Reality is so cruel to climate wish fairies. | Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
Left climate mob admits they might need to be more friendly
We know a movement is on the way down when they start to analyze what is going wrong.
Faced with the Worst Possible Outcome (Trump is still the President), one corner of the climate zealot world is starting to wonder if bundling The Climate Cause in with the Femo-Gay-Lezbian-Gaza-Project as an all or nothing package might be counterproductive. There is even awareness that they are supposed to be the compassionate ones.
Wait til they find out they manipulate, coerce and bully teenage girls and scare toddlers…
To motivate their team, they stoke their worst possible fear, and what’s worse than the climate apocalypse — well, it’s when voters choose a right wing government.
…the two of us share a growing concern about the direction of the climate movement. A project that ought to be broad, open and compassionate has come to be dominated by a narrow set of ideological demands which leave little room for genuine diversity of political perspective. Increasingly, participation in the climate movement has come with an ideological entry fee—where new participants must adhere to specific views beyond climate issues.
Those who want to participate are expected to accept a “package deal” of positions on issues such as race, gender and social justice.
They even call it ideological gatekeeping, and then describe how the cancel culture begins.
“…members were often asked to adopt the slogan “No climate justice without racial justice,” which, in practice, meant aligning with the Black Lives Matter (BLM)
Possibly this article was written by a couple of half-way sensible folk, who were given the job to reach the crazy-flock and pull them back from the puritanical cliff edge.
But they don’t want to demoralize the unwashed masses too much, so they try to roll out some “hope” to end the speech on.
Here’s what Nirvana looks like to people who have never talked to a single climate skeptic. They cling to the fantasy that the average voter (they call them the “hard-right”) will wake up from the non-existent condition they call “climate denial”:
We predict a reversal in the 2030s. As climate denial mostly recedes on the right, hard-right pro-climate movements may emerge. For them, ecological concern could become a vehicle for white nationalism, opposition to democratic institutions and authoritarianism. This would be a bitter irony if it arose because the climate movement failed to engage a broad political spectrum.
Just like the climate modelers — the definitions are inane, the assumptions are delusional, and the predictions are the opposite of reality.
It’s a bankers job to manage the Indian Ocean dipole, don’t you know?
People have noticed that coal, oil and gas projects that were legal and looked profitable were still unable to get funding from the Big Bankers. You might think it was the elected government’s role to figure out the complex trade-offs of how to keep the lights on, avoid unemployment and protect the spotted quoll (and the nation). But even if the people vote, and the government approves, the bankers can still say “No”. And they did…
Yet, thanks to the Straits of Hormuz, suddenly instead of earning bragging rights for their climate saintliness, they face questions about how they let the country down.
Australia’s big banks have defended their financing policies against criticism they fail to support oil, coal and gas projects, as Foreign Minister Penny Wong turns to China to shore up fuel and fertiliser supplies in a high-stakes diplomacy mission that also includes Japan and South Korea.
The trip comes amid concerns from the Coalition that projects that could have delivered oil and fuel had not been offered enough support from not only the government but the banks.
The mindset of the bankers was that coal was unthinkable:
Pembroke Resources founder and ex-chair Barry Tudor laid bare the hurdles [his coal project] faced …
“At one point during the development of Olive Downs, a senior executive at a big four Australian bank told me he really liked our project. He understood it, he believed it would succeed. But he also made something else clear: it simply would not be worth his while explaining to senior management why the bank was financing a new coal project.”
It even extended all the way down to petty cash and loans for a LandCruiser:
As Mr Irving [NAB CEO] and other banking heads rebuffed suggestions there was some kind of explicit “prohibition” on financing carbon-intensive projects, Mr Tudor revealed Pembroke’s house bank had once refused to provide simple financing for a LandCruiser because the vehicle would be used in helping deliver a coal project.
Sometime in the last ten years ago the bankers of the world decided it was their duty to manage the ocean currents and jet streams of Earth, or to at least predict them, and figure out the so-called risks to the economy. Not that they did due diligence on the science, or checked the modelling. They just took the GroupThink and added compound interest.
Westpac Bank Transition Plan
It took years for the Banker Blob to spread into global weather control
Way back in 2010 the National Australia Bank was a founding member of “Climate Active” and was the first bank downunder to become carbon neutral. But lately all the Australian banks felt the need to have a “Climate Change Commitment”– they just want to save the world, right?. Most of these “commitments” may have been trivially symbolic — like NAB installing 2,000 solar panels, and LED lights in all their branches. Nevertheless, overtly or tacitly, it appears the message got through to the staff at least, who became afraid of upsetting the boss.
