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By Jo Nova
Chris Wright, the United States Secretary of Energy, marvels that people can spend so much to achieve so little:
“Germany invested half a trillion dollars, more than doubled the capacity of its electricity grid — and today produces 20% less electricity than before that investment, selling it at three times the price.” — 13 min
“The lucky one billion — including everyone in this room — consumes about 13 barrels of oil per person per year. The other seven billion want to live like we do, but they consume about three barrels per person per year.”
It’s so nice to hear grownups talking:
Some extracts of his interview:
The tale of a remarkable transition from energy importer to energy exporter:
“Look at what’s happened in the United States. We’ve tripled liquids production in less than two decades. We are by far the world’s largest producer. We’ve more than doubled natural gas production, and it’s still growing fast.
This is phenomenal. Lower costs, lower prices — it has transformed the world. It’s hard to overstate the impact of the U.S. shale revolution and what all of you have […]
By Jo Nova
We’re watching the slow collapse of the Net Zero, Gender identity bubble
Australia’s largest military ally announced a major change in direction yesterday — shucking the Woke Hair Shirt and baubles of diversity:
Hegseth boasted of “remov[ing] the social justice, politically correct and toxic ideological garbage that had infected our department”.
He added: “No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses. No more climate change worship, no more division, distraction or gender delusions, no more debris.”
But most Australians won’t know that. The Australian ABC carefully buried this big shift inside a story on the US budget battle. The transformation of US military values was dismissed as just a “pep-talk” for generals. The ABC showed Trump making an inconsequential joke, and Hegseth discussing physical fitness and shaving. In other words, the ABC wants you to think this was a fitness campaign for a”dysfunctional” government which can’t even pay its generals today. How many Australians would join the dots that the country we depend on for protection just shot down twenty years of leftist fashion bubbles? Where were the interviews with the Australian Deputy Director of Navy Diversity & Inclusion […]
By Jo Nova
The rot goes right to the top
In terms of The Blob, the deepest darkest forces of power, the ones that scare even The Bankers, are surely the spies with guns, especially if they are unaccountable, politically biased spies with guns.
For four years since the January 6 Capitol Hill riots, the FBI has refused to say how many agents it had in the crowd, even to Congress, or even to the US President. Now we find, after the denials, there were 274 plain clothes agents there on the day. Donald Trump says “Wow: A radical Left Democrat Scam.”
It puts a whole new meaning to the term “insurrection”. Hundreds of paid agents, armed, and pretending to be protesting the same government that paid them to be there?
Let’s not forget that the main outcome of the Capitol Hill riots was to draw attention away from a critical Senate debates about irregularities with the 2020 election. (Many Republican senators who has promised to object to the certification of Joe Biden withdrew their objections after the riot). It would also be a useful (if awful) tool to imprison nearly 1,000 protestors and thus terrorize and deter people […]
Image: Rolls Royce
By Jo Nova
The Space Race is back
Australia couldn’t build a nuclear plant “til 2045”, but NASA is going to put one on the moon in five years time.
The new NASA chief, Sean Duffy, is set to announce urgent plans to get a very small nuclear reactor on the moon. What was going to be a 40MW microreactor in the “early 2030s” is now said to be a 100MW one launched in 2029. The reason for the rush is because three months ago China and Russia announced plans to cooperate and build their own nuclear plant on the moon in the early 2030s. They want the power to set up what they call an international lunar base. According to Politico, the fear is that the first nation to colonize the moon could declare a “keep out zone” — a quasi form of ownership that would stop another nation setting up in the same area.
Space race: US aims to beat out China and Russia with nuclear reactor on the Moon
By:Sébastian SEIBT , France 24
NASA’s interim chief Sean Duffy has made deploying a nuclear reactor on the […]
By Jo Nova
The Blob makes another move to expand their empire
A group of unelected officials in something called the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) has decided that humans have the “right” to a stable climate and thus, you have the right to pay for it. The court that nobody has heard of says “states have legal obligations to protect people alive today and future generations from the impacts of climate breakdown.”
This includes the obligation to cut emissions, and to guard against the threat of climate disinformation. (Yes, they know they are lying.)
Personally I’d prefer to have the right to free speech, real science, and laws written in simple English:
Countries must protect human right to a stable climate, court rules
Isabella Kaminski, The Guardian
There is a human right to a stable climate and states have a duty to protect it, a top court has ruled.
“Top court”, my foot.
Like pagan sorcery, the government is expected to stop storms, floods and droughts. Even though this is an impossible fantasy the mere attempt at managing the illusion of it will employ tens of thousands of lawyers, accountants, technicians, diplomats […]
By Jo Nova
What an amplifier? The Chinese communist party quietly helped New York create a $75b climate SuperFund Law
That’s a lot of bang for their buck.
