected 21st-century warming would be substantially reduced under all SSP scenarios.
These graphs use Hadcrut4 and include the 2016 El Nino warming event. The exhibit shows since 1947 GMT warmed by 0.8 C, from 13.9 to 14.7, as estimated by Hadcrut4. This resulted from three natural warming events involving ocean cycles. The most recent rise 2013-16 lifted temperatures by 0.2C. Previously the 1997-98 El Nino produced a plateau increase of 0.4C. Before that, a rise from 1977-81 added 0.2C to start the warming since 1947.
The interplay between natural and anthropogenic factors is definitely more nuanced than often portrayed. When empirical models that include natural oscillations are used to project future temperatures, the result is typically moderate future warming rather than extreme trajectories. This raises important questions about the scientific basis for the most aggressive mitigation pathways.
The figure compares the warming expected from GCMs, as assessed by the IPCC, with the associated relative risks, alongside the expectations derived from the empirical modeling proposed in the paper. While net-zero pathways such as SSP1 are considered necessary to meet the Paris Agreement target of limiting global warming to below 2 °C by 2100, empirical considerations suggest that the same target could also be achieved under the far more moderate SSP2 scenario.
This distinction has major global economic implications, because the
prevailing climate-crisis narrative does not appear to be fully supported by the evidence, and far less costly adaptation strategies could be
more appropriate than highly aggressive mitigation policies.
The study stresses the importance of addressing the key open questions of climate science. Climate policy should be informed by the full spectrum of scientific evidence, including uncertainties and alternative interpretations.
Some thoughts from my browser AI. My Question: What are the legal matters, such as major questions requiring congressional action, that favor ending EPA CO2 Endangerment Finding?
Search Assistant Reply:
The legal matters surrounding the repeal of the EPA’s CO2 Endangerment Finding involve the major questions doctrine, which suggests that significant regulatory authority should not be assumed by agencies without clear congressional authorization. This doctrine has been reinforced by recent Supreme Court rulings, indicating that the EPA may need explicit legislative backing to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, thus favoring the argument for ending the Endangerment Finding.
Legal Matters Surrounding the EPA CO2 Endangerment Finding
Major Questions Doctrine
The major questions doctrine is a legal principle that limits the authority of executive agencies, like the EPA, to make significant regulatory decisions without clear congressional authorization. This doctrine has been increasingly applied by the Supreme Court to ensure that major political or economic issues are addressed by Congress rather than delegated to agencies.
Definition: The doctrine asserts that agencies must have explicit congressional authorization to regulate matters of significant economic or political importance.
Recent Cases: The Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA (2022) emphasized that agencies must point to clear congressional authorization for their regulatory actions, particularly when those actions have broad implications.
Implications for the Endangerment Finding
The repeal of the EPA’s CO2 Endangerment Finding could be supported by arguments based on the major questions doctrine:
Lack of Clear Authorization: Opponents of the Endangerment Finding may argue that the Clean Air Act does not provide the EPA with the authority to regulate greenhouse gases based on global climate change concerns, as these gases are not traditional air pollutants.
Historical Context: The Endangerment Finding was established following the Massachusetts v. EPA (2007) ruling, which recognized greenhouse gases as pollutants. However, the current administration may argue that the regulatory framework established under this finding lacks explicit congressional backing for such extensive regulatory power. [Note: AI got this wrong. Mass v. EPA only ruled EPA could itself decide GHGs are pollutants subject to its regulation. That judgment by EPA regarding auto emissions in 2009 is now rescinded by EPA in 2026.]
Potential Legal Challenges
Court Challenges: Environmental groups are likely to challenge the repeal in court, arguing that the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases is well-supported by the Clean Air Act and previous Supreme Court rulings.
Future Regulations: If the Endangerment Finding is repealed, it could undermine existing regulations on vehicle emissions and other sources of greenhouse gases, leading to further legal disputes over the EPA’s regulatory scope.
The intersection of the major questions doctrine and the Endangerment Finding highlights the ongoing legal debates regarding the EPA’s authority and the role of Congress in environmental regulation.
From SCOTUS Blog June 30, 2022
The Supreme Court on Thursday truncated the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to regulate greenhouse gases. The ruling may hamper President Joe Biden’s plan to fight climate change and could limit the authority of federal agencies across the executive branch.
