The thrill of EV ownership in Australia has worn off before it even started
In news that will shock no one, except the Minister for Weather himself, Labor’s plan to have nine out ten new car drivers in an electric vehicle by 2030 has crashed into a mountain of apathy. The latest estimates from the Australian department in charge of guessing these things is that EVs will only be 27% of new car sales by then, not 89%. And the modeling assumes EV’s will be exempt from the usual tariffs and taxes, but finds most Australians would rather pay the extra taxes and get themselves a planet-wrecking petrol-head machine anyway.
Of course, in climate maths, 27% is practically the same as 89% because EV’s may not reduce emissions at all, but since the push to force them on us has nothing to do with carbon emissions, the theatrical chasm in their big plans is a major loss.
By 2030, after years of propaganda and coercion, electric cars are only expected to be 5% of the national fleet of small vehicles.
Of the developed world, Australia is possibly the stupidest country to own an EV in
With the lowest population density, longest hottest roads, and soon to be most unreliable expensive power, there’s a reason Australians have been slow to buy expensive, short range, inflammable machines.
In The Daily Mail today we hear that Belinda Cleary drove a $90,000 EV from Sydney to Melbourne and it cost 30% more in fuel and took 25% longer than her petrol car. The round trip cost $210 in fuel instead of $140 in petrol. So you can pay more to pay more and go slower as well. What’s not to like?
Having wrecked Australia’s cheap energy grid by turning it into a giant cyclone-and-flood talisman, the irony is that electric cars can’t get cheap fuel anymore. The hapless Belinda needed to stop six times to refill on the 1,800 kilometer return trip, and spent three and a half hours enjoying the roadhouses of the Hume Highway. On the way home, someone walked near her car and accidentally spooked the charger into stopping, thus creating an unexpected delay. Oh the complexities of electrical ecology?
But on the bright side, the car didn’t kidnap her, and she points out that all the 350kW charging stations were working. If one had been on the fritz she couldn’t have made it to the next fast charger, so she would have had an instant holiday stopover in Tarcutta. The slow 50 kW chargers are so slow drivers need an overnight stay.
And of course this major highway is the busiest and most well serviced interstate route in Australia. Everywhere else is going to be worse.
Word is spreading openly of the awful third quarter results in wind and solarpower, and in EV’s. Morningstar noted some $14 billion dollars moved out of sustainability funds in the last quarter even before the dismal results were announced. This is only a small part of the $300 billion total, but it’s a big bad shift in momentum in a sector that is supposed to be going exponential and theoretically “the next big thing”.
Two years ago funds were tagging anything they could with Sustainability. But the term has become a dirty word, and so has ESG. Funds that were enthusiastically adding these green terms to their titles are now dropping them and backing away slowly…
With major daily business newspapers now reporting the bad news it’s hard to see what will stop the slide — only massive subsidies would do that (temporarily), but the US has already done that with the bizarrely named Inflation Reduction Act.
But make no mistake, there is a $300 billion industry begging for help and a lot of politicians who don’t want to admit their renewables push was an economic disaster. The German government has bailed out Siemens, and the UK government is throwing money at wind power to try to get investors back. It’s like communism by stealth. The government demands industries do magical things, then when they fail, it saves them, making industry increasingly serve governments instead of customers. But the money, or the system can’t go on forever…
Wall Street rushed to embrace sustainable investing just a few years ago. Now it is quietly closing funds or scrubbing their names after disappointing returns that have investors cashing out billions.
The third quarter was the first time more sustainable funds liquidated or removed ESG criteria from their investment practices than were added, according to Morningstar. That is a reversal from not that long ago, when companies were rebranding faltering funds to cash in on the billions of dollars flowing into sustainable investment products.
At least five other funds also announced they would drop their ESG mandates this year, while another 32 sustainable funds will close, according to data compiled by Morningstar and The Wall Street Journal.
One venture capitalist says Net Zero policies are political pipedreams, and Venture Capitalists knew years ago that industries dependent on government handouts might collapse like Enron:
As early as 2018, key industry executives warned that the renewables sector risked an Enron-style collapse because of its insatiable subsidy-dependence. That unwinding is now happening across the wind, solar and EV industries, and it’s driven by dynamics unlikely to be reversed.
