Day: September 17, 2026

Brussels is Building a Climate Protection Racket in the Name of ‘Climate Insurance’

Kurt Vandenberghe, the European Commission’s Director-General for Climate Action, put the new orthodoxy in a single sentence this month. Posting after a round table with Europe’s insurers on closing the “climate protection gap”, he declared that “insurance as usual will not be sustainable”. Climate policy, he argued, is now effectively insurance policy too: whatever risk insurers decline to cover becomes uninvestable.

According to Vandenberghe, a widening protection gap threatens a looming financial-stability problem for the whole European Union.

A political cartoon depicting European Union leaders celebrating the unveiling of the Climate Protection Fund while money flows from a vault. In the background, scenes of natural disasters such as storms, wildfires, and flooding illustrate the climate crisis. Various characters express discontent over insufficient coverage and funding for climate issues.
AI generated by Grok

From Tilak´s Substack’

By Tilak Doshi

Smoke and flames rising from wildfires in Rhodes, Greece, with a caption about extreme weather and firefighting efforts against multiple wildfires.

Kurt Vandenberghe, the European Commission’s Director-General for Climate Action, put the new orthodoxy in a single sentence this month. Posting after a round table with Europe’s insurers on closing the “climate protection gap”, he declared that “insurance as usual will not be sustainable”. Climate policy, he argued, is now effectively insurance policy too: whatever risk insurers decline to cover becomes uninvestable. According to Vandenberghe, a widening protection gap threatens a looming financial-stability problem for the whole European Union.

In April, the Financial Times pushed the same idea, reporting that EU insurance, pensions and financial regulators want a Brussels-backed fund of €10 billion–€65 billion for natural and climate disasters “to close the bloc’s insurance gap for floods, wildfires, heatwaves and storms”. The figures behind the pitch are stark: only €4.5 billion of the €11 billion in losses from the 2024 Valencia floods were insured; only €13 billion of the €51 billion in losses from the 2021 Ahr valley floods were covered. Natural catastrophes, the regulators said, caused more than €900 billion in damage across the EU between 1981 and 2024 – “only a fraction” of it insured.

Brussels has decided that Europe’s storms and bad weather need a new bureaucracy. The Financial Times report drew on a joint discussion paper published that same day by the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority. It proposed a continent-wide natural catastrophe insurance pool, backed by a loan facility of up to €65 billion, that would supposedly shrink Europe’s “insurance protection gap” from roughly 75% to about 10%. The pool would be financed by risk-based premiums backstopped, ultimately, by the EU’s own credit.

Spain did not wait long to raise the stakes. In a letter to Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra sent on September 2nd 2026, Madrid’s ecological transition ministry proposed a permanent European Climate Adaptation Fund financed by a tax on oil and gas company profits, common EU debt instruments and a public-private reinsurance system issuing “climate risk bonds”. Madrid’s own tally: €822 billion in weather and climate losses across the EU since 1980, with roughly a quarter of that concentrated in just the four years from 2021 to 2024.

Both proposals share the same unstated premise that ordinary weather insurance has failed, and that only a new instrument bearing the word ‘climate’, underwritten by Brussels, can keep Europe insurable. That premise is a category error. It has been made before – by central bankers reaching for ‘climate stress tests’, by ESG fund managers pricing transition risk that never materialised, and now by insurance regulators. Each time, we see the same conflation of routine, priceable risk with manufactured systemic crisis. Each time, the same remedy: more Brussels, less market.

The EU is not starting from zero. The existing EU Solidarity Fund has paid out €8.6 billion since its creation in 2002, across 130 disasters – a modest, largely uncontroversial mechanism for the genuinely catastrophic tail risk. What is being proposed now is something categorically larger: a standing, EU-guaranteed insurance pool for ordinary annual weather losses that private and national markets already price and pay for routinely, rebranded as an unavoidable response to a changing climate rather than what it actually is – a transfer mechanism dressed in actuarial language.

A category error

What households and firms face, and what insurers have priced for centuries, is weather risk – the chance that a specific flood, windstorm, fire or freeze damages a specific asset in a specific place in a specific year. ‘Climate’ is simply the probability distribution that measures the weather: the averages, the tails, and how slowly those tails might shift over decades. As Stanford University economist John Cochrane has argued for more than a decade, a slowly evolving distribution that can be observed, modelled and repriced every year is not a systemic financial surprise. It is the ordinary business of insurance.

Cochrane made the distinction sharpest in his 2021 testimony to the US Senate Banking Committee: “Climate change is an important challenge. But climate change poses no measurable risk to the financial system…. ‘Risk’ means unforeseen events. We know exactly where the climate is going over the horizon that financial regulation can contemplate.” His point about horizons matters. Trouble in 2100, if it materialises, will come from investments made in 2095; supervisors cannot usefully look through 80 years, and treating a century-scale drift as a five-year threat is, in his words, an answer in search of a question – a convenient vehicle for policies that could not otherwise pass ordinary democratic or cost-benefit tests.

None of this requires pretending that weather is stationary. El Niño cycles, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, land-use change and urban heat islands all move the observed distribution over time, and insurers have always updated their actuarial tables to match. Catastrophe models, reinsurance treaties and catastrophe bonds already transfer tail risk into global capital markets built precisely for that purpose. Dykes, flood barriers, stricter building codes, forestry management and better drainage – the unglamorous business of adaptive practices – have reduced the human and economic toll of weather for generations, largely independent of anything happening to emissions. None of that machinery requires a Brussels-branded relabelling to keep functioning; it requires that insurance premiums be allowed to adjust.

