By: Ian Cameron                 TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

2025-07-31

 

International Court of Justice’s Advisory Opinion on Climate Change

Friends of Science’s December 2024 Newsletter (p.4) described how, in March 2023 at the request of Vanuatu, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution requesting an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice on the obligations of states in respect of climate change. The resolution asked the ICJ to rule on two questions:

1. What are the obligations of States under international law to ensure the protection of the climate system and other parts of the environment from anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases for States and for present and future generations?
2. What are the legal consequences under these obligations for States where they, by their acts and omissions, have caused significant harm to the climate system and other parts of the environment, with respect to:
   1. States, including, in particular, small island developing States, which due to their geographical circumstances and level of development, are injured or specially affected by or are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change?
   2. Peoples and individuals of the present and future generations affected by the adverse effects of climate change?

The FoS Newsletter reported on the schedule of written and oral submissions to the ICJ, which concluded on December 13, 2024 when the Court announced that it would deliver its opinion in due course. This occurred on July 23, 2025 when the ICJ released its decision (40-page summary and 140-page opinion). From the opinion:

• The Court summarized the history of UN environmental actions from 1968 to 2023 (opinion, paras 51-71). In para 72 it stated that human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases being the cause of global warming is “scientifically established.” This has a number of negative consequences listed in para 73. As described in paras 74 to 87, the Court refers solely to various IPCC reports as the basis for its scientific conclusions.
• In paras 87-402 the ICJ discusses the meaning and scope of the two questions put to it, obligations of states regarding climate change; applicable international law; obligations of states under the climate change treaty framework, the UNFCCC, other environmental treaties, and human rights law.
• Paras 403-456 discuss the ICJ’s reasoning on which it based its concluding opinions.
• In para 457 the Court’s opinion on Question (a) declares that states that are parties to the UNFCCC and related agreements, and also under international law (including human rights law), have an obligation to “ensure the protection of the climate system and other parts of the environment from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.” Regarding Question (b) the Court finds that states breaching any of the Question (a) obligations must stop doing so, promise not to repeat the breaches, and pay full reparation to injured states.

Reaction to the ICJ opinion from ENGOs like Ecojustice Canada, Greenpeace International, and Earth.org celebrated the result, forecasting that it will encourage courts to find governments in violation of human rights and will open the door for new litigation, demands for reparations and will accelerate climate lawsuits on a global scale. Dentons, the “world’s largest global law firm”, observes that, while ICJ advisory opinions are non-binding under the Court’s statute, this opinion is directed at sovereign states, not private actors, but it “will have significant implications for ongoing and future climate change litigation and the regulation of GHG emissions by individual countries.”

As JoNova puts it, the ICJ opinion is “a great day for lawyers”, “a game of ideological roulette with unlimited plaintiffs” and “So who is this legislative theatre aimed at? The only suckers left – Europe, the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.” (The US has never been willing to submit itself to the authority of the ICJ).

 

US Government Releases New Climate Assessment Report and Announces Reconsideration of Endangerment Finding

Judith Curry describes how she and four others (John Christy, Steve Koonin, Ross McKitrick and Roy Spencer) were invited by US Energy Secretary Chris Wright to form “a diverse team of independent experts to summarize the current state of climate science, with a focus of how it relates to the United States.” This team, known as the Department of Energy (DOE) Climate Working Group (CWG), assembled in April and produced a climate assessment report titled A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate, that the DOE released on July 23. The DOE issued a summary of the report as six bullet points, three of which describe what the CWG did and three significant findings. The latter include:

• Claims of increased frequency or intensity of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and droughts are not supported by US historical data.
• CO₂-induced warming appears to be less damaging economically than commonly believed, and that aggressive mitigation policies could prove more detrimental than beneficial.
• U.S. policy actions are expected to have undetectably small direct impacts on the global climate, and any effects will emerge only with long delays.

Dr. Curry, in her blog, provides her personal impressions. Among them: The CWG “framed the overall climate change issue somewhat differently from the IPCC and the US National Climate Assessments (NCA).” The CWG assessment is “data driven and considers natural climate variability as well as human causes.” She lists 17 issues that the CWG regards as important but have received short shrift in IPCC and NCA reports.

There was swift reaction from the mainstream climate science community, representing the IPCC and NCA viewpoint, as demonstrated by this WIRED story. It accuses the CWG authors of having “a long history of producing work that challenges mainstream consensus on climate science. Their work is often promoted by interests seeking to discredit scientific findings or downplay climate action.” WIRED quotes six authors, whose work was cited in the CWG report and who dispute how their work was interpreted.

Also on July 23 the US Environmental Protection Agency issued a proposed rule titled Reconsideration of 2009 Endangerment Finding and Greenhouse Gas Vehicle Standards. In it the EPA proposes to repeal “all

greenhouse gas (GHG) emission standards for light-duty, medium-duty, and heavy-duty vehicles and engines” and to rescind the EPA administrator’s “prior findings in 2009 that GHG emissions from new motor vehicles and engines contribute to air pollution which may endanger public health or welfare.” FoS Extracts 2025-02-25 (“How to Rescind the Endangerment Finding in a Way that Will Stick”) discussed the likely repeal of the endangerment finding and associated legal/scientific issues.

In anticipation of the EPA’s proposed rule, Roger Pielke Jr. predicted that reconsideration of the endangerment finding will be more about law than science. In one passage he states that the Clean Air Act sets a very low scientific standard for an EPA administrator to issue an endangerment finding (e.g., that greenhouse gas emissions “may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare”). However, a subsequent administrator attempting to repeal that finding must conclude that GHG emissions “may reasonably be anticipated NOT to endanger public health or welfare.” Proving such a negative will likely be impossible. Hence, one must rely on law, not science.

 

Which Are the Stranded Assets Now?

The Manhattan Contrarian’s Francis Menton comments on how quickly the “stranded assets” story has changed. In 2023 he was compiling long lists of quotes from climate activists warning that fossil fuel assets were about to become obsolete and “stranded”, because wind and solar were supposedly cheaper and cleaner for producing electricity. This year such predictions are becoming fewer and fewer, and it is the entire wind and solar “renewable" generation that is likely to get “stranded.”

In the UK the Labour government, elected just a year ago, is drawing record low approval ratings of 23%, compared to 32% for the Reform Party.  On July 16 the deputy leader of Reform, Richard Tice, wrote to the bosses of eight renewable energy companies warning them that a future Reform government would “immediately reassess all Net Zero commitments” and prioritize cost, reliability and security of supply over “spurious decarbonization targets.” Further, a Reform government would try to strike down all contracts signed under this year’s Contracts for Difference Allocation Round 7 (AR7).

In Mr. Menton’s view: “The prediction that wind and solar assets will become ‘stranded’ is fundamentally different, and fundamentally sounder, than the comparable prediction for fossil fuel assets." His reasoning is that wind and solar depends on taxpayer subsidies, without which they are uneconomic, while fossil fuel assets are economic without government support. Currently the oil and gas business is booming as production hits new records.

 

The $7 Trillion Fossil Fuel Subsidy Swindle

Paul Homewood, writing in Not a Lot of People Know That, has had enough of claims that “fossil fuels are being subsidized to the tune of trillions of pounds by governments around the world.” As an example he refers to a 2023 Guardian story stating that oil and gas benefited from $7 trillion in support during 2022. Using 2015-2023 data from the International Energy Agency (which is anti-fossil fuel), these subsidies totaled $620 billion in 2023 – nothing like the $7 trillion asserted by the Guardian. Mr. Homewood then refers to information from Our World in Data showing which countries subsidize fossil fuel consumption by their citizens. Nearly all of these subsidies occur in major fossil fuel-producing countries such as Russia and the Middle East, with just 13 countries accounting for $517 billion.

The $7 trillion in subsidies mentioned in the Guardian story comes from a report by the International Monetary Fund, which Our World in Data explains: “This estimate is much higher than the figures we looked at earlier because it includes not only explicit subsidies (i.e., direct payments) but also implicit subsidies – the societal costs of burning fossil fuels. When we burn fossil fuels, we cause local air pollution that damages human health, and we drive climate change, which also results in environmental and social damage. The IMF also attributes to fossil fuels the social costs of road accidents and congestion. Economists usually refer to these indirect costs, which aren’t reflected in market prices, as ‘externalities’ rather than ‘subsidies.’”

As Mr. Homewood points out, without fossil fuels there would be less air pollution, but the world would be a poorer and less healthy place.

 

AI Revolution Drives Huge Gas Plant Build Out

Steve Goreham has noticed that the boom in artificial intelligence (AI) has created a vast demand for electricity to power the new data centers and upgrades to existing ones. The US had fewer than 2,700 data centers at the start of 2024, but now there are more than 3,900 of them operating. At the start of 2024 data centers consumed 4% of US electricity, and it is estimated that by 2030 they will use 20%.

While green energy advocates want renewables to power AI data centers, wind and solar generation falls short. AI computers must operate 24/7, while wind and solar have capacity factors of 30% and 15%, respectively. Also, wind and solar generators are scattered over wide areas, requiring construction of new transmission lines. In some cases existing or restarted nuclear power plants can supply AI data centers, but constructing new ones would take years longer and cost many times as much as new gas plants.

Elon Musk’s Tesla, while being a leading provider of solar systems and grid-scale batteries, chose 35 on-site gas turbines to supply power for its Colossus xAI supercomputer facility in Memphis, Tennessee. In Texas there are more than 100 gas-fired power plants providing more than 58 GW of capacity, which is more than three times that of the existing wind systems operating in the state. In Pennsylvania, one of the largest natural gas producers, investments of more than $90 billion have been announced for new AI data centers and associated gas plants.

