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By Jo Nova
The brand-name of science is being trashed
Trust in science continues to fall. The disillusionment with the Covid response has spread to science in general. Anthony Fauci said “trust the science” then showed us how untrustworthy science was. SARS-2 definitely wasn’t a lab-leak, except it probably was; the vaccine was 95% effective, except everyone caught covid, and the data was world’s best practice but the FDA fought tooth and nail to stop us seeing it until 2076.
These results are terrible: despite respondents being surrounded by hi-tech cars, phones, food and gadgets which were all impossible without science, only 57% of people now think science has has a “mostly positive” effect. That’s 43% of the population who now think science hurts us as much as it helps (or is even worse).
The good name of science, created by two generations with antibiotics, satellites, and the moon-landing, has been exploited by name-calling parasites.
Pew research released this in November, calling it just “a decline”:
What Pew didn’t say was that these sort of surveys have been going on for years and this was the biggest fall in forty years.
A similar survey set by the National Science Foundation has been running since 1979, and year after year, found that between 68% and 79% of Americans used to think the benefits of science outweighed the negatives.
It’s been remarkably consistent for four decades but we’re in new territory now.
Here are those older results:
People around the world have high levels of trust in scientists, and most want researchers to get more involved in policymaking, finds a global survey with more than 70,000 participants. But trust levels are influenced by political orientation and differ among nations, according to the study, which was described in a preprint posted online last month1.
Respondents were asked to indicate how much they agreed with a dozen statements about the integrity, competency, benevolence and openness of scientists, on a scale of 1 to 5. A higher score indicated higher trust. Across all participants, the average trust score was moderately high, at 3.62…
Even the psychologist they interview can only bring himself to say “fairly high”.
Nature make sure to tell us trust is ” linked to political orientation”. They blame it mostly on political leaders. It’s as if the voters are just the sheep being led astray, not the ones throwing tomatoes at the politicians who are slow to figure it out.
It is the end of an era.
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By Jo Nova
One of the most extraordinary interviews I’ve ever heard. Take everything you thought you knew …
Tucker Carlson talks to Mike Benz who worked in the cyber portfolio at the US State Department. He calmly lays out the dark power of the US intelligence network. This is the inside story of how and why the military industrial censorship complex grew in the last thirty years.
It’s obviously hard to confirm what he says, but we already know Twitter and Facebook were effectively acting as arms of the US government. We’ve got the emails showing they were colluding with US state agencies and the legacy media on a daily basis to cover up government failures and corruption, and to censor Americans. We know the CIA withheld a report on China because it might have helped Donald Trump, and we know the CIA has been feeding the media “misinformation” for 50 years because another insider told us so.
Mike Benz seems to be able to explain so many details on the forces that shaped history.
At first the agencies liked free speech
In 1991 the apparatus of the US State thought the internet and free speech was a great tool. It made it easier to fuel revolutions in foreign countries and overturn inconvenient governments. And so the CIA worked out that if they controlled the social media and legacy media in “problem” countries they could put sympathetic governments into place. It was cheaper than sending in tanks. Thus a giant specialist program of expertise in censorship grew in order to control elections.
Given that this foreign interference was unprincipled, being undemocratic and anti-free speech, it is no surprise that a generation later the same expertise would morph into a malignant agency (or two) used against “Americans who threatened democracy”.
Then they started to fear the rise of the populist right
By 2016 the internet was vastly more mature and influential. Instead of being a tool of the intel agencies it was a tool of the masses, and they were voting the wrong way. The spooks could not “pull a story” by leaning on one editor, or asking friends at Facebook to de-amplify a meme.
Then Brexit lit a fire in the intelligence world — they feared France, Spain and Italy would also leave, the whole EU would disintegrate and worst of all, NATO and the “rules based international order would collapse” (which is another way of saying these meddling people would lose their jobs, their grants and their power). Then of course, months later, Mr Trump was unexpectedly elected, and the world teetered on the edge of functional democracy. A disaster…
There is a transcript which is 29 pages for people who don’t like to watch — but Benz is an exceptional speaker — cutting to the point, without wasting time. It makes a great podcast converted into mp3.
