Energy Policies

ICJ Opinion and UN Resolution Turbocharge Climate Litigation

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Activists hoping the opinion from the ICJ’s judges will have far-reaching legal consequences in the fight against climate change Image: Peter Dejong/AP Photo/picture alliance

The biased Advisory Opinion came down from ICJ a year ago. At the time I posted of how narrow-minded was the decision process.  For example, this from perplexity.ai:

Question: How did the ICJ address scientists disputing IPCC reports like Clintel in its climate advice?

Answer: The International Court of Justice (ICJ), in its advisory proceedings on climate change, did not address or give consideration to scientists or groups—such as Clintel—who dispute the findings of the IPCC. Instead, the ICJ relied heavily and explicitly on the IPCC as the authoritative source on climate science throughout the process.

Key points from the available evidence:

  • The ICJ held a private meeting with IPCC scientists just before hearings began, reflecting the Court’s view of the IPCC as the “scientific pillar” of the climate change regime1.

  • This meeting was not part of the formal, public hearings and did not include scientists who dissent from the IPCC—states and organizations participating in the advisory proceedings had no opportunity to question or respond to IPCC scientists1.

  • The process was criticized for lacking transparency and procedural fairness precisely because it favored a single scientific perspective (the IPCC’s), with no indication that alternative scientific viewpoints were admitted or reviewed1.

  • The UN General Assembly’s request for the advisory opinion itself referenced the “utmost concern [for] the scientific consensus expressed” in the IPCC reports, reinforcing the Court’s mandate to treat the IPCC’s findings as the foundation for its analysis13.

  • Available commentaries and summaries of the ICJ process do not mention any engagement with scientists or organizations disputing IPCC conclusions, nor do they report that groups like Clintel were referenced or invited as experts13.

  • While the ICJ has, in rare past cases, consulted technical experts informally, in this climate case it only announced consultation with IPCC figures, reinforcing the exclusion of dissident scientific voices19.

In summary, the ICJ’s approach gave exclusive scientific authority to the IPCC and provided no forum, reference, or weight to scientists disputing its reports, such as those from Clintel13. The Court did not discuss or acknowledge the existence of such scientific disagreement in its process, instead treating the IPCC’s consensus as fact. This approach has been criticized for its lack of transparency and its failure to incorporate procedural safeguards for alternative scientific views19.

Neverthless, the ICJ AO prompted headlines like these:

Top UN court says countries can sue each other over climate change, BBC

Legal experts say International Court of Justice ruling provides ‘a clear blueprint to hold major emitters accountable’ The Independent

Opened the door for countries to sue each other over impacts of climate change, phys.org

Nations Can Sue Each Other Over Climate Inaction Under International Law, Daily Guardian

Etc., Etc. Etc.

Now on May 20, 2026 the UN General Assembly passed a resolution affirming the ICJ and suggesting implementation.

UN General Assembly ADOPTS resolution welcoming the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice on the obligations of States in respect of climate change

RESULT
In favor: 141
Against: 8
Abstain: 28

Activists gloss over the fact that neither the ICJ Opinion nor the UN Resolution are binding, even though it’s expected for them to be referenced in all the climate warfare going on now, and soon to explode.  Thus it is important to look into the vote and the implications from those who opposed, abstained, or were absent

The table below lists the Authors, those Against, Abstained, Absent and Notables Voting for:

Authors (62) Against (8) Abstained (28) Absent (15) For (79 + 62)
Andorra Belarus Algeria Azerbaijan Notables
Angola Iran Argentina Benin Australia
Antigua and Barbuda Israel Bahrain Bolivia Austria
Armenia Liberia Brunei Central African rep Belgium
Bahamas (The) Russia Czechia Dem Rep Korea Brazil
Bhutan Saudi Arabia Quatorial NG Dominica Canada
Bosnia and Herzegovina United States Eritrea Eswatini China
Bulgaria Yemen Ethiopia Kiribati Denmark
Burkina Faso Gambie Madagascar Egypt
Cabo Verde India Nicaragua Hungary 
Chile Iraq Serbia Indonesia
Colombia Kazakhstan Trinidad Tobago Ireland
Congo Kuwait Turkmenistan Italy
Costa Rica Lesotho Uzbekistan Japan
Croatia Libya Venezuela Malaysia
Cyprus Namibia Mexico
Czechia Nigeria New Zealand
Djibouti Oman Norway
Dominican Republic Pakistan Poland
Ecuador Paraguay Singapore
Equatorial Guinea Qatar Sri Lanka
Fiji South Africa Somalia
Finland Sudan Sweden
France Syria Thailand
Georgia Tunisia Uganda
Germany Turkiye UAE
Greece Tanzania UK
Guatemala Zimbabwe Viet Nam
Honduras
Jordan
Kenya
Latvia
Lebanon
Luxembourg
Maldives
Mali
Malta
Marshall Islands
Micronesia Fed States
Monaco
Montenegro
Morocco
Netherlands
Nigeria
North Macedonia
Palau
Panama
Peru
Portugal
Qatar
Republic of Korea
Romania
Samoa
Senegal
Slovakia
Slovenia
Spain
Switzerland
Togo
Ukraine
Uruguay
Vanuatu

Those who voted against or abstained are likely to refuse recognizing the authority of ICJ and UN in this matter.  In addition some of those absent are also “makers” of hydrocarbon fuels and will oppose the many nations wanting to be “takers” benefiting from the legal circus coming to town.  Many of the Notables voting for are likely to be defendants in this lawfare, especially if they were stupid enough to legislate emissions reduction targets.

Background Post

ICJ Issues Biased Advice on Climate Change

Unreliables Made US Power Grid Fragile

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Kite and Key explain how and why US and Canada electricity is on the brink of blacking out when needed.  For those prefering to read, below is a transcript with my bolds and some added images.

Five seconds.  That’s about how long you’ve been watching this video.  And in 2025, it was also the amount of time it took for 60 percent of the electricity supply in Spain … to vanish from the country’s grid.  Which led to 10 hours of darkness — in parts of four countries.  It’s a nightmarish scenario — and there’s a good chance that it’s coming to America soon.

