conflict
The West’s Green Energy Delusions Empowered Putin

This article submitted by Michael Shellenberger
While we banned plastic straws, Russia drilled and doubled nuclear energy production.
How has Vladimir Putin—a man ruling a country with an economy smaller than that of Texas, with an average life expectancy 10 years lower than that of France—managed to launch an unprovoked full-scale assault on Ukraine?
There is a deep psychological, political and almost civilizational answer to that question: He wants Ukraine to be part of Russia more than the West wants it to be free. He is willing to risk tremendous loss of life and treasure to get it. There are serious limits to how much the U.S. and Europe are willing to do militarily. And Putin knows it.
Missing from that explanation, though, is a story about material reality and basic economics—two things that Putin seems to understand far better than his counterparts in the free world and especially in Europe.
Putin knows that Europe produces 3.6 million barrels of oil a day but uses 15 million barrels of oil a day. Putin knows that Europe produces 230 billion cubic meters of natural gas a year but uses 560 billion cubic meters. He knows that Europe uses 950 million tons of coal a year but produces half that.
The former KGB agent knows Russia produces 11 million barrels of oil per day but only uses 3.4 million. He knows Russia now produces over 700 billion cubic meters of gas a year but only uses around 400 billion. Russia mines 800 million tons of coal each year but uses 300.
That’s how Russia ends up supplying about 20 percent of Europe’s oil, 40 percent of its gas, and 20 percent of its coal.
The math is simple. A child could do it.
The reason Europe didn’t have a muscular deterrent threat to prevent Russian aggression—and in fact prevented the U.S. from getting allies to do more—is that it needs Putin’s oil and gas.
The question is why.
How is it possible that European countries, Germany especially, allowed themselves to become so dependent on an authoritarian country over the 30 years since the end of the Cold War?
Here’s how: These countries are in the grips of a delusional ideology that makes them incapable of understanding the hard realities of energy production. Green ideology insists we don’t need nuclear and that we don’t need fracking. It insists that it’s just a matter of will and money to switch to all-renewables—and fast. It insists that we need“degrowth” of the economy, and that we face looming human “extinction.” (I would know. I myself was once a true believer.)
John Kerry, the United States’ climate envoy, perfectly captured the myopia of this view when he said, in the days before the war, that the Russian invasion of Ukraine “could have a profound negative impact on the climate, obviously. You have a war, and obviously you’re going to have massive emissions consequences to the war. But equally importantly, you’re going to lose people’s focus.”
But it was the West’s focus on healing the planet with “soft energy” renewables, and moving away from natural gas and nuclear, that allowed Putin to gain a stranglehold over Europe’s energy supply.
As the West fell into a hypnotic trance about healing its relationship with nature, averting climate apocalypse and worshiping a teenager named Greta, Vladimir Putin made his moves.
While he expanded nuclear energy at home so Russia could export its precious oil and gas to Europe, Western governments spent their time and energy obsessing over “carbon footprints,” a term created by an advertising firm working for British Petroleum. They banned plastic straws because of a 9-year-old Canadian child’s science homework. They paid for hours of “climate anxiety” therapy.
While Putin expanded Russia’s oil production, expanded natural gas production, and then doubled nuclear energy production to allow more exports of its precious gas, Europe, led by Germany, shut down its nuclear power plants, closed gas fields, and refused to develop more through advanced methods like fracking.
The numbers tell the story best. In 2016, 30 percent of the natural gas consumed by the European Union came from Russia. In 2018, that figure jumped to 40 percent. By 2020, it was nearly 44 percent, and by early 2021, it was nearly 47 percent.
For all his fawning over Putin, Donald Trump, back in 2018, defied diplomatic protocol to call out Germany publicly for its dependence on Moscow. “Germany, as far as I’m concerned, is captive to Russia because it’s getting so much of its energy from Russia,” Trump said. This prompted Germany’s then-chancellor, Angela Merkel, who had been widely praised in polite circles for being the last serious leader in the West, to say that her country “can make our own policies and make our own decisions.”
The result has been the worst global energy crisis since 1973, driving prices for electricity and gasoline higher around the world. It is a crisis, fundamentally, of inadequate supply. But the scarcity is entirely manufactured.
Europeans—led by figures like Greta Thunberg and European Green Party leaders, and supported by Americans like John Kerry—believed that a healthy relationship with the Earth requires making energy scarce. By turning to renewables, they would show the world how to live without harming the planet. But this was a pipe dream. You can’t power a whole grid with solar and wind, because the sun and the wind are inconstant, and currently existing batteries aren’t even cheap enough to store large quantities of electricity overnight, much less across whole seasons.
In service to green ideology, they made the perfect the enemy of the good—and of Ukraine.
Take Germany.
