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.
From the Canadian Energy Centre
‘We are excited to bring this made-in-Canada innovation to the world’
To the naked eye, it looks about as exciting as baking soda or table salt.
But to the scientists in the University of Calgary chemistry lab who have spent more than a decade working on it, this white powder is nothing short of amazing.
That’s because the material they invented is garnering global attention as a new solution to help address climate change.
Known as Calgary Framework-20 (CALF-20 for short), it has “an exceptional capacity to absorb carbon dioxide” and was recognized in connection with the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
A jar of CALF-20, a metal-organic framework (MOF) used in carbon capture. Photo courtesy UCalgary
“It’s basically a molecular sponge that can adsorb CO2 very efficiently,” said Dr. George Shimizu, a UCalgary chemistry professor who leads the research group that first developed CALF-20 in 2013.
The team has been refining its effectiveness ever since.
“CALF-20 is a very exciting compound to work on because it has been a great example of translating basic science into something that works to solve a problem in the real world,” Shimizu said.
Advancing CCS
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is not a new science in Alberta. Since 2015, operating projects in the province have removed 15 million tonnes of CO2 that would have otherwise been emitted to the atmosphere.
Alberta has nearly 60 proposed facilities for new CCS networks including the Pathways oil sands project, according to the Regina-based International CCS Knowledge Centre.
This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to three of Shimizu’s colleagues in Japan, Australia and the United States, for developing the earliest versions of materials like CALF-20 between 1989 and 2003.
Custom-built molecules
CALF-20 is in a class called metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) — custom-built molecules that are particularly good at capturing and storing specific substances.
MOFs are leading to new technologies for harvesting water from air in the desert, storing toxic gases, and capturing CO2 from industrial exhaust or directly from the atmosphere.
CALF-20 is one of the few MOF compounds that has advanced to commercial use.
“There has been so much discussion about all the possible uses of MOFs, but there has been a lot of hype versus reality, and CALF-20 is the first to be proven stable and effective enough to be used at an industrial scale,” Shimizu said.
It has been licensed to companies capturing carbon across a range of industries, with the raw material now being produced by the tonne by chemical giant BASF.
CO2 pipeline at the Quest CCS project near Edmonton, Alta. Photo courtesy Shell Canada
Carbon capture filter gigafactory
Svante Inc. has demonstrated its CALF-20-based carbon capture system at a cement plant in British Columbia.
The company recently opened a “gigafactory” in Burnaby equipped to manufacture enough carbon capture and removal filters for up to 10 million tonnes of CO2 annually, equivalent to the emissions of more than 2.3 million cars.
The filters are designed to trap CO2 directly from industrial emissions and the atmosphere, the company says.
Svante chief operating officer Richard Laliberté called the Nobel committee’s recognition “a profound validation” for the entire field of carbon capture and removal.
CALF-20 expansion
Meanwhile, one of Shimizu’s former PhD students helped launch a spinoff company, Existent Sorbents, to further expand the applications of CALF-20.
Existent is working with oil sands producers, a major steel factory and a U.S.-based firm capturing emissions from other point sources, said CEO Adrien Côté.
“The first users of CALF-20 are leaders who took the risk of introducing new technology to industries that are shrewd about their top and bottom lines,” Côté said.
“It has been a long journey, but we are at the point where CALF-20 has proven to be resilient and able to survive in harsh real-world conditions, and we are excited to bring this made-in-Canada innovation to the world.”
Billionaire Bill Gates — long one of the loudest voices warning of climate catastrophe — now says the world has bigger problems to worry about. In a 17-page memo released Tuesday, the Microsoft co-founder called for a “strategic pivot” away from the obsessive focus on reducing global temperatures, urging leaders instead to prioritize fighting poverty and eradicating disease in the developing world. “Climate change is a serious problem, but it’s not the end of humanity,” Gates wrote.
Gates, 70, argued that global leaders have lost perspective by treating climate change as an existential crisis while millions continue to suffer from preventable diseases like malaria. “If I had to choose between eradicating malaria and preventing a tenth of a degree of warming, I’d let the temperature go up 0.1 degree,” he told reporters ahead of next month’s U.N. climate conference in Brazil. “People don’t understand the suffering that exists today.”
For decades, Gates has positioned himself as a leading advocate for global climate initiatives, investing billions in green energy projects and warning of the dangers of rising emissions. Yet his latest comments mark a striking reversal — and a rare admission that the world’s climate panic may have gone too far. “If you think climate is not important, you won’t agree with the memo,” Gates told journalists. “If you think climate is the only cause and apocalyptic, you won’t agree with the memo. It’s a pragmatic view from someone trying to maximize the money and innovation that helps poor countries.”
The billionaire’s change in tone is sure to raise eyebrows ahead of the U.N. conference, where climate activists plan to push for new emissions targets and wealth transfers from developed nations. Critics have long accused Gates and other elites of hypocrisy for lecturing the public about fossil fuels while traveling the globe on private jets. Now, Gates himself appears to be distancing from the doomsday rhetoric he once helped spread, effectively admitting that humanity faces more immediate moral imperatives than the weather.
(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Stunning Climate Change pivot from Bill Gates. Poverty and disease should be top concern.
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