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Not the kind of article we’d expect to see in Time Magazine. A 100% endorsement of the inescapable need for fossil fuels?
The Modern World Can’t Exist Without These Four Ingredients. They All Require Fossil Fuels
By Vaclav Smil, Time Magazine
Cyron Ray Macey
Four materials rank highest on the scale of necessity, forming what I have called the four pillars of modern civilization: cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia are needed in larger quantities than are other essential inputs. The world now produces annually about 4.5 billion tons of cement, 1.8 billion tons of steel, nearly 400 million tons of plastics, and 180 million tons of ammonia. But it is ammonia that deserves the top position as our most important material: its synthesis is the basis of all nitrogen fertilizers, and without their applications it would be impossible to feed, at current levels, nearly half of today’s nearly 8 billion people.
Does any other odd factoid capture the rise of China so well?
China now produces more than half of the world’s cement and in recent years it makes in just two years as much of it as did the […]
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8.8 out of 10 based on 8 ratings
The Swamp is not even hiding the corruption, just the exact dollar figure
Anthony Fauci is effectively King of the National Institute of Health. He gets paid $450,000 a year — the highest paid public servant in the United States. In just one year alone the NIH dished out $30 billion to more than 50,000 recipients. And there are royalty payments that flow back the other way, which amounted to $350 million dollars over the decade from 2010-2020. And here’s the weird thing, most of those royalty payments are secret.
Thirty billion dollars is an awfully big carrot, and even though $350 million seems small in comparison, it’s awfully big compared to the salaries of the few key decision-makers. It’s an obvious conflict of interest, and lives are at risk, but it’s not even being disclosed.
If Big Pharma were paying off people to get their drugs approved, it would look a lot like this. And if Big Pharma (or the asset managers that own big pharma) were also paying off the media to silence reporting of NIH corruption would the media ignore this story — exactly like it does?
In a normal world this type of corruption would be […]
What are they on? About twenty years of government funded propaganda and guilt.
Most Australian voters don’t have a clue — half of the nation thinks we make 10% of global emissions when the truth is more like 1%.
Climate change might be the greatest moral challenge of our lifetimes but most Australians are in the dark about what the real numbers are. They probably assumed that if we were only making one-tiny-percent, the government, the ABC, or even the education system might have told them. After all, we’re spending $13 billion dollars a year. What exactly are public universities for if not for letting Australians know this kind of data?
Where was the Government? The conservatives in charge keep throwing away their own best arguments. Almost like they want to hang on to a few wealthy seats while they miss the chance to ignite middle Australia.
But the ignorance is no accident. All the players — the politicians, the academics, the ABC, ANU, CSIRO, Schools, Universities, et al and all sundry, all profit from Big Government. They serve the government first, and not the people, and that’s the problem.
Liberals playing politics with pretence Australia can change global climate […]
Stick with this — step over the cheap shots at Trump and predictable hits on conservatives — Bill Maher is doing a cracker job on a soft left audience. He’s packaged up a dose of medicine about how important free speech is. His is a rare voice on the left pointing out the hypocrisy and stupidity of censorship.
“Keeping you safe and sorting out the lies is your job” (not Twitters)
We always focus on the producers and never the consumers, as if we’re all helpless dumb blondes ready to believe everything…
People lie, that’s what people do. Every age is the misinformation age, and whenever a new means of communication comes along some reach for the censor button. In 1858 the New York Times thought we couldn’t handle the Transatlantic Telegraph. “It was superficial and too fast for the Truth”…
He also tosses a cold bucket or two on the lefty willingness to believe the Covid stats, and effectively calls all the censors “assholes”.
In America you have the right to say what you think, to be wrong, and to be an asshole.
And if you […]
Market traders will be sweating. Today in the green-star renewable state of South Australia there won’t be much wind blowing, they’re weeks away from the lowest solar insolation of the year, and the extension cord to the coal plants in Victoria is limited for some reason.
This below is the remarkable AEMO prediction for South Australian for wholesale electricity today. Note the scale on the left hand side. The flat tops on the price peaks mark the cap at $15,000 per megawatt hour. The sheer width of those spike predictions is awesome — potentially nearly ten hours of the day above $10,000. Demand is only 1,500 – 1,800MW but that’s still a bill of $15 million dollars an hour for a small state.
Note the size of those peaks…
The first peak is forecast from 6.30-10am, and the second batch pretty much stretch from 6pm to midnight. Wow.
