In a fluke moment SA and Vic have got cheap electricity (but only thanks to Black coal, and a screwed market)

Yesterdays free advertisement for the Renewables Industry comes from Peter Martin, ANU, and was swallowed whole by The Conversation, and then repeated by The ABC. (If only the ABC had three million dollars a day to spend on checking things before it published them, they might have warned the economist that he doesn’t understand much about the grid or even the energy market.) This kind of anti-coal PsyOps might work on teenagers: Electricity has become a jigsaw. Coal is unable to provide the missing pieces

March 16, 2021 1.46pm AEDT

Yallourn, in the Latrobe Valley, provides up to 20 per cent of Victoria’s power. It has been operating for 47 years. Since late 2017 at least one of its four units has broken down 50 times. Its workforce doubles for three to four months most years to deal with the breakdowns. It pumps out 3 per cent of Australia’s carbon emissions.

And here’s Macarthur Wind Power plant, Victoria’s largest at 420-never-attained-MW. It breaks down nearly every single day:

Fig 1: Anero.id Macarthur Wind output

Martin goes on in a non-stop infomercial for wind and solar He must be aiming for 12 year old voters, or perhaps […]

What will unify the USA–  How about hatred of the corruptocrats?

The USA might just unify despite Joe Biden. There are not many things that can bring the Occupy and Antifa crowd together with Proud Boys but sticking it to the overlords of Wall Street is just the ticket.

The Gamestop monster battle between the ruling class and the peasants

The naked short sellers of Wall Street were never a healthy part of a free market — they were selling shares they didn’t own. Their predatory behaviour could create the very destruction they profited from, ruining potentially productive assets in the process. In a bonfire of gambling greed, the Predators could effectively sell more shares than even existed — betting they could drive the price lower and buy back for a bargain. But the little-guy-punters in the reddit/Wallstreetbets crowd got organized and called the bluff. They pushed the $4 stock to $400, busting the Smarty-pants players and reveling in it. There are estimates that hedge funds have already lost nearly $20 billion. One group of short-selling gurus have been burnt so badly they’ve abandoned publishing short selling research. The wake from this is just beginning.

The problem for the Democrats is that this wave is a form of Draining The Swamp. […]

Green fans, born to be scammed. Finally, jail for a $54m fake green energy ponzi schemer

There are crooks in every field, but some fields are ripe for the picking.

If you wanted to run a scam would you a/ try to fool hard-nosed money changers in a mature industry that makes a real product or b/ pick the latest touchy feely fashionable trope and offer their fans, who are not good with cause, effect or numbers, a chance to feel great and get rich too?

From 2005 to 2009 a few US graduates straight out of college promised to turn biochar into energy and save the world as well. They raised $54m, gave $17m to the early investors and then promised 484% returns to later investors. The Clinton Foundation loved them, but they never made even a kilo of biochar. Not long after that the US SEC figured the scam out and shut them down. That was 2009. Then it only took 10 years to get one sentenced to 30 months jail.

If only the media had been more skeptical:

NBC Philadelphia: 30 months in prison for $54m Green Scam

[Amanda] Knorr co-founded a company called Mantria Corp., which with the help of a slick-talking Colorado “wealth advisor” raised millions for […]

Fake fixed carbon markets feed five billion to financial sharks in EU fraud

Free markets are a hot tool, but sometimes they’re “hot” like a jackhammer at a sewing bee. Who thinks it’s smart to use a free market on a ubiquitous molecule that cycles through almost all life on Earth? Answer: people who profit from it, or people don’t know what a free market is.

About 5 years ago, the VAT tax scam with carbon credits earned financial sharks around five billion Euro. The follow up to that is that, slowly, years later, in Frankfurt about 10 people have been given prison terms. (Is that all? Only ten people and 5b, or are there others in other countries?)

This type of fraud could happen in other markets too, but it surely must be easier to accomplish in fake markets where no goods are transferred. The Global Worriers narrative is that there’s risk in unleashing carbon dioxide, but they never discuss the risks of setting up fake markets, which need a lot of regulation, auditing, checking and all that — especially when every cat and dog have a stake, and the whole market might be controlled by phytoplankton.

Every fake market we set up is a feeding lot for corruption and friends-of-the-mafia. Is […]

Turnbull is already saying climate policies are “not set in stone”. Beware the emissions trading scheme.

It’s only been a week, and already the door is open to the emissions trading monster. The Nationals may have got Turnbull to agree in writing last Tuesday that he would not change the Abbott policies, but writing things on paper is not enough, apparently it needs to be carved in stone.

If the member for Goldman Sachs still wants the fake “free” market solution — the one he threw away his leadership for in 2009 — he can keep the current coalition plan but use foreign credits to meet the targets. The global carbon market is the $2 Trillion dollar scheme to enrich financial houses, crooks and bureaucrats. It’s a whole fiat currency, ready-to-corrupt. The vested interests in this are knocking at every door. They’d be mad not too. But what kind of world do we want to live in? We don’t have to reward the do-nothing unproductive sector and the corrupt.

