The Week That Was: 2025-12-27 (December 27, 2025)
Brought to You by SEPP (www.SEPP.org)
The Science and Environmental Policy Project
Quote of the Week: “The highest court is in the end one’s own conscience and conviction—that goes for you and for Einstein and every other physicist—and before any science there is first of all belief.”— Max Planck, Dilemmas of an Upright Man: Max Planck and the Fortunes of German Science
Number of the Week: — 113 Million
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THIS WEEK:
By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)
Scope: This TWTW opens with the SEPP’s president’s report summarizing major developments in areas of concern for SEPP, namely science, environment, and energy. An interview of William Happer is presented followed by commentary on an absurd claim that global warming may lead to an extreme ice age (Snowball Earth). An essay by Tilak Doshi is presented suggesting that the current retrenchment of climate change alarmism may be only temporary. Cliff Mass suggests that the US Drought Monitor website makes absurd claims. A controversy arising from Roy Spencer’s analysis of the data presented by the UK Met Office is presented and TWTW concludes with a feel-good but meaningless poll by academics.
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President’s Report: SEPP did 48 issues of The Week that Was in 2025. They are 25 to 30 pages long with 7 or 8 pages of commentary. Further, the links have additional commentary. Thanks to Anthony Watts, the distribution is over 100,000 worldwide. Watts Up With That has distributed 671 issues of TWTW.
Among the scientific issues or science related issues discussed the following appear to be the most significant.
SEPP Board Member Willie Soon’s CERES – Science Team published a report showing that there are many interpretations on the stability of the sun, but the UN IPCC chose the most extreme one that assumes no major-variability at all. TWTW discusses and gives links to their reports.
SEPP Board Member David Legates has written a number of essays for the Cornwall Alliance. An outstanding one is on the retraction of the paper in the journal Nature from Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research that claimed dire results to the world’s gross domestic product (GDP) if the globe does not reduce CO2 emissions. In addressing the long delay in the retraction of the paper for lack of evidence and the request by the authors to retract the paper. The evidence was so faulty that a change in the GDP of Uzbekistan significantly changed the claimed worldwide impact of global warming. Legates suggests that exercise may have been a game.
We continue to post on the SEPP website papers written by Howard (Cork) Hayden on topics such as Radiative Forcing, the Greenhouse Effect, what climate science does not include, and Energy issues such as capacity factors. For example, climate science as taught in university programs covers weather features very well. But these programs do not include topics that are critical for understanding the Greenhouse Effect, such as radiative transfer and molecular spectroscopy.
In these papers, Hayden brings out that the first Assessment Report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 1990) calculated the spectrum of infrared energy emitted from Earth to space incorrectly. Since then, the IPCC has dropped the subject. In the latest reports (AR-6, 2021-2023) the IPCC assumed that Greenhouse gases blocked 20 W/m2 of increased infrared flux (flow) due to increased temperature from going to space yet showed the total influence of Greenhouse-gas increases, change in albedo, and aerosols is only 7 W/m2! There is no discussion of the discrepancy of 13 W/m2. The discrepancy between the estimated blocking and estimated total influence is almost twice the estimated total influence.
As Steve Koonin points out, there is some good science in the IPCC reports; however, the end results in the Summaries and the Synthesis reports are absurd.
Cork Hayden’s papers as well as the reports by Atomic, Molecular, and Optical (AMO) physicists William van Wijngaarden and William Happer have been very important to understanding the greenhouse effect and to write about it.
2024 was by far the warmest year in the 46-year Satellite Record. 2023 was also warmer than previous years. The warming rate for the entire 46-year satellite record is 0.16°C /decade or 0.29°F /decade. The UN IPCC continues to ignore the satellite record of the atmosphere which is where the greenhouse effect occurs. Further, the satellite record is the only systematic record of global temperature trends we have. The surface-air record is sporadic, inconsistent, with many areas not covered. The record before 1950 is woefully incomplete. Further, there is no standardized procedure for location, type of instrument, and time of measurement of surface-air temperature measurements. As discussed by Essex, et al., in 2007, there are no physical, mathematical, and observational grounds used to establish a meaningful global temperature for Earth.
Given the historical record of the past 10,000 years, the increase in atmospheric temperatures was not unusual. Based on ocean sediment data for the past 66 million years, Earth has moved from Warmhouse, to Hothouse, to Warmhouse to Coolhouse, to Icehouse with ice caps on both poles. We are in a brief (10,000 year plus) warm period in Icehouse Earth and that is not about to change.
Although there are some exceptions, major scientific societies continue to fail to defend the scientific method. They go along with whatever the IPCC reports state. These reports omit or ignore a great deal of physical evidence inconsistent with their theme that CO2 is causing dangerous warming.
As Steve Koonin writes, there is no Climate emergency or crisis.
The US has withdrawn from the Paris agreement which hobbles economic growth of developed countries. The stagnating economies of Germany and the UK clearly show this lack of growth. Yet both the UK and the EU continue to pursue an energy policy of using more unreliable wind and solar with is driving up the costs of electricity to businesses and consumers. Certain US states such a California and New York are also pursuing such an energy policy to the extent they can.
The EPA has reopened the Endangerment Finding that CO2 endangers life on Earth. CO2 is essential for photosynthesis, and photosynthesis provides the food source for all complex life on Earth. The inconsistency between the Endangerment Finding and the biological necessity of CO2 for Life is ignored by many supporters of the Endangerment Finding, including the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.
On the endangerment finding issue, SEPP has submitted comments to the EPA, to the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the National Academies emphasizing that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere will increase temperatures by a tiny amount while Earth is flourishing with the increased atmospheric carbon dioxide.
The administration has reduced the “allowed indirect costs” (i.e. overhead) of government funded research from up to 70% (with an average of over 50%) to 15%.
The administration has cancelled funding for the US Global Change Research Program. As David Legates has explained, the reports were prepared by a private organization, then rubber stamped by agencies including the NSF. Further, the funding to the NSF is being cut and its chairman resigned.
The Supreme Court struck down an earlier (1984) Supreme Court decision known as “Chevron Deference.” which gave agencies the power to freely interpret ambiguous issues that were not specifically addressed by Congress. Using that freedom, agencies slowly gained great powers over the public, taking advantage of poorly worded legislation such as the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The Council on Environmental Quality has rescinded its onerous regulations.
Several SEPP members attended the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness Meeting (DDP). We announced the Federick Seitz Memorial Award to AMO physicist William van Wijngaarden and the April Fools award to Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission which implements the policies of the EU.
The Climate Working Group of the Department of Energy produced a report demonstrating the great uncertainty in global climate modeling and in climate science itself. The report was written by five independent scientists, three of whom have received the Frederick Seitz award: Roy Spencer; John Christy; and Ross McKitrick. The Climate Working Group was immediately attacked by the NSF and many other groups. There was no physical evidence presented which contradicted the findings of the Climate Working Group. The big issue is the great uncertainty in much of this research, including the role of the sun in climate change. The IPCC and its followers assume there is little or no uncertainty and ignore the physical evidence showing uncertainty.
