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.
The last time I wrote about the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) together, agency staffers were begging President Donald Trump’s DOGE chairman Elon Musk to ‘clean house’, as insiders revealed the agency squandered millions of taxpayer money on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs.
The last time I wrote about the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) together, agency staffers were begging President Donald Trump’s DOGE chairman Elon Musk to ‘clean house’, as insiders revealed the agency squandered millions of taxpayer money on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs.
Janet Petro, the acting director of NASA, announced the move Monday in a memo to staff obtained by USA TODAY, calling it a “phased reduction in force” that is “occurring in advance” of a Thursday deadline for agencies to submit layoff plans to the government’s human resources arm.
The memo did not disclose how many NASA jobs will be cut.
The cuts will close NASA’s Office of Technology, Policy and Strategy; the Office of the Chief Scientist; and the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility branch within the Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity, the memo said. The agency would also reduce the workforce in the Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity.
The mainstream media may decry the axe of the “Chief Scientist,” but that “scientist” was actually a climate advisor.
The cuts affect about 20 employees at NASA, including Katherine Calvin, the chief scientist and a climate science expert. The last day of work for Dr. Calvin and the other staff members will be April 10.
That could be a harbinger of deeper cuts to NASA’s science missions and a greater emphasis on human spaceflight, especially to Mars. During President Trump’s address to Congress last week, he said, “We are going to lead humanity into space and plant the American flag on the planet Mars and even far beyond.”
Change!!!!!
NASA chief scientist Katherine Calvin among 20+ staff laid off under Trump admin
Changes signal potential NASA shift from climate science toward human spaceflight
Military also cutting 90+ studies labeled “climate change crap” by Defense Sec Hegsethhttps://t.co/7bg6DdH17C
The Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) branch and another department are also closing.
NASA’s Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy, meanwhile, was only established in 2021 and serves as the home for the space agency’s chief economist and chief technologist, who provide the administrator “with analytic, strategic, and decisional insights in the form of quick-turn analyses, memos, and reports,” according to its website.
The third NASA office targeted, coordinating the agency’s DEIA efforts, was also the least surprising, as President Donald Trump’s administration has declared it would eliminate such efforts across the government.
What is perhaps most interesting about this news is that this is the agency’s first round of layoffs, and the firings targeted senior leadership.
These are NASA’s first firings since Trump took office, and they have taken a different pattern to those at other federal agencies in the past few weeks.
NASA was spared, for unknown reasons, from the extensive lay-offs of probationary employees — those with little job protection because they have been in their positions for less than two years — seen at other agencies.
The move makes NASA the first agency under the current Trump administration to pre-emptively fire career employees, beginning the required ‘reductions in force’ (RIFs) sooner than many observers had anticipated. It remains unclear whether other agencies might follow NASA’s lead.
Reductions in workforce at NASA have begun.
Divisions closed include Office of the Chief Scientist; the Office of Technology, Policy and Strategy; and the DEI branch of its Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity.
Legal Insurrections readers may recall that Trump selected billionaire, astronaut, and hero of the “Polaris” mission Jared Isaacman to lead NASA. His confirmation is still sitting in the US Senate, and no date has been set for the hearing.
I suspect that when Isaacman arrives for his first day as NASA Director, he will find a wonderfully refocused agency.
The union Aslef has threatened strike action over Sadiq Khan’s unwillingness to ban e-bikes from the London Underground network despite them causing severe fire risks.
h/t strativarius I guess union members watched those terrifying videos of e-bikes spontaneously exploding into white hot fireballs.
Tube drivers threaten to strike unless Sadiq Khan bans e-bikes from TfL network amid fire risks
The union Aslef has threatened strike action over Sadiq Khan’s unwillingness to ban e-bikes from the London Underground network despite them causing severe fire risks.
The warning comes after an explosion at Rayners Lane station occurred on February 27, which saw an e-bike catch fire on a platform, sending toxic fumes across the station.
The union has now argued that e-bikes pose the same fire risk as e-scooters, which were banned from the tube in 2021 due to their lithium batteries.
…
An internal London Underground investigation concluded that the e-bike was “only moments away from boarding the train”.
E-vehicle explosions can be terrifying – imagine this happening on a packed underground commuter train.
I was on the London Underground during the July 7th terrorist attack. I wasn’t on one of the trains which was attacked, but the train I was on went through the smoke cloud.
It didn’t take long for me to figure out what I was smelling, and what had likely happened. Luckily there was a delay in shutting down the cellular system, just long enough for me to phone my wife and let her know I was OK after I reached the surface.
