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Friday

8.8 out of 10 based on 20 ratings

Hallelujah! Trump announces withdrawal of US support and funds for Blob Headquarters — 66 UN and international agencies


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 taxes on global shipping “to reduce carbon emissions” but mostly to earn the UN $40 billion a year to boss us around with. They promote outlandish self-serving fear-mongering, with biblical fire and brimstone, they attack our key industries, try to curb our free speech.

The UN operates like a mafia protection racket. UNESCO threatens to put the Great Barrier Reef on the “in danger list”, even though the reef is the biggest and best managed reef in the world, with record high coral cover. It does this to extract funds, power and status for Blob workers.

There should be a Royal Commission into the politicians and media outlets who sold out the nation to support the UN, like those that signed the Pandemic Treaty, and the Carbon tax on shipping.

From Marco Rubio: Withdrawal from Wasteful, Ineffective, or Harmful International Organizations

Today, in furtherance of Executive Order 14199, President Trump announced the withdrawal of the United States from 66 international organizations identified as part of the Trump Administration’s review of wasteful, ineffective, and harmful international organizations. Review of additional international organizations pursuant to Executive Order 14199 remains ongoing.

The Trump Administration has found these institutions to be redundant in their scope, mismanaged, unnecessary, wasteful, poorly run, captured by the interests of actors advancing their own agendas contrary to our own, or a threat to our nation’s sovereignty, freedoms, and general prosperity. President Trump is clear: It is no longer acceptable to be sending these institutions the blood, sweat, and treasure of the American people, with little to nothing to show for it. The days of billions of dollars in taxpayer money flowing to foreign interests at the expense of our people are over.

As such, the United States will be withdrawing from the 66 organizations that can be found here.

As this list begins to demonstrate, what started as a pragmatic framework of international organizations for peace and cooperation has morphed into a sprawling architecture of global governance, often dominated by progressive ideology and detached from national interests. From DEI mandates to “gender equity” campaigns to climate orthodoxy, many international organizations now serve a globalist project rooted in the discredited fantasy of the “End of History.” These organizations actively seek to constrain American sovereignty. Their work is advanced by the same elite networks—the multilateral “NGO-plex”— that we have begun dismantling through the closure of USAID.

The left are apoplectic

Outrage as Trump withdraws from key UN climate treaty along with dozens of international organisations

The Guardian:

Donald Trump has sparked outrage by announcing the US will exit the foundational international agreement to address the climate crisis, cementing the US’s utter isolation from the global effort to confront dangerously escalating temperatures.

“This is a shortsighted, embarrassing and foolish decision,” said Gina McCarthy, who was a top climate adviser to Joe Biden’s White House.

“As the only country in the world not a part of the UNFCCC treaty, the Trump administration is throwing away decades of US climate change leadership and global collaboration. This administration is forfeiting our country’s ability to influence trillions of dollars in investments, policies and decisions that would have advanced our economy and protected us from costly disasters wreaking havoc on our country.”

Manish Bapna, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said Trump’s decision to exit the UNFCCC is an “unforced error” and “self-defeating” as it will further hamper the US’s ability to compete with China, which is increasingly dominant in the world’s burgeoning clean energy technology industries.

Trump serves oil billionaires, says Al Gore!

Gore, the former US vice-president and climate activist, told the Guardian:“They’ve done this at the behest of the oil industry, so that billionaires can rake in even more money while polluting our planet and endangering people in America and around the world,”…

The World Health Organisation had only one job, to prevent pandemics, and instead  it helped kill at least six million people (so far), and spread disease and chaos to every corner of the world.  WHO made sure nations kept flying in the bioweapon from Wuhan when they could so easily have stopped it. And Tedros, of course, is a devoted minion of President Xi, and a former Minister of Ethiopia during the time the Chinese Belt and Road expanded there. Even as China lied about the human spread and risk of Covid in January 2020 — Tedros worked as a one-man advertising man to cover the bad news and promote the leader of the CCP.

The parasitic bureaucrats and Blob psychopaths value our lives at zero.

h/t Jim Simpson, Willie Soon, David Archibald

 

 

 

9.9 out of 10 based on 141 ratings

Next door’s wind farm can stop you building a home on your own land

Wind turbines, sunset, agriculture, renewables. Photo.

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 land uses such as a house,” he said.

