Climate change causes inflation now too. Quick, put on more solar panels….!

Starving for any attention, the carbon-haters need to find a reason to get into the inflation debate. CO2 keeps rising but crops are up, forests are greener, tropical islands are growing, mangroves are expanding, and the world is in more danger of being overrun with cheap soy and corn than by rising seas. Whatever. The disaster-bus will find a way to blame fossil fuels for everything that’s bad, as if through some miracle EV’s and windmills will make pork cheaper.

It’s a cult:

Climate crisis is ‘battering our economy’ and driving inflation, new book says

Edward Helmore, The Guardian

Forget Ukraine, coronavirus, corporate greed and “supply chain issues”, when it comes to inflation the climate crisis is the real, lasting, worry, according to a new book, and one that’s only likely to get worse. Climatenomics lays out how ‘supply chain disruptions’ has become a euphemism for the effects of climate change

“I don’t think people have realized that climate change is an economic issue now because it’s always been seen as an environmental, health or social issue,” says Keefe. “The fact of the matter is climate change is battering our economy.”

Any long term trend will do, even a really short one:

According to Keefe, citing National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) figures, climate-related weather disasters cost the US economy more than $145bn in 2021 – a nearly 50% increase from last year.

Then Any big Scary Number will do. Lordy Maths! Just say “trillion” and give me your money:

Over the last five years, they have cost $750bn. Since 1980 323 weather and climate disasters have cost $1bn or more, the total cost of these events exceeds $2.195tn.

Nevermind that the long term cost of climate losses is growing smaller as a percentage of GDP.

 As I said five months ago when it was obvious that 2022 would be the Year of Inflation, more money, means more inflation:

More dollars fighting over the same stuff means higher prices. It’s just a supply and demand thing. This is the money base of USD, a rough measure of “how many dollars there are”. It’s obvious where this is going and it isn’t a temporary spike:

US St Louis Federal Reserve, Money Base graph 1918-2008

US St Louis Federal Reserve, Money Base graph 1918-2008 | Source

Cause and effect.

REFERENCES

St Louis Federal Reserve:  AMBSL and  BOGMBASE

Piekle, Jnr (2018) Tracking Progress on the Economic Costs of Disasters Under the Indicators of the Sustainable Development Goals, Environmental Hazards. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17477891.2018.1540343

A complete list of things caused by global warming: Numberwatch

Plus shorter lists:

h/t Graeme No.3

9.7 out of 10 based on 61 ratings

119 comments to Climate change causes inflation now too. Quick, put on more solar panels….!

  • #

    Who writes this crap? Do they really believe it? It’s as if they are putting their stupid right where everyone can see it.

    491

    • #
      Honk R Smith

      Not crap.
      Well crafted propaganda.
      Seed planting for the harvesting of stupid.
      Last couple years produce has set records.
      We are not the target audience.

      352

    • #
      Tel

      No … they think there’s a chance you might believe it … and someone will.

      111

    • #
      OldOzzie

      Ministers quietly abandon ‘green crap’ as focus shifts to food security

      A HEARTWARMING HEADLINE

      It comes from the U.K., via the London Times: “Ministers quietly abandon ‘green crap’ as focus shifts to food security.” The threat of starvation, like the prospect of hanging, concentrates the mind:

      Boris Johnson has scaled back plans to rewild the country as the government retreats from the green agenda to focus on the cost-of-living crisis.

      Ministers last year announced a post-Brexit scheme that would pay farmers up to £800 million a year — a third of the farming budget — to transform agricultural land into nature-rich forests, coastal wetlands, peatlands and wildflower meadows.

      Because who needs food? But that was then and this is now:

      But the fund, called the landscape recovery scheme, has been quietly slashed to just £50 million over three years, less than 1 per cent of the budget.

      The war in Ukraine has precipitated worldwide food shortages:

      The UK is hugely reliant on imports, producing roughly 64 per cent of our food, down from 78 per cent in the 1980s.

      A new national food strategy, due to be published tomorrow, will confirm a shift in emphasis, saying that land management schemes should reflect “farmer demand”.

      Environmentalists are irate, mostly because they hate modern farming, which relies on fertilizers that come in large part from natural gas, as well as other chemicals needed to control pests. Sure, we could go back to farming techniques of, say, the 17th century. And thereby support a global population equal to that of the 17th century.

      As for the heartwarming phrase in this post’s title, it comes from former Prime Minister David Cameron:

      The tensions echo the storm that embroiled David Cameron in 2013, when the then prime minister was alleged to have ordered his aides to abandon “green crap” despite publicly vowing to run the greenest government ever.

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      • #
        another ian

        Re concentrating the minds – there is this bit in Len Dighton’s “Fighter” where that happened on “the bomber will always get through” belief after WW 1. His wording as best I recall –

        “Politicians realised that bombing could kill voters – accurate bombing could kill politicians”

        80

        • #
          GlenM

          Douhets theory no doubt.

          10

        • #
          Graeme No.3

          That explains why the ‘Leaders’ had underground bunkers and the hoi poloi (esp. in the East End) had to improvise with the Underground (once the petty minded bureaucrats were told to shut up about people on the platforms).
          And on my tour to Plymouth I saw the underground steps down the side of the hill (built before WW1) which were used by the locals.

