Here in the U.S., the second Trump administration has largely pulled the plug on the suite of crazy energy policies marching under the banner of “fighting climate change.” But the same is not true in many other advanced-economy countries, for example Germany, Australia and the UK.
Consider the UK. In the 2024 election the voters gave a large parliamentary majority to the left-wing Labour Party. The resulting government has doubled down on the policies of Net Zero, fossil fuel suppression, and generating energy from “renewables.” Convinced of their own correctness, and indeed righteousness, the government seeks to silence all dissent from its policies, characterizing disagreement as “misinformation” or “climate denial.”
Meanwhile, however, when it comes to actual energy production, reality keeps asserting itself.
In a January 9 column at Net Zero Watch, Andrew Montford covers the UK government’s latest tactics in enforcing groupthink and silencing climate dissenters. (Full disclosure: I am on the Board of NZW’s American affiliate.). The title of the column is “The antics of the climate clique.” It seems that Parliament has formed a group called the “Energy Security and Net Zero Select Committee,” and that Committee is conducting a series of hearings with the title “Supporting the energy transition.” Andrew’s summary:
It’s very much what you might expect – panel after panel of prominent members of the green blob, with not a dissenting voice heard, either among the witnesses or the panel members. This is no surprise – most select committees are simply choreographed stage shows, carefully designed to maintain narratives and suppress inconvenient truths.
Montford lists witnesses at two recent hearings, all of them members of what he calls the “tightly closed clique” of climate scaremongers:
- Angharad Hopkinson, a political campaigner from Greenpeace
- Lorraine Whitmarsh, from the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations
- Stephanie Draper, a climate campaigner
- Roger Harrabin, ex-BBC Energy and Environment Analyst
- Bob Ward, PR bod at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change
- Rebecca Willis, ex-Green Alliance, and now an academic at Lancaster University.
Montford’s conclusion:
Everywhere you look – from universities to the academies to the mainstream media there has been a complete shutting out of dissenting voices and an absolute refusal to engage with counterarguments. That is why we are in the disastrous economic state we are.
But then there is reality. You may recall that, back in the early 2000s, the large British oil major then called “British Petroleum” changed its name to BP and began a big rebranding using the tag line “Beyond Petroleum.” Nearly two decades later, in 2020, finding itself still in the oil business, BP decided to double down on its dive into energy transition. This was the time of peak woke. From Forbes, August 4, 2020:
In details released this morning, London-based BP established a battery of targets for 2030. It plans to reduce its oil and gas production by 40% by 2030, from roughly 2.6 million barrels per day currently; increase its investments in renewable energy with the aim of having 50 gigawatts of generation capacity by 2030, up from 2.5 gigawatts last year; and increase the number of electric vehicle charging points it owns from 7,500 to 70,000. And it pledged to undertake no more oil exploration activities in countries where it does not already have some upstream operations.
At the time, some expressed skepticism about BP’s plans, but analysts noted that the goals were sufficiently detailed and specific as to indicate that they “meant business”:
A note by analysts at Sankey Research said that, while skeptics are generally right to harbor “suspicions of a ‘Greenwash’…the scale and scope of these targets is impressive.” The long list of specifics in BP’s new plan offer evidence that BP means business. It knows that targets unveiled today will be used by investors and environmentalists to hold the company to account a decade from now.
Five and a half years later, but still well short of 2030, it looks like BP’s big shift to renewables didn’t work out. The Wall Street Journal had a piece on January 14, quietly buried on page B3, reporting on BP’s debacle. The headline is “BP Flags $5 Billion Write-Down of Low-Carbon Business.” Excerpt:
BP said it would write down the value of its gas and low-carbon energy division by up to $5 billion, the legacy of an ill-timed move into renewables that left it the least profitable of the major oil companies. The London-based company is now in the early stages of a turnaround aimed at bringing the business back to its roots: drilling for oil and gas. BP has reined in investments in operations geared toward the energy transition, walked away from some renewable projects and abandoned plans to sharply reduce its oil and gas production.
