Quotulatiousness

July 22, 2026

Sensible climate spending

Filed under: Environment, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On his Substack, John Robson suggests some spending on environmental issues where we actually can make positive changes as opposed to the spending on climate change which is mostly wasted:

As noted in our latest Green Money Machine, there’s no question that humanity faces real environmental problems and that some worthwhile organizations and people are trying to do something about them. It’s an important reason why we oppose, and even resent, the way the overwhelming focus on “climate change” drains off so much effort, time, and even money. So let us tell you about some actual environmental issues that have caught our attention lately. For instance “the Mediterranean Sea’s critically endangered population of great white sharks”. Of course we also recognize that some ecologists may be taking a worldly, not to say cynical, approach and leveraging concern about climate to raise money for other actually more useful activities. But in the long run cunning isn’t a good plan any more than obtuseness is.

When it comes to great white sharks it is also of course easy to imagine that anyone planning to swim in the Mediterranean might regard their scarcity as a plus. But the fact that such a comment would be controversial today reminds us of just how far the environmental movement has come since the 1960s, and frequently in good ways.

Indeed, being historically minded, we even recall a jibe by the New York Times after US president Franklin Roosevelt’s crushing 1936 reelection victory (he won every state but Maine and Vermont) that “If he were to say a kind word for the man-eating shark, people would look thoughtful and say perhaps there are two sides to the question”. But just in case you were frightened by Jaws in your youth, we could also mention (also from National Geographic) efforts to save the Mekong River’s “megafish”, a catfish bigger than a person that … no, wait. Poor choice. Also scary.

Satellite photo of the Great Salt Lake from August 2018 after years of drought, reaching near-record lows. The difference in colors between the northern and southern portions of the lake is the result of the Lucin Cutoff, a railroad causeway. The image was acquired by the MSI sensor on the Sentinel-2B satellite (Resolution: 20m, RGB Composites: True color, Band 4-3-2).
Wikimedia Commons

OK then. How about the shrinking Great Salt Lake? Because according to National Geographic (yes again they do serve a useful purpose when not banging on about climate):

    Since 1850, the lake has lost 73 percent of its water and 60 percent of its surface area, and as more people move to the region, the water that typically feeds the lake is increasingly being diverted for agricultural, municipal, and industrial needs. What’s more, over the past few decades, a series of challenges – including climate change and the worst megadrought in at least 1,200 years – has impacted the cyclical climatic conditions that have sustained the lake for millennia.

Aaaargh. Banging on about climate. It’s a hard habit to break. And a bad one to keep, because it’s ridiculous to describe the loss of water going back to 1850, attribute it to human folly diverting the flow, and throw in the worst megadrought in at least 1,200 years (which necessarily means there was a horrific one 1,200 years ago which can’t have been our fault) and then toss in “climate change” which again is a description of alterations in weather not a causal force, and then speak of all these things having “impacted the cyclical climatic conditions that have sustained the lake for millennia”.

Bosh. In the first place, they cannot possibly know what cyclical climate conditions were like thousands and thousands of years ago. Nor what kind of pattern of megadroughts occurring millennia apart is natural, especially since interglacials don’t last that many millennia. Second, it isn’t possible that diverting water to agriculture, or swimming pools, has disrupted climate cycles. It just isn’t. Critical thought seems to be among the first and worst victims of “climate change”. The mind virus not the weather thing.

Especially as we regard it as intensely desirable that our fellow human fools stop draining the lake. Really. Take some of the tens of billions governments squander on trying to fix the weather, which honestly has always been bad, frequently dreadful, and put it to sensible uses.

July 20, 2026

Markets reject Carney’s official carbon price, so Canadians have to pay more

Filed under: Books, Business, Cancon, Economics, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Canada is one of the last remaining bastions of Net Zero zealotry … in fact, Prime Minister Mark Carney may be the only national leader trying to turn back the tide of economic reality over this:

AI image posted by L. Wayne Mathison on X.

Mark Carney wrote a book called Value(s) lecturing the world about fairness, responsibility, sustainability and humility. His real governing value appears to be this: when markets reject his climate scheme, force Canadians to rescue it.

Carney now admits the official carbon price is supposedly above $100 while actual credits have traded near $20. Any honest banker would recognize the message. The market does not believe these credits are worth the imaginary price politicians assigned to them.

Carney’s response is classic central-planner arrogance. He will not reconsider the product. He will rig the price, tighten the rules, compel companies to buy it and call the resulting coercion “investment certainty”.

He praised carbon pricing in Value(s) as one of the most important and effective ways to reduce emissions. Then the consumer carbon tax became politically poisonous, so he scrapped it. The industrial version survives because its costs are easier to bury inside electricity, transportation, groceries, construction materials, wages and lost investment.

Carney also boasts that Canada continues sending climate-finance money abroad while other G7 governments pull back. Canadian families are struggling with food, housing and energy, yet our philosopher-banker remains determined to finance his international reputation with their money.

His book preached humility. His government practises price fixing.

His book preached responsibility. His government transfers the risk to taxpayers.

His book preached fairness. His policies protect the climate-finance class while ordinary Canadians absorb the costs.

Carney spent years wrapping political ideology in the language of banking. Now the numbers are exposing the sales pitch. When a theoretical $100 asset trades for $20, the market has delivered its verdict. Ottawa can falsify the price, but it cannot manufacture genuine value.

Value(s) may be hundreds of pages long. Carney’s philosophy fits into one sentence:

When reality refuses to validate the climate fantasy, force Canadians to pay until it does.

July 11, 2026

Governments should not have easy access to emergency powers

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

As we found out in Canada in 2022, when the government gives itself emergency powers unrestricted by normal legal procedure and due process, they abuse those powers. The UK government is eager to grant itself similar powers due to a “climate emergency” that will, among other things suspend habeus corpus and the 1689 Bill of Rights:

Emergency, d’ye see? National security emergency.