          30

      • #
        OldOzzie

        Climate primitives’ are destroying our standard of living

        Australian commentator Andrew Bolt has come up with a great term for the green fanatics who are shutting down energy production from dependable fuels with no reliable alternatives. They reject modern agriculture because it uses chemicals derived from hydrocarbons, but offer no prospect of feeding the earth’s hungry billions. Bolt’s latest column (paywalled) the Herald Sun in Melbourne (he also appears on Sky News) has come up with an apt term for such people: “Climate primitives.”

        Because of the paywall, I must limit myself to fair use excerpts, but the logic of what he says is strong enough that readers can grasp the essence.

        Congratulations! We’re now becoming one of those primitive societies that our earth-worshipping Left dream lived in “harmony” with nature. (snip)

        … like pre-colonialism Tasmanian Aborigines, who for some bizarre reason gave up fishing 4000 years ago, even though it often meant going hungry in winter.

        Or like people living in parts of Nigeria who won’t feed their growing children meat or eggs for fear the spirits will make them grow evil.

        Or like the Kiriwina Islanders, who banned pregnant women from eating bananas and mangoes – the kinds of foods they needed most. (snip)

        … these modern primitives… have said gas, coal, oil and nuclear power are all taboo. Sins against nature. (snip)

        This is a back-to-the caves primitivism, driven not by reason but the latest earth-worshipping faith. Nothing these people say makes sense. (snip)

        … even if Australia did get rid of all its coal, gas and oil, the difference we’d make to the climate is about zero – but the difference we’d make to our lives would be the true catastrophe.

        Well done! These climate primitives are impoverishing us to satisfy their own superstitions in the form of computer models that fail work when applied retroactively.

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    • #
      jelly34

      Are people who believe this crap,born this way or are they taught how to be”Stupid?”Nobody can be this”Stupid”naturally.Really?????????

      40

  • #
    AndyHce

    “The fact of the matter is climate change is battering our economy.”

    Climate change in their reference frame is model and ideology, and the above statement is true — because of the horrendous waste of treasure dedicated to that fantasy.

    351

    • #
      b.nice

      In reality , its the climate change agenda, that is battering our economy.

      All the continual junk science, and the idiotic unreliables, and other response such as unreliable subsidies, mandates etc, ..

      …. all the actions to combat totally natural climate variability..

      .. these are the things that are having such a huge detrimental effect on society and the economy.

      511

  • #
    Kalm Keith

    That graph above is proof that the modern idea about money is that you no longer need to “earn” it, our controllers can spend as much as they like by borrowing from some future fund and then inflating away the damage.

    They’ve even given it a techy new name;

    “Quantitative Easing”. Wow.

    Back at ground level Antoine outlines the gluttony;

    https://joannenova.com.au/2022/06/cold-snaps-and-blistering-electricity-prices-downunder-where-one-state-burnt-2-4b-in-electricity-in-may/#comment-2556605

    “Government” now consists of two elements; rorting and looting.

    The last few posts have been extraordinary in that they have highlighted significant aspects of the collapse of society which is now in full train: teetering on the brink.

    This can’t continue, but restoring sanity to this broken world is a long way off.

    KK

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    • #
      Kalm Keith

      The only way out of this crisis is to re-establish the importance and necessity of demanding the truth.

      At the moment Truth is under attack and must not be allowed to raise its head above the constant false messaging from the UNIPCCC, THE WHO, our ABCCCC, 97% of journalists and most formerly democratic parliaments. As Antoine illustrates in the post linked above, truthtellers will be “put down”.

      The Truth, as I see it, is that the driving force behind the Global Warming and Death by incineration due to CO2 levels meme, is Not true.

      The only way of turning the current madness around is to establish the truth of the science and then act on it.

      The Truth is;

      That CO2 does not, cannot and will never cause or facilitate an increase in atmospheric temperature above what is created by the effect of that day’s ration of Incoming Solar Energy.

      There is No mechanism by which CO2 could “heat” the atmosphere and even if such a mechanism existed the other “truth” is that CO2 is a thermodynamic, quantitative irrelevance in the atmosphere.

      Let’s demand that our Parliaments seek out and act on that truth for without it we are doomed to perpetual domination by the the WEF type Elites and their lackeys.

      KK

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    • #
      Binny Pegler

      If you look at the graph, you can see the ‘Obama printing press’ Then Trump putting the brakes on. Then Biden ‘car jacks’ and slams the heel of his hand on the nitro button.

      141

    • #
      Bozotheclown

      Two party system: the Rorts and the Loots.

      I see it so clearly now!

      20

  • #
    a+happy+little+debunker

    Not completely wrong, but also not at all correct.

    The critical reason why ‘climate change’ is a major contributor to inflationary pressures are the collective policy responses by Western Governments.

    The Western World is literally making energy more expensive (& unreliable) … Which then flows into every other sector of the economy.

    Making energy costs even more expensive will make these problems worse, not better.

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    • #
      Muzza

      …… And are trying to add untold EVs and electric domestic appliances to a grid teetering on the brink………….

      221

  • #
    Dave in the States

    Climate Change Climate Change Action causes inflation.

    There, fixed it for ya.

    391

  • #
    John Hultquist

    There are two concepts:
    a. inflation, and
    b. cost increase

    The first is caused by governments pumping money into the economy — think USA’s covid panic payments.
    The second can be any number of things such as fire damage at your local gasoline refinery, or a cool/wet/windy flowering season and the fruit trees don’t get pollinated. Fewer apples and the prices go up.

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    • #
      Tel

      That’s not quite right.