We can all see where this is going.  Soon, new wind plants will have to compensate neighbors for the loss in amenity and use of their own land. So the cost of wind energy will rise even further.

For Western Australian farmers see the Draft Renewable Energy Planning Code open for feedback until 10th April. Have Your Say.

Who would have thought that collecting energy spread over thousands of square kilometers could have an impact on the air, the rain, the birds, frogs and mammals living underneath them?

Photo by Karsten Würth on Unsplash

 

 

 

9.9 out of 10 based on 80 ratings

Thursday

Sorry about Tuesday and Wednesday.

9.1 out of 10 based on 11 ratings

Psychologists do mass survey of climate messages only to find nothing “opened wallets”

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 would not have been cheap  — They not only surveyed thousands of people, but they did it before a ‘treatment’ and again afterwards. The ‘treatment’ they offered people was to read a few short paragraphs of what the researchers thought was a persuasive message — but in reality was just a rehash of themes they have been beating us over the head with for years.

They were hoping to find a useful phrase that reached Democrats or Republicans and pulled out some cash, or shifted behaviour. But they did not hit paydirt. The results were so bad, they even had to admit they barely moved the dial. Despite the massive numbers taking the survey, they could barely reach statistical significance on anything. It was a wash…

PhysOrgIn a study involving more than 13,000 participants in the U.S., several messaging strategies were shown to move the needle—albeit slightly—in attempts to strengthen pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors regarding climate change. None, however, was effective in spurring people to put their money where their mouth is.

Basically a few people seemed more convinced about climate change after their ‘treatment’ (for the next five minutes) but almost none of them cared enough to donate money to stop it.

The paper almost never gives answers as solid percentages, probably because the absolute numbers were so pathetic. One percentage they supplied was that “treatment conditions increased belief in climate change by 1.16 percentage points….” And remember, this is the result a few minutes after being exposed to the key paragraph. A week later it will be nearer to 0%.

They were also surprised at what they didn’t find– political division:  “And, perhaps most surprisingly, messages’ persuasiveness varied little between Democrats and Republicans.”

So after years of politicization and polarization the researchers were surprised to find that that Democrats and Republicans were both human? If they could have found some difference, it would have been the headline — Democrats, open to persuasion! Republicans, sticks-in-the-mud!

 

The ten themes are explained at the bottom:  Essentially the Republicans were slightly more moved by the patriotic maintenance of the “purity of American land”. Democrats were slightly more moved by being nice to people and touchy feely stuff.

When reading these graphs (they have about 45), the dots on the right of the zero line, were theoretically “positive” and therefore changed opinions  (if we ignore most of the error bars).

Ironically, the only dot below with any statistical significance is the one that suggests that making claims of economic or jobs gains to Republicans will reduce donations. Obviously, Republicans just don’t believe that stuff anymore.

Consensus is still the only winner (for them)

The main argument for believers is still the profoundly anti-science line that truth is what the annointed Gods of Science say.

But every time anyone mentions the Petition Project, we win

When it came to changing beliefs, the “consensus of experts” was the most reliable argument to influence people. New readers may not be aware the Petition Project was an extraordinary survey of scientists in the US which proved that there was no consensus. Nearly twenty years ago, 31,000 scientists including 9,000 PhD’s were willing to sign a strong statement of dissent. Naturally, the legacy media didn’t mention it, even though it was a larger, longer list than any the believers ever arranged. So most people have never heard of it.

Bizarrely, in their theme called Scientific consensus 1 — the researchers talked about the “expert consensus” but also tried to also ‘innoculate’ readers against the Petition Project. And they may have done more harm than good. In trying to debunk the Petition Project they inadvertently opened the average persons eyes to news that there was a scientific debate and it has been surpressed. In contrast Scientific consensus 2 (which didn’t mention the Petition Project) was received as more persuasive in almost every situation. The only time Consensus type 1 was a winner (for believers), was when it worked on Democrats to elict a few more donations. In that case talking to climate activists about “the battle” reminds them of which side they are on in this tribal war. They may feel like the victims battling a big machine (31,000 evil denier scientists!).

The only thing we really learn in the MegaStudy is just how much money The Blob has thrown at polishing its communication memes in order to squeeze a tiny bit more compliance with climate grift and graft. 