Notice here, in his list of the great fears of the intelligence agencies — the point of NATO is to be the army, essentially, of the global bankers.
- Brexit would give rise to “Frexit” in France with Marine Le Pen, to “Spexit” in Spain with a Vox party, to “Italexit” in Italy, to “Grexit” in Germany, to “Grexit” in Greece.
- The EU would come apart so NATO would be killed without a single bullet being fired.
- And then, not only that, now that NATO is gone, now there’s no enforcement arm for the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, or the world Bank.
- So now, the financial stakeholders who depend on the battering ram of the national security state would basically be helpless against governments around the world.
They have redefined democracy
Instead of the “will of the voters” — they are trying to define democracy as the infrastructure and the institutions of democracy. So anything that threatens “trust” in the institutions is a threat to democracy. See how this works? If you criticize mail-in-voting you are undermining elections. If you criticize your rulers you are a cybercriminal, a terrorist.
Mike Benz runs an organisation now called Foundation for Freedom Online
h/t David E. also Ed Dowd, and Richard C (NZ)
Art by Mohammed Hassan
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By Jo Nova
If coal is a planet wrecking problem, if it really mattered, about 30 countries are beating themselves up in acts of grandiose public flagellation, while one country is wrecking the planet and nobody cares. The truth is that no one is behaving like they think CO2 is causing a crisis. All over the West everyone wears the hippie-care coat while buying the cheapest fridges, phones and fashion they can get from the global coal furnace. And China nods the nod then keeps on adding coal power plants.
Climate change: China at risk of missing its goals unless it takes drastic action to rein in coal expansion, new research finds
Eric Ng, South China Morning Post
Last year, the Chinese energy sector’s carbon dioxide emissions increased 5.2 per cent, the same as gross domestic product, highlighting a failure to rein in energy-intensive growth, they estimated.
According to the Global Coal Plant Tracker 70 gigawatts of new coal power was built around the world in 2023. Of the 107 countries they tracked, one country built 47 gigawatts. The other 106 countries combined built 22 gigawatts. The distribution of new coal plants is thus:
 (Click to enlarge) Or put another way:
 (Click to enlarge)
And this pattern has been repeated for 23 years.
This is the combined total of coal power installed around the world since the turn of the century:
 (Click to see the bigger graph)
So the rulers of the West buy their transformers, solar panels and wind turbines from The Coal Giant, while pretending they sincerely want to reduce coal use. And the populace buy their cheap t-shirts, lemon squeezers and avocado-slicers (and their fridges and freezers). And no one in polite society suggests sanctions or boycotts. (No one suggests “checking the science” either). Everyone wants their cheap stuff.
And so the charade continues, China pretends it will reduce emissions, and the West pretends it could happen:
“Another year of rapidly rising emissions in 2023 leaves China way off track against its target of cutting carbon intensity by 18 per cent between 2021 and 2025,” said Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA). “As a result, carbon dioxide emissions would now need to fall by 4 to 6 per cent by 2025 to hit the goal.”
And everyone pretends that it matters.
Global Coal Plant Tracker
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By Jo Nova
History shall record the ignominious boom and bust of a car genre forced on citizens so they could produce better weather.
Things are so bad, Joe Biden has even put the brakes on his aggressive EV scheme, stepping away from the 2030 deadline. “It’s just a delay” of course. The plan would have forced car manufacturers to sell 3 EV’s for every 2 cars with a combustion engine by 2030. If customers didn’t volunteer to buy enough EV’s, companies would be forced to jack up prices of the cars everyone wants in order to cross-subsidize the discounted sales of the unpopular EV’s. Car dealers were appalled and said so.
