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By Jo Nova
Call it an anti-subsidy to kill the product the customers want, and call it an anti-tariff to help foreign manufacturers
The Suicide of The West continues apace.
All around the West governments are concocting rules that force car manufacturers to sell a certain ratio of EV’s to petrol cars. In the UK if they breach the ratio they’ll be fined a savage £15,000 for every petrol car. In other words, if customers don’t voluntarily want to buy as many EV’s as the government thinks they should, the rules will force the car manufacturers to restrict the petrol car sales. Obviously, what’s left of the free market will pay big money for the rare and desirable petrol cars that are permitted to be sold. Soon only the wealthy will be able to afford them, while the riff raff have to catch a bus.
One Ford manager is helpfully telling the world what these rules mean:
Ford threatens to restrict petrol car sales to meet the UK’s EV targets
By Tom Jervis, Auto Express
Introduced at the start of this year, the ZEV mandate requires manufacturers to ensure that a minimum percentage of their […]
…
By Jo Nova
About 90% of solar panels installed in Germany come from China, and earlier this year one of the last solar panel manufacturers closed in Germany. Last week, what was left of the industry begged for mercy (and subsidies) which they didn’t get. Now another German solar panel manufacturer has closed down.
For some cruel reason German factories which are close to their customers, can’t compete with distant foreign factories which have access to slave labor, fossil fueled shipping and cheap coal fired electricity?
The bigger question, seemingly, is how did the country that invented the printing press, diesel engines, and the theory-of-relativity get fooled by such a stupid ploy? Someone told them they could save the world with unreliable energy, so they converted their generators to unreliable ones, only to discover that they can’t afford to use unreliable generators to make the unreliable generators they need to keep saving the world?
The only government stupider than Germany is the one that has already seen how badly this worked out and announces they’re going to do the same thing. Australia is not only ten years too late, but China has flooded the market to the […]
By Jo Nova
The term “Net Zero” has become a dirty word
It’s a win. The climate wars will rage on, but the Net Zero spell isn’t working any more, so they will have to find a newer one without such a smell. The sacred propaganda term that was going to save all life on Earth until five minutes ago is more than just a worn out advertising slogan, the skeptics campaign against it has made it a toxic term. Like ESG, it’s become a liability.
The people know “Net Zero” is not just a fluffy footprint on a forest, but an attack on their wallet and their lifestyle. It’s a great credit to GWPF and NetZeroWatch in the UK for turning this phrase back against the infinitely well funded financial-house-and-government-alliance.
Net zero has become unhelpful slogan, says outgoing head of UK climate watchdog
The Guardian (of the ruling class)
The concept of “net zero” has become a political slogan used to start a “dangerous” culture war over the climate, and may be better dropped, the outgoing head of the UK’s climate watchdog has warned.
“Net zero has definitely become a slogan […]
By Jo Nova
It’s just another signpost on the way to the Great Green Economy Downunder
We’re watching the renewable bubble pop around us. Tritium was the wonder-child Australian technology business that built fast chargers for electric vehicles. It took 20 years to create, and only two years to unravel into receivership. At its peak in 2021, it launched on the NASDAQ and was worth $2 billion, now it is insolvent.
The Driven, explains just how big it was:
The company says it has sold more than 13,000 DC fast chargers in more than 40 countries. At its peak it claimed to be the biggest maker of fast chargers in the US with a 30 per cent market share (unclear if this included the Tesla network), and a 75 per cent share in Australia, and one of the top three in Europe.
When it launched in 2021, shares were selling for $2,500 each. The current price is $1.35.
Tritium Share Price. NASDAQ
Tritium is the perfect emblem for the Technocratic Planned Economy
Only one year ago the Prime Minister of Australia was raving about them, and using Tritium as the posterchild to sell […]
By Jo Nova
There is such a glut in solar panels, the Financial Times reported that people in Germany and the Netherlands are using them as cheap garden fencing, even though the angle is not good for catching the sun. Though given that there is also a glut of solar power at lunchtime this is probably a “good” thing.
Solar Panels
Great time for the Australian Government to spend a billion dollars setting up a giant solar panel production industry, eh?
With exquisite timing the Australian Labor government has just announced a Solar Sunshot for Our Regions. It our Prime Ministers ambition for us to be a “Renewable Energy Superpower” twenty years too late. One third of homes in Australia already have solar panels, but only 1% were made here. The NSW State government will also lob $275 million to support the embryonic industry and workers, most of whom will presumably be doorknocking to give away the panels with lamingtons. After we finish building garden fences, we might be using them to build sheds and cubby houses.