As Mr. Goreham concludes: “The artificial intelligence revolution now drives the US electricity market. Most new AI data centers will be powered by newly constructed natural gas facilities. The Net Zero electricity transition is being left in the rear-view mirror.”

 

More Evidence of a Global Offshore Wind Project Collapse

The Gippsland Dawn project was to be a 2.1 GW capacity generator, with up to 140 offshore wind turbines on fixed foundations, located in the Australian State of Victoria, However, on July 16, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reported that  the company behind the project, Blue Float Energy, withdrew from offshore wind internationally after its major shareholder said that the sector was no longer commercially viable.

According to a July 14 ABC story Gippsland Dawn’s demise resulted from US President Donald Trump’s executive order of last January stopping all new offshore wind projects having a chilling effect on the industry in Australia. A Watts Up With That? essay describes other failed wind projects, such as Atlantic Shores, the recent scrapping of a Dutch offshore wind auction due to lack of interest from potential bidders, and the “brutal year” of 2023, when the dismal economics of offshore wind started to become apparent.

 

2025-07-17

 

Bonn Climate Talks

Last November's COP29 climate talks in Baku, capital of the petrostate of Azerbaijan, left many developing countries bitterly disappointed that their call for $1.3 trillion/year in climate finance from developed countries instead saw these countries agreeing to “take the lead” in raising at least $300 billion/year, including private investment, by 2035. COP29 also punted COP28’s global stocktake to COP30, to be held this November in Belém, Brazil. Combined with the election of Donald Trump as US president, the COP29 outcomes left some questioning the future of multilateral climate negotiations.

Hoping to make breakthroughs on various critical issues before COP30, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change wrapped up two weeks of technical talks (officially known as SB62) in Bonn on June 27. Some of the key outcomes from the Bonn talks:

• Future of the process – SB62 got off to a bad start with the absence of a US delegation and an “agenda fight” that caused two days of delay. The UNFCCC secretariat acknowledged the “growing scale and complexity” in climate talks, “particularly with regard to the increasing number of agenda items and mandated events,” but SB62 ended with parties unable to agree on various proposals to increase process efficiency.
• Adaptation – Agreeing on a Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) proved difficult as delegates tried to reduce the list of potential adaptation indicators from an initial 490 (prior to the Bonn meeting there were 9,000) to 100.
• Climate finance – With the US, previously one of the biggest contributors, having cancelled virtually all climate aid and European donors also cutting back, developing and developed countries argued over Article 9.1 of the Paris Agreement (that developed countries “shall provide” finance to developing countries.) The Azerbaijani and Brazilian COP presidencies will work together to produce a roadmap for scaling up climate finance from $300 billion/year to “at least” $1.3 trillion/year before the start of COP30.
• Just transition – This, along with the GGA and the global stocktake, is one of the Brazilian presidency’s three priorities for COP30. At Baku the COP ended with no agreement on a just transition work program, and disagreement on a JTWP continued in Bonn, though a text was ultimately passed for further negotiation at Belém.
• Loss and damage – Small islands and other at-risk states have fought for years for a L&D fund, and this fund has received $768 million in pledges of which just $339 million has actually been paid. The Bonn talks ended with last-minute agreement to forward an “informal note” for discussion at Belém.
• Mitigation – Delegates spent two weeks at Bonn negotiating how to make the mitigation work program a safe space for overcoming barriers and take actionable solutions, as well as development of a digital platform. Again, the Bonn talks ended with agreement on an informal note for debate at COP30.
• Global stocktake and climate pledges – The year 2025 is when every country is supposed to submit more ambitious plans for cutting emissions under the Paris Agreement’s ratchet mechanism. Nearly 95% of 195 parties to the agreement failed to submit their pledges by last February’s deadline, so the UN’s climate chief, Simon Stiell, extended it to September. Global stocktake negotiations at Bonn failed to reach any kind of common ground, resulting in a final text consisting of two documents, which are separate iterations that negotiators had been considering, with no consensus.
• Road to COP30 – Once again, the COP host country’s oil and gas industry drew criticism from environmental campaigners. Also, finding accommodation in Belém for the expected 50,000 delegates at COP30 will be difficult. African and Pacific island nations have complained to the Brazilian government about the sky-high cost of lodgings that could compromise their participation at COP30.

 

UN Official Calls for “Climate Misinformation” to be Criminalized

A Guardian story on the concerning matter (for the Guardian) of “climate misinformation” refers to two recent reports on the subject. The first, titled Information Integrity about Climate Science: A Systematic Review, was prepared by the International Panel on the Information Environment (IPIE). Among the report’s authors (p.125) was John Cook, whose research focus is “understanding and countering science denial.” The report’s Synopsis (p.3) begins: “The human response to the climate crisis is being obstructed and delayed by the production and circulation of misleading information about the nature of climate change and the available solutions. This report presents a synthesis of the state of knowledge from scholarship addressing the crisis of information integrity about climate science.”

The IPIE study found that a variety of actors were responsible for the “production and circulation of misleading information.” These included (pp.25-35): fossil-fuel industries; governments; political parties and leaders; interest groups, lobbies and think tanks; media and bots; scientists, teachers and institutions of learning; and religious figures and institutions. The report’s policy recommendations comprise legislation and regulation; litigation; education; and alliances of peoples, communities and civil society entities to oppose the powerful economic and political stakeholders which obstruct and delay climate action.

The second report referenced in the Guardian story was authored by the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights in the context of climate change, Elisa Morgera. Her report is titled: The imperative of defossilizing our economies and is far more extreme than the IPIE’s. In Ms. Morgera’s view there is only one villain – fossil fuel companies, and they are the only economic beneficiaries (paras 30-36), thanks to subsidies, tax evasion and financial secrecy. She asserts that fossil fuel companies obstruct climate action by, among other things, strategizing to keep the public uninformed, participating at UN COPs, instilling doubt about renewable energies, and emphasizing the role of fossil fuel products in economic growth and modern life.

Ms. Morgera provided a long list (paras 54-78) of “recommendations to states” to achieve her defossilization imperative. As well as prohibiting new fossil fuel exploration and exploitation, revoking existing licenses and regulating the import and export of fossil fuels (para 58), states should (para 73):

• Criminalize misinformation and misrepresentation (greenwashing) by the fossil fuel industry;
• Criminalize media and advertising firms for amplifying disinformation and misinformation by fossil fuel companies; and
• Criminalize attacks against environmental human rights defenders, including from judicial harassment tactics, in addition to enhancing environmental human rights defenders’ protection and access to justice and effective remedies.

 

Climate-related Deaths are Declining, Not Climbing

Politico published an article titled EU has no plan for rising climate-related deaths, scientists warn. The story begins: “Europe is increasingly grappling with illness and deaths from extreme weather and the arrival of tropical diseases, but it has no plan to prevent and cope with rising climate-related health problems, experts have warned,” without identifying the experts. It then goes on to claim: “Scientists fear mosquito-borne diseases dengue and chikungunya that were once confined to tropical regions could become endemic in Europe due to the northward spread of tiger mosquitos, which have made it as far as Brussels and 20 other towns in Belgium,” and “Meanwhile, heat-related deaths are projected to increase threefold by the end of the century, while deaths caused by extreme events including floods and wild fires are rising.”

However, a Climate Realism story debunks the Politico lies with evidence from multiple sources suggesting that climate- and temperature-related deaths, both globally and in Europe, are in a long-term decline. An example is the following chart, complied by Bjørn Lomborg, showing that worldwide climate-related deaths have declined by more than 98% over the past century.

Another plot of global observations of burned areas and trends for 1998-2015, which was taken from the NASA website, shows no wildfire increase in Europe. Similarly, the IPCC found no increase in flooding, while European floods have not been historically unusual. Politico’s temperature death assertions are an example of misdirection – They totally ignore the decline in cold-temperature deaths, which are far larger than the increase in heat-related deaths. Regarding the assertion that dengue and chikungunya will soon become endemic in Europe due to climate change, the principal factors behind the spread of these diseases are international travel, global shipping, urbanization and human settlement patterns, not CO₂ emissions.

The most egregious claim in the Politico story is that “nearly 60 million people suffered from serious food insecurity in Europe in 2021, with 11.9 million of these cases attributable to climate change.” This assertion is based on computer climate attribution studies, not empirical science, and Europe remains one of the most food-secure regions, as crop yields have risen consistently across Europe and the globe – aided by technological advances and CO2 fertilization. That’s why Europe has no “master plan” to fight rising climate-related deaths.

 

Spain Boosts Natural Gas Capacity After Renewable Energy’s Failure Led to Historic Blackout

On April 28, 2025, a blackout  interrupted electrical power across the Iberian Peninsula for about ten hours. The blackout was triggered by rapid, cascading failure in the grid that resulted in the loss of about 60% of Spain’s electricity supply within seconds. The event was linked to the grid’s inability to handle the variability and intermittency of renewables, especially solar and wind, without sufficient backup from more stable sources like gas or nuclear power.

In the aftermath of the blackout Spain has increased the average share of generation from combined cycle gas plants (CCGTs) from 12% to 18%. CCGTs can be a source of around-the-clock generation, and their turbines also provide kinetic energy to the grid, a key element needed to keep the network stable. Their use is adding between €5 and €10/MWh to costs, which will impact consumer bills.

 

Trump Administration Hires Three Climate Contrarians

Three prominent researchers, who have questioned or even rejected the scientific consensus on climate change, have been given positions in the US Department of Energy. They are:

• Steven E. Koonin, who previously served at DOE during the Obama administration, and earlier was a scientist for the oil and gas giant BP. He has pushed for a public red team debate on climate science findings.
• John Christy and Roy Spencer from the University of Alabama at Huntsville, who have long maintained that satellite data does not show the same trends and extent of global warming as surface weather data and have used that to question the mainstream scientific data.

