Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
Now the Leaf has been phased out, Nissan’s new flagship is the Ariya.
It’s a bog-standard SUV, equivalent to the Qashqai, but the basic model retails at £39645, compared to Qashqai which costs £30135.
The Ariya is totally unaffordable for the average family.
But on top of that come the running costs.
Nissan quote 3.92 miles per kWh, but in the real world you can assume about 2.74 miles. If you are one of the 4-in-10 homes that don’t have off street parking, you are stuck with public chargers. Our local one, a 50 kWh one, charges 75p/kWh, which works out at 27 pence per mile.
The Qashqai is rated at 44.8 mpg, which at current prices works out at 13 pence per mile. However when fuel duties are taken out and VAT equalised at 5%, the Qashqai’s cost reduces to 5.3 pence per mile.
That makes the Ariya much dearer to run. On an annual mileage of 10,000, charging the Ariya will cost £2700, compared to a cost of petrol of £530 for the Qashqai.
Electric cars will be unaffordable for anybody without their own driveways.
The Heartland Institute’s Anthony Watts, Sterling Burnett, Linnea Lueken, and Jim Lakely are joined by special guest Myron Ebell, who was on President Trump’s EPA Transition Team for his first term, to break down what these reversals of radical climate and energy policy will mean for America and the world. We will also cover some of the Crazy Climate News of the Week.
President Trump wasted no time after his inauguration on Monday reversing all of his predecessor’s executive orders that made climate alarmism and “green” energy the focus of American government. He didn’t just reverse bad policies, and pull us out of the Paris Climate Agreement, he went farther than he did in his first term to ramp up American energy production and rein in an Environmental Protection Agency that regulated far beyond its mandate. Among at least 47 climate- and energy-related EOs signed in the first 24 hours of his swearing-in was one tackling what has long served as the keystone of limitless environmental regulation: the “endangerment finding” for carbon dioxide emissions. May we finally see the end of the EPA’s abuse of its regulatory power?
The Heartland Institute’s Anthony Watts, Sterling Burnett, Linnea Lueken, and Jim Lakely are joined by special guest Myron Ebell, who was on President Trump’s EPA Transition Team for his first term, to break down what these reversals of radical climate and energy policy will mean for America and the world. We will also cover some of the Crazy Climate News of the Week.
Join us LIVE at 1 p.m. ET (noon CT) and jump in the chat to offer your comments and questions for us.
The WHO Deputy Director-General’s press conference recently claimed climate change is causing “many, many diseases”, including Mpox, Marburg and Ebola, to accelerate in terms of their emergence. “It’s been driven by climate change, driven by droughts and floods.”
The WHO Deputy Director-General’s press conference recently claimed climate change is causing “many, many diseases”, including Mpox, Marburg and Ebola, to accelerate in terms of their emergence. “It’s been driven by climate change, driven by droughts and floods.”
WHO Deputy Director-General: Climate change is causing "many, many diseases", including Mpox, Marburg and Ebola, to accelerate in terms of their emergence."
"It's been driven by climate change, driven by droughts and floods."
A quick look at Ebola reveals how totally dishonest that claim is.
Ebola Disease is caused by 6 different species of Ebola viruses that are carried by fruit bats and can be transmitted to monkeys and humans. Depending on the species, 25 to 90% of infected people die.
Until 2014, outbreaks of Ebola were reported from remote villages close to tropical rainforests in Central and West Africa. Graphic A shows where non-imported outbreaks were reported. Ebola is transmitted by contact with bodily fluids and organs of infected animals. Infected bats and primates can transmit Ebola to people who eat bats and primates as bush meat. However, care-takers of infected people or sexual contact with survivors can transmit the virus among people.
During an outbreak between 2014 and 2016, Ebola that was imported into urban areas resulted in over 28,000 cases. Multiple countries including Italy, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, Spain, the UK and the US, reported imported Ebola cases associated with this outbreak.
The Reston Ebola virus species sickens non-human primates, but not humans. In 1989 in Reston, Virginia (USA), a colony of monkeys imported from the Philippines, caused outbreaks in non-human primates in Pennsylvania and Texas, and Sienna, Italy. Clearly those imported urban outbreaks have nothing to do with climate change.