TWTW explored the classifications of uncertainty. Some forms of uncertainty are reducible, other forms are not. The forms of uncertainty that can be reduced include the greenhouse effect. No one has produced physical evidence of positive feedback from CO2, which would increase any warming regardless of cause. Such forms of positive feedbacks would apply to other warming influences as well. If true, Earth should never have another glaciation. Yet, we live during a brief warm period in Icehouse Earth, with severe glaciations and milder Dansgaard–Oeschger (DO) events. Found in Greenland Ice Cores which ended during the last warm period, DO events are periods of sudden warming of 30 to 50 years that may be a 10 to 15°C (18 to 27°F) increase in temperatures followed by periods of gradual cooling lasting a thousand years or more. Similar records of these events are found worldwide, including Antarctica, suggesting a change in ocean circulations.
Forms of uncertainty that cannot be reduced are turbulence and cloudiness. No one has produced a satisfactory theory for either of these physical phenomena. Another form of uncertainty is understanding the onset of a future cooling whether it be a Dansgaard–Oeschger (DO) event or a major glaciation. Both occur in Icehouse Earth.
Last month AMO physicist William Happer released a paper explaining saturation physics, a term from radiation transfer physics. In it he stated that for CO2, saturation starts at about only 0.42 ppmv (parts per million volume). That’s when the “law of diminishing returns” sets in. Very quickly, all infrared radiation emitted by Earth in wavelengths (frequencies or wavenumbers) that CO2 can easily absorb are being absorbed. Adding more CO2 to the atmosphere will increase the total absorption somewhat as higher-energy states are filled. Assuming no feedbacks (positive or negative), for CO2 greater than about 50 ppmv, each doubling of CO2 will result in an increase in temperatures of about 0.75 C (= 1.35 F). Thus, diminishing returns in temperature increases sets in well below the minimum threshold plants need to live.
A similar law of diminishing returns applies to water vapor which is even more highly saturated. Climate modelers assert that CO2 causes an increase in Temperature, and then the Clausius-Clapeyron Relationship is used to infer an increase in water vapor; which will cause an increase in temperature (this is a positive feedback). Since there is no physical evidence that increasing CO2 directly causes an increase in water vapor, to be consistent the assertion of the climate modelers applies to any cause of the increase in temperatures — which the modelers ignore.
Further, apparently the modelers fail to consider that the influence of additional water vapor has a diminishing effect on temperature increases. Thus, the influence of water vapor on global temperatures is minimal (though it is important in regional temperatures in arid regions). Also, no one has developed a satisfactory theory on the formation and dissipation of clouds, which Nobel Laureate John Clauser asserts clouds act as a thermostat on Earth’s temperatures moderating any changes. See https://www.sepp.org/twtwfiles/2025/TWTW%207-12-25.pdf
Next year we plan to continue with 48 issues of TWTW, and plan to continue following the developments in climate science based on the physical evidence. TWTW will criticize assertions based on speculation for lacking physical evidence. Further, we will be more aggressive in challenging policies that are inconsistent with the scientific method.
Next year we plan to continue with 48 issues of TWTW and plan to continue following the developments in climate science based on the physical evidence and emphasize assertions based on speculation for lacking physical evidence. Further, we will be more aggressive in challenging policies that are inconsistent with the scientific method.
Respectively submitted, Kenneth Haapala, President
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Negligible Effect:: In a 22-minute video, Angela Wheeler of the CO2 Coalition interviews William Happer, the founder of the Coalition. In it Happer discusses his background at the Department of Energy and the general understanding of the greenhouse effect. Greenhouse gases are transparent to sunlight and opaque to (partially block) infrared energy which is emitted by Earth to cool it. The net result makes Earth warm enough to support life as we know it.
The Greenhouse Effect is generally understood by most competent physicists. Adding carbon dioxide to today’s atmosphere has a negligible greenhouse effect. The big issue is the large positive feedbacks introduced by global climate modelers. Positive feedbacks is contrary to Le Chatelier’s principle which is a fundamental concept in chemistry. If one disturbs a system at chemical equilibrium (like changing temperature, pressure, or concentration), the system will shift its equilibrium position in a direction that counteracts that change to reach a new equilibrium, essentially trying to “undo” the stress.
Le Chatelier’s principle is a key tool for predicting how reactions respond to external forces. The principle applies to thermodynamics, the branch of physics that deals with the relations between heat and other forms of energy, such as chemical and mechanical energy. Why global climate modelers continue to produce models of a warming Earth that continue to ignore Le Chatelier’s is only known by them. See link under Challenging the Orthodoxy.
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The Control Knob Broke? NASA-GISS and others have falsely claimed that carbon dioxide is the control knob of climate change. They have done so by carefully cherry-picking only the physical evidence that supports their claim and ignoring the bulk of evidence that contradicts it. This deceptive process is often employed in geological studies. Jo Nova has uncovered another such study. She writes:
“To the devotee, CO2 is the magical control knob of global weather. So, a team at UC-Riverside wondered why, 600 million years ago, when CO2 was extremely high, Earth ended up frozen over in a Snowball Earth horror show. I mean, how could that be when CO2 ‘boils the oceans’? Normal people would say this shows CO2 is irrelevant — but the cult scientists went hunting with their broken computer models until they found “a new feedback” excuse that can explain this puzzling anomaly.
In their new vision, CO2 warms the world, but under the right conditions, it sets off a ghastly negative spiral where more warming causes more phytoplankton, which sucks the CO2 out of the sky in a feeding frenzy and then sinks and dies at the bottom of the ocean, taking the CO2 down with them. As the CO2 drains out of the sky, we lose its warming glow, and the world sinks into a frozen oblivion.
Though unlike actual scientific advancements it doesn’t explain any of the other thousand anomalies and is falsified by most of the last 500 million years of history. Pretty much all that time, CO2 and temperature were higher than today, but we didn’t keep flipping into a snowball Earth.
The other awkward problem is that phytoplankton grows much more slowly in cooler temperatures, and it will happen in minutes. It’s not like the Earth could drop 20 degrees and the microalgae and diatoms won’t notice for a thousand years and will just keep chugging along. Volcanoes add a stream of CO2 back to the sky, so the phytoplankton would have to outpace them.
Imagine the quicksand the modelers are playing with. They are trying to cover 100,000-year timescales, geological weathering of silicate rocks, and blend it all in happy-happy to model life forms that breed every 24 hours and have a lifespan of six days. The models don’t work to start with, and now we’re extrapolating every variable in every direction.”
Reporting on the paper in the American Association for the Advancement of Science journal Science, the editor writes:
“The stabilization of Earth’s climate by negative feedbacks between atmospheric carbon dioxide and silicate rocks can potentially be overridden by faster processes causing rapid burial of large amounts of organic carbon. Hülse and Ridgwell report model results showing how high rates of organic carbon burial caused by elevated levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, climate-sensitive phosphorous mineral weathering, and phosphate regeneration from marine sediments can turn warming events into ice ages.”
Nova writes:
“Most of the warming effect of CO2 is supposed to come from amplification by water vapor in the upper troposphere, but we looked for decades and 28 million radiosondes didn’t find it. Until the climate modelers admit this, apologize and fix their models, their models won’t work. But we all know they can’t fix their models, because that might accidentally ‘solve’ the climate crisis which would be a disaster for all the subsidy seekers.”
