Climate House of Cards Collapsing at Last

Peter Murphy observes at Washington Examiner The climate change house of cards is finally collapsing.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The prevailing climate change narrative took a big hit in recent days, as scientists who comprise the United Nations’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are backing away from more outlandish climate predictions for the 21st century.

Extreme forecasts of rising temperatures of 4 to 5 degrees, the scientists wrote in the journal Geoscientific Model Development, “have become implausible.” That means predictions of rapidly growing carbon emissions and higher temperatures, supposedly leading to fast-rising sea levels, floods, crop failures, and even human extinction scenarios, are finally being jettisoned.

 

Be Reasonable About Climate Change

As the stool above shows, the climate change package sits on three premises. The first is the science bit, consisting of an unproven claim that observed warming is caused by humans burning fossil fuels. The second part rests on impact studies from billions of research dollars spent uncovering any and all possible negatives from warming. And the third leg is climate policies showing how governments can “fight climate change.”

It is refreshing to see more and more articles by people reasoning about climate change/global warming and expressing rational positions. Increasingly, analysts are unbundling the package and questioning not only the science, but also pointing out positives from CO2 and warming. And as this post shows, essays are challenging the policy proposals advanced by climate activists. David R. Henderson and John H. Cochrane published at WSJ on July 30, 2017 Climate Change Isn’t the End of the World  Even if world temperatures rise, the appropriate policy response is still an open question.  Complete text below (my Bolds and added images)

Climate change is often misunderstood as a package deal: If global warming is “real,” both sides of the debate seem to assume, the climate lobby’s policy agenda follows inexorably.

It does not. Climate policy advocates need to do a much better job of quantitatively analyzing economic costs and the actual, rather than symbolic, benefits of their policies. Skeptics would also do well to focus more attention on economic and policy analysis.

To arrive at a wise policy response, we first need to consider how much economic damage climate change will do. Current models struggle to come up with economic costs consummate with apocalyptic political rhetoric. Typical costs are well below 10% of gross domestic product in the year 2100 and beyond.

That’s a lot of money—but it’s a lot of years, too. Even 10% less GDP in 100 years corresponds to 0.1 percentage point less annual GDP growth. Climate change therefore does not justify policies that cost more than 0.1 percentage point of growth. If the goal is 10% more GDP in 100 years, pro-growth tax, regulatory and entitlement reforms would be far more effective.

Yes, the costs are not evenly spread. Some places will do better and some will do worse. The American South might be a worse place to grow wheat; Southern Canada might be a better one. In a century, Miami might find itself in approximately the same situation as the Dutch city of Rotterdam today.

Rotterdam–Ninety years thriving behind dikes and dams.

But spread over a century, the costs of moving and adapting are not as imposing as they seem. Rotterdam’s dikes are expensive, but not prohibitively so. Most buildings are rebuilt about every 50 years. If we simply stopped building in flood-prone areas and started building on higher ground, even the costs of moving cities would be bearable. Migration is costly. But much of the world’s population moved from farms to cities in the 20th century. Allowing people to move to better climates in the 21st will be equally possible. Such investments in climate adaptation are small compared with the investments we will regularly make in houses, businesses, infrastructure and education.

And economics is the central question—unlike with other environmental problems such as chemical pollution. Carbon dioxide hurts nobody’s health. It’s good for plants. Climate change need not endanger anyone. If it did—and you do hear such claims—then living in hot Arizona rather than cool Maine, or living with Louisiana’s frequent floods, would be considered a health catastrophe today.

Global warming is not the only risk our society faces. Even if science tells us that climate change is real and man-made, it does not tell us, as President Obama asserted, that climate change is the greatest threat to humanity. Really? Greater than nuclear explosions, a world war, global pandemics, crop failures and civil chaos?

No. Healthy societies do not fall apart over slow, widely predicted, relatively small economic adjustments of the sort painted by climate analysis. Societies do fall apart from war, disease or chaos. Climate policy must compete with other long-term threats for always-scarce resources.

Facing this reality, some advocate that we buy some “insurance.” Sure, they argue, the projected economic cost seems small, but it could turn out to be a lot worse. But the same argument applies to any possible risk. If you buy overpriced insurance against every potential danger, you soon run out of money. You can sensibly insure only when the premium is in line with the risk—which brings us back where we started, to the need for quantifying probabilities, costs, benefits and alternatives. And uncertainty goes both ways. Nobody forecast fracking, or that it would make the U.S. the world’s carbon-reduction leader. Strategic waiting is a rational response to a slow-moving uncertain peril with fast-changing technology.

Global warming is not even the obvious top environmental threat. Dirty water, dirty air and insect-borne diseases are a far greater problem today for most people world-wide. Habitat loss and human predation are a far greater problem for most animals. Elephants won’t make it to see a warmer climate. Ask them how they would prefer to spend $1 trillion—subsidizing high-speed trains or a human-free park the size of Montana.

Then, we need to know what effect proposed policies have and at what cost. Scientific, quantifiable or even vaguely plausible cause-and-effect thinking are missing from much advocacy for policies to reduce carbon emissions. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s “scientific” recommendations, for example, include “reduced gender inequality & marginalization in other forms,” “provisioning of adequate housing,” “cash transfers” and “awareness raising & integrating into education.” Even if some of these are worthy goals, they are not scientifically valid, cost-benefit-tested policies to cool the planet.

Climate policy advocates’ apocalyptic vision demands serious analysis,
and mushy thinking undermines their case.

If carbon emissions pose the greatest threat to humanity, it follows that the costs of nuclear power—waste disposal and the occasional meltdown—might be bearable. It follows that the costs of genetically modified foods and modern pesticides, which can feed us with less land and lower carbon emissions, might be bearable. It follows that if the future of civilization is really at stake, adaptation or geo-engineering should not be unmentionable. And it follows that symbolic, ineffective, political grab-bag policies should be intolerable.

Climate science, impacts and policies also appear as a house of cards.

Mr. Henderson is a research fellow with the Hoover Institution and an economics professor at the Naval Postgraduate School. Mr. Cochrane is a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution and an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute.

More about Climate Policy Failures

The exhibit above shows the scope and complexity of the analysis. But the bottom line is that 96% of the effort and trillions of $$$ were spent to no avail. It is estimated that on the order of 1.2 Billion tonnes of CO2 were prevented over the last 20 years, with an additional 23 Billion tonnes to be erased by 2030. Any enterprise with that performance would be liquidated. That is an epic failure in fact.

Climate Policies Fail in Fact and in Theory

World of Hurt from Climate Policies

Speaking Climate Truth to Policymakers

Climate Policies Failure, the Movie

Climatists Wrong-Footed

Complete Slides in English from Dr. Fleischmann

I received today an email from Dr. Bernd Fleischmann acknowledging my effort to present an english version of his recent presentation. In order to have a more accurate and complete communication he sent me the set of english slides in a pdf embedded below. Along with several additional exhibits, this makes a much more powerful and accessible statement of his points regarding the notion of a Climate Crisis. You can either scroll through the exhibits embedded on this page, or download the pdf file by hitting the download button at the bottom.

I thank Dr. Fleischmann for his research and organized critique of this issue and for speaking truth to the powers that be, many of whom are still entranced by a false narrative.

My post is linked above for reference.

The Superclass and Technocrats Busy Designing Our Future (Jacob Nordangård)

The plans and intentions are exposed in a Clintel article From the Polycrisis to a World Government. Climate Alarmism is part of a much bigger agenda driven by the UN, says Swedish scientist, author, and musician Jacob Nordangård. What is the real plan behind all this? The Swiss news outlet Transition News spoke with Nordangård. Excerpts below with my bolds and added images.

Transition News: Some believe that the recent crises and the associated profiteering are pure coincidence and that capitalism simply works this way: one thing leads to another, no one is planning a world government. However, in your book “The Digital World Control”, which has just been published in an updated and expanded German and English edition, you clearly demonstrate that some are following a specific plan, with the United Nations at its center. On what sources do you base your research?

Nordangård: I use original sources from the United Nations and all those organizations that prepared the UN’s Pact for the Future. This means, my research is primarily based on the statements of these institutions themselves. I also consult other sources, for example, the World Economic Forum (WEF), which has entered into a partnership with the United Nations.

The official signing of the agreement took place in June 2019, attended by former WEF CEO Klaus Schwab, then-WEF President Børge Brende, UN Secretary-General António Guterres, and UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed. However, the UN and the WEF had already been cooperating prior to this. Mohammed, for example, served on the board of the Young Global Leaders program. This means that the United Nations and the WEF had been closely linked for about a decade before the official partnership.

When I wrote the Swedish edition of this book, I was focused on the UN’s Our Common Agenda. It was only with the release of the Epstein files that I realized how Epstein was deeply involved with some of the key figures of this UN agenda, such as Brende. Jeffrey Epstein was a member of the Trilateral Commission, which was established by David Rockefeller in 1973. Rockefeller brought Epstein into this group and also into the Council on Foreign Relations, another important think tank that primarily shapes American foreign policy.

Currently, the focus is primarily on sex trafficking and the minors involved. But Epstein was important for connecting people. For example, he befriended Brende, the former president of the World Economic Forum, and they discussed how the WEF could take on the role of the United Nations. He was therefore a key figure in these influential networks.

The modern concept of scientific dictatorship can be traced back to H. G. Wells. But Julian Huxley, a friend of Wells, and the Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin also held similar views on technological change and a technological society, a kind of techno-utopia.

The twelve proposals of the United Nations contained in Our Common Agenda was published in 2021 to establish commitments for implementing the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These commitments include, among other things: leave no one behind, build trust, and listen to young people. It all sounds quite reasonable. What does this have to do with a scientific dictatorship or a techno-utopia?

Such plans are always packaged in fine words. But we need to see the plans behind these well chosen words. Let’s take the slogan “Leave no one behind” and look at what the UN’s Our Common Agenda and Pact for the Future actually intend:

It’s about the digitization of more or less everything on this planet,
everything that can be recorded and monitored.

It is a perfectly ordered and controlled system. No one is to be left behind, as everyone must be part of the system. As a precaution, everyone is monitored.

And when “we” say they want to listen to people, according to “our shared agenda”, it’s about learning what people do and think. Not about giving citizens a real say. “We” have a vision and a pact for the future. And “our” plans are to be implemented, so “we” want to know how people react.

Pseudoscience as Religion

But everything is based on “their” science. I consider this to be pseudoscience. It’s not real science, but a political vision sold as science. I taught and researched at the university for many years—science means questioning everything in order to constantly improve. But here, “science”, which is largely based on model calculations and computer simulations, is being instrumentalized as a religion: If people follow “our” path, it leads to paradise; if not, it leads to hell. “We” must therefore convince people to choose the path “we” discuss at the United Nations. “We” have this one great goal.

Our Common Agenda and The Pact for the Future are
based on behavioral design and behavioral science
.

This behaviorism is used to steer people in the right direction. This corresponds to totalitarian thinking. It is not a particularly empathetic way of dealing with people, but rather turns them into objects that can be programmed to better conform to the visions of those behind these plans.

And when they say: “We want to listen to young people and work with them,” it basically means that young people are to be steered in a certain direction.

