Tag: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

“World Should be Optim­istic About Our Fossil Fuel Future” (Bradley op-ed in Houston Chronicle)

For decades, doomsayers have warned of catastrophic climate outcomes, resource collapse, and the need to rapidly abandon fossil fuels. Those predictions have repeatedly failed to materialize. Instead, climate activism is retreating, the “energy transition” is stumbling, and fossil fuels remain abundant, reliable, and economically superior.

For decades, doomsayers have warned of catastrophic climate outcomes, resource collapse, and the need to rapidly abandon fossil fuels.

Those predictions have repeatedly failed to materialize.

Instead, climate activism is retreating, the “energy transition” is stumbling, and fossil fuels remain abundant, reliable, and economically superior.

Rising CO₂ and modest warming (“global lukewarming”) are manageable realities—not an existential crisis—best addressed through adaptation powered by consumer-chosen fossil fuels rather than government mandates or subsidies.

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From The Master Resource

By Roger Donway

Ed. Note: Robert L. Bradley Jr’s opinion-page editorial, reprinted below, appeared in the Houston Chronicle last Sunday, April 12, 2026. Tomorrow’s post will explain the significance of Bradley’s op-ed given the Chronicle’s long-standing bias against fossil fuels.

CER­AWeek was in town last month, joined by cli­mate act­iv­ists who showed up to protest. The real­ity, however, is that cli­mate act­iv­ism is in retreat.

The so-called “energy trans­ition” is potholed by an unpre­ced­en­ted num­ber of solar bank­ruptcies, elec­tric-vehicle retreats, and cor­por­ate pull­backs from wind, hydro­gen, and car­boncap­ture projects.

A roadmap to phase out fossil fuels was defeated at the last United Nations con­fer­ence on cli­mate change, in line with a recent pre­dic­tion by the Inter­na­tional Energy Agency that oil demand will increase for dec­ades. Texas, for its part, pro­duced a record two bil­lion bar­rels last year.

The U.S. Envir­on­mental Pro­tec­tion Agency even recently reversed its earlier decision that car­bon diox­ide and other man­made green­house gases are a danger to health and human wel­fare.

Plenty of Demo­crats are also rethink­ing their cli­mate policies. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is mov­ing to weaken the state’s cli­mate reg­u­la­tions. Even the rad­ical Sun­rise Move­ment seems to have pivoted to pro-Palestinian act­iv­ism over cli­mate con­cerns.

Yes, atmo­spheric con­cen­tra­tions of car­bon diox­ide and other warm­ing gases are rising. But this is hardly the “exist­en­tial threat of our time,” as Pres­id­ent Joe Biden once put it.

Rather, this is an oppor­tun­ity for optim­ism.

Ignore the rhet­oric about “dis­in­form­a­tion” or “den­iers.” The case for cooler heads starts with a lit­any of other fals­i­fied exag­ger­a­tions pro­pounded by self-pro­claimed defend­ers of the sci­entific con­sensus. In 1968, Stan­ford pro­fessor Paul Ehr­lich’s “The Pop­u­la­tion Bomb” pre­dicted immin­ent riots in U.S. streets from food short­ages. Four years later, The Club of Rome’s “The Lim­its to Growth,” writ­ten by MIT-cre­den­tialed authors, pre­dicted near-term resource crises, includ­ing peak oil and peak gas. In the same dec­ade, global cool­ing fears were touted in books and art­icles.

Those fears never came to fruition, and cli­mate change is fol­low­ing a sim­ilar path.

John Hold­ren, Pres­id­ent Obama’s two-term sci­ence advisor, once warned that as many as a bil­lion people could die by 2020 from cli­mate change. That clearly hasn’t happened.

The real­ity is that the cli­mate changes over time. Since the end of the Little Ice Age in the mid-19th cen­tury, global tem­per­at­ures have increased about two degrees. Some of this increase is nat­ural. Human­ity and nature are find­ing ways to adjust to this change. In our era of con­di­tioned air and other mod­ern con­veni­ences, the tech­no­logy for adapt­a­tion is unpre­ced­en­ted.

What about those weather extremes, such as hur­ricanes, floods and droughts, that human­ity can’t so eas­ily accom­mod­ate? A recent report by the U.S. Depart­ment of Energy found no long-term increases in extreme storms, hur­ricanes, tor­nadoes, floods, or droughts.

Mean­while, fossil fuels are still ascend­ant, partly from a back­lash against “green” energy by those most dir­ectly affected. Many are push­ing back against a top-down energy trans­ition. More than 1,100 wind, solar, and bat­tery projects have been delayed or defeated at the grass­roots level, reflect­ing the prob­lems of inter­mit­tent, fra­gile, land-intens­ive, trans­mis­sion­in­tens­ive, gov­ern­ment-depend­ent renew­able energy.

