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.
Just over a year ago, the headlines were everywhere: Three Mile Island Unit 1 was coming back online as the Crane Clean Energy Center. A site that once defined an entire industry’s future has done it again, this time as a symbol of hope, optimism, and unity as we move toward a reliable and clean energy future.
Just over a year ago, the headlines were everywhere: Three Mile Island Unit 1 was coming back online as the Crane Clean Energy Center. A site that once defined an entire industry’s future has done it again, this time as a symbol of hope, optimism, and unity as we move toward a reliable and clean energy future.
For us, young professionals in the nuclear industry, this moment showed what’s possible when communities come together. From union members and business leaders to viral social media posts and major media outlets, everyone celebrated the announcement of the restart. In a society often defined by polarization, this was a rare moment of shared pride and common purpose. This was a moment of unity.
As 2025 draws to a close, nuclear energy sits at the center of a new national conversation—one driven by optimism, innovation, and a shared commitment to a cleaner future. Public support for nuclear energy is at historic highs, with six in ten Americans in favor of its expansion. Companies that defined Gen Z’s childhood, like Meta, Google, and Amazon, are partnering with nuclear producers to power the data centers that keep our digital lives running. For Gen Z, this isn’t just about keeping the lights on: it’s about building a future where clean energy powers our ambitions, our communities, and our planet.
Growing up, many of us felt politics was a binary choice – two parties, two options, and endless division. But today, nuclear energy stands out as something different: a safe haven for young people across the political spectrum. It’s one of the few issues drawing support from both sides, with the Biden and Trump administrations both advancing policies that strengthen nuclear energy’s role in America’s energy mix. For Gen Z, that bipartisanship represents progress, not politics. We know that America’s ability to deliver reliable, emissions-free energy will define the nation that Gen Z will lead tomorrow—politically, economically, and environmentally.
Now it’s up to all of us to seize this unique opportunity and recognize nuclear’s potential to redefine America’s energy conversation. Nuclear energy is more than a technology – it’s a catalyst for unity, resilience, and innovation. It can deliver on our generation’s hopes for a cleaner, fairer, and more sustainable world.
Nuclear power doesn’t just create reliable, emissions-free energy: it offers countless societal benefits. Generating stations do more than create electricity. They can also support system add-ons that help create clean water through desalination and create valuable medical materials for diagnosing heart disease and providing crucial cancer care.
When we think back to history class, we learned about iconic generational causes like the space race and the wonders that could be unlocked in the internet age. Each generation had something tangible to rally around, something that brought people together to move the world forward. For Gen Z, that unifying cause can be nuclear energy: a reliable, emissions-free solution that defines progress for our time.
We’ve seen it firsthand. We both took the leap to work in the nuclear industry, and more specifically, on a historic nuclear restart. Three Mile Island Unit 1 in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, closed for economic reasons in 2019, hurting hundreds of families whose livelihoods depended on it. Yet as demand for energy surged, the world rediscovered nuclear energy at a critical role. This momentum led to the announcement of the unit’s restart exactly five years after being shut down.
We are both at the beginning of our careers and are hopeful that the momentum we’re seeing now will carry forward for future generations. Being part of the nuclear renaissance, which is turning into a national movement, has filled our young careers with pride and purpose.
Whether you are Gen Z or not – clean nuclear energy can be a uniting force in a divided world. The bipartisan support, private investment, and widespread public acceptance happening today didn’t happen by coincidence – it happened because people came together to focus on what works. We can’t afford to lose that momentum. Let’s build on it and create the next generational cause: a nuclear energy-powered future.
Grace Vanderhei is former Miss America 2023 and a nuclear engineer, and Gabriel Ivory is a fellow engineer.
This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.
It’s been an interesting few weeks on the climate hysteria front. Organizations associated with climate alarmism have recently found themselves engulfed in turmoil. Bill Gates has recanted earlier predictions of gloom and doom. But the Father of Climate Panic, former Vice President Al Gore, remains steadfast, if increasingly marginalized.
It’s been an interesting few weeks on the climate hysteria front. Organizations associated with climate alarmism have recently found themselves engulfed in turmoil. Bill Gates has recanted earlier predictions of gloom and doom. But the Father of Climate Panic, former Vice President Al Gore, remains steadfast, if increasingly marginalized.
