They say you can hear the wailing from space—or at least from deep within the editorial dungeon of The Guardian, where climate correspondents are reportedly being consoled with soy lattes and participation trophies after the unthinkable occurred: the Trump administration canceled funding for ICF International, the contractor coordinating America’s National Climate Assessment (NCA). That’s right—the federal sugar spigot has been shut off, and the climate clergy are not taking it well.

Let’s start with a gem from The Guardian’s April 9th obituary for the ICF’s federal funding:

“There’s really no coming back from this,” moaned one anonymous staffer, whose main contribution to planetary salvation apparently consisted of convening meetings and photocopying catastrophic graphs. “I’m left without a support system and the latest science on climate change”​.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/09/trump-national-climate-assessment-usgcrf

Good heavens. Without a publicly funded bureaucracy to remind them that hot weather in August is now “unprecedented,” how will America survive?

But fear not, dear reader, for this is not the death of science—it’s the euthanasia of a political machine disguised as one.

The NCA: Where Science Goes to Be Molded Like Play-Doh

According to the Breakthrough Institute, the NCA, in its current state, is less an objective scientific document and more “a political tool” riddled with alarmist framing and selective citation​. It is, to borrow their phrase, “far less useful than its potential.” Kind of like a $10,000 espresso machine at a climate summit—impressive, expensive, and mostly producing froth.

The report is infamous for its headline-friendly key messages like “Systemic Racism and Discrimination Exacerbate Climate Impacts on Human Health.” Because nothing says peer-reviewed science like intersectionality word salads​.

Breakthrough’s critique reads like a full autopsy: lack of systematic review, heavy bias toward worst-case scenarios, and reliance on cherry-picked data. The NCA isn’t informing policy—it’s auditioning for a spot on MSNBC.

The Real Tragedy? No More Government-Paid Fiction Writers

One “federal climate expert” (anonymous, of course) bemoaned that firing ICF staff “guts the entire climate research and services ecosystem”​. Translation: a few dozen Beltway bureaucrats lost their raison d’être—and, more importantly, their federal per diems. Another lamented that the sixth National Climate Assessment is now “effectively destroyed.” Cue dramatic string music and shots of melting glaciers.

Meanwhile, back in the world of actual evidence, the Fifth NCA was already shredded by independent analysis. Larry Hamlin here at WUWT exposed the report’s sleight-of-hand, such as combining data from geographically disparate regions (like Alaska and Hawaii) with the continental U.S. to fabricate an alarming warming trend​. Real NOAA data—stripped of manipulative region-stacking—shows no significant temperature anomaly increase in the U.S. since the 1930s. In other words, the “hottest ever” narrative evaporates under scrutiny, like a snowflake in Phoenix.

The Real Inconvenient Truth: This Was Never About Science

If the NCA were a scientific document, its elimination would be met with a sober discussion about methodology. Instead, we get Michael Mann, the godfather of hockey-stick hysteria, declaring that ending ICF’s contract is:

“A crime against the planet – arguably, the most profound of all crimes”​.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/09/trump-national-climate-assessment-usgcrf

Calm down, Michael. Genocide, war, and famine would like a word. This isn’t a crime—it’s budget discipline.

Let’s face it: the NCA and its incestuous network of climate “experts” have long functioned as an echo chamber for worst-case modeling, doomsday predictions, and lucrative consulting gigs. Scrapping it isn’t the apocalypse—it’s spring cleaning.

Don’t Cry for ICF, Argentina

The cancellation of ICF’s contract doesn’t signal the end of climate science. It signals the end of publicly funded ideological propaganda masquerading as science. It’s a budgetary course correction, a rebalancing of priorities, and a much-needed cold splash of reality.

And judging by the caterwauling from The Guardian, it hit exactly where it should.

Keep your tissues handy, climate clerics. The gravy train has left the station—and it’s coal-powered.

Essay by Eric Worrall

What happened to the Net Zero Banking Alliance again?

Amazon partnered with Dominion Energy to build solar farms in Virginia to power its cloud-computing service. Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Companies will still face pressure to manage for climate change, even as government rolls back US climate policy

Published: April 11, 2025 10.44pm AEST

Ethan I. Thorpe Fellow at Private Climate Governance Lab, Vanderbilt University
Michael Vandenbergh Professor of Law and Co-Director, Energy, Environment and Land Use Program, Vanderbilt University
Zdravka Tzankova Associate Professor of the Practice in Climate & Environmental Studies, Vanderbilt University

As the federal government moves to eliminate U.S. climate rules, companies still face pressure to be better stewards of the planet from their customers, investors, employees, local communities, lenders, insurers, global trading partners and many states.

Each of those groups knows it will face increasing costs from rising temperaturesand extreme weather if corporations don’t rein in their greenhouse gas emissions.

…

Companies have also helped drive the expansion of renewable energy, motivated by the competitive economics of renewables and business opportunities. Facebook’s parent company Meta and Google invested nearly $2 billion in projects to provide renewable energy in the Tennessee Valley Authority service area, even though no government required them to do so. And major companies continued signing renewable energy power purchase agreements in 2025.

Microsoft and Amazon are responding to massive new power demand by trying to locate data centers near existing nuclear power plants for cleaner energy supplies.

…

Read more: https://theconversation.com/companies-will-still-face-pressure-to-manage-for-climate-change-even-as-government-rolls-back-us-climate-policy-251580

I love that they picked Facebook / Meta as an example. While companies like Facebook are investing in renewables, or at least announcing such investments, this isn’t the full story.

That “massive new power demand” is the push for artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence requires crazy amounts of energy because it essentially works by trial and error. AI systems compute and discard trillions, possibly quintillions of possible solutions to a problem before finding a solution which works. If the problem is complex, and has to be solved quickly, for example if the AI is powering a game character in a realtime 3D game, you need acres of computers drawing gigawatts of power to fuel the required computations.

But AI works – since shortly after 2020, all those billion dollar investments started delivering impressive results.

Renewables aren’t reliable enough and are too expensive to provide the kind of power AI requires. Remember these guys are competing head to head with Chinese companies which in some cases are paying less than $0.01 / kWh for reliable coal power. The need for cheap energy to keep up with Chinese AI is what cancelled corporate America’s commitment to climate action.

The climate movement is on its death bed. Greens claiming companies will stick to their commitments despite relaxation of rules in my mind are just like those foolish Eastern block communist leaders who thought they still commanded the support of the people, despite decades of communist tyranny. Anyone who continues to entertain such delusions is about to have a hard encounter with reality.

The following article delves into why AI requires so much energy, and contains a real AI which you can run in your web browser.