The United Arab Emirates’ announcement on Tuesday that it will leave OPEC and OPEC+ effective May 1st sent shockwaves through the energy world. As the cartel’s third-largest oil producer, with a production capacity approaching five million barrels per day and ambitions to push higher, the UAE was no peripheral player. Abu Dhabi joined OPEC back in 1967 — before the UAE federation existed in its modern form — and the unified UAE carried that legacy for nearly six decades.

The exit decision was framed by Emirati officials as a “policy-driven evolution” in pursuit of “long-term strategic and economic vision”. Within hours, a familiar trope emerged among media commentators: the UAE, fearing the inexorable global march towards Net Zero, is racing to avoid ‘stranded assets’. Oil will be left in the ground, you see, because electric vehicles in China and Europe’s Green Deal will soon render the black stuff obsolete.

Watch out for stranded assets!

The stranded assets narrative is the climate alarmists’ weapon of choice. In behavioural economics, the tenet of loss aversion suggests that the fear of a tangible loss is far more effective than hope for putative gains in shaping actions. For over two decades, climate activists and financial pundits have argued that fossil fuels — coal mines, oil and gas fields, pipelines, refineries — would soon suffer the fate of the buggy whip on the eve of the automobile age. The energy transition, they insisted, would ‘strand’ trillions of dollars in hydrocarbon assets as the world turns away from carbon-intensive fuels.

Climate activists have long claimed that technological progress in energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies combined with climate policies pursued by governments around the world will lead to substantial falls in demand for fossil fuels. A Financial Times column in 2020, for instance, claimed that the pursuit of climate change policies would “evaporate” a third of the current value of the big oil and gas companies. If countries met their Paris Agreement commitments and kept to the “no more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels” target, 50% of all coal, oil and gas resources would be “stranded” and, by definition, have zero value. If the stricter 1.5°C maximum is aimed for, then 80% of the world’s fossil fuels would be stranded.

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• “Sorry, Los Angeles Times, climate change isn’t driving Georgia’s wildfires” – Data on Georgia’s wildfire history torches the LA Times’s claim that climate change is responsible for worsening blazes, says Linnea Lueken in Climate Realism.

• “The future of leasing is EVs” – The push to make electric vehicles the dominant product in the leasing market raises questions about who will bear the financial risk when residual values collapse, writes Jit at Climate Scepticism.

• “Florida AG James Uthmeier just ended the ‘green’ plastics cartel” – Florida’s Attorney General has issued civil investigative demands to a coalition of green packaging bodies and major corporations including Coca-Cola and Nestlé, accusing them of operating an unlawful sustainability cartel, says Melanie Collette for CFACT.

• “Labour MPs demand Keir Starmer sack ‘bat-s**t’ Ed Miliband” – Anger among Labour backbenchers at the Energy Secretary’s refusal to permit new North Sea oil licences has surged in the wake of soaring energy bills following the Iran war, reports the Mail.

• “Grid balancing costs set to rise to £8 billion by 2030” – Ofgem’s claim that its £80 billion grid upgrade will ultimately cut bills is misleading, says Paul Homewood at Not a Lot of People Know That, with constraint payments alone projected to hit £7.2 billion by 2030.

• “Claim: Extreme heat is responsible for more than half of Aussie natural hazard deaths” – Cold weather still kills more people overall, according to Eric Worrall in Watts Up With That?

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“The Climate Skeptic Podcast | Episode 42” – On the show this week, Laurie speaks to James Graham, Senior Researcher on Financial Freedoms at the Prosperity Institute, on the Filipino disaster survivors suing Shell Oil about the weather – and why London has become the global capital of vexatious green litigation.

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• “Is the country ready for Chancellor Ed Miliband?” – Senior Labour figures are privately acknowledging that Sir Keir Starmer made a bad decision over the Mandelson affair and did not know what was going on in his own Government, raising the prospect of an Ed Miliband succession, says Tim Shipman in the Spectator.

