Voting is open, so presumably, is cheating, which will win?
Betting markets are predicting a Red Wave, but the richest nation in the world can’t afford to use paper ballots, check ID, and can’t count the votes on election night anymore.
Bookies gave Trump roughly 75% odds of a second term, and on PredictIt Trump’s odds of victory peaked at above eighty percent.
In a never-before-seen development in American politics, counting in key states went on for days on end. Over the course of those extra days, Trump’s leads in Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania shrank and then vanished. Legal efforts to block what was unfolding and contest certain questionable ballots went nowhere, and on January 20, it was Joe Biden who took the oath of office.
Things were so bad, 18 States of the US asked the Supreme Court to investigate blatant corruption in 4 other states and the Supreme Court’s only response was to say, improbably, “they had no standing”, as if cheating in some states that changes the US Government could somehow not affect the other states. Remember, if those four states didn’t cheat, the US Supreme Court could have taken that case and showed the election was free and fair, thus healing the rift, supporting the President and helping the Democrats.
Consider Pennsylvania, with its crucial Senate contest between Mehmet Oz and The Creature Who Answers to the Name John Fetterman. Two years ago, Pennsylvania’s election process probably featured more red flags than any other closely contested state. The state took a whole week to count its votes, with Biden only overtaking Trump’s large election-night lead on Friday morning. Pennsylvania let votes count even if they arrived after Election Day, even if they had no postmark, and even if they didn’t have a matching signature. Twenty Pennsylvania counties used millions of dollars donated by Mark Zuckerberg to finance their election activities, including the famous unsupervised “Zuckerboxes,” which made it virtually impossible to enforce the state’s relatively strict limits on ballot harvesting. When Trump supporters tried to independently monitor drop boxes, state attorney general Josh Shapiro (now running for governor) threatened them with prosecution.
So, what are things like two years later? Pennsylvania’s Republican legislature passed bills to ensure signature verification and photo ID, and to ensure proper poll-watching… but Democratic governor Tom Wolf vetoedthose bills. So in Pennsylvania this cycle, things are substantially like they were two years ago. And, yep, the state is even warning that it’s going to take a long time to count ballots again.
In a throwback to 2020, ABC News reports that a “red mirage” could make it look like Republicans are winning big on the night, but that a full vote count could take “weeks.”
The piece explains how Republicans may “appear to be leading their Democratic opponents, even by large margins” in federal and statewide races, but that their leads “will dwindle, or crumble completely” after “dumps” of mail-in and absentee ballots are counted after election day, which could take “weeks”.
For years they told us that the green transition would deliver cheap energy, and that if we just subsidized them enough, prices would keep falling. The promise of free energy on the horizon led whole nations (stupidly) to believe that closing coal plants was viable. But now that damage is done, suddenly the Vestas chief admits that telling people that wind can only get cheaper “was a mistake”.
“Vestas CEO says industry went too far with cheap-energy pledge”
There is carnage in Europe. Orders and profits are collapsing. The largest wind turbine manufacturer in the world has already raised prices by more than 30% this year but despite that, expects its profit margins to shrink to “minus five percent”.
Lucky their orders are down since they are losing money on every turbine.
The fall in sales landed as inflation bites, supply lines are squeezed and their costs are rising. (After all, wind turbine factories can’t run off wind turbines, they’re paying for expensive electricity too). So suddenly Vestas need to raise their prices even more, and their CEO is hoping a belated apology will somehow bring their market back.
Manufacturers such as Vestas Wind Systems A/S are seeing losses pile up as orders collapse at a time when they should be capitalizing on the turmoil in natural-gas markets. To blame — at least in part — is the industry’s insistence that clean electricity can only get cheaper, according to Henrik Andersen, chief executive officer of the Danish wind giant.
“It made some people make the wrong assumption that energy and electricity should become free,” Andersen said in an interview in London. “We created the perception to some extent. So we are to blame for it. That was a mistake.”
How pathetic the truth is — that it takes a war to pump up fossil fuel prices to the point where “wind is competitive”:
To be sure, wind power remains competitive with other energy after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine drove up prices for fossil fuels. But government auctions for new wind farms put pressure on companies to keep prices low, while costly and lengthy processes to gain planning permission continue to inhibit growth.
