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By Jo Nova
Daniel Greenfield put’s his finger on the diabolical feedback loop the West is in.
Big Gov protects the Big Tech monster from market competition — and in return Big Tech protects Big Government from political competition. Democrats have outsourced political repression of their enemies to cabals of private companies.
Nice Racket if you can get it.
The Democrats wet dream is to tar and feather opponents and then ban them from even speaking, and the conglomerate multinational octopuses are happy to oblige by tweaking search results, and suspending the right accounts. In return, they get sweet government deals and Section 230 protection. Who knew Amazon has nearly 500 federal subcontracts? When Amazon employees donate to the Democrats they’re just protecting their jobs.
When Google invests another $2 billion in Renewables, the last thing they want is climate denier Commander in Chief.
Public-Private partnerships are the unholiest anticompetitive destroyer of free speech. Big Gov works to make sure Big Tech can protect its monopoly control, while Big Tech works to make sure sure Big Gov is protected from criticism by blocking and banning free speech.
Sweet.
DEMOCRATS OUTSOURCE POLITICAL REPRESSION TO CORPORATE MONOPOLIES
Daniel Greenfield,
Democrats […]
What happened to the first amendment?
Parler will be tossed off Amazon at midnight US time tonight. Friday, Parler jumped to the #1 app in Apple’s app store. Saturday Apple tossed it off.
The Tech Giants run the country. They control the conversations of millions of people.
ZeroHedge: Parler saw approximately 210,000 installs globally on Friday 1/8, up 281% from approximately 55,000 on 1/7, according to data from the analytics service Sensor Tower. “In the U.S., the app saw approximately 182,000 first-time downloads on 1/8, up 355% from about 40,000 installs on 1/7. Since Wednesday, the app has seen approximately 268,000 installs from across U.S. app stores,” a press rep from Sensor Tower wrote in an email. -TechCrunch
Parler promise to set up again by noon tomorrow
The defiant message from John Matze of Parler:
10:10 PM ET: Sunday (tomorrow) at midnight Amazon will be shutting off all of our servers in an attempt to completely remove free speech off the internet.
We prepared for events like this by never relying on amazons proprietary infrastructure and building bare metal products.
…Amazon, Google and Apple purposefully did this as a coordinated effort […]
Because Big Bankers really want to save the Earth, right?
BlackRock, the 10 trillion dollar “global investment fund” is urging the Australian company AGL to shut Bayswater and Loy B Yang Coal Plants much sooner than planned. BlackRock is a NY based and as wikipedia says “Due to its power, and the sheer size and scope of its financial assets and activities, BlackRock has been called the world’s largest shadow bank.”
The move only got 20% support from investors. Australian investors largely said “no thanks”. Where are The Greens in exposing multinational powers that want to influence Australia — they’re part of the Big Banker Promotion Team.
BlackRock turns up the heat on AGL’s coal exit plans
Nick Toscano, Sydney Morning Herald
AGL faced an investor revolt on Wednesday, as more than 20 per cent of the company’s shareholders backed a resolution for the board to align the retirement of the Loy Yang A power plant in Victoria and its Bayswater station in New South Wales with a strategy to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees.
This would mean shutting Loy Yang A, the largest brown coal fired power plant in Victoria, […]
The parasites take $1,300 per household each year in Australia
Australians could save $13 billion dollars a year if they weren’t forced to pay for pagan climate witchery.
If the bill collector knocked at the door and demanded $1,300 dollars each year to try to stop storms and floods a century from now, there would be riots in the streets. Instead the money is buried in complexity and taken in slices through unlabeled bills and receipts throughout the year. We list the GST. Imagine if we listed “the Climate Tax”?
Malcolm Roberts, a One Nation Senator has commissioned a study by Alan Moran to add up the cost. But why did he have to do that? Where was the Treasury, the Minister for Energy, the CSIRO, the ABC, the Labor Party, the State Premiers, and all our universities? All apparently, are out to lunch with the vested interests or running chicken, afraid of being called names.