Young people can’t simply express their opinions freely. They are asked: “What do you think of climate policy? Should it be stricter or more lenient?” “I don’t believe in it” is not an acceptable answer. These “facts” must not be questioned. Questionnaires and focus groups serve only to justify the implemented measures.

Why is there such a focus on the year 2030? Because these 15-year plans exist. From 2000 onwards, there was this test run with the Millennium Development Goals until 2015 – few have heard of it or remember it – and the goals were not met. But this time, for the year 2030, everything has gained enormous importance and has been used for propaganda purposes since 2015. However, I suspect that the United Nations will no longer be able to successfully implement the Sustainable Development Goals as they are presented to the public by 2030.

So there will be new goals for 2045 – a crucial milestone. In future scenarios, the project is described as The Great Transition – the aim is to establish a world government by the UN’s 100th anniversary. The period leading up to it is a transitional phase, and we are currently in the first stage of this transformation. 2030 is simply a pivotal year on the path to achieving this goal.

Cyber-biological Systems

How does artificial intelligence (AI) contribute to implementing this one world government? I believe the elites of this world view AI as a perfect system because they previously relied on other people to carry out their orders – that is why totalitarian systems can never last in the long run.

If they use this AI-driven system instead, no one stands in the elites’ way: no one can destroy it from within. They can set rules and regulations and tell the autonomous AI system, the world’s control system, what they want to achieve, and it will be implemented.

From where does this idea that humanity could unite with machines and the financial system actually stem? This too is an old idea and closely linked to transhumanism. Eugenics, with its aim of changing and improving humanity, is part of this. Transhumanism has taken this to a new level by using technology to modify us, integrate us into the system, and digitize us.

This development took place at the beginning of the computer age, especially from the 1990s onward. Like many others, I simply considered it the pipe dreams of a few tech enthusiasts at the time. But now it’s ubiquitous and serves as the foundation of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. These transhumanist ideas found particularly fertile ground at the World Economic Forum.

And in 2019, the United Nations and the WEF entered into this very partnership, enabling the World Economic Forum to support the UN in implementing the 2030 Agenda. This is being achieved using the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, more precisely, cyber-biological systems. In this process, humans, machines, and the financial system are merging. This is a crucial aspect, as it leads to a complete transformation of the old, dying system. We will, therefore, integrate ourselves into the financial system.

From the WEF to an UN 2.0

In 2020, the member states of the United Nations adopted a resolution calling on Secretary-General Guterres to produce a document addressing the following question: How can we create a better, more effective UN that can respond to crises such as a pandemic?

Negotiations then took place, and eleven strategy papers were published. Parts of these were incorporated and supplemented in Our Common Agenda. This agenda is rather concise and only describes the desired goals. In addition, there were policy briefs that are considerably more comprehensive, discussing all topics in detail and developing concrete proposals for achieving the desired goals.

The member states then met to discuss these recommendations and thus develop a document that would serve as a Pact for the Future. There were therefore three successive phases. All states were required to agree to the UN’s Pact for the Future in advance in order to implement it more efficiently.

In 2024 the pact was agreed upon by all member states and adopted by the United Nations and the member states. Russia has stated that it will not implement all points. They intend to follow the points they consider sensible, particularly the digitalization agenda.

A multipolar system with regions is now being prepared. An organization called the Stimson Center has been significantly involved in drafting the recommendations for the UN Pact on the Future and repeatedly emphasizes this future world order with regions.

The geostrategist Zbigniew Brzezinski co-founded the Trilateral Commission with David Rockefeller and served for a time as Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor. In his book “The Grand Chessboard”, he developed proposals for how the American empire should function. His goal was to prepare for and shape a new world in which the United States would no longer be the dominant force, but rather the UN would assume this role: The world’s regions would cooperate under the umbrella of the United Nations—a modernized, effective organization capable of operating efficiently on a global scale and no longer merely an informal circle.

We only need to look back three decades to see that much has already been achieved – people are very adaptable. Here in Sweden, cash is hardly used anymore. Thirty years ago, everyone paid in cash; card payments were uncommon. The so-called pandemic or even wars serve to change systems without much fanfare because people are thinking about other things.

Wars are also being fought locally, like here in Sweden, in my hometown: We have bombings, shootings, and crime. At the same time, this agenda is being implemented: Surveillance cameras have been permitted in public streets for two years now, and they are now installed everywhere.

Two sides of the same coin.

Trump and the Polycrisis of the Superclass

In this context, what purpose do crises such as Covid-19, the energy and food crisis – the polycrisis – serve? These crises serve as a trigger. Because in 2024 something very important was not achieved with the UN’s Pact for the Future: the creation of a so-called emergency platform. Instead, we now find ourselves in this permanent crisis situation, which shows the world that we are unprepared and unable to solve these problems.

These events were considered necessary to introduce
new political measures and gain public approval.

And also the actions of US President Donald Trump are creating even more problems. This, too, is about gaining approval for the new world system in order to push through the emergency platform and a UN 2.0. The current multi-crisis will ultimately help those who developed these plans for modernizing the United Nations to obtain the necessary approval for their implementation.

I call him “Wreck-It Trump” because he’s razing the old structure to the ground. He’s destroying the existing system. The United Nations isn’t functioning as it should, and he’s paving the way for something new. Trump is the perfect candidate for it. Nothing will be left of the old system.

And when he’s finished and his time is up, they can simply take over with this new system. Everyone will then say: “Finally, reason prevails. A new system that will make the world safer again.” It’s not about reforms. It’s about power.

Who are these few who want to control the lives of billions of people? They belong to the superclass, as David Rothkopf calls them in his book. These are oligarchs who control the global financial world and the economy. They can be found, for example, in the World Economic Forum and in philanthropic organizations. I wrote about one of these families, and I show how the climate protection agenda came about and what lies behind it.

Here in Sweden, a family named Wallenberg is very powerful. Like the Rockefellers, they belong to the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission. These are extremely influential networks that shaped the old order and now want to gain control of the new one.

They also bring in people from other regions, such as multi-billionaires from India, South Africa, China, and Japan. This elite seems to think they are the chosen ones. Those who have the potential to be successful, to reach the highest positions of power, and to run successful companies consider themselves better than others.

The superclass comprises several thousand individuals worldwide. And among them, of course, there are hierarchies. Some are higher up. But who really knows who’s at the top?

One of the key players driving this agenda is Johan Rockström, who advised Greta Thunberg. Who is this man? Johan Rockström is an agronomist. He was selected by Bert Bolin for a position at the Stockholm Environment Institute. Bolin, in turn, was the first chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and Rockström succeeded him. He is a key figure in climate policy and now heads the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) outside Berlin.

Previously, Rockström headed the Stockholm Resilience Centre. This center was founded with the goal of developing a system for “planetary boundaries”. This explanatory model is crucial for the worldview of the elites and their control system. Rockström and his network of scientists use it to define what we as human beings are even capable of doing on this planet.

He speaks regularly at the World Economic Forum. Furthermore, he is connected to several highly influential networks that advise not only the wealthy and powerful, but also governments worldwide. These include the Climate Governance Commission (CGC), which recommended, even before the 2024 Summit on the Future of Europe, that the UN General Assembly declare a climate emergency because humanity is exceeding planetary boundaries – of which there are nine.

The emergency platform is intended to serve as a means
of implementing the super-class’ plans worldwide.

Rockström belongs to the elite group of scientists who define our limits and determine how many resources we are allowed to use or what we can eat. He is also a member of the organization EAT which advocates for a transformation of the global food system.

This man is very influential, but he’s just one player. Before him, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber headed the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). He advised Angela Merkel, the European Commission, and even the Pope on climate issues. People like Rockström or Schellnhuber work on this topic until they retire, and then there’s a successor. They certainly play an important role in achieving the goals, but the real power brokers are the philanthropists, the super-rich.

What is Sweden’s role when it comes to creating a world government? Sweden acts, in a sense, as a mouthpiece for these influential forces, including the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Bilderberg Group. My home country assumed this role quite early, in the 1950s, and expanded it in the context of climate research and environmental protection.

Sweden hosted the first UN Conference on the Human Environment in 1972, and numerous key players driving this agenda originate from there. However, they are more or less merely proxies for these influential networks. As previously mentioned, the Wallenberg family largely holds the reins in Sweden and controls many large companies; they are very closely connected to the super-class. They have always had influence over the Swedish government—regardless of whether the Social Democrats or the Moderates are in power.

Furthermore, according to futurologist Graham Molitor, innovations are implemented particularly quickly in Sweden. We seem to simply adopt new technologies without questioning them because we are so progressive .

On the other hand, the Green Party in Sweden achieves about six percent of the vote. But that doesn’t matter. Because, if you look more closely at the climate and environmental agenda, you’ll find that it’s not genuine green policy, but rather digital policy. It doesn’t matter whether the country is governed by right or left leaning parties. When it comes to this global agenda, everyone agrees. The Greens are only the activist arm.

I have examined how these environmental organizations are financed and organized by elite networks to popularize these activists and their actions – ultimately, it’s about controlling the entire population, every single individual. That’s why we need these opposition parties and movements.

I also have a history with the Greens; I experienced all of this firsthand. Therefore, it was quite a shock for me when my research revealed that oil barons like the Rockefellers were behind the environmental movement. They were involved in developing precisely the kind of policies that we as Greens supported.

Via Berlin and Kyiv to Technocracy

What purpose does the climate agenda serve, if oil companies exploit this narrative? The Rockefellers and their philanthropists clearly dictate what “we” want to achieve. The climate agenda originated at a meeting with eugenicists in the 1950s. In 1952, John D. Rockefeller III and Detlev Bronk, then head of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), met to discuss a population control plan. This led to the formation of the Population Council. Roger Revelle also attended the same meeting.

In the 1950s, Revelle made global warming a central concern and an important area of research. He also played a crucial role as an advisor to US President Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s. At that time, there was a project called the Special Studies Project with support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, in turn, was managed by the sons or grandsons of John D. Rockefeller. We have David and John D. III, and Lawrence and Winthrop. These brothers received money from the Standard Oil Corporation – oil money – and considered how they wanted to change the world. They came to the conclusion that science was a good way to transform society, given the scientific collaborations between countries. They themselves had established these collaborations, for example, through the Rockefeller Foundation, by providing funding to universities around the world.

The basic idea was that such problems cannot be solved by any one nation alone. They must be solved, more or less, by an international body. So, on the one hand, we have population control, and on the other hand, the idea of a kind of world authority that has to assume control. The other scientific problems were pandemics and the associated global health problems.

Diseases were recognized as a global lever as early as the 1950s. Everything happens quite openly. Why do so few people engage with this topic? Questioning these things comes at a price. After I uncovered these networks, it was very difficult to keep my job as a university lecturer.

When I defended my doctoral thesis – “Ordo ab Chao: The Political History of Biofuels in the European Union. Actors, Networks and Strategies” – in 2012, my opponent said right at the beginning: “You know, my institution has just received funding from the Rockefeller Foundation.” The chairman of the Club of Rome also tried to prevent my dissertation from being accepted at all.

But what surprised me most was this: I came from the environmental movement myself, but when I tried to warn my fellow activists that these oil companies were involved, some of them got really angry. The more we talked about sustainable development, the more cars and technologies were introduced. Nobody wanted to question that. Universities and environmental organizations alike receive funding from these foundations. In the end, it’s all about the money.