      If you have a bad season for apples (i.e. supply shortage) then the price of apples goes up, but not the price of everything else. The point being that the family who pays extra to buy the apples now has less money to spend on other things, thus they don’t buy any bananas. The family who decides those apples are too expensive will then substitute and buy more bananas.

      When you see prices going up right across the economy, it can only be caused by more money pumping, because people are paying those higher prices with money from somewhere.

      That said, there is always a delay between monetary-inflation and the resulting price-inflation. Whoever gets the newly printed money early will be able to spend it ahead of the price hikes and get more value out of it. As the prices adapt to the new money, whoever is further down the chain ends up bearing the brunt in real terms. That’s why the people printing the money will use any political trick they can think of to pretend what they are doing has no long term effects … they want to keep doing it!

      211

  • #
    MrGrimNasty

    It’s old hat now but that Spanish study found that each “green” megawatt installed destroyed 5.3 jobs elsewhere in the economy, and every
    new green job destroyed 2.2 jobs.
    The leverage and the cheap reliable energy that fossil fuels provide is the origin of our economic prosperity.
    You can’t replace that with something costing, conservatively, 6 to 8 times as much, and not expect seriously adverse consequences.

    401

  • #
    David Maddison

    Someone once compiled a list of hundreds of things that have been blamed on “Climate Change(TM)” but I cannot find it with either the censored search engine Google or the minimally censored DuckDuckGo. This could have been added to the list.

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  • #
    David Maddison

    The wonderful thing about the Climate Change(TM) scam is that it is an all-purpose reason to blame for any supposed deficiency that demands to be “corrected” by either:

    – more expenditure of taxpayer dollars,
    – more government control
    – more censorship
    – less freedom
    – more removal of individual rights.

    202

    • #
      Lawrie

      I do believe that the more the idiots blame climate change for everything from fewer frogs to drifting sand the less anyone is listening. The people don’t care because they have bigger problems to deal with than the ramblings of fools. Cold weather across the South East and expensive electricity combined with vaccine mandates for some at the same time there are worker shortages and people are expected to worry about warming that is not happening. The climate clowns are becoming desperate and the more desperate they become the more ridiculous their statements. We always said here that the colder it got the more people would wake up to the scam. Throw in dear food and we have the perfect recipe for some common sense.

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    • #
      John Hultquist

      Just seeing if this works:

      Schist™

      With “Windows”, press Alt key and keep it down while typing 0153.

      20

    • #
      jelly34

      And that is why our government and the politicians love it,David.

      00

  • #
    David Maddison

    Inflation is primarily caused by the Government printing money.

    It is a zero sum gain, like diluting milk.

    It may help some people in certain circumstances such as borrowers because if the loan was established before inflation, what has to be repaid back is worth less than what was borrowed. (That’s how people made money in real estate in the 1980’s and ’90’s.)

    But in general, since no wealth is created and the same product or service costs more dollars, it is a zero sum game as stated above. Ultimately the deficiency created by inflation (less purchasing power etc.) is ultimately stolen from the personal wealth (investments, cash, homes) of regular people.

    162

  • #
    robert rosicka

    It truly is a miracle gas , is there nothing it can’t do.

    131

    • #
      Honk R Smith

      Yes … significantly raise the average surface temperature of the Earth.

      181

    • #
      el+gordo

      Some people think its a bigger greenhouse gas than H2O.

      “…limiting the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ability to regulate carbon dioxide, the most prevalent greenhouse gas causing global warming.”

      70

  • #
    John Watt

    Maybe they have tapped into more flummery from Tim Flannery! How long do we have to wait for “our ABC” to get this guy back in to explain the basis for his infamous “no more rain” waffle?

    111

    • #
      YallaYPoora Kid

      He allegedly has gone into retirement from the public arena – now gone back to his roots at Australia Museum where he should not have come out of to make suck a fool of himself.

      92

      • #
        David Maddison

        Now he is using the Museum as a vehicle to pedal his propaganda to children.

        Unlike real scientists or real journalists (not that there are many of those) the kids won’t ask any difficult questions.

        https://australian.museum/learn/climate-change/

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        • #
          David Maddison

          Climate change is a crisis that threatens our life-support systems. Humans have created the crisis and we have the skills and solutions to turn it around. We can better care for nature, each other and ourselves.

          51

  • #
    Neville

    Thanks again Jo for trying to make us THINK, but it’s a hell of a big task.
    I remember posts from a year or more ago where you estimated global spending ( actually wasted) on their so called climate change mitigation to be 1 to 2 trillion $ a year?
    Most of this money was sourced and wasted from the poor OECD countries’ taxpayers who’ve had to suffer the cost while wealthy elites and grubby banks etc have made trillions $ on their so called mitigation investments.
    The trouble is that we Aussies have just elected a disastrous new government who’ll only make things a lot worse for the poor and elderly for the next 3 years.

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    • #
      PeterPetrum

      As one of the “elderly” living at the top of the Blue Mountains I’m not looking forward to the next three years, and beyond, all that much.

      81

    • #
      jelly34

      And just think Neville.WE are stuck with the most inept bunch of cretins this country has EVER seen,for the next three years.And,because of OUR politicians FIDDLING with the voting system(so that they could make it more difficult to be voted out)this allowed one third of us to install these cretins.This must change……..

      00

  • #
    YallaYPoora Kid

    He allegedly has gone into retirement from the public arena – now gone back to his roots at Australia Museum where he should not have come out of to make such a fool of himself.