But here’s the problem if the government declares a national security emergency:

    Part 1 of the act establishes a new and broad definition of “emergency”. The definition includes war or attack by a foreign power, which were defined as emergencies under previous legislation, as well as terrorism which poses a threat of serious damage to the security of the United Kingdom and events which threaten serious damage to human welfare in a place in the United Kingdom or to the environment of a place in the United Kingdom.

Damage to the environment in the UK. So, that matches. And if they then declare such an emergency, under the act, then the following laws — among others — no longer apply:

    The only primary legislation which may not be amended by emergency regulations is the Human Rights Act 1998 and part 2 of the Civil Contingencies Act itself

That is, all other laws no longer apply. It’s an Enabling Act, allowing rule by decree for the length of the emergency. Absolutely everything is up for grabs. These laws are not, repeat not, protected:

    The peers tried to protect the following laws from emergency regulation:

    Habeas Corpus Act 1679

    Bill of Rights 1689

    Section 7 of the Parliament Act 1911 which limited the duration of a parliament to five years[e]

    Act of Settlement 1701

    House of Commons Disqualification Act 1975

    Life Peerages Act 1958

    House of Lords Act 1999

Seriously, it wipes out the entire legal and constitutional structure.

So, you know, no. Not because there is, or isn’t, a climate change emergency. But because of the powers they’ll take if one is declared.

No.

It’s not November yet, but this sign seems rather appropriate:

July 5, 2026

Canary in a Climate World

Filed under: Books, Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On his Substack, John Robson begins a series looking at a new book that covers the skeptic view of the great climate change debate, Canary in a Climate World:

Today we start a series looking at the new bestselling book Canary in a Climate World: Climate Realism vs. the Net Zero Myth. From the title you can guess the slant, but you may not expect the sheer number (38) of well-credentialed contributors. And we begin where they did, with the first chapter called “A Personal Awakening: from Covid to Climate” by Dr. Angus Dalgleish, Professor of Oncology at University of London. What’s an expert in cancer research doing writing about climate? Well, he doesn’t claim to be a climate scientist in the narrow sense (though he certainly understands statistics). Instead he writes about how his experience as a medical expert during Covid opened his eyes to the way science can be politicized and hijacked to serve an agenda. Once he saw the same pattern in climate, he realized it was essentially the same story, with many of the same characters, just being played out on a much slower time scale.

Dalgleish is a man who understands how science is done, or should be. He’s an expert in cancer immunotherapy and virology, who has made award-winning contributions to the fight against HIV, among other diseases. When Covid broke out he found himself at the forefront of research on the unfolding pandemic. But soon his suspicions were aroused.

    I was surrounded by experts and doctors who believed every word they were being told. What first shook me was work done with my close collaborator Birger Sorensen, with whom I had been helping to improve an already effective HIV therapeutic vaccine, Vacc-4X. Sorensen spotted that the sequence of SARS CoV-2 published in Nature in February 2020 contained several highly positively charged inserts that one simply did not see in natural viruses.

So, a scientific discovery to be shared, right? Dalgleish explains why the six sequences in question could not be natural, and moreover two of them matched ones published earlier by researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But when he pointed this non-coincidence out to colleagues he was told, basically, to shut up. In a revealing echo of the “not a climate scientist” trope, people with far less training than him told him he wasn’t an expert and wasn’t qualified to comment on the matter. And in another revealing echo, when he took his findings to the government he was accused of spreading misinformation for saying something true.

It gets worse. He then watched the official response to Covid break all the rules. China could have stopped the spread within days by preventing people from leaving Wuhan, but instead they and the WHO allowed daily flights to leave the city, sending the pandemic around the world. The data began to show that only the elderly or people with comorbidities were at risk of death, yet governments around the world imposed universal lockdowns, urged on them by incompetent and narrow-minded scientists whose computer models consistently overpredicted infection rates, painting an alarmist picture of catastrophe that went unchallenged.

Dalgleish was also dismayed to see that standard symptomatic treatments, such as vitamin D3 and inhaled steroids, that he was using successfully on his patients, were being cast aside by the General Medical Council in favour of dangerous alternatives including ventilators which, he says, “in many cases certainly killed rather than saved lives by pushing secretions back into the lungs and effectively drowning the patients.” He accused the GMC of:

    prosecuting good doctors for looking after their patients and not slavishly following official guidelines, which often had more in common with what I can only describe as highly coercive and authoritarian behaviour.

Then the vaccines arrived. Dalgleish and his colleagues reviewed all the available literature and concluded that no coronavirus vaccine had ever succeeded. Instead the vaccines were likely to program the immune system against obsolete variants and impair its ability to recognise the current one. The demand that everybody everywhere take the shot, despite the knowledge that it was a futile treatment and posed serious risks to people who were not at risk of dying, convinced Dalgleish that what was happening was a scam or worse.

June 12, 2026

The mystical powers of climate change, is there anything it can’t do?

Filed under: Environment, Media, Soccer — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In Canada, all problems are now blamed on US President Donald Trump. It’s a fantastic get-out-of-trouble move for politicans like Prime Minister Mark Carney, Ontario Premier Doug Ford, and even mayors of towns and cities across the Demented Dominion. But even the malign powers of the Bad Orange Man seem puny in comparison to the amazing powers of — gasp! — CLIMATE CHANGE:

Every now and then I suspect there is a game played by bored elites to see which of them can get away with the most asinine “climate change” claim. There have been some doozies: lack of UFOs, “climate change” anxiety, increased sugar consumption, engineering short people. On and on and on ad infinitum.

Today we meet what could be the winner in the contest. Experts are claiming World Cup matches could be slower. Now instead of ninety-plus minutes running around ending in zero-zero ties and dramatic shootouts, we’ll get ninety-plus minutes of somewhat slower running around ending in zero-zero ties and dramatic shootouts. Because “climate change”.

