When President Donald Trump floated the idea of Canada becoming our 51st state, the Left lost its collective mind on both sides of the border.
A group of Democratic House members <a href="https://democrats-foreignaffairs.house.gov/press-releases?ContentRecord_id=C44F2297-5A45-49AB-806B-D587082D0739&amp;utm_source=chatgpt.com">warned</a> that the president’s rhetoric threatens to leave us alone to face other challenges we cannot overcome on our own. U.S. Rep. Linda Sánchez (D-CA) <a href="https://lindasanchez.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/sanchez-delivers-remarks-house-floor-canada-tariffs-vote">denounced</a> the “childish threats” as “certainly not strategic.&#8221; Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/world/canada/carney-trump-canada-speech.html">declared,</a> “Canada thrives because we are Canadian.”
Fast forward to the present day, and hazardous smoke from over 800 Canadian wildfires is billowing across American skies. As of Friday, air quality alerts were in effect <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/article/at-least-17-states-under-air-quality-alerts-as-canadian-wildfire-smoke-spreads-in-the-midwest-and-northeast-raising-questions-about-the-world-cup-final-184707666.html">across at least 17 states,</a> imperiling the health of more than 125 million Americans. On a scale of 0 to 500, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/weather/what-to-know-canada-wildfires-smoke.html">the air quality rating eclipsed 800</a> in Toledo, Ohio, on Thursday night.
Funny, the chorus of warnings from the Left about reckless behavior has gone quiet. So much for “challenges we cannot overcome on our own.”
These fires are not new, and neither are the consequences. In 2023, Canadian wildfires <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c703nzl25ypo">emitted more carbon</a> (647 million metric tons) than the annual output of all but three countries worldwide.
How does this keep happening, and who is to blame?
The Left, as they are wont to do for almost anything, points the finger at climate change. In 2023, Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer <a href="https://x.com/SenSchumer/status/1666534710720315392">declared</a>, “These Canadian wildfires are truly unprecedented, and climate change continues to make these disasters worse. We passed the Inflation Reduction Act to fight climate change, and we must do more to speed our transition to cleaner energy and reduce carbon in the atmosphere.”
In early 2025, while fires in California <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Los-Angeles-wildfires-of-2025">were claiming 30 lives</a>, forcing more than 180,000 people to flee their homes and costing an estimated $100 billion in damage, California Governor Gavin Newsom <a href="https://x.com/CAgovernor/status/1882904964403511556">told</a> his constituents that “climate change is here and it is real.”
Schumer and Newsom are right. Climate change is the cause of these fires. Only not in the way they are suggesting.
Just as the threat of “carbon emissions” has been used to justify sweeping changes to the American way of life (Barack Obama’s attempt to ban coal, Newsom’s efforts to eliminate gas-powered vehicles, Biden’s IRA boondoggle), the Canadians have used it to mismanage their forests. <a href="https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/forestry">Roughly 38%</a> of Canada’s land consists of forest, significantly more than the U.S, and <a href="https://natural-resources.canada.ca/forests-forestry/sustainable-forest-management/forest-land-ownership">94%</a> of those forests are publicly owned.
On its <a href="https://natural-resources.canada.ca/forests-forestry/sustainable-forest-management/canada-s-forest-laws?utm_source=chatgpt.com">government website</a>, Canada proudly declares its “forest laws are among the strictest in the world,” adding, “by law, forest management plans must be approved before harvesting starts.”
For the last decade-plus, Canada’s government has been run by leftists, first Justin Trudeau, who was succeeded by Carney in 2025. During his tenure, Trudeau repeatedly downplayed forest management, denouncing an “attack on experts, and on science” in favor of his preferred villain of the climate polluters.
In one 2024 House of Commons debate over <a href="https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/House/441/Debates/347/HAN347-E.PDF?utm_source=chatgpt.com">forest management</a>, Trudeau intoned that, “if we do not act in fighting against climate change with everything we have, then there will be no economy of the future.”
Forget about the economy of the future. These fires threaten Canada’s very existence today.
When the government fails to manage the forests, the consequences are steep. When forests are unmanaged and unattended, they burn.
Long after these fires are extinguished and the air returns to normal, the dangerous mentality of the climate cult will persist on both sides of the border.
Even after all his state has been through, Newsom, one of the Democratic Party’s wannabe standard-bearers, <a href="https://usclimatealliance.org/press-releases/alliance-statement-on-epa-endangerment-finding-repeal-feb-2026/?utm_source=chatgpt.com">is still claiming</a>, “greenhouse gases cause climate change and endanger our communities and our health.”
Never mind the children, pregnant women, and those with respiratory conditions in our country today, who are worried about the air they are breathing.
Climate change is the linchpin excuse for failed government. Remember that the next time Gavin Newsom comes after your gas car. Or New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani urges you to set your air conditioning at 78 degrees during a heatwave. Or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says that <a href="https://ocasio-cortez.house.gov/media/press-releases/ocasio-cortez-presses-epa-assistant-administrator-kramer-jeopardizing-clean">data centers are dirty</a>.
The real threat is the failure of leadership. That failure can be deadly, and the symptoms manifest themselves in different ways, but the cause is rooted in climate politics. Given their current plight, perhaps it’s a blessing that Canada did not become our 51st state after all.
***
Daniel Turner is the founder and executive director of Power The Future, a national nonprofit organization that advocates for American energy jobs. He also runs a sheep and cattle farm in rural Virginia.  Contact him at daniel@powerthefuture.com and follow him on Twitter @DanielTurnerPTF

