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Implausible, by Chris Morrison (Free Speech Press, 2026)

Movements obsessed with the imminent end of the world have recurred throughout history. They all share the conviction that Armageddon will be caused by the sins of humanity, and that only self-flagellation will propitiate the angry gods. They’re usually fixated with coercing others into the same mindset.

In the past these movements were religious in nature. God, or any god, they claimed was enraged by evil human beings who therefore needed punishing. We, however, live in a secular age. The present orthodoxy has been recast in a bizarre contemporary conflation of pseudoscience and religious fervour to create a unique variant on ancient and medieval mentalities. “Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.” (George Orwell, 1984.)

Chris Morrison’s Implausible is a short book (100 pages) which these days, when a gnat’s attention span is about the most any author gets, is a good idea. The cover has some wonderful headlines from recent years. My favourite is the Guardian’s ‘Joanna Lumley says wartime-rationing could help solve climate crisis’ (October 26th 2021). What’s next? Climate Crisis Precautions wardens berating residents with a revived “Put That Light Out!” and “Turn That Boiler Off!”?

Apart from the prelims and end matter, Implausible has five chapters on “Hydrocarbons”, “Climate Science”, “UK Met Office”, “Net Zero” and “Climate Clots and Comedians” (the latter including such luminaries as George Monbiot and his litany of date-locked apocalyptic predictions that have never come to pass). The book is, if you will, an exposé of a phenomenon Charles Mackay described in 1841:

Every age has its peculiar folly; some scheme, project, or phantasy into which it plunges, spurred on by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement or the mere force of imitation. Failing in these, it has some madness, to which it is goaded by political or religious causes, or both combined.

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841) (Chapter on Crusades)

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In the Foreword, Toby Young says: “Reading it will make you angry — and you should be angry, very angry. But you’ll also be very entertained.” His take on Chris Morrison’s theme is that “the climate agenda is a thinly disguised power grab by the lanyard classes, determined to assert control over the unruly masses who are proving stubbornly reluctant to give up their sentimental attachment to freedom”.

The whole ‘climate crisis’ all made sense to me when I realised it’s about a very small number of people making a vast amount of money out of, and controlling, everyone else.

Toby’s words could easily be applied to how medieval aristocracies sought to control the peasantry, or how the Victorian landed, political and commercial elite kept the working classes on a tight leash. Plus ça change.

One of the problems with a book like this is that it’s difficult to imagine a screeching eco-protester or a self-righteous Green MP or councillor buying a copy, let alone reading it or being converted. In our polarised era it’s increasingly difficult to have a reasoned debate about anything.

Morrison kicks off with the bombshell that on April 7th 2026 the “United Nations-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) admitted that a set of computer model assumptions commonly known as RCP8.5 were ‘implausible’”. It thereby fired a missile right through the Armageddon stories fuelled by its “high emissions worst-case scenario” that we have been bombarded with by armies of credulous journalists and the Met Office among others for the last few decades. This is important because the whole ‘climate crisis’ cult was only ever going to falter if its own proponents start giving up on it.

Morrison bears down on the meretricious consequences of the RCP8.5 assumptions. “Easily convinced politicians have been taken in by invented claims, and Net Zero rules and regulations have flowed through the economy and society.” Result? Among other outrages, British consumers are now stumping up an extra £200 billion on their electricity bills.

Sir David Attenborough does not escape Morrison’s attention. In 2022 the national hero and holy relic warned that the Arctic was on course to be summer ice free by 2035. But it’s been stable for 20 years now, says Morrison, who points out that polar bears are currently on a roll and mysteriously not teetering into extinction.

To that we can add the mysterious failure of Antarctica to be ice-free by 2023 as well as the apparent downright ignorance of past fluctuations like the high of 1964 not matched again until 2014, or the low of 1966 matching a recent dip. This seems to be a common feature of today’s pseudoscience: an inclination to regard any recent deviation from the mean as unprecedented and of weapons-grade significance.

Like so many people of my age I can vividly recall the insistent predictions (including from my teachers) in the early 1970s that the oil was about to run out, the atmosphere was about to be unbreathable and overpopulation would all conspire to bring about a collapse of civilisation.

The funny thing is that pseudoscience is most likely to be peddled by people who claim to be scientists. Morrison homes in on the problem:

Over the last few years, the implausible pseudoscience of individual weather attribution has taken hold, driven in part by the need of lawfare activists to pin bad weather on industrial operations. This involves comparing two imaginary atmospheres with different levels of CO₂ and producing a computer model finding that an individual weather event is X times more likely to be caused by humans.

Next a fusillade of press releases is sent out to credulous, copy-hungry journalists desperate to fill their bulletins. I can bear witness to that because a long time ago in another galaxy far, far away, I used to work for BBC radio news. Slow news days are always the most dangerous. The hacks reach out for the pile of press releases sent in by charities, political spin-doctors, publicity-hunting commercial concerns, and – of course – ‘scientists’ of every conceivable hue desperate for prominence in their fields.

