Mark Mills at the Manhattan Institute has been sending warning signals for years that the push for intermittent energy in the west could have drastic geopolitical consequences. Here he explains how the conflict in the Ukraine has brought the drastic consequences upon us ahead of schedule.
Naivete about energy realities robbed the U.S. and its allies of important “soft power” options and helped finance Russia’s aggression. In the near term, our choices are limited, but continuing down the same energy path is a formula for yet more problems in the future.
The EU and the US over the past two decades spent more than $5 trillion and made countless mandates to replace oil, natural gas and coal. This brought the hydrocarbon share of all energy use down by two percentage points to 84 percent while burning wood still supplies more energy than all the world’s solar panels and oil still fuels nearly 97 percent of all the world’s transportation.
While the west spent a great deal of money to phase out coal and gas, without going nuclear, Russia and China pressed on to develop their coal and gas resources and nuclear power as well.
Europe gets 25 percent and 40 percent, respectively, of all its oil and gas from Russia. For Germany, the shares are 35 percent and 70 percent, as well as 50 percent of its coal needs.
The pivot from Russia will be painful and retrieving the situation will take a long time – it is like turning around the Titanic. Read the whole story, it is not long, it is very important and it is too densely packed to summarize.
STOP PRESS. Hungary bans grain exports, the first sign of an impending global food crisis.
South Australia is leading the way in the green transition. Whenever the wind is low overnight SA has to import coal power from Victoria. So you know what is going to happen when more coal capacity closes and there is no spare power in Victoria and NSW when the wind is low across SE Australia. Rafe blogs at NewCatallaxy Blog.
Is connecting intermittent energy to the grid ahead of storage capacity the greatest public policy blunder since federation?
The federal court today unanimously decided Federal Environment Minister Sussan Ley does not have a duty of care to protect young people from the harms of climate change.
The ruling overturns a previous landmark win by eight high school students, who sought to stop Ley approving a coal mine expansion in New South Wales.
The bad news is that these same experts can’t see how profoundly silly their reasoning is:
So why was Ley successful? The federal court’s 282-page judgment offers myriad reasons for why no duty should be imposed on the minister. But what emerges most clearly is the court’s view that it’s not their place to set policies on climate change. Instead, they say, it’s the job of our elected representatives in the federal government.
Well, do we live in a democracy or don’t we?
If only Jacqueline Peel and Rebekkah Markey-Towler could persuade us that coal is a killer, they wouldn’t need to go to court to force their opinions on everyone else.
One of these two experts gets Australian government research funding for “climate change litigation” projects. Evidently she’s funded by taxpayers to steal rights away from them.
The whole case was silly beyond words. If the Environment Minister has a Duty of Care to stop a coal mine for fear of losses to these teens in future years, then surely the Treasurer also has a Duty of Care not to wreck the economy and put those same teens in debt on a frivolous pagan quest to stop floods, storms and droughts? Likewise, the Minister for Energy has a Duty of Care to make sure these students don’t grow up to live in a third world banana republic that can’t power factories to provide jobs or keep their quality of life as high as it was for their parents. Where does it end? With a dictator running a command economy, and gulags for the dissidents.
From the original ruling we see the maths never added up:
In the ruling, Justice Mordy Bromberg noted that the expansion of the Whitehaven Coal-owned mine would lead to an additional 33 million metric tons (36 million U.S. tons) of coal being extracted over 25 years and 100 million metric tons (110 million U.S. tons) of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere.
The world uses 8.5 billion tons of coal a year, and the court case was about 1.3 million tons of coal per year or 1 part in 6,500 of annual coal consumption. Even if coal was bad, and even if warming was bad, and even if CO2 caused warming, this case still would not make sense.
Unusual rain in Australia started within days of the Hunga Tonga dust cloud travelling across the continent
On January 15th, Hunga Tonga launched a magma-powered thunderstorm that sent atmospheric shockwaves around the world. Ash, salt and particulates were carried through rising columns, right through the stratosphere, into the mesosphere and all the way up to 58 kilometers above Earth. For hours 400,000-odd lighting bolts zapped the airborne chemical soup.
The dust from Hunga-Tonga travelled West and reached Australia on Jan 18 – 20th. On Jan 21-22 flooding rain washed out the main railway line and roads in central Australia. Over the next few weeks, rains soaked the ground across parts of Queensland and New South Wales. By February 15th, the remnant volcanic dust that had circled the Earth and was back again creating rich red sunsets over Australia. A week or so after that, the rain bombs fell on South East Queensland, and travelled south through New South Wales to Sydney.
