5 billion to $8 billion during years of environmental litigation before Duke Energy and Dominion Energy cancelled it in July 2020. The Constitution Pipeline from Pennsylvania to New York died the same year.

The PennEast Pipeline won its case at the United States Supreme Court in 2021 and still could not get built because New Jersey refused to issue state permits. In Canada, TransCanada abandoned the $15.7 billion Energy East pipeline in 2017 after the National Energy Board required an unprecedented review of upstream and downstream emissions...

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The Iran conflict is a reminder that we must accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels, say many in the media. Iran’s disruption of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz means the world is now losing 13 million barrels per day of oil and refined products, which is over 10% of global consumption.

After QatarEnergy, the world’s largest LNG exporter, declared force majeure on all exports after Iranian drone strikes, Asian buyers scrambled to redirect orders to Australia. But then, last week, a cyclone slammed into Australia’s LNG corridor, forcing shutdowns at three of the country’s largest facilities.

David Wallace-Wells in the New York Times noted, “No one has ever started a war over solar panels.”

But nobody goes to war over solar panels for the same reason nobody goes to war over candles: they cannot power the things that economies, civilizations, and wars run on. A gallon of jet fuel contains 34 kilowatt-hours of energy in a package weighing six pounds. A lithium-ion battery storing the same energy weighs 250 pounds.

That density gap is why every military on earth runs on liquid hydrocarbons, why every container ship crossing the Pacific burns bunker fuel, why every combine harvester in Iowa runs on diesel, and why every 747 landing at Heathrow runs on kerosene. The fact that nobody wages war over solar panels is evidence of their limitations, not superiority.

Many respond by claiming that fossil fuels persist because of government subsidies and political favoritism. The IMF says global fossil fuel subsidies total $7 trillion. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres cited that number when he called for eliminating “fossil fuel subsidies that distort markets and lock us into the past.”

But the $7 trillion figure is almost entirely fictional. The IMF’s own data show that only 18% of its subsidy estimate reflects actual government spending or undercharging for supply costs. The remaining 82% consists of what the IMF calls “implicit subsidies,” a theoretical construct that assigns a dollar value to the environmental and social costs of burning fossil fuels and then treats the failure to tax those costs as a subsidy.

By that logic, any product whose price does not reflect the full externalized cost of its production is “subsidized.”

The real problem is that the world overinvested in green energy and underinvested in oil and gas. Globally, the IEA’s World Energy Investment 2025 report documented that $2.2 trillion flowed to clean energy in 2025, exactly double the $1.1 trillion invested in oil, natural gas, and coal combined. In the U.S., federal tax expenditures for green energy end users in fiscal year 2025 alone totaled $57.9 billion.

That figure exceeds the aggregate of all federal fossil fuel tax expenditures over the 31-year period from 1994 to 2025, totaling $50.8 billion.

The oil and gas extraction sector generated $1.8 trillion in total U.S. revenues in 2024, meaning that the $3 billion in actual government support represents 0.17% of industry revenue, an economic rounding error.

Renewable energy hardware is overwhelmingly manufactured in China, creating a supply chain dependency that is more precarious than the oil dependency it purports to replace. China’s share of global polysilicon, ingot, and wafer production has reached approximately 95%. China controls 91% of rare earth processing and 94% of the permanent magnet production essential for wind turbines.

China dominates more than 75% of global solar cell and module manufacturing and is projected to control nearly 60% of all critical mineral refining by 2030. In 2025, Beijing weaponized this dominance, and bismuth prices surgednearly 500% overnight.

Had the world spent the past decade building the oil, gas, LNG, pipeline, and fertilizer infrastructure that engineers designed and companies proposed, the Hormuz crisis would still be a serious geopolitical event, but it would not threaten to cause a recession.

The Atlantic Coast Pipeline, a 600-mile natural gas line from West Virginia to North Carolina, saw its cost double from $4.

We should have spent more on green energy, say the media. No, we shouldn't have. The $2 trillion we spent did nothing to prevent the energy crisis and may even have caused it.

