Environment and Climate News Podcast

We get so many great questions in each episode of The Climate Realism Show that we decided to dedicate a whole episode to it. Well, all of it but our coverage of the Crazy Climate News of the Week, of course. UN Secretary-General António Guterres is calling (again) for the censorship of climate realists, another giant ship has been set ablaze and adrift by EVs, our atmosphere is getting “thirstier” (and that’s bad, of course), and a Florida TV weatherman is lying about not being able to predict hurricanes because of federal budget cuts. In Episode #160 of The Heartland Institute’s The Climate Realism Show, Anthony Watts, Linnea Lueken, H. Sterling Burnett, and Jim Lakely are joined by newly minted meteorologist Chris Martz, who has been driving alarmists crazy on social media for years. Join us LIVE at 1 p.m. ET every Friday on YouTube, Rumble, and X. In The Tank broadcasts LIVE every Thursday at 12pm CT on on The Heartland Institute YouTube channel. Tune in to have your comments addressed live by the In The Tank Crew. Be sure to subscribe and never miss an episode. See you there! Climate Change Roundtable is LIVE every Friday at 12pm CT on The Heartland Institute YouTube channel. Have a topic you want addressed? Join the live show and leave a comment for our panelists and we'll cover it during the live show!

The Heartland Institute and Heartland UK/Europe have been in Poland and Hungary this week, meeting with leaders of the conservative movement and top politicians. Opposition to Net Zero in Europe is real—and growing. Just a few years ago, even right-leaning public figures were reluctant to publicly oppose the Big Green agenda, and hardly ever spoke of it even in private conversations. Today, climate realism has become a main plank of center-right politics and policy. Heartland Institute President James Taylor and Heartland UK/Europe Director Lois Perry join the show LIVE from Budapest to report on this shift—and take your questions—at 1 p.m. ET. In Episode #159 of The Heartland Institute’s The Climate Realism Show, Anthony Watts, Linnea Lueken, H. Sterling Burnett, and Jim Lakely cover the rise of climate realism in Europe and the Crazy Climate News of the Week. That includes: an alarmist imploring us not to “shatter the climate,” climate clergy livestreaming their climate depression marathon, whether cows dream of electric grills, and the validity of a stack of Biden climate executive orders signed by autopen. Be sure to join the chat—we’ll show your comments and answer your questions! In The Tank broadcasts LIVE every Thursday at 12pm CT on on The Heartland Institute YouTube channel. Tune in to have your comments addressed live by the In The Tank Crew. Be sure to subscribe and never miss an episode. See you there! Climate Change Roundtable is LIVE every Friday at 12pm CT on The Heartland Institute YouTube channel. Have a topic you want addressed? Join the live show and leave a comment for our panelists and we'll cover it during the live show!

Donald Trump achieved a major political and policy victory on Thursday when the U.S. House of Representatives passed what he calls his “Big Beautiful Bill.” The less-creative name is the budget reconciliation bill, which presidents for years have used to implement large parts of their agenda. (That’s how we got “Obamacare.”) The bill includes many of Trump’s economic policy promises, such as tax cuts, but also rolls back much of the “green” energy and climate policies the Biden administration imposed via the Inflation Reduction Act. Join Heartland’s Anthony Watts, Linnea Lueken, H. Sterling Burnett, Jim Lakely, and special guest Steve Milloy LIVE at 1 p.m. ET for Episode #58 of The Climate Realism Show. We’ll break down the good, the bad, and the disappointing in the Big Beautiful Bill. We’ll also cover the Crazy Climate News of the Week and answer your questions in the chat. In The Tank broadcasts LIVE every Thursday at 12pm CT on on The Heartland Institute YouTube channel. Tune in to have your comments addressed live by the In The Tank Crew. Be sure to subscribe and never miss an episode. See you there! Climate Change Roundtable is LIVE every Friday at 12pm CT on The Heartland Institute YouTube channel. Have a topic you want addressed? Join the live show and leave a comment for our panelists and we'll cover it during the live show!

A new study from the University of Alabama in Huntsville addresses the question of how much the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect is responsible for the higher temperatures at weather stations across the world. Dr. Roy Spencer and Dr. John Christy have spent several years developing a novel method that quantifies, for the first time, the average UHI warming effects related to population density. Their finding: no less than 65% of “runaway global warming” is not caused by our emissions of carbon dioxide, but by the urbanization of the world. Dr. Spencer will join us to go over his findings. We’ll also cover the Crazy Climate News of the Week, including an absurd new bit of unscientific propaganda from the U.S. Climate Reference Network at NOAA, wonder if the sun is setting on wide-scale solar energy, and discuss how alarmists refuse to see that we live in a climactic “golden age”—and more. Join Heartland’s Anthony Watts, Linnea Lueken, H. Sterling Burnett, Jim Lakely, and Dr. Roy Spencer LIVE at 1 p.m. ET for Episode #157 of The Climate Realism Show. We’ll be answering questions in the chat for us, and for Dr. Spencer, on the show. In The Tank broadcasts LIVE every Thursday at 12pm CT on on The Heartland Institute YouTube channel. Tune in to have your comments addressed live by the In The Tank Crew. Be sure to subscribe and never miss an episode. See you there! Climate Change Roundtable is LIVE every Friday at 12pm CT on The Heartland Institute YouTube channel. Have a topic you want addressed? Join the live show and leave a comment for our panelists and we'll cover it during the live show!

