Did anyone think about the carbon emissions of new asphalt and new road surfaces?
Major roads are built to take heavier trucks, but suburban streets were only designed to cope with the occasional truck — not the truck that lives next door. When every car has 300 kilograms more “luggage” there will be consequences.
And remember underlying all this, no one even knows if EV’s will reduce carbon dioxide. An e-Golf has to be driven 100,000 kilometers just to break even with a diesel equivalent. With all these extra lifetime costs, if carbon dioxide mattered at all, EV’s might end up raising global temperatures. But who cares about that eh?
It’s not about carbon, and it’s not about the environment. It’s about control.
The country is suffering from a pothole crisis, with half as many filled last year compared to a decade ago amid an estimated £12 billion price tag to fill them all.
The Telegraph found that the average electric car puts 2.24 times more stress on roads than its petrol equivalent, and 1.95 more than diesel. Larger electric vehicles weighing over 2,000kg (2 tons) cause the most damage, with 2.32 times more wear applied to roads.
The AA reported last month that the number of pothole-related call-outs it had received had grown by a third in a year, with the company responding to 52,000 incidents in April alone.
A little bit of weight creates bigger better holes in the road:
Fourth power formula
The analysis uses the “fourth power formula”, which is widely used by highways engineers and researchers to assess the damage caused to road surfaces by heavier vehicles. It means that if weight on a vehicle’s axle is doubled, it does 16 times the damage to the road.
Cut the subsidies, recover fair costs, and the free market will sort this one out.
We are a fossil fueled world. Solar & wind power make up just 7.5% 6% of our energy needs.*
The world has set a new record for energy use in the last year. And even though renewables are being installed at the fastest rate they ever have been, it isn’t enough to keep up with the growing demand for energy let alone to “convert” the world to Net Zero.
Overall, despite our best efforts to wean ourselves off fossil fuels, the world remains “stuck” getting 82% of its energy from them.
The Energy Institute has released the Statistical Review of World Energy, and it shows global energy use has not only recovered from the pandemic, it is now 3% higher than it was pre-Covid in 2019. The relentless human desire for energy continues. In 2022, humans used 1% more energy than they did the year before and 70% of that growth was from China.
To put the historic size of the “Renewable Energy Transition” into focus, here’s the last century of energy transformation. The Energy Institute did not seem to want to highlight the insignificance of renewable energy, so I created this from the OWID myself.
Greenhouse gas emissions from homo sapiens reached 39.3 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. An increase of 0.8% in the last year.
Renewables are not keeping up with the growth in demand
Indeed, if we just look at electricity — demand grew 2% around the world last year. Renewable generators grew at a blistering pace. Solar recorded a 25% growth in output. Wind power grew by 13%. But despite that extraordinary (hard to believe) increase, the gap between the supply of renewables and the total demand for electricity grew even larger.
The Energy Institute spun this the best way they could saying:
“Renewables (excluding hydro) met 84% of net electricity demand growth in 2022.”
But think how pitiful this is. Renewables met none of the normal demand at all, and could not even supply all the new demand.
Soberingly, energy use grew in every region of the world except for Europe.
This is a report written by a new team dedicated to “Net Zero” — so we know it’s as rosy as possible, but it’s still devastating.
“The Energy Institute (EI) is the chartered professional membership body for people who work across the world of energy. Our purpose is to create a better energy future for our members and society by accelerating a just global energy transition to net zero.”
* Total renewables is 7.5% of “Primary Energy” but includes biomass, geothermal, and tidal etc (but not hydro). Stripping away the “other renewables” leaves wind + solar at 6.1%. Wind power now (theoretically) makes 3.75% of total global primary energy. Solar makes 2.4%.
Matt Taibbi talked in London about what he and Michael Shellenberger found in the Twitter files. He realized the free speech battle has evolved into something new — where reality is altered and people are coached into forgetting what they saw, and censoring themselves. A kind of mass digital brainwashing.
In the Twitter Files there was a sinister pattern of “deamplifying” people’s true stories, their experiences, and then deamplifying the person themselves. Running parallel with this was a program to reduce our language, our world into a polarized one-nil, good-bad, us-them division where all shades of complexity were extinguished — so people who had vaccines but didn’t like mandates were anti-vaxxers, and people who had some vaccines, the injured, the unvaccinated — were all “anti-vaxxers”. This was a dystopia George Orwell predicted — the binary existence where there are no shades of gray. There is no safe middle ground. There is only rightthink and wrongthink.
