Matt Taibbi is reading through the TwitterFile emails between the FBI and Twitter and found strangely petty and detailed requests which reveal much more than you might think. The FBI were sending through requests to ban trivial no-name accounts who just posted jokes. They were also asking for their “location information” of people posting the jokes. The overreaction shows how entangled Twitter was with the FBI on day to day operations, but also reveals the hot button priority topic the FBI was so concerned about was election “misinformation”. What are the FBI most afraid of?
“a surprisingly high number [of emails] are requests by the FBI for Twitter to take action on election misinformation, even involving joke tweets from low-follower accounts.
Federal intelligence and law enforcement reach into Twitter included the Department of Homeland Security, which partnered with security contractors and think tanks to pressure Twitter to moderate content.
It’s no secret the government analyzes bulk data for all sorts of purposes, everything from tracking terror suspects to making economic forecasts.
The #TwitterFiles show something new: agencies like the FBI and DHS regularly sending social media content to Twitter through multiple entry points, pre-flagged for moderation.
They were even trying to ban some people just from saying “”Get out there and Vote Wednesday”. Taibbi asks: This, is what the FBI spends time on?
2. Holy cow, me, an account with the reach of an amoeba
3. What else are they looking at?”
Instead of chasing child sex predators or terrorists, the FBI has agents — lots of them — analyzing and mass-flagging social media posts. Not as part of any criminal investigation, but as a permanent, end-in-itself surveillance operation. People should not be okay with this.
“The FBI regularly engages with private sector entities to provide information specific to identified foreign malign influence actors’ subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities. ”
To which Matt Taibbi says it was not about crime but about about controlling opinions:
“This FBI response is disingenuous on multiple fronts. None of this expains flagging the silly jokes of ordinary Americans with low follower counts. Also, they are clearly not doing this in service of investigating crime. This is about domestic intelligence and opinion control.“
The collusion was comprehensive. The FBI delivered up “products” from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The Twitter team could received reports via something called the Partner Support Portal, an outlet created by the Center for Internet Security, a partner organization to the DHS. They could also get reports from “Teleporter” which is an FBI platform. There is a string of three letter acronym agencies in contact with Twitter, including demands to know why Twitter didn’t take action on a tweet from Donald Trump (you know, The President).
In summary, Matt Taibbi says:
.he takeaway: what most people think of as the “deep state” is really a tangled collaboration of state agencies, private contractors, and (sometimes state-funded) NGOs. The lines become so blurred as to be meaningless.
Speaking of Deep State revelations…
Why are the CIA still hiding files 60 years later?
In 1992 Congress decided the JFK files should be released in 2017, but the files remain locked, even though everyone named in them is dead. The Trump administration promised the files would be released, but Mike Pompeo, director of the CIA, applied intense pressure and they were not released. Today the Biden administration did the same. Tucker Carlson asked someone who has seen them:
We spoke to someone who had access to these still hidden CIA documents, a person who was deeply familiar with what they contained. We asked this person directly, “Did the CIA have a hand in the murder of John F. Kennedy, an American President? And here’s the reply we received verbatim. Quote,
The answer is yes. I believe they were involved. It’s a whole different country from what we thought it was. It’s all fake.
It’s hard to imagine a more jarring response than that. Again, this is not a “conspiracy theorist” that we spoke to. Not even close. This is someone with direct knowledge of the information that once again is being withheld from the American public. And the answer we received was unequivocal.
Even Carlson was shocked:
It means that within the US government, there are forces wholly beyond democratic control. These forces are more powerful than the elected officials that supposedly oversee them. These forces can affect election outcomes. They can even hide their complicity in the murder of an American president. In other words, they can do pretty much anything they want.
They constitute a government within a government mocking, by their very existence, the idea of democracy.
If it’s true, then the CIA decided who the President of America was, and that was 60 years ago. The JFK files become a kind of Schrodinger Box. To see them is to know they can’t be spoken of. If a President opened those files, and if the evidence is there, what President would release them?
Who would risk the ire of an agency they thought had killed a President and gotten away with it?
The most courageous newscast in 60 years. The CIA’s murder of my uncle was a successful coup d’état from which our democracy has never recovered. @TuckerCarlson
The backlash has been swift. Over the weekend, Kaili was stripped of her responsibilities as vice president, expelled from her party both in Greece and Brussels, and saw Greek prosecutors freeze her assets.
