The headline is a PsyOp all on its own. You didn’t know you were not allowed to eat crickets and powdered mealworm larvae before. Rejoice in a freedom won:
The European Commission declares new insect products safe for consumption. So from Tuesday, powdered house crickets and the small mealworm will also be allowed in food.
Back in February last year, the European Union announced that three species of insects would henceforth be allowed for human consumption: the migratory spider cricket, the yellow mealworm and the house cricket. Now the European Commission is adding several more insect products to the authorised list…
Insects, they tell us, are “highly nutritious” in a vague non-specific way that does not list a single nutrient which we can’t get enough of at the moment. Instead the main, “unique” selling point is that if we eat crickets we might slow storms eighty years from now:
Insects are also seen as part of the transition to a more environmentally friendly and plant-based food system. The creatures emit less greenhouse gases, have a lot less water and arable land, and convert food into protein much more efficiently than traditional sources of meat.
Ponder that this is yet another vested industry — dependent on the broken climate models. Another cheer squad for carbon taxes.
Cricket powder will now be permitted in a number of food products, such as multigrain bread, crackers, cereal bars, biscuits, beer-like beverages, chocolates, sauces, whey powder, soups, and other items “intended for the general population,” according to the new regulation.
Get ready: It doesn’t need to have specific labeling because we aren’t absolutely sure if it will kill people yet:
Because evidence linking cricket powder to allergic reactions is “inconclusive,” the European Commission decided that no specific labeling requirements should be included in the EU list of authorized novel foods, according to the regulation.
The New York Allergy and Sinus Centers has nevertheless found that “several allergic reactions to crickets” have been reported in the past two years. Individuals allergic to shellfish such as shrimp, crabs, and lobsters “may develop an allergy to crickets” because the species share many of the same proteins.
While insects don’t need a “special label” they do need to be listed somewhere in 4 point font on ingredients lists:
However, the European Commission insists that ingredients must always be properly declared on packaging labels. Manufacturers must always indicate which type of insect it concerns. After all, some people may be allergic to insect food, although this needs to be investigated further. This would mainly concern consumers who are also allergic to crustaceans, molluscs or house dust mites.
On the downside, if you have a prawn or dust-mite allergy you may now need an epipen since prawns and dust-mites didn’t use to suddenly appear in chips and crackers. And hardly anyone sold prawn-flavoured-beer or dust-mite-in-dips. On the upside, if you don’t die, after a few painful years you may have done your own oral desensitization program which normally costs $3,000 from an immunologist.
Of course, we could all just share photos and boycott them all. Vote with your wallet.
“It’s better for the environment” chirps the local Woolworths Australian variety. At least this is not hiding in a cake mix.
The globalists ever so crappy,
Say eat ze bugs and be happy,
But Jiminy Cricket,
Their taste is so wicked,
That we all end up wearing a nappy.
If we don’t teach our children how to spot cults and con artists they might grow into adults who lie on roads, tie themselves to cranes, and throw soup on a Van Gogh. Those who benefit from Climate “action” are exploiting mentally ill people.
A lady with the unlikely name of Zion Lights was once a spokeswoman for Extinction Rebellion but quit and is now speaking out about their brainwashing, destructive behaviour, and the way they never seemed to want to solve climate change.
“The whole thing was a masterclass on how to manipulate emotions”, she says. She was told to “cry on TV” and bring her children to protests. Fellow activists there were so brainwashed some were sure they were going to die before thirty, and the leader of the movement, Roger Hallam offered them salvation, preyed on their guilt, compared himself to Gandhi and MLK and called himself a prophet. But was rude to followers, wouldn’t listen, and really didn’t care about “the people” at all. Ultimately, while he talked about armageddon, “he did nothing to prevent it” she said.
The hypocrisy finally got to her. Ms Lights wanted to talk about nuclear power as a way to solve climate change, but wasn’t allowed to. Indeed, for even suggesting it, she was attacked and called a “climate denier”. What could be worse than that, eh?
