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.
An alert Massachusetts watchdog group has blown the whistle on the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) for issuing potentially catastrophic guidance for building grid scale battery facilities. They are specifying a standard which is only meant for small batteries making some rules deadly wrong at grid scale. Turns out this fallacy is widespread nationally making their warning that much more important.
An alert Massachusetts watchdog group has blown the whistle on the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) for issuing potentially catastrophic guidance for building grid scale battery facilities. They are specifying a standard which is only meant for small batteries making some rules deadly wrong at grid scale. Turns out this fallacy is widespread nationally making their warning that much more important.
The background is that Massachusetts is rushing an enormous grid battery buildout driven by their 2024 Energy Act. Something like 3,500 MW of battery projects are to be built around the State in the next two years or so. A 40 foot long, tractor trailer sized battery is typically just 1 MW so think 3,500 giant batteries but it could be many more.
The Energy Act required the DEP to issue safety guidance for this buildout which they did in August. Laurie Belsito, Policy Director at the Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance, just blew the whistle in a Boston Herald article titled “Belsito: Battery guidance lacks juice to deal with Mass. projects.”
The DEP guidance focuses on National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) Standard 855 — “Standard for the Installation of Stationary Energy Storage Systems.” As Belsito points out this standard is only for small batteries not the giant batteries and battery complexes about to flood Massachusetts.
Here how Belsito puts it:
“By way of scale the NFPA Standard 855 is limited to batteries with an energy storage capacity of 50 kilowatt-hours (kWh) or less. Such a battery might be used for emergency blackout protection in an office building. However, each of the state’s Energy Act batteries is likely to have a capacity of 4,000 kWh (equal to 4 MWh) or more.
Giant batteries 80 times bigger than Standard 855 allows are not adequately covered by that standard. Unfortunately, as of yet there are no national standards for batteries of this scale.
In some aspects, applying 855 would be catastrophically wrong. For example, 855 says that when there are multiple batteries, they should be three feet apart so if one burns it will not ignite its neighbors. That tiny spacing would provide no protection in the case of the giant batteries being mandated in Massachusetts.
The greatest risk with these huge batteries is that a single battery burning has the potential to set the entire complex on fire. The Department of Energy Resources (DOER) has issued a Request for Proposals for Energy Act batteries that in effect, specifies that projects have at least 40 batteries and could have up to 1,000. The possibility of catastrophe is undeniable.”
Unfortunately NFPA 855 sounds like the right standard for grid scale facilities so it is cited frequently, not just in Massachusetts, which is a potentially deadly national error.
For example EPA recently put out “Battery Energy Storage Systems: Main Considerations for Safe Installation and Incident Response” for grid scale batteries. It too features NFPA 855.
The American Clean Power Association has a fact sheet: “NFPA 855: Improving Energy Storage System Safety” which never mentions the 50 kWh limitation. Even worse it features a grid scale battery background photo.
NFPA is partly responsible for this widespread, potentially catastrophic error. In Standard 855 the crucial 50 kWh limitation is not featured; in fact it is hard to find. In the latest 855 I could only find it stated once, as Section 9.5.1.1 where Section 9 is for electrochemical batteries including lithium ion grid batteries. This small battery limitation should be flagged up front in red.
The deeper question is why has NFPA not issued a standard for the giant grid scale batteries? There is a grid scale battery building boom going on. While recent legislation is rapidly phasing out lucrative subsidies for wind and solar it left untouched the similar subsidies for giant batteries.
Clear rules for safe design of grid battery facilities are desperately needed if deadly catastrophe is to be avoided. Belsito has made this urgent need clear for Massachusetts. The other States and the Federal Government need to hear it as well.
Reusing wasted heat exhausted from power plant stacks can support endless greenhouses to help feed the world’s population.
Ronald Stein, P.E. is an engineer, columnist on energy literacy at America Out Loud NEWS, and advisor on energy literacy for the Heartland Institute and CFACT, and co-author of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated book “Clean Energy Exploitations.”
Sid Abma’s company Sidel Systems specialized in the design and installation of warm water heating systems for the commercial greenhouse industry. His passion is to deliver maximum energy efficiency to everything.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and datacenters are coming and so are the natural gas power plants that will be required to provide continuous uninterruptible electricity to power a lot of these facilities. These power plants today can operate at well over 90% Energy Efficiency.
The natural gas power plant that has produced electricity can further benefit humanity via the waste exhaust that would normally be put into a chimney and vented into the atmosphere, which is a waste of heat and a waste of CO2.
Rather than exhausting hot gases up power plants chimneys, the exhaust can be utilized in greenhouses, typically through a cogeneration system. The recovered heat energy can be used to warm greenhouses, and the CO2 fertilizes the plants, and all contributes to feeding the world’s population.
A Combined Heat and Power (CHP) power plant, also known as cogeneration, is a highly efficient energy system that simultaneously produces both electricity and useful heat from a single fuel source. The process involves using a “prime mover,” such as a gas turbine or engine, to generate electricity and then capturing the waste heat from the prime mover for thermal applications like heating or cooling buildings. This integrated approach significantly increases energy efficiency and reduces fuel consumption compared to generating heat and power separately, leading to lower operating costs and fewer carbon emissions.
The CHP process in the power plant involves treating the exhaust with catalytic converters to reduce any harmful components in the exhaust.
