Essay by Eric Worrall
A desperate cry for help?
Clean energy is inevitable despite Trump
The world is not on track to meet its climate targets, and the devastating effects of global warming are appearing faster than many anticipated. But the undeniable progress made in the Paris climate agreement’s first decade provides reason to hope that more progress can be made.
By Jennifer Morgan
Oct. 3, 2025
Brexit, Donald Trump, Covid-19, Russia’s war on Ukraine, Trump 2.0: During the decade since the Paris climate agreement was signed, the debates about global warming have become both more heated and, too often, more dishonest.
I witnessed this as head of Greenpeace International – working with environmental scientists and climate campaigners on the ground – and as Germany’s state secretary for climate policy and special envoy for international climate action.
…
True, the world is not on track to meet its climate targets, and the devastating effects of global warming are appearing faster than many of us anticipated. But the undeniable progress since 2015 provides reason to hope that more progress can be made.
…Understandably, fossil-fuel interests – and the Trump administration – want nothing of the kind. They have not overlooked the rewiring of the global economy, and while they seem surprised and worried that it is going faster than any of them anticipated, they are not ready to accept their inevitable decline sitting on their hands. After all, the Trump administration is working fiendishly to bring back fossil fuels and to destroy not only America’s clean energy, but also foreign green competition to US coal and oil.
Read more: https://www.eco-business.com/opinion/clean-energy-is-inevitable-despite-trump/
…
Jennifer Morgan was head of greenpeace between 2016 and 2022. I had to look it up – I can’t think of a single memorable thing she did during her tenure.
Back in the real world, there is no evidence the green transition is forging ahead.
The Net Zero banking alliance just collapsed, and governments are backing off their climate commitments.
The rise of artificial intelligence has driven a surge in energy demand which has driven tech companies to water down their green commitments.
A few holdouts like Australia and Britain are clinging to the faith, pretending the Net Zero transition is still going to happen, but back in the real world even former star advocates like Reuters admit the green energy transition is dead.
Even if Jennifer’s “devastating events” were to happen, and climate change were to stir up the weather, the world still wouldn’t embrace renewables. Renewables are too vulnerable to storm damage.
COP30 in Brazil will be a wake, a requiem for a failed green movement, not a celebration of achievement. People who think the green transition is powering ahead are not paying attention to what is really happening.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Let me fix that for you.
The “world” has no climate targets; the world simply is. It will do what it will do, regardless of you, governments, or how many trillions of bucks you steal from taxpayers and electricity bills.
I thought that Climate Catastrophes were already driving Clean Energy investments…right into the ground…there have been no climate catastrophes and the lackluster investment stampede in ruinable energy generation proves that.
My reaction was “Who?”. I try to keep up on the players in this soap opera, and she was totally forgettable.
There was a very good reason why Patrick Moore walked away from this organization in the 1980s.
Then Greenpeace lied when it claimed he wasn’t a founder.
No change in their attitude as usual.
Yes. Patrick Moore’s story (from his 2008 Wall Street Journal article) of his co-founding and later departure is here: “Why I Left Greenpeace“
Greenpeace actually tried to erase his very presence in the organisation by making him an unperson.
So, a washed up, failed and flailing huckster is telling the world how they will be ruled? Really? She failed, all the climatards have failed, now it is time to prosecute them for their crimes.
I like what she says.
If the so real ” climate catastrophe “(that never affects food production, nor can it be observed anywhere in the real world)drives clean energy,
than we can finally stop with the subsidies and forced transition.
There is no longer a need for taxpayer money, no need for activism,no need to waste billions to catch a handful of molecules.
Everything will now be done by the ” climate catastrophe”.
Combined with the fact(a fact as real as the climate catastrophe)that green energy is so much better and cheaper,
renewables will easily replace everything else without any help from outside.
No need to artificially shut down nuclear and coal plants.
When pigs fly!
And as you can see in the picture, those pigs have no wings. They must be projectiles. The other saying: what goes up must come down.
And carry an umbella.
Perhaps they are flapping their ears?
