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.
From the “contrails, NOT chemtrails department” comes this research that seems to exist only to make airline travel look to be bad for the planet. – Anthony
Contrails are a major driver of aviation’s climate impact
Aviation’s climate impact extends beyond carbon dioxide emissions. A new study from Chalmers University of Technology and the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and Imperial College, UK, reveals that contrails can represent a significant portion of aviation’s overall climate cost. The study also shows that climate impact can be reduced by optimising flight routes.
In a new article in Nature Communications, The social costs of aviation CO₂ and contrail cirrus, the researchers demonstrate that both CO₂ emissions and contrail formation contribute materially to aviation’s climate impact – and that the associated societal costs differ substantially depending on weather patterns and routing decisions. They find that, at the global level, contrails account for about 15 percent of aviation’s climate impact when measured in economic terms.
After also analyzing nearly half a million flights across the North Atlantic, the research team has generated new insights that can support both industry and policymakers in guiding aviation towards more climate optimal operations. Drawing on extensive flight and meteorological data, in combination with a contrail model and an advanced climate-economy model, the researchers estimated the climate and societal cost attributable to each emission source.
“Our research provides a basis for strategies to reduce the climate impact of contrails. Our calculations can be used for optimisation of flight routes where climate impact is considered alongside, for example, fuel cost and travel time. The results give airline operators and air traffic management new tools for climate optimisation. This could bring significant climate and societal benefits,” says Susanne Pettersson, postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Space, Earth and Environment at Chalmers.
The study shows that 38 percent of flights generate contrails that have a warming effect. It also shows that it would be beneficial from a climate perspective to reduce the formation of contrails of almost all these flights through minor rerouting, to avoid contrail formation, even if this results in slightly higher carbon dioxide emissions.
“The new knowledge also provides a foundation for designing new regulations and policy instruments to reduce aviation’s climate impact. The European Commission is currently working on proposals to steer aviation towards lower climate impact, and our new study can hopefully support this process,” says Daniel Johansson, associate professor at the Department of Space, Earth and Environment at Chalmers and one of the lead authors of the next IPCC climate report.
NOAA deploys a new generation of AI-driven global weather models
I am watching them. So far, they are a joke. All over the place, little run to run consistency, in short, they mimic the NOAA GEFS, the flagship of the US models that over the years billions have been spent to develop, being abysmally in last place even on day 5 vs the European (red) and Canadian (blue). I am sure the UKMET is beating it, too.
The Euro AI’s are also all over the place. The recent Thanksgiving to Christmas cold shot, seen by us and bullet pointed in the Aug 29 issuance of our winter forecast, was not seen till mid November by models. Even now they are all over the place on January. But believe it or not, I am not here to hammer them on the weather, but on something else I found out.
Every December, I meet with some prominent climate skeptics (who shall remain nameless to protect their innocence) at an undisclosed location, which we always keep secret, to make sure Climate nuts don’t show up and spray paint us orange (Okay it’s a place near Boston). So, two of them are engaged in a major project to make sure the AI’s are getting all climate information, not just what the existing paradigm is. Basically, they are doing on a grand scale what you have seen me do in some of the blogs. So, I assumed that once corrected, once the AI admits its wrong and did not see something, it becomes part of the AI’s database.
WRONG
Apparently, what goes on here, as I understand it, is that it will not incorporate what it’s forced to correct. So, it’s getting a continuous stream of information that is one sided and even if corrected, will not adapt it. It may come to the conclusion that it does, and the conclusion may be opposite of what it was before you asked it to go look at the other ideas, but then it does not get incorporated in.
So it will respond and correct itself with you, but it won’t then change its database to adapt that as its answer to someone else.
This is quite interesting to me. The man-made climate agenda is not going away. It’s simply retooling for the day that the current people in charge are no longer in charge. The idea that I see with people on my side that we are “winning” is laughable to me. History should tell you that. A small group of zealots convinced they have the answer have always managed to somehow seize control, and to them, climate policy is the ultimate control tool.
The AI is a tool, also. But I suspect most of them are being programmed by people who have a worldview that is strongly in support of the man-made climate disaster scenario. And since that exists so strongly in the AI’s, it’s a daunting task to get an even-handed presentation of information for them to consider. Their fallback position is always what was fed into them, as even when admitting something, they apparently are not incorporating it.
