JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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The Greens will not be happy. The push for pointless decarbonization inexorably leads to nuclear power. The UK is not only about to sign deals for 16 small nuclear reactors, they are shortlisting sites for a fusion plant. It’s another unintended consequence the Greens did not see coming.
Jim Pickard and Natalie Thomas, Financial Times
U.K. ministers will put nuclear power at the heart of Britain’s strategy to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050 in government documents expected as early as next week, the Financial Times reported.
Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng is to unveil an overarching “Net Zero Strategy” paper as soon as Monday, along with a “Heat and Building Strategy” and a Treasury assessment of the cost of reaching the 2050 goal, the report said.
The main strategy will have a heavy focus on Britain’s nuclear power program. Prime Minister Boris Johnson was expected to give the go-ahead to the documents on Friday, according to the report.
The catch, consumers will have to pay a levy years before they get the electricity:
The creation of a “regulated asset base” model will be key to delivering future large atomic-power stations. Under the plan, households will be charged for the cost of a plant via an energy levy long before it begins generating electricity, the report said.
The nuclear levy is still a “Green Fee” or a “carbon tax”. But at least it won’t leave the country facing an energy crisis every time the wind slows. The UK still has plenty of shale gas to be fracked if only they’d let themselves use it.
Half of Australians already support nuclear power
A recent Essential poll shows that without any public debate at all, 50% of voters already support nuclear power. When the undecideds (18%) hear that there are 450 nuclear plants around the world, the number of supporters can only grow.
Australia will “go Nuclear” too if the Green Blob pushes us to adopt the witchcraft Net Zero goal that uses power plants as “weather changing” machines.
The thing slowing nuclear power in Australia was that coal power was so much cheaper. There is an opening here for one of the big parties to pull a nuclear rabbit out of their hats. The Coalition may lose the coal territory seats of Queensland and the coming election, especially given how unpopular they are in WA too. The Australian Workers Union now backs nukes. Imagine if the Labor Party planned for nuclear power which would allow them to offset the emissions from an extension of coal stations. The Labor Party would suddenly look pragmatic, differentiate itself from The Greens, and the Liberals would be left holding the “Green Hydrogen” and Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro fantasy bag that no one believes in.
One third of the Greens might even vote Labor because they support nukes.
Support for nuclear energy in Australia
 Essential Poll https://essentialvision.com.au/support-for-nuclear-energy-in-australia
9.8 out of 10 based on 62 ratings
It’s an interesting moment in US history. Most Australians may not know what “Let’s Go Brandon” means. Our major news outlets haven’t yet mentioned this cultural phenomenon. It’s being censored.
In the US, The People are not happy, and they’re finding new ways to protest. Traditional protests by the Unmentionables are being banned, or sabotaged by violent infiltrators and ignored by the media. It’s become dangerous to walk the streets and carry placards. A few fake protestors wearing horns can capture all the media glory — and the media is happy to use them to falsely define a largely Christian middle and working class phenomenon as “domestic terrorists”. So a movement has sprung up spontaneously at stadiums of thousands of people. How many Australians are even aware that mass chants of “F*** Joe Biden” are happening at football games in Utah, Oklahoma, Mississippi and New Jersey? These are crude mass declarations of rebellion. It’s being called “a movement” and it’s spreading. Individuals can’t be punished or silenced, and while it’s a desperately pitiful national conversation, it makes a point. It’s gross disrespect for the Office of the President.
So in front of that incendiary mass rebellion, an NBC TV Interviewer was interviewing a NASCAR Driver called Brandon. Anyone with eyes and ears knew exactly what was happening in the background, but she tried to pass off the “F*** Joe Biden” chant as “Let’s Go Brandon”. It was a form of brazen but desperate media gaslighting, and the non-left have picked it up as a slogan against both Biden and the media. “Let’s go Brandon” is the epitome of fake news.
And as mysterious mentions of “Brandon” appear in social media, onlookers are being Red Pilled. Did 80 million Americans really vote for this most popular President ever, and is the media really telling us what’s going on?
Tucker explains the phenomenon:
…
Australians might also find it eye opening to know how many people in the US are walking away from their job over vaccine mandates.
Is that a nurse shortage you see? Are those storms over SouthWest Airlines?
T-shirts and Hats for sale already.