“Extreme” Santa Ana Winds Spark New Wildfires In Southern California

Blame Canada For Their Dumb Hot Wildfires

Canada

Climate Change

DW Opinion

Forest Managment

Justin Trudeau

Wildfires

You’re paying more for groceries, gas, and everything else. Politicians blame tariffs and supply chains. Another real culprit is hiding in plain sight: <a href="https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/">California’s unelected Air Resources Board (CARB)</a>, which is writing energy policy for the entire country and sending us the bill for its climate fantasy.
You never voted for CARB. Your senators didn’t. No one in your state did. Yet federal waivers let this rogue agency impose extreme emissions rules that exceed federal law, jack up costs for every business serving the national market, and have no real-world effect on the climate.
CARB’s rules drive up trucking, shipping, and freight costs in California, and those costs hit every American because <a href="https://centerforjobs.org/ca/trade-reports/california-trade-report-for-march-2025">California ports move nearly 40%</a> of all U.S. imports. That is not a regional impact. That is a national tax levied without representation.
Congress and the Trump administration took important steps in response last year. In June 2025, the Congressional Review Act (CRA) was used to <a href="https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2025/05/up-in-the-air-congress-nullifies-clean-air-act-waivers-for-california">revoke three major Biden-era CARB waivers</a> covering electric vehicle mandates for passenger cars, heavy-duty trucks, and engine emissions.
That was the right call. The <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/2025/06/statement-by-the-president/">bipartisan support</a> it received proved that people across the political spectrum are fed up with California making expensive decisions that the rest of the country has to live with and pay for.
But California refused to accept defeat. <a href="https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/CRA-Response-EO-N-27-25_-bl-formatted-GGN-Signed-6-11-954pmFinal.pdf">Gov. Gavin Newsom immediately signed an executive order</a> directing agencies to circumvent Congress. CARB kept enforcing the voided rules anyway. The Department of Justice had to sue the state in August 2025 to force compliance.
This isn’t a state defending its rights. It’s a state defying democracy by attempting to impose its ideology on the rest of us by any means necessary.
Active waivers are still doing real damage. The <a href="https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/10/20/2023-23261/california-state-nonroad-engine-pollution-control-standards-ocean-going-vessels-at-berth-notice-of">At-Berth Regulation, operating under a waiver</a> granted by the Biden administration to CARB in 2023, requires cargo ships docked at California ports to shut down their diesel engines and either plug into the state&#8217;s grid or pay fines of nearly $50,000 per day.
CARB has collected tens of millions of dollars in penalties since 2025. Shipping companies do not absorb that cost. They build it into freight rates. Freight rates flow into wholesale prices. Wholesale prices hit you at checkout.
CARB put the <a href="https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/sites/default/files/barcu/regact/2019/ogvatberth2019/2nd15dayattb.pdf">price tag at $2.23 billion</a> by 2032. They called that figure reasonable. It is not reasonable when the people paying for it never get a vote.
The same scam runs with <a href="https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/our-work/programs/drayage-trucks-seaports-railyards">drayage truck rules</a>, forcing zero-emission vehicles on an impossible timeline. The technology and infrastructure aren’t ready. The costs simply roll through the supply chain to every American.
Californians can choose this path. The rest of us never did. California has every right to its own policies. It has no right to export the costs to families in Ohio, Georgia, Texas, and Wisconsin.
Right now, they get to feel virtuous about their climate agenda while spreading the bill to people who had no say in writing it. That is not environmentalism. That is cost-shifting dressed up as moral leadership.
On June 12, 2026, the EPA <a href="https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-fulfills-statutory-obligation-transmitting-four-california-waiver-rules-congress">transmitted four additional CARB waivers</a> to Congress for action under the Congressional Review Act. These cover strict vehicle emissions, greenhouse gas standards, and small off-road engines. This latest move confirms the administration is systematically reviewing California’s overreach and that the legal path for ending At-Berth shipping and drayage trucking waivers is wide open.
There is a straightforward solution. The At-Berth shipping and drayage trucking waivers should be the <a href="https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2026/06/epa-sends-4-more-california-vehicle-emission-waivers-to-congress">next ones submitted</a> to Congress under the CRA. The administration has implicitly confirmed that these waivers are eligible for review. The precedent is set. The legal authority is established. What is needed now is the political will to use it.
Midterms are coming. Lawmakers who want to campaign on lowering costs now have a clear, concrete chance. One state should not dictate national energy and shipping costs while sticking the rest of America with the bill.
Call your representatives today. Demand they end CARB’s power to run national policy from Sacramento. The tools are in place. The only question left is whether Congress will use them.
***
Frank Lasee is the president of Truth in Energy and Climate.

Container Ships at the Port of Los Angeles

California’s Climate Tab Is Being Sent To The Rest Of Us

California

California Air Resources Board (CARB)

California Ports

Trump Administration

I&#8217;m on day nine of no air conditioning in my Washington, D.C. apartment. The building decided to upgrade the HVAC systems in the dead of June. In one of the swampiest cities in America.
I feel like a European.
And I hate it.
The silver lining (if you can call slow-roasting inside your own home a silver lining) is that I now have some sympathy for the people forced to endure this reality year in and year out. Not because of broken buildings or bad timing, but because their governments decided that sweating to death is a form of environmental virtue.
They are wrong. Catastrophically and lethally wrong.
Europe&#8217;s anti-AC policies are doing almost nothing to stop climate change. They are, however, killing people. According to the <a href="https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-change-heat-and-health">WHO</a>, Europe averages more than 175,000 heat-related deaths every single year. In 2024 alone, a peer-reviewed study <a href="https://www.isglobal.org/en/-/62.700-muertes-asociadas-con-el-calor-del-verano-de-2024">published</a> in Nature Medicine put the summer death toll at nearly 63,000, compared to roughly <a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2822854">2,400</a> in the United States that same year.
So Europe, with a population just 40% larger than ours, is losing tens of thousands of people to heat every summer, while we lose thousands. The difference isn&#8217;t climate, it’s ideology. The EU&#8217;s Green Deal and its accompanying &#8220;degrowth&#8221; ideology — the belief that every kilowatt of energy consumed is a sin against the planet — have spent decades actively discouraging AC installation, mandating carbon-neutral buildings, and pushing &#8220;passive cooling solutions&#8221; like fans and open windows. The result is not a greener planet, but a deadlier one.
The European heat death toll is <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/04/28/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-us/">twelve times</a> America&#8217;s gun homicide rate. Liberals will go on and on about &#8220;genocides&#8221; in their favorite third-world countries, yet never say a peep about the grim-heater knocking on thousands of their neighbors&#8217; doors every single summer. No marches. No hashtags. No candlelight vigils.
Just grandma dying because a bureaucrat decided a thermostat was too carbon-heavy.
And right now, it&#8217;s happening again. France is currently in the grip of a historic June heatwave. Fifty-four of its 96 departments are under red alert as of this week. Schools are closed, trains are canceled – the whole catastrophe is being compared to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_European_heatwave">2003 heat wave</a> that killed an estimated 15,000 people. Already, 40 people have drowned in rivers and lakes, jumping in to escape the heat. Only about <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/world/europe/heat-waves-france-air-conditioning.html">20%</a> of French homes have air conditioning.
According to <a href="https://www.leparisien.fr/meteo/il-mest-arrive-de-tomber-a-cause-des-etourdissements-le-calvaire-dune-retraitee-dans-sa-bouilloire-thermique-17-06-2026-NZIFJMZBO5DZBB6FK56QNHKD4M.php?at_medium=email&amp;at_emailtype=acquisition&amp;at_campaign=Newsletter&amp;at_creation=75-Paris">Le Parisien</a>, one 67-year-old woman is enduring 90-degree temperatures inside her home, so dizzy she can barely stand. Her survival strategy: three to four cold showers a day and hosing down her house with a garden hose.
The garden hose.
Meanwhile, the French ecological transition agency advises that even the elderly shouldn&#8217;t set their AC below 79 degrees Fahrenheit. For everyone else — the pregnant, the chronically ill, the merely human — the French public health agency has assembled a truly heroic list of <a href="https://www.ameli.fr/assure/sante/themes/canicule-chaleur/que-faire">tips</a>: &#8220;Wear a hat.&#8221; &#8220;Bend your legs regularly.&#8221; Eat &#8220;water-rich foods like cold soups.&#8221; Avoid using &#8220;your oven, computer, hairdryer.&#8221; “Dim the lights.”
They might as well hand out paper-free pamphlets on how to write a will and what to wear at your own funeral.
Dying because European governments won&#8217;t permit a box that sucks heat out of your living room. Welcome to the third world, Europe.
The climate scolds&#8217; math doesn&#8217;t even work. Cooling accounts for roughly <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/air-conditioning-causes-around-greenhouse-gas-emissions-will-change-future">3%</a> of global greenhouse gas emissions. If every European turned on an air conditioner tomorrow, models project it might add <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-69393-1">0.05</a> degrees Celsius to global temperatures by 2050. That&#8217;s not saving the planet. That&#8217;s a rounding error.
Meanwhile, the bodies keep piling up from actual heat exhaustion. Studies show proper air conditioning slashes the risk of dying on brutally hot days by <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/how-can-the-world-reduce-deaths-from-extreme-heat">75%</a>. The U.S. figured this out decades ago and now has near-universal AC with a tiny fraction of Europe’s heat-death toll despite plenty of nasty summers.
In fact, cold-related deaths across the globe still <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/part-one-how-many-people-die-from-extreme-temperatures-and-how-could-this-change-in-the-future">substantially</a> outnumber heat-related deaths. Over time, moderate warming could actually reduce net temperature-attributable mortality in many regions by cutting cold deaths faster than it raises heat deaths. So the entire premise that keeping Europeans sweltering indoors is some heroic act of planetary sacrifice falls apart on its own terms. They&#8217;re not preventing deaths. They&#8217;re just redistributing them.
Get Europe some air conditioning. Cut the heat deaths. And maybe even reduce cold deaths down the road. Bingo.
Because grand-mère isn&#8217;t dying from climate change. She&#8217;s dying because some bureaucrat in Paris decided sweltering until she’s six feet under was virtuous.
And I&#8217;m dying because my building decided June was a great time to upgrade the HVAC.
But at least I know it&#8217;s coming back. For far too many Europeans, it was never there at all.