As demand falters, skyrocketing costs are outstripping even massive subsidies.
Faced with crippling technical problems, growing warranty exposure and companies like Shell walking away from multi-billion-dollar projects, industry leaders Orsted, Vestas and Siemens Gamesa are in structural financial crisis, their shares down by 30 to 60 per cent. Siemens Energy’s recent request for a $16-billion bailout prompted BP’s head of renewable energy to say the industry was “broken.”
What we are witnessing are not bumps in the road to an inevitable clean energy transition but evidence of socio-economic realities unravelling the politics of net zero — including the fiction that we must urgently and radically re-engineer our societies to stop a supposed climate catastrophe that in fact isn’t.
Henry Geraedts worked in venture capital internationally. His PhD is in international political economy, with an interest in strategic aspects of energy and technology.
Three weeks ago the head of renewables for BP used the word “broken”:
The offshore wind industry, one of the fastest growing energy sectors, has recently suffered a string of major setbacks due to equipment reliability issues, supply chain problems and sharp cost increases.
Anja-Isabel Dotzenrath, BP’s head of gas and low carbon, said that problems in the United States included permitting, the time lag between signing power purchase agreements and projects being built and a lack of inflationary adjustment mechanisms.
“Ultimately, offshore wind in the U.S. is fundamentally broken,” Dotzenrath told an FT Energy Transition conference in London.
The profit margins are so thin, and the approval process is so long and complex (because they use so much space), that inflation is eating their returns before they even start.
A rare opportunity: the wonderful Matt Ridley will be in Perth to speak on Tuesday. One of the few great science commentators across economics, biology, genes, climate and politics. Author of The Rational Optimist, Viral: The search for the origin of Covid-19 and for years a writer for The Times, WSJ, and also elected as a hereditary peer to membership in the House of Lords, UK.
Cures vs Consequences: How does Government navigate the science?
Matt Ridley
Join Matt Ridley in PERTH, Novotel Murray Street on Tuesday, November 21 or a thought-provoking discussion on the critical role of Government in shaping climate, health, and energy policies.
Scientists aren’t infallible authorities who universally override political disagreements, nor are they unscrupulous fraudsters with hidden political agendas. Somewhere between the two lies the truth: Science is a flawed and all too human affair, but it can generate timeless truths, and reliable practical guidance, in a way that other approaches cannot.
How can the average person make sense of the often-conflicting scientific opinions that have arisen during the COVID pandemic and in the discussions about climate and energy policies? Unfortunately, there’s no easy solution when it comes to scientific debate.
The only way to be sure that one scientific claim is solid while another is not, is to check out the evidence for yourself. Relying on the reputation of the scientist, or the reporter reporting it, is the way that many of us go, and is better than nothing, but it is not infallible. If in doubt, do your homework!
Thanks to an odd garden hose sticking out of a warehouse wall, the illegal, clandestine, Reedly Biolab was discovered. Chinese citizens wandered around inside with lab coats on. And the “lab” contained samples marked with names like SARS-CoV-2, Chlamydia, HIV, E. coli, Streptococcus pneumoniae, Hepatitis B and C, Dengue virus, the Rubella virus and Malaria.
So Reedly city officials in California stumbled on this warehouse almost by chance, and wanted some answers, but the FBI didn’t want to investigate and the CDC refused to test the pathogens. Most of the samples were destroyed and some 104 tons of material was “eradicated”.
Afterwards City Officials found a freezer the CDC missed. It was labeled Ebola — that most fun infectious agent with fatality rates between 25 and 90%. (Fortunately is not anywhere near as transmissible as Covid).
Jiabei “Jesse” Zhu was known as David He
The man running the lab was Jiabei “Jesse” Zhu, a citizen of China, who formed dozens of companies in Canada in order to steal intellectual property. After he was caught and hit with a $330 million dollar fine, he escaped to the USA, set up the Reedly lab and acquired the pathogens. He also imported Chinese made medical tests and rebadged them, fraudulently, as “Made in the USA”. During this time he received some $2 million in mysterious payments from the People’s Republic of China.
