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By Jo Nova
Electric cars and carbon target fantasies are hitting the wall
Right when they are meant to be growing by double digits German EV car sales are down an astonishing 30% compared to a year ago. Their market share is actually shrinking. EV’s are not much good at reducing carbon dioxide over their lifetime but they are very useful for pretending to “decarbonise” the transport sector. So this creates a vast hole in the German government’s so-called transition, which has fixed targets for every sector. Problematically, the transport sector just doesn’t seem to run on wind and solar panels, or pumped hydro. It’s hard to decarbonize. Liquid fuel is just too convenient.
It seems the German Transport Minister is threatening to ban weekend driving as an ambit claim to expose the absurdity of the Green’s position. He is warning that if the Greens don’t sign a change in legislation to average emission across all sectors, he will have to take drastic action to meet the transport sector goals, which means banning driving on weekends. (Trap set.)
The Greens responded like any petty tyrants would, saying he shouldn’t aggravate people unnecessarily, because there were other ways to fix […]
By Jo Nova
Right about now the Greens should be rushing to reverse all the plastic bans
Now we know that CO2 is aerial fertilizer and feeds the world, but this study highlights the crazy unscientific randomness of environmental policies chanted by the same people who say “follow the science”.
It turns out paper shopping bags produce five times as much CO2 over their lifetime as plastic HDPE bags do. Apparently, plastic bags might strangle a turtle, but in the mind of a dedicated Green, paper bags could be causing the sixth mass extinction. Oh the dilemma?
A new study in Environmental Science and Technology looked at 16 applications of plastics in modern life found that in 15 of them, the plastic version produced fewer emissions than the paper, concrete, steel, glass or aluminum sort. And these 16 applications accounted for about 90% of global plastic volume. It seems that with paper bags people often “double bag” their groceries because the bags are prone to breaking, and in the end, in landfill, the paper waste is degraded into methane.
THE DAILY CHART: PLASTIC MADNESS
Steven Hayward, Powerline
So we went and banned plastic straws and plastic […]
By Jo Nova
Politicians are supposed to care about the voters, but trillions are being spent on a issue that voters don’t give a toss about. Who are politicians serving exactly, because it isn’t the voters. There is no grassroots clamoring demand for “climate action” and there never was. Could it be that politicians are more worried about what the banker cartel think, and the media moguls, or President Xi, or are they just carving out a post-political job for themselves at the UNEP or the WEF?
The Wall Street Journal reports on a survey that shows even young voters know almost anything is more important than climate change.
Biden Is Spending $1 Trillion to Fight Climate Change. Voters Don’t Care.
By Amrith Ramkumar and Andrew Restuccia,Wall Street Journal
A Journal poll, which surveyed voters in seven swing states in March, found that just 3% of 18-to-34-year-old voters named climate change as their top issue, with most citing the economy, inflation or immigration. That is roughly in line with voters of all ages, 2% of whom cited climate change as their top issue.
This has been this way for years. In 2015 only 3% […]
By Jo Nova
It’s just another day in the death of the early 21st Century EV bubble
The fantasy of battery powered vehicles that also fix the weather was foisted upon the people by Big Government. But all the regulatory wands in the world, and even billions in free gifts don’t make a market appear when the product is a dog.
EV’s are meant to be storming the market on their way to domination. But in the UK the market share of EV’s rose only 3.8% last month but the whole car market grew by 10% — so EV’s are in danger of becoming a shrinking part of the UK car fleet. Plug-in hybrids saw a 37% increase.
The EV experiment has gone so very wrong. Last year Ford was the number 2 EV brand in the US, but it was hit with the $4.5 billion dollar black hole of fiscal carnage, losing $38,000 on every single EV. Obviously, something had to change, and now months later, Ford is abandoning plans to bring in two new EV models, and retool their EV manufacturing plants. Instead, it is shifting to hybrid vehicles — copying the Toyota plan.