Michael and I are here to tell a horror story that concerns people from all countries.
What Michael and I were looking at [in The Twitter files] was something new, an Internet-age approach to political control that uses brute digital force to alter reality itself. We certainly saw plenty of examples of censorship and de-platforming and government collaboration in those efforts. However, it’s clear that the idea behind the sweeping system of digital surveillance combined with thousands or even millions of subtle rewards and punishments built into the online experience, is to condition people to censor themselves.
In fact, after enough time online, users will lose both the knowledge and the vocabulary they would need to even have politically dangerous thoughts. What Michael calls the Censorship-Industrial Complex is really just the institutionalization of orthodoxy, a vast, organized effort to narrow our intellectual horizons.
Stanford Uni operated The Virality Project, where Google, Twitter and Facebook shared notes to work to suppress any realities the elite or Deep State didn’t want people to share:
They compared notes on how to censor or deamplify certain content. The ostensible mission made sense, at least on the surface: it was to combat “misinformation” about the pandemic, and to encourage people to get vaccinated. When we read the communications to and from Stanford, we found shocking passages.
One suggested to Twitter that it should consider as “standard misinformation on your platform… stories of true vaccine side effects… true posts which could fuel hesitancy” as well as “worrisome jokes” or posts about things like “natural immunity” or “vaccinated individuals contracting Covid-19 anyway.”
The language erases the spectrum of opinions and leaves only Good and unGood labels:
A person who talks about being against vaccine passports may express support for the vaccine elsewhere, but the Virality Project believed “concerns” about vaccine passports were driving “a larger anti-vaccination narrative,” so in this way, a pro-vaccine person may be anti-vax.
This deters people from tinkering with mild “alternate opinions”. It’s been going on for years in the skeptical world. All skeptics are “climate deniers”, even if they agree with the IPCC and just think the economics of climate change is bonkers.
The Good People and The UnGood
When the binary reduction is applied to people then a person becomes the bad thing they said once — one wrong opinion means everything they say is suspect. As Taibbi says:
We saw NGOs and agencies like the FBI or the State Department increasingly targeting speakers, not speech. The Virality Project brought up the cases of people like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The posts of such “repeat offenders,” they said, are “almost always reportable.” They encouraged content moderators to make assumptions about people, and not to look on a case-by-case basis. In other words, they saw good and ungood people, and the ungood were “almost always reportable.”
It is cancel culture today. In the stoneage, it was ostracism. It’s very effective.
The Social Media Social-Credit-Score
A form of the Chinese Social Credit Score is already here. Social media companies were scoring people and putting some of them on blacklists, and then in some cases even blacklisting others in their networks. It is guilt by association.
Over and over we saw algorithms trying to electronically score a person’s good-or-ungoodness. We found a Twitter report that put both Wikileaks and Green Party candidate Jill Stein in a Twitter “denylist,” a blacklist that makes it harder for people to see or search for your posts. Stein was put on a denylist called is_Russian because an algorithm determined she had too many beliefs that coincided with banned people, especially Russian banned people.
“It’s more than a speech crisis, it’s a humanity crisis”
If you apply these techniques fifty million, a hundred million, a billion times, or a billion billion times, people will soon learn to feel how certain accounts are deamplified, and others are not. They will self-sort and self-homogenize.
We’re building a global mass culture that sees everything in black and white, fears difference, and abhors memory. It’s why people can’t read books anymore …
We have been complaining about censorship, and it’s important to do that. But they are taking aim at people in a way that will make censorship unnecessary, by building communities of human beings with no memory and monochrome perception. This is more than a speech crisis. It’s a humanity crisis. I hope we’re not too late to fix it.
Despite the wind being free, collecting it appears to cost a fortune. Siemens Energy lost a third of its stock price on Friday. Just like that, seven billion dollars in market value disappeared.
Only a month ago they were expecting to break even, as the Wall Street Journal reports, the executives appear to have been blindsided by the rapidly escalating maintenance costs. The problem is so bad, and perhaps fundamental, that shareholders in other turbine manufacturers are selling out. Vestas Wind fell 7% Friday.
The promise was that wind turbines would keep getting cheaper as they got bigger and better. Instead, issues are appearing now even in new installations, and people are starting to wonder if they’ve made the turbines too big too fast. The bearings and blades are wearing out, and the costs to fix them are crippling.
Shares in Siemens Energy plunged by a third after it said turbine components are degrading faster than expected
The news isn’t just a blow for the company’s shareholders, but for all investors and policy makers betting on the rapid rollout of renewable power.
