In the great Covid backpedalling of 2023, even the Australian ABC has finally admitted that natural immunity from Covid “lasts as long as vaccination” which is still false and misleading (because it lasts longer and is higher) but must have caused angst at the office. They go on to say their holy rosary incantation: “but experts have cautioned that vaccines are still the safer option”. Safer than what now, though? The new meta-review in the Lancet says nothing at all about side effects of vaccines or new variants, but people-who-believe-experts and people who think they are “good journalists” need to say their medical Hail-Marys, otherwise they have to admit to themselves that they were wrong and sometimes obnoxiously, insufferably, stupidly so.
The new Lancet metastudy looked at 65 studies from 19 countries. They found the reinfection rate of people who caught Covid was lower than people who were given Pfizer or Moderna. About a year after catching Covid, people with natural immunity still had about 37% protection against getting Omicron BA.1, about four times higher than people who had two Moderna doses. Yet the people with the better protection were locked out, punished, and sometimes even banned from treatment like organ transplants.
For some reason that no one can explain, despite millions of people using Pfizer vaccines, there were apparently no useful studies lasting beyond 30 weeks against reinfection.
But there is no apology, and no admission that they should have been collecting and publishing the data on natural immunity all along. There’s no admission that vaccines were never the right tool to use in a coronavirus pandemic, especially when results were so uncertain and there were so many safe alternatives.
Figure 4 Comparison of protection efficacy from past COVID-19 infection versus protection from vaccination (by vaccine type and dose) against re-infection… for omicron BA.1 variants
Our immune systems can tell the difference between a real infectious threat and a pretend virus
It makes sense that a true infection generates a longer stronger response than a fake one. We evolved from people whose immune systems didn’t waste protein and energy on things that don’t matter. Our personal defense force can’t be bothered staying in DefCon 1 when it’s only the Avon lady at the door again and not the Vikings. So it’s no surprise that usually the antibody protection varies according to the threat. The older nastier SARS-1 virus killed about 10% of those infected, and T-cell immunity was still there 17 years later. Its dark cousin MERS killed about 35% and is not as well studied, but antibodies were still present three years after infection.
On the other hand, protection against the tame common cold sort of coronaviruses is a big “so what” for our immune system. Immunity wears off in months which means we can catch the exact same dang virus the next year, and year after year. Since vaccines are (supposedly) safe, the hard part in vaccine design is to trick our immune system into caring at all about something that isn’t very scary.
In this graph below we see the waning of protection against not just reinfection but “getting sick” or being symptomatic. The result is much like the graph above, with a few more variants of vaccines. I added the labels on the lines in these graphs to hone the point that the top line in every graph was natural immunity. (It wasn’t always obvious which lines were which, especially for anyone who was colorblind).
Figure 4 (D) Comparison between waning of immunity with time of the protection conferred by SARS-CoV-2 infection against symptomatic disease with omicron variant versus vaccine protection against primary infection with omicron by type of vaccine and dose.
“Risk of COVID death or hospitalisation 88 per cent lower for those previously infected…”
The headline conclusion of the ABC story is shown in the graph below. Most people who caught Covid have good protection against getting a severe case of Covid on the second round. But try looking at this graph and reading the ABC description with a straight face: “…natural immunity [is] “at least as durable, if not more so” than two doses of Pfizer or Moderna’s vaccines… “
At least indeed… natural infection had higher efficacy than all the vaccines for 50 out of the last 60 weeks.
Figure 4 Comparison of protection efficacy from past COVID-19 infection versus protection from vaccination (by vaccine type and dose) against re-infection… for omicron BA.1 variants
Hallelujah. 18 months too late we get the big admission — those who had natural immunity should be treated as equivalent to being “vaccinated”
One day we might even hear that the unvaccinated should be treated as equivalent to being human. We live in hope.
For the moment at least researchers are saying what we’ve known for a hundred years: We should take natural immunity into account when making policies.
Our findings have several important policy implications. … restrictions of movement and access to venues based on immune status and vaccine mandates for workers should take into account immunity conferred by vaccination and that provided by natural infection. Countries have taken different approaches to this; for example, immunity from past infection was considered as part of eligibility for the EU COVID certificate but not in countries such as the USA or Australia.
