The impossible conundrum: Going Netzero cancels your ability to get to Netzero
The industrial death spiral grows: Europe is the king of renewables and it’s also got the most expensive energy in the world making it impossible for the EU to make the things it needs to get to NetZero.
Now the Volkswagen chief warns that things are so expensive, it soon won’t be viable to make electric cars and batteries in Europe either — which must be a bit of nasty surprise given that they just started building the first of six planned battery factories in Europe.
How fast those balance sheets change…
Naturally, the whole industry is calling for more subsidies. Obviously they can’t ask for what they really need, cheap energy.
Europe’s energy crisis is leaving the continent’s industry at a standstill, and its biggest car manufacturer says competitors are racing ahead as EU governments fail to provide enough support.
“On the international stage, Germany and the European Union are rapidly losing their attractiveness and competitiveness,” Thomas Schäfer, brand chief executive officer at German carmaker Volkswagen, wrote Monday in a LinkedIn post.
Schäfer said that Volkswagen, and other European carmakers, risk falling behind competitors in the electric car manufacturing space due to high energy prices, as the crisis puts the whole of European industry at a disadvantage.
“We are treading water,” he wrote. “I am very concerned about the current development regarding investments in the industry’s transformation. This needs to be urgently prioritized—unbureaucratically, consistently, and quickly.”
He also warned that Volkswagen could not afford to make batteries in the EU either:
“If we don’t succeed in quickly lowering energy prices in Germany and Europe, then investments in energy-intensive production, or for new battery cell factories, in Germany and across the EU will no longer be feasible,” he said.
…across Europe, major wind turbine makers are reporting massive losses and laying off swaths of employees. Just this month, Denmark-based Vestas Wind Systems, the largest maker of wind turbines in the world, reported a third-quarter loss of 147 million euros (about $151 million). General Electric, another major wind turbine producer in the United States and Europe, reports that its renewable energy unit is likely to report a $2 billion loss at the end of the year. Spanish company Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy, a Madrid-based company that is a leading producer of offshore wind turbines, reported an annual loss of 940 million euros ($965 million) and has announced spending cuts which will incur 2,900 job losses – approximately 11% of the company’s workforce.
Here’s a clue about why wind power can’t compete:
According to the CEO of Siemens Energy, the issue is supply chains. “Never forget, renewables like wind roughly, roughly, need 10 times the material [compared to] … what conventional technologies need,” said Christian Bruch in an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe. “So if you have problems on the supply chain, it hits … wind extremely hard, and this is what we see.”
With slower production due to supply chain problems, the wind industry is stuck — still trying to deliver orders from the pre-covid era at prices that are impossible, to an audience that is strapped for cash and selling a product that no one really needs.
Good News: The best hope of unwinding the unholy alliance between Big-Money and Big-Government comes from the US States and they are starting to sink their teeth in.
BlackRock is the defacto Global Climate Police — but disguised as a monster investment fund. The way to break it is to expose that its primary interest is not in making money for its clients but as a Woke political tool.
BlackRock are able to intimidate most of the world with $10 trillion dollars in assets. They are effectively the third biggest “country” in the world by GDP. But it’s an illusion. They are wielding other people’s money — using their clients own pension funds to indirectly punish their own clients. And once those clients figure it out and pull their funds, BlackRock will become an empty shell. Couldn’t happen to a nicer company…
It’s a scam where BlackRock target legal corporations in states that voted to use fossil fuels to effectively undo what the voters wanted. A few months ago, 19 States in the USA started asking BlackRock and the US SEC some hot and hard legal questions. West Virginia announced they would boycott firms that boycott fossil fuels, and now Florida joins them in boycotting BlackRock.
Dec 1 (Reuters) – Florida’s Chief Financial Officer said on Thursday his department would pull $2 billion worth of its assets managed by BlackRock Inc (BLK.N), the biggest such divestment by a state opposed to the asset manager’s environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) policies.
We note BlackRock used to have $10 Trillion in assets to manage, now it has eight?
The move will hardly dent BlackRock’s $8 trillion in assets and drew a strong response from the company, which said the action put politics over investor interests.
