By P Gosselin

Beginning 2027, EU citizens will see their everyday lives getting much more expensive and painful… thanks to an EU-wide climate tax: ETS-2.

Image generated by Grok

Hans Labohm: “It is frightening that we are subjecting our economy to this madness.”

“Fuel prices and energy bills will rise, while our freedom of choice will be increasingly restricted,” reports German TKP blog here.  All because European citizens will be paying additional European climate taxes soon.

And this is just the beginning says former MEP Rob Roos: ‘Now it’s about houses and cars. Later, this tax will be extended to foodstuffs such as dairy products and meat, clothing and flying. The CO2 budget could be the next step.”

Going green in Europe means going expensive – and unfree. The EU’s new climate tax, ETS-2, set to begin in 2027, will expand the existing ETS-1 system, which requires heavy industry and energy producers to buy CO2 certificates. Next, fuel and energy suppliers will have to purchase certificates for their customers’ emissions. The result? Higher prices for driving, heating, and electricity!

Companies will simply pass on the cost of CO2 certificates to consumers, making everything much more expensive and citizens poorer.

The new ETS-2 system was created as part of the 2023 revisions of the ETS Directive, and the amending directive creating the new scheme came into force on June 8, 2023. Monitoring and reporting of emissions began in 2024, with the first emissions reports due by April 30, 2025.

Lots of pain, no impact on global climate

In 2023, the European Union’s share of global greenhouse gas emissions fell to just 6.0% and so limiting CO2 further will have barely a negligible climate impact overall climate globally. The real impact will be felt by EU citizens, and it’s not going to be painful.

Intensifying climate madness

Economist and journalist Hans Labohm calls the European emissions trading system an “economic instrument of torture” that will suck the life out of Europe’s society. ‘It is frightening that we are subjecting our economy to this madness,’ he says.

Labohm warns of rising energy prices, inflation and a mass migration of companies from Europe.

“Many households have to cut back on food, care or housing because they can’t pay their energy bills,’ Labohm adds.

Read full article here (German). 

From CFACT

By David Wojick

Ten so-called environmental groups, including the biggest, have joined the lawsuit filed by a bunch of green States asking the Court to nullify the President’s day-one executive order putting a hold on federal approvals of wind power projects. These big green groups love wind power.

For those not familiar with the State lawsuit I wrote about it here.

It has long been known that some of the biggest green groups have abandoned environmentalism in favor of net zero industrialization. This time they were nice enough to list themselves, as follows:

NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council)

Citizens Campaign for the Environment

Conservation Law Foundation

Environmental Advocates NY (represented by Earthjustice)

Environmental Defense Fund (EDF)

Environmental Protection Information Center

National Wildlife Federation (NWF)

New York League of Conservation Voters

Sierra Club

Southern Environmental Law Center

Collectively these groups likely make over a billion dollars a year. Here are the rounded annual revenues of the big four: EDF – $320 million, NRDC – $250 million, NWF – $120 million, Sierra Club – $120 million.

Ironically, this action is supported by the National Wildlife Federation (NWF); see their press release here (which includes email addresses for each group).

NWF is the only group that is specifically about wildlife. The one certain harm from wind power is the annual killing of millions of birds and bats. Bird death estimates range as high as 1.7 million a year, with bat deaths up to 2.8 million. That is 4.5 million critters a year killed by wind power.

We presently have about 160,000 MW of wind power, which means over 50,000 turbines and 150,000 chopping blades with tip speeds of 200 mph or so. NWF thinks this is just fine and apparently supports the 230,000 more MW that have applied to be connected to the grid.

They even have a separate portal promoting offshore wind where the National Wildlife Federation says this: “Your voice is needed to advance American offshore wind power and begin a clean energy chapter that will reduce pollution, protect wildlife, and create jobs all along the coast.”

Protect wildlife? Offshore wind kills whales and other marine mammals, likely in large numbers.

The moral bankruptcy of big money environmentalism gets no clearer than this advocacy of big wind. I wonder if NWF’s lavish donors understand the ever growing scale of wind power’s wildlife carnage?

Getting back to the lawsuit, here is a typical big green take from the NWF press release:

““Wind power is a clean, reliable resource, with projects undergoing a well-established, science-based permitting process including robust environmental review and public input to ensure projects avoid, minimize, and mitigate impacts to wildlife and ecosystems. This legal challenge demonstrates a strong consensus that wind energy is an essential part of American energy independence, capable of delivering major environmental and public health benefits by reducing carbon emissions and improving air and water quality. The administration’s attacks on wind disregard both the legal framework and the scientific evidence behind these projects, threatening a clean, affordable, and reliable energy future,” said Jim Murphy, senior director of legal advocacy at the National Wildlife Federation.

Wind power is not clean, not affordable, and certainly not reliable. It is, however, deadly to millions of birds, bats, and marine mammals. No more of these deadly turbines should be allowed to be built.

