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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? 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.
The bigger the bureaucracy is, the more it can screw things up. Keep reading → 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 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.” Climate change, which it describes as “an emerging threat to U.S. financial stability,” is identified in the 2022 annual report as a “key priority” and has been one of the council’s principal preoccupations for the past two years.
Devotion to climate change is a pathological social disorder. Whole civilizations get swept away… Imagine if the national postal service had secret blacklists of people whose mail “should be lost”?What if the FBI, CIA, or Department of Defence was talking to the postie, and the postie read your letters and threw some out, but not others, and none of the institutions told you they were doing this? Or perhaps the post-office told you point-blank you were banned from sending mail now “because your letters were wrong”. In this case the “posties” are private organizations, but to all intents and purposes, their network connection and obedience to Big-Government made them, in effect, another branch of the government. The government wasn’t paying the postie direct, but it protected the monopoly of the corporate postie team and gave them a legal loophole to hide in, and the media outlets stopped anyone criticizing the government. It was a Pravda-KGB consortium with filters that worked at light speed, but hidden.
Where would we be if Elon Musk hadn’t bought Twitter?In the latest round of Twitter Files, Matt Taibbi shows how Twitter was not just censoring things that would later turn out to be true, but things it already knew to be true. The truth can be malinformation you see — it might influence people not to take a medicine that Twitter has decided they should take. For the last few years, your friends and families medical decisions have been made by a quasi government collective. The only people with informed consent were the censors. As Taibbi says malinformation is just a euphemism for “true but inconvenient.” We can all speak with one voice comrade! The GEC voice…It’s no accident why commentators everywhere seem to shift messages together like a school of herding fish. The censorship industrial complex is not just the government, and the media, and the social media giants but also some of the non-government organisations that once upon a time were supposed to be watchdogs of the government. At the centre of this information cabal was the “Global Engagement Center” (“GEC”) — which was established by Barack Obama with Executive Order 13271. This was in 2015-2016 and marked a shift from managing “counter terrorism” to the much broader “disinformation”. GEK decides who’s on the blacklist, and the lists are looong… From Matt Taibbi on Twitter — “the Censorship-Industrial Complex.”But Twitter was more like a partner to government. With other tech firms it held a regular “industry meeting” with FBI and DHS, and developed a formal system for receiving thousands of content reports from every corner of government: HHS, Treasury, NSA, even local police. Emails from the FBI, DHS and other agencies often came with spreadsheets of hundreds or thousands of account names for review. Often, these would be deleted soon after. We came to think of this grouping – state agencies like DHS, FBI, or the Global Engagement Center (GEC), along with “NGOs that aren’t academic” and an unexpectedly aggressive partner, commercial news media – as the Censorship-Industrial Complex. NGOs ideally serve as a check on corporations and the government. Not long ago, most of these institutions viewed themselves that way. Now, intel officials, “researchers,” and executives at firms like Twitter are effectively one team – or Signal group, as it were.
Michael Shellenberger went with Matt Taibbi to Congress and summed it up on his own Substack: Exposed: America’s Secret Censorship-Industrial ComplexThe censorship industrial complex combines established methods of psychological manipulation, some developed by the U.S. military during the Global War on Terror, with highly sophisticated tools from computer science, including artificial intelligence. The complex’s leaders are driven by the fear that the Internet and social media platforms empower populist, alternative, and fringe personalities and views, which they regard as destabilizing. Federal government officials, agencies, and contractors have gone from fighting ISIS recruiters and Russian bots to censoring and deplatforming ordinary Americans and disfavored public figures. Importantly, the bar for bringing in military-grade government monitoring and speech-countering techniques has moved from “countering terrorism” to “countering extremism” to countering simple misinformation. The government no longer needs a predicate of calling you a terrorist or extremist to deploy government resources to counter your political activity. The only predicate it needs is simply the assertion that the opinion you expressed on social media is wrong. You are free to say nice things about the government:… increasingly, the censors say their goal is to restrict information that “delegitimizes” governmental, industrial, and news media organizations. The cartel wants to protect the industry and media from being “delegitimized” too. They are all assets in the same mafia-style organization. Disinformation isn’t the threat to Democracy, industrial fact-checkers are: Jefferson’s ideas still ring true today. In a free society we don’t mandate truth, we arrive at it through discussion and debate. Any group that claims the “confidence” to decide fact and fiction, especially in the