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By AwakenWithJP. Posted by David E.

Yup.

“When you tear out a man’s tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you’re only telling the world that you fear what he might say.” — George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

“Political correctness is fascism pretending to be manners.” — George Carlin

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Weekend Unthreaded

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How to ignore 94% of Covid deaths?

Be wary of junk data and junk conclusions

Death data has become a political tool (stretched both up and down by vested interests). We’ve all heard of the motorcyclist who crashed into the Covid tally, and the payments for US docs. We know there’s junk data out there, but the suggestion we only count deaths “from” Covid, and not the deaths “with” Covid is unscientific in the extreme.

Stick with me. We all want WuFlu to be nothing, but scientists and skeptics need to pick their targets carefully. Don’t lose sight of the real scandal and the real solutions. It’s a travesty that people are dying while cheap vitamins and antivirals are being ignored. Let’s fight for Vitamin D, HCQ, Ivermectin, and all the other potentials like Interferon, Bromhexine, Melatonin, steroids, asthma drugs etc etc. But let’s not get distracted by a hopeful fantasy that the true US  “death tally” is only 6% of Covid deaths in the US.

There’s an idea out there that only 9,680 people have died of Covid in the US, not 161,392 people. It’s because of this CDC quote:

“For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned. For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 2.6 additional conditions or causes per death. “

Ask yourself: Does Diabetes protect you from Covid?

Think it through. In this scenario, in order to be considered a real coronavirus death, the deceased not only have to have been tested, they can’t have any other contributing factor listed on the death certificate. Which means effectively that people with high blood pressure, cancer, heart disease, asthma, diabetes now cannot possibly die of Covid. (Won’t they be glad to hear that?) Nor can people who don’t get tested. And nor can obese people — unless they slim down first, then die.

In a world where only 6% of the US Covid death tally are truly due to Covid, you can protect yourself from Covid by getting fat, not getting tested and getting diabetes. I don’t think so.

Deaths are not simple one-cause events

Most deaths are due to a bunch of bad factors overwhelming the system. The only pure deaths are things like bullets to the head (in homocide, not even in suicide which has its own collection of contributing factors). Death certificates reflect that, allowing doctors to list a lot of contributing factors (read ZdoggMD for a US doctors perspective). The 6% of certificates which didn’t list other factors may represent 10,000 totally healthy people cut down ahead of time, which is it’s own tragedy, surely. But, mundanely, it may also represent that some busy distracted doctors don’t always fill in the form properly.

The question that matters is: How much longer would victims have lived if Covid hadn’t hit them?

We will all die sometime. What matters is whether we are losing people who would have lived years longer. The average age of death in the US might be 78, but that means about half the population expects to live to be older than that. Some 78 year olds have a lot to contribute. Sometime in the next four years, the leader of the free world will be 78.

The average 78 year old can still expect to live ten more years.

So people with co-morbidites are at higher risk of dying of Covid, but someone with high blood pressure can survive years with the condition. Covid may trigger their early death, but if the US borders had been shut in time, that same person might have survived for another decade of holiday and family moments. Another decade of voting and adding a long-life perspective to younger generations.

The real toll of Covid may be higher than the listed Covid deaths

Get ready: Rather than being 6% of the official tally, there are credible arguments that the real tally is probably higher than the official tally, not lower. The US is not testing adequately, the test positivity is still above 5%, and for large periods it’s been as high as 15%. Australia’s test positivity has mostly been below 1%. We know there are many missed cases in the USA.

Mortality counts are far higher than Covid deaths alone:

Nationwide, 223,900 more people have died than usual from March 15 to Aug. 8, according to C.D.C. estimates, which adjust current death records to account for typical reporting lags. That number is 62,000 higher than the official count of coronavirus deaths for that period. Higher-than-normal death rates are now widespread across the country; only Alaska and Hawaii, states outside the contiguous United States, show numbers that look similar to recent years. — New York Times.

So 60,000 extra people have died in the pandemic above and beyond the covid deaths listed on death certificates. Some of them were due to the pandemic, and not due to Covid. But equally, some of them were due to Covid in people that didn’t get tested. There were people who died from heart attacks and strokes who wouldn’t have died if they weren’t afraid to visit hospital during an epidemic. We know people died of cancer due to delays in treatments. We know people in homes died because their families couldn’t get in to see them and report neglect, or changes that only loved ones can spot.  We know people died because of the way governments responded to the pandemic — but some of these people, or even more, would have died even if there were no lockdowns. If the virus ran free in the population, more high risk people would have been afraid to visit the local ER.

For every motorcyclist who was listed as a Covid death — and shouldn’t have been — there might have been ten heart attacks or strokes in people who didn’t realize they had Covid. Ambulance officers reported turning up to homes to find people sitting up with blood oxygen saturation levels we thought were impossible — a classic sign of covid-19.

We need to know excess deaths for the next ten years

Has Covid lowered life expectancy in a measurable way? Anyone who claims to know the definitive answer at this stage is making stuff up.

All death statistics now are subject to change. Three quarters of mild to moderate Covid cases showed signs of heart damage. How do we know if a heart attack victim who wasn’t tested for Covid had an infection that ultimately caused their death? We don’t.

Only changes to excess deaths in coming years will reveal how many effective years Covid has stolen from people. We’ll never know on an individual basis, but only on a population-wide basis as we plot ongoing changes in deaths due to many conditions. Will there be a drop in stroke deaths next year because people at high risk of strokes died a year too soon? Has Covid fished out the high risk people from 100% or only from 20% of the population?

After the pandemic has long gone, PhD’s will be made by studying graphs of excess mortality from various conditions in various towns.  Will there by a dip in mortality figures “after the virus” — a classic sign that the virus took only a short time off the tally, or will the spike stand above the norms, marking deaths of people who died too young? Will there be fewer stroke victims in 2021 because they died in 2020, or will strokes continue at much the same rate?

The Cause of Death is not singular or obvious

Death is a complex event with a chain of dependent variables, which all contribute to the outcome. The true cause of death is often impossible to know without a full autopsy, and sometimes even with one.

To understand how complicated this is, read the 8 page coroner’s report on Patricia Dowd, possibly the first Covid death in the US. She was 57, with no known cardiac risk factors, but was overweight. To accurately figure out what caused her death took hours of work by someone with years of medical training, plus many blood tests, a long write up, and a cost of $3,000 to $5,000.

