Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
Strip away the self-congratulation and the case is this. The world’s third- and fourth-largest economies have become a climate vanguard. Berlin has pledged, for the first time, to end fossil fuel use by 2045.
Mr Newsom says California has run on 100% clean electricity on nine days out of 10 this year. What the Nation never asks is whom this performance serves.
California, once a great oil state, now sources 61% of its crude from abroad, led by Brazil and Iraq. The closure of Phillips 66’s Los Angeles refinery and Valero’s Benicia plant has stripped the state of 17% of its refining capacity and gasoline imports in 2025 exceeded the total for any year since at least 2004.
No wonder Professor Fritz Vahrenholt, a former Hamburg environment senator, told Apollo News this week that Germany’s Energiewende is “not a transition, but a retreat”.
Satire has become redundant. The Nation, an old abolitionist publication founded in 1865 and now proudly the flagship of the Left, has just anointed Germany and California an “environmental superpower”. The author, Mark Hertsgaard, is the magazine’s Environment Correspondent and also Executive Director of Covering Climate Now, a foundation-funded media campaign that the Nation itself co-founded. His two showpiece claims are an interview that Gavin Newsom gave to Covering Climate Now and a poll-based crusade, the 89% Project, run by, naturally, Covering Climate Now and endorsed, in the AP story the piece cites, by an oat-milk company. A perfectly closed loop, which is more than can be said for the energy systems it celebrates.
Strip away the self-congratulation and the case is this. The world’s third- and fourth-largest economies have become a climate vanguard. Berlin has pledged, for the first time, to end fossil fuel use by 2045. It is not clear whether this is on a ‘Net Zero’ basis or if it actually means no fossil fuel use at all. Mr Newsom says California has run on 100% clean electricity on nine days out of 10 this year. What the Nation never asks is whom this performance serves.
Germany and California, it seems, are perfect complements to China. Beijing’s road to global supremacy in manufacturing and technology, artificial intelligence included, runs through cheap, dependable power and control of the supply chains. The two self-appointed climate leaders have made power dear, hobbled their own industries and handed the supply chains to Beijing. Lenin is said to have called such people useful idiots. Patricia Adams put the same point to Western greens in the Financial Post, and at greater length in her Global Warming Policy Foundation paper the Road from Paris. The pattern was already plain when Beijing was being cast as climate saviour: sign the green communiqué, collect the praise, keep building coal power plants as if there is no tomorrow.
In terms of realpolitik, in contrast to public posturing, China has little time for decarbonisation’s urgency. In this it is not alone. The US under Trump, India and Russia — representing over 40% of global emissions — reject the climate crisis narrative. These countries are intent on prioritising economic growth over climate alarmism and debilitating Net Zero policies. They share China’s pragmatism: aspirations for economic progress trumps unproven predictions of climate catastrophe. The first order imperative of Russia, China, India and their counterparts in the developing countries are regime and national security, dependent ultimately on improving the general welfare of their citizens.
A superpower that imports its energy
Germany has the highest household electricity prices in the EU, €0.38 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) in the first half of 2025. A Verivox comparison for the second quarter of 2026 put the German household tariff at €0.36, more than five times the €0.07 paid in China. California’s residential price reached US$0.35 in April, against a national average of US$0.18 per kWh. Industrial users tell the same story. A steel mill in Germany can pay an order of magnitude more for power than a smelter in the Persian Gulf. More than 60% of the German household bill is taxes, levies and network charges – the cost of integrating weather-dependent generation and of paying for backup that must stand idle.
Germany sits on shale gas that its federal geological institute puts at 320 to 2,030 billion cubic metres of technically recoverable resource, far exceeding its conventional reserves, yet a 2016 ban keeps the frackers out while Berlin imported some 684 terawatt-hours of gas in 2025. That import dependence is a policy choice, and a bad one. Germany’s answer to the 2022 gas shock, after it sanctioned Russian gas imports to itself, was to lean harder on lignite while its last nuclear plants closed on schedule and were demolished with fanfare. Dunkelflaute, the cold, still, dark spells northern Europe undergoes, cannot be bridged by batteries at any price an economy could bear. Brussels, whose energy policy takes its cues from Berlin, is no better. Norway, outside the EU, ignores Brussels: it brought the Johan Castberg field onstream last year and its gas already covers about 30% of EU consumption. The Norwegians are not saving the planet; they are selling German’s heat.
When I worked in a major American oil company headquartered in Los Angeles in the mid-1990s, there was an “all-hands” meeting on political risk for the corporate assets from Venezuela to Indonesia. A senior vice-president told the room not to forget the political risks of the “People’s Republic of California”. I never forgot it. The state is an energy island by choice, barely tied into the continental crude network, and it has spent two decades making its own hydrocarbons inaccessible.
Mr Newsom, expected to run for president in 2028, has every incentive to dress up the numbers and his “100%” boast deserves scrutiny. His office’s earlier version of the claim defined the feat as clean power “for at least some part of the day”, which in 2025 meant an average of seven hours daily, the equivalent of about 52 full days or nearly 30% of the year to that point. Nine days out of 10; 30% of the hours. Only a fully ordained member of the climate priesthood could present such statistics as a triumph and only a credulous press corps could print it. The US Department of Energy has put the point without ornament: about 15% of California’s primary energy comes from renewables and more than 75% from oil and natural gas. The California Policy Center has called the Governor’s clean-energy claims “transparently false”. He also says the “markets are moving his way” because the Iran war has made gasoline and diesel dearer. A state that imports most of its crude oil is, to put it kindly, an odd champion of that particular claim.
No wonder Professor Fritz Vahrenholt, a former Hamburg environment senator, told Apollo News this week that Germany’s Energiewende is “not a transition, but a retreat”. German chemical turnover is down about 22% from its 2022 peak. The DIHK energy-transition barometer finds industrial firms postponing core investment and shifting production abroad. Berlin’s answer is another subsidy – an admission that the Energiewende price is incompatible with manufacturing.
Lenin’s idiots, Beijing’s beneficiaries
Now to the beneficiary. The IEA reports that China’s share of every stage of solar panel manufacturing exceeds 80%, and that coal supplies more than 60% of the electricity used to make the world’s solar panels. Western virtue is manufactured in Chinese factories fired by Chinese coal. Beijing commissioned 78 gigawatts of new coal power in 2025, the most in a decade, with proposals for a further 161 gigawatts at a record. BloombergNEF finds mainland China holding over 70% of global capacity in every major clean-tech segment it tracks, and China has shipped on the order of a trillion dollars of batteries, solar equipment, electric vehicles and wind components since 2018. The panel on a German roof or the Baidu EV in the streets of Los Angeles is the clean end of a dirty chain.
China also processes some 90% of the world’s rare earth magnets and when it throttled exports in 2025 Germany’s auto lobby warned that car production could be halted. Professor Vahrenholt’s “retreat” has a human face: Volkswagen now plans to cut 50,000 German jobs by 2030, its profit at the lowest since 2016, as it struggles against Chinese competitors. Nor is the retreat confined to Wolfsburg. Last December the European Commission, bowing to the carmakers, dropped its hard 2035 cut-off for new combustion-engine cars – a tacit admission that an industry cannot be legislated into a technology that China has already cornered.
Then comes the prize. Artificial intelligence is, at bottom, a contest over electrons. China already generates more than twice the electricity of the United States, and BloombergNEF expects it to add more than six times as much generating capacity over the next five years. Where do you suppose the data-centre builders will go: to places that treat cheap, dependable power as a strategic asset, or to the two climate champions that treat it as a moral failing? Vahrenholt’s complaint is precisely that Germany shut its reactors while China and America race for AI leadership.
Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic’s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO₂ Coalition and a former (cancelled) contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.
On September 2nd, the OECD published an 88-page report, funded by the European Union and produced in cooperation with the European Commission, setting out a framework for risk assessment of Net Zero commitments for De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB), the Dutch central bank.
The climate-alarm narrative that has underwritten a decade and a half of ‘green finance’ activism is unravelling in full public view.
On September 2nd, the OECD published an 88-page report, funded by the European Union and produced in cooperation with the European Commission, setting out a framework for risk assessment of Net Zero commitments for De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB), the Dutch central bank. It carries the OECD’s imprimatur, but Brussels paid for it and Brussels co-wrote it – an odd arrangement given that the OECD’s own membership includes a United States Treasury that has spent the past 18 months telling the IMF and the World Bank to abandon precisely this kind of work and instead refocus on narrower, more traditional mandates. Bureaucracies exist to produce reports, and reports, evidently, are what we get, however far the political winds beneath them have already shifted.
There is something almost quaint about the OECD’s involvement at all. The organisation counts among its members a United States that has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement and pushed the multilateral development banks to abandon climate lending targets. It is not obvious Washington signed off on its own club publishing an 88-page manual instructing a European central bank how to entrench climate criteria in bank supervision. But the OECD functions as a technical secretariat and when the European Commission foots the bill and co-authors the terms of reference, its imprimatur becomes less a mark of international agreement than a convenient laundering of a Brussels policy preference through an ostensibly neutral institution.
A study in search of a problem
Strip away the technical language of physical emissions-intensity metrics and disclosure frameworks, and the study’s own description of its purpose gives the game away. The study exists to help DNB assess legal and reputational risks that arise when a bank’s stated decarbonisation targets fail to keep pace with what it had pledged. Note that what is being risk-managed here is not the solvency of Dutch banks nor the stability of the payments system or anything resembling a conventional prudential concern. It is the risk that a bank might fall short of a voluntary climate pledge it was pressured into making in the first place – pressure that, as it happens, came substantially from the same Brussels apparatus that has just commissioned a study on how to police it.
