Around three quarters of the increase in bills can be attributed to Net Zero.
Why Have Electricity Bills Risen?
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May 14, 2025 at 01:37AM
Science does show us that more carbon dioxide leads to a little bit of warming and that both that little warming and the fertilizing effect of the carbon dioxide are likely to be beneficial. Carbon dioxide will not, however, become an existential threat to the planet. (below)
“Mister Legates, I am a big fan of the Cornwall Alliance. However, you, sir, are merely a stooge for the climate alarmist Left, which has an obvious agenda to destroy our economy with its NetZero and its ban on natural gas appliances and its electric vehicle mandates. Anyone who has even a rudimentary understanding of science would clearly know that ….”
Okay, so, nobody really sent that first paragraph to me. But the gist accurately combines views that various people have said.
Background
Over the years, even before I joined the Cornwall Alliance, I received numerous complaints from people sending me emails—who, I believe, are well-meaning—that take issue with my position on carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, as a pollutant, and as the single most existential threat to the planet as a whole.
First, let me state for the record, that I do not believe that carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide are existential threats to the planet. Nor are they reasonable threats of any kind.
Second, let me also state for the record that I do not believe carbon dioxide is a pollutant. In fact, if all life on Earth ceased to exist, our atmosphere would lose all its oxygen content, and the proportion of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere would increase above ninety-five percent.
So what?
Well, according to most reputable scientists, there is no life on Mars or Venus, and the atmospheres of our two closest planets are largely carbon dioxide—that of Mars, about 96 percent carbon dioxide, 2 percent argon, and 2 percent nitrogen, and that of Venus about 96.5 percent carbon dioxide and only 3.5 percent nitrogen. Thus, technically speaking, oxygen in our atmosphere is a pollutant created by life on Earth, most notably by plant life. (No, I don’t seriously think oxygen is a pollutant. You’ve heard of irony, right?)
An Apparent Controversy
Here is something I recently wrote for—well, I won’t tell you where it comes from, to protect the organization. The question was posed to me, “Is carbon dioxide a greenhouse gas?” My response was (trigger alert for some): Yes, certainly. And this is a good thing, because without gases like carbon dioxide creating a greenhouse effect, life on planet Earth wouldn’t exist. Earth’s surface is warmer than it would be in the absence of an atmosphere—by about 54 degrees Fahrenheit, or 30 degrees Celsius. Without it, most of us would freeze to death!
I received a response, and let me say that I have received numerous comments like this over the years, so I am not singling out this one person, but this response was, in essence:
Thanks for your efforts at <Name of Organization Redacted>, but CO2 does nothing to cause warming of the atmosphere. The climate alarmist “greenhouse effect” does not exist and the whole anthropogenic greenhouse gas warming story is a lie from the beginning.
Now, I don’t disagree with everything said here. I believe the concept of anthropogenic warming as an existential threat to the planet was a lie from the moment the first person attached the phrase “existential threat” to anthropogenic warming. But I take issue with the argument that carbon dioxide does not warm the atmosphere and that the so-called “greenhouse effect” does not exist.
Yes, I acknowledge that the greenhouse effect is a misnomer. A greenhouse warms primarily because of the lack of a transfer of latent and sensible heat. In particular, the glass in the greenhouse prevents convection and transport of water vapor—processes that are very important in the surface energy balance—from moving energy away from the greenhouse.
However, the people who have written to me about this issue do not refer to the greenhouse effect as a misnomer; rather, they mean that no gas, including carbon dioxide, can ever warm the atmosphere.
These critics provide reasons why they feel I am placating climate alarmists by admitting the greenhouse effect exists. So, let me briefly discuss some of their reasons and indicate why I think they are misinformed about physics or about what I believe.
Many of the complaints note that “carbon dioxide is a colorless, tasteless and harmless gas that facilitates photosynthesis so we can live on this planet.” Well, I wholeheartedly agree.
Others complain that I should realize hurricanes, tornadoes, heat waves, wildfires, and other weather-related events are not increasing as a result of increasing carbon dioxide. Yes, I have said that many times as well.
So, what IS their argument against the greenhouse effect?
Four Groups
I tend put people into four camps, and I am sure you can name adherents to each group.
There are the climate alarmists, for whom carbon dioxide is an evil gas that will adversely affect our climate and whose production must be stopped at all costs. For them, no solution is too draconian, and both geoengineering and carbon sequestration are requisite actions.