Sxyxs, you forgot the S/ tag.
You’re right!
And yet her position is all gas, coal, oil, hydro and nuclear must be shut down. On top of that she is pushing criminal charges and presecutions for all those involved in those industries. These have been Greenpeace’s positions since the 1990s, she is just changing her language on it.
Has Greenpeace forked over the $660 million they owe Energy Transfer for their Dakota Access Pipeline sabotage yet? I wonder how their donors feel about their money going to the enemy?
I doubt they ever will, they just play pro-bono lawyer games and twirl everything in circles, just like a toilet.
Climate is the statistics of weather observations. Anyone who believes that weather is affected by climate is ignorant and gullible.
The Köppen Climate Classification System is based upon five geographical zones of the earth and takes into account the geology, weather, temperature, flora and fauna of region. There is a file about this system at Wikipedia. You should go there and read about it.
The climate of the earth is water, ice, snow, rocks and sand. Activities of humans are not going to effect the climate of the vast Pacific ocean or the Sahara desert, for example.
Activities of humans in urban areas can effect local climate due to the UHI effect.
Harold, I read your Wikipedia reference. After discovering that the article does not even contain the word “geology”, I suggest “You should go there and read about it”.
Why make stuff up if you don’t have to?
Climate is the statistics of weather observations. If you disagree, you might care to say why. Or not, as you wish.
Why Conservatives Are Attacking ‘Wokepedia’A crusade is growing against Wikipedia, which says it is intent on keeping a neutral point of view
https://www.wsj.com/tech/wikipedia-conservative-complaints-ee904b0b?st=mYh9Ay&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
In today’s WSJ
Wiki neutral? HAHAHAHAHA
You are right. That was a mistake and I won’t make it again.
Wladimir Köppen (1846-1940) and his colleague
Rudolf Geiger (1894-1981) were metrologists.
Harold, you’re going to want to throw something at me, but . . .
I think you mean “meteorologists” rather than “metrologists”.
Both are fascinating in their respective ways.
Absolutely.
And apart from that, there are hundreds if not thousands of unique localities all around the world, with their own particular weather / climatic influences determined by local geography, topography, elevation, marine proximity, seasonal weather cycles, etc, etc, all doing their own things in their own times as determined by their locality’s placement and exposure to atmospheric influences and cycles.
So to talk about “the” climate of this planet is nonsense, and even more moronic to “average” selected weather and other effects from various areas in order to construct a metric that’s supposed to be the single indicator of the planet’s climatic state.
I am still waiting to observe the pending 0.3 hurricane.
5.3 hurricanes is just saying that the final number will be either 5 or 6, with 5 being about twice as likely.
Common sense, let alone standard mathematical practice, says that one round’s off numbers to nearest significant numeral. Since there cannot be 0.3 hurricanes, the round-off would yield the value of 5 hurricanes, thus never implying the value could be 6.
I knew that. They were lazy. They could have just said 5 to 6 and have done with it. %.3 makes them look foolish and destroys any credibility they might have had.
The solar facility that was damaged in a June 2023 hailstorm has been repaired, re-commissioned, and returned to operation. Google Earth will find it for you, search:
Landers Soccer Complex, Scottsbluff
Or, go here: 41.889661, -103.651189
I didn’t see the cost, but insurance is mentioned.
It was down for months and the repair costs were huge.
Just more evidence that wind and solar are too expensive and too unreliable.
Until the next time….
Good news for the Chinese manufacturer and the electrical union.
Um-weather caused rapid deconstruction or something like that. We’ll see it again. And again, and…
Post graphic says it all.
She: ” … and the devastating effects of global warming are appearing faster than many of us anticipated.”
I am amazed that so many people profess these things. I’m guessing that the “devastating” events are standard weather episodes.
If the South West region of England has become a Csa climate (hot-summer, mild wet winter) like Malta – I missed it. “Storm Amy” formed from the remnants of Hurricane Humberto. That there is a European windstorm season is not new. Flooding on the east coast of the USA – not new. Wind, rain, and hail in the USA’s tornado alley – not new.
