Only two men were central to the Green policy stranglehold that cripples Germany today, and one has just been sacked. But look at how easy it was for foreign interests and activists to influence bizarrely suicidal national policies, and how they used the age old art of nepotism.
Eugyppius
A vast foreign-funded climate cabal with a death grip on policy is currently fighting hard to crash the Federal Republic of Germany with no survivors
The international press has maintained near-total silence on the escalating insanity of what is happening in Germany. Media outlets that routinely celebrate German progress towards energy transition don’t want you to know that Europe’s dominant industrial power has entered a deeply destructive political and administrative spiral from which it may never recover. The fault lies with the self-defeating and unworkable energy policies that have a death grip not merely on the Scholz government, but on the entire administrative state.
Germany leads the way in the big green experiment
At one point last winter 12% of the entire Germany GDP was being consumed in the energy crisis. Factories are leaving Germany because energy prices are unbearable, but defying all reason, Germany has just closed its last nuclear power plants and is trying to ban gas and oil heating at home too which will only drive up demand for electricity at a time when electricity is hard to find. Germans burned so much wood last winter at times they ran out, and now their government wants to ban wood stoves too.
Eugyppius explained a couple of weeks ago how a Der Speigel article (surprisingly) revealed that two key political players installed their Green friends in positions of power. And just this week comes the news that one of those men has just been forced to resign due to the same nepotism that was a core part of the climate-cabal plan.
Patrick Graichen was a top state secretary in charge of energy and climate issues until news broke out that he picked his best man to head up the German energy agency and everyone felt that was very suspicious. Especially when it turned out his brother and sister both work for another think-tank that gets money from the Ministry. His sister is also married to another state secretary.
But the trouble in Germany began ten years ago with the Green politician Rainer Baake — who became known as Mr Energiewende himself (the man who created the “Energy Transformation”.) He’s the one who first appointed green technocrats in every corner of the German deep state. By the time German voters picked a centre right party in 2018, the Green momentum wrapped around them and just kept moving.
Baake also founded the most powerful green think-tank in Germany — and appointed his protege Patrick Graichen to head it. See how this works? The think-tank was his springboard into the highest levels of German government, and this think-tank was funded in part by American philanthropists.
As the old-guard industry-friendly civil servants in the German bureaucracy began to retire, Baake filled their posts with Green technocrats wherever possible, such that when control of the Ministry passed to the centre-right CDU in 2018, the damage was done. The institutional momentum had already shifted towards climate change and begun to gather strength under its own power
During his five-year tenure as state secretary, Baake appointed Graichen to head the Agora think-tank, which began churning out policy papers, sponsoring Green scientific research, and gathering an ever-growing crowd of loyal advocates and technocrats. This paid off: [As Der Speigel says, Graichen’s name was used all through the German parliament].
Three easy steps to create a climate fixation in Parliament
It’s a three-step process. 1) Activists and regime-approved scientists identify and make noise about looming problems, and then 2) think tanks write pages and pages of legislative and regulatory solutions for them. All of this happens largely out of sight, until 3) politicians respond to the demand stirred up the activist arm, and having no real expertise or understanding of anything themselves, they have no choice but to enact the proposals that people like Graichen feed them.
Here, then, is the explanation for Robert Habeck’s stubborn idiocy since last Fall. As soon as the Greens entered government, he made Graichen his state secretary for energy, and it is Graichen and the army of technocrats he commands who have been behind every political disaster since.
The farcical response to the energy crisis, where these people were actually forced to work contrary to their principles and buy enormous quantities of coal (from Russia no less); the botched but nevertheless completed nuclear phase-out; and, finally, the catastrophic changes to the Building Energy Act, which will immiserate millions of Germans and do absolutely nothing to change the temperature of Earth.
The influence of American millionaires:
Their work was financed in the background by two men: Bernhard Lorentz, who as head of the Mercator Foundation helped to bring the Agora think-tank to life. And Hal Harvey, an American lobbyist who has funded environmentalist and climate organisations around the world for almost three decades, helped among other things by the philanthropic billions of families like the Hewletts.
This is not the first time we’ve found unlikely American activists and philanthropists behind European – and specifically German – climate activism. Spiegel explains, ominously, that “Harvey sees Europe as the key to preparing a climate-neutral future” and that this reason “he directs millions … to support the likes of Baake and Graichen.” This man, who hardly appears in Anglophone media and doesn’t even have an English-language Wikipedia page, has been christened by Die Zeit as “the most powerful Green politician in the world.”