People with natural immunity are still to this day — barred from entering the USA unless they get a vaccine. I’ve turned down an expenses paid trip to Florida this very week. Hawaii too! — (Thanks Craig and thanks Stephen.)
Hypothetically: If the entire medical system were a mafia cabal designed to create Pfizer profits by banning cheap drugs and useful tests, while guaranteeing indemnity in secret contracts and forcing drugs on people who didn’t want them, what exactly would our Minister of Health have done differently?
And ignorance is no excuse. When there was only a few months of data on the efficacy of vaccines, there was already a whole year of data with natural immunity. In fact, doctors were saying natural immunity worked very well in the BMJ as early as September 2021:
Infection generates immunity. The “SIREN” study in the Lancet addressed the relationships between seropositivity in people with previous COVID-19 infection and subsequent risk of severe acute respiratory syndrome due to SARS-CoV-2 infection over the subsequent 7-12 months (2). Prior infection decreased risk of symptomatic re-infection by 93%. A large cohort study published in JAMA Internal Medicine looked at 3.2 million US patients and showed that the risk of infection was significantly lower (0.3%) in seropositive patients v/s those who are seronegative (3%) (3).
But the study, which is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation comes too late to help thousands forced into vaccinations they didn’t want, and we have to wonder whether the purpose of the study is not just a belated nod to a reality which has become obvious, but as the Defender suggests — to tacitly still endorse vaccine passports, now with the minor, fairly useless proviso that people with natural immunity would have qualified “if only we’d known”. But they knew this was likely. And they had enough data 18 months ago.
The vaccines promising immunity,
Could be seen as a sly opportunity,
To sell boosters to follow,
Which would also prove hollow,
And all this was done with impunity.
Simon P. Michaux calls it “Minerals Blindness” — the inability to see that there are just not enough metals to get to Net Zero.
He is an Australian working for the Geological Survey of Finland. He’s an Associate Professor of Mineral Processing and Geometallurgy, and has added up the tonnage required to convert the first generation of the fleet needed (theoretically) to get to Net Zero. So that’s just 25 years worth of wind turbines, solar panels and batteries.
And then we need to do it all again?
Michaux estimates that we need 944 million tons of lithium alone to go Net Zero (the first time). But at the moment every year we dig up about 100,000 tons a year, or 0.01% of what we need to reach the Net Zero target. Current total known reserves of lithium throughout the world in 2022 are just 26 million tons. Total known (best guess) resources are 98 million tons).* Obviously as the price of lithium rises, we will find a lot more. We haven’t been looking for lithium very long so we may even find ten times as much. But at our current rate of production it will take 10,000 years to dig up enough lithium — a figure that ought to light a barge of fireworks over the reality of the 2050 targets. Politicians and Green magic wish fairies may not realize what kind of galactic upscaling is required.
And of course, we need so much more than just lithium — there’s copper, nickel, cobalt, vanadium and germanium too. And we’ve been mining copper in a big way for a century and the deposits found now are deeper and lower grade than before. Copper discoveries have been declining for the last couple of decades but we’re hoping to dig up five times the entire known global reserve and speed up production from 190 years to just 30? (And remember, we’re using that current copper production for other things, which we still need as well.) Prices are set to go through the roof, and all the forecasts of “affordable” clean energy are just so much flying faerie lore.
Western society has taken one hundred fifty years of progress to achieve a fantastically complex energy system using the dense source of cheap hydrocarbon energy, the master resource. Yet the net zero devotees believe that the complex energy system can be dismantled with minimal disruption and replaced with a low-density renewable energy grid that is intermittent and non-scalable, in less than thirty years. — Robert Bishop
Consider the minerals required just for transport…
EV’s use six times more minerals than conventional vehicles
We are supposedly going to convert 1.5 billion vehicles to electric motors and batteries?
Simon P. Michaux | Click to Enlarge
Known reserves of metals:
Click on the tables to enlarge them.
… Click to Enlarge
Production of metals in 2019
…… Click to Enlarge
…
The price of lithium has risen by a factor of 8 since 2020. Total known global reserves have risen by 30% in the same period. Obviously we are just getting started in discovery and production increases. But all those estimates of car battery costs in 2035 need to forecast the price of lithium, which involves guessing how much we’ll find and how much it will cost, and how many crazy nations will force their unwilling citizens to buy a car they don’t want in an era where electricity prices are on fire.
