Victorian govt accidentally admits wind and solar could use 70% of all agricultural land in the state

By Jo Nova

Victoria is just not big enough to fit all the solar and wind industrial plants

It’s no wonder the Victorian government is desperate to begin building offshore wind turbines. Their own targets for the forced transition are so crazy-brave, they would “need” to use as much as two thirds of the state’s agricultural land instead. It sounds delusional but they told us this straight up in their own policy document released in March 2022.

Thanks to Aidan Morrison at the Centre for Independent Studies, who not only reads these boring tomes, but also noticed that they quietly disappeared the Victorian Offshore Wind Policy Directions Paper. He explained in The Australian that he believes they hid it because they’ve realized how embarrassing it looks.

Apparently 227,000 square kilometers is not enough land to power 7 million people in a NetZero world.

Victorian planners had farmland in their sights (as if it was their own). They mapped it out and described it as “available for onshore renewables”.

If farmers were not aware of the totalitarian disregard the NetZero bureaucrats have for farmers, they know now.

Think about the captive mindset it takes to publish a ludicrous document […]

300 year old sponge suggests seas were warming long before coal power and cars were even invented

By Jo Nova

A new paper (like so many before it) shows that the sea started warming half a century before the first coal fired power plant was ever built, demonstrating yet again, the skeptics are right, and CO2 is irrelevant. Despite that, the world’s supposedly top science journal lauded it in excitement because it showed the world had warmed “more than we thought”, and somehow, in their brains, ipso delerium, all warming was caused by man-made CO2 even if it occurred when there were no flights, no cars, and no electricity.

Life in 1820 was the ultimate “Net Zero” world: literally every flight was grounded and all petrol stations were closed for 80 years yet the world warmed.

Absurdly, evangelistic headlines decreed the world was “hotter than we thought”, had breached 1.5C earlier than we thought and three hundred year old sea sponges were telling us to hurry up and install solar panels. The point that the geniuses who are 99% certain didn’t know how hot the 1800s were until last week isn’t exactly inspiring. But the political activists at Nature felt that breaching the Paris Agreement (before it was even made) was big news and said so in […]

Global carbon market is a $909 billion dollar game that rewards bureaucrats and bankers

By Jo Nova

The global carbon market in sacred certificates-to-stop-storms now “worth” nearly one trillion dollars

Remember this number next time someone tells you fossil fuels are stopping “climate action”.

The whole trillion dollar carbon market is a vested interest. It is a fake market entirely created on government whimsy. The whole absurd point of it is supposedly to slow tornadoes or floods in 2100, and reduce beach-weather in Europe. Because who likes the beach?

LONDON, Feb 7 (Reuters) – The value of traded global markets for carbon dioxide (CO2) permits reached a record 850 billion euros ($909 billion) last year, analysts at Refinitiv said on Tuesday. Around 12.5 billion tonnes of carbon permits changed hands in the world’s emissions markets – 20% less than the previous year – but the value of the markets rose by 14% as prices for permits were much higher.

In a carbon market, certain favoured groups can say they produced less carbon dioxide this year than they otherwise might have. They get to sell their anointed pieces of paper to other less favoured people who have to buy credits because the government says they must. At any point in this game, industries can […]

Mark Steyn ordered to pay $1 million to deter climate deniers from criticizing sacred scientists

The “hockey stick” graph as published in IPCC TAR (Figure 2-20, 2001)

By Jo Nova

Climate deniers must be punished

For newcomers: Michael Mann’s hockeystick graph was wildly different from hundreds of studies of other studies and instantly became the pet graph of the IPCC. It used the wrong proxy, the wrong tree, and the wrong type of averaging. Whole books were written on how bad it was. But when Mark Steyn called it fraudulent Mann sued.

Twelve long years after the case was launched, the six person jury decided that Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg have defamed Michael Mann, but awarded Mann one whole dollar in damages, because he hadn’t been able to prove he suffered any damage at all. Remarkably, though, the jurors felt the skeptics had been so malicious they added punitive damages too. Usually these are limited to a mere four or five times the compensatory damage, but this time it was decided Simberg should pay $1,000 and Mark Steyn $1 million. It sets a new record.

