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Lesson 4-billion-and-one in How Big Government Screws Everything Up
Cuadrilla Shale Gas.
Remember Cuadrilla, the company that discovered 200 trillion cubic feet of gas in Lancashire, UK in 2011? It multiplied the entire national reserve of shale gas by 37 fold. At one point the market value was estimated to be something like £136 billion and could keep the UK “in gas” for 56 years.
It should have changed everything. But in 2022 the UK is in an energy crisis and instead of expanding those shale wells, the UK government is sealing them up. They’re the only two viable shale gas wells in Britain, and the government wants them to pour concrete down the holes.
It’s been a long slow grind to nothing. The anti-frackers frightened the people with stories of “known carcinogens called ‘silicon dioxide’” and seismic shocks that registered 1.5 on the Richter scale. So the people of the UK gave up an industry worth £6 billion a year, and a reliable energy supply because a government department was afraid of pure sand and a class of earthquake so small it’s “rarely felt” and so common the world has “several million” of them each year.
Andrew […]
We finally reached a turning point with Omicron that suggests we have it’s measure.
We couldn’t know if the South African experience would translate to the overweight, indoor and diabetic parts of the world given 60% in South Africa had already had Covid — plus it was summer, and that part of the world is more familiar with certain anti-virals which must not be named.
But the news from the UK is about as good as we could have hoped. And Hallalujah, restrictions are being wound back in the UK.
Hurrah! It’s three doses of Covid cheer as UK cases continue to plunge, Plan B curbs may soon be lifted
DailyMail, UK
Modeling Omicron UK Daily Mail
And on hospitalizations
The hospitalization curve in the UK has just (maybe) started to decline, and if there are no surprises, then Omicron is roughly kinda 10% as severe as Delta was.
Modelling Hospitalizations in the UK. Omicron
I know some will feel that this is no news at all and we could see this coming for weeks. But bear in mind that in South Africa, the country far ahead of us all, the deaths […]
Rarely do we see how meaningless the fear and worry is. One UK polling group asked people about phasing out coal boilers, adding vegan foods on menus and taxing frequent flyers. But the team followed up to find out whether people were willing to make the sacrifices themselves and support suddenly fell off a cliff. Fifty to seventy percent of so-called supporters were suddenly skeptical.
Most polls are only measuring the size of a cheer squad. 83% of Brits say they’re worried about climate change. But they’re so worried, yeah, they couldn’t even bring themselves to say “yes” to poll question. People know we need to fly less to “Save the World”, but they have no intention of riding the e-bike to the tofu factory instead of holidaying in Majorca.
Somehow 45% of people are dreadfully worried about climate change but if it means catching a bus, the Planet can wait, eh?
How worried is this? Climate change: UK public more worried than ever about global warming, but still doesn’t want to pay to fix it
The survey also finds that while people are in favour of drastic measures to help the country become net zero by 2050 […]
A scandal of epic proportions
The data in the UK is some of the best in the world, but if a person has a vaccine and dies in the next two weeks, it’s classed as an “unvaccinated death”. People are not counted as fully vaccinated until 14 days after their second dose, which makes sense if we’re only looking at Covid deaths. But it doesn’t make sense when looking at other deaths. This delayed categorization leads to enigmatic effects, to say the least.
Strangely, the unvaccinated are increasingly likely to die from the week after other people in their age group get the vaccine…
The graph below of the 70-something age group in the UK, charts the non-Covid deaths — all the heart attacks, strokes, cancer and accidents. But notice how the first dose of Covid vaccines peaked in Week 5 (the grey dashed line), but the mortality of the unvaccinated (the blue line) peaks 2 weeks later? These are the non-covid deaths, so heart attacks, strokes, all kinds of things are killing the unvaccinated two weeks after the peak in vaccination for other people in their age-group.
