China built 47GW of coal power last year and is “way off track” to meet emissions targets

By Jo Nova

If coal is a planet wrecking problem, if it really mattered, about 30 countries are beating themselves up in acts of grandiose public flagellation, while one country is wrecking the planet and nobody cares. The truth is that no one is behaving like they think CO2 is causing a crisis. All over the West everyone wears the hippie-care coat while buying the cheapest fridges, phones and fashion they can get from the global coal furnace. And China nods the nod then keeps on adding coal power plants.

Climate change: China at risk of missing its goals unless it takes drastic action to rein in coal expansion, new research finds

Eric Ng, South China Morning Post

Last year, the Chinese energy sector’s carbon dioxide emissions increased 5.2 per cent, the same as gross domestic product, highlighting a failure to rein in energy-intensive growth, they estimated.

According to the Global Coal Plant Tracker 70 gigawatts of new coal power was built around the world in 2023. Of the 107 countries they tracked, one country built 47 gigawatts. The other 106 countries combined built 22 gigawatts. The distribution of new coal plants is thus:

EV Bubble Popping… US backs away from forced EV sales targets

By Jo Nova

History shall record the ignominious boom and bust of a car genre forced on citizens so they could produce better weather.

Things are so bad, Joe Biden has even put the brakes on his aggressive EV scheme, stepping away from the 2030 deadline. “It’s just a delay” of course. The plan would have forced car manufacturers to sell 3 EV’s for every 2 cars with a combustion engine by 2030. If customers didn’t volunteer to buy enough EV’s, companies would be forced to jack up prices of the cars everyone wants in order to cross-subsidize the discounted sales of the unpopular EV’s. Car dealers were appalled and said so.

EV sales growing in some places but falling in others. The shift has been so fast the full length of the supply chain is in turmoil. The price of lithium has fallen 90% from it’s peak, nickel has halved. Ford has sacked 1,400 people. GM has cut its workforce by 1,000. Hertz is selling one third of it’s electric fleet and cancelling $3 billion dollars worth of forward orders. A month ago, the biggest political party in the EU decided it would rather drop the ban on […]

Beijing has coldest December since records began 70 years ago

 

Image by yongbo zhu from Pixabay

By Jo Nova

China must be wishing CO2 caused some damn warming

Beijing this month has had the coldest December since they started measuring the cold in 1951. Obviously, this is because of climate change. Any day now newspapers will start to call this the tragic inevitable result of man-made climate change, reminding us of how we need to send money to renewables, and immediately, or we’ll face so much more of this.

Or maybe journalists will forget how they use every freak warm event as free-advertising for the climate religion:

Beijing breaks a seven-decade cold-weather record

BEIJING, Dec 24 (Reuters) – China’s capital Beijing has broken its record for hours of sub-zero temperatures in December dating back to 1951, after a cold wave swept swathes of the country and brought blizzards in its wake, sending temperatures towards historic lows.

As of Sunday, a weather observatory in Beijing had recorded more than 300 hours of below-freezing temperatures since Dec. 11, the most for the month since records began in 1951, according to state-backed Beijing Daily.

Naturally cold snaps are due to natural causes like a polar vortex. […]

The Chinese Communist Party linked to funding for climate activists in the US and UK

Image by Chris Feser

By Jo Nova

The Chinese Communist Party just wants to save the Earth, right?

Even though China is the largest single user of fossil fuels on Earth, for some reason The Energy Foundation China — an NGO dedicated to worrying about carbon emissions — spent nearly $4 million working on reducing US emissions instead of Sino ones. They also spent some undisclosed amount helping the Grantham Research Institute in London last year. So we have donors in a developing country giving generously to the US and UK because the rich first world is too poor to fund their own environmental philanthropy groups, right?

