IN THIS ISSUE:
- Climate Panickers Bemoan Realists’ Inspired Policy Wins
- The Bloom is Off the ‘Carbon Capture and Storage’ Rose
- China’s Reforestation Benefitting from CO2 Fertilization
Climate Panickers Bemoan Realists’ Inspired Policy Wins
I’ve written in prior Climate Change Weekly posts about President Donald Trump’s moves to rein in the regulatory state, promote sound climate science, advance U.S. energy dominance, and claw-back national sovereignty. It is one thing when I, a long-term advocate for such moves, discusses Trump’s actions, describing them in guardedly glowing terms. It’s another thing entirely when radical environmental activists and climate alarmists are forced to acknowledge and reckon with Trump’s actions and his actions’ influence on other countries’ leaders, admitting climate realism is, for the present, winning its war on their pet causes, but that’s just what happened recently.
We Don’t Have Time (WDHT), which bills itself as the world’s largest media platform for climate action, recently posted an article detailing what it refers to as the fossil fuel lobby’s successes — specifically 45 policies instituted across the globe which WDHT counts as “policy reversals . . . across 15 jurisdictions and the global shipping regime . . . adopted, announced, proposed, taking legal effect or materially advanced between July 2025 and July 2026.”
The first policy reversal listed was the International Maritime Organization’s decision to delay its net zero framework of shipping taxes and port fees for at least a year, possibly longer, at the behest of the Trump administration and Saudi Arabia.
Then WDHT detailed seven pan-European Union policies that delayed, made less stringent, or extended timelines for meeting net zero corporate reporting and finance goals, as well as suspended penalties for methane emissions tied to imports, ended its internal combustion engine ban, postponed its carbon market for transportation fuels, and delayed and diluted its deforestation policies.
Beyond EU wide policies, WDHT also discussed actions taken by individual European countries, particularly, Germany, France, the Czech Republic, and the United Kingdom, that scraped various net zero goals related to methane reductions and heating fuels, among other rules, standards, and deadlines related to reducing fossil fuel use and cutting emissions.
WDHT then listed seven actions taken by the Trump administration reversing climate programs. Most of these actions, like moving to withdraw the Endangerment Finding for carbon dioxide, the offshore wind leasing pause and buybacks of leases, and leaving the Paris agreement and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, I’ve discussed in the Climate Change Weekly posts linked above.
Even greener-than-thou developed countries like Canada, Australia, Norway, Sweden, and New Zealand have rolled back, reduced, or delayed their previous climate commitments and laws over the past year. Norway and New Zealand, for instance, acted to expand offshore oil and gas exploration. This is a reversal of previous bans. And Canada, suspended the clean electricity regulations of Alberta, moved to expand its oil pipeline network to allow expanded shipping of crude, and eliminated its national electric vehicle mandate. Keep in mind these are countries whose leaders like to lecture the United States at various international fora concerning the need for it to cut emissions and to agree to internationally enforceable strict net zero policies — complete with penalties for non-compliance and reparations for developing countries for the past climate sins of the global West.
Nor were developing countries across the globe immune from climate policy backsliding. Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, and Indonesia — all countries that had previously pushed for quicker climate action by developed countries and committed to their own green energy programs — each implemented policies that allowed for the expansion of the development and use of their domestic fossil fuel resources, including coal.
By any measure — from media coverage, to funding, to opinion polls, to public political discussion, to actual policies — climate alarm is in retreat across the globe like never before in my lifetime. And it’s not just me saying so, like some heretic whistling past the graveyard. Rather it is those most wedded to the misanthropic, green energy, climate change, ideologically driven hoax that are decrying the shift.
Honestly, in many respects this is my Conan the Barbarian “crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women,” moment. And the lamentations are beautiful to hear, despite being, regrettably in my opinion, overblown and possibly premature.
Like Dracula, bad policies have a way of rising from the grave to inflict harm once again. Crossing my fingers this is not one of those times.
Source: We Don’t Have Time
The Bloom is Off the ‘Carbon Capture and Storage’ Rose
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) has been sold as a way of having our cake and eating it too by people and companies that want to claim humans are causing dangerous climate change but the world still needs to continue using fossil fuels for the foreseeable future.
Carbon capture and storage systems come (or are being developed) in a variety of forms. In a nutshell, they are designed to capture the carbon dioxide (CO2) produced in an industrial capacity, or pull it directly from the air. Then, usually after being transported through pipelines, the CO2 is stored, supposedly permanently, in an underground reservoir. CCS, as opposed to carbon capture and use (CCU), which oil companies have been doing for years to boost oil recovery from marginal or declining wells, makes no sense except in the context of reducing atmospheric CO2 to prevent dangerous climate change. This means if there is no climate crisis, there is no justification for CCS.
CCS is wholly a creation of government subsidies and tax credits. The rapid and widespread adoption of industrial wind and solar are equally creatures of government support, but they, at least, produce some value in the electricity they generate and a revenue stream. The CO2 stored permanently under CCS has no commercial value or use, because if it is used, it’s not being stored and the supposed value in terms of climate change mitigation is destroyed.
As detailed at Oil Price and by Pro Publica, however, there is good reason to doubt the effectiveness of CCS systems in reducing atmospheric CO2 or CO2 emissions. Projects, when not failing to operate at all, are not operating as promised. And what minimal CO2 is being stored is coming at a high cost.
By the way, this is not a new revelation. A Heartland Institute study and a joint letter delivered to the IRS, both of which I co-authored in 2025, came to the same conclusion.
