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By Jo Nova Is this the End of Communism in Cuba?We don’t hear much about Cuba in Australia, but it is suffering rolling 16 hour blackouts, the streets are filled with rubbish, people are cooking with wood and charcoal, and the airports have run out of jet fuel. The US is offering food aid, but only on the condition that the Cuban government does not interfere with the delivery.
The US is blockading shipments of oil to Cuba in an effort to get the communist regime to talk. Cuba relied on Venezuelan shipments of oil, but after the US captured President Maduro, Cuba lost one of their best allies, and the US has stopped the oil shipments. Trump also signed an order last month declaring Cuba to be a national security threat and he threatened to put tariffs on any nation that sent oil to Cuba. Trump has said that “Cuba is a failed state” and that he won’t mind if there is regime change. “I don’t think we need (to take) any action,” Trump said on Jan. 4, adding: “Cuba looks like it’s ready to fall.” Has Cuba Reached the Point of No Return?— By Sarah Anderson, PJ Media Power outages have increased throughout the nation, with some impacting hundreds of thousands of people at a time and lasting for days. Public transportation has come to a standstill, and there are reports that citizens are not currently allowed to fill up their own vehicles. Food prices are through the roof. Resorts and tourist attractions have shut down. People are using charcoal or wood to cook. Hospital and schools that were already barely functioning are not viable. Several companies and embassies from other countries have plans in place to stockpile supplies and/or evacuate their people. While the immediate cause of Cuba’s pain is the oil embargo, decades of profligate communist economics, and brutal suppression of political dissidents meant healthy workers were fleeing, and the few resources Cuba has were wasted. Rumors suggest as many as a million people have fled out of a population of 11 million. Things were so bad, Cuba, known as ‘the sugar bowl of the world’, had to import sugar. The communist economy builds things no one wants — like 7000 hotels rooms, no one uses: A programme of hotel building has been under way, with 7,000 more rooms added since 2019, despite tourist numbers halving in the same period. And no one answers the question why. The lobby is clean and the shop is open, selling beach towels and hats. The staff are welcoming, their uniforms pressed. The swimming pool is empty and there are no guests. I ask when the last came through and the receptionist tells me four years ago. Meanwhile, in 2021 came a unification of two currencies, one pegged to the US dollar, one local, which resulted in hyperinflation that collapsed the value of state sector pay and pensions. José Daniel Ferrer was once the only effective opposition leader in Cuba, but he spent 12 years in jail, where he saw two people beaten to death, and finally he fled. His view is ““There is nothing to lose with the fall of the regime,” he says bitterly. “Rather we will gain freedom, opportunity and prosperity.”” Rebel News interviewed people in Cuba and found some waving American flags, and others with hopeful signs that Trump will save them like he saved Venezuela.In the soft West it is easy to forget how quickly energy can be weaponized by an adversary, especially if we don’t have our supply chains locked up.
By Jo Nova The latest plan to get better weather in a hundred years, is to cut down trees and dump them in the ocean.The great northern boreal forest has expanded by 12% since 1984. Which means it has locked up all this extra carbon in it. Instead of waiting for it to catch fire and burn, the thinking is that we could cut it down now, and throw the logs in a river that leads to the Arctic ocean where they will sink (eventually, maybe) and take carbon to the sea floor. New Scientist thought this was a good idea. Future anthropologists may file modern eco-science with arsenic cures, and radium toothpaste. In order to save the environment, we need to cut down 180,000 square kilometers of forest and toss it into the river (every year). How many trees do we have to kill to stop a cyclone in 2100AD?
 … These researchers and journalists are the kind of people who’ll check everything — except the core underlying assumptions that their fantasy is based on: Humanity will need to find ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to compensate for industries that are hard to electrify – or even to begin reducing atmospheric CO2 levels. Direct air capture machines are expensive, however, and planting trees can backfire if they die or burn.
Several companies are burying wood, and US firm Running Tide sank 25,000 tonnes of wood chips off Iceland, although it was accused of endangering the environment and later shut down.
How many solar powered chain-saws are there in the world? Is that zero?They have six Arctic rivers in mind, and say that if we can only cut down 30,000 square kilometers of forest on each river, that will bury about 1 billion tons of carbon, which is about 3% of our anthropogenic total emissions (ie. not much).
Previous research shows that waterlogged wood had lasted 8000 years in low oxygen Alpine lakes. How long will it last as a shipping hazard?
The only thing this study shows is how effective government funding is.