A new paper by Dr. Judith Curry, one of the world’s most prominent scientists skeptical of a looming human-caused climate catastrophe, and economist Harry DeAngelo cautions investors and the public that “the apocalyptic climate narrative is a seriously flawed guide for public policy.” Why? “Because it radically overstates the risks to humanity from continued global warming.” Wide-scale suppression of fossil fuel use will not measurably change future temperatures, but “a sharp decline in quality of life would surely ensue.” We are proud to welcome Dr. Curry back to the show to dig deeper into her paper. We will also cover the Crazy Climate News of the Week, including a “die-in” at NOAA, how the polar ice crisis narrative is melting, Bernie Sanders wanting to ban gasoline cars but still flying private jets, and why climate change is not causing kids to miss more school days.

In mid-April, Spain’s socialist government bragged that, for the first time, the nation was powered by 100 percent “renewable” energy—mostly solar and wind. One week later, Spain, Portugal, parts of France, and several other countries suffered the largest peacetime blackout in their histories. Net Zero came to Europe all right—as in zero energy. We were perhaps seconds away from nearly the entire continent going dark. Yet again, wind, solar, and other “renewables” proved they simply cannot generate the consistent power needed to keep a complex electricity grid stable. We’ve been warning about this for a while, and today we’ll break down exactly what happened. The Heartland Institute’s Sterling Burnett, Anthony Watts, Linnea Lueken, and Jim Lakely will also cover some “Crazy Climate News of the Week,” including the federal government scrapping the so-called “social cost of carbon,” NASA’s climate-alarmism office above the Seinfeld diner getting shut down, and a newly minted map of climate anxiety. In The Tank broadcasts LIVE every Thursday at 12pm CT on on The Heartland Institute YouTube channel. Tune in to have your comments addressed live by the In The Tank Crew. Be sure to subscribe and never miss an episode. See you there! Climate Change Roundtable is LIVE every Friday at 12pm CT on The Heartland Institute YouTube channel. Have a topic you want addressed? Join the live show and leave a comment for our panelists and we'll cover it during the live show!

In news that has climate alarmists in an even greater panic, the Trump administration is ending funding for the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the panel that produced the federal government’s National Climate Assessment every four years. Several officials in the office have reportedly been fired, and Trump’s NASA has canceled the contract with the firm that coordinates the production of the National Climate Assessment. Defenders of the program say the report has been a “comprehensive look at climate change,” but has that ever been true? The Heartland Institute’s Anthony Watts, Sterling Burnett, Linnea Lueken, and Jim Lakely will discuss this topic and also cover some of the Crazy Climate News of the Week. In The Tank broadcasts LIVE every Thursday at 12pm CT on on The Heartland Institute YouTube channel. Tune in to have your comments addressed live by the In The Tank Crew. Be sure to subscribe and never miss an episode. See you there! Climate Change Roundtable is LIVE every Friday at 12pm CT on The Heartland Institute YouTube channel. Have a topic you want addressed? Join the live show and leave a comment for our panelists and we'll cover it during the live show!

The Net Zero project in Great Britain, so the country does it’s part to stop climate change, has a true believer behind it in leftist Prime Minister Keir Starmer. But recent opinion polls show the public is starting to turn dramatically against it, especially when the economic costs become increasingly real. A London Times poll in November found that 92% of the British public viewed Labour’s specific Net Zero plans—particularly the 2030 clean power goal—as unrealistic. Despite a foolish drive to “deindustrialize” the UK, force residents to buy expensive heat pumps, and reducing agriculture, the government’s own Climate Change Committee frets that the efforts are woefully inadequate. Is the whole project in danger of collapsing due to the weight of its utter infeasibility? Or is that wishful thinking for the people of Britain and climate realists worldwide? The Heartland Institute’s Anthony Watts, Sterling Burnett, Linnea Lueken, Jim Lakely will discuss this topic and more with special guest Lois Perry, the director of Heartland UK/Europe. We will also cover some of the Crazy Climate News of the Week, including the closing of an EPA museum that no one knew existed, how clinical climate anxiety continues to rise, and how global warming is causing your dog to stress out. In The Tank broadcasts LIVE every Thursday at 12pm CT on on The Heartland Institute YouTube channel. Tune in to have your comments addressed live by the In The Tank Crew. Be sure to subscribe and never miss an episode. See you there! Climate Change Roundtable is LIVE every Friday at 12pm CT on The Heartland Institute YouTube channel. Have a topic you want addressed? Join the live show and leave a comment for our panelists and we'll cover it during the live show!