Green campaigns have succeeded in destroying German energy independence—they call it Energiewende, or “energy turnaround”—by successfully selling policymakers on a peculiar version of environmentalism. It calls climate change a near-term apocalyptic threat to human survival while turning up its nose at the technologies that can help address climate change most and soonest: nuclear and natural gas.
At the turn of the millennium, Germany’s electricity was around 30 percent nuclear-powered. But Germany has been sacking its reliable, inexpensive nuclear plants. (Thunberg called nuclear power “extremely dangerous, expensive, and time-consuming” despite the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change deeming it necessary and every major scientific review deeming nuclear the safest way to make reliable power.)
By 2020, Germany had reduced its nuclear share from 30 percent to 11 percent. Then, on the last day of 2021, Germany shut down half of its remaining six nuclear reactors. The other three are slated for shutdown at the end of this year. (Compare this to nextdoor France, which fulfills 70 percent of its electricity needs with carbon-free nuclear plants.)
Germany has also spent lavishly on weather-dependent renewables—to the tune of $36 billion a year—mainly solar panels and industrial wind turbines. But those have their problems. Solar panels have to go somewhere, and a solar plant in Europe needs 400 to 800 times more land than natural gas or nuclear plants to make the same amount of power. Farmland has to be cut apart to host solar. And solar energy is getting cheaper these days mainly because Europe’s supply of solar panels is produced by slave labor in concentration camps as part of China’s genocide against Uighur Muslims.
The upshot here is that you can’t spend enough on climate initiatives to fix things if you ignore nuclear and gas. Between 2015 and 2025, Germany’s efforts to green its energy production will have cost $580 billion. Yet despite this enormous investment, German electricity still costs 50 percent more than nuclear-friendly France’s, and generating it produces eight times more carbon emissions per unit. Plus, Germany is getting over a third of its energy from Russia.
Germany has trapped itself. It could burn more coal and undermine its commitment to reducing carbon emissions. Or it could use more natural gas, which generates half the carbon emissions of coal, but at the cost of dependence on imported Russian gas. Berlin was faced with a choice between unleashing the wrath of Putin on neighboring countries or inviting the wrath of Greta Thunberg. They chose Putin.
Because of these policy choices, Vladimir Putin could turn off the gas flows to Germany, and quickly threaten Germans’ ability to cook or stay warm. He or his successor will hold this power for every foreseeable winter barring big changes. It’s as if you knew that hackers had stolen your banking details, but you won’t change your password.
This is why Germany successfully begged the incoming Biden administration not to oppose a contentious new gas pipeline from Russia called Nord Stream 2. This cut against the priorities of green-minded governance: On day one of Biden’s presidency, one of the new administration’’s first acts was to shut down the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to the U.S. in service to climate ideology. But Russia’s pipeline was too important to get the same treatment given how dependent Germany is on Russian imports. (Once Russia invaded, Germany was finally dragged into nixing Nord Stream 2, for now.)
Naturally, when American sanctions on Russia’s biggest banks were finally announced in concert with European allies last week, they specificallyexempted energy products so Russia and Europe can keep doing that dirty business. A few voices called for what would really hit Russia where it hurts: cutting off energy imports. But what actually happened was that European energy utilities jumped to buy more contracts for the Russian oil and gas that flows through Ukraine. That’s because they have no other good options right now, after green activism’s attacks on nuclear and importing fracked gas from America. There’s no current plan for powering Europe that doesn’t involve buying from Putin.
We should take Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a wake-up call. Standing up for Western civilization this time requires cheap, abundant, and reliable energy supplies produced at home or in allied nations. National security, economic growth, and sustainability requires greater reliance on nuclear and natural gas, and less on solar panels and wind turbines, which make electricity too expensive.
The first and most obvious thing that should be done is for President Biden to call on German Chancellor Scholz to restart the three nuclear reactors that Germany closed in December. A key step in the right direction came on Sunday when Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck, the economy and climate minister, announced that Germany would at least consider stopping its phaseout of nuclear. If Germany turns these three on and cancels plans to turn off the three others, those six should produce enough electricity to replace 11 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year—an eighth of Germany’s current needs…
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conflict
US airstrike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Was it obliteration?

A satellite image of the Isfahan nuclear research center in Iran shows visible damage to structures and nearby tunnel entrances from recent US airstrikes. / Satellite image (c) 2025 Maxar Technologies.
Seymour Hersh
The US attack on Iran may not have wiped out its nuclear ambitions but it did set them back years
I started my career in journalism during the early 1960s as a reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago, a now long-gone local news agency that was set up by the Chicago newspapers in the 1890s to cover the police and fire departments, City Hall, the courts, the morgue, and so on. It was a training ground, and the essential message for its aspiring reporters was: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”
It was a message I wish our cable networks would take to heart. CNN and MSNBC, basing their reporting on an alleged Defense Intelligence Agency analysis, have consistently reported that the Air Force raids in Iran on June 22 did not accomplish their primary goal: total destruction of Iran’s nuclear-weapons capacity. US newspapers also joined in, but it was the two nominally liberal cable channels, with their dislike—make that contempt—for President Donald Trump, that drove the early coverage.