Seems to me, though, that if we really wanted to save time, we could have all matches begin at the shootouts. The whole tournament could be over in a day. Take that, “climate change”!

Here’s the claim, appropriately announced on a PR site, a site whose specialty is juicing dull and dubious headlines: “Climate Central finds climate change has increased the likelihood of heat that could slow players for 97 of the 104 matches, threatening game speed and fan safety.”

What will happen to the other 7 matches they don’t say. Probably they will end in shootouts.

Details:

    Previous research shows temperatures above 82.4°F can reduce sprint frequency, total distance covered, and recovery time, impacting not only player performance and safety, but also match tempo, tactics, and overall style of play.

Previous researchers discovered — and stay with me, here — that when it’s hot outside people outside in the heat act like people act when it’s hot out.

Where would we be without previous researchers?

[…]

As you have surmised, we don’t have to believe any of this: the scenarios are all silly, proving that the stunning new research is purely performative, a way to signal the vices and predilections of the researchers. As proof, we oblige the PR site which asks us to quote this:

    As global temperatures continue to rise, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, the 2026 World Cup could become another example of how climate change can disrupt sports and traditions people cherish, forcing a reevaluation of how the game is played.

This is all ridiculous, and only saved by the charge of falsity by adding that “could.” Meaning might, which also means might not.

They also provide this quote they ask us to re-quote:

    Alex Jacobs, professional player formerly with the Jamaican Premier League:
    Heat is not new. But extreme heat — made more likely by heat-trapping pollution driving climate change — might just be a difference maker in this summer’s edition of the biggest sporting event on the planet.

Way these quotes work is that either the PR firm, or the organization employing the PR firm, write them for victims, who are sought out and asked to sign on. The people allowing their names to be used are, of course, fully responsible for the words used, and even often believe them. But there’s no mistaking that stilted prose of the manufactured quote. Nobody talks like this. This prose is not conclusive, but whenever you see it, it’s a darn good reason to dismiss the claims made.

Of course, using a highly visible public event to advance the climate change agenda is nothing new, they’ve literally been doing it for decades now. Media outlets have always had a bias toward the most dramatic outcome, if only for marketing purposes — “if it bleeds, it leads” — but even the more skeptical outlets have drifted in the climate hysteria direction over time:

We have complained many times that the public is presented with a picture of climate science systematically biased towards alarmism. And it’s not just our anecdotal impression. We have data, in the form of a new study from the US National Bureau of Economic Research saying the government delegates who write the IPCC Summary for Policy Makers (SPM) overstate the science in the underlying report, and then the media further overstates what’s in the SPM. The study authors used multiple AI systems to extract key scientific statements in every IPCC Assessment Report since 1990, track how they were summarized and what the accompanying media coverage said. Using a statistical model they measured the way the statements get changed or twisted at each stage. There were some surprising results and some unsurprising. Unsurprisingly the data showed the UK Guardian has by far the most climate coverage of all major media outlets and is also the most biased. Another unsurprising result is that the overall media bias regarding the severity of climate change has been consistent over time. A surprising result (to many, but not to us) is that the only major media outlet exhibiting precisely zero bias was Fox News. Otherwise most right-leaning outlets adopted the left-leaning outlets’ alarmist bias as of 2007, again unsurprising to us. And there’s much more.

The authors identified three forms of bias: severity, in which a summary picks the upper end of a range of claims, uncertainty, in which a summary downplays caveats and qualifiers, and scenario in which worst-case scenarios get foregrounded. They used a numerical scale from -2 to +2 that captured bias in either direction: a positive number indicated that the summary was biased towards alarmism and a negative number indicated a bias in the opposite direction. Then they averaged the bias measures together and measured them at two stages in the game of telephone. The “TS-to-SPM” stage compared statements in the author-written Technical Summary to how they were worded in the government-written Summary for Policymakers. The “SPM-to-media” stage looked at how statements in the SPM were then reported in the press. The authors examined the TS-to-SPM stage for every IPCC Assessment Report from 1990 to 2023. They only looked at the SPM-to-media stage from the 2001 Third Assessment Report (AR3) because that’s as far back as their media library went.

[…]

That’s right, folks. Even the right-leaning outlets have also gone in for alarmist bias, at least since 2007. Indeed, the media’s bias converged in size and direction over time, as shown in this chart:

For the AR3 in 2001, right-leaning outlets on average understated the climate findings while left-leaning outlets overstated them. But thereafter both sides shared the alarmist bias. Which reflects the success of alarmist activists in the post-An Inconvenient Truth era (2006) driving skeptical voices out of the media. That campaign didn’t eliminate bias, it only replaced one form by another, with the result that the overall media landscape became entirely one-sided.

The uniformity of the bias can also be seen in this chart:

The right-leaning outlets in red are about as bad as the lefties in blue, except for Fox News which is the only outlet with no measurable bias and the Wall Street Journal which had an overall negative (anti-alarmist) bias.

May 24, 2026

The British Climate Change Committee report is “full of howlers”

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Matt Ridley expands on a recent Daily Mail article on the antics of the Climate Change Committee’s latest “findings”:

The British public has been propagandized to believe the most extreme risks are far more common than they really are … even in the way the weather is reported.

In my Daily Mail essay on the @theCCCuk‘s new report, I point out that they have a vested interest in exaggeration.

“Between the moment when these climatecrats wake in the morning and the moment they lay their overworked brains to rest on feather pillows at night, they have one all-consuming ambition: to maximise their own budget.

They achieve this goal by being as alarmist as possible.

Imagine if they found evidence that climate change was no big deal or even good news: would they want to publish this? Of course not. It would be disastrous for their (taxpayer-funded) income.

The committee has never produced a report on global greening: the remarkable 15-20 per cent increase in green vegetation on the planet over the past four decades, caused mostly by carbon dioxide emissions.

