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By Jo Nova
We need to know: Can We Stop Volcanoes with Solar Panels?
Quick set up a summit. Give me a grant. Climate Change causes more rain (except when it causes more drought), and apparently the weight of “up to” four meters of monsoon rainfall can compress a crustal plate leading to earthquakes.
Now, four meters of rain means a lot to a pitiful 1.8 meter homo sapiens, but it’s hard to believe a plate of rock 30 kilometers thick would care less or even notice. It’s all absurd.
The whole article, written by a “Reader in Physical Geography” at Coventry Uni makes out the climate change is all around us, but unwittingly depends on the idea that the Sun is just a big torch shining on Earth, and not a raging nuclear magnetic dynamo 300,000 times bigger than the planet, blasting us with charged particles at a million miles an hour and with a magnetic field that stretches past Pluto. Poor Dr Blackett with his 20 years of university education was never taught about the Sun. He has a pretty graph pointing out some correlation between earthquakes and monsoons but doesn’t once ask if The Sun might be causing both. What’s more likely, that changes in the solar magnetic field destabilize tectonic plates or your SUV does?
And we don’t even need to guess, it’s already very well established that solar cycles are linked to rainfall, jetstreams, floods, and groundwater, even unpaid bloggers know this. If only universities had not devolved into propaganda houses where people can write abject drivel and there’s not a single well trained person left to point it out. It’s cruel, except he’s paid well to write this.
He probably thinks he’s being provocative, but he’s just proving what a wasteland Big Government Science is:
Matthew Blackett, The Conversation
A warmer atmosphere can retain more water vapour, subsequently leading to higher levels of precipitation.
Interestingly, geologists have long identified a relationship between rainfall rates and seismic activity. In the Himalayas, for example, the frequency of earthquakes is influenced by the annual rainfall cycle of the summer monsoon season. Research reveals that 48% of Himalayan earthquakes strike during the drier pre-monsoon months of March, April and May, while just 16% occur in the monsoon season.
During the summer monsoon season, the weight of up to 4 metres of rainfall compresses the crust both vertically and horizontally, stabilising it. When this water disappears in the winter, the effective “rebound” destabilises the region and increases the number of earthquakes that occur.
It’s like reading tea-leaves:
He’s worried that climate change might melt glaciers and cause decompression melting to occur in the mantle leading to volcanoes. But he’s reassured “phew” because there was a lag of several hundred years…
It’s a cult.
Read the few comments left at The Conversion site where people like us are theoretically banned.
“We are truly too late to do anything that will prevent this disaster.”
9.9 out of 10 based on 107 ratings
9.4 out of 10 based on 18 ratings
By Jo Nova
A second big Australian “Pumped Hydro” scheme is crashing on economic rocks…
 The Marinus Link cable was meant to spark a glorious renewables boom and make Tasmania “The Battery of the Nation”, instead it will cost more than a new advanced coal fired plant, provide no energy at all, and currently even the thought of it is causing chaos. New projects are on hold, factories can’t expand and Tasmania is held hostage to visions of an electricity grid designed to stop storms instead of generate energy.
The Marinus Link is a 255km cable that was supposed to be the second interconnector from Tasmania to the mainland. In theory it would cost $3 billion and carry 1.5GW of electricity. But the costs have blown out to $5.5 billion and the State Premier is balking at the new bill.
However, most of the new wind power projects in the state are awaiting the magic cable before they commit — without it, they can’t reach the real market, which is mainland Australia. But without them, the local grid doesn’t have enough surplus capacity to cover the lean times (or rather, without the cable, they can’t get access to more reliable brown coal power in Victoria).
The brutal truth is that wind power is only “cheap” (or even barely economic) if the poor taxpayer serfs pay for the five thousand million dollar cable (and the storage). If Tasmania built another reliable power plant instead, it wouldn’t need the inter-connector at all. The cables look, smell and cost like public infrastructure, but are just another hidden cost of “renewables”.
The foiled plan and uncertainty means Tasmania is in a quiet energy crisis.
Even without being built, “the cable” is causing chaos
As reported in The Australian, Tasmanian businesses can’t get energy to expand. One paper mill that runs on coal-fired boilers wants to replace them with electricity but can’t. In a state with “100% renewable energy” you’d think the state electricity corporation would be beating a path to their door. Instead Hydro Tasmania said it can’t spare 50MW of despatchable power and told the company it needs to arrange equivalent power from wind and solar generators. But the paper mill is struggling, and says it would involve “substantially higher operating costs”. Funny how the free energy always costs more?
