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By Jo Nova
Don’t call these fossil fuel generators — they are baby hydrogen plants!
Facing industrial death, Germany has finally decided it needs dispatchable reliable electricity. But they can’t announce that they suddenly need to build 10 gigawatts of fossil fueled gas power plants. It would be like admitting the sacred Energiewende had been a ghastly mistake that wasted billions of dollars on a reckless vanity quest to change the clouds. So instead, these new “power plants” with a focus on “gas-fired sites” must be convertible to run on hydrogen by 2045. Of course, they may never run on hydrogen, given that makes pipes brittle, leaks, and costs four times as much as natural gas, but it makes a good cover story.
This is exactly what I would do if I wanted to hide a major backflip and pretend this was just a slight variation on the renewables theme. (Especially if I had no scruples).
Note that the Reuters Blob-Media story (below) does not mention the words “fossil fuels” or “dispatchable” it just talks about the need to generate electricity over “a longer period of time”.
The gas to hydrogen plant story is the PR cover and escape […]
By Jo Nova
Coal is not and never was a stranded asset
Such is the demand for electricity, Donald Trump wants every reliable generator he can get.
One coal plant in Colorado was a week away from closure on Dec 31, when Donald Trump pulled it back from the brink:
Colorado’s coal plant closures and clean air policies go too far, Trump’s EPA says while rejecting plans
—The Colorado Sun
In December, President Donald Trump’s Department of Energy issued an emergency order demanding that Tri-State Generation’s Craig Unit 1 coal plant stay open past the long-planned Dec. 31 shuttering date. Tri-State is now fixing broken parts at the plant, which it had previously not planned to do given the closure, and will bring it back online. The co-op generator says it has not heard any plan on who will pay the up to $80 million annual cost of running the plant in 2026.
The EPA on Friday cited the Department of Energy’s emergency action in calling out Colorado. “These plants are vital to delivering reliable and affordable energy to Colorado families and meeting the surging national energy demand,” the EPA announcement said.
[…]
By Jo Nova
Last year, like every other year, was the hottest variation of something.
All the Blob Media reported the latest trivia in unison, with identikit headlines and matching Pantone Bright Red color.
2025 was the third warmest year on record
For some reason, despite their Pulitzer prizes, and daily acknowledgement of Dreamtime culture — none of the legacy media journalists remembered that prehistory even existed. It’s like 99% of the last 10,000 years never happened. The Stone-age, Iron-age, Egyptians, Sumerians, Greeks — all, Phht. Not one of the “journalists” asked any of these scientists whether it was misleading to focus on the last 150 years when we had thermometers, when it was hotter for thousands of years, and there was no coal plant in sight.
The media is all bread and circuses. It’s a performance art designed to distract us and stop us noticing things that matter. Like the heat in the Holocene, and like the giant volcano called Hunga Tonga. (More on that soon).
Since the first Turks carved out stone pillars at Göbekli Tepe 11,000 years ago, there have easily been 3,000 years hotter than 2025. And we know this because sea levels were […]
By Jo Nova
Almost none of their sacred 30 year trends panned out, so they’re now inventing spooky new forecasts (right after they happen). Any old weather permutation, any random coincidence is fair game. So somewhere on a continent 5,000 kilometers across, there were floods and fires on the same day, and somewhere else, the weather changed from hot to cold. Yeah, verily, as Scorpio crosses through the House of ARC Grants, you will definitely get some weather…
Like unfalsifiable prophets of voodoo, we don’t know whether this exact same “whiplash weather” occurred 1,000 times before in the last 10,000 years, because there are no proxies for daily hot-n-cold flips or simultaneous fires and floods. There are no diatoms, or pollens or Beryllium isotopes that capture the flip. And there are no daily weather records from neolithic Australia.
