Tag: carbon dioxide (CO₂)

Wrong, Euronews: Climate Change Has Not Created a Food, Energy, and Economic “Meta-Crisis”

Euronews claims climate change has evolved into a “meta-crisis” threatening food security, energy supplies, economies, water resources, and international security. This is misleading because the article largely substitutes predictions and assertions for measurements of what is actually happening.

The data show global crop production and yields reaching record levels, deaths from extreme weather collapsing over the long term, and many of today’s energy and economic problems arising from political choices and geopolitical conflicts rather than changes in climate.

A cartoon depicting a news anchor expressing panic about a 'meta-crisis' involving food, energy, and economy, emphasizing that these issues are not caused by climate change. The image features graphs showing crop yields, decreased deaths from weather disasters, and illustrations of people working in various sectors like farming and logistics.

By ClimateRealism

By Anthony Watts

Dry, cracked land with tractors visible in the distance, illustrating the impacts of climate change on agriculture.

Euronews claims climate change has evolved into a “meta-crisis” threatening food security, energy supplies, economies, water resources, and international security. This is misleading because the article largely substitutes predictions and assertions for measurements of what is actually happening. The data show global crop production and yields reaching record levels, deaths from extreme weather collapsing over the long term, and many of today’s energy and economic problems arising from political choices and geopolitical conflicts rather than changes in climate.

Euronews builds its case primarily around an interview with Emmanuella Doussis, UNESCO Chair on Climate Diplomacy at the University of Athens. Doussis declares climate change an economic, social, political, and geopolitical problem, linking it to competition for resources, migration, water shortages, food insecurity, and the energy transition.

Those are sweeping claims. Curiously, Euronews provides remarkably little observational evidence demonstrating that climate change is actually causing the worldwide “meta-crisis” its headline announces.

Perhaps the most obvious contradiction concerns food.

Doussis predicts, “We will face a very large, serious problem with food security.” But predictions about what might happen cannot erase what is happening.

Climate at a Glance: Crop Production summarizes data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization showing that global crop production and yields have risen dramatically during the period of modern warming. Its latest summary reports that the 2023 and 2024 global crop years produced the two highest global crop yields per acre on record.

Climate Realism has documented the same trend repeatedly. Global production of staple crops has increased substantially, and yields have repeatedly set records during recent decades. Even where individual crops suffer poor regional seasons because of drought, floods, pests, or other causes, that is not evidence of a deteriorating global food supply.

There are good reasons for this improvement. Agricultural technology, irrigation, fertilizers, improved crop varieties, mechanization, and better pest control have transformed farming. Modest warming can also lengthen growing seasons and reduce damaging frost events in some regions, while additional atmospheric carbon dioxide generally stimulates plant growth and improves water-use efficiency.

None of this means weather cannot damage crops. It always has. It means that portraying climate change as presently creating a global food-security crisis conflicts with the direction of observed agricultural production.

The article’s treatment of energy is equally peculiar.

Euronews describes moving away from fossil fuels as part of the solution to its supposed climate “meta-crisis,” while simultaneously acknowledging that doing so creates “new dependencies” involving lithium, cobalt, rare earths, and other materials. It concedes that fossil-fuel-producing nations could be economically weakened and that entirely new geopolitical dependencies would emerge.

That sounds less like a crisis caused by climate change than economic disruption caused by policies adopted in response to climate change.

Europe provides an obvious example. Energy prices do not rise because a thermometer records a slightly higher average temperature. Prices respond to fuel availability, generating capacity, taxes, regulations, subsidies, transmission costs, geopolitical disruptions, and government decisions about which power plants may operate.

Climate Realism has repeatedly documented how wind and solar cost comparisons can omit the expense of backup generation, transmission, storage, subsidies, and other system costs necessary to accommodate intermittent generation.

There is an important distinction here that Euronews blurs: costs created by climate policy are not costs created by climate change.

The same problem occurs when the article moves from energy to economics. Weather can certainly cause economic losses. Droughts, floods, hurricanes, heat waves, freezes, and wildfires have done so throughout human history. But declaring climate change responsible for a generalized economic crisis requires evidence that those hazards are worsening in ways attributable to climate change.

Climate at a Glance: Extreme Weather summarizes observational records for floods, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, heat waves, and other events. The picture is considerably more complicated than the simple worsening-disaster narrative presented by much of the media.

More importantly, human vulnerability to weather has declined spectacularly.

Climate at a Glance: Deaths from Extreme Weather reports that global deaths from weather-related disasters have fallen by more than 99 percent during the past century, using international disaster data.

That is a remarkable accomplishment. Wealth, infrastructure, fossil-fueled transportation, modern agriculture, heating, air conditioning, weather forecasting, communications, engineering, and emergency management have made human beings vastly more resilient to nature.

Ironically, Doussis herself provides perhaps the most sensible sentence in the entire Euronews article: “Climate change is not always to blame.”

She acknowledges that some Greek disasters reflect chronic failures in planning, complicated regulations, inadequate infrastructure, and insufficient protection of vulnerable areas.

Exactly. That caveat deserves far more attention than Euronews gives it.

A flood becomes catastrophic when people build in floodplains, drainage systems are inadequate, warning systems fail, or infrastructure is poorly maintained. Drought becomes a water crisis when reservoirs, irrigation systems, groundwater resources, and water policy are poorly managed. A heat wave becomes more dangerous when electricity is expensive or unreliable and vulnerable people cannot afford air conditioning.

Labeling all these interconnected problems a climate “meta-crisis” does not explain them. It can actually obscure their real causes.

The Euronews article commits an increasingly common journalistic error. It begins with climate change, attaches virtually every economic, geopolitical, agricultural, and social problem to it, and then presents the resulting web of associations as evidence that climate change caused the problems in the first place.

That is not how causation works.

Climate changes. Weather varies. Individual regions will experience damaging droughts, floods, fires, freezes, and heat waves, just as they always have. Sensible governments should prepare for them.

But the real-world record does not resemble the spiraling “meta-crisis” Euronews describes. Farmers are producing more food. Crop yields continue reaching records. Humanity has become dramatically less vulnerable to extreme weather. And some of Europe’s most painful energy problems have resulted from decisions about energy production rather than changes in the weather.

Euronews could have investigated those inconvenient facts. Instead, it took a collection of predictions about food, water, migration, geopolitics, and energy, wrapped them together under the fashionable label “meta-crisis,” and called it climate journalism.

That’s not evidence. It’s a narrative looking for a crisis.

Brainwashed by fear: How to save two generations lost to climate panic

For more than four decades, Americans have been subjected to a relentless drumbeat of environmental doom. They have been terrified by warnings of acid rain, the ozone hole, melting ice caps, drowned coastal cities, superstorms and mass extinctions. Then came Al Gore and increasingly apocalyptic warnings about global warming, which has since been rebranded as “climate change.”

Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller, “The Population Bomb,” promised mass starvation in the 1970s. Instead, Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution fed a billion more people. Being wrong has never slowed down the doomsayers.

A colorful illustration contrasting a fear-driven climate panic industry with a diverse group of individuals engaging in a constructive discussion about climate solutions, emphasizing the importance of facts, collaboration, and a hopeful future.

From CFACT

By Frank Lasee

For more than four decades, Americans have been subjected to a relentless drumbeat of environmental doom. They have been terrified by warnings of acid rain, the ozone hole, melting ice caps, drowned coastal cities, superstorms and mass extinctions. Then came Al Gore and increasingly apocalyptic warnings about global warming, which has since been rebranded as “climate change.”

Today, we can see the consequences. Two generations of young people have been taught not to respect the environment, but rather to fear the future.

The numbers are disturbing. A Lancet Planetary Health survey of 15,793 Americans ages 16 to 25 found that 85 percent were at least moderately worried about climate change, including 58 percent who were very or extremely worried. More than half said climate change made them hesitant to have children.

Other research points the same way. A review of multiple studies found that stronger climate worry lines up with wanting fewer children or none at all.

Think about that. We have convinced millions of young people that the future is so bleak that they should reconsider having children.

Yet the picture of a dying planet bears little resemblance to the measurable world around us.

The Earth is getting greener. NASA reported that 25 to 50 percent of the world’s vegetated land greened significantly between 1982 and 2015 — an increase in leaf area roughly twice the size of the continental U.S. Researchers attributed about 70 percent of that greening to rising carbon dioxide.

So carbon dioxide is not merely an emission — it is plant food.

