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What if Global Warming was just because something made the clouds go away…
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Wednesday
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Snowy 2.0 is the Trillion dollar Black Hole of Australia — sucking in energy, money, land, industrial relations, the dollar, our lifestyle
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Winter Solstice
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We were throwing-renewable-energy away at record levels in 2025
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Pauline Hanson, the centrist, just wants a free market in electricity, and an end to the renewable energy bribery
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Blame the Climate Yeti again for making your life more expensive! (It’s a smokescreen)
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The Sunrise Project funneled $343 million from overseas to push net zero
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The US government has been secretly funding 120 dangerous biolabs around the world
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New report shows renewables are a drag on our national productivity
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Well, how convenient. AI data centers have arrived to be the fall guy for the Energy Minister
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Billionaires are leaving the room with excuses — Bezos says “AI will solve climate crisis”
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The Craziest eco laws against Farmers. Let’s check that science…
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China cooks the carbon accounting books by 400 million tons
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The Wind Power Puzzle (add more wind turbines and get the same output)
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To save the world, Cement Australia stops burning coal and burns trees instead
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On Fire! US hunger for gas power so large, wait time for turbines blows out to 5+ years
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Perth event Saturday May 30th: Green Greed and the Grid
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Catastrophic warming already happened in Antarctica 130,000 years ago
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Suddenly the Paris Agreement grows teeth
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Australian renewable investments evaporate in 2025: reaching a ten year low
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The Bubble Pops: Big Miner BHP quietly backs away from decarbonization
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By Jo Nova
Repowering with intent to deceive…
When the subsidies run out, and an old industrial wind plant is due to be demolished and rebuilt, there are perfectly good English words the industry could use like demolish, rebuild or replace, but instead they call it “repowering” — as if we could just plug a bigger extension cord in and let those turbines grow.
In the headline above, Reneweconomy could have just as easily have said the cost of “rebuilding” the old wind farm was too high, and most of the country would know exactly what that means. Instead “repowering” sounds like a minor low cost maintenance job. Nothing to see here!
Think of the difference between someone saying they want to repower your house compared with saying they’re going to demolish and rebuild it…
You might agree to a little repowering without thinking about it. And that’s the point isn’t it? To sneak in a giant civil works operation and a set of 200 meter towers with blades bigger than the wingspan of a Jumbo Jet. Those new foundations will need 3,000 tons of concrete each. Just call it repowering!
Old industrial wind turbines are only 1MW or so, but the new ones are 6 to 8 MW. That’s six times more powerful, and nearly three times as tall. Obviously, none of the old bearings, gears, blades or footings will be reused in the new towers. Ironically, the only thing about repowering that doesn’t change is the power-cord.
It also hides the short, pathetically non-renewable, life of the old wind turbines
Old wind towers don’t die, of course, it is unmentionable, they just get repowered. (Don’t think about the cost, the waste, the disposal. Don’t think about how coal plants run for 50 years.) Shh!
The term is an official industry term now, o-so-conveniently, and even the commentators admit in the details that it means a complete rebuild.
Repowering a wind farm involves completely decommissioning the existing site – nothing can be reused except perhaps the connection to the grid. — Reneweconomy
So the underlings of the industry just absorb the term and use it in their press releases. But someone in a deep-marketing-bunker had to come up with the deceitful PR term in the first place, and they were not hoping you would understand it. It was never meant to inform — only to reframe.
Out with the old, in with the subsidy:
Think of “Repowering” as a shield to deflect attention
Before long, the absurdly meaningless marketing word fills headlines, legal documents and precious seconds of our day. And harried, heavily-taxed voter’s eyes glaze over. Less of them notice that renewables are not renewable, or that the cost of all this demolition and construction must be pushing up electricity bills. The local community-group leader might not pay attention until too late, when the trucks arrive with the supersize 747 wings and 18,000 tons of Repowering Concrete.
Every abused word is a win for the parasites unless we name and shame them for the deceit. The Collectivist Left wordsmiths abuse language all the time (and the foolish Right let them get away with it). Climate change used to mean the climate changed, but now it means your car causes cyclones. Liberal used to mean free. The word-thieves steal perfectly good words and distort their meaning. They destroy our common language one word at a time.