Her cause of death is listed — somewhat ambiguously, and in desperate need of punctuation — as:

“Acute Hemopericardium due to Rupture of Left Ventricle due to transmural myocardial ischemia (Infarction) with a minor component of myocarditis due to Covid-19 infection.”  Feb 10th 2020

SARS-Cov2 RNA was detected in Dowd’s heart, trachea, lung, and intestine. She had no coronary atherosclerosis or thombosis. She complained of a “flu like illness” in the days leading up to her death. But, since she was foolish enough to have one comorbidity (excess weight and a BMI of 31, possibly by following the recommended low fat diet), she would later be described by some as “died with covid” not “died from covid”.  So even though her heart was officially described as “rupturing”, which was broadcast in many sensational headlines, some people appear to be saying it is just a coincidence that she died at the same time as she had a Covid diagnosis. Seriously?

Even car accidents can be caused by Covid

It sounds ridiculous. But it’s even possible that people who died of road trauma might not have if they weren’t infected. How many? Who knows. We’ll have to wait for those excess death studies, and even then we won’t know for sure. I make the point only to show how complicated the cause of death can be.

Imagine someone with early stage Covid, untested and unaware that they were sick. Rapidly sinking into fatigue, they they make a stupid driving error that they wouldn’t have made if they weren’t infected. This sort of thing often happens, even just with the spring daylight savings transition.

Study links daylight saving time to 28 fatal car accidents per year in the US

The evidence shows about a six percent increase in the risk of fatal traffic accidents in the week after the time change each spring. In other words, more than 28 fatal accidents could be prevented yearly in the U.S. if the DST transition were abolished. The effect is especially pronounced in the morning hours and in locations further west within a time zone.

Since it was first introduced, the spring transition to DST has been linked to a variety of problems, including increased risk of heart attack, workplace accidents, and suicides. There had been evidence suggesting an increased risk of car accidents, too.  (Fritz et al, 2020)*

The cause of a driving death is often a judgement mistake, and we know Covid infections cause cognitive deficits, loss of attention, dizziness, and fatigue. In other words, a true post mortem would take a PhD thesis length analysis of their past driving record, level of illness, type of mistake, sleep patterns, etc. etc. ad infinitum — and we probably still couldn’t say for sure whether they would be alive  today if they hadn’t had Covid.

What looks like, smells like and acts like a deadly pandemic?

A wave of excess deaths is traveling around the world. The places with the highest peaks in excess deaths also happen to have the largest positive tests to coronavirus RNA. Coincidence? They also have the highest rates of healthcare worker morbidity and mortality.

Twelve days after quarantine restrictions start or significantly increase in severity, the rate of new infections drops off to a lower rate of exponential growth. People change their behavior in reaction to this new threat as they learn more about it, which is constantly changing all our statistics. It’s highly dynamic situation.

Covid is known to cause major blood clotting which damages organs. It has caused strokes, heart attacks, heart damage, low oxygen levels, and kidney damage, even in mild to moderate cases. There is still much we don’t know about it. Covid probably came out of a Chinese biowarfare lab. Is there something they know about it that we don’t yet? Is it significant that the Chinese put on the most strenuous quarantine measures to date, stricter than any other country? Or is that just another coincidence?

Ominously, there are now four known cases of reinfection only months after the original infection.

* * *

It’s a hot contentious topic. Sorry if it’s not what some what to hear, but thanks greatly to those who stuck with this and read this far. Kudos to skeptics who maintain civility and accurate language even when they passionately disagree. Civil debate is what makes skeptics great.

_______________

REFERENCES

Current Biology, Fritz et al.: “A Chronobiological Evaluation of the Acute Effects of Daylight Saving Time on Traffic Accident Risk” www.cell.com/current-biology/f … 0960-9822(19)31678-1 , DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2019.12.045

* Fritz et al say that there were no lives saved in the fall, though this seems rather odd:  “there were no effects of the fall-back transition to Standard Time (ST) on MVA risk“.

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Thursday Open Thread

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Climate change causes car fires

 

Don’t try this at home:

Premature energy release can ruin your whole day.

h/t Jim Simpson

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Extinction Rebellion founder suggests bullets may improve the climate

What happens when delusional people can’t convince the masses to agree with them

Fury as Extinction Rebellion founder say MPs and business owners ‘should have bullet put through their heads’

The Sun, Sept 2, 2020

A BRITISH co-founder of Extinction Rebellion sparked fury after suggesting MPs and business owners “should have a bullet through their heads”.

Ex-organic farmer Roger Hallam criticised the people “who run society” – saying they were “culpable” for the climate catastrophe.

In a recording obtained by Guido, the 54-year-old was heard saying:

They [leaders] are exponentially more culpable for climate catastrophe.

“1990 might as well give them six months in prison, now maybe you should put a bullet through their head – or rather someone probably will.”

The real crime are the leaders and journalists who feed the delusions for their own profit and power. Creating things like pap declarations of “Climate Emergencies”. They are not just symbolism, they become the license for extreme responses. It’s a psychological and legal tool where people can both justify their own reckless behaviour to themselves, but also to justify dangerous acts of civil disobedience in a court.

Not long back Roger Hallam was calling for Nuremberg style trials.

The founder of Extinction Rebellion wants those responsible for climate change to face Nuremberg-style trials.

Roger Hallam also called for a ‘World War Two mobilisation’ of society, with rationing and the confiscation of private property.

Asked how those responsible for climate change should be dealt with, he told The Times: ‘The question will be who’s culpable, in the same way [as] with the Nazis.

He added that ‘maybe [we] should put a bullet in the head’ as punishment.

A bullet here, and a bullet there, and pretty soon we’ll be talking about a bloody revolution.

Extinction Rebellion responded that this was old news, and they’re resolutely non-violent now. Roger Hallam supposedly said this a year ago and is not formally involved any more. But there is no denying that he and Gail Bradbrook co-founded Extinction Rebellion. They set up the movement after she was inspired by a hallucinogenic experience. Bradbrook happily admitted that she flew 11,000 air miles to Costa Rica for a holiday in 2016 where she took the drugs. She “tripped” in every sense of the word, and flew home to the UK to start a movement, separate from her family, end a marriage and “that was the right thing to do”.

Hallam likes bullets and socialist governments:

If we’re going to have a possibility of living, we’re looking at mass socialistic organisation.”

As Guido says: Socialism brought about by the barrel of a gun. History shows where this leads…

h/t Colin

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Even cough syrup might actually work against Coronavirus

I didn’t think cough syrups even worked against coughs, but one new paper suggests that bromhexine in common cough syrups reduces both Covid-19 rates of ICU and of mortality.

The era of antivirals has come, not that Big Pharma want you to know that cheap out-of-patent drugs might help. But for years we were told that medical science didn’t have an answer to viruses.

Bromhexine was patented in 1961 and is commonly found in OTC pharmacy cough syrups with names like Bisolvon, Robitussin, and Duro-Tuss (Wiki has a long list).