Agriculture tells the same story. The world now grows nearly three times as much grain on the same acre as it did in 1961. The cropland saved is close to the area of the U.S. and India combined. Credit better seeds, machinery, irrigation, modern farming, fossil fuel-derived fertilizer, and that carbon dioxide boost.

Our air is cleaner, too. EPA reports that emissions of the six main air pollutants fell 79 percent between 1970 and 2024, even as the economy grew 338 percent, Americans drove 195 percent more miles, and the population grew by two-thirds.

Prosperity has surged as well. The number of people living in extreme poverty worldwide fell from roughly 2.3 billion in 1990 to about 800 million today, even as the world population grew by nearly three billion. Life expectancy, literacy, and living standards are at record highs.

We have heard the doom and gloom predictions before. Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller, “The Population Bomb,” promised mass starvation in the 1970s. Instead, Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution fed a billion more people. Being wrong has never slowed down the doomsayers.

None of this means environmental problems are imaginary. It means they are problems to solve and not reasons to surrender.

Previous generations built dams, cured diseases, split the atom, crossed oceans, and landed men on the Moon. They faced world wars, depressions, and nuclear standoffs, real existential dangers. Their answer was not to stop having children. It was to build a better world for them.

Even Elon Musk, who believes strongly that man-made carbon dioxide threatens the climate, preaches innovation and expansion — not retreat and despair. That is the mindset young people need.

So teach the real problems we can do something about — not false climate doom. Teach the triumphs, not just the panic. Teach how human ingenuity cleaned our air and rivers, tripled crop yields, cut extreme poverty by two-thirds, and greened a massive share of the planet.

Parents, this one is on us. Ask your school district what your children are being taught about climate, and what they are not. Ask to see the curriculum. Ask whether a single one of these numbers appears in it. Then say so out loud at the next school board meeting.

Two generations have been taught to fear the future. Let’s teach the next one to build it.

This article originally appeared at The Hill

The Great Recycling Swindle

There is no such thing as a free lunch, as Milton Friedman never tired of pointing out. A local authority that pretends otherwise is not practising environmental stewardship.

It is practising virtue signalling at other people’s expense. Let’s take the £720 first.

It is not a recycling saving at all. It is a Love Food Hate Waste talking point about buying less food in the first place, describing what the average family could save by throwing away less edible food. That is a saving from wasting less, not from recycling more.

A cartoon illustration of a recycling industrial complex with various characters discussing waste management and taxes. One character looks worried while holding a council tax bill, and another, a cheerful official, promotes a free food waste caddy. The image features a variety of elements, including food waste, financial elements, and slogans like 'Nothing is free—the bill just moves somewhere else.'

From Tilak`s Substack

By Tilak Doshi

On Thursday I found a parcel waiting at the front door of my Wandsworth flat: a ‘free’ food waste caddy, a starter roll of compostable liners and a note from the council that deserves a place in the annals of municipal self-congratulation. Recycling my food waste, it explained, could save me “as much as £720 every year”. My leftovers would become “a sustainable power source and liquid fertiliser”. And because it is “much cheaper” for the council to recycle scraps than to bin them with the rubbish, the whole exercise “helps keep your Council Tax low”. Each of these claims turns out to be false, an evasion or a subsidy in disguise.

There is no such thing as a free lunch, as Milton Friedman never tired of pointing out. A local authority that pretends otherwise is not practising environmental stewardship. It is practising virtue signalling at other people’s expense. Let’s take the £720 first. It is not a recycling saving at all. It is a Love Food Hate Waste talking point about buying less food in the first place, describing what the average family could save by throwing away less edible food. That is a saving from wasting less, not from recycling more. WRAP, the climate NGO behind the campaign, now puts the annual cost of edible food binned by a family of four at £1,000. But the money is lost by typical household behaviour, not because food waste remains uncollected by the local council.

Separately collected food waste can indeed go to anaerobic digestion, which produces biogas and a digestate fertiliser. But biomethane from digestion is also eligible for the Government’s Green Gas Support Scheme, a tariff subsidy. A “sustainable power source” propped up by a tariff is not a free lunch; it is merely moved from domestic bills to general taxpayers. The household is thus drafted as an unpaid recycler, subject to the good Wandsworth council members that claim to be saving its constituents their own money.

Nor, to be fair to the council’s worthies, is the caddy entirely their idea. Wandsworth’s own website states that all households in the borough must have weekly food waste collections from March 31st 2026, a duty that traces to the Environment Act 2021. This was passed under a Conservative government and is now being delivered under the label of Simpler Recycling. Whitehall wrote the script; Wandsworth Council merely turned up in appropriate costume and supplied the marketing angle.

Social costs and benefits

Had anyone on the Wandsworth Waste Project Team taken the trouble to have a cursory acquaintance of the available analysis, they would have found a remarkably consistent verdict. Thomas Kinnaman of Bucknell University, having reviewed two decades of American recycling experience in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, argued for replacing several state recycling mandates with a moderate landfill tax. A study of a random national sample of municipalities by Robert Bohm, Kinnaman and two co-authors found that both average and marginal costs of recycling exceed those of simple collection and disposal at a landfill. Daniel Benjamin of the Property and Environment Research Center calculated that, even after crediting the resale of recovered materials, curb side programmes in 2009 cost on average $199 a ton against $119 for landfill and concluded that mandatory programmes leave society worse off. It argues that U.S. municipal curb side recycling programmes waste resources and probably do little, if anything, to benefit the environment.

In an article entitled ‘Recycling Is Garbage’ in 1996, New York Times journalist John Tierney concluded that mandatory recycling did not make economic or environmental sense. It legendarily provoked the most hate mail ever delivered to the Times. He returned in 2015 to report that it was still typically more expensive to recycle household waste than to landfill it. He likened the zeal of the faithful to a penance for the sin of affluence.

Food waste, Wandsworth Council’s new enthusiasm, fares worse still. A 2025 study by Jackson Somers of the University of Connecticut, published in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, found that a curb side organics collection programme cost per household was nine times the social benefit of the avoided methane. Across the United States, the median expansion would cost $478 per tonne of CO2-equivalent avoided, against an assumed social cost of carbon of $51. It should be noted here that the concept of the social cost of carbon itself is highly disputed, and it could well be negative if the greening benefits of higher atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are fully taken into account.

Wandsworth’s operation is far from frugal: the council has explained that separate vehicles now collect rubbish, recycling, food waste and small electricals, each at its own time. One more fleet, one more caddy, one more cost on the beleaguered taxpayer. None of this is an argument against recycling as such. Recycled aluminium needs about 95% less energy than metal smelted from bauxite, so scrap commands a price, and a price is all a collector needs. Nobody requires a council leaflet to persuade a scrap dealer to fetch a can. Even Defra concedes that for some plastics the value on secondary markets does not outweigh the cost of collection. Free markets sort winners from losers objectively; policy mandates, however dressed up as virtuous signals, are a net cost to the taxpayer.

The Government’s own arithmetic

The council’s claim that food waste recycling keeps Council Tax low collides with Whitehall’s own paperwork. Defra’s final impact assessment in December 2024 for “Simpler Recycling” models the preferred option with English councils bearing £722 million in transition costs and £567 million in higher ongoing costs in present-value terms. The headline saving to councils of £188 million appears only after crediting about £1 billion of additional garden-waste charges on households and £474 million of deposit-return savings. Remove those and the ratepayer is left holding the caddy.

The department’s £5.9 billion “net benefit to society” for the whole package tells a similar tale. It rests on £10.5 billion of “carbon savings”; remove that single line and the package is some £4.5 billion in the red. The Defra claim rests entirely on how carbon is valued. Everything else in the model (collection costs, transition costs, sorting and the rest) nets out negative once the carbon credit is removed. Defra conveniently chose a carbon price that makes the sum positive. The UK values carbon by the marginal abatement cost, meaning the cost of cutting a tonne needed to hit legally binding carbon budgets. The circularity of Defra carbon accounting, driven by Net Zero ideologues, is astounding.

Household time, meanwhile, is treated as a rounding error: familiarisation and inconvenience costs to householders are not accounted for because Defra does not expect them to be significant. The time value of the person rinsing the caddy is evidently free. Tellingly, the same document abandons the plan for free garden-waste collections because the cost was disproportionate to the “carbon benefits”.

