The uncanny prophesy of Margaret Thatcher on the European Union

Sep 19, 1992 Margaret Thatcher was Speaking to the CNN World Economic Development Conference

The Grocer’s Daughter on Facebook

Huge sums would have to be transferred from richer to poorer countries and regions to allow them to take the strain. Even then unemployment and mass migration across now open frontiers would follow. And a full-fledged Single currency would allow no escape hatch.

The political consequences can already be glimpsed: the growth of extremist parties, battening on fears about mass immigration and unemployment, offering a real — if thoroughly unwelcome — alternative to the Euro-centrist political establishment.

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Submission due for the West Australian EPA on Monday

The West Australian EPA is calling for submissions by Monday Sept 2.

Given the timeframe, this is a draft post — just to flag this and start a discussion. Suggestions welcome. More coming Monday.

In March the WA EPA astonished the state by suddenly declaring that all new projects would need to “demonstrate how they would offset all emissions from their developments.” After an outcry these were withdrawn, but the EPA still wants them and are calling for submissions.

The requirements were so drastic they would affect the whole country just because of the size and the revenue lost from the WA projects. Not to mention that if the WA EPA gets away with this scientifically empty power grab, other EPA’s will follow…

Tens of billions of dollars in new resource projects will be at risk after Western Australia’s Environmental Protection Authority announced tough new measures around carbon dioxide emissions.

The new regulations will affect planned projects such as Woodside Petroleum’s $US11 billion ($15.6bn) Scarborough gas project and its $US20.5bn Browse development, as well as existing projects such as the $US34bn Wheatstone LNG plant and the $US54bn Gorgon LNG plant. — Paul Garvey, The Australian.

[…]

Rare: Sudden Stratospheric Warming in the Southern Hemisphere — cold weather coming?

Right now a very rare southern SSW (Sudden Stratospheric Warming) is taking place, possibly peaking today or this weekend over Antarctica. In the Northern Hemisphere SSW’s happen more often and in the month afterwards, wild polar blasts like the “Beast from the East” can peel off. So somewhere way up at 10hPa or 30 – 50 km, there is an area that’s warmed from -60C to close to zero. The warming up high throws a spanner in the normal jet streams and weeks later, down at the surface, blobs of cold air from the poles may end up wandering far from “home”.

We (as in Africa, Australia, Argentina, or New Zealand) may get bumper snow and severe frosts, or we may not. Some researchers are getting excited and are using the word “historic”.

These are rare over the Southern Hemisphere — due to Antarctica being shaped like a circular cheesecake right over the pole and surrounded by water. The geography is cleaner and simpler than at the north pole, and that generates a strong circumpolar jetstream. The strong pattern normally stops these sudden warmings up high which occur with wandering jetstreams.

In the Southern Hemisphere there have only […]

Tears for the climate (or to boost their social status?)

The Tear Stained Flogs of Climate Science

The unstoppable Tony Thomas has collected the tears of climate scientists the world over as they wallow in their self-inflicted heartache. For anyone who hasn’t come face to face with the raw emotional PR power of a crying scientist, check out Quadrant.

In particular, this new study:

The $2.5 million dollar study of The Emotional Labor of Climate Scientists

.. let’s get back to the psyches of Australia’s top warming spruikers. Geographers Professor Lesley Head (Melbourne University) and Dr Theresa Harada (Wollongong University) have published a breakthrough paper in the peer reviewed journal Emotion Space and Society. It’s called “Keeping the heart a long way from the brain: The emotional labour of climate scientists”.[4] This includes insights about climate-panic people’s “emotional labour” from “feminist perspectives” in which the scientists combat “a strong climate denialist influence”. The authors, straight-faced, found that our climate scientists use emotional denial to suppress the consequences of climate change. Guilt-free, they can then continue “extensive use of long-distance airplane trips throughout a scientific career”.

The authors accept, no questions asked, that 33-50 per cent of the world’s petroleum and over 80 per cent of […]

Basslink cable out again, costing Victorians more as prices rise

The Basslink cable has gone down again, and is expected to be out of action til mid-October. Luckily for Tasmania, the dams are at 45% full. However in Victoria, which sits on one of the largest brown coal reserves in the world, currently prices are hitting $300/MWh every morning and every evening at peak time. This graph below shows 5 minute prices for the last two days in Victoria. Every dollar Victoria saves at lunchtime from solar generation is lost a few hours later, and then some. Though it’s wrong to use the word “saves” at any time of day. The wholesale price of brown coal power for years was $30/MWh, and this below is a wholesale price graph. Even the lunchtime “low prices” are twice as expensive as brown coal which can supply all day, every day and for hundreds of years to come and doesn’t cause voltage surges, frequency instability, or house fires, and doesn’t need backup batteries, demand management schemes, free movie tickets, or dark hospitals.