A quick examination of the climate of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC; formerly Zaire) further shows no significant climate effect and further pulls the curtain down on the WHO’s climate lies.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo is a tropical country whose climate is controlled by the seasonal movements of the Intertropical Convergence Zone which causes an alternation between a wet and dry season. Data from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of University of East Anglia and reported by the World Bank show how little climate change has occurred. The dry season for DRC happens when the ITCZ brings the ITCZ’s rains further north. Precipitation during the dry season has changed from 217.85 millimeters during 1901-1930 average for June, July, and August to our current 30-year average of 216.38 mm, a 0.6% change. Similar percentage change happens during the rainy season when the ITCZ is closer to the equator.
Furthermore, a barely detectable change in average temperature raised the 1901-30 average of 23.21 C during the dry season to a current 23.61; a 0.4C change.
The WHO propagandist wants to convince all the gullible people that a 0.4 C rise in temperature and a 1.5 mm decrease in dry season precipitation in 120 years is increasing deadly diseases like Ebola. Only really stupid people will ever buy that dishonest crap.
Amidst the torrent of news of the Trump team flurry of Executive Orders, personnel firings, and policy changes, being reported on X, I noticed one small thing not being reported.
We create opportunities for Indigenous people at NASA to diversity worldviews within Earth Science.
Because Earth Science needs shamans and medicine bags.
Another excerpt, emphasis mine.
Building Relationships
The Indigenous Peoples Initiative connects, cultivates, and sustains relationships. Our team is focused on engagement, dialogue, and two-way learning through connecting with natural resource managers and community members at conferences and meetings, through co-hosted community events where involving youth and elders, and through listening sessions around EO needs for landscape monitoring and mapping. We believe that “relationships move at the speed of trust” and are dedicated to building lasting relationships with Indigenous communities by creating a trusted, reliable, and Indigenous-centric geospatial community with a focus on environmental justice and climate issues on Indigenous lands and territories.
I’m sure there are hundreds if not thousands of other examples of unreported accomplishments. The Trump administration seems to be returning sanity to Federal science at blinding speed.
It’s amazing how far Justin Rowlatt will go to delude himself.
He posted this report from Baku during COP29, a long rambling article designed to convince himself that the battle against global warming will not miss a beat, despite Trump’s election win.
It’s amazing how far Justin Rowlatt will go to delude himself.
He posted this report from Baku during COP29, a long rambling article designed to convince himself that the battle against global warming will not miss a beat, despite Trump’s election win.
Forget about the US, China will step up and save the day!
I seem to recall that the BBC ran similar articles during Trump’s last term.
Meanwhile back in the real world:
It is noticeable that US emissions have effectively flatlined, regardless of who was President – Obama, Trump or Biden.
There is only one thing China is interested in when it comes to climate change – selling solar panels, EVs and batteries to the rest of the world stupid enough to buy them.
A recent peer-reviewed article in Nature (discussed here) has, once again, knocked this speculative “fat tail” hypothesis down to size. “Based on the here identified relationship and observation-based estimates of the past air-sea heat flux in the North Atlantic from reanalysis products,” the authors concluded, “the decadal averaged AMOC at 26.5°N has not weakened from 1963 to 2017 although substantial variability exists at all latitudes.”
Ed. note: A recent peer-reviewed article in Nature (discussed here) has, once again, knocked this speculative “fat tail” hypothesis down to size. “Based on the here identified relationship and observation-based estimates of the past air-sea heat flux in the North Atlantic from reanalysis products,” the authors concluded, “the decadal averaged AMOC at 26.5°N has not weakened from 1963 to 2017 although substantial variability exists at all latitudes.”
Climate alarm is the name of the game for the government-led Climate Industrial Complex to keep the taxpayer grants going to the wind, solar, and battery rent-seekers. Nature is optimal and fragile, and the game is to throw hypotheticals against the wall to see what might stick. The mainstream media is hungry for a scary scenario too.