How high will the fever pitch prices go, or will reality bomb the market as EV sales decline, the economy crumbles, and it dawns on everyone that no amount of mandates will blink cars into existence or produce megatons of minerals?
*Reserves are rocks in the ground that we are sure (in a legal sense) we can mine economically. Resources are the rocks we think are there, but they’re either not economic to dig up, or not worth drilling enough holes to know for sure just at the moment.
A PowerPoint summary of his thousand-page study can be downloadedhere. Delivered as a seminar last year in Queensland:
Tantangara Resevoir: A whole ecosystem to fill with invasive feral fish and a necrosis virus too.
The Snowy 2.0 Pumped hydro scheme will cost families big money, spread pests, endanger fish, and kill trees but it will allow some renewables investors to make a profit, and that’s all that matters right?
Overseas readers are invited to submit more stupid schemes, with points for delays, cost, incompetence, environmental damage and sheer lack of any public benefit.
Ted Woodley does the best synopsis of the Snowy 2.0 debacle I’ve seen, pointing out how it sets all the worst kinds of records, being delayed 300% with costs up 1000%. It was supposed to be built in four years and cost $2 billion, but will end up taking 12 years (at least) and probably cost $20 billion by the time the cost of the extra transmission lines is added in. As readers here know, the boring machines are the slowest on Earth, one having made it only 200m and being paused for months under a pile of sand.
It was supposed to pay for itself, and make electricity cheaper, but is already chewing through a $1.4 billion taxpayer “injection”, with more to come and even the Snowy Hydro team admit public electricity prices will rise because of Snowy 2.0. And above all, it was supposed to be renewable and save the environment, but it’s just a big inefficient battery that will infect the top lake with feral perch and other pests, and sacrifice some forest for high voltage transmission lines. It will breach all the usual environmental regulations but that’s OK say The Greens who’ll destroy the environment any day if it keeps their big business and banker pals happy.
To put this is perspective, the invasive redfin perch“is a declared notifiable pest under the Biosecurity Regulation 2017. It is illegal to possess, buy, sell or move this pest in NSW.” But the Snowy 2.0 Scheme will pump the eggs and larva by the gigaton. If you do it, you’re breaking the law, but if the Snowy 2.0 scheme does it, they are environmental heroes.
Ever get the feeling the Environmental Movement is just a mafia cabal?
Jo says — make all the renewable energy generators pay the costs themselves, since they are the only beneficiaries, and obey the laws we all obey, and if the project collapses, which it will, we’ll all be richer. That’s how the free market works…
Just picking out the costs and environmental damage:
Record three: underestimated cost – $2bn to up to $20bn
Snowy 2.0’s $2bn estimate increased to $3.8bn-$4.5bn in the business case, to $5.1bn for the main contract (only), to $5.9bn now. It is important to note these estimates don’t include all project costs, such as capitalised interest and suppressed dividends during construction, hedging, exploratory and other works, design, project management, and trans-mission. Also, the allowance for contingencies would have been exceeded by $2.2bn of contractor claims, with more to come. The final cost of Snowy 2.0’s main works is likely to exceed $10bn.
Then there’s a further $9bn-plus for 1000km of 500kV transmission connections to Sydney and Melbourne (Sydney Ring South, HumeLink and VIC/NSW interconnector), primarily for Snowy 2.0’s pumping and generation. Snowy Hydro initially estimated $1bn to $2bn. If Snowy Hydro is not compelled to contribute its fair share of the cost, arguably the majority, NSW electricity consumers will face a doubling of transmission tariffs.
An all-up cost for Snowy 2.0 approaching $20bn represents a tenfold increase, surely a record for cost underestimation.
Record six: inducing the NSW government to grant exemptions from environmental legislation
The claim that Snowy 2.0 will incur minimal impact on Kosciuszko National Park is demonstrably false. Vast construction sites across 30km of the park have been cleared, blasted, excavated, reshaped and compacted. Hundreds of kilometres of roads and tracks are being constructed/ widened, and 20 million tonnes of excavated spoil will be dumped (when the TBMs get boring). But it’s the NSW government’s granting of exemptions from statutory protections that sets a record for environmental vandalism.