Bar graph illustrating global weather disaster losses as a percentage of global GDP from 1990 to 2023, featuring black bars for yearly data and a green line representing the moving 5-year average. The red dashed line indicates the linear trend.
Source: https://globalextremeweather.thehonestbroker.org/

Buffett’s actuarial common sense

Warren Buffett made the identical point in Berkshire Hathaway’s 2015 shareholder letter, responding to a proxy proposal that fretted about climate risk to the insurer’s books. “Insurance policies are customarily written for one year and repriced annually to reflect changing exposures,” he wrote. “Increased possibilities of loss translate promptly into increased premiums.” If catastrophe losses become more frequent or costly, the effect on a well-run insurer is not insolvency but a larger, more profitable book of business – provided prices are allowed to move. Fixed-price, multi-decade policies would be a different matter; that is not how property-casualty insurance works, in Valencia or in Iowa.

That is why the industry regularly accused of ‘failing’ on climate keeps functioning: it reprices weather year by year rather than pretending to underwrite an abstract planetary process called “climate change”. Swiss Re’s own sigma reports show global insured catastrophe losses climbing at a steady 5-7% real annual rate, with reinsurers stepping in to absorb the bulk of losses only in rare ‘peak loss’ years that run far above trend. That is not evidence of a broken market. It is evidence of a market doing exactly what actuarial pricing is designed to do.

The empirical case for treating ‘climate’ losses as a new and exceptional category is weaker than Brussels’s rhetoric suggests. Physicist Steven Koonin’s Unsettled compiles what the observational record and the IPCC’s own assessment reports actually say about extremes, as distinct from what press releases claim. The IPCC assigns low confidence to any long-term global increase in tropical-cyclone frequency or intensity. Global flood and drought trends show no clear, high-confidence signal at the global scale. None of this denies that greenhouse gases warm the planet. What it does deny is that the weather extremes insurers price for have become dramatically less predictable.

Roger Pielke Jr.’s normalisation work tells the same story from the loss side. After adjusting European Environment Agency catastrophe-loss data for 1990-2024 by GDP growth, he finds no long-term trend: direct economic losses from weather and climate events have scaled roughly in proportion with the region’s growing economy, not faster than it. Globally, his earlier analysis found catastrophe losses falling from just under 0.3% of world GDP in 1990 to just under 0.2% by 2019. Even Swiss Re’s own chief economist concedes the underlying mechanism: “economic development continues to be the main driver” of rising insured losses over many decades. More buildings and more wealth sitting in harm’s way, not a broken climate, explains most of the rising bill – and a rising share of that bill is simply previously-uninsured property now being covered, which mechanically inflates the insured-loss total without any change in the underlying hazard.

The protection gap is real – but it is not new, and not uniquely climatic

None of this means Europe’s insurance gap is invented. EIOPA’s own figures show only around a quarter of natural catastrophe losses across the bloc were insured between 1980 and 2024, and the Valencia and Ahr valley figures cited above are typical rather than exceptional. But the gap reflects national differences in insurance take-up, in whether cover is mandatory or voluntary, and in the political reluctance to charge risk-based rates on floodplains and fire-prone hillsides – not a sudden climatic discontinuity that only Brussels can address. Layering a Brussels-level insurance pool on top creates a new constituency that benefits, politically and financially, from calling every flood season or hot summer a climate crisis requiring ‘European solidarity’ rather than a pricing and land-use problem.

The insurance pool does not arrive in isolation. It follows an 88-page OECD study, funded and co-written by the European Commission, instructing De Nederlandsche Bank on how to assess “prudential risk” arising from Dutch banks’ Net Zero commitments – a study this writer criticised in these pages last month. The pattern is consistent: once a regulator is allowed to relabel an ordinary commercial or actuarial question as a matter of ‘climate’, the same logic that turned corporate governance into ESG scorecards and central-bank collateral policy into green industrial strategy takes over. Insurance regulators who cannot distinguish a slowly shifting probability distribution from a genuine 2008-style financial crisis will use ‘climate crisis’ as a licence to direct capital, expand mandates and socialise losses that markets already price.

This is mission creep dressed as prudence. Climate and adaptation policy belongs in legislatures that can weigh costs, benefits and trade-offs in the open, subject to a vote. Insurance belongs with underwriters who live or die by whether this year’s premiums cover this year’s losses plus a return on capital. Confusing the two does not make Europe more resilient to weather; it makes Europe’s insurance market less accountable to the price signal that has, for two centuries, told people where not to build.

Prices, not politics

Adam Smith observed that we do not expect our dinner from the benevolence of the butcher. We should not expect solvent insurance from the benevolence of a European facility that treats every wildfire season or a hot summer as an indictment of capitalism. Ordinary insurance already does what Brussels claims only a new ‘climate’ product could do. It prices flood, wind and fire risk; it transfers tail risk into global capital markets through reinsurance and catastrophe bonds; and it sends an unmistakable signal – through the premium, not the press release – about where not to build, or where to elevate, clear brush or improve drainage. Subsidising that signal away with a Brussels-backed pool does not reduce risk. It socialises the cost of ignoring it and calls the result solidarity.

The storms will keep coming, as they always have. The question Brussels keeps avoiding is whether prices, engineering and private contracts should go on allocating that risk, or whether Europe needs another layer of official climate theology bolted onto a market that has spent two centuries learning how to price rain, wind and fire.

Traditional insurance was never the problem. The attempt to rebrand it as something only Brussels can save us from is.