According to CNN, some “prominent climate scientists are concerned Christy, Spencer and Koonin will be working on an alternative version of the next National Climate Assessment, which would be far more slanted to fringe views on the causes and consequences of global warming.”

 

2025-06-02

 

The Guardian: Former PM Tony Blair Is a “Serious Threat to Climate Action”

Tony Blair was the UK’s prime minister from May 1997 to June 2007, during which he hosted the 2005 meeting of G8 countries. In preparation for that meeting he visited Russia, Germany and France to secure a Europe-wide consensus to limit climate change. At the summit, despite seven of the participants, having ratified the Kyoto Protocol, there was no joint declaration on global warming, due to US opposition. Now, 20 years later The Guardian considers the “out of touch” Mr. Blair a “serious threat to climate action.”

The reason for Mr. Blair’s change from a respected elder statesman on climate change to apostate – in The Guardian's opinion – is this April 29 publication by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change of a paper titled The Climate Paradox: Why We Need to Reset Action on Climate Change. For example, in the forward to the paper, Mr. Blair writes: “… in developed countries, voters feel they’re being asked to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle when they know that their impact on global emissions is minimal … Political leaders by and large know that the debate has become irrational. But they’re terrified of saying so, for fear of being accused of being ‘climate deniers.’”

The paper’s Executive Summary contains two sentences that encapsulate the activists’ dilemma: “We are living in the climate paradox: awareness of the climate crisis has never been higher, yet meaningful action is in decline.” and “Net-zero policies, once seen as the pathway to economic transformation, are increasingly viewed as unaffordable, ineffective, or politically toxic.” To explain why, Chapter 3 describes the continued reliance on fossil fuels and Chapter 4 the evolution of climate solutions over three “eras” – Activism (1980s to 2010s), Optimism (2010s to 2020) and Apathy (2020 to present). Currently we are entering an era of Disruption (either positive or negative.) In order to achieve positive disruption, the paper recommends seven actions (Chapter 7):

1. Accelerating and scaling carbon capture technologies.
2. Harnessing the power of technologies, including AI.
3. Investing in breakthrough and frontier energy solutions.
4. Scaling nature-based solutions.
5. Adapt to what is coming.
6. Simplify global efforts to deliver collective action,
7. Rethink the role of finance, including philanthropy.

If, in the extreme case the above actions fail, the paper suggests considering solar radiation management (Chapter 8).

 

The True Affordability Cost of Net Zero

On May 19, Kathryn Porter, a UK-based independent energy consultant with experience in electricity, gas and oil markets, as well as financial services, released her latest report titled The true affordability cost of net zero. In this post from her website, she summarizes the full report. Some of the report's key points:

• The additional costs applied to energy bills of the UK’s net zero policies are projected to increase to over £20 billion per year in 2029-30.
• Had Britain continued with its legacy gas-based power system in the period since 2006, consumers would have been almost £220 billion better off (2025 money).
• While gas accounts for only 93% of wholesale electricity prices, those wholesale prices are only 40% of the bills. The 53-percentage point difference is caused by ten politically imposed levies that are quietly added to electricity bills: Capacity Market, Contracts for Difference, Renewables Obligation, Feed in Tariffs, Energy Company Obligation, Warm Homes Discount, Green Gas Levy, Network Charging Compensation Scheme, and Assistance for Areas with High Electricity Distribution Costs.
• Windfarms have been deliberately built behind grid constraints in the knowledge that the electricity they produce cannot all be used, so consumers pay for both the electricity they actually use and the electricity that is grid constrained.
• Renewables impact electricity bills both directly through subsidies, and indirectly through network charges. For example, an 800 MW gas turbine power plant requires one network connection, whereas an 800 MW wind farm with 60 turbines needs multiple connections. Moreover, wind turbines operate at a ~35% capacity factor, so 2-3 times as many wind turbines are needed to get the same energy output as a gas-fired power plant – which adds to the network component of bills.
• While the British public has been seduced by narratives that renewables are cheap, the evidence of 35 years of subsidies has yet to provide any benefits through lower bills.

Ms. Porter also participated in a 54-minute video with auto-generated transcript titled Blackout Britain in which she discusses the recent Iberian blackout, a near-miss blackout in the UK last January, as well as the risks imposed by the government's Clean Power 2030 plan, which seeks to make the electricity system effectively 95% zero-CO₂ by 2030.

 

Carbon Capture Scam Does Not Even Offset Its Own Emissions

Climeworks operates two direct air capture and storage plants at Orca and Mammoth in Iceland, with annual CO₂ removal capacities of up to 4,200 t and 36,000 t, respectively. These allow businesses and individuals to pay and get credit for the associated removals. However, according to this story (in English) published by the Icelandic investigative newspaper Heimildin, the Orca facility, in operation since 2021, has captured only 2,400 t of CO₂. In 2023 it emitted 1,700 t for its own operations, while removing only 921 t. The partially commissioned Mammoth plant managed to capture 105 t of CO₂ in its first ten months of operation. The plants use large fans to suck air through filters that capture CO₂ from the atmosphere, an operation that requires a lot of energy (5,000 to 6,000 kWh per tonne), since CO₂ has a concentration of only 0.04% in air.

There are 21,000 subscribers to Climeworks, and the waiting time to receive carbon credits can be up to six years. One of subscribers, UK resident Michael de Podesta, has been paying £40/month to remove 50 kg of CO₂ for two years. Recently he noticed that no matter how much he paid, no CO₂ had been captured and disposed of in his name. Mr. de Podesta began asking tough questions for which he received vague answers. Then he took to social media X complaining: “This has all the hallmarks of a scam. There are undoubtedly a lot of highly paid people traveling the world to sell their services to large corporations to remove carbon credits in the future. They are using a semi-magical technology that doesn’t work as well as expected …  I am urged to convince my friends to join the project. The answers are scarce and full of PR chatter. Climeworks’ operations look like a scam and talk like one.”

Mark Z. Jacobson, a well-known professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, agrees that the carbon capture and disposal industry is nothing more than a scam, “the Theranos of the energy industry.” He added: “Direct capture is a scam, carbon capture is a scam, blue hydrogen is a scam, and electrofuel is a scam. These are all scam technologies that do nothing for the climate or air pollution.”

 

Dutch Wind Woes: Offshore Auction Scrapped as Bidders Bail Without Subsidies

On May 16 the Netherlands government announced that, due to a lack of interest from potential bidders, it will postpone tenders for two offshore wind farms with a total capacity of 2 GW. Interest in the three sites was low as energy firms Eneco and Ørsted said they saw no viable business case without subsidies.

The government is now open a tender for one location in September with a capacity of 1 GW. Last year the Netherlands pushed back plans to increase offshore wind capacity from the present 4.7 GW to 21 GW from 2030 to 2032.citing costs, supply chain difficulties and “challenges in timely decision-making.”

 

Half of Australia Doesn't Want to Pay a Single Cent on Net Zero Targets

Joanne Nova comments on a poll titled Attitudes Towards Net Zero conducted by the Institute of Public Affairs. In late April the IPA polled 1,027 Australians by posing three questions:

1. What should the main focus of the federal government’s energy policy be (Affordability, Reliability, or Meeting the 2050 net zero emissions target)?
2. Australia should pause its commitment to the policy of net zero emissions by 2050 until we have enough energy supplies to avoid blackouts. To what extent do you agree with this statement (Agree, Disagree, or Neither)?
3. How much would you personally be willing to pay each year for Australia to reduce its net emissions to zero by 2050 (Nothing, A$50/year, A$100/year, A$500/year, or >A$500/year)?

For Question 1, 56% chose Affordability and 23% Reliability. Only 21% wanted to meet the zero emissions target. Question 2 got responses of 58% Agree, 21% Disagree and 21% Neither. Question 3's responses were most telling, with 48% choosing Nothing, 26% A$50/year, 19% A$100/year, 5% A$500/year and 2% >A$500/year.

Ms. Nova notes that Australians have been paying more than A$500/year for years, but they don’t know it because the cost is hidden in their electricity bills. As she concludes: “the Blob has been siphoning off this money for years, and 93% don’t want to spend it, and yet the money keeps flowing.”

 

Argentina: New Climate Leader!

The Climate Action Tracker compares government climate action to the Paris Agreement Goal of holding global warming to below 2°C and pursuing efforts to keep it under 1.5°C. In February CAT gave Argentina’s new government under President Javier Milei an overall rating of Critically Insufficient (leading to a 4°C+ world), because the country’s “climate policies and commitments reflect minimal to no action and are not at all consistent with the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C temperature limit.” [For comparison, Canada's overall rating is merely Insufficient (leading to a <3°C world), but this August 2024 classification does not reflect the recent cancellation of the consumer carbon tax.]

To Master Resource’s Robert Bradley Jr. Argentina's CAT rating is: “The grand opportunity is not only to leave climate alarmism and forced energy transformation in the dust. It is also to elevate the private and public wealth of Argentina with expanded private property rights and free markets. Let’s go!”

 

"Renewable" Electricity Champion Denmark now Looking into Nuclear

With a population of only about 6 million, Denmark has pushed renewable electricity generation, getting 62.5% of its 2024 electricity supply from wind and solar. For comparison Germany got 43% from these sources, and California 37.5%. For their virtue Danes enjoyed average residential electricity prices of €0.376/kWh. Realizing that 100% from renewables is not possible, Denmark is reconsidering its four decade-long ban on nuclear. The impetus for this appears to have been the recent blackout in Spain and Portugal, which has been generally attributed to the lack of synchronous generation on the power grids of those countries.

