US Govt Corruption-fest: One third of top EPA officials also invested in companies they oversee

By Jo Nova

The Wall Street Journal — bless them — analyzed 12,000 officials at 50 federal agencies and sifted through 850,000 financial assets to uncover a seething well of graft, grift and pilfering. As the WSJ prosaically says, “The federal government doesn’t maintain a comprehensive public database of the mandatory financial disclosures of all senior executive-branch officials. So The Wall Street Journal built its own.”

There were problems everywhere but the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) got the first mention on the “Six Takeaways” list of government corruption. Who would have thought that a public body holding the purse-strings to the rest of the economy, with vague ill-defined, unmeasurable long term goals would become so corrupt. More to the point, who would have thought they wouldn’t?

With so many public officials making out like bandits the point of carbon credits is not to change the weather, it’s a Bureaucrat Investment Tool. With the power to ban or gift exemptions to favoured firms, bureaucrats can insider trade their way to retirement.

 

 

Six Takeaways From WSJ’s Investigation Into the Stock Trades of Government Officials

By Michael Siconolfi, Wall Street Journal

Numerous […]

NetZero destroys NetZero: Europe can’t make solar panels because green electricity costs too much

By Jo Nova Ironies don’t get better than this: Thanks to the renewable energy transition, Europe can’t afford to make renewable energy.

When will the message get through that renewable energy is not sustainable?

European photovoltaic plants and battery cell factors are temporarily closing or quitting altogether because of obscenely high electricity prices. When the plants were built they expected to pay €50/MWh, but now they are €300 – 400/MWh. And the situation may last another couple of years, so it’s hard to see how these manufacturers can avoid leaving permanently.

So much for all the solar jobs. Europeans are being reduced to being installers while the production of panels shifts to coal fired China because electricity is so much cheaper. Most of the wind turbine industry has already moved to China.

European solar PV manufacturing at risk from soaring power prices – Rystad By Jules Scully, PV Tech

Around 35GW of PV manufacturing projects in Europe are at risk of being mothballed as elevated power prices damage the continent’s efforts to build a solar supply chain, research from Rystad Energy suggests.

The consultancy noted that the energy-intensive nature of both solar PV and battery cell […]

After the storm, then come the EV fires…

Apparently only 0.3% of cars in Florida are currently EV’s, which is lucky, because after the Hurricane Ian a few of them are catching fire. Imagine what happens when all the cars are EV’s and firefighters need to pour on 100,000 liters of water and stick around for hours to baby sit what’s left:

Electric vehicles catching fire in Florida after Hurricane Ian

David Propper, New York Post.

Jimmy Patronis, Florida’s chief financial officer and state fire marshal, said on Twitter.

“There’s a ton of EVs disabled from Ian,” he tweeted. “As those batteries corrode, fires start.

“That’s a new challenge that our firefighters haven’t faced before. At least on this kind of scale.”



@JimmyPatronis …

At least one other twitter account North Collier Fire Rescue reports that “I’m in Naples there have been multiple fires like this in areas impacted by Ian.”

In the twitter thread people warn that that they shouldn’t be using water to put out a lithium battery fire, but there is so little that anyone can do to stop these fires, that pouring hundreds of gallons of water a minute continuously is the official […]

Stark contrasts: UK faces rolling three hour blackouts, while Norway has cheap electricity and “too many profits”

By Jo Nova

Just to recap: Energy prices are so wildly high in Europe — thanks to a quest to alter the planetary climate — that 70% of fertilizer plants have already shut down, half the aluminum and zinc smelters have closed, and glass-makers and tilers who survived both world wars may go out of business. German homes are reduced to being wood fired (if they can find the firewood). Meanwhile someone very naughty set off explosions on the Nordstream gas pipes from Russia, and since a third of all UK gas comes from an underwater pipe to Norway now suddenly people are very nervous about that. Before most of this unfolded, UK consumer confidence was at minus 44 — the lowest ebb ever recorded since 1974 when people started recording these things. Now it’s even lower (minus 49). As many as one in four people in the UK were saying they won’t heat their homes in winter. It’s the most dramatic fall in European energy since the late Middle Ages. Luckily, at least the UK and Germany both have some old coal plants they haven’t blown up.