Exhaust Gas Treatment: The exhaust gas is passed through a selective catalytic reduction (SCR) unit and an oxidation catalyst to remove pollutants like nitrogen oxides (NOx) and non-methane hydrocarbons (NMHC).
Within the combusted exhaust is heat energy that was not used to create electricity. The Sidel SRU Flue Gas Condenser was developed in the early 1980’s to recover the waste heat energy from the exhaust of the boilers used to heat these commercial greenhouses.
Today, over 2.5 million square feet of Greenhouses are using this “recovery of wasted heat” technology every day for increasing energy efficiency and to provide cooled CO2. The cooled exhaust, CO2, is being used in commercial greenhouses for CO2 enrichment. Even the created water in the exhaust has a purpose. The Sidel SRU Flue Gas Condenser is being used today in many other applications such as processing plants, hospitals, petrochemical plants, universities, commercial laundries, and State prisons.
To make the most of the elements from future power plants combusted natural gas exhaust, a greenhouse becomes a perfect partner. The SRU recovered heat energy will be piped over and will be used to maintain the perfect growing environment for a multitude of different food crops. The CO2 in the exhaust will be piped over and injected into these growing environments as a fertilizer that will increase fruit and vegetable size and quantity. The condensate water will have nutrients added and then be used to irrigate these crops.
To apply this technology in power plant applications is a natural forward progression. In Utah at the Current Creek power plant this technology is today being applied, heating 30 acres of commercial greenhouses owned by Houweling Nurseries.
All this happens because the owners of the power plant decided to improve their energy efficiency from 50% to 97% by redirecting the combusted exhaust and utilizing the heat energy and the CO2 and the water to better uses.
Utilizing the wasted heat in the exhaust from natural gas power plants can support endless greenhouses to help feed America and the world’s population.
The AI Centers, datacenters, power plants, and greenhouses will be operating for generations, providing good paying community jobs to parents, kids, and grandkids and food for the population.
The technology condensing flue gas heat recovery, provides beneficial use for heat and emissions that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere. This increases plant yield while reducing the economic costs of energy for the greenhouse.
Everyone WINS, with produced electricity and food.
Increased Plant Growth: Elevated CO2 levels in greenhouses accelerate plant growth and increase harvest yields.
Reduced Energy Costs: By recovering waste heat from the exhaust for heating, operating costs for the greenhouses can be significantly reduced.
Sustainable Operation: This closed-loop system reuses byproducts, turning potential pollutants into a valuable resource for plant cultivation.
Greenhouse Benefits:
CO2 Fertilization: The carbon dioxide from the exhaust is naturally used by the plants, a process known as CO2 enrichment, which can significantly boost plant growth and yield.
Heating: The heat from the exhaust provides efficient heating for the greenhouse.
Utilizing the exhausted energy from power plant stacks is a Win-Win situation for all. All this is because the power plants improved their energy efficiency to 97% just by utilizing the exhaust – the heat and CO2 emissions. A good deal for everybody.
The new AI Centers and datacenters are going to create a lot of new jobs.
The new power plants are going to create a lot of local professional jobs.
The new greenhouses will help feed the world’s growing population and create hundreds of new good paying jobs for the local community.
Utilizing waste heat that is normally exhausted from power plant stacks can support endless greenhouses to help feed the world’s population. It also reduces wasting natural gas.
European Union (E.U.) officials are upholding a first-of-its-kind methane emissions regulation on imported fuels, creating significant uncertainty for the U.S. natural gas and liquified natural gas (LNG) industry. The regulation’s requirements have yet to be defined, and the regulation begins in 2027.
European Union (E.U.) officials are upholding a first-of-its-kind methane emissions regulation on imported fuels, creating significant uncertainty for the U.S. natural gas and liquified natural gas (LNG) industry. The regulation’s requirements have yet to be defined, and the regulation begins in 2027. According to S&P Global, uncertainty about the implementation of the E.U.’s methane regulation is already pushing European gas and LNG market participants to curtail some contract negotiations.
When it begins, the regulation will penalize importers of LNG into the E.U. who fail to prove that their gas meets the same monitoring, reporting, and verification standards imposed on E.U. producers. The E.U. requires importers to provide data “at the level of the producer,” which could be particularly challenging for American LNG exporters. As S&P Global explains, unlike most of the world, U.S. LNG export facilities source natural gas from a vast pipeline network. Supplies are commingled, including volumes sourced from different production basins with varied methane intensities.
According to the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, the E.U. Methane Regulation, effective as of August 4, 2024, introduced new obligations for domestically produced and imported crude oil, natural gas, and coal, including accurately monitoring, reporting, and verifying upstream methane emissions.
The Trump administration, however, has taken steps to reduce reporting requirements while it focuses on expanding U.S. LNG exports. It has a proposal to end reporting obligations for oil and gas companies under the Environmental Protection Agency’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program.
After U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright critiqued a number of E.U. climate laws during his September visit to Europe, he indicated that E.U.’s legal regulatory framework had to change for U.S. natural gas to flow into Europe. According to Secretary Wright, there was agreement on both sides that the regulations as they are now written mean no more U.S. LNG would flow into Europe. Recently, the European Commission Director General for Energy, Ditte Juul Jorgensen, indicated that she was confident that Europe can implement its methane regulation “in a way that doesn’t constitute an irritant in any way.”
