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By Jo Nova
Iran says the Strait of Hormuz is open, but Donald Trump says “wait”.
In other words, the Iranians have blinked first, but the US Navy will stick around until the deal is done properly. Iran has agreed to give up the enriched uranium. It was a “GREAT AND BRILLIANT DAY FOR THE WORLD!” Donald Trump wrote on TruthSocial.
Ships apparently are waiting for insurance calls and confirmation.
Like a comedy team, France and the UK hosted a multinational teleconference call and bravely offered to lead a mission to protect freedom of navigation in the Strait, which they’ve now realized is important to “the whole world”. Trump wryly remarked that: “Now that the Hormuz Strait situation is over, I received a call from NATO asking if we would need some help”. He told them to stay home, “UNLESS THEY WANT TO LOAD UP THEIR SHIPS WITH OIL“. Adding that “They were useless when needed, a Paper Tiger!”
The Australian Prime Minister must be thrilled that he might be spared from further ignominy, as Australia’s pathetic state of energy vulnerability is obvious to everyone, and, if the Strait isn’t opened, we may be mere weeks away from […]
Image by AI_EmeraldApple from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
Oops the cult programming is showing…
One in five British teens hide their political views out of fear of ostracism (and half the rest probably don’t know they agree with them because they’ve never heard them speak.) We all know which side of politics has to hide their views and it’s not the trans-activist communists who believe in using power plants and plastic bags to change the weather. They’re treated like heroes and given a keynote at the UN.
But what does someone do when they believe something crazy, counterproductive and resembling witchcraft? — They call it science, and prey upon the young and impressionable. But this approach is vulnerable to people who speak the truth. One little wicked joke about the cult programming can spread like wildfire and undo years of work.
The only way to stop the truth going viral spread is a wall of mockery, ridicule and good old social ostracism.
The people speaking truth don’t need to shut down opponents with namecalling and social manipulation, but the people pushing a fantasy do — you climate denying, oil shill, racist, conspiracy theorist.
This is how the […]
By Jo Nova
Well, that can’t be good
Details are sketchy, but the Viva refinery in Corio, Geelong Victoria is reportedly on fire in a big way. This is (or was) one of Australia’s last two remaining oil refineries supplying 10% of domestic needs. Reports on X and Reddit claim the fire started with an explosion at about 11pm in Victoria, with “flames 100ft high”. The glow is visible from Melbourne. Others report the fire started in the “gas separator unit”. with some saying they heard, as many as 7 or 8 explosions. The Victorian Fire Dept has issued a watch and act and stay indoors for people in Geelong. As many as 16 fire units are attending a “Building Fire” on Refinery Rd, Corio which (at this time) is not yet under control.
What are the odds? Speculation is rife: “I’m sure it’s just a coincidence” says every second person.
We’re praying the staff are somehow OK, and someone has sent the SAS to guard our other refinery.
Corio Refinery Fire Reddit
But we’ll be fine, right? As our energy Minister Chris Blackout Bowen says: “No war can impede the flow of sun to Australia” (only […]
By Jo Nova
Two trendlines and the climate distraction converged
Just before Easter, the Page Research Centre put out a policy paper that ought to rivet Australians.
We have so casually sleepwalked (sprinted) blindfolded to the edge of cliff. Twenty years ago we were self-sufficient in liquid fuels, then we got distracted trying to change the rain and clouds in 2100 AD. Meanwhile in 2013, the area of South East Asia under the potential control of China was starting to grow rapidly. It is only now, after we have closed 6 of 8 refineries, banned oil exploration and shale use in some states in an Ode to Gaia, but we find that at a moment’s notice, China could potentially put three quarters of our liquid fuel supply under threat.
“In an Asian war scenario, 76% of our liquid fuel requirements would be in immediate jeopardy.”