Electricity. It’s the backbone of our entire world.

Your house. Your town. Your … excessive enthusiasm for Christmas. We build our lives around the assumption that when we flip a switch, it’ll be there for whatever we need — whether it’s controlling the climate in our homes, refrigerating our food, or just making sure the neighbors can see you’ve portrayed Santa committing a class B felony.

And, when you consider the history, you can see just how quickly we’ve gotten used to this. When Thomas Edison opened America’s first commercial power plant in 1882, it served 59 customers in lower Manhattan.ii By the time another 40 years or so had passed, America’s electricity consumption looked like this:iii

By 1929, the U.S. was generating more power than the rest of the world combined.iv And in the century since, our appetite has only grown. In 2025, the government’s Energy Information Administration reported that the country consumed 14 times more electricity than it had in 1950.v

All of which sounds like a standard story of progress: As the decades pass, and technology evolves, things that once seemed miraculous become so commonplace that we can take them for granted.

But here’s the thing: We should definitely not be taking them for granted. Because the days of assuming we know what’s going to happen when we flip the switch … may be coming to an end.

In 2023, members of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission — the government body that regulates electricity transmission — appeared before a Senate committee with a series of dire warnings.

One of them testified that “We face unprecedented challenges to the reliability of our nation’s electric system.”vi

Another said that “The United States is heading for a very catastrophic situation in terms of reliability.”vii

And then he added “This problem is coming. It’s coming quickly. The red lights are flashing.”viii

And while we don’t like to editorialize here at Kite & Key … that sounds bad.

The data shows that these concerns aren’t exaggerated.

In 2026, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation — the body charged with making sure that the power grid is dependable — warned that nearly half of America’s population was going to be at high risk of rolling blackouts in the next few years.ix

In fact, by the end of the decade every single region of the U.S. and Canada is projected to be at least elevated risk … with the single exception of the Canadian province of Saskatchewanx — which makes sense because Saskatchewan literally has more cows than people.xi

So, if there’s a blackout there … well, you know what happened.

But all of this leads to an obvious question: How does this happen? It’s been almost 150 years since Thomas Edison got the ball rolling and somehow we’re getting worse at this? What’s going on here?

To unravel this mystery, go back to those officials testifying before Congress.

One of them summed up the problem in four words: “The math doesn’t work.”xii

Here’s what he meant by that: In many cases we’re actually losing power — as in, we’ll have less of it in a few years than we do now.

Take, for example, the PJM Interconnection, the country’s largest power grid operator, which serves 65 million customersxiii in 13 states.xiv

In 2023, PJM issued a report estimating that it might lose about 40 gigawatts of electricity — more than 20 percent of its capacity — by the year 2030, thanks to power plant retirements.xv

Which isn’t the end of the world, right? You just bring on new power sources! Which is what they’re doing!

Here’s the problem: The high-end estimate of those new sources … is a little over 30 gigawatts.

In other words, they’re replacing 40 … with 30.

Also known as: “The math doesn’t work.”

And similar situations are happening all over the country.

Why? Well to understand that, we have to understand how the economics of electricity works.

And you might be thinking “But, Kite & Key, that sounds excruciatingly boring.” And it is, dear viewer!

Or at least it would be if you hadn’t chosen the one channel that understands it’s so boring that you have to explain it with the assistance of adorable puppies dressed as economists.

Here’s the way this all goes down: In any given part of the country, you might have lots of potential sources of electricity — natural gas, solar, coal, wind, nuclear. And at any given moment all those sources are selling power at different prices.

Now, the decision as to which one to use is not made by you, the customer. It’s made by the people responsible for coordinating the system, who take bids from electricity producers — sometimes as often as every five minutes — and buy whatever options are cheapest at the time until they’ve got enough power to meet demand. None of which seems crazy — adequate energy at low prices is pretty much what everyone wants.

But here’s where this gets complicated: In some cases … cheap electricity comes with unintended consequences.

Here’s what we mean.

Not all energy sources are created equal.

Map of Diminishing Capacity Values for Major RTOs (Regional Transmission Operators)

Some of them like nuclear and most coal plants are what’s referred to as “baseload power” — they can essentially run all the time.

Others like natural gas plants are “dispatchable,” meaning you can quickly turn them on or off depending on demand.

Then there are sources like wind and solar which are “intermittent” — in other words, you only get power from them when the weather is cooperating.xvi

And this is where the problem creeps in.

In 2024, the government reported that wind, on average, only produces energy about 1/3 of the time.xvii For solar, it was less than 1/4 of the time.xviii By contrast natural gas was around 60 percent and nuclear was at 90 percent.xix

But when wind and solar are working they can be incredibly cheap. In fact, because they’re heavily subsidized by the government, their prices can actually go negative — they can pay the grid to take their powerxx — and still stay in business.

Needless to say, all the other electricity producers … can’t do that.

Which makes them less profitable.

Which leads an increasing number of them to close.

Which leads to a world where we’re increasingly dependent on
electricity sources that literally don’t produce any energy most of the time.

Those 40 gigawatts PJM may lose? Almost all coal or natural gas. The up to 30 gigawatts that will partially replace it? Mostly wind and solar.xxi

Which is the kind of thing that leads otherwise boring bureaucrats from places like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to yell “the red lights are flashing!” at members of Congress.

Because by privileging the energy sources that work the best some of the time
… we’re gutting the energy sources that work the best all of the time
— the ones that actually determine whether you’ll have power.

There’s no doubt that wind and solar are going to be important parts of America’s energy future. But imagining that they can carry the burden of the entire system today is risking disaster.

When wind and solar can’t produce, we rely on sources like nuclear, natural gas, and even coal to keep the lights on.xxii But if we cut out that part of the equation — if we don’t build to ensure resiliency — we’re placing our standard of living on a knife’s edge. And if we get that balance even slightly wrong, well…

 

 

No, WSJ: 9 Reasons Why “Green Energy” Makes Even LESS Sense Today

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Green Energy is a mirage that retreats as you approach.

