Tantangara Resevoir: A whole ecosystem to fill with invasive feral fish and a necrosis virus too.
The Snowy 2.0 Pumped hydro scheme will cost families big money, spread pests, endanger fish, and kill trees but it will allow some renewables investors to make a profit, and that’s all that matters right?
Overseas readers are invited to submit more stupid schemes, with points for delays, cost, incompetence, environmental damage and sheer lack of any public benefit.
Ted Woodley does the best synopsis of the Snowy 2.0 debacle I’ve seen, pointing out how it sets all the worst kinds of records, being delayed 300% with costs up 1000%. It was supposed to be built in four years and cost $2 billion, but will end up taking 12 years (at least) and probably cost $20 billion by the time the cost of the extra transmission lines is added in. As readers here know, the boring machines are the slowest on Earth, one having made it only 200m and being paused for months under a pile of sand.
It was supposed to pay for itself, and make electricity cheaper, but is already chewing through a $1.4 billion taxpayer “injection”, with more to come and even the Snowy Hydro team admit public electricity prices will rise because of Snowy 2.0. And above all, it was supposed to be renewable and save the environment, but it’s just a big inefficient battery that will infect the top lake with feral perch and other pests, and sacrifice some forest for high voltage transmission lines. It will breach all the usual environmental regulations but that’s OK say The Greens who’ll destroy the environment any day if it keeps their big business and banker pals happy.
To put this is perspective, the invasive redfin perch“is a declared notifiable pest under the Biosecurity Regulation 2017. It is illegal to possess, buy, sell or move this pest in NSW.” But the Snowy 2.0 Scheme will pump the eggs and larva by the gigaton. If you do it, you’re breaking the law, but if the Snowy 2.0 scheme does it, they are environmental heroes.
Ever get the feeling the Environmental Movement is just a mafia cabal?
Jo says — make all the renewable energy generators pay the costs themselves, since they are the only beneficiaries, and obey the laws we all obey, and if the project collapses, which it will, we’ll all be richer. That’s how the free market works…
Just picking out the costs and environmental damage:
Record three: underestimated cost – $2bn to up to $20bn
Snowy 2.0’s $2bn estimate increased to $3.8bn-$4.5bn in the business case, to $5.1bn for the main contract (only), to $5.9bn now. It is important to note these estimates don’t include all project costs, such as capitalised interest and suppressed dividends during construction, hedging, exploratory and other works, design, project management, and trans-mission. Also, the allowance for contingencies would have been exceeded by $2.2bn of contractor claims, with more to come. The final cost of Snowy 2.0’s main works is likely to exceed $10bn.
Then there’s a further $9bn-plus for 1000km of 500kV transmission connections to Sydney and Melbourne (Sydney Ring South, HumeLink and VIC/NSW interconnector), primarily for Snowy 2.0’s pumping and generation. Snowy Hydro initially estimated $1bn to $2bn. If Snowy Hydro is not compelled to contribute its fair share of the cost, arguably the majority, NSW electricity consumers will face a doubling of transmission tariffs.
An all-up cost for Snowy 2.0 approaching $20bn represents a tenfold increase, surely a record for cost underestimation.
Record six: inducing the NSW government to grant exemptions from environmental legislation
The claim that Snowy 2.0 will incur minimal impact on Kosciuszko National Park is demonstrably false. Vast construction sites across 30km of the park have been cleared, blasted, excavated, reshaped and compacted. Hundreds of kilometres of roads and tracks are being constructed/ widened, and 20 million tonnes of excavated spoil will be dumped (when the TBMs get boring). But it’s the NSW government’s granting of exemptions from statutory protections that sets a record for environmental vandalism.
Snowy 2.0 has been exempted from the statewide ban on transferring noxious pests between waterways. This condones the movement of invasive Redfin perch, among other declared pests, from Talbingo Reservoir to Tantangara Reservoir and then across the alps into the Murray, Snowy, Murrumbidgee and Tumut headwaters, overwhelming native species and devastating trout fishing. Also, Snowy 2.0 has been exempted from the obligation in the Kosciuszko Plan of Management for any additional transmission to be located underground. Four 330kV transmission lines on two sets of 70-metre towers will traverse 8km of the park over a cleared easement swathe up to 140m wide. This will be the first time transmission lines are erected in a NSW national park for 50 years.
