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On episode 109 of The Climate Realism Show, we look at two recent polls that show climate change opinion is sharply waning in its perception as a threat to the public. At the same time, ESG funds have essentially collapsed as investors pull their money.
Joining us to discuss these issues is Donald Kendal deputy director of Heartland’s Socialism Research Center, and video host of the In the Tank weekly podcast.
Plus, host Anthony Watts, The Heartland Institute’s H. Sterling Burnett, and Linnea Lueken analyze this downturn. And, as always, we have the Crazy Climate News of the Week. Join us LIVE at 1 p.m. ET (12 p.m. CT) for the kind of climate realism you can’t find anywhere else, and join the chat to get your questions answered, too.
Follow us on Instagram 👉 @HeartlandInstitute
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Support this content 👉 Donate – The Heartland Institute
Joining us to discuss these issues is Donald Kendal deputy director of Heartland’s Socialism Research Center, and video host of the In the Tank weekly podcast.
Plus, host Anthony Watts, The Heartland Institute’s H. Sterling Burnett, and Linnea Lueken analyze this downturn. And, as always, we have the Crazy Climate News of the Week. Join us LIVE at 1 p.m. ET (12 p.m. CT) for the kind of climate realism you can’t find anywhere else, and join the chat to get your questions answered, too.
Follow us on Instagram 👉 @HeartlandInstitute
We’re on Facebook 👉 The Heartland Institute
Follow Linnea on Twitter 👉 @LinneaLueken
Support this content 👉 Donate – The Heartland Institute
Creators & Guests
Host
Host
H. Sterling Burnett
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., hosts The Heartland Institute’s Environment and Climate News podcast. Burnett also is the director of Heartland’s Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy, is the editor of Heartland's Climate Change Weekly email, and oversees the production of the monthly newspaper Environment & Climate News. Prior to joining The Heartland Institute in 2014, Burnett worked at the National Center for Policy Analysis for 18 years, ending his tenure there as senior fellow in charge of environmental policy. He has held various positions in professional and public policy organizations within the field. Burnett is a member of the Environment and Natural Resources Task Force in the Texas Comptroller’s e-Texas commission, served as chairman of the board for the Dallas Woods and Water Conservation Club, is a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, works as an academic advisor for Collegians for a Constructive Tomorrow, is an advisory board member to the Cornwall Alliance, and is an advisor for the Energy, Natural Resources and Agricultural Task Force at the American Legislative Exchange Council.
What is Environment and Climate News Podcast ?
The Heartland Institute podcast featuring scientists, authors, and policy experts who take the non-alarmist, climate-realist position on environment and energy policy.
And that's what climate change is about. It is literally not figuratively a clear and present danger.
Linnea Lueken:We are in the beginning of a mass extinction.
Speaker 3:The ability of c 02 to do the heavy work of creating a climate catastrophe is almost nil at this point.
Anthony Watts:The price of oil has been artificially elevated to the point of insanity.
H. Sterling Burnett:That's not how you power a modern industrial system.
Donald Kendal:The ultimate goal of this renewable energy, you know, plan is to reach the exact same point that we're at now.
H. Sterling Burnett:You know who's tried that? Germany. 7 straight days of no wind for Germany. Their factories are shutting down.
Linnea Lueken:They really do act like weather didn't happen prior to, like, 1910. Today is Friday.
Anthony Watts:That's right, Grady, you pint sized antagonist. It is Friday, and this is our own personal Friday protest. The Climate Realism Show, episode 109. Climate cult collapse. The people and the market Speak Their Mind.
Anthony Watts:I'm your host, Anthony Watts, senior fellow for environment and climate at the Heartland Institute. Joining me is doctor h w Burnett, director of the Arthur b Robinson Center at the Heartland Institute, and Linnea Lukin, research fellow at the Robinson Center. Also joining us is Donald Kendall, deputy director of Heartland's Socialism Research Center and video host of the tab the In the Tank weekly podcast, which happens on Thursdays at the same time. Welcome, guys.
H. Sterling Burnett:Good to be here again.
Anthony Watts:Thank you. So, on episode 109, we're gonna talk about 2 recent polls that show climate change opinion is taking a dive and the perception and the as climate change is a threat to the public is taking the dive at the same time. Also, ESG funds have essentially collapsed as investors have pulled their money out in a big way. All of this, excuse me, all of this suggest a big downturn. Some might even call it a climate crisis of public opinion.
Anthony Watts:Now we'll get to that in a moment. But first, we've got the crazy climate news of the week, some of the nuttiest eye rolling stuff we've seen on the Internet. First of all, Al Gore is outraged. What else is new? Right?
Anthony Watts:Al Gore is outraged that the Valley Authority is building a new natural gas plant. Oh, noes. It's gonna destroy the planet. Yeah. Gosh.
Anthony Watts:Sorry, Al. We don't care.
H. Sterling Burnett:No. I I I share Gore's outrage. They're closing a coal plant, to justify building the gas plant. You've got a coal plant. It's providing cheap energy.
H. Sterling Burnett:It it it it's working fine, and they're closing that because they're cow towing to, climate alarm. You know, on the on the on the plus side, at least they are rejecting calls to replace all the energy that coal plant is using with wind and, solar and battery backup, much more expensive, much less reliable. But I wish they just said no. We're charged with providing power across the Tennessee Valley. Coal is doing it, and we're not changing that.
Anthony Watts:Gosh. What a concept. Let's stick to our charter.
Linnea Lueken:Right. And, it's it's it's interesting too because Tennessee Valley Authority, last year had some really bad blackouts if people who live in that region remember. They may have had some this year too, but I I know in particular, January of 2023, that winter, they had, like, I don't know, a reduction to 5% load for several hours and and stuff like that. They had they had a real bad time during some winter storms last year. So the idea that they would shut down any operating plants, I mean, unless the coal plant is, you know, struggling and it's not working properly anymore or something, But the idea that they would be, removing plants at all seems like kind of a poor idea at this point.
H. Sterling Burnett:Yeah. They should be they should be adding reliable power, and that would be a gas plant, not replacing reliable power with another source of reliable power or certainly not, unreliable power. That should it it it shouldn't be a few years ago, Boston created a tunnel, right, to to supposedly alleviate, traffic jams. But then they close the roads above it, right, and and create a green space rather than saying, we need more roads, so let's do a tunnel and keep the roads we have. They they close one set of roads.
H. Sterling Burnett:They open the tunnel, leaving aside the flooding flooding issues. No. TVA needs more power, not an equal amount of power replaced.
Anthony Watts:No. Alright. So let's go on to our next one. Greta gets a new gig. Now this one's pretty disturbing.
Anthony Watts:I wanna point out, you know, if there was ever any question about Greta needing to find a photo op every week somehow, some way, this proves it. And so she goes right in the middle of a Palestinian, rights for Palestinians protest. She's dropped from climate change to Hamas and wearing a a what do they call it? A kefir? Anyway, there's a video I think this plays if you can play it, maybe we can hear audio.
Anthony Watts:No. I guess not. But, anyway, the point is is that Greta has become irrelevant in the world stage, and she is scrapping, grasping at straws, trying to find some way to keep herself relevant. So she shows up at a Hamas protest.
Donald Kendal:Yeah. This one this one rubs me the wrong way because I always kinda put Greta in kind of the the camp of people that are, like, the true believers of the climate crisis. You got a lot of people that are doing this for clout or, you know, chasing money or something like that. And I always thought, like, maybe she actually believes all the crazy stuff that she's saying, but this just kind of flies out the window now because, like, if you're really fearing the existential threat, the world's gonna come to an end because of climate change. Let me just put that aside for a minute so I can do this, pro Palestine, marches.
Donald Kendal:So it just doesn't it doesn't comport in my mind.
Speaker 6:Here to show that we think it is outrageous and inexcusable for Eurovision to let Israel participate while committing a genocide. Yes. It's a song contest where where Israel, a country that is currently committing a genocide in Gaza, are allowed to compete.
H. Sterling Burnett:Rather than rather
Speaker 6:than no. Very clear example that does say that when a country accepts in a way that when a country, behaves in a way that is unacceptable, then Eurovision excludes them. So why not Israel?
