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By Jo Nova
Not only is the new RSV vaccine not safe and effective, early results suggest it makes the disease worse
Bear in mind, they are experimenting on the youngest of the young: babies from 5 months to 2 years of age, and we are dealing with a disease that 90% of babies will catch in their first two years. Some of these babies will get a severe life threatening disease, but as I reported last month, the ones who are deficient in vitamin D are 5 to 10 times more likely to end up in intensive care. We can already do a lot to protect these babies, more cheaply and with far less risk than testing immature and complex therapies.
Maryanne Demasi reports that things are looking bad for the new RSV vaccine:
The latest trial data demonstrates the dangerous speed of innovation.
This week, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) disclosed that vaccinated children in the trial experienced higher rates of severe RSV compared to those in the placebo group.
The data was striking: 12.5% of vaccinated children developed severe or very severe RSV disease, compared to just 5% in the placebo group.
Moreover, among those who developed symptomatic RSV, 26.3% of vaccinated participants progressed to severe illness, sharply contrasting with the 8.3% in the placebo group.
The trials were stopped in July after five babies aged 5 to 8 months developed severe cases of RSV. The FDA has since put the experiment on hold.
With uncanny timing, Moderna’s massive new vaccine factory opened in Victoria two weeks ago. It will “have the capacity to produce up to 100 million vaccine doses each year for respiratory diseases including influenza, Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV), and COVID-19.” As Demasi points out the Australian Federal government signed a $2 billion agreement, committing to the purchase of Moderna’s locally produced vaccines for at least a decade. (Damn.)
History rhymes — in the long, unfortunate quest for vaccine development for RSV
 A classic antibody diagram Back in 1966, researchers tried killing the virus and then injecting it into twenty-five children. The results were disastrous — about 80% of the children caught RSV regardless of the vaccination, and worse, 80% who caught the illness went on to have a severe form of the disease. Sadly, two children died. People were still publishing papers on why that happened forty years later.
Years later researchers figured out that the formalin used to kill the virus chemically changed the shape of the key markers, meaning that the children developed immunity to the dead form of the virus which was different from the live form. We trained their bodies to make antibodies that were not at all effective. This was not just a major drain on resources (all those expensive proteins get used to make the wrong weapons), but worse, these antibodies helped the virus gain entry to cells. It was the first instance of vaccine induced antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE).
The message here is that there are far better cheaper ways of dealing with infections than with rapid vaccine development. Vaccines can be very useful, but their are a hundred ways they can go wrong, and changes to our immune system are potentially permanent or at least long term. If we weren’t embedded in a deep dark cav, dripping with patent and profit incentives we would spend a few dollars fixing natural deficiencies, get a little bit of sunlight, and then seek antivirals that we’ve safety tested on millions of people for thirty years.
The FDA will meet urgently to discuss the situation.
__________________________
PS: In great news today Dr William Bay won his case today in the Supreme Court against the Australian medical police who suspended him two years ago for speaking out against vaccination — at one point he yelled at a conference “”stop forcing these vaccines on the people of Australia who are getting killed by them”.”
The regulators argued they had to stop him damaging confidence in vaccines etc, but Justice Bradley said “None of these measures extended the board’s regulatory role to include protection of government and regulatory agencies from political criticism.”
We hope this is truly a free speech win, rather than a technical victory over some fine print. Doctor Mark Hobart (who has also been suspended) seems to think it is — “The house of cards is now falling down. Doctors can now tell the truth. This will be unstoppable. This will spread throughout the world and create a revolution. A revolution of truth.”
Me, I want a free market. I want to be able to visit any doctor I want. I want their honest opinion, not their “permitted one”.
h/t Broadie, Another Ian, Peter C, Ross.
Image by NIAID
Antibody image: Mjeltsch
9.8 out of 10 based on 113 ratings
9.5 out of 10 based on 11 ratings
 … By Jo Nova
Here in crazy Australia, we have too many renewables, but both sides of politics still want more
Here in the Renewable Crash Test Dummy Land, both sides of politics think we should use our national grid for weather control which is good for President Xi, but bad for Australians. The Opposition is pointing out that the 82% renewable purity target is bonkers, and we should add nuclear plants, while the Labor party are hell-bent on running the world’s first experiment in wind and solar with not much hydro, no nuclear power and no extension cords to a international market that can rescue us. Literally no nation on Earth is this recklessly ambitious.
