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.
President Donald Trump has initiated the withdrawal of the United States from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), often described as the “bedrock” global climate treaty.
President Donald Trump has initiated the withdrawal of the United States from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), often described as the “bedrock” global climate treaty.
The agreement in question is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, which the US joined, and Congress ratified in 1992, when George H.W. Bush was in the White House. The agreement does not require the US to cut fossil fuels or pollution but rather sets a goal of stabilizing the amount of climate pollution in the atmosphere at a level that would “prevent dangerous anthropogenic (human-caused) interference with the climate system.”
It also set up a process for negotiations between countries that have come to be known as the annual UN climate summits. It was under the UNFCCC’s auspices that the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated in 1995, and the Paris Agreement in 2015 — two monumental moments of global cooperation and progress toward limiting harmful climate pollution.
In addition, the agreement requires the submission of an annual national climate pollution inventory, which the Trump administration notably skipped this year.
President Trump withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement for a second time on his first day in office. With Wednesday’s move,the US will now become the first country to withdraw from the climate treaty, since virtually every country is a member, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group.
Because the Senate ratified the UNFCCC in 1992, it is a legal gray area as to whether President Donald Trump can unilaterally pull the country out of it. However, if Congress plays a role, the Republican majority would presumably back the move.
If successful, the withdrawal would prevent the US from officially participating in subsequent annual climate summits and could call into question the country’s commitment to other longstanding agreements to which it is a party. It may also prompt other nations to reevaluate their commitments to the UNFCCC and UN climate talks, risking not just US climate progress but that of others.
A US withdrawal could make it difficult for a future president to rejoin the Paris Agreement, since that agreement was struck under the auspices of the UNFCCC.
Trump also moved to withdraw the US from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC — a Nobel Prize-winning group that publishes reports on global warming. While the president likely can’t bar US scientists from participating in IPCC reports, the move could have ramifications for federal scientists who would otherwise contribute. A White House fact sheet stated:
“Many of these bodies promote radical climate policies, global governance, and ideological programs that conflict with U.S. sovereignty and economic strength.”
So, it’s a trifeca: UNFCC, IPCC, and Paris Accord
“The Paris Parrot is not dead, it’s just resting.”
The boss of Centrica, Chris O’Shea, has weighed in on the debate about whether renewables will bring down electricity costs.
By Paul Homewood
h/t Doug Brodie
The boss of Centrica, Chris O’Shea, has weighed in on the debate about whether renewables will bring down electricity costs.
He has posted this on LinkedIn:
There’s a bit of confusion on whether renewables will bring down energy prices from where they are today. People talk about the UK electricity price being set by international gas prices and therefore point to renewables giving us price reductions.
However, the truth is a bit more nuanced. Wholesale electricity prices in the UK may well be set by international gas prices, but the wholesale price does NOT set the price that the majority of consumers pay in the UK.
Why is that? It’s because of the contract for difference (CFD) that renewable energy producers get. There’s a great video attached which explains how the CFD works. Essentially, no matter the wholesale price, renewable producers with a CFD get the “CFD strike price”.
So I thought it may be useful to look at the comparison of current wholesale energy market prices (set by international gas prices) and the (CFD) prices that consumers actually pay:
Current wholesale prices: -Last 24 hours £68.61 -Last 7 days £77.09 -Last year £82.11
Now you may look at those strike prices and think they look attractive-and they do. But unfortunately, these are prices expressed as they would have been in 2012. And as they’re index linked (or inflation proof), they need to be restated to today’s prices. Restating them to 2024 prices (when the last CFDs were granted) gives you the following:
So you can see that the build out of renewables will NOT materially reduce UK electricity prices from current levels. They may give price stability, and avoid future price spikes based on the international gas market, but they will definitely not reduce the price. So the next time you hear someone say the build out of renewables will reduce UK electricity prices, ask them to explain how. Because we need to get the facts out there so we can make the right decisions-we need to stop having a polarised debate populated with unsubstantiated, but convenient, sound bites.
I fully support the move to a cleaner energy system. I am simply very frustrated that people peddle misinformation at best, and disinformation at worst. For example, I was talking to someone in a major UK energy retailer recently and asked why they kept telling people that more renewables would reduce energy prices when I didn’t think it would based on my analysis. What they said was quite surprising-they told me they were always careful to say that more renewables would reduce the WHOLESALE energy price, not the RETAIL energy price. Whilst that statement is factually accurate, I think it could mislead consumers.
