Don’t call these fossil fuel generators — they are baby hydrogen plants!
Facing industrial death, Germany has finally decided it needs dispatchable reliable electricity. But they can’t announce that they suddenly need to build 10 gigawatts of fossil fueled gas power plants. It would be like admitting the sacred Energiewende had been a ghastly mistake that wasted billions of dollars on a reckless vanity quest to change the clouds. So instead, these new “power plants” with a focus on “gas-fired sites” must be convertible to run on hydrogen by 2045. Of course, they may never run on hydrogen, given that makes pipes brittle, leaks, and costs four times as much as natural gas, but it makes a good cover story.
This is exactly what I would do if I wanted to hide a major backflip and pretend this was just a slight variation on the renewables theme. (Especially if I had no scruples).
Note that the Reuters Blob-Media story (below) does not mention the words “fossil fuels” or “dispatchable” it just talks about the need to generate electricity over “a longer period of time”.
The gas to hydrogen plant story is the PR cover and escape hatch from the Sacred Renewables Mission.
It’s just another marker of how fast the renewable energy plan is coming undone…
BERLIN/FRANKFURT, Jan 15 (Reuters) – Germany said on Thursday it had reached an agreement with the European Commission on a plan to build new power stations, adding it would tender 12 gigawatts (GW) worth of capacity in 2026, with a focus on gas-fired sites.
This is a major step on Germany’s path to ensure security of supply in light of the country’s ongoing phase-out of coal-fired power capacity. “With the short-term tenders … we are also laying the foundation for a secure electricity supply in Germany in the future and thus for the competitiveness of our industry,” Economy Minister Katherina Reiche said.
Most of the new capacity, 10 GW, must be able to generate electricity over a longer period of time to ensure steady supply, Germany’s economy ministry said, adding that this included but was not limited to gas-fired power stations.
Wow — 10 GW of new power by 2031!?
The new power stations, which are expected to enter service in 2031, will be able to run on hydrogen by 2045 at the latest, in line with Germany’s goal of becoming climate neutral that year, the ministry said.
Obviously, there are no apologies, no honesty, and they will never admit they were wrong.
In December, President Donald Trump’s Department of Energy issued an emergency order demanding that Tri-State Generation’s Craig Unit 1 coal plant stay open past the long-planned Dec. 31 shuttering date. Tri-State is now fixing broken parts at the plant, which it had previously not planned to do given the closure, and will bring it back online. The co-op generator says it has not heard any plan on who will pay the up to $80 million annual cost of running the plant in 2026.
The EPA on Friday cited the Department of Energy’s emergency action in calling out Colorado. “These plants are vital to delivering reliable and affordable energy to Colorado families and meeting the surging national energy demand,” the EPA announcement said.
The Colorado governor was not happy. And nor were The Blob NGOs — one spokesman at Earthjustice’s Rocky Mountain Office accused Trump, of all things, of being ‘ideological’.
The pace of ’emergency coal rescues’ is quickening:
By November, Chris Wright, the US Secretary of Energy, had stepped in three times to keep coal plants running, but in December, the pace quickened. Wright not only saved the Colorado plant, but also ordered a coal plant in Washington, and two plants in Indiana to keep running.
Under federal law, the Energy Secretary has the authority when an emergency exists, including a shortage of electricity, to make temporary orders regarding electricity infrastructure to address the emergency.
On Dec. 17, Wright ordered the last coal power plant in Washington to remain operational. It was slated for retirement at the end of last month.
Joe Fassler at DeSmog had already tallied up 15 coal plants whose lives had been extended in the USA since Donald Trump was elected, though he admits this was also driven by AI, and data centre demand.
Trump made a promise to revive the US Coal industry and to End the War on Coal.
“Keeping this coal plant online will ensure Americans maintain an affordable, reliable, and secure supply of electricity. The Trump administration is committed to lowering energy costs and keeping American families safe,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in a statement.
If only the Australian government could say the same…
Last year, like every other year, was the hottest variation of something.
