JoNova
A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
Jo appreciates your support to help her keep doing what she does. This blog is funded by donations. Thanks!
Follow Jo's Tweets To report "lost" comments or defamatory and offensive remarks, email the moderators at: support.jonova AT proton.me
Statistics
Here is a fun one. They want to build an enormous lithium battery storage facility just outside of Boston. This article, which I advised on, says that is a very bad plan because these things spontaneously explode or burn and cannot be extinguished.
https://www.massfiscal.org/hazard_warning_for_everett_s_lithium_battery_park
241
Delusionists pushing lithium b.s. into people’s lives and neighbourhoods need to be prescribed lithium to calm their manic erratic episodes (MEE) – the grandeur is all in their heads, as is the boiling and the melting and the runaway tipping points…
Besides, are there any witches left in Boston in 2025?
200
CO2 is the new witch.
The parallels are amazing.
130
If/when there is a fire, there’ll have to be mass evacuations , the emissions from a lithium battery fire are very toxic.
110
Xi Jinping’s energy plan for China: Everything, everywhere, all at once
WILL GLASGOW
Solar projects as big as Singapore. Eleven nuclear power stations signed off in a single meeting.
A fleet of more than 1000 thermal coal-fired power stations … and still growing.
As Australia heads to a federal election that pitches nuclear power against a ramp up of renewables, China is taking an everything, everywhere, all at once approach to its electricity mix.
To travel around China is to witness a rollout of renewables on a scale beyond anywhere else in the world. You can see it from the window of every domestic flight or fast train trip.
Yet all this new solar, wind, hydro and nuclear power is still not enough to meet the growing electricity demands of China’s 1.4 billion people and its economy that remains for so many products the “factory of the world”.
New thermal coal-fired power stations continue to make up the difference.
“Forget about kicking thermal [coal] out of the mix,” David Fishman, a Shanghai-based energy consultant, says. “China is just trying to cover its demand growth with renewables.”
Chinese energy experts call it the country’s “ ‘two-way’ growth trend”, a simultaneous rollout of renewables and coal. Privately, many are aware it is becoming increasingly conspicuous.
Unlike in Australia or the rest of the rich world, China’s gargantuan electricity demand is still growing — even as the Chinese economy slows. This year it has risen by some 7 per cent, a rate that has surprised many long-term analysts of China’s energy market.
The sums in China are staggering. Just the growth in Chinese electricity usage this year was around three times Australia’s entire electricity consumption.
For all the hype about its raft of “world’s biggest” renewable projects, China is transitioning its electricity network at a far slower rate than Australia.
80
Desire to dominate
Xi Jinping outlined his approach in a major speech in 2022 at a twice-a-decade party congress. “We will advance initiatives to reach peak carbon emissions in a well-planned and phased way,” he told senior comrades.
Xi said China would follow “the principle of building the new before discarding the old”.
As is Australia, China is blessed with huge coal reserves. Unlike Australia, Beijing is unapologetic about making the most of them and the same with its gas reserves.
“Coal will be used in a cleaner and more efficient way, and greater efforts will be made to explore and develop petroleum and natural gas, discover more untapped reserves, and increase production,” said Xi in that same keynote speech.
It’s not as catchy as Donald Trump’s “Drill, baby, drill” catchphrase but it’s the same idea.
Beijing has set a renewables target of 40 per cent for 2030, a modest increase from the just over 35 per cent it now derives from hydro, wind, solar and nuclear.
The Albanese government has set a target of 82 per cent by 2030, twice the current level.
China is changing its energy mix but the world’s mightiest one-party state is doing it on its terms.
There are no university students or former government ministers in kayaks blockading its coal ports.
70
NICK CATER
Cold, hard energy lessons for Australia in UK’s grim winter’s tale
Britain’s last coal-fired power station closed at the end of September, throwing households to the mercy of the weather.
Sadly, Britain’s green activists have no plans to follow coal into retirement. The curse, or joy, of being a fighter for progressive causes is that your work is never done.
“The priority now is to move away from gas as well,” Friends of the Earth’s Tony Bosworth told the Guardian. Friends of the Earth, like every other international green activist group, also opposes nuclear power.