As the CEO of a major UK energy retailer, I am far more interested in what consumers pay. We should all be.
The Telegraph have covered the story here. But shamefully they have grossly misled readers with this fake chart:
It is based on old BEIS levelised cost analysis. Offshore wind ludicrously is said to cost £40/MWh – the latest strike price is £85/MWh. Similarly onshore wind and solar are also massively understated.
Meanwhile CCGT includes a “carbon cost” of about £80/MWh. Carbon of course does not cost anything – this figure merely represents the government carbon tax imposed to make fossil fuels uncompetitive.
I’ve covered this before, but it’s worth looking again at how these carbon costs are estimated. This is what the BEIS report stated:
So it starts with the ETS prices, the Emissions Trading Scheme. Then it morphs into a “carbon appraisal price”, with the BEIS link taking us to this document:
In short, the carbon value is set to match the cost of carbon reduction needed to meet decarbonisation targets. The higher that cost, the higher the carbon value.
As the BEIS admitted at the time, the Paris Agreement and the switch to Net Zero have increased pushed carbon values higher.
So when the Telegraph claims that the cost of gas power will increase to £140/MWh, they are lying – what they really mean is that the cost of decarbonisation will be much greater than previously thought.
For too long, the conversation around energy policy in the United States has been dominated by a toxic brew of partisan rancor, media sensationalism, and international grandstanding. The far-left media are now driving a narrative that President Trump’s positions are an assault on reason itself. But the opposite is the truth.
For too long, the conversation around energy policy in the United States has been dominated by a toxic brew of partisan rancor, media sensationalism, and international grandstanding. The far-left media are now driving a narrative that President Trump’s positions are an assault on reason itself. But the opposite is the truth.
What we’re witnessing isn’t a denial of science or a retreat from reality. It’s a bold, pragmatic recalibration – one rooted in economic foresight, scientific clarity, and a refusal to let America’s industrial supremacy be eroded by bureaucratic bloat and globalist agendas.
Back to Energy Dominance
Energy costs ripple through every corner of the economy. When electricity prices spike or fuel becomes scarce, manufacturers scale back, small businesses shutter, and families get pinched. For decades, the U.S. has enjoyed an enviable position as an energy superpower, thanks to fossil fuels and other natural resources, technological ingenuity, and relatively free markets.
Yet in recent years, that advantage has been jeopardized by a tangle of climate regulations, green subsidies, and international climate commitments that often prioritize political optics over practical outcomes.
Take the Paris Agreement, for example, from which Trump intends to withdraw a second time after Biden reversed a withdrawal during Trump’s first term. The agreement is billed as a scientific pact, but it’s a political one – riddled with loopholes for China and India, the world’s biggest CO2 emitters, while saddling the U.S. with disproportionate costs. The United Nations, which oversees it, has a long history of blending science with ideology. Its climate summits are as much about posturing as progress, with jet-setting delegates of powerful countries demanding sacrifices they won’t make themselves.
The Biden years featured a concerted push for “green” technologies – wind, solar, battery storage – coupled with a chokehold on oil and gas development. Agencies like the Department of Energy funneled billions into projects destined for failure, repeating on a larger scale the Solyndra debacle of the Obama administration. Meanwhile, the agency dragged its feet on permits for pipelines and terminals for liquefied natural gas exports.
Trump’s policy shift – emphasizing fossil fuel production, streamlining permitting, and pulling back from the dogmatic green agenda – offers a chance to pursue what works. This is a demonstration of rationality and a rejection of corruption and groupthink that has masqueraded as scientific consensus.
By unleashing domestic oil and gas production in places like the Permian Basin, Alaska, and offshore, Trump is betting on oil deposits that can supply the country for decades and natural gas reserves that can power the world. This isn’t nostalgia for a bygone era but a recognition that fossil fuels remain the most reliable, scalable, and cost-effective energy sources available today.
Far-Left Embraces Pseudoscience
The left accuses Trump of ignoring settled science. But what’s settled? Certainly not the doomsday script that demands abandonment of proven technologies in exchange for so-called renewable fads that make platform shoes look practical.
For years, the climate debate has been less about data and more about dogma. Almost all future forecasts on climate by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are based upon scientifically inaccurate assumptions about the sensitivity of the climate to greenhouse gases.
Even if the U.N.’s moderate emissions scenarios come to pass, global temperatures are predicted to rise only 2-3 degrees Celsius by 2100 – hardly an apocalyptic outcome and very likely a beneficial one.
