Energy
There is nothing green about the ‘green’ agenda
Quick Hit:
RealClearEnergy contributor Steve Milloy argues that the environmental left has been disingenuous about the true costs of so-called green energy. He exposes the environmental and human toll of electric vehicles, solar, and wind power, calling the movement’s claims “Orwellian.”
Key Details:
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Milloy criticizes Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm for claiming President Trump is helping China by cutting subsidies for the green economy.
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He highlights the use of child labor and environmental destruction in mining for electric vehicle (EV) components like lithium and nickel.
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He challenges the credibility of climate activists, pointing out decades of failed predictions and misleading rhetoric.
Diving Deeper:
Now that Democrats no longer control the federal government, Steve Milloy argues that climate activists are scrambling to rebrand their agenda to appeal to conservatives. In a recent op-ed for RealClearEnergy, Milloy calls out Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm for claiming that Trump’s rollback of green energy subsidies is a win for Communist China. Milloy translates this as frustration from the left over the end of “the flow of billions of taxpayers’ dollars to subsidize electric vehicles that nobody wants and only the well-off can afford.”
According to Milloy, the so-called green agenda is anything but environmentally friendly. “If the climate movement was truly sincere and intellectually honest in its desire to stop actions contributing to global environmental degradation, it would stand fast against solar panels and electric vehicles,” he writes. He details the horrific conditions in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where children mine cobalt for lithium-ion batteries with their bare hands, breathing in toxic dust while contaminating their own water supply. Meanwhile, he says, activists remain “blithely unaware or unconcerned in the comfort of their own homes.”
The mining of nickel, another key EV battery component, also devastates the environment. Milloy describes Indonesia’s nickel refining operations, where thick brown smog chokes the air, and chemicals leach into groundwater. “Whatever else climate activists may try to tell us, there is nothing green going on here,” he asserts.
In Brazil, an aluminum refinery linked to Ford’s now-canceled all-electric F-150 Lightning has been accused of poisoning local communities with toxic chemicals. Milloy highlights a lawsuit alleging that heavy metal contamination has caused cancer, birth defects, and neurological disorders. Meanwhile, a separate Brazilian EV factory was recently shut down due to “slavery”-like working conditions. “How is that a green virtue?” Milloy asks.
The environmental destruction doesn’t stop with EVs. “Solar energy, long the prize pig of the climate crowd, isn’t green either,” Milloy writes, citing studies showing that clearing forests for solar farms actually increases carbon emissions. Wind power, he notes, is no better, with massive wind farms killing wildlife and disrupting ecosystems both on land and offshore.
Milloy argues that the climate movement has long relied on fear-mongering and deception. “In 1970, they assured us that human activity would cause an ice age by the 21st century,” he recalls. Predictions of global famine, acid rain catastrophes, and rising sea levels have all failed to materialize. He points to Al Gore’s 2008 claim that the North Pole would be ice-free within five years and UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s 2009 declaration that the world had “fewer than 50 days to save our planet from catastrophe.” “Spoiler alert: We’re still here and thriving,” Milloy quips.
Ultimately, he says, there is no such thing as “clean” or “dirty” energy—only trade-offs and solutions. With energy costs already high, Milloy argues that reliable fossil fuels remain essential. “Word sophistry from our friends on the left won’t change that,” he concludes.
Canada’s failure to push more strongly for LNG has put us in a weaker position, but there is time to recover
Earlier this month, President Donald Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba announced a joint American-Japanese venture for the Alaska LNG Project. Once built, the $44 billion project will ship gas from northern Alaska through an 800-mile pipeline to a liquefaction facility in Nikiski for export.
It is another sign that Canada needs to step up its LNG industry.
For years, Canada has been indecisive about liquefied natural gas (LNG), while others seized the moment. Now, with global demand for LNG surging and allies like Germany, Poland, and Japan needing stable energy sources, Canada finds itself left behind, and forced to regret regulatory missteps, political foot-dragging, and underestimating LNG’s long-term value.
The warning signs have been there for years. In 2022, as Europe scrambled to replace Russian gas after the invasion of Ukraine, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz personally came to Canada to request LNG exports. Instead of seizing the moment, only to be told there was no “strong business case” for Canadian LNG exports to Europe.
The same story followed with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in 2023 and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Polish President Andrzej Duda in 2024. Each time, Canada’s response was the same, with no commitment, no plan, and no urgency.
Meanwhile, others acted. The U.S. and Qatar ramped up their LNG exports, locking in long-term contracts with European and Asian buyers. Germany, despite its push for renewables, invested in floating LNG terminals, recognizing that natural gas would be essential for energy security. Canada, despite having some of the world’s largest natural gas reserves, failed to position itself as a global supplier.
Canada’s failure isn’t just about hesitation, it’s about active obstruction. The federal government’s Bill C-69, the so-called “no more pipelines” law, created an onerous and unpredictable regulatory process for major energy projects. The CleanBC plan made it clear that investment in the sector would face endless hurdles.
The results have been severe. Since 2015, Canada has seen $670 billion in cancelled resource projects, including multiple LNG terminals on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. The Energy East pipeline, which could have supplied LNG facilities in New Brunswick and enabled exports to Europe, was cancelled due to regulatory delays. The proposed expansion of Repsol’s LNG terminal in Saint John faced the same fate. Investors, spooked by uncertainty and government hostility, took their money elsewhere.
While Canada dithered, the world moved. As Stewart Muir, CEO of Resource Works, has written, LNG is not just a “bridge fuel”, it’s a destination fuel for much of the world. Despite heavy investment in renewables, countries like China are building coal-fired power plants because they lack secure, low-emissions alternatives.
