Fact-checking Enemies of Energy

In late May, the Capital Research Center released my report, Enemies of Energy: The Myths, the Movement, and the Money. I went on a two week vacation beginning at the end of June and missed that Enemies of Energy was reviewed in July by the left-wing Congressional Integrity Project (CIP).

For nice summaries, it’s hard to beat how the CIP introduced the subject:

In May 2026, Capital Research Center released a report titled “Enemies of Energy,” profiling what it calls “the 15 most influential anti-energy NGOs, their 15 largest known donors, and ten of the biggest myths and misconceptions they rely on.”

The report dismisses the idea of a climate emergency as “an opinion,” promotes natural gas as “a far cleaner fuel than any other hydrocarbon,” and declares wind and solar energy “enemies of conservationists” for their land use. Capital Research Center has promoted it aggressively: a companion YouTube video has drawn more than 1.3 million views, the organization has published 14 standalone “Green Watch” articles drawn from the report, and released a second video on three of its alleged “myths,” including what it calls “climate alarmism.”

They are correct about the effectiveness of the report. The video we released to promote Enemies of Energy has indeed tallied more than 1.3 million views (so far).

The CIP’s analysis is another matter. The quotes they selected are genuine, but they do not cite even one of the many facts used to back up those statements. A look at just a few of those sources demonstrates why the CIP worked so hard to avoid mentioning them.

The climate emergency

I did write that the climate emergency is an “opinion” and then directly and extensively quoted some of those opinions. Here’s one from the Sierra Club that pushes all the usual panic buttons:

The impacts of climate change are here, and they will only grow more frequent and more severe – from extreme weather and unnatural disasters like fires, floods, heatwaves, and hurricanes, to rising sea levels and global food or water shortages, to ecosystem collapse and biodiversity loss – if we don’t act. We only have a few short years to implement the transformational changes needed to reduce greenhouse emissions and maintain a livable climate.

Though you won’t see it mentioned in the CIP analysis, Enemies also includes refutations of those claims from very mainstream sources. Here’s one from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), wherein the federal agency states there is no “compelling evidence” that a warming world has led to an increase in severity nor frequency of hurricanes:

We conclude that the historical Atlantic hurricane data at this stage do not provide compelling evidence for a substantial greenhouse warming-induced century-scale increase in:  frequency of tropical storms, hurricanes, or major hurricanes, or in the proportion of hurricanes that become major hurricanes. [emphasis in original]

In another of many examples, Enemies quotes what the World Wildlife Fund has said about sea levels: “Glacial melt of the Greenland ice sheet is a major predictor of future sea level rise; if it melts entirely, global sea levels could rise 20 feet.”

Though Enemies does not go into it extensively, this warning about 20-foot sea-level increases has been pervasive. It was featured in An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary from 2006, wherein he showed an image of most of southern Florida sinking beneath the waves. Then he won a Nobel Prize for saying such things.

In Enemies, I use NASA data to explain the absurdity of the claim:

From February 1993 through December 2025, according to NASA, global mean sea level went up 103.8 millimeters—or 4 inches. NASA believes the current pace of increase is 0.44 centimeters per year, or less than the thickness of three pennies stacked atop each other.

At that rate of increase it will take 1,387 years for seas to rise another 20 feet. That would happen in the year 3413—or the early 35th century. The writers working on the Star Trek franchise still haven’t imagined a universe beyond the 32nd century, and that’s after more than sixty years of storylines.

Enemies of Energy is 87 full pages long. The CIP’s attempt at a refutation was 19 sparsely worded pages, many of which have blank white space filling at least the bottom third to half of the page.

The first nine pages have nothing to do with any claims made by me or anyone else but were instead criticisms of some of the Capital Research Center’s supposed donors. Is the Congressional Integrity Project saying people have sent money to CRC because we make factual claims backed up by government research? Again, guilty as charged!

