After a few decades in the wilderness, it looks like the skeptics are now suddenly prevailing in the climate wars. I have long said that this would inevitably happen, and that it was only a question of time, because the laws of physics and economics would inevitably prevail. But what I didn’t know was how much time it would take — perhaps a few years, or maybe many decades. It’s much like North Korea. Their non-functioning communist system will inevitably collapse — but when?
Much credit for the sudden reversal in the climate struggles goes to President Trump. But it is also true that the climate scam was always a house of cards, subject to falling as soon as a critical mass of people started testing its foundations.
And I don’t mean to suggest that the climate wars are totally over. Too many people have been making too big a living off the scam, and have far too much invested to give up easily. And so I continue, along with dedicated colleagues, to do my part to help get this beast killed deader than dead.
On Monday this week (August 4), two colleagues and I filed a comment on EPA’s proposal to revoke the Biden-era regulations that sought to force the closure of all fossil-fuel-based power plants. Here is EPA’s June 11 announcement of its intention to revoke the Biden-era regulation. And here is a link to our August 4 comment.
A little background for those new to this battle. Since the inception of electricity delivered from a grid, the majority of the energy has come from combustion of fossil fuels, mostly natural gas and coal. For a recent data point, in 2023, approximately 60% of U.S. electricity came from those two sources.
However, the Obama administration got the idea that they should force all the fossil fuel power plants to close, supposedly to be replaced with fantasy generation from wind and sun. In 2014 the Obama EPA put forth a proposed regulation called the “Clean Power Plan,” intended to force the closure of all the fossil fuel power plants. The mechanism would be via setting limits on allowable “greenhouse gas” emissions from the plants, which limits would gradually decrease until no fossil-fuel-based power plants could comply, by some time in the late 2030s. The CPP became a final regulation in August 2015.
Then the first Trump administration took control, and in 2018 proposed rescinding the CPP in favor of an Obama-lite alternative that would not end electricity from fossil fuels. On the last day of Trump’s first term (January 19, 2021), the D.C. Circuit struck down the Trump alternative to the CPP. That set the stage for an appeal to the Supreme Court, leading to the landmark decision in West Virginia v. EPA in 2022. In that decision, the Supreme Court said that the attempt by EPA in the CPP to transform the nation’s entire electricity generation system went beyond the powers it had been granted by Congress in the Clean Air Act.
The Biden EPA then went back to the drawing board, and on April 25, 2024 came up with an alternative with the pithy title “New Source Performance Standards for Greenhouse Gas Emissions from New, Modified, and Reconstructed Fossil Fuel-Fired Electric Generating Units; Emission Guidelines for Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Existing Fossil Fuel-Fired Electric Generating Units; and Repeal of the Affordable Clean Energy Rule.” This one was a completely delusional effort to impose wildly uneconomic carbon capture regime on fossil fuel generation of electricity. In this post on May 1, 2024, I characterized this latest Biden rule as a “war on the Second Law of Thermodynamics.” This is the rule that the Trump EPA now proposes to revoke.
This time around, per the June 11 EPA announcement, the second Trump administration is not proposing some Biden-lite regulation to attempt to appease the climate gods. It’s just a full-out repeal. Good riddance.
Our comment is some 33 pages long, plus two short appendices, and includes several arguments supporting the position of the current Trump/Zeldin EPA. In this post I want to describe one of our arguments, which is one that EPA has not utilized in its own documentation.
The Obama and Biden EPAs based their case for regulation (and elimination) of fossil fuel based electricity generation on what they called three “lines of evidence,” only one of which was actually “evidence” in the sense of the scientific method. That one is the Global Average Surface Temperature (GAST) record, maintained by agencies within the purview of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the Department of Commerce. (The other two “lines of evidence” were not evidence at all. They were: the various climate models predicting rapidly rising temperatures, and the supposed “basic understanding” of how the climate system works.)
So they only had one “line of evidence” that was actually evidence. And then they introduced into that one collection of evidence large amounts of purported data that they essentially fabricated to support the desired narrative. In particular, for most of the time period of the GAST data, and for approximately 40% of the earth’s surface (the Southern Hemisphere oceans) they had no data at all. So they made it up.