There was no DIA analysis per se. All US units that engage in combat must file an “after-action report” to the DIA after a military engagement. In this case, the report would have come from the US Central Command, located at MacDill Air Force base in Tampa, Florida. CENTCOM is responsible for all US military operations in the Middle East, Egypt, Central Asia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. One US official involved in the process told me that “the first thing out of the box is you have to tell your boss what happened.” It was that initial report of the bombing attack that was forwarded to DIA headquarters along the Potomac River in Washington and copied or summarized by someone not authorized to do so and sent to the various media outlets.
The view of many who were involved in the planning and execution of the mission is that the report was summarized and leaked “for political purposes”—to cast immediate doubt on the success of the mission. The early reports went so far as to suggest that Iran’s nuclear program has survived incapacitation by the attack. Seven US B-2 “Spirit” bombers, each carrying two deep-penetration “bunker-busters” weighing 30,000 pounds, had flown without challenge from their base in Missouri to the primary target: Iran’s Fordo nuclear facility, concealed deep inside a mountain twenty miles north of the city of Qom.
The planning for the attack began with the knowledge that the main target—the working area of the nuclear program—was buried at least 260 feet below the rocky surface at Fordo. The gas centrifuges spinning there were repeatedly enriching uranium, in what is known as a cascade, not to weapons-grade level—uranium-235 isotopes enriched to 90 percent—but to 60 percent. Further processing to create weapons grade uranium, if Iran chose to do so, could be done in a matter of weeks, or less. The Air Force planning group had also been informed before the bombing raid, most likely by the Israelis, who have a vast spy network in Iran, that more than 450 pounds of the enriched gas stored at Fordo had been shipped to safety at another vital Iranian nuclear site at Isfahan, 215 miles south of Tehran. Isfahan was the only known facility in Iran capable of converting the Fordo gas into a highly enriched metal—a critical early stage of building the bomb. Isfahan also was a separate target of the US attack on Fordo, and was pulverized by Tomahawk missiles fired by a U.S. submarine operating in the Gulf of Aden, off Yemen.
As a journalist who for decades has covered the nascent nuclear crisis in the Middle East, it seemed clear to me and to informed friends I have in Washington and Israel that if Fordo somehow survived its bunker-buster attack, as was initially suggested, and continued to enrich more uranium, Isfahan would not. No enrichment, no Iranian bomb.
I’ve been frustrated and angry at cable news coverage for years, and that includes Fox News, too, and decided to try and find the real story. If your mother says she loves you, check it out. And I checked out enough of it to share.
I was told that “the first question for the American planners was how big was the actual workspace at Fordo? Was it a structure? We had to find that out before we got rid of it.” Some of the planners estimated that the working space “was the size of two hockey rinks: 200 feet long and 85 feet wide.” It came to 34,000 square feet. The height of the underground working space was assumed to be ten-and-a-half feet—I was not told the genesis of that assumption—and the size of the target was determined to be 357,000 cubic feet.
The next step was to measure the power of the dozen or more bunker-busters that were planned to be “carefully spaced and dropped” by the US B-2 bombers, using the most advanced guidance systems. (During one high-level session in Washington, one of the Air Force planners was asked what would happen if the B-2’s guidance systems were corrupted by an outside signal. “We’d miss the target” was the answer.)
I was assured that even if the rough estimate of the working space at Fordo was far off, the bombers targeting Fordo each carried a 30,000-pound bomb with an explosive payload of as much as five thousand pounds, which was more than enough to pulverize the mythical hockey rinks, or even a much larger working space.
Some of the bombs were also outfitted with what is known as a hard target void sensing fuze, which enabled the bombs to penetrate multiple layers of a site like Fordo before detonating. This would maximize the destructive effect. Each bomb, dropped in sequence, would create a force of rubble that would cause increasing havoc in the working areas deep inside the mountain.
“The bombs made their own hole. We built a 30,000-pound steel bullet,” the official told me, referring with pride to the bunker-busters.
Most important, he said, was that there were no post-strike hints detected of radioactivity—more evidence that the 450 pounds of enriched uranium had been moved from Fordo to the reprocessing site at Isfahan prior to the US attack there, which was code-named “Midnight Hammer.” That operation included a third US strike at yet another nuclear facility at Natanz.
“The Air Force got everything on the hit list,” the official told me. “Even if Iran rebuilds some centrifuges, it will still need Isfahan. There is no conversion capability without it.”
Why not, I asked, tell the public about the success of the raid and the fact that Iran no longer has a potential nuclear weapon?
The answer: “There will be a top-secret report about all of this, but we don’t tell people how hard we work. We tell the public what we think it wants to hear.”
