Energy

The Spark That Lit the Gas Stove

Thomas Buckley — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 20:28:58 -0400

On January 1, 2023 it is likely most Americans woke up with a hangover.

On January 1, 2023, it is a almost a certainty that no American woke up worried that the gas stove in their kitchen was secretly killing them.

Within a week, the hangovers had gone away but the nation was being told to be very afraid of the insidious danger that lurked in their kitchens, basements, and grills and that the pernicious fossil fuel known as natural gas must be exiled from modern life.

What happened and why, like so many issues obsessing certain segments of the population such as pronouns and equity and triggers, did the topic of evil gas stoves literally - https://trends.google.com/trends/explore-gas-stove-ban - go from zero to 100 overnight?

It appears – of course – that California and its Uber-nanny Air Resources Board (CARB) had a significant role to play in yet another instance of the “yesterday it was unheard of, today it is evil” swings that our society has become so vulnerable to of late.

In September, 2022, CARB banned the sale of gas water heaters and furnaces in the state starting in 2030. This drew some attention - californiaglobe.com - but as they scheduled a decision on stoves and other appliances until 2025 it did not spark a national debate and was seen for the most part by those on the other side of the Sierra Mountains as wacky California doing wacky stuff, though it did generate this national story in - The Hill.

Shortly before the board’s decision, the Sierra Club and pair of climate and planning activist groups – SPUR - https://www.spur.org/ - and RMI - https://rmi.org/ (which, on its own, tried to get the anti-gas ball rolling in 2020 but didn’t make much headway it seemed at the time) - issued a California-centered report on the horrors of all gas appliances.

Read the rest of this piece at The Point.

Thomas Buckley is the former Mayor of Lake Elsinore and a former newspaper reporter. He is currently the operator of a small communications and planning consultancy and can be reached directly at planbuckley@gmail.com. You can read more of his work at thomas699.substack.com.

Image: courtesy The Point.

Danielle Smith's Pro-Growth Rebellion is a Sign of Things to Come

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 20:28:58 -0400

Canada, even more than the United States, stands at the edge of a great historic opportunity. As worldwide demand for raw materials, including those needed for the much ballyhooed “energy transition,” expands, the country could profit massively from its remarkable array of resources.

Yet, as the recent conflict between Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and the current federal government shows, Canada, like the United States, is not of one mind about its economic future. Recently, Smith told Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that she will “fight” for the province’s oil industry, which accounts for upwards of 30 per cent of the province’s economy. Attempts to push back on Ottawa’s green agenda could also foster something of a constitutional crisis.

This is bigger than merely a battle between one province and the federal government; it’s a divide that could roil Canadian politics, much as is occurring in other resource-rich countries like Australia and the U.S. This reflects competing visions of the future: one that seeks to expand the national economy by tapping its extraordinary agricultural and mineral wealth, and another that seeks to curb any expansion of resource development.

In pure economic terms, the world needs what Canada has, including commodities that it could produce with far better environmental control than, say, Indonesia, the Congo or Bolivia. Eschewing the resource sector would pose a fundamental problem for a country that has long depended on resources for its economic prosperity.

True, Canada produces some high-quality media, but its output of filmed entertainment is dwarfed by the U.S., China, India and the United Kingdom, while in technology products, it is hardly a dominant player. Sorry, Justin, but good looks are not your country’s big export; instead, it’s the great green devil — oil and gas — along with cars, another hated product, and other raw materials. Canada is also the world’s fifth-largest exporter of agricultural products.

Like fossil fuels, agriculture has also become a target of environmentalists, who worry about farming’s impact on climate change. Yet not everything about “net-zero” goals may be bad for Canada. Canada could see much growth in the minerals demanded by net-zero requirements, including rare earth metals, cobalt and, perhaps most importantly, uranium.

The biggest obstacle, ironically, may prove to be the environmentalists, who seem willing to restrict mining and production in developed countries, even though it leads to massive exploitation of land and people in the far less eco-friendly developing world.

Many western elites, citing climate change, actually see degrowth as the future, an approach likely to make most people poorer. In contrast, a growth strategy could make Canada a richer and more egalitarian country, while providing developing countries with the goods they need to grow.

Our ruling classes seem to be slow to realize that the future lies not in the long developed countries, but In booming places like the Gulf states and India. They represent ideal markets for Canada’s bounty of minerals, food, energy and lumber.