This article was first published in the Daily Sceptic https://dailysceptic.org/2026/09/16/brussels-is-building-a-climate-protection-racket-in-the-name-of-climate-insurance/

Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO₂ Coalition and a former (cancelled) contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.

Africa’s Cradle of Humankind Is Tearing Apart — and That’s Why We Have So Many Fossils

The article reports on a 2026 Nature Communications study showing that the Turkana Rift in Eastern Africa, famous as a “cradle of humankind” for its rich hominin fossil record, is further advanced in continental rifting than previously recognized, with thinned crust signaling an eventual breakup of the African continent.

A dramatic landscape of the Turkana Rift Zone featuring a fiery gorge with lava, scattered animal skulls, and ancient tools on the rocky ground under a sunset sky.
AI generated by Grok

The article (likely a phys.org republication of coverage from Columbia Climate School / Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and related outlets) reports on a 2026 Nature Communications study showing that the Turkana Rift in Eastern Africa, famous as a “cradle of humankind” for its rich hominin fossil record, is further advanced in continental rifting than previously recognized, with thinned crust signaling an eventual breakup of the African continent.

Key geological findings

The Turkana Rift (part of the East African Rift System, spanning Kenya and Ethiopia) is a ~500 km- wide region where the African, Nubian and Somali plates are diverging at ~4.7 mm per year. Rifting stretches and thins the crust, allowing magma ascent and volcanism.

New analysis of high- quality seismic data (from industry sources, interpreted with other imaging and in collaboration with the Turkana Basin Institute) shows the crust along the rift axis is only ~13 km thick, much thinner than the >35 km thickness outside the rift. This is the signature of “necking,” a critical late stage of continental rifting analogous to stretching taffy until the middle thins dramatically.

Necking began after widespread volcanism ~4 million years ago (the rift itself initiated ~45 million years ago). There is also evidence of an earlier, incomplete rifting episode that left the crust pre-weakened. Once necking is underway and the crust is this thin, continued rifting is promoted, and the region is considered to have reached a threshold for eventual breakup.

In a few million years (geologically “soon”), the process is expected to advance to oceanization: further thinning allows magma to form new seafloor, and water from the Indian Ocean will flood in, creating a new ocean basin. Turkana is currently the only known active continental rift exhibiting clear necking, offering a unique modern window into processes that shaped many ancient rifted continental margins.

The Turkana Rift has produced more than 1,200 hominin fossils spanning the last ~4 million years, roughly one- third of all such fossils known from Africa, leading many researchers to view it as an evolutionary hotspot or “Garden of Eden” for early hominins.

The study proposes a geological explanation for this abundance: the onset of necking and associated subsidence after ~4 Ma volcanism led to rapid accumulation of fine- grained sediments ideal for fossil preservation.

The rich record may therefore reflect exceptional preservation conditions more than (or in addition to) uniquely high rates of evolutionary activity or diversification in the region. This remains a hypothesis that other researchers can now test, including by coupling tectonic models with climate and landscape reconstructions.

Lead author Christian Rowan (Columbia/Lamont PhD student) and co- authors (including Anne Bécel and Folarin Kolawole at Lamont, Paul Betka at Western Washington University, and John Rowan at Cambridge) emphasize that these results refine models of how continents break apart and provide context for reconstructing past environments relevant to human evolution.

In short, the “cradle” is literally tearing apart on geological timescales, and the same tectonic forces that will one day split eastern Africa may also explain why so many of our ancestors’ remains were preserved there.

Turkana Rift Zone (TRZ) is a major segment of the East African Rift System (EARS) located primarily in northern Kenya (extending into southern Ethiopia). It is centered around Lake Turkana and forms a broad, low- lying region roughly 500 km wide.

Geological setting

The TRZ sits at the intersection of two rift systems:
– The older Mesozoic– early Cenozoic Central African Rift System (CARS), and
– The younger Cenozoic East African Rift System (EARS).

Rifting related to the EARS began in the TRZ around 45- 40 million years ago (the earliest documented EARS activity in eastern Africa).

It is currently one of the most advanced sectors of the EARS outside the Afar Triangle.

Recent key discovery (2026 Nature Communications paper)

High- resolution seismic reflection data show that the crystalline crust along the rift axis has been thinned to approximately 13 km (specifically ~12.7 ± 2.8 km), compared with more than 35 km on the flanks.

This degree of thinning, together with high stretching factors (β ≈ 1.9- 3.1), places the TRZ firmly in the necking phase of continental rifting, the critical stage that precedes full continental breakup and the onset of seafloor spreading (oceanization).

Necking is interpreted to have begun ~4 million years ago, after a major phase of volcanism (Gombe Stratoid Series).

The TRZ is currently the only known active continental rift worldwide that is clearly undergoing necking, making it a unique natural laboratory for studying how continents break apart.

Significance for human evolution

The same tectonic changes that initiated necking caused rapid subsidence and the accumulation of thick sequences of fine-grained sediments. These conditions created ideal environments for fossil preservation.

As a result, the Turkana Basin has yielded more than 1,200 hominin fossils spanning the last ~4 million years, roughly one- third of all such fossils known from Africa. The exceptional fossil record is therefore at least partly a product of favorable geology rather than solely of unusually intense evolutionary activity in the region.

Broader context

The TRZ shares some similarities with the more advanced Afar region (low elevation, relatively shallow Moho), but it is farther south and has been accelerated by structural inheritance from earlier rifting plus magmatic weakening. Its advanced state indicates that eastern Africa as a whole is further along the path toward eventual continental breakup and the formation of a new ocean than previously recognized.

