Worst Climate Stories of Week—Delayed Greenification Edition

One of the most popular stories last week was that of the “de-extinction” company claiming they’d “revived” the dire wolf, a species of wolf that went extinct almost 13,000 years ago. The company behind the event, Colossal Biosciences, took DNA from one fossil around 72,000 years old, and from another fossil around 13,000 years old, combined it with current canine DNA, and produced 3 dire wolf pups.

This complex—and expensive—process that created something resembling an extinct species seems eerily similar to the attempts to prop up green energy despite it failing to compete in a game of the survival of the fittest forms of energy in the free market. The news last week brought us many, many stories of the failure of green energy, despite the endless government programs to prop it up.

Can green energy find a way to become “de-extinct?” Don’t count on it.

This week, the regular segments on imploding green energy and imploding EVs make their regular appearances. In addition, blue states have started defying the Trump administration in creative new ways; Chris Matthews made a fool of himself despite his semi-retirement; several stories reveal the entire industry that has developed to prop up climate doom news; and, like last week, a new movement has emerged to enshrine invented rights into the Constitution.

In our Good News segment, Michal Mann gets partial comeuppance; and President Trump continues to slash and burn his way through wasteful green spending.

Let’s get to it.

(DON'T MISS LAST WEEK'S COLUMN: The Dismantling of the Green State Continues Apace)

This Week in Imploding "Green" Energy Markets

British climate skeptic—er, sceptic, sorry— Ben Pile wrote at his Substack about the spate of green energy companies that have gone out of business recently:

This week, Rebel Energy posted a notice on its website announcing that it had ceased trading. According to the Telegraph, around 90,000 customers of the energy retailer will be moved by the regulator, Ofgem, to another supplier.

Rebel joins 31 energy retailers that have gone bust since 2020 – almost all of them in 2021. Many of them were, by the standards of competitors, tiny boutiques with 10,000 or fewer customers. The largest was Bulb Energy, with 1.7 million customers. The late 2010s were also bad years for the energy upstarts. Twenty-nine firms went bust between 2015 and 2021. The most notable of these were Bristol Energy and Robin Hood Energy, with 155,000 and 112,000 domestic customers respectively.

In other news, the outgoing Biden administration proved yet again the benefits of its green energy programs go to China and not domestic companies. So much for those “high paying green jobs.” The Free Beacon reported that a few days before Trump took office, the EPA issued a waiver for its $7 billion solar program that required grant recipients to buy American solar panels with the federal funding—a congressional mandate. Per the report, “the Biden EPA acknowledged that most solar panel components are sourced from China and that the agency's goals—including ‘climate action and energy justice’—would be derailed without the waiver.”

This Week in Imploding EVs

ZeroHedge reported last week that in the first quarter of 2025, more EV-related projects were canceled than in the previous two years combined:

Despite a wave of electric vehicle factories popping up across the U.S. in recent years—fueled by tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act and promises of jobs in mostly Republican areas—many of these projects are now being scrapped, according to a new article by the Washington Post.

Even before former President Trump’s new tariffs, the clean energy shift was already losing momentum.

In just the first quarter of 2025, more EV-related projects were canceled than in the previous two years combined, according to Atlas Public Policy.

Among the losses: a $1 billion thermal battery barrier plant in Georgia and a $1.2 billion lithium-ion battery factory in Arizona. Thousands of jobs are now in question, casting doubt on the future of homegrown EV production.

The best part? “Industry investment has plummeted, with just $176 million in clean manufacturing announced in January—well below the usual $1 billion.” As we’ll see in our Good News segment, investment has shifted pretty quickly back into real energy solutions.

Blue States Fight to Protect Climate Programs

Despite all that writing being on all the walls, blue states have doubled- and tripled-down on their climate plans. Public radio in the Pacific Northwest has sounded the alarm about the Trump administration attacking state climate policies: “An executive order signed by President Donald Trump on Tuesday directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to look for state and local laws that address climate change or environmental justice and to ‘take all appropriate action’ to stop enforcement of any that are illegal.” The governors of Washington, California, and Oregon remained tight-lipped as of publication time, but issued brief statements stating they would continue to enforce such laws. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) said, “California’s efforts to cut harmful pollution won’t be derailed by a glorified press release masquerading as an executive order.”

At least one blue state caved, however:

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D.) halted his state's enforcement of its aggressive electric vehicle mandate law, citing the Trump administration's withholding of federal funds and concerns from automakers.

In a little-noticed executive order signed Friday, Moore pointed to the Trump administration's policies reversing Biden-era regulations pushing EVs. 

Maybe the shifting winds are why Chevron decided to move its corporate offices from California to Houston, laying off 600 employees in the process.

We Still Grow Trees Here

Breaking news: Longtime MSNBC host and liberal mouthpiece Chris Matthews doesn’t like President Trump very much. He went on a rant on Morning Joe about the new tariff program that includes lumber from Canada, and expressed shock that trees still grow in America:

Chris Matthews on MSNBC:

"We get so much of our lumber, our two by fours from from Canada....What are we going to do? Have more lumber made in the United States now?!"

"What is our plan now...? We're going to create more wood. Is that it?!"