Our language is our heritage. It is our power to understand. Tell the children we must protect it.
9.9 out of 10 based on 128 ratings
The solar arc reaches it most Northerly point on the Earth.
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 Bogong moths resting in caves in the Snowy Mountains. Photo by Eric Warrant. The Conversation. By Jo Nova
First insects to use the stars to navigate?
Each year thousands of Bogong moths hatch all over Eastern Australia. Somehow they fly 1,000 kilometers to caves in the Snowy Mountains that they have never seen. Once inside, they hang around and do an insect form of hibernation in the cool Alpine caves through the heat of summer. When autumn comes, they fly 1,000 kilometers back to where they came from so they can breed, and keel over. Next year their children make the exact same trip.
Researchers managed to catch some moths and put them in flight simulators (for real) where Earths magnetic field was neutralized, so they could figure out if the moths could navigate without it. Somehow they “tethered” the moths, and showed them night sky and lo’, behold, the moths still tried to fly in the right direction. When the sky was flipped, the moths reversed course, and when the stars were randomized, the moths were confused.
Ponder that the stars revolve through the night, the moon comes and goes, and the constellations change with the seasons. Somehow an insect with a brain a tenth of the size of a-grain-of-rice was able to fly straight through the night as the night stars revolved around them. They were not fooled by the moon. And, they weren’t following other moths that knew the way. Months later they could reverse that path and fly back through different seasonal star patterns to get to where they started. Freaky weird stuff.
Somehow they were born knowing how to find caves 1,000 kilometers away. The trip was, apparently, hard-coded in their genes. It’s pretty wild…
Which raises tricky questions about what other complex behaviours might be hard-coded in our own genes that we don’t know about?
 Eric Warrant. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/ Eric Warrant, The Conversation
First we light-trapped bogong moths that were either migrating towards the Alps in spring or away again in autumn. We next placed them in a special flight arena inside the lab, and finely controlled Earth’s magnetic field (with magnetic coils around the arena) and the starry night sky (by projecting a highly realistic starry night sky on the roof of the arena).
Because we already knew bogong moths have a magnetic sense, we used the coils to completely remove, or null, the magnetic field in the arena.
What we found next astounded us. Using only the local Australian starry night sky projected above them, bogong moths flying in our arena were able to discern and follow their inherited migratory direction – both in spring and in autumn.
If we turned this projected sky by 180°, the moths turned and flew in exactly the opposite direction. If we then took all of the stars in this projected natural sky and randomly distributed them across the roof of the arena, the moths became completely confused and lost their ability to migrate in their inherited migratory direction.
The moths can also use the Earth’s magnetic field, so when nights are cloudy they can still navigate. The thinking is that moths have to escape the heat of summer in the outback, so they must find those caves. Presumably, they started, eons ago, living in the mountains near the caves and then gradually expanded their territory to the north and west until they were flying 1,000 kilometers away to breed.
It goes without saying that having survived five or ten million years of ice-ages, droughts, and asteroids, the Bogong Moth is now *threatened* by man-made CO2 (of course). Like all good university research projects are.
h/t Willie Soon.
REFERENCE
Dreyer, D., Adden, A., Chen, H. et al. Bogong moths use a stellar compass for long-distance navigation at night. Nature (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09135-3
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By Jo Nova
The Victorian state electricity grid is running close to the wire
They’ve run their largest coal plants into the ground — to the point of neglect where an air duct “detached from the boiler end and fell to the floor”. So one 380MW unit will be out of action at Yallourn for two weeks. And it’s just the latest in an ongoing series of failures.
We are the Renewable Crash Test Dummy — this is what the unfree, fixed, forced market produces when the best assets in a system are treated like planet-wrecking trolls.
A Hi-Tech transition, my foot…
 An Air duct collapses at Yallourn Power plant. ABC News https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-06-09/yallourn-power-station-outage-air-duct-collapse/105394406 The Net Zero forced transition is just vandalism of a perfectly good electricity grid.
The whole 1,450 MW plant at Yallourn makes 20% of the state’s electricity, but has been described as “limping” along into retirement –– (a lot like Victorian manufacturing.)