Trump’s pledge to slash red tape is a war on waste. He’s betting that American industry, unshackled, can deliver cleaner, cheaper energy faster than any government mandate ever could.
Until recently dictated by fear, guilt, and globalist platitudes, energy policy is now on track to reflect reality and respond to the economic imperative for affordable power and the strategic need to stay ahead of the curve in a competitive and dangerous world.
This commentary was first published at BizPac Review on March 12, 2025.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India.
The Trump administration has issued a stop-work order to U.S. government scientists, effectively excising them from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) next major report, due in 2029. The decision pulls American expertise and funding from a process that’s long leaned on both to prop up its dire pronouncements. For those who’ve watched the IPCC churn out one overheated forecast after another, there’s a certain satisfaction in seeing the climate establishment forced to limp along without its biggest benefactor.
Delegates and experts attend the 45th Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) opening ceremony in Guadalajara, Mexico on March 28, 2017.
The main agenda items of the 45th Session of the IPCC will consider the outline for the IPCC Special Report on Climate Change, Oceans and the Cryosphere and the outline for the Special Report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems. / AFP PHOTO / Hector Guerrero (Photo credit should read HECTOR GUERRERO/AFP via Getty Images)
The Trump administration has issued a stop-work order to U.S. government scientists, effectively excising them from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) next major report, due in 2029. The decision pulls American expertise and funding from a process that’s long leaned on both to prop up its dire pronouncements. For those who’ve watched the IPCC churn out one overheated forecast after another, there’s a certain satisfaction in seeing the climate establishment forced to limp along without its biggest benefactor.
The directive halts federal scientists’ contributions to the IPCC’s seventh assessment report, a multi-volume undertaking that typically mobilizes thousands of researchers across years to paint a picture of imminent catastrophe. NASA’s chief scientist, Kate Calvin, was tapped to co-chair an international meeting in Hangzhou, China, next week, where the report’s scope was to be hammered out. That’s off the table now, and the meeting itself hangs in limbo—organizers must be wondering how to proceed without one of their star players.
“Dr. Calvin will not be traveling to this meeting,” a NASA spokesperson said. NASA denied CNN’s request for an interview with Calvin.
An unnamed scientist involved in the effort told CNN they’re unsure what this means for the planned work. One imagines the uncertainty stings a bit more when your whole career’s been hitched to the IPCC wagon.
The person involved in the report told CNN they were “not sure what this means for the planned work going forward, or if US scientists will participate in the writing of the IPCC reports.”
The U.S. has historically been a pillar of the IPCC’s operations, supplying not just talent but a hefty chunk of the budget needed to keep its machinery humming. These reports—laden with warnings of soaring temperatures, melting ice caps, and “deadly, costly consequences”—have been the bedrock of global climate policy, from the Paris Agreement (promptly abandoned by Trump on day one of his term) to endless rounds of UN summits. The IPCC’s clout depends on its ability to project authority, and American involvement has lent it a sheen of credibility. Without that, the 2029 report risks looking like a thinner, less convincing shadow of its predecessors. Climate advocate Harjeet Singh insists the IPCC remains “unbiased” and “evidence-based,” decrying the loss of U.S. collaboration. Skeptics, meanwhile, might note that an outfit prone to amplifying computer-modeled nightmares over real-world data could use a breather—or at least a reality check.
“The IPCC is the backbone of global climate science, providing the world with unbiased, evidence-based insights needed to confront the climate crisis,” said Harjeet Singh, a climate advocate and founding director of Satat Sampada Climate Foundation.
“The decision to exclude US scientists significantly undermines this collaborative effort and risks compromising the process at a time when robust climate action is needed more than ever,” he told CNN in a statement.
This isn’t Trump’s first rodeo with the climate crowd. His exit from the Paris Agreement in 2017 (and again in 2025) set the tone, and this latest move doubles down on that skepticism. The timing adds a layer of irony: just as the IPCC was gearing up for its Hangzhou confab, the administration yanked the plug, leaving Calvin sidelined and the process scrambling. It’s a dry kind of poetic justice for those who’ve long questioned the IPCC’s track record—think hockey-stick graphs that wobble under scrutiny, Himalayan glaciers that refuse to vanish on cue, or tipping points that keep tipping past their deadlines. The group’s not dead, of course; it’ll soldier on with whatever it can muster from Europe, China, and the usual suspects. But without Uncle Sam’s stamp of approval and deep pockets, the final product might carry less sway—and that’s a prospect worth savoring.