Theoretically Bromhexine sabotages one of our molecules — with the snappy name of TMPRSS2 (which is shorter than saying Transmembrane protease S2).  A protease is a fancy pair of molecular scissors, it chops or tweaks the viral spike and if that doesn’t happen, the virus can’t get into the cell (at least not through its favourite path).

The nice thing about an antiviral acting against our  molecules, rather than against the virus itself, is that it’s harder for the virus to mutate to get around it. That means it’s less likely the virus can develop resistance. The downside of targeting our own molecules is that it might fritz things up. Presumably this protease does something useful sometime. To that end, mice that don’t have this protein at all, seem to do OK. And then, there is fifty five years of drug store sales. How bad can cough syrup be?

Bromhexidine, mechanism of action, TMPRSS2, Spike activation. diagram.

Bromhexidine, mechanism of action, TMPRSS2, Spike activation. diagram.

It is not at all certain that this drug would thwart the virus. Viruses can get into cells through another method called endocytosis. Possibly bromhexine might not make much difference.  Luckily for us, a group in Iran were desperate enough to try it in a small, but reasonable trial, and the results are enticing.

Basically, 39 people were picked at random out of 78 to try the bromhexine. In the half that missed out on Bromhexine, 11 went on to need ICU and 9 died. In the half who got the bromhexine, only 2 went into ICU and none died.

We might feel a bit sorry for the nine in the first trial that didn’t get lucky. We won’t know how unlucky until someone has done a bigger trial. For the moment the p value of avoiding ICU was 0.007. And a p value of 0.027 for avoiding death.

Where are the media?

This paper was published on July 19th. In a world full of journalists, doctors and a million interested onlookers all connected at the speed of light, it’s curious that it hasn’t garnered attention. At this point I can’t find a single news story mentioning these results. There is one Swiss  niche group which mentions it (at a dose of 50 – 100mg). And there is a $3,500 market report available from 2 days ago cryptically suggesting the “bromhexine market will grow a significant rate…”. Nearly every pharma company makes it. I’m curious to do this search now, because if the drug is useful, it will be near impossible to search in a few weeks and find “something that wasn’t there”. Not that I’m certain this drug is the answer, but years from now historians will be looking at how well the news got filtered.

There are a few mentions months ago in medical niche outlets (March 2nd),  clinical trials in China, and obviously some awareness that this drug might be useful. The wonder then, is that with all the billions being thrown at the virus, it was left up to an Iranian lab to pursue this possibility?

According to the Swiss group:

The efficacy of bromhexine in blocking cell entry of coronaviruses was established in 2017.

So we had a three year head start and yet, seven months into a global pandemic and almost no one has studied whether cough syrup might help? There are lessons in there for the ways we structure our research, and how useless our universities are.

And it seems frivolous, but Iran’s death toll peaked the week after this study was published and has declined since then. (There is a swamp of factors: It could be bromhexine, or treatment changes, vitamin D levels, a younger age group, or it could be that Iran doesn’t test enough people, and the true number of infections has declined, even though the official daily new cases is steady on 2,000 a day.) But if word is spreading and Iranian drug stores are running out of cough syrup that would be interesting. Anyone know?

Significant?

Eyeballing table 1 of the paper there’s no obvious reason why the drug group would have done so much better. On average both groups waited about 7 to 8 days after symptoms showed up before going to hospital. Their blood oxygen was 88%. The treatment group may have been slightly less sick, with lower levels of lassitude, headache and tummy aches, was slightly younger (58 not 61) but had more diabetes.

The treatment group was given 8mg, three times a day. Imagine if they had started treatment as soon as they felt sick?

h/t thanks to TedM, who heard it from a Dutch doctor.

UPDATE: As TedM notes, Iran may be using low dose HCQ as standard and Bromhexine may only be useful in combination with HCQ:

In another publication from Iran on the trial is this comment: “Whether this promising result is because of bromhexine alone or combination of low dose HCQ [200 mg/d] and bromhexine is not clear at this point.”

200mg/d is half that in the Zelenko protocol. Both groups were on the 200mg/day HCQ, so it would appear that this dose of HCQ alone is too low to be effective.

The article here: http://www.immunopathol.com/Files/Inpress/ipp-14214.pdf

 REFERENCE

Ansarin et al, (2020) Effect of bromhexine on clinical outcomes and mortality in COVID-19 patients: A randomized clinical trial, BioImpacts, 10(4), 209-215 doi: 10.34172/bi.2020.27 http://bi.tbzmed.ac.ir/

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Tuesday Open Thread

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China poised to be the largest global nuclear power by 2030

President Xi will be delighted that so many industrial competitors are sabotaging their electrical grids with erratic, unreliable solar and wind power. Right now, The People’s Republic of China is the biggest platform in the world for the deployment of nuclear power technology. In twenty years, China has increased its fleet of nuclear power reactors from three to 48, with 11 more plants under construction. That means it will soon surpass France which has 57:

By the end of the twentieth century, France’s mature nuclear energy industry operated over fifty nuclear power reactors to supply about 80 percent of the electricity consumed by its population of 60 million people.1 By contrast, when China connects its fiftieth nuclear power reactor to the grid, which is expected in a few years, China’s nuclear power plants will contribute only about 5 percent of the electricity demanded by its population of 1.4 billion.2

Carnegie Endowment

At the moment the USA has the largest nuclear generation in the world, with more than double the production of the nearest competitor — France. But China began stockpiling uranium in 2007, and in the last five year plan released in 2016 — China aimed to double nuclear power by the end of 2020. It looks like falling short this year — but by 2030 plans to outdo everyone including the USA.

China poised to overtake US in nuclear power by 2030

by Kotaro Fukaroka, Nikkei Asian Review.

TOKYO — China is on track to surpass the U.S. as the world’s top producer of nuclear energy as early as 2030, reflecting hesitance to build new capacity in Japan and Western nations even as emerging economies move ahead.

The trend reflects diverging approaches to nuclear power after the March 2011 Fukushima meltdowns in Japan. While the U.S., Europe and Japan grew risk averse in response to public fears, emerging nations have been keener. Indonesia and Philippines are among the countries dusting off old plans for reactors. And China and Russia have emerged as the main suppliers.

Nuclear Belt and Road:

China is competing with Russia to provide nuclear power in strategic deals, and already has agreements or MOU’s with Pakistan, Romania, Argentina, UK, Iran, Turkey, South Africa, Kenya, Egypt, Sudan, Armenia, and Kazakhstan.  There are fingers in many pies.

China would also have a dominant role in the nuclear industry.

The bigger China’s nuclear power footprint grows, the more say China will have in global nuclear governance. If China in the coming decades becomes the leading nuclear power country, it will demand and obtain a commensurate role in members’ decisionmaking concerning multilateral technical rulemaking compacts and organizations, including the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG). If China closes the nuclear fuel cycle, global governance mechanisms related to nuclear security and nonproliferation may be adjusted to reflect that accomplishment.