• “Run on tumble dryers after Miliband’s Net Zero ban” – Retailers are warning of a rush on traditional condenser dryers before imminent legislation phases them out in favour of more expensive heat-pump models, reveals the Telegraph.

• “Solar panels fitted every three minutes in UK since Iran conflict” – More solar panels were installed in March than in any month since 2012, as the Middle East energy crisis drives a surge in households seeking to reduce their exposure to volatile fossil fuel prices, according to the Times.

• “Britain most exposed European country to jet fuel shortages” – Britons risk summer travel disruption because the country’s lack of oil-refining capability has left it uniquely vulnerable to the supply squeeze triggered by the Iran conflict, says the Telegraph.

• “RIP Doomsday Model RCP8.5 – A Quiet but Profound Shift in Climate Science” – The long run of RCP8.5 has come to an end, writes Anthony Watts in WUWT?

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“Net Zero Lunatics Set to Empty Your Medicine Cabinet” – With up to 20% of oil and gas turned into petrochemicals for medicines and fertiliser, Net Zero is looking more disastrous by the day, writes Chris Morrison.

Windy entrepreneur Dale Vince thinks there is “no single reason for us to drill more oil and gas in the North Sea”, former UK Green leader Caroline Lucas comments on BP’s recent cyclical profits rise by claiming, “such blatant profiteering from human misery is sickening”, while the headbangers’ headbanger George Monbiot likens Norway’s exports of hydrocarbons to “a curse to be dumped on other countries”. One can only pray that these twaddle transmitting twits do not become ill and have to call on modern, sophisticated, hydrocarbon-rich medicines.

Up to 20% of drilled oil and gas is turned into petrochemicals and these are used to make famine-reducing fertiliser, uber-useful plastics and life-saving medicines. Yet around 200 members of the British Parliament were prepared last year to vote for the demented, anti-human private legislation that would have cut all hydrocarbon use in the country, whether it arose domestically or abroad, to just 10% within a decade. Food starvation and painful lingering deaths are just a few thoughts and words that spring to mind.

Treason is another. What other word can possibly describe the wilful political decisions currently being made in countries like the UK to stop future extractions of hydrocarbons? How can politicians like the sinister Ed Miliband claim international leadership of the Net Zero fantasy and expect others to provide future food, fertiliser and medicines? Who will tend to an ailing G. Monbiot when the medicine cabinet is empty and Norway sells its ‘curses’ elsewhere.

Modern medicine depends heavily on hydrocarbons, both as raw material and chemical building blocks. Without them, the production of many essential drugs – from painkillers and antibiotics to cancer therapies – would be significantly more difficult, much more expensive, and in some cases impossible to produce at the required scale. Many pharmaceuticals are organic molecules and hydrocarbons form the backbone of the complex manufacturing chemistry. For example, hydrocarbon-derived benzene can be converted through controlled reactions into compounds such as phenol and aniline to synthesise drugs such as paracetamol. Treating propylene provides vital solvents and other manufacturing intermediaries.

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• “Co-op City: what it looks like when energy reality catches up to you” – New York’s largest residential co-op has been hit with soaring energy costs after mandated green upgrades, offering a vivid case study of what happens when Net Zero ideology collides with the bills that real people have to pay, says Francis Menton in Manhattan Contrarian.

• “Claim: only conservatives who don’t like liberals oppose climate action” – In Watts Up With That?, Eric Worrall discusses a study claiming conservative opposition to climate policy is driven more by dislike of liberals than by any principled objection.

• “Who the hell put the psychologists in charge?” – Behavioural scientists have been allowed to shape climate and public health policy to a degree that represents one of the defining institutional mistakes of the century, argues John Ridgway in CliScep.

• “Ed Miliband plumbs new depths in condemning BP” – In the Telegraph, Jeremy Warner accuses the Energy Secretary of rank opportunism for condemning BP’s profits while refusing to acknowledge that sky-high oil prices are a direct consequence of the Iran war his own Government helped precipitate.

