12 Comments

1. 

   Edward on August 28, 2025 at 12:20 pm

   Is there anything else to say. On the one hand there is plenty to say about what is happening with the climate; however, on the other hand it’s all been revealed what is happening, yet, that is not enough. So, what is the use of sounding the alarms when no serious actions are being implemented to curtail the worst of outcomes.

   Trust in the science has lost ground in recent years to compound the problem. Ugo Bardi’s recent substack post argues that the overall faulty handling of the COVID pandemic eroded trust in science and has had a role in the collapse of trust in climate science.

   The Collapse of Climate Science. The Role of the COVID-19 Story

   As I said, in his article, I don’t think Ugo is saying Climate Science itself is collapsing but trust in science and climate science has declined dramatically due to the mishandling of the COVID pandemic.

   • 

     Panopticon on August 28, 2025 at 5:25 pm

     Thanks, Edward. Ugo makes a very interesting case. I think societies are generally becoming more mistrustful and polarised.

     Tainter’s “diminishing marginal returns on social complexity” problem means that institutions we used to look to for solutions can no longer provide them as effectively. The increasingly beleaguered Fed springs to mind. Countries like the UK and France are becoming ungovernable because governments keep promising a “better” they can’t deliver. Disillusionment and mistrust are the inevitable fruits of that.

     Re climate change, when push comes to shove, people will not sacrifice their standard of living to mitigate what still looks to them like a fairly distant threat, and they will increasingly endorse dissenting viewpoints that claim there is no threat.

2. 

   Leaf Rhetoric on August 28, 2025 at 12:28 pm

   At least that precious filling station wasn’t swept away in Sudan. Maybe we should build flood resistant homes like they build gas pump canopies?

   Also, maybe we don’t need the Children of Kali, just let turbulence kill the airline industry.

   • 

     VPK on August 28, 2025 at 2:36 pm

     Net-Zero Banking Alliance Suspends Activities Amid Wave of Departures
     Banks including JPMorgan, Citi and UBS left the NZBA in the past year as they faced pressure from the Trump administration to ditch green pledges
     By Yusuf Khan
     Aug. 27, 2025 12:03 pm ET|WSJ Pro
     A United Nations-backed alliance that called on banks to align their businesses with net-zero emissions has suspended activities, following the departure of numerous financial institutions from its ranks amid political pressure from the Trump administration.
     The Net-Zero Banking Alliance said Wednesday that it was pausing operations and initiating a vote to decide on whether to continue working as a membership-based alliance or operate as a framework initiative.
     And
     EU carmakers say the 2035 zero-emissions target is unrealistic
     Mercedes-Benz and Schaeffler warn the EU’s 2035 zero-emissions CO2 target is unattainable, citing battery dependence, weak charging networks and rising costs.
     They point to dependence on Asian battery suppliers, a shortfall in charging infrastructure, and high manufacturing costs. Pressure is compounded by Chinese rivals in the electric-vehicle segment and higher U.S. import tariffs. Taken together, these headwinds make the current timeline look optimistic, highlighting a growing gap between policy ambition and what industry can realistically deliver.
     And
     NASA chief to defy agency’s charter, terminating science
     NASA’s 1958 charter’s top priority was, “the expansion of human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere and space.” Is this how it ends?
     In a galling announcement made in August of 2025, NASA’s acting chief, Sean Duffy, declared the intention to abandon all non-spaceflight and exploration-related activities, defying the agency’s charter. Will anyone act to save the heart of NASA?
     and most troublingly, to violate NASA’s original charter and cease science and education operations entirely, except those science operations that are in service to human spaceflight and the human exploration of the space environment itself.
     Explicitly, Duffy himself stated,

     “All the climate science and all of the other priorities that the last administration had at NASA we’re going to move aside, and all of the science that we do is going to be directed towards exploration, which is the mission of NASA… That’s why we have NASA — is to explore, not to do all of these Earth sciences.”

     And the list goes on and on….