The financial sector’s own direct emissions – the diesel in branch managers’ company cars, the gas boilers heating head office – are trivial, a rounding error next to the emissions of a steel mill or an airline. The entire object of the exercise is therefore not the banks’ own minor environmental footprint but the composition of their loan books: which sectors get financed cheaply and which get starved of capital or charged a premium, irrespective of their creditworthiness on ordinary commercial terms. That is not prudential regulation. It is industrial policy conducted through the back door of bank supervision, with the added advantage, from Brussels’s point of view, that it never has to pass through a legislature or face voters who might notice that their mortgage or small-business loan has become dearer because their bank has been nudged into rationing credit to ‘dirty’ sectors.
What the 88 dense pages on emissions-reporting mechanics never pause to ask is whether the Net Zero commitments being defended so elaborately are themselves durable. The European Commission’s own flagship green mandate – the effective 2035 ban on new combustion-engine cars – was quietly gutted in December, with Brussels preparing a looser regime that keeps hybrids and some fuel-burning engines on the road well into the 2040s, after sustained pressure from carmakers and Berlin. German utilities, meanwhile, reported rising coal-fired power generation through 2025 as the country’s wind fleet underperformed. If the commitments anchoring the entire monitoring framework are already being renegotiated by the very governments that made them, a risk-assessment methodology built to enforce fidelity to those commitments is practically defunct.
Net Zero as the true prudential commitment
There is a name for what happens when ‘prudential’ risk is redefined so that decarbonisation, rather than the pecuniary interests of shareholders and depositors, becomes the yardstick against which a bank’s conduct is judged. Professor John Cochrane of Stanford’s Hoover Institution put the point plainly in Senate testimony some years ago, that allowing regulators to tilt the financial playing field in favour of businesses deemed ‘green’ destroys the impartiality that financial regulation is supposed to guarantee across regions, sectors and industries. Once a central bank or its advisers begin treating a contested, multi-decade policy commitment as the organising principle of ‘prudence’, they have left the terrain of financial stability for the terrain of picking winners – precisely the politicisation of the capital-allocation process that classical liberal, shareholder-driven capitalism was designed to prevent.
This is not a new ambition; it merely refuses to die. It was Mark Carney, then governor of the Bank of England and freshly anointed a “rock star” central banker by the BBC, who set much of this machinery in motion. He urged central banks in his 2020 Reith Lecture to arm shareholders with the tools to impose their moral sentiments on company managers – a mandate far beyond any central bank’s statutory brief. The Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero that Carney built has since gone into visible retreat. Its Net-Zero Banking Alliance, once boasting well over a hundred member banks and tens of trillions of dollars in assets, voted last October to cease operations altogether after JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Citi, HSBC, Barclays and UBS all walked out rather than face antitrust and fiduciary-duty exposure at home. Yet the study now advising DNB proceeds as though none of this happened, treating Net Zero commitments as a fixed star by which prudential risk should be navigated, rather than as the fraying, politically contingent pledges they actually are.
The contrast with what is happening on the other side of the Atlantic could not be sharper. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has told the IMF and the World Bank bluntly that “mission creep has knocked these institutions off course”, arguing that both should return to their core mandates of macroeconomic stability and economic development rather than sprawling climate and social agendas. The World Bank’s board, facing that pressure alongside a shareholder coalition that included Russia and Saudi Arabia, duly retired its 45% climate-lending target at the end of June. Whatever one thinks of the coalition that produced it, the direction of travel at the Bretton Woods institutions is now unmistakably away from embedding climate objectives in the core business of finance. The European Commission, funding an OECD study to help a national central bank do exactly what Washington has just told the multilaterals to stop doing, is swimming hard against that tide – and, tellingly, doing so through an intergovernmental technical body rather than through legislation by an elected European Parliament.
The 80% reality Brussels doesn’t want to see
All of this proceeds against a physical reality that no amount of prudential re-engineering can wish away. Oil, coal and natural gas together still supply on the order of four-fifths of the world’s primary energy, a share that has barely moved despite two decades of subsidies and mandates. The energy industry’s most recent statistical review found fossil fuels’ share of global energy supply higher still, with all three fuels reaching fresh absolute highs in 2025. Wind and solar energy are growing, at least where subsidy fatigue has not fully arrived, but they are a tiny sliver of electricity generation growing on top of an expanding fossil base, not in place of it. This is the energy system that heats Dutch homes, moves Dutch freight and keeps Dutch factories running – the same ‘dirty’ sectors that an EU-funded methodology now wants Dutch banks to treat as walking prudential liabilities.
The study elaborates on physical emissions-intensity metrics to police lending to carbon-intensive sectors at the very moment the Commission’s decarbonisation mandates are increasingly being challenged by the strong performance of populist-nationalist parties across the EU. A regulatory architecture built to penalise banks for financing ‘dirty’ industry is being erected in parallel with a political retreat from the very commitments that architecture exists to enforce.
None of this is to deny that financial institutions face genuine risks worth monitoring: credit risk, liquidity risk, the risk that a borrower’s business model becomes obsolete for perfectly ordinary commercial reasons. What the DNB study does is something else. It dresses up a policy preference for reallocating capital away from the energy sources that supply four-fifths of the world’s needs as a technical exercise in prudential supervision, immunising a contestable political judgement from scrutiny. As I have argued elsewhere, once the ESG-industrial complex could no longer win the argument in the marketplace – amid fund outflows, underperformance and mounting fiduciary-duty litigation – it retreated into the regulatory machinery of central banks and financial supervisors, where the same objectives could be pursued with far less democratic friction.
We have plans for your savings…
The OECD study is one plank of a larger platform. The European Commission’s Savings and Investments Union, adopted in March 2025, starts from the observation that around 70% of EU household savings, worth some €10 trillion, sit in ordinary bank deposits rather than in capital markets. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s mission letter to the commissioner running the project was explicit about the purpose: to “unlock the substantial amount of private investment” needed for the green, digital and social transitions. The mechanism under discussion is not compulsion – nobody is proposing (yet?) to confiscate deposits – but a mix of tax incentives, new pan-European savings products and centralised supervision designed to ‘nudge’ ordinary citizens’ savings out of the bank accounts they currently sit in and into vehicles aligned with Brussels’s strategic priorities, a shift that would let policymakers determine where household wealth ultimately flows.
It is the same instinct that produced the DNB study, applied one rung further down the financial system. If a bank’s loan book must be steered away from ‘dirty’ borrowers on prudential pretexts, why not the deposits that fund those loans? Once savings are re-routed into capital-market products carrying the green, digital and defence priorities Brussels has already chosen, the question of which industries get financed is settled well upstream of any saver’s actual preferences.
Britain, despite Brexit, is running an identical playbook. Rachel Reeves’s Mansion House Accord, signed in May 2025, commits 17 of the country’s largest workplace pension providers, managing the bulk of Britain’s defined-contribution pension assets, to put at least 10% of default funds into private markets by 2030, with at least 5% earmarked for UK assets – funds the former chancellor herself has framed as unlocking money for “infrastructure, clean energy and exciting start-ups”. The agreement is voluntary for now, but the Treasury has kept reserve powers to mandate binding allocation targets if providers fail to deliver on their own. Reeves herself pointedly declined to rule out compulsion. Pension trustees are bound by fiduciary duty to act in members’ best pecuniary interests. A government reserving the right to override that judgement in favour of its own industrial and climate priorities is, in substance, the London branch office of the same project under way in Brussels and Amsterdam.
Whether the mechanism is a central-bank risk-assessment framework steering bank lending, a Brussels strategy steering household savings or a Whitehall accord steering pension defaults, the pattern repeats. Capital that would otherwise be allocated on commercial judgement by banks, savers and fiduciary trustees is instead ‘nudged’ – and held in reserve to be mandated – towards sectors that governments and their advisory bodies have already decided are virtuous. It is an un-levelling of the playing field by degrees. First the banks’ loan books, then depositors’ savings, then pensioners’ retirement funds, each step moving real resources away from the fuels that still supply four-fifths of the world’s energy and toward the industries Brussels and Westminster have chosen to prefer.
Central banks and the technical bodies that advise them are duty bound to ensure sound money, financial stability and a level playing field on which capital flows to its most productive use as judged by savers and shareholders, not by Brussels officials working from a spreadsheet of approved sectors. An institution that starts treating voluntary, wobbling, politically contested decarbonisation pledges as the master variable of ‘prudence’ has already abandoned that job. The Dutch central bank would do well to file this particular report where so many of its predecessors now belong – on a shelf, next to the retired RCP8.5 projections. Brussels and Westminster alike would do well to leave household savings and pension defaults to the savers and trustees whose money it actually is, while the real economy, still four-fifths powered by the fuels the planners would like to un-bank, gets on with the business of keeping the lights on.
Just as even paranoiacs can have enemies, so not every conspiracy theory is false.
Half a decade on, nobody of any consequence seriously doubts the lab-leak theory of Covid’s origin, and Anthony Fauci, who acted as the high priest of Covid hysteria, finds himself in contempt of Congress after pleading the 5th no fewer than 111 times.
