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Save the world with disposable EV’s?After children in the Congo have dug out the cobalt for the blessed batteries we’d hope the cars would be sustained as long as possible. Alas, apparently there is just one more design flaw on top of the low mileage, delays, expense, spontaneous fires, and the need for a whole new grid. After a minor accident, no one quite knows how to assess the safety of the battery, so it’s easier to throw it away. That means more waste in the landfill and higher insurance premiums to cover the cost of writing off near new cars. Where are the Greens? If child slaves and emissions matter, isn’t it better to reduce consumption by saving your old car from landfill, especially if your new one might end up there as well? Reduce, reuse, recycle… Meanwhile the UN is demanding Net Zero targets, which are not even theoretically possible, be achieved ten years sooner. Half the technologies we need are not even invented yet. Infinity-minus-ten is a number that won’t get you to work, but it powers whole careers at the UN. h/t David and Notalotofpeopleknowthat Scratched EV battery? Your insurer may have to junk the whole carBy Nick Carey, Paul Lienert and Sarah Mcfarlane, Reuters LONDON/DETROIT, March 20- For many electric vehicles, there is no way to repair or assess even slightly damaged battery packs after accidents, forcing insurance companies to write off cars with few miles – leading to higher premiums and undercutting gains from going electric. And now those battery packs are piling up in scrapyards in some countries, a previously unreported and expensive gap in what was supposed to be a “circular economy.” “We’re buying electric cars for sustainability reasons,” said Matthew Avery, research director at automotive risk intelligence company Thatcham Research. “But an EV isn’t very sustainable if you’ve got to throw the battery away after a minor collision.” Amazing what uncertainty can do to the value of a good car: Allianz [an insurer] has seen scratched battery packs where the cells inside are likely undamaged, but without diagnostic data it has to write off those vehicles. … Keep reading → When the formerly esteemed journal Nature endorsed one side of politics in 2020, apparently it didn’t change any votes, but about a third of Trump supporters decided the science it published was politically biased too. The loss of trust in Nature was so strong that it tarnished the whole field of US science. (Zhang et al) There goes the public faith in peer reviewed “Experts”. “Trump supporters who had been shown the summary of Nature’s editorial were less likely to trust Nature’s information on COVID-19, and also reported more mistrust in US scientists.” Being actively political meant 154 years of scientific reputation disappeared just like that. In the graph below presumably* naive Trump supporters ranked Nature as mostly “informed” (marked in orange, of course). The Trump supporters who saw the political endorsement (marked in red) suddenly, apparently saw Nature as more of a partisan rag than an impartial reporter of scientific truth.  @Nature says: In 2020, Nature endorsed Joe Biden in the US presidential election. A survey finds that viewing the endorsement did not change people’s views of the candidates, but caused some to lose confidence in Nature and in US scientists generally.* Naturally, although the data was smashingly strong, Nature completely missed the signal. The editors tell us it’s the voters fault: This experiment builds on the literature on trust in research among people with different political allegiances. This includes the idea of confirmation bias, whereby people on different sides tend to favour evidence that supports the views they already have, while avoiding evidence that does not, and the backfire (or rebound) effect, whereby evidence that challenges a view can have the opposite effect to that intended. So Nature took a hit for the team. The editors say they had to do it, and would do it again.Jo Nova says, please do, your science journal is a travesty of bias and unreason, and the more voters that realize that, the better. Endorse Away! Nature also endorses namecalling in science and published “research papers” on how to convince “climate change deniers” to believe (Bain et al). I offered to help them reach thousands of deniers, if they could only define the term scientifically and name the evidence that deniers deny. They were unable to. I managed to get an apology issued then. But, true to their religion, Nature was the journal that published a blacklist of 386 scientists and commentators who got too much media on climate change and shouldn’t be listened to (Petersen et al). It was an honor for me to be be listed at 99. (With