PS: One of the 24 authors was the infamous Stephan Lewandowsky, well known for studying skeptics by placing surveys on sites that hate and mock them.  This is the man who once surveyed a 32,000 year old respondent. He’s still around.

_________________________________________

APPENDIX: The ten top favourite climate-messaging treatments:

  • Binding framing — Argues that mitigating climate change aligns with patriotic, family, and religious values.
  • Scientific consensus 1 –Emphasises scientific agreement on human-caused climate change and explicitly inoculates against sceptical narratives, including the Petition Project.
  • Scientific consensus 2 –Emphasises scientific agreement on human-caused climate change and inoculates against a vague “fake debate” strategy, without naming specific dissenting groups.
  • Dire but solvable framing –-Stresses that climate change consequences are severe, but solutions exist.
  • Compatible solution framing –Argues climate mitigation can be achieved while remaining consistent with free-market principles.
  • Gains framing –Highlights benefits and positive outcomes from mitigating climate change.
  • High social distance framing — Focuses on climate harms affecting a socially distant group (e.g., Chinese farmers).
  • Purity framing — Frames mitigation as protecting the purity and cleanliness of American land.
  • System preservation framing — Argues that climate mitigation helps preserve the traditional American way of life.
  • Warmth framing — Appeals to caring for fellow citizens and social compassion.

 

REFERENCE

Voelkel, J.G., Ashokkumar, A., Abeles, A.T. et al. A registered report megastudy on the persuasiveness of the most-cited climate messages. Nat. Clim. Chang. (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-025-02536-2

10 out of 10 based on 62 ratings

Climate Terrorism: Militant left activists use grid arson to blackout 45,000 Berlin homes in midwinter

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 in the heads of the crazy people are the university prophets who are paid to whip up fear and angst:

These are the footsoldiers of Antonio Guterres and his boiling oceans. You can only sing Mass Extinction for so many years before impressionable teens become unhinged, or adrenalin junkies seek you out to fulfill their thrill-seeking desires. If the world is about to end and someone has the urge for arson, what better excuse is there?  These little boys can play Climate Batman and Save The World.

After the unrestrained hyperbole from the highest sources, it’s only a hop, skip and a jump before ideologues decide that arson and sabotage are not only justified—but morally required. When elites declare it’s the end of the world, they can’t feign innocence when some people act as if it’s the end of the world.

Meanwhile the Greenie minions are wound up by the old Class Warfare marxist trope. They think they are taking the fight up to the greedy gas barons, and people in the wealthiest postcodes, but don’t realize these are just decoy targets, designed to keep the greens busy while the Bankers make billions, the politicians get a peace prize and a job with the UN, and China makes its sales figures. The Greens fall for it every time. They are the best friends of The Bankers.

But we don’t need to silence the high priests of gloom, we just need free speech (and to cut off their funding).

In a normal society, deranged prophets of doom get mocked. In a corrupt society, they get a government grant, or they get elected so they can pass laws banning people from mocking them.

h/t to a good person, I’ll figure it out… (sorry)

 

 

9.8 out of 10 based on 112 ratings

Monday

8.5 out of 10 based on 29 ratings

Sunday

8.1 out of 10 based on 24 ratings

Capitalism and carbon emissions saves lives

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 made emissions ramped up from 1980 to 2010, deaths due to extreme weather fell.

 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378019300378

 

I could add in a snarky line about using “Green reasoning”, but the truth is that countries that emit more CO2 tend to increase their GDP.

All those fossil fueled rockets, ambulances,  satellites, mobile phones and private cars are saving people.

  • Richer societies have far lower vulnerability to floods, droughts, heat, cold, and storms

  • The decline in deaths has occurred despite population growth and urbanisation

The data suggest that GDP growth has done more to protect humanity from climate-related deaths than any climate policy ever implemented.

REFERENCE:

Giuseppe Formetta and Luc Feyen (2019)Empirical evidence of declining global vulnerability to climate-related hazards, Global Environmental Change, 57, 101920.

9.9 out of 10 based on 95 ratings

Saturday

9.4 out of 10 based on 16 ratings

Europes biggest insect factory goes bankrupt — these bugs are not even Dog Food

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 food chain” with insect-based protein. But don’t be too quick to attribute its failure to the “ick” factor that many Westerners feel about bugs. Human food was never its core focus.

