Energy Policies

Curtain Falls on Climate Drama

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Vijay Jayaraj makes the curtain call in his Townhall article Trump’s Withdrawal From Collapsing Climate Narrative.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The curtain is falling on the world’s most expensive soap opera. For decades, a cast of unelected bureaucrats and subsidized academics fought to keep the production alive, but the audience has finally walked out. The climate-crisis clown show is over.

In early January, President Donald Trump formally withdrew the United States from the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and severed ties with over 60 associated UN organizations. By ending support for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the self-anointed arbiter of planetary truth – the U.S. stopped bankrolling the institutions that have long conspired to dismantle the economic sovereignty of nations.

Mainstream commentators are scrambling to frame this as a retreat into isolationism. But this represents a rational, economic calculation rooted in evidence rather than the hysteria of doomsday cults.

What deserves attention, however, is that Trump is merely doing openly
what Asia’s energy superpowers have been doing quietly for years.

Beijing long ago stopped pretending to care about the sensibilities of European climate activists. The Chinese Communist Party understands that power – both electrical and geopolitical – comes from hydrocarbons. China is outpacing the rest of the world in building coal-fired power plants at an unprecedented pace.

China is also securing energy lifelines beyond its borders. China National Chemical Engineering signed construction contracts worth $20 billion for the Ogidigbon Gas Revolution Industrial Park in Nigeria. Beijing-based Sinopec committed $3.7 billion to construct an oil refinery in Sri Lanka. Chinese financial institutions have lent $52 billion to Africa’s energy sector, with about half going to fossil fuel projects since the early 2000s.

China’s construction of the Kyaukphyu deep-sea port and Special Economic Zone in Myanmar serves as another telling indicator. Valued at approximately $7.3 billion for the port itself and $1.3 billion for an adjacent economic zone, this project will be a strategic bypass around the congested Malacca Strait – a chokepoint through which over 70 percent of China’s oil and gas trade passes.

The signal is unmistakable: China is not preparing for a post-hydrocarbon
world.  It is ensuring reliable, diversified supply chains
for energy resources, especially oil and natural gas.

India, too, has quietly ended its flirtation with Western green agendas. Indian consumption of petrochemicals is set to grow by 6-7 percent annually. To meet this demand, India is aggressively expanding oil and gas exploration and refining capacity. In November alone, Indian processing of crude oil grew to 22.3 million metric tons, a 2.3 percent increase from the previous year.

Late last year, the Indian government auctioned blocks of coal with combined geological reserves of over 3 billion metric tons. India’s planning documents ignore natural gas as a “bridge fuel” and identify coal as the nation’s mainstay fuel.

Worldwide, there are 460 coal plants under construction. Another 500 have been permitted or are about to be, with an additional 260 new plants expected to be announced. The vast majority of all this activity is in China and India.

These nations are not “transitioning” from coal; they are cementing its dominance. Even Indonesia, which was once the poster child for the West’s “Just Energy Transition Partnerships,” has faced reality as it canceled the early retirement of the massive Cirebon coal-fired plant.

Trump’s withdrawal from the UN’s climate tyranny and the parallel actions of Asian energy giants are a recalibration of global priorities. Governments and businesses are investing billions in extracting and transporting hydrocarbons. Ports, pipelines, and refineries designed to function for decades are being built..

Nations are reasserting the right to pursue policies rooted in their own
economic interests rather than follow “international” edicts of a favored few.

The Trump administration has simply ended American participation in a system that was already irrelevant to the actual decisions being made by the world’s major energy consumers.

In part, the narrative of an “energy transition” survived by being presented as inevitable. That sham has been exposed. A transition will likely occur someday, but only when new technologies prove to be affordable and reliable.

In the meantime, expect more exits, more quiet defiance, more recalibration.
Climate rhetoric will continue to diminish as investments in hydrocarbons accelerate.

Davos Ditches Climate, Focuses on Economy

Posted on by Ron Clutz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s a good thing.

 

 

A German Sees WEF Itself Suffer Great Reset

Posted on by Ron Clutz

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

Machiavelli is dead, long live freedom.

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

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

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

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

Fleet of Teslas at WEF Forum

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

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

Hour of the Antagonists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Milei Delivers an Ethical Bankruptcy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Turning Point Has Arrived

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

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

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

 

The $20 Trillion Question

Posted on by Ron Clutz

The above images put into perspective the scale of William Murray’s issue in his Real Clear Energy article regarding energy investments The $20 Trillion Question: How to Spend It and How Not To.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

$20 trillion is a lot of money. One would expect a big bang to follow the spending of twenty-thousand billion dollars. It’s a lot of money! It’s pretty much the total present value of America’s GDP.