U.S.-E.U. Trade Deal
The United States and the E.U. have a preliminary trade deal that includes purchases of U.S. energy totaling $750 billion over three years. The E.U. has agreed to buy $250 billion worth of U.S. oil, natural gas, and nuclear fuels per year for three years. The strategic purchases include everything from spot purchases to long-term contracts for LNG and nuclear technology.
U.S. LNG Exports to E.U. and Export Capacity
Via S&P Global, the United States is the E.U.’s top LNG trade partner. In 2024, the United States supplied the E.U. with 36.6 million metric tons of LNG and the majority of U.S. LNG cargoes have been flowing to Europe since 2022.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), the United States exported 11.9 billion cubic feet per day of LNG in 2024, remaining the world’s largest LNG exporter. The U.S. LNG export capacity is expected to double by the end of the decade as new export projects come online.
Via the EIA, on December 26, 2024, Plaquemines LNG — the eighth LNG export terminal in the United States — shipped its first cargo after achieving its first LNG production in mid-December. Plaquemines LNG is one of two U.S. LNG export terminals that started LNG production in 2024. Corpus Christi Stage 3, which is an expansion of the existing Corpus Christi LNG export terminal, also began LNG production in December 2024. LNG export capacity is expected to expand to 21.2 billion cubic feet per day by 2028 once the three other U.S. LNG export projects currently under construction — Golden Pass LNG, Rio Grande LNG, and Port Arthur LNG — are completed.
While in the midst of natural gas shortages due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, implementing such emissions regulations on imported fuels not only puts American suppliers in the crosshairs, but is a potential self-inflicted wound on Europe. Even as Europe moves to be free of Russian gas imports by 2027, by implementing new regulations on what will be American supplementation, Europe is demonstrating the catastrophic effect of extreme environmentalism. Instead of aligning with the emissions regulations of the foreign entities, including Qatar, that are looking to increase their exportation of natural gas to Europe, Europe seems to be disconnected from the real supply chain crisis that they face. If these regulations go into effect, it will have a detrimental effect on Europe’s ability to supply natural gas to its people.
In a recent column titled “A Chart Climate Denialists Can’t Ignore,” Bloomberg writer Mark Gongloff presents a graph from Berkeley Earth’s Zeke Hausfather as proof that “the world is getting hotter, and fast.” While the chart may accurately display data, it is highly misleading because it doesn’t take the root causes of such temperature records into account, such as the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect and the warm-biased placement of weather stations that record temperatures, factors that have nothing to do with climate change.
In a recent column titled “A Chart Climate Denialists Can’t Ignore,”Bloomberg writer Mark Gongloff presents a graph from Berkeley Earth’s Zeke Hausfather as proof that “the world is getting hotter, and fast.” While the chart may accurately display data, it is highly misleading because it doesn’t take the root causes of such temperature records into account, such as the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect and the warm-biased placement of weather stations that record temperatures, factors that have nothing to do with climate change.
The chart, Gongloff claims, shows that nearly 80 percent of global land areas have experienced record monthly high temperatures in this century alone. From this, readers are told that the evidence is overwhelming and that skepticism about catastrophic climate change is “denial.” It’s a tidy narrative—but like many tidy narratives, it unravels when context and historical data are brought to bear.
The idea that today’s heat is “unprecedented” is simply false. In fact, most all-time state high temperature records in the United States were set long before the 21st century began. As detailed in Climate at a Glance: The Facts on Climate Change (2nd Edition, 2025), “the all-time high temperature records set in most states occurred in the first half of the twentieth century, decades before anyone was talking about human-caused climate change.” This is not a small technicality. It is a direct contradiction of the claim that modern warming is without historical parallel.
The 1930s remain the standout decade for heat in the American record. Data, drawn from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) U.S. Historical Climatology Network, show that both the number and intensity of heatwaves peaked during that period. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Heat Wave Index, cited in Climate at a Glance, confirms that the 1930s still dominate in frequency and duration of heatwaves nationwide. A chart from Our World in Data, shown below, verifies the EPA heatwave data:
Figure 1: U.S. Heat Wave Index, 1895–2021, from NOAA via EPA (2024) – processed by Our World in Data
Figure 2: USCRN high-temperature data from January 2005 to August 2005.
This data matters because the United States has the longest, most carefully maintained temperature record in the world. If there were truly a runaway increase in record heat, it would be evident here first. Instead, as The Heartland Institute notes, “there has been no significant warming across the United States since 2005” and “recent warming rates are no higher than in the early 20th century.” The NOAA record confirms this trend: when adjustments and urban heat biases are stripped away, the upward slope of U.S. maximum temperatures largely disappears.
Finally, a chart of high temperature records for the past century, seen below in Figure 3, easily disproves the Bloomberg claim.
Figure 3: The annual mean number of days with a daily maximum temperature ≥95°, ≥100° and ≥105° each at 828 NOAA USHCN stations with at least 100 years of daily temperature readings between 1895 and 2023. Graph by Chris Martz from NOAA data at https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2.5/
What is too often ignored in mainstream reporting is the extent to which temperature datasets have been massaged over the years. Historical temperatures in the far past are routinely adjusted downward, and station siting biases in the present exacerbate the problem, exaggerating the appearance of a steep warming trend. An independent audit of the U.S. surface station network done by Heartland in 2022 found that well over 90 percent of stations fail NOAA’s own siting standards, with many positioned near heat sources such as buildings, parking lots, or air-conditioning exhausts. When only well-sited, rural stations are considered, the long-term warming trend falls dramatically.