Pots and kettles indeed. The company which specializes in putting politics over investor interests, accuses the Government of Florida of putting politics over investor interests? Governments are supposed to do politics…
Nonetheless it underscores how a backlash among many Republican leaders, such as those in Florida, against ESG investing, which they see as promoting a “woke agenda” is gathering steam.
The key terms here are “Fiduciary Duty” and “Duty of Care”. If BlackRock are not maximizing the income of their clients by putting their money in the best investments then it would be negligent of any pension fund manager to leave their client’s assets in BlackRock.
Republican State governments are also starting to raise concerns about Vanguard — another supergiant asset manager pushing ESG policies. These motherlodes of unguarded conglomerate money are driving some of the stupidest and most absurd policies in the world. They are often the largest single shareholders in both media and mining assets, and can lean on them to elicit the policies they want. “Nice business you have there, shame if something happened to it…”
UPDATE: To clarify — Obviously $2 billion drawn out of $10 trillion is nothing much, and I searched but could not find any specific listing or reason why BlackRock’s total assets are described as being only worth $8 trillion by Reuters now. Perhaps others are pulling out quietly? Perhaps it’s a typo?
But word will spread, and if pension fund managers start to get questions from clients, and lawyers put the fear of negligence into them, the entire modus operandi of the Bullies at BlackRock will come undone.
But follow the reasoning. The Minister is admitting that the UN listing is not about the reef itself, it’s about whether they have paid enough money for UN causes or adopted the right “NetZero” liturgy.
Ms Plibersek [Environment Minister] and her Queensland counterpart, Meaghan Scanlon, sought to distance themselves from the report’s findings, arguing they were the result of the former Coalition government’s failure to act on climate change.
“The reason that UNESCO in the past has singled out a place as ‘at risk’ is because they wanted to see greater government investment or greater government action – and since the change of government, both of those things have happened,” she said.
Apparently the UN uses the “in danger” listing a form of coercion to squeeze more money for their favourite causes. It’s nothing about the actual reef. Nothing about what Australians want. And it was never about “The Science”:
Steve Edmondson, a reef tour operator in Port Douglas, said the UN-backed report relied on old information gathered during a monitoring mission in March while the reef was going through a mass coral bleaching event.
UN labels are just a form of foreign interference to drum up money for friends which benefit from “climate money”– like the Bankers who invest in renewables, or the Chinese Communist Party that sells us the windmills and solar panels.
Bizzare: A a four month old baby called Will needs open heart surgery, but the parents don’t want the doctors to use the “pooled” vaccinated blood on offer. They’d prefer to use donor blood from unvaccinated people and already have 20 potential donors lined up. All Health New Zealand has to do is say “OK — but you pay any extra costs” and this problem would be solved. Instead the health police are taking the parents (and baby) to court to try to take control of the boy off them, so they can do the surgery their way.
Health New Zealand says the vaccinated blood is fine and dandy because it has extra antibodies in it (and being clairvoyant they already know the results of the ten year studies too.) What they don’t say is whether they can guarantee donor blood has no SARS-2 Spike proteins, or mRNA coding for remnants of lab experiments in it.
Why are Health New Zealand risking the baby’s health, delaying surgery, putting the parents through an ordeal, and wasting money when this could be solved so easily?
What, exactly, are the bureaucrats so worried about — that every parent might start to ask for unvaccinated blood?
The parents of a four-month-old are in court after refusing to allow vaccinated blood to be used in their baby’s lifesaving surgery.
The parents’ lawyer, Sue Grey, said the case was unusual and different from other medical guardianship cases where parents are refusing medical care. For this one, she said, the parents want better care than what the state is offering.
There was no legal or other reason why Te Whatu Ora [Health New Zealand] is refusing to consider the parents’ proposal as a solution, Ms Grey said.
The New Zealand Heart Foundation described stenosis as when one of the heart’s valves didn’t open properly, meaning pressure and blood could back up and cause strain on the heart.