With an election coming, and domestic electricity prices approaching escape velocity, both sides are sparring with economic reports. The government claims it can do a national wind and solar miracle grid for just $122 billion. But Frontier Economics put the cost at $594 billion. The opposition, meanwhile, has finally revealed the first serious costing of their big new nuclear power plan is $331 billion (which is $260 billion cheaper), but it’s still $300 billion we don’t really have.
Awkwardly for Labor, both latter cost comparisons come from the same economists — Frontier Economics. And as Simon Benson points out in The Australian, the Energy Minister might like to discredit them, but his own department uses the same team for energy modelling, so he can’t.
Thus in news that will surprise no engineer, a fifty year old technology will be about half the cost of a wild national experiment with technology so new, half of it hasn’t even been developed yet. The real surprise is that the difference is not bigger, and perhaps the reason for that is that the Coalition plan still has a lot of renewables.
Can’t we just have cheap electricity, and skip the “weather control” fantasy?
Sadly for Australians, no economists, academics, or over-paid bureaucrats, are looking for the cheapest option, which would be coal and gas — or exactly what we had 30 years ago. The invisible problem here is that the Coalition’s plan is 38% nuclear and 53% crazy. (It’s 53% renewables, or 53% unreliable, however you want to label it).
Australia is currently 36% renewable, and it’s already too much
Australia is well beyond the sweet spot of renewable energy, the more we add now, the worse it gets. We already have so much roof-top solar power we are savagely curtailing most of our solar grid scale plants, even in early Spring.
One warm week and the grid is on the verge of blackouts. We’re paying industries to shut down so the grid can survive a normal summer day.
The small Alice Springs microgrid became too unstable with little more than 13% solar power. A cloud rolled over and the whole town blacked out. Since that scare in 2019, other perfectly good solar plants have sat idle for 4 years in the Northern Territory because the people running their grid are afraid their presence will crash the Darwin grid too.
And after the Sydney near miss, our own national grid manager has belatedly realized solar power threatens our largest cities and now wants emergency powers to switch off individual panels spread across 4 million homes. And the South Australians want to force two diesel plants to return to service.
Meanwhile the surge of negative prices at midday is frightening off investors. Jeff Dimery, the head of Alinta Energy, basically said electricity has to get a lot more expensive before an investor will even think of building something to replace coal in Australia.
“At $58, I can’t build anything to meaningfully prepare for coal to come out of the system. I can’t build more solar, because we already have a glut of solar in the middle of the day, which is sending spot prices deeply negative. If I was just looking at the forward price, I would also be very wary about building new wind, because the margins would be slim to non-existent, and any curtailment – which is a growing problem – could be disastrous.”“
When will one of our 27 government agencies find out what Australians really want to know — what grid would get us the cheapest reliable electricity?
Let’s have a plebiscite on whether we should be paying to “fix” the weather?
9.9 out of 10 based on 99 ratings
8.8 out of 10 based on 19 ratings
By Jo Nova
If you have the feeling that our universities are working for the enemy, you might be right
China is a developing nation, too poor to cut carbon emissions themselves, but somehow they can find the money to help the richest nation in the world reduce their fossil fuel use.
The Washington Free Beacon found a climate non-profit called Energy Foundation China was run by former Chinese Communist Party officials. Tax forms show they were sending money to US universities and other left-wing groups to help them research and promote things like “a clean energy future” and “low carbon cities”. Money is ending up at places like Harvard, and UCLA, as well as nonprofits, like the International Council on Clean Transportation, and Natural Resources Defense Council.
China, it appears, is working hard to cut carbon emissions, in other people’s countries
Thomas Catenacci, Washington Free Post
Energy Foundation China, which operates primarily from Beijing, promotes energy policies designed to weaken US, watchdogs warn
“The Energy Foundation’s direct ties to the CCP are incredibly alarming, as they’ve spent millions to push for radical climate initiatives that favor China and harm American energy production,” Caitlin Sutherland, the executive director of ethics watchdog Americans for Public Trust, told the Free Beacon.
“Their dark money has been funneled to groups that want to ban gas stoves and phase out fossil fuels,” she continued. “Next year, Congress should continue their investigation to determine the extent to which China is undermining American energy dominance through this group.”
