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. Not only is the EU backing down on the demands to cut nitrogen and methane by a third, but they’re also not going to halve the use of pesticides, and they’re not even going to harass EU citizens smugly telling them to eat less meat.
The next big move of climate activists was through agriculture, but this has, for the moment, hit the fan…
The European Union has caved in to angry protests from farmers and cut a target to slash agricultural emissions as part of the bloc’s net zero drive.
A demand to reduce nitrogen, methane and other emissions linked to farming by almost a third has been removed from a wider Brussels plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 90 per cent by 2040.
People may have missed just how big the European farmer protests have been. For some reason the media didn’t want to cover what happens when farmers get angry. Like the truck-driver protests in Canada last year, these sort of revolts are potentially dangerous to the political class. They can bring a nation to its knees in days. Journalists and media moguls scorn the workers, but they quietly fear their power. If the masses wake up and realize they don’t have to put up with rules set by chattering classes and desk jocks, that could wreck the cushy lifestyles of the wordsmiths and academics.
A truckload of manure can stop the traffic…
Such was the anger, there were fires in the carpark of the EU Parliament, and fires on French highways.
2,700+ tractors have blocked roads in Brussels as Belgian farmers protest against a new government plan to limit nitrogen emissions that would put many of them out of business ⚠️ pic.twitter.com/ru2oSriw5Z
Reuters: At least 14 highways in the regions of Catalonia, Andalusia, Castille-La Mancha and Valencia were blockaded, official traffic data showed.
Victor Orban PM of Hungary explains that the EU rules destroy farming in Europe by imposing rules on European farmers but then allowing produce from other parts of the world to come in which have none of these rules. The push to reduce pesticides and force organic farming onto European farms, but not on imports was one of the major complaints about EU regulations.
#Brussels is suffocating European farmers. They introduce new burdens and at the same time open up the European market to cheap and uncontrolled agricultural products from #Ukraine. This has to stop! We need a change in Brussels! #farmerprotests2024pic.twitter.com/QXTbgEfO4Y
The war is far from over. After the elections, if there is any way they can, the EU still wants to bring in absurd laws of climate voodoo and witchcraft.
[Reuters] The European Commission is set to recommend an ambitious goal to cut net greenhouse gas emissions by 90% by 2040. The target would aim to foster green jobs and low-carbon industries, drafts of the proposal showed.
Polls show more seats could go to far-right and right-leaning parties opposed to climate policies. EU officials say backing for ambitious green laws has also been eroded among EU states by recent elections in Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.
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.
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 surprised by the results.
One hypothesis is that these misconceptions are rooted in a specific form of self-deception, namely that people simply find it easier to live with their own climate failings if they do not believe that things will actually get all that bad. “We call this thought process ‘motivated reasoning,’…
The only thing the study showed was the dire state of psychological science. For starters, researchers were oblivious to their own prejudice and incompetent background research. They can’t define a climate change denier in any scientific sense, it’s not a label of a group of homo-sapiens who think the climate never changes, it’s just a petty kindergarten insult designed to fool, well… psychologists. And it works. If they had spent five minutes reading skeptical web-sites they’d know that half the population have good reason to be skeptical of unaudited and unaccountable foreign committees which rely on broken models. In fact if they were looking for “motivated reasoning” in the climate debate (and they say they were) then most of it is on the believer side, where people might be motivated by billions of dollars in government grants.
Zimmermann and his colleague Lasse Stötzer told people they could decide where a $20 donation went — they could choose which climate charity would get the cash, or they could keep it themselves. The “control” group weren’t allowed to keep the cash themselves. Basically 41% to 44% of the crowd kept the money. But amazingly more than 50% still gave the cash to a climate charity. Humans are nice people, really. I mean, they could all have kept the cash, and most didn’t. Presumably no one wants to look too scroogey in front of researchers, but some people know climate charities are pagan groups designed to cheat money from the poor and give it to billionaires — so it’s better to look like a scrooge than feed the machine.
At the center of the experiments was a donation worth $20. Participants were allocated at random to one of two groups. The members of the first group were able to split the $20 between two organizations, both of which were committed to combating climate change. By contrast, those in the second group could decide to keep the $20 for themselves instead of giving it away and would then actually receive the money at the end. “Anyone keeping hold of the donation needs to justify it to themselves,” says Zimmermann, … “One way to do that is to deny the existence of climate change.”
