The chapter was included for the first time in the Fourth Edition of the Reference Manual for Scientific Evidence, co-published alongside the Federal Judicial Center, and was authored and influenced by attorneys who are publicly supporting the plaintiffs in climate litigation against American energy companies. This is a clear conflict of interest and an overt attempt by climate activists to bias judges towards pro-plaintiff interpretations of scientific methods.

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Unfortunately, the NAS remains intent on continuing to use flawed processes, and just last month published a climate attribution report where the litigation section was heavily influenced by the same attorney whose fingerprints were all over the judicial training manual.

That attorney is Michael Burger: a legal research scholar at the Columbia Law School, Of Counsel at Sher Edling LLP, and counsel of record for the plaintiffs in Honolulu’s active climate lawsuit.

Read more

The Farm Bill’s Hidden Climate Tax

The Senate Agriculture Committee marked up the Agricultural Act of 2026 today, and buried inside it is Section 12501 — one of the most deceptively drafted energy provisions I’ve seen in years.

On the surface, it looks like a bipartisan win: permanent year-round E15 sales and an end to controversial Small Refinery Exemptions. In reality, it does neither of those things honestly.

The “Small Refinery Certainty” provision doesn’t end exemptions — it makes them permanent. Qualifying refineries get an automatic, forever carveout with no hardship test, no sunset, and no accountability. Other refiners have to absorb the redistributed compliance burden, which means higher Renewable Identification Number (RIN) costs, which means higher prices at the pump. The Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) already costs Americans more than 30 cents per gallon. Section 12501 would drive that higher.

And here’s the kicker: the bill caps small refinery growth. Any refinery that expands beyond the statutory size definition loses its permanent benefit entirely; an incentive, to our already dwindling supply of refineries, to keep production below a certain amount. It’s a government-imposed ceiling on American energy production, dressed up as reform.

A coalition of more than 20 free-market organizations joined us in sending a letter to Chairman Boozman and Ranking Member Klobuchar today demanding the provision be stripped from the bill. You can read the full letter [here].

The SEC’s Climate Disclosure Rule Deserves to Die

On Sunday, the American Energy Association also filed formal comments with the SEC supporting the Commission’s proposed rescission of the Biden-era climate disclosure rule.

That rule would have forced public companies to collect emissions data across their entire supply chain, run climate scenario analyses, and pay billions in compliance costs — $7.9 billion upfront, and up to $5.6 billion every year after that. The SEC’s own numbers.

None of it was required to protect investors. It was required to advance a political agenda.

We argued the rule exceeds the Commission’s statutory authority, violates the First Amendment by conscripting companies into climate advocacy they may not believe, and solves a problem that doesn’t exist — the existing disclosure regime already covers material climate risks. Rescission is the right call, and the Commission should go further by preempting states from trying to impose the same mandates through the back door.

You can read our full SEC comment [here].

The Bottom Line

Whether it’s a farm bill that entrenches ethanol mandates forever or a securities rule that turns every public company into a climate activist, the pattern is the same: government force in service of a green agenda that Americans never voted for and can’t afford.

We’ll keep fighting it. More to come.

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For most American families, a home is their single largest financial asset and the main vehicle for building generational wealth. That cornerstone is being steadily undermined by speculative “climate risk scores” pushed into online listings by unaccountable private actors and amplified by the biggest names in finance.

Platforms such as Zillow, Realtor.com, and Redfin now attach predictive climate labels to properties, presenting them as hard science even when they diverge from the data insurers and emergency managers rely on. A new report from the American Energy Institute and Consumers’ Research shows how these scores routinely contradict FEMA flood maps yet still sit beside the listing price like a red flag. They carry no statutory authority and offer homeowners no meaningful appeal.

That analysis documents a case study that should make every homeowner sit up straight. A property in a FEMA Zone X—minimal flood risk—was branded with a 9‑out‑of‑10 flood score by a private system. Buyer interest collapsed, and the price fell with it. The water didn’t change. The maps didn’t change. What changed was the narrative, imposed by a model homeowners can’t see or challenge. That is how wealth transfers from Main Street to Wall Street.

At the center sits First Street, the private firm generating much of the property‑level climate data now piped into listings and investment tools. It markets itself as a cutting‑edge research group, publishing projections that more than 100 million Americans will face extreme heat as high as 125 degrees within a few decades. But when its scores contradict FEMA maps, homeowners pay the price. The report documents how these models can brand a low‑risk property high‑risk and trigger a cascade of buyer hesitation and falling prices

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This is not about one ambitious data vendor. It’s about the financial infrastructure that stands to benefit. BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street—the “Big Three” asset managers—hold significant ownership stakes in the parent companies behind several of the largest platforms distributing these scores, as the same report documents. These are the firms that spent years pushing ESG and Net‑Zero schemes throughout corporate America, pressuring companies to abandon reliable energy for intermittent, China‑dependent alternatives. Now they sit astride a system that can insidiously depress home values in communities deemed insufficiently “resilient.”

When the same giants that champion Net‑Zero also decide which homes are “climate risky,” Americans are right to ask whose interests are served. Homeowners are never in the room where these models are built, can’t examine the assumptions baked into 30‑year projections, and get no appeal when a score tanks their sale. Yet they absorb the loss while asset managers and data vendors expand their reach and their fees. No regulator signed off on this system. No agency vetted the math.

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And the damage doesn’t stop at resale. A phantom high-risk label can drive up insurance premiums and complicate financing, turning a bad score into a higher monthly bill for families who did nothing wrong. Watchdogs have already flagged it for federal scrutiny, but the scores keep spreading while Washington looks away.

That’s not how markets work. Risk assessment should rest on transparent methods that align with the standards already on the books. If FEMA’s maps and decades of insurance data say one thing and a private score says another, the burden falls on the modelers—not homeowners. A single, unregulated system that can override the government’s own risk determinations and reshape property values nationwide should trouble everyone, left and right.

Congress should drag the firms cooking up these scores into the open and make them answer plainly: how the numbers are calculated, why they contradict official federal data, and what happens to the family whose home is branded high-risk by a machine that’s simply wrong. Any system that moves home values deserves real disclosure, independent oversight, and a genuine path for homeowners to fight back. And regulators should say what should already be obvious—a private climate score is not a substitute for a FEMA map, and it never will be.

American families work for years to buy a home and build equity to pass on to their children. That effort should not be undermined by activists hiding behind proprietary algorithms and Wall Street titans chasing ESG ratings. If we let unaccountable climate scoring become a hidden tax on homeownership, we will watch generational wealth erode in slow motion while the people responsible insist they’re just following the science. It’s time to restore some sanity—protect official risk standards from ideology‑driven models and keep America’s housing market grounded in facts.

Originally published in the Washington Examiner

On June 3, the Amsterdam District Court in the Netherlands delivered a significant blow to Greenpeace’s legal strategy against Energy Transfer.

The court rejected Greenpeace’s attempt to invoke the European Union’s Anti-SLAPP Directive, the central pillar of the legal theory the organization has spent years promoting (and in which it has invested significant resources). The court ruled that the directive simply does not apply to this case.

Greenpeace responded by calling the decision a victory.

It is not, and the gap between what the court decided and what Greenpeace is announcing to the world tells you everything you need to know about how this organization operates.

Let us be clear about what happened in Amsterdam. The court allowed Greenpeace’s Dutch case to proceed, but under Dutch tort law, a framework the author characterizes as placing a higher burden of proof on Greenpeace.

That is not a win. That is a forced migration to harder ground after losing the easier path.

The ruling did not overturn or weaken the North Dakota verdict, handed down in March 2025, which found Greenpeace liable on multiple claims, including defamation and tortious interference, stemming from its 2016 and 2017 protests of the company’s Dakota Access Pipeline.

The ruling did not question Energy Transfer’s conduct or relieve Greenpeace of its potential obligation to post a bond of up to $25 million while appeals proceed.

The verdict and bond obligation stand. Nothing in Amsterdam changes now either.

What Amsterdam did do is strip away Greenpeace’s preferred framing. For years, the organization has characterized Energy Transfer’s lawsuit as a strategic lawsuit against public participation, or SLAPP, designed to bully activists into silence.

A North Dakota jury, after hearing all the evidence, found Greenpeace liable on multiple claims and returned a verdict of nearly $667 million. A judge subsequently reduced that award to $345 million. That verdict does not describe a meritless case. It describes an organization that crossed legal lines and got held accountable.

Greenpeace’s international network is now attempting to use foreign courts to relitigate what an American jury has already decided. That should concern every American who cares about energy security, economic stability or the rule of law.