The creaky components, which affect 15% to 30% of the installed onshore fleet, will be expensive to fix. Management thinks the cost could run upward of €1 billion, equivalent to $1.09 billion, effectively wiping out more than a third of the profit the company is expected to make doing maintenance on wind turbines it has already installed, according to Bernstein analyst Nicholas Green.
These are not words CEO’s ever want to use: ” it’s much worse than even what I have thought possible”:
In a call with reporters, Siemens Gamesa CEO Jochen Eickholt said “the quality problems go well beyond what had been known hitherto”.
“The result of the current review will be much worse than even what I would have thought possible,” he added.
In the call with reporters, Siemens Energy CEO Christian Bruch called the developments “bitter” and “a huge setback”.
The company has seen just “a handful of failures” across a fleet of several thousand turbines, he said, but it now had to assess “what to expect over the next 20 years” and which preventative measures to take.
To put it mildly – It’s either the rotor, the bearings “or the design” — could it be worse? It could — Siemens has already built 132 GW of wind plants — mostly onshore — and these new unforeseen problems may affect as many as 15 to 30% of their turbines. The maintenance costs to meet the warrantees they have already made are substantial. On top of that Siemens has “an order backlog of 34 billion euros”. This could be a very big hole…
On Friday, Siemens Gamesa said that while rotor blades and bearings were partly to blame for the turbine problems, it could not be ruled out that design issues also played a role. It said the problems could affect as many as 15-30% of its turbine fleet.
The company said quality problems “go beyond what we were previously aware of, and they are directly linked to selected components and a few, but important, suppliers”.
It’s a perfect storm of rising supply costs and unexpected maintenance costs:
The company was already being hit with issues such as the rising costs of steel and other key raw materials when the news of its wind turbine failures went public.
Chief executive, Christian Bruch has told reporters “Even though it should be clear to everyone, I would like to emphasise again how bitter this is for all of us”.
Sweden has thrown away the sacred renewables talisman and opened the escape valve from the Temple of WindySolar-Inc. They’ve done the obvious thing anyone who was worried about CO2 would have done in 1992 — aimed for nuclear.
They have switched their 100% “renewables” target by 2045 to a 100% fossil-free target. It’s still a pagan antipathy of the sixth element of the periodic table. But at least it’s a more pragmatic version.
Sweden topped the EU list for renewables share of energy in the last tally — albeit with mostly biomass and hydropower. It was a star of the renewables set — number 1 on the Climate Council list of the “11 countries leading the way“. Yet here they are effectively giving up on the unreliable generators. Surely this must hurt?
Sweden’s parliament adopted a change to its energy targets on Tuesday, which will see it become 100% fossil fuel-free by 2045.
The change means that nuclear generation can count towards the government’s energy targets. Sweden’s Government voted to phase-out nuclear power 40 years ago, but in June 2010 parliament voted to repeal the policy. The government elected last year seeks to promote nuclear power.
Finance Minister Elisabeth Svantesson said in parliament. “We need more electricity production, we need clean electricity and we need a stable energy system.” State-owned utility Vattenfall is looking at building at least two small modular reactors and at extending the life of the country’s existing reactors.
It’s not such a big shift for Sweden. Thirty years ago their electricity was half hydro and half nuclear, and this is just a return to that after the intrusion of some wind and bioenergy.
This new target is just for fossil free electricity, not total “fossil free” energy use. Sweden still gets about 30% of all its energy from coal, oil and gas, and that is not about to change.
As Euractiv notes, the Swedish government has also cut requirements for carbon neutral fuels in cars and also stood up for countries wanting to keep their coal plants on standby.
The coalition plans to cut the bio-fuel mix in petrol and diesel, leading to bigger CO2 emissions, a move that could mean Sweden missing 2030 emissions goals.
Proposals by Sweden to allow countries to prolong subsidies for standby coal power plants have also been met concern in the EU, while Stockholm also wanted Brussels to water-down a landmark law to restore deteriorating natural habitats.
To all intents and purposes, this is what a government would do if it didn’t believe the climate dogma but didn’t want to rock the global boat.
Despite the dreaded “polar amplification” and 1,000 new coal fired plants in China, apparently the fragile Antarctic ice shelves have barely changed in the last 40 years. Indeed, instead of fragmenting, they are melting slightly slower now than they were in 1980. Naturally, the researchers *know*, as only high priests can, that things will change any day now. The tipping point is just around the corner, hiding, ready to pounce.
