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.
As Scott Adams says “The cover up of the cover up is working”
Picking Presidents?
It’s the story of the century that isn’t selling many papers — how the FBI held onto the Hunter Biden Laptop-from-Hell for months and actively colluded with media outlets to suppress that news, all while US voters were deciding whether to vote for his father for President.
The FBI knew the Lap Top contained evidence of corruption of the highest order, yet chose not to investigate. They also knew the story would probably leak in October and were actively contacting Facebook and Twitter on a weekly basis before then to pre-empt it — so that the bad news could disappear and wouldn’t hurt their chosen candidate. When the FBI wanted news suppressed, the media giants “handled ” it in a flash. They could make whole newspapers disappear.
The real story of course, is still that the men with guns are deciding which crimes are worth investigating, what news you are allowed to read, and who the voters should vote for. This makes the USA a lot more like Cuba or Russia than anyone wants to think, and it matters to all of us — even outside the US. This dark influence is a black hole in the free world with event horizon out in space.
In the world we thought we lived in, this would be the lead story and day after day.
Who rules America? The Spies?
The DNC (Democrats) could also make the media giants sit up and pant, but when push comes to shove it’s hard to imagine how the Democrats would scare the FBI more than the FBI would scare the Democrats.
We know now the New York Post reporting on the laptop was correct before the US 2020 election, but Twitter not only blocked their account entirely — they stopped anyone sending direct messages with the link as well.
The Hunter Biden story could well have changed the course of the 2020 election.
A political party using a Big Tech platform as its personal censor? A potentially consequential piece of journalism suppressed during an election? What happened to the Hunter Biden laptop story should take its place among the great free-speech and journalistic scandals of the 21st century. And yet much of the American media is still trying to downplay this debacle, and has responded to the Twitter Files with a mix of silence and derision.
On Twitter, elite journalists have gone after Taibbi, often using the same attack line – that he is ‘doing PR’ for Musk, who has been keen to expose the Hunter shenanigans since he took control of the company.
I’m no expert in US constitutional law, but this looks a lot like agents of the security state outsourcing censorship to the private sector.
We always knew the media was corrupt, sensationalist partisan hacks, but the bigger problem seems to be that the FBI are too, and they are vastly better at it.
Apparently, there just aren’t enough real emergencies anymore, so we need to fake them up.
A couple of weeks ago, our billion dollar ABC, in cohoots with the Bureau of Meteorology, decided to report in prime time news that heatwaves are now so deadly serious we need New Emergency Warnings — “like a Bushfire emergency”, even though we get heatwaves every year, they hardly kill anyone and even five year olds know how to press the air conditioner button.
Back in 1896, Australians had to catch emergency trains and head for the hills the heat was so deadly. But apparently adult mammals are now so stupid they don’t know when it’s hot, and need to sit next to ABC Emergency radio all day in case “things change quickly” and someone needs to tell them to rush to the fridge for a glass of water.
I mean, it’s almost like heatwaves sneak up on people around hills at 100 miles an hour?
Either that or two government agencies want to scare more money out of Australian taxpayers:
Bushfire-style emergency warnings are set to be issued for heatwaves across Australia, as authorities warn their dangers are potentially being overlooked.
No seriously, in an “Emergency” level heatwave the advice is… drink water, stay indoors, and use air conditioning. The whole news story is a form of subliminal coaching to infantalize the nation. You are all babies and Mummy-Government is here to sing a bushfire emergency song.
Get your dose of Play School for adults on the Australian ABC News:
But the real emergency here is the ABC reporting
One day when the ABC gets the internet they’ll be able to do real research instead of being factually wrong and literally incompetent. The ABC says: “Research has shown heatwaves are the most deadly natural hazard in Australia, with the exception of disease epidemics.” But anyone who reads unfunded science bloggers instead has known for years that the worst weather hazard in Australia is called winter, and it kills around 7,000 extra people each year.
Compare that to the official heatwave tally hidden in the ABC news (20 a year), and winter is 300 times worse.
If we are going to talk about overlooked dangers, lets say the word “cold” and sing about fossil fuels. They can keep you warm or fly you to summer, whereever it is.
Average daily deaths for each month in Australia (left axis, black numbers) and New Zealand (right axis, grey numbers) over a ten year period. | Indur Goklany
Officially we’re talking about 20 deaths a year:
This doesn’t sound very scary though so the ABC bundles 18 years of deaths together:
Analysis of coronial records, published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, showed there were 473 heat-related deaths reported in Australia between 2000 and 2018.
It found 354 of these occurring during heatwave conditions.
But in January 1896, when Australia had only one sixth as many people, an astonishing 437 people died of the heat in the space of a few weeks. There were no air conditioners then. So we could add all the deaths that occurred then over an 18 year period and multiply by six and the deaths from actual heatwaves would be vastly bigger than current deaths.
It is written by people who believe the effects of climate change will become more common, and who fish through death and temperature data looking for “heat-related” mortality but presumably not “cold related deaths” or deaths due to unaffordable electricity.
And all of them seem to ignore that it’s well known in mortality research that often heatwave deaths are followed by a dip in deaths. It appears that heatwaves tend to kill people who are so close to dying that they probably would have died in the following weeks. This process is known as forward displacement. The same pattern is not found after cold snaps.
