If we made the green energy transition this war would be unthinkable and these authoritarians wouldn’t be in power — not in the US, not in Iran, not in Saudi Arabia, not in Russia. Hydrocarbons are killing our freedom and just plain killing us.
Posts by Zsolt Lengyel
15 March reminder: a country, #Hungary, that fought repeatedly to push Russian power out now has a government working to bring it back, even acting as Putin’s Trojan horse inside the EU.
HU deserves better than an illiberal, corrupt system looking toward the Kremlin.
More to read: lnkd.in/dS75TwDV
15 March reminder: a country, #Hungary, that fought repeatedly to push Russian power out now has a government working to bring it back, even acting as Putin’s Trojan horse inside the EU.
HU deserves better than an illiberal, corrupt system looking toward the Kremlin.
More to read: lnkd.in/dS75TwDV
13/13 The question is no longer whether these destructive steps are dangerous.
The question is how long we will wait before responding instead of appeasement or inaction.
We Know from History What Happens When Power Tries to Rewrite Physics and/or Borders…
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
12 / Three pillars. One trajectory. The United States choosing ideology over evidence, faction over alliance, and fossil-fuel myth over planetary stability acting as if the future can be negotiated with slogans.
11/ : a divided West, paralysed by internal sabotage, incapable of collective action.
We are watching a triad of self-reinforcing US failures:
- Anti-science at home
- Support for far-right destabilisation in Europe
- Geopolitical signalling that flatters authoritarian regimes
10 / There are two actors who understand the value of this fracture better than anyone: Putin & Xi Jinping.
A US retreating from science, retreating from climate responsibility, and retreating from democratic alliances delivers precisely what the Kremlin and Beijing have sought
9/ Worse, the new doctrine explicitly seeks to cultivate resistance within Europe, celebrating and supporting the rise of illiberal, anti-EU, anti-climate forces from Budapest to Prague. Allies are redefined as burdens. Multilateralism as weakness.
8/ begins with planetary stability. The 2025 NSS doctrine abandons that logic entirely. Climate risk is reframed as ideology. Scientific consensus becomes optional. Data becomes disposable. This anti-science as statecraft.
7/ The 2022 U.S. National Security Strategy recognised climate change for what it is: a hard security threat capable of destabilising states, triggering migration, amplifying conflict, and collapsing food and water systems. Its premise was simple and sober: national security
6/ important / ‘beautiful’ belongs to the 19th century and to the darkest chapters of the 20th. In today’s world, it undermines the very legal and normative order the United States once claimed to defend.
This regression is not accidental.
5/ claims that it is “𝐚𝐧 𝐡𝐨𝐧𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐯𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐞𝐫 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐦𝐚𝐤𝐞 𝐆𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐧𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐚 𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐔.𝐒.”
The idea that powerful states may casually “acquire” land, resources, or influence zones because they are useful
4/ At the same time, the re-emergence of U.S. rhetoric and manoeuvring around Greenland reveals something equally corrosive: the return of annexation logic as the newly appointed Trump Greenland envoy, Jeff Landry , Governor or Louisiana,
3/ We face textbook authoritarianism in the US: when facts threaten power, facts must be eliminated. This is the political mainstreaming of anti-science. -> www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
3/ We face textbook authoritarianism in the US: when facts threaten power, facts must be eliminated. This is the political mainstreaming of anti-science. -> www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
2/ the assertion that power - not evidence - decides reality. Today, that logic is visible in two parallel assaults: the attempt to subordinate science to ideology, and the revival of imperial thinking toward sovereign nations.
1/ One day after Stalin’s birthday there is something chillingly familiar in the moment we are living through. In the 21st century, authoritarianism does not arrive with show trials and gulags. It arrives through institutional erosion, the politicisation of truth, and
Don’t miss the sharp and sobering ‘Trump’s shuttering of the National Center for Atmospheric Research is Stalinist’ article by
@michaelemann.bsky.social & Bob Ward about Trump trying to eliminate NCAR. Climate science is being treated as political dissent, science as an Enemy of the State 👇
The "Institute of Economic Affairs" banked £640,000 in past donations from oil giants BP and Shell, and from Rupert Murdoch
- investigation by @desmog.com reveals how IEA has campaigned against climate action after taking cash from fossil fuel firms
#climatecrisis
www.desmog.com/2025/12/10/t...
and a mitigation work programme stripped of scientific integrity. And she was not alone. The EU, Panama and Paraguay had already voiced serious concerns about both the content (and the process that brought it to the floor.
Read the rest on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/posts/zsolt-...
if anyone still believed that climate diplomacy is a smooth, orderly ritual, #COP30 delivered a sharp reality check.The final plenary was suspended because one delegation - a courageous and razor-sharp Colombian negotiator -refused to let the “Truth COP” end with a procedural sweep-under-the-carpet
In 2024, renewable energy accounted for over 90% of global power capacity expansion. That is because it makes economic sense. IRENA_DAT_RE_Capacity_Highlights_2025-1.pdf
The same for journalists. If a politician or business leader spits out 1.5C or net zero, ask them how fast emissions need to drop to reach net zero in 2050, and how fast they are dropping today. Point out the contradiction. Make them explain it.
And just to be complete, in case you need verified NOAA data, yes, as of October, 2025, it's official, a new record was set for the 36-month mean rate of atmospheric CO2 growth:
Feb., 2019: 7.826 ppm per 36 months.
Oct., 2025: 7.874 ppm per 36 months.
Winning!
6/6 +++ Figure is from Prof. Eliot Jacobson, whose data-driven visualisations set a high standard for clarity, transparency, and public communication of climate indicators.+++
5/ So as you enter the second week of COP30 negotiations, please look again at the the new record. The only metric that matters has just reached its worst value on record.
Act accordingly.
NOAA data: gml.noaa.gov/webdata/ccgg...
4/irreversible tipping points.Every year of delay ensures that the task becomes more brutal, more disruptive, & more expensive.
History records many societal collapses.
But if we continue down this path, we will be the first civilisation to collapse with full scientific knowledge of exactly why.
3/ But physics is not impressed by our results and with our choice of a founding spirit of essentially “let’s all try, and hope the others do more.”
The CO2 record is the planet’s way of reminding us that hope is not a mitigation strategy. Every tenth of a degree is now carrying us closer to
2/ The NOAA: National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration data* is just the empirical confirmation of what many of us already know: we have mistaken process for progress.
After a decade of the Paris Agreement, we cling to a comforting fiction: that we are now entering an “implementation phase.”
1/ - Previous record (Feb 2019): 7.826 ppm per 36 months
- New record (Oct 2025): 7.874 ppm per 36 months
Let’s be brutally clear about what this means. Despite ten years of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) the rate at which we are accelerating the planetary crisis has never been higher.