Tag: Asia

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.

Hormuz Choke Point Displays ‘Green’ Vulnerabilities and US Power

In the volatile waters of the Strait of Hormuz, maritime traffic has slowed to an agonizing crawl. Roughly a fifth of global oil trade passes through this narrow passage. Nearly half of the crude headed toward Asia must cross these waters.

From The CO2 Coalition

By Vijay Jayaraj

In the volatile waters of the Strait of Hormuz, maritime traffic has slowed to an agonizing crawl. Roughly a fifth of global oil trade passes through this narrow passage. Nearly half of the crude headed toward Asia must cross these waters.

As the Iran war escalated, insurance firms raised premiums sharply, ship operators slowed departures, and cargo owners started holding back shipments. The result is a choke point where the world’s energy arteries suddenly look sclerotic.

You are watching, in real time, how a decade of climate-themed hostility to fossil fuels has hollowed out resilience. Governments told you that restraining domestic drilling and pipeline construction in the name of “net zero” would make the world safer. The Strait of Hormuz today tells a different story.

Western nations spent the last two decades systematically crippling their own energy independence. Driven by climate alarmism, European leaders deliberately dismantled their domestic production capabilities. Germany shuttered its nuclear plants and coal facilities under green mandates, forcing a desperate reliance on liquefied natural gas (LNG) from distant suppliers.

The U.K. abandoned abundant North Sea oil and gas reserves, leaving billions of barrels in the ground to satisfy the demands of environmental activists. In Canada, regulatory hurdles have stalled critical infrastructure, such as the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion, which aimed to transport the ouput of Alberta’s vast oil sands to global markets. These decisions, rooted in a narrative that paints hydrocarbons as villains, have eroded self-sufficiency.

By artificially suppressing domestic exploration, developed nations engineered their own dependency on volatile foreign energy imports. They traded secure, homegrown energy for extremely vulnerable supply lines stretching across hostile regions. When Russian gas volumes collapsed after 2022, many European governments scrambled to charter LNG cargoes at eye‑watering prices and sign short‑term deals with Gulf and U.S. suppliers.

That experience should have triggered a sober reassessment. Instead, policymakers doubled down on net zero pledges and treated the crisis as an excuse to accelerate “transition,” not to rebuild baseload capacity or secure diversified long‑term supply. The current Hormuz disruption is a second wake‑up call and this time their contingency plans are little to nothing.

Southeast and Northeast Asia sit at the epicenter of this shock. Nearly half of all crude destined for Asia flows through Hormuz. South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and others have built world‑leading manufacturing economies on the assumption that Gulf oil and gas will remain both available and affordable.

South Korea’s industrial heartlands – Gyeonggi‑do’s factories, Ulsan’s refineries and shipyards – run on imported coal, oil and LNG. In 2024, fossil fuels provided 79% of the primary energy consumed. Japan’s refineries too feed a dense ecosystem of automobile, electronics and chemical plants that cannot substitute the intermittent energy of wind and sunshine for steady combustion.

The financial reckoning for this green delusion is brutal and immediate. On the morning of March 4, South Korea’s market cratered 12% and triggered a circuit breaker, plunging off a cliff in a matter of minutes. South Korean shares plummeted over 10%, erasing $430 billion in value and hitting a 17-year market low amid the escalating Middle East conflict.

To withstand geopolitical shocks like the current conflict, countries need more capacity in dispatchable generation, more storage and a genuinely diversified portfolio of suppliers. That means long‑term oil and LNG contracts with producers outside the Gulf, new receiving terminals and investments in coal where appropriate.

It also means treating natural gas as a core pillar and not a “bridge” to be dismantled on schedule. None of the region’s heavy industries can function on wind and solar alone. Pretending otherwise does not cut emissions; it just raises the odds of blackouts the next time tankers stall in a war zone.

Besides, the climate crisis narrative that drove this global vulnerability is finally collapsing under its own weight. The mask is falling off. Major investment firms, global airlines and giant commercial banks are quietly letting go of their net zero agendas. The financial returns on mandatory green investments proved disastrous.

The disruption at the Strait of Hormuz has exposed how a political campaign against fossil fuels, built on exaggerated climate claims and enforced through finance and regulation, has eroded the energy security of rich and poor countries alike. When insurers cancel coverage for tankers and markets in Seoul lose hundreds of billions of dollars in hours, you are witnessing the cost of building an economy on narratives rather than physics.

The crisis also showcases America’s capacity to support allies and the poor. Long‑term LNG contracts with Asian and European partners, coupled with support for reasonable financing of oil and gas projects in developing countries, can reduce dependence on chokepoints like Hormuz and on coercive suppliers. Energy sovereignty for India, Southeast Asia and Africa aligns with U.S. strategic interests and moral stance.

Originally published in Washington Examiner on March 16, 2026.

Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India. He served as a research associate with the Changing Oceans Research Unit at University of British Columbia, Canada

Asia Is Going Nuclear and the United States Should Help

Asia is the fastest growing region for nuclear energy production, and the most consequential for major-power competition.

A truck transporting a large cylindrical container on a highway, with power lines and a sunset in the background.

From Watts Up With That?

By David Santoro

Asia is the fastest growing region for nuclear energy production, and the most consequential for major-power competition.

If the United States wants to shape nuclear standards, supply chains, and strategic alignments to its liking and gain markets, it must engage Asia now before China and Russia lock in dominance. Doing so isn’t just smart energy policy; it’s a strategic necessity.

Asia is driving nearly all global nuclear expansion. Some 80-85% of all reactors under construction worldwide are in the region, and most of the reactors built in the past decade were Asian projects. Demand is rising in long-established markets: China, India, Russia, South Korea, and Japan. But countries in South and Southeast Asia are also considering going nuclear, and some have taken steps in that direction, such as Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam.

Four motivations are powering this nuclear renaissance. First, soaring electricity needs due to the increased electrification of transport, heating, and industry, the rise of data centers, artificial intelligence, crypto mining, and population growth and urbanization. Over half of global electricity demand comes from Asia today, and an additional 85% is expected through 2030, so Asian countries see nuclear power as a solution to such needs.

Second, Asian countries, notably newcomers, want to take advantage of small modular reactors, microreactors, and advanced reactors. These new technologies offer considerable benefits: lower capital cost and investment risk than traditional nuclear power plants, greater grid flexibility, adaptability, and resilience, and enhanced safety and security features.

Third, Asian countries believe that nuclear power can help them transition towards a greener economy in the context of rapid climate change. That’s because nuclear power provides reliable, zero-carbon baseload and can work in tandem with other forms of (renewable) energy.

Fourth, Asian countries want energy options that enhance their autonomy. Given rising geopolitical tensions, many seek to reduce vulnerabilities, such as potential disruptions in energy supplies caused by a U.S.-China crisis or conflict, and they see nuclear power useful in this regard.

The result is that nuclear power is becoming a domain of competition between the United States and China, but also with Russia, another major U.S. rival and longtime heavyweight in the nuclear industry. There is competition for nuclear exports, setting nuclear technology standards and governance principles, and exerting broader civil nuclear influence in Asia and beyond.

The administration of Donald Trump is well-aware of these dynamics, and its renewed commitment to nuclear power helps position the United States for success.

Unveiled last May, Trump’s policy emphasizes rapid expansion of domestic nuclear capacity, fast-track licensing, development of advanced reactors, microreactors, and small modular reactors, and rebuilding the U.S. nuclear industrial base. It also stresses the role of nuclear power for energy independence and in national security applications, from defense infrastructure to space systems.

These measures provide a foundation for U.S. engagement of Asia, as a robust U.S. nuclear industry is a prerequisite for influence. By strengthening its domestic nuclear sector, the United States can offer competitive exports, provide reliable fuel, and shape nuclear norms in emerging markets.

The Trump administration has already signed agreements to foster nuclear cooperation with several regional countries. In October, for example, it signed two with Singapore to work on feasibility, research and development, and capacity-building related to new nuclear technologies.

There are challenges, however. The Trump administration focuses on domestic deployment, licensing, and innovation but less on competitive export financing, regional fuel-supply partnerships, and engagement of regional allies and potential clients. It thus risks ceding influence on China and Russia, which push state-backed projects that come with financing, turnkey construction, and supply-chain assurances. Moreover, the administration has yet to integrate safeguards, workforce development, and industrial partnerships into a coherent regional strategy.

So, to capitalize fully on the Asian nuclear boom, the Trump administration should adapt its approach. As a first step, it should ensure that U.S. firms have access to government-backed loans, export-credit guarantees, and insurance to compete with the low-cost, state-financed Chinese and Russian offers.

The administration should also build a nuclear fuel consortium with its closest allies¾Japan, South Korea, and Australia. That consortium should include joint enrichment facilities, long-term fuel contracts, and coordinated uranium supply chains, presenting Asian countries with alternatives to Chinese or Russian proposals. Offering “take-back” options of spent nuclear fuel (or high-level waste) would be judicious given current Russian dominance in this area.

Another step should be providing integrated small-modular-reactor and microreactor packages. U.S. exports should go beyond reactor hardware and include training, maintenance, safety oversight, and long-term operational support, ensuring reliability and building local trust.

Moreover, the administration should go beyond engaging regional countries bilaterally. It should coordinate and leverage its ties with Japan, South Korea, and India and engage Southeast Asian countries using both bilateral and multilateral tracks to form greater cohesion among its partners. U.S. nuclear diplomacy should also be paired with clear nonproliferation requirements, and export approvals should be streamlined with international safeguards.

