by Tilak Doshi

A parody video widely shared on X on June 1st had this to say of Harvard university:

Ever wish your child was a full-blown liberal idiot? Desperate to turn them into a Jew hating extremist who’d rather burn a flag than think for themselves? Well Harvard University has the answer. For the low, low price of half a million dollars we will transform your kid into the kind of zealot who sets bags of shit on fire in the street, screaming about whatever CNN’s whining about today. Our elite programme guarantees they’ll swap reason for rage and facts for feelings faster than you can say protest permit.

But, beyond the parody, the escalating confrontation between the Trump administration and Harvard University, the bastion of elite academia, has laid bare a deeper culture war over the direction of American higher education. This clash is not only about gender and sex discrimination under the banner of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), allegations of antisemitism and of undue influence exerted by unreported financial ‘donations’ from China and other countries. It is fundamentally a reckoning with the Gramscian capture of institutions like Harvard by a globalist agenda propped up by government funding and a web of NGOs seed-funded by Leftist billionaire foundations.

A key plank of the globalist agenda is rooted in Malthusian climate alarmism. This pseudo-scientific hobgoblin has long served as a cudgel to demonise fossil fuels and impose a vision of ‘Net Zero’ that prioritises ideological certainty over pragmatic trade-offs in energy policy. The Trump administration’s aggressive actions against Harvard’s politicised administration include freezing $3 billion in federal grants, revoking Harvard’s ability to enrol international students and threatening its tax-exempt status.

This may, as a welcome collateral effect, disrupt the university’s key role in the Church of Climate, forcing it to align instead with the Trumpian vision of American energy dominance and a rejection of the constraints of the Paris Agreement. The Trump-Harvard standoff could mark a turning point in dismantling the climate-industrial complex’s grip on academia.

By granting intellectual heft to NGO activism, Harvard acts as the ‘Jesuit front’ to the Church of Climate. Like the Jesuits who furthered the Catholic Church’s cause in education and missionary work, Harvard’s professoriate leads the ‘climate crisis’, propagating the faith far and wide in the West and the developing world.

To be fair, the university boasts many fine minds and scholars of integrity, but the institution – like most of the ‘woke’ institutions of higher learning in the West – brooks few sceptics in its ranks, if any. Professors lose funding and influence as soon as they fall out of step with the ‘scientific consensus’ on climate or on any of the other liberal causes pursued by the Leftist higher education establishment. 

Harvard’s Climate Alarmist Ecosystem

Harvard’s sprawling network of schools and institutes — most notably the Centre for International Development (CID), the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability and the Harvard University Centre for the Environment (HUCE) — has positioned itself as a global leader in climate change research and policy formulation. These entities, often in lockstep with environmental NGOs like the Environmental Defence Fund and the World Resources Institute, have churned out studies, policy prescriptions and advocacy that align with the ‘Net Zero by 2050’ mantra enshrined in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

CID’s Climate Policy Accelerator Workshop, co-sponsored with the Radcliffe Institute, funds projects emphasising ‘climate justice‘, a term used to cloak redistributive policies and brazen boondoggles in moralistic garb. HUCE supports research grants and fellowships that promote narratives of catastrophic climate change. These efforts are amplified through partnerships with NGOs, such as the Planetary Health Alliance, which collaborates with global bodies like the WHO to push climate-health narratives using ‘fear porn’ techniques of the kind that accompanied the Covid hysteria.

Early investigations by DOGE revealed the extensive interactions between Government funding agencies dominated by USAID, Left-wing billionaire foundations and environmental NGOs in ill-defined and opaque ‘climate justice projects’ to channel money to favoured clients. In this constellation of mutually supportive interests, academia plays a key legitimising role, lending a veneer of scientific respectability. Harvard, with its intellectual prestige and $50 billion endowment fund, plays a vanguard role in the academia-NGO-foundation nexus at the heart of the ‘Green Blob’.

Harvard’s climate research is not just a morality play. It carries real world implications that affect people’s livelihoods. One well known example of this relates to the $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline, which would have transported 800,000 barrels per day of oil from Alberta, Canada, to US Gulf Coast refineries, promising jobs and economic growth. Approved in 2008, it faced delays due to interminable environmental lawsuits and protests, all supported by NGOs and Harvard’s research. President Obama rejected it in 2015, citing climate concerns. Trump revived it in 2017, issuing permits, but legal challenges persisted. Biden cancelled the permit in January 2021, and TC Energy terminated the project in June 2021. Trump, in 2025, pledged to revive it, arguing it supports energy dominance, though progress remains stalled by legal and economic hurdles.