 —  Carnegie Endowment

 David Archibald calculates that China is burning through its coal quickly, but obviously they are well prepared for the next step to nuclear.

There are 451 nuclear plants on the planet. Australia has largest uranium reserves in the world but has no nuclear power plants. Given the inevitable rise of nuclear power one way or the other — perhaps we should dig up and burn our 300 years supply of coal while it is still worth digging up?

If I were President Xi, I’d be donating to Greenpeace, funding The Greens, and sponsoring Greta to help hobble the competition.

 

 

 

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Reagan on rioters, “what’s to negotiate?”

Ronald Reagan:

“I’m sick and tired of the argument about whether some effort to enforce law and order is going to escalate anything at all…”

 

 

Nice civilization you have there. Shame if something happened to it.

As Kamala says with a smile:  “…they’re not going to stop, and nor should they”.

Are the Democrats basically running on extortion: Vote for us so unhappy Democrat voters don’t tear the country apart?

She’s talking about protestors (theoretically) but doesn’t seem to mention the rioters, and as the BLM say “silence is violence”.

Things the ABC / BBC probably won’t mention

The Democrats don’t seem to want to stop the mobs. Tucker Carlson explains…

Keep reading  →

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Weekend Unthreaded

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New Report: Australians pay $1300 in hidden climate bills each year

The parasites take $1,300 per household each year in Australia

Australians could save $13 billion dollars a year if they weren’t forced to pay for pagan climate witchery.

If the bill collector knocked at the door and demanded $1,300 dollars each year to try to stop storms and floods a century from now, there would be riots in the streets. Instead the money is buried in complexity and taken in slices through unlabeled bills and receipts throughout the year. We list the GST. Imagine if we listed “the Climate Tax”?

Malcolm Roberts, a One Nation Senator has commissioned a study by Alan Moran to add up the cost. But why did he have to do that? Where was the Treasury, the Minister for Energy, the CSIRO, the ABC, the Labor Party, the State Premiers, and all our universities? All apparently, are out to lunch with the vested interests or running chicken, afraid of being called names.

Alan Moran adds up the state and federal subsidies, including the renewable schemes (like the SRET) that charge every electricity user for other people’s solar panels.  He also includes the costs to businesses from higher electricity charges — which are invariably passed on to consumers in their purchases. Those frozen peas at Coles have a hidden carbon tax.

Labor likes to say “make the polluters pay”. But in the end, it’s always people who pay, no matter how the charge is hidden. But the Liberals are complicit too (with a few brave exceptions like Craig Kelly). What happened to the free market?

Why are solar and wind “the way of the future” but twenty years later and people still need to be forced to buy them or they’d go out of business?  Enough’s enough.

 Buried costs in the rise in electricity prices

Electricity Cost, Australia. Graph. 2020. Renewables.

Electricity Cost, Australia.

Alan Moran:

The average wholesale price for the years 2008/09 – 2014/15 was $45.4 per MWh and more than doubled to over $92.5 per MWh in 2018/19. This increase is purely because of the effect of climate policies and renewables. The cost of coal is not a factor: the limitless supply of Victorian brown coal is not transportable and is priced at its mining cost plus the state tax, which is incorrectly called a royalty and was trebled in 2016, imposing a cost of $2-3 per MWh; black coal of the quality required for domestic generators is also abundant and its price is not markedly influenced by international trends

Solar Wind, renewables electricity cost.

That’s a lot of money that Australians could spend on other things.

Press Release:

$13 billion hidden cost on households revealed

A landmark economics report shows that climate policies and renewable subsidies cost Australian households around $13 billion per year, or $1300 per household. Senator Roberts commissioned economist Dr Alan Moran to use all existing government data to examine, for the first time, the true cost of climate policies.

Senator Roberts said, “Australians will be shocked to know the additional cost of climate policies on our power bills is a staggering 39%, not 6.5% as the government claims. Using the government’s own data means that the report cannot be sensibly refuted.”

Dr Moran’s report, The Hidden Cost of Renewables on Electricity Prices, takes an all-inclusive accounting approach, including hidden costs of higher energy prices passed on by business.

Senator Roberts stated, “Governments have blatantly distorted and excluded key facts to keep Australians literally in the dark about inflated costs and future unreliability of our electricity. What is abundantly clear is the true cost of electricity would be $13 billion per year less, if cheap reliable coal production was not lumbered with policies that distort the market towards expensive and unreliable wind and solar. Artificially high energy prices savage our living standards and undermine our economic resilience and competitiveness, particularly during our COVID recovery.”

Dr Moran found that the weather-dependent wind and solar currently cost the taxpayer $8 billion per year and continue to receive increasing subsidies after two decades.

Senator Roberts added, “In terms of a true market economy renewables still remain unviable after 20 years and have become a parasitic malinvestment on our energy systems. These renewable subsidies distort low cost coal-based power generation and increases the wholesale price of electricity from $45.5 per MWh to $92.5 per MWh, at our cost.”

Further scrutiny of the job creation in the renewables industry shows renewable subsidies causes a net loss of jobs in the economy, because every subsidised “green” job created, 2.2 jobs are lost elsewhere in the economy.

Full report: The Hidden Cost of Climate Policies and Renewables

Malcolm Roberts Facebook page

Just some of the hidden costs:

Electricity cost

Electricity cost

Follow the money:

Those who own the renewables investments make the profits from forced payments from unwilling customers.

Costs to households of renwables programs.

Where do the Australian subsidies end up?

Australian subsidies employ a lot of people in China, and some people in Australia. But for every Australian who gains a job, two lose theirs as companies move out of Australia to places that don’t pay  hidden Climate Taxes.

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Optimistic? SA Energy Minister says helpfully “The grid blowing up is not the right term”

South Australia has built unreliable generators on one third of all homes in the state. They are expensive, encased in glass, and all fail at the same time, usually for breakfast, and definitely for dinner. They randomly fail when clouds roll in, but consistently fail all night long. When they do work, they all work together, producing an excess of energy when no one need an excess.  In order to pretend that this surge is useful, a billion dollars of working infrastructure has to switch off, scale down, spin its wheels, and toss money out the window.

A few weeks ago, the State Energy Minister of SA, Dan van Holst Pellekaan, warned that the state is only a few years away from reaching “net negative demand” which is a fancy-pants way of describing the moment that solar power makes more energy than the whole state can use. His reassuring comment was “The grid blowing up is not the right term, but it simply will not work.”

With 250,000 unreliable generators in the state the midday excess is now so large it threatens to break things, drive up voltages, drive out reliable generators and generally muck up what was a finely tuned system honed over 50 years.

