Worst Climate Stories of the Week—It’s Winter, So We Have LOTS of EV Failure Stories

The weaponization of government against the American people really accelerated when Barack Obama took office as our 44th president. The Fast and Furious scandal was an Obama administration operation undertaken by the ATF to sell firearms to suspected straw purchasers, flushing them out for arrest and prosecution. Instead, the guns went missing and ended up in the hands of Mexican drug cartels, leading to the death of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry.

In his quest to erase the Obama era from American society, Donald Trump has commandeered the term "fast and furious" for another purpose—the wholesale gutting of waste and corruption in federal spending.

The amount of news about the discovery and elimination of fraudulent expenditures has gotten overwhelming. It’s especially overwhelming given Trump has only been in office for three weeks. The scandals rocking the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) have caused abject panic among career bureaucrats. The effects on Green New Deal spending, EPA regulations, and environmental nonprofits have only begun to have impact. The more that gets uncovered by the Department of Government Efficiency, (DOGE), the deeper the impact going forward.

And we’re here for all of it.

Speaking of fast and furious, that’s how the EV failure stories are coming too—it’s February, after all, so we can’t expect them to function properly this time of year. Sadly, we don’t have any cow fart news this week. We do have a rundown of the USAID debacle and green energy; a wildlife overpass on a major freeway; several nutty California stories; a complete and utter collapse of green energy initiatives; and Elon Musk going all DOGE on NOAA. Our Good News segment this week touts sensible energy in direct proportion to the collapse of "green" energy.

Let's get to it.

(DON'T MISS LAST WEEK'S COLUMN: More Finger-Pointing Amid Unspeakable Tragedy)

The USAID Debacle Lays Bare the Corruption of the Swamp

The DOGE team has deployed a team of coders to map the entire spending web of USAID, and, let's just say, the Swamp has gone into full panic mode. The $70 billion budget has been revealed for the first time, and it's bad. Of course, the Associated Press—which receives millions from USAID to push climate propaganda—thinks this could have a negative impact on climate reporting.

You don't say.

The AP jumped to the defense of USAID, saying it "funds projects that help farmers adapt to a changing climate, protecting biodiversity and the environment and other efforts aimed at fighting or adapting to human-caused climate change."

Those all seem like great reasons to pull the plug.

This is, of course, just a drop in the bucket, but USAID represents everything wrong with the federal government. As one writer put it on Substack:

It turns out the Non-Government Organizations were really the Government. The word for that is GONGO — a government organised non-government organisation. The annual budget of $50 billion dollars in the hands of unaccountable activist NGOs buys a lot of “journalists,” editors and teenage protestors. Suddenly a lot of global patterns make more sense. 

If the representatives of We The People didn't vote for it, it shouldn't get funded. That especially includes things like the "Climate Gender Equity Fund," the "Climate Finance for Development Accelerator," the "Agriculture Innovation Mission for Climate," and other such garbage.

What’s Next, Crossing Guards?

Oregon has received a $33 million federal grant to create a "massive" wildlife crossing over Interstate 5 near the border with California.

As the old joke goes, how do the deer know to cross at the deer crossing sign?

This Week in Imploding and Exploding EVs

A school district in Massachusetts lined up at the Inflation Reduction Act trough in 2022, using a grant of almost $10 million to buy 25 electric school buses and install charging stations for them. Several of the buses sat unused in a bus garage, however, until a couple of weeks ago. That's when they apparently spontaneously caught fire, requiring four departments to put them out. The buses will not be replaced by their manufacturer, Proterra, because they've gone bankrupt.

Meanwhile, another lithium battery storage facility went up in flames, this time in Melbourne, Australia. This one destroyed 3,000 lithium-ion batteries, and required 25 fire trucks to put out.

Finally, the news inconspicuously reported in an underused corner of the internet that Ford Motor Company lost billions on its EV portfolio for the third year in a row. Ford's Model e program lost $5.5 BILLION, which works out to a net loss of $56,000 per EV sold.

California Doing California Things

A couple of weeks ago, this very column wrote about an op-ed in the New York Times by Dave Jones, the former insurance commissioner for California, in which he encouraged lawsuits against "fossil fuel" companies for damages in the recent catastrophic wildfires. Because apparently SUVs caused the Santa Ana winds, or something. 