And I don’t know about you meteorologists out there, but if you are watching AI models like I am, you’ll see that they’re only arguably a bit better. The analog method of forecasting beat them like Scarlett O’Hara’s mule for the early cold, and another major battle is evolving in front of us for 2 weeks ago models were singing a winter’s over tune, and now they are coming around to our analog ideas about January.
Obviously, a tool that can summon facts quickly and advise on an answer is great. Just beware what you are being fed here. Including NOAA headlines about their AI’s, but most importantly, understanding that just because you get an AI to admit your point, it doesn’t mean it will become part of its database.
Someone once said, “it’s not who votes that matters, but who counts the votes.”
With the AIs what really matters is who is feeding it the information. And given statements like what that eminent climate giant John Kerry just said:
“You know, there’s a lot of discussion now about how you curb those entities in order to guarantee that you’re going to have some accountability on facts, etc. But look, if people only go to one source, and the source they go to is sick, and, you know, has an agenda, and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence,”
They are not going away, and they are going to make darn sure they control the AI’s. The goal is to push AI’s as the answer ( be it NOAA headlines) and then make you naturally accept their authority.
In a further sign of declining interest in the Net Zero fantasy, a major climate grooming course has shut up shop. The terminated six-month indoctrination was run by the Oxford Climate Journalism Network (OCJN) and was funded by a number of tax-efficient billionaire foundations. Over the last four years it has hosted around 800 journalists from over 100 countries. Described as a “flagship online course”, it will be “halted” from January 2026
In a further sign of declining interest in the Net Zero fantasy, a major climate grooming course has shut up shop. The terminated six-month indoctrination was run by the Oxford Climate Journalism Network (OCJN) and was funded by a number of tax-efficient billionaire foundations. Over the last four years it has hosted around 800 journalists from over 100 countries. Described as a “flagship online course”, it will be “halted” from January 2026.
As regular readers will recall, the OCJN is one of a number of grooming operations that ensures a regular media drum beat of Greta-inspired climate BS. It is particularly keen on promoting the idea that extreme individual weather events can be tied to humans fiddling with the climate. Attribution Queen Dr Freiderike Otto sits on the OCJN Advisory Board and is a frequent speaker on this exciting new alchemical branch of pseudoscience. Another past speaker Climate and Society Professor Saffron O’Neill from Exeter University has speculated on the need for “fines and imprisonment” for expressing scepticism about “well-supported” climate science.
The market for mainstream climate journalism is falling off a cliff. An OCJN suggested essay around the theme of less tasty mangoes due to climate change can be easily farmed out to AI. In fact, all journalism written to a set political narrative can be entrusted to an AI programme. Given a recent essay published by the OCJN entitled ‘Newsrooms should develop a mental health strategy to help climate journalists’, there are likely to be a number of delicate flowers looking for future employment. They might wish to avoid other journalist areas of interest such as conflict and riot. Even local court reporting might tax their nervous dispositions.
The world has tired of clickbait, centrally organised climate claptrap, whether it be computer-generated tipping point tittle-tattle or sandwich board warnings of imminent Sodom and Gomorrah destruction. Forty years of the Gulf Stream still streaming, the coral reefs not disappearing and extreme weather not getting more extreme have all combined to generate cynicism about the real political/Malthusian reasons for the orchestrated gaslighting.
Reality is starting to dawn that humans cannot currently stop using hydrocarbons without destroying modern society. The fact that a little extra warmth from the ending of the Little Ice Age over the last 200 years has been almost entirely beneficial for life on Earth is starting to cut through. Carbon dioxide has been demonised as a ‘pollutant’, but more people seem aware that the recent atmospheric top-up has ‘greened’ the planet by around 15%–20%. Captured mainstream media doesn’t talk about this, but grooming help is available if, perish the thought, the subject of all this extra food should ever come up. SciLine is another Green Blob-funded agitprop promoter and is connected to the Association for the Advancement of Science, publisher of Science. Its suggested response to all the inconvenient greening is to note that “in many cases, CO2 disproportionately favours weeds over crops, causing more problems for agriculture”.