The big unknown is that the Hunga-Tonga volcano launched water vapor, salt and dust incredibly high — almost too high. The aerosols are far above the troposphere where rainfall originates and some of that floating ash was still too high even as it returned on the second lap of the Earth at 25km above sea level. On the other hand, some particles will fall out faster than others, others will be highly charged and possibly novel entities created in the monster lightning storm above the volcano, and some ash and particles will have been released at lower heights.
This post was inspired by Jennifer Marohasy who pointed out the weak La Nina conditions don’t really explain the floods in Australia this year. She wondered if the recent Australian rain was fueled by aerosols from Hunga Tonga and describes how rainfall has been linked to past eruptions in scientific papers: after “El Chichon spewed 20 million tonnes of aerosols into the stratosphere in 1982, Hong Kong recorded very high rainfalls as the dust arrived across the Pacific”.
The volcanic dust passes over Australia on Jan 18 -20
Hunga Tonga lies 20 degrees south of the equator at roughly the same latitude as Townsville in Queensland. So the densest band of aerosols circling the Earth westwards from the eruption would track right over Queensland.
SO2 emissions of #HungaTongaHungaHaapai. The huge plume of sulphur dioxide was detected today, Jan. 18 by the #Copernicus #Sentinel5p #Tropomi sensor over Northern #Australia.
The volcanic dust cloud travelled west, arriving over Australia on January 18th and reaching the Indian Ocean on the far side by January 20th. It was dissipating as it moved, but could have left a trail of cloud seeding particles in the stratosphere over Australia. These in turn will be falling and blowing with the wind, spreading out through the Southern Hemisphere.
On Jan 21 and 22, flooding in the arid zones of South Australia was so severe, it washed out the one trans Australian railway line and the Stuart Highway as well. And this was in midsummer in an area that rarely gets any rain. Rainfalls in some areas of South Australia were 400% higher than normal.
Perhaps some parts of these falls were too far south, and perhaps the dust just wasn’t low enough in the atmosphere at this point. But on the 16th of January there were slow surface and lower tropospheric winds blowing past parts of the Tonga cloud to the west.
The downpour in central South Australia was so unusual it washed out the sole Trans-Australia “Indian Pacific” railway line running across the nation from East to West.
The line normally delivers 80% of Western Australia’s retail supplies on freight trains that are nearly 2km long. The line took weeks to be restored and the shelves here in Perth are still running empty in somewhat random patterns.
Flooding has damaged parts of the freight line across the Nullabor.
Across Australia the rain for the whole month of January was generally heavier than usual
There is usually very little rain in central Australia in the hottest month of the year. When there are big falls in the deserts it is usually due to the remnants of a cyclone. That doesn’t seem to be the case this time.
And most of the rain recorded on this map occurred after the dust passed over. The first two weeks of January were much drier.
Hunga Tonga was the tallest, wettest, most violent storm in our lifetime
The eruption that reached an astonishing 58 kilometers into the sky.
The underwater explosion made Hungo Tonga very different. Unlike Pinatubo or El Chichon, it didn’t carry a large weight of sulphur dioxide, but did carry a lot of water. The blast punched so far up into the atmosphere, because it was powered by a massive expansion of water vapor as the 20 degree water hit 1000 degree magma. The steam powered column drove a mix of salt, ash and particulates right through the stratosphere and into the mesosphere. It was possibly the biggest thunderstorm on Earth. The rising column generated a phenomenal 400,000 lighting strikes over a seven hour period. That towering electrical morass must have generated a wild-card mix of aggressively charged particles, and at altitudes we never normally see them. Who knows how long those zapped chemicals would take to drift back down to Earth and what mischief they might do on the way?
Lidar showed the sulphates and aerosols were back over Australia from Feb 15th:
The aerosols are still very high, well up in the stratosphere:
“[It’s] showing us what is probably mostly sulphate aerosols (maybe a bit of volcanic ash) around 25 km in height in the stratosphere, sitting well above the troposphere where the clouds are,” according to Dr Tupper [of Natural Hazards Consulting]
On February 15th volcanic aerosols could be seen in the stratosphere over eastern Australia using LIDAR imagery.(Supplied: NASA)
Since the initial explosion, the plume has been circling around the atmosphere, too high to affect our day-to-day weather, but adding a red glow to sunrises and sunsets. The plume has now roughly made its first full loop of the globe and has been travelling over Australia again this week.
“So that’s why we’ve seen these really glowing skies at sunrise and sunset,” Mr [Graham] Creed said.
“The interesting thing is that at sunset you can actually see the meteorological sunset, which is when the clouds change colour but as the sun goes over and it starts to go dark that’s when the volcanic ash was illuminated and was bending and refracting the light.”