Wedded equally to the idea that human CO2 emissions are causing dangerous climate change and must be abated — plus the reality that fossil fuels will be used for some time to come — the World Economic Forum forecast in 2025 that the CCS industry would grow by 400 percent by 2030. While claiming to embrace the need to reduce emissions, the oil industry itself is cashing in on government subsidies which, due to changes in U.S. law, now flow equally to CCU — creating a windfall revenue stream for something oil and gas companies were already doing at a profit.
Oil Price details the government subsides flowing to the technology across the EU, writing,
Some governments are also backing CCS in a big way. In May, Germany launched a $5.7 billion Carbon Contracts for Difference scheme that aims to promote and support CCS and carbon capture and utilisation (CCU) projects. In 2024, in the United Kingdom, the government announced up to $29 billion of funding over 25 years to make the country an early leader in two growing global sectors, CCUS and hydrogen, to be allocated between these two clusters.
Meanwhile, in Denmark, the cement maker Aalborg Portland signed a $2.55 billion CCS contract with the country’s energy agency. Aalborg Portland’s CEO Soren Holm Christensen stated, “We can now take the decisive step toward realizing a project that is not only significant in a Danish context, but is also among the largest industrial CO2 capture projects in Europe.”
Wishes and pipedream aside, early audits of CCS operations show their reality is failing to meet the sales pitches that created them. The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) reviewed 13 operating CCS projects around the world. It found that most of the projects captured far less than 90 percent of the CO2 promised. Many projects displayed serious, and so far insurmountable, technological glitches or problems that have resulted in them failing to operate at all. And the cost per ton of CO2 captured is much higher than estimated by the projects’ boosters when they sold the projects to businesses and government. A second audit, by Global CCS Institute, found that only 50 facilities were operating worldwide by 2024, “with the capacity to capture around one thousandth of global emissions,” per Oil Price.
And, of course, whether the reservoirs where the CO2 is supposed to be permanently stored can and will actually keep the CO2 locked in place for all time is as yet an open question. What works in theory may not work, or work as well, in practice. Are the reservoirs chosen actually impermeable and will they remain so as CO2 is added and pressure builds?
One thing we can be fairly certain of, is that using CCS to reduce the emissions from electric power generation means ratepayers and consumers of energy intensive goods, will pay higher prices.
“In the United States gas industry, the cost of adding CCS to U.S. plants is estimated at $20 to $30 per megawatt hour (MWh), which could potentially double the cost of power production,” reports Oil Price. “Meanwhile, in Europe, the think tanks Agora Industry and Oeko-Institut, estimate the cost of carbon capture, transport, and storage at between $170 and $340 a tonne.
“‘According to these calculations, the costs of existing or planned CO2 storage projects are at least 50 per cent higher than previous forecasts,’ the think tanks stated in a press release,” writes Oil Price.
Pro Publica’s slide show is instructive concerning: (1) the scale of amount of CO2 (1.6 billion tons, per year by 2025) storage; (2) the scale of the industrial undertaking, from capture technologies, to pipelines, to storage capacity (68,000 miles of new pipelines in the United States alone in just two decades); and (3) the cost of the infrastructure needed to make it work. (“By 2050, the world could be spending half a trillion dollars — more than China’s military budget, and 10 times more than the U.N.’s humanitarian and development aid budget — each year.”) And all for a scheme which existing sites suggest may not be able to contain or keep stored nearly the amount of CO2 expected and far less than is needed to substantially offset the ongoing increase in CO2 emissions.
Based the lack of a climate crisis and the rate of success and costs associated with CCW efforts so far, CCS may prove to be among the biggest boondoggles of all. A government financed climate grift to exceed all climate grifts.
Sources: Oil Price; Pro Publica
China’s Reforestation Benefitting from CO2 Fertilization
China undertook a huge tree planting project that is benefitting greatly from rising CO2 levels. Beginning in 1978, in an attempt to reforest land and slow desertification by halting the spread of the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts, China embarked a the “Great Green Wall” plan, planting 66 billion trees so far, with more to come. It has borne success, slowing desert expansion and creating new forest habitat and massively expanded leaf cover.
A new study has found that trees planted as part of China’s forestation efforts have grown faster than natural, previously existing forests, and that’s in large part due to rising CO2 and the age of the trees involved. Young trees use CO2 to expand roots and pack on trunk, limb and leaf and/or fruit growth. As they age, their CO2 absorption slows down.
The study wanted to examine how tree species, forest make up, density, and other factors might respond to and mitigate any impacts of rising CO2.
“Planted forests are widely used in climate mitigation strategies, but most global ecosystem models do not distinguish between forest types or represent age-related dynamics adequately,” lead author Yuhang Luo, a landscape ecologist at China’s Peking University, told Live Science. “So we felt it was important to clarify how these factors interact — not just for scientific understanding, but also for improving the models and assumptions that underpin real-world forest policy and carbon accounting.”
The researchers used satellite data to track leaf area index, a measure of canopy density and a key driver of carbon uptake, to determine how fast the different forest types grew. They found a striking difference: Planted forests increased their leaf area 66 percent faster than natural ones.
The research team used satellite data to track leaf area index, to measure how fast the different forest types grew. They found that China’s planted forests increased their leaf area 66 percent faster than natural ones. Even when comparing natural to planted forests of similar age and under similar growing conditions, the trees in the planted forests grew slightly faster, especially if the tree plantings contained a variety of tree species rather than forests made up of a single species or monoculture. Planted evergreen forests also grew faster than natural forests. In general, the rapid increase began to decline between 30 and 40 years after plating, with difference in growth rates declining sharply after 40 years.
Source: Newsbreak