Energy phys­ics explains the back­lash by con­sumers and com­munit­ies. Earth’s Sun, work­ing over the ages, cre­ated a stock of embed­ded, con­cen­trated energy that is far super­ior to the daily flow of solar rays. Solar in its most effi­cient form is oil, gas, and coal.

Pro­gress­ives may bristle at rhet­oric call­ing cli­mate alarm “a hoax” and the Green New Deal “a scam,” but the world keeps turn­ing, and con­sumer-voters are sens­it­ive to green-energy infla­tion.

Con­sumer-chosen, tax­pay­er-neut­ral energy is the oppor­tun­ity cost of the Green New Deal. Global luke­warming is more the real­ity than a run­away green­house-gas effect. Adapt­a­tion, with the aid of fossil fuels, is the policy pre­scrip­tion. Such middle ground can allow cooler heads to pre­vail in a future filled with optim­ism.

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Robert L. Brad­ley Jr., is CEO of the Insti­tute for Energy Research, which he foun­ded in Hou­s­ton in 1989 and is now centered in Wash­ing­ton, D.C.

Stop Lying, The Guardian, the World’s Oceans Aren’t Becoming Dangerously Acidic

The U.K.’s The Guardian ran an article claiming that the world’s oceans have surpassed a critical tipping point in acidity threatening sea life. This is false. The pH content of the world’s oceans varies by time and place throughout the day, rising and falling modestly, but the average pH content remains far from acidic and there is no evidence crustaceans or other types of shellfish are being threatened by the sea water becoming acidic.

From ClimateRealism

By H. Sterling Burnett

The U.K.’s The Guardian ran an article claiming that the world’s oceans have surpassed a critical tipping point in acidity threatening sea life. This is false. The pH content of the world’s oceans varies by time and place throughout the day, rising and falling modestly, but the average pH content remains far from acidic and there is no evidence crustaceans or other types of shellfish are being threatened by the sea water becoming acidic.

Lisa Bachelor, the writer of The Guardian’s article, “‘Ticking timebomb’: sea acidity has reached critical levels, threatening entire ecosystems – study,” says:

The world’s oceans are in worse health than realized, scientists have said today, as they warn that a key measurement shows we are “running out of time” to protect marine ecosystems.

Ocean acidification, often called the “evil twin” of the climate crisis, is caused when carbon dioxide is rapidly absorbed by the ocean, where it reacts with water molecules leading to a fall in the pH level of the seawater. It damages coral reefs and other ocean habitats and, in extreme cases, can dissolve the shells of marine creatures.

Bachelor’s story is based upon a study which claims that ocean acidity has breached a “planetary boundary,” the seventh of nine such milestones or boundaries to be breached, threatening to cause permanent damage to the planet’s health.

The study looked at ice core records and studies of marine life, run through algorithms of complex computer models to assess the past 150 years, concluding the ocean acidification boundary had been breached, with the world facing a “ticking timebomb,” of sea life destruction.

This study’s findings are driven by woefully flawed computer models, a limited time horizon and understanding of long-term history, and lack a basis in real world data. As such it and The Guardian’s dire warnings based on it, are unjustified.

Model outputs are only as good as the assumptions, data, and our understandings of the feedbacks and systems built into them. Even as our knowledge improves, our understanding of the oceans and the interactions of its various currents, systems, inputs, and outputs remain limited, thus the assumptions built into the models are weak and uncertain. As discussed at Climate Realism, here, here, and here, for example, the climate model outputs fail to match reality.

Concerning the limited time scale of this paper’s analysis, 150 years is a blip in the history of the Earth and its oceans. Coral reefs and shellfish have existed, thrived and evolved over tens of millions to hundreds of millions of years, through periods of both more alkaline and more acidic oceans. Based on current data, there is no reason to believe that recent changes in ocean pH threatens a “timebomb,” or apocalypse for shellfish and other sea life, at least not if one cares about solid evidence as opposed to model outputs.

There are, in fact, no scientifically established “planetary boundaries,” or “tipping points.” Rather such claims are political in nature, meant to drive political action (and likely increased funding) on behalf of the concerns of select groups of scientists. If the research of a select group of scientists are to be believed, the Earth has already surpassed seven of the nine purported boundaries – yet, data on extreme weather shows no worsening of hurricanes, tornados, wildfires, heat waves, drought, temperature or weather related deaths, or long-term coral or shellfish decline (at least, for the latter, no decline not tied to pollution and overharvesting). As such, one must wonder what dangers surpassing the supposed boundaries pose if exceeding them results in no identifiable harm that can be linked to the breach?

Which brings us to the crux of the study’s and The Guardian’s assertions that oceans are becoming dangerously acidic. Climate Realism has rebutted previous mainstream media stories claiming human carbon dioxide emissions were causing the oceans to become more acidic on 10 previous occasions. What the evidence shows is ocean pH varies significantly across the globe, with levels in tropical regions being more than twice as high as those in polar and that marine life has evolutionarily adapted to changes in pH.