One perennial fear is a potential collapse of a crucial system of ocean currents known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). A few scientists are ‘out there’ predicting an increasing chance of a collapse, but the consensus leans the other way. [1]
Forty-four scientists, including Michael “Climategate” Mann, published an open letter with ominous implications. “Recent research since the last IPCC report does suggest that the IPCC has underestimated this risk and that the passing of this tipping point is a serious possibility already in the next few decades,” the letter states. The missive closes with a call to action:
Recognizing that adaptation to such a severe climate catastrophe is not a viable option, we urge the Council of Nordic Ministers to (a) initiate an assessment of this significant risk to the Nordic countries and (b) take steps to minimize this risk as much as possible. This could involve leveraging the strong international standing of the Nordic countries to increase pressure for greater urgency and priority in the global effort to reduce emissions as quickly as possible, in order to stay close to the 1.5 °C target set by the Paris Agreement.
The media loved it. “Key Atlantic current could collapse soon, ‘impacting the entire world for centuries to come,’ leading climate scientists warn,” wrote Sascha Pare in LiveScience. “How much should you worry about a collapse of the Atlantic conveyor belt?,” asked Bob Henson at Yale Climate Connections.
Carl Wunsch Rebuttal
Are the risks of a collapse of the dominant mechanism of northward heat transport in the North Atlantic, ushering in record cold, a real threat? Has it been “greatly underestimated” as the above letter states? In such instances, a good second opinion is needed, and Carl Wunsch of MIT is about as good as one can get.
I emailed Professor Wunsch with the query:
Many years ago, Dick Lindzen gave me your address to ask about the fear of a disruption of the conveyor belt in regard to the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. You expressed doubt back then.
This alarm is in the air today, and I wondered if you had some thoughts on this post (below) to share on LinkedIn where a debate is taking place.
Among the many reasons why we ought to cut climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions as quickly and sharply as possible, the weakening of a system of ocean currents known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, ranks high indeed. Several key scientific papers over the last couple of years have put this long-percolating climate concern back on the front burner. It’s hard to overstate how widespread and calamitous the impacts could be if this conveyor belt were to collapse – and it’s a process that could begin in the next several decades, if the new work is on target.
He responded:
I’m aware of the fuss going on about the AMOC. Indeed I co-authored a paper about it not long ago (I’ve attached it). It’s somewhat technical.
To clarify however: I am *not* a climate skeptic, and I regard the threat of major climate change as very real and very worrisome. In that context, one can argue that alarming the public about elements such as the behavior of the AMOC could lead to useful actual political and scientific/engineering progress and precautions.
Where I become conflicted is when the particular science is mis-interpreted and mis-understood. Turning the AMOC on and off as an explanation of major past and possible future change has become a go-to-story for people who want a simple explanation of a very complicated system. [Wallace] Broecker [here] did the world a great dis-service with his advocacy of the “conveyor belt” which leads people to think they understand a system which looks nothing like his picture (a memorable graphic however).
There are lots of issues connected with the fuss over the AMOC. Amongst them, prominently, are the use of numerical models which produce ocean circulations that are far from what we actually observe. How seriously should one take their “predictions”? That the climate can change dramatically from what we have known for the last several hundred years is a fact, and a very worrisome fact at that. Does that mean the AMOC stories in the media are correct?
Climate is a global phenomenon. Consider a hypothetical situation: turn the North Atlantic Ocean abruptly into all land. Zero AMOC; removal of a major current system. How does the climate system adjust? At the present time, the Earth is in near thermal balance (radiation incoming from the sun is almost equal to that radiated back to space—the small excess of incoming over outgoing is the global warming phenomenon). Physics suggests that the system would adjust to the removal of the North Atlantic by ultimately re-establishing global near-heat balance.
How does that happen? Change in clouds? Change in ocean circulation? Change in distribution of ice sheets? Change in atmospheric circulation? All global. How long does it take (years, decades, centuries)? What will the climate be like during the transition? We do not have numerical models with the demonstrated skill to answer such questions. Could be terrible, however. Suppression of the AMOC, should it happen, raises precisely the same global questions with the added complication that the North Atlantic circulation itself would also change.
