Behold, the Victorian Govt are proving yet again that Soviet-style electricity management can crush lives, hopes and wallets. The free market is never as cruel and destructive as one run on “good intentions” or the desire to win virtue-signaling fashion parades.
The invisible hand of the market was replaced with Daniel Andrews whimsy. This might work if he was smarter than the collective brains of 5 million people. Apparently Andrews assumes serfs people don’t understand the true value of solar panels and the benefits of creating jobs in China, so he has mandated glorious subsidies in the hope of getting nice weather one day, and the desperate punters took them up in droves. The industry boomed. But now they’ve temporarily halted the free gifts, orders have disappeared as the free market returns to accurately valuing solar installations. So the workers are being sacked. The rebates will come back again in July, so business-owners somehow need to get a different income stream for two months, survive the turmoil, and then the golden gravy will run again.
As per usual ABC policy, no free market voices were harmed, interviewed or asked to provide comment:
An award-winning Victorian solar company has laid off just over half of its staff after the Victorian Government placed a temporary freeze on a solar panel rebate program.
The $1.3 billion solar homes package started last August and has been so popular that the rebates for this financial year have been fully subscribed.
Since the freeze on new applications came into effect, the work for solar installation companies like Sky Energy Systems of Melbourne has dried up.
The business’s directors, Sam Kent and Ross Howard, said they had no choice but to cut staff when customers started cancelling their orders.
Twenty-five people have been told to finish up work on Friday and another 15 staff could go in two weeks’ time.
Live by government handouts, die by government handouts. Oh the pain:
“Having no sales is like having no oxygen. You can’t breathe. There’s no business so it’s devastating,” Mr Kent said.
What’s a company that “follows a rebate” — another labor voter
As long as businesses are allowed to earn a living entirely dependent on government largess they are a form of “public servant”, a wing of big government with all the entitlement that doesn’t deserve and none of the obligations:
No sales, no business
A petition has been launched on the change.org website calling on the Victorian Government to reconsider the temporary rebate halt.
“Because consumers know that the rebate will return on July 1, they will be holding off making a purchase,” the petition said.
“For these small businesses to survive 15 weeks without sales is unlikely.”
Mr Kent said many other solar companies are based interstate, and use subcontractors in Victoria.
“They’ll disappear interstate until the rebates comeback. They are companies that are basically rebate-based so they follow the rebates,” Mr Kent said.
Making money in Australia increasingly means being a better lobbyist for government masters, not being a better producer of things Australians need or want.
A major new “nail in coffin” study shows the more renewables we force onto the market the more expensive electricity gets.
Everyday someone tells us renewables are cheap, but these estimates come from flawed “LCOE” method (at best) supposedly the lifetime cost, but without many indirect costs. Granted, it’s hard to figure out what the bill for renewable energy is. But what really matters to every man and his dog, is the cost effect on the whole system, not a cherry-slice comparison of a few sunny-windy hours a day which doesn’t take into account the effect that renewable energy has on the rest of the 24/7 electricity grid.
Greenstone, McDowell and Nath have analysed all 29 states in the US where there are laws demanding a certain percentage of energy be renewable. On average a 4% increase in renewables led to a price rise of 17% and the impost was wildly high compared to any remotely sensible cost-benefit analysis. Renewables are the car insurance bill that costs 3 times as much as your car. Any serious environmentalist would hate renewables.
The cost to consumers has been staggeringly high: “All in all, seven years after passage, consumers in the 29 states had paid $125.2 billion more for electricity than they would have in the absence of the policy,” they write.
Greenstone et al analyze the RPS (Renewable Portfolio Standards) in the US. This is like the RET in Australia and the Renewables Obligation in the UK. Like any market destroying rule, it ensures the system finds a more expensive way to supply electricity.
The low estimates ignore the cost of building and running a gas station that just sits around a a spare wheel, randomly earning no money some of the time. They ignore the vast land area wasted and the long transmission lines. One study by Edison Electric in 2011 estimated that 65% of all planned transmission lines in the US were primarily going to be built for renewables. In the US that’s another $26 billion cost tossed on the invisible renewables BBQ.*
Greenstone et al look at retail prices state by state in the US as these RPS requirements came into action and followed them for the next 7 years.