The situation in 2013 regarding China’s ability to control supply lines:
China’s area of denial capacity 2013
But the world is a different place in 2026:
China’s area of denial capacity 2025
How rapidly we ran towards the pit, closing refineries, assuming it didn’t matter even after China had […]
By Jo Nova
We are killing people by making energy expensive
Researchers followed 80% of the US population for two decades, and found that cold temperatures contributed to a whopping 800,000 deaths while hot temperatures were linked to only 2,000 (per year).*
They were looking at monthly temperature data in 819 locations across the US. Then they checked the cardiovascular death rates and found the burden of excess deaths is “quite substantial”.
During cold periods our blood vessels contract to reduce heat loss, which is why our skin looks slightly bluer or whiter in colder weather. But even a small reduction in volume makes our blood pressure rise. So it is not surprising that colder months are linked to significantly higher death rates from heart attacks, strokes, and coronary artery disease compared to milder periods. As the population ages and kidney disease and diabetes get worse, the deaths will increase.
Nearly every dollar we pour into preventing heat deaths will end up killing more people than it saves. It’s time Climate Ministry’s put more accurate costings on any policy aiming to reduce global temperature. We want numbers, and during cold months the people need cheap oil or gas to keep […]
Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
Engineers were warning the grid was close to crashing due to excess solar
The mass blackouts in Spain and Portugal wrecked havoc on April 28 last year. At the time everyone accountable was feigning confusion, blaming it on a “rare atmospheric phenomenon” which might have set up mysterious oscillations in the line. They were bandying around terms like “ ‘induced atmospheric vibration’ and talking about extreme temperatures (you know, like 23 degrees C). But all along, the head honchos at Red Electrica knew it was due to an excess of solar power and a lack of reliable generation, because the technical staff had told them what was coming:
“Today was really bad, you all saw it”: new audio recordings confirm that Red Eléctrica knew three months before the blackout that the system was failing
By Paula Maria, Elmundo
The Senate committee investigating the blackout heard a second round of conversations this week between private electricity companies and Red Eléctrica, the system operator. Almost a year after the incident, and with no one yet taking responsibility, the latest recordings demonstrate that as early as January 2025, […]
By Jo Nova
The big losers in this war, apart from some former Iranian leaders, appear to be China, and NATO.
In the last two months China has lost easy cheap access to cheap oil from Venezuela and now Iran. China was getting around the sanctions and buying discounted Iranian oil through a shadow fleet of ships. It was acquiring as much as 80% of Iranian oil production. Now it has to pay market prices and fight for a limited supply.
Meanwhile the divide between the US and Europe is suddenly very obvious. NATO has been shown to be an empty shell.
Victor Davis Hanson, the military historian, explains the big picture:
GB News: Basically, is this a victory for Donald Trump? Does Does this ceasefire represent a victory for his sort of strategic campaign?
Victor Davis Hanson: Well, if it’s honored, it is because when all of the rhetoric and all of the politics vanish, and if they abide by the agreement and we stop and the straits stay open and … if we’re viligant — then it is.
He [Trump] comes back and he says when I came into office Iran had […]
By Jo Nova
Finally, a year after the Democrats realized that climate change was a vote loser, the Australian Labor Party are taking their first baby steps to hide their climate zealotry.
Even they realize that bragging about renewable energy targets is like juggling sticks of dynamite when the nation is in danger of running out of diesel. Every time someone mentions the 82% target during an oil crisis, it just reminds us how the government have been barking up the wrong tree.
Make no mistake, they aren’t renouncing Climate Change, they’re just packing the idea away quietly and hoping no one notices. They are testing-the-waters. After the war, if it’s safe to bring aggressive Net Zero policies back, they can pretend it was just a typo. If it isn’t safe, which it probably won’t be, they will be hoping everyone just forgets.
Later they can say there will be no Net Zero targets, while they bring the exact same schemes in under a different name the night before Parliament closes for Christmas. Remember how the hated Emissions Trading Scheme became the SafeGuard Mechanism? Praise be to the Bankers, eh? As long as The Blob gets its funding.
