A Primer on CO2 and Energy

Humans are not destroying Earth or the climate. The widespread belief in anthropogenic warming is the result of political idealism, bad science, faulty data, social psychology, and greed. Even though things are starting to go the right direction, the movement toward “net zero” still has a lot of momentum. Entire countries are deindustrializing for the wrong reasons, and the “green energy transition” is a suicide mission that benefits promoters but hurts poor people and the environment hardest.

Businesses can fix this. Business people can stand up and make their voices heard. Executives can tell the world something their employees, customers, and investors need to hear …

Energy is not a toy. It is not a means to a political end. The best energy is affordable, reliable, and scalable. Intermittent renewable sources are unreliable, and hydro is not scalable. Renewables have no place in any electric grid. There is no rush, and there is no need to electrify. Hydrogen should play no role in energy or transportation. Batteries have no place in grid-scale electricity. Markets will continue to allocate resources most effectively, without government incentives and interference. 

CO2 is not a pollutant. It is not causing warming. More CO2 would be better. We have at least 200 years’ worth of oil, gas, and coal in the ground, probably several times that. We need more energy, and we have enough time to transition slowly to various nuclear technologies. We should focus on real solutions, reduce real pollution, and make energy affordable for all.

This primer is in seven parts: 

  1. About

  2. Climate

  3. Energy

  4. Belief systems

  5. Bad ideas

  6. Solutions

  7. Work with me

1. About me

My name is David Siegel. I wrote my first book on climate change in 1991. Since the mid-1980s, I have over 7,000 hours of study in climate science and energy issues. I’m a member of the CO2 Coalition. I teach a weekly online class on climate science. I want to help people make better decisions. I want to help companies, NGOs, and governments educate their people and the public about the true relationship between climate and energy.

3. Energy

CO2, energy, and climate have become linked through a purposeful effort that started in the 1950s with the Rockefellers. Their goal was to create an environmental movement that demonized oil and gas, because they knew everyone would need oil and gas, but they also knew how much of it there was. The theory was that turning public opinion against oil and gas would help prevent new companies entering the markets, and they could then control the amount produced and keep prices high. This was similar to the way OPEC tried to control production and DeBeers tried to maintain the price of diamonds, which are plentiful. 

It worked. The more you dig into the environmental movement, the more you see Rockefeller money. The Rockefellers have supported most environmental influencers, from Rachel Carson to the World Economic Forum to the Sierra Club to the World Wildlife Fund. The Rockefellers paid millions to universities to set up environmental programs and endow climate professorships. As recently as 2023, Rockefeller Foundation committed $1 billion to the “green energy transition.” Many billionaires have followed this signal, contributing hundreds of billions of dollars to “net zero” objectives, think tanks, and universities. At this point, the amount of agreement on climate change is exactly proportional to the amount of money being spent on it.

In the 1960s and 70s, it was fashionable to construct arguments that CO2 was causing climate change. Even Exxon’s researchers were fooled by papers using radiative models based on tank experiments with CO2. Then Al Gore, Tim Wirth, and James Hansen announced to the world that CO2 was going to cook the planet. David Fenton’s PR firm got involved, and the money started flowing in. 

This explains why on two of Gore’s book covers, the hurricanes are spinning the wrong way. Because it doesn’t matter. What matters is scaring people and getting them to believe that giving money to environmental groups and governments (and him) is the only solution.

The money has gone to support various projects: wind energy, solar energy, decarbonization, grids and connectors, batteries, and “smart” infrastructure, not to mention activist groups, marketing agencies, fundraising consultants, and PR firms. So far, about $9 trillion dollars have been spent on the “energy transition.” 

All of this is based on the assumption that wind and solar plus batteries can replace dispatchable fossil-fuel-driven power plants and nuclear energy. After spending roughly $9 trillion of mostly taxpayer dollars, the US went from getting 76.8% of our energy from fossil fuels in 2000 all the way down to 76.5% in 2023. That’s because wind turbines generate about 25 percent of their stated capacity factor, and solar panels generate about 10 percent. They rely on back-up power 100 percent when they can’t produce energy. Worse, they all provide energy to the grid at the same time in a given region - when electricity is cheapest, and people who rely on that power must buy it back later when electricity is more expensive. This leads to the rule that the more intermittent power a grid carries, the more expensive its energy is. 

Most wind farms so far have lasted 20 years and haven’t had a positive return on investment. Many are shutting down because they are too expensive to operate. More and more license auctions are going without bidders. As soon as you remove the subsidies and price guarantees from wind energy, no investors want to invest. Every single wind farm or solar array must be paired with a fossil-fuel plant to take over when necessary, and those plants do not operate efficiently under stop-and-go conditions. The more renewable energy sources you add to the grid, the more you get of that thing you don’t want in the first place: CO2 emissions.

The price of Net Zero is astonishingly high, and the benefits are negative (blackouts, grid failure, energy poverty, minerals required, etc). The only people who profit from this movement are the rent seekers who want to get some of the cash being thrown overboard in bulk.

There are no commercial batteries that can power even a small town for a whole day. The largest batteries can supply minutes of power to the grid at scale, not even hours. Plus, to charge those batteries, you must dedicate even more land area to renewables. This has caused tremendous tension between Denmark — the world’s leading producer of wind energy — and Norway, which provides consistent back-up power. Denmark has one of the most expensive, unscalable energy systems in the world.