We wonder why someone would keep dangerous pathogens in their workshop freezer for years, and at great cost? It’s hard to imagine any benevolent excuse for keeping bags of things marked HIV and Ebola in a fridge. Zhu doesn’t appear to be thinking of benefits for his US customer base. On WeChat he apparently claimed “his fraudulent activity would help ‘defeat the American aggressor and wild ambitious wolf!’” — The NY Post has a full write up.
Watch the documentary:
In Brief: #CCP ran a secret bioweapons lab in Reedley, CA.
It contained dozens of pathogens, including Ebola (80-90% fatality rate).
In the event of U.S.-China conflict, these would have been released.
The Biden administration covered it up & destroyed the evidence.
The illegal biolab was run by a PRC citizen who is a wanted fugitive from Canada with a $330 million Canadian dollar judgment against him for stealing American intellectual property.
This PRC citizen was a top official at a PRC-state-controlled company and had links to military-civil fusion entities.
The illegal biolab received millions of dollars in unexplained payments from PRC banks while running the illegal biolab.
The illegal biolab contained thousands of samples of labeled, unlabeled, and encoded potential pathogens, including HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, and Covid.
The illegal biolab also contained a freezer labeled “Ebola,” which contained unlabeled, sealed silver bags consistent with how the lab stored high risk biological materials. Ebola is a Select Agent with a lethality rate between 25-90%.
The biolab contained nearly a thousand transgenic mice, genetically engineered to mimic the human immune system. Lab workers said that the mice were designed “to catch and carry the COVID-19 virus.”
After local officials who discovered the lab sought help from the CDC and others, the CDC refused to test any of the samples.
Even if most of these viruses don’t make ideal bioweapons as is, with genetic modification, who knows? In any case, the simultaneous release of minor disabling outbreaks would still play havoc with any nation. Biological warfare can take many options, and as we saw with Covid, sometimes the less deadly viruses are more effective.
I note months before the facts were known an AP news report on this lab said it just “fueled conspiracy theories“, “Officials said it posed no danger.”
John Campbell talks about a speech by Andrew Bridgen MP in the UK Parliament a couple of weeks ago
By Jo Nova
Do you want Tedros and the UN to tell you what medicine you can or can’t have?
This is how the world is silently conquered by Bureaucrats, one subclause at a time. It sounds like something out of a James Bond movie, except so much more believable. The UN and helpful Oligarchs simple bore their way in with “good intentions” and indecipherable legalese, and most of the world slept through it.
It applies to all 192 countries that signed up to the International Health Regulations (IHR), managed by the WHO in 2005. (So, yes, wherever you live). Here’s the sneaky thing, new amendments that change this agreement don’t need to be voted on by your Parliament or Congress. They just need to be tabled and 18 months later, “bing” — if no one objects, they are accepted de facto. The only way for a nation to stay out is if your PM or President writes to the WHO and says “No Thanks”. That date of rollover “acceptance” is December 1. (Can you believe). And yet, for some reason, almost no MP or media outlet has whispered a word of it. Since they love to tell us how saintly and essential the UN is, we can assume that they’re not telling us because they don’t think we’ll like it.
There are two parts to this — one are the Amendments to the IHR, and the other, but completely separate — the Pandemic Treaty. If they both slide into place, the WHO could declare an “Emergency” and decide things like whether you should be allowed to take a drug (or even a vitamin), whether you must take some mandatory medical treatment, and things like that. For your own good of course.
Coming soon: the WHO want digital passports — so they can keep you safe, keep Big Pharma friends happy, and presumably because it suits President Xi. Plus it will make it so much easier to add up their social carbon score.
This is the same World Health Organization that failed at the only task they were set up to do — prevent global pandemics. They were the ones praising China’s transparency and leadership in January 2020, telling us the Wu-Flu wasn’t spread human-to -human and insisting we keep letting bioweapons fly free on planes. It’s almost as if they were trying to spread it…
If the amendments etc become law, the only option is to Exit The WHO (and abandon the whole UN!). Let’s do that anyway.