All the Blob Media reported the latest trivia in unison, with identikit headlines and matching Pantone Bright Red color.
2025 was the third warmest year on record
For some reason, despite their Pulitzer prizes, and daily acknowledgement of Dreamtime culture — none of the legacy media journalists remembered that prehistory even existed. It’s like 99% of the last 10,000 years never happened. The Stone-age, Iron-age, Egyptians, Sumerians, Greeks — all, Phht. Not one of the “journalists” asked any of these scientists whether it was misleading to focus on the last 150 years when we had thermometers, when it was hotter for thousands of years, and there was no coal plant in sight.
The media is all bread and circuses. It’s a performance art designed to distract us and stop us noticing things that matter. Like the heat in the Holocene, and like the giant volcano called Hunga Tonga. (More on that soon).
Sea level have been falling for 7,000 years in Western Australia — one of the most stable and ancient pieces of land in the world. (Lewis et al). How could the world be cooler than today and the seas be 2 meters deeper?
It’s the same all around the world. In Taiwan giant oysters lived 3 meters above the current waterline. In Africa along thousands of kilometers of the entire west coast sea levels have been falling as the world cooled for thousands of years. (Vacci et al).
Human civilization was born in the hot Holocene and yet somehow we and the corals survived just fine….
Tell the children they called it The Holocene Optimum.
REFERENCES
Lewis, S.E., et al., Post-glacial sea-level changes around the Australian margin: a review, Quaternary Science Reviews (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2012.09.006 [abstract] (paywalled).
Kench, P.S., Liang, C., Ford, M.R. et al. (2023) Reef islands have continually adjusted to environmental change over the past two millennia. Nat Commun14, 508 doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-36171-2
Almost none of their sacred 30 year trends panned out, so they’re now inventing spooky new forecasts (right after they happen). Any old weather permutation, any random coincidence is fair game. So somewhere on a continent 5,000 kilometers across, there were floods and fires on the same day, and somewhere else, the weather changed from hot to cold. Yeah, verily, as Scorpio crosses through the House of ARC Grants, you will definitely get some weather…
Like unfalsifiable prophets of voodoo, we don’t know whether this exact same “whiplash weather” occurred 1,000 times before in the last 10,000 years, because there are no proxies for daily hot-n-cold flips or simultaneous fires and floods. There are no diatoms, or pollens or Beryllium isotopes that capture the flip. And there are no daily weather records from neolithic Australia.
Ergo — the smug curmudgeons of science can say whatever they feel like — knowing that no one can prove them wrong, and no journalist at the Sydney Morning Herald will ever ask them a hard question:
By Samantha Selinger-Morris, The Sydney Morning Herald
Bowman: We’re seeing this extraordinarily unstable climate … [what] we’re learning as we’re going is that the Earth system and the climate system is really very complicated.
When you start putting more energy into the atmosphere … the energy expresses itself in extraordinary ways. So we have, as we know, these extraordinary downpours and flooding events, we have these periods of just amazing rain.
We’re seeing this as well in California. So you get these very wet periods, you get flooding. You can get an interaction of the flooding with burnt areas. And then before you know it, you can switch back to drought … and then, to add insult to injury, we’ve been getting these incredible windstorms, and windstorms go with wind-driven fires, and wind-driven fires are just the worst because they move so quickly.
Rather than ask “how do you know this didn’t happen in 5,000 BC”, Ms Selinger-Morris asked the most leading and obvious question she could:
“How is climate change causing or driving this? You know, fires in one part of the country, floods in another. What’s happening here?”
Which was the cue for Mr Bowman to tell her how complex it all is again. (Like a sacred guild.) And to seed an excuse for when they screw up the next forecast. Astrologers always have a fallback plan:
Bowman: What’s happening is basically that the old weather patterns are breaking down … one of the reasons it’s going to become increasingly difficult to forecast weather is because we’re getting all of these complex interactions between sea surface temperatures.
