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By Jo Nova
Don’t mention brown coal?
Last quarter I reported that the Australian Energy Market Operators (AEMO) had strangely “forgotten” to list the brown coal prices in its quarterly report, despite it being the second largest energy source in our national electricity market.
Other quarters, often they would include a graph comparing the average winning bids of all the major fuel types — a graph that surely is essential in these inflationary times where our electricity prices are setting record highs, rising by 25% this month, and we have a national debate on our energy crisis.
In the next quarterly report the AEMO did list the average “winning bids” of brown coal but didn’t do the comparison graph, so I’ve done it for them. If only they had room in their 68 page report and $450 million dollar budget so Australians can see, at a glance, which fuel source provides the cheapest wholesale generation by far, every quarter, all the time?
Despite all the inflation, the war, and the pandemic, brown coal generators are still making electricity for 3c a KWh. Shouldn’t Australians know that?
Click to enlarge (Or download the larger JPG file)
Compare that to […]
Octopus in the city image by Эльвина Якубова
By Jo Nova
23 US state Attorneys General blocked the insurance wing of the global climate police
After the States fired the first “Antitrust” volley across the bows, the largest insurance giants in the world ran for the exits. Within weeks, what was a 30 member alliance became a shell of a dozen minor insurance companies. The NZIA has effectively admitted defeat — announcing that members won’t need to set or report on their carbon targets. Phew.
In 2021 many stars of the insurance world rushed to join the global climate activist cartel — the Net Zero Insurers Alliance (NZIA) — which would have turned their industry into another branch of the global UN and WEF climate police. The plan was to make it hard for unfashionable businesses to get insurance unless they went “Net Zero” and followed the policies the UN and WEF billionaires wanted. Democracy be damned. This effectively would have dragooned the coal miners, airlines, farmers, and publishers — practically everyone who needs insurance, into setting “Net Zero” targets above and beyond their legal requirements. All businesses would have to say the right prayers to the […]
By Jo Nova
A US judge has finally ruled what we knew all along — that it’s not OK for The US Government to collude with Big Tech to silence critics and political opponents.
It’s a reminder that Australians have no right to free speech. It’s time we had our own “First Amendment” written into the constitution. Instead of a referendum for a Voice for some Australians (which is happening this year) we need a Referendum for a Voice for All Australians — one that guarantees their right to speak, no matter what color their skin is, where their ancestors lived, or which team they vote for.
Newseum Tablet of the First Amendment | Photo by DBKing. Amended.
The US Republican States may yet save us all — the Attorney Generals of Louisiana and Missouri accused the Biden bureaucracy of actively colluding with the Tech Giants to suspend critics or remove comments. Finally, a judge in a District Court has ruled that this must stop.
Judge Delivers Major Blow to Biden Admin in Social Media Censorship Case
By Tony Ozimek, The Epoch Times
A federal judge has made a historic ruling by partially granting […]
By Jo Nova
Hail destroyed most of the three year old Scottsbluff community solar project in Nebraska this week. Solar energy might be free but collecting it requires vast acreages of fragile and expensive infrastructure.
Imagine if a three year old coal plant was “destroyed by hail?”
Scottscliffe was a 5.2MW plant with 14,000 panels that started operating in the Spring of 2020. In theory it was going to reduce the “carbon footprint and stabilize city costs for the next 25 years”. Instead it will increase the toxic metal in landfill.
There were tornadoes in the area at the time, but there doesn’t appear to be damage to the fences, trees or poles surrounding the plant.
About a quarter of the panels may have survived, or at least don’t have damage visible from 100 meters away…
We hope they had insurance.
Baseball-sized hail took out a 5.2-megawatt solar farm in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, on Friday
Kevin Killough, Cowboy State Daily
[Don Day, Cowboy State Daily meteorologist] said that the region around southeast Wyoming has some of the highest frequencies of hailstorms in the country. “It’s ground zero,” Day said.