 Who wants a T-shirt?. Reap what you sow. Who started the gross disrespect for the Office of the President and using sport for politics? Not conservatives.
Glenn Reynolds:
[The “F*** Joe Biden chants] seems to be happening all over. It’s amusing to see Democrats respond by demanding respect for the office, and the separation of politics and sport. Too late guys. Enjoy the new rules you made.
When a democracy surrounds the elected representatives with barbed wire, and the media denies the people a voice, they find another way.
People who haven’t seen the F*** chants could watch Russia Today.
9.7 out of 10 based on 91 ratings
 Edible crab like the one used in the study. Jean-Pol Grandmont Wiki It’s a Nightmare on Crab Street
Crabs are being drawn to high electromagnetic (EMF) fields around undersea cables and getting trapped there for hours, “mesmerized”.
They are not just immobilized, in lab tests it screws up their blood chemistry and circadian rhythm too.
Nature-lovers might wonder what other marine life is also being impacted? What if the magnetic fields are playing havoc with migrating fish and turtles too? It might be handy to find that out before we build bigger taller towers offshore with bigger stronger cables.
Where is the Green outcry, or the Save-the-crabs campaign? Perhaps some kinds of pollution are OK “for the greater good”?
These are not some esoteric rare crustaceans, by the way, but common dinner crabs — the ones food chains and fisheries depend on.
If these crabs were victims of coal plants the headlines would be a catastrophe.
Underwater power cables are ‘mesmerizing’ crabs around Scotland
In a new study, researchers found brown crabs ‘freeze’ when they come too close to the electromagnetic fields generated by these cables. This disturbing behavior may negatively affect the marine creature’s migration habits, among other things.
For their new study, researchers at Heriot-Watt University studied nearly 60 crabs at the St Abbs Marine Station in Scotland and found that the high level of electromagnetism coming from the subsea cables is affecting the blood cells of the crabs, which could make them more susceptible to bacterial infections. And that’s not all.
“This doesn’t sound like a problem”? The journalist feels they have to explain why this might not be so good to have mass unemployed crabs sitting around soaking in the milliGauss?
Alastair Lyndon, a researcher from Heriot-Watt University and one of the study’s authors, said that crabs are attracted to the electromagnetic field and just sit still when exposed to it. While this doesn’t sound like a problem, if crabs aren’t moving they aren’t looking for foraging for food or a mate. The researchers also found the magnetic fields are causing changes in the animals’ sugar metabolism.
Isn’t renewable energy supposed to “protect the environment”?
From IFL Science
Keep reading →
9.3 out of 10 based on 71 ratings
8.7 out of 10 based on 13 ratings
Everyone knows what they are supposed to say, but one in four Americans won’t even say it.
The CEI has done a new poll of 1,200 regular US voters. Supposedly 71% of Americans claim they are very or somewhat concerned, but it’s just a fashion statement for half of them.
 Click to enlarge. When it comes to spending their own money to change the global climate, they don’t want to.
Americans can’t be too worried about “climate change” if they don’t want to fork out more cash on gasoline and electricity to save the world. Fossil fuels might be destroying life on Earth, but 4 out of 10 Americans don’t want to spend an extra red cent on gas and electricity. That’s annually — a whole year of power and fuel bills.
And remember, it’s only a theoretical question. Anyone can say they’ll spend a lot.
 Click to enlarge. When will politicians realize that they are being gamed by all the inadequate meaningless surveys that only ask “do you believe”? Those surveys are apparently not designed to find out what the punters think about climate change. For all the world, their main purpose looks like being a tool to frighten and fool politicians. And if that’s the case, their vagueness is a feature, not a flaw.
Americans say “give me my gas guzzler”
Only a quarter of people in the US want to spend more swapping the old car for an EV.
…
Americans don’t want to be told what kind of car they should buy. Except for the baffling 1 in 7 people who want the government to choose their car for them.
Perhaps they’re the ones who already own an EV, and what they really want are the government to force EV’s on everyone else.
….
 Click to enlarge. Sensibly, while people don’t want to pay to change the climate, more are willing to spend money to reduce the impacts of climate change. Presumably they are thinking of sea walls, trees and flood levees.
But even then, half of the population don’t want to spend more than $10 a month. It’s tiny.