Hunga-Tonga isn’t expected to cool the climate much:
The latest estimates of the effect of Hunga Tonga are that the cooling impact will be smaller, because the amount of sulfur dioxide was only 2% of what the Pinatubo eruption released. However the underwater explosion reached far up into the stratosphere, nearly 40km altitude, so those particulates may be suspended for a long time.
Just in case people were thinking a few nuclear bombs don’t matter:
“…even a relatively “minor” exchange of nuclear weapons would wreck the planet’s climate in enormous and long-lasting ways.”
Despite sounding crazily disconnected from reality, Robinson Meyer is slightly less crazy than the cult people he’s trying to reach. Many “artists” and “climate concerned progressives” have leapt on the latest hot-fashion-in-activism (who could have seen that coming?) and they’re calling for a No Fly Zone over Ukraine. It’s like they believe that putting up a sign saying “Warplane Free” will stop the warplanes.
Meyer has figured out that a No Fly Zone might lead to World War III, and he’s trying warn the raptured throngs, that things might not work out so well. Naturally, he’s speaking in lingua-leftie. But how, exactly do you scare someone in a climate cult? Not with nuclear war, but with something catastro-double-awful-bad for the climate.
On the richter scale of climate porn, what’s the worst thing Meyer can imagine:
“And it would be worse for the climate than any energy policy that Donald Trump ever proposed.”
He’s gently telling them their calls for a No Fly Zone might be more damaging for the climate than the demon-man himself. I don’t think they’ll get the message though. The whole package just won’t parse. He goes on to tell them nuclear war “carbon” doesn’t warm the world, it cools it, and cooling is awful.
After 26 UN COP meetings aimed at cooling the world by lowering carbon, this story will just bounce right off:
A 2007 study estimated that if 100 small nuclear weapons were detonated, a number equal to only 0.03 percent of the planet’s total arsenal, the number of “direct fatalities due to fire and smoke would be comparable to those worldwide in World War II.” Towering clouds would carry more than five megatons of soot and ash from these fires high into the atmosphere.
All this carbon would transform the climate, shielding it from the sun’s heat. Within months, the planet’s average temperature would fall by more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit; some amount of this cooling would persist for more than a decade. But far from reversing climate change, this cooling would be destabilizing. It would reduce global precipitation by about 10 percent, inducing global drought conditions. In parts of North America and Europe, the growing season would shorten by 10 to 20 days.
Ponder how far these people are from reality, even at the sensible end of the spectrum. He goes on to say that ocean acidification would get worse, the ozone layer would be destroyed, the world will be fried by extra UV radiation, and people will get skin cancer.
Suddenly central bankers want to reach right into your wallet, follow you around, nudge your every decision, or just stop you spending your dollars less wisely than the average bureaucrat thinks you should. These are the same people who *know* you should be saving the Earth by eating crickets.
This is a great essay, part fiction, part nightmare, but already knocking on our doors. A Central Bank Digital Currency (or CBDC) is your digital ID card and social credit score wrapped into one and actioned with instant bank-freezing potential, honk, honk.
You wave your phone at the pump. Nothing happens. You try again. Your phone buzzes, and you look at it. There’s a message from the Fed: “You have already spent more than the $400 maximum weekly limit on fossil fuels specified in the FedWallet User Agreement. Your remaining account balance cannot be used to purchase non-renewable energy resources. Please make an alternative purchase. Have you considered a clean, affordable New Energy Vehicle? Thank you for doing your part to build a more just and sustainable world!”
You have in fact considered purchasing a clean, affordable New Energy Vehicle. But they still aren’t very affordable for you, what with the supply chain shortages. Despite the instant credit the Fed would add to your balance when buying an electric car – plus the permanent ten percent general subsidy you automatically receive on every purchase as a BIPOC individual thanks to the Fed’s Reparations Alternatives for Comprehensive Equity (RACE) program – the down payment on a new car would still be more than you can afford, even with your new stimmie coins.
Well, you’re not going to be able to make it to work at the warehouse on what you have in the tank. How could you be so foolish? You’re going to have no choice but to park here and blow a bunch of money on hailing one of those sleek, incredibly expensive self-driving electric cabs…
Dystopia is at the garden gate:
But no, you’re actually reading Politico, and see with horror that President Biden has just released a “sweeping” executive order directing the government to immediately begin moving to comprehensively regulate cryptocurrencies while developing a digital dollar issued by the Federal Reserve.
A central bank crypto would bring massive new powers to central bankers, what’s not to like (if you are a central banker)?
Over the last several years, one central bank after another has released reports on what that might look like. As a summary report by the BIS recently put it, “Central banks’ interest in CBDC has increased as a potential means of delivering their public policy objectives,” while allowing them “to evolve in step with the wider digitalisation of people’s day-to-day lives.” Plus, “Profound, ongoing changes across finance, technology and society, as well as the ongoing Covid-19 crisis, provide additional impetus” for doing so now while there seems to be the opportunity for some kind of reset, or something.
