Day: March 8, 2025

Government Funding Corrupts Science, How to Stop It

Direct government funding of science has to end.
Here is why, and what should replace it.

From Science Matters

 By Ron Clutz

William Briggs explains in his blog article The Case For Ending Government Funding of Science.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Direct government funding of science has to end.
Here is why, and what should replace it.

Some are making a big deal of a new paper in which “researchers found that between 1994-2023 not one of the 82 ‘climate science’ papers they identified had a financial or non-financial COI disclosure from at least one author.”

For the last decade, or more, I have been waving my arms around like a deranged monkey shouting that scientists, ante-Trump, did not view money from the government as tainted, biased, interested, dirty, suspicious or, especially, obliging. Instead, they thought of it as a natural and expected reward from the god Beneficence, i.e. Government, giving his people what they deserved, and they deserved because they were smart and spoke the right beliefs. They constantly told each other they were smart, anyway. And awarded credentials to each other to verify it.

Point is, when the moola was from Beneficence,
scientists saw NO conflict of interest.

They could not conceive of it existing. They thought their payoff was natural. And that was just as true when the money came from Beneficence’s brother god NGO. From the same source quoted above: “The research also found that:

“funding from NGOs was a significant predictor of studies reporting a positive association between climate change and hurricane behavior.”

No kidding.

How is it scientists claim purity, innocence, and disinterestedness when it is they themselves who hop on the Acela to DC and sit on the government committees that decide who gets the grant money from Beneficence? Of course, the government has interest in the outcomes of research! How could they not? They asked for the research done specifically. They culled from consideration all proposals that were deemed hostile, inadequate, or politically incorrect. They, in cooperation with the gift getters, chose who lived and who died by the grant. Then Beneficence paid out! The government also asked for regular updates on the work which they asked and paid for.

I become exasperated every time I discuss this topic because I can’t see how this is not obvious. But it isn’t! We saw last week the (now) 3,400+ scientists who rage-signed a petition purportedly against Musk, but really to signal the scientists’ waning respect and fear over loss of all that free money they felt they so richly deserved.

Every source of money, save exceedingly rare completely
anonymous no-known-source gifts, has an interest.

When the sole source of funding, or near enough, is the government, the government thus has total interest and total control over the course of science. And those scientists who participate in the process, especially those who serve on grants committees, become part of the government, even though they hold no official position.

This system would be wonderful if the government was truly beneficent and wise. It is not. It is neither. I need only say to you DIE, “pregnant men”, “climate change”, “women in STEM”—and these are only a fraction of what has gone wrong—to prove that single-source behemoth control of science funding leads to absurdities.

And arrogance. Scientists in universities grew, as Eisenhower warned, too used to the largess, too hubristic over the “we pay; you do” system. That is not my phrase, but The Atlantic’s. They report on growing alarm over the new administration breathing Reality back into science (purging DIE), and from the loss of funds (like overhead). They say “The government has funded science and then largely left well enough alone.” This is as false as “pregnant men”. The government funded what it wanted! And it got what it wanted. They didn’t just leave pools of money from which scientists came and freely grazed. They controlled who got every cent.

Scientists are right to be frightened.
The new small cuts should only be the start.

 The entire grants apparatus, except perhaps for rare special exceptions (which I am not here prepared to name), ought to be dismantled. There are too many scientists, fed by too much money, which leads to too much bad science, which drags the entire system down. I have written about this scores of times and won’t justify that opinion more here.

Notice I do not say “do not fund science”. I say the government grants system ought to be abolished. Here are some ideas what could replace it.

If every source of money is interested, then spread the interest around so it’s not concentrated to serve one cracked master. This reduces the chance science becomes degraded and cancerous and calcified as it now is.

I’ve already written a good deal of science can be shunted to private interests, who are free to pursue that which interests them. That is the most obvious route. Pharmaceuticals rely on this, and they ain’t hurtin’ (Trump will soon sign an executive order banning p-values). Stop counting on universities to churn ideas which private interests might use. Instead, do it yourself, homegrown. A larger spend up front, but an even larger return on investment at the end.

Patronage is a traditional route. The best off should indulge in noblesse oblige. Which, of course, many do. But they give the money to universities, which are corrupted to the bone, not least because of all the government money, but also because of misguided Equality (too many kids go to university), and managerialism (universities have more administrators than professors). If, and once, universities are restored to their former glory, the rich can return and have buildings named after them.

For now, fund individual scientists,
who can be anywhere and not just campus bound.