FRANCE-WEATHER-CLIMATE-HEATWAVE

I Lasted Nine Days Without AC. Europeans Don’t Have A Choice.

Air conditioning

France

Global Warming

Heat wave

As World Cup travelers experience the modern marvels of everyday life in the United States, the headlines are replete with appreciation for <a href="https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/world-cup-fans-found-buc-130000689.html">Buc-ee’s</a>, <a href="https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/world-cup-fans-found-buc-130000689.html">Bass Pro Shops</a>, and bottomless chips and salsa. With summer’s arrival, here’s another one for that list not getting attention but should: air conditioning.
Roughly <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/02/climate/europe-air-conditioning-heat-wave-intl-latam">1 in 5 homes</a> in Europe have air conditioning, compared to an <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/02/climate/europe-air-conditioning-heat-wave-intl-latam">estimated 90%</a> in the United States. While we may take it for granted, the implications mean more than tossing and turning during sleepless nights: it’s a matter of life and death, literally.
A comparison of heatwave-related deaths between the United States and Europe from 2020 to 2025 is alarming. In our country, 9,436 people died. In Europe, <a href="https://x.com/levelsio/status/2069436709993898007?s=46">248,875</a> died, an increase of more than 2,500%.
In any other circumstance, the preventable deaths of a quarter of a million people would demand a United Nations condemnation. Heat takes the lives of the vulnerable: the sick and the elderly, those trapped in higher floors in government housing, those convalescing in windowless hospital beds or nursing homes.
So why the relative silence from the French, still a first-world destination despite their economic stagnation? Because in their country, air conditioning is not a convenience or even a necessity — it’s a controversy. Sacrifice your citizens in the name of battling climate change, and those deaths are an acceptable casualty for the green cause.
During a brutal stretch of heat last summer, one <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/world/europe/heat-waves-france-air-conditioning.html">left-leaning</a> French newspaper described air conditioning as “an environmental aberration that must be overcome.” Since 2007, the government has mandated that air conditioning be set at no lower than 79°F in public spaces.
And France accepts it. The great American economist Thomas Sowell made famous a profoundly complex, yet common-sense, quote: “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.”
The lack of air conditioning in France is not a solution, but a trade-off. The most extreme of the tradeoffs is death.
The cold is even more deadly. Annually, <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542519625000543">nine times</a> as many people die from the cold as from the heat, though it gets much less attention. This past winter, the East Coast endured brutal conditions. The climate protesters were nowhere to be found when large swaths of the country were buried under 18 inches of ice and snow for weeks. No one was glued to the George Washington Parkway, headed to Reagan Airport at -15. The heat makes us ornery and angry, explaining the undercurrent of every Tennessee Williams play.   
Just like the heat, death by cold is a trade-off. If you think this is just a French or blue state problem, think again.
Texas, the oil capital of the world, has an enormously powerful green lobby that has pushed for state-subsidized, unreliable, expensive wind power. When a 2021 ice and snowstorm crippled the entire industry, plunging several million people into weeks without power, more than <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20210718121413/https:/www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/texas-winter-storm-power-outage-death-toll">700 people</a> froze to death. No one rioted or looted. No one built them a statue. Just as in France, they are an acceptable casualty for the green cause.
Even red Texas can be as blind as France when it comes to going green.
There are very few solutions; there are only trade-offs, and the more one digs into opportunity costs, feasibility, and scalability of energy, the more Sowell’s genius quote dissects the conundrum.
To be sure, fossil fuels are not perfect, but neither is the world. Yet the benefits of fossil fuels are documented and real. As U.S. Energy Secretary <a href="https://www.energy.gov/articles/secretary-energy-chris-wright-delivers-keynote-remarks-ceraweek-2025">Chris Wright</a> put it, they have contributed to “doubling human life expectancy, lifting almost all of the world&#8217;s citizens out of grinding poverty, launching modern medicine, telecommunications, planes, trains, and automobiles too.&#8221;
The trade-off is “going green,” and when placed side-by-side in comparison, very few are willing to take the trade-off. Ask any climate-change-concerned parent about “going green” with cloth diapers, beating them clean against a rock in the river, and using that same water source to bathe and make soup. Without fossil fuels, there are no disposable diapers, washing machines, or laundry detergents. Our American quality of life is the trade-off we never eschew.
Even if we pretend we can power our current lifestyle with solar or wind, the fact is, we are still using fossil fuels, just differently. There is more oil, gas, and coal in the sourcing, manufacturing, transportation, installation, and maintenance of wind and solar than wind and solar will ever offset in their lifespans.
Going green is no solution to our climate “problem.” It is a trade-off, and a losing one.
It is tragic to see France accept death as a trade-off for a faux crisis. Our country should not follow their lead, or Texas’ terrible lead, to go green and live miserable, unhygienic, unhealthy, and uncomfortable existences. If we do, the next time our country hosts a World Cup, all those foreign travelers experiencing the amazement of everyday life in the United States today may as well stay home.
***
Daniel Turner is the founder and executive director of Power The Future, a national nonprofit organization that advocates for American energy jobs. He also runs a sheep and cattle farm in rural Virginia. Contact him at daniel@powerthefuture.com and follow him on X @DanielTurnerPTF

FRANCE-POITIERS-HEATWAVE-HOMELESS-RED-CROSS-COOLING

No A/C, No Problem. France Shrugs At Thousands Dead For ‘Climate Change.’