• “Spain and Portugal mark one year since massive blackout, still no one held accountable” – A full year has passed since Spain and Portugal were plunged into darkness in an historic blackout, yet not a single politician or executive has resigned or been held responsible, notes Breitbart.

• “Climate science’s biggest shift in decades: IPCC’s RCP8.5 is officially dead” – The IPCC’s own scenario committee has officially scrapped the catastrophic RCP8.5 emissions pathway as implausible, upending decades of doom-laden projections, writes Roger Pielke Jr. on his Substack.

• “Oversupply of volatile solar energy leads to record negative prices!” – Solar energy has been flooding grids to such a degree that power prices have turned negative on multiple occasions, according to P. Gosselin on No Tricks Zone.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“Another blow to the heat pump agenda” – With analysis showing heat pumps cost £138 a year more to run than boilers and two thirds of users reporting higher bills, no wonder no one wants to buy one. But when will green elites admit the game is up, asks Ben Pile.

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Amid the many complaints about the deficits of modern life, grumbles about gas-fired central heating are extremely rare. For sure, radiators are not as cosy as an open fire. But the convenience of warming a home at the push of a button on a device that can fit in a kitchen cupboard is unmatched. Yet banning the gas boiler has been at the top of recent governments’ policy agendas. But their determined efforts to make the world – but not our houses and flats – a better place were dealt another blow this week by an analysis from the Energy and Utilities Alliance (EUA). Among the EUA’s findings is that there were fewer than 300,000 heat pump installations in the six years 2019-2024.

Worst still for the Gaia-botherers of SW1A, people are increasingly turning their noses up at the inferior appliances – the rate of household’s adoption of heat pumps is falling, despite new regulations. 1.5 million gas boilers are relaced each year in Britain’s 28 million or so homes, at an average cost of around £2,500 each. With just 50,000 or so opting for a heat pump, it would seem that the Clean Heat Market Mechanism (CHMM) or ‘boiler tax’ of £36 per unit, which requires an increasing proportion of heat pumps to be sold, is having little effect. Mike Foster, CEO of EUA, explained: “Instead of stimulating demand, the CHMM has delivered higher costs with declining installations — the opposite of what ministers promised.”

At such a low rate of installation, it would take more than five centuries to replace the boilers in 28 million homes. That’s a cold stark fact when the normal rate of replacement (1.5 million per year) would see all of Britain’s gas boilers replaced every 18.6 years.

The issue is of course economic. Whereas the average gas boiler replacement costs around £2,500, the average air-source heat pump costs £13,700. “The Government grant (BUS) is worth £7,500,” says the EUA, “leaving £6,200 to be found by the householder.”

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• “Wyoming has a secret eagle-kill organisation” – A little-known Wyoming working group has been quietly managing the deaths of golden eagles to accommodate wind energy expansion, reports David Wojick for CFACT.

• “California leading the nation in number of cities with the most polluted air” – California, despite its green credentials and strict environmental regulations, has claimed the unenviable title of home to the most polluted cities in the United States, says Breitbart.

• “Major economies turn to coal with LNG supply constrained” – From Europe to South Korea, major economies are turning to carbon-intensive coal to offset constrained supplies of cleaner-burning gas, reports AGBI.

• “Balsa trees illegally logged for wind power” – The wind industry’s dirty secret has been exposed, with balsa wood – a key structural component of turbine blades – found to be sourced through illegal logging operations, according to H. Sterling Burnett in Watts Up With That?

• “Wrong, AP, wildfires have always burned at night” – In Climate Realism, Anthony Watts debunks the Associated Press’s claim that climate change has caused wildfires to burn through the night.

• “IPCC troubles: the latest from Bangkok” – The IPCC’s Bangkok session has ended in failure for the fifth time in a row, with UNEP warning the climate body’s trust fund may run dry before its next major report is even completed, says Robert Bradley Jr. in Master Resource.

