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By Jo Nova
And the flavor of the month is “failure”
Air New Zealand announced this week that it would not be able to cut its carbon emissions by 29% by 2030. The levers were “outside their control”, they lamented, which was the polite way of saying there isn’t enough sustainable jet fuel in the world, electric planes die after a few weeks, and no one has invented a low emissions plane yet. At the moment the only kind of Net-Zero-flying is not to fly at all.
Current supplies of sacred sustainable fuel are rapidly growing but barely 0.5% of total requirements. Even though production is expected to triple this year to 1.5 Mt of Sustainable Aviation Fuel, the industry needs 200 times what is currently available.
If someone could just invent an anti-gravity machine, or a nuclear jet…
By Charlotte Graham-McLay, Associated Press
Air New Zealand has pulled the plug on its climate targets saying the resources needed to meet them are unaffordable and unavailable.
In a statement the airline said it was removing its 2030 carbon intensity reduction target and will withdraw from the Science Based Targets initiative.
This is the sound of the free market saying “It’s a stupid idea”:
Sustainable transport researcher Dr Paul Callister said Air New Zealand’s climate target was unrealistic and was never going to be achieved. … “We’ve seen report after report saying that sustainable aviation fuels are not being produced and the quantities they should be and part of the problem is that airlines are not willing to pay the full cost of it. They’re wanting cheap fuels and they’re wanting government subsidies to pay for those fuels. It’s a bit of a vicious cycle.
Of course, if customers thought the world was really going to end they might be willing to pay for expensive fuels to prevent that. But no one really believes it.
It was all so different just a few years ago — endorsed by the most Experty experts:
Tuesday’s update was a sharp turnaround from a 2022 announcement by Air New Zealand in which it declared itself the second carrier in the world to have its plans validated by the U.N.’s Science Based Targets initiative aviation framework. It pledged a 28.9% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030, from a 2019 baseline, with a 16.3% drop in absolute emissions.
It was a Science Based Target don’tcha’know?
Meanwhile in Australia most companies are far behind Air New Zealand. Where the airline has tried and failed, 42% of Australian companies have not even started.
By Jared Lynch, The Australian Business Review
Now, a survey of more than 500 companies from Schneider Electric — the biggest adviser of Australian commercial power users — says 28 per cent have no intention of meeting their Paris Agreement commitments. A further 42 per cent say they have not begun decarbonising their operations.
The worst performers in meeting climate goals were smaller companies, healthcare, construction and professional services, with the Schneider survey revealing 18 per cent did not know where to start, while almost a quarter did not consider it a priority.
Ponder just how devastating this is. 42% of Australian companies have not even begun, and another 28% have no intention of finishing.
That’s a 70% failure rate.
Image by Eynoxart from Pixabay
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By Jo Nova
There is hope: Despite the censorship, and the partisan bias in the media, more than half the country has shaken off the propaganda.
All our institutions and experts have been telling us “renewables are cheaper” for twenty years, yet two out of three people don’t believe them. In a similar vein 58% of people could believe electric cars were just as bad for the environment as petrol cars. 50% believe renewable energy leads to blackouts, causes harm to whales and takes away our best farmland. And half the country agrees there is no consensus among the experts either.
We haven’t had a strong election battle on the renewables transition, but statistics like these suggest that if the Opposition picked up on this fear, they would be pushing on an open door.
The IPSOS survey (n=1,000)
And despite higher prices being exactly what happens in every country on Earth, IPSOS arrogantly labels this belief as “Misinformation”.
(Click to enlarge).
They also asked people whether they had “seen or heard anything in the social media about this?” But only 39% said they had seen something on this in the mainstream media. So most of the population hadn’t even seen this discussed on TV or radio yet. Imagine how many more people would know that the transition would ramp up electricity prices if the TV news actually interviewed skeptical engineers, NASA astronauts or Nobel prize winners like John Clauser, every now and again.
We are a country divided and cynical. Half the nation don’t believe the CSIRO or the ABC even a bit. Only 40% think it will be good for the economy. Only 32% think it will increase jobs in their area.
Support for the renewables transition is falling away
In the last 2 years, a tenth of those who thought Australia should be “a world leader” in the energy transition have left the ranch.
And the most important thing to the people was not a speedy transition, but cheap electricity and reliable power.