The media cheered them on, the politicians said “bravo”, and most Australians had better things to do (or so they thought). But the levers of power and accountability were being taken out of Parliament and being handed to bankers. Most of whom should have been serving their country, rather than serving The Blob, the UN, the WEF, and all the agencies of globalist power. But the bankers are creatures of The Blob, which protects them from competition. They look like private institutions but they only exist at the pleasure of the regulators. And our western democracies make sure it’s hard for new competitors to get a license (we must protect the racket). We wouldn’t want any upstart bankers to get off the ground who’d like to loan to Big Oil and Big Coal and proudly so.
So it is somehow very fitting, if not frighteningly so, that the Bankers became the enforcement arm of laws written in Paris, and not necessarily in Parliament.
Let us not forget the bankers role in our current predicament. Make them squirm…
Thanks to Matt Canavan and the National Party who are trying to do that:
The Nationals are calling for a major shakeup of Australian banks, following revelations that energy-lending policies have been destroying investment in coal, gas, and oil.
Leader Matt Canavan said The Nationals had written to the four major banks, expressing concern that a businessman was denied even a bank account after he tried to build a diesel refinery in Gladstone.
“Now, with the benefit of hindsight and our current oil crisis, I am sure Australia would be a lot better off today, had we provided support for someone who had planned to build a refinery in 2018,” Senator Canavan said. “But we need to dump all of this Environmental, Social and Governance agenda because it is now clear that ESG stands for Extreme Shortages Guaranteed.
Snowy 2.0 will stand as a monument to organized crime
Big Government is the ultimate racket. The costs have been hidden, the FOIs denied, the Unions are raking in the cash, and a foreign corporation is soaking in easy money. And in the end, the stored power is likely to be a horrible $200/MWh*, making it 6 times the price of brown coal plant power.
Malcolm Turnbull promised us it would cost $2b and take four years, and here we are, nine years later, with just $40 billion and three more years to go….
There is something in this project for every grifter. The incompetent management delays have added $8b in interest during construction. That will keep the Bankers happy. There are 3,000 extra workers nobody thought we’d need and they earn $250,000 each on average. And there is now $12 billion in interconnector high-voltage line costs. Like all “renewable” projects, the fuel is free but the cost to collect and distribute it burns like a magnesium flare.
The true cost of Snowy Hydro 2.0 has spiralled to $42bn and should be the subject of a Royal Commission into “one of the biggest disasters” in Australian infrastructure, economist Bruce Mountain and energy executive Ted Woodley said.
Major contractors on Australia’s flagship renewable energy project are simultaneously reaping profits at taxpayers’ expense under arrangements that guarantee payment irrespective of performance, while a series of prime ministers have maintained a wall of secrecy around the project.
The cost is now $1,500 per man, woman and child in the country. It’s like the government demanded every family of four pay $6,000 for something that doesn’t generate electricity, it just stores what wind and solar power make at the wrong time, so we can convert a useless product into something less useless.
This is pure subsidy money to wind and solar power. Each renewable project should be charged the fees to cover this, then see what the hourly charge for unreliable power really is.
Who is making money from Snowy?
Italian construction giant Webuild is in charge of the project and booked €4bn of revenue from Australia last year alone (a figure that included other projects). Australia is now a close-second in terms of revenue for Webuild behind Italy, and is its biggest pipeline going forward.
Webuild operates under a controversial cost-plus margin contract. Based on industry standards, that probably means it gets $1.20 for every $1 it spends, creating a perverse incentive to go big.
“That’s a wonderful business to have, isn’t it?” said a former insider.
One of Webuild’s delays was so that they could get worker accommodation built in Italy and sent to Australia. Because the Australian economy is not built around remote mining camps, right?
From the Herald Sun — Bruce Mountain is renewable fan, and even he hates it:
Dr Mountain argued the project represents a fundamental policy failure that successive governments refuse to acknowledge. “Snowy 2.0 is, and always was, a dreadful idea,” he said, citing its price, environmental damage and a storage system that cannot be quickly recharged like batteries.
It takes months to pump water through a cascade system before the upper reservoir can be refilled, making it unsuitable for the flexible backup role it was designed to fill.
When finished, Snowy Hydro should provide 350GWh of long-duration energy storage, impressive enough to power 3 million homes for a week. Whether it is worth $42bn is another thing entirely.
Or we could have built four nuclear plants, South Korean style, and got 5GW of actual generation, with production of 40TWh a year. That’s 100 times as much energy, available when we need it. The big downside of course is that it’s a horror show for renewable investors and all the daft politicians who said wind and solar were “cheap”.