In addition, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency acknowledges that sea water has a normal pH of 8.1 and nowhere across the ocean is anywhere close to 7.0 or below. “Although climate models suggest the oceans’ surface pH may have dropped from pH 8.2 to 8.1 since 1750, that change was never actually measured, rather the pH drop is merely a modeled conjecture,” as Climate at a Glance: Ocean Acidification explains. The EPA provides a helpful graphic by way of comparison. (see the graphic, below)

Comparison of the pH of common substances. Data source: U.S. Environmental Protection AgencFigure 1. Comparison of the pH of common substances. Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Measuring Acid Rain,” epa.gov, last accessed August 12, 2021, https://www.epa.gov/acidrain/what-acid-rainy

To conclude, acidic oceans make for a good scare story, raising the specter of mountains of dead and disintegrating sea life and perhaps bathers and surfers dissolving before horrified beachgoers’ eyes, but neither imaginative image has any relation to reality. We don’t know for sure whether ocean pH has declined over time during the recent period of climate change, but we do know that more than halfway to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentrations above pre-industrial levels, average ocean pH levels are well above the neutral 7 mark, and if they’ve declined at all, it has been by a barely measurable amount. As a result, contra The Guardian’s headline, there is no identifiable “ticking timebomb” threatening ocean ecosystems.

Thanks, New York Times, For Finally Admitting Honey Bees Are Doing Great

From ClimateRealism

ByLinnea Lueken

A recent New York Times (NYT) article titled “The Beekeepers Who Don’t Want You to Buy More Bees,” explains that contrary to popular media narratives, honey bee populations are healthy and numerous. This is true. Colony collapse disorder, the main threat to bees, is largely a commercial bee problem and not necessarily a wild honey bee problem.

In the article, professional bee-keeper Gorazd Trusnovec explains to NYT writer David Segal that the well-intentioned growing popularity of beekeeping is actually misguided, because there are now actually too many honey bees in areas all around the world.

“If you overcrowd any space with honey bees, there is a competition for natural resources, and since bees have the largest numbers, they push out other pollinators, which actually harms biodiversity,” he said, after a recent visit to the B&B bees. “I would say that the best thing you could do for honey bees right now is not take up beekeeping.”

Segal goes on to describe colony collapse disorder, which is a phenomena seen in commercial beekeeping in which a large portion of a bee hive or colony dies or is wiped out. Segal writes that “experts tend to blame pesticides, an invasive parasite, a reduction in forageable habitat and climate change,” and this tracks with what Climate Realism has seen and combatted previously. However, climate change is not among the best explanations for the problem, as explained in “Tell the Truth, UPI News, Parasites and Pesticides, NOT Climate Change, Are Killing Honey Bee Colonies,” or in the June Climate Fact Check.

Extreme weather like heat waves and precipitation aren’t occurring more frequently as measured by any metric, so climate change can’t be implicated in  increasing numbers of commercial bee hives being damaged across large geographic regions.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency lists the factors it believes are the most likely causes of the decline in bees and other pollinators:

  • Honey bee killing, invasive varroa mites;
  • New and emerging insect viruses;
  • Pesticide poisoning;
  • Habitat changes and lack of food sources;
  • Combinations of the above factors.

The alarm around colony collapse disorder (CCD) caused a huge spike in interest in beekeeping in order to “save the bees,” however as a another professional conservationist interviewed by  Segal explained, CCD is “an agriculture story, not a conservation story[.]” In fact, there are “more honey bees on the planet than there have ever been in human history.” Segal writes that the number of hives in the world has risen 26 percent in just the last 10 years.

The New York Times itself has contributed to spreading fallacious claims about climate change and CCD, like in “Without Bees, We Are in Trouble,” and for bumblebees, “Climate Change: It’s a Buzzkill for Bumblebees, Study Finds,” in the past, so the present story is refreshing for its accuracy.

Beekeeping has become so popular in places like Slovenia, for example, that the NYT reports honey yields are dropping locally despite a huge increase in hives because there is not enough plant nectar for all the bees.

Honey bees are also not the only pollinators around, and an overabundance of them could negatively impact the populations of other bee species, like bumblebees, as well as non-bee pollinators. This is particularly true in places like North America, where honey bees are an introduced species brought over by European settlers as livestock for honey production. They are not native here, and are considered by conservationists to be invasive competitors to native species.

Honey bees are doing more than fine, regardless of climate change. According to this NYT investigation, they are almost doing too well, due to an increase in the number of beekeepers. Commercial beehives experiencing CCD are not indicative of the health of the entire species, and certainly climate change is not to blame for their problems. Thanks, NYT, for looking beyond the narrative that “climate change causes everything,” to get to the true root cause of the struggles of honey bees and other pollinators, at least in this one story.

Linnea Lueken

Linnea Lueken is a Research Fellow with the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy.

While she was an intern with The Heartland Institute in 2018, she co-authored a Heartland Institute Policy Brief “Debunking Four Persistent Myths About Hydraulic Fracturing.”

Linnea Lueken