From the Comment, page 8:
[P]rior to the year 2000 the Southern Hemisphere is 80.9% ocean,2 and prior to the year 2000 there was virtually no credible monthly ocean surface temperature data whatsoever for this massive area.3 This fact alone means that until 2000, the surface temperature record had virtually no data whatsoever for over 40% (50%*0.809) of the planet. But the situation is even worse than that because for much of the quoted surface temperature record since about 1850, there are virtuallyno credible monthly surface temperature data outside of North America and Europe.
In other words, an “average” surface temperature has been calculated with 40% of the data missing and filled in by people with a strong interest in creating data to fit their narrative. Nobody really knows what the “average” surface temperature of the world was for most of the time of this data series. We really have no way of knowing that recent temperatures are warmer than temperatures from the earlier years of this record. From our Comment:
Proof that the Global Average Surface Temperature data are fabricated invalidates any claim of record setting temperatures [in recent years].
This argument is easily understood and essentially irrefutable. Trump and EPA would be well-advised to use it in some form in their messaging.
Well, needless to say, lots of environmentalists are also filing comments, and most of them are outraged at the idea that fossil fuels are going to be around for the long term for electricity generation. If you want to review some of their comments, you can go to this link. But do any of them have an answer to the problem that we don’t even know that average temperatures in the most recent year are higher than they were 75 or 100 or 125 years ago? I invite readers to review the comments and see if they can find the answer to that conundrum.
“And so I continue, along with dedicated colleagues, to do my part to help get this beast killed deader than dead.”
Well done, Francis Menton and colleagues! And… Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Amen
Thanks Francis, for all the work you have done and are doing. We all benefit from it.
I saw a report today in Inside EPA that Marcia McNutt announced that the National Academy of Sciences is going to do a literature review and weigh in with a scientific evaluation of climate change. I think we all know how that will turn out.
The Establishment Strikes Back.
I can picture Trump raising his middle finger to the NAS, like we all should 🙂
De-Fund the NAS of these U.S.-of-A.
Turn its desecrated Temples into Museums …
… devoted to preserving the History of Puritanical Persecutors …
… of Free Thought & Expression in the Sciences.
I think he would go further:
Fabricated early data is NOT the only problem with GAST. There are many others, all detailed using multiple concrete examples in essay ‘When Data Isn’t’ in ebook Blowing Smoke.
What can be said with some certainty is that GAST has been warming to some degree since the end of the LIA. The last Thames Ice Fair was in 1818.
And even the IPCC AR4 WG1 SPM admitted in figure 4 that the GAST warming from about 1920-1945 was natural, since there simply not enough rise in CO2 to explain it.
Everybody should get their own copy of Rud’s ebook “Blowing Smoke.”
It must have been dam cold on Thames back then. Moving water isn’t considered safe to be on when frozen. I wonder if there were any casualties?
No OSHA (or Brit equivalent) back then to protect people from themselves.
One reason given for the lack of ice for more than 100 years is the work done by Joseph Bazalgette. He built a massive sewer to clean up the Thames and in the process narrowed the river. This increased the flow of the river making it less likely to ice up. Another factor was the removal of the old London bridge which, with many narrow arches, restricted the flow of the river. Nevertheless the change in climate around that time probably played its part.
“GAST warming from about 1920-1945 was natural, since there simply not enough rise in CO2 to explain it.”
Statement requires that rise in CO2 from about 1920-1945 was not natural.
1818?
Between 1607 and 1814, there were a total of seven major frost fairs held on the frozen River Thames in the heart of London. These fairs hosted bull-baiting, pop-up pubs, and even saw a king or two taking part in the festivities!
I know, picky picky…..
While it is sometimes necessary to use a foe’s own club to beat them about the head, it is well to keep in mind that the historical GAT, as such, (the world-wide average of the local average of the seasonal average of the daily average of the readings of poorly-located thermometers — or the satellite instrument readings adjusted to agree with them) really has no meaningful relation to the actual local climates we experience here on the real Earth.
The very idea that the entire Earth has a certain temperature is unphysical nonsense.