Or not just for now, but forever. This is the idea of Jacob Shell. He would give university scientists large salaries, and no grants. See if you’re not crying “Amen!” at the end of this:

Academic freedom of inquiry is the opposite of the grant system. The two cannot cohabitate the same cosmos. Because academic grants exist, nobody in the academy is really intellectually free. If academics were really intellectually free, then there could not be such a thing as an academic grant.

Scientists would use their own money, however obtained, to fund their own research. Which would be whatever they wanted it to be. Or not. Groups of scientists could form bands and pool their money to do more expensive research. If they wanted. Or not.

This brilliant idea results immediately in far fewer scientists, which brings freedom. It instantly reduces publish or perish, since scientists won’t have to grub for grants. The breathing room bought by this is wonderful to imagine. If this is done at universities, the extra money to pay scientists would have to come from firing administrators and asssistants to the asssistant Deans. A giddy thought.

It’s not that scientists won’t have to beg for money from someone. It’s that they will have to beg from someones. It spreads the interest around. The system becomes more adversarial and independent and thus creative. It would indeed result in a reduction of science. That is a blessing.

It forces the government, which would be out of the business of funding scientists, to find scientists which support whatever programs the government loves and convince those who have money to fund these scientists. That requires real work and will be forever a path to corruption. But a tangled one, which slows the rot. Now, government pays scientists directly to give them the support for The Science, so politicians and announce, “Follow The Science!” and pretend there is no taint.

Science needs to feel the pain of hugeous cuts. Pain is necessary to grow.
If anybody reading this has access to our new rulers,
get them not just to cut overhead but cut it all.

Winter Weather Trends

After what seems to have been three months of weather and flood warnings day after day, it turns out that the winter in this country was not unusual in the least. It was cooler than in was a hundred years ago in 1925, and actually drier than average:

By Paul Homewood

After what seems to have been three months of weather and flood warnings day after day, it turns out that the winter in this country was not unusual in the least. It was cooler than in was a hundred years ago in 1925, and actually drier than average:

The Met Office have an obsession with what the weather was like 150 years ago, which has absolutely no relevance whatsoever without lives now.

Yet according to them, climate is the average of 30 years weather, so what do the 30-year trends look like?

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/pub/data/weather/uk/climate/datasets/Tmean/date/England.txt

There is no obvious evidence of winters becoming warmer. Merely an absence of exceptionally cold ones in the last decade – winters like 1990/91, 1995/96, 2009/10 and 2010/11.

And the precipitation data disproves the routine claims that winters are getting wetter.

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/pub/data/weather/uk/climate/datasets/Rainfall/date/England.txt

Scotland’s Last Oil Refinery to Close – Giving the Lie to Miliband’s Net Zero Jobs Claim

Scotland’s last oil refinery is to close with the loss of more than 400 jobs despite assurances from Keir Starmer and Ed Miliband, giving the lie to claims about Net Zero jobs and a “just transition”.

From The Daily Sceptic

By Will Jones

Scotland’s last oil refinery is to close with the loss of more than 400 jobs despite assurances from Keir Starmer and Ed Miliband, giving the lie to claims about Net Zero jobs and a “just transition”. The Telegraph has more.

When Sir Keir Starmer visited Scotland days after becoming Prime Minister, he sought to reassure workers at the Grangemouth oil refinery by claiming that saving their jobs was a top priority.

What has happened since then, however, has been far from comforting.

After learning their jobs were at risk in December 2023, employees at the PetroIneos refinery in Falkirk – which produces 80% of Scotland’s petrol – were told last September that the site would close with the loss of more than 400 jobs.

Bosses blamed the decision on the costs of operating Scotland’s last refinery, as well as Britain’s plan to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by 2035.

Still, many employees were left stunned. As well as Sir Keir, both Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader, and Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, had given strong assurances they would seek to save the sprawling facility, which has been a fixture in Grangemouth since 1924.

“I think everyone was shocked that the announcement came when it did,” says “Jack”, an employee who started as an apprentice at the refinery and has been there for more than a decade.

The worker, who does not want to give his real name, adds: “The refinery has been around for more than 100 years and it’s part of the community.

“There are people who are the third or fourth generation of their family to work there, others who have been there for 40 years.

“Lots of people here saw it as a job for life, and Labour had said that oil and gas was still going to be around for a long time. So it’s been very worrying – and there’s a lot of anger and frustration.”

The episode has raised troubling questions about the Government’s repeated promises of a “just transition”, where no workers in the oil and gas industry will be left behind as Britain phases out fossil fuels in favour of green energy.

Sir Keir has repeatedly vowed that Labour will not repeat the Thatcher government’s “callous” decision to shut down Britain’s remaining coal mines in the 1980s without ensuring workers had alternative jobs to go to.