As XR hit speed bumps, Roger Hallam did what all self-respecting narcissist con-men do when the going got tough, he avoided answering questions and moved on to set up “Just Stop Oil” — the new incarnation of climate cultishness and road-gluing behavior.
The climate movement is splintering under the weight of absurdities and over-reach, tearing itself apart because there aren’t any real principles to hold itself together. If they cared about CO2 they’d care about reducing it, if they cared about people they wouldn’t treat them so rudely.
At its peak the movement was paying key activists up to £400-a-week to lead protests. Somehow £200,000 was being fed into a “grassroots movement” semi-staffed by professionals who happened to be the right personality type.
Ms Lights left XR two or three years ago and went on to work with Michael Shellenberger for a while promoting nuclear power, but he’s become such a skeptic, perhaps it’s not a good fit anymore. She has set up her own group called “Emergency Reactor“. Obviously, she still believes in the climate change religion, and thinks reliable facts come from “the UN, IPCC and the WHO” — just that she tells green groups to “back nuclear or back down”. Her movement is sort of half-sensible but suspended on an ocean of absurdly stupid science, so it will appeal to the few who are pragmatic enough to solve climate change but not pragmatic enough to check the science. Without help from marxist fans, minions-of-doom, the renewables industry, big-bankers, and China or Russia — which she obviously won’t get — her movement looks doomed.
I see Zion Lights has an MSc in Science Communication, (my very own field) which is presumably why she has no idea what science is. Science Communicators are trained to be marketers for Big-Gov-Science, not journalists to serve the people.
As a member of Extinction Rebellion, writes Zion Lights, I watched people brainwashed into pulling outrageous stunts in the name of ‘saving the planet.’
But there were red flags.
At my first XR media training, I was instructed to cry on television. “People need to see crying mothers,” Jamie Kelsey-Fry, the trainer and longtime XR activist, told me. “They need to be woken up to what they should really care about.” They asked if I’d bring my children to climate marches for the same reason. The whole thing was a masterclass on how to manipulate emotions. We were instructed to bring everything back to the climate emergency and how politicians were failing us. Nothing about solutions or science.
“You could almost describe Roger as the leader of a cult.”
… over time, I realized there was something wrong, and that the guy in charge of XR, Roger Hallam, was the root of it.
Roger, 56, an organic-farmer-turned-radical, is XR’s most dominant leader. He turned to activism after his farm business in Wales collapsed—a failure he blamed on extreme weather. In 2018, Roger founded XR with several people, but his ego propelled him to the top.
When I first saw Roger in the XR office in London, I didn’t see his appeal. His wiry gray hair was unkempt, and he sat behind his desk every day eating pungent homemade hummus. I noticed he didn’t pay attention to people when they talked. That we were facing certain death was his justification (or rationalization) for being rude to everyone.
Members called him a hero, and fell for his constant self-comparisons to MLK and Gandhi. He referred to himself as a prophet, and “proved” he was a martyr through regular arrests and stints in jail.
“He’s a genius,” Joel Scott-Halkes, another spokesperson, told me. Another common refrain: “He’s the only chance we’ve got.”
Roger liked to claim that war, murder and “the rape of young women on a global scale” are just around the corner.
While Roger insists he’s saving the human species from Armageddon, he doesn’t do the things you need to do to prevent it—like lobbying for legislation, electing sustainability-focused politicians, or fighting for actual solutions. (The Free Press got no response from Roger Hallam after sending requests for comment via email and his website.)
There have been a lot of dead whales on the East Coast of the US lately. David Wojik noticed that NOAA was investigating 178 dead whales in something called an Unusual Mortality Event, or a UME — it’s like an episode of X-Files.
NOAA says this wave of strandings mysteriously started in 2016 which was before the offshore wind factory industry got going — but Wojik points out the timing matches very well. Offshore lease sales for the wind industry ramped up 2015-16. There were nine big sales, he says, off New Jersey, New York, Delaware and Massachusetts. And not so coincidentally, apparently 2016 was also the year that NOAA started giving permission slips for whale hunts, sorry whale harrassments for “geotechnical and site characterization surveys“.