By Jo Nova NASA has finally studied the LandSat satellite images of vegetation down to 30 metre resolution and discovered with “unprecedented detail” that climate change is a good thing. The northern boreal forests are the largest terrestrial biome in the world, and it’s warming faster than any other forest type, and loving it. This is the catastrophe they’ve been warning us about… Satellite record shows boreal forests expanded 12% and shifted north since 1985
What kind of pollution causes forest growth? It’s time we got serious about the benefits of CO2.The analysis revealed that boreal forests both grew in size and moved northward. The forests expanded by 0.844 million km² (a 12% increase) and shifted northward by 0.29° mean latitude, with gains concentrated between 64°N and 68°N. Their work also showcased the capacity of new growth to act as a carbon sink. Young boreal forests (up to 36 years) hold an estimated 1.1–5.9 petagrams of carbon (Pg C) with the potential to sequester an additional 2.3–3.8 Pg C if allowed to mature. Landsat’s long-time series of highly calibrated data allows researchers to study how ecosystems shift over decades, a crucial insight into our changing world. What’s not to like about CO2: Extinctions are declining, cyclones used to be nastier, floods were worse, Pacific Islands are growing not sinking, and sea levels used to be much higher. REFERENCEMin Feng et al, Northward shift of boreal tree cover confirmed by satellite record, Biogeosciences (2026). DOI: 10.5194/bg-23-1089-2026 bg.copernicus.org/articles/23/1089/2026/
By Jo Nova The world is backing away from renewablesWow. What a turnaround. President Macron, a man of The Blob, has come right out and blamed the Spanish Blackouts on renewables. No system, he says, can be so dependent on renewables. Everyone knew this, but few in power would say the words. Back in 2017 this was the man who had a plan to shut down 14 nuclear reactors in France. Today he plans to push through a law to reverse that. At the same time, the current French renewable energy targets have just been dropped by 20%. Instead of building 150GW of unreliable power, the new target will be about 120GW. Back in April, Spain finally celebrated 100% renewable energy, and within days suffered a national blackout that caused at least five deaths and left thousands without lighting and the internet, and panic-buying petrol and food. The blackout spread as far as Portugal and Southern France. Macron blames renewable energy for Spain’s national blackout— By Kieran Kelly, The Telegraph French president says European neighbour’s deadly power cuts were caused by shift towards net zero In response to a large-scale power cut that left millions in the dark in April, the French president said no country could rely so heavily on renewable energy. But Mr Macron said: “The Spanish power outage is not related to interconnections, but rather to the fact that no system, at least with current technology, can support such dependence on renewable energy. Stability in the energy mix is needed because otherwise, shocks that are too big occur. But it’s not just about interconnections. Networks are needed.” Spain generates about 60 per cent of its electricity from renewable sources, including wind, hydropower and solar power, according to Red Eléctrica de España, its electricity grid operator. Around 20 per cent comes from nuclear power plants. Supposedly renewable energy is free and nuclear plants are wildly expensive.If renewables were cheaper, France would know — yet France chooses the nukes.The French rebirth of nuclear power started a few years ago. But the plan to close these power plants still needs to be expunged. Spain is aiming for 80% renewables by 2030 and the UK Labour government is aiming for 95% “clean”. But Australia is larger, hotter, and more sparsely populated, with tons of coal and gas, and has no interconnector cables to anywhere, yet we’re aiming for 82%. Fifty shades of crazy. Photo: Defense Visual Information Distribution Service
February 13th, 2026 | Tags: Blackouts, Renewable Energy, Spain | Category: Global Warming |  Print This Post | |
By Jo Nova At some point, Western governments decided to pick winners, and set deadlines for inventions and discoveries and most car manufacturers clapped quietly. They didn’t speak up, presumably because they didn’t want to look like a climate denier. But it’s been a disastrous choice for the auto makers that jumped onto the EV bandwagon with both feet. A few days ago the corporate mothership for Fiat Peugeot and Chrysler, announced a $26 billion US dollar loss and shares fell 27%. This ignominiously follows the brutal $20 billion dollar Ford write down. The CEO of Stellantis has announced a reset of the company and in a radical plan, decided to “make our customers and their preferences our guiding star.” Crikey — they will try making cars that customers actually want, rather than ones that change the weather. Robert Bryce estimates the known losses add up to $140 billion in the last 4 years. And that’s only the money burned by Ford, Stellantis, GM, Mercedes, Volkswagon, Rivian, and Lucid. Other companies have signed and bragged about big deals that they later backed away from. But they haven’t necessarily announced their EV specific losses. So who knows how much Honda, Renault, Mitsubishi, Volvo, and BMW have lost? All