Paul Homewood came across another die-hard believer still saying “What about all the subsidies!” He reminds us of the Guardian headline hand-wringing over $7 Trillion dollars of subsidies in support of fossil fuels. The main source of this meme is the IMF, so I went to their two year old report data to create the graphs that the IMF won’t.
The IMF fossil fuel fantasy update of 2023…
The trillion dollar claims of fossil fuel subsidies amount to nothing more than IMF wet dream. Literally, 80% of the “subsidies” are what they’d like to charge oil and gas companies for things like the imaginary damage that CO2 does on simulated Earths in broken climate models. The IMF calls this “implicit subsidies”. You can I might call it a brazen fake (or worse).
The IMF has a budget of over $1 billion dollars a year, and they have 20 impenetrable super-graphs on their blog and report, but they don’t have the simple graphs like this, that I did below, showing that most of the subsidies are the “implied” imaginary sort, and that one country on Earth does all “the subsidies”. (Click to Enlarge…) Nobody mention China.
The orange “subsidies” are the total fantasies here. It really is that bad.
Fossil fuels cause car accidents, congestion and road wear don’t you know?
Unbelievably, other parts of the “80% implicit subsidy block” even include things like the cost of traffic accidents, fatalities, congestion and wear and tear on the roads. Somehow when fossil fuels cause congestion, and we suffer a loss of productivity, that’s an implicit subsidy because the price of fuel was not efficient. (Congestion is when your car gets stuck and slows you down, and “efficiency” is when you spend an hour riding a horse, and 2 hours mucking out the stables?)
“… things get weirder. For instance, about 39 percent of the “social cost” of gasoline in the IMF analysis comes from accidents, traffic fatalities, and congestion. It is true that these things are externalities. But they’re caused by automobile use, not by gasoline use per se. If we switched over to solar-powered electric cars tomorrow, we’d still have traffic accidents and congestion. It’s strange to argue that this is some sort of “subsidy” for gasoline specifically.”
It’s true: The Government could have charged you more tax:
Apparently, in the deep-climate-dimension — a Blob-academic can imaginethat we’d have less congestion if we taxed fuel more and discouraged driving; therefore, a lower tax is a “subsidy”. I presume efficient pricing means people should be paying so much more that there is no congestion? I wonder if their model includes the cost of suicide and divorce when taxes are so high people spent an hour less at home each day because they have to catch buses, they give up taking the kids to soccer, and don’t eat fresh food from the farmers markets that they can’t afford to drive to?
Maybe the IMF will accidentally solve congestion because everyone will give up and move to the country to grow cabbages?
The IMF Gods-of-control actually flesh out their fantasies of what they think “efficient pricing” for coal, gas, and petrol would be, and in every country on Earth.
Lo and behold, marvel at the Super-Graph below where the efficient pricing is laid out. Be grateful girls and boys, we only pay the red-dot retail price. When the IMF rules the world the real price will be the full bar. They are just practicing for when they are One World Government and can solve congestion, productivity, car accidents and stop storms with taxes!
Imagine how many man-hours this took?
page 14, IMF
I found it so hard to believe they did include road congestion and accidents, I will just include a few passages showing the intricate, vainglorious detail:
Estimating Average Delays from Road Congestion
Average delays are then multiplied by: (i) the relationship between marginal and average delays, which is estimated to be 400 percent (based on a review of the literature); (ii) vehicle occupancy (averaging over cars and buses); (iii) people’s value of travel time (VOT) which is assumed to be 60 percent of the nationwide average market wage in 2022;25 (iv) fuel economy (to express costs per liter rather than per km); and (v) the portion of the fuel demand elasticity that comes from reduced driving (and therefore affects congestion) versus the portion that comes from improved fuel economy/shifting to EVs (that does not affect congestion).26
And wear and tear on the road too:
Externalities from wear and tear on the road network imposed by high axle-weight vehicles are based on highway maintenance expenditures by country (from IRF 2022 and OECD 2023) per unit of road diesel fuel use, an assumption that half of the expenditures are attributed to vehicle use as opposed to other factors (weather and natural deterioration) and scaled by the driving portion of the fuel price elasticity.