“The effects of that are still felt in communities across the country and never, ever again must we make that mistake,” the Prime Minister said in a 2023 speech.

Yet if Grangemouth is the first big test of this policy, local people say the Government is failing badly.

Cliff Bowen, a union convenor for Unite who has worked at Grangemouth for 30 years under Ineos and the site’s former owner BP, is furious about the failure to prevent the refinery’s demise and the lack of action to provide it with an alternative future.

What particularly angers his members, he says, is that the closure will not even dent overall global carbon emissions, of which the UK makes up less than 1%.

Now, Ineos and its partner PetroChina have said the site will become an import terminal for bringing in refined fuels from abroad.

“The reason we ended up with final closure is because there’s not been any political will to get behind it,” says Bowen.

“If you can’t get a just transition at Grangemouth, you have no chance elsewhere. No chance. Because what else is it you’re looking for? We’ve got the skills, we’ve got the geography, we’re blessed with the resources.

“But what we’re going to do is just completely and utterly give all that up on the back of some campaign, this altar of net zero that they all seem to worship in government – with no plan for jobs.”

He adds: “Why would you continue to import from foreign regimes and prop up their economies, to the destruction of your own communities?”

Worth reading in full.

The Horrifying Truth About the Cost of Net Zero

The Telegraph has a piece by Gordon Hughes, former Professor of Economics at the University of Edinburgh, about the real cost of Net Zero in the UK and it doesn’t make for comfortable reading. Frustrated by the absence of the lack of any sensible costings of the Government’s Clean Power 2030 plans, he’s done his own. The person who should be squirming in his seat the most is, of course, Ed Miliband, except that his head is firmly in the sand.

The Daily Sceptic

By Sallust

The Telegraph has a piece by Gordon Hughes, former Professor of Economics at the University of Edinburgh, about the real cost of Net Zero in the UK and it doesn’t make for comfortable reading. Frustrated by the absence of the lack of any sensible costings of the Government’s Clean Power 2030 plans, he’s done his own. The person who should be squirming in his seat the most is, of course, Ed Miliband, except that his head is firmly in the sand.

Hughes points out that the UK simply doesn’t have either the capital or engineers to achieve the 2030 ambitions. But it’s much worse:

You won’t hear that from Ed Miliband, who still insistently repeats the mantra that decarbonisation of the grid will protect us against price spikes caused by “volatile” gas markets. But he cannot know this, because his department has resolutely refused to produce a credible estimate of what the planned Net Zero electricity system will cost. Indeed, one of his first acts as Secretary of State was to cancel the system costing belatedly commissioned by his predecessor, Claire Coutinho.

In the absence of any official estimate, I have recently calculated and published my own system costing of the Net Zero grid, and I can therefore tell readers with some certainty that Clean Power 2030 is an astonishingly poor deal. On average my calculations show that the Net Zero grid would be a remarkable £15 billion per year more expensive than our current one – even allowing for the possibility of our being hit every 10 years by the rare combination of events that led to the 2022 energy price crisis, namely the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline and the simultaneous outage of large parts of the French nuclear fleet. Put another way, Net Zero will only look affordable if there’s a crisis. In normal times it will cost us dear.

Why is decarbonising the grid so expensive, given that the cost of generating wind and solar power is almost nothing? The answer is that Clean Power 2030 involves building, maintaining (and periodically replacing) enormously more machinery and grid connection than we currently have, and the payment of huge extra costs in such areas as balancing the grid. My calculations indicate that every household will need to find an extra £925 per year, probably paid for via higher electricity bills.

It’s already clear that the economy can’t sustain any further energy price rises, let alone increases on the scale that Clean Power 2030 would produce. And there are worse problems: it’s not at all clear that we will make it to 2030 without blackouts, as a glance at the Government’s plans for generation capacity over the next few years shows that we might have a crisis on our hands before then.

In essence we may not have enough generation capacity to keep the lights on.

That will mean new gas power stations, but there’s a problem, says Hughes:

Even if we can get the new gas-fired power stations we need built in time, it is unlikely that they will be the high-efficiency combined cycle units that have been the backbone of the grid for three decades. Instead, we will get so-called open-cycle units, which are more suited to intermittent operation, but will deliver more expensive power (and more emissions). Worse, their owners will have to be paid very high prices when we need them to get through periods of no wind and sun, as much of the time they will sit idle. And there will have to be enough of them to power most of the grid without help, as Dunkelflaute windless gloomy periods can last for days and the grid’s batteries for only hours.

The costs will be astronomical:

To put it another way, under our current direction of travel, the best-case scenario is that electricity becomes impossibly expensive but the lights stay on.