 Click to enlarge. A more telling question would be “what do you spend to reduce the impacts of climate change”. That would reveal how much people are donating to green groups and weather changing charities. But the CEI didn’t ask.
The Washington Times
h/t Marvin W
…..
REFERENCE
CEI National Poll, October 2021, https://cei.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/CEI-National-Poll-Final.pdf
9.9 out of 10 based on 67 ratings
7.9 out of 10 based on 15 ratings
 James Cook University won a Pyrrhic victory at the High Court today. By spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars (how many exactly?), all they have proven is that we can’t trust any research done by that university.
Even if the professors there are being sincere and honest, we will never know whether they are only telling us what their Vice Chancellor, Supreme Ruler Sandra Harding, wants them to say. The government should not be funding this sort of institution. It serves its administration, not the Australian taxpayer.
Two years ago, JCU had already spent $600,000 to make sure all their staff know they can’t criticize the uni.
Peter Ridd was JCU’s best asset until they sacked him. He helped expose manipulated photos of reef fish by a JCU researcher, Oona Lönnstedt, who had already been caught fabricating data in Sweden. Yet JCU “investigated” and sacked Ridd faster than it investigated her suspicious lionfish shots.
Every JCU employee’s work is tainted by this. We will never know what any JCU researcher really thinks, or which results were dropped in the bin, no matter what they say, because we know employees of JCU will be afraid to report bad behaviour, fraud, or sloppy work from other staff. Staff admitted they were too afraid to use their uni emails. Their quality assurance is terminally flawed. This makes the entire institution useless as a research body. JCU protects reputations, not the reef. The government could fix this entire embarrassing debacle in five minutes. They just need to withhold JCU funding ’til the uni gets new management and demonstrate unequivocally that they support free speech.
 Peter Ridd’s book. Click to order. VC Sandra Harding’s judgement is so poor that JCU’s reputation will not recover until she is replaced. She who earnt was paid $975,000 in 2018 has done far more damage to the university’s reputation than anything Peter Ridd ever did or said. He was the one trying to maintain scientific standards and trying to protect the reef. Weak science, fraud, and false news hurt the environment because real problems get ignored while fashionable-but-fake-ones vacuum up the funds.
The Big Win was free speech laws a year ago
Despite the loss in the High Court today, let’s not forget that the judgement was about Peter Ridd’s original contract. The biggest win from his battle is that the government finally, belatedly, did something a year ago to define academic freedom. This decision doesn’t affect that, though academics, especially at JCU won’t feel inclined to test it. So JCU’s case and the High Court decision will help the cheats, frauds, and fashionable academics to relax.
October 2020: As Education Minister Dan Tehan told Sky News:
“[James Cook University] wouldn’t have been able to prosecute Peter Ridd if these laws had of been in place.”
“By defining academic freedom in legislation, Education Minister Dan Tehan is ensuring the dismissal of an academic like Peter Ridd can never happen again,” said Mr Rozner.
This Act is the Higher Education Support Amendment (Freedom of Speech) Act 2020.
Academic freedom means the following:
(a) the freedom of academic staff to teach, discuss, and research and to disseminate and publish the results of their research;
(b) the freedom of academic staff and students to engage in intellectual inquiry, to express their opinions and beliefs, and to contribute to public debate, in relation to their subjects of study and research;
(c) the freedom of academic staff and students to express their opinions in relation to the higher education provider in which they work or are enrolled;
(d) the freedom of academic staff to participate in professional or representative academic bodies;
(e) the freedom of students to participate in student societies and associations;
(f) the autonomy of the higher education provider in relation to the choice of academic courses and offerings, the ways in which they are taught and the choices of research activities and the ways in which they are conducted.
Though was free speech enshrined in law, or did the Government just make it a “moral code”?
Keep reading →
9.4 out of 10 based on 97 ratings
 The Gösgen Nuclear Power Plant by Pareixk Federi The global energy crisis is squeezing the green religion to its logical endpoint. As long as we pretend “carbon” is pollution, the only way out of the maze for badgered politicians is nuclear power. The renewables industry may have thought that beating us over the head with climate propaganda was going to make renewables dominant and profitable, but it may just push everyone into nukes instead.