Only 28% think we will meet our Net Zero targets
Boy are they in for a shock…
 https://www.ipsos.com/en-au/australians-now-more-concerned-about-green-energys-impact-cost-living-and-electricity-bills
Half the nation still thinks (paradoxically) that switching to solar and wind power will improve air quality. Thirty years of teachers, news-readers and politicians calling carbon dioxide “pollution” sowed this confusion.
See the Epoch Times for more commentary on the survey.
See the crowd at Reneweconomy tie themselves in knots with excuses.
But it’s not difficult to see why more Australians are now associating wind and solar farms with higher power bills and cost of living more generally, says the Grattan Institute’s Allison Reeve.
“It’s only very recently that we’ve come to this point where renewables have become the cheapest form of energy, so people who don’t think about energy all the time for a living will have a shortcut in their brain and say ‘oh renewables are more expensive’,” she says.
They’re trying to pretend that the idea of “cheap renewables” is a whole new thing that the masses haven’t been trained-to-death with for two decades.
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 … By Jo Nova
It’s hard to keep up with the great EV unravelling
The best news for the EV industry this month is that Ford is only losing $50,000 a car now on its electric vehicles. That’s so much better than the $132,000 it was losing last quarter. But the true economic carnage is deep and widespread. The one sure bet in the world of electric vehicles was Tesla where sales rose two percent in the last quarter but their profits plummeted 45%. The fire-sale shifted cars but it burned the bottom line. Similarly Mercedes Benz profits were down 21%, mostly thanks to EVs. And Ford’s were down 35% (not surprisingly).
We knew things were bad when the new invention has a small market share but already half of the owners wanted to go back to the old style.
There is trouble even in China where shares in Evergrande New Energy Vehicle are down almost 40% so far this year. Apparently some creditors are coming after Evergrande seeking bankruptcy proceedings for two of its EV arms.
Nearly every major manufacturer is delaying new models or rewriting their targets. Ford is delaying several models, and is redesigning a plant in Canada that was going to make EVs to one that will build pick-up trucks with fossil fuel engines. Bentley and Aston Martin have pushed back the launch of their first EVs. Jaguar have said they will drop two of their planned EV models and keep making their gasoline SUV for longer. Volkswagen diverted $60 billion back into developing ICE cars. Suddenly, they’ve all discovered that Hybrid cars are quite interesting.
Porsche kept their target and dumped it at the same time. They are still (theoretically) aiming to get 80% of its vehicle sales to be electric by 2030. But they added the clause “if the customers support us”. Anything less than 80% will be the customers fault. Porsche off the hook, eh…
Someone is going to write a book about how the top industrial heavyweights of the West virtually all fell for the fantasy that we could toss out a century of engineering and ding, invent new type of car on command. Discovery in aisle nine!
The EV bubble deflates in real time
By Matthew Lynn, The Telegraph
Over the last few days, it has become clear that the EV industry is on the brink of collapse. Hundreds of billions of euros, dollars and pounds have been pumped into this industry by political leaders and the subsidy junkies that surround them – and it is surely time they were held to account for the vast quantities of taxpayer cash that has been wasted.
And it’s not just car makers. It’s bad news for the supply line:
It is even worse for component manufacturers. Shares in Germany’s Varta are down by 70pc over the last month amid reports that the company may have to be rescued from bankruptcy after making heavy losses on batteries for hybrid sports cars. This week, the Belgium chemicals group Umicore announced a €1.6bn (£1.4bn) hit, as manufacturers warned of waning EV demand, and it postponed plans for a battery recycling plant.
As Matthew Lynn says: consumers are increasingly nervous over what may become obsolete technology. That’s got to be the marketing kiss-of-death.
Western governments threw billions of dollars to inflate this bubble
Politicians tried to play God in the car market: In France Macron tossed €700m at a plan to dominate battery production in partnership with Germany. The Germans burned €1bn too. But the EU bragged that it spent €80bn on things to do with EVs, and the US had launched cargo-ships of cash with the Inflation Reduction Act.
In the end, in the biggest transition of them all, from horse to car, Ford didn’t need a government subsidy to invent a Model T. And customers didn’t need to be forced to buy it either.
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By Jo Nova
Like a sabre:
“I am the ultimate diversity hire, I’m both a woman and a person of color, so if you criticize anything I say, you’re both a sexist and a racist”
AI will destroy jobs… (hopefully one in particular).
But both sides can use this tool — to construct a narrative, as well as to destroy it.
