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.
Instead of sipping champagne while making up fantasy stories of melting polar ice and dying polar bears, Wright challenges narratives and promotes policies that will not only help our nation, but the rest of the world.
Instead of sipping champagne while making up fantasy stories of melting polar ice and dying polar bears, Wright challenges narratives and promotes policies that will not only help our nation, but the rest of the world.
President Donald Trump’s current cabinet is a marked upgrade from the one he had in his first term.
Take, for example, the Department of Energy. When he was first nominated to head the agency, I reported that entrepreneur Chris Wright did not believe in the climate crisis hysteria. Rather, he is a proponent of ensuring our nation has inexpensive, efficient, and reliable energy.
Nor does he believe in ginned-up data from climate cultists, who want to pretend that solar and wind options are every bit as reliable and efficient as fossil fuels and nuclear. So, when confronted with the happy talk from the International Energy Agency on their “data”, Write said the organization needed to be reformed or the U.S. would no longer be a member.
In a July 15 interview with Bloomberg, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said he has told Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency (IEA), his agency must either reform its forecasting methods or face potential U.S. withdrawal from the organization. This development reflects growing tensions between the Trump administration’s energy priorities and the IEA’s focus on clean energy transitions.
Wright’s criticism centers on the IEA’s reports and projections, which he and other critics of the agency argue are overly optimistic about renewable energy adoption and fail to adequately prioritize energy security. The debate underscores a broader ideological divide between the U.S. administration and many other western governments over global energy policy and could impact international cooperation and domestic energy strategies.
…Wright laid out the U.S. position in the Bloomberg interview, stating, “We will do one of two things: we will reform the way the IEA operates, or we will withdraw.” He expressed a preference for the former, saying, “My strong preference is to reform it,” in hopes his discussions with Birol and others can influence a return to the more balanced approach which formerly characterized IEA’s modeling approach.
Apparently, the IAE forecasts indicate the need for fossil fuels will “peak” before 2030...then go into decline.
…[T]he IEA’s annual World Energy Outlook (WEO), which it previously styled the “gold standard of energy analysis”, has proclaimed the “Age of Electricity”, consistently projecting that demand for all three fossil fuels will peak before 2030 before going into permanent decline.
“That’s just total nonsense,” responded Wright, who was CEO of a US$2.8-billion oilfield services company before joining Donald Trump’s cabinet and taking over responsibility for his new boss’ analytically challenged “Drill, Baby, Drill” agenda. In an interview during a conference at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University, Wright told Bloomberg he’d said as much to IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol.
“Wright’s criticism of the agency that gets millions of dollars in US funding is in line with Trump’s broader pro-fossil fuels thrust,” Bloomberg writes.
🚨BREAKING: Energy Secretary Chris Wright Threatens to Pull USA from the International Energy Agency
“We will do one of two things: we will reform the way the IEA operates or we will withdraw,”
Energy Secretary Chris Wright blasted the Paris-based International Energy Agency… pic.twitter.com/sR2viq1owI
The IAE’s assertion defies all logic and reason. Take, for example, the more plausible projections of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC):
This forecast starkly contrasts with OPEC’s outlook, which anticipates oil demand rising to 123 million barrels per day by 2050, up from around 105 million bpd today.
OPEC has repeatedly criticized the IEA’s predictions as “dangerous,” warning they could lead to energy market volatility.
Furthermore, it is clear that the IAE numbers are not factoring in the energy-greedy artificial intelligence (AI) data centers. There are likely quite a number of them that will be built, and all of them will require a steady source of a great deal of energy that green energy cannot supply.
Interestingly, the biggest US grid (PJM Interconnection, serving about 65–67 million people across 13 states and the District of Columbia) lacks the capacity to take on these facilities, according to a watchdog group.
“There is simply no new capacity to meet new loads,” said Joe Bowring, president of Monitoring Analytics, which is the independent watchdog for PJM Interconnection, the grid that extends from Washington to Chicago. “The solution is to make sure that people who want to build data centers are serious enough about it to bring their own generation.”
Artificial intelligence is driving the biggest US surge in electric demand in several decades, adding stress to grids that have proven vulnerable to extreme weather. PJM, which is home to the highest domestic concentration of data centers, has endured such tension for more than a year.
Tight supplies on PJM led to a record $14.7 billion in an annual auction last year. (The auction provides a key revenue source for generators within the system.) The results of the next auction, which are scheduled to be released late Tuesday, are expected to show capacity prices match or exceed all-time highs as the growth of data centers, especially for artificial intelligence, accelerates, according to Barclays Plc.
Ignoring economics and physics has real-world consequences. Just ask Spain.
Instead of sipping champagne while making up fantasy stories of melting polar ice and dying polar bears, Wright challenges narratives and promotes policies that will not only help our nation, but the rest of the world.
I was reminded last week in a conversation with a GB News Editor about just how little understanding there is in the MSM of just how much Net Zero could end up costing the country.
I was reminded last week in a conversation with a GB News Editor about just how little understanding there is in the MSM of just how much Net Zero could end up costing the country.
To some extent this ignorance has been deliberately engineered. The original Climate Change Act in 2008 included no sort of cost/benefit analysis at all; it was passed almost unanimously through Parliament on the basis that when you are saving the planet, costs do not matter. It was the same story when Theresa May amended the 2008 Act to set a Net Zero target.
The idea that the public should know the cost of decisions made by their MPs was regarded as abhorrent by them and still is.
Since then, much of the media has been complicit in refusing to discuss the issue of cost. Nevertheless, there have been attempts to put a figure on it. In 2019, then Chancellor Philip Hammond warned May that reducing greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050 could cost the UK more than £1tn.
On the other hand, the Climate Change Committee has claimed the cost would more like £200 billion over thirty years. However, this excludes the costs we are already paying and was based on unrealistically optimistic assumptions about the future cost of renewable energy.
So, who is right?
It is of course foolhardy to try to predict what will happen in three decades time; we have no idea what the economy or technology will look like then. Anybody who thinks they do know is a fool and anybody who claims they do is a charlatan!
But we should have a much better idea of how things will pan out in the shorter term, say the next ten years or so. In any event, nobody cares about what will happen in decades time, when half of us will probably be dead! What they are concerned about is the here and now and what the immediate future has in store.
So, let’s start with what the transition to Net Zero is already costing the UK.
The Office for Budget Responsibility publishes the cost of Environmental Levies each year as part of its Economic & Fiscal Outlook. These levies cover the cost of direct and indirect subsidies for renewable energy which are added to energy bills, or in the case of the Renewable Heat Incentive paid out of general taxation. These are projected to rise to over £17 billion a year and show no sign of falling after 2029/30.
Although some of the older, more heavily subsidised wind farms will start shutting down in a few years’ time, carbon capture and hydrogen production are horribly expensive and highly inefficient ways to replace what we have now – conventional gas power stations.
Additionally, the costs that NESO (the National Energy System Operator), which is responsible for running the grid, pays out to balance the electricity grid has risen to £2.9 billion a year. This is almost entirely all because of the intermittency of wind and solar power; NESO now needs to pay generators to supply power at short notice, pay wind farms to switch off when there is too much wind and pay for storage and other grid frequency measures.
In all, the transition to renewable energy is costing around £20 billion a year. Far from these costs falling in years to come, they are only going to increase, as NESO admitted in their Clean Power 2030 Report published last November.