up, Bryce estimates that the average loss per EV has been around $25,000. The auto industry’s gamble on electric cars has turned into a catastropheBy Matthew Lynn, The Telegraph In reality, it turns out that electric cars are only a small part of the overall market and that, insofar as it exists, Chinese manufacturers will capture most of the sales. There have been two major problems. First, EVs may only be a niche product. Next, where there is a market, the new breed of Chinese brands led by BYD is walking away with it. The traditional auto giants thought the transition was just a matter of replacing an internal combustion engine with a big battery, but it turned out that an EV was a piece of electronics with wheels attached. It has much more in common with the mobile phone market than anything the petrolheads running the industry were familiar with. It is far easier to create a new EV company from scratch than to convert one of the traditional giants. The blunt truth is this: the massive bet that the auto giants took on EVs has backfired spectacularly. If China had paid off Western politicians to force their own citizens to subsidize Chinese cars they could hardly have destroyed the Western car industry any faster.If your country is home to legacy fossil fuel carmakers then schemes like the Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) work like an anti-tariff – It’s a ruling that punishes local industry and forces them and their customers to subsidize foreign car makers. The government sets an arbitrary target, and insists that, say, 22% of all cars sold must be EV’s. The public don’t want that many EV’s but the ZEV ruling contains the financial equalizer. If the fossil fuel car manufacturer doesn’t meet their target and sell enough EV’s they’ll have buy credits from a company that did. Or if companies sell both kinds of cars they can raise the prices of their fossil fuel cars and use those super profits to make their own EVs cheaper. Either way, fossil fuel cars get more expensive and EVs get cheaper until the 22% target is reached. Ultimately, the tradies and renters who buy the fossil fuel cars are subsidizing the electric cars bought by the rich. Australias NVES (New Vehicle Emissions Standards) is very similar to the UK scheme.
Trump to wipe out “Endangerment Finding” and pardon CO2 in largest act of deregulation in US history … By Jo Nova Trump to throw Saurons ring into the volcano this week — soon CO2 will NOT be legally classed as pollution that endangers human lifeTrump always wanted to cut the power of the “Climate Change Hoax” at the source, which was the 2009 Endangerment Finding. It is the excuse for Big Government to get itself into your car, house, air, steaks and factories while thieving from your wallet. A spokesman at the EPA described this as “one of the most damaging decisions in modern history” so we know it hurts The Blob. The Endangerment Finding was the 2009 legal determination that CO2 caused everything bad, and therefore government agencies had an obligation to protect the public from it, and companies had to track emissions, cars had to be purified, emissions had to be tracked and certified. Trump to Repeal Landmark Climate Finding in Huge Regulatory RollbackMeridith McGraw and Benoît Morenne, The Wall Street Journal The Trump administration is planning this week to repeal the Obama-era scientific finding that serves as the legal basis for federal greenhouse-gas regulation, according to U.S. officials, in the most far-reaching rollback of U.S. climate policy to date. The reversal targets the 2009 “endangerment finding,” which concluded that six greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare. The finding provided the legal underpinning for the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate rules, which limited emissions from power plants and tightened fuel-economy standards for vehicles under the Clean Air Act. “This amounts to the largest act of deregulation in the history of the United States,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in an interview. Officials said the rollback would equate to more than $1 trillion in regulation cuts, though they didn’t provide details on how they came up with the number. They said that rescinding the finding would result in an average per-vehicle cost savings of more than $2,400. Public health and environmental groups have said federal climate regulations help prevent hundreds of thousands of premature deaths each year. Big-Government hellfire is tied to the Endangerment Finding. Like Sauron’s ring of power it was sacred, must not be questioned, binds all others, and centralizes control in the hands of a central authority (like the EPA). And like The One Ring of Middle Earth it would corrupt even the good hearted. The immediate effect of this is said to be on cars. But there will be legal wrangling. Environmental groups will challenge the finding in court, dragging out the process for years. The Environmental Defence fund called the endangerment finding “a vital tool”. Eventually this opens the door to reducing rules in other areas like power plants, and oil and gas infrastructure. One official estimated this would save a trillion dollars in regulatory costs — which also means a trillion dollars worth of dependent workers will need to find other jobs. Thanks to Helen D and Climate Depot.