The AEMO is handing out LOR (Lack of Reserve) notices. Watch the Market Notices here. Watch prices here. For those so inclined.
9.6 out of 10 based on 57 ratings
Everyone is going to want one of these. And he’d only six lessons!
Record Jet Suit Mountain Ascent
From the Youtube:
We proved you can scale a Lake District Mountain (3100ft Helveylln) in 3mins 30 seconds, despite very poor visibility that would have grounded a HEMS Helicopter. The Mountain Rescue foot response is over 70 minutes typically. The route was 1.2 miles and 2200ft of height gain.
9.8 out of 10 based on 44 ratings […]
Generation tonight….
Just another week in the Transition we (Don’t) have to have
With 65 Glorious Gigawatts the Australian grid system has a vast excess (theoretically) of generation capacity, yet it’s so fragile that the loss of an interconnector, normal maintenance and a few coal turbines down — has triggered $100 million dollar price spikes. These burning pyres of money are so savage the average cost of wholesale electricity — across a whole day — is lately in the realm of $200- $700 per megawatt hour over most states for 24 hour periods. For the last week, daily prices have been ten times the “old normal”.
And it comes on the back of the most expensive April in the Australian grid history in every mainland state on the National Electricity Market.
Autumn and spring are supposed to be easy days in Australia with peak demand only running at 27,000 MW. Because things are lighter, generators do normal maintenance at this time of year, but at the moment, there doesn’t seem to be any room for that in the network. In summer, demand is often 5,000MW higher. Where’s that going to come from?
Factories are shutting down for fear […]
by Jo Nova
What started as a minor an Australian headline turned into a glimpse of a mysterious world-wide phenomenon.
The Australian ABC tells us that Australian searches for climate change are up 5000%:
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But even the ABC admits no one is really talking about it — apparently Australians are secretly thinking about climate change at home on their computer:
Discussion of climate policy may be conspicuously absent this federal election campaign, but Google search data suggests the warming of the planet is weighing on voters’ minds — at least more so than in 2019.
But strangely, they don’t report actual google search results for “climate change” — instead they quote some focus groups, and talk about 5000% increases in obscure questions like “What is climate change meaning?” which no one except 12 year olds doing high school assignments probably wants to know.
So here’s the last 18 years of actual Google data on Australian searches for “climate change”:
Holy Smoke!
Google Trends: Australia searches for “climate change” hits record high| Click to enlarge
But, wait, really? Is this year really that much more exciting for “climate change” than the uber hot […]
This is a remarkably prescient piece on the fourth quarter of 2020 written by Goehring & Rozencwajg Natural Resource Investors. Don’t ask me how to pronounce their names. The really interesting part is about food rather than energy.
There is a lot of dense information about the impediments to the green transition and the first part is a warning to green investors who are flooding the market to get on the bandwagon of the “great opportunities” that abound. They conclude from their research that green schemes will generally lose money and waste a great deal of investment without making a dent on the level of emissions.
As to the food crisis: on page 12. “For four years global agriculture has sat on a knife edge” with a series of good seasons and bumper crops but at the same time grain inventories have been run down to a point where any hitch in supply could precipitate fears of famine and social unrest in developing nations that are at the pointy end of the food supply chain. There was news of droughts in some major cereal providers and cold weather in other places disrupting harvests.
They expect to see global cooling and […]
JudicialWatch has obtained 466 pages of information through FOIA, which should have been available to everyone all along — what is “Informed Consent”?
Not only does the vaccine take much longer to be degraded and removed from our bodies but it spreads far from the injection site and concentrates in the liver, spleen, adrenal glands and ovaries. And Pfizer knew this, but hid it, and all the agencies that were supposed to protect us didn’t demand the data, or didn’t report it.
Don’t underestimate the effect it will have on parents who find out that the vaccines deliver the bioweapon spikes directly to their daughters ovaries with unknown consequences. This is a message we can share that will create waves.
We can’t take back an injection, but we can stop future ones. It’s a Redpill Moment. People need to understand that the institutions we once trusted — like the CDC, FDA, TGA, Medical unions, media groups, and University academics are failing dismally to protect us and deserve to razed.