And the “free” in “free caddy” rests on the Government’s promise to fund councils’ net additional costs, the so-called new burdens doctrine. The Wandsworth Council leaflet says food waste recycling “helps keep your Council Tax low”. But council tax may well stay low locally only because the Treasury is covering the extra cost, not because recycling is cheap. So the cost of the new service has merely moved from the council’s books to the national taxpayer.

Milton Friedman’s dictum that there is no such thing as a free lunch has apparently not reached Wandsworth; one does not expect a copy of Free To Choose (1980) in the council library. But the deeper problem is the familiar mixture of luxury beliefs and other people’s money. Economists call the satisfaction of doing good a warm glow, and it is a preference, not a resource saving. When a state compels the ‘environmental’ ritual and raises the tax rates, the glow is enjoyed by officials and the chill by ordinary taxpayers.

It is the pattern I described in Ed Miliband’s carbon-capture crusade: policy as moral theatre, financed by somebody else. And it flourishes where the ordinary business of local government is neglected. ‘Woke’ councils seem to have far more time for planning environmental salvation than for potholes, or for easing the fines heaped on hated motorists in Sadiq Khan’s London. As my Daily Sceptic colleague Ben Pile reported last week, recycling centres across the country have been turning away old fridges and freezers, which are now piling up in laybys. Recycling is in trouble where it counts, and officialdom’s answer is another caddy.

The propensity to truck, barter and exchange

What would a rational policy look like? Britain already taxes the tip. The standard rate of landfill tax rose on April 1st to £130.75 a tonne. This tax is not an objective measure of real costs faced by society in getting rid of its rubbish. It is yet another ‘nudge’ by the nanny state to encourage producers to switch to ‘more sustainable alternatives’. ‘Sustainability’ is one of the great weasel words of the modern age, fully in keeping with those who would force taxpayers to ‘save the planet’.

Wandsworth Council should stick to its knitting. Council leaflets should tell residents the truth: that food recycling is a statutory compliance cost, not a saving, and that somebody is paying for it. Let voluntary, price-driven recycling of aluminium, cardboard and scrap metal, like other economic activity, take place by mutually consenting adults freely contracting with each other. Adam Smith argued that the “propensity to truck, barter and exchange” was inherent in human nature and gave rise to the division of labour. Hayek called the belief that a few well-meaning officials can know better than prices what is worth saving the fatal conceit. Wandsworth Council worthies should serve the local public good and let moralising behaviour be the free choice of its constituents.

This article was first published in the Daily Sceptic https://dailysceptic.org/2026/09/24/the-great-recycling-swindle/

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

Farmers’ Lime Is Quietly Pulling Carbon From the Sky

A Yale-led study finds that agricultural liming (adding crushed limestone) in the Mississippi River Basin has acted as a net carbon sink, removing more CO₂ than it emits.

Silicate weathering is the natural chemical breakdown of silicate minerals (e.g., those in basalt, olivine, or other igneous rocks) by carbonic acid formed when atmospheric CO₂ dissolves in water.

A tractor spreading fertilizer over a field at sunset, with lush green crops in the background and dramatic clouds in the sky.
AI generated by Grok

A Yale- led study finds that agricultural liming (adding crushed limestone) in the Mississippi River Basin has acted as a net carbon sink, removing more CO₂ than it emits.

The practice, long used by farmers to raise soil pH, reduce acidity, and boost crop yields, covers a vast region: the Mississippi River Basin spans about 41% of the contiguous U.S. and includes roughly 65% of U.S. cropland.

Researchers, led by geochemist Tim Jesper Suhrhoff (Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture), analyzed more than a century of data (roughly 1900- 2015) on river chemistry, fertilizer use, atmospheric pollution, and liming rates, combined with geochemical modeling.

Conventional accounting (including IPCC guidelines) treats liming as a CO₂ source because the carbon in limestone can be released as CO₂ when it reacts with strong acids in soil.

The new work argues this is incomplete: soil acidity from nitrogen fertilizers and fossil- fuel pollution is the main driver of those emissions. Without liming, the acids would still react with natural soil alkalinity and release CO₂.

In the presence of liming, much of the reaction instead forms bicarbonate that is exported by rivers (including the Mississippi) and can ultimately sequester carbon in the ocean for long periods. Compared with a no- liming scenario, liming in the basin removed an estimated 300- 400 million tonnes of CO₂.

Efficacy has improved since the 1930s as liming rates rose; current removal is estimated at about 75% of the theoretical maximum.

The study (published in Nature) concludes that liming aligns climate benefits with agronomic ones (higher yields, potentially lower nitrous- oxide emissions). It suggests policy and emissions inventories should attribute emissions to acid inputs rather than to liming itself, and that strategies such as adding silicate rock first to neutralize acidity could further enhance carbon removal.

The linked phys.org article appears to cover this same research (the URL slug matches the topic and timing). Related earlier work from the Yale group has also highlighted liming’s dual role in soil management and carbon cycling.

Silicate weathering is the natural chemical breakdown of silicate minerals (e.g., those in basalt, olivine, or other igneous rocks) by carbonic acid formed when atmospheric CO₂ dissolves in water.

The simplified reaction consumes CO₂ and produces bicarbonate ions (HCO₃⁻) plus dissolved cations such as Ca²⁺, Mg²⁺, K⁺, and Si:

CaSiO3+2CO2+H2O→Ca2++2HCO3−+SiO2\mathrm{CaSiO_3 + 2CO_2 + H_2O \to Ca^{2+} + 2HCO_3^- + SiO_2}

(Similar reactions occur for magnesium and other silicates.) The bicarbonate is ultimately transported to rivers and oceans, where the carbon can remain sequestered for thousands to hundreds of thousands of years. Natural silicate weathering already removes roughly 0.5 Gt CO₂ per year globally; enhanced rock weathering (ERW) accelerates it by crushing silicate rocks into fine powder and spreading them on soils (especially agricultural land).

Primary climate benefit: Carbon dioxide removal (CDR)

ERW converts atmospheric CO₂ into stable bicarbonate that is stored in groundwater and the ocean on intergenerational to geological timescales.

Field trials (e.g., U.S. Corn Belt maize-soybean rotations) have measured cumulative CDR potentials of ~10.5 t CO₂ ha⁻¹ over four years at application rates of ~50 t ha⁻¹ yr⁻¹ of basalt.

Modeling studies project that widespread deployment on U.S. farmland could deliver 0.16–0.30 Gt CO₂ yr⁻¹ by 2050 (rising further by 2070), and global estimates often fall in the 0.5–2 Gt CO₂ yr⁻¹ range under ambitious scenarios (after accounting for mining, grinding, and transport emissions).

Unlike carbonate liming (which can release some of its own carbon under acidic conditions), pure silicate minerals contain no carbon of their own, so the alkalinity they generate is more fully atmospheric in origin. Silicates can therefore act as a clearer net sink and are sometimes proposed as a complement or partial replacement for agricultural lime.

Agronomic and soil- health co -benefits

Soil pH regulation: Silicate dissolution neutralizes acidity, raising pH in a manner similar to traditional liming. This improves nutrient availability, reduces aluminum toxicity, and supports healthier microbial communities.

Nutrient release: Weathering supplies plant- available calcium, magnesium, potassium, phosphorus, silicon, and micronutrients. Field studies show elevated concentrations of these elements in soil and crops, partially offsetting the need for synthetic fertilizers.

Crop yield increases: Trials report 12- 16% higher maize and soybean yields, with similar gains for other crops (e.g., sugarcane, miscanthus). Silicon uptake can also strengthen plant tissues, improving resistance to pests, pathogens, and drought.

Reduced nitrous oxide (N₂O) emissions: Better soil conditions and higher pH can lower emissions of this potent greenhouse gas, improving the overall greenhouse- gas balance of ERW by tens of percent in some simulations.

Additional ecosystem effects: Higher silicon in runoff can favor diatoms over harmful algal blooms (reducing eutrophication risk). Downstream alkalinity can help buffer ocean acidification. Some studies also note modest reductions in surface ozone in agricultural regions, which further supports yields.

Relation to the Mississippi River Basin and liming context

In the recent Nature study on agricultural liming, the authors note that silicates are already used for pH management and have attracted strong interest as enhanced- weathering feedstocks. Because silicates do not carry their own carbonate carbon, they avoid some of the accounting complexities of limestone while still providing the same agronomic benefits (pH correction and nutrient release). Modeling and field work in the U.S. Midwest (including the Corn Belt portion of the Mississippi basin) indicate that combining or sequencing silicate and carbonate amendments could optimize both yield and long- term carbon removal.