Nepotism is important in the climate mafia
Eugippius updates the sacking of Graichen for nepotism and explains why Nepotism is part of the plan:
First of all, you have to understand that the transition to renewable energy is no joke. If it’s ever fully accomplished, it will mean the immiseration and deindustrialisation of Germany.
The truth is that Graichen’s relatives and personal friends are strewn throughout the think-tanks and the NGOs of the climate cabal.
The problem for Graichen and his associates, is to create the illusion of a single unified Science that requires nothing but their specific desired solutions. They use all of the organisations under their control to outline and propagate this Science, and flood bureaucrats and politicians with white papers dictating what exactly they have to do. Everybody has to be on the same page for this. Personal connection within the climate cabal are therefore highly important; mafias are run the same way.
I would have thought it would be depressing to read the details, but it feels useful to know the enemy.
Though, of course, in this case, even though both key German players may be out of their official major roles, the team they established are still there.
Exxon was told to jump through circus hoops like a performing seal and report the risks of NetZero to Exxon shareholders. But Exxon pushed back by pointing out that NetZero-by-2050 is so impossible it will never happen, and therefore the risks are not even worth assessing. Furthermore, and rather damningly, Exxon said, society would be unlikely to “accept the degradation in the global standard of living required“. Exxon has taken was was supposed to be another PR win for the narrative and turned it into a media weapon.
This is exactly why the Big-Gov-Corporatist cartel wants to co-opt or destroy independent profitable corporations. In this case, companies that don’t need Big-Gov are free to point out the hypocritical inanity and absurdities which the lap-dog dependent industries like wind power and solar cannot.
Sadly, companies like Exxon still need to be brave because Big-Gov is so big, it is always the largest potential client and holds the sword of mendacious legislation, licensing and regulation as well.
The US supermajor pushed back against investors pressing the company to report on the risks to its business from restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions and potential environmental disasters when in a reply to proxy advisor Glass Lewis, Exxon said the prospect of the world achieving net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 is remote and should not be further evaluated in its financial statements.
A shareholder proposal seeking a report on the cost of having to abandon projects faces a shareholder vote on May 31. Glass Lewis backed the initiative, concluding Exxon could face material financial risks from the net-zero scenario.
Exxon disagreed, and said the world is not on a path to achieve net-zero emissions in 2050 as limiting energy production to levels below consumption demand would lead to a spike in energy prices, as observed in Europe following oil sanctions against Russia over Ukraine.
Exxon, is of course, correct however that won’t stop the green fanatics from beating the drum that somehow the world can transition to “green” energy (at a cost of some $150 trillion mind you) in the next 27 years without an energy cataclysm.
Moments like this expose why the Government-Corporate cartel doesn’t choose to support any “low emissions” industry that is financially viable in and of itself. They can’t support clean high temperature coal plants, even though it would be a sensible and cost effective way to reduce CO2. These new plants could have independent voices which might say inconvenient things and we can’t have that.
Companies that sell useful products don’t need the government like unreliable, uncompetitive wind and solar plants always will. But companies that depend on government rules, subsidies and largess will always be cheerleaders for the biggest government possible. They will always obey.
Last week I told Mark Steyn that heavier cars would wear down tyres faster, which would vaporize more tyre chemicals in the air. And here we are a few days later with news stories saying that EV’s wear out their tyres 50% faster, which is not just inconvenient and expensive, and uses more oil, but unleashes as many as 200 different chemicals into the air and water as well. With 2 billion tyres made around the world each year and the forced EV transition supposedly coming any day, it’s yet another problem to be solved “on the fly”, damn the consequences.
By 2050 there are estimates that tyres will be the worlds largest source of microplastics. Not so good for the corals and fishes, but who cares about them right?
If Greens ever want to start caring for the environment or the poor they could always cut half a ton of weight off an EV just by buying an internal combustion engine car instead. It feeds more plants than a lithium battery does too.
LONDON (Reuters) – Tyre-makers are under pressure to almost literally reinvent the wheel as regulators turn their scrutiny to tyre pollution that is set to surge with the rise of electric vehicles (EVs) and threatens to undermine those cars’ green credentials.
When tyres make contact with the road, tiny particles are abraded and emitted. The extra weight of EVs linked to their batteries means this little-discussed form of pollution – from an estimated 2 billion tyres produced globally every year – is becoming a bigger problem.
Emerging research is showing the toxicity of tyres, which on average contain about 200 components and chemicals, often derived from crude oil.
While critics say tyres contain many toxic and carcinogenic chemicals, so far there is only really consensus around one – 6PPD, an antioxidant and antiozonant found in all tyres that reduces cracking.