As part of the re-focusing, BP is bringing in a new CEO, and getting rid of the people who steered it in the disastrous direction of “fighting climate change”:
Last month [BP] appointed Meg O’Neill, an outsider considered a fossil-fuel champion, as its next boss. . . . BP has brought in a new team of executives, replacing those associated with the expensive push into renewables.
Montford of NZW takes note of the bigger picture, in which the people in the UK Parliament, despite continuing ability to silence their opposition, are rapidly losing the game:
In the aftermath of Ukraine and Venezuela, and the USA’s withdrawal from both the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the IPCC, it is clear that the world is moving on very quickly. Seen in this light, the select committee inquiry can be seen as the last hurrah of a dying movement.
The only reasonable conclusion is that NetZero advocates are utterly and totally bug-f**k. A delusional preaching religion. Neo-Lysenkoism.
Producing more oil in an oil glut. That will help. Meanwhile most now capacity build is renewable and electric car share is growimg, while ICE cars peaked in 2018.
Climate change or not, renewables and electrification are winning.
Trump Is Obsessed With Oil. But Chinese Batteries Will Soon Run the World.
Be a better bot.
Seems to be doing ok as an actor in the Marvel Comics “Multi-verse of Alternate Nonsensical Realities.” I’m wondering if the guy is paid piecemeal by the number of downvotes he gets. Thing to never lose sight of in these situations is when that side accuses our side of being paid to spew disinformation, it’s the people on that side who are actually swimming in cash, doing what they accuse our side of doing.
Is there a prize for “winning”? Or are you merely gullible and ignorant, just parroting the nonsense spouted by dingalings who believe that adding CO2 to air makes thermometers hotter!
When you say “renewables”, do you really mean intermittent and unreliable electricity produced by solar, wind, and hydroelectric power plants? Coal, oil, and gas are renewable in the long term, and organic to boot!
If you can provide electricity to me less expensively, with all other conditions remaining equal, sign me up. I’ll accept that as a “win”.
I wouldn’t lump hydroelectric in with worse-than-useless wind and solar, but otherwise agree.
The green blob is trying hard to end most hydro power. It’s not green enough for them. Some fish or bugs aren’t happy with the dams and we must respect them. 🙂
I happened to be in Tasmania at one time, and my friend drove to a hydro scheme for the view. He said “Here’s something interesting”, and banged on the large penstocks – which were empty. The water level in the dam had apparently dropped to water being drawn off faster than it was replenished.
People tend to forget that the hydroelectricity is created by draining the dam. The more electricity, the faster the dam empties. Hopefully, rain falls in the catchment and all is well.
Even hydro schemes in Nepal fed by the Himalayas frequently suffer from winter droughts.
I agree with you that solar and wind are much, much, worse if stable and reliable baseload capacity is your aim. Thanks for the correction.
None of these power methods you mentioned are stable and reliable they are all weather dependent. Not so coal, gas and nuclear which are reliable, long lasting and dependable baseload for long-term economic growth and cheaper electricity, if managed properly.
BYD have been the beneficiary of zombie lending, and of off balance sheet fakery by failing to pay suppliers for as much as nine months after receiving the supplies. They may be hiding about forty billion dollars worth of debt by these tactics.
Your programmer is deficient in research skills. China’s solar panel industry shed one third of its work force in 2024, and the solar industry’s growth is set to contract worldwide this year, including in China.
And wind farms are being cancelled in Europe, Australia and the US because they are not economically viable, aside from their detrimental effect on birds, bats and insects.
Wind energy in the US is destroyed by king trump. But the last remains of the legal system they have ruled against it.
Are you sure about Europe and Australia? Or is this the new “Wind energy in Eurooe peaked 2017” fantasy?
Also don’t forget to mention whales. We don’t want all the hard work CFACT and friends put into it go to waste, now do we?
Many thousands of acres of prime farm and forest land in Wokeachusetts have been destroyed to build solar “farms”.
You can still farm under the panels. You just need to instal gro-lights.
/s
Yeah, Land rights for gay whales!
You mean “chinese batteries will soon run the world into the ground”..,
there another cure for dyslexia found…lusernamereloaded 3 1/2, still fun laughing at and with you
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
😛
Hmm colour blind and unable to tell the difference between “+” and “-” well I correct my quote to “dyslexia for cure found”.