In bureaucrat-valium-lingo, the license to cause incidental dead whales is called an IHA — or an Incidental Harassment Authorization. This appears to have fooled Greenpeace.
Although since wind turbines are a sacred totem, NOAA could have called them a 007 License to Kill Humpbacks and they might not have cared either. The whales are dying for the planet you know. They’re probably happy about it too.
The “unusual mortality” data is astounding. Basically the humpback death rate roughly tripled starting in 2016 and continued high thereafter.
To date NOAA has issued an astounding 46 one-year IHA’s for offshore wind sites. Site characterization typically includes the protracted use of what I call “machine gun sonar”. This shipboard device emits an incredibly loud noise several times a second, often for hours at a time, as the ship slowly maps the sea floor.
There’s been a string of stories about the downside of vaccines; how they might be fueling new variants, how the harms have been suppressed, how doctors have been silenced, and now how the advertising is “deceptive”. Personal stories are flowing forth.
Musk had taken the vaccines so he could visit his factory in Germany. The next day Scott Adams of Dilbert cartoon fame declared “the anti-vaccers clearly won. I lost.” And he wasn’t joking.
Rassmussen’s survey has reached 29 million views and they credit Scott Adams and Elon Musk.
Photo by Hakan Nural on Unsplash
As far as I can tell, the big media breach started in early January with the Wall Street Journal asking: Are Vaccines Fueling New Covid Variants?” It’s been a long time coming. We discussed these risks here twenty months ago: Leaky vaccines may trigger an arms race that makes Covid more dangerous. The WSJ story was a long feature article, heavy with scientific lingo. Even if most readers missed the significance, editors would have noticed the unthinkable had quietly been said. The vaccines were boosting the wrong antibodies, and people who had more shots were more likely to catch new covid variants. Alyssia Finlay, the author and editor, was holding a box of scorpions, and the article was heavy because she was using peer reviewed papers and technical jargon as a shield to ward off the criticism she knew would come.
That Wall Street article generated nearly 3,000 very heated comments, and another 500 in The Australian. It was denounced as “irresponsible”, “fallacious” and “wrong” and misinformation (of course) but it was a turning point. Interspersed among the noisy critics were people telling their sad stories of injuries.
Perhaps for the first time there was a conversation
Commenters were astonished — Joseph Breton wrote:
“Will my account be suspended if I agree with the WSJ journalist? Normally this type of truth-telling doesn’t sit well with the moderators. Maybe they’ll just delete the whole article.“
Within days there were letters to the editor from doctors saying “Of course it fuels new variants“. The same author, Allysia Finley, went on to write about how the experts hid the dangers, rushed the process and didn’t do enough testing.
The experts are responsible for vaccine skepticism because they aren’t honest about the potential risks.
With thousands dying each day, the FDA in December 2020 decided it couldn’t wait for an exhaustive study and authorized the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines after two large randomized controlled trials showed they were nearly 95% effective against symptomatic infection. But patients had been tracked for only a few months. The trials included too few participants to identify relatively rare adverse effects, especially among those of different age groups or with particular medical conditions. Public-health officials couldn’t conclude with any certainty whether the vaccines cause, for example, neurological symptoms in 1 of every 100,000 recipients or cardiac problems in 1 of every 10,000 young men.
Clearly Allysia Finley had been reading “the internet”:
The internet is full of stories of unexplained deaths that follow vaccines, many of which may be coincidence but some of which may not. The more the experts deny or ignore what people see with their own eyes, or what new evidence and experience show, the more people will ignore their counsel and be open to charlatans who undermine all vaccination.
The Majors and the media ignored the biggest protests in decades
It’s all still couched in generic pro-vaccination terms but suddenly people have a license to say “this vaccine is different”. Finley was called a “purveyor of dangerous public health disinformation”. But the comments kept coming, and the scientific debate has been unleashed.
Commenter Nathanial Haynes was delighted in the change:
” I must say, as someone who has been consistently skeptical of the covid vaccine charade it is a profound pleasure to read these comments. Where once the voices that were doubtful about the wisdom of giving people shots with very a VERY short track record, built on an untested platform and through force and coercion were few and far between it appears that common sense and sanity have prevailed. Perhaps we aren’t doomed after all?