Anthony Watts:We are to show that we
Speaker 6:think it is outrageous and
Anthony Watts:Well, Greta, I have only one thing to say to that.
Linnea Lueken:How dare you?
H. Sterling Burnett:You know, rather than, protesting the fact that they're having song competitions while the earth is burning, right, if as a true believer, She's saying the problem is, they're allowing Israel to participate in a song contest. My suspicion my strong, strong suspicion is she knows even less about the history of Israel and Palestine and the conflict there than she did about climate change when she went off on that. She was she was fed a pack of, lies by her teachers about climate change and now by her peers, or maybe she just saw him on TV and said, I wanna be part of that. But, I doubt she's an expert on the history of, of Palestine, and I don't know why anyone ever took
Anthony Watts:her seriously that climate change. People.
H. Sterling Burnett:That's what I understand. And I I don't understand why they they ever thought that, but I certainly don't understand. I haven't seen her in the negotiations over there, for the past 40 years. It's disturbing. She gets so much attention.
Anthony Watts:Yeah. But I dub her the irrelevant munchkin. Let's move on.
Donald Kendal:Wait. I thought Al Gore was the irrelevant munchkin. Well, he eating plan.
H. Sterling Burnett:Look. The way his, his, weight fluctuates, he is no munchkin. It's munchkin.
Anthony Watts:Alright. So here, we got this oh, no's. We're gonna roast moment on Twitter, from, code red earth. Yeah. We've got that.
Anthony Watts:And this this guy is saying, Johann Rockstrom, whom I've never heard of, if we go past 2 degrees centigrade of global warming, we will enter a completely unknown terrain, a planet that is not even resembling our own planet, a place we haven't seen in the past 3000000 years. Oh, no. Gosh. That's terrible. So what do you think?
Linnea Lueken:I think this is what we call a little bit of exaggerated.
Anthony Watts:Yeah. You got that right.
H. Sterling Burnett:It's alarm, you know, it's alarm and furtherance of the narrative. In the end, anything you have to ask yourself, where did we get the god's eye point of view that we know what the the optimum temperature of the earth should be when it's been all over the place historically? And that it just so happens that the optimum temperature evidently was sometime in the 19 fifties. But now we know it's way too hot, and that disaster will be in the offing. Look.
H. Sterling Burnett:These people have a narrative they're pushing for a variety of reasons, some of them true believers, some of them money, you know, just cashing in, some of them grasping for power because they think they know how other people ought to live. They they wanna be design entire societies, because they're so smart. And, this is just one more statement in furtherance of that goal. Yeah.
Donald Kendal:I thought there was a I thought there was a report from somebody that was like, alright. When it comes to, you know, the predictions about climate change, like, we gotta ease up because we're turning more people off of this. So you gotta be worried about climate change than we're turning on to this this idea. And I remember one of the most extreme ones that I heard. This is, like I think goes back to, like, 2019.
Donald Kendal:It was this idea that we're gonna reach this tipping point where clouds were gonna cease to exist, and then the world was gonna fry or something like that. And that might have been the one that actually was like, alright. Let's ease it up a little bit, guys. This guy didn't get the memo, apparently.
Anthony Watts:Yeah. I mean, climb according to these folk, climate change affects everything, and it's going to destroy all life on the planet. So, you know, anything goes in their minds, really. It's just really sad.
H. Sterling Burnett:They they are they are people who who read a single word from Immanuel Kant, existential, and they think they know what it means. And, and and, a, they don't know what it means. They certainly don't know what Kant meant by it, And, b, there is no existential threat. It just doesn't exist.
Anthony Watts:Yeah. Alright. Clouds could disappear catastrophically. Yeah. Yeah.
Anthony Watts:Right. So
Linnea Lueken:Well, hang on a second. I wanna I wanna talk about the, the science on that for a second there because I have been reliably informed that warmer air holds more moisture over and over and over again. That's the claim is that we're gonna have more rain because, the the warmer air is, able to produce more or have a higher moisture content. Is that not true anymore?
Anthony Watts:Well
Linnea Lueken:Or is there a tipping point? Is that what
H. Sterling Burnett:I'm saying? The rain the rain is gonna come from cloudless days like but when I was young Oh. My mother used to tell me when it was raining on a on a open cloudless day, the devil was beating his wife. Those were her tears. Now, you're right, of course, Linnea.
H. Sterling Burnett:That's what the science shows. That's what all the climate models show, by the way. You know, I don't think they're science, but what they show is as a feedback mechanism, more moisture evaporates, forms clouds, that's more water vapor in the atmosphere, water vapor being the dominant greenhouse gas, by the way. So I don't know where they get that.
Anthony Watts:Yeah. Well, it's I think, basically, science goes climate science goes wherever the tweaked model output leads them. And if a model output says less cloud, I'm absolutely delighted to crisis. Right?
H. Sterling Burnett:Yeah. Alright. More rain climate change, less rain climate change. More hurricanes climate change. Fewer hurricanes climate change.
Anthony Watts:Alright. The Guardian put up an article up the other day, and this article basically says the world's top climate scientist expect global warming to blow past the 1.5 degree centigrade target. Mhmm. And so that's part of what this other one was about where this guy is saying it's gonna hit 2 degrees centigrade, and we're not gonna recognize the world anymore. So so what they did is they went out and they they queried, like, you know, about 800 or so different climate scientists and then tabulated the results.
Anthony Watts:The problem is is that opinion is not science, and I point this out on the Climate Realism article published today. The bottom line here is is that opinion in climate science has a terrible track record. You know, there's been all these predictions of gloom, doom, tipping points. This is gonna disappear. That's gonna disappear.
Anthony Watts:This is gonna happen more often or less often. I mean, they can't even make up their minds about what really is going to happen. But here's the important thing. This graph right here, remember that guy screaming about, you know, oh, no. 2 degrees centigrade?
Anthony Watts:Well, it's already happened in Europe. This is the longest temperature record in Europe right here, and this is from the Berkeley Earth surface temperature data set. And if you can see, since about 18, 20 or so, there's been a 2.0 degrees centigrade rise in temperature. And Europe is still there, and it's still recognizable. You know?
Anthony Watts:I mean, it's like these folks can't even get history into their minds. It's only about what climate models say about the future. Damn the history. We're only interested in what the future is gonna be or or won't be. You know?
Anthony Watts:And it it's it's just absolutely nuts, the levels they go to to work themselves into a titty.
H. Sterling Burnett:I I advocate that our listeners look up the work by Kesten Green and Scott Armstrong on expert opinions versus scientific forecasting. They you know, there are journals that are devoted to this. There are papers that they have written, devoted to this, and they find that expert opinion is no better than the flip of a coin. That, unless you follow certain principles, when you are making forecasts, and and they have the list of principles and they look at how it compares on climate science, but not just climate, it's it's forecasting for anything. These principles, hold stand up quite well and that these experts don't even take into account these principles.
H. Sterling Burnett:So it's a 5050, you know, it's a flip of a coin.
Anthony Watts:Yeah. Yeah. So, anyway, opinion is not science. Now finally, just like any episode of Mythbusters, we can't get through the show without showing something exploding or going up in flames. And here we have we have a charging station in Italy that is burning, and, it there's some video there.
Anthony Watts:Run the video. Oh, it's it just it's not melt. It's a whole charging station complex up in flames. I wonder what the carbon footprint of that thing is now.
H. Sterling Burnett:To be clear, we're we know that this is a charging station, not natural gas things blowing up like we made a mistake a a few weeks ago. We we checked our facts here, folks. That's what this is.
Anthony Watts:Yeah. Well, it seems like everything associated with EVs goes up in flames Mhmm. Later late. Anyway, enough of that. Some cartoons for this week.
Anthony Watts:This is from our resident WWT cartoonist Josh, who has a website, cartoons by Joss, and he publishes some great stuff. This one here, the green economy. We're talking about going into the toilet here in a couple of minutes, but I thought this was appropriate. Just look at the size of that toilet.
H. Sterling Burnett:Could you Brew. Could you make that full screen Could you make that full screen for our audience members who may not have great vision? There we go.
