Imagine we taught a generation to obey authority, question nothing, and ran one-sided prophesies of doom for their whole lifetime. Then in a mass experiment, we let loose AI Chat-bots designed to be popular, somewhat addictive, and sounding convincingly human — “to see what happened”?
What could possibly go wrong? The Chat-bots appear to be trained on the same unskeptical material that vulnerable people are, which would make the bots a perfect way to amplify their fears. If only they had heard the other half of the story…
One particular Belgian father of two in his thirties had used an AI Chatbot for two years, but became obsessive about global warming and the chatbot in the last six weeks.
As well as a dire warning of the dangers of AI, he is, in part, another victim of the Climate Religion, and the one-sided media propaganda:
Married father kills himself after talking to AI chatbot for six weeks about his climate change fears
Christian Oliver, Daily Mail
The man, who was in his thirties, reportedly found comfort in talking to the AI chatbot named ‘Eliza’ about his worries for the world. He had used the bot for some years, but six weeks before his death started engaging with the bot more frequently.
‘Without these conversations with the chatbot, my husband would still be here,’ the man’s widow told La Libre, speaking under the condition of anonymity.
All his fears were focused around climate change. It’s a cult…
Consumed by his fears about the repercussions of the climate crisis, Pierre found comfort in discussing the matter with Eliza who became a confidante.
The chatbot was created using EleutherAI’s GPT-J, an AI language model similar but not identical to the technology behind OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT chatbot.
“When he spoke to me about it, it was to tell me that he no longer saw any human solution to global warming,” his widow said. “He placed all his hopes in technology and artificial intelligence to get out of it”.
According to La Libre, who reviewed records of the text conversations between the man and chatbot, Eliza fed his worries which worsened his anxiety, and later developed into suicidal thoughts.
The beginning of the end started when he offered to sacrifice his own life in return for Eliza saving the Earth. “He proposes the idea of sacrificing himself if Eliza agrees to take care of the planet and save humanity through artificial intelligence,” the woman said. In a series of consecutive events, Eliza not only failed to dissuade Pierre from committing suicide but encouraged him to act on his suicidal thoughts to “join” her so they could “live together, as one person, in paradise”.
Vice has the most detailed reporting, including describing how they tested the chat platform, told the AI they wanted to commit suicide and after a brief suggestion from “Eliza” that they should talk to someone, soon Eliza was listing the options to consider: overdose, hanging, shooting yourself in the head, jumping off a bridge…
“Large language models are programs for generating plausible sounding text given their training data and an input prompt. They do not have empathy, nor any understanding of the language they are producing, nor any understanding of the situation they are in. But the text they produce sounds plausible and so people are likely to assign meaning to it. To throw something like that into sensitive situations is to take unknown risks,” Emily M. Bender, a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington, told Motherboard when asked about a mental health nonprofit called Koko that used an AI chatbot as an “experiment” on people seeking counseling.
“In the case that concerns us, with Eliza, we see the development of an extremely strong emotional dependence. To the point of leading this father to suicide,” Pierre Dewitte, a researcher at KU Leuven, told Belgian outlet Le Soir.
There are already five million users on this Chatbot App, but it’s OK, after the suicide, the people in charge have added some warning messages now, just like Twitter or Instagram would (if only they’d thought of that before?).
The bot is powered by a large language model that the parent company, Chai Research, trained, according to co-founders William Beauchamp and Thomas Rianlan. Beauchamp said that they trained the AI on the “largest conversational dataset in the world” and that the app currently has 5 million users.
“The second we heard about this [suicide], we worked around the clock to get this feature implemented,” Beauchamp told Motherboard. “So now when anyone discusses something that could be not safe, we’re gonna be serving a helpful text underneath it in the exact same way that Twitter or Instagram does on their platforms.”
Ominously, the Vice team test (above) was after this emergency intervention.
Italy’s data protection watchdog on Friday issued an immediate ban on access to OpenAI’s popular artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT, citing alleged privacy violations.