This important context is missing entirely from Gongloff’s piece. Instead, readers are presented with an appealing graphic and a few cherry-picked statistics that appear to seal the case. Yet, as the new Climate at a Glance book points out, climate models and global averages often obscure more than they reveal. “Models run too hot,” the book notes, “and they consistently project more warming than is observed in the real world.” The gap between modeled projections and measured outcomes has persisted for decades, which raises questions not about “denial,” but about scientific humility.
In the United States, there has been no statistically significant increase in either the number or intensity of heatwaves since the early 20th century. That is not a matter of ideology—it is a matter of record.
Gongloff closes his piece by warning that the 1930s Dust Bowl may soon “seem like a cool interlude.” That is preposterous – the data tells a completely different story. America’s hottest decade remains the 1930s, and despite rising carbon dioxide emissions, modern heat extremes have not surpassed those early records. Before accepting graphics designed to shock, it’s worth remembering that charts can be constructed to emphasize whatever conclusion the author prefers. History, on the other hand, does not bend so easily.
Ultimately, long-term unbiased data and a proper accounting of the UHI effect destroy Bloomberg’s intentionally alarming claims about a rapidly warming world.
In southern India, a new enterprise called Peer Publicon Consultancy offers a full suite of services to scientific researchers. It will not only write a scholarly paper for a fee but also guarantee publishing the fraudulent work in a respected journal.
In southern India, a new enterprise called Peer Publicon Consultancy offers a full suite of services to scientific researchers. It will not only write a scholarly paper for a fee but also guarantee publishing the fraudulent work in a respected journal.
It is one of many “paper mills” that have emerged across Asia and Eastern Europe over the last two decades. Paper mills are having remarkable success peddling tens of thousands of bogus academic journal papers and authorships to university and medical researchers seeking to pad their resumes in highly competitive fields.
These sophisticated outfits also engage in trickery to get papers published, infiltrating journals with their own editors and reviewers and even resorting to bribery, according to investigators and a white paper from Wiley, a New Jersey-based publisher. The scale of the fraud is eye-popping: One Wiley subsidiary, Hindawi, retracted more than 8,000 articles two years ago for suspected paper mill involvement.
U.S. universities and regulators have been able to brush off the threat of paper mills because they have mostly sold their services in China, where research integrity standards are rarely enforced, according to experts. But these rogue operators are building on their success in Asia and expanding to the U.S. and Western Europe, where the prize is the prestige of naming an author on an article from a famous university.
“Paper mills have become a huge business,” said Jennifer Byrne, professor of molecular oncology at the University of Sydney, who studies the enterprises. “If some journals are pushing back on papers from China, and they probably are, it makes sense that paper mills will try to diversify their clientele and start working with people in different countries.”
As paper mills expand from the fringe to the center of research, placing professional-looking articles in high-impact journals owned by major publishers like Springer Nature, experts worry about the potential harm to scientific discovery. Researchers willing to break the rules in a Darwinian world of ‘publish or perish’ may mislead other scientists who incorporate their false findings into their own work. “We know little about the actual impact of paper mills on research,” Byrne says. “But if scientists are building on bad information, they are wasting resources and not making progress in their fields.”
Paper Mills Spread to the West
Paper mills appear to be expanding at a rapid clip, aided by AI that enables them to overwhelm journals with dozens of papers in a short period of time, adding to the challenge of detecting fakes. A study by the Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE) revealed that, on average, journals suspected about 2% of submitted papers came from mills about five years ago. After journals published fake papers, however, the paper mills saw the opening and pounced, accounting for nearly half of new submissions.
In a corrupt echo of Moore’s Law, a 2024 study concluded that the number of suspected paper mill articles has been doubling every 18 months, “far outpacing that of legitimate science.”
Researchers in the West appear to be a small but important part of the expansion. Journals have retracted more than 140 papers that name a U.S. co-author because of evidence of organized fraud, and almost 200 retracted papers name a co-author from Western Europe, according to data collected by watchdog group Retraction Watch and analyzed by Cristina Candal Pedreira, an assistant professor at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Scholars at many leading U.S. universities, including the University of California, Emory University, Georgia Tech, and the University of Texas, have co-authored papers linked to paper mills in recent years.
The retraction notice for a 2022 paper co-authored by computer scientist Yanhui Guo, a rising star in the field of AI at the University of Illinois Springfield, is typical. Wiley said its investigation of Guo’s paper “uncovered evidence of systematic manipulation of the publication and peer-review process. We cannot, therefore, vouch for the reliability or integrity of this article.”
It’s difficult to know what role, if any, the U.S. researchers had in collaborating with a paper mill. Assuming the paper is a fake, a U.S. co-author could have purchased it or secured an authorship position on it, or they may have been unaware that a paper mill was involved.
Guo’s retracted article illustrates the different possibilities. It has six authors from five countries – a wide geographical spread that’s common on articles from paper mills, which sell authorship slots worldwide, says Elisabeth Bik, a California microbiologist who investigates scientific misconduct. Indeed, Guo could be unaware that another co-coauthor was collaborating with a paper mill, if that occurred.
It should be up to universities to answer ethical questions about their faculty. But misconduct investigations are cloaked in secrecy. Asked if the university is investigating why two of Guo’s papers were retracted, a spokesperson said, “UIS is following standard protocols and cannot comment further.” Guo didn’t respond to several requests for comment from RealClearInvestigations.
