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.
South Africa’s once dominant ferrochrome industry is on the brink of collapse and requires a government bailout. That decline is not because the world no longer needs ferrochrome. It is because South Africa’s leaders tied their industrial policy to a “green” agenda that undermines reliable, affordable energy and sacrifices economic strength.
South Africa’s once dominant ferrochrome industry is on the brink of collapse and requires a government bailout. That decline is not because the world no longer needs ferrochrome. It is because South Africa’s leaders tied their industrial policy to a “green” agenda that undermines reliable, affordable energy and sacrifices economic strength.
What is happening in South Africa should concern every country that still cares about manufacturing jobs, supply chains and energy costs for ordinary people.
Ferrochrome – made largely of chrome ore, coal products and with lots of electricity – is not a boutique commodity. Valued for its hardness and resistance to corrosion, ferrochrome is a critical component of stainless steel, the alloy used in the making of kitchen appliances, industrial tools, passenger vehicles and construction infrastructure. It is difficult to imagine modern manufacturing without ferrochrome.
All it took was for South Africa to build a leading stainless steel industry was its domestic access to this valuable commodity. South Africa has two strengths worthy of envy: the world’s largest known chrome ore reserves and a ferrochrome production base second only to China’s. That combination should secure the competitive advantage of South African ferrochrome. Yet, the industry is dissolving.
Reporting a decline of more than 25% in ferrochrome production from 2024 to 2025 wasGlencore PLC, a London-based titan in the sector that owns 80% of what was the world’s largest producer, the Glencore-Merafe Venture in South Africa.
The drop in the South African operation’s output – to 430,000 tons from 600,000 – stems from the government’s hostility toward coal and preference for technologies like wind turbines and solar panels – positions that ignore the fundamental laws of energy.
Robert Cartman, a senior analyst at Fastmarkets, predicts that South Africa’s total ferrochrome production could fall from 3.3 million tons in 2024 to a pitiful 1 million tons in 2026. At that point, South Africa ceases to be a major player. Mines will close. The expertise will migrate. The revenue will vanish.
Ferrochrome production is an energy-intensive beast that needs a steady, cheap power supply for electric arc furnaces, which won’t tolerate the intermittent whims of wind and solar. When the clouds roll in or the wind dies, a smelter operating at 1,700 degrees Celsius cannot simply “pause.”
Just as importantly, coal is not only a power source for this industry. Metallurgical coal is a chemical necessity that provides carbon as a reductant for stripping oxygen from chromium ore. Without coal, there is no ferrochrome.
There is no practical alternative to fossil fuels for the ferrochrome industry, but South Africa’s energy regime is discouraging the use of these economical energy sources and compromising the reliability and affordability of electricity.
Electricity rates have been rising for years. In 2025 alone, the National Energy Regulator approved an increase of nearly 13%, continuing a long trend of hefty hikes that stretch household budgets and corporate balance sheets.
While South African furnaces go cold, the demand for stainless steel continues to grow. However, a significant portion of the market has moved away from South Africa, allowing China to surpass it as the leading ferrochrome producer.
China understands what Pretoria has forgotten: Industrial dominance requires reliable, affordable power that can be dispatched when users need it, none of which can be provided by solar or wind. The Chinese government happily imports South African chrome ore, processes it using its own coal-fired power plants, and sells the finished ferrochrome to the world. South Africa is effectively exporting a large portion of its gross domestic product, outsourcing jobs to China and perpetuating domestic poverty.
Under the pressures of South Africa’s woke ESG (environmental, social and governance) demands, global investment firms and banks are abandoning the country’s resource sector. Coal-dependent industries in South Africa are deprived of insurance and financial services while massive amounts of coal fuel the Asian industrial machine.
It is a rigged game. South Africa tangles itself in “green” tape and “carbon” taxes to appease foreign elites, while global competitors double down on the fossil fuels necessary to build strong economies. South Africa’s newest Integrated Resource Plan 2025 (IRP2025) continues to favor wind and solar.
Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa recently admitted that skyrocketing electricity bills are hurting. “The Department of Electricity and Energy acknowledges that the rising cost of electricity presents a serious challenge to households, businesses, and the broader economy,” he said.
This admission is a rare moment of clarity from a government that usually deals in obfuscation. Whether promises of “policy and structural measures” to “over time” reduce the cost of electricity are ever fulfilled remains to be seen. What is clear is that the current trajectory means the complete collapse of the South African ferrochrome industry is a mathematical certainty.
Policies that aim to save industry after the damage is done are reactive, not strategic. South African leaders must pivot to an energy agenda that accepts the present reality: Coal and natural gas are indispensable for industrial competitiveness – at least until affordable, reliable, on-demand alternatives can match their performance and cost.
This commentary was first published by Real Clear Marketson January 7, 2026.
Dr. Lars Schernikau is an energy economist, entrepreneur, commodity trader, author, strategic advisor and member of the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. He is a coauthor of a recent analysis of South African energy policy. Vijay Jayaraj is an energy-environment analyst and Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition.
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 those who prefer reading, below is an excerpted transcript lightly edited from the interview, including my bolds and added images.
Hey everyone, it’s Andrew Klavan with this week’s interview with Bjorn Lomborg. I met Bjorn, he probably doesn’t remember this, but I met him many, many years ago at Andrew Breitbart’s house. Andrew brought Bjorn over to talk in LA, and I listened to him talking about all the simple and inexpensive things that could be done to make actual change and do actual good in terms of climate change, which I think at that point was still global warming.
And you know, we had a small audience, and I asked the question, well, if these are so such smart, cheap ideas, why don’t politicians do them? And Bjorn said, well, because that wouldn’t give them the chance to display their virtue. And I thought, here’s a man who not only knows about science, but actually knows about human nature. And I’ve been following him ever since.
He is a president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, an author of False Alarm and Best Things First, the best writer, I think, on climate issues and other issues. Bjorn, it’s good to see you.
Andrew, it’s great to be here. And I do remember that event, although I remember it for seeing the guy who played on Airplane. Sorry. So I remember that because it was it’s still one of my favorite movies. It’s one of the greatest movies ever made, I think. It really is very, very funny. Yeah.
On a totally different direction. So I was watching with great approval Donald Trump’s appearance at the United Nations. I guess it would be when we’re playing this last week. And he he had this. I’m just going to read just a little bit of the speech. He said in the 1920s and the 1930s, they said global cooling will kill the world. We have to do something.Then they said global warming will kill the world. But then it started getting cooler. So now they could just call it climate change because that way they can’t miss if it goes higher or lower, whatever the hell happens. It’s climate change. It’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion. Do you agree with that?