But I continued working as a lecturer after that, first for a few years at Linköping University and then at Stockholm University. But it became increasingly difficult. Because many, especially junior researchers, discovered that I don’t really subscribe to the climate dogma. And that makes you less trustworthy. We don’t want to tolerate such a “climate denier” at “our” institution.

Apparently, it was just one student who googled me and found out I had written a critical paper on climate change; he probably complained to the head of the institute. For me, this was no longer a pleasant working environment.

But after I wrote the book “The Global Coup-Etat” in the first year of the “pandemic” it became unbearable. Mainstream medicine and the Covid-19 mandates could not be criticized. That was morally unacceptable. The fraudulent scheme was more or less evident by March 2020.

In April 2019, I published my book about the Rockefeller family, describing how their plans for the world were to be achieved through the Fourth Industrial Revolution. While researching climate change, I also came across information related to the health sector. So, it was quite easy for me to put these pieces of the puzzle together.

The mainstream media reacted to my publication about the coup by simply considering it extremist at the time. Sweden was, of course, the better place to live during the “pandemic.” But the media stated, “anyone who doubts that is an idiot.” Alternative media outlets reported on my book, which was published in December 2020, and it quickly sold out.

In 2024, the WEF opened the Global Government Technology Center in Berlin. The goal is to build new systems for governance. These will not be controlled by humans, but by an agent AI. Stanley Milgram coined the term “agentic state” – a state in which someone simply follows the wishes and instructions of the authorities.

A white paper from the Global Government Technology Center bears precisely this title: “The Agentic State”. The agentic AI will be the authoritative body, issuing commands and carrying everything out efficiently, and is intended for use in the UN emergency response platform – without humans who could say: “No, I won’t do that.”

Another Global Government Technology Center is located in Kyiv, where these systems can be tested – this is easier to accomplish in a country at war. That’s why many WEF representatives are working with Ukraine.

How should humanity best respond to this technocratic threat? This attempt by the superclass to rebuild the Babylonian Tower will fail. As soon as the last piece of the puzzle is in place, everything will begin to crumble and collapse. Those building this system use lies and every possible manipulation technique to bring people under their total control. And while the truth lags behind, it is catching up. People see through this. The truth will come to light and wash everything away. So they are trying an impossible undertaking.

At the same time, I think such projects are inevitable. There have always been, and always will be, people who strive for power. When this tower collapses, someone will try to rebuild it. But perhaps we have some time in between to better prepare the world for these psychopaths.

Beware Govt. Agencies Invoking the Science Charade

Aaron L. Nielson writes at Civitas Outlook regarding a possilble outbreak of scientifc chicanery by regulatory agencies in the wake of SCOTUS dismissing the Chevron deference to such bureaucrats.
The “Science Charade” After ‘Chevron’.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
The Court’s decision to overrule Chevron deference may have
the unintended effect of strengthening the
temptation to rely on the science charade.

 

What happens after the U.S. Supreme Court makes it harder for agencies to regulate? There are at least a couple of possibilities. Option One: an agency might just stop trying to regulate under that policy. Or Option Two: an agency might seek another path to achieve the same thing. The danger of Option Two may be one of the most important—but underappreciated—of the Court’s decision in Loper Bright, which overruled Chevron deference. My fear is that agencies will not simply give up but instead will lean into what Professor Wendy Wagner has dubbed “the Science Charade.”

Let’s start with some basics. Under Chevron, courts would defer to an agency’s reasonable interpretation of ambiguous statutory language. The idea was that because agencies are more politically accountable than courts and have a better technical grasp of how complex statutory schemes work, when a statute administered by an agency is ambiguous, courts should get out of the way and let the agency act so long as the agency’s resolution of the ambiguity is reasonable. Chevron presented legal and conceptual problems (including why ambiguity should favor the agency rather than regulated parties, who may be punished—sometimes even criminally—for violating the agency’s view of the statute), but also a practical one that goes to the heart of administrative incentives. Because agencies could expand their power by finding ambiguities, agency officials, often responding to political demands, would unsurprisingly stretch to find them so they could pursue aggressive policies that Congress never authorized.

In Loper Bright, the Court essentially said “enough.” Under our Constitution, the legislature makes the law, and courts ensure that the executive stays within the law as written by Congress. After Loper Bright, courts decide the meaning of statutes, even statutes with some ambiguity. As Justice Clarence Thomas has, Article III’s vesting of the “judicial power” in the judiciary “calls for that exercise of independent judgment,” but “Chevron deference precludes judges from exercising that judgment,” thereby “wrest[ing] from Courts the ultimate interpretative authority to ‘say what the law is,’  and hand[ing] it over to the Executive.”

Loper Bright thus should be a welcome development for purposes of respecting the separation of powers, especially if agencies accept the limits of their authority. But there is a danger: What if they don’t? What if the same political dynamic that prompted agencies to stretch statutes in the first place may also prompt agencies to find alternatives to Chevron? 

I have recently penned an article about one such alternative: the science charade. Wagner coined the term decades ago to explain an important dynamic within administrative law. As she observed, because judges often defer to agencies on questions of science, “the courts offer agencies strong and virtually inescapable incentives to conceal policy choices under the cover of scientific judgments and citations.” Rather than justifying the agency’s policy choice as a policy choice, agencies instead may dress-up their decisions as compelled by science.

To be sure, there are limits to the science charade. Agencies must engage in reasoned decision-making and justify their conclusions as not arbitrary or capricious. So if agencies push too hard, reviewing courts will sometimes catch on that a regulator’s policy choice has outrun its science. For example, I once worked on a where the National Marine Fishery Service used a “model [that] assumed that salmonids would be exposed to lethal levels of the pesticides continuously for a 96-hour period,” but never explained “why the 96-hour exposure assumption accurately reflected real-world conditions.” The appellate court didn’t buy it—but the district court did. This illustrates how difficult it can be to persuade a court to second-guess an agency’s invocation of science. (I often wonder what would have happened had the Environmental Protection Agency itself not criticized the National Marine Fishery Service’s “unreasonable” assumption.)

The intuition driving Wagner’s theory, thus, is impossible to brush aside. To be clear, I do not claim that agencies do this all the time. When we discuss the administrative state, we often focus on unusual occurrences rather than on an agency’s more banal, bread-and-butter operations. But that does not mean we should not worry about incentives or ignore the risk that unthinkable behavior may become more thinkable if bad incentives are not curbed. Agencies are filled with people who want certain policies. Human nature being what it is, people sometimes respond to incentives. So if the best way to get a policy through is to drape a policy decision in as much science as an agency can credibly muster, shouldn’t we expect regulators sometimes to succumb to the science charade’s temptation?

And that brings me to my thesis: Because agencies can no longer use Chevron to pursue policies that Congress has not allowed, their incentive to use the “science charade” should increase, again, at least at the margins.

As I explain in my article, suppose Congress has authorized an agency to “regulate Chemical X if it harms the public health.” Suppose further that agency officials want to restrict Chemical X because it harms birds, but it is unclear whether it has negative health effects on people. Under Chevron, the agency might have argued that the statute is ambiguous as to whether its authority is limited to protecting human health, so it can use the statute to protect birds, too. Of course, such a strained reading may have worked even before Loper Bright, but now agencies know that this interpretation won’t fly. So instead, the agency may lean into the science charade. Because generalist judges may be more comfortable deferring to scientific analysis than to overt policymaking, agencies may deduce that they should not say “we care about birds,” but instead should overstate what the science says about the effects of Chemical X on human health.

Using the science charade as a substitute for Chevron, may thus
allow them to protect birds under the guise of protecting human health.

This increased incentive to rely on faux science should be alarming for at least two reasons. One, the statute books overflow with delegations that are triggered when certain facts about the world exist—facts that require scientific or technical (e.g., economics) judgments beyond the ordinary experience of judges. Agencies may thus stop scouring the U.S. Code for ambiguities and instead scour it for delegations that kick in if certain scientific findings are made. And two, there is a “boy who called wolf” danger.

Good policy needs good science, but if agencies cannot be trusted,
skeptical courts may erroneously reject agency conclusions
that, in reality, are supported by good science.   

Unfortunately, there is no great solution to the science charade. The reason why the charade can work is that judges are not scientists, and even if they have some scientific or other technical training, no one can know everything about everything. Generalist judges are simply not equipped to understand all the technical issues the administrative state presents. Although there are downsides, the best answer might be greater procedural formality in the regulatory process—complete with more extensive cross-examination of agency experts to create a record that may be more understandable to judges. (Of course, the dynamic effect of that prospect may be to dissuade bad science from the get-go.) As I have explained elsewhere, increasing procedural rigor is not costless, which is one reason the administrative state has largely moved away from procedural devices such as cross-examination. But for certain categories of regulatory action, it might make sense to head off bad incentives. Of course, some may argue (presumably, Wagner herself) that such costs are not worth it. But especially given the heightened incentive caused by Chevron’s demise, I’m not so sanguine.

Like most complex systems, the administrative state resists easy answers. It is important to think through incentives and unintended consequences. The Court’s decision to overrule Chevron deference addresses one incentive—the enticement to hunt for statutory language that agencies can claim is ambiguous. But it may have the unintended effect of strengthening the temptation to rely on the science charade. There is no silver-bullet solution; it is important to recognize why agencies act as they do and to create systems to best maximize the benefits of agency expertise while preventing its abuse.

Footnote: A Blast from the past warning about this very issue

From The Hartwell Paper (2010) A new direction for climate policy after the crash of 2009

On the subject, ‘How to get climate policy back on course’ ,   A panel of British professors included this observation:

“Climate change was brought to the attention of policy-makers by scientists. From the outset, these scientists also brought their preferred solutions to the table in US Congressional hearings and other policy forums, all bundled. The proposition that ‘science’ somehow dictated particular policy responses, encouraged –indeed instructed – those who found those particular strategies unattractive to argue about the science.

So, a distinctive characteristic of the climate change debate has been of scientists claiming with the authority of their position that their results dictated particular policies; of policy makers claiming that their preferred choices were dictated by science, and both acting as if ‘science’ and ‘policy’ were simply and rigidly linked as if it were a matter of escaping from the path of an oncoming tornado.

In the case of climate modelling, which has been prominent in the public debate, the many and varied ‘projective’ scenarios (that is, explorations of plausible futures using computer models conditioned on a large number of assumptions and simplifications) are sufficient to undergird just about any view of the future that one prefers. But the ‘projective’ models they produce have frequently been conflated implicitly and sometimes wilfully with what politicians really want, namely ‘predictive’ scenarios: that is, precise forecasts of the future.”

Climate Hysteria Surgically Dissected by Dr. Bernd Fleischmann

In the above presentation, Dr. Bernd Fleischmann cuts to the quick on the Issue: Is Climate hysteria scientifically refuted?   In this provocative lecture, the speaker addresses current climate and environmental issues in the context of global warming and the political agenda. He criticizes the German Federal Constitutional Court’s climate ruling and questions the compatibility of fundamental rights with CO2 reduction measures. Furthermore, he refutes the tipping point theory and many climate models as unreliable, emphasizing the marginal influence of CO₂ on temperature in favor of natural factors.

