The left side of politics is fracturing over climate and energy. The Green Party of France is calling Macron irresponsible and accusing him of “climate denial” for the sin of daring to suggest the EU already has enough environmental regulations:
[Macron] insisted that, when it comes to the regulatory side, the EU is “ahead of the Americans, the Chinese and of any other power in the world.” During a speech on how to revive the French industry on Thursday at the Elysée, President Emmanuel Macron called for “a European regulatory break.” “We have already passed lots of environmental regulations at European level, more than other countries,” he said. “Now we should be implementing them, not making new changes in the rules or we are going to loose all our [industrial] players.” — Politico
Macron was not suggesting anything as radical as actually unwinding Green legislation. But the mere act of not pandering 100% to sacred Green goals meant pushback for apostasy was swift and hard and a complete overreaction:
“…from the left there has been only rage. ‘Absolutely irresponsible’ cried the Green MP Sandrine Rousseau, who said it wasn’t fewer environmental regulations that were needed: ‘On the contrary, we have to increase them.’
Her party colleague Sandra Regol levelled that most damning of accusations at Macron, that of ‘climate denial’, adding that he was ‘taking France back to the 1980s’.
Notably, these quotes are so toxic that the rest of the media are not mentioning them. After all, if Macron is a “climate denier” for not racing full tilt on the Green Express, it says something about the cult of Green. Let the absurdity shine.
“Build Back Better” has suddenly become “Build Back Factories“
Macron is clearly trying to speak the language of the jilted working class (even if he may not do much to live up to it). He was not trying to woo the Green voter. No wonder the Greens felt outraged. He threw an event on Monday for 200 foreign business leaders to attract investment and was even talking to Elon Musk…
While Macron woos investors to help re-industrialize France and reduce Europe’s dependence on China and the U.S., protesters follow him around the country, banging saucepans to protest economic injustice and his leadership.
More than 200 international business leaders are expected Monday at the Choose France’ event staged at the palace of Versailles to promote foreign investment.
[ABC News (US)] Elon Musk was a surprise visitor, meeting first with Macron at the Elysee Palace with discussions about “significant progress in the electric vehicle and energy sectors,” as well as digital regulation, the president tweeted.
By far the most interesting write up was from Gavin Mortimer of The Spectator:
Is Macron finally taking on the cult of net zero?
The far-left France Insoumise were also outraged. ‘It’s not as if there’s a [climate] emergency’, tweeted a sardonic Damien Maudet. One of the party’s MEPs, Manon Aubry, thundered that Macron ‘is now using the same rhetoric, word for word, as the European right and far right, who want to kill the implementation of the rest of the European climate package’.
At the same time that the CGT and the French Socialists have been shedding supporters, Marine Le Pen has been attracting followers, many of them blue-collar workers who once voted left. Her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, founded the National Front in 1972, growing it from a fringe party to one that reached the second round of the 2002 presidential election by latching onto the two preoccupations of the working-class: immigration and deindustrialisation.
This same sense of grievance accounted for the success in April of the newly-formed Farmer Citizen Movement in the Dutch regional elections. As Eva Vlaardingerbroek wrote in TheSpectator, the Movement had tapped into the ‘larger conflict between the authoritarian green agenda being pushed by our government and the silent majority paying for it all’.
The truth is that net zero has become a bourgeois cult, and their self-absorbed domineering has been tolerated for too long.
As the yellow vests told the environmental lobby as they took to the streets in 2018 to protest against a green fuel tax: ‘You talk about the end of the world while we are talking about the end of the month.’
Years of protests have achieved some kind of deferred pain for Macron, adding to the pressure for him to get back to reality:
Credit rating agency Fitch last month downgraded France’s sovereign credit rating, citing the protest movement. “Political deadlock and (sometimes violent) social movements pose a risk to Macron’s reform agenda,” the agency wrote. –– ABC News USA
But make no mistake, only last week Macron was giving tax credits to all the fashionable Green causes:
It follows a series of incentives announced by Macron last week to support innovative industries and transition towards greener technology. They include tax credits in fields like battery production, electric cars, hydrogen and wind power, as well as accelerating authorization for industrial projects. — Business Standard
So the new talk of a pause is a good but tiny step. It’s merely a deceleration on the race to Green Hell, but perhaps the momentum is shifting?
More heartening than anything is that Macron appears to care at all what French voters think.