Ted Woodley is former managing director of PowerNet, GasNet, EnergyAustralia, GrainCorp and China Light & Power Systems (Hong Kong).
It’s an extraordinary poll and a nation unravelling.
Two thirds of American’s don’t trust the media. Half even think they are actively lying, and don’t care about their audience. Nine out of ten people think the media is politically biased. As the trust evaporates, people are switching off the national news. A vast majority of people on one side of the political spectrum now view the media unfavorably, and while that number had jumped in Republican and Independent voters in the last three years — it is even rising in Democrat voters too.
The Knight/Gallup — Trust in Media and Democracy poll reveals, bizarrely, that more than half of the nation thinks the people who really “run” the country are not known to voters. I don’t think I’ve even seen pollsters ask that question before. Effectively then, it follows that nearly six out of ten people think that Joe Biden is not the one running the country, and the same goes for Congress. Barely one person in five thinks voters are choosing the decision-makers.
It’s not just trust in the media that’s collapsing, but trust in the government, and even faith in the workings of democracy is gone. This is a nation in turmoil. But the good news is that most people don’t believe the media, or the government.
Never forget: Skeptics are in the majority.
The media are lying to us
Only about one third of American’s still think they can rely on the media to inform them. But half the population not only think the media is unreliable, but is deliberately lying to them. They think the media intends to mislead, misinform or persuade them. Showing that this malicious interpretation is not an accident, half the US also thinks the media don’t care about their audience.
Trust is evaporating
Look at the change since the start of the pandemic and the debacle of the 2020 election. Trust in the media has fallen across voters of every political type. More people than ever view the media unfavourably. The rising red line measures the fall in trust of the US media. Nearly 80% of Republican voters view the media unfavorably, and in the last five years, despite the bias towards the Democrats, even ten percent of Democrats have “lost the faith” too.
In the biggest shift, one-in-five independent voters has realized the media is a bad thing.
More then half of the US thinks the people who really “run” the country are not known to voters
Faith in the workings of democracy is gone. Nearly six out of ten can see that Joe Biden is not the one running the country. Barely one person in five thinks he does. This result applies to Congress too — whoever is running the country is behind the scenes.
The good news is that eight out of ten people either don’t trust government accounts or are not sure, and most people value the opinion of “ordinary people” more than experts or politicians.
There was a split: 71% of those who didn’t trust the media also believe that the people who really “run” the country are unknown to the voters; but even 46% of those who trusted the media also felt this way. Even half the people who believe the propaganda on TV are still skeptical that Joe Biden runs America.
Americans are switching off the national news
In the last two years, and astonishing 22% of people have stopped paying “a great deal of attention” to the national news.
It’s becoming obvious to everyone that the media is a political player
As many as 89% of all voters in 2022 think there is a fair amount, or “a lot” of political bias in the media.
Which way does the media bias run? Ask the voters
79% of Republicans think the media is biased “a great deal” — the highest category they could choose. There are virtually no Republicans left who think the news is not biased. That says everything anyone needs to know about the direction of bias.
It’s unconfirmed, but there’s a possibility that the US Commander in Chief used an Air Force F-22 fighter jet that costs $80,000 an hour to launch a $400,000 sidewinder missile to shoot down a $13 hobby balloon.
President Biden has been industriously shooting down balloons, almost as if he is trying to distract everyone from noticing how slow he was to deal with the Communist Party balloon, or the Pfizergate video, and the Nordstream leak, or something else. But no one is quite certain what they’ve shot down.
Meanwhile a hobby group called The Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade (NIBBB) have sadly reported their K9YO balloon has stopped sending messages. The K9YO picoballoon had been aloft for 123 days and was on its sixth lap of the world. It was last heard from at around 37,928 feet, south of Alaska and headed towards the Yukon. Whatever the mystery object was that got shot down was described as “foil” at 40,000 feet, so it’s in the right ballpark, but it’s still a big sky.