This begs the question:
How will Britain keep the lights on without the three sources capable of providing baseload power?
Bosworth’s clownish answer is posted on FoE’s website. “We have an abundance of natural resources like wind and solar,” he says.
“They’ll go on forever, and we won’t be reliant on expensive gas and oil.”
Last week, an Arctic front hit with a vengeance, reducing temperatures to as low as minus-20 and burying parts of England in snow.
The diminishing number of Brits who could afford to do so turned up the heating.
Demand for electricity rose to a high of 50GW on Wednesday, well above the 44.4GW peak predicted by the National Energy System Operator in its winter outlook, published just as 2GW of coal generation capacity from Ratcliffe-on-Soar was vanishing forever. Meanwhile, wind speeds fell, as they often do in winter when the Polar Vortex turns limp.
Where do the system operators turn next after scrounging 4GW of nuclear power from France and Belgium, and 1.5GW of hydro from Norway?
They turn to gas, the demon fossil fuel activists want to ban. Between Thursday and Saturday, 55 per cent of electricity came from gas and just 11 per cent from wind and solar. The output from Britain’s nuclear reactors hummed along at 4.7GW, but at 10 per cent of total output it only touches the sides of Britain’s baseload thirst.
At the start of the century, when Britain’s baseload was supplied by coal, the country was blessed with abundant supplies of natural gas.
50
OldOzzie,
This bit was interestingly worded:
They say this like it’s the most natural thing in the world that our electricity demand isn’t growing. Australia’s electricity demand would skyrocket if prices came back down to 15c/kWh.
If they came down to 5c/kWh we might even get some industry back. But forget industry, we’ve become a service economy (which apparently means we get worse service than ever before).
120
So which coal fired plant is going to charge the battery?
Hasn’t anyone in government joined the dots yet? Batteries don’t make energy. At best they just absorb some for later consumption, (after losses).
Batteries for the grid are like a 20,000 litre tank placed in a desert for the purposes of providing drinking water for a town with a population of a 10,000.
The tank can meet the drinking water demand for the people for a couple of hours but after that they soon realise that the tank is empty. There is nothing to fill it. And the people are wondering why it cost $20B.
And now the government want to install more batteries.
50
We are living in an age where spending real money for imaginary benefits and real risks is seen as a virtue.
280
Fire officials say that homeless camp wildfires doubled from 2020 to 2023 to 13,909. There were 24 “homeless related” fires in LA County responded to every day of 2021. https://pjmedia.com/victoria-taft/2025/01/08/what-started-las-firestorm-we-have-some-ideas-n4935774
130
Something that you get with a ‘Sanctuary City’, demorat idiocy knows no bounds.
100
The likely arsonist of the 2021 Palisades fire was one homeless Ramon Santos Rodriguez, 48.
60
ABPI figures in fact indicate that between 2020 and 2023 the RCGP received more than £500k from Pfizer.
Having failed to disclose that it had a financial relationship with Pfizer, @rcgp gave unequivocal, supposedly independent, advice and encouragement for the CMOs to deploy Pfizer’s product to children across the UK: “The Royal College of General Practitioners have consulted widely across GPs, and there is a strong consensus in favour of vaccinating 12-15s”
https://sanityunleashed.substack.com/p/our-institutions-are-hollowed-out-1cd
180
https://www.fresheconomicthinking.com/p/waste-is-great-food-waste-is-better
Consider that in our battle against waste (or more specifically, litter) we have outlawed disposable plastic straws.
Now, we get paper straws that are packaged in plastic to protect them during distribution to get perfectly preserved paper straws that don’t even perform the function that we value.
Surely this is more wasteful, economically and in terms of what we value, than a straw that does work, regardless of the material it is made from.
180
The purpose of banning plastic packaging and convenience products in Australia was not to stop an imaginary litter problem but part of the Left’s strategy of lowering our standard of living by the removal of convenience products (apart from many other strategies).
Leftists claim that plastic in oceans comes from Western countries like Australia and therefore convenience products should be banned. Anybody who has ever been to a Third World country knows exactly where plastic in oceans comes from. Littering and throwing rubbish in rivers is a behavioural problem in Third World countries. That’s the true problem that needs to be addressed.