According to Law.com punitive or exemplary damages are saved for truly dreadful acts:

exemplary damages n. often called punitive damages… are damages requested and/or awarded […]

BP lost $1b in wind power and just flipped from cutting oil by 40% to increasing it

By Jo Nova

There’s no hiding that this is a major backflip

History books will be written about corporate mistakes.

Twenty years ago BP called itself “Beyond Petroleum” and by 2020 the company was hellbent on getting there. They pledged to reduce their own oil production by 40% by 2030, and promised to pivot into renewable power. The media was thrilled — “BP Shuns Fossil Fuels“, said Politico, and shines a light on “stranded oil and gas”. Only two years ago BP talked of “accelerating” it’s green investments. Then the price of oil and gas exploded and problems with unreliable energy started breeding.

Now BP is writing off a billion dollars in offshore wind investment, and the new CEO is calling for “pragmatism”. The company has flipped from cutting oil production 40% by 2030 to increasing it instead.

The new chief, Murray Achincloss said they still want to be “an integrated energy company” (presumably so it looks less like a full-reverse and more like a “tweak”), but he betrayed himself when he said: “we see growing demand for energy right now across the globe”. “It is not slowing down.” When he says energy, he means oil and gas.

BP to […]

Just pause for a moment to appreciate how fast the EV transition is coming undone

Image by GrumpyBeere

By Jo Nova

Last year the acceleration in EV sales stopped accelerating. The industry was still growing they said, just not quite as fast. Now, so soon, the sales are actually falling. In the UK, EV sales dropped off a cliff, falling 25% last month. Perhaps it was just a bad month? But in California, home of global green dreams, sales have also declined, and for the last two quarters. Ominously, this is happening despite government decrees insisting every new car sold in 2035 will be an EV. Sales are supposed to be launching into orbit. Something is very wrong.

Meanwhile Hertz has taken yet another step away from their EV quest — after announcing they were selling off a third of their EV fleet at bargain basement prices, now they are cancelling plans to buy 65,000 Polestars. This was a $3 billion deal, and to let them out of it, Polestar has, by golly, demanded Hertz give them the right to buy back the old Polestars that Hertz wants to sell — that way Polestar can keep the older models off the secondhard market and stop the value from falling the same dire […]

Farmers win: Major EU backdown on farming emissions and regulations

By Jo Nova

Farmers win the day after mass protests

Thousands of farmers in tractors and trucks protested in the Netherlands, Germany, France, Ireland, Sweden, Portugul, Greece and Spain. Farmers in Poland are planning to block the Ukrainian border. The French farmers held Paris under siege, blocking roads, pouring manure everywhere and leaving supermarket shelves empty, then after they won some concessions from President Macron, they kept on driving to Brussels and did it all again with help from farmers from other countries. The EU is the target.

The thing that made this so potent was not just that the farmers had heavy equipment that moved obstacles and drove over barriers, they also had huge public support. Something like 80 to 90% of French citizens supported the farmers and were willing to put up with the inconvenience. Then to cap it off, EU elections are coming in June, and they only happen once every five years. The Greens look like they will do badly. That people like Geert Wilders can win in national elections must have shocked the politerati class. But right wing governments have been elected in Italy, Sweden, and Finland too.

This looks like a major win. […]

Psychologists were sure “climate deniers” were selfish, but a study of 4,000 showed the experts were wrong

By Jo Nova

A team of psychologists were so sure “climate deniers” deceive themselves for selfish reasons that they ran three experiments with four thousand people, only to find they were completely wrong.

The researchers figured that those who do not accept that coal makes storms and floods must be motivated by their desire to keep on polluting, or flying, or feeling warm, and so they lie to themselves about the science in order to feel OK about it. (A bit like academics must do when it turns out they get paid well, but don’t know their research topic at all, maybe?)

