Energy
Climate Change Movement Goes To Court — Will Judges Ban Fossil Fuels?
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
Things are not going well at all for the global warming crusaders. Despite hundreds of billions of tax dollars spent on green energy over the past decade, the world and America used more fossil fuels than ever before in history last year.
The electric vehicle movement is stalled out, solar and wind power are both still fringe forms of energy, and the green candidates got crushed in recent elections in Europe because voters are sick of the higher prices associated with green policies.
So, having struck out with consumers, businesses and at the ballot box, the greens now are moving on to the courts. The climate-change industrial complex has now joined forces with trial lawyers to advance their war on fossil fuels.
One of the more absurd lawsuits happened in Hawaii.
There, a group of 13 teenagers — honest, I’m not making this up — sued Hawaii’s government over its use of fossil fuels. Environmental law firms Our Children’s Trust and Earthjustice claim that Hawaii’s natural resources are imperiled by CO2 emissions. Even if that were true, shouldn’t they be suing China?
The settlement will require the state to eliminate fossil fuels from its transportation system by 2045, and also formally recognizes the right to file future lawsuits against other parties.
Democratic Gov. Josh Green even stood next to the young plaintiffs as he read a statement claiming, “This settlement informs how we as a state can best move forward to achieve life-sustaining goals.”
There is so much that is wrong about this decision. How did a bunch of teenagers possibly have standing to sue? What possible harm have they suffered from fossil fuels?
The irony is that this island paradise in the Pacific — whose primary industry is tourism — is going to collapse without fossil fuels. With no jets and cruise ships allowed, will tourists and business travelers have to arrive by sailboat?
But this new technique of using lawsuits to advance the anti-fossil fuels movement has spread to other states. Last August, a judge ruled that GOP-dominated Montana violated its constitution when it approved fossil fuel projects without taking climate change into account.
After recent flooding in Vermont, green activists sued the state for not abolishing fossil fuels.
Massachusetts is suing Exxon Mobil for adverse weather conditions.
There are now 32 cases filed by state attorneys general, cities, counties and tribal nations against companies including Exxon Mobil, BP and Shell. The lawsuits claim that the industry tried to undermine scientific consensus about the crisis.
Here’s what’s so frightening about these sham lawsuits from trial lawyers who hope to turn oil companies into cash cows similar to the tobacco lawsuits 20 years ago: The end game of lawsuits against states and oil and gas companies for using or producing energy because of alleged damage to the environment could bring about abolition of fossil fuels through the back door of the nation’s courthouses.
But what none of these judges or litigators take into account is the catastrophic economic effects of not using fossil fuels. As an example, the Left wants to abolish air conditioning, which requires electricity, which mostly comes from fossil fuels. But air conditioning saves tens of thousands of lives a year. What about the millions of jobs that would be wiped out with no fossil fuels? How many thousands of Americans would die in hospitals, or assisted living centers, or day care centers, or schools if the lights go out with no fossil fuel power plants?
Fossil fuels have saved millions more lives over the last century than they take. They make Americans much richer and safer and happier and healthier and more mobile. Meanwhile, there is no evidence backing up the absurd claim by teenagers that if Hawaii stopped using fossil fuels, the state’s weather conditions would improve.
Will judges take that into consideration when they try to rob Exxon and coal companies of their profits for the sin of making life on earth much better?
Stephen Moore is a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a senior economic advisor to Donald Trump. His latest book is: “Govzilla: How the Relentless Growth of Government Is Devouring Our Economy.”
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
(Featured Image Media Credit: Screen Capture/Supreme Court of the United States)
Dan McTeague
Will this deal actually build a pipeline in Canada?
By Dan McTeague
Will Carney’s new pipeline deal actually help get a pipeline built in Canada? As we said before, the devil is in the details.
While the establishment and mainstream media cheer on the new pipeline agreement, there are specific details you need to be aware of.
Dan McTeague explains in his latest video.
Energy
Canada following Europe’s stumble by ignoring energy reality
Family in Spain eating by candlelight during a blackout, April 2025
From Resource Works
Canada’s own 2024 grid scare proves we’re on the same path unless we change course.
Europe’s green-energy unraveling is no longer a distant cautionary tale. It’s a mirror — and Canada is already seeing the first cracks.
A new Wall Street Journal investigation lays out the European story in stark detail: a continent that slashed emissions faster than anyone else, only to discover that doing so by tearing down firm power before its replacement existed comes with brutal consequences — collapsing industry, sky-high electricity prices, political fragmentation, and a public increasingly unwilling to subsidize wishful thinking.
The tragedy isn’t that Europe tried to decarbonize quickly.