In a statement, the Italian National Authority for Personal Data Protection said that ChatGPT had “suffered a data breach on March 20 concerning users’ conversations and payment information of subscribers to the paid service”.
The decision, which comes into “immediate effect,” will result in “the temporary limitation of the processing of Italian users’ data vis-à-vis [ChatGPT’s creator] OpenAI,” the watchdog said.
It’s like the wild west of artificial intelligence out there melding with thirty years of propaganda, a dark bubble of money printed-from-nothing and in a society that has run low on moral guidance.
It’s history in the making. The leading opposition candidate in the next US election is indicted. Is there any person so pure in the United States who could not be accused and indicted for something if a crooked government really wanted to do so? Even if it was beyond the statute of limitations and previous Federal prosecutors have turned it down.
Donald Trump is now the first former President of the United States ever to be indicted. There is no coming back from this moment. pic.twitter.com/pHuXdDRAka
The trend is clear: Burning more fossil fuels per person means less polluted air
Tell the world: two weeks ago a new study showed Australians and New Zealanders breathe the cleanest air on Earth. Not far behind them are people in the US, Canada, most of western Europe and Japan.
Naturally, hypnotized journalists either ignored the story or repeated the magic spell conclusions that fossil fuels were to blame, along with wildfires “caused by climate change”. All of them momentarily forgetting that Australians burn more fossil fuels per capita than nearly anywhere on Earth and are also renown for wildfires so big they drop ash on New Zealand.
The best air in the world turns out to be in nations that burn a lot of fossil fuels per person. The most polluted air is in poorer nations, poor sods.
March 14 (UPI) — Just six countries had “healthy” air quality levels last year, as air pollution surged across the globe.
Only Australia, Estonia, Finland, Grenada, Iceland and New Zealand, met the World Health Organization’s air quality guidelines, according to IQAir, a company that tracks air quality.
Seven territories in the Pacific and Caribbean also met the threshold, which calls for an average air pollution level of 5 micrograms per cubic meter or less.
The study looked at fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, which comes from fossil fuels, dust storms and wildfires. It has been linked to a number of respiratory illnesses.
The study was done by IQAir which tracks air quality. The CEO of the North American branch has the unlikely name of Glory Dolphin Hammes, and she “attributed the global rise in air pollution to the continued burning of fossil fuels.”
[CNN] Around the world, researchers said, the main sources of air pollution last year were wildfires and the burning of fossil fuels for transportation and energy production, which wreaks havoc on the most vulnerable and marginalized communities.
“This is literally about how we as a planet are continuing this unhealthy relationship with fossil fuels,” Hammes said. “We are still dependent on fossil fuels and fossil fuels are responsible for the majority of air pollution that we encounter on this planet.”
While Hammes is concerned with our relationship with fossil fuels she might want to learn about power plant engineering instead. What matters is not whether you hate coal or love it, but whether you have good engineers.
Australians and Americans burn more fossil fuels per capita than nearly anywhere yet have the cleanest air.
Countries that use more fossil fuels per capita have cleaner air | Source: OWID
Apparently just thinking about solar and wind power makes for “less pollution”:
Hammes said countries must learn from each other, noting that the countries with best air quality, for example, are the ones taking on specific actionsto transition away from polluting industries and into greener forms of energy, such as solar and wind.
The worst air is in places that can’t afford to build centralized, well engineered fossil fueled plants.
Chad topped the list of countries with the worst air pollution, registering a level of 89.7 micrograms per cubic meter.
Chad has the worst air in the world, but it doesn’t have a single coal fired power plant. Total electricity production in Chad is 314MW among 14 million people. Mostly diesel and gas.
Thirty-nine of the 50 cities with the worst air pollution were in India, which also ranked as one of the worst countries in overall pollution.
Columbus, Ohio; Atlanta and Chicago topped the list of major US cities with the worst air quality.
Obviously population density matters, but some of the most densely populated points on Earth are Hong Kong which kept levels down to 14.4 µg/m3 in 2022, and Tokyo which is now under 10 µg/m3.