Isn’t it worth taking some precautions? It’s an insurance problem in the same sense that I would rewire my house if an electrician told me that the existing wiring could cause a fire (not that a fire *will* happen; only that we know it could).
Comment
We live at a time when climate scientists do not want to be labeled a skeptic or denier, yet honest scientists are still doing their duty to weigh in against undue alarmism. (Note the beginning and end of Wunsch’s replay above.)
Also note that how the Deep Ecology notion of an optimal, stable, fragile climate is the default thinking of so many natural scientists. The idea that the human influence on climate could be positive and even a ‘fat tail’ good (such as cancelling out a series of volcanoes or a natural global cooling) is not part of the analysis.
[1] Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) describes the movement of water from north to south and back from south to north in the Atlantic Ocean. This circulation is responsible for warmth in different parts of the world and carries essential nutrients for ocean life.
The question is whether this (very slow) process is slowing down because of anthropogenic warming of the water, which would cause droughts in South Africa and sea level rise in the eastern U.S.
Capturing and storing carbon dioxide is also a massive waste of resources and causes other harms
ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, IL (January 22, 2025) – Carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects have become an increasingly popular method by which climate activists pursue their ultimate goal of global “net-zero” carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. A new paper by The Heartland Institute urges policymakers to push back against CCS projects, which often entail the use of eminent domain to seize private property from landowners.
The paper concludes by clarifying how CCS indeed poses an imminent threat to Americans’ fundamental private property rights and providing specific recommendations for state and federal policymakers to protect those rights and push back against the green agenda.
Some of those recommendations from authors Jack McPherrin, H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., and Daylea DuVall Camp include state policymakers eliminating or mitigating the ability for CCS companies to use eminent domain by addressing common carrier designations, and federal policymakers both ceasing the regulation of CO2 as a harmful pollutant and cutting off funding for CCS projects.
The following statements from climate and energy experts at The Heartland Institute may be used for attribution.
“Efforts to foist carbon capture and storage (CCS) initiatives on the energy sector represent a government-backed boondoggle. CCS is scientifically unjustified because we don’t face a climate crisis, as well as economically harmful by raising energy costs. And, in the grift of all grifts, CCS results in the forced sale of peoples’ property. No one should be forced to allow a CCS pipeline to be built across their land, as it serves no public purpose; rather, it just accrues unjustified profits to politically connected green-energy promoters. Politicians and public utility commissions should act to specifically preclude CCS companies from using eminent domain to violate peoples’ constitutionally guaranteed property rights.”
Former President Ronald Reagan famously said that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help”. His point was that Government “help” often leads to worse outcomes for its supposed beneficiaries. Not only have many governments been incredibly inefficient in achieving claimed objectives of helping citizens, but they have often proved to be malicious in intent: the “help” offered has been a cover to stay in power.
Former President Ronald Reagan famously said that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help”. His point was that Government “help” often leads to worse outcomes for its supposed beneficiaries. Not only have many governments been incredibly inefficient in achieving claimed objectives of helping citizens, but they have often proved to be malicious in intent: the “help” offered has been a cover to stay in power.
Liberal democracies have a limited repertoire of state-sanctioned carrots and sticks, and none of these allow governments to easily trample citizens’ rights enshrined in law such as habeas corpus or the right to trial in a court of law. There are certain norms that apply to government action in modern liberal democracies, and these cannot easily be over-ridden. We call these norms civilised.
Nonetheless, we have witnessed in our lifetimes a new mode of practical politics observed by the great essayist H. L. Mencken. He said, in so many words, that our governments manufacture imaginary hobgoblins – creatures of the mind that can be mischievous, frightening and even dangerous – and then wait for citizens to clamour for safety.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary
In serving those needs for safety, governments are more likely to get re-elected. Government by hysteria in other words, where fear and alarm are cultivated, then weaponised, for political ends.
Yet exploiting hysteria to govern, with dramatic displays of outrage or emotion, is not without challenges. Hobgoblins cannot bamboozle everyone all the time. Fear and alarm wear out, and truth matters in justifying policies that impact the livelihoods of people.