So I get where he’s coming from. And I think there’s some some truth to this. I mean, Donald Trump always speaks in larger than real life words. Yes. So, it’s not a con job. There is a problem. And actually, in some sense, bizarrely, as it may sound, you know, the world is built all of our infrastructure is built to live at the temperature that we’ve had for the last hundred or two hundred years. That’s true in Los Angeles. That’s true in Boston. It’s true everywhere in the world. And so, if it gets colder or if it gets warmer, that will be a problem. So, there is an issue here.
But obviously, it’s vastly exaggerated when people then talk about the end of the world. You may remember that this was one of the favorite terms of Biden, but not just Biden, but pretty much everyone for the last four years and certainly more as well. That this is an existential crisis. There was a recent survey by the OECD, so in all rich countries in the world, where they found that percent of all peoplebelieve that unmitigated climate change, so climate change we don’t fix, will likely or very likely lead to the end of mankind. And that, of course, is a very different statement.
There is a problem, that’s true. It’s not the end of the world. But the end of the world is a great way to get funding.
And that’s why people are playing it out. But it doesn’t make for good policy. Remember, if you think the end of the world is near, you’re going to throw everything in the kitchen sink at this, which, of course, is what the campaigners would like you to do. But you will probably waste an incredible amount of resources because you’re just going to try everything.
Climate change is a problem. So I disagree with Trump there. But yes, there is an incredible amount of exaggeration. And I agree with him there. So there’s I mean, the climate changes but we’re not living in a glass bubble. And we’ve even in I don’t know, I guess it was the late 19th century, the Thames in London froze over and people went skating on it. It’s so there are these big changes and there have been ice ages, obviously. How much of this or do we know how much of this is is caused by human beings?
I have to preface this with saying I’m a social scientist, so I work a lot on the costs and the benefits of us doing policies against climate change. I’ve met with a lot of the natural scientists who study all this. Please don’t do this at home, but I’ve read the UN climate panel report, most of the pages, not all of them. And it’s incredibly boring, but it’s also very, very informative. So so I have a reasonably good take on this. And what they tell us is that the majority of the recent warming that we’ve seen is due to climate change.
I have no idea to evaluate that, no way of independently evaluating that is due to natural climate change or is manmade, due to mankind. So is it mostly due to us emitting CO from burning fossil fuels?
So there is a significant part of what’s changed over the last century or thereabouts, which is about two degrees Fahrenheit or one degree Celsius. So that’s something and that’s something we should look at. But also, we should get a sense of what’s the total impact of this. Well, actually, climate economics have spent the last three decades trying to estimate: what’s the total cost of everything that happens with climate change.
So, you know, there are lots of negatives. There’ll be more heat waves. There’ll possibly be stronger storms. There’s also going to be fewer cold waves, which is actually a good thing. There’s also going to be CO2 fertilization. So, we’ll have more greenery. You know, if you add all the negatives and all the positives, it becomes a net negative. That’s why it’s a problem. But also get a sense of this.
If you look across all of the studies that we’ve done, we estimate the net negative impact today is about 0.3% of GDP. So yeah, a problem, not the end of the world. And it’s crucial to say, if you look out till 2100 which is sort of the standard time frame, which is a long time from now, we estimate if we do nothing more about climate change, so we end up with three degrees Celsius, so about degrees 5.6 Fahrenheit, then the cost will be about to 2 to 3% of global GDP every year.
That’s certainly not nothing. That’s a lot of trillions of dollars. But again, it’s 2 to 3%. It’s not, you know, the end of mankind, It’s not anywhere near a hundred percent. And this is not me saying this. This is the guy William Nordhaus from Yale university, the only guy to get the Nobel prize in climate economics. And Richard Tol one of the most quoted climate economists in the world. They’ve done separate studies. One to find 2%, the other one to find 3%. That’s the order of magnitude we’re talking about. And just for, for added emphasis, remember by then everyone in the world will be much, much better off.
Just like if you compared people from back in 1925 and until today, the UN on its standard trajectory estimate, the average person in the world by the end of the century will be somewhere around 450% as rich as he or she is today. That’s not the US that will. And you know, people come from Denmark and other rich countries might only be 200% as rich, but many in Africa and elsewhere will be a thousand percent richer. So on average, because of climate change, it will feel like they’re only 435% as rich, which sort of emphasizes, yes, that’s a problem. I would rather have a world that’s 450% as rich trather than one that’s 435%. But it’s not the end of the world.
It’s still a fantastically much better world, just a slightly less fantastically much better world. And that less money that people will have will mean less money you have to spend, what, shoring up buildings. And so the way they measure that is actually in equivalence of how much you would need to get compensated to live with the problems.
So we don’t actually look at whether people will fix it or not. You know, it’s a bit like, if you have a slightly dangerous job, you get more money. And that’s basically a way of saying, but you’ll also have to live with that constant slightly higher risk of dying. Right. So we’re compensating you for that. That’s the, that’s the amount that we’re talking about. So it’ll feel like you’re only % as rich, although you’ll probably in reality, get all that, that slight extra money to get up to 450%, but then you will also have to live with some problems from climate change.
This week I was arguing with a socialist, lovely guy, but just the guy who believes that like all money should be redistributed. And I was pointing out that this was giving a lot of power to the people in power. And one of the things I sent him was this article you wrote in the, in the New York Post, which was exactly the kind of article that makes me angry. And I mean, it makes me frustrated with our politics. I want to read just a couple of sentences. Last year, the world spent over $2 trillion on climate policies. This is Bjorn Lomberg writing in the New York Post. By 2050 net zero carbon emissions will cost an impossible $27 trillion every year. So, this, this will choke growth, spike energy costs and hit the poor hardest and still will deliver only 17 cents back on every dollar spent. Meanwhile, mere billions of dollars could save millions of lives. I’d like to take this apart a little bit, but to begin with all the stuff that we are spending this money on, is it doing anything? Will it have any effect?
It will. I mean, what, what are we spending money on and what will it do? So, these $2 trillion, that’s sort of the official number from the International Energy Agency and many others. It’s a very soft number because obviously what goes into all this money, surprisingly, it’s also all the cost into EVs or electric cars, which of course gives you a thing that can drive you from place A to B, at least if it’s been charged. So, I mean, there are some benefits to this. It’s also spending on solar panels and wind turbines, which again, obviously gives you electricity when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. It actually also gives you higher electricity costs all the other times, because you now need to have backup power for when it’s not shining or windy, and that capital is being used less.
