Instead of the conservatives being torn apart by climate change, now it’s the left side of politics
Politicians finally seem to realize the voters don’t want to spend money on climate change.
Once all players in politics realize that their climate policies and green pledges paint targets on their backs, it’s the beginning of the end.
The UK Labour Party has bragged for two years that it will spend £28bn on green investment if they get elected. But their Green Prosperity Plan has become a target for conservatives to shoot down, and apparently the Labour party is now publicly falling all over itself to distance itself from the number £28bn. They’ve delayed it, added qualifiers, and reduced it from a “pledge” to an “ambition” but nothing seemed to work. Finally, they have had to declare that the spending target has been dropped.
A spending target was always a stupid thing, on any issue. What organisation, company or billionaire pledges to throw money for the sake of hitting a spending target, as if spending itself was the goal? It’s a vanity gig — only for those who want to show off their wealth (or in this case, your captured wealth). Surely the government should be bragging about achieving things as cheaply as possible, not about throwing more money than the next guy?
One target is gone but the boondoggle lives on
Labour still promises to set up a new publicly owned energy investment creature called GB Energy and a national insulation program. The word is that these will cost about £10bn. And there are already £8 – 10bn in green projects that the conservatives are already funding, so if the Labour party keep those, that will still amount to about £20bn. So far too much green gravy will still keep flowing but make no mistake — For an industry levitating on green fairytales, and entirely dependent on government largess, this is bad news. It’s a big shift, a giant deflation.
Naturally Big Green industry are worried. The head of Seimens is now on the back foot: ““Don’t let populism unsettle you,” ” he told the Labour party, which was his coded way of saying “Please keep giving us money”.
Jürgen Maier, former British boss of Siemens, the German industrial giant and major investor, said massive investment was needed to rebuild the British economy and make it fit for the future and that it should focus on low-carbon energy, transport and industry .
“These are the growth areas of the future,” he said. “The £28 billion is not a cost, but an investment. “Don’t let populism unsettle you,” he urged the doubters within the party.
In the EU, the German Greens themselves are putting the brakes on
The German Greens suffered a major hit in popularity polls after they tried to foist “low emission” heaters on the public last year. The next elections are coming up in June, and the Greens look like shrinking from 21 seats to 14. So now they are trying to water down, slow down and take out the sting from their Green policies. It’s almost like voters matter?
The European Green Party is set for an internal battle over climate targets at a party congress this weekend (2-4 February), with the German Greens pushing to postpone the climate neutrality goals by five years and scrap parts of the gas and oil phase-out policies.
The Germans are also pushing to remove calls to end the use of fossil gas by 2035 and of oil by 2040, keeping only the draft’s target of phasing out coal by 2030, as well as a call to prohibit financial services “for coal, oil and gas extraction, coal-fired energy projects, and the companies that develop them”.
The disagreement reveals that the national Green parties remain split on how moderate or radical their targets should be.
The German Greens have been looking to moderate their messaging, as the party is aiming to strengthen its social and economic profile and reconcile more business-friendly rhetoric with the Greens’ traditional stand on climate change.
It’s time we stopped messing around. Clearly, fossil fuels are feeding the world, greening the land, and boosting tree growth. Anyone who gives a damn about the environment needs to start campaigning to increase our fossil fuel emissions.
Recently a batch of studies announced that the era of global greening might be over, or that drought stress might be browning the Earth faster than it was being greened. But a new study shows that the Earth is not only still getting greener, but that the rate of green growth is accelerating on more than half of the world.
Chen et al used four satellite datasets to estimate the Leaf Area Index (LAI). They found the long feared desertification of Earth is only accelerating over 7% of the globe while the long ignored greening is not increasing but even accelerating over 55% of the Earth. At this rate, the barren corners of the Earth are in danger of going missing.
Obviously, the habitat of koalas is benefiting hugely from coal, gas and petrol. But to be more serious, so are the worlds poor. If we care about the children of Haiti, we have a duty to liberate that coal, burn that oil and free up those stores of diesel.