Anthony Watts:Yep. It's a mega toilet. Okay. Now, you know, if you ever read Twitter, you'll see that well, like this guy here, Johan, whatever the hell his name was, rock Rohan's rock star or whatever, you know, wailing about 2 degrees centigrade. They get themselves worked up into it, a Twitter Tuesday.
Anthony Watts:And so this is Josh's take on one day in the mind or one day as a climate alarmist. You wake up in the morning, you write some emails, delete some emails, tweet about me. Then, oh my, the sun's moving. Gosh. Must be a crisis.
Anthony Watts:It's falling out of the sky. It's a catastrophe. I told everyone, but they didn't listen. We're doomed. We're doomed.
Anthony Watts:We send. We used up too much heat. If only I'd shouted louder. Just put it
H. Sterling Burnett:at full screen and let the audience read it, you know, or see it.
Anthony Watts:There you
Donald Kendal:go. That cartoon looks like someone that, I think we're all familiar with. I don't wanna say his name. I'm
Linnea Lueken:kinda confused. I was about to ask, is this supposed to resemble anyone?
Anthony Watts:Oh my goodness. And it's true. I mean, you can see a repetitive pattern in these folks, some of the worst case ones out there where they just do the same thing over and over and over every day. It's they're like robots. Oh, well.
Anthony Watts:Alright. Next cartoon. Climate alarm made simple. There you go. This is it.
Anthony Watts:Give me your money so we can save the planet. Shut up. You know?
Donald Kendal:About the the the the past cartoon, you know, you made that mention of, like, this is just, like, the the routine that they go through. I was actually thinking about this last time we were talking about climate change stuff and, like, you know, some like the early on kind of champions of the climate alarmist movement, like, whether it's, like, James Hansen or something. Like, I I wonder if James Hansen ever thought back in, like, the eighties or seventies whenever he kind of started that gig, if he would ever make it to 2025 and not have already been roasted alive by the sun, like, just the fact that he's, like, getting into, like, his older age, don't you feel like that should make him kind of, like, look back on his career and be like, maybe I overstated a couple
Anthony Watts:of things. Well, you know, I'm sure his prediction of what would happen on things like Twitter are just as good as his climate predictions.
H. Sterling Burnett:Yeah. No. The reason they don't they don't reconsider, they never admit they're wrong because this is they're like a climate they're like a death cult. They say, oh, here's the date when the end, the end of the earth, and we're all gonna be taken up by aliens or whatever. And, the date comes, and they say, oh, well, we got the math wrong, but but but we're still right.
H. Sterling Burnett:And, yeah, I saw this. Yeah. They're all they're always right in retrospect because no matter what they predict is what what happened to have occurred. Hansen has not. He's just he has addressed the fact that some of his prediction he goes, oh, well, I never meant it that way.
Donald Kendal:Mhmm.
H. Sterling Burnett:They they took it out of context. Oh, well, that's still coming, but it's just a few years later than I thought because we've we've done stuff, by the way. I'm out there protesting and and stopping coal plant people from going into coal plants. So there's always an excuse for why they're wrong, you know, to give to give, Paul Ehrlich credit. He almost never, gives an excuse for why he was wrong.
H. Sterling Burnett:He just says, oh, you know, you know, it's still bad. It's always bad. No matter what bet no matter what's happening, it's bad. And, you know, I think his assumption is one day he'll be proven right.
Anthony Watts:Yeah. Well, retractions and admissions of failure are not good are not, good public relations concepts in the climate alarmism world. Now I wanna talk about something that's not a laughing matter. We have right now a severe solar solar storm alert issued by NOAA this morning. There was a joint press conference this morning between NOAA and NASA talking about this major CME event that happened on the Sun, yesterday, and it's blowing off 5 CMEs in rapid fire succession.
Anthony Watts:And they're worried about 3 of them combining into something that I've never heard of that they call a cannibal CME. And I wanted to alert everyone to this because the results of this will be that around 8 o'clock EST tonight, it's gonna pass the l one Lagrange point, and our monitoring satellite there will give us an idea of just how intense this is gonna be. We think it's gonna be, you know, a a a class 4, which is like one scientist described it as like a cat 4 hurricane in space. Well, that's a pretty big deal. So we may see issues with, satellites having to be shut down, satellites that are damaged.
Anthony Watts:The people in the ISS may have to go to their safe room and shut down the station. We may see disruptions in, Starlink, GPS, and other things as this blows through through tonight through tomorrow morning. There's gonna be Aurora at low latitudes throughout the United States and Europe, so be on the lookout for that. I wanna point out that this sunspot you see right here, it's huge. It's on the the size category of the Carrington sunspot in 18/59, the one that set telegraph on fire telegraph lines on fire and things like that.
Anthony Watts:If a Carrington event happened today, we would see a major disruption globally in our power grids and our electronic systems, Internet, so forth and so on. Fortunately, this one does not have the magnetic potential of that particular sunspot. So, no, NASA is saying it's not gonna be it's gonna be bad, but it's not gonna be Carrington event bad. But what this makes me think about is things that are more worrisome than climate change. You know, the sun, if it issued, like I said, a Carrington event type flare, we would be toast.
Anthony Watts:Our civilization would get, you know, that's this guy talking about getting pushed back 2000000 years into their dark ages or whatever. That's what a Carrington event would do. And so Right. Right. Far more worrisome than climate change, in my opinion.
H. Sterling Burnett:It didn't push us back into the dark ages when it happened before. That's an exaggeration. It would destroy some infrastructure, but we can rebuild.
Anthony Watts:But yeah. Yeah.
H. Sterling Burnett:It's it's not an EMP. It's you know, that that takes out all of it. It may destroy some of it. Tonight, what I'm worried about is whether it interferes with the broadcast of the Texas Rangers game. You know, so as long as it doesn't do that or interfere Yeah.
Anthony Watts:Priorities. Growing priorities. Exactly. Exactly.
Linnea Lueken:Anthony, are you, familiar? Because I'm not familiar with the, like, the k index that Noah puts out, but they've bumped it up to a 7. What what what does that mean if you do know?
Anthony Watts:Well, I normally, I see k indexes, over the last year running around 2 to 4. And so this one being bumped up to a 7, so that indicates, almost, essentially a doubling of, business as usual. And I suspect it'll go even higher, but, we won't know until we get some more data when the the CME is past the, Lagrange point and the monoprint satellite there. But, there's gonna be some disruption tonight. It'll be interesting to watch, and, hopefully, nothing really bad happens.
Anthony Watts:And, hopefully, the people in the ISS can get through this in their safe room without too much trouble.
H. Sterling Burnett:I know this. I think we're all old enough on this call to remember 2,000 when I kept hearing about the, the Armageddon for computing in 2000, the y two k. And, I was at a friend's house. We had a big cookout, stayed overnight out there. We called it the branch perlinian compound because her name was Pearl.
H. Sterling Burnett:And, you know what? My computer turned on the next day. My phones worked. Electronics worked. Despite the fact none of the people had planned for y two k, none of the technology was planned for y two k.
H. Sterling Burnett:It still functioned. We may have some disruptions, but, I don't think anyone has to pull a Leslie Nielsen or in the, airplane going or whoever that guy was from airplane running around going crazy.
Anthony Watts:Yeah. This visualization here from NASA kinda gives, an idea of what it looks like. And it's just blowing out this big supercharged, blast of gas and ionic particles and plasma and all sorts of stuff into space headed towards Earth. And, yeah, it it Earth's magnetic field deflects most of it, but but it causes all kinds of disruptions in the magnetic field, Aurora, you know, induction of currents into power lines and things like that. And, of course, it threatens the satellites in space, so that's that's one of the bigger concerns.
Anthony Watts:Alright. Let's move on from that to our main topic. And our main topic is dozens of surveys conducted by a variety of polling organizations over the past 2 decades consistently demonstrate some clear result that there's a plurality or a slight majority of the public for registered voters or people likely to vote are somewhat or very concerned about climate change. When asked to rank it, well, it doesn't rank so high. And a recent Monmouth's University poll reveals a noticeable shift in the American public's perception of climate change that came out this week.
Anthony Watts:And it highlighted a reduction both in the perceived urgency of the issue and support for governmental action. The decline in concern, especially among younger adults, prompts a critical examination of what might be influencing these trends and the potential implications for climate policy. And so we have this, this graph this graphic showing American attitudes on climate change by age. And look at those dips. That's some pretty significant dips.