    42

  • #
    David Maddison

    There being no genuine crises of the type the Left and their useful idiots are promoting (i.e. Climate Change(TM) and covid) they have to invent new ones.

    In fact the very real Existential Crisis we all face, including the Left, is the destruction of Western Civilisation caused by the lies and destructive policies of the Left.

    Apart from other invented crises, there is now also a war against meat. Notice the increasing propaganda against meat and the supposed Climate Change(TM) caused by cattle and in favour of entomophagy, eating insects?

    They are trying to revert we non-Elites back into hunter-gatherers.

    See video: “Rising Meat Prices, the Anti-Meat Agenda, And Why They Want You to Eat Bufs”.

    https://youtu.be/YHrajgXMmQg 11 min 21 sec

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  • #
    DLK

    actually, climate change does cause inflation.

    that’s because:
    renewable energy causes massive increase in electricity prices=>
    massive price rises in goods and services that use electricity (basically everything).

    113

    • #
      David Maddison

      Unreliables cause cost increases, but that is distinct from the debasement of currency caused when the Government prints money which is behind most inflation, especially in the US under the Biden regime.

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    • #
      Mike Jonas

      DLK – What you have just described is not inflation caused by climate change. You described inflation caused by renewables. Very different. And very accurate.

      121

    • #
      Gerry

      It’s inflation caused by Climate Change Policy ….not Climate Change…… just as lockdowns weren’t caused by COVID but by Policies directed at COVID …..h/t Rowan Dean ….

      30

  • #
    David Maddison

    Ludwig von Mises discusses why inflation and credit expansion is bad, in an essay written in 1940.

    https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/inflation-credit-expansion

    III. INFLATION AND CREDIT EXPANSION

    71

  • #
    Clem Cadiddlehopper

    Rising sea levels will be nothing to worry about soon as the doomsday cultists start drowning in their own B*****, oops, please excuse my French.

    30

  • #
    Grant Boydell

    The use of cost as a measure of weather disaster impact is deeply flawed.
    If a 180km/h cyclone hit an island in 1922 and some houses were knocked down and some trees were uprooted, the “cost” is trivial (millions perhaps, even in real terms). And several hundred people killed
    If a 150km/h cyclone hit an island in 2022, it would knock down many more houses, uproot some trees, make the landing strips unusable, overflow the reservoir, knockout the communications towers, destroy the school, flood the roads. But few people killed as the locals went to the hurricane shelter.
    Yes, that hurricane in 2022 certainly cost more. but was it worse?

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    • #
      Ross

      Which is precisely what realists like Bjorn Lombourg and Roger Pielke point out on a regular basis. Even in Australia, anyone with a memory slightly better than a goldfish knows bushfires aren’t getting worse. They’e cyclic and when they hit after the forests have been poorly mismanaged there’s mores stuff that’s in the way and gets destroyed. If you think its bad in Australia, California is much worse with their population at least double ours, all tucked into mostly the southern part of the state.

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  • #
    Mike Jonas

    How many times do they have to jump the shark before they are seen to jump the shark.

    NB. No ‘?’ on the above question because it’s a rhetorical question. The answer is the same as the answer to
    How many times do climate models have to fail before they are seen to fail.
    and many other similar questions,

    102

    • #
      el+gordo

      They are clutching at straws.

      “Sure, the pandemic and war on Ukraine are part of it, but I think this is a teachable moment that will allow people to see just how pervasive climate change is in affecting the way we live”, says Keefe.

      33

  • #
    David Maddison

    How do we get back to the original claim in the flawed hypothesis that CO2 (from any source) causes “global warming”?

    Things have gone too far, and I don’t think there is any going back.

    President Trump tried, but look how that ended for him.

    Obviously the real agenda has nothing to do with science or truth but the destruction of Western Civilisation.

    Destroyers of civilisation know that energy is a fundamental input into civilisation.

    And so is a stable food supply. You watch – the next lines of attack, already started, will be against the food supply. Examples, banning fertilizer in Sri Lanka, water restrictions in California and Australia, false claims that cattle cause global warming, promotion of the eating of bugs for non-Elites, etc..

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    • #
      Ross

      I followed a very good scientist on social media. His specialty was climate “science”. But his views were too realistic and he got kicked off several platforms. He had a theory that we needed evolutionary change within climate science “academia” and advisors. That we needed a new crop of “scientists” to enter the field and look at the data with new eyes and say. ” Hang on a second, those models are all crap, the predictions are all wrong and besides, the radiative theory of atmospheric CO2 warming doesn’t have a lot of merit”. So we need to get rid of Mann, Trembath, Hansen, Karoly or they will retire, hopefully never to be heard of again. If, as projected, the world actually does cool for the next 10 years, that might be possible.

      71

      • #
        Binny Pegler

        What your talking about is the old ‘science advances one funeral at a time’ story. Once someone become a leader in their field, they block any questioning/change of their view of things. So that the ‘field’ doesn’t really get reviewed until after they’ve gone. With Climate ‘science’ being a new field the leader bar was very low. Anyone who took it up in the 90s became a ‘leader’ by default.

        80

  • #
    Bruce

    Gaia strikes!

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKUz5Vjq9-s

    And, does so with monotonous regularity.

    Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does NOT go away.