Then there are the climate apologists, for whom carbon dioxide is an evil gas, but who feel there is little we can do about it because moving off fossil fuels will gut our economy and destroy our current way of life. They see geoengineering and carbon sequestration as necessary, but adaptation to the calamities brought by an overabundance of carbon dioxide is their primary course of action.
Then there are the climate realists, for whom carbon dioxide is a minor player in climate change and a warmer world will, in fact, be a better world. I put myself in that category.
For all three of those views, the greenhouse effect is real. The only difference is the last group—climate realists, my group—argue that carbon dioxide is not likely to create a runaway effect that destroys the planet.
Then, finally, there are those (searching for a name) for whom carbon dioxide plays no role whatsoever in Earth’s radiation balance. Eradicate carbon dioxide or flood the atmosphere with it—Earth’s temperature will remain unaffected.
These are the ones who usually take umbrage with my mere mention of the existence of a “greenhouse effect.” They believe we are the victims of a conspiracy to elevate carbon dioxide to evil gas status when, in fact, it has no effect whatsoever on Earth’s climate.
GHG Hoax?
According to them, the hoax apparently began back in 1845 when physicist James Prescott Joule, for whom the unit of energy is named, produced a false definition of energy that has since corrupted the field of physics. Other big-name physicists have been in on this hoax, most notably Niels Bohr, Max Planck, Gottfried Liebniz, Johann Bernoulli, Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis, Lord Kelvin, and William Rankine, just to name a few.
Even Einstein was in on the conspiracy. Somehow, they all knew climate change would become a major scientific issue some 150 years later, so they made sure carbon dioxide’s being an evil gas was cooked into the immutable laws of physics. Humm….
Some of the arguments made to me have focused on specific aspects of physics. One person noted that when a photon of energy is absorbed by an object (or a gas), it has five femtoseconds, that is five times ten to the minus fifteenth power, to emit that energy. I have no idea from where that magic number arises. The argument is that no object, including a gas, can store energy (Reassure yourself of that next time you pick up a blazing-hot cast-iron skillet and forget the hot pad!), and thus the idea of carbon dioxide heating the atmosphere is a fraud. I am not sure how that person defines the temperature of an object, however.
Another person noted to me that the Ideal Gas Law proves that so-called greenhouse gases cannot warm the atmosphere. The Ideal Gas Law states that pressure times volume equals the number of molecules in the gas, times the ideal gas constant, times the temperature. Therefore, temperature is related only to a change in pressure and/or volume of the gas and thus, according to the argument, as long as the pressure and volume of the gas remain constant, no gas can change its temperature in any other way. The concentration of carbon dioxide is not needed in this equation, and therefore carbon dioxide has no influence. And we don’t need to know the concentration of carbon dioxide to calculate the adiabatic lapse rate, either.
Another person reasoned that if I believe the greenhouse effect keeps Earth warmer by about 30 degrees Celsius and carbon dioxide concentrations have doubled since the Industrial Revolution, then air temperatures should have risen by 30 degrees Celsius since then, too—and they haven’t. So, see, the greenhouse effect MUST be a fraud! They miss two important facts: first, that water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas, and it doesn’t increase in lock step with carbon dioxide; and second, the impact of each added molecule of carbon dioxide has a diminishing effect with increasing concentrations.
Someone else argued that it is inappropriate to use math to represent the complexities of physics because too much is left out of mathematical equations. Besides, they argue, math is not science. I don’t know what to say about that except—good luck doing any scientific calculations.
Conclusion
As I said earlier, I believe most of these people are well-meaning. That is, they recognize that the Earth is not becoming a planet of horrors and that carbon dioxide is indeed the life-affirming gas that it is. But we have to be rooted in truth and hold fast to what is good. Science does show us that more carbon dioxide leads to a little bit of warming and that both that little warming and the fertilizing effect of the carbon dioxide are likely to be beneficial. Carbon dioxide will not, however, become an existential threat to the planet.
Of course, I have been called a “science denier” and labelled as someone who “denies the basics of climate” so many times it is becoming trite. At least it is refreshing to see that I am also being criticized for adhering to the physics.
Maybe someday I will be labelled derisively as a science lover. I can’t wait!