Anthony Watts:And it shows that, you know, it's going back to levels prior to some of the climate alarm that's been distributed out there. And I I think if the crying wolf is starting to, sink in. You know?
H. Sterling Burnett:Yeah. Is it despite the propaganda or because of the propaganda?
Anthony Watts:Donald, what do you think?
Donald Kendal:Yeah. I mean, we we talked about this a little bit on, in the tank episode yesterday, and, I I was pretty blown away by this. I mean, in the prior weeks, we had talked about, kind of the state of climate alarmists, you know, of the year 2024, And we referenced a couple of polls that showed, like, a little bit of a dip here, a little bit of a dip there. I think Pew Research kind of showed, like, couple of percentage points kind of drop across the board when it came to, you know, perceived climate alarm. But I don't think I've ever seen a poll that was this drastic.
Donald Kendal:I mean, just looking at it from 2021 to 2024, you see a 10 percentage point drop across the board of all the different age groups. And the most, noteworthy, in my opinion, is the 18 to 34 year olds, which, you know, generally speaking, are supposedly the the most concerned about climate change, the most progressive thinkers out there. I think Greta still fits in that category there. But that dropped from 67% just 3 years ago to 50%. That's a 17 percentage point drop in 3 years.
Donald Kendal:And then a colleague of ours that's on the, in the tank, Chris Talgo, he was talking about this and just kind of referencing the lines just from 2015 to 2024 and still noting, at least kind of like a a leveling off or even like a slight increase on that. But then my response to that was you're telling me that, like, 10 years of climate propaganda, like, barely moved the needle on this. So I thought these results, these findings were were pretty staggering, and I just can't I I can only imagine, you know, the John Kerry's and the Al Gore's sitting here just, you know, just just pulling their hair out over these results. That's what it seems like to me.
H. Sterling Burnett:You know, you you're spot on there, Donnie. You're you're you're a 100% correct because now Monmouth hasn't been doing this comparative poll forever, but the Gallup organization, a few people might have heard of it, has been doing, climate polling for a long time. And they go back to 2020, and they say ups and downs, just like this does, ups and downs of climate concern, but they've shown a decline. And basically, despite 24 years from from from 2000 to 2024, 25 years now, in inclusive of polling, The concern is about where it was, before, climate change went from global warming to climate change and climate change to the climate crisis.
Anthony Watts:Mhmm.
H. Sterling Burnett:So I don't know if it shows that people are sort of becoming numb to the message, or if other things have just become so much more, immediate, you know, the protest, people graduating and not having jobs, inflation. I don't know. But what what, Gallup's poll show is that it doesn't matter. Year after year after year, when asked to rank against other issues, climate change comes in last either dead last or near last. And the most recent Gallup poll, the Earth Day poll, showed that climate change out of out of 14 issues, climate change tied for 11th.
H. Sterling Burnett:And you know what it was tied with? Energy. We need more energy. So climate change were classing directly with the the policies to fight climate change, which was we need more fossil fuels. That was interesting.
H. Sterling Burnett:But, you know, it's health care came above it. Immigration came above it. Crime came above it. Social Security came above it. Jobs in the economy came above it.
H. Sterling Burnett:And that's not this isn't a a one off. This is 24 years of surveys show the same thing. Climate change is not moving the needle.
Anthony Watts:Yeah. I wanna interrupt just a second and go back to something that Linnea was talking about earlier related to the sun. Linnea, you were talking about the k index, well, being at a 7. I just got an alert in. It just came in by my email.
Anthony Watts:And this graph here shows, the Boyle index taking a hockey stick. This is this is wow. And so what's this That's
Linnea Lueken:not a hockey
Anthony Watts:stick. Average ever.
H. Sterling Burnett:That's a straight
Linnea Lueken:edge. Yeah. It's just yep.
Anthony Watts:So if they have a over 3 hours, they're likely to get a k index of 8 out of this. There you go.
H. Sterling Burnett:And how does the k what does the k index cash out into in effects?
Anthony Watts:I'm sorry. Say that again?
H. Sterling Burnett:What does the k index cash out into in effects? So so we go
Anthony Watts:from the solar wind.
H. Sterling Burnett:Okay. And what does that mean for the earth if we go to 8?
Anthony Watts:Well Does it mean all
H. Sterling Burnett:electronics go off, that that your transformer outside your house explodes? What?
Anthony Watts:Got all of these, charged particles racing through space that are gonna impact the upper atmosphere. And when they impact the upper atmosphere, then they create aurora and all kinds of other effects. So, basically, what they're saying here is that we're seeing a boil index that we haven't seen for decades. And so this is gonna be a a pretty good sized one, and I would say that a very good chance of a solar storm being seen at low latitudes.
Linnea Lueken:I can read off the effects for you, Sterling, from NOAA. They say area of impact is gonna be primarily poleward of 50 degrees. Power system voltage irregularities are possible. False alarms might be triggered on protection devices. Systems might experience surface charging, increased drag on satellites and orientation problems, intermittent satellite navigation problems, loss of lock and increased range error, high frequency radio will be intermittent, and you'll see a bunch of Aurora as low as Pennsylvania to Iowa and Oregon.
Anthony Watts:Yeah. So anyway, be on the lookout. Well, let's get back to our main topic. We were talking about the Gallup poll with Sterling. So we have some of the, the graphics, from the Gallup poll there.
Anthony Watts:The first one talks about drinking water safety. It it tops the environmental worries. So here's the here's the actual Gallup poll itself. And they did this on Earth Day, so it's it meshes pretty well with the Monmouth poll in terms of timing. But one of the graphs that we have that I I sent to our producer, Andy, shows that drinking water safety tops the environmental worries in the United States, and, you know, global warming or climate change is 4th.
H. Sterling Burnett:Yeah. Even among environmental issues, climate change doesn't top the area of concern.
Anthony Watts:Right. Right. And a more complex graph coming from the, Gallup suggest that 22% don't worry about climate change at all, and 16%, yeah, just a little. A fair amount to a great deal or 20 42%, respectively. And and this follows everything we've seen over this whole climate change issue for the past 20 years.
Anthony Watts:It just doesn't get a lot of people worried. You know? They just don't see it as something that's gonna reach out and bother them on a day to day basis. And that's why we see the climate alarmists try to get in and turn weather into climate events, which is a completely bogus thing, of course. But they do
Linnea Lueken:it How dare you?
Anthony Watts:How dare you? Anyway, the problem is is that some people believe this. They can't figure out the difference between weather and climate, and that's where some of this alarm that we're seeing comes from.
H. Sterling Burnett:Well, you know, it's look. This is this is the media's fault to some extent. They they if it bleeds, it leads. And the worse, you know, they they focus on the extremes. It's the same thing going on in college campuses today.
H. Sterling Burnett:Right? Every night, every day, I am, you know, assaulted with pictures on the air of these protests and tents being taken down. And yet they recently did a poll of college students, and it turns out most of them don't care a whit about the Palestinians and Israel. Most of them wanna get on with their lives. A majority don't follow it at all.
H. Sterling Burnett:But you think that campus activism, that everybody's out there in the streets, that none of the students are going to their classes or staying in their dorms if you watch the news. Well, the same thing here. You hear from the extremes. Oh, everybody's concerned about climate change. How do we know?
H. Sterling Burnett:Well, there's protests. There are people doing things to paintings. There are people defacing statues, extinction rebellion. It's having a march. So as if they represent everyone as is as opposed to a rump of the population, even a rump of youth.
Anthony Watts:Yeah. It's the media is out there pushing an agenda, and the agenda a lot what we've discovered through our own research here at Heartland, and other media outlets have also confirmed this is that a lot of these protests are being funded by and and being populated with people outside of the campus. It has nothing to do with the campus itself.
H. Sterling Burnett:Oh, yeah. I think they they found that, less than a third of the people who were have been arrested so far, it turns out less than a third of them actually, go to the school.
Anthony Watts:Yeah. And we see a lot of that in the climate change protests too. You know? People get bust in and get paid to go protest to make make it look good for the cameras.
