The Worst Climate Stories of 2024

Throughout the year that just passed, we witnessed some of the most consequential events in human history. It seems humanity has grown accustomed to making history at an ever-increasing rate. Radical environmentalists didn’t want to get left behind, and gave us some of the craziest stories they could come up with to advance their Cult of Scientism.

Here at Restoration News, we ran the weekly column, Worst Climate Stories of the Week, to document it all. Going into 2025, with a new administration taking over on Inauguration Day, one must wonder what the future holds for this column. But as we take one more look back at 2024, safe to say it could hardly get crazier on the climate front than what we just went through.

Whatever comes our way on the climate front in the new Trump administration, Restoration News will continue to document it, and poke fun at the cultists trying to run up against that brick wall.

Now, let’s run down the kookiest climate stories of 2024.

The Climate Cult Declares War on… Well… Everything

Inhalers, owls, Joshua trees, RVs, air conditioning, LNG exports, and cow farts. What do they all have in common? Radical climate cultists marked them all for death in 2024. Each in its own way made environmental activists very upset, so they had to try to ban them.

Great Britain's socialist National Health Service (NHS) ordered doctors to stop prescribing inhalers to patients with lung problems because of global warming.  

The decline in the population of Spotted Owls in Oregon in the 1980s led to a federal court ruling that virtually halted all old-growth timber harvesting in the state. It was later discovered that invasive Barred Owls had outcompeted the Spotted Owl, causing their decline. Instead of lifting the now-moot moratorium on the timber industry, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has decided to shoot all the Barred Owls. You know, to save the environment.

Those annoying Joshua trees got in the way of saving the planet because they decided to grow on prime solar farm land. Restoration News reported on this in June. A renewable energy company wanted to build a solar project to power 180,000 homes in a rich neighborhood on the California coast, so they chose tiny towns in the middle of nowhere in Kern County. The project threatens Joshua trees and endangered desert tortoises in what the Los Angeles Times called a “trade-off” for the environment.

Restoration News reported on the war on RVs in November: “Six blue states have adopted California’s zero-emission-vehicle regulations which will effectively ban the sale of RVs, motorhomes, and campers. Those states—California, Washington, Oregon, New York, Massachusetts, and New Jersey—decided this segment of the economy deserved to be outlawed. Even purchasing one out of state could cause problems, as the blue states implementing the ban may make registering the vehicles impossible.”

The Summer Olympic Games were held in Paris, France this year. The host city took the opportunity to showcase itself as a climate-conscious city, by building athlete housing without air conditioning. Many nations defied the ban on A/C by bringing their own portable units to keep their athletes comfortable at the height of the European summer.

The Biden administration “paused” approvals for new exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG), claiming they needed to study the “environmental impacts.” Lo and behold, after an entire year, they came out with a report showing minimal impacts, which Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm spun into a desperate need to outright ban LNG anyway.

The final arena in this multi-front war for the future of the planet centered on everyone’s favorite: cow farts. Denmark became the first nation on earth to tax them. Meanwhile, Bill Gates and other respected agriculturists have begun developing mRNA vaccines and dietary supplements to make the cows fart less. The unintended consequences of that should be fascinating.

The Utter Failure of Green Energy

The Biden administration, along with the European Union, invested heavily over the past few years in wind, solar, and other alternate forms of energy. The failures have been spectacular. Several offshore wind farms have gone out of business in the Northeast United States and northern Europe, despite massive public subsidies. Several more have been sued out of existence, like the large wind farm in Oklahoma a judge just ordered to be dismantled. The wind farms that remain have racked up an astonishing number of bird and whale kills. On top of that, several solar farms across the world ended up destroyed by natural causes, like wind, hail storms, and waves.

Wait. Waves?

The worlds largest floating solar field has been damaged by a storm in India. I mean, who could have possibly seen this coming? Thankfully solar panels don't contain toxic chemicals or anything. 🤣 It's almost like these green goons are trying to wreck the environment. pic.twitter.com/Vp9DTjMHwz

— Military Arms (@MAC_Arms) April 30, 2024

Meanwhile, we have a weekly segment in our column on the implosion of the electric vehicle (EV) market for a reason. Sometimes it includes explosions. What it doesn’t include is any success.

The Utter Failure of Radical Climate Protesters

The nutjobs at the radical protest group Just Stop Oil have really made a name for themselves. These folks like to glue themselves to the counter at Starbucks and throw paint on Stonehenge to bring attention to the climate crisis. They generally beclown themselves while annoying other people. So they’re not terribly effective.

This year their activities seem to have waned a bit in 2024, after peaking in 2023. Perhaps it’s because they had two pretty embarrassing episodes. In January, the wackos hurled soup at the Mona Lisa, but missed the mark because the Louvre protects this priceless work of art behind a glass shield.Image via AFPTVThe second epic fail brought Taylor Swift into the fray. Sort of. The nutters tried to dump orange paint on Tay-tay’s private plane. The only problem? They got the wrong plane.

