By Benjamin Zycher

Editors are a central scourge of mankind, imposing length limits guaranteed to hollow out a finely-crafted argument. And the renowned editors of RealClear Energy? A fortiori: they are merciless.

I kid, of course. But in my RCE column on Earth Day 2025, one of the issues that I left on the cutting room floor is that of “environmental justice,” an empty nostrum devoid of rigorous definition but supremely useful to the proponents of left-wing environmentalism in terms of acquiring funding from various foundations, from government, and from private donors either naïve or engaged in classic virtue signaling.

As I discussed in my earlier column, the central Earth Day policy proposal this year is a tripling of renewable power (primarily wind and solar) generation globally by 2030, an insane idea environmentally destructive, fantastically expensive, and guaranteed to yield economic growth and employment impacts massively adverse. The Earth Day proponents continue to assert that wind and solar power are “cheap,” an exercise in political propaganda that shunts aside both the need for massive subsidies to keep the wind and solar power industries afloat and the attendant actual effects on household budgets.

That the heavily-subsidized expansion of wind and solar power increases electricity costs is incontrovertible; it is no accident, as Pravda used to put it, that California has the highest power prices among the lower 48 states, almost double the average for the U.S. as a whole. Accordingly, let us ask the question that the Earth Day proponents avoid at all costs: Across U.S. income quintiles, whom would be harmed the most by such increases in the price of electricity?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics in its Consumer Expenditure Survey reports the following shares of before-tax household income spent on electricity for all households, the lowest income quintile, the second, third, and fourth quintiles, and the highest. The respective percentages: 2.3 percent, 3.7 percent, 3.2 percent, 2.7 percent, 2.2 percent, and 1.6 percent.

Translation: The expansion of renewable power is hugely expensive, it increases the price of electricity, the poor spend a higher percentage of their incomes on power, and so the overall effect would be highly regressive. So much for “environmental justice” as a purported concern of the environmental left.

It is useful to consider more rigorously what “environmental justice” actually means; it typically is defined (e.g., p. 33247) in terms of differing levels of environmental quality experienced by various groups, the poor and minority groups in particular.

That concept is much too narrow. The level of environmental quality experienced (or “consumed”) by a given individual or household is one component of “health” broadly defined. It is clear from the scholarly literature that “health” is a “normal” good, that is, one the consumption of which rises with income or wealth. This is true for individuals and for economies as a whole. Lower-income individuals and households, precisely because their incomes are lower, consume less environmental quality, lower-quality diets, lead less-healthful lifestyles, ad infinitum.

Therefore, it is unsurprising that lower-income individuals and households tend to be located in areas with lower environmental quality; that is what they can afford. This is a reality regardless of the impacts of differences in environmental quality on “health,” that is, mortality and morbidity. Even if a lower level of environmental quality is merely unpleasant, that is a factor relevant to the ways in which individuals and households allocate their limited resources.  

Accordingly, the “environmental justice” issue is little more than the observation, or complaint, that the poor consume less environmental quality than others, that is, that they choose to allocate their resources in ways different from those exhibited by individuals and households wealthier.

And so the definition of “environmental justice” is elusive. There is the classic endowment problem — individuals enter life with very different endowments of human and financial capital — an obvious reality central to the “fairness” and “equity” question, but not a parameter clearly malleable by regulatory policy or, a fortiori, the exhortations from the Earth Day crowd. One central long-term policy initiative by government intended (in part) to deal with the endowment problem is public education, but the low relative quality of public schools in low-income and minority areas illustrates the difficulty of using public policies to change “justice” outcomes in specific directions, because public policies inexorably are politicized.

Efforts by government to effect changes in the distribution of income or wealth necessarily affect resource allocation in ways reducing aggregate productivity. Perhaps a given change in “distributional fairness” and “equity” is worth the attendant reduction in aggregate wealth; perhaps not. There is no “objective” measure of this tradeoff because we do not have an efficiency theory of — a rigorous way to evaluate — the relative virtues of different distributional outcome. 

Have the Earth Day proponents thought about any of this carefully? The question answers itself.

Benjamin Zycher is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

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

By Vijay Jayaraj

In a landmark move that may well redefine the future of U.S.-India trade relations and global energy geopolitics, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance announced the initiation of a new trade deal with India. The day after his meeting with the Indian Prime Minister Modi April 21, Vance said that the two countries had “officially finalized the terms of reference for the trade negotiation.”