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David R. Legates, Ph,D. (Climatology), Director of Research and Education for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, is a retired Professor of Climatology at the University of Delaware and the co-editor of Climate and Energy: The Case for Realism (Regnery, 2024).
The post Am I a Stooge of the Climate Alarmist Left? appeared first on Master Resource.
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May 14, 2025 at 01:07AM
by Tilak Doshi
The UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), established in 2023 with an £800 million purse of taxpayer funds, received a burst of publicity last week when it was unveiled that the agency was planning to “dim the sun” to fight global warming. The agency approved £56.8 million to be spent on “climate cooling” projects which include looking into the logistics of building a ‘sunshade’ in space and injecting plumes of salt water into the sky to reflect sunlight away from Earth.
ARIA is the brainchild of Dominic Cummings, a prominent British political strategist who served as the chief adviser to UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson from 2019 to 2020. Cummings pitched a lean, “audacious” agency to fund high-stakes research in AI, quantum computing and synthetic biology, sidestepping the “timid bureaucracy” of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). In a research paper published in 2018 on his website, ‘On the ARPA/PARC “Dream Machine”, science funding, high performance and UK national strategy’, Cummings proposed a high-powered publicly-funded British research agency to emulate the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC).
The latter two entities inculcated high-risk, high-reward research with minimal bureaucracy and exemplified high-performance team performance, flexible work processes and visionary leadership. They yielded many innovations such as GPS, the internet, laser printing, the graphical user interface and the computer mouse, which resulted in large societal and economic returns.
On Governments Picking Winners
ARIA describes itself as an agency that “empowers scientists and engineers, from our Programme Directors to the teams we fund, with the resources and freedom to pursue breakthroughs at the edge of the possible… Created by an Act of Parliament, and sponsored by the Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology, ARIA funds breakthrough R&D in underexplored areas to catalyse new paths to prosperity for the UK and the world”.
But ARIA is a shaky bet for Britain’s national welfare. The historical record of governments picking winners is a poor one. DARPA’s poster children — the internet and GPS — owe their global dominance to private enterprise. ARPANET, DARPA’s brainchild, needed decades of corporate muscle to become the internet we know. GPS flourished through market-driven scaling up, not Pentagon edicts.
DARPA’s $3.4 billion budget, propped up by the Department of Defence’s $190 billion procurement juggernaut, dwarfs ARIA’s £800 million. ARIA also lacks a clear ‘customer’ to turn ideas into reality. While DARPA is funded by and dedicated to the focused needs of the US Department of Defence, the Xerox PARC research lab was a private sector undertaking, serving the pecuniary needs of the company’s shareholders. ARIA, in contrast, is devoted to the broader, more amorphous goals of economic growth and prosperity.
Margaret Thatcher — Great Britain’s most audacious post-War Prime Minister — was a Hayekian, convinced that the fundamental role of government is to support private entrepreneurs, to unleash their ‘animal spirits’ in their areas of business expertise. She would have scoffed at proposals to ‘invest’ tax-payers’ money in quangos – quasi autonomous non-governmental organisations funded by the government – such as ARIA.
She would have found it more appropriate for the government to offer tax credits to the private sector to pursue its own lines of innovation and invention. For Thatcher, who did much to make “private enterprise not a dirty word anymore”, as the Economist put it, entrepreneurs with their own skin in the game – not government-appointed mandarins – are more likely to rescue Britain from its economic decline.
The Quango That Would Dim the Sun
ARIA, as a quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation under the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, is a textbook case of government overreach. Unlike private firms, which innovate or die by market forces, quangos thrive on political cosiness and self-preservation. ARIA’s exemption from Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, baked into the 2022 ARIA Act, cloaks its £800 million budget in opacity. With little public scrutiny, ARIA could fritter away millions on pet projects, eroding trust in a nation still smarting from procurement scandals during the Covid lockdowns.
Cummings’s 2018 vision for ARIA as a bureaucracy-busting force is noble but naïve. Quangos, by their nature, morph into self-serving beasts, as Friedrich Hayek warned in The Fatal Conceit. His “curious task” of economics — showing how little planners know about what they design — applies to ARIA’s grandiose aims. The agency’s dabbling in geoengineering, like cloud brightening to cool the planet, smacks of hubris. The Telegraph’s Sarah Knapton calls ARIA a “shady no-man’s land” with “eye-watering” public funds but scant accountability, a sentiment echoing Hayek’s scepticism about state overreach.