The next thing you know is that something which might never have been a story has been propelled into people’s homes, often terrorising children, and taken on a life of its own. The whole edifice of scientific publication has been consumed by a movement to suppress anything which diverges from the Holy Writ of the impending end of the world. Citing several chilling examples, Morrison observes:

There is certainly a ‘consensus’ in much mainstream climate science publishing – a consensus of fear that unless the agreed narrative is followed, the chances of publication tend towards zero.

The message might be shifting, something that Morrison mentions. On Friday October 23rd 2026, Radio 4’s Six O’Clock News covered Storm Austen and the damage it had wrought, as well as the prospect of two more storms to come in the following days. I listened with interest, waiting for the Usual Suspects, the BBC’s climate and environment correspondents Justin Rowlatt and Matt McGrath (the latter the recipient of a €100,000 award from the pro-green technology Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria apparently) to be wheeled out.

After all, these days there isn’t a rain shower or breeze we aren’t told was wildly worse than it would have been in the Good Old Days thanks to human-induced climate change. However, climate change went without mention in the bulletin and human responsibility for all our weather woes was ignored too. It was almost like listening to a programme from over 20 years ago.

Nonetheless, my hopes were dashed when a BBC Radio 4 Today presenter announced on October 26th 2026, “we do know however that the weather is getting more extreme”, continuing to peddle the eternal fiction that once upon a time the weather was stable, benign and predictable and only now has it taken a turn for the worse. Morrison cites the 17th-century weather observer Richard Shann and his enthusiasm for climate alarmism (I covered other examples from this period in Daily Sceptic in 2023). Fings ain’t what they used to be, goes the refrain. They never are, are they?

“Climate stability has never existed,” says CM, but “climate science has degenerated into a discussion based on beliefs”:

Political correctness is destroying many academic institutions which are turning into junk echo chambers peddling whatever crazy nostrums bring in the cash and garner mainstream attention.

This has coincided with a proliferation of academic institutions populated by intellectual 12 year-olds each desperate to blaze their way across the firmament.

Then there’s the Met Office, with its “bizarre methodologies and unchallenged hysterical weather claims” used to spread “the necessary climate alarm to promote Net Zero”.

Perhaps one of Morrison’s most convincing points also ought to be obvious:

Science is never ‘settled’ – what was occurring was a deliberate trashing of the scientific process for obvious command-and-control political motives. A vast amount of dark money was helping to gaslight entire populations to the extent that individuals were triggered into climate hysteria if anyone dared to dispute the settled doomsday narrative.

This is all fascinating stuff, and it’s delivered in a fast-paced and highly readable text. But is Implausible going to change anything? I’m no scientist, though I’ve long been concerned by the extent to which what I thought was the true scientific method has been submerged under a tidal wave of fake science and scientists who tell you things they ‘believe’, which instantaneously disqualifies them from being scientists.

My understanding was that in science you produce a hypothesis and then do everything possible to demolish it – as Mr Spock said (borrowing from Sherlock Holmes), “Once you have eliminated the impossible then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Instead, much climate science has been turned into a religion, characterised by dogmatic pronouncements that are declared to be infallible and unchallengeable truths rather than being tested to destruction (as Morrison points out, reminding us that these days dissenters are more likely to be criminalised).

There is nothing more divorced from true science. It’s been compounded by the BBC’s decision that “any dissent from [official climate orthodoxy] could be dismissed as too insignificant to be worthy of notice” (Morrison quoting the climate sceptic Christopher Booker). Morrison rightly equates that with the world of dictators.

No surprise then that Morrison likens climate catastrophism to other falsehoods that have proliferated across the contemporary Western world. Not least is the hypocrisy of those so keen to indulge the fancy that hydrocarbons must be done away with, unaware of what that would mean for their self-indulgent lives. Richard Hammond put this very well in an interview with the Telegraph recently:

How many people do you see sellotaping themselves to bridges to complain about cars, when they’re wearing clothes made from oil-based products? We need to be better informed.

To this one can add, among others, Morrison’s “the scandal that dares not risk being mentioned in the mainstream media” which is the destruction of balsa wood reserves in the Amazon rainforest. Why? Wind turbines need balsa wood cores because of its lightness, strength and load distribution in sandwich composites. I explored this further. There’s a move to substitute PET and PVC foams, but these are made with plastics manufactured from oil and require fossil fuels to provide the extreme heat needed for manufacturing.

That’s the paradox and it’s a central plank of Implausible. While a wind turbine generates electricity throughout its operational lifespan, creating its ultra-strong, lightweight blade structure demands vast quantities of oil-derived materials. And then there are the benefits of elevated CO₂ levels (which varied between two and five times more than today when vast numbers of dinosaurs ate forests for lunch), such as more and larger trees.

Even if Morrison is wrong and the climate-panickers are right, it’s beyond belief that billions of people could be sentenced for generations to doing without, all for the sake of trying to crank down average temperatures a degree or two by slapping concrete/balsa/PVC wind farms all over the place and manufacturing vast quantities of non-recyclable solar panels and batteries.

