Enemies of Energy: The climate emergency

Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from the “Myths and Misconceptions” section of Enemies of Energy, a research report created for the Capital Research Center. The page for the full report is here: Enemies of Energy.

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Sea levels have been rising, carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels have been increasing, and human energy consumption has been a contributing factor. While these statements are objectively true, they are functionally meaningless. It is also true that fire is dangerous, but only a fool would presume this is the most relevant fact about fire. Relatedly, climate change is real, but this was true billions of years before there were humans to worry over it.

The belief that climate change is an existential crisis, or a “climate emergency” in the lexicon of the anti-energy NGOs, is not a fact—it’s an opinion. The fear of flying is also based on an indisputable truth: gravity is dangerous. But the opinion that modern air travel is relatively dangerous is irrational, because flying is far safer than traveling by car.

While a valid opinion must be supported with facts, facts alone do not make the opinion valid. The most effective lies and phobias are those grounded in incomplete or even irrelevant facts. This is how the anti-energy NGOs have built the “climate emergency” fear.

For example, the Sierra Club, the oldest of the major anti-energy groups, makes this alarmist claim:

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.^[i]

Central to all of this is the belief in massive sea level increases, with many alarmists hinting at 20 feet. “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,” claims the World Wildlife Fund.^[ii]

Do we really only have “a few short years” to save our “livable climate” from this? Hardly.

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. ^[iii]

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 35^th century. The writers working on the Star Trek franchise still haven’t imagined a universe beyond the 32^nd century, and that’s after more than sixty years of storylines.^[iv]

Looking backward in history, the sea was rising naturally, long before humans were burning hydrocarbons, and we adapted to it. Humanity has obviously adapted to the four inches of sea rise since 1993 without any substantive concerns, but that’s less than half the story.

Earth.gov, a partnership of the federal government, the World Bank and the United Nations, reports that “global sea level has been rising since the 19th century, when modern records began” and have gone up 6-8 inches since 1920. ^[v]

Long before the 1800s (the 19^th century) we figured out how to adjust our civilization to small differences in sea level and can continue to do so.

Consider the Netherlands, where the locals have been building dikes to reclaim land from the sea since the Iron Age.  A 70-centimeter barrier, which is big enough to hold back a cumulative 140 years of our current rate of sea level increase, was built sometime before the 7^th century. The 21^st century Dutch have gone far beyond that: one third of the nation’s land is below sea level, some of it 22 feet below. ^{[vi] [vii]}

So, the seas are rising … but by less than the thickness of three pennies per year. It’s manageable and not a crisis.

Similarly, humans have spent thousands of years, and in particular the last few decades, adapting successfully to hurricanes and other forms of “extreme” weather. If hurricanes were truly growing more frequent and more deadly, then we would be well-placed to respond.

But this is not what has been happening.

A page hosted by the federal government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) examines “Global Warming and Hurricanes” with the assumption that gradually warming temperatures have increased the fuel (i.e.: warm ocean water) that causes these storms. (As of this writing, the page was last revised in November 2024.) A section that examines a century of storms in the Atlantic Ocean reaches this conclusion, which the authors elected to emphasize with bold typeface: ^[viii]

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. ^[ix]

Much the same can be said of the other “extreme” weather claims made by the anti-energy NGOs. According to Our World in Data, which bases its claim on research from the Global Wildfire Information System, the land scorched by wildfires over the last two decades has declined. ^[x]

One thing that has gotten measurably worse is the damage inflicted by extreme weather of all sorts, particularly hurricanes and wildfires. This factor has led to erroneous claims that the storms themselves are growing worse at a dangerous rate.

But for obvious reasons, Americans love to live near our western mountains and eastern shorelines—respectively prone to wildfires and hurricanes before there even was an America. So, many of our most expensive communities are in the path of predictable destruction. Fortunately, as with the (slowly) rising seas, the solution to this challenge is economic growth, which permits us to build back with even greater resilience.

And here the anti-energy NGOs are correct about one thing. Cutting off our access to hydrocarbons and nuclear power will indeed reduce the economic damage done by hurricanes and wildfires, but only because it will wipe out the prosperity that permits us to build these communities in the first place.

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PDF hyperlink to full report

Endnotes

[i] “Climate.” Sierra Club. Accessed January 8, 2026.  https://www.sierraclub.org/issues/climate

[ii] “Six ways loss of Arctic ice impacts everyone.” World Wildlife Fund. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://www.worldwildlife.org/resources/explainers/six-ways-loss-of-arctic-ice-impacts-everyone/

[iii] “Understanding Sea Level.” NASA. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://sealevel.nasa.gov/understanding-sea-level/key-indicators/global-mean-sea-level/

[iv] Polonowski, Colin. “Star Trek timeline in complete chronological order, explained.” The Digital Fix. Accessed January 29, 2026. https://www.thedigitalfix.com/star-trek/timeline

[v] “Why is Global Sea Level Rising?” Global Sea Level Change | Earth.gov. Accessed January 28, 2026. https://earth.gov/sealevel/about-sea-level-change/global-sea-level-rise/the-basics/

[vi] “Dike History.” Dutch Dikes (Lola Landscape Architects, Rotterdam). Accessed January 12, 2026. http://dutchdikes.net/history/

[vii] “Is the Netherlands below sea level?” Netherlands Tourism. Accessed January 12, 2026. https://www.netherlands-tourism.com/netherlands-sea-level/

[viii] Knutson, Tom. “Global Warming and Hurricanes: An Overview of Current Research Results.” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration | Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laborator. Last revision: November 20, 2024. Accessed January 12, 2026.  https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/

[ix] Knutson, Tom. “Global Warming and Hurricanes: An Overview of Current Research Results.” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration | Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laborator. Last revision: November 20, 2024. Accessed January 12, 2026.  https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/

[x]  Samborska, Veronika; and Hannah Ritchie. “Wildfires.” Our World in Data. April 2, 2024. Accessed January 13, 2026. https://ourworldindata.org/wildfires

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/enemies-of-energy-the-climate-emergency/