And over UAH6’s 46+ years of recordkeeping the average atmospheric warming is a paltry 0.16 C/decade combined over both land and the oceans. Additionally, the UN IPCC’s 2021 Sixth Assessment Report, Chapter 12 clearly shows that extreme weather has not increased in frequency, intensity nor duration in over 100 years.
Wake me when we have some actual climate disaster.
I can report next months best lottery numbers every month, for years. Just send a check.
There is a reason for the “10% greater than Peak” FERC rule requiring a reliable source of power.
Strangely I have never read statements on this web site provided by Electric Utilities Dispatchers [ The people that control the flow of electricity on the GRID. ]
When the GRID is dead you can not flip a switch and Start a Diesel Generator unless that diesel generator has a Battery or sufficient air in a storage tank to start it.
A dead grid also means that there is no power for the communication systems to properly align breakers to obtain power on the Grid or determine which breakers are open.
Above is also true for NG, Coal, Bio, Nuclear, Wind and industrial scale Solar sources of electricity that could be used on the grid.
You need to begin using your brain (or at least checking facts): Your comment is ‘not even wrong.’ The sequential process of bring up a grid from Black Start is very complicated and non-synchronous unreliable wind and solar can’t do the job. I’m an electrical engineer with experience in producing studies of the operation of electrical power systems.
You, Dave, seem to know what ‘usurbrain”s comment means. I have no clue what it relates to. Further, I don’t see what that comment has to do with Menton’s post about filing a comment on EPA’s revoking proposal.
It is still early in the morning for me!
Because, like YOU, most people working at the EPA have ZERO knowledge of how Power plant operators and Utility Dispatchers maintain reliable delivery of electricity. Thus they need to learn how power plants work.
If ALL GAS and COAL plants are eliminated then Outages will be a daily event throughout the USA.
Since the local NPP was shut down to achieve Net Zero myth my utility has at least an Outage a week. Prior to the NPP Shutdown the only time we had large outages was during storms.
You talk like a JOURNALIST THAT ONLY WRITES NEWS STORIES.
If you think that that I do not know all that I wrote earlier I doubt you are a REAL Practicing Electrical Engineer.
As an Electrical Engineer responsible for the Startup of five Nuclear power plants which required notifying the Dispatcher each and every time that I would be starting each one of the larger pumps powered by Electricity. If the Dispatcher was not informed it was highly probable that several counties would not have any electricity.
With twenty years on a USN Submarine I had to make at least a dozen Black Starts and another half dozen during 30 years at Commercial NPP’s.
Suggest you talk to the Dispatcher of the Electric utility you get your power from and learn something.
It is also impossible to black start an electrical grid with inverter based sources like wind and solar generation.
“and industrial scale Solar sources of electricity that could be used on the grid.”
Providing it is not late afternoon, early morning, heavy clouds and the system can handle the current surge. There, fixed it for you.
This is not the end, nor is it the beginning of the end.
It is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
Well done.
The quote was by Sir Winston Churchill after the RAF won the Battle of Britain, if I recall. Same on you for not attributing the quote to Sir Winston.
“It’s much like North Korea. Their non-functioning communist system will inevitably collapse — but when?”
When somebody manages to wipe out that ruling dynasty.
Good question. It took the Communists/Bolsheviks/Soviet Union 70 years to collapse. So no tellin’…
The old Soviet Union was much better connected to the rest of the world, and there were a lot of people in it who knew just how much better life was outside the Soviet Union.
The Kims have managed to keep a much better seal on N. Korea. About the only ones who know anything about the rest of the world, are the kleptocrats in charge. As long as they continue to support the regime, there will be no change in leadership.
Yeah, I’m no expert but NK is a completely different animal. More of a cult than a government.
“lots of environmentalists are also filing comments, and most of them are outraged at the idea that fossil fuels are going to be around for the long term for electricity generation.”
well, if it’ll make’em feel any better, they can always get off the grid, get back to Mother Nature, like in the good old stone age
Yes, no doubt the alarmist cabal is very busy picking cherries and assembling the usual list of logical fallacies -ad hominem, argument from authority, precautionary principle, etc.- to submit and try to derail the process. The MSM propaganda machine will certainly kick in to high gear over this. But the facts are on our side and the comments submitted by Mr. Menton et. al. will be very powerful when the issue ultimately winds up in the Supreme Court because it is also clear the the law is on our side.