Do they really think the people of the 22nd century will thank the 21st for leaving them lumbered with all that debris? Especially if the desired effect never happens because even if it does (and it’s a big if) all the so-called planet-saving eco ‘stuff’ churned out from wind-turbine columns to EV batteries will by then have been slung into landfill sites which will probably have to spread to the Moon.

But that does epitomise the challenge for Implausible, despite the vast amount of detail Morrison has harnessed (only a micro fraction of which I have referred to here). So many people have absorbed the fanciful apocalyptic narrative and the need to adopt the modern equivalent of rain dances and self-flagellation that it peppers their everyday speech and behaviour.

Climate catastrophism has become a trope, a posture, the ‘right’ thing to talk about at parties, the excuse for everything. Now millions of people take it as a given that any deviation from the weather mean is invariably the fault of humans and that by quoting from climate catastrophism liturgy and indulging in futile gestures like buying heat pumps (‘we felt it was the right thing to do’ they trill as they hand over four time the cost of a boiler and replumb the house) the impending end of the world will be extinguished by a gale of virtue-signalling.

Changing minds, even getting people to question anything, is a tall order. Implausible is a necessary book, if only because as a polemic it’s a suitable counterfoil to the polemics produced in yet another an age of insanity, so I wish it well, but it’s an uphill task.

Morrison leaves the reader with two explanations:

Rank stupidity bred of decades of dumbed-down and politically biased education, or another concerted attempt by international hard-Left forces determined to destroy and remake society according to their own perverted ideological whims?

With predictions that AI will wipe out humanity within 10 years, and now Wes Streeting telling Britain to be ready for war in 1,000 days, thereby creating a nationwide shortage of tinned ravioli and wind-up radios, perhaps even the most fanatical proponents of climate catastrophism will find something else to fret themselves into a meltdown over and forget the weather. Maybe it’s all only ever been about terrifying everyone out of their wits to keep them under control.

Then, dreadful trumpet, sound the general doom!

Romeo and Juliet

Guy de la Bédoyère is a historian and writer with numerous books to his credit, most concerned with the ancient world though his latest is The Confessions of Samuel Pepys (Abacus 2025).

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• “Re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic” – The Budget does little to tackle soaring energy costs, though hints of a retreat from Net Zero suggest the penny may finally be dropping, writes Mark Hodgson in Climate Scepticism.

• “England records its wettest week for two years after Austen and Boelo” – This week has been the wettest in England for two years after Storms Austen and Boelo battered the country – but parts of the South have remained in a drought, according to the Mail.

• “Wrong, AP and NPR: Europe’s 50,000 heat deaths are a computer-model estimate, not a real body count” – NPR claims that more than 50,000 Europeans died from heat this year, yet the figure is a statistical estimate from computer models and not a real body count, writes Anthony Watts in the ClimateRealism.

• “Same hospital, new label. Our World in Data finds a third of bilateral project aid is now ‘climate-related’” – A third of bilateral project aid is now labelled “climate-related”, which raises the question of how much pledged climate finance is simply the old aid budget with a green sticker on it, says Charles Rotter in Watts Up With That?

• “Wildfire trends: are fires becoming more frequent?” – At Clintel, Ralph B. Alexander looks at historical wildfire trends and questions whether fires are becoming more frequent or intense.

• “Whisper words of wisdom. Climate ASMR experiment finds no effect on anything, sees potential anyway” – A study has found that autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) made no difference to people’s attitudes or behaviour, yet researchers still claim the technique could help persuade people to go green, reports Charles Rotter in Watts Up With That?

• “Ideologues try their hand at ordering up an electrical grid powered only by ‘renewables’” – El Hierro’s much-vaunted 100% renewable grid has never managed more than 56% wind power in a year. So why are Britain and others repeating the same expensive experiment? wonders Francis Menton in the Manhatten Contrarian.

• “Colder and snowier than normal in the Northwest: this is not the El Nino pattern” – The US Northwest is running colder and snowier than normal in a pattern that is emphatically not the typical El Nino one, notes Cliff Mass on his weather blog.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“London is letting its bridges fall down to ‘save the climate’” – London’s bridges are falling down, and some are now closed indefinitely. Yet councils can find money for endless climate-saving schemes despite supposedly having none for bridges. This is no accident, says Ben Pile.

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Something of a row has broken out about charitable organisations deviating from their nominal purpose. According to a Times report by Juliet Samuel, charities that were seemingly founded to maintain London’s deteriorating bridges have instead been making substantial grants to Left-wing causes. Barrister Barbara Rich, however, has answered this criticism, pointing out that the law does not constrain charities in the way that critics imagine it should, and that the consequences of making it so might not be desirable. But pulling back from the detail of this debate reveals a much more intriguing picture about the state of Britain’s infrastructure and politics.

