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By Jo Nova
Shh! The Monster Banker Funds are secretly saving the World
By sheer coincidence the same day the Australian Treasurer said we’d have to pump up the subsidies on climate targets, a group of largely foreign bankers called for the Australian government to “hurry up with emissions reduction plans “.
The foreign investment bankers market themselves as “Australian and New Zealand investors” but boast they have $30 trillion in assets, which is a bit of a red flag when the GDP of both nations together is $2 trillion USD. It turns out the blandly named Investor Group on Climate Change (IGCC) is only 10% Australasian:
IGCC represents investors with total funds under management of more than $3 trillion in Australia and New Zealand and $30 trillion around the world. Investors welcome the development of internationally aligned climate risk disclosure requirements in Australia. —IGCC Submission to the Australian Treasury Feb 2023
But being 90% foreign doesn’t stop them putting in submissions to Parliament or pretending to be locals. Even The Australian thinks they are Australian:
An Australian investor group representing members with more than $30 trillion in assets says plans being developed by the […]
ABC News
By Jo Nova
It’s just emblematic of your Clean Green Future
Complexity and false hope is eating the crown of Australia’s Net Zero transition — the Snowy 2.0 Pumped Hydro scheme. Things have gone from “debacle” to Soviet Grade Industrial Fiasco. After Florence-the-tunnel-borer got stuck and created a sinkhole, workers spent seven months trying to shore up the ground, playing God against the mountain — pumping in grout, cement and polyurethane foam. But the foam made a gas so toxic the tunnel had to be evacuated. To make things worse the workers were originally told the gas was water vapor but it turned out to be isocyanate. At every point the Snowy Hydro team hid the bad news and issued propaganda, and it’s only taken the ABC a year to tell us the workers predicted the sinkhole, and three months to investigate the safety breach.
Still, that’s better than the NSW regulator who knows all the other safety breaches but won’t even share them, because it’s so bad ” it may affect the contractor’s reputation.” (Which it surely just did anyway.)
This is your low-carbon future. It was supposed to cost $2 billion but the bill […]
Like a Brexit moment for the nation.
UPDATE: Australia overwhelmingly votes for No Segregation. 60:40
UPDATE: New Zealand votes to throw out the Labor Government. It’s a good day!
The Labor Government wants to make some changes to the Constitution but they won’t tell us what they are what’s in the legislation that flows from the vaguely worded changes*. Presumably they know we won’t like it, and presumably, most Australians seem to have figured that out.
How, under the sun, did a nation of adults get to a point where we are being asked to effectively sign legal documents that no one has read?
FocalData
Polling from FocalData suggests that the people who live in the high density inner city locations, furthest from disadvantaged Aboriginal communities, are the ones voting Yes. It’s like a fashion accessory. And for Big Business and washed up celebrities too.
FocalData also said: “… our estimates point to a significant loss, and the potential for a realignment in Australian politics that looks quite a lot like the US and UK realignment.”
h/t Neville
*Amended: It’s a blank cheque. The wording of the constitutional change is listed here, giving Parliament and the […]
By Jo Nova
We’re on the precipice of a radical experiment with a national electricity grid
The AEMO (manager of the Australian grid) has finally released the major report on problems coming in the next ten years on our national grid, and it’s worse than they thought even six months ago. They euphemistically refer to the coming “reliability gaps”. They could have said “blackouts” instead, but a gap in reliability sounds so much nicer.
Bizarrely, the lead graph of the 175 page AEMO report goes right off the scale, mysteriously peaking in the unknown and invisible real estate off the top of the chart. And they’re not projecting troubles fifty years from now. Those cropped peaks of invisible pain hit from 2027.
And even the pain we can see is apparently quite bad. Two states are already likely to breach “the interim reliability measure” in this coming summer. Ominously, just one day after releasing the report, the AEMO is calling for tenders for “reliability reserves” in South Australia and Victoria. Apparently, they want offers of industries ready to shut down who aren’t already on the list, and they want spare generation too — get this — even asking […]
By Jo Nova
The current state of the Renewable Crash Test Dummy Transition
Everyone who can add up in Australia knows it can’t work, but the climate of fear stops them saying so. Last month a senior energy industry executive told the Australian Financial Review quietly that everyone believes [the 2030 target] will be missed, but nobody wants to say it. Apparently, even executives are being coerced into silence for fear of retribution. The insider referred to the “discretion” Ministers have on project approvals. It’s like a national mafia racket: “Nice business you have there — shame if you couldn’t get the permit”. So the Labor Party sets itself up to fail by silencing the people it could be listening to — as if the electricity will still be there when the turbines stop turning.