EV sales growing in some places but falling in others. The shift has been so fast the full length of the supply chain is in turmoil. The price of lithium has fallen 90% from it’s peak, nickel has halved. Ford has sacked 1,400 people. GM has cut its workforce by 1,000. Hertz is selling one third of it’s electric fleet and cancelling $3 billion dollars worth of forward orders. A month ago, the biggest political party in the EU decided it would rather drop the ban on petrol and diesel cars.
Meanwhile EV drivers in China are learning the same awful lessons the US learned a month ago. EV batteries don’t go as far during freezing cold weather and are extremely hard to charge. During the Lunar New Year holiday Chinese drivers have been forced to push their EV’s for miles in the snow, while traffic jams formed at charging stations. Drivers were so desperate they lit fires on roads to stay warm, rather than use their car heaters and drain the battery. EV’s were banned from the Hainan Ferry due to the fire risk. It must have been sudden. Some Chinese EV manufacturers offered to help rescue cars, but it will take weeks to ship the cars back to owners.
China has placed big bets on EV demand. It would get burnt badly if the West wakes up:
Nora Neughton Business Insider
The Biden administration is poised to dump controversial rule that would require Americans to buy more electric cars sooner,…
Lithium and nickel producers begin mass layoffs and pause multi-billion-dollar projects as US says no to electric car push
Daily Mail
…as interest in EVs has slipped, lithium and nickel facilities – metals used in lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles – are taking cost-cutting measures including mass layoffs and suspending operations.
The demand for electric vehicles surged in 2022, rising by 76 percent in April of that year, but by the end of 2023, the number of vehicles sold dropped to just 50 percent.
The price of lithium has fallen 85% from the peak:
[Credendo]: According to the US Geological Survey (USGS), in 2022, batteries dominated the global end-use markets, absorbing 74% of the global lithium production. Indeed, the main driver behind lithium demand is the global transition towards a greener economy.
Global lithium production has doubled in the last six years, but even fans of the green revolution admit that the fall in lithium prices is largely due to the lack of demand because of the unexpected fall in EV orders. According to the USGS batteries used three quarters of the global lithium production.
The same pattern is happening in Germany — From NoTricksZone:
Blackout News here reports how German software giant SAP “no longer wants to use Tesla electric cars as company cars in future.” and is “removing the electric car manufacturer from its list of suppliers”.
Cuts at German Ford plant
In another article, Blackout News reports that Ford is cutting 3500 of 4500 jobs at its Saarloius, Germany plant, citing a “restructuring program.” Deindustrialization is accelerating in Germany.
Production slowdown at Opel
German car manufacturer Opel has announced reduced work-hours at its Eisenach plant “due to low demand” as a “direct response to falling demand for the Opel Grandland SUV, which is offered in variants including an innovative plug-in hybrid.”
Even as Chinese EV companies have aggresssive expansion plans, bad news is popping up:
Long Charging Lines, Snow Stymie EV Drivers in China New Year
Bloomberg
Long waits at highway charging stations, rapid battery depletion in freezing snow and limits on electric vehicles on car ferries because of safety fears have combined to make the Lunar New Year holiday a frustrating experience for China’s growing number of EV drivers.
In central Hubei province, some drivers were forced to push their EVs for miles after heavy snow and freezing rain closed roads, and their batteries — which lose charge faster in cold weather — ran out of juice. According to local media reports, some even resorted to building fires on the road to keep warm because they were concerned using the car’s heater would deplete the battery even faster.
On the tropical island of Hainan — one of China’s most popular tourist spots — the local government restricted the number of EVs and plug-in hybrids on car ferries because of fears of fire or explosions, stranding thousands of cars.
Meanwhile with uncanny timing, the Australian Labor government are aiming to copy the US policies we already know have failed, just as Joe Biden backs away from them:
Australian Financial Review
Labor will press ahead with vehicle emission cuts based on US standards, despite reports the Biden administration is trimming the scale of its own electric vehicle ambitions, amid a growing political clash over the cost of popular utes and SUVs.