Kudos. Now is not the time to sit on our laurels and celebrate. It may feel like the battle is over but believe me, the alarmists are trying to regroup to save their investments in money and ideology.
it looks like the skeptics are now suddenly prevailing in the climate wars.
In the UK there could be light at the end of the tunnel
Reform UK tells energy bosses to end reliance on net zero
Richard Tice, party’s deputy leader, says a Reform government would focus on nuclear and gas-fired power
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/08/08/reform-energy-bosses-end-reliance-net-zero/
Look out Mad Ed
Tice has also warned the UK financial community that future investment in Wind and Solar would be most unwise.
“the Obama administration got the idea that they should force all the fossil fuel power plants to close”
This has got to be in his top 5 dumb ideas. For a while, I thought he was the worst president, but then Sad Joe came along. Obama’s mental state hasn’t been questioned, so there is no excuse. Still, I think it is a tie.
Biden’s administration will need an asterisk. (* mental disfunction)
They were both puppets and someday we might find out who the puppeteers were. Obama was clearly groomed by the Left in a decades-long process, while Biden was simply a last minute substitution to derail the nomination of Bernie Sanders, who although popular with the Left, was considered unelectable because he was an admitted socialist.
I have always been confident that we climate realists will eventually prevail; because our assertions are founded on science, economics, and objective reality. The only question is how much money will be squandered before we do.
An even more important question is how we get our money back.
Thanks Francis. Indeed, the war is not over. I received this note on Sunday about the latest Bay Area Air District in Northern California adopted amendment:
Background & Context
This amendment intends to establish a zero-emission standards for natural gas furnaces and water heaters. The amendment has been adoption by the Bay Area Air District, a public agency that regulates stationary sources of air pollution in nine counties: Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, southwestern Solano, and southern Sonoma.
It is expected that this will be adopted statewide.
What: Furnaces & Water Heaters (only)
When: Effective January 1, 2027
Why: It is anticipated that these changes will improve air quality and public health. In 2019 it was estimated that emissions from natural gas appliances were equal to that of passenger vehicles. The study further states that premature deaths and other health costs could be alleviated.
Please contact your state representative to let them know your position on this issue. This another example of government overreach and an unnecessary burden placed on homeowners.
Key Takeaways
If your Furnace or Water Heater fails post the effective date, it will need to be replaced with a zero-emission alternative.This standard will apply to all new buildings-developments. Federal & State funding will be made available to assist homeowners with older homes requiring electrical retrofit.Read more
Who are your representatives?
Contact Diane Papan, AD 21
Contact Josh Becker, SD 13
Contact Kevin Mullen, CA 15
Contact Sam Liccardo, CA 16
————————————————–
They have not gotten the memo. I had interactions with them in the past about their “evidence” that Natural Gas causes asthma. The studies they shared with me as evidence offered NONE. It was really quite embarrassing and frightening that they relied on those EPA studies….but it is California.
Story Tip
I doubt that there will be any Federal money.
There is no such thing as a zero CO2 emission furnace or water heater using nat. gas fuel unless these electricity.
From F. Menton’s opening:
vs. Dr. R. Spencer’s earlier description:
These statements are not quite the same. Think – think – think … what is missing here?
Hint: Return to Freeman Dyson, a lone voice-of-reason, or Radical Skepticism, from the 1980s until ~ 2020 A.D.
The so-called ‘Gentle Heretic‘.
Who (in his final years) pointed out the need for Young(er) Heretics.
In no regard a ‘Lukewarmer‘ on the Long Carbon-Hydrogen-Cycles.
Recalls precisely one year ago, how the former President [DJT] is the vector-cum-protector for his supporters:
It is not unreasonable to inquire HOW LONG the Manhattan Institute can exist?
How can such practical, responsible, and reasonable, physics-based sentiment be tolerated in the hotbed of thinking ‘contrary to nature’ that is NYC?
