Tag: Bloomberg

Wrong, Bloomberg, Climate Change Has Boosted Food Production and Lowered Prices, Not the Opposite

Bloomberg’s news agency recently published a story claiming that climate change has caused rising food prices, a problem that will only get worse in the future. This is false. Data clearly show that world food production has dramatically increased as carbon dioxide (CO2) levels have increased and the Earth has modestly warmed.

From ClimateRealism


By H. Sterling Burnett

Bloomberg’s news agency recently published a story claiming that climate change has caused rising food prices, a problem that will only get worse in the future. This is false. Data clearly show that world food production has dramatically increased as carbon dioxide (CO2) levels have increased and the Earth has modestly warmed. Growing conditions have improved as has plant health, and flawed climate models’ forecasts aside, there is no meteorological or biological reason for believing such conditions will worsen in the future.

The Bloomberg story, “What Climate Change Costs You at the Checkout,” begins by listing a variety of factors, from the COVID lockdown to the Iran war, that have spiked food prices periodically over the years, complete with a graphic detailing geopolitical events that caused price spikes and the subsequent equally sharp declines once the various crises were over. So far, so good. Then the story goes off the rails.

“[A] less obvious force is also ratcheting up prices, but its effects risk lasting longer and being harder to predict,” claims Bloomberg. “Climate change is turning one-off weather shocks into more regular events that can decimate harvests and strain supply chains.

“As their effects compound, extreme heat and droughts threaten to make climate inflation an economic fixture,” the Bloomberg story continues. “Economists predict that the higher temperatures climb, the more bloated household costs like groceries may become.”

Those paragraphs are replete with false claims about both worsening weather and worsening crop production.

First, data debunk claims that climate change is making heatwaves and extreme weather more frequent or extreme. As detailed in dozens of stories at Climate Realism, neither droughts, nor floods, nor the number and temperatures of extremely hot days have increased or become more severe. In fact, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports it has “low confidence” climate change has had a measurable impact on flooding, in the process admitting that climate change is as likely to have reduced flooding as it is to have made flooding events more common. The IPCC has also been unable to identify any clear global trend in worsening drought, much less any trend in worsening drought that can be scientifically attributed to human greenhouse gas emissions.

Second, if supposed human caused climate change isn’t making the weather conditions which affect farming worse, how is it boosting crop prices, as the title of the story says it is? It isn’t!

No claim has been refuted more at Climate Realism, than that climate change is harming crop yields and/or production. Climate Realism has responded to more than 260 media reports bemoaning climate induced harms to agriculture, refuting each and every story with hard data, mostly from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, showing that the media’s claims to the contrary, crop production and yields have continued to regularly set records during the modern period of modest warming, largely due to the beneficial affects of increased CO2 on plant productivity and health, and improved growing conditions.

Global warming lengthens growing seasons, reduces frost events, and makes more land suitable for crop production. Also, carbon dioxide is an aerial fertilizer for plant life. These factors have resulted in the largest decline in hunger, malnutrition, and starvation in human history.

Whether one examines the production and yield of staple cereal grains, fruits and nuts, legumes, or less critical but still widely consumed crops like coffee and cocoa, the story is the same around the globe: increased yields and production

Previous Climate Realism posts show agricultural productivity has increased dramatically, for example, in Africa, here, here, and here; in the Middle East, here and here; in Latin America, here, here, and here; in Asia, here, here, and here, and in North America, here, here, here, here, and here.

This increase in food production has occurred even as the number of people and the amount of land devoted to growing crops has declined. Fewer people, farming less land, producing higher yields reflects increasing rather than declining productivity.

Because of the growing food abundance, in part climate change driven, the United Nations reports the number of hungry people has declined by two billion people during the past 30 plus years of global warming, since 1990.

So Bloomberg is wrong about climate change causing food shortages and thus higher prices now but what about its predictions, based on climate model projections, about the future. Bloomberg claims “[e]xtreme heat alone could raise global inflation by 0.3 percentage points to 1.2 percentage points a year starting in 2035, according to one study.”

Even if one could trust climate models to accurately portray future climate conditions, which we can’t since they don’t portray past or present conditions accurately without significant “tuning,” botany and agronomy suggests that what rising CO2 has done for crops up until now, should continue into the foreseeable future. The addition of approximately 140 parts per million of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by humans has helped dramatically reduce hunger, by increasing the photosynthetic productivity and improving the water use of plants. Thousands of field and laboratory experiments confirm this basic truth. The result, research shows there is now 17 percent more food available per person than there was three decades ago. There is no biological basis for believing any reasonably expected future levels of CO2 would reverse crop productivity or trends.

In the end, Bloomberg did what other mainstream media outlets have done previously — cite a single alarming study grounded in unrealistic climate model projections, along with quoting select “experts” predisposed to predict climate change doom, to push the narrative that human caused climate change is dooming food production. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s time for Bloomberg to join the increasing number of media outlets that are reducing their alarming climate coverage, at least in part, in response to climate facts finally getting out and the public’s increasing skepticism or apathy regarding alarming climate claims, especially those that have been discredited multiple times in the past.

Dear Bloomberg: Trump Can Be Against Deforestation in the Amazon While Still Thinking Climate Change Is Overblown

A recent article at Bloomberg, “Trump’s Tariff Wall Takes a Curious Woke Turn,” implies that it is hypocritical for President Trump to levy tariffs on Brazil over deforestation while saying that climate change is a hoax. This is nonsense. Climate activism does not hold a monopoly over environmental concerns.

