Kurt Vandenberghe, the European Commission’s Director-General for Climate Action, put the new orthodoxy in a single sentence this month. Posting after a round table with Europe’s insurers on closing the “climate protection gap”, he declared that “insurance as usual will not be sustainable”. Climate policy, he argued, is now effectively insurance policy too: whatever risk insurers decline to cover becomes uninvestable. According to Vandenberghe, a widening protection gap threatens a looming financial-stability problem for the whole European Union.

In April, the Financial Times pushed the same idea, reporting that EU insurance, pensions and financial regulators want a Brussels-backed fund of €10 billion–€65 billion for natural and climate disasters “to close the bloc’s insurance gap for floods, wildfires, heatwaves and storms”. The figures behind the pitch are stark: only €4.5 billion of the €11 billion in losses from the 2024 Valencia floods were insured; only €13 billion of the €51 billion in losses from the 2021 Ahr valley floods were covered. Natural catastrophes, the regulators said, caused more than €900 billion in damage across the EU between 1981 and 2024 — “only a fraction” of it insured.

Brussels has decided that Europe’s storms and bad weather need a new bureaucracy. The Financial Times report drew on a joint discussion paper published that same day by the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority. It proposed a continent-wide natural catastrophe insurance pool, backed by a loan facility of up to €65 billion, that would supposedly shrink Europe’s “insurance protection gap” from roughly 75% to about 10%. The pool would be financed by risk-based premiums backstopped, ultimately, by the EU’s own credit.

Spain did not wait long to raise the stakes. In a letter to Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra sent on September 2nd 2026, Madrid’s ecological transition ministry proposed a permanent European Climate Adaptation Fund financed by a tax on oil and gas company profits, common EU debt instruments and a public-private reinsurance system issuing “climate risk bonds”. Madrid’s own tally: €822 billion in weather and climate losses across the EU since 1980, with roughly a quarter of that concentrated in just the four years from 2021 to 2024.

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• “Wrong, USA Today, ‘hottest summer ever’ claim ignores the most important temperature record” – NOAA’s temperature analysis is incomplete and misleading, and the best available evidence tells a very different story about this summer’s heat, says Anthony Watts in ClimateRealism.

• “AP and Fortune ignore population trends to blame climate change for bear encounters” – Both the Associated Press and Fortune Magazine have ignored surging bear and human population trends in order to pin a rise in bear encounters on climate change, writes Linnea Lueken in ClimateRealism.

• “Lindsay Clancy strangled her kids because of ‘climate change’” – On his Substack, William M. Briggs slams a new academic paper linking temperature to child abuse.

• “Ignore rising factory costs at your peril, Ford boss warns Labour” – Ford’s Chief Executive has warned that its UK operation is under heavy pressure from soaring energy prices, reports the Telegraph.

• “The South China Sea has not been cooperating with the climate change narrative” – Data from the South China Sea continues to defy the prevailing climate change narrative, notes Kenneth Richard on No Tricks Zone.

• “The history is unsettled” – Far from being a fixed backdrop to climate debate, the historical record itself is far from settled, says Geoff Chambers in Climate Scepticism.

• “The world’s climate spending spree has bought us what, exactly?” – After $9 trillion in climate spending since 2020, the UN now admits the 1.5°C target is out of reach while demanding trillions more each year. I’ll take my chances with a warming planet, writes Stephen Moore at the Epoch Times.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“Theeeeey’re baaaaack!” – Did you miss them? After a four-year hiatus, the weird and unemployed activists of Extinction Rebellion have returned to London’s streets to resume their crazed campaign of climate-inspired chaos, says Ben Pile.

In contrast to the social and news media entourages that used to follow them, the return of Extinction Rebellion (XR) to Westminster’s streets has received little attention. A few tweets, mostly from those affected by today’s occupation of Tufton Street, drew more notice than XR’s own. “The unemployed and weird take on 55 Tufton street,” said Anna Ridgway of Students for Liberty. “Soapdodgers at it again outside 55 Tufton Street,” said the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s Ted Newson.

The group officially declared that its style of “public disruption as a primary tactic” had come to an end at the end of 2022. “What’s needed now most” in its place, they claimed “is to disrupt the abuse of power and imbalance, to bring about a transition to a fair society that works together to end the fossil fuel era”. But the truth is that there was no bunch of idiots more capable of drawing rage – not against the climate crisis and the cause of the climate crisis, but against themselves and their radical environmentalism. It had been founded as part of the broader ‘Climate Mobilisation’ movement, which aimed to radicalise the public by doubling down on climate alarmism. But instead it beclowned its own fold.

