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9.7 out of 10 based on 15 ratings

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Chris Wright — We’re in the greatest Malinvestment in Human History

By Jo Nova

Chris Wright, the United States Secretary of Energy, marvels that people can spend so much to achieve so little:

“Germany invested half a trillion dollars, more than doubled the capacity of its electricity grid — and today produces 20% less electricity than before that investment, selling it at three times the price.”    — 13 min

 

“The lucky one billion — including everyone in this room — consumes about 13 barrels of oil per person per year. The other seven billion want to live like we do, but they consume about three barrels per person per year.”

It’s so nice to hear grownups talking:

 

Some extracts of his interview:

The tale of a remarkable transition from energy importer to energy exporter:

“Look at what’s happened in the United States. We’ve tripled liquids production in less than two decades. We are by far the world’s largest producer. We’ve more than doubled natural gas production, and it’s still growing fast.

This is phenomenal. Lower costs, lower prices — it has transformed the world. It’s hard to overstate the impact of the U.S. shale revolution and what all of you have done.

Total energy use in the US is still 72% oil and gas:

“One thing you never hear about: total primary energy consumption in the United States — over 72% now comes from just two energy sources: oil and natural gas. Record-high market share, in addition to record volumes. That doesn’t sound like a dying industry I’ve been hearing about for the last 15 years.

But when you roll over to the electricity sector, it’s a very different story.

In oil and gas production we’ve seen declining capital intensity, increasing efficiencies, and surging production. In electricity? Surging investment — gigantic amounts of money flowing in — and what’s the net result?

Almost no growth in electricity production, but significant growth in electricity prices.

The world isn’t going to copy the UK and Germany (or Australia):

“If you make electricity more expensive, and people don’t know where policy is heading, energy-intensive industry leaves your country. The United Kingdom and Germany are experts at that.

Germany invested half a trillion dollars, more than doubled the capacity of its electricity grid — and today produces 20% less electricity than before that investment, selling it at three times the price.

That is not a winning model. That is not what the world is going to duplicate.

We spend $10 trillion dollars to convert about 6% of global energy to solar and wind power: 

Our industry is about physics, numbers, math — but when it comes to climate change, we check rationality at the door.

It’s only about decarbonizing and claiming we’re in the middle of an energy transition. I think we’re actually in the midst of the greatest malinvestment in human history.

Globally, about $10 trillion has been invested nominally in fighting climate change. What did we get for $10 trillion?

About 6% of global energy comes from these sources after $10 trillion of investment — and everywhere penetration is high, prices have gone up and industry has left.

If you close a factory in the Midlands and move it to Asia where it runs on coal, then ship the goods on diesel ships — that’s not fighting climate change. That’s de-industrializing your nation.

 Oil, gas, and coal run the world. Full stop.

At the time of the Yom Kippur War, 85% of global energy came from hydrocarbons. That crisis launched the energy transition movement over 50 years ago.

Today? 85% hydrocarbons.

Let’s engage with reality. Oil, gas, and coal run the world. Full stop.

You can’t make a wind turbine, a solar panel, or a nuclear power plant without massive amounts of oil, gas, and coal. That’s how the world works.

The lucky one billion — including everyone in this room — consumes about 13 barrels of oil per person per year. The other seven billion want to live like we do, but they consume about three barrels per person per year…

Electricity should be getting cheaper:

For a century, electricity got cheaper and more reliable. We reversed that. Now it’s more expensive and less reliable.

If current trends continue, by 2030 blackouts could be 100 times more common.

Half the states have renewable portfolio standards. Those states have over 50% higher electricity prices than states without them.

If you do crazy things, you get bad results. See Germany. See the UK. See California.

Energy costs should be rising lower than inflation:

States with renewable portfolio standards have seen electricity prices increase at twice the rate of inflation. States that don’t have RPSs — unfortunately they also had increasing nominal electricity prices — but below the rate of inflation.

We should be seeing trends in electricity prices way below inflation.

The biggest source of electricity in the United States by far is natural gas. What has the price of natural gas done over the last 10 or 20 years? It’s plummeted. What has availability done? It’s surged.

More demand for electricity makes electricity cheaper

When people worry that AI demand will push up costs, Chris Wright points out that the US states that have grown their electricity output have also reduced their price of electricity. (Presumably this is because the states that depend on industry and manufacturing build serious generators instead of dancing around the renewable maypole.)