Practical considerations

Benefits are greatest in warm, wet, acidic soils with active biological communities (roots and microbes accelerate dissolution). Application rates of tens of tonnes per hectare are typical. Life- cycle emissions from grinding and transport must be minimized (renewable energy helps), and potential release of trace metals is monitored; well- chosen basalts generally show low risk in trials. Measurement, reporting, and verification of the actual CDR remain active research areas because of soil heterogeneity and time lags.

In short, silicate weathering (especially when enhanced on farmland) offers durable carbon removal while delivering direct benefits to soil fertility, crop productivity, and other greenhouse- gas reductions, aligning climate action with existing agricultural practices.

Agricultural liming is a carbon sink in the Mississippi River Basin

Application of carbonate minerals (limestone or dolomite) to farmland, agricultural liming, is a long-established practice that counters soil acidification and boosts crop yields. Conventional greenhouse- gas accounting treats it as a net source of agricultural CO₂ emissions.

Using century-scale records of liming rates and anthropogenic acidity inputs across the Mississippi River Basin (MRB), the authors show that liming has instead acted as a net carbon sink over the past century. River alkalinity flux records indicate that roughly 90% of the ideal CO₂- removal potential of the lime applied since 1900 (≈ 0.44 Gt CO₂) has been realized at the catchment scale. A multi- decadal time lag occurs because of soil cation- exchange processes and solute transport. Reactive- transport modelling corroborates this: an initial emissions pulse (from neutralizing existing soil acidity pools) is followed by net CO₂ removal.

Current accounting frameworks use an incomplete counterfactual, they attribute emissions to the lime itself rather than to the anthropogenic strong acids (from fertilizers and fossil- fuel pollution) that drive CO₂ release. When evaluated against the proper counterfactual (acidity inputs without liming), liming is a net sink on decade- to- century timescales. The results imply that optimized soil- pH management can simultaneously cut agricultural greenhouse- gas emissions, raise yields, and improve soil health.

Key scientific points from the paper

Chemical basis of the conventional view
At low soil pH, carbonate dissolution releases CO₂:

CaCO3+2H+→Ca2++CO2+H2O\mathrm{CaCO_3 + 2H^+ \to Ca^{2+} + CO_2 + H_2O}

IPCC default methods essentially treat the carbon in applied lime as emitted; U.S. inventories use a lower emission factor (~50%).

Revised framework
The dominant driver of CO₂ release is the input of strong acids (nitric and sulfuric) from nitrogen fertilizers, manure, soil- organic- nitrogen mineralization, biological nitrogen fixation, and atmospheric deposition of SO₂/NOₓ oxidation products. These acids titrate existing alkalinity (bicarbonate) and force CO₂ out of the system regardless of whether lime is added. Adding lime supplies alkalinity that can form bicarbonate, which is exported downstream and ultimately sequesters atmospheric carbon.

Mississippi River Basin as the study system
The MRB covers ~41% of the contiguous U.S. land area and ~65% of its cropland, receives most U.S. agricultural lime, and has well-documented river chemistry. The authors compiled spatially explicit, century-long time series of acidity inputs (fertilizer/manure oxidation, atmospheric deposition, etc.) and lime additions. Cumulative acidity has exceeded lime- derived alkalinity by ~20 Tmol by 2015, but the excess is concentrated outside intensively limed Corn- Belt croplands.

Evidence for net sink

  • Empirical river alkalinity fluxes.
  • Gridded reactive- transport modelling (SCEPTER) comparing “acidity- only” vs. “acidity and lime” scenarios.
    Both approaches show that, after an early emissions pulse, liming produces a cumulative carbon sink on the order of hundreds of millions of tonnes of CO₂.

Implications
Emissions inventories and climate policy should attribute CO₂ release to acidity inputs rather than to liming. Better -aligned pH management (including possible pre- treatment with silicate rocks) can deliver agronomic benefits while contributing to carbon- dioxide removal.

The paper is open- access; a PDF download link is available on the Nature page. Authors include researchers affiliated with Yale (among others).

Journal information: Nature (2026) 

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-11040-2. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-11040-2

Provided: Yale University

Authors: Tim Jesper Suhrhoff,
Christopher T. Reinhard,
Yoshiki Kanzaki,
Samuel Shou-En Tsao,
Beck Woollen,
Tom Reershemius,
Samuel Shaheen,
James Saiers,
Shuang Zhang,
Peter A. Raymond &
Noah J. Planavsky

Abstract

Application of carbonate minerals to arable lands, known as agricultural liming, is a long-standing practice for counteracting soil acidification1,2,3. Although liming boosts crop yields4, it is also considered a source of agricultural carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions5. Here we show, using century-scale records of agricultural liming and anthropogenic acidity inputs for the Mississippi River Basin, that agricultural liming has acted as a net carbon sink over the past century. Records of river alkalinity fluxes suggest that approximately 90% of the ideal CO2 removal potential of agricultural lime added since 1900 (approximately 0.44 GtCO2) has been realized at the catchment scale, with a decadal-scale time lag owing to soil cation exchange and solute transport. These results are consistent with reactive transport modelling of soil cation throughput, which indicates that net CO2 removal emerges after an initial emissions pulse associated with neutralization of soil acidity pools. Current accounting frameworks implicitly apply an incomplete counterfactual, attributing CO2 emissions to lime addition rather than to the anthropogenic acidity inputs that drive CO2 release. Evaluated against the counterfactual of anthropogenic acidity inputs, agricultural liming represents a net carbon sink in the Mississippi River Basin on decade-to-century timescales. These results suggest that optimized soil pH management can reduce agricultural greenhouse gas emissions while simultaneously improving crop yields and soil health.

Biting The Hand That Feeds: Nepal Demands Climate Cash While Blaming Us For Its Disaster

Nepal Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal connects the August 26 flood to the popular narrative that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) cause dangerous atmospheric warming and the melting of mountain glaciers, which, so the logic goes, produces floods like the one that killed his countrymen.

Asian neighbors and Western countries demonized for “climate failings” have supported Nepal’s building of high-voltage lines, tunnels, bridges, vehicles, and other blessings of modernity.

A political cartoon depicting a frustrated Nepalese man demanding climate compensation, with a background showing a disaster-affected Nepal landscape, featuring mountains and damaged buildings. The text emphasizes accountability for climate change and financial aid for recovery.

From The CO2 Coalition

By Angela Wheeler

Nepal Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal’s request for a foreign response to his country’s disastrous Himalayan flood would be better made as an appeal to the charitable instincts of people than as a demand for compensation from climate sinners.

Khanal connects the August 26 flood to the popular narrative that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) cause dangerous atmospheric warming and the melting of mountain glaciers, which, so the logic goes, produces floods like the one that killed his countrymen. “Climate justice” reasoning is that industrialized countries such as neighboring India and China bear more responsibility for the disaster than does Nepal, whose per capita income ranking is less than five on a global scale of 1-100.

Khanal’s framing begins with a vacuous political claim that someone else must pay and ignores realities of the physical world, adopting the false premise that CO2 emissions have made weather worse. He apparently embraces the notion that computer models can assign a dollar value to damages inflicted by increases in the destructiveness of natural disasters. For the foreign minister, an apocalyptic narrative used for a decade to advance net-zero policy is an observed fact rather than an implausibly extreme scenario treated as destiny.

A century of observations shows no CO2-driven march toward more heat waves, hurricanes, droughts, and wildfires. Many of those hazards peaked in earlier decades or have declined. Record U.S. heat still belongs to the 1930s. Hurricane activity has not followed the alarmist script. Wildfire intensity is inseparable from fuel loads and land management.

A report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine that “quantifies climate damages” merely assumes worsening weather with rising CO2 without even attempting to establish a link. The National Academies uses computer-generated models of a world with no industrial CO2 emissions to divine how much milder the weather would be. That is a fabrication for use in a liability case, not a finding of fact.

Studies that purportedly attribute worsening weather to emissions have multiplied because “climate scientists” have been rewarded with research grants, not because physics demonstrates evidence of a connection. Saying the Nepal flood would have been milder on a planet without industrial CO₂ is not evidence that floods have grown more common or more destructive.

Once those exercises are treated as proof of causation, Nepal’s Khanal would say, energy producers “whose historical contribution to greenhouse gases is much bigger than ours” are to be made defendants in civil courts facing billions of dollars in liabilities. This demagoguery makes villains of businesses whose products – coal, oil, and natural gas – have powered electric grids, transportation systems, and factories that have lifted living standards worldwide. The fertilizers and medicines derived from these hydrocarbon feedstocks nourish and enhance the health of billions.