Read the rest of this piece at National Post.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: Kevin He via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Blowback!

Robert Bryce — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 20:28:58 -0400

When it comes to siting renewables, the overwhelming majority of the money, media, and momentum is on the side of the companies that want to impose large wind, solar, and battery projects on rural communities. But over the past few weeks, onshore and offshore, from Iowa to Ireland, and Colombia to New Jersey, renewable projects have been getting hammered by a tidal wave of opposition.

I just finished updating the Renewable Rejection Database to include a spate of restrictions or rejections that have been enacted in Iowa, Illinois, and Ohio. The new totals: Since 2015, there have been 389 rejections or restrictions of wind energy projects and 134 rejections or restrictions of solar projects, bringing the total number of rejections to 523. So far in 2023, there’ve been 23 rejections of wind and 24 rejections of solar.

Before going further, let me state the obvious: These hundreds of rejections don’t fit the narrative around “clean” energy that’s been relentlessly promoted by the anti-industry industry, academics, and their myriad allies in the legacy media. But the numbers are the numbers. And the rejections keep piling up. Let’s look at some of the most recent ones.

Last month in Iowa, according to a news report from KRIB, an AM radio station in Mason City, the Cerro Gordo County Board of Supervisors approved “an 18-month moratorium on accepting applications on issuing permits for utility-scale wind energy conversion systems, solar energy installations, and battery storage installations in the rural portions of the county.” The radio station said that 12 people spoke during the “public hearing about the moratorium, with only two being against.” The piece quoted Stuart Seible, a resident of the town of Swaledale (population 144), who told the supervisors he didn’t “want any more windmills around the area of his property.” Seible went on, saying “You’re going to have to live with that ugliness the rest of your life, because these things will last 30 years or so.”

In Illinois, Apex Clean Energy — which has had its projects rejected in several states, including New York — saw another of its projects get spiked in March when the Piatt County Board voted against its application for a special use permit to build a 300-megawatt wind project in the county. After the permit was denied on a 3-2 vote, the Piatt County Journal-Republican newspaper quoted Board Member Jerry Edwards, (who voted against the project), as saying “We were elected by the people in our various districts to do what is best for our constituents...I have heard from a lot of residents of Piatt County and for the vast majority, this is something they do not want.”

Read the rest of this piece at Robert Bryce Substack.

Robert Bryce is a Texas-based author, journalist, film producer, and podcaster. His articles have appeared in a myriad of publications including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Forbes, Time, Austin Chronicle, and Sydney Morning Herald.

Photo: courtesy Robert Bryce Substack.

Why Africa is Turning Its Back on the Eco-obsessed West

Joel Kotkin and Bheki Mahlobo — Mon, 05 Jun 2023 20:28:58 -0400

The Western democracies appear united in their support for Ukraine, but they may also be losing the bigger, more consequential battle for the loyalties of the developing world. Virtually no developing country – including democracies like India, Brazil, Nigeria and South Africa – has chosen to take steps opposing Russia’s aggression (in fact, South Africa may have joined Iran in sending weapons to Moscow). This is a stark reflection of the West’s waning influence.

The West is losing not because the developing world wants to genuflect to Vladimir Putin, or to his liege lord, Xi Jinping. Instead, we are seeing a growing disconnect between Western ‘values’, including on critical issues like food and energy production, and the needs of developing countries, many of which have struggled since the pandemic. In a period of steadily rising costs, countries such as Egypt, Pakistan and India are refusing to sanction Russian oil, allowing Moscow to match its pre-war oil exports. China has also boosted its oil purchases from Russia, as demand hits record levels.

Unlike the affluent West, people in these countries still believe in future growth. When searching for a modern Marshall Plan, they look increasingly not to America or Europe for support, but to China. China has spent hundreds of billions of dollars in bailouts for developing countries. This is not without its risks, to both the developing world and to China itself, though it has undoubtedly increased Chinese influence.

Critically, the Russian war has accelerated calls for global trade to be conducted in currencies other than the dollar, like the yuan and the rouble. Left-leaning leaders in the US’s traditional Latin American sphere of influence, such as Brazilian president Lula da Silva, are especially keen to end the dominance of the dollar.

