At the American Thinker, Anony Mee wrote The Coming Modern Grand Solar Minimum. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.
I wrote last week about the coming Grand Solar Minimum, something that will have much more impact on the environment than anything we puny humans can do. It generated a lot of interest from all sides, so it’s time to delve deeper into what we can expect.
Starting with the hype: During the last grand solar minimum (GSM), the Maunder Minimum of 1645 to 1715, glaciers advanced, rivers froze, sea ice expanded — in short, the Little Ice Age. Is another one is almost upon us?
Probably not. Maunder occurred at the tail end of a bi-millennial cycle. These cycles range between 2,000 and 2,600 years in length and see the Earth first warm, then cool. Gradual cooling had been going on for hundreds of years. Maunder just capped it off. Today we are a few hundred years into the warming phase of the subsequent bi-millennial cycle. Different starting conditions yield different paths.
The progressives say that we’re so deep into anthropogenically accelerated climate change (AACC) that there’s almost no time left to turn things around. If we don’t act now, it will be too late.
Nope, sorry squad members. What we can predict, instead, is an overall temperature reduction of 1 degree Centigrade by the end of the GSM. Afterward, natural warming at the rate of around 0.5 C. every hundred years will continue for the next 600 years or so.
That gives us a good 35 to 50 years to hone the science and come up with the best ways to mitigate the impact of unstoppable global warming on humankind; until, that is, it naturally reverses. See suggestions below for better uses of funding currently earmarked to address the “climate crisis.”
Reasonably speaking: We’ve been warming, so the cooling of the GSM will just even us out for a while. Therefore, nothing to worry about, right?
Well, not quite. There are a few worries. Plants grow in response to warmth, moisture, nutrients, and most importantly sunlight. Even if the temperature does not plunge to glacial depths, some cooling will take place and clouds are expected to grow denser and cover much of the earth’s surface as this GSM bottoms out. If normally-correlating volcanism takes place, the additional material in the atmosphere will further darken the globe and provide even more opportunity for condensation and cloud formation.
Last year, Dr. Valentina Zharkova wrote “This global cooling during the upcoming grand solar minimum…would require inter-government efforts to tackle problems with heat and food supplies for the whole population of the Earth” (not to mention their livestock).
The pessimists ask, what else can go wrong? Well, cooling will increase the demand for heat, darker days will increase the demand for light, and unfavorable outside conditions will increase the demand for power for enclosed food production. With more power needed, the amount we currently rely on from solar installations will decrease as cloud cover limits their efficacy.
A decrease in solar ultraviolet radiation can be expected to slow the formation of ozone in the atmosphere, a lack of which tends to destabilize the jet stream, causing wilder weather. Wind generators turn off when the wind is excessively strong. As we now know, they are not immune from freezing in place. In the face of a greater demand for power, we will generate less.
Even worse is this: Historically, GSMs have been associated with extreme weather events. Floods, droughts, heavy snowfall, late springs, and early autumns have all resulted in famine. Famine during GSMs has led to starvation and societal upheaval. No one wants the former, and I think we’ve seen enough of the latter this past year or so to do for our lifetimes.
We’re about 16 months into this GSM, with 32 more years to go. Already 2019 and 2020 saw record low numbers of sunspots. We’ve had lower than expected crop harvests due to unseasonable rains both years. The April 2021 USDA World Agricultural Product report has articles detailing Taiwan’s expected 20% decrease in rice production this year over last, Cuba’s rice production 15% below its five-year average, Argentina’s corn, Australia’s cotton, Malaysia’s palm oil — all down, all due primarily to the weather. There are some expected bumper crops, all based on expanded acreage.
We’ve got seven years until we hit the trough. There’s no time to lose. Fortunately, We the People are amazing. We’re strong, courageous, resilient, smart, well-educated, and clever. We are capable of coming together for a common cause and working well together regardless of politics and other differences. We must pull together to make sure we all survive the coming tumult. Here’s what we do.
On the federal level, take the brakes off energy production. No more talk of closing power plants, especially coal-fired ones, or of removing hydroelectric dams. Reinstate the Keystone XL pipeline; we’re going to need that fuel available to us when the predictable contraction of the global fuel market occurs. Extend the tax credits for those who install solar power. Production may not be optimal during the GSM, but as much as can occur will take a load off commercial energy.
At the United Nations, Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield should prioritize preparations for the coming dark, cold years. It is in the world’s best interest that all nations cease aggressions, even if just for a decade or so, so that we all may turn our resources to securing the lives of our peoples.
The USDA should not just take the brakes off agricultural production; it should encourage all producers to ramp it up. We need to have enough on hand to address the expected shortfall between production and requirement for at least five years. All loans to all farmers should be forgiven if they will agree to get on board with maximizing production. Garden seed producers, along with all other producers and processors, should be given significant tax credits for ramping up their production too.
Commerce should support vastly expanded food processing for long-term storage. Congress should fund the acquisition and storage of surplus staples and other food commodities so that sufficient amounts are on hand to keep our markets, feeding programs, and food banks operating when crop after crop begins to fail. Stockpiling for our future should take precedence over exports.
The NSC should demand a reconstitution of our strategic grain reserve, and that we prepare not just for ourselves, but to be able to share with needy neighbors and allies to keep America secure.
State, local, and tribal governments should clear away barriers to gardening and small animal production, including not limiting water catchment for gardening. Everything folks can do for themselves will take pressure off public services and limited markets. Local Emergency Services operations should also look at acquiring stocks of staples to help support their residents, as was done in many places last year.
Individuals, as well as schools and other institutions, should begin to garden, even if it’s just pots in a window. It’s a skill that takes time to learn and practice. Everyone should begin to preserve food for the hard times coming – freezing, canning, drying, smoking, pickling. As much as we can do for ourselves, we won’t be looking for someone else to have done for us.
This is really most important. We need to act now while food production is still relatively normal. Later on, if there’s nothing to buy, it won’t matter how much money we have on hand, as individuals or as a nation.
Valentina Zharkova presents her analysis and findings in paper Modern Grand Solar Minimum will lead to terrestrial cooling. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.
In this editorial I will demonstrate with newly discovered solar activity proxy-magnetic field that the Sun has entered into the modern Grand Solar Minimum (2020–2053) that will lead to a significant reduction of solar magnetic field and activity like during Maunder minimum leading to noticeable reduction of terrestrial temperature.
Figure 3 presents the summary curve calculated with the derived mathematical formulae forwards for 1200 years and backwards 800 years. This curve reveals appearance of Grand Solar Cycles of 350–400 years caused by the interference of two magnetic waves. These grand cycles are separated by the grand solar minima, or the periods of very low solar activity.
Currently, the Sun has completed solar cycle 24 – the weakest cycle of the past 100+ years – and in 2020, has started cycle 25. During the periods of low solar activity, such as the modern grand solar minimum, the Sun will often be devoid of sunspots. This is what is observed now at the start of this minimum, because in 2020 the Sun has seen, in total, 115 spotless days (or 78%), meaning 2020 is on track to surpass the space-age record of 281 spotless days (or 77%) observed in 2019. However, the cycle 25 start is still slow in firing active regions and flares, so with every extra day/week/month that passes, the null in solar activity is extended marking a start of grand solar minimum.
Similarly to the Maunder Minimum … the reduction of solar magnetic field will cause a decrease of solar irradiance by about 0.22% for a duration of three solar cycles (25-27).” Zharkova determines that this drop in TSI (in conjunction with the “often overlooked” role solar background magnetic field plays, as well as with cloud nucleating cosmic rays) will lead to “a drop of the terrestrial temperature by up to 1.0°C from the current temperature during the next three cycles (25-27) … to only 0.4°C higher than the temperature measured in 1710,” with the largest temperature drops arriving “during the local minima between cycles 25−26 and cycles 26-27.
The reduction of a terrestrial temperature during the next 30 years can have important implications for different parts of the planet on growing vegetation, agriculture, food supplies, and heating needs in both Northern and Southern hemispheres. This global cooling during the upcoming grand solar minimum (2020-2053) can offset for three decades any signs of global warming and would require inter-government efforts to tackle problems with heat and food supplies for the whole population of the Earth.
See Also: Modern Grand Solar Minimum (2020-2053) Little Ice Age started Valentina Zharkova (2026)
Fig.8. Solar activity index for 3200 years presented by the summary curve of eigen vectors(blue line (Zharkova et al, 2015) versus the solar activity index derived from the isotopes C14 abundances in the terrestrial biomass (red line) (Solanki et al., 2004).
Fig.9. Annual change of the averaged surface temperature (in °C) in the northern hemisphere from 1780
to 1680 during the GSM period (Grand Solar Minimum). Courtesy of Shindell et al., 2001.
Members of the European Parliament attend a session to vote on legislation to cut import duties for U.S. products in Brussels, March 26, 2026. (Yves Herman/Reuters)
Even as Democratic activists in the U.S. cool to the cause of climate alarmism, environmentalism maintains its political and economic grip on policymakers on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Years into a cost-of-living crisis, why is the European Union still so green?
It may be easy to dismiss this as a case of fanaticism: Sure, American progressives may perhaps not have been truly sincere when they proclaimed their faith in the upcoming apocalypse and the gospel of Greta Thunberg, but maybe her fellow Swedes — and other Europeans — are true believers?
While “sincere” environment activists may be a more common breed in Europe, that does not explain the actions of policymakers and civil servants — technocrats who know for a fact that the “climate transition” was sold to voters by giving disproportionate publicity to worst-case scenarios, rather than the more likely, less catastrophic, and less headline-grabbing scenarios outlined by the likes of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Instead, one must first understand that the EU is a slow-moving beast. The legislative process is complicated and sluggish, with 27 countries and an often-equal number of different viewpoints all struggling to be heard. The rules of the union mean that a third of the countries are able to veto most legislation, and in some cases, unanimity is required. Passing the European Green Deal in the first place required truly draconian efforts of political willpower and coordination, and reversing or altering the deal would hardly be any easier.