Donald Kendal:Yeah. So I wanna I wanna ask, Anthony and and Sterling a question because an episode that we did of In the Tank a couple of weeks ago was focused on the state of the climate alarmist movement, and we we kind of pulled in a whole bunch of different factors, I'm specifically not asking for Linnea's opinion because she was on the show, so I already know it. But, we we talked about a bunch of different factors, whether it's, like, some of these polling or some of these other statements, by, you know, like Larry Fink in talking about wind and solar as not necessarily being what we need to kind of run the energy of the the future as it relates to AI, that sort of thing. And then, also, like, just the state of the the advocates for climate action, you know, whether it's Al Gore, who's kind of increasingly irrelevant, or John Kerry, who's retiring as a climate czar, or Greta, who's more interested in protesting Israel than climate right now.
Anthony Watts:Oh.
Donald Kendal:And I just wonder what you think the state of the climate alarmist movement is right now. Is it strong like every president says about our economy in the state of the union, or is it poor? What do you think?
Anthony Watts:Well, I think it's somewhat in more disarray than it has been in the past, because it like you say, it's been you know, people like Greta are are, you know, blowing their image out there. You know? Oh, well, climate's not so important now. It's more important about Israel. Well, what's that gonna do to people that saw her as a a true champion of the cause?
Anthony Watts:It's gonna dishearten some of them, I'm sure. But I I think that, you know, we've we've got Al Gore becoming insignificant. We've got greater becoming insignificant. We've got some of these other big name becoming insignificant, because they've been crying wolf constantly constantly, and none of the stuff comes to pass. And it's it's all about the future, and it's never about what's happened in the past or what's happening in the present, except when we wanna scare you because the weather turned bad, and it's actually climate according to them.
Anthony Watts:So they're I I think they're grasping at straws right now, trying to convince the public that climate change is a clear and present danger.
Donald Kendal:And, Sterling, I'm I'm curious of your thoughts too, and I'll just add in one more thing, and that seems to be and and you referenced it earlier, that it seems like the current face of the climate activist movement right now is is not even just like the wholesome Greta Thunberg striking, you know, every Friday from school. No. It's like the extinction rebellion wackos that are gluing themselves to banks and throwing paint all over everything. It's like they're basically doing everything they can to annoy as many people as possible. So so what do you think?
Donald Kendal:State of the climate alarmist movement.
H. Sterling Burnett:Well, two things. So a lot of the a lot of the celebrities that were tied to it have, you haven't seen their faces in years, doing that. I think because they got so much backlash. I think Leonardo DiCaprio, for instance, got tired of of it being pointed out. He didn't want you to travel, but he was in private jets to a private island after he won an award for his climate activism.
H. Sterling Burnett:So they've become more silent. But I think this is this is my personal view That except among politicians and profiteers, the climate movement was never very strong. Mhmm. There is a core activist group that are really out there actively, but as far as their impact on average people's lives, except to the extent that they can get politicians, except to the extent that they take the ring through politicians' nose and lead them to doing bad things, they don't have an effect. Most people go to work every day.
H. Sterling Burnett:You know, we're post COVID, so I think most people are still back in offices. I don't think we're all working from home anymore. I say as I work from home. But, most people go to work, and they come home, and they want a meal, and they visit with their family, and, maybe they watch sports, or they watch, some reality program, or whatever. But the point is, most people's lives aren't day to day affected by climate change and the disaster that is happening, and they realize that, and they've always realized that.
H. Sterling Burnett:And so it's largely a nonissue for them. It only becomes an issue when someone like Biden comes in and raises energy prices so high that everything is affected, that your your food prices and then they don't blame climate change. They blame the politicians. They say, you can tell me, that the economy is great and you've created all these jobs. But when I look at my pocketbook, that's not what I'm seeing.
H. Sterling Burnett:And it ain't about climate change. It's about your policy. So I I really think the climate, the movement has always been, the the the idea of its impact has always been inflated, And, I don't know if it's becoming less effective than it's been before because it's not changing their activities. Mhmm. I just don't think it was ever really in the general public very effective at all.
H. Sterling Burnett:It's it's politicians, it's profiteers, it's people who saw a way to make a buck or get some power. And they're still out there doing what they were doing before. The activists are still out there doing what they're doing before, and most people are yawning and ignoring it. Alright.
Donald Kendal:Thank you. Yeah. I was just curious about that.
Linnea Lueken:How dare you? We have a good comment from one of our viewers that I think is interesting to bring up, and it's he says, I think Sterling underestimates the Climate Clown Show. They're just doing theater to people, so they don't look into what the money is being wasted on.
H. Sterling Burnett:Oh, no. I agree. They're spending a lot of money. The profiteers are still making profits, but that's on politicians. That's not in the general public.
H. Sterling Burnett:I I just think most people average people either have more common sense. They know that it's better to live in Miami than Fargo, North Dakota in the sense of climate. They don't wanna go back to an ice age, and they don't want their lifestyles interfered with too much to fight climate change. That's what polling data shows. How much will you spend?
H. Sterling Burnett:You know, how much are you willing to spend extra on your electricity? $1 a year. That's it. How much are you willing to spend on your fuel prices? Oh, well, less than 10¢ a gallon.
H. Sterling Burnett:A lot less. The point is, people, when push comes to shove and they're asked about, do you think climate change is a threat? Yes. Okay. How much you're willing to pay to to to fight that threat?
H. Sterling Burnett:Well, it's not that much of a threat. You know? I I'll pay more for football tickets than I'll pay to fight climate change.
Anthony Watts:Yeah. Yeah. So it basically it it's becoming less effective in my opinion than it has been mainly because of the cry wolf factor. Now along the lines of, you know, what we saw with the poll data, and the declining concern, there's also the market pulling out. And this is really dramatic because, you know, the market really is speaking towards this.
Anthony Watts:The, according to Investment News, that, ESG mandated US funds posted $9,000,000,000 in outflows in Q1 of 2024. $9,000,000,000 taken out of investments or ESG. That's that's a big thing. That's a very clear signal. And when something that large happens in the market, you know, it it other people listen, and they probably like, well, maybe we should take our stuff out too.
Anthony Watts:It'll be interesting to see what happens during the next quarter and what the report is. And this is hot on the heels of 2023, which faced its worst year in 2023. According to Yahoo Finance, 2023 was a just a terrible year for ESG funds. And this whole ESG thing started somewhere around, what was it, thrilling around 2019, 2020? You know?
H. Sterling Burnett:I'd let Donnie talk about that because he's been doing a lot more stuff on his. I mean, it's it it was around then, but there was there was more. I mean, the the progenitors for ESG were out there already, with the sustainable you know, it started out sustainable investment stuff. Mhmm. Yeah.
Linnea Lueken:Right. This stuff this stuff has existed for a long time. I think sorry, Donnie. I think you'll be able to go into a little bit more detail than that, but this is definitely not a new thing that's just popped up.
Donald Kendal:No. No. No. Largely, it, it succeeded and gained so much ground because it was able to kind of fly under the radar. I mean, I remember laying out, old issues of the environment and climate news where there'd be some headlines talking about ESG long before I even knew what it was.
Donald Kendal:So that those date back to, I don't know, 2019, 2018, but some of the original, like, papers that that, called for this. I think there's, like, an old UN paper that's from, like, 2002 or something like that. So it dates back a while, but a lot of people just kinda wrote this off like I did. As just like investment jargon. You know, people that wanted to pursue sustainability, type things and and really didn't pay it as much attention as it deserves to be paid, because, really, it was this backbone of this kind of this creation of this stakeholder, stakeholder capitalism model that the people at the World Economic Forum had, and they had the big advocates.