For the IPCC, the road ahead just got bumpier. The Hangzhou meeting, if it happens, will lack a key voice, and the years-long grind to 2029 will test how well the organization can function on a leaner diet. Trump’s decision doesn’t dismantle the climate machine outright, but it does strip away some of its horsepower. Those who’ve spent decades poking holes in the IPCC’s narrative can sit back and watch the fallout with a quiet grin. The alarmists will howl about “denial” and “sabotage,” no doubt, but the Oval Office isn’t losing sleep over it. Neither, frankly, are we.
“… Individual years pushing past the 1.5-degree limit … means we need to fight even harder to get on track. …”
Press Release | WMO confirms 2024 as warmest year on record at about 1.55°C above pre-industrial level
WMO confirms 2024 as warmest year on record at about 1.55°C above pre-industrial level
The past ten years 2015-2024 are the ten warmest years on record
We have likely seen the first calendar year with a global mean temperature of more than 1.5°C above the 1850-1900 average
Six international datasets are used to reach the consolidated WMO global figure
2024 saw exceptional land and sea surface temperatures and ocean heat
Long-term temperature goal of the Paris Agreement not yet dead but in grave danger
Geneva (WMO – The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has confirmed that 2024 is the warmest year on record, based on six international datasets. The past ten years have all been in the Top Ten, in an extraordinary streak of record-breaking temperatures.
…
“Today’s assessment from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) proves yet again – global heating is a cold, hard fact,” said UN Secretary-General Antóno Guterres.
“Individual years pushing past the 1.5 degree limit do not mean the long-term goal is shot. It means we need to fight even harder to get on track. Blazing temperatures in 2024 require trail-blazing climate action in 2025,” he said. “There’s still time to avoid the worst of climate catastrophe. But leaders must act – now,” he said.
“Climate history is playing out before our eyes. We’ve had not just one or two record-breaking years, but a full ten-year series. This has been accompanied by devastating and extreme weather, rising sea levels and melting ice, all powered by record-breaking greenhouse gas levels due to human activities,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo.
“It is important to emphasize that a single year of more than 1.5°C for a year does NOT mean that we have failed to meet Paris Agreement long-term temperature goals, which are measured over decades rather than an individual year. However, it is essential to recognize that every fraction of a degree of warming matters. Whether it is at a level below or above 1.5°C of warming, every additional increment of global warming increases the impacts on our lives, economies and our planet,” said Celeste Saulo.
Scientists claiming their settled science models didn’t see it coming is also funny.
Climate models can’t explain 2023’s huge heat anomaly — we could be in uncharted territory
Taking into account all known factors, the planet warmed 0.2 °C more last year than climate scientists expected. More and better data are urgently needed.
When I took over as the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, I inherited a project that tracks temperature changes since 1880. Using this trove of data, I’ve made climate predictions at the start of every year since 2016. It’s humbling, and a bit worrying, to admit that no year has confounded climate scientists’ predictive capabilities more than 2023 has.
For the past nine months, mean land and sea surface temperatures have overshot previous records each month by up to 0.2 °C — a huge margin at the planetary scale. A general warming trend is expected because of rising greenhouse-gas emissions, but this sudden heat spike greatly exceeds predictions made by statistical climate models that rely on past observations. Many reasons for this discrepancy have been proposed but, as yet, no combination of them has been able to reconcile our theories with what has happened.
2023-24 appears to have totally messed up the planned climate narrative. The UN and climate scientists looked all set to milk each fractional advance on 1.5C, then suddenly we blow past it and they have nothing to talk about. The Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets failed to slide into the sea, the North Pole Ice Cap is still there, and you can still buy food in the supermarket.
There are feeble attempts to bring forward the 2.0C fear narrative, but they don’t seem to be gaining much traction. After the Covid lockdown debacle, suddenly discovering 1.5C hype was just as fake as Covid lockdown narratives appears to have killed much of the remaining credibility of climate alarmists.
2025 is going to be a very good year for climate skeptics.
Brazil adopted the Paris Agreement and submitted its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) to the UNFCCC in 2016 and its Updated NDC in 2020 in support of its adaptation commitments and continued economic and social development agendas. Through its NDC, Brazil has committed to reduce its GHG emissions by 37% below 2005 levels, by 2025. Brazil has also committed to address climate change impacts to the country’s sectors environment, forestry, agricultural and livestock, energy, and health sectors. Brazil submitted its Fourth National Communication to the UNFCCC in 2020.