Story tip.;;; Over at Nature Briefing, the usual climate activists (Santer, Dessler et.al.) hit back at DOE report…. Scientists fight back Trump’s climate report
USA gained an economic advantage over the rest of the west in the first Trump term. It went a little backward during Biden but is now gaining stride in the right direction.
Australia has continued to decline. The attached chart shows the state of Australia’s electricity market transition extracted from the Q2 2025 AEMO national market report.
The bottom, declining curve on the chart is the wholesale market that AEMO administer. The rising curve is the estimated total demand that includes rooftop solar. The difference between the two curves is rooftop solar and is by far the fastest rising component of total generation.
To put this in better perspective, there has been no reduction in connected dispatchable generation – some new investment in gas generation and some closure of coal plants but the dispatchable generation has increased to meet the rising maximum demand. Most houses do not have batteries yet but they are going in at 1000 homes per day now. Even with batteries, there will be time when the household batteries are flat.
There has been more than $100bn invested in “renewables” including rooftop solar, new power lines, batteries, synchronous condensers, wind farms, solar farms, smart meters, automatic tap changing distribution transformers etc. The rooftops have a competitive advantage because they are located at the load and get first use.
So the volume of the market that AEMO administers is declining. On the other hand, their budget in 2016 was AUD141M. The AEMO budget for 2026 has been set at AUD755M. So a 5-fold increase spread across lower volume.
Overall, I estimate that the labour force involved in Australia’s electricity supply has trip[pled over the past 10 years for a modest gain in volume overall but a decline in the wholesale market.
The Australian electricity market has gone from an essential service to a crapshoot where the fastest and best programmed bidding computer will yield the highest profit. If you want to attempt to understand the complexity involved then try to comprehend this recent report on market rule changes:
NEM Review Draft Report – August 2025 [PDF 8.4MB]
Two large aluminium smelters that have a combined demand of almost 2GW have been written down to zero with little prospect of operating economy,ically any time in the future. So there is a better than even chance the wholesale demand will take a big dive in the coming year or so when these loads drop off.
I disagree with your assumption southern surface temperature measurements or any surface temperature measurements matter. Supposedly CO2 traps energy thus producing unprecedented energy capture which may or may not be a threat to the country and world. It doesn’t capture temperature. Temperature is not a unit of energy! How can you measure how much energy is even in the earth’s atmosphere when you aren’t even using the right units? You don’t have enough data to calculate it from temperature. PV=nRT is what people claim does it. First not a closed sytem, second earth’s atmosphere expands and contracts so V is not known. P pressure varies greatly and even more historical records don’t have this, nor do they have n number of moles of gas. Name one temperature station that records moles of gas? This varies naturally, blow moist air across a dry bed of sand/earth how much of the moisture is absorbed thus changing moles. A formula not fit for purpose, we only have one variable, that the public could understand. if sceptics didn’t like to agrue and try and disprove every theory that the CAGW crowd came up with but kept going back to how can you accurately get energy from temperature when you don’t use the correct formula nor do you even have the variables for the formula you do have.
The earth is almost closed system because it does not exchange mass with its surroundings. The earth loses small amounts H2 and He.
Microcomets add mass constantly. Regardless, closed in this context is in regards to the atmosphere and not the earth as a whole. Atmosphere constantly exchanges mass with the rest of the earth. Example rain. Ideal gas law is completely about “gas” so only atmosphere counts Because air surface temps are used to claim endangerment this is also only about atmosphere. Loss or no loss of mass to Earth is irrelevant.
‘When I said the earth is a closed system, I meant “closed” to include
the atmosphere.
Shouldn’t there also be comments re: the end-to-end process of deploying wind, solar and batteries (wsb) that details how envirinmentally destructive they are, how much fossil fuel energy is required to build them, their inability to produce electricity reliably, their true cost and their relatively short life span which results in mountains of unrecyclable waste? Hopefully, someone like Mark Mills will provide such a comment.
Green energy policy bias like in the northeast and California combined with AI data center deals will speed up the public recognition of bad public policy coming to fruition. And as usual that recognition will be too late for quick fixes. See the WSJ story about rising power rates in NJ assigned to Gov. Phil Murphy.