Here is why this matters beyond one pipeline company and one activist organization. Energy Transfer moves roughly 30% of America’s natural gas. That gas heats homes, powers hospitals, fuels manufacturing, and keeps the lights on for millions of American families. What happens to Energy Transfer has real consequences for real people.

Yet the broader economic stakes go further than any single company. Energy infrastructure is financed over decades. Pipelines, generation assets and distribution networks attract investment only when investors can reasonably predict what legal and regulatory environment they will face over that horizon.

When foreign courts are invited to second-guess projects that have already cleared American permitting and survived American judicial review, investors face a new layer of uncertainty. That uncertainty raises the cost of capital and slows development. It shrinks domestic capacity at exactly the moment when the country needs more of it.

Electricity demand is projected to rise sharply through 2050, driven by reshoring, data center expansion and electrification. Meeting that demand requires committing billions in new infrastructure now. Those commitments are harder to make when activist groups can challenge completed, permitted, operating American infrastructure in a Dutch courtroom.

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If Greenpeace prevails in the Netherlands, the precedent will not be limited to pipelines. Any operator of critical infrastructure in any sector could face open-ended liability in foreign courts, regardless of how a project performed under domestic law.

The signal to investors would be unmistakable: Building American infrastructure carries risks that American courts cannot fully resolve. The result would be fewer projects, delayed capacity and higher prices.

That last point is not abstract. At its peak since the Iran war began, Brent crude surged more than 55% and reached nearly $120 a barrel. American energy production and the infrastructure that moves it are not luxuries. They are the buffer between geopolitical chaos abroad and economic pain at home.

Constraining domestic capacity in this environment compounds the pressure on households already paying more for everything.

Greenpeace is entitled to advocate for its worldview. It is not entitled to misrepresent court decisions to advance a narrative that the facts do not support.

The Amsterdam court did not validate Greenpeace. It rejected the organization’s core legal theory and sent the case to a more difficult terrain. That is not a victory. Americans who depend on reliable, affordable energy should not let anyone pretend otherwise.

Originally Published in the Washington Times

The state’s Division of Petroleum Market Oversight has officially released its list of scapegoats: President Trump, Iran, and branded gas stations like Chevron conspiring to “add to the pain at the pump.”

Conveniently missing from the indictment is the man who spent years taxing, regulating, restricting, suing, and otherwise making California one of the most hostile places in America to produce energy: Gov. Gavin Newsom (D).

The report conveniently avoids discussing Newsom’s nation-leading gas taxes, years-long regulatory onslaught and political war against villainous “Big Oil,” the refinery closures that followed, and all other unique-to-California policies that have steadily reduced fuel supply while increasing the cost of producing it.

It also comes weeks after Newsom’s widely mocked Memorial Day post on X instructing Californians to avoid Chevron stations and buy “unbranded gas” instead — as if California’s energy crisis has been a consumer-branding problem all along. How fortunate that the state’s supposedly independent petroleum watchdog later reached the exact same conclusion.

Unfortunately for Newsom, California’s tax code is a matter of public record. California’s $1.40 per gallon is the highest gas tax in the nation. California now makes more money off each gallon of gasoline sold than the refiners who are actually producing the gasoline.

And that extra $1.40 comes before accounting for the extra expenses of California’s boutique fuel mandates, its cap-and-trade regime, refinery restrictions, and lawfare campaigns charging billions of dollars to the oil and gas industry that helped build much of the state’s economy.

In recent years, Newsom has issued an executive order banning the sale of new gas-powered vehicles by 2035, significantly restricted oil and gas drilling, implemented sweeping emissions reduction mandates designed to cut fossil fuel consumption, extended the state’s Cap-and-Trade and Low Carbon Fuel Standard programs through 2045, and sued the oil industry for billions of dollars in damages for allegedly “lying to consumers for more than 50 years” about climate change. He also gave California energy regulators the authority to require oil companies to pay a penalty if their profits “climb too high.”

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California has already lost roughly 20 percent of its refining capacity in just the few years since this crusade began. Phillips 66 closed its Los Angeles refinery in 2025, and Valero recently idled operations at its Benicia refinery in the Bay Area, together wiping out thousands of jobs and removing a major source of in-state fuel production. ExxonMobil exited onshore production in California altogether in 2023 after years of regulatory and permitting obstacles helped derail efforts to restart offshore operations, ending five decades of production off the Southern California coast.

And because California’s boutique fuel standards effectively turned the state into an isolated “fuel island” whose gasoline cannot easily be replaced by supply from neighboring states, every refinery closure or disruption now hits consumers especially hard.

It is also worth noting that California, once one of America’s top oil-producing states, now imports 60 percent of the crude supplied to its refineries from foreign countries, with roughly 30 percent coming from the Middle East.

Turns out, deliberately making yourself more dependent on foreign oil can leave you a little more exposed to geopolitical instability abroad.

All of this explains the increasingly untenable political position Newsom now finds himself in.

After years spent treating the oil industry as public enemy No. 1, he is suddenly confronting the entirely predictable consequences of making refining and gasoline production economically miserable. As his policies continue shrinking California’s in-state energy production, refinery closures compound, and drivers get hit with ever-higher gas taxes and environmental fees at the pump, Newsom now needs voters to believe the real culprits are Trump and the handful of oil companies still willing to operate in California.

Hence the timely report that ignores the mountain of taxes, mandates, restrictions, lawsuits, and regulatory costs Newsom has forced upon what remains of the industry.

Newsom will not reconsider the policies that helped make California one of the most expensive places in America to drive a car, run a business, or simply live. Californians are paying some of the highest gas prices in America because their government spent years systematically dismantling what was needed to provide cheap and abundant energy. No one should believe a report so obviously intended to redirect blame from where it belongs.

Originally published in The Hill

In this episode

• Oil markets under pressure, but not spiking. WTI at $82.40, Brent at $88, as strikes expand against Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. A drone strike on a UAE tanker transiting the Strait of Hormuz caused the conflict’s first confirmed fatality this week — a serious escalation Trisha says isn’t getting the coverage it deserves.

• Why the US isn’t exposed the way Europe is. The US is producing 13.94 million barrels of crude a day (as of April) and climbing, with rig counts back up. Trisha explains why US oil flows and pricing are largely insulated from Middle East disruption, while Europe’s natural gas market — 100% import-dependent — is a completely different story.

• Europe’s gas price shock. US natural gas is $2.91/MMBtu. Dutch TTF (the European benchmark) hit $20 at the war’s peak in March, fell to under $13.50 by late June, and is now back above $18 — a direct result of Qatar curtailing LNG exports (down from 15 Bcf/day pre-war) and Europe’s total exposure to Middle East supply routes.

• California: the US’s own version of Europe. California has gone from 40 refineries to just 7 — with projections of 5 by year end — while in-state oil production has fallen to roughly 243,000 barrels a day and keeps declining. The state now imports the bulk of its crude from Iraq and Brazil, run through the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf, while turning down cheaper, closer Canadian and Bakken crude for political reasons.

• The real cost of California’s fuel taxes. California’s state fuel tax alone is now over $1.40/gallon, on top of a Low Carbon Fuel Standard (~25 cents/gallon) and Renewable Fuel Standard costs (~37 cents/gallon) — charges most consumers never see broken out. AEI has petitioned the EPA to end the Low Carbon Fuel Standard waiver outside California, where it’s now spreading to Oregon, Washington, New Mexico, and is under consideration in 11 more states.

• The Climate Score Scam. Jason breaks down American Energy’s new report (co-authored by Molly Vogt and Stephanie Cross) showing how First Street’s private “climate risk” scores — now embedded in Zillow and Realtor.com listings, platforms significantly owned by BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street — have assigned high-risk flood ratings to FEMA-cleared properties, tanking sale prices with no meaningful way to appeal.

• The climate model UN scientists just walked away from. Jason explains how the IPCC’s worst-case RCP8.5 / SSP5-8.5 emissions scenario — the basis for a generation of “climate catastrophe” headlines — was quietly withdrawn in April 2026 as implausible. AEI’s new tracker, they-knew.com, has already logged nearly 80 instances of institutions still citing the retired model.

• The war on data centers. A national wave of protests is planned this weekend against data centers, or what Jason calls “critical digital infrastructure.” He and Trisha compare the messaging — claims about respiratory disease, water contamination, and birth defects — to the anti-fracking campaigns of a decade ago, and flag a State Armor report tracking roughly $40 million in foreign-linked funding behind some of the groups driving the backlash. Shoutout to Steve Everly for the content.