It’s only money…

And revenue was the problem. According to publicly available data, Ÿnsect’s revenue from its main entity peaked at €17.8 million in 2021 (approximately $21 million) — a figure reportedly inflated by internal transfers between subsidiaries. By 2023, the company had racked up a net loss of €79.7 million ($94 million).

The vainglorious heady days of climate communism meant some bureaucrats thought it made sense to spend $200 million dollars feeding bugs to cows to try to change rainfall in 2100 AD.

Defenders of the faith will say this bug factory expanded far too fast, and it’s not the bugs that failed but the management. But the factory was plagued with problems from the start — including diseases, parasites, and fat worms that clog the machines.

In the biggest irony, insects need high temperatures to grow fast and the energy costs were killing them:

How the world leader in insects ended up in bankruptcy:

Behind this exciting showcase, the technical difficulties quickly become apparent. By attempting to raise mealworms (Tenebrio molitor), the company ventures into relatively unknown territory. It faces numerous complications: diseases, parasites, overly fatty worms clogging the machines, etc. Furthermore, insects require a high temperature to grow quickly (over 25°C), which leads to high energy costs, exacerbated by rising prices resulting from the war in Ukraine.

This is a dragon that eats its own tail.

The Green revolution kills the green revolution because energy is too expensive. Not to mention that fantasies of weather control attract terrible managers.

 

 

 

 

9.9 out of 10 based on 100 ratings

Friday

9 out of 10 based on 24 ratings

Happy New Year 2026!

Wishing everyone all the best for the new year.

Sadly due to new anti free speech laws some topics are going to be difficult to discuss here. I will get legal advice but on the meantime please assume that some topics are radioactive. Sorry.

Moderation may be heavy and slow. Past unthreadeds have been temporarily made private until more information makes the policy clear.

9.8 out of 10 based on 84 ratings

The world warmed faster 100 years ago when man made CO2 was one-eighth as high…

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, be interested?

Shouldn’t they be honest enough to have published this, and discussed it with those who pay their salaries? I mean, it doesn’t exactly fit with the 97% certainty thing, does it?

Bibek Bhatta tried versions of the 100 best stations, and also the full 1,622 station mix. They tried analyzing it by tight clusters, but it didn’t matter how he cross checked it — the answer came out the same. CO2 isn’t the controller. 

REFERENCES

Bhatta, Bibek, Revisiting CO2 Emissions and Global Warming: Implications for Society (August 17, 2025). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5395197 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5395197 

 

9.7 out of 10 based on 82 ratings

Mouse study suggests that starch-based microplastics may raise blood sugar, damage organs

Image by Nikolett Emmert from Pixabay

By Jo Nova

Remember how biodegradable plastic was going to make the world a healthier place? It would save us all from the horrible plastic landfill that lasts 1000 years, and it would protect the dolphins. Well, let’s just hope the dolphins don’t eat the bags.

Despite the rush to put biodegradable bags in every shopping centre, no one had bothered to study whether it had an effect on our health, and we still don’t know, but we can say that the mice on that compost heap with these biodegradable bags will be more likely to have diabetes, smaller ovaries, and liver damage. Degradable plastic affected their gut flora.  The authors say: “Prolonged exposure to environmentally relevant doses of Starch-based microplastics can have widespread health effects.”

How many native mice will die that could have been saved, and do the Greens care?

This study came out in April:

Mouse study suggests that starch-based microplastics may harm health

Victoria Atkinson, c&en

While many studies have examined the health implications of ingesting petroleum-derived microplastics, none have looked at the long-term health effects on a living organism ingesting starch-based microplastics. To help elucidate the safety of these ecoplastics, Deng and his team used a mouse model to simulate long-term exposure to varying doses of starch-based microplastics. (J. Agric. Food Chem. 2025, DOI: 10.1021/acs.jafc.4c10855) They incorporated various concentrations of starch-based microplastics into the animals’ food, scaled to reflect typical human exposure; after 3 months, they euthanized the mice to probe the impacts of no, low, and high consumption of microplastics

Notably, the exposed mice consistently had elevated blood glucose levels and disrupted insulin regulation—both heavily implicated in conditions such as diabetes.

Organ-sample analysis revealed system-wide physiological changes, including reduced ovary size, liver damage
and inflammation, and impaired colon function. “Starch-based microplastics [SMPs] exhibit widespread harm, potentially affecting multiple tissues and functions,” Deng says. “Given that humans also face real-life scenarios of chronic exposure to starch based microplastics, these findings serve as an important warning regarding their potential health impacts.”