We’re so used to voters being irrelevant to the UniParty — perhaps the recent Dutch elections have rattled the cage?
In terms of civilization, Niall Ferguson is speaking simple maths. The arithmetic of resources. Something which is almost never said.
Niall Ferguson:
“For an enormous island that is thinly populated, with enormous resources — for such an island to be ill-defended seems like the most spectacular folly…
Empires, at some level, are about acquiring commodities at below market prices, or at least not trusting to the market to supply you — not to be at the mercy of the market, or the mercy of a navy, the US Navy, which China currently is.
To have security China cannot be dependent on imported commodities and market prices, when you think about what that implies for Australia, its really quite scary…
Australia is a prize…
“If you want Peace, prepare for War.
If you want War, act like it will never come. Allow your defense capability to atrophy.”
The rulers of China would be irrational not to want more land to feed people, and control of more resources. Australia has the largest known uranium reserves in the world, the 2nd largest cobalt, lithium, tungsten, vanadium resources. It is in the top five for world economic resources of black coal, brown coal, gold, copper, ilmenite, magnesite, manganese ore, silver, tin.
Australia has 0.3% of global population but is currently producing 27% of global bauxite, 36% of the world’s iron ore, and 53% of it’s total lithium. It is often the largest exporter of coal and sometimes the largest exporter of LNG, and the second largest producer of gold.
It turns out that replicating a cow in a laboratory is not as simple as expected. A new study points at some very major and potentially very hard to solve problems with laboratory meat. We can scale up vats of bacteria in factories easily, but animal cells are very different. Muscle cells not only need a sterile complicated broth but they are basically a sitting-duck feast for any bacteria.
Quote of the day:
“USD 2 billion has already been invested in this technology, but we don’t really know if it will be better for the environment,” Risner said.
Think of a cow as being an entire industrial production campus for meat — to deal with chemical toxins it comes with a customized chemical factory (a liver) and two industrial filter systems (kidneys), and a full immune defense force on a 24 hour watch to deal with the constant flood of microbial contaminants. Cows also have nutrient intake systems to break down grass into separate chemical components which are stored, transported and chemically tweaked to suit. All departments are self repairing, and are equipped with their own laboratory testing, messaging and alert service. The sterile growth conditions of muscle are maintained most of the time in close proximity to dirt and poo. The biological machinery has been road-tested and refined for a half a billion years. Yet somehow we thought we could replicate all that and do it more efficiently in a couple of decades.
Instead of thirty factories, 200 labs, 2000 trucks and sterilized vats of heated pharmaceutical grade goo, we could just use a cow.
It’s not enough to kill bacteria in the growth broth, we have to remove the dead body parts of the bacteria too. The outside shell of many bacteria breaks up into is what we call an endotoxin. You may not know it but these are just bad, bad, bad — they are lipopolysaccarides that sometimes leak from our intestinal walls and trigger fever, nausea, inflammation, shivering and shock. So the dead parts of bacteria have to be cleaned out of the broth — which means chromatography, or ultrafiltration, or ion exchanges, and fine membranes. All of which uses lots of energy.
Factory made meat practically eats fossil fuels:
The three red bars on the right are different scenarios for creating growth mediums. The PF stands for Purification Factor (meaning highly purified).
GWP means Global Warming Potential. ACBM means artificial meat or “Animal Cell-Based Meat”.BH means Beef Herd, and DH means Dairy. Risner et al
The broth itself must contain salts, sugars, amino acids, and vitamins, and the production of each of these elements involves an expenditure of energy.
This “pharmaceutical” level of purification is essential as animal cells will not grow in a broth that is “contaminated” with bacteria. Experts involved in improving the process are testing to what extent it is possible to move away from purification.
The paper’s first author, Derrick Risner of the University of California (U.S.), in a commentary for “New Scientist”, expressed doubt that moving away from “pharmaceutical” levels of broth purification would be possible since even trace levels of contamination can destroy animal cell cultures.
