Worst Climate Stories of the Week—A Valentine to DOGE

DOGE has laid waste to waste, fraud, and abuse, and it's got us feeling downright amorous around here. Trump has been in office exactly 26 days as of today, and he and his team have already rooted out and halted billions in fraudulent government spending.

If they keep this up, Americans will be happy enough to create another Baby Boom generation.

The green cultists haven't stopped, though. They continue to manufacture data, create phony outrage over Trump's—and Elon Musk's—existence, and fear monger over a sky that stubbornly refuses to fall. The cult of scientism seems bound and determined to provide a bottomless pit of material for our little weekly column here. With a new sheriff in town, we have another week with almost as much good news as bad.

This week we have more stories about green energy causing bird deaths; more green energy failures and bankruptcies; astonishing panic porn statements from sitting members of congress because DOGE is exposing the massive grift at the EPA; a California battery company exposed as an extension of the Chinese military; and the Paris Agreement is not worth the hemp fiber paper it's printed on.

In our Good News segment, we have environmental justice workers in Seattle locked out of their building; Trump clawing back $20 billion in insane spending by the EPA; great news about the revitalization of nuclear energy; and Trump issuing executive orders to rein in NOAA.

By the time we've finished this week's column, we're all going to need a cigarette. Let's go.

(DON'T MISS LAST WEEK'S COLUMN: It’s Winter, So We Have LOTS of EV Failure Stories)

Solar Plants Fry Birds, Media Ignores

A recent blog post tells the sordid tale of solar farms the corporate media completely ignores:

Solar farms, coming soon to a field near you, are an ecological disaster turning productive land into a nature dead zone. Birds frequently fly into the panels mistaking them for water, while electrocution and incineration are common. Blanketing large areas once open to sunlight causes massive habitat disruption and reduced insect numbers. Like the heavily-shaded ground beneath the miles of often Chinese-made panels, all of this is hidden by a mainstream media and governing class that are desperate to keep the Net Zero kite flying high.

“Bird mortality has become an unintended consequence of renewable energy development,” notes Hannah Vander Zanden, an Assistant Professor of Biology at the University of Florida. Little work has been done specifically on bird mortality at solar farms, although it is known that millions of bats and large birds of every kind are killed every year by giant wind turbines and their associated high power electricity lines. In recent work in California, Vander Zanden found that the birds killed at solar farms were often non-local, with peak kills during migratory periods in April and September. Britain, of course, is a haven for many migratory birds, large and small.

Just another reminder that green energy, along with a complete lack of reliability or scalability, has seriously detrimental effects on ecosystems.

More Green Energy Failures

Last week we reported on the massive solar facility in Nevada that went out of business. This week, Shell Oil has backed out of a massive off-shore wind project in New Jersey, despite it receiving huge public subsidies. That should end the project, with Shell choosing a $1 billion loss over further investment.  

Meanwhile, in this week's EV market implosion news, it looks like Porsche may have grown tired of losing so much money on its EV portfolio—especially on sales in China, down 28% last year. So they've begun switching back to internal combustion and hybrid models.

Sitting Members of Congress Prove We Don't Send Our Brightest Citizens to D.C.

Radical Democratic congressmembers staged political rallies in front of federal agencies exposed by DOGE as organized crime rackets, in an attempt to portray themselves as freedom fighters. Outside of Maxine Waters, one were more cognitively challenged than Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM):

Omg I can’t believe this is real

Democrat Rep Melanie Stansbury is telling the news cameras that DOGE has hacked the system at The EPA and that Americans are going to have to start boiling their water

HOW IS THIS REAL???

'I don't think there is anyone in America that wants to… pic.twitter.com/NG8qvvevOJ

— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) February 13, 2025

California In Bed with the Chinese Military

NBD, just the nation's most populous state run by extremists and inviting the People's Liberation Army over for tea:

A California "new energy" company formed in 2023 has drawn the attention of the House Armed Services Committee after a social media post inadvertently linked them to a Chinese military-owned entity on the U.S. government's sanctions list.