In another variation, participants could pick either a skeptical video or a believer one, and the researchers hoped somehow it would show people who kept the money would choose the skeptical video to reassure themselves that they were right. But as it happens, about 51% of the control group wanted to see “the skeptical side” of this 30 year long boring debate, which was slightly more than the test group. Foiled. Another null result.
It was good, bad, nothing-news really — another piece of useless academic study, and the experts don’t know how to convince anyone:
This finding was also borne out in two further experiments. “In other words, our study didn’t give us any indications that the widespread misconceptions regarding climate change are due to this kind of self-deception,” says Zimmermann, summing up his work. On the face of it, this is good news for policymakers, because the results could mean that it is indeed possible to correct climate change misconceptions, simply by providing comprehensive information. If people are bending reality, by contrast, then this approach is very much a non-starter.
All five treatments found nothing, even though there was money to be had. They even sliced and diced the data according to income to see if poorer people were more likely to keep the money and then “become” a skeptic, but they couldn’t even find a link there.
We do not observe that more financially constrained participants choose the selfish action more frequently in reaction to our treatment variation.
Contrary to our hypotheses, we find no evidence that motivated cognition can help to explain widespread climate change denial and environmentally harmful behaviour.
It never even occurred to Zimmermann and Stötzer that their life’s work was to figure out how to force an absurd political fantasy on to half the population. Do windmills today stop storms in 2100AD? Will solar panels stop the oceans rising? Is it possible that one trace gas controls the global temperature when water vapor is far more important, 10 to 100 times as abundant, and subject to rapid change on a minute by minute basis? Is it possible that the sun and space weather has an effect on our climate through the solar wind, the magnetic field, the heliospheric plane, cosmic rays, or spectral changes.
And lastly, just in case these 2,000 people (or 0.0001% of US voters) were influenced by watching one skeptical video the researchers had to “debrief” them.
To mitigate the ethical concern about showing some participants a video casting scepticism about climate change by presenting factually wrong information, we added a short debriefing for all participants at the end of the experiment (Supplementary Information).
You know it’s a cult…
h/t Willie
Reference:
Lasse S. Stoetzer, and Florian Zimmermann, (2024) “A representative survey experiment of motivated climate change denial” by 2 February 2024, Nature Climate Change. DOI: 10.1038/s41558-023-01910-2
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…
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 – drawn from the Hunter and the Illawarra, the two NSW regions earmarked for the government’s multibillion-dollar offshore wind farms beyond 2030.
PRESS RELEASE – National Rally Against Reckless Renewables – 6 Feb 2024 – Parliament House 10am
We urge the Federal and State Governments to cease their reckless rollout of unreliable, unaffordable, and environmentally destructive wind, solar, limited “firming” batteries, and high-voltage transmission lines, amidst an ever-increasing demand for reliable electricity.
Currently, there are over 1000 new renewable projects in the government’s “Powering Our Nation” pipeline (Source AEMO, 2023). Almost all of these are located in Regional Australia. In the lead-up to most of these “projects”, this government has conducted short, insincere, and unacknowledged community consultation. Exploiting the fact that most of these projects are located in or near coastal, farming, and traditional communities with small populations, the government continues to disregard our concerns. In many cases, our right to judicial review or appeal has or will be removed. Read the whole press release!
h/t to MP and Johnny Rotten. I wish I could be there…
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, your captured wealth). Surely the government should be bragging about achieving things as cheaply as possible, not about throwing more money than the next guy?
One target is gone but the boondoggle lives on
Labour still promises to set up a new publicly owned energy investment creature called GB Energy and a national insulation program. The word is that these will cost about £10bn. And there are already £8 – 10bn in green projects that the conservatives are already funding, so if the Labour party keep those, that will still amount to about £20bn. So far too much green gravy will still keep flowing but make no mistake — For an industry levitating on green fairytales, and entirely dependent on government largess, this is bad news. It’s a big shift, a giant deflation.
Naturally Big Green industry are worried. The head of Seimens is now on the back foot: ““Don’t let populism unsettle you,” ” he told the Labour party, which was his coded way of saying “Please keep giving us money”.
Jürgen Maier, former British boss of Siemens, the German industrial giant and major investor, said massive investment was needed to rebuild the British economy and make it fit for the future and that it should focus on low-carbon energy, transport and industry .
“These are the growth areas of the future,” he said. “The £28 billion is not a cost, but an investment. “Don’t let populism unsettle you,” he urged the doubters within the party.
In the EU, the German Greens themselves are putting the brakes on
The German Greens suffered a major hit in popularity polls after they tried to foist “low emission” heaters on the public last year. The next elections are coming up in June, and the Greens look like shrinking from 21 seats to 14. So now they are trying to water down, slow down and take out the sting from their Green policies. It’s almost like voters matter?