From ClimateRealism

By Linnea Lueken

A recent article at Bloomberg, “Trump’s Tariff Wall Takes a Curious Woke Turn,” implies that it is hypocritical for President Trump to levy tariffs on Brazil over deforestation while saying that climate change is a hoax. This is nonsense. Climate activism does not hold a monopoly over environmental concerns. It is perfectly reasonable to support other environmental causes, especially tangible ones like protection of the rainforest, while being skeptical of man-made climate change and all the burdensome and often authoritarian policies that are supposed to somehow stop it.

The Bloomberg article’s sub-header “A president known for calling climate change a hoax is threatening Brazil with tariffs over deforestation” implies that this is hypocritical. The author goes on to say:

President Donald Trump has shown few signs in his second term that he cares much about the future of the Amazon rainforest. Nor are there any indications that ending either corruption overseas or the use of forced labor are White House priorities.

Yet in recent weeks all three of those things have become justifications for proposed tariffs put forward by the Trump administration. So what should we make of that? Are Trump’s economic wars suddenly embracing a new humanitarian and environmentalist agenda? Or, just maybe, are we seeing a clever strategy unfolding that may make Trump’s tariffs more politically durable?”

The Trump administration is hypocritical, suggests Bloomberg, because Trump “called climate change a hoax and pulled the US out of international talks, axed financing for wind farms and just funded the first US coal-fired power plant in a generation.”

But just because one is skeptical of climate policy, which is what all of the above complaints are connected to, does not mean that other environmental concerns don’t matter. If President Trump does not believe that human emissions of greenhouse gases are causing weather to get worse, which he is correct about, then why shouldn’t he allow for more investment in reliable, cheap energy like coal, over expensive and ironically environmentally destructive wind power?

Conservationists hold that land and resources should be conserved for use, not preserved untouchably, and illegal deforestation, like poaching (illegal hunting) is certainly something that falls under the concerns of conservationists.

Organizations like the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) and the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation promote environmental and species protection but do not hold to the theory of a looming man-created climate catastrophe that requires world economies to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.

It is true that the Trump administration did say that, among other issues, Brazil has failed to combat illegal deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, and also has levied unbalanced tariffs on U.S. ethanol exports.

Interestingly, the ethanol and deforestation issues are linked. Some Brazilian corn ethanol producers have recently come under suspicion of burning illegally clear-cut native wood in their plants because it is cheaper than using planted trees. Similarly, Brazilian sugarcane ethanol plantations were allowed to encroach on old-growth rainforest so that the country could increase ethanol production to meet climate goals. This is a case of climate policy coming up against traditional environmentalism: slashing-and-burning the rainforest to make more ethanol fuel or deforesting portions of the rainforest to build a highway for a climate conference.

It’s possible President Trump is using the deforestation angle cynically, as he is often known to do, but it is nonsense to say that concern about the rainforest requires one to also toe the line on climate policy.

The author of the Bloomberg piece, Shawn Donnan, seems to be more interested in ribbing Trump by accusing him of being “woke” than making a coherent argument. Scoffing that it’s some kind of hypocrisy to be worried about deforestation of the rainforest while calling out the scam that is climate alarmism only demonstrates Bloomberg’s and Donnan’s ignorance of the issues.

Bloomberg Net Zero Obituary: “Even at the peak of its popularity, net zero looked far-fetched”

Bloomberg was until recently Net Zero’s chief champion. But now it was always obvious that Net Zero ambitions were not grounded in reality.

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

Bloomberg was until recently Net Zero’s chief champion. But now it was always obvious that Net Zero ambitions were not grounded in reality.

Net Zero Is Dead. Long Live Renewable Energy

February 25, 2026 at 2:00 PM GMT+10
By Javier Blas

Javier Blas is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy and commodities. He is coauthor of “The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources.”

…

In diplomacy, words matter. When the world’s richest nations got together in 2022 for their biennial energy meeting, their communique mentioned “net zero” 13 times; in 2024, the references went up to 15. After last week’s gathering? Just one occurrence — and that was to underline the lack of universal support. The word-count collapse is illustrative of the direction of global energy policy: Net zero is, effectively, dead.

…

Even at the peak of its popularity, net zero looked far-fetched. One had to believe, as a matter of faith, that consumption of oil, natural gas and coal would drop following stylized cliff-like curves. With current energy-related annual CO2 emissions running above 35,000 million metric tons, reducing them to something that would equal net zero was an impossible task. On current trends, emissions are likely to remain close to current levels for the next 25 years. Even if countries adopt most of the energy policies they’ve announced — a big if — they’ll remain above 25,000 million tons a year until the middle of the century. 

…

A few nations insisted on keeping the net-zero idea alive — notably the UK and Spain …

…

But don’t mistake the death of net zero for the end of renewable energy. The latter is very much alive. For the foreseeable future, electricity will be the fastest growing form of energy — and renewables will cover a significant chunk of the increase. The world will remain addicted to fossil fuels, but more of its additional power needs will be covered by solar, wind, hydro, geothermal and other green sources.

…Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-02-25/climate-change-net-zero-is-dead-long-live-renewable-energy

What a change a few years can make. Back in 2024, a Bloomberg columnist pronouncing the obituary of Net Zero would have been unthinkable.