The big solar rush is over…
The global frenzy to install solar panels has suddenly flattened out last year when it […]
Youtube link
By Jo Nova
Trust us, Kids, We’re Climate ‘Educators’
Tony Thomas has uncovered a plot in Tasmania to turn our schools into leftist activist assembly lines (more than they already are). Luckily it appears to be so boring, no one is watching. (OK, that’s hardly luck, just a fact of life. Beating people up with propaganda is, by definition, and especially after 30 years, not that exciting.) But Curious Climate Schools is still harming children and teachers too, and wasting the taxes of bus drivers, builders and bakers.
In the end, publicly funded academics are shamelessly exploiting eight year olds. They work on their youthful anxiety and naivete (and their dreadful science education) to create political lobby groups which will help academics get more funding. Vote for Big Government! Vote for Climate Change Grants! Write letters to the M.P. you are too young to vote for! It is disgustingly self serving, though all the Doctors of Climate Trauma would be mortified to hear that. They are saving the world, after all. They are the saints who collect salaries. The prophets on academic pay scales.
It’s just Big Government advertising itself, but disguised as “education”:
The […]
By Jo Nova
Martin Durkin’s work will be studied one day like Thucydides as a record of a bizarre moment in human history. It is so quintessentially British. I thought I’d seen it all in the climate debate, but this is so well done, perfect for a curious, matter-of-fact mind. It pulls you along, with timeless nostalgic footage in a classic English delivery, calmly unravelling mythology. It will resonate with people who remember cities, cars and great documentaries of long ago.
Because it’s not angry or activist it’s a gift you can send to friends who are science nerds, or history buffs, or who remember the sixties. Send it to people with teenagers who have no idea the curriculum hides a half a billion years of history. Send it to green friends, who have no idea a third of the food made in Africa rots before it can be eaten without fossil fuels and plastic to preserve and transport it.
Imagine the effect if this was shown at schools.
It’s the story of how an activist movement became a big industry, they say. But I can’t help thinking it was a big industry that grew an activist movement…
The […]
By Jo Nova
There are lots of ways to screw up, delay, distort and blur a medical study
And the Principle Trial did all of them.
So here we are, years too late, getting another nanomole of truth squeezed through the distortion field. The Principle Trial gave people ivermectin far too late, and told them not to take it with food, both of which stop it being useful — yet despite that, ivermectin still saved lives and produced a statistically significant benefit. So the researchers sat on the results for a year and a half, then wrote it up with the opposite conclusion. Welcome to modern industrial medicine where the experiments are just a theatre performance. The government pretends to care and set up a big study, while they design it to fail and then hide and twist the results.
The point of doing experiments is not to find the truth but to kill it. If the crowd is baying for answers, what better way to silence them than to say you are doing a long indepth “glorious” study that takes years to complete?
It was naked sabotage…
Viruses multiply exponentially at the start of an infection, so […]
By Jo Nova
One of the most extraordinary interviews I’ve ever heard. Take everything you thought you knew …
Tucker Carlson talks to Mike Benz who worked in the cyber portfolio at the US State Department. He calmly lays out the dark power of the US intelligence network. This is the inside story of how and why the military industrial censorship complex grew in the last thirty years.
It’s obviously hard to confirm what he says, but we already know Twitter and Facebook were effectively acting as arms of the US government. We’ve got the emails showing they were colluding with US state agencies and the legacy media on a daily basis to cover up government failures and corruption, and to censor Americans. We know the CIA withheld a report on China because it might have helped Donald Trump, and we know the CIA has been feeding the media “misinformation” for 50 years because another insider told us so.
Mike Benz seems to be able to explain so many details on the forces that shaped history.
At first the agencies liked free speech
In 1991 the apparatus of the US State thought the internet and free speech was a […]
Image by GrumpyBeere
By Jo Nova
Last year the acceleration in EV sales stopped accelerating. The industry was still growing they said, just not quite as fast. Now, so soon, the sales are actually falling. In the UK, EV sales dropped off a cliff, falling 25% last month. Perhaps it was just a bad month? But in California, home of global green dreams, sales have also declined, and for the last two quarters. Ominously, this is happening despite government decrees insisting every new car sold in 2035 will be an EV. Sales are supposed to be launching into orbit. Something is very wrong.