With the Government desperate for growth, it is clear that Net Zero is a voyage that the United Kingdom simply can’t afford to take. We will have to turn back if our economy is to survive.

Hughes suggests consumers will be priced out of using power. Unless the Government starts waking up it may be too late and it will face the uncomfortable discovery that when the power cuts start the voting British public won’t care where the power comes from or who provides it, so long as they get it and can afford it.

Worth reading in full, and let’s hope someone in particular does read it.

New Study Finds No Net Warming In Central Scandinavia For The Last 270 Years

A robust 1750-2020 temperature proxy reconstruction (Karlsson et al., 2025) from a spruce forest in the Norwegian mountains identifies yet another location on the globe unaffected by anthropogenic “global warming.”

From NoTrickZone

By Kenneth Richard 

The study locations; showing mountain Middagsvalen: (a), the north-western slope of Middagsvalen MVNW: (b), the south-eastern slope of Middagsvalen MVSE: (c) and the northern slope of Ierhkiebielie IBN: (d).

A robust 1750-2020 temperature proxy reconstruction (Karlsson et al., 2025) from a spruce forest in the Norwegian mountains identifies yet another location on the globe unaffected by anthropogenic “global warming.”

Image Source: Karlsson et al., 2025

,1-s2.0-S1125786525000189-mainHerunterladen

Driving a Stake Through Stakeholder Capitalism

Writing shortly before President Trump’s return to the White House, Peter Thiel hailed the election as an apokálypsis, an unveiling, of the ancien régime’s secrets. “The new administration’s revelations need not justify vengefulness,” Thiel wrote. “But for reconciliation, there must first be truth.” The early weeks of Trump’s second term have been apocalyptic for some of progressives’ favorite acronyms such as DEI and USAID. So far, arguably the most damaging, ESG — an approach to finance derived from the UN’s Principles for Responsible Investment — and its spawn, stakeholder capitalism — which demotes shareholders to one of many groups (employees, customers, suppliers, and the environment) that companies should prioritize — have evaded their rendezvous with truth.

From Watts Up With That?

By Rupert Darwall

Writing shortly before President Trump’s return to the White House, Peter Thiel hailed the election as an apokálypsis, an unveiling, of the ancien régime’s secrets. “The new administration’s revelations need not justify vengefulness,” Thiel wrote. “But for reconciliation, there must first be truth.” The early weeks of Trump’s second term have been apocalyptic for some of progressives’ favorite acronyms such as DEI and USAID. So far, arguably the most damaging, ESG — an approach to finance derived from the UN’s Principles for Responsible Investment — and its spawn, stakeholder capitalism — which demotes shareholders to one of many groups (employees, customers, suppliers, and the environment) that companies should prioritize — have evaded their rendezvous with truth. That needs to change, because the last four years saw an unprecedented and sustained attack on America’s system of shareholder capitalism.

A year ago, the Delaware Court of Chancery struck down the ten-year performance-driven compensation package the Tesla board had awarded Elon Musk, a ruling reaffirmed in December despite the package having gained overwhelming shareholder approval a second time. Three years earlier, in May 2021, shareholders in ExxonMobil voted to put three directors on the board from a minuscule activist investor, Engine No.1, with a mandate to drive America’s largest oil company out of the oil and gas business and thereby destroy shareholder value.

The apparent paradox — no, let’s put that more strongly: The perversity of shareholders voting against their own apparent interests, which is what happened at ExxonMobil, has its own well-deserved apokálypsis in Andy Puzder’s new book, A Tyranny for the Good of Its Victims: The Ugly Truth about Stakeholder Capitalism (Encounter Books, January 2025). Central to Puzder’s account of the attempt to destroy shareholder capitalism is the role of the Big Three asset managers — BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street Global Advisors (SSGA), whose enormous size derives from the popularity of index funds among institutional investors and private investors alike.

Fundamental to the success of shareholder capitalism is the alignment of investors’ financial interests with the success of the businesses they’re shareholders in, which in turn drives economic growth and rising living standards. As Robert Rubin, President Clinton’s Treasury secretary for most of his second term, recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “While every company functions differently, businesses share the overarching goal of strong profitability over time. That focus is fundamental to our market economy.”

That link between the interest of the investor and the company is broken with index investing. “Don’t look for the needle in the haystack. Just buy the haystack!” John Bogle, the pioneer of index investing and founder of Vanguard, advised. The success of index funds gives rise to the anomalous situation where the Big Three have the most votes in a huge number of American companies but where their financial interest in the individual success of those businesses is so attenuated as to be virtually non-existent.