By Jo Nova Cynics are wondering what, exactly Australia got for spending $1.6 million sending 75 people on a two week junket in Brazil last year? Australia, of course, got nothing, but this is the bread and butter currency for The Blob. How else can you convince bored bureaucrats to pretend warming causes cooling, and maintain the righteous indignation! Getting a free trip to Brazil surely ranks pretty high on bragging lists at Saturday night dinners. That shine helps make up for the mental effort of selling your soul and pretending that Sunday night’s pot roast causes floods in Dhaka. It also provides the inspiration to keep the next generation of Blobocrats focused. The underlings learn that people who shed tears about climate change get rewarded, while the critics don’t. Just one ill advised remark, one careless joke, could compromise the plane tickets. Australia spends $1.6m sending 75 officials to Brazil for UN climate climate summitResponses to Senate estimates questions on notice have revealed Department of Climate Change and Energy sent 32 officials, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade sent nine officials, and the Department of Agriculture sent one official to Belém, Brazil in November last year for the UN Conference of the Parties summit. And the Department of Climate Change budgeted $1.6m for their 32 officials to fly to Brazil, it said. And this $395,000 (described below)– it’s just an investment for the future. One day a Youth Climate Coalition leader will end up in a heavily edited documentary promoting your Department. Think of this as advertising money and it all makes sense…. The department also revealed it disbursed a $395,000 grant program for other organisations to attend the COP30 summit. This included groups like the Aboriginal Carbon Fund, Australian Youth Climate Coalition, United Nations Youth Australia, and Women’s Environmental Leadership Australia. Remember, even as the Departments of Fisheries, Forestry and Agriculture enjoy their tours of the Amazon, that some fishermen, farmers and foresters have lost their jobs in Australia due to whimsical policy changes. Labor has recklessly damaged these industries, while the Departmental Chosen Ones use their tax dollars to party in Latin America. See The Australian detail the $1.5m taxpayer bill for 75 public servants to attend UN climate change summit.
These C.O.P.s are always the same, –Ruairi
By Jo Nova Engineers really don’t like phrases like “right skewed degradation with a long fat tail”But new data suggests that’s exactly what’s is happening in the global solar fleet, and it’s bad news for insurers, installers, and grid planners. One of the largest and longest studies ever done has looked at 11,000 solar panels around the world and found the same mysterious bump in unexpected failures. Surprisingly it didn’t matter whether the panels were installed in hot, cold or humid environments, the unexpected failures were still there. This suggests the higher failure rate is a systemic problem, not just something that afflicts those installed, say, in humid areas, or in the desert. UNSW study finds up to 20% of solar panels degrade far faster than expectedBy Casey McGuire Electrical Connection Lead author Yang Tang says this has serious implications for system longevity: “Most solar systems are designed to last around 25 years, based on their warranty period.” “But at least one in five systems degrade much faster than the typical rate and roughly one in 12 degrade twice as fast. This means some systems could lose about 45% of their output by the 25-year mark or reach the end of their useful life in as little as 11 years.” This long tail is more than a statistical oddity. It especially poses a large financial risk for solar farms, where hundreds of thousands of panels are installed, since the data indicates there is a hidden cost associated with samples that do not perform as well or for as long as they should. Importantly, it has also been shown that the extreme degradation observed in these panels is not related to the climatic conditions they are exposed to – ruling out the possibility that the data was being skewed by samples placed in extreme environmental locations such as very hot deserts. Across the whole global fleet, the system performance degrades at 0.9% per year. The graph below plots the degradation rate of the energy produced from each panel. A few lemons are declining at 2, 3, or 4% annually. But the surprise is a big fat bump in panels degrading at 1.3% – 1.8% per year. That bump means that a lot more panels might fail within the warrantee period and need replacing. Maintenance costs and insurance bills will have been calculated on a normal curve, so this is an ominous sign that quite a lot of panels will not make it to the 25 year expected lifespan, and they won’t be producing as many kilowatts as expected either. So maintenance costs are going to be higher than expected. Electricity costs will be more, and to get rid of “the bump” will raise the prices of new panel designs. Someone will have to improve testing and throw away more dud panels before they leave the factory, or they will have to increase the safety margins on components.
 https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2026/01/research-targets-long-tail-solar-panel-issue
Given that hardly any solar plants are 25 years old, we don’t know how the degradation curve will evolve over time. It’s possible these early unexpected failures might grow into a fatter longer tail as the solar fleet ages. There are three kinds of failures:
It’s the second sort that wasn’t expected. And Tang et al point out that microcracks might not even cause a problem for several years, but gradually put stress on other components until there is a cascade of failure. Who could have guessed that equipment covering tens of thousands of square kilometers with complex electronic components would break in a thousand tiny ways? h/t Chris Uhlmann “Systems Under Strain”. REFERENCETang. Y. et al (2026) Understanding and Reducing the Risk of Extreme Photovoltaic Degradation, IEEE Journal of Voltaics, Vol 16. 1. Press Release UNSW — Cracking the ‘long tail’ problem: new research targets hidden solar panel issue Photo of a solar plant in the ACT by JoNova
February 7th, 2026 | Tags: Renewable Energy, Solar Energy (PV) | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | |
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