Snowy 2.0 has been exempted from the statewide ban on transferring noxious pests between waterways. This condones the movement of invasive Redfin perch, among other declared pests, from Talbingo Reservoir to Tantangara Reservoir and then across the alps into the Murray, Snowy, Murrumbidgee and Tumut headwaters, overwhelming native species and devastating trout fishing. Also, Snowy 2.0 has been exempted from the obligation in the Kosciuszko Plan of Management for any additional transmission to be located underground. Four 330kV transmission lines on two sets of 70-metre towers will traverse 8km of the park over a cleared easement swathe up to 140m wide. This will be the first time transmission lines are erected in a NSW national park for 50 years.
Ted Woodley is former managing director of PowerNet, GasNet, EnergyAustralia, GrainCorp and China Light & Power Systems (Hong Kong).
It’s an extraordinary poll and a nation unravelling.
Two thirds of American’s don’t trust the media. Half even think they are actively lying, and don’t care about their audience. Nine out of ten people think the media is politically biased. As the trust evaporates, people are switching off the national news. A vast majority of people on one side of the political spectrum now view the media unfavorably, and while that number had jumped in Republican and Independent voters in the last three years — it is even rising in Democrat voters too.
The Knight/Gallup — Trust in Media and Democracy poll reveals, bizarrely, that more than half of the nation thinks the people who really “run” the country are not known to voters. I don’t think I’ve even seen pollsters ask that question before. Effectively then, it follows that nearly six out of ten people think that Joe Biden is not the one running the country, and the same goes for Congress. Barely one person in five thinks voters are choosing the decision-makers.
It’s not just trust in the media that’s collapsing, but trust in the government, and even faith in the workings of democracy is gone. This is a nation in turmoil. But the good news is that most people don’t believe the media, or the government.
Never forget: Skeptics are in the majority.
The media are lying to us
Only about one third of American’s still think they can rely on the media to inform them. But half the population not only think the media is unreliable, but is deliberately lying to them. They think the media intends to mislead, misinform or persuade them. Showing that this malicious interpretation is not an accident, half the US also thinks the media don’t care about their audience.
Trust is evaporating
Look at the change since the start of the pandemic and the debacle of the 2020 election. Trust in the media has fallen across voters of every political type. More people than ever view the media unfavourably. The rising red line measures the fall in trust of the US media. Nearly 80% of Republican voters view the media unfavorably, and in the last five years, despite the bias towards the Democrats, even ten percent of Democrats have “lost the faith” too.
In the biggest shift, one-in-five independent voters has realized the media is a bad thing.
More then half of the US thinks the people who really “run” the country are not known to voters
Faith in the workings of democracy is gone. Nearly six out of ten can see that Joe Biden is not the one running the country. Barely one person in five thinks he does. This result applies to Congress too — whoever is running the country is behind the scenes.
The good news is that eight out of ten people either don’t trust government accounts or are not sure, and most people value the opinion of “ordinary people” more than experts or politicians.
There was a split: 71% of those who didn’t trust the media also believe that the people who really “run” the country are unknown to the voters; but even 46% of those who trusted the media also felt this way. Even half the people who believe the propaganda on TV are still skeptical that Joe Biden runs America.
Americans are switching off the national news
In the last two years, and astonishing 22% of people have stopped paying “a great deal of attention” to the national news.
It’s becoming obvious to everyone that the media is a political player
As many as 89% of all voters in 2022 think there is a fair amount, or “a lot” of political bias in the media.
Which way does the media bias run? Ask the voters
79% of Republicans think the media is biased “a great deal” — the highest category they could choose. There are virtually no Republicans left who think the news is not biased. That says everything anyone needs to know about the direction of bias.
It’s unconfirmed, but there’s a possibility that the US Commander in Chief used an Air Force F-22 fighter jet that costs $80,000 an hour to launch a $400,000 sidewinder missile to shoot down a $13 hobby balloon.
President Biden has been industriously shooting down balloons, almost as if he is trying to distract everyone from noticing how slow he was to deal with the Communist Party balloon, or the Pfizergate video, and the Nordstream leak, or something else. But no one is quite certain what they’ve shot down.
Meanwhile a hobby group called The Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade (NIBBB) have sadly reported their K9YO balloon has stopped sending messages. The K9YO picoballoon had been aloft for 123 days and was on its sixth lap of the world. It was last heard from at around 37,928 feet, south of Alaska and headed towards the Yukon. Whatever the mystery object was that got shot down was described as “foil” at 40,000 feet, so it’s in the right ballpark, but it’s still a big sky.