Puzder accuses the Big Three of corrupting capitalism. The corruption is not about anything as vulgar as money, it’s about power — in Puzder’s words, the Big Three’s use of their “unaccountable power to accomplish their ends.” Puzder exposes the speciousness of ESG as an investment methodology and how the Big Three’s inflicting ESG on businesses has real-world harms. An example is the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) in March 2023. Each of the Big Three had voted in favor of all SVB board candidates at SVB’s annual shareholder meeting in April 2022, even though BlackRock’s consulting arm had given SVB “a gentleman’s C” for its risk controls and found SVB lagging behind similar banks in eleven out of eleven factors in January 2022. SVB did not have a chief risk officer for nine critical months, and its sole board director with the necessary banking expertise, Thomas King, a former Barclays Investment Banking CEO, was excluded from SVB’s risk management committee.

Despite these warning signs, SVB was still included in BlackRock’s ESG-based fund products. As Puzder observes, “BlackRock’s major concern was not primarily corporate governance — it was diversity, and SVB gave BlackRock what it wanted.” (Puzder on DEI is priceless: “Three lies in one acronym.”) There’s no real reason to think that SSGA or (at least for a while) Vanguard saw things any differently. As Steve Soukup writes in his review, the “G” is often mistakenly viewed as the acceptable letter in ESG and goes on to quote Puzder that the “G” should be a “D” “because it stands for selecting corporate board members based on ‘diversity’ rather than merit or value to the company.”

But wasn’t ESG meant to identify risks that traditional financial analysis allegedly ignores? Not according to MSCI ESG Research, which had given SVB’s parent an above-average “A” rating. One of its vice presidents explained, “E, S, G does not cover core financial risks. We’re looking to assess financially-relevant environmental, social and governance factors, not financially-relevant financial factors.” Got that? Yup. It’s total hogwash.

Puzder puts this in the context of the Big Three’s willingness to use its voting power to bully boards into compliance with their dictates. In BlackRock CEO Larry Fink’s 2020 letter to CEOs — Puzder’s textural analysis of Fink’s annual epistolary emissions is outstanding — he warned boards, “When a company is not effectively addressing a material issue, its directors should be held accountable.” And that’s what BlackRock did. In 2021, BlackRock voted against the reelection of 1,862 directors at 975 companies based on a lack of board diversity.

In his 2019 letter, “Purpose and Profit” — earning Puzder’s rejoinder, “Profit is the purpose for which businesses exist” — Fink asserted that “society,” meaning himself, was “looking to companies to address pressing social and economic problems.” Later that year, the Business Roundtable (BRT) produced its now notorious “Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation,” about which Alex Gorsky, its chair of corporate governance and Johnson & Johnson CEO, confessed, “There were times when I felt like Thomas Jefferson.”

The document produced by the BRT’s Thomas Jefferson reversed the long-standing view of corporate purpose famously set out by Milton Friedman in a 1970 New York Times article. Puzder — his book is dedicated to Friedman’s memory — points out that the Big Three are the largest shareholders in virtually every company that signed the BRT statement, and in the case of Gorsky’s Johnson & Johnson, control a combined 23% of the stock. “It may have been a coincidence that the BRT issues its shareholder-capitalism concession in a year when BlackRock alone ‘voted against or withheld votes from 4,800 directors at 2,700 different companies’ — but I seriously doubt it,” Puzder writes.

Fink’s next two letters were even more extreme. “Every government, company and shareholder must confront climate change,” Fink wrote in bold type in his 2020 letter to CEOs, warning that climate change was causing “a fundamental reshaping of finance.” He went further in his 2021 letter, saying, “It’s important to recognize that net zero demands a transformation of the entire economy.” Who was demanding net zero? It wasn’t Congress. Congress has never passed a climate law with decarbonization targets, let alone a net-zero law. It was Fink who demanded — “we are asking” — that companies prepare net-zero plans and incorporate them into their long-term strategy.

There was real menace behind those words. In his 2020 letter, Fink had written, again in bold type, that BlackRock would be “increasingly disposed to vote against management and board directors when companies are not making sufficient progress on sustainability-related disclosures and the business practices and plans underlying them.” Fink went on to note that BlackRock had voted against or withheld votes from 4,800 directors at 2,700 different companies. That year, BlackRock’s stewardship team disclosed it had identified 244 companies making insufficient progress integrating climate risk into their business models or disclosures and had taken “voting action” against 53 of them. “This was an exercise of raw and absolute financial power,” Puzder writes. “If you were the CEO of one of the thousands of companies in which BlackRock invested the message was clear — Resistance is futile.”