Commenters who need to “Believe the Experts” are floundering and using the same old strategies of namecalling, platitudes and derision. You know the drill: all vaccines have risks; you’re just an anti-vaxxer; all these amateurs think they can do orthopedic surgery; does that mean you take your child to a barber for major surgery..? They are outnumbered and out flanked.
The latest Wall Street Journal story talks about “false advertising”:
You might have heard a radio advertisement warning that if you’ve had Covid, you could get it again and experience even worse symptoms. The message, sponsored by the Health and Human Services Department, claims that updated bivalent vaccines will improve your protection.
This is deceptive advertising. …
The problems are getting repeated and packaged up quickly now:
But three scientific problems have arisen. First, the virus is evolving much faster than the vaccines can be updated. Second, vaccines have hardwired our immune systems to respond to the original Wuhan strain, so we churn out fewer antibodies that neutralise variants targeted by updated vaccines. Third, antibodies rapidly wane after a few months.
Pfizer and Moderna claim their new vaccines are better but the studies are flawed, weak, done at the wrong time and the results are not good anyway:
The studies’ findings contradict November press releases from Pfizer and Moderna asserting that their bivalents produced a response to the BA.4 and BA.5 variants four to six times that of the original boosters. These claims are misleading. Neither vaccine maker conducted a randomized trial. They tested the original boosters last winter, long before the BA.5 surge and 4½ to six months after trial participants had received their third shots. The bivalents, by contrast, were tested after BA.5 began to surge, 9½ to 11 months after recipients had received their third shots.
The CDC published a study in November that estimated the bivalents were only 22% to 43% effective against infection during the BA.5 wave—their peak efficacy. As antibodies waned and new variants took over later in the fall, their protection against infection probably dropped to zero.
Finally fingers are being pointed at the right places:
The vaccine makers designed their studies to get the results they wanted. Public-health authorities didn’t raise an eyebrow, but why would they? They have a vested interest in promoting the bivalents.
Journalists are getting better at spotting the tricks junk medical studies do. But that means the hypocrisy has been noticed:
Many of the same experts who trashed observational studies supporting hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin now flog intrinsically flawed studies on bivalent boosters.
Exactly. We’ve been fed a bunch of medical hocus both ways — to denounce safe treatments and cover up the dangers of forced ones. It’s not just heads that should roll, whole agencies need to be razed, whole companies need to be dismembered and their assets used to compensate their victims.
It’s great to see that conversation start.
h/t David Maddison, Another Ian, Scott of the Pacific.
Golly but, that’s a strange spot to leave a solar panel…
Sydney reached the longest cold streak for 140 years, and it looked like it might become the longest ever. But then a few days ago, after 331 days of cool weather, temperatures reached the magic 30.2C* at Observatory Hill Sydney ending the newsworthy cold run.
Back in 1883 Sydney had 339 days in-a-row where the thermometer didn’t make it up to 30C (86F). Since then, five million people arrived, along with the Cahill Expressway, skyscrapers, and 100,000 cars a day, but even that, apparently, wasn’t enough artificial urban warming to reach temperatures of 140 years ago.
But Craig Kelly (former MP) has some footage from that famous site and asks “What’s going on here?”
Climate change causes roaming solar panels?
That’s a strange spot to leave a panel… | CraigKelly
It’s even more suspicious when looked at from above. The solar panel position (marked in red) is exactly due south of the Stevenson screen where the thermometer is kept (marked with an arrow). If, hypothetically, someone wanted to leave a reflective object pointed at the box at midday, that’d be the place to do it. (Midday of course, is around 1pm Daylight Savings time — or 1:06pm exactly.)
The record on Jan 18th was set between 2pm and 2.30pm.
Note the 5m calibration mark on the bottom right. That solar panel is closer than that.