Making matters worse, the EU has driven past every conceivable off-ramp, events that would have allowed it to change course while saving face. Mere months after the European Green Deal was unveiled, the Covid-19 pandemic went on to turn the world upside down. Mass unemployment and government borrowing followed. At this point, the EU could have cited the pandemic as an excuse as to why climate goals had to be postponed, and some money earmarked for green projects instead used towards health-care or furlough programs.
The next “off-ramp” was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. With Europe suddenly needing to provide aid to Ukraine and rearm itself, policymakers could have made the case that the original timeline of the Green Deal was no longer feasible. Shortly thereafter, inflation would hit double digits in many EU member states, once again providing an excellent “excuse” to cancel a Green Deal that was negotiated in the bygone Zero Interest-Rate Policy (ZIRP) era, and whose ambitious goals assumed that this era would never end.
Now, policymakers are truly stuck with a project that virtually ensures the EU won’t see much of the global, energy-intensive AI boom, as prohibitive electricity prices cause data centers and tech firms to choose other locations. As slow and complicated as the legislative process in the EU is, that alone cannot explain why none of the off-ramps were taken.
It is also, as it so often is in politics, about power. Environmentalism is a convenient ideology for those who wish to transfer power to the state, as it provides justification for the state’s expansion. In Europe, however, environmentalism is chiefly not used to transfer power from the voters to the state, but from the states to the European Union. For a supranational organization whose founding treaty infamously states that it is to strive to be an “ever-closer union,” hardly any excuse for centralization is ever passed by.
It may be easy to dismiss this as a case of fanaticism: Sure, American progressives may perhaps not have been truly sincere when they proclaimed their faith in the upcoming apocalypse and the gospel of Greta Thunberg, but maybe her fellow Swedes — and other Europeans — are true believers?
While “sincere” environment activists may be a more common breed in Europe, that does not explain the actions of policymakers and civil servants — technocrats who know for a fact that the “climate transition” was sold to voters by giving disproportionate publicity to worst-case scenarios, rather than the more likely, less catastrophic, and less headline-grabbing scenarios outlined by the likes of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Instead, one must first understand that the EU is a slow-moving beast. The legislative process is complicated and sluggish, with 27 countries and an often-equal number of different viewpoints all struggling to be heard. The rules of the union mean that a third of the countries are able to veto most legislation, and in some cases, unanimity is required. Passing the European Green Deal in the first place required truly draconian efforts of political willpower and coordination, and reversing or altering the deal would hardly be any easier.
Making matters worse, the EU has driven past every conceivable off-ramp, events that would have allowed it to change course while saving face. Mere months after the European Green Deal was unveiled, the Covid-19 pandemic went on to turn the world upside down. Mass unemployment and government borrowing followed. At this point, the EU could have cited the pandemic as an excuse as to why climate goals had to be postponed, and some money earmarked for green projects instead used towards health-care or furlough programs.
The next “off-ramp” was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. With Europe suddenly needing to provide aid to Ukraine and rearm itself, policymakers could have made the case that the original timeline of the Green Deal was no longer feasible. Shortly thereafter, inflation would hit double digits in many EU member states, once again providing an excellent “excuse” to cancel a Green Deal that was negotiated in the bygone Zero Interest-Rate Policy (ZIRP) era, and whose ambitious goals assumed that this era would never end.
Now, policymakers are truly stuck with a project that virtually ensures the EU won’t see much of the global, energy-intensive AI boom, as prohibitive electricity prices cause data centers and tech firms to choose other locations. As slow and complicated as the legislative process in the EU is, that alone cannot explain why none of the off-ramps were taken.
It is also, as it so often is in politics, about power. Environmentalism is a convenient ideology for those who wish to transfer power to the state, as it provides justification for the state’s expansion. In Europe, however, environmentalism is chiefly not used to transfer power from the voters to the state, but from the states to the European Union. For a supranational organization whose founding treaty infamously states that it is to strive to be an “ever-closer union,” hardly any excuse for centralization is ever passed by.
It may be easy to dismiss this as a case of fanaticism: Sure, American progressives may perhaps not have been truly sincere when they proclaimed their faith in the upcoming apocalypse and the gospel of Greta Thunberg, but maybe her fellow Swedes — and other Europeans — are true believers?
While “sincere” environment activists may be a more common breed in Europe, that does not explain the actions of policymakers and civil servants — technocrats who know for a fact that the “climate transition” was sold to voters by giving disproportionate publicity to worst-case scenarios, rather than the more likely, less catastrophic, and less headline-grabbing scenarios outlined by the likes of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Instead, one must first understand that the EU is a slow-moving beast. The legislative process is complicated and sluggish, with 27 countries and an often-equal number of different viewpoints all struggling to be heard. The rules of the union mean that a third of the countries are able to veto most legislation, and in some cases, unanimity is required. Passing the European Green Deal in the first place required truly draconian efforts of political willpower and coordination, and reversing or altering the deal would hardly be any easier.
Making matters worse, the EU has driven past every conceivable off-ramp, events that would have allowed it to change course while saving face. Mere months after the European Green Deal was unveiled, the Covid-19 pandemic went on to turn the world upside down. Mass unemployment and government borrowing followed. At this point, the EU could have cited the pandemic as an excuse as to why climate goals had to be postponed, and some money earmarked for green projects instead used towards health-care or furlough programs.
The next “off-ramp” was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. With Europe suddenly needing to provide aid to Ukraine and rearm itself, policymakers could have made the case that the original timeline of the Green Deal was no longer feasible. Shortly thereafter, inflation would hit double digits in many EU member states, once again providing an excellent “excuse” to cancel a Green Deal that was negotiated in the bygone Zero Interest-Rate Policy (ZIRP) era, and whose ambitious goals assumed that this era would never end.
Now, policymakers are truly stuck with a project that virtually ensures the EU won’t see much of the global, energy-intensive AI boom, as prohibitive electricity prices cause data centers and tech firms to choose other locations. As slow and complicated as the legislative process in the EU is, that alone cannot explain why none of the off-ramps were taken.
The video player is currently playing an ad.
It is also, as it so often is in politics, about power. Environmentalism is a convenient ideology for those who wish to transfer power to the state, as it provides justification for the state’s expansion. In Europe, however, environmentalism is chiefly not used to transfer power from the voters to the state, but from the states to the European Union. For a supranational organization whose founding treaty infamously states that it is to strive to be an “ever-closer union,” hardly any excuse for centralization is ever passed by.
It may be easy to dismiss this as a case of fanaticism: Sure, American progressives may perhaps not have been truly sincere when they proclaimed their faith in the upcoming apocalypse and the gospel of Greta Thunberg, but maybe her fellow Swedes — and other Europeans — are true believers?
While “sincere” environment activists may be a more common breed in Europe, that does not explain the actions of policymakers and civil servants — technocrats who know for a fact that the “climate transition” was sold to voters by giving disproportionate publicity to worst-case scenarios, rather than the more likely, less catastrophic, and less headline-grabbing scenarios outlined by the likes of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Instead, one must first understand that the EU is a slow-moving beast. The legislative process is complicated and sluggish, with 27 countries and an often-equal number of different viewpoints all struggling to be heard. The rules of the union mean that a third of the countries are able to veto most legislation, and in some cases, unanimity is required. Passing the European Green Deal in the first place required truly draconian efforts of political willpower and coordination, and reversing or altering the deal would hardly be any easier.
Making matters worse, the EU has driven past every conceivable off-ramp, events that would have allowed it to change course while saving face. Mere months after the European Green Deal was unveiled, the Covid-19 pandemic went on to turn the world upside down. Mass unemployment and government borrowing followed. At this point, the EU could have cited the pandemic as an excuse as to why climate goals had to be postponed, and some money earmarked for green projects instead used towards health-care or furlough programs.
The next “off-ramp” was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. With Europe suddenly needing to provide aid to Ukraine and rearm itself, policymakers could have made the case that the original timeline of the Green Deal was no longer feasible. Shortly thereafter, inflation would hit double digits in many EU member states, once again providing an excellent “excuse” to cancel a Green Deal that was negotiated in the bygone Zero Interest-Rate Policy (ZIRP) era, and whose ambitious goals assumed that this era would never end.
Now, policymakers are truly stuck with a project that virtually ensures the EU won’t see much of the global, energy-intensive AI boom, as prohibitive electricity prices cause data centers and tech firms to choose other locations. As slow and complicated as the legislative process in the EU is, that alone cannot explain why none of the off-ramps were taken.
The video player is currently playing an ad.
It is also, as it so often is in politics, about power. Environmentalism is a convenient ideology for those who wish to transfer power to the state, as it provides justification for the state’s expansion. In Europe, however, environmentalism is chiefly not used to transfer power from the voters to the state, but from the states to the European Union. For a supranational organization whose founding treaty infamously states that it is to strive to be an “ever-closer union,” hardly any excuse for centralization is ever passed by.
It may be easy to dismiss this as a case of fanaticism: Sure, American progressives may perhaps not have been truly sincere when they proclaimed their faith in the upcoming apocalypse and the gospel of Greta Thunberg, but maybe her fellow Swedes — and other Europeans — are true believers?
While “sincere” environment activists may be a more common breed in Europe, that does not explain the actions of policymakers and civil servants — technocrats who know for a fact that the “climate transition” was sold to voters by giving disproportionate publicity to worst-case scenarios, rather than the more likely, less catastrophic, and less headline-grabbing scenarios outlined by the likes of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Instead, one must first understand that the EU is a slow-moving beast. The legislative process is complicated and sluggish, with 27 countries and an often-equal number of different viewpoints all struggling to be heard. The rules of the union mean that a third of the countries are able to veto most legislation, and in some cases, unanimity is required. Passing the European Green Deal in the first place required truly draconian efforts of political willpower and coordination, and reversing or altering the deal would hardly be any easier.
Making matters worse, the EU has driven past every conceivable off-ramp, events that would have allowed it to change course while saving face. Mere months after the European Green Deal was unveiled, the Covid-19 pandemic went on to turn the world upside down. Mass unemployment and government borrowing followed. At this point, the EU could have cited the pandemic as an excuse as to why climate goals had to be postponed, and some money earmarked for green projects instead used towards health-care or furlough programs.
