There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true. —Soren Kierkegaard. "…truth is true even if nobody believes it, and falsehood is false even if everybody believes it. That is why truth does not yield to opinion, fashion, numbers, office, or sincerity–it is simply true and that is the end of it" – Os Guinness, Time for Truth, pg.39. “He that takes truth for his guide, and duty for his end, may safely trust to God’s providence to lead him aright.” – Blaise Pascal. "There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily" – George Washington letter to Edmund Randolph — 1795. We live in a “post-truth” world. According to the dictionary, “post-truth” means, “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Simply put, we now live in a culture that seems to value experience and emotion more than truth. Truth will never go away no matter how hard one might wish. Going beyond the MSM idealogical opinion/bias and their low information tabloid reality show news with a distractional superficial focus on entertainment, sensationalism, emotionalism and activist reporting – this blogs goal is to, in some small way, put a plug in the broken dam of truth and save as many as possible from the consequences—temporal and eternal. "The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it." – George Orwell “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” ― Soren Kierkegaard
Electric and gas utilities asked state regulators to approve billions in rate increases.dowell/Getty Images
Electric and gas utilities sought to raise customer bills by 31% in 2025.
Rate hike requests last year more than doubled from 2024.
Utilities are on track to spend $1.1 trillion expanding the power grid by 2029.
The average American’s skyrocketing electric bill has caught the attention of everyone from President Donald Trump to Microsoft executives — just don’t expect lower rates in 2026.
Electric and gas utilities asked state regulators to approve $31 billion in rate increases last year, more than double the $15 billion they sought in 2024, a new study from PowerLines, a nonprofit that advocates for utility customers, found.
The surge in requests from utilities to tack on additional charges to customer bills comes as Big Tech companies continue their sweeping buildout of power-hungry AI data centers across the country. Many utilities have attributed rate increases to unprecedented demand from data centers.
While some of those requests are still pending approval, many — including the majority of a $9 billion increase for customers of one Florida power company — have been pushed through and will start showing up on customer bills this year.
“Gas and electricity are the two fastest drivers of inflation, and not by a little bit more. It’s significantly more than what we’re used to seeing,” said Charles Hua, founder and executive director of PowerLines.
To track rate hikes, PowerLines used publicly available data from investor-owned utilities in the US.
Customers in southern states were hit hardest by rate-hike requests last year, PowerLines found. Utilities in the region sought approval for more than $14 billion in rate increases. Much of that came from Florida Power and Light’s $9 billion rate hike request — nearly all of which regulators approved.
FPL cited population growth and extreme weather events as key factors in its decision to raise rates by such a significant amount.
In Virginia, residential customers of Dominion Energy, which also delivers power to the world’s largest data center hub, will see their bills increase by an average of $13.60 by 2027.
Investor-owned utilities in the US are on track to spend $1.1 trillion on a massive expansion of the power grid between 2025 and 2029, according to the Edison Electric Institute, a powerful industry lobbying group. It has cited data centers and AI as key drivers of utility spending.
The majority of residential ratepayers in the US are customers of investor-owned utilities like NextEra Energy, Duke Energy, and Southern Company. These large, publicly traded companies turn a profit for shareholders by recovering the costs of constructing new power plants and lines, plus interest, from their customer bases.
Big Tech’s power usage faces growing backlash
Big Tech and its enormous appetite for power are facing growing public backlash.
Earlier this month, Microsoft said it would be a “good neighbor” and “pay its own way” for the electricity it uses as it scales its AI data center fleet.
In a Truth Social post preceding Microsoft’s announcement, Trump said his administration will work with tech companies to ensure their data center electricity consumption won’t drive up bills for everyone else.
“I never want Americans to pay higher electricity bills because of data centers,”Trump said in the post.
Power demand forecasts
Some power grid researchers are skeptical of the forecast demand. They have warned that utilities risk overbuilding new power plants and transmission lines that will have to be paid for but ultimately won’t be needed.
Hua is pushing regulators to take a closer look at forecast power demand from utilities, which stand to profit from building new infrastructure that could lead to rate hikes. Steering utilities to first consider the latest electric grid-enhancing technologies before building new power plants to serve data centers could also help lower customer electric bills, Hua said.
“Utilities don’t profit on making the grid more efficient. They are constantly trying to build new infrastructure. That’s their job,” said Hua. “This moment is the perfect justification.”
President Trump on Wednesday trolled the climate hoaxers, calling for an investigation into their corruption and lies about the climate, while speaking at a US-Saudi Investment Forum.