At least there is still some hope justice will be done, for common criminals if not for the criminal investigators.
___________________________
The Babylon Bee satirical site got banned on Twitter, so it’s only fair they get the last word.
Government Warns That With Elon Owning Twitter They Will Only Control 97% Of The Media
“We can’t overstate how dangerous this is,” said gay black Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. “Yes, we still control Facebook, Google, Apple, Instagram, YouTube, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Hollywood, TIME, USAToday, The Wall Street Journal, and pretty much all the rest, but we don’t control Twitter. This is dangerous to democracy.”
The entire intelligence community at the CIA, FBI, and NSA concurred with the warning, stating that “Elon’s ownership of Twitter leaves America vulnerable to dangerous opinions we do not approve of.”
Last Monday in Great Britain the entire steel industry shut down because the wind stopped and wholesale prices reached £2,586 a megawatt-hour. As winter cranks up, British factories are getting ready to shutdown, as the threat of small, medium and blockbuster blackouts loom. In the fifth largest economy in the world, thousands of people are using communal warm spaces because they can’t afford electricity any longer, and the largest North Sea gas producer has decided not to drill for more gas just when the country needs it. The government has slapped a new tax on it, thus achieving the exact opposite of what the government aimed for.
Meanwhile over in Germany one eighth of the entire national economy is now consumed with paying for the energy crisis of 2022. They tried to hold back the seas in 2100 but forgot to secure their own electricity a year in advance.
But the one nobody is discussing is the real possibility the lights could go out. Two stories this week should set the alarm bells ringing. The first was that Drax had been ordered to put its (mothballed) two coal-fired power stations in North Yorkshire on standby. The second came yesterday when a power cut left 2,800 homes in Shetland without electricity. In one of the coldest snaps in recent history where energy use has been peaking, they underpinned a briefing received by Express.co.uk that Britain is teetering on the edge of a catastrophe.
According to someone close to Mr Rees-Mogg [former Business and Energy Secretary], his conclusion was: “If the lights don’t go out this winter or next it will be more luck than judgement.”
His assessment, confirmed by a Whitehall source, was the margins of available energy supply to need were so low that “just one major problem would be enough for the lights to go out.”
The reality is that Whitehall sources and former ministers have confirmed to the Daily Express the well-intentioned headlong pursuit for Net Zero carbon emissions has left the UK in a precarious position.
After becoming the minister Rees-Mogg apparently had to badger staff for two whole weeks just to get an inventory of Britain’s energy supplies. Were they slow because they didn’t want to give him the bad news, or because they had never added them up?
Gareth Stace, director of industry association UK Steel, told the Telegraph that the eye-watering wholesale electricity prices on Monday forced all his members to shut down some production until rates went back to normal.
He said: “We’re just priced out of the market. There would be no point in the energy companies telling our members to turn off, because they know that they will. You just couldn’t keep going, you just lose money for every tonne of steel you make with [energy] prices at these levels.”
Think of what €440 billion euro’s could have done instead?
That’s how much Germany has spent on energy bailouts and schemes since Russia invaded Ukraine. And it probably doesn’t include another 100 billion euro money bomb that was just approved in the German lower house.
Michael Groemling at the German Economic Institute (IW) said… “The national economy as a whole is facing a huge loss of wealth.”
The money set aside stands at up to 440 billion euros ($465 billion), according to the calculations, which provide the first combined tally of all of Germany’s drives aimed at avoiding running out of power and securing new sources of energy.
That equates to about 1.5 billion euros a day since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24. Or around 12% of national economic output. Or about 5,400 euros for each person in Germany.
They could have bought 20 nuclear reactors and secured half their electricity supply for decades to come.
Trump warned about this in 2018, but this trainwreck has been coming for twenty years.
If anyone says “but this was only a few people” — the absolute scandal here is that every nation in the West should have been doing studies like this nearly two years ago and by the hundreds.
German pathologists studied heart muscle cells in 25 people who died at home within a month of getting vaccinated. Of these, five people had strange strange clusters of white blood cells infiltrating their heart muscle and all of those died within just a week of being vaccinated. In three of those cases, the results were quite clear, and there were no other potential causes of myocarditis, and no obvious heart problems, and the link to the vaccination was quite strong. “Further studies are needed”.