Do it for the children…
LAI = Leaf Area Index. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2351989423004262#fig0020
All over the world, the dominant driver (according to the paper) was nearly always CO2.
Chen et al 2024 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2351989423004262
CO2 fertilization is still the dominant (75.63%) driver of the trends on Earth in the last 20 years.
Welcome to modern Australia where the grid is so fragile, poor people have to buy air conditioners that the government can remotely switch off . Such is the state of decay that Queensland no longer has enough electricity to allow the riff-raff to have air conditioning whenever they want it — only the rich can do that.
The state energy companies of Queensland offer customers up to $400 cashback when they buy an air conditioner, but in return they allow the government to reach into their homes and turn off the air conditioner when the grid is in trouble, which it seems is a lot lately. It was only supposed to be a “few days a year”.
It’s a way to manage the grid — think of it as 170,000 mini blackouts instead of one big one:
Queensland’s state-owned power grid remotely turned down almost 170,000 air conditioners six times in the past two months as part of a scheme to protect the electricity network.
…
So this is where someone owns a Hi-Tech instrument designed to keep them cool, that they can’t use on the hottest days of the year. They call this the PeakSmart scheme (so you know it’s stupid). Gone are the luxury days when consumers could control their own appliances, get cheap reliable electricity, and not need invasive, complicated schemes in order to keep some of their own money.
It also allows the energy companies to send people into your home to “visit” for afternoon tea, or rather, to check you haven’t ripped out the PeakSmart controller boxes. They will give you five days notice. Nice of them, eh?
If you like your air conditioner you can keep it (but you can’t use it…)
Ergon and Energex said PeakSmart limiting should only occur “a few times” per year.
There have been six events since December 1 and nine in the last year — the highest rate since the program began.
On Monday and Saturday last week, Energex used its remote access to limit 169,490 air conditioners to run at 50 per cent power between 4:20pm and 6:50pm across the south-east.
The part I like best is when they tell us that you won’t notice anything different about having a compressor that is only running on half strength, but they won’t tell you when they are cutting your air-con (in case you do notice). Somehow they cut your cooling in secret but find the time to tell the company you bought the air conditioner from, just in case you not only notice but call out a repairman.
Users are not told when their unit is affected, but installers and repairers are given notice in case customers report what they think is a malfunction.
Renters or new property owners may not realise their units are fitted with the device.
Multiple installers contacted by the ABC said they were wary about the meters and the potential for the government and energy providers to control an appliance in the home.
Up until now, the riches of the rich were gradually spread to the poor. Have we reached the point when that reverses?
There are big protests coming at parliament house Australia on February 6th. Sorry I’m away today. Some readers have already commented on this event. More details here soon for those who don’t know!
As Winston Sterzel says: Seriously? Why does it cost more to send a postcard to my neighbor than it does for a Company in China to send a package right across the world?
He explains how an old intergovernmental committee — the Universal Postal Union (UPU) — sets the rules so that rich nations subsidize the poor ones. Like all government committees it clings to a good idea for so many years it kills it. It was set up in 1874, and now in 2024, a nation with a space station is draining money from our postal systems and from our local jobs. What a rort…
Everyone paying for postage in the West is also paying the post for businesses in China to send cheap things which undermine local sellers. It is very difficult for a business using postal delivery to compete in the West — even in its own domestic market.
The UPU is — naturally — another subsidiary of the United Nations. What else do we need to know? It works as well as we’d expect any 150 year old unelected and unaccountable bureaucracy to work — like napalm on a free market.
The UPU motto now is “One World. One Postal Network.” They look, act and smell just like a larval world government.
One Australian farmer did more in two hours to celebrate the greatest country on Earth than the entire $44 billion Woolworths corporation. It’s a bit of a “Bud-light” moment downunder. The CEO of “Woolies”, our largest grocery empire, proudly celebrates any culture on Earth except ours. He bragged that they would not stock Australiana for Australia Day (January 26), even though they are happy to cheer on Halloween parties and put up banners for Chinese New Year and Diwali. Not surprisingly, staff were scathing — ““They’re bringing in year of the dragon 2024 Lunar New Year gear, loads of it, but no Aussie stuff, disgusting, go figure, go woke, go broke,” one wrote.”
