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By Jo Nova
A “win” for predatory capitalism and government mis-interference
Liddell power station (foreground). Bayswater power station (rear).Photo NSW DPI
Yesterday, for the last time the final turbine was switched off at Liddell Coal plant after 52 years of operation. The NSW government gave it away for free in 2014 — bundled like a McHappy Meal in with the sale of Bayswater Coal, valued at $0. Governments saw old coal as worthless, at least until 2017 when everyone saw the bloodbath when the Hazelwood coal plant suddenly closed and electricity prices suddenly rose 85%. Then they started to panic a little — even Malcolm Turnbull (our Renewables lovin’ PM) started openly pressuring AGL to sell Liddell so it could keep running until his pet project the Snowy Hydro 2.0 could start. Chinese owned Alinta turned up with $250 million dollars and was willing to put in a billion to repair the station and extend its life up to 2030. Despite that bonanza, AGL refused to take the money. It was determined to run it into the ground and shut it down instead. Now it’s determined to blow it up as well. The Demolition crew is already appointed […]
By Jo Nova
People are waking up to the dark side of the Absolute Zero plan
The totalitarian wet dreams of a UK government consortium of academics are lighting up the internet. As Benny Peiser and Andrew Montford from NetZeroWatch say — people are starting to pay attention in a big way:
The realities of Net Zero are also hitting home for the general public. The threat that the project represents to livelihoods and liberties is becoming more evident by the day. Recently, the mathematician Norman Fenton tweeted an excerpt from a Government-funded report that set out what Net Zero U.K. might look like: no airports, no shipping, no beef and lamb to eat, and most food imports eliminated. Sounds grim, doesn’t it? Lots of people thought so, and the tweet went viral, garnering over three million views.
The Prof Norman Fenton thread that got 3.4 million views on Twitter is, would you believe, about a 2019 UK Government funded research report. Who knew the masses could get that excited about a 31 page prehistoric report on energy policy, but holy-cajoley: it’s a wake up call of just how savage the Absolute Zero plan aims to be. […]
By Jo Nova
Let it be known that the skeptics are, and always have been, the environment’s best friend. The Greens, sadly are the wilderness wrecking, naive minions of the Establishment Powers who will sacrifice whales in a quest to impress their industrial banker overlords. They tell themselves they are saving whales 100 years from now with the same windmills that kill the whales today.
Our good friends at Heartland and CFACT are working to stop the insanity in a guerilla campaign.
“SAVE-WHALES-STOP-WINDMILLS.ORG”.
@ClimateDepot
Conservative watchdogs highlight ‘alarming’ surge in whale deaths as wind farms grow off NY, NJ coasts
Josh Christenson, NY Post
“It’s gone from ‘Save the Whales’ to ‘Kill the Whales.’ And the green groups that have promoted Earth Day for 53 years are totally okay with this agenda.”
Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow president Craig Rucker said the push to build the wind farms comes “despite growing evidence that whales are being impacted by the preliminary sonar blasting being conducted to site windmills, as well as scores of the marine mammals washing up dead on beaches.”
Steve Milloy, a senior fellow at the […]
By Jo Nova
Why would a network axe its most popular show?
Just like that: Fox News and Tucker Carlson have “Parted Ways”. His last show was last Friday, and he did not know at the time. There’s no farewell for the top rating show in America and no replacement host, just a “rotating” generic vague fill-in show. It doesn’t look like this was planned for months in advance? Fox News stocks immediately fell 4%.
Tucker Carlson Tonight was the most watched cable news show in the US. His audience was over 3 million people in the audience every day (not to mention the rest on social media). It’s not clear why this happened but there is speculation that it’s related to the Dominion case settlement.
There is no one more influential in US media. Tucker interviews anyone he wants for as long as he wants in the most powerful nation on Earth — in the last two weeks, for example, Trump for 40 minutes, and Elon Musk for an hour (on Artificial Intelligence).