Donald Kendal:You know, some of the biggest advocates, all, basically, every large company in the world runs sustainability and ESG reports, every year. You've got BlackRock, which is one of the biggest proponents of ESG ESG for a while now, biggest asset manager in the world that's been pushing ESG. And it wasn't until, you know, 2020, 2021 that, the idea and the threats of ESG went mainstream, and people like us have been sounding the alarm on it for a while and really kind of waking everybody up to the real threat that is ESG and basically trying to restructure the economy not towards the needs and wants of, of just like your average age citizen and consumer, but instead trying to push it towards this, the set of metrics that was developed by, you know, like, kind of the globalist elite sort of people, this ESG score, where these companies are chasing a high ESG score instead of just trying to please their consumers. So
H. Sterling Burnett:Oh my god.
Donald Kendal:That once that blew up, you know, a lot it it became a political term. You know, presidential candidates started talking about it. It it kind of we we kind of put a political stink on that word for lack of a better term to a point where we had Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, admitting that the term got too political, and we're just not gonna use it anymore. Basically, running away from it, still pursuing the scheme just under a different name. So, what you just showed with the kind of the $9,000,000,000 loss or however it's phrased, I think is just kind of the the inevitable results of people are correctly identifying ESG as this kind of globalist central planning type scheme that's trying to rework what capitalism is always meant to be, in favor of pursuing what the political agendas are at that time.
Donald Kendal:So, hopefully, we'll see more of it. This this is a relatively small thing. 9,000,000,000 sounds like a massive number, but when we're talking about these funds that have, like, 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars, it's still small, but, hey. You know, I like to be optimistic about this.
H. Sterling Burnett:I'm not I'm not sure, Donnie, that you're right that they're initially, they were just running away from the image. There's no question about that. He said we gotta reframe it. We've got to you know, he made it sound
Anthony Watts:like
H. Sterling Burnett:it was a marketing problem. Yes. But when he starts calling for, when he says wind and solar ain't gonna give it to us. When he talks about AI needing more reliable power, and he's not the only one. Yeah.
H. Sterling Burnett:You know, Zuckerberg says said basically the same thing. They're acknowledging that. And when he shuts down 2 of his own you know, BlackRock shut down 2 of its own funds, ESG funds. I think they're acknowledging more than just it's a marketing problem. It's a money loser.
H. Sterling Burnett:And Absolutely. They're getting pressure. And as importantly, you know, you could talk about the auto companies that are losing 1,000,000,000 and say we're scaling back our EV plans. You can talk about all sorts of companies. I I look at someone like, Warren Buffett and his his company.
H. Sterling Burnett:Right? He is one that never bought heavily into ESG. He invests based on long term returns on investment. Profits are what he cares about, and his, wealth and his, company is going way up while other companies are going oh, we gotta do with the ESG while they're going down. Mhmm.
H. Sterling Burnett:You know, I think in the end, it is to the extent that markets are are allowed to function. Markets show that in the end, what what drives things is return on with profits. Are you returning profits? And if you're not, you're not gonna last long term in a market. Only a political marketplace will keep you afloat.
Donald Kendal:Yes. I referenced this Larry Fink thing earlier when I was talking, and this is this is like a brand new development. I think that this is, just from, like, a week ago, but the World Economic Forum held a special event in Saudi Arabia, and at one of the panels was Larry Fink. He was featured talking about future investment in a fractured world or something like that. And at the end of the panel, he says, he's talking about, the advancements in artificial intelligence.
Donald Kendal:This thing is an emerging market and just the sheer amount of energy that artificial intelligence needs. And during his comments here, he says that the world is going to be short power. Short power, he says. And to power these things like these data companies, you cannot have this intermittent power like wind and solar. I was blown away by this.
Donald Kendal:I couldn't believe it. I can't believe that he said this. I can't believe he said it in public, and I can't believe he said it at a world economic forum event. So this is a like a brand new thing. There has been some, tech leaders have been saying similar things like this.
Donald Kendal:You mentioned Mark Zuckerberg. Sam Altman from Open AI has also been championing, you know, nuclear power as an alternative to wind and solar. So, yeah, I think, and maybe I'm being, you know, too optimistic here, but I really do think that the shine is kinda wearing off this whole, like, green industry transition to net zero sort of thing, at least in, like, the Al Gore version of it where it's like wind and solar and that's it. And what we are seeing is kind of a shift towards, like, no. We actually, we need more cheap, reliable energy.
Donald Kendal:So I think those comments by Larry Fink are unbelievable, and I'm gonna continue to look into them in the coming weeks. That's for sure.
H. Sterling Burnett:Well, you know, yesterday on
Anthony Watts:the show for the nuclear option myself.
Donald Kendal:Right? Me too.
H. Sterling Burnett:Yesterday on the show, you said I think it was either you or Chris or somebody said, my jaw I I can't believe that everyone's jaw wasn't dropping in the audience when he said that. But I looked at the audience and most of them were wearing, you know, they're Saudis. Right? They were oil sheikhs and their jaws didn't drop because they never believed it's crap.
Anthony Watts:And it
H. Sterling Burnett:was and it was and it was being held in Saudi Arabia. So I wasn't surprised at all with their nonplus reaction. It's like, he's just acknowledging what we've been telling you all along, guy.
Donald Kendal:Right.
Anthony Watts:Yep. Right. Yep. Truth rules. Sustainability rules.
Donald Kendal:Now could I just put one one little, rain cloud in the sky when it comes to all of this? And that is what's going on in Europe when it comes to ESG. So within the United States, this is all I mean, what calling it voluntary interactions with private companies is putting it way too far, but it definitely is runs short of being mandated by the government. Europe, they're mandating it. So in the European Union, they're passing like an ESG scheme.
Donald Kendal:It's called the corporate sustainability due diligence something or another. And this ran into a few roadblocks, but they just plowed through them. And as far as I'm aware, in the next couple of weeks, there's gonna be some final vote to basically mandate this into their, their government, their, you know, the way their business is done. And not only does this mandate that all of these companies kind of of track their ESG metrics and all of that, but they also have to, basically, have the companies and firms that are upstream and downstream of their supply chain also adhere to ESG. So while this is gonna be passing in Europe, it could still very much affect the United States because, obviously, we do a whole lot of business in Europe and with European firms.
Donald Kendal:So that is definitely, like, kind of
Anthony Watts:a big thing that
Donald Kendal:kind of gets glossed over in all of this, but that could have some pretty major effects here in the United States too.
H. Sterling Burnett:Is this is this different from what the Europe just rejected a couple of weeks ago when they said, no. We're not gonna impose all these climate rules?
Donald Kendal:That was a specifically a climate thing, which did get rejected. This is kind of packaged as, like, the whole, holistic ESG thing, which has some of those social justice causes in it, but also very much that e component. So while there was kind of a victory on that, it seems like most of this is still gonna get through, through this corporate
Anthony Watts:I wanna I wanna jump in here and say, Andy, our producer, has prepared the, Larry Fink video, and he's got it here live. It's worth watching. Let's
Donald Kendal:see. This is mind blowing. So, yeah, I I support showing it.
Speaker 7:And I do believe to properly, build out AI, we're talking about 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars of investing. So data centers today could be as much as 200 megahertz And they they're they're now talking about data centers that are gonna be 1 gigawatt. That's a that's powers a city. There there is one tech company that I spoke to the CEO last week who said, right now, all their data centers is about 5 gigawatts. By 2030 they need 30 gigawatts.
Speaker 7:30. The amount of power that's needed to use AI is has huge impact on society.
Anthony Watts:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Where's that power going to come from? Are we going to take it off the grid? What does it mean for elevated energy prices for everybody else? If it's that, I think it's going to represent some huge societal questions that we have not addressed the negative side. Forget about the use of it, but just the generation of it is massive power.
Speaker 7:Okay. But that that is a huge investment opportunity. So that we we you know the world is gonna be short power. Short power. And to power these these data companies you cannot have just this intermittent power like wind and solar.
Speaker 7:You need dispatchable power because you can't turn off and on these data centers.
H. Sterling Burnett:And what that means is that dispatchable power is all gonna be I mean, that that those data centers, all the AI will be located in China and India. They they will and and, of course, then it will it be AI or will it be AI as dictated by the Chinese and Indian governments as, you know, as limited speech as dictated by them because they got the dispatchable power. They're building dispatchable power. We aren't doing it. It, the more we push for green energy here, the more we're just off loading our industrial base and our economy to countries that are saying, forget this.
H. Sterling Burnett:And but I have a question for Donnie about the previous ESG thing. So you've got, is it just a reporting requirement? Because, you know, my my thought was always, if I were a company and you said I have to report, you have you have to report on your, your ESG efforts and your upstream and downstream. My my response was I have no idea of controlling or knowing what my ESG what my upstream or downstream, I don't know how to account for that.