“It’s a little conspiracy out there. We have to investigate them immediately. They probably are being investigated,” Trump appeared to joke during his speech at the Kennedy Center.
The United Nations and the Democratic Party have been pushing climate alarmism and signaling the imminent end of the world for decades to implement green energy policies and get rich off back-room deals.
In December 2008, former Vice President Al Gore predicted the North Polar Ice Cap would be completely ice-free in five years.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) claimed in 2019 that life on the planet would end in 12 years unless the US addressed the threat of global warming.
In August 2022, Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which dedicated $369 billion to environmental programs and so-called clean energy. And 96% of the climate data used to justify this climate push is flawed. It was a scam.
Remember how Biden’s disastrous electric vehicle mandate and electric vehicle charging station program received $7.5 billion and built less than 10 electric vehicle chargers? Remember the federally funded electric school bus program, touted by Kamala Harris as a solution to the”climate crisis,” which turned out to be incredibly faulty and unusable by schools?
It’s all a scam which uses fear, intimidation, and even racism to push the agenda. Maybe you’ve heard of “climate equity,” a made-up term used by the left to claim that black people are disproportionately affected by climate change.
Leftists around the world even suffer from a made-up disorder called “climate anxiety” or “eco-anxiety,” which is defined by Harvard as “anxiety rooted in uncertainty about the future and alerting us to the dangers of a changing climate.”
“According to a survey by the American Psychological Association, more than two-thirds of Americans experience some climate anxiety,” Harvard claims.
But Trump destroyed the myth with some comical relief for those suffering, highlighting the ever-changing nomenclature of the climate hoax.
“It used to be global warming. It’s global warming! Well, that didn’t work because it started coming down,” Trump said. “They did the global cooling thing, then they just said, ‘We can’t keep up with this. It’s too much. So, we’ll go, perfect words: climate change!'”
“They’re covered. If it rains, if it snows, if it’s warm, it’s climate change is destroying the world!” Trump continued.
WATCH:
Trump: Everything was a new scam. Green, green, green. Look, I’m all for the environmental everything. I’m all for climate change. You know, they have a new word, climate change. It used to be global warming. It’s global warming! Well, that didn’t work because it started coming down. They did the global cooling thing, then they just said, “We can’t keep up with this. It’s too much. So, we’ll go, perfect words: climate change!”
They’re covered. If it rains, if it snows, if it’s warm, it’s climate change is destroying the world! Remember? The world was supposed to have been gone two years ago. They gave us 12 years, Howard, to live, right? 12 years, but that was 14 years ago. The world was going to burn up. But it got actually much cooler.
These people. It’s a little conspiracy out there. We have to investigate them immediately. They probably are being investigated.
Later in his speech, Trump slammed countries that are still building windmills, “losing their ass” and going bankrupt. He also revealed the requisite for talking about coal in the White House, saying, “you’re not allowed to mention the word coal unless you precede it by saying ‘clean, beautiful’”
WATCH:
Trump: I just hope that some of these countries that are losing their ass— we have countries that are going bankrupt because they’re putting windmills all over the place. You’re supposed to make money with energy, not lose money with energy. And we talk about oil, and we talk even Clean, Beautiful Coal.
I said, you’re not allowed to mention the word coal unless you precede it by saying “clean, beautiful” so I have my people in the office, they’re talking about coal, right? And they go, sir, a Clean, Beautiful Coal is doing very well, sir. And then two minutes later, “Clean, Beautiful Coal.” Then he mentions the third time, “sir, coal.” No! it’s clean and beautiful!
COP30, the UN climate conference, is underway in Belem, Brazil. Thousands of representatives from all over the world have journeyed to discuss how to cut carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to try to fight human-caused climate change. But ten years after the Paris Climate Agreement, the global consensus on climate change is crumbling.
COP30 is the thirtieth “conference of the parties.” The first took place in Berlin in 1995. At COP21 in Paris in 2015, more than 190 countries signed the Paris Climate Agreement, pledging to cut emissions and to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
About 50,000 people are attending COP30 from more than 190 nations. But key world leaders are not attending, including President Xi Jinping of China, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, and President Donald Trump of the U.S. Climatism, the ideology pushing for a global transition to Net Zero energy, faces a rising tide of opposition across the world.
Two weeks before COP30, billionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates posted a memo to COP30 on his website titled “Three Tough Truths About Climate.” In it he states that “Climate change is a serious problem, but it will not be the end of civilization,” and also that “Unfortunately, the doomsday outlook is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals … ” He also said that “Our chief goal should be to prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world’s poorest countries.”