The controversy begins with the fact that some of London’s oldest crossings are decrepit. Hammersmith Bridge has been closed to vehicles since 2019 after defects were found in its structure. Albert Bridge has been closed since February this year for the same reason. London Bridge is closed to traffic for 12 hours a day for opaque reasons, seemingly related to Covid and climate change. These closures have caused traffic chaos in neighbouring areas in a very large city divided by a wide river, both north and south sides of which are very badly served by way of crossings. And things are even worse to the east. Critics ask why it is so difficult to maintain infrastructure, and even more difficult to build new capacity.

As a former East Londoner, and then as an economic refugee (priced out of London and moved to Kent), I have sympathies for these criticisms. Getting from East London to the south by car was very often a chore that would take the better part of the day, as if a cross-country journey, not a trip of less than 10 miles. Coming back from Kent to East London, or to the east of England, I’d find that occasional restrictions or closures of the Dartford tunnel or adjacent Queen Elizabeth II M25 crossings would send traffic between Essex and Kent into East London. These problems, in the most densely-populated parts of the country, force reflection on the question of whether Britain is in any sense ‘developed’ at all.

One of the fetters on the provision of adequate roads is of course the green agenda. Although the Silvertown Tunnel in East London was built in relatively short order and completed in 2025, plans for a Lower Thames Crossing to link Tilbury in Essex with Gravesend in Kent faced legal challenges from Green Blob funded climate and transport campaigners. These legal challenges used the government’s commitments to the Paris Agreement and emissions reduction policies to prove that plans were unlawful. Meanwhile, further inland, the new East London crossing imposed on East Londoners (who are already subject to charges for congestion and pollution) tolls of up to £4.20 each way for a car, which the Mayor believed would “control the numbers using the tunnel and stop an increase in congestion and pollution”, according to the BBC.

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• “Petrol drivers face threat of stealth tax raid to boost EVs” – Petrol drivers could be hit with a stealth tax to subsidise electric vehicles, with an official review proposing that fuel suppliers be forced to fund renewable energy, reports the Telegraph.

• “What emission reduction advocating economists get wrong about the real world” – Putting a price on carbon only works if there are emissions reductions which can be made, says Eric Worrall in Watts Up With That?

• “He who pays the piper calls the tune” – How ‘independent’ can a report commissioned by the renewables industry really be? asks Mark Hodgson at Climate Scepticism.

• “Germany’s green energy transition becoming increasingly expensive” – Germany’s green energy transition is becoming ever more expensive, with another six trillion euros now added to the bill, notes Prof Fritz Vahrenholt in No Tricks Zone.

• “EPA’s carbon repeal saves billions, protects energy supplies” – The US Environmental Protection Agency’s carbon repeal spares Americans a $160 billion charge for a temperature effect no one can measure, writes Vijay Jayaraj in Watts Up With That?

• “The core issues with ‘renewables’” – On his Substack, Stephen Andrews outlines some of the issues with the current renewable strategy.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“Net Zero costs continue to climb in Labour’s budget” – Net Zero costs have continued to climb in Labour’s Budget, with tens of billions in subsidies being poured into renewables and other green boondoggles. We simply can’t afford it, says Paul Homewood.

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This article will look at what the new Budget has to say about projected Net Zero-related costs.

But first, a quick look at the fundamental numbers. You rarely see these spelt out in black and white by the media. They seem to be more interested in the minutiae of tax changes and political point scoring, consequently missing the bigger picture. This is, of course, exactly the sort of deflection the Chancellor wants.

You will hear a lot about ‘fiscal headroom’. I hate that term. It means that the Government can afford to spend and borrow more money. It is a dangerous fallacy. The UK is effectively broke and should be cutting spending, not increasing it.

I have prepared this very simple graph, comparing Public Borrowing forecasts at each of the last three budgets, using the data from the OBR:

Two things stand out like a sore thumb:

1. At each Budget, public sector borrowing was projected to steadily decline, year by year.

2. Each Budget consistently projected higher borrowing than the one before, certainly in cumulative terms.

Somehow, it was always jam tomorrow. But tomorrow never comes. The pot of gold is always just over the rainbow.

I recall George Osborne pulling the same tricks years ago. Don’t worry about the next year or two – everything would miraculously come right in the end – just don’t ask me how!

Just let these two numbers sink in. Two years ago in her first Budget, Rachel Reeves forecast borrowing of £336 billion between 2025-26 and 2028-29.

That figure has now risen to £478 billion – 42% more.

Does anybody still believe in jam tomorrow? If so, I have a bridge to sell them.

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• “John Healey to cut energy bills by scrapping green levies” – John Healey is expected to announce long-term plans to strip more green levies from energy bills and move them onto general taxation, according to the Times.

• “Get drilling! Tony Blair urges PM to give Rosebank green light” – Sir Tony Blair is piling pressure on Andy Burnham to back new North Sea drilling, reports the Mail.

• “Government’s own statistics show rising majority of public opposes Labour energy policy” – Sixty-one percent of the public oppose Britain producing less of its own oil and gas if it means importing more, reveals Guido Fawkes.

