From the NoTricksZone

By P Gosselin

Once considered a key technology in the green energy transition, companies are waking up and finding out that hydrogen isn’t the answer to the challenges posed by renewable energies such as wind and sun.

Symbol image generated by Grok 3 AI

“Instead of progress, disillusionment dominates. The EU in particular – especially Germany – is increasingly being criticized for its costly projects,” reports German online Blackout News. “Companies are pulling out”.

Hydrogen is expensive, hazardous and a real technical challenge that doesn’t promise to be economically feasible. The gas is metallurgically aggressive, highly flammable, explosive. It’s chemical properties make a comprehensive infrastructure difficult to manage. Moreover, producing green hydrogen is “barely affordable” and industries are reluctant to use the volatile gas because it risks being unprofitable.

High costs, low demand and political misplanning are currently jeopardizing the strategy, according to an analysis by Westwood Global Energy Group. “Only a fraction of the planned EU hydrogen pipeline is likely to be operational by 2030.”

Germany has funded an ambitious green hydrogen project in Namibia, in a protected desert area and now it may be demolished for port expansion as the country’s new president is reportedly reassessing the project and looking at a potential shift towards the established oil sector. Technical analyses indicate hydrogen is only suitable as a selective energy source.

Unless there is a major change of course, the  EU’s hydrogen strategy risks being a costly failure.

Mark Gongloff, an opinion columnist at Bloomberg, recently wrote a piece titled “Corporate America Owes the Rest of Us $87 Trillion.” In it, he claims U.S. companies are causing carbon-related social damages worth 131% of all corporate equity and three times America’s GDP. All based, of course, on models, not measurements.

“The social cost of the carbon emissions of US companies will amount to a cool $87 trillion through 2050.” — Mark Gongloff, Bloomberg

That’s not analysis. That’s climate-themed performance art.

The core of this fantasy is the “social cost of carbon” (SCC), a figure so malleable it practically defines policy-based evidence. Gongloff acknowledges the controversy:

“That hasn’t been easy or uncontroversial.”

Indeed. Under Trump, the SCC was $1/ton. Biden’s EPA pushed it up to $190/ton, conveniently aligning with Net Zero mandates. Gongloff prefers the high end—naturally. The study he cites by Lubos Pastor and Wharton School colleagues simply plugs this inflated SCC into an economic model and—presto!—out comes a multi-trillion-dollar guilt trip for corporate America.

The trick is simple: pick a damage number, apply it across a long enough time horizon, assume compounding effects, and declare catastrophe. That’s not economics. It’s speculation wearing a necktie.

Gongloff sets up skeptics as indifferent obstructionists:

“Modern deniers… fire back that the ‘do something about it’ part is too hard, too expensive to be worth trying.”

This is the typical bait-and-switch. Skeptics aren’t denying costs—they’re questioning whether proposed solutions are worse. Germany’s disastrous energy transition, skyrocketing prices, and blackout risk demonstrate what happens when you ignore reality in favor of renewable fairy tales.

Gongloff’s version of pragmatism?

“Being truly pragmatic means leaving fossil fuels behind as quickly as possible.”

That’s not pragmatic. That’s blind faith. Oil, gas, and coal still supply over 80% of global energy. The “just transition” isn’t happening—because it can’t without destroying the economy.

In a particularly deranged twist, Gongloff endorses holding companies responsible for emissions they don’t even directly produce:

“Most of that falls under the category of ‘Scope 3’ emissions… the gasoline burned in cars and the natural gas burned in homes.”

So now energy producers are to blame for how consumers use their product? This isn’t justice—it’s ex post facto criminalization. Under this logic, Ford is responsible for traffic, and McDonald’s for your waistline.

It also forms the foundation for climate lawsuits, which Gongloff promotes:

“New York state and other places are pushing for polluters to kick into ‘Climate Superfunds.’”

This isn’t accountability. It’s green Marxism, thinly disguised as reparative economics.

Gongloff writes:

“$192 trillion is a bargain relative to the potential costs.”

Only in a fantasy world where averted damages are based on inflated assumptions, infinite foresight, and zero economic friction. BloombergNEF, the source for this figure, assumes global coordination, endless spending, and perfect deployment of technologies still in the prototype phase.

There’s no acknowledgment of risk, trade-offs, or unintended consequences. Just more money, more control, more modeling.