The once-marginal alliance of BRICS countries, which met this week for talks in South Africa, represents a counterpoint to Western dominance, especially as it could soon be expanded to include new members such as Iran, Argentina, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Bahrain and Indonesia. China’s coup in bringing Saudi Arabia and Iran to the table presages what could be its role as a dominant global hegemon. Meanwhile, presumed US allies in the Middle East are moving closer to Russia in defence matters. This stems less from China’s or Russia’s power or persuasiveness, but more from the fact that the West is simply not offering enough to countries in the developing world, particularly to those on the brink of bankruptcy.

Africa will be increasingly crucial to geopolitics, in part due to its domination of many critical minerals – notably cobalt, coal and uranium. It is also the only part of the world likely to experience significant workforce growth in the coming decades. By 2050, United Nations projections suggest that nearly 55 per cent of the world’s population growth will occur in sub-Saharan Africa, where fertility rates are still relatively high. From 2050 to 2100, Africa is expected to account for almost 100 per cent of the world’s population growth, as populations plummet elsewhere.

African and other developing countries need to grow. They do not – indeed they cannot – embrace Western assumptions about culture, politics and, most importantly, the balance between economic and environmental goals. As rich countries age and worry about both their pensions and the planetary future, poorer countries are more focussed on how to improve conditions for the rising generation. Net Zero orthodoxy, with its embrace of degrowth and austerity, has little appeal – particularly as residents of wealthy countries, despite all their boasts about solar panels and wind farms, already use 23 times more fossil-fuel power than the average African.

Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.

Bheki Mahlobo was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and is a senior analyst at the Centre for Risk Analysis (CRA), a South African think tank with a global perspective. Mahlobo is a regular speaker and media commentator, providing analysis of the political and economic trends in South Africa and global markets. With John Endres, he is the coauthor of the CRA’s client Risk Alert, a weekly bulletin that identifies the key risks in South Africa and the world. He also contributes research to the Socio-Economic Survey of South Africa, the CRA’s flagship reference guide.

Photo: Rwanda Green Fund via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

China Syndrome

Robert Bryce — Tue, 30 May 2023 20:28:36 -0400

Two years ago, about 40 environmental groups, including Friends of the Earth, 350 Action, Earthworks, Sunrise Movement, and Union of Concerned Scientists, signed a letter urging Congress and the Biden Administration to work with China on a “new internationalism” based on “open sharing of green technologies ” as well as “resource sharing and solidarity.” They called on Biden and “all members of Congress to eschew the dominant antagonistic approach to U.S.-China relations and instead prioritize multilateralism, diplomacy, and cooperation with China to address the existential threat that is the climate crisis.”

They went on: “China is the world leader in industrial capacity across a number of clean energy industries” and that “working together could speed the transition away from dirty energy economies. It could also ensure that the countries and communities benefit from the local extraction of raw materials essential for clean energy supply chains.”

It’s important to recall the context of that July 7, 2021 letter. Friends of the Earth, Sunrise Movement, Union of Concerned Scientists, and the other groups published their epistle two weeks after the U.S. banned the importation of solar materials tied to forced labor in Xinjiang. As the New York Times reported on June 24, 2021, “The White House announced steps on Thursday to crack down on forced labor in the supply chain for solar panels in the Chinese region of Xinjiang, including a ban on imports from a silicon producer there... The action was notable given the Biden administration’s push to expand the use of solar power.”

It also came about a month after the U.S. State Department claimed the Chinese government was carrying “out a mass detention and political indoctrination campaign against Uyghurs, who are predominantly Muslim, and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups,” in Xinjiang province. The document also said that Chinese officials “use threats of physical violence, forcible drug intake, physical and sexual abuse, and torture to force detainees to work in adjacent or off-site factories or worksites producing garments, footwear... materials for solar power equipment and other renewable energy components.” (Emphasis added.)

The alt-energy NGOs may want “solidarity” and “cooperation,” but China Inc. isn’t ready for a cuddle.

Read the rest of this piece at Robert Bryce Substack.

Graph: courtesy Robert Bryce Substack.

Mothers, Electrified

Robert Bryce — Tue, 16 May 2023 20:28:58 -0400

When I met Rehena Jamadar, she was 44 years old. A soft-spoken, elegant woman, she had her first child, a girl, when she was 16. Two other children, a boy, and a girl, came shortly afterward.

