A speech so good he was sacked: HSBC head says investors don’t need to worry about “Climate Risk”

Hopefully Elon Musk will give him a job.

Stuart Kirk, head of “responsible investing” for HSBC let rip at the doommongers of finance with a speech called “Why investors need not worry about climate risk”. He was speaking at A Moral Money Europe Summit, held by the Financial Times and is clearly fed up with listening to hyperbole and being told to analyze and worry about trivial long term future events. “Last night Target fell 25% — twentyfive!” … but I’m being told to worry about something coming 20 – 30 years down the track.” Other speakers were unceremoniously dispatched. He complained climate risk has become so hyperbolic no one knows how to outdo it. “Sharon [a speaker from Deloittes] said “we’re not going to survive!” But no one even looked up and ran from the room.”

Dangerously (for him) he also explained how the central banker models bury massive GDP and interest rate shocks in their economic forecasts of climate risk, otherwise they can’t generate bad news and headlines. Apparently, it’s all in the fine print that nobody mentions. They’re sounding more and more like climate models all the time.

That was last week. This week he’s been suspended.

[…]

The Secret Climate Election we didn’t know we had

The only way Climate elections are won is by keeping it a secret or telling lies. Today we wake up to find out it was a climate election. Who knew?

There was not one word, barely, about climate change in the public square in Australia the last six weeks, yet today suddenly it was “a Green-slide” and a climate election post hoc. But the whole reason the Greeny-Teals did well was because no one talked about climate change.

No one asked how expensive it might be to alter the planet’s weather a hundred years from now? Should we fund hospitals now, or slow cyclones in 2100, ya’reckon?

Whenever it was a climate election in the last 12 years, the skeptical side won.

And the more skeptical they were, the bigger the win was. Tony Abbott won a landslide 90 seats by crushing the Climate Gods. It was a Climate Election and the voters said “No”. To win in 2010 Julia Gillard had to lie “there will be no Carbon Tax”, and do 17 days of wheeling and dealing to barely scrape through. In 2016 Turnbull was barely a skeptic and barely won — losing 14 seats in the […]

Reinvention time: Liberals tried to win wealthy inner city Woke seats and lost the nation

If the Liberals stop trying to pander to the wealthy Woke electorates and focus on what most Australians want they can reinvent themselves to speak for mainstream Australia by the next election.

The dismal election result for the Liberals and Nationals in Australia may yet set them free. By shifting to the left on issues like Climate Change the Liberals were hobbled. They tried to be Labor -lite, but then couldn’t point out the sheer stupidity of trying to change the weather. Net Zero was a good goal they said, and so the voters voted for people who would do more of it sooner. By adopting Labor-Green ideas and just trying to be better managers of bad programs they lost their mojo. There were no battles on principles in this election, just personalities.

The Right have been bullied into submission — afraid of being called climate deniers, racists, sexist or anti-vaxxer, they fought for nothing much. And so the voters voted for nothing much — splitting every which way. Astonishingly a new government will be formed that nearly 70% of Australians didn’t vote for. The Labor Party won with the lowest primary vote ever recorded in Australian history.

The […]

Australian Election

A thread to discuss those results

Tallyroom

Twitter #Ausvotes

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7.9 out of 10 based on 13 ratings

Election Day: Anything but the Uniparty Majors… — a record 29% of Australians want another choice

The only Party that is rising fast is the Anti-Party

The Majors and the media ignored the biggest protests in decades, but all those voters are out there somewhere…

The system is broken and more and more people know it. Both major parties are facing very low primary votes in Australia. Fully 29% of voters are wandering around in the political wilderness looking for another option — a record in Australian politics. But just imagine how big that number of minor party voters would be if the news outlets served up more than the same-old two-party-dichotomy? At the moment the nightly news ignores every minor party unless they can mock them, or lord forbid, the journalists themselves want to vote for them — like the Teal-Green-Independents?

The only time a minor party gets interviewed is after the election and if they win the Preferences lottery.

Newspoll: Labor in front of Coalition but lead narrows

Simon Benson, The Australian

According to an election-eve Newspoll, commissioned by The Weekend Australian, Labor would be positioned to form majority government if the results are replicated at the polling booths on Saturday.

