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By Jo Nova
The good news never ends for the forced transition to electric cars
The latest surveys show Australians are rapidly losing interest in buying an EV (even if they do make the weather nicer a hundred years from now):
Australian drivers slam brakes on electric vehicle sales amid battery cost fears Jared Lynch, The Australian
Australia’s electric vehicle market has hit the skids, with drivers stepping back from new purchases, citing fears over hidden costs and long-term battery uncertainty. A new report from Australia’s biggest auto classifieds site, Carsales, has unearthed that consumers are cooling towards battery-powered vehicles despite a fierce market battle between Chinese-owned BYD and Tesla.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but this (below) sounds like an EV salesman trying not to say that 64% of Australians won’t even consider an EV:
Carsales’s latest EV Consumer Survey has revealed that electric vehicle consideration among Australian drivers has levelled out at 36 per cent, highlighting the market’s abrupt halt.
Except, from another source, it’s 70% who won’t consider buying an EV.
Lifetime EV consideration has again dropped, with only 30% of respondents ever considering an EV. This continued drop from […]
By Jo Nova
If someone wanted to sabotage Western science, this would be a useful technique
A research team has used AI to analyze 2.6 million cancer papers and found a quarter of a million have used suspicious tortured phrases, incorrect reagents, fabricated data and altered or reused figures — all hallmarks of fakery at the industrial paper-mill. A dumb AI will change “energy use” to vitality utilization or convert “raw data” to crude information.
The commentariat is blaming profit and greed for the flood of fake papers, but what if this is no accident? If I were an enemy of The West, and I wanted to sabotage scientific research, this would work like a DDOS on science. Researchers would spend hours running meta-analyses of dud results. They might change their own experiments, scurrying down pointless rabbit holes in search of an effect that doesn’t exist. Or, they might drop a useful approach if they thought someone had tried it and failed. And it can’t be too good for the cancer patients either, can it?
Even businesses might find it appealing to slow down or confuse the competition. Or perhaps they’d like to quote a paper to get their […]
9.4 out of 10 based on 14 ratings
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By Jo Nova
Surprise! The Blob wants to track your car, limit your travel, get more of your money (but only so they can fix the weather!)
How could they resist? The 15-minute city is the fantasy idea that the unwashed masses can get everything they need within 15 minutes of home. But of course, their family may live somewhere else, as might their favourite dentist. How many old folks in nursing homes will miss out on visits because someone doesn’t want to fill out a permission slip or get a fine?
The UK government has said it will let councils use official databases of drivers licences in order to fine people driving outside their “permitted area”.
Oxford has divided up its city into six areas and is set to start fining people later this year. The head of the Alliance of British Drivers said it was “A page out of the East German playbook.”
If this gets off the ground in the UK, we know it’ll end up here.
Labour opens door to ‘Stalinist’ 15-minute cities across Britain
By Camilla Turner, The Telegraph UK
The most high-profile example of such a plan […]
By Jo Nova
Despite the news headlines about the hottest ever heatwave in Victoria this week — old Australian newspapers are mysteriously full of reports of hotter temperatures. Consider, for example January 1932.
Photo: Jo Nova
The town called Ouyen reached 47.5 °C this week — the “hottest temperature ever recorded” we’re told, but 94 years ago it was reported to be 124 °F (51.1 °C). Not far away Mildura reached 123 °F (50.6 °C) and to the south, Hopetoun reached 114 °F (45.6 °C).
You might wonder if these local stations were inaccurate or badly managed, but in New South Wales, Pooncarie recorded 121 °F (49.4 °C) in the shade at 2 pm, Wilcannia – 117 °F (47.2 °C) at the same time, Broken Hill reached 114 °F (45.6 °C), Menindee was 116 °F (46.7 °C), and Bourke – 116 °F (46.7 °C). The heat stretched across to Port Augusta which recorded – 119 °F (48.3 °C). Were they all crazy, or was it really hot?
You might also wonder if they were using non-standard thermometers or the wrong screens, or enclosures which might bias the measurements. Except the Bureau of Meteorology standardized official thermometers to […]
© Jo Nova
By Jo Nova
“It’s just a matter of time” says Frontier Economics chief Danny Price
Even though it was a public holiday, there was a raging bonfire in prices in South Australia on the evening of Australia Day. The spike in prices hit a blistering $20,000 peak and stayed there for three long hours…
AEMO
Expert Danny Price warns of ‘catastrophic’ national grid failure after SA price surge
By Patrick Starick, The Advertiser
The average price for every hour of the 24 hour period in South Australia was $2,457 per megawatthour.
Frontier Economics chief Danny Price, a key architect of energy policy for state and federal governments, warns renewables cannot meet high electricity demand and predicts significant outages and high prices. Wholesale electricity spot prices spiked in SA to near the $20,000 per megawatt hour limit on a still Monday night, when household batteries drained and wind generation dipped, prompting the Australian Energy Market Operator to issue a low-reserve warning at 8.42pm. “It is only a matter of time. It will happen. There’s no doubt that it will happen. Year by year the system becomes more fragile […]
@Jesse_J S
By Jo Nova
On Monday for Australia Day, don’t forget to March For Australia.
12:00 noon – 2pm January 26th.
