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By Jo Nova
Savor the moment. Donald Trump says he wants no wind farms built during his Presidency, and before we can even crack the champagne , the AfD in Germany say if they are elected, they don’t just want to stop people building new wind plants, they want to tear some of the old ones down.
That’s what we like to see, some competition… Who can get to Not Zero the fastest?
By Bloomberg
Bloomberg) — President-elect Donald Trump said Tuesday he would seek to have a policy of having no wind farms constructed during his second term, threatening billions of dollars in planned wind projects.
“We are going to have a policy where no windmills are being built,” Trump said during a lengthy tirade against wind power during a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
Trump, who has vowed a first day executive order targeting wind farms, has long made no secret his disdain for the energy source. But his remarks Tuesday represented the sharpest threat yet from the incoming president.
By MarketWire
Far-right German poltical party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) wants to tear down all wind turbines, according to the party’s candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel. “Down with all these windmills of shame,” she said at a party congress on Saturday in the eastern German town of Riesa, according to Bloomberg News.
Germany will hold Bundestag elections on Feb. 23, and AfD is in second place in the latest polls with 20-22% of eligible voters.
This was later clarified by the AfD to say they urgently want to shut down the Reinhardswald turbines. This is the wind park in the 1,000 year old forest of legend in Germany — the sacred greenery that only an money-hungry industrial vandal would want to despoil with giant bird killing towers.
The main question every Western nation needs to get a grip on — is it cheaper to wait for wind turbines to reach the end of life while paying for batteries, flywheels, hydropower, gas storage, interconnectors, plus pandemonium, extra maintenance on your essential infrastructure, and possible blackouts, or to pay out the current wind contracts, and throw a farewell party?
Obviously, since wind turbines make reliable generators more expensive and inefficient to run and drive the good ones out of business, clearly, the sooner the better. Do it while you still have a grid.
Do it while you still have an economy….
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By Jo Nova
The more CO2 we emit, the less we spend on global weather disasters
Fully half of all human emissions of CO2 ever, have been emitted since 1990. This super-molecule was supposed to cause stronger cyclones, nastier storms, more droughts, floods, sea level surges, blizzards, and fires. We were going to save a fortune by installing solar panels and windmills to reduce CO2 and slow the storms. Instead, we make more CO2 than ever, and 34 years of data suggests that the more we make the less we have to spend on flattened or flooded homes.
Munich Re says the world has experienced $298 billion dollars of catastrophic disaster losses due to weather events in 2024. This sounds terrible in terms of mindless “big numbers” , but Roger Pielke Jnr points out that these losses are shrinking in terms of the size of the global economy.
And they are nothing compared to the size of the dead end “transition” spending. Catastrophic weather losses in 2024 “were about 0.26% of global GDP.” We are rebuilding our entire energy system, supposedly to reduce the damage caused by climate change which that hurts one quarter of one percent of our global economy.
The more CO2 we emit, the less we spend on global weather disasters.
For what it’s worth, Pielke notes that “Global Catastrophe Losses” turns out to be in large part due to US Hurricane losses. We can argue the toss about better ways to measure weather related costs, but we can’t argue that the media spins relentlessly one-sided lies about the cost of “climate change”.
If it suited their narrative they could just as easily say “burn oil” and protect us from floods and storms. Or even more easily, since it is true — the rich world survives fires, floods, droughts and storms so much better than the poor world and fossil fuels are unarguably essential to make the concrete, the fertilizer, the planes, and the fuel to power satellites and mobile phones, ambulances and fire trucks.
Fossil fuels made us rich and keeps us safe.
REFERENCES
Pielke, Jr. R. (2019). Tracking progress on the economic costs of disasters under the indicators of the sustainable development goals. Environmental Hazards, 18(1), 1-6.
DATA
56% of all human emissions have occurred in the period from 1990-2024.
