Daily News 28 May 2025

Shifting from Energy Scarcity to Energy Abundance

Prior to the Paris COP in 2015, French scientists debunked the green agenda in a White Paper drawn up by the Société de Calcul Mathématique SA (Mathematical Modelling Company, Corp.) The battle against global warming: an absurd, costly and pointless crusade. The whole document is evidence-based, and on the second point concerning energy, they said this:

Chapter 2: The crusade is costly
Direct aid for industries that are completely unviable (such as photovoltaics and wind turbines) but presented as ‘virtuous’ runs into billions of euros, according to recent reports published by the Cour des Comptes (French Audit Office) in 2013. But the highest cost lies in the principle of ‘energy saving,’ which is presented as especially virtuous. Since no civilization can develop when it is saving energy, ours has stopped developing: France now has more than three million people unemployed — it is the price we have to pay for our virtue….

Finally, the world seems to be waking up to energy realities. The actual transition is away from the green imperative to make energy scarce, replaced by driving energy abundance. Kevin Killough writes, including commentary from Mark Mills of Energy Analystics, in his Just The News article: World moves away from ‘green gospel of scarcity’ and now embraces ‘energy abundance,’ experts say

“I think we’ve gone from scarcity to abundance — from the green gospel of scarcity and its Trinitarian ESG god — to the promised land of abundance guided by the values of affordability and reliability,” David DesRosiers, conference co-chair of the RealClear Energy Future Forum, said.

In 2019, Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg — then a high-school dropout — was invited to the U.N. Climate Action Summit in New York City. There, she would deliver her famous — or infamous, depending on who you ask — “how dare you” speech, to which legacy media responded with overwhelming enthusiasm. Thunberg claimed that we were at the start of a “mass extinction,” and she admonished the world for ignoring the alleged crisis while talking “about money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.”

What a difference six years can make. Voters elected a president in November who signed an executive order aimed at “unleashing American energy,” and Energy Secretary Chris Wright followed the president’s order with a directive to promote “energy abundance.”

This U-turn in views on energy isn’t limited to a change in administration in the U.S.

In May 2021, the International Energy Agency (IEA), which has been criticized for cheerleading emissions reductions, launched a roadmap to reach net zero by 2050, and IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol told The Guardian that “there will not be a need for new investments in oil and gas fields, or new investments in coal mines.”

At the March CERAWeek energy conference in Houston this year, Birol was calling for more investments in oil and gas.

This shift away from the de-growth fervor that was popular for over a decade was the overriding topic at the RealClear Energy Future Forum Monday. Panels of experts in engineering, data centers, mining, oil and gas, and the electricity grid discussed how this change of views has impacted various aspects of the world’s energy picture.

“I think we’ve gone from scarcity to abundance — from the green gospel of scarcity and its Trinitarian ESG god — to the promised land of abundance guided by the values of affordability and reliability,” David DesRosiers, conference co-chair and founder of the RealClear Foundation, said.

When reality hits

Mark Mills, conference co-chair and director of the National Center for Energy Analytics, discussed the role of increasing energy demand as a result of the growth of data centers and artificial intelligence. While many tech companies, such as Microsoft, embraced net-zero goals, Mills explained that the energy demands of data centers forced companies to contend with the reality that although fashionable in some circles, intermittent wind and solar power are not adequate.

“Eventually, reality rears its ugly head, and we recalibrate around what reality permits,” Mills said.

The IEA last month released an in-depth report on how the demand for electricity will be shaped by AI in the coming years. According to the report, a single data center uses as much electricity as 2 million households. Powering one of these data centers, Mills said, requires as much natural gas every day as a single Space X rocket launch.

“With myriads of data centers planned and announced, this means that lighting up the digital infrastructure will soon have the energy demands equivalent to reliably powering hundreds of millions of households,” Mills said.

Mills said, besides the energy to power these data centers, they will also require an abundance of materials. A skyscraper requires the same amount of materials to build a single giga-scale data center, which is a data center requiring 1 billion watt-hours of electricity every hour — the same amount of power consumed by approximately 1,100 homes in a month.

While some have argued that increased efficiencies will address the demand, Mills pointed out that a single smartphone operating at the energy efficiency of a 1984 computer would use more electricity than an entire city block. More efficiency won’t reduce demand for energy, he explained, it will only increase how much can be done with more energy.

