Way back in his 2021 annual CEO letter, Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, wrote: “No issue ranks higher than climate change.” It will reshape global capital flows, he said, and declared “…anyone can see the impact of climate change in the natural disasters in California or Florida.”
Now though, nevermind about global extinctions and flash floods. Fink just spoke at the Davos ski club for billionaires, and declared that we need “trillions of dollars” of investment for AI. Data centres, he said, are rapidly expanding — one technology company he spoke to said that “its data centres currently use about 5 gigawatts, but by 2030 it expects to need 30 gigawatts.”
But like a true banker, he doesn’t see a backflip, he sees only investment opportunities — the world is short of power he says. (He doesn’t say that this is in large part because BlackRock leaned on companies and countries all over the world to abandon fossil fuels.) Fink helped create the energy shortage that he now calls an investment opportunity. BlackRock is the largest asset manager in the world, controlling $10 Trillion dollars in assets, or five times Australia’s GDP. When that much money talks, everyone listens.
Now Larry Fink throws wind and solar under the bus
He’s matter-of-fact, with a straight face, almost like he never pushed intermittent generators:
Fink: “At the same time, this represents a huge investment opportunity. The world is going to be short of power. And to supply these data centres, you cannot rely solely on intermittent sources like wind and solar. You need dispatchable power, because these data centres cannot simply turn on and off.”
Larry Fink slides the bomb in after 45 mins 30 seconds:
This man probably did more than any single person to pump up the Great Renewables Bubble that peaked in 2022. He presumably has taken his profits long before this speech — leaving mums and dads and pension funds holding the bag with investments in unreliable, expensive generators.
Transcript of Larry Fink at the WEF:
“AI is fundamentally a large-capitalisation business. At the moment, if you look at the S&P 500, the ten largest companies account for about 38% of the index. If AI develops the way many expect, and if you look at the scale of reinvestment these companies are already making, that share could rise to 50%. We may end up with an “S&P 10” and an “S&P 490”. That alone shows the power of what is coming.
Humans used more coal in 2025 than at any point in human history.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) solemnly announced that global coal demand reached another all time record high in 2025. “However, it is expected to decline by 2030 amid competition from other energy sources” they say, just like they say every year when coal hits a new record.
The IEA are a fully paid up part of The Blob– their funding comes from taxpayers in rich nations — so their role is to manage the narrative on energy to keep that funding flowing. Every year that coal hits a record high, the IEA also projects that coal use will plateau or fall. Back in 2019, they said “Over the next five years, global coal demand is forecast to remain stable.” Which it didn’t. In 2020 they said “Coal’s partial recovery is set to fade after 2021”. And it didn’t do that either. In 2022 they said “Global coal demand is set to plateau through 2025”. Yet again, demand for coal keeps rising.
Every year they do some version of the plateau graph (below) which includes their wish-list forecast of coal trending flat or down.
This fictitious faded out extension on the right (after 2026) distracts the eye from drawing a rising line. It feeds the expectation that coal use will start to decline soon, and hides the relentless rise in coal use in the last twenty years.
No doubt China is happy if other countries don’t feel any urgency to ramp up their coal generators. And the UN is happy because they told us coal was a stranded asset for twenty years and they don’t want to look too stupid. And the renewables industry, and all the bureaucrats that feed in that trough, don’t want the taxpayers to know other countries are feeding on coal.
It’s all part of the Psy-Op.
The growth of renewables might be fast, but it’s not even quick enough to reduce the growth of coal use.
Eraring coal plant is Australia’s largest coal power station. Obviously it’s a polluting monstrosity that kills koalas and is more expensive than solar panels. It’s also old and yet, for some reason, when it was supposed to shut down in August last year, the government dished out nearly half a billion dollars to keep it running for another two years until 2027.
Now, in a second round of baffling electrical fever, the NSW government has twisted the arm of Origin Energy to make sure they don’t shut the coal plant until 2029. All four coal units will be kept running.