Developed during the Korean War, research shows that when 6PPD reacts with oxygen or ozone it forms 6PPD-quinone, which has been blamed for mass deaths of Coho salmon off the U.S. West Coast.
Particles from tires are expected to be the largest source of microplastics potentially harmful to aquatic life by 2050. Michelin estimates that globally tires emit around 3 million tonnes of particles annually – and create another 3 million tonnes of particles from road surfaces.
It’s just another unintended glitch on the road to Green Heaven
These issues of pollution are not being actively pursued by Greenpeace as far as I can tell, but by the free market — the tyre companies that want to brag about their better tyres.
Electronic sensors can pick up phantom electrical noise
In the last thirty years the Bureau has installed electronic thermometers all over the country. But unlike the old glass ones, the new sensitive equipment can not only pick up freak gusts of hot air, they can also pick up electrical interference. Theoretically, electronic thermometers could report phantom measurements induced by large electric fields, like perhaps by an airport radar as it sweeps through the electronics.
Indeed as Lance Pidgeon points out, the cable that runs from the platinum resistance probe runs out of the Stevenson screen, down the pole, under the ground and pops up at the electronic data-logger some 6 to 10 meters away. This makes for a nice long aerial ready to pick up “noise” and feed it into the data-logger. Those airport radars produce huge electric fields — all it takes is slight induction of a voltage difference across the 10m cable and voila… the data logger records a “warmer” second.
Here’s the small forgotten airport radar at Heathrow standing about 12 stories high. Imagine the power that puts out?
Electromagnetic interference could also be triggered by mobile phones or radio waves, lightning, two-way radio or television broadcasting as well. Theoretically, at least, it’s possible that any “hottest ever temperature recorded” in newspaper headlines could have been generated the moment the pilot messaged the control tower. Or it could be a maintenance truck driving past, someone in the car park starting their engine or anything electronic really. This was never an issue with a glass thermometer.
As an analogue engineer recently explained to me, because of all the radio interference at airports, it is not really a place to be recording temperatures with resistance probes. Yet this is exactly where most of these temperature recording devices are now located – and not just in Australia, but across the world. So, the average global mean temperature may not only include the blast from a jet plane landing at Cordoba, Spain, but also the chatter from pilots and the control tower because temperature is now primarily measured as changes in electrical current and at airports.
The Bureau of Meteorology say that the new electronic gizmo’s are set up to mimic the old glass thermometers. They carefully calibrate and compare the two types of thermometers in the same box at the same time and in many sites. They have that data. If the electronic systems were working similarly to the old glass ones, and were protected or filtered from the noise, years of side-by-side measurements would show a close correlation and minimal disparities. Too easy, right? But for some reason, the BoM have to hide the parallel data and fight tooth and nail to keep it hidden from the prying eyes of skeptics — temperature data is “a national secret” or something.
Perhaps they’re just trying to save Australians from getting depressed and angry. If hypothetically, airport radars and tarmac caused phantom “global warming” all those trillion dollars worth of solar panels and wind farms would be a total waste of money. To solve global warming we’d just need to go back to glass thermometers.
Sighting the odd phantom hot-second…
We know there are glitches in the system, even if we don’t know exactly what causes them. On the BOM live reporting pages there are often differences within the same minute that are hard to explain. In this one below from Pearce Air base at 11:50am on the 6th of March there was a 1.3C difference between the highest reading of the minute and the last reading of the minute. Sometime in that sixty seconds either the air temperature changed radically, or there was noise in the system.
Click to enlarge
These kinds of anomalies only show up briefly on the BoM observation pages. (Eg NSW, VIC, QLD, SA, ACT, NT, Tas, WA.) Someone has to be watching to notice when the highest temperature of the day occurs at the same minute as the current observation. The ten-minute data comes from the last reading of the minute, but the highest or lowest temp recorded can cherry pick any second — effectively fishing for the extremes. And it doesn’t average out. See below — for lots of reasons there are more extremes in hot afternoons than there in the cold hour at dawn.
Strange noise pops up in other observations. Here below are the measurements every half hour at Maryborough one day in summer. Ken Stewart had noticed that the BOM have different “live” reporting systems and they often conflicted. The 30-minute observations reported 32.2C at exactly 1pm, but the “Latest Observations at Maryborough” reported 33.7C at exactly the same time. That’s a 1.5C temperature difference, and in the same minute?
The BOM would argue the thermal heating noise is a well known phenomenon, but as Lance points out a single electronic gizmo thermometer can’t be perfectly tuned to both maximum and minimum thermometers at the same time. Maximum thermometers were traditionally mercury thermometers, but minimum ones were more likely to be alcohol thermometers and they have slightly different profiles.