The only thing you’ll “win” is additional laughter.
We’re not ignoring you, just laughing at you.
If we carry on down this route the deindustrialization of our economies in the West will leave the Chinese as the only economy capable of producing anything, with coal as their main source of energy
And yet despite all that, CO2 emissions are increasing not decreasing. Something is obviously wrong with your summation.
You assume we wouldn’t have seen a larger increase otherwise.
Ah! Is that like when it’s cooling, you claim we would have had more cooling otherwise?
Just what is the Null Hypothesis for Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming? Without it, Climate Scientology isn’t science, you know?
There is no way of knowing. All we can know is what is.
Maybe there would have been a very slightly larger increase – probably negligible! Given that China, India, Russia and most of the developing world – ie the vast majority of the human population, haven’t cut back at all on CO2 emissions, I think any larger increase than we’ve already seen, would have been virtually unnoticeable.
Let’s face it, if it had even been an extra 10 or 20 parts per million, what real difference would this have made to such a tiny trace gas in our atmosphere? 0.001% to 0.002%…in addition to the roughly 0.017% increase we’ve seen over the couple of hundred years??? Really??
The fellow who runs Stellantis says nobody wants EVs.
True, we just have to ignore all the people who buy one.
Maybe we should have asked the fellow who ran Nokia about smartphones?
Would they have bought an EV without subsidies and tax breaks?
The magic of the Three Fs. Fanatics, fleets and freebies. There are only so many battery car fanatics and once they all have one. Fleets are being pushed into buying them but their problem is the crashing used market value with few buyers for a used battery cars. And finally the taxpayer bungs to induce purchases can only go so far given the cost to the economy.
Well he’s right!
bingo!
and he doesn’t want to make them either – Jeep recalled 320,000 because of batteries that will explode – not to mention that they lose thousands on every car sold
I heard Gretchen Witmer on the radio this morning. She said that the auto business in Michigan is declining. Could it be the EV business they all bought into is declining?
Even if this is the case, which is highly debatable, the fact that any dissenting voices have been completely silenced is wrong. We’re supposed to live in a democracy, in which freedom to express views contrary to the mainstream, is not only allowed but encouraged! Also, true science is supposed to test any hypothesis to destruction by challenging it, not by burying any alternative explanations. The bottom line is that democracy is an ideal that no longer exists in the UK. We live in a pseudo-democratic, woke driven, politically & media manipulated dictatorship.
Autocracy is a better word.
I did think about autocracy but went for dictatorship instead because I think probably Von de Leyen dictates everything – even here in the UK which has supposedly brexited🥴
I guess you don’t like falling prices for the gasoline you put in YOUR car.
There are
“around 15,000 oil and gas fields worldwide and oil and gas flows become increasingly dominated by exports from the Middle East to Asia” IEA ‘World Energy Outlook 2025’ (Nov.2025)
China energy use…
Can you say COAL , oil gas and hydro.
Anything else is fantasy.
Wind, solar and batteries.. So you want to DESTROY THE PLANET
Wind and solar are totally unsustainable and from mining, through manufacturing, installation, in use to end of life are the most environmentally and economically destructive form of erratic electricity there is.
Batteries are not much better, requiring rare earths at require huge amounts of mining and processing by nasty chemicals leaving lakes of unused sludge material. They have a short life, and a high propensity to catch fire spewing highly toxic fumes over wide areas. Totally unsustainable.
I hope you have skin in this renewables game, because you are going to lose big time matey!
Please send some your “oil glut” to California. We are losing refinery capacity which will mean shipping refined Gasoline and diesel from South Korea, India and Singapore.
That is simply confirming that the issue is EXCLUSIVELY POLITICS, in particular among the Angloxaxons. The important is now (unfortunately most top financial societies are driven by anglosaxons) that ONLY those Countries pay the enormous cost of a transition from an economy based on combustion to an economy based on electricity. From a scientific viewpoint, I can assess that IPCC is lying on important data, namely the GSMT (in fact I was unable to publish on important Journals … but I did somewhere else)
An “economy based on electricity” is STILL an “economy based on combustion. One need only look at how frequently the crap that the Climate Fascists think is an “alternative” needs to be replaced and where all the energy inputs to this serial manufacturing come from, plus where most of the electricity comes from, to understand that.