The AEMO must be counting their lucky stars that this happened at probably the “best” time of year when demand is lower.

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The effect of the Basslink outage […]

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G7 Success — leaders issue statement 2% of usual length — and climate sidelined

Winning: The ABC news implied the G7 didn’t achieve much and was a bit of a flop with leaders “unable to overcome their differences…” and signing only a one page form. But for the rest of the world, the G7 was a big success — there were no long pledges to lead the world in weather changing voodoo. Climate was sidelined.

Plus the 2019 G7 leaders statement was 54 times smaller than the last G7 leaders statement.

Varney: Trump ‘dominated’ the G-7 summit ‘like no other president has done in years’

Stuart Varney, Staff, Fox News

“No matter what you read and hear from the media, this G-7 was all about Trump re-aligning the world — reshaping the world economy with America’s interests first and foremost,” said Varney on Fox Nation’s “My Take.”

“Trade was the headline issue … A deal with Japan — they will import a lot more of our agricultural product. Britain gets a major trade deal after Brexit, and there’s dialogue with Germany on car tariffs as well, but the most important — China,” stressed Varney.

After President Trump’s news conference, at the conclusion of the summit on […]

3 weeks to go til Climate Propaganda Week starts

Did you get the memo?

Which journalists are “just following orders”?

All groupthink-minded, obedient journalists have been advised to find a climate crisis to report on in Sept 16th which is the week before the next UN climate summit on Sept 23. How many will obey, conveniently serving the UN, big government activists with “free advertising”?

Kip Hansen on WattsUp spotted the National Narrative for media on Climate Change a couple of months ago.

The best things skeptics can do is expose how artificially crafted and politically timed this “reporting” is. Spread the word that it’s coming to help neutralize the effect.

Let’s ask our favourite ABC/BBC/Guardian/NY Times journalists in advance if they plan to obey this directive. Perhaps we could score each journalist with a Climate Patsy mark as the week unfolds and they hit their prescribed targets? They score extra points for saying “12 years to go”, “all scientists agree” and using the terms “climate crisis”, and “climate emergency”. Triple points go to photos of weather porn: Eg melting asphalt, “rain bombs”, freak clouds, and 20 year old photos of the Amazon burning.

The Email to Journalists

Greetings.

We’re writing from Covering […]

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Firestorm of Fake News: “convenient” global hysteria about Amazon based on nothing but twitter pics

Look who’s feeding the fake news?

Global Fire Data shows this year is unequivocally a low fire season in the Amazon. But social media tears and outrage is running at 1000% driven by old photos and fake facts of the Amazon producing “20% of our planet’s oxygen”.

And the media experts reported the house was on fire in the lungs of the world, or something to that effect. They didn’t check the data, didn’t ask hard questions.

Based on hyperbolic twitter pics French leader Macron is threatening to cancel a foreign trade deal. The hype serves the purpose of attacking the right wing Brazilian leader Jair Bolsonaro in the lead up to a G7 summit this week…

Who’s feeding the twitter flames?

@EmmanuelMacron

The photo he used? It’s a stock photo from Loren McIntyre, a photographer who died in 2003. h/t @Desesquerdizada

Funding cuts have created plenty of enemies

Many people have a reason to want Bolsonaro to look bad: In May Bolsonaro withdrew an offer to host a United Nations Latin America and Caribbean climate week. In the same week, the president fired self-confessed “militant environmentalist” Alfredo Sirkis, then-leader of The Brazil Forum […]

Sea Level scare industry urges plans to panic and evacuate over 1mm rise

Please, sell us your low lying land

Let’s play sea level bingo with the latest advertising from the Merchants of Sea-level Scares.

Hitting the media outlets tonight — the latest “Prepare to Die” news stories claim we must plan now for evacuees, refugees, inundation and homeless koalas. All the usual features of marketing are there — firstly all the images they use are from mocked up futuristic sea level rise. Secondly, it’s not a continuation of current trends, it a sudden acceleration — in this case from 1mm to year to 9mm a year, effectively starting tomorrow.

1 tiny millimeter

From 1969 – 2013 the seas have not changed the beaches around these Tuamotu atolls — or almost any other atoll you can name.