…what we’re really describing is what’s being called in fire science “hydroclimatic whiplash”, this climate whiplash where we’re … going from wet to dry, wet to dry. So we’ve got this flickering between these states.
Melbourne was always supposed to have “four seasons in one day” — which is why Crowded House wrote a song about it 30 years ago before humankind emitted half our emissions. That sounds like pretty flickery weather.
Then, within our fire seasons, we’re seeing extreme heat waves, extreme wind events, and then you get the conjunction of an extreme heat wave and extreme wind event. We’ve just seen what happens. It’s just absolutely horrendous.
Horrendous indeed, but also handy — if they are wrong about the weather, remember, it’s because they were right about “climate change”. Excuses, excuses…
And that is a really important point … it’s not a criticism that this terrible fire season wasn’t adequately forecast … what we know from the past isn’t necessarily scaling well into the future.
So even though they sort of predicted this, and were right except when they were wrong, now the climate has changed, and they have to learn how to predict it again? So fossil fuels cause bad forecasts too?
Climate astrology might be the new normal, but climate science died a long time ago.
Green activists who sabotaged the Berlin grid last week may not have convinced anyone that carbon dioxide was a threat, but they have raised awareness that Germany needs more diesel generators, and thermal power plants.
On January 3rd, left wing extremists caused the longest blackout in Berlin since World War II leaving 100,000 people without heating or electricity for up to five days in midwinter. Suddenly local utilities have realized how vulnerable Germany is and are calling for a “national crisis reserve of mobile generators and heating systems.” And they want several hundred megawatts of it.
The association of local utilities (VKU) put out a press release calling for this new emergency reserve to be set up and spread around the country so it can restore power within 24 hours. They also for someone to clear away the bureaucratic red tape that slowed down the helpers, specifically mentioning the odd thing that must have delayed the response this time — like “responsibility, permits, liability, costs, labor rules and insurance.”
They paid homage to the “decentralized energy supply base on renewables” which could have (but didn’t) mitigate the damage. They probably had to write that. They also want to add in “grid meshing” or more interconnectors –presumably to make it harder for vandals to knock out one key line. But it will be “expensive” they say (isn’t it always). It’s just another bucket of money needed to be added to the renewables bills.
Germany’s municipal utilities are calling for a national crisis reserve of mobile generators and heating systems. These should be dispatched in an emergency to restore the electricity supply within 24 hours, argued industry lobby group VKU.
The VKU said the emergency reserve would enable the creation of temporary “island electricity grids” independent from the main supply system. These could be run by emergency power generators, which mostly run on diesel, combined heat and power plants, and gas turbines that could be activated with “a single phone call”. The association stated that this emergency reserve should have a combined capacity of several hundred megawatts.
In other lessons from Germany, Prof Vahrenholt points out that converting everyone on gas or petrol to electricity only makes a blackout so much worse and the nation more vulnerable.
Frontier Economics estimates the total cost of the energy transition until 2045 at an unaffordable 4,800 to 5,400 billion euros.
But now, the attack in Berlin demonstrates to us that such an energy system, based solely on electricity, is highly vulnerable. We are learning that when the power fails, the heat supply also fails—at least when it is supposed to be generated by heat pumps. And to make matters worse, we are learning that in freezing temperatures, heat pumps face total loss due to bursting pipes. This particular “warning label” was certainly not included in the “Habeck heating law,” which the CDU-SPD federal government intends to continue seamlessly. The content of the law will remain the same, but to ensure citizens don’t quite realize it, the name of the law is to be changed.
We are also learning that during a large-scale power outage, electric vehicles can only help if they happened to be charged before the “bang.” Otherwise, this utility also fails.
Home batteries and electric cars won’t be much use if the terrorists attack just before they get recharged.
ADDENDUM: Let’s not forget their manifesto for grid sabotage:
“In the greed for energy, the earth is being depleted, sucked dry, burned, ravaged, burned down, raped, destroyed,” the group, which is listed by Berlin’s intelligence services as a left-wing extremist organization, said in the letter.