Constantin Schwab and others searched back through historic records and were struck that during the last 20 years of autopsy service at Heidelberg University Hospital they had not seen any “comparable myocardial inflammatory infiltration.” It really was unusual.
In this case the myocarditis was not necessarily severe, but the mild localized inflammation in clusters may have interfered with the pattern of contraction of heart muscle, causing fibrillation — where contracting cells become unsynchronized. In that trembling state, the heart can’t pump blood and death is rapid unless someone gets “defibrillated” and the electric shock resets the pattern.
Dr John Campbell describes this study as a “smoking gun” in terms of the cause and effect connection with vaccines.
And in one of those uncanny coincidences, wouldn’t you know it, but communal defibrillators are being installed on the front of houses in a trial in one suburb of Melbourne this year. Because fibrillation can happen to anyone… see below.
Medical pathologists from Heidelberg University Hospital in Heidelberg, Germany have published direct evidence showing how people found dead after mRNA vaccination died. As this team of six scientists explore in their study, these mRNA-vaccinated patients suffered from heart damage because their hearts were attacked by their own immune cells. This autoimmune attack on their own heart cells then leads to their damaged hearts beating so many times per second that, once the tachycardia unexpectedly started, they died in minutes.
Died of Ventricular Tachycardia or Fibrillation
Ventricular tachycardia is when the heart begins beating so fast that it doesn’t have time to refill with blood between beats, so it is not adequately pumping blood. The problem originates from the ventricles: the chambers that push the blood out of the heart to the rest of the body.
In these images of heart muscle cells, inflammatory white blood cells appear as small dark spots. In D, as we zoom out we can see they are clustering sites of inflammation. These dark cells are not supposed to be there.
A Lymphocytic aggregates in the interventricular septum of case 1 with associated myocardiocyte destruction. B The infiltrate is predominantly composed of CD3-positive T-lymphocytes and C CD68-positive macrophages. D In lower magnification two foci of CD4-positive lymphocytes are evident (D)
Visibly Damaged Hearts
Macrophages are large cells that are part of our immune system. When the immune system is functioning properly, our bodies use macrophages to attack infectious agents and other foreign matter. Macrophages are a key part of the innate immune system, helping with normal tissue development as well as with repairing damaged tissue, according to researchers from Northwestern University.
But in the case of the people who died suddenly within a month of being vaccinated, the body’s own macrophages permeated their heart muscle, chewing up the muscle and causing spots that disrupted the heart rhythm. This macrophage invasion appeared to have literally short-circuited the heart’s conduction of the electrical impulses, causing the heart to beat irregularly.
The irregular heartbeats led to a negative feedback loop, making the heart race faster and faster as it tries to right itself. When that happens, the heart is effectively pumping no blood, and the victim dies within seconds or minutes unless there is a defibrillator nearby—to deliver an electrical shock to the heart to help it get back into rhythm—and someone knows to use it immediately.
Heart muscle is special, primed from the beginning to contract in regular cycles for life. Cardiac cells generate their own electrical impulses, and they send signals to the cells around them so they can synchronize their contractions. If one cells “falls out” of the pattern, presumably the others around it bring it back in. But if enough cells lose the beat, chaos spreads.
Not so coincidentally, defibrillators are being rolled out in a Melbourne suburb
In Resevoir, 28 defibrillators have been installed at the front of homes, available for anyone to use, and no more than 400m away. It’s handy for all those times a teenage jogger collapses with ventricular tachycardia.
According to the experts Sudden Cardiac Arrests can impact and affect almost anybody, don’t you know: “it’s not about age it’s not about gender, it’s simply a killer across the board”, says CEO of St John Ambulance Victoria, Gordon Botwright.
Just like when we were kids, yeah? Which house on your street had a defibrillator when you were growing up…
The researchers speculate that the lop-sided nature of the inflammatory clusters (foci) could be due to intravenous delivery:
Interestingly, we recorded inflammatory foci predominantly in the right heart, which may suggest a gradual blood-stream derived dilution effect and based on this finding it is at least tempting to speculate that inadvertent intravascular vaccine injection may be contributive.