Finally, the administration should form partnerships with Asian countries to train nuclear engineers and operators, and ensure that nuclear deals highlight ancillary benefits, such as grid resilience, energy security, and support for high-energy applications, be it semiconductor fabrication, artificial intelligence clusters, and space operations.

Taken together, these steps will help the Trump administration transform nuclear power from a domestic priority into a strategic lever, shaping Asia in a way that advances U.S. interests for decades to come.

Dr. David Santoro is President and CEO of the Honolulu-based Pacific Forum.

This article was originally published by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire.

BHP Exec to Australia: “time to reconsider net zero” if Australia wants Mining Investment

First published JoNova; A senior executive of Australia’s largest mining company has delivered an ultimatum to our green leaders.

A foggy railway scene featuring two rows of rusted freight train cars alongside railroad tracks, with piles of black coal on the ground.

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by  Eric Worrall

First published JoNova; A senior executive of Australia’s largest mining company has delivered an ultimatum to our green leaders.

Mining giant’s rising star Brandon Craig warns even green policy stalwarts like Canada are moving to protect their economies

By Brad Thompson, The Australian

BHP rising star Brandon Craig has warned Labor it needs to reconsider how policy settings are calibrated, including around emissions and climate targets, or risk being left behind by governments hungrier for mining investment.

Investment rivals like Chile, Argentina, the United States and Mark Carney’s Canada were acting to attract and secure multi-billion dollar investment from miners, but Australia was failing to meet their terms.

Mr Craig suggested it was time to reconsider net zero and decarbonisation policies to safeguard Australia’s economy. “I would let readers form their own conclusions but I think if we contrast directionally where the rest of the world is going versus where Australia is going across energy policy, tax policy, industrial policy, deregulation, even in some respects net zero positioning and decarbonisation, even stalwarts like Canada – in the face of tariffs and the impact to the economy from US policy – is walking back policies that the country can’t afford anymore,” he said.

…Read more: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/mining-giants-rising-star-brandon-craig-warns-even-green-policy-stalwarts-like-canada-are-moving-to-protect-their-economies/news-story/cf40509945848e7bfd4e926dd0f041b5

Mines need continuous investment to function. As patches of ground are exhausted, mining equipment needs to be moved to new parts of the claim, or to new claims entirely.

But nowadays there is a lot of competition for that mining investment.

Argentina is developing the enormous Vaca Muerta Shale gas field as a national priority, which directly threatens Australia’s gas dominance. The new $15 billion Simandou Iron Ore mine in Guinea threatens Australia’s iron ore exports, and Indonesia has had a 5 year winning streak of rising thermal coal exports to Asia.

Despite a lot of noise about renewables, the reality is coal demand is Asia, already at a record high, is still rising. But that demand might not be satisfied by Australia.

Tactics to dump coal are failing in Asia as energy demand booms

Bloomberg News | December 9, 2025 | 4:38 pm  Energy Asia China Coal 

Coal’s future in Asia is looking brighter, as the top-consuming region’s efforts to shift to cleaner energy suffer a series of setbacks.

Indonesia has canceled a flagship project that was the poster child for shuttering coal plants early. India is considering expanding its fleet until mid-century instead of through 2035. And China’s on track for another year of record mine output, bolstered by demand from the chemicals sector, despite a steady roll-out of renewables.

The through line here is that concerns over energy security and costs are trumping the climate agenda in Asia’s high-growth, high-polluting economies. Power demand is soaring for everything from air conditioning to AI data centers, and governments keen to avoid outages are waving through coal plant approvals.

…Read more: https://www.mining.com/web/tactics-to-dump-coal-are-failing-in-asia-as-energy-demand-booms/

Despite relatively high costs and long-distance logistics, Australia until recently won top marks for political stability. That reputation for stability is now in doubt, as threats to limit gas exports, soaring energy prices and looming grid instability spook mining companies like BHP.

$60 Billion Investor Slams Green Australia for “Quietly Quitting” on Gas

Australia desperately needs mining investment.

In some cases like Mount Isa, Aussie governments are so desperate for miners to stay, they’re handing out subsidies. Yet on other issues, like affordable energy and a stable political landscape, Australia is letting miners down.

If green energy delivered the lower energy costs advocates keep promising, none of this would be an issue. But the reality is Australia’s energy transition is an economy wrecking disaster. Even green stalwarts like Canada have realised it is all a big mistake, and are slowly, quietly, walking back the worst of their green energy madness.

Brandon Craig just delivered BHP’s final warning to Australia. But I very much fear Australia’s current leaders are too stupid to listen.

