The Reckoning Ahead: Transforming Our Energy System to Address Some Existential Threat from Climate Change Just Won't Fly Today

Roger Caiazza

Guest Post by Roger Caiazza of Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York.

Worldwide support for the net-zero energy transition is falling apart as the existential threat justification falls apart and the reality of the harms to affordability, reliability, and the environment become apparent. The question now is not if but when New York’s Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act) will be paused to account for reality.

Impetus

I was prompted to write this article by Judith Curry’s announcement that her blog Climate Etc. is being euthanized. She described the reasons that she will no longer support her blog:

• Major progress has been made in the climate debate and the political climate has changed

• My interests have evolved in other directions

• The logistics and cost of keeping the blog running are substantial.

Her summary of the state of the climate debate prompted me to write about the situation in New York. First, I want to acknowledge the impact her blog had on this one. I have great respect for Dr. Curry, and her writings influenced me greatly.

I also strongly admire her courage because she took the politically inconvenient position that the existential threat of climate change argument was not supportable and paid for it personally and professionally. In addition, she published some of my guest posts and put my blog on the map so to speak when she added it to her blog roll. For many years most of my visitors came from that list. It also led to some collaboration related to the New York State Reliability Council’s Extreme Weather Working Group. I am in her debt.

State of the Climate Debate

Dr. Curry was a member of the “Climate Working Group” with John Christy, Steve Koonin, Ross McKitrick, and Roy Spencer that prepared a draft report for U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright on the topic of climate change impacts on the United States.

The draft “Critical Review” remains publicly available and on DOE’s books, but the Climate Working Group that wrote it has been dissolved and a federal court has ruled that DOE violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) in the way it set up and used the group. Earlier this year McKitrick cleared up some misconceptions about the report.

In my opinion, critics of the report ignore the fact that this process was more transparent and open than the process used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to produce its reports that are considered the “proof” that action on climate change is needed. Therefore, I believe that the criticisms of the process are overblown and the Executive Summary arguments are valid:

• CO₂ has substantial fertilization and “global greening” benefits and that these are underplayed in IPCC assessments.

• CMIP-class climate models overstate historical and projected warming, especially in the troposphere, and therefore exaggerate risks.

• Long‑term trends in most U.S. extreme weather metrics (hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts, wildfires) are weak or absent in the historical record, and U.S. sea‑level rise shows little acceleration once local subsidence is accounted for.

• Economically, plausible climate sensitivities imply relatively modest damages, uncertain and potentially low social cost of carbon, and U.S. mitigation policies with “undetectably small” direct effects on global climate.

Dr. Curry noted that the DOE report has influenced the climate debate by changing the arguments for the need to transition away from fossil fuels. Another key argument in the debate is the widespread acknowledgement that the emissions scenario used to produce the most extreme impacts is an implausible emissions scenario.

Over the past few years, climate scientists and assessment bodies have moved away from treating RCP8.5 as a realistic baseline or “business‑as‑usual” trajectory and now generally regard it as an implausible, low‑likelihood pathway whose coal‑heavy emissions profile no longer matches observed and projected energy trends.

In updated scenario sets and popular explanations, RCP8.5 (and its successor SSP5‑8.5) is explicitly excluded from the range of plausible futures, yet retained as a worst‑case or “high‑end risk” scenario because its strong forcing signal is valuable for probing upper‑bound climate responses, local impacts, and model behavior.

I have long been a critic of this practice in New York regulatory proceedings, especially as it relates to Part 490 Sea-Level Rise. It remains to be seen whether New York will modify its analyses to exclude this emission scenario.

State of the Transition Debate

Despite the massive investments the wind, solar, and energy storage approach advocated in the Climate Act is failing globally. “A sea-change is occurring in energy policy as realism overtakes magical thinking” but Robert Bradley notes that folks who rely on social media for their information still rely on magical thinking for energy policy. The reality is that no amount of clean energy media messaging can avoid the fact that wind and solar require so much backup support that they will never be affordable.