So, there’s a lot of spending, it’s a very big headline number. There’s $2 trillion, everyone uses it, but it, but it’s not all that informative, because the global economy is about a hundred trillion dollars. It means we’re spending 2% on stuff that we probably wouldn’t have done had we not been scared witless on climate change. And that’s a waste. I mean, remember the total spend on healthcare is perhaps 8%. The total spend on education globally is about 5%.
These are big numbers. This is something that could have done a lot of good elsewhere. But I think the real point here is to say people want to take us to a cost that’s much, much, much higher. Remember all the world’s governments, almost all the world’s government now, not Donald Trump and the US, but most governments have pledged in one form or another that we’re going to go net zero around 2050 or shortly thereafter. But nobody looked at what the cost of this will be, which is a little surprising. Because the numbers I’m going to show you suggest that this one single promise is about a thousand times more expensive than the second costliest policy to which the world has ever committed, which was the Versailles treaty back in 1919, had Germany actually paid all the money it was supposed to. That cost was about half a trillion dollars in today’s money, which of course is why Germany never paid it. But now we’re talking about something that is going to be in the order of a thousand to two to 3000 times more costly.
Yet nobody’s looked at what the cost will be and what will be the benefits? There’s no official estimate of this.
So two years ago, a professor from Yale university, Robert Mendelsohn, gathered a lot of really smart climate economists to try to estimate what’s the cost, and what’s the benefit of net zero. A lot of those really, really smart economists ended up chickening out. You can understand why it’s a really hard question. You’re also asking what will happen in the next hundred years and you’re trying to put estimates on it. At the end of the day, they published a big study published in the journal of climate change economics, which is a period article.
And they had one benefit estimate and three cost estimates. So, this is obviously not great, but it’s the only thing the world has. And so that gives you a sense of how much this cost will and how much good will do. If you take the average of these three cost estimates, that gives you $27 trillion in cost per year throughout the 21st century. That’s where that number comes from. $27 trillion. So that’s about a quarter of global GDP right now, because we’re going to be much richer, that is only going to be about 7% of global GDP across the 21st century. But you know, that’s an enormous cost that’s on the magnitude of bigger than education, a bit smaller than healthcare and for everyone in the world, that’s a lot of money.
Now, if this gave you a lot of benefits that might be worthwhile. I mean, we pay a lot of money for stuff that’s good, but we’ve already established that even if we could entirely get rid of climate change, it would only reduce costs by two to 3%. So, spending 7% to get rid of two to 3% is a bad deal, but unfortunately net zero by 2050 means we’ll only get rid of part of it, right? Because we’ll already have cost a lot of climate change. So, the net benefit is only about 1% of GDP across the century or about four and a half trillion dollars.
So, there’s a real benefit. That’s why climate change is real. There’s a real benefit to net zero, but the benefit is much, much lower than the cost. So, $4.5 trillion in benefits, $27 trillion in cost every year in the 21st century, we’ll be paying much, much more than the benefits will generate for the world. That’s just a bad deal. There’s no other way to put it.
And the fact that we’re not honest about this and that most people just are not honest about it is one of the reasons why we’re wasting money and spending it so badly. The last bit of the quote that you just said was we could do so many other good things. Remember, most people in the world are not living in nice countries like the US or Denmark. Most people are not considering, you know, the biggest problem which of the many programs and series they want to follow are, am I going to take first or watch first? Or, you know, what kind of takeout am I going to have? They worry about their kids dying from easily curable infectious diseases, not having enough food, having terrible education, not enough jobs, corruption, all these other things. And the truth is we could solve many of these problems, not all of them, but many of them to save millions of lives at a fraction, a tiny, tiny fraction of this cost. So instead of talking trillions, we’re talking billions.
Why is it that we’re so obsessed with spending trillions to do almost no good a hundred years from now, instead of spending billions and doing a lot of good right now to avoid people dying from tuberculosis and malaria, avoid people having terrible education, getting better economies, all these things that we know work at much lower cost. That’s my central question to all these feel gooders. I mean, I know that they want to feel good about themselves, but in some sense, I would like to believe that they actually want to have done good at the end of the day.
I think it’s much more a question of saying, if I am doing effective policies, there’s not much money to hand out to friends and to buy more votes and all that kind of stuff. Whereas if I am overseeing, you know, an enormous amount of spending on stuff that doesn’t really matter. So, I can just spend it on whatever. Then clearly, I have a lot more latitude and a lot more opportunity to get people to like me and to show what a good person I am. So, I think in some sense, it’s just plain politics. You know, if you’re saying the world is on fire and you’re at risk. But vote for me and I can save your kids. And it’s only going to cost you 7%. I can see, you know, why people want to vote for that. But if you’re saying, look, things are fine and just give me a little bit of money and I’ll fix the rest of the problems. It doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, does it?
So, so if, if we were to get to net zero, wouldn’t that cripple poor countries? I mean, in other words, it seems to me that people who burn the most fossil fuels are the people who are building up most and the people who are developing most. Whereas we’re sort of, we’ve sort of leveled off, haven’t we?
Yes. So, the truth about the $27 trillion is that this is an, sort of assuming that we’re going to be smart. But I don’t know what the climate future is going to look like. I don’t think anyone really knows, but we have a good sense that we’re good at, you know, innovating stuff. And we know how to get CO2 free energy. We can do it with nuclear. We also know we can get some from solar and wind. We’ll probably have more batteries. We’ll have lots of things. I think the world was sort of, you know, stumble through and we’ll be okay. But the point is we could have been much, much better off.
Does that affect your sense of politics at all? Oh, of course it does. And I’m disappointed that half the world would tend to dismiss a lot of this because these are inconvenient facts, with that said though I also talk about all the incredibly important things we could do in the poor part of the world. This is not true for most of the world, this is a very Western, kind of rich world situation where we have this very clear distinction between right and left. And, and a lot on the left, I think have sort of gone off on the deep end on some of these things.
For instance, on climate change, which has become this identifying totem, that they worship, and not in a smart way. Remember a lot of standard left-wing belief was about helping the downtrodden, which I perfectly agree with. And I think a lot of people would agree, we need to get poor people out of poverty. That’s a terrible situation and it destroys human dignity and liberty and all kinds of things. We should absolutely do something about that. But the truth is that’s where, you know, seven eighths of the world’s population is because they know poverty and they want to get out of it.
Although when you go to these events in New York and, and elsewhere, even politicians from Africa and elsewhere, they’ll of course say all the platitudes that come along with getting some funding from rich Western nations. But in the private cocktail conversations afterwards, you know, they don’t look at Germany and the UK and say: oh yes, deindustrialization and incredibly high energy costs, that’s what we want. No, they look at China because they want to get rich like China did.