NESO estimated that Ed Miliband’s plan to fully decarbonise the grid by 2030 would add £25/MWh to the cost of electricity. When wind and solar power is tripled, as planned, there will be many occasions when there is too much power for the grid to handle. As a consequence, billions will be paid out to wind and solar farms to switch off – so-called constraint payments. But there will also be long periods when there is not enough electricity to meet demand; when that happens billions more will be paid to standby generators and batteries to switch on. All in all, NESO estimates this will add another £9 billion a year, on top of the £20 billion we are already paying.
Astonishingly NESO did not budget any extra costs for the enormous task of expanding the electricity transmission network. Only this month OFGEM announced the first tranche of an £80 billion grid upgrade which will need to be completed by 2030. This upgrade is only necessary to meet decarbonisation targets. On OFGEM’s calculations, this expenditure will add an extra £6 billion to electricity bills.
NESO also made it clear that building new wind and solar farms would not produce electricity any more cheaply than simply continuing to run our existing gas generators, which would need to be paid to provide standby capacity anyway. (They say renewables will be cheaper than gas, but this is sleight of hand, because it assumes a punitive carbon tax on gas generators).
Add that lot up and you get a cost of £35 billion a year, just for decarbonising the electricity sector alone. That figure can only go up, as the bills for carbon capture and hydrogen storage start to take effect.
Moreover, we have not even started to address the problem of upgrading the local electricity distribution network, which brings power from the high voltage transmission grid into our homes. As we all start using more electricity for heating and electric cars, the existing network will quickly get overloaded. This will effectively mean digging up streets up and down the country to replace cabling, replacing fuse boxes in homes and increasing the capacity of sub stations. One independent electrical engineering expert, Mike Travers, researched the problem five years ago, and estimated the cost of all this work at around £200 billion, not even counting the enormous cost of disruption which will inevitably be caused. We are probably looking at a figure closer to £300 billion now.
Earlier this month the OBR published the costs to the public sector of the transition to Net Zero – note this just accounts for the cost to government, not the wider UK economy. The bill comes to £257 billion over 26 years. As is usual with Net Zero, most of the cost is frontloaded. Supposedly these costs will start to rapidly decline in the 2040s. Only a fool would believe that. We are expected to believe in jam tomorrow!
Using the OBR’s high-end scenario, that cost could be 50% higher. In the next fifteen years alone, the cost will be £204 billion, all to be funded by higher taxation, reduced public spending or borrowing.
Most of this expenditure will have little added value, for instance installing heat pumps in public buildings, electrifying buses. It also includes the tens of billions handed to Ed Miliband to waste on Great British Energy, carbon capture and other nonsense.
But the private sector will also be hit hard as well. Within the next ten years, everybody with a gas boiler will need to replace it with a heat pump when it packs up. About 20 million homes have gas boilers. Including extra insulation, hot water tanks and radiators, we are probably looking at £15,000 a go, compared to £3000 for a boiler. That’s a total cost of £240 billion, or £16 billion a year.
Meanwhile electric cars remain stubbornly more expensive to buy than petrol ones. Even allowing for savings on fuel costs, the extra cost of purchase will amount to at least £16 billion a year when the petrol/diesel ban comes into force in 2030.
And we have not even looked at the cost of complying with decarbonisation targets which will be incurred by industry.
If we add that lot up, we get approximate annual costs in the 2030s of:
· Electricity Supply – £35 billion
· Heat pumps – £16 billion
· Electric Cars – £16 billion
· Public Sector – £14 billion
· Upgrading distribution networks – £20 billion
A total of £101 billion. It is possible that costs may start to subside from this peak at some point in the distant future, but the damage will be done by then.
Proponents of Net Zero often try to deflect attention from the issue of cost by claims that millions of green jobs will be created and that the economy will somehow grow because of Net Zero.
However, the hundreds of thousands of green jobs long promised have never materialised; the number of jobs in the renewable sector are no more than tens of thousands, many less of course than the jobs that have been lost to the UK because of high energy prices over the years.
Moreover, their claim defies the laws of economics. Jobs that create no extra value and rely on subsidies and government diktat simply drain money and resources from the productive economy. It’s the old “Green Door” theory – pass a law requiring every home to have their doors painted green, and you create work for decorators; but homeowners then have less money to spend on other goods and services.
Whether it’s electricity generation, transport or heating, the solutions demanded by Net Zero are more expensive and less efficient than existing ones. No economy can grow by promoting and subsidising inefficient alternatives.
Worse still, the threat to British industry and jobs from Net Zero is a very real one. This is one cost that is impossible to measure.
This exercise is, by definition, broadbrush. But it is all founded on officially sourced data and analysis and based on sound principles. Maybe some new technology will come along eventually or maybe the cost of renewable energy will tumble.
But where we stand today, the cost of transitioning to Net Zero will within a few years cripple the UK economy.
Once perched atop the climate movement’s moral high ground, the self-anointed “climate hawks” are now watching their influence dwindle, and nowhere is that retreat more visible than in California. Long the epicenter of progressive climate ambition, the Golden State is now backpedaling.
Danielle Franz writes at Real Clear Energy No Country for Climate Hawks. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Once perched atop the climate movement’s moral high ground, the self-anointed “climate hawks” are now watching their influence dwindle, and nowhere is that retreat more visible than in California. Long the epicenter of progressive climate ambition, the Golden State is now backpedaling. Democrats who once championed aggressive environmental mandates are hitting pause, reworking regulations, and distancing themselves from policies that have driven up energy and housing costs. A post-2024 reality check has swept the party: climate may still poll well in theory, but not when it collides with affordability.
This shift isn’t isolated. It’s emblematic of the climate hawks’ broader failure — a movement that moralized, catastrophized, and sacrificed working-class livelihoods on the altar of performative virtue. And it didn’t stop with workers. Families were expected to absorb the fallout — higher costs, fewer opportunities, and a more uncertain future — all in the name of climate dogma. For years, these activists dominated environmental discourse by demanding ideological purity.
They mistook loud rhetoric for leadership, performance for policy, and apocalyptic forecasts for political strategy.
Thankfully, as The Breakthrough Institute’s Alex Trembath has long forecast, the era of the climate hawk is over. And the climate will be better off for it. As former allies begin to walk away, it’s clear their crowning achievement was turning climate into a culture war they were never equipped to win.
At the heart of this shift is a growing movement that doesn’t treat energy as a sin, but as a tool of national strength.
t’s a philosophy that values building over banning, which means restoring industrial capacity, modernizing infrastructure, and investing in the American worker. It rejects the scarcity mindset that tells people they must give up comfort, reliability, or opportunity in the name of climate – so that the next generation doesn’t grow up fearing collapse, but growing into a culture of confidence, responsibility, and renewal.
Instead, it insists that the way forward is to invest in the backbone of our economy, empower the working class, and bring energy production home.
It recognizes the answer to environmental challenges isn’t less; it’s more. More energy. More innovation. More freedom to solve problems creatively. Instead of forcing society to shrink and sacrifice, we ask how we can grow smarter. Recognizing that climate strategy must also serve the interests of the people, national security, and long-term prosperity, it’s a vision rooted in hope for the future, not austerity.
And there’s a policy consensus emerging. Clean energy systems need to be affordable and reliable.