Let’s start with probably the best-known environmental organization in the world, the Sierra Club. According to a recent New York Times report, the club thrived when it seemed laser-focused on the environment. But then, during Donald Trump’s first term, “its leaders sought to expand far beyond environmentalism, embracing other progressive causes. Those included racial justice, labor rights, gay rights, immigrant rights, and more.”
As a result of the effort to morph into a catch-all for a myriad of social justice causes, the Times noted that by 2022 the Sierra Club “had exhausted its finances and splintered its coalition.” By August, according to the Times, the number of Sierra Club “champions” – “a group that included dues-paying members as well as supporters who had donated, signed petitions or participated in events” – was “down about 60 percent from its high in 2019.”
Despite the upheaval, few lessons seem learned. The Times noted that “in recent weeks, supporters who clicked on the group’s website for ‘current campaigns’ were presented with 131 petitions, some out of date, like calls to support clean-energy funding that Mr. Trump has already gutted, or to support a voting-rights bill that died in 2023.”
Asked whether he had any regrets, the club’s current board president, Patrick Murphy, summoned the spirit of Kamala “not a thing comes to mind” Harris and replied, “I have a hard time pinpointing how I believe we should have made different choices.” Alrighty then.
Also falling on hard times is 350.org, which first gained notoriety for its successful efforts to block the Keystone XL oil pipeline during the Obama administration. As Politico reported this month, the group “will ‘temporarily suspend programming’ in the U.S. and other countries amid funding woes.”
Executive Director Anne Jellema said 350.org “had suffered a 25 percent drop in income for its 2025 and 2026 fiscal years, compelling it to halt operations,” and would subsequently reduce its global staff by about 30 percent.
“The group had endured economic hardship over the years, including problems of financial management and several rounds of layoffs that eroded its influence,” Politico reported. Jellema said the organization was facing its challenges “with our ambition intact.” But apparently not much else.
An implosion of a different kind is from the world of “green banking.” NBA star Kawhi Leonard’s endorsement contract with the pro-environment group Aspiration is alleged to have been a vehicle for Leonard and the Los Angelas Clippers to skirt NBA salary cap rules.
As reported by ESPN, Aspiration Partners was a company founded in 2013 to provide “socially-conscious and sustainable banking services and investment products.” Their slogan was, “Do Well. Do Good.” Catchy. Operating like an environmentally conscious digital bank, Aspiration promised to “never fund fossil fuel projects like pipelines, oil rigs, and coalmines.” The company’s products included “an option to plant a tree with every purchase roundup.”
According to ESPN, Clippers owner Steve Ballmer invested $50 million in Aspiration. The subsequent allegation is that Leonard signed a $28 million endorsement deal with Aspiration “as a way to circumvent the league’s salary cap.” Ballmer has denied any knowledge of the deal, according to the report. Leonard has also denied any wrongdoing.
ESPN reported that Aspiration filed for bankruptcy in March, and co-founder Joe Sanberg pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud after “federal prosecutors said Sanberg defrauded investors and lenders out of $248 million by fraudulently obtaining loans, falsifying bank and brokerage statements, and concealing that he was the source of some revenue booked by the company.”
The NBA is investigating. How many trees Aspiration planted is unknown.
To add insult to injury comes what appears to be an about-face from no less a dedicated environmentalist than Bill Gates. For decades, Gates has been a leader in the movement to reduce carbon emissions. But last month, he caused a stir when he declared that climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise.”
It’s heartening when others finally catch on. Earlier this year, the climate group funded by Gates, Breakthrough Energy, laid off dozens of employees in the U.S. and Europe “as it pulls back from public policy advocacy work that was a cornerstone of its mission,” as the industry site Energy Connects reported.
Sadly, such admirable retrospection will likely never occur to Al Gore, arguably history’s leading figure in propagating climate hysteria and someone who has reportedly made a fortune from his climate alarmism. Gore’s reaction to Gates’ newfound enlightenment was a predictable temper tantrum during which he speculated that Gates had succumbed to “bullying” by President Trump.