Nor do its members talk about falling deaths from cold weather anywhere near as much as they do about the smaller number of deaths from hot weather.

Good news for us, in short, is no news for them.

The report is full of howlers. It states emphatically that, by 2050, ‘sea levels will be [not “could be” or “may be”] 20–45 cm higher around UK coasts than today.’

That implies sea levels rising over the next 24 years by 8mm to 19mm per year.

But over the 35 years we have had satellites measuring it, sea levels have risen on average by just 3.4mm per year. There was a little acceleration in 2015-2020 and there has in fact been a deceleration since then: 4.5mm increase per year since 2010 and 3.7mm per year since 2015. (In some parts of the country, such as East Anglia, the land is sinking, a different effect.)

So to assume that the rate of sea-level rise could more than quadruple within the next quarter-century is completely unscientific. Neither Greenland nor Antarctica is losing ice at an accelerating rate — and they are the only possible sources for such a huge increase.

How, then, does @theCCCuk justify this hysteria over sea levels?

It bases its sea-level prediction “on a high-emissions scenario (RCP8.5), using the upper-end estimate (95th percentile)”.

RCP8.5 is an economic scenario that was produced in 2011 for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) by a team of mathematical modellers.

Their instruction was to find out what it would take to increase CO2 emissions at a rapid rate to a very high level by the end of the century.

First, the modellers said, the world would have to massively increase the use of coal at the expense of oil and gas — using coal to make fuel for cars and planes, burning eight times much coal in 2100 as the world did in 2000, and projecting that fully half of all the world’s energy would be supplied by coal by the end of this century.

Yet even this back-to-coal fantasy was not enough to achieve the gargantuan emissions the modellers were tasked with producing. So they assumed both that the world’s population growth would also reverse its current slowdown, surging to 12 billion people by the end of the century, that innovation to make our lives more fuel-efficient would largely end, and also that we wouldn’t even try to cut emissions.

None of these are going to happen.

Scientists have been saying for more than a decade that the apocalyptic RCP8.5 scenario is extremely unrealistic, and even the alarmist BBC said in 2020 that it was “exceedingly unlikely”.

The IPCC has recently announced that it is abolishing RCP8.5 altogether, while one of the Climate Change Committee’s own members, Professor Piers Forster, wrote an article just last week “on the death of RCP8.5”.

Nobody, at all, ever, under any circumstance, should be using RCP8.5 to forecast climate. Yet the CCC is still using it to terrify the government and the British people – and even taking its “upper-end estimate”!

April 12, 2026

“The ‘Green Energy Transition’ is … a watermelon, green on the outside and red on the inside”

Filed under: Africa, Business, Environment — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On Substack, John Robson discusses the state of the fake green economy in the wake of a carbon market scandal where a now-bankrupt “green” company appears to have sold far more “carbon credits” than they should have:

One problem among many with the “Green Energy Transition” is that it was always a watermelon, green on the outside and red on the inside. It wasn’t market-driven, it was designed, and hyped, by people who didn’t care what people actually wanted to buy and indeed, in many cases, who actively believed that consumer preferences were inefficient and unenlightened. As when Bloomberg Green worries about “What a Clean Cookstove Company’s Bankruptcy Means for Carbon Markets”. Why one company’s bankruptcy should mean anything for “carbon markets” is less clear even than what a “clean cookstove” would be. One where you sprayed and wiped the backsplash as well as the main surface? But both are clearer than “carbon markets”. You just can’t go into a store and buy carbon. What are they talking about? Why, another face-plant by central planning, of course.

According to the article, in case you weren’t independently aware of it:

    This year was supposed to be a turning point for carbon markets, with the United Nations’ long-delayed country-to-country trading system coming into force and airlines preparing to enter a mandatory program to offset their emissions.

Before we get to “a turning point for carbon markets” let us give a bit of attention to “supposed to be”. Supposed by whom? Perhaps people who think the United Nations was an efficient central planner, or some subset of them. But we’ll bet that nobody normal ever said to you, or anyone else, in the course of a chat last year, “2026 will be a turning point for carbon markets”. Nobody.

Also, who was going to compel airlines to enter a “mandatory program”? Laws are made at the national level, not internationally. Turns out it’s the UN too, via the International Civil Aviation Organization, so no one was going to bungle or cheat, obviously. What could go wrong?

[…]

Why? If a company selling stoves went bankrupt in Peoria, would it cause people in Kenya, or Patagonia, or Tokyo to reconsider the whole issue of applying heat to transform food and decide that stoves, food or both were overrated? No. Of course not. The problem here is that this whole business of carbon credits was flummery.

First you made an estimate of how much harm carbon dioxide did which was nonsense. Then you made an estimate of how much CO2 some activity would release that was also nonsense. And then you made an estimate of how much CO2 some activity would not release (in this case cooking with ethanol in Mombasa) that was also nonsense. And on that basis you proposed to link the worlds of high finance, aviation and having stuff generally to a system that would have been economic rubbish even if it weren’t flashing a big bright sign “Defraud the gullible foreigners HERE!!!” Which it was.

Mathiness being in vogue, Bloomberg Green has a colourful chart explaining that “Cookstove credits are expected to become more important from 2027” that deserves as much respect as the journalistic passive voice typically does. Or perhaps even less.

The story also says:

    Prices on Corsia, the marketplace for airlines where Koko was looking to sell its credits, fell as low as $12.25 from about $15 just before the firm’s collapse, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, and now sit at $12.85.

As prices for tulips softened abruptly in the Netherlands in 1637. Except at least there really were tulips and markets for same. Corsia is not a marketplace. It is, instead, the ICAO’s (remember: the International Civil Aviation Organization) “Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation”. As if ethanol stoves in Kenya, a land of some 53.3 million people who presumably only eat three meals a day on average, could offset the vast clouds of so-called “carbon pollution” that travellers, including the big-carbon-footprint bigmouths who lead most western countries, emit every day. The whole thing is speculation piled on ignorance atop mismeasurement built on the sand of dishonesty. What could go wrong?