• “COP that!” – The latest climate summit has delivered more promises to hold further summits, with the coalition of the willing showing little appetite for anything beyond talking, writes Mark Hodgson in CliScep.

• “Britain’s AI superpower: a sermon in small print” – Ministers are preaching Net Zero virtue and digital sovereignty while British households underwrite American-owned data centres, note the Rationals on Substack.

• “BP profits double as Iran war triggers oil trading boom” – BP’s quarterly earnings have surged by more than 130% in the wake of the Iran conflict, with campaigners calling it an unearned windfall as millions struggle with energy bills, reports GB News.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“Miliband’s favourite economist doesn’t understand how markets work” – Ed Miliband has found an economist who agrees with him that Net Zero is the route to cheaper energy. Unfortunately, says Dr Tilak Doshi, she has no understanding of how real markets work.

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When Ed Miliband took the podium at the Good Growth Foundation’s National Growth Debate in Westminster last week, he did not disappoint his audience of the faithful. Flanked by the economist he has long revered, Miliband delivered a speech that could serve as a textbook case of what I have elsewhere called the economic illiteracy of UK energy policy. Yet to dismiss it as mere stupidity would be a mistake. There is a method to Miliband’s madness — one honed over years in the cloistered halls of ‘woke’ Oxford and the Fabian-inspired London School of Economics and now supercharged by the ‘mission’-obsessed theories of Professor Mariana Mazzucato of University College.

In that speech — republished by the New Statesman — Miliband declared that “the era of fossil fuel security is over, and the era of clean energy security must come of age”. He credited “the godmother of missions, Marianna Mazzucato, who’s with us,” for the intellectual scaffolding of Labour’s clean energy push.

The mission, he said, established in opposition and now in Government, has “two parts — driving to a clean electricity system but also electrifying as much as we can as we decarbonise the wider economy”. Informed by the “lessons” of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the latest crisis over the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Miliband insists Britain must “double down” on Net Zero, tax North Sea oil and gas investments punitively and “electrify everything” while rejecting any new exploration and development of domestic hydrocarbons.

Pernicious political elite

This is not ignorance born of inexperience. Miliband has been a central figure in Britain’s — and the world’s — climate movement for nearly two decades. As climate change secretary under Gordon Brown, he helped shepherd the 2008 Climate Change Act, the legislative foundation for the UK’s self-proclaimed “international climate leadership”. He has since served as shadow secretary of state for energy and climate change and, since July 2024, as the Government’s Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary.

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• “NatWest’s Rick Haythornthwaite faces climate row investor revolt” – A shareholder rebellion has been brewing against NatWest chairman Rick Haythornthwaite following disclosures over the bank’s climate commitments, says the Times.

• “Miliband is branded a hypocrite for having no solar panels on his home” – The Energy Secretary’s £1.6 million North London home has a bare tiled roof, with even a neighbour having beaten him to installing the green technology he demands the rest of the country adopts, reports the Mail.

• “The true cost of Chernobyl isn’t what you think” – In the Spectator, Tim Gregory calls Europe’s post-Chernobyl flight from nuclear into coal as one of the great energy policy disasters of the modern era.

• “Net Zero and the myth of German efficiency” – Germany generated 57% of its power from renewables last year – but the economic cost has been severe, writes Leon Mangasarian in the Spectator.

• “Top lobbying firm does bidding of entity linked to Uyghur repression” – Lobbying firm Akin Gump has been found advocating on behalf of a solar polysilicon firm linked to the repression of the Uyghur people, casting a shadow over Western clean energy supply chains, according to the Washington Examiner.

• “Physics versus ideology – 10 years of energy policy confusion” – The Watt-Logic blog celebrates turning 10, marking a decade of explaining how electricity grids actually work regardless of how politicians wish they did.

• “Welcome to Oomeen’s website” – Oomeen Basing runs a website for non-scientists that explains the greenhouse effect while challenging the claim that human emissions are driving dangerous global warming. Well worth checking out.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“More doubts about Met Office rainfall claims” – The Met Office’s claim that we have just had one of the wettest winters on record is rapidly losing all credibility, says Paul Homewood, as further hard data contradict its models and fabrications.