By every method known to man, seas are rising around 1mm a year:

1,000 tide gauges, hundreds of studies of beaches, satellites measuring sea levels, and satellites measuring beaches.

All anyone needs to know about sea levels is that for the last 50 years sea levels have been rising at 1mm a year as shown by a thousand tide gauges all over the world. There was no acceleration. (Beenstock et al). Some of those gauges […]

British MPs and Oxford dons say “No more cars for you”. Not even EVs!

Turning up the screws

Ban cars to get better weather!

A UK committee of academics and one of MP’s say cars are not compatible with life as we know it:

Ditch cars to meet climate change targets, say MPs

Roger Harrabin, BBC

The Science and Technology Select Committee says technology alone cannot solve the problem of greenhouse gas emissions from transport.

In its report, the committee said: “In the long-term, widespread personal vehicle ownership does not appear to be compatible with significant decarbonisation.”

It echoes a report from an Oxford-based group of academics who warned that even electric cars produce pollution through their tyres and brakes.

Naturally, after suggesting a preposterously large, transformative impossibility — the report then just says the government should spend more on more of the same: buses, trains, bikes and ride shares. See the segue? What starts as a huge mission to change the world morphs into an excuse to boost pet projects. The ridiculous gambit claims pave the way to make another round of “more, more, more” look reasonable.

Let’s join the dots that they won’t. How many storms exactly will 1,000 extra buses […]

Walmart asks Telsa to remove solar panels from 240 stores and pay damages after 7 fires

New rooftop BBQ known as TeslaKebab

Photo from the legal paper. Also known as a “money printer” according to Elon.

Walmart installed Tesla solar panels on 240 stores across the US. There have been 7 incidences of fire which Walmart claim has cost them $8.2m and were caused by negligence on Tesla’s behalf. After a spate of fires in 2018 Walmart de-energized all the panels. Then one more caught fire. Now it not only wants damages paid, it wants Tesla to remove all of the panels.

It’s not that there is something wrong with solar power, just that it’s complex, unnecessary, unaffordable and the companies that install panels can’t afford to train staff or pay guys who know what they are doing:

Tesla is getting sued by Walmart

Elecktrek @FredericLambert

One of them in 2012, one in 2016, another in 2017, and then three of the fires happened in the first half of 2018 and it eventually led Tesla to de-energize all 240 solar power systems at Walmart stores:

“Fearing for the safety of its customers, its employees, and the general public, and wishing to avoid further damages and store closures, Walmart demanded on May […]

Bluescope spends a billion in US because “cheap energy”

Add another billion to the cost of the Renewable Energy Target?

In the last few days Bluescope Steel (formerly BHP) has confirmed it will spend US$700m (AU$1b) to expand it’s North Star steel mill in Ohio. So there are multiple headlines. But back in February CEO Mark Vassella explained exactly why they were thinking of it, and his first reason was “energy prices”. Last week, high energy prices were even “a tragedy” for Australian manufacturing. This week however, he’s clarified his position by muddying it up. Now there other reasons and the solution is to fix our gas prices. He’s backpedaling and tossing quotes that happen to help the renewables industry.

Perhaps he’s been heavied by his PR and strategy team? Now he’s saying that energy costs matter, but labor costs do too and “we weren’t ever going to put another steel mill in Australia”. He’s even saying energy costs “did not play a role” — the complete opposite. These will become the quotes the renewable energy fans rely on. Apparently, now what he really wants is cheaper gas — which requires a socialist government-driven solution to fix gas prices, and it’s safe for anyone to mention anything that requires […]

Australian grid wars: MP says Queensland should cut off other states to make electricity cheaper

Guess which state, big business will be headed to next?

Brilliant! Let’s talk about a Quexit of the NEM. Nationals MP, Keith Pitt is suggesting that Queenslanders could cut their power bills if Queensland stands alone and disconnects from the rest of the Australian National Grid. There are concerns from experts within the energy sector that this could result in blackouts in other states… (is there an “e” in electricity?).

Keith Pitt says these are Queensland assets paid by the Queensland people, owned by the Queensland people, but we can’t continue to prop up states that make silly decisions. He’s driven by one motivator, and that’s price for consumers.

Check out the AEMO data dashboard. On any given minute Queensland is probably sending electricity to most of the NEM.