In lab tests normal plastic bags didn’t harm the cells.

Biodegradable bags are TOXIC – and may be linked to liver and ovary damage, scientists warn

By Xantha Leatham, Daily Mail, 

‘Biodegradable starch-based plastics may not be as safe and health-promoting as originally assumed,’ said Professor Yongfeng Deng, one of the study’s authors.

In a previous study the researchers compared the compostable bags to normal plastic bags after they had been left out in the sun and composted. But when they put them next to fish cells, “A ‘high level of toxicity’ was produced by the biodegradable bags, harming the fish cells,”

Cinta Porte, lead author of the study, published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials, said: ‘We were surprised that cells exposed to conventional plastic bags showed no trace of toxicity.

I don’t put these bags into my own compost. The Council can have them.

REFERENCE

Liu et al (2025) Long-Term Exposure to Environmentally Realistic Doses of Starch-Based Microplastics Suggests Widespread Health Effects. J Agric Food Chem,  2025 Apr 23;73(16):9867-9878.  doi: 10.1021/acs.jafc.4c10855. Epub 2025 Apr 9.

9.9 out of 10 based on 69 ratings

Blockbuster: Renewables, EVs need silver but China bans silver exports, and the price takes off

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.

The largest single use of silver has become “industrial applications”:

Silver, it turns out, is the best electrical and thermal conductor of all the elements. It is essential to the solar panel industry, EV’s, and data centres. And for the last five years the demand from the tech giants and renewable industry has been so great the global silver miners have not been able to keep with demand. The cumulative deficit in silver production since 2020 is  1.1 billion ounces. That’s a lot of silver that has been pulled from physical stores and sent to industrial buyers.

When Elon Musk says “it’s not good” he is thinking of the silver his factories need. Without enough supply, production lines will grind to a halt. Current EV’s use about twice as much silver as a petrol and diesel car (25-50 grams per car.) But the demand is only going to rise. The new Samsung sold state battery is rumored to need hundreds of grams, or even 1 kilogram of silver in every battery. It’s only a prototype, but supposedly charges in nine minutes and has a range of 900km (600 miles). You know they will want silver…

And even if the price of silver rises substantially, it’s still a small part of the whole cost of an EV, therefore the factories are going to pay the new higher prices. Anything is better than shutting down…

 

It is possible to substitute other metals for silver, but the losses are significant. Copper oxidizes badly, and has higher resistance.

Meanwhile, inconveniently, China announced two months ago that export licenses will be required for silver in 2026 (this is the same treatment they have done with rare earths). So technically, the CCP can say they haven’t banned anything, but the new rules just happen to restrict supply leaving the country from January 1 (Friday). The Export licenses are just “sanctions by paperwork”. Hence many industrial players are just starting to realize their supply lines are suddenly at risk.

There is a big silver shortage, which may bring down some bankers, the ones left holding the short contracts on silver… At the very least, the money printers will have to work hard.

The most calculated trade in inside trading

The Asian Guy  in the videos below, is telling (or selling) a story. Strangely, his YouTube channel only started three weeks ago, yet his reports on silver have been so detailed and prescient he has gathered 43,000 subscribers. He appears to be pure AI, and, we should keep in mind that he may even be a product of the JP Morgan marketing team. Who knows? He almost seems to know too much.

WARNING: There are many copies and imitators and ambush spam videos acting as decoys. The original is OG Jon AG. Also on X: OGJohnAG and the backup channel is here. The transcript of this video (now made private) is here.


..

The Asian Guy  describes himself as a silver bug, and talks the talk of the long suffering silver nerd, and yet, in the end, we have to ask why he is suddenly making these videos and “who benefits” from them. Obviously JP Morgan comes out looking very powerful, (albeit, also rather predatory. They told everyone not to buy silver while they bought it themselves).

The Asian Guy is effectively telling Elon Musk he has been out-gamed by JP Morgan and he will need to knock at their door and wait for them to set the price. Presumably they don’t want him to buy up Mexican silver mines…

In this video (below) made a few days ago, The Asian Guy claims last Friday, one banker must have gone to the US Federal Reserve to beg for $17 billion in Repos (Repurchase agreements) to keep them alive in the disastrous silver shorts gamble. A repo is a loan of last resort. If it’s true, it suggests things are getting very close to the wire for some traders.