By a vote of 6-3, the court agreed with Republican-led states and coal companies that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit was wrong when it interpreted the Clean Air Act to give the EPA expansive power over carbon emissions. The decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, was handed down on the final opinion day of the 2021-22 term.
Turning to the merits of the case, Roberts wrote that the EPA’s effort to regulate greenhouse gases by making industry-wide changes violated the “major-questions” doctrine – the idea that if Congress wants to give an administrative agency the power to make “decisions of vast economic and political significance,” it must say so clearly.
Section 7411 of the Clean Air Act, Roberts reasoned, had been “designed as a gap filler and had rarely been used in the preceding decades.” But with the CPP, Roberts observed, the EPA sought to rely on Section 7411 to exercise “unprecedented power over American industry.” “There is little reason to think Congress assigned such decisions to” the EPA, Roberts concluded, especially when Congress had previously rejected efforts to enact the kind of program that the EPA wanted to implement with the CPP.
“Capping carbon dioxide emissions at a level that will force a nationwide transition away from the use of coal to generate electricity may be a sensible ‘solution to the crisis of the day,’” Roberts wrote. But only Congress, or an agency with express authority from Congress, can adopt a “decision of such magnitude and consequence.”
Roberts’ full-throated embrace of the major-questions doctrine – a judicially created approach to statutory interpretation in challenges to agency authority – likely will have ripple effects far beyond the EPA. His reasoning applies to any major policymaking effort by federal agencies.
In a concurring opinion that was joined by Justice Samuel Alito, Justice Neil Gorsuch emphasized that the dispute before the court involved “basic questions about self-government, equality, fair notice, federalism, and the separation of powers.” The major-questions doctrine, Gorsuch wrote, “seeks to protect against ‘unintentional, oblique, or otherwise unlikely’ intrusions on these interests” by requiring federal agencies to have “clear congressional authorization” when they address important issues. Whether coal- and gas-fired power plants “should be allowed to operate is a question on which people today may disagree, but it is a question everyone can agree is vitally important.”
The curtain is falling on the world’s most expensive soap opera. For decades, a cast of unelected bureaucrats and subsidized academics fought to keep the production alive, but the audience has finally walked out. The climate-crisis clown show is over.
In early January, President Donald Trump formally withdrew the United States from the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and severed ties with over 60 associated UN organizations. By ending support for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the self-anointed arbiter of planetary truth – the U.S. stopped bankrolling the institutions that have long conspired to dismantle the economic sovereignty of nations.
Mainstream commentators are scrambling to frame this as a retreat into isolationism. But this represents a rational, economic calculation rooted in evidence rather than the hysteria of doomsday cults.
What deserves attention, however, is that Trump is merely doing openly
what Asia’s energy superpowers have been doing quietly for years.
Beijing long ago stopped pretending to care about the sensibilities of European climate activists. The Chinese Communist Party understands that power – both electrical and geopolitical – comes from hydrocarbons. China is outpacing the rest of the world in building coal-fired power plants at an unprecedented pace.
China is also securing energy lifelines beyond its borders. China National Chemical Engineering signed construction contracts worth $20 billion for the Ogidigbon Gas Revolution Industrial Park in Nigeria. Beijing-based Sinopec committed $3.7 billion to construct an oil refinery in Sri Lanka. Chinese financial institutions have lent$52 billion to Africa’s energy sector, with about half going to fossil fuel projects since the early 2000s.
China’s construction of the Kyaukphyu deep-sea port and Special Economic Zone in Myanmar serves as another telling indicator. Valued at approximately $7.3 billion for the port itself and $1.3 billion for an adjacent economic zone, this project will be a strategic bypass around the congested Malacca Strait – a chokepoint through which over 70 percent of China’s oil and gas trade passes.
The signal is unmistakable: China is not preparing for a post-hydrocarbon
world. It is ensuring reliable, diversified supply chains
for energy resources, especially oil and natural gas.
India, too, has quietly ended its flirtation with Western green agendas. Indian consumption of petrochemicals is set to grow by 6-7 percent annually. To meet this demand, India is aggressively expanding oil and gas exploration and refining capacity. In November alone, Indian processing of crude oil grew to 22.3 million metric tons, a 2.3 percent increase from the previous year.