The deal, initiated against the backdrop of Trump’s tariff threats, could turn out to be a masterstroke of economic diplomacy. Trump’s announcement of a 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs, which could have raised duties on Indian exports, provided India with a window to negotiate.

The energy economics of this deal, and its potential to reshape the global market for fossil fuels, is particularly interesting. In his announcement, Vance declared, “We want to sell more energy to India and also help it explore its own resources, including offshore natural gas reserves and critical mineral supplies.”

The arrangement could propel India toward its long-standing goal of energy surplus – a feat that appeared daunting – perhaps impossible – against the nation’s projections for a massive increase in demand – the fastest-growing among major economies for the next two decades.

Let’s get it straight: India has a long way to go before it even contemplates applying the brakes on consumption of hydrocarbons. Even a middle-class Indian like me residing in a major city experiences power blackouts on a regular basis – precisely why the nation has postponed net zero ambitions to a distant 2070. Even the documents for the country’s participation in the nutty United Nations Paris Agreement clearly prioritize domestic energy security over international climate diplomacy.

Posing a strategic vulnerability is India’s reliance on imported energy, which includes over 85% of its crude oil and roughly 50% of its natural gas. The government looks to more than double natural gas’s share of the energy mix to 15% by 2030. U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) suppliers have surpassed the United Arab Emirates to become India’s second-largest LNG supplier, trailing only Qatar.

A key player in this unfolding saga is GAIL, Limited, India’s state-owned natural gas company. On April 11, GAIL issued a tender to procure 1 million metric tons per annum of LNG from an existing or new U.S. LNG liquefaction project, with operations commencing by 2030. The agreement, potentially extendable by 5 to 10 years, signals India’s commitment to U.S. supplies.

GAIL had to stall a similar process in 2023 to buy a stake in a U.S. LNG plant after then-President Joe Biden banned export permits for LNG projects. It took the Trump administration’s return to the White House in 2024 to lift the ban.

Notable is the timing of the upcoming deal, which strengthens India’s position as a counterweight to China. The Quad alliance – comprising the U.S., India, Japan and Australia – gains heft as India bolsters its energy security and economic clout.

U.S. willingness to share technology and expertise, as Vance emphasized, could enhance Indian autonomy, reducing reliance on adversarial suppliers. This alignment is particularly crucial as China intensifies its trade outreach in Southeast Asia and seeks to blunt the effect of U.S. tariffs.

The Western media will decry the expansion of trading in fossil fuels as a climate catastrophe, as though that will resonate with a serious person. The U.S.-India deal wisely eschews climate moralizing and embraces a symbiotic truth: America’s shale boom and India’s hunger for energy are a perfect match.

This deal is a reaffirmation of energy sovereignty. And perhaps it marks the beginning of a global recalibration, where nations rediscover the courage to assert their right to energy abundance and economic self-determination without apologizing to the corrupt and decrepit climate cartel of Brussels, Davos and U.N. corridors.

May the new world order feature developing nations standing for their futures and rejecting the false campaign of planetary salvation.

This commentary was first published at The Washington Times on April 28, 2025.

Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO₂ Coalition, Arlington, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India.

Conventional thinking treats ice primarily as a consequence of climate change: when the planet cools, ice grows; when the planet warms, ice melts. Alex Pope has convinced me that this view is mostly wrong. Furthermore, Alex’s somewhat radical hypothesis fits neatly into my New Theory of Climate Resilience, including through our shared focus on the Earth’s oceans.

Join Alex and me on 24th May to discuss all of this and more. You will need to register for this Zoom webinar. There are three sessions across three time zones:

The first session will be at 12noon Brisbane time, CLICK HERE
The second session will be at 1pm London time, CLICK HERE
The third session will be at 4pm Houston time, CLICK HERE

After you click to register for one or all of the sessions, you will receive an email with a link that you will need to keep to be able to join that session on Saturday 24th May.

While Milankovitch cycles set the stage for glacial-interglacial transitions, they don’t fully account for the speed, magnitude, or mechanisms of events like the 120 metres of sea level rise beginning some 16,000 years ago.

Milankovitch-driven insolation changes are relatively small (~10–20 W/m² at high latitudes). While sufficient to perhaps initiate ice sheet retreat, they struggle to explain the massive ice volume loss required for a 120-meter sea level rise.