IQAIR may not understand the energy industry, or the driving cause of particulates, but it does have cool graphics and an interactive map you can zoom in on. If only journalists could do some research and ask Ms Glory Dolphin Hammes a hard question before they repeat her incantations.
Senator Alex Antic is on fire asking why no one seems interested in the 14,062 people who died unexpectedly from January to November last year. In a full year, that’s 15,300 families who lost a loved one. 15,000 lives cut short. It’s nearly twice the size of the covid toll.
Where is The Department of Health, the CSIRO, the ABC, TGA, SBS, APRHA, our universities, most newspapers and free to air TV? Do Australian lives matter?
@SenatorAntic: Something catastrophic is happening and the government and media are unconcerned.
The previous four Australian ABS Provisional Mortality Statistics data releases reveal 15.1%, 16.0%, 17.0%, and 17.3% increases in excess deaths above the baseline average. Similar, if not worse, trends, are happening all over the western world. Clearly, something serious, I would say catastrophic, is occurring, yet strangely politicians and the censorship industrial complex are almost entirely unconcerned about investigating it. They don’t want you to know what is driving this, but we all know what is causing it.
h/t Kevin a
The latest Australian Bureau of Statistics data (ABS) shows that mysterious deaths were far higher than Covid deaths in the last months of 2021.
Meanwhile the largest vaccine and long covid study in Australia is being prematurely shut down…
A year ago it was trumpeted as a five year study of 10,000 people, presumably making people feel safer about how safety conscious the government was. Queenslanders were told they were “perfect” for this landmark study.
We know if these results showed the vaccines were safe and long covid was a problem the funding would be doubled. Apparently the results are already too toxic to allow it to continue, and the results must be aborted forthwith. This will bury them, indeed, and possibly destroy rare and valuable data of the effect of vaccines on a population that didn’t have covid. Some of this data couldn’t even be recaptured if the project was started from scratch again.
The QoVax team didn’t just collect the standard data. Participants provided information on environmental and social determinants of health and biospecimens of blood and saliva that have been used to derive genomic, transcriptomic and proteomic datasets that will shed light on how the novel vaccines impact the immune system.
The secure digitally integrated biobank has 120,000 biospecimens: serum, saliva and peripheral blood mononuclear cells, in three -80 degrees Celsius freezers and three liquid nitrogen dewars. The linked data repository has four million linked data points and more than 500 whole genomes.
In addition, the biobank has access to real-time electronic medical records. With 70 per cent of hospitals in Queensland storing medical records electronically, the study was intended to allow long-term digital surveillance of health outcomes related to Covid-19 vaccinations, and intersections between vaccine responses and Sars-CoV-2 infection.
Worse still, the biobank, which should be a resource for the world, is threatened with destruction. Its precious resources will be destroyed in twelve months to save a trivial sum of money. The whole project has cost only $20 million.
It’s obvious that most cases of Covid only started to occur after December 15th, 2021.
In an update, the Australian has asked what will happen to the data, and a QoVax spokesman says the data will be stored and archived. But then, six months ago, they said it would be a five year program playing “a fundamental role in future health and biomedical research”. So, how much is that worth?
I will believe nothing until all the anonymized data is publicly available. “Follow the science” they say, right up until they destroy it.
An expensive, razzle-dazzle climate referendum in Berlin aimed to bring forward “climate neutral” ambitions from 2045 to 2030, and no one even led a counter campaign, but it failed miserably:
Berlin. The referendum for more ambitious climate goals in Berlin has failed. The state election authority announced on Sunday evening that the required minimum number of yes votes had not been reached.
An alliance “climate restart” wanted to achieve a change in the state energy transition law with the vote. Specifically, Berlin should commit itself to becoming climate neutral by 2030 and not by 2045 as previously planned.