It must have been quite the shock when Zimmermann and Stötzer were proved wrong on every single experiment. They even tried to bribe skeptics with $20 cash rewards and it still wasn’t enough.

Why are people climate change deniers? Study reveals unexpected results

Do climate change deniers bend the facts to avoid having to modify their environmentally harmful behavior? Researchers from the University of Bonn and the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) ran an online experiment involving 4,000 US adults, and found no evidence to support this idea. The authors of the study were themselves […]

Reckless Renewables Protest in Canberra, Australia on Tuesday

By Jo Nova

Farmers all over the world are bearing the brunt of the massive infrastructure and land needed to collect low density, unreliable energy. They’re being forced to take part in a giant pagan experiment to try to change the global weather and with virtually no consultation. No wonder they’re angry. In Australia there are more than 1,000 renewable projects in the pipeline and people in the regions are furious. They’re coming to Canberra at 10am on Tuesday. Professor Peter Ridd will be there. Don’t miss it if you can get there…

The regions renewable energy war in Canberra on Tuesday

by Mathew Condon, The Australian

They will come from the north and south. By car and bus and train. And if they have to, given their passion, by Shanks’ pony.

The“Reckless Renewables Rally” is also expected to attract similarly disaffected sympathisers from Queensland, Victoria (itself embroiled in the great wind farm debate) and Tasmania.

Hundreds if not thousands of the wind farm- and renewable energy-aggrieved are set to pour on to the manicured lawns of Parliament House, Canberra on Tuesday, February 6 – federal parliament’s first sitting day for 2024 […]

Green backdowns — Chaos and division strikes UK Labour and German Greens over climate targets

By Jo Nova

Instead of the conservatives being torn apart by climate change, now it’s the left side of politics

Politicians finally seem to realize the voters don’t want to spend money on climate change.

Once all players in politics realize that their climate policies and green pledges paint targets on their backs, it’s the beginning of the end.

The UK Labour Party has bragged for two years that it will spend £28bn on green investment if they get elected. But their Green Prosperity Plan has become a target for conservatives to shoot down, and apparently the Labour party is now publicly falling all over itself to distance itself from the number £28bn. They’ve delayed it, added qualifiers, and reduced it from a “pledge” to an “ambition” but nothing seemed to work. Finally, they have had to declare that the spending target has been dropped.

A spending target was always a stupid thing, on any issue. What organisation, company or billionaire pledges to throw money for the sake of hitting a spending target, as if spending itself was the goal? It’s a vanity gig — only for those who want to show off their wealth (or in this case, […]

Burn oil, save forests: Global greening is accelerating in 55% of the world thanks to fossil fuels

By Jo Nova

Thanks to Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone for finding this paper.

It’s time we stopped messing around. Clearly, fossil fuels are feeding the world, greening the land, and boosting tree growth. Anyone who gives a damn about the environment needs to start campaigning to increase our fossil fuel emissions.

Recently a batch of studies announced that the era of global greening might be over, or that drought stress might be browning the Earth faster than it was being greened. But a new study shows that the Earth is not only still getting greener, but that the rate of green growth is accelerating on more than half of the world.

Chen et al used four satellite datasets to estimate the Leaf Area Index (LAI). They found the long feared desertification of Earth is only accelerating over 7% of the globe while the long ignored greening is not increasing but even accelerating over 55% of the Earth. At this rate, the barren corners of the Earth are in danger of going missing.

Obviously, the habitat of koalas is benefiting hugely from coal, gas and petrol. But to be more serious, so are the worlds poor. If we care about […]

Grid on the Edge: Queensland Govt switched off thousands of home air conditioners six times in the last 8 weeks

By Jo Nova

You will own nothing and be hot and bothered

Welcome to modern Australia where the grid is so fragile, poor people have to buy air conditioners that the government can remotely switch off . Such is the state of decay that Queensland no longer has enough electricity to allow the riff-raff to have air conditioning whenever they want it — only the rich can do that.