Eraring supplies nearly a quarter of the electricity used in our largest industrial state, but apparently the wonderland new renewables grid isn’t quite ready, even though it’s 2026 and we are supposed to be aiming for 82% unreliable energy by 2030. But cruelly, the renewables revolution hit a wall and the Snowy Hydro Scheme hit an unmodeled rock. Only three new wind farms have been built in Australia last year, and everyone hates the interconnector transmission lines.
If the renewables grid was utterly failing, and the targets were all going to be missed, this is exactly what the early stages of a big backflip would look like. They can just keep extending the coal plants.
Ministers say Eraring will be used less and less and exists only as “insurance”. Which is like buying a truck to sit on the lawn, just in case your bike, roller skates and e-scooter can’t get you to work.
NSW Energy Minister Penny Sharpe said the extension will help keep power bills down. “My number one job is keeping the lights on and putting downward pressure on power prices. NSW is making real progress replacing ageing coal-fired power stations. Since the election, we have increased the amount of renewable energy capacity in operation by almost 70 per cent. That’s equivalent to Eraring’s capacity,” said Ms Sharpe.
The longer lifespan would not impact Origin’s own emissions reduction targets and taxpayers will not at this stage be called upon to provide any financial support, underscoring the profitability of the coal power station near Lake Macquarie.
Shares in Origin rose 2.6 per cent to $11.34 as the market cheered the prospect of additional returns from Eraring.
Green groups are calling this a disaster. They believe that renewables are cheaper than coal, yet say that keeping an old coal plant going will “crowd out” cheaper investments — though they don’t explain why people will choose the coal….
The CEO of the Nature Conservation Council of NSW, Jacqui Mumford, said “far from supporting the transition, Origin’s decision will crowd out investment in the clean, modern sources of generation we need to be switching to”.
Meanwhile The Blob speaks its own language — this decision has obviously increased real “certainty”, but the Blob says it has been undermined.
Johanna Bowyer of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis said extending Eraring “undermines certainty right when investors in new replacement generation need clarity”
Just substitute the phrase “certainty” with “certain income”, or “subsidies” and it all makes sense. And do the same for “clarity” which is another Green word for “money”.
Aurora Watch Current due to the X1.9 flare that went off early Monday morning Australia time.
Glendale App reports the strongest ever substorm they have ever recorded hit Earth this morning 9am Eastern Australian time, sadly during daylight hours for us. Europeans got a roaring show, as are people in North America now. There may or may not be some action still running as darkness falls across Australia. It is cloudy in New Zealand, but they’ve probably seen too many auroras already… 🙂
How fast was this backflip? How big was this mistake…
Germany shut down its last three reactors in April 2023, but three years later, they’ve realized it was a terrible mistake and want to rebuild them or put small modular reactors “likely on the same sites”.
After 66 years of operating nuclear power without any major accidents, the irony was that Germany shut down its nuclear industry mostly because other countries had accidents. But now they admit they need more electricity.
This would be one of the biggest backdowns in the fake renewables “transition”. Germany is the third largest economy in the world, and Chancellor Merz said this openly at a business conference a few days ago, but the mass media have said nothing.
The media groups that have reported it are niche outlets with names like Deseret News, TVPWorld, and American Thinker.
Translations from the video below:
Chancellor Merz “It was a serious strategic mistake to exit nuclear energy. We are now undertaking the most expensive energy transition in the entire world. I know of no other country that makes things so difficult for its own industry.”
“To have acceptable market prices for energy production again, we would have to permanently subsidise energy prices from the federal budget,” Merz said, adding: “We can’t do this in the long run.”
“If you are going to do it, you should at least have left the last remaining nuclear power plant in Germany on the grid three years ago, so that you at least have the electricity generation capacity that we had up until then,” he said.
Abdulvehab Ejup reports on TRT World — the Turkish Public Broadcaster.
Germany once had 19 nuclear power plants, which provided more than a quarter of its electricity, but now they are bleeding industrial power, losing solar, wind power, EVs and now AI before it has barely started:
Germany, meanwhile, is watching the digital economy and the jobs that come with it flow to nations with cheaper, more reliable electricity. And Berlin’s solution seems to be if you can’t beat them, join them. Merz has dropped German opposition to nuclear energy in EU law, opening the door for German companies to invest in French small modular reactor projects.
