Tag: climate pseudoscience

Amsterdam Ad Ban Typifies Climate Alarmism’s Farce

Amsterdam just became the world’s first capital to outlaw public ads for both meat and fossil fuels. Starting May 1, city officials scrubbed billboards, tram stops, and metro stations of promotions for gasoline cars, airlines, cruises, and distant vacations, along with beef, chicken, pork, and fish.

From CO2 Coalition

By Vijay Jayaraj

Amsterdam just became the world’s first capital to outlaw public ads for both meat and fossil fuels. Starting May 1, city officials scrubbed billboards, tram stops, and metro stations of promotions for gasoline cars, airlines, cruises, and distant vacations, along with beef, chicken, pork, and fish.

In place of the now illegal ads are posters for the Rijksmuseum and piano concerts, which apparently are included in the city’s vision of a carbon-neutral metropolis that consumes half as much meat.

Driving the ad ban through city council were two political parties, GreenLeft and Party for the Animals. Their claim of fighting impulse buying that locks in “high-carbon” habits poorly disguises an abuse of political power that denies people reasonable everyday choices in exchange for nothing benefiting the environment. Attacking ordinary human life, Amsterdam officials now treat essential fuels and basic nutrition as societal evils that must be hidden from public view.

City councillor Anneke Veenhoff likens the ban to helping people kick addictions by removing the temptation of a substance to force behavioral change.

Other Dutch cities have instituted ad bans, including Haarlem’s prohibition of meat promotion in 2024 and The Hague’s 2025 barring of fossil fuel advertising. Worldwide, more than 50 cities—from Stockholm and Edinburgh to Sydney and Florence—indulge the same folly.

France passed a national ban on fossil fuel ads in 2022, and Spain is considering one. U.N. boss Antonio Guterres cheered on such bans last year, calling for prohibitions on oil, gas, and coal ads while labeling humans the “meteor” smashing Earth. This “attitude-shifting” is presented as something akin to an anti-smoking campaign.

The ad bans are based on nothing more than climate pseudoscience, which draws on exaggerations of the effects of natural processes, fabrications of data, and speculative computer modeling. The apocalyptic predictions of anti-meat activists, for example, are easily refuted by empirical data. Methane emissions of ruminant animals purported to threaten dangerous atmospheric heating have an immeasurably small influence on the planet’s temperature.

An analysis published by the CO₂ Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia, shows that even extreme mitigation measures produce negligible results. Eliminating all 1.6 billion cattle worldwide was calculated to avert warming by about 0.04 degrees Celsius. The effect of killing 1.3 billion sheep would be 10 times smaller.

These figures represent changes so small that they fall below the threshold of detection in real-world climate systems.

Policies crippling to agriculture produce massive economic destruction for no benefit. No sane leader would spend a single taxpayer dollar to chase such statistically irrelevant and ludicrous objectives. Activists pushing these agendas demand immense sacrifices from working families while offering no environmental improvement.

The campaign against fossil fuels mirrors this same detachment from reality. Energy abundance remains a requirement for prosperity. Fossil fuels have powered innovation, extended lifespans, and expanded opportunity everywhere. Hydrocarbons power transportation, generate electricity, and serve as feedstock for countless products. From fertilizers that sustain crop yields to materials used in medicine, fossil fuels underpin modern life.

European politicians banning advertisements for petroleum-powered vehicles signal a profound ignorance of history and economics and a deficit of common sense. Modern economies rely on affordable, abundant coal and natural gas to power factories, build infrastructure, and move essential goods. When international bodies stigmatize these fuels, they threaten the economic advancement of the world’s most vulnerable populations and the sustenance of all.

Advertising bans serve only to boost a feeling of moral superiority among urban elites while achieving nothing and jeopardizing much. They represent a rejection of human progress and a dangerous embrace of unscientific dogma.

Amsterdam’s performative stunt exposes climate dogma’s hollow core of grand gestures and zero results that must be rejected at every opportunity.

Originally published at PJ Media, May 22, 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.

About time climate, green energy scams take well-deserved heat

A costly Green New Scam premised upon conflicted special interests of climate pseudoscience science and rent seeking wind/solar industries mutually invoke entirely unwarranted fear and fantasies.

From CFACT

By Larry Bell

A costly Green New Scam premised upon conflicted special interests of climate pseudoscience science and rent seeking wind/solar industries mutually invoke entirely unwarranted fear and fantasies.

Any claim of a consensus that “science is settled” regarding the existence of a dire climate crisis caused by carbon dioxide is a deceptive, destructive, and costly fraud.