Mankind has emitted fully 65% of our total carbon emissions since the year 1980 — and yet it has not done much at all to the melt-rate of the ice shelves of Antarctica. In fact, if anything, climate change is slowing the ice melting.
That’s 1.1 Trillion tonnes of man-made CO2, and no catastrophe to show for it.
The new study by Banwell et al used satellite microwave data and modeling of meltwater.
GRL
Note that the “small but significant decrease” in melting gets headlined as “a minor change”. Since when where significant warming trends reported as just a “minor change” of indeterminate direction?
The results show Antarctic ice shelves overall have seen only minor changes in surface melt rates over the past 40 years, and the modeling results even show a small but significant decrease in melt rates during the study period.
The findings appear to be good news for the Antarctic region, but the researchers caution that they do expect Antarctic ice shelves to see higher surface melt in the coming decades.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the “small but significant” decrease in melt rates is visible to the naked eye.
Timeseries of observed and modeled melt days. All ice shelf regions in Antarctica. –Banwell
Since 1998 the Antarctic ice shelves have had cooler mean summer temperatures and lower meltwater volume. Which climate models predicted this?
Figure 4. Modeled meltwater production volume. (a) Modeled annual meltwater volume (Gt yr−1) over all ice shelves (black line, left y-axis) and Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications Version 2 mean summer (November 1 to March 31) air temperature over all ice shelves (red solid line, right y-axis). Banwell
Feel the faith of the research team — “it just hasn’t kicked off yet”.
“As air temperatures increase over the coming decades, we’re expecting a real increase in these surface melt rates up until the end of the century,” Banwell said. “So although we haven’t seen much change in melt rates yet, we will see that to come. It just hasn’t really kicked off yet.”
If Antarctic ice shelves were melting faster we would have seen headlines every year. Indeed we got them anyway — from August 2022 — “Antarctica’s Ice Shelves Could be Melting Faster than We Thought.” That was Caltech, which modeled the effects of a small current running counterclockwise around Antarctica and predicted the ice sheets were melting more than the great climate models thought they would.
“It’s not who the President is, it’s who controlling the wallet of the President.” “Who’s that?” she asks. “The Hedge Funds, BlackRock, the banks. These guys run the world.”
..you take a big f– ton of money and then you can start to buy people. Obviously we have this system in place. First, there’s the senators. These guys are f***ing cheap. You got ten grand? You can buy a senator.
BlackRock don’t want people to notice them:
“BlackRock don’t want to be in the news. They don’t want people to talk about them. They don’t want to be anywhere on the radar.”
“Why not?” she asks.
“I don’t know … I suspect because it’s easier to do things when people aren’t thinking about it.”
What kind of things are easier to do in the dark? Things other people won’t like.
News – he says, is propaganda. If you hear it on the news, do the opposite. If Jim Kramer says buy, you should sell. He’s an inverse indicator…
Volatility creates opportunity to do business.
War is really f** good for business.
As I’ve written before, there’s a reason everything seems to be going off the rails simultaneously: It’s fed by a dark bubble.
Vast amounts of “money printing” via low interest rates and easy loans mean the rich get richer, and pools of wealth equivalent to whole nations falls under the control of just one or two men. When men with trillions of dollars in their pockets can “do favours” for politicians, who in turn do favours for them, no wonder the politicians don’t care much what the voters think.
Don’t wait for the receipts. Ask the question: If a few men had this kind of power, hypothetically, what would stop them using it?
After thirty years of propaganda the people aren’t buying the crisis. The UK Sunpolled 2,000 people and found that 60% think the government should be *prioritizing* a reduction in their bills rather than worrying about reaching Net Zero. Barely 20% thought Net Zero was more important — and they were presumably the only ones who could still afford to pay their bills.
The bigger problem is that it’s not democracy. The UniParty just don’t seem interested in winning votes. They’re not fighting “over the centre”, they’re fighting over the most extreme left 20%.
And ponder that these dismal results come despite 65 per cent of people thinking Net Zero is somehow a useful idea. Imagine what the polls would be like when people find out that carbon dioxide feeds the world and the Sun controls the climate?
Sun poll shows clueless MPs have NO idea of the pain policies like Net Zero inflict on ordinary Brit families
by Harry Cole,
A massive 62 per cent told a YouGov poll for The Sun that getting prices down is more important than achieving carbon neutral status by midway through this century.