The Iran conflict triggered the energy crisis, but its roots lie in the West's opposition to the production of oil and gas outside the Persian Gulf. The climate movement is, says former radical environmentalist @ziontree, "fundamentally anti-human in its thinking."

UK Energy Secretary @Ed_Miliband called North Sea drilling "climate vandalism." Now he's waffling on new drilling, which he should have approved long ago. What changed? The war exposed the fraudulence of his net-zero, anti-oil-and-gas fantasy. 🧵

2/ In November 2025, Miliband banned new oil and gas exploration licenses in the North Sea. He said Britain needed to "get off the fossil fuel rollercoaster." Five months later, the Strait of Hormuz closed, oil hit $100, and the UK started reviewing fuel rationing plans.

https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/uk-fuel-rationing-iran-us-war-strait-of-hormuz-5HjdWP5_2/

3/ Miliband's response to the worst energy crisis since 1973? Plug-in solar panels at supermarkets. The UK is receiving its last shipment of jet fuel with nothing behind it, and Miliband wants you to buy a solar panel at Tesco.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/24/iran-war-britain-new-homes-solar-heat-pumps-energy-crisis.html

4/ Now Whitehall sources say Miliband will new drilling, even as his own ministry calls reports of the approval "unfounded." He cannot even commit to the reversal he knows he has to make.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/news/uk/2026/04/03/uk-set-to-approve-new-gasfield-in-north-sea-amid-fuel-shortage-worry/

5/ This is the pattern everywhere. Greens/Labor/Democrats restrict oil and gas production for years. Then, a crisis hits and they quietly reverse course while pretending nothing changed. They never accept responsibility for the damage.

6/ Upstream oil and gas investment peaked at $869 billion in 2015 and fell to $350 billion by 2020. It recovered to only $570 billion by 2025, still a third below the peak. Meanwhile, governments poured $2.2 trillion into green energy in 2025 alone.

iea.org/reports/world-…

https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-investment-2025/executive-summary

7/ The world installed 1,600 gigawatts of solar and 1,000 gigawatts of wind. None of it mattered when Hormuz closed. Renewables generate electricity, which is just 21% of final energy consumption. The other 79%, the part that moves ships, flies planes, makes fertilizer, and heats buildings, still runs overwhelmingly on fossil fuels. Oil and gas alone supply 56% of all global energy.

https://hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/2026-03-25/debates/1A55782D-9726-4276-8EFE-B5922770D6E6/FuelSuppliesWarInIran

8/ Denmark, which banned new oil licenses in 2020, now considers extending North Sea production. Germany, which spent €500 billion on renewables while shutting nuclear plants, depends on LNG that can no longer transit Hormuz. The UK, which banned exploration five months ago, faces fuel rationing.

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/03/31/strait-of-hormuz-shutdown-what-implications-for-europe-for-how-long-and-how-high-can-price

9/ The US produces natural gas at $4 per million BTU and delivers it through 3 million miles of pipeline. Europe pays $16 for the same gas because it arrives by tanker. The difference is decades of policy choices. America built pipelines while Europe built dependency.

https://www.regit.cars/car-news/global-fuel-shortages-2026-how-countries-are-reacting-to-the-strait-of-hormuz-crisis

11/ Real energy abundance means piped natural gas at $4, nuclear plants running at 90% capacity for 100 years, and domestic oil production that cannot be disrupted by a drone strike, not solar panels at the supermarket.

Democrats must rebrand their energy agenda around abundance, some say. But doing so is fundamentally dishonest. For decades, the party has fought, blocked, and closed nuclear plants, pipelines, and oil and natural gas production, laying the foundation for today's energy crisis.

Investors built their portfolios for a world of cheap energy that no longer exists. Dozens of traders, shippers, and executives say the market still has not grasped the severity of the Hormuz crisis. Today might be the day it does.

