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.
Parts of Australia recorded their highest temperature of all time this month, while across the world, the crucial 1.5°C warming limit is sliding increasingly out of reach. But much of the media no longer cares.
In January 2021, it [media climate mentions] dropped back, with 2,050 references. It then continued to slowly decline: 1,779 in January 2022, 1,913 in 2023, 1,629 in 2024, and 1,600 in 2025. …
But then came the COVID-19 pandemic …
The genocide in Gaza …
That’s surely the context for the media’s declining attention to climate. This week, the US finished its withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement … political and media insiders feel less pressure than ever to discuss climate: a topic increasingly off the global agenda.
Back in the day, many scientists thought the reality of a warming planet would be enough to force a response. That’s clearly not the case. Without a renewed movement for climate action, the temperature records will continue to fall –and nothing whatsoever will follow.
He is a former columnist for Guardian Australia, a former Breakfaster at radio station 3RRR, and a past editor of Overland literary journal. His books include Provocations: New and Selected Writing, Crimes Against Nature: Capitalism and Global Heating, Fascists Among Us: Online Hate and the Christchurch Massacre, Trigger Warnings: Political Correctness and the Rise of the Right, No Way But This: In Search of Paul Robeson and several others titles.
As usual greens are blaming everyone and everything but themselves.
The real reason the green agenda is collapsing is nothing bad has happened. Hitting 1.5C without any climate disasters caused a critical loss of credibility for the green movement. Their pathetic flailing about claiming the climate disaster is here, trying to redefine Australia’s beach weather Summer as a climate catastrophe, or talk up the January US snow storm, it’s like a comedy horror story reveal where the terrifying monster turns out to be a mouse.
With fresh memories of the lies and the exaggerations of the Covid lockdown, the exposure of the fake climate crisis, the exposure of 1.5C as being just an arbitrary number pulled out of someone’s proverbial, came at just the wrong time for greens. People are fed up with being frightened and misled by activists in lab coats.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
In the climate change episode of his 2011 BBC Frozen Planet series ‘On Thin Ice’, Sir David Attenborough told viewers that polar bear mothers and cubs across the Arctic were starving because climate change was melting the sea ice, even as he sat beside a fat, healthy Barents Sea female.
In the climate change episode of his 2011 BBC Frozen Planet series ‘On Thin Ice’, Sir David Attenborough told viewers that polar bear mothers and cubs across the Arctic were starving because climate change was melting the sea ice, even as he sat beside a fat, healthy Barents Sea female (below).
I wonder how Sir David Attenborough feels now. Has anyone bothered to tell him that Norwegian biologists have finally admitted that Barents Sea polar bears were actually fat and healthy in 2010 when they assisted in the filming of his BBC documentary? Or did Attenborough know even then that this population of polar bears was thriving despite the large loss of sea ice – but let his viewers think otherwise?
The image above is from an expedition Attenborough took to Svalbard (in the western Barents Sea, likely the spring of 2010), where he sat with a sedated fat sow while talking about starving polar bears and falling population numbers due to loss of sea ice. This sequence was filmed in the same area where researchers have recently shown that by 2005, at least, bears were in much better condition than they had been in 1995, even though local sea ice had declined dramatically (Aars et al. 2026).
What this also means is that the bears were being handled and measured, so the biologists must have known that the bears in 2010 were not dying of starvation but were actually doing better than they had been in 1995 – even though the sea ice had markedly deteriorated.
Below is a graph taken from the Norwegian monitoring site that posts their Svalbard polar bear data every year. This graph shows body condition of adult male bears right up to 2025 – seven years beyond the cut-off date for the 2026 Aars study.
The statement below about the population trend vs. sea ice is from the same site:
It seems to me that by 2010 when these same authors helped Attenborough make his BBC documentary, these researchers already had the data they needed to determine that sea ice loss was not causing a population decline in the Barents Sea because female bears were not starving (Lippold et al. 2019).
In the figure below, the last panel (“BCI”) shows body condition (i.e., “fatness”) of females over time, from 1997 until 2017. While by 2010, the modest increase in body condition may not have been as strongly apparent as it was a few years later but there was definitely not a decline.
Fat bears mean the population is healthy and thriving, not struggling to exist.
I suggest one of two options: either Norwegian researchers lied to Attenborough about the status of the Barents Sea bears or they went along with his lie that these bears were starving just like “most of the bears” across the Arctic – because they were all invested in the narrative that sea ice loss blamed on human-caused climate change would eventually drive polar bears to near extinction (Crockford 2019).
I guess we won’t know unless someone asks him.
