Energy
UN Secretary-General Ramps Up Tiresome Climate-Fright Rhetoric One More Time
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
In his unending quest to constantly heat up fright rhetoric about climate change, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres last week referred to oil companies as “the godfathers of climate chaos” and urged national governments to place bans on their ability to advertise their products.
Speaking at an event called World Climate Day, Guterres told attendees that “we are playing Russian roulette with our planet,” adding, “we need an exit ramp off this highway to hell.”
The latter bit of hyperbolic nonsense was a reference to a bit of fright rhetoric he unveiled during the COP27 conference held in Egypt in November 2022. In that speech, Guterres warned: “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator.”
He also warned, outrageously, that: “We can sign a climate solidarity pact, or a collective suicide pact.”
The global media establishment threw a collective hissy fit in March when former President Donald Trump used the term “bloodbath” to describe the damage that Biden administration policies are doing to the U.S. auto industry. Imagine the pearl clutching that would take place at the same media outlets if the GOP presidential candidate used the term “collective suicide pact” to describe his opponent’s climate policies.
Talking heads at CNN and MSNBC might faint dead away on air.
But because Guterres is a key pusher of the preferred climate narrative, his bombastic rhetoric is fine. In his most recent salvo, the secretary general failed to include reference to his July 2023 claim that the hot weather last summer (who knew it is hot in New York in July?) meant that “the era of global warming has ended” and “the era of global boiling has arrived.” We should all be grateful for that omission.
Guterres’ latest bit of panic speech comes as world events indicate that the climate change narrative is failing. The just-completed elections for the European Union Parliament resulted in a rejection of Europe’s ruling class that was significant enough to convince Belgian Prime Minister Alexander de Croo to resign and French President Emmanuel Macron to dissolve France’s parliament and call for snap elections.
In the United States, poll after poll shows low support for the Biden energy and climate agenda, and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm is suddenly showing strong support for nuclear energy. Meanwhile, Biden’s vaunted offshore wind initiatives are faltering badly, and the U.S. electric-vehicle industry is also struggling.
In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal entitled “The Climate Crisis Fades Out,” former Obama climate advisor and author Steven Koonin says one reason why the climate alarm rhetoric is failing to move voters lies in the reality that “the energy transition’s purported climate benefits are distant, vague and uncertain while the costs and disruption of rapid decarbonization are immediate and substantial. The world has many more urgent needs, including the provision of reliable and affordable energy to all.”
Noting that the preferred, rent-seeking “solutions” to climate change offered by the ruling class are not really solutions at all — a theme I’ve written about for several years now — Koonin posits that we should be happy that the “crisis” narrative is failing and fading as it goes through what he refers to as the “issues-attention cycle.”
As a result of this focus on these non-solutions, global emissions have continued to rise in this century. Fossil fuels still provide roughly 80% of primary energy now despite more than $12 trillion in renewable energy investments in just the past 9 years. Koonin points out that the “latest United Nations emissions report projects that emissions in 2030 will be almost twice as high as a level compatible with the [2015 Paris Agreement] aspiration.”
Koonin believes the public’s fading attention to the issue of climate alarmism “means that today’s ineffective, inefficient, and ill-considered climate-mitigation strategies will be abandoned, making room for a more thoughtful and informed approach to responsibly providing for the world’s energy needs.”
But seeking more thoughtful and informed approaches does not appear to be a high priority at the UN these days, so we can all sit back and wait to see how Guterres will attempt to ramp up his tiresome, counterproductive hyperbole next. Expecting anything more is a fool’s errand.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
2016 image provided by Misti Leon, left, sits with her mom, Juliana Leon. Misti Leon is suing several oil and gas companies in one of the first wrongful-death claims in the U.S. seeking to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for its role in the changing climate.
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Jason Isaac
They twist yesterday’s weather into tomorrow’s crisis, peddle apocalyptic forecasts that fizzle, and swap “global warming” for “climate change” whenever the narrative demands. They sound the alarm on a so-called climate emergency — again and again.
Now, the Left has plunged to a new low: weaponizing the courts with a lawsuit in Washington State that marks a brazen, desperate escalation. This isn’t just legal maneuvering—it’s the exploitation of personal tragedy in service of an unpopular anti-energy climate crusade.
Consider the case at the center of a new legal circus: Juliana Leon, 65, tragically died of hyperthermia during a 100-mile drive in a car with broken air conditioning, as a brutal heat wave pushed temperatures to 108 degrees Fahrenheit.
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The lawsuit leaps from this heartbreaking event to a sweeping claim: that a single hot day is the direct result of global warming.
The lawsuit preposterously links a very specific hot weather event to theorized global warming. Buckle up—their logic is about to take a wild ride.