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The Met Office’s claim that we have just had one of the wettest winters on record is rapidly losing all credibility.

It own data confirm that it was not the wettest February in Worcestershire, something which it still claims. And data from its only long running meteorological station in Northern Ireland, Armagh Observatory, make a nonsense of its claim that the country had its ninth wettest winter, or anything close to it.

In England, the Met Office claims it was the eighth wettest, with record rainfall in Leicestershire and the West Midlands. But its only official site in Leicestershire is Market Bosworth, which only has data since 2002, while in the West Midlands it has two – Coventry and Winterbourne, opened in 1998 and 2011 respectively.

They have no actual station data to back up their “record rainfall” claim, which originates solely from computer models – what they grandly call the HadUK-Grid dataset. Where there is no data, they simply invent it. And then they compare the results with other “estimated data” from earlier years.

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• “Local 10 examines why expensive electric buses sit in disrepair in Miami-Dade, Broward” – Ninety-six million dollars’ worth of electric buses are sitting idle across South Florida, with some dumped in landfill and others parked at an air force base, according to Local 10.

• “Leftists fake tears about high energy prices, but ignore the foreign-funded lawfare” – Progressives wringing their hands over energy bills are ignoring the foreign-funded legal campaigns that blocked domestic production and drove those prices sky-high in the first place, says Larry Behrens in Watts Up With That?

• “Ed Miliband’s crusade against gas will help no one” – Eco-zealots have misunderstood the meaning of energy security, argues Dillon Smith in CapX.

• “UK should forego North Sea Oil expansion because nobody needs oil and gas” – The head of the International Energy Agency has told Britain to abandon North Sea expansion on the grounds that nobody needs oil and gas anymore – a claim that will land oddly with anyone paying their energy bills, says Eric Worrall in Watts Up With That?

• “European energy policy is accelerating towards the wall” – Faced with clear evidence their energy policies are heading the wrong way, European leaders have responded by pressing harder on the accelerator, notes Evert Doornhof in the Liberum.

• “It’s the cold, stupid!” – Multiple peer-reviewed studies confirm that cold kills around 20 times more people than heat – a finding that sits awkwardly with the relentless focus on warming as the great killer, writes P. Gosselin on No Tricks Zone.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“Time for the UK Met Office to reform its junk temperature statistics before it’s too late” – Two years on from the Daily Sceptic’s ‘junk station’ scoop, the Met Office is still leaning on dodgy, heat-skewed readings from badly placed sites – and, if anything, it’s getting worse, says Chris Morrison.

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Two years ago, the Daily Sceptic shocked the climate science world by revealing that the UK Met Office was inflating recent warming by deliberately collecting recordings from stations that were so ravaged by unnatural heat sources that the figures could realistically be labelled as junk. Almost 80% of its 380 station network spread across the UK were in locations that came with possible international errors between 2°C to 5°C. Mainstream media largely ignored the story since it did not fit the political Net Zero narrative, but the information has spread rapidly across all social media. Why was the story ignored? – because the higher temperatures from the UK and other similarly corrupted recordings around the world helped boost the supposed rate of warming in global datasets, and thus raised useful alarm in promoting the Net Zero fantasy. But when the Net Zero blackouts begin and the food riots hopefully don’t start as deliberate hydrocarbons restrictions bite, the Met Office will be asked to explain its rackety role in promoting the non-existent climate emergency – an invented crisis that will be seen as one of the greatest scientific frauds of all time.

