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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 Tesla’s.
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
Hallelujah — Kemi Badenoch has thrown Net Zero under a bus
Finally, 8 weeks after Donald Trump was sworn in, the UK conservative party says what skeptics and many conservatives have been saying for ten or twenty years. Perhaps they were jolted into action by the shocking polls that showed — from out of nowhere, the Reform Party was polling just as well, or even better than the 200 year old Conservative party.
Conservatives supporting global weather witchcraft and UN fantasies are facing an existential threat.
The GWPF is delighted, of course, having warned about the dire Net Zero outcomes for 15 years. And Kemi Badenoch blasts the old policies, calling them “fantasy politics” that cost the Earth, drive up the cost of electricity, while “not really” protecting the environment. She’s realized no one had a detailed plan, and if they did, sensationally, she says they wouldn’t talk about it because it would reveal “just how catastrophic the actual costs will be for families, for businesses, and for our economy.” In a blockbuster moment, she even admits the futility of it all saying that the UK has done more on carbon emissions that anyone in the […]
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) […]
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By Jo Nova
With exquisite timing, another price rise in Australian electricity arrived just in time for the next election
As the Opposition point out the Labor government went to the last election telling us 97 times how they would make our electricity $275 cheaper, but with the latest rise, it’ll cost more like $1,300 more than it did before the Labor party were elected. Prices look set to rise about two or three times faster than inflation. But coming after big blockbuster rises two years in a row, even a 5 or 10% rise is nasty.
The Australian Energy Regulator (AER). Being part of The Blob, diplomatically and uselessly blame nearly every part of the system, as though this is just bad luck, even though they must know exactly which single dominant factor has changed in the last 30 years.
Average wholesale market spot prices increased across 2024, impacted by factors such as high demand, coal generator and network outages, and low solar and wind output that drove high price events across DMO regions. These high price events have also affected the price of wholesale electricity contracts for 2025–26.
Meanwhile Minister Chris […]
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
Shamen and fortune-tellers are back preying on suggestible minds
A new “study” warns us that the most populated cities on Earth have a distinct trend towards, wait for it, wetter or drier weather. Somehow, 95 of the 100 biggest cities do not have the exact same amount of rain that they had 40 years ago. (The horror). And this is “weird” they say, as if shifting patterns of rain have not been normal for the last four billion years.
The new term this week in Climate Bingo is “Climate Whiplash” — which means a city that has had more droughts and floods lately. It’s just another sort of Global Weirding which was predicted by exactly no models anywhere until after it happened, and sometimes not even then.
The trick here is to study some random permutation in an obscure weather metric over an absurdly short time frame — like for example the moisture surplus/deficit difference between precipitation and evapotranspiration, and voila, we find a “40 year trend”. Given that the Pacific ocean oscillates on 20 – 30 year cycle, and the Atlantic on a 60 to 80 year one, the world will never run out of […]
By Jo Nova
Who knew? Penguins are not only a “sentinel species” warning us about climate change in Antarctica but “Adélie penguin breeding is closely linked to temperature“. More warming equals more penguins.
So just as we can use trees as thermometers, we can use penguins as thermometers. And when we do, we find that there was a veritable boom in penguins in the Ross Sea 1,000 years ago.
It’s all there in the peer reviewed Zheng paper, 2023 — thanks to NoTricksZone and KlimaNachrichten for finding the paper.
As one of the most important ‘sentinel species’ in the Antarctic ecosystem, the Adélie penguin (Pygoscelis adeliae) is widely distributed in the Ross Sea region and its population is extremely sensitive to climate change (Ainley, 2002; Ainley et al., 2010). Since the International Geophysical Year in 1957, researchers have conducted extensive field investigations on climate change (including temperature, SST, sea ice, and polynyas) and Adélie penguin populations in Antarctica.