In the real world, you couldn’t make some of this stuff up, however hard you tried. Wrong sort of plants threaten Climate Armageddon.
There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that climate change gaslighting is falling down the editorial agenda. Last year in the US, the volume of climate change coverage on mainstream morning and nightly TV news programmes as well as Sunday morning political shows is reported to have fallen by 25% from the year before. The Trump effect is highly unlikely to have improved the time given over to invented doomsday scenarios. Earlier this month, the BBC’s Rowlatt-in-waiting Mark Poynting ran a 40 paragraph-plus story highlighting the Met Office’s claim that 2025 in the UK could be the ‘hottest year evah’ since it was on course to be 200th of a degree centigrade warmer than 2022. Cynics might note that the activist-riven Met Office published its forecast assuming an average temperature pattern until the end of the month. Curiously, at the same time the Met Office was forecasting a prolonged forthcoming spell of colder weather. The usual media suspects fell on the concocted story, but interestingly it seems to have been ignored by a number of mainstream outlets including the Telegraph, the Times, the Daily Mail, the Sun, the Daily Express and the Mirror.
Predicting ‘hottest evahs’ based on 200ths of a degree from a largely junk UK temperature network, with measuring ‘uncertainties’ ranging from 2°C to 5°C over 80% of the sites, is becoming very last year in many editorial rooms.
It is not clear if the OCJN will shut down completely, but its published material seems to suggest it relies on networking journalists around the world via its six-month course. It is part of the Oxford-based Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, which is backed by the Thompson Reuters Foundation and numerous billionaire funders such as Knight and Laudes. Media supporters are said to include the BBC, Google News Initiative, You Tube and the UK media regulator Ofcom. An interesting new recruit to the party is the former BBC Director of News Helen Boaden, who recently became the chairwoman of the Reuters Institute’s Steering Committee, replacing the former Guardian editor Alan Rushbridger. Boaden attended the infamous secret meeting in 2006 that helped put the BBC on the path of covering climate change to a strict political narrative determined by Net Zero. Rushbridger’s role in setting the Guardian on its hysterical climate change path requires no further comment.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.
I recently had the honor to write CFACT comments in response to an Energy Department (DOE) request for information (RFI). The topic is “Transformational Artificial Intelligence Models” where the transformation in question is that of improving scientific and engineering research. DOE is one of the world’s biggest funders of physical and computer science research, so this is potentially an important opportunity to make a big difference.
I recently had the honor to write CFACT comments in response to an Energy Department (DOE) request for information (RFI). The topic is “Transformational Artificial Intelligence Models” where the transformation in question is that of improving scientific and engineering research. DOE is one of the world’s biggest funders of physical and computer science research, so this is potentially an important opportunity to make a big difference.
The focus of their RFI is on using AI models to do research. But we pointed out that they can also be used to understand what is going on in research across the huge number of publications that are often published on a major topic. Our point is on the “I” side of AI. It is a specific form of intelligence that AI models can emulate.
Here are the CFACT comments:
Transformational AI Models for Analyzing Science and Engineering Research
By David Wojick, Senior Analyst, CFACT
Here are CFACT comments in response to the U.S. Energy Department’s “Request for Information (RFI) on Partnerships for Transformational Artificial Intelligence Models.“
DOE proposes “to curate DOE scientific data across the National Laboratory complex for use in artificial intelligence (AI) models and to develop self-improving AI models for science and engineering using this data.“
Our basic comment is that DOE’s Transformational AI Program should include the use of AI models to analyze ongoing research. A major research area typically produces far more publications than a human can read. Those models focused on language and reasoning capabilities can be configured to effectively analyze these massive bodies of information, where the data is textual.
For example, plasma physics is a major topic of DOE research, both scientific and engineering. According to Google Scholar the number of journal articles specifically addressing plasma is on the order of 40,000 a year or more. Articles at least mentioning it number in the hundreds of thousands a year. These numbers are well beyond what a human can read and analyze.
A properly designed and trained AI model can read all of these articles and answer well formulated questions about the entire corpus. Here are some of the sorts of questions the answers to which could dramatically assist American researchers.
