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By Jo Nova
But who needs radar right?
We found out last year that offshore wind turbines scramble Air Force Radars. RAF pilots already use the turbines in training exercises to help them hide. But ships also use radar and a new study quietly reported a couple of years ago that offshore wind turbines will interfere with shipping radar, may cause collisions, and interfere with search and rescue. The 2022 report was from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in the US.
But it’s OK right, we just need to upgrade all the old radar systems, keep boats out of the area, or wrap the blades of the turbines in the same material we use on stealth aircraft. (That will add to the costs of wind power). No doubt GPS and AI systems can help, but radar adds an independent and well developed layer of safety. Who wants to purely rely on the satellite connection on a stormy night?
And after we’ve built all the wind towers, upgraded the boats and planes, then we can build the second and third generation of turbines and fill holes in the ground with the waste from the first. After we’ve paid for that and for the collisions and lives lost, and the whales killed, and the porpoises deafened, we hope that in one hundred years the rain will be more evenly spread, and the storms more well behaved. It’s like the neolithic raindances never ended.
You never know, maybe some groups will benefit from the radar noise — like drug runners, pirates and people smugglers?
Unfortunately wind turbines are usually built close to shore, where our shipping lanes often are…
Eric Niiler, Wired, March 2022
It turns out that massive wind turbines may interfere with marine radar systems, making it risky for both big ships passing through shipping channels near offshore wind farms and smaller vessels navigating around them. While European and Asian nations have relied on offshore wind power for more than a decade, the big wind farms proposed off the US continental shelf are larger and spaced further apart, meaning that ships are more likely to be operating nearby. These farms are proposed along the East Coast from Massachusetts to North Carolina, as well as for a handful of locations off the California coast, according to data from the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.
A panel of experts convened by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine concluded in a report issued last week that wind turbines can create two different problems. First, their steel towers can reflect electromagnetic waves, interfering with ships’ navigational radar systems in ways that might obscure a nearby boat.
The turbine’s rotating blades can also create a form of interference similar to the Doppler effect, in which sound waves shorten as a moving object approaches the observer. In this case, the spinning blades shorten and distort the radar signals sent from passing ships and can produce what’s called “blade flash” on a ship’s radar screen. These flashes can create false images that look like boats and could confuse a human radar operator on the bridge.
“If you have something that’s moving toward you and you are illuminating it with a radar signal, then the signal that is returned will actually have what’s called a phase shift. Essentially, it appears that you have the object coming closer,” says Jennifer Bernhard, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a member of the National Academies panel that produced the report. Bernhard says that phenomena does not completely block the radar image, “but it does create clutter “…
There are no easy answers:
While the report offered some ways for mitigation, it noted that there is “no simple modification” that could allow marine vessel radar to operate in “the complex environments of a fully populated continental shelf wind farm.”
Deadly open-seas collisions and hampered search and rescue efforts
Disrupted radar systems are not mere hassles of dealing with cluttered displays. They can result in deadly open-seas collisions. The turbines can “cast radar shadows, obfuscating smaller vessels exiting wind facilities in the vicinity of deep draft vessels in Traffic Separation Schemes.”
The US Coast Guard wrote about this last year:
… offshore wind turbines have been shown to affect the capabilities of the Coast Guard’s Search and Rescue Optimal Planning System (SAROPS), which is used for drift modeling and search planning. The oscillating rotor blades and generator of a wind turbine emit high levels of electromagnetic interference that can affect high frequency radar capabilities around an [offshore renewable energy installation] (OREI).
The map suggests multiple wind plants could severely limit radar operation:
Report: Wind Turbine Generator Impacts to Marine Vessel Radar
h/t David Maddison
9.9 out of 10 based on 72 ratings
8.7 out of 10 based on 14 ratings
8.5 out of 10 based on 27 ratings
By Jo Nova
There is no saving the Australian wind industry from a high pressure cell
Right now 19 out of 20 wind turbines are essentially towers of fiberglass waste
Australia has built 11.5 GW of theoretical total wind power capacity on the National Energy Market (NEM) spread across 80 locations on the Eastern Seaboard, and at one point today only 4.1% of it was working. Another gigawatt of generation on the Western side is only generating at 3 – 5% capacity.
The green bar below represents total wind generation today compared to the total power consumed (the black line).