Cumulative human emissions of CO2 1990 – 2024 (OWID)
1990: 808.9 billion tons
2023: 1,800 billion tons
2024: (Assume same as 2023 = 1,850 billion tons)
Percentage of human emissions from 1990 – 2024 = 56%
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By Jo Nova
The Los Angeles Fires seem to symbolize the great achievements of collectivist governance. It took decades to reach these Black Belt levels of incompetence: to weaponize the committees, neutralize the media, and to teach the people that fires are caused by hamburgers and stopped by solar panels.
Currently 150,000 people are still under evacuation orders in Los Angeles and some 10,000 buildings are estimated to have been destroyed. To twist the knife on the pain, some insurance companies have recently abandoned Californian clients due to a 1988 law called Proposition 103. The State government regulates price rises in insurance. It’s a form of price fixing. It means insurance companies can’t adjust their premiums to take the higher risks into account, so they do they only thing they can — stop offering insurance.
Then there is the irony that green activists have worked to stop fuel reduction burns. @MarioNawfal names the Sierra Club.
The Californian situation by Dennis Presiloski
In a form of Democrat maths — the LA mayor Karen Bass saved $18m from the fire department budget but the state lost $150 billion in damage (so far).
“The bluest people on the planet are going to flip vote red”
Adam Carolla points out that the areas that burnt were some of the wealthiest, most democrat-voting precincts in the country. “It’s about 80% Democrat” — who he predicts will flip red when they drown in regulations trying to rebuild.
What he doesn’t say is that these are often the most important donors who may abandon the party. It’s not the size of the votes that matter but the financial clout and cachet of the famous and wealthy that the Democrats will lose. (Though there will be 10 million people in LA watching this debacle and they might not actually need to have their own house burn down to get the point.)*
The people in the $20 million dollar mansions on the beach are going to be “knee deep” in regulations. The deep blue democrat fire victims are going to spend years trying to permits to rebuild their own homes and that will turn them into red voters. He names one couple that tried to get a permit to rebuild their home of 40 years on PCH (Pacific Coast Highway). In the end they gave up and moved. He says the point that got to Bill Maher (the comedian who seems so much more conservative lately) was the three year epic he went through to set up his solar panels on his house in Beverley Hills. “He was strangled by the regulations, the overreach.” “That’s when he turned against the government”.
These are wealthy people who love their homes, he says. They love Malibu, they love the Palisades… there is going to be a whole bunch of rich people and they want to build as fast as they can. From the time they go in and fill in the first form, til the time they get delivery of the first load of wood on their property will be three years. [This Australian wonders if they will rebuild with wood. How does anyone defend a wooden house against embers during the Santa Ana winds? — Jo]*
Then there are the extras:
You want a swimming pool… it has to be double hulled in case it leaks into the water table. Carson Daily had to build a swimming pool like a modern day oil tanker. It’ll just cost $500,000 for a swimming pool.
He’s in a hotel room, evacuated from his home at the time he did this, and “language warning”, he doesn’t hold back:
“You guys all voted for Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles. You all voted for Gavin Newsom, and now you f**ing get what you get. Now that your house is on fire.“
He doesn’t think the coastal commission of California will even let people rebuild on the beach. “They are in the business of getting you to leave …”
Warning: his language is strong.
His prediction sounds outlandishly pessimistic, but Elon says “Accurate” and @StewMama71 agrees, saying: Only 25% of the houses burned in Malibu in 2018 Woolsey fire have been rebuilt. UPDATE: The Democrats could change this in five minutes, by dropping most of the regulations. But will they?*
Then there is the Oscar level Virtue Signalling:
Bureaucrats in California were so concerned about breaking glass ceilings they seemingly forgot their first priority.
Nothing quite sums up how far gone everything is, better than this — listen to the assistant fire chief who blames the man caught in a fire (that she can’t carry) for being in the wrong place:
Not only did the Assistant Chief of the LAFD say it — apparently other people edited that into a professional little promo clip. What were they all thinking?
Apparently of rainbows, and not fire hydrants and fuel loads.
*A few late additions this morning.