Many U.S. researchers who co-authored suspect papers were born in another country and came to the U.S. as young scholars to make their names. Mohammed Ali Al-Garadi obtained his Ph.D. in computer science in Malaysia before joining Emory University in Atlanta as a postdoctoral researcher in 2019, according to his IEEE profile. While at Emory, he was one of nine authors from seven countries on a 2021 paper that three years later was retracted by a Wiley journal because of “indicators of systematic manipulation of the publication process.”
In 2022, Al-Garadi landed a plum job at highly ranked Vanderbilt University, where he’s a research assistant professor in biomedical informatics. Al-Garadi and Vanderbilt didn’t respond to questions about the retracted paper, one of two of his articles yanked from a journal.
When more prominent U.S. researchers are named on alleged paper mill articles, experts say “name theft” might be involved. A scholar such as Jonathan Koomey, who has taught at Stanford University and has written more than 200 articles and reports and 10 books, would have no apparent motive to conspire with a paper mill. The mill, however, would have a motive to put his name on a paper without his knowledge to give it more credibility with a publisher.
Koomey says he had no idea that his name and prestigious affiliation – Stanford – appeared on a retracted paper by a Sage journal until RCI recently asked him about it. Koomey’s name was listed with four scholars from China on a paper about an English oral evaluation algorithm. Koomey’s specialty is another field altogether: energy and climate change.
“This is a paper to which I never contributed and have no idea who these authors are,” said Koomey. “They just stuck my name on the paper without my knowledge.”
When U.C. Berkeley retired senior researcher Xiao-Yun Lu recently discovered that he was also a victim of name theft on two retracted papers linked to paper mills, he was alarmed. “I must stop this from happening immediately,” he told RCI.
Lu believed the lead author of the papers, Yi He, a former post-doctoral student at Berkeley, was responsible. So Lu emailed He, who now works at Wuhan University of Technology in China, and told him to follow proper scientific methods in his work and to stop putting his name on papers.
“The research approaches, data and results all need to be scientific and objective,” Lu wrote to He in a September email shared with RCI.
He responded, defending the retracted papers as “original achievements” and assured Lu that he won’t use his name on papers in the future. “I apologize for the trouble caused to you,” He wrote.
How Paper Mills Operate
Wiley, a major academic publisher with 1,600 journals, has warned that its industry faces a “deepening crisis” from paper mills. They first appeared about 15 years ago, and many have evolved into sophisticated businesses, producing complex papers with all the trappings of science. Mills appear to hire scientists, perhaps drawing from the surplus of Ph.Ds., and include lab facilities in their sales pitch.
The basic business model is selling authorship slots, if not the entire paper, to scholars on a wide variety of topics, from cancer research to economics to education, according to the COPE report. Paper mills write the articles, create charts based on online or fabricated data, respond to queries from editors, and guarantee publication in journals indexed to essential platforms like the Web of Science. It’s a wall-to-wall scam so convincing that journal editors, who are typically unpaid and have limited time for vetting papers, are easily deceived.
Researchers pay more for papers published in high-impact journals and for being the first listed author. While getting named on a low-profile conference paper might cost only $100, the price might jump to $1,200 for the first position in an influential journal, said a source in the academic publishing industry who asked to remain anonymous. “The highest fee I have heard of is $8,500.”
Paper mills operate with a remarkable degree of transparency, advertising their illicit services online to attract customers, with little concern that they will be shut down. They also offer legitimate services that can serve as camouflage for illegitimate ones.
The website of India’s Peer Publicon Consultancy, for instance, leads off with an offer to correct the grammar and spelling on medical-related papers. That’s fine. Then comes the offer of help in every facet of writing and publishing a literature review article for about $300. Dig deeper to find this suspect offer: “You can join as a co-author for the review articles we prepare for publication in indexed journals.”
RCI reached out to Professor P. Mutha Prasanna, a managing director of a group that oversees Peer Publicon. He is also a co-author of a highly cited paper that is full of plagiarized text, according to Elisabeth Bik, the integrity consultant. Prasanna told RCI that the paper “was drafted mainly by another author” and that Peer Publicon “was recently launched and it has nothing to do with that paper.” He didn’t answer questions about Peer Publicon’s activities.
In Russia, a paper mill called International Publisher says it operates in a glassy tower in central Moscow and claims to have published more than 4,000 papers, some in high-impact journals. “We can help teach authors how to write articles that will be accepted into international journals,” according to its website. “We can also handle any aspects of the work ourselves.” That includes enhancing the “scientific value of the article (improving the research, updating the relevance and analysis, logically organizing the content, strengthening the conclusion).” The pricing is laid out in a chart: Writing or revising a paper costs $2,400, and getting it published in a top-ranked journal is an additional $4,200.
Anna Abalkina, a research fellow at the Institute for East European Studies of the Free University of Berlin, brought unwanted scrutiny to the paper mill with her 2023 study. International Publisher had listed on its website the titles of papers with co-authorship slots for sale. Abalkina matched the titles with those that were later published, identifying at least 451 papers co-authored by more than 800 scholars over a three-year period. International Publisher didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The Russian paper mill has extended its reach into the United States. A student at an East Coast university put her name on two published papers with titles that first appeared, almost word for word, on articles for sale on International Publisher’s website. The Russian company also publicizes a long list of U.S. universities that it claims provide “reviewers” for its articles.
