Tag: climategate

“Renewable” energy policies can’t work – because of physics

Chapter 1: The Physics That Demolishes Energy Policy, Or Why You Can’t Boil An Egg In A Swimming Pool

By Richard Lyon, 3 March 2026

On Saturday, I told you I’d written a book and promised to walk through its core arguments chapter by chapter. Some long-standing readers will recognise what follows from a post I wrote in 2024. This is the sharper, tighter version that became the book’s opening chapter – the foundation everything else rests on. If you’re new here, start here.

There is far more heat energy in a swimming pool than in a pan of boiling water. You can boil an egg in the pan. You can’t boil an egg in the pool. And if you doubled the size of the pool, you’d double the energy available – and still have a cold, raw egg.

This is not a riddle. It is the single most important concept in the energy debate, and almost nobody making energy policy understands it.

Gradient

To do useful work, energy must flow from a region of high concentration to a region of low concentration. This difference is called the energy gradient. The steeper the gradient, the more work you can extract. A shallow gradient means the energy is real but useless.

Think of a ski slope. A run that falls 1,000 feet over 1,000 feet of distance is steep enough to let gravity do the work. A ski queue that falls 10 feet over 100 feet is too shallow – you have to shuffle. Now join 100 ski queues end to end. The total height difference is 1,000 feet – the same as the ski run. But do you glide down it? No. Because the gradient hasn’t changed. It’s still a long, flat shuffle.

This is exactly what happens when you build more wind turbines. A gas flame at 1,500°C in a 15°C room is a ski run – a vast temperature difference that a power generation system can exploit. A wind turbine extracts energy from air moving at perhaps 25 miles an hour. That’s real energy, but it’s a tiny gradient – the difference between a breeze and no breeze. Build a thousand turbines and the total energy grows, but the gradient of each one hasn’t changed. You haven’t built a ski run. You’ve built a thousand ski queues.

Density

Energy gradient tells you whether a source can do work, and therefore why the sheer quantity of energy available tells you almost nothing about how much useful work you can extract from it. Energy density tells you whether you can build a civilisation on it.

Diesel contains roughly 44 megajoules per kilogram. The best lithium-ion battery manages about 1. That is a ratio of 44 to 1 – and the gap is not an engineering problem. It is a chemistry problem. Carbon-hydrogen bonds release enormous energy when broken. Shuttling lithium ions between electrodes releases much less. The periodic table is not subject to software updates.

This is why you can drive from London to Edinburgh on 50 litres of diesel, but need a battery weighing half a tonne to do it in an electric car. It’s why aviation runs on kerosene and always will. It is not a matter of waiting for better technology. It is a hard physical constraint.

Every successful energy transition in history has moved up the density ladder: wood to coal, coal to oil, oil to nuclear. Each step concentrated more energy into less mass, enabling capabilities that were physically impossible before. Railways. Aviation. The globalised supply chain. The direction has always been the same: concentration.

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Kathy Hochul: Oops, That Climate Law Was a Mistake…

Kathy Hochul is up for reelection this year, and has a big, big problem: for all the talk about an “affordability” agenda, every single policy the Democrats like to push increases costs, reduces quality of life, and drives people out of Blue states. 

And one of the worst problems she faces is skyrocketing energy bills, and the prospect that those prices will rise even more and faster in the next few years as climate deadlines rapidly approach. 

The pressure is so great, both because consumers are pissed off and businesses that can move begin doing so, that Hochul wants to “delay” the climate goals she and the Democrats were so excited about just a few years ago. 

Gov. Kathy Hochul on Friday moved to alter and delay the implementation of New York State’s landmark 2019 climate law, which calls for gradually decreasing greenhouse gas emissions by certain deadlines.

Those proposed adjustments include delaying issuing the regulations for enforcing the law — already two years late — until 2030 and amending how certain emissions are measured.