Reuters on Monday matched the story, noting the US Environmental Protection Agency in April 2023 proposed requiring a 56 per cent reduction in new vehicle emissions by 2032. Under the initial EPA proposal covering 2027-2032, car makers were expected to aim for EVs to constitute 60 per cent of their new vehicle production by 2030. EVs now make up about 7 per cent of the US car fleet.
The Australian opposition will take that electoral gift and run with it:
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, campaigning in Victoria ahead of next month’s byelection, accused Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of “proposing a great big new car and ute tax, which is going to drive up the cost of a HiLux or a Ranger by somewhere between $10,000 and $15,000”.
Car crash photo by Alexa from Pixabay
Australian flag by Phillip Barrington
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By Jo Nova
In Carnarvon yesterday the Bureau tells us that the temperature was “a record” 49.9 degree day (almost 122 Fahrenheit). But in 1896 the Brickhouse Station just 15 kilometers north of Carnarvon hit 121 Fahrenheit in the shade, and there were reports of birds dying and other measurements “in the shade” that were as high as 125F. Somehow man-made emissions have been heating the planet for 128 years but the current freakishly hot days are about the same as the ones when no one in Australia owned a car and CO2 levels in the atmosphere were still under 300 ppm.
Lest we forget, there are hundreds of thermometer records from the pre-1908 era that are apparently worth nothing to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. Climate change threatens all life on Earth, so you’d think climate scientists would be excited about the longest historical records they can find, but for some inexplicable reason they show little interest in the historical records from 1896 when a heatwave struck and 437 people died across Australia.
Temperatures hit 50C in the shade in many places in January 1896. In locations hundreds of kilometers apart, people were reporting similar temperatures. Perhaps they were all wrong?
 January 5th 1896, Western Australia https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/3076152 At Yalgoo over Christmas 1895 temperatures reached 122 to 127F:
 January 5th 1896, Western Australia https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/3076152 At Southern Cross a man died in his office chair. The heat averaged 115 and reached 122F.
 January 5th 1896, Western Australia https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/3076152 A child succumbed to the heat in Geraldton and in Mullewa it was so hot the railway workers refused to work because it was “impossible to handle the rails”. These towns are 500 km south or 300 miles away from Carnarvon.
 January 5th 1896, Western Australia https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/3076152 Temperatures in Mullawa hit 121F.
Inland at Cue for three weeks the temperature was above 105 F, even reaching 118 twice in the shade.
1,000 kilometers south of Carnarvon, nested among forest, south of Perth, even Pinjarra experienced 114F on Friday 3rd January 1896. This heatwave affected a vast area.
 … The Bureau will say many of these older records were done in “non-standard” equipment, but thermometers were a 300 year old technology even then. Sometimes we have records of the types of screens they used and we even have standardized comparisons of the small differences between the different screens. But the BoM is too precious to admit these old records are useful — the same BOM that doesn’t care when modern sites are surrounded by hot black bitumen or sits near incinerators. The same BOM that shrank the Stevenson screens from 230 litres to just 60 litres and changed the glass thermometers to electronic ones. The best measurements in our history probably came after the BOM was formed in 1908 and standardized the screens. Yet the BOM has adjusted the Carnarvon trends in those years down by as much as 2 whole degrees. In what universe does this make sense?
The actual warming over the whole century was almost nothing until the BOM adjusted the records. Thanks to Ken Stewart for this analysis:
![](https://kenskingdom.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/carnarvon-tmin.jpg?w=450&h=256 ?w=450&h=270")
The ABC parrots the mindless weather trivia produced by the BOM — they both lie by omission
Both institutions hide what Australians really need to know — our history:
“It was the nation’s second-hottest February temperature on record and tied as the eighth-hottest temperature recorded in Australia.”
ABC Feb 19th, 2024
Yesterday wasn’t the “eighth hottest” in Australian records. There are scores of days of baking hot 122 to 125F temperatures in our historical newspapers, often from the 1800s, yet the ABC never investigates, and never asks the Bureau of Meteorology a single hard question. Were all those thermometers in the wrong places? Were all those temperatures invalid? Astronomers were trained to use thermometers, it was a 300 year old technology even during the heatwaves of the Federation drought, and people knew the difference between “in the shade” and “in the sun”.
