By Robert Bradley Jr
“I’ve yet to meet a blue-collar worker at a cleantech conference, nor have I met one at cleantech dinner tables. The industry needs to ditch its self-righteous virtue signaling and stop relying on handouts.” (- a Cleantech veteran, below)
“Is this really the climate movement’s next chapter?” asked Stephen Lacey, cofounder and executive editor of Latitude Media, a publication “covering the new frontiers of the energy transition.”
If so, it will end in nothing more than further alienating voters. The progressive approach to climate mobilization has largely failed to build durable coalitions and policies. The election of Trump clearly showed that kitchen table issues matter most. We are in an extraordinary moment where people are struggling to pay their energy bills — and this is the answer? I agree with Michael Liebreich that we need a deep, pragmatic climate reset.
Bravo: And ultimately the reset will have to reconsider (ouch!) the case for climate alarmism and forced (governmental) energy transformation.
Lacey was referring to a Climate Week wrap-up article in The Nation, “Where Did All the Youth Activists Go?,” with the summary sentence: “The ‘Make Billionaires Pay’ march might hint at where the climate movement is headed—away from fossil fuel divestment and toward broader resistance, with fewer young people.” Teen activist Keanu Arpels-Josiah explained in the article:
… the fight for climate justice is the same as the fight against ICE. It’s the same as the fight against the attacks on our trans siblings. It is the same as the fight against genocide in Gaza. It’s the same as the attacks on affordability we’re seeing across the country and across our city.
Interesting comments followed. Chris Moyer agreed, stating:
If we aren’t talking about household energy costs in 2026 and 2028, we won’t just lose elections—we’ll likely set back clean energy policy for years. The current administration will blame renewables for price hikes, and voters will believe it, and the the wrong elected officials will hold power.
For the first time, the fight against climate change intersects directly with something broadly felt and politically potent: monthly utility bills rising in a meaningful way. We don’t need to talk directly about climate change to actually address climate change! If we choose to focus on the climate crisis in the abstract or on unrelated issues, we will miss the moment—and regret it.
I responded to Moyer:
Wind and solar (and more so with batteries) are more expensive except in flawed studies. Grassroot opposition (the real environmentalists?) is growing. The next elections will be won by energy exceptionalism, not dilute, intermittent, fragile, land-intensive, transmission-intensive, and taxpayer-dependent wind and solar.
Another commenter, noting his scar tissue in cleantech space, stated:
I’ve yet to meet a blue-collar worker at a cleantech conference, nor have I met one at cleantech dinner tables. The industry needs to ditch its self-righteous virtue signaling and stop relying on handouts.
I responded:
It is crony capitalism that started with Ken Lay and Enron and the Republicans in Texas. And consider John Berger of Sunnova vs. everyone else. The Climate Industrial Complex is quite elitist.
Zack Coman, energy and environmental reporter at Politico, then chimed in, noting his new piece, “We are not winning’: Greens look for new spark under Trump 2.0.”
And the debate continues, with the real free market coming into view.
The new catch phrase of the socialists is that right wing populists are a threat to democracy. Both Trump and Farage are right wing populists. They are a threat to democracy (read socialism and the big government where taking outpaces making).
Democracy is essentially a popularity contest and populations are sick to death of socialists using their climate agenda to command ever greater share of wealth.
Australia has become a socialist state with big government having its paid for propaganda arm and taking now almost excludes making. They are destroying Australia’s wealth.
After US EPA Administer Lee Zeldin rescinds the 2009 CO2 Endangerment Finding, what ever will Premier Anthony A. and
the Canberra Climate Commissars do? They will have to eat humble
pie and repeal the draconian climate agenda.
Please go to the late John Daly’s website: “Still Waiting For Greenhouse”
available at http://www.john-daly.com. From the home page page down to the end and click on “Station Temperature Data” On the “World Map”, click on “Australia”. There is shown a list of 21 stations. Click on “Adelaide”. The chart (See below) shows a plot of the average annual temperature from 1857 to 1999. In 1857 the concentration of CO2 in dry was ca. 280 ppmv
(0.55 g CO2 /cu. m.) and by 1999, it had increased to ca. 370 ppmv
(0.73 g CO2/ cu. m.), but there was no warming. Instead there was a slight cooling. The empirical temperature falsifies the claim by the IPCC that the increasing concentration of CO2 in air causes an increase in temperature.
The reason there was no increase in air temperature is that there is too little CO2 in the air to absorb out-going long wavelength IR light emanating from the earth’s surface to cause heating of the air. John Daly found over 200 weather stations that showed no warming up to 2002.
NB: If you click on the chart, it will expand and become clear. Click on the “X” in the circle to return to comment text.
I just posted the the wrong chart for Adelaide. The chart from John Daly’s website is shown below. The chart showing plots of Tmax and Tmin data was made from the temperature data from this new website:
https://www.extrmemeweatherwatch.com/cities/adelaide/average-temperature-by-year.
The chart was prepared for me by my son. Note slight warming after 1999 which is probably due to the UHI effect.