     I find the article about the sharks most chilling…ocean acidic waters already affecting the poor guys teeth, maybe we can fit them with dentures?
     I’m amazed this circus called modern civilization is holding itself together by hook and winks…when it blows up will be quite and show..
     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPKO-s3uATg
     There’s No Business Like Show Business
     From The Judy Garland Show, taped October 4, 1963 and aired October 6, 1963. A young Barbra Streisand is paired with Judy Garland as her guest star for this episode.
     Ethel Merman “crashes” the “Tea for Two” segment, and the three sing a rousing rendition of Irving Berlin’s “There’s No Business Like Show Business.”
     This is the only time these three legendary belters ever appeared together.
     1963, I was just a little guy with a diaper and had no clue…

     • 

       Panopticon on August 28, 2025 at 5:55 pm

       Vince, thank you for the round-up and the Judy Garland trivia. Assuming a stage name was well advised for Judy, whose birth name was the decidedly unglamorous Frances Ethel Gumm.

       This is Art Berman’s take on the Net-Zero Banking Alliance debacle:

       “Net zero isn’t just stalled — it’s dead. Banks saw the math: trillions in uneconomic projects, no real impact on global emissions, and endless greenwashing risk. Enthusiasm collapsed because the goal itself was absurd.”

       https://x.com/aeberman12/status/1961052845722972567

   • 

     Panopticon on August 28, 2025 at 5:48 pm

     “At least that precious filling station wasn’t swept away in Sudan.”

     On the plus side, Leaf, at least there won’t be soil/groundwater contamination from the fuel.

3. 

   zip on August 28, 2025 at 1:33 pm

   Hello Pan, I put together a combination on Iraqs watercrisis with a report from Watson in Oilprice.

   All parallel worlds pretending they can simply coexist. Chevron announced this week, with much fanfare, that it is “back” in Iraq, ready to reinvest in oil exploration.

   Oilprice presented the news as the comeback of an American energy giant in a country still sitting on large reserves. But the context in which Chevron is returning has changed dramatically. At the same time, Iraq’s Ministry of Water announced that the country’s reserves have fallen to their lowest level in eighty years. The Tigris and Euphrates now carry less than 40 percent of Iraq’s treaty share. Drought, climate change, and massive dam projects in Turkey and Iran have left rivers drying up, farmland devastated, and millions forced to abandon their villages. Riverbeds lie bare, islands appear where water once flowed. The contrast could hardly be greater.

   On the one hand, an oil giant eager to pour money into new fossil production, with all the water consumption of drilling, refining, and cooling. On the other hand, a society literally running dry, cutting back irrigation and watching food security collapse. Where Chevron talks about “energy security,” the UN and UNICEF warn of a humanitarian crisis in which millions of children lack access to clean drinking water.

   But of course, Baghdad claims to have a solution. A 300-kilometer desalination and pipeline project, touted as a national “lifeline,” though far from a new idea.

   For more than a decade it has been discussed, and each time it collapses. In reality, it is a classic Iraqi deadlock: a dossier where provinces, ministries, and foreign players collide. Basra insists on priority since it bears the brunt of salinization, while Baghdad demands water for the capital. That makes distribution politically explosive.

   Meanwhile, China has offered to finance and build the pipeline and desalination plants as part of its Belt and Road strategy. For Washington, the prospect of Baghdad’s water lifeline in Chinese hands is a nightmare. Financing remains another barrier: Iraq can only fund the project through oil revenues and loans, and every attempt runs into corruption, procurement scandals, and provincial opposition. French and South Korean consortia drafted studies, but execution was always postponed.

   In short: water is Iraq’s great unresolved crisis, and this project has long been a snake pit. Each time it resurfaces, it exposes the country’s fragility: an oil empire with a population suffering from growing water stress, chasing a “solution” that looks more like a mirage across a parched land.

   No clearer picture can be drawn—we are at the last frontiers.

   https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/US-Oil-Powerhouse-Chevron-Is-Back-In-Iraq-But-Will-It-Be-Different-This-Time.html

   • 

     Panopticon on August 28, 2025 at 6:03 pm

     Zip, thank you for that excellent synthesis.