As I’ve pointed out: just look at them. Do they look to anybody else like the kind of people we might turn to for expertise on society’s functioning? They are not dressed to be taken seriously. And they do not argue like people asking to be taken seriously. Indeed, they style themselves as absurd creatures. There cannot be a more counterproductive strategy of public engagement. It is alienating, weird and irritating. And it was very soon shown to have been so at the so-called 2019 “battle of Canning Town”, where the rough-and-ready commuters showed XR activists exactly what they thought of being obstructed.

But as Oscar Wilde once observed, “There’s only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that’s not being talked about.” And so it has been a miserable three years for the eco-narcissists who had to get used to the indulgence of the sympathetic press. True, those who were desperate enough could have joined Just Stop Oil (JSO) or some other XR franchise. But JSO itself declared victory on the first week of the new Labour government, following the July 2024 General Election. Citing “the new governments’ commitment to end new oil and gas licensing”, JSO seemed to be explaining its winding down. Besides, many of its terminal narcissists were now behind bars.

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• “Amazon admits selling fake ‘Net Zero’ plugs to UK shoppers” – Amazon has acknowledged it is still listing dangerous fake “energy saving” plugs that pose a fire risk, despite having previously assured MPs the products would be removed, says the Telegraph.

• “Approving oil and gas licences in North Sea ‘vital to UK growth’” – A poll of economists shows eight in 10 back the approval of new licences for oil and gas exploration in the North Sea, according to the Times.

• “Expert’s stark winter warning as families brace for energy bill hike” – A leading analyst has warned that Britain is facing a perfect storm of the Iran war, record-low gas reserves and a water shortage in Norway that could send energy bills sharply higher, reports the Mail.

• “Reform vows to block carbon clean-up in Midlands” – Reform has promised to stop the Peak Cluster scheme, which would store carbon emissions from cement and lime producers in Derbyshire and Staffordshire under the Irish Sea, says the Times.

• “Circular logic all the way down” – The circular reasoning embedded in global climate models makes them fundamentally unfit for purpose, argues Mike Jonas in Watts Up With That?

• “Hottest summer on record? A closer look at US data” – An examination of NOAA temperature data raises serious questions about whether the summer of 2026 was genuinely the hottest on record in the US, writes Chris Martz for Clintel.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“The big song and dance about Reform’s donations” – Two billionaires have given £72 million to Reform and the establishment has cried foul. Yet Christopher Hohn’s charitable foundation pumps £175 million a year into NGOs to spew out pro-Green propaganda, says Ben Pile.

This week, two crypto billionaires announced that they would each be supporting the Reform Party with substantial donations worth £1 million per month, each month until the next general election. The combined total of £72 million – each greater than any earlier single donation to a UK political party – has enraged many commentators. But behind this rage are levels of hypocrisy and special pleading that are astronomical.

On Friday, Ben Delo announced in a Telegraph article that he was “giving Reform millions to make the next election a fair fight”. Labour, explained Delo, were burning nearly £4 million a month, and the Tories nearly £2.3 million. Reform, despite having spent most of the 25 months since the election leading in opinion polls, was only managing to raise £1.8 million. The party with a solid chance of forming the next government certainly needs to develop its policy platform and, at the very least, if it is to form the Opposition, also needs to communicate with the public. “I want a fair fight and a level playing field”, he concluded. Not to be outdone, fellow businessman Christopher Harborne announced on Saturday that he would match Delo’s contribution.

This has ignited much hostile commentary about British politics being biddable. The Sunday papers featured the stories on their front pages. “£72 million gift to Reform stuns politics,” claimed the Sunday Times. “72 million to buy Britain ‘could be illegal’,” whinged the Observer, adding that “Crypto billionaires’ donations to Reform may break new law, anti-corruption tsar says.” That ‘tsar’ is none other than Labour Party peer and former minister of a number of things under previous Labour governments, Baroness Margaret Hodge. Inside the paper, Hodge was revealed to have been “shocked, stunned and alarmed” and that the sum “represents a dangerous challenge to democracy when a couple of billionaires can capture one of the political parties”.

Speaking of corruption, however, it turns out that the “law” which would punish such outlandish behaviour as billionaires not aligning with Labour or Conservative parties does not yet exist. And even more curiously, it may apply retrospectively. It is remarkable, when one thinks about it, that an ‘anti-corruption tsar’ would be speaking about ad hoc, arbitrary legislation that suits the party of government of which she is a member, while invoking a “dangerous challenge to democracy”.

“With fears that the cash from billionaires could distort British politics”, explained the Independent, “[Angela] Rayner warned that Reform should not count on keeping all the money as new law Labour is pushing through parliament will be ‘backdated’ to cover all donations from March this year.”