The Climate Hobgoblins
Climate hobgoblins have been long in the making. Maurice Strong, a Canadian environmentalist and principal architect of the 1972 Stockholm conference – the first global summit to make the environment the central issue – proclaimed that “If we don’t change, our species will not survive. … Frankly, we may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilisation to collapse.” For mere hobgoblins, this was big stuff. These ones endangered mankind itself.
The threatening features of this genre of hobgoblins went through several permutations. It started with Paul Ehrlich’s famine and war through over-population and the Club of Rome’s prediction of inevitable resource scarcity. It then morphed into global cooling during the 1970s, before finally settling for global warming (now called ‘climate change’) due to effects of greenhouse gases. The focus is on the trace gas carbon dioxide mainly emitted by humans combusting fuels for industry, cooking, heating, cooling and transport.
The story is that the CO2 hobgoblins are the control knob of climate and, by extension, our cataclysmic future, a theory spread via the panic of a Swedish school drop-out who deleted her predictive tweet about the end of the world by 2023. Along with the Swede Greta Thunberg (now a campaigner for Palestinian rights) are the assorted ‘climate scientists’ who have conjured up the climate hobgoblins with their global warming ‘hockey stick’ charts and their pseudoscientific climate models duly adopted by the UN’s IPCC.
Lionel Shriver captures the climate hobgoblins’ mischievousness well:
They take temperature readings at Heathrow airport. They refuse to cite less distressing satellite readings. They attribute single weather events to climate change without supporting data. They play on the fact that up close, all natural disasters seem like the worst ever. They suppress good news, such as the recovery of the Great Barrier Reef and the fact that hurricanes have not grown more frequent – only reporting the ’hottest July on record’ without noting when the ‘record’ goes back only to 1940.
The work of the climate hobgoblins has stoked up the climate hysteria which is amplified by the mass media on almost daily basis. The deluge of catastrophic predictions regarding climate change and its consequences has reached everyone on the planet. One has only to cite the frequent hyperbolic pronouncements by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who never tires of reminding his global audience of the “climate emergency”: it is “a code red for humanity. The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable”; the “era of global boiling has arrived”, and so on ad nauseam.
John Clauser, a 2022 Nobel prize laureate in physics, finds climate alarmism “a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people”. He continues:
Misguided climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience. In turn, the pseudoscience has become a scapegoat for a wide variety of other unrelated ills. It has been promoted and extended by similarly misguided business marketing agents, politicians, journalists, agencies and environmentalists.
The COVID-19 Hobgoblins
If the climate hobgoblins were long in the making, the Covid variety were anything but. The first reports of COVID-19 emerged in late December 2019, when an outbreak of an unidentified form of pneumonia was reported in Wuhan, China. The World Health Organisation (WHO) and the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began reporting on the outbreak in January 2020 with individual cases reported in Thailand and elsewhere.
By March 2020, the World Health Organisation (WHO) had declared COVID-19 a global health emergency and named the virus “severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2”. It was also in March that WHO officially declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic. In the early stages of the spread in infection, countries around the world took different approaches to manage COVID-19 and reduce the spread of the virus. Most countries adopted more or less strict lockdowns (encompassing stay-at-home orders, curfews, quarantines, cordons sanitaires and similar societal restrictions) with the significant exception of Sweden which undertook limited targeted measures such as protecting the elderly and the infirm. Strict lockdowns were precluded by insufficient state capacity in the poorer countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
The British Prime Minister Boris Johnson spoke of common sense, ‘herd immunity’ and protecting the vulnerable. He initially rejected banning mass gatherings or imposing social distancing rules. Then, an unpublished alarmist March 16th report by Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London warned of 510,000 deaths in the country if the country did not immediately adopt a suppression strategy. On March 23rd, the UK Government reversed course and imposed one of Europe’s strictest lockdowns. For the US, the professor had predicted 2.2 million deaths absent similar government controls, and there too, Ferguson’s fearful predictions of mass deaths helped move the US federal government into lockdown mode.