Terigi Ciccone wrote an Open Letter to Ed Ballard Re: “Why Green Energy Makes More Sense With Each Price Shock” (WSJ, April 9, 2026).  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Open Letter to Ed Ballard
Re: “Why Green Energy Makes More Sense With Each Price Shock” (WSJ, April 9, 2026)

Dear Mr. Ballard,

I have sent you several detailed emails over the past few years outlining the engineering and economic realities of integrating variable renewable energy (VRE). You have never replied. Your latest column—celebrating the Iran/Hormuz crisis as yet another “proof” that solar-plus-battery is now the rational choice—is the latest example of journalistic cheerleading that substitutes press-release optimism for rigorous system-level analysis. As a power-plant design engineer with decades of hands-on experience specifying dispatchable generation, I write this open letter to correct the record, not in theory, but in the hard language of capital costs, ancillary services, capacity factors, and ecological externalities that your piece airbrushes away.

Your star exhibit is the Philippines’ MTerra Solar project: 3.5 GW solar + 4.5 GWh battery storage, fast-tracked amid LNG shortages, now supposedly delivering 13 hours of power “marginally below” LNG cost. You quote Actis investor Rahul Agrawal: “This is not theory. This is actually happening on the ground now.” Indeed, it is—but the ground truth is far uglier than your narrative admits.

1. Intermittency is not a rounding error; it is the dominant cost driver. Even with batteries, MTerra is engineered for ~12–13 hours of mid-merit output. The remaining 11–12 hours (and any multi-day typhoon-induced lull) still require dispatchable backup. My own peer-reviewed analysis of ancillary-service burdens shows that adding solar and wind to a reliable grid inflates total system costs by 135–235 % once frequency regulation, inertia, voltage support, and ramping are properly valued. The raw LCOE of ~$40/MWh becomes a delivered cost of ~$500/MWh.
See: Terigi Ciccone, “A Narrow Lens on Ancillary Services: Overlooking the Full Costs and Ecological Damage of Solar and Wind Integration” 

2. The “phenomenal” price drop in Chinese panels and batteries is a geopolitical trap, not progress. You correctly note falling panel costs, but you fail to mention that China controls ~85% of solar manufacturing and ~80% of the battery supply chain. Swapping Middle-East oil dependence for Beijing’s critical-mineral monopoly and state-subsidized overcapacity is not energy security; it is energy servitude. When those subsidies or export policies shift, the “cheap” becomes expensive overnight.

3. Full-system costing reveals multipliers your LCOE ignores. Economist Bjørn Lomborg has repeatedly documented the same reality using Value-Adjusted LCOE (VALCOE). A peer-reviewed study he cites shows that once reliability and backup are included, wind power becomes 11–12× and solar up to 38–42× more expensive than combined-cycle gas turbines (CCGT).
Bjørn Lomborg, “Why solar and wind power aren’t winning,” Financial Post, 17 April 2024 
(Identical findings appear in Lomborg’s “The True Cost of Wind and Solar Energy,” NH Journal, 20 May 2024.)

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

My own comparison of 1 GW reliable output at 99.9 % uptime reaches the same conclusion: onshore wind requires 5.6× and offshore wind 7.2× the capital investment of a CCGT, once overbuild, storage, transmission, and peaker plants are added.
See: Terigi Ciccone, “The Well Hidden and Distorted Costs of Renewables: A Comprehensive Comparison of Wind Power and Combined Cycle Gas Turbine Plant” 

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

4. Academic “System LCOE” literature confirms the same directional truth— Falko Ueckerdt, Lion Hirth, and colleagues introduced System LCOE precisely because standard LCOE is misleading at high VRE penetrations. Their 2013 analysis (and subsequent updates) shows integration/profile costs can equal or exceed generation costs themselves once wind shares exceed ~20 %. At the levels now being forced, those costs become an economic barrier.
Ueckerdt et al., “System LCOE: What are the costs of variable renewables?” Energy 63 (2013) 61–75 

5. Ecological and material externalities are catastrophic. Your column is silent on land use (10× that of nuclear or gas for equivalent firm power), avian/bat mortality, 78 million tons of non-recyclable solar waste projected by 2050, and the concrete-steel-copper footprint of batteries that must be replaced every 8–12 years. My third paper tallies these hidden costs in full.
See: Terigi Ciccone, “Revised: Let’s Make Electricity Affordable Again” 

Moreover, the raw-material demands are staggering. Utility-scale solar and wind installations consume vastly greater quantities of concrete, steel, copper, silver, rare-earth elements, and other minerals per unit of firm, reliable electricity than any dispatchable source. This triggers massive mining operations with severe habitat destruction, water contamination, and toxic tailings. Manufacturing these components remains overwhelmingly dependent on fossil fuels for the energy-intensive processes of silicon purification, steel smelting, and mineral extraction. In full life-cycle terms, many VRE systems may never recover the total primary energy invested in their construction, installation, maintenance, and eventual replacement—rendering the entire enterprise an energy and cost sink rather than a net contributor.

Drone footage shows hundreds of solar panels ripped apart and scattered across farmland after a powerful tornado tore through Wheatfield overnight. Homes in the area also suffered heavy damage as the violent storm carved a path of destruction. Photo credit Joemar Sombero

6. Real-world stress tests expose the fantasy. Philippine typhoons shred solar farms; Florida hurricanes do the same. After every major storm, we see acres of twisted panels and batteries that cannot survive Category 4 winds. Yet the same voices warning about climate risk keep prescribing an energy system that collapses precisely when the weather turns ugly.

7. Ultimately, we are inflicting these enormous costs for no good reason. The entire policy edifice rests on the assumption that anthropogenic CO₂ is the primary driver of dangerous warming. In reality, CO₂’s greenhouse effect is already near saturation in its principal absorption bands; additional emissions yield only minuscule marginal forcing. The true temperature powerhouses on Earth are gravitational auto-compression (the dry adiabatic lapse rate driven by atmospheric mass and pressure) and the dominant water-vapor/latent-heat cycle, which together govern the vast majority of Earth’s energy balance.