1. Who is doing what, including by country? For example China now rivals America in research output. In which topics are they most active?
2. How do the articles on a given topic all fit together? This includes mapping the cognitive structure of the research.
3. How does that cognitive structure changes over time? Examples include the dynamics of the findings, methods, applications and questions being addressed. All change over time, sometimes rapidly emerging. Early identification could be crucial.
4. What are the competing hypotheses and schools of thought regarding a specific problem or question? The frontier of science and engineering is a land of conjecture and debate. These debates often generate central questions for new research.
A model or models that can answer these crucial questions will give new meaning to the concept of keeping up with one’s field of research. This new power can both speed up the diffusion of knowledge and lead to new discoveries.
Regarding curation this AI research analysis will of course require access to a large number of journals, conference proceedings, research reports and other sources. DOE’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) has already made considerable progress in this regard. DOE should also consider partnering with major journal publishers. A small number of leading publishers account for a large fraction of the journals.
Initial efforts could focus on a specific research topic, or a specific community like DOE funded research, or both.
By way of background I was Senior Consultant for Innovation at OSTI for almost ten years under director Walt Warnick, where I did a lot of research on mapping the cognitive structure and dynamics of scientific and engineering research. This research has continued at CFACT and CFACT has also done research on AI cognition. I will be happy to provide additional information on these comments.
The singular ability of language and reasoning models to analyze huge bodies of technical information opens up new ways to understand and advance research.
From the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science, and the “Hey whatever happened to that CO2 master control knob?” department, comes this encouraging news where real data-driven science was performed instead of the typical modeling madness.
Earth’s growing heat imbalance driven more by clouds than air pollution, study finds
Satellite and reanalysis data show aerosol changes in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres largely cancel out, shifting attention to cloud changes due to surface warming and natural climate variability.
MIAMI — Earth is taking in more energy than it releases back to space—a growing “energy imbalance” that is fueling global warming. A new study led by scientists at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science finds that recent changes in air pollution are not the main reason this imbalance has increased.
Aerosols—tiny airborne particles from sources such as pollution, wildfires, and volcanoes—can affect how clouds form and how much sunlight Earth reflects back to space. While aerosols can influence climate regionally, the new research shows their recent global impact has been small.
Published November 28 in the journal Science Advances, the study analyzed nearly two decades of satellite observations combined with modern atmospheric reanalysis data. The researchers found that aerosol changes have affected the climate in opposite ways in the two hemispheres.
In the Northern Hemisphere, cleaner air in heavily industrialized regions has reduced the number of particles that help clouds reflect sunlight, allowing more solar energy to reach Earth’s surface. In contrast, the Southern Hemisphere has seen large increases in natural aerosols from events such as the 2019–2020 Australian wildfires and the 2022 Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha’apai volcanic eruption. These particles made clouds brighter and more reflective, sending more sunlight back to space. Together, the opposing effects largely cancel each other out, resulting in little net global influence from aerosols on Earth’s rising heat imbalance.
The study also shows that the recent increase in Earth’s energy imbalance is driven mainly by changes in reflected sunlight, rather than by changes in heat escaping to space. From 2003 to 2023, Earth gained heat at a rate of about half a watt more energy per square meter each decade, largely because the planet is absorbing more sunlight.
Fig. 1. Decadal trends (2003–2023) and monthly anomalies in the natural logarithm of aerosol proxies. (A) Spatial maps of trends in the natural logarithm of the aerosol index (AI) from MODIS satellite and (B) sulfate aerosol mass concentration at 925 hPa (SO4) from MERRA-2 reanalysis for the period 2003–2023. (C–E) Vertical profiles of ln (SO4) monthly anomalies over the boxed regions in (B): (C) East Asia, (D) North America, and (E) the Southeastern Pacific. The dashed line in each panel represents the 925 hPa pressure level. Credit: Park, Soden. University of Miami Rosenstiel School
To track how aerosols are changing over time, the researchers used two independent indicators. One came from satellites that observe how aerosols in the air affect the passage of sunlight through the atmosphere. The other came from reanalysis data, which combine observations and models to estimate sulfate particles produced by pollution, volcanoes, and wildfires. Despite their different approaches, both methods revealed the same pattern—declining aerosols in the Northern Hemisphere and increasing aerosols in the Southern Hemisphere—indicating that aerosols have had little overall effect on the global energy trend.