There are, of course, excellent reasons for secrecy
Responsible Members of Parliament clearly have a duty to keep these obscene costs a secret from taxpayers, adversaries, and anyone with a calculator. This isn’t about dodging accountability —it’s about protecting Australians from the harmful effects of understanding the astronomical numbers. Clearly releasing the truth suddenly would demoralize the nation, increasing rates of depression and suicide if people knew how crooked and inept our government really is. This is secrecy in the interests of public mental health.
Then there is the matter of commercial sensitivity. We don’t want foreign infrastructure firms to know how easy it is to screw absurd amounts of money out of Australia. They will all raise their quotes. If word got out that budgets are flexible, deadlines optional, and overruns practically a revenue stream, every bidder would adjust accordingly. Australia will never get a reasonable tender again.
Naturally national security is also at stake. If adversaries learned how effectively a single project can inflate costs and strain the grid, they might attempt to replicate the model. Why sabotage infrastructure when you can simply commission it?
Though in fairness, it’s hard to imagine how foreign spies could make the situation worse than the Labor party already has.
Two years ago the Victorian government banned new houses adding a gas connection. The houses had to be built “all electric”. It’s all part of a smooth and efficient transition, the government said. (And you ‘vill save money whether you like it or not.*).
However the demand for electricity in some areas is so high that the voltage falls, and some householders can only use one hotplate on the stove at a time, or they can’t get the heat pump to work at all. And naturally, they can’t charge their electric vehicle. But it’s all for a good cause — pagan weather control.
A network operator has warned a massive spike in power consumption from houses transitioning off gas has led to undervoltage.
It is causing some households to be unable to use car chargers, cooktops and heaters.
Do the maths: by their own numbers, that’s 300,000 incidents a year where appliances fail:
CitiPower said it had received about 1,000 voltage complaints in the past 12 months, and estimate that for every complaint there are 320 additional customers experiencing non-compliant voltages.
Undervoltage issues were occurring primarily in older areas of the network, such as inner city and older suburban Melbourne, and older urban areas of Ballarat, Geelong and Bendigo.
“…shortly after moving in, problems started. First, Ms Slako noticed she could only use one hotplate at a time on her induction cooktop. Then she found the microwave would not heat food at dinnertime, but would burn everything at other times.
This month, she discovered her split system would not heat the house.”
“There’s a sense of dread waiting for winter when I’m cold and the split system’s not heating reliably.
A few weeks of high fuel prices have destroyed 20 years of climate propaganda, pfft!
Australians have barely mentioned drilling for oil in Australia in the last twenty years. It was unthinkable. But two new polls show a dramatic awakening. Suddenly Australian voters want more oil and gas. In the first poll, 65% support more drilling for oil and gas, and in the second poll, it was 57%. These are whopping majorities. And we’ve barely started to discuss it.
Only a small minority (just 16%) were still waving the Green flag and are opposed to oil drilling. Rarely in a democracy, do we see so many people line up on the opposite side of the government policy.
Negativity to Renewables is rising. I don’t see how the Net Zero forced revolution is going to survive high fuel and electricity prices.
Only 10 per cent of Australians oppose developing more refineries and 16 per cent reject allowing more oil and gas drilling.
The Mood of the Nation survey, (April 7-13), revealed “record high negativity towards the renewable energy transition”. The SECNewgate Mood of the Nation survey of 1237 voters across every state and territory
A new Sky News poll of 1.500 Australians also finds that an overwhelming majority want more oil and gas drilling, even if it undermines Net Zero emissions.
The numbers are so stark, that even 47% of Labor voters support oil and gas exploration. If the Opposition makes this an election issue, the Labor party will bleed voters. But the Liberals are vulnerable too. If they don’t champion oil and gas exploration, they will bleed votes to the Nationals and One Nation.
Finally, the horror show that is “renewable energy” has had one expose on the mainstream media. A full hour of hard hitting investigation into the environmental destruction, the clubbed koalas, the dead bats, and the poor whipped slaves of Africa.
For the first time, there are none of the usual caveats explaining how climate change is still a threat and we will “have to” do something.
And Liam Bartlett mentions China or Chinese involvement more than 50 times. That will bite hard with Australians feeling the cost-of-living squeeze and it will be a dark new theme for most mainstream TV watchers who are used to soaking in the green fairytale story.
The awful truth of our renewable fantasy is that it’s so uncompetitive, it’s so uneconomic, that we have the second largest reserves in the world for Cobalt, but we can’t afford to mine it, because it would push up the price or renewables even higher.
Renewable energy is so uneconomic we have to use slave labor in Africa to even pretend it’s affordable.
In Liam Bartlett’s questioning at the end Bowen tells us we are 150 million kilometers from the sun, like a grade schooler trying to show how smart he is in a trivia contest. If only he could cite how many barrels of diesel we need each day and where they are going to come from if the Strait of Hormuz doesn’t open soon. Because all the refineries in Asia that we normally buy from, rely on ships from the Middle East.