The Met Office has had two years to make much needed improvements to the siting of its weather stations. Using a Freedom of Information (FOI) request, we disclosed at the time that 77.7% of its stations were in CIMO Classes 4 and 5 with internationally-recognised ‘uncertainties’ of 2°C and 5°C respectively. We checked last September on progress only to find that over the intervening 18 months, Classes 4 and 5 now accounted for 80.6% of the total. Far from appearing to take the matter seriously, we discovered that the Met Office had opened 20 new stations in the period, with an astonishing 67.7% starting life in the Class 4/5 junk lane. It might be asked why any scientific organisation that sets itself up as an authority on providing reliable untampered ambient air temperature statistics would consider doing this.

While many climate scientists seem happy to accept Met Office recordings at face value and use them in their climate model predictions, Associate Professor Nicola Scafetta bucks the consensus crowd by proposing some obvious allowances. In a recent paper on the detection, attribution and modelling of climate change, he argued that there had been a warming bias up to 20% in the recent temperature records that could be attributed to the effects of urbanisation. Scafetta works out of the Department of Earth Sciences, Environment and Georesources at the University of Naples. He is a long-time critic of many of the excess warming-based results of computer models that drive the Net Zero political process. Using modelled information, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change seems to ignore the role of natural climate variation, and arrives at the clearly false conclusion that warming in the atmosphere since 1900 is primarily due to humans burning hydrocarbons and releasing carbon dioxide. In his latest paper, Scafetta suggests that human involvement in the warming from around 1850 may around 30%.

Pristine Class 1 sites in the UK that give a proper ambient air temperature are a vanishing breed with a recent drop in stations between our FOI requests from 24 to just 19. It seems that the UK is so crowded with airports (100+ sites), solar farms, electricity sub stations, walled gardens, along with a multitude of brick walls and tarmac surfaces, that the Met Office can only find 19 places where there is no barrier likely to affect the recording of an accurate temperature.

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• “Activist Yorkshire councillor demands the British Government make fossil fuel extraction more difficult” – A Yorkshire councillor has called for tighter restrictions on fossil fuel extraction, notes Eric Worrall in WUWT.

• “The Urban Heat Island and Urban Cool Island: a few examples for US major metropolitan areas” – Dr Roy Spencer has some further details on the corruption of the US historic temperature record.

• “Claim: global warming is bringing sexual equality to Africa” – The traditional African taboo against women fishing alongside men has been broken thanks to global warming, apparently. Eric Worrall has a sceptical take in WUWT.

• “The National Trust catches climate” – Climate Scepticism slams the National Trust for embedding climate messaging prominently in its work and communications and losing sight of its original purpose.

• “Best-selling Chinese electric car records everywhere you’ve been” – A leading Chinese electric car brand has been found to store detailed journey data indefinitely, raising serious privacy concerns, says the Telegraph.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“Give it a Rest George Monbiot” – Give it a rest George Monbiot, says Chris Morrison: decades of hysterical climate and Net Zero fearmongering have clearly left you terminally confused.

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Last month, the Guardian’s star climate and Net Zero headbanger George Monbiot was singing the praises of solar power, stating that along with wind it is “the cheapest component of our energy supply”. Alas, Our George, a posher person’s version of the down-market climate comedy clown Jim Dale, has not always been so effusive in promoting sunbeams as the answer to running a modern industrial economy. In June 2013, he noted that solar worked well at lower latitudes where peak electricity demand coincided with peak sunlight, but “less well” in places like the UK where peak winter demand occurs between 5pm to 7pm. After “initial enthusiasm”, he wrote that he was turned away from solar to give “reluctant” endorsement to large-scale wind and nuclear power.

What has changed in the meantime seemingly to alter his view, we may well ask. Nothing much. Solar still requires large and numerous subsidies, currently estimated at up to £4 billion a year, to provide intermittent, unreliable power amounting to a pitiful 6% of UK electricity. To achieve this, vast swathes of productive food-producing land are being turned into unsightly industrial dead zones. But ‘cheap’ wind and solar, along with expensive baseload-only nuclear, are all he has to justify cutting off humanity’s vital supply of hydrocarbons. Battery storage, explosive hydrogen, hydro, tidal power, cold fusion – all have failed various financial hurdles or the laws of physics and chemistry, sometimes both.