Make these people beg directly to the voters for their salaries. It would end this nonsense in a minute…
Martin Durkin’s latest video exposes the stealthy rise of a secret new ruling class in society.
The most powerful class in society has been anonymously invisible, unnamed, and unnoticed, and this is key to its success. If the ruling class is named, the masses would be able to discuss the common motivations and interests of its members. While it has no name, it can disguise itself as separate neutral parties working to help “society”.
“An entire social class that has steadily grown in size and power over the past century — whose very existence, whose jobs and income depend on depriving the rest of us of our money and freedom.”
That this cloak of invisibility, it turns out, is exactly the way the Soviet bureaucrats worked. We know this, because, as Martin Durkin explains, it was described in 1957 by a man called Milovan Djilash in his book called The New Class. His book was smuggled out of Yugoslavia and printed in the US. It earnt him 15 years in jail — obviously he was speaking a dangerous truth.
Djilash had become appalled by the socialist system he helped set up. He had come to realize it did not represent a victory of the working class, but of a new oppressive parasitic, bureaucratic class. And for this New Class, he said, it was vital that it must deny its own existence. This, he said, was the biggest deception it must accomplish.
” The source of power for this new class was public administration — its power to regulate and control everybody else. The new class, he said, finds itself unavoidably at war with everything which it does not administer or handle and must deliberately aspire to destroy or conquer it. “
Gorilla Science
The New Deal in the 1930s led to an explosion in alphabet agencies and regulators and planners. Understandably, the people inside the class are only human, and they like their jobs and their junkets. Thus they become “a bureaucratic solution in search of a problem to solve”, in order to grow their own power. Verily, the bureaucracy expands to fill as much of the economy as it possibly can (and then some).
The New Class is at war with the free individual:
The new class, by definition, is absolutely at war with laissez-faire free market capitalism.
For the new class, lower taxes and less regulation are a direct challenge to its livelihood.
The new class, though it does not say it outright, is implacably against the notion of private property.
It ought to be up to the state, the state run by them, to determine how much of our money, our earnings, and savings we will be allowed to keep.
And so for the new class, it’s axiomatic that capitalism is cruel, oppressive, inefficient, corrupt.
Martin Durkin points out that the State calls itself “democratic” to soften up the awful truth of the authoritarian power. “Instead of calling something “state control” it’s called “democratic control”. This mirrors what Mike Benz talks about with the US State Department and its “Whole of society censorship framework”. When we protest and complain about a state institution we are “attacking democracy itself” which justifies calling for censorship. It is as if democracy means the Institutions of a democratic country, rather than the power of the voters.
Part of the reason the New Class has stayed so well hidden is because the very academics and people who define the Classes of society are a part of the New Class, and there are no benefits to them in being exposed as a class that serves itself.
And of course, in an unholy alliance, the bureaucrats align with the corporate predators who are folded into the New Class too. The Big Pharma Giants work with the regulators they capture in a symbiotic parasitic relationship.
I shall continue to call this new class The Blob, for want of any better, more apt sounding name. But we must have a name, for we cannot fight a vaporous foe. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to help tell the world about the new ruling class. Everything they want to hide, we must expose.
My draft definition:
BLOB (The)— The parasitic unholy alliance of Big Corporations, Big Government, Big Bankers and their entire fan club and cheer squad of supporters. Dangerously, this also includes the watchdogs: the Spy Agencies and large parts of the media. The Blob takes money from citizens, pays other parts of the Blob (eg USAID, The UN, The BIS, The World Bank etc), pretends to “help” some token victim group or environmental cause, or even to monitor or audit The Blob, but the outcome benefits The Blob more than the victims. They line their own pockets and increase their own privileges.
The Blob also includes a special category of “useful idiots” who naively assist them in looting Western Civilization. These people are paid in status or an illusory sense of purpose rather than money. They may not realize they are part of the self-serving Blob, and in the long run are not only harming the trees, birds and whales they say they want to save, but are harming their own health, wealth, national security, and worse, that of their children.
The pushback is coming. Any word that gives power to the individual will be subsumed, relabeled, distorted and misused by The Blob in an attempt to neutralize it. I’m sure I saw the ABC mention it recently…
Twelve thousand years ago sea levels around Africa rose much faster than today
It’s another totally solid, non-controversial paper that will never be mentioned in the media or by 50 shades of climate experts.