Our media is the problem
The real issue here is not the Heatwave Emergency Warnings, but that the ABC acts as a propaganda unit. They should be mocking the BoM instead for treating us like babies and filling our airwaves with meaningless warnings.
When we were kids we’d turn on the garden sprinklers and run through them on hot days, and we didn’t wait for the ABC to suggest it.
The 15 Minute City is a UN and WEF plan, because they care about you want you to drive less.
A cartoon from the WEF just for you good girls and boys:
In the WEF’s own words — this rearrangement of cities is absolutely about climate change:
As climate change and global conflict cause shocks and stresses at faster intervals and increasing severity, the 15-minute city will become even more critical.
And the solution was the pandemic (they really say that):
The obvious, yet incomplete, answer is the pandemic…. with COVID-19 and its variants keeping everyone home (or closer to home than usual), the 15-minute city went from a “nice-to-have” to a rallying cry. Meeting all of one’s needs within a walking, biking or transit distance was suddenly a matter of life and death.
And then the dark hand of the totalitarian managers appears, as James Woudhuysen, warned in Spiked in late October:
The green agenda is taking inspiration from the illiberal days of lockdown.
To this end, Oxfordshire County Council, which is run by Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party, wants to divide the city of Oxford into six ‘15 minute’ districts. In these districts, it is said, most household essentials will be accessible by a quarter-of-an-hour walk or bike ride, and so residents will have no need for a car.
On the surface, these 15-minute neigbourhoods might sound pleasant and convenient. But there is a coercive edge. The council plans to cut car use and traffic congestion by placing strict rules on car journeys.
Residents will have to register their cars with the council and they will be tracked to count their journeys through the key gateways. It’s the social credit scheme that starts with your car and works like anti-frequent-flyer points.
Under the new proposals, if any of Oxford’s 150,000 residents drives outside of their designated district more than 100 days a year, he or she could be fined £70.
The concept of the 15-minute city was born with ‘C40’. Chaired today by London mayor Sadiq Khan, C40 calls itself a ‘network of mayors of nearly 100 world-leading cities collaborating to deliver the urgent action needed right now to confront the climate crisis’.
Climate lockdowns? Seriously?
It all sounds a bit ridiculous to suggest a lockdown “for the climate” but listen to the BBC. They’re working awfully hard to persuade us — they obviously think voters won’t want this. Here they are connecting the “15 Minute City” to the fun of covid lockdowns, and setting this up as though it’s totally normal for the government to decide who your friends are:
And furthermore lockdowns in Paris were great social moments where we all made friends. Who knew how much fun it would be to be told you couldn’t drive far?
.. for Fraioli, the two-month lockdown that began on 17 March – confining her to a 1km radius of her home – gave her a nuanced, enriching view of her neighbourhood. “I discovered it’s possible to feel like you’re in a small village in Paris,” she says. “To get to know your neighbours, to maintain good links with shopkeepers, to favour local craftsmen and shops over large supermarkets. I even joined a citizens’ movement where people prepare food baskets for homeless people. I thought I would have a hard time living the lockdown, but I was perfectly at home, in a quiet place.”
I don’t seem to recall “getting to know neighbours” as being part of any lockdown anywhere?
It’s a crowded area, Oxfordshire, and no one likes traffic congestion, but in a free world the problem is self-limiting as drivers get fed up with delays and exorbitant parking costs, and they car-pool or choose to catch the bus or ride a bike. But in Big Nanny State the local rulers start making rules about who can and can’t visit and how often, and they want your car registered on their own special list with cameras to track you and fines to punish you. They offer exemptions of course, but then you have to apply for them and get permission.
Oxfordshire County Council yesterday approved plans to lock residents into one of six zones to ‘save the planet’ from global warming. The latest stage in the ’15 minute city’ agenda is to place electronic gates on key roads in and out of the city, confining residents to their own neighbourhoods.
Under the new scheme if residents want to leave their zone they will need permission from the Council who gets to decide who is worthy of freedom and who isn’t. Under the new scheme residents will be allowed to leave their zone a maximum of 100 days per year, but in order to even gain this every resident will have to register their car details with the council who will then track their movements via smart cameras round the city.
Every resident will be required to register their car with the County Council who will then monitor how many times they leave their district via number plate recognition cameras.
In the end, these aggressively overmanaged schemes mean more paperwork, more tracking, more jobs for bureaucrats and more free passes for “friends” of Big Government.
The more rules you have the more corrupt the system gets. For example, some city blocks are included in the favored list with 100 passes, while others get just 25 — so the property values of the inner circle addresses rise. As a bonus, in years to come property developers “in the know” and on the favoured list with certain councilors can arrange for rezoning on the right day (the one after they buy the property) and voila — that’s a nice capital gain for them
The councilors held a major consultation process but apparently knew the outcome. It says rather a lot about the attitude of one councilor who said it was going ahead whether people liked it or not.
ROAD blocks stopping most motorists from driving through Oxford city centre will divide the city into six “15 minute” neighbourhoods, a county council travel chief has said.
And he insisted the controversial plan would go ahead whether people liked it or not.
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