• “Villagers block wind farm from ‘ruining’ Hockney landscape” – Villagers have blocked plans for six wind turbines in the Yorkshire Wolds, according to the Scarborough News.

• “Marine fuels – the bill hiding in your next pair of shoes” – Your next pair of shoes may come with a climate policy surcharge that appears nowhere on the receipt but is buried in the cost of transportation and production, warns Dr. Lars Schernikau in Watts Up With That?

• “Why the prevailing climate change narrative is wrong” – On Substack, Stephen Andrews explains why the prevailing climate change orthodoxy is utter nonsense.

• “CBC’s ‘climate change’ false spook story about Canadian pumpkin harvests is all trick and no treat” – CBC News is blaming climate change for damaged pumpkin harvests in Canada, but the evidence doesn’t stack up, says Linnea Lueken in ClimateRealism.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“Phase out fossil fuels, says BMJ” – Why is the Editor-in-Chief of the BMJ calling for the phase-out of fossil fuels and cuts in defence spending? When did this once prestigious medical journal become a Left-wing propaganda rag, asks Paul Homewood.

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Since it was first published in 1840, the British Medical Journal, now simply known as “The BMJ“, has been among the most influential and widely-read peer-reviewed medical journals in the world, famous for its publication of high-quality original research.

So it claims anyway.

It is a reputation that is quickly being trashed if the latest article by its Editor-in-Chief is anything to go by. Its title, ‘For the sake of both health and security: phase out fossil fuels‘, rather gives the game away that it is just yet another propaganda piece designed to scare us into giving up fossil fuels.

According to the article:

Summer is coming. While superpowers engage in forever wars; while nation states, rogue states and failed states flex their weaponry; while old alliances are abandoned and new ones forged; while our thoughts are consumed by security threats and our leaders dream of building military might; while the elite pray to new gods and dream of new worlds; while the growing ranks of undeserved and underserved poor people are too distracted, disempowered or disinformed to contemplate a better future; while the people tasked with securing our existence are conflicted by personal, corporate and national interests; and while we banish our greatest threat, the threat we must unite against, from our collective conscience, the forces of summer are breaching our planetary walls — and they bring annihilation.

Annihilation is a pretty strong word! The article then proceeds to back up these extraordinary claims with a handful of examples of ‘climate doom’, based on the flimsiest of evidence at best, cherry-picked and totally devoid of any context.

Indeed, it could have been written by the BBC’s Justin Rowlatt!

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• “Net Zero added £140.3 billion to our electricity bills. Nobody official counts it” – On Substack, Richard Lyon puts Net Zero’s price tag at £140 billion on Britain’s electricity bills and asks why nobody official is keeping track of what climate policies are costing us.

• “Britain will pay a high price for its doomed EV transition” – Investors have poured huge sums into the assumption that we would all have to plug in our cars and now stand to lose a lot of money, notes Matthew Lynn in the Spectator.

• “Sudden stratospheric warming, powerful El Niño combination may lead to extreme Europe cold, energy crisis!” – Sudden stratospheric warming combined with a powerful El Niño may bring extreme cold and an energy crisis to Europe, warns P. Gosselin at NoTricksZone.

• “UN climate panic rests on false scenario and buried past” – In Townhall, Vijay Jayaraj claims that UN climate alarm relies on outdated scenarios and ignores historical warm periods and the benefits of CO₂.

• “The climate blame game: when correlation becomes causation” – In America Out Loud, Mary-Jean Harris takes aim at a report claiming the “climate crisis” fuels sexual violence, child marriage and unintended pregnancy.

• “The new Alaska gold rush” – Alaska’s UKMP project is a potential new US source of copper, zinc and other metals vital to domestic supply chains, reports Duggan Flanakin at CFACT.

• “Indian collegian challenges EV ‘sustainability’ claims” – A CFACT collegian takes on the claim that electric vehicles are more sustainable than petrol-powered vehicles.

• “I have trust issues with Big Nature” – Too many nature charities are putting Left-wing activism before serving the causes for which they were founded, says Charles Moore in the Telegraph.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“How Green billionaires convinced the world to build thousands of useless windmills” – In the Daily Sceptic’s final exclusive extract from Chris Morrison’s new book on the ‘climate crisis’: trying to run a modern economy on windmills is insane, but eye-watering sums from green billionaires say it isn’t.

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Today we publish a final exclusive extract from Chris Morrison’s explosive new book that is shooting up the bestseller charts and sending shockwaves through both the ‘settled’ climate science community and the hard-Left promoters of the wicked Net Zero lunacy.

However many lies are told, the fact remains that running an electricity grid on intermittent wind and solar is for the surviving birds. Nothing beats hydrocarbons for providing almost instant power, a fact that is constantly glossed over by windy fanatics. Taking away hydrocarbon power and expecting a much larger grid, as yet unbuilt, to cope with all our energy requirements is a recipe for economic and societal collapse. Windmills have had a good run since they were first seen in the reign of Henry II (1154-1189), but in a modern industrial society they should be regarded as little more than a curiosity piece.