The tide of Net Zero fantasy is rapidly retreating, not least because the general public is slowly starting to understand the vital role that hydrocarbon-produced fertiliser plays in keeping world hunger at bay. Plastics, building materials and life-saving medicines can also be added to an extremely lengthy list. Anyone who wants to ‘Just Stop Oil’ needs to explain how life will continue with a 50% reduction in global food supplies resulting in horrendous decreases in populations around the world. The current problems in the Gulf with a potential 20% cut in global oil and gas are a massive wake-up call to push back on the decades-long nonsense peddled by elite, middle-class attention-seekers such as G. Monbiot.

Monbiot hates hydrocarbons with a vengeance and compares Norway’s vital exports to the British 19th century trade in opium – “a curse to be dumped on other countries”. One might wonder if he has ever tried spreading his luxury sneers and beliefs among Africans using natural gas and oil to improve crop yields, produce better drugs to battle tropical disease killers and to power water sanitation plants. Needless to say, Monbiot was a big supporter of last year’s Climate and Nature private member’s bill in the British Parliament. Mercifully, this disgusting anti-human bill did not pass since it would have cut UK hydrocarbon use to just 10% within a decade. That cull of 90% would have included the use of hydrocarbons in everything that was domestically or internationally produced. In addition to Monbiot, 200 MPs were prepared to support this high water mark of utter Net Zero stupidity.

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• “Hybrid drivers face pay-per-mile tax hit despite proof they rarely use electric mode” – Plug-in hybrid car owners have been told they will have to pay Rachel Reeves’s new electric road tax from 2028, with each mile attracting a 1.5p charge, says the Telegraph.

• “Britain in talks to sell Rolls-Royce mini nuclear reactors to Sweden” – Advanced negotiations are under way on a deal that would see Rolls-Royce supply pioneering small modular reactors to Sweden, notes the Telegraph.

• “Pubs ban climate change councillors who ended free parking” – Landlords in a Kent seaside town have refused to serve the local councillors responsible for imposing parking charges on what had been a free public car park, reports the Telegraph.

• “Britain must learn from its energy crises” – The Iran war has sent wholesale gas prices surging and exposed the incoherence of Britain’s energy policy, says John Browne in the Spectator.

• “Brace yourself for a super El Niño, scientists warn” – Researchers have warned that the world could be on course for an unusually powerful El Niño weather event that would push global temperatures to record highs and intensify extreme weather across the planet, according to the Mail.

• “Here’s why $96 million worth of electric buses sit idle across South Florida” – An investigation has found that a fleet of electric buses worth $96 million has been left out of service across South Florida, mirroring similar failures in other American cities and raising serious questions about the viability of electric public transport, reports the Climate Change Dispatch.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“The Climate Skeptic Podcast | Episode 41” – On this week’s show, Laurie speaks to Ben Pile, journalist and Daily Sceptic regular, about the BBC’s activist ‘climate editor’ Justin Rowlatt and his brass-neck U-turn on the cost of Net Zero.

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• “Obama-appointed judge Denise J. Casper blocks Trump administration’s efforts to stop ‘green new scam’” – A federal judge appointed by Barack Obama has halted Trump administration moves to rein in wind and solar development, ruling they are likely unlawful, says Breitbart.

• “New paper: US temperature extremes have declined since 1899” – A new study has found that both hot and cold temperature extremes across the US have actually fallen since 1899, reports Anthony Watts on Clintel.

• “Guardian: At 1.5°C 90% of coral reefs will die” – The Guardian has warned that 90% of coral reefs will die if warming hits 1.5°C – somewhat undermined by the fact that the world has already breached that threshold and the reefs are still there, says Eric Worrall in Watts Up With That?

• “How environmentalism’s ‘follow the science’ became the enemy of scientific progress” – The green movement’s demand that everyone defer to settled consensus has quietly morphed from a defence of science into one of the most effective weapons against genuine scientific inquiry, writes Marc Oestreich on RealClearEnergy.

