- Speaking of not working, Aviation Week informs us that “UK regional startup Ecojet – which had ambitions of becoming the world’s first electric airline – has filed for liquidation, two-and-a-half years after the project was first announced.” Really? You can’t fly an airplane on batteries? Who knew? (Not the British government, it seems, since at least indirectly its subsidies for electric aeroplanes went to Ecojet.) It called itself “The airline for a green Britain” (which is actually symbolically appropriate since it never actually flew a plane and because its founder is a major Labour Party donor) and its website still contains credulous media hype from 2023. But alas, no airplanes of the future. Just another charred money pit.
- Speaking of which, Montgomery County, Maryland is currently buying an expensive fleet of diesel-fueled buses because um uh well see the electric ones we spent a fortune on don’t work. Including, although Maryland is not exactly Baffin Island, because of their poor performance in the cold. As the Washington Post editorialized, “It’s embarrassing but not surprising, given that the Free State’s grand green ambitions were never in touch with economic reality.” But it wasn’t just the Free Money State. The county, whose school district basically services the Washington, DC area (again, not Baffin Island), went heavily for electric before the state mandated it. Typical government procurement policies didn’t help. But nor did believing in unicorn power.
- Speaking of unicorns, the government of Canada puts out a press release starting “Canada is a global energy superpower”. Right. One that our own energy companies are bailing on and that now has to import LNG from Australia. However behind the babble is something vaguely promising; an agreement with the province of Newfoundland and Labrador to develop an offshore oil project, the first “standalone offshore oil and gas development” in that province in nearly two decades. We also note with cautious approval that the separatist Bloc Quebecois sneered that it “porte un haut risque pour le climat planétaire et la biodiversité [carries a high risk for the global climate and biodiversity]” and “s’inscrit dans la lignée de l’abandon des objectifs climatiques par les libéraux de Mark Carney [is in line with the abandonment of climate objectives by Mark Carney's Liberals]”; to which we reply: if only. But we limit ourselves to vague encouragement because, this being Canada, they blast away on their own horn about “the signing of a landmark agreement” that “will enable Equinor to move closer to a positive final investment decision in 2027.” Which, we predict, it won’t. Equinor being, the press release fails to explain, a Norwegian energy giant that might agree to start the project in a year as it seems there’s no Canadian firm willing to take it on, us being an energy superpower notwithstanding.
- Two truths in one. Irritating social media billionaire and long-time wokester Mark Zuckerberg has just bought a mansion in red Florida for a mere $170 million, fleeing blue California’s envy-fueled war on wealth and productivity. (If you’re wondering how a house could possibly be worth nine figures, it may have something to do with the built-in hair salon.) So (first truth) such policies really are a disaster, driving away talent and hope. Also, the mansion is in an exclusive gated community in Indian Creek, an us-not-them community on a man-made island with a maximum elevation of 10 feet. So (second truth) the rich are not actually remotely concerned about climate-driven sea-level rise.
- In February we mentioned that climate-ravaged California, in the grip of a never-ending man-made drought and suffering never-ending man-made floods, might well enjoy a wildflower “superbloom” due to how great the weather has been. Well, not quite. Thus far “Death Valley” is life valley and “This is the ‘best bloom year’ since 2016, according to the National Park Service, stopping short of declaring this year’s expanse of blooms a ‘superbloom,’ at least thus far. Superblooms occurred in 2016, 2005, and 1998.” The latter is also odd in the middle of a mass-extinction extreme-weather climate crisis.
- Finally, on the subject of settled science, New Scientist is all excited about “The bombshell results that demand a new theory of the universe”. Specifically, “Last year, our most detailed map of the universe yet suggested our understanding of dark energy has been wrong for decades.” Now at the risk of seeming like historians of science, the fact that the orthodox cosmological view could only be sustained by insisting that most matter and energy is totally invisible (“dark matter constitutes 85% of the total mass, while dark energy and dark matter constitute 95% of the total mass-energy content”) looks like the kind of kluge that brought down the Ptolemaic system and you wonder why those in the field didn’t go wait, that’s silly, the point of a theory is to explain what exists, not conjure up vast amounts of things that don’t. But we digress. The key takeaway is that in virtually every field of scientific inquiry, people are continually finding surprises that upset the established view and loving it (for instance “The universe is filled with a cacophony of colliding black holes/ A new catalog of gravitational waves more than doubles the known number of these spacetime ripples”). Only on climate is everything settled, and the constant surprises all confirm the established view that it’s worse than the established view thought.
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11 Mar 2026 | News Roundup