There is already so much excess at lunchtime that the Energy Czars want to remotely switching off people’s solar panels at their most productive time, much to the outrage of hapless homeowners who thought they were buying something useful.

Rooftop solar destabilising South Australia energy supply, says Dan van Holst Pellekaan

by Perry Williams, The Australian, August 5, 2020

One third of the state’s households have rooftop solar systems installed but the strong uptake has created issues for the renewables-heavy grid, with solar at times generating so much surplus energy that demand falls near zero, destabilising the power system.

Residents with solar now face the prospect of their rooftop panels being switched off remotely to ensure the grid stays stable and secure.

“If the grid reaches net negative demand which under current operations is forecast in South Australia only a few years away, that’s not a political issue, that’s not a market issue, that’s not an environment issue. It’s actually a physics and engineering issue,” Mr van Holst Pellekaan told a Smart Energy Council forum on Wednesday. “The grid blowing up is not the right term, but it simply will not work.”

South Australia has also accelerated a timeline for renewables to provide 100 per cent of its electricity needs with plans to hit the ambitious target by 2030.

It didn’t have to be this way

The entirely artificial rise of solar panels in South Australia:

Solar installations in South Australia to the SA Power Networks distribution network, July 2008 to July 2020. Source: SA Power Networks.

 

No wonder South Australia is in so much trouble

The conservative party is in charge now in SA, but here’s the sensible party, telling us how practical they are, while they are trying to change the global weather with green electrons.

“We are not philosophically or ideologically constrained in our governance in South Australia,” Mr van Holst Pellekaan told the forum of Australia’s state and territory energy ministers. “We are constrained by a firm conviction that we must move forward with regard to harnessing renewable energy and it must be in a practical way that works for everybody who participates in the market. We’re not locked into ideology. We’re locked into continuing down a path of making sure it’s a practical way to do it.”

We’re not ideologues, my foot.

It’s projection all the way down.

Money, money,money

It’s an expensive game — global weather tweaking. The cost of managing the grid is rising fast.

The costs of managing the power system soared to $310m in the first quarter of 2020, more than double the previous record set in 2008,consuming 8 per cent of all energy costs for the three month period compared with just 1-2 per cent historically, the Australian Energy Market Operator said.

Are these $310 million dollar new costs being borne by the wind farms and solar panel owners?

The solution to the destabilization-by-unreliable-generators, is to add more unreliable generators and on top of that — spent $1,500 million dollars on a giant interconnector emergency IV line to NSW.

The report also highlights the benefits of a greater interconnected grid as levels of renewable energy increase. In South Australia’s case the proposed EnergyConnect project will dramatically reduce security challenges and allow South Australia and NSW to take advantage of their geographic ­diversity through their ability to share resources when it is to their economic advantage.

This will drain unreliable energy out of South Australia at lunch time and windy days. That way, the surge can destroy the baseload economics of New South Wales as well. It also means South Australia can pretend to be 100% “renewable”, even though it won’t be able to do it without the billion dollar extension cord.

9.8 out of 10 based on 71 ratings

Thursday Open Thread

9.2 out of 10 based on 13 ratings

Activist mobs for dinner? Things the ABC and BBC might not mention.

When the hollering throng comes demanding strangers raise their fists, good people at dinner might agree, and take the path of least resistance. And if everyone did, it becomes another advertisement for a political terror group. “Look everyone supports us!”. But it only took one  woman to refuse and the propaganda moment suddenly flipped.

If you can’t see the video, you can watch it here.

Is this the point the BLM groupies back up at least on this approach? In comments under this tweet,  there are many droll comparisons of Brown Shirts and RedGuards. But even BLM supporters know this went too far:

 @saletan Anyone who stages this kind of mob aggression is doing the Trump campaign’s work for free.

@LAppiah This is just bizarre. I sincerely believe white people need to take a big step back and consult black leaders about what is and isn’t helpful…
But others are saying the protest is full of “whites” and they can see a red hat.

These comments win the internet today:

@GreerMcVay said “I’m convinced these are right wing plants. I just don’t believe BLM advocates would do this.”

@RidgePlaysGames: This was a psyop. No one on the left is doing something this stupid and baseless.

Others take the mickey:

@MichaelTanuvasa How many of these kids have Parents they wont say this shit, too? Honestly they should be looting and burning stuff. Not pulling stunts like this. If you are going to alienate ppl with no plan at least wreck some rich peoples money flow

Funnily enough, apparently Lauren B. Victor, the women who wouldn’t accede, explained “It just didn’t feel right”  though she could understand their anger. She revealed, “I’m very much with them. I’ve been marching for weeks and weeks.”

So these are BLM supporters harrassing a BLM supporter.

Civilizations need to discuss these moments, even if the ABC and BBC might not want to. Skeptics know that if people give in to bullies, the mob just asks for more. The new coercion-for-dinner  event has gone viral on twitter, but word is only just spreading now into some mainstream news sources.

Good people need to be prepared.

Speaking of which, if you think the BBC is doing its own form of racism by banning the words to Rule Brittannia and The Land of Hope and Glory, you can sign the petition, and do your best to learn the words and sing these as often as possible. Teach the children.

Britain abolished slavery in 1807. Let’s celebrate that.

 

9.7 out of 10 based on 69 ratings

Reinfection and T cell immunity — does the common cold give us protection against Coronavirus?

The first case of a definitive reinfection was reported today

Before we look at whether a cold gives us protection let’s point out we don’t know how well a SARS 2 infection gives us protection.

A 33 year old man in Hong Kong was tested positive nearly five months after his first infection, and with a slightly different variant of the virus, so it’s very likely this was a second infection rather than a resurgence of the first.  It hints that Covid may be a bit like the common cold, and our immunity may be partial and temporary which is not good news for the herd immunity idea and the vaccine plan, but it’s only one case. On the plus side,  he had a three day fever, cough and sickness in March, but is asymptomatic this time, suggesting that maybe there is enough residual immunity to help him beat the second infection.

There have been other reports of people getting reinfected but none of the previous cases had genetic testing of both infections to show they were different.  But 13% of 4,000 doctors who were surveyed in May (even at that early stage) believed that at least one of their patients had been reinfected, so it is not that rare.

UPDATE: Already today two other cases of reinfection have also turned up in Belgium and the Netherlands. More coming soon…

Predictably, vaccine makers are rushing to say that these are not unexpected and probably don’t matter, but other researchers are more concerned. Vaccines are less likely to work for long if our immune systems can’t achieve it with a natural infection.

How about Herd Immunity?