Five metres due south of the Stevenson screen…? Google Maps
Someone has already done a backyard experiment, which is probably more than the million-dollar-a-day BOM has done. And it’s pretty obvious that sunlight reflects off a solar panel. But then, the Experts say the Sydney Observatory set-up is accurate to a tenth of a degree and we shouldn’t trust the non-standard equipment of 1883, because it doesn’t have solar panels lying around, I mean, it wasn’t standardized…
The same Experts also say that screens should have a 30 meter buffer zone cleared around them. Nevermind about that. Remember it was 30.2C on Jan 18th, so tell the world, right?
Note to the ABC, who’s full time meteorologist Tom Saunders, didn’t visit the site, this is what unpaid citizen journalists do. Will the two-million-dollars-a-day ABC find a moment to ask the BoM why the solar panel was there? Was it connected to anything, when was it “installed” and is it mentioned in the meta-data? Perhaps the panel was at the wrong angle and had no effect, but if the BOM was an agency of science, it would want to know.
More importantly, if “climate change” is the greatest threat we face today, the BOM would act like temperature measurements matter.
As long as the BOM treats their sites like a joke, we know “climate change” isn’t science.
* Lance points out that the BOM observations above show 30.1C as the max (which was what I wrote in the post initially) but apparently there was at least one or two seconds at 30.2C in that half hour which means officially the max was 30.2C.
Two wins. BlackRock has agreed to Ron DeSantis’ demands that Florida’s state pension funds can’t be used for eco-activism fantasy quests (like ESG*). Now they have to be used to make profits for the people those funds belong to. That’s not much of a win you might think, since that’s just a return to “the world we thought we were living in”, but in the World of Absurd it’s popping a very important bubble. Possibly “the” most important bubble — the loose money driving the trainwreck of stupid investments and sabotage-like-boycotts.
Secondly — Larry Fink feels hurt. The glitter-wheels are falling off the climate fund-wagon. The CEO of BlackRock was running around the world acting like the third largest nation on Earth. He was waving ten trillion dollars of other people’s money and bossing people into joining his cult. That party is coming undone.
Larry Fink — who called climate change the investing opportunity of his lifetime — tells Davos gathering he’s working to change the narrative, such as Elon Musk saying ESG’s ‘S’ stands for ‘satanic’
That’s fund giant BlackRock Inc.’s(BLK) Chief Executive Larry Fink’s answer when asked this week at the glitzy Switzerland gathering of executives, economists and politicians about the “anti-woke” pushback against Wall Streeters who see investment opportunity in fighting climate change.
Fink said… “”Let’s be clear, the narrative is ugly, the narrative is creating this huge polarization.”
Larry Fink said that criticism of ESG investing has become personal and accused critics of trying to “demonize” an investment strategy he has championed for the past several years.
“I’m taking this very seriously,” the BlackRock chief said in an interview with Bloomberg TV on Tuesday. “We are trying to address the misconceptions. It’s hard because it’s not business any more, they’re doing it in a personal way. And for the first time in my professional career, attacks are now personal. They’re trying to demonize the issues.”
Karma. When did Larry Fink say anything about the rampant demonization and personal attacks on climate skeptics?
Florida hasn’t taken much money back from Fink (in the big scheme), but they have shown the way, and Fink must be worried that if word spreads, BlackRock could become an empty shell. There is a long way to go, but the legal process used by US State governments against BlackRock can cut the heads off the funding hydra that takes trillions of dollars from citizens and uses it against them.
What would it look like if a doomsday cult had a billion dollars to spend on a skiing holiday?
Maybe like the World Economic Forum: Here are people who think they are the select few, saviours of the world. They’re touched, they say by something (like an extra terrestrial maybe?) It’s an apocalypse, you know, like 600,000 Hiroshima class atomic bombs says Al Gore. They’re boiling the oceans.
They might be powerful and rich, but the good news is they are utterly absurd.
The modern prophets are here to rescue you
Especially US climate envoy John Kerry:
“When you start to think about it, it’s pretty extraordinary that we – a select group of human beings, because of whatever touched us at some point in our lives – are able to sit in a room and come together and actually talk about saving the planet,” Kerry told a WEF panel on Tuesday.
“It’s so… almost extra-terrestrial to think about, saving the planet. If you say that to most people most people, they think you’re just a crazy tree hugging and lefty liberal, you know, do-gooder, whatever,” he added.