After all the attention starting to grow on this the NIBBB has clarified that even though they expected to hear from the balloon last Saturday it has dropped out of communication before and for as long as thirty days. It may well reappear. It uses a small solar panel to send messages and can’t send messages at night, or in the dark.
Naturally, there’s no official confirmation, but there probably never will be if the US Air force just wasted half a million dollars to destroy a party balloon. This opens a new front in warfare. If an adversary releases enough pico-balloons, the US Airforce could run out of money and missiles…
Whatever it was, the rumour that it might have been a party balloon will surely stop the blitzkrieg. It rather takes the fun out of the PR. Big-man Biden just blew up a helium balloon?
The bigger question is why this bread and circus performance art from Biden and the media was going on in the first place?
Modeling shared by NIBBB shows its balloon was headed in the direction of Yukon before it vanished – and opens up the possibility it was one of the suspicious objects down by the U.S. military.
The object shot down by a a U.S. Air Force F-22 fighter jet over Mayo, Yukon, was variously described by officials in Canada and the U.S. as a ‘cylindrical’, metallic balloon with a payload.
Balloons used by hobby groups like NIBBB often fit the same description. They are usually attached with a small, solar-powered payload that transmits location data back to listening posts on the ground. Typically, these payloads are no larger than a credit card.
NIBBB has not said its balloon was definitely the downed object, but an overview of the circumstantial evidence by Aviation Week leaves the possibility wide open.
For those who want the nerdy technical detail on picoballoon flights:
However there is also the simpler ‘pico’ ballooning hobby, which involves the use of mylar helium party balloons to launch small solar powered payloads that are only a few grams in weight. They typically transmit low power WSPR at HF frequencies and can only transmit whenever there is sufficient solar power available. Amateur radio or SDR hobbyist stations around the world can pick up these transmissions, and report them on amateur.sondehub.org and/or wsprnet.org. Well built balloons can totally circumnavigate the globe several times over several months before degrading.
The insidious vaccine debacle may seem to have come out of nowhere, but pharmaceutical and regulatory rot has been growing for decades.
The story of Zantac, the common heartburn medicine, is both awful and good – it’s awful because one of the most common drugs on the market may have been causing cancers for forty years. It’s good only because the story is finally being told and 70,000 people are suing GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). The “good” here is the hope that some justice might finally be done, and because the public might find out just how ghastly the industrial pharma octopus really is, and how welded it is in the system.
It’s time to burn down the unholy empire of Big Pharma and Big Government and start again.
This is not a case of one bad egg in the system, it’s the story of a system that virtually creates bad eggs
Glaxo was a little company in the 70s that took one of the most popular drugs on the market, Tagamet, tweaked it enough to patent a “better version”, then aggressively out-marketed it, and eventually bought out the companies that made Tagamet to become the $70 billion GlaxoSmithKline giant.
“By 1989, Zantac was worth $2 billion. It accounted for half of Glaxo’s sales and 53% of the market for prescription ulcer remedies.”
But the common heartburn drug Zantac, or ranitidine, which drove their profits — also broke down into NDMA which is a known carcinogen, and there were warnings of this in 1981 and 1982, but it wasn’t until September 2019 that an independent lab tested for NDMA and found it in every sample and at alarming levels. By April 2020 the FDA forced every manufacturer to stop producing and selling the drug altogether. Now, the court cases have started.
Most of the Bloomberg story — which is worth reading in full — focuses on just how badly behaved GlaxoSmithKline have been by hiding the early data for forty long years. But GSK also chose not to do more tests when it should have; it did not try to transport and store the drug in ways the reduced the contamination, and it did not advise the public to take the tablets outside meals. There is no sense that customer health mattered.
To me the bigger question that is never asked, is why drugs like this are not tested by publicly funded groups before they get approval to be rolled out en masse? The tests that were finally done in 2019 are not two-year studies involving thousands of people, they are just lab tests for contamination. What is the point of all the public health funding, the regulatory agencies, and public universities if they aren’t used to defend the public?
If the FDA has the legal power to approve drugs or ban them, shouldn’t it also bear the responsibility when it gets that wrong?