The Energy Foundation China (EFC) generously wants to help the US phase out coal and electrify their cars. But that’s just the nice political power that the CCP is (the kind that also builds fortified islands in shipping lanes):

CCP-Tied Group is Quietly Fueling US-Based Climate Initiatives: Tax Filings

By Thomas Catenacci , Joe Schoffstall Fox News

A climate-focused nonprofit with significant operations in Beijing has wired millions of dollars to fund climate initiatives and environmental groups in the U.S., according to tax filings first obtained […]

How many more secret warehouses of viruses are there in all our countries?

By Jo Nova

Time the CDC was razed

Thanks to an odd garden hose sticking out of a warehouse wall, the illegal, clandestine, Reedly Biolab was discovered. Chinese citizens wandered around inside with lab coats on. And the “lab” contained samples marked with names like SARS-CoV-2, Chlamydia, HIV, E. coli, Streptococcus pneumoniae, Hepatitis B and C, Dengue virus, the Rubella virus and Malaria.

So Reedly city officials in California stumbled on this warehouse almost by chance, and wanted some answers, but the FBI didn’t want to investigate and the CDC refused to test the pathogens. Most of the samples were destroyed and some 104 tons of material was “eradicated”.

Afterwards City Officials found a freezer the CDC missed. It was labeled Ebola — that most fun infectious agent with fatality rates between 25 and 90%. (Fortunately is not anywhere near as transmissible as Covid).

Jiabei “Jesse” Zhu was known as David He

The man running the lab was Jiabei “Jesse” Zhu, a citizen of China, who formed dozens of companies in Canada in order to steal intellectual property. After he was caught and hit with a $330 million dollar fine, he escaped to the USA, set up the […]

China promised to strictly control coal then started 182 coal power plants instead

By Jo Nova

Two and a half years ago President Xi promised to “strictly control coal-fired power generation projects” in China. Before this solemn pledge the CCP had approved a blockbuster 54 gigawatts of coal fired power plants in just two years. Afterwards, to show how committed they were to Net Zero principles and international agreements, they *only* approved 131 GW. As President Xi promised — he’s “strictly in control” (of a massive increase). He’s also strictly in control of the world’s manufacturing.

After being deceived, the UN, Greenpeace, and Joe Biden promptly did nothing at all — it’s not like the future of life on Earth is at stake. And John Kerry somehow saw only “agreement” and “hope”.

When faced with this environmental catastrophe, the BBC told the world about China’s green power surge instead, and only mentioned the coal in passing as an aside. China had spawned a world record in coal plant construction, but apparently these coal plants are not so bad because many are built on renewable parks, “partly as backup for all the new wind and solar farms”. As if CO2 emissions are neutralized just by the presence of the sacred talisman of “renewables”. It’s […]

UN admits World will crash through Paris Agreement goals by a factor of two for 2030

By Jo Nova

Top 20 Energy mining nations are planning to increase production, not decrease it.

Despite 151 nations signing the Paris Agreement, the UNEP has all but admitted that most of the world is not even pretending to meet their emissions promises. As is obvious in the graph below, governments of the top 20 producers of the evil coal, oil and gas are planning to dig up even more of it by 2030 than they do now. These 20 nations produce 80% of the world’s fossil fuels and somewhere out there are lots of customers.

The report appears to be a scorecard to guilt-trip the 20 naughty nations into giving up warmth, food or billions of dollars in exports, but it reads like the Paris Agreement is pure charade.

Governments plan to produce double the fossil fuels in 2030 than the 1.5°C warming limit allows

Stockholm, 8 November 2023 – A major new report published today finds that governments plan to produce around 110% more fossil fuels in 2030 than would be consistent with limiting warming to 1.5°C, and 69% more than would be consistent with 2°C.

Who are we kidding?

The Production Gap really means “The […]

China plans wind tower as big as the Eiffel Tower, blades 1000ft across (Better at killing birds and bats?)

MingYang

By Jo Nova

In the race for “free” but random energy, or perhaps for bigger status symbols, China set a new record in July with a 16MW wind tower with a rotor diameter of an awesome 853 feet (260m). It’s a bird mincer one quarter of a kilometer across. But already plans are being drawn up for an even bigger one.