Let us hope politicians find the courage to start banning dangerous e-batteries in enclosed spaces. The thought of politicians willing to risk inflicting such an experience on innocent people, not because they are terrorists, but simply because they are too stubborn to put safety ahead of green zealotry, this fills me with horror and disgust.
After twenty years of hailing wind and solar, suddenly the world’s tech giants are cheering for nuclear power. Worse — they don’t even mention the words carbon, low emissions or CO2. The new buzzwords are “safe, clean and firm“. They talk about needing energy “round the clock”, and they talk about “energy resilience” — but they don’t say nuclear is “low emissions”. It’s like they want everyone to forget their activism. Did someone say something about climate change?
After twenty years of hailing wind and solar, suddenly the world’s tech giants are cheering for nuclear power. Worse — they don’t even mention the words carbon, low emissions or CO2. The new buzzwords are “safe, clean and firm“. They talk about needing energy “round the clock”, and they talk about “energy resilience” — but they don’t say nuclear is “low emissions”. It’s like they want everyone to forget their activism. Did someone say something about climate change?
Meta, Amazon, and Google have flipped like a school of barracuda. Five minutes ago, life on Earth depended on achieving Net-Zero with fleets of wind farms in the sunset, now, they just want energy and lots of it. The big tech fish and their friends have signed a Large Energy Users Pledge admitting that the demand for energy is rising rapidly, that nuclear should triple by 2050 and that large energy users depend on the availability of abundant cheap energy (Small energy users too, Mr Bezos-Zuckerburg-Pichai.) The closest they come to hinting at the ghost of renewables is when they say they want energy that’s not dependent on “the weather, the season, or the geographical location”.
There’s no “Sorry we got it wrong”. There’s no apology for hectoring us, censoring us, or wasting billions of dollars. It’s just Mr Don’t-Look-Over-Here telling us what most engineers knew for 30 years. This is the billionaire club asking the taxpayers to build them more nuclear plants.
It’s the perfect storm. Just as renewable investments wallow in their failures, the AI race is escalating, and it needs monster data, which means monster energy. As we saw in Texas the new grid entrants are asking for a whole gigawatt of capacity each, and peak demand is expected to rise by a wild 75% in the next five years.
And of course, Donald Trump is in the WhiteHouse, so the subsidies are gone and the mood has changed. Indeed, it’s almost like the Tech Giants are afraid to mention “climate change” too much lest it annoy the new President or remind all their shareholders how much money they wasted.
Other governments need to adjust their policies at speed. Run, don’t walk…
The post below updates the UAH record of air temperatures over land and ocean. Each month and year exposes again the growing disconnect between the real world and the Zero Carbon zealots. It is as though the anti-hydrocarbon band wagon hopes to drown out the data contradicting their justification for the Great Energy Transition. Yes, there was warming from an El Nino buildup coincidental with North Atlantic warming, but no basis to blame it on CO2.
The post below updates the UAH record of air temperatures over land and ocean. Each month and year exposes again the growing disconnect between the real world and the Zero Carbon zealots. It is as though the anti-hydrocarbon band wagon hopes to drown out the data contradicting their justification for the Great Energy Transition. Yes, there was warming from an El Nino buildup coincidental with North Atlantic warming, but no basis to blame it on CO2.
As an overview consider how recent rapid cooling completely overcame the warming from the last 3 El Ninos (1998, 2010 and 2016). The UAH record shows that the effects of the last one were gone as of April 2021, again in November 2021, and in February and June 2022. At year end 2022 and continuing into 2023 global temp anomaly matched or went lower than average since 1995, an ENSO neutral year. (UAH baseline is now 1991-2020). Now we have had an usual El Nino warming spike of uncertain cause, unrelated to steadily rising CO2 and now dropping steadily.
For reference I added an overlay of CO2 annual concentrations as measured at Mauna Loa. While temperatures fluctuated up and down ending flat, CO2 went up steadily by ~60 ppm, a 15% increase.
Furthermore, going back to previous warmings prior to the satellite record shows that the entire rise of 0.8C since 1947 is due to oceanic, not human activity.
The animation is an update of a previous analysis from Dr. Murry Salby. These graphs use Hadcrut4 and include the 2016 El Nino warming event. The exhibit shows since 1947 GMT warmed by 0.8 C, from 13.9 to 14.7, as estimated by Hadcrut4. This resulted from three natural warming events involving ocean cycles. The most recent rise 2013-16 lifted temperatures by 0.2C. Previously the 1997-98 El Nino produced a plateau increase of 0.4C. Before that, a rise from 1977-81 added 0.2C to start the warming since 1947.