We are dismantling reliable, dispatchable power systems, subsidizing
foreign supply chains, and covering productive land in fragile panels
—all to chase a trace-gas tail that cannot wag the climatic dog.

8. Increased atmospheric CO₂ is demonstrably greening the planet. NASA satellite data confirm that rising CO₂ has driven substantial global greening over recent decades. The increase in leaf area is equivalent to twice the size of the continental United States, with CO₂ fertilization responsible for approximately 70 % of this greening across 25–50 % of vegetated lands. Far from harming the biosphere, higher CO₂ levels are enhancing vegetation growth, boosting agricultural yields, and expanding natural habitats worldwide.

9. Humans are not the sole source of rising atmospheric CO₂. As I document in detail in “Revised: Let’s Make Electricity Affordable Again,” natural sources—including volcanic activity, oceanic degassing, and other geological processes—play a far more significant role in the global carbon cycle than the prevailing narrative acknowledges. Attributing nearly all recent increases to human emissions oversimplifies complex geophysical realities and ignores the “Volcanic Vibes” that have shaped atmospheric CO₂ long before industrial civilization.

Mr. Ballard, energy crises do not “hammer home” the virtues of green energy. They expose its fatal engineering defects: zero inertia, negative correlation with demand, dependence on foreign supply chains, and an energy return that fails even basic life-cycle scrutiny. The rational response is an all-of-the-above portfolio anchored by dispatchable, high-capacity-factor sources—modern CCGT, nuclear (including SMRs), and geothermal—with targeted renewables only where they demonstrably lower system cost without compromising reliability.

Your repeated refusal to engage with the peer-reviewed literature or
practicing engineers suggests a commitment to narrative over evidence.

I invite you, once again, to reply—publicly or privately—and defend your claim that solar-plus-battery “makes more sense with each price shock” once full system costs, ecological and material realities, geopolitical risks, and the actual physics and benefits of atmospheric CO₂ are included. Until then, this open letter stands as the record of your April 9 column that you omitted. Let’s bury the narrative. 🔥

Respectfully but firmly,
Terigi Ciccone Ret. Gas Turbine Engineer for power generation and aviation, an independent researcher on climate, Sarasota, Florida, USA

 

 

2026 Update: Fossil Fuels ≠ Global Warming

Posted on by Ron Clutz

gas in hands

Previous posts addressed the claim that fossil fuels are driving global warming. This post updates that analysis with the latest (2025) numbers from Energy Institute and compares World Fossil Fuel Consumption (WFFC) with three estimates of Global Mean Temperature (GMT). More on both these variables below. Note: Previously these same statistics were hosted by BP.

WFFC

2025 statistics are now available from Energy Institute for international consumption of Energy sources. Statistical Review of World Energy. 

The reporting categories are:
Oil
Natural Gas
Coal
Nuclear
Hydro
Renewables (other than hydro)

Note:  Energy Institute began in 2023 to use Exajoules to replace MToe (Million Tonnes of oil equivalents.) It is logical to use an energy metric which is independent of the fuel source. OTOH renewable advocates have no doubt pressured EI to stop using oil as the baseline since their dream is a world without fossil fuel energy.

From BP conversion table 1 exajoule (EJ) = 1 quintillion joules (1 x 10^18). Oil products vary from 41.6 to 49.4 tonnes per gigajoule (10^9 joules).  Comparing this annual report with previous years shows that global Primary Energy (PE) in MToe is roughly 24 times the same amount in Exajoules.  The conversion factor at the macro level varies from year to year depending on the fuel mix. The graphs below use the new metric.

A new wrinkle in the EI 2026 report is a shift in terminology concerning supply and consumption.  Previous reports headlined Primary Energy Consumption (PEC), but this year the top line is Total Energy Supply (TES).  No doubt the change is to raise the profile of non-carbon energy (NCE).  A comparison with previous years stats shows that consumption numbers for all years from 1965 to 2024 have been lowered in this report, a puzzling result likely due to methodology.  And yet tables show that summing the consumption EJs of each of the six energy categories matches the TES, effectively the same result as Energy Consumption, albeit with lower numbers across the board.  Apparently the motivation was to remove “Primary” to make room for Non Carbon Energy (NCE) sources like renewables that only input into Electricity, a Secondary energy form.

I found this diagram on the internet, but don’t have a link for it at  EI itself.  However, I can confirm it with statistics from the 2026 Data Report.  Those provided the basis for the chart later on. Firstly, here is analysis from 2025  combining the first three, Oil, Gas, and Coal for total fossil fuel consumption world wide (WFFC).  The chart below shows the patterns for WFFC compared to world consumption of Primary Energy from 1965 through 2024 from the EI 2025 report.

The graph shows that global Primary Energy (PE) consumption from all sources has grown continuously over nearly 6 decades. Since 1965  oil, gas and coal (FF, sometimes termed “Thermal”) averaged 88% of PE consumed, ranging from 93% in 1965 to 81% in 2024.  Note that in 2020, PE dropped 21 EJ (4%) below 2019 consumption, then increased 31 EJ in 2021.  WFFC for 2020 dropped 24 EJ (5%), then in 2021 gained back 26 EJ to slightly exceed 2019 WFFC consumption. For the 60 year period, all net changes were increases from previous years and were:

Oil 207%
Gas 555%
Coal 183%
WFFC 252%
PE 308%
And Now The Energy Institute 2026 Report

Note the orange TEC line is slightly below the green line in the 2025 report, and also that FF have a slightly larger % of TEC. The 600 EJ total matches the consumption sum of all energy categories. The green NCE line includes Nuclear, Hydro and Renewables.  WFFC proportion of Total Energy Consumption ranged from 97% in 1965 to 86% in 2025, an average of 91% over those six decades. NCE proportion matches exactly the remainder of TEC after subtracting WFFC, from 2.6% to 13.8%. The Table below shows EJs and %s for 2024 and 2025