Shucks. The industry that lives off Big Government suffers some red tape. Cry me a river. The same corrupt bureaucracy that created the wind industry in the first place will mismanage them right off to China.
By Jo Nova Like a conglomerate witch-doctor cum pagan-preacher the only thing Al Gore recycles is the overproof grade hellfire of centuries past. Chieftain Al will stop the storms if only everyone will do as he says and invest in his climate asset fund. For he cometh armed with windmills that stop rain-bombs and solar panels that hold back the sea.
Like medieval Occult leaders, superstitious rain dancers, and healers with magical cures, the modern witchdoctors have satellites and simulations, but run on the same old formula since time began. Fear, smear, demons, and magic. All prophesies are ambiguous. Nothing he sayth can be falsified.
Coal, apparently, is not just a source of emissions, but a veritable “culture of death.” Despite the era of coal being a time of record crop yields, bountiful food, travel, and exponential world population growth. Despite the working class of today being richer than the kings of centuries past.
One day, he promises, after he is safely dead, all weather will be good weather, and only the perfect amount of rain will fall, and ski seasons will start and end on the same day each year. Trust me, he says.
Damian Carrington, at The Guardian, swallows the whole prospectus:
The former US vice-president Al Gore is on fist-waving, passionate form in front of world leaders at Cop27. “We continue to use the thin blue atmosphere as an open sewer,” he says. “It is getting steadily worse. We have a credibility problem – all of us – we are not doing enough.”
Gore says we can continue the “culture of death” by continuing to dig up fossil fuels, and cites vast floods in Pakistan, heatwaves and “rain bombs” in China, and a million displaced in Nigeria.
And the valley of death will spread, and 1 billion immigrants will move into your home. (And you thought the southern US border crisis was bad?)
“The current areas of the world considered uninhabitable by doctors are small today but due to expand,” he says, with 1 billion migrants potentially crossing international borders this century, with all the colossal difficulties that would bring. If we stop subsidizing the culture of death and back renewable energy instead we can survive, Gore says, and no new fossil fuel projects are acceptable.
Here me O’ Minions — take this essence of arsenic, I mean lithium, and it shall cure your poverty:
Instead, Gore says, “Africa can be a renewable energy superpower”. He says 40% of world potential is in Africa.
Sure, Africa can be a renewable energy superpower, just like nowhere on Earth is. Europe can’t manage it, but Chad will show the way.
Of course, those who question their Occult Leader are racist pigs:
He says the dash for gas in Africa, a contentious issue at COP27, is a new form of colonisation, with the fuel to be sent to rich nations. He quotes the late archbishop Desmond Tutu as saying climate change is the apartheid of our time.
Somehow drilling gas in Africa for Europe is “colonisation” but using African children to mine cobalt for our batteries is the work of saints. Often the same saints want to segregate nations according to skin color. When did Al Gore say “All Lives Matter?” I can’t recall…
Toss in an attempt at being a Concern-Troll:
[Gore] also warns about stranded assets of billions, especially in Africa, if climate action closes oil and gas plants early.
Shucks. The last thing Al Gore wants is Africans to be lifted out of energy poverty.
So much better to keep casting those spells and doing rain dances. Africans are just his stage props.
NEW YORK — Four times a week on average, an e-bike or e-scooter battery catches fire in New York City.
These bikes when they fail, they fail like a blowtorch,” said Dan Flynn, the chief fire marshal at the New York Fire Department. “We’ve seen incidents where people have described them as explosive — incidents where they actually have so much power, they’re actually blowing walls down in between rooms and apartments.”
As of Friday, the FDNY investigated 174 battery fires, putting 2022 on track to double the number of fires that occurred last year (104) and quadruple the number from 2020 (44). So far this year, six people have died in e-bike-related fires and 93 people were injured, up from four deaths and 79 injuries last year.
In early August, a 27-year-old Venezuelan immigrant, identified as Rafael Elias Lopez-Centeno, died after his lithium ion battery caught fire and ripped through the Bronx apartment where he was staying. Carmen Tiburcio, a neighbor, said Lopez’s aunt told her he had tried to escape through the front door, but the bike was in the way. Instead, he took refuge in the bathroom, where he tried to fill up the bathtub with water to protect himself from the flames. But the smoke got to him, she said.