One wonders whether it would be possible to buy propaganda that more successfully demonstrates that a corrupt political establishment has reached the point of defending arbitrary seizure to protect itself from challenge. How much would it cost to convince people that the rules are changed on a whim to suit the Government? More than £72 million, one would guess – and more than that sum spread out over three years i.e., £2 million a month. Nigel and his donors surely owe Ange and Maggie a thank-you note.

But worse than the press and establishment putting on this pearl-clutching performance is its insult to our intelligence. Their stories would require us to believe that a budget of £2 million a month is sufficient to “buy” British politics. The sum total of £72 million is roughly equivalent to £1 per person in the UK. Over three years, that is about 33p per person per year. How exactly is a sum of money equivalent to a second-class stamp per voter going to change that voter’s mind? What magic spells exist to turn such modest sums into governance of an economy worth £3 trillion and nearly 70 million people? The conception of “politics”, and indeed of “democracy”, that populate leftoid conspiracy theories about “funding” excludes any notion of the demos or the poli. And that is very telling.

My interest, of course, is in green politics, and I have – since I was first accused of being in the employ of “Big Oil” – been interested in the funding of the green movement. I have never received a penny from a company with coal, oil or gas interests to my knowledge. Yet “funding” became the major concept seemingly dividing pure science from its denial in the climate debate. I argued that the market for hydrocarbon energy did not exist merely for the benefit of the companies that produce it. So the conspiracy theory of “Big Oil” paying people to argue for abundant and affordable energy leaves out the entire public. And, it turns out that behind the cross-party Westminster consensus on climate policy, a very large amount of money had been invested in sustaining the democratic deficit.

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• “Race targets and hormone therapy for all: the Greens’ plan for the NHS” – In the Spectator, Noa Hoffman says the Green Party’s vision for the NHS – including race targets, universal hormone therapy and plant-based menus – is unlikely to prove an electoral draw.

• “Second Green deputy leader is also a landlord – despite party’s stance” – A second Green Party Deputy Leader has been revealed to be a landlord, despite the party previously claiming she was not, reveals the Telegraph.

• “Net Zero grid upgrades running out of control” – The cost of upgrading Britain’s electricity grid to meet Net Zero targets is spiralling into hundreds of billions with no easy solutions in sight, writes Paul Homewood in Watts Up With That?

• “William to announce electric tuk tuks as finalists for Earthshot prize” – Mahindra, India’s largest maker of electric autorickshaws, is among 15 finalists shortlisted for the Prince of Wales’s Earthshot prize, reports the Mail.

• “Germany enters heating season with historically low gas reserve fill levels” – Germany is heading into the heating season with gas reserve fill levels at historic lows, warns P. Gosselin at NoTricksZone.

• “‘The climate crisis is now a continent-wide economic security emergency’” – The United Nations’ top climate official has declared the climate crisis a “continent-wide economic security emergency”. Eric Worrall reacts in Watts Up With That?

• “Environmental priorities vs ‘climate change’” – Bjorn Lomborg’s landmark 2020 analysis of how climate change and climate policies rank against other pressing environmental and development priorities is well worth revisiting, says Robert Bradley Jr at Master Resource.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“Why is no one talking about Gross Zero carbon emissions?” – ‘Net’ Zero is a con, says Professor James Alexander, like trying to save the world with a sleight of hand. Gross Zero would be more honest. But all too often it’s the words we use that hide the truth.

Philology. Study it. We need it more than ever. Become a philologist. Love words. Care about the logos. Why? Because our words lie and conceal the truth. Let’s just consider one example: the word ‘carbon’.

What does carbon mean?

As usual, it means different things to different political sides. Most simply,

• For the standard Establishment sheeplike administrator whose highest ambition is to be standing around while Burnham makes an inspirational postmanpatlike speech about delivery: carbon means filth, dirt, soot, pollution, capitalism, corporations, oil spills, refinery skylines, bad consciences, global warming, climate crisis, etc.

• For those of us on the other side: carbon means, alas, the stupidity associated with making a fuss about all of that: it means the ideology of that, the jolly hockeysticks and mad modelling and dubious data. It is nothing to do with us. It is an imposition. Aye, as usual, we are playing black, not white (chess metaphor). We didn’t start it: they did.

Carbon is, of course, an element. So all of this language is bogus. For what ‘carbon’ really is, here, is a synecdoche for ‘carbon dioxide’.

Let us look at the strange word ‘decarbonisation’. Looked at literally, it makes almost no sense. Taking the carbon out of something is far from easy, and certainly not a standard sort of activity. (Well, I suppose mining coal could considered decarbonising the ground.)