This is a remarkable change of position for Mr. Gates, who has spent billions in the fight against climate change over the last two decades. In 2021, he wrote a best-selling book titled How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. His shift of emphasis away from stopping emissions to solving real world problems is a move away from climate alarmism and toward common-sense policy.
President Trump called climate change “the greatest scam ever perpetrated on the world” in his address to the UN General Assembly in September. During the last 10 months, the Trump Administration has shut down permits for offshore wind, slashed subsidies for wind, solar, and electric vehicles, cut climate funding, and banned climate change rhetoric in government documents. The U.S. is not sending delegates to COP30.
But in addition to the U.S., opposition to Net Zero and Climatism is rising in other nations. Reform UK, the opposition party led by Nigel Farage in the UK, is now using the phrase “Net Stupid Zero.” Reform UK is now leading in some political polls.
Alternative für Deutschland, the number two political party in Germany, wants to tear down all wind turbines, calling them “windmills of shame.” Germany has more than 20,000 wind turbines installed, one of the highest densities in the world. Last month the Nationals party in Australia voted to abandon support for Net Zero. Nationals leader David Littleproud said, “We believe in reducing emissions, but not at any cost.” Australia, Germany, the UK, and other nations are struggling with escalating energy costs and no apparent benefit from Net Zero policies.
What have thirty UN climate conferences accomplished since 1995? The answer is “no measurable climate benefit.” Since 2000, the world has spent about $10 trillion on renewable energy, but hydrocarbons─coal, natural gas, and oil─still provided 87% of world energy in 2024 according to the Energy Institute.
Since 1965, global energy consumption has quadrupled and has accelerated since 2000. Every year the world adds about an additional UK worth of energy consumption. Except for the recession year of 2012 and the COVID-19 year of 2020, wind, solar, and other renewables failed to generate enough new energy to provide for the global increase in consumption, let alone replace hydrocarbons.
Last year, former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said, “There shouldn’t be any more coal-fired power plants permitted anywhere in the world.” But global coal consumption continues to rise. Today, more than 6,500 coal-fired power plants operate across the world and another 1,000 are in planning or under construction. In 2024, coal provided 34% of the world’s electricity, the largest source of power.
Global energy consumption will continue to rise. The U.S. has about 80 vehicles for every 100 people, but vehicle usage in Africa and India remains below 10 vehicles for every 100 people. Today, developed nations use up to 20 times as much plastic as poor nations on a per-person basis. Developing nations will continue to use more hydrocarbon fuels to enable their economies to grow.
As Mr. Gates has observed, poverty still characterizes many of the world’s people. Almost 700 million people do not have access to electricity and another two billion have blackouts or brownouts every other day. Over two billion people do not have access to clean water. Millions die each year from malaria, typhoid, and other diseases. World leaders should concentrate on these real problems, instead of unfounded concerns about carbon dioxide emissions.
From the political scene to the continued growth of hydrocarbon energy, the global climate consensus and the push for Net Zero is crumbling. It’s time for nations to return to sensible energy policy.
Steve Goreham is a speaker on energy, the environment, and public policy and author of the bestselling book Green Breakdown: The Coming Renewable Energy Failure.
This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.
World leaders gathered in Belém, Brazil, for the COP30 conference this week, turning the event into a platform for bashing President Donald Trump over his refusal to buy into their climate agenda. Trump skipped the summit entirely and sent no top officials, drawing sharp rebukes from several socialist figures who dominate the proceedings.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro led the charge. “Mr. Trump is against humanity. His absence here demonstrates that,” he declared.
Chilean President Gabriel Boric piled on, saying, “The president of the United States at the latest United Nations General Assembly said the climate crisis does not exist. That is a lie.”
Trump lambasted them at the UN in September, labeling the whole climate push “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” He went further: “Climate change, no matter what happens, you’re involved in that. No more global warming, no more global cooling. All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people that have cost their country’s fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success.”
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer avoided naming Trump but griped that the “unity” and “consensus” on climate matters had vanished. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva echoed the sentiment, blasting “extremist forces that fabricate fake news and are condemning future generations to life on a planet altered forever by global warming.” Lula also claimed Trump confided in him: “President Trump told me he doesn’t believe in green energy. He will believe in it, because he’ll realize that we don’t have much of an alternative.”
The summit reeks of double standards. While these elites preach sacrifice, they jetted in on fuel-guzzling planes, racking up massive carbon emissions. Organizers even cleared swaths of rainforest to pave a highway for their convoys, leaving local acai farmers in the dust. When pressed on why they didn’t just video conference—like everyone else has since the COVID days—they shrugged it off with excuses about spotty internet.