    71

    • #
      DLK

      the eruption ejected massive amounts of sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere, which reduced the solar radiation reaching the Earth’s surface and cooled the atmosphere for several years… Volcanic winter of 536

      wait a minute.
      we all know there is a blanket of c02 that wraps snugly around the earth and keeps it warm.
      so even if the sun were to be blocked out by volcanic aerosols the co2 blanket would keep the earth warm.
      whereas your link contains the preposterous observation that a dimming of the sun led to an immediate cooling.
      this is inconsistent with the well-known theory that co2 is the Earth temperature control knob.
      observations inconsistent with well-known theory must be rejected.
      i therefore dismiss your link.
      /sarc.

      70

  • #
    el+gordo

    The death toll is decreasing because of cyclone shelters and early warnings.

    ‘The decrease in death rates can be attributed in part to significant improvements in early warning systems around the world, with the total number of deaths decreasing by more than half between 1970 and 2019.’ (Forbes)

    So they’ll say these events are happening more often with global warming and the insurance bill is inflationary.

    40

  • #
    RickWill

    I wonder what happened to the FRED money supply when it turned down in 2016?

    Whatever it was, it was the first time in a long time that the money base went backwards. USA was even heading to live within its means rather than leeching off the rest of the world.

    Countries now need RUB to purchase their energy needs and that is making the RUB more precious:
    https://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=RUB&to=USD

    30

  • #
    Neville

    Why do we live in such a crazy world today?
    Climate change is no different now than it was in earlier periods, but we are so much safer today compared to all other periods in the last 200,000 years. And our Human population today is many times higher than earlier periods and yet fewer people die from extreme weather events.
    But today our tertiary educated (?) elites can’t even provide us with the “definition of a woman”. This includes a top USA judge appointee, an Aussie chief health officer, a number of people who’ve been asked this very simple question in the Aussie Senate recently etc.
    But I’m sure everyone knows other prominent examples. Here’s my definition….. A woman and a man love one another and after their union the woman can become pregnant and carries the baby for 9 months and then hopefully has a successful birth of a healthy new born.
    Or a shorter version…. the woman provides the eggs and the man provides the sperm and their union can result in a healthy baby.
    What’s so difficult about the definition of a woman and why are so many tertiary educated (?) people so afraid to state the bloody obvious?

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    • #
      PeterPetrum

      Because a man can become a woman – dontcha know. And then everything you (correctly) stated above becomes null and void.

      40

    • #
      Mike Jonas

      I have done a lot of research on my family tree, and one of the patterns that emerges – without exception – is that every one of my ancestors has no more than two known parents, and when two are known then one is a man and one is a woman.

      70

  • #
    ozfred

    “Quick, put on more solar panels….!”

    I support the idea that earth’s climate responds to the energy it receives from the sun more than anything else. I also support that prices will always go up over time, whether the rate is influenced to be higher by government action or not.

    If you are a home owner and not well over your head in debt, you would be a financial idiot if you did not install solar panels on your roof to the extent that the roof and government regulations allow. Current technology means that they will generate power for far more than ten years in reasonable quantities. And the above mentioned price increases will ensure a satisfactory return on your investment independently of whether the “grid” pays you for your excess generation or not. Alas, to justify home level battery installations would require “special situations” at current price levels.
    Grid level solar farms are a far different proposition. The conditions may have changed in five years time, when the schemes to power Singapore from Australia will have commenced/succeeded (or not).

    41

    • #
      RickWill

      home level battery installations would require “special situations” at current price levels

      There are two things that I expect will be on the subsidy agenda very soon. Double glazing and household batteries.

      Victorians still get a good slice of the capital of solar installations paid for.

      Current solar panels were made with last year’s coal and have not yet inflated the same way as everything else; but they will

      There is a simple engineering fact – grid scale wind and solar offer little to no benefit of scale. They can benefit from siting but the cost of transmission will more than negate that benefit. Ultimately it will be lower cost to have solar at home anywhere on mainland Australia than buy electrical energy from the grid.

      If you live under a roof and not doing something about putting solar panels on it you will be constantly disappointed that there is no sensible politician. I learnt a long time ago that politicians were there to feather their own nest.

      .

      40

      • #
        RickWill

        I asked the question – double glazing is already subsidised to some degree in Victoria:
        https://www.victorianenergysaver.vic.gov.au/save-energy-and-money/victorian-energy-upgrades/save-with-these-energy-efficient-products/glazing

        Does anyone know the level of rebate?

        30

        • #
          ozfred

          In the early 1970s, I purchased a 1890s house in the USA. First thing I did was add storm windows, effectively converting all the windows to double glazing.
          This would be massively cheaper than replacing existing windows with “modern” double glazing. Why are these not a “thing” in Australia? And they are “low visual impact”.
          https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/storm-windows

          30

        • #
          Gerry

          I looked the link up …. The accredited providers for double glazing in my area NE Melbourne – one doesn’t provide double glazing to home residents and the other only provides it for people with timber frames …I’ve got a basic 3br bv with aluminium frames ….. so that’s working fine !

          Let’s tick off a double glazing policy so that we can say it’s done but make it inaccessible to many/most

          20

      • #
        Honk R Smith

        Government subsidizes to make up for economic unviability, until reality eats your cookie.

        Serious question though …
        what happens if your roof is covered in solar panels and you get a leak?
        Does the gubmint help you pay for removal and replacement of said panels to facilitate roof repair?
        It is my experience that roof science, even in this Space Age (wait, is it still a Space Age), has lots of holes. 🙂

        Plus, how heavy are the things?
        Doe gubmint subsidize roof buttressing?
        Or is structural integrity also now aspirational?