Rather than relying on long-term subsidies or regulations, domestic policy should be structured to encourage the innovation, commercialization, and deployment of cheaper and cleaner energy resources. This way, American resources and technology can expand energy at home and dominate global markets, while also reducing emissions. Likewise, policy should prioritize climate adaptation. We should empower communities with the tools and flexibility to manage their forests, embrace regenerative agriculture, and resourcefully steward their ecosystems as the climate changes. Our environmental approach should be grounded in the American family and national interest at the center of the conversation.
What’s replacing the hawks isn’t apathy. It’s realism. A new generation is emerging – leaders who are less interested in preaching and more interested in producing. They view climate not as a moral crusade, but as a challenge of engineering, economics, and national renewal. They understand that the future won’t be built through degrowth or doomerism, but through innovation, adaptation, and strategic investment in America’s strengths.
This isn’t about utopian dreams or global pledges. It’s about reindustrializing the nation, repowering the grid, and grounding environmental goals to serve the American people. That’s how you build lasting support – and get real results.
The climate hawks are facing extinction. And in their absence, something stronger is finally taking flight.
A boom in artificial intelligence (AI) investments now drives the United States electricity market. New data centers and upgrades to existing data centers are creating a vast demand for power. However, major AI firms are opting for natural gas plants to provide electrical power, rather than renewable energy.
A boom in artificial intelligence (AI) investments now drives the United States electricity market. New data centers and upgrades to existing data centers are creating a vast demand for power. However, major AI firms are opting for natural gas plants to provide electrical power, rather than renewable energy.
Since ChatGPT released their conversational AI chatbot in November of 2022, the world of artificial intelligence has exploded. ChatGPT showed that machines can learn the complexities of human language and interaction. Within five days, the chatbot had attracted over one million users. ChatGPT ushered in the modern AI revolution, producing trillions of dollars of investment in the US and around the world.
Artificial intelligence uses vast amounts of computing power and databases with trillions of parameters to solve problems and make predictions. Generational AI can create text, images, music, and videos. These capabilities require enormous data centers filled with thousands of servers using high-speed graphics processing units (GPUs).
Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Tesla, and other firms are investing billions to build new data centers and to upgrade existing facilities. According to USA Datacenters, America had fewer than 2,700 data centers at the start of 2024. Now, about 3,900 data centers are operating, an increase of more than 40 percent in 18 months.
Data centers traditionally support the internet and cloud storage. At the start of 2024, data centers consumed about 4% of US electricity. But when servers are upgraded with thousands of high-speed GPUs to deliver generational AI, they use six to ten times as much power. It is estimated that by 2030, US data centers will consume 20% of the nation’s power. And the overwhelming majority of electricity for these AI facilities will come from new natural gas power plants.
Green energy advocates want renewables to power the AI data centers, but wind and solar systems fall far short. AI computers operate 24-hours a day, which can’t be supported by the 30% capacity factor of wind or the 15% capacity factor of solar. Gas plants are designed to deliver their rated output over 90% of the time.
Nuclear plants may be able to power AI in some cases. Retired nuclear facilities in Palisades, Michigan, and Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, are being restarted to drive AI. But a start-up nuclear plant costs up to 10 times as much as a gas-fired power plant. It can take more than five years to bring a nuclear plant on-line, compared to 1-2 years for a gas plant. Small modular nuclear reactors promise breakthroughs in cost and cycle time, but these remain unproven technologies.
Wind and solar also suffer from transmission costs and delays. These systems are scattered over wide areas, requiring new transmission towers and lines to be built across the countryside to aggregate enough power for a large data center. In contrast, gas plants provide concentrated generating power that can be built near the data center and existing transmission lines.
Elon Musk’s Tesla is a leading provider of solar systems and grid-scale batteries. But Tesla chose 35 on-site gas turbines to supply electricity for its Colossus xAI supercomputer facility in Memphis, Tennessee. Colossus was built and expanded to 200,000 GPUs in less than six months in 2024 and claims to be “the most powerful AI training system yet.”
The Colossus build is an example of BYOP, or “bring your own power.” Rather than using electricity from the grid, leading technology firms are building their own natural gas plants on-site to power data centers.
AI data centers are huge facilities. EdgeConneX plans to build two data centers in New Albany, Ohio, to be completed by the fall of 2027, using existing warehouse space and new construction. The facilities will total 1.2 million square feet, covering an area larger than 20 football fields. These data centers will be powered by on-site gas plants.
More than 100 gas-fired power plants are planned for deployment in Texas, including 108 new plants and 17 expansions. The projects will provide 58 GW of electrical power. Sixty percent of the projects aim for completion by the end of 2028. These new facilities, if completed, will deliver more than three times as much electricity as all of the wind systems currently operating in Texas, the leading US wind state.
Earlier in July, President Trump joined state senator Dave McCormick at the Energy Innovation Summit in Pennsylvania. At the conference, they announced private investments of more than $90 billion in AI data centers and new or expanded power-generating systems. Amazon, Blackstone, CoreWeave, Pennsylvania Data Center Partners, PowerHouse Data Centers, and other firms will build AI infrastructure in Carlisle, Lancaster, Pittsburgh, and other Pennsylvania locations.
Pennsylvania is one of the largest producers of natural gas. Recently, the price of gas in Pennsylvania has been too low for local firms to make a profit. But most new AI installations will be powered by gas plants, to be constructed by PPL Corporation, Frontier Group, and others, providing new high-demand customers for gas producers. Westinghouse Electric also plans to build ten new nuclear reactors in the state, to be on-line by 2030.
Meta claims to be building the largest data center in the Western Hemisphere. The facility will be located in Richland Parish in northeast Louisiana, 250 miles north of New Orleans, and will cover 3.5 square miles or 2,250 acres. When completed in 2030, the installation will use twice as much electricity as the city of New Orleans. Entergy Louisiana is building three large gas-fired power plants at the Meta site at a cost of more than $3 billion.
The artificial intelligence revolution now drives the US electricity market. Most new AI data centers will be powered by newly constructed natural gas facilities. The Net Zero electricity transition is being left in the rear-view mirror.
Steve Goreham is a speaker on energy, the environment, and public policy and author of the bestselling book Green Breakdown: The Coming Renewable Energy Failure.
Originally published in the Tennessee TriStar Daily on July 25, 2025.
Every on-land wind project requires a permit to kill eagles from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). These permits are based on an offset program in which eagle deaths are supposedly offset by saving the lives of other eagles by making power poles safer.
Eagle bird flying on sunset sky abstract background. Animal and freedom concept. Generative ai
Every on-land wind project requires a permit to kill eagles from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). These permits are based on an offset program in which eagle deaths are supposedly offset by saving the lives of other eagles by making power poles safer.
In a recent study I found that this offset program is not working.
It turns out that failure to verify that this offset program is working is a deep violation of FWS’s own regulations. The regulations passed in 2016 clearly contemplate the possibility of offset program failure and require the FWS to track program effectiveness. FWS has done no such thing.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is not in compliance with its own permitting regulations, so permitting should stop until compliance is achieved. Existing permits to kill eagles should also be declared invalid, since they are based upon an offset practice that has not been shown to work and cannot work in its present form.
The offset program is called compensatory mitigation because the wind project owner pays to mitigate the eagle deaths caused by its project. The money is used to make power poles safe from electrocuting eagles, supposedly in numbers of eagles that are equal to or greater than the number killed by the project.