Ruling out traditional nuclear plants, Denmark is studying only next generation small modular reactors.

 

2025-05-07

 

What Does It Cost? The Consequences of the Net Zero Energy Agenda

Oregon and Washington State have passed legislation to eliminate fossil fuels and rely solely on zero-emission electricity sources by 2040 and 2045, respectively. This inspired Ken Peterson of the Discovery Institute to produce a 37-minute documentary video called What Does It Cost, which explores  “the devastating economic consequences of this legislation” for the Pacific Northwest. The video draws heavily from a 38-page report titled The Crippling Costs of Electrification and Net Zero Energy Policies in the Pacific Northwest.

The authors of the report used the 2023 hourly electricity demand as a template to estimate future hourly demand, including additional power requirements for electric vehicles, other transportation, space & water heating and data centers to 2050. These will be double the 2023 peak demand. For new generation the authors considered two scenarios: renewables only (RO) and natural gas + nuclear (NGN). However, the current political climate in both states is anti-nuclear, so only the RO scenario is politically feasible.

To meet the forecast demand to 2050 with just wind, solar and storage (RO scenario), capacity would have to increase from 49 GW currently to 398 GW (report, Table 2). For the NGN scenario only 75 GW would be needed. As explained on p.21 of the report, the reason for the disproportionate RO capacity required is that wind and solar generation must be overbuilt to account for these resources’ intermittency and to provide surplus electricity for battery storage. Wind and solar farms would occupy 25% - 35% of the land area of eastern (rural) OR and WA. New transmission lines would take the power over the Cascade mountains to the population centers in the west.

Table 4 of the report (p.28) shows the estimated total (capital, O&M, taxes and utility profits) costs in 2024$. For the RO scenario they are $550 billion, compared to $86 billion for the NGN. From these the authors calculated (pp. 31-34) that customer rates would more than double in inflation-adjusted terms to 24.6¢/kWh by 2046 for the RO scenario. Under the NGN scenario, rates would rise to an average of 13.6¢/kWh by 2046.

Finally, full electrification would have negligible impact on the climate. Assuming that both states’ CO₂ emissions were eliminated by 2040, the authors used the MAGICC climate model to calculate that the reduction in world temperature by 2100 would be 0.0029⁰C.

 

The Science of Scapegoating: Nature’s Farcical Case for Climate Litigation

On April 23, Nature published a paper titled Carbon majors and the scientific case for climate liability. The first three sentences of the abstract: “Will it ever be possible to sue anyone for damaging the climate? Twenty years after this question was first posed, we argue that the scientific case for climate liability is closed. Here we detail the scientific and legal implications of an ‘end-to-end’ attribution that links fossil fuel producers to specific damages from warming.” The paper claims that is now feasible to draw quantitative linkages between individual emitters and specific harms, “making science no longer an obstacle to the justiciability of climate liability claims.”

Watts Up With That?’s Charles Rotter unravels the “pseudo-scientific spaghetti” that the paper attempts to pass off as scientific analysis. To him, assigning legal liabilities to producers for climate outcomes ignores the role of demand, policy and collective human action. It overlooks the benefits provided by hydrocarbon energy sources over centuries, including a counterfactual analysis – what would the world have looked like without fossil fuels? The historical net social benefit of hydrocarbons dwarfs the theoretical damages derived from speculative modelling.

To Mr. Rotter, the paper is a legal brief dressed up as climate modelling, seeking to forge causality out of correlation. It reveals the degradation of scientific integrity and says more about the authors than the Earth’s climate.

 

Airbus’s Hydrogen Fantasy Crash Lands

In 2020, under strong pressure from politicians in France and Germany, Airbus SE announced plans to launch a hydrogen-powered aircraft by 2035. After exploring various hydrogen combustion propulsion systems and aircraft concepts, the company settled on a hydrogen fuel-cell powered, four-engine electric propellor design, which it showcased in March during the 2025 Airbus Summit.

Then in April came a Wall Street Journal story that, after spending $1.7 billion, Airbus is retreating from its hydrogen-aircraft project. A Watts Up With That? story by Charles Rotter reports that the project was a bet against thermodynamics, not a technological revolution. It depended on storing liquid hydrogen at -253°C (only 20° above absolute zero) and constructing a global hydrogen supply chain from scratch. The technical problems are monumental and the economics worse. The reason that Airbus pressed ahead with something so clearly unfeasible was that it, like so many corporations, threw itself into ESG posturing, taking taxpayer money and appeasing regulators.

 

The Iberian Blackout

On April 28, at around 12:30 local time, a massive electrical blackout hit all of Spain and Portugal. Full power was restored by the following day. Roger Pielke Jr. spent some time analyzing the event and shares what he learned. Spain lost 60% of its electricity supply in five seconds, then the grid frequency dropped, triggering power stations to switch off. According to a Spanish energy expert, one of the most important electric corridors (Aragón-Catalonia) experienced power fluctuations that tripped the country’s interconnection with France. With the Iberian peninsula’s network isolated it was unable to maintain 50 Hz frequency, and solar/wind farms (very sensitive to frequency variations) automatically disconnected, taking 15 GW, or 60% of the power, off the grid.

For normal grid operation the frequency should be kept within +/- 0.5 Hz of its nominal value (50 Hz in Europe). Power system inertia, in the form of synchronous rotating masses at thermal and hydro plants, opposes frequency changes. As more non-synchronous, inverter-based generation resources (wind, solar, batteries) increase, the system’s synchronous inertia will decrease. When the Aragón-Catalonia electricity corridor experienced a shock and went offline, there was not enough inertia in the system to prevent a cascading system failure and massive blackout. Of all the types of power generation, the one with the highest inertia constant (measured in seconds) is nuclear (Fig. 2 in Dr. Pielke’s report).

The following figure, showing Spain's power generation at hourly intervals, illustrates the high proportion of zero-inertia power at the time of the blackout.

The lesson that Dr. Pielke takes from Spain's blackout is that, in the future the role of wind and solar should be built on a foundation of nuclear power, supplemented by dispatchable natural gas.

 

US Scraps Office on Climate Diplomacy

The US State Department confirmed on April 25 that its Office of Global Change, in charge of representing the US in UN climate diplomacy, was being closed. A State Department spokesperson said: “We will not participate in international agreements and initiatives that do not reflect our country’s values. Consequently, this office – which supported the efforts of previous administrations to hobble the United States through participation in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and other agreements purporting to limit or prevent climate change – is unnecessary.”

If there is a complete US absence from the COP30 climate conference next November in Belém, Brazil, this would represent a major shift in global climate diplomacy.

 

Green NGOs Feel the Heat

The European Court of Auditors found that information on EU funding to NGOs that are active in the bloc’s internal policies suffers for a lack of transparency. The European Commission (the EU’s executive) did not properly disclose certain EU-funded activities such as lobbying. Between 2021 and 2023 the NGOs were awarded €7.4 billion for work on the EU’s key internal policies such as cohesion, research, migration and the environment. Of this, €4.8 billion was granted by the Commission and €2.6 billion by member states. However, the auditors warn that these figures should be taken with caution since there is no reliable overview of EU money paid to NGOs. Such information is published in a fragmented way, which hampers transparency. The full audit report is available here.

Net Zero Watch, in its story on the audit, reports that the audit follows revelations by the Dutch daily De Telegraaf that the Commission had been paying green NGOs, via its environmentalist LIFE fund, to lobby for the EU’s “Green Deal”, a series of costly climate policies.

 

Time to Defund Climate Models?

Master Resource's Steve Goreham comments on the Trump administration’s funding cuts for climate research and suggests that it is time for NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) to stick to space exploration, NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) to weather forecasting, and for their climate models to be shut down. For more than 35 years these models have been used by the US government, the UN and organizations around the world to warn about global warming and demand a shift to renewable energy.

There are more than 40 climate models operating across the world, with 13 of the leading models located in the US. The latter are operated by NASA, NOAA and the Department of Energy, and all three organizations have been ordered to reduce staff. Climate models run on supercomputers costing about $50 million, with $20 million/year to support each climate-modelling team.

 

2025-04-15

 

IMO Approves Net-Zero Regulations for International Shipping

After its April 7-11 meeting in London the International Maritime Organization announced approval of the IMO Net-zero Framework, which “is the first in the world to combine mandatory emissions limits and GHG pricing across an entire industry sector.” The framework’s measures are set to be formally adopted as regulations in October 2025 and come into force in 2027. They will be mandatory for ocean-going ships over 5,000 gross tonnage, which emit 85% of CO₂ emissions from international shipping. Under these regulations, ships will have to comply with:

• A global fuel standard that will reduce over time their annual greenhouse gas fuel intensity (in emissions of CO_2eq per unit of energy used.)
• A global economic measure, whereby ships emitting more than the GFI threshold will have to acquire “remedial units” to balance their excess emissions, while those using zero or near-zero GHG technologies will be eligible for financial rewards. Delinquent ships will purchase remedial units through contributions to the IMO’s Net-Zero Fund.

Climate Home News’ report on the IMO agreement contains some more details. There are fixed annual targets for each year between 2028 and 2035, with targets for 2035-2040 to be decided in 2032. The price for remedial units will be $380/tonne, and the IMO will spend the money collected on cleaning up the maritime sector, helping impacted workers, and compensating developing countries for the effects of higher shipping costs. The CHN report also includes the voting record – 63 for, 16 against and 25 abstentions.