Most 70-somethings who did get vaccinated, got their second dose […]
Lord Deben, (John Gummer) UK
Australians heard how disappointing we are to Lord Deben, who earns £1,000-a-day as chairman of the Committee on Climate Change (CCC). But the Australian-investigative-media didn’t mention that conflict of interest, or that Lord Deben’s private company was caught in 2019 being paid £600,000 from ‘green’ businesses, like windfarms and car battery makers, which he never declared. He says there’s no conflict of interest and that he “complied with disclosure rules”.
So now we know the rules are inadequate.
Australia named climate ‘disappointment’
Canberra Times
Australia has been labelled “a great disappointment to the rest of the world” by the United Kingdom’s climate advisor for clinging to coal-fired power.
Imagine if the ABC introduced every Deben pronunciation with the information that Deben earned money from Green businesses and is paid to head a committee that wouldn’t exist if climate change was natural.
Scott Morrison accused of failing to understand the ‘urgency’ of climate change
The ABC
“What was so disappointing for us is the way it appeared your prime minister really doesn’t understand the urgency of what we have to do,” Lord Deben said.
For a […]
The COP 26 organizers must be quaking in their chardonnay. Just when they need all the usual hyped up wind powered record headlines, they’re getting headlines of record gas prices, rocketing inflation, and industries thinking about shutting down.
Welcome to the Green Revolution:
UK industry could face shutdowns as wholesale gas price hits record high
Rob Davies and Joanna Partridge, The Guardian
…
Wholesale gas prices hit new all-time highs on Wednesday, prompting warnings that factories could be forced to shut down over winter or switch to more polluting fuels just as the UK hosts the Cop26 climate conference next month.
Trade body UK Steel said it was now “uneconomic” to make steel at certain times in the UK, with British firms facing double the electricity prices paid by rivals in Germany, France and the Netherlands.
Don’t say “oil” say “polluting fuels that had been abandoned”:
Paul Pearcy, the federation coordinator at the trade body British Glass, said companies that make windows could be forced to revert to powering their furnaces with polluting fuels that had been abandoned.
British Glass makers are thinking of using fuel oil again because gas […]
The irony — the renewables propaganda was so overdone that the EU and UK got caught with their pants down without enough stable fossil fuel powered electricity. European investors were so afraid gas and coal would be stranded assets that they stopped building reliable power generators. Russia supported the “anti-frack” movement in the West in order to sabotage competition, and now wants to squeeze a hot deal on its Big New Pipeline, so it has reduced the gas supply, so gas prices are headed for record highs and businesses are collapsing, food shortages are predicted. In the short run coal is being reinstated — Drax is thinking of keeping coal plants running. But the only long term path out of the Green-Energy-Quicksand without breaking the sacred “anti-carbon-dioxide” jinx is with nuclear power.
So thus, the greedy power grab and profiteering by the renewables industry, the globalists, the Chinese, the Russians and the Greens may force out cheap coal in the long run, but accelerate the dawn of a new era of nuclear power.
Suddenly government love nuclear
Here come the Small Modular Reactors:
Dawning of Britain’s ‘new nuclear age’: Gas crisis prompts ministers to ‘change focus’ with Kwasi Kwarteng poised […]
It’s not even winter yet but suddenly all eyes are on the gas prices
Gas through the roof…
Thanks to fear of climate change voodoo many nations in the EU have effectively stopped exploring for gas and decided not to frack their shale deposits to get cheap gas too. (In Australia too). Vainglorious governments aimed to change the weather instead of having cheap electricity and lo, wind-towers were built everywhere.
What could possibly go wrong? Nearly everything.
Even the massive size of the European market hasn’t saved them from price rises so large that retail suppliers are collapsing, and fertilizer factories are closing.