2024 EJ 2025 EJ EJ Increases Sources 2024 %s 2025 %s
592.18 600.31 8.14 Total
199.04 200.97 1.93 Oil 33.61% 33.48%
148.72 150.70 1.97 Gas 25.11% 25.10%
165.35 166.03 0.68 Coal 27.92% 27.66%
30.71 31.04 0.33 Nuclear 5.19% 5.17%
16.1 16.1 0.02 Hydro 2.72% 2.69%
32.24 35.45 3.20 Renewables 5.45% 5.90%
592.18 600.31 8.14 Sum of All 100.00% 100.00%
Renewables Breakdown
Exajoules Consumed
2024 2025
Solar  7.8 10.1
Wind 9.1 9.8
Bio and Other 15.4 15.6
Renewables 32.2 35.4

The data show that Wind and Solar energy is about half of the Renewables category, or about 3% of Total Energy Consumed, not much larger than previously.

Global Mean Temperatures. 

Everyone acknowledges that GMT is a fiction since temperature is an intrinsic property of objects, and varies dramatically over time and over the surface of the earth. No place on earth determines “average” temperature for the globe. Yet for the purpose of detecting change in temperature, major climate data sets estimate GMT and report anomalies from it.

UAH record consists of satellite era global temperature estimates for the lower troposphere, a layer of air from 0 to 4km above the surface. HadSST estimates sea surface temperatures from oceans covering 71% of the planet. HadCRUT combines HadSST estimates with records from land stations whose elevations range up to 6km above sea level.

Both GISS LOTI (land and ocean) and HadCRUT4 (land and ocean) use 14.0 Celsius as the climate normal, so I will add that number back into the anomalies. This is done not claiming any validity other than to achieve a reasonable measure of magnitude regarding the observed fluctuations.[Note: HadCRUT4 was discontinued after 2021 in favor of HadCRUT5.]

No doubt global sea surface temperatures are typically higher than 14C, more like 17 or 18C, and of course warmer in the tropics and colder at higher latitudes. Likewise, the lapse rate in the atmosphere means that air temperatures both from satellites and elevated land stations will range colder than 14C. Still, that climate normal is a generally accepted indicator of GMT.

Correlations of GMT and WFFC

The next graph compares WFFC to GMT estimates over the decades from 1965 to 2024 from HadCRUT5, which includes HadSST4.

Since 1965 the increase in fossil fuel consumption is dramatic and monotonic, steadily increasing by 252% from 146 to 513 exajoules.  Meanwhile the GMT record from Hadcrut shows multiple ups and downs with an accumulated rise of 1.4C over 60 years, 10% of the starting value.

The graph below compares WFFC to GMT estimates from UAH6, and HadSST4 for the satellite era from 1980 to 2024 a period of 45 years.

In the satellite era WFFC has increased at a compounded rate of 1.5% per year, for a total increase of 99% since 1980. At the same time, SST warming amounted to 0.8C, or 5.6% of the starting value.  UAH warming was 1.1C, or 8% up from 1979.  The temperature compounded rate of change is 0.1% per year for HadSST4, and 0.2% per year for UAH, an order of magnitude less than WFFC.  Even more obvious is the 1998 El Nino peak and flat GMT until 2023-24.

Summary

The climate alarmist/activist claim is straight forward: Burning fossil fuels makes measured temperatures warmer. The Paris Accord further asserts that by reducing human use of fossil fuels, further warming can be prevented.  Those claims do not bear up under scrutiny.

It is enough for simple minds to see that two time series are both rising and to think that one must be causing the other. But both scientific and legal methods assert causation only when the two variables are both strongly and consistently aligned. The above shows a weak and inconsistent linkage between WFFC and GMT.

Going further back in history shows even weaker correlation between fossil fuels consumption and global temperature estimates:

wfc-vs-sat

Figure 5.1. Comparative dynamics of the World Fuel Consumption (WFC) and Global Surface Air Temperature Anomaly (ΔT), 1861-2000. The thin dashed line represents annual ΔT, the bold line—its 13-year smoothing, and the line constructed from rectangles—WFC (in millions of tons of nominal fuel) (Klyashtorin and Lyubushin, 2003). Source: Frolov et al. 2009

In legal terms, as long as there is another equally or more likely explanation for the set of facts, the claimed causation is unproven. The more likely explanation is that global temperatures vary due to oceanic and solar cycles. The proof is clearly and thoroughly set forward in the post Quantifying Natural Climate Change.

Footnote: CO2 Concentrations Compared to WFFC

Contrary to claims that rising atmospheric CO2 consists of fossil fuel emissions, consider the Mauna Loa CO2 observations in recent years.

Despite the drop in 2020 WFFC, atmospheric CO2 continued to rise steadily, demonstrating that natural sources and sinks drive the amount of CO2 in the air.

See also: Nature Erases Pulses of Human CO2 Emissions

02/2025 Update–Temperature Changes, CO2 Follows

Follow the Money Leaving Wind Farms

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Boluwatife Remy reveals what many have overlooked, widespread disinvesting in wind power.  Not so long ago, the climate feaful were badgering education and religious institutions, among others, to disinvest in hydrocarbons from Big Oil companies.  Well, the worm has turned.  Remy’s article at benzinga is
Why Shell Is Selling Its Wind Farms—And What It’s Building Instead. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The energy transition was supposed to be the defining corporate story of the 2020s. For Shell (NYSE:SHEL), it has become the story of what the company tried, reconsidered, and is now unwinding at a pace that leaves little room for ambiguity about where management stands.

Bloomberg reported Friday that Shell is preparing to offload a portfolio of offshore wind farms in a transaction expected to generate more than $1 billion. Rothschild and PJT Partners are handling the advisory work, with the formal sale process targeted for 2027. Shell said nothing publicly. What the company has not stayed quiet about, expressed through a long sequence of exits and disposals over the past two years, is the direction it has chosen and the conviction behind it.