The World Bank Portal analysis of Brazil also includes details of the NDC, the emissions pledge made by the country as their contribution to the Paris Agreement:
Another year, and another ‘Conference of the Parties’ (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will convene. The 29th COP is meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan. It started yesterday and will last for 11 days.
Another year, and another ‘Conference of the Parties’ (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will convene. The 29th COP is meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan. It started yesterday and will last for 11 days.
My view of the previous year’s UN climate jamboree, attended by a record-breaking 86,000 delegates, was realistically downbeat (some would say cynical):
It is likely that apart from grand-sounding communiques, more breast-beating by the climate NGOs and alarmist headlines by the legacy media, nothing much of practical significance will come out of the 28th Conference of the Parties in Dubai.
But the seismic change brought on by the election of Donald “drill baby drill” Trump on Tuesday as U.S. president-elect – an avowed ‘climate denier’ and whose campaign has already promised to withdraw from the Paris Agreement a second time – must leave the West’s faithful devotees of the Church of Climate aghast. A second Trump presidency together with a Republican senate majority will bring about what finance and energy consultant Doomberg calls a “whirlwind that is about to befall the progressive environmental Left [that] will reverberate for decades”.
Pragmatists vs. Alarmists at COP28
As important as Mr. Trump’s triumphant election win is to the outlook for the globalist climate change agenda, let’s step back a bit for context.
It will come as no surprise that over the past year since COP28, large developing countries such as China, India, Indonesia and Vietnam carried on with their ambitious schedules for growing coal mining capacity and building new fossil-fueled power plants needed by their growing economies.
Just as unsurprisingly, the Biden administration and the left-of-centre European and U.K. governments zealously continued their quest for ‘Net Zero (emissions) by 2050’, the mantra that has entranced Western governments since the 2015 Paris Agreement.
Many governments in the Global South struggle to have access to affordable fossil fuels. Meanwhile, with the relentless climate alarmist propaganda going on for three decades, Western policymakers continue to demonise fossil fuels and nurture (with taxpayers’ money) their favoured green technologies, such as electric vehicles, solar and wind power, “green” hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, many of which have yet to be proven commercially viable.
With their control over leading financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, Western governments veto the development and use of fossil fuels in developing countries in the name of the “climate crisis”. Carbon colonialism hypocritically denies developing countries the means to scale the energy ladder that the now-developed West has exploited to obtain their industrial prosperity and high standards of living.
Last year’s COP28 served as a crossroad when the contradictions between the ‘energy pragmatist’ and the ‘climate alarmist’ camps – roughly matching the ‘Global South’ and the ‘collective West’ – broke out into the open. Dr. Sultan Al Jaber, the president of the COP28 climate summit and CEO of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, said in an interview: “You’re asking for a phase-out of fossil fuels… Please, help me, show me the roadmap for a phase-out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socio-economic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves.”
Al Jaber’s remarks were amplified by Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman who told Bloomberg that the world’s biggest oil exporter would not agree with Western demands to phase out fossil fuels. “Absolutely not,” he said in an interview in Riyadh. “And I assure you not a single person – I’m talking about governments – believes in that… If they believe that this is the highest moral ground issue, fantastic. Let them do that themselves. And we will see how much they can deliver.”
Enter President-elect Trump
Ah, what a difference a year – and an American presidential election – makes! Expectedly, the hyperventilating headlines of the mainstream media were out in full force within 48 hours of the election results being announced:
Bloomberg: “Trump Stranglehold Adds to Growing Doubts at Climate Talks”
Euronews: “Trump victory casts shadow over upcoming COP global climate talks”
Politico: “No leaders remain to check Trump’s climate wreckage”
MSN News: “Trump’s climate denial and green rollbacks poised to fuel warming”
BBC News: “Trump victory is a major setback for climate action, experts say”
Activist-journalists fulminating in the legacy media over what the Trump win means for the globalist climate agenda are among the less interesting aspects of this year’s UN climate fest in Baku.
The COP29 summit, in the shadow of Mr. Trump’s return as the 47th U.S. President, will be noteworthy for other, more durable reasons. When the U.S. first pulled out of the Paris Agreement with a formal notice in 2017 during President Trump’s first term, it was only three years later – as it happened, the day after the 2020 election – that the decision took effect under UN rules. Upon taking office, President Joe Biden promptly re-instituted U.S. participation in the UN agreement. This time around, it will take a year for a withdrawal to take effect under the terms of the pact once the Trump administration files its exit notice to the U.N. upon assuming office on January 20th 2025.