It’s also true to say that hot blobs of air float around at 1pm, rising off tarmac, but not to many cold blobs levitate 5 feet off the ground at 6am, or any time. It isn’t symmetrical. There is a lot more turbulence, volatility, and also plane traffic and radio chatter at 2pm in the afternoon affecting the maximum temperatures. And as long as the maximums are being warmed, the headlines of deadly heatwaves will keep writing themselves, and the average temperature of the day will still keep rising too.
For the technically inclined
The BOM claim to have worked on the platinum resistance probes to make them mimic glass thermometers, but problems are more likely to be in the long cables and other electronic gear like the data-logger.
Lance Pidgeon: Breaking the automated measurement system into the two parts that are several meters of cable apart, i blame the data logger for most of the problem. Not the simple resistance probe even with its dubious time constant. Specifically i blame the lack of averaging. The small signals are vulnerable to the many forms of higher frequency electrical noise generated both within and external to the system. The missing averaging could cancel most of this out by lowering the frequency response to near that of a glass thermometer. Thus rejecting most of the electrical noise but allowing the desired signal.
If the BOM had sorted all this out, why are they hiding the parallel data?
Electromagnetic interference is a well known problem, at least among electronic engineers, if not meteorologists. The WMO – World Meteorological Organisation warns of electromagnetic interference and talks about testing for such. (vol 5, Section 4.2.3)
In general, sensors respond more slowly than the atmosphere changes, and they add noise. Sensors also do other, usually undesirable, things such as drift in calibration, respond non-linearly, interfere with the quantity that they are measuring, fail more often than intended, and so on, but this discussion will only be concerned with response and the addition of noise.
The bottom line is that it’s a real threat, but a very solvable problem. The question is whether the BOM have solved it. And the only test that matters is not a certificate from an inspector but the real life data, en masse, and in toto.
The BOM need to publish all the parallel temperature data so Australians know that the equipment is not just “world class” (which is appalling low) but comparable to the old glass thermometers. Conflicting temperatures that change by a degree within one minute tell us something is wrong. The BOM cover up tells us that too.
With South Africa only weeks away from the start of winter, the head of the State owned Eskom warns there will be the worst blackouts on record, which is really something because some people are already going 10 – 12 hours a day without electricity at the moment.
The country is allegedly at Stage 6 blackouts with “Stage 8” appearing to be a near certainty (if not there already). But apparently they are making plans to invent a “Stage 16” just in case they need it.
“Luckily” South Africa may meet Climate Goals to cut emissions by 2030, though possibly destroy their civilization in the process.
Johannesburg – South Africans should brace themselves for the possibility of being plunged into the worst darkness ever since the start of load shedding, as load shedding up to stage 16, meaning an unspecified 32 hours of power cuts, is anticipated to avert the total collapse of the grid owing to mounting demand.
A document titled “voluntary” NRS048-9 edition 3, which would in unforeseen emergency circumstances allow Eskom to implement drastic load shedding beyond stage 8, is currently being finalised by the National Regulatory Services Association of SA, a voluntary association assisting with regulating load shedding.
“Most municipalities and Eskom-supplied areas have adopted a two-hour load-shedding schedule. On a two-hour load-shedding schedule, you would expect to be off for 32 hours in a 32-hour period (under stage 16),” she said.
Not so reassuringly, the Eskom spokesperson said it would only be implemented “if there were emergencies threatening to collapse the grid, something that might be possible during winter.” She further maintained that the country was only at stage six blackouts and “doesn’t seem to be moving towards that direction of 16.” Thus confirming that they were thinking about it.
Unfortunately an energy expert said that things have been worse than stage six for a long time and Eskom just lie and call it “stage six” regardless.
On Monday, Eskom announced the implementation of Stage 6 load shedding following the failure of two generating units. Eskom said breakdowns are currently at 18 016MW of generating capacity while the generating capacity out of service for planned maintenance is 3 987MW.
Group chief executive at the Whitford Group and energy expert, Adil Nchabeleng, said the country has technically moved beyond Stage 6 load shedding with some areas having no electricity for well over the hours as per Eskom’s load shedding schedule.
In an interview with “Morning Live“, Nchabeleng said Eskom was lying to the public. Nchabeleng said some areas go for up to 12 hours without electricity. “Half of the country, almost 80% of the country is without electricity at every given time,” he said.