Thanks so much to research by Chris Gillham, Ken Stewart and Silligy and the rest of the BOM volunteer audit team — without any funding they discover the hot records the bureau can’t seem to find even with $350 million dollars a year and a staff of 1,600 people.
Citizen science beats government funded science any day.
All the historic newspaper links for the map are available at the original post on historic heatwaves.
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By Jo Nova
This paper shows exactly how good “Peer Review” is
It’s not just that a clever AI image slipped through peer review, it’s that it was garishly fake in a supersize kind of way. Scientifically everything about it was radioactive satire and yet it still got through “peer review”. The words are gibberish. The editors didn’t even run a spell checker on it before publishing it, let alone the gaze of a single trained biologist in the field.
The paper has been retracted thanks to the real peer review which happened on social media. This was a case of X (formerly Twitter) saves the day. Where normal peer review can take up to two years (if you are an unpopular skeptic) it was only three days from the X review to retraction.
A scientific paper purporting to show the signalling pathway of sperm stem cells has met with widespread ridicule after it depicted a rodent with an anatomically eye-watering appendage and four giant testicles.
The creature, labelled “rat”, was also sitting upright in the manner of a squirrel, while the graphic was littered with nonsensical words such as “dissilced”, “testtomcels” and “senctolic”.
 FIGURE 1
Spermatogonial stem cells, isolated, purified and cultured from rat testes. The macrophages have become Macromages. The Natural killer T-Cells have become “nokillas”, but it’s not a name-swap, it’s just complete and utter nonsense — like a microbiology word soup met a UFO.
 The JAK/STAT pathway and immune regulation in spermatogonial stem cells The researchers even told them the images were faked: “(Images in this article were generated by Midjourney).”
At best, perhaps this is a real paper with junk AI images. There are no obviously imaginary words in the text (unlike the graphics). But it’s still a devastating take on “peer review”. I mean, these images are practically satire… If rushed scientists are using AI to help them write, and AI to get cheap images, and the Peer review journals are just posting anything without even checking, modern science is a zombie.
This is not a one off problem, and the use of AI to create images in peer reviewed science is widespread:
[The Telegraph] Writing on the Science Integrity Digest, Dr Elisabeth Bik, the Dutch microbiologist who works spotting manipulation in scientific papers, said: “Of course, we can have a good laugh at these figures, and wonder how on earth the handling editor and the two peer reviewers didn’t catch this.
“These figures are clearly not scientifically correct, but if such botched illustrations can pass peer review so easily, more realistic-looking AI-generated figures have likely already infiltrated the scientific literature.”
Dr Bik has identified more than 1,000 papers which have fraudulent imagery, most of which she believes was generated by AI.
Amanda Yeo claims as many six real people supposedly gave it a tick:
It isn’t clear exactly how these diagrams made it all the way to publication without being picked up. The article was edited by a member of Frontiers‘ editorial team as well as reviewed by two other parties, which means at least six people gave it their approval. In a statement to Motherboard, one of the reviewers said that he had only assessed the paper for its scientific aspects, and that it was not his responsibility to check the accuracy of the AI-generated images.
For what it’s worth, Frontiers in Cell and Development Biology (Front Cell Dev Biol) is not a big name in the medical world, but they have apparently published 10,730 papers in the National Library of Medicine. The umbrella publishing unit called Frontiers –says it is the 3rd most cited publisher.
The retraction message isn’t exactly confidence boosting:
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Naturally the Big Bankers dress up in trees and rivers… they wouldn’t wear the Dracula Cape when people are looking, would they?
By Jo Nova
The biggest climate bullies on the planet just got a bit smaller. There are two monster climate banker clubs in the world, and yesterday, one of them, the “Climate Action 100+” lost three of the six largest asset management funds in the world, namely JP Morgan Chase, State Street and BlackRock.