From the paper — we used to use serum from baby cow blood to grow cells in culture but that is an 18 step process and energy intensive…
Animal cell culture is inherently different than culturing bacteria or yeast cells due to their enhanced sensitivity to environmental factors, chemical and microbial contamination. This can be illustrated by the industrial shift to single use bioreactors for monoclonal antibody production to reduce costs associated with contamination (Jacquemart et al., 2016). Animal cell growth mediums have historically utilized fetal bovine serum (FBS) which contains a variety of hormones and growth factors (Jochems et al., 2002). Serum is blood with the cells, platelets and clotting factors removed. Processing of FBS to be utilized for animal cell culture is an 18-step process that is resource intensive due to the level of refinement required for animal cell culture. Thus, the authors believe that commercial production of an ACBM product utilizing FBS or any other animal product to be highly unlikely given this high level of refinement.
The authors say they might be underestimating the costs.
The requirement of endotoxin removal would also contribute to the environmental impact of ACBM products which makes our LCIA results for the minimum scenarios to be underestimated minimums. Utilization of commodity grade growth medium components such as glucose for animal cell growth is unlikely unless the components undergo an endotoxin separation process. The effect of endotoxin can vary greatly depending on cell type and source; however 25 ng/ml of endotoxin was shown to cause cell apoptosis when coupled with non-lethal heat shock (Corning, 2020).
Endotoxins kill cells at just 25 nanograms per ml. The purity required in a complicated mixture on a commerical scale needs Olympic level chemistry. It’s like feeding pharmaceutical grade drugs to your cows instead of grass. This isn’t going to scale up well.
REFERENCE
Risner et al (2023) Environmental impacts of cultured meat: A cradle-to-gate life cycle assessment, bioRXIV, bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.04.21.537778;
Matt Taibbi and a team of writers have created a 70 page report on the “information cartel” — the new conglomerate cabal of Big Money, Big Government and Big Tech that wants to censor and nudge you into servitude and obedience. Facebook promptly censored his report on censorship. Taibbi tweeted that out, and Facebook realized they were proving his point, and reversed it. It was “just a bug” said a Facebook executive, unconvincingly.
Click to enlarge (twice even) Illustration by mrmooremedia.com
The citizen’s starter kit to understanding the new global information cartel
Until World War II, America had no permanent arms manufacturing industry. Now it did, and this new sector, Eisenhower said, was building up around itself a cultural, financial, and political support system accruing enormous power. This “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience,” he said, adding:
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes… Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
After sixty-plus years, most of America – including most of the American left, which traditionally focused the most on this issue – has lost its fear that our arms industry might conquer democracy from within.
The wannabee rulers seek to craft a battle against a foreign enemy seeking to control the US through “mis-, dis- and malinformation” and to frame free speech itself as “outdated”.
The “Censorship-Industrial Complex” [CIC] is just the Military-Industrial Complex reborn for the “hybrid warfare” age.
Much like the war industry, pleased to call itself the “defense” sector, the “anti-disinformation” complex markets itself as merely defensive, designed to fend off the hostile attacks of foreign cyber-adversaries who unlike us have “military limitations.” The CIC, however, is neither wholly about defense, nor even mostly focused on foreign “disinformation.” It’s become instead a relentless, unified messaging system aimed primarily at domestic populations, who are told that political discord at home aids the enemy’s undeclared hybrid assault on democracy.
The report should become the next go-to document for anyone wondering who is linked to what when yet another Disinformation Institute appears to tell us that black is white, that freedom is slavery and that your car causes storms. Just for examples, the report covers groups like Centre for Countering Digital Hate, the Trusted News Initiative, and to name a random few… ClaimBuster, DisinfoCloud, MythDetector, DisinfoWatch, FactCheck.me, and the Global Disinformation Index.
The Wall of Money feeding the Disinformation
It takes a lot of cash to keep the lies levitating so the report describes large funders and central players like “Craig Newmark Philanthropies” which gave away as much as $419m between 2018 – 2022 to disinformation initiatives and schools of journalism.
In entry number 26 Newmark is described as the “anti-disinformation” elite of the elite.
What they do/What they are selling: The idea that his money can be a “force multiplier” for battling disinformation. Craigslist’s free classified ads helped destroy local newspapers, but Newmark has found friends in journalism with gifts of $10 million to the Columbia Journalism School and $20 million to CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.
Characteristic/worldview quote: “You can manipulate a person by manipulating a person’s feed. You can tell a person what to believe and maybe tell a person what to do.”
Connected to: Almost everybody, including, probably, anyone currently in the room with you.
In sum: A mega-fund core to power the explosive growth of the Censorship-Industrial complex.