It couldn’t possibly be a cynical strategy to trick the soft, self absorbed West and gain industrial power. Noooooo…
Just ask “Who benefits?”
If the West chooses low-density, random energy in a fairy quest to get perfect weather, which nation stands to gain the most from our barking mad obsession?
As I’ve said before: the nation that is the coal furnace of the world, has gained our factories, our IP, our supply lines, and our dependence. They control the rare earths, and are the largest manufacturers of wind and solar power in the world. They are flooding the market with EVs.
They would be crazy if they didn’t support the leftist charity groups and pay off our politicians to cripple our grid.
That’s $12 million in the last five years:
The Energy Foundation has given nearly $12 million for climate initiatives in the United States since 2020, according to a Free Beacon analysis.
If only we taught our children to think for themselves so they wouldn’t fall for these ridiculous stories
“The entanglement of this foundation with former Chinese Communist Party government officials, and its active engagement of U.S. academic institutions and other NGOs, is gravely troubling when it comes to our national security, foreign policy and energy policy, and how they may be compromised or undermined,” said former United States ambassador Joseph Cella, a cofounder of the Michigan-China Economic and Security Review Group.
“This seems to be a quasi-subnational incursion and influence operation by the CCP as they use our open system and existing tax law for leverage to gain an advantage economically, politically or in the realm of societal debates and public opinion,” he continued.
Tangled is the web: At the start this group was a US funded operation
In 1991 the Energy Foundation was started as a collaboration of Pew Charitable Trusts, the Rockefeller family, and the MacArthur Foundation, so very much a US based non-profit. In 1999, the Packard Foundation helped to set up an offspring called Energy Foundation China, with an office in Beijing. But it seems that in the years since, the Chinese subsidiary may have quietly taken control, because after the official split in 2019, it retained the original tax file identification number and the San Francisco address, and the official name “Energy Foundation” but most of the staff are Chinese and the main operations and grant making activity are done in China.
After the split the other half of the organization became the “United States Energy Foundation”, and it has revenue of about $180 million. As “pass through” organisations they can take anonymous donations and send them on to politically active groups. The lines get very blurry about who influences what…
The activist left call Trump a dictator.
Think how they will feel when they find out they are tools of an actual dictator.
Photo of President Xi from APEC 2013
Thanks to Marc Morano of Climate Depot and Willie Soon
9.8 out of 10 based on 97 ratings
8.7 out of 10 based on 13 ratings
By Jo Nova
““The green transition in Denmark has stalled right now”
Denmark was the posterchild for the wind industry. It has the largest share of wind power in its national grid, and is home to the industry giants, Vestas and Orstead — two of the world’s largest wind-manufacturers . Denmark is planning a large expansion in wind energy (or it was). But when the government offered up three areas of the North Sea that were described as “among the best in the world”, the deadline came and went last Thursday and not a single bid was received.
Wind energy is free and no one wants it…
This is a huge shift from the situation in 2021 when there were so many bids for one wind plant, it ended up being settled by a lottery.
By Sanne Wass and Will Mathis Bloomberg
High costs and power price risks made auction undesirable
The Danish Energy Agency didn’t receive a single offer by Thursday’s deadline in the tender to develop three offshore wind farms, it said in a statement. It will now initiate a dialog with the market to find out why.
Between the European Union and the UK, countries aim to have some 150 gigawatts of capacity by the end of the decade, more than quadruple today’s level. The failure of the Danish tender puts that goal further out of reach and similar struggles to attract new investment in neighboring Sweden show it’s not an isolated case.
“The green transition in Denmark has stalled right now,” Kristian Jensen, chief executive officer of industry group Green Power Denmark, said in a statement. “Too few wind turbines are being built both at sea and on land, and if that situation does not change, we will continue to depend on electricity from brown energy sources.”
One industry magazine is doing damage control, and blames the “Danish auction design”. But the key problem with their design apparently is that it doesn’t have billions of dollars of subsidies. The people of Denmark are not even paying for the grid connection…
So the free market is telling us that building wind towers in the ocean is a stupid way to make electricity.
Wind Europe
Denmark’s latest 3 GW offshore wind auction round ended without any bids. That’s a huge disappointment for Denmark and for Europe’s wider energy security and electrification efforts.
Why did the Danish auction fail to attract bidders?