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• “British car industry is approaching the end of the road” – High costs, restricted access to the EU, and the forced shift to electric vehicles are combining to push mass-market UK car manufacturing towards collapse, notes the Times.

• “Khan prepares to ban log burners in clean air clampdown” – Sadiq Khan is pushing to outlaw wood stoves in private homes across the capital by introducing area-specific bans through new zero-emission zones, reports the Telegraph.

• “Burnham ‘running scared’ of the Greens as he delays drilling approval” – The Prime Minister is set to postpone approving drilling of the North Sea’s Jackdaw oil field until after the Holborn and St Pancras by-election, in a move critics say reveals his fear of Green competition, according to the Mail.

• “Green leader Polanski to take on Labour for Keir Starmer’s former seat” – Zack Polanski has been unveiled as the Green Party’s candidate for the October 8th Holborn and St Pancras by-election after local members selected the populist leader to challenge Labour on its own ground, says the Mail.

• “Zack Polanski blames council for being listed to vote under two names” – The Green Party leader was registered to vote as David Paulden when he last ran for Parliament, and appeared under both names in 2020 and 2021, with Polanski attributing the anomaly to a council error, notes the Mail.

• “Lammy: my seat is at risk from Green-voting hipsters” – David Lammy has admitted that Labour can no longer take his Tottenham constituency for granted amid a surge in Green support, reports the Telegraph.

• “Women ‘quit Greens over extraordinary instances of misogyny’” – A motion submitted for the Greens’ autumn conference makes explosive allegations that the party’s leadership has minimised “extraordinary instances of misogyny”, according to the Mail.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“The Climate Skeptic Podcast | Episode 61” – On this week’s episode of the Climate Sceptic podcast, meteorologist and statistician William M. Briggs takes a closer look at Britain’s heatwaves and the claims being made about them, from temperature records and ‘excess deaths’ to climate models, statistics and the assumptions behind them.

Follow William on X. Read his Science Is Not The Answer Substack here. Watch his YouTube chann…

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• “Global coal demand hits record high as Iran war cuts gas supplies” – The conflict with Iran is driving a record surge in global coal consumption as gas supplies are disrupted, according to the Telegraph.

• “The progressives’ war on reliable and affordable electricity” – Progressive energy policies are systematically undermining the reliable and affordable electricity that modern economies depend on, notes Geoffrey Pohanka in ClimateRealism.

• “Labour must go further and faster in the North Sea” – In the Spectator, Michael Simmons argues that Labour’s Net Zero agenda is stifling the North Sea oil and gas industry at a moment when growth is desperately needed.

• “Claim: 1.5°C global warming is not a magic number” – The case that the 1.5°C warming threshold is an arbitrary target rather than a scientifically decisive boundary – and that climate alarm must press on regardless – is examined by Eric Worrall in Watts Up With That?

• “New study: the Antarctic ice sheet gained mass from 2020-2024 due to staggering snow and ice accumulation” – A new study finding that the Antarctic ice sheet gained mass between 2020 and 2024 owing to exceptional snow and ice accumulation is reported by Kenneth Richard in the No Tricks Zone.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“Want to Get Rich? Join an Environmental Protection Charity” – With CEO pay frequently approaching a million dollars, environmental protection charities are clearly the place to make your fortune, says David Craig. But should the boss of Ducks Unlimited really get $500k?

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You’ll all probably know that an undercover sting operation by a newly-formed investigative group called Verbatim — which is backed by the US-linked climate journalism group Centre for Climate Reporting (CCR) — targeted senior officials of the UK political party Reform UK.

When hearing about this, I began idly Googling US-based climate and environmental non-profit organisations. Within a couple of minutes, I came across a list of what appeared to be the highest-paid head honchos at environmental and nature protection non-profits.

Before you read any further, please make sure you are sitting down in a safe place with no risk of personal injury when you see what follows.

I won’t even comment, I’ll just list the salaries and total compensation packages of some of the leading environmental and nature protection organisations, many of which are so ‘important’ that (like me till five minutes before I wrote this) you’ve probably never even heard of them. Here are the Top 10:

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1. Carter Roberts, President and CEO, World Wildlife Fund

Roberts, who has led the massive international conservation group since 2005, remains one of the environmental world’s top-paid leaders. His base pay in 2022 was $904,841, according to the World Wildlife Fund’s tax records. Roberts’s total reported compensation that year was $1,204,775.

2. Fred Krupp, President, Environmental Defense Fund

EDF’s leader of nearly four decades took home base pay of $669,771 in 2021, the group’s records show. Krupp’s total compensation that year was $922,022.