This is the sum that was globally spent — largely by Europe and the United States — in a coordinated effort by the developed world to decarbonize the global economy. China, in contrast, sold the world windmills and solar panels while it opened a new coal-fired power plant per month.

What was the net effect of this “Green” Marshall Plan? Hydrocarbon consumption continued to increase anyway. All that was achieved was a tiny reduction, just 2%, in the share of overall energy supplied by hydrocarbons. Put simply, as the energy pie got bigger and all forms of energy supply increased, hydrocarbons ended up with a slightly smaller share of a larger pie.

We also saw the de-industrialization of the European and American economies — not just with higher prices at the gas pump and on electric bills, but a stealth green tax that was passed on to consumers on everything. This is the culprit of our American and global affordability crisis.

So much treasure and pain for a 2 percent reduction in the share of hydrocarbons.

What a tilting-at-windmills waste. The worst bang for the public and private buck ever. Yet, the Chicken Little believers of the Church of Settled Science and the grifters who profited from it will still sing in unison that it failed because they did not go far enough. If only the global community spent and regulated more!

In contrast, the actual Marshall Plan (which ran from 1948 to 1951) rebuilt a decimated Europe into an industrial, interconnected, peaceful powerhouse. It was a great success by any measure. At the time, its price tag was huge: $13.3 billion in nominal 1948-1951 dollars, which is the equivalent of approximately $150 billion in today’s dollars.

Since a trillion is such a large number, let’s divide $20 trillion by an inflation-adjusted Marshall plan of $150 billion and we have 133 Marshall opportunities. Money was not the problem. To give a sense of the comparative bang-for-buck, by the Marshall program’s end, the aggregated Gross National Product (GDP) of the participating nations rose by more than 32 percent, and industrial output increased by a remarkable 40 percent.

President Trump has been on the global-funding rounds and has secured upwards of $18 trillion in investments. He has secured the equivalent of 120 Marshall Plans — just 2 shy of $20 trillion — to be invested here and nowhere else.

Unlike NAFTA — where the rich got richer under the banner of free markets and in exchange America’s underemployed families got cheaper goods — Trump’s is a recipe for prosperity for all Americans.

Making these investments an American reality will require a growing army of blue- and white-collar workers. With the wealth that it creates, our debt could be paid down and, finally, off. Social Security and Medicare would be placed on a solid footing for time immemorial. All our public obligations to each other would be paid from ever-growing prosperity and not from borrowed money and strangling debt service.

Nothing approaching this level of intentional investment in one country has ever been done. Yes, a similar tranche of greenbacks was burnt to no noticeable environmental benefit and great economic hardship for all. And yes, the American economy under the guise of comparative advantage sent trillions to our south and east — putting America second, hollowing out the American middle class, and neutering the American dream.

Trump’s Plan is the opposite of both failed experiments. Like the original Marshall plan, Trump’s is a recipe for the re-industrialization of the American economy and military, and it is not going to be fueled by windmills and solar farms but with hydrocarbons and uranium. That’s the Trump Plan. It has merit.

Yet, if we look at the polls, Trump is underwater and his base show signs of stress fractures. You bring peace to the Middle East, stop 6 other wars, and bring in some $20 trillion in America First-investments within your first year, and you come home to find yourself underwater and called a lame duck. Democracies — even Democratic Republics — are known to be fickle and hard to please, but this is still rich — and it will result in poverty, which is the opposite of affordability if it continues.

Without the use of tariffs and his deal making, there would not be $20 trillion looking to onshore to the United States. You can blame Trump for higher costs on bananas and coffee. But it’s the cost of electricity and healthcare — not the cost of coffee and bananas — that are roiling kitchen-table economics.

Vice President JD Vance recently made the right call for popular and populist patience. Those who are impatient should look at the offsets already passed, like no taxes on social security, tips, and overtime. That helps pay for bananas and coffee and then some.

My fellow Americans, these sovereign wealth funds that are presently lining up on our water’s edge are coming here based on promises made from a can-do president speaking for a can-do nation. While Trump is a can-do guy, are “We the People” presently a can-do people? Or, do we at least want to return to becoming a can-do people again? The “can’t do” forces are legion and they are the ones now championing the affordability crisis that they caused.

When America was a can-do nation, we built the Empire State Building
in a year. Today, it would take years to get a permit.

Those willing to invest such money will require some certitude that the power they’ll need will be there to “build, baby, build.” If not, the money and the opportunity will pass before it has the possibility to take needed root.

And what about us, the American family, worker, and business that continues to struggle under the legacy of throttling energy privation? In short, we all have a common good — a shared interest — in righting the wrongs that control our grid and our nation’s future.

