Worst Climate Stories of the Week—Is the CO2 Endangerment Finding Endangered?

Feb 28, 2025
Jeff Reynolds
Energy & Environment

The Trump administration keeps on truckin' towards climate sanity.

Here in Florida, it seems the worst of what passes for winter around here has passed for good, and spring has sprung. That doesn't mean we've seen the last of the EV failure stories, though. We also have green energy failures piling up, so plenty to write about here.

But there's also a growing body of good news, as the Trump administration keeps on truckin' towards climate sanity and undoing the worst of the Obama-Biden-Harris war on energy. The more Trump rolls back, the more the world restores modern life and human advancement.

As always, this week we start with the crazy and finish with the good news. A wind turbine in Oklahoma that give up on life (possibly due to impending Trump cuts); several more stories about the full implosion of the EV market; firefighters who still can't extinguish the fire at a lithium battery facility; Greenpeace sued for a gojillion dollars; and a scientific study that proves the unreliability of scientific studies about climate.

Of course, the biggest news is the highly anticipated order by the Trump administration to reverse the "endangerment finding"—the Obama-era EPA ruling that carbon dioxide is a pollutant. We have other good news, too. Not only has EPA administrator Lee Zeldin submitted his endangerment finding report to President Trump, but he also continues to clean up the agency by gutting its DEI programs. Meanwhile, Trump issued an order opening up logging in the West; he canceled the US participation in the IPCC; and oil companies decided to return their focus to petroleum products.

Are you tired of winning yet?

(DON'T MISS LAST WEEK'S COLUMN: It's the End of the Gravy Train as We Know It, and I Feel Fine)

Oklahoma Wind Turbine Can't Even

A wind turbine just fell over in Oklahoma. Nobody seems to know why, since it (ironically) wasn't a windy day when it collapsed.

Is it possible it just gave up on life, seeing the writing on the wall from the Trump administration?

This Week in EV Implosions

The State of New York continues its net zero push, including EV mandates, despite seeing sales implode. The state projections of sales of EVs and plug in hybrids have badly missed the mark:

New York electric vehicle sales are not meeting the projections necessary to meet the Climate Act mandates. NYSERDA’s reports describing “record sales” don’t bother to mention that fact. That is misleading and biased so it looks like propaganda to me.

There is another consideration. The lack of evidence that the electric vehicle transportation sector emission reduction plan will work is one more reason that New York State needs to pause the process and determine if the plans are feasible before more money is squandered.

Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, a company that makes home EV charging ports is on the brink:

One of the UK’s largest charger companies is facing a fight for its future, after the slowdown in EV take up wiped more than £10 million from its market value overnight.

On the release of its 2024 results, which revealed a £7m shortfall on its revenue target of £60m, Pod Point’s share price fell 41%.

The EDF-owned company, which has installed 250,000 chargers since 2009, blamed its downbeat forecast on the UK government’s recently launched zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) mandate review, saying this is causing uncertainty and worsening an already “challenging backdrop”.

Lithium Battery Fire Refuses to Go Out

We've covered many stories about lithium battery fires and the difficulty in getting them extinguished. Here's another one. A battery storage plant in California caught fire a few weeks ago, releasing all sorts of toxic fumes into the community. It's still burning, over a month later:

North County firefighters determined that a group of lithium batteries in an area that had previously burned during the Jan. 16 fire had smoldered and reignited. According to Mendoza, the flames burned at varying intensities throughout the night before the fire burned itself out at about 8 a.m. on Wednesday. 

Greenpeace Sued over Pipeline Protests

The company that built the Dakota Access Pipeline has sued Greenpeace for $300 million, saying the protests they organized added that much to the cost of the project:

A trial is set to begin Monday in North Dakota for a lawsuit that could force the environmental group Greenpeace USA to shut down.

The company behind the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline, Energy Transfer, first sued Greenpeace and other activists in federal court back in 2017. Energy Transfer claimed that thousands of protestors who camped near the construction site for months delayed the pipeline’s start and increased costs by at least $300 million. A federal lawsuit by the company was dismissed, but it filed a similar one in North Dakota state court in 2019. That’s the case now headed to trial.

The pipeline company’s lawsuit claims Greenpeace and others engaged in an “unlawful and violent scheme to cause financial harm to Energy Transfer, physical harm to its employees and infrastructure, and to disrupt and prevent Energy Transfer’s construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.”

