Month: July 2025

Daily News 31 Jul 2025

Nuclear power start-up pulls out of Britain as Miliband drags feet

By Paul Homewood

h/t Philip Bratby

Miliband dragging his feet again!

From the Telegraph:

A nuclear start-up is quitting the UK in frustration after ministers, including Ed Miliband, failed to support the project.

Newcleo, an Anglo-Italian company, said it was suspending a £4bn proposal to build a fleet of mini nuclear reactors in Britain and planned to scale back its domestic presence dramatically. The company currently employs about 150 people and all those roles are now at risk.

Bosses told The Telegraph they were frustrated with a lack of concrete action from ministers, including Mr Miliband, the Energy Secretary.

They said the company struggled to get support for their proposals to build reactors “in principle”, which had made it impossible to take investment decisions with confidence.

Full story here.

If this had been a wind or solar farm, Miliband would have given it a contract already.

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July 31, 2025 at 02:25AM

Daily News 31 Jul 2025

Climate Activism Fail from the Inside

Ed. Note: With the multi-decade climate movement in crisis, the blame game is on. Today’s post follows a similar one earlier this week, Climate Messaging: The Alarmists are Alarmed.

Nathan Truitt, executive vice president of climate funding at the American Forest Foundation (a ‘carbon management’ entity), explained his “theory of what’s wrong with the climate action community and how to fix it.” He began:

First off, why do I think something is wrong? Well, we are facing an existential threat to human civilization, but the community that works to promote climate action is riven with internal disagreements, easily spending more time arguing with itself than trying to convince others.

Really? An existential crisis? Will he read the new DOE report on climate science and economics? Truitt continues in fantasy land:

This shouldn’t be the case. The climate action community should be one that everyone is psyched to join, because it’s full of amazing, dedicated people working on cool things. For example:

– There are people designing frameworks and systems to push companies to decarbonize. Which is awesome.
– There are people constructing an entire industry from scratch in order to suck excess CO2 out of the air and put in back underground. Which is awesome.
– There are people working on the next generation of renewable energy and all the associated technology. Which is awesome.
– There are people using nature’s engineered solution – photosynthesis – to capture unprecedented amounts of CO2 in the biosphere. Which is awesome.
– There are people designing public policies to accelerate our transition away from burning fossil fuels. Which is awesome.

And this is just scratching the surface. Heck, there are people cloning wooly mammoths to help restore the Arctic’s carbon sequestration capacity!

Who wouldn’t want to be part of such a community, where every day you are exposed to innovative ideas, and where you can spend your time solving difficult problems with an immense impact?

I can think of a lot of people: the silent majority of climate/energy realists who have shifted the debate from alarmism to understanding and optimism.

Well unfortunately the climate action community doesn’t just come up with awesome ideas. It is obsessed with an additional question: “Of all the awesome things we are doing, what is the AWESOMEST? Better yet, let’s create a hierarchical list of awesomeness.”

Once we’ve asked this question, what could be a unified and inviting group becomes one roiled with constant disagreement, as practitioners constantly punch “up” or “down” in defense of their corner of the movement. And if you are not judged to be working on one of the AWESOMER ideas, you are likely to be ignored or treated with disdain.

This is not the kind of group people want to join. And as a result, the climate action community continues to be way smaller and less influential than it could be (and needs to be).

The fix is easy: let’s stop asking which idea amongst the community is the “best.” They’re all good. They’re all needed. The question of which one is the best is one for historians 200 years from now (if we make it that far). We’ll be dead and won’t care.

If we are serious about climate action, we have to be serious about ALL climate action, not just the piece we work on. We have to be supportive and encouraging of our colleagues throughout the movement, even if their theory of change is different from ours. If we make this community an inviting and exciting place, it will grow and we will succeed!

I commented:

It’s a wasteful, futile crusade. How many more years of accumulating failure will it take to realize that climate and energy reality is different that what the Deep Ecologists dream about?