Green energy

Last week, the UN-backed climate modeling community <a href="https://gmd.copernicus.org/articles/19/2627/2026/">quietly retired RCP 8.5</a> — the infamous “business as usual” scenario that for more than a decade was sold to the public as the most likely future if we didn’t surrender trillions of dollars and our freedoms to the green agenda. President Donald Trump celebrated on <a href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116586488927495029">Truth Social</a>, calling out years of exaggerated projections. The legacy media’s response has been the most revealing part of all: a grudging, face-saving admission wrapped in spin.
Smoothing and soothing the narrative remains of paramount importance.
This is not new. Back in November 2018, during Trump’s first term, the Fourth National Climate Assessment dropped just after the midterm elections. Then-White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders didn’t mince <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHTrdadzs7U">words</a>: she said the report’s conclusions were based upon the most extreme model scenario. <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46351940">Trump said</a>, “I don’t believe it.”  The <a href="https://www.axios.com/2018/11/27/white-house-criticizes-its-climate-report-as-not-based-on-facts-1543360830">media exploded in outrage</a>. How dare the administration question the experts? Partisan <a href="https://www.factcheck.org/2018/12/trump-administration-distorts-the-facts-on-climate-report/">fact checkers</a> turned out to be wildly wrong.
Yet here we are in May 2026, and the same modeling establishment has finally admitted what critics have said for years: RCP 8.5 was never a realistic central pathway. It assumed a massive global coal renaissance — coal usage exploding to five- or seven-times today’s levels by 2100 — despite clear economic and technological trends pointing the other direction. The scenario was structurally implausible from the start. <a href="https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/no-rcp85-did-not-become-implausible">Indeed, RCP 8.5 was never plausible.</a>
The New York Times, Washington Post, the Associated Press, and others spent more than a decade treating RCP 8.5 as the default future. Headlines warned of drowned cities, mass extinctions, and civilizational collapse by 2100 unless we acted immediately. In the Biden administration, RCP 8.5 and its updated cousin, SSP5-8.5, fueled draconian and ruinous energy and economic policies under the guise of an existential climate threat. Politicians and activists cited them constantly. The Fourth National Climate Assessment relied heavily on it. So did thousands of impact studies that shaped policy from sea walls to insurance rates to trillions in green spending.
None of this was hidden. In 2014, <a href="https://financialpost.com/opinion/ipcc-climate-change-warming">Matt Ridley wrote in the Financial Post</a> that “the one thing we can say about RCP 8.5 is that it is very, very implausible.” In 2017, energy modelers Justin Ritchie and Hadi Dowlatabadi <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360544217314597">published a detailed takedown</a> of the coal assumptions. In 2018, my late colleague Pat Michaels and I at the Cato Institute laid out the same problems <a href="https://www.cato.org/blog/time-cool-it-uns-moribund-high-end-global-warming-emissions-scenario">with these moribund models</a>. The loudest and most steadfast voice, however, belonged to Roger Pielke Jr., who led the charge with <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2214629620304655">detailed work</a> exposing the exaggeration and <a href="https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/how-climate-science-lost-its-way">lack of course correction</a> — and was <a href="https://youtu.be/9fyFbPWpZzs?si=H1q3PzMOI0deLb0c">treated very unfairly for it</a>.
Pielke bore the brunt of the response from much of the climate establishment and legacy media: smears, silence, or claims that we were “<a href="https://x.com/DoctorVive/status/2055995519000821931?s=20">downplaying the risks</a>.”
They weren’t just wrong. They were protecting a narrative underpinning global climate action.
Even after Zeke Hausfather and Glen Peters published their important <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00177-3">2020 Nature comment</a> pointing out the rampant misuse, many in the climate impacts community kept defaulting to RCP 8.5. Why? It produced scary results that justified bigger research budgets, more urgent headlines, and more aggressive policies. Only sustained external pressure — including <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/05/restoring-gold-standard-science/">Trump’s Gold Standard Science Executive Order</a> — finally forced the modeling community to retire the high-end scenarios as “implausible” for CMIP7.
Now watch the spin. The <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/18/climate/trump-global-warming-truth-social.html">New York Times</a> and <a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-trumps-false-claims-about-the-ipcc-and-rcp8-5-climate-scenario/">others</a> insist the worst-case scenario “had become” implausible because of policy success and cheap renewables. It’s a clever half-truth. Yes, clean energy has done well. But the core problem was never recent success. It was unrealistic assumptions baked into the scenario from the beginning. The media will not say the quiet part out loud: they spent more than a decade hyping an extreme outlier as the most likely future, and critics who pointed that out were attacked as deniers. And the media was a major part of the smear machine.
This matters. Trillions of dollars in policy, regulation, and subsidies were justified in part by these hyperbolic projections. Public fear was stoked. Trust in institutions was eroded. Let’s connect the dots: early warnings were ignored, critics smeared, and a reluctant correction came only after presidential political pressure. This misinformation campaign, aided and abetted by the media, erodes public trust in science.
President Trump has been consistent: the climate alarmism pushed by some activists and their media allies contains large elements of exaggeration and a political agenda. The quiet retirement of RCP 8.5 proves he was right all along about these hyperbolic models. The media only reported on the story days after Trump and the White House broke the news on social media. But the New York Times couldn’t report the major news without wrapping it in face-saving language that still protects the broader narrative.
Science best advances when it corrects its errors openly. The RCP 8.5 saga shows how slowly and grudgingly that correction happens when politics and funding are involved. Americans deserve better than this narrative management disguised as science. They deserve a full accounting and audit of the damage done by hyperbolic climate model scenarios.
***
Dr. Ryan Maue is a former NOAA chief scientist in the Trump administration and a former White House Office of Science and Technology Policy official. He is on X @RyanWeather and Substack at “<a href="https://weather.substack.com/">Weather Trader.</a>”

Participants seen holding signs at the protest. Hundreds of

Trump Was Right About Hyperbolic Climate Models

RCP 8.5

<a href="https://grist.org/accountability/multnomah-county-lawsuit-exxon-deadly-2021-heat-wave/">Multnomah County’s $51 billion climate lawsuit</a> against America’s energy producers was never going to age well. It was built on activist science, conflicted lawyers, and a worst-case scenario its own modelers admitted was implausible. This month, the bottom fell out.
In April 2026, the international scientific committee that designs climate scenarios for the United Nations <a href="https://www.aei.org/articles/rcp8-5-is-officially-dead/">officially retired SSP5-8.5</a> — the corollary to the infamous RCP 8.5 — declaring it “implausible” and dropping it from the framework that will underpin the next IPCC assessment. That is the very pathway that has powered nearly every catastrophic climate headline you have ever read, and it is the scaffolding behind tens of billions of dollars in damage claims now winding their way through American courts.
For more than a decade, RCP 8.5 was marketed to judges, regulators, and reporters as “business as usual.” It was nothing of the kind. Its own creators designed it as a 90th-percentile stress test built on absurd assumptions — 12 billion people on Earth, technology frozen in place, a fivefold global increase in coal, more coal than geologists believe can even be mined. Scientists began warning that it was implausible in 2017. A <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00177-3">2020 paper in Nature</a> said it “becomes increasingly implausible with every passing year.” The Biden EPA quietly pulled it from regulatory cost-benefit analysis in 2022.
They knew. They used it anyway.
By 2024, new academic studies citing RCP 8.5 were still appearing at a rate of 25 per day. The U.S. National Climate Assessment used it as recently as 2023. The <a href="https://americanenergyinstitute.com/docs/americanenergy-eli-climate-judiciary-project.pdf">Climate Judiciary Project</a> trained more than 2,000 judges on materials built on it. And plaintiffs’ lawyers built billion-dollar damage claims on it.
The institutional footprint is staggering. Over <a href="https://www.ngfs.net/en/publications-and-statistics/publications/ngfs-climate-scenarios-central-banks-and-supervisors-phase-v">140 central banks</a> stress-tested the global financial system against it. The <a href="https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/country-climate-development-reports">World Bank applied it across more than 100 countries</a>. The United Kingdom built two decades of national adaptation planning around it. Germany, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, and Japan each embedded it in building codes and flood maps.
Multnomah County is one of the most brazen examples of how this fiction was weaponized in court. The county, home to the city of Portland, claims that major energy companies were a substantial factor in causing and exacerbating the 2021 heat wave and is seeking $51 billion in damages. The core of that claim is an “attribution science” study by <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08751-3">Christopher Callahan and Justin Mankin</a> that purports to assign dollar values to heat-related damages from individual energy producers — claiming Chevron alone caused as much as $3.6 trillion in losses. That study draws its projections directly from the high-emissions scenarios the U.N. has now retired.
It gets worse. According to <a href="https://www.eenews.net/articles/chevron-lawyer-in-51b-lawsuit-failed-to-disclose-support-for-climate-research/">Chevron’s filings</a>, plaintiffs’ lead attorney Roger Worthington had undisclosed financial involvement in at least two of the studies the county presents as neutral, peer-reviewed science. Early drafts of the Mankin study were hosted on Worthington’s law firm website. An early version acknowledged funding from the <a href="https://cjp.eli.org/">Environmental Law Institute’s Climate Judiciary Project</a> — the same group running “neutral” judicial education seminars — before that disclosure was quietly scrubbed from the published version.
So the science was manufactured. The funding was hidden. The judges were trained on the same compromised material. And the underlying scenario has now been officially retired by the U.N. itself.
This is not climate science. It is climate racketeering, exposed.
Multnomah is not alone. The Boulder case heading to the Supreme Court next term, the Honolulu suit, the Minnesota complaint, and dozens of others all draw on the same body of work. Every active climate damages claim in the United States now rests on a scientific foundation that the international scientific community has formally repudiated.
And the cost of letting these cases proceed falls squarely on American families. If courts award damages anywhere near what plaintiffs seek, the bill will not stop at the boardroom door. It will flow straight to consumers through higher pump prices, higher utility bills, higher insurance premiums, and a higher cost of capital baked into every barrel of oil and every kilowatt-hour of electricity produced in this country. Climate litigation is, functionally, a regressive tax imposed by trial lawyers rather than elected legislatures, hitting hardest the working families who can least afford it.
Courts should treat this seriously. Judges should exclude RCP 8.5-based evidence and expert testimony at the gate, the same way they would exclude any other retracted study. The <a href="https://www.epa.gov/regulations-emissions-vehicles-and-engines/final-rule-rescission-greenhouse-gas-endangerment">EPA’s rescission of its 2009 Endangerment Finding</a> should accelerate — the regulatory edifice was built on the same retired scenarios. Central banks should rebuild their stress-test frameworks on plausible trajectories. And the <a href="https://ago.wv.gov/article/federal-judicial-center-confirms-climate-chapter-removal-responds-west-virginia-led">Federal Judicial Center was right to pull its climate science chapter</a> from the judicial reference manual earlier this year. Every state and federal court training program should follow.
The doomsday scenario is officially retired. So is the case for these lawsuits.
***
The Honorable Jason Isaac is the CEO of the American Energy Institute and previously served four terms in the Texas House of Representatives.