State Street manages about $3.6 trillion in funds, JP Morgan Chase about $3 or $4 trillion, and BlackRock $10 trillion, so that’s something like $17,000 billion dollars that just left the ranch. The fact that this kind of money was all grouped together in a cabal of any sort is bad enough, but ponder that now, after the biggest fish have left the tank, there’s still $50 trillion left in assets on the inside.
It appears the Climate Action 100+ group had grown too big for its boots — the new Climate Action 100+ “phase 2” strategy expected asset managers to actively hound companies to cut their emissions.
The Wall Street Journal
The climate alliance’s new rules would compound the legal and political jeopardy. In its withdrawal announcement, State Street said its rules “are not consistent with our independent approach to proxy voting and portfolio company engagement.” BlackRock said the rules “would raise legal considerations.”
Members are supposed to “engage” 170 “focus companies” such as Boeing, Home Depot and American Airlines—that is, threaten to vote against non-compliant corporate directors and back shareholder resolutions that pressure management. Their campaign has had great success with 75% of targeted companies committing to “net zero.”
But the climate left is never content. Last June the alliance impelled its members to publish information on their “engagements” and to explain how and why they voted on shareholder resolutions flagged by the outfit. The point was to embarrass asset managers that climate scolds accuse of being insufficiently committed to the cause.
 Climate Action 100+ sells itself as a group of investors who want to save the world and pressure naughty corporations to behave. The truth is that most of the investors are workers with pensions tied up in funds who have no idea they are in an international cabal. Normal real investors try to make money rather than use their life savings to bully companies into political fantasies like fiddling with the weather. But in the monster funds, it’s the asset managers who decide to join clubs like “Climate 100+” and it’s twin club with the sexy name –the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ).
Climate Action 100+ started in 2017 and the day before yesterday it had 700 investors who managed $68 trillion in assets, yet mysteriously has no Wikipedia page (like the ghost that walks?). According to InfluenceWatch it was “conceived by members of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) in 2016 at the French Mission to the United Nations.” So it was set up by the largest government pension fund in the US in cahoots with the UN in order to use workers money to boss around companies and to force left wing policies on right wing states through a back door.
It’s big brother — the other climate banker cabal called GFANZ — was set up in 2021 by the UN and Mark Carney (former governor of the Bank of England). At one point GFANZ grew to an obscenely unbelievable $130 trillion in “funds under management”, giving it the financial power equivalent to a black hole. The largest 20 national economies in the world have a combined GDP of $87 trillion. So when a collective managing $130 trillion says “jump” there are not many Presidents or Prime Ministers inclined to say “No”. In October 2020, the CEO of BlackRock told the Australian government he wanted them to shut coal plants faster and three weeks later, Scott Morrison and the treasurer signed us up for Net Zero, even though the voters had picked them to do less climate action rather than more.
But it was all a big bluff, as I explained — all the giant funds use other people’s money to bully and cajole boards, ministers, and global leaders into doing things that none of them might want. They were supposed to be investing pension funds to earn money for workers to retire on, instead it looked and smelled a lot like they were squandering the returns in order to prop up socialist ideologies, dodgy companies, and to coerce governments to legislate policies that the voters didn’t vote for.
Larry Fink the CEO of Blackrock, and his pals, turned our pension funds into a leftist activist machine. Thankfully 19 US States fought back by asking the legal bombshell questions about whether these funds were cooperating in a way that breached antitrust laws and neglected their fiduciary duty. Ron deSantis in Florida took $2 billion of state pension funds back from Blackrock. It doesn’t sound like much, but it pulled the string on the big bluff, and threatened to unleash an exodus. Now a year later, many funds are backing away slowly.
Make no mistake, the term ESG or Environmental Social Governance is a dead dog, but all these conglomerate Financial Swamp Monsters like BlackRock et al, will still be buying and leveraging up their renewables investments whenever it suits them. They’ll still be flying to Davos to consort and coordinate behind the scenes.
