Imagine you had been fed climate nonsense your whole life, but now, science has entered the industry. What do you do?
Imagine you had been fed climate nonsense your whole life. Your teachers were emptied-headed little bimbos who had bought into the climate agenda wholesale and tolerated no dissent from their students. By the time that you reached college, you were sure that you wanted a career with “sustainable” or “sustainability” in your title. While in college you discover that you can have a career saving the planet and at the same time make decent money by majoring in “sustainable finance.”
You work hard pleasing your professors who are also true believers, and with luck you impress a hiring manager at the sustainable finance branch of Barclays Bank and land that sweet job that you wanted. Barclays immediately puts you to work spitting out reports professing that the economics driving the clean energy transition is so rosy that it will happen swiftly. So fast that the oil majors will be holding stranded assets totaling trillions of dollars.
Then, one day your boss walks into your office and asks you to take a fresh look at this clean energy transition from a realistic angle. At first, you think that he is joking, but then you realize that he has received his marching orders from above. You have spent your whole life rationalizing wacky ideas to please your teachers, professors, and employers, but this request is different and unsettling. It is asking you to deny your belief system. It is an assault on your identity.
For a moment, you think of resigning, but realize that you have mortgage payments on your condo in the city and cottage at the shore, in addition to private school tuition for your kids at that woke academy. So, you swallow your pride and undertake your task.
If you had read my articles on the subject, you would have an easy go of it, but you refuse to read the work of any climate heretic. You instead skirt the truth by making some concessions that you think will make you look reasonable and give your report the sobering title, Transition Realism: Financing Energy Systems That Work.
However, writing pithy prose like “The result is that the world is discovering that cheap modules [renewables] do not automatically translate into cheap delivered power,” does not make you appear wise. It makes you look like the last guy to know that his wife is cheating on him. Firstly, renewables are not cheap no matter how you cut it. Secondly, from a system perspective, which is the only way to look at it, they are insanely expensive.
Robbed at an early age of the ability to think critically, you fall back on a new mantra that “The real bottlenecks are now in grids – permitting, financing, and system integration – not in the cost of generation hardware.” You miss the reason for the caution exercised by grid operators. It is justified because the addition of renewables has made grids more fragile and prone to catastrophic collapse, as we saw last year in Spain. (For a better understanding, read Kathryn Porter’s brilliant explanation in Net Zero Watch.)
Moreover, even if one were to blanket the countryside with transmission wires, there is no guarantee that renewable energy will find a taker. Alleviating grid congestion does nothing to ameliorate the fact that when the wind is blowing hard and the sun is shining bright, there may be no demand for it, and vice versa.
There is also the question of how you square your current realism with your earlier glowing reports that the energy transition was moving along without a hitch. Your drinking buddies over in tax credit finance, whose commissions have been in the toilet since Trump removed the punch bowl, are not going to be happy with it. You tell them that you have not lost your religion. You still believe in the clean energy transition, but in a more tempered manner. You even feel good about yourself in cutting the Gordian knot. Your boss is happy because Barclays has been able to reposition itself with minimal loss of reputation, and you are happy because you did not come off as a climate denier. Your wife is happy that you did not act rashly and quit your job and your kids can continue enrolled at their woke academy, thus ensuring another generation of empty-headed little fools.
The temptation to say, “We told you so” is difficult to resist.
Nor should it be resisted.
It should be repeated, and often
That’s just pathetic.
Is this now a creative writing blog?
The teachers are activists in the classroom, now….
A really simple guide to climate change
From the newly rebranded “Brittin Broadcasting Corporation”
Thank you for the link.
That is appalling and disgusting.
It’s official.
Excuse me while I part company with my breakfast…
They make it all sound so cretain.
But then there’s little lapses such as this –
“tipping points”:
It is not clear exactly where they sit, but once these thresholds are passed, changes could accelerate and become irreversible.
‘They make it all sound so cret
ain.’There, fixed it.
I refuse to give even a penny to BBC.
There was a controversial add to Virginia School curriculum about “ocean acidification.”
The bubbled CO2 into a jar of tap water than dropped in shell fish shell to watch them dissolve.
The number of flaws in this experiment/demonstration are significant.
The closing question of that class was, “Now tell us how you can reduce your CO2 (or carbon) footprint (or similar).”
Not precisely the way I remember it, but:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/03/13/teaching-the-science-virginia-style/
Your link includes the statement and link:
“This has been without doubt caused by human activities,”
which then further links to a doco with the statement [my bold]:
“How do we know humans are responsible for global warming?Greenhouse gases – which trap the Sun’s heat – are the crucial link between temperature rise and human activities. The most important is carbon dioxide (CO2), because of its abundance in the atmosphere.”
Water vapour – what’s that when we have a world to save???