The state energy companies of Queensland offer customers up to $400 cashback when they buy an air conditioner, but in return they allow the government to reach into their homes and turn off the air conditioner when the grid is in trouble, which it seems is a lot lately. It was only supposed to be a “few days a year”.

It’s a way to manage the grid — think of it as 170,000 mini blackouts instead of one big one:

Energex remotely cuts power to 170,000 air conditioners six times in a month

ABC News

Queensland’s state-owned power grid remotely turned down almost 170,000 air conditioners six times in the past two months as part of a scheme to protect the electricity network.

[…]

Wednesday

Back tomorrow….

8.5 out of 10 based on 18 ratings

Long live Australia Day — A corporate attack and a great Farmer protest

By Jo Nova

One Australian farmer did more in two hours to celebrate the greatest country on Earth than the entire $44 billion Woolworths corporation. It’s a bit of a “Bud-light” moment downunder. The CEO of “Woolies”, our largest grocery empire, proudly celebrates any culture on Earth except ours. He bragged that they would not stock Australiana for Australia Day (January 26), even though they are happy to cheer on Halloween parties and put up banners for Chinese New Year and Diwali. Not surprisingly, staff were scathing — ““They’re bringing in year of the dragon 2024 Lunar New Year gear, loads of it, but no Aussie stuff, disgusting, go figure, go woke, go broke,” one wrote.”

Why didn’t the ABC put Harrison Schuster’s inspiring art on the news?

A 27-year-old farmer has paid tribute to his country ahead of Australia Day with an incredible art piece carved into his family’s paddock. pic.twitter.com/al6W3hG67e

— Warren 👉☕️ (@YoungWazza2) January 25, 2024

See how he created this in the video below (it’s a great protest tool, farmers!) What farmers lack in inner city presence they can make up for in protests visible from space.

This absolute legend of an […]

Trump’s advisers vow to decimate climate policy and go all-out on fossil fuels

By Jo Nova

Now that the Billionaire-Green mask is off, conservatives are getting serious

Scott Waldman at Politico outlines the nightmare scenario where if Trump wins, he might “rewrite federal climate reports” or “install loyalists atop key science agencies” without seeming to realize that’s the Democrats modus operandi of science for thirty years.

No more going wobbly in climate fight, Trump supporters vow

Trump’s campaign utterances, and the policy proposals being drafted by hundreds of his supporters, point to the likelihood that his return to the White House would bring an all-out war on climate science and policies — eclipsing even his first-term efforts that brought U.S. climate action to a virtual standstill. Those could include steps that aides shrank back from taking last time, such as meddling in the findings of federal climate reports.

“The approach is to go back to all-out fossil fuel production and sit on the EPA,” said Steve Milloy, a former Trump transition team adviser who is well known for his industry-backed attacks on climate science.

But as the GOP front-runner, he’s gone back to alleging that human-caused global warming is fake, is baselessly blaming whale deaths on […]

New deniers eh? One third of UK teenagers think climate change is deliberately exaggerated

By Jo Nova

There is hope: Thirty years of namecalling, propaganda and censorship still isn’t enough

Despite being raised on non stop media propaganda and being drip fed the climate bible in school, one third of teenagers have somehow figured it out anyhow. Even the systematic censorship on Youtube and Google where skeptics are downranked, delegitimized and demonetized hasn’t stopped the truth getting through to some of the most impressionable and vulnerable minds.

Because this blasphemy is shocking to Guardian staff, that students might think for themselves, they can only report it with a ready-made excuse loaded into the subheader. It’s Youtube’s fault.

Helena Horton, The Guardian writes:

Third of UK teenagers believe climate change exaggerated, report shows

YouTube criticised for amplifying lies about the climate with disinformation videos watched by young people

A third of UK teenagers believe climate change is “exaggerated”, a report has found, as YouTube videos promoting a new kind of climate denial aimed at young people proliferate on the platform.