Bloomberg: Europe Must Double Down on Net Zero

So what happened to produce such a radical about face? One possibility, AI suddenly became really important in the investment landscape – and Bloomberg is a big player in the AI investment space.

2025: The Year of the Gigawatt AI Project
As China launches an AI Manhattan Project, US AI Support is buckling under High Energy Prices

And AI is incompatible with Net Zero.

Honeywell CEO Vimal Kapur: Powering Data Centers with Renewables is “Against Physics”

Are solar panels and possibly even wind turbines here to stay? Absolutely. There are plenty of niche uses of solar energy where it makes sense, including in some cases powering remote sites, where the cost of importing energy exceeds the cost of a solar / battery system.

But until there is a major breakthrough, such as consumer acceptance of micro nuclear fission, or an energy breakthrough such as small portal nuclear fusion, or until we completely run out of recoverable fossil fuel, there will be no Net Zero.

No, Bloomberg, One Chart Does Not Prove the World Is Getting Hot Fast

In a recent column titled “A Chart Climate Denialists Can’t Ignore,” Bloomberg writer Mark Gongloff presents a graph from Berkeley Earth’s Zeke Hausfather as proof that “the world is getting hotter, and fast.” While the chart may accurately display data, it is highly misleading because it doesn’t take the root causes of such temperature records into account, such as the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect and the warm-biased placement of weather stations that record temperatures, factors that have nothing to do with climate change.

A dry, cracked landscape with sparse vegetation and scattered rocks, depicting a barren environment under a clear sky.

From ClimateRealism

By Anthony Watts

A bar chart illustrating the share of global land with record maximum temperatures per decade, showing a significant increase from the 1980s to 2020.

In a recent column titled “A Chart Climate Denialists Can’t Ignore,” Bloomberg writer Mark Gongloff presents a graph from Berkeley Earth’s Zeke Hausfather as proof that “the world is getting hotter, and fast.” While the chart may accurately display data, it is highly misleading because it doesn’t take the root causes of such temperature records into account, such as the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect and the warm-biased placement of weather stations that record temperatures, factors that have nothing to do with climate change.

The chart, Gongloff claims, shows that nearly 80 percent of global land areas have experienced record monthly high temperatures in this century alone. From this, readers are told that the evidence is overwhelming and that skepticism about catastrophic climate change is “denial.” It’s a tidy narrative—but like many tidy narratives, it unravels when context and historical data are brought to bear.

The idea that today’s heat is “unprecedented” is simply false. In fact, most all-time state high temperature records in the United States were set long before the 21st century began. As detailed in Climate at a Glance: The Facts on Climate Change (2nd Edition, 2025), “the all-time high temperature records set in most states occurred in the first half of the twentieth century, decades before anyone was talking about human-caused climate change.” This is not a small technicality. It is a direct contradiction of the claim that modern warming is without historical parallel.

The 1930s remain the standout decade for heat in the American record. Data, drawn from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) U.S. Historical Climatology Network, show that both the number and intensity of heatwaves peaked during that period. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Heat Wave Index, cited in Climate at a Glance, confirms that the 1930s still dominate in frequency and duration of heatwaves nationwide. A chart from Our World in Data, shown below, verifies the EPA heatwave data:

Line graph showing the Annual Heat Wave Index in the United States from 1895 to 2022, indicating fluctuations in heat wave frequency and intensity over the years, with a notable peak in the 1930s.
Figure 1: U.S. Heat Wave Index, 1895–2021, from NOAA via EPA (2024) – processed by Our World in Data

More recently, the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN)—a pristine system of modern sensors launched in 2005 to avoid problems like urban heat contamination—shows no sustained increase in high-temperature extremes since its inception, seen in Figure 2 below:

Line graph depicting maximum temperature anomalies from January 2005 to August 2025, showing fluctuations in temperatures with both upward and downward trends. The USCRN data is highlighted in red.
Figure 2: USCRN high-temperature data from January 2005 to August 2005.

This data matters because the United States has the longest, most carefully maintained temperature record in the world. If there were truly a runaway increase in record heat, it would be evident here first. Instead, as The Heartland Institute notes, “there has been no significant warming across the United States since 2005” and “recent warming rates are no higher than in the early 20th century.” The NOAA record confirms this trend: when adjustments and urban heat biases are stripped away, the upward slope of U.S. maximum temperatures largely disappears.

Finally, a chart of high temperature records for the past century, seen below in Figure 3, easily disproves the Bloomberg claim.

A bar chart illustrating the percentage of very hot days per year in the contiguous United States from 1895 to 2023, showing trends in temperatures reaching 95°F and 100°F.
Figure 3: The annual mean number of days with a daily maximum temperature ≥95°, ≥100° and ≥105° each at 828 NOAA USHCN stations with at least 100 years of daily temperature readings between 1895 and 2023. Graph by Chris Martz from NOAA data at https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2.5/

What is too often ignored in mainstream reporting is the extent to which temperature datasets have been massaged over the years. Historical temperatures in the far past are routinely adjusted downward, and station siting biases in the present exacerbate the problem, exaggerating the appearance of a steep warming trend. An independent audit of the U.S. surface station network done by Heartland in 2022 found that well over 90 percent of stations fail NOAA’s own siting standards, with many positioned near heat sources such as buildings, parking lots, or air-conditioning exhausts. When only well-sited, rural stations are considered, the long-term warming trend falls dramatically.