I ask this because of a recent email exchange with a person of considerable significance to me, who has wondered whether my opposition to climate catastrophism, and the anger I feel at the damage it is doing to our societies, have so obsessed me that I have become slightly detached from reality. It’s a good question.
Just as even paranoiacs can have enemies, so not every conspiracy theory is false. To give one recent example that less disagreeable people than I would prefer to forget: in the early weeks of the Covid epidemic, the idea that it resulted from a leak in a Wuhan lab engaged in gain-of-function research was dismissed as ‘conspiracy theory’, with an extra topping of ‘raycism’ thrown in for good measure. Half a decade on, nobody of any consequence seriously doubts the lab-leak theory of Covid’s origin, and Anthony Fauci, who acted as the high priest of Covid hysteria, finds himself in contempt of Congress after pleading the 5th no fewer than 111 times. He’s done so in response to questions aimed at clarifying his role in directing US funds towards gain-of-function research in the Wuhan lab – the very lab which, back in 2020, he had vehemently denied could be responsible for creating, and allowing the escape of, the Covid virus. Vehemently denied in public, that is, though thanks to the Washington hearings, his private email correspondence now reveals that he shared with confidantes his fear that a lab leak was indeed the source of the epidemic.
Still, my belief in the existence of a vast conspiracy of silence, encompassing the IPCC, most of the mainstream media, Google and the commanding heights of the political classes of the EU, the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand to suppress any information, however authoritative its source, that might cast doubt on the need to ‘decarbonise’ their societies is certainly a big one, and it’s fair to question it.
So is my belief that climate alarmism began with a plausible hypothesis, but one which has since been emphatically disconfirmed. Not, however, before it had spawned an entire industry of grant funding, renewables grifting and organisational groupthink. And not before a culture had arisen to protect that industry, within which academics are rewarded with funding and peer approval, while dissidence is punished with ‘cancellation’ and penury.
Which brings me to the first reason to suspect that I may, after all, be quite sane. Because there are literally no social rewards for being a climate sceptic – and plenty of penalties. I can count on the fingers of one hand the people I know who share my scepticism about climate alarmism, let alone my anger at the damage it is doing. The sole reward for my position is the rather solitary one of being able to live with myself. Which is a good thing, because it’s certainly no way to make friends.
People’s reactions vary when they are confronted with my doubt that man-made ‘emissions’ are causing such damage to the planet that it makes good sense to impoverish our people, ruin our economies, hand the People’s Republic of China an industrial sword of Damocles with which to threaten us at a future time of its choosing, and to top it all off, deny the developing nations the finance they need to build the power infrastructure required to bootstrap their economies the way we, their erstwhile colonists, bootstrapped ours – because we have decided that we know better than they do what is best for them.
The true believers, and those with vested interests – for instance in the bottomless trough of renewables – are visibly angry, and accuse me of ignorance, or of being a habitué of something called Q Anon. (I’ve heard of Q Anon, but never quite fathomed what it is.)
The inner-city progressives, who haven’t a clue about the science underlying the supposed warming effect of CO2, but have been schooled to believe that adherence to the cult is a mark of civic virtue, tend to respond with that look of pity which the latter-day pharisee reserves for those he considers his moral inferiors.
Slightly less vexatious are those who pretend to engage with one’s arguments, but invariably fall back on the argument to authority – that is, that the overwhelming majority of the scientists to whose opinions they have been exposed think the alarmist hypothesis is sound. Of course the key words here are “to whose opinions they have been exposed”; few seem ever to have heard of Ian Plimer, Roy Spencer, Roger Pielke, Judith Curry or William Happer, let alone the legion of less prestigious scientists who do not, in the main, reject the hypothesis that man-made contributions to atmospheric CO2 have a warming effect, but insist that this is mild, declines logarithmically with increasing concentration, poses no threat to planetary habitability, and may, in fact, enhance it, just as Svante Arrhenius, the physicist who first hypothesised that increasing CO2 levels, whether or not of anthropogenic origin, could warm the planet and increase its fertility, predicted. And why would they have heard of these scientists, when their most likely sources of news and information are dedicated to ensuring that their voices are never heard?
And it has to be said that the week in which Jason Arday has resigned his professorship at Jesus College, Cambridge is not a good one in which to try to persuade me that the academy is a place of irreproachable intellectual purity, committed to the dispassionate pursuit of truth. Trying to argue with these people is to be constantly reminded of Mark Twain’s aphorism that it is easier to fool a man than to convince him that he has been fooled.
A tiny minority greet my scepticism with a literal or metaphorical high-five, but precious few of even this meagre cohort are of a mind to join me in declaring the Emperor naked. As I said above, there are many penalties for doing so.
But why, the least unsympathetic of my interlocutors ask, am I so angry about all this? Why, their question implies, do I not just do what most people do – go along with the consensus, settle for a quiet life, and enjoy the social rewards of tribal membership that ensue? I’ll try to answer that question, but it’s a difficult one, since the more I think about why the climate hoax angers me, the angrier I get, and I don’t particularly enjoy being angry.
Most obviously, there are the direct costs of Net Zero. I’m not an economist, so I’m far from able to calculate the amount of money it is proposed to spend on ‘decarbonising’ the world economy. However, Bloomberg suggest that around US$200 trillion will need to be spent to achieve Net Zero by 2050. Since Bloomberg are noted cheerleaders for climate woo-woo in general, and Net Zero in particular, it’s likely that that is a substantial underestimate – but let’s play their silly game and just imagine what that figure, which equates to an annual expenditure (depending on the discount rate you use) of around $2.75 trillion per annum, really means.
$2.75 trillion per annum? What’s that to get angry about? I suppose it is, literally, an unimaginable sum of money – but let’s try and imagine it, by looking at what it could buy if it weren’t being simply evaporated on the altar of climate alarmism.
According to ChatGPT, it costs about US$5 million to design, build and equip a medium-sized hospital in Zimbabwe. Let’s take that as a rough-and-ready guide for the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. If that’s so, our $2.75 trillion would buy us 550 such hospitals. This exercise was fun, and to some extent made up for the mounting anger I experienced in performing it, so I continued, and came up with a short table of Stuff We Could Buy if the Greenies Weren’t Wasting All Our Money.
All costs in approximate US$.
I could go on, but you must surely get the picture. I had to check and recheck these numbers to make sure I wasn’t overstating them by a factor of ten. Please do the same, and tell me if I’m wrong. Frankly, even if I was, the numbers would still be staggering. And these are just the direct costs of Net Zero, estimated by an organisation with an avowed belief in climate catastrophism; to paraphrase Groucho Marx, if you don’t like them, much higher estimates are available. And don’t let’s kid ourselves that the major emitters of CO2 like China and India are going to cough up any of it.
But then there are the indirect costs.
Those economies which have most assiduously pursued Net Zero have all seen the cost of their energy soar, and their economies have paid the price. They have experienced growth, in per capita terms, barely distinguishable from zero. Such anaemic GDP growth as they have enjoyed is almost entirely acquitted by their immigration.
But the consequences of energy costs bloated by renewables subsidies, together with the exorbitant costs of taming all that free wind and sun so that it doesn’t crash the grid every ten minutes – oh, and did I mention the cost of paying renewables generators not to feed their electricity into the grid when there’s too much of it? Or the cost of keeping under-utilised (and therefore over-priced) fossil-fuel generation capacity in existence and on standby for the cold, still nights when there isn’t any renewable power at all? If I didn’t, I ought to have, even if it has the disagreeable effect of making me angrier than I already am.
This extraordinary self-harm project has had the effect of steadily eliminating what vestiges of heavy industry remained in Australia and the UK, and indeed wherever it is being seriously attempted, while handing to China the job of producing what we used to produce – something it does by burning coal – while cultivating a Potemkin renewables infrastructure with which to deceive the useful idiots of the West’s green movement into believing they are on board with this stuff. And to keep buying their solar panels and windmills, all of which were supposed to be made in the West as part of the preposterously named green revolution – remember that? But then, as my interlocutor implies, maybe this is all in my deranged head.
Of course, the Net Zero zealots will insist that not spending these scarcely credible sums will result in ‘climate damage’ that exceeds them – but then they would, wouldn’t they? Bjorn Lomborg, who goes significantly further than I do in acknowledging the damaging effects of anthropogenic CO2, and who, just as much to the point, has forgotten more about economics than I’ll ever know, has laid out in exhaustive detail why the money spent on Net Zero could be much better spent on adaptation to whatever climate changes actually eventuate (as opposed to those that exist only in the computer models of the climatariat), with oodles left over for some of those hospitals, schools, submarines, etc. (see above).
Lomborg’s pretty angry about it. Just think how angry he’s going to be when he bones up on a bit of atmospheric science and realises that there really is no ‘climate crisis’, and so the costs of adaptation will be no higher than they have been throughout the history of mankind.
So that’s one source of my anger. But it’s far from the only one.
The history of human betterment is essentially a story of people obtaining usable energy from increasingly dense forms of carbon. With the sole exception of hydro – a renewable of which I thoroughly approve – there are no examples of societies becoming richer, let alone attaining the sort of prosperity we in the West have come to expect, by adopting less energy-dense fuels. None. And as my mother was fond of saying, anyone who thought pre-industrial society had a lot going for it should imagine having toothache in the 17th century.