He also addresses the unintended consequences of wind power and warns against a political agenda that allegedly seeks greater control over the population. The speaker appeals to the audience to critically consider the information disseminated. H/T NoTricksZone

May 19 Update: Complete Slides in English from Dr. Fleischmann

I received today an email from Dr. Bernd Fleischmann acknowledging my effort to present an english version of his recent presentation. In order to have a more accurate and complete communication he sent me the set of english slides in a pdf embedded below. Along with several additional exhibits, this makes a much more powerful and accessible statement of his points regarding the notion of a Climate Crisis. You can either scroll through the exhibits embedded on this page, or download the pdf file by hitting the download button at the bottom. Link in red goes to post with english slikes.

The original language is german, but video settings allow for choice of language, both audio and closed captions. For those who prefer to read I provide below a lightly edited transcript with my bolds and added images consisting of the following themes:

  1. Introduction to the Climate Issue
  2. Ignorance as the Basis of Climate Policy
  3. The Media and Their Responsibility
  4. Propaganda in Climate Research
  5. The Reality of the ‘Climate Crisis’
  6. The Influence of CO2 on Plants
  7. Wind Turbines and Their Unexpected Consequences
  8. Redistribution Through Climate Policy
  9. Conclusions and Personal Remarks

Introduction to the Climate Issue

The question is, of course, a rhetorical question, as you can imagine. But the topic is interesting and still very important.  And you can see that, for example, in the climate decision of the Federal Constitutional Court.  Most of you probably don’t remember it being published a few years ago. But the fewest know that we will be affected by it for the next few years. Because it was decided that for Germany a carbon dioxide budget of 6.7 gigatons is still available, so that we can save the global climate.

And we have already used half of that. And we will have used the remaining half in the next five years or so. And what comes next? The Constitutional Court already has a solution for this. It wrote at the time that behaviors that are directly or indirectly associated with CO2 emissions can only be allowed if the basic rights can be implemented in accordance with climate protection. But the relative weight of freedom of movement, i.e. not free time, but freedom of movement, i.e. eating a sausage, driving a car, these are freedom of movement, because all of this is harmful to carbon dioxide. They are then restricted.

And we have to be aware of that. In the decision that took place without oral negotiations and without listening to reasonable people, but only relied on the results of the IPCC and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research, only these, I would say, alarmist models were laid down. And now we have to ask ourselves, can you trust them? Can you trust the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research? It is the most influential climate institute in the world with almost 500 employees, which we all here finance, as far as we pay taxes.

And they, for example, they brought up the legend of the tipping points. There was a publication in 2008. And this is a picture from this publication without the arrows. I added the arrows. I may have to explain it briefly. Tipping points are elements of the Earth’s climate system.  These are these colorful surfaces here that will tip when it gets a few degrees warmer. That’s the assumption. And they defined around a dozen of these tipping points at the time.

And eleven years later, in 2019, the five elements on which the arrows indicate, I added these arrows because they no longer appeared in the update in 2019. For example, the greening of the Sahara was a positive tipping point. The theory is, and it’s actually true so far, when it gets warmer, more water evaporates from the oceans.  There are then clouds and then it rains more. And then the Sahara turns green. And as a tipping point, it was also defined that way because it stays green.

But because this is not alarmistic enough, this tipping point was thrown out. And the other tipping points don’t appear in the update either. This is a graphic from the update in 2019.  Other tipping points are defined there. But they have long been contradicted by statistics and climate history. So the greening of the Sahara was no longer an issue.

And measurements contradict almost all these tipping points. And as alarmists, they pay for themselves. So you can’t trust the Potsdam Institute for Climate Follow-up Research.

At least, you can trust the World Climate Council. They wrote something right 13 years ago. Namely, if the CO2 content in the atmosphere doubles, i.e. 100% more, then the temperature rises by any value between 1 and 6 degrees.  That was pretty honest. Especially because they also added with 10% more probability, with 5% less probability.

Ignorance as the Basis of Climate Policy

But ultimately, this tension between 1 and 6 degrees means that they don’t know. This is a sign of ignorance. And everything that is told to us, it is based on a mean value that they have taken, but which cannot be justified by the models.  It is arbitrary.

If you look at CO2 alone, then it becomes warmer by a maximum of 1 degree, rather less. And everything that is added, it comes through feedback. And these positive feedbacks, these reinforcing feedbacks. A feedback, a positive one is, for example, if I hold the microphone towards the speaker, then it whistles. This is a reinforcing feedback.

And every reinforcing feedback in a loss-free system leads to instability. And the climate would then be unstable if these models were correct. But the climate has been stable for the last 10,000 years, as we all know.  The climate system is stable, the feedbacks are not reinforcing. And the measurements also confirm these reinforcing feedbacks.

Richard Lindzen is one of the advisors of Donald Trump. And he is an emerited professor. Almost everyone who dares to tell the truth is emerited these days, because they are no longer dependent on financial support.  And he said, all models do not agree with the observations. So the positive feedback in the models is wrong. In the last IPCC report of 2021, this span was slightly reduced from 1 to 6 degrees.

But at the same time he wrote, our new models scatter more than the old ones. That is, it is actually a larger span that these models produce, which has nothing to do with reality. And from the new IPCC report is this graph.

I have to explain this now. This graph represents the reflected solar radiation. What comes down from the sun is reflected.  From clouds, from everything that is on the earth’s surface, from ice and snow, of course, but also from plants, etc. And this graph, the black one, is supposed to be the measurement. And the colorful ones are models. And this graph shows that the reflection is increasing. So more is scattered back. And if more solar radiation is scattered back, it gets colder.

Figure 8. Comparison between observed global temperature anomalies and CERES-reported changes in the Earth’s absorbed solar flux. The two data series representing 13-month running means are highly correlated with the absorbed SW flux explaining 78% of the temperature variation (R2 = 0.78). The global temperature lags the absorbed solar radiation between 0 and 9 months, which indicates that climate change in the 21st Century was driven by solar forcing.

So this graph indicates that this cannot be a reason for the warming that we have found. And this is the original graph, the lower graph. From the CERES program, that is a satellite measurement program, you can call it.  And the two graphs are exactly mirrored. So in fact, the reflected solar radiation, which is reflected by the sun, has become less over the last few years. And significantly less. And that explains the warming. That is, because the IPCC has shown the opposite, they have mirrored it. This cannot have been a coincidence.

Figure 10. This graph is the cloud fraction and is set forth on the left vertical axis. The temperature is on the right vertical axis and the horizontal axis represents the observation year. The information was extrapolated from figures prepared by Hans-Rolf Dubal and Fritz Vahrenholt [37]. Source: Nelson & Nelson (2024;)

The report has 3,000 pages, just the one from the Working Group 1, which deals with physics. And around this graph, there is about a third page, which deals with it and does not really thematize it. So, the increase in the absorbed solar radiation, it is less reflected, it is absorbed more, that explains the warming. And I calculated that, how the temperature development is. And I have taken this increase of the absorbed solar radiation into account.

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.

And El Niño in the Pacific and the Niño phenomena in the Atlantic. These are ocean cycles, which are irregular, but occur again and again. They then cause, for example, for this warming 2010, 2016, 2024. So it has to do with the ocean cycles. And the linear trend since 2000 to 2025, it comes from the increase of the absorbed solar radiation. The blue curve is the temperature curve measured by satellites. And the orange curve, I hope this is also orange here, the orange curve is the temperature curve that I calculated.

Without greenhouse gases, only the effects, increase of the absorbed solar radiation and the ocean cycles in the Pacific and in the Atlantic. That’s it. That’s it to calculate how the temperature develops. The difference between the two curves is in the middle 0.05 degrees. And you will not find a climate researcher who, with the greenhouse theory, with CO2 and something else, comes to similarly good agreement. I have, as I said, completely ignored the greenhouse gases and come to a very good agreement.

CO2 plays a small role, in my opinion, but it is so small that it has been declining more or less in the rush for at least the last 25 years. So what the IPCC said in 2013, 1 to 6 degrees temperature range, this ignorance, that was the basis for the Paris climate agreement, for the EU Green Deal, for the Climate Decision of the Federal Constitutional Court and, as a result, for the destruction of industry in Germany, for the poverty of the population. You probably already feel it in your wallet. And for future freedom restrictions. All this is based on ignorance.

The Media and Their Responsibility

And the Germans are of course not the only ones who are on this wrong path. The UNO propagates it quite strongly. This figure here, this knight of the sad figure, this is Antonio Guterres, the UN General Secretary, and he spoke of the sinking planet. He is very good with his formulations. The sinking planet, it supposedly stands in the water in front of Tuvalu. This is an island group in the Pacific. Coral islands.

And the article in Time magazine is from 2019. A year earlier there was a publication that dealt with how the surface of Tuvalu develops. And they found that Tuvalu is growing. Coral islands adapt to the sea level. The corals form a rock. This is then partially ground up in the surf and lifted up to the island with the next storm.  That is why they have not sunk in the last thousand years and will not do so when the sea level rises, which it does, but also much slower than many claim. It grows at almost all measuring stations only with 1-2 mm per year. So that was a lie that the planet is sinking.

Nonsense anyway. He then increased it with the statement that the era of global warming is over. We are now in the era of global cooking. I think that from 10 km above sea level the water boils at 40 ° C or so. But what he says is complete nonsense. I ask myself, how did this socialist become UN Secretary General? Who is pulling the strings? And the most important question that interests me the most is, what does this guy smoke? Time magazine definitely spreads lies.

When I read this headline it took me about 5 seconds to find out in Google what is really going on with Tuvalu. And they have to do that too. It is their duty as journalists to report truthfully.

Well, the Time magazine is not so great now, but we still have the Upper Bavarian Volkszeitung. Climate emergency, United Nations set alarm. This, of course, also comes from Guterres. And it says in the article I called it on April 20th. The article is from March 24th. And it says the past year was the second or third warmest since measured.

The second or third warmest, okay. But we know exactly that it was 1.43 degrees warmer than 150 years ago. So they know that by a hundredth of a degree. But not whether it was the second or third warmest. Questionable. Well, the reference period is 1850 to 1900. Guterres added other nonsense, load limits, etc. Of course I looked at it. I thought, okay, very interesting.

What measuring stations were there in 1850? I looked up at NASA. The Goddard Institute for Space Studies has several thousand measuring stations that are, I’m not allowed to say, manipulated, that design it creatively. But of course they didn’t do that for the time from 1850, because these are all measuring stations from the time until 1879.

They don’t need new glasses. There are none. This is a graph directly from the website of NASA GIS.
And you can enter which period. I entered from 1879. So all stations that have been running continuously since 1879. And that’s exactly zero. Exactly zero. And then I looked at what it looks like on the other side of the globe. So it’s Pacific, Australia, Antarctica. And the period from 1880. There were the first measuring stations. And that’s a handful. A handful for half the globe. At that time there was not a single measuring station in Africa.

Not a single one. And in many other countries of the world there was not a single measuring station. And on 95% of the earth’s surface there were no measuring stations at all. There are still no measuring stations today that provide really meaningful values in most of Africa on an area of 20 million square kilometers. That’s twice as much as the area of Europe. There are no measuring stations.

And then they produce a temperature for the globe with an accuracy of one hundredth of a degree for a period when there were practically no measuring stations. That’s nonsense. Yes, down here in Argentina there is a measuring station. I looked at it. It shows a cooling down for the last 150 years. So how much warmer has it actually become? Certainly not 1.43 degrees since the end of the Little Ice Age.