“The aim of the action is to cause significant damage to the gas industry and the greed for energy,” its authors wrote. The group has used similar means to communicate in the past, and Berlin police believed the letter to be genuine.
Chris Wright, the United States Secretary of Energy, marvels that people can spend so much to achieve so little:
“Germany invested half a trillion dollars, more than doubled the capacity of its electricity grid — and today produces 20% less electricity than before that investment, selling it at three times the price.” — 13 min
“The lucky one billion — including everyone in this room — consumes about 13 barrels of oil per person per year. The other seven billion want to live like we do, but they consume about three barrels per person per year.”
It’s so nice to hear grownups talking:
Some extracts of his interview:
The tale of a remarkable transition from energy importer to energy exporter:
“Look at what’s happened in the United States. We’ve tripled liquids production in less than two decades. We are by far the world’s largest producer. We’ve more than doubled natural gas production, and it’s still growing fast.
This is phenomenal. Lower costs, lower prices — it has transformed the world. It’s hard to overstate the impact of the U.S. shale revolution and what all of you have done.
Total energy use in the US is still 72% oil and gas:
“One thing you never hear about: total primary energy consumption in the United States — over 72% now comes from just two energy sources: oil and natural gas. Record-high market share, in addition to record volumes. That doesn’t sound like a dying industry I’ve been hearing about for the last 15 years.
But when you roll over to the electricity sector, it’s a very different story.
In oil and gas production we’ve seen declining capital intensity, increasing efficiencies, and surging production. In electricity? Surging investment — gigantic amounts of money flowing in — and what’s the net result?
Almost no growth in electricity production, but significant growth in electricity prices.
The world isn’t going to copy the UK and Germany (or Australia):
“If you make electricity more expensive, and people don’t know where policy is heading, energy-intensive industry leaves your country. The United Kingdom and Germany are experts at that.
Germany invested half a trillion dollars, more than doubled the capacity of its electricity grid — and today produces 20% less electricity than before that investment, selling it at three times the price.
That is not a winning model. That is not what the world is going to duplicate.
We spend $10 trillion dollars to convert about 6% of global energy to solar and wind power:
Our industry is about physics, numbers, math — but when it comes to climate change, we check rationality at the door.
It’s only about decarbonizing and claiming we’re in the middle of an energy transition. I think we’re actually in the midst of the greatest malinvestment in human history.
Globally, about $10 trillion has been invested nominally in fighting climate change. What did we get for $10 trillion?
About 6% of global energy comes from these sources after $10 trillion of investment — and everywhere penetration is high, prices have gone up and industry has left.
If you close a factory in the Midlands and move it to Asia where it runs on coal, then ship the goods on diesel ships — that’s not fighting climate change. That’s de-industrializing your nation.
Oil, gas, and coal run the world. Full stop.
At the time of the Yom Kippur War, 85% of global energy came from hydrocarbons. That crisis launched the energy transition movement over 50 years ago.
Today? 85% hydrocarbons.
Let’s engage with reality. Oil, gas, and coal run the world. Full stop.
You can’t make a wind turbine, a solar panel, or a nuclear power plant without massive amounts of oil, gas, and coal. That’s how the world works.
The lucky one billion — including everyone in this room — consumes about 13 barrels of oil per person per year. The other seven billion want to live like we do, but they consume about three barrels per person per year…
Electricity should be getting cheaper:
For a century, electricity got cheaper and more reliable. We reversed that. Now it’s more expensive and less reliable.
If current trends continue, by 2030 blackouts could be 100 times more common.
Half the states have renewable portfolio standards. Those states have over 50% higher electricity prices than states without them.
If you do crazy things, you get bad results. See Germany. See the UK. See California.
Energy costs should be rising lower than inflation:
States with renewable portfolio standards have seen electricity prices increase at twice the rate of inflation. States that don’t have RPSs — unfortunately they also had increasing nominal electricity prices — but below the rate of inflation.