Alan Moran adds up the state and federal subsidies, including the renewable schemes (like the SRET) that charge every electricity user for other people’s solar panels. He also includes the costs to businesses from higher electricity charges — which are invariably passed on to […]
Another hidden renewables tax buried in complexity
Here in Renewables World we now have to pay companies to make less of the products we want. It’s a sign of how fragile and dysfunctional the Australian grid is.
“Big energy users like factories and farms will be able to earn money by saving energy during heatwaves and at other times when electricity prices are high,” the Australia Institute’s energy lead Dan Cass said.
They call it “wholesale demand response”. We call it planned blackouts. All over the country equipment will be switched off when its needed most so that our green grid doesn’t fall over, or create billion dollar price spikes.
With some of the most expensive electricity in the world, there is already a strong price signal driving companies to use electricity efficiently. This new “price signal” drives them to be less efficient. Because the grid is now incapable of providing regular reliable electricity whenever it’s most useful to companies, the government is adding a whole new layer of complexity to try to squeeze out the spikes they can’t handle.
This move will mean more people will have to be employed in account-management, but the products made will […]
Just when you think banks are only in it for the money, along comes Goldman Sachs to advise us on the planetary atmosphere:
“Goldman Sachs released a 34-page analysis of the impact of climate change. And the results are terrifying.”
All these nice banks want to save Earth too.
Yusef Kahn, Business Insider, Sept 2019
For some reason (what could it be?) a few months ago the Goldman Sachs investment bank was gripped with a sudden urge to repackage the IPCC report. Perhaps they were afraid their clients didn’t watch CNN, the BBC, or, pick-any-channel, maybe they couldn’t afford a television?
A Goldman Sachs report on the impact of climate change on cities across the world makes for grim reading. The bank warned that “consequences of a warming world may well play out over several decades to come, even if efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions are successful today.” Rising temperatures would lead to changing disease patterns, more intense and longer-lasting heatwaves, more destructive weather events, and pressure on the availability and quality of water for drinking and agriculture.
“Despite the uncertainty around the timing and scale of the impact, it may be prudent […]
There’s another round of push-poll fake surveys telling us how much the public want action on climate change. Part of the aim is to scare politicians and trick them into thinking that voters won’t vote for skeptics and will be happy to pay more for electricity, food, cars, and everything. But the awful truth is that the voters “vote” with their own wallets every time they fly, and 98% of them don’t care enough to spend a single dollar. That’s even when the airlines do all the work and just ask their customers to “tick a box”.
So that’s six bucks to save the world but hardly anyone can be bothered
Climate change: Half world’s biggest airlines don’t offer carbon offsetting
By Dulcie Lee & Laura Foster, BBC News, May 2019
When airlines do offer a [carbon offset] scheme, generally fewer than 1% of flyers are choosing to spend more.
Prices vary but a return flight from London to Malaga, Spain, would cost around £4 to offset.
That tells us exactly how much the punters are panicking about climate change, and suggests that most western democracies are absolutely ripe-for-the-picking for any politician with […]
On fire — Ann Widdecombe lays out the situation.
The only kind of Brexit is a clean break.
October 18th 2019
“The Brexit party will take Leave and nothing else.”
“We gave Europe their freedom and in return they want to take ours.”
She’s 72, and has studied Latin, Philosophy at Oxford. She was a Minister in the John Major Government. What a powerhouse.
Bring on an election!
h/t Jim Simpson.
9.6 out of 10 based on 83 ratings
Add another billion to the cost of the Renewable Energy Target?
In the last few days Bluescope Steel (formerly BHP) has confirmed it will spend US$700m (AU$1b) to expand it’s North Star steel mill in Ohio. So there are multiple headlines. But back in February CEO Mark Vassella explained exactly why they were thinking of it, and his first reason was “energy prices”. Last week, high energy prices were even “a tragedy” for Australian manufacturing. This week however, he’s clarified his position by muddying it up. Now there other reasons and the solution is to fix our gas prices. He’s backpedaling and tossing quotes that happen to help the renewables industry.