It’s about as totalitarian as it gets — give us your children:
The New Zealand Herald understands Te Whatu Ora is seeking the guardianship of the four-month-old be shifted from his parents to the courts so consent to use donated blood in the required open-heart surgery can be given.
Protestors are gathering in support
About 100 people gathered in support of the baby’s parents outside the front of the court’s entrance, holding placards and loudhailers. Some recorded the ongoing scenes on their devices.
NZ Blood Service says there’s no problem:
The website confirmed any Covid-19 vaccine was “broken down” in the blood soon after injection and would not be transferred to recipients of donations.
“All donated blood also gets filtered during processing, so any trace amounts that may still be present poses no risk to recipients,” it said.
But a paper from 11 months ago shows that the mRNA vaccines produce large amounts of Spike protein and for at least two months. It would be extremely costly to remove this from donated blood, but fairly cheap to get blood from an unvaccinated person.
Twitter, after all, may have affected the 2020 US election by protecting Hunter Biden and the FBI. It also may have protected Big Pharma by suppressing bad news on vaccines and good news on cheap antivirals. There is a body count in this free speech debate… and Elon Musk recognises the gravity of the situation.
In reply to this dangerous free speech concept new signups at Twitter are at an all time high, but Apple has withdrawn advertising on Twitter. To which Elon Musk asks “Do they hate free speech in America?” And apparently they do, because they are also now threatened to withhold Twitter from their App Store and they’re not even trying to explain why.
Apple similarly deplatformed Parler from its App store in Jan 2021. Twitter had banned the President of the US and Parler was taking off as the alternative. It threatened to take 80 million Trump fans off Twitter. This was so unthinkable, the thought of Trump and the deplorables having a venue to speak at, that Google deplatformed Parler too. It’s like a information cartel isn’t it?
Indeed 50 other companies also apparently hate free speech and have withdrawn advertising from Twitter now that Elon Musk owns it. This includes Chevrolet, Ford, Jeep, Kraft, Coke, Nestle and Kelloggs. What is it these companies want to achieve that is more important than reaching new customers?
Musk responded to conservative commentator Liz Wheeler, who tweeted: “If Apple & Google boot Twitter from their app stores, @elonmusk should produce his own smartphone. Half the country would happily ditch the biased, snooping iPhone & Android. The man builds rockets to Mars, a silly little smartphone should be easy, right?”
“I certainly hope it does not come to that,” Musk told Wheeler, “but, yes, if there is no other choice, I will make an alternative phone.”
Ron de Santis weighed in, warning that Apple looks like a vassal of the CCP
The all-in war on Elon Musk shows us what the Tech Giants fear the most. Not only will free speech on Twitter expose their own skeletons and destroy their sacred cows, but worse, he threatens to steal their power base and end their political protection racket.
The Murray River was far higher in the 1970 floods and worse still in 1956 when CO2 was just 314ppm. Obviously, if all current floods are “caused by CO2”, we need more of it.*
A photo of flood markers on a tree in South Australia has sparked a debate on Facebook. The only things we know for sure — floods were worse when CO2 was perfect, and censorship of banal truths is the only way to stop the climate change rort unravelling.
A picture of a tree in regional South Australia has sparked a wild climate change debate.As floodwaters from the River Murray crept up the Loxton’s Tree of Knowledge, one local thought it was a good time to take a picture to put things into perspective.
The updated flood markings of The Tree of Knowledge, SA, Nov 30th, 2022. Click to enlarge
“Using one tree as evidence to suit your agenda shows what level of intelligence we are dealing with,” one said.
“There are many factors why areas have worse flooding. There is no denying though, with mass land clearing as one factor, flooding will only get worse under extreme climate events such as La Nina,” he continued.
History speaks on the Land of Droughts and Flooding Rains:
Main street of Mannum under 2.4m to 3m of water in 1956.
As many as 4,000 homes may be inundated as flood waters rise, and our thoughts are with them. Because the Murray River drains a basin that covers one million square kilometers, the waters are flowing from up to two thousand kilometers away. The peak may not happen til later near Christmas.