He shapes the news. If they can silence Tucker, they can silence anyone. It may define a pivot point in US history — the end of […]
By Jo Nova
Environmental wokeness has become a liability for investors
The backlash against ESG has hit bonds, stocks, corporates
In a recent survey, half of large investors in North America now admit to worrying that ESG exposes them to legal risk. When companies want to create a Green-Woke project they issue ESG bonds to get loans to build it, but sometime between last year and this year those Bonds have halved. Suddenly companies are not dressing up in the Big Green cloak. That’s $6 billion in ESG investments that didn’t happen.
The change in direction has been driven by Florida and Texas and the 19 or more states that have joined them. Even though the $2b in funds Ron De Santis pulled from BlackRock et al last year was a drop in the ocean for a $10 trillion dollar fund, it was the tip of a spear at the heart of the beast. The financial houses and asset managers were using other people’s money to force through political changes those same people didn’t want to vote for. If the crowd followed De Santis the whole game was up.
De Santis has just tightened the screws further today:
DeSantis […]
By Jo Nova
Where do people live?
These marvelous spike maps mark out a 3D representation of the population density on each two-kilometer-square pixel of Earth’s surface. There are no outlines for countries, yet for the most part we can still see where the land meets the sea.
Credit goes to Alistair Rae, formerly a professor of urban studies and planning at the University of Sheffield. He used the EU’s population density data with the mapping tool Aerialod to create these glorious 3D maps.
And the map shouts “India”.
UPDATE: Do click to see the larger maps!
Alistair Rae, Stats, Maps n Pix Click to enlarge | CC 2.0
This is the global distribution of 8 billion people. The abundance of South East Asia is undeniable, as is the emptiness of the Sahara and the vacancy of Siberia. Antarctica is an invisible continent.
Australia and New Zealand are barely there. We can see how isolated Perth Australia is (where I live).
Annotated by Jo to show friends in the USA where Perth is.
Hawaii and Auckland likewise, stand apart.
Most maps originally came from Alastair Rae on Twitter in 2020 and later from the Visual Capitalist […]
by Jo Nova
Bankers are just nice people
A major banker, worth $2 billion, says the government needs to take land away from poorer people and build machines on it to change the weather.
CEO Jamie Dimon says he “is a red-blooded, patriotic, free-enterprise and free-market capitalist” while he promotes government control of markets, land, clouds, wind and rain. ” We simply are not getting the adequate investments fast enough for grid, solar, wind and pipeline initiatives” he complains, suddenly unhappy with the free-market, and sounding like a red-blooded communist on steroids instead. Even the Soviets didn’t try to micromanage the planet’s weather.
Dimon’s annual letter to Shareholders starts with all the right catchphrases. He comes in “defense of democracy and essential freedoms, including free enterprise”, but he doesn’t seem too interested in private property rights. He’s exasperated with people who won’t consider a carbon tax to stem climate change, though he doesn’t say anything about people who have considered it and think it’s Shamenistic VooDoo.
h/t To John Connor II, Climate Depot and Marc Morano
Seize property to build wind and solar farms, says JP Morgan chief
by Simon Foy, The Telegraph, UK
The […]
Emden, Germany by Gritte, @gritte
By Jo Nova
Germany is at the leading edge of the climate wars and the Greens are starting to lose both in polling and policy. Despite the claims that the energy crisis will push everyone into renewables, one year later, the dominant energy source for German electricity is coal, up by eight percentage points to 33% of generation.
While the world is supposedly caught in a renewable rush to 2030, the German government just announced it will build 25 gigawatts of gas powered plants by 2030 so they are there when “when [the] wind and sun do not provide enough”. And this week Germany is doing a backflip on their recent EU deal to ban sales of petrol and gas powered cars by 2035. It appears now they will ban the ban, rather than the car, and Germany has the power in the EU to do that. Though it’s not freedom to buy any car you want, but quixotic car loophole.
It’s still a mess of awful, subsidized craziness in a futile quest to control the clouds — but there are signs it is getting less crazy.