Late last year, the Indian government auctioned blocks of coal with combined geological reserves of over 3 billion metric tons. India’s planning documents ignore natural gas as a “bridge fuel” and identify coal as the nation’s mainstay fuel.
Worldwide, there are 460 coal plants under construction. Another 500 have been permitted or are about to be, with an additional 260 new plants expected to be announced. The vast majority of all this activity is in China and India.
These nations are not “transitioning” from coal; they are cementing its dominance. Even Indonesia, which was once the poster child for the West’s “Just Energy Transition Partnerships,” has faced reality as it canceled the early retirement of the massive Cirebon coal-fired plant.
Trump’s withdrawal from the UN’s climate tyranny and the parallel actions of Asian energy giants are a recalibration of global priorities. Governments and businesses are investing billions in extracting and transporting hydrocarbons. Ports, pipelines, and refineries designed to function for decades are being built..
Nations are reasserting the right to pursue policies rooted in their own
economic interests rather than follow “international” edicts of a favored few.
The Trump administration has simply ended American participation in a system that was already irrelevant to the actual decisions being made by the world’s major energy consumers.
In part, the narrative of an “energy transition” survived by being presented as inevitable. That sham has been exposed. A transition will likely occur someday, but only when new technologies prove to be affordable and reliable.
In the meantime, expect more exits, more quiet defiance, more recalibration.
Climate rhetoric will continue to diminish as investments in hydrocarbons accelerate.
Kathryn Porter’s recent article on the plight of UK’s electrical grid at her blog: Electrification – can the grid cope?The excerpt below provides findings from her new research paper, available at the link above.
Electrification has become the default answer to almost every energy and climate question. Heat? Electrify it. Transport? Electrify it. Industry? Electrify it. In policy circles, electrification is often treated as a frictionless substitute for fossil fuels: cleaner, simpler, and largely inevitable. In this new report I take a look at what electrification would mean for the GB power grid, if it went ahead as planned. I also consider the impact of additional demand from AI data centres.
Electrification policy rests on optimistic assumptions
Across heating, transport and industry, electrification targets rely on a similar set of assumptions:
♦ that consumers will change behaviour rapidly, ♦ that costs will fall quickly and predictably, and ♦ that electricity infrastructure will expand smoothly to accommodate new demand.
The report tests these assumptions sector by sector and finds them wanting.
The good news is that electrification targets are unlikely to be met without some form of compulsion. In heating, rapid deployment of heat pumps is implausible under current conditions. Consumer resistance remains high, installer numbers are growing too slowly, and both capital and running costs are materially higher than for gas heating. Even where heat‑pump subsidies reduce upfront costs, households still face additional expenditure on larger emitters, pipework and insulation, as well as higher ongoing energy bills because electricity prices remain far above gas prices. These are not marginal issues – they are fundamental barriers to mass adoption.
Transport electrification faces a similar gap between ambition and delivery. Mandates for electric vehicles are running ahead of public willingness to adopt them, while grid and charging‑infrastructure constraints remain severe. These problems are magnified for larger vehicles. There is currently no credible fast‑charging solution for HGVs, and electrifying buses outside dense urban centres is far more challenging than policy documents typically acknowledge, particularly where vehicles do not return regularly to a single depot.
In industry, the constraint is both technical feasibility and economic viability. High electricity prices have driven deindustrialisation across large parts of the UK economy, reducing electricity demand far more quickly than electrification can increase it. In practice, deindustrialisation is the dominant trend, and a stronger driver of demand than electrification across the economy as a whole.
Across all three sectors, the modelling used by both NESO and the Climate Change Committee depends on behavioural and technological assumptions that are optimistic, weakly evidenced, and often inconsistent across scenarios. My report does not assume electrification will fail entirely, but it does find that current targets are unlikely to be met without significant compulsion, which brings its own political and social risks.
The system is under strain even without electrification
The bad news is that, even without electrification, the electricity grid is likely to struggle unless action is taken. One of the most important findings of my report is that the GB electricity system is already heading towards a serious adequacy problem even if large‑scale electrification largely fails.