I’ve written about Attenborough’s Arctic Betrayal before, of course, which reached egregious levels in 2019 when he falsely told the world that Russian walrus had hurled themselves off tall cliffs because of climate change – when it was actually because they were being stalked by bears. There was a video (copied below), and then a book (Fallen Icon: Sir David Attenborough and the Walrus Deception).
Attenborough’s Arctic Betrayal video:
References
Aars, J., Ieno, E.N., Andersen, M. et al. 2026. Body condition among Svalbard Polar bears Ursus maritimus during a period of rapid loss of sea ice. Scientific Reports16, 2182. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-33227-9 Open access.
Crockford, S.J. 2019. The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened. Global Warming Policy Foundation, London. Available in paperback and ebook formats.
Crockford, S.J. 2022. Sir David Attenborough and the Walrus Deception. Amazon KDP, Victoria.
Lippold, A., Bourgeon, S., Aars, J., et al. 2019. Temporal trends of persistent organic pollutants in Barents Sea polar bears (Ursus maritimus) in relation to changes in feeding habits and body condition. Environmental Science and Technology 53(2):984-995. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.8b05416
“CO2/climate optimism is merited, not more recalibration by falsified merchants of doom.”
David Carlin must be a worried guy outside of his smiling photos. This “policy, sustainability, and finance expert” has a firm (D. A. Carlin Company) ready to assess your climate/ecology risks for a nice fee. He has the knowledge and answers to the ‘problem’… Or maybe not.
With 2026 beginning, what date would we overshoot the planet’s resources if everyone lived your lifestyle?
Great visualization showing when 100+ countries would exceed a sustainable balance based on the resource use and consumption habits of different nations.
The U.S. and Canada hit their sustainability threshold in March, so maybe North America should just hibernate for three-fourths of the year.
Carlin ends:
It’s the mirror image of how many earths we would need. An earlier overshoot date means that country is borrowing against the future. Needless to say, we cannot borrow forever!
Malthusianism never dies. Paul Ehrlich lives! The neo-Malthusian ‘overshoot’ predictions date back to the 1960s and 1970s with such quotations as:
MIT/Club of Rome (1972)
If all the policies instituted in 1975 in the previous figure are delayed until the year 2000, the equilibrium state is no longer sustainable. Population and industrial capital reach levels high enough to create food and resource shortages before the year 2000.
Donella Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth (New York: Universe Books, 1972), p. 169.
Although we have many reservations about the approximations and simplifications in the present world model, it has led us to one conclusion that appears to be justified under all the assumptions we have tested so far. The basic behavior mode of the world system is exponential growth of population and capital, followed by collapse.
Ibid., p. 142.
Limits to Growth … “astonishingly young” (the oldest was 30) authors were true believers. Dennis and Donella Meadows retreated to a New Hampshire farm after completing the book “to learn about homesteading and wait for the coming collapse.” “‘We definitely felt like Cassandras,’ Donella Meadows added, ‘especially as we watched the world react to our work’.”
Quoted in Robert Bradley, Capitalism at Work: Business, Government, and Energy (2009), p. 234.
And regarding climate change?
“Many people think that the threat of ‘global warming’ arose only towards the end of the twentieth century…. Climate change, either natural or anthropogenic, has been discussed from the classical age onwards, evolving from the expected benefits of climate engineering to today’s fear of global disaster.”
Hans von Storch and Nico Stehr, “Climate Change in Perspective,” Nature, June 8, 2000, p. 615.
At the moment we cannot predict what the overall climatic results will be of our using the atmosphere as a garbage dump. We do know that very small changes in either direction in the average temperature of the Earth could be very serious. With a few degrees of cooling, a new ice age might be upon us, with rapid and drastic effects on the agricultural productivity of the temperature regions. With a few degrees of heating, the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps would melt, perhaps raising ocean levels 250 feet…. In short, when we pollute, we tamper with the energy balance of the Earth.
Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (Cutchogue, New York: Buccaneer Books, 1968, 1971), p. 39.
Another ‘overshoot’ is the world racing past the (arbitrary, peculiar) temperature increase of 1.5°C, a baseline for Net Zero policies in the future. The quicker the warming threshold is exceeded, the more angst will follow and new targets set. In the meantime, free markets will adapt to weather/temperature changes with government “climate mitigation” policy causing waste and futility. CO2/climate optimism is merited, not more recalibration by falsified merchants of doom.