Bartlett might have done better asking what percentage of the giant mining haul trucks and combine harvesters were solar or wind powered, and how exactly, our renewable future will power the heavy machinery that our economy depends upon.
So they knew it was happening and kept promoting the panels and batteries anyway? How does that that moral equation pan out — we worry more about the children born in a hundred years time suffering through one extra hot day than we worry about the living children of Africa dying right now in a primitive mine?
And cobalt is still used in NMC batteries (the C stands for Cobalt) and magnets for wind turbines, and all the mobile phones, and lap tops.
–hat tip Paul Michael, Another Delcon and Jim Simpson. Thank you!
Facebook “Crap Home Battery Installs Australia”. It seems the inverter fell off the wall, but luckily missed the gas bottles.
By Jo Nova
It’s like the “Pink Batts” debacle but this time with potentially explosive electrochemical gear
The costs have blown out in the subsidized home battery scheme– and now so have the safety standards.
Costs of the Cheaper Home Batteries Program were supposed to be $2.3 billion but when homeowners realized they got huge subsidies for installing bigger batteries than they needed, they … installed bigger batteries than they needed. Thus and verily the Cheaper Home Batteries Program blew out to $7.2 billion. And since most of the lucky homeowners won’t be sharing their battery with the voracious energy cartels, their batteries will sit at home barely used.
The government only woke up to their own inept scheme after 160,000 home units had been installed. Then they suddenly had to slap an end point on the scheme in order to stem the bleeding. So just as night follows day — that created a rush to install as many batteries as possible before the deadline, eventually reaching 250,000. Ponder that a 25kWh battery (the average size in Australia) is around 200 to 300 kg. It’s a big piece of equipment.
But a new survey of 1,250 installations shows that 1.2% were actually unsafe.
Between July 2025 and April 2026, the Clean Energy Regulator carried out 1,278 compliance inspections on battery systems installed under the program.
Some 60.8 per cent of inspected system installations were found to be “substandard” and 1.2 per cent of installs were found to be “unsafe”. The problems weren’t about the batteries themselves, but the way they had been installed.
The sample size in the regulator’s report is small — 0.5 per cent of the total number of systems installed.
With such a small sample size, it is hard to extrapolate the level of installation non-compliance across all systems in Australia. But if similar trends continue in inspections over a larger sample size, there could be approximately 3,000 battery installs that are unsafe and a further 152,000 that are non-compliant.
Exposed wiring is also a common issue that needs to be addressed as a priority. If wiring is not enclosed, it can be damaged and increase the risk of a severe electric shock if touched. The independent solar energy website, SolarQuotes, highlights the exposed wiring issue well, showcasing several installations with non-compliant wiring.
For batteries, no amount of exposed cable is compliant. Cables need to be protected from mechanical damage for the full cable run, using electrical conduit or metal ducting.
Alarmingly, reports from experts in the field indicate that only 10 peer cent of installers are following these wiring practices correctly.
A quick scroll of social media groups that rate battery installation jobs visually confirms the issues. Posts of substandard installations show exposed cables, batteries placed in full sun, delicately anchored to a wall with standard masonry wall plugs or supported with loose bits of timber and pavers.
After creating all the right conditions for dangerous rushed boom the government is talking tough about “ramping up inspections” and identifying the poor performers. More money on this bonfire!
The regulator is even talking about limiting the number of installations that each installer can do in one day.
Many of the non-compliant issues relate to the sticker forest that has grown on most batteries. And while a misplaced sticker won’t set the battery on fire, if a battery is deemed non-compliant, it may void the insurance. Wouldn’t that be a nasty surprise?
There are a lot of jokes about stickers, like “A few more stickers would’ve fixed that”.
The Solar Quotes article on “cheap batteries” has plenty of photos.
An advert for “Cheap Home Batteries” in Qld shows that customers only needed to pay a few hundred dollars more to drain the public purse by $4,000 extra and get a battery three times larger than they will probably ever use.
Some readers may remember his great contributions at this blog. He trained as a Nuclear Physicist, attended Harvard Business School and was a Fellow at Oxford. Not exactly the stereotypical knucklehead climate denier, he worked at Fermilab and CERN, and was once Deputy of VENCorp — managing the gas and electricity market in Victoria, which made him very well qualified to point out how subsidized wind power would drive out reliable baseload generators that keep the system running (and cheap).
When others might have retired to play golf, Tom was indefatigable, volunteering to warn us of the expensive mistakes the nation was making. His work with Paul Miskelly was years ahead of anyone else. If only the nation had listened more carefully to Tom and Paul, we could have saved a few hundred billion dollars or more. We don’t appreciate our star science talent…
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