The permitting regulations require FWS monitoring of the effectiveness of compensatory mitigation, which they have not done. It is the law.
Here are the relevant regulatory requirements. The eagle-kill permits specify the required compensatory mitigation actions and measures:
“Section 22.220 Compensatory mitigation
(b) All required compensatory mitigation actions must:
(4) Use the best available science in formulating, crediting, and monitoring the long-term effectiveness of mitigation measures.
(7) Include mechanisms to account for and address uncertainty and risk of failure of a compensatory mitigation measure.”
The Regulation’s Environmental Impact Statement spells it out in more detail:
“Compensatory mitigation must be based on the best available science and must use rigorous compliance and effectiveness monitoring and evaluation to make certain that mitigation measures achieve their intended outcomes, or that necessary changes are implemented to achieve them.”
Even though the Regulations specifically refer to the risk of failure, FWS has done no effectiveness monitoring of the compensatory mitigation measures. Given that approximately 30,000 wind turbines have been permitted to kill eagles, this is noncompliance on an enormous scale.
Moreover, as I explain in my report, it is virtually certain that the compensatory mitigation program is highly ineffective. Here is why:
“The likely cause of this failure is FWS’s use of a wildly inaccurate electrocution death rate. As a result, the number of power poles made “safe” is just a tiny fraction of what would be required to create a legitimate offset. While FWS currently requires about 278 poles to be “made safe” per wind-killed eagle, the correct number, according to the results presented in this report, may be closer to 67,000.”
If FWS wants to use an offset program for wind turbines killing eagles, it must first do the research to establish the effectiveness of the offset measures. The present program is based on a single small 2010 study, with results so extreme as to be questionable.
This research must be done before offsets can be used to permit wind power killing eagles under the Eagle Protection Act. As things stand, FWS is deeply violating its own permitting regulations.
“Joe Romm soldiers on in a futile, quixotic crusade against energy and climate reality. No midcourse correction as his tent grows smaller and smaller. Angry Joe wants to stay that way.”
“Joe Romm soldiers on in a futile, quixotic crusade against energy and climate reality. No midcourse correction as his tent grows smaller and smaller. Angry Joe wants to stay that way.”
Perennially wrong Joseph Romm is now with Michael “Climategate’ Mann at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media. And the news is bad, very bad, for both Romm and Mann as the general public is not buying climate alarm–and is upset about “green” energy. Their Center, meanwhile, employs no critics of climate exaggeration and wind/solar/battery industrialization. It is in the tank for the Climate Industrial Complex.
So what is the latest from Romm, the subject of numerous posts over the last 15 years here at MasterResource? Before Trump 47, his habit (as always) was blaming ‘”cimate change” for bad things, as well as fussing at a world going the other way. And now with the new regime reversing Podesta-Biden-Harris’s “whole of government” approach to climate alarm/forced energy transformation? More breathless warnings and despair.
Consider these social media posts:
Romm is often his own worst enemy. And he gets pushback from the alarmist community. In response to an angry post by Romm on the link between solar/wind and the Spanish blackout, David McKeown politely wrote:
Joe, the setting forces me to repost not comment. I just want to ask you to use your influence differently. I have enjoyed and learned from many of your posts. But this one worries me.
Surely we need to understand the root causes properly? We also need to understand how those were worsened or lessened by current designs and arrangements and actions. This means objective analysis without regard to blame in the first instance.
If you encourage blame based on more noise, or suggest that increased weight of opinions (including ignorant and ill-informed) should direct future policy, you undermine the application of engineering and science. You also reduce trust in knowledge and competence.
Let’s not try to shout louder. Let’s try to focus everyone on the facts and single truth, (not my truth or their truth!!). I choose to believe that reports yet to be issued will clarify and seek truth not obfuscate.
Then let’s also try to understand why some actors may have got things wrong innocently or deliberately. We need to make assumptions explicit, especially across contractual and organisation/team boundaries. (Silo mentalities don’t help and especially entrenched positions from fear of blame.)
Sorry to be critical. But please think how your influence can help. Thank you.
No quarter from Joe Romm on this one. He soldiers on in a futile, quixotic crusade against energy and climate reality. No midcourse correction as his tent grows smaller and smaller. Angry Joe wants to stay that way.
Something rather odd is happening to the weather. Millions, nay billions, are on the move fleeing droughts, floods, wildfires, runaway temperatures, rising sea levels (see any mainstream media page climate page to fill in rest of sentence). Armageddon will only be put on pause when hard-Left elites take control of the climate and corral us all into their fantasy world of Net Zero. But hold on a minute – news just in. The first half of 2025 has seen the smallest number of deaths related to extreme weather since records began.
Something rather odd is happening to the weather. Millions, nay billions, are on the move fleeing droughts, floods, wildfires, runaway temperatures, rising sea levels (see any mainstream media page climate page to fill in rest of sentence). Armageddon will only be put on pause when hard-Left elites take control of the climate and corral us all into their fantasy world of Net Zero. But hold on a minute – news just in. The first half of 2025 has seen the smallest number of deaths related to extreme weather since records began. And more weird weather news – despite boiling seas, all four northern hemisphere ocean basins in the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific are running below average on accumulated cyclone energy. The North Atlantic has seen very little activity with the ACE energy measurement from January 1st to July 21st running at only 41% of the 1991-2020 average.
The cyclone news is natural variation of course, but don’t let on to climate fanatics. The news on deaths from extreme weather is not. It is a long-term trend that has seen weather fatalities plunge by over 99% during the last 100 years. As hydrocarbon use pulls billions out of grinding poverty, so fortunate humans can use the extra wealth to protect themselves against all that Nature throws at life on Earth.
Roger Pielke Jnr has compiled the weather and climate related deaths over the last 25 years and his graph above shows that just 2,200 deaths from a world population of over 8 billion can be attributed to the weather in the first six months of the year. Past number spikes are invariably caused by one-off disasters such as the 138,00 fatalities attributed to Cyclone Nargis in the Indian Ocean during 2008. Pielke concludes that it is likely that the first half of 2025 has seen the fewest deaths related to extreme weather of any half year “in recorded history”.
The slump in the extreme weather death in the hydrocarbon age is truly astonishing as the graph below illustrates.
“In contrast to apocalyptic sermons, at no point in human history have humans had less risk of death related to extreme weather and climate”, concludes Pielke.
In fact, the risks of extreme weather are the number one weapon used by activists to scare populations into accepting Net Zero. Just look at the twaddle below recently published by the part Green Blob-funded Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), or perhaps that should be the Union of Scientists you should be Concerned About.
Certainly this does not appear to be a Union that cares much for unbiased science and the rigours of the scientific process. Earlier this year, President Trump signed an executive order telling all federal scientists to stop pissing about with propaganda piffle and reconnect with Popperian scientific principles. It was a tricky order to complain about since it laid down perfectly reasonable rules and procedures for employees paid by the taxpayer. “It all sounds very non-objectional, but it’s extremely dangerous in its details and subtext”, observed Gretchen Goldman, President of the UCS. Danger is a word much favoured by these Armageddonites – it seems that 169 million Americans are in extreme danger this summer, particularly if they don’t use sunscreen lotion.
