Climate Alarm and โ€œGreenโ€ Energy: Protest from San Antonio

San Antonio attorney Stanley Bernstein posted on social media (July 6, 2026) about the feelings of many of his neighbors about electric rate inflation from (not-so) โ€œgreenโ€ energy. โ€œSan Antonio has spent and lost billions chasing the green energy hype,โ€ he began.

From Master Resource

By Robert Bradley Jr.

San Antonio attorney Stanley Bernstein posted on social media (July 6, 2026) about the feelings of many of his neighbors about electric rate inflation from (not-so) โ€œgreenโ€ energy. โ€œSan Antonio has spent and lost billions chasing the green energy hype,โ€ he began. โ€œDuring that time, electric rates have increased, the City of San Antonio is facing millions of dollars in budget deficits, and thousands of potential jobs have been lost.โ€

Bernstein also shared a testimonial from respected local meteorologist, Steve Brown, stating:

Many people in the San Antonio area have trusted and relied on Steve Brown as their go-to meteorologist for decades. I hope youโ€™ll take the time to read what he has to say [below] as he speaks the truth.

A Meteorologist Protest

โ€œI [Steve Brown] have been following the global warming er climate change story closely for half a century. Iโ€™ve heard all the hyperbole from politicians who keep predicting apocalypse right around the corner. Those milestones (the ice caps will melt, our cities will be underwater) keep coming and the doomsayers keep shouting. In 2018 one politician declared this is our World War 3! The world will end in 18 years! That end is less than 4 years away and little has changed.

There is no question CO2 levels have risen. Weโ€™re at 430 ppm and climbing every year. Global temps have warmed too by about 2ยฐ F in the past century. I accept that some of that warming is related to CO2 levels. But I also know that global temps have changed both up and down in the past. There absolutely was a medieval warm period and also a little ice age in the past 2,000 years. Both of those periods are well documented and had zero to do with CO2 levels. I also know that 430 parts per million sounds scary but in reality it means CO2 levels are now at 0.04%. Thatโ€™s up a whole 0.01% in the last century.

Children, like Greta Thunberg have been brainwashed to believe that 0.01% means the end is near. She shouts shame on us but the real shame is on her brainwashed teachers, our brainwashed media and our brainwashed politicians. It pains me to see so many of our children and young adults have been fed a diet of doom and gloom for all of their young lives. Thatโ€™s the real shame.

Iโ€™m happy to see that more and more scientists came out this past year and went on the record to say this climate change thing is out of control. This is not apocalypse now. Letโ€™s cool the rhetoric. The world is not going to end in 2030.

We all know that most of the worldโ€™s energy comes from fossil fuels and when you burn them you raise CO2 levels. The world is slowly changing to more renewable sources of energy and thatโ€™s okay but there is no imminent threat to life on earth. Chill out already.

How do I know that there is no imminent threat? Earthโ€™s climate history. 200 million years ago CO2 levels were at least 5 times higher than they are today. The planet was warmer by 10-15ยฐF. There were no ice caps. The earth was teeming with life. Plant life flourished everywhere, on land, at the poles and even in the ocean. The herbivores, the animals that ate the plants were huge. Dinosaurs ruled. Life was abundant and it was all possible because CO2 levels were extremely high.

Over millions of years the plants slowly used up the CO2 in the atmosphere and died. They sank to the bottoms of oceans and got buried. CO2 levels dwindled. Plants had to adapt to utilize the CO2 left. They developed more and more stomata to do so. The increased stomata gave off more water vapor, so the plants needed more water just to survive. Many did not. The deserts expanded.

Along came humans. First, we tamed wood fires. Then we discovered these vast fossilized plant deposits we call coal and gas that burned even better. They burned hotter and longer. We burned them to make steam and electricity to power our factories. We burned them in internal combustion engines to move our cars, boats and planes. We dug up these buried carbon deposits and burned them to fuel our entire civilization. We unleashed CO2 back into the ecosystem. Is this all bad? I say itโ€™s good.

All the life around us depends on atmospheric CO2. All of our food comes from CO2. Through the miracle of photosynthesis, it gets converted to grass to cows to our dinner plates but it all comes from CO2. Without CO2 in the air weโ€™d all starve. CO2 is the gas of life.