Mantle plumes significantly influence continental rift dynamics by providing heat, melt, and buoyancy that weaken the lithosphere, localize deformation, and accelerate progression through rifting stages (stretching → necking → oceanization). In the East African Rift System (EARS), and specifically the Turkana Rift Zone (TRZ), these effects are particularly well- documented and relevant to the recent findings of advanced crustal necking.

Core mechanisms of plume- rift interaction

Mantle plumes (upwellings of hot, buoyant material, often rooted in the deep mantle or Large Low Shear Velocity Provinces such as the African Superplume) interact with the lithosphere in several ways:

Thermal weakening– Elevated temperatures reduce lithospheric strength and viscosity, making it easier for tectonic stresses to thin and break the plate.

Magmatic weakening– Partial melting generates magma that intrudes the crust and mantle lithosphere as dikes and sills. This further reduces yield strength (sometimes by an order of magnitude) and can focus strain into narrower zones.

Dynamic topography and buoyancy forces- Plume- related uplift creates gravitational potential energy that contributes to extension.

Focusing and localization- Plumes promote narrower, more localized rifts with deeper faults and stronger control by major border faults, rather than broad, distributed deformation.

Interaction with pre-existing structure– Plume material is often deflected or channeled by thick cratonic keels and earlier zones of lithospheric thinning. This can produce asymmetric rift systems (magma- rich vs. magma- poor branches) from a single plume.

Numerical models show that plume impingement combined with far- field extension commonly leads to successful breakup, whereas pure passive rifting is more likely to stall.

Application to the East African Rift System

The EARS is a classic example of plume -influenced (or “active”) rifting, underlain by the African Superplume (a broad lower- mantle anomaly) and/or discrete upper-mantle plume heads (commonly invoked beneath Afar and Kenya).

  • Plume material has ponded and flowed laterally beneath regions of thinner lithosphere since at least ~45 Ma, explaining the distribution and timing of widespread Cenozoic volcanism and plateau uplift.
  • Northward mantle flow associated with the Superplume contributes to observed rift-parallel surface deformation and seismic anisotropy.
  • Plume- craton interactions help explain the dual (magmatic eastern vs. more amagmatic western) branches of the central EARS.
  • In more advanced sectors such as Afar, the plume continues to supply melt that facilitates the transition toward seafloor spreading.

Specific impacts in the Turkana Rift Zone

The TRZ has experienced episodic, plume- derived volcanism throughout much of the Cenozoic. Key points include:

  • Early plume- related magmatism (starting ~45- 37 Ma) contributed to initial lithospheric weakening, building on earlier Mesozoic- Paleogene rifting (Central African Rift System / Anza Rift inheritance).
  • Around ~4 Ma, a shift occurred to the Stratoid Phase, with magmatism increasingly derived from decompression melting of the mantle. This coincides with the onset of crustal necking documented in the 2026 Nature Communications study.
  • Seismic tomography reveals slow wavespeeds (hot, partially molten mantle) beneath the TRZ, including possible plume- tail structures extending into the lower mantle. The thin lithosphere here allows relatively efficient melting and ponding of plume material.
  • Geochemical studies of Turkana lavas show evolving source contributions: early involvement of metasomatized lithospheric mantle, followed by HIMU- or EMI- type enriched components (often linked to plume outer layers or recycled material), and later more primitive lower- mantle signatures.
  • Despite slower plate divergence rates (closer to the Nubia- Somalia Euler pole than the Main Ethiopian Rift), the combination of structural inheritance a prolonged plume- related magmatic weakening is interpreted as having driven “premature” necking of the TRZ crust to ~13 km thickness. This advanced state helps prime eastern Africa for eventual continental breakup.

In the 2026 TRZ necking paper, the authors explicitly note that EARS rifting in the zone is characterized by episodic plume- derived volcanism, and that late Cenozoic magmatism (coupled with inheritance) contributed to the accelerated evolution toward the necking phase.

Broader implications

Plume influence does not act in isolation, far- field plate forces, lithospheric heterogeneity, and successive rifting episodes all interact. In the TRZ, the plume appears to have tipped the balance toward successful localization and thinning rather than stalled, distributed extension.

This makes the region a valuable modern analog for understanding how plume- assisted rifts progress to continental breakup and new ocean formation on geological timescales.

Necking of the active Turkana Rift Zone and the priming of eastern Africa for continental breakup

Abstract (key excerpt)

Continental rifting initiates the transition to breakup when the crust is necked, and deformation localizes at the rift axis. However, the slow crustal- stretching rates and >20-km deep mantle beneath many active rifts worldwide suggest that present- day breakup may not be imminent. High- resolution seismic data from the Turkana Rift Zone of the East African Rift System (EARS) reveal the rift’s subsurface structure. Here, we show that Turkana’s crystalline crust has thinned to ~13 km along the rift axis, revealing an active rift undergoing crustal necking. Onset of necking is constrained to ~4 Ma and facilitated the accumulation of Turkana’s world- famous fossil record of human evolution. Identification of necking in the EARS indicates that eastern Africa is primed for continental breakup.