The next “off-ramp” was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. With Europe suddenly needing to provide aid to Ukraine and rearm itself, policymakers could have made the case that the original timeline of the Green Deal was no longer feasible. Shortly thereafter, inflation would hit double digits in many EU member states, once again providing an excellent “excuse” to cancel a Green Deal that was negotiated in the bygone Zero Interest-Rate Policy (ZIRP) era, and whose ambitious goals assumed that this era would never end.
Now, policymakers are truly stuck with a project that virtually ensures the EU won’t see much of the global, energy-intensive AI boom, as prohibitive electricity prices cause data centers and tech firms to choose other locations. As slow and complicated as the legislative process in the EU is, that alone cannot explain why none of the off-ramps were taken.
The video player is currently playing an ad.
It is also, as it so often is in politics, about power. Environmentalism is a convenient ideology for those who wish to transfer power to the state, as it provides justification for the state’s expansion. In Europe, however, environmentalism is chiefly not used to transfer power from the voters to the state, but from the states to the European Union. For a supranational organization whose founding treaty infamously states that it is to strive to be an “ever-closer union,” hardly any excuse for centralization is ever passed by.
It may be easy to dismiss this as a case of fanaticism: Sure, American progressives may perhaps not have been truly sincere when they proclaimed their faith in the upcoming apocalypse and the gospel of Greta Thunberg, but maybe her fellow Swedes — and other Europeans — are true believers?
While “sincere” environment activists may be a more common breed in Europe, that does not explain the actions of policymakers and civil servants — technocrats who know for a fact that the “climate transition” was sold to voters by giving disproportionate publicity to worst-case scenarios, rather than the more likely, less catastrophic, and less headline-grabbing scenarios outlined by the likes of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Instead, one must first understand that the EU is a slow-moving beast. The legislative process is complicated and sluggish, with 27 countries and an often-equal number of different viewpoints all struggling to be heard. The rules of the union mean that a third of the countries are able to veto most legislation, and in some cases, unanimity is required. Passing the European Green Deal in the first place required truly draconian efforts of political willpower and coordination, and reversing or altering the deal would hardly be any easier.
Making matters worse, the EU has driven past every conceivable off-ramp, events that would have allowed it to change course while saving face. Mere months after the European Green Deal was unveiled, the Covid-19 pandemic went on to turn the world upside down. Mass unemployment and government borrowing followed. At this point, the EU could have cited the pandemic as an excuse as to why climate goals had to be postponed, and some money earmarked for green projects instead used towards health-care or furlough programs.
The next “off-ramp” was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. With Europe suddenly needing to provide aid to Ukraine and rearm itself, policymakers could have made the case that the original timeline of the Green Deal was no longer feasible. Shortly thereafter, inflation would hit double digits in many EU member states, once again providing an excellent “excuse” to cancel a Green Deal that was negotiated in the bygone Zero Interest-Rate Policy (ZIRP) era, and whose ambitious goals assumed that this era would never end.
Now, policymakers are truly stuck with a project that virtually ensures the EU won’t see much of the global, energy-intensive AI boom, as prohibitive electricity prices cause data centers and tech firms to choose other locations. As slow and complicated as the legislative process in the EU is, that alone cannot explain why none of the off-ramps were taken.
The video player is currently playing an ad.
It is also, as it so often is in politics, about power. Environmentalism is a convenient ideology for those who wish to transfer power to the state, as it provides justification for the state’s expansion. In Europe, however, environmentalism is chiefly not used to transfer power from the voters to the state, but from the states to the European Union. For a supranational organization whose founding treaty infamously states that it is to strive to be an “ever-closer union,” hardly any excuse for centralization is ever passed by.
It may be easy to dismiss this as a case of fanaticism: Sure, American progressives may perhaps not have been truly sincere when they proclaimed their faith in the upcoming apocalypse and the gospel of Greta Thunberg, but maybe her fellow Swedes — and other Europeans — are true believers?
While “sincere” environment activists may be a more common breed in Europe, that does not explain the actions of policymakers and civil servants — technocrats who know for a fact that the “climate transition” was sold to voters by giving disproportionate publicity to worst-case scenarios, rather than the more likely, less catastrophic, and less headline-grabbing scenarios outlined by the likes of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
It may be easy to dismiss this as a case of fanaticism: Sure, American progressives may perhaps not have been truly sincere when they proclaimed their faith in the upcoming apocalypse and the gospel of Greta Thunberg, but maybe her fellow Swedes — and other Europeans — are true believers?
While “sincere” environment activists may be a more common breed in Europe, that does not explain the actions of policymakers and civil servants — technocrats who know for a fact that the “climate transition” was sold to voters by giving disproportionate publicity to worst-case scenarios, rather than the more likely, less catastrophic, and less headline-grabbing scenarios outlined by the likes of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Polish coal miners protest against liquidation of Polish coal mines.
Instead, one must first understand that the EU is a slow-moving beast. The legislative process is complicated and sluggish, with 27 countries and an often-equal number of different viewpoints all struggling to be heard. The rules of the union mean that a third of the countries are able to veto most legislation, and in some cases, unanimity is required. Passing the European Green Deal in the first place required truly draconian efforts of political willpower and coordination, and reversing or altering the deal would hardly be any easier.
Making matters worse, the EU has driven past every conceivable off-ramp, events that would have allowed it to change course while saving face. Mere months after the European Green Deal was unveiled, the Covid-19 pandemic went on to turn the world upside down. Mass unemployment and government borrowing followed. At this point, the EU could have cited the pandemic as an excuse as to why climate goals had to be postponed, and some money earmarked for green projects instead used towards health-care or furlough programs.
Making matters worse, the EU has driven past every conceivable off-ramp, events that would have allowed it to change course while saving face. Mere months after the European Green Deal was unveiled, the Covid-19 pandemic went on to turn the world upside down. Mass unemployment and government borrowing followed. At this point, the EU could have cited the pandemic as an excuse as to why climate goals had to be postponed, and some money earmarked for green projects instead used towards health-care or furlough programs.
The next “off-ramp” was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. With Europe suddenly needing to provide aid to Ukraine and rearm itself, policymakers could have made the case that the original timeline of the Green Deal was no longer feasible. Shortly thereafter, inflation would hit double digits in many EU member states, once again providing an excellent “excuse” to cancel a Green Deal that was negotiated in the bygone Zero Interest-Rate Policy (ZIRP) era, and whose ambitious goals assumed that this era would never end.
Now, policymakers are truly stuck with a project that virtually ensures the EU won’t see much of the global, energy-intensive AI boom, as prohibitive electricity prices cause data centers and tech firms to choose other locations. As slow and complicated as the legislative process in the EU is, that alone cannot explain why none of the off-ramps were taken.
Making matters worse, the EU has driven past every conceivable off-ramp, events that would have allowed it to change course while saving face. Mere months after the European Green Deal was unveiled, the Covid-19 pandemic went on to turn the world upside down. Mass unemployment and government borrowing followed. At this point, the EU could have cited the pandemic as an excuse as to why climate goals had to be postponed, and some money earmarked for green projects instead used towards health-care or furlough programs.
The next “off-ramp” was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. With Europe suddenly needing to provide aid to Ukraine and rearm itself, policymakers could have made the case that the original timeline of the Green Deal was no longer feasible. Shortly thereafter, inflation would hit double digits in many EU member states, once again providing an excellent “excuse” to cancel a Green Deal that was negotiated in the bygone Zero Interest-Rate Policy (ZIRP) era, and whose ambitious goals assumed that this era would never end.
Now, policymakers are truly stuck with a project that virtually ensures the EU won’t see much of the global, energy-intensive AI boom, as prohibitive electricity prices cause data centers and tech firms to choose other locations. As slow and complicated as the legislative process in the EU is, that alone cannot explain why none of the off-ramps were taken.
The next “off-ramp” was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. With Europe suddenly needing to provide aid to Ukraine and rearm itself, policymakers could have made the case that the original timeline of the Green Deal was no longer feasible. Shortly thereafter, inflation would hit double digits in many EU member states, once again providing an excellent “excuse” to cancel a Green Deal that was negotiated in the bygone Zero Interest-Rate Policy (ZIRP) era, and whose ambitious goals assumed that this era would never end.
Now, policymakers are truly stuck with a project that virtually ensures the EU won’t see much of the global, energy-intensive AI boom, as prohibitive electricity prices cause data centers and tech firms to choose other locations. As slow and complicated as the legislative process in the EU is, that alone cannot explain why none of the off-ramps were taken.
And such an excuse was exactly what environmentalism provided: No single EU member can deal with climate change on their own, since none of them contributes to more than 0.7 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The only way to fight this new threat, Brussels explained, was to do it together, under the benevolent direction of your friendly neighborhood eurocrat. Anyone who did not want to see the Swiss Alps underwater had no choice but to go along with the program.
That the EU as a whole only ever contributed 10 to 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions even before the first moves to transition were taken in the 1990s is the type of “inconvenient truth” voters rarely heard when the Deal was passed.
It is now down to less than 6 percent, yet Europe’s
green frenzy continues virtually unabated.
For the EU, the sunk cost has also been far greater than for America. Long before the European Green Deal, the EU made serious — and costly — efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Whereas American emissions wouldn’t peak until 2007, in the EU, they peaked in 1990, after which they have been on a steady decline. Total U.S. emissions were still more than 20 percent higher in 2024 at the end of Biden’s presidency than they had been in Europe in 1990.
Europeans have felt the pain of climate policies in the form of gas prices that (prior to the Iran war) averaged 2 to 3 times what American car owners paid. Higher electricity prices, tied to the shuttering of oil and coal but also nuclear power plants, have prevented air conditioning from taking off in Europe — ironically, this increases the number of Europeans who will suffer and even die as a result of rising global temperatures.
Already, more than 60,000 Europeans die of heat every summer.
More Europeans die from lack of AC than Americans do from gun violence.
Europeans have gritted their teeth and accepted that sacrifice, along with a large chunk of its traditional manufacturing sector — jobs that they were promised would be replaced by roles in “green” manufacturing and other “climate-friendly” industries the EU anticipated dominating on the world stage. That is not how things have turned out.
Instead, China has ascended as a dominating force in green industries
like solar panels and — worse for the EU — batteries and electric vehicles.