These must be the “devastating effects” referred to. What else could they be seeing that I can’t see.
[Full disclosure: I can’t see CO2 either.]
“What else could they be seeing that I can’t see.”
The Climate Alarmists are not seeing anything unprecedented. This “Climate Crisis” is a figment of their imagination. They are seeing what they want/expect to see, not what is really there. They are living in a False Reality of their own creation.
“She: ” … and the devastating effects of global warming are appearing faster than many of us anticipated.””
Huh?
Does she mean “global warming” predictions are failing faster than she anticipated?
(I suppose to her that would be a “devastating effect”.)
Hey Jen, whistle past the graveyard much?
That’s exactly what she is doing.
Well, the market for useful idiots is cratering these days, so what else can a
girlperson do?The last two UNFCCC conferences in Dubai and Baku were notorious for: 1. the number of world national leaders which did NOT attend, and 2. the fleets of private jets at airports taking assorted billionaires and their hangers-on to the conferences.
It will be interesting to see who, if anyone, actually attends this year’s event in Belem. I would not expect the United States to bother attending the December gabfest at all. The 2026 UNFCCC conference is supposed to be held in Australia, with that of 2027 to be held in Lagos, Nigeria.
“the number of world national leaders which did NOT attend”,
Is this a new pronoun? I hear they are all the rage 😉
True, the world is not on track to meet its climate targets, and the devastating effects of global warming are appearing faster than many of us anticipated.
Faster? We only have 10 years left to fix the climate => 1989
We’ve survived the end of the world for over 25 years!
But the undeniable progress made in the Paris climate agreement’s first decade
Progress? What progress? Look at the graph, can you circle the progress?
OK, if you can’t circle the progress, can you at least circle that dip in CO2 in 2020 when we shut down the global economy for Covid? There must be a dip! We shut down air travel, downtowns were empty, we closed the schools, the factories, everything except essential services. Oh and the French Laundry.
If THAT didn’t make a blip think how much more we’d have to curb the economy to make a blip. Ms Morgan? Hello?
At the MLO in Hawaii, the concentration of CO2 in dry air is currently 425 ppmv. One cubic meter of this air has a mass of 1.29 kg and contains a mere 0.83 g of CO2. This small amount of CO2 can have no effect on the physical properties of such a large mass of air.
I suggest for visual impact you convert 1.28 kg to 1290 g when comparing to 0.83 g.
People will read over the kg.
PP 101.
A few grams of arsenic can kill a fully grown man.
A molecule of CO2 absorbs a photon, then within a few nano seconds, transfers that energy to another molecule in the atmosphere. Each CO2 molecule does this millions of times per second.
You copy and paste the exact same paragraph at me over and over and over again. I’m not going to bother explaining to you why you are wrong again. Move onto something else.
It must suck to be people like Jennifer.
Definitely. People like her live in a horrible Bizzaro World where their imaginations run wild and fills them with fear.
Not a pleasant existence.
If they only knew the truth. Unfortunately, people like her already have their minds made up and no amount of logic will change them.
Climate targets, a licence to print money, a never ending gravy train for corrupt scientists, is that right Al Gore?
Jenny lives in her own little world.
The only inevitability is that as fossil fuel gets scarcer and more expensive, the Western lifestyle, if the population level remains, will need to replace it with nuclear power.
This has nothing to do with climate change or lack thereof. It is solely economics and reality.
.
We currently have 300 years worth of proven reserves of oil and gas….. still many shale formations deep water traps and many other areas that have not been evaluated. In addition we know that there are vast amounts of gas hydrates that at present we do not know how to safely extract. Nuclear fusion power suffers the same problem of resources with high enough Uranium concentrations …. e.g. you could mine Uranium in cornwall assuming you dig up all the granite economically i.e. almost the whole county for low concentration extraction…. fusion is fundamentally a material science problem, but we have at least 300 years to address that. Wind and solar are not environmentally friendly in terms of extraction of resources, and habitat destruction, never mind the land use requirements access roads and network connectivity, and energy use for mineral processing, manufacturing and construction. If we put all the money we waste on subsidies on renewables into nuclear research we may get their sooner…. the ITER Tokamak will not generate any usable electricity, a giant lab experiment and has yet to be completed due to “corruption and incompetence” and Billions over budget. Your cost of oil and gas is determined by governments, taxes, speculators and traders.
