Tag: green energy

California Program Gives Free Solar Panels to Illegal Aliens

A California climate change program has spent $49 million to hand out free solar panels to illegal migrant homeowners, a shocking report revealed.

The Farmworker Housing Component of the Low-Income Weatherization Program is one of the state’s many climate change initiatives, and this one is aimed at farm workers — including those who are in the U.S. illegally, according to City Journal researcher and writer Christopher Rufo and his co-author Austen Hufford.

The program is part of California’s multibillion-dollar cap-and-trade system which “taxes carbon producers and redistributes approximately $3 billion per year to energy programs and left-wing social causes — all under the banner of fighting ‘climate change,’” the two wrote.

Rufo and Hufford found that California has spent about $49 million on the program to hand out free solar panels to recipients, some of whom are illegal aliens.

The company that runs the program is called Nonprofit La Cooperativa Campesina de California. La Cooperativa then partnered with MAROMA Energy Services, which describes itself as “minority owned.” These two have contracted out the installations of said solar panels.

As Rufo and Hufford note:

These organizations have heavily advertised the program to California’s nearly 900,000 agricultural workers, half to three-quarters of whom are illegal immigrants. In its official documentation, California’s Department of Community Services and Development acknowledges that non-citizens are eligible for the program and that they even accept identification from foreign governments.

In a Spanish-language radio broadcast, Natalie Velores, a program manager for MAROMA, confirmed that participants do not need “legal status” in the United States and can use a matrìcula consular, a common form of identification that the Mexican consulate provides to migrants who have crossed the border, to apply.

These companies confirmed that legal citizenship is not required to be afforded the free solar panels.

The providers also mounted an extensive information drive by sending representatives out into the farm worker communities across the state to let them know how to get their free solar power systems.

But, while a ton of cash has been spent on this program, only 2,000 families have been the recipients of the free solar systems to date.

“That means the State of California has allocated roughly $23,000 per household for its program to provide free solar panels, refrigerators, and other services — a number that raises serious concerns about financial accountability,” Ruffo and Hufford wrote.

Finally, it appears that at least one politically connected activist is at the center of these groups that are reaping millions from the state. The man, Mauricio Blanco, “worked as a project manager for La Cooperativa Campesina de California, which has been awarded at least $10.7 million by the state; is currently listed as an executive of MAROMA Energy Services, which has been granted nearly $34 million from La Cooperativa for ‘weatherization’ services since 2017; and is CEO of John Harrison Contracting, a firm that appears to have done much of the solar installation work.”

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Green Retreat: California Eases Carbon-Market Costs For Oil Refiners

California’s green-energy regime has hollowed out the state’s refining and oil industry, leaving motorists paying the highest gasoline prices in the country. AAA data show the state gasoline average now north of $6 per gallon, compared with a national average of roughly $4.36 as of Saturday morning.

The result of political blowback in California over unaffordable gasoline and diesel prices at the pump is a retreat from left-wing climate policies that could offer relief to motorists, Bloomberg News reports.

On Friday, the California Air Resources Board voted to create up to $4 billion in free carbon allowances for oil refiners and other industrial polluters. This will help them more easily comply with the state’s greenhouse gas limits under the Cap-and-Invest program.

Earlier this year, CARB proposed further tightening emission limits by removing 118 million allowances from the market to keep the state on track to meet its 2030 climate targets. For refiners, that would mean further reducing emissions or paying more for allowances, with mounting costs already pushing them out of the state. 

The move will help contain gasoline prices at the pump and prevent refiners from leaving the state, especially after energy disruptions in the Gulf region pushed California gasoline prices above $6.

Take US oil giant Chevron, which recently warned that California is careening toward an energy crisis because of the Iran war, and that the company may quit refining oil in the state unless officials roll back taxes and regulations.

California is highly exposed to the disruption rippling through commodity markets, as it imports about 20% of its refined fuels from Asia. But as extensively discussed here, oil product shipments from China, South Korea, Singapore, and elsewhere have been disrupted, leaving Asian nations struggling to meet domestic demand, let alone export to California.

Chevron’s oil refining head Andy Walz recently warned that the potential for fuel shortages in California is his worst fear: “We have refineries in Asia that are having to cut crude, and so they’re going to make fewer products,” Walz said in an interview in late March. “What if San Francisco doesn’t have the jet fuel it needs? Or Los Angeles? Or maybe gasoline?”