Unlike climate change models that predict outcomes over a period of decades, however, it takes only days and weeks for epidemiological model forecasts to be falsified by data. Furthermore, by including all extreme weather (whether heavy snowfalls or heatwaves, droughts or floods) as results of an all-encompassing ‘climate change’, nothing could be disproven.
But the COVID-19 hobgoblins could not provide cover for Professor Ferguson’s hysterical conjectures. Thus, by March 25th, Ferguson’s predicted half a million fatalities in the UK was adjusted downward to “unlikely to exceed 20,000”, a reduction by a factor of 25. This drastic reduction could not be credibly explained by UK’s lockdown measures which had been imposed only two days previously, before any such measures could possibly have had enough time to work.
The Corruption of Science
While the climate and COVID-19 hobgoblins may be of different genres, they share much in common. They share striking parallels in the corruption of science, with the use of models whether they be of a bogus global warming hockey-stick or runaway epidemiological fatality predictions. This inordinate dependence on speculative, not-fit-for-purpose models betray the lack of transparency and groupthink, which involves the suppression of sceptics who question the imaginary hobgoblins.
A recent victim of the groupthink censorship is the highly eminent public health specialist Dr Jay Bhattacharya who co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration which criticised the wholesale adoption of rigid lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Nominated by President Trump as the next head of the National Institutes of Health, he has undergone four years of censorship, blacklisting and vilification. Dr John Clauser, who disputes the ‘climate crisis’ narrative, was similarly cancelled. He was disinvited by the IMF from a talk he was supposed to deliver and was subject to hit pieces in the mainstream media.
In the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown in the UK, former Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption denounced the country’s “hysterical slide into a police state. … An irrational overreaction driven by fear”. He went on to masterfully describe the role of hysteria in politics:
The real problem is that when human societies lose their freedom, it’s not usually because tyrants have taken it away. It’s usually because people willingly surrender their freedom in return for protection against some external threat. And the threat is usually a real threat but usually exaggerated. That’s what I fear we are seeing now. The pressure on politicians has come from the public. They want action. They don’t pause to ask whether the action will work. They don’t ask themselves whether the cost will be worth paying. They want action anyway. And anyone who has studied history will recognise here the classic symptoms of collective hysteria. Hysteria is infectious. We are working ourselves up into a lather in which we exaggerate the threat and stop asking ourselves whether the cure may be worse than the disease.
Hobgoblins Fade, People Wake Up
Much as people want protection from imaginary hobgoblins and their perceived threats, when governments turn tyrannical and pursue policies which cost far more than they benefit, people eventually undergo a process of disillusionment with a yearning for meaningful change. Regimes in power in turn double down on hysteria and panic-driven policies to keep the hobgoblins at bay. This causes even further impoverishment and alienation among larger sections of the population.
Rather than allocating resources and efforts towards protecting the vulnerable from COVID-19 while allowing the rest of the population to carry on with their livelihoods with individuals taking responsibility for safe socialising, most governments imposed top-down, economy-crushing lockdowns followed by mandates and exhortations to wear masks and take vaccinations and endless booster shots. And rather than mitigating real environmental threats such as ensuring water reservoirs are filled and forests are managed to safeguard against fires in California for example, the climate change establishment advocates further ‘decarbonisation’ (read deindustrialisation) to save us from extreme scenarios of global warming.
The triumphant return of Donald Trump as the 47th president of the US was the culmination of that process of disillusionment. The hobgoblins of COVID-19 and climate no longer seemed to hold sway. Rather, more people than not preferred to believe in, and vote for, a leader that dismissed the ‘climate crisis’ as a hoax and who was willing to give succour to those that refused COVID-19 vaccinations despite being threatened with the loss of jobs and ordinary freedoms.
On the first day of his administration, President Donald Trump signed a series of executive orders which promise to end hysteria over fearful narratives. In the areas of energy, environment and the so-called ‘climate crisis’, President Trump has instructed his administration to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord, reopen Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas exploration, temporarily withdraw all areas on the Outer Continental Shelf from offshore wind leasing, review the federal Government’s leasing and permitting practices for wind projects, declare a national energy emergency, stop radical environmentalism by “putting people over fish” to provide water to southern California; and put ‘America First’ in international environmental agreements.