Meanwhile Hertz has taken yet another step away from their EV quest — after announcing they were selling off a third of their EV fleet at bargain basement prices, now they are cancelling plans to buy 65,000 Polestars. This was a $3 billion deal, and to let them out of it, Polestar has, by golly, demanded Hertz give them the right to buy back the old Polestars that Hertz wants to sell — that way Polestar can keep the older models off the secondhard market and stop the value from falling the same dire […]
By Jo Nova
As Winston Sterzel says: Seriously? Why does it cost more to send a postcard to my neighbor than it does for a Company in China to send a package right across the world? He explains how an old intergovernmental committee — the Universal Postal Union (UPU) — sets the rules so that rich nations subsidize the poor ones. Like all government committees it clings to a good idea for so many years it kills it. It was set up in 1874, and now in 2024, a nation with a space station is draining money from our postal systems and from our local jobs. What a rort… Everyone paying for postage in the West is also paying the post for businesses in China to send cheap things which undermine local sellers. It is very difficult for a business using postal delivery to compete in the West — even in its own domestic market. The UPU is — naturally — another subsidiary of the United Nations. What else do we need to know? It works as well as we’d expect any 150 year old unelected and unaccountable bureaucracy to work — like napalm on a free market.
The […]
By Jo Nova
In a radical move, the French government has quietly dropped their renewables targets from their draft energy bill, risking being seen as unfashionable losers in billionaire ski clubs. The nation that, forty years ago, built 56 nuclear reactors in 15 years has decided they just need to build another 6 to 14 new nuclear plants to reach “Net Zero” by 2050. This puts them in danger of being one of the only nations on Earth that might reach their target.
This, of course, is terrible for the renewables industry as it risks exposing the wanton frivolity and utterly superfluous nature of the wind and solar subsidy farms. If France can do this without the bird chopping, the slave labor and the lithium bombs, so can nearly everywhere else.
It’s a big change from 2014 when France aimed to reduce nuclear power to just 50% by 2025.
As NetZeroWatch says in their email newsletter, this is a win:
France drops renewables targets, prioritises nuclear in new energy bill
The proposed text, which is slated to go before the cabinet early next month and then be submitted to lawmakers, reaffirms France’s commitment to nuclear power to […]
Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
For three years they told us it was the most secure election in history, and only deniers would question the result, but a simple poll of voters by the The Heartland Institute shows cheating was widespread in mail-in voting.
In the contest to decide who would control the most powerful country on Earth, as many as 43% of voters cast ballots by mail. If the media pundits care so much about democracy, why didn’t they do a poll like this two years ago? Why didn’t the Republicans or the Democrats? Presumably they knew what they would find.
As David Evans points out, this adds up to 13 million fraudulent votes out of 158 million total, nearly double the difference between the Biden tally of 81 million and Trump result of 74 million. That alone could easily have swung things.
In terms of the future of Western Civilization, it’s hard to think of anything much more important than US election security. Almost all the other crimes depend on who’s writing the rules, or who has the power to set things straight. As Mark Steyn says he’s increasing weirded out […]
Image by Willgard Krause from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
What did I say? After the near collapse of climate talks, global leaders “rescued” COP28 at the last minute, scoring top marks in Climate Bingo: the talks are “historic“, “landmark“, “unprecedented” and use the actual phrase “transition away from fossil fuels” for the first time ever. Be still my beating heart.
A hundred billionaires met with 70,000 groupies, using millions of dollars mostly taken from other people, and have decided they need to do it all again.
The point of these meetings is to issue more press releases, reward the faithful underlings, arrange golden handshakes behind the scenes, and transfer billions of dollars from the riff raff to the Private-Jet-Class. This glorious goal is achieved when the Grand UN Performance of vague non-binding Hopium is used to fool investors and voters in domestic theatres.
And so it comes to pass that all nations have finally agreed to do what they were doing anyway. But UN-speak translates the nothingness into hyperbole:
“The agreement marks “the beginning of the end of fossil fuels” — UNFCCC
The president of the European Commission has welcomed the COP28 agreement, hailing […]
By Jo Nova
The Pandemic woke up a lot of people
Thanks to Pierre Gosselin at NoTricksZone who lets us know that Kristina Schröder — a minister in the Angela Merkel government for four years, has written in Der Pragmaticus, of her fear that the German government is copying the dark pattern of the pandemic to create a nation where the government controls what people eat and wear, and whether they can travel.
It would have helped if she had seen this coming ten years ago, when she was a Minister, but she says, she did not believe Germans would accept drastic restrictions for the “collective good” until the pandemic hit. Now she asks why there is a blindness to the costs of climate action, and why there is indifference to the losses of freedom. (Obviously, the German media and industrial censorship complex is just like the rest of the West, and there is no outrage allowed, no node for protests to gather on, and a constant stream of gaslighting — “renewables are cheap”, the “world is hotter than ever” and “climate change makes goldfish alcoholic”, that sort of thing).
The good news is that word is spreading…
Kristina […]
By Jo Nova
Scientifically the UN Conference of Parties (COP) has abjectly failed 27 times at the one thing it was supposedly set up to do, which was reduce carbon emissions and save the weather, but it’s been a wild success on the Global-Trade-Party-and-Schmooze calendar.