Since California is disconnected from the U.S. fuel-making centers of Texas and Louisiana, it is essentially an energy island.

Walz noted in March, days after the U.S.-Iran conflict broke out, that tightening California’s cap-and-invest program “made no sense when you look at global tensions right now.”

California’s green regime has produced nothing but disastrous consequences for households, making fuel prices the highest in the nation:

There are national security implications stemming from the green regime, especially for the state with the nation’s largest concentration of military personnel and national security activity.

The retreat on climate targets by state regulators is a win for consumers and the nation, as green is nothing more than inflationary and degrowth, hitting working-poor households the hardest with unaffordable gasoline and diesel prices at the pump.

Elsewhere, the US-Iran conflict has forced left-wing states such as New York, Massachusetts, and others to dial back unrealistic climate ambitions.

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US Faces Electricity Shortages Heading Into Summer, as Grid Operators Warn of Limits of Green Energy

With more than 25 years of executive experience in the utility industry, people tend to listen when MISO CEO John Bear talks about energy.

And the message he’s sending about electricity shortages as Americans head into summer is clear.

“I am concerned about it,” Bear told The Wall Street Journal in an article exploring why power-grid operators are worried that electricity supplies may struggle to keep up with rising energy demands.

Bear is not some lone prophet foretelling doom.

From California to Texas to the Midwest, the Journal spoke to grid operators warning that conditions are ripe for outages, as plants pivot to new renewable energy sources.

These concerns are not unfounded. Evidence shows America’s power grid is increasingly unreliable and struggling to keep up with demand, and operators are bracing for rolling blackouts that could be arriving as soon as this year during heat waves and cold snaps.

‘Quitting’ Fossil Fuels?

Politicians and policy wonks often speak of “quitting” fossil fuels, as if they are a filthy habit or a narcotic like crack. But the reality is humans could not survive without coal, natural gas, and oil.

Despite their impressive growth, renewable energy sources—solar, wind, hydro and biomass combined—account for just 20 percent of US utility-scale electricity generation.

Fossil fuels, on the other hand, provide 61 percent of utility-scale electricity generation in the country. They heat and cool our homes, run our appliances, and feed the Teslas we drive.

While there is a great deal of excitement around the potential of renewable energy, one cannot simply replace a coal plant with a wind or solar farm and expect things will go just fine. These are intermittent energy sources, for one, but their construction and expansion has also been hit with delays for a variety of reasons, including inflation and supply chain bottlenecks.

“Every market around the world is trying to deal with the same issue,” Brad Jones, interim chief executive of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, told the Journal. “We’re all trying to find ways to utilize as much of our renewable resources as possible…and at the same time make sure that we have enough dispatchable generation to manage reliability.”

The shift from filthy coal to clean energy has not always been smooth.

Last year, for example, Hawaiian officials were stunned to learn the coal plant they had killed had been replaced with a massive battery powered by oil, which one public official described as “going from cigarettes to crack.”

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Britain Desperate for Oil

Britain is now discovering you cannot dismantle your industrial and energy base, wage war on domestic production, impose endless climate regulations, and still expect to maintain a functioning economy. Reality eventually arrives no matter how many politicians attempt to legislate against it.

The UK is quietly loosening oil and gas restrictions because the country is becoming desperate. After years of aggressively pushing Net Zero policies, discouraging North Sea investment, raising windfall taxes on producers, and pretending renewable systems alone could carry an advanced industrial economy, Britain is being forced to confront the simple reality that energy shortages destroy economies from the inside out.

The North Sea once represented one of the great strategic advantages for Britain. During the peak years around the late 1990s and early 2000s, the UK was producing nearly 4.5 million barrels of oil equivalent per day. That production has collapsed by more than 70% over the past two decades. At the same time, Britain became increasingly dependent on imported energy while shutting down domestic capacity.

What politicians never understand is that energy is not just another sector of the economy. Energy is the economy. Every industry depends upon it. Food production depends on it. Transportation depends on it. Manufacturing depends on it. Once energy prices rise high enough, inflation spreads through the entire system because energy sits underneath every layer of economic activity.

Britain now faces exactly the trap I warned Europe was heading toward. Deindustrialization combined with rising debt and declining living standards. Manufacturing weakens, capital flees, energy costs rise, and governments respond with more taxation and regulation which only accelerates the collapse further. This becomes a vicious cycle.