Adding to the farce, China and India, the planet’s top polluters, didn’t even show up. Yet the blame falls squarely on Trump for shattering the so-called consensus. These Global South heavyweights have made it plain they won’t hobble their economies for pie-in-the-sky green targets, exposing the whole affair as a power grab by bureaucrats eager to dictate energy policies worldwide.
Trump’s team isn’t taking it lying down. Energy Secretary Chris Wright slammed the conference from Athens, where he’s negotiating more U.S. natural gas exports to Europe and Ukraine.
“It’s essentially a hoax. It’s not an honest organization looking to better human lives,” Wright said. “Gatherings of global leaders and businesses should be about humans… not on the desire to scare children and grow government power. They’ve lost the plot.”
White House Assistant Press Secretary Taylor Rogers reinforced the point: “President Trump will not jeopardize our country’s economic and national security to pursue vague climate goals that are killing other countries.”
This obsession with Trump reveals the real game—using climate fear to expand control, sideline American interests, and prop up failing regimes. As the U.S. focuses on real energy independence, the summit’s theatrics only confirm what many suspect: it’s less about the environment and more about reshaping the world order under a green facade.
“It comes less than a week after the U.S. scored a surprising victory over a proposed United Nations climate fee on shipping, in what one Trump Cabinet member described Wednesday as an ‘all hands on deck’ lobbying blitz.”
Embattled Ursula von der Leyen now has to deal with the US pressure to do away with climate delusions.
The US Energy Department and Qatar wrote the EU regarding its Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive.
“’It is our genuine belief, as allies and friends of the EU, that the CSDDD will cause considerable harm to the EU and its citizens, as it will lead to higher energy and other commodity prices, and have a chilling effect on investment and trade’, the department and the Qataris said in an open letter Wednesday to European heads of state and EU members.”
Trump and his team have been fighting the suicidal policies of ‘climate regulations’ both at home and abroad.
“On Friday, U.S. pressure succeeded in thwarting a proposal by U.N.’s International Maritime Organization to impose the first worldwide tax on climate pollution from shipping. The maritime body had been widely expected to adopt the shipping fee at a meeting in London, but instead it postponed the initiative for at least a year.”
Trump is fighting the ‘climate hoax’ policies that hurt economic groweth.
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright:
“’We’re going to come back to realistic views on energy’, Wright said at an event hosted by America First Policy Institute. ‘That’s a win not just for America, that’s a win for the world’.”
Trump: "The 'carbon footprint' is a hoax made up by people with evil intentions, and they're heading down a path of total destruction."
Americans can learn which policies work and don’t work by looking at policies that have been tried in other times and places. That way, we can avoid the mistakes that other people have already made. That’s one of the reasons why people like Thomas Sowell so much – he is always talking about which policies work, and which ones don’t. And in Germany, it’s mostly policies that don’t.
Here’s a fun article from Victor Davis Hanson, writing for the Daily Signal. If you’re like me, you already know Dr. Hanson from his writings on military history. But he likes policy, too.
He says:
Today I’d like to talk about the crisis facing Europe, specifically its self-implosion across the spectrum—energy, population, fertility, defense. Germany, for example, has been systematically shutting down its nuclear plants and, for a while, its natural gas electrical generation plants.
If you know your energy policy, then you know that natural gas and nuclear power are the two power sources pushed by conservatives. They are safe and reliable, and they are also zero emission. Best of all for me, they don’t kill bats, birds and other animals. Birds are my favorite animals, and that’s a huge reason why I hate wind and solar power – they kill birds in large numbers.
More:
the net result of all of this deliberate turn to wind and solar, at the expense of fossil fuels and nuclear, is that it costs about four times more to use electricity in Germany than it does on average throughout the United States. That’s not the only problem.
Germany is deindustrializing. And by that I mean it’s losing about 200,000 jobs in its auto industry due to these high energy prices and regulations. Its green mandates, especially electric vehicle mandates, have revolutionized the car industry, in the sense that they’re not selling abroad as they did in the past.
When you raise the prices of gas and electricity, it raises the price of all production of goods, and transportation of goods. The funny thing is that this has been going on for some time. I remember talking about Angela Merkel’s failed policies with an international student from Germany with I was in grad school. And they never pulled out of their death spiral! It’s still going now.
Anyway, the higher cost of gas and electricity is having big effects:
In addition to that, Germany’s disarmed. They only have about 125 attack aircraft. They have very few armored vehicles. Their active military is only about 180,000 soldiers.
They have 84 million people in the country. The fertility rate is getting very close to 1.4. I know we have problems here in the United States at 1.6, but 1.4.