And China of course got rich famously by dramatically increasing its energy consumption through coal. At its lowest China’s energy from renewables was 7.5%, and now it’s up to about 11%. So, people think, oh China is this green giant, but no it’s not. It gets the vast majority of its energy from coal. And not surprisingly, because that has been historically the cheap opportunity to drive your economy and development.
Britain risks electricity rationing by the next general election unless its fleet of ageing gas-fired power stations is urgently upgraded, a new report has warned.
Britain risks electricity rationing by the next general election unless its fleet of ageing gas-fired power stations is urgently upgraded, a new report has warned.
More than a dozen of Britain’s gas-fired power stations are so old that they may not last until the end of the decade and key parts required to upgrade them take years to arrive on order, energy consultancy Watt-Logic said.
It called on Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, to face up to the threat amid growing concern over UK power supplies, which still rely largely on gas despite the expansion of renewables.
“Without urgent action to secure dispatchable generation and stabilise the gas network, the UK faces escalating risks of supply shortfalls and widespread system failures well before 2030,” the report warns.
“It will be difficult to meet existing demand without rationing, let alone any additional demand from electrification.”
About a third of the UK’s electricity is generated by gas-fired power plants – but on windless days, this proportion can double.
Kathryn Porter, from Watt-Logic, warned that in five years time – just after the next general election – many of those gas plants could be offline and there are currently no plans to replace them.
She said a third of the fleet had been built in the 1990s and “while most received upgrades in the 2000s, in most cases this did not involve replacing rotors [a key component prone to wear]”.
“This means the anticipated retirement dates are becoming imminent and there is no replacement and minimal upgrade plans in place,” she added.
It means the risk of electricity rationing during the winter months will increase over the next five years – peaking between 2028 and 2031 – because of the loss in energy production.
The loss will be made worse by the planned shutdown of the UK’s ageing nuclear stations. Eight of the 10 remaining reactors face closure before or in 2030.
But still NESO and DESNZ continue to bury their heads in the sand and gaslight us:
Responding to the report, a Neso spokesman said: “Great Britain has one of the most secure energy systems in the world… our engineers are confident Britain’s grid will continue to operate safely and securely as more renewables connect to the network in the years ahead.”
A spokesperson for the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said: “The National Energy System Operator, has been clear the faster we decarbonise, the more secure we are.
“Gas will continue to play a key role in our energy system as we transition to clean, more secure, homegrown energy.
“That’s why we are also delivering the biggest upgrade to Great Britain’s electricity network in decades to deliver clean power by 2030 and beyond.”
Yes, we used to have “one of the most secure energy systems”, but we certainly have not now. As for more renewables making us more secure, NESO know this is untrue.
It was them who warned in their Clean Power 2030 report in 2024 that we would still need our full fleet of gas power stations for many years to come. They know full well that wind and solar power cannot supply all of the power we need day in, day out, even with contributions from nuclear, biomass and imports.
You can triple wind and solar power capacity, but three times nothing is still nothing.
Miliband knows that the real problems will start to kick in after the next election, so he will do his utmost to destroy the country before then, knowing he won’t have to face the consequences.
I can’t recall the USA ever stopping foreign scientists from visiting, but apparently that will be a thing in the future.
Why Greenland is indispensable to global climate science
Published: January 10, 2026 4.39am AEDT Martin Siegert Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Cornwall), University of Exeter
A 30-minute stroll across New York’s Central Park separates Trump Tower from the American Museum of Natural History. If the US president ever found himself inside the museum he could see the Cape York meteorite: a 58-tonne mass of iron taken from northwest Greenland and sold in 1897 by the explorer Robert Peary, with the help of local Inuit guides.
For centuries before Danish colonisation, the people of Greenland had used fragments of the meteorite to make tools and hunting equipment. Peary removed that resource from local control, ultimately selling the meteorite for an amount equivalent to just US$1.5 million today. It was a transaction as one-sided as anything the president may now be contemplating.
But Donald Trump is now eyeing a prize much larger than a meteorite. His advocacy of the US taking control of Greenland, possibly by force, signals a shift from dealmaking to dominance. The scientific cost would be severe. A unilateral US takeover threatens to disrupt the open scientific collaboration that is helping us understand the threat of global sea-level rise.
…
Unlike Antarctica or Svalbard, Greenland has no treaty that explicitly protects access for international scientists. Its openness to research therefore depends not on international law, but on Greenland’s continued political stability and openness – all of which may be threatened by US control.
This has got to be one of the more absurd arguments against a US takeover of Greenland. The USA as far as I know has never stopped climate scientists from visiting US territory, the Trump administration just doesn’t want to pay for climate voodoo.
Labour has unveiled plans to introduce a petrol and diesel lorry ban as part of their net-zero drive.
Ministers have announced an end to the sale of new fossil fuel-powered trucks in a move that opens up a new battle with the Tories and Reform.
They have ruled out allowing the continued use of low-carbon or synthetic fuels, meaning that from 2040 all new heavy goods vehicles (HGVs) will have to be electric.
Critics warned that forcing haulage companies to adopt expensive battery or hydrogen-powered vehicles would push up the cost of business.
The extra expense would then be passed onto consumers in the form of higher prices for goods like food and clothes, as well as parcel deliveries.
Richard Holden, the Tory shadow transport secretary, said: “Labour are sleepwalking into a cost shock for the entire economy.
“Forcing haulage firms to scrap perfectly good lorries while they can still run for years and replace them with other vehicles before either the technology or infrastructure is ready will simply drive up costs, as well as being environmentally disastrous.
“Those costs will be passed straight through supply chains into higher prices in shops, higher construction costs, and more pressure on inflation. Every supermarket shelf, building site, and home delivery will feel higher prices.
The problem goes way beyond the cost of buying an electric lorry. It goes to the heart of the haulage industry.
Just as with EVs, electric lorries will have a very short range. Having to stop for an hour or so to recharge will turn one day journeys into two days. That assumes the driver can even find a charger on his route.
As a consequence, haulage companies will have to operate many more lorries in their fleets.
There is also the issue of weight – HGVs already place huge strains on road surfaces. Heavy batteries will either make matters worse or enforce lighter loads. The latter will, of course, mean hauliers will have to operate even more lorries.
According to the Telegraph, the DfT are considering three options:
The first would see manufacturers set annual quotas for the number of electric HGVs they must sell, similar to how the petrol car ban will work.
Another option laid out by ministers is to follow the EU’s approach and set haulage companies ever decreasing carbon emissions caps.
Finally, delivery firms could be required to ensure that an ever increasing proportion of their fleet was electric, eventually reaching 100 per cent.