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        James Murphy

        What if one cannot install solar panels because they live in an apartment, or in a building with a roof area not amenable to solar panel installation…?
        I guess they have to just live with the skyrocketing electricity prices while continuing to subsidise those who do have the space to install panels…? Or maybe they should just move?

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      • #
        Philip

        If you live under a roof and not doing something about putting solar panels on it you will be constantly disappointed that there is no sensible politician

        The 8 panels on our roof produce electricity from 9-12am. They are shaded by trees greens will not let us cut down. This is useless production, electricity i snot used during these hours in our household. Even if you are at home you are not using electricity in those hours. IT made us about $100/yr. Therefore we disconnected it because we wanted the wall space the inverter took up on the wall.

        Solar is just not suitable for many places. To plan it as a way out for the home owner is terribly simplistic.

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    Serge Wright

    The transition to RE energy is not about CC but about imposing control.Proof is now announced by Germany, who have doubled down on the banning of coal and nuclear are are bringing in laws to restrict energy usage by 10% per household and as we know, once the public have been conditioned, then the restrictions will keep increasing to 20% and beyond. We can expect the same policy down here and it might happen faster than we think.

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      Ross

      Then, meanwhile in Germany the locals have gone “Mein gott” when they’ve received their power bills and are now converting some of their heating back to wood fired. So, that there are reports that woodlands are now being cut down for firewood. I suspect the same might apply here also, like you. Those able, might be replacing gas with Coonaras.

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      David Maddison

      I have no doubt about electricity rationing. Smart meters enable that. As soon as you have used yiur monthly, weekly or daily quota of kWh of electricity, you will be disconnected until the start of the next quota period.

      And the use of cash decreased dramatically during the plandemic. This conditioned everyone to do what few remaining cash transactions they did, with digital transactions (credit card, direct funds transfer, etc.).

      With all transactions digital, this enables everyone to be traced and tracked and your purchases monitored and rationing applied to them as well. E.g. you reach your monthly quota of meat, and further purchases will be banned but you’ll be offered a kilo of insects instead.

      Want to catch your own meat? The means to do that in Australia is already highly restricted due to restrictions on hunting locations and over-restrictive firearm laws. Want to share hunted meat? Nope. In Victoria (the most dictatorial state in Australia) the Labor regime wants to or already has prohibited hunters from sharing their meat with others (not a joke!).

      https://www.weeklytimesnow.com.au/news/labor-bans-hunters-from-sharing-game-meat/news-story/870f0bdad3fc246039206370c0f16f1d

      Labor bans hunters from sharing game meat

      Victorian hunters will be banned from sharing their kills with friends and neighbours, with one MP saying “these city centric people haven’t thought this through”.

      June 10, 2022 – 11:39AM

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      • #
        ozfred

        I suspect your farmer friends would also find it would be illegal to kill, butcher and sell any of their live stock….

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      • #
        b.nice

        Would be fun trying to enforce that little bit of stupidity !

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      • #
        jelly34

        David,this has all been planned by Klaus Schwab and the WEF.Greg Hunt and ScoMo and a number of other members of government have been quietly instigating his policies for some time(like around little johnny howards time)These people are evil and dangerous and must be nullified.

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    Zane

    Albo knows how to solve inflation. Give everyone a pay rise. Simple. 😄

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      James Murphy

      the extreme Left in France have run their legislative election campaign on a 15% increase in the minimum wage. the first round of voting happened today (Sunday).
      With high inflation, those on the minimum wage are quickly affected by inflation, but I struggle to see how increasing the rate will make anything better long term.

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    mwhite

    And here’s me thinking that it was the fault of adding trillions to the global money supply by printing it.
    Note – You can’t print wealth, that has to be created.
    Shutting down the global economy for two years didn’t help either.

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      David Maddison

      You mean, what the South African finance minister said wasn’t true?

      https://newspunch.com/south-africa-print-money-rich/

      “South Africans are continuing to be poor when we can print more money to ensure that everybody has it. Our people are poor because there is a shortage of money in the country. It’s not the shortage of jobs that makes people poor, it is the shortage of money. We have paper and ink, so we will print more money and give it to the poor, and make all of them billionaires if that is possible.” Nene said.

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    another ian

    Did you ever have a lemon vehicle to beat this”

    “Saturday Snippet: The Curse of Christine”

    https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2022/06/saturday-snippet-curse-of-christine.html

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    • #
      PeterPetrum

      Well written and very funny. Thanks.

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    • #
      Hanrahan

      Just sounds like a bit worse than average yank tank of the vintage. The US was ripe for the picking for the Japanese.

      Much the same here. I am old enough to know a VW salesman working at the time the Mazda 1500 shipped. He didn’t understand why their resale was sooo much higher than his gutless beetle. I did.

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  • #

    The interpretation of the FRED Money Supply Graph in the article is completely misleading.

    There was minimal money supply growth in the 1970s and 1980s but with high inflation/stagflation. So how come?

    There has been a heck of a lot of money printing since the GFC in 2008 and there was NO inflation until recently. So how come?

    This recent inflation is being caused by supply side issues (The Virus Lockdowns, killing of Small Business, Red tape, Green tape and Multi-coloured tape) and not demand side issues. Raising the interest rate will not fix this inflation problem the way that Central Banks want it to. It will fix inflation but at the cost of wrecking the Economy with a Recession/Depression and millions of people will be out of work and having lost their Homes. Nice work Central Bankers and Policy Wonks.