This important context is missing entirely from Gongloff’s piece. Instead, readers are presented with an appealing graphic and a few cherry-picked statistics that appear to seal the case. Yet, as the new Climate at a Glance book points out, climate models and global averages often obscure more than they reveal. “Models run too hot,” the book notes, “and they consistently project more warming than is observed in the real world.” The gap between modeled projections and measured outcomes has persisted for decades, which raises questions not about “denial,” but about scientific humility.

In the United States, there has been no statistically significant increase in either the number or intensity of heatwaves since the early 20th century. That is not a matter of ideology—it is a matter of record.

Gongloff closes his piece by warning that the 1930s Dust Bowl may soon “seem like a cool interlude.” That is preposterous – the data tells a completely different story. America’s hottest decade remains the 1930s, and despite rising carbon dioxide emissions, modern heat extremes have not surpassed those early records. Before accepting graphics designed to shock, it’s worth remembering that charts can be constructed to emphasize whatever conclusion the author prefers. History, on the other hand, does not bend so easily.

Ultimately, long-term unbiased data and a proper accounting of the UHI effect destroy Bloomberg’s intentionally alarming claims about a rapidly warming world.

1930s Dust Bowl

Exxon Is Right Again, Bloomberg, Oil and Gas Will Be Needed for Decades to Come

A recent article from Bloomberg, carried by Rigzone, describes Exxon/Mobil Corporation’s (Exxon) plan to continue investing in and developing oil and gas resources well into the future. This is welcome news, as Exxon is right that oil and gas will be needed for a very long time, not just for transportation fuels and to generate electricity, but for other uses as well.

An offshore oil drilling rig with a support vessel nearby, set against a sunset sky.

From ClimateRealism

ByLinnea Lueken

An oil pump jack against a blue sky with clouds, surrounded by greenery.

A recent article from Bloomberg, carried by Rigzone, describes Exxon/Mobil Corporation’s (Exxon) plan to continue investing in and developing oil and gas resources well into the future. This is welcome news, as Exxon is right that oil and gas will be needed for a very long time, not just for transportation fuels and to generate electricity, but for other uses as well.

The article, “Exxon Says Demand Makes Case for Fossil Fuel Growth,” reports on the company’s promise to continue pursuing growth in their oil and gas projects between now and 2050, with no plans to slow or halt investments or operations.

Bloomberg reports that Exxon “is not concerned with ‘chasing the narrative of the week’ but will invest in oil and gas projects that it believes will be needed for decades to come.”

“Upstream” in this context means exploration, drilling, and production, so this is heartening to hear from Dan Ammann, president of Exxon’s upstream division. Exxon is not planning any reductions, Bloomberg reports, instead the company will “double its sales of liquefied natural gas by 2030 and is investing heavily in oil growth in Guyana and the Permian Basin.”

Ammann said the company is forecasting that energy demand is going to continue to grow, and that refusing to divert from its core business of oil and gas development and sales for climate reasons has worked out well for Exxon. He said that for companies that chose to declare their commitment to reducing carbon dioxide emissions, there was “literally no math you could do to suggest that was a good idea.”

Ammann and by extension Exxon are correct on multiple fronts.

On the climate side, greenhouse gas emissions are not leading to catastrophe necessitating the abandonment of fossil fuels. As Climate Realism demonstrates every week; extreme weather is not getting worse, crop production is improving globally, and there are many reasons to be skeptical of the pushes for rapid geoengineering projects to “fight” the non-issue that is global warming.

Fossil fuel consumption at the global scale is still growing. Though green activists will claim that renewables are overtaking oil, gas, and coal, data shows that renewables are being added to the mix, but the overall consumption of all energy is increasing. The “share” of electricity production by source doesn’t matter when all electricity production is increasing. (see figure below)

A line graph depicting global electricity production from various energy sources from 1985 to 2024, showing the growth in production quantities in terawatt-hours (TWh) for coal, gas, oil, nuclear, hydropower, wind, solar, bioenergy, and other renewables.

Anyone claiming that fossil fuels are going out of vogue any time soon is wish-casting and not reporting on reality.

A recent report called ‘Energy Delusions,’ published by a former chief of the International Energy Agency (IEA) discussed these facts in detail. It outlines how many green activists, including the IEA itself in recent reports, greatly overestimate the future popularity of electric vehicles, and ignore things like increasing demand from the petrochemical industry.

As western nations’ governments virtue signal about decarbonization, other parts of the world are not so eager to follow that path. Places like Africa, far from abandoning development, are expanding oil exploration and are taking advantage of their natural fuel resources. Indonesia has pledged to increase their coal consumption. China, while claiming to be green, shows with new coal-fueled power plants opening each week that it has no intention of abandoning coal.

Even if production for electricity use was declining — its not with the rapidly developing AI industry driving a growth in demand — there are countless other ways oil, gas, and coal are used in modern economies. Fossil fuels are necessary to maintain high yields of crops, because of their use in the production of fertilizers and pesticides, as well as fuel for tractors and other equipment that makes harvesting from large swaths of land in a timely manner. Industrial processes depend on a variety of petrochemical products, and the production of steel, cement, and other vital ingredients for modern infrastructure would not be possible without oil, its refining byproducts.

In terms of affordability for electricity, conventional gas and coal are both still less expensive than their proposed replacements of wind and solar. The latter’s popularity is largely boosted by government subsidies and mandates, and not market demand. To imagine that they will soon eclipse fossil fuels, and that energy companies should abandon those traditional resources for them, flies in the face of the reality of what it takes to keep the electric grid functioning reliably and to move people and goods across long distances in as short a time as possible.