The good news is that a bill was introduced in the House during the government shutdown. It’s called the “Affordable, Reliabile, Clean Energy Security Act.” Unlike Obamacare, which clocked in at 903 pages, this bill is a lean 763 words, that, if it became law — and it should — would change everything for the better. (Unlike Obamacare, which is recipe for un-affordability).

Mr. President, your one beautiful bill was missing this one thing. Your short- and long-term, America First ambitions are dramatically increased by making this bill into law before the midterm elections. Connect the state siting of these investments to Democrat support of the bill and you will find it on your desk before the midterms. Executive orders don’t offer the energy security that these investors require and that the American people deserve.

$20 trillion is a lot of money. Coming to our shores is a new lease on the American experiment as we enter our 250th birthday hopelessly divided and broke. Let us come together and solve not just the affordability crisis but set the conditions of greatness for the next 250 years.

 

See also:

How Wasteful is Green Energy? Count the Ways

 

Net Zero and British Grid: Dire Straits (Kathryn Porter)

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Kathryn Porter’s recent article on the plight of UK’s electrical grid at her blog: Electrification – can the grid cope? The excerpt below provides findings from her new research paper, available at the link above.

Electrification has become the default answer to almost every energy and climate question. Heat? Electrify it. Transport? Electrify it. Industry? Electrify it. In policy circles, electrification is often treated as a frictionless substitute for fossil fuels: cleaner, simpler, and largely inevitable. In this new report I take a look at what electrification would mean for the GB power grid, if it went ahead as planned. I also consider the impact of additional demand from AI data centres.

Electrification policy rests on optimistic assumptions

Across heating, transport and industry, electrification targets rely on a similar set of assumptions:

♦  that consumers will change behaviour rapidly,
♦  that costs will fall quickly and predictably, and
♦ that electricity infrastructure will expand smoothly to accommodate new demand.

The report tests these assumptions sector by sector and finds them wanting.

The good news is that electrification targets are unlikely to be met without some form of compulsion. In heating, rapid deployment of heat pumps is implausible under current conditions. Consumer resistance remains high, installer numbers are growing too slowly, and both capital and running costs are materially higher than for gas heating. Even where heat‑pump subsidies reduce upfront costs, households still face additional expenditure on larger emitters, pipework and insulation, as well as higher ongoing energy bills because electricity prices remain far above gas prices. These are not marginal issues – they are fundamental barriers to mass adoption.

Transport electrification faces a similar gap between ambition and delivery. Mandates for electric vehicles are running ahead of public willingness to adopt them, while grid and charging‑infrastructure constraints remain severe. These problems are magnified for larger vehicles. There is currently no credible fast‑charging solution for HGVs, and electrifying buses outside dense urban centres is far more challenging than policy documents typically acknowledge, particularly where vehicles do not return regularly to a single depot.

In industry, the constraint is both technical feasibility and economic viability. High electricity prices have driven deindustrialisation across large parts of the UK economy, reducing electricity demand far more quickly than electrification can increase it. In practice, deindustrialisation is the dominant trend, and a stronger driver of demand than electrification across the economy as a whole.

Across all three sectors, the modelling used by both NESO and the Climate Change Committee depends on behavioural and technological assumptions that are optimistic, weakly evidenced, and often inconsistent across scenarios. My report does not assume electrification will fail entirely, but it does find that current targets are unlikely to be met without significant compulsion, which brings its own political and social risks.

The system is under strain even without electrification

The bad news is that, even without electrification, the electricity grid is likely to struggle unless action is taken. One of the most important findings of my report is that the GB electricity system is already heading towards a serious adequacy problem even if large‑scale electrification largely fails.

Renewables cannot provide security of supply during prolonged low‑wind winter events, and reliance on interconnectors is risky when neighbouring systems face similar weather patterns. Meanwhile, just under 5 GW of nuclear generation is scheduled to close by 2032 at the latest, and around 12 GW of CCGT capacity is at risk of closure due to age and declining utilisation.

While Hinkley Point C and perhaps a small amount of new open‑cycle gas capacity may come online over the next five to seven years, this does not come close to offsetting expected closures. Under plausible assumptions, the system could face a capacity shortfall of around 12 GW on cold, low‑wind winter days.

In such conditions, meeting demand without rationing would be impossible.

Replacing or upgrading ageing gas generation is constrained by long lead times. New rotors typically require around 5 years, and entirely new gas turbines 7-8 years, reflecting global supply‑chain bottlenecks. These are physical constraints that cannot be resolved by market reform or policy ambition alone.