3. Jennifer Morris, CEO, the Nature Conservancy

Morris, who started as the conservation group’s CEO in May 2020, earned $732,138 in base pay during her first full year on the job in 2021, the tax filing shows. Her total compensation that year was $758,013.

4. Elizabeth Gray, CEO, National Audubon Society

Gray was promoted in November 2021 to become the group’s permanent CEO. Her base pay that year was $462,069; her total compensation was $705,458. Her pay that year included a contractual retention and sign-on bonus, the tax filing says. She also received a discretionary bonus of $46,514 approved by the board of directors.

(Gray’s predecessor, David Yarnold, left in May 2021. His total compensation that year was $1,276,173, including severance and other benefits.)

5. Mitchell Bernard, Interim President, Natural Resources Defense Council

NRDC’s then-executive director Bernard stepped in to lead the group in early 2021 when Gina McCarthy left her post as president and CEO to join the Biden White House. Bernard held the role through August of that year and is now NRDC’s Chief Counsel. His base pay in 2021 was $479,498, the records show. His total compensation that year was $705,195

6. Janis Searles Jones, CEO, Ocean Conservancy

Jones has led the ocean conservation group since 2017. Her base compensation in 2022 was $440,860, the latest filing shows. Her total compensation that year was $692,836.

7. Jamie Rappaport Clark, President and CEO, Defenders of Wildlife

Clark, who has led her conservation group since 2011, said she plans to step down this year. In 2022, Clark’s base pay was $531,907, according to the group’s most recent tax filing. Her total compensation was $616,137.

8. Andrew Sharpless, CEO, Oceana

Sharpless, who retired in 2024, received base pay in 2022 of $499,936; his total compensation that year was $546,078.

9. Adam Putnam, CEO, Ducks Unlimited

The former Florida Republican congressman has led the conservation group since 2019. His base pay was $339,805 in 2021, and his total compensation that year was $538,303.

10. Abbie Dillen, President, Earthjustice

Dillen took over as the green group’s leader in 2018. She earned base pay of $473,920 in 2021, and a total compensation package of $536,931.

The above salaries are from 2021 and 2022. Doubtless they’ve all increased substantially since then, as so often happens in organisations which seem to enjoy lavishly spending other people’s money on themselves.

I promised I wouldn’t comment. But I’ll briefly break my promise. I don’t want to insult people who like ducks and be reported to the police for ‘duckophobia’, but how on earth does someone in an organisation protecting ducks, Ducks Unlimited, get paid $538,303? And further down on the list, at number 15, how is someone leading Trout Unlimited pocketing $441,847?

You probably suspect that I think it’s April 1st and I’m pulling your leg. But I’m not. Ducks Unlimited and Trout Unlimited really do exist. And, of course, if the top person is raking in hundreds of thousands a year, there are bound to be a whole slew of directors and senior managers also pocketing eye-watering amounts of donors’ cash.

The other issue I noticed from briefly glancing at the list was how similar many of these organisations seemed. Some are so similar as their names are nearly identical. For example, Oceana claims to be “the largest international advocacy organisation focused solely on ocean conservation”. Oceana’s mission is apparently to protect and restore our oceans. But we also have Ocean Conservancy, which tells us that it is a US-based organization that works globally to protect the ocean. Ocean Conservancy proudly proclaims: “Together, we are securing a healthy ocean and a thriving planet.”

When I wrote my 2015 book The Great Charity Scandal I worried about what I felt to be the rather generous six-figure salaries many of the larger UK-based charities paid their executives. But I had no idea of the hundreds of thousands being showered on the bosses of many US charities, which make UK charity bosses look like paupers in comparison.

Good grief. I clearly made the wrong career choices. I should have gone into an environment and nature protection non-profit – ideally in the USA. That seems to be the way to get really rich.

Anyway, if you want to be astonished and amazed, here’s a link to what seem to be the Top 30 most highly-paid executives in mainly US-based environment organisations. Enjoy!

David Craig is the author of There is No Climate Crisis, available (for now) as an e-book or paperback from Amazon.

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• “Britain needs cheap energy but Net Zero isn’t delivering” – With Ofgem’s energy price cap set to rise a further 4% in October to £1,723 for a typical dual-fuel household, the case that Net Zero is failing to deliver affordable energy grows ever harder to ignore, says Kathryn Porter in the Telegraph.

• “The ONS, the doubt and the lost benefit” – The ONS and UN keep stacking the scales towards heat deaths while sidelining cold risks, writes John Ridgway at Climate Scepticism. There is just too much clumsy work going on here for it to be perfectly innocent.