After all the attention starting to grow on this the NIBBB has clarified that even though they expected to hear from the balloon last Saturday it has dropped out of communication before and for as long as thirty days. It may well reappear. It uses a small solar panel to send messages and can’t send messages at night, or in the dark.
Naturally, there’s no official confirmation, but there probably never will be if the US Air force just wasted half a million dollars to destroy a party balloon. This opens a new front in warfare. If an adversary releases enough pico-balloons, the US Airforce could run out of money and missiles…
Whatever it was, the rumour that it might have been a party balloon will surely stop the blitzkrieg. It rather takes the fun out of the PR. Big-man Biden just blew up a helium balloon?
The bigger question is why this bread and circus performance art from Biden and the media was going on in the first place?
Modeling shared by NIBBB shows its balloon was headed in the direction of Yukon before it vanished – and opens up the possibility it was one of the suspicious objects down by the U.S. military.
The object shot down by a a U.S. Air Force F-22 fighter jet over Mayo, Yukon, was variously described by officials in Canada and the U.S. as a ‘cylindrical’, metallic balloon with a payload.
Balloons used by hobby groups like NIBBB often fit the same description. They are usually attached with a small, solar-powered payload that transmits location data back to listening posts on the ground. Typically, these payloads are no larger than a credit card.
NIBBB has not said its balloon was definitely the downed object, but an overview of the circumstantial evidence by Aviation Week leaves the possibility wide open.
For those who want the nerdy technical detail on picoballoon flights:
However there is also the simpler ‘pico’ ballooning hobby, which involves the use of mylar helium party balloons to launch small solar powered payloads that are only a few grams in weight. They typically transmit low power WSPR at HF frequencies and can only transmit whenever there is sufficient solar power available. Amateur radio or SDR hobbyist stations around the world can pick up these transmissions, and report them on amateur.sondehub.org and/or wsprnet.org. Well built balloons can totally circumnavigate the globe several times over several months before degrading.
The insidious vaccine debacle may seem to have come out of nowhere, but pharmaceutical and regulatory rot has been growing for decades.
The story of Zantac, the common heartburn medicine, is both awful and good – it’s awful because one of the most common drugs on the market may have been causing cancers for forty years. It’s good only because the story is finally being told and 70,000 people are suing GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). The “good” here is the hope that some justice might finally be done, and because the public might find out just how ghastly the industrial pharma octopus really is, and how welded it is in the system.
It’s time to burn down the unholy empire of Big Pharma and Big Government and start again.
This is not a case of one bad egg in the system, it’s the story of a system that virtually creates bad eggs
Glaxo was a little company in the 70s that took one of the most popular drugs on the market, Tagamet, tweaked it enough to patent a “better version”, then aggressively out-marketed it, and eventually bought out the companies that made Tagamet to become the $70 billion GlaxoSmithKline giant.
“By 1989, Zantac was worth $2 billion. It accounted for half of Glaxo’s sales and 53% of the market for prescription ulcer remedies.”
But the common heartburn drug Zantac, or ranitidine, which drove their profits — also broke down into NDMA which is a known carcinogen, and there were warnings of this in 1981 and 1982, but it wasn’t until September 2019 that an independent lab tested for NDMA and found it in every sample and at alarming levels. By April 2020 the FDA forced every manufacturer to stop producing and selling the drug altogether. Now, the court cases have started.
Most of the Bloomberg story — which is worth reading in full — focuses on just how badly behaved GlaxoSmithKline have been by hiding the early data for forty long years. But GSK also chose not to do more tests when it should have; it did not try to transport and store the drug in ways the reduced the contamination, and it did not advise the public to take the tablets outside meals. There is no sense that customer health mattered.
To me the bigger question that is never asked, is why drugs like this are not tested by publicly funded groups before they get approval to be rolled out en masse? The tests that were finally done in 2019 are not two-year studies involving thousands of people, they are just lab tests for contamination. What is the point of all the public health funding, the regulatory agencies, and public universities if they aren’t used to defend the public?
If the FDA has the legal power to approve drugs or ban them, shouldn’t it also bear the responsibility when it gets that wrong?
