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By Jo Nova
Le Pen has weaponized ‘punitive’ environmental policies, and voters seem to like that
In the largest turnout since 1981, French voters chose the “Far Right” National Rally party in a record vote of 33 per cent. It is the first round of voting with the second on July 7th, but The Washington Post is already comparing the potentially “shocking” French election result with the 2016 Brexit win in the UK. The Guardian said the unthinkable has become plausible.
French elections: Why is the rejection of environmentalism a driving force behind France’s far-right vote?
By Matthieu Goar, Le Monde
After long neglecting environmental issues, the far-right party has made the denunciation of allegedly ‘punitive’ environmental policies into its new electoral weapon.
The former presidential candidate railed against “Brussels,” which “forces you, almost overnight, to change your boiler for €15,000,” against the “authoritarian reductions to agricultural land” and against the “heartless European Commission.”
“Don’t they have as their objective the reduction of human activity as a whole?” she asked, before connecting the issue to her obsession with French people’s daily lives, a strategy that […]
By Jo Nova
The Democrats needed a reason to dump their placeholder candidate for 2024, and that convention is coming soon. Obviously they want to drop in a new candidate at the last minute with just enough time to ride home on the honeymoon glow. Debates are not usually held before the conventions.
They were always going to throw Biden under the bus, but this way they stop him being the lame duck for as long as possible while they protect their real candidate from scrutiny. Republicans counting chickens at this point are far too relaxed.
Flag: Clément Bardot
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By Jo Nova
Sixty percent of all human CO2 emissions have been emitted since 1985 but today the corals are healthier than ever
In 1985 humans were emitting only 19.6 billion tons of CO2 each year, and now we emit 37 billion tons. In the meantime AIMS have been dragging divers thousands of kilometers over the reefs to inspect the coral cover. These are the most detailed underwater surveys on the largest reef system in the world, and they show that far from being bleached to hell, the corals are more abundant than we have ever seen them.
As Peter Ridd points out, when the reef was doing badly, AIMS was happy to combine the data on the whole reef, so we could lament its demise. But lately AIMS splits it into separate sections and if Peter Ridd didn’t check the numbers, who would know it was a record across the full 2,300 kilometer length of the reef? And that may be exactly the point. As Ridd reminds us, in 2012 the AIMS team predicted the coral cover in the central and southern regions would decline to 5 – 10 percent cover by 2022. Instead the whole reef is […]
By Jo Nova
The evil shipping smoke was shielding us from global warming…
You’ll never guess but it’s worse than we thought, and we are more to blame than we thought, kiss my government grant and pray to Gaia.
Wouldn’t you know — shipping smoke was polluting the world, but the smoke also seeded clouds, which cooled the Earth, and undid some of the global warming we caused with CO2. Now that we are finally fixing up the dirty ships, oh no, we’ve accidentally unleashed the global warming which the ship smoke was hiding. So there is about to be another wave of global bad news. And for some reason we didn’t see it coming, even though we’ve known for decades that sulfate aerosols caused cooling (and we had those expert climate models all along, didn’t we?)
Remember all those other times they said disaster would strike, and it didn’t, well, they were right. It would have happened, we just couldn’t see it because of the shipping pollution.
See how perfect this is for The Climate Industrial Complex?
We’ve been accidentally cooling the planet — and it’s about to stop
By Shannon Osaka, Washington Post
June 27th, 2024 | Tags: Aerosols, Shipping | Category: Atmosphere, Big-Government, Global Warming, Marine, Meteorology |  Print This Post | |
MKinsey Survey
By Jo Nova
EV Mandated Revolution hits a hurdle
The first buyers of EV’s were their most passionate fans, and presumably the people-most-likely to love them, and in the best position to use them. Yet, when surveyed, 49% of Australians who owned an EV and 46% in the US said they want to go back to an internal combustion engine for their next car.
And the US and Australia are two nations where nearly everyone has a home-garage or driveway which makes EV ownership a bit easier (as long as the house doesn’t catch fire). Yet even with this cheaper and easier form of charging half the EV owners don’t want another one.
McKinsey & Co surveyed 30,000 people in 15 countries and were said to be surprised at the result.
Almost half of U.S. electric car owners want to switch back to gas-powered cars, survey shows
Brad Matthews, The Washington Times
Nearly half of American owners of electric cars want to switch back to traditional cars powered by internal combustion engines, according to a consumer survey released by McKinsey and Co. earlier this month.