Imagine you were an empty-headed Climate Troll, who had been fed climate nonsense your whole life…
Yes, I might call myself MyUsername or some such.
you do better genius
No it’s not. It’s the story of the carbon revolution and now you have to face the missus that she needs to lower her carbon footprint-
Australian supplier to Ferrari, Ford in administration after EV stumble
We’re all in this together honey for the sake of the munchkins.
I was just gonna say that I think the author nailed it. 🙂
What’s pathetic is a name like MyUsernameReloaded. 🙂
LCOE uses a bad denominator. Anyone with basic knowledge of math, engineering and reality recognizes the fundamental error in the computation.
Even the UN Economic Commission for Europe recognises that LCOE doesn’t do the job that some, Lazards and our own Nick Stokes, say it does.
https://unece.org/climate-change/press/unece-and-partners-lazunch-initiative-develop-full-system-cost-approach-guide
Yeah, “empty headed little bimbos” was over the top. Teachers (were?) are pressured and brain washed by the educational system and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. Trump needs to address what’s going on in the department of education.
And on that note, Google AI says:
Executive Order: On March 20, 2025, Trump signed an executive
order to start the dismantling process, aiming to return educational
control to states and parents.
Are they brainwashed? Or are they fellow travelers?
To quote a well known politician, “What difference does it make?”
I instantly thought of Hanoi Jane…
The truth hurts doesn’t it?
Having read your comments, to an extent I would have to agree
He’s creative?
You have created a strong perception that you graduated from such a curriculum.
Reality is painful. I am enjoying your suffering.
Absolutely agree…https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/03/12/barclays-sounds-the-alarm-on-renewable-energy/
Imagine you had been fed climate nonsense your whole life
Or the best part of the last 40 years. And the indoctrination (formerly known as education) gets more intensive and dogmatic year on year, cohort after cohort. The state broadcaster is a key facilitator and gatekeeper. It should be judged by what it omits as well as what propaganda it chooses to air.
In today’s Grauniad is an interesting article written by their infamous environment editor.
Fears net zero is ‘next Brexit’ as oil crisis fuels political climate divide
Could net zero become “the next Brexit”? That is the fear stalking climate advocates
…
Labour has nothing to lose and much to gain from going “all out” for net zero, adds Robbie MacPherson, a Kennedy scholar at Harvard University and former head of secretariat for parliament’s all-party climate group. “You’ve got to show what Labour stands for”
The Labour government is paralysed in the attempt to go net zero and to have economic growth; and the latter is losing badly. Any deviation from the climate crisis/net zero line is automatically a far-right and Brexity thing, it’s bloody childish 6th form student nonsense. I posted this yesterday, but it’s worth posting again.
““You’ve got to show what Labour stands for””
I should think it stands for benefiting the working class. Apparently, they forgot.
They forgot?
You are generous.
Yeah, like modern labor unions here in the US. Most unfortunate, most sad…and also sad is that I did a gig as a local union organizer and learned the sad and sorry truth the hard way.
At least with unions in companies- the company can move or fight back. With government unions, we’re screwed- our elected people won’t fight them. Look at the teachers’ unions. And I watch the outrageous salaries of state workers- not all, but many. Double or triple what they’re worth.
“Robbed at an early age of the ability to think critically…”
There you have it.
The tiniest bit of common sense would have first asked, about wind and solar power, “Wait. What happens, exactly, when it is calm and dark, to meet demand?” Then the followup question: “What happens when there is high output but little demand?”
It was never all that hard to figure out that these devices making electricity from “free” energy would drive overall system cost through the roof.
Stop the theft.
You have just described “the electricity duck_curve”, something I haven’t seen posted about in some time. An images search reveals the concept. There may be posts on WUWT. I don’t have time to check.
Schools are supposed to teach kids how to think and how to learn to prepare them for an ever changing world.
Schools fail and instead teach kids what to think.
Not everywhere, but too many places.
I can’t wait for Scene II, the one where Barclays realizes their repositioning on Retardables isn’t working, and asks the protagonist to rethink his position on them once more, and this time, get it right.
Barclays are protected by The Tribe as are most western financial systems
“By the time that you reached college, you were sure that you wanted a career with “sustainable” or “sustainability” in your title.”
I thought that- but to have a career in sustainable forestry. Then the climate bozos came along and said we must lock up the forests so their only function will be to sequester carbon to save the planet. It’s that demand on their part that first got me into the climate emergency skeptical perspective.
But they still need managing…
Everyone loves wood products but we’re not supposed to get the wood from the forests. Maybe make it out of sunlight and wind like all energy? 🙂
Synthetic wood, like synthetic meat?
You can get fake wood floors now. Not sure what they make it out of. Ugly as hell. The local Walmart put that in about a decade ago. They just pulled it all out and now it’s just polished cement, which looks better!
It’s made from plastic, the next boogeyman.
Some form of vinyl.