Modern monitoring data also show that Adélie penguin breeding is closely linked to temperature…
After comparing with historical records of penguin populations at Cape Bird, Dunlop Island, and Cape Adare, all were found to have a […]
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 […]
Cyclone Alfred headed straight for Brisbane
It’s not often a cyclone heads straight for a big population center in Australia, and the media is running minute by minute updates:
Nullschool
It’s a slow moving category 2 storm, that won’t set any wind speed records, but will cross paths with 3 or 4 million people. Current wind speeds at 20 locations are available here. Let’s just hope it doesn’t rain for too long. The latest BOM report says sustained winds are 95km / hour with gusts to 130 km/hr. (Roughly 60 to 80 mph).
http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDQ65002.shtml
If “Climate Change” has any effect on Australian cyclones, it’s to reduce them:
With the usual logic and reason of top climate experts, this suggests that car engines, burgers, cows and coal can prevent cyclones. Anyone driving an EV, or eating vegeburgers clearly doesn’t care about koalas (or delicate solar panels):
BOM
These were Australian cyclone tracks 51 years ago, before mankind emitted 75% of all emissions of CO2 ––
Two cyclones went past Brisbane.
BOM — Cyclone Tracks Southern Hemisphere_
Back in days when humankind had barely started jumping on planes for hot weekends and footy finals, […]
By Jo Nova
There’s nothing like a few belligerent trade spats, and miscreant dragged anchors to ruin a brand’s reputation
After six separate incidents of underwater cables being sabotaged in the Baltic Sea, the German Defense Ministry is wondering if it is wise to buy Chinese wind turbines with all their electronic parts. A new report commissioned for the department not only suggests the government should restrict new turbines, it advises them to call a halt to an existing project.
Hypothetically, China might remotely shut down wind turbines at a key moment, creating crazy price spikes, and industrial havoc (although wind turbines seem quite good at that on their own). But seriously, if wind turbines got a bit more random, or a bit less efficient, would anyone know for sure? And if a market player had that information in advance, they could make out like a bandit — bidding at the right moment, and collecting on all the price spikes. It would be just another way to bleed a country, raise electricity prices, and reduce it’s competitiveness. (But good for business back home, eh? )
Oddly, the Defense analysts seem to worry more that China might delay projects on purpose, […]
By Jo Nova
Wow. Just Wow. Trump gets elected and Reuters realizes renewable energy is unrealistic
In a rush, at least one opinion writer at Reuters is suddenly saying all the things skeptics have been saying for years: all the things Reuters has hidden from the world about renewable energy.
It is hard to believe, but it’s all there… the naked utter failure of solar and wind to reduce CO2, to reduce oil and gas, and to reduce prices. Edward Chancellor calls it a “resounding failure”. He has the devastating figures, and even the graph showing how countries with more renewables have more expensive electricity. He has another graph of the share market failure of renewables compared to the fossil fuel success, and he uses the words “tumbled” and “soared”. To grind it home, he explains how we just export our manufacturing to China which uses coal (is this news?). He calls Net Zero an “illusion” where we think we lower our emissions but we actually raise them overseas.
There is carnage among the sacred cows…
Climate policy requires a more realistic approach
By Edward Chancellor, Reuters
LONDON, Feb 27 (Reuters Breakingviews) – The pursuit […]
By Jo Nova
People with a good education are hard to fool, which is why the curriculum buries the good stuff until it disappears under a kiloton of culture, engagement and sustainability blah. Then the media (with US government Blob funding) repeats the hypnotic trance line “seas are rising due to climate change” until anyone who was accidentally taught real science, forgets it.
How many children (how many adults) think that sea levels have been the same for a million years? The travesty of 12 years of education is that 99% of people know nothing about 99% of history, and even less about prehistory. Every one of these defenseless souls is so easily fooled into panic attacks about seas rising a millimeter a year. “Unprecedented” they say! Don’t use the hair-dryer!
Willie Soon has some fun in his time machine zipping through ancient Greece and Roman history, where ports were built 6 crazy kilometers from the sea…
As Willie mentioned, it’s awkward that the rise started 100 years before cars, and coal power plants existed.
And after two world wars, 1.5 billion cars and 35 million planes a year, the rate of sea level rise is pretty much […]
By Jo Nova
If CO2 isn’t endangering lives, legally, there’s no reason to outlaw oil and gas
Marc Morano of ClimateDepot calls this the “holy grail” of the climate agenda. Most of the climate policies of the United States depend on “the Endangerment Finding”– so President Trump asked the new EPA head to look closely at it. This is the “finding” in 2009 that CO2 endangers the public, and that in turn means the EPA must regulate this “pollutant”. Thereby becoming the perfect excuse to allow the bureaucrats to regulate cars, trucks, planes, gas stoves and anything from hair dryers to home insulation.