Without enormous cash subsidies, few if any practical entrepreneurs would invest in wind energy. According to Professor Gordon Hughes, a former political economist at the University of Edinburgh and senior energy adviser to the World Bank, green subsidies now account for three quarters of the price of electricity in the UK, while “the cost of Net Zero to the public is much higher than politicians are willing to admit“.

In a recent paper co-authored with Dr Lee Moroney, Associate Director of the Renewable Energy Foundation, it is noted that the British consumer has been forced over the last two decades to pay a staggering £274 billion (at 2025 prices) to support electricity generated from renewable sources. The numerous direct and indirect annual subsidies for the unreliable breezes and beams have risen from £0.2 billion in 2005 to £22.6 billion last year. That sum, suggest the authors, is expected to grow rapidly under current Government plans and could exceed UK defence spending by 2030.

Who will stop this out-of-control spending on a system that also requires the further massive expense of a full stand-by gas station network for what the Germans call dunkelflaute (rough translation: no frigging wind) and 18 hours of sunless winter nights. All subsidies and other distorting charges on gas considered, Hughes and Moroney state that for every £1 that electricity users would have paid in 2025, they ended up paying £3.90.

The next time someone lies to you that the price of electricity is set by gas, renewables are getting cheaper while energy security is just around the corner, it will be time to not only count the spoons but to audit the full cutlery canteen.

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• “Healey draws up ‘green tax’ on petrol” – John Healey has drawn up plans to announce a “green tax” on imported fuel in next week’s Budget, prompting fears that petrol prices could rise again, reveals the Telegraph.

• “Brits split on climate change but many agree on one thing” – As far as the electorate is concerned, climate change is not a scientific controversy but a political one, writes Lord Ashcroft in the Mail.

• “E-bike chaos takes over London’s streets” – Swarms of e-bikes are invading parking spaces reserved for cars, leaving drivers across London struggling to park outside their own homes, according to the Telegraph.

• “You can’t build there, newts need a view of Saturn” – I’d like to create some jobs, please, but first I need permission from Brian Cox and the local amphibians, says Jeremy Clarkson in the Sunday Times.

• “Scroby Sands is running aground” – On his Eigen Values Substack, David Turver notes that the decommissioning cost for one offshore wind turbine at Scroby Sands is six times the forecast rate for the remaining 29 turbines.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“The North Sea green paradox” – Green blobbers want us to stop drilling because the North Sea is running dry – so why the panic about oil and gas extraction? The answer is that it’s as much about politics and punitive taxes as geology, says Ben Pile.

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One of the most curious responses to the ongoing controversy around North Sea oil and gas is that permission for developments should not be granted because the wells are drying up. I’ve long argued that the authors of green arguments owe little to their maths teachers, but any sense of logic or proportion is often conspicuously absent. After a great deal of delay, the Jackdaw field has finally been given consent by the Government, though the Rosebank field looks set to be denied. This has increased the volume of chatter from green quarters, the angry flurrying of which further exposes its departure from reality.

Ahead of the Government’s Jackdaw decision, it was the Guardian that claimed that “Heat pumps and insulation would cut UK living costs more than new oilfields, study suggests.” The ‘study’, however, seemed to be merely a blog post published on the website of the influential green think tank E3G a week earlier. Rather than presenting any new research, the post collected some anti-North Sea development talking points, most of which were themselves scraped from other green blob-funded fake civil society organisations.

“North Sea revenues are declining dramatically,” claims E3G. In support of this claim, it produces the following alarming chart, which does indeed look volatile. It shows a precipitous decline in revenues at the start of the preceding decade, spiking again during the post-lockdown era, followed by a projection back to zero. “New licences cannot restore these revenues,” it asserts.

But E3G’s chart is misleading. Yes, revenues are volatile. But the causes of this volatility and its tendency towards zero are not direct representations of geological reality. This is shown by a chart of the same data on an axis that spans the history of North Sea oil and gas.

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• “Water, water everywhere, but swimming pools shut over drought” – Swimming pools are shut over drought even as storms rage and Britain is warned of a winter of flooding, notes the Telegraph.

• “Approving Jackdaw is the right call” – Labour has accepted the case for domestic gas and must now follow the logic through, says Harry Wilkinson in the Critic.

• “The Jackdaw decision is a telling sign of dissent among Labour’s climate faithful” – The Jackdaw decision is a telling sign of dissent among the climate faithful, as Net Zero by 2050 and its importunate demands on our wallets make people lose belief and patience, writes Charles Moore in the Telegraph.

• “Andy Burnham steps aside from EV decision over wife’s industry links” – The Prime Minister will not be involved in deliberations about EV sales targets because of his wife Marie-France van Heel’s connections to a charging company, reports the Times.