the other half, David Evans very pleased to be ranked at 57). To mark the occasion I designed a cover page just for them for free:  … by Jo Nova, 2020. Since 60% of US voters already think climate change is a religion, all Nature has to do is keep pumping out these kind of excuses (below) and no one will believe anything it says. It’s acting for all the world like a Union of Science Bureaucrats that think they know what’s best for the health and wellbeing of US citizens, even if the voters aren’t smart enough. Nature, being paid mostly through government funded subscriptions knows Big Government is always the answer. Excuses from the Nature Editorial Staff: Should Nature endorse political candidates? Yes — when the occasion demands it Political endorsements might not always win hearts and minds, but when candidates threaten a retreat from reason, science must speak out. …the study does question whether research journals should endorse electoral candidates if one implication is falling trust in science. This is an important question, and there are, sadly, no easy answers. The study shows the potential costs of making an endorsement. But inaction has costs, too. Considering the record of Trump’s four years in office, this journal judged that silence was not an option. Nature’s October 2020 editorial was an appeal to readers in the United States to consider the dangers that four more years of Trump would pose — not only for science, but also for the health and well-being of US society and the wider world. Trump had laid waste to science and scientific institutions at home on issues from COVID-19 to climate change, and had gutted environmental regulations even in the face of increasing climate risk. At a time when the world needed to unite to deal with these and other global threats, he took an axe to international relationships, pulling the United States out of the 2015 Paris climate agreement and the United Nations science agency, UNESCO. He moved to defund the World Health Organization, and he walked away from a deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) that the United States had carefully negotiated with Europe, China and Russia to prevent Iran’s government from enriching weapons-grade uranium. It is hard not to think of a worst-case scenario for public health, climate change or nuclear security had Trump remained in office today. How dare any political leader defund globalist committees that spread viruses and rave about President Xi?! ____________ * The graph Nature tweeted doesn’t say what the survey answers relate to, and the paper is behind their own paywall, but we presume this graph refers to a question about their own reputation, not how Trump supporters scored on a science-quiz. REFERENCESFloyd Jiuyun Zhang, Political endorsement by Nature and trust in scientific expertise during COVID-19, Nature Human Behaviour (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-023-01537-5. www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01537-5 Alexander Michael Petersen, Emmanuel M. Vincent & Anthony LeRoy Westerling (2019) Discrepancy in scientific authority and media visibility of climate change scientists and contrarians, Nature Communications, volume 10, Article number: 3502 (2019) | Copy of the deleted supplementary list here. Today we are trying to fix the comment box toolbar to allow commenters to add bold etc to comments. So the layout may change and randomly. Thanks for your patience and feedback.  Art by Syaifulptak Now that half the US knows that climate science has become a religion, let’s all thank the IPCC for working hard to convince the other half. Here comes Fire, Brimstone, and Ticking Bombs again:Like all successful bureaucracies, The IPCC is here to pretend to save you from problems it invented. The taxpayer funded doomsday cult wants you to think of them as a brave bomb disposal team, putting their lives on the line to do anything humanly possibly to make storms go away, except for using a tried and tested technology with a 50 year record of zero emissions. Nobody say n.u.c…. IPCC climate scientists issue ‘a survival guide for humanity’, warning window closing to reduce emissions“The climate time-bomb is ticking,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres, at a meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which this week released its final “synthesis report”, marking six years of work by about 700 scientists. “Today’s IPCC report is a how-to guide to defuse the climate time-bomb,” he said. “It is a survival guide for humanity.” Senior marketer of renewable energy, Sarah Prophet Kirkpatrick says we are all doomed unless we buy more Chinese solar panels, even though China is making most of them with coal: University of New South Wales