Don’t call these fossil fuel generators — they are baby hydrogen plants!
Facing industrial death, Germany has finally decided it needs dispatchable reliable electricity. But they can’t announce that they suddenly need to build 10 gigawatts of fossil fueled gas power plants. It would be like admitting the sacred Energiewende had been a ghastly mistake that wasted billions of dollars on a reckless vanity quest to change the clouds. So instead, these new “power plants” with a focus on “gas-fired sites” must be convertible to run on hydrogen by 2045. Of course, they may never run on hydrogen, given that makes pipes brittle, leaks, and costs four times as much as natural gas, but it makes a good cover story.
This is exactly what I would do if I wanted to hide a major backflip and pretend this was just a slight variation on the renewables theme. (Especially if I had no scruples).
Note that the Reuters Blob-Media story (below) does not mention the words “fossil fuels” or “dispatchable” it just talks about the need to generate electricity over “a longer period of time”.
The gas to hydrogen plant story is the PR cover and escape hatch from the Sacred Renewables Mission.
It’s just another marker of how fast the renewable energy plan is coming undone…
BERLIN/FRANKFURT, Jan 15 (Reuters) – Germany said on Thursday it had reached an agreement with the European Commission on a plan to build new power stations, adding it would tender 12 gigawatts (GW) worth of capacity in 2026, with a focus on gas-fired sites.
This is a major step on Germany’s path to ensure security of supply in light of the country’s ongoing phase-out of coal-fired power capacity. “With the short-term tenders … we are also laying the foundation for a secure electricity supply in Germany in the future and thus for the competitiveness of our industry,” Economy Minister Katherina Reiche said.
Most of the new capacity, 10 GW, must be able to generate electricity over a longer period of time to ensure steady supply, Germany’s economy ministry said, adding that this included but was not limited to gas-fired power stations.
Wow — 10 GW of new power by 2031!?
The new power stations, which are expected to enter service in 2031, will be able to run on hydrogen by 2045 at the latest, in line with Germany’s goal of becoming climate neutral that year, the ministry said.
Obviously, there are no apologies, no honesty, and they will never admit they were wrong.
In December, President Donald Trump’s Department of Energy issued an emergency order demanding that Tri-State Generation’s Craig Unit 1 coal plant stay open past the long-planned Dec. 31 shuttering date. Tri-State is now fixing broken parts at the plant, which it had previously not planned to do given the closure, and will bring it back online. The co-op generator says it has not heard any plan on who will pay the up to $80 million annual cost of running the plant in 2026.
The EPA on Friday cited the Department of Energy’s emergency action in calling out Colorado. “These plants are vital to delivering reliable and affordable energy to Colorado families and meeting the surging national energy demand,” the EPA announcement said.
The Colorado governor was not happy. And nor were The Blob NGOs — one spokesman at Earthjustice’s Rocky Mountain Office accused Trump, of all things, of being ‘ideological’.
The pace of ’emergency coal rescues’ is quickening:
By November, Chris Wright, the US Secretary of Energy, had stepped in three times to keep coal plants running, but in December, the pace quickened. Wright not only saved the Colorado plant, but also ordered a coal plant in Washington, and two plants in Indiana to keep running.
Under federal law, the Energy Secretary has the authority when an emergency exists, including a shortage of electricity, to make temporary orders regarding electricity infrastructure to address the emergency.
On Dec. 17, Wright ordered the last coal power plant in Washington to remain operational. It was slated for retirement at the end of last month.
Joe Fassler at DeSmog had already tallied up 15 coal plants whose lives had been extended in the USA since Donald Trump was elected, though he admits this was also driven by AI, and data centre demand.
Trump made a promise to revive the US Coal industry and to End the War on Coal.
“Keeping this coal plant online will ensure Americans maintain an affordable, reliable, and secure supply of electricity. The Trump administration is committed to lowering energy costs and keeping American families safe,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in a statement.
If only the Australian government could say the same…
Last year, like every other year, was the hottest variation of something.