Importantly, the theory of human-caused global warming asserts that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere changes the baseline and causes systemic warming in our climate. On the contrary, all of the warming since 1947 was episodic, coming from three brief events associated with oceanic cycles. And now in 2024 we have seen an amazing episode with a temperature spike driven by ocean air warming in all regions, along with rising NH land temperatures, now dropping below its peak.
Chris Schoeneveld has produced a similar graph to the animation above, with a temperature series combining HadCRUT4 and UAH6. H/T WUWT
With apologies to Paul Revere, this post is on the lookout for cooler weather with an eye on both the Land and the Sea. While you heard a lot about 2020-21 temperatures matching 2016 as the highest ever, that spin ignores how fast the cooling set in. The UAH data analyzed below shows that warming from the last El Nino had fully dissipated with chilly temperatures in all regions. After a warming blip in 2022, land and ocean temps dropped again with 2023 starting below the mean since 1995. Spring and Summer 2023 saw a series of warmings, continuing into 2024 peaking in April, then cooling off to the present.
UAH has updated their TLT (temperatures in lower troposphere) dataset for February 2025. Due to one satellite drifting more than can be corrected, the dataset has been recalibrated and retitled as version 6.1 Graphs here contain this updated 6.1 data. Posts on their reading of ocean air temps this month are ahead of the update from HadSST4. I posted recently on SSTs January 2025 Oceans Still Cool. These posts have a separate graph of land air temps because the comparisons and contrasts are interesting as we contemplate possible cooling in coming months and years.
Sometimes air temps over land diverge from ocean air changes. In July 2024 all oceans were unchanged except for Tropical warming, while all land regions rose slightly. In August we saw a warming leap in SH land, slight Land cooling elsewhere, a dip in Tropical Ocean temp and slightly elsewhere. September showed a dramatic drop in SH land, overcome by a greater NH land increase. This month has contrasting warming in ocean air anomalies, especially in SH, somewhat offset by land air cooling especially in NH.
Note: UAH has shifted their baseline from 1981-2010 to 1991-2020 beginning with January 2021. v6.1 data was recalibrated also starting with 2021. In the charts below, the trends and fluctuations remain the same but the anomaly values changed with the baseline reference shift.
Presently sea surface temperatures (SST) are the best available indicator of heat content gained or lost from earth’s climate system. Enthalpy is the thermodynamic term for total heat content in a system, and humidity differences in air parcels affect enthalpy. Measuring water temperature directly avoids distorted impressions from air measurements. In addition, ocean covers 71% of the planet surface and thus dominates surface temperature estimates. Eventually we will likely have reliable means of recording water temperatures at depth.
Recently, Dr. Ole Humlum reported from his research that air temperatures lag 2-3 months behind changes in SST. Thus, cooling oceans portend cooling land air temperatures to follow. He also observed that changes in CO2 atmospheric concentrations lag behind SST by 11-12 months. This latter point is addressed in a previous post Who to Blame for Rising CO2?
After a change in priorities, updates are now exclusive to HadSST4. For comparison we can also look at lower troposphere temperatures (TLT) from UAHv6.1 which are now posted for February 2025. The temperature record is derived from microwave sounding units (MSU) on board satellites like the one pictured above. Recently there was a change in UAH processing of satellite drift corrections, including dropping one platform which can no longer be corrected. The graphs below are taken from the revised and current dataset.
The UAH dataset includes temperature results for air above the oceans and thus should be most comparable to the SSTs. There is the additional feature that ocean air temps avoid Urban Heat Islands (UHI). The graph below shows monthly anomalies for ocean air temps since January 2015.
In 2021-22, SH and NH showed spikes up and down while the Tropics cooled dramatically, with some ups and downs, but hitting a new low in January 2023. At that point all regions were more or less in negative territory.
After sharp cooling everywhere in January 2023, there was a remarkable spiking of Tropical Ocean temps from -0.5C up to + 1.2C in January 2024. The rise was matched by other regions in 2024, such that the Global anomaly peaked at 0.86C in April. Since then, all regions have cooled down sharply. In February 2025, SH rose from 0.1C to 0.4C pulling the Global Ocean air anomaly up from 0.3C to 0.5C.