Exxon expressed similar sentiments in the past; in 2023 a spokesperson said that while net-zero by 2050 might be a popular idea, it is “highly unlikely that society would accept the degradation in global standard of living required to permanently achieve” it. Based on the evidence around the world of riots and protests when fossil fuels prices and food prices go up due to government climate policies or when shortages arise, resulting in electoral shifts, this is clearly true. It is heartening to see that Exxon is holding firm to this realistic perspective, despite massive pressure via lawfare and bad press to do otherwise.

Exxon should be applauded for not “chasing the narrative of the week,” as they put it, and instead continuing to invest in reliable resources that the world will continue to need for reliable energy and vital products for the foreseeable the future.

COP 30 Preparations show up All That is Wrong with Climate Alarmism

In case you’ve missed it amid the Trump White House’s decision to ban U.S. participation, this year’s U.N.-sponsored COP 30 conference is being hosted by Belem, the capital city of the Brazilian state of Para.

An illustration depicting the COP30 conference, featuring a large gathering of people in an outdoor setting adorned with greenery and flowers, with the text 'COP30' prominently displayed.

In case you’ve missed it amid the Trump White House’s decision to ban U.S. participation, this year’s U.N.-sponsored COP 30 conference is being hosted by Belem, the capital city of the Brazilian state of Para.

By David Blackmon

Suffice it to say that, as is always the case with these annual gatherings of globalist elites, preparations for this year’s event have been filled with a series of pitfalls, emergencies, and the usual stories of rank hypocrisy. The Daily Caller has the story.

A great example came Tuesday, when Bloomberg ran a story with the alarming headline, “Nations Rethink Plans for Brazil Climate Summit as Costs Soar.” Sounds scary, doesn’t it? Yeah, that’s probably the point.

It turns out that prices for hotel rooms and other accommodations are soaring (unexpectedly!) in advance of the conference, which should actually surprise no one given that these events are regularly attended by tens of thousands of conferees armed with virtually unlimited expense accounts.

The profit motive remains alive and well in the midst of the Amazon jungle despite the best efforts of Brazil’s socialist government to kill it off. Go figure.

Bloomberg’s writers first imply that the high costs of attendance are falling mainly on the shoulders of developing nations, saying, “representatives of developing and at-risk countries say they’re considering scaling back their presence at this year’s event, which would reduce their visibility and negotiating power.”

Countries must have a big delegation present to ensure they get their entitled slices of every one of the myriad climate alarm initiatives, schemes, and scams that will be rolled out at this year’s conference, you know.

The piece singles out Tanzania’s Richard Muyungi, who chairs the African Group of Negotiators, as claiming that “African national delegations typically range from about 60 to 100 people.” 

After all, it’s a two-week event, so countries feel the need to be able to sub-in backups for exhausted participants like an NFL defensive coordinator rotates tackles and linebackers.

Read the full story here.

Renewables Investment “falls off a cliff” in Australia — down 64% this year

There is a bit of paralysis of green investment Downunder.

An abandoned renewable energy site featuring two large, damaged wind turbines and fallen solar panels, surrounded by barren land and dark clouds.

From JoNova

By Jo Nova

A partially assembled wind turbine stands in a field, with several wind turbines in the background under a blue sky.
By Tedder – Own work, CC BY 3.0,

“No wind project, not a single one, was signed off financially in the first half of 2025.”

There is a bit of paralysis of green investment Downunder.

BloombergNEF  sells itself as the analysts of the energy transition for investors. According to them, Australia’s rapid transition is “seen as a global test case”  and if so, the green wish-fairy needs an ambulance full of money. This year investments in grid-scale solar shrank to just 30% of what they were a year ago, and no wind project at all was committed in the first half of 2025.

This is a fall that is accelerating. 2023 was the boom year and in 2024 investment “fell 48%” which sounds pretty drastic. But this year is even worse.

Renewables investment falls off cliff as no new wind projects reach financial close in first half of 2025

By Sophie Vorrath, RenewEconomy

Investment in new wind and solar projects dropped by 64 per cent in the first half of 2025, compared to the same period in 2024, underscoring concerns that Australia’s energy transition is not attracting nearly enough capital.

“In the first half of 2025, Australia saw $556 million of investment in utility-scale solar, falling sharply from $1.6 billion in the same period in 2024,” the report says. No wind projects at all reached financial close over the period.

This is a far cry from the roughly $US59 billion ($A92 billion) BloombergNEF has said that Australia needs to invest some (sic) every year between now and 2030 to meet its economy wide net zero target – currently set for 2050.

At Bloomberg, they know this is serious: “the slowdown in wind farm development has come despite government support for wind being at an all-time high” they say wistfully.  A month ago they surveyed investors who managed as much as $38b in renewable “assets” so the Bloomberg team already knew from investors that the transmission lines are delayed, the communities hate the projects, and the costs have reached escape velocity.

Australia’s transition is “sluggish” and “slow” and new projects are “stranded”:

Renewables Investors Say Australia’s Grid Delays Hamper Outlays

By Keira Wright, Bloomberg

Australia’s rapid energy transition to replace aging coal-fired plants is seen as a global test case, but its sluggish build out of transmission infrastructure has left new solar and wind projects stranded, and helped make its power market one of the most volatile in the world.