All the Blob Media reported the latest trivia in unison, with identikit headlines and matching Pantone Bright Red color.
2025 was the third warmest year on record
For some reason, despite their Pulitzer prizes, and daily acknowledgement of Dreamtime culture — none of the legacy media journalists remembered that prehistory even existed. It’s like 99% of the last 10,000 years never happened. The Stone-age, Iron-age, Egyptians, Sumerians, Greeks — all, Phht. Not one of the “journalists” asked any of these scientists whether it was misleading to focus on the last 150 years when we had thermometers, when it was hotter for thousands of years, and there was no coal plant in sight.
The media is all bread and circuses. It’s a performance art designed to distract us and stop us noticing things that matter. Like the heat in the Holocene, and like the giant volcano called Hunga Tonga. (More on that soon).
Sea level have been falling for 7,000 years in Western Australia — one of the most stable and ancient pieces of land in the world. (Lewis et al). How could the world be cooler than today and the seas be 2 meters deeper?
It’s the same all around the world. In Taiwan giant oysters lived 3 meters above the current waterline. In Africa along thousands of kilometers of the entire west coast sea levels have been falling as the world cooled for thousands of years. (Vacci et al).
Human civilization was born in the hot Holocene and yet somehow we and the corals survived just fine….
Tell the children they called it The Holocene Optimum.
REFERENCES
Lewis, S.E., et al., Post-glacial sea-level changes around the Australian margin: a review, Quaternary Science Reviews (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2012.09.006 [abstract] (paywalled).
Kench, P.S., Liang, C., Ford, M.R. et al. (2023) Reef islands have continually adjusted to environmental change over the past two millennia. Nat Commun14, 508 doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-36171-2
Almost none of their sacred 30 year trends panned out, so they’re now inventing spooky new forecasts (right after they happen). Any old weather permutation, any random coincidence is fair game. So somewhere on a continent 5,000 kilometers across, there were floods and fires on the same day, and somewhere else, the weather changed from hot to cold. Yeah, verily, as Scorpio crosses through the House of ARC Grants, you will definitely get some weather…
Like unfalsifiable prophets of voodoo, we don’t know whether this exact same “whiplash weather” occurred 1,000 times before in the last 10,000 years, because there are no proxies for daily hot-n-cold flips or simultaneous fires and floods. There are no diatoms, or pollens or Beryllium isotopes that capture the flip. And there are no daily weather records from neolithic Australia.
Ergo — the smug curmudgeons of science can say whatever they feel like — knowing that no one can prove them wrong, and no journalist at the Sydney Morning Herald will ever ask them a hard question:
By Samantha Selinger-Morris, The Sydney Morning Herald
Bowman: We’re seeing this extraordinarily unstable climate … [what] we’re learning as we’re going is that the Earth system and the climate system is really very complicated.
When you start putting more energy into the atmosphere … the energy expresses itself in extraordinary ways. So we have, as we know, these extraordinary downpours and flooding events, we have these periods of just amazing rain.
We’re seeing this as well in California. So you get these very wet periods, you get flooding. You can get an interaction of the flooding with burnt areas. And then before you know it, you can switch back to drought … and then, to add insult to injury, we’ve been getting these incredible windstorms, and windstorms go with wind-driven fires, and wind-driven fires are just the worst because they move so quickly.
Rather than ask “how do you know this didn’t happen in 5,000 BC”, Ms Selinger-Morris asked the most leading and obvious question she could:
“How is climate change causing or driving this? You know, fires in one part of the country, floods in another. What’s happening here?”
Which was the cue for Mr Bowman to tell her how complex it all is again. (Like a sacred guild.) And to seed an excuse for when they screw up the next forecast. Astrologers always have a fallback plan:
Bowman: What’s happening is basically that the old weather patterns are breaking down … one of the reasons it’s going to become increasingly difficult to forecast weather is because we’re getting all of these complex interactions between sea surface temperatures.
…what we’re really describing is what’s being called in fire science “hydroclimatic whiplash”, this climate whiplash where we’re … going from wet to dry, wet to dry. So we’ve got this flickering between these states.