• “Claim: solar saved the day when heatwaves forced shutdowns of European nuclear plants” – In Watts Up With That?, Eric Worrall challenges the claim that solar energy rode to the rescue when heatwaves forced European nuclear plants offline.

• “Wrong, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, nuclear power isn’t the reliability problem” – In ClimateRealism, Anthony Watts argues that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ claim that nuclear power is unreliable is flatly contradicted by the facts.

• “UK energy schizophrenia (all pain, no gain)” – UK energy planners are falsely blaming geology rather than Net Zero for the decline in North Sea production, says Robert Bradley Jr in Watts Up With That?

• “How undersea geological activity could influence El Niños” – In Climate Change Dispatch, Thomas Richard writes that undersea eruptions, seafloor heat and the Ring of Fire may be an overlooked geological driver of El Niño events.

• “Apocalypse not: decades of failed doomsday predictions refuse to die” – From resource depletion and mass starvation to peak oil and climate catastrophe, dire predictions have repeatedly failed to materialise – yet continue to shape policy, says Wilfred Reilly in Climate Change Dispatch.

• “Father’s VW EV repeatedly accelerated on its own” – A single father has vowed never to buy a Volkswagen EV again after he says it assumed a mind of its own on a busy road, almost killing him and his young children, reports the Mail.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“Green rules mean Britain can’t even recycle a fridge” – Fridges are piling up in laybys across the country as recycling centres refuse to take anymore. It’s the backfiring result, in part, of pettifogging green waste disposal regulation, says Ben Pile.

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You may be one of those unfortunates whose fridge or freezer stopped working during the summer. Or you may have had a new kitchen installed. If so, your hopes of being free of your old appliance may have been dashed over the summer and into this month. Recycling centres nationwide have been refusing to accept fridges and freezers, with notices advising that the question of what to do with them is your own problem now. Recycling, once the main plank of the green dream, is in crisis.

At issue is a ‘backlog’ of processing after demand for disposal of cooling appliances began exceeding waste processors’ capacity. According to recycling industry compliance non-profit Ecogenesys, this backlog has two main causes. First, hot weather tends to increase the number of cooling appliances that consumers desire to replace. Second, and more significantly, a number of major recycling processors have gone out of business over the last year or so.

One of those processors was Unimetals, whose Newport site in Wales had a capacity to recycle one million appliances per year. The company went into liquidation last November. In February this year, a fire took out a newly constructed plant operated by European Metal Recycling at its Darlaston site, which had previously boasted a capacity to recycle a fridge “every 30 seconds”. And then in April, a plant in Thetford was also damaged by fire, causing Wiser Recycling’s capacity to process such waste to be lost. With all this capacity lost, England’s remaining processors were unable to meet demand, and the fridges started piling up at local waste recycling centres.

At the core of the problem is the substances that makes fridges work – the gases whose cooling effect is achieved by vapour compression and decompression, and the foam that insulates the appliance. In the past, fridges used ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbon (CFCs) gases which were also common in the foams. Though CFC’s have been replaced by flammable hydrocarbons, environmental regulations require that waste processors can accommodate either species of coolant and foaming agent. Regulations and legislation governing the disposal of Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) have grown increasingly strict in recent years, as have green rules more broadly.

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• “Green movement’s selective outrage over ESA reforms” – Anti-development activists have responded with “crocodile tears” to the Trump administration’s reforms to the Endangered Species Act, says Vijay Jayaraj at CO2 Coalition.

• “Sadiq Khan’s Net Zero targets ‘will hit growth’” – The Mayor of London’s proposal to cap carbon emissions for new offices, shops and warehouses at 605kg per square metre threatens to damage economic growth, reports the Telegraph.

• “Heathrow expansion incompatible with UK legal climate targets, major report finds” – New modelling finds there is no credible scenario in which Heathrow expansion can proceed without blowing a hole in the UK’s legally binding climate targets, writes Paul Homewood on his Not a Lot of People Know That blog.

• “Climate extremists target, attack large-scale power grid infrastructure in Germany” – Climate extremists have carried out attacks on large-scale power grid infrastructure in Germany, reports P. Gosselin at No Tricks Zone.

• “Nepal wants a $5 billion climate handout from UN for a Himalayan bedrock collapse” – In Legal Insurrection, Leslie Eastman says the UN should reject Nepal’s $5 billion climate funding request over a Himalayan bedrock collapse unless it would also stump up for recovery from an American earthquake or tsunami.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“OECD risks US wrath by pushing ahead with climate finance despite Washington calling time on Net Zero” – The OECD is risking US wrath by pushing ahead with green finance initiatives despite Washington calling time on Net Zero, says Dr Tilak Doshi. A new report on climate regulation has Brussels’s fingerprints all over it.