Ergo — the smug curmudgeons of science can say whatever they feel like — knowing that no one can prove them wrong, and no journalist at the Sydney Morning Herald will ever ask them a hard question:
Fires, floods, swimsuits and jumpers in one day: ‘Climate whiplash’ is our new normal
By Samantha Selinger-Morris, The Sydney Morning Herald
[…]
By Jo Nova
Green activists who sabotaged the Berlin grid last week may not have convinced anyone that carbon dioxide was a threat, but they have raised awareness that Germany needs more diesel generators, and thermal power plants.
On January 3rd, left wing extremists caused the longest blackout in Berlin since World War II leaving 100,000 people without heating or electricity for up to five days in midwinter. Suddenly local utilities have realized how vulnerable Germany is and are calling for a “national crisis reserve of mobile generators and heating systems.” And they want several hundred megawatts of it.
The association of local utilities (VKU) put out a press release calling for this new emergency reserve to be set up and spread around the country so it can restore power within 24 hours. They also for someone to clear away the bureaucratic red tape that slowed down the helpers, specifically mentioning the odd thing that must have delayed the response this time — like “responsibility, permits, liability, costs, labor rules and insurance.”
They paid homage to the “decentralized energy supply base on renewables” which could have (but didn’t) mitigate the damage. They probably had to write that. […]
By Jo Nova
Chris Wright, the United States Secretary of Energy, marvels that people can spend so much to achieve so little:
“Germany invested half a trillion dollars, more than doubled the capacity of its electricity grid — and today produces 20% less electricity than before that investment, selling it at three times the price.” — 13 min
“The lucky one billion — including everyone in this room — consumes about 13 barrels of oil per person per year. The other seven billion want to live like we do, but they consume about three barrels per person per year.”
It’s so nice to hear grownups talking:
Some extracts of his interview:
The tale of a remarkable transition from energy importer to energy exporter:
“Look at what’s happened in the United States. We’ve tripled liquids production in less than two decades. We are by far the world’s largest producer. We’ve more than doubled natural gas production, and it’s still growing fast.
This is phenomenal. Lower costs, lower prices — it has transformed the world. It’s hard to overstate the impact of the U.S. shale revolution and what all of you have […]
By Jo Nova Finally! Trump kills off funding and support for 66 international agencies, promises more to get the axe
The United Nations finally gets some accountability after serving itself or foreign dictators for decades. Trump isn’t just withdrawing from The Paris Agreement, he’s gone for the nuclear option of pulling out of the UNFCCC completely.
The WHO could have stopped Covid, instead they actively help spread it and covered up for the Chinese Communist Party. They look, act and behave like a larval form of One World Government — constantly trying to pass agreements that take over sovereign control or generate funds for the UN. They dream of setting up a Global Pandemic Treaty where they can dictate what injections you must have, what drugs are permitted, and get access to your medical data. These are not just pie-in-the-sky ambitions, the UN already effectively stopped unvaccinated Australians from leaving the country during Covid.
The UN helped set up giant $130 Trillion dollar banker cartels to control national energy policy, allowing China to set up gigawatts of coal power while the West is crippled with unreliable generators made with the same Chinese coal. They repeatedly try to install […]
By Jo Nova
Lordy! It’s just another catch in a low density energy grid
If your neighbor builds an industrial wind turbine plant, you might need developmental approval to build anywhere close to them even on your own property. Why? Although wind turbines are officially wonderful, the people living in the new home might file a noise complaint which will lead to ‘operational risk’, and ‘investor uncertainty’.
Neighbourhood row blowing in with WA wheatbelt wind farm plans
By Paige Taylor, The Australian
The WA Cook Labor government is preparing to adopt contentious rules which could prevent farmers from building a dwelling on their own land if it is deemed too close to their neighbour’s wind turbine, as the West Australian wheatbelt becomes the next frontier for renewable energy companies.
Current modeling typically suggests gaps between homes and turbines of 1.5 kilometer (~1 mile).
WA Planning Minister John Carey said the proposed renewables code, open for public comment until April, encouraged early engagement with communities.