Even […]
Coober Pedy Hybrid Renewable Power
By Jo Nova
This is the feasibility study for the whole country that the government could have done…
Instead of doing reckless experiments with our national grid, we could have done a practice run and transitioned one small town to see if it worked. If renewables were going to be successful anywhere, it would be in a place like Coober Pedy. After all, these small desert communities have wide open spaces, lots of sun, and new renewables only have to compete with expensive diesel generators, not cheap coal.
Fans of renewables were partying last week because one small town had managed to run for “nearly five days” on renewables. Nearly five!?
You might think this was a new set up, but this is a system that was built in 2017. Basically, the people of Coober Pedy have been waiting for nine long years to get this lucky with the weather.
And the previous record they set with this equipment was in 2019!
New record, as iconic mining town runs on 100 pct wind and solar for nearly five days straight
By Sophie Vorrath, Reneweconomy
In a LinkedIn […]
By Jo Nova
Google was going carbon free by 2030 right up until it needed reliable hard energy itself, then the Net Zero goals were dropped in a hole. Even though The Goolag has been censoring skeptics and lecturing the public for ten (or twenty) years about the dangers of fossil fuels, now that it wants more power, Google chooses “gas”. Never mind the families that can’t afford dinner …
Google didn’t just promise to use more renewables—it promised to run on carbon-free power every hour of every day. “Climate Change is an urgent threat to humanity,” said Google in 2020. But now Google wants to build a 933MW gas plant in Texas, and is exploring building another huge gas plant in Nebraska.
Google was a key part of the marketing and election campaign to crush fossil fuels and promote the renewables industry, and it’s not even pretending that solar and wind power are the answer any more.
Google to tap into gas plant for AI datacenter in sharp turn from climate goals
— by Dara Kerr, The Guardian,
Michael Thomas, the founder of Cleanview and author of the report [on Google’s new gas […]
By Jo Nova
What a difference an oil war makes…
Five weeks after it started, suddenly Australians are noticing the bonanza under our feet all along.
That most hated thing, the unthinkable brown coal, could save the day if we would only stop beating it down with blunt sticks and Voodoo dolls.
In 2016 Geoscience Australia estimated we have so much brown coal we could keep burning the deposits we already know about at the current rate for our whole lives, and our children’s lives, and their children’s lives too. We could keep going for 40 generations.
“Australia’s recoverable brown coal EDR did not change during 2016. The majority is located within the Latrobe Valley (Victoria). At 2016 production levels, Australia’s recoverable brown coal EDR is expected to last more than 1000 years.”
We burned it to make electricity all year in 2016 but the total amount was so insignificant no one counting national resources could even notice.
Look at the size of the Gippsland Basin deposit. It’s almost like God has a sense of humour putting all that in there so close to socialist HQ.
https://www.ga.gov.au/aecr2025/coal
Brown coal is the cheapest fuel there is […]
Image by Semevent from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
The trend is spreading. Coal, the stranded asset of a bygone era, is hot property again everywhere. All it took was a few weeks of an energy crisis, and decades of brainwashing against coal is evaporating.
On Friday, I wrote about how countries like Japan, Korea, and India were redirecting themselves towards coal power. Now Bloomberg, Fortune, and others are reporting this trend. As I write, Italy is considering delaying the closure of all its coal plants til 2038, Germany is reopening old coal plants. Thailand is restarting two coal plants it only shut down last year. Bangladesh is going to run its coal plants at max capacity all summer.
And the Ecoworriers are starting to fear this crisis will trigger a more permanent shift back to coal — which it absolutely will — not because of ‘sunk costs’ or any of the other excuses the greenies tell themselves, but because the oil crisis will break the sacred exorcism spell cast upon coal. Governments have been shocked at how vulnerable they are without fossil fuel energy.
People might be ordering EVs, but governments want fossil fuels.