The big funds will still be leaning on governments, but there is more risk other funds will break ranks, offering to fund the projects the cabal don’t want funded. In a free market, it wouldn’t matter a damn if one stupidly large fund said it wouldn’t fund a coal mine because some other fund surely would. That’s why these banker collectives are so profoundly undemocratic and anti-competitive. For their game to work, they have to stop all the other bankers too.
It is after all, why the USA has antitrust laws. It’s why cartels are banned.
So much of the pushback against the banker consortiums comes from the US States:
Mary Chastain, Legal Insurrection
Agricultural officials from 12 states launched probes into ESG investing practices at some big banks. The officials worry that the involvement could “impact food availability, lead to price increases, limit credit access for farmers, and have broad negative economic consequences.”
Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti sued BlackRock, alleging the firm harmed consumers through ESG.
“We allege that BlackRock’s inconsistent statements about its investment strategies deprived consumers of the ability to make an informed choice,” explained Skrmetti
At this point in time the GFANZ cabal still say their members include ANZ, the Bank of America, Barclays, the Bank of New Zealand, Commonwealth Bank, JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, National Australia Bank, National Bank of Canada, Westpac and a hundred others.
There is still so much to do. But three weeks ago Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan, shifted gears — openly saying “Trump was kinda right” and that his supporters deserve respect. I asked at the time if Wall Street was shifting away from the whole poisonous left. Dimon’s statements were game-changing.
We don’t need all the bankers to shift, we just need a few so we have some competition.
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By Jo Nova
Victoria is just not big enough to fit all the solar and wind industrial plants
It’s no wonder the Victorian government is desperate to begin building offshore wind turbines. Their own targets for the forced transition are so crazy-brave, they would “need” to use as much as two thirds of the state’s agricultural land instead. It sounds delusional but they told us this straight up in their own policy document released in March 2022.
Thanks to Aidan Morrison at the Centre for Independent Studies, who not only reads these boring tomes, but also noticed that they quietly disappeared the Victorian Offshore Wind Policy Directions Paper. He explained in The Australian that he believes they hid it because they’ve realized how embarrassing it looks.
Apparently 227,000 square kilometers is not enough land to power 7 million people in a NetZero world.
Victorian planners had farmland in their sights (as if it was their own). They mapped it out and described it as “available for onshore renewables”.
If farmers were not aware of the totalitarian disregard the NetZero bureaucrats have for farmers, they know now.
Think about the captive mindset it takes to publish a ludicrous document like this without blinking? These are people who never meet a skeptic. Whoever wrote and approved it didn’t even try to hide the ghastly cost of building wind and solar power onshore. And they certainly didn’t spend a nanosecond imagining what Victorian farmers might think of it. (Or checking their own maths — 70% of agricultural land is not the same as “four times the area of Greater Melbourne”.)
Presumably some bureaucrats were tasked with justifying the big Offshore wind developments and it didn’t even cross their minds that “Net Zero” is a option, a frivolous quest, and that farmers, and everyone (outside the party room) might just say “No”.
Billions of dollars are on the table and no one even reads the policy documents. We live in an era of distilled incompetence.
The Bottom Line:
Victoria is supposedly aiming to be 95% renewable by 2035, and at this point gets about 50% of it’s electricity from fossil fuels (and even more of it’s total energy). Even after the mass installation of unreliable energy for the last ten years Victoria needs to build 15 times as much to reach its target.
There are no offshore wind farms in Australia, and the federal government just put a poleaxe through the offshore plans of the Victorian government. But around the world investors are running away, share prices are falling, and insurance firms are balking at the million dollar cost of repairing the cables.
Now would be the perfect time for Australia to get out of offshore wind — right before it gets into it.
Victoria farmers won’t be pleased,
If their lands are confiscated or seized,
For vast solar panel fields,
Decimating food yields,
Nor by wind turbine pipe dreams appeased.
–Ruairi
REFERENCES
The original government source page contains the dead link. Luckily for us the Wayback Machine captured the site and the PDF.
Image by Mystic Art Design from Pixabay
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