• “The climate blame game: when correlation becomes causation” – A new report blames climate change for sexual violence, child marriage and unintended pregnancies, but Thomas Richard in the Climate Change Dispatch points out that correlation is not causation.

• “Cancel culture. Another science paper credits CO₂ with calling off the next ice age” – A new science paper concludes that as CO₂ keeps rising, a return to glacial conditions is “extremely unlikely”, says the Watts Up With That.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“Wind Turbines vs Nature” – From beaches to old-growth forests, wind farms are destroying the environment in the name of saving it, says Sandra Bourke. Greens are turning their backs as reckless renewables industrialise the natural world.

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What happens to a Green when he photographs the renewables industry’s damage to Australian rainforests?

The Greens turn their backs.

In August 2025, Steven Nowakowski took my husband, Bruce, and me on an incursion into a wind turbine installation on a ridge in Australia’s wild far north, to show us what they ignore.

The roads hit us first. The developer had cut 39 kilometres through the forest to carry turbine blades longer than a jumbo jet’s wingspan. Bulldozers had shoved the old growth trees aside into long rows, and crews had blasted the ridgelines flat.

Twenty-eight turbines stood over us, each 226 metres tall, 91 metres taller than the London Eye. Around their concrete footings lay dead bats and birds.

Steven crouched beside them. “They light the turbines up at night,” he told us. “The lights pull in the insects, and the insects pull in the bats. Nobody is really even counting.”

Steven is a renowned wilderness photographer. He sells his calendars at a Sunday market for $20 each. He ran as an Australian Greens candidate in 2006 and backed the party’s push for 100% renewables until he photographed the turbines’ impact on the rainforest. He co-founded a volunteer group that defends biodiversity in court.

Ravenshoe, a timber town, sits below that ridge. When the tropical forests won World Heritage listing in 1988, the logging stopped, and the Greens celebrated a victory. Nearly 40 years later, the bulldozers are back on the same ridgelines, and those same Greens back the machines because they are “renewable”.

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• “Shooting is our only hope of saving British wildlife” – Defra’s baffling consultation on gamebirds is raising fears that Labour is preparing to ban shooting, writes Patrick Galbraith in the Telegraph.

• “Extremist Greens blasted for bid to teach pupils about ‘throuples’” – Scottish Green activists are demanding that schoolchildren be taught about relationships involving multiple partners, reveals the Mail.

• “Smart TVs to switch on more slowly under EU Net Zero rules” – Smart TVs, Robot vacuum cleaners and voice-activated light bulbs face a two-watt cap under the EU’s Net Zero rules, notes the Telegraph.

• “For the sake of both health and security: phase out fossil fuels” – As superpowers fight forever wars and leaders dream of building military might, phasing out fossil fuels is the answer to both health and security, says the BMJ.

• “Trump praises Burnham for defying ‘liberal’ principles on North Sea” – Donald Trump has thanked Prime Minister Andy Burnham for defying “liberal principles” and approving North Sea drilling, according to the Telegraph.

• “Electricity is dear because of gas, we’re told. that can be tested” – On his Substack, Richard Lyon says a new series of reports will test the claim that electricity is expensive because gas is expensive – and it may turn out to be false.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“The Climate Skeptic Podcast | Episode 67” – On this week’s show, Laurie sits down with the Daily Sceptic’s Energy Editor Dr Tilak Doshi to discuss why household recycling is one big fat scam.

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• “Energy Secretary’s former employer doubts North Sea wealth fund” – A think tank once led by Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh has slammed her plans for a North Sea wealth fund, according to the Telegraph.

• “Landlords could be forced to allow tenant EV chargers” – Landlords could be forced to install residential electric vehicle chargers under new renters’ rules put forward by Angela Rayner, reports LandlordZONE.

• “National interest should come before Net Zero” – Britain is sacrificing too much for Net Zero while contributing less than 1% of global emissions, says the Telegraph in a leading article.

• “National Energy boss Fintan Slye (yes, really) said ‘holistic’ three times. No word is a surer sign of baloney!” – In the Mail, Quentin Letts writes that Britain’s energy policy is often ascribed to ‘Red’ Ed Miliband and Miatta Fahnbulleh, but that they did not do it alone.

• “Church faces financial ruin over slavery reparations, report warns” – The Church of England is “heading for financial disaster” because of Net Zero targets and slavery reparations, according to LBC.

• “Councils spend £42 million on 20mph zones – enough to fix half a million potholes” – Councils have spent more than £40 million introducing 20mph zones in the past three years, enough to fund the repairs of half a million potholes, reports the Telegraph.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“No, Britain’s Puffin’s aren’t about to disappear due to ‘climate change’” – Every year we’re fed the same scare story about Britain’s Atlantic Puffins all about to disappear, with climate change inevitably blamed. But as so often, it’s the reverse that’s true, says Paul Homewood.

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Every year we are fed the same scare story about Britain’s Atlantic Puffins all disappearing in the near future.

This time, the Daily Telegraph has fallen for it, reporting:

Puffins could almost disappear from the British Isles in the next 25 years, new research has warned.

