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 United States during the entire 20th century.
Thanks to communist central planning much of that concrete may be mal-invested and mal-constructed and in need of demolition but that just needs even more fossil fuels.
Despite cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia being so different, they have three things in common, Smil says: they can’t be replaced by other things easily, we need more of them than ever, and they all absolutely have to have fossil fuels.
Ammonia synthesis uses natural gas both as the source of hydrogen and as the source of energy needed to provide high temperature and pressure. Some 85% of all plastics are based on simple molecules derived from natural gas and crude oil, and hydrocarbons also supply energy for syntheses. Production of primary steel starts with smelting iron ore in blast furnace in the presence of coke made from coal and with the addition of natural gas, and the resulting cast iron is made into steel in large basic oxygen furnaces. And cement is produced by heating ground limestone and clay, shale in large kilns, long inclined metal cylinders, heated with such low-quality fossil fuels as coal dust, petroleum coke and heavy fuel oil.
But if you think that’s demanding — look at the shopping list for Electric Vehicles:
A typical lithium car battery weighing about 450 kilograms contains about 11 kilograms of lithium, nearly 14 kilograms of cobalt, 27 kilograms of nickel, more than 40 kilograms of copper, and 50 kilograms of graphite—as well as about 181 kilograms of steel, aluminum, and plastics. Supplying these materials for a single vehicle requires processing about 40 tons of ores, and given the low concentration of many elements in their ores it necessitates extracting and processing about 225 tons of raw materials.
The only politically correct line in the whole article was one slipped in there about reducing fertilizer by eating less meat. But really, it was nothing compared to the ideological advertising we’ve come to expect and it was in a section quietly headlined “Ideas — Climate Change” ?
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 front page news. There is no reason royalty payments should be secret.
The conflict of interest alone should have been enough to remove Dr. Anthony Fauci and others from positions inside the National Institutes for Health, the Food and Drug Administration and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Yet, here we are as a bombshell has been dropped unmasking that not only did Fauci and other bigwigs receive $350 million “royalty” payments from Big Pharma, but the NIH tried to hide those numbers.
OpenTheBooks filed some, wow, 47,000 FOIA requests last year. They have a federal lawsuit running against the NIH and are seeking those royalty payment details.
Dr. Anthony Fauci received 23 royalty payments, but the NIH has yet to disclose the sum total of those payments.
Recently, our organization at OpenTheBooks.com forced NIH to disclose more than 22,100 royalty payments totaling nearly $134 million paid to the agency and nearly 1,700 NIH scientists. These payments occurred during the most recently available period (September 2009 – September 2014).
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.
A survey this week by Compass Polling tested what percentage of global emissions people thought could be directly attributed to Australia. Astonishingly, the average answer was 10 per cent – 10 times higher than the reality. Half of all respondents put the figure at 10 per cent or higher. More than 10 per cent of respondents said Australia contributed 20 per cent or more of global emissions. And a slightly lower proportion got it right at around 1 per cent.
This level of ignorance is reprehensible when you consider the media, political and educational fixation with climate change over the past two decades.
Yet few people call it out; the major parties, most of the media, and academe, all constrain the debate within absurd boundaries of make believe – they all pretend our climate policies matter.
Wait til Chris Kenny finds out that we make 1% of human emissions which are only 4% of total emissions, so that’s 0.04% or 4 parts in ten thousand of all the CO2 emissions on Earth. And that’s assuming CO2 emissions matter in the first place, which they probably don’t given how the effect of CO2 is dwarfed by the effect of water, and the tiny warming (such as it is) is beneficial in any case.
So
But he’s spot on with the money. The only electorates where climate change matters are the ones that can afford Gucci:
It is no accident that the most prominent voices in the climate change policy debate are millionaires and billionaires, nor is it surprising that they find the most receptive audiences for their prognostications in the wealthiest postcodes.
These are not people who have lost their jobs because of the expensive transition to renewable energy – well, except for Turnbull and Rudd. Rather than fall victim to closed factories or skyrocketing power prices, these people have added to their wealth thanks to the taxpayer-subsidised renewable energy boom.
Spender’s campaign posters promise a “better climate for Wentworth”. I guess this must be what you give the voters who have everything.
How many votes would Scott Morrison win if he pointed out it was a rich man’s fantasy to change the worlds weather and the poor punters were the ones who would pay?