Land Air Temperatures Tracking in Seesaw Pattern
We sometimes overlook that in climate temperature records, while the oceans are measured directly with SSTs, land temps are measured only indirectly. The land temperature records at surface stations sample air temps at 2 meters above ground. UAH gives TLT anomalies for air over land separately from ocean air temps. The graph updated for February is below.
Here we have fresh evidence of the greater volatility of the Land temperatures, along with extraordinary departures by SH land. The seesaw pattern in Land temps is similar to ocean temps 2021-22, except that SH is the outlier, hitting bottom in January 2023. Then exceptionally SH goes from -0.6C up to 1.4C in September 2023 and 1.8C in August 2024, with a large drop in between. In November, SH and the Tropics pulled the Global Land anomaly further down despite a bump in NH land temps. February showed a sharp drop in NH land air temps from 1.07C down to 0.56C, pulling the Global land anomaly downward from 0.9C to 0.6C.
The Bigger Picture UAH Global Since 1980
The chart shows monthly Global Land and Ocean anomalies starting 01/1980 to present. The average monthly anomaly is -0.03, for this period of more than four decades. The graph shows the 1998 El Nino after which the mean resumed, and again after the smaller 2010 event. The 2016 El Nino matched 1998 peak and in addition NH after effects lasted longer, followed by the NH warming 2019-20. An upward bump in 2021 was reversed with temps having returned close to the mean as of 2/2022. March and April brought warmer Global temps, later reversed
With the sharp drops in Nov., Dec. and January 2023 temps, there was no increase over 1980. Then in 2023 the buildup to the October/November peak exceeded the sharp April peak of the El Nino 1998 event. It also surpassed the February peak in 2016. In 2024 March and April took the Global anomaly to a new peak of 0.94C. The cool down started with May dropping to 0.9C, and in June a further decline to 0.8C. October went down to 0.7C, November and December dropped to 0.6C. February is down to 0.5C.
The graph reminds of another chart showing the abrupt ejection of humid air from Hunga Tonga eruption.
TLTs include mixing above the oceans and probably some influence from nearby more volatile land temps. Clearly NH and Global land temps have been dropping in a seesaw pattern, nearly 1C lower than the 2016 peak. Since the ocean has 1000 times the heat capacity as the atmosphere, that cooling is a significant driving force. TLT measures started the recent cooling later than SSTs from HadSST4 but are now showing the same pattern. Despite the three El Ninos, their warming had not persisted prior to 2023, and without them it would probably have cooled since 1995. Of course, the future has not yet been written.
“Until now, the origin of the climate dynamics of the Central Andes during the last millennium has been speculative. On the basis of statistical evidence, we have identified solar variability as its origin.” – Schittek et al., 2025
“Until now, the origin of the climate dynamics of the Central Andes during the last millennium has been speculative. On the basis of statistical evidence, we have identified solar variability as its origin.” – Schittek et al., 2025
1) The Little Ice Age (LIA) was a global-scale cold event.
2) Southern Hemisphere (Peruvian Andes) climate (precipitation) variations are robustly linked to variations in solar activity over the last 1,000 years.
3) The modern (1900s-2000s) and Medieval Climate Anomaly climate warmth are associated with reduced rainfall, and the LIA colder temperatures are associated with more precipitation.
“…the LIA was a global event, marked by advance of glaciers worldwide.”
“Solar irradiation is the primary driver for all climate circulation processes on Earth. Evidence for a direct solar influence on the Earth’s climate has been growing.”
“Our study reveals evidence that precipitation changes in the south-eastern Peruvian Andes are linked to variations in solar activity during the LIA [Little Ice Age].”
“Several studies attribute climate cooling during the LIA to solar forcing, particularly during the Wolf, Spörer, Maunder, and Dalton Minima.”
“The position of the ITCZ [Intertropical Convergence Zone] is robustly dependent on the interhemispheric temperature gradient triggered by solar forcing.”
So-called renewable energy is ONLY intermittently generated ELECTRICITY from renewables, as wind turbines and solar panels CANNOT make any products or fuels for the various transportation industries.
So-called renewable energy is ONLY intermittently generated ELECTRICITY from renewables, as wind turbines and solar panels CANNOT make any products or fuels for the various transportation industries.
Those “renewables” of wind turbines and solar panels CANNOT exist without oil, as all the parts and components of the net zero emissions fantasy from wind turbines and solar panels are 100% dependent on the oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil, the same oil that net zero enthusiasts want to rid the world of.d
Today, American policymakers setting “green” and “zero emissions” policies are oblivious to the reality that electricity came about AFTER the discovery of oil. Without oil, there would be no electricity!