The Emmett Environmental Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School has a history of collaborating with non-profit organisations, including the Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC), on environmental litigation and policy advocacy against US fossil fuel infrastructure projects. The objections mounted against the pipeline were ultimately founded on the carbon footprint of the pipeline – to ‘fight climate change’ – rather than potential, real world local environmental impacts such as groundwater pollution or biodiversity issues, which are all subject to checks by strict environmental reviews.

Harvard’s Carbon Imperialism

On the international front, we get such gems of muddled myopia induced by the climate change hobgoblin as the following from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (“where science and engineering converge”):

With renewable energy cheaper and more efficient than ever, countries in Africa have the unique opportunity to harness abundant renewable sources like wind, solar and geothermal to leapfrog the dependence on fossil fuels that has poisoned the air and environment in Europe, the US, India and China. But will they? New research from Harvard University and the University of Leicester finds that if Africa chooses a future powered by fossil fuels, nearly 50,000 people could die prematurely each year from fossil fuel emissions by 2030, mostly in South Africa, Nigeria and Malawi.

Evidently the tropes of ‘cheap renewable energy’ and ‘leapfrogging’ energy technologies in developing countries is not restricted to the likes of Greenpeace activists, who are rather light on the verities of physics and economics. The above passage was even published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. There is no mention of the robust link between per capita fossil fuel use and standards of living as demonstrated by two centuries of the economic growth record of countries around the world. Nor is there even a cursory assessment of the massive health costs of using traditional biomass for indoor cooking when clean fuels such as propane are lacking. And, in the ‘fight for climate change’, the activist engineers and scientists of Harvard don’t see the need to acknowledge the prohibitive costs of so-called renewables once the full system costs imposed by intermittency, dilute energy and new transmission lines are factored in.

Harvard’s collaborations with NGOs – which parade themselves as ‘grassroots organisations’ – often serve as fronts for globalist interests. The Harvard Project on Climate Agreements, for example, hosts forums with NGOs to design climate governance models, while the Emmett Environmental Law and Policy Clinic works with NGOs like the Natural Resources Defence Council to push litigation that restricts fossil fuel development. These partnerships are not merely academic exercises but part of a broader strategy to shape global policy, often at the expense of developing nations reliant on affordable energy.

Harvard, then, is an arch-practitioner of what India’s ex-chief economic advisor Arvind Subramaniam called carbon imperialism. It hypocritically denies developing countries the means to scale the very energy ladder that the now-developed West had exploited to attain their industrial prosperity and high standards of living.

Enter President Trump

President Trump’s withdrawal of the US from the Paris Agreement and his commitment to fossil fuel expansion from the first days of his administration stands in stark contrast to Harvard’s climate orthodoxy. By prioritising oil and gas dominance and by cutting subsidies and mandates to favoured ‘green’ industries, the Trump administration aims to restore affordable energy to American consumers and support developing nations’ industrialisation — policies that clash with Harvard’s advocacy of renewables and Net Zero targets. The administration’s funding cuts will help disrupt Harvard’s ability to sustain its activist climate research, which relies heavily on federal grants. This collateral impact is a silver lining for critics of climate alarmism, who see Harvard’s programmes as perpetuating pseudoscientific claims of ‘climate crisis’.

Compare the Net Zero policy positions of the tenured climate ideologues ensconced in the ivory towers of Harvard with that of Chris Wright, who previously founded and ran a US energy company until he was picked by President Trump to be Energy Secretary. He told leaders at an African energy summit that the Trump administration “has no desire to tell you what to do with your energy system. … We had years of Western countries, including my own (USA) shamelessly saying (to Africa), ‘don’t develop coal, don’t develop coal, coal is bad’, that’s just nonsense, 100% nonsense”.

The Trump administration has taken a sledgehammer to a university administration which is wedded to the familiar ideological terrain of critical race theory, DEI, ESG and not least, the climate crisis. For proponents of fossil fuels and robust economic growth to support human flourishing, this confrontation is a long-overdue correction. Harvard’s climate agenda, intertwined with NGOs and ‘deep state‘ networks, has prioritised ideology over evidence, demonising fossil fuels while ignoring their role in lifting billions out of poverty. President Trump’s policies offer the prospects of further unleashing American energy resources to drive economic growth and to support allies like Azerbaijan (host of COP29 in Baku), whose President called oil and gas a “gift from God”.

The Trump-Harvard standoff is more than a policy dispute; it is a battle against the capture of academia by a climate-industrial complex that serves globalist interests over those of ordinary citizens.

Photo courtesy of Harvard Archives. Harvard’s Centennial celebration in 1936. The painting is by Waldo Pierce, who earned his Harvard degree in 1909.

Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO₂ Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.