When the rich campaign to tax flights and fuel they are just clearing out some riff raff from the roads and airports, and lining their own pockets with government funded gravy.
Here’s a graphic that’s hard to find
Australia circled in red. New Zealand too (below Australia). Most graphs are done per capita, for obvious reasons, not per country. And of course the best graphic doesn’t exist. I want the one that shows all these countries next to “plants”, “oceans”, “animals” and “microbes”.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
If CO2 mattered at all, there are only a few players that count.
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 think you know everything and no one else could possibly have another truth you should be glad of that protection — because you’re an asshole.
Ron DeSantis announces that November 7th will be a day to honor the Victims of Communism
A true leader:
“I notice, that people who escape communism for free societies never choose to go back…”
“There are probably more Marxists on college faculties in the United States than there are in all of Eastern Europe combined.”
“The body-count of Mao is something that everybody needs to understand.”
The key parts are from 2:30 – 5:00.
Students will learn what Marxism does:
Beginning in the 2023-2024 academic year, high school students enrolled in US government courses will get at least 45 minutes of instruction each November 7 describing how “victims suffered under these regimes through poverty, starvation, migration, systemic lethal violence, and suppression of speech.” – New York Post:
The legislation means students will learn about Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot
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.
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.
India needs a billion tons of coal a year, and digs up about 770 million tons. Suddenly the plan is to increase that to 1.2 billion tons “in the next two years” and if that means opening 100 old mines and throwing away the green tape, so be it.
Phys-Org
Soaring temperatures have prompted higher energy demand in recent weeks and left India facing a 25-million-tonne shortfall…
The government hopes to woo private mining giants—like Vedanta and Adani—to revive more than 100 dormant coal mines previously deemed too expensive to operate, using new technology and fresh capital. …the Environment Ministry said it has allowed a “special dispensation” to the Ministry of Coal to relax certain requirements—like public consultations—so mines could operate at increased capacities. Coal mining projects previously cleared to operate at 40-percent capacity may now increase capacity to 50 percent without undertaking fresh environment impact studies, the authority said.
Benjamin Parkin and Chloe Cornish, Financial Times
About two-thirds of 21,500 people recently surveyed by pollster LocalCircles reported they had suffered power outages. One in 10 said the blackouts lasted between four to eight hours.
India is the world’s second-largest coal producer and consumer and depends on the fossil fuel for about 70 per cent of power generation. But the combination of surging demand as economic activity rebounds after Covid restrictions were eased and supply chain bottlenecks, such as a lack of rail cars to transport coal, have left many plants plagued by shortages.
The ‘little ice age’ of the 14th to the 19th centuries brought cold winters to Europe and unusual weather globally. Studying how humans adapted could be valuable.
The story isn’t entirely settled, but researchers are increasingly confident about the initial trigger: volcanoes.
“You have these eruptions that are happening in clusters,” says Degroot. A 2015 study used data from ice cores to identify 25 major eruptions from the past 2,500 years. Between 1200 and 1400, there were huge eruptions of the Samalas volcano in Indonesia, Quilotoa in Ecuador and El Chichón in Mexico.
But the volcanoes reasoning is a bit hand-wavy and vague, so Michael Marshall knows he needs other reasons. He considers the sun as a ball-of-pure-light for a few paragraphs, ignoring that it might have a magnetic field 12,000 times bigger than Earths, or a solar wind that buffets Earth at a million miles an hour. Thus, on the basis of ignoring most solar physics, he rules it out as a big contender. Which leaves him free to fill in the gaps in his theory with the two most fashionable Voodoo dolls of Postmodern Witchcraft — White Men and CO2.
… this cold spell was caused by humanity – in a truly horrible way.
The great dying
In 1492, Christopher Columbus reached the Americas. Over the following decades, Europeans began colonising them. In the process, they fought with Indigenous Americans, often killing them. But even more lethally, they brought diseases. One of the worst was smallpox, which killed millions.
As well as being a genocide and a tragedy, this may have had an impact on the climate. Many Indigenous Americans were farmers who had cleared forests for their crops and when they died the trees grew back, drawing carbon dioxide out of the air and cooling the planet.
So White men killed the nice native farmers, and that meant the forests grew back, which was terrible, by the way, and the naughty trees ate up all the CO2 from the Sky-Princess, and thus the world mostly, sorta got cooler. See how this works?