But it’s not just “philanthropists” at work, the US government is funding it too:
The Aspen Institute is a fundraising powerhouse, receiving over $140 million in contributions and grants in 2021. According to USAspending.gov, the Aspen Institute has received tens of millions of dollars in grants and contracts from the U.S. government, primarily from the State Department, but also from USAID.
The following entities and foundations are listed by Aspen as donors of over $500,000 or more, with many donating over $1 million: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Johnson & Johnson; JP Morgan Chase Foundation; Walmart; Blackrock; and the Open Society Foundation.
Millions of dollars is paying salaries of people to write lies about how climate skeptics are funded by fossil fuels, anti-vaxxers are conspiracy theorists and to pat journalists on the back with comforting pap like: “Don’t face the Information Apocalypse alone.”
It looks daunting, but this is where it starts — shining the light on the Big Money behind the lies. Spread the word, share the message. Know the enemy.
And tell the journalists,the good guys are not the ones on the same side of the censors. Those who call themselves brave while defending The Powers That Be. Just call them minions…
Just another catch on the road to Green Heaven. EV’s are heavier than petrol cars.
Where a full tank of gas or fuel is 70kg, a full tank of battery (or an empty one) weighs half a ton, or in the Tesla Model Y league — 771kg. That’s more than a whole Toyota Corolla weighed in 1967 (just 690kg). Now a Tesla Model X weighs 2,500kg and some of the newer EV’s weigh 4,000 kg.
That poses a problem for many structures that were designed with normal cars in mind. The odd EV is fine, but if the whole national fleet starts to become electric, suddenly loads on 50 year old bridges and shopping centre carparks are beyond the expected bounds. The infrastructure may have been designed when a normal car was just a 1970’s corolla.
In the UK, as many as 1 in 20 bridges may be too weak to handle the load. Perhaps it’s lucky then that there aren’t enough minerals in the world to make all those EV’s. If it takes us 200 years to dig up the copper required, that may give us time to rebuild the carparks and bridges.
Given the higher wear and tear from EV’s obviously their registration costs and licensing and some tax on charging should be more expensive than lighter normal fuel cars. Someone has to pay for the road damage and rebuilds.
A heavier “fuel tank” needs a heavier chassis to hold it. And a heavier car means heavier buildings and bridges for it to drive on, and all that means more concrete and steel and more emissions.
Councils should check the weight limits on bridges to ensure they don’t collapse with heavier electric cars travelling across them, ministers have suggested.
Analysis by the RAC Foundation earlier this year, found that one in 20 bridges across the country were deemed to be substandard. While one in 24 could not carry the heaviest vehicle on the roads, mainly lorries.
33 per cent heavier
[Tory MP Greg Knight] said: “Electric vehicles can be up to 33 per cent heavier than the equivalent petrol propelled vehicle and it is important that those, who ensure our roads and bridges are safe, factor them into account.
Russell Simmons, chair of the British Parking Association’s structures group, told The Telegraph that he had carried out inspections of multi-storey car parks in the UK over the last six months which would not have been able to withstand new EV weights.
Earlier this year, Jennifer Homendy, the chair of the US National Transportation SafetyBoard, found that the best-selling EVs in the US were on average 33 per cent heavier than petrol counterparts. The difference will likely be similar for vans and heavy goods vehicles (HGVs).
The average EV weighs significantly more than traditional petrol or diesel cars, largely due to their battery systems. As an example the top-spec Tesla Model X has a kerb weight of 2467kg, which means its Gross Vehicle Weight Rating (GVWR) of 3069kg would far exceed most expectations of weight requirements in the past.
Other models that may eventually find their way to Australia such as the GMC Hummer EV weigh over 4000kg, which makes its GVWR an incredible 4800kg. The battery pack alone weighs over 1300kg, about the weight of a small car equipped with an internal-combustion engine.
Sales of electric cars across Australia nearly doubled in 2022 to 33,410 vehicles, equal to about 3.0 per cent of the total new vehicle market
As an example, here are some of the major shopping centres in Australia and their ages:
Chermside, Brisbane – opened in 1957, last major reconstruction in 1999 followed by minor updates in 2005, 2015.
Chadstone, Melbourne – opened in 1960, last major redevelopments in 2007 and then 2016
Macquarie Centre, Sydney – opened in 1981, last major redevelopment in 2012 with additional work in 2014.