After Abalkina’s study was published, she says the paper mill tried to cover its tracks. It published thousands of abstracts of legitimate papers on its website, claiming it had helped to get them published. “Some of the legit authors complained to a prosecutor,” she said. “But the paper mill continues to operate.”
Secretly Infiltrating Journals
Producing fraudulent articles is only part of the paper mill contagion. They have also infiltrated journals to get them published.
Journal editors commonly ask authors to recommend scientists who can peer review their work, which theoretically should provide a shield against publishing fake research. But when a mill produces the article, it sometimes recommends its own reviewers who then provide positive feedback to editors about a bogus article, according to the COPE report. In 2021, a SAGE journal pulled 122 published papers because of “clear indications that the submission and/or peer review process … was manipulated.”
When publishers seek outside editors for special issues, a popular practice, paper mills have also taken advantage of the opportunity to fill the temporary role. These “guest editors” then fill the special issues with rubbish articles and fabricated authors. A Chinese paper mill boasted about bribing a guest editor with a thousand dollars per paper for a special issue by publisher Hindawi, according to a report in For Better Science. The widespread infiltration of Hindawi’s special issues led to the mass retractions and the closing of the Hindawi brand by Wiley.
Journals that focus on human gene research appear to be a favorite target of paper mills, partly because experimental results are simple to fabricate, according to Sydney’s Byrne. Her research shows that paper mills, which in the past appeared to focus on marginal journals because they may be easier to penetrate, have moved up the food chain, presenting a greater threat to cancer research.
Byrne and other researchers found that two top-rated high-impact cancer journals from Springer Nature, Molecular Cancer, and Oncogene, have published a significant number of papers with wrongly identified nucleotide sequences that suggest foul play in many cases. Over a span of years ending in 2020, 18% of the Molecular Cancer papers examined in the study contained errors, as did 40% of the 2020 Oncogene papers.
“Although we can’t be sure that all of these papers with nucleotide sequence errors came from paper mills, at least some of these papers seem likely to have been produced with paper mill support,” Byrne said.
As paper mills penetrate more influential journals, they may also be collaborating with a significant number of Western researchers who seek such top-shelf exposure. While most of the co-authors of the problematic papers in Molecular Cancer are in China, 8% are in the U.S., and 11% are in Western Europe.
Battle Against Paper Mills
Despite the work of scientists like Bik, Abalkina, and Byrne to expose paper mills, there’s not much getting in the way of their expansion. In the U.S., much of the responsibility rests with universities and their research integrity officers. But they face institutional hurdles, from researchers afraid to blow the whistle on colleagues to pressure from university leaders to slow-walk investigations that could taint an academic institution’s reputation.
University officials may not even know that a faculty member has been subjected to a retraction. A North Carolina State University computer science professor still posts his paper on the school’s website without noting that it was retracted by a Sage journal in 2023 due to concerns that could include “unauthorized third party involvement” and “unverifiable authors and reviewers.” The researcher didn’t respond to a request for comment.
In response to the onslaught of fraudulent scholarship, journals are bolstering their efforts against paper mills. A Wiley spokesperson told RCI it has developed AI-powered detection systems to intercept suspect papers before they reach peer review while also scaling up its internal integrity teams. Some publishers, such as Taylor & Francis, are combating authorship sales by making it harder for mills to add and remove names from papers.
Considering the rapid growth in the number of indexed published papers, topping 2.8 million in 2022, publishers don’t vet every paper for every type of wrongdoing. They tend to find and reject the submissions that are clearly fraudulent.
“It’s the people who are lazy or not very good at faking it who probably get caught,” the publishing source said. “But if a paper mill doesn’t put anything in a paper that’s obviously fake and they are not too greedy in terms of numbers of authors, they can definitely get it published.”
Byrne agrees that publishers are still routinely fooled by sophisticated fakes. She was recently asked to peer review a cancer paper submitted to a journal at one of the big five publishers. As a leading expert in the field, Byrne found serious flaws in the complicated paper, which wrongly described the behavior of cancel cells. It was a typical paper mill product – a fancy piece of rubbish.
Byrne’s peer review report to the editor was blunt: “This paper must not be published. It’s absolutely not true,” she said. “But they didn’t listen to me.” Instead, the editor asked the authors to make revisions on the paper that’s now headed for publication.
“Honestly, this drives me nuts,” Byrne said. “And this is happening at scale all around the world.”
This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.
Yahoo News’ reprinted an item from The Cool Down, titled “Experts warn that beloved US coastal town could soon vanish off map entirely: ‘I’m scared,’” which claims Cape Coral, Florida will disappear soon due to climate change induced sea level rise. This claim is absolutely false. Actual sea level rise data is well below the extreme scenarios promoted in the story the article is based on.
Yahoo News’ reprinted an item from The Cool Down, titled “Experts warn that beloved US coastal town could soon vanish off map entirely: ‘I’m scared,’” which claims Cape Coral, Florida will disappear soon due to climate change induced sea level rise. This claim is absolutely false. Actual sea level rise data is well below the extreme scenarios promoted in the story the article is based on.
The Cool Down story repeats exaggerated projections from the organization called Climate Central, suggesting that Cape Coral, Florida, will “vanish” under rising seas by 2150. It asserts that Florida’s average sea level could rise 3.6 feet by the end of the century and that 17,000 homes statewide could face annual flooding by 2050. Actual measured sea level data shows this to be impossible.