Yes, the end of the 19th century. Yes, this reference period 1850 to 1900. That was the coldest phase of the Holocene of the last 10,000 years. The glaciers have advanced as far as never in the last 10,000 years. They have threatened villages in Switzerland. You can read that. It was the coldest phase.

And a warmer phase was, for example, the High Middle Ages about 1,000 years ago. And you know that it was about as warm as it is today. Otherwise, the Vikings would not have made their way to Greenland. Well, Greenland was not entirely green. It is not entirely covered by ice today. But Iceland was ice-free a few thousand years ago.

And my estimate for the temperature development in the last 1,000 years is 0 plus or minus 1 degree. So I don’t know it exactly. I don’t know if anyone knows it better. But this 0 plus or minus 1 degree is, let’s say, an engineer-like statement with an uncertainty.

 Propaganda in Climate Research

1.43 degrees without uncertainty is propaganda. And propaganda is what the media can do best. Some of you may remember this hysteria from three years ago. Po river and Lake Garda are drying up. The editorial network Deutschland is one of almost 500 media where the SPD has the say. 500. I think they have a share in more media than not.  But they were not the only ones.

Po river and Lake Garda are drying up. Lake Garda is only filled to 38%. The average depth of Lake Garda is 133 meters. Absolutely ridiculous. But news agencies like Reuters and EPA have spread the nonsense. The Süddeutsche Zeitung, Die Zeit and of course ARD and ZDF. And the fact is, the level was only 0.5 meters lower than usual at this time of year. A few months later it was higher than usual in the summer.

Yes, this is just normal variation. Therefore, my recommendation to the media and if a media representative is here, please turn on your brain before you spread nonsense.

The Reality of the ‘Climate Crisis’

So, there would be a climate crisis if it got colder. Yes, the little ice age, that was the phase of starvation, poverty, but also flooding. The largest part of the flood was 200 years ago in the little ice age, 1804. Not the one 5 years ago, in 1804 it was worse. And what you see here, this is the vegetation in North Africa. Once to the peak of the Holocene, that is, the current warm season, about 6000 years ago.

And there you see three little white spots up here. I don’t know if you can see them on the screen. Yes, you can still see them. These three little white spots, that was the desert 6000 years ago. Today it is almost the entire desert of North Africa because it has become colder. It was warmer back then and there were no glaciers on Iceland because it was warmer.

So there were not glaciers, but birch forests. And the lower graphic is for the last interglacial warm period 130,000 years ago. It was even warmer there. It was about 8 degrees warmer than today. And what happened? The Sahara was even greener. And all climate researchers know that it was warmer and greener back then.

That’s why you hear a lot, we had the hottest month, the hottest year since 125,000 years ago. Because 125,000 years ago the interglacial period came to an end and the ice age began. And the EME warm period was so warm without the four private jets of Bill Gates. He has four, two Bombardier, two Gulfstream and without our beautiful SUV.

The Influence of CO2 on Plants

Back to the topic of the climate crisis. More CO2 is of course also good. The plants need CO2 to grow. Everyone knows that. And the more CO2 is in the air, the better they grow. That’s why CO2 dioxide is often added. And this graph is from the Australian Environment Agency. This graph shows the growth of leaf coverings in the last 40 years. And green and blue areas show an increase in leaves and only the red areas show a decrease.

So where there is a fire, there is less fire. But especially in the semi-dry areas in the Sahel, that is the area south of the Sahara, from the Atlantic to the Indian ocean, it has become much greener. In India it has become much greener.

In Australia and other areas it has become much greener. That is why they do not belong to war zones. The population of the Sahel has tripled to quadrupled in all countries in the last 40 years. Because it has become greener, they were able to do that. The deserts are getting smaller. And the Sahel has benefited more than almost any other region in the world.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung has written the opposite. Where is the Sahel zone, whose inhabitants suffer the most from climate change? I think Dr. Weiss, the director of the Wissensredaktion, knows it better. I had a communication with the Süddeutsche three years ago. I showed them with scientific publications ten mistakes on their website . Within a few days I got an answer. They did not try to contradict me. They told me five other things, which were also wrong. These mistakes are still on the website. And I have a presentation on my website, in which the mistakes are shown and why they are mistakes. And because I drew the attention of the Süddeutsche Zeitung to the mistakes, it is no longer an accident or out of ignorance. They deliberately lie.

Is it better to be warm? Someone has to tell this to Karl Lauterbach, who annoys us with his heat protection killers. This is from a publication in Lancet. This is one of the most famous medical science journals. Unfortunately, the graphic is as it is. You can’t see what it says. This is an overview of all European countries, from southern Europe to northern Europe.

The blue bars are deaths from severe cold. The red bars are deaths from severe heat. It looks similar in size. It looks like this for you, because you can’t see the scale below. The ones in the front can see it. The scale is about 5 different.

And if you compare it with the same scale, it looks like the chart on the right. There are 5 to 10 times more deaths from cold than from heat Even in southern Europe, there are more deaths from cold than from heat. Even in the countries of Africa and Oceania, this was found in another publication.

Heat is not the problem. In Singapore, the average temperature is 17 degrees higher than in Germany. And people live 5 years longer. It even says on Wikipedia, there are different times, life expectancy, temperature.  Of course, this is even on Wikipedia on different pages, life expectancy, temperature, but it is a fact. So five to ten times more deaths from cold than from heat.

Wind Turbines and Their Unexpected Consequences

So why are we doing all this with the wind turbines? Can we trust the wind turbine lobby? Of course, this is also a rhetorical question, the solution is coming.

This is unfortunately a complicated graphic, but it can be explained relatively well. Because it doesn’t cool down so well, more water evaporates from the ground. The soils dry out more with wind turbines. And if you plaster the whole world with wind turbines, if you switch the entire energy supply to wind and sun, then there is a Temperature increase that people have calculated. And the red curve down here, this is the temperature curve for the case that 40% of the total energy is generated by wind turbines, 4 seconds. 40% worldwide increases the temperature, I think you can see, by 1 to 3°, so more than carbon dioxide. Its a Chinese publication and Germany would then be a single windpark with hundreds of thousands of wind turbines.

Firstly, we don’t want to see that and, secondly,
we don’t want it for our soils and for the quality of life.

But not only the Chinese have found out, but there is a marine research center, the Helmholz-Zentrum Hereon. They have investigated this for wind turbines in the sea and they have found that these wind farms are changing the North Sea. They even change the ocean currents, they change the mixing on the surface and the reduction of the wind behind the wind farms. This can be measured up to 70 km behind the wind farm.

And then they wrote, so not me, but Helmholz-Zentrum Hereon, who live on taxpayers’ money, they were honest, they wrote that the changes show similar orders of magnitude as the suspected ones changes due to climate change. So, we want to prevent climate change and prevent a suspected and definitely create climate change with the wind turbines. So it really doesn’t get any dumber than that.

And we don’t just change the climate with wind turbines,
some people get sick with the infrasound of the wind turbines.

Not everyone may be so sensitive, but these infracircuits are the pulsed pressure changes that result from such a propeller blade passing the mast. This creates a pressure that spreads. You can’t hear it, but you can feel it. These are enormously high switching pressures and just like they are in the Discoen bass, you can feel it when you’re around. And sensitive people can still do that in 5 km distance, via petzo channels in our cells.

There are publications for this discovery, the Pzukanal even won the Nobel Prize in 2021. So that’s science, that’s not whirlwind. And the organ that suffers the worst from these pressure fluctuations is our brain. And maybe they want to make us stupid on purpose so that we continue to vote for the old parties. I don’t know. So, here are a few sources. There is much more. You can’t find the information on my website yet. I have them relatively new.

Redistribution Through Climate Policy

Okay, they trust Harald Lesch from his statements. He once said that there were temperature increases of more than 10° within a few decades. That’s right. That happened in the Ice Age. Today the argument says:

“Climate change is man-made, leads to catastrophic storms and thermal power plants increase the temperature through their waste heat.”

This is all wrong with the idea of the climate case He has a climate kit for the Ludwig Maximilian University which was distributed to all kinds of schools. When presenting this case, he made 30 false statements in one hour, which I was able to prove to him. 30, so one every 2 minutes. I won’t go into detail about it now, you can find a PDF on my website. If you see, hit me around the ears. Good.

So, who ultimately benefits? Ottmar Edenhofer said that 16 years ago, he is Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research and he said that we are redistributing money and de facto destroying the world’s wealth. He did not say to whom it would be redistributed. However, he has admittedly, it has nothing to do with environmental policy. In any case, it doesn’t reach the poorest. And who benefits?

Yes,  who has benefited from the Covid vaccination? Vaccination in quotation marks, of course. Some of you will probably think of this name here. Bill Gates has sent a letter to all participants of the last climate conference in Brazil and said that there are more important things than a certain temperature that we must not exceed. Feeding the world is more important and he did not say the medical care provided by the pharmaceutical companies he leads. I took a closer look at his letter.

He makes statements in various areas where we have to achieve net zero. He stands by his statement, we need net zero as soon as possible. and he named 36 companies in this letter. And I took a look at what kind of companies they are. They are all from Breakthrough Energy’s portfolio. This is an investment vehicle that he founded, in which Jeff Bezos of  Amazon, Bloomberg Media’s Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg and other billionaires are involved.

Why did he write this letter?  Because the USA has withdrawn from the Paris Climate Agreement and all these companies are not viable, without subsidies and without regulations that applied in the USA and no longer apply. That was a battle letter to the other states. Make the motto: “Help me, otherwise I’ll get in trouble from my fellow billionaires.” And this energy transition in quotation marks with almost everything we do is a redistribution from poor to rich and super-rich and he actually admitted it himself.

Conclusions and Personal Remarks

So, I’m slowly coming to the end. I spoke a little slower so that I could be understood well. I hope this worked.

The question is, of course, why are other climate scientists not being heard? And there’s this email that was laid out as part of ClimateGate a few years ago, very revealing. The most influential climate scientist to the most influential climate scientist in the United States, saying we will publish and keep out of the IPCC report publications that do not correspond to their opinion. And if necessary, we will redefine what peer review, is. So they deliberately make propaganda.

Conclusion: There is no threat of a climate crisis. The greenhouse effect caused by carbon dioxide is marginal. Carbon dioxide is the gas of life. More carbon dioxide makes the world greener. The influence of the sun from clouds and ocean cycles determines the temperature.

Wind turbines raise the temperature. And they dry out the soils. To do this, they poison the environment with the glass fibers that are knocked out. They kill insects 5000 tons per year. It was once calculated in Germany. They kill feather mice and birds of prey.

Infrasound makes you sick and reduces plant growth. This is because plants also have these petzo channels in their cells and grow less well. Science agrees, it is a lie. I am the living example that it is a lie. And the energy transition is a redistribution of normal earners.

Never trust AD, ZDF, Süddeutsche Zeitung etc. So many of them have not known me to this day. I am not a well-known expert, because you only become a well-known expert if you support government policy, and I don’t do that. Thank you very much.

 

 

 

 

 

 

IBM Shareholders Get Climate/AI Bias Alert (Milloy)

Milloy reads AI bias/climate riot act to IBM management at annual shareholder meeting.  Here is the media release and audio presentation for the IBM shareholder proposal of the Free Enterprise Project of the National Center for Public Policy Research. The annual shareholder meeting is April 28, 2026. Text of press release below with my bolds and added images.