It would confirm […]

Voting Day Election 2022 Australia — Saturday

With both major parties being two sides of the same UniParty, and the media afraid to ask real questions, this election campaign has been a vacuum — more like a personality quiz in Dolly magazine than a National Debate. The Conservative government, which hasn’t conserved much, looks likely to lose to the Makeover Man from the Labor Party who wears designer black shirts and fancy rims because a marketing expert told him to. A group of sneaky-pseudo-Greens called the Teal Independents are pretending to be central, but are only running against the Coalition, not against Labor, showing exactly which side of politics they’re on. They’re funded by a billionaires son, wealthy CEO’s and people that profit from renewables money — so much so that even The World Socialist Website sees them as “bogus” corporate raiders, seeking profits and called them a “reactionary fraud”. That bad.

The best hope now is that freedom loving candidates and parties will win the balance of power in the Senate. Yes, we long for Government gridlock. Australians can still put The Majors Last. Don’t waste those preferences!

It’s not too late to volunteer to help any small party of your choice, for example to […]

Shocking electricity price rises starting in Australia — so bad that small retailers ask customers to leave

It’s the day before the election and all through the house, electricity bills are doubling…

The price rises are so extraordinary one retailer is asking their customers to leave “in the next 24 hours”.

Across Australia small power suppliers are sending emails to customers right now warning them that their rates are going up next week by eye-watering amounts. Wholesale electricity prices were at a record high in April this year, and it hasn’t improved in May. Prices are hitting $200-$300 per megawatt hour, not as a peak, but as a 24 hour average. In South Australia two days ago, the average for the full day was $1,141. Futures contracts are rapidly taking off and these rises are starting to flow through to customers. Already, the small retailers are bleeding cash, just as they did in the UK, and if wholesale prices don’t come back to Earth soon, they will go out of business.

Reader Brett in South Australia shared an email from Discover Energy. As of next week the standard peak rate will rise from 39 cent per kilowatt hour to 70 cents. Off peak rates rise from 27 to 46. He also adds, “My brother lives in NSW […]

Inconvenient: The four pillars of civilization all require fossil fuels, and more of them

Not the kind of article we’d expect to see in Time Magazine. A 100% endorsement of the inescapable need for fossil fuels?

The Modern World Can’t Exist Without These Four Ingredients. They All Require Fossil Fuels

By Vaclav Smil, Time Magazine

Cyron Ray Macey

Four materials rank highest on the scale of necessity, forming what I have called the four pillars of modern civilization: cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia are needed in larger quantities than are other essential inputs. The world now produces annually about 4.5 billion tons of cement, 1.8 billion tons of steel, nearly 400 million tons of plastics, and 180 million tons of ammonia. But it is ammonia that deserves the top position as our most important material: its synthesis is the basis of all nitrogen fertilizers, and without their applications it would be impossible to feed, at current levels, nearly half of today’s nearly 8 billion people.

Does any other odd factoid capture the rise of China so well?

China now produces more than half of the world’s cement and in recent years it makes in just two years as much of it as did the […]

Monday Open Thread

8.8 out of 10 based on 8 ratings

Here’s real Misinformation: The average Australian thinks we make an astonishing 10% of global emissions

What are they on? About twenty years of government funded propaganda and guilt.

Most Australian voters don’t have a clue — half of the nation thinks we make 10% of global emissions when the truth is more like 1%.

Climate change might be the greatest moral challenge of our lifetimes but most Australians are in the dark about what the real numbers are. They probably assumed that if we were only making one-tiny-percent, the government, the ABC, or even the education system might have told them. After all, we’re spending $13 billion dollars a year. What exactly are public universities for if not for letting Australians know this kind of data?

Where was the Government? The conservatives in charge keep throwing away their own best arguments. Almost like they want to hang on to a few wealthy seats while they miss the chance to ignite middle Australia.

But the ignorance is no accident. All the players — the politicians, the academics, the ABC, ANU, CSIRO, Schools, Universities, et al and all sundry, all profit from Big Government. They serve the government first, and not the people, and that’s the problem.

Liberals playing politics with pretence Australia can change global climate […]

The Misinformation Age with Bill Maher

Stick with this — step over the cheap shots at Trump and predictable hits on conservatives — Bill Maher is doing a cracker job on a soft left audience. He’s packaged up a dose of medicine about how important free speech is. His is a rare voice on the left pointing out the hypocrisy and stupidity of censorship.

“Keeping you safe and sorting out the lies is your job” (not Twitters)

We always focus on the producers and never the consumers, as if we’re all helpless dumb blondes ready to believe everything…

People lie, that’s what people do. Every age is the misinformation age, and whenever a new means of communication comes along some reach for the censor button. In 1858 the New York Times thought we couldn’t handle the Transatlantic Telegraph. “It was superficial and too fast for the Truth”…

He also tosses a cold bucket or two on the lefty willingness to believe the Covid stats, and effectively calls all the censors “assholes”.