They had their reasons (boy did […]
By Jo Nova
It wasn’t supposed to be this cold and windless in Australia
For some reason that no climate model can explain, Australia has run out of wind power three months in a row, which means we had to use more gas than expected. It’s also been colder than climate models predicted, despite global emissions being higher than ever in history. For some other reason that no rational adult can explain, the State of Victoria banned gas drilling for most of the last decade (to reduce the beachy-weather days in eighty years) and thus, as night follows day, the state is running out of gas. Ergo, predictably, it is also facing blackouts, cost blowouts and manufacturers dependent on gas are warning they may have to close down, or move to the US, where gas is still cheap.
If only the climate models could predict temperatures and wind even a month in advance?
The AEMO (our electricity grid manager) says Victoria will run out of gas before winter runs out of bite. Apparently Victorians are pulling twice as much gas out of their main storage as they can afford to at the moment. Not only does Victoria need the […]
By Jo Nova
Global fossil fuel use hits a new record level in 2023
We spent $1.77 Trillion dollars on the clean energy transition last year, yet our fossil fuel use is still rising and our emissions are still increasing.
The Energy Institute released their annual “Statistical Review of World Energy”. Total energy used in the world went up by 2% showing no sign of slowing down. For the first time, more coal was used in India than Europe and North America combined, a trend that is unlikely to stop soon. Despite there being more EVs on Earth than ever before, oil consumption was up 2% to above 100 million barrels for the first time. China overtook the US as the country with the largest oil refining capacity in the world last year at 18.5 million bpd. But the US overtook Qatar as the largest exporter of LNG. And global man-made emissions of carbon dioxide exceeded 40 gigatons for the first time.
Imagine what a different place the world would be if we spent that money on something useful? Just a tenth of that might provide clean water and sanitation for the poorest of the poor and stop children […]
Clearing in the Snowy Mountains. Geoff Wise on Facebook, June 4th 2024
By Jo Nova
It’s just another day on the job to save the world from man-made pollution
In a quest to make the weather a bit nicer in 100 years these trees needed to be cut down now so we can connect up a big hydropower “battery” for holy solar and wind power. The towers will be 75m high and the path through the forest, 140m wide.
When we ran off coal and gas power, we didn’t need pumped hydro. Fossil fuels protect the forests and hills of Australia.
These photos were posted by Geoff Wise on the “High Country of Australia” show us what our clean green future will look like:
“Here is where the power lines from the Snowy Hydro 2, at Lobs Hole, will cross the Tumut River ravine to go to the recently cleared site of the switching station in the Maragle State Forest, before heading north to feed into the National Power grid. The power lines will come from near the distant horizon. Look at the photos for more information. You can see this for yourself, as I was […]
By Jo Nova
The Renewable Crash Test Dummy hits a fork in the road
Finally the Australian opposition is bravely popping the sacred cow of the Energy Wars. The Dummy nation was aiming for the holy grail “low emission” grid that no other nation had tried. The driest continent on Earth, with small hydro, and no extension cords to any nuclear power, were going to build the perfect grid based on the wind and sun alone. It was always doomed to fail, it was just a question of how much money would be burned at the pyre before the Crash Test Dummy crashed.
Because they didn’t do their homework, and the fan-media didn’t ask them to, the Labor Party set themselves up to fail. They left their left flank wide open, and the Opposition is finally launching the missiles that have been there all along in the mist. The ultimate low-emissions generator was always and obviously the unspeakable nuclear power. It’s a fifty year old technology. If anyone actually cared about carbon dioxide, they would have done this instead of the Kyoto scheme in 1997. But it was all a theater of grift and graft for unreliable, fairy energy, […]
By Jo Nova
The cost problem is solved (for all the wrong reasons), but it’s still not enough
Around the world, governments are trying to force people to buy electric vehicles because they are nice people who are worried about polar bears. And since drivers out there all believe in climate change, according to all the pollsters, it shouldn’t be a big ask. (Who wouldn’t want to save the Earth?)
Supposedly, just 10 years from now, they told us, we wouldn’t be able to buy a new combustion engine car at all. Instead, not only are sales of new EV slowing rapidly, to the point where there is a glut, but as prices fall for used cars customers are not rushing out to pick up the cheaper second hand EVs either.
Look at how fast the turnaround in this market has been in the last year — a 25% price premium– gone:
Used EVs are now selling for thousands of dollars less, on average, than comparable gas-powered vehicles.