. . . it was an October LinkedIn post that caught the attention of Rep. Abe Hamadeh (R-AZ), a member of the [House Armed Services Committee]. In that post, SPT announced they'd "been awarded a Bankability Technical Assessment report by DNV, a globally recognized leader in certification and risk management." The post included screenshots from selected pages of the bankability report, which lists the company name as Fengfan Co., Ltd., not Stored Power Technology.

As noted by the Department of Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, Fengfan Co., Ltd., is the former name of China Shipbuilding Industry Group Power Company Limited, an entity that's part of the China State Shipbuilding Corporation - entities which are all on the NS-CMIC sanctions list as components of the Chinese Military-Industrial Complex under both Executive Order 13959 and Executive Order 14032.

A Shockingly Low Number of Nations Comply with the Paris Agreement

Kevin Killough of Just the News reported this week that only twelve nations met the deadline to submit the regular reports they agreed to generate under the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015. Under the global climate agreement, nations agreed to submit their five-year plans for achieving emissions reductions by Feb. 10, 2025. Fully 94 percent of the world blew off the deadline, indicating the weight they give to prioritizing Paris.

And now for some good news.

Environmental Justice Employees Locked Out in Seattle

The headline says it all: The Purge Has Begun. "Nine Environmental Protection Agency employees in Seattle have been put on leave by the Trump Administration because they work on environmental justice." New EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the firings of 171 employees total across the nation:

 "The previous Administration used DEI and Environmental Justice to advance ideological priorities, distributing billions of dollars to organizations in the name of climate equity,” Zeldin said in a press release. "This ends now." 

Apparently DOGE is also conducting "15-minute justification interviews" for federal employees to tell them why they shouldn't be fired.

Ahhhhh, MAN that feels good.

Tens of Billions Blown by the EPA—Trump Admin Trying to Claw It Back

Apparently Zeldin is just getting started:

🚨The Biden EPA tossed $20 billion of “gold bars off the Titanic”.

BIG UPDATE! We found the gold bars and they are now being recovered for you, the hardworking American taxpayer.

Here are more of the details: pic.twitter.com/DM4C0TQcpj

— Lee Zeldin (@epaleezeldin) February 13, 2025

On top of that, Secretary of State Rubio announced the Trump administration canceled $4 billion in pledges to the "Green Climate Fund" at the United Nations, gutting its budget.

Nuclear Power Ready for Its Comeback

This Substack account has a nice rundown of the pro-nuclear power news we've seen recently:

• Belgium has reversed its decision in 2003 to stop building new nuclear reactors, with new plans to double its nuclear power production.
• Estonia has removed impediments that have stalled the construction of new nuclear power plants for over a decade.
• The Netherlands will subsidize the construction of four new "large-scale nuclear reactors."
• Vietnam announced that it will direct state-owned companies to begin construction on two new nuclear plants.
• The Indian government announced plans to expand its nuclear portfolio, and will loosen up stifling regulations on the industry.
• The United Kingdom will also cut regulations in an attempt to promote new nuclear power production.

NOAA Gets Spanked

The New York Times reports:

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, one of the world’s leading climate science agencies, has been ordered to identify grants related to global warming and other topics targeted by President Trump’s executive orders, raising fears that those grants are at risk of being canceled.

The instructions were issued on Thursday at the direction of the Commerce Department, which includes NOAA, according to a copy of the document viewed by The New York Times. NOAA staff members were given a list of all “active financial assistant awards” at NOAA and told to identify which of those grants could be “potentially impacted” by one of Mr. Trump’s orders.

One of the directives in question, signed by Mr. Trump the day he took office, is aimed at demolishing federal government programs that address climate change. Based on that order, NOAA staff members have been told to search their existing grants for terms that include “climate science,” “climate crisis,” “clean energy,” “environmental quality” and “pollution.”

Of course they present this as the sky falling, people dying, dogs and cats living together, because Trump doesn't care about global warming, especially when it affects black and brown people. 

Same old tired straw man arguments. But really, this is the tip of the iceberg—Trump is cleaning up the massive grift enabled by the climate cult. It can't happen soon enough.

(READ MORE: Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility Could Spell Big Trouble for Climate Grants)