Its a great way to give your enemies the upper hand
The wind drought in spring and summer meant that wind farms failed. Then the Russians squeezed gas supply in to the EU looking suspiciously like they were hoping to push up prices and pressure Germany into approving the controversial Nordstream 2 pipeline. Now the Kremlin is suggesting a quick approval will alleviate the gas shortage (they’re just trying to help). In the latest news one large interconnector between the UK and France has suffered a fire and broken down and won’t be restored til […]
Political correctness is the correct way to lose every election. By its very nature, virtue signalling is almost guaranteed to be an electoral disaster. The whole game is to get to the top of the pecking order and mark yourself as being above the unwashed riff raff. A long time ago, if your brain wave was a good idea, the riff raff would adopt it too, which was all fine and good, except then you need another different good idea. And when all that’s left are more absurd signalling displays: Can you control the weather with your plastic shopping bag? Can you set people free by vandalizing statues?
Labor Parties all over the world suffer from the same thing. They stopped listening and caring what the workers think.
h/ t David E
Look at the massive disconnect here:
Poll proves wokery lost Labour ‘red wall’ seats:
Glen Owen, Mail on Sunday
Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is out of touch with public opinion on woke issues, a Mail on Sunday poll has found. The survey revealed that the party was overwhelmingly associated with support for politically correct issues – such as pulling down statues of […]
The island of Jersey gets 95% of its electricity via cables from France. The latest post-Brexit fishing dispute got so hot so fast, that a French minister even suggested cutting off the electricity if they didn’t get their way. 60 French fishing vessels were protesting at slow licensing. But naval ships from both sides were even called in to patrol the area, the situation has been defused.
Surely the UK government must be working out that electricity supply is a major tool for foreign disputes. Currently about 10% of the UK electricity comes in via undersea cables*, but that is set to rise to 25%, according to the Daily Mail. Surely alarms are ringing? This is not even the first time this outrageous threat was made. Macron himself threatened it last October too. See “Hands Up! Your money or your Fish!“
There is a very uneasy power balance here: The right to fish in British waters is worth about 650 million euros to EU fishermen, but European energy markets were worth up to £2.3 billion for the UK.
Not only does it leave the UK in a weaker negotiation position, but a selfish foreign player could also ambiguously twist […]
They couldn’t cancel Prince Philip, but the media have cancelled that he was a skeptic of climate change.
Prince Philip not only read Ian Plimer’s books, and said good things about him, he wrote, thanked and endorsed him on official letterhead. He organised a speech for Plimer at the Royal Society of Artists (which then cancelled by other people).
The Duke of Edinburgh was a fan of David Bellamy and Christopher Booker too. He invited Bellamy to give a lecture at Buckingham Palace and wrote a “long and thoughtful” letter to Christopher Booker.
So while the BBC et al are lavishly and justifiably praising the Great Duke, they prefer not to mention that he thought wind farms were “useless” “monstrosities” that were ‘completely reliant on subsidies’ and ‘would never work’. The Australian ABC found time to say that he once made a joke asking whether Australian Aboriginals still threw spears at each other. The ABC called it a “faux pas” as if the Duke might have been asking it seriously, or aboriginals might not have a sense of humor? (There’s that soft racism again).
So his opinion on national energy policy is not worth discussing, but a one liner from […]
Prince William wraps himself in the UpperClass Climate Club Fashion du jour
After all the hoo-ha with Megan and Harry, somehow the harangued Duke thought that standing with the bankers, multinational corporations and Tech Giants while pressing the Public Guilt Button would endear him with the people?
Or perhaps he’s just hoping to buy a bit of protection from the thought police? Boy, is he in for a surprise. Every flight he gets on will be mocked by both sides.
PRINCE WILLIAM has been blasted for his latest message about climate change, with people pointing out on social media that he and his family drive Range Rovers and frequently take private jet flights.