One of those companies is, of course, ExxonMobil. Justifying its value-destroying, anti-fossil-fuel vote for the three Engine No.1 directors, BlackRock said it had a long history of multi-year engagement with the company on a range of issues including “oversight of climate risk” and had engaged with Exxon no fewer than twelve times over the previous year. “That is a lot of ‘stewardship,’” Puzder writes. “As it turns out, for U.S. and global consumers, international security, and Exxon’s shareholders, forcing Exxon to reduce oil production and advance net-zero policies was unequivocally the wrong plan.”

The Big Three are unlike other investors who make a bad call and suffer the consequences in their investment performance or who vote their values and accept the hit to their returns. For index fund providers, owning individual stocks and the proxies vested in them is an unavoidable by-product of Bogle’s buying the haystack. The Big Three’s vast accumulation of proxies creates the temptation for index managers to exercise power without responsibility and pursue ESG as politics by other means. The traditional assumption that shareholders were solely or primarily interested in financial return was not one that could be safely made in their case. That might have been true of their clients, whose money they were managing — the “real” (underlying) shareholders — but their investment managers had bigger fish to fry such as saving the planet.

Of them, despite some verbal backtracking by Fink, only Vanguard has shown the necessary awareness of the dangers this creates. “We don’t believe that we should dictate company strategy,” Vanguard’s then CEO, Tim Buckley, told the Financial Times in February 2023. “It would be hubris to presume that we know the right strategy for the thousands of companies that Vanguard invests with. We just want to make sure that risks are being appropriately disclosed and that every company is playing by the rules.”

Puzder has been a leading light in the resistance against ESG, which, especially at state level, was already proving far from futile even prior to Trump’s return to the White House. It’s a mark of progress that, as early as June 2023, Fink had dropped the term ESG, but remains committed to discussing “decarbonization” with companies that it describes as “critical to the transition to a low-carbon economy,” including those with carbon-intensive business models. DEI lives on in BlackRock’s “engagement” with companies over their “human capital management” including efforts to foster a diverse and inclusive workforce culture. “If you believe the collectivists will discontinue their efforts to use their massive financial leverage in order to achieve their authoritarian vision of utopia, you are wrong,” Puzder warns.

A May 2024 Bloomberg editorial board opinion piece echoed Buckley’s view in arguing that the Big Three’s stewardship “should be restricted to ensuring effective corporate governance and rigorously documented and disclosed.” Bringing about such a restriction in a legal settlement should be a key aim of litigation against the Big Three brought by states such as Texas. “Stewardship is actually more effective and more insidious than proxy voting, as it occurs in C-suite conference rooms and on Zoom calls, beyond the purview of both investors and those who would protect their interests,” Puzder says. The only durable and effective remedy is to radically curtail the scope of issues on which index funds can cast their proxies so that they are cast in favor of board proposals except for those ensuring more effective corporate governance or where adoption of a proposal would result in a demonstrable increase in shareholder returns.

Puzder himself says of ESG’s opponents, “We are not going away.” On January 23, President Trump nominated him to be U.S. ambassador to the EU. If confirmed by the Senate, Puzder will confront another threat to American capitalism in the form of the EU Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation and the EU taxonomy on sustainable activities and the ESG requirements they impose on European investors in American companies. If Brussels wants to gain a preview of the nominee, they would do well to read Puzder’s book, as should anyone who cares about the future of shareholder capitalism in America.

RUPERT DARWALL is a senior fellow of the National Center for Energy Analytics and author of The Age of Error: Net Zero and the Destruction of the West (publication later this year by Encounter Books).

This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.

The Climate United Fund Outrage: $7 Billion in Taxpayer Money Squandered in a Sham of Transparency and Accountability

It’s an absolute disgrace: the Climate United Fund, a shady nonprofit slapped together in November 2022, somehow wangled a jaw-dropping $7 billion grant from the Biden administration’s climate slush fund in April 2024—the largest nonprofit grant in U.S. history. This money, ripped from taxpayers’ pockets, was supposed to fuel clean energy projects under the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) of the Inflation Reduction Act. Instead, it’s become a glaring symbol of political cronyism, grift, and utter mismanagement, leaving Americans furious and demanding answers.

From Watts Up With That?

By Charles Rotter

It’s an absolute disgrace: the Climate United Fund, a shady nonprofit slapped together in November 2022, somehow wangled a jaw-dropping $7 billion grant from the Biden administration’s climate slush fund in April 2024—the largest nonprofit grant in U.S. history. This money, ripped from taxpayers’ pockets, was supposed to fuel clean energy projects under the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) of the Inflation Reduction Act. Instead, it’s become a glaring symbol of political cronyism, grift, and utter mismanagement, leaving Americans furious and demanding answers.