The US official, asked about the future of the Iranian nuclear program, quickly acknowledged that “there is a communication problem” when it comes to the fate of the program.
The intent of the strike planners, he said, “was to prevent the Iranians from building a nuclear weapon in the near term—a year or so—with the hope they would not try again. The clear understanding was that there was no expectation to ‘obliterate’ every aspect of their nuclear program. We don’t even know what that is.
“Obliteration means the glass—[eliminating] Iran’s nuclear program—is full. The planning and the results are the glass is half-full. For Trump critics, the results are the glass is half-empty—the centrifuges may have survived and four hundred pounds of 60 percent enriched uranium are missing. The bombs could not be assured to penetrate the centrifuge chamber . . . too deep, but they could cover them up [with rocks and other bomb debris] and in the process cause unknown damage to them.
“Whether the 60 percent [enriched uranium] was there or not is irrelevant because without centrifuges they cannot refine it to weapons grade. Add to this the research and refinement and conversion from gas to metal—required for a bomb—at Isfahan are also gone.
“Results? Glass is half-full . . . a couple of years of respite and uncertain future. So now Trump’s defense is Full Glass. Critics? Half-empty. Reality? Half-full. There you are.”
The immediate beneficiary of the use of US force in Iran will not be a more placid Middle East, but Israel, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli Air Force and army are still killing massive numbers of Palestinians in Gaza.
There remains no evidence that Iran was on the cusp of becoming a nuclear power. But as the world has known for decades, Israel maintains a significant nuclear arsenal that it officially claims does not exist.
This is a story not about the bigger picture, which is muddled, but about a successful US mission that was the subject of a lot of sloppy reporting because of a reviled president. It would have been a breakthrough had anyone in the mainstream press spoken or written about the double standard that benefits Israel and its nuclear umbrella, but in America that remains a taboo.
conflict
Obama Dropped Over 26K Bombs Without Congressional Approval

@miss_stacey_ Biden, Clinton, Obama & Harris on Iran #biden #clinton #obama #harris #trump #iran #nuclear
Iran has been the target for decades. Biden, Harris, and Clinton—all the Democrats have said that they would attack Iran if given the opportunity. It appears that Donald Trump is attempting to mitigate a potentially irresolvable situation. As he bluntly told reporters: We basically — we have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f‑‑‑ they’re doing.”
A portion of the nation believes Trump acted like a dictator by attacking Iran without Congressional approval. I explained how former President Barack Obama decimated the War Powers Resolution Act when he decided Libya was overdue for a regime change. The War Powers Act, or War Powers Resolution of 1973, grants the POTUS the ability to send American troops into battle if Congress receives a 48-hour notice. The stipulation here is that troops cannot remain in battle for over 60 days unless Congress authorizes a declaration of war. Congress could also remove US forces at any time by passing a resolution.
Libya is one of seven nations that Obama bombed without Congressional approval, yet no one remembers him as a wartime president, as the United States was not technically at war. Over 26,000 bombs were deployed across 7 nations under his command in 2016 alone. Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, and Pakistan were attacked without a single vote. Donald Trump’s recent orders saw 36 bombs deployed in Iran.
The majority of those bombings happened in Syria, Libya, and Iraq under the premise of targeting extremist groups like ISIS. Drone strikes were carried out across Somalia, Yemen, and Pakistan as the Obama Administration accused those nations of hosting al-Qaeda affiliated groups. Coincidentally, USAID was also providing funding to those groups.
The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) was initially implemented to hunt down the Taliban and al-Qaeda after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Obama broadened his interpretation of the AUMF and incorporated newly formed militant groups that were allegedly expanding across the entire Middle East. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism believes there were up to 1,100 civilian casualties in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Thousands of civilians died in Syria and Iraq but the death toll was never calculated. At least 100 innocent people died in the 2016 attacks in Afghanistan alone.
The government will always augment the law for their personal agenda. The War Powers Resolution was ignored and the AUMF was altered. Congress was, however, successful in preventing Obama from putting US troops on the ground and fighting a full-scale war. In 2013, Obama sought congressional approval for military action in Syria but was denied. Obama again attempted to deploy troops in 2015 but was denied. Congress has to redraft the AUMF to specifically prevent Obama from deploying troops in the Middle East. “The authorization… does not authorize the use of the United States Armed Forces on the ground in Syria for the purpose of combat operations.” Obama attempted to redraft the AUMF on his own by insisting he would prohibit “enduring offensive ground combat operations” or long-term deployment of troops. He was met with bipartisan disapproval as both sides believed he was attempting to drag the United States into another unnecessary war.
The United States should not be involved in any of these battles, but here we are. Those living in fear that Donald Trump is a dictator fail to recognize that past leadership had every intention of sending American men and women into battle unilaterally without a single vote cast.
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