Thanks to NetZeroWatch for the links:
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By Jo Nova
Wade Allison has done a short but devastating analysis for the GWPF. The take home message is that the energy contained in the wind is diabolically more erratic than most people realize. It’s just basic physics and almost no one in politics seems able to comprehend just how impossible these numbers are. If only they would “follow the science” eh?
Thanks to Paul Homewood at Notalotofpeopleknowthat.
The exponential death of affordable electricity
It’s just physics. The power of the blowing wind increases by the speed of those particles cubed which produces a twin engineering nightmare. If the wind doubles in speed, the energy goes up by a factor of 8 (or 2 × 2 × 2, and we need to spell it out), and if it slows by half, the energy drops eight-fold. It’s bad both ways. At high speeds, the mechanical engineers have to turn off the turbines to protect them, and at low speeds the electrical engineers have to ramp up power stations that may not exist, or pray to Gaia for batteries that will never exist.
Allison has a graph showing the total output of all the wind turbines in the UK and Europe […]
A sign in Rockhampton. Where do they mention the fine though? | Photo by RegionalQueenslander
By Jo Nova
Block a sacred weather-changing EV from a charging point and you may have to sell your car
Feel the fear. The whole EV fantasy is coming undone as people miss planes, get stuck in cars, or ruin holidays because their battery is flat. There aren’t enough chargers, and charging is slow. In abject desperation, some Australian states are slapping monster fines on to make inadequate infrastructure stretch further, or because they realize how vulnerable they are to a protest campaign. Either that or they are actually trying to finance the transition to NetZero through parking fines. Call it a secret subsidy…
Victorians may be hit with a $370 fine if they drive a normal car and accidentally park it in an EV charging spot, thus depriving a sacred EV user of the chance to top up. You might think that’s wildly out of proportion — it’s only $100 less than if you recklessly run a red light. But it’s nothing compared to what NSW, Queensland and the ACT are doing. Drivers in these states who make the same mistake could […]
By Jo Nova
Last winter’s debacle in Australia could be repeated this year, but at even higher prices.
Despite adding more cheap renewables per person than nearly anywhere on Earth, for some inexplicable reason our retail electricity prices rose 18% last year and are set to rise another 20 to 30% this winter.
Last year was a bloodbath on the wholesale electricity market. Those costs have fed through to retail.
AER Australian wholesale electricity prices.
The Energy Minister Chris Bowen blames the Russians, and says we need more renewables.
Shock power bill jump to hammer households
Perry Williams, The Australian
Power bills for households will soar by hundreds of dollars a year from July 1, adding to soaring cost of living pressures as the regulator blamed supply challenges and volatility for the steep cost hit.
Customers in Victoria face a 30 per cent jump on ‘safety net’ prices while households in NSW, South Australia and southeast Queensland will see bills soar by up to 24 per cent.
The Victorian ruling by the Essential Services Commission estimates power costs will jump by $426 for residential customers to $1829 […]
By Jo Nova
Imagine if the national postal service had secret blacklists of people whose mail “should be lost”?
What if the FBI, CIA, or Department of Defence was talking to the postie, and the postie read your letters and threw some out, but not others, and none of the institutions told you they were doing this? Or perhaps the post-office told you point-blank you were banned from sending mail now “because your letters were wrong”.
In this case the “posties” are private organizations, but to all intents and purposes, their network connection and obedience to Big-Government made them, in effect, another branch of the government. The government wasn’t paying the postie direct, but it protected the monopoly of the corporate postie team and gave them a legal loophole to hide in, and the media outlets stopped anyone criticizing the government. It was a Pravda-KGB consortium with filters that worked at light speed, but hidden.
“Undeniably, the making of such lists is a form of digital McCarthyism.”
Where would we be if Elon Musk hadn’t bought Twitter?