** The Rainbow hydrant photo is a Grok image “Satire”
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By Jo Nova
A few years ago they were all going to save the world from the sixth mass extinction, but now they just want to avoid an anti-trust suit.
Such is the phase change of the Trump win, the largest banks in the USA, JP Morgan and Morgan Chase have now joined Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo the Bank of America, and Citigroup.
The Guardian
Analysts have said the withdrawals are an attempt to head off “anti-woke” attacks from rightwing US politicians, which are expected to escalate when Trump is sworn in as the country’s 47th president in just under a fortnight.
The giant super-squid of asset management is also thinking of leaving the UN Net Zero Alliance.
By Charles Gasparino, New York Post
BlackRock — which for years has courted controversy with its focus on so-called ESG, or Environmental Social Governance investing — is considering an exit of the so-called “Net Zero” coalition of top corporations who pledge to reach zero-carbon emissions by 2050, The Post has learned.
BlackRock’s likely departure is more significant [than all the other banks]. The world’s largest investment fund, with more than $10 trillion in assets under management, was a leader in ESG investing, with its top executives including Fink evangelizing on the need to use the company’s investing might to force corporations to reduce their carbon footprint.
Mum’s the word:
BlackRock press officials declined comment. A rep for State Street and JPMorgan didn’t return a call for comment. A press official for the alliance declined to comment.
Their lawyers will have beaten them into silence. If the world is facing a crisis they look like cowards, and if the world isn’t facing a crisis they look like crooks for abusing clients funds for ideological quests or worse, traitorous sell-outs to the global oligarchs.
As I said, the Net Zero Banking Alliance was the UN-banker cabal that were colluding to use $130 trillion dollars in assets to bully the first world into sabotaging their economies by buying expensive, unreliable Net Zero electricity. It was dangerously close to being a proto World Government. The club effectively could decide national policies on who could build competitive electricity grids, and who had to do the fantasia plan to control the storms of 2100 with their electricity grid in 2024.
They wouldn’t be jumping ship if Kamala had won.
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By Jo Nova
Something awful is going down today in California. Pray tonight for the people of the Pacific Palisades, LA. The infamous Santa Ana wind phenomenon is running at 80 to 100 mph. 30,000 people have been ordered to evacuate, so far, and there are two deaths and 1,000 buildings destroyed. It’s winter, but there is no water in the fire hydrants, hardly any firefighting planes, and “it’s like a third world Armageddon”. The fire department can’t do a thing…
Two other fires have broken out around Los Angeles in other areas.
Then there are videos like this one, or a raging inferno surrounding the house, with a thousand comments below, wondering if they survived, and asking “why are they filming”? The men sounded far too calm, saying “I’ve turned off the gas”. “Oh Shit”. The scene is so surreal I wonder if this is AI generated, but it may be people raised in Californian education, living through a moment they could not parse.
…
One comment below by Kelly Jo says “they got them out”. (We hope so.)
In this video, they’re leaving the house, but the trees outside (the trunks!?) are already on fire.
—
Just in: Daybreak on Sunset Boulevard
…–…
Incompetence plus fuel = disaster
“There’s no water coming out of the fire hydrants.
You don’t see the fire fighters there, because there is nothing they can do — it looks like we’re in a third world country here.
What was your brush mitigation program. The brush up in these hills … probably have been handled, mitigated, pruned, removed for probably thirty or forty years. It was a disaster waiting to happen.”
— Rick Caruso, Real Estate Developer.
There’s been no mention yet, but Australian gum trees arrived in Los Angeles in the 1870s and spread like weeds, with help from “over 100 companies” setting up Blue Gum plantations in a boom around 1900. There are historic pictures of Eucalyptus trees on the hillside of the Pacific Palisades. Did the fire loving trees make the fire worse, or were they just the icing on a gargantuan multilayered cake of incompetence?