Isn’t it time we talked about the risks of lithium batteries?
Well that was lucky. Early reports suggest the Chinese space junk from the launch four days ago has crashed in the Pacific 1,000 km short of Mexico. However, if I am reading those maps (below) correctly, on this uncontrolled reentry it only missed Australia and New Zealand by half an hour, and just a few minutes later and it would have “landed” somewhere in Mexico or maybe Florida. (Now that would have been a November surprise).
Despite what China says, this is not what the rest of the world does:
It was China’s latest round of celestial roulette involving a deliberate uncontrolled atmospheric re-entry. The rocket stage, by design, did not include a system to guide it into a specific spot on Earth, far away from people.
“The thing I want to point out about this is that we, the world, don’t deliberately launch things this big intending them to fall wherever,” Ted Muelhaupt, a consultant for the Aerospace Corporation, a nonprofit group largely financed by the U.S. government that performs research and analysis, said in a news conference on Wednesday. “We haven’t done that for 50 years.”
There’s a callous attitude of disregard here in these excuses:
However, Zhao Lijian, a foreign ministry spokesman, on Friday rejected the notion that China’s handling of the Long March 5B rockets represented anything unusual. “I would like to stress that China has always carried out activities in the peaceful use of outer space in accordance with international law and international practice — re-entry of the last stage of a rocket is an international practice,” he said.
Mr. Zhao added that the Long March 5B had been designed to pose less danger upon re-entry. The rocket “is designed with special technology; most of the components will burn up and be destroyed during the re-entry…
It broke no laws because there are no international laws on reentry. This is not “international practice”, and if it had crashed in a populated area, it would have killed people.
Other rockets are designed with measures in place to ensure their core stages are steered into the ocean after launch, while others like SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9, are designed to come down in one piece and be reused. China’s most powerful rocket has no such measures in place.
Unfortunately, there are no international agreements in place to prevent these incidents from occurring again in the future, said Marlon Sorge, Executive Director for The Aerospace Corporation’s Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies during a media briefing on Wednesday (Nov. 2). “And the reality is there aren’t any real laws, treaties, internationally that govern what you’re allowed to do in terms of reentry,” Sorge said
China, like always refuses to take responsibility for its falling rocket, instead claiming that it will burn up on re-entry. However, on three separate occasions, metal from their rockets has made impact on the Earth. Once, they managed to damage an entire village.
On the three previous launches by the Chinese space agency where they have used a similarrocket, back in 2020, 2021, and 2022, large chunks of debris damaged villages in the Republic of Cote d’Ivoire, fell into the Indian Ocean, and landed near villages in Borneo, respectively. Fortunately, no one has yet been injured by this falling debris.
According to Alex on twitter, “The Chinese #CZ5B rocket flew over Catalonia a while ago at a height of 148 km and a speed of more than 28,000 km/h.” Which makes it 140 km above most planes. Still, at some point, 23 ton objects moving at Mach 22 through your airspace will surely be breaking some laws.
Judging by reports, it went over northern Spain, past the UAE, over Western Australia and New Zealand and then crashed 1000 km short of Mexico.
Note the tick marks on the path show how far this travels in five minutes. It was a 35 minute flight from Spain to Australia. (I wish I’d known to look out the window as it went past Perth).
China does not know how to play diplomat, and is not even trying. It is treating the world like a trash can. Careless with rockets. Careless with viruses.
How much more would it have cost to add in the last stage small burner to control that reentry?
Apparently China will try this again next year.
UPDATE: For those who believe CCP promises that the craft will burn up, here is past debris.
Shoo 👀 A cropland in Gansu got struck by a large chunk of Long March 2D Y72 debris Twitter
Rocket debris believed to be from China’s Long March 5B (CZ-5B) booster rocket were found by fishermen near the Mindoro Strait, the Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) confirmed. (Photo courtesy of PCG Station Mamburao)
UPDATE #2:
MV wisely points out these are not blackened. Apparently they are likely space trash from “suborbital” parts early after the launch. They don’t show whether a 23 ton stage would burn up but they do show that the CCP treats the world like its trash can.