Takes one to know one – Gore has often been accused of bullying those not on board with his climate crusade.
In an increasingly splintered movement that once marched in lockstep, it may be that someday only Al Gore will remain – the last true believer of a story he largely authored, perched atop his high horse at his solar-powered compound.
Phys.org recently published “Global warming amplifies extreme day-to-day temperature swings, study shows,” reporting on a new study in Nature Climate Change which claims that human-caused warming is intensifying rapid day-to-day temperature fluctuations, in the process creating a new category of climate hazard. This is false.
Phys.org recently published “Global warming amplifies extreme day-to-day temperature swings, study shows,” reporting on a new study in Nature Climate Change which claims that human-caused warming is intensifying rapid day-to-day temperature fluctuations, in the process creating a new category of climate hazard. This is false. The underlying study not only relies almost entirely on notably flawed climate-model assumptions, but astonishingly also ignores well-documented, real-world factors that directly affect short-term temperature variability, such as the urban heat island effect (UHI) and temperature-station siting biases. These omissions fatally undermine the study’s conclusions.
Phys.org’s press release asserts that “extreme day-to-day temperature changes have become more frequent and intense across low- to mid-latitude regions,” with researchers’ “optimal fingerprinting” methods confirming greenhouse gases as the primary cause. It further claims this daily volatility creates “a climate roller coaster” harmful to public health. The underlying Nature Climate Change study echoes this framing, presenting global maps of amplified temperature swings but never addresses the integrity—or contamination—of the surface data employed.
This is the study’s central flaw: Urban Heat Island (UHI) contamination artificially raises nighttime minimum temperatures, causing next-day temperatures to begin from an already elevated baseline. Artificial surfaces—pavement, buildings, vehicles, heat-retaining infrastructure—release stored heat overnight, pushing lows upward and exaggerating the apparent magnitude of day-to-day variations. Yet the terms “urban heat island” or UHI do not appear even once in the Nature Climate Change publication or the press release. Nor does the paper mention temperature-station placement, metadata quality, microsite compliance with quality control, or any discussion of observational uncertainty.
These omissions are inexcusable, because, as the linked Heartland Institute report Corrupted Climate Stations: The Official U.S. Temperature Record Remains Fatally Flawed demonstrates, approximately 96% of NOAA climate stations fail to meet the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) own siting requirements, and are corrupted by localized heat sources such as asphalt, rooftops, HVAC exhaust, machinery, or reflective surfaces. Heartland’s report shows that compliant stations—those free of artificial heat contamination—exhibit about half of the warming trend found in the corrupted network. See the figure below. Note the difference between the blue line (the uncorrupted stations) and the orange and red lines.
These findings are backed by NOAA’s own siting standards and confirm that station bias, not climate physics, drives much of the exaggerated warming in the U.S. record, and by extension, much of the world.
If the observational foundation is distorted, the derived conclusions—such as “increasing day-to-day temperature volatility”—are also distorted.
Further, the Nature Climate Change authors use global reanalyses and model-based “optimal fingerprinting” to attribute these amplified swings to greenhouse gases. But a model in which biased data serves as a foundation will simply reinforce or exacerbate those biases. None of the physical mechanisms the authors propose—soil moisture changes, pressure variability, drought feedbacks—can be meaningfully evaluated if the input dataset contains systematic nighttime warming caused by UHI and faulty station placement.
This is precisely why the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN), which avoids artificial heat sources by design, shows smaller warming trends than the older, urban-contaminated networks. See the USCRN figure below showing maximum temperatures in the U.S. since 2005. Note the lack of increased temperature extremes (peaks) today compared to 20 years ago, or any obvious upward trend in the data.
Yet the current study never references USCRN data—or any equivalent bias-free baseline.
Even their health-risk findings rely on heat-biased data. If nighttime temperatures are artificially elevated due to urbanization and poor siting, the apparent “roller-coaster swings” reflect local land-use change, not global climate physics. Any claimed health correlations with mortality data would therefore be mixing genuine weather effects with measurement artifacts.
What’s missing, in other words, is climate science’s most basic requirement: separating real climate signal from non-climatic noise.