Kaya Ginsky, CNBC
The difference between the price of a used Tesla Model 3 and BMW 3 Series shows how a “premium” associated with EVs in the […]
By Jo Nova
How much back-up do we need for our 11.5 gigawatt wind system? About 11.4 gigawatts.
Wind energy failed on Thursday at what must be close to a record low — with barely 88MW of production from 11,500MW of wind turbines. That’s about 0.7% of total nameplate capacity.
With construction costs running at $2 million for every theoretical megawatt of turbine, that’s $20 billion dollars of machinery sitting out there in the fields and forests of Australia producing about as much as two diesel generators.
We have 84 industrial wind plants across 5 states of Australia, and the green band below was their total contribution to our national electricity needs on Thursday — put your reading glasses on.
Anero.id
Things were even worse in Western Australia, where at the one point that afternoon when I happened to look the state’s total wind generation was minus 11MW. Some wind turbines were drawing a megawatt here and there, perhaps to keep the turbines rolling so they don’t get flat spots on bearings.
It was an attack of another climate-denying high pressure cell on Thursday. There was no place in Australia good for wind generation except (maybe) for our […]
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By Jo Nova
The deadliest climate question: How many degrees cooler will that be?
Ask it now, ask it later, before breakfast and while watching “the news”. Teach the children to ask in kindy.
We know the IPCC wildly exaggerates, but pretend they’re right and it still doesn’t make any sense. Richard Lindzen, Will Happer, and William van Wijngaarden took the IPCC at its word and calculate that even if we get to Net Zero by 2050, will only make the world a tiny bit cooler, assuming they’re right (which they’re not) and assuming the rest of the world joins in (which they aren’t).
Say we stop all coal, oil and gas, redesign our energy grids, cull the cows, give up our holidays, our cars and ride bikes to work, fill the oceans with windmills, and turn our thermostats down. We spend a quadrillion dollars on a Moonshot to stuff a perfectly good fertilizer in holes underground, and instead of getting to the moon, the world is barely 0.28 degrees C cooler. That’s a half of one lousy Fahrenheit less that it would have been. This ladies and gentlemen is the best case scenario for the global action plan […]
By Jo Nova
Here we go again. It’s another round of the climate wars in Australia. It’s the issue that never dies, because global weather control is a stupid idea levitating on righteous indignation and a hundred billion dollars. As long as it floats, it’s the Hindenburg of National Energy Policy. It will only end when there’s nothing left to burn.
This time, the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, has said what all the grown ups already know — that the 82% renewables target by 2030 that Labor legislated is doomed and we should delay it. Two years after ignition, everyone knows the NetZero rocket is impossible. Renewable investment has ground to a halt, people are not buying EV’s, farmers don’t want the transmission lines, coastal towns don’t want the wind towers, project costs are doubling and tripling, and Florence the borer is still stuck in a short hole that is meant to be a long one. Worse, we’ve already got more solar power than the grid can handle and extra solar power is so useless we’re about to start charging people who carelessly add to the glut at lunchtime.
Peter Dutton is sadly still saying we should do “Net […]
By Jo Nova
The spell is broken
Thirty years of crafting a fantasy narrative was fine while countries floated on a cloud of endless easy money, but those days are over.
Counting is still underway in the EU elections, but the Greens appear to have lost around 20 seats, shrinking from 74 seats to 53. In Germany, the Green-stranglehold of Europe, exit polls suggest the Green vote fell from 20.5% to 12%.
In a shock, Marine Le Pen’s party in France doubled Macron’s party vote achieving 30% of the vote to his 15%, whereupon Macron called an emergency election, hoping to save a few extra spots in France’s Parliament before the “Far Right” really wakes up.
The “Far-Right” of course, being any party which doubts that bicycles can stop storms:
Despite 242% of Nobel prize winning experts being certain that life on Earth will be destroyed by 2034*, climate action was not a priority for most Europeans.
Newspaper journalists though have different priorities to most voters. There go those climate ambitions…
The result comes amid a broader shift to the right and a green backlash — or “greenlash” — against policies designed to tackle […]
By Jo Nova
EV manufacturers are backing away slowly from the Great EV Debacle
The government commanded the EV bubble, but even with billions in subsidies, schemes and advertising the chemistry didn’t obey. Somehow, even with legislation, the right discoveries didn’t discover themselves on cue.
VW has decided to use one third of its EV development money to develop a better fuel car instead.
Hey, it’s only 60,000 million Euro.