“Proposed mandatory noise modelling aims to ensure turbines comply with noise limits, which typically results in a minimum separation of around 1.5km between turbines and noise-sensitive […]
By Jo Nova
They must have been disappointed
Psychologists have finally run a massive test of climate communication strategies, — and they all fail.
A new megastudy of more than 13,000 Americans tested the ten most cited climate-messaging strategies drawn from 157 previous papers. Twenty-four co-authors from five countries were involved. They wanted to find the paragraph — the killer framing — that would change beliefs, shift behaviour, or, ideally, persuade people to part with some cash. They didn’t find it.
Probably the most newsworthy finding is that there is a vast pool of grant money available to study rehashed minutiae of how to sell weather-changing sorcery to the jaded public. It’s a full time Blob Psy-Op machine to “nudge” the voters. If only they spent some of this money checking the science before they fine tuned the fear campaign?
This is a Psy-Op machine in search of a slogan
They call this research “science” but it’s more like corporate message-testing in advertising. And it’s done for free at universities to help the industry. The goal here is not to understand the human condition, it’s to sell a carbon tax or a solar panel.
The study […]
AI image by Sonja Ritter.
By Jo Nova
They wanted to “cut the juice to the ruling class”
Saving the world now means committing arson, and cutting off grandma’s electricity for days in midwinter Germany.
The attack burned through a cable connected to one of Berlin’s gas plants. The so-called Vulkangruppe (Volcano Group) claimed responsibility and published their manifesto online in German.
Leftwing militants claim responsibility for arson attack on Berlin power grid
Deborah Cole, The Guardian
German leftwing militants protesting over the climate crisis and AI have claimed responsibility for an arson attack that cut power to tens of thousands of households in Berlin.
As state security authorities opened an investigation into the cause of the blaze near the Lichterfelde heat and power station that damaged several high-voltage cables, the Vulkangruppe (Volcano Group) said it had deliberately targeted some of the city’s wealthiest districts.
In a 2,500-word pamphlet seen by the Guardian which a police spokesperson called “credible”, the group said it had aimed to “cut the juice to the ruling class”.
This is what happens when one side of a debate is silenced. The voices […]
By Jo Nova
Congratulations World!
Roger Pielke Jnr celebrates another great year where humanity had a near record low in deaths due to climate disasters.
He reminds us of a paper from a few years ago showing that the richer we all are, the less likely we are to die from floods, cold, drought and wind.
When we adjust against GDP per capita we find that GDP itself is the big protector of humanity.
The best thing we can do to help Africans defeat climate hazards is not to send them solar panels, but to help them get filthy rich.
And anyone who cares about vulnerable people will be protesting at the reckless destruction of what was a cheap, efficient electricity grid. We will surely kill more people by reducing our GDP with unreliable generators, than we will ever save with solar panels.
Once income is accounted for, the apparent relationship between climate hazards and mortality largely disappears. In other words, economic development—not renewable energy—dominates human survival outcomes.
Follow the Science, girls and boys,
If man-made emissions do anything at all, the more we emit the lower the death rates are. We can see that as man […]
By Jo Nova
In the renewable frenzy of the early 2020s Ÿnsect raised €600 million to “Reinvent the food chain” and pioneer alternative foods that “respect the planet’s boundaries”. Some $200 million of their funding came from hapless taxpayers somewhere. But in record time, seemingly before it began, it has already gone. Bankrupted. And not because people don’t want to eat mealworms (which they don’t) but because there wasn’t much market in making animal feed either. It turns out that farm owners didn’t want to spend 2 to 10 times as much on “sustainable” cattle fodder. So the company shifted focus to high end pet food, where besotted owners have money to spare, but that crashed too.
h/t Tom Nelson
How reality crushed Ÿnsect, the French startup that had raised over $600M for insect farming
By Anna Heim, TechCrunch
The company’s demise is hardly a surprise, as Ÿnsect had been embattled for months. Still, there is plenty to unpack about how a startup can go bankrupt despite raising over $600 million, including from Downey Jr.’s FootPrint Coalition, taxpayers, and many others.