The 2009 paper Nova cites is by Garth Paltridge, et al., and the abstract concludes with:
“Negative trends in q [a 35-year trend in zonal-average annual-average specific humidity] as found in the NCEP [National Centers for Environmental Prediction] data would imply that long-term water vapor feedback is negative—that it would reduce rather than amplify the response of the climate system to external forcing such as that from increasing atmospheric CO2. In this context, it is important to establish what (if any) aspects of the observed trends survive detailed examination of the impact of past changes of radiosonde instrumentation and protocol within the various international networks.”
Since the paper the prompted Nova’s response claims dangerous climate change from increasing CO2, all the links are under Defending the Orthodoxy.
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Only a Pause? With the retrenchment that occurred at COP-30, some commentators considered the issue of climate change to be over. Tilak Doshi, a former commentator in Forbes, takes exception to this view. In his essay “The Resilience of the Church of Climate” Doshi writes:
“The evidence against climate alarmism is no longer relegated to alternative media. It is visible in electricity bills that have exploded precisely in those countries and states – Germany, Great Britain, California – most exposed to wind and solar absolutism. It became apparent in the great Iberian Peninsula blackout in April, which lasted for hours and led to the deaths of 11 people, a systemwide failure due to insufficient fossil fuels-based synchronous generation and an excessive reliance on inverter-based solar power.
It is evident in Europe’s industrial heartlands, hollowed out by irrational energy policies sold as moral imperatives but delivered as economic self-sabotage. Yet another reminder of Western Europe’s on-going deindustrialization emerged two days ago, as the Financial Times reported that Volkswagen will stop manufacturing vehicles at its site in Dresden, marking the first time in the carmaker’s 88-year history that it will close production at a site in Germany.
Even in the EU, the epicenter of green utopianism, policymakers have come under pressure from powerful business lobbies to weaken proposed ‘sustainability’ rules as part of a drive to reduce burdens on domestic enterprises. AP reported yesterday that European officials moved to ease their ban on sales of cars with internal combustion engines by 2035, responding to pressure from governments and automakers who argued that the industry needed more flexibility to help achieve EU climate goals.”
After stating that many accomplished scientists have spoken out against climate zealots and certain politicians have done so as well, Doshi warns that:
“The lesson of the past decade is sobering. Empirical truth, by itself, is not enough. Ideas matter, but so do moral narratives, institutional incentives and cultural coherence. Climate alarmism has proven resilient precisely because it is not a theory but a worldview — one that flatters its adherents, rewards its enforcers and immunizes itself against doubt. [Boldface added]
If there is to be a genuine reckoning, it will require more than cheaper gas or failed wind farms. It will require reclaiming the moral language of human flourishing, exposing the hubris of central planning, and reasserting the primacy of evidence over piety. Until then, the climate apocalypse will remain postponed — but endlessly proclaimed.”
See link under Questioning the Orthodoxy.
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Drought Deception: By December 15, the Pacific Northwest had heavy rains and snow from atmospheric rivers, long, narrow corridors in the atmosphere that transport large amounts of water vapor. Common to the West Coast of the US, such rivers originate in the Pacific tropics as far away as Indonesia and Hawaii and have been given names such as the Pineapple Express.
Unfortunately, weather reporting organizations such as National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln have lowered their standards with terms such as “Flash Droughts.” Meteorologist Cliff Mass in Washington State exposes this deception with the US Drought Monitor map (valid December 23) falsely showing that most of Washington State is in drought ranging from Abnormally Dry to D3 (Extreme Drought). Mass writes: “As shown below, this is total nonsense and inconsistent with hard data.”
See link under Lowering Standards.
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A Controversy: The UK Met Office (UKMO) has been criticized for reporting temperatures where there are no stations and for poor sitting of stations, both of which may lead to extreme bias in the results. Climate scientist and co-developer of the method calculating temperature trends from satellite data, Roy Spencer examined the method the Met Office uses for reporting average temperatures. In his conclusions to “The Record Hot UK Summer of 2025: Validation of the UKMO Methodology, but the Record Was Only in Tmin” Spencer writes:
“Despite criticisms of the UKMO data and methods for computing UK-average temperatures, I find that a simple bias-removal method of combining all available UK stations produces essentially identical results to the much more complex UKMO methodology. It should provide some vindication for the UKMO methodology in the context of climate temperature trend monitoring.
The record hot summer of 2025 in the UK was in the nightly minimum temperatures, not in the daytime maximum temperatures. This is true in both my analysis and that of the UKMO.
Finally, neither my nor the UKMO method accounts for possible changes in stations over time, such as an increasing urban heat island (UHI) effect at some stations. Based upon our work on this in recent years I suspect this effect since 1960 would be small, but I don’t know that for sure.”
Spencer’s post has produced a round of criticism that may or may not apply. See links under
Measurement Issues – Surface.
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Feel-Good Polls: Members of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication have produced a poll that prompted headlines such as “Majority says climate change hurting affordability: Poll.” In the description of the poll by the Yale group, the questions in the poll were not given. In the report, in the Executive Summary and the chapter “Support for Transitioning from Fossil Fuels to Clean Energy,” there is no mention of costs. Yet the costs are the issue!
A meaningful poll, rather than a political one, would include questions such as “Are you willing to pay $500 or $1000 more per month for 99.99% reliable electricity from wind and solar sources plus storage? Such questions would give clearer answers to questions regarding public support of alternative energy sources. The US collapsing electric vehicle industry (with the elimination of special tax credits) shows that the US public is giving a clear indication of what it thinks of EVs. See link under Communicating Better to the Public – Do a Poll?
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Number of the Week: — 113 Million According to the US Drought Monitor for the US States and Puerto Rico, the current estimated population of those living in drought areas is 112,582,606. Those living in drought areas are about 33% of a total estimated population of 345 million.
NEWS YOU CAN USE:
Challenging the Orthodoxy — NIPCC
Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science
Idso, Carter, and Singer, Lead Authors/Editors, Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), 2013
Summary: https://www.heartland.org/_template-assets/documents/CCR/CCR-II/Summary-for-Policymakers.pdf
Climate Change Reconsidered II: Biological Impacts
Idso, Idso, Carter, and Singer, Lead Authors/Editors, Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), 2014
http://climatechangereconsidered.org/climate-change-reconsidered-ii-biological-impacts/
Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels
By Multiple Authors, Bezdek, Idso, Legates, and Singer eds., Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, April 2019
http://climatechangereconsidered.org/climate-change-reconsidered-ii-fossil-fuels/
Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming
The NIPCC Report on the Scientific Consensus
By Craig D. Idso, Robert M. Carter, and S. Fred Singer, Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), Nov 23, 2015
http://climatechangereconsidered.org/why-scientists-disagree-about-global-warming/
Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate
S. Fred Singer, Editor, NIPCC, 2008
http://www.sepp.org/publications/nipcc_final.pdf
Challenging the Orthodoxy – Radiation Transfer
The Role of Greenhouse Gases in Energy Transfer in the Earth’s Atmosphere
By W.A. van Wijngaarden and W. Happer, Preprint, Mar 3, 2023
Dependence of Earth’s Thermal Radiation on Five Most Abundant Greenhouse Gases
By W.A. van Wijngaarden and W. Happer, Preprint, December 22, 2020
Net Zero Averted Temperature Increase
By Richard Lindzen, William Happer, and William A. van Wijngaarden, CO2 Coalition, June 2024
Radiation Transport in Clouds
By W.A. van Wijngaarden and W. Happer, Klimarealistene, Science of Climate Change, January 2025
Challenging the Orthodoxy
CO₂ Facts vs. Fear with Dr. William Happer | Climate Debrief
22-minute Video, Carbon Debrief, CO2 Coalition
Measuring Climate Change Without a Ruler
By Charles Rotter, WUWT, Dec 23, 2025
Defending the Orthodoxy
Global warming could trigger the next ice age
By Jo Nova, Her Blog, Dec 24, 2025
Link to press release: Global warming could trigger the next ice age
Earth’s climate control system may cool so hard after warming that it freezes the planet over.