Imagine The Blob buddied up with China to lobby for a law that forced energy companies (and thus the shareholders and customers) to cough up $75 billion to fund green initiatives? The Blob gets more money to buy power and influence and buy favors from their friends. The Chinese Communists make their competitors energy more expensive, and thus all their products more costly, less competitive, their economy weaker. Suits every kind of grifter, eh?
But perhaps China just wants to save American whales right? Why else would the Chinese-American Planning Council (CPC) be so worried about US Emissions, but not their own? The CPC has been publicly lobbying for New York to legislate the “Climate Change Superfund Act — a bizarre retrospective law which would force energy companies to pay billions for past emissions back to the year 2000AD. Supposedly, companies like Exxonmobil, Shell, and others are going to pay $3 billion a year to help New York prepare for climate change. Though obviously, it will raise the price of energy […]
By Jo Nova
Nothing like mucking up the holiday plans of the overbearing bureaucrat…
To combat the rise of the Blob’s new insidious censorship laws Donald Trump will deny visas to any foreign officials who are now or ever were involved in censorship of American citizens.
Suddenly EU lawmakers, and Brazilian Judges will find they can’t get a visa to the USA, and the ban may apply to their family members too.
This should slow down the spread of new cancerous “content moderation” laws around the world, and the attacks on the US Tech Giants. It would also apply to the Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese if he brings back the Misinformation and Disinformation laws he tried to rush through last November.
Thus, it may be that Donald Trump may yet prevent some of the worst laws ever dreamed up in Australia (hallalujah). Not that anyone in the government will ever admit that.
Announcement of a Visa Restriction Policy Targeting Foreign Nationals Who Censor Americans
Press Statement, Marco Rubio, Secretary of State
Today, I am announcing a new visa restriction policy that will apply to foreign nationals who are responsible for censorship of […]
By Jo Nova
The winds of change are howling through electricity grids
Since 2022, AI -related firms have stormed the S&P 500 market — growing by $12 trillion dollars.
The IEA just posted a whole report dedicated to AI. The demand from data-centers is so large in some places it is already rivaling the kind of monster consumption we are used to seeing from aluminum smelters. There are six states in the United States where data centers already consume over 10% of the electricity supply. In Ireland, data centers swallow about 20% of the electricity.
Currently, a normal data center consumes the same amount of electricity as 100,000 houses. But the new gargantuan data centers under construction will consume 20 times as much — equivalent to adding 2 million homes to the grid.
Data centers of the world are not spread evenly. In Virginia, the largest conglomeration of industrial data, their demand for power pulls in a quarter of the state’s electricity.
Australia is being left behind, because we won’t build coal plants in case we offend the UN, and we banned nuclear power as a fashion statement in 1998. The AI global race is on, but digital machines […]
By Jo Nova
Trump switches on the giant dormant coal infrastructure of the US
In the last twenty years 770 coal turbines have been switched off in the US, and Donald Trump wants to turn as many back on as he can.
Any moment now President Trump is expected to sign an executive order that will boost coal mining, keep old coal power stations running and restart shuttered coal plants. The word is that the US government will define coal as a “mineral” which allows him to use presidential wartime authority to speed up approvals for coal mines, and to bypass environmental red tape and even prioritize exploration and mining on federal lands.
US agencies will be told to rescind any policies that aim to “transition away from coal” or “otherwise establish preferences against using fossil fuels”. The country with the largest known coal reserves in the world is now planning to increase coal exports.
Furthermore Trump will ask the Energy Department to consider whether coal should be listed as a ‘critical mineral’ — something described as a ‘coveted status’ which activates even more emergency powers.
Shares of coal companies in the US are up 11 to 18%, and […]
By Jo Nova
Nearly every plea for carbon subsidies depends on “the Social Cost of Carbon”, and it’s wrong
Every ton of carbon dioxide we emit is supposedly going to cause $220 USD in losses in the future, which justifies throwing lots of money at efforts to reduce emissions — like subsidizing EVs and solar panels, and inventing cricket burgers. This is called the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC). But half of that imaginary cost was the devastation higher temperatures would theoretically wreak on agriculture — which doesn’t make sense given that plants eat CO2 for breakfast. But for years bureaucrats and scientists have been telling us the damage in crops was going to cost $102USD per ton of carbon, and investors and politicians have been feeding that into their cash registers, and it’s all wrong.
Ten years ago Challinor et al did a big meta-review of crop changes with temperature, using 1,722 records, but many of these records had no figures for CO2 itself. And the whole point of calculating the social cost of carbon really depends on calculating what happens when CO2 rises, and supposedly causes temperatures to rise too. In 2017 Moore et al took those numbers […]
By Jo Nova
A jury in North Dakota has ordered Greenpeace to pay $660 milllion USD to a Texas pipeline company called Energy Transfer. Greenpeace will appeal, but the suit named both Greenpeace USA and also the international arm, and the damages are so large, if they survive the appeal they would bankrupt the US branch entirely and prevent Greenpeace operating in the USA.