“Understanding this hemispheric “balancing act” helps society focus on the true forces behind global warming—changes in cloud behavior linked to surface warming and natural climate variability—rather than mistakenly attributing recent warming to cleaner air,” said Chanyoung Park, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the Rosenstiel School. “Even though the Northern Hemisphere may experience some regional warming due to reduced aerosols, this does not translate to a significant global impact. This clarity supports better climate planning, more accurate public communication, and informed policy decisions.”
The findings also highlight a potential limitation in some climate modeling studies, which focus mainly on pollution reductions in the Northern Hemisphere and may underestimate the growing influence of natural aerosol events in the Southern Hemisphere.
“Earth’s energy imbalance tells us how fast heat is building up in the climate system,” said Brian Soden, a co-author of the study and a professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the Rosenstiel School. “Many earlier studies suggested that cleaner air might explain much of the recent increase, but our results show that aerosol changes largely cancel out between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. That means we need to look more closely at changes in clouds and natural climate variability to understand why the planet is continuing to gain heat.”
The geniuses who are planning New York’s energy future think that they can make intermittent wind and solar generators work to power the electrical grid by the simple device of providing some battery storage. The idea is that when there are abundant wind and sun, they can store up the power for use during those calm and dark periods in the winter. How much battery storage will that take? It’s a simple arithmetic calculation, but none of our supposed experts have taken the trouble to crunch the numbers.
The geniuses who are planning New York’s energy future think that they can make intermittent wind and solar generators work to power the electrical grid by the simple device of providing some battery storage. The idea is that when there are abundant wind and sun, they can store up the power for use during those calm and dark periods in the winter. How much battery storage will that take? It’s a simple arithmetic calculation, but none of our supposed experts have taken the trouble to crunch the numbers.
Nevertheless, without any kind of feasibility study of whether this will work, they soldier forth building large grid-scale battery storage facilities. The battery building program is under way, at least to some degree, and a few such facilities are actually complete and operating out in the rural parts of the state. Meanwhile, there are plans for some much larger such facilities in New York City, including right in some of its most densely populated sections. Is there any problem with this that we ought to know about?
In a post back in March 2024, I reported on the progress of our two “climate leader” states with developing grid-scale battery storage. It turned out that the big problem was that these facilities were subject to large and dangerous fires on a regular basis. In some cases, the same facility would catch fire multiple times. That post reported on major fires in California at a site called Valley Center in San Diego County in September 2023, and at another one called Moss Landing south of San Francisco in September 2022. In January 2025, the Moss Landing facility had another major fire. From the EPA website:
On January 16, 2025, the Moss Landing 300 battery energy storage system at the Moss Landing Vistra power plant (Monterey County, Calif.) caught fire.
The 300-megawatt system held about 100,000 lithium-ion batteries.
About 55 percent of the batteries were damaged by the fire.
There were prior fires at the Moss Landing facility in September 2021 and February 2022.
Back here in New York, my March 2024 post reported on no fewer than three major fires at grid battery storage facilities in this state that had taken place during 2023. The following quote came from a piece at Canary Media from August 2023:
New York state is grappling with how to adjust its ambitious buildout of clean energy storage after fires broke out at three separate battery projects between late May and late July [2023]. . . . First, on May 31, a battery that NextEra Energy Resources had installed at a substation in East Hampton caught fire. . . . Then, on June 26, fire alarms went off at two battery units owned and operated by Convergent Energy and Power in Warwick, Orange County; one of those later caught fire. On July 27, a different Convergent battery at a solar farm in Chaumont caught fire and burned for four days straight.
Might you have the idea that these fires are becoming less frequent over time? If so, that’s only because these fires are one of those things — like the Somali welfare fraud in Minnesota — that the liberal media just don’t choose to report. It turns out that the Convergent Energy facility in Warwick, New York had another big fire just last week. From Etica AG, December 22:
Late on the evening of December 19, 2025, a fire occurred at the Church Street Battery Storage Facility in Warwick, New York, operated by Convergent Energy & Power. While no injuries were reported and the fire was confined to a single container, the incident remained active into the following day and prompted a multi-agency response, air quality monitoring, and renewed scrutiny of battery energy storage system (BESS) safety in the community. For Warwick residents and local leaders, the fire carried added weight. The town has experienced multiple battery storage incidents in recent years, and each new event raises difficult questions about risk, emergency response, and whether existing BESS designs are suitable for locations near homes, schools, and small businesses.