 Total wind generation for the NEM in Australia. The Australian government is telling us “we’re different” to other countries struggling to make wind and solar work. We supposedly have “world-class resources” and “natural advantages in renewables“. But we also have world-class high pressure cells that stop wind generation across the entire nation simultaneously. On days like these, it doesn’t matter much whether we have 1,000 wind turbines or 10,000 if 95% of them are failing.
Compared to Europe, we have a natural disadvantage in wind power — there’s no one to rescue us when we screw up. We’re surrounded by vast oceans which make interconnectors prohibitively long, expensive and a strategic security risk for communist ships that might drag anchors accidentally-on-purpose through a region with long sub-sea cables. (Which is apparently what happened in the Baltic Sea last year).
So where exactly can we build another thousand wind turbines that would work on a day like today? Macquarie Island or Antarctica?
And it’s not just one day. So far for May 2024 wind generation has been unusually low about half the time.
On May 25th at one point the entire generation was just 221MW or 2% of total wind power capacity. So that’s 98% useless.
 Australia has 11GW wind power “capacity” and 5% of that is working.
There’s no extension cord long enough to get to the land at the top of The Renewable Faraway tree where we have dependable wind
Over in Western Australia, total wind production this minute (1pm WA time) is 30MW. So even a new cable 2,000 kilometers long from Perth to South Australia won’t save the national grid. It’s not blowing in WA either. Wind power is only supplying 1.5% of the total electricity on the Western Wholesale Market for Perth and South West Australia. The total installed capacity of wind power in the West is about 1 GW, so it is supplying only 3 to 5% of that.
Macquarie Island is 2,500 kilometers from the closest Australian capital city, and Casey base Antarctica is 3,500 kilometers away. It’s 2,000 kilometers direct to New Zealand, which is bad enough, but parts of the Tasman Sea are 5km deep. They don’t call it the “abyss” for nothing. In any case, wind speeds over New Zealand right now are only 1 – 7 km/hr. (At about 3pm EST Australia).
For the record, the National Energy Grid connects the Eastern five states of Australia and 90% of the population and is running at about 25GW in late autumn. The South West grid is a tenth of that, and all those other dots, apart from Darwin, are “microgrids”. In some parts of Australia all we need is one diesel generator, and we’ll put it on the national map. Kings Canyon, for example is just 1.1MW. The square is vastly larger than the town.
Today the 24 hour fuel mix on the NEM is 72% coal, and 9% gas.
Source: 2009 Map.
9.7 out of 10 based on 113 ratings
8.3 out of 10 based on 27 ratings
8 out of 10 based on 22 ratings
By Jo Nova
Proving that unpaid anonymous review is worth every cent, the 217 year old Wiley science publisher “peer reviewed” 11,300 papers that were fake, and didn’t even notice. It’s not just a scam, it’s an industry. Naked “gobbledygook sandwiches” got past peer review, and the expert reviewers didn’t so much as blink.
Big Government and Big Money has captured science and strangled it. The more money they pour in, the worse it gets. John Wiley and Sons is a US $2 billion dollar machine, but they got used by criminal gangs to launder fake “science” as something real.
Things are so bad, fake scientists pay professional cheating services who use AI to create papers and torture the words so they look “original”. Thus a paper on ‘breast cancer’ becomes a discovery about “bosom peril” and a ‘naïve Bayes’ classifier became a ‘gullible Bayes’. An ant colony was labeled an ‘underground creepy crawly state’.
And what do we make of the flag to clamor ratio? Well, old fashioned scientists might call it ‘signal to noise’. The nonsense never ends.
A ‘random forest’ is not always the same thing as an ‘irregular backwoods’ or an ‘arbitrary timberland’ — especially if you’re writing a paper on machine learning and decision trees.
The most shocking thing is that no human brain even ran a late-night Friday-eye over the words before they passed the hallowed peer review and entered the sacred halls of scientific literature. Even a wine-soaked third year undergrad on work experience would surely have raised an eyebrow when local average energy became “territorial normal vitality”. And when a random value became an ‘irregular esteem’. Let me just generate some irregular esteem for you in Python?
If there was such a thing as scientific stand-up comedy, we could get plenty of material, not by asking ChatGPT to be funny, but by asking it to cheat. Where else could you talk about a mean square mistake?