The payment is to compensate for damages and losses from protests in 2015 and 2016 that damaged and delayed the North Dakota Access Pipeline. The protests were so large and so out of control, the clean up bill cost North Dakota $38 million dollars.
Perhaps most importantly, this case may inspire other corporations to fight back. Kelcy Warren, the magnate who owns Energy Transfer, said in 2017 “Everybody is afraid of these environmental groups and the fear that it may look wrong if you fight back with these people,”. “But what they did to us is wrong, and they’re gonna pay for it.” (– Wall Street Journal)
The 1,172 mile long pipeline did eventually start operation in 2017. It shifts about 5% of the daily oil production of the United States. Presumably every month it […]
By Jo Nova
Even as Elon Musk rescues astronauts abandoned in space, activists set fire to random Teslas.
Are these the same people who think we should ban gas stoves to save the world?
We are not the same. pic.twitter.com/2oiMDRGJd6
— Political Blasphememes (@PBlasphememes) March 18, 2025
It’s possible some indoctrinated teens want to save the world from fascists — or maybe the Blob strikes back — I mean, we have to ask who benefits from the circus distraction of anti-Musk confected hate? Obviously the millionaires in Congress with their hand in the jar benefit from a decoy story. “Look, a squirrel”! Those with something to hide would like it if Musk can be bullied, coerced or harassed into leaving DOGE alone. There might be some very nervous people in the Halls of Power who are afraid he’ll get the code crackers into the FBI and find the Epstein files, or the grants they arranged for their girlfriend. There may even be foreign interests who don’t want their web of influence and schemes exposed.
Elon Musk speaking on Hannity, Fox News talks
“I always thought that democrats were supposed to be the party of empathy […]
By Jo Nova
Isn’t it time we talk about The attempted Coup (and the media)?
…
In the two weeks since Elon Musk spoke to Joe Rogan for three hours, the media has ignored it, trivialized it, or reduced it to “Elon tries to explain his Nazi salute”. Here was the richest man in the world, best friends with the most powerful man on Earth and he’s talking without an autocue, walking through the underbelly of the US government and describing the “greatest scam in human history” and the media are discussing the weather.
Thanks to DOGE we now know that the US government spent $270 million on 6,200 journalists, which presumably buys a lot of “Nothing to see here”. Which is exactly why I feel an urge to pass this on.
What Musk describes is the ultimate pork barrelling
Instead of giving our tax dollars to buy votes in marginal seats, it looks like the Democrats were giving away the country, to buy voters to fill marginal states, so they could stay in power. By offering up free houses, free healthcare and free citizenship to non-citizens, as Musk describes it, the Democrats (really, the whole Blob) […]
ESG Today/
By Jo Nova
Renewables are so over
Just like that — the renewables bubble went phht.
After twenty years of hailing wind and solar, suddenly the world’s tech giants are cheering for nuclear power. Worse — they don’t even mention the words carbon, low emissions or CO2. The new buzzwords are “safe, clean and firm“. They talk about needing energy “round the clock”, and they talk about “energy resilience” — but they don’t say nuclear is “low emissions”. It’s like they want everyone to forget their activism. Did someone say something about climate change?
Meta, Amazon, and Google have flipped like a school of barracuda. Five minutes ago, life on Earth depended on achieving Net-Zero with fleets of wind farms in the sunset, now, they just want energy and lots of it. The big tech fish and their friends have signed a Large Energy Users Pledge admitting that the demand for energy is rising rapidly, that nuclear should triple by 2050 and that large energy users depend on the availability of abundant cheap energy (Small energy users too, Mr Bezos-Zuckerburg-Pichai.) The closest they come to hinting at the ghost of renewables is when they say […]
By Jo Nova
Nishant Gupta set up a green energy hedge fund last year managing about $100m in assets, but he probably wishes he hadn’t.
His words are about as blunt as any hedge fund owner could possibly get.
Hedge Fund Built on Energy Bets Says ‘Clean Is Dead for Now’
Bloomberg
“The whole sector — solar, wind, hydrogen, fuel cells — anything clean is dead for now,” said Nishant Gupta, founder and chief investment officer at London-based Kanou Capital LLP.
Against a barrage of political headwinds in the US, a war-fueled energy crisis and stubbornly high interest rates, large parts of the clean-energy industry are stalling. In the past year, the S&P Global Clean Energy Index has lost 20%, a period during which the S&P 500 Index gained 16%. And with the Trump administration shredding climate policies in the world’s largest economy, many green investors are taking a timeout.
Over the last year clean energy stocks have lost 20% of their value, whereas stocks in fossil fuels are up 13%.