We should be seeing trends in electricity prices way below inflation.
The biggest source of electricity in the United States by far is natural gas. What has the price of natural gas done over the last 10 or 20 years? It’s plummeted. What has availability done? It’s surged.
More demand for electricity makes electricity cheaper
When people worry that AI demand will push up costs, Chris Wright points out that the US states that have grown their electricity output have also reduced their price of electricity. (Presumably this is because the states that depend on industry and manufacturing build serious generators instead of dancing around the renewable maypole.)
If you plot states that have grown their output of electricity — meaning re-industrialization or new demand — the faster the growth in demand for electricity, the lower the rise in price.
North Dakota is the champion: over 30% growth in electricity output, and electricity prices have actually declined. All the other states that have had flat or below-inflation price increases have had growing production of electricity.
And the champions on the other end — California, New York, Massachusetts, Maryland — that have had skyrocketing electricity prices: all of them produce less electricity today than they did five years ago.
There is something prosaic about ministerial titles in the USA. Chris Wright, is the Secretary of Energy and knows exactly what his primary task is, unlike the Australian Minister for Coal, Oil, Gas, Corals, Koalas and Weather Control.
Finally! Trump kills off funding and support for 66 international agencies, promises more to get the axe
The United Nations finally gets some accountability after serving itself or foreign dictators for decades. Trump isn’t just withdrawing from The Paris Agreement, he’s gone for the nuclear option of pulling out of the UNFCCC completely.
The WHO could have stopped Covid, instead they actively help spread it and covered up for the Chinese Communist Party. They look, act and behave like a larval form of One World Government — constantly trying to pass agreements that take over sovereign control or generate funds for the UN. They dream of setting up a Global Pandemic Treaty where they can dictate what injections you must have, what drugs are permitted, and get access to your medical data. These are not just pie-in-the-sky ambitions, the UN already effectively stopped unvaccinated Australians from leaving the country during Covid.
There should be a Royal Commission into the politicians and media outlets who sold out the nation to support the UN, like those that signed the Pandemic Treaty, and the Carbon tax on shipping.
From Marco Rubio: Withdrawal from Wasteful, Ineffective, or Harmful International Organizations
Today, in furtherance of Executive Order 14199, President Trump announced the withdrawal of the United States from 66 international organizations identified as part of the Trump Administration’s review of wasteful, ineffective, and harmful international organizations. Review of additional international organizations pursuant to Executive Order 14199 remains ongoing.
The Trump Administration has found these institutions to be redundant in their scope, mismanaged, unnecessary, wasteful, poorly run, captured by the interests of actors advancing their own agendas contrary to our own, or a threat to our nation’s sovereignty, freedoms, and general prosperity. President Trump is clear: It is no longer acceptable to be sending these institutions the blood, sweat, and treasure of the American people, with little to nothing to show for it. The days of billions of dollars in taxpayer money flowing to foreign interests at the expense of our people are over.
As such, the United States will be withdrawing from the 66 organizations that can be found here.
As this list begins to demonstrate, what started as a pragmatic framework of international organizations for peace and cooperation has morphed into a sprawling architecture of global governance, often dominated by progressive ideology and detached from national interests. From DEI mandates to “gender equity” campaigns to climate orthodoxy, many international organizations now serve a globalist project rooted in the discredited fantasy of the “End of History.” These organizations actively seek to constrain American sovereignty. Their work is advanced by the same elite networks—the multilateral “NGO-plex”— that we have begun dismantling through the closure of USAID.
Donald Trump has sparked outrage by announcing the US will exit the foundational international agreement to address the climate crisis, cementing the US’s utter isolation from the global effort to confront dangerously escalating temperatures.
“This is a shortsighted, embarrassing and foolish decision,” said Gina McCarthy, who was a top climate adviser to Joe Biden’s White House.
