Worst Climate Stories of the Week—Maximum Octane Edition

This week, several stories emerged that shows America has done an about-face on cars and energy. We've ditched the low-wattage ideas of the green zealots and re-embraced the things that make America awesome. One of those things just happens to involve a sad climate scientist and phony Nobel "laureate"—Michael Mann.

As this column has observed many times, America is healing.

We have a lot of stories to cover this week, so we're going to jump right in. There's so much electric vehicle news this week, it could take up a column just by itself. On top of that, we have this week in penguin poop news; bearing no relation to the prior item, we have further troubles for Michael Mann and the continued vindication of Mark Steyn; more legal news as leftists try to sue Big Oil; and continued fallout from the Klamath Dam removal disaster in northern California.

In our Good News segment, the government is cutting the environmentalist red tape in infrastructure improvements, and more good news for the nuclear power industry.

Here we go.

(DON'T MISS LAST WEEK'S COLUMN: Will the EPA Do Something Right for a Change?)

This Week in EV Implosions—American Muscle Edition

The EV cancellation market is booming! The news came fast and furious this week, led by the announcement from Dodge that it will discontinue the Electric Charger Daytona R/T. According to one report, "the ‘brotherhood of muscle’ isn’t exactly embracing the EV revolution. In fact, it seems like their idea of 'muscle' is still firmly rooted in gas-powered engines." Soon after this, GM announced it will switch from EVs back to V8s—responding to market demand by investing almost a billion dollars to change over a plant in Buffalo from EVs to  trucks and SUVs.

Meanwhile, a German EV trade association has gone bankrupt.

JUST IN - German Electric Mobility Association (BEM) has filed for bankruptcy. pic.twitter.com/ZzCoEQttb6

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) May 25, 2025

Energy expert David Blackmon covered this event and pointed out the numerous high-profile bankruptcies happening in the EV sector, including:

• Fisker: Filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in June 2024.
• Proterra: Filed for Chapter 11 in 2023.
• Lordstown Motors: Filed for Chapter 11 in June 2023 but re-emerged in March 2024 under a new name, Nu Ride Inc.
• Nikola: Filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in February 2025.
• HiPhi: Filed for pre-reorganization bankruptcy in August 2024.
• Aptera: While not officially bankrupt, Aptera has faced financial challenges and has been through a re-emergence period.
• Faraday Future: Has faced significant financial issues and is still struggling.
• Northvolt - filed for bankruptcy in March 2025.
• Lion Electric - filed in February 2025.

America, and the world, appear to have rediscovered the advantages of muscular internal combustion engines.

In case you still harbor any doubts as to the utter failure of EVs, radio host Larry Elder has a new documentary out to tell you all about it.

Michele Tafoya invited me on her podcast to talk about my new documentary, "Electric Vehicles: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly," and of course, crazy California! @Michele_Tafoya @WatchSalemNOW pic.twitter.com/RfiP9kROUv

— Larry Elder (@larryelder) May 28, 2025

This Week in Penguin Poop News

The last time this space covered news about poop, it revolved around polar bears. Had you assumed this would be the last time we covered this subject, dear reader, you would have been incorrect. A scientific study published in an academic journal came to this conclusion:

Penguin poop helps form clouds that could slow Antarctic warming

Bowel movements will save the climate!

On a serious note, it's good to see some scientists finally acknowledging the role the plant and animal kingdoms play in affecting Earth's climate, something too many scientists find inconvenient to acknowledge.

Mann Slapped, Steyn Vindicated

In the almost decade-and-a-half saga regarding alleged climate scientist and confirmed Nobel fraudster Michael Mann suing his critics over free speech, the victory Mann celebrated last year has completely unraveled. You may recall that pyrrhic victory from 2024, in which a D.C. jury awarded Mann $1 in damages for lost income, and $1 million in punitive damages, all to be paid by columnist Mark Steyn. Our friends over at PJ Media have the details:

In May 2025, a D.C. Superior Court judge issued a stunning reversal. The punitive damages were slashed from $1 million to just $5,000, a more proportional figure given the $1 compensatory judgment.

In legal terms, the court found that the original award was “grossly excessive.” But in human terms, it was something far more profound: vindication.

Steyn had stood alone for over a decade, enduring the weight of the court and the pressure of being a target in the climate orthodoxy’s war on dissent. He didn’t just win on paper; he won morally, publicly, and profoundly.

This case, like Mann’s broader legal campaign, embodied a SLAPP, a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. These lawsuits are designed not to win but to exhaust, intimidate, and silence. And in the world of climate science, where the political and the empirical are often inseparable, they have been used to devastating effect.

To add justice to this vindication, Mann suffered an ignominious defeat in which a court ordered him to pay nearly $1 million in legal fees for lying in court about his actual financial losses. Mann has lived high on the hog as the pugilistic defender of the climate narrative for decades, but this loss shreds his reputation.

Big Lawsuits against Big Oil

Despite (or, perhaps, because of) President Trump's renewed focus on reliable energy, several folks have decided to take it upon themselves to take on Big Oil. Several lawsuits appeared this week to find legal fault with the companies supplying energy to our society over perceived ills.