What could possibly go wrong? It’s typhoon proof…

Gargantuan 22-MW wind turbine will be among history’s largest machines

By Loz Blain, New Atlas

Imagine something as tall as New York’s Chrysler building, but spinning. China’s Mingyang Smart Energy has announced plans for a colossal 22-megawatt offshore wind turbine, and standing in its presence will be an unprecedented human experience.

The new turbine proposed for 2025 by MingYang, according to Bloomberg, will have a peak output of 22 MW, and a rotor diameter over 310 m (1,017 ft), corresponding to a swept area of at least 75,477 sq m (812,425 sq ft, 14.1 NFL football fields, 60 olympic swimming pools), minus hub.

The Eiffel Tower is 324m tall.

A few months ago Siemens got bad news on turbine maintenance that was […]

Teslas being banned in some areas of China because they are a spy threat

By Jo Nova

Sometimes we just need to pay attention to what adversaries are doing.

Why would China be so worried about foreign EV’s near airports and holiday resorts of VIPs?

Winston Sterzel spent 14 years in China and has some of the best insights and connections behind the propaganda wall.

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I am unavoidably distracted by other things for the next two days. Sorry I will not be able to reply to emails or comments. Thanks to the moderators for keeping the ship running.

h/t John Connor, Furiously curious, Kim, and RexAlan

 

 

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Climate Tales: BlackRock got Exxon to divest oil fields that PetroChina wanted (which BlackRock also owned shares in)

by Jo Nova

When will the Green climate activists realize they are the minions of the Banksters, and communist governments?

In 2021 BlackRock used its shareholder influence to force Exxon to drop some gas fields under the guise of “climate activism”. BlackRock were the second largest shareholder with 6.6% of Exxon at the time. They bragged about getting three new activist board members elected to help Exxon in the “energy transition”. But they also happened to be major investors in PetroChina too with 7% of the Chinese oil and gas company and BlackRock didn’t seem to care too much about their ESG policy. Conveniently, PetroChina was “poised” to buy many of the fields that the giant US oil company was getting its arm twisted to sell.

Naturally the Stupid-Media wrote this up as a win for koalas and whales or something:

It’s like sabotage of national assets

While BlackRock pretend to care about the environment, they were potentially undermining a US company, their US shareholders, and own pension fund clients, all to get a better deal, perhaps, with “favours” of who-knows-what for a foreign company, which is a subsidiary of the Chinese State CNPC. We can only speculate, […]

BRICS expand to nearly half the world’s population, ask for climate money, free tech and a free pass

Written by Jo Nova

Are we paying attention yet?

The BRICS nations (in red, below) have just accepted six new members — Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Argentina, Iran, Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates (green). The block now includes 46% of the population of Earth. They make 43% of the worlds oil, and about a quarter of the traded goods. The BRICS are going to abandon the US dollar and another 20 nations have expressed a desire to join. The India Narrative, called it “a new world order”.

In other news, the BRICS groups said they’d quite like the West to keep giving them money and free climate technologies to save the world from climate change, (while the West battles the climate demons and hobbles its own economies). The BRICS promise they will absolutely, definitely, maybe get serious too in a few decades.

While they’re busy burning record amounts of coal, they oppose any trade barriers done by the developed world in the name of climate change. We wouldn’t want things like pollution, child labor or slavery to get in the way of a good trade would we?

When President Xi brags that they are the “global majority” it’s just […]

“Turbinegeddon” — Siemens loses €4.5 billion because collecting free energy is not cheap

Siemens Gamesa

By Jo Nova

The end of the naive era of hope in Wind Power fairies

Remember how they said wind energy would keep getting cheaper? Only a year ago academics were still writing papers about the “Moore’s Law” miraculous future of wind power. Only we appear to have already hit the point where bigger is not better. Two years ago the former head of Siemens bizarrely warned that “Wind power risks becoming too cheap” and Reuters, bizarrely, published it.