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• “America depends on small businesses. Small businesses depend on reliable energy” – In RealClearEnergy, Ted Ellis argues that the political push away from a dependable electricity grid threatens the small businesses that form the backbone of the American economy.

• “Norway’s oil and gas production to plummet in threat to UK supplies” – Norway has warned that its North Sea gas production will begin to fall as soon as 2030, threatening crucial supplies that have helped Britain keep the lights on, according to OilPrice.com.

• “We passed peak ‘climate change’ (um) research” – Data from Google Scholar suggests the torrent of academic papers carrying the keyword “climate change” has crested and is now in decline, writes William M. Briggs on his blog.

• “Leading physicist debunks foundation of Canada’s Net Zero goals” – Professor William A. van Wijngaarden of York University in Toronto argues that there is no human-made climate crisis and that efforts to “stop climate change” will cause serious damage to society, according to CO2 Coalition.

• “Aussie activists moaning about massive new ‘climate bomb’ gas field in the Northern Territory” – Australian climate activists are denouncing a major new gas field development in the Northern Territory as a “climate bomb”, insisting that no amount of jobs or economic benefit can justify it, writes Eric Worrall in Watts Up With That?

• “And they’re off!” – The BBC is scaremongering about climate change threatening seahorses, despite evidence that human activity is the real threat, says Mark Hodgson at Cliscep.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“Flight of the Jaguar” – Jaguar has announced 4,000 job cuts in the UK, blaming Brexit, Trump and China. But the real culprit is the misbegotten shift to EVs without checking anyone wants to buy them, says Paul Homewood.

“OECD risks US wrath by pushing ahead with climate finance despite Washington calling time on Net Zero” – The OECD is risking US wrath by pushing ahead with green finance initiatives despite Washington calling time on Net Zero, says Dr Tilak Doshi. A new report on climate regulation has Brussels’s fingerprints all over it.

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Jaguar is to cut 4,000 jobs in the UK, according to the BBC:

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) is to cut 4,000 jobs as the carmaker struggles with Chinese competition, US tariffs and the transition to electric vehicles.

The cuts will happen over the next two years and will mostly affect the head office, which is based in the UK.

Chief Executive P.B. Balaji said the firm was “committed to supporting everyone with care, fairness and respect” through the redundancy process. The automotive industry faces significant challenges, with technological change amidst intense competition and ongoing geo-political uncertainty.”

JLR is hoping to achieve the cuts through voluntary redundancy, with a window open until October 4th, but said it would make compulsory redundancies with less generous terms if necessary. Affected staff will receive an email in the coming days.

The redundancies are being made in an attempt to save £1.7 billion over the next two years.

JLR has blamed Brexit, Trump and China, but the real culprits are closer to home.

It was a different story five years ago, when the BBC reported:

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On September 2nd, the OECD published an 88-page report, funded by the European Union and produced in cooperation with the European Commission, setting out a framework for risk assessment of Net Zero commitments for De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB), the Dutch central bank. It carries the OECD’s imprimatur, but Brussels paid for it and Brussels co-wrote it — an odd arrangement given that the OECD’s own membership includes a United States Treasury that has spent the past 18 months telling the IMF and the World Bank to abandon precisely this kind of work and instead refocus on narrower, more traditional mandates. Bureaucracies exist to produce reports, and reports, evidently, are what we get, however far the political winds beneath them have already shifted.

The timing could hardly be worse for the study’s underlying premise. The climate-alarm narrative that has underwritten a decade and a half of ‘green finance’ activism is unravelling in full public view. The scientific committee that builds scenarios for the IPCC’s next assessment report has retired RCP8.5 and its successor SSP5-8.5 — the lurid ‘business as usual’ emissions pathway that supplied the statistical backbone for a generation of doomsday headlines — calling it implausible. Acting on demands from the Trump administration, the World Bank’s board voted at the end of June to retire its target of directing 45% of lending to projects with climate co-benefits. I made the case in these pages last month that the ECB and Bank of England continue doubling down on climate regulation even as green finance collapses around them. I also argued in July that the whole alarmist edifice is now engaged in a desperate rear-guard action to save a narrative the data no longer support. Into this rubble steps the OECD, handing the Dutch central bank an 88-page manual on how to keep the faith.

There is something almost quaint about the OECD’s involvement at all. The organisation counts among its members a United States that has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement and pushed the multilateral development banks to abandon climate lending targets. It is not obvious Washington signed off on its own club publishing an 88-page manual instructing a European central bank how to entrench climate criteria in bank supervision. But the OECD functions as a technical secretariat and when the European Commission foots the bill and co-authors the terms of reference, its imprimatur becomes less a mark of international agreement than a convenient laundering of a Brussels policy preference through an ostensibly neutral institution.