VW Will Spend Billions of Its EV Development Budget on Gas Engines
By: Adrian Padeanu, Motor1.com
Of the €180 billion ($196 billion) set aside in 2023 primarily for next-generation EVs, the German brand will now use one-third to continue the development of combustion engines. The announcement comes from Arno Antlitz, the Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer at the Volkswagen Group. The company intends to spend roughly €60 billion ($65 billion) to “keep our combustion cars competitive.”
It’s a stark departure from the previous plan announced in late 2022 to build and sell only electric cars in Europe from 2033.
Only a year ago Volkswagon was confident it could build a cheaper EV. But a month ago they reported a 20 percent […]
By Jo Nova
To solve the increase in global disasters just axe the UN
Despite a galactic rise in Headlines of Doom, the world is a safer place than ever. The United Nations however is an absolute danger to our quality of life and our children’s mental health. They’ve shamelessly concocted the myth that disasters are increasing due to “climate change”.
NetZeroWatch report on a new paper on natural disasters and find that yearly deaths are down. Somehow satellites, phones, antibiotics, bulldozers and fire trucks are better at saving lives than horse drawn carts and hessian bags. Who would have guessed, apart from everyone?
From Alimonti and Mariani.:
Below the graph of natural disaster events shows a huge increase in the reporting of disasters, at least up until the turn of the century. But there is, if anything, a decline since then. There are three very different trends. But the giant bureaucratic sponge that is the United Nations can shamelessly draw a straight linear trend through this graph and tell the world that disasters are getting worse, even as they are obviously not.
In the last twenty years, humans have put out 40% of all the CO2 emissions they’ve […]
By Jo Nova
Stop Storms with Censorship!
The UN Chief reminds us that we are babies who need an unelected tribal chieftain to protect us from seeing naughty persuasive words. Lord help us if grown up doctors, dentists, economists and people who keep planes-in-the-sky are accidentally exposed to The Word Of Exxon, or Shell, or BP. They might vote the wrong way, or buy the wrong car. They might influence their own children. (They might wonder why they pay money to The UN?)
What looks acts and smells like a global government in waiting? The United Nations wants your money and control over what you read and see. They also want control over the voices of the industry they are proposing to destroy.
The latest science decree from the Experts is that fossil fuel companies are the “Godfathers of climate chaos”. They’re probably sneaking around behind you like the mafia, dropping flood-bombs on your children’s school and raining on your Pride Parade. Fossil fuels are just like tobacco now — apart from how they harvest the fields and feed the children and fly us to Barbados for beachy weekends. (Marlboro only did that in the adverts…)
The UN need […]
By Jo Nova
It’s just another scientific study doomed to disappear
A Norwegian whaler paid for 2,200 aerial photos of East Antarctica in 1937. Since then humankind has emitted 91% of all the emissions we’ve ever produced and the world is facing an extinction level catastrophe and yet satellite photos show this 2,000 kilometer long section of East Antarctica hasn’t changed — or at least, not in any way related to our uptake of coal power or planes, trains, airconditioners and cars. Basically the human race emitted 1,600 billion tons of carbon dioxide which was supposed to warm the poles twice as fast as anywhere else, but there is still nothing to see here.
Belated Thanks to Tallbloke for the first article I saw on this.
2,000 km of Antarctic ice-covered coastline has been stable for 85 years
Using hundreds of old aerial photographs dating back to 1937, combined with modern computer technology, the researchers have tracked the evolution of glaciers in East Antarctica. The area covers approximately 2,000 kilometers of coastline and contains as much ice as the entire Greenland Ice Sheet.
Compared to modern data, the ice flow speeds are unchanged. While some […]
By Jo Nova
Just enjoy for the moment the small victory of what’s happening in democratic New Zealand. The Guardian is apoplectic, so we know it must be good:
Rightwing NZ government accused of ‘war on nature’ as it takes axe to climate policies
The Guardian
The New Zealand government has been accused of waging a “war on nature” after it announced sweeping cuts to climate action projects, while making no significant new investments in environmental protection or climate crisis-related policy.
But absent from the budget documents was any meaningful new spending on the climate crisis. Instead, dozens of climate-related initiatives, including programmes in the Emissions Reductions Plan and funding for data and evidence specialists were subject to sweeping cuts.
Notice how the critics are all so vague. Their big fear, and worst threat, is some unfashionable place called “backwards”:
The Labour opposition called the budget a “catastrophe” that was “taking us backwards”.
For some reason the opposition did not say “Lord help us, The NZ government will warm the world!” Mostly because it sounds too stupid to lay the point of all these policies right out there. I mean, […]
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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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