“As the only country in the world not a part of the UNFCCC treaty, the Trump administration is throwing away decades of US climate change leadership and global collaboration. This administration is forfeiting our country’s ability to influence trillions of dollars in investments, policies and decisions that would have advanced our economy and protected us from costly disasters wreaking havoc on our country.”
Manish Bapna, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said Trump’s decision to exit the UNFCCC is an “unforced error” and “self-defeating” as it will further hamper the US’s ability to compete with China, which is increasingly dominant in the world’s burgeoning clean energy technology industries.
Trump serves oil billionaires, says Al Gore!
Gore, the former US vice-president and climate activist, told the Guardian:“They’ve done this at the behest of the oil industry, so that billionaires can rake in even more money while polluting our planet and endangering people in America and around the world,”…
Lordy! It’s just another catch in a low density energy grid
If your neighbor builds an industrial wind turbine plant, you might need developmental approval to build anywhere close to them even on your own property. Why? Although wind turbines are officially wonderful, the people living in the new home might file a noise complaint which will lead to ‘operational risk’, and ‘investor uncertainty’.
Neighbourhood row blowing in with WA wheatbelt wind farm plans
By Paige Taylor, The Australian
The WA Cook Labor government is preparing to adopt contentious rules which could prevent farmers from building a dwelling on their own land if it is deemed too close to their neighbour’s wind turbine, as the West Australian wheatbelt becomes the next frontier for renewable energy companies.
Current modeling typically suggests gaps between homes and turbines of 1.5 kilometer (~1 mile).
WA Planning Minister John Carey said the proposed renewables code, open for public comment until April, encouraged early engagement with communities.
“Proposed mandatory noise modelling aims to ensure turbines comply with noise limits, which typically results in a minimum separation of around 1.5km between turbines and noise-sensitive land uses such as a house,” he said.
We can all see where this is going. Soon, new wind plants will have to compensate neighbors for the loss in amenity and use of their own land. So the cost of wind energy will rise even further.
Who would have thought that collecting energy spread over thousands of square kilometers could have an impact on the air, the rain, the birds, frogs and mammals living underneath them?
Psychologists have finally run a massive test of climate communication strategies, — and they all fail.
A new megastudy of more than 13,000 Americans tested the ten most cited climate-messaging strategies drawn from 157 previous papers. Twenty-four co-authors from five countries were involved. They wanted to find the paragraph — the killer framing — that would change beliefs, shift behaviour, or, ideally, persuade people to part with some cash. They didn’t find it.
Probably the most newsworthy finding is that there is a vast pool of grant money available to study rehashed minutiae of how to sell weather-changing sorcery to the jaded public. It’s a full time Blob Psy-Op machine to “nudge” the voters. If only they spent some of this money checking the science before they fine tuned the fear campaign?
This is a Psy-Op machine in search of a slogan
They call this research “science” but it’s more like corporate message-testing in advertising. And it’s done for free at universities to help the industry. The goal here is not to understand the human condition, it’s to sell a carbon tax or a solar panel.
The study would not have been cheap — They not only surveyed thousands of people, but they did it before a ‘treatment’ and again afterwards. The ‘treatment’ they offered people was to read a few short paragraphs of what the researchers thought was a persuasive message — but in reality was just a rehash of themes they have been beating us over the head with for years.
They were hoping to find a useful phrase that reached Democrats or Republicans and pulled out some cash, or shifted behaviour. But they did not hit paydirt. The results were so bad, they even had to admit they barely moved the dial. Despite the massive numbers taking the survey, they could barely reach statistical significance on anything. It was a wash…
PhysOrg: In a study involving more than 13,000 participants in the U.S., several messaging strategies were shown to move the needle—albeit slightly—in attempts to strengthen pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors regarding climate change. None, however, was effective in spurring people to put their money where their mouth is.
Basically a few people seemed more convinced about climate change after their ‘treatment’ (for the next five minutes) but almost none of them cared enough to donate money to stop it.