Industry, jobs on hold as Tasmania ‘runs out of power’ and Marinus Link stalls
Matthew Denholm, The Australian
Tasmanian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive Michael Bailey said the state was in “another energy crisis”.
We have businesses asking the government for more power to expand and create more jobs, yet today we’ve heard that the government is turning them away because we simply do not have enough generation to meet demand,” Mr Bailey said. “If that’s not the definition of a crisis, then what is? Even the Economic Regulator has said … there is no ‘head room’ in the Tasmanian grid, which confirms the business community’s worst fears.
In the glory days of 2018 as dreamed up by Malcolm Turnbull, the second cable was originally estimated to cost $1.1 billion, and the full 5GW “Battery” of pumped hydro in Tasmania would be twice the size of Snowy 2.0 (which is currently also stalled in its own cost blowout and trapped tunnel borer).
Some Greens want to Sink the Link too
Environmentally the idea is so bad even Bob Brown and Christine Milne, former Greens leaders, have launched a “Sink the Link” campaign to stop the cable for environmental reasons. They can see now that it will unleash a wave of industrial development that will consume the wilderness.
Are these older Greens finally realizing they were tools of property developers and big industry all along? They campaigned for years for exactly this future. Now they want to stop this train?
“No one in Tasmania’s south appreciates the sell-out and industrialisation of the north that is being proposed to line the pockets of private developers and feed power to the mainland. The magnificent Robbins Island, takayna, Stanley, and forests and farmlands from Circular Head to Eddystone Point and the Central Plateau are all in the firing line. It is time that people had access to information about what is happening on the ground,” Bob Brown Foundation takayna Campaigner Scott Jordan said.
–Bob Brown Foundation
This is the state that approved a Mega Wind farm that won’t be able to operate for five months of the year lest it hurt the Orange-bellied Parrot. That’s the Robbins Island Mega wind farm: killing birds and baseload power at 300 kilometers per hour. Presumably construction of the largest wind farm in the Southern Hemisphere is also waiting for the big cable…
See also The Tasmanian Times
9.8 out of 10 based on 112 ratings
8.9 out of 10 based on 14 ratings
By Jo Nova
Whatever you do, don’t let the punters know the corals aren’t collapsing.
 Wise Hok Wai Lum Last year, the Great Barrier Reef had blockbuster levels of coral cover, and this year it’s the same, even though global carbon dioxide levels rose 1%, and China probably installed another 100 coal fired plants. The corals, apparently, don’t care.
The Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) issued a press release, calling this repeat record a “pause”.
“A pause in recent coral recovery across most of the Great Barrier Reef” — AIMS
Last year only 3% of Australians knew the Great Barrier Reef was in record good health, and AIMS seemingly wants to keep it that way.
If this survey showed the reef was in record poor cover for a second year, would they call it a pause in recent damage? The lies-by-omission are still lies. AIMS is deceiving the taxpayers who pay for AIMS.
It’s a disaster, again. How will scientists get research grants to manage a reef that looks after itself?
Peter Ridd is scathing:
 “The fabulous condition of the reef demonstrates that the public has been systematically misled by many science institutions about the condition of the reef,” Dr Ridd said.
The Australian
The reef now has twice as much coral as in 2012 when it hit a low point after being smashed by major cyclones.
Last year’s record-breaking result was also embarrassing to the GBR science institutions. They had proclaimed that the reef had just been devastated by four unprecedented hot water bleaching events in 2016, 2017, 2020 and 2022 – but then it had more coral than ever. …
Ridd says it’s time to audit the science institutions:
The truth is we have been scammed for decades, and the perpetrators have been caught out. Once-trusted science institutions have become untrustworthy. It is time they are subjected to serious scrutiny. Have they become ideological? Are they inclined to groupthink? Are they motivated by the funding imperative, which relies on the reef being perpetually doomed? How do they handle dissenters – are they ostracised or welcomed? What are their quality assurance systems that clearly failed? How did they get this so wrong for 60 years?