Reality may become very hard to find with unmarked Deepfake voices “on the loose” — especially if there is no shared public forum to hammer out the truth. That seems like a brilliant but dangerous game. The thing about great satire, as opposed to deepfake lies, is that when it’s done well, and it speaks the truth (in a fake voice), the target wouldn’t want to draw attention to it by denying they said it.
But perhaps we need an AI watermark…
h/t Stephen Neil
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By Jo Nova
The government has this hope that homeowners can be tricked into paying for the batteries (in the form of EVs) that the wind and solar industry need to make their useless random energy into something reliable. Now comes the news that not only are batteries hazardous fire risks and expensive themselves, but to connect to our grid in a two way arrangement we need to spend $3,000 dollars per household (or maybe $10,000) to buy the bit of equipment that makes this work. Not to mention adding another million gigawatts of generation so the cars can be charged in the first place.
Remember in the end, we are not buying EV’s because they go further, cost less, or are more convenient, we’re buying them because we want to stop storms in 100 years.
How many nice weather days will I get in 2100AD for that $3,000 inverter?
By Natasha Schmidt, The Australian
Interim Director of Monash Energy Institute, Roger Dargaville, said powering EVs in just one million households could cost as much as $10bn in power inverters.
Professor Dargaville said such inverters, unlike home batteries such as Tesla’s Powerwall, would allow EV drivers to recontribute power into the grid.
“That piece of infrastructure costs about $10,000 at the moment, and if you have a million vehicles sometime in the future trying to do this that’s $10bn,” he said.
Prof Dargaville hopes that mass production might reduce the cost to $3,000 each if we are lucky. (Mass money printing and inflation will probably prevent that.)
Historians will look back on this era and describe it as a case study in corruption and mass delusion. The great capitalist free market of Adam Smith exists only in limited pockets that masquerade as “free choice”.
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By Jo Nova
If Australia gets any more free cheap energy we’ll go broke
The Australian Energy Regulator has the data on electricity pricing and possibly a budget $20 million a year but hasn’t yet updated with the last quarter, so I thought I’d help them out. Because surely this is a graph that all Australians need to see?
This is every state in the National Energy Market, and even though some have more renewables than others, the long term trends are the same. Unreliable generators in one state can vandalize the whole market:
 (Click to expand). Back in the dinosaur days when Australia had virtually no wind and solar power, the price for wholesale electricity was $30 a megawatt hour year after year. Then Kevin Rudd was elected in 2007, and we started to add the intermittent, unreliable generators which have free fuel, but need thousands of kilometers of wires, batteries, subsidies, schemes, farmland, FCAS markets, and an entire duplicated back up grid that sits around not-earning money for hours, days or five years at a time.
And we wondered why electricity got more expensive:
And again with labels.
The market never did recover from the closure of the Hazelwood coal plant. Costs rose by 85% and it took a pandemic to bring them down again, but only temporarily.
So Australia is close to 30% total wind and solar generation, and aiming with gossamer fairy wings for 82% in five years time.
Luckily, it appears there’s no chance we’ll get there. The solar daytime glut, negative prices and community hatred of high voltage lines is spoiling the market for developers. And not a day too soon….
REFERENCES
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By Jo Nova
It’s another outbreak of the Hottest-ever-Day Fever , where buses catch fire, and the worlds top journalists forget to ask anyone anything useful about the last 500 million years.
The Copernicus data might be fine and dandy but it only goes back as far as 1979. The warm weather we are having now is just a welcome break in a cooling trend that started 7,000 years ago. It not only isn’t a record that means anything, it’s almost certainly a net benefit to warm blooded mammals.
The collective amnesia about the Holocene and most of the history of human civilization is complete. Apparently the world is in uncharted territory, except for thousands of rocks, stones, spears, shells, bits of wood, pollen, diatoms, fossilized plant leaves, and all the ice cores we’ve ever dug up. 4,000 stone-age spears and whatnot that melted out of the Norwegian glaciers in the last few years, must have frozen into them sometime in the last 5,000 years. And all the bones of dogs, rabbits, geese and frogs found inside the Arctic circle suggest our world is too brutally cold now. Likewise the giant oyster shell found on a building site in Taiwan reminds us of a time the oceans were 1 to 2 meters higher than today, and the cavemen survived just fine.
CNN By Angela Fritz
Sunday was the hottest day in recorded history, according to preliminary data from a climate tracking agency monitoring temperatures since the mid-1900s.