By the 19th century, Britain, the country where I was born, had become ‘the workshop of the world’ by successfully harnessing the energy density of coal, and was beginning to discover, thanks to the efforts of that much-maligned American titan John D. Rockefeller, the even denser energy to be had from oil. It had also developed institutions that safeguarded property, enforced contracts and rewarded merit. As a consequence, it was wealthier than any country in history. Its people enjoyed an increasing lifespan, and its Navy, nourished by a proto-meritocratic culture and supplied by a chandlery, armaments and victualling infrastructure that anticipated the standardisation and mass-production techniques that would come to define the industrial revolution, enabled it to project power globally. It was therefore all but inevitable that it should become the most successful coloniser in history.
This is not the place to debate the merits of the resulting British Empire, but it is, I think, vain to deny that those of its former colonies that most closely adhered to the model of governance it bequeathed to them have enjoyed the most favourable post-colonial outcomes. Compare New Zealand with Zimbabwe, or Singapore with Sierra Leone, if you want to see what I mean. With that said, though, no society, as I’ve said earlier, has ever attained the sort of prosperity we take – at our peril – for granted, without access to abundant, on-demand energy of the kind that only fossil fuels (with the sole exception of hydro) have been shown to deliver.
Climate alarmists flatter themselves that their neo-Malthusian Gaia-bothering is saving the planet, and by extension the people who inhabit it. They are the sort of people who wring their hands at the plight of sub-Saharan African countries. They can even be heard muttering about various forms of restorative justice, involving handing over huge sums of cash to the supposed victims of British Imperial rule.
Yet these people enthusiastically abet the policy of denying World Bank finance for fossil-fuelled energy projects in those countries – most of them in sub-Saharan Africa – which most need them. “Burning carbon gave us the prosperity you crave,” they say, “but now we have discovered that our wealth was built on two centuries of ecological vandalism, and have decided to repent. And you must repent with us, by seeking your own wealth on the back of this nice, shiny, but entirely theoretical and unproven renewables technology we’ve got for you. Well, when we say ‘we’, we mean some friends of ours. Connections are so important, don’t you know?”
Not only is this a futile ploy, since China, which has no qualms about burning coal, will happily build the power stations the pious West eschews, and will thereby extend yet further its baleful geopolitical influence – it is also insufferably condescending to the Africans concerned.
Cue more anger.
Because it seems to me that if you are going to try to stifle the economic development of a large number of people less fortunate than you, you ought to be damn certain of your reasons for doing so. To persist in such a policy when your hypothesis has been repeatedly disconfirmed, and with utter disregard for the wishes of the people upon whom you are imposing it, is staggeringly unethical – and that angers me. Greatly. I suppose that’s a conspiracy theory, in strict terms, but it’s not as though these bastards are shy about it – heck, they brag about it!
So where are we up to? We’ve covered the deindustrialisation of our spavined economies. We’ve covered the stifling of developing economies by artificially depriving them of the finance they need to, er, develop. We’ve covered the eye-watering rivers of cash being doled out in pursuit of these ridiculous goals. What’s left? I know – the complete absence of any democratic mandate. I mean, if all this were really such a good idea, you’d think its advocates would have the confidence to plead its case in Parliament. But no. Both in Australia, the UK and a dozen other countries, the climatariat so captured the governing elites that swathes of sociopathic legislation passed into law without effective parliamentary scrutiny.
Whatever you think about the case for decarbonisation, you surely must have misgivings about committing such vast sums of taxpayers’ money without the semblance of a debate. A good example of this occurred in the UK, when Theresa May, desperate to leave something on the statute books that would constitute a ‘legacy’, and draw some of the attention away from her otherwise catastrophic premiership, signed Britain up to ‘Net Zero by 2050’ using secondary legislation – that is, law-making by means not of a parliamentary vote, but by the exercise of powers conferred upon her by earlier legislation.
That pretty much wraps up my catalogue of conspiracy theories or, as I prefer to think of them, reasons for being incandescently angry at the whole shoddy business of climate alarmism. There is, however, just one more point I’d like to make, and it concerns the trashing of science.
Way back in 2009, when the world learned – but tried to pretend that it hadn’t – that a group of ‘scientists’ were conspiring to evade attempts to replicate their work by a number of means, including rigging peer review to exclude from major journals any papers which cast doubt on the alarmist narrative, Professor Michael Kelly, who served on the Oxburgh Committee investigating what became known as Climategate, wrote the following:
(i) I take real exception to having simulation runs described as experiments (without at least the qualification of ‘computer’ experiments). It does a disservice to centuries of real experimentation and allows simulations output to be considered as real data. This last is a very serious matter, as it can lead to the idea that real ‘real data’ might be wrong simply because it disagrees with the models! That is turning centuries of science on its head.
He went on to write:
My overall sympathy is with Ernest Rutherford: “If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.“
Despite this trenchant criticism, the Committee felt able to exonerate the UEA scientists of any ‘intentional’ scientific misconduct – the word ‘intentional’ doing some pretty heavy lifting, it seems to me.
In truth, the scientific principles with which I was schooled have been comprehensively flouted, and the scientific academy has suffered as a result. It’s perhaps worth rehearsing just one or two of those principles.
Data beats theory, every time. To quote the great Richard Feynman: “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.” The so-called ‘climate scientists’ – remember when we had a discipline called climatology, practised by climatologists? – didn’t get the memo.
The Climategate scandal revolved around a piece of scientific deceit used by Michael Mann (whose evidence in a recent defamation case against Mark Steyn was described by the judge as constituting “bad-faith trial misconduct” and “an affront to the Court’s authority”.) to conceal the fact that the dendrological evidence, upon which he was relying to construct his famous ‘hockey-stick’ graph of temperature trajectory, having corresponded with the instrumental record quite well since instrumental records began back in the days of Newton, started to go rogue just when Mann wanted it to agree with the upward tick in temperatures that began after the Little Ice Age ended – the ‘blade’ of his ‘hockey stick’.
In defiance of Feynman, Mann simply truncated the dendrological record at the point where it parted company with observations, and spliced onto it the instrumental record for the missing years, before submitting it for publication in Nature. This was known among Mann’s cronies, prominent among them those working at the UEA, whose server contained the emails that revealed the misconduct, as ‘Mike’s Nature Trick’. The resulting graph, paired with the IPCC’s now-discredited (i.e., the IPCC has now declared it to be “implausible”) RCP8.5 model, became parents to countless pieces of climate-bothering, sociopathic legislation.
Speaking of the IPCC, here’s another of my wild-eyed conspiracy theories: it was set up to wrangle a problem that was presupposed to exist. The idea that it might at any stage in its lamentable existence have concluded that anthropogenic CO2 emissions were not really a problem, so it could wind itself up and allow its contributors to do something useful with their lives, is simply preposterous. Turkey, Christmas, etc. It is, I suppose, important to observe that the IPCC generates two reports:
the Assessment Report (AR), containing the results of the lucubration of the IPCC’s academic participants. Nobody reads the AR, apart from dastardly deniers looking for errors or, more commonly, findings which are at odds with what is to be found in
the Summary for Policy Makers (SPM). Supposed to be a simplified, but truthful distillation of the AR, comprehensible to the lay reader, and so, allegedly, suitable for informing policy-makers.
The problem with this structure is that it allows the compilers of the SPM to misrepresent aspects of the AR which they find insufficiently alarming, and to be reasonably confident that their enhancements will pass unnoticed. Conversely, it provides cover for the AR academics. If challenged by dastardly climate deniers to explain the failure of some aspect of a past SPM to agree with observations, they can point to the relevant section of the corresponding AR and say “look, we may have mentioned outcome x in our report, but we did so with ‘low confidence’ – shame that detail didn’t make it into the SPM, but the SPM’s not our responsibility, so…”
Well, I think the AR contributors are responsible for the way their work is represented in the SPMs. They were aware, year after year, that their ‘low-confidence’ (I prefer ‘garbage in, garbage out’) model RCP8.5 was being brandished as the Business as Usual (BAU) case by the activist journalists of the legacy media to persuade legislators to take ever more expensive ‘action on climate’. Even if professional etiquette did not compel it, it was a matter of simple civic duty to point out that RCP8.5 was shot through with gross exaggerations, and quite unsuitable for policy-making purposes. But that would have imperilled the increasingly lucrative climate cult, of which the IPCC was the Vatican. So instead, and despite numerous complaints (that’d be those dastardly deniers with their ridiculous conspiracy theories, again), they did nothing to correct the record.
Michael Mann’s peccadillos, and those of the British and New Zealand cronies whom he suborned, were waved aside by the closing of the ranks which has characterised climate ‘science’ ever since. Academics, having no more courage than any of us, and rightly sensing that there was little to gain but much to be lost by speaking out, have tended, if they have not joined the chorus of doom, to stay silent. One of the consequences of this browbeating of dissidents has been to create the misleading impression of an ‘overwhelming consensus’ of scientific opinion backing the alarmist narrative.
And even if such a consensus did exist, so what? Science advances by challenging consensus, not by bending to it. From Galileo, insisting that the earth was in orbit around the sun and not the other way round, to Barry Marshall, infecting himself with helicobacter pylori to test his hypothesis that it, and not stress, was the cause of peptic ulcer, the history of science is all but the history of cranks proving themselves right – overturning the prevailing consensus.