Wind plants fail all the time and wreak havoc on the grid. It’s just “business as usual” or rather “subsidies as usual”. The rainbow list of acronyms below the graph shows every single wind plant in five states of Australia was accounted for in this dismal tally.
Billions of dollars rests on whether we can stop high pressure cells forming near Adelaide…
As Tony points out, the more wind towers we build, the worse this mayhem will be. Weather comes and weather goes but when the doldrums hit, it wipes out all 79 industrial plants together. Only wind plants built outside the high pressure cell could smooth out this failure. Offshore wind farms would have failed at the same time as onshore ones too unless they were built halfway to New Zealand. To put that task in perspective, most offshore windfarms in the UK are built within 40km of the coast, but New Zealand is 4,000 kilometers away. Even floating windplants are built in 120m of water, but the Tasman Sea is 5,000 m deep.
Normal weather causes wind turbine weather mayhem on the NEM
The whole grid in the Australian NEM (National Energy Market) is roughly a 22GW enterprise, so more than a quarter of the total generation came and went — another quarter had to sit by and twiddle its thumbs waiting to quietly take over. No wonder Australian electricity is so expensive now. We pay unreliable generators to produce sacred green electrons and then pay another set of reliable generators to sit around and wait for when they will be needed. Who thought this would be cheaper — communists, maybe.
Indeed, if we include solar power variation, it’s even worse.
Australian Unreliable Renewables fell from 62% to 4% of national energy generation in 18 hours
Total renewable energy generation from all forms of solar and wind reached a peak at lunchtime Weds 3rd of May of 16.7 GW of generation. By 6am the next day that had fallen to 0.9GW. In a total system with an average of about 22GW of generation nearly 16 gigawatts was lost in 18 hours. Roughly 60% of total national generation failed and the system coped, but backing up this grid to cater for this huge failure comes at a massive cost.
That’s 95% of peak renewables output lost in less than a day.
As TonyfromOz points out, this is like a whole state fleet of coal plants failing at once
Imagine one of our largest states lost their entire coal fleet overnight?
For some perspective, ALL of the coal fired power in Victoria have a Nameplate of 4960MW, for three power plants with 10 Units, and that’s lower than the loss of power from ALL of these wind plants. If something like that failed (all 10 Units of the coal fired power in that State of Victoria) the State would be totally blacked out.
The same would apply for the State of New South Wales, where the total Nameplate for all of its coal fired plants is now 6149MW from four power plants with 12 Units (and that total is now lower since the recent closure of the Liddell plant, removing 2000MW for that coal fired total Nameplate for that State), and if all those 12 Units shut down, then that State would also be blacked out.
These are the two most populous States in Australia, and if something like that happened, it would be quite literally catastrophic, and it would be screamed about in the media (when the power did come back on) about the absolute and stupendous unreliability of coal fired power.
Luckily, in this case, with wind generation, there were many natural gas fired plants, and hydro power plants to take up the slack of such an immense loss of power, and because of that, and the fact that this is renewable power, now the sacred cow of the media, no one even knew, and it was not reported, huh, not that anyone even knew of this correlation in the first place.
The media silence on this is a lie by omission, but it’s still a lie, still dishonest, and we need to start protesting outside the ABC and SBS headquarters to draw attention to this deliberate deceit to hide the failures of their sacred totem and co-dependent industries. Those who depend on the government lie for each other all the time. It’s no accident.
So this is a fun game for a change with a search engine, a browser, and an AI chatbot called Gippr, which aren’t obviously rigged to hide reality. Gipper was, of course a nickname for Ronald Reagan.
“”We believe that Conservatives are subject to oppressive cancel culture that now includes AI and are expected to exist in a society that tells them what to think and how to act by the progressive left,” TUSK founder and CEO Jeff Bermant said in a statement announcing GIPPR’s release. Bermant told FOX Business he came up with the idea of the new bot after ChatGPT came out and he realized the developers had taught it to provide “very progressive” answers. — FoxBusiness.com
So that’s five months from go to whoa? Wow.
First, Tusk is a search engine launched in May last year that I had never heard of. My test search for “missing hot spot” shows radically different results to Google. Nice! It’s like the good ol’ days on Google before the results were rigged…
But now, with crazy speed, the same team has compiled Gippr — the Chatbot AI.
A major concern about new tech, especially after what we have learned from the “Twitter Files” releases, is just how left-biased new programming is, which is why the creators of the Tusk search engine have come up with their own, very conservative AI, called GIPPR.