The average […]
Image by Gerd Altmann
By Jo Nova
Matt Taibbi talked in London about what he and Michael Shellenberger found in the Twitter files. He realized the free speech battle has evolved into something new — where reality is altered and people are coached into forgetting what they saw, and censoring themselves. A kind of mass digital brainwashing.
In the Twitter Files there was a sinister pattern of “deamplifying” people’s true stories, their experiences, and then deamplifying the person themselves. Running parallel with this was a program to reduce our language, our world into a polarized one-nil, good-bad, us-them division where all shades of complexity were extinguished — so people who had vaccines but didn’t like mandates were anti-vaxxers, and people who had some vaccines, the injured, the unvaccinated — were all “anti-vaxxers”. This was a dystopia George Orwell predicted — the binary existence where there are no shades of gray. There is no safe middle ground. There is only rightthink and wrongthink.
The Elite War on Free Thought
Matt Taibbi, Racket News
Michael and I are here to tell a horror story that […]
By Jo Nova
…
Sweden has thrown away the sacred renewables talisman and opened the escape valve from the Temple of WindySolar-Inc. They’ve done the obvious thing anyone who was worried about CO2 would have done in 1992 — aimed for nuclear.
They have switched their 100% “renewables” target by 2045 to a 100% fossil-free target. It’s still a pagan antipathy of the sixth element of the periodic table. But at least it’s a more pragmatic version.
Sweden topped the EU list for renewables share of energy in the last tally — albeit with mostly biomass and hydropower. It was a star of the renewables set — number 1 on the Climate Council list of the “11 countries leading the way“. Yet here they are effectively giving up on the unreliable generators. Surely this must hurt?
The team at NetZeroWatch applaud the Swedish shift, and suggest the UK follow.
Sweden adopts new fossil-free target, making way for nuclear
Florence Jones, Power Technology
Sweden’s parliament adopted a change to its energy targets on Tuesday, which will see it become 100% fossil fuel-free by 2045.
The change means that nuclear generation can count towards […]
By Jo Nova
James O’Keefe formerly the soul of Project Veritas is back — he’s set up O’Keefe Media Group (OMG News). One of his insiders filmed Serge Valay, A recruiter at BlackRock, bragging about how they work.
“It’s not who the President is, it’s who controlling the wallet of the President.” “Who’s that?” she asks. “The Hedge Funds, BlackRock, the banks. These guys run the world.”
..you take a big f– ton of money and then you can start to buy people. Obviously we have this system in place. First, there’s the senators. These guys are f***ing cheap. You got ten grand? You can buy a senator.
BlackRock don’t want people to notice them:
“BlackRock don’t want to be in the news. They don’t want people to talk about them. They don’t want to be anywhere on the radar.”
“Why not?” she asks.
“I don’t know … I suspect because it’s easier to do things when people aren’t thinking about it.”
What kind of things are easier to do in the dark? Things other people won’t like.
News – he says, is propaganda. If you hear […]
By Jo Nova
China is the leader in EV car production but it’s not quite the success you might think it is.
The CCP was apparently determined to claim that they are making more EV’s than Tesla. But in order to get the EV subsidies, companies are producing vast numbers of cars no one wants to buy. It seems these cars are registered, falsely listed as “sold” and driven 30 miles to a graveyard to presumably rot, or spontaneously combust, whichever comes first. After thirteen years of one particular subsidy, supposedly only worth 3-6% of the best selling car, the government has paid out nearly $15 billion, which seems like it would buy quite a few fields of Neta V EVs.
“China is the land of shortcuts and facades”
Winston Sterzel has an insiders view on China, and claims there are also fly-by-night investment schemes which appear, inflate and disappear, in get-rich-quick projects purely designed to scam investors out of their money. In 2018 bicycle sharing schemes led to mountains of rotting bikes, and so it is again — this time with glass, heavy metals and rare earths.