Gavin Newsom's wife expressed concern with boys "moving to the right" and said "we're working on legislation" to address it. @Jacob__Siegel, the author of a major new book, says progressives are waiting in the wings with a plan for total information control to counter populism.

Trust in universities fell 57% to 36% in the last decade, and 70% of Americans say they're headed in the wrong direction. A new Yale report whitewashes the reason why: because they're obsessed with teaching students to hate Western civilization and American values.

No one is arguing that slavery, colonialism, and racial injustice should not be taught, but rather that it should be taught rigorously and in full historical context. Few who peruse Yale’s teaching of slavery will view it as fair or balanced. Instead, it trains teachers to teach children that America is dominated by “white supremacy” and that black people remain victims of it, a false and demoralizing message.

The report notes the partisan imbalance in passing but pivoted to the softer language of “intellectual pluralism” and “echo chambers,” calling for department self-studies. It never asks the obvious question: what is the intellectual source of that imbalance?...

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Yale University released a candid report last week documenting why Americans no longer trust higher education in general and the Ivy League in particular. A ten-person faculty committee spent a year examining the collapse. One-third of Yale undergraduates, they note, no longer feel free to express political views in class, up from 17% in 2015. Public confidence in colleges and universities fell from 57% a decade ago to a historic low of 36% in 2024, according to Gallup. Seventy percent of Americans today say the sector is heading in the wrong direction. And Americans are more skeptical of Ivy League universities than any others.

But the report fails to identify the cause of the rising censorship and public mistrust, and Yale’s special role in it: the intellectual assault on Western civilization. That academic attack, or “deconstruction,” is aimed at undermining the central commitments of Western civilization, including the pursuit of truth. And it has been going on at Yale and other universities since the 1980s, and arguably longer.

There are, of course, other reasons for the worsening of the quality of American universities. The Yale report identifies several contributing factors, each of which is real. Social media amplifies conformity and shaming, and smartphones distract attention. Activist administrators enforce political dogma and overstep their role. Yale employs more than 6,000 managerial staff, roughly matching the undergraduate population. Students self-police. And there is grade inflation.

But many of those are downstream of the prior assault on the foundations of the West. When professors teach that all claims to truth mask power, students learn that the moral move is to shame dissenters rather than argue with them. When an institution declares that its mission is “improving the world today,” as Yale’s 2016 mission statement now does, rather than the older and narrower goal of seeking the truth and creating and preserving knowledge, everything becomes political.

The Yale report treats self-censorship as a generalized climate, noting carefully that “discomfort appears to be rising across the spectrum.” The phrasing implies symmetry, but a survey of 517 Yale in fall 2025 found that 79% of Republican students say they often self-censor in classroom discussions, while only 29% of Democratic students report the same. A separate survey found that 75% of Republican students and 47% of independents self-censored, compared with 26% of Democrats.

In December 2025, researchers found that across Yale’s 43 undergraduate departments, the Law School, and the School of Management, 82.3% of identified faculty are registered Democrats or donate heavily to Democratic candidates, while only 2.3% are Republicans. That is a 36-to-1 ratio. At the School of Management, the ratio runs 78 to 1. At Yale Law School, the faculty is 94% Democrat versus 1.5% Republican. The Political Science department identified exactly one Republican. Twenty-seven of 43 undergraduate departments contained zero Republicans, and three departments contained neither a Republican nor an independent.

All of this matters because Yale has a broad societal impact. For example, the “Yale and Slavery Teachers Institute” trains K-12 teachers and promotes teaching the 1619 Project to fourth through sixth graders. The 1619 Project, created and promoted by the New York Times, argues that America began with slavery, not with the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. The 1619 Project frames the United States as essentially racist.

The reality is significantly more complex. Thousands of Americans died during the Civil War to end slavery. The Civil Rights Movement is widely viewed as a high point in American history. And the US has taken extraordinary efforts, far beyond other nations, to reduce racial discrimination to the point of creating widespread racial preferences for nonwhites in hiring, contracting, and admissions.