Not that I’m mocking the devastating effect of smallpox, just the cult-like unfalsifiability of the Climate Religion. All roads lead to white men and CO2.
And of course, like all ideological fantasies, it raises more questions than it solves: if forests are that dangerous, should we be replanting them hither thither? What if we get carried away with the carbon credit schemes and trigger another ice age? And doesn’t this destroy the whole HockeyStick Graph? How can there be both a global little ice caused by volcanoes and then by Christopher Columbus AND also a flat line for the last thousand years of history? Besides, doesn’t extra CO2 cause the ice caps to melt which slide off the polar crustal plates, leading to more volcanoes?
But of course, the shifting narrative has its own uses. Should the world cool now, instead of warm, volcanoes make a handy back door escape route. The climate models will never be wrong — it’s just bad luck. Someone will get a good grant and find volcanoes got bigger, or more clustered, or spewed different particulates, or in different jet streams.
Still not wrong:
The “hockey stick” graph as published in IPCC TAR (Figure 2-20, 2001)
Coming soon: how the Medieval Warm Period was caused by the Russians.
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 of burning through their cash balance
Business in RenewableWorld means being ready to drop everything and switch off the lights, but it might stop storms a hundred years from now, so it’ll be worth it…
Soaring wholesale electricity spot prices have sparked warnings of factory shutdowns as big power users struggle with extreme volatility amid a growing number of outages and high fuel costs.
Sell & Parker, a scrap metal buyer in Banksmeadow that supplies to BlueScope Steel, said it had to curtail production over the last three days due to huge price volatility for its electricity supplies.
“Prices are jumping up 45-fold in a matter of minutes and we are being forced to shut down production,” Sell & Parker director Morgan Parker said. “It just kills you to run at those sort of prices.”
The company shuts off its metal shredder, one of only three in the state, during high price events and said it was being handicapped in comparison to international competitors operating in the same business.
Big grid users can hedge against that volatility, but hedges have their own costs (which must surely be rising) and smaller victims with wholesale spot contracts must be sweating on every five minute contract in the late afternoon.
On Sunday the AEMO (Australian Energy Market Operator) was already forecasting a drop in wind power on Thursday so severe that will leave South Australia at risk of rolling blackouts. The AEMO forecast a rare LOR3 (Lack of Reserve Class 3) though hours later resolved it. It seems the Heywood interconnector that South Australia relies on to get coal fired power from “next door” in Victoria will be limited on Thursday. The combination of low wind and little back up from interstate coal puts the South Australian RenewableWorld at risk of running out of power.
I’ll be discussing the absurdity of Destroying Perfectly good Electricity Grids in Australia with the Friends of Science in Calgary, Canada with a presentation then Q&A. It will be live 7pm MDT Monday evening in Canada/USA and Tuesday 10th morning in Australia (11am EST, 9am WST). It will be available to watch afterwards as the wonderful Ian Plimer’s is now from last week.
“Australia – Crash Test Dummy of Renewable Energy” with Joanne Nova
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 duo of Copenhagen and ClimateGate in 2009, or Al Gore’s Nobel winning Documentary in 2007, or the massive bushfires of Dec 2019 when the whole continent was on fire?
It turns out that all the frantic interest in “climate change” in Australia happened in just one week. No, wait, it was all in just one day!
And that day Australians were interested in climate change was April 22.
What freak event would that be, that I can’t remember from three weeks ago?
…
But wait — the same effect happened on the exact same day in the USA, and the UK, and New Zealand, and Canada. And tripping off the Radar of Weirdness, the one-day wonder effect happened even in China and Afghanistan too?
Bizarrely, the whole world woke up on April 22 and decided to search for “climate change”.
Google Trends searches for Climate Change 2022
Even people fighting a war in Russia and Ukraine stopped to look up “climate change” too. Though for the latter two countries, unlike many places, it wasn’t an all time highest ever record. But that did occur and by a wild margin in the West. What was going on?
The big event, apparently on April 22 was “Earth Day 2022”
Remember it? Me neither. Apparently Joe Biden gave a speech, and the whole world got excited, and more people than ever before searched for “climate change” on their computer, even in the back-blocks of Brazil, and the far reaches of Poland. And then it was gone. The record hit was a One Day Wonder. Either that or it was a fake “bot” at work, rigging results — but you’d have to ask, why bother? If the aim was to create a hit for PR purposes, why that day? Why not every day? And where were all the stories — Did I miss them?