In fact, desperation stalks the halls of activism, politics, media and science. Forty years of hysterical climate alarms, predicated on the unproven opinion that humans control the climate by adding the trace gas carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, is coming to an end. Opinion polls asking unloaded questions are starting to show that interest in climate cry-baby catastrophising is waning. The Swedish Doom Goblin has moved onto more fashionable causes. Promised tipping points don’t tip, the corals don’t disappear – ditto the polar bears – and the ocean currents don’t stop. Eventually, the vox populi shrugs – nice try, but no cigar. The climate, in fact, is in a relatively benign phase. A little (largely natural) extra warmth and a CO₂ top-up from previously denuded levels has greened the planet, and crop yields have soared, leading to reduced levels of global famine. Despite all the Net Zero blather and unworkable mandates, hydrocarbon use across the world still provides over 80% of total energy – a prospect that holds out hope for further action against grinding poverty in the developing world.
For decades, elites have managed to shut down scientific debate by dishonestly claiming the science is somehow ‘settled’. As a result, most climate activists have lost the ability to debate the underlying science backing Net Zero. When public scientific discussion is encouraged on broadcast forums such as Britain’s Talk and GB News, the fact that almost the only person willing to debate against known critics is the climate comedy turn Jim Dale says it all.
The inability to stand up arguments in the face of increasing public scepticism will count heavily against the activists when the settled science barrier crumbles away. Needless to say, it started to fall some time ago on social media. On genuine free speech platforms such as X, the activists have long fled to the safer spaces offered by echo chambers such as Bluesky. Hiding behind the settled science comfort zone and backed by the pseudoscience offered by weather attribution guesses and computer model predictions, the activists are woefully unprepared to engage in genuine scientific discussion about the little understood complexities of the atmosphere and climate. The notorious letter published by the Guardian in 2018, when a group of activists including BBC regular Professor Mark Maslin said they would no longer “lend their credibility” in debating human-caused climate change, was a notable low point in the decades-long campaign to quash dissent.
Put simply, the activists are terrified to enter into genuine dialogue. The more intelligent ones are probably aware that if they reveal an obvious inability to counter all the alternative views around natural climate variation, this will greatly reduce public support for the Net Zero project. They are aware that CO2 levels have been much higher in the past without a provable link to runaway temperatures. Propping up this hard-Left controlling political fantasy with an unproven claim that humans somehow control the climate by releasing a trace gas into the complex atmosphere will likely be seen by future historians as the centrepiece of one of the greatest science swindles of all time.
And of course the dosh is starting to dry up. Some of the most fanatical Net Zero cash incontinent countries are running out of money, or rather other people’s money that they are borrowing to destroy the financial prospects of future generations. In the United States, the entire Net Zero scam is dead in the water with President Trump taking all the toys away. Delegates to the upcoming COP 30 Belem meeting in Brazil, travelling through the Amazon on the special road carved out of the rain forest to speed their virtuous journeys, will find the magic money tree has also been chopped down. There will be no more financial freebies from the US, which accounts for almost 60% of the GDP of the G7 group of guilt-tripped industrialised countries. China is not interested in handing out no-strings attached cash and India only plays lip service to the aims of Net Zero. Grifting nations likely to be disappointed include all those Pacific Islands growing in size but apparently destined to soon disappear beneath the waves. Bad news also for all those political chancers inventing nonsense tales for gullible woke westerners of climate justice and colonial climate oppression.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.
From the Friends of Science Society Newsletter, where they give our own Willis Eschenbach props and suggestions for his important recent work – Anthony
From the Friends of Science Society Newsletter, where they give our own Willis Eschenbach props and suggestions for his important recent work – Anthony
The Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) project provides satellite-based observations of Earth’s radiation budget and clouds. CERES instruments on several satellites measure longwave and shortwave radiation from the Earth. The longwave radiation is the radiation emitted upward to space from the Earth’s surface and clouds. The upward shortwave radiation is the reflected solar radiation which doesn’t enter the climate system. If the outgoing longwave radiation is less than the absorbed solar radiation, there is a positive top-of-atmosphere radiative imbalance (imbalance) which increases the global average temperature.
Equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) is a measure of how much the Earth’s global average surface temperature will eventually increase in response to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. Image by Anthony Watts
Willis Eschenbach used the CERES database, which gives the monthly radiative fluxes in each 1° latitude by 1° longitude starting March 2000, to calculate the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) to greenhouse gases. He produced a graph of imbalance versus the surface temperature by 1° latitude by 1° longitude with time averaged over 24 years. Eschenbach applied a lowess fit to the data. He calculated the slope of that fit and calculated the area weighted imbalance per degree of temperature change. Eschenbach asks “How much does the earth have to warm up to restore the 3.7 watts per square meter (W/m2) of TOA radiation imbalance that is said to result from a doubling of CO2 (2xCO2)?” Willis says the amount of warming required to rebalance the imbalance is called the ECS, but I believe that isn’t correct. The imbalance is not at an equilibrium state but is the result of a continual increase of greenhouse gases.
The transient climate response (TCR) is the change in temperature after a doubling of CO2 at a constant increase of a 1%/year, which would result in a doubling in 70 years. The actual average CO2 increase from 2000 to 2024 was 0.567%/year. Willis calculates the imbalance at 6.6 W/m2 per °C of surface temperature change. This equates to a TCR 3.7/6.6 = 0.56 °C, which is the TCR at 0.567%/year CO2 increase. I call this the “slowTCR”, to distinguish it from the normal TCR with a 1%/yr CO2 increase. Using a simple 1-D climate model tuned to 3-D models, with CO2 increasing at the actual rate, I calculated that the slowTCR of 0.56 °C corresponds to an ECS of 0.68 °C, which seem much too low compared to other observation-based estimates.
I did a similar calculation using the same CERES data. Each data point is 1° latitude by 4° longitude. I applied a 4th-order polynomial fit to the average 25-year data (16200 data points) as shown in this graph. I made another graph of the slope of the fitted curve and calculated a global average imbalance of 3.95 W/m2 per °C of surface temperature change, which corresponding to a slowTRC of 0.94 °C and an ECS of 1.14 °C. The lowess fit heavily discounts data further away from the mean to discount outliers. The polynomial fit might be better as all the data is of equally high quality. Changing the best fit method has a large effect on the results.
Several papers, see here and , here, argue that cloud cover can change due to atmospheric circulation changes caused by a temperature change. The analysis by Eschenbach and myself using time averaged CERES data doesn’t account for this possible effect and assumes that any potential temperature-caused air circulation changes will not significantly change the relationship between imbalance and temperature over the next few decades of climate change. Therefore, I did the same calculation using the four coldest years of the CERES data (2000, 2001,2008, 2011) and the four warmest years (2018, 2019,2023, 2024). The global average temperature difference between these year groups is 0.68 °C. If the air circulation changes were causing more warming, the result of the warm years would show a lower imbalance change per temperature change than the cold years. In fact, the warm years analysis has a slightly smaller change of 0.13 W/m2/°C, so it appears that this effect is leading to more warming. Therefore, the method we used to estimate ECS is likely inaccurate. It is not a simple task to estimate the ECS.
The recent advisory decision issued by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), runs (including headnote summary, etc.) to 140 pages, and is far too detailed for me to offer an in-depth analysis. What follows then, is simply a potted history of how we arrived here, and the implications that arise.