A carbon tax is a pointless waste, and the worst kind of carbon tax is a global trading scheme.

If Australians don’t want to be sold out in Paris, they need to protest now. I suggest writing to The Nationals, Libs, Nick Xenophon and media outlets.

Six […]

Another carbon credit fraud – $2b. The faked fixed unfree market feeds crooks and makes no difference to emissions.

More news of how the faked fixed unfree market in carbon credits feeds the people who are inclined to cheat, and may have actually increased emissions by 600 million tonnes as well (not that that matters). Around $2 billion dollars may have been wasted, but it’s worse than wasted; the money does not just evaporate. Rewarding cheating takes money from honest players of society and feeds the corrupt sector. Free markets are a powerful tool, but good tools can be used in stupid ways. And so it is with a market trying to sell units of an atmospheric-absence-of-a-gas that no one really wants or has a use for.

The only people calling for a free market in carbon are the people who don’t know what a free market is. Sometimes a free market is just a dumb idea — like when trying to run a global market in a ubiquitous gas molecule that is intrinsic to life on Earth and oceanic chemistry. Worse, we think we might do it in countries with weak law and order, and high rates of corruption. Even sillier than that, we’re trying to sell units that depend on intentions — was that a sincere new […]

This gold bar is worth its weight in … tungsten — corruption knocks on every door

A gold bar that should have weighed 1,000 grams, weighed 2 grams too little. The owner had it cut in half to reveal that the certified, stamped bar with serial numbers had tungsten rods inserted all the way through it. Tungsten, has a density of 19.35 g/cm3, so is a near-perfect match for gold (19.32 g/cm3) and it sells for just one ten thousandth of the price.

The gold bar was cut in half to reveal the tungsten rods.

The problem of fake gold bars By Felix Salmon March 25, 2012

You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to find this worrying: a 1kg gold bar, certified as 99.98% pure by XRF (X-ray fluorescence) tests, turns out to have been drilled out and largely replaced with tungsten. This bar was discovered only because it was 2 grams lighter than it ought to have been: the forgers failed to add quite enough gold to the outside of the bar to make up for the weight lost when they replaced gold with tungsten. But if they’d gotten the weight right, it would probably still be circulating today.

[Reuters]

Is this a big issue? Who knows? Gold bars are rarely audited. […]

The fickle nature of a fake free market

Carbon prices have plummeted in the US.

(So they are that much closer to their true value…)

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative sold 40.7 million permits for $1.88 each, 19 cents lower than the last auction held in March and 2 cents above the minimum allowable bid, the cap-and-trade program said on its website today. Each permit in the carbon trading program for power plants from Maryland to Maine represents one ton of carbon dioxide.

Why are prices so low? On the one hand, people have doubts about Congress creating a national market for them. Fair enough. But on the other hand, “Tim Cheung, an analyst with Bloomberg New Energy Finance said: “Demand for power hasn’t increased with the economic recovery…”

Since people aren’t buying as much electricity there are spare “permits to pollute” all over the place. But it begs the question of what kind of economic recovery it is, if it doesn’t need … power?

Can I sell you some air over China?

Meanwhile some NGOs are waking up to the scammability of permits for invisible unverifiable goods. CDMWatch was set up by a group of NGO’s and has found the firms that sell the […]

Carbon market chaos strikes again

What a surprise: The free-market-that-is-not-free leaps from one scandal to the next. In a real free market where salesmen sell something real, and buyers buy something they want, people can’t get away with cheating, or not for long.

If someone sold you a bulk carrier of coal, and it turned up empty, you’d notice.

10 out of 10 based on 3 ratings […]

The carbon casino caught with its pants down (again)

Another major carbon auditor goes down.

Norways’ DNV (Det Norse Veritas, “The Norwegian Truth”) was the largest auditor of the infamous CDMs (Clean Development Mechanisms) until it was suspended last December when it was caught selling carbon credits for projects it hadn’t checked. At the time it was so large it had approved fully half of all CDM credits on the market. Its excess workload was transferred to number two auditor, SGS, and shock, this week, SGS has been caught and suspended because it couldn’t prove it’s staff had properly vetted projects either. Indeed it couldn’t show that they were even trained to do that vetting. (Did SGS not see this coming?)

When the West offered money to buy the rights to air-with-slightly-less-carbon-dioxide-than-it-could-have-had, China and India put up their hands and said “Yes please” 900 times. And why wouldn’t they? CDMs are worth about 20% of all emissions trades, which amounted to $126 billion in 2008. Up until the global financial crisis it was doubling annually, like all good ponzi schemes do.

10 out of 10 based on 2 ratings […]