• The real economics of data centers. In Texas alone, data centers are set to generate over $1 billion in local property tax revenue this year — matching the state’s entire annual water infrastructure appropriation — plus real, well-paying jobs in the trades (electricians, plumbers, HVAC) that the buildout is driving demand for. Shoutout to Texas State Senator Charles Perry for the content.

• Where Trisha and Jason push back on Big Tech. Even while criticizing “anti-energy” activism, both raise a real concern: some tech companies are building on-site power generation while still buying renewable energy credits and power purchase agreements — a cost, they argue, passed straight to ratepayers to fund corporate virtue signaling.

Notable quotes

“It’s impressive that oil prices are not a lot higher... there’s a lot going on under the hood.” — Trisha Curtis

“We produce 13.94 million barrels per day... we are just not exposed from an import standpoint in importing all this crude oil from the Middle East.” — Trisha Curtis

“You are just being Europe here.” — Trisha Curtis, on California’s crude oil import dependence

“People need to understand what is causing the rise in electricity prices. It was well before data centers started.” — Trisha Curtis

“That’s forcing you and I to pay for their virtue signaling.” — Jason Isaac, on tech companies’ renewable energy credit purchases alongside on-site generation

Resources & links mentioned

• The Climate Score Scam: How Wall Street Is Quietly Undermining American Home Values — American Energy Institute

• they-knew.com — American Energy’s tracker of institutions still citing the withdrawn RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5 climate scenario

• PetroNerds Podcast — Trisha Curtis’s podcast, available on Spotify, YouTube, iTunes, and all major platforms

• American Energy Institute — AmericanEnergyInstitute.com

• Trisha Curtis on LinkedIn and at PetroNerds.com (contact page)

• Jason Isaac on X: @ISAACforEnergy

About the guest

Trisha Curtis is CEO and Chief Economist of PetroNerds and host of the PetroNerds Podcast, and serves as Chief Economist for the American Energy Institute.

About the host

Jason Isaac is the Founder & CEO of the American Energy Institute and host of the High Carbon Lifestyle Podcast.

The president’s critics were quick to respond with a tutorial on oil market mechanics: gas stations are independently owned, tanker deliveries take weeks, refineries are price-takers and federal investigations have never once found Big Oil guilty of price gouging in the entire history of the charge.

All of that is true.

But here is what his critics are missing: Trump’s instinct that the major oil companies are not producing what they could is correct. Not because of greed, and not because of price manipulation. Because of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) policies.

The ESG movement spent the better part of a decade infiltrating the boardrooms of America’s largest energy companies. Asset managers like BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard, armed with proxy votes from millions of retirement accounts, pressured the majors into net-zero pledges, methane commitments and capital discipline frameworks that amount to a structural bias against production growth.

The executives running these companies are not villains. Many of them are trapped between market signals that say “drill” and boardroom pressure that says “restrain.” ESG won that argument for years. American consumers are paying for it.

The evidence is not theoretical. Consider three examples.

During the recent conflict that threatened the Strait of Hormuz and sent oil prices sharply higher, domestic producers in the Permian Basin had an opportunity to accelerate output.

Getting more crude to market faster sometimes requires flaring excess natural gas, a routine operational practice that independent producers use routinely. The majors largely held back.

Why? Methane and flaring commitments made to ESG-aligned institutional investors. While the price of oil spiked and American consumers felt it at the pump, some of the largest energy companies in the world sat on production capacity because burning off gas would have violated their green pledges.

Then there is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).

Congress authorized leasing in ANWR. The Trump administration opened the bidding. The geology is well understood, and the reserves are real. Not a single major oil company submitted a bid. Zero.

The resource is there. The legal authority is there. The national interest is obvious. But ESG commitments to institutional shareholders meant that bidding on Arctic leases was simply off the table.

Smaller independents were the only ones willing to move, and they face capital constraints the majors do not. The result is that a federally authorized domestic reserve sits largely untouched while the administration rightly tries to bring more supply online. When the companies with the deepest pockets and the best drilling technology will not bid on leases the federal government is actively offering, something other than geology and economics is driving the decision.

The third example is less visible but equally telling. In 2024, the major oil companies aligned with the Biden administration in supporting increased financial assurance requirements, known as bonding requirements, for offshore drilling in what was then called the Gulf of Mexico.

The new requirements did not threaten the majors; they’re exempt. The burden falls on smaller independent operators, the same independents who have driven the U.S. production surge of the last decade. Backing rules that kneecap your competitors is not a market decision. It is a strategy dressed up as regulatory compliance.

The pattern here is consistent: ESG-captured management teams have traded production ambition for boardroom approval, and in doing so, they have made American energy less responsive, less competitive and more expensive than it should be.

The president does not need the Department of Justice to investigate price gouging. Those investigations have never produced a conviction because the prices at the pump are not being manipulated.

What he needs is for the work his administration has already begun, rooting out ESG ideology from American financial institutions, to continue with urgency. The Labor Department’s fiduciary duty rules matter. State-level anti-ESG legislation matters. Pressure on the proxy advisory firms that serve as transmission belts for activist agendas into corporate governance matters.

Trump’s frustration is justified. His target is right.

The mechanism is not gouging at the pump. It is green ideology in the executive suite, quietly capping the American energy production that would drive prices down not just this week but for years to come.

The solution is not a federal investigation. It is finishing the job of getting politics out of the boardroom and letting American energy companies act like American energy companies again.

Originally Published in Daily Caller

President Trump has made the answer unmistakable. He has put winning the AI race at the center of American economic competitiveness and national security—our edge over China depends on it—and he has already moved to make sure the buildout of AI infrastructure does not become a hidden tax on working families struggling to make ends meet. Leadership means building fast, protecting working families and staying ahead of China.

The framework makes clear that winning AI means building the power-hungry infrastructure to support it. It ties American economic competitiveness and national security to rapid deployment of these facilities. And in March, Trump’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge, signed by CEOs of the nation’s largest companies, ensures families won’t foot the bill for AI growth. When power demand surges, utilities and tech firms commit to shielding ratepayers first.

That is exactly why the opposition campaign deserves such intense scrutiny. It is a coordinated national effort to slow the electricity systems, transmission upgrades, and industrial expansion needed for AI, manufacturing, and growth—not just a handful of neighbors objecting down the road. This goes far beyond spontaneous local objections.

But don’t take my word for it. The evidence of a coordinated campaign is overwhelming.

In December 2025, more than 230 organizations sent a letter to Congress demanding a moratorium on new data centers, branding the AI boom one of the biggest environmental threats of our generation. Signers included Indivisible ($7.4M foreign funds), 350.org ($9.5M), Oil Change International ($5.9M), GAIA ($6.4M), and Sierra Club ($2.1M).

Just follow the money. The Americans for Public Trust report from last October documents nearly $2 billion flowing from five foreign charities into U.S. activism, litigation, and policy fights. Quadrature Climate Foundation sent over $530 million to American groups. KR Foundation from Denmark gave $36 million. Oak Foundation more than $750 million. Laudes Foundation nearly $20 million. Children’s Investment Fund Foundation over $553 million. These funds grease a machine that churns out protests, lawsuits, and lobbying—from national headquarters down to local Sierra Club chapters coaching residents in Louisiana, Kansas, New Jersey, Delaware, Michigan, and Minnesota to block zoning changes.

Extinction Rebellion, which favors street disruption over traditional activism, signed that moratorium letter too. Indivisible chapters escalate the chaos with mass rallies. The money trail runs straight from foreign donors through to U.S. nonprofits to “grassroots” obstruction.

Now the radicals in Congress are amplifying it. Just last month, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced an AI data center moratorium bill. Even Senators Mark Warner and John Fetterman of their own party called it nonsense. When the far left wants to freeze AI infrastructure and foreign-backed nonprofits are helping bankroll the broader anti-development ecosystem, it is fair to ask whether the real goal is protection or paralysis. It’s working families who pay the price.

When data centers stall, the ripple effects hit fast. Farmers lose access to the AI tools that cut fertilizer and fuel costs. Trucking companies run less efficient routes, driving up freight prices. Small manufacturers and local businesses pay more for the cloud services that keep them competitive. Those costs don’t disappear, they show up at the grocery store, in shipping fees, and on monthly energy costs.

America cannot surrender its AI edge to this playbook. Data centers power the systems that keep our economy moving, from farms and freight to factories and finance. If foreign-funded activists can choke off that backbone, China won’t hesitate to build it instead. That’s not just falling behind, it’s handing over the advantage without a fight.

Policymakers see the stakes. Trump’s framework demands federal consistency to cut red tape and speed deployment. His pledge locks in consumer safeguards. Leaders on the right should call this opposition what it is: a foreign-influenced campaign dressed as local concern. The question hangs plain. Who benefits when overseas cash slows America’s technological surge?