The voting did not include the US, which pulled out of the meeting on April 8, while threatening reciprocal measures on any fees imposed on American vessels based on GHG emissions or fuel choices. However, there are only 80 US-flagged ships currently trading internationally. A March 28 article by Alex Epstein, warned that “an ocean carbon tax is a tax on America most of all” because the US is the largest importer of goods, with $3.2 trillion worth annually. Expect some reaction from the Trump administration before next October.

 

Bjørn Lomborg: Solar and Wind Power Are Expensive

Mr. Lomborg uses the bitter experience of businesses and families in Ontario to make the point that adding solar and wind to the energy supply pushes up the price of electricity. From 2005 (when Ontario began phasing out coal) to 2020 the average, inflation-adjusted cost of electricity doubled, from 7.7 ¢/kWh to 15.3 ¢/kWh. In response the Ontario government has implemented nine energy and electricity subsidy programs. One of these is the Renewable Cost Shift, which costs Ontario more than $6 billion/year, four times what it did in 2018.

Mr. Lomborg has produced a plot, using data from the International Energy Agency, showing the weighted average 2024 electricity prices for nearly 70 countries as a function of the percentage of wind and solar generation in their electricity supply. This shows a clear correlation between greater use of solar and wind and higher average household and business energy prices. For every 10% increase in in the share of wind and solar, average electricity costs go up by 8 ¢/kWh. For nations with big green ambitions, the evidence is clear: no one gets a lot of power from wind and solar and has low electricity costs.

 

Atlantic Shores Wind Project Sinks – And with It, A Green Illusion

The Atlantic Shores wind project, a 50-50 partnership between Shell New Energies and EDF Renewables North America, to develop 1,510 MW of wind power off the coast of New Jersey, suffered a major blow when the Environmental Appeals Board of the US Environmental Protection Agency granted a remand of the EPA’s air pollution permit. The EPA had issued this permit less than six months earlier.

This decision was the result of the Trump Administration’s executive order for a temporary withdrawal from offshore wind power leasing and a petition by a citizens’ group Save Long Beach Island that challenged the EPA permit, citing “flawed analysis, including improper air quality modeling.” As Charles Rotter, writing in Watts Up With That? puts it: “Make no mistake, this isn’t just about one permit. This is a high-voltage message to the entire offshore wind sector. If these projects can be stopped for sloppy modeling and dodgy math, then the entire house of cards might be in trouble.”

 

Norway’s Political Earthquake: A Backstop No More

Germany's Energiewende (energy transition) shuttered baseload nuclear and fossil fuel power plants while lavishing subsidies on wind and solar power. During Dunkelflauten (“dark lulls” – long stretches, usually in the winter, when there’s no sun and wind), Germany has become dangerously dependent on power through cross-border connectors from hydro-rich Norway. These connectors were supposed to create a seamless European grid, sharing resources and equalizing prices. For Norway the result of increasing electricity exports to prop up struggling grids abroad has been power prices in southern Norway becoming 50% higher in 2023-2024 than in 2010-2020. In effect, German voters enjoy cheaper power because Norwegian voters pay more.

In a dispute over the adoption of European Union energy policies, Norway’s Euroskeptic Center Party quit the coalition government on January 30, eight months before the scheduled September election. (Norway is not a EU member, but has adopted thousands of EU rules and regulations, and proposes to adopt the bloc’s directives on renewable energy consumption, energy performance in buildings and increased overall energy efficiency, all of which the Center Party opposes.)

The Center Party has done more than provoke a government shakeup. It has sent a message that Norway won’t be Europe’s backup generator anymore. There have been similar tensions elsewhere:

• Sweden recently rejected a German request for another interconnector.
• Norway previously turned down a British proposal for a cable to Scotland.
• France, Austria, and even Greece are starting to complain about similar grid dynamics.

 

Net Zero Will Make Air Travel the Preserve of the Privileged, Airline Boss Admits

Vanessa Hudson, the CEO of Qantas Airlines, warned that higher fuel costs of sustainable aviation fuel, which costs 3-5 times as much as kerosene, would push up air fares and make flying “something for the privileged.” Guillaume Faury, the boss of Airbus, said that net zero would add a “green premium” to plane tickets and reverse the decades-long trend of flying getting cheaper over time, adding that the price of SAF may never match that of kerosene.

Britain has mandated thar air carriers use at least 10% of SAF by 2030, while the EU target for that year is 6%. Due to its high prices and current low production volumes, SAF in 2024 made up less that 1% of the airline industry’s fuel consumption.

 

EU Exploring Weaker 2040 Climate Goal

The EU’s executive, the European Commission, is expected to propose legislation in the coming weeks to adopt a previously-announced target to cut 90% of CO₂ emissions by 2040. However, there are concerns about the effect on heavy industry and agriculture and to allay those concerns – and to make an increasingly unpopular goal more politically palatable – the EU’s Climate Commissioner, Wopke Hoekstra, is weighing “flexibilities” for reaching the 2040 goal.

The options being discussed include:

• Using a “nonlinear” path between the EU’s 2030 emissions-cutting target of 55% and its 2040 goal, rather than a straight line. This means slower emissions cuts initially, compensated by more rapid ones in the late 2030s.
• Letting countries purchase carbon credits on new international markets. This risks flooding the EU with international credits and lowering their price.
• Letting countries depend more on negative emissions (removing CO₂ from the air by forests or nascent technologies).
• Allowing countries to set sector-specific emissions targets, so that if one sector can’t reach its mandated cuts, governments could count on credits from sectors more successful in emissions cutting.

While the EU’s own laws require it to legislate the 2040 goal, political attention has drifted from climate change to more immediate priorities, such as defense and industrial competitiveness. Moreover, opposition to the 90% goal is growing, particularly by Italy’s government, which wants the target lowered to 80-85%. Also, it is not certain if Germany’s incoming government (still in coalition talks) will support the target.

 

2025-03-29

 

How the “scientific consensus” on Climate Change Was Invented

 

This 6:47 video, which is an  excerpt from Climate the Movie (2024), explains how the “scientific consensus” that climate change is mostly human-caused was forced by:

• Shutting down funding for scientific research into natural causes, and
• Punishing scientists who pursued this research anyway.

The video features statements by Willie Soon, Sallie Baliunas, Richard Lindzen, Ross McKitrick, Roy Spencer, Steven Koonin, Henrik Svensmark, Nir Shaviv, Matthew Wielicki and William Happer about their experiences when they dissented in any degree from the narrative that human emissions of CO₂ were causing dangerous climate change. Anything they produced that was skeptical of the climate crisis was denied publication, and they were marginalized by their former colleagues. As Dr. Wielicki puts it: “This is one of the reasons you can build a consensus in a community is because anybody who is skeptical of that consensus essentially gets kicked out of the community.”

 

 House Republicans Line Up to Save Biden’s Legacy Climate Law

In a speech to kick off the 2025 CERAWeek conference, US Energy Secretary Chris Wright criticized the Biden administration’s climate policies as impoverishing to Americans, economically destructive to businesses and politically polarizing, saying: “There are no winners in that world, except for politicians and rapidly growing interest groups.” However, it turns out that there are some “winners in that world,” including members of Mr. Wright’s own Republican Party. Twenty-one House Republicans wrote a joint letter to the House Ways and Means Committee chairman urging him  to preserve hundreds of billions of dollars in green energy tax credits from President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.

Republican congressional districts have benefitted from IRA tax subsidies even though the law received no GOP votes when it passed Congress in August 2022. Back then, Rep. Andrew Garbarino, the leader of the 21 Republicans, wrote in a press release: “I voted AGAINST the deceptively named ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ just like I voted against the reckless Build Back Better scheme. We can’t tax and spend our way out of the economic crisis that Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi created … Two hundred and thirty economists agree that the so-called Inflation Reduction Act is expected to contribute to skyrocketing inflation and burden the American economy.” Apparently, inflation and burdening the economy don’t matter when it comes to getting government support for one’s constituents.

 

‘Roadkill:’ Amazon Rainforest Cleared for Highway to Carry Globalists to COP30

Next November the COP30 climate conference will take place in Belém, the capital and largest city in the Brazilian state of Pará. As reported by the BBC, more than 50,000 people are expected to attend, and to ease traffic in the city, the state government is building a new four-lane highway through tens of thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest, while touting the highway’s “sustainable” credentials. The cleared area stretches 13 km through the rainforest into Belém. People living in communities along highway’s route won’t be able to use the road since it will be walled on both sides. The highway will leave two disconnected areas of protected forest that will fragment the ecosystem and disrupt the movement of wildlife.

 

The Net-Zero Banking Alliance Explores Axing 1.5°C Temperature Goal

As reported by Bloomberg the Net Zero Banking Alliance, after experiencing a wave of high profile exits, is currently undertaking a strategic review  to “investigate how it can continue to deliver value and better support member banks to individually and independently implement their climate strategies.” Among the options being considered:

• Abandoning the requirement for banks to align their businesses with the 1.5°C target of the Paris Agreement in favour of a new limit of “well below 2°C”.
• Removing financed emissions as the sole metric for assessing a bank’s climate performance.
• Stop policing how well members align their operations with climate-friendly goals.

 

US Supreme Court Rejects Long Running Youth Climate Lawsuit

In a decision that marks the end of the long-running case of Juliana v. United States, on March 24 the US Supreme Court denied the plaintiffs’ application for certiorari (a petition that argues that a lower court has incorrectly decided an important question of law). The Department of Justice’s statement on the denial mentions that Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had twice ruled that the plaintiffs lack “Article III standing,” which refers to Article III of the US Constitution dealing with the jurisdiction of federal courts.