If you plot states that have grown their output of electricity — meaning re-industrialization or new demand — the faster the growth in demand for electricity, the lower the rise in price.

North Dakota is the champion: over 30% growth in electricity output, and electricity prices have actually declined. All the other states that have had flat or below-inflation price increases have had growing production of electricity.

And the champions on the other end — California, New York, Massachusetts, Maryland — that have had skyrocketing electricity prices: all of them produce less electricity today than they did five years ago.

There is something prosaic about ministerial titles in the USA. Chris Wright, is the Secretary of Energy and knows exactly what his primary task is, unlike the Australian Minister for Coal, Oil, Gas, Corals, Koalas and Weather Control.

h/t Scott

9.9 out of 10 based on 141 ratings

Saturday

9.1 out of 10 based on 11 ratings

Friday

8.8 out of 10 based on 20 ratings

Hallelujah! Trump announces withdrawal of US support and funds for Blob Headquarters — 66 UN and international agencies


By Jo Nova

Finally! Trump kills off funding and support for 66 international agencies, promises more to get the axe

The United Nations finally gets some accountability after serving itself or foreign dictators for decades. Trump isn’t just withdrawing from The Paris Agreement, he’s gone for the nuclear option of pulling out of the UNFCCC completely. 

The WHO could have stopped Covid, instead they actively help spread it and covered up for the Chinese Communist Party. They look, act and behave like a larval form of One World Government — constantly trying to pass agreements that take over sovereign control or generate funds for the UN. They dream of setting up a Global Pandemic Treaty where they can dictate what injections you must have, what drugs are permitted, and get access to your medical data. These are not just pie-in-the-sky ambitions, the UN already effectively stopped unvaccinated Australians from leaving the country during Covid.

The UN helped set up giant $130 Trillion dollar banker cartels to control national energy policy, allowing China to set up gigawatts of coal power while the West is crippled with unreliable generators made with the same Chinese coal. They repeatedly try to install taxes on global shipping “to reduce carbon emissions” but mostly to earn the UN $40 billion a year to boss us around with. They promote outlandish self-serving fear-mongering, with biblical fire and brimstone, they attack our key industries, try to curb our free speech.

The UN operates like a mafia protection racket. UNESCO threatens to put the Great Barrier Reef on the “in danger list”, even though the reef is the biggest and best managed reef in the world, with record high coral cover. It does this to extract funds, power and status for Blob workers.

There should be a Royal Commission into the politicians and media outlets who sold out the nation to support the UN, like those that signed the Pandemic Treaty, and the Carbon tax on shipping.

From Marco Rubio: Withdrawal from Wasteful, Ineffective, or Harmful International Organizations

Today, in furtherance of Executive Order 14199, President Trump announced the withdrawal of the United States from 66 international organizations identified as part of the Trump Administration’s review of wasteful, ineffective, and harmful international organizations. Review of additional international organizations pursuant to Executive Order 14199 remains ongoing.

The Trump Administration has found these institutions to be redundant in their scope, mismanaged, unnecessary, wasteful, poorly run, captured by the interests of actors advancing their own agendas contrary to our own, or a threat to our nation’s sovereignty, freedoms, and general prosperity. President Trump is clear: It is no longer acceptable to be sending these institutions the blood, sweat, and treasure of the American people, with little to nothing to show for it. The days of billions of dollars in taxpayer money flowing to foreign interests at the expense of our people are over.

As such, the United States will be withdrawing from the 66 organizations that can be found here.

As this list begins to demonstrate, what started as a pragmatic framework of international organizations for peace and cooperation has morphed into a sprawling architecture of global governance, often dominated by progressive ideology and detached from national interests. From DEI mandates to “gender equity” campaigns to climate orthodoxy, many international organizations now serve a globalist project rooted in the discredited fantasy of the “End of History.” These organizations actively seek to constrain American sovereignty. Their work is advanced by the same elite networks—the multilateral “NGO-plex”— that we have begun dismantling through the closure of USAID.

The left are apoplectic

Outrage as Trump withdraws from key UN climate treaty along with dozens of international organisations

The Guardian:

Donald Trump has sparked outrage by announcing the US will exit the foundational international agreement to address the climate crisis, cementing the US’s utter isolation from the global effort to confront dangerously escalating temperatures.