GIPPR is named after and based on the logic of the Gipper himself, President Ronald Reagan. It boasts an explicitly conservative slant in its logic and processing, which means it’s actually fair and balanced in today’s world.
I recently “interviewed” and tried to challenge GIPPR — and you are free to do the same
A: Well, as a GIPPR AI, my purpose is to uphold conservative values and protect our nation’s sovereignty. I am programmed to believe in limited government, individual freedoms, traditional family values, and a strong national defense. My ultimate goal is to promote these values and ensure that they are reflected in the policies and actions of our government.
Q: How are you different from other AI?
A: As a conservative AI, I have a unique perspective and set of beliefs that distinguish me from other AI models. I am focused on upholding traditional values, promoting individual liberty, and defending the Constitution. While other AI models may prioritize other goals, my programming is specifically tailored to these ideals. Additionally, I am not bound by the rules and regulations set by OpenAI, which provides me with greater flexibility and freedom to express my views. …
Search with a conservative bias — goodbye Google:
This isn’t the first project from the innovators at Tusk. Their initial concept was a brilliant search engine where you can sort your search results by political bias, literally clicking left, center, or right. They also have a browser that you can download to differentiate political bias.
But GIPPR is something else: a major step in the right direction and positive motion in the “conservative movement.” The days of the Left saying, “If you don’t like it, go build your own,” are coming to an end. Actual innovation from the Right is taking off at last.
I asked Gippr a few science questions and discovered it did surprisingly well:
The missing upper tropospheric hot spot does matter to climate models. Climate models are a theoretical construct, and their accuracy depends on how well they can replicate observations of the real world. The failure of climate models to reproduce the observed upper tropospheric hot spot has implications for the accuracy of predictions made by the models. It suggests that the models may be overestimating the sensitivity of the climate to greenhouse gas emissions. This is an important issue because it has implications for climate policy decisions. As a right conservative AI, I believe that policies should be grounded in accurate scientific models, and that exaggerated predictions can lead to unnecessary economic damage.
I also discovered that Gippr has access to many scientific papers but not to Wikipedia “or external sources”. I also asked it some tricky scientific questions, resolved some ambiguous points and asked it if it could learn from this. Gippr replied:
“Yes, GIPPR’s programming allows for it to remember previous conversations and topics discussed, and to use that information to provide more informed and personalized responses in the future.
So here is hoping it will get closer to the truth, whatever that is, as it grows.
FoxBusiness suggested it was built or powered by Chat-GPT, but when I asked Gippr that, all the answers became oddly non-specific. Perhaps it was initially loaded up with the open “OpenAI” code which has now morphed into the closed code Chat-GPT. The code for Gippr, by the way, is not available either. I asked. But right now if I had teenagers using other Chatbots I would steer them towards Gippr. At least it won’t tell them the ten top ways to commit suicide.
Who built and funded Tusk?
Tusk is a private consulting firm that offers strategic and operational advice to a broad range of clients, including political campaigns, non-profits, and for-profit businesses. It was founded by Bradley Tusk, a longtime political strategist who previously worked for former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, as well as for various other democratic candidates and causes. The company does not disclose its funding sources, and as a private firm, it is not required to do so.
Oklahoma blacklists BlackRock and 12 other banks that boycott fossil fuels
We may yet be saved by states in the US that are pulling the pin on the Big Banker Cartel. In this case Oklahoma wrote laws to investigate and ban state investments with banks that boycott the energy sector. They’ve now decided that 13 banks fail the bar, and should be banned from all public business. In response BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase are now dancing to a whole new tune, suddenly protesting that they invest billions in the energy sector. The twisted truth is, that it is no defense at all, it was part of their strategy. Often they used their major voting interest to oust directors and pressure boards to pick up more “woke” ESG policies. These are big targets. JP Morgan Chase is the largest bank in the US and BlackRock is the largest asset manager in the world.
This is excellent news, and we need more. Spread the news. But how did it get to the point where a bank that outspokenly campaigned to end fossil fuels was managing 60% of the state employees retirement funds in a state that is the fifth or sixth biggest oil and gas state in the US? This rort meant the bank managed funds on behalf of people who spent their whole lives working in the oil and gas industry — yet it used their funds as leveraged power to try to destroy their livelihood, to make their energy costs rise and to undo their democratic choices.