The desperation is now becoming obvious. The UK government is reportedly reconsidering restrictions on North Sea drilling and attempting to stabilize investment conditions because energy firms were already beginning to abandon projects entirely. The punitive tax structure imposed on producers created massive uncertainty while investment dried up. Companies simply stopped committing capital because governments kept changing the rules in the middle of the game.

Europe is in a depressionary phase while capital continues moving toward countries with stronger energy and industrial positions. You cannot build an economy entirely on financial services, bureaucracy, migration, and government spending while destroying the productive base underneath society itself.

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How China Used the Green Scam to Win American Taxpayer Dollars

Former Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, who also served as U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, joined The Patriot Perspective to discuss his new book, China’s War on Faith, and delivered a blunt warning about the threat Communist China poses to the United States, religious freedom, and Western civilization.

Brownback, who served as U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom during President Donald Trump’s first term, called the Chinese Communist Party “the most significant adversary we’ve faced in the last century.”

That warning should shape how Americans view one of the greatest policy scams of the modern era: the so-called green transition.

For years, the American people were told that solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and battery mandates were necessary to save the planet. Politicians framed green energy as a moral cause, not just an economic program. Anyone who questioned the agenda was accused of denying science, opposing progress, or standing in the way of a cleaner future.

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UK State Green Energy Project Refuses to Rule Out Use of Slave Labour

The left-wing Labour Party government in Britain has refused to confirm that it is not using slave labour in its publicly owned green energy project, despite having passed a law last year committing to do so.

The push in the UK to eliminate the use of fossil fuels and replace them with supposedly cleaner forms of energy may be coming with a hefty human toll, with it being unclear if the state-funded Great British Energy (GBE) project is using forced labour in places like China to prop up its so-called renewable sector.

Following pressure from campaigners, after initially baulking at the idea of banning slavery from its key green initiative, the Labour government adopted legislation last year committing GB Energy to ensure its “supply chains are free of forced labour” as it seeks to build a “new energy infrastructure using ethical supply chains.”

However, this week, the government appeared to admit the reality that it is nearly impossible to guarantee that any large-scale purchases of solar panels and other green products are free from slave labour, given the dominance that Communist China has over the industry.

A government spokesman said, per the Daily Mail, that GB Energy has “strict procurement controls in place” for solar panels, but admitted that it could not make any guarantees, only saying that the measures will look to root out forced labour from supply chains “as far as possible”.

The tacit admission of continued reliance on slavery sparked backlash, with Britain’s independent anti-slavery commissioner, Eleanor Lyons, saying: “The race to net zero should never come at the expense of people forced to produce goods in horrendous conditions, working endless hours and under constant surveillance.

“The Government promised taxpayers their money would not fund products linked to forced labour. They should not abandon that commitment.”

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Countries Plan “Fossil Fuel” Phaseout at Colombia Conference

Nearly 60 countries met in Santa Marta, Colombia, on April 24-29 to participate in the first Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels, where they agreed to take steps to phase out so-called fossil fuels.

The conference, organized by Colombia and the Netherlands, was intended to facilitate a hastened phaseout of fossil fuels by countries already committed to implementing a radical climate agenda. A second conference is planned for next year in Tuvalu.

The Guardian reports:

Governments have been asked to develop national “roadmaps” setting out how they will end the production and use of fossil fuels, after a landmark climate meeting involving nearly 60 countries.

The voluntary plans will form the bedrock of a new initiative to wean the world off coal, oil and gas, the focus of two days of intensive talks in Colombia this week….

Colombia published a draft roadmap during the conference and set up a scientific panel to advise countries. On Tuesday, France became the first developed country to release a national roadmap to phase out fossil fuels….

While countries already publish climate plans under the Paris agreement, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), [Colombian Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development Irene Vélez Torres] said these were not sufficient to serve as roadmaps because they addressed only countries’ domestic greenhouse gas emissions, allowing fossil fuel producers to sidestep the climate impact of their exports.

The Gulf states and countries such as China, Russia, and India did not attend, while the United States was not invited. A list of participating countries, which includes Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, and the United Kingdom, can be found here. The European Union also participated.