I can’t find any mention of this battery fire at the New York Times or at major media sites like CNN or the major television networks.
The Convergent Energy Warwick energy storage facility has a capacity of 12 MW and 57 MWh. Meanwhile, back here in New York City, there are plans, well advanced (although not quite yet under construction), to build a much larger grid battery storage facility in Ravenswood, Queens. That would be right on the East River, directly across from East Midtown and the Upper East Side of Manhattan:
You can see on the map how close much of Manhattan is to this facility. To be fair, the wind usually blows the other way, but the parts of Queens near this facility are also very densely populated. Something called Queensbridge Houses — the largest public housing project in the country — is immediately adjacent.
The planned capacity of the battery storage facility in Ravenswood is 316 MW/2528 MWh — some 25 or more times the size of the facility in Warwick that has now caught fire at least twice.
A New York agency going by the name NYSERDA (New York State Energy Research and Development Authority) is leading the charge to build these energy storage facilities, including in densely populated areas like Queens. On their website, they have a page touting the new battery storage project at the Ravenswood location. Believe it or not, their sales pitch is that the new battery facility is cleaner and greener than the prior natural gas power plants on the site. Here is a quote they take from Queens Borough President Donovan Richards:
“The days of environmental and economic injustice in Western Queens, especially for our historically marginalized public housing families, are coming to an end. As we prepare to transform the Ravenswood Generating Station into a clean energy producer, it’s critical that the surrounding community reaps the benefits of that transition,” said Borough President Richards.
Somehow, both NYSERDA and Donovan omit to mention the issue of the fires.
Even GB News have fallen for this load of climate baloney!
The dramatic collapse of a canal embankment in Shropshire has exposed the fragile condition of Britain’s ageing waterways.
Engineers are now warning tiny, often invisible cracks are increasingly responsible for sudden and catastrophic failures across the network.
The incident, which saw a section of the Shropshire Union Canal give way and drain into surrounding farmland, has been described by waterways specialists as a textbook example of how ageing infrastructure, compounded by extreme weather, can unravel with little warning.
Britain’s canal system, much of which dates back more than 250 years, was constructed using materials and techniques that were robust for their time but are increasingly vulnerable to modern stresses.
Prolonged droughts can cause clay embankments to shrink and crack, while subsequent heavy rainfall allows water to penetrate deep into the structure, washing away supporting material.
The Canal & River Trust, which manages around 2,000 miles of waterways in England and Wales, told The Sunday Times such incidents are becoming more likely as climate volatility increases.
Alternating periods of extreme heat and intense rainfall place unprecedented strain on historic earthworks that were never designed to cope with such fluctuations.
There is no evidence whatsoever that alternating periods of extreme heat and intense rainfall are becoming more common.
But inadvertently the Canal & River Trust give the game away:
Engineers say the challenge is exacerbated by the sheer scale of the network.
Thousands of embankments, locks and cuttings require constant inspection, yet many defects remain hidden until failure occurs.
While modern monitoring techniques can identify surface movement, internal erosion is notoriously difficult to detect.
Funding pressures have also sharpened concern.
The Trust faces a long-term reduction in government support, raising fears that preventative maintenance will increasingly give way to costly emergency repairs.
Experts argue that routine inspection and early intervention are far cheaper than rebuilding collapsed infrastructure but require sustained investment.
If you want more money from the government, what better excuse do you need than “climate change”!
History will likely remember 2025 as the year energy corporatists finally stopped pretending there is a climate crisis. For a decade, a bizarre theater of the absurd played out as titans of the oil and gas industry apologized for their core business while pledging allegiance to a “green transition” that existed mostly in the imaginations of Western bureaucrats. But the curtain has seemingly fallen.