Meanwhile production costs are rising for the offshore variety too, and Siemens is scrambling to delay deliveries, so it can fix problems first…

The Washington Post, a big fan of the “Green transition”, puts in an admirable effort to make excuses for the bad luck of the wind industry — anything but admit that this failure may represent real mechanical limits to the collection of erratic, low density energy in the most hostile settings on Earth.

These machines are so fragile they cannot just sit under their own weight motionless, less they get permanent brinelling damage to the bearings. And tiny micro-oscillations can create False Brinelling.

Wind ‘Turbinegeddon’ Is a Troubling Climate Omen

by Chris […]

How to paralyze a city with one easy EV “update”

BohunkaNika

By Jo Nova

Imagine giving an enemy the ability to track your VIPs movements and listen to their conversations in the car? Adversaries could learn national secrets, play mayhem on the markets with insider tips or just figure out who was having an affair with a view to blackmail and extortion. Worse, what if your adversaries could electronically upload software to your vehicles and shut down even 1 car in 100 on the major national highways — bringing the road network to a grinding halt?

Where is James Bond when you need him? This would have been a great script.

Thanks to NetZeroWatch:

China To Crash EV Market and Paralyse Motorists in UK

Michael Curzon, European Conservative

A new report warns of a major impending security risk in handing Beijing the power to immobilise thousands of cars owned by Britons—and many others across Europe. Professor Jim Saker of the Institute of the Motor Industry, quoted in The Times, said “the threat of connected electric vehicles flooding the country could be the most effective Trojan horse that the Chinese establishment has.” There would, he added, be no way to prevent Chinese state-owned manufacturers from […]

The Spy problem with not-so-smart solar inverters

….

By Jo Nova

Soon we may have hackable transmitters and receivers on every roof…

When storms hit Adelaide last November the first thing the AEMO did was ask people to switch off their own solar panels so they didn’t swamp and crash the fragile wounded grid. Some 400MW of rooftop PV was also remotely shut down through the combination of smart inverters and voltage controls. Imagine if a foreign power could launch a cyber attack — one that switched a large energy source on or off at the wrong moment?

Last year “a hacker gained access to PV systems in the Netherlands that were operated via a monitoring tool from China’s Solarman“. That meant a Dutch government agency was suddenly called on to investigate and report on the risks. According to PV magazine:

“The hacker was able to view the personal data of Dutch customers, create new customers and delete existing users,” reported Tweakers. “He was also able to find out how much electricity customers’ solar panels generate via GPS coordinates, and download, adjust and upload inverter firmware.”

In May this year a report by the Dutch National Digital Infrastructure Inspectorate (RDI) found that many […]

Greatest emitter in world says it will “follow it’s own path” which means, emissions-on-a-rocket, and no one cares

By Jo Nova

Does the planet matter or doesn’t it?

Today the headlines read “As the world sizzles, China says it will deal with climate its own way“, as if it made sense that the planet could be burning up and the largest emitter was clearly steaming ahead anyway. But no one got too upset in the Washington Post, or anywhere else either.

From a carbon-believer’s point of view this should be the main game, the big crisis, the drama to launch a thousand protests and fund-raisers. But there are no encampments outside the Chinese embassies, no one is calling for boycotts on Chinese goods “until they act”, and no people are gluing themselves to wharves to stop “the boats of doom” loading and unloading.

China’s intentions are pretty clear:

China’s output of carbon dioxide is set to reach a new record high in 2023. It grew 4 percent in the first quarter this year alone.

Apparently China is committed to deadlines but not to a path, or a tempo, or a public plan, or any kind of transparency:

China remained “unwaveringly” committed to reaching its peak in carbon emissions before 2030 and becoming […]

Thousands of EV’s rotting in fields in China

By Jo Nova

China is the leader in EV car production but it’s not quite the success you might think it is.