Rehena lives in the village of Majlishpukur, a tiny agricultural settlement located southeast of central Kolkata in a region known as South 24 Parganas. The road to the village is intermittently paved with bricks and is barely wide enough for two full-size vehicles to pass safely. Most of the vehicles on the road had two or three wheels. Bicycles were the most common conveyance. Chickens, pigs, and dogs roamed freely. Rainwater collected in trash-strewn drainage ditches on both sides of the road. Smoke from dozens of small cooking fires had left a light blue-gray haze that softened the late-morning December sun.

My dear friend, Joyashree Roy, a professor at the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok, a senior fellow at the Breakthrough Institute, and a lead author of several reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, arranged our visit to Majlishpukur. She was our guide and interpreter.

Rehena’s modest home had been connected to the electric grid 14 years earlier. She led us to the side porch of her brightly painted home to show us her electric meter. She was getting cut-rate electricity thanks to the federal government’s electrification program. She paid the bill every three months. Inside her home were a few light bulbs, a fan, and an outlet in the kitchen. One of the things she liked best about having electricity was that kitchen work gets done faster. She was using an electric grinder to prepare the spices she uses in her food. Before electrification, she had to do that grinding by hand, which consumed much of her time in the kitchen.

I had lots of questions. Joyashree easily translated them into Bengali. What was it like before her home got electricity? What was it like now? Rehena told us about the beneficial impact that electricity had on her children. Thanks to electricity, her children were able to read books, practice their writing, and manage their schoolwork at night. That had had a clear and positive result: one of her daughters was attending college in Kolkata, a fact of which Rehena was clearly proud.

After we’d talked for a while longer, I asked Rehena: “If you had lived in a house that had electricity when you were growing up, would you have gone to university, too?” A brief smile flashed across her face and without a nanosecond of hesitation, she nodded her head to the right, in the way typical of many residents of West Bengal, and said, “Yes. I would have.”

Read the rest of this piece at Robert Bryce Substack.

Photo: courtesy Robert Bryce Substack, by the author.

Ninth Circuit Spikes Berkeley's Gas Ban

Robert Bryce — Mon, 01 May 2023 20:28:58 -0400

Three federal court judges just rescued your gas stove and other gas-fired appliances from the nanny state.

Yesterday, in a unanimous opinion, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that the nation’s first ban on natural gas, put in place by the City of Berkeley in 2019, violates federal law. The three judges found that the city’s ordinance was preempted by the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975, which prohibits the implementation of regulations that favor one type of fuel over another.

The first report I saw on the court’s ruling was here on Substack by my friend, Ed Ireland. There’s no doubt that the decision is a huge win for consumers, businesses, and energy security. Indeed, the ruling in California Restaurant Association vs. City of Berkeley, has ramifications that go beyond California and the Ninth Circuit. It should invalidate the dozens of gas bans that have been enacted across the country over the past four years. It may also mean that plans by federal authorities, including the Consumer Product Safety Commission, to ban, or restrict, the use of gas stoves, gas furnaces, and other gas-fired appliances, are kaput.

About 47 million American homes have gas stoves and lots of chefs, and consumers, including Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, like cooking with gas. The Department of Energy’s own numbers show that heating homes with gas is far cheaper than heating with electricity. Despite these facts, a group of lavishly funded activist groups have been pushing electrify everything mandates that would prohibit the use of gas in homes and businesses and require consumers to rely almost exclusively (including energy for electric vehicles) on our already-shaky electric grid. The electrify everything claque got a boost in January after Richard Trumka Jr., who sits on the Consumer Product Safety Commission, told a Bloomberg reporter that gas stoves are a hazard and that “any option is on the table,” including, presumably, a ban.

Trumka’s comments sparked a storm of criticism. Within hours, the White House issued a statement saying that President Joe Biden doesn’t support a ban on gas stoves.

What has since been dubbed the “gas stove culture war” was ignited in July 2019, when Berkeley became the first municipality in the country to ban the use of gas. Since then, as I explained in January, (See: “The Billionaires Behind The Gas Bans”), several NGOs, including Climate Imperative, the Sierra Club, and Rocky Mountain Institute, as well as Rewiring America, have spent untold (and undisclosed) millions of dollars campaigning and lobbying at the local and national levels to ban the direct use of natural gas in homes and businesses. And thanks to remarkably friendly (and largely unquestioning) coverage from legacy media outlets, they’ve had undeniable success.