Transmission delays and slow planning processes are the biggest barriers to deploying capital, closely followed by costly and slow grid connections, according to the survey of members of the Clean Energy Investor Group.

To be fair, part of the slowdown this year was also the uncertainty over the recent Australian election, not that the opposition opposed NetZero, or even mentioned it much. But it’s a dire statement anyway — if an industry depends on the outcome of an election in a life-and-death kind of way, it only proves they are not and never were competitive, needed, or popular products. To that end, the Labor government has tried to make up for that by  dropping money from helicopters with a boost to the Capacity Investment Scheme (CIS)” which will “support” another 3GW of unreliable generation.

But even Ross Garnaut, perpetual fan of green energy, says this is not enough, and he is long past mincing his words:

“The renewable energy transition is sick,” he said. “We are, for the time being, on a path to comprehensive failure.”

If the quote above from Sophie Vorrath is accurate, then according to Bloomberg, Australia needs to spend $92 billion every year for the next five years to meet it’s Net Zero Target. (Just $460 billion!) Where was that price tag in the Australian election when we needed it?

Climate Change Is Reducing, Not Increasing Food Costs, Mainstream Media

A flurry of mainstream media reports, from Bloomberg, The Guardian, Financial Times, and CNN, among other outlets, claim that climate change is causing rising food prices “worldwide,” based on a single new study. This is false. Bad weather has always impacted crop production, and there is no actual evidence that extreme weather is increasing. Globalization of media coverage is simply making it easier to hear about bad weather elsewhere in the world, meanwhile crop production and yields globally continue to set records – a fact the same media outlets largely ignore.

A vibrant agricultural field with rows of green and purple lettuce, set against a clear sky and distant trees.

From ClimateRealism

By Linnea Lueken

A flurry of mainstream media reports, from Bloomberg, The Guardian, Financial Times, and CNN, among other outlets, claim that climate change is causing rising food prices “worldwide,” based on a single new study. This is false. Bad weather has always impacted crop production, and there is no actual evidence that extreme weather is increasing. Globalization of media coverage is simply making it easier to hear about bad weather elsewhere in the world, meanwhile crop production and yields globally continue to set records – a fact the same media outlets largely ignore.

Focusing on the coverage by Bloomberg, in an article titled “How Climate Change Is Raising Your Grocery Bill,” Bloomberg writers report on a study from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and the European Central Bank, which claims price jumps in certain food products are due to “extreme weather they say is linked to climate change.”

Bloomberg claims that consumers around the world “say they are feeling the effects of climate change on their grocery bills, making food unaffordable for some and posing a challenge for central bankers trying to tame inflation.” If true at all, this almost certainly the effect of media coverage like Bloomberg’s insisting that climate change is responsible, instead of observational evidence of crop production.

It is worth noting that the study uses the term “unprecedented” eight times in the mere four pages of content. To justify their use of the term unprecedented to describe global weather events in the last few years they reference ERA5 surface temperature data going back to 1940, and the standardized precipitation index from CRU going back to 1901. The reason why this is non-scientific and misleading will become clear when we go over the weather events they claim were so “unprecedented.”

Bloomberg discussed a few of the weather events mentioned in the study linking them to increases in the price for specific crops. They first highlighted increases in lettuce and vegetable prices in the United States, driven by droughts in California and Arizona, the former of which Bloomberg claims saw the “driest three-year period ever recorded.” Also mentioned was hurricane Ian. The problem, of course, is that California’s drought was anything but unprecedented. As discussed in the post “Mega-droughts and Mega-floods in the West All Occurred Well Before ‘climate change’ Was Blamed for Every Weather Event,”  historical data and proxies show that California has experienced far more widespread and severe periods of drought in the past, some of which lasted as long as two hundred years.

In Asia, Bloomberg says a heatwave impacted South Korean cabbage production. While UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) data indicate that cabbage production has been slowly declining after a massive spike in the 1970s, yields have remained stable or increased since 2000. This suggests that economic considerations or political decisions made about the relative benefits of growing cabbage versus other crops that could be grown, or uses the land could be put too, rather than climate, are responsible for changes in production.

Australia also saw high lettuce costs due to flooding in the eastern part of the country in recent years, but the year Bloomberg and the study highlight, 2022, was not unprecedented as they implied. In fact, 2022 was only the sixth “wettest” year on available Australian rainfall records, the wettest year on record was in 1950.

Bar chart illustrating annual rainfall in Eastern Australia from 1900 to 2022, with 2022 marked as the sixth wettest year.
Figure 1: Australian rainfall records, chart from Jennifer Marohasy: https://jennifermarohasy.com/2023/01/fear-flooding-forecasting-australias-2022-official-rainfall-statistics/

Bloomberg goes on to explain how the study allegedly “found that heat, drought and floods were occurring at an increased intensity and frequency,” which is at odds with available data and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 6th assessment report, which though it claims an increase in extreme heat has been detected, finds no emergence of increased flooding or drought in the current historical period.

In short, Bloomberg, and the other mainstream media outlets hyping the BSC report, failed to do any fact checking, failed to examine crop trends, and illegitimately linked individual weather events to long-term climate change, despite such events being common in history and there being no discernable trend in an increase in such events amid the slight warming that has occurred in recent years. To be clear, weather is not climate and, despite what unscientific attribution studies claims, no specific weather event can be tied to long-term climate change.

In short, none of the weather events Bloomberg referred to as unprecedented was in fact unique or even rare historically.