UHI, land-use change, asphalt expansion, vegetative loss, waste heat emissions, and the explosive growth of built environments all elevate nighttime minimums and increase apparent variability. The study treats all variability as atmospheric in origin, ignoring the man-made thermal reservoirs embedded in modern cities.
A rigorous scientific analysis would have:
Examined UHI contamination explicitly.
Segregated rural high-quality stations from urban or microsite-compromised ones.
Compared modeled projections to USCRN’s pristine, bias-free observational network.
Quantified the effect of siting violations documented in my 2022 Corrupted Climate Stations study.
Instead, the authors rely on global models and “fingerprinting” techniques that simply assume the data are valid. That assumption is not supported by the evidence, and the report’s conclusions cannot be meaningfully distinguished from the biases embedded in the underlying data. This is not “a new extreme climate hazard”—it is the predictable result of modeling data with errors, then attributing those errors to greenhouse gases.
Phys.org does its readers a disservice by not fact checking the Nature study and examining other possible causes for its conclusions. Instead of a thoughtful scientific examination of the novel claims made in the study it is reporting on, Phys.org’s readers got a fawning, uncritical summary of the flawed Nature study, which exaggerates day-to-day variability based on the well-documented role of UHI and siting flaws. That’s not inquisitive journalism, that’s promotion; in reality no better than a press release.
Climate change could pose a threat to children’s intellectual development, a new study says.
Kids growing up under higher-than-usual temperatures — average temps above 86 degrees Fahrenheit — are less likely to meet developmental milestones for literacy and mathematics, researchers reported Monday in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.
“Because early development lays the foundation for lifelong learning, physical and mental health, and overall well-being, these findings should alert researchers, policymakers and practitioners to the urgent need to protect children’s development in a warming world,” lead researcher Jorge Cuartas, an assistant professor of applied psychology at New York University, said in a news release.
For the study, researchers analyzed data for more than 19,600 3- and 4-year-olds in the African nations of Gambia, Madagascar, Malawi and Sierra Leone; in Georgia, a nation on the Black Sea; and in Palestine.
…
These effects were more pronounced among kids from poor households, those who lacked access to clean water and those living in urban areas.
Increasing evidence suggests that climate change, along with its cascading impacts on ecosystems, societies, and communities, has significant effects on both physical and mental health. However, less is known about how exposure to excessive heat early in life may influence the development of foundational skills that shape lifelong developmental trajectories. This study examined the effects of ambient heat on early childhood development across six countries, using geographic and time-stamped data on child development and ambient temperature.
Methods
Our primary outcome is the Early Childhood Development Index. We used linear probability models with geographic and seasonality fixed effects to account for baseline climatic conditions, as well as other individual and contextual covariates to address potential selection bias. The sample comprised 19,607 children aged three and four from Georgia, The Gambia, Madagascar, Malawi, Sierra Leone, and the State of Palestine, all participants in Multiple Indicators Cluster Surveys collected between 2017 and 2020. We merged these data with temperature data from the ERA5-Land Monthly Aggregated Climate Dataset, calculating the mean monthly maximum temperature children experienced from birth to interview.
Results
We found that children exposed to average maximum temperatures above 32°C were less likely to be developmentally on track compared to those exposed to cooler temperatures, even after accounting for baseline average climatic conditions and other covariates. Domain-specific models indicate that these effects were most pronounced in literacy and numeracy skills. Subgroup analyses revealed that the negative impacts were particularly severe for children in economically disadvantaged households and urban areas, and for those lacking access to adequate water and sanitation.
Conclusions
This study highlights the potential impact of excessive heat on early childhood development, emphasizing the need for policies and interventions that enhance preparedness, adaptation, and resilience to support human development in an rapidly warming world.Read more: https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcpp.70081
If heat is the major negative factor in childhood development, why is Singapore so smart?
The sample – “children aged three and four from Georgia, The Gambia, Madagascar, Malawi, Sierra Leone, and the State of Palestine” – for some reason excluded places like Singapore.
There is an obvious difference between Singapore and the nations included in the study: Singapore has a stable society, good food, clean water, and a high quality medical system.
Let’s just say I’m not convinced heat alone plays a significant role.