The scientific community and the media are focused almost exclusively by how greenhouse gas emissions affect the climate — from power plants to automobiles to your fireplace to your gas stove, and even cow farts. But what about that big ball of gas in the sky? Why does it get short shrift when it comes to the causes of climate change? The Heartland Institute’s Anthony Watts, Linnea Lueken, Jim Lakely will discuss this topic, asked for by many of the show’s fans, with one of the leading solar and climate experts in the world: Dr. Willie Soon. We will also cover some of the Crazy Climate News of the Week, including a global warming conference that got snowed in, how climate change is affecting your naps, a promise by the crazies in Just Stop Oil to cease all its childish “direct action” to save the planet, and a debunking of human-caused climate change causing cherry blossoms to bloom too early. SUPPORT THE SHOW! https://donate.heartland.org/campaign/599325/donate Join us LIVE at 1 p.m. ET for every episode of The Climate Realism show and we will answer your questions in the chat. WILLIE SOON'S presentation as a PDF: https://heartland.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Willie-Soon-March28-2025-slides-for-Heartland-podcast.pdf In The Tank broadcasts LIVE every Thursday at 12pm CT on on The Heartland Institute YouTube channel. Tune in to have your comments addressed live by the In The Tank Crew. Be sure to subscribe and never miss an episode. See you there! Climate Change Roundtable is LIVE every Friday at 12pm CT on The Heartland Institute YouTube channel. Have a topic you want addressed? Join the live show and leave a comment for our panelists and we'll cover it during the live show!

The other day, Donald Kendall, director of the Glenn C. Haskins Emerging Issues Center at the Heartland Institute, was a guest on the Shawn Thompson Show on AM 560 The Answer in Chicago. Donald is a regular guest on Sean's show and was invited on this time to talk about a new heartlands to paper titled The High Cost of Green Scams, assessing the Green Giveaways in the Inflation Reduction Act. Donald details how the whole thing was a scheme designed to enrich the politically connected. It had nothing to do with fighting climate change, let alone reducing inflation. Have a listen. Donate here: https://heartland.org/donate/

The new EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, dropped the Mother of All Bombs this week on the radical environmental agenda that has dominated Washington, DC since the start of the Obama administration. If it holds, the impact will be devastating. The Heartland Institute’s Sterling Burnett and Jim Lakely are joined by SPECIAL GUESTS Matthew M. Wielicki, Ph.D.—an earth science professor-in-exile from “official” academia at the University of Alabama—and Steve Milloy, who served in Trump’s EPA Transition Team in his first presidency.

Big news this week as EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has reportedly told the White House it should officially abandon the ruling that greenhouse gases pose a threat to human health and welfare. The so-called “endangerment finding” for carbon dioxide and methane emissions forms the backbone of government regulations to “fight climate change” by heavily regulating everything from power plants to automobiles to stoves. Will President Trump repeal the endangerment finding? Can he do it unilaterally? We will discuss. Also, NOAA has “homogenized” the temperature data again. What does that mean? And does it correct the historical record, or distort it to support the alarmist global warming narrative? In “climate grift” news, Climate Crusader Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse has been caught backing legislation that funneled millions of taxpayer dollars to his wife’s nonprofit organization. How convenient, and corrupt. And good news, everyone! The absurd plot of the climate disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow is not actually going to happen, despite alarmist “scientists” claiming it could be imminent.

The FBI is investigating an alleged "honeypot" operation against the 2016 Trump campaign, in which Comey's FBI may have planted female agents to try to compromise Trump. It has been a tough week for our mainstream media elites—multiple MSM personalities were fired or retired, and Jake Tapper is pretending he wasn’t involved in covering up Biden’s obvious decline. Bezos cracks the whip on The Washington Post Opinion section writers, and the White House Correspondents' Association loses its special status as press pool wranglers. The Heartland Institute’s Linnea Lueken, Jim Lakely, and Chris Talgo will discuss all this and more on this episode of the In The Tank podcast.

Physicist C. Michael Hogan says the evidence shows that we do not face a climate crisis and that there is no existential threat. Instead, now, as throughout history, a warmer world is improving life. Attempts to fight climate change by forcing wind, solar, and battery power onto the grid are undermining the nation's electric power supply, costing enormous sums of money, and damaging the environment. Gas and nuclear power, not wind and solar, are the future.