It also confirms that the US central powers are willing to inflate their way out of trouble.

 

The Blob bureaucracy depends on fiat currencies

If the Blob can print money — they can keep giving away other people’s purchasing power in order to buy votes. The game is up though, if the voters realize what is going on and abandon the dollar in favor of something else, like gold or silver.

Because the Blob bankers can always print more money, they have created vast numbers of layers of derivatives, options and hedge contracts.  Astonishingly, the ratio of “paper silver” to real silver is estimated to be over 100 to one, or much higher. What’s changing is that people are demanding the physical silver, not just another paper contract. They can’t make solar panels or EVs with paper silver. But once people realize there isn’t enough silver, everything falls apart just like a bank run, and panic sets in.

_______________

PS: My other half, Dr David Evans and I own Goldnerds. We’ve  been watching the precious metals market for 30 years, and  waiting for the house of cards to come undone (as have many skeptics). Obviously anything I write here is not market advice, just posted for information…

 

 

9.9 out of 10 based on 74 ratings

Global warming could trigger the next ice age

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 of history. Pretty much all that time, CO2 and temperature were higher than today but we didn’t keep flipping into a snowball Earth.

The other awkward problem is that phytoplankton grow much more slowly in cooler temperatures, and it will happen in minutes. It’s not like the Earth could drop 20 degrees and the microalgae and diatoms won’t notice for a thousand years, and will just keep chugging along. Volcanoes add a stream of CO2 back to the sky, so the phytoplankton would have to outpace them.

Imagine the quicksand  the modelers are playing with. They are trying to cover 100,000 year timescales, geological weathering of silicate rocks, and blend it all in happy-happy to model life forms that breed every 24 hours and have a lifespan of six days. The models don’t work to start with, and now we’re extrapolating every variable in every direction.

We might as well read tea leaves. It would be cheaper and we can fertilize the garden afterwards.

100 shades of irrelevant

If carbon dioxide doesn’t cause much warming in the first place, it can’t cause much cooling when it’s gone, and we know its minor. The hot spot has been missing for 20 years. Most of the warming effect of CO2 is supposed to come from amplification by water vapor in the upper troposphere, but we looked for decades and 28 million radiosondes didn’t find it. Until the climate modelers admit this, apologize and fix their models, their models won’t work. But we all know they can’t fix their models, because that might accidentally “solve” the climate crisis which would be a disaster for all the subsidy seekers.

For anyone new to this debate, their modelers said that water vapor was the big deal, and the fingerprint of disaster right up until the minute they discovered the fingerprint wasn’t there.

Excuses, Excuses

To explain why this dire whipsawing feedback worked in 600 million BC, but hasn’t been noticed in the last half a billion years, the researchers do some convoluted excuse-making.  Apparently it was more likely then because oxygen levels were lower. In that scenario, the CO2 sinks, but the phosphorus recycles at the surface which feeds even bigger phytoplankton blooms, like a global vacuum sucking CO2 out of the sky and pumping it down the Mariana trench. It’s all just-so reasoning.

Until the climate modelers make models that work in the last 50 years, they haven’t got a clue about the Precambrian.

What this paper does show though, is that Climate Science functions like a cult.  This is what happens with 30 years of government funded research that no one can question.  Teams of semi-functional desk-jockeys with PhDs  take a bad assumption, amplify it in broken computer models and come up with nonsense that unfunded bloggers can disassemble on sight.

But handily, if an ice age happens, they’ll be able to say “we were right” and blame CO2.

Ice-age

The 500 million years of CO2 and Temperature on Earth. | Berner and Scotese

h/t Peter C and Krishna Gans

REFERENCE

Dominik Hülse, Andy Ridgwell (2025) Instability in the geological regulation of Earth’s climate. Science, 2025; 389 (6767) DOI: 10.1126/science.adh7730

 

 

10 out of 10 based on 76 ratings

Please: This Blogger could use your help to shine a light on grift, graft and pagan witchcraft in science

For a few days new posts will appear below this one. Thank you to everyone and Merry Christmas!Ministry of Climate Panic

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 reaching the children with our dangerous graphs of the Holocene, the Eemian and Chinese coal use. We all know they banned X for under 16s but not its mirror leftie twin “BlueSky”. Age Verification is just an excuse for Digital ID which starts softly and quietly two days after Christmas. Shh!