Renewables cannot provide security of supply during prolonged low‑wind winter events, and reliance on interconnectors is risky when neighbouring systems face similar weather patterns. Meanwhile, just under 5 GW of nuclear generation is scheduled to close by 2032 at the latest, and around 12 GW of CCGT capacity is at risk of closure due to age and declining utilisation.
While Hinkley Point C and perhaps a small amount of new open‑cycle gas capacity may come online over the next five to seven years, this does not come close to offsetting expected closures. Under plausible assumptions, the system could face a capacity shortfall of around 12 GW on cold, low‑wind winter days.
In such conditions, meeting demand without rationing would be impossible.
Replacing or upgrading ageing gas generation is constrained by long lead times. New rotors typically require around 5 years, and entirely new gas turbines 7-8 years, reflecting global supply‑chain bottlenecks. These are physical constraints that cannot be resolved by market reform or policy ambition alone.
Britain is not alone in facing a potential problem with system adequacy. Norway, the Netherlands and Germany were all considered as part of the report and in each case, possible shortages are identified. Norway assumes that flexibility, demand response, or batteries will full the gap. The Dutch are less confident and intend to monitor the generation mix in neighbouring countries in the hope of persuading them to maintain enough firm generation to secure the Dutch grid on low wind days. Only Germany has explicitly identified a need to build more gas generation, although its target is likely inadequate.
Europe at night from space NASA 2016
Flexibility helps, but does not replace firm capacity
One of the report’s central findings is that electrification does not increase demand evenly. Heat pumps, EV charging, and industrial electrification all tend to concentrate demand in time (cold evenings, post‑work charging windows), and concentrate demand in space (residential feeders, urban substations, motorway corridors).
Annual energy numbers hide this – a system can look comfortable
on a terawatt‑hour basis while becoming acutely
stressed for a few hundred hours a year.
Flexibility features heavily in electrification plans with smart charging, demand response, batteries, and thermal storage. While flexibility can shave peaks, this only works where consumers tolerate loss of convenience. In many cases, policymakers ignore real-world constraints such as fire risks associated with overnight operation of domestic appliances, and noise restrictions within multi-occupancy residential buildings. Batteries are energy‑limited and cannot cover prolonged stress events. Many flexibility services depend on digital systems that introduce new operational and cyber risks. Flexibility may reduces costs at the margin, but it does not eliminate the need for firm capacity, resilient networks, or system strength.
Infrastructure challenges present further risks
In addition to the issues with reliable generation capacity, there are further difficulties with distribution and transmission constraints which arrive earlier and are also hard to fix quickly. Key points from the report include:
Local distribution networks were not designed for mass electrification of heat and transport
Reinforcement timelines are measured in years, and often a decade or more
Connection queues and “paper capacity” obscure real‑world deliverability
The report also identifies risks with aging grid infrastructure and the recently identified risks that premature closure of offshore gas pipelines may constrain gas supplies to the grid on cold winter days, limiting the gas available for electricity generation.
What this means in practice
Taken together, the findings point to an uncomfortable conclusion. The GB electricity system is likely to struggle to maintain today’s level of demand reliably, let alone accommodate the additional 7–10 GW of load in 2030 implied by current electrification agendas. AI data centres are therefore likely to pursue off‑grid solutions, not because of technological failure but because the grid is no longer perceived as sufficiently reliable for mission‑critical loads.
Large‑scale electrification of heat and industry before 2030 appears improbable, and likely remains so for several years thereafter. Without decisive policy action, the probability of regional rationing, blackouts and cascading grid failures rises materially.
To restore Britain’s energy security, government must
pivot from aspirational modelling to credible planning.
This means:
♦ supporting life extension of ageing gas generation, ♦ accelerating procurement of new dispatchable capacity, ♦ reforming network investment incentives to prioritise resilience, and ♦ reassessing electrification timelines.
Net zero targets cannot be allowed to override public safety.
Security of supply must once again become
the foundational principle of UK energy policy.