Who knows what the real price of an […]
By Jo Nova
Once again, batteries just aren’t living up to hopes and dreams. Only a year ago Rolls Royce were excited about the nine-seater P-Volt electric plane — forecasting that it would be carrying customers on ninety mile hops in 2025 and 250 miles by 2030. Alas, it must have been a sobering year. The developers of the P-Volt have pulled the pin indefinitely and decided to wait until battery capacity and weight improvements make it realistic.
The P-Volt made by Tecnam
Pioneering electric plane shelved as batteries only last a few hundred flights
Howard Mustoe, The Telegraph
A pioneering electric plane developer has shelved development of its new craft after discovering that its batteries will only last a few hundred flights before they need to be replaced.
Tecnam said its main challenge was the energy density of the batteries available today, which are relatively too heavy for the amount of power they can store.
The speed at which the batteries would lose charge would erode the nine-passenger craft’s value, ruining its commercial prospects, it added.
“Not commercially viable” could be name for most Green engineering.
What do we […]
By Jo Nova
Corporate leaders are not bragging about their environmental wins or diversity hires with the same fervour they had a year ago. Some of this is due to pressure from the 23 US state Governors who are asking CEO’s sharp and pointy questions about anti-trust behaviour and fiduciary duty and campaigning on anti-Woke platforms. And some of this is due to the backlash against disastrous Bud-Light and Target campaigns.
Companies Quiet Diversity and Sustainability Talk Amid Culture War Boycotts
Mark Maurer, Wall Street Journal
Companies’ mentions of green and social initiatives during earnings calls have fallen off sharply in recent quarters, reversing a more boastful approach taken over the past few years amid intensifying pressure from some investors and conservative activists. Finance chiefs and other executives have significantly quieted down in public settings about their environmental and employee diversity efforts …
Charting the rise and fall of public “Woke” declarations in the corporate world.
Peak ESG may be behind us… WSJ
The backlash is coming from several angles — investors, conservative groups, political leaders.
It’s a good sign democracy and free markets are not dead yet. But these companies are probably pursuing […]
By Jo Nova It’s great to see new media platforms blossoming Australia. I spoke to Topher Field at The Aussie Wire to explain how BlackRock, bankers and the Insurance giants use your insurance, pension and super funds against you and why the 23 states of the USA are pushing back and even winning some battles. UN NetZero cartel wants to make Insurance Firms into “Climate Police”. But the insurance fund cartel is unravelling.
The Big Money Cabal waving the socially responsible flag is The Dark Bubble that drives the Global Crazy Train we all ride at the moment.
Topher introduces me at 13 minutes and generously lets me talk…
Hopefully we can reach a whole new group of people who might not read blogs.
In this episode of the AussieWire Topher also discusses the Housing Affordability Crisis in Australia, the South Australian Penalties for disruptive protests, and questions about “hate speech” legislation with David Limbrick MP.
Check out The Aussie Wire — other guests this week include Ed Dowd (Don’t miss him with Dr Malhotra in Perth this Saturday if you can!)
9.9 out of 10 based on 65 ratings […]
By Jo Nova
Nearly every proposal from the climate activists was struck down:
How times have changed. After the energy crisis of 2022 investors at major oil and gas firms are spurning climate activism. A year ago nearly a third of investors at Chevron and Exxon voted for the draconian “Scope 3” emissions targets. These targets are ludicrous — requiring the oil and gas giants to adopt a plan to reduce third party use of their own products. It’s like a form of corporate sabotage.
This year only about 10% of the same investors voted for these measures. And apparently there’s a similar trend on the other side of the Atlantic with BP and Shell investors rejecting activism too.
This is a very encouraging sign that the dominance of BlackRock et al is waning — they are bullying the world with other people’s money, and word is spreading as the US states fight back.