This so-called “popup nonprofit shell” started with a paltry $547,000 in revenue in 2022. By 2023, it had burned through $451,000 in just two months, with a whopping $323,000 of that mysteriously unaccounted for in its tax returns. Where did it go? No one knows—because the fund’s filings are a black hole of transparency, offering no details on officer pay or project plans, which any legitimate nonprofit would be required to disclose. Yet, Kamala Harris and EPA Chief Michael Regan handed over $7 billion for vague solar projects in Idaho, Arkansas, and Oregon—totaling a measly $50 million, a drop in the bucket compared to the billions entrusted to them. It’s an insult to every taxpayer who’s been left in the dark about where their hard-earned money is disappearing to.

The fund’s ties to Democratic insiders make this scandal even more infuriating. Its CEO, Beth Bafford, is a former Obama aide and campaign operative, and its board includes heavyweights like California’s Democratic Party Chairman Phil Angelides, Obama’s Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, and Stacey Abrams, whose linked group, Power Forward Communities, quietly pocketed some of the cash. This isn’t climate action—it’s a taxpayer-funded piggy bank for political pals, a blatant case of favoritism that reeks of corruption.

And it doesn’t stop there. This outrage is just one piece of a broader fiasco with the GGRF, which rushed $20 billion to eight newly minted environmental nonprofits after Biden’s 2024 election loss but before Trump took office in January 2025. Reports from the New York Post and Project Veritas expose how Biden officials scrambled to dump the money, with an EPA insider caught on video calling it “throwing gold bars off the Titanic.” Now, Trump’s EPA head, Lee Zeldin, has rightly frozen access to that $20 billion held by Citibank, citing rampant fraud, waste, abuse, and conflicts of interest. The DOJ and FBI are digging in, but it’s maddening that no hard evidence of criminality has surfaced yet. It’s a betrayal of public trust and a slap in the face to every American worried about their tax dollars.

As investigations grind on and lawsuits pile up over the frozen funds, the Climate United Fund scandal screams for justice. Federal government spending needs ironclad transparency and accountability, not backroom deals for political cronies. This mess is an outrage that demands answers.

CCN Moan About Efficiency Savings At NOAA

You may recall that CCN is a far-left lobby group for the climate agenda.

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

You may recall that CCN is a far-left lobby group for the climate agenda. In their own words:

It is a global journalism collaboration that supports, convenes, and trains journalists and newsrooms to produce rigorous climate coverage that engages audiences. 

Co-founded in 2019 by Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation magazine in association with the Guardian and WNYC, CCNow invites journalists everywhere to transform how our profession covers the defining story of our time. With hundreds of partner news outlets from over 60 countries reaching billions of people, CCNow helps journalists produce more informative and engaging coverage of the climate crisis and its potential solutions.

https://secure.givelively.org/donate/fund-for-constitutional-government/covering-climate-now

This week they have been complaining about Trump wanting to make some efficiency savings in the bloated NOAA organisation:

A Deadly Assault On Weather Reporting
“There will be people who die.” That stark warning came last week from Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, after US president Donald Trump sought to fire more than 800 employees of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. As a former TV weathercaster myself, I know the same worry is shared throughout the professional meteorological community.


NOAA houses the National Weather Service, which provides the data and analysis that informs virtually all of the weather forecasts Americans receive, whether via TV or radio broadcasts or their cell phone apps. Emergency alerts to coastal residents as a hurricane approaches? Warnings to farmers about an impending flood or heat wave? A winter weather advisory for mountain-bound ski vacationers? These and countless other life-saving services are at risk if Trump succeeds with his order, which legal experts say violates US law, according to reporting by Inside Climate News. 
“Going into the severe weather and hurricane season, this cannot be good,” Al Roker, the chief meteorologist for NBC News, wrote in a social media post responding to the NOAA layoffs.
The public deserves to know what’s at stake. To aid coverage of this developing story, it’s worth noting that NOAA is one of the best investments of taxpayer dollars on record. The National Weather Service’s annual budget of roughly $1.4 billion delivers an economic return in excess of $100 billion, according to one recent study. That’s not surprising, considering how directly the weather affects so much of the economy, including agriculture, air transportation, fishing, tourism, utilities, and commerce. To highlight this angle, reporters can explore the potential losses that companies, universities, and nonprofits may experience with further disruptions to the NOAA workforce. Think of airlines unable to steer their planes safely away from storms and farmers left unaware of an upcoming frost that threatens their entire season’s harvest.
Reporting can also point out that providing critical weather and climate information is just one part of NOAA’s work. Eat seafood? NOAA ensures that fish and shellfish from across the world are safe to consume. Enjoy a beach day? NOAA protects you from a number of marine impacts, including tsunamis (recent cuts included one scientist from this team). NOAA’s reach even extends beyond our planet, monitoring solar activity and “space weather” that disrupts global communications.
As climate change drives increasingly volatile and destructive extreme weather across the US and around the world, a reliable understanding of the climate-weather connection is critical to saving lives and ensuring that society can continue to function. Plain-spoken journalism can make clear the consequences if this attempt to cripple NOAA succeeds: People will die.
— David Dickson
CCNow’s TV Engagement Coordinator

Oh dear, poor NOAA!

