The professional climate alarmists aren’t fading away. They’re practically mutating. Louder, angrier, and more desperate than ever, they’ve learned that if outright activism draws too much scrutiny, the next best move is infiltration and subversion. Now they’re embedding themselves deeper inside trusted institutions and laundering their message through official channels.
Some in the media want Americans to believe Democrats are quietly retreating from aggressive climate messaging. The opposite is true. The most zealous voices in academia and government are amplifying the panic, using their credentials not as evidence of expertise but as weapons of intimidation. Their “science” isn’t about discovery. It’s about control.
Michael Mann is the perfect example. He turned a routine Olympic broadcast into a climate sermon, claiming snow conditions were proof of global collapse. That wasn’t scientific analysis—it was fearmongering presented as commentary.
Texas A&M professor Andrew Dessler follows the same script. In one moment, Dessler argued that economic models used by plaintiffs to calculate damages for the so-called social cost of carbon are “made up.” Then, in the next, he is engaged in emotional outbursts. In academia today, volume and anger aren’t liabilities; they’re virtues. The showmanship draws attention. In any other field, emotion like that would be disqualifying. That’s not science; it’s performance.
This culture of performative panic has moved into a new and more dangerous phase: subverting institutions through the bureaucratic backdoor. Look at the Federal Judicial Center (FJC), which recently and quietly pulled the climate chapter from the online version of its official Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence. They did so because the chapter, written by activist scientists pushing extreme climate narratives, triggered a backlash that threatened the FJC’s credibility and funding.
But here’s the trick: the chapter didn’t disappear. It’s still live on the National Academies of Sciences (NASEM) website, where the organization has explicitly stood by itin the pages of The New York Times. The Academies, which hold the copyright, may even continue printing versions that include it. While the FJC shields itself from scrutiny, it quietly directs readers to NASEM, outsourcing climate indoctrination to a proxy. This is by no means a retreat. It is reinvention — a deliberate laundering of the same activism through new institutions to preserve the illusion of legitimacy.
The same academics who once claimed to be neutral arbiters of truth are now weaponizing institutions to hide their activism behind bureaucratic credibility. They’re embedding their ideology deeper into the machinery of government, courts, and policy schools—places the public rarely looks. This is the next phase of their radical climate crusade. When their narrative collapses under scrutiny, they simply shift it to another institution and continue the mission.
Meanwhile, ordinary Americans pay the price. Soaring energy costs, unreliable grids, and overregulation are the fruit of policies born in ivory towers and rubber-stamped by agencies too afraid to challenge the climate orthodoxy. Families choosing between groceries and heating bills don’t need another federal manual telling judges that skepticism is heresy—they need affordable, dependable energy. Climate extremism punishes the people who keep this country running.
Those who believe the climate radicals are retreating are fooling themselves. They’re not backing down—they’re burrowing in. Every time they’re exposed, they shift venues or change labels, but the mission stays the same: centralize control in the name of “saving the planet.” When power over how we heat our homes, drive to work, or grow food moves from citizens to bureaucrats, liberty vanishes with it.
The veneer of science gives this movement authority it doesn’t deserve. Scratch that surface, and it’s politics all the way down. Real science welcomes debate. Climate extremism silences it. The FJC’s quiet erasure and NASEM’s defiance show just how far this has gone—the climate cult doesn’t compromise; it adapts.
Americans need to see this clearly: the radicals aren’t losing ground. They’re evolving into something even more strategic. It’s time for those who believe in freedom, affordability, and reason to speak up before bureaucracy and ideology complete the takeover.
Mr. Isaac, a former member of the Texas House of Representatives, is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation and CEO of the American Energy Institute.
We always knew it would be costly, and experience has proven that true. But now, in a newly released report published by the Arizona Free Enterprise Club and the AZ Liberty Network, the cost for Arizona’s largest utility to go “Net Zero” was found to be even more expensive than expected coming with a massive price tag of at least $42.7 billion by 2038.
History of the Green New Deal in Arizona
The “green” agenda is not new to Arizona. In 2006, then Chairman of the Corporation Commission Kris Mayes pushed through the first mandates in Arizona, requiring our utilities to get 15% of their energy generation from “renewables” by 2025. Those rules alone have already cost ratepayers $2.3 billion. In 2018, an out-of-state billionaire funded a proposition on the ballot that would have required utilities to obtain 50% renewable generation by 2035. That measure went down in flames, being rejected by a 2-1 vote.
And these aren’t just public statements. The utilities have committed to going “Net Zero” in SEC filings to their shareholders, and they even compensate their top executives (page 68) based on how much “clean” energy they build in our state. Unsurprisingly, these commitments completely shape their resource plans…
“It’s an absolutely sh*t situation.” That is the assessment of Norway’s energy minister, Terje Aasland, about his country’s electricity costs rising to record levels due to its exports of power to the United Kingdom, Germany, Denmark and other European countries.