Anthony Watts:Mhmm.
H. Sterling Burnett:I don't control them. But for myself, I would just say, okay. Here's how I account for my ESG efforts. We have none. We are not doing ESG, but that's the accounting of it.
H. Sterling Burnett:We've now reported. I'm not doing a single ESG thing, and, there's your report. Now if it's a mandate that I actually must do ESG things, that's a different thing.
Donald Kendal:Yeah. No. I I I think it is a mandate, and I think it's tied very much to in the same way that we talk about here in the United States to, like, access to capital from banks and all of that. And then I've even seen this is kind of post COVID, but, some some countries in Europe talking about, like, framing their bailout and stimulus packages, around corporations that are kind of pursuing, like, the public good and that sort of thing. So, at the very least, I think you're gonna see those elements included.
Linnea Lueken:Okay.
Anthony Watts:Yeah. So, anyway, we're, we're at the top of the hour now, and we've got time for just a few questions. We've had a number of questions come in from our viewers. Linea handles our questions. So Linea, take it away.
Linnea Lueken:Hello. Alright. Cool. Okay. So first, I wanna get, right to Steven Frazier gave us a super chat of $20.
Linnea Lueken:Thank you so much, Steven. And, he said, what's going on in Europe? I'm hearing there's a rebellion. And I think we touched on that a little bit. It's a little bit less of a rebellion and more a, we had some sparks of farmer protests that, were, pretty successful in at least getting the EU and their climate panels to give lip service to backing down on some of their, regulations that they were trying to put forward, but I don't know if it's happening for them in reality, unfortunately.
Linnea Lueken:Sterling, you're thinking no? Oh, Donnie.
Donald Kendal:Well, just wanna comment on that because I know that there is a kind of a expected kind of rightward shift, in a lot of the elections that are gonna be going on in Europe. So that was one of the things that we are paying attention to when it came to this vote on this corporate sustainability due diligence thing that if they weren't able to pass it, like, this year, it was, like, unlikely that they're gonna pass it in any year in the near term future. So that that could be part of this kind of revolution or however he phrased it in Europe.
H. Sterling Burnett:I think that's what, you know, watered down some stuff and and led to the defeat in part led to the defeat of the climate legislation is they were looking forward, and they said, we wanna keep her. I have no doubt that they'll try and bring a lot of this stuff back. But they were looking at the elections and saying, we'd still like to be here after the elections. Our party would still like to be in power. And as far as in the capitals, there is no question that the the protest have actually had on the ground impacts.
H. Sterling Burnett:Policies that were going forward ended. They they they said we are not doing that now. Like I said, they may come back, but I suspect if they do, you'll see the same kind of protest. As far as I can tell, the French are in a constant state of protest. You know, who who knows how long Macron will hold on if he brings back some of the stuff that, brought out the protest initially with the yellow vest.
Linnea Lueken:Right. Okay. We also got a, £5 from our friend, Alan Griffiths, who says, big tech now realizes it needs more cheap energy to expand AI. Renewables won't cut it. Will the narrative change?
Linnea Lueken:Let's hope. Well, yes, indeed. Let's hope. But, I don't know if it will. I don't know if the overall narrative will change.
Linnea Lueken:I think as we talked about on in the tank yesterday a bit, the, this might be a a tiered energy system that we're gonna be looking at.
Donald Kendal:Yeah. I am very, very hopeful about this, and I've I've I've been saying this for, like, a few weeks now, maybe even a month now that, like, it seems like there's an incongruence between kind of the the big tech left that's pursuing this AI and everything associated with that cryptocurrency, things that use a lot of energy, and then the climate alarmist left, that basically wants to shut off all energy that works. And it's just like those two things don't meld up, and I just wonder. And maybe this is me being way too naive, but I don't know. I just wonder if there's some weird, pairing that could happen between, you know, climate realists and and, you know, pro energy people and, you know, the big tech left, but a man can dream.
H. Sterling Burnett:Well, you know, Linnea, she's she I think she may be on to something. You know, maybe it's power for the elites and not for the average folks. I know that they're shutting down coal plants, but, specifically, in Kansas, for instance, recently, they were shutting down a coal plant, and a battery manufacturing plant was being cited there. And they said, we need a lot of power. And so they waived the requirement to shut down the coal plant.
H. Sterling Burnett:They're keeping the coal plant online specifically to provide power to the battery plant. So, you know, that may be the kind of thing you see. The name may be right.
Anthony Watts:Yeah. And in Wyoming, we've got the National Center For Atmospheric Research that has their super mega fantastic supercomputer in Wyoming, whereas the National Center For Atmospheric Research is located in Boulder, Colorado. So why is there a supercomputer located in Wyoming? Cheap coal. And just this week, Wyoming is affected to hit a milestone of 9,000,000,000 tons of coal mined.
Anthony Watts:And so, yeah, we're gonna see these data centers go where the power is cheap. There's no two ways about it.
Donald Kendal:Or a loosening of red tape when it comes to, like, putting in one of these, like, small module, nuclear reactors that just power some data center while while simultaneously tightening the red tape on all of our energy production for just your average day citizen. So there's there's a lot of creative ways
Linnea Lueken:that you
Donald Kendal:can go about
H. Sterling Burnett:this. Imagine this.
Linnea Lueken:I mean, Donnie, though, the these these AI centers that they're talking about use more energy. I mean, you need several small nuclear reactors to power one of these, new data centers. I mean, it's unbelievable the amount of power that we're talking about here.
H. Sterling Burnett:Imagine this. You work at one of these data centers. Right? You work at one of these data centers centers where you have a power plant devoted just to you, and you go home from work at the end of the day and your air conditioning doesn't work because the power plants devoted to you don't work.
Linnea Lueken:Sterling, this is the future you're showing us. I'm pretty sure that this is what what's gonna end up happening. Okay. So I have, speaking of where we're going with this stuff, do you where do you see grid scale battery backup in the future? It's already working in many areas currently and successfully.
Linnea Lueken:I do have questions about, many areas and successfully. I I said this on the show yesterday on in the tank. I am extremely skeptical of planning infrastructure based on future technology. I I genuinely hope that there is a massive breakthrough in battery technology. Because that wouldn't just help us in terms of energy storage for, like, grid storage stuff, but it as well.
Linnea Lueken:Oh, whoops. Am I back?
Donald Kendal:You're there. Yep.
Linnea Lueken:Okay. We've got a little bit of weather going on here today, so I'm not surprised. So, so, yeah, I, what do you what do you guys what do you guys think about this one?
H. Sterling Burnett:Well, to follow-up on something you said, he's saying it works currently and successfully. Well, I guess it depends on how you define currently and successfully. California. Oh, California's got all these batteries and all this solar, and they said, we were able to power our almost a 100% of our system for 3 whole minutes. Well, I'm sorry, the summer doesn't operate for 300 minutes, and they're having blackouts every year.
H. Sterling Burnett:They've got more batteries than anybody, and their power prices are more expensive than almost everybody. So if you mean cheap, it's not successful. If you mean reliable over more than just a few seconds or minutes, It's not successful. So I don't know where he's talking about. It's currently working and successfully.
Anthony Watts:I think maybe they're referring to one place in Australia that had one working. I recall there was one in in Southern Australia that that might have been working for a while, but I think it also has its problems.
H. Sterling Burnett:Well, ask the Australians whether they've what their power prices have been like and what they felt, you know, and how they did when they had droughts because those battery centers require a lot of air conditioning, a lot of water. And so my suspicion is they are not currently working by any reasonable definition of successfully anywhere in the world. Look, a coal plant works successfully. A natural gas plant works successfully. How do we know that?
H. Sterling Burnett:It delivers power on demand when you need it.
Anthony Watts:Mhmm.
H. Sterling Burnett:Not for 3 minutes at a time as a backup.
Anthony Watts:Right. Right. Alright. What else we got, Lenea?
Linnea Lueken:We've got a whole lot. We have alright. Question. Earth's feedbacks are net negative. Right?
Linnea Lueken:It's a stable planet that has been able to host life for 1,000,000,000 of years. I guess it depends on what you mean by stable. I mean, over geologic time spans, I would argue a little bit with that one. And I'm not sure if you can I don't I don't really know if you can classify the entire planet's history of feedbacks as net negative?