The whole world was searching for climate change on April 22?
There was one lame UK story that capitalized on the trendy spike – but it was hardly a big event worthy of coordinated cyber bot campaign.
At the 3-million-dollar-a-day ABC not one journalist — apparently — bothered to do a google Trends search on “climate change” for the latest story. They’re activists — all of them, and rather pathetic ones. Consider how lame this is — not only is there no rising trend, and not much discussion of climate policy a bare two weeks before an election but the journalists are trying to convince themselves that Australians care about climate change and are really too scared to mention it.
So Australians are googling climate change, even if they’re not talking about it.
And in areas where they’re talking about it least, they may be googling it even more than elsewhere. “Maybe they can ask Google when they can’t ask their neighbour,” Dr Huntley said. “It’s not a surprise to me that people in small farming communities, where they don’t necessarily feel like they can have this conversation at the pub, are places where people are googling it.”
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 this will be a shock for food production after a remarkable streak of 40 years with generally excelling growing seasons apart from occasional droughts and floods that did not disturb the favourable trends in production (whether due to warming or just better farming practices.)
This report appeared before there was any sign of the Ukraine invasion that has two devastating strikes on the food supply: first curtailing production from the rich farmlands of the Ukraine and second, triggering a potentially catastrophic increase in the cost of fertilizer (hence reduced supply and more expensive food) caused by the inflated cost of gas.
Interesting times indeed. People, at least in poor nations, will soon have more serious things to fret about than climate change.
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:
(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that it received 466 pagesof records from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) regarding biodistribution studies and related data for the COVID-19 vaccines that show a key component of the vaccines developed by Pfizer/BioNTech, lipid nanoparticles (LNPs), were found outside the injection site, mainly the liver, adrenal glands, spleen and ovaries of test animals, eight to 48 hours after injection.
Pfizer/BioNTech’s mRNA-based COVID vaccine relies on LNPs as a delivery system. Pfizer said in a January 10, 2022 press release that Acuitas TherapeuticsLNP technology is used in COMIRNATY, the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.
Judicial Watch also received 663 pagesof records from HHS regarding biodistribution studies and related data for COVID-19 vaccines, which show that Johnson & Johnson relied on studies showing that vaccine DNA particles and injected virus particles were still present in test animals months after injection.
Biodistribution is the key word that describes where the vaccines end up — which tissues and organs are those spikes delivered to? Those studies should have been among the first to be conducted, and the results should not have been “Commercial in confidence” for any person who was deciding if they should take the vaccine.
Johnson and Johnson are also implicated. They did not include studies in their application to the FDA. In February last year Pfizer did not even do the studies.
The Pfizer records include a report, which was approved in February 2021, on the animal trials on the distribution of the Pfizer COVID vaccine in rat subjects, in a section titled “Safety Pharmacology,” the report notes, “No safety pharmacology studies were conducted with BNT162b2 [the BioNTech vaccine] as they are not considered necessary…”
Pfizer knew that the various Lipid Nano Particles (LNP’s) — which are the delivery vehicle for the spike RNA — end up in liver, adrenal glands, spleen and ovaries within 48 hours of injection. The most common spot was the liver. (Up to 18% of the particles end up there.) And hepatitis is or course, a disease of the liver. There are potentially reasons that sending a bioweapon spike into liver cells might not work out well.
The same Pfizer study admitted that there were no genotoxic studies, or carcinogenicity studies because problems were “not expected”.
Acuitas Therapeutics paid for a study, in November 2020 of the effect of the LNP’s in rats that showed these particles were going to the liver and other tissues. Though Johnson and Johnson records show there was a study as long ago as 2007 that showed the adenovirus vaccines in rabbits ended up in the spleen and iliac lymph node. So it’s not just the mRNA vaccines that spread further than they are supposed to. Adenovirus vector vaccines include AstraZenica, Johnson and Johnson, Sputnik (Russian) and Convidecia (a Chinese vaccine). mRNA vaccines include Pfizer and Moderna.
The latest tranche of secret Pfizer docs is also out.
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In 1492, Christopher Columbus reached the Americas. Over the following decades, Europeans began colonising them. In the process, they fought with Indigenous Americans, often killing them. But even more lethally, they brought diseases. One of the worst was smallpox, which killed millions.
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, 
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