 

#9News can reveal #EXCLUSIVE details on a bold new plan to cut power prices. @jekearsley #auspol #9News pic.twitter.com/OGVfxfLOxW

— Nine News Queensland (@9NewsQueensland) August 20, 2019

 

simon holmes à court @simonahac

this is _the_ dumbest idea i’ve heard @keithjpittb since gina’s dad suggested using nuclear bombs for earthmoving. while you’re there, you may as well blow up the highways in and out of […]

Just change one rule — so the world can see what Wind and Solar really cost

Random power generators. Photo JoNova

Wind and solar power are the intermittent freeloaders on the electricity grid. They are treated as if they’re generators, adding power to the grid, but instead they provide something the grid doesn’t need — power that can’t be guaranteed.

Random gigawatts has the illusion of looking useful, but it’s the gift of a spare holiday house you don’t know if you can use til the day before. It’s the spare fridge in the garage that overheats in hot weather, the extra turkey for thanksgiving that might not arrive til the day after. The bills, the storage, the clutter, the chaos.

As I keep saying in RenewablesWorld fuel bills go down, but the land-maintenance-staff-insurance-FCAS-storage-and-capital costs all go up.

RenewablesWorld is a place where a lot more people and machines sit around and watch cat videos on youtube.

Here’s a great plan by Terry McCrann.

The one rule that would expose wind power’s true cost

Terry McCrann, The Australian, Business Review

If you wish to sell power into the grid, the NEM or National Energy Market, you will have to guarantee a minimum level of supply and guarantee that minimum level of […]

Solar road is $6m epic disaster — 4% capacity, broken and so noisy speed-limits were cut

Solar Road, Normandy, France | Credit: KumKum

Would you like to drive slower, add to noise pollution and waste money? Then solar roads are for you:

The world’s first solar road has turned out to be a colossal failure…

Ruqayyah Moynihan and Lidia Montes, Business Insider

Two years after the world’s first solar road — the Normandy road in France — was set up, it’s turned out to be a colossal failure, according to a report by Le Monde. The road has deteriorated to a terrible state, it isn’t producing anywhere near the amount of energy it had previously pledged to, and the traffic it has brought with it is causing noise problems.

The original aim was to produce 790 kWh each day, a quantity that could illuminate a population of between 3,000 and 5,000 inhabitants. But the rate produced stands at only about 50% of the original predicted estimates.

Even rotting leaves and thunderstorms appear to pose a risk in terms of damage to the surface of the road. What’s more, the road is very noisy, which is why the traffic limit had to be lowered to 70 kmh.

Despite costing up […]

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Skeptics get 49% more media, and other fairy fantasy stories from Nature Gossip Mag

Skeptics get banned, rejected, blocked and sacked from the mainstream media yet somehow Nature has a paper on Skeptics getting too much media. Believers don’t have to be an expert to control the news agenda, just a Greenpeace activist, or a teenage girl. Skeptics on the other hand, can be Nobel Prize winners, but the BBC won’t even phone them.

Nature, the former science giant, just launched the tenets of science over the event horizon. This paper is Argument from Authority rolled into false equivalence, and powered with cherry-picked errors in both category and in categorization. Nonsense on a rocket. It’s not what science is, and it’s not what journalism should be either. And Nature is supposed to be both. Judith Curry calls it The latest travesty in ‘consensus enforcement’ and the worst paper she has ever seen in a reputable journal.

….

Both David Evans and I get a mention on what is effectively Nature‘s blacklist. What an honour! No really — there are 386 great names. Even more of an honour is a mention on Judith Curry’s site “blogs she’s learnt something from”. (By some freak, my name comes right after Freeman Dyson and Ivar […]

Time Mag — Buttering up Believers: Why deniers brains can’t process climate change

It’s self congratulation disguised as “science”. The insults are passed off as universal human failings but the unmistakable message is that those who do believe in “climate change” are exempt. (Only the unbelievers have smaller minds and more selfish cortexes. )

Time Magazine: Why Your Brain Can’t Process Climate Change

You’d have to be pretty stupid not to get this message:

…We know—at least those of us not in the grips of outright climate denial—how bad it is. But we can’t seem to act to save the future.

The Time readers who haven’t cancelled their subscriptions already may like to read this and give themselves a free shot of mojo, knowing that they can process climate change. Possibly they buy Time because it tells them they’re the gifted, superior beings they hope they might be. This is manna for those with low self esteem and meaningless lives.

This is not just some random author either, Bryan Walsh, who wrote this, was TIME’s International Editor, its energy and environmental correspondent and was the Tokyo bureau chief in 2006 and 2007.

As usual, it’s projection all the way down:

There are many reasons why [we fail to […]