TOPSHOT-NETHERLANDS-UN-ICJ-CLIMATE

The Worst-Case Emissions Scenario That Turned Out To Be A Lot Of Hot Air

Carbon Emissions

Earth Day, the annual event focused on climate change and environmental action, can be traced to a charismatic founder with a secret dark side.
Held on April 22, Earth Day celebrates &#8220;<a href="https://www.earthday.org/history/">the birth of the modern environmental movement,</a>&#8221; which began in 1970 in the United States and has since grown into a global movement.
Supporters use the day to raise awareness of climate-related issues, encouraging consumers to change their behavior and urging governments to enact regulations in the name of protecting the planet. In many respects, the movement has achieved significant success.
In 1970, the first Earth Day led to a wave of legislation, including the creation of the sprawling Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which is tasked with enforcing federal environmental laws and setting national policies and regulations from Washington.
Ira Einhorn, a self-proclaimed environmental activist, was the master of ceremonies at the first Earth Day rally on April 22, 1970, according to NBC News. Nine years later, police raided his apartment and found the &#8220;composted&#8221; body of his ex-girlfriend.
Einhorn gained attention among environmental circles in the 1960s and ’70s by embracing the persona of a tie-dye-wearing “ecological guru” and Philadelphia&#8217;s “head hippie,&#8221; according to NBC News. Einhorn, who had a long beard and gap-toothed smile, called himself &#8220;Unicorn&#8221; and promoted a message of &#8220;peace and free love&#8221; while studying at the University of Pennsylvania.
The &#8220;charismatic and flamboyant personality&#8221; also claimed to have played a pivotal role in founding Earth Day, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/us/ira-einhorn-dead.html">according to the New York Times. </a>
But Einhorn appeared to unravel after his girlfriend of five years ended their relationship and moved to New York.
On Sept. 9, 1977, Holly Maddux returned to the Philadelphia apartment she had shared with Einhorn to retrieve her belongings and was never seen again.
Einhorn told investigators that Maddux left the apartment to buy some tofu and sprouts but never returned, according to NBC News. About 18 months later, police searched his apartment after a neighbor complained of a &#8220;reddish-brown, foul-smelling liquid&#8221; leaking from the ceiling.
Inside a closet, authorities found Maddux’s dead body concealed in a trunk that was also packed with Styrofoam, air fresheners, and newspapers. Her remains were partially mummified, NBC News reported in 2011.
After evading authorities for more than two decades, Einhorn was extradited to the United States to stand trial. NBC reported that Einhorn claimed CIA agents were responsible for killing his ex-girlfriend, and said they&#8217;d framed him for knowing too much about classified &#8220;paranormal military research.&#8221;
He was convicted of the charges and sentenced to life in prison without parole. In 2020, Einhorn died in prison at the age of 79.
“The chapter is finally, for real, closed,” Elizabeth Hall, one of Ms. Maddux’s sisters, <a class="css-yywogo" title="" href="https://www.inquirer.com/news/ira-einhorn-dead-unicorn-killer-earth-day-holly-maddux-20200403.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">told The Philadelphia Inquirer </a>at the time. “I think a lot of people in Philadelphia were waiting to hear that he had died. He became part of the city’s consciousness in an ugly way.”
Since the salacious scandal, Earth Day&#8217;s organizers have sought to separate themselves from Einhorn&#8217;s activism and roots in the movement. Many, including the <a href="https://www.epa.gov/history/epa-history-earth-day">official EPA website</a>, cite former Wisconsin Governor and U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson as Earth Day&#8217;s official founder and organizer.

Youth Climate Strikes Break Out Across The U.S.

Remembering The Dark Origins Of Earth Day

Earth Day

Ira Einhorn

MixCollage-03-Apr-2026-10-36-AM-7165

The Globe Trotting Lifestyle Of Three Anti-Oil Activists Who Live ‘Like Royalty’

