Recent Posts


On fire! Australian opposition throws down the nuclear gauntlet in the Energy Wars: “No more large scale renewables”

By Jo Nova

The Renewable Crash Test Dummy hits a fork in the road

Finally the Australian opposition is bravely popping the sacred cow of the Energy Wars. The Dummy nation was aiming for the holy grail “low emission” grid that no other nation had tried. The driest continent on Earth, with small hydro, and no extension cords to any nuclear power, were going to build the perfect grid based on the wind and sun alone. It was always doomed to fail, it was just a question of how much money would be burned at the pyre before the Crash Test Dummy crashed.

Because they didn’t do their homework, and the fan-media didn’t ask them to, the Labor Party set themselves up to fail. They left their left flank wide open, and the Opposition is finally launching the missiles that have been there all along in the mist. The ultimate low-emissions generator was always and obviously the unspeakable nuclear power. It’s a fifty year old technology. If anyone actually cared about carbon dioxide, they would have done this instead of the Kyoto scheme in 1997. But it was all a theater of grift and graft for unreliable, fairy energy, […]

Wednesday

10 out of 10 based on 10 ratings

Not the Transition they expected: People paying thousands more for second hand petrol cars rather than equivalent used EVs

By Jo Nova

The cost problem is solved (for all the wrong reasons), but it’s still not enough

Around the world, governments are trying to force people to buy electric vehicles because they are nice people who are worried about polar bears. And since drivers out there all believe in climate change, according to all the pollsters, it shouldn’t be a big ask. (Who wouldn’t want to save the Earth?)

Supposedly, just 10 years from now, they told us, we wouldn’t be able to buy a new combustion engine car at all. Instead, not only are sales of new EV slowing rapidly, to the point where there is a glut, but as prices fall for used cars customers are not rushing out to pick up the cheaper second hand EVs either.

Look at how fast the turnaround in this market has been in the last year — a 25% price premium– gone:

Used EVs are now selling for thousands of dollars less, on average, than comparable gas-powered vehicles.

Kaya Ginsky, CNBC

The difference between the price of a used Tesla Model 3 and BMW 3 Series shows how a “premium” associated with EVs in the […]

Tuesday

9 out of 10 based on 11 ratings

Monday

7.8 out of 10 based on 29 ratings

Sunday

8.5 out of 10 based on 27 ratings

On a bad day $20 billion in wind power across Australia can only guarantee as much power as two diesel generators

By Jo Nova

How much back-up do we need for our 11.5 gigawatt wind system? About 11.4 gigawatts.

Wind energy failed on Thursday at what must be close to a record low — with barely 88MW of production from 11,500MW of wind turbines. That’s about 0.7% of total nameplate capacity.

With construction costs running at $2 million for every theoretical megawatt of turbine, that’s $20 billion dollars of machinery sitting out there in the fields and forests of Australia producing about as much as two diesel generators.

We have 84 industrial wind plants across 5 states of Australia, and the green band below was their total contribution to our national electricity needs on Thursday — put your reading glasses on.

Anero.id

Things were even worse in Western Australia, where at the one point that afternoon when I happened to look the state’s total wind generation was minus 11MW. Some wind turbines were drawing a megawatt here and there, perhaps to keep the turbines rolling so they don’t get flat spots on bearings.

It was an attack of another climate-denying high pressure cell on Thursday. There was no place in Australia good for wind generation except (maybe) for our […]

Saturday

9.4 out of 10 based on 16 ratings

Bargain: Make the whole world “Net Zero”, spend a quadrillion dollars, and cool the world by 0.3 degrees!

By Jo Nova

The deadliest climate question: How many degrees cooler will that be?

Ask it now, ask it later, before breakfast and while watching “the news”. Teach the children to ask in kindy.

We know the IPCC wildly exaggerates, but pretend they’re right and it still doesn’t make any sense. Richard Lindzen, Will Happer, and William van Wijngaarden took the IPCC at its word and calculate that even if we get to Net Zero by 2050, will only make the world a tiny bit cooler, assuming they’re right (which they’re not) and assuming the rest of the world joins in (which they aren’t).

Say we stop all coal, oil and gas, redesign our energy grids, cull the cows, give up our holidays, our cars and ride bikes to work, fill the oceans with windmills, and turn our thermostats down. We spend a quadrillion dollars on a Moonshot to stuff a perfectly good fertilizer in holes underground, and instead of getting to the moon, the world is barely 0.28 degrees C cooler. That’s a half of one lousy Fahrenheit less that it would have been. This ladies and gentlemen is the best case scenario for the global action plan […]

Friday

10 out of 10 based on 15 ratings

Fauci’s agency approved monkeypox experiments that could create a virus with a 15% fatality rate, then hid that from Congress

By Jo Nova

We’ve reached a point of Maximal Bureaucratic Psychopathy in Science

That’s where committees of committees aim to improve your health by giving one human the ability to kill a billion.