And they don’t have borders. They have had a million to 2 million illegal aliens just prance into Germany, especially during the last years of the Merkel chancellorship. In terms of percentage of foreign-born, Germany has more foreign-born than does the United States, which doesn’t have a border in the south, at least until Donald Trump comes in. Twenty percent of the German population is foreign-born.
We have a new administration now, and if you look at the picks for Department of the Interior, and Secretary of Energy, then we should be getting some action on developing our own supply of clean energy. Let’s hope that we don’t make the same mistakes that the Germans made.
By the way, if people ask you “why are you a conservative?” it’s nothing to be ashamed of. You don’t have to bring up Bible verses, religious beliefs, or moral issues. Start with economic policies. Just tell them that conservative policies are policies that allow you to have a job, earn money, and spend it how you like. And when they ask you for an example, you can talk about energy policy, and how things are going in free countries that produce a lot of energy (like Norway) vs un-free countries that don’t develop a lot of energy (like Germany). Norway’s GDP per capita is $90,500 (great), but Germany’s is $61,900 (trash). That’s why we want to be like Norway, and we don’t want to be like Germany.
By arguing for conservative fiscal policies, you often will get an opportunity to argue for conservative social policies. Once people see that you have done your homework in one area, they will be more welcoming of your views in other areas. At the very least, you win whenever you can show your work.
Conservative policy is just “let’s do what works” and “let’s not do what does not work”. Secular leftist policy is “do what feels good” and “do what makes people like me”, but that often produces very bad results, especially for the next generation.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin gave a liberal CNN host an epic schooling on the law and actual facts when she spread climate propaganda and tried to shame him for supposedly not doing enough to combat climate change.
On Sunday, Zeldin appeared on CNN’s State of the Union with guest host Kasie Hunt to discuss the Trump Administration’s proposal to repeal the 2009 endangerment finding by the Obama regime, which states that human-caused climate change endangers human health and safety.
Zeldin said instituting the proposal would be the largest deregulatory action in American history. The plan also allows companies to plan appropriately and gives the American people more affordable choices when deciding to buy a car.
Moreover, repealing the endangerment finding makes it far more difficult for future Democratic regimes to try to suffocate fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas.
Hunt attempted to ambush Zeldin and paint him as a climate denier while trying to make audiences believe the U.S. would soon be less livable. Zeldin quickly embarrassed her right off the bat.
WATCH:
WATCH: EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin just completely OBLITERATED CNN's running propaganda. 😂
CNN: "Thank you so much for being here….Do you accept the overwhelming scientific consensus that these greenhouse gas emissions are the biggest drivers of man made climate change?"… pic.twitter.com/S6y8uecwN7
HUNT: Thank you so much for being here. Do you accept the overwhelming scientific consensus that these greenhouse gas emissions are the biggest drivers of man-made climate change?
ZELDIN: Great to be on with you. First, it’s worth pointing out that all eight or so images that you just posted on the screen have nothing to do with this week’s announcement.
CNN has been using a lot of photos that show smokestacks from stationary sources like power plants, which is not what we proposed. Now, going back to 2009, the science they were reviewing included both optimistic and pessimistic scenarios to reach the 2009 endangerment finding. They relied on the most pessimistic views of science.
The great news is that a lot of the pessimistic views ended up not panning out. We can rely on 2025 facts instead of 2009 assumptions. At EPA, we also don’t get to just create the law to whatever we want it to be. The Supreme Court overturned the Chevron doctrine; agencies like the EPA can’t just use vague language and statute and try to make it (the law) whatever we want it to be.
Later, Hunt tried to get Zeldin to admit that the federal government should regulate carbon emissions, which she says drive global warming. Instead, she got a brilliant explanation of how the American government and legal system work.
Hunt was left completely outwitted again.
🔥 NEW: Lee Zeldin just TORCHED CNN’s Kasie Hunt over radical climate mandates—“We are NOT going to regulate out of existence entire sectors of our economy.”
HUNT: Do you think the federal government should have a role in trying to combat climate change?
ZELDIN: It’s a great question, and I’m at the EPA and running an agency. The Supreme Court made it clear that I have to follow the law. You have to follow the plain language of the law, and I can’t get creative.
So, when you read through the 2009 endangerment finding, they say that where there’s silence in the law…That I should be interpreting at my own discretion. The Supreme Court has made it very clear that this is not a power that I have.
This is a decision that Congress needs to make.
HUNT: With all due respect, a power that you have is to rewrite a regulation. You are taking an action; you could just leave it alone.