And so eight of the largest central banks (including the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, and the Bank of Canada, among others) have decided to form a tentative consortium, with guidance from BIS, in order to “enable interoperability and cross-border transactions between [their] domestic CBDCs” as they move forward with development.
I didn’t know central banks had “public policy objectives”, I mean apart from supposedly keeping currencies stable and inflation under control. Who elected them?
World’s Reserve Currency up for grabs?
But it’s suddenly urgent now because the US is the worlds reserve currency, but that could disappear in five minutes as Russia gets canceled and forced into bed with China, and China is already road-testing a Digital Yuan. Thanks to Justin Trudeau freezing the $10-Trucker-donors to hell — everyone now knows just how insecure all western currencies are. And Joe Biden’s cancellation of Russian oligarchs suddenly means the whole world is reconsidering what “trust” means.
Where the USD was trustworthy, everyone now knows the rule of law means nothing if you are a political enemy.
In banking, trust means everything. That bit of useless paper called a dollar is just an IOU. We all trust that it will be worth something next week.
Trust is the difference between business-as-usual or a bank run and the overnight collapse of the currency.
Would you like money with an expiry date?
We The People have continually thwarted central bankers by saving money when they were supposed to spend. But a new digital currency means the government can decide if you should save:
When word first arrived that the People’s Bank of China “has tested expiration dates to encourage users to spend it quickly, for times when the economy needs a jump start,” Western monetary policymakers – who struggled for years to use negative interest rates to stop people from saving – probably spat coffee-flavored milk beverage all over their monitors. But that is still pretty midwit-level creative thinking.
There are so many micro-control possibilities – -central bankers could change the price of everything based on your identity. Are you the kind of person supporting LGBT small businesses? Give yourself a bonus. “Thanks for supporting diversity”.
It’s that bad…
The implementation of a CBDC could represent the single greatest expansion of totalitarian power in human history. Never has there been any regime with such omnipotent insight into and control over its people’s every transaction as what CBDCs may soon make possible.
When the unvaccinated die of Covid they get turned into advertising material for Pfizer. But when people died in the weeks after after getting the vaccines, the companies, the institutions and the media did their utmost to hide it.
A group of doctors and researchers wanted the 326,000 pages of FDA data used to approve the Pfizer vaccine, but neither the FDA or Pfizer would give it them. So the doctors put in an FOIA, and again the FDA hid the data, so the doctors sued the FDA for withholding it.
Serving Big-Pharma with all the funds they can get…
But when pressed they said they needed 55 years to redact out all the juicy bits so “people couldn’t cherry pick” or something like that. When pushed, the FDA told the judge they really needed 75 years to provide it. This was the same FDA that supposedly read all those 326,000 pages in detail in just 108 days in order to speedily approve the vaccine “with the utmost of care”.
The first of those secret batches came out last week. So after millions of people have been injected with the Pfizer vax, now we find out that in just the first three months of use (from December 2020 onwards) there were 42,000 reports of adverse effects and 1,223 deaths.
This is justice delayed. People have lost their jobs and some have lost their lives. The data should have been public from the beginning.
But it’s a denominator free zone
As John Campbell points out below, we don’t know how many people were vaccinated in total. Even the number of doses shipped in those three months has been redacted. Were deaths a one-in-one-thousand thing, or a one in a million? Who knows? Pfizer does. So does the FDA, and so possibly do elected representatives. But the punters getting injected don’t.
Pfizer Vaccine data (Document 5.3.6 postmarketing experience.pdf)
Steve Kirsch points out that the code (b) (4) (in the gray box in the image above) is legal speak for “Trade secrets” telling us the profits are at the start, middle and end of everything about this. It’s not about public health.
Who has informed consent?
Table 1 (Click to enlarge)
Why did it take court orders to get information used to force a medicine on millions of people?
John Campbell has built quite a following and is fully vaccinated himself. He’s conscientiously assessed the risks according to the publicly notified data. He’s a very honest player, just the kind of person we’d want training nurses. But when he describes these documents below, he’s not a happy camper. From about 18.2 minutes, he’s quite flummoxed. There is some soul searching going on.
“I would have thought this was a complete scandal. The mainstream media don’t seem to be interested…”
He’s very troubled, framing this as equivalent to something like Watergate and in the context of the hippocratic oath: It appears we’ve done some harm.
It’s just destroyed trust.
This is just the beginning of the RedPill for the West. Oh boy has trust been lost.