In extraordinary detail, Vecchi et al look at 347 datapoints up and down the west coast of Africa and find that, like everywhere else, sea levels were a blockbuster 125m lower at the depths of the ice age 25,000 years ago. Then seas rose in rapid bursts as the vast Laurentide and Eurasian ice sheets melted, until they finally stopped rising 8,000 years ago. It must have been twelve thousand years of mayhem for corals, mangroves and beach-side cave-dwellers.
In the northern Gulf of Guinea seas were recorded as rising at up to 25 mm per year about 12,000 years ago — eight times faster than anything we see today. And given the difficulty of knowing sea levels 15,000 years ago, there were probably many short episodes of faster shifts that got washed away, never to be recorded.
All our panic about the current crisis of a pitiful 3mm-a-year rise allegedly “due to man-made CO2” pales to nothing compared to what Monster Nature does. This study and hundreds like it, are like a stake through the heart of the vampire. For if the children understood the seismic shifts of the past, they would know that they were being sold a lie that the world had a stable and perfect climate or that current beaches have some sacred right to exist in perpetuity. Obviously, as commenters* pointed out, the Torres Strait Islanders ought to have a cultural memory of massive inundation, reefs shifting and the beaches being washed away. Like everywhere else in the world, Australian sea levels have been falling for 7000 years.
Click to enlarge | Nature | NB: The authors must be left-handers and run their graphs right to left — so in graph C, the present is on the left.
And if natural rises can be eight times faster than what we see today, then how do we know the current rise is not partially or wholly natural? All we have are climate simulations…
Sea levels have fallen by 1 to 4 meters in last 5,000 years
Imagine the amount of work to collect all these data points from so many locations?
There were some sharp falls in sea level in the last 2,000 years.
Two men from a Torres Strait Island spent four years trying to sue the Australian government for “its duty of care” to change the global weather. Both sides agreed climate change will be a disaster, so the science was never debated in court. Despite this, Justice Michael Andrew Wigney said he accepted “many of the factual allegations” upon which the case was based, even though the claims were never tested, no one spoke against them and they didn’t get a fair trial, or even any trial at all.
Thus Justice Wigney issued his prophecies of biblical hellfire, no doubt raising anxiety levels of the Torres Strait islanders even further, but who cares about their mental health right? They are just the mascots used by The Blob:
The Australian government has no duty of care over the people or the islands of the Torres Strait with regard to climate change, even though there is a “real risk” the land could disappear entirely, the Federal Court of Australia has found.
I’ve accepted the scientific evidence … concerning the devastating impacts that human-induced climate change has had, and continues to have, on the Torres Strait Islands and on the traditional inhabitants … their culture and way of life,” Justice Wigney said.
“Severe erosion, the salination of wetlands and previously arable land, the degradation of fragile ecosystems … has become more frequent and more severe in recent times,” he said. “There is a very real risk that the worst fears of the applicants will be realised.”
The defendant*, The Australian Government — could hardly disagree with “the science”. It is spending hundreds-of-billions to protect us from the climate gorgons, after all, so it can hardly argue that climate science is skill-less, unfalsifiable and based on unverified junk simulations. So the whole legal show is mere pantomime theater, and in the end, the ABC and other junk media get to breathlessly tell the world that in a smashingly big climate case, even the Judge has found that climate change is real. Gnash! Gnash! Gnash!
Judge as Weather Prophet
So the Judge is reduced to doing free advertising for The Blob. And perhaps that was the whole point of the case, since it was always ridiculous, in a democracy, that a judge should be the one to set national energy policy.
The islanders have been shamelessly wound up by activists, the ABC and CSIRO lobbyists to serve their own purposes. They were set up to expect something they could never get, and thus their crushing disappointment was just the third act in a badly written play.
But the other point about this case is the way the science debate gets sidestepped yet again — so the judge issues his judgment, but makes a lot of wholly unnecessary statements of climate assumptions that were not tested in his court. And not only do these become free advertising on prime time TV but they will be used in subsequent cases as if they mean something. “Quoted as fact” they may also influence policy and legislation, and help to cement the profoundly unscientific “consensus” and all the Blob institutions that feed off that. So the world just got more cluttered. Science shrank, and everyone, bar the Blob, got poorer.