ZELDIN: No, the power comes from the law! I don’t get to just make up (a regulation) just because a predecessor decided to fill in vague language in the law to do many mental leaps, to try to justify an electric vehicle mandate…To strangulate out of existence entire sectors of our energy economy.
You were posting earlier a whole bunch of photos of stationary sources. Well, the Biden Administration did do a whole bunch of regulations to try to make, for example, the coal industry get regulated out of existence.
I come from a state where the governor says New York is a substitute for baseload power. It’s not.
In order to unleash energy dominance… we are not going to regulate out of existence entire sectors of our economy.
The power comes from the law and from Congress, not from our own creativity.
If someone told you they were desperate for work, but refused to apply for any jobs, you’d understand they shouldn’t be taken seriously. As Jesus tells us, we can judge a tree by its fruit (Matt. 7:15-20).
So, when climate catastrophists steer us away from fossil fuels and nuclear energy too, that’s some fruit. Solar and wind might be their ideal, but these are more expensive than fossil fuels, and higher energy costs would hurt billions. Nuclear does have considerable downsides, but it is the only CO2-free energy source that could produce the energy we need at the prices we’d need to fill the gap that banning fossil fuels would create. So, to not have it as an option is to mark these “environmentalists” – their fruit shows them to be either uncaring or naive.
Now Alberta is offering the country another option – natural gas. It’s still a CO2 emitter but an improvement on coal and other CO2 sources. This option could effectively scrub all of Canada’s CO2 emissions. Great news, right? Well, we’ll see if the federal government thinks so. Their response will provide us with some more fruit we can assess.
Does buying Canadian really have an impact on American producers? Not if those “Canadian goods” are actually American. It seems some stores are mislabeling goods to funnel patriotic outrage towards padding their bottom dollar.
“Ontario’s euthanasia regulators have tracked 428 cases of possible criminal violations — and not referred a single case to law enforcement, say leaked documents.”
Murder is the unlawful and euthanasia the lawful taking of a human life. So what would it be then, if someone committed euthanasia unlawfully? Well, isn’t an unlawful taking of a life murder?
But how many doctors do you think would be willing to do a procedure that, if they ever didn’t do it quite right, would send them to jail for murder? Not many, right? That kind of chill might put an end to euthanasia altogether. And that’s what pursuing these 428 cases could do for any doctors considering killing as their living – put a chill on that So, for euthanasia to be both legal and available, the government is motivated to overlook any irregularities.
God’s people too often seem intent on logic-ing our culture into the Kingdom. We address sins like abortion and transgenderism with arguments that are common sense but not specifically Christian – we channel Ben Shapiro and Pierre Poilievre but we don’t talk about God.
And how’s that working out?
We’ve misunderstood the fight we’re in. This isn’t a debate that we’ll win on points. What we’re contending with is a rebellious world that needs to be called to repentance by the power of the Holy Spirit.
We profess that God’s Word is “like fire…and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces” (Jer. 23:26), it is “alive and active, sharper than any two-edged sword” (Heb. 4:12), and “it will not return to Me empty but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it” (Is. 55:10-11). What might God work through us, if we were willing to stand with Him instead of just with logic?
Perhaps the climate hoax is actually not about saving the environment? What is it, then?
Some environmental problems of pollution are clearly caused by man; the effect of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), as in certain hairsprays for instance, on the ozone layer over the Antarctica. CFCs thin, or make a “hole,” in the planet’s ozone layer that protects the people from harmful ultraviolet rays. There is also the very real man-made problem of insoluble trash in the oceans. Generally, however, the problems of pollution are separate from those of climate change. Whatever can reasonably be done to curb man-made pollution should, of course, be advanced, but sometimes climate change and pollution overlap – seen by many, apparently, as an invitation to muddle and conflate them.
Climate change is largely caused by solar flares. So far, at least, there is not a blessed thing anyone can do about them. Many industries offer grants for papers that support the efficacy of their products that relate to climate change. Solar flares, regrettably, do not offer grants.
[Former Special Presidential Envoy for Climate] Kerry and his family flew on 48 trips and emitted more than 300 metric tons of carbon dioxide in just the 18 months between January 2021 and July 2022. Private jets “are 10 times more carbon intensive than airliners on average, and 50 times more polluting than trains,” according to a 2021 report. Kerry justified his polluting by declaring, unfortunately without a trace of irony, that private jets were the “only choice for somebody like me.”
The answer was supplied as early as 2015 by Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change: “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”
That would mean the destruction of capitalism and the world economy, however long that takes.