They found three things: A 4% increase in renewables led to a price rise of 17% and the impost was wildly high compared to any remotely sensible cost-benefit analysis
1. Electricity prices rise after the RPS rules come in. After 7 years the prices are 11% higher, and after 12 years they are 17% higher.
2. The addition of renewables does reduce the “carbon intensity” of the system. But the cost is exorbitant. Across the 29 states and after 7 years it costs somewhere from $130 – $460 per ton of CO2 “saved”. In Obama’s reign the social cost of carbon was wildly overestimated at around $50 per ton, so the intermittent energy generators are orders of magnitude more expensive than doing nothing. Compare that to the Australian Dutch auction process called Direct Action (by Tony Abbott) which reduced carbon for under $14 a ton. The relentless push to use wind and solar to save the world looks like a late-night infomercial for the renewables industry. Even if the IPCC were right, and if there was a global carbon market to reduce CO2, no one would want to use renewable energy to do it. It’s too expensive.
3. That many of the states already had renewables (I’m guessing hydro) so the targets were already partly met. So the net increases in renewables were smaller than the gross target suggests. These targets were very small, averaging around 2% extra renewables after 7 years and 4% by 12 years.
Clearly, it doesn’t take many intermittent renewables to wreck the grid.
Renewable total and net requirements per state, USA. Plus the Australian RET target (red). | Click to enlarge.
A better headline would be: Renewable targets make electricity so expensive miners are forced to switch to renewables.
The money quote:
Emily Alford is a principal consultant at Oakley Greenwood … [she] told The Weekend Australian that solar generation cost about $200 a megawatt hour five years ago, and had dropped to about $70-$80 now.
The $70-$80 estimate is artificially low. Unreliable power makes the other baseload generators more expensive, adding $30/MWh to gas generators for example. Because the back up generators have to be there, not earning money while solar feeds in, they have to charge more to recoup those costs in a shorter working period. Doh. So add that cost to solar, not the gas.
Compare the real costs and weep:
I’ll repost those graphs from a year ago from the AER report on the closure of Hazelwood:. These are the price setting winning bids by different fuel types. It’s a better way to understand the real cost differences.
The following graphs show the percentage of time power stations located in various regions of the NEM were involved in setting the 5 minute dispatch price in Victoria (vertical bars) and the average price of the offered capacity which was involved in setting that price. –– Appendix C, AER, 2018
Bayswater coal plant used to be able to win bids at $40/MWh (or it used to have to bid that low to win). Thanks to the RET (Renewable Energy Target) destroying some of the cheapest power, that’s not happening any more. Costs are up and competition is down.
As I keep saying: Solar power reduces fuel costs, but makes capital, staff, maintenance, and land costs more expensive.
Solar looks “cheap” when compared to expensive alternatives. Nobody mention coal:
Ms Alford says an initial push to justify installation of renewable energy generation on the grounds of pure carbon abatement, as part of the miner’s social licence to operate, has been overtaken by the cost benefits of adding solar or wind generation to the mix.
“We’ve got to a stage now with renewables where the commercial benefit outweighs any social licence consideration. Renewable generation is becoming a commercial no-brainer from a cost and economic point of view,” Ms Alford said. “If you’re burning diesel you’re burning cash, and on the east coast if you’re burning gas you’re burning cash.”
Solar power is only a “no brainer” economic choice because the electricity market has been brainlessly wrecked by the Renewable Energy Target and a host of other subsidies.
All journalists need to be reminded of the invisible elephant in the room. As long as they are not comparing a generator to brown coal, they aren’t looking at all the options.
Is this the tipping point for David Attenborough’s reputation?
Will anyone see David Attenborough the same way again after the Netflix debacle that is “Climate Change: The Facts”?
The Attenborough subspecies may present itself as an impartial scientist but under scrutiny this is revealed to be a chameleon-like illusion that hides the real intent, which appears to be to garner prizes, funds, fame and better dinner invitations. Evolutionarily, Attenborough may be seeking to increase his own status (and resources for kin) at the expense of taxpayers, donors and hapless walruses.