ALL six methods for the generation of electricity from hydro, coal, natural gas, nuclear, wind, and solar are ALL built with the products, components, and equipment that are made from oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil.
All EVs, solar panels, and wind turbines are also built with the products, components, and equipment that are made from the oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil.
Everything that needs electricity to function, like iPhones, computers, data centers, and X-ray machines, are made with petrochemicals manufactured from crude oil. Without fossil fuels, there would be nothing that needs electricity!
The Bogus Myths for the generation of occasional and unreliable electricity that also kills birds, bats, and whales and lays waste to farmlands, forests, and oceans are numerous:
> It is claimed that wind and solar renewables are green and kind to the environment.
Humongous mining requirements occur in developing countries for the exotic minerals and metals from this 4-billion-year-old planet Earth’s natural resources, the same ones that are not being replaced.
The Pulitzer Prize-nominated book “Clean Energy Exploitations – Helping Citizens Understand the Environmental and Humanity Abuses That Support Clean Energy does an excellent job of discussing the lack of transparency to the world of the green movement’s impact upon humanity’s exploitations in the developing countries that are mining for the exotic minerals and metals required to create the batteries needed to store “green energy.” In these developing countries, these mining operations exploit child labor and are responsible for the most egregious human rights violations of vulnerable minority populations. These operations are also directly destroying the planet through environmental degradation.
Minimal or even non-existent labor laws in poorer developing countries to protect people against human atrocities of people with yellow, brown, and black skin.
Minimal or even non-existent environmental laws and regulations laws in poorer developing countries to protect against environmental degradation to local landscapes from the massive mines scarring the landscape to produce the copper, silver, cobalt and rare earth metals required.
Maximum usage of this 4-billion-year-old planet Earth’s natural resources, the same ones that are not being replaced for future generations.
Humongous “footprint” of land compared to the generation of electricity via nuclear, natural gas, hydro, or coal.
Emissions will be exploding from those poorer developing countries, i.e., the other seven billion on this planet. Unlike the wealthy countries that have huge economies that can subsidize any delusionally obsessed idea, those poorer countries’ dismal economies cannot subsidize themselves out of a paper bag!
To manufacture each EV auto battery that weighs 1,200 pounds, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, just one Tesla EV battery requires the processing of more than 500,000 pounds of materials somewhere on the planet.
> It is claimed that renewables are cheap.
Only the wealthier developed countries can afford the humongous subsidies required to build renewables, like Germany, Australia, Great Britain, New Zealand, all of the EU, and the USA.
Wind turbines for the generation of electricity under favorable weather conditions would be non-existent were it not for government subsidies and mandates behind them.
Net Zero policies raise electricity costs for families and businesses in the wealthier countries that have the ability to subsidize them and threaten the reliability of the electricity system
High electricity prices coupled with electricity austerity have led to economic stagnation in many of those wealthier countries.
The cost of renewables is rising but is not recognized or understood for wind turbines, solar panels, and EV batteries
> It is claimed that renewables will replace fossil fuels.
Despite decades of efforts and billions in subsidies to bolster “green electricity” from weather-dependent wind and solar, people still get all of the 6,000 products from oil, the same products that are integral to human prosperity across the globe, that support the demands of infrastructures like: Transportation, Airports, Water filtration, Sanitation, Hospitals, Medical equipment, Appliances, Electronics, Telecommunications systems, Heating and ventilating, and the Space programs.
Everything that needs electricity to function, like iPhones, computers, data centers, and X-ray machines, are made with petrochemicals manufactured from crude oil. Without fossil fuels, there would be nothing that needs electricity!
ALL the parts and components of renewables are built with the products, components, and equipment that are made from the oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil, the same oil that renewables are supposed to replace. Without fossil fuels, there would be no electricity!
Shockingly, the “green” movement has yet to identify a replacement for oil to support the materialistic demand for those 6,000 products made from oil.
We’ve had more than 200 years to “clone” oil to support the supply chain of products demanded by our materialistic society and have been unsuccessful.
Net Zero, only in the wealthy countries that can subsidize renewables, is ineffective in achieving its primary goal and can never stop the weather changing. The impact of Net Zero policies is devastating for the economy and high productivity, electricity, all the more than 6,000 products made from oil derivatives, and the aviation, gasoline, and diesel fuels for our intensive industries in particular. Renewables are not kind to the environment and the lies and bogus myths being told to promote them are untenable.