The more usual claim is that ice sheet melting was likely amplified by feedback mechanisms. There are appeals to albedo feedback, the idea being that melting ice exposes darker land/ocean, absorbing more heat even CO₂ feedback that rising temperatures released CO₂ from oceans and permafrost, enhancing greenhouse warming.

The hypothesis that I will be discussing with Alex is quite different, and more complex and a better fit with the measurements.

Meanwhile, I received an email just yesterday, further lamenting my recent focus on C02 and more generally my latest obsession that is developing a new theory of climate change. A learned scholar, an expert in metrology (the study of measurement), wrote from Germany:

Why let yourself be dragged into unimportant questions? CO2 has negligible influence on the climate. Climate is controlled by solar activity (and finally probably by the planets). Period!

So sure of what he knows, but unable to articulate a coherent theory of climate change that fits with the measurements. Because there is so little we truly understand about the weather and climate change, even over the millennia including about glaciation.

There is no unifying theory and too often an appeal to gravity (orbits of the planets) even as an external driver affecting solar variability, or carbon dioxide as an internal driver because that suits the current consensus IPCC politics.

What we can surmise as likely to be correct is that around 16,000 years ago, Earth was emerging from the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, 26,500–19,000 years ago), when vast ice sheets covered North America, Europe, and Asia.

As the climate warmed, these ice sheets melted rapidly, causing global sea levels to rise by approximately 120 meters between ~18,000 and ~6,000 years ago. This equates to an average rate of ~1 meter per century, with pulses like Meltwater Pulse 1A (14,700–14,300 years ago) contributing 20–25 meters in just a few centuries.

In the first webinar in this series (CLICK HERE FOR A SUMMARY), Bill Kininmonth presented a model of the Earth’s climate system emphasising the role of convection by air rising within hot towers, also known as Anvil clouds. I am of, and from the tropics, and I know that these clouds can thunder. They are a feature of the tropical convergence zone straddling the equator moving energy from the bottom to the top of the troposphere. Bill explained that in the tropics, atmospheric temperatures lag ocean temperatures and that the ocean is regulating the temperature of the atmosphere in the tropics.

Alex will emphases that component of the solar energy absorbed by the oceans in the tropics, which begins to move poleward via ocean currents. He will explain that this thermal inertia delays the full impact of solar variations, by which he means varying solar input because of the Milankovitch cycles.

When warm ocean currents reach the poles, if polar oceans are thawed, evaporation accelerates leading to heavy snowfall on land. And so, land ice builds up, cooling the continents and reflecting more sunlight. Ice sheets advance. Thawing ice, in turn, chills polar ocean currents, sending delayed cooling back toward the tropics. According to Alex’s theory, ice cycles regulate Earth’s heat distribution beyond the tropical convergence zone. Indeed, his theory dovetails neatly with Bill’s model.

The background image within the banner at the top of this post has been extracted from the short video by my sometimes scuba buddy and ace underwater photographer Stuart Ireland. The video was filmed as part of the Ocean Geographic Elysium Visual Expedition in 2010. The chart within the banner is from the late Bob Carter.

In their recent article, “America’s Climate Anxiety Map”, Axios claims that Americans across the country are increasingly distressed about climate change, and that this emotional distress can be neatly visualized in map form. That claim is misleading at best and politically constructed at worst. Why? Because the “climate anxiety” map itself looks eerily familiar—it mirrors the 2024 presidential voting map, with the most “anxious” areas neatly aligning with Democrat strongholds. The data doesn’t suggest a climate emergency; it suggests a partisan psychological phenomenon manufactured by relentless media messaging.

Let’s start with the map Axios published. It’s presented as a national heat map of where people feel most “anxious” about climate change, based on polling from the American Psychological Association (APA) and The Harris Poll. The darker the color, the more distress reportedly felt.

But do a simple hue shift on that image—flipping greens and blues to blues and reds—and something remarkable happens: it starts looking a lot like the 2024 electoral map by county. Red counties (which dominate the interior) show lower concern, while blue coastal urban centers light up like warning beacons of existential dread.

So, what are we really mapping here? Is it climate anxiety—or is it partisanship?

The entire premise of this map is based not on physical reality—no temperature data, no CO₂ concentrations, no storm frequencies—but on self-reported feelings.

Let that sink in. Axios and the APA are treating emotional distress as a reliable indicator of climate danger. But we know from decades of polling that political orientation has a powerful influence on how people perceive risk, especially on abstract or complex issues like climate. According to Gallup’s long-term tracking, Democrats consistently report far more concern about global warming than Republicans or independents. This has remained true even when objective metrics—like hurricane landfall trends or U.S. temperature anomalies—have shown little change.