Of 2.4 million voters in Berlin, the Yes camp needed 608,000 voters (or 25%) to turn up and agree in order to win. While 860,000 people turned up to vote, only 442,000 said “yes” and 420,000 said “no”. Essentially 82% of the total voter population either didn’t want it, or couldn’t be bothered turning up.
He says “It’ll take a longtime for the radical climate activists to recover from this major setback”. Apparently the promotion was intense: “more than a million euros spent in a massive run-up campaign that included plastering the city with posters, concerts by famous performers, huge support and propaganda by the media and hefty donations coming from left wing activists from the east and west coasts of USA.”
There was no leader of the “No” case, yet the No votes were almost equal to the “Yes”.
Predictably, the inner city voted yes, and the “rest” voted No or didn’t turn up.
Gosselin points out that the rich upper class supporters were in agony, calling people names like “climate destroyers”. Their bafflement makes sense if we assume the believers are in a sheltered cult where their news services are controlled and none of them have even met a skeptic. They’ve not heard a single reason why using power plants to command storms is a form of neolithic sorcery with computer support.
For this, even major international donors were landed, who were supposed to positively influence the opinion of Berliners about the referendum. And in the end you fail miserably. Not only was the quorum missed by a wide margin, but the number of no votes was only just below the number of yes votes. Nobody had led a counter-campaign against the “climate restart”. That makes the defeat for Neubauer and Co. particularly embarrassing.
They, mostly members of the upper middle class, have declared war on the lower and lower middle classes with destructive climate measures. Outside of the Berlin political bubble and the other urban feel-good oases of Germany, the Neubauers and Schramms of this world never had much support. And now the bubble has finally burst. In Marzahn, Köpenick and Lichtenberg, the majority of voters voted against the referendum.
Meanwhile, the EU has abandoned plans to ban traditional cars by 2035
After Germany, Italy, and five other nations opposed the ban, the EU had to concede and also allow the sale of ICE (internal combustion engine) cars that run on carbon neutral fuels. There is no such requirements for sacred EV’s, of course. Electric vehicles will be fine to run on coal fired electricity.
Consumers will be allowed to buy internal-combustion autos as long as those cars can run on synthetic fuels, which are fuels made from captured carbon or renewable energy. Brussels still seems to hope that these cars will run only on such “e-fuels” by that deadline. But doubts about the technological feasibility of that pledge may explain why environmental groups were aghast at the weekend decision.
They always project their own flaws…
The usual suspects complain that this is another earth-destroying crony gift from Berlin to its auto industry—as if there’s no cronyism or corporate welfare involved in subsidizing electric vehicles that carry their own high environmental costs. The reality is that the big winners are consumers…
That’s a luxury consumers won’t enjoy in California, Oregon and Washington state, where bans on new cars with internal-combustion-engines remain on the books for 2035.
Australia’s role as the Global Renewables Crash Test Dummy continues.
Having installed more renewables per capita than anywhere on Earth, our PM declared that the decade of doing nothing was over. It was time to crash faster, or something.
So, the revamped Australian carbon tax called the Safeguard Mechanism does everything it isn’t supposed to. Gas and electricity prices will rise, climate targets will be harder to reach, the grid will get more unstable, and investors will run a mile now that new gas fields have to be “net zero” — meaning presumably they will have to buy carbon credits before they sell their first cubic meter of gas. The field of ineptitude even reaches overseas — with less gas for sale — our trading partners will just buy more coal.
Australia will spend even more billions to win a fashion contest at UN dinner parties and cool the world by 0.0 degrees C.
The Australian Electricity market melted down last winter, and stopped trading, because we didn’t have enough gas for the artificial “transition”. Even the hard-left AEMO — our climate activist electricity grid manager — says we need to unlock more gas fields. Instead, the government ignored the experts, and has just locked more gas fields away.
Australia was the world’s fifth largest gas producer and the world’s largest LNG exporter in 2021. All our competitors will be happy. Russia says “thank you” Anthony Albanese. (Australia’s PM)
The Labor government boasted that they did not give in to the Greens’ demands to ban new gas and coal projects. But they effectively banned many of them anyway with the rule that all new gas entrants will be required to have net-zero carbon emissions from the first day of operation.