Climate Advocates

Louisiana

New Orleans

Oil companies

This piece is part of MI x DW, a collaboration that brings Daily Wire readers exclusive commentary and research from the Manhattan Institute’s world-class team of scholars.
In this piece, an exclusive excerpt from a forthcoming City Journal piece, Heather Mac Donald exposes the absurdity of climate litigation, showing how plaintiffs can blame companies around the world for alleged environmental distress. In addition to shining light on these pseudoscientific lawsuits, Mac Donald warns that allowing these cases to continue could seriously undermine the rule of law.
***
While the Trump administration has ended for now the federal regulatory war on traditional energy, a litigation war has quietly gathered force. Cities and states are suing American fossil fuel companies for the alleged climate harms those jurisdictions claim to suffer.
The first multibillion-dollar judgment against the industry could unleash a cascade of similar rulings. Leading climate litigator Benjamin Franta estimates that the potential liability runs into the trillions of dollars.
The effect on the American economy would be dire. But equally catastrophic, from a philosophical standpoint, would be the damage to rationality itself. The causal claims behind the climate-change lawsuits insult reason, repudiating the hard-won gains of the Western empirical tradition.
The plaintiffs in the more than three dozen climate suits filed in the United States read like an honor roll of progressive localities: San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Maine, Minnesota, and Massachusetts, among others. Their targets include some of the great industrial concerns of the modern age — ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, and Shell.
So far, the cases have turned on questions of jurisdiction. The defendant oil and gas companies have argued that the city and state plaintiffs are violating the constitutional limits on their power, since they are trying to regulate economic activity outside of their borders. For a while, this argument worked. Judges in Delaware, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and elsewhere tossed climate-change suits out of court on the grounds of federal preemption. But then the defensive wall was breached. Several federal appeals courts and the state supreme courts of Colorado and Hawaii ruled that the global warming suits could continue. Once those trials begin, the plaintiffs’ causal claims will come to the fore.
Every suit blames a particular set of companies for a particular set of climate harms in a particular locality. But one can accept the broad outlines of climate change theory and still reject the plaintiffs’ core causal claims.
Global warming allegedly results from a century and a half of cumulative CO₂ emissions from industrial activity. When trillions of CO₂ molecules accumulate in the upper atmosphere, they affect how heat escapes into space. That means the planet’s atmospheric energy balance is global, not set by any one city or state’s emissions. One CO₂ molecule is indistinguishable from another and cannot be traced to its point of origin.
Yet the climate suits are startlingly precise in pinning responsibility for a locality’s purported climate disasters. An international case provides an almost parodic version of the logic in climate litigation. In 2015, a farmer in the Peruvian Andes sued Germany’s largest electric utility provider for allegedly causing the glacier outside the farmer’s village to melt. We were meant to believe that CO₂ emitted from the utility’s German facilities could be identified and tied to a particular diminishing ice pack in Peru.
While a German court ultimately threw out the case on jurisdictional grounds, it allowed the causal illogic to stand, and it has since been widely replicated. In 2020, 16 Montana youths, aged five to 22, sued the state of Montana, claiming that it had destroyed their prospects for a normal adult life and had inflicted climate-related trauma on them.
Because Montana licensed fossil fuel operations without considering their global warming impacts, argued the plaintiffs, additional CO₂ was emitted in the state. That local incremental CO₂, in turn, caused global warming in Montana, which harmed the 16 children and young adults. In 2023, the judge in Held v. Montana found the state liable for the plaintiffs’ alleged injuries, which included, the judge declared, the increased risk of dying, chronic despair, damage to the liver and kidneys, impaired physical and cognitive development, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and broken bones.
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The causal claim in Held v. Montana is absurd. Global warming is not a local phenomenon. Moreover, even if the extra CO₂ purportedly generated by Montana’s regulatory negligence could be geotagged and traced to the state, it would be trivial compared with the cumulative emissions of every other global source over decades.
The climate bar has adopted an additional causal claim. Oil and gas companies allegedly concealed what they knew about climate change, the plaintiff cities and states assert, and that concealment — amounting to corporate fraud and deception — caused heat waves and forest fires in their jurisdictions.
An ongoing case in Hawaii, Honolulu v. Sunoco, illustrates the reasoning behind this consumer fraud gambit. According to the city and county of Honolulu, over a dozen fossil-fuel producers and marketers caused flooding and erosion in Honolulu by failing to disclose what they allegedly knew about climate change. “But for Defendants’ conduct” in withholding that knowledge, claim the plaintiffs, “the City would have suffered no or far fewer serious injuries and harms than it has endured.”
We will leave aside, for the moment, the truth of the claim that the defendants possessed secret knowledge about global warming. We will also set aside the suspension of disbelief required to accept the argument that a failure to communicate something was the “but-for cause” of rising sea levels. 
Even on its own terms, Honolulu’s argument is fantastical. Here, one must reintroduce the concealed causal link (CO₂) whose absence in the complaint is merely a verbal trick. Data on Honolulu’s energy-related greenhouse-gas emissions are not readily available, but Hawaii’s were about 18 million metric tons in 2021; Honolulu’s share would be maybe half that. The International Energy Agency estimates that fossil fuel combustion produced about 36.3 billion metric tons of CO₂ globally in 2021. Hawaii’s emissions thus represented about 0.05% of the global total; Honolulu’s, maybe 0.025% of the global total.
Yet we are to believe that a 0.025% reduction in global emissions — the result of a hypothetical cessation of Honolulu’s fossil fuel consumption — would have prevented the city’s alleged global warming injuries.
If the causal claims strain credulity, the factual premises are scarcely stronger. The consumer fraud suits now underway all assert that oil and gas companies possessed early, unique knowledge about climate change, which they concealed from an ignorant public and policymaking class for decades. Instead of warning the world about the dangers of fossil fuels, the firms stressed uncertainties in climate models and funded research that critically examined what the New York Times calls the “settled science of climate change.”
But the fuel industry had no monopoly on climate speculations. The federal government has been reporting on anthropogenic global warming since 1965. Since then, warnings in the media about CO₂ emissions have only grown more dire, without having the slightest effect on consumer behavior.
The use of smartphones and AI, jet travel to conferences and vacations, routine reliance on Amazon Prime and food delivery apps, heat in winter and air conditioning in summer, the near-universal consumption of bottled water — all these accoutrements of modern life show no sign of abating in Honolulu or in any of the other communities now suing the sources of their lavish consumer lifestyles.
The explosion of climate litigation is about expropriation and hatred. These lawsuits do nothing to advance the cause of arresting anthropogenic climate change. Sixteen of the top 20 CO₂ emitters in 2023 were state-owned foreign companies, with China dominating. Seven of the top 20 were coal companies — six of them Chinese, with the seventh in India. Private American oil and gas companies account for only a small share of global emissions.
The litigation war on the oil and gas industry reflects the parasitism, entitlement, and ingratitude that now characterize modern Western societies. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund is emblematic. Its billion-dollar philanthropic portfolio exists because of John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil. Rockefeller’s advances in refining, pipelines, transport engineering, and petroleum chemistry transformed the world. Yet today, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund bankrolls efforts to sue Standard Oil’s corporate descendants into submission, if not bankruptcy.
The alternatives to fossil fuels championed by climate litigators are not viable replacements today and will not be for the foreseeable future. Solar and wind power were largely irrelevant during the deadly snow and ice storm that struck a 2,000-mile swath of the United States in January 2026. Without coal, natural gas, and nuclear power, millions more Americans would have lost heat and running water. The crisis in the Strait of Hormuz is a reminder of how essential oil and gas are to nearly every aspect of the world economy.
The Western concept of impersonal causation once undergirded both experimental science and Anglo-American tort law. The belief that causation was regular and measurable enabled the rational control of nature. The legal requirement that a defendant’s unreasonable act actually caused a plaintiff’s injury restrained the human impulse toward vengeance. In the 20th century, however, tort law increasingly shifted from assigning liability for fault to extracting wealth for redistribution by loosening traditional causation standards and weakening the idea of personal responsibility.
Climate litigation takes that earlier erosion of causation to a new level. If judgments against Big Oil are allowed to stand, they will set precedents for wider assaults on private enterprise and the rule of law.
For now, the best hope for halting the raid on Big Oil’s social and economic capital lies in an appeal before the Supreme Court challenging a climate suit out of Boulder, Colorado. At the heart of every such climate case lies a philosophical travesty that reflects a deeper decline in rational thought.
Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and a New York Times bestselling author.