But other parts appear to have crashed on land in 2020, showing that the CCP are not being honest when they claim their reentries burn up:
“For a large object like this, dense pieces like parts of the rocket engines could survive reentry and crash to Earth,” McDowell told CNN. “Once they reach the lower atmosphere they are traveling relatively slowly, so worst case is they could take out a house.” ““I conclude that the objects seen in Mahounou, and at least some of the other objects from the Cote d’Ivore region whose photos are being circulated in African media, are very likely parts of the Chinese rocket stage,” McDowell wrote on Twitter.”
It was an 18 ton stage, and there was seismic evidence supporting debris hitting the ground too.
Lo behold, I give you the sign of doom. Bioluminescent jellyfish have traveled from the Pacific to the UK to warn of climate change.
We know this because citizen scientists have been tracking jellyfish for at least 20 years of the Holocene, if not the other 12,000 years, and they noticed things have not stayed exactly the same.
We don’t understand the underlying ocean gyrations, currents, jellyfish biology, or long term cycles of anything, but the team collected 1,315 sightings in the last year, which is a big number. Lordy, in waters surrounding 66 million people, it amounts to them counting three or four jellyfish a day.
Based on this we’d like your wallet, your pension fund, and the deeds to the houses your children haven’t bought yet.
Britain’s seas are becoming populated with large groups of unusual jellyfish owing to climate breakdown…
Between 1 October 2021 and 30 September 2022, there were a total of 1,315 jellyfish sightings reported to the MCS.
Eight jellyfish species are normally seen around the UK and Ireland but this year 11 were spotted, with more uncommon visitors now visiting these waters
Bioluminescent crystal jellyfish made up 3% of total sightings: these animals are nearly completely transparent, but give off an amazing green-blue light under certain circumstances because of the fluorescent protein produced by their bodies. They are usually found in the Pacific Ocean and rarely visit UK waters.
The doom in this story is the state of science journalism. The Guardian churns out pagan whimsy and astrological prophesy on a daily basis, and calls it science — yet no publicly funded academic scientist has the guts to call this out. We are regressing to an era of tea-leaf reading, and scientists are preying upon the vulnerable and untrained.
No wonder the public thinks that “climate change is already here”.
With all the calm language of a paid ad agency, the ABC is breathless because an esoteric measure called “minimum operational demand” has hit a record or two. This glorious moment may have only lasted 30 minutes, and it isn’t actually a useful thing, but it’s a “record”.
Soaring power production from households and businesses with rooftop solar panels has sent records tumbling across Australia as output from fossil fuels falls to all-time lows.
The record so-called minimum operational demand excludes the power generated by consumers with their own solar panels, which met 92 per cent of South Australia’s overall needs at one point on October 17.
The surge in power at midday forces the rest of the reliable generators to spin their wheels, running inefficiently, while they wait to be allowed back to do what they could have done all along without all the stopping and starting. It’s a miles per gallon kind of thing. Solar power makes the whole grid less efficient.
Here’s South Australia on October 16th setting a record in vanity-electricity:
The achievement is that the grid is so overdeveloped that it had twice as many generators as it needed at midday. Briefly, rooftop solar was making 92% of all the electricity the state could use.
Solar panels are the roadworks on the grid freeway that slows down the trucks and cars that are doing something useful. They provide poor quality electricity, which needs back up, frequency stabilizers, storage, long transmission lines, huge subsidies and large holes in the ground to store all the waste. Not to mention slave labor too. What’s not to like?
This AEMO graph below shows the exotic but mindless concept of “Instantaneous renewable penetration”. It creates the illusion that this concept is a long term meaningful attribute, when really this is just the peak half hour in a three month period, or 1 part in 4,000 of what we really need. This represents just the leading creeping edge of the fantasy. 99.99% of the time, the world doesn’t look like this.
AEMO Q3 report. 2022.
The fine print:
28Instantaneous renewable penetration is calculated using the NEM renewable generation share of total generation The measure is calculated on a half-hourly basis, because this is the granularity of estimated output data for distributed PV.
If they could have estimated the five minute peak of solar, they would have.
China emits more CO2 than first world combined, but tells the West to “do more” as it quietly sprints into the Space Race
…
China signed the Paris Agreement, which meant nothing at all. It is now building 60% of all the new coal plants in the world while the West does a kind of Tantric Energy Yoga — trying to run smelters with solar panels.