Automobile exports are now dropping fast. From 2008 to 2023, over 2.3 million European manufacturing jobs were lost, compared to “only” around 800,000 in the United States during that time period.
There is also no guarantee that lost manufacturing jobs would return and shuttered factories reopen any time soon even if Brussels were to pump the brakes now, much like how the coal mining jobs have so far failed to return despite Donald Trump’s reversal of Biden’s policies (they also declined under his first term).
However, the “harmless” transition policies proved costlier, and voters turned out to be less invested in the project than the policymakers believed. On paper, most voters did support the idea of climate transition. But supporting an idea is different from actually paying the price at the pump and in the form of higher utility bills. (And let’s not forget those abominable paper straws.)
Lawmakers in the European Parliament agreed today, Nov. 13, 2025, to dramatic cuts to the EU’s sustainability reporting and due diligence laws, including significant reductions in the number of companies to be covered by the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), and the elimination of the obligation for companies to prepare climate transition plans. The vote, was 382 MEPs in favor and 249 opposed,
After all these sacrifices, few governments in the EU could afford to admit that it was all for nothing. Their position is made even more precarious as this would be the second such embarrassment: After the 2015–16 refugee crisis, most governments across Europe took steps toward restricting immigration, effectively conceding that the parties they had (and continue to) labeled “far-right” had been correct about the challenges caused by rising immigration numbers.
To give the same parties another win and concede that —
much like multiculturalism — climate transition too had turned out
to be a better idea on paper than in practice would simply be too much.
Since the 2008 financial crisis, the U.S. economy has outgrown the economies of Western Europe, creating a growing wealth gap. As Europe continues down the path of chasing green dreams instead of greenbacks, this gap is only likely to continue to grow until the day its leaders are finally forced to admit that their policies only ever ensured future generations would inherit not a cooler planet, but a poorer continent.
Peter Zeihan is a global energy, demographic, and security expert breaking the news about a new tech revolution enhancing extraction of hydrocarbon fuels. For those preferring to read, below is a lightly edited transcript from the video with my bolds and added images.
Hey all, Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Los Angeles on the California coast, and today we’re going to talk a little bit about oil. There have been a couple of technological breakthroughs that I think are worthy of mentioning in the shale era. So ExxonMobil, big company, one of the largest players in the world, produces just under 5 million barrels a day, has basically started mucking around with something called propping, so dial back.
Hydraulic fracturing or fracking is basically how the United States produces 80 percent or more of its crude oil these days, as well as the vast majority of its natural gas. It’s not a fringe technology, it’s the backbone. What you do is you drill down vertically and then you make a horizontal split that goes two, three, four, maybe even five miles, and then you inject water that is laced with sand.
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The water, hydraulics, does not compress under pressure, so it cracks the rock apart, and then the water goes in with the sand and accesses tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny little deposits of petroleum. Then you stop the pumping, and because those tiny pockets of petroleum have now been exposed, they produce a back pressure that pushes the water out, but the sand stays lodged in the cracks, keeping them open so the flow can continue.
The sand is called proppant, and it’s one of
the biggest expenses in a fracking operation.
Well, ExxonMobil has now changed the proppant and is
triggering what is basically the fourth shale revolution.
Backstory for that. First shale revolution is when we figured out how to do this and brought out natural gas. The second shale revolution is when we figured out how to do this to bring out liquid oil. The third is when we built the infrastructure, things like LNG facilities or chemical facilities or refineries, to metabolize all this raw product that we’re now producing. All of that’s done. All that’s in the past.
Fourth revolution is taking the capital and the technological skill sets of the majors like Exxon and applying them for a whole new generation of technology. See, one of the weird things about the shale revolution is when it started, most of the super majors had kind of written off the American oil patch, and we had seen oil output from the United States drop to historical lows.
Well, still in the last century and a half. That meant we had small mom and pops that were doing everything, and they were trying everything they could come up with to get incremental increases, and that’s what generated the first few million barrels a day. Well, as time went on, oil does what oil does, and it rises and it falls and it rises and falls, and so we got a series of busts, and ExxonMobil was able to come in with its better capital position and buy up a lot of the smaller companies. To the point that it and Chevron now dominate the space and collectively produce almost nine million barrels a day.
Now, you apply what Exxon has across its entire value chain, and you get a very different proposition. So for proppant specifically, what we’re talking about today, they went into their refineries and they found waste products, something called petroleum coke, and they were able to manufacture that into a kind of a synthetic sand, if you will. The Proppant is where a lot of experimenting has been going on in a lot of subsectors for the last several years, and you’ve got some pretty expensive stuff that’s called ceramics.
Spherical grains of petroleum coke material are effective in fracking operations in coal seams.
Called ceramics? It is ceramics. Petroleum coke is cheaper than that, more expensive than sand, but its real advantage it’s a lot less dense, maybe 40-50% less dense than sand, which means you can suspend it in the water better, which means it pushes into the formation better, which means it holds open cracks deeper in the formation, and for a small increase in cost using what used to be a waste product, Exxon has seen their numbers increase by 10% to 20% to maybe even 30% in some wells. And that alone changes the math of the shale revolution, because a 10% to 30% increase in output for only a slim investment in what was a waste product, now that’s amazing.
And so the shale revolution is nowhere near done. You’ll hear people
saying that eventually the shale revolution is going to run out,
there’s only so much oil, but that misses the point.
In the pre-shale era, we were able to access about 10%, 9-10% of global energy reserves. There’s a lot down there we don’t have the technology to get to. The shale revolution doubled the percentage of what was accessible within the U.S. space. So we’re talking about 150 years of output, and suddenly we have access to something like that again, and we keep making these incremental increases, like with proppant, that pushes the horizon back even further.
Sheikhs vs. Shale
So the shale revolution continues to set new records for output, adding somewhere between a half a million and a million barrels a day per year, and has now been doing that since 2009. You get a lot of output when you do it for that long. So this year is not the last year of the shale revolution, neither is next year, or the year after, or the year after that, because the numbers keep getting better, the technology keeps pushing further, and the break-even cost for what it takes to get a chunk of oil out in an economically viable way keeps going down.
Russian Nuclear Icebreakers on the Northern Sea Route, March 2025
The arctic ice extents are now reported through end of May 2026, and as noted previously the wavy polar vortex has hampered ice formation with incusions of warmer southern air into the Arctic circle. This factor receded in May, and extents have closed the gap with the averages somewhat. The Northern Sea Route (NSR) goes through the Russian shelf seas of Laptev, East Siberian, and Chukchi seas on the way to Bering Strait in Beaufort Sea.
As the image from yesterday shows, despite some melting on the margins, the Arctic Ocean core is solid, expecially along the Eurasian NSR seen on the left vertical side.
The chart below shows the 20-year May averages for Arctic ice extents, along with 2026, 2025 and 2006 as well as SII v.4.
Remarkably the deficit to average opened up on May 5 (day 125) to 739k km2, but since then the gap was cut to 1/3, reaching 250k km2 on day 145, before ending 439k at month end . SII tracked close to MASIE, but ended May 150k higher and matching 2006.
The table below shows the distibution of ice extents on day 151 across regions of the Arctic ocean.
| Region | 2026151 | Day 151 Ave. | 2026-Ave. | 2006151 | 2026-2006 |
| (0) Northern_Hemisphere | 11297960 | 11734791 | -436830 | 11425616 | -127655 |
| (1) Beaufort_Sea | 1015077 | 1013073 | 2004 | 1063879 | -48801 |
| (2) Chukchi_Sea | 880665 | 876472 | 4192 | 907609 | -26945 |
| (3) East_Siberian_Sea | 1038006 | 1066371 | -28365 | 1073889 | -35883 |
| (4) Laptev_Sea | 838754 | 826149 | 12605 | 856108 | -17354 |
| (5) Kara_Sea | 873688 | 826976 | 46712 | 848172 | 25516 |
| (6) Barents_Sea | 141624 | 314200 | -172576 | 180906 | -39281 |
| (7) Greenland_Sea | 516827 | 588635 | -71808 | 522040 | -5213 |
| (8) Baffin_Bay_Gulf_of_St._Lawrence | 692121 | 902041 | -209920 | 721606 | -29485 |
| (9) Canadian_Archipelago | 830939 | 814415 | 16524 | 800561 | 30378 |
| (10) Hudson_Bay | 1139854 | 1080088 | 59765 | 989550 | 150304 |
| (11) Central_Arctic | 3197949 | 3220706 | -22757 | 3188696 | 9253 |
| (12) Bering_Sea | 84979 | 113623 | -28645 | 179378 | -94399 |
| (13) Baltic_Sea | 0 | 5749 | -5749 | 720 | -720 |
| (14) Sea_of_Okhotsk | 46029 | 172136 | -126107 | 89739 | -43710 |
The table shows that most regions are close to or above the 20-year average. The majority of the 4% overall deficit is from Baffin Bay, Barents, Okhotsk and Greenland seas. All of those regions will be nearly ice-free end of summer.
Illustration by Eleanor Lutz shows Earth’s seasonal climate changes. If played in full screen, the four corners present views from top, bottom and sides. It is a visual representation of scientific datasets measuring ice and snow extents.
In the video speech yesterday, Conservative opposition leader Pierre Poilievre brings the receipts damning PM Carney for Canada sliding into economic recession. Transcript below with my bolds and added images.
He’s the only leader in the G7 to have plunged his economy into recession. He’s been Prime Minister for four quarters now. The economy has shrunk in three of those quarters. He’s the only G7 leader who can say that. The economy is smaller today than when Mark Carney became Prime Minister a year ago. He’s the only G7 leader who can say that.
Mark Carney will like to make excuses today, but let me ask him a question. But before I do, I’m going to actually quote back to him something he said to one of you. Mark Carney said to one of the journalists, Rosie, look inside yourself. Well, I’m going to ask Mark Carney to look inside himself, and I’ll ask him directly.
Mr. Carney, if it really is global factors and tariffs that have given Canada the only recession in the G7, why have France, Italy, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States all avoided a recession? They all have the same tariffs and the same global factors, yet none of them, not one, is in recession. Only Mark Carney has the distinction of leading his country into a recession.