Perhaps he’s been heavied by his PR and strategy team? Now he’s saying that energy costs matter, but labor costs do too and “we weren’t ever going to put another steel mill in Australia”. He’s even saying energy costs “did not play a role” — the complete opposite. These will become the quotes the renewable energy fans rely on. Apparently, now what he really wants is cheaper gas — which requires a socialist government-driven solution to fix gas prices, and it’s safe for anyone to mention anything that requires […]
Remember when we were told coal was dying?
Donald Trump is changing the rules which will keep older cheap coal plants running.
Trump ditches sole climate rule that aimed to reduce coal plant pollution
Emily Holden, The Guardian
Donald Trump’s administration is finalizing plans to roll back the US government’s only direct efforts to curb coal-fired power plant pollution that is heating the planet.
Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency will replace an Obama-era climate change rule with a regulation that experts warn could help some of America’s oldest and dirtiest coal plants to keep running.
His agencies have slashed programs designed to limit carbon dioxide from power plants, cars, and trucks, and encouraged oil drilling and coal mining.
Democrat states are expected to challenge the rule in courts, but Trump’s team argues that it doesn’t have the legal authority to regulate climate. Who does? God, maybe. If Trump wins that court case a whole lot of climate gravy may evaporate.
Trump will kill as many 80,000 people
One minute we’re talking about a pollutant that isn’t. Next thing, it’s a totally different pollutant that has nothing to do with CO2:
June 20th, 2019 | Tags: Coal, USA | Category: Economics |  Print This Post | |
A big new study by electricity grid nerds (and I mean that in the nicest possible way) shows that after all the money and pain of 20 years of forced transition Australia’s electricity has shifted from 85% coal powered to 75% coal powered, which cost billions and as a bonus, made electricity more expensive and unstable. We drove out some brown coal, but swapped it for black coal. Instead of ousting coal power, the extra solar and wind power replaced some gas and hydro.
The authors are genuine independent experts, and the report is incredibly detailed — so this is rare — but still suffers from serious drawbacks:
The team doesn’t question the need for an artificial expensive transition. Almost all the problems they describe are caused by government policies that task our grid with changing the climate as well as producing cheap and reliable electricity. In a grid being ruined by inept policy, the implied solutions almost all involve more regulation and government policy. If our gas prices are too high we could ban sales overseas, but then we lose the export income. The left hand steals from the right. The free market solution is to use another fuel, […]
Behold, the Victorian Govt are proving yet again that Soviet-style electricity management can crush lives, hopes and wallets. The free market is never as cruel and destructive as one run on “good intentions” or the desire to win virtue-signaling fashion parades.
The invisible hand of the market was replaced with Daniel Andrews whimsy. This might work if he was smarter than the collective brains of 5 million people. Apparently Andrews assumes serfs people don’t understand the true value of solar panels and the benefits of creating jobs in China, so he has mandated glorious subsidies in the hope of getting nice weather one day, and the desperate punters took them up in droves. The industry boomed. But now they’ve temporarily halted the free gifts, orders have disappeared as the free market returns to accurately valuing solar installations. So the workers are being sacked. The rebates will come back again in July, so business-owners somehow need to get a different income stream for two months, survive the turmoil, and then the golden gravy will run again.
As per usual ABC policy, no free market voices were harmed, interviewed or asked to provide comment:
Victorian solar company reeling after popular rebate […]
Millenials are aged 25 – 39. In Australia four out of five are not even “familiar” with Mao. Half have never heard of him, even though he caused the deaths of twice as many people as Adolf Hitler.
Political ideologues control our education system. We teach kids identity politics, and how to control the weather with light globes, but not the most important political lesson of the 20th Century.