Things are so bad, two years ago the government ordered in 1,220 megawatts of floating Turkish Karpowerships which will burn low sulpfur HFO, or “oil” as normal people would call it. Though apparently the ships will have to anchor off Mozambique, and run with some energy sharing export deal — because environmentalists didn’t like it and Eskom “demanded indemnity against any adverse outcomes from corruption allegations.” Life gets so complicated when corruption and green fantasies run rife.
Karpowership — runs on Natural Gas, LNG or Low Sulfur HFO.
In a kind of parody, when a small town spent $5m US to build their own 4.3MW solar farm they barely started operation when State owned Eskom took them to court and “won on a technicality” thus stopping the town from using their own solar-plant to reduce their own blackout times. So the solar plant produces nothing at times while the country is racked with an energy crisis. The script writers in Yes Minister didn’t even see this coming.
In the ensuing case, Eskom argued that RFS had not been granted authorisation to carry out its own blackout programme.
The monopoly explained that Frankfort still needed to draw power from Eskom’s grid.
The town’s solar panels were not enough to cover its needs, and its system did not have batteries in which to store excess power and draw on it at time of need, it said.
Why? The town might set an example for other towns:
If the town were allowed to dispense with Eskom’s blackout schedule, others could follow suit, causing anarchic fluctuations in supply and demand that could cause the national grid collapse, the company contended.
“If the floodgates are thus opened, Eskom’s ability to ensure the safety of the grid… will be severely compromised,” it said in its affidavit.
So solar power is NOT the solution to an energy crisis. Tell the world, eh? Though possibly the real fear is that people might figure out their own solutions? Energy companies, no matter how crooked and badly run, really seem to own The People, and these poor businessmen sound pretty desperate.
“If they are not going to allow us to use the solar… or to use our own electricity, we don’t have any choice, we will have to take the law into our own hands,” warned Pretorius, who grows cereals and relies on electricity to power the irrigation system.
“It’s a matter of survival.”
Let’s not forget that fifty years ago South Africa built the Arnot Coal Power Station in just four years. The first power stations were built in South Africa in the 1920s but now, people are hot-rigging electricity substations to steal electricity, and there are estimates that as many as 50% of the customers in Soweto are illegally connected.
Arnot Coal Power Station South Africa built in four years and finished in 1975. (2230MW)
Control your climate with blackouts?
It’s hard to believe Bloomberg thought this was a good story. They see this as some kind of “success”, as if the megatons of carbon saved to pretend to reduce world temperatures by 0.0001 degrees Celcius in a hundred years made this kind of pain worthy:
South Africa is ahead of its target for cutting emissions of greenhouse gases.
Output of the climate-warming gases from the world’s 14th-biggest emitter is already falling even though its Nationally Determined Contribution, a target adopted by the cabinet in 2021, only forecast a decline from 2025.
“It’s unintentional,” Crispian Olver, the executive director of South Africa’s Presidential Climate Commission, said in an interview in Johannesburg on Monday. “We reckon we are well within the range” of meeting the 2030 target, he said.
South Africa aims to reduce its emissions to between 350 and 420 megatons of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2030, bettering a target set in 2015 of emitting between 398 and 614 megatons by that date. The 2021 goal was key to South Africa securing pledges of $8.5 billion in climate finance from some of the world’s richest nations.
The EU is fracturing over energy, and not a day too soon…
Signs of hope. Just as Germany recently pulled the pin on the EU’s Electric Vehicle mandate, France is now threatening to scupper the EU’s new Renewable Energy Directive unless they include a role for nuclear power. It was supposed to be signed off on Wednesday. Despite nuclear being the only reliable baseload source of “Net Zero” energy, France has had to fight for its inclusion at every step.
France is gathering 16 European nations into a Nuclear Alliance
France’s Minister for Energy Transition, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, brought together her counterparts from member countries of the Nuclear Alliance on 16 May at the Ministry for Energy Transition. A total of 16 countries were represented. In addition to the host country, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia and Sweden, plus Italy with observer status, were represented. The UK was present as a guest country.
“Nuclear power may provide up to 150 GW of electricity capacity by 2050 to the European Union (vs roughly 100 GW today),” the statement says. “This represents the equivalent of up to 30 to 45 new-build large reactors and small modular reactors in the EU and such new projects would also ensure that the current share of 25% electricity production be maintained in the EU for nuclear energy.”
Nuclear energy generates electricity in 14 of the 27 EU Member States, and currently provides 25% of Europe’s electricity and 50% of its low carbon electricity.
We know this matters because Team-Renewables are angry
“France is crazy, ”said a diplomat from one EU country, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about country dynamics, adding that there was “a lot” of anger at Paris “from all sides.”
