GOLDEN CRESCENT AND 1000 ISLAND NEWS

  Sep 05, 2026   “Here is the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: if you’re alive, it isn’t.” – Richard Bach Among the most ironclad, stone-cold, lead-pipe-lock bets of history is that aggregate primary energy consumption is a curve that goes up and to the right . Longtime readers will be familiar with the physical foundations for why this is so: The human endeavor is a constant, unrelenting struggle against the forces of entropy; one must harness primary energy to temporarily prevail in that struggle; one’s standard of living is thus measured by how much primary energy is on offer for the task; and all humans everywhere want a higher standard of living. Wars, famines, political crises, and pandemics come and go. Degrowth nutters and carbon-counters ebb and flow in their political influence. Social shaming to make do with less—an impulse that invariably emanates from do-gooders already flush with abundance—occasionally bends localized policy for short perio...

  The progressive government raid on fossil-fuel producers hit a roadblock this week, with a federal judge striking down a New York law that would make companies pay reparations for their worldwide CO2 emissions. Sorry, climate change doesn’t let states ignore the Constitution. Democrats in Albany in 2024 passed a law that required fossil-fuel companies to cough up $75 billion to compensate for alleged damage from their CO2 emissions. “This landmark legislation shifts the cost of climate adaptation from everyday New Yorkers to the fossil fuel companies most responsible for the pollution,” Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office said at the time. Under the law, the state apportions liability among three dozen or so companies that sold fossil fuels in the state based on their estimated contribution to global CO2 emissions dating to 2000. This amounted to a giant tax on the companies—many of which don’t operate in New York—their customers and shareholders. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, fossil-f...

  The past 75 years have brought the greatest improvement of human welfare in history. But over the past decade, much of that progress has stalled. This happened at the same time that the rich world shifted its attention to climate change. This isn’t a coincidence, and it has to change. Consider extreme poverty, long defined as living on less than $1 a day, adjusted for inflation and purchasing power. In 1950, more than half of humanity was that poor (using the 1985 dollar as the benchmark). Today the share is 7.6%, the lowest ever recorded. Average schooling has almost tripled, from 3.2 years to nearly nine. Electricity access has soared. Problems remain, but the gains have been spectacular. Yet that development has lately slowed to a crawl. After almost two centuries of declining poverty, the number of poor people in the world hasn’t budged since 2016. Global progress is at its slowest pace since 1950, according to the World Bank. There are many causes, but one stands out. In ...

  The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York struck down the state’s Climate Change Superfund Act on Monday, ruling that the 2024 law is invalid under the federal Clean Air Act. The law set up a cost recovery scheme whereby fossil fuel companies would pay into a fund used to finance climate change adaptation-related infrastructure projects. The state’s argument rested in part on the Trump administration’s decision earlier this year to rescind the Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding on greenhouse gases, which gave the agency authority to regulate climate pollution. Judge Brenda K. Sannes dismissed that argument in her decision, citing the Supreme Court’s ruling in American Electric Power v. Connecticut from 2011, which, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo put it , “established companies’ protection from federal public nuisance claims over greenhouse gas emissions. That decision sprang from the Court’s earlier 2007 decision that the Clean ...

  I take the title of today’s post from the closing line of a fantastic 2014 article by Dan Sarewitz in Slate . Sarewitz wrote: “Climate change, added on top of all the other causes of these problems, will often make things worse. But for the most part there will be no way to tell which ones are worse than they would have been anyway, or how much worse they have become. So it’s not that apocalyptic fears about climate change are utterly fantastic—climate change may well exacerbate a range of serious and potentially even disastrous problems—it’s that the monomaniacal, apocalyptic version of climate change gives us a picture of the world that is so incomplete that it’s much worse than simply wrong. Worse because, just like religious and political orthodoxy, it cannot be falsified. On the contrary, everything that goes wrong simply reinforces the conviction that there is just one explanation for all our problems—climate change—and that there is only one thing we can do to keep the ...