ESG Blowback: Investors Reject Climate Measures at Exxon, Chevron
By Collin Eaton and Jenny Strasburg, The Wall Street Journal
The votes were abysmal for climate activists. All but two of the 20 shareholder proposals for the two companies garnered less than 25% […]
By Jo Nova
It is in effect: If there is a train and it’s less than a 2.5 hour trip, in France you can’t fly — unless of course, you own your own private jet, the most “polluting” kind of plane (according to the EcoWorriers). How does that make “carbon sense”? Are we saving the planet, or just stopping the riff-raff from traveling?
It’s one rule for you, another for the Feudal overlords.
Private planes make 5 to 14 times as much CO2, but they are “good to go”?
by Valentina Morando, Impakter
… numerous studies demonstrate that private jets are much more impactful to the environment than other modes of transportations.
They are about “5 to 14 times more polluting than commercial planes (per passenger),” a report published by the Transport and Environment group in 2021 states.
According to a recent study, “only 1% of the population causes 50% of global aviation emissions.”
Right now there are only three routes in France that will be banned, Paris-Orly to Bordeaux, Nantes and Lyon affecting only 2.5% of all domestic flights. The original plan was to ban five more routes, but the […]
By Jo Nova
Make no mistake, the UN “finance” cartel is the supermassive black hole at the centre of the climate-mafia galaxy.
The UN Environment Programme brags that across insurance, banking and investing, it has over 450 members representing more than $100 trillion dollars worth of carrots and sticks to beat up politicians and businesses with. These are the cogs and levers of the halls of global power.
Image by Amy from Pixabay
It’s a UN programme, but the first “target setting” rules were launched at Davos at the latest World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting — the skiing holiday for corporate rulers and their celebrity minions. The Big unelected political powers holidaying with the richest people in the world. Democracy on a barbecue.
In 2021 many Insurance giants had rushed to join the global climate activist cartel designed for their industry — the Net Zero Insurers Alliance (NZIA) — which would have turned the insurance industry into another form of climate police answerable to the UN or the WEF. But it’s all coming undone now, thanks to the 23 US States who are pressing the Antitrust button. I mean, imagine if all the competitors in an industry got […]
By Jo Nova
Only two men were central to the Green policy stranglehold that cripples Germany today, and one has just been sacked. But look at how easy it was for foreign interests and activists to influence bizarrely suicidal national policies, and how they used the age old art of nepotism.
Eugyppius
A vast foreign-funded climate cabal with a death grip on policy is currently fighting hard to crash the Federal Republic of Germany with no survivors
The international press has maintained near-total silence on the escalating insanity of what is happening in Germany. Media outlets that routinely celebrate German progress towards energy transition don’t want you to know that Europe’s dominant industrial power has entered a deeply destructive political and administrative spiral from which it may never recover. The fault lies with the self-defeating and unworkable energy policies that have a death grip not merely on the Scholz government, but on the entire administrative state.
Germany leads the way in the big green experiment
At one point last winter 12% of the entire Germany GDP was being consumed in the energy crisis. Factories are leaving Germany because energy prices are unbearable, but […]
By Jo Nova
Exxon was told to jump through circus hoops like a performing seal and report the risks of NetZero to Exxon shareholders. But Exxon pushed back by pointing out that NetZero-by-2050 is so impossible it will never happen, and therefore the risks are not even worth assessing. Furthermore, and rather damningly, Exxon said, society would be unlikely to “accept the degradation in the global standard of living required“. Exxon has taken was was supposed to be another PR win for the narrative and turned it into a media weapon.
This is exactly why the Big-Gov-Corporatist cartel wants to co-opt or destroy independent profitable corporations. In this case, companies that don’t need Big-Gov are free to point out the hypocritical inanity and absurdities which the lap-dog dependent industries like wind power and solar cannot.
Sadly, companies like Exxon still need to be brave because Big-Gov is so big, it is always the largest potential client and holds the sword of mendacious legislation, licensing and regulation as well.