Before Net Zero enthusiasts destroy the economy, they need to identify the “replacement” to crude oil that will support the materialistic demands of the e8 billion on this planet for all the products made from those oil derivatives, as well as the aviation, gasoline, and diesel fuel needs of the various worldwide transportation infrastructures, before they preach net zero emissions.
A climate group started by billionaire and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is reportedly slashing some of its workforce in part due to Republicans winning back power.
A climate group started by billionaire and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is reportedly slashing some of its workforce in part due to Republicans winning back power.
The green energy group, Breakthrough Energy, has laid off multiple workers and is also planning to eliminate its U.S. policy side, an anonymous source told Politico’s E&E News. Another anonymous source told the outlet that Breakthrough Energy’s policy team’s last day of work would be Friday.
Several staffers on Breakthrough Energy’s philanthropic side were also laid off, one anonymous source told the outlet. Relatedly, The New York Times reported Wednesday that “dozens” of Breakthrough Energy staffers were laid off, including the group’s entire U.S.-based team working on policy issues, most of its employees working on partnerships with other climate organizations, as well as its European unit.
Gates’ decision to slash Breakthrough Energy’s U.S. policy team was in part caused by him anticipating that the team was unlikely to have a significant impact in Washington, D.C. following the Republican Party’s victories in November, winning control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, anonymous sources told the NYT.
“Bill Gates remains as committed as ever to advancing the clean energy innovations needed to address climate change,” a spokesperson for Gates told the NYT in a statement when asked about the cuts. “His work in this area will continue and is focused on helping drive reliable affordable, clean energy solutions that will enable people everywhere to thrive.”
In February, Breakthrough Energy told its partners that it would slash its climate grantmaking budget this year, Heatmap News reported.
Notably, Gates has backed various clean energy initiatives over the past several years, including investing in green energy startups and climate change research.
President Donald Trump has been overseeing a sweeping effort to revitalize America’s energy sector and “unleash” American energy as part of his broader “energy dominance” agenda. While on the campaign trail, Trump vowed to overturn various green energy policies and regulations put into place by the previous presidential administration.
Breakthrough Energy did not respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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With the US-led demise of Net Zero and “energy transformation,” prior attempts to come to grips with climate futility and energy reality are worth revisiting. This article, “Three Decades of Climate Mitigation: Why Haven’t We Bent the Global Emissions Curve?” (Annual Review of Environment and Resources: Vol. 46, 2021), is an example of a faulty worldview, a vastly overbuilt academic climate network (23 authors), and an inability to seriously deal with critical views of climate alarm/forced energy transformation.
Ed. note: With the US-led demise of Net Zero and “energy transformation,” prior attempts to come to grips with climate futility and energy reality are worth revisiting. This article, “Three Decades of Climate Mitigation: Why Haven’t We Bent the Global Emissions Curve?” (Annual Review of Environment and Resources: Vol. 46, 2021), is an example of a faulty worldview, a vastly overbuilt academic climate network (23 authors), and an inability to seriously deal with critical views of climate alarm/forced energy transformation.
“The globalizing formations of industrial modernity … are, arguably, most distinctively driven by an array of fallacies, fictions, and fantasies of control.” [1]
This post presents the article’s Abstract, Summary Points, Future Issues, and Conclusion followed by my critical comment.
Despite three decades of political efforts and a wealth of research on the causes and catastrophic impacts of climate change, global carbon dioxide emissions have continued to rise and are 60% higher today than they were in 1990. Exploring this rise through nine thematic lenses—covering issues of climate governance, the fossil fuel industry, geopolitics, economics, mitigation modeling, energy systems, inequity, lifestyles, and social imaginaries—draws out multifaceted reasons for our collective failure to bend the global emissions curve.
However, a common thread that emerges across the reviewed literature is the central role of power, manifest in many forms, from a dogmatic political-economic hegemony and influential vested interests to narrow techno-economic mindsets and ideologies of control. Synthesizing the various impediments to mitigation reveals how delivering on the commitments enshrined in the Paris Agreement now requires an urgent and unprecedented transformation away from today’s carbon- and energy-intensive development paradigm.
Despite three decades of political efforts and scientifically informed warnings of the likely catastrophic effects of climate change, CO2emissions have continued to rise globally and are 60% higher today than they were in 1990.
Since the first IPCC report was published in 1990, more anthropogenic fossil CO2 has been released into the atmosphere than previously throughout all of human history.