One report on the power station found that at least one of its four generators was out of action for a third of the time last year. Yallourn was supposed to close in 2032, but under siege from heavily subsidized unreliable generators, and a rigged market, that’s been brought forward to 2028.
It doesn’t help that it is owned by EnergyAustralia which is a wholly owned subsidiary of China Light and Power (CLP) Group. Presumably the CCP won’t mind at all if Victoria burns less coal, loses more smelters and can’t compete with it in the race to build data centres?
Things got so hairy last week, Paul McArdle of WattClarity has written nine articles about “June 12th”, when the wind power (marked in green) produced virtually nothing of the state’s electricity. (Graph from Anero.id)
The state used 13% of their annual gas supply to keep the lights on for three days.
Saner heads are pointing out the obvious risks:
The Queensland government told the Victorian government off, saying it couldn’t keep “bailing out Victoria’s bad decisions”.
And CEO’s are calling for more coal and gas to give the system a buffer and warning that it could fall over any time:
By Perry Williams, The Australian
The transmission giant delivering the roll-out of renewables infrastructure has advocated for authorities to accelerate the development of gas plants and retain a buffer of coal after warning the power grid has been “stripped thin” of supply.
Transgrid chief executive Brett Redman, a former boss of AGL Energy, said it was time to prioritise putting “more buffer” back into the system.
“We’ve really stripped the system very, very thin. And so the events a couple of years ago where we nearly saw widespread outages and even what’s happening in Victoria in the last couple of weeks, we are in this world now where you cannot predict exactly when it will happen.
Meanwhile China Light and Power (who own EnergyAustralia) effectively said they are committed to “Net Zero” (in other countries):
 EnergyAustralia told The Australian it had made a pledge for net-zero emissions by 2050 and “closing Yallourn by 2028 is part of that commitment”.
Why aren’t EnergyAustralia committed to keeping the lights on, keeping electricity prices low, and serving Australians? Hmm?
Does anyone really believe energy companies care about fixing the planetary weather a hundred years from now, or that it is appropriate for them to pursue their storm-stopping-witchcraft with essential public infrastructure?
What kind of lunacy is this? Not that they say it, but that we accept these ridiculous lines?
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By Jo Nova
Seismic backflip — NetZero unravelling in real time around us
Mark Carney, recently elected the new PM of Canada, was Mr Net Zero Banker-man himself. Once upon a time, he was Governor of The Bank of England, and was so passionate about saving the planet, he set up a cartel of bankers called The Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ). Since 2021 this was the black hole sucking in national energy policies. At one point, all the bankers in GFANZ cumulatively managed $130 trillion dollars worth of assets — that’s trillion with a T — meaning it was so large it was five times bigger than the US economy. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they were in cahoots with the UN and were essentially acting like a quasi world government, setting targets and rules and bossing democracies around by boycotting loans to legal oil and gas companies. GFANZ were eventually neutered by 19 Republican States in the US who fired off legal anti-trust and fiduciary duty salvos.
The new Mark Carney seems to find Donald Trump more frightening than Climate Change
Never mind about the sixth mass extinction, Mark Carney now wants Canada to dig up more oil and gas so they don’t have to buy it from the US. What matters is not whether his great grandchildren will bake in a catastrophe — but whether he can win a trade war with Donald Trump and stop him stealing Alberta:
Thanks to @NetZeroWatch
By Johnathon Leake, The Telegraph (UK)
Once considered the Bank of England’s greenest-ever governor, Mark Carney has seemingly undergone a Damascene conversion.
During his time at Threadneedle Street, he called on the world to leave 80pc of oil and gas in the ground.
But now, as Canada’s new prime minister, he wants to pump as much as he can to protect the country’s economy from Donald Trump’s trade war.
Canada is going to become an energy powerhouse, Carney told reporters last week…
Mark Carney was dropped in as Prime Minister in mid-March, but facing an election, the first bill he signed was to kill off the carbon tax — something the opposition leader, Pierre Poilievre, was campaigning heavily on.