“This is a shortsighted, embarrassing and foolish decision,” said Gina McCarthy, who was a top climate adviser to Joe Biden’s White House.

“As the only country in the world not a part of the UNFCCC treaty, the Trump administration is throwing away decades of US climate change leadership and global collaboration. This administration is forfeiting our country’s ability to influence trillions of dollars in investments, policies and decisions that would have advanced our economy and protected us from costly disasters wreaking havoc on our country.”

Manish Bapna, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said Trump’s decision to exit the UNFCCC is an “unforced error” and “self-defeating” as it will further hamper the US’s ability to compete with China, which is increasingly dominant in the world’s burgeoning clean energy technology industries.

Trump serves oil billionaires, says Al Gore!

Gore, the former US vice-president and climate activist, told the Guardian:“They’ve done this at the behest of the oil industry, so that billionaires can rake in even more money while polluting our planet and endangering people in America and around the world,”…

The World Health Organisation had only one job, to prevent pandemics, and instead  it helped kill at least six million people (so far), and spread disease and chaos to every corner of the world.  WHO made sure nations kept flying in the bioweapon from Wuhan when they could so easily have stopped it. And Tedros, of course, is a devoted minion of President Xi, and a former Minister of Ethiopia during the time the Chinese Belt and Road expanded there. Even as China lied about the human spread and risk of Covid in January 2020 — Tedros worked as a one-man advertising man to cover the bad news and promote the leader of the CCP.

The parasitic bureaucrats and Blob psychopaths value our lives at zero.

h/t Jim Simpson, Willie Soon, David Archibald

 

 

 

9.9 out of 10 based on 141 ratings

Next door’s wind farm can stop you building a home on your own land

Wind turbines, sunset, agriculture, renewables. Photo.

By Jo Nova

Lordy!  It’s just another catch in a low density energy grid

If your neighbor builds an industrial wind turbine plant, you might need developmental approval to build anywhere close to them even on your own property. Why? Although wind turbines are officially wonderful, the people living in the new home might file a noise complaint which will lead to ‘operational risk’, and  ‘investor uncertainty’.

Neighbourhood row blowing in with WA wheatbelt wind farm plans

By Paige Taylor, The Australian

The WA Cook Labor government is preparing to adopt contentious rules which could prevent farmers from building a dwelling on their own land if it is deemed too close to their neighbour’s wind turbine, as the West Australian wheatbelt becomes the next frontier for renewable energy companies.

Current modeling typically suggests gaps between homes and turbines of 1.5 kilometer (~1 mile).

WA Planning Minister John Carey said the proposed renewables code, open for public comment until April, encouraged early engagement with communities.

Proposed mandatory noise modelling aims to ensure turbines comply with noise limits, which typically results in a minimum separation of around 1.5km between turbines and noise-sensitive land uses such as a house,” he said.

We can all see where this is going.  Soon, new wind plants will have to compensate neighbors for the loss in amenity and use of their own land. So the cost of wind energy will rise even further.

For Western Australian farmers see the Draft Renewable Energy Planning Code open for feedback until 10th April. Have Your Say.

Who would have thought that collecting energy spread over thousands of square kilometers could have an impact on the air, the rain, the birds, frogs and mammals living underneath them?

Photo by Karsten Würth on Unsplash

 

 

 

9.9 out of 10 based on 80 ratings

Thursday

Sorry about Tuesday and Wednesday.

9.1 out of 10 based on 11 ratings

Psychologists do mass survey of climate messages only to find nothing “opened wallets”

By Jo Nova

They must have been disappointed

Psychologists have finally run a massive test of climate communication strategies, — and they all fail.

A new megastudy of more than 13,000 Americans tested the ten most cited climate-messaging strategies drawn from 157 previous papers. Twenty-four co-authors from five countries were involved. They wanted to find the paragraph — the killer framing — that would change beliefs, shift behaviour, or, ideally, persuade people to part with some cash. They didn’t find it.

Probably the most newsworthy finding is that there is a vast pool of grant money available to study rehashed minutiae of how to sell weather-changing sorcery to the jaded public. It’s a full time Blob Psy-Op machine to “nudge” the voters. If only they spent some of this money checking the science before they fine tuned the fear campaign?

This is a Psy-Op machine in search of a slogan

They call this research “science” but it’s more like corporate message-testing in advertising. And it’s done for free at universities to help the industry. The goal here is not to understand the human condition, it’s to sell a carbon tax or a solar panel. 