This is the luminous elephant floating in the kitchen at COP27:
If CO2 mattered, they would care. But the point of COP27 was never about the climate.
…
China absurdly mocks the moral carbon-beauty-contest of the west, while applauding us, and playing by its own rules
From the sidelines, the CCP berates and eggs on the West saying that “empty slogans are not ambition” and calling for the “UN climate summit to address the concerns of developing nations.”
Li Gao, director of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment’s climate change department… urged developed nations to meet their commitments on the US$100 billion per year and called for rich countries to develop a more ambitious road map for climate finance for 2021-25 and onwards. — South China Morning Post
Meanwhile today China-the-developing-nation is celebrating the docking of their third space module. Nothing says “advanced” quite like building your own space station. Nothing says “dangerous” quite like working on the far side of the moon, where no one can see you, which is another project for the China National Space Administration.
China Launches Final Module To Complete Space Station
There’s a shadow war in Space “every day”. China is actively testing the US defences in space on a daily basis, harassing them with lasers, radio jammers, cyber attacks and even other satellites with robotic grappling hook arms.
Meanwhile it’s almost like there is a shadow economic and industrial war too, and one of the weapons is “carbon”.
Things are far far worse at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology than even we realized.
“If you think your public forecasts have gotten worse, that’s because they have,” one meteorologist says.
While Australia is flooding and lives depend on forecasts, the management of our weather bureau is cutting back on meteorologists and on weather balloons, but they’re making sure they do frivolous exercises in rebranding with a new kindergarten logo and calls to be “The Bureau”, and not the BoM.
It’s hard to believe, but instead of releasing two weather balloons from each site every day like the rest of the modern world, the BoM has decided to cuts costs and reduce many regional sites to just one or even none each day. This is in breach of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) standards. Weather balloons are the prize “unrivaled” meteorological instrument. In roughly 900 places all over the world, weather balloons are launched twice a day, every day of the year. These radio back temperature, humidity and wind and pressure data as they rise up as high as 30 kilometers (20 miles) into the atmosphere.
The degradation of the BoM as a science agency is so far gone, that there was even an astonishing plan to reduce launches in capital cities. The idea was to do just one balloon a day, with a second one “on request”. After a fierce internal battle, it appears the aviation division of the bureau, perhaps concerned that planes might crash, said they will find some money to cover the second balloon. Though that’s only for this financial year. The intent is still there. Who needs data, eh?
Insiders are so outraged, they are speaking anonymously to reporters of The Saturday Paper.
One meteorologist at the bureau, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said it was now “an open secret that we are not meeting our WMO obligations” on upper atmosphere observation. “We have been told by several senior people that we are now not meeting our WMO requirements, but I also get the sense that it is not considered to be a big deal,” they said. “It’s kind of horrific, the effect that it would have on our model quality as well as just our ability to add our own expertise on top of the computer models. It is crazy to me.”
“Everywhere around the world balloons are launched twice daily at more or less synchronised times,” a meteorologist employed by the BoM said on the condition his identity not be revealed. “Not only is this data the only way to get a real idea of what is actually going on in the vertical profile of the atmosphere, it provides crucial observations for the NWP [numerical weather prediction] models.
“The NWP models are going to become significantly worse across Australia, which in turn affect forecast quality, especially with public weather relying on pure model data so much lately.”
It’s not clear exactly how many sites have shifted from 14 weather balloons a week “to five”, but if the capital cities were next on the list, how many other sites are left still maintaining the normal WMO standards?
Does the climate matter to the BoM? Looks like “not”.
The loss of weather balloon data is an absolute scandal — our entire hundred billion dollar forced transition depends on climate models that use weather balloon data as the main tool to identify the major cause of the warming. Hey, but it’s only “attribution”, who cares what drives the climate, apart from 26 million people paying for green electrons and eating crickets to save the world?