The global electricity debate has reached a critical impasse. While developed nations debate the finer points of renewable electricity portfolios, like how much profit is being made, billions of people in the world remain trapped in electricity poverty. For half of the world’s people living on less than $10 per day—and particularly the 565 million Sub-Saharan Africans without electricity—the conversation about electricity must be grounded in pragmatism, not ideology.
The global electricity debate has reached a critical impasse. While developed nations debate the finer points of renewable electricity portfolios, like how much profit is being made, billions of people in the world remain trapped in electricity poverty. For half of the world’s people living on less than $10 per day—and particularly the 565 million Sub-Saharan Africans without electricity—the conversation about electricity must be grounded in pragmatism, not ideology.
The US has recently signed an economic and Defense Partnership with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that includes civilian nuclear energy.
South Africa expects to lift the care and maintenance status of its Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) by the first quarter of next year or even earlier. Alternative sources of stable, continuous electricity, in this instance provided by SMR units, will benefit as environmental trends increasingly move towards green technologies. These technologies, because of cost and price trends, will become increasingly economic and cost-effective in the future.
A comprehensive economic impact study of South Africa’s small modular reactor (SMR) deployment strategy, undertaken by one of the authors of this report, reveals what is at stake when developing nations pursue practical electricity solutions that can generate continuous, uninterrupted, and emission-free electricity. The findings offer a compelling blueprint for how SMR technology could transform not just electricity access, but entire economies.
Nations need dispatchable electricity. What is often forgotten is that all developed and developing nations require dispatchable electricity to maximise economic growth and efficiency. The purpose is to maximise benefits for their citizens by raising their standard of living, reducing unemployment, and poverty. Dispatchable electricity means that sufficient electricity is available immediately on demand by businesses and the public, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Energy sources must first be examined on their ability to meet this criterion. Using South Africa as the example, the primary alternative electricity sources that need to be examined are:
Firstly, renewable energy sources in the form of wind and solar that are renowned for their unreliability and unpredictable intermittency.
Secondly, fossil fuels in the form of coal and gas.
Thirdly, nuclear power.
The Reality Check Beyond Wind and Solar
When visiting a modern hospital or airport, consider everything you see that didn’t exist 200 years ago: the plastic chairs, synthetic fabrics, medical devices, computer components, pharmaceuticals, and countless other products. Many of which are essential for maintaining one’s own family and home. Now ask yourself: can any of these items be manufactured by a wind turbine or solar array?
The answer exposes a fundamental flaw in current electricity discourse. Oil, gas, and coal aren’t just fuel sources—they’re raw materials for petrochemicals, plastics, pharmaceuticals, fertilizers, construction, infrastructure, and thousands of essential products. The modern world’s material foundation depends on hydrocarbons as manufacturing feedstock to support the supply chain for those essential products.
This distinction matters enormously for developing economies. While wealthy nations can afford to experiment with intermittent renewable sources, backed by existing infrastructure and capital reserves built as a result of the use of fossil fuels now being shunned, developing countries need reliable, continuous power to build industries, create jobs, and lift people from poverty. These policies being set have all the requirements to set a global economic reality of keeping the rich developed world rich and the poor developing world poor. In practice, the “green” policies in the richer countries will negatively affect the economic growth of both the developed world and the developing world.
The resurgence of nuclear-generated electricity is occurring in many countries. The reasons are not difficult to find. The benefits of nuclear power have shown themselves in many ways. Nuclear has proven itself to be: Safe, there have been very few injuries. It is environmentally benign, has very small land use, discharges no pollutants, and produces little waste. It is reliable and has a capacity factor of over 90%. It is energy-dense and scalable. It is economical with a long life and low running costs. South Africa’s Koeberg Power Station has had a long life and is one of the most economical power stations in the country. It is a foundation for other applications, and its Safari reactor is a world’s major commercial producers of medical and industrial radioisotopes.
Numbers That Transform Nations
The economic analysis of SMR deployment, yet to be formally released, demonstrates transformative potential:
GDP Impact: Within two decades of operation, an SMR program would contribute approximately R74 billion (roughly $4.3 billion USD) annually to GDP, representing 1.1% of South Africa’s baseline GDP. This is significant growth for the economy. It is an economy-altering development.