One video has the sound of “popping” and we wonder about all the EV’s or home batteries that surely line the wealthy streets of the Pacific Palisades and Malibu. We hope everyone’s EV was fully charged before the evacuation. Imagine being told to leave your home immediately and you only needed an hour to charge? If a thousand cars are bumper to bumper it might only take a few to run out of charge and lock up to really screw the traffic flow.
Donald Trump says “Newscum” made it dry to save a worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn’t work!) but didn’t care about the people…
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1877036020081803468
It’s winter, but we know they’ll blame “climate change”.
Thinking of you Scott of the Pacific, who can see the fire from his apartment miles away.
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By Jo Nova
Suddenly free speech is cool again
This is not the Tipping Point they were expecting.
Now that the election is safely over, Mark Zuckerberg, the coward, admits that censorship went too far and free speech is important. He’s decided that Facebook and Instagram will drop the third party “fact checkers” that crushed content and banned people because the “fact checkers” made too many mistakes. (Of course, he doesn’t admit that these were not mistakes at all, but entirely the plan.)
As David Evans (the other half) says “Reminds me of 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell. It was the end of another leftist regime based on censorship and cancelling. The good news just kept on coming.”
It’s a very limited mea culpa — it was just good intentions and a bit of scope creep you know…
It’s not like he was interfering in elections, tilting the balance to buy political protection, increase his profits, or score points at dinner parties with billionaire friends.
From the Press Release:
In recent years we’ve developed increasingly complex systems to manage content across our platforms, partly in response to societal and political pressure to moderate content. This approach has gone too far. As well-intentioned as many of these efforts have been, they have expanded over time to the point where we are making too many mistakes, frustrating our users and too often getting in the way of the free expression we set out to enable.
And it was only “harmless content” that was lost and a bit of frustration was caused — it’s not like people died, wallowed in jail, or got attacked by illegal immigrants due to their loss of free speech:
Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in “Facebook jail,” and we are often too slow to respond when they do.
The Fact Checkers turned out to have their own biases:
If his plan was to give more expert opinions so “the people could judge” it does seem odd that they hired 20 year old nobodies with no qualifications to censor Harvard Professors in medicine.
The intention of the program was to have these independent experts give people more information about the things they see online, particularly viral hoaxes, so they were able to judge for themselves what they saw and read.
We’re not buying this miracle, Zuck, of how the people were supposed to be able to judge what they couldn’t see and never read…
It was just terribly bad luck the fact checkers all happened to support the same side of politics that Zuckerberg donated $400 million dollars to in 2020:
That’s not the way things played out, especially in the United States. Experts, like everyone else, have their own biases and perspectives. This showed up in the choices some made about what to fact check and how. Over time we ended up with too much content being fact checked that people would understand to be legitimate political speech and debate. Our system then attached real consequences in the form of intrusive labels and reduced distribution. A program intended to inform too often became a tool to censor.
He openly admits that the Twitter community notes policy is much better and will adopt it
It’s unusual in the business world to see someone copy a competitor (and openly say so):
We plan to phase in Community Notes in the US first over the next couple of months, and will continue to improve it over the course of the year. As we make the transition, we will get rid of our fact-checking control, stop demoting fact checked content and, instead of overlaying full screen interstitial warnings you have to click through before you can even see the post, we will use a much less obtrusive label indicating that there is additional information for those who want to see it.
And unusual too, that his competitor is happy.Elon Musk says “This is cool”.
And also like Musk, Zuckerberg is sending the policy brains team to Texas — realizing ten years too late, that the Californian bubble is not the place to connect with most Americans:
… we will be moving the trust and safety teams that write our content policies and review content out of California to Texas and other US locations.
Suddenly people will be able to discuss immigration and gender identity
Just toss those sacred cows out the window…
We want to undo the mission creep that has made our rules too restrictive and too prone to over-enforcement. We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate. It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms. These policy changes may take a few weeks to be fully implemented.
How telling that he picks these topics. Immigration, especially is the hot button issue in the US, UK and Europe. This change will come through in mere weeks, he says, leaving us wondering if Zuckerberg suddenly realized Facebook and Instagram were in danger of being 100% irrelevant in the real world. A cruel observer might say that his interest in free speech was purely profit driven (or an act of desperation).