Wiley — a mega publisher of science articles has admitted that 19 journals are so worthless, thanks to potential fraud, that they have to close them down. And the industry is now developing AI tools to catch the AI fakes (makes you feel all warm inside?)
EMIL LENDOF THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
By Nidhi Subbaraman, May 14, 2024
Fake studies have flooded the publishers of top scientific journals, leading to thousands of retractions and millions of dollars in lost revenue. The biggest hit has come to Wiley, a 217-year-old publisher based in Hoboken, N.J., which Tuesday will announce that it is closing 19 journals, some of which were infected by large-scale research fraud.
In the past two years, Wiley has retracted more than 11,300 papers that appeared compromised, according to a spokesperson, and closed four journals. It isn’t alone: At least two other publishers have retracted hundreds of suspect papers each. Several others have pulled smaller clusters of bad papers.
Although this large-scale fraud represents a small percentage of submissions to journals, it threatens the legitimacy of the nearly $30 billion academic publishing industry and the credibility of science as a whole.
Scientific papers typically include citations that acknowledge work that informed the research, but the suspect papers included lists of irrelevant references. Multiple papers included technical-sounding passages inserted midway through, what Bishop called an “AI gobbledygook sandwich.” Nearly identical contact emails in one cluster of studies were all registered to a university in China where few if any of the authors were based. It appeared that all came from the same source.
One of those tools, the “Problematic Paper Screener,” run by Guillaume Cabanac, a computer-science researcher who studies scholarly publishing at the Université Toulouse III-Paul Sabatier in France, scans the breadth of the published literature, some 130 million papers, looking for a range of red flags including “tortured phrases.”
Cabanac and his colleagues realized that researchers who wanted to avoid plagiarism detectors had swapped out key scientific terms for synonyms from automatic text generators, leading to comically misfit phrases. “Breast cancer” became “bosom peril”; “fluid dynamics” became “gooey stream”; “artificial intelligence” became “counterfeit consciousness.” The tool is publicly available.
Generative AI has just handed them a winning lottery ticket,” Eggleton of IOP Publishing said. “They can do it really cheap, at scale, and the detection methods are not where we need them to be. I can only see that challenge increasing.”
The ABC in Australia even wrote about this, but only because it worries about the loss of public faith in its pet universities:
For the ABC, peer review is like the Bible, and universities are the Church. The public must believe!
So the ABC makes excuses… Oh! Those poor poor universities, forced to become billion dollar businesses selling defacto Australian-citizenships to children of rich Chinese families. If only they got more money, their Vice Chancellors wouldn’t have to make do with million dollar salaries, and punishing professors who pointed out fraud, and they’d have time to do research and prevent the fraud instead.
Wiley’s ‘fake science’ scandal is just the latest chapter in a broader crisis of trust universities must address
By Linton Besser, ABC News
 It [the Wiley debacle] also illustrates what is just another front in a much broader crisis of trust confronting universities and scientific institutions worldwide.
For decades now, teaching standards and academic integrity have been under siege at universities which, bereft of public funding, have turned to the very lucrative business of selling degrees to international students.
Grappling with pupils whose English is inadequate, tertiary institutions have become accustomed to routine cheating and plagiarism scandals. Another fraud perfected by the internet age.
This infection — the commodification of scholarship, the industrialisation of cheating — has now spread to the heart of scientific, higher research.
With careers defined by the lustre of their peer-reviewed titles, researchers the world over are under enormous pressure to publish.
Suffer the researchers who are forced to pay for fake papers just so they can “do their job”? Sack the lot.
The ABC is part of the reason science is corrupt to the core. The ABC Science Unit is paid to hold junk-science’s feet to the fire, instead it provides cover for the pagan witchcraft that passes for modern research.
The rot at Wiley started decades ago, but it got caught when it spent US $298 million on an Egyptian publishing house called Hindawi. We could say we hope no babies were hurt by fake papers but we know bad science already kills people. What we need are not “peer reviewed” papers but actual live face to face debate. Only when the best of both sides have to answer questions, with the data will we get real science:
In March, it revealed to the NYSE a $US9 million ($13.5 million) plunge in research revenue after being forced to “pause” the publication of so-called “special issue” journals by its Hindawi imprint, which it had acquired in 2021 for US$298 million ($450 million).