I’ve just been made aware of a paper critical of the “consensus” view that man-made climate change is dangerous. It is by Ashutosh Sharma, Vinit Vithalrai Shenvi, and Mohit Sain of the MS Ramaiah Institute of Technology in India (or MSRIT) (Sharma et al., 2024). It was published just two months before “Carbon Dioxide and a Warming Climate are not problems,” by Marcel Crok and myself (May & Crok, 2024) and makes similar points, at least until we reach the paper’s conclusions. The paper argues that: “climate change policies impose unwarranted economic strains on nations and impede technological advancement.”
I’ve just been made aware of a paper critical of the “consensus” view that man-made climate change is dangerous. It is by Ashutosh Sharma, Vinit Vithalrai Shenvi, and Mohit Sain of the MS Ramaiah Institute of Technology in India (or MSRIT) (Sharma et al., 2024). It was published just two months before “Carbon Dioxide and a Warming Climate are not problems,” by Marcel Crok and myself (May & Crok, 2024) and makes similar points, at least until we reach the paper’s conclusions. The paper argues that: “climate change policies impose unwarranted economic strains on nations and impede technological advancement.”
Unfortunately, like many papers, after it completely destroys the whole idea of dangerous climate change it turns around and claims the consensus is correct after all:
“The consequences of climate change are already evident in rising temperatures, melting ice caps, and extreme weather events, and if left unchecked, these effects will become increasingly severe in the future. It is crucial for policymakers, businesses, and individuals to acknowledge the reality of climate change and take proactive measures to mitigate its effects.”
I have seen this sort of nonsense in too many papers to count. First, they show there is no evidence that man-made climate change is unusual or dangerous, and then they say that future will be different, trust me. The conclusions in May and Crok are more sensible:
“The infrastructure to replace fossil fuels does not exist and likely cannot be built in a short time. Current realistic estimates of future energy use suggest that fossil fuels will still supply half our energy in 2050 and beyond. Yet no credible evidence exists that this is a problem or will become a problem. Recent research into climate change has suggested that nature plays some role, and certainly greenhouse gas emissions may play some role as well. What we do not know is how much of climate change is human-caused and how much is natural. No drastic changes to our economy are justified until we can figure this out.”
Key points made by Sharma et al.:
Climate change is not solely driven by anthropogenic factors. The main factor emphasized by the consensus is that increasing CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels will somehow create problems for mankind. While some impact from burning fossil fuels on climate is expected, it is likely minor and not dangerous (Sharma et al., 2024) and (May & Crok, 2024).
The research supporting dangerous anthropogenic climate change is based upon manipulated data, biased methodologies, and political agendas.
Renewable sources of electricity require fossil fuel backup and cannot provide a consistent and reliable source of power.
Government subsidies have driven the growth of renewables and distorted the energy market.
Government spending on renewables has diverted spending from education, health care, and infrastructure, areas that should take priority.
Trends in mid-late Holocene climate change, particularly the transition from Holocene Climatic Optimum to the Little Ice Age challenge assumptions that recent changes are due to human activities or extreme in a proper historical context. This is also a point made by May and Crok.
The Holocene period (~9700BC to the present) is a brief warm interlude in a three-million-year ice age. As this paper and May and Crok point out the warmest period in the Holocene, was not the Modern Warm Period (1850 to the present), but 6000 years ago in the Holocene Climatic Optimum. This casts considerable doubt on the man-made climate change hypothesis.
The dark side of environmental activism has had a significant effect on public perception of climate change, also see the discussion of this factor in May, Politics and Climate Change: A History, 2020.
They acknowledge that the increase in climate disaster costs in recent years is primarily due to increasing populations and affluence in vulnerable areas.
The paper accepts the reduced uncertainty in climate sensitivity in AR6, as explained by (Sherwood et al., 2020), yet this new subjective Bayesian analysis technique for deriving climate sensitivity has been successfully debunked by Nic Lewis (Lewis, 2023).
Conclusions
It is an awful thing to read through a good paper that lays out a very good case why there is nothing to worry about regarding man-made climate change and then watch the authors do a complete U-turn in the conclusions and push the idea of potentially dangerous climate change. The change from downplaying concern to emphasizing it is abrupt in this paper and unexpected.
But I’ve seen it many times before. Roger Pielke Jr.’s otherwise excellent book: The Climate Fix: What Scientists and Politicians Won’t Tell You About Global Warming does the same thing;I explain the discrepancy here. First Pielke completely destroys the argument that man-made global warming and climate change are dangerous, then he states that “carbon dioxide matters a great deal.” He never really explains why but states it anyway. Pielke is an excellent scientist and a good writer but is just as susceptible to unsupported conjecture about the supposed “dangers” of carbon dioxide emissions as most other scientists. Sigh.