Within a few years there will be a big cyclone, which is now known to be by far the biggest coral killer, or another plague of crown of thorns starfish, both of which are entirely natural. The amount of coral will reduce. Doubtless the headlines will say we have lost half the coral on the reef, as they have proclaimed many times in the past – occasionally truthfully. The science institutions will be happy. The money will keep flowing. The children will remain depressed. More costly red-tape will be imposed on farmers to “save the reef”, and the reef-tourism industry gets kicked in the teeth again by the bad publicity.
—The Australian
It’s time to audit the media too. The junk science news produced by junk institutions should be mocked by an independent media, not repeated parrot style. Something is very wrong with the media landscape…
UPDATE: Thanks to Peter Ridd for this graph
 After 37 years of non-stop pollution, there are more corals than ever growing on the Great Barrier Reef.
9.9 out of 10 based on 127 ratings
8.7 out of 10 based on 18 ratings
By Jo Nova
The end of the naive era of hope in Wind Power fairies
Remember how they said wind energy would keep getting cheaper? Only a year ago academics were still writing papers about the “Moore’s Law” miraculous future of wind power. Only we appear to have already hit the point where bigger is not better. Two years ago the former head of Siemens bizarrely warned that “Wind power risks becoming too cheap” and Reuters, bizarrely, published it.
Meanwhile production costs are rising for the offshore variety too, and Siemens is scrambling to delay deliveries, so it can fix problems first…
The Washington Post, a big fan of the “Green transition”, puts in an admirable effort to make excuses for the bad luck of the wind industry — anything but admit that this failure may represent real mechanical limits to the collection of erratic, low density energy in the most hostile settings on Earth.
These machines are so fragile they cannot just sit under their own weight motionless, less they get permanent brinelling damage to the bearings. And tiny micro-oscillations can create False Brinelling.
Wind ‘Turbinegeddon’ Is a Troubling Climate Omen
by Chris Bryant, The Washington Post
…the Siemens Gamesa wind business moved too fast and has now discovered abnormal vibrations arising from blades and bearings which may have to be replaced.
While the affected models represent only 4% of its installed fleet, the direct costs of the fix are estimated at €1.6 billion. The company faces further unexpected expenses related to ramping up production of offshore turbines, as well as unfavorable tax effects. Bernstein Research analyst Nicholas Green has evocatively dubbed the moment Turbinegeddon.
Shares fell dramatically six weeks ago when the problems were first announced and after more information, and a long hard think — have not recovered at all.
Oh Woe is the Wind Industry
It’s so unfair that people don’t like bird-bashing giants and thumping infrasound. And who could have seen that spending trillions turning our electricity grid into a giant weather changing machine would make energy costs higher, thus piling wood on the inflationary fires that have come back to bite wind turbine manufacturers?
The wind industry should be flying high but instead is entrapped by a cornucopia of troubles. Projects are too often held up by red tape and nimbyism, while contracts signed years ago have become onerous due to material and logistics cost inflation. Chinese companies that dominate their home market are looking increasingly to expand overseas, pressuring pricing.
Imagine tying one arm behind your back while competing with a nation powered with cheap coal and slave labor?
h/t Colin
9.9 out of 10 based on 119 ratings
9.4 out of 10 based on 13 ratings
By Jo Nova
Imagine giving an enemy the ability to track your VIPs movements and listen to their conversations in the car? Adversaries could learn national secrets, play mayhem on the markets with insider tips or just figure out who was having an affair with a view to blackmail and extortion. Worse, what if your adversaries could electronically upload software to your vehicles and shut down even 1 car in 100 on the major national highways — bringing the road network to a grinding halt?
Where is James Bond when you need him? This would have been a great script.
Thanks to NetZeroWatch:
Michael Curzon, European Conservative
A new report warns of a major impending security risk in handing Beijing the power to immobilise thousands of cars owned by Britons—and many others across Europe. Professor Jim Saker of the Institute of the Motor Industry, quoted in The Times, said “the threat of connected electric vehicles flooding the country could be the most effective Trojan horse that the Chinese establishment has.” There would, he added, be no way to prevent Chinese state-owned manufacturers from including technology in cars set to be exported which could bring them all to a halt.
This comes just months after reports of a Chinese tracking device being found in a UK government vehicle.