Originally Published in Washington Examiner

It’s a satisfying fantasy. It is also a luxury that almost no one in the real economy actually has. When Washington comes for your livelihood, you cannot disappear into the mountains. You either stay and fight, or you fold.

For eight years, Atlas Energy Solutions, one of America’s most important energy companies, chose to fight. Atlas didn’t shrug.

Atlas controls the largest position of high-quality frac sand in the Permian Basin, mined from the Kermit and Monahans dunes of West Texas. That sand is the unglamorous, indispensable input that makes the American shale revolution possible—the proppant that holds fractures open so oil and gas can flow. It also happens to sit on the same shinnery oak dunelands that are home to a three-inch reptile called the dunes sagebrush lizard.

In 2018, the Center for Biological Diversity and Defenders of Wildlife petitioned to have that lizard listed as endangered. In May 2024, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service obliged, naming oil and gas development and frac sand mining as the primary threats to the species. The listing was a direct shot at companies like Atlas, and at the broader Permian—the most productive oil field on the planet, responsible for a staggering share of the energy that powers American life.

Here is what an endangered listing means in practice. It becomes a federal crime to “harm” the species, a term that agencies have stretched to cover ordinary land use. New projects and project renewals trigger mandatory analyses that grind [WS1] permitting to a halt.

Acreage becomes locked. Investment dries up. The lizard becomes a legal lever to do what activists could never accomplish at the ballot box: shut down production across a 4% sliver of the Permian that happens to overlap some of its richest reserves.

The easy move would have been to retreat. Relocate operations, settle quietly, write off the West Texas dunes as too politically radioactive to develop. Atlas did the opposite.

Years before the listing, after being rejected from an existing state-managed conservation plan drafted primarily for major oil company operators, Atlas led an effort to create a new voluntary conservation agreement. That effort was successful, and the 2020 CCAA for the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard in West Texas was created.

As a result, Atlas set aside substantial lands for lizard habitat, more than any other company, and invested in innovative electrified dredge mining technologies that disturb less surface area per ton of sand than conventional methods. It demonstrated, in the field and on the balance sheet, that responsible production and species conservation are not enemies requiring government regulations to[WS2] break up the fight.

Bud Brigham, John Turner, Rick Fletcher and the entire Atlas team treated the lizard not as a nuisance to be litigated around but as a problem to be solved—and then they refused to be punished for solving it.

That refusal is why the story has the ending it does. This month, the federal government moved to settle the State of Texas’ challenge to the listing by conceding a fundamental error. The Service had assumed that destroyed habitat was, for all practical purposes, gone forever—that once a dune was disturbed, it could not be restored within any meaningful timeframe. That single mistaken assumption was the load-bearing wall of the entire “endangered” determination.

The government now admits it ignored promising habitat restoration efforts, including work done by the private sector on oil and gas well pads, and that it discounted the very conservation programs that companies like Atlas had been funding for years. The rule has been vacated and sent back for reconsideration.

Let me be clear about what this victory is and what it is not. The rule is remanded, not buried. The Service must issue a new finding, and the activists who started this will be back. The fight is not over; it has simply moved to the next round.

But that is precisely the point. Standing in a courtroom requires members willing to stand. Associational challenges to regulatory overreach live or die on whether real companies with real operations are willing to put their names on the line and stay there for the long haul—through the petitions, the comment periods, the litigation, the stays, and the settlements that take the better part of a decade to resolve.

American energy dominance is not an abstraction handed down from Washington. It is built, ton by ton and well by well, by people who refuse to walk away when the regulatory state decides their work is inconvenient. The looters were counting on the producers to shrug. Atlas didn’t.

Neither should the rest of us.

Originally Published in The Daily Signal

But here’s what I really wanted more time to say on air.

The major oil companies are not producing what they could. Not because of geology. Because of ESG.

During the Iran conflict, Permian producers could have accelerated output. That sometimes requires flaring excess gas, a standard practice. The majors largely held back because of commitments made to ESG-aligned investors. When the Trump administration opened ANWR leases on proven reserves with existing infrastructure, not a single major oil company submitted a bid. Zero. And after the White House meeting with executives in January, most of the majors kept waffling on Venezuela investment commitments — exactly the kind of thing that visibly frustrated the president.

These companies say “drill, baby, drill” in Washington. Then they go back to managing their reputations with Wall Street.

The price gouging investigation will come up empty. The real constraint on American energy production is not criminal. It is ideological. And the fix is exactly what this administration has already started: restoring fiduciary duty and getting ESG politics out of the American boardroom.

Cheap gas is coming. The deeper problem will take longer.

A Dutch newspaper ran it on the front page. De Volkskrant: “Almost everything you read about the climate future is wrong.”

The New York Times said nothing. The BBC said nothing. The Guardian said nothing.

That silence is the story.

The Scenario That Ate the World

RCP8.5 modeled a world of 12 billion people burning five times more coal than today, with almost no technological progress — exceeding what geologists believe can even be physically mined. It was the most extreme outlier in a set of four IPCC scenarios. Its own creators built it as an upper bound, roughly the 90th percentile of worst-case outcomes.

It was called “business as usual.”

That label — implying this was simply what happened if society changed nothing — was not a mistake. It was a choice. And it cascaded through everything: the headlines, the regulations, the financial stress tests, the court filings, the classroom curricula, the documentaries, the speeches.

For fifteen years, the public discourse on climate was built on a scenario that was never meant to be the expected outcome.

They Were Warned

This is where it stops being a story about scientific uncertainty and becomes a story about institutional failure.

In 2017, researchers published in Energy that RCP8.5’s coal assumptions were physically impossible. Flagged. On the record.

In 2020, Hausfather and Peters published a landmark paper in Nature — cited over 1,300 times — demanding RCP8.5 stop being called business as usual. By that point, approximately 16,800 scientific papers had been built on it.

In 2021, Pielke (The Honest Broker on Substack) and Ritchie called continued use of RCP8.5 “one of the most significant failures of scientific integrity of the century.” That same year, the IPCC cited RCP8.5 more than 1,359 times in its own assessment.

In 2022, the Biden EPA quietly concluded that SSP5–8.5 fell outside the entire 1st-to-99th-percentile range of plausible futures and removed it from regulatory cost calculations. Quietly. No announcement. No press release.

In 2023, the U.S. government published the National Climate Assessment using SSP5–8.5 as a primary scenario anyway.

Every institution that kept using RCP8.5 after 2020 had read the warnings. They made a choice.

The Cost Is Not Abstract

Fifteen years of apocalyptic projections built on a broken scenario left marks that won’t be easy to undo.

59% of young people report being “very or extremely worried” about climate change. That’s not from a fringe poll — it’s from a Lancet study of 10,000 respondents across ten countries.

1 in 4 young Americans aged 16–24 question whether to have children because of climate fears — and nearly 1 in 3 say “maybe”

Over 140 central banks stress-tested the global financial system against a scenario now officially called implausible. The ECB put 112 banks through it. Trillions in investment decisions were shaped by a number scientists knew was fiction.

Courts used RCP8.5-based projections to pursue tens of billions in damages. Six U.S. states mandate curricula treating extreme-scenario projections as established fact. California began climate education at kindergarten, using materials calibrated to a scenario its own federal government had concluded was impossible.

We’re Launching the Record

They-Knew.com is the American Energy Institute’s answer to the silence.

It is a documented, sourced, public record — year by year, institution by institution — of who used RCP8.5 after the warnings were on the record. The IPCC. The U.S. government. The World Bank. 140+ central banks. The plaintiffs’ bar. The classroom.

Every claim is sourced to peer-reviewed research, government documents, and primary sources. This isn’t an opinion site. It’s a ledger.

And because SSP5–8.5 was officially retired in April 2026 and studies are still citing it at roughly 25 per day, we’re also running the Continued Misuse Tracker — a live log of every new paper that uses the scenario without disclosure, published after its retirement.

The record is open. It will keep growing.

Why This Matters Beyond Climate

The RCP8.5 story is not ultimately about climate science. It’s about what happens when institutions find an extreme scenario useful and keep using it long after the scientific basis has collapsed — because the alarm it generates serves other purposes.

It’s about what happens to public trust when the correction finally comes and the institutions that drove fifteen years of fear say nothing.

It’s about 59% of young people walking around convinced the world is ending, based on a number scientists privately knew was broken.

The scenario is officially retired. The damage is not.

They knew. Now so do you. →

That calculus is changing faster than most people realize.