A “World Climate Declaration” made public by the non-profit scientific Global Climate Intelligence Group (CLINTEL) endorsed in 2023 by 1,609 informed scientists and professionals – including two Nobel Laureates — asserts the opposite, that here is no such climate emergency consensus.

On top of this, proposals driven by climate alarmism to rapidly transition America away from the more than 80% of energy provided by fossil fuels by sufficiently increasing intermittent wind and solar systems currently producing about 3% combined are additionally delusional, with solar producing less than 1%.

The Wall Street Journal’s Barton Swaim observes that over the past three decades, someone who pigheadedly didn’t embrace the belief that “science was settled” that life on earth faces imminent extinction from “global warming” and, later, “climate change,” was labeled a crank, or worse a “climate denier.”

The latter characterization — an offensive epitaph sometimes hurled against me and many of my writings on the subject — presents an obvious correlation with ignorant disbelievers who’ve denied horrific historical events.

So yes, climate changes, and has been doing so ever since our planet had an atmosphere. Besides, if it didn’t, we wouldn’t need a word for it other than just “weather.”

As Swaim points out, “The possibility that an entire academic discipline, climate science, could have gone badly amiss by groupthink and self-flattery wasn’t thought possible. In many quarters this orthodoxy still reigns unquestioned.”

Fortunately, that circumstance appears to be changing.

As observed in this writer’s previous Feb. 7 column, President Donald Trump’s landslide election offers heaping amounts of evidence, that a majority of Americans have lost patience and charity for woke government policies.

Edicts premised upon unsupported alarmist climate claims and wildly unrealistic green capacity projections that choke energy-driven consumer commodity costs and lifestyles, business and employment opportunities, and national prosperity and security.

All one need do is look at California and New York as painful examples.

California’s Legislative Analyst Office (LAO) recently released a report revealing that the Golden State’s average monthly electricity rates for residential customers have nearly doubled since 2019, a trend negatively influenced by green energy policies.

LAO attributes major contributing factors for these price hikes to “ambitious” greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction targets and taxpayer-funded energy programs, leading to the nation’s second highest rates following Hawaii.

The California Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) requires that by 2030, 60% of an electricity provider’s portfolio must come from more costly “renewable energy” resources, and legislation signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, D-Calif., in 2022, seeks to require that 85% of the state’s GHGs are reduced to below 1990 levels by 2045.

Making matters worse, Californians are also seeing increased energy costs resulting from programs that are using their tax dollars to build many thousands of charging stations for electric vehicles (EVs), which-in turn, increase electricity demand and shortages.

As consequences, LAO found that, “On average, residential electricity rates in California are close to double those in the rest of the nation.”

Nevertheless, New York is making great progress in competing with California and Hawaii to achieve distinction for the nation’s highest electricity costs.

In attempting to meet a state-wide mandate that 70% of power generation come from renewables (including hydropower from Quebec) by 2030, investor-owned Con Edison, which serves New York City and its suburbs, proposes to hike utility bills by 11.4% on average and 13.3% for gas service.

This will raise average residential electricity bills to about $500 monthly, $154 more than five years ago.

And that vital hydropower from Quebec?

Another transmission line under construction to provide more is costing a whopping $6 billion, four times more than Con Edison’s proposed electricity rate increase this year.

Still, in November the New York Independent System Operator warned of potential power shortages next year if the line isn’t operational by May.

Meanwhile, last spring state regulators cancelled three offshore wind contracts owing to rising interest rates and inflation along with a planned 175-mile-long transmission line to power New York City from gigantic upstate wind and solar farms.

It hasn’t helped that former Gov. Andrew Cuomo mandated a premature shutdown of the Indian Point nuclear plant that generated about a quarter of New York City’s power plus banned shale fracking and vetoed gas pipelines.

These actions will continue to drive up electricity costs since Con Edison says they need more money for infrastructure upgrades to strengthen their power grid as more intermittent renewables come online, particularly at a time of increased electricity demands related to New York’s climate regulations banning gas hookups for new buildings.

There should be no wonder why deep blue New York and California, along with Illinois, led the nation in 2023 population losses.

Ironically, those who are least able to afford these unnecessary financial burdens caused by woefully misguided climate-alarm energy policies are typically the same lowest income ones, including many elderly, who can’t afford relocation expenses . . . the very same populations that virtue-signaling liberals hypocritically purport to care most about.

This article originally appeared at Newsmax