Under legal cross examination the director of research and development admitted they had known for almost 40 years that ranitidine could degrade under conditions of high temperature and moisture … .
Glaxo says the heartburn drug doesn’t cause tumors. But the company was warned by its own scientists and independent researchers about the potential danger.
In 2019 the drug was found to be tainted with high levels of a probable carcinogen. Not by chance or mistake in a few batches. The poison is created by ranitidine itself. Zantac’s makers and health regulators around the world recalled the drug, and in the spring of 2020 the FDA forced it off the market altogether. No company could manufacture it; nobody should ingest it. The carcinogen, called NDMA, was once added to rocket fuel and is now used only to induce cancer in lab rats. The FDA says consuming minuscule amounts isn’t harmful. But tests were revealing excessive amounts of NDMA in ranitidine—and a capacity to create even more over time. No version seemed safe.
From ranitidine’s beginning to its end, Glaxo had been warned by its own scientists and independent researchers about the potential danger. An account of those four decades emerges in hundreds of documents, thousands of pages, many of which have never been made public. Bloomberg Businessweek reviewed court filings, many still under seal, as well as studies, FDA transcripts and new drug applications obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests. They show that the FDA considered the cancer risks when approving ranitidine. But Glaxo didn’t share a critical study. Over the years, the company also backed flawed research designed to minimize concerns and chose not to routinely transport and store the medication in ways that could have eased the problem. Glaxo sold a drug that might harm people, tried to discount evidence of that and never gave anyone the slightest warning.
Plaintiffs’ lawyer:At any time when Zantac had been on the market for almost 50 years, did Glaxo cause anyone to test for the presence of NDMA, a probable human carcinogen, in the product it was selling to American consumers known as Zantac?
Glaxo senior medical adviser:Not to my knowledge.
—Deposition, June 2021
NDMA, which is short for N-Nitrosodimethylamine, is a yellow liquid that dissolves in water. It doesn’t have an odor or much of a taste. It was first linked to cancer in 1956 and is most toxic to the liver. It’s one of a group of chemicals called nitrosamines, which by the 1970s were considered the most potent carcinogens yet discovered. They caused cancer in every species of animal tested. A single dose of less than a milligram of NDMA can mutate mice cells and stimulate tumors, and 2 grams can kill a person in days.
Many people would end up taking Zantac for months, sometimes years, even decades.
The 1981 in-house study that Glaxo hid:
Glaxo asked one of its scientists to conduct his own tests: Richard Tanner, who worked in the biochemical pharmacology division. He got the same results. He identified as much as 232,000 nanograms of NDMA in some samples. When the FDA later deemed that a tiny amount of NDMA was acceptable in any drug, that amount was 96ng. Tanner didn’t find NDMA when he used a lower nitrite level, which the company now says is closer to conditions in an actual human stomach. But back in 1982, court documents show, Glaxo kept the study secret. The associate director of clinical research in the US was never told about the Tanner report. The senior medical adviser for gastrointestinal research was unaware of it. So was the FDA.
Their competitors which made Tagamet, even did a study told them in 1982 that their drug would form NDMA.
It’s all about the money, and GSK became the largest drug company in the world at one point:
Zantac’s sales in the US that first year were about $125 million, which made it one of the best launches of a drug ever. “
That year, Tagamet became the first billion-dollar drug. The next year, Zantac overtook Tagamet.
In 1995, Glaxo completed a hostile takeover of another British drug company, Wellcome. Five years later, in 2000, Glaxo Wellcome acquired its longtime rival, known then as SmithKline Beecham. It was the biggest merger in the industry’s history and created the biggest drug company in the world, GlaxoSmithKline.
GSK was hit with a $3b fine “the largest health-care fraud settlement in US history”
This had nothing to do with Zantac, it was for their next two top selling productions. Spot the pattern?
In 2012 the company agreed to plead guilty and pay a $3 billion fine for marketing drugs for inappropriate uses, disregarding safety data and cheating Medicaid. The drugs were among the company’s most popular after Zantac: Paxil, Wellbutrin and the diabetes drug Avandia. The US Department of Justice called it the largest health-care fraud settlement in US history and the largest payment ever by a drug company. Two years later, China fined GSK $500 million and deported a top executive for bribing doctors to prescribe its drugs. The company told the BBC it had “published a statement of apology to the Chinese government and its people.”