Even better, to make the national suicide voluntary and complete, the CCP probably wouldn’t even need to do anything so brazen as paralyzing the car fleet. China has just taken the top spot as global car exporter. Cars shipped grew by, wow, 76% for the year. One quarter of those cars are EV’s and they are €10,000 (£8,600) cheaper than the cars made in Europe, Japan and America.
 As long as the West forces EV’s on its own population, and then taxes them to subsidize all the charging stations and extra generation required, the put-upon and suffering customers will choose the cheapest car they can find.
And without cheap electricity from coal or slave labor in the factories, how could the Western car industry ever compete?
The CCP plugged in $100 billion in subsidies to get the EV industry up and running. They “pressured foreign firms into forming joint ventures with Chinese counterparts ” and learnt their trade secrets.
Of course, that’s a big punt for China. If the West decided to let the free market rule instead of forcing EV’s on everyone, then China will have cornered a market in nothing much. President Xi, presumably will be keen for Westerners to stay in the thrall of pagan weather-control via lithium batteries.
The alarming reality of cheap Chinese cars on British roads
ByMatt Oliver ; Howard Mustoe and Will Hazell, The Telegraph
Sources who spoke on condition of anonymity said these trials – which revealed “gaping holes” in security – were carried out at the request of sceptical car manufacturers who refused to believe such hacks were possible until they were demonstrated in front of them.
It’s just a software update…
Modern cars are increasingly dependent on “over the air” software updates, which they receive through a mobile phone-style SIM card that is built into the vehicle.
If a malicious actor gained access to these update systems, through servers known as “the backend”, they could beam out software that allows them to spy on vehicles and their driver remotely.
It’s already here:
This is the case for all new cars, wherever they are made in China, Europe or the US. A SIM card allows the car to receive updates, new features and security patches, just like a smartphone. In a crash a car will phone the emergency services. To do this, it needs a microphone and a link to the outside world. Cameras inside make sure you are not nodding off at the wheel.
All of this can be used to spy on you if security is lax, says Ken Munro, a security expert and ethical hacker at Pen Test Partners, a company that tests for security holes.
“We did a bunch of work on aftermarket car alarms. And we discovered that in many of them, you could actually remotely enable the microphones and listen to people in the cars.”
The Telegraph has a long feature on this, read it here.
Chinese Statue Photo by Serg Balak
9.8 out of 10 based on 98 ratings
9.5 out of 10 based on 16 ratings
By Jo Nova
The man is a soldier — Ian Plimer has put out three new books at once, written in three different styles at three different levels.
Volume 1 is written for primary school children and uses body functions such as food and farts to show the carbon cycle and demonstrates that net zero and carbon neutral are impossible. Volume 2 is for secondary school children and deals with the basics of climate change, renewable energy and EVs in a humourous, irreverent, slightly seditious and entertaining style whereas Volume 3 for post-secondary school children deals with the history of the planet’s climate changes and how climate policy will have a profound negative effect on their generation.
The book is aimed at parents and grandparents all over the world who might want to deprogram children from the barrage of propaganda that children are exposed to at school, in the mainstream media and on social media.
Order through Connor Court
9.8 out of 10 based on 80 ratings
By Jo Nova
It’s like a light has switched on in UK politics
Who would have guessed that voters like their gas guzzling cars? Well everyone would, of course. Which is why it defies explanation that both sides of politics ignored this for so long. But a phase change is underway…
 After the Uxbridge by-election surprise, Rishi Sunak suddenly talked about being pragmatic on the road to Net Zero and said he would “Max Out” the North Sea Oil reserves. He vowed to review the “low traffic neighborhoods” (the bossy bollard program) and said he was on the side of the motorists. Since then he’s apparently leapt from -2.7 in net satisfaction polls among Tory members to +20.7, a leap of 23%.
Thanks to NetZeroWatch for keeping us informed:
Jack Maidment, The Telegraph
Last month, Mr Sunak’s popularity among the Tory grassroots sunk to its lowest level since he took over at No 10. He received a net satisfaction rating of -2.7 – …But the premier has bounced back in the latest survey of party members, with a score of 20.7 …
A separate ConservativeHome survey of Tory members published earlier this week showed the political importance of net zero for the Prime Minister.
How strong is that message? Four out of five conservatives like their petrol cars:
It revealed that an overwhelming majority – 83 per cent – believed the Government was wrong to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030. Mr Sunak has insisted that the policy will go ahead as planned.