In case you were wondering why we have no nuclear power and why the sensible old-time conservation movement turned into a radical green monster, the late John Grover told the story in his book Struggle for Power (1980). This is a summary of the chapter on the birth of the anti-nuclear program under the guise of “respectable” consumer advocacy in the US and also the worldwide network of communist agencies and their fronts.
To summarize the summary:
In 1971 Ralph Nader, bankrolled by the Rockefeller network, began to work with the “Union of Concerned Scientists” to combine the efforts of environmental groups and public interest lawyers against nuclear power (NP). They worked on several fronts: Legal action to delay projects; Lobbying Congress and Government agencies; Propagandising the churches; Advertising directed at the general public.
Exaggerated dangers and innuendos of industry incompetence were widely accepted and the industry had no strategy to respond.
“To cut a long story short, thanks to Ralph Nader’s initiative, there exists a well co-ordinated coalition of interest groups in the USA with all the attributes of a major corporation: well planned, influential, with strong political and financial support, well-tested strategies, professional communication expertise and tremendous legal punch. About 600 full-time “environmental lawyers” operated on a budget of at least 45 million dollars in 1977 and about one-third of this was spent purely on energy-stopping.”
The major agencies involved in this effort were Consolidated Intervenors, doing legal activities to impede developments; the Union of Concerned Scientists, mostly funded by Dr Henry Kendall of MIT; Business and Professional People for the Public Interest in Washington to front Government committees and inquiries; Friends of the Earth co-ordinating environmental groups and disseminating information by advertising, books and pamphlets; Environmental Action, National Intervenor and The Public Media Centre dealing with publications and presentations.
Russia says the US has bioweapon research labs in Ukraine, an outrageous claim that was instantly fact-checked to oblivion until Senator Marco Rubio stopped the show by asking a US official under oath: Does Ukraine have chemical and biological weapons?
Victoria Nuland, US Under Secretary of State, could have said “No” but instead she said:
Ukraine has Biological research facilities… which in fact we are quite concerned about — that Russian troops, Russian forces may be seeking to gain control of. So we are working with Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into Russian hands should they approach…
So not only is there some kind of research going on, but it’s so safe and fine that the US is worried the Russians might get it. And despite the Russians queuing for days in tanks at the border, no one thought to secure or destroy it?
Then the US official who hid secret labs and worries about what the Russians will do tells everyone that
“It’s classic Russian technique to blame on the other guy what they are planning to do themselves…”
I’m not sure whether to hope the US secures the bio-research.
The World Economic Forum, was founded in 1971 by German engineer and economist Klaus Schwab where he hit upon the winning idea of organizing a ski holiday for the worlds richest people, described as a management training session or something tax deductible. Like most of these conferences, once the richest of the rich were there, everyone else had to be as long as the riff-raff were kept out. The importance of it was almost certainly not the official speeches but the deals done over drinks-with-new-friends at the bar, or on the piste. It was a chance to meet with Moguls on the moguls.
The foundation is mostly funded by its 1,000 member companies, possibly in lieu of the taxes they don’t pay to their home countries. The 1,000 corporate members are all theoretically “$5 billion dollar entities”, except the ones that are $5 Trillion dollar entities, so they are kind of like the UN of the corporate world, with five times as many members and without the hanger-on-erers. (Fifty of the UN’s members would be too small to qualify). At best, the WEF is the ultimate corporate conference club, and at worst, a kind of quasi corporate world government. The truth is somewhere in between, but where?
The WEF elites fly in to Davos in late January every year in private jets while they figure out how to save the world from fossil fuels. In their spare time they probably swap names of pliable politicians, or even meet them. They can also find out the names of great accountants, and swap ideas on how to deal with unacceptable citizens.
I wonder if Klaus hired Professor Yuval Noah Harari to speak at Davos 2020, so everyone that quoted him could be called a conspiracy theorist nutcase? It could work.
It’s hard to say these lines without sounding like a Technocratic-psycho:
“This whole idea of humans have this soul or spirit and nobody knows what’s happening inside them, and they have free will, that’s over.”
Data might allow human elites to do something even more radical than just build digital dictatorships, by hacking organisms elites may gain the power to reengineer the future of life itself.
People could look back in a hundred years and identify the coronavirus epidemic as the moment when a new regime of surveillance took over…
If we succeed in hacking life, this will be the greatest revolution in biology, since the very beginning of life.
Soon, at least some corporations and governments will be able to systematically hack all the people.“My brain, my body, my life, does it belong to me or to some corporation or to the government….
This is the intelligent design of the IBM Cloud the Microsoft cloud.
— Professor Yuval Noah Harari
He’s like the decoy Fake Time Magazine cover used to hide the real Time Magazine cover.