Pretend the conservatives were conservative. Pretend they cared about the voters. When asked if Ministers should prioritize keeping prices down over reaching Net Zero, fully 76% of conservative voters agreed, and half of Labor voters did too. If, hypothetically, one major party said they’d build cheap reliable electricity, while the other spouted off about pagan weather control, 60% of the electorate are there for the picking…
Nearly half the country is fed up and every protest they see on the news just makes them angrier:
50% of voters don’t want to ban petrol driven cars too.
Half the country is being ignored (and the other half get their “news” from the BBC?)
Astronomers are very excited. A new paper suggests Betelgeuse — the red giant in Orion — might be only a decade or two (or maybe a century) away from going supernova. It’s the sort of thing that only happens once in a thousand years. Whenever it does go boom, it will shine brighter than the moon, and dominate the sky for a few months to a year.
It’s 600 light years away, so if it is going to go supernova in the next twenty years, then, of course, it must have already happened and the light is on the way.
Before anyone cracks the champers, the new paper by Saio is based on models trying to figure out what’s happening on a pulsating ball of fire 5,600 trillion kilometers away.
There hasn’t been a supernova in our neighborhood since July 4, 1054, when Chinese astronomers observed a supernova, now labeled SN1054, that remained visible for almost two years. The remnants of that supernova are now called the Crab Nebula.
At the end of it’s life after a star runs out of hydrogen to fuse, it starts to collapse. The extra pressure and heat that generates kicks off fusion with the helium core which produces carbon. When the helium runs out the star shrinks again and pressurizes the carbon core, fusing carbon into bigger elements. But these stages are shorter and faster. Below is a graph of the timelines (with a log scale), and in Saio’s latest estimate Betelgeuse is already burning through the carbon core and has less than 20% of the carbon left, and maybe as low as 0.5%. The red line (the carbon) is theoretically bottoming out in less than 10 to 100 years.
….
The game is over when it fuses its way up to iron:
Charlie Martin:
If the star masses more than the Chandrasekhar limit, gravity causes the stellar material to continue fusing, producing elements farther and farther up to iron and nickel. Eventually, though, the core of the star is largely iron, and the fusion of iron takes more energy than it releases. At that point, the equilibrium of fusion heat and gravitational pressure is broken. The star collapses inward at 20% or more of the speed of light; the shockwave compresses the core until the atoms collapse; and the electrons meet the protons, converting them to neutrons and neutrinos and releasing immense amounts of energy — 100 “foe“, or about 1046 Joules.
We may not see the supernova, but from 6:40 minutes we can at least see Dr. Becky Smethurst get genuinely excited. She explains it well. Though what are the odds, a star 10 million years old reaching the end of days in the 21st century. OK, I’m skeptical…
Sometimes it’s nice to get away from politics.
Just how far is Betelgeuse?
To put in perspective how little we know, I typed in “how far is Betelgeuse” and discovered to my surprise, we don’t have much idea. Three years ago Betelgeuse was “discovered” to be much closer than we thought at 543 light years away. But in January this year it was found to be 724 light years from Earth, or at least between 613 and 881 light years away. Righto…
Betelgeuse is a biggie. See the progression of astronomical bodies up to Betelgeuse in set 5. If it were where our sun is, it would reach past the asteroid belt. Lucky it isn’t our sun.
China is the leader in EV car production but it’s not quite the success you might think it is.
The CCP was apparently determined to claim that they are making more EV’s than Tesla. But in order to get the EV subsidies, companies are producing vast numbers of cars no one wants to buy. It seems these cars are registered, falsely listed as “sold” and driven 30 miles to a graveyard to presumably rot, or spontaneously combust, whichever comes first. After thirteen years of one particular subsidy, supposedly only worth 3-6% of the best selling car, the government has paid out nearly $15 billion, which seems like it would buy quite a few fields of Neta V EVs.
“China is the land of shortcuts and facades”
Winston Sterzel has an insiders view on China, and claims there are also fly-by-night investment schemes which appear, inflate and disappear, in get-rich-quick projects purely designed to scam investors out of their money. In 2018 bicycle sharing schemes led to mountains of rotting bikes, and so it is again — this time with glass, heavy metals and rare earths.
Who knows what the real price of an EV is in China?
Not surprisingly, given the waste, inefficiency, and purposeless grind, something bad is happening in the Chinese economy — all car sales (petrol and EV’s) are down nearly 20%.
Which is not to say Western economies don’t have their waste, inefficiency, and purposeless grind.
Elon may be getting the last laugh if this May 31 headline is correct:
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