To put the size of the moonshot in perspective, even Federal Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen himself said the nation must “install 22,000 500-watt solar panels every day for eight years along with 40 seven-megawatt wind turbines every month”. In toto, we are supposed to build 44GW of “renewables” by 2030.
Instead of this frenetic pace, renewable energy investment ground to […]
Fifty years of the French Nuclear Industry
By Jo Nova
The dismal, destitution of our national energy debate
You would think our former Chief Scientist would know how to do basic research before commenting in the national news?
Alan Finkel says Australia probably couldn’t build one nuclear plant in less than twenty years, because the UAE took fifteen years. But fifty years ago the French built 56 nuclear plants in just 15 years. Isn’t that relevant and shouldn’t we at least mention that? At the time, the population of France was 51 million — twice what Australia is today. So pro rata, Australia could be aiming for 26 reactors.
If we ask nicely, perhaps we could borrow the old 1973 plans? The Messmer plan was launched in response to the oil crisis and the French started construction on three plants in the same year. The slogan they used was “In France, we do not have oil, but we have ideas.”
In Australia, our slogan it seems, is we don’t have oil, but we buy solar panels from China.
In a similar vein, two weeks ago Sweden announced it would be building 10 new nuclear reactors by 2045. With […]
Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
The Government is not afraid of misinformation, they are afraid you will speak the Truth
Add your submission by August 20th
Misinformation is easy to correct when you own a billion dollar news agency, most academics, institutions, expert committees and 25% of the economy. The really hard thing, even with all that power and money is to defend an absurd lie and stop people pointing it out. Like for example if you want to spend a trillion dollars of taxpayer money using power stations, cars and steak sandwiches to change the global weather. For that, you need the Ministry of Truth to force the falsity on the serfs.
The best way to deal with misinformation is to speak better information.
Let the court of public opinion decide. There is something profoundly arrogant about the assumption that 26 million brains are too stupid to figure out the truth when left to their collective free debate.
The proposed Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) misinformation bill is truly the draft that Mao or the Politburo would have admired. Effectively if you are government “approved” (institutional, […]
By Jo Nova
Whatever you do, don’t let the punters know the corals aren’t collapsing.
Wise Hok Wai Lum
Last year, the Great Barrier Reef had blockbuster levels of coral cover, and this year it’s the same, even though global carbon dioxide levels rose 1%, and China probably installed another 100 coal fired plants. The corals, apparently, don’t care.
The Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) issued a press release, calling this repeat record a “pause”.
“A pause in recent coral recovery across most of the Great Barrier Reef” — AIMS
Last year only 3% of Australians knew the Great Barrier Reef was in record good health, and AIMS seemingly wants to keep it that way.
If this survey showed the reef was in record poor cover for a second year, would they call it a pause in recent damage? The lies-by-omission are still lies. AIMS is deceiving the taxpayers who pay for AIMS.
AIMS
It’s a disaster, again. How will scientists get research grants to manage a reef that looks after itself?
Peter Ridd is scathing:
“The fabulous condition of the reef demonstrates that the public has been systematically misled by many […]
By Jo Nova
The man is a soldier — Ian Plimer has put out three new books at once, written in three different styles at three different levels.
Volume 1 is written for primary school children and uses body functions such as food and farts to show the carbon cycle and demonstrates that net zero and carbon neutral are impossible. Volume 2 is for secondary school children and deals with the basics of climate change, renewable energy and EVs in a humourous, irreverent, slightly seditious and entertaining style whereas Volume 3 for post-secondary school children deals with the history of the planet’s climate changes and how climate policy will have a profound negative effect on their generation.
The book is aimed at parents and grandparents all over the world who might want to deprogram children from the barrage of propaganda that children are exposed to at school, in the mainstream media and on social media.
Order through Connor Court
9.8 out of 10 based on 80 ratings […]
Freedom is steak and cars. Picnic at Albert Park Lake, Melbourne 1974 | by Rennie Ellis | NLA
By Jo Nova
How much is The Planet worth?