    Fix the supply side issues first. That means allowing the unvaccinated to work and allowing Energy Companies to get on with their work. No more “Ruinables” and then build more Power Stations powered by coal, gas and in time hopefully nuclear.

    QED (Quite Easily Done)

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    • #

      John, go to St Louis Fed Reserve. Adjust the years used. Look for growth in money base from 1930 – 1970. You’ll find it.

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      • #
        Tel

        Many of the charts have been discontinued, ensuring no direct comparison between 20th Century and 21st Century.

        https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=QuDQ

        That one, for example, shows sharp growth of the monetary base during the war, then a flat period in the 1950’s and 1960’s followed by exponential growth (straight line on a log scale) from about 1970 to 1995, then easing a bit after that. There were no big monetary dumps like we saw in October 2008 and again in March 2020. It’s worth noting that back in the 1970’s the Federal Reserve strictly involved itself with monetary policy … no longer true anymore.

        In 2009 they started the Large-Scale Asset Repurchase Program (LSAP), and the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and a bunch of similar programs, where they simply broke the law and used a financial emergency as the excuse. The Fed has never been allowed to purchase arbitrary assets … especially not high risk assets, because of the massive moral hazard and opportunity for corruption that entails.

        To get around the law, they created a series of convenient legal fictions known as “Special Purpose Vehicles” and then loaned money to the SPV which would then buy all sorts of assets, way outside the scope of what a central bank is allowed to buy. The Fed then reports a bunch of IOU notes written by the same SPV’s they themselves created (as if these were reserves) and the Fed pretends not to have any risky assets in their balance sheet. Clear as mud? That’s the whole idea. In many cases they convinced the panicked US Treasury to sign off on also throwing money into these SPV’s, meaning the US Treasury then increases total government debt and sells its own IOU notes to the Fed (indirectly via a bunch of middle-men).

        Since there is no way to actually audit where the money got spent, no one has any idea how much got into the general economy and which assets were purchased.

        https://www.gao.gov/assets/a321522.html

        That report gives a rough idea, it’s from 2011 although a lot of the SPV entities are still operating and started purchasing even more assets after the 2020 fiasco.

        Other things that started happening were paying interest on reserves, which resulted in a huge jump in the amount of money the banks parked at the Fed as reserves. Yes, in effect the central bank loaned out money to the banks and then paid them NOT to make loans with that money … so the banks then handed it back to the central bank as reserves in order to collect the interest. More recently, under the cover of COVID the Fed simply abandoned all reserve requirements entirely, then discontinued the series where they report the excess reserves.

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        • #
          Tel

          Everything piled on one graph, with the various monetary totals (M2, Base money, bank reserves and Excess reserves) all on the left hand log scale.

          https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=QxeC

          Right hand axis is producer price index (i.e. broad basket of commodity prices, including oil, Gold, Silver, many other metals, and basic foods) percent change from a year ago, compared with 10 year treasury interest rates … that being a good general indicator of USD cash investments.

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    b.nice

    Oh dear, what a pity. 🙂

    Poor unreliables scammers are having trouble getting enough batteries.

    https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2022/06/12/battery-shortage-is-affecting-u-s-energy-drive-to-replace-fossil-fuels-with-other-sources/

    Seriously, have these muppets done the sum on how many batteries would be needed to have any significant effect !

    After all, they don’t actually produce electricity, y’know !

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  • #
    RicDre

    “Climate change causes inflation now too.”

    Well, maybe in Australia, but here in the US it is caused by “’banana Republicans’ and the events of January 6, 2021”

    Larry Summers Blames ‘Banana Republicans,’ January 6 for Inflation

    https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2022/06/12/larry-summers-blames-banana-republicans-january-6-for-inflation/

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  • #
    another ian

    Questioning that inflation assumption

    “Ukraine Has LOST, And So Have We”

    https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=246101

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    • #
      OldOzzie

      At the same time the so-called Russian Sanctions have blown up spectacularly in the western world’s face. Russia now has a stronger currency than it did before the war we instigated began. Oil and Natural Gas, never mind things like fertilizer, are nice and expensive which suits Putin just fine. He has negotiated long term interchange with China for both and is building out the capacity to wildly increase same. Europe is f@cked down the road as a result and in the meantime they got nothing for all these “sanctions.”

      For that matter so are we. We’ve sequestered our inflationary deficit spending overseas via the China/US (and other nations, including India) trade deficit for the last two decades. That’s over and will never come back because none of the nations that we were doing it with have any reason to allow it ever again and they don’t need to. Not a single member of the Fed or other “economic punditry” has said one word about this although I sure as Hell have.

      At the same time Russia is shipping oil to these nations who then cross-ship it back, some refined first, and there’s absolutely no way to do anything about that since we’re incapable of sanctioning either without instantly detonating our supply chains, offshored labor or both. As a result we can no longer spend in deficit without it reflecting back into inflation which means the “free ride” gave has been terminated and while this was always eventually going to end we did this to ourselves and thus the inflation you’re seeing and will continue to see was and is caused directly by our policies and our government.

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  • #
    OldOzzie

    Biden’s Food And Fuel Crisis — It’s The Policy, Stupid

    The only thing standing in the way of that, invariably, is your government. In the case of the U.S., the Biden Junta has done everything possible to ensure that not only would gas prices rise to a completely unacceptable level, but that they would stay there until what’s left of the middle class is left broke and out of gas by the side of the road.

    A couple of months ago there was a little announcement that the Biden administration would raise the cap on ethanol blending into gasoline stocks beyond the 10% limit in order to alleviate the ‘gas shortage.’