Employment Creation: The program would generate, within ten years of becoming operational, over 33,000 direct jobs and over 154,000 indirect jobs. The following decade, it will have created almost 350,000 jobs within two decades, supporting over 1.4 million people. These aren’t temporary construction positions, but sustained employment in high-skill manufacturing, engineering, and operations.
Skills Development: Unlike fossil fuel extraction or installations of wind turbines or solar panels, nuclear technology demands—and develops—a highly skilled workforce. An SMR program would create a permanent increase in technical capabilities, helping retain talent while attracting international expertise.
Trade Balance: Long-term projections show an ongoing current account surplus of approximately R8 billion ($9.4 billion USD) annually, as exported SMR units and associated services generate hard currency for the developing economy.
Tax Revenue: Annual tax generation would exceed R19 billion ($1.1 billion USD), with annual remuneration associated with these jobs approaching R33 billion ($1.9 billion USD)—funds that fuel further development, education, and healthcare improvements.
Why Small Modular Reactors?
Traditional large-scale nuclear plants require massive upfront capital, decade-long construction periods, and proximity to major grid infrastructure. For developing economies like South Africa, these barriers are often insurmountable. Countries in Africa are exceptionally large, a fact that is little known and often overlooked by so-called overseas experts.
SMRs offer a different pathway to electricity. Modern designs—such as helium-cooled, graphite-moderated reactors using advanced fuel configurations—exemplify the advantages:
Scalability: Units can be deployed incrementally, matching investment capacity and demand growth. A typical rollout could envision four domestic units annually within years of initial deployment, rising to eight exported units within two decades.
Flexibility: Smaller SMR units can be located closer to demand centers, reducing transmission losses and infrastructure costs. They’re ideal for industrial process heat applications, such as powering chemical facilities or electricity generation in regions far from existing power stations.
Safety: Passive safety features and simpler designs reduce operational risks. Modern SMR designs incorporate inherent safety characteristics that make them particularly suitable for nations building nuclear expertise.
Industrial Development: Unlike imported renewable components, SMR programs build domestic manufacturing capacity. A comprehensive SMR initiative creates an entire nuclear industry value chain: development, engineering, design, and manufacturing.
The Megaproject Precedent
History validates this approach. South Africa’s Richards Bay development, Sasol’s coal-to-liquids technology, Petro SA’s gas-to-liquids technology, and automotive industry growth each transformed regional economies. SMR deployment compares favorably with projected employment to be 340,000 jobs and a dependent population supporting 1.4 million people, while offering a superior balance of payments outcomes.
These megaprojects succeeded because they addressed real needs with practical technology, creating sustainable industries rather than dependency on imported solutions.
Building a Nuclear Industry
SMRs represent more than power generation; they’re platforms for industrial development. A national SMR program involves the construction and operation of units for domestic markets and export, alongside the development of a local nuclear industry with significant local content.
The construction phase includes substantial localization to ensure regular long-term supply by original equipment manufacturers. This creates an entire value chain encompassing development, engineering, design, and manufacturing, significantly enlarging the manufacturing base of the economy.
The operational phase generates ongoing expenditures in wages, fuel acquisition (including nuclear fuel production), maintenance, and subcontracted services—creating permanent economic activity rather than boom-and-bust cycles associated with construction-only projects.
For countries with uranium reserves, SMRs offer additional opportunities. The technology and skills developed can extend to uranium enrichment industries, producing nuclear fuel domestically and for export, adding considerable value to natural resources.
The Path Forward
For the 565 million Sub-Saharan Africans without electricity, and billions more worldwide trapped in electricity poverty, the choice is clear. They cannot afford to gamble for their future on renewable infrastructure of wind turbines and solar panels, which are intermittent and undermine industrial development. The full lifecycle economic cost of renewable electricity projects does not support the needs of growing economies and keeps these countries trapped as consumer nations in perpetual debt cycles.
SMRs offer developing economies what they need most: reliable baseload power that builds domestic capability, creates quality employment, and establishes technology platforms for future growth. The alternative—continued electricity poverty or dependency on imported sources of energy for transportation and electrification—condemns billions to economic stagnation.