By University of California – Riverside, Dec 21, 2025
Link to paper: Instability in the geological regulation of Earth’s climate
By Dominik Hülse and Andy Ridgwell, AAAS Science, Sep 25, 2025
Link to earlier paper cited by Nova: Trends in middle- and upper-level tropospheric humidity from NCEP reanalysis data
By Garth Paltridge, Albert Arking & Michael Pook, theoretical and Applied Climatology, Feb 26, 2009
Defending the Orthodoxy – Bandwagon Science
CLAIM: Feedback loops accelerate warming, other atmospheric changes in Arctic
By Anthony Watts, WUWT, Dec 23, 2025
Link to paper: Overview of the Chemistry in the Arctic: Clouds, Halogens, and Aerosols (CHACHA) Field Campaign
By Jose D. Fuentes, et al., Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Nov 13, 2025
From the abstract: Two instrumented aircraft were deployed: the Purdue University Airborne Laboratory for Atmospheric Research and the University of Wyoming King Air. Flights were conducted out of Utqiaġvik, Alaska, between 21 February and 16 April 2022, sampling air over snow-covered and newly frozen sea ice in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas, over open leads, and over the snow-covered tundra of the North Slope of Alaska, including the oil and gas extraction region near Prudhoe Bay.
[SEPP Comment: Utqiaġvik, Alaska, is in the North Slope Borough of Alaska. Also, Prudhoe Bay is in the North Slope Borough about 200-250 miles (320-400 km) by air from Utqiagvik.]
Scientific Report or Legal Brief? The Hunga Tonga Assessment and the Anatomy of Narrative Closure
By Charles Rotter, WUWT, Dec 20, 2025
Link to report: The Hunga Volcanic Eruption Atmospheric Impacts Report
By Yunqian Zhu, Graham Mann, Paul A. Newman, William Randel (Eds.), APARC (Atmospheric Processes And their Role in Climate) and WCRP (World Climate Research Program), December 2025
“This report has aligned closely with… upcoming international assessments.”
Study: “We need a big stick” to Force Down Carbon Emissions by 2050
By Eric Worrall, WUWT, Dec 23, 2025
Link to paper: Modelling the impacts of policy sequencing on energy decarbonization
By Huilin Luo, Nature Climate Change, Dec 22, 2025
From abstract: Policy carrots [green technology subsidies] alone do not dramatically reduce future emissions. Only with policy sticks are there unambiguous signals to substantially shrink the size of incumbent fossil fuel industries.
[SEPP Comment: Beat that CO2 into submission, or beat humans?]
Questioning the Orthodoxy
The Resilience of the Church of Climate
By Tilak Doshi, Tilak’s Substack, Dec 24, 2025
STEVE MILLOY: Trump Dismantles Climate-Industrial Complex
By Steve Milloy, Daily Caller, Dec 21, 2025
The Eco-Zealots Were Wrong Again
I & I Editorial Board, Dec 19, 2025
Destroying countrysides to save Earth from a climate non-crisis
By Paul Driessen, WUWT, Dec 24, 2025
From Apocalypse to “Oops” – The Emily Litella Climate Moment has Arrived
By Anthony Watts, WUWT, Dec 24, 2025
Link to commentary: We Have Reached the Emily Litella Moment on Climate Change
By Michael Barone, Rasmussen Reports, Dec 19, 2025
From Watts: If there is a genuine tipping point here, it isn’t measured in degrees Celsius. It’s measured in how willing people are to question claims that demand obedience but deliver exaggeration. On that front, Barone’s essay is less a eulogy than a marker — a sign that the long-delayed “never mind” has finally arrived.
Energy & Environmental Review: December 22, 2025
By John Droz, Jr., Master Resource, Dec 22, 2025
After Paris!
E&E News: “The Paris Agreement at 10: What the World has Achieved”
By Robert Bradley Jr., Master Resource, Dec 23, 2025
Link to commentary: The Paris Agreement at 10: What the world has achieved.
By Sara Schonhardt, E&E News by Politico, Dec 12, 2025
The blockbuster climate deal made history a decade ago. But its record at taming climate change is spotty.
The Paris Agreement — the first binding international pact to tackle runaway temperatures — showed that the world was finally serious about addressing the damaging effects from rising seas, intensifying storms and searing heat waves. It puts a major environmental problem on the radar of humanity.
“This agreement recognizes that we are going to have to begin to change the way we power our planet,” said then-secretary of State John Kerry.
[SEPP Comment: President Obama made sure that the Senate would not act on the agreement by either accepting or rejecting it as a binding treaty. The rest is propaganda.]
Problems in the Orthodoxy
Climate Faithful Admit Need for Fossil Fuels
By Vijay Jayaraj, CO2 Coalition, Dec 17, 2025
EU abandons petrol car ban
By Paul Homewood, Not a Lot of People Know That, Dec 20, 2025
Measurement Issues — Surface
The Record Hot UK Summer of 2025: Validation of the UKMO Methodology, but the Record Was Only in Tmin
By Roy Spencer, His Blog, Dec 19, 2025
Dr Roy Spencer’s Backing of UK Met Office Temperature Record Draws Furious Counter Reaction
By Chris Morrison, The Daily Sceptic, Dec 23, 2025 [H/t Bernie Kepshire]
Link to: Spikey! Are PRTs actually fit for purpose?
By Eric Huxterr, Frayed Ends Blog, May 31, 2025
Something that does not seem to have been considered in Spencer’s work is the effect of the change over the last few decades of measuring devices from liquid in glass manual thermometers to automatic electronic systems. This is a largely unaddressed issue in meteorological science, but it is highlighted in recent work compiled by Dr Eric Huxter. Looking at the daily Tmax published by the Met Office throughout last May, he found that on average about 0.89°C was added to the maximum recording by temporary and most likely unnatural blips that would not have been picked up by slower-reacting glass bulb devices. Dr Huxter has told the Daily Sceptic that he is confident that electronic devices are biased to recording higher Tmax temperatures, especially given siting issues.
Met Office Junk Sites Are Still Junk, Roy
By Paul Homewood, Not a Lot of People Know That, Dec 22, 2025
Ray Sanders has responded on Talkshop to Roy Spencer’s surprising defence of the Met Office’s use of junk stations:
Government Minister Steps in to Defend Met Office as Fake Temperature Scandal Escalates
By Chris Morrison, The Daily Sceptic, Dec 19, 2025
Changing Weather
How Unusual Were the Recent Floods? Did Global Warming Play a Significant Role?
By Cliff Mass, Weather Blog, Dec 21, 2025
LIVE: Southern California hit with strongest Christmas storm in years
By Tony Kurzweil, The Hill, Dec 24, 2025
“We haven’t had an atmospheric weather event like this in some time, probably more than four or five years,” said Mark Pestrella, director of L.A. County Public Works. Residents are urged to visit Ready.LACounty.Gov for emergency alerts and preparedness tips.