Clean burning natural gas

Back to what is written in the Enemies report, it is yet another fact that natural gas is “a far cleaner fuel than any other hydrocarbon.” One source I used for saying so was a U.S. Department of Energy report posted during the tail end of the Biden administration that showed natural gas emitting far less CO₂ than coal, oil, diesel, and all other hydrocarbons.  Another Department of Energy report I used was also released during the Biden administration, and it carried this headline: “Electric power sector CO2 emissions drop as generation mix shifts from coal to natural gas.”

None of this is remotely new information. As noted in Enemies, even the far-left loons from the 1970s knew natural gas was a cleaner fuel:

Ramparts, for example, was a stridently left-wing, often communist-sympathizing glossy magazine that was published from the early 1960s through 1975. But for the October 1973 issue, Ramparts environmental reporter James Ridgeway wrote the following: “In the late 1960s there was a particularly keen demand for the clean burning natural gas because of air pollution in big metropolitan areas.” [emphasis added]

On the matter of wind and solar energy chewing up tons of the environment to produce unreliable and tiny trickles of power, I’m guilty yet again of repeating a point obvious to even the Bloomberg climate news division. Enemies of Energy references it this way:

An April 2021 study in Bloomberg Green calculated that solar energy needs 140 times the land area to produce the same kilowatts as a natural gas plant, 47 times more than an emissions-free nuclear plant, and nearly 18 times more than a coal-fired power station. The comparisons were even worse for wind: 370 times more land needed than natural gas, 123 times more than nuclear, and 46 times more than coal.

While someone at the Congressional Integrity Project clearly read Enemies of Energy, they selectively quoted it and didn’t manage to understand why gobbling up the Earth with wind turbines and solar panels is no way to preserve it. There is a whole section on that in Enemies. Here’s a sample:

Policy changes can and have led to the creation of more bald eagles, wolves, whales, and other flora and fauna. But no policy can create more mountains and shorelines. At the most basic level, the land, skies, and waterways are our environment, and what we have is all we have. Those who claim to be conservationists should aim to conserve as much of what we cannot replace as possible.

Beyond my personal work, the CIP report also claims the Capital Research Center has written more than 500 articles “to track—and attack—the environmental movement.”

With so much alleged material to draw from and so few words in the CIP report, one might think they’d be able to selectively attack the weakest things any of us have written. Instead, the CIP makes a big deal of this:

In its [CRC’s] 2023 series “The Global Warming Scam” — subtitled “The Greatest Heist In World History” — it claimed “the entire Western world” has been lied to, and argued that “carbon dioxide is plant food.”

I didn’t write that article, and I don’t know the author, but my admittedly basic knowledge of Earth science is that more CO₂ means more plant growth, and no CO₂ in the atmosphere means plants, animals and all of us die. To “argue” the CRC author’s point a bit more, I’d say that a hypothetical loss of plant food would qualify as a genuine “climate emergency.”

I learned this (apparently now controversial?) fact about CO₂ and plants from my fourth-grade science teacher. He was awfully old even when he explained it to me in 1978. But a bit of googling tells me the claim became an established scientific fact sometime well before Thomas Jefferson made the deal for the Louisiana Purchase.

Mistakes were made

Policy researchers (at least the honest ones) will always endure a little pang of worry when a critic attempts to fact check such a big project. And I’ll even admit that buried within the 87 pages of analysis, nearly two dozen charts and 557 end notes Enemies of Energy has at least one tiny and inconsequential numerical error. It is so harmless that I have since used the accurate figure to make the same point.

And yet, every time I look at Enemies, I think about that two-dollar parking ticket of a mistake. It haunts me.

So, I’d like to thank my new fans at the Congressional Integrity Project for fact-checking Enemies of Energy, missing out on the one small thing I know is wrong with it, and demonstrating how factually bullet proof the rest of it truly is.

Anyone who would like a hard copy, please send a note to [email protected]. For a donation of $100 or more, I’ll even sign my name next to the error that keeps bothering me.

*** Further reading:

InfluenceWatch profile of the Congressional Integrity Project

InfluenceWatch profile of Ramparts

Al Gore’s 30-plus years of climate errors

Enemies of Energy: The Myths, the Movement, and the Money