“We need more time,” Ms. Hochul wrote in an editorial that was published on Friday morning in The Empire Report, a news site that covers state politics. “So much has radically changed since the Climate Act was enacted, necessitating common-sense adjustments.”

The proposal, anticipated by lawmakers in Albany, comes late in the budget negotiation process. Although Ms. Hochul has considerable leverage to push for her agenda during this time, members of the Legislature will need to approve the final budget, which would include changes to the climate law.

So much has changed since 2019? Not really. Every sane person then knew that these goals were unattainable, but the pursuit of them would inevitably mean skyrocketing energy costs. 

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Another Connecticut Climate Plan — Another Charge On Your Bill 

Connecticut lawmakers have a habit of raising taxes by calling them something else. 

The latest example is S.B. 453, a proposal that would impose a five-percent surcharge on certain insurance policies tied to fossil-fuel infrastructure in the state. 

The revenue would flow into a new “climate resilience account.” According to the bill, the fund would support projects such as flood-risk data collection, public awareness efforts in high-risk communities, and grants for infrastructure designed to mitigate flooding. 

On paper, the plan sounds straightforward: apply a surcharge to fossil-fuel infrastructure and use the proceeds for climate-related programs. 

In practice, costs introduced into complex systems rarely stay where they start. 

They move. 

How the Surcharge Works 

The bill applies to insurance policies covering infrastructure involved in the processing, export, or transportation of oil, natural gas, or coal. It specifically references pipelines, refineries, terminals, and utility-scale generation facilities. 

That last category is significant. 

New England continues to rely heavily on natural-gas for electricity generation. When the cost of operating those facilities rises — whether from fuel, regulations, or insurance — those increases do not simply vanish. They are incorporated into wholesale electricity markets, which influence the supply rates paid by customers of utilities like Eversource and United Illuminating. 

A surcharge introduced upstream can work its way, step by step, into ratepayer bills. 

It is also important to note that the surcharge is not imposed directly on fossil-fuel companies themselves. It is added to the insurance policies that cover them. Insurers collect the surcharge and remit it to the state, but the insured entities ultimately bear the cost — and costs in the energy sector tend to ripple outward. 

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Scientists DUMP 65,000 Litres Of CHEMICALS Into Ocean In Geoengineering Experiment

In a move that’s raising alarm, researchers have poured 65,000 litres of sodium hydroxide into the Gulf of Maine, claiming it’s a step toward combating climate change through geoengineering. 

With unknown effects on marine life, many are worried this experiment reeks of tinkering that could backfire.

The trial, dubbed the LOC-NESS project, took place off the Massachusetts coast last August, with scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution leading the charge. 

They argue that boosting ocean alkalinity could suck more CO2 from the atmosphere, turning it into harmless baking soda. 

Yet, as globalist agendas push these unproven fixes, freedom-loving skeptics see it as another layer of control over nature without public consent.

Over four days, the team added the alkaline chemical, tagged with red dye for tracking, to waters 50 miles off Boston. “These early results demonstrate that small-scale OAE deployments can be engineered, tracked, and monitored with high precision,” said principal investigator Adam Subhas of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. “We need independent, transparent research to determine which solutions might work.”

The method, known as Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement (OAE), aims to mimic and accelerate the ocean’s natural CO2 absorption. 

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California’s green policies destroy blue-collar jobs

Gavin Newsom complains of “faux outrage” over his comments to a largely black audience in Atlanta about his SAT scores, in which he implied a shared lack of ability.

No state makes more of its “enlightened” stance on racial justice than California. But few states do worse.

Governor Newsom and his Sacramento claque have embraced reparations for the descendants of slaves. They are also working overtime to preserve affirmative action policies, despite the electorate’s widespread rejection.

But Newsom’s racial rhetoric is, as the leftist site Jacobin suggests, nothing more than “pure rhetorical posturing.”

For example, the reparations promise new free tuition and housing subsidies to anyone who can prove they are descendants of slaves — but there’s little to no money behind this feint.