Under legal cross examination the director of research and development admitted they had known for almost 40 years that ranitidine could degrade under conditions of high temperature and moisture … .
Glaxo says the heartburn drug doesn’t cause tumors. But the company was warned by its own scientists and independent researchers about the potential danger.
In 2019 the drug was found to be tainted with high levels of a probable carcinogen. Not by chance or mistake in a few batches. The poison is created by ranitidine itself. Zantac’s makers and health regulators around the world recalled the drug, and in the spring of 2020 the FDA forced it off the market altogether. No company could manufacture it; nobody should ingest it. The carcinogen, called NDMA, was once added to rocket fuel and is now used only to induce cancer in lab rats. The FDA says consuming minuscule amounts isn’t harmful. But tests were revealing excessive amounts of NDMA in ranitidine—and a capacity to create even more over time. No version seemed safe.
From ranitidine’s beginning to its end, Glaxo had been warned by its own scientists and independent researchers about the potential danger. An account of those four decades emerges in hundreds of documents, thousands of pages, many of which have never been made public. Bloomberg Businessweek reviewed court filings, many still under seal, as well as studies, FDA transcripts and new drug applications obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests. They show that the FDA considered the cancer risks when approving ranitidine. But Glaxo didn’t share a critical study. Over the years, the company also backed flawed research designed to minimize concerns and chose not to routinely transport and store the medication in ways that could have eased the problem. Glaxo sold a drug that might harm people, tried to discount evidence of that and never gave anyone the slightest warning.
Plaintiffs’ lawyer:At any time when Zantac had been on the market for almost 50 years, did Glaxo cause anyone to test for the presence of NDMA, a probable human carcinogen, in the product it was selling to American consumers known as Zantac?
Glaxo senior medical adviser:Not to my knowledge.
—Deposition, June 2021
NDMA, which is short for N-Nitrosodimethylamine, is a yellow liquid that dissolves in water. It doesn’t have an odor or much of a taste. It was first linked to cancer in 1956 and is most toxic to the liver. It’s one of a group of chemicals called nitrosamines, which by the 1970s were considered the most potent carcinogens yet discovered. They caused cancer in every species of animal tested. A single dose of less than a milligram of NDMA can mutate mice cells and stimulate tumors, and 2 grams can kill a person in days.
Many people would end up taking Zantac for months, sometimes years, even decades.
The 1981 in-house study that Glaxo hid:
Glaxo asked one of its scientists to conduct his own tests: Richard Tanner, who worked in the biochemical pharmacology division. He got the same results. He identified as much as 232,000 nanograms of NDMA in some samples. When the FDA later deemed that a tiny amount of NDMA was acceptable in any drug, that amount was 96ng. Tanner didn’t find NDMA when he used a lower nitrite level, which the company now says is closer to conditions in an actual human stomach. But back in 1982, court documents show, Glaxo kept the study secret. The associate director of clinical research in the US was never told about the Tanner report. The senior medical adviser for gastrointestinal research was unaware of it. So was the FDA.
Their competitors which made Tagamet, even did a study told them in 1982 that their drug would form NDMA.
It’s all about the money, and GSK became the largest drug company in the world at one point:
Zantac’s sales in the US that first year were about $125 million, which made it one of the best launches of a drug ever. “
That year, Tagamet became the first billion-dollar drug. The next year, Zantac overtook Tagamet.
In 1995, Glaxo completed a hostile takeover of another British drug company, Wellcome. Five years later, in 2000, Glaxo Wellcome acquired its longtime rival, known then as SmithKline Beecham. It was the biggest merger in the industry’s history and created the biggest drug company in the world, GlaxoSmithKline.
GSK was hit with a $3b fine “the largest health-care fraud settlement in US history”
This had nothing to do with Zantac, it was for their next two top selling productions. Spot the pattern?
In 2012 the company agreed to plead guilty and pay a $3 billion fine for marketing drugs for inappropriate uses, disregarding safety data and cheating Medicaid. The drugs were among the company’s most popular after Zantac: Paxil, Wellbutrin and the diabetes drug Avandia. The US Department of Justice called it the largest health-care fraud settlement in US history and the largest payment ever by a drug company. Two years later, China fined GSK $500 million and deported a top executive for bribing doctors to prescribe its drugs. The company told the BBC it had “published a statement of apology to the Chinese government and its people.”