Meanwhile, The cyber attacks on this site started on Easter Saturday, two weeks before the Australian election, crippling the blog for days until we added better armor, which costs more. The hostile force behind that kept coming back. This was a graph below of a typical day in September when a thousand ‘people’ in Singapore suddenly needed to read this site at half past the hour, every hour. Similar artificial patterns came often from Chinese servers, or through Hong Kong or Vietnam. There was also a lot of US traffic, but not with this screaming spike pattern. Those who were attacking didn’t bother to hide it. They wanted me to know, perhaps hoping I would be intimidated?

Presumably the CCP doesn’t like it when I explain that China makes out like bandits from our Net Zero stupidity, which I’ve done, 146 times. 

Tip Jar ButtonIt’s been 17 years here on this blog, somehow, outside the system, living off goodwill and donations, debating the U.N. and trillion dollar cartels. Real freedom is writing with no corporate sponsor, and no major advertiser. There’s no billionaire publisher to cancel me. The government can’t take away a grant it never gave me, and the cowards of Cancel Culture can’t scare away the advertisers I don’t have.

I am not dependent on any institution, but I am of course, dependent on you, the reader, which is exactly how it should be. To serve the people direct, instead of serving Disney, Pfizer or President Xi. When no one holds the strings, everyone does.

I don’t ask for a subscription here, just some help if you can spare it.

Thank you to everyone who cancelled subscriptions to the propaganda sheets, and sent that money to someone in the new independent media instead.

Never surrender

Please hit the tip jar, buy me a coffee, a steak, a month on the server (now $194) and money to pay the bills. Australians may prefer to use direct deposit (details below) where you can also set up a monthly donation which helps me plan ahead. Thanks for your contribution, no matter how big or small. I know times are tough for some people.

Due to ridiculous legal froufrou,  Paypal donors will need to “buy” a number of “units of emergency chocolate” — (1 unit=$1) so write a number of dollars into the Quantity Field!  (Apologies it’s not more user friendly). This works in AUD, CAD, EUR, GBP, NZD or USD.

Tip Jar Button

OR send help directly via National Australia Bank for UnQwerty Pty Ltd  BSB: 086420 Account number: 563148308 or via International transfer or even via snail-mail.

I will try again to set up GiveSendGo. I’ll update as soon as I can…

Merry Christmas and best wishes to everyone here.

With a special thank you and best wishes to Bryant.

Thanks in recent weeks to JS, PM, RK, RR, FA, CK, DL, RI, PC, DM, AD, JE, TK, FF, AC, AH, RG, LA, DM, TP. CM and other Delcons.

 

 

 

9.9 out of 10 based on 90 ratings

The Forced EV Revolution — the Big-government Boom that Busted and Ford alone blew $20b US

EV Bubble

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 supposed to come into effect in 2035. Theoretically they’re only dropping the 100% ban to a 90% one. But the ideology has cracked, largely due to the uproar from European car makers who were not selling enough EV’s to make it work.

There are already calls to drop the 90% rule. It will mean that only the rich will be able to afford the few new petrol and diesel cars available for sale. Presumably the unwashed masses will just keep driving their old cars,.

The car maker takes a $19.5 billion write-down on its electric-vehicle business.

The Wall Street Journal

Not long ago, auto makers were touting electric cars as the future. Well, now they are slamming the brakes hard on that future as market reality has hit them like a 16-wheeler. See Ford Motor’s stunning announcement Monday that it will take a $19.5 billion charge on its electric-vehicle business.

“Instead of plowing billions into the future knowing these large EVs will never make money, we are pivoting,” Ford CEO Jim Farley said as he explained the company’s plan to boost its lineup of gas-powered cars and hybrids. Ford will also scrap its all-electric F-150 Lightning pickup, which has been a favorite of the EV-loving press.

Ford has lost $13 billion on its EV business since 2023, with bigger losses expected in years to come. Last year Ford lost about $50,000 for each EV sold. The truth is that the business case for EVs has always rested largely on government subsidies and mandates. Now that this combination of government favoritism and coercion is mostly going away, most car makers have much less reason to make EVs.