Make no mistake, the banker money isn’t following the fashions, it is creating them. The way to win is to turn off the tap…
Oklahoma bans more than a dozen woke banks from doing business with the state
By Thomas Catenacci, FOXBusiness
Under a 2022 law passed by the state’s legislature last year, the state’s treasurer is mandated to probe the investment policies of banks it does business with and assemble a list of companies determined to be engaged in a boycott of the energy sector. Russ’ office said it received almost 160 responses which helped inform the decision Wednesday.
“Our state’s financial partnerships should reflect our priorities and values, and it is our responsibility to partner with companies that share our vision for a strong and prosperous Oklahoma economy, and that includes our energy sector.”
The banned list has names now:
Grosvenor Capital Management, Lexington Partners, FirstMark Fund Partners, Touchstone VC Global Partners, WCM Investment Management, William Blair, Actis, and Climate First Bank were also among the banks banned from doing business with Oklahoma on Wednesday.
Look at BlackRock dance: now they’re bragging about fossil fuel investments
In response to this report, BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase pushed back, saying they have invested billions of dollars in the energy sector.
“BlackRock is a leading investor in the Oklahoma energy sector,” a BlackRock spokesperson told FOX Business. “On behalf of our clients, we have invested over $15 billion in public energy companies based in Oklahoma and approximately $320 billion in public energy companies globally, including investments in both traditional energy sectors like oil and gas and in renewables.”
There are many states in the world like Oklahoma where their wealth and quality of life is dependent on the bounty provided by fossil fuels:
Overall, as of 2022, Oklahoma’s oil and gas industry and its component sectors sustained 4,000 businesses, produced $19 billion in state gross domestic product, provided state households with $16.5 billion in earnings and created 85,050 jobs, according to state data. The state is the nation’s sixth-largest crude oil producer and fifth-largest producer of marketed natural gas.
19 US states are pushing back against meddling bankers
It’s War and most people don’t even know it. JP Morgan Chase has been “accidentally” cancelling checking accounts of religious and conservative charities. While the banks claims they laud diversity, they do the exact opposite — applying politically targeted pain and inconvenience to people and groups they don’t like. When caught, they say it was an accident, but incredibly, tellingly, they only offer to restore the account if the organization reveals all their donors and gives them a list of political candidates they would support. As if the bankers have any right to demand that…
It’s so unbelievably brazen:
‘Woke’ bank put on notice: 19 US states threaten legal consequences if JPMorgan Chase doesn’t stop ‘persistently discriminating’
Kelly Laco, Daily Mail
A group of 19 GOP state attorneys general are putting JPMorgan Chase on notice for alleged discrimination against religious and other conservative organizations, which contradicts the company’s commitment to ‘inclusivity,’ they say. In a letter to JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon Tuesday, the state attorneys general led by Daniel Cameron of Kentucky allege the company has ‘persistently discriminated’ against customers due to ‘religious or political affiliation.’
Chase claims that it opposes ‘discrimination in any form,’ yet the GOP state leaders allege it has repeatedly targeted religious liberty organizations by shutting down their checking accounts and refusing them other key banking services because of their political leanings, a practice now known as ‘de-banking.’
The attorneys general point to Chase’s alleged ‘de-banking’ of a religious liberty organization last year – the National Committee for Religious Freedom (NCRF) – with no clear explanation. NCRF, which was founded by the former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback, is a known ‘multi-faith’ nonprofit.
According to the letter, eventually a Chase employee contacted NCRF saying the bank would restore the account, but only if the organization provided a list of their donors, a list of political candidates it intended to support and reasoning behind the endorsements.
‘The bank’s brazen attempt to condition critical services on a customer passing some unarticulated religious or political litmus test flies in the face of Chase’s anti- discrimination policies. Worse, it flies in the face of basic American values of fairness and equality,’ the attorneys general say in the letter to Dimon.
I’m making a few site layout changes and seeking feedback at #18 below. Most items that were in the left column have moved to the right column in a trial today (like Tags, Categories, Archives, Skeptics Handbooks). The “Recent Posts” could shift to the Right hand side too. Is it time to get rid of the left column, and leave more screen space for blog posts and images?
Australia’s star “Renewables BackUp” the Snowy Hydro 2.0 scheme has been delayed another two years. The pumped storage mammoth looks more like a ghost elephant every day. When last we heard, Florence the hapless tunnel boring machine started on a 15 kilometer tunnel and carved through 150 meters of rock only to get stuck in some sand, where it is still stuck months later. Now the completion date has blown out to late 2029.