But more importantly than the formal details of UN bureaucratic rules, the expected second pullout by the incoming Trump administration next year from the (non-binding) Paris Agreement will happen at a time when other Western countries leading the global environmental agenda are themselves exhausted economically and politically.
Hours after the announcement of the results of the U.S. elections, the German three-party ruling coalition government collapsed after Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced the sacking of Finance Minister Christian Lindner over deadlocks on spending and economic reforms. The fiscal constraints brought on by years of irrational energy policies that de-industrialised and immiserated EU economies have come home to roost.
The imposition of sanctions on supplies of cheap Russian energy imports in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which boomeranged on Europe, effectively put paid to Europe’s climate leadership. Its farmers have revolted. Its working and middle classes, owing no allegiance to the luxury beliefs of Brussel bureaucrats and political elites in Berlin, Paris and London, have begun to support the populist right as a force in the European political order.
It’s all about the money
The U.N. climate summit in Baku has been dubbed the “climate finance COP” for its central goal: to agree on how much money should go each year to helping developing countries cope with “climate-related costs”. From the current climate finance commitment of $100 billion annually by wealthy nations (not achieved in most years), some negotiators hope to transfer $1 trillion a year for “climate mitigation and adaptation goals” to the developing countries.
But in the U.S., the UN’s biggest climate finance contributor, ‘Bidenomics’ and the duplicitously termed Inflation Reduction Act which promise massive subsidies for ‘green’ energy were comprehensively rejected at the ballot box last week.
Mr. Trump’s climate scepticism will once again encourage U.S. oil and gas dominance in global markets, continuing a strong theme of his first term in office. One would think that even the climate-obsessed European elites will be under no illusion about what a Trump administration would make of the U.N.’s push for transfers of vast financial resources to poor countries for what is essentially bad weather. As they might say in Main Street U.S.A., “that ain’t going to happen” on Mr. Trump’s watch.
Indeed, among Mr. Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters will likely be the host of COP29, Azeri President Ilham Aliyev, who described his country’s oil and gas resources as “a gift from God”. Trump’s election victory could not have been more nicely timed to put a nail in the coffin of the globalist environmental agenda.
Dr. Tilak K. Doshi is an economist, a former contributor to Forbes, and a member of the CO2 Coalition.Follow him at Substack and X.
Stop Press: Heather Mac Donald has written a wonderfully vituperative piece about COP29 for City Journal: “Any doubt regarding the wisdom of the next Trump administration’s likely pullout from such meetings should be dispelled by the conference photos alone.”
President Macron has called a snap parliamentary election after devastating losses to right wing challenger Marine Le Pen in recent European elections.
President Macron has called a snap parliamentary election after devastating losses to right wing challenger Marine Le Pen in recent European elections.
France’s snap election: what happened, why, and what’s next?
In a shock move, president Emmanuel Macron called a parliamentary election, describing it as ‘an act of confidence’
Jon Henley Europe correspondent Mon 10 Jun 2024 08.01 AEST
In a shock move, France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, has called a snap parliamentary election that will be held within the next 30 days. What happened exactly, why – and what might come next?
What’s the story?
After suffering a crushing defeat at the hands of Marine Le Pen’s far right National Rally (RN) in the European parliamentary elections, the French president on Sunday evening unexpectedly announced a snap general election.
According to usually accurate projections, Macron’s centrist list, headed by MEP Valérie Hayer, scored between 14.8% and 15.2% in the European poll, less than half the 32%-33% tally booked by RN, whose lead candidate was the party’s president, Jordan Bardella, 28.
The president won re-election in 2022. His current term runs until spring 2027 and he cannot stand again.
What were Macron’s reasons?
The president said the decision was a “serious and heavy” one, but that he could not resign himself to the fact that “far-right parties … are progressing everywhere on the continent”.
Bear in mind, when “The Guardian” say “Far Right”, they mean anyone to the right of President Biden. Le Pen is no President Trump. But she has promised to cancel wind and solar subsidies and instead concentrate on nuclear power, and she has also indicates she wants to protect French manufacturing – she regards driving manufacturing offshore with harsh climate rules but still using the manufactured products, importing the products instead of manufacturing them in France, as “climate hypocrisy”.
The following is from April 2022.
Climate discussed for 20 minutes in 3-hour-long Macron-Le Pen debate
During the three-hour-long debate between French presidential candidates Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, climate was discussed for just 20 minutes, despite being one of the most anticipated topics. EURACTIV France reports.