They either didn’t know where the vaccine particles went in the human body, and failed to ask, or worse, they did know:
Judicial Watch: Pfizer/BioNTech Study Found Lipid Nanoparticles […]
Remember when Uni students were “repulsed” at the idea that Bjorn Lomborg, an economic but not even a science skeptic, might get $4m from a legally elected government to set up a centre that was passively or actively rejected by every university in Australia?
How dangerous was that $4 million?
John Doerr gives $1.1 billion to Stanford for new climate school; largest gift in Stanford history
In the largest gift ever to Stanford University, Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr and his wife, Ann, have agreed to donate $1.1 billion to set up a new school on the campus devoted to the study of climate change and its solutions.
These are not funds seeking to understand the climate. The people who work for him know exactly what he wants them to find. He’s a longtime “clean tech” investor. His website is “SpeedandScale” and it’s 100%-non-stop-Decarbonium. What happens, if theoretically, one of his researchers (or even someone else at Stanford) discovers the Sun drives climate change?
How can science flow unimpeded when it comes pre-packaged with funding for all the solutions to the “answers” the science is supposed to discover, and from a man who makes money on those […]
Brisbane on May 3rd was a glorious 15 to 25C (or 60F – 77F) and yet the price of electricity was shocking.
The scale of the graph is so distorted that all the normal price gyrations fall to nothing, and there is only the spike — a full hour of $14,000 burning for every megawatt, and the state needing 7,000 megawatts. The demand level, or load is not unusual, but it’s about $100 million in electricity.
And this is the nice time of year for electricity managers, or it used to be. With weather that’s ideal for human habitation most air-conditioners and heaters are off. But the sun is setting earlier, and solar power is shrinking just as everyone gets home from work to turn on the oven.
AEMO
Some may blame the “lack of coal power”, but notice what’s happening to wind and solar power at critical time from 5:20pm to about 6:30pm.
All the wind and solar power in Queensland on May 3, 2022 |
Though there are other factors at work too and some are a bit mysterious according to Paul McArdle. Queensland at one point had only a 7% instantaneous reserve plant […]
Don’t mention the Australian vaccine: The TGA bans Aussie Professor from talking about his work
Australia has a mini Ministry of Truth already. It’s called the TGA.
Australians can probably still get a Pfizer vaccine in chemists and carparks across Australia, but they still need to fly to Iran to get an Australian-made vaccine. The good news is that at least this week it’s legal for Australians to finally fly to Tehran without taking Pfizer or Moderna shot first — as long as they don’t fly on an Australian airline. (Not mentioning any names, Qantas!)
The people mostly responsible for this situation are the TGA (Therapeutic Goods Association). They’re supposed to be looking after Australians health but somehow all their decisions happen to be exactly what a Pfizer CEO would want. Spooky eh? The TGA rushed the approval for the Pfizer vaccines, but still, millions of doses later, won’t release the procurement contracts, even under FOI. Signed on our behalf, and for our own good, yes? Did they even read the documents that Pfizer AND the FDA tried to hide for 75 years?
Now meet Professor Nikolai Petrovsky from Flinders University, Australia, who had already developed protein based vaccines against […]
An electric bus in Paris self immolated last Friday.
There were no injuries, apart from the bus itself, presumably because there were no passengers.
Note how little time all the passengers on a packed bus would have had to get out.
Just four weeks ago another Bolloré brand electric bus caught fire in Paris. A passer-by saw smoke and told the driver, and everyone on board got safely off before the situation got out of control. In response to this second explosion all 149 similar Bolloré brand Bluebuses have been withdrawn from circulation. The RAPT points out that “it has been operating electric buses since 2016 without any major incident”. But I think everyone can see what might have happened.
Buses are killing other busses though:
In late September 2021 a large fire event in Stuttgarter Straßenbahnen (SBB)’s depot, in Gaisberg, destroyed 25 buses. A first assessment by the police, reported on many German media, said that the fire could have been caused by an electric bus during charging procedure.
From Notalotofpeopleknowthat
h/t b.nice
10 out of 10 based on 55 ratings
The Conversation accidentally provides a great case study in confirmation bias
It’s how the fake consensus in science was created in the first place. Just sack the skeptics, poll the survivors, and pretend you’ve “discovered” something scientific!
The Conversion gets excited in 2022 A staggering 10,000 people took part in our #SetTheAgenda poll, and voters’ number one issue was climate change.
“Climate change was overwhelmingly the number-one issue on our readers’ agenda. In fact, more than 60% of you picked it…”
We wonder what they will do with the other 40%?