Changing Cryosphere – Land / Sea Ice
Two More New Studies Show The Southern Ocean And Antarctica Were Warmer In The 1970s
By Kenneth Richard, No Tricks Zone, Dec 23, 2025
Link to one study: Antarctic sea ice and climate change
By Timo Vihma and Petteri Uotila, Chapter 6 in Indicators of Climate Change, 2025
From the Discussion: While the Arctic sea ice has shown a consistent and significant decline, the Antarctic sea ice has displayed more complex and regionally variable patterns, including a slight increase in extent from 1979 to 2014, followed by a sharp decrease thereafter. However, knowledge on the past changes prior to the satellite era is very limited and, given the high variability in Antarctic sea ice and the influence of both natural and anthropogenic factors, predicting future trends is challenging. The recent decline in sea ice since 2015 has raised questions about whether Antarctic sea ice may now be on a long-term decreasing trend similar to the Arctic, or has reached a new state, though more data and further studies are required to confirm this.
Link to second paper: Deep learning-based reconstruction of monthly Antarctic surface air temperatures from 1979 to 2023
By Ziqi Ma, et al., Nature, Scientific Data 2025
From the abstract: In this paper, we develop a new, regularly updated, spatio-temporally complete Antarctic monthly SAT dataset from 1979 onwards, with a spatial resolution of 1° x 1° in latitude and longitude, from multiple sources of in situ observations using deep learning method. Deep learning model was trained with daily SATs [Surface Air Temperatures] from three global reanalysis datasets. The reconstructed Antarctic SATs were successfully validated using data from staffed and automated meteorological stations, demonstrating a closer match with observations, particularly in capturing the patterns of temperature trends. This dataset represents a new advance in the development of Antarctic observational climate dataset and is an important resource that underpins research across diverse scientific disciplines, facilitating a deeper understanding of the Antarctic climate system and its global implications.
[SEPP Comment: Doubt daily or even monthly surface-air data exists on 1° x 1° scale of the Antarctic. There are about 100 Automatic Weather Stations.]
Agriculture Issues & Fear of Famine
Climate Apocalypse Fantasy: From Next Year, Crop Yields will Begin to Fall
By Eric Worrall, WUWT, Dec 20, 2025
Link to paper: Impacts of climate change on global agriculture accounting for adaptation
By Andrew Hultgren, et al., Nature, June 18, 2025
Here we empirically estimate the impact of global producer adaptations using longitudinal data on six staple crops spanning 12,658 regions, capturing two-thirds of global crop calories. We estimate that global production declines 5.5 × 1014 kcal annually per 1 °C global mean surface temperature (GMST) rise (120 kcal per person per day or 4.4% of recommended consumption per 1 °C; P < 0.001). We project that adaptation and income growth alleviate 23% of global losses in 2050 and 34% at the end of the century (6% and 12%, respectively; moderate-emissions scenario), but substantial residual losses remain for all staples except rice. [Boldface added.]
[SEPP Comment: The estimates are pure speculation. But crop yields will fall with a severe global cooling.]
Lowering Standards
Drought Deception
By Cliff Mass, Weather Blog, Dec 25, 2025
The center of what might be called the Drought Exaggeration Industry is the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, which is associated with the United States Department of Agriculture and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Communicating Better to the Public – Use Yellow (Green) Journalism?
Claim: British Media are “Divorcing” Net Zero from Climate Change
By Eric Worrall, WUWT, Dec 24, 2025
No, NPR, CBS, and NBC, Climate Change Isn’t a Proven Cause of Arctic Warming
By Anthony Watts, Climate Realism, Dec 22, 2025
Periods such as the early twentieth century saw pronounced Arctic temperature increases comparable, in relative terms, to more recent decades. Without consistent, high-quality measurements extending well beyond the modern satellite era, claims of unprecedented warming rest on shaky ground.
Climate misinformation is becoming a national security threat. Canada isn’t ready for it.
By Sadaf Mehrabi, The Conversation, Dec 21, 2025 [H/t Bernie Kepshire]
The Conversation: We cut through the noise and give you the facts, from people who’ve studied what they’re writing about.
Canada is entering an era where climate misinformation is becoming a public-safety threat. As wildfires, floods and droughts grow more frequent, emergency systems rely on one fragile assumption: that people believe the information they receive. When that assumption fails, the entire chain of crisis communication begins to break down. We are already seeing early signs of that failure. [Boldface added]
[SEPP Comment: No facts showing wildfires, floods, and droughts are growing more frequent, just noise.]
Quit Lying, The New Republic, Climate Change Isn’t Threatening ‘Favorite Holiday Foods’
By H. Sterling Burnett, Climate Realism, Dec 19, 2025
Communicating Better to the Public – Exaggerate, or be Vague?
Met Office Charlatans Claim Hottest Year by 0.02C!!!!!!
By Paul Homewood, Not a Lot of People Know That, Dec 24, 2025
Very sorry, but anybody who claims they know the UK annual temperature to two hundredths of a degree is a charlatan. Indeed, with 80% of their data coming from junk stations, which are so badly sited that they could be overestimating temperatures by as much as 5C, they cannot seriously claim accuracy to within one degree.
Communicating Better to the Public – Do a Poll?
Majority says climate change hurting affordability: Poll
By Ryan Mancini, The Hill, Dec 26, 2025
Link to poll: Climate Change in the American Mind: Politics & Policy, Fall 2025
By Anthony Leiserowitz, et al., Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, Dec 17, 2025
Communicating Better to the Public – Use Propaganda
Fossil-fuel propaganda is stalling climate action. Here’s what we can do about it.
By Samuel Lloyd and Katya Rhodes, The Conversation, Dec 22, 2025 [H/t Bernie Kepshire]
For years, the movement’s main strategy was to deny that climate change was happening or to claim that humans weren’t causing it. However, as summers got hotter and wildfires, floods and hurricanes became increasingly common, this narrative became less convincing.
[SEPP Comment: Start the argument with false premises to launch new false claims?]
Communicating Better to the Public – Protest
All 30 Extinction Rebellion Members Stage Mass Climate Protest in London
By Eric Worrall, WUWT, Dec 21, 2025
Funding Issues
Climate Change Weekly # 566— Big Banks No Longer Bound by Federal Climate Accounting Rules
By Staff, The Heartland Institute, Dec 19, 2025
Litigation Issues
California Slow roll
By Staff, Government Accountability & Oversight, Dec 23, 2025
Government Accountability & Oversight has filed a California Public Records Act suit against the Department of Justice to obtain public information that the DoJ has redacted in full or part, all pertaining to the state’s participation in the climate industry’s litigation campaign, its Plan B of “climate superfund” in the face of the former bogging down—requiring legislation unlikely to get off the ground outside of a few bastions of progressive-activist governance—and of course its related pivot to Plan C plastics litigation.
These parts of the same whole have proved to have overlapping principals and underwriters.