So what this map actually reveals is not where the climate is changing the most—but where people have been most influenced by alarmist messaging.

The problem is that media narratives are driving climate perception, not actual events or trends.

If you live in New York, San Francisco, or Seattle, you’re inundated daily with headlines predicting everything from the end of snow to boiling oceans. If you believe the mainstream narrative, every heat wave is a sign of the apocalypse. Never mind that these claims often fall apart under scrutiny.

For instance, climate models used by the IPCC have repeatedly run too hot compared to observed temperatures—a fact acknowledged in the AR6 report itself. Additionally, data from NOAA and the National Hurricane Center shows no upward trend in U.S. hurricane landfalls since records began (link). In fact, some categories of extreme weather have shown declines in intensity or frequency. But those facts rarely make it into mainstream coverage.

Instead, young people are bombarded with terms like “eco-grief,” “climate trauma,” and “solastalgia”—psychological disorders supposedly caused by fear of climate change. These are not mental illnesses born from lived experience. They are constructs shaped by repetition and ideology.

The American Psychological Association, which co-sponsored this anxiety map project, has increasingly positioned itself not as a neutral observer, but as an active participant in climate activism. Their climate change resource center is filled with advocacy language, warning of the devastating psychological impacts of global warming—most of which are based on projections, not measurements.

Let’s be clear: there’s no established medical consensus that climate change is causing widespread diagnosable mental illness in the U.S. Instead, people are reporting worry, which the APA then recasts as a psychological crisis. This is classic feedback-loop thinking. The more people are told they should be terrified, the more they are—and the cycle continues.

We’ve seen this movie before. During the Cold War, some Americans lived in daily fear of nuclear annihilation. But no one suggested we map national anxiety as if it were proof that war was imminent. Anxiety is a consequence of perception, not a measure of external truth.

Strangely absent from the Axios article is any mention of actual weather trends where anxiety is supposedly highest. Did New Yorkers suffer a record number of natural disasters in 2024? Was there a heat dome over Boston? Did the Pacific Northwest burn to the ground last year?

The answer is no. In fact, U.S. wildfire acreage burned in recent years is well below the peak decades of the 1930s and 1940s, as documented by the National Interagency Fire Center. Heat waves, while attention-grabbing, are not more frequent than they were in the early 20th century. And cold extremes still regularly sweep through “climate-anxious” zones—undermining the simplistic idea that people’s emotions are a rational response to their environment.

If the fear were rooted in actual weather experience, we’d expect rural Texans and Floridians—who live with droughts and hurricanes—to top the list. But they don’t. Instead, we see anxiety clustering in university towns and media hubs.

This map also unintentionally reveals how successful climate messaging has become in certain demographics. For years, groups like Climate Central, the UN IPCC, and the U.S. Global Change Research Program have pushed increasingly dire forecasts into the public consciousness. In schools, in newsrooms, and even in mental health training, the message has been: you should be afraid. Basically, Climate messaging has become ideological grooming.

And when people—especially younger generations—report that fear, activists point to it as evidence of crisis. But it’s not. It’s evidence of indoctrination. An emotional reaction to a steady drumbeat of narrative, not a scientific appraisal of conditions on the ground.

Let’s not forget the tangible consequences of this climate-induced psychological fragility. People who believe the world is ending in 10 years are less likely to invest in their future, more likely to support extreme policy interventions, and increasingly distrustful of dissenting viewpoints. This isn’t just emotional discomfort—it’s a recipe for poor decision-making at every level of society.

And the irony? Many of the same people who are emotionally paralyzed over “climate catastrophe” live in regions with some of the lowest per capita emissions and highest standards of living in the world. They are not suffering from climate change—they are suffering from narrative fatigue.

In the end, what Axios published was not journalism. It was narrative engineering. A psychological temperature chart built not on data, but on feelings—feelings shaped by decades of one-sided storytelling and political ideology.

This is not a “climate anxiety map.” It’s a partisan vulnerability map. And The Hill, the APA, and Axios ought to be ashamed of pushing this kind of pseudo-scientific, politically driven drivel onto the public. It is simply bad journalism hiding behind a map.

The job of the press is to inform, not manipulate. But when it comes to climate, lately that line has been blurred beyond recognition.