Your correspondent has a confession. I need to get up at least two hours earlier to keep abreast of all the current madness that is Net Zero. The un-walked dog will have to go back to resuming her slumbers on the best seat in the house while I digest the latest reports piling trillions of pounds onto the realistic cost of the Net Zero fantasy. Long hours must be spent trying to work out how the sinister Miliband plans to make household energy cheaper by giving billions to useless, unreliable wind and solar, and then sticking the horrendous costs straight onto consumer bills. “Cheaper than gas!” this still-at-large lunatic is apparently still howling. Then I would have time for a good laugh with the really dumb stuff. And none dafter than the recent suggestion from the Green Blob-funded Conservative Environment Network (CEN) to blanket inland water areas with solar panels, killing local aquatic life and tricking diving birds into crashing into them.
If they were bats mistaking floating solar panels for water, hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of pounds would need to be spent constructing elaborate protecting tunnels (okay, I know the Sun will not be able to shine on the panels, but it doesn’t much anyway in the winter, and I am just making it all up, like everyone else in the Net Zero business). The last Conservative government allowed spending of £120 million to protect a few rare bats by building a 1,000-metre tunnel on the new high-speed railway from London to Birmingham.
The bat protection structure runs for 1km over the railway line, costing £120m.
But then perhaps such magic money-tree largesse would not be available for water bird-whacking solar panels – ‘green’ technology is good and different rules apply. Bats are killed in their millions worldwide by giant wind turbines, but nobody gives a flying squeak about that.
The CEN wants the UK Government to cut red tape to “unleash” solar farm developments on “man-made bodies of water” and to help projects selling power to the electricity grid. It is claimed that red tape has put a straitjacket on private investment in the UK floating solar industry. Man-made water areas are said to include disused docks and quarries along with on-farm reservoirs. CEN wants to encourage water companies to build solar farms on the 570 reservoirs that exist in the UK, potentially generating 2.7 terawatt-hours of electricity.
Waiving local planning rules for unreliable energy projects is much in fashion with the national political parties, particularly Labour and the Conservatives, who face forthcoming local election humiliation at the hands of the surging anti-Net Zero Reform Party.
Many long-standing pools of freshwater, whether originally man-made
or not, become vibrant centres of aquatic and avian life.
Dumping huge solar panels on the surface is a considerable nature killer. A paper published last month in Environmental Science and Technology examined the interaction of birds and floating solar panels and concluded that their industrial structure could pose “significant risk” to certain bird species, especially those with limited visual acuity and flight manoeuvrability adapted to aquatic habitats. Birds most at risk were said to be waterfowl, shorebirds and gulls.
The big danger for birds is one of fatal collision with solar panels that replicate the surface of water. It can affect birds diving for food but is a particular problem for aquatic species that land harder and faster on water. The panels also present problems for birds that require a ‘runway’ to take off. Overall, the survey suggests fatalities of around 11.61 birds per megawatt generated per year. Needless to say, there are other ecological concerns that will need to be ignored by Net Zero fanatics. With even limited panel coverage there will be changes in shading, dissolved oxygen levels and water temperature. These create altered microclimates and disrupt food chains.
The CEN looks forward to generating 2.7 terawatts from panelling over the ponds, a power source that, due to its appalling unreliability, will further destabilise Britain’s already creaking grid. It is the latest quack scheme produced by an operation supported by 49 Conservative MPs that remains dedicated to the Net Zero lunacy. This caucus, which represents a significant 41% of the current parliamentary party, is a substantial roadblock to attempts by the party’s leadership to move away from all the Net Zero hysteria that has engulfed the Conservatives over the last two decades. Attempts last year by the leader Kemi Badenoch to ditch the 2050 Net Zero commitment were met by the CEN director Sam Hall complaining to the Guardian that the move “undermines the significant environment legacy of successive Conservative governments”.
But politics is a fluid business in the modern Conservative party. The CEN parliamentary group includes Simon Hoare and Sir Roger Gale, the two midwit buffers who intended to vote last year for a society-destroying private bill that would have cut all hydrocarbon use in the UK to 10% within 10 years. On the other hand, it also counts Esther McVey, who recently informed Talk Radio that Net Zero was a “dud”.
Tom Harris and Todd Royal explain why “official” temperature history from Canada government is distorted to invent warming where very little has actually ocurred. Their article: Is Canada basing its climate policies on ‘decision-based evidence-making?’ Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Politicians want us to believe that they base their decisions on solid, verifiable evidence. “Evidence-based decision-making,” they call it. But what if the decision is made first and then the data is selected, or left uncorrected, in order to support the now politically correct decision? That would then be “decision-based evidence-making.” In other words, a complete corruption of honest decision-making.
