EU’s Green Deal is pushing Europe into decline

 The great majority of mankind aspires to more prosperity, which requires abundant and cheap energy. However, the EU is using its Green Deal to do the opposite.

In the following, Samuel Furfari highlights a report that reveals the EU is clinging to the pretence of leading an “energy transition” as Europe declines under the weight of “green” climate policies.

An Energy Institute report reveals a Europe clinging to the pretence of leading an “energy transition” as the continent declines under the weight of climate policies whose quixotically utopian objectives are negated elsewhere by fossil fuel-supported economic growth.

Data from the 75th edition of the annual ‘Statistical Review of World Energy‘ will surprise only those ignoring the facts: The world continues to depend massively on fossil fuels [more correctly, hydrocarbon fuels]. Solar and wind technologies, while expanding, still lag ever-rising energy demand, which last year reached a record 600 exajoules. (That’s 600 quintillion joules, where a joule is equal to the work necessary to create one watt of power for one second.)

Of total primary energy consumption, 86% came from fossil fuels – oil at 33.5%; coal, 27.6%; and natural gas, 25.1%. Accounting for just 3% were solar and wind, which are heavily promoted by the European Commission over the much-demonised hydrocarbons.

From 2015-2025, the first decade of the Paris Agreement on climate change, global energy consumption rose more than 14%, with sharply contrasting dynamics. European Union use declined about 1% annually, while consumption in the Asia-Pacific region grew 2.6%....<<<Read More>>>...

UN declares every nation has a legal duty to obey its climate decrees – or face the consequences

More and more people recognise that the so-called climate emergency is not about the Earth’s climate but is a vehicle for wealth redistribution, central planning and eroding national borders in favour of supranational governance.

So the UN is trying to muscle in, take control and force its climate scam on all nations. The Globalist organisation has taken it upon itself to declare that its climate decrees are “international law” and nations must obey or face the consequences.

Irrespective of what the UN or any of its puppets say or do, we must never lose sight of the facts: CO2, the gas of life, is not the enemy; centralised power pretending to save the planet at the expense of liberty is....<<<Read More>>>...

UK’s Net Zero costs are soaring out of control

In the following article, David Turver demonstrates how the UK electricity grid expansion for Clean Power 2030 is in chaos. Costs are exploding and projects are massively delayed.

When the National Energy System Operator (“NESO”) produced their plan to deliver Ed Miliband’s Clean Power 2030 (“CP2030”) goal, they said that all the planned transmission grid expansion works must be built on time and that “involves twice as much in the next five years as was built in total over the last decade.” From the outset, delivering on that part of CP2030 was always a tall order.

I have been contacted by several people over the past few weeks highlighting several issues that indicate these ambitious plans (some may say fantastical) will probably not be achieved. For those of us sceptical of Net Zero generally and Clean Power 2030 in particular, this represents both good news and bad news.

First, the good news: Slipping schedules means they will not spend all the money earmarked for grid expansion, which ought to mean our bills do not go up as much as feared. The bad news is that, based on the limited data available, it looks like the costs of this work are soaring out of control.

Let’s dig into the details, beginning with the bad news so that we can end on a high note....<<<Read More>>>...

Miliband Overrules His Inspectors to Approve Britain’s Second-Largest Solar Farm

 Ed Miliband has approved Britain’s second-largest solar farm on 4,000 acres of prime farmland after overruling opposition from his own inspectors. The Telegraph has the story.

The Energy Secretary on Wednesday said he had granted planning permission to the One Earth Solar Farm development to be built on prime farmland across Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire.

It comes despite a recommendation to block the development from Miliband’s own planning inspectors.

They warned that the scheme would be destructive for the environment, would put historic structures at risk, damage the health and well-being of local people and cause transport problems.

The controversial decision marks the third large solar farm approved by Miliband in recent days, coming a week after he backed two other large solar farms, Pear Tree Hill in East Yorkshire and Dean Moor in West Cumbria.

Sceptics suggest the Energy Secretary is trying to sign off as many such developments as he can before Andy Burnham takes office and potentially moves him to a new position.

One Earth has been cleared for construction on 4,000 acres of prime farmland near Bassetlaw, Newark and Sherwood and West Lindsey district council areas.

Besides the thousands of Chinese-made solar panels, the scheme will also include giant batteries to store surplus electricity.