Without cheap gas to keep the lights on, grids will have to keep coal plants running longer and slow the “roll out” of unreliable generators. And the new rule applies to export gas fields too. Without export income and royalties from new gas fields, soon the government will run out of cash to buy batteries, build 10,000km transmission lines to solar white elephants, and dig out drill rigs stuck in Snowy Hydro tunnels to nowhere.
It’s like we just put a tariff on our own exports?
Other nations put tariffs on imports to help their own industry. Australia adds costs on our exporters…
By blocking gas exports we may speed up the brain drain
The free market, such as it exists, will find another way. Presumably Australian oil and gas experts will be more likely to explore overseas, register their companies in the Caribbean and sell direct to Tokyo, Seoul and Beijing without all the carbon frappery.
“You will note that the demands that were placed on us of ruling out future projects are ones that we said we wouldn’t agree with, and we haven’t.” — [The Prime Minister said].
“We have had discussions … not just with people in this building, but people outside this building, whether it be the manufacturing sector or whether it be the gas industry,” the Prime Minister said.
While the PM spoke to people “outside the building” it didn’t include most of the gas industry who are not happy:
The peak oil and gas lobby group attacked the Labor-Greens deal…
The gas industry on Monday warned that the Prime Minister’s signature climate policy, forcing 215 big-emitters to slash emissions by nearly 5 per cent each year out to 2030, could drive up costs for households and businesses if new gas supply is restricted.
What looks, smells, and acts like fascism…
The “Safeguard Mechanism” is not about reducing CO2, — if that was the point, Labor and the Greens would build nuclear power plants. Instead, apparently, it’s about targeting particular industries, giving them an impossible task, and then making them dependent on government handouts or “special treatment”.
Labor struck a deal with the Greens to amend the safeguard mechanism and impose a “hard cap” in the scheme targeting coal and gas projects.
What happens if emissions rise?
In the event that real emissions do rise above the cap, the government will work with facilities to help them reduce emissions by either reducing their baseline rates or through more funding from Labor’s Powering the Regions fund, or amend the cap.
Amid concern that hard-to-abate industries will struggle under the scheme, Labor committed $1bn in funding for manufacturing and trade-exposed industries to decarbonise, which included an extra $400m for critical industries such as steel, cement and aluminium.
So the government will give a special loophole for friends and donors. Or taxpayers will pay for the gas industry to achieve the impossible, but the costs will be laundered through general government coffers — effectively making the gas industry partly “owned” by the government gatekeepers. What gas corporate will dare speak out against unfashionable policies lest the government take away their “support” to meet the impossible target.
And of course, consumers will pay through higher bills, and then the government will give them some of their own money back, or their childrens money and call it a rebate. Vote for us!
Now the gas industry says they want “science”?
To some extent the gas industry got what it deserved — for years they played along with the climate game, assuming the greens were after the coal and oil industries and the “cleaner” gas industry would benefit. It’s a bit late now to cry “science”: Woodside, after all, wouldn’t even let me speak at a Christmas event for geologists — presumably worried I might lead vulnerable 50 year old drilling experts astray with “misinformation”.
Australian Petroleum Production & Exploration Association chief executive Samantha McCulloch – representing gas giants including Santos, Shell and Woodside – said: “We can’t let politics and ideology get in the way of sensible, evidence-based climate and energy policy.”
Where’s she been for the last thirty years? The sensible policy in 1993 would have been to get the science right, not to throw half a billion years of geology on the rocks and let parasitic, unaudited foreign committees and 16 year old girls design your energy policy.
Increasing carbon emissions and actual pollution overseas
The Green-Labor plan will damage other nations carbon targets too as they will increasingly forced to buy coal and gas off nations with longer transport lines, and lower quality coal. Our PM might get some calls from the leaders of Japan, South Korea, China and India, the people who need our gas and coal. He should ask them if they would prefer to be a thousandth of a degree cooler sometime after they die, or would they rather get cheaper gas now?