The question isn’t whether developing nations should pursue nuclear technology. It’s whether wealthier developed nations will support or obstruct that pragmatic choice. Electricity policy must serve people, not ideology. For the billions of people living on less than $10 a day, that’s not just good policy; it’s a moral imperative. The path to prosperity runs through reliable electricity. Small modular reactors can light that way.
Please share this information with teachers, students, and friends to encourage Energy Literacy conversations at the family dinner table.
The old academic putdown ‘it’s not even wrong’ comes to mind in considering the disgraced and now retracted science paper Kotz et al. The science writer Jo Nova has speculated on how the paper was even published in Nature, “given how awful it was”. With its unfalsifiable claims of $38 trillion of global damage each year by 2050 due to human-caused climate change, Kotz was patent nonsense. It was not even within touching distance of other extravagant claims of climate damage.
The old academic putdown ‘it’s not even wrong’ comes to mind in considering the disgraced and now retracted science paper Kotz et al. The science writer Jo Nova has speculated on how the paper was even published in Nature, “given how awful it was”. With its unfalsifiable claims of $38 trillion of global damage each year by 2050 due to human-caused climate change, Kotz was patent nonsense. It was not even within touching distance of other extravagant claims of climate damage. Yet Kotz was avidly picked up by government agencies around the world seemingly desperate to use any old gobbledegook to push the Net Zero fantasy.
Being wrong assumes that something is within a ballpark of being right. The Kotz authors tried that and made some adjustments to the figures after initial criticism when the paper was published in April 2024. But in the end the task was hopeless and Nature retracted the work this month. But not before its conclusions on climate impacts have cascaded through numerous governmental operations tasked with determining and regulating public policy. A great deal of rewriting now looks to be in order.
Earlier this month, the Bank of England used “plausible” scenarios derived from Kotz to go into full climate catastrophising overdrive with suggestions that asset and bond markets could face stresses similar to the 2008 global crash. On Monday, the Daily Scepticlooked in detail at the Horlicks made by the UK’s Office for Budget Responsibility, which used Kotz to divest itself of the opinion that the country’s GDP would fall by nearly 8% unless humans stopped the weather changing. Annual state borrowing was forecast to rise by £50 billion by 2050 unless the Net Zero rain dance was successful. In a report to the British Parliament, the Climate Change Committee referenced Kotz in a section discussing economic damage arising from climate risk. Meanwhile, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) appears to have been a keen fan of Kotz and all its downstream impact works such as NGFS Phase V. Over the last year there are many references with the FCA keen to emphasise non-linear economic losses and the need for conservative assumptions in financial stress testing.
What might be considered surprising is that all of this work closely connected to Kotz was produced at a time when serious doubts about the paper were raised in science circles. From the start of this year, concerns started to mount about data quality and extrapolation methods. It became apparent there were problems over an Uzbekistan economic database from 1995-1999 that led to model estimates of temperature impacts on growth inflating global projections by a factor of three. Attempts were made to revise the original paper but in the end the task was too great, and Nature finally retracted it. It is hardly an exaggeration to observe that dodgy data from Uzbekistan cascaded through the paper out into the real world where it led the Bank of England just a few days ago to publish scares of climate-induced global crashes.
“This study was used to justify all kinds of economic decisions that otherwise make no sense. Ka-ching. Ka-ching,” notes Jo Nova. This is emblematic of the whole field of climate research, she observed, adding: “Monopsonistic research always finds what the one sole customer (the Blob) pays it to find. Thus the government-funded establishment loved it. Look how popular this junk research was.”
The Kotz paper arose from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), a known nest of hard-line climate activists with substantial past climate catastrophising form. This is the number one place to go for disappearing sea ice, an overturning Gulf Stream and bazillion-dollar falls in global wealth. Needless to say, it is backed by copious amounts of Government money from the European Union as well as private foundations. Considerable money appears to flow from individual project grants.
Interestingly, few US government bodies appear to have been caught out by the damage impacts model produced by Kotz that was later integrated into the NGFS catastrophising scenarios. The Trump Administration has been cleaning house of all the federal climate catastrophising BS this year. It didn’t take long for the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Treasury Department to withdraw from the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS), an international body of regulators and banks set up at the height of the Green Mania in 2019.