The failure of leadership, particularly from within high-emitting countries, sectors, corporations, and individuals, has locked in intra- and intergenerational suffering and long-term existential threats to livelihoods and ecosystems.
Entrenched geopolitical, industrial, and military power and associated mindsets are fundamental barriers to effective mitigation.
Orthodox schools of thought and research traditions (including highly constrained forms of modeling), particularly in the fields of economics, energy, and climate mitigation, need to be challenged and replaced with, or complemented by, more heterodox approaches.
Three decades of choosing to fail on mitigation have shifted the climate challenge from a technocratic adjustment to business as usual to requiring a rapid, system-level change within both industrialized and industrializing societies.
Transformations toward more sustainable and just futures require a radical reconfiguration of long-run sociocultural and political-economic norms and institutions currently reproducing the very problems driving climate change.
Attention to equity, high-carbon lifestyles, and conditions for enabling new social imaginaries has the potential to disrupt dominant, high-carbon development pathways.
How could geopolitical competition over energy resources and ideologies of control that frame dominant responses to climate change be challenged and overcome?
How have mainstream economics and neoliberal responses to climate change (e.g., carbon markets and a broader financialization of the environment) become so pervasive, and what opportunities are there for alternative or complementary approaches?
How can research approaches currently dominating advice and underpinning climate mitigation policy (such as integrated assessment modeling) be complemented with a more varied array of approaches and perspectives?
How could approaches that rapidly reduce energy-related emissions be realized (e.g., actively displacing and disassembling fossil fuel–based energy systems, and energy demand management practices)?
How can the large asymmetry in responsibility for emissions within, as well as between, nations be addressed in climate policy and governance?
How can fossil fuel–based, high-carbon lifestyles, practices, and visions of incremental mitigation be rapidly replaced by sustainable alternatives and profound system change, informed by a timely response to the Paris temperature and equity commitments?
How can knowledge systems and institutions currently reproducing the very problems driving climate change be transformed?
How can existing and new social movements mobilize popular power and social imaginaries in a way that effectively challenges the status quo and helps drive structural change at the scale and pace required?
This article has demonstrated that, while the reasons for 30 years of failure to bend the global emissions curve are multifaceted, a common and strong thread is woven through them all. In various guises and to differing degrees, the centralization of power and the privileges that accompany it have coalesced around a particular worldview. Through recent decades, the central tenets of this worldview have evolved into a wider global Zeitgeist whereby development and progress are reduced to economic growth and defined by increasingly narrow financial metrics and indices.
Coincident with this financial reductionism and economic characterization of nations and societies has been a growing recognition that the “system” externalities are set to undermine the very tenets of the system. Thus far, however, the power and inertia of the existing system have been sufficient to give the impression of ongoing control. The challenges are “recognized” and “internalized,” and through promised technical futures that are carefully costed in elaborate models, the existing power structures remain unchallenged.
From Bias to Gobbledygook
“The process of writing this article has been iterative and humbling,” the 23 authors admit. [1] “As the article coalesced, it became increasingly evident that any attempt to distil a single clear narrative was misguided.” It is also stated: “… we coauthors have not necessarily been neutral observers of others’ failings.”
This aside, the analysis turns against the general population that has been duped or is just plain unqualified for the task at hand, which is a “radical reconfiguration of long-run sociocultural and political-economic norms and institutions.” Translated, a governmental low-carbon, Net Zero lifestyle must be mandated for one and all.
Enter the vast right-wing conspiracy. It is stated that “people can, at least temporarily, be steered to ignore physical reality.” The masses are victims of “elite political discourse,” “dogmatic political-economic hegemony,” and “narrow techno-economic mindsets.” The “psychological, social, and emotional capacity of individuals and groups to understand, explore, and create different social imaginaries has been steadily weakened.” And:
“Inadequate responses from societies can partially be attributed to psychological factors such as the limited capacity to apprehend and formulate responses to climate change….”
An ‘epistemological monoculture’ … has impoverished the collective global capacity to imagine and realize forms of living not dependent upon exploitation of people and natural “resources”….
In the educational and epistemological arena, indigenous and decolonial traditions of thought are already providing a powerful critique of education’s role in reproducing and defending the status quo.
Back to reality. Gobbledygook is defined as “language that is meaningless or is made unintelligible by excessive use of abstruse technical terms.” This is why the above article is so obtuse.
Will the separation of government and climate change result in these “experts” doing something more useful? Even getting a job in the private sector creating wealth rather than theorizing to redistribute it?