David Attenborough, homo propagandis, wears the guise of environmental scientist while spruiking pagan fears, cherry picked evidence and lying by omission.
The facts turn out to be half-truths that fit the pattern of exploiting primal fears to create deep psychological spin. He says “we don’t know” but then shows the opposite — associating every kind of bad weather, fire, and storm with man-made emissions even though data shows that these were worse in the past or are caused by other factors. In probably his lowest career point, rumours are spreading that not only did thriving polar bears cause the falling walrus episode rather than coal power stations, but his crew may have killed walruses unwittingly by being there. Paul Homewood argues the team itself scared the walruses by flying drones near the herd and spooking them, or blocking their exit path. Attenborough’s team deny this, but the “trust me” answer doesn’t sit well with past behavior. They didn’t mention the presence of polar bears in the documentary, nor past walrus-on-the-rocks deaths, they blamed it all (improbably) on a lack of sea ice — as if walruses climb high cliffs to escape the open sea, and they won’t say when and where it was filmed. In short, there’s no trust left in the Attenborough-trust-bucket.
Let’s pause for one minute’s silence to mark the death of a once great reputation.
[World Tribune] There was an incident in Russia in 2017 where polar bears were reported to have spooked a herd of walruses, causing them to fall off a cliff to their deaths. Crockford believes this is the event that was filmed by the documentary crew.
“The film crew have steadfastly refused to reveal precisely where and when they filmed the walrus deaths shown in this film in relation to the walrus deaths initiated by polar bears reported by The Siberian Times in the fall of 2017,” Crockford said.
The film’s message was so bleak it could have been made by Extinction Rebellion, the eco-anarchist protest group which has brought Central London to a standstill.
Watching it did fill me with horror, but not at the threat from global warming. It was at the way Sir David and the BBC presented a picture of the near future which was so much more frightening than is justified.
…it is a grotesque travesty of the truth to claim that ‘nothing’ has been done: for example, since 1990, UK emissions have fallen by 43 per cent, according to the Government’s Committee on Climate Change. Not only that, Government statistics say 56 per cent of our electricity came from low carbon sources in 2018, our last coal-fired power station will close in six years and the Government has pledged to ‘decarbonise’ electricity by 2030.
Above all, the Climate Change Act requires Britain to reduce its 1990 carbon emissions by no less than 80 per cent by the year 2050…
Rose explains how (among other propaganda) the documentary claims that Orangutans were being evicted from forests by land clearing to make soap and biscuits. Attenborough somehow forgets to mention that Borneo’s forests are also being razed to make palm oil as a biofuel for cars. What’s killing orangutans is not climate change but the climate change industry.
What I won’t let go is this growing practice … of trying to link every adverse weather event to climate change. In this, Attenborough’s documentary was a masterclass.
If you are going to present a film called Climate Change: the Facts the very least you should be doing is, well, presenting the facts. Well here they are, in two of the areas which made up such a hefty part of the film: wildfires and hurricanes. Are wildfires increasing?
Michael Mann says wildfires are tripling. Clark points out the US EPA data says “not”:
…the US Environment Protection Agency (EPA) [data] shows no upwards trend in the number of wildfires in the US over the past 30 years. Take another way of measuring wildfires – the acreage burned, in figure two of this data – and there is an upwards trend since the 1980s.
It is little wonder that terrified kids are skipping school to protest against climate change. Never mind climate change denial, a worse problem is the constant exaggeration of the subject.
Read more at both The Daily Mail and The Spectator.
It is the earliest recorded snow eventin a calendar year in the state’s history. Statistically, we can tell how anomalous this is by the behaviour of the local wildlife – seen snowboarding in shorts on the driveway in Albany. (Even going across the road). It’s possible this is the longest snowboard ride in the state’s history too. Though technically it is hail-boarding.
For foreign readers, WA (Western Aust) doesn’t have a snow season. Last regular snow was probably circa 20,000BC.
The ABC reports:
BOM forecaster Matt Boterhoven said snow was an extremely rare occurrence in April.