Now we know that there will be a lot of excuses today, but excuses will not put food on the dinner table of the 2.2 million people relying on food banks. Excuses will not get the jobs back for the 120,000 people who’ve lost them, as Canada has the second highest unemployment in the G7. Excuses will not allow a young couple to buy a home, as Mark Carney has given Canada the worst housing costs in the G7.
Excuses will not help the mother who is tossing and turning in bed at night wondering how she will make her mortgage payment, as Mark Carney has given Canada the most indebted households anywhere in the G7. By the way, Mark Carney will claim that this is just technical. There’s nothing technical about having an empty stomach because you can’t afford paying the worst food inflation in the G7.
There’s nothing technical about coming home from work and telling your kids that you no longer have a job and that they’re going to have to sell the house because Canada has the second highest unemployment in the G7. That is not technical. It is real. This is a full-blown liberal recession. And it’s not just one or two little data points that cause this, my friends. It is one of many data points that we see today.
For example, in the last few weeks alone, we have fact after fact showing that the liberal economy is collapsing. I’m going to quote from Equifax. Insolvency volumes have increased to levels not seen since 2009, up 19% year over year. Delinquency rates climbed 32% year over year. In the first quarter of this year, insolvency volumes hit a 17-year high, partly due to escalating financial strain on mortgage holders. And one in 1.5 million Canadians missed a minimum debt payment in the first three months of this year alone.
Then there’s the investment numbers, which came out just yesterday. They show that in the first four quarters under this Liberal Prime Minister, Canada saw $1.9 billion of investment flee. That’s $20 billion more than entered our country. That’s a net $20 billion leaving our country to build pipelines, mines, homes, bridges, technology, and other countries for foreign businesses and foreign workers.
Again, we cannot blame foreign factors for that, because the other countries to which that investment fled are facing the same foreign factors. So no more excuses, please. We actually need results. Furthermore, we know that the Prime Minister is fond of doing illusions of action, but here is the core reality. After a year in office, what has really changed in our economic policy? Every anti-development law remains in place, C-69, C-48.
He’s increased the industrial carbon tax six times higher than it was when Justin Trudeau was in office. Home building has actually dropped, and in many provinces the GST still applies to that home building. He’s renamed, not eliminated, renamed the consumer carbon tax, and there are 500 economic projects waiting, some of them for years, just to get through the Liberal bureaucracy permitting system.
Now, we know what won’t fix this. Dazzling speeches at the World Economic Forum, clever-sounding corporate buzzwords, signing fake and unenforceable MOUs in grand halls with stately backdrops, none of these things will reduce costs or boost growth. Announcing projects that were approved many years earlier or making pie-in-the-sky promises like he’s going to double electricity production 25 years from now with no details on how, all of these things are illusions.
They give the impression of action, but in reality, all of the policies of Justin Trudeau remain the same, or they have gotten worse. The deficit has doubled, spending is higher, the only spending that has not gone up is capital spending, precisely the opposite of what Mr. Carney promised. The only way out of this Liberal recession is to reverse the policies that caused it in the first place.
And that is why we are calling for the Prime Minister to get back in the House of Commons next week and introduce a bill to reverse all of the economic policies his party has introduced over the last decade. We don’t need more photo ops, more signing ceremonies, more discussion papers. We need to reverse the Liberal policies that have given Canada the only recession anywhere in the G7.
Conservatives have put forward positive plans to unleash our growth, including a real plan to incentivize the Americans to sign on to tariff-free trade, eliminating capital gains tax on reinvestments in Canada, ending the industrial carbon tax, in fact, cutting taxes on work, energy, home building, and investment, making Canada the fastest place anywhere on earth to get a permit, the freest economy in which to trade, work, invest, and get a return.
Let’s restore the promises of this country where anybody who gets out of bed in the morning can find a terrific job, a job that gives them a great paycheck, that buys affordable food and homes, where our young people can afford to start a family, where our parents can afford to give their children the best start, where our seniors retire in peace and tranquility, and where our economy is truly independent, self-reliant, standing on its own two feet.
That is the mission. Now, let’s turn it into action. Thank you very much. Thank you.
We’ll now take questions from reporters. Please identify yourself and your outlet. One question each.
I can start. Yes, hello, Mr. Poilievre.Laurence Martin from Radio-Canada. It’s an article that just came out this morning. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Trump administration wants vehicles covered by the CIO, so with low or exempt tariffs, to have at least 50% of American content.Is that an acceptable request in your opinion?
No, I have already proposed a positive plan to eliminate all tariffs on cars, which will force manufacturers to produce one car in the United States for each of their customers in the United States, and one in Canada for each of their customers in Canada. That way, we will be able to increase the production of cars in our two countries, massively, to reverse the commercial deficits that both countries have now. So that’s the only way we can eliminate tariffs between Canada and the United States.
Mr. Carney has given up, and he hasn’t done anything. He’s not at the negotiating table when Mexico is there. And because Mr. Carney is absent, now we’re seeing more dangerous threats compared to our automotive sector. There is no future for our automotive sector without direct and non-tariff access to the United States. That’s why I presented a plan about three months ago to save the automotive sector and to reverse the decline that we’ve seen in Canada for 10 years.
Mr. Carney has done absolutely nothing since then, except make big contradictions. Yesterday, he said that he wants to, and I quote, make America, in his words, great again, after saying that he wanted a break with the United States. So that’s another big failure for Mark Carney, and perhaps that’s one of the reasons why Canada has the only recession among the G7 countries. Yes, well over three months ago, I presented a plan for tariff-free auto trade with the United States, bring back the 1965 auto pact, which would massively increase production in both Canada and the United States, and actually achieve the stated goals of both countries.
Since that time, Mark Carney has been nowhere and done nothing. While the Mexicans are at the negotiating table eating our lunch on auto negotiations, Mark Carney has not shown up for one negotiation so far. The result is that our auto sector is hemorrhaging jobs under his leadership.
In the last 10 years, we’ve lost half of our auto production,
and now we’re losing even more.
But because Mark Carney has done literally nothing to fight for tariff-free trade on autos over the last decade, we’ve lost even more auto jobs, and one of the facts that Statistics Canada reported that led to us being the only country in the G7 in recession is the decline in the auto sector. Yesterday, Mark Carney gave a baffling, confusing, and contradictory speech in which he simultaneously said we need a rupture with the United States, and that we need to make America, in his words, great again. So, his elbows are up and down so fast, he’s doing a rhetorical chicken dance while we lose our auto sector.
Rahim Ahmed from the National Post. Mr. Paliyev, you said that you’ll be campaigning across Alberta for a united Canada. Can you give us an update on any visits that you have scheduled back home in the next few weeks? And are you open to debating folks like Keith Wilson and some of the other prominent Alberta separatists?
We will be back in my home province of Alberta to campaign for a united country, and our message is that all of Canada needs to wrap its arms around Alberta. Let’s ensure that every Albertan knows that Canada loves Alberta, that Canada is Alberta, Alberta is Canada, we need to have a strong united nation right across this country.
And that will mean a stronger province of Alberta, but getting out of the way and off the backs of our energy sector, getting rid of the gun grab, locking up criminals to bring safety to our streets, allowing young Albertans to start families with affordable homes, decentralizing control in the country so that Albertans have more direct decision-making power within their provincial boundaries, that is a positive, optimistic, unifying vision that I will be presenting to all Albertans in all corners of the province.
Mr. Poliev, the Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs is in town today. He said this morning to Anita Anand, the Canadian minister, that if the momentum continues, trade could increase by more than 100% in five years, and that the Chinese market would remain open to Canada, and that it would soon become the largest market in the world. How do you think that will be received in the United States, and what is the risk to Canada?
First of all, Mr. Carney is directly in a conflict of interest. He went to China to receive a loan of $200 million from a bank controlled by the Chinese government a few months before he took office. He still has investments in Brookfield that he wants to expand his business in China. He has already allowed Brookfield to be at the table of discussions and talks by representing Canada. It has never happened that a prime minister sends his company to make talks.
We want a prime minister who defends Canada’s interests and not his company. Obviously, to say that we can replace the United States with China is not realistic when we sell 20 times more to the United States than we sell to China. Perhaps one of the reasons why Canada is the only country in recession among the G7 countries is our bad calculation of Mark Carney, a man who has been wrong on all economic issues for a decade.
He was wrong on the carbon tax, on the plans to keep all oil on the ground, his opposition to pipelines, his support for monetary pressure. He has been wrong on all economic issues for a decade, and we see that he is still wrong on global issues. Do you think China will do anything to make Beijing unhappy? Of course not. He won’t do anything to make Beijing unhappy.
A year after Mark Carney said that China was the single biggest risk to Canada, he claimed that we were going to have a full rupture with the United States in favour of a strategic partnership for a new world order with the dictatorship in Beijing. Of course, Mr. Carney is in a terrible conflict of interest.
He went and got a $200 million loan for his company from a state-backed Chinese bank while he was the economic advisor to Justin Trudeau. That loan is still owed, my understanding is, by Brookfield, which the Prime Minister continues to be invested in. He allowed Brookfield to be at the table for discussions.
Mr. Carney has got to be clear that he should represent Canada’s interests, not his corporation’s interests. Maybe one of the reasons why Canada is the only G7 country in recession right now is because he is miscalculating on trade, just like everything else. He has been wrong on every economic question over the last decade, and Canadians are paying the price.
He was wrong on carbon taxes, wrong on keeping half our oil in the ground, wrong to oppose a pipeline to the Pacific, wrong to support money-printing inflation, and now he is wrong in his trade priorities. We sell 20 times more to the United States than we sell to China. That is just a mathematical fact, and Mark Carney’s Brookfield interests in China will not change that.
We need a Prime Minister who is fighting for our workers in this country. We should have the best economy in the G7, not the worst. In Q3 2025, the economy grew at an annualized rate by 2.6%. We have economists saying that today’s numbers are so nominal that they could be forecasted away and revised away.
Aren’t you jumping the gun a little bit and calling this a full-blown recession? I know that there are a lot of excuses being made for Mark Carney today, and I am not surprised. By the way, which outlet are you with? The Hilltop. Is 2.6% economic growth an excuse, or is that just the numbers? There is no 2.6% economic growth. You are having to go back? How many quarters are you having to go back now? Two quarters. You are having to go back. Let’s get this straight.
