Truth generally ages well, and only gets truer with time.
Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” debuted 20 years ago today. It was apparently even more inconvenient than we thought at the time. The fossil fuel barons have since made it clear that they’re willing to lock down the world in a global authoritarian state – if that’s what it takes to maintain revenues and, more importantly, control.
I took my family to see it at a theater about 20 miles away. After it ended, my son, then about 20, mused as to whether we should walk home. I’d been following the science of the greenhouse effect since, well, since I read about the problem in Isaac Asimov’s “Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science”, when I was 10 years old. It came up again in the 70s, when Jimmy Carter’s Global 2000 report mentioned it as an emerging issue in 1977.
This Australian’s reply to #Trump‘s rant about “NATO not being there for America” is perfect.
“Mate. You run a country with 600,000 homeless people sleeping on the street tonight. A country where 40% of adults can’t cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money. A country where insulin costs more than a car payment and people are rationing it to survive. A country where medical debt is the number 1 cause of bankruptcy. A country where women are dying in hospital car parks because doctors are too scared of abortion laws to treat a miscarriage.
You lock up more of your own citizens than any nation on earth. More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea. The land of the free has 2 million people in cages, and a quarter of them haven’t even been convicted of anything. They’re just too poor to make bail.
Your life expectancy is going backwards. You’re the only developed nation where that’s happening. Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba’s. Your kids do active shooter drills between maths and English while you sell the gunmaker’s stock to your mates.
Your minimum wage hasn’t moved in 15 years. You’ve got teachers working 2 jobs and veterans sleeping under bridges and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that didn’t attack you.
PBS report from Denmark comes at a time when a Middle Eastern War for Oil has closed off 20 percent of the world’s oil and gas supplies, indefinitely. Denmark is uniquely positioned to ride out the storm, and stands as a strong counterfactual to the Trump administration’s rants against clean energy, particularly wind.
The report also touches on another bogus tactic Secretary Chris Wright has used against wind energy – the myth of “national security” concerns related to wind’s radar signature.
The Trump administration justified its nearly $1 billion settlement agreement with TotalEnergies to effectively buy back the French company’s U.S. offshore wind leases by citing national security concerns raised by the Department of Defense. Emails obtained by House Democrats and viewed by Heatmap, however, seem to conflict with that story.
California Representative Jared Huffman introduced the documents into the congressional record on Wednesday during a hearing held by the House Natural Resources Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.
“The national security justification appears to be totally fabricated, and fabricated after the fact,” Huffman said during the hearing. “DOI committed to paying Total nearly a billion dollars before it had concocted its justification of a national security issue.”
The email exchange Huffman cited took place in mid-November among officials at the Department of the Interior. On November 13, 2025, Christopher Danley, the deputy solicitor for energy and mineral resources, emailed colleagues in the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the secretary’s office an attachment with the name “DRAFT_Memorandum_of_Understanding.docx.”
As part of its deal with fossil fuel billionaire donors, the Trump administration has ordered several expensive and obsolete coal plants, slated to be closed, to remain open, using specious “emergency” powers to keep ordering 90 day extensions. In other words, the same half assed corrupt way they’ve been running everything else, from the War for Oil to the Protections for Pedophiles. One of those plants is the J.H. Campbell plant near Lake Michigan.
The Trump administration has once again ordered the J.H. Campbell power plant in West Michigan to remain open, despite Consumers Energy’s plan to shut the plant down last year.
President Donald Trump issued an executive order declaring a national energy emergency on his first day in office last year. After that, Energy Secretary Chris Wright issued a 90-day order for the coal-fired power plant on the shore of Lake Michigan to remain in operation. That order has been renewed every 90 days since then. The latest order was set to expire Monday, when Wright issued his 5th renewal.
The May 23, 2025, order was the first of more than a dozen 90-day emergency orders U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has issued to utilities and power grid operators in four other states, forcing them to extend the life of fossil fuel plants otherwise destined for closure. Wright said their power was needed to protect against shortages.
Advocacy groups and Democratic states tied to the Midwestern electricity grid, including Michigan, are challenging Wright’s use of federal emergency powers, claiming he falsified an energy emergency to prop up the coal industry and overrule local decision-makers. They made their case Friday before a panel of judges on a federal appeals court.
Even officials in Republican states are pushing back after seeing their share of the Campbell Plant’s bill.
“We didn’t even know the plant existed,” said Chris Nelson, South Dakota Public Utilities Commission chair, who estimated his state’s customers already are on the hook for well over $1 million in Campbell costs. “Certainly, the plant is of no benefit to our customers in South Dakota. Now, all of a sudden, we are faced with paying our proportional share of those ongoing costs. Our contention is that that, just frankly, is absolutely unfair.”
Greenlanders don’t want MAGA hats, apparently. Governor Jeff Landry found no takers when he reportedly offered children “all the chocolate chip cookies they could eat” to come to his mansion. Nothing creepy about that, Jeff.
President Trump’s special envoy to Greenland, Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana, came to the island this week on a self-proclaimed good-will mission to “make a bunch of friends.”
So far, he has not found many.
Within hours of landing on Sunday in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, Mr. Landry was touring the town in a cold drizzle when one Greenlander gave his entourage the finger.
After he offered some MAGA hats to Greenlandic children, several shook their heads.
He even told some kids that if they came to his mansion in Louisiana, they could have “all the chocolate chip cookies you can eat.”
The next day, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, Greenland’s prime minister, expressed his discomfort with the whole thing.
Clean Energy has won the argument, and the global energy transition will now proceed at warp speed.
“Those who’ve fought to keep the world hooked on fossil fuels are inadvertently supercharging the global renewables boom,” UN official Simon Stiell recently told a conference of nations,
Future generations will look back on the ill considered and incompetently managed Iran war as the global shock that triggered, finally, a massive rush to renewable energy.
It’s happening now, not because nations have awakened to the urgency of climate change — but rather because the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has finally driven home the critical unreliability of fossil fuels.
Globally, leadership has been making this point clearly.
Americans have cumulatively spent about $45 billion more on gasoline and diesel during the war with Iran than they did during the same period a year ago, according to an analysis of OPIS pricing data and federal demand figures. The surging costs are eating an outsize share of low- and middle-income consumers’ paychecks, darkening their outlook relative to the well-off.
At the same time, investors in oil-and-gas companies are watching their portfolios swell. Big energy returns bolstered a blockbuster corporate-earnings season and added momentum to the artificial-intelligence-led rally that has pushed the stock market to records. While higher inflation and borrowing costs have added stress on less-affluent Americans, many economists believe high earners will continue powering the U.S. ahead.
I am still on travel but monitoring the big picture of the current poly-crisis. Above, Oil expert Jeff Currie has been one making some of the most dire warnings. Short 2 minutes above, longer discussion below. Addresses the disconnect between the dire threat to physical markets and the relatively muted response of oil futures. If people like Currie are right, there is a very sharp cliff coming.