The Sun editorial even says: “If Rishi Sunak put brakes on net zero, it could see him back on the road to election victory.
To put that in perspective, in late July polls in the UK put the Conservatives at 28% and Labor at 45% so to even talk of winning shows how the landscape is shifting.
By ESTHER MCVEY
I can’t be the only one enjoying the screeching U-turns politicians are making over Net Zero. Many of us have been raising the alarm over its timetable and estimated trillion-pound plus cost for a while, and so we welcome those who are belatedly seeing the light.
It’s happening in many countries:
Germany woke up first, seeing the devastation it would cause to their motor industry, and they are now desperately trying to kill-off the EU ban on conventional cars.
Macron is now asking Brussels for a “pause” in its investment-deterring green regulations and, Sweden – the country that led the way to enshrining net zero into law back in 2017, and gave the world Greta Thunberg – has quietly abandoned its pledge to be 100 percent renewable by 2045.
We hope politicians in Canada, Australia and New Zealand are watching this phase change. This post is for all them.
Photo Prime Minister Rishi Sunak by Lauren Hurley / No 10 Downing Street
9.9 out of 10 based on 89 ratings
9.7 out of 10 based on 18 ratings
By Jo Nova
We’re at an extraordinary moment in history. Of Republicans, 69% now believe Biden’s win was illegitimate. In spite of a relentless propaganda campaign, as many as 38% of all US voters think that “Biden did not legitimately win enough votes to win the presidency”. Think about how devastating that is to a democracy. Rather than dealing with this, CNN calls four out of ten Americans “election deniers” which perversely works to endorse Trump’s claims of the “Fake News Media”.
Despite the censorship, despite the indictments, or actually because of them, the deep pervasive sense that democracy itself is broken is widespread.
Campaign ads like this will not only tap into that but grow it.
…
This ad is a call to arms to face down the name-calling, the bullying and intimidation. It’s a great strategy to undermine one of the biggest tools in the Big-Government program:
Never give up.
*Headline corrected from Six out of ten Voters to 69% of Republicans.
9.9 out of 10 based on 84 ratings
10 out of 10 based on 11 ratings
By Jo Nova
 The perennial problem: Who watches the Watcher?
The Founder of Wikipedia reveals to Glenn Greenwald that he’s shocked at the bias and that CIA and FBI computers have been used to edit Wikipedia and that the intelligence agencies pay off “the most influential people to push their agendas” or they just develop their own talent within the [intelligence] community.
This is the problem: create something great, and powerful people can take it away, unless checks and balances stop them. But what stops the FBI and CIA — Who do the intelligence agents with guns fear?
Richard Abelson, Gateway Pundit
Speaking to Greenwald, Wikipedia founder Larry Sanger said that Wikipedia “used to be kind of anti-establishment” but “between 2005 and 2012 or so, there was this very definite shift to Wikipedia becoming an establishment mouthpiece. It was amazing. I never would’ve guessed that in 2001,” when he first founded the site, Sanger said.
Wikipedia became just another version of the left-wing media:
“By the time Trump became President it was almost as bad as it is now”, Sanger said. “No encyclopedia to my knowledge has been as biased as Wikipedia is now. It’s over the top.” The “rank and file Wikipedians” take their cues from CNN, MSNBC and the New York Times, and had declared “80% of the major news sources on the right to be unreliable. Officially It’s in the policy. A lot of people don’t realize that, but it’s true,” Sanger remarked.
What do the Deep State want you to believe?
Sanger noted that Wikipedia had become an instrument of “control” for the CIA, FBI, and other US intel agencies. “We do have evidence that, as early as 2008, that CIA and FBI computers were used to edit Wikipedia,” Sanger said. “Do you think that they stopped doing that back then?”
A programming student named Virgil Griffith first revealed the activity of the CIA and FBI on Wikipedia in 2007, Sanger said.
Alternatives to Wikipedia as suggested by Larry Sanger:
A good, “explicitly neutral” political encyclopedia is “Balletopedia” and, on the right “Conservopedia”, Sanger said. “Or go to encyclosearch.org or encycloreader.org.”
Or there is InfoGalactic, set up by Vox Day.
Spread the word. The more people who know, the weaker the influence the manipulators have.
Watch the full two hour interview on Rumble.