In their recent article, “America’s summers keep getting warmer,” Axios claims that hotter summers across the U.S. are “one of the clearest ways we experience climate change.” That statement is misleading. The article focuses exclusively on “average summer temperatures” while ignoring crucial underlying details — specifically, the difference between daytime highs and nighttime lows. A closer look at the data suggests that rising nighttime temperatures — not dangerous daytime heat — are mostly to blame for the modest increase in “average” temperatures. This pattern is a well-documented signature of the urban heat island (UHI) effect, not global climate change.

The entire Axios piece rests on the idea that an increase in average temperatures over the past 50 years (from 1970 to 2024) proves human-caused climate change. But here’s the problem: an “average” can be deceptive. By combining daily high and low temperatures  into one metric, the nuance disappears. And that nuance matters. According to detailed meteorological analysis done by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), high temperatures (daytime maximums) in the U.S. have remained relatively stable, while low temperatures (nighttime minimums) have been increasing. This skews the average upward without indicating an actual increase in daytime heat — the kind that poses the most risk to people and infrastructure. This is backed up by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) analysis, Mapping U.S. Climate Trends, from the NOAA climate website. This report highlights that nighttime minimum temperatures have warmed at a rate of 1.43°F per century compared to 0.89°F per century for daytime maximums during the period 1895–2016, illustrating the asymmetric warming trend.

The real-world implication of this divergence is crucial. If daytime highs aren’t increasing substantially, the scare factor vanishes. Nobody complains about slightly warmer nights — in fact, many people prefer them. But when you average those warmer nights with stable daytime highs, you get the illusion of “climate change” through rising average temperatures. And that’s precisely the sleight-of-hand Axios and their source, Climate Central, are engaging in.

This divergence was comprehensively documented in recent peer-reviewed research by Dr. Roy Spencer, former NASA scientist and principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. In a 2024 paper published in the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, Dr. Spencer examined the spatial relationship between population density and temperature trends using NOAA data from 1895–2023. His findings? The urban heat island effect is the dominant cause of warming in U.S. temperature records, especially in the minimum temperatures that drive up averages. As population increases, more asphalt, buildings, and energy usage trap heat at night, particularly in cities. This is not global warming — it’s local heat retention caused by development. Spencer’s full paper is available here.

Now, to Axios’s credit, they do briefly acknowledge the urban heat island phenomenon, noting that “many cities suffer from ‘heat islands’ — areas of especially high temperatures caused by roads, parking lots, buildings and other heat-trapping features”. But they bury that admission and fail to connect it to the broader implication: if these “heat islands” dominate the temperature increase, then the change is local and anthropogenic in an entirely different sense — a land-use artifact, not a carbon dioxide crisis.

This is not a new argument. As we’ve outlined repeatedly at Climate Realism, the UHI effect explains much of the warming shown in localized temperature datasets. Yet climate advocacy groups like Climate Central — heavily cited in the Axios article — downplay or ignore this effect when it doesn’t serve the narrative. More fundamentally, their own data often supports the skeptical case when viewed critically. For example, they chart average temperatures but omit daily maximum temperature trends — an omission that speaks volumes.

Another critical flaw in the Axios article is its lack of statistical scrutiny. The claim that 97% of cities analyzed saw warming since 1970 might sound compelling, but it’s also meaningless without examining how much of that warming occurred in rural versus urban stations. Rural stations, being less influenced by land-use change, would provide a better indicator of climate trends untainted by urbanization. But Axios doesn’t provide that breakdown — likely because it would undercut the headline.

Further, the cherry-picked focus on specific cities like Reno (+11.3°F), Boise (+6.3°F), and El Paso (+6.2°F) is another red flag. These cities have undergone dramatic urban expansion and population growth since 1970. Reno’s population has more than doubled; Boise has added tens of thousands of new homes and highways. Of course they’re warmer — they’ve built over their own thermometers. As we’ve shown at Climate at a Glance, genuine climate signals must be filtered through the noise of land use change, otherwise the data is just measuring asphalt’s heat retention effects, not atmospheric temperature increases due to the supposed heating effect of carbon dioxide.

It’s also worth noting the psychological tactics in the article. Loaded language like “health risk,” “pregnant women,” and “vulnerable groups” are peppered throughout to provoke emotion rather than provide objective data analysis. The appeal to emotion is a classic rhetorical device used to bypass rational scrutiny. Instead of showing a balanced analysis, Axios jumps straight from a graph of average temperatures to policy implications and public health warnings. That’s advocacy journalism, not science reporting.

In conclusion, the Axios piece is yet another example of lazy climate reporting masquerading as fact. It relies on average temperatures while ignoring the high/low divergence, fails to contextualize the urban heat island effect despite briefly mentioning it, and leans heavily on emotive language rather than objective data analysis. If this is the best journalism Axios can muster, one must seriously question their editorial standards and scientific literacy. They’re not informing the public — they’re selling a narrative, one misleading map at a time.

Anthony Watts

Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.