The failure of the press to do its job is also gruesomely on display with the fabled “green energy transition”. It’s not happening, and whether you think it should be, or could be, or are convinced that it’s undesirable or even impossible. you want to know basic stuff such as that it’s not.

We understand that some organizations reporting on current events do so from a particular strongly held worldview. We ought to. We’re in that category ourselves. And honestly we prefer outfits with clearly articulated, carefully examined ideas to those that drift with a consensus they’ve never thought about partly because they don’t know anyone who thinks differently. And, worse, regard themselves as courageous intellectual rebels just like everyone else. So we’re not going to be too hard on, say, Canary Media for telling us that:

“Nearly 40% of ironmaking facilities in development today are set to use a cleaner technology, even though many coal-burning holdouts are still firing.”

We would simply urge them to investigate whether supposedly cleaner technologies are really better than modern coal-fired plants when you take everything including environmental manufacturing and disposal costs into account. Especially as they have a bit of a habit of touting exciting new clean green things that then fizzle.

What we have in mind is so-called “mainstream” media outlets’ tendency to talk as though there were an irresistible rush into wind, solar, geothermal or even green hydrogen when, as Catherine Swift recently noted:

“In 2024, the world’s largest banks increased their overall financing for the oil and gas sector by about 20 per cent, which was the first increase since 2021. The 16th Annual Banking on Climate Chaos report showed that the leading 65 banks globally increased their funding of fossil fuel businesses by $162 billion from 2023. Most of this added financing came in the form of loans and bonds, although all forms of funding saw increases. Overall fossil fuel funding hit $869 billion in 2024 by the leading banks.”

Just as people need energy, firms need profits. And both come from oil and gas because they work. Thus far it has only been massive subsidies that made wind and solar seem profitable, and so, typically, Canary Media warns that:

“This week, Senate Republicans joined their House colleagues in proposing to curtail a slew of clean energy incentives. Losing those could upend many a clean energy business, but the cuts would drive a dagger through the heart of the burgeoning green hydrogen sector in particular.”

Surely someone somewhere can figure out that the problem is that this stuff is not competitive. Yet Global News, for instance, writes without drawing any relevant conclusions that:

“It could cost between $5 billion and $10 billion to build a transmission line that would connect Nova Scotia’s proposed offshore wind farms with the rest of the country, Premier Tim Houston says.”

Instead it interviews activists, peddles political rhetoric and praises subsidies. And Heatmap tries to explain “If Wind and Solar Are So Cheap, Why Do They Need Tax Credits?” and only comes up with “Removing the subsidies would be bad enough, but the chaos it would cause in the market is way worse.”

Meanwhile governments feign being older and wiser. But really they’re still in the grip of these expensive delusions. As Bloomberg Green complains:

“Germany this week is discussing a new government budget with the largest green spending program in the country’s history — supporting everything from upgraded power grids and geothermal energy to more climate-friendly public transport. Yet buried within the more than 3,000 pages of text are some surprising setbacks for climate action. One of the items causing controversy is a plan to use the nation’s climate and transformation fund – set to be bolstered with €100 billion ($117 billion) – to help pay some of the costs for natural gas storage. The nation’s backup supply has been traditionally funded through a gas storage levy, paid by domestic traders or utilities with costs rolled on to customers.”

What a smorgasbord of unexamined assumptions. Including that the right way to understand an issue is to speak to zealots who share your zealotry:

“The idea of using climate money – in total €3.4 billion – to support natural gas is drawing ire from climate advocates. Tapping a green fund for fossil fuel is a ‘plunder,’ said Sascha Müller-Kraenner, executive director of Environmental Action Germany.”

So why are they doing it? To be fair, the piece did note that:

“for the government, this is not a fossil fuel promotion but a ‘measure to reduce energy prices and to relieve the burden on consumers and the economy,’ an economy ministry spokesperson said.”

But then it went right back to interviewing irritated activists, instead of tackling such questions as why, if renewables are cheaper, even a government that claims to think so too is instead leaning on hydrocarbons to hold down prices and voters’ ire.