Its statement noted the Hindawi program, which comprised some 250 journals, had been “suspended temporarily due to the presence in certain special issues of compromised articles”.
Many of these suspect papers purported to be serious medical studies, including examinations of drug resistance in newborns with pneumonia and the value of MRI scans in the diagnosis of early liver disease. The journals involved included Disease Markers, BioMed Research International and Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience.
The problem is only becoming more urgent. The recent explosion of artificial intelligence raises the stakes even further. A researcher at University College London recently found more than 1 per cent of all scientific articles published last year, some 60,000 papers, were likely written by a computer.
In some sectors, it’s worse. Almost one out of every five computer science papers published in the past four years may not have been written by humans.
Even if one in five computer science papers are written by computers, this is just the tip of the iceberg of the rot at the core of “peer reviewed research”. The real rot is not the minor fraudsters making papers that no one reads to pad out their curriculum vitae. It’s the institutional parasites taking billions from taxpayers to create modeled garbage to justify the theft of trillions. But that’s another story.
PS: Who knew, academic journals were a $30 billion dollar industry?
h/t SharperinOz
9.8 out of 10 based on 138 ratings
9.4 out of 10 based on 12 ratings
Saving the world with silent killers
A new study shows electric cars are twice as likely to hit pedestrians compared to petrol and diesel cars. Presumably this is because EVs are so quiet. Though it’s also possible the dash interfaces are hideous, and some menu options are more deadly and distracting than others. Or perhaps EV drivers are more stressed or feeling nauseous? The study didn’t investigate that.
Amazingly the data was from six to ten years ago in the UK, so countless people have died in the interim, and if it is just a noise issue, it could have been fixed, or at least investigated. Where is the precautionary principle when you need it?
And if electric cars are killing more people in cities, we would presume that Fido and Spot would be a part of the carnage too. But who would know what the car-pet-kill tally was? Well, manufacturers might — they own the camera footage, but no one is even asking that question. Animals have rights you know, but they don’t donate to Greenpeace.
The Greens are rushing headlong to roll out the auto-weather-saving-machines across the countryside, and they might be killing wallabies and spotted quolls too but who cares, right? It’s not like anyone has done that study, or the Greens are worried about flattening a few rare endangered animals on their road to redemption.
Apparently, it makes sense if a few extra people and pets die now to save someone else who might suffer in one hundred years, maybe, if the computer models are right, and if EVs reduce emissions, and if emissions matter in the first place. All of which is unlikely. But rush, sprint, hurry to force those EVs onto the road. Even if they kidnap people, or kill children, it’s all for a good cause.
Scitech Daily
Study reveals a higher risk of accidents in urban areas across Great Britain from 2013 to 2017. Researchers call for measures to mitigate this risk as fossil-fuel vehicles are phased out.
A study has found that pedestrians are twice as likely to be hit by electric or hybrid vehicles compared to those powered by petrol or diesel. The research, which was published on May 21, 2024, in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, examined casualty rates in Great Britain from 2013 to 2017.
The risk is greater in urban areas, and governments must take steps to mitigate this safety hazard as they proceed to phase out fossil-fueled vehicles to improve air quality and curb climate change, urge the researchers.
Road traffic injuries are the leading cause of death for children and young people, and 1 in 4 road traffic deaths are of pedestrians, they note. Amid the ongoing shift to electric and hybrid cars, concerns have been raised that these vehicles may pose more of a safety hazard to pedestrians than fossil-fuelled cars because they are quieter, particularly in urban areas where background ambient noise levels are higher.
the researchers calculate that between 2013 and 2017, the average annual casualty rates of pedestrians per 100 million miles of road travel were 5.16 for electric and hybrid vehicles and 2.40 for petrol and diesel vehicles.
Perhaps it’s really the fault of all those young inexperienced drivers?
And younger, less experienced drivers are more likely to be involved in a road traffic collision and are also more likely to own an electric car, possibly accounting for some of the observed heightened risk associated with these vehicles, they suggest.
Sure. These are the same careless teenagers who were “more likely” to splash $100 K on a Tesla Model S in 2016, right? What are these researchers thinking?