Press Release: IBM’s AI Model: Garbage In, Garbage Out

Washington, D.C. – At next week’s IBM annual meeting, shareholders will vote on a proposal from the National Center for Public Policy Research’s Free Enterprise Project (FEP) tackling potential bias within the company’s artificial intelligence models.

Proposal 7 (“AI Bias Audit”) requests “a report, within the next year, on the methods used to eliminate bias from the Company’s artificial intelligence (AI) models.”

At the April 28 meeting, FEP Executive Director Steve Milloy will cite climate alarmism as an example of where AI too often gets it wrong:

I am an AI user and it can be a great tool. But AI is subject to what 1950s IBM programmer George Fuechsel called “GIGO” – garbage in, garbage out. The Internet is full of amazing information. It is also full of amazing garbage. AI models often cannot distinguish between the two.

An example of garbage-in, garbage-out AI occurs in the controversial area of global warming and climate change. Here are three hardcore facts about climate:

♦  It cannot be scientifically demonstrated that greenhouse gas emissions have had
any effect on global climate.
♦  Emissions-driven climate models do not work.
♦  No emissions-based apocalyptic climate prediction has ever come true.

Despite these realities, if you query IBM AI on climate, you will get back gloom-and-doom climate hoax dogma. This happens because the Internet has been loaded for decades with bogus climate hoax claims and assumptions that are erroneous garbage.

Milloy believes IBM’s own website is partly to blame for this misinformation:

On IBM’s website, IBM’s chief sustainability officer says, for example, that:

Global warming is “leading to increased flooding, causing heat stroke and destroying farms and livelihoods. Insurance is becoming unaffordable.”

None of that is true. But it is what IBM AI is programmed with. Even IBM staff has been polluted with the climate. It is precisely the sort of garbage that George Fueschsel warned about.

The mindless parroting of climate hoax garbage to governments, businesses and the public has had devastating economic and societal impacts around the world – from wars to inflation to deadly energy failures to energy rationing to crop failures to deindustrialization to lost jobs to wasted taxpayer money to traumatized school children and beyond.

It has been estimated that world has wasted $10 trillion chasing the climate hoax narrative since 2015 alone. The list of harms from the climate hoax is endless. Yet IBM AI has learned the hoax and spreads the climate garbage on to users. Milloy will say:

“While IBM may be great at the computing part of AI, the world actually functions on realities that are often lost in the Internet dumpster,”  “Management needs to be much more humble about all this. It needs to take the bias problem seriously. Touchy-feely videos on the IBM website just don’t cut it.”

IBM shareholders can support Proposal 7 by voting their proxies before Tuesday’s meeting.

 

EPA Endangerment Recission More Epic Than Iran War

William Murray writes at Real Clear Energy The End of EPA’s Endangerment Finding Is a Bigger Deal Than the Iran War.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Two things happened in February that will change the world. The first is the Iran War.

The second is an event so obscure most Americans don’t even know it happened — the Feb. 12 repeal of the 2009 Endangerment Finding by the Trump Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This decision puts a knife into the kidney of all the major U.S. climate rules made under the Obama and Biden administrations. It was the legal underpinning for the Green New Deal.

Of the two events, the end of the Endangerment Finding is of a greater consequence, yet 21st Century conventional wisdom — curated and gatekept by social media, the most unwise medium ever invented — makes it hard to fit one’s head around this argument. But here goes.

The Iran War is costing about $1-2 billion a day in direct costs, and several times that in indirect costs from higher energy prices across most of Europe and Asia, though less so in the United States, which is increasingly energy independent.

Meanwhile, the 2009 Endangerment is one of those “regulatory state” workarounds when Congress doesn’t pass a law or the Supreme Court passes on a tough decision. This administrative decision is the foundation of ALL modern climate regulation and global climate diplomacy. Its reversal has the Trump administration crowing about the $1.3 trillion in savings over the next decade to American citizens through cheaper automobiles, among other things.

This has made a lot of the right people unhappy.

In an interview with The New York Times, Jody Freeman, director of Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program, who happened to design the Endangerment Finding for the Obama White House, said the Trump administration wants “to not just do what other Republican administrations have done, which is weaken regulations. They want to take the federal government out of the business of regulation, period.”

Speaking as someone who worked at the EPA during the first Trump administration, I know Freeman is wrong. Republicans don’t mind environmental regulation based on good incentives that don’t penalize industries that are politically disfavored through no fault of their own.

But there is a human cost to all regulation that is essentially unpriced,
and it is something Freeman and the Left never acknowledge.

Federal regulation itself was invented by the government to improve human lives — think the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Air Act, or the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act that ended child labor.  The problem is that future choices forgone, which economists call opportunity costs, are nearly impossible to quantify and constrain, thereby stifling innovation and invention in almost unfathomable ways.

Consider the following counterfactual.

If the U.S. Supreme Court had made privacy laws stricter in the late 1990s, sharing pictures of strangers without their permission would have been illegal. This would have disincentivized early camera phone makers, Sharp and Sanyo, from including cameras in the first smartphones in the early 2000s and would have slowed or even undermined Apple’s decision to build the iPhone.

Less than 25 years after the first U.S. camera phone was released, the total value of mobile technologies and services globally exceeds $7 trillion, representing more than 6% of global GDP. Much of these trillions of dollars of newly created wealth exists in the share price of Silicon Valley firms, and the retirement savings of nearly 100 million Americans and the U.S. economy writ large.

What the Endangerment Finding did was create a domestic legal predicate
to treat carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act.

That predicate, in turn, allowed Democratic administrations to commit America to the Paris Agreement and the broader U.N. climate regime that the U.S. Senate was fooled into accepting when it passed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992.

It’s quite possible that the global climate regime created under UN sponsorship had a similar effect on energy-intensive industries to that a strict privacy law would have had on smartphones, which became the entry point for billions of people into the digital economy.

And now it’s ending.  By undoing the Endangerment Finding, you don’t just repeal a regulation; you repeal the regulatory superstructure that has saddled the United States with trillions of dollars in opportunity costs and billions in explicit costs every year.

Thus, however costly a short conflict with Iran would be, it hasn’t been
nearly as much as the unpriced opportunity costs of
the last 30 years under the UN Climate regime.

Once the U.S. is no longer legally bound at home, it can exit the international framework cleanly. And when America leaves, the dominoes fall in order. Russia, China, India, and Saudi Arabia — none of whom ever believed “the planet is dying” rhetoric anyway — will follow suit. They never saw the climate treaty as anything other than a wealth-transfer mechanism from the West, and now the jig is up for the American Left and the European establishment.

Instead of this transhumanist dystopia, we have the possibility of
returning meaningful heavy industry to the U.S.,
creating over a million good-paying craft jobs,
while still maintaining strong environmental laws
.

Indeed, fears of environmental backsliding could be easily remedied by Congress if it were to pass the Affordable, Reliable, Clean Energy Security Act (ARC-ES)introduced in Congress late last year by Rep. Troy Balderson (R-OH). The ARC-ES bill would codify into law clear definitions of key terms like “affordable,” “reliable,” and “clean,” ensuring that investment risks are limited to cost-effective infrastructure projects only.

The bill would help America’s most affordable, reliable, and environmentally-friendly energy sources, including nuclear and natural gas, remain part of the energy mix — a crucial requirement for American households and businesses.

The fact that neither the ARC-ES nor the Endangerment Finding’s reversal of fortune is anywhere in the news tells you everything you need to know about the current state of global journalism.

This is no slight to the news coverage concerning Iran, which is compelling, but all over the place. It just shows how incentives for informing the public in the 21st century about what truly matters in their lives are weak and getting worse. Perhaps one day someone will invent a better medium for information.

William Murray is a former speechwriter for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the past editor of RealClearEnergy from 2015 to 2017, and currently the chief speechwriter for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

Footnote:  Fed court rejects costly green housing policy

The Biden administration’s obsession with climate change has contributed to the housing affordability challenges Americans face today, and there are many harmful green policies that need to be undone. The Trump administration is taking an ax to several of them, and it just received a big boost when a U.S. District Court repealed a measure burdening low-income and first-time home buyers.

Specifically, on March 5th, an Eastern District of Texas decision vacated a 2024 requirement from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) that new homes qualifying for federally-backed mortgages must comply with the 2021 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC). Thankfully, the court in Utah v. HUD found the agency’s actions in violation of the law.

The IECC is a spare-no-expense assault on residential energy use – for example, by requiring far more insulation than makes sense and necessitating costlier appliances. A number of environmental organizations advocated for the IECC’s building code dictates, saying they would ensure that “low-income homeowners and residents are prioritized in a climate-aligned future.”

And mind you, this was HUD – not the Environmental Protection Agency – an agency whose core mission is to make housing more affordable. Yet it was trying to impose these expensive environmental requirements on the very Americans who need federal help to qualify for a mortgage. In fact, over 80% of HUD-backed mortgages have gone to first-time buyers with lower credit scores and smaller down payments than those served by conventional lenders.

Deluded Economists Devolve into Useful Idiots

Tilak Doshi explains how formerly empirical economists have been captured by climatist ideology, betraying their profession and public trust.  His Clintel article is UK economist says high energy prices are ‘good for the climate’.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

[Note: “In the old Soviet Union, the Communists allegedly used the term “useful idiot” to describe Westerners whose naïve political views furthered the Soviet agenda, even though these Westerners didn’t realize that they were being exploited in such fashion. It is in this context that I confidently declare that American economists have been useful idiots for the green socialists pushing extreme climate change policies.”  Robert Murphy]

A UK economist recently said the quiet part out loud: high energy prices are ‘good for the climate’. This is not an aberration, says Tilak Doshi, but symptomatic of modern economists. “The barbarians did not storm the gates. The Western elites invited them in, gave them chairs, and asked them to redesign the curriculum.”

When petrol prices rocket because of supply shocks—such as the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the rerouting of oil tankers—one might have expected a discussion of geopolitics, market signals and the obvious supply-side remedies. Of which there has been plenty, some competent and even masterly, some not so competent by “instant expert” talking heads in social and mass media. But a recent article by an economist in The Conversation offered a solution so perversely tone-deaf it could have been lifted from a Babylon Bee satirical script.

Citing research that a 10 per cent rise in UK petrol prices can cut demand by up to 5 per cent, the piece solemnly declared that “high prices are a way of adjusting consumption to cope with the lower supply.” The subtext was unmistakable: with refined products suddenly scarcer, the proper response is not to produce more fuel if the country were blessed with domestic fossil fuel resources (like the UK) or to import more from sources outside the Strait of Hormuz or both. Instead, the advice from Christoph Siemroth, Senior Lecturer in Economics, University of Essex, is to make what little remains even costlier—so that the hoi polloi drive less, take the bus and hasten the glorious transition to net zero.

Clueless and Insidious

One is reminded of Marie Antoinette’s famous cake remark, betraying aristocratic cluelessness. But The Conversation article is something far more insidious: the capture of economics itself by the green ideology that now rules our institutions from the BBC to the Treasury, from Oxbridge common rooms to the UK Met Office service. The discipline that once stood as the last redoubt against the Frankfurt School’s long march through the social sciences has fallen. Frank Knight, Gary Becker, George Stigler, Milton Friedman et al held the gates against postmodern gibberish for a generation. No longer. The barbarians are inside the citadel, wearing lanyards from the oxymoronically named Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, chanting “sustainability” like a secular rosary.

