Climate & Energy

The Climate Conversation Is Broken

Everyone agrees the climate is changing. Nobody agrees on what to do about it - or whether what’s being proposed would work even if it were tried.

This section exists for the same reason the economics section does: to give you the handful of ideas that actually explain how energy, climate, and policy work, and to help you spot the bad arguments people use to confuse you.

You don’t need a science degree. You just need to be willing to ask: who pays, who decides, and what happens when it doesn’t work?

• The Carbon Border Tax Hits the Farm → - Tax the imports with one hand, compensate the farmers with the other. The CBAM is real, and the compensation claims are already arriving.

• The Nuclear Cost Myth → - US nuclear costs exploded because of policy choices, not technology. France and South Korea built cheaper. America chose to fail.

• Germany’s €600 Billion Lesson → - Germany spent a generation and a fortune on its energy transition. Its emissions stayed flat. Its electricity prices doubled. Something went wrong.

• Climate Bureaucracy, Part 1 → - The climate funding pipeline follows a predictable path: government grants flow to academics who produce the science that justifies more government grants. The IPCC is not a conspiracy - it’s an institution full of people doing exactly what their incentives tell them to do.

• Climate Bureaucracy, Part 2: The Scenario That Wouldn’t Die → - The RCP8.5 climate scenario - the worst-case projection used to justify the most aggressive policies - was never realistic. Yet it remained in official use for over a decade. The story of how a bad scenario survived tells you everything about how climate policy actually works.

• The Carbon Tax That Already Exists → - The UK already prices carbon at over £229 per tonne through fuel duty. Every additional carbon tax is double taxation on a problem that has already been priced. The debate about carbon pricing needs to start from this fact, not pretend it doesn’t exist.

• The Grid That Isn’t There → - Britain paid over a billion pounds this year to switch its own wind off. The grid is the bottleneck, and nobody owns the bill.

• The £315-a-Year Bill → - The standing charge is the bill you pay before using a watt - and it is going up again.