Abbie Lewellyn, The Express
In a video message broadcast at the Conservation International Gala in the UK, the Duke of Cambridge called for humanity to “reset our relationship with nature and our trajectory as a species” in order to avoid a climate disaster. He said the next decade will be “one of our greatest tests” and he warned that the most vulnerable people around the world would be most hit by the devastating effects of climate change. While […]
All those silicon chips and no real knowledge
The poorest quarter in the UK have more information at their fingertips than King George did, but half the modern population have no idea what’s going on. In big bold terms of history, no other century saw so many lives saved, and deadly foes conquered. But most of the lucky recipients of the biggest bounty in a hundred thousand years aren’t just oblivious to the good news, they think things are getting worse.
Instead of drowning in floods they are drowning in junk headlines.
View this poll as a test of the media. If they told the truth — in perspective — the responses would cluster in a bell curve around the correct answer. Instead, a third of the population don’t know, and half the population know even less.
The GWPF has done a survey in the UK and discovered that less than 10% of the population even realize that the death toll from natural disasters is down at all, let alone by 95%. More than half the population can’t even guess the trend. And if these were “per capita” stats, the trend practically fell off a cliff. Since 1920 the global […]
In Europe the second wave is setting new records for daily cases but not for deaths so far (thankfully). So the big question is whether this will stay the same or follow the case tally up.
It’s probably not an accident that infections are spreading fast in mid October. Not only was it late summer in Europe, but the virus has been spreading mostly through 15 to 24 year old healthy young people and when Vitamin D levels were high. But as the Northern Hemisphere tracks away from the Sun, vitamin D levels are falling, temperatures are dropping, and the sterilizing rays of ultra violet grow weak. And, as the days grow colder people gather indoors too. Viral doses are rising.
The enduring scandal of the epidemic is that there are so many ways to treat this virus but they’re not expensive enough for the TGA to recommend them. ;- )
Lots more cases but not many deaths
Exhibit One: The United Kingdom
Some people have used this graph to claim the virus poses no threat. But it isn’t that simple.
UK New cases and Worldometer Deaths graph. (Click to enlarge)
Ten reasons death rates were lower in Europe’s […]
The UK wants to get back its fishing rights as part of a Brexit deal. The French aren’t too happy about that, but since the UK is heavily dependent on French interconnectors Macron can and is holding the UK electricity grid hostage.
Green Energy puts the UK in a much weaker negotiation position.
The French interconnectors under the Channel are needed both to import reliable nuclear power and to sell off the excess fluffy green kind of unreliable electricity that UK wind power makes at random times. The “value” of energy sales is more than the value of the fisheries (at least in hard currency). But UK imports are larger than the exports, and the UK electricity grid is so fragile it fell over last year leaving people stuck in underground trains for hours, and cutting off a million customers in an instant. The biggest weakness of all is probably the reliance on a foreign power to just keep the lights on. The cost of unplanned blackouts would trump everything else. And could the French “Break” the UK grid with plausible deniability and some inconvenient outage? Sorry but the interconnector had a fault?
I know they might not play that […]
Did the British Labor Party just agree to Brexit, talk of family, nation, and chuck out the anti-semites?
Just when democracy looks dead, comes this. The British Labour party got savaged in the last election, but they appear to have quietly decided to aim for the centre.
The new leader, Keir Starmer, has apparently “set his sights on the Red Wall seats that Labour had lost.”
Keir Starmer, a true conservative
Maurice Glasman, UnHerd
Brexit was the fault-line that destroyed the Left and created a one-nation Conservatism that would push Labour back to its progressive comfort zone in the big cities, sealing it off from the small towns and working class heartlands forever. The Conservatives would be in power for a generation and when Keir Starmer was elected leader, it sealed the deal. A Remainian lawyer could never heal the wounds.
They [the Tories] didn’t notice when he said that the issue of Brexit had been resolved and Labour supported leaving the EU by the end of the year. The biggest issue in British politics had dissolved into a previous era and the Covid response was centre stage. They didn’t notice when Rebecca Long-Bailey […]
Extinction Rebellion blockade the Murdoch Press in the UK because climate reporting is supposed to be one-sided
After thirty years of saturation media on climate change, XR realize there is absolutely nothing new they could say that hasn’t already been said 4,000 times. So they attack the newspapers that put forward a few opposing views among the wall-to-wall propaganda.This helps keep the compliant newspapers in line.