The only thing we know for sure is that the rush to force EVs on us has nothing to do with morality or compassion. It’s not about saving lives or protecting fluffy mammals. The Greens don’t care about those lives now, let alone the people of the future.
______________________
More tales from the EV files:
10 out of 10 based on 86 ratings
9.4 out of 10 based on 14 ratings
By Jo Nova
Games with levelized guesses don’t take all the hidden costs into account
Prize of the day for national policy research goes to Nick Cater, who managed to ridicule our billion dollar national science agency, the CSIRO, with a newspaper column.
The CSIRO put out a report proclaiming that nuclear power would be impossible before 2040 and cost “twice as much” as renewables. But Nick Cater just compared electricity in New South Wales to Finland to prove their 129 pages of modeled costs were wrong:
On Saturday…. Electricity generation in NSW was releasing 750g of carbon into the atmosphere per megawatt hour of electricity. In Finland, it was 35g.
If the CSIRO’s GenCost report is to be believed, Finnish electricity prices should have gone through the roof a year ago when its newest reactor was turned on. They did not. The retail price of electricity in Finland, which is indexed to the spot market, came down almost immediately.
Were Energy Minister Chris Bowen to spend a few days in Finland, he might realise almost everything he says about nuclear is complete and utter nonsense. This might be why he spent his time in Europe last year trying to sell green hydrogen to the Germans.
All over Europe the countries with the most solar and wind power have the highest prices
Modeling electricity costs is ripe for the plucking, so the only costs that count are the real ones that customers pay. According to Eurostat data on electricity prices in the EU last year, some countries were paying twice as much as others. And the cheapest electricity was in countries using coal power or lands with lots of hydroelectricity and plenty of water.
And if nuclear power was “eight times” more expensive than solar and wind, why is that Germany pays so much more for electricity than France does?
Germany, Italy, Poland, and Greece are all pricey but none of them have nuclear plants (yet).
Serbia has cheap electricity and it is nearly 70% coal powered. Norway has cheap electricity and 100,000 natural Fjords for hydroelectricity.
Look who has solar power and expensive electricity:
Things aren’t working out well for Greece, Germany and Italy.
Look who has wind power too
Denmark has a lot of wind, but it also has seven interconnectors to countries with cheap reliable hydro and nuclear power. We don’t.
CSIRO artificially pumped up the cost of building a nuclear plant in Australia because it would be a new industry here. Did they do that for technologies that are barely invented like hydrogen and batteries too? They claim it would take 15 years to build one plant, yet the French built 56 plants in 15 years, and that was 40 years ago. The average build time then, without faxes, flip phones and “the internet” was just 7 years, yet somehow they got it done. Do the CSIRO think they can get away with publishing this kind of incompetent partisan hackery and Australians won’t find out?
9.9 out of 10 based on 108 ratings
8.7 out of 10 based on 15 ratings
By Jo Nova
Six months after Geert Wilders won the Dutch election he has finally negotiated an agreement with a few minor parties to form government and the unthinkable has happened. The centre-of-the-road conservatives (referred to as “far right extremists”) got elected to unwind the worst excesses of the totalitarian left. Henceforth, the forced farm reclamations will stop, mandated heat pumps are out, electric car subsidies are going and in a brave scientific move, no one will be culling livestock to change the weather. The Netherlands won’t have to pursue stronger environmental policies than the rest of the EU so their leaders can show off at cocktail parties and get jobs with the UN. The Netherlands will still be tied to crazy EU rules, but those elections are coming next month. And official government ministers are so much harder to ignore in EU negotiations. The landscape has changed.
The Telegraph in the UK gets the message: The Tories should go to war on Net Zero. This applies everywhere else too. Tony Abbott didn’t win a 90 seat landslide victory in Australia by trying to do half a carbon tax. He won because he said he would Axe the Tax. (And Stop the Boats.)
The political candidate who goes to war on Stupid Plans has the freedom to point out the all the stupidity. The weaker man with a halfway plan is still agreeing with the witchcraft, he’s just suggesting a different spell. No wonder it doesn’t sell.
To arrange the deal Wilders gave up the Prime Ministership (a win no doubt for the namecalling mud slingers), but he appears to be the one in charge nonetheless. We hope he gets his day…
h/t to NetZeroWatch
Dutch farmers force heat pumps about-turn
Meike Eijsberg London and James Crisp, The Telegraph
The Netherlands will tear up rules forcing homeowners to buy heat pumps as part of a war on net zero by Geert Wilders and the Dutch farmers’ party.