The globalist unaccountable Blob wants us to forget what makes The West great. They want to erase our heritage, our customs, our history, and even the names of places in the land we grew up in.
The gradual character assassination of every early hero is not an accident. Their stories of success can be turned into woke-fairy tales to scare little children.
When we become a lost people, apologizing for every tiny imperfection, we are easy to rule. But when we stand on the shoulders of the world’s greatest civilization we expect to be treated as equals. For we are the children of people who built a nation. And it’s a nation worth defending.
March For Australia locations Monday
Melbourne: Flinders St Station
Sydney: Prince Alfred Park, Cleveland St
Gold Coast: Macintosh Island Park, Surfers Paradise
Adelaide: Wigley Reserve, Corner of Anzac Highway and Adelphi Terrace
Perth: Wellington Square, Hill Street Entrance
Canberra: Parliament House Lawns.
Hobart: St […]
By Jo Nova
The Biggest Banker in the world has flipped
Way back in his 2021 annual CEO letter, Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, wrote: “No issue ranks higher than climate change.” It will reshape global capital flows, he said, and declared “…anyone can see the impact of climate change in the natural disasters in California or Florida.”
Now though, nevermind about global extinctions and flash floods. Fink just spoke at the Davos ski club for billionaires, and declared that we need “trillions of dollars” of investment for AI. Data centres, he said, are rapidly expanding — one technology company he spoke to said that “its data centres currently use about 5 gigawatts, but by 2030 it expects to need 30 gigawatts.”
But like a true banker, he doesn’t see a backflip, he sees only investment opportunities — the world is short of power he says. (He doesn’t say that this is in large part because BlackRock leaned on companies and countries all over the world to abandon fossil fuels.) Fink helped create the energy shortage that he now calls an investment opportunity. BlackRock is the largest asset manager in the world, controlling […]
By Jo Nova
Humans used more coal in 2025 than at any point in human history.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) solemnly announced that global coal demand reached another all time record high in 2025. “However, it is expected to decline by 2030 amid competition from other energy sources” they say, just like they say every year when coal hits a new record.
The IEA are a fully paid up part of The Blob– their funding comes from taxpayers in rich nations — so their role is to manage the narrative on energy to keep that funding flowing. Every year that coal hits a record high, the IEA also projects that coal use will plateau or fall. Back in 2019, they said “Over the next five years, global coal demand is forecast to remain stable.” Which it didn’t. In 2020 they said “Coal’s partial recovery is set to fade after 2021”. And it didn’t do that either. In 2022 they said “Global coal demand is set to plateau through 2025”. Yet again, demand for coal keeps rising.
Every year they do some version of the plateau graph (below) which includes their wish-list forecast of coal trending flat or down.
This […]
Nick Pitsas, CSIRO
By Jo Nova
The Zombie coal plant lives again
Eraring coal plant is Australia’s largest coal power station. Obviously it’s a polluting monstrosity that kills koalas and is more expensive than solar panels. It’s also old and yet, for some reason, when it was supposed to shut down in August last year, the government dished out nearly half a billion dollars to keep it running for another two years until 2027.
Now, in a second round of baffling electrical fever, the NSW government has twisted the arm of Origin Energy to make sure they don’t shut the coal plant until 2029. All four coal units will be kept running.
Eraring supplies nearly a quarter of the electricity used in our largest industrial state, but apparently the wonderland new renewables grid isn’t quite ready, even though it’s 2026 and we are supposed to be aiming for 82% unreliable energy by 2030. But cruelly, the renewables revolution hit a wall and the Snowy Hydro Scheme hit an unmodeled rock. Only three new wind farms have been built in Australia last year, and everyone hates the interconnector transmission lines.
If the renewables grid was utterly failing, and the […]
Aurora Watch Current due to the X1.9 flare that went off early Monday morning Australia time.
Glendale App reports the strongest ever substorm they have ever recorded hit Earth this morning 9am Eastern Australian time, sadly during daylight hours for us. Europeans got a roaring show, as are people in North America now. There may or may not be some action still running as darkness falls across Australia. It is cloudy in New Zealand, but they’ve probably seen too many auroras already… 🙂
See also SpaceWeatherLive and the Lake Superior live web cam. with some beautiful action in the last few hours.
From Melbourne:
https://x.com/AGretlich80048/status/2013587123677638762
10 out of 10 based on 30 ratings
Phillippsburg Nuclear Power Plant by Lothar Neumann, Gernsbach [1]
By Jo Nova
How fast was this backflip? How big was this mistake…
Germany shut down its last three reactors in April 2023, but three years later, they’ve realized it was a terrible mistake and want to rebuild them or put small modular reactors “likely on the same sites”.
After 66 years of operating nuclear power without any major accidents, the irony was that Germany shut down its nuclear industry mostly because other countries had accidents. But now they admit they need more electricity.
This would be one of the biggest backdowns in the fake renewables “transition”. Germany is the third largest economy in the world, and Chancellor Merz said this openly at a business conference a few days ago, but the mass media have said nothing.
The media groups that have reported it are niche outlets with names like Deseret News, TVPWorld, and American Thinker.
Translations from the video below:
Chancellor Merz “It was a serious strategic mistake to exit nuclear energy. We are now undertaking the most expensive energy transition in the entire world. I know of no other country that makes things so difficult for its […]
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 […]
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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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