The recent advisory decision issued by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), runs (including headnote summary, etc.) to 140 pages, and is far too detailed for me to offer an in-depth analysis. What follows then, is simply a potted history of how we arrived here, and the implications that arise.
It’s over two years since the Guardian reported on the start of this long and winding road. Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change (PISFCC) was founded in 2019 and pushed for a UN resolution to seek an opinion from the ICJ “clarifying nations’ obligations to tackle the climate crisis and the consequences they should face for inaction.” Of course, given the state of play at the UN, they were pushing against an open door, and the opinion was duly requested in resolution 77/276 adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 29th March 2023.
Against that background, it would have been a surprise if the ICJ had done anything other than come to the conclusions it did. In order to understand the answers, though, first it is necessary to know what the questions were.
The nature of the Resolution
For those of us who are used to the English adversarial system, where the idea is that a disinterested judiciary impartially administers justice by deciding which of two opposing claims is legally correct, the way international law operates comes as something of a shock. Perhaps the wording of the letter to the ICJ shouldn’t have seemed so surprising, given the increasingly bizarre pronouncements of the UN Secretary-General (think “global boiling”). Although the questions to be put to the ICJ could have been reduced to a short paragraph, it didn’t work like that. Instead it was subjected to a quasi-hysterical rant that left it in no doubt that the narrative wasn’t to be questioned in reaching its decision; and it could equally be in no doubt regarding the conclusions it was expected to reach. Sure enough, it duly delivered.
The letter starts as it means to go on:
Recognizing that climate change is an unprecedented challenge of civilizational proportions and that the well-being of present and future generations of humankind depends on our immediate and urgent response to it…
No pressure, then, ICJ Judges.
It then recalled various UN resolutions over the years – relating to the protection of the global climate for present and future generations of humankind; on the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment; on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development; on human rights and climate change; as well as the need to ensure gender equality and empowerment of women.
Next it emphasised the importance of the UN Charter; of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; and sundry UN Conventions, before recalling the Holy Grail of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Kyoto Protocol and Paris Agreement. Thus, it inserted the concept of “the emission reductions required to hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and between current levels of adaptation and levels needed to respond to the adverse effects of climate change”.
One might have thought that ICJ Judges could be trusted to be aware of all this stuff, but the UN General Assembly was taking no chances. Next it reminded the ICJ that the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement are to be interpreted so as “to reflect equity and the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, in the light of different national circumstances”.
That wasn’t enough. The ante had to be upped some more. It went on to note “with profound alarm” that despite all these brilliant Conventions, Protocols and Agreements, greenhouse gases continue to rise and that developing countries are suffering climate plagues of Biblical proportions (I paraphrase) . I don’t think my cynicism is entirely unjustified. The effects the letter referred to are as follows:
…including [presumably this is thus not an exclusive list and they are keeping their options open with a view to adding to it] persistent drought and extreme weather events, land loss and degradation, sea level rise, coastal erosion, ocean acidification and the retreat of mountain glaciers, leading to displacement of affected persons and further threatening food security, water availability and livelihoods, as well as efforts to eradicate poverty in all its forms and dimensions and achieve sustainable development…
To profound alarm the letter added the UN’s “utmost concern” regarding the scientific consensus represented by the IPCC – just in case the ICJ dared to consider re-opening this issue. And what, exactly, is this scientific consensus that must not be challenged, but must rather be noted with profound alarm?
…that anthropogenic emissions of greenhouses gases are unequivocally the dominant cause of the global warming observed since the mid-20th century, that human-induced climate change, including more frequent and intense extreme events, has caused widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people, beyond natural climate variability, and that across sectors and regions the most vulnerable people and systems are observed to be disproportionately affected…
Then it acknowledges that as temperatures continue to rise, it’s all going to go to hell in a handcart, and so it emphasises the urgency of scaling up action and finding the money to do so. It concludes by expressing “serious concern” that the goal of mobilising £100 billion per annum by 2020 hasn’t been met (I think we can reasonably infer from this that it’s up to the ICJ to produce a decision that will enable the money to be extracted from some nasty rich countries).
Finally we arrive at the questions that the ICJ is to answer (but not before insisting that it has to have “particular regard” to the various Conventions and Treaties referred to above):
First:
What are the obligations of States under international law to ensure the protection of the climate system and other parts of the environment from anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases for States and for present and future generations?
Second:
What are the legal consequences under these obligations for States where they, by their acts and omissions, have caused significant harm to the climate system and other parts of the environment, with respect to:
States, including, in particular, small island developing States, which due to their geographical circumstances and level of development, are injured or specially affected by or are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change?
and
Peoples and individuals of the present and future generations affected by the adverse effects of climate change?
The decision
After listing a huge number of organisations (and the individuals representing them) – this part runs to thirteen pages – that made submissions, the ICJ finally got around to looking at the law. Before I turn to that, I note that the UK representative was the Rt Hon. Lord Richard Hermer, KC, HM Attorney General for England and Wales. I am curious to know the gist of his submission. According to the BBC’s report of the judgment:
…developed countries, including the UK, argued that existing climate agreements, including the landmark UN Paris deal of 2015, are sufficient and no further legal obligations should be imposed…
Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find anything more on the UK government’s website.
Back to the ICJ. It commenced by noting that it has a discretion as to whether or not to issue an advisory decision, and then decided that it would exercise its discretion to do so, noting that there was no compelling reason why it should decline to offer its opinion.
It then turned “to the context in which resolution 77/276 was adopted, as well as to the relevant scientific background.” Inevitably there followed six or so pages dealing with the context (basically a recitation of the various UN jamborees that have led to this point) and another five or so pages discussing “the science”, with particular reference to the work of the IPCC. Finally, on page 39 of the judgment, the ICJ got around to discussing the scope and meaning of the questions it has been asked to answer. It noted that it has the power to interpret the questions put to it for an advisory opinion and that it is for the Court “to appreciate and assess the appropriateness of the formulation of the questions”. Further, that if questions put to the Court are ambiguous or vague, the Court may clarify them before giving an opinion. However, it wasted no time in concluding that “[i]n the present instance, the Court considers that there is no need for it to reformulate the questions submitted to it”.
Paragraph 97 is interesting. It touches on the question of whether states can be liable for historic emissions, and notes that there is an issue as to whether states can be held responsible for actions taken before they were covered by a treaty obligation. It sidestepped the issue by noting that the questions involve the obligations of all (rather than asking about the liability of individual) states. As we will see later, it also seeks to impose a further legal duty based on general concepts of international law, rather than one based solely on Treaty obligations.
I am racing through the judgment, because there is much that is of interest to an international lawyer, but which is of less interest to a curious layperson. Some time is spent analysing the UN Charter, international climate treaties, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and other environmental treaties, before the ICJ turns its attention to customary international law. After a fairly brief review of this latter area, it concludes, at paragraph 139:
…that the duty of States to prevent significant environmental harm applies in the context of climate change and that this duty forms part of the most directly relevant applicable law….
Looking at the UN Charter, the ICJ next concluded (at paragraph 142):
…that the duty to co-operate for the protection of the environment forms part of customary international law and can also serve as a guiding principle for the interpretation of other rules. It forms part of the most directly relevant applicable law.