The European Green Party is set for an internal battle over climate targets at a party congress this weekend (2-4 February), with the German Greens pushing to postpone the climate neutrality goals by five years and scrap parts of the gas and oil phase-out policies.
The Germans are also pushing to remove calls to end the use of fossil gas by 2035 and of oil by 2040, keeping only the draft’s target of phasing out coal by 2030, as well as a call to prohibit financial services “for coal, oil and gas extraction, coal-fired energy projects, and the companies that develop them”.
The disagreement reveals that the national Green parties remain split on how moderate or radical their targets should be.
The German Greens have been looking to moderate their messaging, as the party is aiming to strengthen its social and economic profile and reconcile more business-friendly rhetoric with the Greens’ traditional stand on climate change.
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 the children of Haiti, we have a duty to liberate that coal, burn that oil and free up those stores of diesel.
Do it for the children…
LAI = Leaf Area Index. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2351989423004262#fig0020
All over the world, the dominant driver (according to the paper) was nearly always CO2.
Chen et al 2024 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2351989423004262
CO2 fertilization is still the dominant (75.63%) driver of the trends on Earth in the last 20 years.
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:
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.
…
So this is where someone owns a Hi-Tech instrument designed to keep them cool, that they can’t use on the hottest days of the year. They call this the PeakSmart scheme (so you know it’s stupid). Gone are the luxury days when consumers could control their own appliances, get cheap reliable electricity, and not need invasive, complicated schemes in order to keep some of their own money.
It also allows the energy companies to send people into your home to “visit” for afternoon tea, or rather, to check you haven’t ripped out the PeakSmart controller boxes. They will give you five days notice. Nice of them, eh?
If you like your air conditioner you can keep it (but you can’t use it…)
Ergon and Energex said PeakSmart limiting should only occur “a few times” per year.
There have been six events since December 1 and nine in the last year — the highest rate since the program began.
On Monday and Saturday last week, Energex used its remote access to limit 169,490 air conditioners to run at 50 per cent power between 4:20pm and 6:50pm across the south-east.
The part I like best is when they tell us that you won’t notice anything different about having a compressor that is only running on half strength, but they won’t tell you when they are cutting your air-con (in case you do notice). Somehow they cut your cooling in secret but find the time to tell the company you bought the air conditioner from, just in case you not only notice but call out a repairman.
Users are not told when their unit is affected, but installers and repairers are given notice in case customers report what they think is a malfunction.
Renters or new property owners may not realise their units are fitted with the device.
Multiple installers contacted by the ABC said they were wary about the meters and the potential for the government and energy providers to control an appliance in the home.
Up until now, the riches of the rich were gradually spread to the poor. Have we reached the point when that reverses?
There are big protests coming at parliament house Australia on February 6th. Sorry I’m away today. Some readers have already commented on this event. More details here soon for those who don’t know!
As Winston Sterzel says: Seriously? Why does it cost more to send a postcard to my neighbor than it does for a Company in China to send a package right across the world?
He explains how an old intergovernmental committee — the Universal Postal Union (UPU) — sets the rules so that rich nations subsidize the poor ones. Like all government committees it clings to a good idea for so many years it kills it. It was set up in 1874, and now in 2024, a nation with a space station is draining money from our postal systems and from our local jobs. What a rort…
Everyone paying for postage in the West is also paying the post for businesses in China to send cheap things which undermine local sellers. It is very difficult for a business using postal delivery to compete in the West — even in its own domestic market.
The UPU is — naturally — another subsidiary of the United Nations. What else do we need to know? It works as well as we’d expect any 150 year old unelected and unaccountable bureaucracy to work — like napalm on a free market.
The UPU motto now is “One World. One Postal Network.” They look, act and smell just like a larval world government.
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
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 Aussie farmer used his tractor 🚜 to recreate the Australian country outline with the flag in the middle!
This post is late, but it’s still (just) Australia Day.
We didn’t ask for it, but Australia Day is now a test. Do we love the country, are we proud to be Australian? The same test is happening all over the West. Are our borders, our culture, our way of life worth defending, or will we let someone else choose what matters? Will young men give their lives to protect a country that won’t even celebrate its own existence?
Good people need to say something to defend the bounty, lest we forget.
PS: I found a butcher-warehouse in a light industrial area to buy bulk beautiful cuts that are better and cheaper than Woolworths. My personal protest continues…
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