Keep in mind we don’t know if the second-timer in Hong Kong was infectious this time. His immunity may have helped him feel better, (or it could be that his Vitamin D level was higher in summer) but he may still be able to infect others. This makes all the difference. If people can still reinfect vulnerable family members their immunity is not protecting the herd. Some people are hoping that Herd Immunity may be reached at 20% infected but an asymptomatic infection is not the same as immunity. Asymptomatic people shed just as much virus as symptomatic people. (Seungjae Lee et al) The whole point of herd immunity is the kind of immunity that stops the spread of the virus.

After mild Covid-19 infections antibodies seem to fade fairly quickly, with a half life of 73 days. But could that protection be hiding in T cells, rather than antibodies?

Our immune system — like the armed forces

T cells are the deep controllers of white blood cells, and in one of their many roles, they activate the B cells that make the antibodies. Normally we test for antibodies to see if people have immunity because that’s the cheapest way to tell if the whole army of immune cells knows what to look for. A fully fledged antibody response is a mature, armed-and-ready response. It is usually assumed that if we don’t have antibodies we don’t have protection.

 

T-cells activate B-Cells, which make antibodies

T-cells activate B-Cells, which make antibodies. | Image adapted from Mikael Häggström.

A flurry of studies have dug deeper and are finding that it’s possible to have T-cells specific to virus without having any detectable antibodies to it. Antibodies are like small sentinels and look outs, sweeping our mucosal surfaces and blood for threats. They offer fast protection, ready to raise the alarm. T-cells, perhaps are the Colonels and Generals as well as the SAS. They can get activated within hours. Albeit, hours can matter with exponential invaders.

Can common colds and T-cell memories give us protection? Maybe.

One fifth of all our colds are coronaviruses. People are estimated to get a coronavirus cold on average every two to three years. Protective antibodies wane between colds, but cellular (T cell) immunity “could remain”. People appear to get less severe infections after the initial rounds.

Sette and Crotty reviewed five studies on T-cells that showed that between 10 and 50% of people who have never been exposed to Coronavirus nonetheless carry T-cells that recognise parts of the SARS-Cov-2 virus.

It’s possible that T-cell recognition is useful and gives us a head start, but the authors warn that it might be good, irrelevant or even a bad thing. If the  antibodies are aimed at the wrong parts of the virus they may send the immune system out on a dead end path. That’s the ‘original antigenic sin’. Think of a distracted army aiming for the wrong target. It’s also possible that the antibodies themselves are a pest, clogging up the works, or worse — even helping the dang virus get inside immune cells themselves  (known as ADE) thus making the infection worse. (It is known to happen in Dengue, Zika, Ebola and with some Coronaviruses).

It is frequently assumed that pre-existing T cell memory against SARS-CoV-2 might be either beneficial or irrelevant. However, there is also the possibility that pre-existing immunity might actually be detrimental, through mechanisms such as ‘original antigenic sin’ (the propensity to elicit potentially inferior immune responses owing to pre-existing immune memory to a related pathogen), or through antibody-mediated disease enhancement. [ADE] While there is no direct evidence to support these outcomes, they must be considered. A detrimental effect linked to pre-existing immunity is eminently testable and would be revealed by the same COVID-19 cohort and vaccine studies proposed above. — Sette and Crotty.

It is a war out there.

We already knew around 45% of the population don’t seem to get any symptoms to Covid-19, so they are protected (from symptoms at least, though half show signs of lung damage).  That may be because of their T-Cells, but it may not. Asymptomatic infections may occur because the initial viral load was low (masks help), or because they had a lower expression of ACE2,  or higher Vitamin D levels, or high NK (Natural Killer cell) activity. It may be better cytokine production. And it may be something else entirely.

T-cells are mostly targeting the side of the spike, not the active end

Stick with me. We can learn a lot from Braun et al. They looked at which parts of the virus the T cells were reacting to, which matters. As we already know survivors seem to have more antibodies against the spike – not against the nucleocapsid shell.

Braun et al used 68 blood samples taken before the epidemic.They exposed their stored blood to the novel virus for 16 hours and found that 24 of the 68 samples proved to have T-cells that reacted in some way to the Coronavirus that they had never come across before.  So 35% had some immune recognition. These are probably left over units from past battles with two of the common cold coronaviruses. We even know which two coronavirus common colds, namely 229E and OC43, are the top candidates because they have a few short amino acid sequences that are identical to sequences on the spikes on Covid viruses.

To figure out what the Tcells were aiming at, the researchers split the spike into S1 and S2 zones. But most of the T cells were reacting to the S2 part, and only 6% of the total sample carried T-cells that recognised the S1 part — which is probably the most important part as it  contains the RBD (Receptor Binding Domain) at the active end of the spike — that’s the zinger hot spot that sticks to our ACE2 receptors.

This quiet line in Braun et al seemed important:

 ” Most COVID-19 patients with critical disease exhibited no reactivity to S-I “

Could it be that sickest patients were extra sick because they are not targeting the S1 area? Perhaps their immune systems were aiming at the wrong part of the spike? It’s not clear that T cells against the S2 area will help. This may be the antigenic sin Sette referred to, though Sette reviewed the Braun et al paper but did not comment on the S1 and S2 ratio.

The Braun et al paper was hard work to decipher. This diagram from Meirson et al helped explain what was going on.  (My explanation of what this means is below).

Coronavirus, spike, protein, n-terminus, c-terminus.

Figure 1. Structural comparison of SARS-CoV-2 S protein conformational states. (A) Surface diagram of SARS-CoV-2 homotrimeric structure in the unbound- closed and open conformations. (B) Structural illustration of S protein, including functional domains (NTD, N-terminal domain; RBD, receptor-binding domain; CTD2, C-terminal domain 2; CTD, C-terminal domain 3; and proteolytic cleavage sites (S1/S2, S2’). (C) S trimer with one RBD in the open conformation and (D) RBD-ACE2 complex shown as a cartoon. (E) Superposed structures depicting the conformational changes between the unbound-open (left) to the ACE2-bound state.  (Meirson et al, 2020)

 

 Deciphering the spike picture above:

A/ Shows the spike in an open and closed form. The RBD means Receptor Binding Domain. That is the key spot that sticks to the ACE2 receptor. Obviously we don’t want that to happen. The “key” that clamps onto our cells is a way to open the door.

B/ Shows the genetic map. One spike is made of three repeats of this code string. The RBD is on the first part of the coding string (which the researchers call S1). Looking at picture D, we see that the N terminal end starts near the virus membrane then reaches out along the spike to the important RBD. Then the string folds back on itself so that the C terminal ends up close to the starting point.  The middle of the string sticks out on spike.

C/ One of the spike sections hinges open.

D/ The skeleton of the long string molecules, plus the ACE2 molecule the spike sticks too. Everything in biology is done in strings — that’s how they are read from the code.