The case began in 2015 when 21 young Americans filed a lawsuit against the US government claiming that, through the government’s affirmative actions that cause climate change, it has violated the youngest generation’s constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property, as well as failed to protect essential public trust resources. Our Children’s Trust, which has been managing the case for the plaintiffs, issued a press release noting that, while the Supreme Court's decision “brings this chapter of these claims to a close, the case has sparked a global movement” inspiring over 60 youth-led climate lawsuits worldwide.

 

Northvolt Files for Bankruptcy

According to a March 12 press release the Board of Directors of Northvolt AB announced that the company is filing for bankruptcy in Sweden. The reasons cited include rising capital costs, geopolitical instability, subsequent supply chain disruptions, and shifts in market demand, as well as challenges in ramping up production. Paul Homewood, writing in Not a Lot of People Know That, identifies two major factors behind the bankruptcy: lack of demand for EVs in Europe and the impossibility of competing profitably with batteries made in China.

Two wholly owned subsidiaries, Northvolt Germany and Northvolt North America are not filing for bankruptcy in their jurisdictions. While Northvolt North America supposedly remains solvent, the fate of its largest project, a $7 billion plant in the Montérégie region of Quebec is in doubt. When the project was announced in 2023, Canada’s federal government pledged $1.34 billion, while the Province of Quebec promised $1.37 billion, plus another $1.5 billion in a “production incentive” over 5-9 years.

 

European Citizens’ Choice: Pay Up or Freeze

In a Watts Up With That? essay, author Charles Rotter comments on the EU policymakers’ planned, sweeping expansion of the bloc’s carbon market, thereby implementing a system that will make energy unaffordable for millions of Europeans. Mr. Rotter refers to a Bloomberg news article titled EU's New Carbon Market Is Set to Slash CO₂ with Soaring Prices for Home Heating. The new emissions system, set to take effect in 2027, could double the price for emitting a tonne of CO₂ to €149 by 2029. As a consequence heating bills could jump by up to 40% and transportation costs by 27%.

As a solution the EU offers “green alternatives” such as heat pumps, electric cars and home renovations, all of which mean substantial upfront costs, which many cannot afford. The EU bureaucracy appears unable or unwilling to learn from Germany’s disastrous energy transition. The only beneficiaries are:

• Corporate interests and investors (the rent-seekers).
• Bureaucrats and policymakers (exercising control over peoples’ use of energy).
• The virtue-signaling elite class who can afford to “go green”.

 

Greenpeace Ordered to Pay Hundreds of Millions in Dakota Pipeline Protest Lawsuit

A jury in North Dakota has awarded pipeline company Energy Transfer LP more than $660 million in damages against the US entities of Greenpeace after finding them liable for defamation. The lawsuit resulted from protests in 2016 during construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, a 1,172-mile-long pipeline to transport up to 750,000 barrels/day of light crude oil from the Bakken Formation in North Dakota to an oil terminal near Patoka, Illinois.

Energy Transfer’s legal action named Greenpeace USA, as well as its Washington DC-based funding arm Greenpeace Fund Inc and its Amsterdam-based parent group Greenpeace International. Greenpeace has counter-sued Energy Transfer in a Dutch court, claiming the oil firm is attempting to unfairly use the legal system to silence critics. It has vowed to appeal the North Dakota decision, having previously said that it could be forced into bankruptcy over the case.

In The Climate Realism Show #150, from 37:10 to 54:10 of its video, the Heartland Institute’s Anthony Watts, Sterling Burnett, Linnea Lueken, and Jim Lakely discuss the “possibility of an extinction event for mighty Greenpeace.”

 

2025-02-25

 

How To Rescind the Endangerment Finding in a Way that Will Stick

One of US President Trump's first day executive orders, the one called Unleashing American Energy, under Section 4(f) directed a reconsideration of Environmental Protection Agency’s “Endangerment Finding” (EF) of 2009. The EF declared that CO₂ and other greenhouse gases are “pollutants” under the Clean Air Act because they pose a “danger to public health and welfare.” As Francis Menton, writing in the Manhattan Contrarian, states, the EF underlies all the Biden-era regulations restricting use of fossil fuels, and any attempt to eliminate it will be met with litigation. So, Mr. Menton offers ways to address some of the issues that will come up in the litigation. He begins with two legal decisions:

• Massachusetts v. EPA is a case where the Supreme Court held that the EPA was required to decide as to the status of CO₂ and other greenhouse gases as “pollutants” under the Clean Air Act. Mr. Menton notes that the Supreme Court did not declare these gases as pollutants, just the EPA, and a new, well-reasoned determination by the EPA that CO₂ and other GHGs are not pollutants, would not violate Mass. v. EPA.
• West Virginia v. EPA is a 2022 Supreme Court decision that found that the EPA’s Clean Power Plan was beyond its regulatory authority under the Clean Air Act, because the CPP falls under the Major Questions Doctrine, thus requiring the EPA to get a clear direction from Congress first. Despite this ruling, in 2024 the EPA issued two regulations restricting the use of fossil fuels in power plants and automobiles. Mr. Menton believes that today’s Supreme Court will uphold a well-reasoned rescission of the EF.

Mr. Menton then addresses three main points that need to be made in any new EPA regulatory action to rescind the EF:

• Empirical evidence accumulated since the original EF invalidates it.
• There have been huge increases in CO₂ and other GHGs outside the US since 2009, and these are outside the ability of the EPA to regulate, so no action by the EPA could have any meaningful impact.
• Efforts by the EPA to control the climate by restricting CO₂ and other GHGs would have adverse effects on public health and welfare.

The first of the above three points deals with the “science” of GHGs and global warming. Mr. Menton recommends not trying to prove that GHGs don’t cause global warming but instead forcing the other side to prove that GHGs emitted under the EPA’s jurisdiction cause dangerous warming. There are hundreds of scientific papers published since 2009 showing empirical evidence that the dangers predicted 15 years ago have not happened.

The second and third points are more important than the science because they show the trying to replace the fossil fuel energy system with something untried and untested poses a more immediate danger than anything that might result from a hypothetical warming of a degree or two a hundred years from now.

 

Trump Bars US Federal Scientists from Working on IPCC Report

The Trump Administration has issued an order to US government scientists preventing them from working on the IPCC’s next report (AR7), which is due in 2029.  Among the scientists affected is Katherine Calvin, NASA’s Chief Scientist and Senior Climate Advisor, who in 2023 was elected co-chair of the IPCC’s Working Group III – Mitigation of Climate Change. Dr. Calvin was due to attend the 62nd Session of the IPCC, February 24-28 in Hangzhou, China, but a NASA spokesperson said, “Dr. Calvin will not be traveling to this meeting,” adding that they were “not sure what this means for the planned work going forward, or if US scientists will participate in the writing of the IPCC reports.”

 

New Jersey Pulls Plug on Offshore Wind Projects Over High Costs, Supply Chain Woes

The Democratic governor of New Jersey, Phil Murphy, took office in 2018 hoping that offshore wind projects would be a perfect issue to unite a liberal coalition and ensure his legacy by providing clean energy to fight climate change and mega projects to employ union workers. The state approved five projects, agreeing to put ratepayers on the hook for the power from the windfarms. Two of the projects were cancelled in 2023 by the Danish developer Ørsted over inflation and supply chain issues.

The other three projects were plodding along until Donald Trump took office and ordered a halt to all federal approval of offshore wind. On February 3 Governor Murphy announced: “… the offshore wind industry is currently facing significant challenges, and now is the time for patience and prudence.” He supported the New Jersey Bureau of Public Utilities’ decision to not proceed with the state’s fourth offshore wind solicitation, which cited Shell’s backing out as an equity partner in the Atlantic Shores project, as well as uncertainty driven by federal actions and permitting. Atlantic Shores received all its federal permits in the final weeks of the Biden Administration but needed more money from the state.

Republican Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey celebrated the NJBPU decision, saying: “The BPU’s cancellation is a sign that they have finally understood the undeniable facts. Industrializing our oceans is completely untenable, widely rejected by the public, and will come at an unimaginable cost to New Jersey’s tax and ratepayers.”

 

UN Gives Countries more Time to Submit “quality” Climate Plans

Under Article 4 of the Paris Agreement its 197 parties are supposed to submit new Nationally Determined Contributions to reduce emissions every five years (2015, 2020, 2025, etc.) with successive NDCs entailing a “ratcheting up” of ambition over time. In April 2024 the UN Environment Program required parties to submit their latest NDCs by February 2025, to allow time to compile a report for COP30 next November.

On February 6 Climate Home News reported that only “a handful” of countries have submitted their 2025 NDCs and that Simon Stiell, the executive director of UN Climate Change was therefore giving countries until September to submit “quality” plans. The source for the “handful” of countries was Climate Watch’s NDC Tracker, which shows that only 10 countries (the US, Brazil, the UK, the UAE, Ecuador, New Zealand, Switzerland, Uruguay, Saint Lucia and Andorra) made the February deadline.

At the 2023 COP28 in Dubai countries agreed that the 2025 NDCs should set a specific target for cutting emissions by 2035 and be aligned with limiting warming to 1.5°C. The early submissions haven’t all reached that ambition.

 

After US Retreat, Countries Clash over Making Up Green Climate Fund Shortfall

In December 2023 at COP28 in Dubai, the US Biden Administration announced a $3 billion pledge to the UN’s Green Climate Fund. This came on top of a 2014 pledge of $3 billion by President Obama. On January 27 the US Secretary of State wrote to UN Secretary-General António Guterres, stating, “The government of the United States rescinds any outstanding pledges to the Green Climate Fund.” This announcement effectively means cancelling $4 billion promised to the GCF, since only $2 billion of the 2014 pledge has been delivered.