It is an outcome that many warned the Norwegian government would come about as the decisions were made to build the interconnects to export power into the European Union and the UK. Those critics were of course ignored as those in charge of Norway’s fortunes at the time felt compelled to genuflect to the demands of the EU and other globalist organizations.
Norway derives the vast majority of its electricity from hydropower, which currently provides 90% of the country’s power generation. Most of the remainder comes from wind power, and the nation enjoys a large excess of generating capacity on most days. Thus, all other factors being equal, it made some financial sense to establish those interconnects to sell the surplus into other countries.
But it only made sense when those other countries were taking care to ensure the continuing health and adequacy of their own electric grids. That certainly has not been the case in either the UK or Germany, whose governments have in recent years chosen to discard a former wealth of reliable baseload capacity provided by coal and nuclear plants in favor of relying too heavily on intermittent, weather-dependent wind and solar.
Now, when the wind stops blowing and the sun isn’t shining, those customers of Norwegian power exports drain the host country’s surplus, causing the extremely high energy costs to flow back upstream, hitting Norwegians with abnormally high utility bills. It all came to a head this week when low wind speeds, combined with abnormally cold temperatures on the European mainland, caused power rates in Norway to spike to as high as €1.12 ($1.18) per kilowatt hour (kwh).
By comparison, the average electricity rate per kwh in New York is around 22 cents, while Texans typically pay around 15 cents per kwh. What that price spike meant for Norwegians on December 12 is that taking a 5-minute warm shower would have cost them $5. Doing the same in Texas would have cost around 16 cents.
Naturally, public outrage in Norway over these needlessly high electricity rates is now causing policymakers there to run for political cover. The Financial Times reports that both the ruling leftwing Labour Party and conservative Progress Party are now making plans to campaign next year on platforms to limit or end the export of electricity via these international interconnections.
That is a prospect that no doubt sparks fear in the hearts of the central planners in both Germany and the UK, where electricity imports from Norway play a central role in their own emissions reduction plans. Those plans involve the willful destruction of reliable baseload power stations and forcing power costs to dramatically increase, which in turn results in heavy industries like steelmaking and other manufacturing to leave the country. In that way, these governments are essentially exporting their emissions to China, whose own government is only too happy to serve as home to these heavy industries and power them with the hundreds of coal-fired power plants they build each year.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom and his fellow Democrats have pursued essentially the same strategies in California in this century, with predictable results: Californians pay among the highest power rates in the United States as their power grid has become overloaded with intermittent generation and increasingly reliant on imports from other states. Rather than exporting its emissions to China, California exports them to Nevada and Utah and other U.S. states.
The Biden administration has attempted to take the entire country down this same economically ruinous path for the past four years. Fortunately, voters awakened just in time this year to head off the most damaging impacts now being seen in Germany and the UK.
For Norway, is this an example of the law of unintended consequences setting in? Sure, to some extent. But it is also a clear example of entirely foreseeable consequences stemming from poor policymaking by multiple national governments flowing across borders. This “sh*t situation” was all avoidable, and frankly should have been.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
The dead-end hyperinflationary policies of the Biden-Harris administration have put the American Dream out of reach for many young people. I have talked to my 21-year-old daughter about this so many times that it breaks my heart.
Ruby, like so many young Americans, is doing everything right. She works hard, she saves up, but that old-fashioned notion of the white-picket fence seems to be slipping away from her grasp. Part of the reason I am running for Senate is to make America affordable again. And I know that bringing down out-of-control housing prices is the key to restoring access to the American Dream for our young people.
Per Federal Reserve data, in 1984, the median U.S. household income was $22,400 and the median home price was $78,200, or about 3.5 times the median income. By 2022, median household income had risen to $74,580, but median home prices had risen to over $433,000 — or nearly six times median income.
Elected officials owe it to our constituents to take clear and decisive action to reduce housing costs.
There has been so much focus on the role of interest rates, but the answer to bringing them back down, while hard to achieve, is fairly straightforward: the federal government needs to stop printing money we don’t have so that it can pay bills that we can’t afford. Taming that imbalance won’t be quick or easy, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you a bill of goods.
But there is another key element of the housing crisis that we can address quickly and effectively: a lack of skilled tradespeople. According to an analysis by Associated Builders and Contractors, the United States is short over half a million skilled construction workers. The lack of skilled construction workers combined with rapidly increasing costs of materials is creating a roadblock to building the millions of additional housing units that are needed to relieve the cost bottleneck.
Bringing down the cost of materials largely hinges on three things: reducing the price of energy and fuel, eliminating excessive regulations created by the Biden-Harris administration, and increasing the number of skilled workers available to producers. Limitations on oil-and-gas production and refining are leading to rapidly increasing fuel and energy costs that have inflated the price of building materials by tens of thousands of dollars per home.
Likewise, excessive regulation and DEI mandates being forced on producers by the Biden-Harris administration are also increasing materials and labor costs, without appreciable benefit to society in terms of reduced inequality. Lastly, the rush to send every high school graduate to a four-year college, with massive government subsidies, is draining the workforce of skilled tradespeople which both increases the cost of construction and delays additional new home starts.