A study in search of a problem

Strip away the technical language of physical emissions-intensity metrics and disclosure frameworks, and the study’s own description of its purpose gives the game away. The study exists to help DNB assess legal and reputational risks that arise when a bank’s stated decarbonisation targets fail to keep pace with what it had pledged. Note that what is being risk-managed here is not the solvency of Dutch banks nor the stability of the payments system or anything resembling a conventional prudential concern. It is the risk that a bank might fall short of a voluntary climate pledge it was pressured into making in the first place — pressure that, as it happens, came substantially from the same Brussels apparatus that has just commissioned a study on how to police it.

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• “Manual for judges saying ‘how science works’ is very wrong on climate science” – At CFACT, David Wojick argues that a US judicial guidance manual gets the science wrong and risks steering judges towards ideological narratives rather than the facts on climate science.

• “Sorry, Fortune, climate change is hardly the prime influence on sardine fisheries” – Chinese overfishing and natural cycles are the real culprits behind falling sardine catches and rising prices – not climate change, writes Linnea Lueken at ClimateRealism.

• “Britain braces for crippling food crisis as ‘Godzilla’ El Niño stirs” – As weather threatens the world’s harvests, the prospect of a devastating food crisis looms, warns Hans van Leeuwen in the Telegraph.

• “The Great Barrier Reef refuses to die on schedule” – In the Los Angeles Times, Bjorn Lomborg argues that it takes considerable nerve for climate scientists to spend decades forecasting the reef’s death and then claim credit for its historic resilience.

• “What to do about Net Zero” – On his Substack, David Turver sets out what should be done about Net Zero, drawing on a speech he delivered to the Reform fringe.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“Greenland’s icecap grew this year” – Greenland’s icecap is doing just fine, says Paul Homewood. It’s still much larger than it has been for most of the last 10,000 years and if it is shrinking at all, it is doing so no faster than a century ago.

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Greenland’s icecap is melting away thanks to global warming, at least that is what we are told. According to the EU’s European State of the Climate 2025 Report, the ice sheet lost 139 Gt last year. They say that is equivalent to about 1.5 times the amount of ice stored in all the glaciers in the European Alps, and raised global mean sea level by 0.4 mm. (A gigatonne is one billion tonnes.) Since 1972, losses have amounted to 5,747 Gt. The rate of ice loss has increased by around five times since the 1980s and is expected to continue increasing beyond the end of the century.

These amounts sound terrifying, which is of course the object of the exercise – at least until you realise that at present rates it would take Greenland 27,000 years to melt away.

I am always suspicious when ‘scientists’ present trends since the 1970s, a time when the Earth had gone through three decades of cooling and there were genuine fears among both scientists and world leaders about the return of the Little Ice Age. I am even more suspicious when I discover that official data about the Greenland ice sheet is publicly available back to 1840.

In 2021, a peer-reviewed study calculated the annual changes in the ice sheet mass balance since 1840. (The heavy black line represents the net changes, which is of relevance to this discussion):

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• “Labour tax raids make US gas cheaper than North Sea supplies” – Labour’s tax raids have made producing North Sea gas more expensive than importing it from the US, energy experts warn, notes the Telegraph.

• “Sorry, Fortune, climate change is hardly the prime influence on sardine fisheries” – In ClimateRealism, Linnea Lueken argues that Fortune magazine is wrong to blame declining sardine catches on climate change, pointing instead to Chinese overfishing and natural cycles as the real culprits.

• “Secretary General António Guterres is on track to be the UN’s biggest climate loser” – While his predecessors secured the UNFCCC, the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, António Guterres looks set to leave office empty-handed on climate, notes Eric Worrall in Watts Up With That.

• “Met Office admit Kew is a class 5 junk site” – A Freedom of Information request has revealed that the Met Office classifies the Kew Gardens weather station as a class 5 site – the lowest possible rating for data quality – notes Paul Homewood in Not a Lot of People Know That.

• “Taxpayer subsidies for Chinese batteries? Just say no!” – A coalition of free market energy groups has written to US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent urging him to close a legal loophole that allows Chinese-owned battery component manufacturers to receive taxpayer-funded subsidies, reports Master Resource.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“Green Censorship Industrial Complex Turns to AI to Shut Down Debate as Climate Consensus Collapses” – Put on the back foot by the collapsing climate consensus, the green Censorship Industrial Complex and its billionaire backers have turned to AI to try to close down a debate they are fast losing control of, says Ben Pile.

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