    On the surface that idea made a kind of simplistic sense, along with the releases from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, if we were no longer going to buy crude oil from the Russians.

    But, there’s only one problem with that, namely there isn’t enough ethanol to blend into the gas. Oh, and that SPR release? It all went to Europe while prices rose here.

    Moreover, that same fuel needed to produce nitrogen fertilizer which is needed to produce the corn is part of the same supply shortage that we’re supposedly trying to help overcome.

    We’ve been trained to laugh at such profound government ineptitude. But this is no laughing matter. They are the ones laughing at us for thinking they are just stupid.

    They aren’t stupid, well, except for Elizabeth Warren.

    Lastly, it takes more energy to produce the fertilizer to grow the corn to convert to ethanol to blend into the gasoline than it takes to just crack the crude oil in the first place, put it on a truck and deliver it to the corner gas station.

    There is this thing called the Gibb’s Free Energy equation, and it’s kinda important.

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    OldOzzie

    Dutch gov’t angers farmers with ’emission’ mandates that will put many out of business

    The Dutch government unveiled goals Friday to drastically reduce emissions of nitrogen oxides to protect the environment, a plan that would lead to major upheavals in the Netherlands’ multibillion dollar agriculture industry and has already angered some farmers.

    Calling it an “unavoidable transition,” the government mandated reductions in emissions of up to 70% in many places close to protected nature areas and as high as 95% in other places.

    The ruling coalition earmarked an extra 24.3 billion euros ($25.6 billion) to finance changes that will likely make many farmers drastically reduce their number of livestock or to get rid of them altogether.

    Farming is a key sector in the Dutch economy, with exports worth nearly 105 billion euros last year. But it comes at a cost of producing of polluting gases, despite farmers taking steps to reduce emissions.

    Prime Minister Mark Rutte conceded that the plan would hit many farmers hard.

    “Of course, it has enormous consequences. I understand that, and it is simply terrible,” Rutte said. “And especially if they are businesses handed down in the family who want to proudly continue.”

    Comment: It seems those in power in the Netherlands haven’t learnt (or don’t care to) from the grave errors made by those in Sri Lanka: Sri Lanka economic crisis: Shoot on sight order issued against protesters as troops deployed in Colombo

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    • #
      Zane

      Rutte is a cookie cutter globalist tool.

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      Tombstone Gabby

      Thank you for the link to ‘Colombo’, Sri Lanka, at SOTT. I just spent over an hour looking at their presentation of world-wide news. Yup, I bookmarked it, for daily viewing.

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    DLK

    Dutch gov’t angers farmers with ’emission’ mandates that will put many out of business

    eat the bugs!!!

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    RoHa

    It’s climate change now?

    I thought it was Biden.

    Or the Russians.

    Or bankers or something.

    Nice to know it’s just more climate change.

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    OldOzzie

    Pitchforks soon in Europe?

    their war

    European leaders crave for their war, so they can´t think of a better way to provoke it than by applying ever larger and ´meaner´ sanctions on Russia as if (a) sanctions were effective and (b) as if Europe could win such war (not).

    Accordingly, we now have yet another set of spanking new EU “sanctions” in package No. 6 that will eventually backfire flat on Europe´s face – like all the others — such as banning the insurance and financing of oil tankers that carry Russian oil.

    Accordingly, the EU is now trying its very best to

    (1) bankrupt the successful Western oil tanker insurance business by reducing the number of participants

    (2) induce higher shipping and insurance costs worldwide by reducing the number of participants

    (3) foster the development of yet another Russian import substitution service namely oil tanker insurance & financing

    (4) seriously hinder the world´s economy by not allowing deliveries of any oil tankers carrying Russian oil anywhere (EU or non-EU) thus cutting off some 15% of the world´s oil supply from the world market and necessarily sending its price yet higher with yet more EU-induced inflation as if we had not had enough already, please brace for it.

    (5) force the construction of a new Russian-Chinese-Indian oil tanker fleet leaving idle part of today´s fleet

    (6) tempt Russia to embargo strategic value-chain upstream items with captive consumers cascading into multiple failures thru lack of nat-gas, rare earths, inert gases, potash, sulfur, uranium, palladium, vanadium, cobalt, coke, etc.

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      Yes, yes, yes.In a time when energy source and ensuring strategic semi-conductors is essential, Europe has dug itself into a hole that will affect the livelihood of 800 million cits. From the above links:

      “The real ultimate EU problem is ´negotiating´ from a position of extreme weakness it has dug itself into and should have always avoided. But at the same time, Europe cannot be anywhere independent from Russia. So the above will affect current and future European production of fuels to fertilizers and everything in between, from kerosene to diesel to gasoline affecting cars, trucks, buses, plastics, pesticides, agricultural, mining and industrial machinery, foodstuffs, water quality and availability, pharmaceuticals, ships, inks, airplanes, polymers, medical and industrial gases, sealing rings & membranes, power transmission, transformer and lube oils, etc.”

      What are they doing – more significant than what they are saying? Words-prevarication happens. Climate Change scare tactics from UN Brett Eclund initiated Sustainability Program -> Energy Poverty Re Intermittent technology -> food poverty -> constraints on learning via censorship-> dark Ages -> o–//

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      another ian

      Aha but!

      When Russian oil is massaged through an Indian refinery it isn’t Russian oil

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    kentlfc

    I used to read The Guardian articles for a good laugh….now they’re just outright insane!

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