Nepal’s own development depends on fossil fuels. Transport runs on imported diesel and gasoline. Cooking and industry use liquefied petroleum gas and coal. Coal is necessary for production of cement, which is integral to the infrastructure of the country’s hydroelectric system and highways.

Asian neighbors and Western countries demonized for “climate failings” have supported Nepal’s building of high-voltage lines, tunnels, bridges, vehicles, and other blessings of modernity. Foreign Minister Khanal is biting hands engaged in feeding his country.

None of this diminishes the tragedy of the thousands of dead and missing in August’s awful flood. Nonetheless, compassion does not require surrendering facts to accommodate what amounts to a scam. There is no evidence of carbon dioxide emissions precipitating the Nepal flood or any other disaster. Even the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has declared as implausible its most extreme predictions of global warming. The most likely cause of the flood has been identified as the failure of bedrock underlying a glacier.

More than climate apostates to blame, Nepal needs modern technology and better land-use practices to protect people as much as possible from the risk of nature’s brutality.

In the meantime, the country has reportedly received $820 million in aid, which suggests that at least some of the developed world is more charitable than villainous.

Originally published in Washington Examiner on September 22, 2026.

Angela Wheeler is executive director of the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. She is a cum laude graduate of Emporia State University, Kansas, where she studied communication, with additional biology and pre-medicine coursework.

‘The Future of CCS Can No Longer Be Assumed’ (a supporter rethinks …)

Martin Jagger, a climate activist specializing in carbon capture & storage, recently wrote a sobering post on the progress of this technology in addressing the assumed-to-be climate crisis. This problematic approach is another example of the tears-in-the-ocean choices of climate mitigation policy.

“Today, global operating nameplate capture capacity is approximately 60 million tonnes a year. If fully utilised, that would represent gross capture equivalent to roughly 14-15 hours of annual global energy and industrial emissions. Actual verified net storage is lower.”

An illustration depicting a construction site with pipes and industrial equipment, featuring a worried worker in a hard hat. The scene is marked by signs about carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects, discussing budget overruns and uncertain future. Text includes phrases like 'Reality Check', 'The Future of CCS?', and 'CCS Project Uncertain'.

From Master Resource

By Robert Bradley Jr.

“Today, global operating nameplate capture capacity is approximately 60 million tonnes a year. If fully utilised, that would represent gross capture equivalent to roughly 14-15 hours of annual global energy and industrial emissions. Actual verified net storage is lower.” (- Martin Jagger, below)

Martin Jagger, a climate activist specializing in carbon capture & storage, recently wrote a sobering post on the progress of this technology in addressing the assumed-to-be climate crisis. This problematic approach is another example of the tears-in-the-ocean choices of climate mitigation policy.

“For twenty years,” he begins, “I have argued that CCS has an important role to play in managing emissions from industries where practical alternatives remain limited.” The progress to date has been small, and the effect on global emissions minuscule. He explains:

Today, global operating nameplate capture capacity is approximately 60 million tonnes a year. If fully utilised, that would represent gross capture equivalent to roughly 14-15 hours of annual global energy and industrial emissions. Actual verified net storage is lower…. Closing even the gap between today’s operating capacity and the announced [EIA estimated 2030 pipeline would require an extraordinary acceleration in permitting, financing, construction, commissioning and sustained operating performance.

The interest and potential investment are there, he believes, but “delivery” is small and problematic.

… announcements are not delivery, storage resources are not injection capacity, and nameplate capacity is not independently verified climate impact. The next phase of CCS must therefore be more demanding than the last. By 2030, success should no longer be measured primarily by the number of projects announced, memoranda signed, licences awarded or billions committed. It should be measured by verified net tonnes securely stored, year after year. That requires a tougher delivery model.

He alludes to the problem of getting from hyperbole to practice.

We have largely solved the problem of attracting interest and announcing investment. We have not yet solved the delivery problem. That distinction matters because CCS cannot indefinitely be judged by its potential. Nor should every delay be explained by saying that the industry simply needs more policy support or more public money. After two decades, the burden of proof must begin to shift.

Continuing:

That shift also requires greater honesty about how progress is reported. Too many of the institutions responsible for advocacy and industry leadership still present CCS largely as a good-news story. New projects, funding awards and headline capacity are publicised; delays, cancellations, operating shortfalls and the absence of verified storage receive much less attention.

Final Comment

Government incentives to carbon capture and storage, formalized in the Energy Improvement and Extension Act of 2008 (Section 45Q tax credit), should be terminated, an end to please many environmentalists and the free market community. [2] The whole initiative is inconsequential to global or regional climate, and projects have been opposed by local residents in the U.S. and elsewhere. [3]

[1] Martin Jagger’s bio reads:

I am an Executive Consultant in Energy Transition Strategy and Decarbonisation Delivery with a track record of bringing operator discipline to CCS policy and projects. I established Shell’s Carbon Capture and Storage Centre of Excellence in 2007 and helped shape international frameworks for long-term CO₂ storage that informed UNFCCC CDM mechanisms and regulatory guidance.

I currently advise sovereigns, regulators and innovators on areas where policy realism, technical feasibility and capital must align. My work tests the credibility of targets, the true scaling pathways for CCS and low-carbon fuels, and the structural barriers that stall momentum – especially FID drag, subsidy distortion, infrastructure mis-sequencing and the policy-performance gap.

[2] The tax credits since 2022 are $85 per ton of CO₂ stored for dedicated geologic storage projects and $60 per ton for CO₂ utilization projects with associated storage, increased from $50 and $35 subsidies (2018) and $20 and $10 (2008). A summary of federal largess from Taxpayers for Common Sense reads:

For decades, the federal government has provided billions of dollars in both direct and indirect subsidies to support CCS technology and projects. These subsidies have included research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) funding, loan guarantees, and tax credits.

Over the past few decades some of these subsidies have gone to projects that have been repeatedly started and stopped, only to eventually collapse due to various economic issues and controversies (e.g., FutureGen, Kemper). Additionally, the 45Q tax credit, which has grown significantly in both size and scope, has been mired in fraud and waste. To date, the federal government has spent tens of billions of taxpayer dollars on CCS through research and development funding and tax credits, yet the technology is still struggling with widescale deployment issues due to high costs….

According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), Congress provided roughly $9 billion (in nominal dollars) in annual appropriations for DOE’s FECM from FY2010 to FY2023, with over $2.8 billion specifically directed towards CCS line items…. Congress appropriated $12 billion more to the technology through the infrastructure law (Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, P.L. 117-58) and greatly expanded the already lucrative tax credit in the Inflation Reduction Act (Public Law 117-169).

[3] There are currently 15 operating CCS facilities in the U.S. and another 120 projects under development. The top ten projects are (verbatim):

1. Stratos Direct Air Capture (DAC) Project

Companies: Occidental Petroleum (through its subsidiary 1 Point Five) and Origis Energy
Capacity: 500, 000 metric tons of CO₂ annually
Application: Direct Air Capture powered by a dedicated solar portfolio
Source: Origis Energy Commissions 500 MWdc Swift Air Solar Projects in …

2. Calpine Baytown Energy Center CCS Project

Companies: Calpine Corporation and Exxon Mobil
Capacity: Approximately 2 million metric tons of CO₂ annually
Application: Low-carbon power generation from a new natural gas plant
Source: Calpine, Exxon Mobil sign CO 2 transportation and storage …

3. CF Industries Donaldsonville CCS Facility

Companies: CF Industries and Exxon Mobil
Capacity: A key component of Exxon Mobil’s contracted ~9 million metric tons per annum (MTA) portfolio
Application: Decarbonization of ammonia production
Source: Here’s How XOM Is Scaling Up Its CCS Footprint to Reduce Emissions

4. Google-Backed Gas Power Plant with CCS

Companies: Google and Mitsubishi Power
Capacity: Designed to capture 90% of CO₂ emissions
Application: Firm, low-carbon power for data centers
Source: Google Commits to First U.S. Gas-Fired Power Plant with Integrated …

5. California Resources Corporation (CRC) Carbon Terra Vault I (CTV I)

Company: California Resources Corporation
Capacity: Not specified; designed as a dedicated CO₂ storage facility
Application: CO₂ injection and permanent geologic storage
Source: California Resources Corporation Breaks Ground on California’s …