Earlier this year, President Trump signed an executive order that said the results of federal scientists must be falsifiable, computer models must be explainable and negative results available. Not all activist-scientists were happy with this return to the ” gold standard”, with a group including Michael ‘Hockey Stick’ Mann writing in the Guardian – seemingly without irony – that it will “destroy American science as we know it”.
It certainly destroyed the ability of the American Central Bank to tout global financial collapse on the basis of a Government-funded science paper so bad even ideologically-captured Nature has been forced to retract it.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.
According to NESO, that aiming for an 80pc reduction in carbon emissions by 2050, rather than the current “net zero” target, could save £14bn a year on average.
According to NESO, that aiming for an 80pc reduction in carbon emissions by 2050, rather than the current “net zero” target, could save £14bn a year on average.
NESO have compared two of their scenarios – Holistic Transition (HT) and Falling Behind (FB). The first assumes we go flat out, changing the way we live, whereas the second assumes a slightly slower progress – as NESO note, this is NOT status quo:
It begs the question, if going slow saves so much money, how much more would be saved by doing nothing? Sadly, NESO have not costed the latter! I wonder why.
Below is the Key Stats table from the Future Energy Scenarios, published during the summer, which NESO have now added costings to:
As you can see, there is significantly less electrification on FB -less capacity, less demand, more CO2.
Below is the key NESO graph from today’s report:
As the mauve line, Net Costs, indicates, the extra annualised cost increases year by year on HT compared to FB, until around 2045. Even then HT remains much more expensive.
Their costings are supposed to recognise all CAPEX and OPEX spend. So, for instance, CAPEX on wind farms, which are capital intensive, will increase the overall CAPEX element of total energy costs, but this is offset by reduced fuel costs – ie. buying gas.
As already noted, if less electrification, fewer renewables, fewer EVs and heat pumps lead to £350bn savings, how much could be saved by staying as we are?
At this point, I should make comment about some unrealistically optimistic assumptions made by NESO:
1)Offshore wind costs:
As the CCC did most recently, NESO have assumed impossibly low costs for offshore wind. According to the Data Workbook, their costs calculations are based on offshore wind costing £70.10/MWh for new projects. Incredibly these will fall even further to £53.20/MWh for wind farms built in 2035. (All costings in the NESO report are at 2025 prices)
This is Jackanory stuff and on its own makes the whole report pretty meaningless.
2) EVs
Again, in common with the CCC, they have assumed that EVs will be cheaper to buy than petrol after 2027:
This has no basis in reality – like for like, EVs still cost many thousands more than petrol.
It is also worth noting that NESO are forecasting a spend of £133bn on upgrading the electricity distribution network, on top of the £75bn already planned by OFGEM for the transmission grid. These upgrades are specifically connected to Net Zero objectives.
With OFGEM dishing out contracts with ROC of 7%, annual electricity bills will increase eventually by about £15bn.
I also take issue with this curious claim by NESO:
They say that CAPEX will be less in the 2040s than it is this year. They appear to assume that we won’t have to build any more wind and solar farms, battery storage, cars or heat pumps. as if they will miraculously last forever!
But the wind farms already operational will all need replacing long before 2050, as will heat pumps and EVs. So why is this cost not shown?
All of this means that we must ignore everything NESO have claimed about the 2040s, when they say that all the savings from Net Zero will miraculously start appearing.
So let’s examine what we do know:
Renewable energy remains more expensive than fossil fuels
Extra electricity grid costs – for upgrades, system balancing and storage – will add billions a year to electricity costs
Heat pumps are more expensive to buy and run than gas boilers
EVs are more expensive to purchase, with the extra cost more than outweighing savings on running costs.
No amount of dissembling by NESO can alter these basic facts.
We are already paying more than £20bn a year to finance the push to Net Zero. This cost will continue to rise.
It may be that at some time in the future, technology will appear that is cheaper and better than that which we currently have. Just maybe EVs will halve in price. Or nuclear power costs tumble.
If so, society will do as it always has – rush to adopt something which is better. It will need no incentives, no penalties, no coercion, no subsidies.
You must be logged in to post a comment.