Melbourne was always supposed to have “four seasons in one day” — which is why Crowded House wrote a song about it 30 years ago before humankind emitted half our emissions. That sounds like pretty flickery weather.
Then, within our fire seasons, we’re seeing extreme heat waves, extreme wind events, and then you get the conjunction of an extreme heat wave and extreme wind event. We’ve just seen what happens. It’s just absolutely horrendous.
Horrendous indeed, but also handy — if they are wrong about the weather, remember, it’s because they were right about “climate change”. Excuses, excuses…
And that is a really important point … it’s not a criticism that this terrible fire season wasn’t adequately forecast … what we know from the past isn’t necessarily scaling well into the future.
So even though they sort of predicted this, and were right except when they were wrong, now the climate has changed, and they have to learn how to predict it again? So fossil fuels cause bad forecasts too?
Climate astrology might be the new normal, but climate science died a long time ago.
Green activists who sabotaged the Berlin grid last week may not have convinced anyone that carbon dioxide was a threat, but they have raised awareness that Germany needs more diesel generators, and thermal power plants.
On January 3rd, left wing extremists caused the longest blackout in Berlin since World War II leaving 100,000 people without heating or electricity for up to five days in midwinter. Suddenly local utilities have realized how vulnerable Germany is and are calling for a “national crisis reserve of mobile generators and heating systems.” And they want several hundred megawatts of it.
The association of local utilities (VKU) put out a press release calling for this new emergency reserve to be set up and spread around the country so it can restore power within 24 hours. They also for someone to clear away the bureaucratic red tape that slowed down the helpers, specifically mentioning the odd thing that must have delayed the response this time — like “responsibility, permits, liability, costs, labor rules and insurance.”
They paid homage to the “decentralized energy supply base on renewables” which could have (but didn’t) mitigate the damage. They probably had to write that. They also want to add in “grid meshing” or more interconnectors –presumably to make it harder for vandals to knock out one key line. But it will be “expensive” they say (isn’t it always). It’s just another bucket of money needed to be added to the renewables bills.
Germany’s municipal utilities are calling for a national crisis reserve of mobile generators and heating systems. These should be dispatched in an emergency to restore the electricity supply within 24 hours, argued industry lobby group VKU.
The VKU said the emergency reserve would enable the creation of temporary “island electricity grids” independent from the main supply system. These could be run by emergency power generators, which mostly run on diesel, combined heat and power plants, and gas turbines that could be activated with “a single phone call”. The association stated that this emergency reserve should have a combined capacity of several hundred megawatts.
In other lessons from Germany, Prof Vahrenholt points out that converting everyone on gas or petrol to electricity only makes a blackout so much worse and the nation more vulnerable.
Frontier Economics estimates the total cost of the energy transition until 2045 at an unaffordable 4,800 to 5,400 billion euros.
But now, the attack in Berlin demonstrates to us that such an energy system, based solely on electricity, is highly vulnerable. We are learning that when the power fails, the heat supply also fails—at least when it is supposed to be generated by heat pumps. And to make matters worse, we are learning that in freezing temperatures, heat pumps face total loss due to bursting pipes. This particular “warning label” was certainly not included in the “Habeck heating law,” which the CDU-SPD federal government intends to continue seamlessly. The content of the law will remain the same, but to ensure citizens don’t quite realize it, the name of the law is to be changed.
We are also learning that during a large-scale power outage, electric vehicles can only help if they happened to be charged before the “bang.” Otherwise, this utility also fails.
Home batteries and electric cars won’t be much use if the terrorists attack just before they get recharged.
ADDENDUM: Let’s not forget their manifesto for grid sabotage:
“In the greed for energy, the earth is being depleted, sucked dry, burned, ravaged, burned down, raped, destroyed,” the group, which is listed by Berlin’s intelligence services as a left-wing extremist organization, said in the letter.
“The aim of the action is to cause significant damage to the gas industry and the greed for energy,” its authors wrote. The group has used similar means to communicate in the past, and Berlin police believed the letter to be genuine.
We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.
Recent Comments