This Is Not a One-Off Decision

Anyone tempted to read the Bloomberg report as an isolated portfolio adjustment has not been following what Shell has been doing since Wael Sawan took the chief executive role with an explicit mandate to tighten the company’s strategic focus and restore the return on capital that investors had been pushing for.

The wind exits have been coming in steady succession. Shell walked away from the Atlantic Shores offshore wind project in the United States, absorbing a $1 billion writedown after concluding the numbers no longer worked. It sold its half of the MarramWind floating offshore wind development off Scotland to joint venture partner ScottishPower Renewables and abandoned the CampionWind project it had been developing independently.

Positions in other offshore wind assets across multiple markets have been quietly sold down as each successive review of the business case reached the same conclusion. The explanation attached to each departure has been consistent: the project either fails to meet the company’s return thresholds or no longer fits what Shell believes it does well.

One exit looks like a portfolio decision. A dozen exits
over twenty-four months looks like a verdict.

What Shell Is Building in Place of Wind

The company Sawan is assembling has a narrower and more deliberate focus than the Shell that spent the early 2020s presenting sweeping energy transition commitments to investors and government audiences. Liquefied natural gas trading and upstream oil and gas production are where the strategy now concentrates, businesses where Shell carries genuine competitive advantages built over decades that no amount of capital could quickly replicate elsewhere.

That repositioning is not unique to Shell. The same reassessment has been running simultaneously across the major integrated oil companies. BP has been selling renewable assets and reorienting capital toward upstream production. Equinor reduced its renewable energy workforce by around 20% while boosting spending on oil and gas. TotalEnergies negotiated an exit from nearly $1 billion in U.S. offshore wind leases and committed the equivalent amount to domestic fossil fuel development instead.

 The companies that arrived at the 2021 and 2022 investor days with ambitious clean energy targets have each, at their own pace and with varying degrees of public candor, concluded that those targets were built on assumptions that did not hold.

How Offshore Wind Lost Its Financial Logic

The deterioration in offshore wind economics between 2021 and 2024 was sharper than almost anyone inside the industry publicly acknowledged while it was happening. Construction costs climbed as specialist installation vessels became scarce and supply chains struggled to keep pace with the volume of projects that had been approved simultaneously across European and American markets.

Interest rates moved from near zero to levels that fundamentally changed the math on capital-intensive long-duration infrastructure. Turbine manufacturers, squeezed between fixed-price contracts and rising input costs, ran into serious financial difficulty.

The gap between what projects were expected to cost when developers submitted bids and what actually arrived on the invoice became a recurring crisis.

Contracts got cancelled. Projects got written down. 

Governments that had structured power purchase agreements around cost assumptions from a different era found themselves in renegotiations that pleased nobody. The companies carrying the heaviest exposure to offshore wind at the peak of the enthusiasm cycle spent years managing the fallout from decisions that looked reasonable in 2020 and looked considerably less so by 2023.

What This Means for Shell Shareholders

Selling wind farms that are not generating acceptable returns and redirecting the proceeds into businesses that are creates a cleaner financial picture for investors who have been watching Shell carry underperforming assets longer than they would have preferred. 

Shell has been among the more aggressive capital returners among the major oil companies, and management has been consistent about treating buyback capacity and dividend sustainability as priorities that outrank maintaining positions in low-return businesses.

The assets being brought to market will find buyers. Infrastructure funds and specialist renewable developers have been steady acquirers of divested offshore wind portfolios throughout this cycle, often able to hold the assets more cheaply than integrated oil companies whose capital costs and return expectations create a structural disadvantage in low-margin infrastructure. Shell selling is not the same as the assets disappearing. It is the assets moving to owners better suited to hold them.

What stays with Shell is the part of the energy business it has decided it is actually good at. For investors, that clarity is worth more than a diversified portfolio of businesses generating mixed returns and requiring constant explanation.

See Also: Wind Power Economic Failure

The Short Lives of Wind Turbines

Fourth Shale Revolution = Hydrocarbon Abundance

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Peter Zeihan is a global energy, demographic, and security expert breaking the news about a new tech revolution enhancing extraction of hydrocarbon fuels.  For those preferring to read, below is a lightly edited transcript from the video with my bolds and added images.

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Los Angeles on the California coast, and today we’re going to talk a little bit about oil. There have been a couple of technological breakthroughs that I think are worthy of mentioning in the shale era. So ExxonMobil, big company, one of the largest players in the world, produces just under 5 million barrels a day, has basically started mucking around with something called propping, so dial back.

Hydraulic fracturing or fracking is basically how the United States produces 80 percent or more of its crude oil these days, as well as the vast majority of its natural gas. It’s not a fringe technology, it’s the backbone. What you do is you drill down vertically and then you make a horizontal split that goes two, three, four, maybe even five miles, and then you inject water that is laced with sand.

The water, hydraulics, does not compress under pressure, so it cracks the rock apart, and then the water goes in with the sand and accesses tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny little deposits of petroleum. Then you stop the pumping, and because those tiny pockets of petroleum have now been exposed, they produce a back pressure that pushes the water out, but the sand stays lodged in the cracks, keeping them open so the flow can continue.

The sand is called proppant, and it’s one of
the biggest expenses in a fracking operation.

Well, ExxonMobil has now changed the proppant and is
triggering what is basically the fourth shale revolution.

Backstory for that. First shale revolution is when we figured out how to do this and brought out natural gas. The second shale revolution is when we figured out how to do this to bring out liquid oil. The third is when we built the infrastructure, things like LNG facilities or chemical facilities or refineries, to metabolize all this raw product that we’re now producing. All of that’s done. All that’s in the past.

Fourth revolution is taking the capital and the technological skill sets of the majors like Exxon and applying them for a whole new generation of technology. See, one of the weird things about the shale revolution is when it started, most of the super majors had kind of written off the American oil patch, and we had seen oil output from the United States drop to historical lows.