Scientific Studies on Climate Display Significant Bias

In the world of peer-reviewed scientific journal studies, it’s common practice for the authors to disclose any conflicts of interest they may have—be it funding sources, employers, and professional affiliations. Disclosing these conflicts does not necessarily invalidate the scientific study. But when those conflicts are not disclosed, it automatically raises questions of ethics and scientific rigor. A new analysis of 82 papers about climate in the peer-reviewed literature shows zero of 331 authors disclosed any conflicts of interest:

Funding from non-governmental organizations was correlated with finding “a positive association between climate change and geophysical characteristics of hurricanes as a research outcomes.” That’s pretty important stuff, considering that how much climate change may or may not impact hurricane strength has serious implications on public policy . . . .

Out of 82 papers the authors analyzed in the meta-analysis, written between 1994 and 2023, absolutely zero of the 331 academics who had conflicts of interest disclosed them, despite the fact that the conflicts of interest are positively correlated with alarmism about anthropogenic climate change and hurricane strength.

If one didn't know better, one might conclude the studies in question were designed by the organizations paying for them to come to a particular conclusion.

Now for the copious amount of good news from the week.

The Endangerment Finding Is on the Endangered List

Ok, it hasn't happened yet. But it seems inevitable at this point. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has privately submitted his report to President Trump on the carbon dioxide endangerment finding that dates back to the Obama-era EPA. That finding defines carbon dioxide (CO2) as a pollutant, which allows the EPA to write all sorts of rules to curb "global warming" without significant congressional oversight. The climate cultists, naturally, have started their freakout, to the delight of realists:

“This is the holy grail of the climate agenda,” said Marc Morano, who runs the climate-skeptic website ClimateDepot.com. “If you want to permanently cripple the United States climate agenda you have to go at the heart of it. This is the heart of it: the endangerment finding.” 

Cleanup on Aisle E(PA)

Zeldin has been busy at EPA. On top of the endangerment finding, he's cleaning up the entire agency. He announced this week another round of cancelations of wasteful spending:

Trump to Canadian Lumber: Take Off Hosers, Eh?

This week, President Trump did something residents in the western part of the country have begged the feds to do for years: He "freed up forests for more lumber production." This should lead to more affordable building products and stabilization in new housing costs.

Trump Withdraws the U.S. from the IPCC

The International Panel on Climate Change has led to catastrophic public policies in nations around the globe, due to its flawed science and bullying tactics by the UN. So, Trump decided to withdraw the U.S. from the IPCC:

The Trump administration told US government scientists working on a vital global climate report to stop their work, according to a scientist involved in the report – the latest move to withdraw the US from global climate action and research.

The US had been highly involved in planning for the next installment of the report due out in 2029 from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading scientific authority on climate change.

Oil Companies Return to Oil

Finally this week, Kevin Mooney of Restoration News noticed this news item: British Petroleum will abandon its renewables sector and focus once again on actual energy.

This came on the heels of another oil giant, Shell, issuing a report predicting a huge surge in energy demand due to artificial intelligence and the coming economic boom it will create:

This becomes evident in the annual Shell Energy Security Scenarios report, in which the authors dedicate major focus on the topic of the impacts AI is likely to have on the global energy equation in the years to come. The report’s creators go so far as to include an entirely new scenario – titled “Surge” – which they say, “explores the prospect of a new wave of economic growth driven by productivity improvements catalysed by AI.”

In that Surge scenario, Shell projects that adoption and refinement of AI technologies helps create more rapid economic growth which in turn drives higher demand for all forms of energy. At the same time, though, AI adoption also drives rapid advancement in technologies which result in faster cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. Those emissions reductions come about even in the face of continuing strong demand for fossil fuels like oil and natural gas well into the 2040s. 

So much for the doom and gloom scenarios implausibly predicted by the climate cultists.

What a time to be alive.

(READ MORE: EXCLUSIVE: NOAA Caught Manipulating Temperature Data to Advance the Global Warming Narrative)

Jeff Reynolds is Senior Editor for Restoration News, specializing in energy and science policy, as well as dark money. Jeff is an author, editor, strategist, and public speaker. A prolific researcher and writer, he authored the book Behind the Curtain in 2019, which details the billionaires and foundations responsible for the radical left's ascension in American politics. Jeff graduated from Connecticut College with a bachelor's in Zoology. 

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