It seems that Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) is doing exactly thatwith the country’s temperature data in order to support the government’s mantra that Canada is “warming twice as fast as the global average.” For, if the one-degree anomalous spike in Canada’s “mean temperature” in 1998 is removed from the data, as even ECCC researchers themselves advocated previously should be done to preserve data integrity in cases like this, then Canada is not warming at all and much of the $200 billion spent on the climate file by the federal Liberal government since 2015 is a complete waste.
In 2021, Dr. Joseph Hickey, a data scientist with a PhD in Physics, specializing in complexity science, then an employee of the Bank of Canada, alerted ECCC to this one-degree jump in temperature data across much of Canada, and asked for an explanation. The below graphs of mean, maximum and minimum temperatures constructed with data from three Canadian cities—Moncton (on which Hickey illustrates the step change with red lines), Ottawa and Montreal—are samples of those created by Hickey using ECCC data downloaded on November 11, 2025, data that is the same as that he sent to ECCC researchers as an attachment to his email of June 24, 2021.
Ignoring their previous position about the need to remove such sudden discontinuities from the data, ECCC staff had little to say and left the anomaly in the record, asserting that it was “probably” a real sudden change in temperature.
Making matters worse, another Bank of Canada employee, economist Julien McDonald-Guimond, had already alerted ECCC by email on December 7, 2020, that he had found more than 10,000 instances of days for which the daily minimum temperature was greater than the daily maximum temperature. Again, ECCC staff had no reasonable justification.
Dr. Hickey shows that, if you apply ECCC’s trend analysis method to their data, you find an increase of 1.74° C (which is statistically significant) from 1948 to 2018. And then, he tells us, if you correct for the one-degree step increase in 1998, you find only a 0.29°C rise. That small change “is indistinguishable from zero,” explains Hickey. “There is no evidence of warming.”
Figure 7: Map showing Sr calculated using Tmean, for the break year 1998 with two five-year windows (1993-1997 and 1998-2002) for the 302 3rd generation AHCCD stations with sufficient data. Circle radius is proportional to the absolute value of Sr. Circle colour indicates Sr ranges as follows: blue: Sr < 0; black: 0 ≤ Sr ≤ 1; red: Sr > 1. Moncton, NB (Sr = 2.74) is indicated with a green circle, for reference.
In Figure 7, AHCCD stations with Sr < 0 are coloured blue, while black indicates 0 ≤ Sr ≤ 1, and red indicates Sr > 1. The AHCCD records with the largest stepwise increases at 1998 are located in Eastern and Central Canada (including the stations listed in Table A), and there are many records with discernible steps at 1998 in the Prairies (provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta) and the north of the country. British Columbia remains the main outlier, with most ofits AHCCD stations having no discernible steps at 1998.
Figure 8: Map of trend in Tmean over the period 1998-2018, for the 3rd generation AHCCD stations with sufficient data, calculated using linear least-squares fitting. Circle radius is proportional to the absolute value of the trend. Blue circles correspond to negative trends (trend < 0) and red circles to positive trends (trend > 0).
In Figure 8, the trend for a particular Tmean record is equal to the slope (°C/year) from a linear least-squares fit to its data for 1998-2018, times 21 years. An AHCCD station was considered to have sufficient data if its record had at least 350 days of non-missing daily data per year for every year from 1998 2018. Approximately two thirds of the AHCCD records with sufficient data have negative trends for 1998-2018 using linear least-squares fitting.
Summation
This report demonstrates Environment Canada’s dismissive response to being alerted to a large, apparently non-climatic artifact in its flagship temperature time-series product, an artifact which could, on its own, be responsible for essentially all of the calculated warming for many Canadian locations over the past six or seven decades.
The said apparent artifact, referred to as the “1998 step-increase feature” in this report, is a stepwise increase of approximately 1°C in magnitude occurring at 1998 in the annual mean time-series of daily maximum, minimum, and mean temperatures for many stations across Canada in Environment Canada’s Adjusted and Homogenized Canadian Climate Data (AHCCD).