Ultimately, Ÿnsect failed to fulfill its ambition to “revolutionize the […]
By Jo Nova
No wonder the climate experts are not that interested in the historic data.
You might think that if the world was going to hell in a handbasket, that climate scientists would want to get all the data they could and pore all over it carefully.
Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone has found a study of 60 million temperature readings. It shows the world was warming faster in the first half of the 20th century even though there was 8 times less man-made CO2 around.
Man-made CO2 (black) can apparently cause big warming, big cooling, or anything it wants (orange).
You can’t look at the graph above and say: CO2 is Earth’s control knob.
And the table lays out the trends, and the cumulative CO2 emissions. It’s the simplest thing, and all the old data was there all along. Anyone could have done most of this in 1995, and saved us from wasting a few trillion dollars.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5395197
Critics will counter that these temperatures are only on land, and mostly in Europe and the United States.
However, it’s a global emergency you know and this is the best data we have. Shouldn’t the experts, at least, […]
By Jo Nova
History books will be written about this week. “This is not good” says Elon Musk.
This week the world woke up to realize that silver is a critical mineral for the high tech, AI, solar panels, and renewables. In four days time, China, which supplies more than half of the processed silver on Earth, effectively blocks their exports of silver.
Meanwhile it turns out JP Morgan, which has been aggressively shorting the silver market for 15 years — was accumulating it all along. The entire COMEX silver market in New York has 30 million ounces of silver that is ‘immediately deliverable’. But JP Morgan is widely reported to control or custody up to ~700–800 million ounces of silver across vaulting, ETFs and proprietary holdings. It is de facto, the US strategic reserve, but controlled by a private bank, not by the Treasury.
The phase change is in progress. I’m not trying to cover all the details, just to let people know that something very big is unfolding.
Kitco Silver Price
The largest single use of silver has become “industrial applications”:
Silver, it turns out, is the best electrical and thermal conductor of all the […]
Image by Vilius Kukanauskas from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
It’s a cult science
To the devotee, CO2 is the magical control knob of global weather. So a team at UC-Riverside wondered why, 600 million years ago, when CO2 was extremely high, Earth ended up frozen over in a Snowball Earth horror show. I mean, how could that be when CO2 ‘boils the oceans’? Normal people would say this shows CO2 is irrelevant — but the cult scientists went hunting with their broken computer models until they found “a new feedback” excuse that can explain this puzzling anomaly.
In their new vision, CO2 warms the world, but under the right conditions, it sets off a ghastly negative spiral where more warming causes more phytoplankton, which suck the CO2 out of the sky in a feeding frenzy and then sink and die at the bottom of the ocean, taking the CO2 down with them. As the CO2 drains out of the sky, we lose its warming glow, and the world sinks into a frozen oblivion.
Though unlike actual scientific advancements it doesn’t explain any of the other thousand anomalies, and is falsified by most of the last 500 million years […]
For a few days new posts will appear below this one. Thank you to everyone and Merry Christmas!
From Jo Nova
Thanks to the wonderful souls who helps me cover the bills, so I can roast those who abuse science for profit and power.
This year saw the Net Zero mythology take a mortal blow. Electricity prices hit a bleeding point just as the Trump hammer fell, and the insatiable AI race spooked the Blob, which suddenly realized there actually was a global energy contest and we are the losers. But despite these wins, the bankers that created the bubble took the profit and ran (for Prime Minister of Canada), the witchdoctor-scientists still give terrible advice, and billions are still being poured into glorified rain-dances.
We still have to win the science war. The modern shaman tell us batteries will change the jet streams, save koalas, stop domestic violence and end wars. Then the ARC gives them another grant. And the ABC gives them free advertising. And we pay for all of it: the CSIRO-bad-science, the subsidies, and the ABC-BBC-CBC blob.