Well, still in the last century and a half. That meant we had small mom and pops that were doing everything, and they were trying everything they could come up with to get incremental increases, and that’s what generated the first few million barrels a day. Well, as time went on, oil does what oil does, and it rises and it falls and it rises and falls, and so we got a series of busts, and ExxonMobil was able to come in with its better capital position and buy up a lot of the smaller companies. To the point that it and Chevron now dominate the space and collectively produce almost nine million barrels a day.

Now, you apply what Exxon has across its entire value chain, and you get a very different proposition. So for proppant specifically, what we’re talking about today, they went into their refineries and they found waste products, something called petroleum coke, and they were able to manufacture that into a kind of a synthetic sand, if you will. The Proppant is where a lot of experimenting has been going on in a lot of subsectors for the last several years, and you’ve got some pretty expensive stuff that’s called ceramics.

Spherical grains of petroleum coke material are effective in fracking operations in coal seams.

Called ceramics? It is ceramics. Petroleum coke is cheaper than that, more expensive than sand, but its real advantage it’s a lot less dense, maybe 40-50% less dense than sand, which means you can suspend it in the water better, which means it pushes into the formation better, which means it holds open cracks deeper in the formation, and for a small increase in cost using what used to be a waste product, Exxon has seen their numbers increase by 10% to 20% to maybe even 30% in some wells. And that alone changes the math of the shale revolution, because a 10% to 30% increase in output for only a slim investment in what was a waste product, now that’s amazing.

And so the shale revolution is nowhere near done. You’ll hear people
saying that eventually the shale revolution is going to run out,
there’s only so much oil, but that misses the point.

In the pre-shale era, we were able to access about 10%, 9-10% of global energy reserves. There’s a lot down there we don’t have the technology to get to. The shale revolution doubled the percentage of what was accessible within the U.S. space. So we’re talking about 150 years of output, and suddenly we have access to something like that again, and we keep making these incremental increases, like with proppant, that pushes the horizon back even further.

Sheikhs vs. Shale

So the shale revolution continues to set new records for output, adding somewhere between a half a million and a million barrels a day per year, and has now been doing that since 2009. You get a lot of output when you do it for that long. So this year is not the last year of the shale revolution, neither is next year, or the year after, or the year after that, because the numbers keep getting better, the technology keeps pushing further, and the break-even cost for what it takes to get a chunk of oil out in an economically viable way keeps going down.

 

 

Climate House of Cards Collapsing at Last

Posted on by Ron Clutz

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.

 

Complete Slides in English from Dr. Fleischmann

Posted on by Ron Clutz

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.

Wind_power_and_climate_Bernd_Fleischmann_20260422Download
Climate Hysteria Surgically Dissected by Dr. Bernd Fleischmann

My post is linked above for reference.

Greenpeace Legal End Run to Avoid US Court is Ruled Out of Bounds

Posted on by Ron Clutz

AI generated free pik

Jason Isaac report at The Hill Greenpeace’s attempt to swindle US courts just got harpooned.  Excerpts in italics wtih my bolds and added images.

The North Dakota Supreme Court just drew a bright line for the rule of law, U.S. sovereignty and the energy infrastructure that keeps our country running. On May 7, the court ruled four to one that Greenpeace International cannot use a Dutch court to nullify what a unanimous American jury already decided.

It is a welcome victory, but the fight against eco-lawfare is far from over.

The case began in 2019, when Energy Transfer sued Greenpeace and other activist groups over the coordinated, sometimes violent campaign waged against the Dakota Access Pipeline. After six years of litigation and a three-week trial, twelve North Dakota jurors unanimously found Greenpeace liable for conspiracy, defamation, defamation per se and tortious interference.  The damages exceeded $666 million across the three Greenpeace defendants, with more than $130 million tagged to Greenpeace International alone. The jury heard the evidence and reached its verdict.

That should have been the end of it. It was not.

Two weeks before the North Dakota trial began, after six years of fighting in American courts, Greenpeace International filed a new lawsuit in Amsterdam. The plan was straightforward: ask a Dutch court to declare the North Dakota case “manifestly unfounded and abusive” under a new European Union anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) directive, then use that foreign declaration to erase the verdict and seize Energy Transfer’s assets wherever they could find them. It was a calculated end-run around our judiciary, dressed up in the polite language of European jurisprudence.

The North Dakota Supreme Court saw through it. Justice Jerod Tufte, writing for the majority this month, made the principle clear:

Substance matters, not labels. A claim that requires a foreign court to find an American jury wrong is a collateral attack on that jury, no matter what name the lawyers attach to it.

The court ordered the trial judge to issue a narrowly tailored injunction
blocking Greenpeace from pursuing the parts of its Dutch action
that depend on relitigating what North Dakotans already decided.

The opinion is worth quoting on the point that matters most,  The court wrote,:

“ Comity expires when the strong public policies of the forum
are vitiated by the foreign act.”

In plain English, foreign courts get respect when they earn it. A party that races to Amsterdam on the eve of an American trial to undermine the anticipated verdict cannot then demand that American courts politely defer to the foreign proceeding it manufactured.

This is the right ruling. It is also a narrow one.

The injunction applies to one party in one state. Unfortunately, that means Greenpeace can still pursue the parts of its Dutch action that do not require erasing the North Dakota verdict.

Federal courts have not yet weighed in on whether American courts can block foreign collateral attacks on American judgments. And the federal circuits are split on how heavily international comity should weigh against such injunctions. Other state supreme courts have not taken up the question. The next activist group with a domestic loss and a foreign sympathetic forum will try the same play, just with better lawyers and a cleaner record.

And they have plenty of reasons to keep trying. The European Union’s 2024 anti-SLAPP directive was sold as a shield for journalists and dissidents in countries with weak speech protections. In practice, however, it is becoming a sword aimed at American energy companies that win in court. The directive’s “manifestly unfounded” standard invites foreign judges to second-guess the merits of American court verdicts. Article 17 invites damages claims for the offense of having sued. The architecture is custom-built for the exact tactic Greenpeace attempted.