There have been four quarters since Mark Carney became Prime Minister. The economy shrunk in three of those four quarters. Canada is the only G7 country for which that is the case. There has now been an entire year of Mark Carney that is recorded in economic data, and the GDP is smaller today than when he took office. That is only true of Canada among G7 countries.
Now there are two back-to-back quarters where the economy shrunk,
which is the literal definition of a recession.
By the way, it is not just that our economy is shrinking quarter after quarter. It is that we have the second highest unemployment in the G7. You think that the 120,000 people that lost their jobs since the beginning of this year call this just a technical recession? No. They call this real job loss. Then you have the delinquency rate that is up 32% year over year at 17-year highs. We have the highest household debt of any country in the G7, the worst housing costs of any country in the G7, and for most of the last year, the worst food price inflation of any country in the G7.
So yes, you are making excuses and trying to hide from the reality that Mark Carney has given Canada the worst economy in the G7. It is time to stop making excuses, not for political reasons. It is time to stop making those excuses because this is people’s lives. Behind these statistics are empty stomachs, empty fridges, and empty bank accounts. Behind these numbers are 120,000 people who have come home to their kids saying, we cannot have you registered for hockey this year. We have to sell our home. I do not know what we are going to do. That is the reality of Mark Carney’s economy, and it is trying to stop covering it up with illusions.
Good afternoon, Pierre. So, Pierre, on national defence, Pierre. I will get your question, but I just have to get this. On national defence, yesterday, CanSec, the conference, concluded, and both of your former colleagues in Aeronautical and Peter McKay sang praise of the government’s shift of national defence policy under Mark Carney’s leadership. What do you make of the shift of that national defence strategy and procurement specifically? And also, do you believe you are losing ground to Mark Carney in an issue like national defence to the progressive conservative flank of your party?
No. What we have seen is a lot of illusions from Mark Carney, a lot of spending on bureaucracy, on procurement, and on consultants. A lot of big corporations will get very rich. The problem is that the money is not reaching the equipment in the hands of the soldiers. We 100% support more military spending, but we want to turn that spending into better equipment and better results for our soldiers, not more expensive bureaucracy, more confusing procurement, and more profits for multinational defence contractors.
So, Pierre, your final validation is that there is influence of Mark Carney’s leadership into the media.
Who can even ask questions? I think it is very troubling. The question for those who could not hear is that Mr. Carney has decided to protect the minister from Beijing by not allowing media to enter the room and only to release state photography of the meeting. That is how things are done in Beijing, and now Mark Carney is importing those methods here. Even one liberal commentator on CBC, Althea Raj, said that Mark Carney has an authoritarian streak.
I would remind him that he is supposed to work for Canadians, not for Beijing, not for Brookfield and its Chinese investments. He should open up and actually take questions from the media, like I am doing here today. By the way, he should actually show up in the House of Commons and answer questions there. We see that Mark Carney cannot take difficult questions because his illusion shatters under any scrutiny, but that is not how Canada works.
We are a free and open democracy, not an authoritarian state. Yes, I find it very disturbing that Mr. Carney forbids the media to take pictures and ask questions. He is trying to import protocols from the regime in Beijing, here in Canada. It is not democratic. There are certain CBC commentators who have noticed that he has an authoritarian streak, and now he is using it to promote Beijing’s dictatorship. I remind Mr. Carney that we are a democracy in Canada.
We work for the Canadian people and not for Beijing’s leaders. We should be willing to talk and trade with China. It is a brilliant civilization with hard-working, decent people, but we have to do so with our eyes open. This is a dictatorship that Mr. Carney himself acknowledged was the biggest threat to Canada only a year ago. Our interests in Canada are in being sovereign, self-reliant, and standing on our own two feet, ensuring that we have full control over our technology, our economy, and our minerals. Never will we be vulnerable to the aggressive instincts of a foreign dictatorship.
We have not proposed that. We think that the government should focus on reducing the cost of government spending. It should unleash free enterprise so that our small businesses, our workers, and our investors can make Canada the richest and most affordable country anywhere on Earth.
First of all, we should allow the savings that come as a result of AI to be passed on to consumers. They should not be inflated away through more money printing. Second of all, we cannot allow the government to use high-tech companies as a surveillance arm of the state. That is why we are fighting against the changes proposed in C-22.
We are very worried about excessive government power for surveillance and for control of the population. We need to have a free and open society where Canadians can use the tools that AI offers to make their lives affordable, empowered, make their paycheques bigger, and their lives less complicated. At the same time, we need to make sure that the government does not abuse that technology for its own control. Thank you very much.
Peter Murphy observes at Washington Examiner The climate change house of cards is finally collapsing. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
The prevailing climate change narrative took a big hit in recent days, as scientists who comprise the United Nations’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are backing away from more outlandish climate predictions for the 21st century.
Extreme forecasts of rising temperatures of 4 to 5 degrees, the scientists wrote in the journal Geoscientific Model Development, “have become implausible.” That means predictions of rapidly growing carbon emissions and higher temperatures, supposedly leading to fast-rising sea levels, floods, crop failures, and even human extinction scenarios, are finally being jettisoned.
This long-standing climate change narrative, always a house of cards designed to scare societies into submission, is collapsing — first gradually, now suddenly, to borrow a phrase from Ernest Hemingway.
Turns out even climate scientists on the U.N. dole have a modicum of self-respect such that they can no longer defend such lunatic predictions that were never plausible from the start.
“For the 21st century, this range [of future climate scenarios] will be smaller than assessed before,” they wrote. As a way of saving face, their scaling back of climate change doom comes from “[lower] costs of renewables, the emergence of climate policy, and recent emission trends.”
In fact, these scientists, in long-winded, technical jargon, are eating crow. Do they, or anyone else, really believe a few windmills and solar panels scattered about like a handful of microscopic specks on the planet’s landmass — which itself is only 30% of the globe — affected anything?
These longtime scare tactics from the IPCC and its echo chamber of universities, NGOs, and government bureaucracies certainly had their effect, especially on young people. It reminds me of an encounter 18 months ago while attending the U.N. COP29 Climate Summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, as part of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow delegation.
CFACT President Craig Rucker and I took some time to visit the Old City. At this tourist enclave of Baku, we met three American college students from North Carolina who were also attending the conference. We struck up a conversation about climate change.
There was no arguing or acrimony, just a pleasant back-and-forth. Craig explained to them in his affable but thorough manner that the impact of climate change is emphatically not what the U.N. or the outgoing Biden administration claimed. It’s not an “existential threat,” climate doomsday predictions going back nearly 40 years have never panned out, it’s OK to have children, and so on.
Among the three students, one (the male) was not buying it, a second (female) had an unsure, quizzical expression, while the third (female) had a palpable countenance of relief, like the weight of the world was lifted from her. All three had been bamboozled on climate issues for their entire lives, perhaps starting with Saturday morning cartoons, to hypocritical Hollywood actors, corporate grifters seeking government contracts, and charlatan college professors drinking the same Kool-Aid.
With this latest from these IPCC scientists, the prevailing narrative from all these institutions should be coming unglued, as it can no longer withstand the scientific, planetary, and human realities before us.
The North Pole and Antarctica still have massive ice buildup in their respective winters. The Atlantic Ocean will not subsume Miami or the Obamas third (or fourth?) home on the shoreline of Martha’s Vineyard. New technologies like artificial intelligence and military hardware cannot operate now or ever on wind and solar power. Liquefied natural gas is abundant and spreading widely across the globe, courtesy of growing U.S. exports, and carbon-free (assuming it matters) nuclear energy is slowly but inexorably making a comeback.
The higher price of gas due to America’s war with Iran is also a tell. Americans detest gasoline at $4.50 per gallon, Californians hate it even more at $6-plus. This war has an end date, hopefully sooner rather than later, after which global oil markets will flow and gasoline prices will drop. But climate policies for so-called green energy can only survive and expand in a high-priced world of oil and gas, which is where the climate lobby wants it to stay indefinitely.
Except for the most craven, gullible politicians, most of the remaining elected officials are not going to tolerate — and risk blame for — permanently skyrocketing energy prices from imposing climate change energy policies, knowing their current unpopularity with the public.
Of course, the climate change industrial complex, spearheaded by the IPCC, is not going to disappear nor admit they were peddling climate nonsense. The beat will go on, but their credibility and decades of scaremongering under the false flag of “science” should never again be taken seriously.
Regarding that college student from North Carolina who felt enormous relief that climate change was not a threat to her future, I hope millions more will feel likewise as this colossal lie of climate change Armageddon continues to collapse under its own weight.
As the stool above shows, the climate change package sits on three premises. The first is the science bit, consisting of an unproven claim that observed warming is caused by humans burning fossil fuels. The second part rests on impact studies from billions of research dollars spent uncovering any and all possible negatives from warming. And the third leg is climate policies showing how governments can “fight climate change.”
It is refreshing to see more and more articles by people reasoning about climate change/global warming and expressing rational positions. Increasingly, analysts are unbundling the package and questioning not only the science, but also pointing out positives from CO2 and warming. And as this post shows, essays are challenging the policy proposals advanced by climate activists. David R. Henderson and John H. Cochrane published at WSJ on July 30, 2017 Climate Change Isn’t the End of the World Even if world temperatures rise, the appropriate policy response is still an open question. Complete text below (my Bolds and added images)
Climate change is often misunderstood as a package deal: If global warming is “real,” both sides of the debate seem to assume, the climate lobby’s policy agenda follows inexorably.
It does not. Climate policy advocates need to do a much better job of quantitatively analyzing economic costs and the actual, rather than symbolic, benefits of their policies. Skeptics would also do well to focus more attention on economic and policy analysis.
To arrive at a wise policy response, we first need to consider how much economic damage climate change will do. Current models struggle to come up with economic costs consummate with apocalyptic political rhetoric. Typical costs are well below 10% of gross domestic product in the year 2100 and beyond.
That’s a lot of money—but it’s a lot of years, too. Even 10% less GDP in 100 years corresponds to 0.1 percentage point less annual GDP growth. Climate change therefore does not justify policies that cost more than 0.1 percentage point of growth. If the goal is 10% more GDP in 100 years, pro-growth tax, regulatory and entitlement reforms would be far more effective.