The main reason for the Danish auction attracting less industry interest than similar offshore wind auctions in Poland, the Netherlands and the UK lies in the Danish auction design.
The Danish auction system does not foresee any form of state support or revenue stabilisation model – such as the Contracts for Difference (CfD) used in many other European countries. Instead offshore wind developers are asked to pay for the right to build a wind farm. Denmark’s uncapped negative bidding creates an unhealthy race to the bottom and unnecessarily increases the upfront costs for offshore wind developers. On top of that Denmark does not pay for the grid connection to the offshore wind farms, instead developers have to take on these extra costs.
The European Union want to pave the oceans with wind turbines. At the end of last year they had 20GW of offshore wind, but they want that to grow to 60GW in just the next five years, and reach 300 GW by 2050.
If that’s going to happen, it will take monster subsidies to conquer the sea of apathy.
h/t Greg M
9.8 out of 10 based on 99 ratings
8.7 out of 10 based on 18 ratings
By Jo Nova
No wonder climate models can’t predict rainfall
” Until now, isoprene’s ability to form new [cloud seeding] particles has been considered negligible.”
Broad leaf tees emit up to 600 million metric tons of isoprene each year, but no one thought it mattered much. For obvious reasons it is made near the ground, and it’s quite reactive and doesn’t last long. During daylight it’s destroyed within hours. So the experts didn’t think the isoprene could help seed clouds in the upper atmosphere. But there is still quite a lot of isoprene left in a rainforest at night, and tropical storms suck it up “like a vacuum cleaner” and pump it up and spray it out some 8 to 15 kilometers above the trees. Then powerful winds can take these molecules thousands of kilometers away.
When the sun rises, hydroxyl radicals start reacting with the isoprene again, but the reactions are quite different in the cold upper troposphere. And lightning may have left some nitrous oxides floating around too. This combination ends up making a lot of the seed particles that generate clouds in the tropics. It’s almost like the forests want to create more rain…
To put some perspective on this, isoprene is the most abundant non-methane hydrocarbon emitted into the atmosphere.
As Jasper Kirkby at CERN says — this is big:
Isoprene represents a vast source of biogenic particles in both the present-day and pre-industrial atmospheres that is currently missing in atmospheric chemistry and climate models.”
Until now, isoprene’s ability to form new particles has been considered negligible.
But climate models have also been estimating aerosols in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, and they didn’t realize trees made so much aerosol than they thought. This is so big, it may change the sacred “climate sensitivity” of the whole Earth:
“This new source of biogenic particles in the upper troposphere may impact estimates of Earth’s climate sensitivity, since it implies that more aerosol particles were produced in the pristine pre-industrial atmosphere than previously thought,” adds Kirkby. “However, until our findings have been evaluated in global climate models, it’s not possible to quantify the effect.”
Another possibility is that if forests of broadleaf trees turn out to be seriously helpful at seeding clouds, presumably that means the last few centuries of deforestation might have reduced cloud cover on Earth, which would have allowed much more sunlight in to heat the planet. If that’s true, it’s just one more climate forcing the modelers didn’t know about. It’s one more thing that warmed the planet which we blamed on carbon dioxide, but were wrong about. And it’s yet another feedback. More CO2 makes more forest grow, which may seed more clouds.
As usual, even though this study shows that climate models are missing yet another major factor, it’s always good news as they say: “The researchers, therefore, expect that their findings will contribute to improving climate models”. Hardly anyone says “The models were wrong, and the experts had no idea”.
Who hasn’t enjoyed the aromatic scent in the air when walking through the woods on a summer’s day? Partly responsible for this typical smell are terpenes, a group of substances found in tree resins and essential oils. The primary and most abundant molecule is isoprene. Plants worldwide are estimated to release 500 to 600 million tons of isoprene into the surrounding atmosphere each year, accounting for about half the total emissions of gaseous organic compounds from plants.
Thunderstorms act like vacuum cleaners
… tropical thunderstorms … brew over the rainforest at night. They pull the isoprene up like a vacuum cleaner and transport it to an altitude of between 8 and 15 kilometers. As soon as the sun rises, hydroxyl radicals form, which react with the isoprene. But at the extremely low temperatures that prevail at these high altitudes, the rainforest molecules are transformed into compounds different from those near the ground. They bind with nitrogen oxides produced by lightning during the thunderstorm. Many of these molecules can then cluster to form aerosol particles of just a few nanometers. These particles, in turn, grow over time and then serve as condensation nuclei for water vapor—they thus play an important role in cloud formation in the tropics.