California’s adoption of such “reparations,” recently also embraced in San Francisco, also seems a bit absurd, given that it was never a slave state.

California, like every state, is burdened by a racist past, but much of this was aimed at what were larger populations — first Native Americans, then old Californios (descendants of Mexican/Spanish settlers) and, most of all, Asians, who were banned from landownership and were subject to brutal pogroms, the worst occurring in Los Angeles.

But the greatest irony is that both Latinos and African Americans do worse in California than in  “unenlightened places”  like Texas and Florida.

The key difference in California has been the imposition of draconian environmental regulations, which have devastated industries like construction, manufacturing, and logistics. 

It’s what attorney Jennifer Hernandez calls “the green Jim Crow.”  

Latinos have been hardest hit because many are employed in the “carbon economy,” which relies on energy and has been decimated by regulatory pressures. 

For example, Latinos constitute well over 50% of all California construction workers and the majority working in logistics, according to the American Community Survey.  

But due to regulatory constraints, construction in California has been among the weakest in the nation, making it hard to build what the market wants — namely, affordable apartments and modestly-priced single family homes. 

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Dutch farmers protest across the country in response to proposed environmental laws

Farmers all across the Netherlands have banded together in recent weeks to protest newly proposed emission cuts that would devastate the livestock industry, with farmers shutting down major city centers, distribution centers, airports, and more across the small European country.

On Tuesday evening, police fired upon farmers in their tractors.

Police said that they were responding to a “threatening situation” in which farmers were attempting to drive their tractors into officers and service vehicles at just before 11 pm.

According to Friesland police, officers issued warning shots as well as more targeted shots.

One tractor was shot, with the tractor being stopped shortly after. Three people were arrested, and no injuries were reported.

Due to shots being fired, The Rijksrecherche, the Dutch government’s internal investigator, has been requested to conduct an investigation into the matter.

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Was Climate Change The Greatest Financial Scandal In History?

Environmental scholar Bjorn Lomborg recently calculated that across the globe, governments have spent at least $16 trillion feeding the climate change industrial complex.

And for what?

Arguably, not a single life has been or will be saved by this shameful and colossal misallocation of human resources.

The war on safe and abundant fossil fuels has cost countless lives in poor countries and made those countries poorer by blocking affordable energy.

Since the global warming crusade started some 30 years ago, the temperature of the planet has not been altered by one-tenth of a degree—as even the alarmists will admit.

In other words, $16 trillion has been spent—a lot of people got very, very rich off the government largesse—but there is not a penny of measurable payoff.

But it’s much worse than that.

In economics there is a concept called opportunity cost: What could we have done with $16 trillion to make the world better off?

What if the $16 trillion had been spent on clean water for poor countries?

Preventing avoidable deaths from diseases like malaria?

Building schools in African villages to end illiteracy?

Bringing reliable and affordable electric power to the more than 1 billion people who still lack access? Curing cancer?

Many millions of lives could have been saved.

We could have lifted millions more out of poverty.

The benefits of speeding up the race for the cure for cancer could have added tens of millions of additional years of life at an economic value in the tens of trillions of dollars.

Instead, we effectively poured $16 trillion down the drain.

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Global Warming Claim: CO2 CAN’T Hold Heat — and Real Scientists Have Known This for Ages

President Donald Trump recently reversed the Obama-era “endangerment finding,” which had identified CO2 as a public-health threat. Global-warming alarmists consider this a step backwards. But, says a man with actual hands-on experience working with so-called greenhouse gases, it’s a step toward sanity.

In fact, writes James T. Moodey on Sunday, “Real scientists have known the truth about global warming for decades.”

What’s more, “There’s an easy test to disprove global warming,” he states at American Thinker. “I did it myself.”

