H. Sterling Burnett

Guest author H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D. is a Heartland research fellow on environmental policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News.

Study: Net Zero Wind and Solar Buildout Needs Huge Amount of Land

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New research published in the journal Nature confirms what The Heartland Institute and our allies in the free-market environmental community have long argued: wind and solar power have low power density and thus impose huge environmental footprints. The new study acknowledges the environmental footprint of wind and solar is even larger than industry promoters have admitted. As […]

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Recent Headlines Prove Wind, Solar Still Aren’t Ready for Prime Time

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A colleague of mine, Chris Talgo, recently penned an op-ed titled “Windmills and Solar Panels Aren’t Ready for Prime Time,” a title similar to my own from CCW 462, “Green Technologies Are Dangerous, Not Ready for Prime Time.” Both articles, and others I have written periodically across the past couple of decades, make the point

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GAO Questions Biden’s Offshore Wind Effort, Vindicates Critics

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An April 2025 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) affirms what critics of President Joe Biden’s wind-energy spree have long argued: offshore wind is an expensive, environmentally damaging solution in search of a problem. Offshore wind is neither necessary nor justified to fight climate change or for any other purpose other than to

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Budget-Busting Climate Provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act Must Go

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The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Joe Biden on August 16, 2022. The bill was badly mistitled and intentionally so. The Biden administration and Democrats in Congress took advantage of Americans’ desire for a response to high and rising prices for food, fuel, and other basic consumer goods.

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Carbon Capture and Storage Is a Bad Climate Policy

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The climate “hoax,” as President Donald Trump calls it, and the “green new scam,” also in Trump’s words, have spawned a plethora of bad ideas and policies. In the transglobal elites’ attempts to direct the world’s economy by controlling average people, they have pushed the idiotic and dangerous vision of the nations of the world

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Some Suggestions on Climate and Environmental Policy for the New Sheriff in Town 

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President-elect Donald Trump’s overwhelming electoral victory and his winning of the popular vote gives him a mandate to move forward with his agenda, not the least of which on the climate and energy deregulatory agenda he promoted during his campaign. In anticipation of Trump’s victory, a coalition of groups—among them the Heartland Institute, E&E Legal

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Plants Are Using Much More CO2 Than Climate Models Assume

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A study recently published in the journal Nature finds plants have been absorbing 31 percent more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than previously assumed and modeled. The international team of researchers, led by Jiameng Lai at Cornell University, examined gross primary production (GPP), the largest carbon flux (carbon sink and cycling) in the biosphere. The

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Climate Journalism, Increasingly Bought and Paid For

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I have written a couple of times previously about the mainstream media’s outside-funded collaboration to promote climate alarm. For example, the Associated Press took millions of dollars from left-wing foundations specifically to cover climate change. Journalistic creed and ethics be damned, media outlets collaborated to suppress voices of dissent, first about climate change, then about

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