So after the last year, skeptical investors are 30% richer than their believer friends. As it should be.
S&P Global […]
By Jo Nova
The insatiable hunger for electricity
The world is about to flip from an energy diet to an electrical boom. Look at Texas.
Here in Australia our top Blob Scientists tell us it will take 15 years to build one nuclear plant. But in Texas, which has two nuclear plants already, the AI revolution is beating down the door, and it’s saying “Feed me 30 plants for breakfast ” — or at least by 2030. It’s like a different planet.
There are already 340 datacentres in Texas which use 8GW of power, but new projects are so large, they are starting to ask for a whole gigawatt up front. And the sum total of requests for new electrical supply add up to 99 gigawatts — most of which have materialized in the last year. The new level of demand is so big, the grid managers are starting to worry that single new industrial loads are large enough to threaten the grid.
We’re talking of a seismic shift:
The ERCOT grid peak load last summer was 86 gigawatts. The new peak demand by 2030 is expected to be 75% bigger. It may not all be nuclear, ERCOT did […]
By Jo Nova
Without forced theft from the poor, Sunnova (and others in the solar industry) might disappear
Bloomberg writers call it “chaos” and Barrons blames Trump for “uncertainty”, but the truth is the value of solar was always a false bubble held up by forced payments, fantasy, or vicarious political whimsy that spread the costs onto other people. Trump has merely restored the certainty of real value in the free market. He hasn’t banned a single person from buying solar panels, it’s just that not many people want to spend their money on glass panels that make green expensive electrons. They don’t want to spend money on “cheap electricity” that only comes at lunchtime either.
The 70% fall in the stock price is just the last few days since Sunnova officially warned it might not be a “going concern”. The longer term figures are much worse.
On November 4th, when some investors though the word-salad-woman might win, the share price briefly spiked to $7. Right now it is 58 cents, meaning it has lost 92 percent of its value since Trump won the election. The entire $12 mini-boom peak in September last year, arguably, was a bet that […]
By Jo Nova
The Royal Society is thinking of chucking Elon Musk out of their exclusive club. The man who caught a falling rocket, who bought electric cars to the world, who is testing chips that may heal paralysis, and runs the first private company to put astronauts in space, is not good enough for the precious collective. One day, he may well get us to Mars. Which science club would look pretty silly then?
After all, it’s not like he faked data, wasted billions in grants, sold taxpayers a hundred dodgy weather-changing-schemes, or killed people with an experimental drug is it? (Though, if he had, they’d probably give him a medal.)
It’s all about The Money
The Royal Society was founded in 1660 and hasn’t chucked anyone out for 150 years, so you’d think his crime must be a serious failing in science. Supposedly, the mob say, he breached their code of conduct, was mean to other members and spread “conspiracy theories” and “misinformation”. But the real truth, as even Nature explains in their subheader, is that he committed the unforgivable sin of cutting off the grant money.
We know this because even though 74 members protested last August […]
……..
By Jo Nova
Another day, another racket
As Elon excavates the Motherlode of global funding, the pieces start to fit together.
Kanekoa the Great wonders why USAID gave $68 million dollars to the World Economic Forum — a group of networking billionaires who meet in January each year to ski in Davos. They turn up in private jets to discuss how they can stop the average man flying. You ‘vill own nothing!
Jo Nova wonders why no media outlet on Earth seemingly figured this out for themselves. Perhaps it was the millions in funding the government paid some media outlets, presumably, to say nothing at all the right moments?
USAID: taking money from poor Americans to give to rich Marxists to plot in Davos, Switzerland—about how to take more money from poor Americans
Trust people
Be skeptical of government https://t.co/o4fYdQxn7k
— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) February 6, 2025
It’s almost like we already had One World Government all along, we just didn’t know it.
As Mike Benz said we’ve lived our whole life in “the Truman show”. We think we have free press. We think US foreign aid buys tents for refugees and food for starving […]
By Jo Nova
It turns out the Non-Government Organizations were really The Government
The word for that is GONGO — a government organised non-government organization — at once, an impossible thing and also a tautology.
Hands up who is still reeling with the news that USAID had 50 thousand million dollars of political and media influence? The annual budget of $50 billion dollars in the hands of unaccountable activist NGOs buys a lot of “journalists”, editors and teenage protestors. Suddenly a lot of odd repeated patterns around the world make more sense. Why were all governments suddenly worried about disinformation, or the rights of transexuals?
Today we found out that news outlets like Politico, and the New York Times were being given millions of dollars from the US government.
Benny Johnson says:
This is the biggest scandal in news media history: No employee at Politico got paid yesterday. First time ever the company missed a pay period. This is a crisis. Now we learn Politico — a “news company” — which spent the last 10 years trying to destroy the MAGA Movement was being massively funded by USAID.
It seems some $27 million dollars went to Politico […]
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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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