Consider the elementary logic that every first-year economics student once absorbed before the PPE types at Oxford and Cambridge began their higher education in Gaia worship. When the price of a good rises because of scarcity—whether from a blockade in the Persian Gulf or an OPEC production cut—the signal is unambiguous: produce more, explore more, innovate more. Britain sits atop some of the richest hydrocarbon resources in Europe. North Sea oil and gas reserves are not physically exhausted; they are made economic infeasible in the face of Miliband’s punitive tax rates.

Onshore shale, barely scratched after a decade of regulatory vandalism,
could transform our energy security if the
“precautionary principle” were not treated as holy writ.

Higher prices should, in any sane world, trigger precisely that response: more drilling, more fracking, more investment in refining capacity, more imports of oil and gas from diversified suppliers. Instead, our green economists prescribe the economic equivalent of putting a feverish patient into a sauna. Demand must fall. Prices must stay punishingly high. The suffering is the point.

Taxes

The Conversation piece is exemplary in its genre. Price caps are correctly dismissed as distortionary, leading to physical shortages and queues as a means of rationing. One needs to only remember the long lines at gas stations in the US under Jimmy Carter’s price controls after the 1979 oil price shock.

Roughly 50–55% of the UK retail price for both petrol and diesel currently go to the government as taxes. But fuel duty cuts are rejected because they are untargeted and cost the Exchequer revenue—fuel duty, after all, is nearly 2 per cent of government income, a nice little earner for the net-zero industrial complex.

The preferred remedy? One-off cash transfers to low-income car owners, modelled on Germany’s 2022 gas rebate which provided a temporary fuel tax cut in 2022 to ease soaring petrol and diesel prices during the energy crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The beauty of this, we are told, is that it preserves the “price signal” while letting households “profit” by leaving the car at home. Translation: we will bribe you to stay poor and immobile, all in the name of the planet. Meanwhile, the authors of such wisdom never feel the pinch. They lecture the white van plumber, carpenter or electrician going about his work and the hard-pressed mother doing the school run that their higher fuel bills are a feature, not a bug.

Luxury Beliefs and Intellectual Corruption

These are luxury belief-inspired energy policies which “confer status on the upper class at very little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes”. As Victor Davis Hanson has so often pointed out, leftist policy elites in Democrat-run states suffer little from the consequences of their own policies. The metropolitan elite’s enthusiasm for open borders stops abruptly at the high walls of their own villas (Nancy Pelosi anyone?)

The same applies to energy. Inhabitants of the liberal metropolitan bubble can afford the £12-an-hour parking in Covent Garden, the retrofitted Victorian terrace with an air-source heat pump the size of a small car, and the Tesla whose real environmental cost is buried in Chinese lithium lakes and in artisanal cobalt mines using Congolese child workers. For them, “sustainability” is a lifestyle brand. For the rest of the country—pensioners choosing between heating and eating, hauliers facing bankruptcy, farmers unable to run their tractors—it is economic sadism dressed up as virtue.

Buddhist economist

The historical parallel is instructive. E.F. Schumacher — the “Buddhist economist” — told us, “small is beautiful” and that giant power stations were somehow spiritually corrosive. One wonders what he would make of the fact that a modern combined-cycle gas plant needs to be at least 200 MW to be remotely efficient, or that industrial civilisation runs on economies of scale, not backyard steel furnaces.

Yet today’s green establishment is repeating the Maoist folly in Western drag: decentralised “community energy”, intermittent wind and solar that require massive subsidies and backup gas plants, and an ideological insistence that the optimal size of an economy is whatever fits the carbon budget decreed by “climate modellers” in Exeter or East Anglia. The Soviet Union tried to create the New Soviet Man—selfless, collective-minded, liberated from base material desires. The project failed spectacularly. Its successor is the New Green Man, who measures his carbon footprint, cycles to the vegan restaurant, and cheers when Ed Miliband shuts down another North Sea field. The totalitarian impulse remains; only the Orwellian vocabulary has changed from “proletarian internationalism” to “just transition” and “climate justice”.

The intellectual corruption runs deep. Paul Krugman, a Nobel laureate in trade theory, now produces columns that read like press releases from the Church of Climate. Marginal costs of natural gas? Not so relevant when policy costs—carbon taxes, renewable obligations, network charges, capacity market payments—make up some 60% of your bill. As Kathryn Porter, David Turver and others have documented with forensic clarity, the “energy price crisis” is largely a net-zero policy-induced crisis. The wholesale cost of electricity is only part of the story; the rest is the deliberate layering of green levies and taxes that no classical economist would recognise as market-based. Yet we are told, with straight faces, that the “97 per cent consensus” demands we accept this as settled science. The same consensus, one notes, that once assured us the pause in global temperature increase was impossible, that polar bears were doomed, and that Himalayan glaciers would vanish by 2035.

Tyranny

Rupert Darwall’s Green Tyranny provides an insightful exploration into the origins of the climate industrial complex. The green movement’s roots lie not in empirical ecology but in a Malthusian revulsion against industrial modernity and a quasi-religious yearning for control. What to eat (less meat), how far to travel (fewer flights), what temperature your thermostat may reach (no more than 19°C if Whitehall has its way)—these are not technical questions but moral ones, policed by the new priesthood of economists who have traded the parsimony of Occam’s Razor for the abusive use of the precautionary principle (“better safe than sorry”). Uncertainty is weaponised asymmetrically so that minor or hypothetical risks (e.g., induced seismicity from fracking) trigger regulatory paralysis, while the far larger risks of alternatives are downplayed. The precautionary principle becomes a de-facto veto tool for ideological opposition to hydrocarbons, not genuine risk management.

Homo economicus, the rational maximiser embedded in cultural norms that Adam Smith understood in both The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, has been replaced by Homo Climaticus: a creature whose every decision must be subordinated to the carbon ledger.

The consequences are not abstract. Britain’s energy prices are among the highest in the developed world precisely because we have chosen ideology over geology. While China adds coal-fired capacity equivalent to the entire UK grid every few years and India builds out its fossil infrastructure without apology, the West hectors the Global South about net zero and wonder why BRICS+ nations hedge their “policy commitments” to UN forums such as the COP30 conference in Brazil last year. The multipolar realignment is not just geopolitical; it is energetic. The Rest have noticed that the West’s net-zero experiment is self-inflicted economic suicide. They intend no such folly.

Glimmers of Hope or Barbarians At The Gates?

Yet there are glimmers of hope. The tide is turning, as Matt Ridley explains in his recent Clintel lecture “The Climate Parrot is almost dead.” Mr. Ridley argues that public and political momentum behind the “climate emergency” narrative is weakening. Indeed, public tolerance for green virtue-signalling has limits when the bills arrive. The on-going protests in Ireland over the cost of fuel by farmers, contractors and others have been massive, leading the government to place the army on “standby” as nationwide fuel protests continue to cause significant disruption and threaten critical supplies across the country. The military’s potential involvement comes as blockades outside major fuel depots intensify, prompting a dangerous government shift towards an “enforcement” phase in response to the escalating crisis. There are indications that these protests are spreading to Norway and France, as farmers and truckers there block arterial roads with tractors and trucks.

Populist movements across Europe and the United States are demanding energy realism: all-of-the-above policies that include nuclear, gas, and yes, even beautiful, black coal, where geology and economics dictate. The Chicago School may have been breached, but it is not yet razed. Rigorous economists—those still willing to follow the data rather than the grants—continue to point out that adaptation and technological progress have always outpaced apocalyptic forecasts. The “climate emergency” that justifies Soviet-style rationing by price is, on closer inspection, a political choice, not a scientific imperative.

Barbarians

Economics was once the most parsimonious of the social sciences, cutting through trite views with marginal analysis and revealed preference. When it abandons that discipline for the higher calling of Gaia worship, it ceases to be economics and becomes propaganda. The article in The Conversation is not an aberration; it is a symptom of a discipline that has exchanged truth for tenure and rigour for righteousness. The barbarians did not storm the gates. The Western elites invited them in, gave them chairs, and asked them to redesign the curriculum.

The corrective will not come from more white papers or behavioural nudges. It will come when voters—those whose lived experience of green policy is higher bills, colder homes, and slower journeys—demand an end to the experiment. Ireland is in tumult as we speak. Energy abundance is not a luxury; it is the foundation of modern civilisation. To pretend otherwise is not sophistication. It is civilisational self-harm. And the bill, as always, lands on the people least able to afford the eco-crucifix.

IMF and World Bank Misled by Climate Obsession (Lomborg, Bessent)

The above video includes a conversation between Bjorn Lomborg and Scott Bessent at the annual IIF gathering (Institute of International Finance).  The introduction by IIF CEO Tim Adams starts about 11 minutes in.  For those who prefer reading, below is a lightly edited transcript of comments back and forth, along with some added images. TA refers to Adams, BL to Lomborg and SB to Bessent.

TA: Today we’re going to deepen the discussion with a conversation between Bjorn Lomborg who runs the Copenhagen Consensus and the author how to spend 75 billion to make the world a better place. I’ve had this book on my desk since it was published in 2014. It’s a great publication. If you haven’t read it, you should. I’m sure Bjorn will give you some copies. It really is how do we do development and a cost benefit assessment? How do we get the most bang for our buck? And that conversation is often missed in this town and other capitals. And of course, we’re delighted and honored to have the Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent back today to join us at our spring meetings. So, ladies and gentlemen, please invite to the stage Bjorn and Secretary Scott Bessent.

BJ: Thank you very much. Tim, you kind of took away all our talking points. So, Mr. Secretary, it’s great to have a conversation here today about the World Bank and the IMF here at their spring meeting. The goals of these institutions, of course, is to accelerate global development, drive economic growth, and lift billions of people out of poverty. And these goals remain vitally important. Unfortunately, many development institutions now prioritize Western elite issues like gender, social topics, and climate change over what the world’s poorest people need and want: better education, healthcare, and reliable energy.

Nowhere is this disconnect more clear than in their climate fixation. In the latest year, 48% of the World Bank’s financing went to so-called climate finance, up from 44% the year before, exceeding their own uh 45% target. I suspect the reason why elites are so climate focused is because they correctly see the poor as more vulnerable to climate impacts. But remember, poor people are more vulnerable to every impact. They’re more vulnerable to disease, to hunger, to bad education, to corruption.

The World Bank and the IMF need to get back to making rational priorities. For instance, using cost benefit analysis. As Tim also just mentioned, these organizations used to lead the world in cost benefit analysis. As I’ve argued for a long time, and the reason I think we’re having this conversation now is that we need to scrap these climate targets and get the World Bank and IMF back to their core missions.

In your speech here last year at the IIF, you made this exact point and you called on the World Bank and the IMF to refocus on their core missions. In your view, how has the bank and the fund responded and what more do they need to do?

SB: Well, Bjorn, thank you and good good to be back here a year later to talk a little about a report card for the multilateral banks and to also say that the US leads the G20 this year and I can tell you that our agenda is growth. We believe in the US that the biggest risk to financial stability is a lack of growth.