Read the rest of this piece at Robert Bryce Substack.

Photo: Fried rice being prepared over a gas flame, Tokyo, March 4, 2023. Photo by author.

Wisconsin Town Fights Big Solar

Robert Bryce — Sun, 30 Apr 2023 20:28:58 -0400

When I arrived at the Christiana Town Hall yesterday afternoon, Mark A. Cook, the town chairman, and two local landowners, John Barnes, and Roxann Engelstad, were ready and waiting. They had multiple maps and charts showing the footprint and details of Invenergy’s proposed 300-megawatt Koshkonong Solar Energy Center.

Cook got right to the point. Christiana, he said, has been “based on agriculture since people settled here. This project will completely kill ag in this town for generations.” The solar project is targeting “our very best farmland. It’s not like they are taking the crap land. This is the cream of the crop.” He went on, saying that the company is targeting farmland because it’s relatively flat and therefore will be easy to cover with panels. In addition, Christiana is near a gas-fired power plant that is connected to the high-voltage transmission grid. That location will make it easy for the proposed solar project to get its electricity onto the grid.

About 1,800 people live in Christiana, which is located 70 miles west of Milwaukee. It sits amid picturesque rolling hills and farms that mostly grow corn and soybeans. The landscape is marked with thickly wooded patches of trees and shrubs that have grown back in the areas that aren’t under the plow. The soil is a rich, dark brown. Under cloudy skies, the tilled land looks almost black.

Cook, who is also the president of the Cambridge Area Fire and EMS Commission, told me Christiana operates on a budget of about $3.8 million. It has already spent about $200,000 in legal fees fighting the Invenergy project. It has filed one lawsuit to stop the $650 million project and will soon file another suit against the Wisconsin Public Service Commission. The town is claiming the agency violated the Wisconsin Constitution and the commission’s own rules when it granted a permit for the project last year. More about the legal details in a moment.

The fight in Christiana provides yet another snapshot of the land-use conflicts over renewables that are raging all across the country. People like Cook, Barnes, Engelstad, and the other people in Christiana, are not NIMBYs, the slur that project developers and many climate activists like to use when describing people who are fighting big renewable projects.

Instead, their efforts to protect Christiana and its farmland from the energy sprawl that comes with large-scale renewable projects are directly in line with the views of an overwhelming majority of Americans. In March, a new media outlet called Heatmap (“focused on the biggest story in the world: the great climate and energy transition”) published the results of a poll of 1,000 adult Americans.

The poll, which included people from all 50 states, found that “79% of Americans said that new renewable energy should be rolled out ‘slowly’ rather than ‘quickly’ and that the conservation of land and wild animals should be prioritized above rapid greenhouse-gas reductions.”

Read the rest of this piece at Robert Bryce Substack.

Photo: Roxann Engelstad, John Barnes, and Town Chairman Mark A. Cook, at the Christiana Town Hall, April 25, 2023. Photo courtesy Robert Bryce Substack.

The Inhumanity of the Green Agenda

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 20:28:58 -0400

‘Man is the measure of all things’, Greek philosopher Protagoras wrote over 2,500 years ago. Unfortunately, our elites today tend not to see it that way.

In recent years, the overused word ‘sustainability’ has fostered a narrative in which human needs and aspirations have taken a back seat to the green austerity of Net Zero and ‘degrowth’. The ruling classes of a fading West are determined to save the planet by immiserating their fellow citizens. Their agenda is expected to cost the world $6 trillion per year for the next 30 years. Meanwhile, they will get to harvest massive green subsidies and live like Renaissance potentates.

In Enemies of Progress, author Austin Williams suggests that ‘the mantra of sustainability’ starts with the assumption that humanity is ‘the biggest problem of the planet’, rather than the ‘creators of a better future’. Indeed, many climate scientists and green activists see having fewer people on the planet as a key priority. Their programme calls not only for fewer people and fewer families, but also for lower consumption among the masses. They expect us to live in ever smaller dwelling units, to have less mobility, and to endure more costly home heating and air-conditioning. These priorities are reflected in a regulatory bureaucracy that, if it does not claim justification from God, acts as the right hand of Gaia and of sanctified science.