So any self respecting editor ought be asking: If Extinction Rebellion aren’t blocking us, what are we doing wrong?
Pity the poor newsagents and delivery boys and girls who lost money so XR could do grand-standing camping, blocking trucks and newspapers from getting out.
Extinction Rebellion: Printworks protest ‘completely unacceptable’ says Boris Johnson
More than 100 protesters used vehicles and bamboo lock-ons to block roads outside the printing works at Broxbourne, Hertfordshire, and Knowsley, near Liverpool. By Saturday morning, police said some 63 people had been arrested.
The presses print the Rupert Murdoch-owned News UK’s titles including The Sun, The Times, The Sun on Sunday and The Sunday Times, as well as The Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, and the London […]
Do 10,000 extra infections matter?
JoNova — cheaper and faster than a Parliamentary Report — said two months ago that it was baffling that the UK locked everyone down, but kept flying in the virus. Now British MP’s are saying the same.
UPDATE: Given Boris Johnson suddenly changed policy on flights from Spain last week, immediately adding a mandatory quarantine, what’s the bet someone told him this report was coming?
No 10’s ‘inexplicable’ decision to lift quarantine at height of pandemic: MPs’ damning report condemns ‘serious mistake’ that allowed 10,000 infected people into the UK
David Barett, DailyMail
Delaying quarantine measures at the border was a ‘serious mistake’ that allowed 10,000 infected people into the UK accelerated the virus spread, a major report by MPs says.
The cross-party inquiry is highly critical of the Government’s ‘inexplicable’ decision to lift its initial quarantine measures in mid-March, ten days before lockdown.
Experts from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine calculated that up to 10,000 infected people, largely from Spain, France and Italy, imported the virus into the UK.
Viruses can only survive in people temporarily, so to beat a rogue chemical […]
New research of the WuFlu “gene” lineage in the UK show that the virus kept being introduced via planes, trains and cars. The entire time that UK residents were being restricted in lockdown, tens of thousands of people were allowed to bring virus in through the border. Sabotage or Incompetence? The single failure to quarantine arrivals in the UK means the lockdown has gone on longer than it needed, cost more than it had too, has been less successful, and now, as the UK reopens, it does it with infections still running, when it could be doing it “like New Zealand”.
The BBC news mentioned that there were a lot of imported cases, that the biggest variety of genetic variants came from Spain, France and Italy and not China. But one tantalizing finding was that the UK transmission lines now appear to be “very rare or extinct”. Which surely implies that the lockdown is working, the UK lines are dying out, and that … by golly, the new infections must be regular incoming virus?
Three Key Conclusions: The UK epidemic comprises a very large number of importations due to inbound international travel2. We detect 1356 independently-introduced transmission lineages, however, we […]
The Swedish soft lockdown will cost a lot more in the long run
Despite the relaxed approach, Sweden still had major changes in behaviour and movement patterns. The “half lockdown” may have stopped the exponential growth, but it wasn’t enough to reduce the spread. So Sweden is now trapped into maintaining some kind of isolation measures for months while other countries open up around them, and possibly, fly right over.
Norway’s sharp hard action and closed borders cost more in the short run, but they are now tracking towards zero cases and recovery beckons. Sweden has twice as many cases per capita as Norway, and ten times as many deaths, and there’s little sign the new infections are declining, nor that herd immunity is close. Antibody tests show that by late April only 7% of Stockholm may have been exposed to the virus, much less than the 20+ percent that the Swedish Chief Epidemiologist was expecting.
In the graph below the number of cases are on the same scale, though Sweden has twice the population. Given that viruses grow and decline on exponential scales, the Swedish curve could have still shrunk almost as fast as it rose — like Norway’s […]
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