The way the grid works

Energy abundance is not only producing more energy. The supply has to be reliable, the experts at the conference said. A few speakers pointed to the blackouts that gripped Spain and Portugal last month as an example of how dangerous an unreliable energy supply can be. Estimates place the death toll from the one-day event at seven people.

James Robb, CEO of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, said that the exact cause of the event is still under investigation, but there are facts that point to the overreliance on intermittent wind and solar.

At the time of the blackout, Robb said, there was little traditional generation — coal, natural gas, hydroelectric and nuclear — operating. To make wind, solar and battery power work on the grid, it has to go through an inverter, which doesn’t have the spinning inertia of generators powered by traditional sources. Grid operators need to maintain a certain frequency of power, and when there’s a disruption, spinning inertia can absorb some of the frequency changes until things stabilize.

Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Mark Christie explained inertia as a 100-acre lake 6-inches deep. At one end is a river flowing into the lake, like power generated on the grid. At the other end is a river flowing out of the lake, which is the demand for power. To make the grid work, the water has to be kept 6-inches deep at all times.

“If that lake, at any point, becomes an inch deeper or loses an inch of depth, the lake ceases to operate. That’s the way the grid works. It has to be balanced at all times, and that’s the term frequency,” Christie said.

Robb said there are technologies that create synthetic inertia for wind and solar generators, but these are unproven at scale.

“They’re not without their issues there, and one of the big challenges we always have in the electric grid with any new technology is you can study something in the lab. You can deploy…a pilot [project] on a grid somewhere. But when you try to scale it to the level of the North American grid, which is a terawatt of generation, typically in that translation from pilot to terawatt, we discover things that we don’t understand,” Robb said.

Spain and Portugal Achieve Net Zero Accidently

Holding back

Despite many signs pointing to the overreliance on solar energy on the Iberian Peninsula grid as being the cause of the blackouts, other speakers noted that politics is often holding back more discussion on the problem of intermittency.

“It is very clear that the intermittency of wind and solar had a great deal to do with shutting down the grid, but you cannot admit that if you’re in power in Spain or Portugal. Because there are liabilities,” Terrence Keely, CEO of 1PointSix, LLC, a financial advisory firm, said.

Daniel Yergin, vice chairman of S&P Global, said that between 2022 and 2023, the world’s dependence on fossil fuels was down less than one half of one percent. Yet, he said there were still contradictions coming from leaders. As an example, he pointed to British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer who recently said that Britain would increase emission-reduction efforts to 2050.

“But he also said, ‘Oh, let me be clear with you, oil and gas are going to be in the mix for a long time.’ That really captures the struggle of people, of leaders, to kind of adjust to a reality that’s different from what has been the conventional wisdom,” Yergin said of Starmer.

As with any global shift in thinking on issues, some nations are slow to change — or reject it altogether. But the experts at the forum concluded generally that the so-called energy transition, and the de-growth attitudes that drove it for so long, are losing steam.

via Science Matters

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May 28, 2025 at 12:30PM

Daily News 28 May 2025

Climate Clergy Livestreams the Sads

It’s not often one encounters a spectacle so rich in irony and unintentional comedy that it practically writes its own parody. Yet here we are, watching the “Weather & Climate Livestream” (WCL) unfold—a 100-hour marathon of hand-wringing and bureaucratic bereavement that makes the average opera look stoic.

Launched with all the solemnity of a state funeral, the WCL is the alarmist’s answer to QVC. Instead of selling miracle blenders, they’re peddling fear, nostalgia for the heyday of bloated climate budgets, and a heaping spoonful of institutional self-pity. The official pitch? A “non-partisan” event dedicated to “educating the public” about the catastrophic consequences of proposed federal budget cuts to climate research. The reality? A long, monotonous group therapy session for government scientists afraid their gravy train has hit a fiscal cul-de-sac.

The pageantry of this livestream is nothing short of remarkable. With a tone oscillating between funeral dirge and telethon, they’ve assembled a lineup of federally funded forecasters, former agency heads, and token youth activists to warn of a future where hurricane forecasts are slightly less precise—unless, of course, Congress acts now to restore their budgets to previously unchallengeable levels. It’s like watching a PBS pledge drive hosted by Chicken Little and Greta Thunberg’s ghostwriter.