name of protecting democracy, is always, itself, the real threat to democracy. For hundreds of years, the thing that’s distinguished Americans from all other people around the world is the way we don’t let anyone tell us what to think, certainly not the government. The First Amendment, and an American population accustomed to the right to speak, is the best defense left against the Censorship-Industrial Complex. If the latter can knock over our first and most important constitutional guarantee, these groups will have no serious opponent left anywhere. If there’s anything the Twitter Files show, it’s that we’re in danger of losing this most precious right, without which all other democratic rights are impossible. Wouldn’t true information be bliss, –Rauiri hat tip to KP, JB, Honk R Smith, Tombo, Beth the serf, John Connor II, Richard C. Censored logo: Piotr VaGla Waglowski Many Australians face a 20% rise in their electricity bill this coming winter, so it seems odd that the AEMO* forgot to put the price of the cheapest source of electricity in their last quarterly report. The bid-setting prices for brown coal have been some of my favourite graphs, but this quarter, for the first time a whole energy source disappeared. It would only be another 2 digit number in a 69 page report, yet the average winning bid of brown coal generators on our national grid last quarter is not even mentioned? The nation faces major decisions about whether to continue to try changing global weather with our power plants. You would think Australians would like to know which fuel produces the cheapest electricity and by exactly how much? I mean, what’s the true cost of cooling Australia by a thousandth of a degree in 2100? Perhaps the AEMO didn’t like that skeptics spread the message that brown coal could still generate electricity for less than 4c/KWh, or that hydro and gas were seven times more expensive? After all, the head of the AEMO — Daniel Westerman — says we must ramp up renewables to avoid blackouts. I’m sure the AEMO doesn’t want to misinform Australians so I decided to help them by adding in last years brown coal prices to this quarters graph instead: Obviously I’d use the current prices if the AEMO will tell us… we know they know what it is. With 300 years of coal left, Australians could easily reduce electricity prices The nation is still using brown coal, but only at about half the rate. When we had cheap electricity (2010), brown coal would generate 6GW. Now it is only about 3GW. Not surprisingly, the less brown coal we use, the higher the prices rise. Brown coal, also known as lignite, –Rauiri Next winter could work out as badly as the last one:Prices may yet go blockbuster in Australia with one black coal plant closing, and two other turbines broken and delayed another six months: Callide C coal plant delays spark fears of winter energy crunchThe Australian Further delays to the restart of the Callide C coal-fired power station in Queensland, coupled with the impending closure of AGL’s Liddell coal plant, have heightened fears of another harsh winter for the country’s vulnerable energy system. Keep reading → A new paper shows islands are young, dynamic creatures, and mother nature is mean. And nothing we see today on Indian or Pacific Islands is unprecedented. All the panic about islands disappearing is nothing compared to what nature does all the time. Indeed, man-made climate change, if it has done anything at all — has been a boon for islands in the last fifty years. Thanks to Kenneth Richard, at NoTricksZone for finding the paper: Recent Shoreline Changes To 1100 Pacific Islands ‘Dwarfed’ By Change Magnitudes Of The Past The new paper by Kench et al looked at 1,100 islands across the Pacific and Indian oceans, and even though CO2 levels rose from 325ppm to an apocalyptic 420ppm, the average island got bigger instead of smaller, and only 3 small uninhabited islands completely disappeared. And when we say small, some of the islands we are tracking are mere 30m wide sand spits. Is it really fair to call that an “uninhabited island”? The world may have Olympic-sized junkets every year because shorelines have moved 40m in the last fifty years, but it turns out that shorelines moved 200 meters before anyone built a coal plant. This, below, is just the last fifty years in the life of Kandahalagalaa Island, and about 20% of the island has shifted. Currently sea levels are rising 3mm a year, but in its short life sea levels at Kandahalagalaa have already gone down and up some 900mm without humans doing a damn thing. Satellite data is all very well for the last fifty years, but it can’t tell us whether islands used to move so much before humans invented the Ford Model T. So Kench and co. got very serious about one little island in the Maldives with the tongue-twisty name Kandahalagalaa. They drilled the holy smoke out of it, and radiocarbon dated the layers until they pieced together its history. They discovered that its whole life has been in a state of flux. It only emerged out of the ocean a during the dark ages, 1,400 years ago, shifted and grew to the south, and the ocean has turned a lot of the island upside down. The Kench team are data nerds and did some serious drilling — taking some 154 sediment samples from 20 cores, they used 23 samples of a particular green algae to do radiometric age tests. They also did laser levels six different ways to survey the island. They took 11 other cores of outcrops, and used four different satellites to get lots of photos of the shoreline. This is one churned islandMost of the cores were upside down, with the older layers at the top. Nature is evidently reworking the island, dropping 1100 year old deposits on top of 300 year old ones, in various combinations that were different in nearly every hole.