The Blob pretends to care about the world while it uses and abuses the mental health of the Islanders in a quest to increase their own power and income.
And The Blob pretends to care about “science” even as it destroys the tenets of the Scientific Method.
The antidote, as always, is to tell the world and pop that smug-bubble in public.
Their case is being supported by the Grata Fund, an Australian “strategic litigation funder” and the Urgenda Foundation, a Dutch group that uses lawfare to “help” the renewables transition. Obviously if giant industrial renewables firms and bankers, or the Chinese government were donating to these groups (with the best of intentions) we probably would never know. It’s not like The ABC will ask them hard questions like that, is it?
The city kids don’t know the first thing about the sky
Despite the media frenzy here, no one seems to have noticed that the lost tourist, Carolina Wilga, was walking for 11 days in the wrong direction. She said she “followed” the sun, and thought she was going west, but she was actually going north-west, away from help. See the map below to appreciate what a terrible mistake she was making (among a list). At this time of year, the sun is setting almost as far north as it ever sets. Somehow she was missing the entire Wheat Belt of Western Australia.
Primitive hunter gatherers knew the cycles of the sun and the movement of stars we can’t even see. It’s the most ancient science and we seem to have lost it. Not just Ms Wilga, but all the commentators too. Neolithic Brits built Stonehenge 4,000 years ago to mark the solstice and modern phone bunnies with silicon chips have lost it. Heck, even Bogong moths can navigate by the stars.
Carolina Wilga, 26
The 26 year old German backpacker drove 35 km off the beaten track into no-mans land and had an incident where the car slid, and she hit her head and got bogged. After giving up on the car, she waited a day, then walked “west”. She drank water from puddles and bee-hives. At night, temperatures drop to around zero (32F). No surprisingly, she was convinced she would die. It would have been gruelling and very very scary. On the 12th day, somehow, through extraordinary luck, or a divine act, the one sole station owner for 50 kilometers happened to see her on a dirt track that the owner doesn’t travel on much. Tania Henley (the rescuer) called it a miracle, which I thought was the usual hype, until I saw the map. Out in the border-land surrounding the vast desert center of Australia there are thousands of empty square kilometers.
The direction Carolina was headed in was almost doomed — running parallel to the northern edge of the wheat and barley fields in a largely uninhabited semi-arid zone.
What the bland mass media map doesn’t show is where civilization is, and how she was headed in the wrong direction
In the satellite photo below we can see the wheat and barley farms to the south, where she had come from, and would have found safety and people. To the north and north-west is Bimbijy — which is one of the vast remote stations in Western Australia. (The red dots marking her start and end points are only approximate. The car was stuck in “Karroun Hill Reserve” which no one has ever heard of, but is 3,097 square kilometers in size. She apparently covered 24 kilometers on foot and was found west of Bimbijy, and her car was left 35km from “any established track”.)
Never mind the brown snakes, the deadliest thing out there is the lack of water. Rainfall in this area is less than 300mm or 12 inches a year and all the lakes are salt-pans. Luckily June and July are the rainiest time of year. One 73 year old gold prospector went missing in the same area last December, and sadly, has still not been found.
Headed NW to follow the Sun.
Ponder that the one cleared pale square under the word “Bimbijy” above is the station homestead and airstrip. The only one out there.
Tania Henley (the rescuer) said:
“It was meant to be because no one goes up and down that road. “I don’t go to Beacon very often…”
We can zoom out and see that by following the sun Carolina’s direction was one long miss. (Along the dotted white line). In midwinter at 29°S the sun is setting 23° north of west. Though obviously, she should have been going south west, not west in any case. (Don’t leave home without a paper map, eh?)
The only “need” for Green Steel on earth is because it’s a fashion accessory at UN events, or because some people believe it can change the weather. There is no intrinsic benefit, it’s not shinier or stronger, it just has more social scoring points, or bragability if you go to inner-city upmarket arts parties. Technically, according to the experts, owning green steel will confer benefits like extending winter for a few more days a year (theoretically). I can’t see that catching on.