The article discusses plans to build hydro storage schemes in the Scottish Highlands, but also looks at the genuine environmental concerns, not least the effect of rapidly changing water levels in lochs on salmon. The Guardian report:
“Brian Shaw stood at the edge of Loch Ness and pointed to a band of glistening pebbles and damp sand skirting the shore. It seemed as if the tide had gone out.
Overnight, Foyers, a small pumped-storage power station, had recharged itself, drawing up millions of litres of water into a reservoir high up on a hill behind it, ready for release through its turbines to boost the UK’s electricity supply. That led to the surface of Loch Ness, the largest body of freshwater in the UK, falling by 14cm in a matter of hours.
Shaw, an expert in freshwater salmon who runs the Ness District Salmon Fishery Board, believes this is a warning of things to come. “I had a complaint about the level of Loch Ness dropping by a foot overnight,” he said, gesturing at the shore. “It’s actually dropped six inches over the course of the day. That wouldn’t happen naturally.”
Glen Earrach’s proposals have fuelled anxiety locally. It is the third such plan proposed for Loch Ness but also the largest by far.
More than a dozen agencies, conservation bodies and local businesses have lodged objections or raised questions about Glen Earrach with the Scottish government’s energy consents unit, which oversees power station applications.
Its critics fear that if all four plants are approved, that could significantly affect the loch’s delicate ecology, its migrating salmon and trout, its leisure cruising firms and its archaeological sites, including a prehistoric crannog, or human-made island.”
Glen Earrach is by far the biggest of the proposed storage schemes, with capacity of 30 GWh at a cost of £3 billion. There are the usual claims that such schemes will “provide an energy reserve to cope with peak demand and wind-free days.”
But how much difference will 30 GWh make? (To put it into perspective, Dinorwig, the main storage we have currently, has capacity of 9 GWh).
The CCC’s 7th Carbon Budget wants 88 GW of offshore and 32 GW of onshore wind by 2040. This would on average offer about 48 GW.
To cover for those “windless days”, Glen Earrach’s 30 GWh would only cover that missing wind power for 37 minutes..
In reality, Glen Earrach would only ever be used for managing peak demand, as with Dinorwig. You can forget about it covering for days and weeks of low wind.
And we will have to fork out £3 billion for something that we only need because of overreliance on intermittent wind power and the maniacal drive to close gas power stations.
Republican South Dakota Gov. Larry Rhoden signed a bill Thursday banning the use of eminent domain for carbon dioxide pipelines, ensuring land protections for farmers across the state.
Republican South Dakota Gov. Larry Rhoden signed a bill Thursday banning the use of eminent domain for carbon dioxide pipelines, ensuring land protections for farmers across the state.
“South Dakota landowners feel strongly that the threat of involuntary easements for the proposed carbon dioxide pipeline infringes on their freedoms and their property rights,” Rhoden wrote in a letter to the legislature and to the people of South Dakota. “I have said many times that Summit needs to earn back trust from South Dakota landowners. Unfortunately, once trust is lost, it is a difficult thing to regain.”
“Here is my open message to Summit Carbon or anyone else who wants to try to come abuse our fellow South Dakotans,” Republican South Dakota House Speaker Jon Hansen wrote on X. “Your green new deal boondoggle; your lawsuits; your threats; and your intimidation against our people, our counties, and our grassroots commissioners ARE NOT WELCOME HERE.”
Summit spokesperson Sabrina Zenor said in a statement that “it’s very unfortunate that, despite our approvals in Iowa, North Dakota, and Minnesota, South Dakota changed the rules in the middle of the game.”
“The governor has made it clear that HB 1052 targets one company – Summit Carbon Solutions,” Zenor continued. “It’s unfortunate that a piece of legislation has been framed around a single company rather than addressing broader infrastructure and economic policy.”
“This is definitely a win for the little guy,” Steve Milloy, a Senior Legal Fellow at the Energy & Environment Legal Institute, told the DCNF.
Milloy pointed to how carbon capture’s expensive price tag, the unpopularity of eminent domain and underground storage issues make it an extraordinarily difficult practice. He also noted that the government can only seize land for public use, and that there is “no legitimate public use” for CO2 pipelines.
The author also referenced both the Mississippi CO2 pipeline rupture, as well as the Lake Nyos disaster in Cameroon in 1986 that both destroyed land and livestock. The Cameroon pipeline explosion even left 1,700 people dead.
Summit Carbon Solutions did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment in time for publication.
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