We won the cold war, then lost the peace.
Why Millenials are embracing Socialism
Tom Switzer, Sydney Morning Herald
The survey evidence is clear. In a YouGov poll commissioned by the Centre for Independent Studies last year, 58 per cent of Australian millennials have a favourable view of socialism, with only 18 per cent having an unfavourable one. These findings reflect Millennial attitudes in Britain and the US.
What’s going on?
Part of the problem is plain ignorance. Most Millennials were hardly alive when Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire”.
According to the CIS poll, only 26 per cent of Millennials are familiar with Vladimir Lenin and 34 per cent with Joseph Stalin. Only 21 per cent of […]
Australia Wins The Global Patsy Award 2019
The Brookings Institute released a report that claims everyone is better off economically by sticking to Paris, but check out the devastating graphs. Economically, everyone is a loser, but the three biggest losers are Australia, Russia and OPEC.
Australia is doing more, paying more, suffering more and yet will make almost no difference to the global emissions tally in anything other than a purely symbolic impress-your-dinner–guests kind of way.
If Australia left the Paris Agreement, even the left leaning Brookings Institute can’t find much difference in total global man-made emissions. Australia is forcing the renewables transformation faster than anywhere else, it will lose GDP, wages, jobs, investment, and the dollar will fall. All that, and no one could even tell the difference between Paris with Australia, and Paris without.
Clearly Australian negotiators at the UN are incompetent on a whole new scale. If they had Australian’s interests at heart, even a little bit, they would have done this study themselves, and gone to Paris with some realistic comparative data to argue that we are cutting too fast and paying too much. Finalists for most useless Global Negotiator of the Decade are Kevin Rudd, […]
Opportunity costs are the most invisible costs in the world.
Purely hypothetically, if you wanted to nobble a competing country, you could pay 350.org…
“We know what it takes to stop this industry,” said 350.org’s May Boeve. “It is not a mystery, it is not magical.
Valerie Richardson, The Washington Times
Climate protests cost $91 billion in lost economic activity, chamber study finds
Climate activists fighting to derail pipelines and other energy projects have blocked $91.9 billion in U.S. economic activity and hundreds of thousands of jobs, according to a new report.
See more at: https://www.globalenergyinstitute.org/infrastructure-lost
There is no Economy B. Once we have wrecked this one….
The report analyzed 15 targeted projects, including the hotly contested Keystone XL pipeline, Constitution Pipeline, and Oregon LNG terminal, as well as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s 2014 fracking ban.
In addition to $91.9 billion in lost economic activity, the protests cost nearly 730,000 job opportunities and $20 billion in tax revenue to federal, state and local governments.
…the U.S. surpassed Russia this year to become the world’s largest crude oil producer and has led the world in […]
The advantage of communist autocrats is that they can create government havoc so much more efficiently.
The Chinese solar boom was so big it became the world’s largest solar market. It was so big it pushed up global “clean energy” investment to a record high. China became the veritable show pony of the solar spruikers: “leading the world in clean energy investment”. Mashable tells us it was so big “the solar boom could be seen from space“.
But the star advertisement for renewable glory was all based on subsidies:
The Chinese solar boom was “pretty significant”
A couple of months ago the Chinese government admitted they were cutting the subsidies to make electricity cheaper again for consumers. That hit the stock market. Now projects are being cancelled and orders are drying up for the hapless manufacturers.
The free market might be telling us something China’s solar industry is at a crossroads
“Without subsidies there’s no return on investment for over a decade, so investors and property owners aren’t interested in distributed solar. With subsidies it only takes seven years to recoup the investment,” he adds.
China’s solar manufacturers are unhappy with recent government policy changes […]
Wow. Wait til word gets out. This is dynamite.
Chinese Bitcoin miners are reopening the Hunter Valley coal power station called Redbank in NSW. They have a deal that gets around our gargantuan, mismanaged grid by buying coal power direct for 8c/kWh, while Australians in the same place pay 28c/kWh.