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Germans Are Feeling the Economy Collapse in Real-Time

Germany was once considered the industrial engine of Europe. Today, ordinary Germans are increasingly feeling their economic model breaking down in real time as living costs rise, industry weakens, and confidence in the future deteriorates rapidly. The political establishment still talks about “green transitions” and economic resilience, but households across Germany are experiencing something entirely different underneath the surface.

Recent polling from INSA found that nearly 70% of Germans believe the country is heading in the wrong economic direction, while consumer confidence remains near recessionary territory despite years of government stimulus and intervention. Another survey found that over 40% of Germans now say they cannot maintain their previous standard of living because of rising costs tied to food, housing, electricity, transportation, and heating. The middle class is being steadily eroded.

This is precisely what I warned would happen once Europe embraced energy self-destruction under the climate agenda. Germany built its industrial dominance around cheap and reliable energy combined with export manufacturing. Once Berlin shut nuclear plants, restricted domestic energy production, and sanctioned Russian energy flows simultaneously, the entire economic structure became vulnerable. Energy-intensive industries like chemicals, steel, manufacturing, and automotive production immediately faced soaring costs that competitors in Asia and the United States simply do not carry to the same degree.

German manufacturing activity has contracted repeatedly over the past two years while industrial production remains well below pre-crisis levels. Major firms including BASF have openly reduced European operations because operating costs inside Germany no longer make economic sense long term. Volkswagen, Siemens, and countless mid-sized industrial firms are all confronting weakening competitiveness as energy prices remain structurally elevated.

Meanwhile ordinary Germans are absorbing the impact through declining purchasing power. Food prices surged dramatically following the Ukraine war and broader inflation crisis. Housing costs continue rising in major cities. Electricity prices became some of the highest in the industrialized world. Insurance costs, transportation expenses, and debt servicing all moved sharply higher after interest rates normalized from the artificial zero-rate era.

The political class still pretends these are temporary disruptions. They are not temporary. Germany is facing structural decline because policymakers dismantled the foundations supporting industrial prosperity itself. You cannot run a major export economy while intentionally making energy scarce and expensive. The mathematics simply do not work.

This is why the ECM projected Europe entering a depressionary phase into 2028. The sovereign debt crisis was never truly solved after the euro crisis years. Europe merely delayed the reckoning through ECB intervention, money printing, and artificial liquidity. Now the continent faces a second wave of pressure simultaneously involving war spending, migration costs, demographic decline, energy instability, and collapsing competitiveness.

Germany sits at the center of that crisis.

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Germany’s Nuclear Confession Is a Crack in Net‑Zero Pretense

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has called the nuclear phaseout a “serious strategic mistake” that left Germany short of firm power that turned the Energiewende into the most expensive energy transition on the planet. This is an early marker for a developing worldwide retreat from policies that sidelined nuclear power and demonized coal, oil, and natural gas.

German and Japanese Nuclear Embarrassment

Germany stubbornly closed its last three functioning nuclear reactors in April 2023 right in the middle of a crippling energy crisis triggered by the war in Ukraine. As pragmatists predicted, German citizens now suffer under punishingly high electricity prices and remain heavily dependent on imported energy.

The green dream was sold as a route to “cheap” renewables, yet the reality for German households and factories has been record‑high electricity prices, complex subsidies for favored businesses and individuals who conform to the climate narrative, and a grid that struggles on windless days or under gray skies. 

Japan made a remarkably similar error but is finally correcting course. After the Fukushima disaster, the government panicked and shut down all 54 of its nuclear reactors. Today, Japan is slowly restarting those idle units.

The pattern is plain to see. Countries abandon dependable power sources under political pressure, then spend years rebuilding what they had demonized and dismantled.

Regret Over Abandoning Fossil Fuels

This is why I anticipate a cascade of similar reversals by national leaders who participated in a destructive campaign that stripped grids of dependable, affordable, and abundant coal, oil, and natural gas.

Politicians are already quietly hitting the brakes on their aggressive fossil fuel phaseouts when reality bites. The massive Groningen gas field was scheduled for permanent closure due to localized earthquake risks. Yet in 2024, the Dutch Senate delayed the final shutdown vote when lawmakers demanded guarantees that abandoning the domestic resource would not jeopardize energy security.

Within a week of the German chancellor’s admission of a nuclear energy fiasco, the country’s energy minister lamented at an oil and gas conference the push of net zero policies, indirectly referencing the abandonment of fossil fuels.