The tragedy is how they did it: by insisting on an “or” transition — renewables or fossil fuels — instead of what every energy-literate nation outside Europe pursued: renewables and fossil fuels, working together while the system evolves.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth:
Canada has already had its first European-style crisis. It happened in January 2024.
Canada’s early warning: the January 2024 electricity crunch
Most people have already forgotten it, because our political class desperately wanted you to. But in January 2024, Western Canada came within a whisker of a full-blown energy security breakdown. Alberta, Saskatchewan, and B.C. were stretched to their limit. The grid was under cascading stress. Contingency plans were activated. Alberta came terrifyingly close to rolling blackouts.
It wasn’t caused by climate change. It wasn’t caused by a mysterious cyberattack.
It was caused by the same structural brittleness now crippling Europe:
- Insufficient firm power, after years of political messaging that we could “electrify everything” without adding real generating capacity.
- Overreliance on intermittent sources not backed by storage or gas.
- A planning system that punted risk into the future, betting the grid could be stretched indefinitely.
The January 2024 event was not a blip. It was a preview.
Our European moment in miniature.
But instead of treating it as the national wake-up call it should have been, B.C. did something telling — and deeply damaging.
The B.C. government’s response: attack the messenger
Just a couple of years ago, an economist publicly warned about the economic price of emerging system vulnerabilities due to a groaning stack of “clean economy” policies.
The B.C. government didn’t respond with data, evidence, or even curiosity. Instead, a cabinet minister used the safety of legislative privilege — that gold-plated shield against accountability — to launch nasty personal attacks on the economist who raised the concerns, which themselves had originated in the government’s own analysis.
No engagement.
No counter-analysis.
No willingness to consider the system risks.
Just slurs — the very definition of anti-intellectual governance.
It was a moment that told the whole story:
Too many policymakers in this province believe that energy systems obey politics, not physics.
Physics always gets the last word.
Europe shows us what political denial turns into
The WSJ reporting couldn’t be clearer about the consequences of that denial:
- Germany: highest domestic electricity prices in the developed world.
- U.K.: highest industrial electricity rates among major economies.
- Industrial flight: chemical plants closing, data centres frozen, major players hinting at exiting Europe entirely.
- Grid instability: wind farms paid tens of millions not to generate because the grid can’t handle it.
- Public revolt: rising support for parties rejecting the entire green-transition agenda.
- Policy whiplash: governments rushing to build gas plants they swore they’d never need.
Europe is now an object lesson in how good intentions, executed poorly, can produce the exact opposite of what was promised: higher prices, higher volatility, declining competitiveness, and a public ready to abandon climate policy altogether.
This is precisely what January 2024 warned us about — but on a continental scale.
The system cost we keep pretending doesn’t exist
Every serious energy expert knows the truth Europe is now living: intermittent renewables require massive amounts of redundant capacity, storage, and backup generation. That’s why the U.K. now needs 120 gigawatts of capacity to serve a demand previously met with 60–70 gigawatts, even though electricity use hasn’t meaningfully grown.
This is the math policymakers prefer not to show the public.
And it’s why B.C.’s refusal to have an honest conversation about firm power is so dangerous.
If we electrify everything without ensuring affordable and abundant natural gas generation, we’re not building a green future.
We’re building Europe, 10 years early.
The lesson for Canada — especially for B.C.
Here is what Europe and January 2024 together say, in one clear voice:
1. There is no energy transition without firm power.
Renewables are part of the system, but they don’t run the system. Natural gas does. Hydro does. Nuclear does. Pretending otherwise is how you end up with rolling blackouts.
2. Political denial makes crises worse.
When ministers attack economists instead of answering them, it signals that ideology is running the show. Europe learned the cost of that. We will too, unless we change course.
3. Affordability is the foundation of public consent.
Europe lost the room. Once people see their bills double while factories close, the climate agenda becomes politically radioactive.
4. B.C. has an advantage Europe would kill for.
Europe dreams of having an abundant, local, low-carbon firm-power fuel like northeastern B.C.’s natural gas. We treat it like a political liability. That’s not strategy. It’s negligence.
5. The transition will fail if we don’t treat electricity like the national security asset it is.
Without energy, there is no industry.
Without industry, there is no prosperity.
Without prosperity, there is no climate policy that survives the next election cycle.
What we need now
Canada must embrace an “and” strategy:
Renewables and natural gas. Electrification and realism. Climate ambition and economic competitiveness.
January 2024 showed us the future in a flash. Europe shows us the end state if we keep ignoring the warning.
We can still choose something better. But only if we stop pretending that energy systems bend to political narratives — and start treating them with the seriousness they demand.
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