Associate Professor Sarah Perkins Kirkpatrick said it had to be done before 2030. “Bottom line, we need to stop burning fossil fuels — 80 per cent of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions actually comes from burning fossil fuels [such as] coal, oil and gas,” she said. Quick, buy my panels, she says, they come with nice weather eighty years from now after you’re dead, but only if you sign here by Friday. The Perfect Doom Sale:The panic is now perfectly tuned like a Boxing Day sale — stocks are limited but there is hope if you act fast. Every warning is the last chance, every catastrophe is ten years away, and every final clearance sale has a discount for early responders… “This is the final warning to limit the climate warming,” Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick said. “In the next 10 years, we’ll overshoot that 1.5-degree threshold, but then we can bring it back down again — with heavy climate mitigation, heavy investment in renewable energy and also carbon capture and storage,” she said. Macquarie University’s Professor Lesley Hughes … “One of the things this IPCC report emphasises is that the window of opportunity for a safer climate in the second half of this century is closing rapidly, but it’s not yet closed,” she said. 16 years ago we had only ten years to save the world: Pagan witchery and voodoo meets catholic guiltThe ABC include no evidence at all in this round of perfect panic — just the words “drought” and “flood” and gospel of the 700 scientists of the high realm of the IPCC is enough. The new IPCC report, is just like all past reports: it depends on climate models that ignore solar magnetic effects, solar wind, cosmic rays, and changes in the solar spectrum to pretend that CO2 causes all the changes they can’t otherwise explain. It’s argument from authority that depends on argument from ignorance with circular reasoning and it’s based on a simulated planet that has a tropospheric hot spot which 28 million weather balloons can’t find here on Earth, but nevermind. It’s only data! But a foreign unaudited committee says “it’s unequivocal” and it will cost us trillions, and the ABC can’t see any problem with that. Just lay on the guilt trip — what kind of evil person wants to send their own children to hell, I tell you… Macquarie University’s Professor Lesley Hughes said what happens in the next seven years would be vital if we’re to leave a world that’s habitable for our children and grandchildren.  Think of the children! | Image by Garten-gg. Gone are the days when the media would even try to communicate science. Now it’s like reality TV. Tug my heartstrings — one poor man in Torres Strait is being terrorized by witchdoctors in lab coats. The ABC is exploiting his macabre fear of the bones of his parents being washed out to sea. This is climate science reporting in 2023: On Australia’s Torres Strait islands, Warraber man Daniel Billy has been taking photos of what has already been lost as the sea creeps up on his homeland. “Just to see a lot of the land mass taken out from the islands, it’s really sad,” he said. “It’s destroying places. “It’s very sad and it’s scary at the same time, as it’s slowly coming up to the community.” Mr Billy is worried about the cemetery, metres from the shoreline, where his parents have been laid to rest. “I don’t want to pick up my parents’ remains from the reef,” he said. “I don’t want my children, or their children, my nieces and nephews to pick up my remains.” Someone needs to show Mr Billy the study of 700 Pacific islands which are almost all growing (thanks to climate change). As long as he buried his parents on an inhabited island, they’ll be fine. The only islands disappearing are sand drifts with a population of zero that are just a hundredth of a square kilometer in size. It’s war, I tell you, War! sayth NonScientist magazine:The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a global group of climate scientists, has released its latest report today. It yet again warns that without immediate and massive emissions reductions, limiting global warming to 1.5°C will be beyond reach. “If we don’t act with the necessary speed, we will shoot past 1.5 degrees and possibly even 2 degrees,” says Peter Thorne at Maynooth University in Ireland, one of the authors of the report. “Really it’s a call to arms.” Hyperbole knows no bounds. REFERENCE Synthesis Report, Sixth Assessment Report, IPCC, Working Group I, II and III.  