You should go to this particular URL. At the top of the page there is the
“Select City” box. Click on it and the enter the name of city. If temperature data is in NOAA’s data base, the city name will be displayed below the box. Click on it and there will be displayed a table of Tmax and Tmin data.
You can also get data from non-city sites such as parks such as Death Valley.
If you should next go to:
https://www.extremeweatherwatch.com/adelaide/weather
the temperature is displayed in a different format. You several options for display of the data which are listed at the bottom of page.
If you should finally go to home website at:
https://www.extemeweatherwatch.com.
There is displayed in highlight many countries from around the world. Click on country to get weather and climate data.
NB: If you click on the chart, it will expand and become clear. Click on the
“X” in circle to return to comment text.
wait till sleazy finishes his brainwash by stark raving mad and BLIAR re all the climate cons and cdbc and ID cards for all
PS bLIARS son is CEO of the corp their ID scam is being handed to ..how nepo of them
The fight for climate justice is the same as the fight for recognition of trans unicorns in cloud cuckoo land.
In some ways, the globalists’ offer / threat that “you will own nothing and be happy” could be very appealing to a large % of the population.
Particularly if the proles are reduced to a state of constant anxiety about “kitchen table” budgeting matters and general quality of life.
Meeting the costs of necessary maintenance on houses & assets could be an incentive for many folks to be sorely tempted to “own nothing”.
But it’s the “be happy” part of the equation that I’d be worried about.
To wit –
would this necessitate receiving regular injections of some new “vaccine” against “unhappiness”?
Don’t ask questions, just take your dose of Soma.
Eventually reality asserts itself. The hope all along was that it would reappear before serious issues (blackouts in winter) arose. Trump seems to have pushed the needle enough that we might end the stupidity before killing our economies.
Unfortunately for Germany, the UK and my native Canada their leaders are still ostriches with their heads stuck in the sand…Canada’s Budget officer, hired by Carney himself, just announced that the government’s spending is ‘unsustainable’, and as he put it, “I don’t use that term lightly”…the Liberals have enriched themselves & their friends at the expense of everyday people and they continue to push their climate mania…if they don’t get back to commonsense policy, unleash the tremendous fossil fuel and nuclear resources Canada has Canada will soon be a 3rd world country…
Generally agreed. The problem is that there are still a few hangers-on from the dismal Trudeau administration. Carney has demoted or dumped the most egregious from cabinet, but there’s still a lot of work to do within various government ministries. Environment Canada and Global Affairs Canada are two ministries in particular which need a thorough house cleaning.
As for Parks Canada, its incompetence was widely and publicly demonstrated by its spectacular failure from the Jasper fire in July 2024. The Ministry’s own forest management policies were the principal reason why the fire was so rapid, damaging and extensive.
In short, it takes time to purge idiocy out of a civil service.
The elites are distancing themselves from climate alarmism like rats off a sinking ship.People see that the Russia-China-India ‘friendship’ has nothing to do with CC except selling panels and turbines to the gullible West and buying Russia oil. And that sinking ship is going down faster than it took to build it. Thank you Trump.
These knuckleheads need to spend less time trying to figure out how to convince people of their cult beliefs and more time researching CO2. CO2 can’t cause catastrophic global warming.
These climate conferences remind me of their education counterparts. The latter tend to be infested with consultants, coordinators, academics, senior administrators, and bureaucrats who try to convince each other that their latest untested, unproven theories actually represent the new wave of education reform. Meanwhile front line teachers are rarely asked for their input. Likewise These climate get-togethers are nothing more than gabfests that produce no solutions except vague warnings about climate catastrophes that none of the countries aim to take action against anyway. Just look at the unbroken record of COP conference failures. So cleantech workers would be out of place here because they’d be likely to point out all the flaws in the pie-in-the-sky proposals that abound here.
There will never be any energy transition for the heavy industries (e.g., mining, forestry, agriculture, metal smelters, steel, cement and ceramic plants, refineries and petrochemical plants), and the big heavy transports (cargo ships, freight truck and trains, air planes), space and water heating, etc. Where do these guys live? Have they ever experienced winter? They do in St. Moritz.
Clearly, their Climate Lies haven’t panned out, so what they are left with are lies about the “energy transition” and how “renewables are cheaper, cleaner, and create jobs”, while blaming billionaires and “greedy” fossil fuel companies for rising energy costs. Plus, they want to incorporate all the favorite, elitist, crackpot ideologies they can scrounge from the extreme left. Yep, sure. That’s the ticket. Uh huh. Grasp at straws much?
Keanu Arpels-Josiah
I always enjoyed the names that Kurt Vonnegut made up for his short stories and novels. Diana Moon Glampers is probably my favorite, from Harrison Bergeron.
Bradley : “I responded to Moyer:
In President Trump and Energy Secretary Wright’s first six months in office, China found the means to add 212 Gigawatts of solar power to its base & launch its next generation of lithium-free power storage and truck batteries.
You neglected to mention the rural Chinese forced out of their then-demolished villages to build them, that a good amount of them will never be actually hooked to the grid, that they were built primarily for propaganda photo-ops, or that the also-built coal plants (which have few to no scrubbers) provide the real power.
SOURCE?