Britain is not alone in facing a potential problem with system adequacy. Norway, the Netherlands and Germany were all considered as part of the report and in each case, possible shortages are identified. Norway assumes that flexibility, demand response, or batteries will full the gap. The Dutch are less confident and intend to monitor the generation mix in neighbouring countries in the hope of persuading them to maintain enough firm generation to secure the Dutch grid on low wind days. Only Germany has explicitly identified a need to build more gas generation, although its target is likely inadequate.

Europe at night from space NASA 2016

Flexibility helps, but does not replace firm capacity

One of the report’s central findings is that electrification does not increase demand evenly. Heat pumps, EV charging, and industrial electrification all tend to concentrate demand in time (cold evenings, post‑work charging windows), and concentrate demand in space (residential feeders, urban substations, motorway corridors).

Annual energy numbers hide this  – a system can look comfortable
on a terawatt‑hour basis while becoming acutely
stressed for a few hundred hours a year.

Flexibility features heavily in electrification plans with smart charging, demand response, batteries, and thermal storage. While flexibility can shave peaks, this only works where consumers tolerate loss of convenience. In many cases, policymakers ignore real-world constraints such as fire risks associated with overnight operation of domestic appliances, and noise restrictions within multi-occupancy residential buildings. Batteries are energy‑limited and cannot cover prolonged stress events. Many flexibility services depend on digital systems that introduce new operational and cyber risks. Flexibility may reduces costs at the margin, but it does not eliminate the need for firm capacity, resilient networks, or system strength.

Infrastructure challenges present further risks

In addition to the issues with reliable generation capacity, there are further difficulties with distribution and transmission constraints which arrive earlier and are also hard to fix quickly. Key points from the report include:

  • Local distribution networks were not designed for mass electrification of heat and transport
  • Reinforcement timelines are measured in years, and often a decade or more
  • Connection queues and “paper capacity” obscure real‑world deliverability

The report also identifies risks with aging grid infrastructure and the recently identified risks that premature closure of offshore gas pipelines may constrain gas supplies to the grid on cold winter days, limiting the gas available for electricity generation.

What this means in practice

Taken together, the findings point to an uncomfortable conclusion. The GB electricity system is likely to struggle to maintain today’s level of demand reliably, let alone accommodate the additional 7–10 GW of load in 2030 implied by current electrification agendas. AI data centres are therefore likely to pursue off‑grid solutions, not because of technological failure but because the grid is no longer perceived as sufficiently reliable for mission‑critical loads.

Large‑scale electrification of heat and industry before 2030 appears improbable, and likely remains so for several years thereafter. Without decisive policy action, the probability of regional rationing, blackouts and cascading grid failures rises materially.

To restore Britain’s energy security, government must
pivot from aspirational modelling to credible planning.

This means:

♦  supporting life extension of ageing gas generation,
♦  accelerating procurement of new dispatchable capacity,
♦  reforming network investment incentives to prioritise resilience, and
♦  reassessing electrification timelines.

Net zero targets cannot be allowed to override public safety.
Security of supply must once again become
the foundational principle of UK energy policy.

UK Goes Full Nut Zero

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Chris Morrison at Daily Sceptic reports on the latest UK insane climate policy proposal Net Zero Conservative MPs Promote Scheme to Cover Ponds With Solar Panels That’s Completely Quackers. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images

Your correspondent has a confession. I need to get up at least two hours earlier to keep abreast of all the current madness that is Net Zero. The un-walked dog will have to go back to resuming her slumbers on the best seat in the house while I digest the latest reports piling trillions of pounds onto the realistic cost of the Net Zero fantasy. Long hours must be spent trying to work out how the sinister Miliband plans to make household energy cheaper by giving billions to useless, unreliable wind and solar, and then sticking the horrendous costs straight onto consumer bills. “Cheaper than gas!” this still-at-large lunatic is apparently still howling. Then I would have time for a good laugh with the really dumb stuff. And none dafter than the recent suggestion from the Green Blob-funded Conservative Environment Network (CEN) to blanket inland water areas with solar panels, killing local aquatic life and tricking diving birds into crashing into them.

If they were bats mistaking floating solar panels for water, hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of pounds would need to be spent constructing elaborate protecting tunnels (okay, I know the Sun will not be able to shine on the panels, but it doesn’t much anyway in the winter, and I am just making it all up, like everyone else in the Net Zero business). The last Conservative government allowed spending of £120 million to protect a few rare bats by building a 1,000-metre tunnel on the new high-speed railway from London to Birmingham.

The bat protection structure runs for 1km over the railway line, costing £120m.