The deeper problem is that the activist legal industry has discovered something useful. When the protests fail, when the defamation campaigns get punished, when the juries refuse to play along, there is always another forum, another court, another friendly jurisdiction willing to entertain the argument that American energy infrastructure is itself a kind of crime.

The point is not to win on the merits. The point is to make building anything in this country so legally treacherous that capital flees and projects die. This strategy will work in proportion to how seriously American courts take it.

The North Dakota Supreme Court took it seriously. Other courts must follow. Congress should pay attention too. American companies operating under American law, sued in American courts and vindicated by American juries should not have to fight the same case all over again in Amsterdam, Brussels, or anywhere else.

A federal statute clarifying the authority of American courts to block foreign collateral attacks on domestic judgments would put the matter beyond doubt. The Trump administration’s commitment to energy dominance demands nothing less.

The stakes are not abstract. Every data center humming with artificial intelligence, every factory bringing jobs back from overseas, every home heated through a North Dakota winter depends on the ability of American companies to build, operate, and defend the infrastructure that delivers reliable energy. Strip away the certainty that an American verdict actually means something, and that infrastructure becomes a much riskier bet. Risk premiums rise. Capital gets scarcer. Projects do not get built.

Greenpeace lost in North Dakota. It lost again on May 7. This is all good. But the rest of the country needs to make sure those losses stick and continue, because the next case is already being drafted somewhere, and the activists who brought us a six-year siege of the Dakota Access Pipeline are not going to take this defeat as a final answer.  Neither should we.

 

 

 

 

Norway Leads Europe Back to Energy Sanity

Posted on by Ron Clutz

An article at Liberty Beacon spills the beans, or IOW, explains how they are letting the oil and gas cat out of the bag: ‘We are talking about energy security for Europe’: Norway doubles down on oil and gas production.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Norway, an energy superpower, which gives it its massive sovereign wealth fund,
is stepping up for itself and Europe. Sensible. Everybody wins.
Meanwhile, the Left and the UK look like idiots.

In case of any doubt about Norway’s commitment to maintain – and expand – its production of gas and oil offshore, the energy minister,

“We will develop, not dismantle, activity on our continental shelf.”

This week, to the alarm of environmental campaigners, he announced that three gasfields off the country’s southern coast would reopen by the end of 2028 – nearly three decades after they closed – to meet a shortfall caused by the impact of the war in Ukraine and disruption to supplies from the Middle East.

The decision will help keep gas and oil production at about the 2025 level – which has been stable for almost 20 years – and stay broadly the same for the rest of this decade. Norway has 97 offshore oilfields, three of which came on stream last year, and its Norwegian Offshore Directorate expects “100 and beyond” within the next two years, still producing at least the present level of 2m barrels of oil daily.

The Barents Sea, in the high north, is the new gas and oil frontier – with the prospect of mining for seabed minerals between northern Norway and Greenland, a more distant prospect after initial surveys by the Norwegian Offshore Directorate – an agency of Aasland’s department – showed potential.

“Norwegian offshore production plays an important role in ensuring energy security in Europe,” says Aasland.

“The world, and Europe, will have a need for oil and gas for decades to come and it is crucial that Norway continues to develop its continental shelf to remain a reliable and long-term supplier … and (with) a high level of exploration activity.”

The sector generates vast wealth for Norway, but the decision this week to reopen the Albuskjell, Vest Ekofisk and Tommeliten Gamma gasfields in the North Sea, which were closed in 1998, has received heavy criticism in some quarters.  It goes against the advice of the country’s environment agency, and the Socialist Left party accused the government of “greenwashing”.

North Sea oil rigs | Source: GETTY © GB News

Matt Gibson provides additional details at MSN Norway reopens three North Sea gas fields to power millions of homes while UK stalls.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images

Norway plans to revive three mothballed North Sea gas fields as demand in Europe soars.  As the UK stalls on developing its side of the basin, with new licences banned and work on two fields frozen because of climate challenges, the Norwegian fields will be opened for the first time in 30 years.

They are believed to contain enough fuel to heat millions of homes and the country says it is vital for European energy security.  The gas will be sent by pipeline to Germany with light oil sent to the UK.

The Norwegian government has also said that it is keen to further exploit its resources in the North Sea, the Norwegian Sea and the Barents Sea. It plans to access 70 blocks identified on the seabed.  Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said: “Norway’s oil and gas industry is vital to Norway and to Europe.” Energy minister Terje Aasland said: “Norwegian production of oil and gas is an important contribution to energy security in Europe.

“Developing new gas fields allows Norway to maintain high supply levels over the long term. This has become all the more crucial since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the conflict in the Middle East.”

The three fields are run by ConocoPhillips. The company’s European president, Steinar Våge, said: “By utilising existing infrastructure, we can produce substantial resources at low cost, and strengthen gas exports to Europe.”

The UK spent £20b buying oil and gas from Norway last year.
Meanwhile, its domestic output continues to fall. 

Offshore operators have complained that it is becoming difficult to work under the current political regime. Drilling at both Rosebank, Britain’s largest untapped oil field, and Jackdaw, a gas field, has been halted after a legal challenge on climate grounds.  The decision on whether work can restart rests with energy secretary, Ed Miliband.

The Norwegian fields were closed in 1998. However, thanks to new technology, they have become accessible.  They are set to reopen in 2028 and are predicted to be in operation for 20 years. Energy experts suggested that the UK’s offshore industry was being held back by policy.

A spokesman for Offshore Energies UK told the Telegraph:

“The discrepancy in success in the two different regions of the North Sea is not dictated by geology. “It is entirely determined by how respective governments treat oil and gas resources through policy, regulation and taxation.”

Shadow energy minister Claire Coutinho said:

“Norway just announced 70 new blocks of oil and gas exploration, including in the North Sea. “Meanwhile, just over the border on the British side of the North Sea, our Energy Secretary tells us we’ve got nothing left so he has to ban new licences.

“Same basin. Same geology. The difference is political will.”

Apologies to anyone offended by an oilman’s vocabulary.