This is exactly the nightmare the head of the Australian Energy Management Organisation (AEMO) spoke of just last week — that “big players could abandon the grid”. That’s a degenerate spiral leaving a shrinking pool of suckers to pay for the inefficient, bird-killing, blackout prone, witchdoctor grid.
Bitcoin mining’s growing demand for cheap energy revived a shuttered coal mine
Ashat Rathi, Quartz
Consumers there pay, on average, $A0.28 ($0.22) per kilowatt-hour (kWh) for electricity. But Hunter Energy, which owns Redbank, are offering the crypto miners electricity at a fraction of the cost. The “first-of-its-kind” deal, as the Age puts it, will see the crypto miners pay only A$0.08 per kWh in the day and A$0.05 per kWh at night. Hunter Energy told the Age that the price is feasible because the electricity produced at the coal power plant would go straight to the crypto miners, bypassing—and […]
The Australian Fake Free market is so screwed. What asset is worth more in the trash-can than sold to a willing bidder? AGL is the definition of Predatory Capitalism.
Everyone is talking about Liddell. The old coal plant is on the chopping block in 2022 and we can see the electricity price rise coming from here.
People in Australia are going without their veggies to pay for electricity. Liddell coal plant makes cheap electricity (like old coal plants everywhere). This is a problem that would solve itself if not for Malcolm Turnbull, the RET, and the AEMO. It takes a lot of money and whole fleets of bureaucrats to stop the free market fixing this by default.
AGL is the largest coal-fired producer in Australia, but it’s also the largest generator in toto and the largest investor in renewable energy on the Australian Stock Exchange. Spot the conflict of interest? The company controls 30% of the generation in our two largest states, and 40% in South Australia. The man in charge of AGL – Andy Vesey — formerly of New York, earns $6.9 million a year, and can probably afford to pay his own electricity bill. But as Tony Cox […]
Electricity prices declined for forty years. Obviously that had to stop.
Here’s is the last 65 years of Australian electricity prices — indexed and adjusted for inflation. During the coal boom, Australian electricity prices declined decade after decade. As renewables and national energy bureaucracies grew, so did the price of electricity. Must be a coincidence…
Today all the hard-won masterful efficiency gains of the fifties, sixties and seventies have effectively been reversed in full.
Indexed Real Consumer Electricity Prices, Australia, 1955-2017.
For most of the 20th Century the Australian grid was hotch potch of separate state grids and mini grids. (South Australia was only connected in 1990). In 1998 the NEM (National Energy Market) began, a feat that finally made bad management possible on a large scale. Though after decades of efficiency gains, Australians would have to wait years to see new higher “world leading” prices. For the first years of the NEM prices stayed around $30/MWh.
But sooner or later a national system is a sitting duck for one small mind to come along and truly muck things up.
Please spread this graph far and wide.
Thanks to a Dr Michael Crawford who did the original, […]
A fairly crappy investment in every sense — even as a “subsidy farmer”:
…renewable energy proponents say individual consumers like Mr Pulford could play an increasingly important role as citizen investors.
“I say it is a little bit gold plated,” Mr Pulford says of his $20,000 investment.
‘The new system was installed last month and he is already generating enough power to run all his home energy needs, charge his son’s hybrid SUV and sell excess back to the grid. “It ranges between $2 to about $1.90 a day for energy and that can be with the clothes dryers and bar heaters on.”
Mr Pulford said he expects to pay off the investment within 14 years.
He’s excited that his electricity bill is only $700 a year, after laying out twenty grand. After 14 years his “investment” will start to pay off, assuming the batteries are still running, the solar panels are clean, and the inverter didn’t need replacing. Those battery warranties, at best, are ten years. He might get lucky. Without subsidies, his “pay-back time” would be something like 30% longer.
In the ACT, 250 homes with Reposit technology […]
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The nerds have the numbers on precious metals investments on the ASX
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