BRUSSELS — Anger at France boiled over on Wednesday as EU countries accused Paris of taking a key piece of EU climate legislation “hostage” at the last minute to extract further concessions in the text.
EU ambassadors were due to sign off on the Renewable Energy Directive on Wednesday, an integral part of the bloc’s flagship Fit for 55 climate package that aims to slash greenhouse gases by 55 percent by 2030 and ramp up the share of renewables in the EU’s energy mix to 42.5 percent.
Ostensibly, France is asking for its industrial production of ammonia to be partially exempted from meeting green hydrogen targets, according to three diplomats. But that could also be a front for extracting further demands, including on nuclear, they said.
“This is the Renewable Energy Directive, not the Nuclear Energy Directive ” fumed one diplomat, apparently forgetting that the aim was meant to be “low carbon”, not just jobs for the Renewables-Boys.
They’re supposed to be rescuing the world from CO2 aren’t they?
The Olkiluoto 3 (OL3) nuclear plant completed the transition from testing to regular output last month to become Finland’s first new nuclear plant in more than four decades. It is expected to produce up to 15 percent of the country’s power demand.
And while the plant’s production is still in its early days, its launch has had a considerable effect on Finland’s energy prices, lowering the electricity spot price in the country from €245.98 per megawatt-hour (MWh) in December to €60.55 per MWh in April, a reduction of more than 75 percent, according to physical electricity exchange, Nord Pool.
A wonderful chance to discuss some of the heavier aspects of EV cars, more dangerous car parks and car accidents, the fun of fires on cargo ships, novel ways to douse a smoking car, and the delusional need for more metal than anyone can dig up on Earth. Heavier cars means more wear and tear, more road noise, more latex in the air, and more costs to rebuild our car parks and bridges.
Peer Review has been a sixty year experiment with no control group
It’s touted as the “gold standard” of science, yet the evidence shows Peer Review is an abject failure.
There are 30,000 scientific journals that publish nearly 5 million articles a year, and the only thing we know for sure is that two-thirds of papers with major flaws will still get published, fraud is almost never discovered, and peer review has effectively crushed groundbreaking new discoveries.
Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that’s a great thing
For the last 60 years or so, science has been running an experiment on itself. The experimental design wasn’t great; there was no randomization and no control group. Nobody was in charge, exactly, and nobody was really taking consistent measurements. And yet it was the most massive experiment ever run, and it included every scientist on Earth.
It seemed like a good idea at the time, instead it was just rubber stamp to keep the bureaucrats safe. As government funded research took over the world of science after World War II, clueless public servants wanted expert reviewers to make sure they weren’t wasting money on something embarrassingly stupid, or fraudulent. They weren’t search for the truth, just protecting their own necks.
Scientifically, there’s no evidence supporting peer review:
Here’s a simple question: does peer review actually do the thing it’s supposed to do? Does it catch bad research and prevent it from being published?
It doesn’t. Scientists have run studies where they deliberately add errors to papers, send them out to reviewers, and simply count how many errors the reviewers catch. Reviewers are pretty awful at this. In this study reviewers caught 30% of the major flaws, in this study they caught 25%, and in this study they caught 29%. These were critical issues, like “the paper claims to be a randomized controlled trial but it isn’t” and “when you look at the graphs, it’s pretty clear there’s no effect” and “the authors draw conclusions that are totally unsupported by the data.” Reviewers mostly didn’t notice.
In fact, we’ve got knock-down, real-world data that peer review doesn’t work: fraudulent papers get published all the time. If reviewers were doing their job, we’d hear lots of stories like “Professor Cornelius von Fraud was fired today after trying to submit a fake paper to a scientific journal.” But we never hear stories like that. Instead, pretty much every story about fraud begins with the paper passing review and being published. Only later does some good Samaritan—often someone in the author’s own lab!—notice something weird and decide to investigate. That’s what happened with this this paper about dishonesty that clearly has fake data (ironic), these guys who have published dozens or even hundreds of fraudulent papers, and this debacle:
Gotta love this graph!
Wait a second, these are not real error bars … the author literally just put the letter “T” above the bar graphs 😭 pic.twitter.com/KKtTGRHFaw
That graph was published, in Advances in Materials Science and Engineering. After peer review failed, but “Twitter Review” succeeded in discovering the error bars were deliberate typos, so-to-speak, it has been retracted. But how much other junk got set in print in 4.7 million articles a year?