“It’s exceptional. We’ve only recorded once, in the last 100 years, snow as early as this on top of the Stirling Ranges,” he said.
“It’s related to a very strong cold air mass moving over the south-west of the state, so when conditions get below freezing and there’s precipitation, snow can form on top of Stirling Ranges.”
Mr Boterhoven predicted further snow flurries were possible into Saturday morning — something which came to pass overnight.
We all know this is weather not climate. We also know that if this was the earliest heatwave of the season it would be “proof of climate change” on the ABC.
Bluff Knoll, where the snow is, is a five hour drive from Perth. In WA snow is so rare we have “snow chasers”. Reportedly “dozens” of people are headed there to see the snow. Dozens!
Chocolate is produced from the beans that grow on cocoa trees. These plants can only grow in a fairly narrow range of conditions, which makes them vulnerable to changes in the environment.
Unfortunately, climate change is threatening some of these key growing regions. According to the IPCC, rising temperatures and a relative reduction in rainfall could make areas like West Africa less suitable for cocoa production in the future. Changes to the climate are also pushing cocoa-growing regions to higher altitudes in some parts of the world, which can make some crops unsustainable.
We can see just how hard cocoa crops have been hit by record heat and 500 billion tons of carbon.
Yet another big win against carbon taxes: Abbott, Trump, Ford and now Kenney
Provinces of Canada.
The first pledge was to get rid of the carbon tax. The victory was a scorching 63 to 24 seats, or 55% to 32%.
Alberta is a conservative province of Canada with 4 million people. It’s wealthy from oil, gas and agriculture. (It’s not that different to Queensland and WA.). Jason Kenney is on a mission to get the province back from environmental zealots: fergoodnesssake, he even vowed to set up a ‘War Room’ against energy activists.
The greens were the main target and the people said “Yes”.
…Kenney defeated center-left incumbent Rachel Notley, 55, whose New Democratic Party snapped four decades of conservative rule in 2015. His UCP won 63 seats in the provincial legislature, against 24 for Notley’s NDP,
He’s vowed to get stalled pipelines built, scrap the province’s carbon tax, and create a “war room” to hit back at anti-oil-sands campaigners. He also pledged to cut corporate taxes and balance the province’s books in his first term.
The United Conservative Party’s win will mark a sharp turn in the province’s environmental policy. The NDP introduced a number of stringent climate measures in 2015 that included the province’s first ever economy-wide carbon tax. Kenney has promised to repeal that tax as one of his first policy moves after taking power.
In a nutshell, if the Labor Party wins (and that’s looking likely) Australia will pay $25b, maybe $35b to foreigners for paper certificates that claim to have reduced a tiny amount of beneficial gas. This is hard earned money leaving the country so that our foreign minister and PM can sit at better tables at UN Gala Dinners. The paper certificates have a long history of fraud, are often based on good intentions of Chinese or Russian businessman saying they will put out more CO2 but can stop if we pay up. It’s so stupid sometimes people even create pollution just to get paid to clean it up. They’re unauditable, worthless, and based on scientificy assertions that are also unaudited and worthless. It’s a double layered scam.
Welcome to pagan Australia, obedient fool serf for namecalling rulers of Europe, giant banks, and multinational corporations.
This is mature policy debate in the lucky country.
Richard Ferguson, The Australian
Bill Shorten has angrily dismissed claims his carbon reduction policy could cost business $25 billion as “nonsense” and labelled Scott Morrison a “climate-denying cave dweller.”
But wait — why’s that number wrong?
“The $25 billion figure is a lie. It’s using… You can make any number work for you if you pump in the assumptions you want to.”
Mr Scare Campaign tells people not to run scare campaigns
Today’s comic relief: Mr Shorten says we’re all going to die from floods and droughts but warns that Scott Morrison is running a scare campaign:
.@billshortenmp on climate change policy: You and I know this is a fundamentally dishonest debate … You all recognise a scare campaign when you see one.