     The geopolitics of water is looking increasingly incendiary in that region. Iraq is accusing Turkey, itself struggling with severe drought, of withholding flows from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers upstream. Meanwhile, Iran is experiencing dire water shortages, now exacerbated by Afghanistan’s newly inaugurated Pashdan Dam. Afghanistan in turn is severely water-stressed:

     “Kabul could become the first modern city to completely run out of water, experts have warned.”

     https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/07/kabul-could-become-first-modern-city-to-run-out-of-water-report-warns

4. 

   jupiviv on August 28, 2025 at 2:21 pm

   I haven’t seen Alice Friedemann’s blog mentioned here much. Her latest post is classic “climate action” humor!

   https://energyskeptic.com/2025/carbon-capture-and-storage/

   The much ballyhooed company Climeworks in Iceland has capture just 105 tons of CO2 of the 36,000 tons promised, less than their own climate footprint (Alexandersson 2025).

   • 

     Panopticon on August 28, 2025 at 6:11 pm

     Jupiviv, many thanks for that. I haven’t checked in on her blog for a while.

     To me, carbon capture has always been as patently absurd as the claim that LNG is a cleaner “bridging fuel” – no deep analysis required, although I do enjoy those.

     The UK government is investing £2 billion in a huge carbon capture scheme at Liverpool Bay. It pains me to see so much money squandered when social care is in extreme crisis.

5. 

   Rob on August 28, 2025 at 4:09 pm

   Global War on Terra: the two war criminals, The Fractured States of America and the Russian Conflagration, are also environmental criminals who are using Ukraine in the same way the Bushes used Iraq:

   To distract the world from the dire straits the twin hegemons have steered it into. The economy, Ever Driven to giantism and centralization to cut costs, and thereby dominate every competitor to the point of extinction, has morphed into the CrytpoCapitalism model of Fraud and rehypothecation, even going so far as to create cryptoCurrency exchanges to facilitate the hiding of the breathtaking scale of piracy, piracy without which the globaloney economy collapses. Like Queen Elizabeth (the first one … you know, the one the Pope hired an assassin to murder) turning a blind eye to English piracy on the high Seas, because its unlawful activity filled the coffers of the Royal Treasury, the modern state doesn’t simply ignore financial defalcations, it actively abets them.

   As a brown cloud of pollution, caused by the nearby oil and gas operations, stretches along the Rocky Mountains, the increase in insolation, and the resulting desiccation such pollution engenders, fires rage in Colorado, in New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona, the cause of which is never stated but is readily known. But unlike the Great London Smog that killed thousands and that marked one of Queen Elizabeth’s (this time the QE2) first public catastrophes, and resulted in the cessation of burning coal for heat in London, the deaths, firestorms, derechos, hailstorms, earthquakes, amped-up hurricanes, relentless heatwaves, and historically destructive floods, never get associated with the rapidity with the the North America continent has become populated with pumpjacks and fracking wells, bespeckled with cesspools of noxious chemicals, veiled, thanks to its unmitigated release, with methane and nitrous oxide, while still flaring unprecedented amounts of natural gas, amid the ongoing rampant destruction of the prairies to grow food for fuel and by the installation of a pipleline network so extensive it makes Enron’s look like a paragon of industrial planning.

   Instead of cessation, only expansion is envisioned:

   https://robertlowrey.blogspot.com/2022/05/cryptocapitalisms-global-war-on-terra.html

   • 

     Panopticon on August 28, 2025 at 6:24 pm

     Rob, thank you for the poetic rant.

     Re Ukraine, every missile, drone or armoured vehicle is a node in Nate Hagens’ superorganism’s metabolism, dissipating energy not just through explosions but via the industrial supply chain that made them possible. Destructive or constructive – the superorganism doesn’t care as long as the throughput of energy and resources keeps increasing.