A few academic scientists, some of whom I have named above, have taken advantage of their tenured status to express their disapproval of the shenanigans necessary to keep the increasingly lucrative bandwagon on the road, but the absurdly counter-scientific notion that the science was ‘settled’ had so captured the mainstream media that organs such as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC and the Guardian, if they admit the existence of these heretics, do so only to disparage them as ‘deniers’.
But then I suppose that could just be another of my conspiracy theories.
Religion was once described as the opium of the people. Our drug of choice today is climate change. It seduces the addict with a promise of euphoria and treasure: a pot of gold, a grant or some carbon credits at the end of an alarmist rainbow. Monetizing atmospheric carbon dioxide has never been so easy and rewarding. Too much money is being made and influence peddled by too many folk claiming they can control our weather and ‘protect’ the climate.
Religion was once described as the opium of the people. Our drug of choice today is climate change. It seduces the addict with a promise of euphoria and treasure: a pot of gold, a grant or some carbon credits at the end of an alarmist rainbow. Monetizing atmospheric carbon dioxide has never been so easy and rewarding. Too much money is being made and influence peddled by too many folk claiming they can control our weather and ‘protect’ the climate.
Many countries are demanding ‘proper reparations’ and ‘climate justice’ too, with much ‘saving the planet’ hyperbole. They are part of the entrenched international racket pursuing a new utopia: ‘climate stability’. We live in an age where this fantasy destination is promoted as both desirable and achievable. Everyone must worship at the shrine of ‘decarbonisation’; everyone except China. Climate change has become a lucrative playground for countless activist lawyers, bureaucrats, computer modellers, green crusaders and politicians.
United Nations Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, recently warned that a severe El Niño will form soon in the Pacific Ocean. It will “pour fuel on the fire of a warming world”, increasing global temperatures and the risk of ‘super weather’. What if the cause of any meteorological mayhem is not, as the Secretary-General claims, the world’s “addiction to fossil fuels”, but its addiction to climate catastrophism?
Natural variability is a fact of life. Take this simple test: look in a mirror at least once a decade. Change is what nature does, without our help or influence. As George Orwell once lamented: “To see what is in front of one’s nose requires a constant struggle”. Given the stench around dodgy climate causation, add a nose peg too. Atmospheric water vapour is the most abundant greenhouse gas, not carbon dioxide. And so on and so forth.
Karl Marx’s metaphor came to mind on seeing the Minister of Climate Change and Energy defending his $150m climate presidency budget on Sunrise last month: $50 million to prepare for the thirty-first annual UN Conference of the Parties (COP) in Antalya, Turkiye, this November; and $100 million for “broader Pacific engagement”.
Mr Bowen and his “Pacific family” are high on noble-cause euphoria. Over 100 bureaucrats are involved here, presumably to reassure our Australian family that the money will be well spent. Chasing a climate chimera is an expensive exercise.
He indicated last November a pre-COP meeting would be held “at a location to be determined by our Pacific family friends”. The Prime Minister added that the presidency would enable Australia “to invite world leaders to make sure that the issues confronting this region – the very existence of Pacific island states such as Tuvalu and Kiribati, the issue of our oceans – all of those issues will be front and centre.”
A cynic might ask whether the $100m is ministerial payback for the region’s critical support in the UN General Assembly (UNGA) vote that elected Minister Bowen President of Negotiations for COP31, and on other environmental and climate votes.
COP31 was on the agenda when he visited Fiji in late August 2023 to discuss “cooperation on climate action” and how the region “could maximise the opportunities of the clean energy transformation.”
Australia’s bid for the Pacific to co-host COP31 will also be a topic of discussion, with a strong focus on maximising opportunities for the entire region. (Department of Climate Change and Energy media release, 21 August 2023)
Australia hopefully is not funding quixotic quests to control El Nino frequency and intensity; to lower sea-levels in an ocean that is almost half the planet’s total water surface area; to “enhance carbon sequestration of ecosystems”, or other dubious schemes.
Whatever the case, the government currently has several agreements with “Pacific family friends” as part of an ambitious international climate action program.
It signed the Australia-Tuvalu Falepili Union Treaty on 9 November 2023 Described as the world’s “first bilateral agreement on climate migration”, it created a “special human mobility pathway” for Tuvalu citizens to live, work, and study permanently in Australia. The Treaty came into force on 28 August 2024.Tuvalu comprises four reef islands and five coral atolls in Oceania. It has a population of about 10,000 people.
In November 2024, Minister Bowen launched the Australia-Pacific Partnership for Energy Transition (APPET) at COP29. This $50 million grant is “to support Pacific nations transitioning away from fossil fuels, improve energy security, reduce electricity costs and build the skills and tools to support the energy transition”.
There is also a 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent. Our Pacific family wants to create a “future-ready” region by “anticipating and preparing for hazardous climate events while advocating for urgent global action.”
The Blue Pacific Continent continues to experience damaging impacts of climate change and requires timely access to scaled-up, effective and sustainable climate finance.
Our ambition is that all Pacific peoples remain resilient to the impacts of climate change and disasters and are able to lead safe, secure and prosperous lives. In addition, the region continues to play a leadership role in global climate action.
In 2023 a Pacific Resilience Facility was established as “a financing institution and vehicle for funding climate change adaptation, increased resilience and disaster risk initiatives in the Pacific region, including grants for so-called “loss and damage projects”. To justify building ‘resilience’ in the climate context also requires sustainable alarmist rhetoric.
A mantra often heard in Canberra is that Australia “punches above its weight.” It certainly does so with coal, gas and iron ore exports; and solar panel, wind turbine and battery imports.
WA is already a “world leader in battery storage capacity”, according to Synergy CEO, Kurt Baker. Perth’s two-billion dollar plus Kwinana batteries can power 354,000 homes for four hours. What happens after 240 minutes is unclear, at least to me.
Roman Loosen, chief operating officer at Fluence, a battery technology company controlled by Siemens and AES, agrees with him: “Australia is clearly leading the worldwide agenda and being a lighthouse basically regarding the renewables transition.”
Few folk, however, are prepared to speculate on precisely what impact the so-called “renewables transition” will have on our weather and climate. Could it be that the expensive Net Zero projects will have zero effect? Surely not.
Has Australia punched above its weight in the climate ring? History suggests otherwise. It is “our Pacific family” of 14 islands, together with another 25 pugilistic countries that comprise the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), that have played the long game here.
How did AOSIS, with less than one percent of global GDP, territory and population, become so influential? The answer: the Alliance’s significant voting power in the UNGA.Small Island States make up 20 percent of the 193 UN member states. Each state has only one vote. Tuvalu has the same vote as Australia or the USA. UNGA voting is by consensus. When the UN was created in 1945 only 51 countries joined as founding members. Another 142 countries have joined it in the past 81 years.
AOSIS formed as an intergovernmental group in 1990, just before the Second World Climate Conference in Geneva. It emerged from a 1989 Small State Conference on Sea Level Rise in the Maldives, where a decision was taken to fight the “threats of global warming and rising sea levels”. No small island developing state has vanished under the ocean in the past 36 years.
AOSIS’s primary goal in global climate policy is ensuring the physical survival of its member nations by aggressively combating global warming and its resulting sea-level rise. Because small island developing states (SIDS) are disproportionately vulnerable to environmental destruction while contributing less than 1% of global greenhouse emissions, their unified diplomatic platform prioritizes two main areas within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC):
Limiting Global Warming to 1.5°C, the “1.5 to Stay Alive” standard: AOSIS pioneered the push to strictly cap global temperature increases at 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, warning that a 2°C rise represents an existential threat to low-lying countries; and
Ambitious mitigation targets: AOSIS demands rapid and legally binding emission reductions from major industrialized nations, arguing that those most responsible for environmental damage must bear the greatest responsibility.
On May 20, 2026, AOSIS achieved one of its goals. UNGA passed a resolution (Draft Resolution A/80/L.65) backing the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice of 23 July 2025: Obligations of States with respect to Climate Change.
Nations now have obligations under international law to ensure “protection of the climate system and other parts of the environment from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.” Some of them, including Australia, may one day have to pay “reparations” to allegedly climate-vulnerable Pacific communities.
The resolution was supported by 141 states, including Australia, the EU and most developing nations. Eight states voted against it, including some of the world’s biggest oil and gas producers: USA, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Belarus, Iran, Israel and Yemen. There were 28 abstentions, including India and Türkiye.
While the UNGA resolution and ICJ advisory opinion are not legally binding, they are important. UN Secretary-General António Guterres praised the vote as a “powerful affirmation” of climate justice and international law.
Ironically, the diplomatic push here came from our Pacific family punching above its weight. Vanuatu‘s prime minister, Jotham Napat, said the resolution was the start of a “new chapter” in climate action. “The task before all of us now is to translate legal clarity into meaningful action, stronger cooperation, and greater protection for present and future generations.”
Will climate litigation now become the most lucrative game on the planet after AI and the World Cup? The so-called “climate-vulnerable” communities, the small island states and other developing countries are dancing a resilience-and-reparations tango with renewed vigour.
In our age of post-normal science monetizing climate change clearly continues to corrupt research, governments and international agencies. Orwell again: “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” A pot of gold at the end of an alarmist rainbow corrupts language and thought too.
The above essay was first published in Australia at Quadrant Online on 19 June, 2026
The Office for Budget Responsibility has published its latest Economic & Fiscal Outlook, following the Chancellor’s Spring Statement this week. The Outlook contains details on the Government’s tax and spending plans for the next five years.
