- Not that the quality of debate in the modern world is disintegrating. But Scientific Paranoia runs a piece “The Fossil-Fuel Industry Has a Plan to Drown Earth in Plastic”. Not “Oh Dear, There’s a Downside to this Wonderful Material”. Heck no. Instead “To keep profits rolling in, oil and gas companies want to turn fossil fuels into a mounting pile of packaging and other plastic products”. Boo packaging! Boo companies! Boo profits! But be assured, their climate reporting is just as sensible. Oh wait. This is their climate reporting. See “As the looming dangers of climate change are pushing the world away from fossil fuels, the industry is betting on plastic to protect its profitability.” As we noted last week, the world is not being pushed away from fossil fuels; peak oil is a mirage and oil, gas and coal provide most of humanity’s power. But something may well be pushing the world away from Scientific American. Namely its plan to drown science coverage in activism.
- Reuters “Sustainable Switch” led off on Nov. 27 with “Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia have been hit with deadly downpours, while Australia has been pelted with giant hailstones. Heavy rain also caused flooding in the Gaza Strip, submerging the tents of thousands of homeless Palestinians facing the prospect of a harsh winter without sturdy shelter.” Man, that’s a lot of woke in one unrepresentative sample that somehow fails to mention that a harsh winter near the equator isn’t proof positive of heating. Likewise Bloomberg Green (same day but at least they’ve figured out how to post newsletters online) runs with “Vietnam has faced extreme storm after extreme storm this year, including one that nearly set a global rainfall record. The disasters have left the country and its scant defenses reeling. Today’s newsletter looks at the costly challenges Vietnam faces in adapting to climate change, a problem other nations are also grappling with.” Reading such stuff you’d really think heavy rain in the tropics was something essentially unheard of and obviously artificial. (Oh, and they then invite us to “Be sure to bookmark these stories for relaxing after dinner” so obviously their idea of relaxation also differs from ours.)
- All cherry-picking, all the time: from Heatmap AM on Nov. 25: “Current conditions: Snow is blanketing parts of the Mountain West and Upper Midwest, making travel difficult in Montana, North Dakota, and Minnesota • Winds of up to 40 miles per hour could disrupt some air travel through Chicago and Detroit • A cold snap in China is set to drop temperatures by double digit degrees Fahrenheit in northern areas.” No mention of current conditions where it’s nice, though it just might be somewhere. And note that it’s all winter all the time, though of course a mere “cold snap” not a pattern.
- Satire cannot keep up with the “media advisory” that “Taleeb Noormohamed, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation, will highlight new ocean technology projects that are driving sustainable transformation in the ocean economy.” (Of course it manages to have a land acknowledgement even with regard to water.) And yes, his boss the Prime Minister loves transformative, leverage and catalyse (but not catalyze). As he loves the present tense to describe implausible aspirations not actual achievements. But isn’t there something a bit demeaning in pretending that such sentences refer to anything real? In the “ocean economy”. And “supported by Canada’s Ocean Supercluster.” Whaaaaat?
- It does not mean what you think it means: Canary Media, whose coverage of the inevitable inexorable massive green energy transition increasingly involves “hopeful monster” startups not things working at all, let alone on scale, chirps that “Happy day-before-Thanksgiving! Our holiday travel takes us to Connecticut, where a unique model is making solar development happen, Jeff St. John reports. There, the state-run Green Bank has become a developer and even owner of solar projects on public buildings like schools and low-income housing.” But the fact that “state-run” institutions are pouring other people’s money into trendy technologies does not prove that they are succeeding in the real economy; indeed almost inevitably it means that are not and will not.
- From the “evacuate in our moment of triumph?” file, Bloomberg Green chortles that “New York City Comptroller Brad Lander is urging three of the city’s pension funds to drop BlackRock because of ‘inadequate’ climate plans, the latest move to penalize investment firms for failing to tackle global warming.” Say, would that be the same New York City that, along with the entire state, is about to hit the “green wall” as its alternative energy fantasies collide with reality, and also that faces a conventional budget catastrophe? Great time to depress pension returns, guys and gals. A sure-fire political and economic winner, that one is.
- Heatmap is all excited that “China Forms a 10-Nation Fusion Energy Alliance”. Dudes. Fusion doesn’t work. But you just know what’s coming, right? Yay China boo United States yay spending billions on fantasy. “The first fusion reaction to produce more energy than it took to spark occurred at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in December 2022. Since then, billions of dollars have flowed into fusion energy research and a number of prominent companies have proposed building power plants harnessing the technology. As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham put it, it’s ‘finally, possibly, almost time for fusion.’ But the U.S. risks losing its edge, according to a new report by the Congress-backed Commission on the Scaling of Fusion Energy.” Wake us when it works. We need a long nap.
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03 Dec 2025 | News Roundup
Throughout my working life, from 1970 to 2005, doing research in support of CANDU fission reactors, cheap fusion energy was always just 10 years away. I guess it still is.
As John has said, hydrogen is the energy of the future and will always be so.
Current technologies for storage, transportation, and safe use are functional for specific industrial and pilot applications, but economically viable, scalable solutions that can replace existing fossil fuel infrastructure on a mass market level are still in development and require ongoing research and investment. And could be subject to the elusive 10 years as in fission technology