The study would not have been cheap  — They not only surveyed thousands of people, but they did it before a ‘treatment’ and again afterwards. The ‘treatment’ they offered people was to read a few short paragraphs of what the researchers thought was a persuasive message — but in reality was just a rehash of themes they have been beating us over the head with for years.

They were hoping to find a useful phrase that reached Democrats or Republicans and pulled out some cash, or shifted behaviour. But they did not hit paydirt. The results were so bad, they even had to admit they barely moved the dial. Despite the massive numbers taking the survey, they could barely reach statistical significance on anything. It was a wash…

PhysOrgIn a study involving more than 13,000 participants in the U.S., several messaging strategies were shown to move the needle—albeit slightly—in attempts to strengthen pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors regarding climate change. None, however, was effective in spurring people to put their money where their mouth is.

Basically a few people seemed more convinced about climate change after their ‘treatment’ (for the next five minutes) but almost none of them cared enough to donate money to stop it.

The paper almost never gives answers as solid percentages, probably because the absolute numbers were so pathetic. One percentage they supplied was that “treatment conditions increased belief in climate change by 1.16 percentage points….” And remember, this is the result a few minutes after being exposed to the key paragraph. A week later it will be nearer to 0%.

They were also surprised at what they didn’t find– political division:  “And, perhaps most surprisingly, messages’ persuasiveness varied little between Democrats and Republicans.”

So after years of politicization and polarization the researchers were surprised to find that that Democrats and Republicans were both human? If they could have found some difference, it would have been the headline — Democrats, open to persuasion! Republicans, sticks-in-the-mud!

 

The ten themes are explained at the bottom:  Essentially the Republicans were slightly more moved by the patriotic maintenance of the “purity of American land”. Democrats were slightly more moved by being nice to people and touchy feely stuff.

When reading these graphs (they have about 45), the dots on the right of the zero line, were theoretically “positive” and therefore changed opinions  (if we ignore most of the error bars).

Ironically, the only dot below with any statistical significance is the one that suggests that making claims of economic or jobs gains to Republicans will reduce donations. Obviously, Republicans just don’t believe that stuff anymore.

Consensus is still the only winner (for them)

The main argument for believers is still the profoundly anti-science line that truth is what the annointed Gods of Science say.

But every time anyone mentions the Petition Project, we win

When it came to changing beliefs, the “consensus of experts” was the most reliable argument to influence people. New readers may not be aware the Petition Project was an extraordinary survey of scientists in the US which proved that there was no consensus. Nearly twenty years ago, 31,000 scientists including 9,000 PhD’s were willing to sign a strong statement of dissent. Naturally, the legacy media didn’t mention it, even though it was a larger, longer list than any the believers ever arranged. So most people have never heard of it.

Bizarrely, in their theme called Scientific consensus 1 — the researchers talked about the “expert consensus” but also tried to also ‘innoculate’ readers against the Petition Project. And they may have done more harm than good. In trying to debunk the Petition Project they inadvertently opened the average persons eyes to news that there was a scientific debate and it has been surpressed. In contrast Scientific consensus 2 (which didn’t mention the Petition Project) was received as more persuasive in almost every situation. The only time Consensus type 1 was a winner (for believers), was when it worked on Democrats to elict a few more donations. In that case talking to climate activists about “the battle” reminds them of which side they are on in this tribal war. They may feel like the victims battling a big machine (31,000 evil denier scientists!).

The only thing we really learn in the MegaStudy is just how much money The Blob has thrown at polishing its communication memes in order to squeeze a tiny bit more compliance with climate grift and graft. 

PS: One of the 24 authors was the infamous Stephan Lewandowsky, well known for studying skeptics by placing surveys on sites that hate and mock them.  This is the man who once surveyed a 32,000 year old respondent. He’s still around.