They are all equally unacceptable. It is therefore disappointing that the haulage industry is not fighting this hard. Instead we get weasel words:
Chris Ashley, from the Road Haulage Association (RHA), said: “We’re clear that the decarbonisation transition hinges on two key issues being addressed – infrastructure in place to power zero emission HGVs, and vehicle affordability.
“The pathway to decarbonise lorries and coaches in the UK must be realistic and viable – we’ll look to see how the consultation achieves that.”
The motor manufacturing industry made the same mistake years ago, succumbing to Net Zero madness. Now they are paying the price.
Apparently there are 535,000 HGVs in the UK, of which only 500 are electric. The Green Finance Institute has estimated £100bn worth of additional finance and subsidies would be needed to support electric lorry take-up.
There is also the question of international carriers. We cannot ban a French lorry, for instance, from crossing the Channel and delivering loads up and down the country. Banning UK hauliers from buying diesel lorries will simply make them uncompetitive, with their business handed over to European transport companies.
Moreover, a UK haulier is hardly likely to send an electric lorry across Europe, where there will be little charging infrastructure.
It is quite frightening that this crazy policy is being pushed through by Keir Mather, the minister for transport decarbonisation. Mather is 27 years old and has a Degree in History and Politics. His only work experience outside of Parliament was an 18-month stint as a public affairs advisor for the CBI, before becoming MP for Selby in 2023.
Keir Mather
He says there was a need to act because lorries “have a high environmental impact” and emit 16 per cent of all emissions from domestic transport.
“That is why we are firmly committed to accelerating the transition to clean technologies and to setting a path to phase out the sale of…all new non-zero emission heavy goods vehicles by 2040.”
HGV GHG emissions are about 16 MTCO2 a year, about 5% of the UK total or 0.03% of global emissions.
Why is somebody without the slightest experience of the real world given the authority to make such far reaching and potentially catastrophic policy decisions?
Frigid tempertures have gripped Central Europe and the population is struggling to stay warm. Media say it’s all part of warming!
Frigid weather grips Germany. Symbol photo by P. Gosselin
Nine days ago I warned that such junk science would soon be reported. We can’t have people questioning the warming dogma when it’s frigid outside, now can we?
Germany’s online Frankfurter Rundschau (FR) just published an article titled: “Why the cold winter is no evidence against warming.”
The article explains why severe winters in Germany do not contradict global warming. The core argument lies in the distinction between weather (short-term events) and climate (long-term trends). That of course gets ignored by the media when there’s a hot summer day.
Experts, the FR reports, emphasize that a single cold winter is merely a statistical fluctuation, while the global trend points upward. “Weather is what you see outside; climate is the statistics over a long period of time,” the FR reports. “A cold winter does nothing to change the long-term warming trend.”
A warm Arctic produces cold Europe temperatures?
Moreover, the Frankfurter Rundschau reports that there are meteorological explanations for extreme cold phases despite global warming: a weakening polar vortex, fueled by Arctic warming, that can cause icy polar air to surge further south. “The Arctic is warming about four times as fast as the rest of the world,” writes the FR “This disrupts the jet stream and allows cold air masses from the north to penetrate our regions more easily.”
People have queried what is happening in Australia with their push for a decarbonised all renewables/ Net Zero grid since the last update in 2023. The answer is not much progress, but massive amounts of money spent.
People have queried what is happening in Australia with their push for a decarbonised all renewables/ Net Zero grid since the last update in 2023. The answer is not much progress, but massive amounts of money spent.
Renewable power has gone up to 9% of energy consumption, but energy productivity and intensity trends are flattening out. Power prices have risen above the rate of inflation and there is near terminal de-industrialisation. Despite massive LNG exports, there is a gas shortage, including for power stations. Biomass still provided more energy than wind and only a little less than solar. Most energy production is exported – the coal and gas shipments that people don’t want to be reminded of as that pays for the virtue signalling. The promised nirvana of cheap plentiful carbon-free power is probably further away now than it was then. Reality is just so cruel to the idealistic dreamers. Probably best summed up by a quote from Nick Cater “Sadly, our climate and energy policy remains in the grip of an intelligentsia that lacks the wisdom to recognise the boundaries of its own ignorance”.
The long outage at Broken Hill showed wind, solar and batteries couldn’t work when they were islanded. AEMO recognised in their Dec 2025 Transition Report about the difficulty of doing a system restart using only renewables. They write “exploring restoration support services to address stable load unavailability, and two new Type 2 Transitional Services trials to demonstrate black start capability using inverter-based resources (IBR) and to enable system restart in a high distributed photovoltaic (PV) environment.” They are still testing basic functions, like restarting without traditions resources, so it hasn’t been proven as viable, let alone something that can be relied upon.
There is a very good definition by AEMO that encompasses what system security means:
“A secure power system is one operated safely within defined technical limits, with the ability to withstand credible disturbances, return to secure operation, and restart following a widespread outage. While reliability requires sufficient generation and network capacity to meet customer demand, the requirements for system security are more technical, and include system strength (the ability of a power system to maintain and control the voltage waveform at any location, both during normal operation and following a disturbance), frequency and inertia, voltage control, transient and oscillatory stability, operability, and system restoration.”
If synchronous generators are to be replaced by IBRs, the latter have to be proven to reliably meet all those requirements in adverse conditions. Even the ever-optimistic AEMO doesn’t think that is the case.
In their earlier power system risk review report, they were concerned that all the renewables would cause protection issues, more non-credible events (2 or more loss of generation/ transmission events together or cascading) and batteries changing power flows in the transmission system. Their answer seems to be just more studies, reviews and consultations. They saw the emerging risks from synchronous generation shutting down with resultant low system strength as a possibly very serious issue, potentially leading to cascading events like the one which blacked out Spain. The terminology now used for unstable frequency is “small signal stability” As they write “Small signal stability is the ability of the power system to maintain synchronism after being subjected to a small perturbation without the application of a contingency event. This issue is gaining an increased focus in the NEM due to the growing presence of IBRs. “ That was another system strength problem that Spain highlighted with sub/ super synchronous oscillations leading to the cascade.
Armwaving statements by academics and advocates about what they theoretically do doesn’t cut it in the real world of grid operations. Performance and reliability have to be shown to be there before acceptance. That is why new plants have strict grid acceptance tests of their setting and protection systems before they are allowed to connect. They then need regular tests to show they stay compliant. And when issues arrive like relays tripping when they shouldn’t (the initiator of the Iberian blackout), the setpoints need to be changed and proven to work at the new settings.
There is a tacit acknowledgement that wind is too unreliable to provide a backup to solar. Even for an area the size of Australia, the wind isn’t always blowing somewhere. Figure 1 shows the variability. Figure 2 shows the continued reliance on coal for electricity.