We’ve never had another third quarter this expensive
Despite setting price records — averaging $200/MWh across the whole quarter for the whole five-state National Energy Market, there’s like a cone of silence around the price of brown coal. The ABC is happy to evangelize about 30 minute “renewable energy records”, but they don’t mention that the three-month total system costs went off like a bomb.
Somehow Australia has all that free cheap green power and yet the wholesale costs exploded. The system broke:
No other Q3 has ever been this expensive.
But one unmentionable fuel type was still cheap
The average wholesale price for all generators last quarter was 20 cents a kilowatt hour (or $200 per megawatt hour), but brown coal generators were still able to supply during that same incendiary quarter for just at 4c a KWh. That was the average “winning bid”. So last quarter brown coal was one fifth the price of black coal, and one sixth the price of gas or hydro, and no one is talking about it.
The cheapest prices were from brown coal. (Far right)
Imagine if Australia had a free market in electricity?
Ponder for a moment, if households were allowed to choose the generator they wanted to buy electricity from? Imagine if there was a company that sold brown coal power direct to the customers?
Obviously the government would have to ban it, or regulate it away, or everyone would buy it. If nine out of ten households just wanted cheap reliable electricity, and they could get it, the free market grid would be full of coal plants. If the solar and wind plants had to pay for the extra transmission lines, the batteries, and the backup generators as one package, there would be a tiny niche market for rich-hipsters and Gucci-grid show-offs.
Brown coal or lovely lignite, is immune to the international crisis in energy stocks. It can’t be loaded on container ships (it burns spontaneously). It is our insurance, our cheapest baseload power, our back-up in times of war or inflation.
And we still have 300 years of coal left to burn (of both the brown and black stuff). If we started now, we could have cheap electricity in less than ten years.
This is a public service announcement for Victorian voters in their election today. Rebel News has footage of preferences-dealer Glenn Druery admitting he set the “Sack Dan Andrews” party up deliberately to harvest votes which will eventually return to Labor in preferences. Druery wants Labor to stay in power. This seems like the sort of thing Victorians might want to know before they vote.
See Rebel Newsand spread the word. Where was “the ABC”? — Good luck to Victorians.
Reader Yarpos suggests Turning Point Australia to see how your preferences flow before voting.
The star of the report is the 1.5 degrees of Australian “hockeystick” graph of warming (below). The Herald Sun calls it “Scary”.
The biggest crimes of this report are what they don’t say. The CSIRO and BoM must know, but don’t mention, that satellites don’t show any warming in Australia in the last ten years at all. Satellites track across all seven million square kilometers of Australia, and are calibrated against thousands of weather balloons. The CSIRO and BoM prefer to use thermometers in carparks, near runways, or close to incinerators, then they magically adjust trends at some sites up by as much as 2 degrees (that’s the whole century-long trend right there?!)
Big Scary Graph according to the Sun Herald. From the State of the Climate Report, 2022.
But it makes sense in a non-scientific kind of way. Government funded scientists would get smaller grants if there was no climate crisis. There are a billion reasons to find “global warming” and none at all to find natural cycles of weather that no one can tax. The hapless researcher who finds that Australia has always been a land of droughts and flooding rains will find themselves sacked for being non-collegial, called a pariah and a climate denier. Just ask Peter Ridd.
This is what we are panicking about?
If the CSIRO and ABC were really serving Australians they’d mention that the best equipment there is shows that Australian temperatures are largely the same now as they were ten years ago. The UAH data is calibrated with thousands of weather balloons released by the very same BoM, but not calibrated (thankfully) with the incompetent thermometers on the ground.
Wow, what a different picture this is?
Australian temperature variation as measured by UAH satellites. (2012 – 2022) | UAH Data.
In the same ten year period CO2 has increased from to 391 ppm up to 416 ppm. That’s a full 25 additional ppm of the planet-heating-gas yet who could tell?
Part of the global warming seen in the top graph, but not recorded by satellites, is found with expert thermometers like the one in Maitland (SA) pictured here. This thermometer is not part of the official best 100 official ACORN sites, but it has been used to “correct” the data from at least six of those sites. Ken Stewart assessed hundreds of these sites and found many were not compliant with the Bureau’s own guidelines.