Energy Issues – Non-US
Meteorologist Dr. Ryan Maue Warns “Germany Won’t Make It” If Winter Turns Severe
By P Gosselin, No Tricks Zone, Dec 25, 2025
Link to paper: On the Link Between Weather Regimes and Energy Shortfall During Winter for 28 European Countries
By Emmanuel Rouges, Marlene Kretschmer, Theodore G. Shepherd, Royal Meterological Society, Aug 6, 2025
From the abstract: Of the six weather regimes considered here, only a subset is found to favor the occurrence of high shortfall days. This subset affects much of Europe, causing simultaneous shortfall days across multiple countries. Furthermore, if multiple countries experience shortfall days, neighboring countries are more likely to experience shortfall days. Motivated by this result, we examine the hypothetical impact the coldest European winter of the 20th century, 1962/1963, would have had on the present-day energy system. We found that persistent blocking conditions associated with that winter, if they occurred today, would lead to higher demand and shortfall across Europe during most of the winter and would be extreme in this respect compared to other winters.
Why Solar Power Does Not Work in Britain
By Paul Homewood, Not a Lot of People Know That, Dec 24, 2025
GB solar capacity is 21 GW, so on Thursday our solar fleet produced just 0.3% of capacity.
In winter, we use about 900 GWh a day. Miliband wants to triple solar capacity, but three times nothing is still nothing!
[SEPP Comment: Britian is about 55° North latitude, about the latitude of Labrador City, Canada, a small town.]
Starmer to push Britain into stricter net zero targets under EU deal
By Paul Homewood, Not a Lot of People Know That, Dec 24, 2025
Labour are now trying to cause as much damage to this country as possible, before they are kicked out:
Labour To Limit Parking Spaces On New Homes
By Paul Homewood, Not a Lot of People Know That, Dec 21, 2025
To them, the ability to travel where and when you want is not compatible with the sort of state control of our lives that they yearn for.
“This ISN’T COMMUNIST China!” | Labour Plan To Limit Car Parking Spaces On New Housing Developments
By Paul Homewood, Not a Lot of People Know That, Dec 21, 2025
17-minute video
Energy Issues — US
America’s Energy Economy: Why Natural Gas and Nuclear Still Matter
By Timothy G. Nash , Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn , Bob Thomas , Thomas Rastin, Real Clear Energy, Dec 22, 2025
Counting Our Energy Blessings During This Season of Hope
By Gary Abernathy, Real Clear Energy, Dec 19, 2025
Fuel rationing chaos looms in New York State
By David Wojick, CFACT, Dec 22, 2025
First a little background. When the Climate Act was passed back in 2019, the utopian assumption was that a massive switch to EVs would quickly occur. So, they set a very aggressive 2030 emission reduction target of 40%. Getting rid of internal combustion exhaust was thought to be beneficial, so the law actually specifies that poor communities should be targeted for the biggest cuts.
New England Needs More Gas, Not Less!
By Paul Homewood, Not a Lot of People Know That, Dec 21, 2025
Gas provides over half New England’s electricity, ramping up and down as required, even during summer heatwaves. It is also, of course, vital for domestic heating.
You’ll need a magnifying glass to see the contribution from AEP’s favorite wind and solar power.
Tech Behemoth Gobbles Up Power Company In $5 Billion Deal To Juice Data Centers
By Audrey Streb, Daily Caller, Dec 22, 2025
[SEPP Comment: Why are they not buying up industrial wind and solar which developers promoted that Big Tech was supporting the developments?]
Washington’s Control of Energy
The Trump Administration Protects U.S. National Security by Pausing Offshore Wind Leases
Press Release, US Department of the Interior, Dec 22, 2025
From DOI: As for the national security risks inherent to large-scale offshore wind projects, unclassified reports from the U.S. Government have long found that the movement of massive turbine blades and the highly reflective towers create radar interference called “clutter.” The clutter caused by offshore wind projects obscures legitimate moving targets and generates false targets in the vicinity of the wind projects.
The Department of Energy in a 2024 report stated that a radar’s threshold for false alarm detection can be increased to reduce some clutter, but an increased detection threshold could cause the radar to “miss actual targets.”
Trump Administration Announces Change to Offshore Wind Construction
By Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell, The Daily Signal, Dec 22, 2025
Return of King Coal?
Why America Might Find Coal in Its Stocking This Christmas — And Be Jolly
By Audrey Streb, Daily Caller, Dec 25, 2025
Trump Energy Department scuttles planned closures of 2 Indiana coal plants
By Ian Swanson, The Hill, Dec 25, 2025
The Times also reported that Northern Indiana Public Service Company had intended to close the two final coal-burning units at the Schahfer Generating Station in Wheatfield saved by Wright’s order, so that it could pursue more natural gas, wind and solar power, in addition to battery storage.
[SEPP Comment: What is the total cost of reliable electricity from wind and solar plus enough batteries to guarantee 99.99% reliability?]
Nuclear Energy and Fears
President Trump Invests in a Nuclear Fusion Startup
Trump Media announces merger with fusion firm TAE Technologies
By Eric Worrall, WUWT, Dec 25, 2025
From Worrall: Show me a self-sustaining 80 million degree plasma Deuterium Tritium proof of concept reactor, and I’ll take your 5 BILLION degree commercial Boron Hydrogen plasma ambitions seriously.
Note I use Proton and Hydrogen interchangeably in this article. A proton is an electrically charged hydrogen atom.
[SEPP Comment: An oversimplification by Worrall. A proton is a stable, positively charged subatomic particle found in the nucleus of every atom. The number of protons is an element’s unique identifier. The Hydrogen atom has one proton; uranium has 92 protons.]
Alternative, Green (“Clean”) Solar and Wind
Wind turbine eagle-kill secrecy may soon end
By David Wojick, CFACT, Dec 18, 2025
ACC [Wyoming’s Albany County Conservancy] has a compelling reason for wanting this kill data. There was an elaborate Wyoming tagging study that found wind turbines killing more Golden Eagles than all other human causes combined.
Forecasting The Vagaries of Wind Power
By Paul Homewood, Not a Lot of People Know That, Dec 24, 2025
Joe has been keeping tabs on NESO’s predictions of wind power output. Looks like they leave a lot to be desired!
It hardly gives you confidence with the ever-increasing reliance on wind power, even if the same day, latest forecast is robust.
Offshore Wind Is Not a National Security Threat. Misusing the Term Is.
By Jason Ryan, Real Clear Energy, Dec 24, 2025
Offshore wind represents one of the largest sources of untapped domestic energy in the United States. It delivers power where demand is highest, along the coasts, while revitalizing ports, expanding U.S. shipbuilding, strengthening supply chains, and creating skilled industrial jobs. These are not abstract climate aspirations. They are core components of national resilience, economic strength, and deterrence. [Boldface added]
[SEPP Comment: Offshore wind may deliver where power is needed but it does not necessarily deliver when it is needed. Offshore wind power is a high-cost, unreliable source of electricity. If reliance on offshore wind grows, blackouts become more likely. Blackouts can affect national security. See links under Washington’s Control of Energy.]
Alternative, Green (“Clean”) Energy — Other
Biomass Energy Exorbitant, Destructive and Pointless
By Ron Clutz, His Blog, Dec 23, 2025
Shaye Wolf writes at CalMatters Biomass is a money pit that won’t solve California’s energy or wildfire problems. Shaye Wolf is the climate science director at the Center for Biological Diversity. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Link to paper underlying the original essay: Does wood bioenergy help or harm the climate?
By John Sterman, et al., Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May 9, 2022
[SEPP Comment: In the original essay, Ms. Wolf claims that wood gasification produces CO2 that is causing a climate crisis.]