Sharma et al. emphasize the importance of critical thinking and evidence-based decisions and then immediately ignore all the fine evidence they present in the earlier part of the paper that climate changes today are not unusual and are not dangerous. They go on to immediately use unsupported conjecture to proclaim that climate change is dangerous and urgent action is needed. It is truly absurd how often this logical error is found in otherwise good climate change papers.
The IPCC AR6 Synthesis Report (IPCC, 2023) is another good example. The detail chapters review the data on extreme weather and find no global increase attributable to human activities, yet in the conclusions and in The Summary for Policymakers they focus on future projections and conjecture to imply the opposite of what the data shows. Roger Pielke Jr. provides a very thorough critique of the Synthesis Reporthere.
Bottom line: Scientists should stick to the facts as we know them today, conjecture and predictions are fine, as long as they are clearly labeled as such. We all are susceptible to defending our ideas and conjectures, it isn’t just Sharma, et al. However, logic and common sense tell us to stick with clear evidence. Reasonable conjectures should be kept in mind but not acted upon until facts and observations support them.
May, A., & Crok, M. (2024, May 29). Carbon dioxide and a warming climate are not problems. American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12579
Sharma, A., Shenvi, V. V., & Sain, M. (2024). Reevaluating the Concern of Climate Change. International Journal of Environment and Climate Change , 14(3). https://doi.org/10.9734/IJECC/2024/v14i34056
Sherwood, S. C., Webb, M. J., Annan, J. D., Armour, K. C., J., P. M., Hargreaves, C., . . . Knutti, R. (2020, July 22). An Assessment of Earth’s Climate Sensitivity Using Multiple Lines of Evidence. Reviews of Geophysics, 58. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1029/2019RG000678
Al Jazeera (AJ) recently published an article titled “Drought in the east, floods in the south: Africa battered by climate change” by Haru Mutasa, in which the reporter details recent experiences of drought in East Africa and flooding in southern Africa, asserting that those weather events are proof that climate change is battering the continent. This is false. The article relies on flimsy content such as personal observation, interviews, and evocative imagery to imply causation, ignoring data and trends that show no appreciable changes in flood or drought patterns over time.
Al Jazeera (AJ) recently published an article titled “Drought in the east, floods in the south: Africa battered by climate change” by Haru Mutasa, in which the reporter details recent experiences of drought in East Africa and flooding in southern Africa, asserting that those weather events are proof that climate change is battering the continent. This is false. The article relies on flimsy content such as personal observation, interviews, and evocative imagery to imply causation, ignoring data and trends that show no appreciable changes in flood or drought patterns over time.
Mutasa asserts that “rising seas and intensifying storms” and shifting rainfall patterns are already devastating livelihoods, citing the author’s personal field observations as evidence of a broader climate crisis. Readers are shown photos of dry riverbeds, dead livestock, submerged neighborhoods, and distressed residents, then invited to connect these scenes directly to global warming. The emotional impact is real, but emotion is not evidence.
Let us start with AJ’s most basic error: weather is not climate. Climate is defined by long-term patterns measured over decades, typically 30 years or more. A drought in one region followed by floods in another over a few weeks or months says nothing about a durable climate trend. Africa’s climate has always been highly variable, with sharp swings driven by ocean–atmosphere cycles such as the El Niño–Southern Oscillation and the Indian Ocean Dipole. Short-term extremes—sometimes back-to-back—are a known feature of the region, not a recently discovered diagnostical proof of climate change.
The historical record bears this out. Southern and eastern Africa experienced severe droughts and catastrophic floods long before modern greenhouse gas emissions rose. Mozambique’s Limpopo River basin, featured prominently in the article’s flood imagery. The area has a long history of major inundations, including the devastating 2000 Mozambique floods, which displaced hundreds of thousands and occurred during a strong El Niño year. East Africa’s Horn has likewise seen repeated, multi-year droughts throughout the twentieth century, interspersed with episodes of extreme rainfall. These precedents matter because they show that today’s events are consistent with a long pattern of variability rather than proving a novel climate regime.
When measured data are consulted instead of anecdotes, the alarm bells fade. Climate at a Glance summarizes the global evidence in “Floods” and “Drought,” explaining that there is low confidence in any increasing trend of global flood frequency or magnitude and that drought trends are regionally mixed, not universally worsening. These conclusions align with the cautious language used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), which emphasizes uncertainty and regional variability rather than blanket claims of intensification.