The CCP was apparently determined to claim that they are making more EV’s than Tesla. But in order to get the EV subsidies, companies are producing vast numbers of cars no one wants to buy. It seems these cars are registered, falsely listed as “sold” and driven 30 miles to a graveyard to presumably rot, or spontaneously combust, whichever comes first. After thirteen years of one particular subsidy, supposedly only worth 3-6% of the best selling car, the government has paid out nearly $15 billion, which seems like it would buy quite a few fields of Neta V EVs.

“China is the land of shortcuts and facades”

Winston Sterzel has an insiders view on China, and claims there are also fly-by-night investment schemes which appear, inflate and disappear, in get-rich-quick projects purely designed to scam investors out of their money. In 2018 bicycle sharing schemes led to mountains of rotting bikes, and so it is again — this time with glass, heavy metals and rare earths.



Who knows what the real price of an […]

The Sunday Times says “bioweapon” very quietly

By Jo Nova

Ten years of lies, deception, and dangerous experiments

Imagine if our adversaries were splicing together mutant viruses and testing them on humanized mice for years in order to make them more pathogenic, and our top researchers were helping them, our government was funding them, and we had years of warnings that the experiments were dangerous.

The Sunday Times says “bioweapon” very quietly, but it’s in print in a long feature article with plenty of ugly details. The headline is very sedate given the gravity. The world would have reacted very differently in January 2020…

An Act of War or an accident of war? What really went on inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid erupted

Johnathon Calvert and George Abuthnott, The Sunday Times

Fresh evidence drawn from confidential files reveals Chinese scientists spliced together deadly pathogens shortly before the pandemic, the Sunday Times Insight team report.

For starters — here’s a map of the places where people were reporting on social media that they had covid in January 2020. While everyone was talking about sea-food markets, the big clue was there all the time.

These hot spots were […]

China wants what we have

By Jo Nova

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 lucky country needs to prepare

Alistair Rae, Stats Maps and Pix.

The rulers of China would be irrational not to want more land to feed people, and control of more resources. Australia has […]

A map that might change the way you think about the world

By Jo Nova

Where do people live?

These marvelous spike maps mark out a 3D representation of the population density on each two-kilometer-square pixel of Earth’s surface. There are no outlines for countries, yet for the most part we can still see where the land meets the sea.

Credit goes to Alistair Rae, formerly a professor of urban studies and planning at the University of Sheffield. He used the EU’s population density data with the mapping tool Aerialod to create these glorious 3D maps.

And the map shouts “India”.

UPDATE: Do click to see the larger maps!

Alistair Rae, Stats, Maps n Pix Click to enlarge | CC 2.0

This is the global distribution of 8 billion people. The abundance of South East Asia is undeniable, as is the emptiness of the Sahara and the vacancy of Siberia. Antarctica is an invisible continent.

Australia and New Zealand are barely there. We can see how isolated Perth Australia is (where I live).

Annotated by Jo to show friends in the USA where Perth is.

Hawaii and Auckland likewise, stand apart.

Most maps originally came from Alastair Rae on Twitter in 2020 and later from the Visual Capitalist […]

Perth, Sunday: Steven Mosher speaks — Australia is on the frontline

A very rare chance means the extraordinary Steven Mosher will be speaking in Perth tomorrow (Sunday) for the CNI. Tickets are free. (He is presenting on other topics in Sydney and Melbourne.)

Australia on the Frontline

Why China’s Dream is the New Threat to World Order

2.30 – 4.30pm, Sunday 19th March

Royal Perth Yacht Club, Crawley, Perth, Western Australia.

Steven W. Mosher is the President of the Virginia based Population Research Institute (1995 to present) and the author of a number of books on China, including Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream is the New Threat to World Order, recently published in a new Australian edition by Wilkinson Press. His other books include Hegemon: China’s Plan to Dominate Asia and the World and China Misperceived: American Illusions and Chinese Reality.

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