The gloss is coming off
The WEF is tax-exempt, which is a pretty rich wicket, and the Swiss government taxpayers pay for security at Davos, which is worth about 32 million Swiss francs a year. On top of that the taxpayers pay another few million for “extra security”. But the free run is feeling some friction. Last year a few Swiss politicians and civil society groups criticized the security bill, and the Swiss government announced they’d cut it back by a million or so each year. Go, democracy, Go.
It’s a sign that the people are starting to notice the WEF and there may come a day when politicians don’t want to mention their WEF membership. Who wants to look like a patsy?
My favourite description of the WEF is that they are globalization’s “Mafiocracy” of bankers, industrialists, oligarchs, technocrats and politicians.
“They promote common ideas, and serve common interests: their own.”
It would be very useful in comments if commenters can talk about what the limits are. When do the WEF get thwarted? The WEF is obviously a hot and influential club, like a radioactive octopus, but Klaus Schwab presumably brags like any shameless compulsive promoter would. So some of the politicians in his fold may be in a cult, but others just spent a weekend skiiing.
__________
*There’s something good about seeing little corporates fight back against the biggest of the big ones.
h/t David E, Mark, Scott of the Pacific, Bill in AZ, Old Ozzie, Jill J, OriginalSteve, Brenda, Mantaray, Vlad the Impaler, Bob Dinn, Konrad, David Maddison, Marksman, Truthseeker, another Ian, Klem, Jelly34, Alistair Crooks, Len, Beth the Serf, John Connor II, Tides of Mudgee, Neville, Beowulf, Rod Stuart and Chris D
Warwick McKibbin reckons Vladimir Putin might be the best thing that’s ever happened to the energy transition.
Speaking at The Australian Financial Review Business Summit on Tuesday, the economist, academic and former Reserve Bank board member argued that surging commodity prices caused by the war in Ukraine could force the urgent shift to clean energy to accelerate.
Really?
In the parallel universe Mark Mills at the Manhattan Institute has been sending warning signals for years that the push for intermittent energy in the west could have drastic geopolitical consequences. Here he explains how the conflict in the Ukraine has brought the drastic consequences upon us ahead of schedule.
Naivete about energy realities robbed the U.S. and its allies of important “soft power” options and helped finance Russia’s aggression. In the near term, our choices are limited, but continuing down the same energy path is a formula for yet more problems in the future.
He notes that the EU and the US over the past two decades spent more than $5 trillion and made countless mandates to replace oil, natural gas and coal.
This brought the hydrocarbon share of all energy use down by two percentage points to 84 percent while burning wood still supplies more energy than all the world’s solar panels and oil still fuels nearly 97 percent of all the world’s transportation.
While the west spent a great deal of money to phase out coal and gas, without going nuclear, Russia and China pressed on to develop their coal and gas resources and nuclear power as well.
Europe gets 25 percent and 40 percent, respectively, of all its oil and gas from Russia. For Germany, the shares are 35 percent and 70 percent, as well as 50 percent of its coal needs.
The pivot from Russia will be painful and retrieving the situation will take a long time – it is like turning around the Titanic.
Read the whole story, it is very important and it is too densely packed to summarize.
STOP PRESS. Hungary bans grain exports, the first sign of an impending global food crisis.
You can take the conspiracy theory out of the story and it is still terrifying.
AND A BIT MORE TO GO ON WITH, A REMINDER ABOUT THE SITUATION CAUSED BY OUR ENERGY POLICY
South Australia is leading the way in the green transition and whenever the wind is low overnight SA depends on local gas plus imported coal power from Victoria.
ANCHORAGE, AK—The deliberate and premeditated invasion of Ukraine by brutal dictator Vladimir Putin has forced the US to reassess the importance of energy independence. With this new resolve, the Biden Administration has taken its first step toward increasing oil production for Americans by selling Alaska back to Russia so we can start drilling for oil there again.
Jen Psaki praised Biden’s brilliance in finding a solution that would prevent an energy crisis while also preventing new drilling on American land. She pointed out succinctly to journalists, “You see, it’s not American land anymore; it’s Russian land.”
The truth
Joe Biden needs to stop buying oil and gas from the Russian dictator, but rather than getting it from the US or Canada he’s talking to a dictator in Venezuela.
President Biden is scrambling to contain soaring oil prices, which closed at more than $123 a barrel on Monday. It speaks volumes about this Administration that it’s seeking help from Vladimir Putin’s client in Venezuela and our estranged Saudi allies rather than U.S. shale producers or our Canadian friends.
The Saudis and UAE are the only OPEC members that appear to have spare capacity, but they’ve rebuffed Mr. Biden’s pleas to increase supply. One reason is they don’t want to alienate Mr. Putin, who has become a power broker in the Middle East. Mr. Biden should never have alienated the Saudis, but we’d be much better off if he simply encouraged U.S. energy production.