March 9, 2026

A lot of real problems could be fixed with $16 trillion

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On his Substack, John Robson observes that there are huge numbers of problems — real, measurable problems — that could be ameliorated or completely solved by the application of $16 trillion dollars. But instead, the governments of the western world have pissed that up against the wall on unsuccessful efforts to address climate change:

In the Epoch Times Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation writes “Environmental scholar Bjorn Lomborg recently calculated that across the globe, governments have spent at least $16 trillion feeding the climate change industrial complex. And for what?” A splendid question. Of course some people would say “Well, to keep the sky from catching fire, duh”. But since the reduction in emissions has been trivial, it wasn’t a great bargain. Plus, Moore being an actual economist, he drills in on the key point: “But it’s much worse than that. In economics, there is a concept called opportunity cost: What could we have done with $16 trillion to make the world better off?” So, after carving “Opportunity cost” over the entrance to our academy, we ask anyone who enters to suppose that you are a do-gooder, and a green one at that. And suppose that someone had offered you sixteen trillion bucks back in 1995 to do good with. Whatever you wanted. Malnutrition in Africa. Plastic in the oceans. Loss of habitat. Safe drinking water for people in South Asia or even on Canadian aboriginal reserves. Literally anything. What could you have accomplished, or at least attempted? This question was long ago posed by Lomborg, albeit only with $75 billion imaginary dollars, to a panel of experts who concluded climate change was far down the list of spending targets. And yet governments said no thanks and spend all $16 trillion fighting “carbon pollution”. And for what?

In their defence those same governments might be tempted to point to the lack of warming and say something like “See, it worked! Sure, $16 trillion is a lot but we saved Earth from runaway heating so be grateful.” However they are also the ones who lament that the planet continues to warm, heat, bake and boil. So even if they’re right, they’re wrong. And either way, the money really was all wasted.

Of course they might say no, see, it would have been way worse without that spending. And as we’ve noted before, one of the many slippery things about climate alarmism is just how fast they think changes in CO2 produces changes in temperature and via changes in temperature, changes in weather. It’s very difficult to pin them down on just when the really troubling impacts began to be palpable, not least because they generally say we’re already in a climate crisis that’s about to hit. But even the models, and here we include hysterical ones like RCP8.5, do not generally suggest that the temperature today would be a whole lot higher if we’d stayed on the emissions track from 1995 instead of, well, staying on it, with Western nations declining due to increasing energy efficiency not political grandstanding and China, India and others more than taking up the slack.

To be fair, it would not be illogical for such persons to say, or shriek, that it proves $16 trillion was just peanuts, we should have spent $160 trillion or $48 quadrillion or 4 Triganic Pus or something of that sort. And they did.

For instance, just over two years ago Bloomberg actually ran a column saying “$266 Trillion in Climate Spending is a No-Brainer”. And we agreed, sardonically, since the whole world GDP seems to be around $96 trillion as nearly as anyone can estimate it. (We are not convinced most alarmists who toss such numbers around, like former Canadian Environment Minister Catherine McKenna who wanted “trillions in infrastructure investments from both governments and the private sector”, can tell you off the cuff to within an order of magnitude what, say, the current US or Canadian GDP is.)

February 24, 2026

Canada’s climate follies, a brief update

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Environment, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On Substack, John Robson looks at the Canadian federal government’s lofty climate goals and their pathetic strategies to achieve those goals and the vast chasm between the two:

Chinese electric vehicles are likely coming to Canadian roads, like these BYD models.

Forgive us for being fixated on Canada’s climate follies just because we live here. But they are revealing, including the U-turn on EVs that we mentioned last week where the government yanked the steering wheel so hard they did a 360 from banning gasoline vehicles by law to banning them by regulation. Raising the question whether they actually know what they’re doing and, if so, whether they regard themselves as commendably devious or just way smarter than everyone else. We hope not the latter because the policy is going to fail big-time. As Randall Denley just warned in the National Post, “To summarize, the Carney plan relies on electric vehicles (EVs) that Ontario plants don’t produce, a sudden and dramatic new appetite for buying EVs and an imagined export market that doesn’t exist. To top it off, the federal government will provide $2.3 billion in EV rebates that will encourage Canadians to buy cars made elsewhere.” Apart from that, a stroke of genius of the sort that, through decades of diligent effort, has made the nation tragically poorer without hitting any of our targets including the one where they get more humble.

As a Globe & Mail news story blurted out:

    A new study published Friday by the Canadian Climate Institute says Canada is not on track to meet any of its climate targets – not the 2026 interim emissions reduction target, the 2030 Paris Agreement commitment, or even the long-term goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050.

Oh. Pretty hard to make that one sound like an achievement, isn’t it? Or to sound as if the people who pulled it off should be trusted with the next one.

Now as we’ve complained before, the “Canadian Climate Institute” bills itself as some sort of dispassionate neutral observer when in fact it’s a creature of the state. And, worse, one of those lavishly-funded outfits (we deniers may have all the money, but they got $30 million from the Canadian government and we did not … uh no, that was just one grant, the total’s higher) that exists to push the government to do things it wants to do anyway but needs the appearance of “civil society” support to pull off.

Thus, the Globe sonorously informs us, the problem isn’t that the targets were impractical or the politicians and bureaucrats inept. Heck no. As usual with Thomas Sowell’s “unconstrained vision” of public policy, all you need is love:

    The report suggests Canada has moved away from its climate goals thanks to “a slackening of policy effort over the past year, marked by the removal or weakening of climate policies across the country”.

Which gives the impression they had been on track to meet their goals up until some recent backsliding, whereas in reality they have never shown any sign of meeting them. After all, what policies have actually changed since Carney took over as Prime Minister in ways that could possibly affect long-term trends? And how close was Canada to meeting “its climate goals” before this disastrous swerve into the camp of the deniers?