Solving the first two problems is very simple. Replace President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris with Donald Trump, overturn the current administration’s pointless and counterproductive executive mandates, and you are two thirds of the way there. The last step — increasing the number of skilled construction workers — is going to take more effort.
But with some simple changes in federal education funding and policy, we can turn that deficit around in a matter of just a few years by revising federal education funding and loans to stop discriminating against trade schools and technical education and support the development of a skilled workforce sufficient to meet the demands of our housing market.
First, we need to revise the guidelines for Pell grants to allow them to be issued and used for more students to attend trade and technical schools. Second, if the government is going to continue to back student loans, eligibility for those loans needs to be aggressively expanded to include more trade schools.
Currently, trade-school students can access government-backed student loans, but only if their trade school is federally accredited. Many are not. Getting the vast majority of trade schools nationwide accredited so their students have access to government-backed loans should be a major priority for the next administration and will be a priority of mine in the U.S. Senate.
Lastly, the government needs to aggressively partner with industry to expand trade school opportunities by making low-interest loans available to companies and unions to invest in new and expanded trade and technical-school facilities.
The cost to attend trade and technical schools is far less than the cost of a four-year degree, and the returns on that investment are astronomical. A few thousand dollars of up-front investment in these careers yields a lifetime of high earnings, and resultant increased tax revenues. As a result, investing in expanding our skilled workforce is responsible governance, and must be a priority going forward.
Arizona’s Energy Competitiveness Index was released Friday by the Common Sense Institute of Arizona (CSIA) and despite skyrocketing electrical rates, Arizona’s energy reliability and competitiveness have reportedly fallen since 2022. With businesses and families buckling under the strain of higher rates passed by the Arizona Corporation Commission in March, the state and nation are pivoting further away from reliable natural gas and nuclear power toward more intermittent solar and wind solutions. And the outcome seems to be hurting Arizona families.
According to the report, “Arizona’s relative affordability has improved compared to other states. The state now ranks 21st in residential electric affordability, up from 28th in 2011.” But legislators and regulators shouldn’t celebrate much. This isn’t simply because Arizona has gotten better, but also because almost every other state has gotten much worse.
The CSIA report found in part, “The reliability of energy grids across the country is on the decline, although Arizona remains one of the more reliable grids in the country. On average, a user of electricity in Arizona faced 136.9 minutes of interruption in 2022 – up from 73.9 minutes in 2013, and nearly 59% less than the duration faced by the average customer across the U.S. (333 minutes). Despite falling slightly in the two reliability competitiveness indices, Arizona still ranks 5th in reliability.”
⚡ Despite a national decline, Arizona's energy grid remains one of the most reliable! In 2022, the average Arizonan faced only 136.9 minutes of interruption, compared to the national average of 333 minutes.
— Common Sense Institute Arizona (@CSInstituteAZ) July 29, 2024
However, the report added, “Both the electricity and natural gas prices faced by residential, commercial, and industrial customers in Arizona have increased in the last 13 years, but have also become more competitive as other states experienced larger increases. Arizona now ranks 21st in residential electric affordability, up from 28th in 2011.”
The report shows in detail that since peaking in 2022 at a score of 82.9, Arizona’s competitiveness index has dropped precipitously ending at 79 in 2023.
As noted by the Common Sense Institute: “Arizona’s Energy Competitiveness Index was 77 in 2011, peaked in 2022 at 83, and then declined to 79 in 2023. An increase in the Energy Competitiveness Index is a positive qualitative change – i.e., the state is more competitive as the index approaches one hundred. While the headline index extends through 2023, data for some of the individual component metrics are not available for the entirety of the period covered. For those metrics, we present the results through the latest year of data available.”
In regard to capacity, the report reveals that Arizona’s generating capacity, referred to as “nameplate capacity” increased from 2019 to 2022 but has barely kept pace with population increases and has declined considerably since peaking in 2012. The report noted, “Arizona has experienced a large increase in its population in recent years due to high levels of net migration. Because power plants typically take several years, if not a decade or more to complete, nameplate capacity has not increased as much, thus the decrease in nameplate capacity per 100,000 residents.”
From 2011 to 2023, Arizona's overall energy competitiveness ranking jumped to 21st, with improvements in six out of ten key indices.
— Common Sense Institute Arizona (@CSInstituteAZ) July 26, 2024
The Common Sense Institute offered a stark warning that, “While the goals of implementing a more environmentally friendly energy system have merit, policymakers should take caution not to recklessly transition their energy grids to renewable sources too quickly, and without appropriate supporting infrastructure. Renewable transition elsewhere, namely in states like California and Texas, has proven to be both costly and at a detriment to reliability and competitiveness.“
Should Washington and Phoenix continue to plunge headlong down this path, it seems unlikely that Arizona’s energy outlook will remain sunny.