People at CERN were involved in testing the reactions at minus 30°C and minus 50°C
“High concentrations of aerosol particles have been observed high over the Amazon rainforest for the past twenty years, but their source has remained a puzzle until now,” says CLOUD spokesperson Jasper Kirkby. “Our latest study shows that the source is isoprene emitted by the rainforest and lofted in deep convective clouds to high altitudes, where it is oxidised to form highly condensable vapours.
In addition, the team found that isoprene oxidation products drive rapid growth of particles to sizes at which they can seed clouds and influence the climate – a behaviour that persists in the presence of nitrogen oxides produced by lightning at upper-tropospheric concentrations. After continued growth and descent to lower altitudes, these particles may provide a globally important source for seeding shallow continental and marine clouds, which influence Earth’s radiative balance (the amount of incoming solar radiation compared to outgoing longwave radiation).
This story reminds me of the big paper ten years ago Do forests create the wind that brings the rain?
“Rather than assuming that forests grow where the rain falls, it would be more a case of rain falling where forests grow. “
Forests can create their own rain,
Which climate models did not ascertain,
As gaseous molecules of isoprene,
Feed the rainforest cloud machine,
A hydrocarbon that is non-methane.
–Ruairi
REFERENCE
Curtius, J., Heinritzi, M., Beck, L.J. et al. Isoprene nitrates drive new particle formation in Amazon’s upper troposphere. Nature 636, 124–130 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08192-4
Shen, J., Russell, D.M., DeVivo, J. et al. New particle formation from isoprene under upper-tropospheric conditions. Nature 636, 115–123 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08196-0
Photo by Tom Barrett on Unsplash
9.8 out of 10 based on 118 ratings
8.2 out of 10 based on 21 ratings
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8 out of 10 based on 25 ratings
By Jo Nova
The Australian electricity grid is not-fit-for-purpose. And failure is being normalized.
Last Wednesday, during the near-miss of a blackout in Sydney, the AEMO spent $3,558,000 on “demand reduction” which means they paid productive industries to stop working to save the grid from a blackout. Translated: poor electricity users in New South Wales paid $3.5 million to businesses to do nothing, because the grid didn’t have enough energy, and the people in charge really didn’t want any embarrassing blackouts so close to an election.
So renewables are wonderful, clean and cheap but your workers, assets and capital will sometimes need to sit around and do nothing so we can stop some storms in the 22nd century.
In political spin, planned blackouts can also be called “Virtual Power Plants”
“Demand Management” is a smarmy marketing word for a lot of little Blackouts. In the lexicon of a failing grid, all the bad-words get tortured into iced doughnuts — if your company has agreed to be ready to shut down at a moment’s notice on a warm day, that’s not being on “Standby to Close”, instead your business is a ““pre-activated” extra reserve.”
In Renewable-World-Psychosis bad is good: your smelter used to make aluminum, but now you can sell “electricity use reduction” as well, and the AEMO (the grid manager in Australia) will call you a “Virtual Power Plant” too. Australian companies can now sell their own blackouts back to the grid. Neat eh?
Indeed, you and I are probably thinking about this all wrong — like electricity is a net good, and a dead smelter is a waste of space.
John Rolfe, Daily Telegraph
… AEMO CEO Daniel Westerman told an energy planning and regulation Senate committee hearing that the market operator spent $3,557,700 on reducing demand to increase emergency reserves in NSW on Wednesday November 27 as a supply shortage took shape.
Mr Westerman indicated AEMO did not end up having to reduce Wednesday’s demand by as much as first expected. But, in anticipation of a greater shortfall than eventuated, AEMO had “pre-activated” extra reserves.
Mr Westerman said the purchased electricity use reduction came from “virtual power plants”, which were an “aggregation of … smaller demand.”
For what it’s worth, which is not much, the large aluminium smelter Tomago, was not forced to shut down, but it was “pre-activated” and ready to close. Apparently, even though the cool weather change came through, they shut down that afternoon anyway, or perhaps they just gave up. Who could blame them?