Given the assumption (probably valid) that the earth will provide us with constrained resources, whether 300 or 100 or 50, we have time to evolve new technologies.\
Step functions create instabilities. We do not need to follow Veruca.
Funny how the “devastating effects of global warming” are always somewhere else. In the past it was just bad weather.
Jen can’t tell the difference between weather speculation and established facts. This is a known flaw in Climate Alarmist thinking.
“I witnessed this as head of Greenpeace International “
Yes, Greenpeace is one of the most dishonest money-grabbing group of activist thugs there is.
She witnessed it, because she was part of it.
She’s still grabbing some of the big money after leaving Greepeace International, currently as a rep on ‘international climate policy’ for Germany’s Federal Foreign Office. One of the prior leaders of Greenpeace USA grabbed – and is apparently still grabbing – even more after he left that USA wing of the organization. Same guy along with his ex-GP USA subordinate who seems to have a vendetta against Exxon same pair who have every appearance of helping to facilitate the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits that contain their accusation of Dr Willie Soon being bribed by ‘Big Oil.’
From Copilot AI …
Total Global Spending on Climate Mitigation …
Cumulative Estimate (2011–2025):
Let’s look at the share of spending that went to nuclear and hydro, which are dispatchable, low-carbon sources with proven scalability:
Nuclear Power
Yet it receives less than 5% of total climate finance. Much of the underinvestment stems from:
Hydroelectric Power
Still, hydro remains one of the most cost-effective and resilient low-carbon sources.
Much of the climate spending has favored popular, politically palatable technologies (solar, wind, EVs), while technically robust solutions like nuclear and hydro have been underutilized. If even 20–30% of global climate finance had been directed toward nuclear and hydro, the world would likely be in a stronger position to meet energy security and decarbonization goals.
This is like replacing freighters with sail boats.
It isn’t carbon. It is CO2.
We need to alter the language back to sane science.
The amount of investment that can be made into new hydraulic development is highly limited. Most of the best sites in the world are already developed. Unlike nuclear or gas, power production can be highly limited in despatchability because of the nature of the site.
“People who think the green transition is powering ahead are not paying attention to what is really happening.”
bingo!
All well and good if man could influence the climate. There is not a shred of scientific evidence that he can.
Her statement reads like any grant application. Meaninglessness mixed with persuasion.
Greenpeace . . . hey, weren’t they a somewhat relevant organization before Patrick Moore (co-founder of the organization, President of Greenpeace Canada for nine years, and member of Greenpeace International) left the organization in 1986, citing his belief that it “took a sharp turn to the political left” and began embracing politically motivated extremism instead of focusing on science.
Yes, I admit I was a financial contributor to Greenpeace up to then . . . I did not see this pivot coming. Kinda like Jennifer Morgan, quoted in the above article, doesn’t see that there is no such thing as “devastating effects of global warming appearing faster than many anticipated”.
Jennifer, please point out just one “devastating effect” to support your claim.
Unfortunately it is now alarmist doctrine that things are getting worse faster.
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2025/09/climate-change-is-accelerating-scientists-find-in-grim-report/
I see that they don’t mention that H2O is by far the most important GG.
This argument might have some validity if there had been a number of climate catastrophes and there were an actual climate crisis; but since neither exists, all it’s doing is generating the usual snort of derision with more that a few horse laughs thrown in.
Must be global warmening-
Eastern Australian humpback whale population now well above pre-whaling levels, report finds
Obviously the lack of offshore wind farms helps.
I’m just surprised Greenpeace still exists after the collapse of the Soviet Union. I guess Putin still sees them as useful idiots.