Elon Musk's DOGE crew continues to shine a light on how our federal government operates, and it is exposing more climate grift than even the most cynical among us could have imagined. The latest involves the EPA giving failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams $2 billion to expand "clean energy by prioritizing housing, equity, and resilience." Her organization, Power Forward Communities, says it will install heat pumps, solar panels, EV chargers, and other "green" technology. Does Abrams have any expertise in this field? No. In fact, her organization incorporated itself with $100 in the bank just months before receiving $2 billion of our tax money. The Washington Free Beacon also reported this week that the man Biden put in charge of the EPA's "Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund" funneled $5 billion to his former employer, something called the Coalition for Green Capital. The climate grifters are being exposed, and the EPA is trying to claw these billions of dollars back. But how deep does the corruption go? We're bringing in Steve Milloy of the Energy and Environmental Legal Institute, an EPA transition team member in Trump's first term, to get a handle on it. The Heartland Institute's Anthony Watts, H. Sterling Burnett, Linnea Lueken, and Jim Lakely will also cover some of the Crazy Climate News of the Week, including a look at NOAA data showing the second-biggest month-to-month temperature drop since 2009.

The good news for climate realists and better governance in the Trump administration is piling up so fast it is difficult to keep up. As we covered on this show on December 6, a bit of undercover journalism by Project Veritas exposed a left-wing staffer at the Environmental Protection Agency admitting that he and others were trying to get billions of our tax money “out as fast as possible” before the Trump administration arrived in January and put a stop to it. “It truly feels like we’re on the Titanic and we’re throwing gold bars off the edge,” laughed Brent Efron, former “special advisor for implementation” at EPA. Well, new EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced this week that he has jumped into his submersible and snatched the gold bars ($20 billion) out of the hands of unaccountable lefty nonprofit “NGOs” and returned them to the treasury. The endless flow of our tax money going to environmental extremists groups who advocate against America’s interest seems to be coming to an end The Heartland Institute’s Anthony Watts, Sterling Burnett, Linnea Lueken, and Jim Lakely, will also talk about how the Paris Climate Agreement seems to be breaking apart, provide a media “Climate Fact Check” for January, check in on the continuing failure of EVs, show you what a “dying coyote” climate protest looks and sounds like, and more. DONATE to support the show. http://heartland.org/tcrs

Join us as we dive into President Trump’s bold “Unleashing American Energy” executive order—a decisive move to free America’s most valuable resources, from coal and oil to natural gas and nuclear power. In this episode, we contrast this strategic shift with policies favoring costly, unreliable renewable alternatives, and explore how a return to sensible energy choices could redefine our national landscape. Dr. Sterling Burnett shares his insights on how unlocking America’s energy potential can safeguard our cherished resources while powering progress. Tune in for a informative conversation on why embracing our energy independence matters now more than ever!

President Trump has struck the Biden administration’s climate and energy policy like a hurricane – from increasing energy exploration and extraction, to letting 1,000 employees at the Environmental Protection Agency know they could be fired at any time, to taking all mentions of climate change from the website of the Department of Agriculture, and more. But what will be the Trump Effect on the global climate agenda? Will the dedication to reorder the economies and societies of the world to “save the planet” being to crumble? And if so, which country will give up first? President Trump has struck the Biden administration’s climate and energy policy like a hurricane—ranging from increasing energy exploration and extraction to informing 1,000 Environmental Protection Agency employees that they could be fired at any time, to removing all mentions of climate change from the Department of Agriculture’s website, and more. But what will be the "Trump Effect" on the global climate agenda? Will the dedication to reorganizing the world’s economies and societies to “save the planet” begin to crumble? And if so, which country will be the first to give up?

H. Sterling Burnett, director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute, was a guest recently on the Bill Cunningham Show on WLW radio in Cincinnati. He was invited on to talk about Donald Trump withdrawing the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement and the blizzard of executive orders he issued reversing all of the Biden administration's climate and energy policies.

The historic and devastating fires in Los Angeles exposed the incompetence of leaders such as Gov. Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass. So how do state legislators want to address that? By allowing victims who had their lives destroyed sue Big Oil. Of course. The Heartland Institute’s Anthony Watts and Jim Lakely blow holes in that absurd political stunt and also discuss other recent to abuse the courts to push climate alarmism. Also, Lee Zeldin has just started his first week as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and already the environmental left is terrified that the days of considering human emissions of carbon dioxide are coming to an end. We will dig deeper into the EPA’s “endangerment finding” for CO2 and whether it can be overturned in the next four years. We will also cover some of the “Crazy Climate News of the Week.”