Why didn’t the ABC put Harrison Schuster’s inspiring art on the news?
A 27-year-old farmer has paid tribute to his country ahead of Australia Day with an incredible art piece carved into his family’s paddock. pic.twitter.com/al6W3hG67e
See how he created this in the video below (it’s a great protest tool, farmers!) What farmers lack in inner city presence they can make up for in protests visible from space.
This absolute legend of an Aussie farmer used his tractor 🚜 to recreate the Australian country outline with the flag in the middle!
This post is late, but it’s still (just) Australia Day.
We didn’t ask for it, but Australia Day is now a test. Do we love the country, are we proud to be Australian? The same test is happening all over the West. Are our borders, our culture, our way of life worth defending, or will we let someone else choose what matters? Will young men give their lives to protect a country that won’t even celebrate its own existence?
Good people need to say something to defend the bounty, lest we forget.
PS: I found a butcher-warehouse in a light industrial area to buy bulk beautiful cuts that are better and cheaper than Woolworths. My personal protest continues…
This week the agitprop-media was full of contrived good news about electricity prices in Australia, associated suggestively, in the loosest, most meaningless way with the word “renewables”. Not one of them said that long term prices were still higher than when we started trying to force unreliable wind and solar power on the grid, and not one of them said prices would be one half of the price now if the country was lucky enough to run off brown coal.
These misleading stories were disguised adverts for renewable energy pretending to be “news”. They were on display at The Guardian,The ABC and The Sydney Morning Herald, and every other paper across Australia. Not one journalist apparently had the wit to ask the AEMO how this compared to long term prices. But all of them obediently repeated that prices this December were 48% cheaper than the December before that, as if Australians like to discuss that sort of thing across the BBQ. Were monthly average wholesale prices good for you Jim?
Wholesale power prices across Australia’s main electricity market almost halved at the end of 2023 compared with a year earlier, stoking hopes households may soon see smaller bills.
Spot prices in the National Electricity Market (Nem) that serves the eastern and southern states fell to an average of $48 a megawatt-hour (MWh) in the December quarter, down 48% on the previous year, the Australian Energy Market Operator (Aemo) said in a report released on Thursday. Carbon emissions also dropped to record lows.
The newspapers were conveniently parroting the half-truths and half-lies of the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) which had issued a media release designed to mislead. What none of them reported was that current prices were merely a partial recovery from the obscenely high peaks of 2022, and things are still not as cheap as most of the years when the grid had more coal.
This graph below from the Australian Energy Regulator (AER) shows annual prices, but the trend is clear. The more renewables we have, the more expensive electricity becomes. That’s a cause and effect thing. Renewables didn’t cause the last downward spike, but they did cause the long increase. Thank renewables for the price spikes at 6pm, the big batteries, the $12 billion Snowy 2.0 elephant and the $20 billion wish list for interconnectors. Unreliable generators make reliable ones more expensive.
If our whole electricity grid was 100% brown coal, electricity would be half the price
The newspapers blame fossil fuels for the freak pricing of 2022, but if Australia had more brown coal generators running, and allowed more gas exploration, we could have avoided some or most of the “war time” peaks. The peak was due to Net Zero policies trying to change the weather. Australia ran out of gas and couldn’t ramp up brown coal plants it had already blown up. If we could have shifted back to brown coal, we could have saved a fortune on electricity, and made a bonanza selling more black coal and gas to our desperate allies.
The thrill this week was that December prices returned to “just” $48 a megawatt hour. But this was nowhere near as cheap as brown coal was still supplying and winning bids at. The prices for the last quarter available here show that in Victoria, brown coal generators were still supplying electricity for $16/MWh, or one third of the whole monthly average cost. The negative prices for wind and solar power just prove the market is screwed. No business can operate by paying customers to use their product. It’s only subsidies drawn from the poor of Australia that keep the unreliable generators swimming in profits they do not deserve.