It’s not even true that “Canada” as a collective has collective “climate goals”. The government has climate goals, and they come bundled with a host of other policies at election time, especially since even our “Conservative” party is terrified of challenging climate orthodoxy. Public support for those goals is weak, sporadic and prone to vanish when real costs hove into view. But ignoring that piece of typical collectivist prose, Mark Carney has spent most of his prime ministership flying around virtue-signaling in the presence of others doing the same. (No, really. It’s been less than a year and he’s taken almost three dozen flights.) He hasn’t been in the office shredding this and demolishing that.

January 15, 2026

Having it both ways, thanks to the miraculous powers of “climate change”

Filed under: Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Remember those news reports from a few years back, when the media urgently informed you that your home town was “warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet”? Sure you do, because every major outlet latched on to the idea and juiced it for that local angle. In the days before the internet and social media, it would have worked, too. This is an example of the amazing powers of climate change, but far from the only one. Apparently the wonders of climate change can both speed up and slow down the rotation of the entire planet:

Here is a headline from Forbes 4 August 2022:

Here, five short days later, is a headline from The Independent 9 August 2022:

It is possible to reconcile these two messages, if you are are dedicated The Science follower who greatly fears being called a science denier.

This is how: that on or before 8 August 2022, you swear the earth is spinning faster, and you say that any who doubts this is a troglodyte MAGAtard, and that 9 August 2022 and after, you swear the earth is spinning slower, and say that any who doubts this is mouth-breathing redneck.

The Science is self-correcting in this way.

Now what is amusing about this is not the hubris and over-certainty of scientists, which because scientists are people have characteristics in them no different than in non-scientists. What matters to us are (a) the alleged causes of the changes in rotational speed, and (b) AI.

[…]

I have been trying, with little success, to explain that AI is programmed to be sycophantic, to give users a feeling that what they (the users) believe is right, and that they are right to believe whatever it is they want to believe. Press any of these AI models strongly and consistently enough, and you can get them to “admit” just about anything — that they haven’t been hard coded not to notice. DIE is still with us, even, or especially in, AI.

AI has sworn that earth is both speeding up and slowing down, promising both were true with searches I did (for the article titles) separated by less than a minute.

Now this is partly to blame on the training material, because scientists themselves are claiming the same things AI found. Which brings us to the alleged causes of both.

Climate change.

Well of course it was climate change. Climate change, as we discovered earlier, is responsible for all things on earth. All bad things, that is. Climate change simultaneously causes earth to spin both slower and faster. Climate change is therefore a branch of quantum mechanics, where outcomes both happen and don’t happen, depending on which scientist is looking.

January 4, 2026

“You will eat the bugs, peasant!”

Filed under: Food, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR reacts to yet another “bugs are yummy, peons, you are going to eat them” post:

Contemplating this picture, I had a realization about the people who want you to eat bugs.

The fact that the bugs are disgusting to you is the whole point. Enlisting you as the principal enforcer of your oppression is the program. Fucking with your head is the actual goal, not just a tactic.

It doesn’t matter whether or not Western prejudice against eating insects is irrational. In an alternate world where we routinely eat insects, the people who want you to eat the bugs would find some other kind of disgusting garbage and play to make you eat it.

Because this isn’t sustainability or any of that bullshit. The degradation is the point.

However, even the powers-that-be can’t magically create economic conditions in which insect factories earn profits:

In the renewable frenzy of the early 2020s Ÿnsect raised €600 million to “Reinvent the food chain” and pioneer alternative foods that “respect the planet’s boundaries”. Some $200 million of their funding came from hapless taxpayers somewhere. But in record time, seemingly before it began, it has already gone. Bankrupted. And not because people don’t want to eat mealworms (which they don’t) but because there wasn’t much market in making animal feed either. It turns out that farm owners didn’t want to spend 2 to 10 times as much on “sustainable” cattle fodder. So the company shifted focus to high end pet food, where besotted owners have money to spare, but that crashed too.

h/t Tom Nelson

    How reality crushed Ÿnsect, the French startup that had raised over $600M for insect farming
    By Anna Heim, TechCrunch

    The company’s demise is hardly a surprise, as Ÿnsect had been embattled for months. Still, there is plenty to unpack about how a startup can go bankrupt despite raising over $600 million, including from Downey Jr.’s FootPrint Coalition, taxpayers, and many others.

    Ultimately, Ÿnsect failed to fulfill its ambition to “revolutionize the food chain” with insect-based protein. But don’t be too quick to attribute its failure to the “ick” factor that many Westerners feel about bugs. Human food was never its core focus.

It’s only money …

    And revenue was the problem. According to publicly available data, Ÿnsect’s revenue from its main entity peaked at €17.8 million in 2021 (approximately $21 million) — a figure reportedly inflated by internal transfers between subsidiaries. By 2023, the company had racked up a net loss of €79.7 million ($94 million).

The vainglorious heady days of climate communism meant some bureaucrats thought it made sense to spend $200 million dollars feeding bugs to cows to try to change rainfall in 2100 AD.

QotD: The boomerang effect

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I’ve noticed a common phenomenon. Let’s call it the boomerang effect.

Lament the rise of an opinion or policy without noticing how your preferred policies helped cause it.

Vaccination rates down — because you wrecked the reputation of vaccines during the pandemic by over claiming.

Anti-immigrant feeling leading to difficulties for legal immigrants — because you welcomed millions of illegal immigrants and prevented them being deported.

Prosecution of political opponents — because you did it too.

Dislike seeing people cancelled for their opinions — because you started it.

Rising climate scepticism — because you censored reasonable criticism of climate extremism.

Anger at trans rights activists — because you shouted down concerns about men pretending to be women in sports and prisons.

Government attacks on universities — because you turned them into ideological madrassas.