In the latest round of Twitter Files, Matt Taibbi shows how Twitter was not just censoring things that would later turn […]
By Jo Nova
Twenty six months after the so called “deadly insurrection” at the US Capitol, the video tapes that have been hidden are finally available. This was a day that “echoed through history” according to Kamala Harris, who compared it to Pearl Harbor but didn’t want you to see the footage. People are in jail because they dressed up and walked with a police escort through open doors.
It’s a Redpill moment. The few people who did break windows or incite the crowd to do acts of violence have not been arrested. Who were the Feds?
“Even 57% of Democrats think that it’s at least somewhat likely that Feds were not just there but were also encouraging people to riot or go into the Capitol.” — Thomas Massie Rep Congressman.
The Jan 6th Committee had all this footage. They knew…
Tucker Carlson Fox News
..
Jan. 6 footage shows Capitol cops escorting QAnon Shaman to Senate floor
Miranda Devine, New York Post
“The tapes show the Capitol Police never stopped Jacob Chansley. They helped him. They acted as his tour guides.”
And yet in the narrative formed that […]
OWID
By Jo Nova
It’s the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth and one country is building six times as much new coal power as the rest of the world combined. But no one cares.
Sinful Australia hasn’t even built a coal plant in 12 long years, but Saint China is approving a new one every three and a half days. One nation is theoretically destroying the world’s corals, creating droughts, floods and bad storms, and making reef fish reckless but no one is gluing themselves to the Chinese Embassy. The same universities who lecture us on carbon pollution are not even boycotting Chinese students. We have to ask — do reef fish matter? Are floods a bad thing?
Either CO2 is just a shiny amulet or everyone who cares about it is functionally innumerate. It could be both.
CREA
Meanwhile on the cat-walks of intellectual fashion shows the Western world’s elite competes to be more concerned than the next guy about the dire problems of CO2. President Xi cheers them on, promises to act, then builds another coal plant.
Constructing 106 Gigawatts of coal power in 2023 doesn’t exactly sit well with President […]
By Jo Nova
What an honor. I am just so humbled to win the Dauntless Award of 2023. I mean apart from the towering giants of the Climate Skeptic world who have already won it, to be on the same page as Walt Cunningham, one of the three Apollo 7 astronauts, who risked their lives for science, is a career highlight. Walt Cunningham helped make NASA what it is, and he could have said nothing, but he became an outspoken skeptic of the way NASA was abusing the trust of the public, and abusing science. He was a fighter pilot and a physicist who flew on the first manned launch after the tragic fire that killed all three astronauts on Apollo 1. Sadly the world lost Walt only weeks ago.
Thanks to Ric Werne for the photo. Click to Enlarge.
Other Dauntless winners include Dr Jay Lehr (who helped set up the US EPA fifty years ago and then spent decades working to undo that) and legends like Marc Morano (Climate Depot), Professor Fred Singer, and Christopher Monckton. People who I have learnt so much from.
Craig Rucker announces the award from 25.20. From 28 minutes Heartland […]
By Jo Nova
Tantangara Resevoir: A whole ecosystem to fill with invasive feral fish and a necrosis virus too.
The Snowy 2.0 Pumped hydro scheme will cost families big money, spread pests, endanger fish, and kill trees but it will allow some renewables investors to make a profit, and that’s all that matters right?
Overseas readers are invited to submit more stupid schemes, with points for delays, cost, incompetence, environmental damage and sheer lack of any public benefit.
Ted Woodley does the best synopsis of the Snowy 2.0 debacle I’ve seen, pointing out how it sets all the worst kinds of records, being delayed 300% with costs up 1000%. It was supposed to be built in four years and cost $2 billion, but will end up taking 12 years (at least) and probably cost $20 billion by the time the cost of the extra transmission lines is added in. As readers here know, the boring machines are the slowest on Earth, one having made it only 200m and being paused for months under a pile of sand.
It was supposed to pay for itself, and make electricity cheaper, but is already chewing through a $1.4 billion taxpayer “injection”, […]
By Jo Nova
Arecleoch Wind Farm | Mary and Angus Hogg.