We do want to credit Reuters with having run a contrary piece back in February to which Climate Depot just re-alerted us, which started:

“The pursuit of net zero carbon emissions has been a resounding failure. Despite trillions of dollars spent on renewable energy, hydrocarbons still account for over 80% of the world’s primary energy and a similar share of recent increases in energy consumption, according to The Energy Institute. Coal, oil and natural gas production are at record highs. Emissions of greenhouse gases continue to rise inexorably. The financial markets were already losing confidence in the energy transition before Donald Trump returned to the White House. A more realistic approach to climate policy is urgently needed.”

And let us emphasize that the author of this piece explicitly believes that “The world still urgently needs an alternative to fossil fuels.” He just doesn’t think the world needs an alternative to reality in which dreams come true. The problem is, Reuters generally operates, like many media we could name, as though pieces such as this do not exist or are plainly wrong.

For instance Scientific American, which surely at least ostensibly is a high-minded big-brained purveyor of truth, keeps running pieces like:

“Wind and Solar Energy Are Cheaper Than Electricity from Fossil-Fuel Plants/ Even without subsidies, renewable energy is staying competitive with power from gas and coal”

And politicians apparently believe it. But voters increasingly do not. A recent item in The Midwesterner profiled Michigan residents who “’basically live Amish’ to beat constant Consumers, DTE rate hikes” that, in English, are theoretically competing energy providers in Michigan who, of course, actually get to charge people what the government says, which keeps going up. And why? Well, the paper adds:

“The squeeze is tied in part to efforts to fulfill Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s climate goals, which call for net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and 100% “clean energy” by 2040.”

Some strange use of the word “cheaper” we hadn’t previously encountered.

The lack of useful reporting goes deeper. For instance as Roger Pielke Jr. noted in June, under “The Most Amazing Climate Policy Figure/ And we don't even understand it” is that there’s been a straight-line decline in the carbon intensity of US GDP since 1992. In case that sentence needs translating into English, the amount of CO2 emitted per $1,000 of production (in constant 2025 dollars) has fallen not just steadily but at an essentially constant rate since 1992.

For our part we do understand it. Firms try to reduce costs to increase profits and since energy costs money they work to use less of it. It’s not government policy. It’s not green dreams. It’s Scrooge and Marley hard at work to improve the balance sheet. And it’s also not something you’ll find in endless stories about how the U.S. is “Falling further behind China” because:

“China has taken an enormous lead in clean energy and is extending that lead by the month. In May, for example, solar panels in China generated as much energy as one-third of all American power generation, combined. The U.S., meanwhile, under President Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda, is turning its back on renewables and doubling down on fossil fuels like gas, oil and coal. The implications of these dueling strategies are vast, including for climate change. How fast the world’s two largest economies decarbonize will matter for the whole planet. Yet the rush to embrace renewable power matters from a strategic standpoint, too. China has already developed a stunning lead in almost all of the key renewable technologies. And China is innovating: its biggest automaker, its biggest battery maker and its biggest electronics company have each introduced systems that can recharge electric cars in just five minutes.”

As noted elsewhere this week, believing Chinese government claims is a mugs’ game. But the whole premise of the story, about a sprint to a new economy with the U.S. gobbling doughnuts and waddling far behind, is wrong.

As Bjorn Lomborg recently wrote:

“When a grid failure plunged 55 million people in Spain and Portugal into darkness at the end of April, it should have been a wake-up call on green energy. Climate activists promised that solar and wind power were the future of cheap, dependable electricity. The massive half-day blackout shows otherwise. The nature of solar and wind generation makes grids that rely on them more prone to collapse – an issue that’s particularly expensive to ameliorate.”

Should have been. Not was. And note “expensive to ameliorate”. Somebody in the Wall St. Journal newsroom put the subhed “Madrid knew solar and wind power were unreliable but pressed ahead anyway” on the piece. But actually Lomborg said:

“the Spanish government is still in denial. Even while admitting that he didn’t know the April blackout’s cause, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez insisted that there was ‘no empirical evidence’ that renewables were to blame and that Spain is ‘not going to deviate a single millimeter’ from its green energy ambitions.”

It’s not much of an excuse for him. But if he reads most newspapers it’s understandable that he thinks there’s no such evidence. And most newspapers have no excuse for being so persistently, smugly, ignorantly wrong.