If they are correct, tragically these deaths might have been avoided with aspirated intramuscular injections which make sure they are not going straight into the bloodstream. It only takes a little bit longer…
As part of the study, they ruled out all the other viruses and bacteria that are capable of causing myocarditis:
Fusion reactors will one day be the ultimate in “free energy”, but judging by the latest news of holy grail moments, it won’t be soon. The bonanza of energy that everyone wants was never going to come by catching photons from the sun with a million square kilometer PV net, but from recreating the source of those photons here on Earth. It’s the energy released if we can smack two atoms together and make them fuse which requires extreme temperatures and pressures (a bit like the sun) and do it efficiently, reliably, and millions of times a day.
On Dec. 5, 2022, the National Ignition Facility shot a pellet of fuel with 2 million joules of laser energy – about the amount of power it takes to run a hair dryer for 15 minutes – all contained within a few billionths of a second. This triggered a fusion reaction that released 3 million joules. That is a gain of about 1.5, smashing the previous record of a gain of 0.7 achieved by the facility in August 2021. — The Conversation
The newer numbers are slightly better than the ones released last week. This is the same lab. The energy gain appears to have improved from 20% to 50%.
“ It’s become something of a bad joke amongst the science community that fusion is always decades away. “
The announcement itself is a puzzle and had the feeling of being some much needed good news to announce. In reality although the experiments referred to took place a few months ago the “breakthrough” results were reported a year ago with the major advance being published in the Journal Nature in 2014. By one analysis 2.05 MJ of energy pumped into the pellet produced 3.15 MJ of energy. This does not include the 322 MJ needed to run the 192 lasers. So the story wasn’t a real breakthrough, just an advance. In any commercial development of this laser technique millions of fuel pellets would be needed for each reactor a year. At present they are tailor-made and cost almost $1 million each.
If confirmed, the breakthrough is quite important, putting the world into the realms of “fusion ignition”, and perhaps in the future into a sustained and controlled fusion reaction. Sustained is a key word there. The current experiment lasted a fraction of a second.
There a few extra caveats. [Like] what net energy means? The lasers used by the Lawrence Livermore laboratory are extremely inefficient, so although the experiment produced net energy compared to what the laser delivered, the lasers consumed a LOT more before to charge. The experiment released 2.5 megajoules vs 2.1 MJ of laser energy. But due to inefficiencies, the lasers consume ~330 MJ to charge, with the energy stored in 3,840 high-voltage capacitors for 60 seconds before being released in a 400-microsecond burst. See “Energizing the Lazers“.
Even though climate deniers are the most hated, reckless, planet destroying people, who are excluded from dinner parties, and hounded from office, there are somehow still a lot of them. As many as 37% of the population of 30 countries were still willing to tell a pollster that they think climate change was “mainly caused by natural phenomena”.
The poll was conducted by EDF, the French state owned electricity giant.
This clearly is not what the IPCC has been hammering home for 30 years.
According to a worldwide IPSOS survey covering two-thirds of the world’s population, nearly four people in every 10 believe climate change is mainly due to natural causes. The degree of scepticism over human-caused global warming will shock the ‘settled’ science green catastrophists, who use constant scare tactics to promote the command-and-control Net Zero agenda.
EDF seems rather bemused by its findings. It suggests that populations are noting the occurrence of what it calls “extreme climate events”, but this is not making them “more concerned, nor is it convincing them of the human origins of the phenomenon”.
Decades of relentless climate catastrophising, characterised by far-fetched predictions and forecasts that never materialise, is starting to take its toll. Perhaps, people are just getting tired of being scared all the time, all to no avail. Global warming ran out of steam at the end of the last century, despite the upward adjustments made regularly by corrupted surface temperature datasets. This year in particular has been a disaster for doomsters with coral growing back in record amounts, Arctic summer sea ice and, possibly, the Greenland ice sheet increasing in mass, and annual hurricane energy falling by 33%. Living by the sword means dying by it, although of course there is a constantly moving conveyor belt whipping up new hysteria about ‘extreme weather’ events.
Things are changing fast as energy bills bite:
EDF notes that climate skepticism has grown by six points over the last three years, while skepticism in France grew by eight points in a single year.