Tough to ignore examples as to why the weather can’t be “worse than ever”

Again I am not saying I have the answer. But to ignore what should be something that raises questions and shouting down people that bring it up is no way to pursue the true answer. I may not have that answer but I darn sure have some questions

Green meadow horizon and blue sky tranquil landscape scene

From CFACT

By Joe Bastardi

This is a golden age for people who love weather.

We are experiencing oceanic warming which is influencing weather and temperature patterns.   In the case of the interaction with the tropics and the global weather patterns, truth be told, looking at major precip and SLP patterns and their changes in the last 60 years, it is OPPOSITE of how it’s portrayed.

We all know that lower pressure is inherently more unstable, right?   

We all know and love big high pressures to the north and lower pressures to the south right?   Dr. Joel Myers, the founder of ACCU Weather,  had a rule. Lows follow highs. Predict the High you can predict storms. 

The biggest storms are when a stubborn high is moving slower than a storm advancing right at it.  

It’s common sense.

Now I want you to look at the  GLOBAL SLP of the tropical seasons of the 1950s.  I have the same scaling for the last 10 years below it:

Look at the tropical Atlantic and Asia. That’s a lot of low pressure. High pressure is banked up in the eastern US forcing the convergence to the south in the means.

Now look at the last 10 years:

SLP pressures are running higher. That implies less, not more instability in the entire pattern.

And the precip patterns show this in no uncertain terms.

The areas of wet and dry are more vivid in the 1950s ( again same scaling):

last 10 years:

Look at the flips that have occurred in the Southern Atlantic Basin   

Heaviest precip is now around land masses in Africa and Se Asia and Indonesia. 

What is most remarkable is both were periods of the warm AMO yet the Atlantic feedback is much different. This goes directly to my distortion point that says you can’t use the same ideas of cold and warm AMO and PDO and weight them equally. It’s intuitively obvious something is going on there that is pulling the focus away from the tropical oceans. 

And we observe it  in the lack of long-tracked storms hitting the US MAINLAND near their peak.   

Most of the storms that are major and hit the US become hurricanes 2 days away not 5 or more. 

What does this imply? That the total energy of the storm is less despite the ACE and Saffir Simpson scale indicating otherwise  Those metrics need to be expanded. 

Why? Because a longer-tracked storm covers more area so there is a larger diameter of strong winds even if the wind at the center is the same as the storm matures. So when someone tries to say things are getting worse, in a true sense of bundled energy and redistribution that is plainly not the case.  And the means show that. 

It’s the opposite. 

The drier areas are not drier and the wetter areas are not wetter. 

Rising pressures imply more, not less stability. Hence the reason many of the true weather geeks that have watched this for over a half-century more than anything else every day like it was eating and breathing, are bored a lot of the time. 

Can you imagine if we had the technology in the 30,40s 50s we have today? No weather nut would ever sleep there would be so much going on.

But here is the kicker. It does not matter in the end what is causing this, It matters that we research and adapt to the facts in front of us. 

It is more of a problem in forecasting than it is for the human race.  How do models handle situations where there may be more overall energy in the entire system, but spread out in such a way it can inhibit, not increase, total overall events?

Then there is the portrayal of the events.  The easiest thing for me to do is to sell out and say yes it is getting more extreme and who is the guy that for over 50 years has had the knock ( and if right the benefit). of seeing extremes and loving them? So much so that what used to be a positive, knowing the past, is becoming a negative for people that may not know it, or may not want it revealed because of how they want the present portrayed.   

But here is the fact. The good old days were more extreme. People growing up in the 30s thru 50s are leaving this life now, so their library of knowledge that has been a treasure to future generations is no longer that.  And its being swept away and diminished.  

And that is a shame.  But instead of putting tons of money into telling us how bad it is now, or how one thing after another is doomed, why don’t we get down to the real deal, looking at what the warming is doing and how it affects us in forecasting? 

This is not some cherry-pick. And any meteorologist that has any objectivity has got to understand that if the air is more stable and precipitation overall is less extreme, there is something going on that is opposite of what is being pushed, that NEEDS RESEARCH.     

And Simply saying this is worse than ever or that is worse than ever when it suits you (it is a great strategy, make sure no one knows what has happened and simply use the inevitable major weather event to support your argument) is not getting to what my field NEEDS TO KNOW. The actual changes that are the result and an objective look at the good, the bad, and the ugly ( I like the last 2 best more fun to forecast)

Again I am not saying I have the answer. But to ignore what should be something that raises questions and shouting down people that bring it up is no way to pursue the true answer. I may not have that answer but I darn sure have some questions

Author

  • Joe BastardiJoe Bastardi
  • Joe Bastardi is a pioneer in extreme weather and long-range forecasting.
  • He is the author of “The Climate Chronicles: Inconvenient Revelations You Won’t Hear From Al Gore — and Others” which you can purchase at the CFACT bookstore.
  • His new book The Weaponization of Weather in the Phony Climate war can be found here. phonyclimatewar.com