Meanwhile, Alberta, the energy rich “engine” of Canada, was talking about seceding if he won, fed up with all the carbon rules and “Liberal neglect”. But suddenly Carney went on to promise to build oil and gas pipelines, set up LNG export terminals and undo the restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions. All the Trump talk of Canada becoming the 51st State and the imposition of tariffs may have slayed their carbon tax, and triggered new gas pipes and ports for Canada.
UPDATE: This is not a case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Trump is a real threat (to Canada’s poncy green delusion). Carney is a smart guy (he’s selfish, serving the UN-banker-blob, but he’s not stupid). Trump has dropped the tariff bomb on Canada’s economy — he sees the weakness in the Canadian position and has upped the ante. Trump holds the cards. Carney knows he has to make Canada more self-sufficient. So paradoxically, Carney has to act like Trump, and not like a Greenie Banker, or Trump will be able to blow up Canada’s economy and even split the country in half. If Alberta leaves, there goes massive resources, and possibly British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Manitoba too.
Anthony Albanese is not that smart. But if he was, he’d be paying close attention to the Canadian situation. Trump is about to point out how utterly dependent Australia is on the USA.
Amazing what Donald Trump can achieve:
By Nadine Yousif, BBC News
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said his government will start pushing legislation that would fast-track ambitious national projects to boost Canada’s economy, now faced with Donald Trump’s tariffs.
Carney said his plan is to narrow down a list of so-called “nation building” projects – like pipelines, nuclear reactors and trade corridors – and create a framework in which the projects would be approved in under two years’ time.
Apparently large gas pipelines are all OK now, just say the magic words: “carbon capture”.
UPDATE: Obviously the futile and useless “carbon capture” is just the marketing cover to hide that Mark Carney has just flipped 180 degrees. Carney doesn’t now, and probably never did give a damn about CO2 (he would have promoted nuclear power if he did). Right now he is playing poker against Trump but needs some fakery to pretend this is not complete capitulation and the end of the green fantasy. Carney is just putting out breadcrumbs for the green serfs, so they don’t revolt.
Bloomberg, June 3, 2025
Mark Carney said he sees opportunity for Canada to build a new pipeline to ship more oil to foreign markets, if it’s tied to billions in green investments to reduce the industry’s environmental footprint.
Carney said Canada still aims to ease trade tensions with US President Donald Trump, but in the meantime it must scrap internal trade barriers and build national-scale projects in order to take matters “very much into our own hands.”
“We will be a superpower when it comes to energy of all forms,” Ontario Premier Doug Ford said in his own remarks. “That’s our goal today, to make sure that we have large, national infrastructure projects that will benefit every Canadian from coast to coast to coast.”
Though the Bloomberg team that wrote carbon capture in the headline did not mention it in the story. Shh! The Blob-Media is helping Mark Carney pretend that oil and gas pipes can be green.
The US is the worlds top producer of oil at the moment, with 44 billion barrels of oil in reserve. Amazingly Canada has four times as much — or 171 billion barrels of oil in recoverable reserves, says the Telegraph. It’s amazing how stupid rich countries can be — to leave, as Alberta’s premier says, “$9 trillion worth of oil wealth we have in the ground”?
Speaking of stupid, perhaps the greatest and saddest irony is that Mark Carney once was the green-extreme Governor of the Bank of England. And while there, he helped tie the UK down in carbon markets and energy transitions that still cripple their economy. Can Trump save the UK too?
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By Jo Nova
What an amplifier? The Chinese communist party quietly helped New York create a $75b climate SuperFund Law
That’s a lot of bang for their buck.
Imagine The Blob buddied up with China to lobby for a law that forced energy companies (and thus the shareholders and customers) to cough up $75 billion to fund green initiatives? The Blob gets more money to buy power and influence and buy favors from their friends. The Chinese Communists make their competitors energy more expensive, and thus all their products more costly, less competitive, their economy weaker. Suits every kind of grifter, eh?
But perhaps China just wants to save American whales right? Why else would the Chinese-American Planning Council (CPC) be so worried about US Emissions, but not their own? The CPC has been publicly lobbying for New York to legislate the “Climate Change Superfund Act — a bizarre retrospective law which would force energy companies to pay billions for past emissions back to the year 2000AD. Supposedly, companies like Exxonmobil, Shell, and others are going to pay $3 billion a year to help New York prepare for climate change. Though obviously, it will raise the price of energy by $3 billion dollars a year (for 25 years) and it will be the mums and dads who pay the bills, not the corporate CEOs. Not surprisingly, it’s been called a “Shakedown” law.