The same week as CSIRO decided 90% renewable was near enough, the EU did a similar thing:

EU drops 2035 combustion engine ban as global EV shift faces reset

By , Reuters
STRASBOURG, Dec 16 (Reuters) – The European Commission unveiled a plan on Tuesday to drop the EU’s effective ban on new combustion-engine cars from 2035 after pressure from the region’s auto sector, marking the bloc’s biggest retreat from its green policies in recent years.
Dominic Phinn, head of transport at non-profit group Climate Group, countered that the measures were a “tragic win” for the traditional industry over electric cars. “The watering down of the petrol and diesel-engine phase-out flies in the face of leading companies across Europe, who are investing billions in electric fleets and desperately need the stability it provides,” he said.
Under Tuesday’s proposal, EU targets would shift to a 90% cut in CO2 emissions from 2021 levels, instead of current rules that all new cars and vans from 2035 have zero emissions.

The lesson, yet again, is that in trying to artificially make EV’s cheaper, Big Government has made all cars more expensive. Ford and everyone else will have to make up those losses somehow. And in trying to reduce emissions, the bureaucrats have almost certainly increased them. By denying  the poor a chance to own a new car, they’re undoubtedly kept older, higher emission cars on the road. Not that emissions matter — the point is that whatever it was that the geniuses with the magic wand wanted, the free market would have done it better.

POST-NOTE: I meant to mention Francis Menton’s article,The Electric Vehicle Collapse: Wow, That Was Quick! which described just how fast and furious this EV Bubble has inflated and collapsed:

“It was less than three years ago — early 2023 — that I was writing about the then-universal government and industry line that electric vehicles (EVs) would soon be taking over the American car market. “

In a post in January 2023, I linked to the websites of Ford and GM, where they both touted their grand plans for rapid conversion of their companies to the manufacture of mostly or entirely EVs. At that time, Ford was claiming that it would “lead America’s shift to EVs,” and would achieve 50% of its sales in that category by 2030. GM bragged about its “path to an all-electric future” by 2035.

Let’s face it, this was always ill-conceived central planning, and it was never going to work. I went back to the links that I had included to the Ford and GM websites in my January 2022 post. Both links remain active, but the excited talk about leading the way to an all-EV future has been scrubbed from both.

 

 

9.9 out of 10 based on 109 ratings

Wind investment fell off a cliff: The industry gets excited, because the *first* wind project just got approved for 2025? (!)

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 Investment Decision in 2025 and shows that the investment drought for new projects in Australia is finally breaking,” said Tilt CEO Anthony Fowler.

“Wind projects have been held back by a combination of grid access, connection challenges, social licence, and rising costs, although the industry says these have now started to ease. “

Even though the Green-Labor Party won the Australian election in May, everything has gone wrong for wind farm developers. The drought in wind projects that started before the election has continued afterwards too. Even a compliant,  delusionally-supportive government can’t change geography, or high pressure cells. What’s killing wind power was always going to kill it.

One big high pressure cell can stop the wind all over the country at once (Jun 2024)

High pressure cell over Australia destroying wind production.

 

Sooner or later, as intermittent energy dominated the grid, the value of more random generation would fall to nothing.  We reached a point where all the good locations for wind plants were filled, so there were no nice windy spots near transmission lines left. Then the horrible farmers got organized to stop the big new high voltage lines going through, which meant new sites would be delayed by years, or never get connected at all.

Making it worse, the unstoppable rise of subsidized solar power ate the profits of every generator at lunchtime forcing the market into negative prices. Then the rise of subsidized batteries chewed through the bonuses that might have come in frequency control markets and the bonanza evening price spikes.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, and it was terrible — the diabolical uncertainty of marginal losses was ruining business plans  — each year the AEMO applies a new marginal loss value on projects that are too far from the cities, or who have too many other generators around them. This reflects the electrical losses in long lines or congested wires. But it means effectively the generators lose income for 10, 20 or 30% of all the electricity they make, and if a competitor builds a wind plant next door, they both suffer higher marginal losses.

Thus and verily, new wind plant developers faced an impossible Gordian knot — they needed to be close to cities, but far away from other generators. They had to be near high voltage lines, but in a different climate region so it might be windy for them when it was calm for everyone else. Wind turbines needed to be near, but far, alone but together — It was never going to work.

Photo By Tedder – Own work, CC BY 3.0,

 

 

9.8 out of 10 based on 90 ratings