TOPSHOT-KENYA-CLIMATE-DEMO

The Climate Litigation Swindle

Heather Mac Donald

Lawsuit

MI x DW

Recent media coverage of rising gas prices reflects something more consequential than concern for energy affordability. It reveals a pattern of selective outrage and one meant to condition the American public to view any temporary cost associated with national security as politically unacceptable — especially under a Republican administration. This dynamic carries strategic consequences. It erodes trust, weakens institutional resilience, and reduces our country’s capacity to absorb short-term strain in pursuit of long-term stability.
During the Biden administration, gasoline prices <a href="https://www.wbur.org/npr/1084893419/gas-prices-surge-to-above-4-a-gallon-oil-russia-ukraine-antony-blinken">reached</a> historic and unsustainable levels, surpassing $5.00 per gallon in many parts of the country as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupted global energy markets. The media’s coverage at the time was extensive, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/09/us/politics/fact-check-republicans-biden-gas.html">but they refused to blame then-President Biden</a> for foolishly tapping into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) in November 2021 ahead of the war. The dominant narrative emphasized structural forces, including global commodity markets, supply chain disruptions, and post-pandemic demand recovery outpacing supply. It was the former president’s climate policies, however, that inevitably invited energy insecurity.
Those explanations reflected the realities of energy economics. Energy markets respond to geopolitical shocks, and price volatility often follows disruptions to supply and transportation infrastructure. Public messaging from legacy media during that period <a href="https://time.com/6188569/gas-prices-oil/">emphasized patience while markets stabilized</a>.
Current coverage reflects a very different emphasis: It’s panicked, grim, and chaotic. The narrative is intended to guilt developed nations into <a href="https://apnews.com/article/middle-east-wars-renewable-energy-asia-4b5fe0693ce5816472c905db85f7da6e">abandoning</a> “warmongering” oil and gas for “<a href="https://time.com/7358460/renewable-energy-peace-democracy-venezuela/">peaceful</a>” renewable energy to fight a so-called climate crisis, despite much of the world now <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/16/magazine/climate-politics-us-world-paris-agreement.html">prioritizing</a> energy security. The United Nations claims wind and solar energy, unlike oil and gas, will withstand closures in the Strait of Hormuz. Much to the UN’s chagrin, energy-importing nations that have adopted 100% renewable energy targets are planning to purchase <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-19/after-qatar-lng-plant-outage-more-buyers-turn-to-us-suppliers">American liquefied natural gas (LNG)</a> or <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/18/business/iran-war-lng-asia-japan.html">pivot back to coal</a> after Qatar’s LNG terminal closed down.
Price volatility is frequently presented as <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/21/us/politics/gas-prices-republicans-affordability.html">evidence of policy failure</a> rather than as a predictable consequence of geopolitical risk. Rather than putting the temporary economic pressure as something that deserves perspective and patience, it is portrayed as a political liability that must be eliminated immediately. This framing amplifies anxiety while obscuring the strategic rationale behind national security decisions and the long-term expectation that energy prices will soon come back down. This isn’t 2022, with an administration that deliberately suppressed domestic energy production. The landscape is vastly different, and arguably more secure, with American energy dominance keeping prices relatively low here at home and coming to the rescue abroad.
That shift in emphasis by the media shapes public perception over time.
Research on public opinion during military operations <a href="https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1111/j.1468-2508.2007.00602.x">demonstrates</a> public support for national security decisions tracks the signals sent by major institutions.
Coverage that focuses primarily on risk, cost, and disruption encourages the public to conclude that action lacks justification. A sustained emphasis on negative consequences and downplaying the purpose and potential upsides contributes to declining confidence in leadership and reduced tolerance for continued engagement.
Over the long term, the media framing weakens our country and the public. A society that interprets every economic disruption as a disaster and evidence of fundamental failure becomes less willing to endure temporary hardship even when the alternative carries greater long-term risk and expense.
Trust declines gradually through accumulated inconsistency.
This erosion of trust carries implications beyond the current moment. A public conditioned to associate short-term economic disruption with failure will resist future decisions that require temporary sacrifice, regardless of the strategic stakes involved.
Public uncertainty about the necessity of current operations reflects an imbalance in how the rationale has been reinforced in public discourse. Policymakers have articulated the objective of degrading the capabilities of a regime that was developing advanced ballistic missile capabilities <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/iran-fires-missiles-remote-uk-us-base-claiming-long-range-capabilities-rcna264547">able to reach long distances</a>, unfettered <a href="https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2025/05/21/9-myths-about-irans-uranium-enrichment-program/?gad_source=1&amp;gad_campaignid=23305160353&amp;gbraid=0AAAAADHXS9VYjLIExrfvz9Me63UlMpO7a&amp;gclid=CjwKCAjwyYPOBhBxEiwAgpT8P611Ekse1TESk6d_oEGyl9DdHc8HDPOTawrLNLyStN8M33Drkse33BoCfyAQAvD_BwE">nuclear ambitions</a>, arms proxy forces <a href="https://www.cfr.org/articles/irans-regional-armed-network">across multiple theaters</a>, and uses <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/world/iran-chokes-strait-hormuz-reported-2m-tanker-toll-regime-threatens-global-oil-supply">instability</a> to influence global energy markets.
The strategic logic rests on deterrence. Restoring deterrence imposes short-term costs but reduces the likelihood of sustained instability and higher long-term economic disruption – specifically global energy prices.
Coverage that concentrates on immediate economic consequences without sustained attention to strategic necessity leaves the public with incomplete information. That informational gap encourages apprehension and weakens support for popular actions that serve long-term security interests.
The United States has historically maintained security and prosperity by accepting temporary hardship when the stakes were explained clearly and consistently. Wartime rationing, economic sanctions, and military mobilization all required short-term sacrifice in service of larger objectives.
Public resilience depends on coherent communication from institutions and a shared understanding of the relationship between cost and purpose. That resilience weakens when the information environment frames disruption as avoidable and treats temporary hardship as evidence of failure.
Leadership requires the willingness to act despite short-term discomfort and to explain the reasons for that action clearly. Public resilience requires the willingness to endure temporary strain when the strategic rationale is understood.
Americans facing higher gas prices deserve transparency for what they are being asked to pay and the strategic purpose behind this ask from the media without bias. Clear explanation strengthens trust, supports resilience, and preserves the capacity to act decisively when national security requires it.
* * *
Meaghan Mobbs is director of Independent Women’s Center for American Safety and Security.
Gabriella Hoffman is director of Independent Women’s Center for Energy and Conservation.

California Gas Prices

Two Hits At The Pump — And What The Media Wants You To Forget

Affordable

Coal

Energy

Joe Biden

Oil and Gas

Opinion

Solar Power

A University of Pennsylvania professor who was sanctioned by a court for acting in “bad faith” is set to teach a course on “misinformation” next year.
Michael Mann, a prominent climate activist and director of Penn’s Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media, announced that he will again co-teach a course on climate change communication alongside Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). The course, previously offered at the University of Pennsylvania, focuses in part on combating what Mann describes as a “surplus of misinformation” surrounding climate change.
“The problem isn’t so much a deficit of information; it’s a surplus of misinformation,” Mann said at a journalism conference, arguing that outright climate denial is fading and being replaced by what he calls “doomism, division, deflection, and delaying action.”
Mann recently confirmed the course’s return on a university podcast, describing it as a “real pleasure” to collaborate across Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences and the Annenberg School for Communication.
But Mann’s role as an authority on misinformation should draw scrutiny given his own legal history. A District of Columbia judge previously sanctioned Mann and his legal team, finding “by clear and convincing evidence” that they had acted in bad faith by presenting erroneous evidence and making false representations related to damages claims.
“Here, the Court finds… that Dr. Mann… acted in bad faith when they presented erroneous evidence and made false representations to the jury and the Court,” the <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/yixcqfv4h1idp1xt5elo7/2025.03.12-Order-Granting-Def-s-Sanctions-Mots.pdf?rlkey=yqactvu9h9bpwlyp6q2taaj7h&amp;st=g53sry23&amp;dl=0">ruling stated</a>. The court ordered Mann to pay more than $28,000 in legal fees. The controversy adds to a broader pattern of inflammatory rhetoric and political activism from Mann, who has repeatedly targeted conservatives in public statements and on social media.
Mann has compared prominent figures such as Peter Thiel, Charles Koch, and Rupert Murdoch to the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks, and previously wrote that the Republican Party should be “destroyed.” He deleted the posts, but they were saved in screenshots.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Michael Mann has been trafficking in violence-justifying (wink wink) Tweets for a long time
He is celebrated and rewarded for it in the climate community
His latest won&#8217;t change that <a href="https://t.co/YMpnmxAdWX">pic.twitter.com/YMpnmxAdWX</a>
— The Honest Broker (@RogerPielkeJr) <a href="https://twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr/status/1966493707345019074?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 12, 2025</a></blockquote>
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As reported by the <a href="https://freebeacon.com/campus/upenn-provost-resigns-after-boosting-social-media-post-likening-charlie-kirk-to-hitler-youth/">Washington Free Beacon</a>, Mann faced backlash for amplifying a social media post referring to conservative activist Charlie Kirk as “Hitler Youth,” a controversy that preceded his resignation as vice provost at Penn. He remains on faculty and continues to lead his research center.
The resignation came after Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA) <a href="https://x.com/SenMcCormickPA/status/1966307689023287332?s=20">called on the university</a> to take “immediate, decisive action.”
Mann has also drawn criticism for comments interpreted as invoking political violence, including a post referencing “second amendment territory” in relation to President Donald Trump, he has since deleted the post, but it was <a href="https://archive.is/dSu5A">digitally archived</a> to verify.
The course’s co-instructor, Jamieson, is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, which has itself <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/gop-officials-demand-trump-admin-suspend-funding-of-science-org-over-climate-activism">faced scrutiny</a> over its handling of climate-related materials. Critics have pointed to the academy’s refusal to remove a controversial climate chapter from its judicial reference manual, even after the Federal Judicial Center declined to include it, citing concerns about bias.
Mann has also <a href="https://x.com/MichaelEMann/status/2034046926208045535?s=20">recently praised</a> the late biologist Paul Ehrlich, whose 1968 book &#8220;The Population Bomb&#8221; famously predicted mass starvation and societal collapse due to overpopulation — predictions that failed to materialize. Despite that track record, Mann continues to position himself as a leading voice on climate communication and misinformation.
The announcement of the course raises broader questions about credibility, academic standards, and whether individuals with documented histories of misleading claims should be tasked with defining “misinformation” for the next generation of students.