To make things more exciting, last week, after the underwater bombs went […]

“We own the Science” brags UN chief who works with Google to suppress climate skeptics

 

By Jo Nova

Once upon a time Google had the best search engine in the world but solo unfunded skeptics had all the fun and were outscoring the UN, academia, and official government sites.

So the UN stopped competing and just colluded with Google to rig the game:

Melissa Fleming: (Under-Secretary for Global Communications at the UN) “We partnered with Google. For example, if you Google ‘climate change,’ you will, at the top of your search, you will get all kinds of UN resources. We started this partnership when we were shocked to see that when we Googled ‘climate change,’ we were getting incredibly distorted information right at the top. So we’re becoming much more proactive. We own the science, and we think that the world should know it, and the platforms themselves also do. But again, it’s a huge, huge challenge that I think all sectors of society need to be very active in.” (Full transcript here)

Naturally this bragging was at the World Economic Forum — the hippest conference-cum-holiday club that can be called a tax deduction for the uber-ultra-rich and their minion political puppets.

Where else could people say smug totalitarian lines with a […]

Jacinda Ardern calls for a Global Ministry of Truth to stop disinformation “weapon”

by Jo Nova

Jacinda Ardern gave a speech to the UN last Friday which has suddenly gone viral in an Ebola kind of way. The new weapon in war she tells us, is misinformation. Since she is the single source of truth (she told us that in July) that means the disinformers are anyone who disagrees with Jacinda. See how easy this is? It’s just another Ministry of Truth plan to save the world from climate change and Covid.

Who needs Free Speech?

Following in the foot-stomps of dictators everywhere Jacinda Ardern lays out the threat of speeches from people more inspiring than her:

The face of war has changed. And with that, the weapons used.

Traditional combat, espionage and the threat of nuclear weapons are now accompanied by cyber-attacks, prolific disinformation and manipulation of whole communities and societies.

After all, a bullet takes a life. A bomb takes out a whole village. A lie online or from a podium does not. But what if that lie, told repeatedly, and across many platforms, prompts, inspires, or motivates others to take up arms? To threaten the security of others. To turn a blind eye to […]

Bet the world, but not my superannuation on our climate models says modeler Prof Andy Pitman

By Jo Nova Warn the bankers, our climate models are not something to invest in say the modelers

A group of top climate modelers have come together to warn bankers that climate models are wonderful but basically useless for predicting things that financial models need — like the trends in the hottest, wettest or windiest weather in any city on Earth. Often the expert models can’t even agree on the sign. Will it get bigger or smaller? It’s that bad.

The raw truth of just how unskilled these models are is laid bare in the graphs. The modeling team chose London, Mumbai, New York and Beijing and picked the nearest 100km x 100km “square” on the map. They ran about 37 models on 3 scenarios and achieved something that looks like a painting done with a jet engine.

The modelers can’t say if the hottest maximums in Beijing will get hotter. Even if the world warms 2 degrees (by random happenstance), Beijing’s hottest-days might actually get cooler. The rainiest days of the year could be more extreme unless they’re less extreme. And the windiest days will definitely be stronger, weaker, or about the same. Get it?

The quote of the […]

As underwater gas pipes explode, ponder that a third of UK gas comes from an underwater pipe

The UK is pretty much one wayward submarine away from losing a third of its gas supply. Even if the pipe stays intact, it’s already a national security crisis. It’s a vulnerability that will affect the UK’s ability to bargain with confidence or battle right now.

German authorities are saying that the pipelines will be rendered unusable if salt-water has entered the pipes. Corrosion will make them unrepairable.

And lets not forget there are a lot of other underwater cables which nations with unreliable energy are now utterly dependent on. Here in Australia, an interconnector trip led to the Statewide blackout in South Australia, and the Bass Strait cable break (not even an act of war) left Tasmania on the verge of one for five months. In both cases they lost hundreds of millions of dollars, but it would be so much worse if that happened today during a global energy crisis when there’s is already a bun fight for spare parts and spare fossil fuels.