And in Australia where container deposits schemes operate, that has meant that all products sold in a plastic or glass container have increased in price and continue to do so because of the rising cost of the scheme. And most people continue to put their containers in the recycling bin as they did before because it is not worth the effort to collect and store (using a large amount of space) a large enough number of containers to take them to a deposit centre. So they lose their “deposit” anyway. Who actually does get it anyway?
And the Left also told numerous lies in their campaign to ban supermarket plastic bags. For a start they were biodegradable anyway. Secondly they lied (as the Left do whenever they open their mouths) by calling them “single use”. Everyone I know had a multitude of uses for three bags such as small garbage bin liners and many other uses.
There is no demonstrable problem in Australia that banning these plastic convenience products have actually solved. We just get daily reminders of how the Left destroy EVERYTHING they touch.
230
Of course the biggest worry is that your plastic straws will end up polluting the beaches of Bali, and the rest of the Orient, where nobody gives a damn about pollution or helping to prevent pollution .
https://www.skynews.com.au/world-news/worst-trash-wave-huge-amounts-of-rubbish-washes-ashore-at-balis-jimbaran-beach-as-locals-clean-up-the-mess/news-story/1ec9037f87a6e49aedb877273ded9d0c
40
Here is a very good video from Craig Kelly talking about the Australian federal government’s fuel economy tax which will dramatically increase the cost of larger vehicles and also reduce the range available in Australia.
What a disgraceful tax.
Have the fake conservative Liberal Party said they’ll remove it if they get elected?
https://youtu.be/9j7MgPahA2w
170
The disconnect from reality, scientific and engineering knowledge, and basic human decency of 99% our politicians is staggering.
120
More good news from the US.
More fightback against the Left.
Victims of childhood “gender transitions” are now suing the doctors who mutilated and sterilised them.
https://youtu.be/THjQz045H4k
And TRUMP has said he’ll ban transgendering of children.
150
Here is a video by a person who describes himself as a MAGA supporting LGB comedian.
He’s talking about the outbreak of free speech in the US due to the TRUMP Revolution and how ultimately nothing bad will come from it.
He makes a lot of sense despite his unconventional looks with a lot of facial tattoos and piercings.
https://youtu.be/3ECLowaNfsY
40
Lionel Nation talks about the DEI disaster and the LA Fire Department.
https://youtu.be/m1u1w1FR_7Y
Matt Walsh talks about the DEI disaster and the LA Fire Department.
https://youtu.be/7gKqeKLx_HU
Clinton Jaws talks about the DEI disaster and the LA Fire Department.
https://youtu.be/pFFjiCcc1Qc
20
In the US companies who are responsible to their shareholders and also for safety reasons are rapidly dropping their skin colour and gender based employment policies, otherwise known as DEI.
But in one of the wokest countries on the planet, Australia, we continue with a vengeance.
I have a friend who was in a major Australian Government department who, upon being offered a redundancy package, was advised to take it because as a white male there was virtually no chance of promotion. In a section meeting it was also stated that they were aiming for a staff mix of 40% male, 40% female and 20% “other”.
In the same department my friend worked for, a head of division was appointed who was in her late 20’s and had an impossibly long list of scientific publications for that age, supposedly authored by her. Rather than personal authorship, it’s likely that as she was being groomed and promoted through the ranks as the DEI star, she would have demanded her name be put on any publications produced by her staff, regardless of her not being personally involved in the work or even understanding it.
120
‘Promotion, I don’t want no promotion, I just want to stick around and annoy the idiot DEI faction.’
00
FWIW
News for “ElBowen”
“Europe Dominates Global Nuclear Energy Investment”
“The vast energy potential and clean nature of generating power through nuclear reactions have caused a surge in global demand, with nearly every region increasing nuclear energy investment by at least 50% over the last five years.”
More at
https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/europe-dominates-global-nuclear-energy-investment
70
This is the stuff Albo and Bowen think doesnt work and is unaffordable. They need to send the rest of the world a memo. Wont anybody say “oh noes! We are falling behind” on this one?
https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/europe-dominates-global-nuclear-energy-investment
60
Australia is notably absent.