Polling shows Australians don’t believe there is much of a climate crisis. If they thought the planet would boil, they would surely be willing to spend more than $20 a week.
When it came to other climate-punishments to save the planet, the average person rated giving up meat as the worst option, followed by giving up petrol and diesel cars, and appliances.
The Greens were willing to pay more, but they weren’t so happy about giving up their overseas flights. Doesn’t that say everything? Which will it be, no more polar bears or no more skiing trips to Chamonix?
The truth laid bare in this poll is that Australians have no idea what the real cost of NetZero fantasies are. If they had any idea what the true price was, they’d be livid.
The great success of the green parasites has been to hide the costs of wind and solar schemes
The big message here for the Coalition is that all they had to do to win the last election […]
By Jo Nova
Don’t mention brown coal?
Last quarter I reported that the Australian Energy Market Operators (AEMO) had strangely “forgotten” to list the brown coal prices in its quarterly report, despite it being the second largest energy source in our national electricity market.
Other quarters, often they would include a graph comparing the average winning bids of all the major fuel types — a graph that surely is essential in these inflationary times where our electricity prices are setting record highs, rising by 25% this month, and we have a national debate on our energy crisis.
In the next quarterly report the AEMO did list the average “winning bids” of brown coal but didn’t do the comparison graph, so I’ve done it for them. If only they had room in their 68 page report and $450 million dollar budget so Australians can see, at a glance, which fuel source provides the cheapest wholesale generation by far, every quarter, all the time?
Despite all the inflation, the war, and the pandemic, brown coal generators are still making electricity for 3c a KWh. Shouldn’t Australians know that?
Click to enlarge (Or download the larger JPG file)
Compare that to […]
Image by Gerd Altmann
By Jo Nova
Matt Taibbi talked in London about what he and Michael Shellenberger found in the Twitter files. He realized the free speech battle has evolved into something new — where reality is altered and people are coached into forgetting what they saw, and censoring themselves. A kind of mass digital brainwashing.
In the Twitter Files there was a sinister pattern of “deamplifying” people’s true stories, their experiences, and then deamplifying the person themselves. Running parallel with this was a program to reduce our language, our world into a polarized one-nil, good-bad, us-them division where all shades of complexity were extinguished — so people who had vaccines but didn’t like mandates were anti-vaxxers, and people who had some vaccines, the injured, the unvaccinated — were all “anti-vaxxers”. This was a dystopia George Orwell predicted — the binary existence where there are no shades of gray. There is no safe middle ground. There is only rightthink and wrongthink.
The Elite War on Free Thought
Matt Taibbi, Racket News
Michael and I are here to tell a horror story that […]
By Jo Nova
Make no mistake, the UN “finance” cartel is the supermassive black hole at the centre of the climate-mafia galaxy.
The UN Environment Programme brags that across insurance, banking and investing, it has over 450 members representing more than $100 trillion dollars worth of carrots and sticks to beat up politicians and businesses with. These are the cogs and levers of the halls of global power.
Image by Amy from Pixabay
It’s a UN programme, but the first “target setting” rules were launched at Davos at the latest World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting — the skiing holiday for corporate rulers and their celebrity minions. The Big unelected political powers holidaying with the richest people in the world. Democracy on a barbecue.
In 2021 many Insurance giants had rushed to join the global climate activist cartel designed for their industry — the Net Zero Insurers Alliance (NZIA) — which would have turned the insurance industry into another form of climate police answerable to the UN or the WEF. But it’s all coming undone now, thanks to the 23 US States who are pressing the Antitrust button. I mean, imagine if all the competitors in an industry got […]
By Jo Nova
Electronic sensors can pick up phantom electrical noise
In the last thirty years the Bureau has installed electronic thermometers all over the country. But unlike the old glass ones, the new sensitive equipment can not only pick up freak gusts of hot air, they can also pick up electrical interference. Theoretically, electronic thermometers could report phantom measurements induced by large electric fields, like perhaps by an airport radar as it sweeps through the electronics.
Indeed as Lance Pidgeon points out, the cable that runs from the platinum resistance probe runs out of the Stevenson screen, down the pole, under the ground and pops up at the electronic data-logger some 6 to 10 meters away. This makes for a nice long aerial ready to pick up “noise” and feed it into the data-logger. Those airport radars produce huge electric fields — all it takes is slight induction of a voltage difference across the 10m cable and voila… the data logger records a “warmer” second.
