The Carbon Mirage:

When the DOE Broke Ranks and the Climate Script Cracked

The Carbon Mirage: When the DOE Broke Ranks and the Climate Script Cracked

By Jim Reynolds – Climate Realist
Join in the fun at www.reynolds.com

Part I – The Breach

For decades, the rules were simple:

• The science was settled.

• The skeptics were deniers.

• The only question was how quickly we should kneel.

Then, in July 2025, something inconvenient happened: the U.S. Department of Energy—yes, the actual federal agency, not a Substack, not a contrarian YouTube channel—released a report that calmly, surgically dismantled the panic narrative.

No screaming. No slogans. Just math. Just data.

And in that calm, a rupture.

“No detectable increase in extreme weather.”
“Minimal economic harm from warming.”
“U.S. mitigation efforts have no measurable impact on global climate.”

That’s not a blog post. That’s page one of a government report.
From the people who’ve been propping up this narrative for decades.

And the Climate Realists—you know, the ones who’ve been ridiculed for not hyperventilating—finally got a nod. Not from talk radio. From the Department of Energy.

Bob, wiping his glasses:

“You mean we could’ve skipped the economic self-harm, kept our trucks, and told the Weather Woke to pound solar sand?”

Exactly, Bob.

Meanwhile, the Climate Alarm Choir lost its mind.
Michael Mann called the report “science denial in the extreme.”
Which is a curious phrase for someone whose hockey stick snapped years ago.

Part II – The Opportunity Cost of Obedience

While the Carbon Cult waved doomsday placards and warned of planetary fireballs, America spent trillions chasing the climate mirage. And what did we buy?

• A half-billion-dollar bonfire called Solyndra, whose CEO was—what luck—a major Obama donor.

• The Inflation Reduction Act, a $400 billion Trojan horse for every green boondoggle from EV tax credit scams to wind farm subsidies built by child labor abroad.

• University research centers that produced climate papers indistinguishable from press releases—each concluding, shockingly: “We need more funding.”

• A generation of bureaucrats and “nonprofits” riding the carbon offset carousel while real infrastructure crumbled and energy prices soared.

Milton Friedman once said:

“The real cost of government is what we forego when resources are misallocated.”

So what did we forego?

• Modernized power grids

• Safer roads and bridges

• More air traffic controllers

• Breakthroughs in nuclear energy or real medical research

• Even just… truth

All sacrificed at the altar of atmospheric virtue-signaling.

And now, when the DOE quietly admits it didn’t amount to anything measurable, the Climate Clingers clutch their pearls and scream “Denial!”

Bob, looking over the receipts:

“You mean we could’ve cured something—or paved a damn road—but instead we paid activists to print scarier graphs?”

Yes, Bob. That’s the scam.

Part III – The Failed Forecast Parade

(With Steyn’s shadow smirking quietly from the wings)

They told us the science was settled.
What they didn’t settle was the score—because they keep losing.

🔹 2006 – Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth
Prediction: “The Arctic will be ice-free by 2013.”
Reality: Arctic sea ice expanded in 2013. Still there. Still cold.
Label: Tundra Truthers
Bob: “Don’t worry—Gore’s ice-free forecast is only off by… the Arctic.”

🔹 2008 – James Hansen: West Side Highway underwater in 20 years
Reality: You can still catch a cab in Manhattan—unless they banned it for not being electric.
Label: Hudson Hysterics
Steyn: “Ah yes, Manhattan, that famously submerged ruin where Whole Foods still delivers.”

🔹 2000 – “Children won’t know what snow is”
Reality: Major snowstorms in 2010, 2013, 2018, 2021...
Label: Flake Fumblers
Bob: “Quick—get that snow to a museum before the Climate Priests confiscate it.”

🔹 2007 – UN IPCC: 5.8°C rise by 2100
Reality: NOAA and NASA have quietly walked back warming estimates for years.
Label: Thermometer Thespians
Steyn: “They adjust the models so often, even the models need therapy.”
Bob: “The model giggles every time you tweak one of its variables.”

🔹 1989 – UN: “Entire nations will be wiped out by 2000”
Reality: No nations wiped. Maldives are building new airports.
Label: Atoll Alarmists

🔹 2019 – AOC: “The world will end in 12 years”
Reality: That gives us until 2031. No fireballs. Just inflation, censorship, and Teslas—when you aren’t firebombing them.
Label: Countdown Clowns
Bob: “Twelve years, huh? That’s barely enough time to ban gas stoves and build 800 offshore wind turbines that don’t work.”
Steyn: “She missed the fine print: it’s not the planet ending—it’s rational thought.”

Part IV – The Name Game

By now, you’ve met them all:

• The Countdown Clowns

• The Thermometer Thespians

• The Hudson Hysterics

• The Tundra Truthers

• The Greenhouse Grifters

• The Carbon Cultists

• The CO₂ Charlatans

• The Flake Fumblers

• The Weather Woke

• The Climate Scammers

• The Apocalypse Acolytes

Call them what you will.
The one thing they’re not… is right.

And yet they continue—failing upward, forecasting disaster, demanding tribute.

Meanwhile, the rest of us—the Climate Realists—are just trying to keep the lights on, the beef warm, and the gas tank full without joining a doomsday subscription plan.

Bob:

“It’s not that they were wrong. It’s that they were pompously, performatively, hilariously wrong. And we let them run the place.”

Part V – The Wall of Shame: Follow the Grift

And if you followed the money instead of the models, you met these too:

• The Grant Grifters – writing research papers for whoever signs the check

• The Friedman Deniers – allergic to markets, blind to opportunity cost

• The Subsidy Suckers – feeding endlessly at the taxpayer trough

• The Carbon Kleptocrats – laundering fear into foundation wealth

• The Inflation Reduction Racketeers – turning climate panic into campaign cash (and creating 9% inflation in the process)

• The Opportunistic Parasites – attaching themselves to every new green hysteria

Bob, scanning their donor reports:

“Turns out it wasn’t about saving the planet—it was about saving their funding.”

🧨 Final Word

So here we are.

Decades of fear, trillions of dollars, and enough failed predictions to bury a weather satellite—only to be told by the U.S. Department of Energy that none of it added up.

• The storms didn’t surge.

• The oceans didn’t swallow.

• The planet greened.

• And the grift went on.

They weren’t prophets.
They were Climate Scammers in lab coats and campaign buttons.
They didn’t save the Earth.
They monetized the fake apocalypse.

And we—the Climate Realists—stood here the whole time, accused of heresy for having the gall to notice the math didn’t match the mouth.

So now the only real question left is this:
What are we going to do about it?

Because the planet was never the crisis.
The racket was.