By paragraph 148 we are getting to the meat of the UN’s ongoing determination to transfer wealth from developed countries to developing ones:
In the view of the Court, the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities reflects the need to distribute equitably the burdens of the obligations in respect of climate change, taking into account, inter alia, States’ historical and current contributions to cumulative GHG emissions, and their different current capabilities and national circumstances, including their economic and social development. The principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities thus acknowledges, on the one hand, the historical responsibility of certain States and, on the other, that the measures which can be expected from all States with respect to addressing climate change are not the same.
And at paragraph 150:
The Court thus notes that on one end of the spectrum are the most developed States which have contributed significantly to the overall amount of GHG emissions since the Industrial Revolution, and which have resources and the technical capacity to implement wide-ranging emission reductions. On the other end are those least developed States that have contributed only minimally to historical emissions and have only a limited capacity to transform their economies. In between are States that have progressed considerably in their development since the conclusion of the UNFCCC in 1992, in line with that instrument’s expectation that “the share of global emissions originating in developing countries will grow to meet their social and development needs” (UNFCCC, third preambular paragraph), and some of which now contribute significantly to global GHG emissions and possess the capacity to engage in meaningful mitigation and adaptation efforts, as well as other States with significant resources and technical capabilities to contribute to addressing global climate change.
I suspect the “in-between” states referred to there definitely include China. Good luck in persuading them to cough up some dosh.
Paragraph 157 deals with inter-generational equity:
In the Court’s view, intergenerational equity is a manifestation of equity in the general sense and thus shares its legal significance as a guide for the interpretation of applicable rules. Accordingly, considerations of intergenerational equity must play a role infra legem, without displacing or exceeding the limits of the applicable law. Due regard for the interests of future generations and the long-term implications of conduct are equitable considerations that need to be taken into account where States contemplate, decide on and implement policies and measures in fulfilment of their obligations under the relevant treaties and customary international law.
For the avoidance of doubt, the conclusion reached at paragraph 161 is everything that the UN might have hoped for:
For these reasons the Court concludes that the principles of sustainable development, common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, equity, intergenerational equity and the precautionary approach or principle are applicable as guiding principles for the interpretation and application of the most directly relevant legal rules.
Skipping through the decision, things become quite interesting from paragraph 304 onwards. Paragraph 304 contains this nugget:
…While States have obligations to make individual contributions to collective efforts under the duty to prevent significant harm to the environment, the interpretation and fulfilment of their substantive obligations under that duty must also take account of the situation of other States and, as far as possible, be fulfilled in co-operation with other States…
Does this allow individual states to evade responsibility by saying that the lack of co-operation from other major emitters means they aren’t obliged to take individual action if such measures would be futile? Almost certainly not – see paragraph 306:
…The Court recognizes that the duty to co-operate leaves States some discretion in determining the means for regulating their GHG emissions. However, this discretion cannot serve as an excuse for States to refrain from co-operating with the required level of due diligence or to present their effort as an entirely voluntary contribution which cannot be subjected to scrutiny...
And paragraph 308:
…Climate change is a common concern. Co-operation is not a matter of choice for States but a pressing need and a legal obligation…
Paragraph 315 seeks to avoid allowing parties to evade liability by not being a party to climate change treaties:
…Customary obligations are the same for all States and exist independently regardless of whether a State is a party to the climate change treaties…
Only on page 116 does the ICJ get around to dealing with the legal consequences of its findings regarding various aspects of international law. Critically (at paragraph 406):
...it is not the Court’s task in this Opinion to establish the individual responsibility of a State or group of States for the damage caused to the climate system (see paragraphs 107-110 above); such responsibility can only be established on a case-by-case basis...
Paragraph 421 onwards deals specifically with determination of state responsibility in the climate change context. At this point I think it is worth referring to my own article in which I seek to explain the difficulties involved in apportioning liability for climate change damage (even assuming – as of course the ICJ does – that the IPCC science is beyond challenge). For I am not alone in observing that these issues are profoundly complex. The ICJ acknowledges as much:
The Court recalls that climate change is a highly complex and multifaceted phenomenon involving possible responsibilities for multiple States over long periods of time. The unprecedented nature and scale of harm resulting from climate change give rise to particular issues in relation to the application of the customary rules on State responsibility. That is so because concentrations of GHG emissions are not produced by a single activity or group of activities identifiable or associated with a certain State or States. Moreover, it is the collective and aggregate effects of GHGs, anthropogenic as well as from natural sources, that cause damage to the climate system. While, in general, all States both contribute to these emissions and are adversely affected by climate change, it is to be recalled that States have contributed to significantly different degrees to the concentration of GHGs in the atmosphere and are affected differently by the effects of climate change. The Court finds it necessary to address, as part of its reply to the General Assembly, some of the issues raised by these special features of climate change to the application of the customary rules on State responsibility.
Chief amongst these issues are questions relating to attribution and causation, which require clarification in view of the special features of climate change. Indeed, the need for such clarifications is self-evident given that, under the rules on State responsibility, only an action or omission attributable to a State can give rise to international responsibility. Moreover, in cases where reparation is claimed, it must be shown that the damage for which reparation is claimed has been factually and legally caused by a State.
Paragraphs 427 and 428 are particularly interesting, and is, I think, one of the paragraphs that has given rise to much of the excitable reporting of the judgment:
Failure of a State to take appropriate action to protect the climate system from GHG emissions — including through fossil fuel production, fossil fuel consumption, the granting of fossil fuel exploration licences or the provision of fossil fuel subsidies — may constitute an internationally wrongful act which is attributable to that State. The Court also emphasizes that the internationally wrongful act in question is not the emission of GHGs per se, but the breach of conventional and customary obligations identified under question (a) pertaining to the protection of the climate system from significant harm resulting from anthropogenic emissions of such gases….
…In relation to private actors, the Court observes that the obligations it has identified under question (a) include the obligation of States to regulate the activities of private actors as a matter of due diligence. Therefore, attribution in this context involves attaching to a State its own actions or omissions that constitute a failure to exercise regulatory due diligence….
Also paragraph 429:
The Court further notes that some participants submitted that it is difficult to invoke responsibility in the context of climate change given that the wrongful conduct is cumulative in nature, involving different States over a period of time, and involving a plurality of States that cause injury to a plurality of injured States. In this respect, the Court observes that while climate change is caused by cumulative GHG emissions, it is scientifically possible to determine each State’s total contribution to global emissions, taking into account both historical and current emissions….
I profoundly disagree with this bland and casual statement. It is far more complex than that. I dealt with the difficulty of (inter alia) establishing the emissions on a state by state basis here.
Paragraph 431 is crucial:
Therefore, in the climate change context, the Court considers that each injured State may separately invoke the responsibility of every State which has committed an internationally wrongful act resulting in damage to the climate system and other parts of the environment. And where several States are responsible for the same internationally wrongful act, the responsibility of each State may be invoked in relation to that act.
This is immensely problematic. If the IPCC and the UN (and Ed Miliband and the rest of them) are to be believed, every state (including the UK) has suffered climate change injury. Equally, every state has (on the basis of the ICJ’s analysis) at some time, and to a greater or lesser extent, “committed an internationally wrongful act resulting in damage to the climate system and other parts of the environment.” I discuss the implications of this bizarre paragraph below.