With the gas price crisis, wind drought, and coal shortage, suddenly everyone is talking about nuclear power:
Michael Shellenberger
National leaders around the world are announcing big plans to return to nuclear energy now that the cost of natural gas, coal, and petroleum are spiking, and weather-dependent renewables are failing to deliver.
France was reducing nukes from 70% to 50% of its total power generation fleet, but not any more:
“The number one objective is to have innovative small-scale nuclear reactors in France by 2030 along with better waste management,” said French President Emmanuel Macron.
“But the mood has now changed,” the paper writes today. “Macron said on Tuesday he would begin investing in new nuclear projects ‘very quickly.’” — Financial Times.
Public support for nuclear energy rose 17 percentage points in France. “I do not want our country to lose its energy sovereignty under the pretext of an absurd energy transition copied from Germany,” said a conservative French presidential candidate seeking to defeat Macron.
Finland has joined France, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic in lobbying the European Union to categorize nuclear power as sustainable.
Yesterday, Japan’s new prime minister, Fumio Kishida, defended his pro-nuclear policies in Parliament. Kishida came to power on a pro-nuclear platform.
Half of Australia wants nuclear power
The AUKUS “nuclear subs” announcement was a bolt from the blue after decades of Nuclear-free energy debates. But a recent poll shows Australians are rapidly growing to like the idea. Of course, electricity prices have rocketed since 2015 too, adding to the shift.
In 2015, forty percent of Australians supported it, and forty percent opposed it, and one hundred percent of politicians avoided discussing it. Now suddenly, we’ve bought a couple of nuclear subs and in a blink 50% support nuclear power and only 30% oppose it.
Just like that, and with no discussion, suddenly nuclear power has potential. Imagine what the numbers would be if people actually discussed it?
The bottom line is that the West had better hurry.
China is the Fastest growing Nuclear Power in the world
As Jo Nova said in May:
China is poised to be the largest global nuclear power by 2030, overtaking the USA in the next nine years. In the last twenty years, China has increased its fleet of nuclear power reactors from three to 49, with 17 more plants under construction. That means it will soon surpass France which has 57 reactors. At the rate the USA is closing plants, China may hit the No 1 spot faster than expected.
China has a nuclear Belt and Road project too, Argentina, Iran, Pakistan:
Future projects are also being developed in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and South America
Brown coal is still the cheapest kind of electricity there is, and we are mad not to use it, especially because it’s only $30 a MWh and feeds plants and we have a 300 year supply sitting there in the ground.
 Rise of Nuclear Power in China. Graph.
9.8 out of 10 based on 82 ratings
9.2 out of 10 based on 13 ratings
On the one hand, our bureaucrats are telling us coal power in Australia might be finished by 2035.
 .. On the other hand, in the rest of the world, coal prices are hitting records, China and India are suffering rolling power cuts. In China, floods have shut about 10% of the 682 coal mines in the Shanxi Province. China is so desperate for coal that a few days ago, it finally unloaded the Australian coal it held hostage in the 80 bulk carrier ships that have languished offshore for months in a petty trade war. Pune, in India is in a coal shortage crisis, forced to shut down 13 power plants because they’ve run out of coal. They’re asking people to be “sparing” between 6 and 10 both morning and night. India has 135 coal fired plants in total, and fully 70 of them are currently working with less than four days coal supply.
Even with the efforts, China could face a coal supply gap of 30-million to 40-million tonnes in the fourth quarter, Citic Securities analysts said in an October 8 report. A shortage of the fuel could cut industrial power use by 10% to 15% in November and December, which would potentially translate into a 30% slowdown in activity in the most energy-intensive sectors like steel, chemicals and cement-making, according to UBS Group AG.
The State Council said electricity prices will be allowed to rise by as much as 20% against a benchmark, compared with a current cap of 10%.
Meanwhile BHP is suddenly renegotiating the coal assets it was giving away a bit too cheaply.
Kerry Schott’s declaration of the death of coal is a brave announcement given that Australia is still 70% coal powered. In 14 years it would take a big shift to get it to down 50%, much less zero. But it’s especially heroic given what’s happening in the rest of the world.
It’s almost like Kerry Scott had the press release on her desk since the last COP ready to be released “on schedule” for this one.
The Daily Mail
It’s just a blip.
9.9 out of 10 based on 88 ratings
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