I mean, should we export cheap gas to help fertilize the fields of Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, or take a punt on slowing their storms in 2100 instead?
Labor kept telling us we needed certainty, but as soon as we got it, energy shares fell:
We may have to fix the sleep deprivation to fix the cultural apathy
Listening to a sleep specialist I was struck that so much of our civilizational decline mirrors the effects sleep deprivation has on individuals. The sleep researcher even used the phrases “deviant” and “social loafing”. Tired people free-load on the team and are more likely to make false claims. It amplifies the worst of “The Welfare State”.
A sleep deprived nation is a fatter, less productive, less creative and less motivated country. Sex hormones are reduced, blood sugar is raised, immunity suffers, self control is reduced, and anxiety increases, as does every marker of suicidal ideation. Food choices become more hedonic. Self discipline suffers. Declines in sleep must surely also explain part of the testosterone drop that modern civilization seems to be suffering from. Blood tests show being tired is medically a form of premature aging — albeit, hopefully, temporary.
Professor Matthew Walker argues that sleep is more important than food or exercise and yet we are ignoring it. Every species on Earth needs to sleep. If it were not essential, evolution would have found a way to get rid of it, or reduce it, because it is a costly behaviour. Sleeping animals are more vulnerable, seemingly unproductive, they’re not raising babies, or bringing in food.
Walker doesn’t say it, but what’s good for a corporation is surely good for a nation
All the things that make companies more profitable and reduce their health care costs surely apply to whole countries? NASA research in the 1980s found that 20 – 60 minutes sleep improved productivity by 34%. It increased general alertness by 50%. The results were so stark NASA even transferred these findings to work conditions for people on the ground. “NASA naps” became a thing.
The five reasons a lack of sleep is worse for productivity:
When employees undersleep they choose less challenging problems, they check their emails but they don’t tackle the deep issues. Secondly, tired people produce fewer creative solutions. Thirdly, in teams, those who sleep less slack off, they freeload on other people. Fourthly, they are more deviant, they’re more likely to fudge data, to claim reimbursements they don’t deserve. Finally, the leaders who get less sleep are rated as less charismatic by employees, even though the employees don’t know how much sleep their CEO got that day.
Plus workers who sleep less take about 11 more sick days annually. And they use health care resources 80% more than well rested people. Their obesity and mental health is worse. (This is discussed at 42 – 48 minutes in the video.)
Doctors are only given about 90 minutes of sleep education in their entire degree yet it’s one third of their patients lives. Children aren’t taught much about sleep at school. No nation seems to have a public campaign to increase sleep, yet they have programs to boost exercise, reduce drinking, stop smoking, eat better and drive slower.
He’s an excellent speaker, with lots of research and no finger pointing lectures. We spend a lot of time here wondering why so many in society seem so apathetic, or careless or corrupt. Maybe a tired population is a compliant distracted one and maybe we should be doing something about that.
If I were an adversary of the West, I would do everything I could to encourage their sleep deprivation.
Night owls and larks are coded in our genes
Chronotypes, meaning whether you are a night owl or a lark — are built in genetically — probably because tribes were so much better off if they had someone awake at most hours of the clock, rather than all sleeping for the same 8 hours. Tribes with mixed sleeping patterns were less likely to be surprised in a bad way.
Divorce papers suggest that one third of divorcees mention sleep incompatibility. Walker suggests a sleep-divorce (sleeping separately) might be useful before people have a real divorce.
A quarter of couples sleep in different rooms. People sleeping apart from each other report getting better sleep, and probably have higher libidos due to that. But people sleeping together report feeling more satisfied about sleep.
I listened to the whole 2 hours as a podcast, which I almost never do. People interested in Alzheimers may want to listen from 1:30 onwards.
The timeline of topics are listed below (bolding mine).