This is a market that the bottom could fall out of any day
In May, only 13% of UK Voters said Net Zero goals were more important than their cost of living. So 87% of the market is already not interested in buying Green Steel instead of normal steel. And that 13% “peak” is only maintained with bullying, censorship and non-stop propaganda by the legacy media. Imagine how fast that niche group would shrink if word spreads that Net Zero policies are killing birds and whales and hurting the poor? Or that thousands of scientists are skeptics — including men who walked on the moon and won Nobel Prizes (Vale Ivar Gievar!).
Half of Australia doesn’t want to pay a single cent on Net Zero targets. The IPA research showed barely 7% of the population are willing to spend anything meaningful. So 93% of Australians don’t want “green steel”. The 7% figure who might hypothetically pay more for “weather changing steel” can only shrink from here.
The only market for Green Steel in China is the one we make, sorry, we fake here at home, with government decrees, forced carbon markets, subsidies, and Soviet rules.
In the EU there is a small premium paid for green steel, but they have a carbon market and targets. In the US where people are now more free to choose their favourite steel, the green steel market is “stagnant”.
Devastatingly, Fastmarketreports that the differential paid for green steel was “$0” per short ton (per long ton too!).
That’s how much people in the US are willing to pay voluntarily for green steel. Nothing.
There may come a time soon, when it will be negative. Don’t give me that…
If Australia tries to make wind-solar-battery-power “Green Steel” five minutes later, China will start nuclear power green steel, and wipe out our market
If the gormless West taxes and subsidizes the population into paying more for green steel, China will be only too happy to profit from selling niche fashionista pointless items to the West. If we delude ourselves that it is a market with “hundreds of thousands of jobs” — a moment later, China will process green steel with electric arcs powered by “low emission” nuclear plants.
It’s so unfair, the wind is free, but who could have known we’d need metals, boats, cables, and magnets?
Governments waved their magic wands to declare the renewable transition would “bling” into existence, but they didn’t bother doing the sums on whether we could mine the vast resources in time, and what would happen to the prices of everything, if every other stupid fashion-obsessed western nation tried to do the same thing at the same time.
At the academic safe-space known as “The Conversion” Thomas York explains to baffled renewables fans why wind farm developers are mysteriously pulling out at the last minute. He doesn’t spell out the baby-nature of the economic reality, but we can read between the lines. The ship called The Infrastructure-Bill has arrived and it’s killing them: the price of steel, copper and aluminium has doubled and tripled; we can’t make the right boats fast enough to build the towers out at sea; everyone wants high-voltage cabling at the same time, and they all need the rare metals for the magnets, which are well, rare. Then, the delays in arranging all this mean the developers fall over their contract agreements timelines, so they start to lose subsidies.
Ultimately developers have raised their prices to cover the true costs, but then the customers aren’t happy. As the University of Leicester researcher says so poignantly when faced with the brutal reality of the market: “it [wind power] is simply not profitable enough”. He even admits “renewable energy still cannot compete with oil and gas.” Sacre bleu!
The UK government magic wand says it can generate 95% of energy from renewable sources by 2030. York, master of understatement, says the “target is now in jeopardy.”
The UK government’s strategy for tackling climate change received a major blow in May when Danish developer Ørsted announced that adverse economic developments had halted its 2.4 gigawatt (GW) Hornsea 4 wind farm in the North Sea.
Supply, meet demand: When everyone wants the same thing at the same time, prices rise
Building a wind turbine requires significant amounts of steel, copper and aluminium, all of which doubled or tripled in price between 2020 and 2023. Turbine manufacturers have raised prices in an effort to recover recent losses…
Impending national and international net zero targets also mean that developers globally are having to make earlier investments in transmission infrastructure. An exponential increase in demand for scarce high-voltage cabling has already led to high-profile cancellations of offshore wind farms in the US.
… Rising demand for rare earth metals used to make magnets in turbine generators has also been snared by geopolitical issues.
There are just not enough boats:
Ørsted ceased work on its 2.2GW Ocean Wind development zone off the coast of New Jersey in 2023, citing a vessel delay in its decision to cancel the project.
According to the advocacy group WindEurope, demand for vessels capable of installing foundations and turbines and laying cables will outstrip availability within the next five years. The gap between the two is forecast to skyrocket between 2028 and 2030….