And, wouldn't you know it, a bill has just appeared in the California state assembly to allow just that:

California would be the first U.S. state to allow such lawsuits if approved. According to supporters of the bill, these disasters have driven insurers to raise rates, limit coverage, or pull out entirely from regions susceptible to wildfires and other natural disasters. Of course, there is no mention of the benefits of fossil fuels, including supplying life-saving heat in winter, air conditioning in summer, food on the table, and economic prosperity from supporting industrial activity. 

On the other hand, the Trump administration is taking on California, asking the state to pay back the $3.5 billion invested by the feds in its absurd bullet train to nowhere:

President Trump announced an investigation into California's high-speed rail project, which appears to some as a giant money laundering scheme.

"I built for a living, and I built on time, on budget. It's impossible that something could cost that much."

Californians should be… pic.twitter.com/o64vUR2aTQ

— George (@BehizyTweets) February 4, 2025

That represents a small fraction of the estimated $107 billion the project would cost, should anyone ever decide to complete it.

The Utter Failure of Green Energy

So many green energy failure stories this week, so little space.

• Headline out of Virginia: Cost of Virginia Beach wind farm jumps almost $1 billion, with increase passed onto customers
• From the Institute for Energy Research (IER): "According to Carboncredits.com: over the past two years, the average cost of offshore wind projects has risen by 30% to 40%, reaching $230 per megawatt hour." While it was already one of the most expensive technologies being considered, its costs have grown even higher than the increase in inflation due to high interest rates and supply chain problems.
• A New York meteorologist says the net-zero goals passed by the state legislature will do more harm than good: ". . . implementation of the New York Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act) net-zero mandates will do more harm than good if the future electric system relies only on wind, solar, and energy storage because of reliability and affordability risks." He also says, accurately, that green energy has more harmful effects on the environment than fossil fuel energy production.
• Pennsylvania is learning that "renewable" energy has layers upon layers of hidden costs that make it more expensive than "fossil fuel" energy production.
• Hawaii has come to the realization that they cannot do renewable energy without backing it up with increased LNG production for the sake of reliability. Renewables simply cost too much.
• From energy expert David Blackmon: "A massive solar plant observed by hundreds of thousands of tourists as they flew in and out of Las Vegas and Los Angeles is going out of business just 11 years after it began operations in the Mojave Desert." It had an original life expectancy of 25 years.
• The Heritage Foundation has a thorough report exploring how renewable energy is not at all reliable, and that it's "time to say goodbye to the Biden administration’s push for wind energy, a plan that risked steering America toward an unreliable energy path."

Elon Musk to NOAA (Probably): Let That Sink In

Lefties and greenies are freaking out about everything DOGE has done since Trump took office, but their investigation into the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has them shaking almost as much as the raid on USAID:

Staffers with Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) reportedly entered the headquarters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) in Silver Spring, Maryland, and the Department of Commerce in Washington DC today, inciting concerns of downsizing at the agency. “They apparently just sort of walked past security and said: ‘Get out of my way,’ and they’re looking for access for the IT systems, as they have in other agencies,” said Andrew Rosenberg, a former Noaa official who is now a fellow at the University of New Hampshire. “They will have access to the entire computer system, a lot of which is confidential information.” 

Given how much NOAA manipulates the temperature data it releases in order to falsely bolster the predictions of climate doom, this comes as a welcome investigation for climate realists.

And now for some more good news.

Good News

The state of New Jersey sued Big Oil over "climate misinformation," relying on the radical green claims that Big Oil knew their products caused global warming and hid the information from consumers. A judge just tossed the state's frivolous lawsuit:

A New Jersey judge on Wednesday tossed out the state's lawsuit over climate misinformation against ExxonMobil, Shell Oil, Chevron, BP, ConocoPhillips and the American Petroleum Institute, ruling only federal law can be used to regulate nationwide emissions. 

Learn more about the climate scam in the comprehensive report by Restoration News: How the Left’s Global Warming Ideology Wrecked Science—And How to Stop It