When will he let people discuss their medical experiences?
At ZeroHedge, they point out that it’s just over a month since Zuckerberg met Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and only one day after one of Trump’s closest allies joined the board of Facebook — the UFC CEO Dana White. Perhaps Trump gave him one last chance (with conditions)?
It’s all a step in the right direction. But after censoring ICU Specialists who were trying to save lives and who turned out to be right, Zuckerberg is going to have to do a lot more than mouthing the weak words of “mistakes”. The nicest possible interpretation is that as a mere double-digit billionaire, (unlike Musk) Zuckerberg was squeezed by the Blob until he complied. The US government could have put him out of business in five minutes if he offended them. But where is that story? His country — the world — really needs to hear the real mea culpa.
UPDATE: Meta’s chief Global Affairs Officer, Joel Kaplan says “they’ll cooperate with the Australian government on the under-16 social media ban, but stresses, “the right way to do it is to trust parents to know what’s best for their children.” This kind of pressure from Big Tech and from the US Government may end the Australian governments attempt to force digital ID’s upon us.
Nothing can compensate for the damage to lives that could have been avoided, but there are plenty of people out whose losses can be cut quickly:
— Jason Olbourne – (The Daily Australian) (@JasonQCitizen1) January 7, 2025
As Zuckerberg avoids a prison cell announcing the end of fact checkers and vastly reducing censorship, I am still waiting for my ‘appeal’ against a heinous false charge with no evidence, no due process and no way to get in touch which disabled 17 years worth of work, the past ten…
Letting all those people out of Facebook jail would be a start.
Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash
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By Jo Nova
Extraordinary. Four years ago a crowd armed with flags and a helmet with horns was taking part in the greatest fake insurrection that never was. But today, Kamala certified Donald Trump’s win. Justin Trudeau announced his resignation as Prime Minister of Canada and Elon Musk is publicly tearing strips off the Prime Minister of the UK.
Twitter — X — is alive in a pile-on that has been building for a few days and is now breaking out into the real world. Finally, the worst depravity, the moral plague that infects the UK bureaucracy at every level, is being exposed. And even Keir Starmer is in the cross-hairs. He was director of the Crown Prosecution Service from 2008 – 2013. He secured some of these “token” prosecutions, but many cases were dropped, even with DNA evidence.
It is as if years of corruption and a fake media are starting to unravel. In a testament to free speech, Musk has achieved more in a few tweets than twenty years of media investigation in the UK. Starmer has finally had to answer Musk in a press conference, and dismisses demands for a full inquiry as “jumping on the bandwagon of the “Far Right”. As if only the “far right” could get a bit jumpy about rape gangs attacking teenage girls. Musk, the richest man in the world, and the incoming US presidents right-hand man, replied that Starmer is “utterly despicable”.
The Blob is coming after Musk. President Macron has accused Musk of interfering in foreign elections, to which Musk replied “Oh, like that time Starmer called @realDonaldTrump a racist and said the British government should do everything to stop him?”
By Dominic Green, The Free Press
The serial rape of thousands of English girls went on for many years. Few in power cared. Then Elon Musk started tweeting.
LONDON — The grooming and serial rape of thousands of English girls by men of mostly Pakistani Muslim background over several decades is the biggest peacetime crime in the history of modern Europe. It went on for many years. It is still going on. And there has been no justice for the vast majority of the victims.
British governments, both Conservative and Labour, hoped that they had buried the story after a few symbolic prosecutions in the 2010s. And it looked like they had succeeded—until Elon Musk read some of the court papers and tweeted his disgust and bafflement on X over the new year.
Britain now stands shamed before the world.
The scandal is already reshaping British politics. It’s not just about the heinous nature of the crimes. It’s that every level of the British system is implicated in the cover-up.