Concerning the crops, BSC and the media focuses on the most, lettuce and cabbage, data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization show that between 1993 and 2023 (the most recent 30-year period of climate change for which we have available data):

  • Lettuce (and chicory – the FAO combines them) production grew approximately 112 percent;
  • Lettuce and chicory yields increased by about 4 percent;
  • Cabbage production expanded by nearly 75 percent;
  • And cabbage yield grew by more than 37 percent. (see the graph below)
Line graph showing global production and yield trends for cabbage and lettuce from 1994 to 2022, with distinct colored lines representing world production and yield for each crop.

Bloomberg does briefly concede that other factors, like El Niño, a totally natural phenomenon, played a role in weather in 2023 and 2024, impacting certain crops. The outlet also begrudgingly admits that “food price shocks typically turn out to be short-term in nature, because high prices incentivize more production, which brings prices back down,” though they try to say that coffee and cattle are exceptions to this rule. Although Bloomberg reports that coffee futures are high, there is no evidence that climate change is actually damaging global coffee production, as explained in Climate Realism posts here, here, and here.

Bloomberg ends with a warning from the study authors, claiming that “slashing greenhouse gas emissions and containing global warming will be key to reducing food price inflation risks,” but this ignores another key aspect of food costs. They are also impacted by the cost to produce food, like when governments increase the price farmers pay for fossil fuel derived pesticides and fertilizers or try to restrict their use. Fossil fuel derived chemicals increase yields with less labor and using much less land. Take a look at Sri Lanka for a good example of what happens when climate action is prioritized over food production.

Never before has it been so easy for the media to report on various weather disasters and crop failures globally, and this certainly has an impact on peoples’ perceptions as well as the ability for studies to try to draw connections that aren’t really backed by data. This Bloomberg piece is nothing more than climate fearmongering; taking disconnected crop shortages from around the world from localized weather events and trying to blame them on climate change, when the truth is that there have always been crops failing somewhere in the world at any given time.

Bloomberg’s $87 Trillion Carbon Fantasy: When Climate Modeling Meets Magical Thinking

Mark Gongloff, an opinion columnist at Bloomberg, recently wrote a piece titled “Corporate America Owes the Rest of Us $87 Trillion.” In it, he claims U.S. companies are causing carbon-related social damages worth 131% of all corporate equity and three times America’s GDP. All based, of course, on models, not measurements.

From Watts Up With That?

By Charles Rotter

Carbon Costs: Corporate America Owes Us $87 Trillion – Bloomberg

Mark Gongloff, an opinion columnist at Bloomberg, recently wrote a piece titled “Corporate America Owes the Rest of Us $87 Trillion.” In it, he claims U.S. companies are causing carbon-related social damages worth 131% of all corporate equity and three times America’s GDP. All based, of course, on models, not measurements.

“The social cost of the carbon emissions of US companies will amount to a cool $87 trillion through 2050.” — Mark Gongloff, Bloomberg

That’s not analysis. That’s climate-themed performance art.

The core of this fantasy is the “social cost of carbon” (SCC), a figure so malleable it practically defines policy-based evidence. Gongloff acknowledges the controversy:

“That hasn’t been easy or uncontroversial.”

Indeed. Under Trump, the SCC was $1/ton. Biden’s EPA pushed it up to $190/ton, conveniently aligning with Net Zero mandates. Gongloff prefers the high end—naturally. The study he cites by Lubos Pastor and Wharton School colleagues simply plugs this inflated SCC into an economic model and—presto!—out comes a multi-trillion-dollar guilt trip for corporate America.

The trick is simple: pick a damage number, apply it across a long enough time horizon, assume compounding effects, and declare catastrophe. That’s not economics. It’s speculation wearing a necktie.

Gongloff sets up skeptics as indifferent obstructionists:

“Modern deniers… fire back that the ‘do something about it’ part is too hard, too expensive to be worth trying.”

This is the typical bait-and-switch. Skeptics aren’t denying costs—they’re questioning whether proposed solutions are worse. Germany’s disastrous energy transition, skyrocketing prices, and blackout risk demonstrate what happens when you ignore reality in favor of renewable fairy tales.

Gongloff’s version of pragmatism?

“Being truly pragmatic means leaving fossil fuels behind as quickly as possible.”

That’s not pragmatic. That’s blind faith. Oil, gas, and coal still supply over 80% of global energy. The “just transition” isn’t happening—because it can’t without destroying the economy.

In a particularly deranged twist, Gongloff endorses holding companies responsible for emissions they don’t even directly produce:

“Most of that falls under the category of ‘Scope 3’ emissions… the gasoline burned in cars and the natural gas burned in homes.”

So now energy producers are to blame for how consumers use their product? This isn’t justice—it’s ex post facto criminalization. Under this logic, Ford is responsible for traffic, and McDonald’s for your waistline.

It also forms the foundation for climate lawsuits, which Gongloff promotes:

“New York state and other places are pushing for polluters to kick into ‘Climate Superfunds.’”

This isn’t accountability. It’s green Marxism, thinly disguised as reparative economics.

Gongloff writes:

“$192 trillion is a bargain relative to the potential costs.”

Only in a fantasy world where averted damages are based on inflated assumptions, infinite foresight, and zero economic friction. BloombergNEF, the source for this figure, assumes global coordination, endless spending, and perfect deployment of technologies still in the prototype phase.