Yes, the costs are not evenly spread. Some places will do better and some will do worse. The American South might be a worse place to grow wheat; Southern Canada might be a better one. In a century, Miami might find itself in approximately the same situation as the Dutch city of Rotterdam today.
Rotterdam–Ninety years thriving behind dikes and dams.
But spread over a century, the costs of moving and adapting are not as imposing as they seem. Rotterdam’s dikes are expensive, but not prohibitively so. Most buildings are rebuilt about every 50 years. If we simply stopped building in flood-prone areas and started building on higher ground, even the costs of moving cities would be bearable. Migration is costly. But much of the world’s population moved from farms to cities in the 20th century. Allowing people to move to better climates in the 21st will be equally possible. Such investments in climate adaptation are small compared with the investments we will regularly make in houses, businesses, infrastructure and education.
And economics is the central question—unlike with other environmental problems such as chemical pollution. Carbon dioxide hurts nobody’s health. It’s good for plants. Climate change need not endanger anyone. If it did—and you do hear such claims—then living in hot Arizona rather than cool Maine, or living with Louisiana’s frequent floods, would be considered a health catastrophe today.
Global warming is not the only risk our society faces. Even if science tells us that climate change is real and man-made, it does not tell us, as President Obama asserted, that climate change is the greatest threat to humanity. Really? Greater than nuclear explosions, a world war, global pandemics, crop failures and civil chaos?
No. Healthy societies do not fall apart over slow, widely predicted, relatively small economic adjustments of the sort painted by climate analysis. Societies do fall apart from war, disease or chaos. Climate policy must compete with other long-term threats for always-scarce resources.
Facing this reality, some advocate that we buy some “insurance.” Sure, they argue, the projected economic cost seems small, but it could turn out to be a lot worse. But the same argument applies to any possible risk. If you buy overpriced insurance against every potential danger, you soon run out of money. You can sensibly insure only when the premium is in line with the risk—which brings us back where we started, to the need for quantifying probabilities, costs, benefits and alternatives. And uncertainty goes both ways. Nobody forecast fracking, or that it would make the U.S. the world’s carbon-reduction leader. Strategic waiting is a rational response to a slow-moving uncertain peril with fast-changing technology.
Global warming is not even the obvious top environmental threat. Dirty water, dirty air and insect-borne diseases are a far greater problem today for most people world-wide. Habitat loss and human predation are a far greater problem for most animals. Elephants won’t make it to see a warmer climate. Ask them how they would prefer to spend $1 trillion—subsidizing high-speed trains or a human-free park the size of Montana.
Then, we need to know what effect proposed policies have and at what cost. Scientific, quantifiable or even vaguely plausible cause-and-effect thinking are missing from much advocacy for policies to reduce carbon emissions. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s “scientific” recommendations, for example, include “reduced gender inequality & marginalization in other forms,” “provisioning of adequate housing,” “cash transfers” and “awareness raising & integrating into education.” Even if some of these are worthy goals, they are not scientifically valid, cost-benefit-tested policies to cool the planet.
Climate policy advocates’ apocalyptic vision demands serious analysis,
and mushy thinking undermines their case.
If carbon emissions pose the greatest threat to humanity, it follows that the costs of nuclear power—waste disposal and the occasional meltdown—might be bearable. It follows that the costs of genetically modified foods and modern pesticides, which can feed us with less land and lower carbon emissions, might be bearable. It follows that if the future of civilization is really at stake, adaptation or geo-engineering should not be unmentionable. And it follows that symbolic, ineffective, political grab-bag policies should be intolerable.
Climate science, impacts and policies also appear as a house of cards.
Mr. Henderson is a research fellow with the Hoover Institution and an economics professor at the Naval Postgraduate School. Mr. Cochrane is a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution and an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute.
The exhibit above shows the scope and complexity of the analysis. But the bottom line is that 96% of the effort and trillions of $$$ were spent to no avail. It is estimated that on the order of 1.2 Billion tonnes of CO2 were prevented over the last 20 years, with an additional 23 Billion tonnes to be erased by 2030. Any enterprise with that performance would be liquidated. That is an epic failure in fact.
World of Hurt from Climate Policies
Speaking Climate Truth to Policymakers
Climate Policies Failure, the Movie
Ole Humlum published his annual summary The State of the Climate 2025 Global and Arctic Based on Real Observations*. Synopsis below with my bolds and added images.
Real observations show a slight decrease of global temperature in 2025 compared with the previous ten years. Some stations in the Arctic show warming, but most are fairly stable. The Arctic Ocean is cooling to considerable depth, while the tropical and Antarctic oceans have a slight surface warming. The sea level trend is not changing as IPCC model data indicate. The Arctic September sea ice varies but its area has the last 4 years been much larger than modelled by the IPCC. The average snow cover on the Northern Hemisphere is fairly constant during the last 50 years. The number of tropical cyclones varies, but with no clear trend. The integrated cyclonic energy shows some periodic variations, but no trend. Global precipitation has almost zero trend. The global cloud cover decreased from 64 % to 61 % from 1985 to 2020. At the same time the global temperature increased 0.7 °C, suggesting a possible relation. The observed sequence: first warming the of the sea surface, then the deeper sea, atmosphere and land suggests that the Sun is the source of warming, modulated by clouds, and there is no manmade climate catastrophe in the foreseeable future.
The United Nations Secretary General, António Guterres on July 27, 2023, declared: The era of global boiling has arrived. We have a huge climate crisis. There is a good reason to study the available climate data to see if that is true. In the following we will compare data for 2025 with previous years and look for trends of this claimed extreme warming and accompanying weather extremes. We found no sign of a coming climate crisis.
Before I started this survey, I asked my helpful AI to make some images illustrating a) Changing
Climate, b) Natural climate change, and c) Good climate change and d) Man made climate change.
The pictures are shown on the next page.
They give a good idea of what the public is told about climate and climate change and that mankind is destroying it, as stated by the UN Secretary General. In this extended abstract I present a short status for the atmospheric and ocean temperatures, sea level, sea ice, sea level, snow, wind and storms, precipitation and global cloud cover.
My talk can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch v=85puIDVyBgc. Monthly updates of climate data are available at my website: http://www.climate4you.com.
Figure 2: The average temperature of the year 2025 versus last 10 years
The average change is -0.24 °C and is more a sign of cooling than warming. A warning: The use of just one number, the average change in global temperature, hides the fact that our planet has various temperature regions which may show a different change than the average. In 2025 we observe that the Southern Africa has cooled 3.4°C, while Greenland and Northeast Canada have warmed 3.0 °C. The use of averages tends to hide important details.
The general impression of the global sea temperatures is that they follow the radiation pattern of the Sun, with a maximum surface temperature in Equator regions and colder water towards the poles. At the deep bottom of both Polar Oceans we find, to our surprise, permafrost regions.
If we look at data for the Argo Ocean temperature surveys for the oceans from 0 to 1900 m depth, from 2004 to 2021, we find that the average temperature of the global oceans has increased from 6.42 to 6.47 °C. However, if we look at different oceans: the Circum-Arctic oceans are cooling, while the Circum-Equator oceans are warming – but only near the surface level. The CircumAntarctic oceans show warming down to 500 m. This is illustrated in Figure 4.
Much is still to be learned about the oceans! We should focus on local and regional values instead
of global averages and should not overinterpret published values.
The satellite observations refer to a global model of the sea surface of the oceans. It is far more relevant to study the traditional sea level observations in coastal areas where people live. An important measuring station is Korsør in Denmark, which is in a geologically very stable area with no uplift or sinking. Measurements since 1897 in Figure 5, shows a linear trend of +0.83 mm/year. This means an estimated sea level rise of about 10 cm in 2150.
Figure 5: Sea level measurements in Korsør, Denmark. A geologically stable location.
5. Sea iceThe future of the Arctic Sea ice is rather serious according to the last IPCC report. Some scenarios
predict practically ice-free conditions in September from 2050 as shown in Figure 7. But observations show that for the last 4 years the sea ice area has been considerably higher than forecasted
by the models.
Figure 7: Arctic minimum sea ice (September) from last IPCC report (2021) with observed areas for 2022- 2025 (blue circles).
[Note: See the linked paper for Humlum’s point on Snow, Wind and Storms, and Global Precipitation, all of which show unalarming trends.]
If all clouds were suddenly removed, then our planet would gain about 17 W/m2 in solar radiation
and become warmer. In the period 1982-2019 we have observed a decrease in cloud cover from
64 % to 61 %. This means that the Earth has received significantly more solar radiation. This may
well be the main explanation for the observed temperature increase of about 0.7 °C during this
period, as shown in Figure 11.
Figure 11: Global cloud cover and global temperature in the period 1982 – 2019.
Climate scientists admit that they cannot model the cloud cover in a reliable way. It is simply not possible to trustworthy model small scale phenomena as evaporation and condensation, for use in global climate models.
There are many additional parameters that may act on the cloud cover. For instance, if we study the changes in the Earth’s rotation, which we measure as the length of the day, we find that it was 2 milliseconds longer in 1980 than it is today. The faster rotation mirror decreasing cloud cover and decreasing humidity. Thus, it is therefore entirely possible that these parameters in some ways are related. Much is still to be learned about global cloud cover.
The principal question was this: Are we currently in a climate crisis?
1. The observed average global air temperature change during the last 40+ years is about
+0.16°C per decade. If unchanged, the additional average global air temperature increase
by year 2100 will be about +1.15°C. However, part of the temperature increase reported may be caused by administrative changes, and the real future increase may therefore be smaller.
2. Tide gauges along coasts indicate a typical global sea level increase of about 1-2 mm/yr.
Coastal sea level change rate last 100 year has essential been stable, but with periodic variations. If unchanged, global sea level at coasts will typically increase 8-16 cm by year 2100, although many locations in regions affected by glaciation 20,000 years ago, will experience a relative sea level drop.
3. Since 2004 the global oceans above 1900 m depth have on average warmed about 0.037°C
(do not overinterpret). The maximum warming (about 0.2 °C, 0-100 m depth) mainly affects oceans near Equator, where incoming solar radiation is at maximum.