Six months after his shock election victory, Mr Wilders this week struck an agreement to usher in a Right-wing coalition government of four parties. “We are writing history,” he said as he announced the programme for the new government.
The new coalition marks the first time that a party focused on the interests of the agricultural sector has got into power in the Netherlands. Earlier this year, mass farmers’ protests swept Europe.
The coalition pact includes pledges to reverse green policies introduced under the previous government to hit EU climate targets, including compulsory buyouts of polluting farms. It also plans to end subsidies for electric cars in 2025 and rejects an EU demand that the Dutch reduce livestock numbers to cut pollution.
The Tories should go to war on net zero excess
Editorial, The Telegraph
But now even Western countries are starting to turn against the worst excesses of the green movement. The new Dutch coalition has released its programme for government, and at the heart of it are a swathe of pro-consumer, pro-energy security policies, reversing some of the bizarre environmental schemes introduced by its predecessors.
Among them was a programme to compulsorily purchase farms to meet EU climate targets. The result was a farmers’ revolt and a new insurgent political party. The coalition agreement tears up rules forcing homeowners to buy heat pumps, and scraps an obligation that the Netherlands should pursue a “more ambitious environment policy” than the rest of Europe.
Young voters are shifting right and breaking “taboos”
Geert Wilders party did better among 18 – 35 year olds than among some older groups. If all ages matched the younger vote his party would have won four more seats.
At Politico writers are worried that trends like this, which are also seen in Portugul and France mean the “taboos against voting for populist anti-immigration parties is fading”. Which begs the question of who decided that was taboo in the first place?
Their biggest fear is that even young voters are breaking out of their educational pens. They paint this as a devious “far right” opportunity, instead of what it really is, the young rebelling against a lifetime of propaganda. The old jargon and namecalling formula to bully the workers into submission isn’t working any more.
Geert Wilders turned all corners of Dutch Society into far right voters
By Hanne Cokelaere and Eva Hartog, Politico
Across Europe, far right parties are advancing with support from young — and first time — voters. Despite being one of the EU’s wealthiest countries, the Netherlands’ shortage of affordable housing has become a key concern. Amid rising prices, many have an increasingly cynical outlook on life. Unlike their parents and grandparents, this generation feels less restricted by party loyalties, making them more of a wild card and therefore an attractive pool of new voters for anti-establishment candidates.
“The older voter, who was still loyal, is dying; younger voters are going in all directions,” said Josse de Voogd, a Dutch researcher who has made electoral geography his specialty.
For far-right parties, that presents an opportunity.
Wilders’ success took many by surprise, but it is indicative of a broader trend: The taboo of voting for populist, anti-immigration parties is fading. In the June EU election, the European Parliament’s Identity and Democracy group is projected to reap the electoral benefits of increasingly broad support; also among young voters.
In Portugal, exit polls from the March election suggested that under-30s accounted for approximately 25 percent of those who voted for the far-right Chega party.
Young voters are looking for a strong leader and few men are as strong as Geert Wilders — the man who received countless death threats and lives under permanent guard, but keeps going.
It is easy to imagine the new Prime Minister (whoever that is) living in the shadow of the real leader, the man who takes risks.
9.9 out of 10 based on 126 ratings
9 out of 10 based on 11 ratings
By Jo Nova
Finally, the Green-left activists are starting to ask if Big Money is distorting their own environmental efforts
Twenty years too late, a few on the green patsy environmental side are starting to feel “uneasy” about the billions of dollars gifted into their accounts by the nice caring bankers and oligarchs. The money thrown at believers is so obscenely big even they are raising eyebrows.
After smearing skeptics as shills for Big Oil, a few on the left are wondering if funds 300 times larger just from one man might be a bit concentrated. The Bezos Earth Fund has $10,000 million dollars in total to give away but in the last three decades of climate debate the evil Exxon only gave skeptics a grand total of $30 million dollars. Now they worry?