E/ Some pretty tricky engineering changes happen as the spike bites the ACE2 receptor.

 The spike proteins are quite different in the different coronaviruses, but there are a few common sections and some people have antibodies to parts on what is called the C-terminal. The question that matters — are these T-Cells that recognise this part of the spike useful in preventing a bad disease. Do they neutralize the virus, or just clog up our antibody tests?

Here’s another image below, a bit like the one above.  The skinny part of the spike is connected to the virus. The fat part is seeking out your ACE2 cells and wants to clamp on them. The two orange parts are probably the most important targets of antibodies.

N terminal, C Terminal, SARS CoV2, graphic, spike, Covid.

N terminal, C Terminal, SARS CoV2, graphic, spike, Covid.  Rahman et al

 

 The big questions

Can T-cells protect us from a bad Covid infection? Are they the reason about 45% of people appear not to get any symptoms at all? But if these T cells are useful why do so many medical workers catch Covid? Why are the ranges of T cell responses here so wide? There is the puzzle that children suffer worse colds, yet get better protection from Covid, though have at least as much virus in their noses and throats.

Will people with reinfections of Covid shed less virus than the first time?

 

Keep reading  →

8.8 out of 10 based on 52 ratings

Tuesday Open Thread

8.1 out of 10 based on 10 ratings

Caravans of airships riding jetstreams for freight?

The low carbon idea is a frivolous fashion, but could airships take some freight from container ships? Seems unlikely but there are visions here of giant caravans of airships lifting into jetstreams and travelling perpetually eastwards. And there are already models competing for start up funds.

Airships use a lot less fuel than jets do, but a lot more helium, which is a point that gets a mention, but not much of an answer.

How airships could provide the future of green transport

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Telegraph

A Boeing 747 requires at least 70 tonnes of aviation fuel to cross the Atlantic. Mr Handley says his ARH 50 model has the same cargo payload but needs just five tonnes of fuel for the same journey, yet can still reach 300 km/h at high altitude.

Airships can land anywhere there is a flat space — they don’t need the runways and airports. They can get closer to their destination. Even landing on a river.

An academic paper from the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis In Austria proposes using the Jet Stream to transport cargo on transcontinental routes without any need for power beyond the initial lift and descent. The cargo ships would float on high winds above 40,000 feet at an average speed of 160 km/h, displacing fleets of container shipping at sea. The study claims that they would cut fuel use by 96pc.

The circular flow would always be from West to East – Shanghai to Los Angeles, New York to London, or Frankfurt to Mumbai – rotating in a perennial circuit. It would take eight days to cross half the world by the northern Jet Stream, and seven days by the southern route, beating maritime shipping on time as well as emissions.

These unmanned super-Hindenburgs controlled by artificial intelligence could be over a mile long, spectral airships passing far overhead in caravans along regulated bands near the troposphere, emitting no sound or CO2.

Read it all at The Telegraph

Is there enough helium in the world to sustain a big airship industry?

We know a low carbon fantasy (with subsidies) can support an uncompetitive industry for a long time.  But do airships make sense without the subsidy?

8.9 out of 10 based on 46 ratings

Australian academics working for the CCP on the side…?

Some Australian researchers visiting China turned out to be effectively Chinese researchers funded by Australians.

What does it mean to be an Australian citizen paid by Australian taxpayers if it’s “OK” to take $150,000 extra from the CCP, plus benefits for the wife and kids, and in some cases also keep that a secret from the Uni in Australia that they work for? How about having a cloned research project in China studying the same high tech topics and producing patents owned by the Chinese government? The “Thousand Talents Plan” has been described by FBI director Christopher Wray as “economic espionage”.  It includes military technology, drone automation, AI, biotech, and many high tech areas. To put a fine point on it, some of these researchers are signing up to agreements to obey Chinese laws, and which require them to ask permission from the CCP before they disclose these arrangements to their Australian employers.

We might be tempted to call this all sort of names, but this sort of activity is apparently legal. It’s just a loophole being exploited.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s new report: Hunting the phoenix: The Chinese Communist Party’s search for technology and talent.

Remember Peter Ridd can be sacked for being uncollegial, but it appears that academics who may undermine national interests and give away intellectual property are acting within the law. Where were the Vice Chancellors? What were they thinking: Employment contracts stop Australian professors from speaking freely in Australia, but allow them to serve the CCP at our expense?

Looks like one civilization is fast asleep at the wheel.

Some things matter:

China exploits Australia’s lax laws to sign up researchers for secretive program

Sharri Markson, and Kylar Louisikian, The Australian

The Chinese government is ­actively recruiting leading Australian scientists for a secretive research program that offers lucrative salaries and perks but requires their inventions to be patented in China and obliges them to abide by Chinese law.

The Australian’s investigation has exposed that universities do not know: how many Thousand Talents Plan recipients are in their employ; if their academics are lodging patents in China; and whether their academics are being paid second salaries by affiliated Chinese universities.

Thank goodness for The Australian newspaper which has a large feature story today. Where was Our ABC?

Andrew Hastie M.P. has called for an “urgent” inquiry into the Thousand Talents Plan.

The Australian’s summary:

  • Under “Thousand Talents Plan” contracts, scientists legally sign away the rights to their intellectual property to China.
  • A standard clause in the contracts states China: “owns the copyrights of the works, inventions, patents and other intellectual properties produced by Party B (the academic) during the Contract period.”
  • Many contracts order the scientist to observe Chinese legal system, stating the academic: “shall observe relevant laws and regulations of the People’s Republic of China and shall not interfere in China’s internal affairs.”
  • Australian academics are also warned about religious practices, with contracts often stating: “Party B shall respect China’s religious policies, and shall not conduct any religious activities incompatible with his/her status as a foreign expert.”
  • They are offered a lucrative second salary, upwards of $150,000 a year, with generous research funding.
  • Other perks include travel, tuition for their children and housing subsidies.
  • Some academics are given an entire new laboratory in a Chinese university and team of research staff to work for them.
  • They then have a “clone” team in China – often unbeknownst to their Australian employer.
  • The academic often makes numerous trips to China to conduct research.
  • The aim of the program is to ‘own’ the research conducted and paid for by western universities.

 

It works out pretty well for interested researchers:

Professor Yu specialises in drone automation and artificial intelligence, and has been working on an area of intense interest to the Chinese government: aerial warfare and co-ordinating thousands of unmanned aerial vehicles to co-operate in the air.

Chinese-language reports state he is part of Chinese government recruitment programs including the Qianjiang Scholar of Zhejiang Provincial Talents program and the Taishan Scholars Project, Shandong Province.

Despite being on full-time pay at Curtin [in Western Australia], where he receives a 60 per cent loading on a professor’s salary and his research institute has been funded to the tune of $4m, The Australian understands he has spent most of the year in China.