From somewhere above Earth in an omnipotent kind of place, here’s someone who thinks he’s God:
As Jordan Peterson says: “Who are you gong to sacrifice to save the planet @JohnKerry — and do you think and how will you ensure that they have any say in the matter?“
It’s the hellfire and brimstone formula, with hyperbole, sensationalism and big-scary-numbers.
Chris Donaldson, BizPac Review, claimed the overstuffed prophet of climate doom delivered a deranged rant, and all Donaldson had to do was quote him:
“We’re still putting 162 million tons into it every single day, and the accumulated amount is now trapping as much extra heat as would be released by 600,000 Hiroshima class atomic bombs exploding every single day on the Earth,” Gore said.
“That’s what’s boiling the oceans, creating these atmospheric rivers and the rain bombs and sucking the moisture out of the land and creating the droughts and melting the ice and raising the sea level and causing these waves of climate refugees predicted to reach 1 billion in this century,” he ranted.
“Look at the xenophobia and political authoritarian trends that have come from just a few million refugees. What about a billion? We would lose our capacity for self governance on this world.
Modern science is just a competition to see who can cry the most. It’s national policy by agony aunt analysis. The terror and tears are right there in the national policy news at The Guardian. Six months after the UK experienced a hypothetical 40 degree minute the media are still dining out on the psychoanalysis of it.
What is it like to have a front row seat for the worst show in the world? Four meteorologists describe how they are explaining the reality to viewers – and coping with it themselves
Long gone is the British stiff upper lip as the Luftwaffe bomb London, now beach weather brings tears:
Switching channels, the ITV meteorologist Laura Tobin, who does the weather bulletins on Good Morning Britain, was also on duty that day. Like Rich, she had been watching the models with a mixture of incredulity and dread. “I remember when I did my first bulletin on that Tuesday morning I forecast that we would break 40C. Then when I sat down and chatted to my producer, I had tears in my eyes. Something I had thought would be a reality in the future was a reality that day. We shouldn’t be reaching these temperatures – it would be impossible to without climate change.”
TV journalists are, in theory, supposed to ask hard questions — like maybe whether hot records mean anything at all when they are recorded with equipment that sits next to hot tarmac, has an error margin of 1 to 2C, and lasted less than three minutes. Three of the five hottest spots that day were also at airports while a station in the green fields of Harpenden only reach 37.8°C. See Cliscep for all those details.
If you don’t like forty degree days, don’t build next to a tarmac.
It was hardly the “New Normal” it was the hyped hot two-minutes
The record [at RAF Coningsby] was set at 3.12pm following a sudden jump in temperature of 0.6°C in the previous two minutes. Sixty seconds later, the temperature fell to 39.7°C. The Met Office has refused to answer our questions on the matter.
So the record probably didn’t even exist, and even if it did, it’s hardly a PTSD event to be psychoanalysed months later. Get ready for therapy:
I’m talking to four weather presenters and meteorologists about what it is like to have a front row seat at the worst show in the world: the climate crisis.
Weather is not the same as climate, except when it is:
Of course, weather is not the same thing as the climate: one happens over days, the other decades. But, as Clare Nasir puts it: “Climate impacts weather.”
Obviously the weather-isn’t-climate line is getting to them. Let’s use it.
And they know their whole faith comes back to climate models
If you start with useless models — CO2 can pretend to fill in for all the other variables you forgot:
She explains how scientists have learned to detect a climate-change footprint in a particular weather event (extreme heat, rain, storms, etc) “by running the computer models with the scenario that has just happened but with lower amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to see if you could actually squeeze out that temperature, or that amount of rainfall. They then go back and put in a lot of different scenarios so they can calculate the likelihood of this event happening because of climate change. They can put a number on it – say, for example, it’s 100 times more likely this event has occurred because of climate change.”