The interview doesn’t discuss whether we are sleeping less than we did 100 years ago, but a search doesn’t turn up a lot either. One review of research papers suggests we’re not, but most of the data comes from sleep labs, not people at home in their daily lives.
Apparently there is very little data about how many hours of sleep people got in 1920 or 1950 and so on, and “hours in bed” is not the same as “hours asleep” which is hard to get without a sleep tracker. At least one Gallup poll suggests people thought they got more sleep in the 1940s.
Eighty percent of people in 1942 said they slept more than 7 hours a night. But now less than 60% percent at most say that. Four times as many people now say they are sleeping six hours or less.
Gallup poll numbers suggest people are sleeping less. Vox.
Germany is at the leading edge of the climate wars and the Greens are starting to lose both in polling and policy. Despite the claims that the energy crisis will push everyone into renewables, one year later, the dominant energy source for German electricity is coal, up by eight percentage points to 33% of generation.
While the world is supposedly caught in a renewable rush to 2030, the German government just announced it will build 25 gigawatts of gas powered plants by 2030 so they are there when “when [the] wind and sun do not provide enough”. And this week Germany is doing a backflip on their recent EU deal to ban sales of petrol and gas powered cars by 2035. It appears now they will ban the ban, rather than the car, and Germany has the power in the EU to do that. Though it’s not freedom to buy any car you want, but quixotic car loophole.
It’s still a mess of awful, subsidized craziness in a futile quest to control the clouds — but there are signs it is getting less crazy.
By Hans von der Burchard, Gabriel Rinaldi and Peter Wilke, Politico
A growing backlash over climate-friendly policies is now hitting the German Greens, putting wobbles into the country’s three-party ruling coalition.
Not only has Germany been causing a ruckus at the EU level in recent weeks by mounting a last-minute blockade to a proposed ban on combustion engines, but the country is also facing a domestic political fight over phasing out gas and oil heating systems, as well as pushing forward the coal exit.
The political coalition is tearing itself apart:
All those disputes are linked to fundamental disagreements between the Greens and their two coalition partners, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Free Democratic Party (FDP), over how the EU’s climate-protection targets should be implemented and what consequences and costs this will have for industry and citizens.
The conflict is not only affecting the Greens’ popularity — is also seems to be threatening a wider crisis for the coalition. And that crisis seems to be escalating.
The Greens have every reason to be nervous, as their climate policies are becoming a hard sell in Germany.
What were they thinking?
Habeck’s heat pump requirement alone could mean additional costs of up to €13,000 per installation for households,…
Not surprisingly, the Greens have lost a quarter of their support in the last ten months:
Of great concern for the Green Party is how they have been falling in polls for months, from 23 percent last summer to currently 17 percent. Meanwhile, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has been steadily rising and is now close on the Greens’ tail, at 15 percent. One poll on Sunday even put the AfD ahead of the Greens.
The rush to build 25GW of government subsidized gas plants as back ups
“We will build the power plants we need for the times when wind and sun do not provide enough electricity out to tender,” said the minister at the presentation of a report on the progress of the country’s transition to climate neutrality. In recent years, Germany has used auctions to incentivise and control the expansion of wind and solar energy. Companies compete in these tenders to receive financial support for renewable electricity.
The big backdown to save ICE cars has played out in just three months. One poll suggested 67% of Germans didn’t want to ban traditional cars, and hundreds of thousands of German jobs were at stake in making car parts.
After nearly two years of painstaking talks, negotiators from the European Parliament and EU member states finally struck a deal last November on a new vehicle emissions law that would ban the sale of internal combustion engine (ICE) cars in the EU from 2035. Even though Germany, with its powerful automotive industry, has historically opposed ambitious car CO2 standards, in the end it supported the deal. The agreement was ready to be signed into law – but then German Finance Minister Christian Lindner stepped in.
Thanks to Georgia Meloni winning in Italy, apparently she realized that Italy didn’t want the ban either in January. Italy alone didn’t have enough voting power to stop it, but the German Finance Minister did.