Australia with about 28% of the world’s uranium has zero percent of the world’s nuclear power.
Don’t forget it was the fake conservative Liberals that banned nuclear power twice. First they stopped a nuclear power reactor already under construction in 1971. Then Howard banned nuclear power in law in 1998.
The cluelessness of our Uniparty politicians is staggering.
110
FWIW – more covid scene
“The Appalling Treatment of Covid Vaccine Whistleblower Dr. Byram Bridle”
https://dailysceptic.org/2025/01/11/the-appalling-treatment-of-covid-vaccine-whistleblower-dr-byram-bridle/
80
From a balcony above St Peter’s Square an old man mumbles “Suffer the little children” – oops wrong quote, that was Joe Biden – from the Vatican Il Papa said “I am close to the people of Los Angeles … I pray for all of you”, via Reuters/RNZ.
How ‘close’ he is could be taken many ways: he has friends in high places (webcams as well?), he respects all lifestyles, he loves Moses and rainbows too, and he admonishes sinners to ‘save the planet’ from a fiery end by becoming action heroes for Mother Earth…
Yeah but there’s no water in the hydrants.
60
But that’s not important.
The important thing was that they were painted with woke rainbows.
Only a “MAGA supporting redneck far right uneducated racist” (/sarc) would expect water in fire hydrants and not rainbows painted on them.
https://x.com/ryancduff/status/1877026575117361307
110
Colourful but totally useless, now who does that remind me of.
30
20
Labor’s UK Ambassador Stephen Smith, appointed by Labor PM Tennis Albo, going into Bat for Australia
40
Everyone needs to relax. The World is still going on and spinning around our Life saving Giving Sun. The centre of of our Solar System is not Planet Earth. It is the SUN.
Copernicus knew it in the 1500s. Smart Man. And the Catholic Church who were the worst Astronomers ever got it WRONG. It has taken so long for the Vatican to having so many worldly treasures to get it right. How about selling all of that wealth into a World Trust Fund where the income helps the POOR? How about that?
The Church like the Climate Alarmists now don’t want to know any facts. LOL. Or help the Poor.
31
I have lived in the Philippines and have seen the Catholic Church at work.
All of the Priests eat at the best eating places and drive the latest model cars. The Churches are very well looked after. And the poor people who are so poor and who are so brain washed into the Religion, they still give money to the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church gives peanuts back to the Poor and sends a load of money to the Vatican.
The Vatican has massive wealth. Do they need it. Would God and Jesus want them to have it? LOL. It is a Racket just like the Mafia.
What a load of Rollocks……………..And you know what I mean. The letter B for an R
10
Did anyone notice that the poorest countries are usually the most Catholic, are they Catholic because they are poor or are they poor because they are Catholic.
10
SMH running another hit piece on Musk, this time by some woman who was running campaigns for the Greens in Germany and the Libs here. Her company is called “Agenda C”.
“Having, in his own estimation, rescued American democracy, his disrupter instincts are searching for opportunities elsewhere….We don’t need him to disrupt the stinking little hypocrisies in our politics – we know what they are. We can and should be doing it ourselves, without the pitfalls of misinformation that come from relying mainly on X for information.”
Her overall picture is that he is given too much credence by ordinary people when he disrupts politics, while she would rather the politicians handled it all themselves and continued to pay her millions of dollars for their campaigns. Musk might look too hard at what she does!
https://www.smh.com.au/technology/meddling-musk-should-discover-his-limitations-he-s-not-the-messiah-20250110-p5l3fg.html
50
Shouldn’t be too hard for NSW Police to round up the usual suspects in Newtown Syn@gogue attack
Here’s the CCTV from police. It appears to be a magnified image from very early in the video.
If you can lift a better image, please do. pic.twitter.com/P6cL1mA5PN
— Dr David Adler (@DrDavidAdler1) January 12, 2025
Anyone else think the smaller person in the Video is a Female?
00
Shouldn’t be too hard for NSW Police to round up the usual suspects in Newtown Syn@gogue attack
Surely the Question should be why isn’t NSW Labor Premier Chris Minns putting this Image enlarged out to all media – Newspapers/TV etc?