6. Sweetwater Carbon Storage Hub (SCS Hub)

Companies: Frontier Infrastructure and Baker Hughes
Capacity: Positioned to be one of the largest U.S. CO₂ sequestration assets (specific tonnage not provided)
Application: Multi-user CO₂ sequestration hub for industrial emitters
Source: Baker Hughes, Frontier Infrastructure Partner on Carbon Capture …

7. ADM Decatur CCS Facility

Company: Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM)
Capacity: Averages nearly 0.5 Mtpa (based on 4.5 million metric tons sequestered over a decade)
Application: Long-term industrial CCS for ethanol production
Source: ADM and Carbon Capture and Storage

8. Lake Charles Power Station Integrated CO₂ Capture Project

Company: Project supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)
Capacity: Not specified; large-scale pilot
Application: Advancing capture technologies for power generation
Source: [XLS] Sheet 1 – Climate Program Portal

9. Illinois CO₂ Injection Project

Company: Unnamed Texas-based developer
Capacity: Not specified; early-stage regulatory filing
Application: New CO₂ injection and storage project
Source: CP Daily Newsletter: Wednesday February 18, 2026 – Carbon Pulse

10. Bantam DAC Facility

Company: Climeworks
Capacity: Over 5, 000 tons of CO₂ annually
Application: Direct Air Capture, noted as the largest operational DAC in the U.S. as of October 2025
Source: Facilities – CO 2 RE – Global CCS Institute

The El Nino is but a Band-Aid on the western drought

The drought in the West will persist until the La Niña base state changes.

And that won’t happen until the forcing causing the distorted warming changes.

And there is no reason to believe it will happen, even if nations decide to commit economic suicide via net zero.

Le Chatelier’s principle states that if a dynamic equilibrium is disturbed by changing conditions, the position of equilibrium shifts to counteract the change and reestablish equilibrium.

A single sunflower growing out of cracked, dry earth with mountains in the background under a cloudy sky.
A solitary sunflower stands defiantly amid a jagged, parched terrain, with rugged mountains fading into the horizon, symbolizing hope amid desolation.

From CFACT

By Joe Bastardi|

The drought in the West will persist until the La Niña base state changes. And that won’t happen until the forcing causing the distorted warming changes. And there is no reason to believe it will happen, even if nations decide to commit economic suicide via net zero.

But what is the La Niña Base State? It is a climate Le Chatelierian response to the warming. Remember what Le Chatelier’s principle says:

Le Chatelier’s principle states that if a dynamic equilibrium is disturbed by changing conditions, the position of equilibrium shifts to counteract the change and reestablish equilibrium.

This is obvious when we look at the Multivariate ENSO Index, which, since the great El Niño of 1997-98, has been more negative than positive.

Line graph displaying the Multivariate ENSO Index Version 2 using JRA3Q, spanning from 1980 to 2025, with red bars indicating positive values and blue bars indicating negative values, and a horizontal line at zero.

The climate debate has prostituted the physical meaning of this. People on my side of the AGW issue try to push the idea that a La Niña has a cooling impact. It does, but only in response to the sudden warming of El Niño (which, btw, shows you it’s water vapor, not CO2 that impacts temperature) and only to establish a new equilibrium, which can be clearly seen if one examines the relationship of El Niño to the temperature surges, the fall-off, and the new plateau that develops behind it.

Graph depicting UAH satellite-based temperature deviations from the 1991-2020 average for the global lower atmosphere, showing data points from 1979 to projected values for July 2026.

You can clearly see when the strong El Niños went off: the rapid rise, then the fall to a higher equilibrium. It’s a step-up function. These started to become really impactful after the geothermal input started. There was a very strong El Niño in 1982-83, and then 1986-87, and yet no equilibrium increase.

Graph depicting the relationship between ocean heat content anomaly and mid-ocean seismic activity from 1977 to 2022, showing a rising trend in both metrics over time.

But if we then look at the increase in SST after the input from geothermal, we get the answer to why the 1997-98 event did what the previous ones did not, and why each subsequent one has continued: There is more heat to put into the atmosphere. The fact that there were more El Niños before 1997-98 shows that the earth was not warming, as there was a warm response to the cooling, but overall, the planet did not warm. That can be plainly seen in the decadal temperatures from the 1950s to the decade ending in 1985 (the input started its rise after that).

Global surface air temperature anomalies from 1951 to 1960, with colors indicating variations from the average temperature 1991-2020, presented in a world map format.
World map displaying surface air temperature anomalies in Celsius from 1991 to 2020, created by NCEP/NCAR, showing variations from January to December 1976 to 1985.

The change there is much less than what has occurred since then.

World map showing surface air temperature anomalies from 2016 to 2025, with color gradients indicating warmer and cooler areas compared to the 1991-2020 average.

This is why the global temperature metric, though mathematical, has some value in helping to explain what we are seeing. The nature of the warming, more away from the tropical Pacific than around it, means warmer temperatures and more low pressure over Indonesia and the Indian Ocean, and higher pressures in the mid-latitudes in the northern and southern hemispheres.

World map showing surface pressure anomalies in millibars from January to December 2016 to 2025, based on NCEP/NCAR reanalysis data from 1991 to 2020.

This creates a stronger easterly flow in the mean in the equatorial Pacific and hence the La Niña base state overall. El Niños, when they occur, have a greater heat source to tap, so they can go off, but you will see this collapse quickly in the spring, and next year at this time there should be a strengthening La Niña. And the lack of hurricanes this season will reverse. We are already thinking a major impact year is on the way next year.

All this is to explain that the drought-quenching rains with this El Niño, in the West, are a Band-Aid on a wound that cannot heal in this state. And it’s feeding back. You see that same distortion leads to less cloud cover in areas with the most incoming solar radiation, which in turn leads to a reduction in the Earth’s albedo (along with less ice), and that is a major natural warming signal. The man-made climate advocates want you to believe it’s CO2. Any point they have is dwarfed by the large natural forcing as described above. So, until the natural causes change, the West is in big trouble. For a while, I have been on record since April saying this El Niño is going to bust up the drought across the South and Southwest, it’s a one-year event, and they will be right back in the overall trend toward drier within a few months of the El Niño ending.

Knowing this, people in the West have to adapt rather than shake their fists at the sky or blame this or that. But overall, they have been just as negligent as people who should have had all hands on deck for the grid (if anything, the Biden administration was doing all it could to sabotage that). But what is going on in the West will get a Band-Aid. It has already started, as the anticipated Pacific-tropical connection, be it direct or indirect, is occurring. But this El Niño, with a negative PDO and such high-water temps off the Mexican coast, is going to be able to dump heavy to excessive amounts of precipitation across the South into the spring. I said the drought headlines will be replaced by flood headlines, and it’s already starting.

But the bottom line: This is a Band-Aid on the overall situation in the West, and adaptation policies need to be developed with all haste.

The history tells us that:

Tree-ring reconstructions (the North American Drought Atlas and related Colorado River / Sierra Nevada streamflow reconstructions) show repeated “megadroughts” — persistent dry spells of roughly 20–40 years or more — especially between about 800 and 1600 CE. Notable examples include:

  • Two long dry intervals in California and the Sierra Nevada, roughly 862–1074 and 1122–1299, documented by trees that grew in lake beds and river channels that later refilled.
  • A particularly severe mid-12th-century drought (roughly 1130s–1170s), including the driest decade in some Colorado River reconstructions around 1146–1155.
  • Additional multi-decadal dry spells in the 13th century and a widespread late-16th-century megadrought (about 1559–1590s).

The difference, of course, is there weren’t about 85–90 million people, or roughly one-quarter of the U.S. population then.

You aren’t going to stop it. It’s already entering mega-drought status. And this El Niño may stop the bleeding, but again it’s a Band-Aid on a gashing wound. Adaptation is the answer, not draconian CO₂ policies that have no impact.

Trump’s EPA Ends America’s War on CO2

On Monday in Houston, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin stood alongside Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum at a G20 ministerial meeting on energy abundance and signed what may be the single most consequential act of environmental deregulation in American history.

The reaction from the climate establishment was as predictable as it was shrill. The green rag Guardian announced that Trump’s EPA had stripped itself of regulating ability, gutting the Clean Air Act in “a gift to planet polluters”.

Cartoon illustration depicting a celebration of the end of EPA regulations on carbon dioxide, featuring characters holding signs with various slogans, a cheerful carbon dioxide character breaking free from chains, and symbols of energy sources like wind and solar power in the background.