While British people can’t afford to warm their own homes in winter some Scottish wind turbines are being rotated and de-iced with warmth from diesel generators which also leaked some 4,000L of diesel. Since this was due to a cabling fault, presumably the other shivering wind turbines are maintained with mains power?
If giant turbine blades sit still too long, the bearings can generate permanent Brinelling damage. Alternately micro-oscillations or vibrations can cause False Brinelling. Small metal fragments then grind more of the metal around it, reduce efficiency, and increase the friction, the heat and the fire risk. It’s a couple of the hidden costs of maintaining a vast network of infrastructure to collect low density energy. Coal turbines must be slowly rotated too, to avoid the shaft bending, but coal turbines run for months at a stretch without stopping. One coal turbine can weigh up to 600 tons, but wind turbines nacelles usually weigh 100-300 tons, but can weigh up to 700 tons)*. The largest wind turbine blades can weigh 35 tons each. The power-to-maintenance ratio of wind turbines is absurd.
The wind turbine industry today […]
By Jo Nova Remember how the war with Ukraine was going to accelerate the green energy revolution?
The Flakpanzer Gepard needs more ammo, not solar panels. Photo By Hans-Hermann Bühling
For some reason, unreliable wind and solar power are not helping German industry build more tank ammunition. Instead, the federal government is allegedly talking to the state governments about taking green subsidies and spending the money on factories to build shells instead. And they are building those factories near the coal plants.
Just a couple of weeks ago, the chief of Germany’s army warned that sending weapons and arms to Ukraine has left military stockpiles “bare”.
Germany led the way in the great Green Energiewende transformation spending in the order of €32 billion a year, every year, in a quest for green electrons. Instead of creating peace on Earth and better weather, it just made the legendary economic powerhouse of Europe weak and vulnerable.
Tell the world, if the Germans can’t run a nation efficiently on “renewable” power, who can?
It’s perhaps not the Reset Klaus had in mind:
Great Reset Fail? Germany Mulls Diverting Green Agenda Cash Aimed at Killing Coal to Arms Industry
Kurt […]
By Jo Nova
What if the news media formed a global monopoly to control the news?
Imagine if the media and tech giants of the world banded together behind-the-scenes to rule certain stories were “misinformation” and all their agencies thus reported the same “news”?
That’s what the Trusted News Initiative aimed to do — decide what ideas were and were not allowed to be discussed.
It’s like “free speech” but without the free part.
Not only could the media bury things but they could get away with it if no upstart competitor could red-pill their audience.
It would be the death of the Free Press
In a world like that the people would be ruled mostly by whomever it was that decided what was “misinformation”. Those controllers would be the defacto Ministry of Truth.
We all saw it happen over the last three years, so it’s good to put a name on the beast, but even better, Robert F Kennedy is suing them for anti-trust violation.
Trusted News Initiative, TNI,
The Trusted News Initiative is everything journalists should hate. It’s basically there to “protect” voters from hearing about things like the Hunter-Biden Laptop, good climate news and […]
After the blockbuster revelations, the Babylon Bee right onto it:
NEW YORK, NY — Pfizer Inc. dropped their new COVID variant and accompanying vaccine Thursday at midnight, much to the delight of CDC officials. The new vaccine is reportedly shown to be 90% effective against the COVID variant Pfizer created in their lab.
Experts suggest Pfizer’s radical approach to virus treatment may be tantamount to an abusive relationship, but that’s okay because we probably deserve it.
“I’d suggest we investigate this immediately,” said Congresswoman AOC. “But I don’t want to burn any bridges. I might have to get a job there someday.”
h/t John Connor II, David
PS: Huge congratulations to the indominatable Novak Djokovic, a man we discussed so much a year ago when he was deported for not taking drugs. See the raw emotion as he breaks down in the stands a few minutes after his win. It really is remarkable. It’s not just the vaccine debacle last year, but serious injuries in the last few weeks as well. The man is a champion who will not submit. Last year, they were afraid he would win and spread freedom, not viruses.
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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