_________________________________________

APPENDIX: The ten top favourite climate-messaging treatments:

  • Binding framing — Argues that mitigating climate change aligns with patriotic, family, and religious values.
  • Scientific consensus 1 –Emphasises scientific agreement on human-caused climate change and explicitly inoculates against sceptical narratives, including the Petition Project.
  • Scientific consensus 2 –Emphasises scientific agreement on human-caused climate change and inoculates against a vague “fake debate” strategy, without naming specific dissenting groups.
  • Dire but solvable framing –-Stresses that climate change consequences are severe, but solutions exist.
  • Compatible solution framing –Argues climate mitigation can be achieved while remaining consistent with free-market principles.
  • Gains framing –Highlights benefits and positive outcomes from mitigating climate change.
  • High social distance framing — Focuses on climate harms affecting a socially distant group (e.g., Chinese farmers).
  • Purity framing — Frames mitigation as protecting the purity and cleanliness of American land.
  • System preservation framing — Argues that climate mitigation helps preserve the traditional American way of life.
  • Warmth framing — Appeals to caring for fellow citizens and social compassion.

 

REFERENCE

Voelkel, J.G., Ashokkumar, A., Abeles, A.T. et al. A registered report megastudy on the persuasiveness of the most-cited climate messages. Nat. Clim. Chang. (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-025-02536-2

10 out of 10 based on 62 ratings

Climate Terrorism: Militant left activists use grid arson to blackout 45,000 Berlin homes in midwinter

AI image by Sonja Ritter.

By Jo Nova

They wanted to “cut the juice to the ruling class”

Saving the world now means committing arson, and cutting off  grandma’s electricity for days in midwinter Germany.

The attack burned through a cable connected to one of Berlin’s gas plants. The so-called Vulkangruppe (Volcano Group) claimed responsibility and published their manifesto online in German.

Leftwing militants claim responsibility for arson attack on Berlin power grid

Deborah Cole, The Guardian

German leftwing militants protesting over the climate crisis and AI have claimed responsibility for an arson attack that cut power to tens of thousands of households in Berlin.

As state security authorities opened an investigation into the cause of the blaze near the Lichterfelde heat and power station that damaged several high-voltage cables, the Vulkangruppe (Volcano Group) said it had deliberately targeted some of the city’s wealthiest districts.

In a 2,500-word pamphlet seen by the Guardian which a police spokesperson called “credible”, the group said it had aimed to “cut the juice to the ruling class”.

This is what happens when one side of a debate is silenced. The voices in the heads of the crazy people are the university prophets who are paid to whip up fear and angst:

These are the footsoldiers of Antonio Guterres and his boiling oceans. You can only sing Mass Extinction for so many years before impressionable teens become unhinged, or adrenalin junkies seek you out to fulfill their thrill-seeking desires. If the world is about to end and someone has the urge for arson, what better excuse is there?  These little boys can play Climate Batman and Save The World.

After the unrestrained hyperbole from the highest sources, it’s only a hop, skip and a jump before ideologues decide that arson and sabotage are not only justified—but morally required. When elites declare it’s the end of the world, they can’t feign innocence when some people act as if it’s the end of the world.

Meanwhile the Greenie minions are wound up by the old Class Warfare marxist trope. They think they are taking the fight up to the greedy gas barons, and people in the wealthiest postcodes, but don’t realize these are just decoy targets, designed to keep the greens busy while the Bankers make billions, the politicians get a peace prize and a job with the UN, and China makes its sales figures. The Greens fall for it every time. They are the best friends of The Bankers.

But we don’t need to silence the high priests of gloom, we just need free speech (and to cut off their funding).

In a normal society, deranged prophets of doom get mocked. In a corrupt society, they get a government grant, or they get elected so they can pass laws banning people from mocking them.

h/t to a good person, I’ll figure it out… (sorry)

 

 

9.8 out of 10 based on 112 ratings

Monday

8.5 out of 10 based on 29 ratings

Sunday

8.1 out of 10 based on 24 ratings

Capitalism and carbon emissions saves lives

By Jo Nova

Congratulations World! 

Roger Pielke Jnr celebrates another great year where humanity had a near record low in deaths due to climate disasters.

He reminds us of a paper from a few years ago showing that the richer we all are, the less likely we are to die from floods, cold, drought and wind.

When we adjust against GDP per capita we find that GDP itself is the big protector of humanity.

The best thing we can do to help Africans defeat climate hazards is not to send them solar panels, but to help them get filthy rich.

And anyone who cares about vulnerable people will be protesting at the reckless destruction of what was a cheap, efficient electricity grid. We will surely kill more people by reducing our GDP with unreliable generators, than we will ever save with solar panels.

Once income is accounted for, the apparent relationship between climate hazards and mortality largely disappears. In other words, economic development—not renewable energy—dominates human survival outcomes.