The Yahoo News reposting also repeats the tired talking point that “a warmer planet acts as ‘steroids’ for weather,” claiming more frequent hurricanes and floods. Yet data shows no clear global trend in tropical cyclone frequency. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Historical Hurricane Tracks database similarly shows no upward trend in U.S. hurricane landfalls over the past century. Climate at a Glance also demonstrates that there is no upwards trend in U.S. hurricanes.
The article quotes one resident saying, “I’m scared. It’s really weird. It’s weird to think about that it’s not gonna be here when I’m gone.” That misplaced and overwhelming sense of fear is precisely what Climate Central’s alarming “drowning maps” are designed to provoke. It is not, however, justified by what Florida’s sea-level data actually show.
According to NOAA’s tide gauge record for Fort Myers (Station 8725520), which is the nearest to Cape Coral, the relative sea-level trend near Cape Coral is 3.64 millimeters per year, with a 95% confidence interval of ±0.42 mm/year, based on continuous monthly mean data from 1965 to 2024. That equates to 1.19 feet per century, as seen in the graphic below:
The long-term rise is steady and gradual—not accelerating catastrophically, and less than a third of 3.6-foot projection that Climate Central is lying about.
In other words, the tide gauge shows reality; the computer model shows fantasy. Even if the Fort Myers trend continued unchanged, simple math shows it would take roughly 300 years to reach the water levels Climate Central claims are possible by 2150.
Florida’s sea-level record is also influenced by local land subsidence, not just ocean volume changes. As NOAA notes, relative sea level is affected by both global sea changes and regional ground motion. In Cape Coral’s case, this modest rise includes such localized effects. There is no evidence of a dramatic sea level acceleration in recent decades.
Even accounting for local subsidence, for nearly 60 years Cape Coral’s sea-level trend has been consistent, moderate, and predictable. The total rise of about one foot per century is entirely manageable with conventional coastal infrastructure, drainage, and adaptation strategies—just as Floridians have managed tides, storm surges, and erosion for generations.
Climate Central’s projections are not measurements—they are computer model outputs layered onto maps to produce alarming visualizations. These “surging seas” graphics have been widely criticized for failing to align with observed trends. Climate Realism has debunked similar false projections and maps made by Climate Central for locations such as, Miami, Norfolk, and San Francisco, previously.
As Climate Realism has repeatedly shown, sea-level rise rates at U.S. tide gauges have remained stable for more than a century, even as atmospheric CO₂ increased. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change AR6 report found that there is “low confidence in observed acceleration in sea-level rise at the regional scale,” further undercutting the premise that Florida is facing a rapid inundation crisis.
This article substitutes emotion for evidence and cites the anecdotal fears of residents, mislead by the mainstream media over the past two decades with false claims about climate change induced sea level rise, rather than real world data. Climate Central’s maps do not represent measured science; they represent model-driven marketing for climate fear. The real-world numbers from NOAA’s tide gauges make that clear.
Journalism is supposed to illuminate truth and inform the audience rather than incite unwarranted panic. By promoting unfounded projections that “Cape Coral could vanish,” Yahoo News and The Cool Down are doing just the opposite. That’s a sad indictment of the two media outlets’ reporting standards.
In 2025, climate activists experienced several major litigation defeats in the United States, especially in their attempts to challenge President Trump’s climate and energy policies at the federal level and to anchor climate protection as a constitutional right.
What are the most notable climate activists litigation defeats in 2025? Response from perplexity.ai
In 2025, climate activists experienced several major litigation defeats in the United States, especially in their attempts to challenge President Trump’s climate and energy policies at the federal level and to anchor climate protection as a constitutional right.
Key Litigation Defeats
♦ Young climate activists and their legal team from Our Children’s Trust faced a significant setback in federal court in Montana while seeking to block three of President Trump’s executive orders promoting fossil fuels. Despite a previous win at the state level, legal experts indicated that the lack of explicit environmental protections in the U.S. Constitution made success in federal court extremely unlikely, with Judge Dana Christensen leaning toward dismissal of the lawsuit known as Lighthiser v. Trump.
♦ The Supreme Court declined to hear Juliana v. United States, a long-running youth-led climate lawsuit, ending the federal court battle after a decade. This rejection marked the conclusion of a pivotal effort to make climate protection a constitutional right in the United States, moving activists to seek remedies through international legal bodies instead.
♦ Multiple states and the federal attorneys argued in Montana that overturning Trump’s orders would undermine the democratic process and risk national energy security. The lack of constitutional language guaranteeing a right to a “clean and healthful environment” at the federal level proved a decisive barrier to the activists’ arguments.
♦ With federal options closed, activists petitioned the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, alleging U.S. violations of international law for climate harm, but outcomes remain pending and U.S. jurisdiction over international tribunals is limited.
Landmark Litigation Losses and Developments
Courts have started recognizing corporate responsibilities regarding emissions but continue to hesitate imposing mandatory emission reduction targets, reflecting ongoing legal and evidentiary hurdles for plaintiffs. Notable cases from 2025, such as Milieudefensie v. Shell and Lliuya v. RWE, ultimately resulted in losses for claimants but set significant legal precedents confirming that corporations can, in principle, be held liable for climate harm.
Climate-washing litigation targeting misleading corporate environmental claims saw a high success rate—over 60% of such cases resulted in court victories for plaintiffs in 2024, according to recent reports summarized in 2025. However, the number of these cases dropped sharply compared to the previous year.