Numbers of the seabird have fallen in recent years, leading to the species being declared vulnerable to global extinction.

Climate change, overfishing, invasive species, pollution and habitat loss are among the causes that have threatened their existence.

Research from the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) has warned of a possible 90% crash in the puffin population of the British Isles by 2050, amid a battle to reverse the species’ “catastrophic decline”.

The BTO said: “One of the greatest concerns for BTO scientists is the decline in sand eels, which are a major food source for many adult, and especially young, seabirds. Overfishing and changes in climate are significant drivers in the loss of the sand eels.

“An increase in extreme winter storms, exacerbated by climate change, has also resulted in high mortality of puffins and other seabirds.

The Atlantic puffin is one of 10 seabird species predicted to suffer long-term effects on their populations as a result of climate change, as warming air and sea temperatures reduce food availability and drive extreme weather events.

Recent declines have been linked to increasingly frequent marine heatwaves and intense storms, which led to thousands perishing at sea last winter.

As often with these silly scare stories, the reverse is true.

One of Britain’s biggest puffin colonies is on Skomer Island, just off the Pembrokeshire coast. The Wildlife Trust of South and West Wales has been conducting population counts there every spring since 2004.

Their surveys have shown a steady increase in puffin numbers in recent years. This year a record number of 52,019 puffins were counted. Back in the 1990s numbers rarely exceeded 10,000:

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• “Trump joins calls for PM to go further after Jackdaw finally approved” – Andy Burnham has been urged to go further in opening up North Sea drilling after the Jackdaw gas project finally received approval, reports the Mail.

• “Energy secretary ‘minded to reject’ Rosebank oil field” – Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh, who approved the Jackdaw gas field, is reportedly less keen on the larger Rosebank oil field, according to the Telegraph.

• “Jackdaw exposes the muddle of Labour’s economic thinking” – The North Sea gas decision on Jackdaw is welcome but it does not change Labour’s Net Zero policy, warns David Frost in the Telegraph.

• “The green case for drilling in the North Sea” – Mankind is rising to the climate challenge, even if it does not feel like it yet, writes Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the Telegraph.

• “Kemi just missed an opportunity to nail Burnham” – The Tory leader chose to question the PM on North Sea drilling rather than the divisions in his Cabinet over immigration, notes Tom Harris in the Telegraph.

• “Miliband risks blood on his hands” – In the Mail, Andrew Neil writes that by championing Net Zero above all else, Miliband and Co aren’t just guilty of economic folly, they risk blood on their hands.

• “Africa’s poorest countries need energy, not empathy” – Africa’s poorest countries need reliable energy to fight poverty and support development, writes Vijay Jayaraj for PJ Media.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“The EU’s climate agenda is running on empty – and the UK isn’t far behind” – France and Germany have teamed up to press the EU to relax its looming combustion car ban. It’s the latest sign the EU’s climate agenda is running on empty, says Ben Pile – and the UK isn’t far behind.

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• “Labour to approve new North Sea drilling as gas prices hit four-year high” – As gas prices hit a four-year high, the Government is finally set to approve the Jackdaw gas field’s licence after a months-long delay, says LBC.

• “Grid bosses cling on as investigation lays bare blackout panic” – Britain’s grid bosses may have dodged a blackout cover-up charge, but engineers feared sounding the alarm as Net Zero strained the system and bosses worried about bad headlines, reports Matt Oliver in the Telegraph.

• “Grid blackout warnings cannot be dismissed as scaremongering” – Two reports published this week raise serious concerns about electricity blackouts that can no longer be dismissed as scaremongering, says Kathryn Porter in the Telegraph.

• “It’s 2026 and British people can’t safely drink tap water or go swimming. Reform will fix that” – It is time to put the people of this country first and take back control of our essential utilities, writes Nigel Farage in the Telegraph.

• “Mother Jones blames climate change for mass migration, data and migrants prove them wrong” – Migrants cite economic reasons rather than weather for heading to Europe, undermining the claim that climate change is a driver of migration, reports Linnea Lueken at Climate Realism.

• “BOM’s scientific scandal: the raw data is not raw” – Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology is sitting on hundreds of oddities in its supposedly raw weather data, including whole months of records that appear to have been cut and pasted, reveals Joanne Nova at CFACT.

• “Predictions made by renowned climate professor over past decades have been proven to be poor” – German climate alarmist Mojib Latif has made some pretty poor predictions over the years, notes P. Gosselin at NoTricksZone.

• “UN climate panic rests on false scenario and buried past” – UN climate alarm relies on outdated scenarios while ignoring historical warm periods and the benefits of CO₂, writes Vijay Jayaraj in Townhall.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“Disappearing hurricanes leave disappointed scientists without fuel for climate alarm” – Hurricanes in the North Atlantic have largely disappeared this year, leaving bitterly disappointed scientists without fuel for their climate alarm and having to admit the role of natural variation, says Chris Morrison.

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