Fig 1 The total Eastern grid (NEM) wind generation over 24-day period showing both its variability and rapid changes (from Jo Nova). The black line shows total grid load and green is the wind generation.
The promised new pumped storage and transmission lines to support the renewables are bogged down by delays. Snowy 2.0 looks like it will be near a decade late and an order of magnitude more expensive with less storage capacity that originally promised. About the scheme, Robert Onfray in late 2023 substack post wrote “ In January this year, the project made headlines again after it was announced there would be a one-year delay. Then, in May, another announcement pushed the estimated completion out another two years. In five months, the official completion date has been delayed by three years, from 2026 to 2029. When first announced by Turnbull, Snowy 2.0 was going to be built by 2022. The construction cost estimate has blown out ten-fold to $20 billion, plus $10 billion for the plant and another $9 billion for 1,000 kilometres of 500kV transmission line connections to Sydney and Melbourne”. The energy company that is building it is currently preparing the latest price and commissioning estimate. Despite their promises, it won’t be the final one.
About the engineering aspects of the scheme, he wrote “Snowy 2.0, on the other hand, will be a giant, expensive, inefficient battery that will consume water and electricity to produce very little electricity, in contrast to the original Snowy Mountains Hydro Scheme’s excellent reputation and engineering excellence. ….It is no secret in engineering circles that the Snowy 2.0 tunnels are far too long for an efficient pumped hydro system. Leading geologists and engineers know that the geological conditions for tunnelling in a typical tectonically induced alpine geology with opposing faults, tight folds, shears, bedding plane shears, and abutting perched waters are challenging and expensive. They knew this from geotechnical reports from the original Snowy scheme. And they were right, as the project costs have blown out way behind original estimates. It is simply remarkable that this project went ahead at all. It was doomed because of geology alone, let alone the defective concept.” No doubt it went ahead because the incompetent people advising the incompetent Prime Minister of the time thought he needed a good soundbite of a “vision” as his legacy. He will be remembered for it, but not in the way he dreamt.
The giant pumped storage in Queensland was cancelled by a new government that baulked at the cost. – even more expensive than Snowy 2 The smaller one at Borumba still hasn’t been committed to by the state but has Federal approval (and money) for exploratory works. The timeline for that is ridiculously ambitious and even if it goes ahead, it will be late and invariably overbudget. – they still haven’t confirmed the geology yet. The new transmission lines to bring in power to the cities, replacing the coal fired stations, from yet to be built solar and wind are overbudget and held up with planning delays. For some reason the city elites can’t understand, farmers don’t want all the pylons and power lines crossing their land with all the use restrictions with it. The woke are very big on Aboriginal land acknowledgements but not so for farmers who have been there generations. As the link mentions, these transmission lines will also need Federal concessional finance, aka subsidies.
The proposed extra DC link to Tasmania has also been hit by cost blowouts. The state no longer has an abundant hydro supply (they had to restart a mothballed fossil fuel plant as they had run out of water through reckless energy trading), and often has to import brown coal power from Victoria.
NSW is paying for a power company to extend the life of a big coal powered power station again, possibly to 2030s. The closure of Liddell cost them dearly and they are now near constantly having to import power. They also need more gas to reduce the summer blackout risk. The average age of the remaining coal stations across Australia is about 40 years old. People seem to want them only to generate when it is needed but things aren’t like that. They cannot just stop and start, can’t even rapidly ramp up or down and they have a relatively high minimum stable generation limit that constrains their turndown. They are not well maintained because of budget cuts starving them of capital investment, having to run at a loss at least part of the time, uncertainty of operation and politicians regularly trumpeting imminent closure to meet the Net Zero goals.
Fig 2: the year’s grid fuel source of the electricity generation showing coal is still the backbone of supply. The bars show the percentage from each source for the year while the graph under it is the weekly generation from each source. The dip at the end is the Xmas holidays. By showing wind as a weekly figure, it minimises its variability (note uncredited graphs are from the AEMO website)
Because of the regular middle of the day negative pricing caused by a surplus of solar and wind, some States are looking at “free” electricity to consumers over this period. The details of how this will be done has yet to be worked through, but it will invariably cost either consumers or taxpayers. You don’t get owt for nowt.
Another problem the grid is having to deal with is the loss of visibility for all the domestic solar – the behind the meter generation. When this generation drops, like for say a cloud going over, it only shows as an unexpected increase in demand. These increases can be big. Figure 3 shows a 500MW increase. This would have to be covered by FCAS (Frequency Control Ancillary Services). Note that there are now 10 products in the FCAS market, a number of which had to be introduced because of unreliability and lack of inertia for wind/ solar.
To try to deal with the excessive domestic generation and subsequent negative pricing in the middle of the day, the federal government came up with a multi-billion-dollar scheme to subsidise domestic battery installation. The scheme was badly designed and in something that should have been obvious to everyone except the scheme designers, rich homeowners installed the biggest batteries they could. These were a lot larger than their solar panels can deliver. The scheme costs got out of control. The government has redesigned the scheme and put in more money. The actual effect of all these household batteries on the grid has not been determined. It is fair to say that it is unlikely to be what was intended. It is hard to believe that all that uncontrollable and largely invisible load/ generation will make grid operations and management any easier.
Fig 3 The upper graph of grid demand showing a significant unexplained jump while the lower one was generation from grid connected solar farms. The mass of lines was the model’s prediction of the load, with the marked ones the actual load. This event was probably from something like a front arriving and domestic solar dropping output. (graphs from Wattclarity)
When events like this happen, it is no wonder that the grid frequency has increasing instability (Figure 4). The swings regularly go outside the deadband. That must cause significant changes in currents flowing along the lines, with the transformers having to adjust the tapchangers to keep the voltages under control. Even with frequency control on automated dispatch in the batteries providing FCAS, it would be difficult for the operators to see what is happening, let alone take remedial action.
Fig 4 The grid frequency over a 5-hour period middle of the day showing the instability – small signal stability conditions. It is often outside the deadband where no corrective action is needed and stays within the permissible bounds but there would be significant call on FCAS. (Wattclarity is a very good site for providing reports on Australian grid events and things of interest.)
Though the batteries are touted as energy storage, they mainly seem to be used as reserve generation for grid management. In 2025, near half the revenue of the South Australian ones came from FCAS during outages and the accompanying price spikes. If they are there to provide that, their general energy trading operation providing power after the sun goes down is much restricted.