When the global elites arrived in Davos, Switzerland, in 2023 to discuss the urgent need to declare climate emergencies, they did so using more than 150 private jets.
Any journalists or commentators who dare to question or oppose the climate change orthodoxy are immediately shunned as “climate deniers” and met in the legacy media with an instant end to their careers.
“What is, in my view, even more dangerous, is the quasi-scientific form that their many times refuted forecasts have taken upon themselves.” — Former Czech President Vaclav Klaus, The New American, December 22, 2009.
Klaus stressed that environmentalism disguises itself as science. Under this disguise, it attempts to force its precepts on humanity. When it comes to global warming or climate change, that process is made easier: the topic is scientifically complex, which makes it hard for most people to refute the climate scammers.
“For the last 16 years, temperatures have been going down and the carbon dioxide has been going up and the crops have got greener and grow quicker. We’ve done plenty to smash up the planet, but there’s been no global warming caused by man…. I still say it’s poppycock! If you believe it, fine. But I don’t and there’s thousands like me.” — David Bellamy, English botanist and former BBC broadcaster, The Daily Mail, January 22, 2013.
It is no wonder that the climate change scam won the day. Few people have been willing to risk their livelihoods to fight against the manipulation.
Meanwhile, at the latest UN Climate Conference, COP29, which took place in Baku, Azerbaijan in November 2024, the agenda to destroy the world’s economy and the West by forcing wealth redistribution made new strides…. [Developing countries] apparently demanded $1.3 trillion annually. In the words of energy expert Alex Epstein: “The basic idea here is what they call ‘climate reparations,’ which is the idea that the US and others have ruined the world with fossil fuels, and so we have to pay a trillion dollars a year to make up for it, which, by the way, if the US paid that, that’s $7,700 per household per year.”
Notably, China retained its status as a “developing country” at the COP29, thereby exposing the enormous extent of the climate hoax. According to the International Energy Agency, “China’s total CO2 emissions exceeded those of the advanced economies combined in 2020, and in 2023 were 15% higher.” In addition, while China continues to build more coal-fired power plants than the rest of the entire world combined, the West continues on the path of deindustrialization in the name of the climate.
Thankfully, President Donald Trump, once again, has withdrawn the US from the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. As the past has shown, however, such a withdrawal holds no future guarantees. Trump also withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement during his first term, but President Joe Biden then brought the US back the first chance he got. For this reason, it is crucial that the current US administration do all it can to publish the truth about the climate scam and work towards ending it across the board.
As the Italian poet Dante pointed out many centuries ago, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
And when it comes to renewable energy and the push to net zero, the intention of many Australian politicians is good. Federal Labor Energy Minister Chris Bowen had this to say in a recent National Press Club address:
‘Renewable energy is incredibly cheap because its fuel is free, whether that is sunshine or wind. When the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, we have ample power flowing into the grid at zero marginal cost, which brings down the wholesale cost of power to zero and even delivers negative prices in parts of the day.’
But is that the case? Are we facing a clean, cheap, reliable energy future? Or is there more to renewable energy than free sunshine and wind?
According to journalist Chris Uhlmann in his new one-hour-long documentary “The Real Cost of Net Zero: The shocking truth of the renewable energy push“, renewable energy sounds good in theory, but the reality is vastly different. Think ‘grand-canyon-level’ difference between Labor’s promises of cheap energy and what we’ll experience when our nation switches to 80% renewable energy by 2030 (yes, that’s only six years away).
It was one of the most disturbing yet enlightening documentaries I’ve watched in a long, long time. And if you’re not left asking serious questions after watching this documentary, check your pulse.
Because he’s the thing we need to keep front and centre:
Cheap, reliable energy lifts people out of poverty. But expensive, unreliable energy will send them back.
Energy is life.
It’s like food, water, and shelter. Life can’t happen without it. And we in the modern world have taken this reality for granted. While our ancestors toiled, froze, boiled and went hungry (as do billions who don’t have access to cheap, reliable energy), we now cool and heat a house at the push of a button. We cook food by turning a dial. And we buy goods and services at massively reduced prices compared to what our ancestors paid.
All because of cheap, reliable energy.
But not having access to cheap, reliable energy is like not having access to affordable food, water and shelter. It holds societies back from developing, with the poor paying the biggest price.
And if, as Christians, we are concerned for the welfare of the poor, we’ll be concerned about policies that affect their wellbeing. Such as energy policies.