Climate was one of the ten topics on the debate’s agenda on Wednesday (20 April), ahead of the final round of voting on Sunday.
…
Le Pen wants a slowed transition
For Le Pen, French purchasing power is at the heart of her discourse on the environment. The far-right leader promises to lower VAT on fuel, gas and heating oil while exiting “the European electricity market” to restore the purchasing power of the French.
While favouring the ecological transition, Le Pen wants “it to be slower than what is being imposed on the French, to enable them to cope with it.”
According to her, the current government is asking too much of the French people, and she blamed Macron for his “punitive ecology”.
Le Pen also believes that “wind power is an ecological and economic absurdity”. She promised a referendum on the dismantling of wind turbines and said she had “a plan to develop nuclear power” at the start of her mandate.
If President Macron loses ground in this snap election, he will still be President – it’s a Parliamentary election, not a Presidential election. But Macron will be even more of a lame duck President than he is already, his hands would be tied on many issues, it would be an enormous embarrassment for him.
What can we conclude from all this, with regards to the Paris Agreement? Le Pen has said she plans to uphold France’s Paris commitments, but she also makes it clear the Paris Agreement is not her main priority. If greens play hardball, my crystal ball tells me Le Pen would choose economic sanity over damaging climate commitments. So we are seeing an entertaining though slim possibility that France is kicked out of the Paris Agreement, maybe even before Trump wins office at the end of the year.
Does “there’s no sense in signing up to targets you don’t have any prospect of achieving” translate to a commitment to dump Australia’s Paris obligations?
Does “there’s no sense in signing up to targets you don’t have any prospect of achieving” translate to a commitment to dump Australia’s Paris obligations?
Dutton to pull Australia out of Paris Agreement if elected
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has signalled he will scrap the nation’s legally binding 2030 climate target and risk Australia’s membership of the Paris Agreement on climate change, following his vow to deploy nuclear energy to reach net zero by 2050.
Dutton declared on Saturday that a Coalition government would not pursue Australia’s legally binding climate target to cut emissions by 43 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030 – a significant escalation of Australia’s long-running climate policy war ahead of the next federal election due by May next year.
Dutton told The Australian on Saturday that the government’s renewable goal was unattainable and “there’s no sense in signing up to targets you don’t have any prospect of achieving”.
The opposition has said if it forms government it would build up to seven emissions-free nuclear power plants to replace the energy supply from Australia’s dirty coal plants, which have begun to shut down across the country. He would also pause the rollout of wind and solar farms.
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“You can’t have the prime minister saying we aren’t going to have coal, we aren’t going to have gas and were not going to have nuclear power and we are going to keep the lights on – that’s just fantasy. We now have a debate about energy which I think we can win,” he told The Australian.
Suggesting Dutton’s statement is a commitment to pull out of the Paris Agreement seems a trifle exaggerated.
WUWT has repeatedly criticising the Aussie opposition’s Frankenstein climate policy. While on the surface Dutton’s nuclear push might seem a good idea, in my opinion it is actually a weak attempt at appeasement politics.
At last year’s Aussie CPAC MP Keith Pitt, formerly a staunch defender of coal, made a bizarre speech about the need to demolish coal plants and build nuclear plants in their place, to take advantage of all the distribution infrastructure which has already been built for the coal plants.
The problem is there is still plenty of coal, mostly brown coal, in the ground in the proposed nuclear sites. Building a nuclear plant on top of a coal field risks sabotaging remaining stocks of coal – even a low level radiation leak which seeped into the coal layer would make burning the coal even more controversial than it already is. Building a coal plant and using the available brown coal would be far cheaper and would offer almost immediate cost relief to business and domestic energy consumers.
Nuclear plants, however desirable in the long term, do not offer short term benefits in most locations. Aside from the high upfront capital costs, and the lack of local expertise, greens would immediately launch a tsunami of well funded lawfare. I have no problem with nuclear plants being built in locations where they offer an economic benefit, but the decision should be based purely on economics, such as installing a nuclear plant to service a remote location and save on fuel deliveries. The decision to go nuclear should not be because mainstream Aussie politicians are too timid to challenge the greens head on and fully exploit Australia’s abundant coal resources.
The one silver lining of the opposition nuclear push is it has sabotaged the renewable plans of the current Aussie administration. It’s hard to get a bank loan when the opposition leader is promising to withdraw the subsidies which are your basis of your business profitability.