A sign in Rockhampton. Where do they mention the fine though? | Photo by RegionalQueenslander Block a sacred weather-changing EV from a charging point and you may have to sell your carFeel the fear. The whole EV fantasy is coming undone as people miss planes, get stuck in cars, or ruin holidays because their battery is flat. There aren’t enough chargers, and charging is slow. In abject desperation, some Australian states are slapping monster fines on to make inadequate infrastructure stretch further, or because they realize how vulnerable they are to a protest campaign. Either that or they are actually trying to finance the transition to NetZero through parking fines. Call it a secret subsidy… Victorians may be hit with a $370 fine if they drive a normal car and accidentally park it in an EV charging spot, thus depriving a sacred EV user of the chance to top up. You might think that’s wildly out of proportion — it’s only $100 less than if you recklessly run a red light. But it’s nothing compared to what NSW, Queensland and the ACT are doing. Drivers in these states who make the same mistake could end up paying, respectively, a blistering $2,200, $2,875, or $3,200. It’s just climate maths at work isn’t it? Take any normal number and extrapolate to bankruptcy. How long would I have to spend in jail for non-payment, I wonder? Drivers face steep fines for parking non-electric vehicles in electric vehicle charging stationsby Someone at The ABC So it’s written in the road rules but “little known”? The fines, some of them added to road rules late last year, range from $3,200 in the Australian Capital Territory to $369 in Victoria. Drivers could be fined as much as $3,200 for parking in spaces for electric vehicles as part of little-known penalties introduced in four states and territories. Remember when they said EV charging would be fast and convenient, and it would be easy to build a network of chargers? Then they found out the lack of EV charging spaces is threatening their whole fantasy transition… But experts say the heavy penalties are important to encourage electric vehicle adoption and prevent drivers doing the equivalent of parking “in front of a fuel bowser”. Yes, because lots of people accidentally park in front of fuel bowsers and go shopping, right? Lots, as in — absolutely no one, ever. Maybe because fuel bowsers aren’t sometimes placed in what used to be normal parking spots.  | Photo by Mariordo of a charging station in Costa Rica. You might be ICE-ing a climate warrior…Apply a malignant acronym, and suddenly these car drivers who park in a spot with a charger sound like terrorists or a drug gang: The fines apply to drivers who leave petrol or diesel vehicles in spaces designated for electric cars, in an act known as “ICE-ing” for its use of internal combustion engine cars. So EV drivers need another subsidy then? NSW Metropolitan Roads Minister Natalie Ward said the government added the offence to “support the transition to electric vehicles on our roads”. “To make sure we keep the community moving forward, we want electric vehicle drivers to have access to charging stations when they are on offer,” she said.
It’s the sense of entitlement that shines like leaders of a weather cult: Australian Electric Vehicle Association national president Chris Jones said while the penalties for blocking infrastructure were high, they were necessary to educate members of the public who may not have considered the repercussions. People who aren’t driving EV’s must be really really stupid, yeah? In Chris Jones’ vision, the sort of fine that stops dumb punters running a red light needs to be five or ten times bigger so they understand how they are threatening the planet, or at least, threatening his plans to sell more EV’s. Imagine if EV cars were a personal luxury, doing almost nothing of benefit to society, and everyone was expected to learn new rules, avoid their parking spaces, and practically go to jail if they made a mistake? Electric Vehicle Council policy head Jake Whitehead said the fines sent “a very clear and strong signal”. But he said greater education may be needed for petrol car drivers who encountered chargers added to existing car parks, as well as new electric vehicle drivers who did not recognise the need to vacate charging locations for other drivers as soon as practical. At least they recognise that some EV drivers also haven’t read and memorized Labor’s Powering Australia Plan either. Nor, after being sold sunshine on stilts, have they figured out that the rushed EV-transition is doomed to run up hard against the brutal reality of charging times and access to kilowatts. Imagine how inconvenient it would be as an electric car owner to have to return to your car from shopping or a business lunch because the car’s finished charging and you need to park it somewhere else or face a $3,000 fine? Don’t worry, there will be a phone App for that soon, so your car can call you. The cult confuses “want” with “need”:
“Every charger available is critical and valuable to the fleet of 80,000-odd EVs in the country, and we need to make sure they’re not blocked, either intentionally or accidentally,” he said. “There are genuine mistakes made by some people, but we need to have a broad recognition across society that these chargers need to be available to EVs so we can have more on our roads.” Every charger is critical to keep their fantasy alive… March 19th, 2023 | Tags: Electric Cars (EV) | Category: Australia, Global Warming, Grids |  Print This Post | |
Australia on the Frontline Why China’s Dream is the New Threat to World Order 2.30 – 4.30pm, Sunday 19th March Royal Perth Yacht Club, Crawley, Perth, Western Australia. Steven W. Mosher is the President of the Virginia based Population Research Institute (1995 to present) and the author of a number of books on China, including Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream is the New Threat to World Order, recently published in a new Australian edition by Wilkinson Press. His other books include Hegemon: China’s Plan to Dominate Asia and the World and China Misperceived: American Illusions and Chinese Reality. Keep reading → March 18th, 2023 | Tags: China, Social Events for Skeptics | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | By Jo NovaThe TGA in Australia* have handed Clive Palmer a dynamite story to use against them and Big PharmaPalmer is in fine form below — shining a light on the pathological success of health regulation. Early use of HCQ could have saved thousands of people, but as readers here know, if there was a cheap useful treatment for Covid available, other expensive, barely tested, risky new drugs would not be given an Emergency Use Authorization, thus threatening to kill a $200 billion dollar cash cow. Getting rid of safe competing drugs is just a part of the business plan for Big Pharma and they would be letting down their shareholders if they didn’t lobby like hell to make it happen.
HCQ reduced death rates by 72% in 15 early treatment trialsThe short video above could use one more slide so people know there are at least 466 studies of hydroxychloroquine with Covid-19 involving as many as a half a million people. Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine was adopted for early treatment in all or part of 41 countries. Claims were made that the doses of HCQ required in lab studies were too high to be useful in vivo, but Ruiz et al found that the drug concentrated 38 fold higher in lung tissue than in blood plasma.  Click to enlarge. | See all the papers listed at: https://c19hcq.org/ The C19 team add the caveats: Late treatment and high dosages may be harmful, while early treatment consistently shows positive results. Negative evaluations typically ignore treatment delay. Some In Vitro evidence suggested therapeutic levels would not be reached, however that was incorrect [Ruiz]. Recent: Spivak Mathew Llanos-Cuentas Delgado Alshamrani Nasri Viglione. If the short video doesn’t show above watch from 2.30 here, and also hear how he was treated with ivermectin.
*The TGA — Therapeautic Goods Association, is equivalent to the FDA in the US. March 18th, 2023 | Tags: Antiviral, Coronavirus, Corruption (Medicine), Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), Palmer (Clive) | Category: Health | Print This Post | |  … The expert science bubble has popped. New polling shows 60% of US voters agree that that Climate Change is a religion and has nothing to do with the climate. Even more shocking is that 47% of US voters strongly agree. It’s an Exocet for the priests of Climate Science. Their power depends on people believing “they are The Science”, and The Science is sacred. But word is spreading that the experts are more like prophets-of-gloom than disciplined researchers. And once the idea is seeded, it won’t go away. People who didn’t notice before will suddenly see the failed predictions, the ice age that never came, the droughts that become floods and the snow that children wouldn’t know. Humans are excellent at pattern matching, just give them the right pattern to look for… This is an idea that has barely been mentioned in mainstream TV yet half the nation are already 100% sold. Ten days ago Vivek Ramaswamy talked about the climate religion on Fox News, and so Rasmussen asked the punters. And thus the emperor has no clothes — fully six out of ten agree that “Climate is a religion”. Vivek Ramaswamy on FoxNews:…the climate religion actually has nothing to do with the climate. It is all about power, control, dominion and apologizing for America’s own success. And the reason why is that this religion looks the other way when PetroChina picks up the projects that American companies drop. Last time I checked, it was global climate change, and also it’s hostile to nuclear energy, which is truly bizarre because that’s the best form of carbon-free energy production known to mankind. This Rasmussen question is Kryptonite There is no pussy footing around the question, no ambiguity, no caveats: “Do you agree or disagree with this statement: Climate change has become a religion that actually has nothing to do with the climate and is really about power and control?” AGREE – by Party