Australians are not just paying companies to do nothing, they pay them to be ready to do nothing too. There’s a part payment for the pre-activated companies, even if they don’t have to switch off. It reflects the hassle of running an industrial outfit with your hand on the power lever, and your brain in the state of uncertainty. And that’s the thing isn’t it — no company is going to be more productive “on standby” than it is running full tilt. It’s a stupid way to run a nation.
Australia is on the road to becoming a “pre-activated nation”
We’re a first world country ready to be the third world at a moment’s notice.
Pretty soon the whole country will be paying itself to be on standby, or selling our own blackouts back to the grid, what then, eh? The Stone Age?
Your air conditioner can be a Virtual Power Plant too
John Rolfe in the Daily Telegraph found a Monash Uni professor who was cheerfully telling the world Australians will need to give up control of their air-conditioners so their AEMO masters can turn them down on hot days when they need them the most.
Dr Dargaville is an expert in “large-scale energy system transition optimisation” — a thing that’s never happened once, anywhere in the world. So it’s like being a specialist in Yetis except with less credibility. There’s a possibility that a real Yeti exists, but we know for a fact, there aren’t any optimal large-scale renewables grids. There aren’t even any optimal small scale grids, just different scales of blackouts.
Dr Dargaville … said authorities would have to expand their options to deal with more frequent instances of surprisingly high demand and low supply.
Options were likely to include the installation of “widgets” on aircons that allow third parties to engage “economy mode” to reduce power use in peak periods.
When asked in a Newspoll: “Should authorities be allowed to take control of power usage in your household?”, naturally, 94% said “No”. But we know that when they are offered a $400 cashback for a “smart” but government-controlled air conditioner, they may buy the plan. It’s already happening in Queensland. It’s only supposed to be a few days a year, but last summer, the grid officials reached into their homes and turned off their air conditioners six times in two months.
Dr Dargaville speaks for The Blob — You will own nothing (and be hot and bothered):
…consumers should not be alarmed by such moves, he said. “There will be a period of adjustment but it will be become normalised,” Dr Dargaville told [The Daily Telegraph]
Naturally, it’s not their fault — they blame climate change, and fossil fuels. The chutzpah here is astounding.
If the energy system was less volatile you wouldn’t need to use it,” he added, but that was unrealistic given more extreme weather, reduced reliability of coal-fired power and more generation from variable sources such as wind and solar.
Obviously if we didn’t actively sabotage coal plants, the energy system wouldn’t be volatile.
Every part of this trend is a step in a dumb direction. We’re paying more for less in every single aspect. More people sit around being useless, or half useful, or distracted. More companies make fewer goods. And more government makes more government which is the worst thing of all…
Those who control the energy, control the people.
h/t David Maddison, Strop
9.8 out of 10 based on 117 ratings
Sorry about Thursday…
9.7 out of 10 based on 12 ratings
 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-03/bankers-to-start-including-counterfactuals-in-carbon-accounting By Jo Nova
What other industry gets paid for what they could have done, but didn’t?
The carbon market is the perfect scam-quasi-tax currency for our banker overlords. They were always trading reductions in an invisible gas, now they’re trading reductions from an imaginary increase that may never have occurred.
Carbon credits were always atmospheric nullities that “might theoretically change the weather”. Now they’re even less real…
It’s a nice gig if you can get it. This elastic game can expand to cover as much of the economy as feasible. The bankers payout is limited only by how much they can squeeze out of their political vassals. Homeowners will not get a “carbon credit” for turning a heater off that they might have left on, or for not-buying a second-hand Dodge Challenger Hellcat. This is a game only the uber rich money-changers can play. The Blob has effectively set up a secondary fiat currency in the world that has a Byzantine web of rules that they control but has no physical products for delivery.
As Steve Milloy says — Coming soon: Unending bank climate fraud
Bankers will soon be able to claim credit for emissions they say their financing has helped avoid, as the world’s largest voluntary carbon accounting framework for the finance industry works on broadening standards.
Under the approach, banks can assume a counterfactual scenario in which emissions remain elevated, and contrast that with the CO2 avoidance their loans or bonds enable, according to the Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials.
Note the galactic size:
PCAF’s proposed standards are part of a larger package of changes and additions that will result in at least 90% of assets under management globally being covered by the carbon accounting system.
Why stop at 90%? When will it end?