There’s no acknowledgment of risk, trade-offs, or unintended consequences. Just more money, more control, more modeling.

Gongloff even dusts off the IMF’s infamous claim:

“The fossil-fuel industry gets $7 trillion in government largesse every year.”

This number is fake. It counts the absence of carbon taxes as a “subsidy.” If governments don’t charge you an imaginary fee, that’s now a handout. It’s like calling your paycheck a gift because the government didn’t seize it.

Real direct subsidies to fossil fuels are minimal. But the green energy industry? That’s a subsidy black hole, endlessly gorging on mandates, tax credits, and bailouts.

Gongloff sums it up:

“Add it up over 25 years… and $87 trillion starts to seem like a low bid.”

Of course it does—when the number is built on circular logic, unprovable assumptions, and the moral conviction of a missionary. This isn’t journalism. It’s climate absolutism wrapped in pseudo-economics.

And the real danger isn’t the carbon. It’s the crusade to control human behavior, dismantle prosperity, and punish the very systems that made modern life possible—all in the name of speculative models.

Let the markets—not modelers—guide our energy future.

Atlantic Shores Wind Project Sinks—And With It, A Green Illusion

There are few things more satisfying than watching a multi-billion-dollar boondoggle collapse under the weight of its own bureaucratic absurdity and scientific sloppiness. That’s precisely what happened when a critical air permit for the Atlantic Shores South offshore wind farm was voided—just weeks after President Donald Trump publicly hoped the project was “dead and gone.” He got his wish.

From Watts Up With That?

By Charles Rotter

There are few things more satisfying than watching a multi-billion-dollar boondoggle collapse under the weight of its own bureaucratic absurdity and scientific sloppiness. That’s precisely what happened when a critical air permit for the Atlantic Shores South offshore wind farm was voided—just weeks after President Donald Trump publicly hoped the project was “dead and gone.” He got his wish.

And if this story weren’t already sweet enough, it came courtesy of Bloomberg, a publication not exactly known for its admiration of Trump or skepticism of the climate change-industrial complex.

The project—backed by none other than Shell New Energies and EDF Renewables—suffered a major blow when the U.S. Environmental Appeals Board granted a remand of the EPA’s air pollution permit. The agency had issued this permit less than six months earlier, but now, thanks to legal challenges from local citizens and the Trump administration’s new energy policies, it’s back to square one.

Let’s pause and savor the irony: a project intended to save the planet was derailed by the EPA—because of air pollution concerns. You can’t make this stuff up.

According to Bloomberg, “The decision to remand an Environmental Protection Agency air pollution permit for the Atlantic Shores South venture is the boldest strike yet against a wind farm since Trump took office in January and froze federal permitting of the projects.” Just weeks before, Trump had blasted the project, calling it a “large scale Windmill DISASTER off the coast of Southern New Jersey” and wishing it a swift death. Almost prophetically, it got it.

Shell, recognizing the writing on the wall, had already jumped ship, writing off nearly $1 billion and pulling out as an equity partner. That’s not exactly a vote of confidence in the green energy future, especially from a corporation eager to greenwash its image at every opportunity.

And what caused this glorious collapse? Not just executive action, but local resistance—people who live near the proposed turbine site, armed with common sense and a healthy distrust of bad math. The group Save LBI filed a challenge against the EPA’s permit, citing “flawed analysis, including improper air quality modeling.” The Appeals Board agreed.

Bob Stern, head of Save LBI, put it bluntly: “It highlights the lack of full disclosure and questionable science and mathematics that has characterized other applications and approvals.” That’s code for: the numbers don’t add up, the models are junk, and someone finally noticed.

Make no mistake, this isn’t just about one permit. This is a high-voltage message to the entire offshore wind sector. If these projects can be stopped for sloppy modeling and dodgy math, then the entire house of cards might be in trouble.

Bloomberg framed this as a troubling development for energy investors. Jason Ryan from the American Clean Power Association lamented that the move could “chill investment in the US for all types of infrastructure if a project permit is canceled for political reasons and not because of real impacts.” But here’s the punchline—this was because of real impacts. The project flunked the regulatory sniff test. Investors are right to be spooked. They’re finally realizing these wind fantasies don’t stand up to scrutiny.

This case is also a textbook example of how the climate crusade sacrifices transparency and public input for the illusion of progress. Offshore wind projects are “uniquely vulnerable to political shifts,” Bloomberg admits. Well, good. They should be. When a trillion-dollar sector feeds off public subsidies, environmental exemptions, and manipulated data, political accountability becomes a feature, not a bug.

Atlantic Shores was supposed to deliver 2.8 gigawatts of electricity via 200 turbines—about 8.7 miles off the Jersey coast. But the public never bought the green utopia they were selling. Instead, people asked uncomfortable questions. Like: why are we installing massive metal structures in marine ecosystems to fix a problem that hasn’t been properly measured, modeled, or proven?

And that’s the crux. The offshore wind push, like so much of climate policy, rests on wobbly assumptions. The Atlantic Shores debacle isn’t an isolated misstep. It’s a symptom of a system built on speculative science and political theater. It’s not just the wind that’s blowing—so is the smoke screen.

So let’s raise a turbine-sized toast to President Trump, Save LBI, and every skeptical voice who refused to be gaslit by Green New Dealers in lab coats and pinstripe suits. With any luck, this is just the first domino in a long line of wind follies waiting to topple.

The climate-industrial complex is finally facing a breeze it can’t spin.