Even nearly half the democrats agree. Does anything show better that democracy is not about voters anymore? There are no vote winners for pushing the climate faith, instead there is a vast untapped sea of voters who think climate change is a money making scam. They want someone to vote for, not a politician who says I’ll be less of liar than the other guy. Strong questions bring out strong answersIn a world of wishy-washy surveys, just saying the flagrant bleeding truth in full technicolor will bring out a stronger response than tip-toeing around the point. Sometimes just asking the question provokes the answer. How many people heard the question and went — oh yeah, now that you mention it… The last dynamite poll in the world of surveys was in late 2015 when Donald Trump stepped out and said “climate change is a total hoax”, and when asked, 31% of US voters agreed, which was astonishing in an era when three quarters of Americans would also say “climate change is happening” and “was a threat” to the US. Now, half the voters are so cynical they believe the media is actively trying to deceive them. And the meme is even more dangerous because it’s closer to the truth — “climate is a religion” not only includes the hoax, but also explains the blind passion of the teenage throwers of soup and glue. They are not hoaxers, they’re just deluded kids. Live by the smear, die by the smearFor 30 years the Climate Crisis Team have talked about the dark influence of fossil fuel money, like it was Gore’s Law of Physics, and it worked to inure sleepy people against skeptical points. But now the tables are turning and the insidious suggestion that “it’s all about power, control and money” will work every bit as well against those who never once spoke up to stop the namecalling and demonization of other scientists. They could have told the world there are no sacred cows in science, instead they created the cows — “there is a consensus!”. They could have said that science is not a religion because there is no bible, but instead they held up the IPCC reports like The Word of Mother Nature. Instead of debating skeptics, with their overwhelming evidence, they called them deniers and fled from the room. 97% of climate scientists acted like science was a religion. Karma comes back to get them. The creed of the global warming craze, –Ruairi UPDATE: The Rasmussen survey was by phone and online and involved 950 likely US voters on March 6-8, 2023. h/t ColA via Gateway Pundit Last winter’s debacle in Australia could be repeated this year, but at even higher prices. Despite adding more cheap renewables per person than nearly anywhere on Earth, for some inexplicable reason our retail electricity prices rose 18% last year and are set to rise another 20 to 30% this winter. Last year was a bloodbath on the wholesale electricity market. Those costs have fed through to retail.
The Energy Minister Chris Bowen blames the Russians, and says we need more renewables. Shock power bill jump to hammer householdsPerry Williams, The Australian Power bills for households will soar by hundreds of dollars a year from July 1, adding to soaring cost of living pressures as the regulator blamed supply challenges and volatility for the steep cost hit. Customers in Victoria face a 30 per cent jump on ‘safety net’ prices while households in NSW, South Australia and southeast Queensland will see bills soar by up to 24 per cent. The Victorian ruling by the Essential Services Commission estimates power costs will jump by $426 for residential customers to $1829 a year while small businesses face bills surging by a third or $1738 a year to $7358. Energy Minister Chris Bowen suggested measures would be introduced in the May budget to help households cope with the coming bill shock. … “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has seen energy costs skyrocket globally, and Australia has not been immune,” he added. For 40 years electricity prices went down, but something changed in the last ten years. What could it be?  Source: OWID Australia “invested” $4 billion dollars in renewables just last quarter. Despite waves of inflation in the 1970s Australian electricity kept getting cheaper. Engineers were improving the system faster than the costs went up. Then the government joined all the separate state grids into one big bureaucracy and decided to change the weather as well, and we can see how that worked out.