Meeting for the first time since the January 27 announcement (and without US participation), board members of the GCF sparred over who should plug the gap. Germany’s representative wanted “high-income, non-traditional donors” as a potential source of funding, alongside “non-sovereign contributors” and the private sector. South Korea and Sweden encouraged existing donors to put more money into the GCF. Saudi Arabia’s representative fiercely opposed suggestions that developing countries should be asked to put more money into the GCF’s coffers.

With the US withdrawal, the top pledges to the GCF’s second replenishment are currently: Germany, the UK, France, Japan, Sweden, Canada, Norway and Italy. The GCF discussion ended without a conclusion on how to make up the funding shortfall.

 

UK's Losing Wind Gamble a Warning for World

On January 22, 2025 as a cold high-pressure system settled over the UK, wind turbines went idle just as demand for heating and electricity surged. This GridWatch wind production chart illustrates how the country's wind energy swings wildly from nearly 100% of capacity to near zero within days or hours. British households pay nearly double the electricity rates of their mostly nuclear-powered French counterparts.

Moreover, the UK’s energy policies include the perverse mechanism of compensating wind turbine operators to switch off during periods of high wind, as occurred on January 24 when a storm with gusts exceeding 100 miles/hour battered Ireland and Scotland. According to Lee Moroney of UK’s Renewable Energy Forum, “Not only do they pay for electricity that wind farms predicted they would generate but were instructed not to because of grid congestion, but they also have to pay a bonus to the wind farms for the trouble of reducing output. And they must also pay for the costs of turning up conventional generation (such as gas-fired power stations) to make up the shortfall.”

 

Sweden’s Supreme Court Rejects Greta Thunberg’s Lawsuit Over Climate Inaction

On February 19 Sweden's Supreme Court ruled that Greta Thunberg and hundreds of other young activists cannot sue the state in a Swedish court over what they say is insufficient action against climate change. The activists filed a class action lawsuit in 2022 with a district court claiming the state violates their rights as laid out in the European Convention on Human Rights by not doing enough to limit climate change, nor to mitigate its effects.

After the state requested the case be dismissed the district court asked the Supreme Court to clarify whether a such a lawsuit could be effectively tried in a Swedish court. In its decision the Supreme Court said, “A court cannot decide that the Riksdag [Swedish Parliament] or the government must take any specific action. The political bodies decide independently on which specific climate measures Sweden should take.”

The above ruling is significant because it establishes that courts cannot enter the political arena by ordering legislatures to pass laws forcing governments to undertake climate action. If there is already such legislation in place, then courts can rule whether governments are complying with it. However, repealing existing climate legislation may be difficult. For example, in Canada a youth-led lawsuit [FoS Extracts 2024-11-05] is dealing with the question whether the Ontario government can repeal its Climate Change Mitigation and Low-carbon Economy Act.

 

European Union to Exempt Most Firms from New Carbon Border Tax

The EU introduced the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) on a transitional basis for the period October 2023 to December 2025. The object of the CBAM is to tax (i.e., apply a tariff to) direct and indirect emissions embedded in a range of goods imported into the EU. Initially the CBAM, when fully in place as of 2026, will apply to six products: iron & steel, cement, fertilizers, aluminum, hydrogen and electricity. The transitional period serves as a pilot and learning phase for importers, producers and authorities involved; collect information to refine the calculation methodology; and bring the price of EU emissions in line with those of imported goods.

During the transitional phase European companies grumbled about the complicated and costly form-filling required. Since few countries have EU-style emissions trading schemes or calculate carbon content, compliance proved onerous for EU importers. Therefore, the EU tax commissioner announced that more than 80% of European companies will be exempt from complying with the CBAM, leaving just the largest importers responsible. According to the commissioner, “Less than 20 per cent of the companies in scope are responsible for more than 95 per cent of the emissions in the products.”

Canada doesn’t have a CBAM but Mark Carney, the leading candidate in the race to replace Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, promises to scrap the unpopular consumer carbon tax, replacing it with consumer incentives to make greener choices, “and we will get the big polluters to pay for it,” and a CBAM that “would ensure that Canadian companies can compete on a level playing field by penalizing ‘high-polluting foreign imports.”

 

2025-02-06

 

Trump Orders US to Quit Paris Agreement and Pause all Foreign Climate Finance

On his first day in office US President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order (Putting America First in International Environmental Agreements) formally withdrawing the US from the Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change – with immediate effect. The EO also revokes and rescinds the US International Climate Finance Plan under which the Biden Administration had submitted a FY2025 request of $3.3 billion. In FY2024 the same administration delivered over $11 billion to support climate action in developing countries.

In response to the EO, Bloomberg Philanthropies announced on January 23 that it will provide funding to help cover the US contribution to the UNFCCC's budget, stating: “Bloomberg Philanthropies and other US climate funders will ensure the United States meets its global climate obligations.” The statement provided no details on the amounts of funding or who the other climate funders will be.

 

 Trump Truth Bombs “Green” Energy

As reported by Steve Goreham in Master Resource, in addition to the executive order withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, on January 20 President Trump signed three wide-ranging executive orders that "radically change" US energy and climate policy. These EOs “restore efforts to promote coal, natural gas, oil, hydropower, nuclear, and biofuels, while curtailing support for wind and electric vehicles.” These include:

• Temporary Withdrawal of All Areas on the Outer Continental Shelf from Offshore Wind Leasing and Review of the Federal Government’s Leasing and Permitting Practices for Wind Projects withdraws “all areas within the Offshore Continental Shelf” from wind leasing and requires the new Secretary of the Interior to determine the necessity for “terminating or amending any existing wind energy leases.” The stock price of Danish wind system supplier Ørsted dropped 17%.

• Unleashing American Energy calls for the elimination of the electric vehicle (EV) mandate, reviewing all actions that potentially burden the development of domestic energy resources and revoking a number of Biden era EOs dealing with climate, clean energy, and the environment, as well as terminating the American Climate Corps.
• Declaring a National Energy Emergency speeds the deployment of pipelines and other energy infrastructure, while rolling back regulations on oil and gas to expand US production.

 

Benny Peiser: How Can Eager Governments Get Off the Net Zero Hook?

In this 37:50 video, Dr. Peiser gives his farewell lecture as Director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, arguing that for the first time since the launch of the GWPF 15 years ago, the climate consensus is breaking down. This is because the focus is shifting from the science to the cost of net zero and other climate policies. The climate alarm is no longer trusted by huge chunks of the public. Climate scientists have overplayed their hand with their partisanship, censorship and intimidation (see Climategate), thus losing the trust of the public.

The issue we’re now seeing is governments that have been campaigning on climate for the last 20 years falling by the wayside and losing elections. Their replacements will have to deal with the consequences of 20 years of destructive eco-socialism. Their attempts at reform are being shackled by the bureaucracies and campaigners’ lawfare. To get off the net zero hook Dr. Peiser compares seven styles: Trump, Milei, G7, EU, UK, Canadian and Australian.

The failure of the Copenhagen COP15 in 2009, a historical milestone, led to breakdown between the West and developing countries over climate issues and formation of the BRICS alliance with a diminished role for Europe. Predictions of climate disasters have failed, and global temperatures have increased at half the rate originally predicted by the IPCC in its first assessment.

The Europeans put everything into the net zero basket, and no resulting policy is going to plan (e.g., heat pumps, EVs, battery plants, aviation). Emissions have fallen due to shifting of industry abroad, while importing goods with embedded emissions. The European car industry is facing an existential crisis due to eco-socialist command and control policies. China has overtaken Europe as a bigger historical emitter of CO₂. But as a developing country (and it will always be officially “developing”) China is exempt from net zero targets, allowing it to free ride on cheap coal.

Rolling back green policies in the EU is difficult because its parliament plays no role in policy making (the EU Commission and national heads of government make the big decisions). The UK government is split over net zero as their economy sinks fast. Despite Trump’s victory and Republican control of Congress, the left and eco-socialists can still go to court to try to thwart him.

The biggest hurdle for governments trying to get off the net zero hook is the climate laws, carbon budgets, etc. The only way to get off this hook is to change the environmental laws, which is difficult. In the US the biggest obstacle is the Endangerment Finding declaring CO₂ as a dangerous pollutant, which was left untouched in the first Trump administration. Dr. Peiser asserts that the only way to overturn the Endangerment Finding is to challenge the science behind it.

For the Europeans Dr. Peiser’s recommended exit strategy is to make emissions targets and climate finance conditional on China ending its free riding “developing nation” status. But ultimately parliaments will have to find a way to repeal their climate laws. Dr. Peiser ends by noting that, for the first time, policymakers are asking the GPWF for help in getting them off the hook.

 

The Energy Storage Fiasco — How Soon Will It Be Abandoned?

The Manhattan Contrarian’s Francis Menton revisits the intermittency problem when trying to run the electrical grid just on wind and solar generation. Referring to his December 2022 energy storage report The Energy Storage Conundrum, he noted the report’s conclusion that a predominantly wind and solar grid would need energy storage of 500-1,000 hours of average electricity usage. Currently the states of New York and California are forging ahead plans for wind / solar grids backed up by batteries. Despite years of effort neither state has built even 1% of the energy storage needed but have nevertheless blundered into an unanticipated problem – lithium battery fires.

While spontaneous fires with EV batteries have occurred, these batteries, with about 100 kWh of storage, are tiny compared to the thousands of MWh needed to back up a grid. Between May and July 2023 New York State’s grid (with 1.2 GWh of storage capacity) had three large fires. The state’s governor has set a goal to have 24 GWh of energy storage by 2030.