The UK imports 11% of its power from Europe, half from France, and two years ago President Macron was threatening to block an interconnector in a battle over post-Brexit fisheries. […]

Nordstream gas pipeline apparently sabotaged with “explosions” and three huge leaks

“It’s difficult to imagine it could be accidental”

The leaks are massive

Indeed “leak” does not seem like the right word.

@JavierBlas

The explosions are marked with stars.

The sites are 75 kilometers apart just outside official Danish territory.

Euronews –– Swedish national broadcaster SVT reported that national seismologists had registered “two clear explosions” around the area, first at 2:03 AM and then at 7:04 PM (CET) on Monday.

Hours after the explosions, coincidentally, Gazprom also warned that one of the two remaining major pipelines to Europe was at risk due to a legal dispute over fees. Gazprom was refusing to pay a transit fee that the Ukrainian energy firm said it was supposed to pay.

At this stage everyone is saying the leaks are sabotage, but no one is claiming to know anything for sure. The US government has said it is ‘ready to provide support’ to Europe.

So, below, this is quite an awkward flashback, to say the least. It’s from February when Joe Biden was trying to talk Russia out of invading Ukraine:

Biden: “If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream […]

We should stop all Covid vaccinations says UK Cardiac Specialist who once promoted them

by Jo Nova

Blockbuster Review papers like this are very useful to pass on to your doctor or officials. And until all patients get some synopsis of this or equivalent, there is no informed consent.

Dr Aseem Malhotra

As Dr Aseem Malhotra says: “It’s perhaps the most important work of my career so far…”

The great thing is that he is speaking at medical conferences in the UK, and senior doctors are astonished. There is hope that things may yet improve after the worst medical experiment in history.

The figures that hit the hardest are that for the young, thousands of people need to be vaccinated to save one life, yet in the UK 1 in 120 people suffer from something defined as more than mild effects, and in Norway 1 in 1,000 end up in hospital or with “life changing” effects.

Dr Malhotra was the cardiac specialist I wrote about in November last year, who put forward the first very convincing case I had seen that not only were cardiac inflammatory risk factors doubled after vaccination (Gundry et al) which might double the risk of heart attacks, but that reports and images of cardiac damage and an […]

Monday Open Thread

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Just like that: European Fertilizer production down 70%

The vainglorious shunning of gas production in Europe in quest for weather salvation will hurt the world’s poor the most. As Europe scrambles to replace the astonishing loss of 70% of their own fertilizer production they will be competing to import fertilizer from stretched markets around the world.

The price rises in gas, fertilizer and next year in food, will hurt the poorest of the poor far more than the theoretical temperature rise ever could. Thank the EU. Thank the Greens.

Click to enlarge: It’s a wipeout

Higher gas prices deepen Europe’s fertiliser crunch, threaten food crisis

Europe’s fertilizer crunch is deepening with more than two-thirds of production capacity halted by soaring gas costs, threatening farmers and consumers far beyond the region’s borders.

As Europe becomes a net importer of fertilizer, the fallout from the supply crunch will spread. The region will start competing for scarce supplies with poorer nations, especially in Africa, where food insecurity is exacerbated by persistent droughts and conflict.

These prices cause third degree burns:

Fertiliser shortage threatens farming, food security in Europe

According to the CRU Group, a business intelligence firm specialising in commodities, fertiliser producers in the EU […]

PETA calls for female sex strike to save the planet from storms caused by steak and sausages

by Jo Nova

Quick, save the world now! Create nice weather and peace on Earth with coercive bargaining, threats and deprivation.

The PETA-FemoNazi recipe to stop floods and hot weekends is to demand men give up meat or live without sex. There’s no more persuasion for civilization — according to PETA it’s their way or the highway, and most men must be too stupid to realize the PETA powers of climate prophesy are unquestionable. After all, there’s no chance that animal activists could be fooled by emotional soppy propaganda pushed by Global bankers, billionaires and UN industrial cartels, right? PETA can tell those moist adiabatic lapse rates from the missing tropospheric hot spots. If only men could too!