In a flash of insight, or possibly rank capitulation, Facebook has announced last week that it will “fight misinformation” with censorship. Seems Facebook thinks Facebook-users are too stupid to figure out the misinformation themselves. Besides, fighting misinformation with the truth is especially hard if the misinformation is true:
Facebook says it is rolling out a wide range of updates aimed at combating the spread of false and harmful information on the social media site – stepping up the company’s fight against misinformation and hate speech as it faces growing outside pressure.
And it’s not even transparent censorship but the the most weaselly hidden kind:
The updates will limit the visibility of links…
How does Facebook define misinformation? Wait til you hear this: Groupthink = truth?
…limit the visibility of links found to be significantly more prominent on Facebook than across the web as a whole, suggesting they may be clickbait or misleading.
So that pretty much rules out Facebook spreading the word of whistleblowers, rebels, new theories, suppressed ideas, oppressed people and anything controversial, interesting or not completely predictable. Facebook seems to want to transform itself into a mumsie discussion board of old news and approved memes with all the thrill of an in-flight safety lecture.
Thus Facebook will become a mirror of the permitted, official, authorized web. Expect their ratings to adjust accordingly.
Facebook’s VP of integrity (?) points out that ‘striking a balance between protecting people’s privacy and public safety is “something societies have been grappling for centuries.”’ But that’s the point. It took centuries but we worked out the worst kind of lies are the ones told by the rulers, and the only antidote to those is free speech.
In an information war the deepest pockets are in the Treasury’s pants.
Facebook’s solution is some kind of automated groupthink algorithm (like that won’t be gamed) and teams of tens of thousands of moderators with “at least 80 hours training” who are paid “above industry standard”.
The story was published on April 7 in The Australian.
Doctors are at it again trying to scare people about “climate change”. But all around the world, in every study in every city humans die more from the cold than they do from the heat (and by six to 20 times more). That’s thousands of lives and it happens every single year. Don’t these doctors know anything?
Attributable fraction of deaths: Heat, cold and temperature variability together resulted in 42,414 deaths during the study period, accounting for about 6.0% of all deaths. Most of attributable deaths were due to cold (61.4%), and noticeably, contribution from temperature variability [TV] (28.0%) was greater than that from heat (10.6%). Cheng et al.
The awful truth that incompetent self-serving doctors forgot to mention was that cooler room temperatures allow viruses to survive longer, which is just one of many reasons the Flu Season is always worse in winter.
Break my heart, if “climate change” is real the only thing the docs have to worry about is whether they’ll earn less money in winter.
Here’s the real news: The health system needs to be protected from climate-change-doctors. We can’t afford to have medico’s who don’t understand the scientific process, who think “models” provide real evidence, or who will use their positions of trust to falsely scare people for the sake of their own financial gain or political and religious infatuation. We can’t afford to have doctors who don’t understand what the error bars mean on rare events or that correlation is not causation. Who would put their life in the hands of gullible fools who follow groupthink or who get their medical knowledge from watching the ABC?
At the very least, we expect these docs would do a basic competent literature search on the topics they profess to lecture us on. Even a freshman doctor straight out of med school should know deaths are higher in winter.
That said, there are many skeptical doctors around. Many of my top supporters are GP’s and Specialists.
What incompetent doctors are saying in the media:
“With heatwaves more people will die and get sick from things like respiratory illnesses, strokes and things like that, as well as dehydration.”
Higher temperatures also provide vectors for disease, especially mosquito-bourne illnesses, with the insects travelling further south than usual.
That was on top of more frequent natural disasters putting a strain on the health system, he said.
“With heatwaves more people will die and get sick from things like respiratory illnesses, strokes and things like that, as well as dehydration.”
Shame we didn’t have more competent journalists to ask them real questions.
Brilliant. There is still some free speech in Australia, as long as you are willing to risk your career, 12 months out of action and a huge legal case. Peter Ridd wins on all counts.
Presumably James Cook will have to reinstate him, and he is now free to talk about the failure of replication in science and how our institutions may not be trusted. How many taxpayer dollars were fritzed defending the indefensible? Will Ridd get compensation? Will JCU staff get punished or sacked for their war against science?