I joined Dagen McDowell and Brian Brenberg on Fox Business’s The Bottom Line this week to walk through what’s actually happening in global energy markets right now. Here are the three things I think matter most.

1. The UAE is going to zero — and getting there fast.

The United Arab Emirates — one of the world’s major oil exporters — is on track to route 100% of its oil exports around the Strait of Hormuz via bypass pipelines. A second pipeline is already 50% complete and targeted for 2027, which will double the UAE’s existing bypass capacity. Other Gulf producers are building similar infrastructure. The Strait is losing its power as a weapon — not because of any treaty or diplomatic breakthrough, but because producers got tired of depending on it.

2. The SPR drawdown was more strategic than it looked.

The Biden administration drew down 300 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve — 180 million of them just before the 2022 midterms, a nakedly political move to suppress prices at the pump. The Trump administration has taken a different approach: its 172-million-barrel drawdown, coordinated with 31 other countries, was structured as a loan. Oil companies are required to replace that oil between 2026 and 2028, and they must do so with at least 15–22% more barrels than were withdrawn. That’s an extraordinary financial structure that will deliver real value to the American consumer — and it’s almost never discussed.

3. China is paying full price.

For years, China quietly purchased heavily discounted oil from Iran and Venezuela, effectively subsidizing its own growth at the expense of global market stability. That’s over. China is now paying full market rates, which takes downward pressure off global prices for everyone else. American consumers, European buyers, Asian importers — everyone benefits when the world’s largest oil importer stops gaming the system.

The Strait of Hormuz will remain relevant for some time. LNG flows, in particular, still pass through it in significant volumes — though even that is changing as U.S. LNG export capacity expands and we supply more of our allies’ needs directly. But the era of the Strait as an unambiguous, unbeatable geopolitical weapon is ending.

That’s good news for global consumers. And it’s one more reason why American energy leadership — producing more, exporting more, and doing it more responsibly than anywhere else on earth — is one of the most consequential things this country can do for the world.

Watch the full Fox Business segment here.

Foreign money is fueling the organized opposition to American energy — and now the data centers that need it — and it’s working.

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The Gallup poll anchor Bryan Llenas cited says it all: 71% of Americans now oppose having a data center in their area — a higher number than those who oppose a nuclear power plant in their neighborhood. That is an extraordinary figure, and it didn’t get there on its own.

When billions of dollars flow from foreign foundations through dark money intermediaries like Arabella Advisors into left-leaning advocacy groups, those groups go to work. They flood local communities with misinformation about water use, noise, property values, and health. They mobilize protests, file lawsuits, and manufacture the appearance of organic opposition. They put up yard signs next to “Bernie can’t be bought by billionaires” — and then foreign billionaires fund the whole operation.

Kevin O’Leary had to hire auditors to find this. American Energy found it in public IRS 990 filings. The receipts are there, and one of the largest foreign donors behind this movement is a Swiss billionaire who is now publicly denying our findings. We stand by every word.

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The pushback Bryan raised is worth acknowledging: yes, some people have legitimate concerns about specific data centers, just as they have concerns about any industrial neighbor. Those concerns deserve thoughtful state-level regulation — for noise, light, water, and vibration — and America produces everything more responsibly than anywhere else on the planet. But the organized, well-funded, nationally coordinated opposition campaign is something different entirely, and conflating the two is exactly what the funders want.

What’s actually at stake: AI-powered precision agriculture is already delivering a 60% reduction in herbicide use on farms using the technology. Data centers are accelerating breakthroughs in cancer research, supply chain efficiency, and national defense. Texas became a national leader in data center development because lawmakers — including during my time in the Texas legislature — understood that early. The rest of the country needs to catch up, not slam the brakes.

Gordon Chang is right on the solution: enforce FARA, the Foreign Agents Registration Act, against organizations coordinating with foreign sources — and ban foreign contributions to American nonprofits engaged in domestic policy fights. This is not a complicated fix. It just requires the will to do it.

Read our full reports on the anti-energy coalition and the foreign funding network. Defend American Energy and free-markets by supporting our work at AmericanEnergyInstitute.com.

It is a welcome victory, but the fight against eco-lawfare is far from over.

The case began in 2019, when Energy Transfer sued Greenpeace and other activist groups over the coordinated, sometimes violent campaign waged against the Dakota Access Pipeline. After six years of litigation and a three-week trial, twelve North Dakota jurors unanimously found Greenpeace liable for conspiracy, defamation, defamation per se and tortious interference.

The damages exceeded $666 million across the three Greenpeace defendants, with more than $130 million tagged to Greenpeace International alone. The jury heard the evidence and reached its verdict. That should have been the end of it.

It was not. Two weeks before the North Dakota trial began, after six years of fighting in American courts, Greenpeace International filed a new lawsuit in Amsterdam. The plan was straightforward: ask a Dutch court to declare the North Dakota case “manifestly unfounded and abusive” under a new European Union anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) directive, then use that foreign declaration to erase the verdict and seize Energy Transfer’s assets wherever they could find them. It was a calculated end-run around our judiciary, dressed up in the polite language of European jurisprudence.

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The North Dakota Supreme Court saw through it. Justice Jerod Tufte, writing for the majority this month, made the principle clear: Substance matters, not labels. A claim that requires a foreign court to find an American jury wrong is a collateral attack on that jury, no matter what name the lawyers attach to it.

The court ordered the trial judge to issue a narrowly tailored injunction blocking Greenpeace from pursuing the parts of its Dutch action that depend on relitigating what North Dakotans already decided.

The opinion is worth quoting on the point that matters most. Comity, the court wrote, “expires when the strong public policies of the forum are vitiated by the foreign act.” In plain English, foreign courts get respect when they earn it. A party that races to Amsterdam on the eve of an American trial to undermine the anticipated verdict cannot then demand that American courts politely defer to the foreign proceeding it manufactured.

This is the right ruling. It is also a narrow one.

The injunction applies to one party in one state. Unfortunately, that means Greenpeace can still pursue the parts of its Dutch action that do not require erasing the North Dakota verdict.

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Federal courts have not yet weighed in on whether American courts can block foreign collateral attacks on American judgments. And the federal circuits are split on how heavily international comity should weigh against such injunctions. Other state supreme courts have not taken up the question. The next activist group with a domestic loss and a foreign sympathetic forum will try the same play, just with better lawyers and a cleaner record.

And they have plenty of reasons to keep trying. The European Union’s 2024 anti-SLAPP directive was sold as a shield for journalists and dissidents in countries with weak speech protections. In practice, however, it is becoming a sword aimed at American energy companies that win in court. The directive’s “manifestly unfounded” standard invites foreign judges to second-guess the merits of American court verdicts. Article 17 invites damages claims for the offense of having sued. The architecture is custom-built for the exact tactic Greenpeace attempted.

The deeper problem is that the activist legal industry has discovered something useful. When the protests fail, when the defamation campaigns get punished, when the juries refuse to play along, there is always another forum, another court, another friendly jurisdiction willing to entertain the argument that American energy infrastructure is itself a kind of crime.

The point is not to win on the merits. The point is to make building anything in this country so legally treacherous that capital flees and projects die. This strategy will work in proportion to how seriously American courts take it.

The North Dakota Supreme Court took it seriously. Other courts must follow. Congress should pay attention too. American companies operating under American law, sued in American courts and vindicated by American juries should not have to fight the same case all over again in Amsterdam, Brussels, or anywhere else.

A federal statute clarifying the authority of American courts to block foreign collateral attacks on domestic judgments would put the matter beyond doubt. The Trump administration’s commitment to energy dominance demands nothing less.

The stakes are not abstract. Every data center humming with artificial intelligence, every factory bringing jobs back from overseas, every home heated through a North Dakota winter depends on the ability of American companies to build, operate, and defend the infrastructure that delivers reliable energy. Strip away the certainty that an American verdict actually means something, and that infrastructure becomes a much riskier bet. Risk premiums rise. Capital gets scarcer. Projects do not get built.

Greenpeace lost in North Dakota. It lost again on May 7. This is all good. But the rest of the country needs to make sure those losses stick and continue, because the next case is already being drafted somewhere, and the activists who brought us a six-year siege of the Dakota Access Pipeline are not going to take this defeat as a final answer.

Neither should we.

Originally Published in The Hill

In April 2026, the international scientific committee that designs climate scenarios for the United Nations officially retired SSP5-8.5 — the corollary to the infamous RCP 8.5 — declaring it “implausible” and dropping it from the framework that will underpin the next IPCC assessment. That is the very pathway that has powered nearly every catastrophic climate headline you have ever read, and it is the scaffolding behind tens of billions of dollars in damage claims now winding their way through American courts.