In the governmental context, landmark litigation sought to enforce national and international climate commitments, referencing human rights and environmental standards. A recent International Court of Justice (ICJ) advisory opinion concluded that states ignoring fossil fuel regulation are committing internationally wrongful acts. While not binding, this opinion is expected to empower future climate litigation and enhance compensation claims for vulnerable nations.
Procedural and jurisdictional challenges remain. For example, in People v. JBS USA Food Co., a New York court dismissed a case on jurisdictional grounds, highlighting ongoing obstacles to holding companies accountable for generic net-zero marketing claims without robust, actionable plans.
In high-profile U.S. litigation, a court denied Tyson Foods’ motion to dismiss a greenwashing case, stating that future-looking net-zero claims must be backed by solid evidence and current technology—not just promises of technological advancement.
What are the key legal reasons defeating climate lawsuits?
The primary legal reasons defeating climate lawsuits include statutory displacement, lack of standing, the political question doctrine, difficulty proving causation, preemption by federal law, and inadequate legal remedies. Courts often find that existing statutes like the Clean Air Act preempt common law claims, making it impossible for plaintiffs to address climate issues through federal court-made legal principles if a federal statute already covers the matter—even if the statute does not offer a complete solution. Additionally, lawsuits face defeat when courts decide that climate policy decisions should be made legislatively rather than judicially, treating them as ‘political questions’ beyond the judiciary’s purview.
Statutory Displacement Courts frequently rule that federal environmental statutes, such as the Clean Air Act, preempt or displace claims brought under federal common law. This means plaintiffs cannot use nuisance or other tort claims to address climate harm when statutes exist, limiting the options for federal climate lawsuits.
Standing and Causation Many lawsuits are dismissed due to lack of standing, meaning plaintiffs cannot sufficiently show a direct, personal injury caused by the defendant’s actions. Additionally, climate change causation is global and diffuse, making it challenging for plaintiffs to link their harm to a specific company or government action and demonstrate that a court-ordered remedy would meaningfully address the injury.
Political Question Doctrine Some courts view wide-scale climate regulation, emission reductions, and related damages as issues that require policy choices reserved for legislative or executive branches, not judicial intervention. This doctrine precludes courts from adjudicating matters they see as inherently political in nature.
Preemption by Federal Law and Removal to Federal Courts Efforts by energy companies to move cases from state to federal courts—where precedent is often less favorable to climate plaintiffs—also contribute to the defeat of many lawsuits. The U.S. Supreme Court has expanded the grounds for companies to fight climate lawsuits, making it easier for them to have cases dismissed at the federal level.
Inadequate Legal Remedies Courts can find that litigation is not the proper tool for addressing climate change, as tackling global warming requires international cooperation and extensive policy changes—beyond what a court order can achieve. This challenge is reflected in rulings that climate harm is not redressable through the available legal frameworks.
Litigation Updates from Sabin Center
Federal Court Said Puerto Rican Municipalities’ Climate Claims Against Fossil Fuel Industry Were Time-Barred
The court found that there was “overwhelming evidence of public knowledge of articles, reports, and cases making the connection between Defendants and Plaintiffs’ claims” so that by September 2021, four years after the 2017 hurricanes, the plaintiffs knew or should have known both that they suffered injury and also whom to sue.
Maine Federal Court Remanded State’s Climate Case Against Fossil Fuel Defendants to State Court and Granted State’s Motion for Costs and Fees
The court found that the defendants failed to satisfy the requirement for federal officer removal that any action by the defendants under a federal officer’s authority have a sufficient “nexus” to the conduct charged in Maine’s complaint—i.e., the defendants’ acts of “deceiving consumers and the public about climate change.”
Eighth Circuit Said Department of Energy Exceeded Authority with Rule Intended to Incentivize Electric Vehicle Production
The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated a 2024 final U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) rule that changed the methodology for determining the equivalent petroleum-based fuel economy values for electric vehicles (EVs). The rule preserved and then gradually phased out a “fuel content factor” that “artificially inflates” EVs’ fuel economy to increase adoption of EVs.
Wisconsin Federal Court Said Environmental Review Considered Climate Consequences of Land Exchange for Completed Transmission Line
The court concluded that even though the transmission line project had been completed and placed in service in September 2024, on the merits the court rejected arguments that the exchange violated the National Wildlife Refuge System Improvement Act of 1997 and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
Massachusetts Federal Court Said Climate Working Group Did Not Qualify as Exception to Federal Advisory Committee Act but Found that Environmental Groups Did Not Establish Irreparable Harm Warranting Preliminary Injunction
The court denied the environmental group plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction requiring the defendants to provide them with the Climate Working Group records; the court found the plaintiffs’ inability to draw on the records in comments on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed rescission of the 2009 Clean Air Act endangerment finding regarding greenhouse gas emissions did not constitute an irreparable informational injury.
Charleston Elected Not to Appeal Dismissal of Climate Case
August 2025 dismissal of its lawsuit seeking to hold fossil fuel industry defendants liable for the harmful effects of climate change.
The Exception, a wrong and morally hazardous ruling in Montana
Montana Trial Court Awarded Held v. State Youth Plaintiffs Attorney Fees and Costs
The Montana District Court awarded the youth plaintiffs who prevailed on climate change-based Montana Constitution claims against the State of Montana and other State defendants more than $2.8 million in attorney fees and almost $100,000 in additional costs.
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