Image via BBC

Somehow these events failed to engender the desired sympathy among most humans.

The Profligate Waste of the Inflation Reduction Act that Even Funds Terrorists

We’ve spilled a lot of ink in 2024 (well, electrons, actually) reporting on the insanity of the Inflation Reduction Act—Joe Biden’s signature legislation that ushered in the Green New Deal. Beyond the eye-popping waste of federal dollars, perhaps the most insulting aspect involves giving money to terrorists.

Actually.

Senate Republicans revealed a proposed EPA grant to Climate Justice Alliance, which proudly proclaims its solidarity with Hamas on its website. They “repurposed” the IRA acronym to mean, “Investing in Radical Activists.” They say the “liberation” of “Palestine” is a climate justice issue on their website:

With this newest round of genocidal attacks by Israel on the civilian Palestinian population, that has forced thousands to flee and live without water, food and electricity which is continuously blockaded and shut off, the Israel government has defied international law; President Biden must oppose this.

This follows the absurdity of the Taliban’s invitation to the UN’s climate summit, COP29:

For the first time since the Taliban returned to power in 2021, Afghanistan on Monday sent a delegation to the United Nations climate talks in a bid to garner help in dealing with global warming.

Matuil Haq Khalis, who’s head of the country’s environment protection agency, told The Associated Press that Afghanistan needs international support to deal with extreme weather like erratic rainfall, prolonged droughts and flash floods.

“All the countries must join hands and tackle the problem of climate change,” said Khalis . . .

One wonders if the Taliban will make us all sorry if we don’t fund their climate program.

Michael Mann Sues Critic into Submission

In February, climate “scientist” Michael Mann inexplicably won his decade-plus lawsuit against conservative commentator Mark Steyn, for the crime of debunking Mann’s hockey stick temperature graph. As Restoration News wrote at the time, “Ultimately, this trial didn’t prove that Mann prevailed on the facts. Rather, much like the OJ Simpson murder trial three decades prior, it demonstrated the folly of a legal strategy which entrusts complex scientific questions to a jury.” That jury ordered Steyn to pay $1 million in punitive damages, and $1 in compensatory damages. Steyn has appealed the ruling.

SEC Climate Rule

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has a mandate to “facilitate capital formation and maintain market efficiency.” Which means the Biden administration felt it necessary to take it over and reimagine its purpose to be more environmental. The new SEC rules require corporations to disclose twelve new categories of climate data, at their own expense. This will require them to hire climatologists, lawyers, and administrative staff to handle the expansive new reporting requirements. Hopefully, the incoming Trump administration will unwind this absurdity—his SEC nominee has already said he would do so. Just in case, 25 state attorneys general have sued to block the rules.

Destroying the Planet with Geoengineering to Save the Atmosphere

2024 was the year of crazy geoengineering experiments with no thought to the globe-altering unintended consequences. Things like spraying salt crystals over large regions of the atmosphere to form clouds and block the sun. Glacier curtains. Undersea walls to block ocean currents in an effort to save an Antarctic ice shelf. Massive carbon capture projects buried in pipelines, or under water. Restoration News reported in April on one project hidden from the public:

Yes, just last week, in fact. The New York Times bragged about all sorts of geoengineering projects by “scientists” who hope to reverse global warming. Another story this week, this time in Scientific American, tells of scientists shooting microscopic salt particles into the air in San Francisco to see if they could make more clouds, to reflect sunlight away from the earth. The researchers didn’t announce their operation until it started, to avoid “backlash.” It will go until the end of May. Even the radicals at Scientific American expressed misgivings about the project, saying this doesn’t address carbon dioxide emissions, and could alter weather patterns in “unclear ways.” No pun intended.

Believe it or not, there was some good news on environmentalism this year, and we will finish out with a funny video from Australia, where all the best satire originates.

Looking Ahead: How Trump Can Permanently Kill the Paris Treaty

Kevin Mooney of Restoration News published a detailed article on how the incoming Trump administration can permanently kill the 2015 Paris Treaty—by insisting on a vote by the Senate, as required by the Constitution. Given the Republican majority in the incoming Senate, it should go down in defeat, making it not just partially dead, but all-dead.

Read it here: Experts Agree: Trump Should Permanently Defeat the Paris Climate Treaty. Here's How.

Finally, we wrap up a maniacal 2024 in climate news with a truly hysterical video. Satire is a satisfying way to cut authoritarians down to size, and Rita Panahi of Sky News Australia has cornered the market. She can’t stop laughing at Sonny Hostin of The View blaming earthquakes on global warming:

Here’s hoping 2025 brings us more sanity, more rational public policy, and energy and prosperity for all. Then again, what would we have to write about if that happened?

(Learn more in the definitive report by Restoration News: How the Left’s Global Warming Ideology Wrecked Science—And How to Stop It)