As a sign of how few people know how bad Zantac potentially is, the “new” version of it called famotidine is being marketed “building on the Zantac brand’s established history and legacy.”
Blame Exxon for the dead children of Turkey, eh? It’s not the corrupt building codes, the crustal plates, or the solar magnetic field. Climate change sets off earthquakes, you know.
A High Priest Ecologist has read the chicken entrails and prophesies that things will get worse. Your car creates earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis — unless it’s an EV. It’s hard to satirize this, it’s too stupid.
It’s not just earthquakes — it’s tsunamis and volcanoes too:
We do not know for sure what triggered this horrific natural disaster, but we do know there is growing scientific evidence that climate change increases the risk of such tremors, together with tsunamis and volcanic eruptions.
Here comes Occult Science:
“If a fault is primed or ready to rupture, all that is needed is the pressure of a handshake to set if off […] Environmental changes associated with rapid and accelerating climate breakdown could easily do the job,” professor of geophysics and climate hazards at University College London Bill McGuire pointed out back in 2012.
If a fault is “primed to rupture” and the pressure of shaking hands will set it off, then presumably semi-trailers in Turkey are a no-no. I mean, if the Big One wasn’t set off by climate change at 4.17am, then it would have been by the Ford F-Max at 4:18. Do these professors even read what they write?
And biblical hellfire will reign:
Furthermore, NASA scientists acknowledged that glaciers retreating due to global warming have been triggering earthquakes in Alaska in the last decades.
The impact is not limited to the Arctic. As melting glaciers change the distribution of weight across the Earth’s crust, the resulting “glacial isostatic adjustment” drives changes in plate tectonics that could lead to more earthquakes, awaken volcanoes and even affect the movement of the Earth’s axis.
Melting gigatons of ice might well affect crust plate tectonics, but solar activity is much more likely to be melting the ice, not the air-conditioners of Sydney, or the hair-dryers of London — in which case all the carbon credits in the world won’t stop a single seismic event. The effort to shield us with windmills will look like necromancers shouting at the breeze.
And occult science flows straight into tribal hate
Everything fossil fuel companies do is a crime against humanity. They are the “evil spirits” of the climate cult. A google search for “climate activists launch law suits” gets 3 million results. But when fossil fuel companies target 150 environmental activists it’s proof that they run the world:
A series of investigations and legal proceedings over the years have shown how fossil fuel giants call the shots: they use and abuse the rule of law to escape accountability for environmental pollution, resource-grabbing and cronyism. Those objecting are often silenced.
Just over the last decade, fossil fuel companies in the United States have targeted over 150 environmental activists with lawsuits.
Oh woe is us, say the purveyors of nonsense. They can’t persuade the world to follow their soothsayers, so they feel silenced and victimized if they can’t turn off the taps on major gas pipelines instead:
Meanwhile, dozens of US states are in the process of enacting “critical infrastructure” legislation, increasing criminal penalties against activists protesting pipelines that will wreck the planet.
Professor İbrahim Özdemir is shamelessly exploiting the deaths in Turkey to promote his own career
Here is his byline:
Professor İbrahim Özdemir is a UN advisor and an ecologist teaching at Üsküdar University. He has served as Director-General at the Department of Foreign Affairs of the Turkish Ministry of Education and was a leading member in drafting the Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change endorsed by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC.
Complexity has a price, and a renewables grid is a bit like a 240 volt moving Rubiks cube. Here we see an unnecessary project hit by a random factor that in turn will affect all the others, blowing out other costs and schedules.
Australia’s breakneck energy transition, driven like a crash test dummy by government subsidies, depends on finishing the massive pumped hydro scheme called Snowy 2.0. However it has hit another delay no one apparently saw coming.
“Australia’s biggest renewable energy project” is the $6 – 10 billion plan to pump water uphill so it can run back down again to generate electricity every time the windmills and solar panels suffer a catastrophic failure, which is nearly every day. The entire project is superfluous in a grid with coal power — as we know from the last fifty years when we didn’t need it.
Unfortunately a 2,400 ton Tunnel Boring Machine called Florence is quite stuck under a cave-in. According to the ABC she started ten months ago, and is supposed to be digging her way through 15 kilometres (10 miles) of mountain. The stuck bore can’t go forwards, but she can’t go back the way she came in either. The team has installed concrete reinforcing behind Florence as she moved and the concrete reinforcing effectively locks her in. It’s meant to be a one way trip.