But then perhaps such magic money-tree largesse would not be available for water bird-whacking solar panels – ‘green’ technology is good and different rules apply. Bats are killed in their millions worldwide by giant wind turbines, but nobody gives a flying squeak about that.

The CEN wants the UK Government to cut red tape to “unleash” solar farm developments on “man-made bodies of water” and to help projects selling power to the electricity grid. It is claimed that red tape has put a straitjacket on private investment in the UK floating solar industry. Man-made water areas are said to include disused docks and quarries along with on-farm reservoirs. CEN wants to encourage water companies to build solar farms on the 570 reservoirs that exist in the UK, potentially generating 2.7 terawatt-hours of electricity.

Waiving local planning rules for unreliable energy projects is much in fashion with the national political parties, particularly Labour and the Conservatives, who face forthcoming local election humiliation at the hands of the surging anti-Net Zero Reform Party.

Many long-standing pools of freshwater, whether originally man-made
or not, become vibrant centres of aquatic and avian life.

Dumping huge solar panels on the surface is a considerable nature killer. A paper published last month in Environmental Science and Technology examined the interaction of birds and floating solar panels and concluded that their industrial structure could pose “significant risk” to certain bird species, especially those with limited visual acuity and flight manoeuvrability adapted to aquatic habitats. Birds most at risk were said to be waterfowl, shorebirds and gulls.

The big danger for birds is one of fatal collision with solar panels that replicate the surface of water. It can affect birds diving for food but is a particular problem for aquatic species that land harder and faster on water. The panels also present problems for birds that require a ‘runway’ to take off. Overall, the survey suggests fatalities of around 11.61 birds per megawatt generated per year. Needless to say, there are other ecological concerns that will need to be ignored by Net Zero fanatics. With even limited panel coverage there will be changes in shading, dissolved oxygen levels and water temperature. These create altered microclimates and disrupt food chains.

The CEN looks forward to generating 2.7 terawatts from panelling over the ponds, a power source that, due to its appalling unreliability, will further destabilise Britain’s already creaking grid. It is the latest quack scheme produced by an operation supported by 49 Conservative MPs that remains dedicated to the Net Zero lunacy. This caucus, which represents a significant 41% of the current parliamentary party, is a substantial roadblock to attempts by the party’s leadership to move away from all the Net Zero hysteria that has engulfed the Conservatives over the last two decades. Attempts last year by the leader Kemi Badenoch to ditch the 2050 Net Zero commitment were met by the CEN director Sam Hall complaining to the Guardian that the move “undermines the significant environment legacy of successive Conservative governments”.

But politics is a fluid business in the modern Conservative party. The CEN parliamentary group includes Simon Hoare and Sir Roger Gale, the two midwit buffers who intended to vote last year for a society-destroying private bill that would have cut all hydrocarbon use in the UK to 10% within 10 years. On the other hand, it also counts Esther McVey, who recently informed Talk Radio that Net Zero was a “dud”.

Canada’s Climate Wake up Call

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Vijay Jayaraj writes at American Thinker Canada wakes up to climate reality Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Canadian fearmongering about a “climate emergency” served
only to empower a bureaucratic class intent on
controlling consumption and taxing lifestyles. 

A recent memorandum of understanding between Canadian prime minister Mark Carney and Alberta premier Danielle Smith represents the inevitable reassertion of economic necessity over the fantasy of “decarbonization” that has gripped Ottawa for the past decade.

Allowing for the construction of a pipeline to transport Albertan oil to a Pacific export terminal, the agreement prompted the resignation of one liberal member of parliament and celebration from the province’s leader. “This is a great day for Alberta,” declared Smith.

Alberta is a major vessel in Canada’s economic bloodstream. The province’s energy sector generates $88 billion in annual gross domestic product (GDP), which is 25% of the Alberta’s total economic output. This revenue flows east to the national capital to fund federal transfers that support public finances of other provinces, some of which oppose the oil production that provides them cash.

Global Warming survey of Canadians, twisted and ignored by Trudeau Liberals.

Atlantic Canada, parts of Quebec, and even Ontario benefit from royalties and tax revenues generated by hydrocarbons extracted thousands of miles away. So-called moral objections to oil sands development are often voiced by inhabitants of Halifax or Montreal, but rarely heard is a willingness to forgo the western revenue that keeps hospitals open and public payrolls funded.

So, it was financial reality that drove Carney to upend expectations established by countless government documents, climate pledges, and regulatory frameworks the previous government put in place to “save the planet” by discouraging the use of fossil fuels. 

Canada’s climate industrial complex had predicted that pipelines would become stranded assets and that Alberta would fade into irrelevance as net zero became federal policy. However, the deal signed by Carney moves in the opposite direction, making provisions for new infrastructure and signaling that even Canada’s most climate-obsessed federal leadership cannot govern without fossil fuels.