"Are we going to make more wood in… pic.twitter.com/cVlvJ6SvEu

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) April 9, 2025

Of course, President Trump had already addressed this with the Immediate Expansion of Timber Production Executive Order on March 1, but nobody ever accused Matthews of keeping up with the actual news.

Propping Up Climate Doom Despite a Lack of Supply

Last week saw a spate of articles pushing a narrative of increasingly frequent natural disasters, inadvertently proving the demand by climate cultists for stories of disaster far exceeds the supply.

• The United Kingdom got caught yet again inventing data from non-existent weather stations.
• The manufactured panic over Trump streamlining FEMA’s budget mirrors the manufactured panic over “busier disaster seasons.” Have you noticed that severe weather alerts have gotten more frequent? Is that due to more frequent bad weather, or normal weather patterns being characterized as “extreme?” 2024 was “one of the worst years for disasters declarations in the last three decades (1995-2024), according to a new analysis from the International Institute for Environment and Development, or IIED, shared exclusively with CNN.” A major disaster was declared every four days under the Biden administration.
• Perhaps these more frequent disaster declarations have their root in motivations that diverge from truth-telling: “More than three decades ago, Congress launched an initiative called the U.S. Global Change Research Program. Today, it spends billions of dollars a year empowering liberal climate scientists to spread climate change doom.”
• The “Atlas of Accountability” purports to prove that 99.5% of congressional districts experienced at least one federally declared weather disaster in the past 15 years. They push hard on the “billion-dollar disaster” narrative.
• The Guardian in the UK has decided to step in and help with the doom-saying: 
  Trump’s ‘climate’ purge deleted a new extreme weather risk tool. We recreated it.
• Supposedly climate change caused wildfires in Japan and South Korea.
• These stories of increased disasters and their roots in climate change receive academic support from the World Weather Attribution group that supposedly proves the science behind climate impacts on extreme weather events. Climate skeptic Roger Pielke, Jr. writes The Honest Broker at Substack, and recently published a thorough takedown of the pseudoscience employed to make these claims.
• An insurance company warns that all these supposedly increased disasters spell doom for capitalism.

In spite of all the unsubstantiated hype around increased natural disasters, a new academic study reveals that Earth achieved a record level of greenness in 2020. In the abstract, they state, “Our findings highlight the resilience and dynamic nature of global vegetation in response to diverse climatic and anthropogenic influences.”

The Rights of Nature Movement

There’s a new climate movement in town, destined to have way more success than the other ones:

Here’s what you need to know about one of the fastest-growing environmental and social movements worldwide—to secure legal rights for ecosystems and other parts of the natural world.

“Rights of nature” is a movement aimed at advancing the understanding that ecosystems, wildlife and the Earth are living beings with inherent rights to exist, evolve and regenerate.

Legal rights are the highest form of protection in most governance systems. In the United States, humans and non-humans have enforceable legal rights, like corporations’ right to freedom of speech. 

At the same time, most legal systems treat nature as rightless property that humans can own, use and destroy.

Apparently you can make this crap up.

And now for the Good News segment.

Michael Mann Gets Spanked

Last month, the court imposed fine in climate “scientist” Michael Mann’s defamation suit against Mark Steyn et. al. got reduced on appeal from $1 million to $5,000. Now, on top of that, a court has ordered Mann to pay the legal fees of the other entity he sued, National Review.

Pay up, creep: Court denies fake Nobelist and hokey stick inventor Michael Mann's request to postpone payment of $530,000 in attorneys fees to National Review in Mann v. Free Speech.https://t.co/2YmAlrSc6O pic.twitter.com/jAXRvvKiYG

— Steve Milloy (@JunkScience) April 5, 2025

Trump Axes Princeton’s Climate Funding

As part of a broader review of federal grants to America’s colleges and universities, the Trump administration last week cut off $4 million in NOAA grants to Princeton for climate studies. According to Axios, “The Department of Commerce said awards, including those pertaining to climate risks and global warming, ‘are no longer aligned with the program objectives of NOAA’ and are ‘no longer in keeping with the Trump Administration's priorities.’"

Trump Reinvests in Real sources of Reliable Energy

On April 8, President Trump signed an executive order restarting coal mine leasing on federal lands. He also reclassified coal as a “critical mineral.” The order aims to enhance national energy security while providing the necessary levels of power to fuel artificial intelligence under the Trump administration. At the same time, calls have emerged for the Trump administration to begin refilling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve now that oil prices have dropped—reversing the actions of the Biden administration to drain the reserve by as much as 40%.

Climate Science isn’t Science

A blog post by meteorologist Anthony Watts does a thorough job of showing that climate science suffers from corruptions so pervasive as to make the entire field questionable, at best:

Bottom Line

Yes, the climate is changing. It always has. The idea that global climate must be unchanging is simply wrongheaded. The real issue is how much of today’s change is due to human activity, how reliable our predictions are, and whether proposed policy responses are justified — or likely to do more harm than good.

At Watts Up With That, we’ve been pointing out for years that this issue is riddled with confirmation bias, model overconfidence, and selective reporting. There is no justification for shutting down economies or reshaping civilization based on the incomplete science of climate change.

So yes, climate change is real, but no, it’s not a crisis.

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