Climate models are just the neolithic binary entrails that modern shamen read. The modelers don’t even include electromagnetism, space weather, cosmic rays and changes in UV spectrum. If any of those changed the climate in the last fifty years, the models will blame CO2 instead. That’s what they are designed to do…
Tobin’s in tears again: “there’ll be no more reindeer”
This is what 40 years of feminism has brought us, the right for women to cry on TV?
In 2021 Tobin went to Svalbard, the Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic, to report for Good Morning Britain. She saw how the glaciers had receded, how the fjords were no longer freezing over, how this was affecting the wildlife: polar bears were dying, human economies were dying. And again there were tears, this time live on camera. “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t want it to be about me crying; I wanted it to be about the science. But I just saw the reality of it and it moved me. I realised that we – everybody – is responsible for that change. Seeing the reality compared to seeing and knowing the science was different. That was the moment for me when I was like: I want my daughter to come back and see this. If we don’t change there may be no reindeer, polar bears or glaciers when she’s my age. That was reality.”
It doesn’t get much more embarrassing for women in science than disappearing reindeer, except possibly for women who use namecalling, guilt, and ad hom attacks:
Back then, [Clair] Nasir says, the media thought it needed to provide a “balanced” point of view, and “even though the science at that point was pretty much spot on, they were allowing these climate deniers – whether they were in the pockets of the fossil fuel companies or whatever – to come on to voice their opinions without any factual backing whatsoever. I’m going to say this in the harshest possible terms: everybody had blood on their hands.”
It’s not science, it’s just a Psy-Op. The money is a billion times bigger on their side. Someone tell Clair about the $130 trillion dollar banker cartel called GFANZ.
Surprise: Government fixes price, and gas supply gets paralyzed
Now that the Australian government has played the Command Economy Joker Card, the gas industry has accidentally frozen. The old rules that set prices competitively have been set on fire, and the new rules are written in government jello. No one wants to set up new long term contracts when the government could change their mind any day, and the industry may either miss out on huge profits a year from now, or be in breach of “goodwill” and “reasonable price” provisions that are the legal equivalent of Ebola.
For some reason ordering people to have goodwill “or else”, just means everyone hires more lawyers, no one knows what they can “reasonably” charge, investors run for the hills, and production shrinks. It’s almost as if the free market turned into a Soviet economy… if the government decides the price, it’s almost like the government owns the industry, yeah?
Samantha McCulloch, the chief executive of the Australian Petroleum Production & Exploration Association (Appea), said…. “The lack of clarity on how the price cap order is to be applied alongside the threat of permanent gas price regulation has virtually paralysed the market.”
Companies could face a $50m penalty for breaching rules that are still being defined, she said…
Multiple energy retailers across the eastern seaboard have stopped taking new gas customers and others are ramping up their prices as they struggle to secure ongoing supply from producers following the Albanese government’s imposition of a wholesale price cap.
And energy retailers can’t get gas:
Australia’s second-largest energy retailer, AGL, has been unable to secure contract supply of gas for 2023, prompting it to cease taking new commercial and industrial customers…
Every energy retailer The Australian contacted said they had been unable to secure gas from producers under the $12/GJ price cap.
“No counterparty is currently willing to sell at the proposed $12 rate, and we’re not even sure how it’ll work in practice when the reforms come into place, since there’s very little that seems to be actual concrete around it right now,” Mr Yemm said.
Strangely price caps do not drill holes and find more gas:
“The superficial appeal of capping prices is quickly eroded as investment wanes and production falls, leading to sustained higher prices over the longer term and inevitable supply constraints,” Mr Heffernan said. “If the desire is to increase supply, especially during periods of high need, and reduce prices, then price caps do the opposite.”
“If suppliers don’t know what (the reasonable pricing) provision is, it would be difficult to write a multi-year contract,” Ms Reeve said.
“If they assume a future higher price, they may get caught out if that price is later determined to be ‘unreasonable’. If they assume $12/GJ continues, they may miss out on profits.
The most competitive household gas prices on the east coast are already as high as Jim Chalmers’ worst-case scenario, as retailers hike prices by a further 20 per cent from next month.
The European Commission declares new insect products safe for consumption. So from Tuesday, powdered house crickets and the small mealworm will also be allowed in food.
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