Patriotic nationalism turning uglier — because you told people flags were racist.

Criticism of judges — because they became nakedly political.

Defunding of biotechnology — because you failed to call out dangerous gain-of-function virology as the likely cause of the death of 20 million+ people.

Etc etc

Matt Ridley, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-09-27.

December 17, 2025

“The ‘liberal international order’ – a technocratic oligarchy sustained by tightly interlocked institutions”

Filed under: Europe, Government, Media, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Last week, Len D. Pozeram wrote about how the real (but mostly unacknowledged) American empire is facing unprecedented challenges and may indeed be in serious decline:

“The Empire’s Mask is Slipping”, The Libertarian Alliance

For generations, Americans were sold a saccharine myth: that our nation’s vast global presence — its military bases on every continent, its endless wars, its economic interventions — was all done in the name of “freedom” and “human rights”. This was the sales pitch. Washington, we were told, was the benevolent policeman of a dangerous world, upholding a Pax Americana designed to uplift humanity.

But for those willing to look beyond the rhetoric, the truth was never hidden — only ignored. This narrative was never more than a sophisticated marketing campaign, engineered to pacify a domestic public and legitimize imperial conquest abroad. From the very beginning, the post-WWII global order was not about freedom, but about power — and who would control it after the collapse of the old European empires.

With the fall of the British Empire, America did not merely “step up” to defend the West — it seized control of the imperial machinery and rebranded it. The British financial aristocracy gave way to a new though related American elite, its nucleus formed around Wall Street banks, the military-industrial complex, Big Oil cartels, and, increasingly, a rising Zionist lobby with ambitions stretching far beyond Tel Aviv.

Under the guise of “containing communism” or “defending democracy”, this new managerial class waged a quiet war against genuine national independence movements across the globe. Countries seeking to control their own resources, chart their own destinies, or resist Western financial domination were systematically targeted for destabilization or outright annihilation.

Guatemala in 1954. Iran in 1953. Indonesia in 1965. The Congo. Chile. Nicaragua. Greece. Even Australia, whose 1975 constitutional crisis remains a textbook case of covert Anglo-American regime change. The public, of course, was kept in the dark. History books were rewritten. Journalists who strayed from the script were destroyed or silenced. CIA fingerprints are now visible in dozens of these cases — operations sanctioned not to spread freedom, but to preserve a system of elite extraction and control.

This system — often referred to in polite company as the “liberal international order” — is, in fact, a technocratic oligarchy. It is sustained by tightly interlocked institutions: the Federal Reserve, the IMF, the World Bank, NATO, and a sprawling Intelligence Community whose true loyalties lie not with the American public, but with transnational networks of finance, energy, and geopolitical strategy. To the extent that ideology plays a role, it is the convergence of evangelical apocalypticism and messianic Zionism — two religious currents that have dangerously informed U.S. foreign policy since the Reagan era.

Yet today, this system is beginning to eat itself. The ideology of endless war, and top-down control has run up against hard limits: financial, and political. The de-dollarization trend in the Global South, the rise of multipolar alliances like BRICS, and the exposure of elite criminality — from Epstein to the endless intelligence scandals — are all symptoms of imperial overstretch and rot.

We are watching the slow collapse of an empire built not on democratic values but on lies, coercion, and institutionalized greed.

From a slightly different viewpoint, Spaceman Spiff maintains that the narratives that have been used to direct and control political thought in the west are in the process of collapsing:

Image from Postcards from the Abyss

As reality intrudes the naivety behind many sacred cows is exposed. The emperor is naked and his supporters look equally naked. The narratives driving their fantasies are failing.

The big three issues common in the West illustrate why people are noticing.

Diversity and immigration

The promotion of diversity as a strength is a consequence of blank slate thinking, a belief disparate populations are substantially the same with most observable differences due to environment only.

This is at odds with what we observe, the significant range in ability and proficiency between distinct groups that becomes apparent when we interact. So artificial variety is sold as a positive in an attempt to downplay the homogeneity that gets better results.

The consequence of this is quotas, where arbitrary rules are enforced to ensure a diverse outcome.

This destroys competency even if we ignore the potential for conflict when foreigners are imported in large numbers.

The main effect of pushing this absurd policy seems to be the rise of ethnic awareness among those who must step aside to accommodate it. How could it not? When people are excluded because of their ethnicity it becomes important to them.

This is not what advocates of diversity intended but is already happening.

Climate

Climate and energy policy is based on anti-scientific magical thinking. With the current emphasis on carbon dioxide we are told a tiny portion of our atmosphere is responsible for most of the future changes that will cause widespread harm. There is no evidence for such claims.

The reality of climate is different from the narrative. It is resilient, as many things are. Our obsession is arrogance. A belief we matter more than we do.

Intellectuals are prone to get lost in their theories of how the world ought to work. Activists then latch on to their utopian ideas to gain some sense of meaning in their lives.

Society also has people lacking conscience who will profit from anything no matter how much damage it causes. Combining these two, dreamers with schemers, is often lethal. Seemingly opposing forces, left-wing activists and capitalist profiteers, can cooperate even if they embrace distinct beliefs.

As many memes remind us, if you have corporate sponsorship you are not the resistance. This is precisely what we see.

Narratives begin to collapse as we witness ruthless corporations promote feelgood nonsense about climate while fleecing taxpayers in the background. Many are noticing.

And the effects of suicidal climate goals are difficult to hide. Every closed factory or power station kills another element of credibility.

Socialism

Socialism is based on the idea an educated elite can make decisions for us all while simultaneously conditioning us to be better versions of ourselves. It ignores all of history and everything we have learned of human psychology to embrace a literal fantasy utopia that no one has even come close to realizing.

Nothing sums up the bankruptcy of our intellectuals more than their inability to reject this failed ideology.

But it also shows us the Anglo-Saxon instinct to restrict others’ control over us is the only way to counter it.