In America you have the right to say what you think, to be wrong, and to be an asshole.

And if you […]

Fever-priced in South Australia today: Ten hours forecast above $10,000 a megawatt…

Market traders will be sweating. Today in the green-star renewable state of South Australia there won’t be much wind blowing, they’re weeks away from the lowest solar insolation of the year, and the extension cord to the coal plants in Victoria is limited for some reason.

This below is the remarkable AEMO prediction for South Australian for wholesale electricity today. Note the scale on the left hand side. The flat tops on the price peaks mark the cap at $15,000 per megawatt hour. The sheer width of those spike predictions is awesome — potentially nearly ten hours of the day above $10,000. Demand is only 1,500 – 1,800MW but that’s still a bill of $15 million dollars an hour for a small state.

Note the size of those peaks…

The first peak is forecast from 6.30-10am, and the second batch pretty much stretch from 6pm to midnight. Wow.

The AEMO is handing out LOR (Lack of Reserve) notices. Watch the Market Notices here. Watch prices here. For those so inclined.

9.6 out of 10 based on 57 ratings

Mayhem on the Australian Grid continues — Record prices, factory shutdowns, emergency warnings

Generation tonight….

Just another week in the Transition we (Don’t) have to have

With 65 Glorious Gigawatts the Australian grid system has a vast excess (theoretically) of generation capacity, yet it’s so fragile that the loss of an interconnector, normal maintenance and a few coal turbines down — has triggered $100 million dollar price spikes. These burning pyres of money are so savage the average cost of wholesale electricity — across a whole day — is lately in the realm of $200- $700 per megawatt hour over most states for 24 hour periods. For the last week, daily prices have been ten times the “old normal”.

And it comes on the back of the most expensive April in the Australian grid history in every mainland state on the National Electricity Market.

Autumn and spring are supposed to be easy days in Australia with peak demand only running at 27,000 MW. Because things are lighter, generators do normal maintenance at this time of year, but at the moment, there doesn’t seem to be any room for that in the network. In summer, demand is often 5,000MW higher. Where’s that going to come from?

Factories are shutting down for fear […]

Don’t believe the headlines: Google Trends for “climate change” are not rising, but something very weird is going on…

by Jo Nova

What started as a minor an Australian headline turned into a glimpse of a mysterious world-wide phenomenon.

The Australian ABC tells us that Australian searches for climate change are up 5000%:

….

But even the ABC admits no one is really talking about it — apparently Australians are secretly thinking about climate change at home on their computer:

Discussion of climate policy may be conspicuously absent this federal election campaign, but Google search data suggests the warming of the planet is weighing on voters’ minds — at least more so than in 2019.

But strangely, they don’t report actual google search results for “climate change” — instead they quote some focus groups, and talk about 5000% increases in obscure questions like “What is climate change meaning?” which no one except 12 year olds doing high school assignments probably wants to know.

So here’s the last 18 years of actual Google data on Australian searches for “climate change”:

Holy Smoke!

Google Trends: Australia searches for “climate change” hits record high| Click to enlarge

 

But, wait, really? Is this year really that much more exciting for “climate change” than the uber hot […]

Rafe Champion guest post. Advance warning of a global food crisis

This is a remarkably prescient piece on the fourth quarter of 2020 written by Goehring & Rozencwajg Natural Resource Investors. Don’t ask me how to pronounce their names. The really interesting part is about food rather than energy.

There is a lot of dense information about the impediments to the green transition and the first part is a warning to green investors who are flooding the market to get on the bandwagon of the “great opportunities” that abound. They conclude from their research that green schemes will generally lose money and waste a great deal of investment without making a dent on the level of emissions.

As to the food crisis: on page 12. “For four years global agriculture has sat on a knife edge” with a series of good seasons and bumper crops but at the same time grain inventories have been run down to a point where any hitch in supply could precipitate fears of famine and social unrest in developing nations that are at the pointy end of the food supply chain. There was news of droughts in some major cereal providers and cold weather in other places disrupting harvests.

They expect to see global cooling and […]

Another Tech Oligarch with a billion dollars to give to a Uni for the “climate cause”

Remember when Uni students were “repulsed” at the idea that Bjorn Lomborg, an economic but not even a science skeptic, might get $4m from a legally elected government to set up a centre that was passively or actively rejected by every university in Australia?

How dangerous was that $4 million?

John Doerr gives $1.1 billion to Stanford for new climate school; largest gift in Stanford history

In the largest gift ever to Stanford University, Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr and his wife, Ann, have agreed to donate $1.1 billion to set up a new school on the campus devoted to the study of climate change and its solutions.