It takes an industrial wall of censorship of keep the simple truth from reaching most people
Imagine how big that number would be if Sixty Minutes interviewed people like Harrison Schmidt, who walked on the moon fifty years ago, and asked him why he was skeptical? Or Ivar Giaver, who won a Nobel Prize in Physics? If Channel Nine played documentaries on historic heatwaves, or thermometers next to blistering tarmacs, or exhaust vents, the Bureau of Meteorology would fix those sites in a flick, and trim their hyperbolic heatwave emergencies. If the BBC ran debates on climate change, and actually found the best people from both sides to put their reputation on the line in public, the science wouldn’t look so settled. Without relentless bullying the whole faith system would unravel in a few weeks.
After propaganda that starts in primary school and climate porn bushfires and floods in the news every year, if people aren’t already sold on it, they’re not going to be:
Populations are not reacting in the same way everywhere. 55% of Australians (+24 pts) mentioned the flooding that hit their country this year. Nevertheless, their sense of being confronted with climate change is still lower than elsewhere and is not growing.
Climate change is a rich mans fashion:
The environment is still a priority for the upper categories: while it ranks 2nd (44%) among the most affluent households, just after the increase in the cost of living, it ranks only 6th among lower-income households (36%), behind poverty and inequality (49%), unemployment (44%), the health system (41%) but also corruption.
Interestingly age is not the predictor of belief that it used to be?
Age does not appear to be a divisive criterion on this subject: the level of climate-skepticism is very similar in all age categories. Political tendency is more decisive on the other hand: in the seven countries where this political question was asked[2], 28% of supporters of the left turned out to be climate skeptics as opposed to 50% of supporters of the right.
The young rebels against the dogma must be rising.
A study on 32 million heart deaths in 27 countries shows extreme cold killed four to six times as many people as extreme heat. Since climate change makes our hottest days hotter and warms our winter nights, this will mean less heart failure in the future.
For every extra summer death due to heart failure, six lives will be saved in winter thanks to people who burn oil. Obviously it’s time to subsidize coal plants to save medical costs. Every dollar spent warming the world is an investment against heart failure. You know the drill.
Naturally in science communication, headlines and truth are 180 degrees apart.
A new multinational analysis of 32 million heart-related deaths over the past 40 years found more occurred on days with severe temperatures, an issue that climate change could make even worse.
The investigators compared heart-related deaths on the hottest and the coldest 2.5% of days in 567 cities with those on days when temperatures were optimal.
For every 1,000 heart-related deaths, there were an additional 2.2 deaths on days with extreme heat. There were also 9.1 additional deaths on days with extreme cold, the findings showed.
Among people with heart failure, there were 2.6 additional deaths on extremely hot days and 12.8 on extremely cold days, the researchers reported.
Remember the old cannard that climate change warms up nights faster than days (thus wiping out the coldest extremes)? Just ask the IPCC — They told us there are less cold days now and it’s because of climate change:
Based on the AR5 and SREX, as well as recent literature (see Supplementary Material 3.SM), there is high confidence (very likely) that there has been an overall decrease in the number of cold days and nights and an overall increase in the number of warm days and nights at the global scale on land.
As a bonus we gain more warmth at the cold end than at the top — stable temperature save lives!
In particular, they identified that one-quarter of the land has experienced an intensification of hot extremes (maximum temperature on the hottest day of the year, TXx) by more than 1°C and a reduction in the intensity of cold extremes by at least 2.5°C (minimum temperature on the coldest night of the year, TNn).
This was reported ad nauseum for the last twenty years, by NewScientist, unSkepticalScience, The Conversation, PopScience, the New York Times, and those scientific giants –The WEF (among a hundred thousand others). It was a defining feature, a fingerprint, of man-made climate change. It’s therefore obvious that climate change is a cardiac winner, and all the journalists know it.
It’s more evidence that Science Communication is not a profession but just a marketing exercise. Apparently, they’re not there to inform the public, just to scare tax dollars out of them.
So climate change causes colder winters now?
The medical paper simply says so:
Climate change produces both hotter summers and colder winters, rendering populations not accustomed to these unusual weather conditions vulnerable, especially in low-income areas where there may be less adaptability to changing conditions.