The AJ article substitutes interviews for analysis. Quoting local residents and aid workers about hardship may document suffering, but it does not diagnose cause. Infrastructure deficits, land-use changes, deforestation, river management, dam releases upstream, population growth in floodplains, and limited early-warning systems all play decisive roles in disaster outcomes across Africa. Climate Realism has repeatedly shown how media coverage overlooks these factors while attributing complex events to climate change by default, as catalogued in its Africa-related reporting and extreme-weather analyses accessible via Climate Realism’s search on floods and droughtsand Climate Realism’s coverage of drought claims.
Even within the article’s narrative, local management issues loom large. Mutasa notes dam releases in South Africa’s Mpumalanga province sent additional water downstream into Mozambique—an operational decision with immediate hydrological consequences that has nothing to do with global temperature or climate change. Treating such factors as footnotes while elevating climate change as the primary driver of flooding misinforms readers about where real risk reduction lies.
Serious climate reporting distinguishes between events and trends, and between personal experiences and measured evidence.
By presenting interviews and moment-in-time scenes as confirmation of a continent-wide climate verdict, Al Jazeera is misleading its audience by making a causal connection where data show none. Africa’s vulnerability to climate and weather extremes is real, but the causes are multifaceted and long-standing. Ignoring historical precedents and measured trends in favor of an alarming narrative certainty does not inform the public; it misleads it with false headlines.
Yeah, global cereal production (including wheat, maize/corn, rice, barley, sorghum, and other coarse grains) reached a record high in 2024, according to data and reports from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations and related sources.
Yeah, global cereal production (including wheat, maize/corn, rice, barley, sorghum, and other coarse grains) reached a record high in 2024, according to data and reports from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations and related sources.
Mid-2024 forecasts pegged it at around 2,854 million tonnes, slightly above the previous year’s level and marking a new record.
Later refinements placed final or near- final estimates for 2024 production in the range of approximately 2,848– 2,853 million tonnes, still representing a peak or near-peak output.
This was driven by strong performances in coarse grains (like maize), wheat in regions such as Asia (e.g., record wheat in Pakistan), and rice nearing or hitting records (around 535–537 million tonnes milled basis).
It’s the same story with overall agricultural production, again setting a new high in 2024 – note these are at fixed prices and are therefore not distorted by inflation:
The UN are also projecting another big increase in cereal production for 2026/26:
FAO’s latest forecast for world cereal production in 2025 has been revised upward this month to 3 003 million tonnes, marking the first time the global output is estimated to surpass the 3-billion-tonne level.
Upward revisions to wheat production estimates are primarily behind the improved outlook, driven especially by Argentina, where larger-than-expected plantings and likely record yields, supported by favourable weather, are expected to result in an all-time-high harvest.
Revisions to wheat production in the European Union and the United States of America also contributed to this month’s more buoyant outlook.
Likewise, global coarse grain production has been raised, although to a lesser extent, mostly reflecting higher barley output.
As for rice, FAO has upgraded its production forecast for Indonesia since November, as official assessments in the country indicate that continued area expansions are likely to translate into a higher- than -previously-expected offseason harvest.
Coupled with improved crop prospects for Bangladesh and Japan, this revision raises the global production forecast for 2025/26 by 2.4 million tonnes to 558.8 million tonnes (milled basis).
At that level, world rice output would be 1.6 percent above the 2024/25 result and at an all- time high.
Bangladesh, Brazil, China, India, and Indonesia are forecast to spearhead this growth, more than compensating for contractions in Madagascar, Nepal, Pakistan, Thailand, and the United States of America.
The long-term increase in food output has been undoubtedly driven by fossil fuels. Fertilisers have, of course, been hugely important, but maybe more important still has been the increase in productivity resulting from mechanisation.
Mechanisation on farms has obviously transformed the agricultural sector. But the ability to get foodstuff to markets, refrigeration and shipping are all equally important factors.
None of this would be possible without fossil fuels.
Looking to reorient U.S. energy policy toward fossil fuels and nuclear plants, President Trump has access to an enormous sum of money made available by an unlikely source: the Biden administration and congressional Democrats.
Legislation passed on party-line votes, most notably the $1 trillion Inflation Reduction Act, allocated hundreds of billions to the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency to fund various green energy projects. While some of that money has since been zeroed out by Republicans, more than $280 billion remains – allocated but unspent.
Looking to reorient U.S. energy policy toward fossil fuels and nuclear plants, President Trump has access to an enormous sum of money made available by an unlikely source: the Biden administration and congressional Democrats.
Legislation passed on party-line votes, most notably the $1 trillion Inflation Reduction Act, allocated hundreds of billions to the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency to fund various green energy projects. While some of that money has since been zeroed out by Republicans, more than $280 billion remains – allocated but unspent.