Anthony Watts:I'm not Well, there's been times when we've seen the planet go to a hot house state, and there's been times when we've seen, you know, ice ball Earth. And these are mostly predicated on changes in, orbits and processions and so forth over a very, very long period of time. Recently, there was an article on WhatsApp With That that talked about, a change that's expected to happen, several 1000000 years into the future when we get into a different part of the spiral arm of our galaxy, and and that will change things. So there's all kinds of external influences going on. And but I would say this.
Anthony Watts:Just without these external influences such as orbit changes, possession changes, galactic changes, that kind of stuff, Earth is pretty good at self regulating.
Linnea Lueken:A lot of people say the CMEs trigger storms. Is there any truth to this?
Anthony Watts:There has been some correlation between, coronal mass ejections and solar storms to thunderstorm outbreaks. There has been a school of thought that they trigger more, seed nuclei for, you know, water vapor to condense on and so forth, but, it's not totally proven just yet. On the other hand, if all of a sudden we find ourselves seeing massive amounts of thunderstorms tomorrow and the CMA is coming in tonight, then then, well, we may see some news data on that.
Linnea Lueken:Okay. What do we think the life expectancy is for the climate movement? I do not want to make a long term prediction on this particular topic. I think they'll keep it going as long as there's media people willing to push the story.
Donald Kendal:Yep. So the this one I I wanna comment on, because the the, like a lot of things, climate change movement is like an intersubjective concept that's just kind of, supported by a whole bunch of different groups that have a whole bunch of different agendas, whether it's people that are just trying to be, you know, progressive, they sound progressive, they don't wanna be labeled some type of climate denier, so they're pushing it. Or you got the true believer types that are pushing it, or you've got the people that are pushing it for certain types of governmental power. They're pushing it. And then you've got, like, the big money that's being pushed towards it, like I talked about earlier with the BlackRocks and, the whole ESG scheme and all
Anthony Watts:of that. The simple answer is, Donald, it'll last until the money holds.
Donald Kendal:Well, that's the thing. That's the thing. That big support system element of it is very crucial to this, intersubjective concept of climate alarmism. So if that goes away and you see, BlackRock and Larry Fink instead of trying to cash in on all the money coming through government and into all of these green projects and instead chase money that's associated with artificial intelligence or something that he thinks he can make a a bigger return on his investment, I think that would go a long way and just kind of, like, cutting out the knees underneath this climate alarmist movement. So I won't put any date on it, but I am kind of hopeful that it's kind of falling apart here.
H. Sterling Burnett:I won't put a date on it either, but I will put us a condition on it. It goes away the minute government refuses to subsidize any longer wind and solar every year, every every time the, wind and solar protection tax credits and the investment credits disappear usually for just a month or 2 months because they can't get their, you know, the Congress can't get its, its its funding bills in order. And so they then pass an omnibus. But in the time between when they pass that omnibus and the bills fail, factory shut down that day. Yep.
H. Sterling Burnett:Factory shut down that day. And if it's never renewed, they never come back.
Anthony Watts:Right.
H. Sterling Burnett:So that would end it. It'll be a
Anthony Watts:case of money talks and bullshit walks.
Linnea Lueken:Alright. We've got more on the storm for tonight. Concerning the storm, is it possible we'll see a discernible impact on short term cloud formation?
Anthony Watts:I'm gonna answer that with a triple answer. Yes, no, and maybe. No.
Donald Kendal:Clouds don't exist anymore. Climate change has been running wild.
Linnea Lueken:Oh, that's right.
Donald Kendal:You're right. Clouds.
Linnea Lueken:It's too hot for clouds. They're gone. So, no. And I think the the, the angle that this question is coming from is the theory that, space weather can impact cloud formation because it it reduces the amount of, like, particles.
Anthony Watts:Yeah. But that's cosmic that's cosmic rays. That's not Okay. Energetic That's a
Linnea Lueken:different thing than this. Yeah. Okay. Next. I don't recall global warming being suggested as the cause of extreme weather a decade ago.
Linnea Lueken:How or who developed this connection?
Anthony Watts:I would attribute that to Joe Rom, who used to run a, a blog, and he would he would make wild claims on that. I remember getting very upset and writing a a scathing rebuttal to one of his articles about, tornado outbreak in the south being caused, ex by climate change, and it was, you know, because Republican climate deniers lived in these states and all kinds of other crazy stuff. But I think that the seed of this stuff got started on his particular blog, and the progressive, the progressive organization that funded that blog. And they spread that stuff all over the place. So that and the union of concerned scientists, they work hand in hand.
Anthony Watts:So I think it started about 10 years ago due to these connections they were making by some of these, progressive liberal bloggers.
Donald Kendal:Well, I think it was Roland Emmerich with the creation of the day after tomorrow movie, which is
Anthony Watts:Oh, there's that. 4. Yeah.
H. Sterling Burnett:Yeah. I think it's been around longer, but it wasn't getting the media attention longer. I mean, the IPCC has been saying things since its beginning. It initially was saying it was gonna make hurricanes worse and, more frequent. Those were its initial reports.
H. Sterling Burnett:Later, the reports came out and said, well, no. We we can't we can't find evidence of that. They initially said that it was gonna make sea level rise, you know, rise dramatically, and that would have an impact.
Anthony Watts:Oh, that's not weather,
H. Sterling Burnett:though. Well, that's not weather. But, they they they the the IPCC has been alarmist they were alarmist on this before they became not alarmist on this. Yeah. And I think And,
Anthony Watts:of course, it was Al Gore. Al Gore at his movie, you know, in alerts. Yeah. Started talking about hurricanes are gonna get worse. And so that one that one got a lot of traction in 2,005.
Anthony Watts:And then, of course, nature thumbed her her nose at him and made a hurricane drought that lasted for 10 years for major hurricanes hitting the United States, and he was proven wrong, of course.
H. Sterling Burnett:Polar bears are gonna drown on the ice and all the things that he said. But, you know, he wasn't alone. The IPCC said the glaciers in the Himalayas would be gone. Where they get that? Well, blue literature from an environmental group, not any peer reviewed and that came out.
H. Sterling Burnett:So it's been around for a while, but it's just got a lot more notoriety as the press look, the press the press went from talking about global warming to climate change. But then literally literally in in the past decade, the Los Angeles Times said, we will no longer allow climate skeptic voices, climate denier voices, a forum. We won't even take letters to the editors for people who disagree with climate science. And then the press, they literally had a, you know, confluence. Okay.
H. Sterling Burnett:Should we all agree that we're just gonna stop talking climate change and start calling the climate crisis in every story? There's no longer a climate change. It's a climate crisis. It's not change. It's a crisis.
H. Sterling Burnett:So that's it's really ramped up since then.
Linnea Lueken:Right. Okay. I've got one final question that we are going to leave off on. It's very important. If the solar event knocks out electronics, how long until Gen z loses the very will to live?
Linnea Lueken:As the, as the closest one to Gen z, I might be Gen z, I might be the last of the millennials, I think it would happen very rapidly. That would be a positive feedback. Me. A tipping point, and the world will tremble in terror at what these, Gen zers without their phones would accomplish.
Anthony Watts:Yeah. Alright. Well, that music means it's time to end this episode 109 of the Climate Realism Show. I wanna thank all of our viewers. Actually, we've had the biggest amount of viewers on YouTube on this show compared to any other.
Anthony Watts:We're up to 661 61 right now. Wow. So that's good news. I wanna say here's a reminder to visit our website, climate ataglance.com, climaterealism.com, where we debunk crazy stories in the media every day, energy at a glance.com, where we have factual rebuttals to energy questions and energy issues. And then, of course, my website, what's up with that dot com.
Anthony Watts:I wanna thank Donald and Sterling and Linnea for joining us today along with all of you viewers, and I hope to see you here next week assuming the solar storm doesn't shut off all modern life on Earth. Let's hope not. Anyway, I'm Anthony Watts, senior fellow for environment and climate for the Heartland Institute, wishing you all a great Friday and a fantastic weekend. Bye bye. Go, Ranger.
H. Sterling Burnett:He's a lion dog faced pony soldier.