The Office for Budget Responsibility has published its latest Economic & Fiscal Outlook, following the Chancellor’s Spring Statement this week. The Outlook contains details on the Government’s tax and spending plans for the next five years.
It offers a stark reminder of how much we are already spending on Net Zero and how much this will increase in coming years.
Starting with Ed Miliband’s Department of Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) itself, RDEL, day-to-day spending, is running at £2 billion a year. On top of that, CDEL or capital spending adds up to £53 billion for the five years to 2029/30:
A total of £60.7 billion, pretty much all of which could be saved if the Department was shut down, as it should be.
The OBR also include in their figures what are called “Environmental Levies”. These are levies added to energy bills because of government policy. They are all directly or indirectly subsidies for renewable energy. (Note that the Renewable Heat Incentive, which pays subsidies to households to fit renewable heat systems, such as biomass boilers, is funded out of taxation.)
These various subsidy schemes are expected to cost £15.2 billion, rising to £19.8 billion in five years’ time.
Levies are paid via our energy bills, while DESNZ costs are funded through taxation. But one way or another, we will be paying more than £150 billion in the next five years for the obsession with Net Zero.
We can add to these costs the climate change levy, an environmental tax introduced in April 2001. It applies to the non-domestic use of certain forms of energy, including electricity and gas, with the primary aim of encouraging businesses to improve energy efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This raises £1.8 billion a year currently and impacts the rest of us through higher prices.
Similarly with the Emission Trading Scheme, which raises over £3 billion a year. This penalises electricity producers and heavy industry for using fossil fuels. This tax directly impacts the price we pay for electricity. It has been estimated that the ETS alone is adding 10% to electricity bills, as it increases the cost of gas generation, which in turn tends to set the wholesale price.
Both the CCL and ETS are damaging the competitiveness of UK industry.
These costs are only the tip of the iceberg, as far as Net Zero is concerned. They are only the items that appear on the government’s balance sheet.
They do not include, for instance, the £80 billion OFGEM have said needs to be spent in the next five years on the electricity grid, specifically to make it Net Zero ready. Or the £200 billion which has been estimated to upgrade the electricity distribution network, the low-voltage system which brings power into our towns and homes, and which will be needed to cater for the extra electricity we will need for electric cars and heat pumps.
Nor does it include the costs imposed on households and businesses, forced to pay for unaffordable heat pumps, electric cars and decarbonisation nonsense.
In a commentary article in the Financial Post on Tuesday, Bjørn Lomborg argues that Net Zero is “on its way out”, as politicians across the world face up to the high cost and tiny climate returns of raising energy prices. With voters “weary of soaring energy bills and annoyed by increasingly hysteric and patronising climate rhetoric”, governments from the US to UK, Germany to Australia are waking up to the “simple truth”: “aggressive Net Zero mandates are delivering economic pain for unmeasurable and far-off climate gain”. Lomborg senses “a new pragmatism” entering the climate debate.
In a commentary article in the Financial Post on Tuesday, Bjørn Lomborg argues that Net Zero is “on its way out”, as politicians across the world face up to the high cost and tiny climate returns of raising energy prices. With voters “weary of soaring energy bills and annoyed by increasingly hysteric and patronising climate rhetoric”, governments from the US to UK, Germany to Australia are waking up to the “simple truth”: “aggressive Net Zero mandates are delivering economic pain for unmeasurable and far-off climate gain”. Lomborg senses “a new pragmatism” entering the climate debate.
Lomborg takes the example of United Kingdom, whose Net Zero law enacted in 2019 committed it to zero emissions by 2050. “Hailed as bold leadership, its reality has been economic sabotage” as the UK’s industrial electricity prices surged at four times the increase in the US- leaving the UK with the highest power rates in the Western world.
While Prime Minister Keir Starmer is reportedly preparing to delay or dilute key green commitments to curb “voter revolt”, Reform UK, leading the national polls by far, promises to end Net Zero targets when the party comes to power. Kemi Badenoch, leader of the Conservatives, pledged in 2025 to repeal the Climate Change Act. Lomborg notes the retreat from penurious green policies in the EU, Germany, Australia, Japan and even in Democrat states in the US.
So how does the Western painful dalliance with Net Zero end, according to Lomborg? He finds promise in the about-turn declared by philanthropist Bill Gates who seems to have had an epiphany about the costs of Net Zero. Lomborg is on the same page as Gates. In his long memo ahead of the COP30 climate summit, Gates called for attending states to face up to “three tough truths”: climate change is serious but “will not lead to humanity’s demise”, temperature is not the best measure of progress, and our best defences against climate change are better health and increased prosperity.
What can governments – made more “pragmatic” in the face of voter revolts – do in response to all the money wasted on futile Net Zero policies which cost far more than their presumed (and speculative) long-term ‘benefits’? Lomborg, like Gates, is a techno-optimist, and he sees hope in government-funded research “to achieve breakthroughs in nuclear, carbon capture, geo-engineering and far more efficient green-energy generation and storage”.
The Lomborg Conundrum Bjørn Lomborg occupies a curious and increasingly uncomfortable position in the climate wars. To climate activists, he is a dangerous heretic who undermines the urgency of ‘The Science’ by questioning the costs of Net Zero. To many skeptics, he is a frustrating near-ally who dismantles the climate policy edifice brick by brick — only to stop short of questioning its foundations.
Lomborg insists that climate change is real, that CO2- driven warming is a problem and that humanity must ultimately ‘solve’ it. Yet he also argues, persuasively, that the costs of current climate policies vastly exceed their benefits, and that trillions are being squandered on symbolic decarbonisation while far more urgent human needs go unmet.
This intellectual tension- between scepticism about policy and faith in the premise defines Lomborg’s conundrum. He rightly rejects Net Zero as economically ruinous but still accepts the moral framing that elevates man-made CO2 to a civilisational threat in the first place. He denounces coercive regulation and carbon taxes but places hope in large-scale, government-funded research and development to deliver future technological salvation. In doing so, Lomborg offers a critique that is incisive but incomplete — and ultimately justifying the very climate orthodoxy he seeks to reform.
Lomborg’s most valuable contribution has been to puncture the illusion that climate mitigation is a ‘free lunch’ or ‘win-win’. He draws on the work of William Nordhaus, the Nobel prize winning economist who is well known for “integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis”. Lomborg treats climate change as a long-term economic externality whose damages, while real, are modest relative to the benefits of growth. The central error of Net Zero policies, he argues, is not that they fail to reduce emissions but that they impose crushing costs today for vanishingly small benefits decades hence.
What was sold as ‘green growth’ has now revealed itself as no growth.
Lomborg has been clear-eyed about this retreat, describing it not as moral failure but as political reality. He notes that governments are discovering that climate virtue cannot be eaten, worn or used to heat homes. The lived experience of voters has finally punctured the abstractions of climate modelling. On this terrain, Lomborg, the sceptical environmentalist has done more than most to restore economic realism to a debate long dominated by moral theatrics.
Yet for Lomborg this retreat from Net Zero seems merely tactical. The destination- deep decarbonisation- remains appropriate, only the route is wrong. This insistence is where his analysis begins to raise questions among others who also call themselves sceptics.
Techno-Optimism and the Mirage of State-Led Innovation If Lomborg’s critique of Net Zero is grounded in economics, his proposed alternative rests on faith in the powers of planners. He repeatedly returns to the same solution: massive public investment in research and development to deliver breakthroughs in clean energy.
Advanced nuclear, carbon capture and storage, better batteries, green hydrogen, even geoengineering- all are invoked by Lomborg as future tools that will make decarbonisation cheap, painless and politically palatable. Lomborg has consistently advocated government investments in green R&D. He even cites studies that purport to show that “every dollar invested in green R&D could prevent $11 in long-term climate damages, making it arguably the most effective global climate policy available”.
Lomborg aligns closely with Bill Gates whose own climate evangelism has undergone a tactical rebranding in recent years. Gates, like Lomborg, rejects degrowth and hair-shirt austerity. He promises instead that innovation — funded and guided by governments — will square the circle between climate goals and prosperity. The link between Gates, who holds himself out as a private philanthropist, and the Lomborg solution of private-public funding of large-scale environmental R&D came under stress as the Trump administration’s DOGE initiatives began to bite.
With the end of USAID and its folding into the State Department, Gates went on record to blame the end of USAID, saying: “The things USAID fund – I fund.” Bill Gates isn’t happy about DOGE cutting funding to projects he’s also involved in. This, some would say, should tell you all you need to know.
But this shared techno-optimism is precisely where Lomborg’s brand of environmental scepticism deserts him. The history of state-directed innovation is not one of elegant breakthroughs and timely miracles. It is a history of misallocated capital, political capture, crony capitalism and technological white elephants. Governments do not ‘pick winners’; they subsidise incumbents, entrench failures and reward those best able to navigate bureaucracies rather than markets. More often than not, it is losers who pick governments.
Take the example of the Ivanpah solar power project, one of the most expensive green energy projects ever undertaken in American history, costing $2.2 billion to build. Benjamin Zycher of the American Enterprise Institute put the promise of the solar power project in California’s Mojave Desert this way:
It was the future. It would demonstrate how to save the planet. It would produce electricity clean and cheap and immune to the vagaries of international shifts in prices, interest rates, currency exchange values and the caprice of foreign governments. It was a demonstration of the massive achievements possible from public-private ‘partnerships’, that is, central planning American style.