Activists should be panicking […]
…
by Jo Nova
The Iranian oil and gas crisis is causing a sudden realignment of national energy policy with reality.
Spare a thought for the poor Ecoworriers who are hoping the Straits of Hormuz will finally be The Springboard to Renewable Heaven. Any day now, they think, the world will wake up to the wonders of low density energy captured in a million square kilometers of industrial glory…
Instead, just like the Ukraine War, the middle east crisis reminds everyone of the importance of fossil fuels.
After thirty years of international pogrom against coal — it only takes a few weeks of an energy crisis to explode propaganda that was six feet deep.
Japan, Korea, India, Europe, The Phillipines, (and that’s just in the last few days) have all announced they will be using more coal to make up for shortages in gas from the Middle East.
And even if the oil crisis ended tomorrow, things are not going back they way they were. The shock of discovering how vulnerable your nation is will leave a mark. National Energy Security is back on the agenda.
Japan to Allow More Coal-fired Power to Cope With Energy […]
Photo by Petar Milošević
By Jo Nova
Coal, it turns out, is an infinite chemical wellspring, being converted into everything from plastic, to diesel, jet fuel, gas, methanol and fertilizer. There is no way, just no chance, that China will leave this bounty locked underground. And why are we?
The idea of converting coal to liquid fuel sounds like an expensive exotic chemical reaction that is barely used. If people have even heard of it, it’s mainly because the Nazi’s were so desperate for liquid fuel to power their tanks and armored cars, they converted coal in a large plant that became a wartime target in World War II. It produced 92% of Germany’s air fuel, and 50% of its petroleum. Who knew, those Messerschmidts were coal powered? Later South Africa used it in the 1980s in response to an oil embargo, and they still do.
Quietly China has developed a giant coal-to-liquids industry to reduce its strategic vulnerability to an oil shock or a wartime embargo, and the volume is astounding. Accurate numbers are hard to obtain, but the IEA estimates that every year China is converting 380 million tons of coal into fuel, ammonia […]
By Jo Nova
Quietly while Australians were talking about Grace Tame or Britanny Higgins the levers of industrial power are shifting gear
While Australia has a puritanical objection to nuclear power there are 437 operating reactors around the world producing 9% of global electricity. One day Australians might be as technologically advanced as Armenia and Bangladesh. We can only hope…
For the last fifty years, the leaders of the world in nuclear power have been the US first and then France second, and by a long way, but China is about to change that global tally board.
Currently operating nuclear plants
Click to enlarge (World Nuclear Association)
Under Construction
There are 78 Reactors Under Construction which will add another 78,986 MWe, and nearly all of that is in one country.
Click to enlarge (World Nuclear Association)
The tally board stands at 438 Operable Reactors with a capacity of 400,680 MWe producing 9% Share of Global n Electricity Generation and 2,667,383 GWh (2024).
Why aren’t we talking about this?
10 out of 10 based on 84 ratings
Image by Zdenek Vadura from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
This study kills a few sacred cows at once: it pokes a hole in the idea that less red meat is always better, and that one diet is “the best” for everyone.
Researchers in Sweden followed 2000 people for 15 years, and expected to find that the people with the high risk ApoE4 gene, ate more red meat they would suffer from an increase in dementia. Instead the study showed the opposite. People with the ApoE4 gene who had lower intakes of red meat, had “more than twice” the risk of Alzheimers. But the ApoE4 people with the highest consumption of meat had the same risk as people without the risky gene.
There’s a dark possibility that all those years of Vegan Wokery pushing people to eat less red meat to “save the planet” may have come at the price of an increase in Alzheimers.
ApoE4 is a very unusual variant, it’s both common and yet important — about 30% of the Swedish population have one or two copies of ApoE4, which puts them at significantly greater risk of Alzheimers. Even one copy of the variant increases the risk […]
By Jo Nova
Foreign readers may not be aware of the bunfight for petrol and especially diesel fuel in Australia. Three weeks in, and the energy and exporting giant of coal and gas is unraveling at the seams. Regional towns and some servo‘s are running out, farmers aren’t sure if they will be able to seed this year, and miners are starting to lay off staff. Three weeks.