Tonight the UN COP28 “climate” conference is on the ‘Verge of complete failure’ says CNN — because they’ve given up talking about “phasing out fossil fuels” and they’re only trying to reduce fossil fuels now (exactly the same as the last 27 meetings). No doubt tomorrow, headlines will tell us a historic deal, which is barely enough, was somehow clawed from the brink after an all-nighter.
The historic deal will amount to ambiguous subclauses that enable carbon grift and graft wherever carbon grafting and grifting were likely to happen anyway.
28 conferences and nothing to show for it:
It was never about CO2 anyway, was it?
Whatever happens, the conference is a big success as the Planetary Fashion Parade where the virtue-signalers of the world unite to show off their cloaks of carbon-purity. In the background it’s the place where billionaires and bankers bring their yachts and personal planes to meet Presidents […]
By Jo Nova
In the last couple of weeks a New Zealand whistleblower came forward with detailed, but anonymized data showing that certain batches of the experimental you-know-what, were associated with shockingly high mortality rates. As this news started to spread, the government could have responded to correct or explain this, instead they arrested him, thus accidentally verifying that the data he showed was not wrong, but real. His crime apparently was not faking-up the data, but “accessing a computer system for dishonest purposes” which seems like a very strange crime given that, as he describes it, he was paid to work with the data, and the results of public health data is — in a free society — supposed to be public.
In the world we thought we lived in, we would assume that the NZ government would already know and track the mortality of all the batches they forced the citizens to take. Unless they were grossly incompetent or inherently corrupted by, hypothetically say, large multinational entities earning a hundred billion dollars — authorities would have the real death rates at their fingertips, surely? So if he faked the data, or misinterpreted it, or he made an […]
Image by Donna Kirby from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
University degrees aren’t what they used to be
After years of universities turning out smug self-obsessed graduates of Woke ideology, Big Business has realized they might be better off hiring people with experience in the real world instead. They are also doing their own testing — with 2 out of 3 setting their own test assignments for candidates.
This year more than half of the 800 employers surveyed had already dropped bachelor degree requirements for at least some of their roles. It must have worked out, because next year almost all of those same companies plan on dropping the requirement for even more roles. That looks like a trend…
This surely must be ringing some warning bells in a few Ivory Towers? Fewer students, means less income, less influence, and fewer alumni:
How the college degree lost its value: Nearly half of US companies plan to ax Bachelor’s degree requirements – after Walmart, Accenture and IBM led the charge
DailyMail
Nearly half of US companies intend to eliminate Bachelor’s degree requirements for some job positions next year, a new survey has revealed.
By Jo Nova
A new paper tries to clean up the chicken entrail decrees of Mark Lynas (and earlier of John Cook) and concludes that their methodology is so bad, a 99.85% consensus could just as easily have been 32%.
All the papers in between 32 and 99% were neutral on the cause of man-made climate catastrophes, but Lynas et al bundled them in with the believer pack and made hay in the global media. This was even though many of the “neutral” papers showed results that didn’t fit the consensus. But who cares about results eh? If an abstract was neutral, it was therefore a “sign” the authors believed — like reading their tea leaves, or laying out the entrails. (Either that or it was a sign scientists who question the dogma get sacked, lose funding, and get uninvited to laboratory barbeques, but, shh! We won’t mention that.) So Lynas assumes that as long as a scientist doesn’t specifically say they disagree, they de facto endorse the “consensus”.
Why do people who call themselves scientists even talk about a “consensus”?
Obviously if believers had evidence, they’d talk about that instead.
Dentelski et al do an admirable job of pointing […]
Who believes the UN anyway?
By Jo Nova
A few academics want to add apocalyptic climate labels to meat to turn people off their steaks
The aim, apparently, is to shame and harass people into buying the vegeburgers they aren’t voluntarily buying, and thus make the Weather Gods less angry in 2100 AD. Fortunately, in the trial, 90% of would-be meat-eaters just ignored the label and chose the meat anyhow. This must have disappointed the new prohibitionists.
Climate labels similar to cigarette packet warnings could cut meat consumption
The Conversation
To gauge the impact of graphic warning labels on the number of people opting for meat, we split participants into four groups. One group saw a warning label beneath the meat option depicting a deforested area and the phrase “eating meat contributes to climate change”. Another group saw the meat option labelled with an image of a man having a heart attack and the text “eating meat contributes to poor health”. A third group saw a label below the meat option depicting caged animals in a wet market, alongside “eating meat contributes to pandemics”. The final group saw the four meal options with […]
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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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