Why don’t reviewers catch basic errors and blatant fraud? One reason is that they almost never look at the data behind the papers they review, which is exactly where the errors and fraud are most likely to be. In fact, most journals don’t require you to make your data public at all. You’re supposed to provide them “on request,” but most people don’t. That’s how we’ve ended up in sitcom-esque situations like ~20% of genetics papers having totally useless data because Excel autocorrected the names of genes into months and years.
Mastroianni makes the case that the whole point of peer-review was to deal with the explosion of new government funded papers. Once the bureaucrats took command of science the main aim was not “brilliant discoveries” but just not to fail embarrassingly. Thus peer review was merely a bureaucratic safety value that cost no dollars but gave a rubber stamp to “government science”. It became the committee cover that “protected” jobs — but in a sense all of science became a bureaucratic protectorate:
Why did peer review seem so reasonable in the first place?
I think we had the wrong model of how science works. We treated science like it’s a weak-link problem where progress depends on the quality of our worst work. If you believe in weak-link science, you think it’s very important to stamp out untrue ideas—ideally, prevent them from being published in the first place. You don’t mind if you whack a few good ideas in the process, because it’s so important to bury the bad stuff.
But science is a strong-link problem: progress depends on the quality of our best work.Better ideas don’t always triumph immediately, but they do triumph eventually, because they’re more useful. You can’t land on the moon using Aristotle’s physics, you can’t turn mud into frogs using spontaneous generation, and you can’t build bombs out of phlogiston. Newton’s laws of physics stuck around; his recipe for the Philosopher’s Stone didn’t. We didn’t need a scientific establishment to smother the wrong ideas. We needed it to let new ideas challenge old ones, and time did the rest.
Weak-link thinking makes scientific censorship seem reasonable, but all censorship does is make old ideas harder to defeat.
Mastroianni argues that having a meaningless rubber stamp is worse than no rubber stamp at all — as if the FDA inspected meat just with a sniff, and then put on sticker saying “Inspected by the FDA”. It’s dangerous…
If you want to sell a bottle of vitamin C pills in America, you have to include a disclaimer that says none of the claims on the bottle have been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. Maybe journals should stamp a similar statement on every paper: “NOBODY HAS REALLY CHECKED WHETHER THIS PAPER IS TRUE OR NOT. IT MIGHT BE MADE UP, FOR ALL WE KNOW.” That would at least give people the appropriate level of confidence.
“Hooray We Failed” he says. No one was in charge of this experiment, so no has the job of saying it’s over. Mastroinni appoints himself, and declares it “done”.
What should we do now? Well, last month I published a paper, by which I mean I uploaded a PDF to the internet. I wrote it in normal language so anyone could understand it.
Then thousands of people read it, retweeted it and he got more reviews and feedback than he’s ever had. NPR asked him for an interview, and professors offered him ideas. The free market in ideas will always beat the bureaucratic committees. Blog science, substack articles and tweets may yet rescue science from the government funded strangehold. The only formula for finding the truth is free speech.
In his followup article he talks about the response to his article: the fears and the inevitable rage and yelling from the people who’ve worked so hard at climbing the ladder of citations.
Richard Smith, the former editor of the British Medical Journal, commented:
It’s fascinating to me that a process at the heart of science is faith not evidence based. Indeed, believing in peer review is less scientific than believing in God because we have lots of evidence that peer review doesn’t work, whereas we lack evidence that God doesn’t exist.
It’s a long feature article and well worth reading. Though it’s no accident, of course, that archaic bad systems of publication still control science 30 years after the spread of the internet — the gatekeepers of science and government don’t want to lose control of the monoculture they created.
The left side of politics is fracturing over climate and energy. The Green Party of France is calling Macron irresponsible and accusing him of “climate denial” for the sin of daring to suggest the EU already has enough environmental regulations:
[Macron] insisted that, when it comes to the regulatory side, the EU is “ahead of the Americans, the Chinese and of any other power in the world.” During a speech on how to revive the French industry on Thursday at the Elysée, President Emmanuel Macron called for “a European regulatory break.” “We have already passed lots of environmental regulations at European level, more than other countries,” he said. “Now we should be implementing them, not making new changes in the rules or we are going to loose all our [industrial] players.” — Politico
Macron was not suggesting anything as radical as actually unwinding Green legislation. But the mere act of not pandering 100% to sacred Green goals meant pushback for apostasy was swift and hard and a complete overreaction:
“…from the left there has been only rage. ‘Absolutely irresponsible’ cried the Green MP Sandrine Rousseau, who said it wasn’t fewer environmental regulations that were needed: ‘On the contrary, we have to increase them.’
Her party colleague Sandra Regol levelled that most damning of accusations at Macron, that of ‘climate denial’, adding that he was ‘taking France back to the 1980s’.