In technical terms, the federal cap on oil and gas emissions has been suspended. The Clean Electricity Regulation — a proposed constraint on Alberta’s ability to generate affordable power — has been loosened. Timelines for reducing methane emissions have been extended beyond 2030. Yes, there are caveats that appear to impose a soft form of anti-carbon sentiment, but the overall picture has changed. 

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), a publicly funded institution, has consistently parroted environmental advocates who treat fossil fuels as abominations rather than economic necessities. This messaging has convinced many Canadians that their government is committing a terrible sin by producing energy the world demands. Lost on them is the fact that Canadian oil and natural gas are produced under far more stringent standards than exist in the Middle East, Russia, or other regions.

Energy abundance underpins prosperity. Nations that constrain their energy supply impoverish themselves. Nations that produce reliable, affordable energy benefit their populations and the broader world. Canada should produce the energy for itself and export the surplus to global markets.

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Beyond energy economics, there is another dimension to Canada’s economic future that the legacy climate orthodoxy dismisses: agriculture. Canada’s warming climate has extended growing seasons across the prairies and opened new agricultural possibilities. 

According to official data, “total wheat production rose 11.2% year over year to a record 40 million (metric tons) in 2025, surpassing the previous record set in 2013.” Canola production rose 13%, surpassing a record set in 2017. Barley and oat production rose 19% and 17%, respectively.

In all, the output for all principal field crops increased by 4% year-over-year. For the next crop year (2025-2026), total production is projected to reach near record levels, up 3% year-over-year and 8% above the previous five-year average.

Historical analysis demonstrates that climate conditions across Canadian agricultural regions have shifted toward longer growing seasons, with more frost-free days and expanded viable crop zones.

Critics will claim that allowing a new pipeline is a betrayal of future generations. But what truly endangers posterity? A fraction of a degree of warming that extends growing seasons? Or a future of energy scarcity, deindustrialization, and economic stagnation?

Fearmongering about a “climate emergency” served only to empower a bureaucratic class intent on controlling consumption and taxing lifestyles. It did nothing to change atmospheric physics or the needs of people who rely on affordable energy to survive.

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Tide Turns Against Climatists’ Agenda

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Richard Miller points to growing distrust of climate ideology and to receding support for impractical energy and social policies aimed at fighting global warming/climate change, but serving only to inflict energy poverty  His article is The Tide Turns Against the Climate Change Agenda: A Long-Overdue Reckoning.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

For nearly two decades, Britain’s climate lobby has held an iron grip on policy, discourse, and public imagination, promising a utopian future of cheap energy, green jobs, and global leadership. From Westminster’s corridors to the BBC’s airwaves, the mantra was clear: Net Zero would make us richer, healthier, and safer, all while saving the planet. But the cracks in this narrative are now gaping wounds. Soaring energy bills, crumbling industries, and a public fed up with unfulfilled promises signal a seismic shift. The tide is turning against the climate change agenda, and it’s about time.

The climate establishment’s dominance rested on a seductive pitch: green policies would deliver prosperity without pain. Wind turbines and solar panels would slash energy costs, insulate us from petrostates, and create a jobs bonanza. As Maurice Cousins noted in his August 2025 Artillery Row piece, this vision transformed environmentalism from a middle-class indulgence into a technocratic consensus, backed by state funding, Big Philanthropy, and celebrity endorsements.

Yet, the reality is starkly different. Britain now faces some of the highest industrial energy costs in the developed world, with electricity prices for businesses nearly double those in the U.S. Heavy industry is in retreat, steelworks and manufacturing plants are shuttering, while the UK’s reliance on energy imports has surged, exposing vulnerabilities during crises like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The public isn’t blind to this failure. Polls reflect a growing backlash. While abstract support for Net Zero lingers, a 2025 YouGov survey found 47% of Britons want climate policies scaled back when faced with their costs, high bills, job losses, and lifestyle constraints. Reform UK voters, with 32% endorsing reduced green measures, are leading the charge, but even mainstream figures like Tony Blair and trade unions like Unite are breaking ranks, questioning the feasibility of the green agenda. This isn’t just scepticism; it’s a revolt against a narrative that promised abundance but delivered austerity.

The climate lobby’s response? Double down and deflect. Take the recent video by Simon Clark and Carbon Brief’s Dr. Simon Evans, which Cousins critiques as a desperate attempt to “manage” dissent rather than engage with it. Acknowledging rising bills and Britain’s mere 1% of global emissions, it dismisses public concerns as misinformation fuelled by fossil-fuel propaganda. This patronising tone, epitomised by praising the “independent” Climate Change Committee, a body of unelected technocrats, only deepens distrust. It’s a tired playbook, seen in Brexit and migration debates: label critics as ignorant, pathologise their concerns, and cling to elite authority.