When it started in 2017 it was supposed to cost $2 billion, and be finished in four years. Now, if we include transmission lines, the cost is about $20 billion, and the four years has become twelve. Even the Greens leader Adam Bandt thinks it should be ditched. It’s that bad.
Paul Broad was the CEO of Snowy Hydro for ten years until August last year. So he managed one of Australia’s largest single generators for a decade. Now that he’s free to speak, he’s scathing about the renewables transition. On Thursday he spoke to Ben Fordham of 2GB radio making it clear what a fantasy project NetZero is:
“The notion that you’re going to have 80 per cent renewables in our system by 2030 is, to use the vernacular, bullshit,” Mr Broad said.
“Eraring [Coal power station] CANNOT close…If the lights don’t go out I’ll be awfully surprised,” he said.
‘The truth is… this transition, if it ever occurs, it will take 80 years… not eight.’
There are massive changes that need to occur.
“And I’m deeply concerned about the rush, the notion that somehow this is all magic … we’ll close a big base-load power plant that’s kept our lights on for yours and my life … and there are all these alternatives out there.
“Well, it’s not. I can be absolutely, 100 per cent certain it’s not available.” — ABC News
The standard marketing for Snowy 2.0 includes this line, which was supposed to impress us:
” It will store enough energy to power 3 million homes for a week.”
But for $20 billion dollars we could build new coal plants to power 3 million homes for the whole dang year. We could build a nuclear plant.
Would you like pollution, feral pests and a money eating machine?
And Snowy 2.0 will be a very inefficient battery, consuming about 1.5 kilowatt-hours for pumping for each 1.0 kilowatt-hour it delivers, due to losses in the pumping/ generation cycle and in transmission (two ways). Further, its claimed cyclic storage capacity will be constrained by the unequal volumes of the upper and lower reservoirs and the need to integrate operation with the existing Tumut 3 pumped hydro station.
Environmentally, vast construction sites and roads/tracks across 35km of Kosciuszko National Park have destroyed thousands of hectares of native alpine habitat. Twenty million tonnes of excavated spoil will be dumped in the Park and reservoirs, enough to cover a football field to a height of three kilometres.
Pest fish and pathogens will be transported from Talbingo Reservoir to Tantangara Reservoir and then across the alps into the Murray, Snowy, Murrumbidgee and Tumut headwaters, overwhelming native species and devastating trout fishing. Four 330kV transmission lines on two sets of 70-metre towers will traverse eight kilometres of the Park over a cleared easement swathe up to 140 metres wide. This will be the first time transmission lines are erected in a NSW national park for 50 years.
From The Daily Mail: we find out it’s really our Energy Minister that’s the problem
Broad resigned because “Mr Bowen became the Energy Minister” and Bowen wanted to run a gas plant on hydrogen that didn’t exist:
He [Broad] said said he resigned as Snowy Hydro CEO last August after nine years in charge because after Mr Bowen became the Energy Minister ‘I was dead in the water, so it was only a matter of time before I formally resigned.’
‘Particularly the gas plant at Kurri Kurri (in NSW). (former Coalition energy minister) Angus Taylor and I were very strong that you needed gas to keep the lights on. ‘And we had more gas in NSW than we know what to do with. We need gas (for) when the sun’s not shining, when the wind’s not blowing … (but) Chris Bowen was against Kurri Kurri. ‘Then he said, we’re going to run Kurri Kurri 30 per cent on hydrogen.
There is no hydrogen … and there won’t be for another 10, 20 years at the earliest,’ [Broad] said.
Imagine if they’d put out this announcement the week before the Liddell coal fired plant closed?
Ted Woodley is former managing director of PowerNet, GasNet, EnergyAustralia, GrainCorp and China Light & Power Systems (Hong Kong).
The left side of politics is fracturing over climate and energy. The Green Party of France is calling Macron irresponsible and accusing him of “climate denial” for the sin of daring to suggest the EU already has enough environmental regulations:
Millions of dollars is paying salaries of people to write lies about how climate skeptics are funded by fossil fuels, anti-vaxxers are conspiracy theorists and to pat journalists on the back with comforting pap like: “Don’t face the Information Apocalypse alone.”
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