In California, getting 500-1,000 hours of battery storage would mean building 15,000-30,000 GWh of battery capacity, but only 54 GWh has been built so far. In September 2022 and September 2023 two grid battery fires broke out in Moss Landing and Valley Center. However, the biggest fire occurred on January 16, 2025, again at Moss Landing, requiring the evacuation of 1,200-1,500 residents from a 12 square-mile area. At the time of its second fire the Moss Landing facility was the world’s largest, with 3 GWh of capacity.

Despite these battery fires, NY State is pressing ahead with a 100 MW facility (equivalent to 400 MWh assuming four hours of use) on a barge on the East River, opposite Midtown Manhattan. It will use the same technology as at Moss Landing. A 12 square-mile evacuation around a fire at this NY facility would involve hundreds of thousands of people. Mr. Menton quotes two press releases extolling the environmental and social benefits of the new facility and concludes: “This is the level of incompetence we are dealing with.”

 

UN Scrambling to Save the Credibility of the Paris Agreement

In a Watts Up With That? essay Eric Worral refers to the World Meteorological Organization’s press release confirming 2024 as the warmest year on record at 1.55°C above pre-industrial levels. In response UN Secretary-General António Guterres said: “Individual years pushing past the 1.5-degree limit do not mean that the long-term goal is shot. It means that we need to fight even harder to get back on track.”

The WMO’s Secretary-General Celeste Saulo added: “Climate history is playing out before our eyes. We’ve had not just one or two record-breaking years, but a full ten-year series. This has been accompanied by devastating and extreme weather, rising sea levels and melting ice, all powered by record-breaking greenhouse gas levels due to human activities. It is important to emphasize that a single year of more than 1.5°C for a year does NOT mean that we have failed to meet Paris Agreement long-term temperature goals, which are measured over decades rather than an individual year. However, it is essential to recognize that every fraction of a degree of warming matters. Whether it is at a level below or above 1.5°C of warming, every additional increment of global warming increases the impacts on our lives, economies and our planet.”

Mr. Worrall then refers to a statement by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies director Gavin Schmidt that climate models can’t explain 2023’s huge heat anomaly and predicts that 2025 will be a good year for climate skeptics.

 

2025-01-16

 

Canada Set 2035 Emissions Target, Ignoring Official Advice

On December 12 Canada’s minister of environment and climate change, Stephen Guilbeault, announced a change in the country’s 2035 emissions target. The existing target is 40-45% below 2005 levels and the new one is 45-50%. This backgrounder on the new target points to Canada's “legally binding" commitments under the Paris Agreement and the Canadian Net-Zero Accountability Act to set increasingly ambitious emissions reduction targets. It says that the government’s decision was “informed by the best science, international climate commitments, Indigenous knowledge, and the advice of the Net-Zero Advisory Body.” This is a group of independent experts charged with providing advice to the minister.

However, the NZAB responded to Minister Guilbeault's announcement by referring to its September 2024 report that, on p.3, recommended (1) developing a Canadian carbon budget – a cumulative amount of emissions over a period (e.g., to 2050) needed to limit a specific global temperature increase, such as 1.5°C or 2.0°C; (2) adopting an emissions reduction target of 50-55% below 2005 levels by 2035; (3) addressing Canada’s "excess emissions” – the difference between a “fairness-based” carbon budget and a “target-based” carbon budget (p.12), which the NZAB calculated to be more than 8,400 Mt (p.10). It proposed addressing the excess emissions by enhancing international climate financing, negative emissions and internationally financed emissions reductions (p.21).

Table 4 and Figure 4 (pp.36-37) of the report depict five pathways (trajectories) for Canada going from 698 Mt of emissions in 2021 to zero in 2050. Their 2035 emissions relative to 2005 range between -46% to -55%.

 

Canada Delays Net-Zero Electricity Target by 15 Years

On December 17 a Canadian government news release announced the finalized Clean Electricity Regulations, replete with promises of “clean, affordable and reliable power,” jobs, savings for families on their energy bills and gushing quotes from government ministers, rent-seekers and activist organizations. The announcement, together with supporting information such as a backgrounder and a statement on “Canada's clean electricity future,” indicate that the government intends to achieve net-zero electricity by 2050. However, there is no mention that the government’s original target date was 2035, a goal highlighted on the governing Liberal party's website.

Various news outlets, such as Global News and the Delta Optimist, noticed the 15-year delay in reaching the target and quoted Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault as admitting that it would have been impossible to make the country’s electricity grid 100% emissions neutral in ten years.

 

11 US States Sue Three ESG Giants for Working as a Cartel to Reduce Coal Use and Increase Electricity Prices

Texas and 10 other US states have joined to sue BlackRock Inc., Vanguard Group Inc., and State Street Corp. claiming that these money-manager companies bought large stakes in coal companies and then colluded to promote ESG and DIE (diversity, inclusivity and equity) goals that reduced coal output. According to section 1 of the complaint: “Defendants have reaped the rewards of higher returns, higher fees, and higher profits, while Americans have paid the price in higher utility bills and higher costs.” Such behaviour violates the Clayton Act, which prohibits acquisition of stock to lessen competition.

In 2021 (s.4 of the complaint) the defendants “each publicly announced their commitment to use their shares to pressure the management of the portfolio companies in which they held assets to align with net-zero goals. These goals included reducing carbon emissions from coal by over 50%.” The companies (s.7) publicly defended their scheme with appeals to environmental stewardship.

The three defendants together have $26 trillion in assets under management. The complaint (s.192) singles out Blackrock, accusing it of deceiving investors in its non-ESG funds by using their money to promote an ESG agenda.

In s.271 the complaint asks the US District Court to cease the defendants’ uncompetitive behaviour and order them to pay various civil penalties and costs.

 

Climate Disobedience Ahead? Be Ready

Robert Bradley Jr. of Master Resource comments on the reaction of  Michael Mezzatesta, a self-described “economics & climate educator … sharing ideas for a better future,” to the election win of Donald Trump. On social media Mr. Mezzatesta posted: “A silver lining of this election result: US progressive resistance movements are about to get a big boost … I predict that it will be a huge four years for progressive organizing and the labor movement, and I think it will be a MASSIVE four years for the climate movement.” Mr. Mezzatesta called on progressives to channel their anger and frustration by supporting three resistance movements: Sunrise Movement, Working Families Party, or Climate Defiance.

Mr. Bradley thinks that, with climate exaggeration and extremism being out of favour, the public will pounce at any social disruption from the Church of Science, which holds three resolute beliefs:

• The human influence on climate is pronounced and controlling.
• That influence cannot be positive or benign, only catastrophic.
• Global governance can and must solve this problem.

He notes that even Michael Mann has parted ways with Extinction Rebellion and with Scientist Rebellion, warning about “individuals who are convinced that the latest extreme weather event is confirmation that the climate crisis is far worse than we thought” and “the damage done by deeply misguided individuals who in principle would seem to be on the side of climate action but are instead dividing the community and playing right into the agenda of the forces of inaction.”

 

Bankers Find Innovative Way to Claim Credit for Avoided Emissions

As Joanne Nova puts it: “The carbon market is the perfect scam-quasi-tax currency for our banker overlords. They were always trading reductions in an invisible gas, now they’re trading reductions from an imaginary increase that may never have occurred.” The imaginary increase occurs when a bank assumes a counterfactual scenario in which emissions remain elevated and then compares the emissions in that scenario with the CO₂ avoidance its bonds or loans enable.

The idea for this scheme came from the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, which in September 2023 published a consultative document titled Defining Transition Finance and Considerations for Decarbonization Contribution Methodologies. This document introduced a new metric called “expected emissions reduction,” or EER, which is similar to the “expected return” of a financing activity.

 

Bankers Quietly Backing Away from Banking Climate Cartel

In 2021 at COP26 the UN’s special envoy for climate action, Mark Carney, proclaimed that more than 160 financial institutions had signed into the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero with the declaration: “Right here, right now, is where finance draws the line." One GFANZ offshoot was the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) made up of over 140 banks committed to reaching net zero. Since the beginning of December 2024, in view of the impending Trump inauguration, six of the largest US banks (JP Morgan, Citigroup, Bank of America. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo) announced that they are leaving the NZBA.

In Canada, there is speculation that two of the country’s largest banks, Royal Bank of Canada and Bank of Montreal, will walk away from the NZBA. The RBC’s CEO tried to mitigate what this would mean, stating: “Pulling out of NZBA, hypothetically, doesn’t lead to a non-commitment to net zero or climate change,” while the BMO’s CEO said the bank is still a “member of the alliance. At least we are today.” The Canadian ENGO Stand.earth commented on the possible withdrawals from the NZBA by pointing out that it and 90 other organizations had warned Mark Carney in October 2021: "… without stricter standards, we highlighted the risk of the banks and others using the initiative as a greenwashing tactic, to gain cover as they came under increasing pressure from fossil fuel impacted communities and civil society organizations. Full page ads were run in the Toronto Star and Financial Times to make the case.”

 

When Failure Becomes a Commodity

Joanne Nova asks us to: “Ponder for a moment how intrinsically unsuitable, maladapted, and worthless wind turbines are to a grid.” For example, the Seagreen complex, Scotland’s largest offshore wind farm, with 114 turbines and 1074 MW of capacity, earned £100 million for making electricity, and £200 million for being “constrained.” The useful electricity produced by Seagreen, which operated at a pathetic load factor of 14%, cost £2.70/kWh.

As Ms. Nova notes: “Obviously, when the government rewards failure, the market responds by planning to fail.” Accordingly, huge numbers of windfarms are built in Scottish waters, located in the most remote and overloaded corner of the network where they will receive lucrative payments to be switched off. The Renewable Energy Foundation has published a chart showing the top 20 UK wind farms with constrained output in 2024. Accompanying the chart is a comment that more than 98% of the total constrained energy arose from Scottish wind farms.

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