Whether it’s tomorrow’s temperatures or the sea level in fifty years, Americans need to plan for our futures. For generations, the US government has invested in the science that helps us do so, building one of the greatest meteorology and climate science communities in the world.

https://wclivestream.com/

Take, for example, the session titled “Live from the last hours in the NASA GISS lab.”

You’d think from the name that the building was literally collapsing under rising sea levels, not merely facing administrative restructuring. But for the GISS faithful, reduced funding is indistinguishable from Armageddon. It’s the end of the world, not because of climate change, but because their climate change funding is on the chopping block.

Former directors of the National Weather Service make appearances to share tales of days gone by when budgets were fat, forecasts were vague, and accountability was optional. “People don’t realize,” one panelist intoned with practiced gravitas, “that this is about saving lives.” No mention, of course, of the many billions already spent over the decades on climate modeling efforts that continue to be—how to put this politely—spectacularly inconsistent with observed reality. No mention of the vast sums funneled into agencies that produce redundant data sets or spend years refining models that can’t agree on whether your grandkids will need parkas or parasols.

This livestream extravaganza is being promoted as a grassroots movement, but like all good astroturf campaigns, it’s deeply establishment. The message is clear: only by maintaining the current bureaucratic caste can Americans be kept safe from the wrath of Mother Nature.

Let’s strip this to the studs. The underlying assumption of this whole production is that the American public owes eternal fealty to the climatariat. Never mind that private sector meteorology and open-source climate data analysis have made enormous strides. Never mind that redundancy, inefficiency, and mission creep are rampant within federal climate programs. The WCL’s cast of worried scientists demands not only your attention but your unquestioning financial support.

But it’s not too late to stop these cuts. Already, public pressure has helped to reopen shuttered weather data centers. To help keep this pressure building, meteorologists and climate scientists from across America want to fulfill our mission by sharing our science with you – so we’re coming to your screens, speaking and answering your questions, for over 100 hours, in this science-filled, non-partisan event:

https://wclivestream.com/

You see, budget cuts are a threat—not to the climate, but to their social status and sinecures. They claim these cuts could “endanger lives” during hurricane season. But what really endangers lives is blind faith in centralized planning, especially when it’s masquerading as empiricism. The dirty little secret no one on the livestream wants to admit is this: weather forecasting and climate research are not going to disappear. They are evolving, often improving, and increasingly taking place outside the sclerotic confines of federal bureaucracy.

Still, the participants have latched onto the time-honored activist formula: crisis equals cash. Like a televangelist promising salvation for a donation, they urge viewers to “call your reps” and demand the restoration of their preferred budget lines. It’s science, they insist—just ignore the political theater, the emotional appeals, the relentless narrative-building. Ignore the fact that their models can’t even retroactively predict the 20th century without massive fudge factors.

As a viewer, it’s hard not to be struck by the theatrical nature of it all. The staging, the graphics, the sorrowful piano music—everything short of a candlelight vigil. But then again, this is the climate establishment’s version of a wake. The end of unquestioned funding is treated as a death. And like all good funerals, there’s a donation plate.

It would be funny if it weren’t so tragically manipulative. These aren’t starving scientists operating from a garage. They are some of the most institutionally entrenched figures in modern science. And yet, they present themselves as delicate visionaries under siege, whose only salvation lies in another congressional spending spree.

What makes this even more absurd is that the very same crowd has been telling us for decades that the climate crisis is “existential.” That we’re running out of time. That the tipping point is just five years away—forever. And now we’re meant to believe the apocalypse hinges on whether a few federal jobs at NASA and NOAA are consolidated or defunded?

If the “existential threat” can be averted by phoning your senator and asking for a $500 million line-item reinstatement, perhaps it was never so existential in the first place.

The truth is simpler: the climate industrial complex is adapting to a new political reality. One in which skepticism of bloated bureaucracies is growing, and where climate alarmism no longer guarantees a blank check. The WCL livestream isn’t a cry for help—it’s a tantrum. A carefully choreographed public meltdown meant to preserve the status quo under the guise of saving the planet.

So let them livestream the sads. Let them sing mournful songs for the climate programs of yesteryear. Meanwhile, the rest of us will continue demanding science over sentiment, cost-benefit over catastrophe theater, and reform over reflexive largesse.

Because unlike the WCL crowd, we understand that real climate resilience comes not from a 100-hour pity party, but from sober, empirical, and above all skeptical inquiry. And no amount of livestreaming can replace that.

Make sure to tune in.