Chris Minns says ‘an accelerant’ possibly used during Newtown Syn@gogue attack amid ‘massive escalation’ of antis@mitism
James Harrison Business Reporter
Authorities are concerned an accelerant was possibly used in an attack on a Sydney syn@gogue as the NSW Premier lamented a “massive rise” in antis@mitism.
“Obviously this is an escalation in antis@mitic crime,” Mr Minns said.
“Police and the government remain very concerned that an accelerant may have been used in Newtown on Saturday morning.
“This would lead everyone to believe that this escalation is very concerning not just for the J@wish community but for the wider community.”
Mr Minns said if these attacks were to continue there would be additional government support for security at J@wish institutions and highlighted “comprehensive criminal investigation” examining these antis@mitic attacks, which included Counter-Terrorism Command, State Crime and local resources.
“This is obviously a fraught time in the city’s history, but we need to stick together,” Mr Minns told reporters.
When questioned on claims from pro-Palestine groups the government was giving disproportionate attention to the rise in antis@mitism compared to isl@mophobia, the Premier noted the intense rise in bigotry against J@wish people since late 2023.
“I want to make it clear however that the information that we’ve been provided by security agencies is that there’s been a massive escalation in antis@mitic hate crime in Australia since the 9th October two years ago,” Mr Minns said.
00
As I posted yesterday, most fires are caused by arsonists.
https://saltbushclub.com/2025/01/10/wildfires-climate-or-criminal/#more-2917
Check it out…………
Just a few days into January 2025, the season has already started, with a major fire in Los Angeles; typically, the usual “catastrophic” fire season begins around May. Seven fires, including on the iconic Sunset Boulevard, have created significant damage, with tens of thousands evacuated, and only two under control (am 9/01). The city, with a population of 4 million has a massive urban sprawl, resulting in an area 50% bigger than New York.
The cause is yet to be evaluated, with temperatures as low as 3 degrees it is difficult to relate it to excess heat, no doubt some will try; strong winds are exacerbating the damage, with already (Day 2) a thousand homes lost. The timing of onset of fires, and their multiple inner-city sites, are all strongly suggestive of arson.
The Northern Hemisphere summer bushfire outbreak in 2024, had begun in Portugal, the Government declaring a state of emergency, and the massive scale needing help from outside countries. The Government believed many fires were started by accident or intent, Reuters reported 14 arrested, with 125,000 hectares, burned.
Major bushfires in Greece threatened Athens in August 2024, and again, led to requests for help from other countries; the inevitable cry of “global warming” ensued. The previous year’s summer fire-storm in Greece, in 2023, had led to 140 arrests, officials had blamed negligence or arson for the majority of the blazes. Estimates are that 60% of fires in the Italian summer of 2023 were also intentionally lit, with 22 arrests. Spain’s Asturias region was hit by 90 fires that year, most believed to be lit by arsonists, labelled “fire terrorists”.
Of over 6000 fires in 2023 in Canada, were blamed on climate change, half were believed to result from human accidents, some shown to have been caused by arson. Interestingly, a Canadian man, who claimed fires were deliberately started by government agencies, was, in January 2024, himself convicted of starting 14 fires the previous year. The all-time record holder, inevitably from the US, is John Orr, believed to have lit over 2000 fires between 1984 and 1991.
There were no lightning strikes in September 2023, when a series of small fires in the East of Australia joined up into a mega event, most were man-made. In the New Year, before the rains came, an outbreak in North Adelaide was a suspicious event, and an arrest made, several fires near Geelong in January 2024, were again being treated as suspicious. Fires, in March on the outskirts of Perth in WA, resulted in arrests made. There were also suspicious fires on the Sunshine Coast and the Whitsundays. In the Northern Territory one man was charged over 18 fires, with dozens more suspected, arson was reported in central NSW, with 24 charged. Fortunately, and unanticipated by BoM, rain stopped play!
20
There are sick puppies scattered all though our society, then there are fire bugs, some join the MFB or the Rural Fire Brigade to be closer to the action, and perhaps ‘respond’ to their handiwork.
It’s a real sickness and there’s heaps of them.
00