After The Australian contacted him and Curtin University, Professor Yu’s Hangzhou Dianzi profile became unavailable for public view. Curtin declined to answer specific questions about him, despite issuing a press release with great fanfare when it appointed him to the role of Optus Chair of Artificial Intelligence in May last year. …

Some in the US woke up to this late last year:

Jenny Leonard, Bloomberg, Dec 2019

Officials are concerned about spying and intellectual-property theft.

U.S. officials say TTP encourages economic espionage and theft of intellectual property, the issue at the heart of President Trump’s trade war with China.

Was any of this a secret?

Hardly. Until last September, China published the names of recruits on an official website. That all ended when a Chinese American engineer (and TTP participant) working for General Electric Co. was arrested for allegedly stealing tech secrets from the company.

That’s a lot of patent applications:

China patent applications, Graph.

Patent applications from China and the US. : Bloomberg

 

The CCP have been recruiting scientists all over the world:

Ben Packham in The Australian

Chinese Communist Party uses ‘talent stations’ to lure scientists: report

The Chinese Communist Party has at least 57 talent recruitment “stations” in Australia to lure the top scientists to work for Beijing on Xi Jinping’s goal of global dominance in critical technologies, a new report says.

The ASPI report says an estimated 1000 Australian scientists are believed to have been recruited to participate in its overseas talent plans, with many working on technologies that can be harnessed by the Chinese military.

China’s talent program recruiters are paid up to $40,000 for each scientist they recruit, plus annual operating costs, the report by China analyst Alex Joske says.

They are part of a web of more than 600 such stations located in technologically advanced countries.

In the highest profile example of alleged misconduct by a Chinese talent plan scientist, Harvard Professor Charles Lieber, a nanotechnologist with no Chinese heritage, was arrested earlier this year for allegedly failing to disclose a US$50,000 monthly salary from a Chinese university.

Notably, China doesn’t want to adopt many of our climate scientists, I can’t think why. But there are several that are claimed to be involved.

For example, Wenju Cai at CSIRO is named in many Chinese sites as being a part of the Thousand Talents Plan, though the CSIRO says this is not true.  He works at CSIRO in Climate and marine science,  and officially also at the Qingdao National Marine Laboratory in China. That lab has 3,000 researchers and some of them are involved in satellite mounted laser detection of submarines at depths of 500m. Professor Cai admits to being a part of the Aoshan Talent program, a different Chinese program which The Australian tells us can pay up to $200,000 a year with research funds of up to $1m, and includes help for some to buy a house if they sign up for the 6 year plan.  The Australian does not specifically claim any benefits in Professor Cai’s case.

There is also Huijun Zhao, Griffith University, director of the Centre for Clean Environment and Energy, which researches chemical and microbiological approaches to pollution. The Australian only says he receives a daily allowance for expenses when he is in China.

Also Dai Liming University of NSW, a specialist in carbon based, metalfree renewable energy technology.  Professor Andrew McMinn, Uni of Tas, who is a researcher of sea ice ecology and environmental change. His university knew about it.

How about Professor Zhaoyang (Joe) Dong, University of NSW, who is a specialist in power system planning and stability and is director of the UNSW Digital Grid Futures Institute. Professor Dong heads one of Australia’s largest energy research projects — the ARC Hub for Integrated Energy Storage. “As a consultant he also leads the development of the load models for Western Power Corporations daily usage in operations and planning of Western Australia;s transmission network. He further leads the gas and electricity network co-planning for the $12.6m CSIRO Future Grid Project.”

Then there is Professor Guoxiu Wang at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) who denies being a Thousand Talent recruit. He specialises in energy storage and batteries. UTS says that China is loosely referring to him being in the Thousand Talents program and it is merely a mark of respect, not that he is part of the official program. The Australian discovered his name was on 11 patent applications, but Professor Dong says he had no knowledge of 10 of those applications. He has asked for his name to be taken off them.

If there are weaknesses and vulnerabilities in Australian energy grids, China is possibly very well informed of them, and if we did discover an efficient battery we might end up buying them from China and paying for the royalties on their discovery too.

 * * *

Commenters please note: “The Australian is not suggesting the academics have acted inappropriately.” That goes for Jo Nova too, and I ask commenters to refrain from suggesting this behaviour is illegal.  It may be unethical, unAustralian, shortsighted, naive and selfish, but it is not illegal.  More fool us.

There are plenty of targets to blame for enabling this behaviour and allowing this to go on for years.

9.5 out of 10 based on 50 ratings

Megatons of Solar Panel trash coming to a dump near you soon…

Solar Power, not-so-sustainable?

Solar panels need a special kind of recycling that costs 4 to 8 times as much as the recycled bits and bobs are worth. And the first major generation of solar panels will hit their use-by date soon.Solar Panels, resting on a river of subsidies. Photo.

Solar Panels Are Starting to Die, Leaving Behind Toxic Trash

Maddie Stone, Wired

By 2050, the International Renewable Energy Agency projects that up to 78 million metric tons of solar panels will have reached the end of their life, and that the world will be generating about 6 million metric tons of new solar e-waste annually. While the latter number is a small fraction of the total e-waste humanity produces each year, standard electronics recycling methods don’t cut it for solar panels. Recovering the most valuable materials from one, including silver and silicon, requires bespoke recycling solutions.

The solar sleeper awakes:

Most solar manufacturers claim their panels will last for about 25 years, and the world didn’t start deploying solar widely until the early 2000s. As a result, a fairly small number of panels are being decommissioned today. PV Cycle, a nonprofit dedicated to solar panel take-back and recycling, collects several thousand tons of solar e-waste across the European Union each year…

In the EU the producers have to recycle the panels they make. Rules to deal with solar remnants are apparently in progress in Australia, India and Japan, but there are almost none in the USA.

At a typical e-waste facility, this high-tech sandwich will be treated crudely. Recyclers often take off the panel’s frame and its junction box to recover the aluminum and copper, then shred the rest of the module, including the glass, polymers, and silicon cells, which get coated in a silver electrode and soldered using tin and lead. (Because the vast majority of that mixture by weight is glass, the resultant product is considered an impure, crushed glass.) Tao and his colleagues estimate that a recycler taking apart a standard 60-cell silicon panel can get about $3 for the recovered aluminum, copper, and glass. Vanderhoof, meanwhile, says that the cost of recycling that panel in the US is between $12 and $25—after transportation costs, which “oftentimes equal the cost to recycle.” At the same time, in states that allow it, it typically costs less than a dollar to dump a solar panel in a solid-waste landfill.

Second-hand solar panels are being sent to the third world. Makes a cheaper form of landfill…

h/t Enoch R

9.6 out of 10 based on 66 ratings