The Trump administration is wiping clear billions of dollars in loans made by the Biden administration and will streamline the federal grant process, while changing the name of the Loan Program Office to the Office of Energy Dominance Financing (EDF). Energy officials assert the department will rely on “common sense and data,” thereby eliminating the numerous charges of conflicts of interest associated with energy loans during the Biden era, which were highlighted in a recent report from the department’s inspector general.
“The Biden administration had an agenda to decarbonize without asking the important questions of reliability and affordability,” said Greg Beard, the senior advisor to the EDF. “I wouldn’t describe our plan as an agenda; I would describe it as common sense. We’re grateful that Congress saw that the Trump Administration can have an important impact while being good stewards of taxpayer dollars.”
Billions ‘Rushed Out the Door’
Energy Secretary Chris Wright has been an outspoken proponent of oil, natural gas, and nuclear power for years, and quickly took an aggressive stance toward department loans. Last year, he canceled $3.7 billion in loans he said made no financial sense, and on Jan. 22, 2026, he announced $83 billion in Biden administration energy loans would be “restructured, revised or eliminated” and characterized the portfolio as part of the “Green New Scam.”
“We found more dollars were rushed out the door of the Loan Programs Office in the final months of the Biden administration than had been disbursed in over 15 years,” Wright said.
That announcement came on the heels of Wright’s remarks at the World Economic Forum earlier this month, when he urged Great Britain and other European countries to turn away from expensive and dicey NetZero projects. That was the framework Biden and the Democrats sought to fund when passing bills via reconciliation without any Republican support, and Wright had urged Congress last year to keep the money available.
Energy’s new lending agency says it will support critical minerals and hydrocarbon projects, including, in some cases, coal, as well as restarting or upgrading the nation’s existing nuclear energy sector – all things the Trump administration considers far more reliable sources of affordable energy than solar, wind, and other renewables. President Trump underscored this commitment last May when he issued an executive order on nuclear power. Since then, administration actions have included a $1 billion loan to restart a nuclear plant on the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania, and a continuing $1.52 billion loan to the Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan.
The change in emphasis was welcomed by some experts who think the shift recognizes the supply and technological situation that exists in the energy sector today.
“Reality has signaled to the world it needs to have a recalibration when it comes to energy matters. There’s even some clarity restored to the IEA’s world energy outlook,” said Mark Mills, executive director of the National Center for Energy Analytics. “The world isn’t following the ‘NetZero’ blueprint, Europe is backpedaling, and one of the big stories going forward this year will be the who, when and where the Trump administration decides to put money.”
Warping the Market
Mills cautioned that the government’s resources are so great that massive loans in one sector could warp the market by discouraging private capital, but the EDF’s Beard told RealClearInvestigations his office is aware of that possibility, particularly with nuclear energy. In addition, any new nuclear project will take at least five years to deliver energy to the grid, and that is probably an optimistic timeline.
“EDF loans are all tied to specific companies and projects and are the subject of extensive due diligence to validate that projects meet EDF standards for project readiness and reasonable assurances that loan will be repaid,” Beard said. “There is never a scenario where we do not know where the money is going.”
Those who believe global warming is an existential crisis have decried the Trump administration’s focus on plentiful energy sources that emit carbon, a process that the Energy Department’s new direction will continue. RCI reached out to prominent environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and the Environmental Defense Fund, but they did not respond. However, several environmentalists recently told the New York Times the results would prove catastrophic.
“Emissions will be higher,” Dartmouth College associate professor Justin S. Mankin told the newspaper. “Trump’s greenhouse gas emissions will cause Trump’s heat waves, Trump’s droughts, Trump’s floods, and Trump’s wildfires.”
The Trump administration’s approach is also being criticized by some free-market energy experts who say the federal government should not be in the loan business at all and would prefer the office be disbanded and the money spent elsewhere.
“We were excited to see that the Department of Energy is canceling $30 billion in green loans, but would like to see them go much further,” said Thomas Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research. “For more than a decade, we have called for Congress and DOE to end the loan program altogether. Absent that, President Trump to send a recission to Congress and announce that the money is going to pay down the deficit. The taxpayer should not be on the hook for commercial projects, regardless of their merit.”
Lingering Questions
As it reorients the federal government’s energy loan portfolio, the administration has revamped the way those loans are made in response to questions raised about the Biden administration’s practices. The Environmental Protection Agency – a regulatory agency that Biden, for the first time, made into a financial arm of his NetZero push – now appears to be out of the energy loan business, even as questions linger about that activity.