The problem isn’t that “Big Oil” wants to keep production low. It’s that Joe Biden, Hassan, and the rest of Senate Democrats have made it clear for years that they want to force “Big Oil” out of business entirely. They’d rather put money in the hands of Iranian terrorists and Putin’s imperial army than put it on the household tables of American oil workers. Even the sight of Russians targeting civilians in Ukraine hasn’t changed their calculus on their opposition to American production of fossil fuels as a necessity for strategic leverage in a very dangerous world.
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board slams Biden and Democrats for seeking oil from malevolent dictators in Tehran and Caracas rather than in the good ol’ USA. It makes no sense from a security perspective, nor from an economic perspective:
Easing Venezuelan sanctions would be a strategic blunder that provides a financial lifeline to Mr. Maduro while doing little to ease the oil price spike. Venezuelan oil companies say they can increase production by several hundred thousand barrels a day in eight months. The war in Ukraine may be over by then. …
Shale producers can increase production twice as fast as Venezuelan oil companies, and the profits would go to U.S. workers and shareholders rather than another dictatorship.
The anti gas and oil thing was never about the weather, and not about CO2 either. It’s not about the workers, the voters, or the environment either. Just power and money.
There is pandemonium on the markets and suddenly many nations want to be energy sufficient. It’s perhaps not The Great Reset than the collective-types were expecting?
The gas flows from Russia to the EU are sporadically tightening, and the Yamal-Europe line has been cut off. Gas in Europe is now trading at €340/MWh which is fully 22 times the long term average. Newcastle coal normally trades around $60 per ton, but now is over $400 USD.
A few days ago the former head of MI6 in the UK called for an immediate lifting of the frakking ban which was set to see concrete poured down the only two shale gas wells in England by March 15th. Thirty-five Tory MPs and four peers sent a letter to Boris demanding the same thing. Now even Boris Johnson is suggesting the Green targets could be relaxed, not just for Britain, but for all the West. He went so far as to suggest The West could give itself a “climate change pass” while we figure out how to get energy that isn’t Russian gas.
Major swings in everything. From top left: Dutch Gas, TTP, European Gas storage, Gas flows from Russia, Carbon credits, and Coal forward contracts. | Twitter. Click to Enlarge.
Brilliant: A referendum on Net Zero
Nigel Farage launched a campaign Britain Means Business seeking to force a referendum on the Government’s plan to achieve “net zero” carbon emissions in the UK by the middle of the century.
Who could argue with that, apart from all the people that know the voters don’t want Net Zero if they have to pay for it.
Green Blob has it’s own crisis — how to stay relevant
Imagine an army of community groups suddenly roaming the countryside to save Britain from Vladimir by explaining heat-pump grants and waving infra red detectors at their drafty doors?
It all seems a tad artificial. If the planet was at stake they could have done this all along. Why now?
John Taylor, the energy projects manager at Energy Hub, argues that the UK should be convening local groups that can help give advice on grants for insulation and heat pumps, set up community-owned renewable projects, and help with insulation.
“Volunteers can be provided with thermal imaging cameras to go door to door,” he suggested. They can help “identify cold spots and installing simple measures like draft proofing and radiator panels. They can also help set heating controls and lower boiler flow temperatures.”
He also suggests that community groups can “run a village survey to find out who needs items like DIY loft insulation and draft proofing kits. Then order them wholesale to get bulk discounts and deliver them to a community centre or village hall for people to collect.”
Vladimir Putin might be the best thing that ever happened to Western Energy independence.
UPDATE: Latest news is that Russia says it will end the War on four conditions. Ukraine must stay neutral, recognize Crimea is Russian and that Donestsk and Luhansk are independent. In reply, Zelensky has already done an interview saying “No” but Putin needs to start a dialogue. Zelensky suggests that Putin is in a bubble and may not be getting realistic information.
People were dying, hospitals were overflowing, but even by January 2021 we already knew ivermectin could save three quarters of those who died. Randomized trials of 2,282 people showed that only 2% of people on ivermectin died, compared to nearly 10% of the hapless people who missed out, yet he picked the “missed out” path.
Everything pointed in the right direction. The result of the meta-study was highly significant (p=0.0002!), the risks were almost nothing, the outcome was extraordinary, the effect was dependent on the dose, and the blood markers of inflammation were also reduced, as we’d expect. Yet the conclusion of the same paper was that we needed larger trials before the results could even be reviewed. And this single line that contradicted nearly everything in the paper, was quoted everywhere to say the evidence was “inconclusive”.
This was from the same man who said Ivermectin was “the way forward” and that he would give ivermectin to his own brother. Then suddenly he flipped.