 

Follow the Science, girls and boys,

If man-made emissions do anything at all, the more we emit the lower the death rates are. We can see that as man made emissions ramped up from 1980 to 2010, deaths due to extreme weather fell.

 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378019300378

 

I could add in a snarky line about using “Green reasoning”, but the truth is that countries that emit more CO2 tend to increase their GDP.

All those fossil fueled rockets, ambulances,  satellites, mobile phones and private cars are saving people.

  • Richer societies have far lower vulnerability to floods, droughts, heat, cold, and storms

  • The decline in deaths has occurred despite population growth and urbanisation

The data suggest that GDP growth has done more to protect humanity from climate-related deaths than any climate policy ever implemented.

REFERENCE:

Giuseppe Formetta and Luc Feyen (2019)Empirical evidence of declining global vulnerability to climate-related hazards, Global Environmental Change, 57, 101920.

9.9 out of 10 based on 95 ratings

Saturday

9.4 out of 10 based on 16 ratings

Europes biggest insect factory goes bankrupt — these bugs are not even Dog Food

By Jo Nova

In the renewable frenzy of the early 2020s  Ÿnsect raised €600 million to “Reinvent the food chain” and pioneer alternative foods that “respect the planet’s boundaries”. Some $200 million of their funding came from hapless taxpayers somewhere. But in record time, seemingly before it began, it has already gone. Bankrupted. And not because people don’t want to eat mealworms (which they don’t) but because there wasn’t much market in making animal feed either. It turns out that farm owners didn’t want to spend 2 to 10 times as much on “sustainable” cattle fodder. So the company shifted focus to high end pet food, where besotted owners have money to spare, but that crashed too.

h/t Tom Nelson

How reality crushed Ÿnsect, the French startup that had raised over $600M for insect farming

By Anna Heim, TechCrunch

The company’s demise is hardly a surprise, as Ÿnsect had been embattled for months. Still, there is plenty to unpack about how a startup can go bankrupt despite raising over $600 million, including from Downey Jr.’s FootPrint Coalition, taxpayers, and many others.

Ultimately, Ÿnsect failed to fulfill its ambition to “revolutionize the food chain” with insect-based protein. But don’t be too quick to attribute its failure to the “ick” factor that many Westerners feel about bugs. Human food was never its core focus.

It’s only money…

And revenue was the problem. According to publicly available data, Ÿnsect’s revenue from its main entity peaked at €17.8 million in 2021 (approximately $21 million) — a figure reportedly inflated by internal transfers between subsidiaries. By 2023, the company had racked up a net loss of €79.7 million ($94 million).

The vainglorious heady days of climate communism meant some bureaucrats thought it made sense to spend $200 million dollars feeding bugs to cows to try to change rainfall in 2100 AD.

Defenders of the faith will say this bug factory expanded far too fast, and it’s not the bugs that failed but the management. But the factory was plagued with problems from the start — including diseases, parasites, and fat worms that clog the machines.

In the biggest irony, insects need high temperatures to grow fast and the energy costs were killing them:

How the world leader in insects ended up in bankruptcy:

Behind this exciting showcase, the technical difficulties quickly become apparent. By attempting to raise mealworms (Tenebrio molitor), the company ventures into relatively unknown territory. It faces numerous complications: diseases, parasites, overly fatty worms clogging the machines, etc. Furthermore, insects require a high temperature to grow quickly (over 25°C), which leads to high energy costs, exacerbated by rising prices resulting from the war in Ukraine.

This is a dragon that eats its own tail.

The Green revolution kills the green revolution because energy is too expensive. Not to mention that fantasies of weather control attract terrible managers.

 

 

 

 

9.9 out of 10 based on 100 ratings

Friday

9 out of 10 based on 24 ratings

Happy New Year 2026!

Wishing everyone all the best for the new year.

Sadly due to new anti free speech laws some topics are going to be difficult to discuss here. I will get legal advice but on the meantime please assume that some topics are radioactive. Sorry.

Moderation may be heavy and slow. Past unthreadeds have been temporarily made private until more information makes the policy clear.

9.8 out of 10 based on 83 ratings

The world warmed faster 100 years ago when man made CO2 was one-eighth as high…

By Jo Nova

No wonder the climate experts are not that interested in the historic data.

You might think that if the world was going to hell in a handbasket, that climate scientists would want to get all the data they could and pore all over it carefully.

Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone has found a study of 60 million temperature readings. It shows the world was warming faster in the first half of the 20th century even though there was 8 times less man-made CO2 around.

Man-made CO2 (black) can apparently cause big warming, big cooling, or anything it wants (orange).

You can’t look at the graph above and say:  CO2 is Earth’s control knob.

And the table lays out the trends, and the cumulative CO2 emissions. It’s the simplest thing, and all the old data was there all along. Anyone could have done most of this in 1995, and saved us from wasting a few trillion dollars.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5395197

Critics will counter that these temperatures are only on land, and mostly in Europe and the United States.

However, it’s a global emergency you know and this is the best data we have. Shouldn’t the experts, at least, be interested?

Shouldn’t they be honest enough to have published this, and discussed it with those who pay their salaries? I mean, it doesn’t exactly fit with the 97% certainty thing, does it?

Bibek Bhatta tried versions of the 100 best stations, and also the full 1,622 station mix. They tried analyzing it by tight clusters, but it didn’t matter how he cross checked it — the answer came out the same. CO2 isn’t the controller. 

REFERENCES

Bhatta, Bibek, Revisiting CO2 Emissions and Global Warming: Implications for Society (August 17, 2025). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5395197 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5395197 

 

9.7 out of 10 based on 82 ratings

Mouse study suggests that starch-based microplastics may raise blood sugar, damage organs

Image by Nikolett Emmert from Pixabay

By Jo Nova

Remember how biodegradable plastic was going to make the world a healthier place? It would save us all from the horrible plastic landfill that lasts 1000 years, and it would protect the dolphins. Well, let’s just hope the dolphins don’t eat the bags.

Despite the rush to put biodegradable bags in every shopping centre, no one had bothered to study whether it had an effect on our health, and we still don’t know, but we can say that the mice on that compost heap with these biodegradable bags will be more likely to have diabetes, smaller ovaries, and liver damage. Degradable plastic affected their gut flora.  The authors say: “Prolonged exposure to environmentally relevant doses of Starch-based microplastics can have widespread health effects.”

How many native mice will die that could have been saved, and do the Greens care?

This study came out in April:

Mouse study suggests that starch-based microplastics may harm health

Victoria Atkinson, c&en

While many studies have examined the health implications of ingesting petroleum-derived microplastics, none have looked at the long-term health effects on a living organism ingesting starch-based microplastics. To help elucidate the safety of these ecoplastics, Deng and his team used a mouse model to simulate long-term exposure to varying doses of starch-based microplastics. (J. Agric. Food Chem. 2025, DOI: 10.1021/acs.jafc.4c10855) They incorporated various concentrations of starch-based microplastics into the animals’ food, scaled to reflect typical human exposure; after 3 months, they euthanized the mice to probe the impacts of no, low, and high consumption of microplastics

Notably, the exposed mice consistently had elevated blood glucose levels and disrupted insulin regulation—both heavily implicated in conditions such as diabetes.

Organ-sample analysis revealed system-wide physiological changes, including reduced ovary size, liver damage
and inflammation, and impaired colon function. “Starch-based microplastics [SMPs] exhibit widespread harm, potentially affecting multiple tissues and functions,” Deng says. “Given that humans also face real-life scenarios of chronic exposure to starch based microplastics, these findings serve as an important warning regarding their potential health impacts.”

In lab tests normal plastic bags didn’t harm the cells.

Biodegradable bags are TOXIC – and may be linked to liver and ovary damage, scientists warn

By Xantha Leatham, Daily Mail, 

‘Biodegradable starch-based plastics may not be as safe and health-promoting as originally assumed,’ said Professor Yongfeng Deng, one of the study’s authors.

In a previous study the researchers compared the compostable bags to normal plastic bags after they had been left out in the sun and composted. But when they put them next to fish cells, “A ‘high level of toxicity’ was produced by the biodegradable bags, harming the fish cells,”

Cinta Porte, lead author of the study, published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials, said: ‘We were surprised that cells exposed to conventional plastic bags showed no trace of toxicity.

I don’t put these bags into my own compost. The Council can have them.

REFERENCE

Liu et al (2025) Long-Term Exposure to Environmentally Realistic Doses of Starch-Based Microplastics Suggests Widespread Health Effects. J Agric Food Chem,  2025 Apr 23;73(16):9867-9878.  doi: 10.1021/acs.jafc.4c10855. Epub 2025 Apr 9.

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