After failing to meet its targets, it is set to shut down in 2026 “after eating up massive amounts of taxpayer dollars and killing thousands of birds”.
Britain’s disastrous carbon capture and storage (CCS) project offers another case in point. After decades and billions in subsidies, the technology remains commercially marginal, energy-hungry and dependent on permanent public support. Grid-scale batteries face material constraints that no amount of funding can wish away, as the example of Massachusetts shows. GM, Ford, and other big car makers are “waving white flags” after huge losses and layoffs from their electric vehicle ventures.
These are not failures of imagination or underfunding. They are constraints imposed by the very nature of public sector funding. Lomborg understands these realities when he criticises climate policy mandates. Yet he suspends disbelief when the same political systems are recast as benevolent patrons of innovation.
The Premise Lomborg Will Not Abandon This is the heart of Lomborg’s conundrum. He accepts that climate change is “a problem”, even as he shows repeatedly that it is dwarfed by other challenges and grossly inflated by policy responses. He argues that adaptation is cheaper than mitigation, that growth saves lives and that energy poverty kills far more people than climate variability.
Yet he stops short of asking the obvious question: if the man-made CO2 problem is small, distant and manageable, why must it remain central at all?
Across the Atlantic, under Donald Trump, the United States has answered that question bluntly. Climate alarmism has been labelled a hoax, international climate institutions such as the IPCC and the UNFCC defunded, Paris-style multilateralism abandoned. Whatever one thinks of Trump’s rhetoric, the underlying shift reflects a broader reassessment: climate policy has delivered higher costs, lower resilience and no measurable climatic benefit.
Lomborg watches this reversal with a mixture of admiration and unease. He welcomes the rejection of Net Zero but not the rejection of climate exceptionalism itself. He wants climate policy to be cheaper, smarter- but still morally privileged.
A more thoroughgoing realism, as put across by President Trump in his speech to the UN, would go further. It would recognise that modest warming (whatever its cause) is not an existential threat. It would abandon global temperature targets as technocratic fantasies. It would prioritise energy abundance, resilience and adaptation over decarbonisation. And it would treat climate as one variable among many in the complex equation of human welfare.
Lomborg has performed a valuable service in exposing the economic wreckage of Net Zero and the hollowness of green utopianism. But by clinging to the premise that climate change must ultimately be “solved” through policy-directed and publicly funded innovation, he gives credence to the very worldview he criticises. His halfway house reassures moderates, comforts elites, and irritates activists- while leaving untouched the deeper error that made Net Zero plausible in the first place.
Until that premise is confronted, Lomborg will remain an ambiguous figure – demonised by climate ideologues, praised by pragmatists, yet tethered to an idea whose time seems to have quietly passed.
Originally published in Daily Scepticon January 27, 2026.
Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO2 Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.
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There was a time when publication in Nature signaled restraint. Not correctness, not consensus, but seriousness: an awareness of uncertainty, an allergy to grand prescriptions, and a reluctance to turn provisional findings into marching orders. That version of Nature treated science as a method, not a ministry.
There was a time when publication in Nature signaled restraint. Not correctness, not consensus, but seriousness: an awareness of uncertainty, an allergy to grand prescriptions, and a reluctance to turn provisional findings into marching orders. That version of Nature treated science as a method, not a ministry.
The version now publishing climate-policy optimization exercises like “Large carbon dioxide emissions avoidance potential in improved commercial air transport efficiency” operates very differently. It does not merely describe the world. It scolds it. It does not explore trade-offs. It resolves them in advance. It does not ask whether its preferred objectives are justified. It assumes they are, and then works backward to discipline behavior accordingly.
This is not an aviation paper in any meaningful sense. Aviation is the prop. The real subject is moral instruction — how people ought to travel, how airlines ought to behave, and how policy ought to coerce them when they fail to comply.
The collapse of Nature from scientific journal to nagging preacher is not subtle anymore. This paper is a clean, almost didactic example.
The authors begin with the now-ritual framing: aviation emissions are growing, technological progress is insufficient, and therefore “efficiency gains will be an important pillar of any decarbonisation strategy”. Notice what is absent already. There is no serious interrogation of whether the scale of the problem warrants the scale of intervention implied. There is no cost-benefit framing in any human sense. The premise is treated as settled.
From that point on, the paper becomes an exercise in moralized accounting. A single metric — grams of CO2 per revenue passenger kilometer — is elevated to supreme status. Everything that does not optimize this metric is reclassified as inefficiency, regardless of why it exists.
Comfort becomes inefficiency. Choice becomes inefficiency. Redundancy becomes inefficiency. Even economic viability is treated as a secondary consideration, mentioned only as a constraint to be overcome.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the discussion of seating configurations. The authors write, approvingly:
“Business and first class seats are up to 5 times more CO₂-intense than economy class seats… An all-economy class configuration would consequently reduce emissions.”
This is presented not as a descriptive observation, but as a normative indictment. The existence of premium seating is framed as a moral failure of the system. The fact that passengers willingly pay for space, privacy, or flexibility is not treated as data. It is treated as pathology.
The market signal — perhaps the cleanest empirical signal in economics — is ignored. Instead, the authors propose that emissions could be reduced by forcing aircraft into maximum seating density, increasing passenger numbers by as much as 57%, with only a “small fuel penalty” .
This is where the paper’s tone quietly shifts from analysis to instruction. It is no longer asking how aviation operates. It is telling aviation how it should operate, under the assumption that emissions minimization overrides all other values.
The same logic appears in the fixation on load factors. We are told that average load factors of 78.9% are insufficient, and that a hypothetical 95% load factor would reduce emissions by another 16.1% . What is glossed over is what such load factors actually imply: fewer flights, less slack in the system, tighter scheduling, diminished resilience to disruptions, and a travel experience increasingly indistinguishable from livestock transport.
The authors briefly acknowledge that achieving this would require “considerably reduced capacity” and policy intervention, but this is treated as an implementation detail, not a fundamental trade-off. The possibility that resilience, redundancy, and flexibility have value is never seriously entertained.
This is moral preening masquerading as efficiency. The message is not that emissions can be reduced. The message is that passengers should expect less — less comfort, less choice, less accommodation — and that resistance to this outcome is a problem to be managed.
The paper is explicit about that. In its conclusions, it states:
“New policies and policy corrections are needed to accelerate efficiency gains in aviation.”
Resistance, we are told, “must be expected,” because airlines operate under economic constraints and expectations of growth. That sentence alone reveals the posture. Economic constraints are not signals; they are obstacles. Expectations of growth are not preferences; they are moral failings.
This is sermonizing with equations.
What makes this particularly striking is the paper’s technocratic confidence in its own ability to redesign a complex adaptive system. Aviation is treated as a mechanical assembly of levers: aircraft type, seating layout, load factor. Adjust the levers, and the system obediently optimizes.
Absent from the discussion is any serious treatment of failure modes. There is no exploration of how hub-and-spoke networks respond to reduced slack. No discussion of how safety margins interact with density. No accounting for how airlines hedge risk through fleet diversity and differentiated products. These are not minor omissions. They are the substance of how real systems survive.
Instead, we are offered cap models, intensity thresholds, and regulatory analogies to washing machine energy labels. The authors suggest CO2intensity caps as a governance tool, explicitly drawing parallels to appliance standards and insurance bonus-malus schemes .
This analogy alone should disqualify the argument from a serious journal. A commercial aviation network is not a refrigerator. It is a globally interdependent system operating under safety constraints that tolerate very little error. Treating it as a consumer appliance awaiting regulation is not just naïve; it is dangerous.
Yet Nature publishes this without blinking.
Perhaps the most revealing irony in the paper appears when the authors briefly admit that one of the flagship climate policies — sustainable aviation fuel mandates — may actually worsen outcomes:
“Paradoxically, this legislation could lead to an increase in overall warming, even if quotas are successfully met, if total fuel use increases faster than the share replaced with SAF.”
In an older scientific culture, this would have been a red flag. A moment for pause. Evidence that the system does not respond linearly to intervention.
Here, it is treated as a footnote on the way to recommending more policy. The conclusion is not that policy may be the wrong tool, but that different policies — efficiency caps, penalties, ratings, and fees — must be layered on.
This is the circular logic that now dominates climate policy discourse. Policy fails. The failure is not evidence against intervention. It is evidence that intervention was insufficiently ambitious.
Science, properly understood, is supposed to break such loops. Nature once did that work. Now it legitimizes the loop.
The deeper problem is institutional. Publication in Nature confers authority. It signals to policymakers, journalists, and regulators that “this is what the science says.” But this paper does not say what the science says. It says what the authors want society to value.
CO2 per RPK, (Revenue Passenger Kilometre), is not a law of nature. It is a chosen metric. Choosing it as supreme is a value judgment. Deciding that comfort, choice, and resilience must yield to it is a moral decision. None of this is acknowledged as such.
Instead, normative claims are laundered through technical language until they appear inevitable. Once that laundering is complete, dissent becomes ignorance, and skepticism becomes obstruction.
That is how journals become preachers.
The rot does not stop with Nature itself. If the flagship journal has become preachy, its specialist offspring—most notably Nature Climate Change—have become something worse: a containment zone for arguments that are too nakedly normative, too speculative, or too politically eager to survive scrutiny in the parent journal. What does not quite pass as “general science” is rerouted into a venue where the audience is narrower, the priors are aligned, and the conclusions are rarely surprising. There, the moral framing is no longer implicit. It is the point. Papers routinely blur the boundary between analysis and exhortation, between describing risks and prescribing social reorganization, all under the protective branding of Nature.