The AEMO in their December 2025 transition plan admit “Grid-forming battery energy storage systems (BESS) are progressing rapidly to be able to deliver a wide range of system security services in the NEM such as frequency control, voltage stability and some aspects of system strength.” Note they aren’t there yet and even then, they won’t provide the full suite of system strength abilities. All of which fossil fuel plant supplies as free extras to go with their generation. For the organisation tasked with implementing the government’s plans, that is quite an admission. Or are they just preparing the groundwork to say “I told you so” when the next blackout happens?
They then write “AEMO’s 2025 system strength and inertia assessments have confirmed the importance of delivering system strength and inertia solutions in tandem.” This is why Planning Engineer has been regularly writing that system strength is an undervalued capability. The lack of it is one of the main reasons the Iberian Peninsula blackout occurred.
The current federal government in Australia came to power in 2022 with a promise that their renewables push would lower power prices to the consumer. By mid 2023 the energy regulator was warning of power price increases. Since being in power, prices to consumers have gone up by hundreds of dollars. Undaunted by their failure, the same government hasn’t backed away with the promises still being made – just a longer timescale is needed.
The “average” spot price on the wholesale market bears no resemblance to what is paid by consumers because of all the negative pricing. It also isn’t volume weighted. But it is still touted by the know-nothings as proof of the cheapness of renewables. Data is hard to come by but it appears many stations (especially solar ones) are constrained off a significant proportion of the time from a combination of negative pricing together with system and line constraints. That will affect their commercial viability (a case for more subsidies?).
Australia has stopped building wind farms. It took until December for the first wind farm that year to get to financial close.so construction could start. Even then, this station was just for the separate South Western Grid in Western Australia. There were several in South Australia that were close to go-ahead but the ink isn’t on the contracts yet. Their economics (who will buy their power) aren’t known either.
AEMO, the grid operator, has warned of blackouts if the remaining coal plants are shut down. This was because the replacement equipment to provide system security wasn’t being built. That warning could be why the governments are now quietly pushing for the plants closure to be postponed, going for underwriting their continued operation. Originally this was just to 2027 for a large station in NSW, but now they want longer and no doubt more plant will be included.
South Australia (SA)
There are still the puff piece articles with headlines like this – South Australia may be first big grid in world to go without synchronous generation . The article is wrong. South Australia is not a grid. It is a small part of the larger Eastern Australian (NEM) grid. There is a massive AC interconnector coming into the state from the south and smaller DC ones from the East. The current flows along these interconnectors (at times 20-30% of grid load) mean that South Australia can virtue signal about its renewables target with minimised risk of blackout when the wind/ solar can’t deliver. The brown coal stations in Victoria supply power when wind and solar can’t. SA is also subject to massive electricity price variability on the spot market. And one trading period, or even one day is not what to base your electricity supply on. It needs to be over a ten year period at N-1-G (enough generation to cope with both the biggest transmission line and biggest single generator out of service at peak load) before it can be regarded as even near secure.
Boxing Day 2025 gives a very good illustration of how the raw grid data can be spun by articles like the Renew Energy one. The AEMO graphs showing the State’s supply, demand and price shows an apparent load of just 99MWnett for the state (Figure 5). However, the grid operators have a much higher Minimum System Load (MSL) they have to conform to give stability. It was why 243MW was being generated – a third on gas– the difference had to be exported on the interconnectors (Figure 6). Without them, the State would have been in significant strife trying to cope with excess generation. This low nett generation is because of all the behind the meter household solar generation.
Fig5 Boxing Day 2025 showing minimal SA grid load (99MW), and power flowing into and out of the state on the interconnectors – why it isn’t a self-contained grid. The DC in is at its operating limit and the AC out near its limit. However, despite negative pricing, the gas turbines are generating as they are constrained on (which consumers have to pay for) to provide system strength services.Fig 6 The fuel supply for the Minimum System load shown in previous figure showing the gas turbines running for grid stability. Note no grid solar.
A lot of grid solar and wind will be shut down as nowhere for the power to go. Incidently, that regular curtailment is causing commercial viability issues. The promoters’ pollyannaish answer to this seems to be new transmission lines and more batteries will solve the problem. As New Zealanders say sarcastically, “Yeah, right”
The minimum nett dropped to just 19MW for one period on Xmas Day 2025 (Fig 7) with rest of 180MW exported. However, one of the big grid batteries was issued a directive on Xmas Day to stay synchronised and absorb load to give extra grid support.
Fig 7 The SA grid generation source on Xmas Day 2025 showing the wind and solar were dispatched off to keep gas on. The actual generation mix at the marked line is shown in the bar chart below.
This very low grid generation is not truly representative for the State though. Looking at the data over a 12 month period shows a significantly different picture. That (Fig 8) shows that gas is still producing a quarter of the electricity. For one week in winter, it was about half, with diesel engines providing more power than batteries. Grid solar provided very little as that is always being constrained off by the domestic solar.
Fig 8 Electricity generation in SA over a year showing a quarter comes from gas. Highlighted is a week where most was supplied by gas and diesel produced as much as batteries. As previously mentioned, the aggregating of the wind to weekly figures masks its variability.
It gets even worse that that if one dives deeper into the detail. On one day (Figure 9), 83% of the generation came from gas and a further 5% from diesel. The much vaulted batteries provided less than that. It is days like this that the grid operators have to plan for. If they listened to the wind/ solar advocates with no fossil fuels allowed; as well as power being very expensive, there would be near total blackouts. But the fossil fuel generation needing to be available has to be paid for, even if it rarely generates. So it costs more to have a duplicated system.
Fig 9 Generation in South Australia 27th Jun 2025 showing overwhelming reliance on gas and diesel for the peaks with very little wind or solar available that day. There would have also been significant power imported from Victoria through the interconnectors.
Even that bad news for the advocates is not the full picture. Like the Boxing Day data shows, they are often exporting electricity at giveaway prices. No generation company could survive the loss making, unless there are big subsidies. But at night in the winter months as well as burning diesel to run engines, the state will be importing expensive coal powered energy from Victoria or possibly even Queensland. That is why they need the interconnectors.
Of course there is a price to pay for the solar, wind and batteries. The state has the most expensive electricity in Australia for the consumer – about US30c a unit. That power price is part of the reason the state has deindustrialised more than others have.
There is so much rooftop solar that the SA government has introduced solar curtailment plans so their supply can be shut off if it is too high. They are also lowering feed in tariffs. This is to try to reduce the risk of excessive voltages on the distribution network, which will damage appliances. In serious cases, the grid operators can automatically trip inverters. As part of this, the power network has introduced a scheme where you can send up to 1.5kW into the grid near unrestricted except for when excessive voltage trips your system. The alternative they want adopted is allowing up to 10kW in, but the network has more control over that supply. It remains to be seen if this solves the problem.