What these crooks don’t tell you is that these 800 employees facing the boot are just a tiny fraction of the 12,000 employed at NOAA.

Are they really saying that there is no room for efficiency savings?

And if they are worried about the effect on weather forecasting, maybe they should trim some of the fat in the climate change sections, which now dominate all other activities. Just as in our UK Met Office, they are the tail wagging the dog.

Just as in the rest of the public sector, both in the UK and US, NOAA employees believe they are irreplaceable. And as here, many are still “working” from home – 500 have already accepted the government’s “fork in the road deal”, which pays them to carry on working at home till September and then leave.

The latest 800 are merely probationary employees, so are hardly vital to NOAA’s operation.

CCN’s protestations really are proof that the climate change gravy train is all about money and ripping off taxpayers.

AI revolution: So big, Texas grid needs the equivalent of 30 Nuclear Reactors By 2030 to meet Power Demand

The world is about to flip from an energy diet to an electrical boom. Look at Texas.

From JoNova

By Jo Nova

The insatiable hunger for electricity

The world is about to flip from an energy diet to an electrical boom. Look at Texas.

Here in Australia our top Blob Scientists tell us it will take 15 years to build one nuclear plant. But in Texas, which has two nuclear plants already, the AI revolution is beating down the door, and it’s saying “Feed me 30 plants for breakfast ” — or at least by 2030. It’s like a different planet.

There are already 340 datacentres in Texas which use 8GW of power, but new projects are so large, they are starting to ask for a whole gigawatt up front. And the sum total of requests for new electrical supply adds up to 99 gigawatts — most of which have materialized in the last year. The new level of demand is so big, the grid managers are starting to worry that single new industrial loads are large enough to threaten the grid.

We’re talking of a seismic shift:

The ERCOT grid peak load last summer was 86 gigawatts. The new peak demand by 2030 is expected to be 75% bigger. It may not all be nuclear, ERCOT did ask for “the equivalent” of 30 new nuclear plants. But it will be big and fast.

Texas has 31 million people. Australia has 26 million (plus a million foreign uni students). We’re performing a national pantomime over whether it’s realistic to build a few nuclear plants and a couple of SMR’s, as if we’re plotting to build the first colony on Venus. Meanwhile Texas is leading the revolution.

Texas Needs Equivalent of 30 Reactors to Meet Data Center Power Demand

Financial Post

“We’ve never existed in a place where large industrial loads can really impact the reliability of the grid, and now we are stepping into that world.”

[Bloomberg]— Demand on the Texas power grid is expected to expand so immensely that it would take the equivalent of adding 30 nuclear plants’ worth of electricity by 2030 to meet the needs.

That’s according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the grid. The forecast is based on the addition of new data centers needed to power artificial intelligence. And it’s raising concerns about whether infrastructure in the state will be able to expand fast enough — and at what cost.

ZeroHedge

Individual projects are already starting to request 1 gigawatt of power and they pose new risks to maintaining a stable grid, said Agee Springer, Ercot’s senior manager of grid interconnections. A gigawatt is typically enough to power 250,000 homes in Texas.

Ercot said it’s gotten requests equal to 99 gigawatts for new connections to the grid from big power users, including data centers, bitcoin miners and hydrogen producers, according to an internal grid presentation Thursday. That’s up from 40.8 gigawatts last March.

There’s a big question as to whether infrastructure can be built fast enough because of supply chain issues, resulting in long wait times for things like big turbines to produce electricity and other key equipment such as transformers. Another critical issues is who is going to pay for all of this build out.

One company is already planning to build 30 micronuclear plants. Another wants to develop molten salt reactors.

None of the AI teams are begging for wind or solar power. If Australia were to build new coal plants, or new nuclear plants with spare capacity, Big AI would be here in a flash. The La Trobe Valley could become a world leading AI centre if the government was willing to keep using the 300 years of cheap brown coal there. At 3 cents a kilowatt hour wholesale, it’s still the cheapest electricity on the planet.

Do we want to be the coal and iron mine at the edge of the world, or would we like to ride the revolution?