The new law also targets companies that are outside New York State. It’s a kind of super-communism, where truly Big-Government get to punitively tax people in other jurisdictions as well as their own. Where will it end? Well, 22 other states are challenging it in court.
The CPC gets funding from the Bank of China and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) which are Chinese State owned entities. They also (wouldn’t you know it) get funding from the US government for “Community Resilience Support Services”. China might be hand-feeding our self-defeating sabotage, but the West is pretty good at it already.
The CPC, after all, is supposed to be there to help the “social and economic empowerment of Chinese American, immigrant, and low-income communities in New York City.” How exactly is this gargoyle of a law going to help poor Chinese immigrants?
A New York nonprofit bankrolled by Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-linked entities is at the center of a controversial state climate law that could force fossil fuel companies to pay $75 billion over 25 years for climate mitigation projects. The Chinese-American Planning Council (CPC), which received millions from Chinese state-owned banks and Washington taxpayer funds, has aggressively backed the “Climate Change Superfund Act,” sparking a federal investigation and constitutional concerns. Critics argue the law, signed by Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul in December 2024, threatens U.S. energy security, inflates consumer costs and represents undercover influence by Beijing to undermine American sovereignty.
The CPC’s financial ties to Beijing are well-documented. It has secured $1.4 million in U.S. taxpayer funds since 2022 and over $445,000 from Chinese government-linked institutions, including state-owned banks like the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) and the Bank of China.
Legal experts and industry analysts have raised concerns about the law’s constitutionality and economic impact. The Trump administration’s May 1 lawsuit against New York and Vermont argues it unlawfully imposes retroactive liability on energy companies for climate damages and violates the Commerce Clause by targeting out-of-state operations.
“The law doesn’t just strain budgets — it’s a constitutional time bomb,” said Republican Party energy lawyer
Tom Jensen. “Forcing companies to pay for past emissions they couldn’t foresee is trial by legislature, not due process.”
Read it all at NewsTarget and The Daily Caller.
Naturally, it’s hard to know how much different a half a million here or there in lobbying makes, but if they are openly cheering on climate taxes like this, and providing testimony supporting the law, what’s going on behind closed doors, with Quid Pro Quo deals and honeypot extortion, and who is trying to find out? House Republicans have begun probing the CPC funding, but behind closed doors there may be no paper trail unless a patriotic whistleblower speaks up.
As a tool of warcraft, it’s a bargain for China to throw money at green charities in the West
We already know they are sending money through the Energy Foundation China which ends up in environmental groups in the USA, like the Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC), that files legal challenges to stop oil pipelines, drilling, coal plants and other mining activities.
China would be crazy if they weren’t…
China controls the rare metals market, builds the wind turbines and solar panels, and now also the EV’s. Obviously, on a pure self-serving business level, the CCP would be crazy if they weren’t amplifying Green fantasia in the West in order to sabotage the competition.
Hypothetically, if China was feeding millions of dollars through NGO’s and philanthropic organizations, and our traitorous universities, what would stop it happening — investigative reporting from The ABC, the BBC or the CBC? How about CNN?
In years to come people may come to see the whole sorry escapade of the “Climate Wars” as a tactic where the Blob used China and China used the Blob to screw over The West.
Both photos by Serg Balak on Unsplash and Unsplash
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By Jo Nova
Politico doesn’t even know what “Culture” is (or Science)
They were paid millions by the USAID Blob as a fake news outlet, but even Politico has finally been dragged by its fingernails to admit something, anything, is not quite working for them in climate politics.
But make no mistake, this is not a mea culpa, it is just damage control, years after they really lost the culture war. After all, two years ago in March 2023, fully 60% of American voters already thought Climate science was more like a religion. And in any case, Donald Trump called climate change a hoax in 2016, and American voters elected him President.