Just how dimming the sun will help Britain’s quest for prosperity – ARIA’s explicit mandate – is not clear. Is the argument that temperate Britain is ‘over-heating’ and hence unable to promote economic growth? This goes against the historical record which shows that the Northern Atlantic underwent an agricultural revolution, more extensive human settlements and higher life expectancy rates during the Medieval Warming Period (900-1300) when temperatures were at least as high if not higher than in the late 20th Century.
Medical commentator Dr John Campbell raises urgent concerns about the planned sun dimming experiments, warning it could sabotage agricultural yields, trigger famine on a “biblical scale” and destabilise weather systems — all without public consent. James Melville, a media commentator with over half a million followers on X, questions “an energy strategy of plastering solar panels on farmland when the government also spends £50 million on dimming the sun experiments”.
Thaddeus G. McCotter, who served as a Republican representative in Michigan’s 11th Congressional District from 2003-2012, had this to say of ARIA’s proposed experiments:
Standing with both hands extended for a £50 million squeeze of the public teat, United Kingdom scientists claim the sun you celebrate in song contributes to ‘runaway climate change’. And these white-robed high priests of perfidious Albion’s climate cult have a novel idea to control the weather and forestall the impending apocalypse: dimming the sun.
In these experiments, ARIA is indistinguishable from the Green Blob that is doing the bidding of climate zealot Ed Miliband, from “sucking CO2 directly out of the ocean” to betting £22 billion in funding for unproven carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects.
Markets, Not Mandarins, for Britain’s Future
Private enterprise, not quangos, is Britain’s best bet for innovation and inventions that lift social welfare. The British agricultural and industrial revolutions took place in the 18th and 19th Centuries in the complete absence of government funding for science, as the work of Terence Kealey demonstrates. ARIA’s top-down bets driven by quango functionaries who buy into Ed Miliband’s obsessions with global climate change risk missing the mark on Britain’s urgent challenges to revive economic growth.
Government funding often crowds out private investment, skewing priorities. The £800 million sunk into ARIA could instead be used to slash taxes for start-ups or streamline regulations for tech hubs, unleashing market dynamism. Silicon Valley’s success stems from such freedom, not state handouts. ARIA’s mandarins, shielded from scrutiny, could cling to failing projects, wasting funds that markets would redirect swiftly. In sum, ARIA is a misguided use of taxpayers’ money. Private enterprise, with its ruthless efficiency and market-driven focus, trumps quangos in delivering innovations that can boost Britain’s economy and welfare. Britain deserves better — a market-led renaissance, not a quango’s pipe dreams.
King Canute apocryphally commanded the incoming waves to halt and not wet his feet or cloak. As the waves inevitably drenched him, he said: “Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but he whom heaven, earth and sea obey by eternal laws.” The humility and wisdom of Canute and his respect for eternal laws are evidently lost on the likes of the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) and its hubristic managers.
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.
Stop Press: ARIA CEO Ilan Gur has written in defence of his quango on Substack. Read it here.
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May 14, 2025 at 12:03AM
Ed. Note: In August 2022, Bradley challenged Lynne Kiesling to answer ten questions—to no response. To follow up on his posts this week (here and here), the questions are stated after the introduction, also reproduced verbatim from the original post 14 months ago.
“Totally forgotten in this transformation [to mandatory open access] was a simple removal of the regulatory covenant to allow a real free market and genuine entrepreneurial discovery process…. Instead, we were told the ISO/RTO model worked: the planners knew how to price for volume and for reliability with Texas as the national model.”
Classical liberal theory explains market coordination and governmental discoordination, even “planned chaos.” The same intellectual tradition notes the propensity of government intervention to expand from its own shortcomings. Electricity is no exception. The rise and fall of the Texas grid is a case study–just the opposite of what some claiming to be classical liberal thought (see yesterday’s post).
The history of electricity in the U.S. is supportive of an undesigned order, beginning with inventor Thomas Edison and his business protégé Samuel Insull in the 1880s. In its first decades, electricity largely overcame the problems of local regulation on the one side and municipalization on the other. Still, the threat of both led industry leaders to embrace statewide public-utility regulation to protect investment against takings via rate ordinances or socialization.