From Tilak´s Substack

By Tilak Doshi

On Monday in Houston, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin stood alongside Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum at a G20 ministerial meeting on energy abundance and signed what may be the single most consequential act of environmental deregulation in American history. The final rule, formally the “Partial Repeal of the Carbon Pollution Standards for Fossil Fuel-Fired Electric Generating Units”, eviscerates the Biden administration’s 2024 mandate requiring coal- and gas-fired power plants to capture 90% of their carbon dioxide emissions or shut their doors. A companion proposal goes further still, moving to rescind the EPA’s underlying claim to authority to regulate greenhouse gases from power plants under the Clean Air Act altogether. It is an attempt not merely to repeal a rule but to permanently dismantle the legal scaffolding beneath the entire punitive regulatory edifice inspired by the Church of Climate.

The reaction from the climate establishment was as predictable as it was shrill. The green rag Guardian announced that Trump’s EPA had stripped itself of regulating ability, gutting the Clean Air Act in “a gift to planet polluters”. Environmental groups vowed immediate litigation, and the Clean Air Task Force branded the repeal unlawful. Sceptics will recognise the pattern by now: any retreat from Net Zero orthodoxy is met not with argument but with moral panic dressed up as science.

Undoing a fraudulent finding

To understand why Monday’s action matters so much, one has to trace the regulatory lineage back nearly two decades. In 2007, the US Supreme Court in Massachusetts v EPA ruled that greenhouse gases could, in principle, be treated as air pollutants under the Clean Air Act. The Obama EPA seized on that narrow opening in 2009 to issue what became known as the Endangerment Finding, the proposition that greenhouse gas emissions from new motor vehicles endanger public health and welfare. That single administrative finding, resting on computer models rather than observed harm, became the legal mechanism through which the entire American climate-regulatory apparatus was subsequently built: vehicle mileage mandates, methane restrictions on oil and gas wells, and, in 2024, the power-plant carbon-capture rule that is now being repealed.

Zeldin’s EPA had already struck at that foundation earlier this year, when it finalised the rescission of the 2009 Endangerment Finding itself in February, arguing that the agency lacks statutory authority under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act to regulate emissions on the basis of an imagined ‘climate crisis’ rather than demonstrable local harm. Power plants, the second-largest source of America’s greenhouse gas emissions after transportation, were always the next logical target. The courts’ “major questions doctrine”, which holds that agencies need clear congressional authorisation before regulating matters of major economic significance, cuts sharply against the sweeping powers the Obama and Biden EPAs assumed for themselves.

Monday’s rule is designed with that doctrine in mind, and the accompanying proposal is engineered so that no future administration can simply reinstate the old regime by regulatory fiat. Given that the entire edifice was erected on shaky legal and scientific foundations to begin with, its removal is wholly justified.

The scale of what is underway should not be understated. The power-plant rule is only one entry in a list of dozens of environmental regulations Zeldin targeted when he announced what his agency called the most consequential day of deregulation in American history back in early 2025: vehicle emissions standards, the ‘good neighbour’ rule governing cross-state pollution, environmental-justice offices and mercury restrictions have all been in his sights. Zeldin has been careful to stress that the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards themselves remain. The green lobby has been happy to blur this distinction in its rush to cast every rollback as an assault on breathable air. The distinction matters. It is a repeal of climate regulation built on a contested finding about global atmospheric effects, not a repeal of the conventional pollution controls for particulates, sulphur dioxide and mercury that the Clean Air Act was originally written to address and that have genuinely cleaned America’s air over half a century.

Line graph showing the decline of various pollutants from 1990 to 2023, including SOx, NOx, Mercury, Particulate Matter, and Ozone, with each pollutant represented by a different colored line.
Source: Based on data collated by Grok from EPA and EIA sources.

CO2: the gas of life, not a pollutant

What the hysteria over Monday’s announcement obscures is an elementary scientific point that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. It is a trace gas, present in the atmosphere at a small fraction of one percent, and it is essential to photosynthesis, the biochemical process on which virtually all plant, and by extension all life on Earth depends. Dr Will Happer, the Princeton physicist and CO2 Coalition co-founder, has for years called carbon dioxide the gas of life, not as rhetorical flourish but as biochemical fact: plants cannot grow without it. Satellite records show the planet has measurably greened as CO2 concentrations have risen and crop yields have benefited accordingly.

The Endangerment Finding inverted this reality, transforming a trace gas integral to agricultural productivity into an object of state-sanctioned hostility. It asked Americans to believe that the same molecule enriching greenhouses to boost tomato yields is simultaneously an existential threat requiring the closure of the power plants that keep their lights on. The absurdity was never really about atmospheric physics. It is about political power, specifically the power to reorganise the American economy around the preferences of a green priesthood that has rarely had to answer for the cost of its prescriptions in higher electricity bills, deindustrialisation and diminished energy security. Zeldin’s EPA estimates that eliminating the power-plant carbon rule alone will remove more than $300 billion in compliance costs. That is the agency’s own figure, not an independent audit, and it deserves the same scrutiny any regulatory-impact estimate does. But even a fraction of that sum, redirected from compliance costs to reliable power generation, is a fraction worth having.

It is worth dwelling on the numbers that the climate alarmists prefer not to mention. Atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen from roughly 280 parts per million before the Industrial Revolution to something over 400 parts per million today, an increase that sounds dramatic until one recalls, as CO2 Coalition scientists routinely point out, that concentrations were several multiples higher for most of the planet’s geological history, when life was in no way endangered by it. The CO2 Coalition, of which more than 80 scientists and researchers are members, has argued for years that treating a two-hundredths-of-one-percent increase in a trace gas as the central threat to human civilisation inverts the actual risk ledger: energy poverty, not energy abundance, is what shortens lives and stunts economies. That is not a fringe position but reflects elementary plant physiology better than the vilification campaign the Obama and Biden EPAs built their anti-fossil fuels regulatory onslaught upon.

Houston and the energy counter-revolution

That Zeldin chose to make the announcement in Houston, at a G20 ministerial gathering explicitly billed around the theme of energy abundance, was no accident. It is the latest instalment in the broader Trump energy counter-revolution I have chronicled in these pages since the President’s inauguration. Delegations from China, India, Japan and Germany, alongside major oil producers, gathered in the same rooms where Zeldin, with Chris Wright and Doug Burgum, made their case that reliable, affordable energy, not emissions targets set by unelected bureaucrats, should be the organising principle of energy policy.

The announcement landed even as a war-disrupted oil market has pushed fuel prices higher across the country, a reminder that energy abundance and energy security are not abstractions but kitchen-table concerns for ordinary households. Surging electricity demand from data centres, artificial intelligence infrastructure and advanced manufacturing has made the reliability case for coal- and gas-fired baseload power more urgent, not less. This was a point industry groups were quick to make in welcoming Monday’s repeal as protection for grid reliability at precisely the moment America can least afford to lose it.

The Houston meeting’s guest list underscores just how far the old climate consensus has frayed as a diplomatic project. The talks brought together not only China, India, Japan and Germany but also Saudi Arabia, Canada and, notably, Russian officials attending a G20 energy forum for the first time since the invasion of Ukraine. A Venezuelan delegation was also invited amid Washington’s newly expanded stake in that country’s oil reserves. Whatever one makes of the geopolitics, the symbolism is unmistakable: the world’s major economies, energy producers and consumers alike are gathering under an American Presidency that has explicitly reframed the global energy conversation away from emissions targets and toward supply reliability and low cost. It is the same reorientation when Trump first returned to office promising an “energy dominance” agenda that would find enthusiastic support well beyond America’s shores among governments no longer willing to subordinate their energy security to the Brussels and Davos-style globalist climate agenda.

None of this will stop the green ideologues from fighting a rear-guard action in the courts, and it would be naïve to expect otherwise. But the wider context is instructive. Despite the IPCC’s quiet retirement of its most extreme warming RCP8.5 scenario, the climate establishment has refused to acknowledge the collapse of its own modelling premises. Rather than reassess, it doubles down, through litigation, through international bodies, through central-bank mandates dressed up as prudential risk management. Confronted with an EPA that has simply followed the statute and the underlying physics and economics of reliable energy supply, critics reach not for a rebuttal of the science but for the courts and the language of moral urgency.