The ICJ specifically discussed the issue of causation from paragraph 433 onwards. I won’t go into detail, and I observe that it rather airily dismissed the causation issues that I dealt with at some length in Gimme, Gimme, Gimme. I am not an international lawyer, and I have not practised law for some years, so what do I know compared to these eminent Judges? Still, I venture to suggest that the issues I raise are of relevance, and should be argued in any case brought against a state as a result of the advisory ICJ decision. Despite the erudition on display (as one would expect from eminent international Judges) and despite the length of the decision, the section dealing with causation is cavalier in its simplicity, given the complexity of the issue, especially in this context. It is is this, more than anything else, that convinces me that this is a political decision doing the UN’s bidding, rather than a truly independent and objective Court finding. Anyone defending a claim issued on the back of this decision shoud certainly seize on the words of the ICJ at paragraph 454:
In the climate change context, reparations in the form of compensation may be difficult to calculate, as there is usually a degree of uncertainty with respect to the exact extent of the damage caused.
It seems beyond doubt that this judgment will be used to justify claims against individual states, as the final part of the conclusion makes clear. The ICJ concludes:
Unanimously, Is of the opinion that a breach by a State of any obligations identified in response to question (a) constitutes an internationally wrongful act entailing the responsibility of that State. The responsible State is under a continuing duty to perform the obligation breached. The legal consequences resulting from the commission of an internationally wrongful act may include the obligations of: (a) cessation of the wrongful actions or omissions, if they are continuing; (b) providing assurances and guarantees of non-repetition of wrongful actions or omissions, if circumstances so require; and (c) full reparation to injured States in the form of restitution, compensation and satisfaction, provided that the general conditions of the law of State responsibility are met, including that a sufficiently direct and certain causal nexus can be shown between the wrongful act and injury.
At the end of the decision, paragraph 456 is overtly political, and makes it clear that the issued decision is part of the process of trying to achieve the UN’s objective with regard to climate change:
Before concluding, the Court recalls that it has been suggested that these advisory proceedings are unlike any that have previously come before the Court. At the same time, as the Court concluded earlier, the questions put to it by the General Assembly are legal ones (see paragraph 40), and the Court, as a court of law, can do no more than address the questions put to it through and within the limits of its judicial function; this is the Court’s assigned role in the international legal order. However, the questions posed by the General Assembly represent more than a legal problem: they concern an existential problem of planetary proportions that imperils all forms of life and the very health of our planet. International law, whose authority has been invoked by the General Assembly, has an important but ultimately limited role in resolving this problem. A complete solution to this daunting, and self-inflicted, problem requires the contribution of all fields of human knowledge, whether law, science, economics or any other. Above all, a lasting and satisfactory solution requires human will and wisdom — at the individual, social and political levels — to change our habits, comforts and current way of life in order to secure a future for ourselves and those who are yet to come. Through this Opinion, the Court participates in the activities of the United Nations and the international community represented in that body, with the hope that its conclusions will allow the law to inform and guide social and political action to address the ongoing climate crisis.
Implications
The implications for the UK, and its current Labour government, strike me as intriguing, to say the least. I posited in Are There Two Sides to Ecocide? that the Scottish government has a dilemma in deciding whether or not to press on with the Ecocide Bill – does it provide exemptions for the renewable energy companies who are causing so much environmental damage, thereby undermining the Bill, or does it allow them to fall within its scope, thereby undermining its energy policy? Or does it decline to allow the Bill to go forward, thereby undermining its claims to be in the environmental vanguard?
Similarly, in the event that an individual or a country sues the UK in reliance on the ICJ decision, how should the UK government respond? It has insisted on the vital importance of international law (even while paying lip service to it). Does it deny responsibility for any such claim that might be made on the basis of the UK’s historic emissions? Or does it acknowledge some liability? If the former, how does it continue to claim to be at the forefront of the fight against climate change? If the latter, how does it explain to UK voters that their taxes are going to have to go up even more to pay these damages? Especially given that we are always being told (disingenuously) that the costs of net zero are justified because they are less than the costs of inaction. How ironic it would be if we ended up paying the enormous costs of net zero, saw no benefit from them in the form of mitigation of climate change, and also ended up paying damages to others for the climate change they claim they are suffering.
What’s the alternative? Does the UK admit the claim based on historic emissions, but deny any obligation to pay damages, because the UK is in turn owed damages by those other countries (the vast majority of them) who are not following the UK’s “lead”, who are not making meaningful efforts to reduce their own emissions, and who are manifestly failing to comply with the obligation detailed by the ICJ to co-operate with other nations with regard to emissions reductions and climate change mitigation? Remember, in this context, paragraph 431:
Therefore, in the climate change context, the Court considers that each injured State may separately invoke the responsibility of every State which has committed an internationally wrongful act resulting in damage to the climate system and other parts of the environment. And where several States are responsible for the same internationally wrongful act, the responsibility of each State may be invoked in relation to that act.
Where does it end? Will every nation sue every other nation for their breaches of the duties established by the ICJ? Who will pay? It can safely be assumed that Russia, Iraq, India, China, USA (under Trump) and the other big emitters won’t be in a hurry to part with any money. Will the UK, yet again, be the mugs who pay for everything?
However this pans out, I think the ICJ decision will turn out to be a very low point indeed, despite the high moral tone it has adopted. It has opened Pandora’s Box, and potentially unleashed chaos. It seeks to build international co-operation. Instead, there is a distinct possibility that this will lead to countries being at each other’s throats for decades to come. It is a most unwelcome development, whatever the climate-concerned might wish to believe to the contrary.
“We need to build and maintain vast AI infrastructure and the energy to power it. To do that, we will continue to reject radical climate dogma and bureaucratic red tape, as the Administration has done since Inauguration Day,” the plan says. “Simply put, we need to ‘Build, Baby, Build!’”
…
“At its core, President Trump’s AI agenda is nothing more than a thinly veiled invitation for the fossil fuel and corporate water industries to ramp up their exploitation of our environment and natural resources – all at the expense of everyday people,” said Mitch Jones, a managing director Food and Water Watch, an environmental advocacy group.
…
“Under this plan, tech giants get sweetheart deals while everyday Americans will see their electricity bills rise to subsidize discounted power for massive AI datacenters,” said JB Branch, a big-tech accountability advocate with the consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen. “States are held hostage: either stop protecting their residents from dangerous, untested AI products, or lose federal funding.”
…
“We can’t let big tech and big oil lobbyists write the rules for AI and our economy at the expense of our freedom and equality, workers and families’ wellbeing,” the coalition wrote.
As the public support base for climate action narrows, greens have long been searching for a replacement for the climate crisis which could re-engage groups which outright reject their climate crisis claims. From 2016;
I predicted in 2017 that AI would be the winning replacement ticket. It was already obvious by then that the political right in key nations was less than enthusiastic about the climate crisis narrative. The threat to greens of permanently losing a large chunk of their audience was obvious.
What I didn’t predict in 2017 was the enormous energy footprint of AI and the AI jobs crisis would be the trigger which convinces climate activists to experiment with anti-AI activism. I thought the trigger would be fear of malevolent AI. I knew the energy demand of AI would be large, but Microsoft rehabilitating Three Mile Island nuclear plant just so they can power their AI is next level.
The threat of millions of jobs being automated by AI dangles the possibility of resurrecting broad based political support for the green movement. If greens succeed in amplifying public fear of AI job losses, they could split the Republican base. The climate crisis component of green messaging might leave unbelievers unmoved, but you don’t have to be a Democrat to fear losing your job to AI automation.
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