Even more troubling is the illusion of rigor. While Nature Climate Change carries the prestige of the brand, it does not consistently carry the same level of adversarial peer review that once defined it. Reviewers are often drawn from the same tight epistemic community, steeped in the same assumptions, rewarded for the same conclusions. The result is not fraud or fabrication, but something more insidious: a soft consensus factory, where weak models, speculative impacts, and policy-forward narratives receive far less resistance than readers are led to believe. The journal functions less as a filter than as an amplifier. What emerges is not settled science, but settled attitude — and that attitude then flows upstream, cited, echoed, and laundered into inevitability by policymakers and journalists alike.
In that sense, Nature Climate Change increasingly functions as an institutional pressure valve. It absorbs the most overtly prescriptive, least self-critical material, allowing the flagship journal to preserve a veneer of restraint while the broader Nature ecosystem advances a far more aggressive normative agenda. The brand continuity does the rest. To policymakers and journalists, a paper in Nature Climate Change is still “a Nature paper,” carrying an implied authority few will interrogate. This division of labor is convenient: advocacy is outsourced, credibility is retained, and the boundary between science and sermon is blurred without ever being formally crossed. What emerges is a publishing architecture that shields ideology behind prestige, while quietly lowering the epistemic bar where it matters most.
When scientific journals create specialty outlets to house certainty they can no longer defend under adversarial review, the problem is no longer bias. It is institutional self-preservation.
At this point, the specific aviation paper almost no longer matters. It has served its purpose. What remains in view is a publishing culture that no longer treats skepticism as a virtue, restraint as a discipline, or uncertainty as an obligation. The problem is not that Nature and its satellites publish flawed papers — that has always been true of science — but that they now publish them with moral confidence,institutional protection, and an unmistakable sense of righteousness. When journals cease to ask where the limits of their knowledge lie, and instead focus on where compliance must be extracted, they stop functioning as scientific institutions at all. They become instruments of persuasion, dressed in equations, animated by a conviction that being on the “right side” of history absolves them from the harder work of being careful.
The tragedy is not that Nature publishes climate papers. It is that it no longer seems capable of publishing skepticism — not denial, but skepticism in its proper sense: disciplined uncertainty, careful boundary-drawing, and resistance to moral certainty.
When a journal trades those virtues for advocacy, it does not become more relevant. It becomes louder. And like all nagging preachers, it eventually discovers that scolding people into submission works far less well than understanding them in the first place.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Just a few years ago, Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) was expected to be the saviour of the oil and gas industry, as major fossil fuel firms invested heavily in CCS activities aimed at decarbonising operations. Governments worldwide have encouraged companies to invest in CCS in recent years, funding green energy projects to help reduce the carbon emitted from oil and gas operations, and to allow countries to continue using fossil fuels to bridge the energy gap over the coming decades. However, as we see delays in the rollout of CCS projects and more evidence that suggests most CCS installations do not work as well as anticipated, many are questioning whether investing in this type of decarbonisation is viable.
Governments and fossil fuel firms have invested billions in CCS, but delays, glitches, and cost overruns have slowed progress.
Evidence shows many CCS and DAC facilities are capturing far less carbon than promised, shaking investor and public confidence.
Critics warn that overreliance on CCS could divert crucial funding away from long-term renewable energy development.
Just a few years ago, Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) was expected to be the saviour of the oil and gas industry, as major fossil fuel firms invested heavily in CCS activities aimed at decarbonising operations. Governments worldwide have encouraged companies to invest in CCS in recent years, funding green energy projects to help reduce the carbon emitted from oil and gas operations, and to allow countries to continue using fossil fuels to bridge the energy gap over the coming decades. However, as we see delays in the rollout of CCS projects and more evidence that suggests most CCS installations do not work as well as anticipated, many are questioning whether investing in this type of decarbonisation is viable.
CCS involves capturing carbon dioxide at emission sources, to be transported and stored or buried in a suitable deep, underground location. There is now a range of CCS technologies being used in fossil fuel and industrial operations worldwide, including conventional CCS installations and direct air capture (DAC), which removes CO2 directly from the atmosphere.
Following significant support from governments and fossil fuel companies worldwide, the CCS market could attract as much as $80 billion in investment by 2030, to support an anticipated 270 million tons of carbon dioxide capture a year. However, many scientists now suggest that financing CCS is a waste of money, as the technology does not work as effectively as previously expected, and it could detract from funding long-term green energy projects. A new report suggests that globally, the maximum reduction that CCS operations could achieve for the atmosphere would be 0.7 degrees Celsius, which is far short of the 5 °C to 6 °C industry and governments claim.
The U.K. has committed $40.5 billion to CCS technology in support of its net-zero emissions aims for 2050. The country hopes to find a way to reduce emissions in the mid-term as it gradually incorporates more renewable energy capacity into the energy mix, while it continues to rely heavily on oil and gas for power and heating. However, getting CCS projects off the ground has been no easy feat, with decades of delays under several governments.
The increased funding into CCS technology in recent years is supposed to have led to technological improvements and design innovation that will help suck more carbon from the sky. However, technology glitches and the high costs associated with installing CCS equipment have delayed projects and deterred companies from investing in CCS operations. Thilo Trabner, a business development manager for the Zurich-based CSS provider ABB, explained, “First-of-a-kind technology challenges continue to contribute to delays in some projects, and reliance on subsidies and offtake agreements continues to play a critical role in project viability.”
Some of the projects for the U.K. include a gas power plant on Teesside in the north of England, which is expected to be operational by 2028, with plans to capture 95 percent of its emissions – around 2 million tonnes a year, and capacity to transport and store up to 4 million tonnes of carbon a year. Another three projects in the first round of the project pipeline are under negotiation, with plans to capture carbon from a methane-based blue hydrogen plant and energy from waste.
In Switzerland, one of the world’s most well-known CCS companies, Climeworks, announced in May that it would be cutting its workforce by more than 10 percent, citing economic uncertainty and “reduced momentum” for CCS technology. Climeworks is famous for constructing the world’s first DAC facilities. However, the company has come under fire as two of its flagship plants in Iceland were found to be capturing significantly less carbon than originally anticipated. Climeworks said that it was uncertain whether a third facility planned for the U.S. would go ahead due to the uncertain energy environment under President Trump.
DAC technology is much more expensive than conventional CCS equipment, but many companies have invested in DAC activities in recent years in response to government pressure to decarbonise. Now, recent reviews suggest that DAC technology is struggling to grow out of the pilot phase, as interest in the sector wanes. Climeworks said that at its flagship Mammoth plant in Iceland, which is thought to have a carbon capture capacity of 36,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, the equipment captured just 750 tonnes in the first 10 months of operations.
The outlook for CCS technology is uncertain. In recent years, several governments, industries, and oil and gas companies have invested heavily in CCS technology in a bid to decarbonise. However, many of the planned projects have been delayed due to technological constraints and high costs. Now, reports on existing CCS activities suggest that the technology may not be working as successfully as anticipated, which has cooled investor interest in the sector and could cause progress in the CCS rollout to stall in the coming years.
Felicity Bradstock
Felicity Bradstock is a freelance writer specialising in Energy and Finance. She has a Master’s in International Development from the University of Birmingham, UK.
Mining giant BHP has dumped plans to build a major renewable energy project at its flagship iron ore operations, sparking claims the company is slowly walking away from efforts to decarbonise.
In 2023, BHP announced it would spend about $US2 billion ($3 billion) building more than 500 megawatts of large-scale wind, solar and battery projects to clean up and electrify its iron ore business in Western Australia’s Pilbara region.
…
But internal BHP documents seen by the ABC show the miner binned the plans last year because of budget cuts.
The company instead suggested it would pursue other “commercial arrangements” to bring on renewable energy projects.
“Due to capital constraints, the project has ceased,” BHP noted in one document seen by the ABC.
“Its scope has been transferred to the larger WAIO [WA Iron Ore] renewables program which seeks to deliver renewables through commercial arrangements,” the document read.
…
The cancellation of the so-called ‘Inland Solar PV’ project comes amid what one analyst described as a “cooling” by BHP on broader decarbonisation efforts.
When you look at the energy requirements of miners it becomes obvious solar was never going to deliver.
According to an article in PV Magazine, BHP’s Pilbara operation uses 1500 Megalitres of fuel per year for over 1000 pieces of mining equipment, along with a 158 Megawatt electricity generator.
Replacing all that with solar and batteries would need a lot of solar and batteries, which would have to operate in one of the harshest environments on Earth.
The Pilbara (21º South) alternates between an arid desert climate, with conditions comparable to Death Valley, occasionally interrupted in Summer by extreme tropical cyclones barrelling off the Indian Ocean. Neither would be good news for the longevity of fragile renewable installations.
A small nuclear plant might take the pressure off supplying fuel to that 158Mw generator. it also seems likely some of that mining equipment is only running on diesel because for now diesel is the most efficient option, but could be converted to run on electricity if an affordable and reliable electricity option was available.
But until Australia comes to its senses on the nuclear issue, those diesel trains and trucks will continue to supply the mines of Australia’s remote North West for the foreseeable future.
Update (EW): MGUY’s hilarious take on the issue.
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