….
A forensic analysis of that strange contradictory paper shows there were two or three other voices who influenced the wording. They were not named. When pressed, Dr Andrew Hill admitted that even The charity Unitaid has a say in the conclusions… This is how the brand name ScienceTM works. It’s not the data that matters.
Watch him squirm, as Dr Tess Lawrie grills him:
Dr Andrew Hill: “I’m not going to let this last for a long time”… (he knows it’s wrong).
He knew 15,000 people were dying every day. “It’s just six weeks” said Hill. That works out to nearly half a million people who could have been saved. And it ended up being a lot longer than six weeks. It was an opportunity missed. The paper was used to sack good doctors, slow research, and feed corporations billions of dollars for treatments that didn’t work.
Follow the documentary maker on Telegram: t.me/OracleFilms
The Abstract:
Ivermectin is an antiparasitic drug being investigated for repurposing to SARS-CoV-2. In-vitro, ivermectin showed limited antiviral activity and a COVID-19 animal model demonstrated pathological benefits but no effect on viral RNA. This meta-analysis investigated ivermectin in 18 randomized clinical trials (2282 patients) identified through systematic searches of PUBMED, EMBASE, MedRxiv and trial registries. Ivermectin was associated with reduced inflammatory markers (C-Reactive Protein, d-dimer and ferritin) and faster viral clearance by PCR. Viral clearance was treatment dose- and duration-dependent. In six randomized trials of moderate or severe infection, there was a 75% reduction in mortality (Relative Risk=0.25 [95%CI 0.12-0.52]; p=0.0002); 14/650 (2.1%) deaths on ivermectin; 57/597 (9.5%) deaths in controls) with favorable clinical recovery and reduced hospitalization. Many studies included were not peer reviewed and meta-analyses are prone to confounding issues. Ivermectin should be validated in larger, appropriately controlled randomized trials before the results are sufficient for review by regulatory authorities.
Given that an EV is so impractical for long road trips, and is a “second car”, it makes some sense to have effectively a two seater shopping trolley, covered with plastic. At the moment, there is some loophole in the UK where this is allowed on the road, but doesn’t require a drivers license. Bureaucrats are bound to change that any second.
It looks ideally suited to slow London and Paris traffic and tight parking spots. But in higher speed Australian and US cities, I suspect accident stats would look ominous if the 485 kg plastic buggy met a two ton SUV at normal driving speeds. Not that it can do normal driving speeds. At 40km/hr top speed, its probably too slow to be legal on Australian roads, and too fast to be legal on sidewalks.
The sunroof is cute in cold climates, but here in Aus it might cause second degree burns and heat stroke in January. It has a 6kW motor and 5.5kWh battery pack — can it run an airconditioner AND a motor for half an hour?
I would be amazed if this were legal to drive unlicensed (or even licensed) on most Australian roads, but I haven’t asked. It may “take off” in Europe like the Mini did during an oil price crisis. There are no right hand drive options. Here in the vast suburbs, with a top speed of 45km/hr it will be hated by every other driver. Perfect for school zones though.
From Tonyb in comments:
No, don’t laugh, but is this the future of Electric cars, because whether we like it or not, the EV is the way most countries are heading. The Citroen Ami comes to the UK in a few months after taking Europe by storm(ish)
Its a 2 seater that will do 43 miles (60km) on a charge which apparently covers the majority of journeys. I can see it in urban places but not to drive across country, but it wouldn’t be legal anyway on our motorways. Top speed 28mph (40km/h).
The thing is that for an electric car its very cheap at around £6000. Most electric cars over here are around £25/35,000. So it becomes realistic as a second town car and you keep your grown up fossil fuel one. At £30,000 the EV is likely to be your only vehicle and an EV as a first car is unlikely to be a good idea.
So, would it work in Oz’s urban centres?
Unlikely to be available in Australia
There is a webpage with a “.au” domain, and perhaps a theoretical Australian sort of model, with a canvas roof, and a top speed of “45km/hr”. CarPrice suggests it costs $8k in Australia. I doubt it is sold here at all. Wheels Mag had it on their wish list last November.
The Citroen AU page ought to be reported for false advertising, claiming that it works “without emitting CO2”. In Australia that would only apply to homes with solar that only charge at lunchtime, or in SA on a windy day (but not during a storm). Otherwise, it’s 60% fossil fueled.
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ANCHORAGE, AK—The deliberate and premeditated invasion of Ukraine by brutal dictator Vladimir Putin has forced the US to reassess the importance of energy independence. With this new resolve, the Biden Administration has taken its first step toward increasing oil production for Americans by selling Alaska back to Russia so we can start drilling for oil there again.
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