The paper almost never gives answers as solid percentages, probably because the absolute numbers were so pathetic. One percentage they supplied was that “treatment conditions increased belief in climate change by 1.16 percentage points….” And remember, this is the result a few minutes after being exposed to the key paragraph. A week later it will be nearer to 0%.
They were also surprised at what they didn’t find– political division: “And, perhaps most surprisingly, messages’ persuasiveness varied little between Democrats and Republicans.”
So after years of politicization and polarization the researchers were surprised to find that that Democrats and Republicans were both human? If they could have found some difference, it would have been the headline — Democrats, open to persuasion! Republicans, sticks-in-the-mud!
The ten themes are explained at the bottom: Essentially the Republicans were slightly more moved by the patriotic maintenance of the “purity of American land”. Democrats were slightly more moved by being nice to people and touchy feely stuff.
When reading these graphs (they have about 45), the dots on the right of the zero line, were theoretically “positive” and therefore changed opinions (if we ignore most of the error bars).
Ironically, the only dot below with any statistical significance is the one that suggests that making claims of economic or jobs gains to Republicans will reduce donations. Obviously, Republicans just don’t believe that stuff anymore.
Consensus is still the only winner (for them)
The main argument for believers is still the profoundly anti-science line that truth is what the annointed Gods of Science say.
But every time anyone mentions the Petition Project, we win
When it came to changing beliefs, the “consensus of experts” was the most reliable argument to influence people. New readers may not be aware the Petition Project was an extraordinary survey of scientists in the US which proved that there was no consensus. Nearly twenty years ago, 31,000 scientists including 9,000 PhD’s were willing to sign a strong statement of dissent. Naturally, the legacy media didn’t mention it, even though it was a larger, longer list than any the believers ever arranged. So most people have never heard of it.
Bizarrely, in their theme called Scientific consensus 1 — the researchers talked about the “expert consensus” but also tried to also ‘innoculate’ readers against the Petition Project. And they may have done more harm than good. In trying to debunk the Petition Project they inadvertently opened the average persons eyes to news that there was a scientific debate and it has been surpressed. In contrast Scientific consensus 2 (which didn’t mention the Petition Project) was received as more persuasive in almost every situation. The only time Consensus type 1 was a winner (for believers), was when it worked on Democrats to elict a few more donations. In that case talking to climate activists about “the battle” reminds them of which side they are on in this tribal war. They may feel like the victims battling a big machine (31,000 evil denier scientists!).
The only thing we really learn in the MegaStudy is just how much money The Blob has thrown at polishing its communication memes in order to squeeze a tiny bit more compliance with climate grift and graft.
PS: One of the 24 authors was the infamous Stephan Lewandowsky, well known for studying skeptics by placing surveys on sites that hate and mock them. This is the man who once surveyed a 32,000 year old respondent. He’s still around.
_________________________________________
APPENDIX: The ten top favourite climate-messaging treatments:
Binding framing — Argues that mitigating climate change aligns with patriotic, family, and religious values.
Scientific consensus 1 –Emphasises scientific agreement on human-caused climate change and explicitly inoculates against sceptical narratives, including the Petition Project.
Scientific consensus 2 –Emphasises scientific agreement on human-caused climate change and inoculates against a vague “fake debate” strategy, without naming specific dissenting groups.
Dire but solvable framing –-Stresses that climate change consequences are severe, but solutions exist.
Compatible solution framing –Argues climate mitigation can be achieved while remaining consistent with free-market principles.
Gains framing –Highlights benefits and positive outcomes from mitigating climate change.
High social distance framing — Focuses on climate harms affecting a socially distant group (e.g., Chinese farmers).
Purity framing — Frames mitigation as protecting the purity and cleanliness of American land.
System preservation framing — Argues that climate mitigation helps preserve the traditional American way of life.
Warmth framing — Appeals to caring for fellow citizens and social compassion.
REFERENCE
Voelkel, J.G., Ashokkumar, A., Abeles, A.T. et al. A registered report megastudy on the persuasiveness of the most-cited climate messages. Nat. Clim. Chang. (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-025-02536-2
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