But here the Blob Media are, trying to sell themselves as the firemen hosing down the global inferno.
h/t to Climate Depot
As if they give a damn about “Culture”:
“‘We’ve lost the culture war on climate” they say, but in the article they say nothing at all about culture and everything about federal regulators, funding for junkets, tax breaks and incentives. Culture is apparently just about The Money, The Rules, The Blob.
The big news here is not that Politico is reporting something meaningful, it’s that its role is shifting to “damage control”. This article is the closest thing they can think of for an excuse. They won’t admit they lost the science debate, or that the experts were wrong, or that CO2 is free fertilizer, or that Net Zero targets were futile. Instead, years too late, they’re pretending to care about culture while they demonstrate they just care about the money.
President Donald Trump’s latest climate rollback makes it all but official: The United States is giving up on trying to stop the planet’s warming.
More than 15 years after federal regulators officially recognized that greenhouse gas pollution threatens “current and future generations,” their most ambitious efforts to defuse that threat have been blocked in the courts and by Trump’s rule-slicing buzzsaw. Wednesday’s action by the Environmental Protection Agency would extend that streak by wiping out a Biden-era regulation on power plants — leaving the nation’s second-largest source of climate pollution unshackled until at least the early 2030s.
“Culture” is just an excuse to cover up a complete backdown on a stupid policy:
“There’s no way around it: The left strategy on climate needs to be rethought,” said Jody Freeman, who served as counselor for energy and climate change in President Barack Obama’s White House. “We’ve lost the culture war on climate, and we have to figure out a way for it to not be a niche leftist movement.”
So to avoid being irrelevant, they need to do what the skeptics said all along, “use gas”:
It’s a strategy Freeman admitted she was “struggling” to articulate, but one that included using natural gas as a “bridge fuel” to more renewable power — an approach Democrats embraced during the Obama administration — finding “a new approach” for easing permits for energy infrastructure and building broad-based political support.
Basically, this is Politico trying to show the Bloblings and climate fan-boys how to frame a big backdown as if it’s just a shift in “the culture war” not an admission that they were wrong.
The truth is that they lost the science war long before they lost the culture war:
It’s been bad for believers ever since the ice cores showed temperatures rise before carbon dioxide does, and by hundreds of years, and we’ve known that since 2003. The only signature of catastrophe that mattered was the upper tropospheric hot spot, which was totally missing in 2005 and is still missing, (it was the only fingerprint they said that counted, right up until they couldn’t find it).
The data kept backing the skeptical side: 3,000 ocean buoys, 6,000 boreholes, a thousand tide gauges, and 28 million weather balloons. The ocean warming isn’t statistically significant, sea-levels started rising before we even built the coal plants, and still aren’t rising fast enough. The Holocene was wickedly hot for thousands of years, and they don’t know why.
Antarctica was supposed to be warming faster than almost anywhere but they were totally wrong. The only part of Antarctica that was warming was sitting on top of a volcano chain they prefer not to tell you about.
The climate experts still can’t predict the climate on a local, regional, or continental scale, they don’t know why global warming slowed for years, or the world was warm in medieval times. And all along some of their best scientists were hiding data, declines, history, adjustments and methods.
In 2007 30,000 scientists signed a petition skeptical of global warming, By 2012 two thirds of engineers and geologists in Canada were skeptics.
But Politico won’t report this — it doesn’t suit the narrative.
Teach the children. The big lies of the Blob Media are what they don’t say.
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By Jo Nova
According to expert reporters, and smug academics, Coal is dead, a stranded asset, and a dying investment all around the globe.
Meanwhile, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has just published a graph of global approvals of coal-fired plants over the last ten years. For some inexplicable reason, the original graph was various shades of blue and green, by crikey. (Almost like the IEA hoped that no one would notice the contribution from China?).
But obviously, the CCP is always Communist Red, so I fixed the graph for them. We can see how badly China wants to achieve Net Zero right here in the graph We can also see how good President Xi is at sticking to his words — look at the ramp up from 2021.
 These are just approvals for coal plants, of course, but the IEA says “China started construction of nearly 100GW of new coal fired plants”. No one is planning a coal plant in 2025 that they want to shut down in 2035.
Australia’s total coal fired capacity (built over the last fifty years) is 18GW. China approved five times as many new coal plants in a single year as we currently run.
