“It was like a bunch of gangsters coming into the neighborhood and smashing windows and threatening shop owners … a shock-and-awe thuggery approach.” – Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D, Rhode Island)
The recent New York Times article, “Trump Officials Accused of Bullying Tactics to Kill a Climate Measure” (Lisa Friedman et al.: November 6, 2025) somehow forgets that politics is messy and confrontational. It did not start with Trump, and climate politics has long been a contact sport for the Progressive Left.
“Nations were poised to approve the first fee on pollution from ships. That’s when the Trump administration began the threats,” the article begins. Trump’s intervention was “extraordinary, even by the standards of the Trump administration’s combativeness, according to nine diplomats on its receiving end.”
The global climate taxers were nonplussed.…
“Bill Gates has been rightly slammed for his anti-scientific memo calling for shifting our focus away from ‘near-term’ emissions cuts. Tragically, that shift could cause the very doomsday scenario he dismisses.” (Joe Romm, below)
Doomism is alive and well at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media, despite Michael Mann’s advice to the contrary. It exists in the person of Joe Romm, Mann’s colleague. Maybe the two need to meet to figure out how to alarm but not be alarming….
“Gates is wrong,” Joe Romm reports. “Global warming could well ‘decimate civilization’, but his ‘strategic pivot’ would make catastrophic warming far more likely.” Doomster Romm continues:
…Bill Gates has been rightly slammed for his anti-scientific memo calling for shifting our focus away from “near-term” emissions cuts.
“The siren song of inexpensive nuclear power continues into its seventh decade. Taxpayer and ratepayers beware.”
Commercial nuclear power has turned into the welfare energy de jure. It is politically correct despite many decades of failure to compete against other forms of thermal energy. Uranium might be the ultimate energy density-wise, but nuclear fission (and more so nuclear fusion) is the most complicated, expensive, fraught way to boil water.
Commercial nuclear power was government-created in the 1950s and remains government dependent today. (Stay tuned: my primer on the history of this energy source is forthcoming. [1]). Regarding the present, consider this example from Jamie Smyth, editor of US Energy, who wrote:
…Nuclear technology company Oklo has no revenues, no licence to operate reactors and no binding contracts to supply power.