It is set to be the second largest solar farm in the UK after the Springwell Solar Farm in Lincolnshire, an 800-megawatt project approved by the Government in April.

Confirming his decision, Miliband said: “The only way to have energy security is if we take a pro-growth approach to building more clean energy in Britain. For two years that is exactly what this Government has done.”

However, the new scheme is controversial because it will see several rural communities largely surrounded by solar panels covering what were once fields and hedgerows.

The village of North Clifton, around 10 miles from Lincoln, would have solar farms to the north, east and south, with some of the local farms being completely surrounded....<<<Read More>>>...

Europe’s carbon rules buckle as Volkswagen weighs 100,000 job cuts

Meanwhile .... more news on the carbon is guilty lie and the mechanism is for depopulation and parasite class control.

++++++++++++++++++++ 

 The EU is holding to its Green Deal targets — a 55% emissions cut by 2030 and net-zero by 2050 — even as its carbon market comes under growing political attack.

Carbon costs have climbed sharply, from an average €25 per ton in 2020 to over €100 by 2023, adding pressure on European manufacturers.

Germany, Italy, and Eastern European nations are demanding looser climate rules amid job cuts at major employers like Volkswagen.

The EU's Emissions Trading System faces political backlash, with Italy calling for suspension and Poland and the Czech Republic securing a delay to the ETS2 carbon-pricing scheme.

Critics, including Hungary's energy minister, argue the EU's aggressive targets risk economic harm while it accounts for less than 7% of global emissions.

Europe's green agenda is colliding with economic reality, and the strain is showing across the continent's industrial heartland. As European Union leaders hold to their target of a net-zero economy by 2050, a growing bloc of national governments is demanding the rules be loosened — and some of the bloc's biggest employers are shedding jobs.

At the center of the fight is the EU's Emissions Trading System, the carbon market that has anchored the bloc's climate strategy since 2005. The system charges companies for every ton of carbon dioxide they emit, and the politics around it have turned volatile....<<<Read More>>>...

Food for Thought #1153

 

Sweden’s new 25-year mining lease exposes the dirty secret behind ‘green’ technology

The Swedish government has just handed a Canadian mining company a 25-year license to tear into the Earth’s crust for heavy rare earth elements. The green utopia is now colliding with the brutal reality of extraction, and the truth emerges from the rubble: electric vehicles, wind turbines, and the entire “clean energy” revolution are built on a foundation of mining, pollution, and geopolitical dependency on mining deposits.

The Norra Kärr deposit in southern Sweden, now awarded to Leading Edge Materials, will supply terbium, dysprosium, and yttrium - the invisible skeletons of permanent magnets that spin every so-called “zero-emission” motor and every wind turbine blade. But what the media refuses to tell you is that for every ton of these minerals ripped from the ground, there are mountains of toxic waste, destroyed ecosystems, and exploited labor forces....<<<Read More>>>....

Sudden calls to return to hydrocarbon-generated energy expose the climate crisis hoax

 In a monologue about artificial intelligence, which he describes as a metastasising cancer on societies, Neil Oliver highlights how Net Zero rhetoric has gone a bit quiet now that technocratic elites need dependable energy for massive data centres, which are the building blocks of a digital cage.

Tony Blair’s calls to return to oil and gas, after years of global elites promoting wind and solar energy, expose the climate crisis hoax for all to see, he said.

We need to talk about cancer, by which I mean the metastasising cancer that is artificial intelligence, AI. Cancer is the multiplication of cells that have gone wrong, failed and should have died. Instead, the process gets out of control, dangerous, unwanted, rogue cells multiplying faster and faster.

I say the hard tumours of the cancer of AI are the data centres, popping up everywhere, almost always where they are least wanted. Like malignant tumours, data centres demand and monopolise more and more of the world’s precious resources. As the tumours grow and the cancer spreads, that malign hunger leaves less and less for that body, so to speak, that the body finally dies. Malignant cancerous tumours take more and more without giving.

Blackrock CEO Larry Fink says everyone must invest in AI, whether they want to or not. Eventually, all the water, all the energy, all the nutrients, if you like, will be co-opted and diverted to more and more data centres.