EVs have crashed […]
By Jo Nova
…
Dear Australians, people are sneaking into your house and stealing your money every year. You may have no idea because the theft comes in one thousand little instances, hidden within labels like “electricity bill”, “peas” and “soccer fees”. It’s also hidden in your income tax. Pagan fantasy plans to stop storms and hold back the tide are being funded by you, whether you like it or not.
Solar panel installations are partly paid for by their neighbors who don’t have solar panels, it’s hidden in their electricity bills. When a wind farm is built out past the Black Stump, shareholders of the wind farm don’t pay for the high voltage line to connect themselves to the grid, you do. When the new unreliable generators wipe out the midday profits from the old reliable plants, the old essential plants still have to pay their capital costs, insurance and staff. So they just have to charge more for the hours they do run. The new vandal plants make the old reliable ones more expensive than they would have been. (See Stacy and Taylor) You pay that bill too.
When the soccer club pays higher electricity […]
By Jo Nova
There is such a glut in solar panels, the Financial Times reported that people in Germany and the Netherlands are using them as cheap garden fencing, even though the angle is not good for catching the sun. Though given that there is also a glut of solar power at lunchtime this is probably a “good” thing.
Solar Panels
Great time for the Australian Government to spend a billion dollars setting up a giant solar panel production industry, eh?
With exquisite timing the Australian Labor government has just announced a Solar Sunshot for Our Regions. It our Prime Ministers ambition for us to be a “Renewable Energy Superpower” twenty years too late. One third of homes in Australia already have solar panels, but only 1% were made here. The NSW State government will also lob $275 million to support the embryonic industry and workers, most of whom will presumably be doorknocking to give away the panels with lamingtons. After we finish building garden fences, we might be using them to build sheds and cubby houses.
The big solar rush is over…
The global frenzy to install solar panels has suddenly flattened out last year when it […]
By Jo Nova
This tells us everything we need to know about modern Western civilization. A blimp with wings.
These pufferfish of the sky could be the ugliest, most absurd planes to take to the troposphere.
They are emblematic of the era we live in. Wind turbines destined to rot in the ocean are so big now they can’t even fit on a truck, so someone is planning a plane specially for them. It will be 100 feet longer than a Jumbo jet but carry no tourists, except the fibreglass kind that torment whales, deafen porpoises and vandalize fine electricity grids. The whole point of these machines is a quest to appease the weather Gods one hundred years from now.
Presumably these will run on fairy dust or fermented tofu.
The Flying white elephants could “hit the sky” in four years
To be clear, all that was announced two weeks ago was that Radia has “plans” to make these aircraft and wants $300 million dollars. Presumably the photos here were made by ChatGPT or equivalent.
Radia’s WindRunner to be the world’s largest aircraft ever built
by Rizwan Choudry, Interesting Engineering
The WindRunner’s colossal dimensions dwarf […]
By Jo Nova
Strange sightings of Batman and Robin have been occurring in London
Thousands of ULEZ (Ultra Low Emission Zone) cameras have been installed to record numberplates of offending older cars so their owners can be charged £12.50 for daring to drive a non-compliant car in London. This usually means any diesel car made before 2014 or a petrol car made before 2006, so the fines especially hurt low paid workers, students and retirees.
The two masked crusaders have been seen helping the local bat population by installing homes for them in front of ULEZ cameras. Since bats are a protected species (unlike motorists) once the bat boxes are installed they can not be tampered with nor disturbed by law. Batman and Robin helpfully also place legal notices on the poles so workers coming to fix the cameras know they risk a six month jail sentence or an “unlimited” fine if they so much as touch the bat box.
The bat boxes cost £10.