It’s not climate change that is deadly but climate change action. The more money we waste on unreliable energy the more people we kill from unaffordable energy bills.
Despite the paper having 51 references there were none to back up their “colder winters” claim.
The biology of hot and cold deaths:
To spare you the details, essentially heat causes dehydration and thickens blood, and is thus solvable with a glass of water. Cold causes vasoconstriction and high blood pressure, which is bad for everything, and solvable with fossil fuels.
Weatherzone report that Thursday was the equal coldest morning ever recorded anywhere in Australia in summer time. Oddly, there were no preemptive emergency warnings the night before, no news stories announcing the area “might” hit a new record, no camera teams visited the scene and the BOM did not invent a Coldsnap Emergency Alert System to tell Australians to put on a jumper.
On Thursday, Perisher Valley in the Australian Alps got down to minus 7.0 C (19F) equaling the record set in Perisher in January 1979 and which was also reached at Charlottes Pass in December 1999.
Oddly, no one blamed this on climate change, or mentioned that it would have been worse if we hadn’t burnt all that coal. After all, without CO2, it would have been minus ten, right?
Kap København is almost the closest point there is to the North Pole on dry land.
The survival of some DNA for two million years is astounding all of itself — breaking the record for oldest known DNA by nearly a million years. Before this, the oldest DNA was thought to be 1.2 million years — beyond which all the global DNA of all the species that ever lived was assumed to be dissolved into unreadable mush.
But now we have found enough of the ancient code to identify a whole ecosystem on the northern edge of Greenland that no one expected to find. Apparently giant elephant-like Mastodons were wandering the far northern parts of Greenland — practically as close as they could get to the North pole without swimming.
At the time, the world was not just 1.5 catastrophic degrees warmer than today, but a full nuclear 10 to 17 degrees hotter.
Strangely life on Earth wasn’t suffering the sixth mass extinction.
The incomplete samples, a few millionths of a millimetre long, were taken from the København Formation, a sediment deposit almost 100 metres thick tucked in the mouth of a fjord in the Arctic Ocean in Greenland’s northernmost point. The climate in Greenland at the time varied between Arctic and temperate and was between 10-17C warmer than Greenland is today. The sediment built up metre by metre in a shallow bay.
Scientists discovered evidence of animals, plants and microorganisms including reindeer, hares, lemmings, birch and poplar trees. Researchers even found that Mastodon, an Ice Age mammal, roamed as far as Greenland before later becoming extinct. Previously it was thought the range of the elephant-like animals did not extend as far as Greenland from its known origins of North and Central America.
As exciting as this is, it’s awkward for the catastrophic narrative, since there was no catastrophe, so it was time to accidentally say what everyone was thinking and hose it down with the usual meaningless caveats:
“One of the key factors here is to what degree species will be able to adapt to the change in conditions arising from a significant increase in temperature. The data suggests that more species can evolve and adapt to wildly varying temperatures than previously thought. But, crucially, these results show they need time to do this. The speed of today’s global warming means organisms and species do not have that time so the climate emergency remains a huge threat to biodiversity and the world — extinction is on the horizon for some species including plants and trees.”
How exactly do these results show species “need time” to adapt to a warming of 0.13 degrees C per decade which is what we have today? It’s not like anyone anywhere, apart from God, has the full weather history of Greenland circa two million BC. There just isn’t the resolution to know how much things changed from the year two million and twenty to the year two million and ten. The climate could have been changing ten times faster than today and how would we know? All the spikes blend to nothing when the graph resolution has one dot every thousand years.
It’s not that we know the climate was changing rapidly then, but we know they don’t know. And yet they doth protest…
Information bonanza coming
If we can still find ancient DNA in clay and quartz it opens whole new fields of research in biology, evolution, and paleoclimate studies. The DNA won’t just point at animals and plants but fungus and bacteria too. It will produce a trove of climate markers and whole new temperature proxies which might offer different localized climate histories and free us from the Pleistocene Cult of Ice Cores:
Professor Willerslev explained: “DNA generally survives best in cold, dry conditions such as those that prevailed during most of the period since the material was deposited at Kap København. Now that we have successfully extracted ancient DNA from clay and quartz, it may be possible that clay may have preserved ancient DNA in warm, humid environments in sites found in Africa.