It teaches us of the wisdom of documents like Magna Carta or the Bill of Rights, designed to constrain the powerful regardless of their motives, ambitions or mental state. Rare moments of historical sanity that remind us what effective countermeasures can look like.

It would seem this lesson must be relearned every few generations. But we are learning it. Real life is reminding us why we must limit government and its agents no matter how inconvenient.

Bad ideas are inevitable. It is the ability of activists and the powerful to enact them many are now waking up to as narratives visibly fail.

November 5, 2025

QotD: Progressive anger

Filed under: Education, Environment, Europe, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

This year, as last, bees — tens of thousands of them — made their home between a window in my house in France and the shutters. We called a local bee-man and he came to try to capture the bees in an artificial hive. This is not a straightforward operation and success is not guaranteed, because it is necessary to capture the queen, which is not always possible. Without the queen, the bees are lost. They fly off in a swarm, buzzing angrily (I anthropomorphize, I admit) as they search for their lost leader and somewhere new to settle.

As they did so in this case, I could not help but think of the analogy with our present situation. We have a huge fund of very angry people buzzing about in mobs looking for somewhere on which their anger can settle. It seems an epoch ago that it landed on #MeToo and turned all men into Harvey Weinstein. Then, under the direction of little Greta, who somehow managed to combine an autistic manner with hysteria, opposing tendencies reconciled no doubt by the ineffable self-pity of the privileged, global warming provided a temporary resting place. However, with the killing of George Floyd, climate change seems as passé as Mussolini’s spats. (“Too many spats, too many spats!” someone once said of him.) But if no new thing is found after all the statues have been pulled down, the books burned, and the films withdrawn from circulation, climate change could return faute de mieux. On the other hand, free-floating anger is highly inventive as to the reasons for its existence: It can attach itself to almost anything, as flies can walk upside down on ceilings. Being no prophet myself, I have no idea what will be the next object of angry righteousness by people brought up to believe in moral relativism.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Bees With Degrees”, Taki’s Magazine, 2020-07-02.

September 13, 2025

“It was about control before green policy became popular, and it is about control now”

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In the National Post, Carson Jerema identifies the common thread among all of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s efforts since becoming Liberal party leader:

Then-Governor of the Bank of Canada Mark Carney at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
WEF photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Prime Minister Mark Carney may not be as obnoxiously progressive as Justin Trudeau, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t stubbornly left wing in his own right, though he has managed to convince many critics otherwise.

Over the past decade, the Liberals were particularly self-righteous over climate policy, so much so that the deviations made by Carney since assuming office have been met with praise — or, on the left, with scorn — that he is somehow pro-business and represents the return of the centre-right Liberals. Some even think he’s a conservative. Others have suggested that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is now entirely redundant.

This narrative is just more proof of how utterly captured the media is in this country by the Liberal party. It is true that Carney gives the appearance that he is abandoning many of the government’s environmental policies. He set the carbon tax rate to zero, paused the EV mandate and, on Thursday, he refused to endorse his government’s own carbon-emissions targets.

None of this, however, should be taken as evidence that Carney represents some sort of rightward or pro-business shift in the Liberal party. He is not proposing to let markets determine what infrastructure projects get built. Nor is he proposing to minimize regulations to attract investment.

Instead, Carney wants to command the economy by himself, laying bare the reality that what attracts left-wing politicians to climate policy is not saving the planet from carbon, but using environmental objectives to manage the economy. It was about control before green policy became popular, and it is about control now. For Carney specifically, before he entered politics, “decarbonizing” markets was quite remunerative in his various banking roles.

Noticeably absent from the five infrastructure projects that the prime minister said on Thursday would be fast-tracked under the Major Projects Office was an oil and gas pipeline. Also noticeable was the fact that all five of the projects had already been approved, but the government tried to pass them off as something new anyway.

Even if the projects had been all brand new, the lack of a pipeline would still be of no surprise, as what private investor would be willing to back a pipeline when the Liberals’ Impact Assessment Act, tanker ban and emissions cap all exist to conspire against energy projects of any kind?

One thing that became incredibly obvious early in Justin Trudeau’s premiership was that the prime minister — and his ministers in general — really did seem to believe that talking about doing something was as effective in solving problems as actually doing the thing. Many had hoped that Mark Carney would be different … but as Dan Knight points out, he may actually be worse:

From there, [Poilievre] broadened the attack. He spoke of an entire generation priced out of homeownership, of immigration growing “three times faster than housing and jobs”, of crime rising, and of what he called “the worst economy in the G7”. And then he turned squarely on Carney: “Mr. Carney is actually more irresponsible than even Justin Trudeau was“, citing an 8% increase in government spending, 37% more for consultants, and 62 billion dollars in lost investment — the largest outflow in Canadian history, according to the National Bank.

The message was simple: Liberals talk, Conservatives build. Poilievre painted Carney as a man of speeches and promises, not results. “The mistake the media is making is they’re judging him by his words rather than his deeds“, he said.

It was an opening statement designed less to introduce policy — those details came later — and more to frame the battle. For Poilievre, Carney isn’t just Trudeau’s replacement. He’s Trudeau’s sequel, and in some ways worse.

[…]

Pierre Poilievre didn’t hold back when asked about Mark Carney’s record. His words: “Mr. Carney is actually more irresponsible than even Justin Trudeau was“. That’s not a throwaway line, he backed it with numbers.

According to Poilievre, Carney inherited what he called a “morbidly obese government” from Trudeau and made it worse: 8% bigger overall, 37% more for consultants, and 6% more bureaucracy. He says Carney’s deficit is set to be even larger than Trudeau’s.

Then the jobs number: 86,000 more unemployed people under Carney than under Trudeau. That, Poilievre argued, is the real measure, not the polished speeches Carney gives. His line: “The mistake the media is making is they’re judging him by his words rather than his deeds“.

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