In the first, the City of Charleston, South Carolina employed a San Francisco law firm to sue Chevron and other petroleum extraction companies:

The City of Charleston case involves Chevron, along with most other “big oil” companies doing business in the United States, a true scattergun approach. The city claims it has somehow been damaged to the tune of billions of dollars on allegations that the companies have sought to hide the climate impacts from emissions resulting from the refining and usage of the products they produce.

As they have done in every other case brought and dismissed by various states and cities which have been recruited for this lawfare campaign, lawyers for the defendants argue that this case must also be dismissed because it is a clear violation of the U.S. Constitution and provisions in the federal Clean Air Act barring lawsuits that seek relief for injuries allegedly caused by out-of-state and international greenhouse gas emissions.

The second one involves an elderly Washington woman who died during a heat wave:

In one of the nation’s first wrongful-death claims seeking to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for its role in the changing climate, a Washington state woman is suing seven oil and gas companies, saying they contributed to an extraordinarily hot day that led to her mother's fatal hyperthermia.

The lawsuit filed in state court this week says the companies knew that their products have altered the climate, including contributing to a 2021 heat wave in the Pacific Northwest that killed 65-year-old Juliana Leon, and that they failed to warn the public of such risks.

To their credit, Chevron issued a scathing statement in response:

Chevron Corporation counsel Theodore Boutrous Jr. said in a statement: “Exploiting a personal tragedy to promote politicized climate tort litigation is contrary to law, science, and common sense. The court should add this far-fetched claim to the growing list of meritless climate lawsuits that state and federal courts have already dismissed.”

These lawsuits appear frivolous in that they cannot attribute any injury to climate, never mind proving the man-made global warming theory. Absent that sort of evidence, juries should see right through these suits.

In fact, we have one bit of good news about these frivolous types of climate lawsuits. This column has previously covered the Peruvian farmer who sued a "fossil fuel" company in Germany for melting the glacier near his home. The German court dismissed his case this week.

Let's hope these other frivolous suits meet a similar fate.

More Fallout from the Klamath Dam Removals

In an update on the removal of the Klamath River hydroelectric dams in southern Oregon and northern California, an opponent of the project has written a blistering report on the effects that runs counter to the rosy media coverage the effort has received. Richard Marshall, president of Siskyou County (CA) Water Users, skewers the efforts, noting that the intent to save endangered salmon and suckerfish will most certainly fail:

What is most interesting is that the discussion of the benefits always focuses on the upper Klamath Basin while the damage that will result from removal of the Klamath Hydro facilities will occur primarily below Iron Gate Dam on the middle and Lower Klamath River. We contend that the totality of biological damage which will occur is monumental in scope and potentially unredeemable in terms of impact on all forms of both aquatic life and wildlife dependent on the water for drinking and food. The Department of Interior in an earlier and now outdated Environmental Impact Report and comments by officers of the DOI concluded that the true impact of dam removal success or failure will not be known until 2060. The aquatic life of endangered species will be catastrophically impacted. The long nose and short nose sucker fish will be extirpated by admission of the Oregon Environmental Agency (ODEQ) in their study of the destruction of the J.C. Boyle Dam. This is further supported by the fact that the California Legislature approved the extermination of the sucker fish in advance to give cover to the California Dept. of Wildlife.

Marshall points out that Oregon and California created a 501(c)(3) organization to take on full liability for this process, absolving the states of any legal liability.

As noted in last week's column, removal of existing hydroelectric dams makes absolutely no sense, and accomplishes none of the stated goals from the environmentalists.

Let's move to our Good News segment.

Good News: Cutting Infrastructure Red Tape

In what's being described as a landmark decision, the Supreme Court ruled against what it called "aggressive interference" under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA:

The U.S. Supreme Court reversed a D.C. Circuit ruling that had blocked construction of a new 88-mile freight railroad line, clarifying the scope of impacts that federal agencies must consider under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The Court’s majority opinion in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, No. 23-975 (May 29, 2025) is a sharp rebuke to what the Court describes as the aggressive interference by certain federal lower courts with the exercise of agency discretion in determining the scope of a NEPA review, a practice the Court found contrary to the intent of NEPA as a “purely procedural statute” designed to assist in agency decision making.

The best part? The decision was unanimous: 8-0. Even Justices Kagan, Jackson, and Sotomayor failed to side with the environmentalists.

Nuclear Power Continues Its Gains

More and more nations have come to the realization they need reliable, clean, always-on electrical production to power their modern societies. This time, it's Belgium:

Belgium’s parliament on Thursday voted to drop the country’s planned nuclear phaseout.

The motion was passed with 102 votes in favor, eight against and 31 abstentions…

In 2003, Belgium passed a law for the gradual phaseout of nuclear energy.

The law stipulated that nuclear power plants were to be closed by 2025 at the latest, while prohibiting the construction of new reactors.

In 2022, Belgium delayed the phaseout by 10 years, with plans to run one reactor in each of its two plants as a backup due to energy uncertainty triggered by Russia’s war in Ukraine.

(READ MORE: The Iberian Nightmare Forecasts a Future Using Only Renewable Energy)