Expect, too, the familiar coalition of blue-state attorneys general and legacy environmental groups to pursue litigation that has accompanied nearly every Trump-era rollback since the February rescission of the Endangerment Finding itself. Several states announced plans to sue within hours of the announcement. Some of that litigation may well succeed at the margins. The American legal system gives courts ample room to quibble over procedure even when the underlying policy judgment is sound. The argument that a trace atmospheric gas essential to plant life poses imminent danger to human life and justifies the reorganising of the entire American power grid rests more on speculative modelled projections than on measured harm.

A long-overdue correction

What Monday’s action represents, then, is not simply a rollback but a long-overdue correction. It is a recognition, 17 years late, that carbon dioxide was never the pollutant the 2009 Endangerment Finding pretended it to be. An economy built on affordable, reliable fossil-fuelled power is not a problem to be regulated away but the foundation on which American prosperity and the world’s energy security still rest. The gas of life has, for now, won a favourable hearing in Washington. Whether that verdict survives the inevitable litigation by Leftist-Democrat interests is a question for the courts. That it was ever seriously in doubt is a question for historians of the climate industrial complex that demonises as a poison a trace gas essential to life on Earth.

This article was first published in the Daily Sceptic https://dailysceptic.org/2026/09/18/trumps-epa-ends-americas-war-on-co2/

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

Another Big Step In The Removal Of Destructive “Climate” Regulations

And yet, by the time President Joe Biden and his minions had left office in early 2025, such people, operating deep in the administrative state (and with the apparent blessing of a demented President), had managed to impose regulations that, by some time in the 2030s would have, among other things, forced the end of the manufacture and sale of all vehicles except electric vehicles, and forced the closure of all power plants using fossil fuels.

Since taking office in January 2025, President Trump and his people have been actively working to rescind and eliminate this insanity.

Today the EPA took another big step in removing these destructive regulations by finalizing a Rule titled “Partial Repeal of the Carbon Pollution Standards for Fossil Fuel-Fired Electric Generating Units.”

A cartoon depicting the removal of climate regulations, featuring a character representing climate alarmism surrounded by vines labeled with various regulatory terms. The scene shows individuals discussing changes to the EPA's guidelines, with details about new rules and the benefits of affordable energy.

From Manhattan Contrarian

 By Francis Menton

I will never understand how large numbers of seemingly intelligent people got the idea that they were going to save the world by forcing the closure of all the functional parts of the energy system of the U.S. Nor will I ever understand how enough of those people got themselves into positions of sufficient political power to put their wacko energy ideas into effect. And yet, by the time President Joe Biden and his minions had left office in early 2025, such people, operating deep in the administrative state (and with the apparent blessing of a demented President), had managed to impose regulations that, by some time in the 2030s would have, among other things, forced the end of the manufacture and sale of all vehicles except electric vehicles, and forced the closure of all power plants using fossil fuels.

Since taking office in January 2025, President Trump and his people have been actively working to rescind and eliminate this insanity. I have previously reported on many of these actions, for example here and here. Today the EPA took another big step in removing these destructive regulations by finalizing a Rule titled “Partial Repeal of the Carbon Pollution Standards for Fossil Fuel-Fired Electric Generating Units.” The final Rule was published today in the Federal Register at 91 F.R. 58,954; it takes effect 60 days from today, that is, November 16, 2026.

Today’s action is ludicrously complex in its efforts to clear away some of the convoluted regulatory thicket erected by the previous administration. (It was 195 pages long in the standard double-spaced typed format issued a few days ago, in advance of the official Federal Register publication.). The complexity of the rescission is a function of the complexity of the prior actions that it seeks to unwind. Today I’ll try to provide a comprehensible summary of the background, and how the latest action fits into the mix.

It was way back in December 2009, during Barack Obama’s first year as President, that EPA adopted what is known as the Endangerment Finding, purporting to determine that carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases” constitute a “danger” to human health and welfare. In the same December 2009 regulatory action, EPA also claimed to find that emissions of these gases from “from new motor vehicles and new motor vehicle engines contribute to the greenhouse gas pollution that threatens public health and welfare.” That finding then formed the basis for the subsequent regulations that initially imposed fuel economy standards on vehicles, and then further imposed emissions mandates that would ratchet down over time until only fully-electric vehicles could be manufactured and sold.

After the December 2009 action, it remained for further regulations to extend the Endangerment Finding to other emissions sources like industry, aircraft, and power plants. As to power plants, the major initiative of the Obama administration was a regulation informally known as the Clean Power Plan, finally imposed in October 2015, during the second half of Obama’s second term. (The official name of the CPP was “Carbon Pollution Emission Guidelines for Existing Stationary Sources: Electric Utility Generating Units.”). The basic structure of the CPP was to set limits on the amounts of CO2 and other GHGs that a power plant could emit, with those limits ratcheting down over the years until, by some point in the late 2030s, it would be impossible for any power plant using fossil fuels to comply. At that point, all fossil fuel power plants would be forced to close.

During President Trump’s first term, EPA attempted to do away with the CPP and replace it with another regulation called the Affordable Clean Energy rule; but that effort got struck down by the D.C. Circuit, thereby seemingly re-instating the CPP pending Supreme Court review. The litigation reached the Supreme Court in 2022, during the Biden presidency, in a case called West Virginia v. EPA. The Supreme Court struck down the CPP as being beyond the authority conferred on EPA by Congress in the Clean Air Act.

But the zealots in the Biden EPA were not going to be deterred by the Supreme Court’s striking down of the CPP, and they looked for another avenue to force the end of electricity generation by fossil fuels. In May 2024 the Biden EPA went final with a Rule with a ridiculously long title but generally referred to as the “Carbon Pollution Standards” for power plants. To avoid the Supreme Court’s West Virginia decision, this regulation took a new approach, which was to declare that the “best system of emissions reduction” (BSER) for a power plant would be to adopt a system of carbon capture and sequestration or storage (CCS), supposedly to capture 90% of the emissions of the power plant.

The problem with CCS is that it is enormously costly and uses up a large fraction of the energy produced by the plant in the effort to capture the emitted CO2. In the limiting case, you can use up all the energy produced by the plant, and still not capture the last bits of the emitted CO2. (I have previously referred to CCS as “a war against the second law of thermodynamics.”)

When the Biden EPA proposed the Carbon Pollution Standards, numerous commenters — including major states like Ohio and West Virginia — pointed out why the standards were technically infeasible. I summarized those comments in this post from August 2023. But EPA went ahead anyway.

EPA’s action today rescinds the Carbon Pollution Standards for existing power plants. In support of its action, EPA basically adopts the infeasibility arguments made in the cited comments of Ohio and West Virginia. Here are some excerpts from the Executive Summary:

The EPA is finalizing the repeal of the emission guidelines for existing fossil fuel-fired steam generating units in their entirety. Specifically, the EPA is finalizing the determination that 90 percent CCS is not the BSER for existing long-term coal-fired steam generating units because 90 percent CCS has not been adequately demonstrated, the costs of 90 percent CCS are not reasonable, and the associated degree of emission limitation is not achievable. In a change from the 2024 CPS, the EPA concludes that previous projects that failed to achieve 90 percent CCS were not a sufficient basis to conclude the technology has been adequately demonstrated. Additionally, the carbon dioxide (CO2) capture, pipeline, and sequestration infrastructure necessary to implement 90 percent CCS for the fleet of existing coal-fired steam generating units does not currently exist and would need to be broadly deployed. Because it is significantly unlikely that the necessary infrastructure for CCS can be deployed by the January 1, 2032 compliance date, the EPA is finalizing the determination that the degree of emission limitation in the 2024 CPS for long-term coal-fired steam generating units is not achievable.

Note that, as with the previous rescission in February 2026 of the Endangerment Finding as to motor vehicle emissions, EPA did not attempt in this rule-making to take on the scientific basis for the claim that human GHG emissions are leading us to some kind of global warming apocalypse. I regard that omission as a lost opportunity. EPA’s 2009 Endangerment Finding rested on a very shaky foundation, most notably claiming to find ongoing warming in a surface temperature record that lacked almost all data for 40% of the earth’s surface (the Southern Hemisphere oceans). It would be great to point out how comically weak were the bases on which this power-hungry agency purported to imposed trillions of dollars in cost on the American people.

Like the February rescission of the EF, this action will undoubtedly quickly proceed to litigation in the D.C. Circuit. Although I would have liked EPA to base its actions on additional arguments besides the ones it has used, I still think its position is strong. Indeed, I can’t even think of what the environmental groups are going to say to the arguments about infeasibility of CCS. There really is no functional economic demonstration of this technology at scale, even today, and there likely never will be. So have at it!

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.