What can we conclude from all this? On this issue I believe claims Aussie Conservative leader Peter Dutton is trying to leave the Paris Agreement are exaggerated. As far as I can tell Peter Dutton is just as onboard with Paris as other mainstream Aussie politicians, he just wants a different approach. I’m glad Dutton has taken a stand against absurdly unrealistic emissions reduction targets. But I’m saddened that Dutton still hasn’t found the political courage to do what he is being accused of – ditch all emissions targets and tear up Australia’s participation in the Paris Agreement.
Rishi Sunak could not have done less to correct the Net Zero mess. But what he has done is a good thing. And it includes setting a trap for the eco-catastrophists. The more they howl and wail, the more they will expose their utter contempt for ordinary people.
Rishi Sunak could not have done less to correct the Net Zero mess. But what he has done is a good thing. And it includes setting a trap for the eco-catastrophists. The more they howl and wail, the more they will expose their utter contempt for ordinary people.
Rishi Sunak’s ‘watering down’ of certain Net Zero targets is the first time that the green policy agenda has had ANY scrutiny of any consequence, despite many failures, starting with the ruinously expensive Renewable Obligation, extending into the totally failed CfDs that allowed wind farm developers to lie to achieve planning consent over rival generators and technologies. Not one part of the green policy agenda has lived up to any promise to deliver good to the British public.
It was the mildest possible reversal. It is in fact an attempt to save Net Zero, not roll it back.
Complaints that it has left Britain without an ‘industrial policy’ or has left ‘investors’ without ‘confidence’ are for the birds. It has put the UK in the same policy position as the EU (more on which in a bit), and there is no evidence of green policies having delivered any significant industrial development to these shores. No green jobs. No green growth. No green industrial revolution. Not even a BritishVolt. It is a farce. Politicians, who know nothing of the subject in fact, have been misled into believing that strong climate targets encourage domestic manufacturing. That is a lie. The main beneficiary of UK & EU climate laws has been China, of course, which benefits from cheaper energy prices (among other things) precisely because China does not have energy policies like ours. Strict targets are not industrial policy. Nobody was looking to develop ‘Gigafactories’ in the UK for the fact of the UK having the earliest ICE car sales ban. It’s a nonsense. Sunak has taken stock of the simplest elements of green policy failure:
1. No politician has any clue how to realise Net Zero targets. To understand this, you need to drill down into the Climate Change Committee’s (CCC) advice to Parliament, and advice from wonks and academics to the CCC itself. They speak more candidly the deeper you investigate. The promises of upsides are simply lies. There are no drop-in replacements for the things that make our lifestyles today. That is why the CCC told Parliament that up to 62% of emissions reduction is going to come from ‘behaviour change’, which is to say that Net Zero requires government to use the criminal law and price mechanisms to regulate what people can do. That is what Sunak means when he says that previous governments have not been straight with the public. It is fact.
2. The green lobby has LONG promised lower prices and greater energy security but has failed to deliver. There have been many claims that the costs of wind power have fallen based on low ‘strike prices’ offered by wind farm developers since the Contracts for Difference (CfD) scheme was introduced in 2017. None of those miraculous strike prices have been achieved. The wind farm developers simply reneged on them. They were never going to take them up. They calculated that they would never have to. This came to crunch in the latest auction, when the government removed the wind farm operators’ ability to walk away from the contract — they called the wind sector’s bluff. No bids were offered. The major promise of renewable energy has been utterly debunked by the green lobby’s own actions.
3. Behind the scenes, the failure of both global and national climate policy has been known for a long time — since the Paris Agreement (PA) at the latest. The PA is not in fact a ‘global agreement’; it allows countries to determine their own commitment. And all that has done in turn is reignite the talking point that beset global climate policymaking in the 1990s and 2000s: the ‘free rider’ problem. Some emerging one-time ‘developing’ economies, are now booming, whereas much of the West/G7 is stagnant and facing deindustrialisation, precisely as critics of climate policy had argued, decades ago. This is why there has been so much emphasis since the PA on LOCAL government, such as LTNs/ULEZ/CAZs, using ‘air pollution’ as a proxy battle in the climate war. This was encouraged by central government, which accelerated this fake ‘localism’ during lockdowns by making large grants available to local authorities to restrict private car use. Sunak has seen the robust response to this in London, in Wales, and in cities that have adopted them, and has realised that the public has been setting down its own red lines. The green agenda is now visible to all and politically toxic.
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