Main scientific contributions

  • Using high-resolution seismic reflection data, borehole constraints and published Moho depths, the authors show the crystalline crust thins from >35 km on the flanks to ~12.7 ± 2.8 km along the rift axis.
  • β- factors (stretching factors) reach 1.9- 3.1 along the axis, values characteristic of the necking domain seen in ancient rifted continental margins.
  • Present- day seismicity is concentrated in this thinned axial zone, confirming active deformation localization.
  • Necking began ~4 million years ago, shortly after the widespread Gombe Stratoid Series volcanism. The resulting rapid subsidence and fine- grained sedimentation created ideal conditions for the exceptional preservation of the region’s famous hominin fossil record.
  • The Turkana Rift is currently the only known active continental rift clearly in the necking phase. This makes it a unique natural laboratory for studying the critical transition that precedes full continental breakup and seafloor spreading (oceanization).
  • Structural inheritance from an earlier Mesozoic- early Cenozoic Central African Rift System episode, combined with later magmatism, appears to have accelerated necking here relative to other sectors of the East African Rift System.

In short, the paper provides the first clear geophysical evidence that an active continental rift has entered the necking stage, showing that eastern Africa is further advanced toward eventual continental breakup than previously recognized, while also offering a geological explanation for why the Turkana Basin preserves such a rich record of human evolution.

Title: Necking of the active Turkana Rift Zone and the priming of eastern Africa for continental breakup

Published:  Nature Communications volume 17, Article number: 3585 (2026)

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-71663-x (open access)

Provided: Columbia Climate School

Authors: Christian M. Rowan,
Folarin Kolawole,
Anne Bécel,
Paul Betka &
John Rowan 

Abstract

Continental rifting initiates the transition to breakup when the crust is necked and deformation localizes at the rift axis. However, the slow crustal-stretching rates and >20-km deep mantle beneath many active rifts worldwide suggest that present-day breakup may not be imminent. High-resolution seismic data from the Turkana Rift Zone of the East African Rift System (EARS) reveal the rift’s subsurface structure. Here, we show that Turkana’s crystalline crust has thinned to ~13 km along the rift axis, revealing an active rift undergoing crustal necking. Onset of necking is constrained to ~4 Ma and facilitated the accumulation of Turkana’s world-famous fossil record of human evolution. Identification of necking in the EARS indicates that eastern Africa is primed for continental breakup.

Unlocking America’s Nuclear Gold Mine: The Promise of Spent Fuel

The recent shift in the national conversation around nuclear-generated electricity is encouraging. After decades of political hesitation, federal and state leaders are once again speaking positively about nuclear power’s role in delivering reliable, abundant electricity. That change in tone matters.

The Department of Energy’s Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus initiative is a case in point. The program has generated headlines by identifying five states as potential partners in exploring integrated nuclear fuel cycle facilities.

An illustrated scene depicting miners in a tunnel with barrels labeled 'spent fuel' alongside signs promoting nuclear energy benefits, including 'advanced reactors', 'more power', and 'lower emissions'. A group of concerned individuals discusses nuclear safety, while a banner emphasizes the importance of nuclear energy as clean, reliable, and affordable.

From The CO2 Coalition´Substack

By Ronald Stein, Olivia Vaughan, and Steve Curtis

The recent shift in the national conversation around nuclear-generated electricity is encouraging. After decades of political hesitation, federal and state leaders are once again speaking positively about nuclear power’s role in delivering reliable, abundant electricity. That change in tone matters. However, favorable rhetoric alone will not solve one of the industry’s most persistent challenges: what to do with America’s growing inventory of spent nuclear fuel. That “spent” is also referred to as “slightly used nuclear fuel” (SUNF), which still contains about 95% of its unused potential energy after years inside a reactor

The Department of Energy’s Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus initiative is a case in point. The program has generated headlines by identifying five states as potential partners in exploring integrated nuclear fuel cycle facilities. Yet the reality is more modest than many observers assume. Although the states have signed non-binding memorandums of understanding to continue discussions, they have not committed to accepting spent nuclear fuel, nor have final host agreements been executed.

That distinction is important because public discussion sometimes creates the impression that a solution to the nation’s nuclear waste dilemma is just around the corner. In reality, the United States remains a long way from establishing a permanent or consolidated system for managing spent fuel.

Decades after Congress assigned the federal government responsibility for disposing of commercial spent nuclear fuel, most of that material remains stored at reactor sites around the country. The Government Accountability Office has repeatedly described the nation’s waste management program as being at an impasse and has called for congressional action to move the process forward.

The Limits of a Government-Only Strategy: Federal efforts in recent years have focused heavily on “consent-based siting,” a process intended to identify willing host communities for spent fuel storage facilities. DOE describes this approach as a collaborative, community-centered process that may ultimately lead to negotiated agreements for interim storage facilities.

Consent-based siting is an improvement over past approaches that attempted to impose solutions from Washington. Communities deserve a meaningful voice in decisions that affect their future.

But the challenge is that process alone is not a solution, as evidenced by the fact that no state has “consented to accept” spent nuclear fuel, either as a permanent solution or an interim solution.

Too often, public policy substitutes studies, committees, consultations, and funding announcements for measurable progress. Government can facilitate discussions and establish regulatory frameworks, but it cannot create effective economic incentives necessary to transform spent nuclear fuel from a liability into a valuable resource.

As long as success is measured by meetings held, grants distributed, and reports published, there is little incentive to deliver a commercially sustainable outcome.

Turning a Liability into an Asset: A different approach begins with a simple question: What if spent nuclear fuel were viewed not primarily as waste, but as a valuable energy resource?

Many advanced nuclear technologies, particularly fast reactors, are designed to utilize materials that remain in used nuclear fuel. Supporters of fuel recycling argue that a significant portion of the energy potential contained in spent fuel remains available for future use. In that view, the challenge is not merely disposal but resource recovery.

This is where private enterprise can make the difference because there is huge commercial opportunity in turning spent nuclear fuel into electricity.