Bat roosts have legal protection:
Vigilante anti-ULEZ campaigners hang bat boxes on cameras to stop engineers fixing them
By Adam Toms and Rom Preston-Ellis, The Mirror
The £10 animal homes […]
Youtube link
By Jo Nova
Trust us, Kids, We’re Climate ‘Educators’
Tony Thomas has uncovered a plot in Tasmania to turn our schools into leftist activist assembly lines (more than they already are). Luckily it appears to be so boring, no one is watching. (OK, that’s hardly luck, just a fact of life. Beating people up with propaganda is, by definition, and especially after 30 years, not that exciting.) But Curious Climate Schools is still harming children and teachers too, and wasting the taxes of bus drivers, builders and bakers.
In the end, publicly funded academics are shamelessly exploiting eight year olds. They work on their youthful anxiety and naivete (and their dreadful science education) to create political lobby groups which will help academics get more funding. Vote for Big Government! Vote for Climate Change Grants! Write letters to the M.P. you are too young to vote for! It is disgustingly self serving, though all the Doctors of Climate Trauma would be mortified to hear that. They are saving the world, after all. They are the saints who collect salaries. The prophets on academic pay scales.
It’s just Big Government advertising itself, but disguised as “education”:
The […]
By Jo Nova
As Western grids are teetering, people are suddenly realizing demand for electricity is about to skyrocket
Unstoppable demands are about to meet immovable rocks. A year ago the grid managers thought they had their five year plans figured out, but now the same experts think we are going to need to add twice as much generation as they did then. The watt-hogs have arrived to chew on some gigawatt hours.
The usual slow grid planning processes are getting upended. Take the US State of Georgia for example. They have scored lots of new electric vehicle and battery factories, a few large “clean energy” manufacturing projects, and have attracted a bunch of energy-sucking data centers, but all of these things add massive loads to the grid.
In the last 22 years demand for electricity hasn’t growth much, so in 2022 Georgia Power were expecting to close their coal fired plants pretty soon, and not even put forward a new plan til 2025. Instead Georgia Power are knocking on the state regulators door to let it expand generation. They’re now expecting winter demand will grow 17 times faster than their previous plan, and summer use will explode to […]
By Jo Nova
Sometime a few years ago the Carbonistas stopped trying to pretend it was science, climate change has morphed into a ecclesiastical piñata instead. (If they whack it hard enough, grants fall out).
Instead of talking about 30 year trends (because they were wrong), the experts started coloring weather maps blood red and hyperventilating with every warm weekend. So it makes perfect sense they need the ritual reminders of holy mythology, and this is one of those stories. It’s the weekly nod for the awestruck fanatics that the world really does revolve around “climate change”. They can nod solemnly, and pat each others solar panels.
The theory is that because our showers are too long or our beef steaks are too big (don’t you feel important?), the poles are melting and some ice near the poles has dribbled out to the equator, slowing the planet’s spin. Since the Earth is a rotating ball of rock 10,000 kilometers across, the movements of a few millimeters of water on the surface are somewhat minor. But nevermind. So the dire news, such as it isn’t, is that the Earth’s clocks might have to be wound back by one whole second in […]
By Jo Nova
There are so many holes in the Holy Carbonista Bible it’s easy to find one to surprise a BBC interviewer with.
Now that Guyana has discovered the joys of major oil deposits, the President came prepared. But because the BBC is so robotically predictable, Irfaan Ali knew exactly what they would ask, but host Stephen Sackur, seemingly had no idea what was coming. If only the BBC had interviewed a few skeptics in the last thirty years…
There are few things I enjoy quite as much as watching indoctrinated Western virtue signallers get epically destroyed by people from developing countries who are willing to be honest. pic.twitter.com/MkC2EIyQZR
— Konstantin Kisin (@KonstantinKisin) March 29, 2024
…
“Let me stop you right there,” he said. “Did you know that Guyana has a forest that is the size of England and Scotland combined, a forest that stores 19.5 gigatons of carbon, a forest that we have kept alive?”
“I’m going to lecture you on climate change. Because we have kept this forest alive that you enjoy that the world enjoys, that you don’t pay us for, that you don’t value.