Besides, if the greenhouse “hot spot” fingerprint isn’t there, it’ll be so much easier to find it with sparser data and wider error bars. 28 million weather balloons looked for the hot spot from 1959 – 1999 and couldn’t find it, but maybe they could’ve if models had interpolated the “gaps” instead? Sometimes you can have too much data…
It’s not just the cost cutting, and the data loss, but also the management
Hard to believe I could ever feel sorry for the meteorologists at the BoM, but here we are. They didn’t speak up for science and data much in the last twenty years, instead they welcomed Big Government and it has come in to eat them. Karma, much?
Giles Met Station launching a weather balloon.
Instead of being a scientific agency it is now a Home-for-Bureaucrats which also does some forecasts. It’s run by administrators, not people who love meteorology, and as the bureaucrats grew, the meteorologists shrank. Increasingly the bureau is relying on models, but with less data, and less expert oversight. Staff are not being replaced to keep up with attrition.
“If you think your public forecasts have gotten worse, that’s because they have,” one meteorologist says. “The public forecast gets produced twice a day, at 4am and 4pm. The national production team is shockingly small for the task at hand.
To cope with the vast task of individual town forecasts across a whole continent, the BoM is increasingly relying on “automation and bureaucracy through decision matrices.” All the advanced neural nets in the brains of meteorologists are ignored in favour of a silicon chip decision. So when a prediction from the weighted “global model of models” looks wrong, the experts can’t override it.
“Say, then, that in Melbourne the max temperature that was generated by models was going to be too high, or the models were saying showers all day when it really wasn’t going to happen,” a meteorologist says.
“Even if a forecaster in national production knew this was the case, and even if it would take them five minutes to fix, it would not satisfy the decision matrix for that day, and they would not be allowed to fix it. I stress, even if it would take them five minutes.”
The BoM defends its forecasts are better now than five years ago, and that the automated forecasts are more accurate. Though, of course, some of us wonder what accurate means, and who decided how to measure it.
The whole nation is spending billions of dollars to “fix” our weather based on warming measured in sites that often fail the BoM’s own standards, but the BoM is more concerned about the way people refer to it on Twitter instead of the thermometers placed near incinerators and bitumen car parks.
There’s a lot more BoM incompetence on display in The Saturday Paper article, which is well written, but is paywalled. In other scandals the BoM’s giant new supercomputer has sat there for years unable to be used until it can be moved to a new “resilient data centre” perhaps another year or two away. And an 18 month long program to upgrade the national forecast grid from 6km to 3km ended with them dropping the more accurate 3km grid which existed in Victoria and Tasmania and putting the whole nation on the lower resolution 6km grid. So not only did the process reduce the resolution in two states, but now there are many work-arounds to compensate for the lack of the 3km grid everyone was expecting to use, and had been planning for.
Thanks to David E, El Gordo, and The Great UnVaxxed.
This may explain why some unlucky people got such bad reactions.
Dr Ryan Cole points out that it normally takes years to perfect the mass production of a new class of drug products, but many people, he claims were lucky because they got a shot “of mush” — from harried car park pop-up clinics — if the vaccines weren’t kept cold enough they had probably already degraded.
Quality control was so poor, he claims, that batches weren’t mixed well, and some people got a dilute vial from the start of a batch. The fats in the vat float to the top, apparently, and the first vials are missing “the goods”. But by the end of the batch the last vials are high dose, and with debris from manufacturing, from gaskets, aluminum seals, and crushed glass.
“The more we look at it, the more we see bad manufacturing.”
By Jo Nova Just as Joe Biden cancelled Keystone on his first day, the new UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak canned Fracking on Day one. He was appointed on Tuesday and the fracking ban was reinstated Wednesday. It tells us exactly what his top priorities are, and perhaps also tells us what the real unforgivable sin was that Liz Truss committed. There are a lot of vested interests that would hate to see fracking start in the UK. The horror, after all, would be if that cheap gas started to flow and people in the UK got used to it, and realized micro earthquakes were, well, nothing. How would anyone cork up those wells after the war? If a few old coal plants restart it’s no big deal, they can be shut down again. But if shale gas “was trialled” there’d be no going back.
Fracking shale gas turned the US back into an energy giant. For the last month or so, there was the stark danger that the UK might get energy independence too, but then Rishi Sunak arrived to save the day, or rather to save a few houses from theoretical seismic events so small that people would need a Richter scale in the kitchen to detect most of them. The UK fracking limit is set at a tiny 0.5 magnitude.