Rather than relying indefinitely on federal appropriations and political cycles, policymakers should consider creating conditions that allow private industry to assume greater responsibility for managing and recycling spent fuel. The federal government would still play an essential role by establishing clear rules, enhancing safety, and honoring existing commitments. But innovation, investment, and execution should increasingly come from the private sector.

A Proposal for Partnership: One model would be to use resources already accumulated through the Nuclear Waste Fund and related federal commitments to facilitate the transfer of spent fuel management responsibilities into a commercially driven framework. At the same time, one or more states would need to voluntarily agree to host facilities capable of receiving, processing, recycling, or otherwise managing used nuclear fuel.

Such an arrangement would not simply spend public money. It would seek to leverage public resources to catalyze private investment, job creation, technological development, and long-term industrial growth.

The DOE has promoted Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses as hubs that could eventually support fuel fabrication, enrichment, recycling of used fuel, and waste management functions. If structured properly, such campuses could become engines of private-sector innovation rather than primarily government-directed programs.

The economic potential could be substantial. DOE has stated that innovation campuses could attract significant private investment and create large numbers of high-paying jobs in host regions.

From Subsidy to Incentive: There is an old saying: give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach him to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.

The same principle applies here.

Simply distributing government funding without creating strong incentives for performance risks perpetuating the cycle of study, delay, and dependency. By contrast, jump-starting companies to enter the business of successfully recycling, processing, and utilizing spent nuclear fuel aligns economic incentives with public objectives.

When private investors have capital at risk, delays become costly, innovation becomes valuable, efficiency becomes essential, and results become measurable.

That does not mean government disappears from the process. On the contrary, government remains responsible for enhancing public safety, environmental oversight, and policy certainty. But government should create the conditions for success rather than attempting to manage every aspect of implementation.

A Historic Opportunity: The United States may be entering a unique moment, as public attitudes toward nuclear energy have become more favorable, concerns about energy security are increasing, and advanced reactor technologies continue to gain attention.

Federal leaders deserve credit for recognizing the strategic importance of nuclear power and for reopening discussions about the back end of the fuel cycle.

The next step, however, is to move beyond discussion.

America’s spent nuclear fuel challenge will not be solved by rhetoric, grants, or endless study alone. It will be solved when states voluntarily participate, when private industry sees opportunity rather than liability, and when policymakers create incentives that reward actual progress.

The choice is simple. America can continue talking about the problem or build a system that finally solves it. The most promising path forward is one in which government enables, private enterprise leads, and the nation transforms a long-standing burden into a lasting economic opportunity to provide affordable and abundant electricity to its citizens and to the world.

Please share this information with teachers, students, and friends to encourage Energy Literacy conversations at the family dinner table.

Click this Link to Sign up for Energy Literacy from Ronald Stein

Originally published at America Out Loud, September 14th, 2026.

Ronald Stein, P.E., is a CO2 Coalition member, engineer, columnist on energy literacy at America Out Loud NEWS, and advisor on energy literacy for the Heartland Institute and CFACT, and co-author of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated book “Clean Energy Exploitations.” He is also the recipient of an unsolicited Tribute to Ronald Stein from Stephen Heins.

What’s New!

The CO2 Coalition has released its new episode of the Climate Debrief Podcast, Beyond the Narrative and Following the Data featuring Vijay Jayaraj. Watch the full video on YouTube here!

The Climate Debrief Podcast is now also available on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, and iHeartRadio!

Trump Completely Rejects AI “Experts” Push to ‘Pace the Frontier’

“We’re leading China in AI. We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI wins.”

I will simply note that this would not be the first time that China used our “experts” against us. Dr. Anthony Fauci and the rest of the “coronavirus experts” implemented a great deal of destructive policy under the banners of science and safety.

A cartoon illustration depicting a rocket labeled 'AI FRONTIER' being launched with Donald Trump at the controls. Behind him, figures resembling Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and others express caution. The rocket's trail includes a reference to a 'China AI Push' and the scene conveys themes of urgency in the AI race, with slogans such as 'PACE THE FRONTIER!' and 'AI RACE: NO BRAKES. NO REGRETS.'

From Watts Up With That?

From Legal Insurrection

“We’re leading China in AI. We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI wins.”

Posted by Leslie Eastman

Close-up of a man with blonde hair speaking while seated at a desk, wearing a dark suit and red tie, with blurred figures in the background.

Late last week, I argued that America cannot afford to let environmental- lawfare campaigns, spy-generated social media influence, and intellectual- property theft hand the Chinese Communist Party a substantial strategic advantage in developing artificial intelligence (AI).

The appropriate response to China’s meddling in US AI business is absolutely not naïve “cooperation,” but a serious commitment to securing our research, expanding reliable energy and data-center capacity, and treating China’s AI ambitions as the highly complex national-security challenge they plainly are.

It appears President Donald Trump agrees with me.

President Trump dismissed a rare bipartisan call from the CEOs of Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI to slow the pace of artificial intelligence development, telling reporters Sunday that the U.S. cannot afford to fall behind China.

“We’re leading China in AI. We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI wins,” Trump said. “We can put guardrails. We can do this and that. But I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up, and they’re bringing up things that won’t happen.”

Trump’s comments were his first public response to a joint moment Saturday when Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of xAI publicly backed a call to reduce the pace at which AI companies build more powerful models. The CEOs’ statements came just days after Anthropic revealed that its chatbot, Claude, was being used to attempt to create bioweapons, spy on Ukraine and scam dating-app users.

I will simply note that this would not be the first time that China used our “experts” against us. Dr. Anthony Fauci and the rest of the “coronavirus experts” implemented a great deal of destructive policy under the banners of science and safety.