The idea came from the Monster Banker Cartel, so we know it will benefit the bankers:
The Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, the largest finance sector climate coalition, introduced the idea of a new metric last year to drive transition finance, calling it expected emissions reductions (EER). The basic principle is that finance firms compare the emissions associated with the entity or asset in a business-as-usual scenario with those achieved if that company implements a science-based transition plan, or if a polluting asset is eventually shut down. The so-called delta is the EER.
Of course, companies drop inefficient products in favor of better ones all the time, but now, they’ll be able to say they’ve reduced the emissions they expected to have, and thus earn some carbon credits that they can sell to some other sucker, or use to offset their charter jet flights to Azerbaijan.
This will work best for corporate behemoths who can afford to pay “climate lawyers” to fill in the forms, and “climate lobbyists” to bend all the rules to suit themselves. It’s another tool to make life harder for small businesses and customers but easier for the Big Guy.
Note there is another monster banker cartel called PCAF — in this case with assets of $92 Trillion.
PCAF was created by Dutch financial institutions during the 2015 Paris Climate summit to encourage banks and investors to play their part in delivering a transition to a low-carbon economy.
Since then, the number of financial institutions committed to or already applying its accounting methods has climbed to more than 550, with combined financial assets of $92.5 trillion, according to PCAF’s website.
It’s time for a monster round of Anti-Trust suits.
Thanks to Tom Nelson and @JunkScience
9.8 out of 10 based on 94 ratings
By Jo Nova
Going Green with Diesel
Back in February, South Australia was the Renewables Wonderland basking in the thrill of driving two diesel plants out of business. The remarkable transition had claimed two new fossil fuel scalps. But the farce of last week’s near blackout in Sydney must have scared the management in South Australia. Suddenly this week, the government announced it wants to change the rules and force those mothballed diesel plants back into action.
The Frankenstein economy fails (again)
The government created a monster — an artificial market that favoured random energy and drove dependable power out of business. So, not surprisingly, now they have to do emergency market surgery and spend even more money, to force Engie to reopen these uneconomic plants.
The fact that essential plants are “uneconomic” only shows what a Quasimodo market this is. If the rules favored the cheap reliable electricity (that customers want) instead of hobgoblin-electrons that change the future weather (maybe), no one would have to order Engie to restart the plants. They wouldn’t have gone out of business. Instead, a bunch of unreliable wind farms and fields of glass would never have been created. No one could afford to build them with their backup or their batteries or their 1,000 miles of wires.
Excuses, excuses
It’s not that the South Australian government has only just realized summer has arrived (unexpectedly in December), apparently it’s because the interconnector they’re building to NSW is 12 months behind schedule. Which might make sense, except it was not scheduled to finish until mid 2026 in any case:
Mr Koutsantonis has warned the forecast for the reliability of power supply in SA this summer – which shows a predicted shortfall of 200 megawatts — has been underestimated because the AEMO has not accounted for the delay in a new interconnector with New South Wales.
It [EnergyConnect] was due to be completed by July 2026 but is currently about 12 months behind schedule.
Somehow we’re supposed to believe the blackout risk is higher this summer because a high voltage line that dead-ends 900 km away should have reached a couple of hundred kilometers closer. Like that would help…
In the next breath the Energy Minister admitted that this is really about what happened in Sydney last week:
Mr Koutsantonis argued energy operators needed greater powers to bring back thermal generators “to address reliability risks arising during the peak demand periods expected from December 2024”.
Speaking on 5AA radio on Monday, Mr Koutsantonis said: “given what happened in New South Wales last week, when they had one 40 degree day and they were nearly short on power, and told people to turn their air conditioners off and not turn dishwashers on, if we rely on an interconnector to New South Wales and it’s hot across the entire national electricity market, we’re in trouble”.
The South Australian Energy Minister has just realized that even when the $2 billion dollar interconnector is finished, they don’t want to rely on our most populated state’s electricity grid, because it’s a debacle.
Is this the moment when the fantasy of saviour interconnectors came undone?
South Australia has walked the plank right out to 70% renewable energy, a feat only possible because of they are just 6% of a larger stable system. So far the baseload power in other states could keep the lights on in South Australia, and interstate homes and factories could soak up their excess solar and wind power. But every state can’t play the same game at the same time.
South Australia was the Show Pony for renewable energy, but it was an illusion based on reliable energy hidden in other states.