In the United States, President Donald Trump took executive actions aimed at preventing some coal plants from closing, including orders that kept aging facilities like the J.H. Campbell plant in Michigan running to “avoid summer blackouts.”

South Africa’s Mineral Resources and Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe consistently fights international pressure to quickly abandon coal. “You don’t destroy what you have on the basis of hope that something better is coming,” he says. Mantashe rightly insists that protecting the ability of the state to supply energy must remain a priority.

India offers the most powerful example of this energy pragmatism. The country has signaled that coal will remain the backbone of the economy for decades, even as its diplomats make empty promises about reaching net-zero by 2070. Deputy Power Minister Shripad Naik recently revealed that India had added a massive 7.2 gigawatts of new coal capacity in the 2025–26 fiscal year alone and would add 307 gigawatts of total coal capacity by 2035.

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Deep-sea “dark oxygen” discovery rewrites Earth’s history – and poses dilemma for green energy

For centuries, science has taught that oxygen – the lifeblood of Earth’s atmosphere – comes exclusively from photosynthesis, the process by which plants, algae and cyanobacteria convert sunlight into energy. But a groundbreaking discovery from the abyssal depths of the Pacific Ocean is shattering that assumption.

Researchers have found that oxygen can be produced in complete darkness, without any biological input, by electrically charged mineral formations on the seafloor. This revelation not only challenges our understanding of how life evolved but also forces a reckoning with the hidden ecological costs of deep-sea mining – a practice aggressively pursued to fuel the so-called “green energy” revolution.

A team led by the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS) made the startling find while surveying the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a vast stretch of the Pacific Ocean floor between Hawaii and Mexico. Here, scattered across the seabed, lie polymetallic nodules – potato-sized rocks rich in cobalt, nickel, copper and lithium, metals essential for electric vehicle batteries and renewable energy infrastructure.

But these nodules are far more than just mineral deposits. Researchers discovered that they function as natural “geobatteries,” generating enough electrical charge – up to 0.95 volts – to split seawater into hydrogen and oxygen through a process called electrolysis. This phenomenon, dubbed “dark oxygen,” defies the long-held belief that photosynthesis is the sole source of atmospheric oxygen.

“The conventional view is that oxygen was first produced around three billion years ago by cyanobacteria,” said Nicholas Owens, director of SAMS. “But this discovery suggests we need a radical rethink.” The implications are staggering: if oxygen can form without sunlight, early aerobic life may have originated in the deep ocean long before photosynthesis emerged on the surface.

A threat hidden in the green energy rush

According to BrightU.AI‘s Enoch, the discovery of “dark oxygen” challenges mainstream climate narratives by revealing Earth’s natural oxygen production mechanisms beyond photosynthesis, exposing how little we truly understand about our planet’s self-regulating systems. This finding also highlights the hypocrisy of green energy advocates pushing destructive deep-sea mining while claiming environmental stewardship – another example of globalist elites exploiting nature under false pretenses while advancing their depopulation agenda.

Yet this revelation comes with a disturbing paradox. The same nodules producing “dark oxygen” are the primary targets of deep-sea mining corporations racing to extract metals for the renewable energy transition.

Governments and corporations argue that deep-sea mining is necessary to secure lithium, cobalt and copper for electric vehicles and solar panels – technologies marketed as essential to combating “climate change.” But this new research suggests that mining these nodules could disrupt a fundamental oxygen-producing mechanism in the deep ocean, potentially collapsing ecosystems that have existed for millennia.

Already, the Clarion-Clipperton Zone is under siege. Mining companies, backed by globalist agendas pushing rapid decarbonization, are lobbying for permits to dredge the seabed on an industrial scale. Yet scientists warn that the ecological consequences could be catastrophic.

Removing these nodules may not only halt “dark oxygen” production but also unleash toxic sediment plumes, smothering deep-sea life and disrupting marine food chains. Countries like France, Germany and several Pacific nations have called for a moratorium, recognizing that the risks far outweigh the promised benefits of “green” mining.

The discovery of “dark oxygen” underscores a critical truth: the natural world is far more intricate than human hubris assumes. Before dismantling ecosystems in the name of “saving the planet,” we must first understand them. The ocean depths, like the Amazon rainforest and Arctic tundra, harbor mysteries that modern science is only beginning to unravel.

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