According to figures published by the Environmental Rights Centre for Scotland, the country where I live, projected energy requirements for data centres already planned or proposed for Scotland are between 4,450 and 4,950 megawatts. That’s more than peak demand for the whole country of Scotland in the depths of a typical winter. That is a doubling of demand for electricity before so much as a single kettle has been boiled....<<<Read More>>>....

The Climate Cult

 Many people with inadequate scientific knowledge are convinced that Planet Earth is in mortal danger from global warming due to humans. If Planet Earth were really in great danger from humans, any means to protect it would be justified. Some extremists propose reducing Earth’s eight billion population of people to no more than one billion. How this is to be done has always been a bit vague. Genghis Khan made a good start by slaughtering some 40 million people in the 13th century. In our day, Prince Philip, father of King Charles III of the United Kingdom, opined that: “If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.”

The climate alarmism of our time is a malignant alliance of ignorant fanaticism, like that mentioned above, and opportunism: the lust for power, fame and wealth. Like all fanatical movements, climate alarmism is doing great collateral damage, most notably to the reputation of my own profession of science. Generous research grants from governments and private foundations have created a new discipline of ‘climate science’. Traditional, rigorous disciplines like atmospheric physics, atmospheric chemistry, meteorology or palaeontology were quick to cash in by renaming themselves with some variant of ‘Centre for Saving the Planet’. They were generously rewarded with research grants, new laboratories, professorships, elections to learned societies, prizes and other tokens of gratitude....<<<Read More>>>...

UK Parliament needs to launch an investigation into the Clean Power 2030 plan before it does any more damage

In 2024, National Energy System Operator (“NESO”) and Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (“DESNZ”) devised their “Clean Power 2030” plan. They claimed their plan would bring down energy bills for both households and businesses for good.

But the plan is failing to meet its targets on cost, time and quality – and grid integration costs are soaring. It is clear the Clean Power 2030 project is off the rails, David Turver writes.

Additionally, wind- and solar-generated energy are not going to be able to meet the UK’s requirements. There will be a significant shortfall in energy supply by 2030 and it’s unclear where this energy will come from.

There are now strong grounds to launch a Parliamentary investigation into the Clean Power 2030 to get the project cancelled before any more damage is done.

Back in 2024, NESO and DESNZ outlined their Clean Power 2030 (“CP2030”) plan. That plan called for a big increase in grid spending, an ambitious rollout of wind and solar capacity and also relied on negative emissions from Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage (“BECCS”) to meet emissions targets. NESO claimed CP2030 “can be delivered without increasing costs for consumers.” DESNZ claimed that CP2030 would “build an energy system that can bring down bills for households and businesses for good.”

Recently, DESNZ released new data (ET6.1) showing the installed capacity of wind and solar at the end of 2025, and Drax announced it had got cold feet about investing in BECCS. So, what do these developments mean for Miliband’s CP2030 plan? Time to look at how well CP2030 is going against the plan. It is customary to analyse projects through three different dimensions: cost, time and quality...<<<Read More>>>....

Massive Curriculum Changes Required for UK School Geography After Met Office Climate Projections Ruled “Implausible”

 The world of geography teaching in the UK is in crisis following guidance from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that a collection of assumptions used in climate computer modelling known as RCP8.5 is “implausible”. The ruling has effectively trashed the Met Office’s 2018 climate projections report (UKCP18) which only used this scenario to produce a variety of always ridiculous forecasts. To widespread mainstream media acclaim at the time, it was said that summer temperatures could rise by over 5°C in 50 years. Since 2018, UKCP18 has been embedded in UK school geography teaching as a core forecasting source. Its predictions are assessed, used for impact studies and underpin public examinations. The “implausible” ruling means that geography teaching materials particularly at A-level now require a major rewrite of core textbooks involving the removal of all the junk predictions.

Preferably by the start of the Autumn term in September.

It’s not as if teachers can argue that only the ‘high emissions’ pathway of RCP8.5 can be ignored. At the time, the Met Office only ran RCP8.5 assumptions through its super-computer, the results of which it then described as “plausible” as it promoted them in bold type. Using only RCP8.5 was justified on cost grounds since it enabled the available computer time to produce results – guesses might be a more accurate description – down to 2 kms. School resources do note that lower emissions results are available, but these were statistically derived by the Met Office from the RCP8.5 results. This means that all the Met Office projections are compromised and a thorough cleansing needs to be undertaken of all the flawed information wherever it occurs in the teaching environment....<<<Read More>>>....