Then there is the free speech war. The Ministry of Misinformation will return. The government wants to stop us […]
By Jo Nova
The EV bubble, or what’s left of it, popped this week
After carmakers invested billions into EV designs, and the EU and UK vowed to ban internal combustion engines, it’s all come undone. Donald Trump pulled the pin on subsidies for EVs and eased the strict emissions rules that punished petrol and diesel cars. US sales of electric cars promptly fell 40% in November. Ford’s fell by nearly 60%.
In response, Ford has killed off several electric cars, and will swallow a bitter pill of a $19.5 billion US dollar write down. That’s a lot of cars it will have to sell to make that money back. Gone is the fully electric F-150, the next generation electric truck, and any plan to make electric commercial vans. Instead Ford says it will shift into gas and hybrid models.
General Motors laid off 3,300 workers at EV plants in the US.
On the other side of the Pacific, shares of Korean battery makers “slumped across the board” this week after the news.
The day after the Ford announcement the European Commission let the world know it would wind back the total ban on internal combustion engines which was […]
By Jo Nova
Despite the government plans to cover the country in wind turbines, the wind industry fell in a very big hole in 2025
Things in Renewable-Land must be worse than they seem. Giles Parkinson at RenewEconomy has been reduced to celebrating that *one* sole wind plant in Australia (one!) finally got a green light to proceed. This was “a first for 2025”. Ouch. Which is another way of saying that the economics of wind turbines are so awful, no one else in Australia wanted to build one this year.
“The investment drought is breaking,” says CEO hails first Australia wind project to reach financial close in 2025
Giles Parkinson, RenewEconomy
Auaetralia’s year-long wind energy investment drought has finally been broken after Tilt Renewables gave the green light to the 108 megawatt (MW) Waddi wind project in Western Australia.
The Waddi wind farm, located in the state’s wheatbelt about 150 kms north of Perth, is the first wind project to reach financial close in 2025 in Australia, and will begin construction in 2026 and reach full operations in 2028.
“This will be the first wind farm to reach a Final […]
By Jo Nova
It’s a High-Voltage Wealth Transfer Disguised as Climate Policy
The big new “cheaper battery scheme” was so badly designed it accidentally burned through $2.3 billion in just 6 months. We could have built two new gas plants… instead we blessed a few wealthy homes with batteries bigger than they can use, which will probably sit around doing nothing most of the time. The scheme is so bad, the government has already promised to add another $5b to the pyre.
And since most homeowners are not opting to share their battery in a virtual power plant with the voracious retailers, this extra battery power will probably just sit there unused in homes around the country, hopefully not catching fire too often. It’s just another Soviet-style failure of communist midwits.
The government keeps bragging about the rampant success of the program but it is a globalist lemon from end to end. The Cheaper Battery Scheme was supposed to save homeowners $4,000 on a new 10kWh home battery, but the rebate was offered “per kilowatt hour” not per battery. (Does Chris Bowen does even know what a kilowatt hour is?).
The design meant solar installers had every incentive to […]
By Jo Nova
If man made CO2 emissions have any effect at all on extinctions — it stops them happening
New research looked at 500 years worth of extinctions and concludes that species loss peaked about a century ago. Far from the rate accelerating as we pour carbon dioxide into the sky, fewer species are disappearing now than forty or fifty years ago.
Kristen Saban and John Wiens considered data on as many as two million species. They specifically analyzed some 912 plants and animals that became extinct in the last 500 years.
Many of the doom and gloom forecasts took extinction rates from long ago and extrapolated them mindlessly forward, as climate modelers are want to do.
Extinction rates have slowed across many plant and animal groups, study shows
EurekaAlert
“To our surprise, past extinctions are weak and unreliable predictors of the current risk that any given group of animals or plants is facing,” said lead author Saban, who recently graduated from the U of A and is currently a doctoral student at Harvard University.
Humans have wiped out species, but mostly by bringing in rats, pigs and goats to isolated islands:
December 13th, 2025 | Tags: Biodiversity, Biology, Evidence, Extinction | Category: Global Warming |  Print This Post | |
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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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