The cheapest energy in Australia is brown coal, bar none, and the “newspapers”, the academics, the Minister, and the paid staff of the AEMO are hiding that from the taxpayers and subscribers who pay their wages.
The data is quietly buried on page 18 of an 81 page report.
But the pattern is the same every quarter. Brown coal is always the cheapest reliable generator:
What do we pay them for? Neither the AEMO or the AER issue a press release telling the teachers, truckies and farmers of Australia that brown coal is far cheaper than any other reliable source. It’s like informed consent for voters — how can they judge how much the weather-control fantasy costs if the so-called “public servants” are not telling the whole truth?
One and half cents a kilowatt hour — that’s the price brown coal suppliers were still bidding and winning wholesale auctions at in 2023. Inflation my foot…
The news that matters to Australians is that the less coal power we have, the more expensive our electricity is getting.
Now that the Billionaire-Green mask is off, conservatives are getting serious
Scott Waldman at Politico outlines the nightmare scenario where if Trump wins, he might “rewrite federal climate reports” or “install loyalists atop key science agencies” without seeming to realize that’s the Democrats modus operandi of science for thirty years.
Trump’s campaign utterances, and the policy proposals being drafted by hundreds of his supporters, point to the likelihood that his return to the White House would bring an all-out war on climate science and policies — eclipsing even his first-term efforts that brought U.S. climate action to a virtual standstill. Those could include steps that aides shrank back from taking last time, such as meddling in the findings of federal climate reports.
“The approach is to go back to all-out fossil fuel production and sit on the EPA,” said Steve Milloy, a former Trump transition team adviser who is well known for his industry-backed attacks on climate science.
Robert Gottleibsen points out that if the Trump plans are carried out Australian green policies will be wildly out of whack with the US. Even the presence of Trump 2.0 on the campaign trail can put a break on climate-ambition:
Trump aims for the US to have the lowest-cost energy and electricity of any nation in the world, including China, by reversing the Biden carbon policies. He will ramp up oil drilling on public lands; and offer tax breaks to oil, gas, and coal producers; roll back current efforts to encourage the adoption of electric cars; and reverse the proposed pollution limits that would require at least 54 per cent of new vehicles sold in the US to be electric by 2030.
That will make Australia out of step with the US, and it means that the world is going to reduce carbon emissions at a much slower pace. We will need to take that into consideration in our policies.
“We’re writing a battle plan”:
[Politico] Dozens of conservative groups have banded together to write climate policy goals that would devastate virtually every regulation of the fossil fuel industry. The Project 2025 effort, led by the Heritage Foundation and partially authored by former Trump administration officials, also would turn key government agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, toward increasing fossil fuel production rather than public health protections.
“We are writing a battle plan, and we are marshaling our forces,” Paul Dans, director of Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation, told E&E News for a story last year. “Never before has the whole conservative movement banded together to systematically prepare to take power Day 1 and deconstruct the administrative state.”
It’s excellent to hear conservatives are banding together and planning ahead on climate policy. We just hope they are also banding together on election reform to get rid of electronic machines, fix dodgy software, reduce ballot harvesting and teach voters why fraud is not The American Way. Polling effectively shows 13 million voters in the US would admit casting fraudulent ballots if asked by a pollster. One fifth of US voters don’t seem to know that polling is meant to be done in the privacy of a ballot booth, not watched by coercive friends, or handed to middle men…
Climate bullying doesn’t work anymore
The experts have noticed that Trump is not “tempering” his language. The climate bullies are irrelevant.
Dana Fisher, director of American University’s Center for Environment, Community and Equity, called the change in tone both notable and dangerous — showing that Trump is no longer concerned about reaching moderate and independent voters with his approach to climate policy.
“He doesn’t feel like he has to temper his language,” Fisher said. “The rhetoric means that he’s much more likely to empower these efforts and initiatives than when he was concerned about how they would play the last time.”
And after 91 indictments, it’s not like anyone would care about being called a climate denier. Indeed, he is probably hoping they’ll do it more.
To reassure himself, the Politico writer doesn’t think Trump’s full throated “denial” will sit well with the voters (boy is he in for a surprise). He quotes the usual mindless apple-pie climate poll, where people are asked if they don’t mind if the government uses other people’s money to solve climate change.