It’s the second consecutive year average global temperatures have crashed through shocking climate records and will not be the last, as planet-warming fossil fuel pollution drives temperatures to shocking new highs.
July 21 clocked in at 17.09 degrees Celsius, or 62.76 Fahrenheit, and was the hottest day on Earth since at least 1940, according to the preliminary data from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
It’s 100,000 years of journalistic negligence:
Despite being based on data from the mid-20th century, the temperature records represent the warmest period the planet has seen in at least 100,000 years, scientists have found from many millennia of climate data extracted from ice cores and coral reefs.
Someone should send Angela Fritz (and most of the world’s journalists) the graphs of the ice cores which she has clearly never seen:
 7,000 years of cooling in Greenland. This graph shows the ice-core data up until 1855. The last 150 years (1705 to 1855) are highlighted in red to show the warming as the Earth began coming out of the LIA. Send them the Vostok Ice Cores too. Send them Brazilian sea levels, and tell them the the Sahara was lush green and wet, and the water near Indonesia was 2 degrees hotter. And 6,000 boreholes drilled around the world agree, along with 700 Pacific Islands that aren’t shrinking. The real science deniers are the ones ignoring half a billion years of evidence.
It’s been hotter for thousands of years during human civilization and it wasn’t caused by our cars.
 https://secretsoftheice.com/ REFERENCES
Copernicus media release –they it’s a the hottest day “in recent history” which the media turned into the hottest day in a hundred thousand years. h/t Gee Aye
Keep reading →
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By Jo Nova
Europe’s solar manufacturers are in a crisis
Forty year old German solar panel producers are closing factories they only opened three years ago.
The world now has the capacity to make 1,600 GW of solar panels annually, but demand has unexpectedly flat-lined — staying at barely 500GW. In a world awash with solar panels that no one needs, prices have fallen dramatically, but that hasn’t solved the glut which is so bad, people are using solar panels for fencing in Europe.
The CCP has bet big that the exponential growth curve in solar customers was going to keep being exponential. Instead, demand flattened off suddenly. Currently, 80% of the world’s solar panels are pouring out of China.
With impeccable timing, just weeks ago the Australian Government threw a billion dollars at a program to help Australia become a solar panel superfactory just at the moment when China is practically giving them away.
Rachel Millard and Amanda Chu, Financial Times
“There is overcapacity in every segment, starting with polysilicon and finishing with the module,” said Yana Hryshko, head of global solar supply chain research at the consultancy Wood Mackenzie.
According to BloombergNEF, panel prices have plunged more than 60 percent since July 2022. The scale of the damage inflicted has sparked calls for Brussels to protect European companies from what the industry says are state-subsidized Chinese products.
Europe’s solar panel manufacturing capacity has collapsed by about half to 3 gigawatts since November as companies have failed, mothballed facilities, or shifted production abroad, the European Solar Manufacturing Council estimates.
The Salad Days of Solar Power are behind us
The sudden death of the solar boom is due to rising interest rates which take the fun out of getting a loan, but it’s also due to rising electricity costs, which increase the prices of everything, including solar panels themselves and the batteries they need to back them up.
But there’s an argument to be made that the grid itself has reached the limit. The Duck Curve has been quacking on grids in California and Australia for years. Ponder that in towns like Alice Springs the microgrid is in danger of falling over when a cloud rolls in, and only 1 in 4 homes there have solar panels. Indeed, in the sunny centre of Australia, the limit for solar power appears to be just 13% — meaning it’s hard to stabilize the grid when more than 13% of the annual supply is made from solar power.
When storms knocked over a high voltage line in South Australia the first thing the government did was to ask people to switch off their solar panels so they wouldn’t crash the grid.
Even on the big grids, there’s already such a glut of solar panels on homes, that the midday surge of “green” electrons is causing voltage surges which can damage other equipment. Solar “feed in” tariffs to homeowners are shrinking to nothing, or even going negative themselves. In Adelaide and Perth the government now insists people installing solar panels get smart meters so the grid managers can remotely switch off their panels. Worse, in Sydney solar home owners now have to pay to dump unwanted solar power on the grid at lunchtime.
Then there’s the mayhem of negative prices on national markets which is driving baseload providers off the grid and out of business. Large industrial generators are restructuring their businesses to accommodate the crazy pricing.
Last word: China already controls 80% of the market, would it really want to dump so many solar panels it drove the last 20% out of business, or was this just one huge Big-Government mistake?
Photo: Tadeáš Bednarz
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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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