• “Earth Day’s flawed premise: the planet does best when the country does more” – Every Earth Day, environmentalists demand that prosperous industrial civilisations feel guilty for their existence – but the evidence suggests wealthy, productive nations are precisely the ones best placed to clean up the planet, says Chris Johnson in the Washington Examiner.

• “BP’s new boss hit with shareholder revolt over climate rules” – New BP CEO Meg O’Neill has faced a bruising baptism of fire as shareholders clashed with the board over plans to scrap climate reporting and shift the AGM online, according to the Times.

• “The contract for crisis” – Britain’s Contracts for Difference renewable subsidy scheme has been shown to swap the occasional misery of a gas price crisis for the permanent misery of a subsidy one, writes Richard Lyon on his Substack.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

• “Why the UK and EU keep doubling down on Net Zero dogma in the face of spiralling economic dysfunction” – The hangman’s noose may concentrate minds wonderfully, but Net Zero ideologues in the UK and EU wear the noose as a fashion accessory as they double down in the face of spiralling economic dysfunction, says Dr Tilak Doshi.

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On Monday, GB News ran a story on UK Energy Secretary Ed Miliband’s vow to “double down” on the Government’s environmental agenda whilst accusing Net Zero critics of “making up nonsense and lies”. In a “strongly worded statement”, Miliband warned that abandoning the Net Zero agenda would not only risk “climate breakdown” but would also “forfeit the clean energy jobs of the future”.

The hangman’s noose concentrates the human mind wonderfully, Dr Samuel Johnson once observed. But this evidently does not apply to the government bureaucracies ensconced in Westminster or Brussels. The oil price shock triggered by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz — “the world’s worst energy crisis in history exceeding the combined shocks of both the 1970s oil prices shocks and the Ukraine war”, according to the IEA chief Fatih Birol – has led the environmental justice warriors among the ruling elite to yet more muddled thinking.

Econ 101 anyone?

Instead of applying basic economic principles — comparative advantage in international trade, portfolio diversification to manage risks and the role of marginal costs in commodity pricing — Europe’s elites have doubled down on their Net Zero dogma. The theme is now familiar: the two great energy shocks of the past five years – the 2022 Ukraine war and today’s Hormuz crisis – prompt not a return to economic rationality but a frenzied acceleration of the very policies that created the vulnerability in the first place. Economic illiteracy, it seems, is an incurable condition: those afflicted are immune to intervention by reality or logic.

Start with the fundamentals. International trade operates on David Ricardo’s principle of comparative advantage: nations specialise in what they produce relatively efficiently and trade for the rest of their needs. In the case of international trade in fossil fuels (as with other natural resources), nations produce based on the natural endowments they are blessed with.

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• “The climate litigation swindle” – A flood of lawsuits utilising junk science is seeking to bankrupt energy companies and undermine the basis of American power, warns Heather Mac Donald in City Journal.

• “Stop protecting insurance profiteers, San Francisco Chronicle, climate change is not responsible for California’s high cost of living” – In Climate Realism, Linnea Lueken slams the San Francisco Chronicle’s claims that California is suffering from the impacts of climate change and that oil companies should “pick up the tab”.

• “Britain at risk of mobile signal rationing as energy costs soar” – Telecoms firms warn they may have to ration mobile signal to save energy, according to the Sun.

• “Ed Miliband’s green energy is going to waste, says EDF boss” – The CEO of EDF has warned that green energy generated by Ed Miliband’s renewables drive is going to waste, says the Telegraph.

• “Net Zero: bin it or back it?” – The Spectator has scheduled a debate on whether Net Zero should be scrapped.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

• “The conflict between Net Zero and the energy demands of AI and crypto isn’t going away” – A “giant Yorkshire gas field” is to be exploited “to mine Bitcoin”, say the papers. No surprise there, says Ben Pile: the conflict between Net Zero and the vast energy demands of AI and crypto isn’t going away.

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