Thanks to Peter for fighting on when so many would have given up, and thanks to everyone who helped fund the case!
UPDATE: In reply, the Provost of James Cook Uni says Ridd was never gagged or silenced, nor sacked for his scientific views.Which would be great if it were so. But there’s a pattern here — how many skeptical scientists do they employ? Is that zero? We all know they went to great lengths to blackball, evict, and practically erase skeptical Prof Bob Carter too. If there are any skeptical scientists left at JCU, they are probably too afraid to speak out. Which is rather the point. Without some mea culpa, and a change of management, or some encouragement for skeptics to speak we have to assume that all research from JCU is tainted — we don’t know what the researchers won’t say or which results they daren’t mention.We don’t know what experiments they won’t dare do.
My lawyers have told me that the judge handed down his decision and we seem to have won on all counts.
It all happened very quickly and we had no warning , and because I live almost a thousand miles from the court, I was not able to be there. I have still not seen the written judgement and will update you all when I have that information.
Needless to say, I have to thank all 2500 of you, and all the bloggers, and the IPA and my legal team who donated much of their time free for this success. But mostly I want to thank my dearest Cheryl, who quite by chance has been my bestest friend for exactly 40 years today. It just shows what a team effort can achieve.
The next chapter of this saga must now be written by the JCU Council which is the governing body of JCU. What will they do about the VC and SDVC who were responsible for bringing the university into disrepute, not just in North Queensland, but also around the world. JCU crushed dissent, crushed academic freedom and tried to crush my spirit with their appalling behaviour. They only failed because I had your support. But if the JCU council does not act, they will be complicit in this disgraceful episode.
Attention must now focus on the JCU council.
I will update you shortly when I have more information, but for now I certainly have a spring in my step.
“The Court rules that the 17 findings made by the University, the two speech directions, the five confidentiality directions, the no satire direction, the censure and the final censure given by the University and the termination of employment of Professor Ridd by the University were all unlawful,” Judge Vasta said.
Solar installations are rapidly accelerating in Australia, surging in the last quarter by an extraordinary 482MW. This is partly due to rapidly rising electricity costs, but in the last quarter, especially amplified by an extra $2250 subsidy in Victoria which adds to current subsidies like the SRES (RET) which already cover around half the cost of installation.
This is obviously a market destroying practice but will be hailed as evidence that solar power is “surging” due to “falling prices” and “increasing demand”. More fake news.
In the land of the Renewable-Crash-Test-Dummy we’re hitting the death spiral. Every installation costs non-solar owners more (with the tally at $200pa and rising fast) and there are fewer non-solar owners left to pay. Obviously, the whole market has to be changed to ensure that solar owners pay a fair share of networking and backup costs.
If solar power was cheap, useful or competitive, it wouldn’t need the subsidies. Instead, the nation keeps adding more useless infrastructure and wondering why the price of electricity is rising.
Solar Panels are essentially useless most hours of the day, most days of the year, and sometimes the entire Eastern Seaboard of solar panels are only working at half speed even at midday. When they are working together they force the grid voltage as high as 253 Volts, making other equipment prone to breaking and even more costly to run. The dangerous voltages triggers some solar panels to cut themselves off, right at the peak time of day when they are actually working. Solar electricity is so unnecessary that when an eclipse wiped out California’s massive solar input, the price of electricity got cheaper.
It’s a disaster: More plants, more crops, more flowers!
Between 1995 and 2011, fewer freeze-free days meant 11 to 27 days added to pollen season for most of the United States, research shows. The Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America, which does an annual survey of allergy season, noticed that it’s been growing each year.
It’s a spurious correlation: quick, build a wind farm!
The number of allergy sufferers has grown, research shows. One in 10 Americans struggled with hay fever in 1970, and 3 in 10 did by 2000. Asthma, which can be made worse by exposure to pollen, has become more common too, with higher rates among kids, low-income households and African Americans.
Warming cycles have always happened, and when times are good, plants have to ramp up the competition — it’s in their genes. Allergy cycles, we can bet, probably didn’t happen so often to paleolithic people who didn’t have access to Ventolin-trees or Epipen-plants.