It would be nearly impossible to fabricate a better fictional demonstration of motivated reasoning than the May 2025 Nature commentary titled “Hurricane risk in a changing climate — the role of uncertainty” by Adam Sobel and Kerry Emanuel. In fact, if one needed a primary source to study how scientific ambiguity can be massaged into policy certainty, this article would serve beautifully.

The authors begin by acknowledging the obvious:

“there’s also a lot that we don’t know”

about how climate change affects hurricanes. This initial concession gives the impression of intellectual humility. Yet what follows is a masterclass in rhetorical misdirection—a piece that deserves to be taught in schools, not for its science, but for its persuasive structure.

Rather than treating uncertainty as a reason for caution, Sobel and Emanuel treat it as a trigger for urgency. They write,

“In general, uncertainty increases risk”.

This sounds profound until you realize it’s a tautology masquerading as logic. More uncertainty does not inherently increase actual risk—it increases the range of possible outcomes. But in the world of policy-driven science, this range is always framed around the worst case.

This is how one turns “known unknowns” into leverage for sweeping intervention.

The authors proceed to break down various hurricane risk factors

“in roughly decreasing order of confidence,”

a rhetorical trick designed to create a gradient of believability. It starts strong—with precipitation—then deteriorates into hedging and handwaving, without ever breaking the narrative thread.

On rainfall, they write:

“Scientists are confident that rainfall associated with hurricanes will increase in a warmer climate”

because

“more water vapour can be held in a warmer atmosphere”.

This is true in theory. But the authors make no effort to quantify it, nor do they explain how this theoretical increase translates into measurable damages—particularly when modern infrastructure, forecasting, and drainage systems have vastly improved.

On coastal flooding, the authors rely heavily on sea-level rise, noting that “

global sea level has risen by around 20 centimetres since pre-industrial times”

and that flooding

“would have been less”

a century earlier during events like Hurricane Sandy. But they gloss over local variability, subsidence, and historical storms of equal or greater magnitude. Context is everything—and here, it’s notably absent.

Theoretical Constructs and the Mirage of Consensus

One of the more revealing passages deals with wind speeds. The authors admit that

“the wind-intensity increase is harder to observe than sea-level rise,”

yet assert,

“multiple lines of evidence support an increase in wind speeds as an important factor contributing to increased risk”.

That’s not science; that’s theology. Evidence that can’t be reliably observed shouldn’t be used to underwrite regulatory or economic policy.

On storm frequency, they are more candid:

“Researchers do not yet fully understand what controls the global frequency of hurricanes, and models produce conflicting predictions”.

But instead of urging restraint, they dive deeper into the weeds of uncertainty, hoping the complexity will obscure the weakness of the claim.

The Atlantic hurricane uptick? Not due to greenhouse gases, they say—it’s likely

“more a response to decreasing air pollution than to increasing greenhouse gases”.

This claim directly contradicts the mainstream narrative that CO2 is the prime villain. And yet, they deploy it only to claim that the hurricane surge is real—even if the carbon culprit isn’t.

A Moving Goalpost, Expertly Camouflaged

Their discussion of aerosol impacts is perhaps the article’s most candid moment.

“In the mid-twentieth century, aerosols… had a cooling effect by reflecting solar radiation away from Earth,”

they explain.

“This effect has reduced as clean-air policies have taken hold. Simply put, more solar radiation means warmer seas”.

Fair enough—but what follows is the quiet pivot:

“If that explanation is true, it implies that the recent increase in Atlantic hurricane intensity is unlikely to continue,”

yet also “

that the dearth of Atlantic hurricane activity in the 1970s and 1980s is unlikely to be repeated”.

In short: whatever happens, the authors’ thesis remains valid. Heads they win, tails you still lose.

This is textbook motivated reasoning. The causal arrow is bent and twisted until it points wherever the authors need it to—toward more funding, more intervention, more regulation.

Models, Models Everywhere—And Not a Truth to Hold

Finally, they return to models.

“Earth-system models project that greenhouse gases will tend to further increase equatorial eastern Pacific sea temperatures… This is consistent with the expectation of low Atlantic hurricane activity in coming decades,”

they write—only to immediately undercut it:

“But observations have instead demonstrated the opposite”.

So let’s tally that up: the models say one thing, reality says another, and the authors still walk away claiming credibility. In any other field, this would trigger a re-evaluation of assumptions. In climate science, it’s just another paragraph.

Conclusion: The Climate Policy Ouroboros

The final message of the piece is a kind of circular logic loop: uncertainty justifies concern, concern justifies policy, and policy then retroactively validates the concern.

“Our overall opinion is that present US hurricane hazard is greater than the longer-term historical average,”

the authors write, due to

“well-understood factors that increase hazard and poorly understood ones that might increase it”.

Translation: we don’t know what we don’t know, but let’s act as if we do.

This is not empirical science. This is moral theater, staged with peer-reviewed props. It takes a complicated, poorly understood, regionally inconsistent phenomenon like hurricane frequency and repackages it as a policy cudgel.

And therein lies the real danger. Not from the storms—but from the political winds that follow them.