So we have the irony of a machine designed to carve through miles of rock trapped inside a pile of sand. But it gets worse.
Last month, the Snowy Hydro Corporation said it was monitoring a “surface depression” above the boring machine. So a local man decided to go looking for the hole. As he says “technically, [Florence] should be 9 kilometers in but I thought I’d start about 3 kilometers out and start walking my way back in,” Mr Anderson said.
He spent four days looking for the hole only to find it, wow, barely 150 meters from the entrance.
His big shock was not the hole, but that the tunnel borer had barely achieved anything at all. These machines are designed to travel 30 to 50 meters a day, so this short tunnel is effectively one week’s work. The Snowy 2.0 scheme is supposed to be finished by December 2026, (just revised a week ago to Dec 2027) but at the current rate of 60 centimeters (2ft) a day it will take about 70 years to finish.
Looks like we will need those old coal plants for a bit longer. This delay could affect the rollout of new renewables.
The hole is only 150m from the entrance.
Future options include jacking it up (described as “a huge task”) or disassembling Florence — all 143 meters and 2,400 tons — and extracting the machine in pieces. But if they do that, they will have to start the whole tunnel again. Still they hadn’t got very far…
You’d never know Australia was a top mining nation, eh?
Pumped Hydro is giant appliance that sucks electricity and gives you back some later. In a system with reliable baseload generators it is superfluous, redundant, and entirely unnecessary. It is an expense we don’t have to have, didn’t need, and don’t want to pay for. It can only make things more expensive than the system we used to have. Not only do we have to pay for the giant infrastructure, every day it operates we also throw away 20 – 30% of the electrons (so to speak) that go through it.
The mammoth pumped Hydro scheme is a $10 billion dollar disaster that will never pay for itself, is already being superseded by battery technology, and will scar the land, infect pristine alpine lakes, risk critically endangered species, damage fishing grounds, and breach the Biosecurity Act in a National park. (Where are the environmentalists, Tim Flannery? Does anyone care?)
Thanks to Steve Hunter
UPDATE: A net-zero grid (without nuclear power) needs 23 Snowy 2.0 schemes for storage:
The Australian Energy Market Operator estimates that by 2050, without coal power plants, the National Electricity Market will require 45 GW and 620 gigawatt-hours of storage in all its forms to manage variations in fast-growing wind and solar generation, and to keep the grid stable. The figure rises steeply the closer the grid gets to 100 per cent renewables.
Snowy chief commercial officer Gordon Wymer points to an old estimate from ITK Services that some 8000 GWh – 23 times the capacity of Snowy 2.0 – could be needed for a fully renewable NEM, while Snowy’s own estimates signal that three to five times the capacity of 2.0 is needed for a 50-60 per cent renewable grid. (ITK principal David Leitch says his estimate is out of date and refers back to AEMO’s estimates.)
Snowy 2.0 needs huge transmission line construction as well (Humelink and VNI West):
There’s another $6 billion in transmission lines that we didn’t need for a coal fired grid.
“The cost/benefit analyses undertaken by TransGrid and also by AEMO makes quite clear that HumeLink plus Snowy 2.0 – they go together, the one is useless without the other – will destroy the wealth of New South Wales electricity consumers and Australian taxpayers,” says Bruce Mountain, director of longstanding Snowy 2.0 critic, Victoria Energy Policy Centre at Victoria University.
He says findings by AEMO and TransGrid that HumeLink provides net benefits only get to that conclusion by ignoring the cost of Snowy 2.0.
Broad argues the new transmission was required as long as 10 years ago, pointing to the bottlenecks in the system that prevent even the existing Snowy hydropower output reaching Melbourne and Sydney during demand spikes on hot summer days. Lack of grid capacity is also crimping new wind and solar generation, he notes, saying the critics are “missing the point” and getting caught up in “the politics of who’s doing what”.
Broad fears the $3.3 billion HumeLink will slide into 2027, while the $3 billion VNI West, which three years ago was expected by 2028, is now pencilled in for July 2031 in AEMO’s latest draft grid blueprint but may slip into 2032.
Recent Comments