Reuters, 2021: China will start phasing down coal use from 2026 as part of its efforts to slash greenhouse gas emissions, President Xi Jinping said at a summit of global leaders on Thursday…
“We will strictly limit the increase in coal consumption over the 14th five-year plan period (2021-2025) and phase it down in the 15th five-year plan period (2026-2030),” he said.
Xi’s comments mean that China’s coal consumption, by far the highest in the world, will reach a peak in 2025 and start to fall thereafter. Xi already pledged last year to bring China’s emissions to a peak before 2030 and make the country “carbon neutral” by 2060. “China has committed to move from carbon peak to carbon neutrality in a much shorter timespan than what many developed countries might take, and that requires hard efforts from China,” Xi told the summit.
As we all know, the media is one giant gas-lighting propaganda cartel. Tell the children.
PS: Site still struggling under the load of weaselly vandals. We are refining the armor. There are hints it is costing someone quite a lot of money to run this seige. We will prevail! Thanks for your patience.
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The DDOS Cyber attack ramped up yesterday with a flood of traffic coming in from Hong Kong.
Eric took many measures today that improved things, but it remains difficult to write and publish blog posts.
I have paid for a new level of security and tools today which had some success, but it is an arms race with the vandals who don’t want you to read this site.
Traffic patterns are obviously artificial. We see very high strange but regular spikes from US sources, and then the long grinding burst of thousands of new “fans” in Hong Kong who all decided to read an Australian site this afternoon. Compare the new robot traffic to the normal size of reader traffic in Australia, France and Germany.
Which country would have billions of dollars to lose if Australia stopped ordering wind-trinkets, batteries and solar-voodoo and woke up to the glorious power of cheap brown coal?
So behind the scenes it is hard to write or publish while we add armor to the site to control the trouble, and so please forgive errors, typos or other unusual lack of polish. I can’t predict when a draft will be saved…
Thanks to people who have donated to help shore up the site.
DDOS = Distributed Denial-of-Service attack.
10 out of 10 based on 94 ratings
By Jo Nova
Will anything be salvageable?
*UPDATED: No — After drifting abandoned and on fire for three weeks, The MorningMidas has sunk.
The latest update shows the fires still burning and (wow) extensive damage to the hull.
A week after fire broke out on the Morning Midas, the salvage crew have finally reached the boat. The bulk car carrier was abandoned last Tuesday and has been adrift 300 miles south of Alaska. The ship only had 68 full EVs on board, with 681 hybrid cars, among a total load of 3,000 cars. But apparently that was quite enough to turn it into a 47,000 ton slow burning barbecue.
But alas, a week later, the photos show the slow burn has consumed much of the ship. Even though the hull appears intact and the ship is not listing, the damage is extensive. How much of the cargo on board would have survived a week of smoke and heat?
The Morning Midas is a bulk carrier which was headed from China to Mexico. The fire broke out last Tuesday Alaskan time, so it is said, from the deck where the electric cars were. After the crew sealed the doors and unleashed the carbon dioxide bottles, there wasn’t much else they could do. All 22 sailors abandoned ship and were rescued by a Costco carrier.
The 46,800-ton ship itself was built in 2006 and is worth about $14 million. With 3,000 new cars at $30,000 each that would be a loss of $90 million. If the ship and cargo is lost, as happened to the Felicity Ace in 2022, the total loss could be around $100 million.
Without any realistic way to put out these fires, perhaps EV’s will have to be parked on the top deck next to an ejector hatch, with a catapault? It would save so much money if they can be dumped at sea at the first sign of smoke?
Sal Mercogliano, a specialist on shipping news points out that on these ships, the cars are packed bumper to bumper and tied down with straps over the wheels. As the fire burns through the straps, he says the cars can start to roll on the seas. (His youtube on this is here).
He also points out the crew have to get off early in a situation like this. They are 10 to 12 decks high above the water, or 100 – 120 feet above water. The lifeboats must be lowered into the water, and if they wait too long, they might be unable to do that. At that point they are left jumping 30-40 meters into the cold Pacific Ocean.
What the ship looked like last week as the fires started.
Imagine if this was a ferry with 300 passengers?
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