The new EPA head just finished his 30 day consideration and recommends the Whitehouse rewrite the past conclusion entirely.
Ann Carlson of LegalPlanet says undoing the Endangerment Finding …”would mean full-blown warfare against all things climate.” She describes how the entire bureaucratic edifice crumbles if CO2 is not a pollutant:
If the Administration were to reverse the endangerment finding, greenhouse gases would no longer need to be regulated under the Clean Air Act. Presumably, EPA would then simply move to revoke all of Biden’s major climate rules regulating cars, trucks, power plants, and oil […]
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By Jo Nova
The iconic 120 year old company shares fall as rumors of a takeover spread
BP has lost a quarter of its share value in the last two weeks. The fall started when company profits turned out to be just $9 billion, down from $14b a year ago and $28b in 2022. As The Telegraph reports, “BP’s shareholders had realized that the green spending they supported in 2020 had halved their dividends.” But Shell, Chevron, and Exxon — the other oil giants — they were all doing much better.
Twenty years ago BP changed its branding to “Beyond Petroleum”*. By 2020 the company was hellbent on getting there. Suicidally, the oil company pledged to reduce their own oil production by 40% by 2030, (which did nothing except help all their competitors) and promised to pivot into renewable power. BP set itself a target to increase renewables generation by a factor of twenty this decade. The media gushed — “BP Shuns Fossil Fuels“, said Politico. BP supposedly shone a light on “stranded oil and gas”!
Thus and verily, in mid 2020, with exquisite timing, BP management leapt headlong in the magical energy pit. They were […]
By Jo Nova
Wake up Patsy States! Trump dumps “climate change” and creates a *Council of National Energy Dominance*
Donald Trump is not wasting time unpacking the mess. In a blockbuster sweep he’s ordered the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to immediately “stop work connected to climate change” and eliminate “climate-related terms” across the agency, and to the “maximum extent permitted by the law”. Homeland Security is supposed to be guarding the USA against terrorists, hackers, disasters and other threats, so this is a major refocusing exercise for an agency that was wandering in the dark trying to hold back the sea, and prevent droughts and floods with windmills and LED lights.
The DHS was set up in response to the Sept 11 terrorist attacks, so it was only 22 years old, yet it had already mutated into an agency that that was “working to inform the American people about climate-related risks, including extreme heat, flooding, wildfire, and drought, and to provide them with clear information about how to reduce those risks. ” In other words, it was a walking-talking scare machine to squeeze more money out of taxpayers to feed The Big Government Blob. The official webpage […]
By Jo Nova
Just another $20 billion dollars for the Climate Swamp
The New EPA chief has just tracked down another $2 billion handed out to a 2-bit nothing climate entity at the last minute. It’s only a tiny part of the Monster Swamp but it captures the spirit of bald-faced looting that was The US bloated Government.
The US voters voted to cut government spending on November 5th, so the obvious thing for Democrats to do was — the exact opposite. In the last days of the Biden pillage-n-steal campaign about $20 billion dollars was “allocated” to the EPA and parked in a bank account. Presumably in the hope of keeping the NGO activists of “climate” alive through the dark days of Trumpian hell. It may also have been a way to pay off friends, or stash funds for nice post-Trump career opportunities, who knows? But it was all a bit of a panic and the aid was jetting out through a fire hose. So much so, that, one community group with only a $100 in revenue, was given two whole billion dollars.
New York Post
The funds were set aside at an outside financial […]
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 “DOGE can’t be stopped because it’s a very technical team.”
Trump and Elon Musk make a killer combination — One has business and politics, the other has wildly hi-tech science (and business skills too). For decades the Blob controlled science, captured it and strangled it to make it dependent. But they crippled their own teams so badly that one man came to achieve more than NASA. So it’s fitting that the same man came back to outflank the Blob’s technical defenses and leave them bare…
Joe Lonsdale, a tech venture capitalist who made his millions selling software to the Defence department, explains why Elon Musk and his tech expertise change everything this time. According to him, when Reagan tried to get answers from the bureaucracy, he’s didn’t have the technical help. They would ask questions but “there are so many ways of obscuring and to block these things. ” As Lonsdale describes it, “– no president has done this, ever. No President has ever had tech people around him.”
Lalonde: Elon got root access
They went to the systems… and they started finding things, like “oh my goodness” and these people who work for the […]
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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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