The state-level ‘regulatory covenant’ gave utilities franchise protection in return for cost-plus rate maximums. But for Insull and other industry leaders, rate ceilings were all but superfluous as economies of scale allowed a virtuous cycle of rate reductions and load growth. It began in the cities and reached the suburbs and then the countryside, a story told elsewhere. [1]
There was no market failure to justify the regulatory covenant–only political failure. There were industry complaints that ruinous competition would lead to natural monopolization and exploitation, but that theory never seemed to find traction in the real world. Besides, regulation introduced its own set of shortcomings that would evolve to where we are today.
Public utility regulation worked reasonably well in the era of coal-fired generation and hydropower. Natural gas later emerged to steam the turbines only to encounter shortages from federal price regulation in the 1970s. The bust of cost-plus regulation came with nuclear power, both before and after the Three Mile Island partial meltdown in 1979. [2]
Utility owners were entitled to a reasonable rate of return on regulatory-approved capital projects–and nuclear was the most capital-intensive generating source of all. More capital, more profit. Economists correctly fingered ratebase (mal)incentives under public-utility regulation for the cost inflation.
The ratebase problem of franchised utilities gave rise to a new model of electricity, mandatory open access, where both wholesale interstate transmission (federal) and last-mile transmission (state) were ‘socialized’ by government intervention. The owners of the transmission could no longer buy and sell their own power on the grid; they had to provide transmission services at cost and let outside parties buy and sell the electrons.
Totally forgotten in this transformation was a simple removal of the regulatory covenant to allow a real free market and genuine entrepreneurial discovery process between firms, independents and integrated majors alike. Instead, we were told, the ISO/RTO model worked: the planners knew how to price for volume and for reliability. Texas was the premiere example, as explained in a book edited by Lynne Kiesling and Andrew Kleit, Electricity Restructuring: The Texas Story (American Enterprise Institute, 2009). [3]
—————–
This background sets up a list of questions for any alleged classical liberal supporting infrastructure socialism and multi-service-area government-directed wholesale power planning. The Independent System Operator/Regional Transmission Organization (ISO/RTO) model for wholesale electricity sets up outsider “competition” to buy and sell power versus the traditional franchise utility model where integrated operations fulfill the ‘obligation to serve.’ But at what cost? And opportunity cost?
Questions for Lynne Kiesling
- Define classical liberalism and its application to electricity. How does mandatory open-access (MOA) square with private property rights? How does a government-directed wholesale power market over multiple control areas square with a free market?
- Are ISO/RTOs as territorial monopolies with pricing and capacity powers subject to the Mises/Hayek/Lavoie criticism of central planning?
- Is retail competition based on MOA/wholesale planning a true market?
- Is the private provision of electricity a “market failure”? If so, why?
- What is the “commons problem” of electricity given the ability of firms to establish control areas? Did Elinor Ostrom identify electricity as a “commons problem”? Might she have identified today’s ISO/RTO as a governmental commons problem?
- Explain how the ISO/RTO model has subsidized intermittent (wind, solar) generation at the expense of dispatchable, reliable generation–and thus challenged grid stability?
- How does Public Choice explain the development and shortcomings of today’s ISO/RTO regimes–and demote the ‘nirvana’ case for the same?
- Does demand-side planning and usage rationing correct the problems created by supply-side planning/intervention? Or is this a case of the Mises Interventionist Thesis, with intervention expanding from its own shortcomings?
- How would you revise your co-edited 2009 book, Electricity Restructuring: The Texas Story, given the Texas blackout of February 2021 and current grid instability issues? [See tomorrow’s post on this book]
- Is there a case for an unhampered market in place of the current interventionist regimes of either the traditional regulatory covenant or the ISO/RTO model?
MasterResource will be happy to publish the answers to these questions–and entertain follow-up questions for continuing debate.
——————-
[1] Bradley, Edison to Enron: Energy Markets and Political Strategies (Salem, MA: Scrivener Publishing; and Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2011), Part I.
[2] “A survey of plants begun after 1970 shows an average overnight cost overrun of 241%.)
[3] Kiesling and Kleit wrote: “Electricity Restructuring: The Texas Story tells how Texas, alone among U.S. states, moved forward into a truly restructured and competitive electricity era.” (p. 2)
The post Classical Liberalism and Electricity: Ten Questions for Lynne Kiesling (again) appeared first on Master Resource.
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May 13, 2025 at 09:41PM
Iowa Climate Science Education 