If Canada had been exporting LNG between 2020 and 2022, it could have displaced an entire year’s worth of Canada’s domestic emissions in coal-dependent countries. Instead, Canada chose climate protectionism, prioritizing domestic emissions cuts over global impact.
The irony is that Canada’s hesitation to embrace LNG has hurt the climate more than it has helped. As coal consumption rises in Asia and Europe, emissions continue to soar, emissions that Canadian LNG could have displaced. A National Bank of Canada report found that transitioning India from coal to natural gas could cut four times more emissions than Canada’s total annual output, a massive missed opportunity.
Beyond environmental costs, the economic consequences are enormous. LNG projects in B.C. have been job engines, revitalizing communities once dependent on fishing, mining, and forestry. The Atlantic provinces, struggling economically, could have experienced the same boom had LNG infrastructure been developed there. Instead, they’ve been left behind.
There’s still time for Canada to change course, but it will require a complete reversal of policy. The federal government must:
- Reform permitting and regulatory processes to make LNG projects viable and competitive.
- Acknowledge LNG’s role in global emissions reduction and align climate policies with global realities.
- Develop Atlantic LNG infrastructure to serve European markets, capitalizing on growing demand.
As Enbridge CEO Greg Ebel said at LNG2023, Canada’s allies have been “knocking on our door…to which we’ve said…no.” It’s time to stop saying no, to LNG, to economic growth, and to a cleaner energy future. If we don’t act now, we’ll be left behind forever.
From Clintel.org
By Vijay Jayaraj
Underestimating Clouds: A Climate Mistake We Cannot Afford
A new paper by physicists W. A. van Wijngaarden and William Happer, Radiation Transport in Clouds, suggests that clouds affect atmospheric temperature more than CO2, says Vijay Jayaray of the CO2 Coalition.
Carbon dioxide (CO₂) has been predominantly portrayed as the chief culprit driving global warming. For decades, this misconception has guided international policies, prompted ambitious targets for reducing CO2 emissions and driven a shift from reliable and affordable energy resources like coal, oil, and natural gas toward problematic wind and solar sources.
However, this theory overlooks important factors that influence Earth’s climate system, including a critical variable in the climate system – the role of clouds, which remains woefully underestimated.
Recent work by physicists W. A. van Wijngaarden and William Happer challenges this prevailing paradigm: Their new paper, Radiation Transport in Clouds, suggest clouds affect atmospheric temperature more than CO2 because they have a greater impact on the comparative amounts of solar energy entering Earth’s atmosphere and escaping to outer space.
The Overshadowed Influence of Clouds
Clouds simultaneously reflect incoming sunlight back to space (cooling the Earth) and trap outgoing heat (warming the Earth). This dual nature makes clouds both powerful and perplexing players in our climate system. The net effect of clouds on climate is a balance between these opposing influences, thus a central component of the Earth’s energy budget.
A recent study by van Wijngaarden and Happer, titled “Radiation Transport in Clouds,” delves into this complexity. The 2025 paper says the radiation effects of clouds can easily negate or amplify the impact of CO2. The researchers highlight that clouds have a more pronounced effect on Earth’s radiation budget than greenhouse gases like CO₂.
For instance, their research reveals that a modest decrease in low cloud cover could significantly increase solar heating of the Earth’s surface. In comparison, a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentrations reduces radiation to space by a mere 1%: “Instantaneously doubling CO₂ concentrations, a 100% increase, only decreases radiation to space by about 1%. To increase solar heating of the Earth by a few percent, low cloud cover only needs to decrease by a few percent.”
This stark contrast highlights the disproportionate influence of cloud dynamics compared to CO2 fluctuations. Most state-of-art climate models are still in their infancy. We need more accurate measurements of clouds’ properties and their influence on the electromagnetic components of solar radiation if they are to be useful inputs for climate models.
Implications for Energy Policy and Reliability
Current strategies assume a direct and dominant link between CO2 emissions and global temperatures to justify aggressive “decarbonization” efforts and an increase in the use of solar and wind energy.
However, solar and wind are inherently intermittent, rendering them unreliable and very expensive as components of a power grid. The infrastructure required to support these technologies entails substantial upfront investments, higher operating costs and increasing utility bills for consumers.
Blackouts, energy shortages and price spikes are becoming increasingly common in regions that have prematurely decommissioned fossil fuel plants without adequate backup solutions. This trend disproportionately affects vulnerable populations, exacerbating energy poverty and hindering economic development.
The major justification for using solar and wind has been that they counter global warming by reducing CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels. If small variations in cloud cover actually overwhelm the effects of CO2, then the climate’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases is being significantly overestimated. This has profound implications for policy.
Attributing global warming predominantly to CO₂ emissions from the use of fossil fuels is a gross oversimplification. While CO2 undoubtedly has a warming effect, it is relatively modest and beneficial, mainly moderating the difference between daytime and nighttime temperatures. On the other hand, clouds, with their multifaceted interactions and feedbacks, represent a critical and underappreciated component of this puzzle.
The findings of van Wijngaarden and Happer highlight a broader issue within climate science: the tendency to oversimplify complex systems for the sake of political expediency. As the global energy landscape continues to evolve, it is imperative that decisions be based on sound science rather than political dogma.
The time has come to reassess our approach to both climate science and energy policy. The stakes are too high to continue down a path of destructive policies based on erroneous analyses. We must prioritize reliable, affordable energy sources and grid stability over useless reductions in emissions of a harmless gas.
Click here to access the entire Radiation Transport in Clouds paper.
This commentary was first published at BizPac Review on February 10, 2025
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