 Electricity prices in Australia were falling for 40 years, then we added renewables… The bigger the bureaucracy is, the more it can screw things up. Keep reading → March 16th, 2023 | Tags: Electricity Grids | Category: Australia, Big-Government, Cost, Electricity, Global Warming | Print This Post | | Strange things are happening in the calm before the storm…This week the financial world balances on the edge, and all the old rules have broken. Joe Biden is signing off on an oil drilling program on US soil which he said he’d never do — and it’s one of the largest ever — like building “66 new coal plants”. At the same time the Bank of England is apparently cutting the sacred climate change spending, and has leaked this news to the world. As someone said on Twitter, “last week was a different country”. After all these years, climate change has fallen out of the Weekly Hit Parade of Panic.  Bank of England Headquarters, London, photo by Елена Пехчевска Bank of England Will Cut Spending for its Work on Climate ChangeBy Ellen Milligan and Philip Aldrick, Bloomberg Climate programs will slip lower on the central bank’s agenda so officials can focus more on the core operations such as financial stability… As Dr Benny Peiser of NetZeroWatch says “the risk of costly climate and Net Zero policies have become a bigger threat to the UK’s economy and financial stability than climate change.” It’s not all good news though. One of the Bank’s new core operations is “a digital currency” — which is the ultimate social credit score and even more invasive than a carbon tax. Either climate change is being crushed under the weight of financial reality, or else it’s become irrelevant as newer, more potent scares appear. Sorry to be a cynic. The only thing that has materially changed about reality in the last week are bad loans rattling the stockmarkets. A major turning point?The Bank of England has been pumping climate fear for years, and like the chief Octopus — it has been organizing other central bankers: The move marks a sharp break from the emphasis Mark Carney put on climate during his term as BOE governor from 2013 to 2020. Rishi Sunak, during his term as chancellor of the exchequer in 2021, updated the BOE’s monetary policy remit to “reflect the government’s economic strategy for growth that is environmentally sustainable and consistent with the transition to a net zero economy.” BOE officials led by Carney have been among the most vocal in speaking about the climate-related risks facing the global economy in the coming decades. They helped build the Network for Greening the Financial System, a group of almost all the world’s top central banks coordinating best practice on oversight. The Bloomberg reporters also mention that Michael Bloomberg, the owner, “backed Mark Carneys work on the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures”. It’s all so cosy isn’t it? Presumably Bloomberg himself could easily confirm this story or bury it if he wanted too. Something has changed… Giant, huge, US carbon monster drilling oil project: all OK now?Black is White, Up is down. And after Biden did everything to avoid approving oil drilling on US soil, even being nice to Venezuela, he’s just done exactly that: Joe Biden signs off oil drilling equivalent to 66 coal plants in ‘climate catastrophe’by David Millward, TheTelegraph His administration gave the green light to the Willow Project on Alaska’s North Slope, effectively reversing a policy pledge he made during the 2020 presidential election. Having entered office vowing “no more drilling on federal lands, period”, Mr Biden’s hand has been forced by soaring energy prices, which have fuelled inflation. The Willow Project, which has been led by oil behemoth ConocoPhillips, could produce more than 600 million barrels of crude oil over the next 30 years. Does carbon dioxide matter, or doesn’t it? Obviously, this week is a convenient week for announcing major backflips and hoping people won’t notice.