I wish the negative nellies in our media, our schools and our politicians would listen to what the real scientists are finally admitting. This is not the end of the world folks. In fact, it may be just the beginning of a much greener world. Cheersโ€


AI profile: โ€œSteve Brown is a legendary retired Chief Meteorologist who served South Texas at KSAT 12 in San Antonio for 26 years. He officially retired from television in June 2018. Known for his infectious laugh, colorful weather commentary, tuba playing at Christmas, and passion for gardeningโ€”particularly growing legendary weather tomatoesโ€”he remains a beloved local figure.โ€

Houston: Oil and Gas Capital (โ€˜energy transitionโ€™ hyperbole falls flat)

Hyperbole and government subsidies (bribes, to critics) is the lifeline for inferior energies (think dilute, intermittent, resource-intensive wind and solar). Such as been the case since the 1990s in Houston, Texas when Ken Lay of Enron Corp. empowered executive Robert Kelly to create a new renewables business, a story told here.

From Master Resource

By Robert Bradley Jr.

โ€œCity leaders should stop pretending Houston will, or should, transition away from oil and gas anytime soonโ€ฆ. Houston should embrace its role in sustaining and improving the lives of literally billions of people globally each day. Itโ€™s a legacy worth standing up forโ€ฆ and even celebrating.โ€ (Doug Sheridan, below)

Hyperbole and government subsidies (bribes, to critics) is the lifeline for inferior energies (think dilute, intermittent, resource-intensive wind and solar). Such as been the case since the 1990s in Houston, Texas when Ken Lay of Enron Corp. empowered executive Robert Kelly to create a new renewables business, a story told here.

And shame-on-shame that some Houston business leaders that should know better have embraced low-density, political energies. I am thinking of Bobby Tutor, chair of the Houston Energy Transition Initiative, and Steve Kean of the Greater Houston Partnership. [1] There are others to be sure, but these two certainly head the list.

Tomlinson Hate

On the media front, there is the business editorialist Chris Tomlinson, who is a climate alarmist through-and-through who refuses to consider the weaknesses in his position from the science, economics, and public policy sides. Terribly conflicted, his wife, Shalini Ramanathan, is a multi-millionaire renewable energy rainmaker. Tomlinson himself snidely denounced Chevronโ€™s decision this week in the Houston Chronicle:

โ€œOil giantโ€™s relocation to Houston skirts climate accountability,โ€ conflicted Chris wrote.

Yippee, another world-class polluter is moving its global headquarters to Houston, bringing a few hundred employees and a fossil fuel business plan unable to adapt to climate changeโ€ฆ.

Every serious scientist and government recognizes we must reduce carbon emissions to slow global warming and protect life as we know it. Consumers will need to stop burning so much oil and natural gas to produce energy, which means we will need a lot less of them. The oil and gas industry must shrink to prevent the worst of climate change.

What? Climategate to climate models, the climate alarm has a half-century of bad optics and bad predictions. To say that โ€œevery serious scientistโ€ knows that reducing CO2 emissions is necessary to โ€œprotect life as we know itโ€ is dead-on-arrival argumentation. Little wonder why โ€œclimate changeโ€ is bad politics in the current election cycle. [2]

Energy Exceptionalism

The story of oil and gas in Houstonโ€™s development and growth is both fascinating and compelling. โ€œThe wildcatters showed their gratitude to their city through their philanthropy,โ€ University of Houston history professor Joseph Pratt wrote. โ€œThey were not the only ones who supported good causes in our region, but many of the foundations in Houston had their beginning in the oil and gas industries.โ€ A century later, with much more oil and gas today that existed a century ago (the story of resourceship), the story is the same.

Sheridan on Chevron

With Chevron relocating its headquarters to Houston, escaping the termite aspirations of Governor Gavin Newson and state agencies in California, Doug Sheridan of EnergyPoint Research wrote this comment that is worth amplifying.

Back in 2021, when virtually everyone became an overnight expert on energy and simply โ€œknewโ€ oil was going to be replaced by renewables, the great minds at the City of Houston, Greater Houston Partnership and other civic organizations got behind the slogan, โ€œHoustonโ€”The Energy Transition Capital of the World.โ€

Of course, there was no factual basis for the claim. It was just easy to say, so they said it. In reality, nothing could have been farther from the truthโ€”no city in the world had more to lose from a transition away from oil and gas than Houston. Anyone who stopped to think had to have known this. But stopping and thinking wasnโ€™t in vogue in 2021.