But the public’s lived experience, bills they can’t pay, industries they’ve lost,
trumps rhetorical window-dressing.

The folly of the climate agenda lies in its defiance of economic and physical realities. Low-density, intermittent renewables like wind and solar cannot power a modern industrial economy without massive subsidies and grid instability. The Office for Budget Responsibility has warned that Net Zero’s costs, projected at £1.4 trillion by 2050, far outstrip promised savings. Meanwhile, global competitors like China and India, responsible for over 40% of emissions, continue burning coal with little regard for Western virtue-signalling. Britain’s “lead by example” approach is not just naïve, it’s self-destructive, hamstringing its economy while others race ahead.

This reckoning is long overdue. The climate lobby’s promises were always more faith than fact, rooted in a utopian vision that ignored trade-offs. Green jobs? The UK’s renewable sector employs fewer than 75,000 people, a fraction of the 500,000 jobs lost in manufacturing since 2000. Cheaper energy? Households face bills 60% higher than a decade ago. Energy independence? The UK imports 40% of its electricity on peak days, often from fossil-heavy grids abroad.

The climate agenda’s failures are not a messaging problem,
they’re a policy disaster, colliding with
the hard limits of physics and economics.

The tide is turning because the public sees through the façade. From factory workers to suburban families, people feel the squeeze of policies that prioritise ideology over reality. The green backlash isn’t just about cost, it’s about trust. When elites lecture about “saving the planet” while ordinary citizens struggle to heat their homes, resentment festers. Reform UK’s rise and the growing chorus of mainstream dissent signal a broader awakening: the climate agenda, as it stands, is unsustainable.

It’s time to pivot. Instead of doubling down on unworkable targets, Britain needs pragmatic policies, investment in nuclear energy, which provides reliable, low-carbon power; deregulation to revive industry; and a frank acknowledgment that global emissions won’t bend to Western sacrifices alone. The climate lobby’s grip is slipping, and no amount of technocratic spin can stop the public’s demand for change. The reckoning is here, and it’s about time we embraced it.

 

Biomass Energy Exorbitant, Destructive and Pointless

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Biomass Energy Process

Shaye Wolf writes at CalMatters Biomass is a money pit that won’t solve California’s energy or wildfire problems  Shaye Wolf is the climate science director at the Center for Biological Diversity.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

California’s most expensive electricity source is finally poised to lose a government handout that props up its high costs and harmful pollution. In an era of clean, cheap solar and wind energy, policymakers are rightly beginning to treat biomass energy like the boondoggle it is.

Biomass energy — electricity made by burning or gasifying trees —
is an expensive, dirty relic that relies on industry misinformation and taxpayer money. 

In a vote later this month, the California Public Utilities Commission is expected to end the BioMAT subsidy program, which requires electric utilities to buy biomass power at exorbitant costs — four times the average. Californians get hit with those extra costs in our power bills, along with pollution that harms our health and climate. 

Utilities and environmental groups support ending this costly subsidy.   But the biomass industry is fighting back with misleading claims that its projects are made clean by “new” technology or that they’re needed for wildfire safety. Don’t be fooled.

Burning trees to make electricity harms the climate. In fact, biomass power is more climate-polluting at the smokestack than coal.

Biomass energy releases toxic air pollutants that endanger health, increasing the risk of premature death and illnesses like asthma. The facilities often are located in low-income communities and communities of color that have long fought to shut them down.

It is telling that the biomass industry is rebranding.  It claims it will use “clean” methods to gasify trees instead of burning them. But gasification — which also involves heating organic material — releases large amounts of climate-harming air pollution.

State regulators in May denied a costly biomass gasification project
that couldn’t show it would reduce emissions as promised.

The industry also promotes carbon capture and storage, claiming this technology will suck up carbon dioxide from biomass smokestacks and store it underground forever. But carbon capture and storage is a costly, decades-old technology with a long history of failure and serious health and safety risks.

Finally, the industry claims biomass energy projects will help pay for forest thinning, which it says will protect communities during wildfires. That means cutting trees, often large trees, which threatens wildlife and depletes forests, which naturally store carbon and fight climate change.

Thinning isn’t a good way to keep communities safe. Most of the community destruction is caused by wind-driven fires during extreme fire weather, made worse by climate change. The fastest-moving 3% of wind-driven fires is responsible for 88% of the damage to homes. [Note: no proof wildfires are worse now than in the past]

No amount of forest thinning can stop that. In fact, thinning makes cool, moist forests hotter, drier and more wind-prone, which can make fires burn faster and more intensely.