Taxpayer-backed net zero project axed after five months
By Paul Homewood, Not a Lot of People Know That, Dec 22, 2025
From The Telegraph:
“A £14m taxpayer-funded scheme to deploy a fleet of hydrogen-fueled delivery trucks across the South East has collapsed just five months after it was launched.”
Alternative, Green (“Clean”) Vehicles
Let Americans Choose Their Cars – Not the Government
By James K. Glassman, RealClearEnergy, Dec 23, 2025
New York Unheated EV School Bus Horror
By Eric Worrall, WUWT, Dec 21, 2025
A Hybrid Future For Europe?
By Paul Homewood, Not a Lot of People Know That, Dec 22, 2025
The 2021 baseline for passenger cars was approximately 110 g CO2/km, so the 2035 target will be around 11kg. But currently, manufacturers have already managed to cut to 93.6 g.
The Volkswagen Golf hybrid is said to emit 25 g/km, compared to 115 g/km for the diesel. Large scale rollout of plug in hybrids will therefore take manufacturers much closer to their 2035 targets.
The likely result is that many will simply carry on using hybrids as if they were bog-standard petrol cars. They will run wholly on petrol, which will emit just as much CO2 as the petrol version does!
Forget About mHEVs
By Paul Homewood, Not a Lot of People Know That, Dec 24, 2025
[SEPP Comment: MHEV is a Mild Hybrid Electric Vehicle with a traditional gas or diesel engine supported by a small electric motor and battery.]
California Dreaming
Gavin Newsom Sticks It To California Ratepayers
Last week, his appointees ordered the Ivanpah solar boondoggle to keep operating, which will cost California residents an extra $100 million per year.
By Robert Bryce, His Blog, Dec 12, 2025
Now that he’s set his sights on the White House, Newsom suddenly cares about affordability. In June, he claimed that he is pushing for “affordable pathways for every Californian.” Earlier this week, during an appearance on The Ezra Klein Show, Newsom said, “the affordability issue in California is real.”
No kidding. California has the highest poverty rate in the US.
[SEPP Comment: State poverty rates vary by what organization is reporting. Definitions are different. The US Census reports that for 2023 12.5% (40.7 million) of the people in the US including Puerto Rico lived below the poverty rate. Puerto Rico had a poverty rate of 39.6% (1.3 million) slightly skewing the statistics. The state with the highest rate was Louisiana, 18.9%; followed by Mississippi, 18.0%; other states include New York, 14.2%; WDC, 14.0%; and California has 12.0%. California had the highest population in poverty with 4.6 million. Bryce apparently mixed number of people in poverty with poverty rate.]
Environmental Industry
Why Are Environmental Groups Attacking the Industry That Makes America’s Clean Energy Future Possible?
By Marjorie Haun, American Thinker, Dec 24, 2025
A plethora of Biden-era national monument designations—pushed by the aforementioned environmental groups and many others—did little or nothing to protect “antiquities,” but they have served to crush local economies and crucial industries. Biden’s new and revamped national monuments in Western states, such as the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni in Arizona, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah, and Avi Kwa Ame in Nevada, all impose sweeping withdrawals that prohibit new mining claims, mineral leasing for coal, potash and lithium, oil and gas, and geothermal development on millions of acres of federal lands.
[SEPP Comment: Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument was begun by Clinton with 1.7 million acres, then reduced in half, and then expanded by Biden to 1,880,461 acres (7,610 km2).]
BELOW THE BOTTOM LINE
Oceans are supercharging hurricanes past Category 5
Warming oceans are fueling a surge of extreme, off-the-charts storms—so powerful that scientists say it’s time to invent a whole new hurricane category.
Press Release, American Geophysical Union, Dec 25, 2025 [Bernie Kepshire]
Claim: Some Men Downplay Climate Concerns Because of Gender Insecurity
By Eric Worrall, WUWT, Dec 26, 2025
Link to paper: Man enough to save the planet? Masculinity concerns predict attitudes toward climate change
By Michael P. Haselhuhn, Journal of Environmental Psychology, November 2025
[SEPP Comment: One of the Highlights: Concerns about maintaining manhood predict less worry about climate change in men.]
How a PNAS Study Confuses Institutional Authority with Truth
By Charles Rotter, WUWT, Dec 25, 2025
Link to paper: Divergent patterns of engagement with partisan and low-quality news across seven social media platforms
By Mohsen Mosleh, et al., PNAS, Oct 30, 2025
From Significance: When analyzing over 10 million posts across 7 social media platforms, we find stark differences across platforms in the political lean and quality of news shared, as well as qualitatively different patterns of engagement. While lower-quality news domains are shared more on right-leaning platforms, and news from a platform’s dominant political orientation receives more engagement, we nonetheless find that a given user’s lower-quality news posts consistently attract more user engagement than their higher-quality content—even on left-leaning platforms.
From Rotter: A genuinely skeptical study would have examined claim-level accuracy. It would have tracked which “low-quality” claims later proved correct. It would have tested ideological variance among raters rather than asserting neutrality by credential. It might even have entertained the heretical notion that elite consensus is sometimes wrong.
This paper does none of that. Instead, it constructs a closed epistemic loop, defines disagreement as low quality, and then expresses concern that disagreement is popular.
The real finding is not about misinformation. It is about the collapse of deference—and the quiet panic of institutions that mistook authority for truth.
New Climate Guilt Trip: Don’t Enjoy Food During the Holidays
By Anthony Watts, WUWT, Dec 23, 2025
Link to paper: Dietary GHG emissions from 2.7 billion people already exceed the personal carbon footprint needed to achieve the 2 °C climate goal
By Juan Diego Martinez* and Navin Ramankutty, Environmental Research: Food Systems, Nov 11, 2025
ARTICLES
1. Democrats Vote Against Abundance
They oppose permitting reform, 195-11, in the House, bowing again to the green left.
By The Editorial Board, WSJ, Dec 21, 2025
TWTW Summary: The editorial concludes with:
[The Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development (Speed) Act] “attempts to simplify the morass of federal permitting by limiting environmental reviews to the impact from a proposed project but not from speculative downstream effects. The Act also imposes sensible limits on the lawsuits that are routinely deployed to delay projects for years. Under the bill, lawsuits must be filed within 150 days and can only be filed “by a party that has suffered or imminently will suffer direct harm from the final agency action.”
The Democrats who voted no bowed to the green lobby that refuses to accept any changes to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the 1970 law that has become the main impediment to building roads, bridges, tunnels, pipelines, transmission lines, you name it. Some 26 environmental interest groups opposed the bill, while nearly all business groups supported it.
Opponents claim the Speed Act guts NEPA, but that’s false. It restores NEPA’s original intent, which was to make sure environmental impact was considered before approval, not that it would become a weapon for stopping American progress on energy and crucial infrastructure.
The bill now moves to the Senate, where it will be an abundance test for the likes of Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff, who is up for re-election this year. The bill will need 60 votes to pass, and progressives will try to water down the NEPA changes or kill it.
Democrats have blocked permitting reform for years, but 2026 is the year Republicans should make it a political priority. That includes President Trump, who has been missing in action so far in this debate. Democrats talk a good game about growth and abundance, but when voting arrives they always bow to their anti-growth left. If they kill reform again, voters will know they’re the same old Biden-Pelosi-Elizabeth Warren Democrats.”