For more than a decade, RCP 8.5 was marketed to judges, regulators, and reporters as “business as usual.” It was nothing of the kind. Its own creators designed it as a 90th-percentile stress test built on absurd assumptions — 12 billion people on Earth, technology frozen in place, a fivefold global increase in coal, more coal than geologists believe can even be mined. Scientists began warning that it was implausible in 2017. A 2020 paper in Nature said it “becomes increasingly implausible with every passing year.” The Biden EPA quietly pulled it from regulatory cost-benefit analysis in 2022.

They knew. They used it anyway.

By 2024, new academic studies citing RCP 8.5 were still appearing at a rate of 25 per day. The U.S. National Climate Assessment used it as recently as 2023. The Climate Judiciary Project trained more than 2,000 judges on materials built on it. And plaintiffs’ lawyers built billion-dollar damage claims on it.

The institutional footprint is staggering. Over 140 central banks stress-tested the global financial system against it. The World Bank applied it across more than 100 countries. The United Kingdom built two decades of national adaptation planning around it. Germany, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, and Japan each embedded it in building codes and flood maps.

Multnomah County is one of the most brazen examples of how this fiction was weaponized in court. The county, home to the city of Portland, claims that major energy companies were a substantial factor in causing and exacerbating the 2021 heat wave and is seeking $51 billion in damages. The core of that claim is an “attribution science” study by Christopher Callahan and Justin Mankin that purports to assign dollar values to heat-related damages from individual energy producers — claiming Chevron alone caused as much as $3.6 trillion in losses. That study draws its projections directly from the high-emissions scenarios the U.N. has now retired.

It gets worse. According to Chevron’s filings, plaintiffs’ lead attorney Roger Worthington had undisclosed financial involvement in at least two of the studies the county presents as neutral, peer-reviewed science. Early drafts of the Mankin study were hosted on Worthington’s law firm website. An early version acknowledged funding from the Environmental Law Institute’s Climate Judiciary Project — the same group running “neutral” judicial education seminars — before that disclosure was quietly scrubbed from the published version.

So the science was manufactured. The funding was hidden. The judges were trained on the same compromised material. And the underlying scenario has now been officially retired by the U.N. itself.

This is not climate science. It is climate racketeering, exposed.

Multnomah is not alone. The Boulder case heading to the Supreme Court next term, the Honolulu suit, the Minnesota complaint, and dozens of others all draw on the same body of work. Every active climate damages claim in the United States now rests on a scientific foundation that the international scientific community has formally repudiated.

And the cost of letting these cases proceed falls squarely on American families. If courts award damages anywhere near what plaintiffs seek, the bill will not stop at the boardroom door. It will flow straight to consumers through higher pump prices, higher utility bills, higher insurance premiums, and a higher cost of capital baked into every barrel of oil and every kilowatt-hour of electricity produced in this country. Climate litigation is, functionally, a regressive tax imposed by trial lawyers rather than elected legislatures, hitting hardest the working families who can least afford it.

Courts should treat this seriously. Judges should exclude RCP 8.5-based evidence and expert testimony at the gate, the same way they would exclude any other retracted study. The EPA’s rescission of its 2009 Endangerment Finding should accelerate — the regulatory edifice was built on the same retired scenarios. Central banks should rebuild their stress-test frameworks on plausible trajectories. And the Federal Judicial Center was right to pull its climate science chapter from the judicial reference manual earlier this year. Every state and federal court training program should follow.

The doomsday scenario is officially retired. So is the case for these lawsuits.

Originally Published in Daily Wire

Trisha Curtis joins me in the Wimberley studio to talk grid reliability, negative gas prices in the Permian, and the global energy reckoning Europe and the IEA still refuse to face.

Trisha Curtis, Chief Economist at the American Energy Institute, joined me this week in our Wimberley studio for a conversation that should be required viewing for every legislator in Austin and every policymaker in DC.

Trisha was in Texas this week meeting with legislators and the governor’s staff at the Capitol, and what we discussed should alarm anyone who cares about affordable, reliable electricity. Texas, the energy capital of the world, is sitting on so much natural gas that producers in the Permian Basin are paying people to take it off their hands. Negative prices. And yet we are still bending over backwards to force more wind, solar, and short-duration batteries onto our grid.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

Over the last five years, Texas has added 56 gigawatts of generation. Of that, 53 gigawatts were wind, solar, and batteries. Three gigawatts of natural gas. We have actually lost 700 megawatts of coal since Winter Storm Uri, the same coal generation that, along with natural gas, kept Texans alive when wind and solar collapsed and produced just 8 percent of our electricity during that deadly week.

Electricity rates in Texas are up 28 percent over that same five-year period. The market has spent roughly 53 billion dollars chasing intermittent generation that ratepayers will be picking up the tab for over the next twenty years. Had we built 15 gigawatts of natural gas instead, ratepayers would owe 15 billion dollars and we would have reliable, dispatchable power.

That is not a market outcome. That is a distorted market disaster.

Number One in Wind. Number One in Solar. Tenth in Affordability.

The American Legislative Exchange Council just released its energy affordability index. North Dakota came in first. Louisiana second. Texas, the biggest oil and gas producing state in America, came in tenth. That is a slap in the face to every Texan who pays an electric bill.

We are number one in installed wind capacity. During peak demand, wind doesn’t show up. We are now number one in solar. During peak demand in late summer afternoons, the sun sets and we get the duck curve from hell, with natural gas scrambling to fire up to keep the lights on. We are about to surpass California in installed battery capacity, except these are short-duration batteries that run for two hours and take days to recharge.

For one billion dollars, you can build a gigawatt of natural gas that runs 24/7. For that same one billion dollars, you can build a gigawatt of batteries that run two hours every other day. The cost-benefit analysis is not even close. Yet because of subsidies, mandates, and a rigged market, the unreliable option keeps winning.

The Stranded Wind and Solar Problem

Now legislators are talking about building 765 kV high-voltage transmission lines, 2,500 miles long and 200 feet wide, to move stranded wind and solar from the middle of nowhere to where the demand actually is. That is longer than the southern border of the United States. It is a massive land grab, and Texas ratepayers will foot the bill for transmission infrastructure that exists solely to prop up generation that should have never been built where it was built.

Markets reward reliability and locate generation close to demand. What we have in Texas is the opposite of a market. If you are concerned, visit AmericanEnergyWorks.com. We have petitions and letters going to legislators and the Public Utility Commission urging a pause on these transmission boondoggles.

The Global Picture: “Cleaner and Greener” Means Poorer

Trisha and I also dug into the geopolitical reality. The war in Iran has WTI sitting around 95 dollars a barrel, and the United States is barely feeling it because we produce our own energy. Europe is not so lucky. The UK is importing oil from Norway out of the same North Sea fields it refuses to drill itself. Germany decommissioned its nuclear and is back to taking record volumes of LNG from Russia. France increased its imports of Russian LNG by a billion cubic feet per day in 2024.

President Trump warned them in his first administration. They laughed. If Germany could be powered by smug, they would have an unlimited supply.

The economic data tells the story. The US is growing GDP at around 2 percent with estimates we could hit 4 percent. The UK and EU are limping along at half a percent. China is growing above 5 percent and embracing coal. The correlation between coal and natural gas use and GDP growth is direct and undeniable. Cleaner and greener is just another way of saying poorer.

The IEA’s Green Deceit

The Guardian recently ran an interview with IEA chief Fatih Birol under the headline “the damage is done, global oil crisis has changed industry forever.” In it, he advises the UK not to produce its own oil and insists “nobody regrets renewables.” Texans regret renewables. Germans regret renewables. Anyone paying an electric bill in Europe regrets renewables.

The IEA was founded to ensure energy security for its members. It has become a propaganda arm for an agenda that leaves Western nations dependent on Chinese critical minerals to build intermittent power that doesn’t work when you need it. Wind and solar do not replace oil. Oil is transportation fuel, synthetics, jet fuel, and the foundation of modern industry. Wind and solar are crap power, and you cannot substitute one for the other.

What Has To Change

We have to get energy policy right. We cannot keep getting this wrong. The path forward is clear:

Build dispatchable thermal generation. Natural gas, coal, and nuclear are the only technologies that produce affordable, reliable electricity at scale. The first new coal plant in over a decade is being expanded at Dry Fork in Wyoming. We need more of that, not less.

Stop subsidizing intermittent generation. If heavy industrial users want wind and solar, let them pay for wind and solar. Don’t let them connect to the grid and buy renewable energy credits while pushing the cost of intermittency onto the rest of us.