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What’s Being Taught Behind Ivy League Doors? Inside Controversial ‘Misinformation’ Course

Education

Misinformation

U.S.

University of Pennsylvania

Over a dozen Republican attorneys general demanded Wednesday that the Trump administration suspend or yank funding for a taxpayer-funded scientific organization over politically biased climate change activism, according to a letter obtained by The Daily Wire.
Led by Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen, the GOP officials <a href="https://www.scribd.com/document/1010506858/AG-Letter-To-DOT-DOW-And-DOE">said</a> that a chapter included in the “Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence: Fourth Edition” produced by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine failed to disclose links to climate litigation advocacy. Knudsen demanded that the Departments of Energy, War, and Transportation cut funding to the National Academies over the chapter in question. 
Knudsen <a href="https://content.govdelivery.com/attachments/MTAG/2026/03/10/file_attachments/3579240/2026-03-11%20AGs'%20Ltr%20to%20Agencies%20re%20NASEM_ex%20A.pdf">wrote</a> that the chapter “was designed to influence judges in multi-billion-dollar climate cases, was funded by climate litigation funders, was written by academics with little relevant scientific expertise and documented financial and institutional ties to climate litigation advocacy, and was shaped by a climate plaintiffs’ attorney.”
The letter was addressed to Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. The Pentagon declined to comment.
Knudsen said that the academies should be suspended or disbarred from “all federal contracts and grants across the executive branch.” The National Academies received tens of millions of dollars in grant money every year from the federal government. 
&#8220;Taxpayer dollars should not be used to fund efforts that impartially influence judges. Given multiple opportunities, NASEM and NSF still refuse to take responsibility for publishing a biased climate science manual violating their public commitments and legal obligations,” Knudsen told The Daily Wire. “The organizations producing these manuals and pushing their climate agendas on judges must be investigated and all funding to them should stop. As Attorney General, I will continue to sound the alarm until we put an end to their deception.”
The <a href="https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/26919/chapter/1">manual</a> was produced with the Federal Judicial Center to serve as a guide for federal judges. Last month, the judicial center <a href="https://www.wsj.com/opinion/reference-manual-on-scientific-evidence-climate-science-elena-kagan-federal-judges-f8e8604a?gaa_at=eafs&amp;gaa_n=AWEtsqenuW1BIeQcsljVCaPocCtWHummF76Pu_cnQ0KlguiQAeIUNm7GcmAXGmI1sSg%3D&amp;gaa_ts=6997208c&amp;gaa_sig=wVTzH3siKR3DaS1OsCzap4UGuaUWOHjVYeBgLh2Y2IVt5AfO9iotN2ZjJgaB3QunvcBEg3kfNQRJ2dCjybLV0Q%3D%3D">removed</a> the climate chapter from its version of the book after more than two dozen Republican attorneys general warned it could improperly influence their decisions. They <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/taxpayer-funded-science-org-faces-demands-from-gop-officials-over-climate-activism">urged</a> the National Academy in February to do the same. 
One issue raised by Knudsen regarding the flagged chapter was that the manual was funded in part by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has <a href="https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-activist-side-third-party-litigation-support/">reportedly</a> donated to the Collective Action Fund, a group that has <a href="https://freebeacon.com/latest-news/anti-energy-lawfare-congressional-investigation-uncovers-dark-money-fueling-climate-change-lawsuits-nationwide/">contributed money</a> to climate litigation firm Sher Edling. The attorneys general argue that this creates a conflict of interest and violates the terms of an $875,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to the National Academy to develop the manual. 
The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation told The Daily Wire that it donated $100,000 to the Collective Action Fund in 2017 and hasn&#8217;t provided any more funds to the group since then.
&#8220;We were not involved in either the development or review of the final guide,&#8221; the foundation said. &#8220;As you have likely seen on our website, the focus of our environmental work is not climate-driven but instead focused on conservation of landscapes and seascapes.&#8221;
The attorneys general also pointed to the ties between the chapter’s authors and reviewers and climate change advocacy. Jessica Wentz, one of the authors, is a fellow at Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. She wrote in an <a href="https://climate.law.columbia.edu/sites/climate.law.columbia.edu/files/content/Willow%20amicus%20brief%20-%20FILED.pdf">amicus brief</a> opposing the development of an oil drilling project in Alaska that “the world needs to phase out fossil fuels as rapidly as possible in order to avert potentially catastrophic levels of global warming and climate change.”
The Sabin Center has <a href="https://climate.law.columbia.edu/content/support-us">received support</a> from the Rockefeller Family Fund, which has, in turn, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2024/05/28/nx-s1-4977572/rockefellers-profited-on-fossil-fuels-these-days-theyre-taking-aim-at-the-industry">reportedly</a> funded “a wave of litigation” against the fossil fuel industry. 
Radley Horton, another co-author of the chapter in question, is a professor at Columbia University’s Climate School. Horton, who has <a href="https://www.eli.org/vibrant-environment-blog/educating-judges-climate-litigation-today-and-tomorrow">previously</a> trained judges on climate litigation, has <a href="https://therealnews.com/rhorton1127climate">said</a> that “it’s absolutely critical that there be a global effort to do everything we can to dramatically draw down emissions.”
Columbia University’s Climate School, which has a Center for Sustainable Development <a href="https://ccsi.columbia.edu/donate/">funded</a> by the Rockefeller Brothers, a group that has also donated to the Collective Action Fund. 
Those acknowledged in the chapter included Michael Burger, who is representing Honolulu in litigation against energy companies, and Michael Gerrard, who has advocated for “decarbonization” through climate-related lawsuits. Burger serves as counsel for Sher Edling, the climate activist firm. 
In the initial stages of planning for the fourth edition of the manual, it was <a href="https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/26231/chapter/1">suggested</a> by the National Academies that the new manual would be “accessible to judges who might be more skeptical of climate science’s methods and conclusions.” Scientists skeptical of climate change theories were listed off as “not credible.” 
The attorneys general also say that no reviewers of the manual represented “materially different viewpoints on climate science,” which they said was a violation of the National Science Foundation grant. 
In light of these issues, the Republican officials say that the Trump administration should cut funding for the National Academies, which in 2024 received $84 million in contracts or grants from the Department of Transportation, $7 million from the Department of Energy, and $33 million from the Department of War. 
They also called for Congress to initiate an investigation into the development of the manual.
Other states that signed on include Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
The National Science Foundation declined to comment.

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