History will likely remember 2025 as the year energy corporatists finally stopped pretending there is a climate crisis. For a decade, a bizarre theater of the absurd played out as titans of the oil and gas industry apologized for their core business while pledging allegiance to a “green transition” that existed mostly in the imaginations of Western bureaucrats. But the curtain has seemingly fallen.
ExxonMobil, one of the world’s largest energy producers, has slashed $10 billion from its low-carbon investment commitments through 2030. Simultaneously, the company announced that it expects $25 billion in earnings growth from 2024 to 2030 to be powered primarily by increases in oil and gas production, which will push daily output to 5.5 million barrels of oil equivalent by the end of the decade.
This is not a company abandoning climate responsibility but rather at last recognizing what has long been obvious: The path prescribed by the climate industrial complex is economically destructive and operationally impossible – even with massive government subsidies.
For years, the global energy strategy has been surreal. Companies that built the modern world on the back of energy-dense hydrocarbons indulged those celebrating the arrival of wind turbines and solar panels to power civilization. But reality, stubborn and unforgiving, has interrupted the psychedelic revelry.
ExxonMobil’s low-carbon investments will be paced to policy support and customer demand, says the company. That is corporate speak meaning that spending on green projects is paused unless the government – using our tax dollars – subsidizes the risk or until a market exists.
Megaprojects, once heralded as the future, are now in line for deferral. Why? Because without taxpayer handouts, the economics of trying to bury underground a plant food like carbon dioxide simply do not work – and defy common sense.
The energy sector is pivoting from a strategy of “grow clean at all costs” to “returns first, transition last.” “Green” projects are being relegated to a secondary capital bucket – a token for good PR instead of a core activity.
Europe’s Shell and Aker BP and Canada’s Enbridge have withdrawn from the Science Based Targets initiative to establish “science-based emissions reductions.” This was a retreat from what is described as a “credible, science-based net-zero framework” because there was neither credibility nor science. It was a political suicide pact. The energy giants looked at the cliff’s edge and refused to jump.
British multinational BP, having abandoned its promise to go “Beyond Petroleum,” has raised its oil and gas spending and softened its renewable targets.
ENEOS Holdings, a Japanese refiner, has discarded hydrogen production targets, with CEO Tomohide Miyata explaining that “the shift toward a carbon-neutral society appears to be slowing.”
These U-turns represent a renaissance in policy realism. Energy needs do not disappear because politicians make speeches at climate summits or corporations allocate funds to ESG programs or governments attempt to control consumption and choices of appliances and automobiles.
Second thoughts about an inevitably doomed “green” transition is a victory for the single mother in the U.S. trying to budget for winter heating and for the small business owner in the U.K. whose margins are crushed by one of the highest commercial electricity rates in the world. And for the billions of people in developing nations, this pivot could be salvation from generational poverty.
The question now is whether governments will recognize what corporations have made clear: that the energy transition was a fantasy infused with scientific language and draped in moralistic gingerbread. Or will they continue to increase subsidies and regulations?
Very likely, there will be a bifurcation: on the one hand, western bureaucracies, particularly in Europe, continuing an economic decline under mandates and taxes, and on the other, pragmatic governments, many of them in Asia, pursuing prosperity with fuels and technologies that work.
This commentary was first published by Daily Calleron December 25, 2025.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India.
For nearly two decades, Britain’s climate lobby has held an iron grip on policy, discourse, and public imagination, promising a utopian future of cheap energy, green jobs, and global leadership. From Westminster’s corridors to the BBC’s airwaves, the mantra was clear: Net Zero would make us richer, healthier, and safer, all while saving the planet. But the cracks in this narrative are now gaping wounds. Soaring energy bills, crumbling industries, and a public fed up with unfulfilled promises signal a seismic shift. The tide is turning against the climate change agenda, and it’s about time.
Richard Miller points to growing distrust of climate ideology and to receding support for impractical energy and social policies aimed at fighting global warming/climate change, but serving only to inflict energy poverty. His article is The Tide Turns Against the Climate Change Agenda: A Long-Overdue Reckoning. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
For nearly two decades, Britain’s climate lobby has held an iron grip on policy, discourse, and public imagination, promising a utopian future of cheap energy, green jobs, and global leadership. From Westminster’s corridors to the BBC’s airwaves, the mantra was clear: Net Zero would make us richer, healthier, and safer, all while saving the planet. But the cracks in this narrative are now gaping wounds. Soaring energy bills, crumbling industries, and a public fed up with unfulfilled promises signal a seismic shift. The tide is turning against the climate change agenda, and it’s about time.