Now finally the Energy Minister of South Australia gets it:
“Every state should have sufficient capacity to look after itself first and not rely on other jurisdictions,” he said.
These two diesels plants are not large, but in South Australia every little bit of dependable energy matters. Engie, the French electricity giant owns the 75 megawatt (MW) Port Lincoln plant and the 63MW Snuggery plant that were closed in July this year.
Apparently they were mothballed after the Federal government got puritanical about their “capacity investment scheme” they ruled out fossil fuel generators. (Reneweconomy) But we didn’t need “capacity investment schemes” before we had renewable subsidies, and if we had a free market in “capacity” the diesel generators could still have saved the day. At this point, we’re up to second and third order screwiness in this market. There are bandaids on the bandaids and no end in sight.
h/t OldOzzie, Neville, David Cooyal in Oz
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By Jo Nova
Shh. The Renewable Crash Test Dummy Nation is at work.
We’re still subsidizing new solar panels even as we figure out how to shut down the excess panels we already have.
The body responsible for keeping the lights on in Australia’s biggest electricity grids wants emergency powers to switch off or throttle rooftop solar in every state to help cope with the daily flood of output from millions of systems.
It turns out those negative prices for electricity at midday are there for a reason. A firehose of electricity at lunchtime isn’t always a good thing. Negative prices are not a bargain, they’re the penalty a seller has to pay to get someone to take the toxic waste away, and the price signal was saying “Don’t Add More Solar”.
The amazing thing is that an institution with fifteen years of grid management didn’t see this coming fifteen years ago. Does night follow day? Is there any industry that runs better for only four hours a day rather than for 24?
The AEMO surely knew that without a Sea-of-Galilee type miracle in battery storage, the whole nation could not run on lunchtime generators. The AEMO also surely knew that our 50Hz stability comes from 500 ton turbines that spin 3,000 times a minute, and not from flat glass panels that make the wrong kind of electricity (the DC kind, not the AC). Yet here we are, 60 quarterly reports later, swamped with excess solar power to the point where we suddenly need to add remote switches to four million already-installed solar panels, so the guys in the the control rooms can stop them doing the one thing they are supposed to do at the time of day when they are best at doing it.
The disaster days are now Spring — when the sun is shining but people don’t need their air conditioners on, which begs the question of whether we just need to issue emergency announcements to turn on the dishwashers, pool pumps and ovens to save the grid. You know, “Pyrolytic Ovens save the day, people”.
In any case, wasn’t climate change going to turn spring into summer? Won’t this problem solve itself as spring disappears and long hot summers take over the calendar? No one seems to be saying that now…
Solar is pushing out the “other” forms of generation that are keeping the grid stable
AEMO said the ever growing output from solar was posing an increasing threat to the safety and security of the grid because it was pushing out all other forms of generation that were needed to help keep the system stable.
But isn’t the whole point of solar exactly that? Aren’t we supposed to drive out the other sorts of generation because they cause storms and floods and they start wars, kill koalas, and makes babies premature. Are all these things OK now?
Did we say “desperate”?
The AEMO admits what many suspect they are already doing, rather brutally sending voltage spikes down the line to trip out the solar panels:
And it warned that unless it had the power to reduce — or curtail — the amount of rooftop solar times, more drastic and damaging measures would need to be taken.
These could include increasing the voltage levels in parts of the poles-and-wires network to “deliberately” trip or curtail small-scale solar in some areas.
They’re hinting these voltage spikes might damage some delicate equipment. Would you like a big blackout or a small capital loss?
An even more dramatic step would be to “shed” or dump parts of the poles-and-wires network feeding big amounts of excess solar into the grid.
“If sufficient backstop capability is not available … the NEM may be operating insecure for extended periods,” the agency wrote in the report.
The Bureaucrats that wrote this hope you don’t understand it:
“(It may) therefore be operating outside of the risk tolerances specified in the National Electricity Rules, where the loss of a single transmission or generation element may lead to reliance on emergency control schemes to prevent system collapse.
But there it is. They’re talking about “system collapse”.
As it is, new solar panels already have to have the remote control switch built in in WA, SA, Victoria and parts of Queensland. Yesterday was the day when the AEMO announced we needed to do this in every state, and “by next year”.
Just four weeks away…
h/t David of Cooyal in Oz
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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