End the transmission ratepayer shakedown. Generation should be built close to demand. Wind and solar developers should pay their own transmission costs.

Conduct honest cost-benefit analysis. As a senior official at the Department of Energy told me recently, if cost-benefit analysis were the only driver of what gets built today, the only thing being built would be natural gas.

The Trump administration and Secretary Chris Wright are focused on lowering costs and restoring reliability. Texas, of all places, should be leading on energy affordability. Right now we are tenth. We can do better, and Texans deserve better.

Trisha and I will be back soon to discuss our petition to EPA on the endangerment finding, the low-carbon fuel standards, our lawsuit in the Fifth Circuit protecting offshore exploration in the Gulf of America, and much more. Subscribe so you don’t miss it.

Watch the full conversation below.

Faster to secure domestic supply chains. Faster to deploy reliable energy. And faster to bring next-generation technologies to life.

Across the country, innovators are answering that call, working to bring reactors to criticality, a key milestone where a system achieves a self-sustaining reaction and begins to demonstrate real-world potential. In Texas, that progress is taking shape in a meaningful way.

Oklo Inc. is advancing its Groves Isotope Test Reactor in Caldwell County, an important step toward strengthening U.S. capabilities in nuclear technology, medical isotope production, and advanced fuel recycling. This is not just another energy project, it is a strategic investment in American resilience.

This effort comes at a moment when one of the most important challenges in healthcare remains largely invisible.

Millions of cancer treatments depend on something most people have never heard of, and that supply is fragile.

More than 50 million nuclear medicine procedures take place each year, and demand is rising quickly. Roughly half of all cancer patients will receive radiation therapy at some point, with many of those treatments relying on medical isotopes.

For decades, the United States has depended heavily on foreign sources for many of these materials, with a small number of aging reactors overseas supplying much of the global market. When those facilities go offline, the effects ripple across the globe, delaying care and creating uncertainty for providers and patients.

These medicines cannot be stockpiled. Many isotopes decay within hours, requiring production, transport, and delivery on tight timelines. When supply is disrupted, treatment is delayed because cancer does not wait.

This is not a theoretical risk. Past outages at foreign reactors have led to real shortages, forcing hospitals to delay diagnostic scans and ration care. It is a fragile system that leaves American patients exposed to disruptions far beyond our control.

Projects like Groves are designed to strengthen this system by expanding domestic production and reducing dependence on vulnerable foreign supply chains. Bringing that capability back to the United States is not just a healthcare priority, it is a matter of national security.

For families in communities like Lockhart and Luling, that work connects directly to more timely, precise care. It also represents something larger: rebuilding U.S. leadership in technologies at the intersection of healthcare, energy, and national security.

The benefits extend well beyond medicine.

Advanced nuclear technologies make more efficient use of fuel while providing steady, around-the-clock power that supports grid reliability. Unlike weather-dependent sources, nuclear energy delivers consistent output aligned with real-world demand.

That reliability matters for Texas. When energy is dependable and costs are stable, businesses can invest, manufacturers can expand, and families are better insulated from volatility. Reliable power is not a luxury, it is the foundation of economic growth and modern life.

Nuclear energy delivers this output with a small physical footprint, preserving land while producing significant energy close to where it is needed. Advanced designs like Oklo’s also improve fuel efficiency and extend the lifecycle of nuclear materials, extracting more value from existing resources.

The progress underway in Caldwell County reflects what happens when policy and innovation align. Recent executive actions to modernize the regulatory environment have helped remove barriers that slowed nuclear development for decades, while other nations moved forward.

For too long, the United States allowed overregulation and political opposition to stall one of its most promising energy technologies. That is beginning to change as policymakers recognize the need to restore American leadership in nuclear innovation.

Today, that trajectory is changing. Advanced reactor developers are moving from design to deployment, from concept to capability.

Milestones like criticality mark that shift, when years of engineering begin to translate into real, measurable progress.

Texas has long led in energy innovation, from oil and natural gas to LNG exports, and is now positioning itself at the forefront of next-generation nuclear technology.

Caldwell County is part of that story, and its role will only grow as these technologies move from testing to deployment.

This is what American innovation looks like when it is allowed to move.

And Texas is showing the country how it is done.

Originally Published in The Texas Dispatch

As electricity demand surges due to artificial intelligence, data centers, reshoring, manufacturing and population growth, the U.S. is rediscovering a basic truth: You cannot power a modern economy on hope, weather forecasts, and subsidies. You need dense, reliable, round-the-clock energy, and nuclear delivers exactly that.

What makes this moment different from illusory nuclear renaissances of the past is not lofty promises from politicians but innovation from the private sector. American companies are advancing technologies that do what federal programs never could, turning long-ignored liabilities into strategic assets.

Used nuclear fuel, treated for decades as untouchable waste, still contains more than 90 percent of its original energy. Yet the U.S. has stored more than 90,000 tons of it across dozens of sites, costing taxpayers close to $1 billion annually just to guard material that could be powering the country for generations.

Advanced fuel recycling changes that equation entirely. Instead of burying or warehousing used fuel, new processes can safely convert it into usable material for modern reactors. This is not speculative science or climate-era wishcasting. Countries like France have been recycling nuclear fuel for decades, delivering dependable electricity with strong safety records. The difference today is that American firms are developing approaches that are more efficient, more economical, and tailored to next-generation reactors, reclaiming U.S. leadership in a field we once defined.

The same logic applies to surplus Cold War plutonium. For years, Washington argued endlessly over how to dispose of it while spending billions to secure it. The smarter solution is to put it back to work. Repurposing surplus plutonium into advanced reactor fuel reduces a national security liability while producing domestic energy, skilled jobs and fuel made in America. The only way to truly eliminate unused plutonium is to consume it, not to entomb it.

This renewed seriousness around nuclear mirrors a broader shift underway at the Department of Energy. Under Energy Secretary Chris Wright, federal energy policy is moving back toward engineering reality and away from political fantasy. When the administration reinstated the National Coal Council, reversing its elimination under the Biden administration, Wright was blunt about the consequences of ignoring proven energy sources, calling the prior decision a product of “ignorance and arrogance.”

That critique extends beyond domestic policy. It applies directly to how the U.S. competes with China. While Washington spent years constraining its own power generation in the name of climate leadership, Beijing was building hundreds of gigawatts of new coal-fired generation, often commissioning plants over months rather than decades. Coal remains the backbone of China’s grid, supplying the dependable electricity that powers steel, cement, manufacturing, and the data centers behind its AI ambitions.

China understands something many Western policymakers ignored: Industrial dominance requires energy abundance. You cannot run an advanced economy, let alone a military or manufacturing base, on intermittent power and political agendas. Beijing’s aggressive coal buildout is not a contradiction of its climate rhetoric — it is an admission of reality.

Nuclear is America’s strategic answer. Advanced reactors, fueled by recycled material and surplus plutonium, can operate continuously, independent of weather and without reliance on foreign enrichment services. Some estimates suggest that reprocessing nuclear material could unlock energy equivalent to several times the reserves of major oil-producing nations. It is a competitive advantage hiding in plain sight.

This is about recognizing what actually keeps hospitals operating, factories producing, and data centers online. Nuclear, natural gas, and coal are indispensable tools for a country that intends to lead technologically and economically rather than outsource its energy security to adversaries and fragile supply chains.

The contrast with weather-dependent power could not be clearer. Wind and solar require vast land use, massive transmission buildout, and constant backup, yet still fail when demand is highest. Batteries offer minutes or hours at best, not days or weeks. Nuclear delivers power when it is needed most — during heat waves, cold snaps, and grid emergencies, without apology or excuse.

America’s nuclear comeback is not being driven by mandates, subsidies, or elitist rhetoric. It is being driven by reality. If the U.S. wants to out-innovate China, reshore industry, and maintain economic and geopolitical leadership, it must build energy systems grounded in physics, not politics. By unleashing private-sector nuclear development, expanding coal and natural gas generation, and rejecting the illusion that weather can replace reliable power, America has the opportunity to turn decades of energy mismanagement into a multi-generational advantage.

Originally Published in The Hill

High Carbon Lifestyle Podcast | April 10, 2026

It’s Friday afternoon in Texas — no time change, no daylight saving (which, as Jason correctly notes, is German energy policy we imported in the 1900s and should have left there) — and Trisha Curtis, Chief Economist of the American Energy Institute and CEO of PetroNerds, joins Jason for a conversation that covers more ground in 50 minutes than most cable networks manage in a week.

Here’s what you need to know.

The Courts Are Being Captured. AEI Has the Receipts.