Moodey then elaborates, providing some background on climate-change alarmism’s origins:

The groupthink started in 1994 as a political movement to ban fossil fuels at our country’s first climate change bureaucracy, Southern California Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD). A local professor wrote a rule for them that became known as “cap and trade.” It required our factories to reduce combustion of natural gas by an average 75 percent over five years. I owned a Weights and Measures gas-physics test-and-repair facility. The air quality district chose my company to test the factories’ gas-physics instruments for accuracy once per year. We witnessed the closing of over 1,200 factories because of that rule.

We were skeptical of the rule’s assumptions, so we tested carbon dioxide. It cools twenty degrees in less than four minutes. It cannot possibly retain heat from day to day (global warming). It does not cause any warming.

Of course, this may or may not be definitive. After all, a given researcher could always be missing something. But the scientific establishment wasn’t interested in finding out.

That is, Moodey brought his findings to a 2014 Heartland Institute conference. He was rebuffed — even by those on “his side.” As he relates:

I offered to build the test bench for a respected professor, who said to me, “We believe that carbon dioxide causes warming; we just don’t know exactly how or how much.” I walked away thinking, “That is the most unscientific statement I have ever heard.”

Moodey says he then realized that tackling all of academia was fruitless. He was astounded at the “groupthink.”

What he encountered, too, was something late author Michael Crichton warned of: “consensus” (pseudo)science. As Crichton put it in a 2003 Caltech speech:

Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he … has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world.

In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus.

Crichton later added that talk of consensus is a red flag. It “is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough,” he explained. “Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.”

Not anyone, that is, except global-warming alarmists.

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Rich Elites Ignored Climate Change by Flying Hundreds of Private Jets to the Super Bowl

Wealthy elites, many of whom likely believe that climate change is a big problem, flew hundreds of private jets to attend the Super Bowl this weekend.

These are the same people who support things like banning plastic straws. Funny how all of that goes right out the window when it comes to their comfort and convenience.

They will virtue-signal in public then just do whatever they want to do.

Townhall reported:

Elites Did Their Part to Fight Global Warming by Flying Dozens of Private Jets to the Super Bowl

The Democrats keep telling us we have to address climate change immediately, or half the country will end up underwater. Bernie Sanders, who supports the Green New Deal and calls climate change an “existential threat” to humanity, spent more than half a million dollars on private jets during his “Fight Oligarchy” tour.

Yesterday, following the Super Bowl in San Francisco, hundreds of private jets were seen leaving the area. We’re willing to be that 90 percent or more of them were owned by people who agree with Bernie Sanders about climate change.

As always, it’s (D)ifferent when they do it. The Obamas bought a waterfront mansion in Martha’s Vineyard a couple of years ago, and Kamala Harris just dropped $8 million on a Malibu property with “sweeping ocean views.”

What kind of carbon footprint did all of this produce?

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DOJ probing incident where climate group stormed Jewish synagogue event with Democrat congressman

The Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into an incident this week in which climate protesters stormed a Jewish synagogue where a Democrat congressman was speaking, signaling an aggressive effort to protect houses of worship from vile intrusions from leftist activists.

Attorney General Pam Bondi confirmed the probe in a statement Saturday to Just the News.

“We are investigating this case and will continue to actively investigate any house of worship that is disrupted,” Bondi said.

The decision to probe the intrusion by the group Climate Defiance at a Long Island synagogue in Roslyn, N.Y., comes days after DOJ charged three activists — including former CNN anchor Don Lemon — for invading a Christian church service in Minnesota.

Both incidents involved increasingly aggressive leftist activists who are protesting the Trump administration’s arrests of illegal aliens nationwide.

The most recent episode targeted Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi over his initial vote to back a GOP-led spending bill that directed more federal funding to ICE’s crackdown on illegal immigration.

Video footage showed Suozzi was speaking Wednesday night when activists from Climate Defiance stormed the synagogue with diapers and kneepads while cursing and making vile comments.

Climate Defiance called Suozzi a “hideous, grotesque, fascist-loving coward” with “blood on his hands” in a social post.

The New York probe will be slightly different than the Minnesota case, where a worship service was underway.  Wednesday’s event involved a speech by a politician hosted by a house of worship.

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