1,100 Islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans are stableDespite the threat of man made climate change, nearly every island larger than a tenth of a square kilometer is the same size as it was or expanding. This is an update on a previous survey of 700 islands which showed they were mostly growing. It’s not necessarily an improvement — Kench et al appear to have just added 400 teeny tiny islands to spread the splatter on the left hand side. Notice how the log scale gives tiny islands a big role? An island 0.01 km2 is a mere 100m by 100m across. Half the graph is really plotting the fate of shifting sand dunes. Is it fair to call them islands? The climate signal got blurredThe authors comment that they were unable to implicate climate change: Collectively, these studies have been unable to establish specific environmental drivers of island change, nor directly and unambiguously implicate climatic change as a mechanism for observed changes. To date, local-scale processes appear to have blurred any climatic change signal22,24. Translated: even though everyone says climate change is real and obvious expert researchers couldn’t find a signal above the noise. I suspect Kench et al were disappointed not to find that signal, given he was not happy some skeptics used his study a few years ago. But full credit to the team for being so dedicated at collecting data and writing it up so honestly. Islands were forming as the holocene sea levels fellGiving some idea of just how young these islands are, Kench et al reviewed about 15 different studies of islands between the Maldives and Fiji and found that the oldest known samples from each was about 1,500 to 7,000 years old (black circles below). Holocene sea levels (marked in blue) were an unthinkable 2 meters higher 5,000 years ago. Sea levels have been falling around Australia for thousands of years. The little very-drilled island of Kandahalagalaa is “e” below, with the oldest samples from nearly 3,000 years ago, presumably underwater then, since that was long before Kench declares it it to have emerged from the sea. h/t Kenneth Richards, El Gordo, Another Ian. REFERENCESKench, P.S., Liang, C., Ford, M.R. et al. (2023) Reef islands have continually adjusted to environmental change over the past two millennia. Nat Commun 14, 508 doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-36171-2 By Jo Nova Twenty six months after the so called “deadly insurrection” at the US Capitol, the video tapes that have been hidden are finally available. This was a day that “echoed through history” according to Kamala Harris, who compared it to Pearl Harbor but didn’t want you to see the footage. People are in jail because they dressed up and walked with a police escort through open doors. It’s a Redpill moment. The few people who did break windows or incite the crowd to do acts of violence have not been arrested. Who were the Feds? “Even 57% of Democrats think that it’s at least somewhat likely that Feds were not just there but were also encouraging people to riot or go into the Capitol.” — Thomas Massie Rep Congressman. The Jan 6th Committee had all this footage. They knew… Jan. 6 footage shows Capitol cops escorting QAnon Shaman to Senate floorMiranda Devine, New York Post “The tapes show the Capitol Police never stopped Jacob Chansley. They helped him. They acted as his tour guides.” And yet in the narrative formed that day by Democrats and much of the media, “Jacob Chansley became the face of January 6, a dangerous conspiracy theorist dressed in an outlandish costume who led the violent insurrection to overthrow America’s democracy,” says Carlson. Chansley, the horned “Shamen” became the perfect Photo Op for the Democrats. His sentence is four years. Why were these tapes released now? Apparently Tucker Carlson was given the footage as part of a deal to win over the last few Republican votes that were needed to get Speaker Kevin McCarthy elected as Speaker of the House. * * * Those with discernment don’t buy it, –Rauiri This site is but a cog in an information war. Every news outlet that ran the Insurrection story on January 6th should have been showing these tapes tonight. Keep reading → By Jo Nova Everything is a PsyOp now: even the weather maps are on fireAustralia has had a mild summer, a mild year, but that’s a reason for another meaningless “hottest” headline. “Millions across NSW suffering through hottest day over two summers“. So outback New South Wales finally gets an average warm summer day and the climate map makes it look like a nuclear meltdown. Since when was 35 degrees C a shade of heat so hot it was black? (That’s 95F). To put this in perspective, the town of Cobar near the centre of the map made it to 37C today (98.6F). But a few years ago the average temperature for the whole month of February was 37C. Any Cobar resident who feels like 37C is unusually warm, moved there this morning. If newspapers were not paid agents or religious acolytes for the cult of climate change the headlines would have said “finally a last blast of summer warmth after two cold years”. But that doesn’t sell solar panels. No heat? No problem…Call it color inflation. The value of any color is shrinking. Satellites show Australia hasn’t warmed at all in the last ten years, but the headlines and artwork still look the same. Back then, it was a different kind of PsyOp. In 2013, the BOM announced climate change had made Australia so hot they needed to change the color scale of their maps so they could add “purple heat” for a prediction of over 50 degrees C (a temperature that didn’t even happen). Now, 40C is the new 50C and what was an average day in 2020 in January for Bourke is now a purple holocaust. (40C is 104F and 50C is 122F). To be fair the BOM has the same color chart it had then, and the new radioactive maps are made by some other agency, NCA NewsWire or Stormcast, whoever they are. But the BOM says nothing about this, and the media are happy to play deceptive color tricks on their hapless audience. I pointed out ten years ago that if Australian towns hit 50C it wasn’t a record but just a return to a temperature measured all over Australia in the 1800’s.
Real Australians aren’t afraid of 35 degrees C, but sleepy distracted Australians might be fooled out of some taxes by a hellfire map. |
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