The Federal Judicial Center released a 2,000+ page judicial training manual on New Year’s Eve 2025. Buried in it: the National Academies — a government-funded institution founded under Abraham Lincoln in 1863 to provide independent scientific guidance — helped write training materials for judges who are actively hearing climate litigation cases against energy companies.

The problem? Attorneys from law firms that are suing those very energy companies were also involved in writing the manual.

AEI just published a full report breaking this down at americanenergyinstitute.com. The National Academies’ leadership is pulling in over seven figures in compensation. Seventy-four percent of their 2024 funding came from taxpayers. The rest came from dark money networks — the same ones Bernie Sanders says need to be shut down. The political donation history of this leadership is exactly what you’d expect.

This isn’t a minor footnote. It’s the corruption of federal jurisprudence in energy cases.

Gunshots and Data Centers: The Opposition Isn’t Organic

An Indianapolis city councilman voted to approve a data center. This week, 13 rounds were fired through his front door. A note under the doormat read: no data centers.

This came days after Indivisible — an organization that received over $7 million in foreign funding — posted targeted social media calling him out by name.

AEI has also published a report on foreign funding flowing into data center opposition, tracing money through UK and Swiss intermediaries, Arabella Networks (which has reported CCP connections), and other dark money channels. The goal is to stop American AI infrastructure, plain and simple. China doesn’t want us to win on energy. They definitely don’t want us to win on AI.

Meanwhile, AI is quietly doing remarkable things. Farmers are already using camera-equipped equipment to identify weeds vs. crops in real time — reducing herbicide use by 60%. The same technology is reshaping logistics and transportation. That’s what’s at stake when foreign money tries to kill data centers.

The Strait of Hormuz: What the Stock Market Isn’t Telling You

Trisha Curtis doesn’t mince words about financial media coverage of oil markets: “The people on TV have no idea. They can’t even say the metrics it’s in. So they just don’t talk about gas.”

So here’s what’s actually happening.

WTI is sitting at roughly $95/barrel. On Tuesday, a tentative ceasefire between Iran and Israel was announced, and crude sold off $20 a barrel. Markets treat a ceasefire as a solved problem. It isn’t.

The Strait of Hormuz has never actually been closed in history — until now, in a meaningful functional sense. Flows are down roughly 8–10 million barrels per day. Iran is extorting $2 million per vessel in cryptocurrency to provide a “safe” shipping route — which may or may not reflect actual mining of those waters. Japan, India, and much of Asia have been effectively cut off.

The Saudi East-West pipeline (the Yanbu pipeline, which runs underground — because they live in the Middle East and planned accordingly) is running at full capacity, around 7 million barrels per day. A drone strike knocked 700,000 barrels offline for a period. When that number gets reported on Bloomberg, they say “700,000 barrels” without mentioning the context: that’s out of 7 million moving through the same pipe. Context matters.

China is still receiving Iranian crude — roughly 2 million barrels per day, carried by vessels that are the only ones transiting freely. Iraq has made a deal to truck some crude out. The UAE pipeline south of the Strait is exporting what it can.

The SPR exchange is adding roughly a million barrels per day to global markets temporarily — helpful, but not transformational. This is a logistical crisis, not a supply crisis for the US. For everyone else, it is very much a supply crisis.

India, Fertilizer, and the Sri Lanka Warning

India signed long-term LNG contracts with Qatar. Those supplies are now disrupted. The result: LPG for cooking fuel is scarce. Delivery drivers can’t fuel their bikes. Farmers can’t access fertilizer during planting season. The knock-on effects are already showing up in Egypt, in developing economies across Asia and Africa, in food prices globally.

This is the fertilizer domino that Jason has been warning about for years.

The cautionary tale is Sri Lanka — a country that was outpacing its neighbors economically, exporting tea and rice, until it elected the world’s first self-declared net-zero candidate. He immediately banned nitrogen fertilizer. Within one growing season, crop production fell 40%, food prices rose 80%, and nine in ten Sri Lankans were facing daily hunger. One policy. One election. One catastrophe.

The EU made a version of the same mistake when Russian gas supplies collapsed — fertilizer plants went offline across the continent, and food prices in Europe rose 50%. The headlines called it a “climate crisis.” It was a policy crisis.

The lesson: the world runs on natural gas. When you can’t get it, people don’t eat.

Europe Is Living the Consequences

Spain’s grid collapsed shortly after the country celebrated running on 100% solar. Russian LNG tankers are now being escorted by Russian military vessels through the English Channel. The UK imports Norwegian energy from the same North Sea it could be drilling in itself. Every European nation that spent decades dismantling domestic hydrocarbon production is now maximally exposed to a conflict they also refuse to help resolve militarily.

As Trisha put it: “You have chosen for decades not to produce it, and to pretend you’re not consuming it.”

The wake-up call is real. The question is whether Europe will actually change — or just double down on coal and nuclear while continuing to pretend they’re on a path to net zero.

California: A Cautionary Tale at Home

California was once the third-largest oil-producing state in the country and had 40 refineries. Today it has fewer than 10, trending toward six. The attorney general is suing the Trump administration over the Sable pipeline. Senator Hirono in Hawaii is blaming the administration for gas prices — while having spent her career supporting the Green New Deal.

Hawaii ranks dead last (50th) on ALEC’s new Energy Affordability Index. It runs primarily on diesel generation. The US has sub-$3/MCF natural gas sitting in the ground. An LNG pipeline to Hawaii is not a luxury — it’s a national security imperative, especially given Hawaii’s military significance in any Pacific conflict with China.

California’s Petroleum Administration Defense District 5 — a designation from World War II — once processed over 3 million barrels per day of refined product. It’s lost more than a million barrels per day of capacity since 2010. The state imports from Iraq (likely Iranian crude). It blocked Bakken crude by rail. It doesn’t build pipelines. And it has the highest gasoline prices in the country.

Look at what happened in Guyana. A poor country discovers offshore oil. Companies invest. Within a few years, grocery stores that once struggled to stock basics are flush with options. That transformation is available to California. Its politicians just won’t allow it.

Texas Grid: We Should Be #1. We’re #10.

North Dakota is #1 on ALEC’s Energy Affordability Index. Louisiana is #2. Texas is 10th.

As Jason said: “That just hurts as a Texan.”

Over the last five years, Texas added 53 gigawatts of wind, solar, and battery capacity and only 3 gigawatts of natural gas. Ratepayers have absorbed over $50 billion in costs. Electricity prices have risen 28%. Utilities love expensive infrastructure — they pass the cost to ratepayers and earn a return on the asset. The market currently rewards building expensive things in remote locations and moving the electricity via high-voltage transmission lines that ratepayers also fund.

The fix isn’t complicated: if generators had to pay for their own transmission costs, no one would build wind farms in the middle of nowhere. They’d build natural gas generation near demand centers. The Department of Energy has said privately that if cost-benefit analysis were applied to every generation dollar being invested right now, every dollar would flow toward natural gas.

Governor Abbott was at a new Entergy natural gas facility this week. That’s a step in the right direction. We need many more.

The US LNG Opportunity Is Right Now

The US produced 136 BCF/day of natural gas as of December 2025. With oil at $95, associated gas production remains high — prices in the Permian have even gone negative at times because there’s so much of it. That gas needs to get into the system and onto the water.

India needs it. Japan needs it. Europe needs it. Every country that signed long-term contracts with Qatar and is now watching those supplies evaporate is looking at the United States — because we have rule of law, reliable contracts, and the molecules.

Building gas turbines, expanding LNG export capacity, and sustaining prices around $4/MCF for domestic consumers while supplying the world isn’t just good economics. It’s the single most impactful thing America can do right now for global stability.

The Bottom Line

This ceasefire is tentative. Iran’s IRGC factions are making independent decisions. No one knows if the new Supreme Leader is even alive. Pakistan is hosting talks; France is hosting separate negotiations. The Artemis crew is due to splash down this weekend.

Markets have been driven by emotion and panic. The underlying fundamentals for US energy — supply, infrastructure, exports — are strong. The problems are political: courts being corrupted by activist science, foreign money attacking American infrastructure, and state governments choosing ideology over energy security.

The American Energy Institute is fighting all of it. And on Fridays at 4pm Texas time, Jason and Trisha are going to tell you exactly what’s happening and why it matters.

Keep living the High Carbon Lifestyle.

Jason Isaac is CEO of the American Energy Institute. Follow him at @ISAACforEnergy. Trisha Curtis is CEO of PetroNerds and American Energy’s Chief Economist. Find her podcast at petronerds.com. Reports mentioned in this episode are available at americanenergyinstitute.com.