Food for Thought #1114

 

Relentless Drive to Net Zero is Trampling British Industry, Chemicals Plant Boss Warns

 British industry is being trampled underfoot as the country “gallops” to Net Zero, the head of a West Midlands chemicals plant, Adrian Hanrahan, has said. GB News has the story.

Adrian Hanrahan said that energy costs had been high since the Ukraine invasion and warned that green levies and the pressure to decarbonise were making the situation worse.

The Managing Director of historic chemicals company Robinson Brothers said the plant, along with other manufacturers, had taken huge strides in increasing energy efficiency.

But with prices soaring again as a result of the Iran war, the cumulative pressure on the chemicals industry was becoming too much, he said.

He said of the Net Zero demands: “We’re trying to run a marathon in a sprint format.”

The sector employs more than 150,000 people directly and supports half a million jobs in the wider economy. It has annual exports worth £61 billion.

Robinson Brothers was founded in 1869 and had weathered calamities including two world wars, the Great Depression, the financial crisis and the Covid pandemic.

But not once has the family-run firm considered leaving its West Midlands roots. After the 2008 crash, Hanrahan pointed out that China might prove more lucrative.

“I explained they’d make more money”, he said, as he showed GB News around the 14 acre site in West Bromwich....<<<Read More>>>...

Food for Thought #1109

 

IPCC admits its doomsday model is “implausible” – corporate media is silent

 For years, corporate media has been peddling the IPCC’s RCP8.5-fuelled terror – now that there has been a massive course correction, a semi-retraction of it, silence.

RCP8.5 is a high-emissions climate scenario used in the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (“AR5”) published in 2014 to model future climate change. In April this year, the hammer was dropped on this doomsday scenario and declared “implausible.”

Although corporate media have publicised the IPCC’s implausible scenario for years, when it is corrected, they ignore it. The reason for the media blackout is not hard to fathom. “These outlets built empires on existential dread. Admitting the favourite scare tool was nonsense risks exposing the hype machine,” Stephen Heins writes....<<<Read More>>>....

IPCC Admits Apocalyptic Climate Scenarios Are “Implausible” – Meaning Most Media Scare Stories Over Last 15 Years Are Officially Junk

 Activist climate scientists, journalists and Net Zero-obsessed politicians are in shock following an official admission from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that a set of key assumptions promoting a climate ‘crisis’ since 2011 are “implausible”. The notorious set of always-improbable RCP8.5 ‘pathway’ assumptions which fed into computer models trying to measure an unmeasurable climate are no more. Since around 2011, these ‘business as usual’ assumptions have produced outlandish claims of future climate catastrophe which have been lapped up by lap dog journalists and politicians. The influential writer Roger Pielke Jr. called RCP8.5’s demise, “the most significant development in climate research in decades”.

Others might observe that we have not heard the last of RCP8.5. Its gross misuse is likely to be given a starring, central role when the history of the Great Climate and Net Zero Scam comes to be written.

Pielke lays it out clearly what has happened:

What matters today is that the group with official responsibility for developing climate scenarios for the IPCC and broader research community has now admitted that the scenarios that have dominated climate research, assessment and policy during the past two cycles of the IPCC assessment process are implausible. They describe impossible futures.

He goes on to note that tens of thousands of research papers have been and continue to be published using these scenarios. In addition, a similar number of media headlines have “amplified their findings”, while governments and international organisations have built these implausible scenarios into policy and regulation....<<<Read More>>>....

Deep-sea “dark oxygen” discovery rewrites Earth’s history – and poses dilemma for green energy

 Researchers found that polymetallic nodules on the Pacific seafloor produce oxygen through electrolysis – without sunlight or photosynthesis – challenging the long-held belief that oxygen originates solely from biological processes.

These nodules, rich in metals like cobalt and lithium (used in "green energy" tech), are targeted for industrial-scale mining, risking irreversible damage to deep-sea ecosystems that rely on their oxygen-producing function.

Globalist-backed corporations exploit "climate change" narratives to justify destructive deep-sea mining, despite evidence that disrupting these nodules could collapse marine oxygen cycles and food chains.

Mining operations could smother deep-sea life with toxic sediment plumes, while governments and corporations ignore warnings from scientists and nations calling for moratoriums.