With respect to issues related to COVID-19 and public health, the most consequential move Mr. Trump made in his election campaign was to unite forces with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who initially ran as an independent, and to nominate him as his next Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. On his first day, he issued an executive order to withdraw from the World Health Organisation. He also promised to “reinstate any service members who were unjustly expelled from our military for objecting to the COVID-19 vaccine mandate with full back pay”.
At his 1933 Presidential Inauguration, Franklin D. Roosevelt asserted his firm belief that “the only thing we have to fear is… fear itself”. Imaginary hobgoblins, threatening as they are, do fade away as people realise the truth.
Dr. Tilak K. Doshi is an economist, a former contributor to Forbes, and a member of the CO2 Coalition.
Last month I analyzed various holes in the draft federal California Programmatic EIS (PEIS) for offshore wind.
Now a new report shows that these seemingly big holes are tiny compared to the yawning Programmatic EIS gap created by the Federal Action Plan for West Coast offshore wind development.
Last month I analyzed various holes in the draft federal California Programmatic EIS (PEIS) for offshore wind. See.
Now a new report shows that these seemingly big holes are tiny compared to the yawning Programmatic EIS gap created by the Federal Action Plan for West Coast offshore wind development.
To begin with the full California Program is huge compared to the measly five leases covered by the so-called California PEIS. The document I wrote about would be better called the Starter Kit EIS. Plus, there is a lot of development off of Oregon and Washington.
I earlier pointed out that the PEIS document did not address the cumulative impact of those five leases; it just looked at the generic impact of one lease. But what is really Missing In Action is an environmental impact assessment for the entire West Coast Program.
The new report bears the long title: “AN ACTION PLAN FOR Offshore Wind Transmission Development in the U.S. West Coast Region” (all caps in the original).
The Action Plan is a conceptual design for transmission of offshore generation but in order to do that design you have to know where the generation is so that is included in considerable detail.
Instead of the just five leases considered in the present draft EIS the Action Plan includes about one hundred leases by 2035. These typically occur in clusters of from 5 to 20 leases. Moreover while the total generating capacity for 2035 is 15,000 MW this grows to 33,000 MW in 2050.
Each lease contains numerous huge floating turbines each anchored to the sea floor thousands of feet below with multiple mooring lines. So, the environmental impact of each cluster is potentially enormous.
Even worse a series of these clusters basically line the coast especially in Northern California and Southern Oregon. Migrating species might encounter and be adversely affected by this entire series.
The list of endangered or protected species that are threatened is quite long. As I pointed out in my prior article these massive 3D cable arrays are a new form of harassment under the Marine Mammal Protection Act. There are also endangered sea turtles, giant rays, etc., in jeopardy.
The PEIS says a single turbine floater can require up to 12 mooring lines to keep it stable and in place in heavy weather. Assuming 15 MW turbines with a dozen lines each the 15,000 MW development would have 12,000 mooring lines. The 33,000 MW case would have a staggering 26,400 mooring lines, many over 4,000 feet long.
We are talking about thousands of square miles of deep ocean literally filled with webs of cables. Harassment is defined by the Marine Mammal Protection Act as causing behavioral change on a protected animal’s part and these monstrous webs will certainly do that. This very large scale continuous harassment should be carefully assessed.
The PEIS also briefly mentions the threat of “secondary entanglement” in the nets, lines and other debris that are caught on these cables over time. The potential adverse effects of this deadly accumulation needs to be assessed in detail before any offshore projects are approved.
The clear solution to these mooring line threats is to severely constrain the number of harassment authorizations. With these very limited authorizations very few new offshore wind projects can be built. Nor should they be since they are environmentally destructive. Each project requires a large number of authorizations so drastically reducing their number drastically reduces the number of offshore wind projects.
The simplest way to do this is to cap the total number of wind authorizations that will be issued throughout the Program for a given exposed population. This is analogous to capping the emission of dangerous pollutants. One could even have a cap and trade program where developers bid for authorizations just as they now bid for leases. The 1990 cap and trade program for power plant sulfur dioxide emissions is an obvious analog.