This has been acknowledged in at least one state. In April 2026, North Carolina regulators ordered Duke Energy to pause its next round of solar projects while finalizing a broader energy plan. North Carolina’s carbon‑plan results show that even with strong climate goals, a real‑world grid ends up needing more firm capacity—gas and nuclear—alongside renewables and storage to keep the lights on and bills tolerable.

Because New York faces harsher winters, more aggressive statutory mandates, and similar emerging reliability concerns in NYISO and State Energy Plan modeling, it is very hard to see how New York avoids eventually making the same kind of course correction.

In North Carolina, once planners incorporated actual load growth, winter risk, project lead times, and customer‑bill impacts, the Commission’s “carbon plan” backed away from a renewables‑only path and embraced new gas builds and extended nuclear as the least‑cost, reliability‑constrained solution, while loosening the 2030 interim emissions requirement.

New York’s own studies already tell a parallel story: NYISO’s winter assessments flag growing fuel‑security risk and winter adequacy concerns; the State Energy Plan acknowledge a need for roughly 20–25 GW of “clean‑firm” capacity by 2040, equivalent to most of today’s fossil fleet. I have shown that wind and solar can be almost absent during peak winter demand, making dispatchable emission-free resources(DEFRs) non‑negotiable.

On the Other Hand

Unfortunately, there is so much invested in the clean energy transition that stamping out the nonsense is a big problem. Climate‑ and environment‑focused nonprofits now constitute a large professionalized industry, and climate change activism sits at the center of that funding stream.

In the United States alone, environmental organizations collectively report more than 30 billion dollars in annual revenue and tens of billions more in assets, with climate advocacy a dominant theme in their campaigns, communications, and grant proposals.

A relatively small number of large national and international NGOs capture a disproportionate share of this money, reporting annual revenues in the hundreds of millions and in some cases over a billion dollars, much of it from major foundations and high‑net‑worth donors explicitly interested in climate policy and energy transition.

By contrast, the thousands of small grassroots climate groups that are often highlighted in media coverage operate on comparatively modest budgets, together accounting for only a small fraction of the sector’s total income even though they make up the vast majority of organizations by number.

John Robson’s weekly Climate Discussion Nexus newsletter regularly documents the “Green Money Machine”. He describes the revenues of the smaller non-governmental organizations dedicated to the proposition that they can save the planet if only people would donate more for their work.

In addition, there are many people who’s careers depend on climate change being an issue. Consider all the universities that have climate change related programs. Anthony Watts describes former EPA regulatory staff who want to the climate movement to continue.

According to a June 23 New York Times report, “Former NOAA Employees Revive Climate Site Shut by Trump Administration,” a small group of former NOAA employees has recreated much of the former Climate.gov website under a new domain, Climate.us, after the original site was effectively retired during the Trump administration. The project reportedly involved former NOAA staff, approximately $280,000 in crowdsourced funding, and the painstaking recataloging of more than a thousand reports, datasets, articles, and educational resources.”

I have no doubts that the same actors will advocate that New York continue the Climate Act as long as possible.

Conclusion

The rationale to transform the energy system because there is an existential threat due to climate change caused by GHG emissions is no longer justifiable.

Once policymakers can no longer ignore the electric system constraints—especially as retirements and electrification continue—New York will face the same fundamental choice North Carolina just confronted: either relax or reinterpret interim targets and incorporate substantial firm capacity (through gas, nuclear, or other DEFRs), or accept growing reliability risk and politically unsustainable rate and outage impacts.

The only question that remains is when this reckoning will occur.

#NewYork #ClimateAct #Climate #Caiazza #EnergyTransition #Emissions #Reliability #Reckoning

Roger Caiazza, a retired air‑pollution meteorologist, blogs on New York energy and environmental issues at Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York. This post represents his opinion alone and not the opinion of his previous employers or any other company with which he has been associated. Roger has followed the Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act) since it was first proposed, submitted comments on the Climate Act implementation plan, and has written over 650 articles about New York’s net-zero debacle.

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