Another discouraged activist commented:

The Carbon community is its own worse enemy:
1. Always overly critical (a lot of people “have a problem for every solutuon”)

2. Too ideologically/virtue driven (you cannot start by saying “offsetting is bad” or “corporations are evil because they emit Co2” – particularly because they emit to produce the goods and services WE buy)

3. Always reinventing the wheel: there are thousands of examples of similar instruments, contracts that are PERFECTLY UNDERSTOOD by markets. Yet they insist on “new” (often worse thought out) approaches. Normally because the world of carbon is full of actors with very little experience in the “real world of finance”

Final Comment

Read between the above lines. So-called ‘carbon management’ is receiving withering criticism from climate activists who see carbon credits as untrustworthy and a license for ‘polluting’. Let’s-all-be-friends in our rent-seeking, Truitt is saying. Keep me in business, in other words. This is hardly convincing….

The post Climate Activism Fail from the Inside appeared first on Master Resource.

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July 31, 2025 at 01:15AM

Daily News 31 Jul 2025

FWS is violating its own eagle-kill regulations

From CFACT

Every on-land wind project requires a permit to kill eagles from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). These permits are based on an offset program in which eagle deaths are supposedly offset by saving the lives of other eagles by making power poles safer.

In a recent study I found that this offset program is not working. See the report here: https://www.cfact.org/2025/06/29/cfact-report-feds-fail-to-offset-wind-turbine-eagle-kills/

It turns out that failure to verify that this offset program is working is a deep violation of FWS’s own regulations. The regulations passed in 2016 clearly contemplate the possibility of offset program failure and require the FWS to track program effectiveness. FWS has done no such thing.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is not in compliance with its own permitting regulations, so permitting should stop until compliance is achieved. Existing permits to kill eagles should also be declared invalid, since they are based upon an offset practice that has not been shown to work and cannot work in its present form.

The offset program is called compensatory mitigation because the wind project owner pays to mitigate the eagle deaths caused by its project. The money is used to make power poles safe from electrocuting eagles, supposedly in numbers of eagles that are equal to or greater than the number killed by the project.

The permitting regulations require FWS monitoring of the effectiveness of compensatory mitigation, which they have not done. It is the law.

Here are the relevant regulatory requirements. The eagle-kill permits specify the required compensatory mitigation actions and measures:

“Section 22.220 Compensatory mitigation

(b) All required compensatory mitigation actions must:

(4) Use the best available science in formulating, crediting, and monitoring the long-term effectiveness of mitigation measures.

(7) Include mechanisms to account for and address uncertainty and risk of failure of a compensatory mitigation measure.”

The Regulation’s Environmental Impact Statement spells it out in more detail:

“Compensatory mitigation must be based on the best available science and must use rigorous compliance and effectiveness monitoring and evaluation to make certain that mitigation measures achieve their intended outcomes, or that necessary changes are implemented to achieve them.”

Even though the Regulations specifically refer to the risk of failure, FWS has done no effectiveness monitoring of the compensatory mitigation measures. Given that approximately 30,000 wind turbines have been permitted to kill eagles, this is noncompliance on an enormous scale.

Moreover, as I explain in my report, it is virtually certain that the compensatory mitigation program is highly ineffective. Here is why:

“The likely cause of this failure is FWS’s use of a wildly inaccurate electrocution death rate. As a result, the number of power poles made “safe” is just a tiny fraction of what would be required to create a legitimate offset. While FWS currently requires about 278 poles to be “made safe” per wind-killed eagle, the correct number, according to the results presented in this report, may be closer to 67,000.”

If FWS wants to use an offset program for wind turbines killing eagles, it must first do the research to establish the effectiveness of the offset measures. The present program is based on a single small 2010 study, with results so extreme as to be questionable.

This research must be done before offsets can be used to permit wind power killing eagles under the Eagle Protection Act. As things stand, FWS is deeply violating its own permitting regulations.