Here’s the small forgotten airport radar at Heathrow standing about 12 stories high. Imagine the power that puts out?
David Monniaux
Electromagnetic interference could also be triggered by mobile phones or radio […]
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 […]
By Jo Nova
A “win” for predatory capitalism and government mis-interference
Liddell power station (foreground). Bayswater power station (rear).Photo NSW DPI
Yesterday, for the last time the final turbine was switched off at Liddell Coal plant after 52 years of operation. The NSW government gave it away for free in 2014 — bundled like a McHappy Meal in with the sale of Bayswater Coal, valued at $0. Governments saw old coal as worthless, at least until 2017 when everyone saw the bloodbath when the Hazelwood coal plant suddenly closed and electricity prices suddenly rose 85%. Then they started to panic a little — even Malcolm Turnbull (our Renewables lovin’ PM) started openly pressuring AGL to sell Liddell so it could keep running until his pet project the Snowy Hydro 2.0 could start. Chinese owned Alinta turned up with $250 million dollars and was willing to put in a billion to repair the station and extend its life up to 2030. Despite that bonanza, AGL refused to take the money. It was determined to run it into the ground and shut it down instead. Now it’s determined to blow it up as well. The Demolition crew is already appointed […]
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 […]
By Jo Nova
Senator Alex Antic is on fire asking why no one seems interested in the 14,062 people who died unexpectedly from January to November last year. In a full year, that’s 15,300 families who lost a loved one. 15,000 lives cut short. It’s nearly twice the size of the covid toll.
Where is The Department of Health, the CSIRO, the ABC, TGA, SBS, APRHA, our universities, most newspapers and free to air TV? Do Australian lives matter?
@SenatorAntic: Something catastrophic is happening and the government and media are unconcerned.
The previous four Australian ABS Provisional Mortality Statistics data releases reveal 15.1%, 16.0%, 17.0%, and 17.3% increases in excess deaths above the baseline average. Similar, if not worse, trends, are happening all over the western world. Clearly, something serious, I would say catastrophic, is occurring, yet strangely politicians and the censorship industrial complex are almost entirely unconcerned about investigating it. They don’t want you to know what is driving this, but we all know what is causing it.
h/t Kevin a
The latest Australian Bureau of Statistics data (ABS) shows that mysterious deaths were far higher than Covid deaths in the last months of 2021.
ABS: Provisional […]
A sign in Rockhampton. Where do they mention the fine though? | Photo by RegionalQueenslander
By Jo Nova
Block a sacred weather-changing EV from a charging point and you may have to sell your car
Feel the fear. The whole EV fantasy is coming undone as people miss planes, get stuck in cars, or ruin holidays because their battery is flat. There aren’t enough chargers, and charging is slow. In abject desperation, some Australian states are slapping monster fines on to make inadequate infrastructure stretch further, or because they realize how vulnerable they are to a protest campaign. Either that or they are actually trying to finance the transition to NetZero through parking fines. Call it a secret subsidy…
Victorians may be hit with a $370 fine if they drive a normal car and accidentally park it in an EV charging spot, thus depriving a sacred EV user of the chance to top up. You might think that’s wildly out of proportion — it’s only $100 less than if you recklessly run a red light. But it’s nothing compared to what NSW, Queensland and the ACT are doing. Drivers in these states who make the same mistake could […]
By Jo Nova
Last winter’s debacle in Australia could be repeated this year, but at even higher prices.
Despite adding more cheap renewables per person than nearly anywhere on Earth, for some inexplicable reason our retail electricity prices rose 18% last year and are set to rise another 20 to 30% this winter.
Last year was a bloodbath on the wholesale electricity market. Those costs have fed through to retail.
AER Australian wholesale electricity prices.
The Energy Minister Chris Bowen blames the Russians, and says we need more renewables.
Shock power bill jump to hammer households
Perry Williams, The Australian
Power bills for households will soar by hundreds of dollars a year from July 1, adding to soaring cost of living pressures as the regulator blamed supply challenges and volatility for the steep cost hit.
Customers in Victoria face a 30 per cent jump on ‘safety net’ prices while households in NSW, South Australia and southeast Queensland will see bills soar by up to 24 per cent.
The Victorian ruling by the Essential Services Commission estimates power costs will jump by $426 for residential customers to $1829 […]
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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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