It also doesn’t make sense to electrify everything, especially for political purposes. Trains can easily be electrified, but trucks can’t. Most industrial processes need much more heat than electricity can provide. Heating should be done with natural gas, and air conditioning should be done with electricity. Jets and boats should use whatever combination of fuel and technology is most effective at scale. We have a fantastic fossil-fuel delivery infrastructure. Electrical grids operate optimally when the load can be planned ahead of time.

4. Belief Systems

In the Seventies, it became fashionable to be concerned about the environment. Many books and promoters were funded by the Rockefellers and their beneficiaries. Soon, environmentalism became mainstream, and the cause was more important than the data. Rather than doing science, many groups looked for charismatic leaders who could raise funds. There were many predictions about climate and billions of dollars were spent on models, yet none of those predictions came true, and the models have been predicting higher-than-observed temperatures from the beginning. 

Now, it’s no longer about science. It’s about identity. Researchers have shown that people are easily influenced by their political beliefs when looking at data

People have been conditioned by weaponized language like “climate denier” and “We own the science.” Textbooks explain climate change in simplistic terms that is not based on the peer-reviewed literature. Teachers don’t know anything. Government agencies, foundations, and the press use storytelling and fearful language to create a “crisis” that’s been going on (not happening) for 40 years now. They present pseudoscience and trust that people are not critical thinkers, because it’s the narrative, not the details, that count. Why? Because it makes money. All you need to do is show pictures of fires, floods, and hurricanes, and people believe these natural disasters are now caused by evil oil companies. The trick is repetition and visual imagery. An existential crisis that you can point to on the ground right now is taylor-made for media companies to turn eyeballs into cash.

At school, children are not allowed to ask questions. Almost no one, including professional “climate scientists,” knows much of anything about the climate. The Chinese government pays hundreds of “researchers” to contribute to the IPCC reports, so they can maintain a strong voice in the UN, while they have no intention of decarbonizing and are building two new coal-based power plants every week. 

Stanford, Yale, Columbia, MIT, and many other universities are all-in on the climate disaster. They rely on huge donations from billionaires and government grants that have been coming in for decades. On almost any campus in the US, in any climate-PhD factory, it is not okay to ask these questions.

The issue has become politicized. Notice that the big promoters of the climate scare are all liberals. There are no conservative billionaires or oil companies funneling money to people like me who stand up for the scientific method. When Bill Gates writes a book on climate, everyone believes he knows what he’s talking about. We hear scary stories of climate on the news daily. We hear “A recent paper in the journal Nature predicts that in 2050, half of the earth will be uninhabitable and there will be six billion climate refugees.” yet after 50 years of scary environmental predictions, including alar, ozone holes, plastics, and much more, not one of them has come true.

It really isn’t about climate at all. It’s about money. Al Gore and his friends created an industry. Now, many groups want to get their hands on a piece of the $2 trillion dollar pie going into climate projects each year. There are even climate architecture and climate law firms now. Disasters and “crises” are great fundraising tools. John Stossel calls this crisis activism — many people are happy to champion the crisis that pays the most money. When you see hundreds of private jets parked in a petro-state airport for a big climate conference, you understand that everything is going to plan. 

Even though the peer-reviewed literature shows no climate crisis, even though there isn’t a single paper showing that CO2 is driving temperature, even though Germany and Denmark’s virtue signaling has been near suicidal for their economies, even though the models are always wrong, we are long past talking about facts and science. We are heading off a very real economic cliff that hurts everyone, especially poor people, especially the environment.

Now is the time to fix this. We need to work on messaging. We can do it better together than individually. 

5. Bad ideas

Not a single pilot project anywhere in the world shows any group of people living completely off solar, wind, and electricity storage. Several have tried and failed. We cannot spend trillions of dollars decarbonizing and get nothing for it. The rent seekers must find another way to make a living. More things that are a complete waste of money: 

  • Trying to remove CO2 from the atmosphere

  • Cloud seeding to block the sun

  • Trying to protect glaciers

  • Funding billions of dollars worth of bad research

  • Climate conferences

  • Climate accounting

  • Climate law and lawsuits

  • Climate regulations

  • Carbon credits

  • Mining more lithium, copper, and rare-earths

  • Putting a price on carbon

  • Developing grid-scale energy storage

  • Electrifying energy

  • Electric trucks

  • Electric vehicles

  • Intermittent-adapting the grid

  • Heat pumps in cold places

  • Anything to do with hydrogen

  • Relying on neighbors for power when you have none

  • Any wind power connected to the grid

  • Any solar power connected to the grid

7. Work with me

I’m a member of the CO2 Coalition — a group of critical-thinking scientists and communicators who want to accomplish all these things. We have done the scientific work. We don’t all completely agree on exactly how Earth’s complex climate system works, but we do agree on one thing: more CO2 is better, and less land area dedicated to solar and wind is better for the grid, for society, and for the environment. 

I want to help corporations be part of the solution. I want to help you educate and communicate with your stakeholders. I run classes, workshops, create events, and work on documents. I’m looking for funding for my debate. We can put together a new alliance of corporate officers who will go against the ESG machine and demand that companies go back to what they are designed to do: create and deliver excellent products and services. This is the best possible thing for poor people, society, and the future. Let’s stop shooting ourselves in the foot and start working together to make a better world for all. 

See my programs page for details. There’s a lot of material here on this website. Contact me. Tell me what you need to do to improve your business and what’s in your way.