That process, which the EPA’s inspector general likened to the agency creating an “enormously complex investment bank” that would be difficult to monitor, involved roughly $27 billion doled out to nonprofits via its short-lived Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund and Solar For All programs.
As RCI previously reported, familiar names in the Obama and Biden administrations were sprinkled throughout the nonprofits receiving the billions, which took another bizarre twist after Trump won the 2025 election. At that point, it was revealed the EPA had “parked” roughly $20 billion at Citibank, an unorthodox arrangement that took the cash out of Treasury Department control in a process one former Energy Department employee compared in an undercover video to “throwing gold bars off the Titanic.”
The Citibank money remains embroiled in litigation. Nonprofits suing for the money they were promised prevailed at the federal district court level, but that ruling was reversed by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals last September in a decision that validated the agency’s decision to end the programs.
Four months after that, however, the EPA did not respond to a question about why the money has not been returned. Both court papers and background on the unique process the Biden administration used to give out the money are part of a new EPA webpage that even features a section entitled, “Self-dealing and Conflicts of Interest.”
Something similar appears to have been occurring at the Department of Energy. Around Christmastime, the department’s inspector general’s office released an audit report that found potential conflicts of interest among 20% of officials it reviewed at the Loan Program Office, which, under Biden, was slated to handle some $380 billion.
The IG launched its audit of some activities by DOE’s loan office in September 2024 in response to its meteoric rise under the Biden administration. In the past, the office had been a somewhat sleepy section of the agency that offered money “to companies considered risky by traditional lenders and investors” that focused on “innovative clean energy, advanced transportation, and tribal energy projects.”
Biden-era legislation turbocharged the Loan Program Office. According to the report, it had $385 billion in new loan authority, a gigantic leap in its balance sheet thanks primarily to the Inflation Reduction Act. To handle the crush, the office had requested an additional 105 full-time federal employees from FY2022 through FY2024. There were 219 people working in the loan office when the audit began.
The auditors spent one year looking at 40 employees and $31 billion in loans – and found potential issues with eight of those employees. The report does not identify either the employees or the loans in question.
In general, the report revealed that loan department employees had failed to disclose prior management positions with firms seeking loans and, in some cases, had financial ties with loan office contractors. This included at least two “senior-level employees.”
These examples raised the potential for conflicts of interest and the “appearance of loss of impartiality in performing official duties,” an issue that arose in part because the office became increasingly sloppy in background work as its ranks swelled, according to the report.
Nothing Untoward?
Some of the report’s conclusions would appear to warrant further investigation. For example, auditors said “we found the employee authorized the interagency package concurrence for multiple loans worth billions of dollars, where their former employer was the financial advisor or investor for those loans. The employee had significant financial interest with this company.” Department officials told auditors there had been a “recusal” in that case, which in the end kept the employee from making any final decisions.
In another case, the report found “a supervisory loan specialist that had not been recused from matters involving their outside employer. Specifically, the employee was a company board member, and, as such, the financial interest of the company was imputed to the employee, creating a possible financial COI.”
The IG said these various errors occurred because the office did not follow standard ethics regulations and internal policies. Yet the precise details of what happened in the decision-making process, and whether the loans the IG examined were among those canceled by the Trump administration, remain unclear because neither the individuals nor the companies were named.
RCI spoke with liberal government watchdog groups and current Department of Energy officials who insisted the report did not conclude anything specifically untoward had occurred. The IG listed three recommendations, which the department says it has already implemented. These include a staff lawyer dedicated to ensuring compliance with ethics regulations and resolutions of “the potential conflicts identified during the audit.”
But the Trump administration seems more interested in spending the money secured by the Biden administration than it is in revisiting the previous administration’s missteps.
“We have a clear vision with the right goals – to bring energy addition and not subtraction,” Beard said. “The office has restructured around a foundational mission to lower electricity prices, empower the private sector toA invest in the future, help win the AI race, strengthen American industry, lower electricity prices, and restore American energy dominance.”
This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.
The Version 6.1 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for January 2026 was +0.35 deg. C departure from the 1991-2020 mean, up a little from the December 2025 value of +0.30 deg. C.
The Version 6.1 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for January 2026 was +0.35 deg. C departure from the 1991-2020 mean, up a little from the December 2025 value of +0.30 deg. C.
The Version 6.1 global area-averaged linear temperature trend (January 1979 through January 2026) remains at +0.16 deg/ C/decade (+0.22 C/decade over land, +0.13 C/decade over oceans).
The following table lists various regional Version 6.1 LT departures from the 30-year (1991-2020) average for the last 25 months (record highs are in red).