The discovery exposes humanity's arrogance in dismantling ecosystems (like deep oceans) for short-term profit, revealing how little we truly know about Earth’s self-regulating processes.

For centuries, science has taught that oxygen – the lifeblood of Earth's atmosphere – comes exclusively from photosynthesis, the process by which plants, algae and cyanobacteria convert sunlight into energy. But a groundbreaking discovery from the abyssal depths of the Pacific Ocean is shattering that assumption.

Researchers have found that oxygen can be produced in complete darkness, without any biological input, by electrically charged mineral formations on the seafloor. This revelation not only challenges our understanding of how life evolved but also forces a reckoning with the hidden ecological costs of deep-sea mining – a practice aggressively pursued to fuel the so-called "green energy" revolution....<<<Read More>>>...

Food for Thought #1026

 

Dale Vince Slams Heat Pumps as Overhyped and Mis-Sold

In comments sure to rile Ed Miliband, green energy tycoon Dale Vince, speaking to the Telegraph’s Alex Marsh, says heat pumps are overhyped and mis-sold, warning that Labour’s Warm Homes Plan could leave the country’s poor out in the cold. Here’s an excerpt:

“I’ve been using heat pumps for 20 years,” he says. “I know what they can and can’t do. The idea that you can get your bills down is going to be a very rare case.”

As one of Britain’s foremost green energy tycoons, Vince’s cynicism is striking. His declaration that heat pumps have been “mis-sold” has made national headlines at a time when Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, is heavily pushing them – not least because Vince has donated around £5 million to Labour.

Miliband’s latest green energy announcement, the Warm Homes Plan, sets aside £2.7 billion to fund heat pump grants worth £7,500 each, with a target to hit 450,000 installations a year by 2030.

Heat pumps warm homes by drawing air from the outside, and are considered a low-carbon alternative to a boiler as they run on electricity rather than gas.

Yet many – including Vince – are doubtful that the economics of installing a heat pump stack up at a time when Britain’s electricity costs remain among the highest in the world.

“Gas is a quarter of the price of electricity so a heat pump has a monumental task ahead of it just to keep bills the same,” Vince says.

To prove cost-effective, a heat pump needs a coefficient of performance – the measure of how much heat is produced per unit of electricity used – of four. According to a Government-funded report published at the end of 2024, the average is around 2.8, which Vince says would push an energy bill up by 30%.

Telegraph analysis has found it costs £80 a year more to keep a home warm with a heat pump than a gas boiler in Britain. Research by the Green Britain Foundation, a charity founded by Vince, revealed that two-thirds of heat pump owners find that their home is now more expensive to heat than under their old heating system....<<<Read More>>>...

When Climate Data Don’t Match the Climate Story

 For decades we’ve been told a simple story: more carbon dioxide means higher global temperatures. That simplicity proved politically convincing and underpins the most expensive set of policies in modern history, covering Net Zero targets, taxes and vast subsidies to decarbonise industry, energy and transport within a generation. The world is effectively betting trillions that the temperature dial can be turned down by squeezing CO2 emissions.

But what if that core assumption is far less robust than advertised?

My answer came in an analysis published last month in Science of Climate Change that used my background as a finance academic the way a financial analyst would interrogate a market hypothesis. In finance, no matter how elegant a theory looks, you still test it against hard data. If the numbers don’t confirm the model, the model gives way, not the other way around..

The starting point is uncontroversial: since the 19th Century both CO2 and global temperatures have risen. The correlation is visually potent. But anyone who has worked with time series knows how deceptive such correlations can be. Ice-cream sales and shark attacks rise together in summer; that doesn’t make one the cause of the other. Two trending variables will often appear tightly linked even when the relationship is entirely coincidental.

Econometricians therefore strip out time trends and examine how annual changes relate to each other. Does each year’s increase in CO2 reliably produce a corresponding nudge in temperature? When we look at the data since reliable measurements began around 1960, the answer is awkward. CO2 has risen sharply, yet the rate of temperature change has not moved in lockstep. In fact, the annual changes diverge. If CO2 were the master control knob, you would expect accelerations in CO2 to march closely with accelerations in temperature. They don’t.

I stress-tested this across multiple temperature and CO2 datasets. The result was the same: the neat, linear linkage between CO2 levels and temperature weakens once you look beneath the headline trend. The famous correlation appears, at least in part, to be a statistical mirage...<<<Read More>>>...