When I look at the choices that Europe has made unable to follow the Draghy report from Mario Draghy on how to increase growth. The the EU was originally the European Economic Union and it was meant to facilitate trade among the members, make it more seamless, create more prosperity. And it turns out that it’s probably been a hint of the IMF and World Bank.  I’m informed by Grace Hopper who was the first female Admiral in the US who was a big fan of it. She has some great sayings. Two of them, one is: The most dangerous words in the English language are “because we’ve always done it that way”. And the second is: “The way to get things done is to get things done.”

And I think we need to step back and look at the IMF and World Bank, their core missions. The IMF I believe the is global financial stability and stabilizing the countries that are in bad equilibriums and getting them back to a sustainable path an economically sustainable path. World Bank is to pull people out of poverty and we cannot have these kinds of elite beliefs get in the way. And I think a lot about this Nature magazine article that came out in April of 2024 that became the guiding principle for so much of the climate beliefs: that GDP was going to be 60% % lower by the turn of the century. So then it was the gospel for 18 months and then it was refuted.

So every everything was based on that. So you know I I don’t think that we can have this kind of short- termism. I think we have to stick with core principles and I do think we we are starting to see at at the World Bank. They are starting to take a tack more for energy abundance and all of the above. They have now gotten on board with nuclear energy. I’m not sure why it ever went away.

And then the IMF, I think, needs to lead by example, probably get rid of their golf course out in Maryland, which I said last year, and focus on global imbalances. Because I can tell you this slow motion buildup of global imbalances after a lack of sustainable growth, it is the the the biggest risk.
The the world cannot take a China with a trillion dollar trade surplus.

BL: And I think you’re absolutely right and one of those points that we we believe somehow that climate is so important that we need to do everything because the nature study that you mentioned that suggests that we could lose 60% of global GDP if we didn’t fix climate change. Which later turned out to be wrong, but of course the point is if that was really true, it should have been rich countries spending rich country money on dealing with climate change. But that’s not what’s happening. It’s mostly rich countries deciding to spend poor people’s money through the World Bank and the IMF badly. And this is not what the the world’s poor are telling us that they want.

So I I had the fortune to work together with Nobel laurate Tom Shelling and he often asked the very simple question, how do you best help poor people? Through development policy or through climate policy? Remember climate policy costs hundreds of trillions of dollars and it shaves off a tiny fraction of a degree in a century’s time. Development policy like avoiding death costs just billions or maybe even just millions of dollars and saves lives right now. And of course that is why development policy often is much much better if you actually want to help poor people.

And of course it also builds much more resilience. Look, a hurricane that hits poor Haiti kills hundreds of people. The same hurricane hitting rich Florida kills virtually no one because prosperity protects people. And so we need to get this conversation back and I think this is exactly where the IMF and the World Bank need to get back to their core missions.

SB: I think it has to be resiliency supply chains. Again, I think you know both the IMF and the World Bank have an important role in understanding this debt loop and downward spiral that many countries are in. Several countries, one in particular, have done the equivalent of a loan to own program. With a lot of these countries there’s a lot of undisclosed debt. There are a lot of tolling arrangements that are unfortunate and I think only the these multilateral banks can effectuate that.

But you know again I do want to congratulate them. The IMF was willing to say this time is different with Argentina and Argentina’s been a fantastic success. They’re accumulating reserves every day as we speak. Tens of millions of people there are being brought out of poverty. The government of Javier Milei, I’m very interested to see it was the poorest elements of Argentine society who voted for him this time around and the young people. So there there’s optimism there. And then you know that the IMF is working on bringing Venezuela back into making it look more like a normal economy, and I think will play a very important role there. And I think the World Bank leadership is back on a good trajectory in terms of energy and unlocking resources for the the very poorest countries.

BL: Yeah. If you don’t mind, I’ll pick you up on that energy point because last October you withdrew the United States from the Green Climate Fund. Because in your words, their goals run contrary to the fact that affordable, reliable energy is fundamental to economic growth and poverty reduction. I think that shows the general point we often forget, how energy really powers modern life. It warms us in the winter, it cools us in the summer, it transports us. I mean, look around this room and I think pretty much everyone is from somewhere else. And this is what energy does. Energy allows us to live better than kings of the past.

Energy really is prosperity. Yet, the climate fixation that we’ve been talking about means that both the World Bank and the IMF pushed for a rapid shift away from fossil fuels and towards renewables and for total ban fossil fuel investment. And I think they need a reality check. There is no transition that taking place globally. We use more renewables, yes, but we also use much more fossil fuels. The world still gets more than 80% of its total energy from fossil fuels. And the decline is so slow that on current trends, we will only get to 0% in 4 to 10 centuries.

Germany has spent famously 700 billion euros on its energy shift since 2002. Electricity prices more than doubled and yet Germany’s energy is still 79% fossil fuels. China produces most of the world’s solar panels, wind turbines and electric cars, but much of this of is produced with coal. China’s energy is still 87% fossil fuel. I would say a Chinese EV is a coal powered vehicle. Much of it is in China and of course especially in some places, for instance India, which are driven enormously on coal, they simply they emit more. But the real point is that poor countries want to get rich like China did. They want to use more energy and much of this will be fossil fuels. They don’t want to copy Germany and they don’t have 700 billion euros to blow on climate policies. So it is just simply hypocritical forcing poor nations into renewables that even rich Germany or China aren’t achieving.

In your IIF speech last year, you call on the World Bank to focus its efforts on expanding developing country access to reliable and affordable energy and you criticized its climate targets. You noted that the IMF devotes disproportionate time and resources on climate even though it’s not part of the fund’s mission. So, what have you seen from the bank and the fund in these areas since your speech? And what more do you expect from them?

SB: Again, as as I said earlier, I think the World Bank is has made a good pivot. They they are now pushing or they are a proponent of nuclear energy. I’m not sure how that wasn’t considered a renewable for for so many years. I mean, if if you look now, France is powering the European energy grid and their their reactors are running the full blast and it’s one of the cleanest. But when you think the Europeans got into this terrible recursive loop because they they decided to turn turn off their nuclear energy. The Germans became more dependent on Russian crude and then the Russians were selling them the crude to finance the war against them.

But you know I do think the World Bank is moving to an all of the above energy process and program and again is getting back to the core mission of lifting people out of poverty. And you know I would just say it’s very good to follow not only what people say but what they do. Bill Gates, who for a long time had pushed this climate agenda, has also changed tack. If you read his recent speeches he believes we’re going to innovate our way out of this. And the Gates Foundation has something like 13 billion of investment in energy innovation. Look no one’s expecting deos machina, one day and everything will be fixed. But in in the US we were going to run out of everything, going to run out of the crude and crude derivatives. And then fracking was invented and now that the the US larger reserves than Saudi and Venezuela.

On the other side, I think the IMF getting back to this message of stability, of monitoring global imbalances and stepping in early. You know I didn’t always agree with Ben Bernanke’s monetary policy, but I always admired Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke because he had a framework. And if you ask him a question, you could almost see him run it through his framework and everything was always consistent. And I think with the IMF and the World Bank the framework needs to always be consistent.

BL: On the Bill Gates point I think really two things stand out. First of all, the innovation point that you just made. I mean this is what has always solved the problem. Tim mentioned the green revolution that we had in the 1970s when we worried about running out of food. Remember, we didn’t fix the problem of the world not having enough food by telling everyone, “I’m sorry. Do you mind not eating as much?” And then we’ll send it down to whoever it is that we worry about. The point was that we innovated a way to generate much more food.

And of course, we’ll do the same thing with climate. We are going to solve big problems through innovation. That’s how we’ve always done it. But I think Bill Gates made another point which is incredibly powerful and useful when you talk about climate change. He said: “For so long we’ve been talking about climate as if the point is to cut carbon emissions or to reach a certain temperature limit. No, the point is to make the world better for humans. And there the question is do we make the world better for humans by cutting carbon emissions by whatever tons? Or do we make it better by for instance making it so small children don’t die or that in school there’s so many other ways we can also do this or that. This of course refers back on the IMF and especially the World Bank on what can be done and there are just so many incredible things that we can do first.

SB: Yeah, again, you know, I think keeping focus on the main thing and not getting distracted by what feels good, it’s convenient, it’s part of the the Davos consensus while much of the Davos consensus seems to have been shattered.

WEF’s Global Risks Perception Survey

BL: Yes. So I want to just take us to our third and and and last point and talk about tradeoffs. Because all international financial institutions need to get back to the core point of tradeoffs. Look,the money that the World Bank spent on a solar panels can’t be invested in healthcare or education. And the world’s poor tell us very clearly not to focus on climate first. When Africans are asked what worries them the most, climate change came almost at the bottom. A vast survey of more than 50,000 Africans across 39 countries found that climate change ranked 31 of 34. The top concerns are not surprising there. It’s unemployment, the economy, health, education, poverty, roads, electricity, hunger, and corruption. And then it goes on for a long time until you get to 31, which is climate change.

When your child might die tonight from a preventable disease, no family cares about shaving a fraction of a degree off global temperatures in a century from now. Elected leaders of poor countries tell us the same thing. In a large survey of low and low middle- income countries, they show climate ranks 12 of 16 issues. Even the World Bank’s own client surveys show climate ranks low. So international financial institutions should compact to focus on their strengths. As you’ve said, the World Bank should focus on poverty reduction and the IMF on macroeconomic stability, but the world’s poor are very clearly saying don’t focus on climate first.

So from your perspective as treasury secretary, how do you view the international financial institutions and their effectiveness in general and the bank and the fund specifically?

SB: You know I would also highlight that it’s not a unique survey item among the world’s poorest. Germany instituted very very strict remodeling and rebuild requirements for German households. So you had to spend I can’t remember it was 30 40 50,000 euros to upgrade to a a more green house and they’re all getting voted out. So like probation is not a good motivator. I do think,as I said last year, that we are determined with the multilateral financial institutions the US wants to be in it to win it. We want to be good partners. America first does not mean America alone. And we we want to go back to basics.

These banks were invented around Breton Woods which was post World War II Europe and Asia, and was a unique time in America and it led to incredible prosperity the across the world. So, you know, why can’t we do that again? And why can’t we focus on growth? Like what are the tools? What what what is hindering growth of these economies? Is it the unsustainable debt which is is the IMF concern?
Is it the poor infrastructure, health and hygiene, which is the World Bank role?

Because you know for a time we kind of skipped the foundational elements and tried to jump to something else, kind of luxury beliefs, instead of issues when a government was not able to fund itself or if people were not able to feed themselves. We’ve just got to get back to that. I I think Ajay and Kristalina have have gotten the message and are moving forward in a very very constructive way and I want to congratulate them.

BL: When you have to decide what to do obviously I’m I’m an advocate for cost benefit analysis so I’m going to be saying they should be looking at it. Really, if you think about it, the World Bank and IMF used to be world leaders in cost benefit analysis. And it makes sense if you only have limited money. If you have to think about trade-offs all the time, you have to ask yourself where can we spend scarce resources and do the most good in the world. And this is exactly what cost benefit analysis does for you. It allows you to pick out the really good policies and make it just much more likely that we can actually achieve all these goals that we’re talking about.

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Davos Ditches Climate, Focuses on Economy

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