If that’s true, they’ll have to stop looking. They’ll be in danger of discovering the climate keeps changing and life keeps adapting in every corner of a hotter and colder Earth.
When does it make sense to build 122 giant industrial turbines that can’t operate for nearly half a year?
The EPA has approved Robbins Island Mega Wind Factory in a remote island off Tasmania that will have to stop working for five months of the year so it doesn’t hurt the Orange-bellied Parrot. It will however be able to kill eagles and other birds for the other seven months of the year.
Green electrons are revered, Orange-bellied parrots are sacred but our way of life is up for grabs. It’s a cult.
This is infrastructure that only works about 30% of the time anyhow, and now will be reduced to something like 17%. The theoretical capacity will be 340MW in the first stage, supposedly growing to 900MW if they can somehow build the extra 170km transmission lines and perhaps get the taxpayer to help build another undersea cable across the Bass Strait. (If the company was going to pay, why was the Tasmanian government spending $20m on the “business case”?)
It will be one of the largest wind factories in the Southern Hemisphere (the biggest being West of Melbourne), but as Tom Quirk showed years ago, when the wind stops in Tasmania it often also stops in Victoria. So the two giant wind factories with supposedly 2GW of random unreliable power between them will both probably be useless together.
A contentious wind farm proposed for Tasmania’s north-western tip has been given the green light from the state’s environment watchdog, but under the condition it doesn’t operate for almost half the year.
Vanguard has $7 trillion in assets under management, and GFANZ is a conglomerate cabal of bankers insurers and asset managers that has snowballed into a 550 member cabal with a jawdropping, obscene, 150 trillion in assets. Together, for a moment, they almost created the illusion of a One World Government by Bankers. After all, the GDP of the United States of America is only $23 trillion. So when an organization with six times the pulling power tells the world to go Net Zero, which company, which government would say “No”? Well, Ron de Santis did — and 18 other US states are working on it too.
The key weakness to the $150,000 billion dollar GFANZ monster is — as I said last week — that it’s an illusion. They are wielding other people’s money — using their clients own pension funds to indirectly punish their own clients, and the good guys are figuring out how to call their bluff.
Clients (like state pension funds) are figuring out that it might not be the best return to invest in political activist groups rather than in funds dedicated to making money. Who wants to accept a smaller pension in order to save the world — well, almost no one. Otherwise everyone would put their money in the “ethical” and ESG investments category, which they have been free to do for decades, but mostly haven’t.
Florida only pulled out $2 billion, but these asset managers can surely see the writing on the wall and it’s an avalanche they don’t want to trigger.
Vanguard Group Inc. is walking out of the world’s largest climate-finance alliance, marking the coalition’s biggest defection to date as U.S. Republicans step up their threats against firms deemed hostile toward the fossil-fuel industry.
GOP politicians have made clear that they plan to ratchet up their attacks on firms suspected of being anti-oil, or “woke.” House Republicans are set to hold congressional hearings on the subject, while a number of anti-ESG bills will soon be introduced in states across the country.
GFANZ looks, acts and smells like a cartel — an illegal group conspiring to rig the market
As well as clients abandoning them, there is also a growing legal threat. The banker club, after all, openly admits they aim to punish fossil fuel corporations that are acting legally. It reeks of antitrust.
“The Sherman Antitrust Act broadly prohibits 1) anticompetitive agreements and 2) unilateral conduct that monopolizes or attempts to monopolize the relevant market.”
It all threatens to pop the GFANZ bubble, and any other cartel that tries to form, and the whole project may yet unravel if sensible politicians grow enough spines to keep turning the screws.
Earlier this year, it emerged that two pension firms and an investment consultant dropped out of GFANZ.
That coincided with reports that JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp. and Morgan Stanley were mulling defection after a requirement “to phase down and out unabated fossil fuels, including coal” was introduced by Race to Zero, the UN-backed entity that underpins GFANZ. A swift clarification followed to soften that language, ostensibly in an effort to appease members.
Vanguard pointedly said it was pulling out “so that we can provide the clarity our investors desire.”
Indeed. Investors desire funds that make them money now, not funds that lecture them on how sinful they are and raise their electricity bill in a fantasy quest to stop storms a hundred years from now.
.jpg){kind=link}
Recent Comments