Exxon Crushes Progressive Dreams That “Net Zero” Has Any Chance By 2050: It Would Mean Collapse In “Global Standard Of Living”
By Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge
The US supermajor […]
By Jo Nova
Electronic sensors can pick up phantom electrical noise
In the last thirty years the Bureau has installed electronic thermometers all over the country. But unlike the old glass ones, the new sensitive equipment can not only pick up freak gusts of hot air, they can also pick up electrical interference. Theoretically, electronic thermometers could report phantom measurements induced by large electric fields, like perhaps by an airport radar as it sweeps through the electronics.
Indeed as Lance Pidgeon points out, the cable that runs from the platinum resistance probe runs out of the Stevenson screen, down the pole, under the ground and pops up at the electronic data-logger some 6 to 10 meters away. This makes for a nice long aerial ready to pick up “noise” and feed it into the data-logger. Those airport radars produce huge electric fields — all it takes is slight induction of a voltage difference across the 10m cable and voila… the data logger records a “warmer” second.
Here’s the small forgotten airport radar at Heathrow standing about 12 stories high. Imagine the power that puts out?
David Monniaux
Electromagnetic interference could also be triggered by mobile phones or radio […]
By Jo Nova
The EU is fracturing over energy, and not a day too soon…
Signs of hope. Just as Germany recently pulled the pin on the EU’s Electric Vehicle mandate, France is now threatening to scupper the EU’s new Renewable Energy Directive unless they include a role for nuclear power. It was supposed to be signed off on Wednesday. Despite nuclear being the only reliable baseload source of “Net Zero” energy, France has had to fight for its inclusion at every step.
France is gathering 16 European nations into a Nuclear Alliance
World Nuclear News:
France’s Minister for Energy Transition, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, brought together her counterparts from member countries of the Nuclear Alliance on 16 May at the Ministry for Energy Transition. A total of 16 countries were represented. In addition to the host country, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia and Sweden, plus Italy with observer status, were represented. The UK was present as a guest country.
“Nuclear power may provide up to 150 GW of electricity capacity by 2050 to the European Union (vs roughly 100 GW today),” the […]
By Jo Nova
Peer Review has been a sixty year experiment with no control group
It’s touted as the “gold standard” of science, yet the evidence shows Peer Review is an abject failure.
There are 30,000 scientific journals that publish nearly 5 million articles a year, and the only thing we know for sure is that two-thirds of papers with major flaws will still get published, fraud is almost never discovered, and peer review has effectively crushed groundbreaking new discoveries.
By Adam Mastroianni, Experimental History
The rise and fall of Peer Review
Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that’s a great thing
For the last 60 years or so, science has been running an experiment on itself. The experimental design wasn’t great; there was no randomization and no control group. Nobody was in charge, exactly, and nobody was really taking consistent measurements. And yet it was the most massive experiment ever run, and it included every scientist on Earth.
It seemed like a good idea at the time, instead it was just rubber stamp to keep the bureaucrats safe. As government funded research took over the world of science after World War […]
By Jo Nova
In terms of civilization, Niall Ferguson is speaking simple maths. The arithmetic of resources. Something which is almost never said.
Niall Ferguson:
“For an enormous island that is thinly populated, with enormous resources — for such an island to be ill-defended seems like the most spectacular folly…
Empires, at some level, are about acquiring commodities at below market prices, or at least not trusting to the market to supply you — not to be at the mercy of the market, or the mercy of a navy, the US Navy, which China currently is.
To have security China cannot be dependent on imported commodities and market prices, when you think about what that implies for Australia, its really quite scary…
Australia is a prize…
“If you want Peace, prepare for War.
If you want War, act like it will never come. Allow your defense capability to atrophy.”
The lucky country needs to prepare
Alistair Rae, Stats Maps and Pix.
The rulers of China would be irrational not to want more land to feed people, and control of more resources. Australia has […]
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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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