Delays caused by these issues can result in a problem known as “contract erosion”. In their contracts, developers have a commissioning window within which turbines have to start generating. If they are not operational within this time, they lose their subsidies on a day-by-day basis.
Ultimately, the market hath spoken:
Rising costs mean that even one of the world’s biggest wind farms, Dogger Bank in the North Sea, will not be profitable for its developer, Equinor. As a prospect for generating financial returns, renewable energy still cannot compete with oil and gas.
This is the key argument of economic geographer Brett Christophers in his recent book The Price is Wrong. Christophers argues that, if national governments continue to rely so heavily on private sector investment to build renewable energy, decarbonisation is unlikely to proceed as fast as it needs to. It is simply not profitable enough.
If the government had got out of the way and let the market speak twenty years ago without hiding the truth under a bonanza-fog of subsidies, we wouldn’t have wasted twenty years and trillions of dollars to find out it was not going to work.
Burn more oil and coal, save lives and never ever apologize
It’s been a hot ten days in Europe and the Blob-Propaganda Machine is running full tilt. A rapid “analysis” invented a number of excess deaths faster than junk science has ever been done before. So teeth can be gnashed appropriately, never mind about peer-review, who needs that? Thus, extreme heat was said to have killed 2,305 people across 12 cities — 2,305! And with Coupled Voodoo Models we can “show” two thirds of those deaths were because of fossil fuels and “Climate ChangeTM“! This study, note, has not even been published, it can’t be using real data from the event “seven days prior” (June 23 to July 2, 2025) because that won’t be published for weeks or months. It’s all guesstimated from past deaths in other years.
One *handy* thing about rapid analysis like this is that it’s also “too fast” to see if the excess deaths were followed by a lower death rebound, which often happens after heat-waves. A few hot days in a row generally take those who are about to die in the next six weeks anyway, so after the peak, comes the drop. It’s rather darkly known as harvesting future deaths. Good studies use at least a 21 day lag, but crass publicity-science-stunts don’t even wait 21 days to hit the news stands. Maybe they “guessed” that too in the assumptions? Who can tell? Maybe they’ll add it in and adjust the numbers later — after the media hype?
Of course, if the sole purpose of junk-science-academia is to promote government tax and spending plans, then we wouldn’t want to do a careful analysis and find that 1,500 people weren’t really excess deaths we could blame on fossil fuel induced warming, or that by the same reasoning probably 15,000 Europeans were saved last winter. Shh!
The complete sell out of university and legacy-media is there for all to see. All it takes is for one professor, or one journalist to do five minutes of research (or a read a blogger for free) and show what we all know — that if global warming kills anyone in summer, by the same reasoning it would save ten every winter. Around the world Global warming saves 166,000 lives a year. (Zhao et al). Where are the headlines for the people the Greens don’t care if they kill in winter each year?
Climate Change saves ten times as many lives every winter
It’s rare in medical science to have unequivocal research. But this is one of those moments. Studies of 74 million people show the same pattern everywhere; in terms of the climate nothing is more deadly to humans than winter. (See Gasparrini et al). For every summer heat wave death, at least 6, 10 or even 20 people die due to cold weather in winter. The largest study across 13 countries found cold deaths were twenty times more common than heat deaths. Look at the scary blue bars below, it’s moderate cold coming to get you!
In richer European cities, with gas stoves and coal fired power stations *only* ten times as many people will die of the cold. (Mazzelot et al) Even in warm sunny Brisbane, Australia, six times as many people die in mild cold weather as in the heat of summer. (Cheng et al).
Remember this graph? The one on the left made it through peer-review and expanded deaths on the “warm” side. The graph on the right is the real proportion of cold deaths to warm ones. And the Lancet published the big 74 million deaths study in 2015. They knew. They knew!
Thanks to Patrick Moore https://twitter.com/EcoSenseNow
The benefits we can derive,
From warming, helps keep us alive,
While our true foe is cold,
Killing both young and old,
Who with warming would otherwise thrive.
– Ruairi
REFERENCES
The World Weather Attribution study (unpublished) … ?
Masselot et al (2023) Excess mortality attributed to heat and cold: a health impact assessment study in 854 cities in Europe, The Lancet, DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(23)00023-2
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