Stating the bleeding obvious about climate science earns headlines
Tony Abbott merely states what no real scientist could argue with. Things are not quite as settled in climate science as people say. For this tiny deviation from the permitted line he is isolated and depicted in a headline as “questioning science” when he’s really just questioning propaganda lines.
The editors of both AAP and The Australian could have chosen a different headline: Abbott declares “we only have one planet”. But in headline-world, which is often the only line people will read, Abbott is made out to be saying something risky. Imagine, I am Spartacus, if every single conservative politician said “of course — Climate science isn’t perfect.” But almost none of them have the balls.
Tony Abbott has questioned the “so-called settled” science about climate change, a month after dropping his view that Australia should pull out of the Paris climate agreement.
The former prime minister insisted he was a realist when asked about his position on climate change during his election campaign launch in Manly on Friday.
“The so-called settled science is not quite as settled as people say, and that’s my position,” he told reporters.
“Nevertheless we have only got one planet; we should do what we reasonably can to rest lightly upon it.”
Despite this questioning, Mr Abbott said he does believe climate change happens and that mankind makes a contribution.
“We should do what we reasonably can to reduce emissions,” he said.
“What we shouldn’t do though, is turn our economy upside down in what turns out to be a futile green gesture.”
It’s hard to believe with statements so banal and ordinary are worth a mention, let alone a headline. But such is the paralyzing grip of fashion and religion in Australia.
There are crooks in every field, but some fields are ripe for the picking.
If you wanted to run a scam would you a/ try to fool hard-nosed money changers in a mature industry that makes a real product or b/ pick the latest touchy feely fashionable trope and offer their fans, who are not good with cause, effect or numbers, a chance to feel great and get rich too?
From 2005 to 2009 a few US graduates straight out of college promised to turn biochar into energy and save the world as well. They raised $54m, gave $17m to the early investors and then promised 484% returns to later investors. The Clinton Foundation loved them, but they never made even a kilo of biochar. Not long after that the US SEC figured the scam out and shut them down. That was 2009. Then it only took 10 years to get one sentenced to 30 months jail.
[Amanda] Knorr co-founded a company called Mantria Corp., which with the help of a slick-talking Colorado “wealth advisor” raised millions for a supposed clean energy product called “biochar.”Their pitch about producing biochar, however, turned out to be completely baked, according to prosecutors, and eventually proved to be a giant Ponzi scheme.
Knorr was also sentenced to five years’ parole and ordered to pay $54 million in restitution. She so far has paid $10,000 through wage garnishments, according to prosecutors.
The Clinton Global Initiative, run by Bill and Hillary Clinton, link to Mantria on its website, ambiguously praise the “committment” and value it at “$600,000”?” Did they fund it, or are we just meant to think they did? There are many details and plans of how carbon sequestration would enrich the soils of Africa and cool the world on that site, but there’s only one progress report: This commitment was reported unfulfilled.
A brief break in transmission now for the first photograph of a black hole, looking pretty much exactly as anyone would expect it to. The photons caught in this image traveled for hundreds of years at the speed of light. Lots of “hundreds” — burning through space for some 55 million years.
The numbers melt neurons: The supermassive black hole called M87 is 6.5 billion times bigger than our Sun. It’s bigger than the orbit of Neptune (which is circling 30 times further out from the Sun than we are). This star is 10 billion kilometers across.
Geoffrey Crew, a research scientist at Haystack Observatory commented that “With the M87 black hole being so massive, an orbiting planet would go around it within a week and be traveling at close to the speed of light.”
The black heart of Messier 87, or M87, a galaxy within the Virgo galaxy cluster, 55 million light years from Earth.
It takes a telescope roughly as big as The Earth to catch an image 20 micro-arcseconds across. Eight radio telescopes were combined across four continents and lined up on a few special days when they all had clear weather together. Each telescope took a petabyte of data. Some one million gigabytes. It was so much data that it was quicker to fly the discs around the world in planes rather than try to upload it.
These photons started their journey during the Eocene on Earth, so Antarctica was covered in subtropical rainforest and the biggest mammals were about the size of pet cats.
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