Wiki logo by Wugapodes – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,
9.8 out of 10 based on 62 ratings
9.2 out of 10 based on 12 ratings
By Jo Nova
What looks, acts, and smells like an unelected World Government telling us what to do?
 The Australian government bragged about getting a six month free-pass from the global UNESCO naughty corner but in reality they were craven patsies to an absurd unaudited, unaccountable foreign committee.
The UN was threatening, as it always does, to lumber The Great Barrier Reef with an “In-Danger” sticker, despite the coral on the largest reef in the world being healthier than it’s ever been since estimates began in 1986.
To avoid the dreaded sticker of reef sin, apparently Labor saved the day by putting in a 43% emissions cut which will kill eagles and bats with wind turbines, plaster the wilderness with high voltage towers, infect the alpine lakes with feral pests and threaten whales with off shore wind plants. (That’s just for starters).
The price to appease the UN apparently includes spending another $1.2 billion to “protect the reef” (which will expand the bureaucrat class) and twisting the thumb-screws of regulation on fishermen and farmers (thus punishing the workers). The UN gave the Australian government a pat on the back for canceling the Urannah and Hell’s Gate dams. Since when did we need a foreign committee to tell us whether to build a dam?
See how this works? It costs the UN almost nothing to launch preposterous PR Bombs and extract whatever they want. And we pay the UN to do it.
The Labor party sold out the nation. The only correct response was to ask UNESCO why it was wasting our taxpayer funds and launch an audit of our UN contributions. Do we get value for money, or is the UN using our funds, and their own corrupt heritage list, to extort policies that the Australian voters didn’t vote for?
It’s not about the science:
 Click to enlarge. Click to enlarge. Figure 4: Coral cover for the Great Barrier Reef as measured by the AIMS Long Term Monitoring Program. Supposedly “devastating” bleaching events were recorded in 2016, 2017, 2020, and 2022, (red dots). The GBR has record high coral cover in 2022, and at least twice as much coral as in 2011/2012. Coral is a slow growing organism, so this graph is proof that institutions claiming major coral loss due to bleaching is grossly exaggerated. Uncertainty margin is approximately ±0.04 This wouldn’t be possible if the media mocked the UN and exposed it as the loafing incompetent parasites they are. But only 3% of Australians even knew the Great Barrier Reef corals have entirely recovered from the waves of recent bleaching and was in record health. See the AEF survey results here. By keeping Australians in the dark (thanks especially to the ABC) it makes it so much easier for the UN to launch false ambit claims and not be mocked back to Geneva.
Graham Lloyd does a great job in The Australian:
 Marine scientist Peter Ridd calls it blackmail. “UNESCO threatens to list the reef as endangered unless we make a futile gesture to net zero and the fact that the reef has record high coral is studiously ignored.”
Albanese has misread the way in which the reef has been taken hostage by UNESCO and green groups as leverage to get their way. Against the Prime Minister’s partisan stand, it must not be forgotten that the UN’s in-danger interest was piqued by Labor’s plans for unrestrained development along the Queensland coast.
The Expert Panel is a fraud — relying on chicken-entrail predictions from people who’ve been wrong for decades:
Behind the scenes, UNESCO said it was taking advice from groups including WWF-Australia, the Australian Marine Conservation Society, and Earth Justice. All are pointing to the potential for a return of bleaching. While the Prime Minister was declaring success, the Green NGO’s already are claiming a false dawn.
Defund the UN now. It is a menace to democracy.
UN Logo: Sshu94 | Photo by Stelio Puccinelli
10 out of 10 based on 116 ratings
9.2 out of 10 based on 15 ratings
By Jo Nova
A local extreme protest has dragged in the national broadcaster to an embarrassing national debate.
Everyone wants to know why the ABC didn’t call the police…
The climate activists turned up at the family home of Meg O’Neill at 6:50 am on Tuesday morning in Perth, Western Australia. They had spray paint and padlocks because she’s the CEO of Woodside Energy which will, in their words “emit 6 billions tonnes of carbon over the next fifty years”. Police say CCTV footage shows they had already done surveillance on the house to find out what time she left for work. O’Neill lives with her partner Vicky Hayes* and teenage daughter and was described as “shaken” by the incident.