These are not funds seeking to understand the climate. The people who work for him know exactly what he wants them to find. He’s a longtime “clean tech” investor. His website is “SpeedandScale” and it’s 100%-non-stop-Decarbonium. What happens, if theoretically, one of his researchers (or even someone else at Stanford) discovers the Sun drives climate change?

How can science flow unimpeded when it comes pre-packaged with funding for all the solutions to the “answers” the science is supposed to discover, and from a man who makes money on those […]

Scorching electricity price spikes in NSW and Queensland

Brisbane on May 3rd was a glorious 15 to 25C (or 60F – 77F) and yet the price of electricity was shocking.

The scale of the graph is so distorted that all the normal price gyrations fall to nothing, and there is only the spike — a full hour of $14,000 burning for every megawatt, and the state needing 7,000 megawatts. The demand level, or load is not unusual, but it’s about $100 million in electricity.

And this is the nice time of year for electricity managers, or it used to be. With weather that’s ideal for human habitation most air-conditioners and heaters are off. But the sun is setting earlier, and solar power is shrinking just as everyone gets home from work to turn on the oven.

AEMO

Some may blame the “lack of coal power”, but notice what’s happening to wind and solar power at critical time from 5:20pm to about 6:30pm.

All the wind and solar power in Queensland on May 3, 2022 |

Though there are other factors at work too and some are a bit mysterious according to Paul McArdle. Queensland at one point had only a 7% instantaneous reserve plant […]

Would you let your children catch this bus?

An electric bus in Paris self immolated last Friday.

There were no injuries, apart from the bus itself, presumably because there were no passengers.

Note how little time all the passengers on a packed bus would have had to get out.

Just four weeks ago another Bolloré brand electric bus caught fire in Paris. A passer-by saw smoke and told the driver, and everyone on board got safely off before the situation got out of control. In response to this second explosion all 149 similar Bolloré brand Bluebuses have been withdrawn from circulation. The RAPT points out that “it has been operating electric buses since 2016 without any major incident”. But I think everyone can see what might have happened.

Buses are killing other busses though:

In late September 2021 a large fire event in Stuttgarter Straßenbahnen (SBB)’s depot, in Gaisberg, destroyed 25 buses. A first assessment by the police, reported on many German media, said that the fire could have been caused by an electric bus during charging procedure.

From Notalotofpeopleknowthat

h/t b.nice

10 out of 10 based on 55 ratings

Great moment in Academic rigor: The Conversion bans skeptics, and “surprise” finds their readers want climate action

The Conversation accidentally provides a great case study in confirmation bias

It’s how the fake consensus in science was created in the first place. Just sack the skeptics, poll the survivors, and pretend you’ve “discovered” something scientific!

The Conversion gets excited in 2022 A staggering 10,000 people took part in our #SetTheAgenda poll, and voters’ number one issue was climate change.

“Climate change was overwhelmingly the number-one issue on our readers’ agenda. In fact, more than 60% of you picked it…”

We wonder what they will do with the other 40%?

People were asked to pick three topics from a set list, so the 60% is inflated too.

Flashback to 2019:

“The Conversation” bans all skeptical scientists from commenting What kind of conversation only has one side? Paid propaganda.

by Jo Nova

The Conversation is a site established** by your taxpayer dollars, in countries where 50 – 60% of the entire population don’t agree with the IPCC’s dominant mantra. Yet no matter how qualified you are, no matter how good your argument, your evidence and your data, you, we, half the population, is now banned. The editor Misha Ketchell has officially blocked unbelievers, […]

Day One of the Ministry

Good: some in the US are doing something

Lauren Boebert leads effort to defund Biden Administration’s ‘disinformation’ board

Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., has authored legislation to shut down a new Department of Homeland Security board designed to police misinformation. Boebert’s legislation would defund the “Disinformation Governance Board” and ensure the federal government doesn’t have role in defining what truth is for the American people.

“‘It is our duty to shut down this department immediately,’ Boebert tells Fox News Digital.

The clocks are striking thirteen. Welcome to the Ministry. pic.twitter.com/uQGmTFUTnn

— U.S. Ministry of Truth (@USMiniTru) April 30, 2022

 

In other news, which may or may not be disinformation, Brett Sutton — former Chief Health Body of Victoria just said something very odd. He was explaining why people need an influenza jab this winter in Australia:

In fact for people who are vaccinated against Covid it [influenza] might be a much more significant illness… with the high fevers, the terrible headaches, …can’t get off the couch. People genuinely feel like they have been hit by a truck.

The full 5 minute interview is here, for context. […]