So it’s not that climate models have been pathetically wrong for their whole lives, and many of their parents and grandparents don’t believe the climate religion either — this is […]

What a backflip: The Biggest political party in the EU now wants to drop the ban on petrol and diesel cars

By Jo Nova

The voter backlash begins

How much more would the car lovers and petrol-heads of Europe take? In draconian style, last February, the EU declared all petrol and diesel cars would be banned from 2035. It was their star policy for the Net Zero push. Car makers would have to cut their emissions by a shocking 55% by 2030 and an unthinkable 100% by 2035. It was to be the end of an era.

The idea was so big and embedded in the EU that only one month ago an insurance insider warned that his company was already devising elaborate plans for a world where everyone had an EV and the insurance giants and the government got access to all your data. Police would be issuing your speeding tickets while-you-drove, and insurance companies would be granting drivers a discount if they allowed them to sell all their data to the highest bidder. Indeed, the word was that insurance companies wouldn’t even insure petrol cars. Obviously only the rich were going to be able to afford a petrol car or an EV “with privacy”.

But now, the largest party in the EU is drafting a policy to ditch […]

Surprise!? CEO of JP Morgan says “Trump was kinda right” and his supporters deserve respect

By Jo Nova

Did Wall Street just step away from the poisonous left?

The head of the largest bank in the US said the unthinkable in Davos this week. Jamie Dimon, CEO of J.P. Morgan, and perhaps the most important banker in New York and thus the US, warned the Democrats that they were making a mistake demonizing Trump supporters. He even admitted Trump got some things “kind of” right, suggested rather radically that it was time people grew up “I mean, really?” he said “Can we stop that stuff” and “treat other people with respect and listen to them a little bit?”

Normally, JP Morgan can be counted to be on the same side as the big banker WEF cabal, or to some extent, driving it. Dimon has spent the last three months talking up Nikki Haley. So he is going right off the ranch here.

“I wish the Democrats would think a little more carefully when they talk about MAGA,” Dimon told CNBC on Wednesday from the World Economic Forum in Davos.

“I don’t think they are voting for Trump because of his family values,” Dimon said. “Just take a step back and be […]

WEF say World’s greatest threat is “Misinformation” — (The biggest threat to experts and billionaires is free speech)

By Jo Nova

Finally, they admit that Free Speech is more scary than climate change

The WEF, being the billionaire’s ski club — are of course, talking about the worlds greatest threat to them, not to you.

In the WEF Global Risks Report they asked 1,490 experts and leaders and their the list of biggest risks in the next two years was misinformation and disinformation. Forget bioweapons, nuclear bombs, wars, corruption, asteroids, inflation and global boiling — the thing that keeps the favored “experts” awake at night is whether people will point out their flaws and expose the rorts* that put them at the top of the pile.

World Economic Forum, Survey 2023-24

The “Misinformation and Disinformation” line is dressed up as a concern that AI generated or false information is the problem, but note the giveaway — those in authority are most worried about public opinion shifting to distrust those in authority — as if “authority” could never be wrong.

Blind trust is how you build nations right?

Persistent false information (deliberate or otherwise) widely spread through media networks, shifting public opinion in a significant way towards distrust in facts and authority. Includes, but […]

EV’s stuck for days unable to charge in frozen Chicago : “A bunch of dead robots”

By Jo Nova

“Plugged in and not charging”

In the deep freeze this week, people all over Canada and the USA are finding out how complicated it is to own an EV in cold weather.

Not only do the cars lose a hefty 30 to 50% of their range, but the battery itself can’t accept charge if it gets too cold, so EV’s need to precondition their batteries before they can start to charge. (To precondition is EV-jargon for “warming them up”.) However, there is a point, as temperatures fall, where batteries cannot even heat themselves enough so they can start charging. They have to drain the battery to charge the battery. It’s a death-spiral towards a frozen singularity.

How cold is too cold? The ideal temperature for charging an EV is 15 – 35°C (or 60-95 F) so some advise preconditioning the battery when it’s below 15C. But the charging speed declines as the chemical reactions slow down, and it reaches nothing at about 0°C (32F). So if the car is minus five, the battery won’t even accept a charge.

At the supercharging station in Oak Brook Chicago, people have been trying for days to charge […]