But more fiscally astute observers suggest an alternative explanation. Perhaps AI companies are facing slowing model gains, soaring compute and infrastructure costs, and growing public resistance to the data centers needed to sustain the race. Calls to slow development may therefore be as much about managing expectations, cutting spending, and rebuilding public support as about protecting humanity.

Let’s call this one the “Save the IPO” hypothesis.

Anthropic is on the frontline of AI development, as is OpenAI. New regulations can be tailored to hinder the success of other firms that are a little less far along in development. And I will also note that Elon Musk’s SpaceX is one of Anthropic’s biggest customers, paying a $1.25 billion monthly fee for exclusive use of its Colossus cluster.

Billions are on the line in being among the first “winners” in the AI race. Reuters reported that Anthropic projected as much as $18 billion in 2026 revenue and $55 billion in 2027 revenue. By comparison, OpenAI had passed a $25 billion annualized revenue rate by early 2026 but remained heavily investment-intensive, underscoring that immense sales do not automatically equal profits in an industry with substantial computing and infrastructure costs.

Meanwhile, the White House AI Czar David Sacks says Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman already dominate frontier AI and therefore can voluntarily slow development if they believe their unreleased systems pose serious risks. He argues they should not use safety concerns to seek exemptions from antitrust rules, preemptive regulatory approval, or industry-controlled evaluation regimes, which he portrays as potential mechanisms for regulatory capture.

Sacks also added that a China-inclusive global slowdown is unlikely.

Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.

You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.

…So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.

If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.

It is clear Trump will not allow a small group of well-connected AI “experts” to convert speculative fears into a Washington-designed moat around their own market share.

A competitive free market paired with strong enforcement against Chinese espionage and theft will produce better technology and more resilient national security than regulatory capture masquerading as “safety.”

China benefits when America’s innovators are tied down by bureaucrats; the U.S. benefits when entrepreneurs remain free to compete, build, and win.

I am glad to see the current administration applying the lessons learned from COVID to protect American AI development.

Nature Retracts Oxford-Led Study Claiming Warming Made Droughts 40% Worse — Key Numbers Were Wrong

The 2025 Nature paper by Gebrechorkos et al. on warming and global drought severity was retracted in early September 2026 due to calculation and coding errors.

The specific quantitative claims you listed from the 2025 Gebrechorkos et al. Nature paper are the ones that were reported and widely disseminated, and those published numbers are unreliable due to the calculation and coding errors that led to the retraction.

Text graphic announcing the retraction of an Oxford-led study by Nature, stating that claims about warming worsening droughts by 40% were incorrect.
AI generated by Grok

The 2025 Nature paper by Gebrechorkos et al. on warming and global drought severity was retracted in early September 2026 due to calculation and coding errors.

The paper is: Gebrechorkos, Solomon H., Justin Sheffield, Sergio M. Vicente-Serrano, Chris Funk, Diego G. Miralles, Jian Peng, Ellen Dyer, et al. (2025). “Warming accelerates global drought severity.”

Nature 642(8068): 628- 635 (published online 4 June 2025; DOI 10.1038/s41586-025-09047-2). It has been formally retracted, with a Retraction Note published 2 September 2026.

Using high- resolution drought datasets (1901- 2022) that incorporated atmospheric evaporative demand (AED, sometimes called “atmospheric thirst”), the authors reported an increasing trend in drought severity.

Key quantitative claims included that AED had increased drought severity by an average of ~40% globally; that drought- affected areas expanded substantially in recent years (e.g., +74% on average in 2018- 2022 vs. 1981- 2017, with AED contributing a large share); and that 2022 was particularly extreme.

They linked the rise in AED to warming and argued this role would likely grow under further warming. The work received substantial media coverage and citations while active.

The authors retracted it after being notified of errors and identifying additional issues themselves. The main problems were:

Area- weighted grid cells were not used when calculating study- wide averages. This affected numerical values in the main text, Fig. 1b, and some Extended Data figures.

Results based on an earlier version of a dataset (GLEAM v3 instead of GLEAM4) were used in one Extended Data figure; the datasets are largely consistent for most of the period, but the proper weighting changed the 2022 drought– affected area figure.

A related coding and time stepping error affected date handling when subsetting data.

The authors stated that the errors changed the reported percentages (the corrected figures are expected to be somewhat lower) but that the overall conclusions were not overturned. They indicated they intend to submit a fully revised and corrected version for peer review. Retraction Watch coverage quotes the lead author describing it as a coding error unrelated to the underlying data or core methodology.

Lead author Solomon H. Gebrechorkos and co- authors including Ellen Dyer and Simon J. Dadson are (or were) affiliated with the University of Oxford’s School of Geography and the Environment, related units. Other co- authors are from institutions including the University of Southampton, Spanish and Belgian research groups, US institutions (e.g., UCSB), and others. It is an international collaboration, not solely an Oxford “pack,” though Oxford researchers played prominent roles and the university publicized the original findings.

Retractions of high- profile climate- related papers for methodological or calculation errors do occur and are part of the normal scientific process of correction (especially for complex global datasets and derived indices).

The paper’s high citation count before retraction means some of the original quantitative claims circulated widely; corrected numbers, once published, will need to be checked against those earlier reports.

The authors’ stated position is that the directional findings on AED’s role hold, albeit with adjusted magnitudes.

Independent verification of any revised version will be the proper next step.

The specific quantitative claims you listed from the 2025 Gebrechorkos et al. Nature paper are the ones that were reported and widely disseminated, and those published numbers are unreliable due to the calculation and coding errors that led to the retraction.