PETA strays so far out their lane they end up in orbit. They alternately blame bad weather on meat-eating, then on men, on toxic masculinity and then they blame the babies too. It’s breathtaking in grandiose, overbearing, imperious intolerance. Apparently omnivorous men don’t deserve to have babies. A ban on procreation for meat-eating-men would be… purposeful. They actually say that. Your value to the world is measured in tons of carbon. A bit like a farm animal really? Except PETA select […]

Winning: Antitrust laws slow down the climate plans of $130T monster cartel of UN and global bankers

by Jo Nova Banks suddenly threaten to abandon the Glasgow GFANZ “climate action” group

It was the massive miracle-funding coalition of Glasgow but it is already starting to unravel as the banks figure out that conspiring to force “climate action” puts them at risk of antitrust suits.

A month ago I wrote that 19 US States were pointing out that it’s not OK for asset managers like BlackRock and co to join together in cartels to block investment in fossil fuels. These corporations bragged about belonging to groups like GFANZ (the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero) as if it made them into saintly environmentalists. But belonging to the group meant they are also effectively restraining trade, reducing competition and acting against the interests of their clients and against the wishes of voters.

Don’t underestimate how important this is or how ugly these monster cartels are: GFANZ has attracted some 500 members which control $130 trillion in assets. But the carbon targets they are told to aim for are set by the UN through something called the Race-To-Zero campaign. So this is a quasi World Government in cahoots with world bankers. Like a Great White Shark meets a pod […]

The clean green future where you’re locked indoors due to toxic electrical battery smoke

by Jo Nova

Just another day saving the Earth from pollution

Highways were shut for 12 hours and people had to seal themselves in their homes for hours.

Green Inferno: Tesla Battery Catches Fire in California Causing Shelter-In-Place

A Tesla Megapack battery caught fire at PG&E’s Elkhorn Battery Storage facility in Monterey County, California. A shelter-in-place advisory was in place for 12 hours due to fears of toxic smoke from the fire caused by Elon Musk’s battery system, with county officials announcing that even though the fire was “fully controlled” by 7:00 p.m. PT, “smoke may still occur in the area for several days.”

Monterey County Sheriff’s Office, North County Fire Protection District, and Pacific Gas & Electric had all issued a shelter-in-place advisory for nearby areas, including an interactive map showing which areas are affected and closing roads for over 12 hours.

Local residents were told to shut all windows and turn off ventilation systems due to the hazardous waste material that may have entered the atmosphere due to the Tesla Megapack fire.

Also this week, but so much worse:

Electric scooter battery fire kills 8-year-old in US

New York: Amid […]

Vaccine injury groups reduced to talking in “carrots”. BBC dobs them in for WrongSpeak, so Facebook can shut them down

by Jo Nova

Will Jones at the Daily Sceptic noticed that the BBC was very pleased with itself for dobbing in the vaccine victims who were using carrot emojis as a code for “vaccine” on Facebook. Feel the power! Some 250,000 people had come together to discuss their injuries or the deaths of loved ones on Facebook, but after the BBC reported them, Facebook shut them down. Bravo BBC. We wouldn’t want the riff raff to have an unpermitted conversation.

If ever there was a prime example of how publicly funded media would inevitably grow to be a communist pox on the nation, this would be it. A quarter of a million people were finding some comfort in discussing their suffering and losses on Facebook. The BBC of course, should be giving them a voice — telling their stories — and letting the world know these victims are so oppressed they have to use cartoon codes instead of words like “vaccine” to even have a conversation.

If the victims are British, they are probably paying the BBC licensing fee and not only are they getting nothing for their money, they’re paying the salary of BBC smug know-nothings to silence them. […]

Pandemonium: Energy Bills Force Europe’s Factories to Go Dark

Written by Jo Nova

Spare a thought for glassmakers and tilers in Europe who can’t run on solar and wind powered furnaces.