Canadian fearmongering about a “climate emergency” served only to empower a bureaucratic class intent on
controlling consumption and taxing lifestyles.
A recent memorandum of understanding between Canadian prime minister Mark Carney and Alberta premier Danielle Smith represents the inevitable reassertion of economic necessity over the fantasy of “decarbonization” that has gripped Ottawa for the past decade.
Allowing for the construction of a pipeline to transport Albertan oil to a Pacific export terminal, the agreement prompted the resignation of one liberal member of parliament and celebration from the province’s leader. “This is a great day for Alberta,” declared Smith.
Global Warming survey of Canadians, twisted and ignored by Trudeau Liberals.
Atlantic Canada, parts of Quebec, and even Ontario benefit from royalties and tax revenues generated by hydrocarbons extracted thousands of miles away. So-called moral objections to oil sands development are often voiced by inhabitants of Halifax or Montreal, but rarely heard is a willingness to forgo the western revenue that keeps hospitals open and public payrolls funded.
So, it was financial reality that drove Carney to upend expectations established by countless government documents, climate pledges, and regulatory frameworks the previous government put in place to “save the planet” by discouraging the use of fossil fuels.
Canada’s climate industrial complex had predicted that pipelines would become stranded assets and that Alberta would fade into irrelevance as net zero became federal policy. However, the deal signed by Carney moves in the opposite direction, making provisions for new infrastructure and signaling that even Canada’s most climate-obsessed federal leadership cannot govern without fossil fuels.
In technical terms, the federal cap on oil and gas emissions has been suspended. The Clean Electricity Regulation — a proposed constraint on Alberta’s ability to generate affordable power — has been loosened. Timelines for reducing methane emissions have been extended beyond 2030. Yes, there are caveats that appear to impose a soft form of anti-carbon sentiment, but the overall picture has changed.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), a publicly funded institution, has consistently parroted environmental advocates who treat fossil fuels as abominations rather than economic necessities. This messaging has convinced many Canadians that their government is committing a terrible sin by producing energy the world demands. Lost on them is the fact that Canadian oil and natural gas are produced under far more stringent standards than exist in the Middle East, Russia, or other regions.
Energy abundance underpins prosperity. Nations that constrain their energy supply impoverish themselves. Nations that produce reliable, affordable energy benefit their populations and the broader world. Canada should produce the energy for itself and export the surplus to global markets.
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Beyond energy economics, there is another dimension to Canada’s economic future that the legacy climate orthodoxy dismisses: agriculture. Canada’s warming climate has extended growing seasons across the prairies and opened new agricultural possibilities.
According to official data, “total wheat production rose 11.2% year over year to a record 40 million (metric tons) in 2025, surpassing the previous record set in 2013.” Canola production rose 13%, surpassing a record set in 2017. Barley and oat production rose 19% and 17%, respectively.
In all, the output for all principal field crops increased by 4% year-over-year. For the next crop year (2025-2026), total production is projected to reach near record levels, up 3% year-over-year and 8% above the previous five-year average.
Historical analysis demonstrates that climate conditions across Canadian agricultural regions have shifted toward longer growing seasons, with more frost-free days and expanded viable crop zones.
Critics will claim that allowing a new pipeline is a betrayal of future generations. But what truly endangers posterity? A fraction of a degree of warming that extends growing seasons?Or a future of energy scarcity, deindustrialization, and economic stagnation?
Fearmongering about a “climate emergency” served only to empower a bureaucratic class intent on controlling consumption and taxing lifestyles. It did nothing to change atmospheric physics or the needs of people who rely on affordable energy to survive.
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 peoplebelieve 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.
Moreover, despite ongoing controversy surrounding long-term solar variability, current GCMs are typically forced with solar reconstructions that exhibit extremely low secular variability. This helps explain why these models attribute nearly 0 °C of the observed post 1850–1900 warming to solar changes and simultaneously fail to reproduce the millennial-scale oscillations evident in paleoclimate records.
The system is under strain even without electrification
Beyond energy economics, there is another dimension to Canada’s economic future that the legacy climate orthodoxy dismisses: agriculture. Canada’s warming climate has extended growing seasons across the prairies and opened new agricultural possibilities. 
Science Matters 