**********
2. The EU Fights Carbon and Loses
The bloc considers establishing a subsidy to offset a tariff meant to offset a tax.
By Carlo Stagnaro, WSJ, Dec 21, 2025
TWTW Summary: The research and studies director at the Bruno Leoni Institute, an Italian think tank begins with:
“The European Union may establish a subsidy to offset a tariff meant to offset a tax. The European Commission, the bloc’s executive branch, recently announced a €600 million temporary fund to help domestic businesses cope with a new carbon border tax that will take effect in January. The fund is part of the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, a tariff system conceived to protect European producers from foreign competitors that aren’t required to pay for the carbon emissions they generate.
CBAM will create as many problems as it addresses. During the transitional phase, 2023-25, importers of some carbon-intensive goods (cement, iron and steel, aluminum, fertilizers, electricity and hydrogen) were required to report the embedded emissions of their imports. Next year, they will pay a fee linked to the price of carbon allowances in the EU Emissions Trading System. The distribution of free allowances—set up to protect energy-intensive, trade-exposed industries from foreign competition—will be phased out.
According to the European Commission, the law is ‘a tool to put a fair price on carbon emitted during the production of carbon-intensive goods that are entering the EU, and to encourage cleaner industrial production in non-EU countries.’ Who could object to leveling the playing field, improving environmental quality, and protecting the competitiveness of European producers? But the implementation is riddled with complexity.
Take its reporting requirements. The direct and indirect emissions of imported goods are difficult to estimate even in countries with strong, transparent reporting frameworks—never mind in places like China, where verification is nearly impossible. Yet importers are responsible for the accuracy of their submissions.
Such systems are also easy to game. When California introduced its cap-and-trade system and a carbon border fee on imported electricity, generators in neighboring states rerouted low-carbon electricity to California while sending carbon-intensive electricity elsewhere. Such ‘reshuffling’ involved substantial paperwork and had no environmental benefit. Now imagine the scale of such opportunism when the trade involves the EU and China or India.
Even if gaming could be eliminated, the law would be seriously flawed. Applying only to certain carbon-intensive sectors, it raises prices to reflect the cost of embedded carbon and so creates a perverse incentive to outsource production of downstream goods. If the cost of EU-made cars or wind turbines rises because the law increases the price of steel, it may become cheaper to import finished cars or turbines. That wouldn’t prevent ‘carbon leakage’—the relocation of industrial activity to avoid regulation—but exacerbate it. The commission admitted the problem and extended the mechanism to such finished products as washing machines, industrial radiators and garden tools. But importers will need to assess the direct and indirect carbon content of every component.
There’s more. Even if the law successfully levels the playing field within Europe, many European firms rely heavily on exports. In the first three quarters of 2025, the EU recorded a trade surplus in goods of €104.3 billion, with extra-EU exports of €1,986.7 billion. These exporters will face higher domestic input costs for products under the law, and the announced fund, which is likely incompatible with trade rules under the World Trade Organization, is too small to do much good. The €600 million fund is supposed to offset a cost estimated to be around €1.4 billion. As a result, European producers may lose market share abroad to competitors in more carbon-intensive jurisdictions. Global emissions will rise, harming both Europe’s economy and the planet.
Economist James Bushnell noted when the debate over the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism began: ‘There is at least one instrument that avoids all of these problems. Strangely enough, that instrument is output-based allocation’—i.e., free allowances to carbon-intensive, trade-exposed industries—’the very tool being phased out by the EU in favor of CBAM.’”
The author discusses friction occurring among EU countries due to these issues then concludes with:
“Carbon pricing is the most efficient tool to abate emissions; its pain may be alleviated by pragmatic fixes, such as recycling revenues to reduce other taxes or distributing free allowances to industries exposed to foreign competition. Economic historian Carlo Maria Cipolla defined stupidity as causing losses to others while gaining nothing. It’s time for Europe’s climate policies to become smarter.”
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All in all it’s been a pretty bog standard year with nothing remotely close to being out of the bounds of natural variation – and the UK climate is highly variable. In the early months of the year warnings were received…
Landowners warn Labour’s rewilding plans could trigger wildfires ‘too large to fight’ – The Independent
And then
2025 is already worst year on record for wildfires – with more to come – Wales Online
They obviously learned from the California experience. If you really want to make the climate crisis appear apocalyptically bad, do a bit of rewilding. It works and it then allows for some great hacktivism…
Heat, drought and fire: how extreme weather pushed nature to its limits in 2025
National Trust says these are ‘alarm signals we cannot ignore’ as climate breakdown puts pressure on wildlife
the UK experienced a sun-soaked spring and summer, resulting in fierce heath and moorland fires, followed by autumn floods. – The Guardian
Floods? Where? They don’t say because there haven’t been any. But the best laugh is the institution charged with maintaining the nation’s heritage and buildings etc: “A country house scheme was set up and the National Trust Acts of 1937 and 1939 facilitated the transfer of estates from private owners to the Trust. “
Since its capture the National Trust now says…
Find out about our work to tackle climate change, protect historic sites and help people and nature thrive.
…
Nature and climate
Reducing carbon emissions, planting trees and protecting wildlife habitats – The National Trust
They put climate change as their top priority. Bizarre for a national monuments outfit. But not in this paradigm.
Apart from it being the warmest year on record in the UK.
So, in every single part of the UK, there have never been higher temperatures anywhere since thermometers were invented.
I’m shocked, shocked I tell you that the BBC’s fact checkers haven’t challenged doubters of this fact.
Not sure where you got that from. That’s not the claim being made.
2025 is likely to have seen the warmest average temperature of any year in the UK since the UKMO’s UK record begins, in 1884.
According to Strat, this is “pretty bog standard“.
Makes you wonder what would stand out for him?
Had it been the coolest year on record, instead of the warmest, do you think it would have stood out more?
LOWEST TEMPERATURE RECORDED IN CANADA IN DECEMBER SINCE 1975 [-56.7°C]
https://x.com/RyanMaue/status/2003618411473973566
Winterless Christmas….
This must be satire, right ?
Matthias Schmidt
@eurofounder
My son asked for a PS5 for Christmas
I said no
“Son, PlayStation is made by an evil corporation built on worker exploitation”
I got him another electronic gift instead – an EU-approved USB-C cable
He opened it with visible disgust
Then something utterly shocking happened
My wife’s boyfriend Arnold got him the PlayStation my son wanted
“Thank you uncle Arnold” my son hugged him for almost a minute
I pulled my wife aside and explained that her lover is undermining our values
She mumbled “at least he got him a real gift”
The morning after, while my son was still asleep, I took his console and went to the store
Thanks to the wonderful EU consumer protection law, I was able to get a full cash refund of €549
Then I bought a gift for my son that he truly deserves
€549 worth of carbon offset credits
When I came home my son was crying looking for his PS5
I smiled and showed him the carbon certificate
He started shaking and cried even more
Being a good parent means teaching your child European values
And I know my son will thank me for it in the future
https://x.com/eurofounder/status/2004837957933375812
He talks up “European values”, while casually revealing this –
My wife’s boyfriend
What tha??
He’s cool with this?
If that’s representative of today’s ‘European values’, I suggest the Euros are well on their way to emulating the Fall Of The Roman Empire.
The divorce rate per capita is higher in the US than in the EU, so…?