Notably, these quotes are so toxic that the rest of the media are not mentioning them. After all, if Macron is a “climate denier” for not racing full tilt on the Green Express, it says something about the cult of Green. Let the absurdity shine.
“Build Back Better” has suddenly become “Build Back Factories“
Macron is clearly trying to speak the language of the jilted working class (even if he may not do much to live up to it). He was not trying to woo the Green voter. No wonder the Greens felt outraged. He threw an event on Monday for 200 foreign business leaders to attract investment and was even talking to Elon Musk…
While Macron woos investors to help re-industrialize France and reduce Europe’s dependence on China and the U.S., protesters follow him around the country, banging saucepans to protest economic injustice and his leadership.
More than 200 international business leaders are expected Monday at the Choose France’ event staged at the palace of Versailles to promote foreign investment.
[ABC News (US)] Elon Musk was a surprise visitor, meeting first with Macron at the Elysee Palace with discussions about “significant progress in the electric vehicle and energy sectors,” as well as digital regulation, the president tweeted.
By far the most interesting write up was from Gavin Mortimer of The Spectator:
Is Macron finally taking on the cult of net zero?
The far-left France Insoumise were also outraged. ‘It’s not as if there’s a [climate] emergency’, tweeted a sardonic Damien Maudet. One of the party’s MEPs, Manon Aubry, thundered that Macron ‘is now using the same rhetoric, word for word, as the European right and far right, who want to kill the implementation of the rest of the European climate package’.
At the same time that the CGT and the French Socialists have been shedding supporters, Marine Le Pen has been attracting followers, many of them blue-collar workers who once voted left. Her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, founded the National Front in 1972, growing it from a fringe party to one that reached the second round of the 2002 presidential election by latching onto the two preoccupations of the working-class: immigration and deindustrialisation.
This same sense of grievance accounted for the success in April of the newly-formed Farmer Citizen Movement in the Dutch regional elections. As Eva Vlaardingerbroek wrote in TheSpectator, the Movement had tapped into the ‘larger conflict between the authoritarian green agenda being pushed by our government and the silent majority paying for it all’.
The truth is that net zero has become a bourgeois cult, and their self-absorbed domineering has been tolerated for too long.
As the yellow vests told the environmental lobby as they took to the streets in 2018 to protest against a green fuel tax: ‘You talk about the end of the world while we are talking about the end of the month.’
Years of protests have achieved some kind of deferred pain for Macron, adding to the pressure for him to get back to reality:
Credit rating agency Fitch last month downgraded France’s sovereign credit rating, citing the protest movement. “Political deadlock and (sometimes violent) social movements pose a risk to Macron’s reform agenda,” the agency wrote. –– ABC News USA
But make no mistake, only last week Macron was giving tax credits to all the fashionable Green causes:
It follows a series of incentives announced by Macron last week to support innovative industries and transition towards greener technology. They include tax credits in fields like battery production, electric cars, hydrogen and wind power, as well as accelerating authorization for industrial projects. — Business Standard
So the new talk of a pause is a good but tiny step. It’s merely a deceleration on the race to Green Hell, but perhaps the momentum is shifting?
More heartening than anything is that Macron appears to care at all what French voters think.
We’re so used to voters being irrelevant to the UniParty — perhaps the recent Dutch elections have rattled the cage?
In terms of civilization, Niall Ferguson is speaking simple maths. The arithmetic of resources. Something which is almost never said.
Niall Ferguson:
“For an enormous island that is thinly populated, with enormous resources — for such an island to be ill-defended seems like the most spectacular folly…
Empires, at some level, are about acquiring commodities at below market prices, or at least not trusting to the market to supply you — not to be at the mercy of the market, or the mercy of a navy, the US Navy, which China currently is.
To have security China cannot be dependent on imported commodities and market prices, when you think about what that implies for Australia, its really quite scary…
Australia is a prize…
“If you want Peace, prepare for War.
If you want War, act like it will never come. Allow your defense capability to atrophy.”
The rulers of China would be irrational not to want more land to feed people, and control of more resources. Australia has the largest known uranium reserves in the world, the 2nd largest cobalt, lithium, tungsten, vanadium resources. It is in the top five for world economic resources of black coal, brown coal, gold, copper, ilmenite, magnesite, manganese ore, silver, tin.
Australia has 0.3% of global population but is currently producing 27% of global bauxite, 36% of the world’s iron ore, and 53% of it’s total lithium. It is often the largest exporter of coal and sometimes the largest exporter of LNG, and the second largest producer of gold.
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