People were asked to pick three topics from a set list, so the 60% is inflated too.
Flashback to 2019:
“The Conversation” bans all skeptical scientists from commenting What kind of conversation only has one side? Paid propaganda.
by Jo Nova
The Conversation is a site established** by your taxpayer dollars, in countries where 50 – 60% of the entire population don’t agree with the IPCC’s dominant mantra. Yet no matter how qualified you are, no matter how good your argument, your evidence and your data, you, we, half the population, is now banned. The editor Misha Ketchell has officially blocked unbelievers, […]
Good: some in the US are doing something
Lauren Boebert leads effort to defund Biden Administration’s ‘disinformation’ board
Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., has authored legislation to shut down a new Department of Homeland Security board designed to police misinformation. Boebert’s legislation would defund the “Disinformation Governance Board” and ensure the federal government doesn’t have role in defining what truth is for the American people.
“‘It is our duty to shut down this department immediately,’ Boebert tells Fox News Digital.
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The clocks are striking thirteen. Welcome to the Ministry. pic.twitter.com/uQGmTFUTnn
— U.S. Ministry of Truth (@USMiniTru) April 30, 2022
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In other news, which may or may not be disinformation, Brett Sutton — former Chief Health Body of Victoria just said something very odd. He was explaining why people need an influenza jab this winter in Australia:
In fact for people who are vaccinated against Covid it [influenza] might be a much more significant illness… with the high fevers, the terrible headaches, …can’t get off the couch. People genuinely feel like they have been hit by a truck.
The full 5 minute interview is here, for context. […]
Luckily for Energy Oligarchs, Australian electricity prices have bounced right back to pre-pandemic insanity. Wholesale rates are romping around $170 dollars a megawatt hour in April across the whole national grid…
The media mouthpieces are blaming it on outages of coal turbines — even though wind power fails every week, and solar fails every day. If unreliable generators cause high prices, then Wind is King Fickle. They’re also blaming high coal prices, but coal itself, is a small part of the cost of a two billion dollar plant. Naturally, neither political team has a clue how to fix this. But it’s all so banal — the prices are set at auction, and some fuels are cheap. Add more of the cheap type, and we’d get cheaper electricity.
Right now, if there were more black coal plants setting the price more of the time, electricity would be half the cost. If enough brown coal plants like Hazelwood were still running, the prices would be a fifth. It’s all there in the data that ABC journalists never find. Consider the winning bids by fuel type in Australia for the last quarter of 2021. For Brown Coal, the average winning bid was $11 […]
Dominion Voting Machine
What would you do if you discovered three weeks before your national elections that the voting machines your nation was about to use were easily hackable by local or foreign state actors? The Dominion electronic machines were going to be used in 16 states, and it was a “matter of national security”.
Judge Amy Totenberg decided it was all far too hairy, and too late to do anything, so she sealed the entire 25,000 word report by Dr Alex Halderman. But strangely in September the following year the author was still unable to send these “national security” documents to DHS-CISA. They were still legally sealed, and he was unable to give that information to the government.
Dr Patrick Byrne, the Stanford graduate of Philosophy, and also Asian studies, polymath, and self made Overstock billionaire wrote a story last October that in a normal world would have printed its own front page headlines, along the lines of “Scandalous report on Risks of Dominion Voting Machine Suppressed before 2020 election”. Naturally, no one has heard about it. Note that the report and study was done before the elections and contains no evidence that the 2020 elections were […]
A week ago our newspapers were full of dire warnings that the Australian coal mining industry was going to be left in the lurch by declining orders from China. “The End of Australia’s coal export boom is Imminent” said the AFR — parroting a report by a group that includes Alex Turnbull, someone known to profit from renewables.
What none of the headlines mentioned was that China is set to hit a new all time record of coal use this year.
China now wants to boost coal production by 300m tons —six times* as much coal as Australia uses each year
China already burns 32 82 times as much coal each year as Australia does. Soon that will be 34 88 times as much. But who’s counting?
China promotes coal in setback for efforts to cut emissions
By Joe McMoncald, AP Business Writer, 25th April 2022
Official plans call for boosting coal production capacity by 300 million tons this year, according to news reports. That is equal to 7% of last year’s output of 4.1 billion tons, which was an increase of 5.7% over 2020.
Chinese officials are blunt about why they need more coal:
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