The Daily Mail asked the voters instead, and found it was a winner:
Americans by a wide margin endorse President Donald Trump’s pledge to ‘Drill, baby, drill’ and allow oil and gas schemes on federal lands, despite fears of global warming after 2023’s searing temperatures, our poll shows.
A DailyMail.com/TIPP Poll reveals that 49 percent of US adults support the former president’s pro-fossil fuel policy, while only 40 percent disagree. Another 11 percent said they were not sure.
Trump instead vows to slash US energy and electricity costs by ramping up domestic production of fossil fuels, with tax breaks for producers of oil, gas, and coal, even as scientists warn about man-made global warming.
He also wants to scrap much of Biden’s $369 billion Inflation Reduction Act, the largest climate measure in US history.
US oil production broke records last year, and it’s on track to surge to a new high of 13.21 million barrels per day this year, says a forecast from the government’s Energy Information Administration.
Steve Milloy, mentioned as a Trump advisor at the top of the Politico article, has written the skeptical JunkScience.com blog for years. If he’s ever put in charge of the EPA, it will be toast. Which is exactly why the grifters of government will fight to the death to stop Trump 2.0. They can’t let him win.
There is hope: Thirty years of namecalling, propaganda and censorship still isn’t enough
Despite being raised on non stop media propaganda and being drip fed the climate bible in school, one third of teenagers have somehow figured it out anyhow. Even the systematic censorship on Youtube and Google where skeptics are downranked, delegitimized and demonetized hasn’t stopped the truth getting through to some of the most impressionable and vulnerable minds.
Because this blasphemy is shocking to Guardian staff, that students might think for themselves, they can only report it with a ready-made excuse loaded into the subheader. It’s Youtube’s fault.
YouTube criticised for amplifying lies about the climate with disinformation videos watched by young people
A third of UK teenagers believe climate change is “exaggerated”, a report has found, as YouTube videos promoting a new kind of climate denial aimed at young people proliferate on the platform.
So it’s not that climate models have been pathetically wrong for their whole lives, and many of their parents and grandparents don’t believe the climate religion either — this is caused by evil YouTubers who have been running sophisticated communication campaigns or something like that. It’s a new kind of denial they say (presumably getting ready to ask for even more Youtube and social media censorship).
Instead of studying the climate, Guardian journalists and academics study opinion polls, and trends in fashionable words, which is why they have no idea what is going on.
Their own weapons-grade namecalling campaign has fooled themselves. Who are these mythical denier creatures who don’t think we have a climate?
Previously, most climate deniers pushed the belief that climate breakdown was not happening or, if it was, that humans were not causing it. Now, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) has found that most climate denial videos on YouTube push the idea that climate solutions do not work, climate science and the climate movement are unreliable, or that the effects of global heating are beneficial or harmless.
Researchers from the CCDH gathered a dataset of text transcripts from 12,058 climate-related YouTube videos posted by 96 channels over almost six years from 1 January 2018 to 30 September 2023. They also included the results of a nationally representative survey conducted by polling company Survation which found 31% of UK respondents aged 13 to 17 agreed with the statement “Climate change and its effects are being purposefully overexaggerated”.
“Researchers” from the CCDH imply there is some devious importance or meaning in the “shift” in YouTube topics as if some guys in a smokey room are dishing out the orders. But around 2018 there were a spate of super cold winters, and lately, there has been a spate of economic “storms” for wind and solar projects. The only reason the youtube content has changed is because the most spectacular failures have changed.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) was founded by a policy advisor to the UK Labor party, and has staffers on the board. They’re so tight with the Labor party, one board member had to resign to become chief of staff to the current Labor leader Kier Starmer. (See InfluenceWatch for details). That’s how “non-political” the CCDH is — practically a subdivision of the British Labor Party.
This activist team get about $1.5 million dollars to save the world, but mostly uses it to silence people who point out how stupid climate change policies are. The CCDH provide the statistical cover so the old Twitter could pretend they had a reason to exile Katie Hopkins, and Google could pretend they have an excuse to demonitize ZeroHedge.