If we look at the Earth’s climate on geological time scales of millions of years, it is surprisingly
stable. In most periods it is stable and warm – about 25 oC on average, and in some periods, it is
about 10 degrees colder, as we observe now. It seems that the planet has a thermostat that keeps
the climate between these limiting temperatures. Today, our planet is well situated in between
these limits, and there is no reason to think that we are in a climate crisis.
In a simple way, observed data shows us what really controls the global air temperature. We just need to use our common sense and examine the sequence of temperature changes. Measurements (Figure 12) tell us that the global temperature signal originates at the ocean surface. Two weeks later the signal is recorded by satellites in the lower atmosphere. The land surface air temperature also follows the ocean surface temperature with a delay of two months, and 20 months later the signal is recorded in the ocean at 200 m depth. This sequence was first described by Humlum et al. (2012) and demonstrates the key role for ocean surface temperature in controlling atmospheric temperatures.
Figure 12:The sequence of global climate signal from the sea surface (SST) to the deep ocean.
The hypothetical CO2 temperature signal originates in the upper troposphere, and – if dominant –
we would see the signal in the satellite data from the lower atmosphere, before we see the signal
arriving at the ocean surface. Measurements show that the opposite is the case (Figure 12). To the
degree CO2 influences atmospheric temperatures, its effect is clearly subordinate in relation to
other influences.
I have two overall conclusions and one suggestion for what should be the future main climate
research focus:
1. Observed data do not support the notion of a climate crisis but reveals many and partly
recurrent natural variations.
2. Ocean surface temperature controls the atmospheric temperature.
The principal climate research question therefore is this: What controls the ocean surface temperature? Presumably, the Sun is the key answer, modulated by the global cloud cover.
Source: Nelson and Nelson (2024) Decoupling CO2 from Climate Change
Bryan Leyland explains the basic mistake threatening society’s energy platform in his article at Climate Depot. Electricity Markets & Engineering Realities. Text in italics with my bolds and added images.
‘It is telling that while [solar & wind] developers routinely claim their energy is now the cheapest available, they never argue that subsidies are therefore no longer needed’
The prime objective of any modern power system is to deliver a reliable and economic supply over the long term, whereas the prime objective of any market system is to maximize profit. For electricity markets to work, their rules must reward those who best provide reliable, affordable power.
Many electricity systems are managed by markets that focus on minimizing day-to-day prices, operating on the blind assumption that low prices today will guarantee a reliable supply tomorrow. This assumption is wrong. A power system is a complex, interconnected machine that forms the lifeblood of a modern economy. It must deliver stable power at the lowest cost, not just today, but decades into the future. Systems governed by short-term markets have repeatedly failed to do this.
The fundamental error is treating electricity as a commodity
like any other. It is not.
Electricity must be generated at a rate that exactly matches demand, second by second, while keeping frequency and voltage within tight limits. The system must survive major disturbances — generator failures, transmission faults, and the rapid fluctuations inherent in wind and solar output. When it cannot, catastrophic cascading collapse becomes inevitable, as Spain recently demonstrated.
TSO data shows the point just after 12:30 on Monday 28 April when Spain’s electricity grid collapsed. When the collapse occurred, the Spanish electrical grid had almost 80% renewable generation, 11% nuclear, and only 3% natural gas. There was practically no base generation or physical inertia to absorb the shock that was generated. Source: Red Eléctrica
Any system that subjects its customers to
price spikes, blackouts, and unstable supply is
incompatible with a functioning modern economy.
Current plans for future power supply increasingly rely on “demand side management” — a phrase that amounts to an admission that, when generating capacity falls short, consumers will be forced to reduce consumption. This ignores hard lessons from unreliable systems elsewhere: when electricity is scarce, many businesses don’t curtail operations — they shut up shop or buy diesel generators. The latter results in higher costs and higher emissions, the opposite of what was intended.
An ideal power system is built around reliability, security, stability,
and long-term least-cost design for the system as a whole.
These qualities can only be achieved through rigorous engineering — careful long-term planning, comprehensive analysis of worst-case conditions, and the kind of disciplined foresight that experienced power engineers bring. When a system works well, success is invisible: the lights stay on, business operates efficiently, and everyone’s expectations are quietly met. Failure, by contrast, is expensive and political dynamite.
Other factors — profit, market share, political targets, public perception — are legitimate considerations, but they are secondary. When they dominate over providing a reliable and economical supply, problems follow.
Short-term electricity markets are structured to optimize generation based on prices set by generators – the organizations that also control the supply. When there is surplus capacity, prices crash to zero. When there is a shortage, prices spike. As two departing New Zealand electricity executives openly acknowledged, the way to make money in the local market is to keep the system on the edge of shortage. This creates a perverse incentive: underinvestment in capacity becomes a profit strategy. High prices and forced demand reductions become routine features rather than emergency exceptions.
Short-term markets place little value on long-term resilience,
adequate reserve capacity, energy storage, or system stability.
The result is chronic underinvestment in precisely the assets that keep systems secure. The growing concentration on intermittent wind and solar compounds this problem, which is exacerbated by the fact that intermittent generation gets paid at the same rate as reliable generation. While wind and solar generation is often cheap at the station gate, the full system cost — backup capacity, storage, grid reinforcement — is borne by consumers, not by the owners of intermittent plant.
Multiple independent analyses confirm the pattern: the higher the share of wind and solar on a system, the higher the ultimate cost to consumers. This fact has escaped many industry leaders in New Zealand.
Wind and solar development in most countries is driven heavily by political incentives and substantial subsidies. It is telling that while developers routinely claim their energy is now the cheapest available, they never argue that subsidies are therefore no longer needed. Without those subsidies, intermittent renewables would play a modest role in large-scale power generation.
When providing a reliable and economic supply is no longer treated as
prime requirements, the risks don’t disappear — they are simply deferred.
Language shifts to conceal the retreat: “reliability” becomes “acceptable risk”; shortages become “price signals”; engineering constraints become “obstacles to be managed.” The system drifts, steadily and quietly, away from everything that underpins it.
The solution is not to abandon markets, but to redesign them around what the power system and the economy actually need. Long-term system performance — not short-term price — must guide both investment and operation. Engineers must be empowered to speak plainly about risks ahead, and their warnings must be taken seriously before failures occur rather than after.
If we want a reliable and affordable power system, we must make that a non-negotiable requirement. Markets should be the enabler of that goal, not the driver that overrides it. Ignore this reality, and high prices and shortages are not a risk — they are a certainty.
Bryan Leyland MSc, DistFEngNZ, FIMechE, FIEE(rtd) is a power systems engineer with 65 years experience in New Zealand and in many overseas countries.
Many headlines proclaiming lots of warming with the current La Nina ending. Some examples from the usual suspects:
El Niño is coming, chances rising it will be historically strong, CNN
What Makes This Year’s Super El Niño the Strongest in 140 Years?, Science Times
Weather experts warn of ‘super’ El Niño. Here’s what could happen,. USA Today
Here’s What The Super El Niño Means In Your State, Weather.com
Source: psl.nooa enso current
After all, warmists need warming to justify their narrative, and people attending outdoor sporting events in NH are noticing how cool it is presently. So hope abounds for a great reversal in coming months, while leaving unstated that oceanic cycles are a natural climate driver unaffected by CO2 emissions.
Importantly, the theory of human-caused global warming asserts that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere changes the baseline and causes systemic warming in our climate. On the contrary, the graph above shows all of the warming since 1947 was episodic, coming from three brief El Nino events associated with oceanic cycles. And in 2024 we saw an amazing episode with a temperature spike driven by ocean air warming in all regions, along with rising NH land temperatures, now dropping well below its peak.
The certainty in the headlines is speculative and exaggerated. The Climate Prediction Center is more circumspect and unbiased. The forecast is here: ENSO Alert System Status: El Niño Watch Synopsis in italics with my bolds and added images.
El Niño is likely to emerge soon (82% chance in May-July 2026)
and continue through Northern Hemisphere winter 2026-27
(96% chance in December 2026-February 2027).
In the past month, ENSO-neutral conditions continued, as indicated by near-average sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the east-central equatorial Pacific Ocean [Fig. 1].
The latest weekly Niño-3.4 index value was +0.4°C, with the westernmost (Niño-4) and easternmost (Niño-1+2) indices at +0.5°C and +1.0°C, respectively [Fig. 2]. The equatorial subsurface temperature index (average from 180°-100°W) increased for the sixth consecutive month [Fig. 3], with widespread, significantly above-average subsurface temperatures across the equatorial Pacific [Fig. 4]. Westerly wind anomalies were observed over the western equatorial Pacific at low levels and were evident over the central and east-central Pacific at upper levels. Convection was near average on the equator near the Date Line and was suppressed around Indonesia [Fig. 5]. Collectively, the coupled ocean-atmosphere system reflected ENSO-neutral conditions.
The North American Multi-Model Ensemble (NMME) average, including the NCEP CFSv2 [Fig. 6], favors El Niño to form by next month and persist through Northern Hemisphere winter 2026-27.
While confidence in the occurrence of El Niño has increased since last month, there is still substantial uncertainty in the peak strength of El Niño, with no strength categorization exceeding a 37% chance [Figs. 7 & 8].
The strongest El Niño events in the historical record are characterized by significant ocean-atmosphere coupling through the summer, and it remains to be seen whether this occurs in 2026. Stronger El Niño events do not ensure strong impacts; they can only make certain impacts more likely (see CPC outlooks for probabilities of seasonal anomalies). In summary, El Niño is likely to emerge soon (82% chance in May-July 2026) and continue through Northern Hemisphere winter 2026-27 (96% chance in December 2026-February 2027).
Warming in Nino 3.4 index in 2026.
This discussion is a consolidated effort of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), NOAA’s National Weather Service, and their funded institutions. Oceanic and atmospheric conditions are updated weekly on the Climate Prediction Center web site (El Niño/La Niña Current Conditions and Expert Discussions). A probabilistic strength forecast is available here. The next ENSO Diagnostics Discussion is scheduled for 11 June 2026.
Science Matters 