Some activist scientists have further speculated that what may be a gradual long-term trend of slight warming thought to be both cyclical and natural, might be possibly exacerbated by the release of greenhouse gases. Some of these releases are the result of volcanic activity while some comes from human activities, including the burning of oil, natural gas and coal.
Grabbing onto that last, unproven thread, the plaintiffs have zeroed in on a handful of energy giants—BP, Chevron, Conoco, Exxon, Phillips 66, Shell, and the Olympic Pipe Company—accusing them of causing Leon’s death. Apparently, these few companies are to blame for the entire planet’s climate, while other oil giants, coal companies, and the billions of consumers who actually use these fuels get a free pass.
Meanwhile, “climate journalists” in the legacy media have ignored key details that will surely surface in court. Leon made her journey in a car with no air conditioning, despite forecasts warning of dangerous heat. She was returning from a doctor’s visit, having just been cleared to eat solid food after recent bariatric surgery.
But let’s be clear: this lawsuit isn’t about truth, justice, or even common sense. It’s lawfare, plain and simple.
Environmental extremists are using the courts to hijack national energy policy, aiming to force through a radical agenda they could never pass in Congress. A courtroom win would mean higher energy prices for everyone, the potential bankruptcy of energy companies, or their takeover by the so-called green industrial complex. For the trial lawyers, these cases are gold mines, with contingency fees that could reach hundreds of millions.
This particular lawsuit was reportedly pitched to Leon’s daughter by the left-leaning Center for Climate Integrity, a group bankrolled by billionaire British national Christopher Hohn through his Children’s Investment Fund Foundation and by the Rockefeller Foundation. It’s yet another meritless claim in the endless list of climate lawsuits that are increasingly being tossed out of courts across the country.
Earlier this year, a Pennsylvania judge threw out a climate nuisance suit against oil producers brought by Bucks County, citing lack of jurisdiction. In New York, Supreme Court Justice Anar Patel dismissed a massive climate lawsuit by New York City, pointing out the city couldn’t claim both public awareness and deception by oil companies in the same breath.
But the Washington State case goes even further, threatening to set a dangerous precedent: if it moves forward, energy companies could face limitless liability for any weather-related injury. Worse, it would give unwarranted credibility to the idea — floated by a leftwing activist before the U.S. Senate — that energy executives could be prosecuted for homicide, a notion that Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz rightly called “moonbeam, wacky theory.”
The courts must keep rejecting these absurd lawfare stunts. More importantly, America’s energy policy should be set by Congress—elected and accountable—not by a single judge in a municipal courtroom.
Jason Isaac is the founder and CEO of the American Energy Institute. He previously served four terms in the Texas House of Representatives.
From the Canadian Energy Centre
By Cody Ciona
‘Alberta has never seen this level and volume of load connection requests’
Billions of investment in new data centres is still expected in Alberta despite the province’s electric system operator placing a temporary limit on new large-load grid connections, said Carson Kearl, lead data centre analyst for Enverus Intelligence Research.
Kearl cited NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s estimate from earlier this year that building a one-gigawatt data centre costs between US$60 billion and US$80 billion.
That implies the Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO)’s 1.2 gigawatt temporary limit would still allow for up to C$130 billion of investment.
“It’s got the potential to be extremely impactful to the Alberta power sector and economy,” Kearl said.
Importantly, data centre operators can potentially get around the temporary limit by ‘bringing their own power’ rather than drawing electricity from the existing grid.
In Alberta’s deregulated electricity market – the only one in Canada – large energy consumers like data centres can build the power supply they need by entering project agreements directly with electricity producers.
According to the AESO, there are 30 proposed data centre projects across the province.
The total requested power load for these projects is more than 16 gigawatts, roughly four gigawatts more than Alberta’s demand record in January 2024 during a severe cold snap.
For comparison, Edmonton’s load is around 1.4 gigawatts, the AESO said.
“Alberta has never seen this level and volume of load connection requests,” CEO Aaron Engen said in a statement.
“Because connecting all large loads seeking access would impair grid reliability, we established a limit that preserves system integrity while enabling timely data centre development in Alberta.”
As data centre projects come to the province, so do jobs and other economic benefits.
“You have all of the construction staff associated; electricians, engineers, plumbers, and HVAC people for all the cooling tech that are continuously working on a multi-year time horizon. In the construction phase there’s a lot of spend, and that is just generally good for the ecosystem,” said Kearl.
Investment in local power infrastructure also has long-term job implications for maintenance and upgrades, he said.
“Alberta is a really exciting place when it comes to building data centers,” said Beacon AI CEO Josh Schertzer on a recent ARC Energy Ideas podcast.
“It has really great access to natural gas, it does have some excess grid capacity that can be used in the short term, it’s got a great workforce, and it’s very business-friendly.”
The unaltered reproduction of this content is free of charge with attribution to the Canadian Energy Centre.
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