If only they had evidence, they could just tell the kids about science instead, eh?
And if they asked students if climate change was more religion than science, and mostly done for money, the answer would probably be a lot higher than 31%.
How much more would the car lovers and petrol-heads of Europe take? In draconian style, last February, the EU declared all petrol and diesel cars would be banned from 2035. It was their star policy for the Net Zero push. Car makers would have to cut their emissions by a shocking 55% by 2030 and an unthinkable 100% by 2035. It was to be the end of an era.
The idea was so big and embedded in the EU that only one month ago an insurance insider warned that his company was already devising elaborate plans for a world where everyone had an EV and the insurance giants and the government got access to all your data. Police would be issuing your speeding tickets while-you-drove, and insurance companies would be granting drivers a discount if they allowed them to sell all their data to the highest bidder. Indeed, the word was that insurance companies wouldn’t even insure petrol cars. Obviously only the rich were going to be able to afford a petrol car or an EV “with privacy”.
But now, the largest party in the EU is drafting a policy to ditch the same ban they voted in a year ago. The European People’s Party (EPP) is theoretically a “centre right” party, despite acting like the radical left, but that means they stand to lose their voter-base in a blink as the reality of the bans sinks in, which it has.
BRUSSELS — Europe’s biggest conservative force, the European People’s Party, wants to massively bulk up the EU’s external guard force and drop plans to phase out the combustion engine across the bloc by 2035, according to a draft of the party’s manifesto obtained by POLITICO. With its heavy emphasis on migration control and call to “preserve our Christian values,” the manifesto reflects the growing strength of right-wing parties across the bloc.
In other news, the EPP wants to triple the number of border guards in the EU, and to relax some of the rules protecting nature. The European Commission president Mrs von der Leyen is as green as they come, but decided maybe wolves don’t need so much protection after one of them killed Dolly, her beloved horse.
By sheer coincidence the next EU elections are in June.
The mass farmers protests and electoral shocks in the Netherlands are making their marks.
“Net Zero is now a toxic vote loser”
Ralph Schoellhammer wonders if the whole Net Zero plan will be next as right wing parties realize how much traction they can get by attacking climate policies:
The European Right has discovered anger against Net Zero policies as a powerful theme for mobilising disenchanted voters, as demonstrated by farmer protests in countries such as the Netherlands and Germany. A number of parties across the continent, from the Austrian FPÖ to the German AfD and the RN in France, have been quick to make this a main campaign issue.
What was once an issue for left-of-centre parties to win over voters has now become a toxic vote-loser. This shift shouldn’t surprise us: Europeans support taking action on climate change — just so long as it doesn’t affect their lifestyles.
Once it becomes clear that reducing emissions comes at a significant cost, support for corresponding policies falls dramatically. The German example of the last two years has shown that the green transition is not leading to more jobs and prosperity, but instead the opposite. Germany was the worst performing major economy in 2023
The EU looks like it will have to remove the ban, but presumably they’ll think up other painful, stupid ways to coerce us into EV’s.
The Australian government, meanwhile, is just about to repeat all the EU mistakes but in the most sparsely populated, petrol loving, first world nation on Earth.
The UK Labour Party has bragged for two years that it will spend £28bn on green investment if they get elected. But their Green Prosperity Plan has become a target for conservatives to shoot down, and apparently the Labour party is now publicly falling all over itself to distance itself from the number £28bn. They’ve delayed it, added qualifiers, and reduced it from a “pledge” to an “ambition” but nothing seemed to work. Finally, they have had to declare that the spending target has been dropped.
The European Green Party is set for an internal battle over climate targets at a party congress this weekend (2-4 February), with the German Greens pushing to postpone the climate neutrality goals by five years and scrap parts of the gas and oil phase-out policies.
In other news, the EPP wants to triple the number of border guards in the EU, and to relax some of the rules protecting nature. The European Commission president Mrs von der Leyen is as green as they come, but decided maybe wolves don’t need so much protection after one of them killed Dolly, her beloved horse.
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