YEAR
MO
GLOBE
NHEM.
SHEM.
TROPIC
USA48
ARCTIC
AUST
2024
Jan
+0.80
+1.02
+0.57
+1.20
-0.19
+0.40
+1.12
2024
Feb
+0.88
+0.94
+0.81
+1.16
+1.31
+0.85
+1.16
2024
Mar
+0.88
+0.96
+0.80
+1.25
+0.22
+1.05
+1.34
2024
Apr
+0.94
+1.12
+0.76
+1.15
+0.86
+0.88
+0.54
2024
May
+0.77
+0.77
+0.78
+1.20
+0.04
+0.20
+0.52
2024
June
+0.69
+0.78
+0.60
+0.85
+1.36
+0.63
+0.91
2024
July
+0.73
+0.86
+0.61
+0.96
+0.44
+0.56
-0.07
2024
Aug
+0.75
+0.81
+0.69
+0.74
+0.40
+0.88
+1.75
2024
Sep
+0.81
+1.04
+0.58
+0.82
+1.31
+1.48
+0.98
2024
Oct
+0.75
+0.89
+0.60
+0.63
+1.89
+0.81
+1.09
2024
Nov
+0.64
+0.87
+0.40
+0.53
+1.11
+0.79
+1.00
2024
Dec
+0.61
+0.75
+0.47
+0.52
+1.41
+1.12
+1.54
2025
Jan
+0.45
+0.70
+0.21
+0.24
-1.07
+0.74
+0.48
2025
Feb
+0.50
+0.55
+0.45
+0.26
+1.03
+2.10
+0.87
2025
Mar
+0.57
+0.73
+0.41
+0.40
+1.24
+1.23
+1.20
2025
Apr
+0.61
+0.76
+0.46
+0.36
+0.81
+0.85
+1.21
2025
May
+0.50
+0.45
+0.55
+0.30
+0.15
+0.75
+0.98
2025
June
+0.48
+0.48
+0.47
+0.30
+0.80
+0.05
+0.39
2025
July
+0.36
+0.49
+0.23
+0.45
+0.32
+0.40
+0.53
2025
Aug
+0.39
+0.39
+0.39
+0.16
-0.06
+0.82
+0.11
2025
Sep
+0.53
+0.56
+0.49
+0.35
+0.38
+0.77
+0.30
2025
Oct
+0.53
+0.52
+0.55
+0.24
+1.12
+1.42
+1.67
2025
Nov
+0.43
+0.59
+0.27
+0.24
+1.32
+0.78
+0.36
2025
Dec
+0.30
+0.45
+0.15
+0.19
+2.10
+0.32
+0.37
2026
Jan
+0.35
+0.52
+0.19
+0.09
+0.30
+1.40
+0.95
The full UAH Global Temperature Report, along with the LT global gridpoint anomaly map for January 2026 and a more detailed analysis by John Christy, should be available within the next several days here.
The monthly anomalies for various regions for the four deep layers we monitor from satellites will be available in the next several days at the following locations:
The study of a scientific paper titled “Body condition among Svalbard Polar bears Ursus maritimus during a period of rapid loss of sea ice,” published in Scientific Reports on January 29, 2026 explains Svalbard bears are resilient due to local factors: increased abundance of alternative prey like harbour seals, reindeer, and walrus, which may compensate for reduced ringed seal access during ice-free months.
The study of a scientific paper titled “Body condition among Svalbard Polar bears Ursus maritimus during a period of rapid loss of sea ice,” published in Scientific Reports on January 29, 2026 explains Svalbard bears are resilient due to local factors: increased abundance of alternative prey like harbour seals, reindeer, and walrus, which may compensate for reduced ringed seal access during ice-free months.
“[S]ea ice loss did not lead to a reduction in BC [body condition] among adult BS [Barents Sea] bears. Rather, after around 2000…both males and females of different reproductive categories increased in body condition for the following two decades.” — Aars et al., 2026
Thick sea ice is not a necessary condition for polar bear health and survival.
As local residents regularly observe, today polar bears successfully hunt bearded seal “when sea ice is absent.”
They also routinely feed on harbour seals, walrus, and reindeer throughout the summer.
Consequently, despite the expectation that a reduction in sea ice would harm polar bear populations, not only has the body condition (BC) of Svalbard bears improved since 2000, “the population has been increasing” for the last 50 years.
Interestingly, Svalbard polar bears – especially males – in the colder northern regions with thicker sea ice are in worse body condition (shown in blue) than bears in the warmer southern regions (red).
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