Gongloff even dusts off the IMF’s infamous claim:

“The fossil-fuel industry gets $7 trillion in government largesse every year.”

This number is fake. It counts the absence of carbon taxes as a “subsidy.” If governments don’t charge you an imaginary fee, that’s now a handout. It’s like calling your paycheck a gift because the government didn’t seize it.

Real direct subsidies to fossil fuels are minimal. But the green energy industry? That’s a subsidy black hole, endlessly gorging on mandates, tax credits, and bailouts.

Gongloff sums it up:

“Add it up over 25 years… and $87 trillion starts to seem like a low bid.”

Of course it does—when the number is built on circular logic, unprovable assumptions, and the moral conviction of a missionary. This isn’t journalism. It’s climate absolutism wrapped in pseudo-economics.

And the real danger isn’t the carbon. It’s the crusade to control human behavior, dismantle prosperity, and punish the very systems that made modern life possible—all in the name of speculative models.

Let the markets—not modelers—guide our energy future.

By Jonathan Lesser

A recent article published in Nature claims that climate liability lawsuits, such as the ones various U.S. states and municipalities continue to pursue, are on rock-solid legal grounds, thanks to the authors’ new research “proving” that the world would be $28 trillion richer today but for carbon emissions from fossil fuels over a 30-year period, 1991 -2020. Ignoring the emissions from developing countries, notably China, which today accounts for one-third of all energy-related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the authors focus instead on oil companies, which they call the “carbon majors” – especially Saudi Aramco, Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, and Gasprom.

For example, according to the authors Chevron has caused an estimated $2 trillion in damages, and perhaps as much as $3.6 trillion. Exxon Mobil is right behind at $1.9 trillion. Similarly, Saudi Aramco and Gazprom are each responsible for $2 trillion in damages. BP is the laggard, at just under $1.5 trillion in damages. Levying fines of those amounts, which greatly exceed these companies’ market values, would lead to their immediate bankruptcy. While the authors may consider such an outcome a “win,” bankrupting these companies would not change the physical and economic realities that the world depends on fossil fuels and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. (Moreover, it is not clear who would levy the fines and who would receive the monies received – other than trial lawyers.)

To derive their damage estimates, the authors combine bad science with bad economics. First, they use simplified climate models to predict what average world temperatures would have been had there been no GHG emissions from fossil fuels. Next, they use other models to determine how many fewer extreme heat events, which they define as the hottest five days of each year, there would have been absent GHG emissions from fossil fuels. Finally, they calculate the damages in terms of lost GDP based on a simplistic regression model that assumes lost GDP increases in proportion to the square of temperature increases, and which ignores the myriad other economic factors that affect economic growth. They justify this absurd specification, which has no economic basis, on “peer-reviewed research” – a previous article they published.

The approach used by these authors is a form of “attribution science,” which attempts to link specific weather-related events to GHG emissions. That approach, which was first developed about two decades ago to attribute a 2003 European heat wave to climate change, is statistical legerdemain that depends on counterfactual models, just as the authors use here.

Ironically, the authors acknowledge the benefits of fossil fuels, stating that “fossil fuels have also produced immense prosperity.” Yet, they purposefully ignore those benefits because, as they state, “these companies have already been handsomely paid.” This latter statement reveals further economic ignorance. Without fossil fuels, modern life would be impossible. The benefits of fossil fuels to modern society are probably incalculable, but they far exceed the profits these companies have made, and far exceed the damage estimates the authors calculate.

The authors claim that fossil fuel damages are what economists call an “externality” and that “Courts may need to consider how the benefits of energy use are balanced against its externalities and the potential duty of care these companies have to the public.” (They also raise the discredited claim that oil companies “knew” about climate change and hid the evidence from the public.)

Externalities are a real phenomenon of energy development and use. But in this case the externalities are unobservable and instead estimated based on theoretical models having little accuracy. Moreover, levying penalties to “internalize” an externality that would cause far greater economic losses is unjustified.

Ultimately, this article is simply an advocacy piece for specious lawsuits against oil companies with deep financial pockets. Nature should be ashamed of itself for publishing it.

Jonathan Lesser is a Senior Fellow with the National Center for Energy Analytics. His report, “The Social Cost of Carbon: A Flawed Measure for Energy Policy,” was released on April 23.

This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.