They cannot be treated as established results.

The paper’s abstract and key findings stated (among other points):

  • An increasing trend in drought severity worldwide since roughly the early 1980s.
  • Atmospheric evaporative demand (AED, the “thirst of the atmosphere”) increased drought severity by an average of ~40% globally.
  • In 2018- 2022 versus 1981- 2017, drought- affected areas expanded by 74% on average, with AED contributing 58% of that increase.
  • In 2022, ~30% of global land area experienced moderate to extreme drought, with a substantial fraction attributed to increased AED.
  • The role of AED was expected to grow with further warming.

These figures were the ones circulated in media coverage and the authors’ own communications.

The official Retraction Note (2 September 2026) and related statements identify these problems:

  • Area- weighted grid cells were not used when calculating study- wide averages. This directly affected numerical values in the main text, Figure 1b, and Extended Data Figures 4 and 8.
  • Results based on an earlier dataset version (GLEAM v3 instead of GLEAM4) were used in one figure; after proper area weighting the 2022 drought- affected area figure was reduced.
  • A time stepping and coding error meant dates were not properly parsed when sub setting data for the 1981- 2017 versus 2018–2022 periods. This misclassified time steps and affected regional averages.
  • The application of an arid- regions mask (areas with mean annual precipitation < 180 mm) was not clearly explained and was applied selectively.

These are concrete computational and data- handling mistakes in producing the global and regional averages and percentage attributions. The authors themselves describe them as changing the reported percentages (they expect the corrected numbers to be “slightly lower”) while asserting that the broader directional conclusion, that rising AED linked to warming has exacerbated drought severity, still holds.

They withdrew the paper because the scope of corrections required full revision and new peer review rather than a simple correction notice.

The published numerical results (the 40%, 74%, 58%, 30% figures, etc.) are invalidated by the errors and should not be cited as accurate.

That is why the paper was retracted. However, the authors and the retraction notice do not state that the entire analysis or the qualitative finding is false or that the methodology was fundamentally invalid.

They frame the issues as correctable calculation and coding problems (including failure to area- weight properly and a date- parsing bug) and plan to resubmit a revised version. Independent evaluation of any corrected analysis will be needed to judge the revised magnitudes and robustness.

The colorful description of “comparing apples at the equator with dry ice in the Arctic” overstates what the documented errors were.

The documented failures were in area- weighting of grid cells, dataset version, time- period subsetting via code, and clarity of masking, not a wholesale mixing of incompatible physical regimes in the manner suggested. Area- weighting errors on a global grid can distort averages (especially if high- latitude or other regions are mishandled), which is why proper weighting is standard practice; that is precisely one of the errors acknowledged.

In short: the headline quantitative claims that were disseminated are not reliable. The paper is retracted for those reasons. Whether a corrected analysis will support substantially the same qualitative conclusions (with lower percentages) remains to be seen once the revised work appears and is scrutinized. Until then, those specific 2025 numbers should be disregarded.

Energy Future: CO2 Enrichment Ahead (de-decarbonization)

The much-hyped “energy transition” has predictably failed.

The plants rejoice as CO2 enrichment continues. A greener Planet Earth is surely better than wind, solar, and battery industrialization from all points of view.

A cartoon illustration depicting the future of energy, highlighting CO2 enrichment. It features a cheerful man watering plants while promoting CO2, a city skyline with industrial features, and characters expressing surprise and confusion about the energy transition. The scene contrasts natural elements with fossil fuel infrastructure.

From Master Resource

By Robert Bradley Jr.

“There is no renewables ‘transition’ – ONLY addition.” (below)

The much-hyped “energy transition” has predictably failed. Grant Lukies presented the chart below and reported on social media:

For those of you paying attention – still no ‘transition’ evident whatsoever (to August 2025). 33 years of IPCC stewardship and panic and $billions spent and absolutely zero downward trend in slope of the curve.

THIS is THE failed KPI of alarmist catastrophism writ large. There is no renewables ‘transition’ – ONLY addition.

Line graph showing carbon dioxide concentration at Mauna Loa Observatory from 1960 to 2025, with ppm values ranging from 310 to 440. Data points are marked with black dots, with a blue line indicating Mauna Kea data. The graph highlights the increasing trend of CO2 concentration over the years.

Is this bad news? Hardly. The plants rejoice as CO2 enrichment continues. A greener Planet Earth is surely better than wind, solar, and battery industrialization from all points of view.

Remember what Daniel Yergin concluded in The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations (2020), p. 422:

As they grow, wind and solar and EVs will need ‘big shovels’ to meet their increasing call on mined minerals and land itself. It is estimated that an onshore wind turbine requires fifteen hundred tons of iron, twenty-five hundred tons of concrete, and forty-five tons of plastic. About half a million pounds of raw materials have to be mined and processed to make a battery for an electric car.

And more recently (2025):

[In 2020] when the [New Map] came out, there was still this kind of magical thinking almost about energy transition…. We’ve heard the British Prime Minister Keir Starmer say that, “Sorry to tell you all this, but oil and gas is going to be around for a long time in the mix.”

And James Hansen, father of the climate alarm, who stated:

The notion that renewable energies and batteries alone will provide all needed energy is fantastical. It is also a grotesque idea….

and another observation:

Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.

And as Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said this week at the G20 Meeting in Houston, the energy capital of the world:

It wasn’t true, the idea that somehow there was an energy transition going on in the world, and the energy transition was the highest priority. We’re not talking about energy transition because the transition was actually energy subtraction.

Enough said.