It could be something to do with forward planning.
While the rest of the world has 90 days stockpile, Australia imports 90% of its oil, and has about three weeks fuel left. Obviously, our great leaders looked at our remote, low density island with an economy based on heavy industry and said “who needs diesel”?
David Archibald has spent 50 years around the oil industry and he has a plan
“There are no impediments to Australia becoming completely autarkic in liquids fuel production, and also petrochemical precursors and LPG, and ammonium sulphate for fertiliser.”
— David Archibald
The method as described in The Solution To Our Fuel Crisis has three main parts:
Australia already produces oil as a byproduct of the North West […]
It’s a tortured headline in ScienceAlert
By Jo Nova
For the first time Antarctic ice core teams have got hold of ice that is 3 million years old and the results have confounded them
The way CO2 responds in ice cores is canon to “the faith” so this is more important than it seems at first glance. Believers are really struggling.
Three million years ago the world was warmer, and about to cool into the violent ice age cycles. The ice core experts were expecting to confirm that CO2 levels were about 400ppm, as other proxies had shown, and they thought that greenhouse gases might fall and lead the cooling shift. But instead of CO2 being at 400 parts per million, and then leading the cooling, the bubbles trapped in ice were only 250 parts per million to start with and they stayed constant through important temperature swings. Sacre Bleu! CO2 did not appear to have any role in causing the warmth that was, or the cooling that followed. And nor did methane. O’ the dilemma?
Some sacred cows have to be sacrificed. Either CO2 is not a major driver of climate change, or the ice cores are […]
By Jo Nova
The Soothsayers of Weather have come up with a new spooky fundraising term — “Climate Whiplash”. It’s multi-purpose: it’s a handy excuse for their failures at the same time as a plea for more cash.
Essentially the BOM needs more of your money because they’re more wrong than ever before. The same experts that told you it’s just the physics stupid, are now saying that the climate has changed in ways that they didn’t predict, and that makes it harder for them to predict. It’s such bad luck…
Where were their forecasts of “Climate Whiplash affecting their BoM predictions,” thirty years ago?
‘Climate whiplash’ making Australian weather forecasts increasingly unpredictable and costly
7 News
Australians are facing a new climate reality where traditional weather patterns no longer apply, with scientists warning that “climate whiplash” is making seasonal forecasts increasingly unreliable and costly.
The phenomenon has left meteorologists struggling to predict what’s coming next, as one season can bring floods, fires, storms and record heat with little warning.
Sounds like an infinite excuse. The BOM were never able to do seasonal forecasts anyhow and there wasn’t even […]
by Lieven
By Jo Nova
It’s the New Zero-Defence Strategy — where we build the shields to hide the enemy’s bombs
If Britain (or Australia) ever needed to build an iron dome to protect itself, it’s a shame that giant rotating objects interfere with the radar.
A senior defense source has told the Daily Mail that Britain is a sitting duck:
Ed Miliband’s wind farms could cripple UK ‘Iron Dome’ anti-missile systems
By Glen Owen and Dan Hodges, Daily Mail
Britain is a ‘sitting duck’ in the face of drone attacks because Ed Miliband’s wind farms interfere with radar-based defensive domes, senior defence sources have claimed.
Ministers have been warned the UK lacks any equivalent to Israel‘s famous ‘Iron Dome’, which gives it the capability to intercept ballistic missiles at high altitude from 40 miles away.
The source added: ‘Wind farms are effectively giant chunks of metal that stand in the way of way of the tracking stations. It’s fair to say wind-farms and radar are not a great mix.
Labour is committed to switching to 95 per cent clean power sources by 2030 – […]
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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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