40% of our man-made warming was in the last eight (flat) years?
Suddenly in the 2022 report the experts are saying Australia has warmed by 1.5°C since 1910. But in 2014 the very same experts said “Australia’s climate has warmed by 0.9°C since 1910”. So the BoM says we are 0.6 degrees warmer now than in 2014 and 40% of our entire century long trend happened in the last eight years. We know the science is settled and all, but according to the satellites Australia is the same temperature now as it was in 2014? (Still, it’s a bit unfair to think all the warming occurred after 2014. With the power of expert adjustments it’s quite possible in the last eight years the 1910’s got colder too. The poor sods of World War I! More frosts than they ever realized…)
Historic heatwaves. 50 degree temperatures were everywhere, right across Australia in the 1800s and 1900s.|
Oops. The pace of warming has slowed, not sped up
The full satellite record shows Australia has warmed in the last 43 years, but the rate of warming has slowed since 2007 (draw a line with your mind’s eye). Rather than accelerate, as all the Chinese emissions of CO2 filled the sky, the warming in Australia slowed down.
Not what the models predicted. Not accelerating. Not apparently affected by extra CO2.
Australian temperature variation as measured by UAH satellites. (1979 – 2022)
Something else, or several other things, are driving our climate and the modelers don’t know what they are.
Finally, here’s a flashback just to remind us of why the UAH satellite system really is the best record of temperatures.
UAH agrees with millions of calibrated weather balloons released around the world. RSS now agrees more with surface data from equipment placed near airports, concrete, air-conditioners and which is itself wildly adjusted.
In the latest adjustments UAH uses empirical comparisons from satellites that aren’t affected by diurnal drift to estimate the errors of those that are. RSS starts with model estimates instead.
Two particular satellites disagree with each other (NOAA-14 and 15). The UAH team remove the one they think is incorrect. RSS keeps both inconsistent measurements.
Diurnal drift probably created artificial warming in the RSS set prior to 2002, but created artificial cooling after that. The new version of RSS keeps the warming error before 2002, but fixes the error after then. The upshot is a warmer overall trend.
UAH uses a more advanced method with three channels. RSS is still using the original method Roy Spencer and John Christy developed with only one channel (which is viewed from three angles).
Lastly The CSIRO budget is $1.2 billion a year and the BOM’s is $300 m. Why is it left to unfunded volunteers to provide the full story?
Hat tip to Neville, RickWill, b.nice. But also thanks to Ken Stewart, Chris Gillham, Lance Pidgeon and all the BOM Audit team.
The South Australian Health department must have known about the surge of young people with heart problems, but they did nothing. The only reason we have this data now is because Senator Antic filed an FOIA to get it and that’s a scandal in itself.
Cardiac presentations in South Australian hospitals . | Click to enlarge
These cardiac events in 2021 were not caused by Covid.
South Australia makes a tidy control case. Unlike most other nations there were virtually no cases of Covid at all until after New Years Eve 2022. So the entire first and highest peak in cardiac problems occurred months before the virus even started circulating.
There were virtually no cases of Covid in South Australia until after New Year 2021. | Covid19data
Senator Alex Antic*:
Cardiac Presentations for 15 – 44 year olds in South Australia …almost doubled as the vaccines were rolled out.
They are harming and killing young people.
This injection campaign is going to go down as the greatest scandal in medical history and none of you said a thing.
So many questions arise from this — when did the TGA, ATAGI and Federal Minister of Health become aware if this? Why didn’t they stop the vaccine rollout? The Premier and SA Minister of Health were forcing vaccine mandates on many people in this age group — isn’t data like this urgent and important so people have informed consent? If this data was available but withheld does that mean no one in South Australia (or anywhere else) could have given consent…?
STICKY POST: Thursday December 1: Meet Jen Marohasy and myself tonight at the screening of two short films, Bleached Colorful, and Finding Porites, showing the real state of the Great Barrier Reef. It’s on at 6.30pm at The Windsor Cinema, Nedlands. Tickets here.
This is a public service announcement for Victorian voters in their election today. 
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