The question we need to ask is: sustainability for whom? US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen recently suggested that her department sees climate change as ‘the greatest economic opportunity of our time’. To be sure, there is lots of gold in green for the same Wall Street investors, tech oligarchs and inheritors who fund the campaigns of climate activists. They increasingly control the media, too. The Rockefellers, heirs to the Standard Oil fortune, and other ultra-wealthy greens are currently funding climate reporters at organs like the Associated Press and National Public Radio.

Under the new sustainability regime, the ultra-rich profit, but the rest of us not so much. The most egregious example may be the forced take-up of electric vehicles (EVs), which has already helped to make Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, the world’s second-richest man. Although improvements are being made to low-emissions vehicles, consumers are essentially being frogmarched into adopting a technology that has clear technical problems, remains far more expensive than the internal-combustion engine and depends primarily on an electric grid already on the brink of blackouts. Green activists, it turns out, do not expect EVs to replace the cars of hoi polloi. No, ordinary people will be dragooned to use public transport, or to walk or bike to get around.

The shift to electric cars is certainly no win for the West’s working and middle classes. But it is an enormous boon to China, which enjoys a huge lead in the production of batteries and rare-earth elements needed to make EVs, and which also figure prominently in wind turbines and solar panels. China’s BYD, which is backed by Warren Buffett, has emerged as the world’s top EV manufacturer, with big export ambitions. Meanwhile, American EV firms struggle with production and supply-chain issues, in part due to green resistance to domestic mining for rare-earth minerals. Even Tesla expects much of its future growth to come from its Chinese factories.

Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.

Jamie Dimon's Climate Corporatism

Robert Bryce — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 20:28:58 -0400

Deep Throat never said, “follow the money.”

That phrase, which has become one of the most famous axioms in politics and journalism, was featured in the 1976 movie “All the President’s Men,” which starred Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford. But that phrase was not in the 1974 book of the same title by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward that recounted their investigation into the Watergate debacle. Instead, it appears the phrase was first used by an attorney named Henry Petersen who testified at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in 1974. It then made it into the movie screenplay which was written by Woodward and William Goldman.

Today, the phrase is part of our political vernacular. It has been used as the title in a movie, as the title of a book, and it’s used in dozens of websites, including followthemoney.org, that track political contributions.

Follow the money and you’ll understand why Jamie Dimon, the CEO of J.P. Morgan, the world’s largest bank by market capitalization, wants the government to seize private property so that his bank can finance the construction of more solar and wind energy projects in the name of doing something about climate change. Last week, in his letter to shareholders, Dimon wrote “Permitting reforms are desperately needed to allow investment to be done in any kind of timely way,” Dimon wrote. “We may even need to evoke eminent domain––we simply are not getting the adequate investments fast enough for grid, solar, wind, and pipeline initiatives.” (Emphasis added.)

Follow the money. Dimon wants the government to seize private property because his bank is one of the two biggest players in the business of tax equity finance, a $20 billion-per-year business that is crucial to wind and solar development. If those projects don’t get built. J.P. Morgan will lose out on billions in profits. To justify the taking of private property, Dimon invoked the specter of climate change, writing that the “window for action to avert the costliest impacts of global climate change is closing” and that we “need to do more, and we need to do so immediately” to meet “science-based climate targets.”

Dimon uses the word “science” to justify the seizure of private property, but what he’s advocating for is what I call climate corporatism, which is the use of government power to increase the profits of big corporations at the expense of consumers—and in particular, at the expense of small (and mostly rural) landowners—in the name of climate change.

Follow the money. J.P. Morgan’s profits last year totaled some $37.7 billion, a drop of about 20% from 2021. Dimon needs more tax equity finance deals to bolster his bank’s bottom line.

Dimon did not mention in his shareholder letter—and legacy media outlets largely refuse to cover—the raging land-use conflicts over renewable projects that are happening from Maine to Hawaii. As I have documented in the Renewable Rejection Database, since 2015, local communities and jurisdictions have rejected or restricted wind or solar projects nearly 500 times. Rural Americans are fighting these projects because they are concerned about their property values, and rightly so.

Read the rest of this piece at Robert Bryce Substack.