Even today, thereโ€™s an effort to position Houston as some clean energy innovation mecca. We doubt the claim would stand up to scrutiny. For one, weโ€™d wager half the investments labeled โ€œclean energyโ€ are just typical energy technology investments, the kind companies in Houston have been making for decades. Of the other half, weโ€™d guess a material proportion wonโ€™t be commercially viable in the end.

Contrast that with whatโ€™s going on with oil and gas in the city. By 2025, both of Americaโ€™s two largest oil and gas companies, ExxonMobil and Chevron, will have moved their headquarters to Houston. And virtually every other petroleum entity in the world of any consequence has a presence in the city, including supermajors Shell, BP, and TotalEnergies, as well as leading NOCs like aramco. Houston today is as much an oil town as ever.

No doubt city leaders, many of them liberal, will attempt to pitch the presence of these oil and gas majors as just more money and expertise to invest in what they habitually like to claim is some big shift to clean and green energy. But thatโ€™s not true either. None other than the International Energy Agency (IEA) recently posted a chart showing just how little oil and gas firms are investing in clean energy. For once, the IEA hits on the truth.

So why arenโ€™t oil and gas companies investing in clean energy? The official line is green energy and innovation isnโ€™t a core competency. And thatโ€™s true, in so far as firms like to stick to their knitting. But the real reason, and donโ€™t say it out loud, is that these companies understand green forms of energy, especially renewables, are for the most part so inferior they canโ€™t cover their cost of capital. And for real managers, investments that canโ€™t cover their cost of capital are to be avoidedโ€”not pursued.

Houstonians should welcome with open arms the arrival of ExxonMobil, Chevron and other oil and gas companies. And city leaders should stop pretending Houston will, or should, transition away from oil and gas anytime soon. As Alex Epstein stresses, oil and gas are essential to human flourishing. Houston should embrace its role in sustaining and improving the lives of literally billions of people globally each day. Itโ€™s a legacy worth standing up forโ€ฆ and even celebrating.

โ€”โ€”โ€”โ€”โ€”โ€”-

[1] Bobby Tutor was a principal of Goldman Sachs global energy practice and founding head of Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co., a major energy investment banker. Steve Kean, former CEO of Kinder-Morgan, one of the nationโ€™s leading energy infrastructure companies, heads the Greater Houston Partnership.

Both Tutor and Kean know energy very well, well enough to not buy into climate alarmism and forced energy transformation. Their shift to political energy can only be described as pragmatic and amoral. Go with the political flow, get your share of kudos and government favor for personal and professional gain.

[2] For my long-standing criticisms of the fossil-fuel-misanthropist Tomlinson, see here.

Storm Agnes

Storm Agnes is yet another one that failed to live up to the hyperbole beforehand, with the media publishing all sorts of bloodcurdling nonsense, fanned by the Met Office warnings.

The fierce Storm Agnes is on her way to the UKย (Image: WXCHARTS/Getty)

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

Storm Agnes is yet another one that failed to live up to the hyperbole beforehand, with the media publishing all sorts of bloodcurdling nonsense, fanned by the Met Office warnings. The Express, for instance:

https://www.express.co.uk/news/weather/1816375/storm-agnes-live-warning-met-office-forecast

The media, of course, loves all of this, because it attracts readersโ€™ attention, but you cannot blame them when the Met Office has been equally guilty of fanning the flames:

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/press-office/news/weather-and-climate/2023/autumnal-weather

As usual, the Met Office found its 80 mph gust, this time at Capel Curig, half way up a mountain in Snowdonia:

https://earth.google.com/web/search/53.094+-3.94/@53.09566603,-3.94197926,200.60420227a,0d,80.54690393y,199.82224702h,83.3622888t,0r/data=CigiJgokCfFEnBF95UNAEYOwrj0o5UNAGU4Hsp6lNyNAIfbMI1r5NSNAIhoKFjY1NXVIMWRkQjFYaGF0dnVRUk5URUEQAg

Capel Curig is only a few miles from Conwy on the coast. There sustained winds were only a breezy 14 mph:

https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/@2652426/historic

At nearby Rhyl, the Met Office could only find maximum gusts of 34 kts, (39 mph):

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/observations/gcmr0gu3s

Once again, the Met Office prefers spin to responsible weather forecasting.