They wonder if Jeff Bezos is controlling too much of the environmental charity funding, and that he really wants to set up carbon offset schemes which greens fear will be “greenwashed” corrupted and a waste of time. This is quite a rare hint that a few in the environmental circles are just starting to be suspicious that they are being used to support other money making agendas.
But this is a crack in the door for skeptics to wedge:
By Patrick Greenfield, The Guardian
Launched with a skeleton team in February 2020, the Bezos Earth Fund aims to give away $10bn (£7.9bn) of the Amazon founder’s $200bn personal fortune to combat the climate crisis and biodiversity loss by the end of the decade. So far, it has issued more than 230 grants worth $2bn, funding initiatives from AI environmental solutions to clean energy for disadvantaged communities.
In the process, the Bezos Earth Fund has become one of the most influential voices in the climate and biodiversity sector, with its fellows, advisers and directors a high-profile presence at international negotiations.
Now they worry about the conflict of interest?
But privately in the climate and biodiversity sector, the mood around the Bezos Earth Fund has turned to one of growing unease. Researchers, climate policy advisers and NGO staff voiced concerns about the level of influence the organisation holds over critical environmental institutions for halting climate change and biodiversity loss, many of which now count Bezos Earth Fund among their biggest funders. Some did not want to be named due to concerns about the consequences for their own funding.
“We have seen millions of dollars paid to conservation and climate organisations. So many have taken money from the Bezos Earth Fund and I find it really worrying. There is obviously a risk of a conflict of interest,” says Holger Hoffmann-Riem from the Swiss NGO Go for Impact. “The credibility of the system relies on independence.”
The system needs independence indeed, but where were they when science needed independence? They were in bed with the bankers and bureaucrats, demanding carbon credits to save the world.
The aim of the Big Banker class was always to establish a carbon fiat currency brokered by them. It was potentially a $7 Trillion dollar money making venture (for bankers). Wouldn’t you love to be paid to profit from an invisible product where no one needed delivery of anything, yet you could claim to be saving the world? The only “commodity” in this market are paper certificates issued by third world bureaucrats, and checked by people who want jobs with the UN or HSBC? (We all know what HSBC is looking for in an employee, and it isn’t “independence”. (Remember Stuart Kirk’s story?)
More signs that the Green left are starting to fragment
Does Jeff Bezos really want to save the world? Green gravy train troughers are afraid to ask out loud:
One climate policy expert, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says: “In the few years since it started distributing enormous amounts of money for climate change and conservation, Bezos Earth Fund has established influence over many major initiatives and their board members.
“At this point, Bezos Earth Fund’s enormous presence in the climate and conservation space starts to look less philanthropical, and more like an attempt to take over the corporate governance system for its own interests and agenda.”
Things are cracking up in the Carbonista cabal because the impossible Net Zero targets can only be met by buying carbon credits from countries who have a massive dirty emissions industry they can clean up cheaply or who can fake it. The true (delusional but more honest) Greens sense that there is something wrong with this international money market idea. After all, people close to home won’t have to give up their air conditioners and cars if they can just pay some slave in Malawi to do it for them. Hence there was a big dummy-spit when Bezos group was seen supporting “carbon offsets”:
Many in the conservation and climate world say their concerns crystallised this year, when a bitter internal row erupted at the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), one of the world’s most important climate certification organisations. The SBTi, which received an $18m grant from Bezos in 2021, is the organisation responsible for assessing whether some of the world’s leading companies are decarbonising in line with the Paris agreement.
In April, the SBTi board unexpectedly announced plans to allow companies to meet their climate targets with carbon offsets from the unregulated voluntary carbon market for indirect emissions. The move provoked internal fury. Staff and technical advisers said they were not consulted about the announcement and warned it could open the door to greenwashing.
They expressed fears that the science-based process was being sidelined in favour of more company-friendly policies with weaker standards, with large polluters allowed to buy offsets instead of cutting emissions. Dozens of SBTi staff called for the resignation of the CEO, Luiz Fernando do Amaral, and board members, including the Bezos fellow Iván Duque, in an internal letter.
But ponder this –a lot of the green-left-industrial complex don’t want a real free market in carbon either. The renewables industry wants a half-baked one to support them, but doesn’t want want a full open free market in carbon because the sell products that are expensively stupid ways to reduce CO2. So if there is anything resembling a free market in carbon credits, they might lose market share to all the cheaper options. When Australia had a carbon auction system small tree farms used to win the bidding at $14 a ton of carbon “saved”. While wind and solar power were costing hundreds of dollars a ton. And electric vehicles are even worse.