If the cumulative harassment were limited to say 10% of the exposed population of each threatened species this would severely constrain offshore wind development.
In summary the so-called California Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement is nothing of the kind. The full Offshore Wind Program needs to be assessed for the entire West Coast before any project is approved for construction. This required assessment is Missing in Action.
Based on this assessment the cumulative impacts then have to be minimized. Capping the authorized harassment of each threatened species may be the best way to avoid destructive impacts.
A few hundred years ago, coffee was almost an unknown commodity with hardly a handful of countries consuming it at a commercial scale. But today, it is a sought-after drink that drives multiple companies to compete for the world’s best beans.
A few hundred years ago, coffee was almost an unknown commodity with hardly a handful of countries consuming it at a commercial scale. But today, it is a sought-after drink that drives multiple companies to compete for the world’s best beans.
An estimated 21 billion pounds of green coffee are produced annually across more than 25 million acres worldwide. U.S., Brazil, and Japan are the top coffee-consuming countries.
Though late to the caffeinated party, China is now driving global demand. In the 2023-2024 crop year, China’s consumption reached nearly six million 60-kilogram bags, while domestic production stood at less than two million bags. The balance was imported.
But will this global java joy be interrupted by production shortfalls caused by climate change? A simple Google search will yield thousands of news articles about how a warming world is killing Arabica and Robusta coffee beans.
I am currently based in India where tea is king. But coffee consumption is on the rise and could soon reach levels seen in Scandinavia, Canada, and Indonesia. Coincidentally, I am writing this from a city just few hours away from the largest coffee-growing region in the country.
“There have been difficulties in terms of water (and) temperatures, but (they have) not affected production majorly because (they are) not something new,” says Suhas Dwarkanath of Benki Coffee.
This was confirmed by India’s Commerce Ministry, which has allayed fears about weather disruptions and projects higher coffee output for 2024-25. The Indian Coffee Board has set a 10-year road map for doubling the country’s coffee production and exports.
While focusing on weather impacts, analysts and media often overlook other factors that can significantly influence coffee crops.
Colombia, for example, has experienced important benefits from improved agronomic practices. In fact, the coffee crops have benefited from adaptation to changing climate and enhanced pest-control methods. These two factors have been credited for Columbia’s record 2024 production of coffee beans, which is expected to be as much as 20% higher than the previous year’s.
Likewise, Brazil has seen an increase of 32% in production this year. Brazil contributes over a third of the global coffee supply and is the primary producer of Arabica beans, making up approximately 75% of the world’s coffee production.
Coffee Under Worst Case Scenario
It is important to note that most of the fear surrounding a rise in future temperatures is based on erroneous climate models that are currently being used for forecasting. These models are notorious for glaring errors, including the exaggeration of greenhouse gases’ warming effect and the failure to account for other causes of warming.
Even if temperatures do rise significantly, coffee production can be moved to cooler locales at higher altitudes and at latitudes farther from the equator. For instance, conducive to growing both Arabica and Robusta are Southern California and alternative regions in existing coffee-producing countries like Brazil and India.
In Colombia, researchers modeled “climate suitability and crop-yield for current and future climate scenarios” and included factors such as soil constraints, pest infestation and socio-economic elements. They found that the “foothills along the eastern Andean Mountain ranges, the high plains of the Orinoquía region and the wet parts of the Caribbean region” are highly favorable to growing coffee if average temperature were to increase.
In Ethiopia — one of the world’s largest coffee producers — climate change was found to increase the suitable growing area by as much as 44% by 2080.
Likewise, the plateaus in China’s Yunnan Province are expected to have acreage suitable for growing coffee increase significantly in scenarios assuming future warming.
None of this takes into account improved coffee hybrids that can increase yields by 30-60%. Researchers have now found that these varieties have greater resistance to climatic changes and to pests.
I think it is safe to say that our coffee supply is secure for the foreseeable future. So, the next time you hear that the emissions of your internal combustion engine are endangering your morning cup of joe, take it with a grain of salt — or perhaps with a cup of salted caramel cappuccino.
This commentary was first published at American Thinkeron January 13, 2025.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India.
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