And at the same time, they demanded 10% alcohol in gas and 10% palm oil in diesel oil to “save the world” from climate change, but forgot that one need a lot of tropical forests to grow all that sugar cane and palms to supply these “renewables”…
Or even more stupid: cut forests to feed “green” power plants…
Drax uses wood waste from US southern lumber mills for making wood pellets which are shipped to UK in cargo ship using large amounts of fossil fuels. I recall Drax gets subsidies from the UK for suppling the wood pellets to the UK.
Crazy, isn’t it? But that’s the way Greenies think (or, rather, don’t think).
‘Then the climate bozos came along and said we must lock up the forests so their only function will be to sequester carbon to save the planet.’
Much of the ‘forest’ in my neck of CT is former farm or pasture land that was abandoned when people migrated to better lands out west or moved to mill towns in search of better ways of making a living.
These lands are not particularly attractive and, apart from deer flies and ticks, are fairly devoid of fauna of the feathered and furry persuasion that people actually like, most of which only lives today on the margin between said woods and open land.
It is, as you rightly say, however, heavily loaded with ‘sequestered carbon’, much of which will be uncontrollably returned to the atmosphere should we ever encounter a couple of years of extended drought.
Those forests- same as here though ours may be a bit more mature- desperately need thinning. Doing that will add great wealth to the owners. Not much from the thinnings which should remove the worst trees. But leaving the trees that can add value the most over some decades will be advantageous to the future owners. Also, the stands will look much nicer after thinning, there will be more trails, more wildlife of all sorts and less fire risk. And, as I’ve often argue to the idiots running my state’s forest policies, there will actually be MORE carbon in those future forests because the most vigorous trees will be growing not decadent, damaged, diseased, rotting trees. Most logging in New England until the past few decades was “high grading” where they took the best and left the rest including pines that are forked due to the white pine weevil, clumps of red maple that grew up from a stump, beech with beech bark disease, etc.
A lot of beech trees around here – they look awful.
Most beech have beech bark disease. Some don’t. Those that don’t shouldn’t be cut during a timber project as they’re probably resistant, not just lucky. But, unfortunately, most logging in hardwood stands was poorly done until recent years. Loggers would always cut the best trees and leave the worst. If they always left the best, resistant beech, over time, the health of that species would improve, even without finding a direct solution to the disease. If you own any beech on a woodlot, cut as many of the diseased beech as possible. Better to allow other species to come into that location. If you google beech bark disease you’ll find tons of information.
Each tree is only fixing carbon until it reaches maturity. Then it just stands there and breathes in and out just like we do, fixing no more carbon than is needed to make new leaves.
Logging old growth forests makes sense if the wood is used close to where it is harvested and that saplings are grown to replace them. The result is slightly better that the natural forest fires which have circled the world for millions of years.
It depends on how you define maturity- there are 3 types, biological, financial, pathological. Even when mature biologically, they’ll still grow somewhat- some for a very long time. But, most old trees have had previous injuries so that “defect and decay” are in the tree causing rot. So even if the tree is adding small rings, it’s likely to be losing carbon internally- something that is NOT understood or appreciated by those who say we shouldn’t cut the trees to retain carbon. But since the remaining old growth is rare- I support not cutting proven old growth. Some good biological research can be done in those stands. We don’t need them for wood because there are hundreds of millions of acres of stands that are not old growth that are hardly being managed correctly. We can produce all the wood the world needs if done right without cutting any more old growth.
“For a moment, you think of resigning, but realize that you have mortgage payments on your condo in the city and cottage at the shore, in addition to private school tuition for your kids at that woke academy.”
Not to mention the 100k student loan for the utterly useless degree.
utterly useless degree
BSc (Hons) Degree in Equine Management
https://www.cafre.ac.uk/student-courses/bsc-hons-degree-in-equine-management/
Open to everyone? No.
All those wishing to ride must take and be successful in the campus riding assessment. Please note the weight limit for riding is 89kg (14 stone), including tack and equipment.
For anyone with a serious and scientific BSc (Hons) Mickey Mouse degrees like this are a real slap in the face.
So, he really knows how to shovel it then?
Same problem with scientists and researches involved with climate related grants.
Talk about a dose of realism!
Well met! Well done!
Barclays is a financial institution. They follow the money (as they should).Subsidizes are drying up. There’s a lot less of the taxpayers’ green to rake in for pushing Green things.
Probably the best money launderers in the world…
I’ve no idea where that phrase cane from….
Then you call your friends over at SF based investment consultants for pensions and other friends in NY at bond rating agencies. They have all been running the lie in consulting advice, bond ratings metrics, in addition to your own chronic failings in due diligence. You are all told to pack up and leave the building with escorts and told to not work in the finance industry henceforth. That would be a perfect world.
Very nice. It doesn’t matter who is doing the fibbing, if it is a fib it is wrong.