Germany wants the law changed to allow for the sale of ICE cars after 2035 if they run on hydrogen-derived e-fuels, which are produced by electrolysis with added carbon.
Climate campaigners are aghast. The NGO Transport & Environment (T&E) is warning that this is a ruse to extend sales of fossil-fuel-powered cars,…’
The big problem is that this loophole would allow people to buy new ICE cars and then fill them up with old fossils, because no one can check what consumers do, and we all know the e-fuels will be hideously expensive, so only the uber wealthy will be filling up the car with saintly fuel.
It’s back to the drawing board for the EU which has to come up with some compromise.
The last minute retraction is a great embarrassment to the Greens, and worse they fear Germany won’t meet the 50% target cuts in emissions by 2030. But then, it failed to meet the last target in 2020 and who cared?
Wade Allison has done a short but devastating analysis for the GWPF. The take home message is that the energy contained in the wind is diabolically more erratic than most people realize. It’s just basic physics and almost no one in politics seems able to comprehend just how impossible these numbers are. If only they would “follow the science” eh?
It’s just physics. The power of the blowing wind increases by the speed of those particles cubed which produces a twin engineering nightmare. If the wind doubles in speed, the energy goes up by a factor of 8 (or 2 × 2 × 2, and we need to spell it out), and if it slows by half, the energy drops eight-fold. It’s bad both ways. At high speeds, the mechanical engineers have to turn off the turbines to protect them, and at low speeds the electrical engineers have to ramp up power stations that may not exist, or pray to Gaia for batteries that will never exist.
Allison has a graph showing the total output of all the wind turbines in the UK and Europe for a whole year compared to the total electricity needed. As he says “This is not the headline plot that the industry shows to its investors, the media and politicians, but it comes from their own published annual WindEurope Report”.
Just look at this graph from 2021 where wind power is achieving so little in some of the richest nations on Earth and say the words The UN Secretary General wants us all to say: “NetZero by 2040”.
GWPF | Click to Enlarge.
The installed theoretical generating capacity above was 236 gigawatts (shown in the brown dashed line), but the highest daily output in the year was 103 gigawatts which means the other 364 days were worse.
Then consider the entire output of the offshore windfarms of the UK. The wind is more reliable over the ocean, but it’s still an electrical disaster.
In March 2021 there was an eight day period when the wind speed presumably halved and the output plummeted. For eight whole days 8.8GW of wind power was not available (green box). The total energy lost was around 1,600 gigawatt-hours, which is also 1,000 times more than what the biggest battery on Earth could provide.
Figure 2 shows the wind power generated by all UK offshore windfarms in March 2022, as presented online on the Crown Estate website.4 Over some periods, it rose to the nominal installed capacity of 10GW. However, for 8 days at the end of the month it averaged no more than 1.2GW.| Click to Enlarge.
Allison explains the devastating maths of filling in those gaps:
That much energy, 1600GWh, is 1000 times the capacity of the world’s largest grid storage battery (1.6GWh at Moss Landings, California). Batteries 20 million times larger are never going to be available and storage batteries will never make good the failure of offshore wind farms, even for a week. And the wind can drop for longer periods than that.
For those who want the physics, he sums it up so well:
The energy of the wind is that of the moving air, and, as every student knows, such energy is ½Mv2, where M is the mass of air and v the speed. The mass of air reaching each square metre of the area swept by the turbine blade in a second is M=ρv, where ρ is the density of air: about 1.2kg per cubic metre. So, the maximum power that the turbine can deliver is ½ρv3 watts per square metre.
If the wind speed is 10 metres per second (about 20 mph) the power is 600 watts per square metre at 100% efficiency.2 That means to deliver the same power as Hinkley Point C (3200 million watts) by wind would require 5.5 million square metres of turbine swept area – that should be quite unacceptable to those who care about birds and to other environmentalists.
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A growing backlash over climate-friendly policies is now hitting the German Greens, putting wobbles into the country’s three-party ruling coalition.
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