“BP said it would write down the value of its gas and low-carbon energy division by up to $5 billion, the legacy of an ill-timed move into renewables…”
Its not about the “timing” at all.
“…getting rid of the people who steered it in the disastrous direction of “fighting climate change”…”
There, that’s a better sense of the problem. There never was anything about the climate to “fight” against.
Now ExxonMobil needs to wise up about the disastrous direction of investing in CCS and hydrogen assets.
The only renewable part of wind farms is their replacement every 15 or 20 years. Let’s go with coal. You can store coal without a container and we could build them quickly like China. T hey last 60 to 80 years!
Fundamentally, leakage current is a fact that must be engineered around. For most circuits the magnitude of the current is minimized by scaling down the size of components, etc.
That problem with batteries becomes more pronounced when they are scaled to provide increasing amounts of power. To compete fairly, the fuel tanks of ICE vehicles should be punctured so as to leak stored energy at a similar rate.
When will you learn? That saying «satire is dead» exists for a reason. Don’t give them ideas.
A large section of a 20 acre solar farm next to my ‘hood was replaced after a lightning storm- when the “farm” was only about 8 years old. And that reminds me to go out today and photograph the solar panels buried under a foot of snow. A climatista once told me that they solar panels will still work under that much snow!
Yup, and that “serial manufacturing” of worse-than-useless wind and solar crap is all done using coal, oil and gas anyway, so there is NO “transition,” just a moronic waste of resources on virtue signaling which sacrifices lives and prosperity.
BP formerly British Petroleum could have employees start each daily grind with a chorus a pledge, repeating “BP owes its existence to the fortune made by John Knox d’Arcy from gold mining at Mount Morgan, Queensland.”
(Mount Morgan mine was the richest big gold mine in the world in the 1920s. My employer company took it over in the 1960s and mined it until the gold ran out in the 1990s.). Geoff S
and provided good pay for many families that grew up in Mount Morgan and the nearby towns
let’s see – the green push has led to the highest energy prices on the planet and a deindustrialization of its economy which will lead to massive unemployment – other than that everything is good – my favorite quote from Ayn Rand – One can ignore reality but one cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality
Convinced of their own correctness, and indeed righteousness, the government seeks to silence all dissent from its policies, characterizing disagreement as “misinformation” or “climate denial.”
****************
In my mind, the problem with people like those referenced above is that it is all too easy for them to confuse arrogance and egotism for what they think are correctness and righteousness. When you confuse the former for the latter (as I think they do) and you are in govt, you create policies and narratives that can be more destructive than anything else. Yet we are told to believe even though those policies and narratives take on a definite character of tools of deceit for activist political and environmental agendas.
The problem is rooted in the fact that most if not all of the individuals involved have little or no background in the science of climate and energy. The political base of support to whom they are pandering likely are equally lacking. And none of them probably care that they are lacking. When the truth is damaging to the cause, the campaign of censorship and oppression begins with claims of “misinformation” and “denialism.”
The critics of Net Zero and climate alarmism should consider themselves fortunate that they are not being locked up. Some semblance of George Orwell’s Airstrip One Oceania exists in real life more than many people would probably like to admit. How much has the developed western world really learned from his novel?
The developed world has learned plenty from Orwell’s novel. Sadly much of the learning has been in using it as something of a sourcebook and instruction manual for the people Orwell warned about.
Famous Climatist quote:
“First we refuse to debate them, then we declare the debate over, then we call them deniers and label anything they say as disinformation and use lawfare against them, then we win.”
I read that as lose + lose + lose + lose + lose = win.
Makes as much sense as the three step plan of the South Park underpants gnomes.
BP is one reason I have issues with big business but at least they can be held accountable, they lose money and heads roll unlike government.
You make a fundamental mistake right in the title by implying that this outcome somehow defeats those involved. No, reality asserting itself is not a bug, it’s a feature.
[ /dank_moldbuggery ]