There are companies that started business in the 1800s and survived two world wars but may not last the coming winter. It’s all changing so fast, they lament. With energy costs rising three to sixfold, the highest energy industries are folding. The first casualties were fertilizer, aluminium and zinc, and now in the second wave, the glass makers and tilers are coming undone, and with them, whole towns that support them will unravel too:

‘Crippling’ Energy Bills Force Europe’s Factories to Go Dark

Liz Alderman, The New York Times

Half of Europe’s aluminum and zinc production has been taken offline, according to Eurometaux, Europe’s metals trade association.

Eschenbach Porcelain survived Germany’s transition from communism to capitalism after 1989. But when its energy contracts run out at the end of this year, the company will face annual energy bills of €5.5 million, or roughly six times what it is paying now, said Rolf Frowein, its director.

Eschenbach Porcelain started 130 years ago. The giant glassmaker Arc started in 1825.

The numbers […]

In 1969 the FDA commissioner issued a dire warning: The FDA protects the drug companies not the people

Written by Jo Nova

A reminder that the dark influence of corruption started decades ago:

It may have seemed like things went off the rails in the last two years, but it couldn’t have been achieved without fifty years of work. The absurdities just felt like they came out of nowhere.

Herbert Ley sounds like a great man. From Wikipedia:

His three years at the FDA came during the time when the FDA grew from an insignificant agency to the key agency protecting consumers; during that time 300 drugs were removed from the market.[4] After he left, Ley stated that he had “constant, tremendous, sometimes unmerciful pressure” from the drug industry and that the drug company lobbyists, combined with the politicians who worked on behalf of their patrons, could bring “tremendous pressure” to bear on him and his staff, to try preventing FDA restrictions on their drugs.

There’s a sad article in Woroni (Canberra) in 1980 lamenting the reach of drug companies. An antibiotic called Panalba had been sold in the US from 1957 generating $18m in revenue for Upjohn. By 1968 30 experts from the National Academy of Science declared that it was harmful and should […]

Facebook will read your personal messages and send them to the FBI if you vote the wrong the way

Mark Zuckerberg | Photo by JD Lasica

Handy things to know: Someone inside the Department of Justice in the US has talked to the New York Post and says that Facebook spied on Americans who doubted Joe Biden or the election, and gave that information to the FBI “outside due process”. A full FBI investigation often followed the “leads” that came from Facebook.

Despite the mountain of data they found no domestic terrorists — not one criminal or violent Trump supporter — only full blooded patriots. They must have been disappointed. “It was a waste of our time” said an insider.

So Facebook has become a wing of the Government. Facebook needs Big Government to protect their Section 230 legal loophole and Big Government needs Facebook to protect the voters from the ugly truth. Nice racket if you can get it.

The old Sovinformburo must have longed for a searchable database of private conversations. If only the USSR had Facebook.

As the commenter Deplorable at the NY Post says “First thing is Facebook must be told that they can no longer call their private messenger private. “

Thank goodness for the New York Post. Thank goodness for brave […]

NetZero takes a hit in the UK — Fracking is on and “could eclipse North Sea Gas”

by Jo Nova

Good News — Fracking will start in the UK after ten years of absurd delays over bizarre seismic excuses where the fracking industry was supposed to stop if tremors were larger than 0.5 on the Richter scale which meant it never started. A 0.5 level tremor is so small you’d need a Richter scale to even know it occurred. People usually can’t feel shakes of 2.0 or less, and it’s a logarithmic scale…

Once fracking starts it will be hard to put this genie back in the bottle. Will Australia, Canada and New Zealand be the last three nations on Earth still serious about Net Zero?

As Gaia Fawkes says: Truss Gets Cracking With Fracking

The news comes as The Guardian reports Liz is planning to follow through on her leadership election pledge and lift the ban on fracking as soon as possible, with first licences set to be issued as early as next week. This will no doubt come as welcome relief as energy bills continue to rise during winter. The decision comes despite the paper’s ominous quote from a forthcoming report that forecasting fracking-induced earthquakes “remains a significant challenge”. In August 2019 […]