So other big money guys who are using the greens have an interest in making sure the carbon market isn’t too free and only certain “low emissions” schemes can be accepted.
From the Bezos Fund site — obviously they don’t want a real free market, they want a rigged one, as long as they get to do the rigging, eh?
“The market economy can play a valuable role in shifting to a green future, but free markets alone can simply perpetuate past pollution and depletion. The Bezos Earth Fund is working to accelerate changes in goods and financial markets to create a virtuous cycle of investment, prosperity, jobs, innovation, emission reductions and ecosystem protection.”
But when you have $10 billion dollars to give away and Big Bankers for friends, what’s to say you can’t rig the market?
Related stories on Bankers in Climate Change
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By Jo Nova
Government plans to badger us into EV’s have hit a hurdle
Things are so bad in the world of electric cars that fields of the cars-of-the-future are appearing at ports in the EU. China has shipped 1.3 million EV’s there in the last quarter but they are piling up in car parks unsold. Countries within the EU are throwing money at customers to get them to buy EV’s, and companies are discounting too, but still it isn’t enough. EV sales fell by 11% across the EU and by 29% in Germany.
Across the Atlantic, something is going wrong in the USA too. The world’s top brand is renting space in shopping centres and airports in America to store the unsold cars.
Car dealers are warning they might not be able to sell many petrol cars, even when buyers walk in to buy them, because they can’t find enough EV buyers so they can meet the mandated target ratio. We might be at the start of a buyer freeze…
Chinese EV’s are filling up EU ports
There are just extraordinary shots of cars lined up in EU ports:
By John Varga, The Express UK
Major EU ports are almost full to capacity with Chinese electric vehicles (EVs) that no one wants to buy. A slump in sales across Europe has caused parking lots at the Belgian ports of Antwerp and Zeebrugge to fill up with the Chinese imports.
A spokesman for the Port of Antwerp-Bruges, the second largest in Europe, said: “This is what is happening in all European ports that handle large numbers of cars.”
And it’s a similar story in the US:
Unsold Teslas Pile-Up In Mall Parking-Lots, Big Discounts Likely
Mike Shedlock, Mishtalk, via ZeroHedge
Please consider Tesla’s Storing Unsold Inventory In An Abandoned Mall Parking Lot
Parking lots full of Tesla vehicles are becoming impossible to ignore as the electric automaker seemingly can’t sell enough cars and trucks to match its rate of production. According to its own figures, the electric automaker produced 46,561 more vehicles than it delivered to customers during the first quarter of 2024. Where are all these cars going? Parking lots at its factories, malls and airports.
Drivers warned of petrol car shortages as net zero to ‘choke off’ supply
By Matt Oliver, The Telegraph
Car salesmen face a shortage of petrol vehicles under Rishi Sunak’s net zero crackdown, one of Britain’s biggest dealership chains has warned.
Vertu Motors said sales of electric cars had “stalled” in the UK, raising the risk that manufacturers will miss sales targets mandated by law. Under the zero emissions vehicle (ZEV) mandate, 22pc of carmakers’ sales must be electric this year with the target rising annually until it reaches 80pc in 2030.
But with manufacturers risking fines of £15,000 per car for breaching the rules, Vertu warned that many might simply throttle supplies of petrol and diesel cars to artificially boost their compliance.
Australia copies the UK and US “emissions standards” just as EV sales fall
With uncanny timing the Australian government has adopted the same rigged ratio of EV sales that isn’t working in the UK or the US, and they’ve done it the same week car magazines here are just starting to ask “Is the honeymoon over for electric vehicles in Australia?”
Australia is years behind the EV bubbles of Europe and America because we are the last rich nation on Earth that anyone would want to buy an EV in. We’re sparsely populated and 5,000 kilometers wide. Half the continent doesn’t have high voltage line within 100 kilometers of the road let alone a fast charger.
As luck would have it, sales for EVs in Australia were barely starting to take off, but EV sales declined in April for the first time since EV’s became “a thing”. It’s only a 5% slip, but it’s the trend, the trend…
h/t to Kim, CO2 Lover
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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