PS: You thought “One Health World Government” was nice line, but actually it’s WHO policy –– “One Health” is designed to wrap the health of people, plants, animals and trees — even the planet — into one conglomerate Quadripartite Executive. It’s the acronym basket of the WHO, FAO, WOAH and UNEP. So if there is a vaccine against climate change, they will want to make you take it. If there is a bug-burger that will stop the storms, or prevent pandemics, that’ll be in your allocated menu. It’s like supergiants in the bureaucratic galaxy are forming a black hole…
More information on the Amendments thanks to James Roguski:
Thanks to Tides of Mudgee, Strop, David Maddison, MP, Lance, Catherine, John Connor II, Robert Rosicka, KP, Tel, Robert Christopher, Anton, Steve, Paul Cottingham, cherry-picked#7, and also Malcolm Roberts, Craig Kelly and George Christiansen.
Two and a half years ago President Xi promised to “strictly control coal-fired power generation projects” in China. Before this solemn pledge the CCP had approved a blockbuster 54 gigawatts of coal fired power plants in just two years. Afterwards, to show how committed they were to Net Zero principles and international agreements, they *only* approved 131 GW. As President Xi promised — he’s “strictly in control” (of a massive increase). He’s also strictly in control of the world’s manufacturing.
When faced with this environmental catastrophe, the BBC told the world about China’s green power surge instead, and only mentioned the coal in passing as an aside. China had spawned a world record in coal plant construction, but apparently these coal plants are not so bad because many are built on renewable parks, “partly as backup for all the new wind and solar farms”. As if CO2 emissions are neutralized just by the presence of the sacred talisman of “renewables”. It’s a religion.
Just for comparison: Australia has one 1,000 MW plant in the “pre-permit” stage. (Collinsville). A whole gigawatt of dreamtime coal plant. It’s so “pre” that even though it was suggested four years ago, and awarded $4m for a feasibility study, no feasibleness has been announced. In the same years, China built about 300 coal plants.
All this data on coal plants comes not from overpaid academics, Ministries of Energy, or publicly funded “news” broadcasters. None of them, apparently, give a toss about actual CO2 emissions. Instead, this was done by some NGO’s who are paid to be perplexed but at least they are honest in their confusion.
These people believe propaganda put out by both the UK and by China, and are caught in the headlights, genuinely surprised…
The recent about-face on coal is odd for Beijing, which generally under-promises and over-delivers on climate commitments. Controlling new coal power projects is one of the few pledges China has made from now until 2025. Furthermore, more coal power is not necessary to keep the lights on, since China has a booming clean energy sector.
By many measures, China is the front-runner in the global clean technology race. Its renewable energy investments accounted for 55 percent of the global total in 2022. Just two Chinese companies have captured over half of the world’s electric vehicle battery market, and 60 percent of electric cars sales in 2022 occurred in China.
Someone should tell them that “half the worlds renewables” only made 7% of China’s total energy needs.
Written just in time for the UN Climate junket, Anna Lee, 21, declares she’s too worried about climate change to have children.
In the past these declarations have been a part of a Doomer fashion show where people who probably wouldn’t have had children anyway brag about how saintly they are for not having them. They wear their childlessness as a badge of glory. But Anna Lee’s declaration sounds more like a cry for help from someone raised on a climate fantasy. She doesn’t feel she can offer her children a future, perhaps because she doesn’t have one herself. She has, after all, been raised by the village on a dead-end religion. The world will only be saved if impossible things happen. Storms, fires and floods can be stopped with whirly-gigs and magical silicon carpets, don’t you know? The solution is so obvious, and it’s cheap and free too, but people in our tribe are too stupid and greedy to do it. Imagine what a depressing message that would be — born into a craven mob of colonizing lemmings who didn’t do anything good like ending slavery, inventing antibiotics or walking on the moon. Losers…
Some subset of Gen Z have been turned into perpetual climate alarm machine.
On the other hand, there’s also an activist element here. News editors are milking youthful angst to help the UN agenda. And Greenpeace are holding the next generation hostage unless they get their way on climate change. The Greenpeace plan, called “No Future, No Children” aimed to get teenagers to pledge not to have children unless the government fixed the weather, or helped oligarchs get very rich, or something like that. Thankfully I don’t think their 2019 plan caught on. The webpage CNN links to is now a shipping container company. But what could go wrong with coercing adolescents into making pledges they may later regret?
If temperatures weren’t rising, I’d choose the name “Athena” for a girl. If the rivers were safe, I’d choose “William” for a boy. If I could breathe clean air on my morning commute, I’d paint the nursery a warm yellow. If I could see hope for a sustainable future on this planet, I wouldn’t be spending time mourning the children I’ll probably never have.