March 31st, 2024 | Tags: BBC, Media bias, South America | Category: Global Warming, Media-matters |  Print This Post | |
By Jo Nova
That which must not be spoken
Every news outlet today is saying how good it is that “relations” with China have thawed, like it was just a bad patch of weather, and now the clouds have cleared they’ve allowed us to sell them wine again. But there is a kind of collective amnesia about why relations froze in the first place.
Just to recap, through incompetence or “otherwise” naughty-citizen China leaked a likely lab experiment, lied about it, and destroyed the evidence. They stopped it spreading at home but sent it on planes to infect the rest of the world. Then when Scott Morrison, Australian Prime Minister, dared ask for an investigation in April 2020, within a week China threatened boycotts, and followed up with severe anti-dumping duties on Australian barley. After which the CCP discovered “inconsistencies in labelling” on Australian beef imports, and added bans or tariffs on Australian wine, wheat, wool, sugar, copper, lobsters, timber and grapes. Then they told their importers not to bring in Australian coal, cotton or LNG either. The only industry they didn’t attack was iron ore, probably because they couldn’t get it anywhere else. In toto, the punishment destroyed […]
By Jo Nova
Our news is filled with fatuous lies every single day.
Mr Bowen, Minister for Changing the Weather, wants to force efficiency standards on Australian cars so we “have more choices”, he says. Mysteriously, it seems there are companies overseas making cheap, clean, wonderful cars who selfishly refuse to sell them to us. Crazy eh?
Would that be because:
Car salesmen want to save the world? There’s no market for efficient cars here. Australians prefer cars that burn up and waste fuel! It costs more to sell to nations with no efficiency standards since they have to install the Fuel Worse-ifier?
Or could it be they know Australians won’t buy their damn cars unless the government bans the cheaper ones first?
Mr Bowen, now says they never had a target. Of course! And people are mobbing him in the street wanting to buy expensive European EV’s:
Chris Bowen ditches doomed EV sales target
By Jess Malcolm, The Australian
Energy and Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen has walked away from Labor’s target to have 89 per cent of new car sales electric by 2030, casting doubt on the government’s green agenda.
By Jo Nova
Imagine the outcry if a coal plant was obliterated by hail?
A few days ago, a 3,300 acre solar power plant in Texas suffered major hail damage. This was a plant so new it was still under construction. The Fighting Jays solar project started generating in 2022, but was not expected to be fully complete until the end of 2024. In theory it was supposed to last for 35 years.
It is so large they boasted that it covers 2,499 football fields (like that is a good thing). Despite the vast footprint, it was rated at only 350 MW. At noon at peak production it could generate about half of what one forty year old coal fired turbine makes all day every day, and every night too.
Collecting low density energy is more expensive than the wish-fairies might think.
BREAKING: Hail storm in Damon texas on 3/24/24 destroys 1,000’s of acres of solar farms.
Who pays to fix this green energy? @StateFarm? @FarmBureau? @Allstate?
Or you the taxpayer? pic.twitter.com/GpNSaopObZ
— Corey Thompson (@Roughneck2real) March 25, 2024
At an average construction price of $1 million per megawatt the project likely cost about $350 million dollars. […]
By Jo Nova
The “Misinformation Industry” has been caught with its pants down — accidentally finding, then burying, the information that nearly everyone in their own industry “leans left”.
This is a field that generated headlines about how conservatives are more susceptible to believing misinformation, and conservatives consume more Facebook disinformation. It would be awkward then if the whole field turned out to be leftist academics, and they tried to hide that, which is exactly what just happened.
The leading “journal” on misinformation surveyed 150 of its own academic experts, then forgot to mention that one of the most striking and significant results from their own survey was that being a “Misinformation Expert” was a left wing phenomena.
Bjorn Lomborg noticed the statistics on their self-admitted political leanings buried in an appendix, and graphed it himself. He writes: “Misinformation experts are perhaps not quite unbiased”.
There was barely a conservative among them:
@BjornLomborg
Speaking of misinformation, it’s a little misleading, don’t you think, to pretend this doesn’t matter in a field “devoted” to researching political misinformation?