By Jo Nova SVB or Silicon Valley Bank is the US’s 17th biggest bank, or it was until last week when it became the US’s second biggest bank failure instead. Interest rate rises are supposed to squeeze out the dumbest investments, so it is fitting that one of the first casualties of this boom-bust cycle is a green banker, mostly doomed by loaning half their cash to the same bankrupt Big-Government that created the green improbable fantasy industries which SVB was largely serving. SVB was a “Green” Banker. We know this, not because newspapers are saying that now, but because of the emergency flares released on behalf of the victims. The New York Times tells us that the collapse of SVB is going to hit green tech hard because SVB clients included 1,550 companies dedicated to “fighting climate change”. If only SVB had served coal miners or gas frackers instead they might still be in business? The deposits they needed would have kept on coming as the profits flowed in. David Gelles, New York Times, naturally, misses the whole point:
Silicon Valley Bank Collapse Threatens Climate Start-UpsIn reality, climate start-ups threaten the bank, and climate finish-ups threaten the country. The bank had relationships with more than 1,500 companies working on technologies aimed at curbing global warming. The bank, the largest to fail since 2008, worked with more than 1,550 technology firms that are creating solar, hydrogen and battery storage projects. According to its website, the bank issued them billions in loans. Groupthink strikes again. The majority of the solar or climate market just banked with the herd: “Silicon Valley Bank was in many ways a climate bank,” said Kiran Bhatraju, chief executive of Arcadia, the largest community solar manager in the country. “When you have the majority of the market banking through one institution, there’s going to be a lot of collateral damage.”  … It was a Ponzi schemeDuring the pandemic, fluffy money, made from nothing by Big Government to “save the economy” was put into stupid businesses to “save the planet”. The businesses put their cash into Silicon Valley Bank, which got so much cash, it couldn’t do anything with half of it — except give it back to Big-Government in the form of a loan called a Treasury Bond — thus completing one full Cycle of Stupid. Money printed from nothing, achieved nothing, and went back home. On the way a whole lot of people got paid to pretend to change the weather. But money printing causes inflation, and in inflationary times interest rates have to rise. So it follows that when easy money flows into your wallet, easy solutions, like fixed loans with low interest are the stupidest possible solution. SVB was promising to guard Green-tech money, but it was locking it away in long term loans, and essentially relying on a regular flow of deposits coming to keep earlier depositors happy: Silicon Valley Bank Collapse Is A Blow To Clean Energy Techby Mark Le Dain, Forbes …this will be a massive blow to the cleantech ecosystem. After COVID the assets of SVB rapidly grew. New spending dynamics meant money was flowing into tech vs the traditional economy, and those companies were also able to raise funds as well. This money had to be parked somewhere and a lot of it ended up at SVB. It’s rare for a bank to have a concentrated deposit base grow so quickly but, in any regard, they needed to invest it. To invest the deposits the bank targeted long-dated treasuries, with slightly higher interest rates but less liquidity. Even if this was a bad decision banks usually find a way out of it because deposits keep coming, allowing the bank to layer on other types of investments. Many banks will also typically hedge their interest rate exposure. There doesn’t appear to have been hedging though and deposit growth slowed as interest rates rose. The companies were no longer raising funds and instead using their existing funds to run the business. These dynamics meant deposits were now declining at the same time the investments, these long-dated treasuries, were losing value. As the bank announced it had to sell some of these instruments at a loss, and raise capital, people were worried and it resulted in an old-fashioned bank run. There is no free lunch. By definition, if someone is making windmills to change the weather, and people are still throwing money at them, then money is “easy” and inflation is coming. Ultimately, because the government was already broke, and money printing causes inflation, it meant interest rates would have to rise… As sure as night follows day and birds fry midair at Ivanpah. Government committee to stop bank collapses, didn’t see this coming…The USA has a committee to stop this sort of thing, but even they were more worried about climate risks than national ponzi schemes: Silicon Valley Bank had more red flags than a CCP meeting but regulators cared about climate not bank risksSVB’s collapse on March 10 begs the question where were the regulators? By Liz Peek, Fox Business Authorities should have been on high alert. They were not. Consider the Financial Stability Oversight Council, the body created in 2010 after the financial crisis, which was meant to avert just this sort of collapse. The council is chaired today by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and includes 9 other voting members including Fed Chair Jay Powell, the heads of the FDIC and the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection (CFPB), Gary Gensler, head of the SEC. The council’s website defines its task as “identifying risks to the financial stability of the United States…” The council last met on February 10 via videoconference. The readout of that meeting shows the group previewed its 2023 priorities, which included “climate-related financial risks, nonbank financial intermediation, Treasury market resilience, and risks related to digital assets.” Devotion to climate change is a pathological social disorder. Whole civilizations get swept away… March 14th, 2023 | Tags: Bankers, Climate Money | Category: Big-Government, Global Warming | Print This Post | | |
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