Social workers were intimidated into silence. Local police ignored, excused, and even abetted pedophile rapists across dozens of cities. Senior police and Home Office officials deliberately avoided action in the name of maintaining what they called “community relations.” Local councilors and Members of Parliament rejected pleas for help from the parents of raped children. Charities, NGOs, and Labour MPs accused those who discussed the scandal of racism and Islamophobia. The media mostly ignored or downplayed the biggest story of their lifetimes. Zealous in their incuriosity, much of Britain’s media elite remained barnacled to the bubble of Westminster politics and its self-serving priorities.
They did this to defend a failed model of multiculturalism, and to avoid asking hard questions about failures of immigration policy and assimilation.
The girls were coerced with food, or drugged, gang-raped and sometimes murdered. The horror stories occurred in as many as 50 cities and no one knows how many victims there are. It’s been going on for decades. One report estimated there were 1,400 victims in just one town (Rotherham). When fathers tried to intervene they were sometimes the ones who were arrested. The injustice is shocking. There is a Tommy Robinson documentary somewhere on X. He is in jail.
But we can celebrate that at least Canada has freed itself from the man who doxxed and froze bank accounts of everyone who even gave $10 to help the Canadian Truckers protest. Donald Trump’s tweet today:
Monastery hall image by Peter H from Pixabay
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Subsidy farms are designed to suck payments from plumbers, bakers and mums and dads.
By Jo Nova
When failure becomes a commodity…
Ponder for a moment how intrinsically unsuitable, maladapted, and worthless wind turbines are to a grid. Their failure is so comprehensive, multifaceted and inevitable, an entirely new and bizarre market was invented to reward their failures. Even when they generate electricity, if the time is wrong, the demand is low, or the network can’t handle it, they will still be paid. The grid can’t use the power, but the customer still gets slugged for something they didn’t use, or they couldn’t get. In the UK the costs for this useless power grew to nearly £400 million last year.
The largest provider of useless power was SeaGreen wind plant which made nearly twice as much from being “constrained” than from being of service. The Renewable Energy Foundation (REF) reports that SeaGreen earned £100 million for making electricity, and £200 million for being “constrained”. Effectively, the useful electricity it made costs a shocking £2.70 a kilowatt hour, after the other payments are included.
Obviously, when the government rewards failure, the market responds by planning to fail. It follows then that industrial wind plant developers would be bonkers if they weren’t looking for sites where their output would arrive at the worst possible time, or through the most remote and overloaded corner of the network.
Everything about the wind industry has “Rent Seeker” tattooed all over it.
Campaign group Net Zero Watch has condemned the renewables industry rip-off of electricity consumers. New data published by the Renewable Energy Foundation reveals that the cost of paying windfarms to switch off soared by 91% in 2024. These payments are necessary when the grid has insufficient capacity to deliver the power to market. Nearly £400 million was paid to windfarms in 2024, and much more than this in indirect costs [1].
The largest single recipient was Seagreen, a new windfarm off the coast of Angus, which received nearly £200 million in these so-called “constraint payments”.
Net Zero Watch director Andrew Montford said:
The Renewable Energy Foundation suggest that Seagreen is making around £270 for each megawatt hour it actually produces, more than three times market averages, because it’s so lucrative to be switched off. This is a truly obscene rip-off of the consumer.
Windfarms seem to be being deliberately built in Scottish waters, where they will receive lucrative payments to be switched off.
And there are huge numbers of new windfarms planned for Scottish waters, where they will be just as constrained. So the rip-off is only going to get worse.
[1] When windfarms have to switch off, their customers still need power, so it is necessary to pay a gas-fired power station to switch on to meet demand.
SeaGreen wind plant has about 114 towers in the ocean east of Scotland. It could make about 1 gigawatt in theoretical capacity if all the turbines were working, but its actual load factor was a pathetic 14%. Of course, as a subsidy farm, it’s load factor was 200%.
Imagine a coal plant that earned money every time it had to slow down because customers weren’t using as much electricity as the power plant could have made?
h/t to Andrew Montford @Dissentient
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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