For some reason, the national public broadcaster, the ABC, was coincidentally also there to film the likely criminal activity at this unlikely hour, but having filmed it, for some other reason, they didn’t show the footage or even report the incident at all on the ABC News Tuesday night, while it made headlines around the state and was “the biggest news of the day”.
Woodside on Tuesday pointed to the camera crew’s presence to show the home invasion was “an organised and deliberate act designed to intimidate Ms O’Neill and her family’’.
The idea of menacing families at home is usually something the Mafia does. Pretty much everyone, except the ABC apparently, could see why this could be a criminal act. Indeed, two of the leading protestors were already on bail. The police were watching them, and were at the house ready to ambush them at 6.40am. Who was more surprised in that moment — the Police that the suspects came with the ABC, or the ABC, that the police were already there before them?
The police arrested the activists, two of whom spent the night in jail. They’ve since faced court and been bailed (again). The Magistrate says she believed the case had “a reasonable prospect of conviction”.
But the big question remains — The Australian, and The West Australian and the state Premier in Parliament are all asking what the ABC was doing there. The broadcaster was there in a suburb ready to film a dawn protest with vandals seeking to terrorize a family and possibly damage their home?
– The West Australian
Mr Cook said it was “simply not good enough if what has taken place … is that there was a conspiracy to withhold details of this unlawful action from the police”.
“Given that they knew that this action was going to involve going to someone’s private home, I think anyone would be appalled if that sort of action was known about and wasn’t acted upon,” he said. –
So the ABC excuses flow, and it just gets worse
Incredibly, the ABC flew in a film crew all the way from Sydney on the other side of Australia, but say they didn’t know it was a private home, and didn’t know it belonged to the Woodside boss.
Shannon Hampton, The West Australian
The ABC claims it had no idea climate activists were planning to target a house — or that it was the home of Woodside boss Meg O’Neill — when a 4Corners film crew was given a tip to attend an address in City Beach.
The national broadcaster issued a fresh statement on Wednesday finally addressing the furore amid pressure to explain after Disrupt Burrup Hub protesters targeted Ms O’Neill’s family home with an ABC film crew in tow.
It confirmed the crew, which is understood to have flown in from Sydney, was filming for 4Corners and attended the property to “gather material for a potential report later this year”.
Presumably the ABC send crews on 4,000 kilometer trips all the time without bothering to do two more seconds of research. That’s what tax dollars are for!
If we don’t shut the ABC down for colluding with people planning potentially criminal things, we should shut them down for criminal waste of taxpayer money.
The ABC say they got a tip off “just prior to the action” — as you do, you know — before gathering a film crew and jumping on a five hour flight. As it happens, they claim the police were already there when they arrived, and they didn’t trespass and they didn’t collude.
If you chain someone’s gate to stop them leaving, is that a siege?
The details look bad.
Rebecca Peppiatt, WAToday
[WA Police prosecutor Kim Briggs] said the protesters, who are part of an activist group called Disrupt Burrup Hub, planned to damage the property and stop the Woodside boss from leaving.
“The intention of the group was to damage the property using spray paint and lock themselves [to a gate] with a D-lock to hinder the ability of Ms O’Neill to leave the property,” he said.
Two activists were already on bail
To make things even worse for the ABC, two of the activists was already on bail for a previous incident of climate extremism at the Woodside AGM. If only the ABC had “the internet” and had looked up Jesse Noakes and Gerard Mazza they would have know what a high risk event this might be?
In June, Mr Noakes was charged with aggravated burglary with intent and refusing to obey a data order stemming from an alleged protest at Woodside’s AGM in Perth Convention and Exhibition Centre.
— Sarah Steger, The West Australian
Indeed, this was so high risk, the WA Police were watching the activists and were ready at the house on the day. Six police officers stormed out of the house to ambush the protesters who had turned up “with the ABC in tow”.
Mr Noakes said his only role that morning was to lead a convoy of four ABC TV crews to the house and observe the protest.
— Sarah Steger, The West Australian
Surely that’s a misprint. It must be four ABC people? But it’s still an expensive team to fly on a return trip across a continent when you don’t know who they’re talking to, what they’re going to do, or where it is going to happen, eh?
Either the ABC is innocent but utterly incompetent, or they are colluding in intimidation for political gain.
*Corrected: Her husband turned out to be a wife.
9.8 out of 10 based on 112 ratings
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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The nerds have the numbers on precious metals investments on the ASX
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