It seems The Misinformation Review has been misinforming its readers.
The Misinformation Industry looks, acts and smells like a leftist invention […]
By Jo Nova
Ponder how far we have come when more than half of the US sees the media, not just as self-serving, biased hacks, but as The Enemy itself.
“Fake News” is annoying, but active lies and suppression are a campaign to steal something from you — or everything: your money, your health, your vote and your children. There is no “town square” anymore, no common forum where ideas are batted back and forth until both sides agree. There is only entrenched polarization. A house divided, and no shared meals. Fomenting civil war.
Rasmussen Reports asked 1,114 likely US voters whether the media are “truly the enemy of the people”, and an amazing 60% agreed.
By Nicole Wells, NewsMax
According to the survey, of the 60% majority who agree with Trump’s 2019 assessment that the media are “the enemy of the people,” 30% strongly agree with the presumptive GOP presidential nominee; 36% disagree with the statement, including 21% who strongly disagree.
It’s much more widespread across the political spectrum than you might think:
On whether the media are “truly the enemy of the people,” 79% of Republicans, 60% of […]
By Jo Nova
Martin Durkin’s work will be studied one day like Thucydides as a record of a bizarre moment in human history. It is so quintessentially British. I thought I’d seen it all in the climate debate, but this is so well done, perfect for a curious, matter-of-fact mind. It pulls you along, with timeless nostalgic footage in a classic English delivery, calmly unravelling mythology. It will resonate with people who remember cities, cars and great documentaries of long ago.
Because it’s not angry or activist it’s a gift you can send to friends who are science nerds, or history buffs, or who remember the sixties. Send it to people with teenagers who have no idea the curriculum hides a half a billion years of history. Send it to green friends, who have no idea a third of the food made in Africa rots before it can be eaten without fossil fuels and plastic to preserve and transport it.
Imagine the effect if this was shown at schools.
It’s the story of how an activist movement became a big industry, they say. But I can’t help thinking it was a big industry that grew an activist movement…
The […]
By Jo Nova
Nobody mentioned the nausea
The planet-saving cars that are being forced upon us have another catch — they might make you vomit. Apparently, motion sickness is “a thing” for EV’s, not that our public broadcaster would mention it in the regular adverts they run to tell us how wonderful EV’s are “with ridiculous savings!”. Apparently the silent sudden acceleration of an EV is leaving some stomachs in a lurch — and some adults, kids and even dogs are throwing up.
‘I need a solution fast’: Electric car owners complain of motion sickness
Zane Dobie, Drive
Another user said: “I drive in an electric vehicle a lot, and I’ve found that regenerative braking absolutely makes me motion sick. I’m not always driving, so I don’t always have control of how it’s being driven, so other people’s driving really makes me sick… I really need to find a solution fast”.
Some drivers also reported their electric cars making their pets sick too. “Since [buying] the Tesla, [my dog] throws up in it almost every time…”
The theory is that EV’s are too quiet, too fast, and have too few cues to warn our insides to […]
By Jo Nova
The clean energy revolution is failing, and everyone knows it
In a radical move, the CEO of an oil giant actually defended oil. For a brief moment the space-time continuum opened a worm hole to reality, and leaders of some of the world’s largest corporations briefly said sensible things.
The energy transition is falling apart so fast, even the prime targets of hate, the Big Oil Men themselves, are now openly pointing out what a waste of time and money solar and wind power are. BP was trying to cut oil production 40% until very recently when it flipped to increasing it. But now we have a whole conference of Big Oil.
Saudi Aramco CEO says energy transition is failing, world should abandon ‘fantasy’ of phasing out oil
By Spencer Kimball, CNBC
HOUSTON — Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser said Monday that the energy transition is failing and policymakers should abandon the “fantasy” of phasing out oil and gas, as demand for fossil fuels is expected to continue to grow in the coming years.
“In the real world, the current transition strategy is visibly failing on most fronts as it collides […]
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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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