And this is Uhlmann’s point: large-scale renewable energy can’t deliver the energy we need to thrive. While I urge you to watch the documentary for yourself (it’s only an hour long), here are three lies Uhlmann exposes about our renewable energy transition:
That’s right: in one of the richest countries in the world, a country with abundant energy resources, during peacetime, the government asked people to ration their electricity use. That’s a failure of energy policy if ever there was one.
But according to Uhlmann, that is but a minor taste of what is coming our way with renewable energy. For the biggest lie behind the push for renewables is that renewable energy is reliable.
Uhlmann interviews various experts in the energy sector both here and overseas, and it becomes clear that renewable energy is, unsurprisingly, beholden to the weather and the earth’s rotation. At best, renewable energy will produce energy around 30% of the time (compared to 90+% for coal and nuclear). This might be fine if you’re only powering a hobby farm, but it’s problematic if you’re powering cities, hospitals, schools, businesses and homes.
So how will the government get around this problem?
By building energy storage. Hydroelectric dams and batteries will be used to store surplus energy and then use it when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.
But here’s the disturbing truth: the large-scale battery technology needed to store the required amounts of energy for the time required (days or possibly even a week) doesn’t yet exist.
And no other nation has yet gone to 80% renewable energy.
In other words, we’re embarking on a nationwide high-risk experiment with a commodity fundamental to life, namely energy.
And this is where we run into the second lie.
Lie #2 – Renewable energy is cheap
Chris Bowen’s assertion that renewable energy is cheap runs afoul of fundamental physics: to get renewable energy happening, you need to build massive amounts of wind and solar farms (causing vast amounts of environmental damage; see next point), along with the hundreds of thousands of kilometres of cables to take the energy from the remote wind and solar farms to the cities (again, with a substantial environmental footprint through pristine bush and farmland), and then mind-boggling amounts of battery and hydro storage.
Oh, and then there’s the running cost.
So, what are some ballpark figures?
The Centre of Independent Studies has summarised the costs based on CSIRO figures.
Taking just the cost of storage and transmission: hydro storage, transmission lines, and batteries together, they calculated an eye-watering total of $301.8 billion. That doesn’t include tens of thousands of hectares of solar panels and wind turbines (the part that generates the electricity).
Who’s going to pay for that? You, the consumer – through higher taxes and higher electricity bills.
With 1 in 4 households already struggling to pay their electricity bills, how will a bill increase – think of a 50% – 200% increase, along with the proportional increase in goods and services – impact people? Here are some possible consequences:
Your elderly parents will have to choose whether to turn their aircon on during the hot summer or their heating during the cold winter.
The single mom will have to decide which meal she (and even her children) skips.
The stay-at-home mum of the three-year-old and one-year-old will be forced to return to full-time work and put her two young children into full-time childcare, against everyone’s wishes.
And those at the bottom of the social-economic ladder will be forced onto the streets because they can no longer afford electricity or rent.
Lie #3 – Renewable energy is environmentally friendly
Another problem with renewables is the massive amounts of land needed for energy generation.
While coal and nuclear plants have a small, contained land footprint, solar and wind turbine projects will require tens of thousands of hectares of land to be cleared to generate the necessary amount of energy. This will threaten koala habitats, bushland and farmland, among other environmental concerns. How many native birds and bats will be slaughtered by the thousands of wind turbines that will blight our landscape?
And because turbines and solar panels have relatively short life spans (20-30 years), these must be disposed of. Currently, there is no way to recycle most of their parts, so tens of thousands of these will need to be buried… considering solar panels have highly toxic chemicals in them, this poses a risk to the water table below the land.
It’s also worth noting that most rare earth metals and solar panels needed for renewables come from China – not exactly a place with stellar environmental or workplace health and safety standards.
We need an adult conversation about energy and net zero
We live in a culture where renewable energy is unquestioned orthodoxy.
To merely raise questions about the rush toward renewables risks being branded a climate heretic/denier. But these reactions are informed more by emotion and fear (‘the planet will die if we don’t go to renewable energy’), rather than sober, calm, reasoned discussion.
And to put it bluntly, good policies arise from calm, rational discussion. We need a conversation about energy driven by facts and data, not fear and panic. If we as a nation are serious about net zero, then we should carefully explore all the options for our crucial energy future.
By way of example, we can have carbon-neutral, affordable, reliable energy. An energy source exists that doesn’t harm large swathes of the environment. It’s an energy source that doesn’t create economic distress or drive people into poverty. It’s an energy source we could have up and running by 2040 — a decade before our net zero deadline. It’s an energy source many nations already benefit from (no need to experiment on our nation!).
But it requires us to have an adult conversation, because it’s called nuclear energy. And Chris Uhlmann also explores this alternative in his documentary.
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