SA subsidises consumers and small businesses. This is in addition to the federal government subsidising renewable generation and paying the fossil fuel plants not to shut down as well as generating to provide system strength services.
Summing Up
There has been little decarbonisation since 2020. Aging, increasingly unreliable coal fired power stations are still the backbone of the electricity supply. The price of energy is inexorably rising. Australian governments, both State or Federal, are subsidising domestic solar and batteries, subsidising grid wind and solar generation, subsidising fossil fuel plant to stay generating to do what the unreliable wind and solar can’t, and subsidising consumers as power is too expensive. When will it all end in tears?
Donald Trump’s latest attack on climate action takes place amid rapidly rising temperatures, rising sea levels, still-rising greenhouse gas emissions, burgeoning costs from extreme weather and the imminent danger that the world will trigger “tipping points” in the climate system that will lead to catastrophic and irreversible changes.
…
Simon Stiell, the UN’s climate chief, said US citizens and companies would bear the impact. “It is a colossal own goal which will leave the US less secure and less prosperous,” he said. “It will mean less affordable energy, food, transport and insurance for American households and businesses as renewables keep getting cheaper than fossil fuels, as climate-driven disasters hit American crops, businesses and infrastructure harder each year and as oil, coal and gas volatility drives more conflicts, regional instability and forced migration.”
Mohamed Adow, the director of the thinktank Power Shift Africa, predicts countries will take a similar attitude this year, carrying on without the US. “The climate movement is bigger than any one nation,” he said. “African nations and the global south will continue pushing for climate justice, demanding that wealthy polluters honour their historical responsibilities, and building the clean energy future our people deserve.”
…
Under Trump, the US risks being left on the sidelines – a position that Kerry called a “gift to China”. The economist Nicholas Stern said: “The economics of the [low-carbon] transition look ever more attractive. Every time we look at the science it looks more worrying, and every time we look at the technology it is more encouraging. In an increasingly insecure world, countries and industries will be seeking independence from fossil fuels and the great volatility such dependence brings. In a world with sluggish growth, countries and industries will be seeking new opportunities. These will be in the technologies of the 21st century, not the 19th and 20thcenturies.”
But he noted that Trump, though he could not change the economic direction of travel, could unsettle some investors on the margins. “Any actions that slow down the pace are unhelpful,” he said.
This claim is so absurd. There is no scenario in which the USA does not gain an economic advantage by pulling out of climate treaties.
Imagine for a moment the climate crisis was as bad as John Kerry and the fantasists at the Guardian believe, and that green energy is the solution. By withdrawing from climate treaties, the USA still gains a significant economic advantage by freeloading off the climate efforts of others. By avoiding the economic disruption of a premature green energy transition, the USA can sit on the sidelines, letting others carry the burden of reducing global CO2 emissions, and use its economic advantage to scoop up any useful green energy technology after the patents run out.
The reality is there is no climate crisis, and green technology will never be useful. In this scenario the USA has an even greater advantage, by avoiding the economic folly of wasting money on technologies which can never fulfil requirements.
The United Nations finally gets some accountability after serving itself or foreign dictators for decades. Trump isn’t just withdrawing from The Paris Agreement; he’s gone for the nuclear option of pulling out of the UNFCCC completely.
The United Nations finally gets some accountability after serving itself or foreign dictators for decades. Trump isn’t just withdrawing from The Paris Agreement; he’s gone for the nuclear option of pulling out of the UNFCCC completely.
The WHO could have stopped Covid, instead they actively help spread it and covered up for the Chinese Communist Party. They look, act, and behave like a larval form of One World Government — constantly trying to pass agreements that take over sovereign control or generate funds for the UN. They dream of setting up a Global Pandemic Treaty where they can dictate what injections you must have, what drugs are permitted, and get access to your medical data. These are not just pie-in-the-sky ambitions, the UN already effectively stopped unvaccinated Australians from leaving the country during Covid.
There should be a Royal Commission into the politicians and media outlets who sold out the nation to support the UN, like those that signed the Pandemic Treaty, and the Carbon tax on shipping.
From Marco Rubio: Withdrawal from Wasteful, Ineffective, or Harmful International Organizations
Today, in furtherance of Executive Order 14199, President Trump announced the withdrawal of the United States from 66 international organizations identified as part of the Trump administration’s review of wasteful, ineffective, and harmful international organizations. Review of additional international organizations pursuant to Executive Order 14199 remains ongoing.
The Trump administration has found these institutions to be redundant in their scope, mismanaged, unnecessary, wasteful, poorly run, captured by the interests of actors advancing their own agendas contrary to our own, or a threat to our nation’s sovereignty, freedoms, and general prosperity. President Trump is clear: It is no longer acceptable to be sending these institutions the blood, sweat, and treasure of the American people, with little to nothing to show for it. The days of billions of dollars in taxpayer money flowing to foreign interests at the expense of our people are over.
As such, the United States will be withdrawing from the 66 organizations that can be found here.
As this list begins to demonstrate, what started as a pragmatic framework of international organizations for peace and cooperation has morphed into a sprawling architecture of global governance, often dominated by progressive ideology and detached from national interests. From DEI mandates to “gender equity” campaigns to climate orthodoxy, many international organizations now serve a globalist project rooted in the discredited fantasy of the “End of History.” These organizations actively seek to constrain American sovereignty. Their work is advanced by the same elite networks—the multilateral “NGO-plex”— that we have begun dismantling through the closure of USAID.
Donald Trump has sparked outrage by announcing the US will exit the foundational international agreement to address the climate crisis, cementing the US’s utter isolation from the global effort to confront dangerously escalating temperatures.
“This is a shortsighted, embarrassing and foolish decision,” said Gina McCarthy, who was a top climate adviser to Joe Biden’s White House.
“As the only country in the world not a part of the UNFCCC treaty, the Trump administration is throwing away decades of US climate change leadership and global collaboration. This administration is forfeiting our country’s ability to influence trillions of dollars in investments, policies and decisions that would have advanced our economy and protected us from costly disasters wreaking havoc on our country.”
Manish Bapna, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said Trump’s decision to exit the UNFCCC is an “unforced error” and “self-defeating” as it will further hamper the U.S.’s ability to compete with China, which is increasingly dominant in the world’s burgeoning clean energy technology industries.
Trump serves oil billionaires, says Al Gore!
Gore, the former U.S. vice-president and climate activist, told The Guardian: “They’ve done this at the behest of the oil industry, so that billionaires can rake in even more money while polluting our planet and endangering people in America and around the world”…
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