Most of California’s destructive wildfires — like the Los Angeles area fires in January — have burned in shrublands and grasslands, not forests, making thinning irrelevant in those cases.

Instead, the best investment for protecting communities during wildfires is hardening homes, so they’re less likely to catch fire, and stopping new development in fire-prone areas. Yet the state has earmarked only 1% of its wildfire funding for home hardening. Most goes to thinning.

Where thinning occurs, it’s most cost-effective to scatter the wood in the forest to create wildlife habitat, retain vital nutrients, and enhance natural carbon storage. If wood must be removed, it can be turned into mulch and shavings. The worst choice is subsidizing biomass companies to make dirty energy.

Any way you look at it, biomass energy is a polluting money pit
that won’t solve our climate or wildfire safety problems.

See also: 

Green Electrical Shocks in 2024

 

Trees converted into pellets by means of petroleum powered machinery.

Carney Directs Canada Pipeline Charade

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Q: Do Leopards Change Their Spots? A: No,
because it’s chamouflage concealing their real motives.

This National Post editorial gives the game away: The Carney-Smith pipeline of uncertainty.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

MOU adds as many roadblocks as it clears away

Prime Minister Mark Carney, right, signs an MOU with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith in Calgary, Alta., Thursday, Nov. 27, 2025. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh

Had the Great Smith-Carney Pipelines and Climate Pact of 2025 emerged say, five years ago, it would have been considered squarely within the realm of Liberal environmentalism. Instead, because former prime minister Justin Trudeau brought in several anti-business policies, the current prime minister is being feted/scorned as being pro-energy industry by disappointed Liberals and relieved conservatives alike. While Mark Carney deserves credit for negotiating this deal with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, and bringing a rival onside, we’re skeptical at the chances a pipeline ever gets built.

All of these regulations have been points of contention for Alberta, so it is to Smith’s credit that she was able to persuade Carney to budge.  But it’s possible this will not accomplish much more than to remove extra layers of regulation, which were unnecessary even by environmental standards. Under the Trudeau Liberals, there was to be a consumer carbon tax, industrial carbon tax, as well as the clean energy regulations and emissions cap. And it did not end there, as the Impact Assessment Act, also brought in under Trudeau, mandates onerous environmental and social review, including the consideration of “Indigenous knowledge” alongside scientific assessment, as well as considering the “intersection of sex and gender with other identity factors.”

If Carney is at all serious about kickstarting investment in Canada,
he should at minimum be willing to clear away some of these extra rules.

Further to that, the construction of a pipeline is entirely contingent on the simultaneous construction of a massive carbon capture project, presumably so Carney can claim the new pipeline is moving only “low emission” barrels of bitumen. Finally, while the MOU does not explicitly give B.C. a veto, that province is to be included “immediately” in a “trilateral discussion” on the project. B.C. Premier David Eby is opposed to a pipeline and was highly critical of the deal, claiming it would take priority away from other projects, specifically B.C. projects Eby supports. [

April 30, 2024 (IEEFA) – More than CAD1 billion were spent retrofitting the Boundary Dam 3 (BD3) coal plant in Saskatchewan to add carbon capture technology. After nine years, the project has a consistent history of capturing far less than the 90 per cent promised when the project was built—and all the carbon dioxide (CO2) captured at the plant is used for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) that injects captured CO2 into the ground to extract more oil..Carbon capture at Boundary Dam 3 still an underperforming failure

And the roadblocks to a new pipeline don’t end there. While it would be approved through the Major Projects Office, it isn’t at all clear what purpose that will serve. Carney’s Liberals gave themselves the authority to suspend regulatory review to expedite projects in the national interest. However, the office is electing not to use this power so far, stating on its website that “Projects will continue to be subject to all regulatory review processes.”

So being approved through the MPO may give the pipeline certainty that
it will be approved — eventually. That means every investment killing
process under the Impact Assessment Act will have to be passed.

What the Smith-Carney deal does accomplish is to buy both of them time to each satisfy their base. For Smith that is conservatives flirting with separatism, and for Carney, it is environmentalist Liberals, some of whom see this deal as a betrayal, such as former environment minister Steven Guilbeault who quit cabinet in protest. We applaud genuine attempts from Ottawa to work with, as opposed to against, Alberta, but we’re not confident this plan will deliver what is promised.

See Also:

Canada PM Carney Floats Imaginary “Decarbonized Oil” Pipeline

On Energy, Carney the Wrong Man at the Worst Time