If things were different, I’d be honored to become a parent — indeed, I think there is no greater privilege or responsibility. But each day, the current state of the world dissuades me more and more from having children. Like many folks in Gen Z (those born between 1997 and 2012), my main concern is climate change. And, as climate catastrophes are already well in motion (coupled with a host of related socioeconomic and equality issues), I feel as if I would be doing an increasingly irreparable injustice to any children I would bring into this world with my inability to offer them a future.
Is she the product of Green Woke parents who felt guilty themselves? Sounds like her childhood may have been filled with doomsday clocks.
At my age, concrete discussions of family and having children are still far down the line — but this is a decision I’ve held firmly to since I, myself, was a child. Passing on my own climate anxiety would be akin to a generational curse — nor do I think the joys of childhood should be tampered with doomsday clocks, higher risks of disease and health issues and climate change’s ripple effects on the economy, violent conflict and education.
It certainly wasn’t filled with patriotic pride. For Anna, the US is not a culture, just a place on a map:
As a US citizen, I wield enormous privilege by virtue of location, alone…
Climate anxiety is becoming unbearable
Climate anxiety knows no national borders — according to a study from the University of Bath, nearly 40% of 16- to 25-year-old participants from several countries stated that they were hesitant to have children because of climate change.
Threats for climate change!
Other organizations, such as the Canadian “No Future No Children” group, have gained considerable traction among teens, many of whom are pledging not to have children until their government takes climate change more seriously.
…many of my decisions emerge from a need for control. Like many Gen Z and Millennial individuals, I feel largely powerless within today’s environmental and political climate.
The pointless rituals of comfort to soothe the anxiety:
With larger policy control out of the picture, I find myself grasping for any miniscule way to assuage my climate anxiety — finding green travel alternatives, reusing plastic bottles until they fall apart, buying locally sourced food and repurposing any clothes or unwanted items. My decision over whether to have children is yet another example of exerting control over events that seem to be, at this rate, uncontrollable.
The purpose of the story (for CNN at least) is to push the propaganda for the UN annual junket. The editors even admit that:
This story is part of CNN’s coverage of climate change ahead of the COP28 summit …
In reality of course, for most fertile adults it’s not about climate change but about the cost of living. Give them cheap fossil fuels and a culture that believes in itself.
Hottest 12 months in 125,000 say EU Soothsayer scientists
UPDATE: This graph shows the ice-core data up until 1855.
Think for a minute about how stupid this claim is that no single year, not one, in the last 125,000 years was warmer than the last 12 months. Cavemen are rolling in their graves.
Homo Sapiens have had satellite data for 44 years, which only leaves 124,956 years of extrapolation to guess at the rest. Not one journalist at the ABC, Sydney Morning Herald, CNN, or anywhere, asked the “scientists” — how would you know? Do tell us, professor, what exactly was the temperature from November 6,789 BC to October 6,788? And to a tenth of a degree, and globally. I heard it was hot?
Try to imagine what kind of miraculous science makes these headlines make sense? Did the EU team find neolithic newspapers hidden in caves in Turkey? Could they reconstruct temperatures from 10,000 BC to 1978 to a tenth of a degree Celsius. And not just Turkish temperatures but ones in Timbuktu and Peru too? Those goat herders needed a satellite program. Perhaps clay pots powered with goat dung?
It’s as if thousands of hotter Holocene years never existed
Studies all around the world show sea levels were as much as 1 – 2 meters higher 6,000 years ago, and have been falling for thousands of years. For example, studies on mangroves in Brazil show sea levels were about 2.7 meters higher in the mid-Holocene, and mangroves grew 34 kilometers further inland. (Fontes et al 2017). How does that happen if the world was cooler then?
This pattern of falling sea levels all over the world doesn’t fit the climate models. Instead of just admitting the models are wrong, researchers call their failure the “Holocene Temperature Conundrum”. We’re going to have to fight for the Holocene — the modelers want to erase it to solve the conundrum.
Shock news for alarmists, poor dears,
And sure to cause climate stress tears,
As 2023 beat,
All records of heat,
Kept for 125,000 years.
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