NIAID image of Monkeypox

In 2015 a scientist at Anthony Fauci’s agency thought it would be neat to mix two Monkeypox strains together to make a nastier one. For no reason anyone can explain, the National Institutes of Health’s Institutional Review Board thought it would be neat too, and approved it.

A normal person might worry that doddery Joe Biden has the nuclear codes, but all along, unnamed, unaccountable countless others might have their fingers on equivalent bombs, and they won’t need to input any codes to set off the bombs, just have a bad day.

The idea was to mix a deadly but slow strain of monkey pox with a tamer monkey pox strain that spread quickly. This could have created a virus with the “best of both” — an agent with a 15% fatality rate and a reproduction rate of 2.4, which would make it very much “pandemic potential”. (With one infected person infecting 2.4 others, this was a similar rate of […]

Thursday

9.2 out of 10 based on 14 ratings

The Climate Wars ignited again in Australia and Labor’s best argument is just scorn and derision

By Jo Nova

Here we go again. It’s another round of the climate wars in Australia. It’s the issue that never dies, because global weather control is a stupid idea levitating on righteous indignation and a hundred billion dollars. As long as it floats, it’s the Hindenburg of National Energy Policy. It will only end when there’s nothing left to burn.

This time, the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, has said what all the grown ups already know — that the 82% renewables target by 2030 that Labor legislated is doomed and we should delay it. Two years after ignition, everyone knows the NetZero rocket is impossible. Renewable investment has ground to a halt, people are not buying EV’s, farmers don’t want the transmission lines, coastal towns don’t want the wind towers, project costs are doubling and tripling, and Florence the borer is still stuck in a short hole that is meant to be a long one. Worse, we’ve already got more solar power than the grid can handle and extra solar power is so useless we’re about to start charging people who carelessly add to the glut at lunchtime.

Peter Dutton is sadly still saying we should do “Net […]

Wednesday

9.2 out of 10 based on 17 ratings

Despite the hottest year in a hundred thousand years, Europeans voted for maligned, climate denying, far right parties

By Jo Nova

The spell is broken

Thirty years of crafting a fantasy narrative was fine while countries floated on a cloud of endless easy money, but those days are over.

Counting is still underway in the EU elections, but the Greens appear to have lost around 20 seats, shrinking from 74 seats to 53. In Germany, the Green-stranglehold of Europe, exit polls suggest the Green vote fell from 20.5% to 12%.

In a shock, Marine Le Pen’s party in France doubled Macron’s party vote achieving 30% of the vote to his 15%, whereupon Macron called an emergency election, hoping to save a few extra spots in France’s Parliament before the “Far Right” really wakes up.

The “Far-Right” of course, being any party which doubts that bicycles can stop storms:

Despite 242% of Nobel prize winning experts being certain that life on Earth will be destroyed by 2034*, climate action was not a priority for most Europeans.

 

 

Newspaper journalists though have different priorities to most voters. There go those climate ambitions…

The result comes amid a broader shift to the right and a green backlash — or “greenlash” — against policies designed to tackle […]

Tuesday

8.4 out of 10 based on 17 ratings

Monday

7.3 out of 10 based on 37 ratings

Sunday

8.6 out of 10 based on 29 ratings

Saturday

8.7 out of 10 based on 21 ratings

VW takes €60 billion out of the EV budget and puts it back into combustion cars

By Jo Nova

EV manufacturers are backing away slowly from the Great EV Debacle

The government commanded the EV bubble, but even with billions in subsidies, schemes and advertising the chemistry didn’t obey. Somehow, even with legislation, the right discoveries didn’t discover themselves on cue.

VW has decided to use one third of its EV development money to develop a better fuel car instead.

Hey, it’s only 60,000 million Euro.

VW Will Spend Billions of Its EV Development Budget on Gas Engines

By: Adrian Padeanu, Motor1.com

Of the €180 billion ($196 billion) set aside in 2023 primarily for next-generation EVs, the German brand will now use one-third to continue the development of combustion engines. The announcement comes from Arno Antlitz, the Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer at the Volkswagen Group. The company intends to spend roughly €60 billion ($65 billion) to “keep our combustion cars competitive.”

It’s a stark departure from the previous plan announced in late 2022 to build and sell only electric cars in Europe from 2033.

Only a year ago Volkswagon was confident it could build a cheaper EV. But a month ago they reported a 20 percent […]