The climate establishment’s dominance rested on a seductive pitch: green policies would deliver prosperity without pain. Wind turbines and solar panels would slash energy costs, insulate us from petrostates, and create a jobs bonanza. As Maurice Cousins noted in his August 2025 Artillery Row piece, this vision transformed environmentalism from a middle-class indulgence into a technocratic consensus, backed by state funding, Big Philanthropy, and celebrity endorsements.
Yet, the reality is starkly different. Britain now faces some of the highest industrial energy costs in the developed world, with electricity prices for businesses nearly double those in the U.S. Heavy industry is in retreat, steelworks and manufacturing plants are shuttering, while the UK’s reliance on energy imports has surged, exposing vulnerabilities during crises like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The public isn’t blind to this failure. Polls reflect a growing backlash. While abstract support for Net Zero lingers, a 2025 YouGov survey found 47% of Britons want climate policies scaled back when faced with their costs, high bills, job losses, and lifestyle constraints. Reform UK voters, with 32% endorsing reduced green measures, are leading the charge, but even mainstream figures like Tony Blair and trade unions like Unite are breaking ranks, questioning the feasibility of the green agenda. This isn’t just scepticism; it’s a revolt against a narrative that promised abundance but delivered austerity.
The climate lobby’s response? Double down and deflect. Take the recent video by Simon Clark and Carbon Brief’s Dr. Simon Evans, which Cousins critiques as a desperate attempt to “manage” dissent rather than engage with it. Acknowledging rising bills and Britain’s mere 1% of global emissions, it dismisses public concerns as misinformation fuelled by fossil-fuel propaganda. This patronising tone, epitomised by praising the “independent” Climate Change Committee, a body of unelected technocrats, only deepens distrust. It’s a tired playbook, seen in Brexit and migration debates: label critics as ignorant, pathologise their concerns, and cling to elite authority.
But the public’s lived experience, bills they can’t pay, industries they’ve lost, trumps rhetorical window-dressing.
The folly of the climate agenda lies in its defiance of economic and physical realities. Low-density, intermittent renewables like wind and solar cannot power a modern industrial economy without massive subsidies and grid instability. The Office for Budget Responsibility has warned that Net Zero’s costs, projected at £1.4 trillion by 2050, far outstrip promised savings. Meanwhile, global competitors like China and India, responsible for over 40% of emissions, continue burning coal with little regard for Western virtue-signalling. Britain’s “lead by example” approach is not just naïve, it’s self-destructive, hamstringing its economy while others race ahead.
This reckoning is long overdue. The climate lobby’s promises were always more faith than fact, rooted in a utopian vision that ignored trade-offs. Green jobs? The UK’s renewable sector employs fewer than 75,000 people, a fraction of the 500,000 jobs lost in manufacturing since 2000. Cheaper energy? Households face bills 60% higher than a decade ago. Energy independence? The UK imports 40% of its electricity on peak days, often from fossil-heavy grids abroad.
The climate agenda’s failures are not a messaging problem, they’re a policy disaster, colliding with the hard limits of physics and economics.
The tide is turning because the public sees through the façade. From factory workers to suburban families, people feel the squeeze of policies that prioritise ideology over reality. The green backlash isn’t just about cost, it’s about trust. When elites lecture about “saving the planet” while ordinary citizens struggle to heat their homes, resentment festers. Reform UK’s rise and the growing chorus of mainstream dissent signal a broader awakening: the climate agenda, as it stands, is unsustainable.
It’s time to pivot. Instead of doubling down on unworkable targets, Britain needs pragmatic policies, investment in nuclear energy, which provides reliable, low-carbon power; deregulation to revive industry; and a frank acknowledgment that global emissions won’t bend to Western sacrifices alone. The climate lobby’s grip is slipping, and no amount of technocratic spin can stop the public’s demand for change. The reckoning is here, and it’s about time we embraced it.
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