For perspective, there were 45,000 shale gas wells operating in the US in 2014, but the UK has two which are not operating, and they want to shut them down in the middle of an energy crisis. Things are so bad in the UK, that 1 in 10 hotels, pubs and restaurants may go out of business this winter.
The situation is so bizarre, so over-the-top, that there are calls for a general election from every angle. Even the greener end of the Tory Party are mad, because killing off shale is not enough — Sunak is committing blasphemy by not singing hymns at COP27 in Egypt too. Speaking of which, Boris is heading off to COP27 because grandstanding is what it is designed for, and the rumors are running that he will make a comeback.
The anti-frackers frightened the people with stories of “known carcinogens called ‘silicon dioxide’” and seismic shocks that registered 1.5 on the Richter scale. So the people of the UK gave up an industry worth £6 billion a year, and a reliable energy supply because a government department was afraid of pure sand and a class of earthquake so small it’s “rarely felt” and so common the world has “several million” of them each year.
It’s a case of selective enforcement. No other industry has to keep seismic events to nothing; not truckers, or miners, or pop singers. Even primary school children are allowed to generate seismic shocks ten times bigger than Cuadrilla is. In 2001, one million of children jumped off chairs to create a shake of about a 3.0.
The Russians have been feeding fracking fear for years:
Russia makes about $300 billion in gas and oil exports each year. For a tiny tenth of a billion dollars it fed western activists in NGOs* and successfully stopped fracking development in the UK (and some parts of Australia apparently). It’s what you call a stupendous investment.
But China also benefits from UK energy poverty; The EU doesn’t want a strong independent UK, and the WEF, the UN, the renewables industries, and the religious greens are all happy about it too.
No wonder British people want an election:
Liar!
Rishi Sunak 10 weeks ago showing his support for fracking and once he got the position of Prime Minister, banned it.pic.twitter.com/hLWt0gutw0
Whatever the question, the excuse is always “climate change” and the answer is always Wind and Solar.
Are you an Energy Minister? Did you stop drilling for gas, let teenage girls design your national grid, and rely on a hostile power to supply your fuel? Stupid you, but that’s OK, because if your reliable grid is failing, it’s not your fault, it’s “climate change”. See how this works? It’s not that you vandalized a highly engineered system with frivolous vanity projects but that you didn’t do enough of them.
Heatwaves are apparently wrecking coal plants now. That extra one degree outdoors makes all the difference to a turbine that runs 24 hours a day at 540 degrees C. If only we’d known? Or maybe we did. In 1962 we could build coal plants in Arizona that are still running, and gas plants (in 1959) in Yuma County where the average maximum is 45C (115F) for three months of the year.
Seems the engineers had hot weather sorted out 60 years ago.
Extreme weather events – high winds, heatwaves, freezing rain, and loss of glaciers and snow pack mean once reliable sources of power can fail.
It’s not that socialist policies to drive out reliable power have succeeded and 50 year old equipment is being neglected and not replaced. No…
Clearly children are not doing enough tours of nuclear plants and coal turbines. They grow up to be journalists for The Guardian that think rainy, windy days can slow these industrial giants down.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) says 87% of global electricity comes from nuclear, hydro and thermal fossil fuel plants that rely on water for cooling, and up to a third of these are in high water stress areas. Predicting droughts, stream flows and water availability is therefore vital for maintaining supply.
If only climate models were not 100% skillless in predicting regional rain, droughts or extremes, 1,2,3,4 they might be able to tell us where to build our power plants. Not to mention those windmills…
For solar and wind, where water is less of an issue, predicting wind strength and sunshine hours is key. In countries with highly variable weather, such as the UK, this is still a work in progress, although improving all the time. Partly, these problems can be mitigated by giant batteries and well-tried technologies, such as pump storage, where water is pumped back uphill at night for hydro-power production at peak times.
““A beautiful thing about Twitter is how it empowers citizen journalism – people are able to disseminate news without an establishment bias.”“
Restoring free speech on Twitter is not necessarily a given. There are plenty of political players that are afraid of uncontrollable citizen journalists and they will fight back.
But Musk at least, is clear on what he hopes to achieve:
The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence. There is currently great danger that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society.
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