As a sign of how few people know how bad Zantac potentially is, the “new” version of it called famotidine is being marketed “building on the Zantac brand’s established history and legacy.”
Blame Exxon for the dead children of Turkey, eh? It’s not the corrupt building codes, the crustal plates, or the solar magnetic field. Climate change sets off earthquakes, you know.
A High Priest Ecologist has read the chicken entrails and prophesies that things will get worse. Your car creates earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis — unless it’s an EV. It’s hard to satirize this, it’s too stupid.
It’s not just earthquakes — it’s tsunamis and volcanoes too:
We do not know for sure what triggered this horrific natural disaster, but we do know there is growing scientific evidence that climate change increases the risk of such tremors, together with tsunamis and volcanic eruptions.
Here comes Occult Science:
“If a fault is primed or ready to rupture, all that is needed is the pressure of a handshake to set if off […] Environmental changes associated with rapid and accelerating climate breakdown could easily do the job,” professor of geophysics and climate hazards at University College London Bill McGuire pointed out back in 2012.
If a fault is “primed to rupture” and the pressure of shaking hands will set it off, then presumably semi-trailers in Turkey are a no-no. I mean, if the Big One wasn’t set off by climate change at 4.17am, then it would have been by the Ford F-Max at 4:18. Do these professors even read what they write?
And biblical hellfire will reign:
Furthermore, NASA scientists acknowledged that glaciers retreating due to global warming have been triggering earthquakes in Alaska in the last decades.
The impact is not limited to the Arctic. As melting glaciers change the distribution of weight across the Earth’s crust, the resulting “glacial isostatic adjustment” drives changes in plate tectonics that could lead to more earthquakes, awaken volcanoes and even affect the movement of the Earth’s axis.
Melting gigatons of ice might well affect crust plate tectonics, but solar activity is much more likely to be melting the ice, not the air-conditioners of Sydney, or the hair-dryers of London — in which case all the carbon credits in the world won’t stop a single seismic event. The effort to shield us with windmills will look like necromancers shouting at the breeze.
And occult science flows straight into tribal hate
Everything fossil fuel companies do is a crime against humanity. They are the “evil spirits” of the climate cult. A google search for “climate activists launch law suits” gets 3 million results. But when fossil fuel companies target 150 environmental activists it’s proof that they run the world:
A series of investigations and legal proceedings over the years have shown how fossil fuel giants call the shots: they use and abuse the rule of law to escape accountability for environmental pollution, resource-grabbing and cronyism. Those objecting are often silenced.
Just over the last decade, fossil fuel companies in the United States have targeted over 150 environmental activists with lawsuits.
Oh woe is us, say the purveyors of nonsense. They can’t persuade the world to follow their soothsayers, so they feel silenced and victimized if they can’t turn off the taps on major gas pipelines instead:
Meanwhile, dozens of US states are in the process of enacting “critical infrastructure” legislation, increasing criminal penalties against activists protesting pipelines that will wreck the planet.
Professor İbrahim Özdemir is shamelessly exploiting the deaths in Turkey to promote his own career
Here is his byline:
Professor İbrahim Özdemir is a UN advisor and an ecologist teaching at Üsküdar University. He has served as Director-General at the Department of Foreign Affairs of the Turkish Ministry of Education and was a leading member in drafting the Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change endorsed by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC.
Complexity has a price, and a renewables grid is a bit like a 240 volt moving Rubiks cube. Here we see an unnecessary project hit by a random factor that in turn will affect all the others, blowing out other costs and schedules.
Australia’s breakneck energy transition, driven like a crash test dummy by government subsidies, depends on finishing the massive pumped hydro scheme called Snowy 2.0. However it has hit another delay no one apparently saw coming.
“Australia’s biggest renewable energy project” is the $6 – 10 billion plan to pump water uphill so it can run back down again to generate electricity every time the windmills and solar panels suffer a catastrophic failure, which is nearly every day. The entire project is superfluous in a grid with coal power — as we know from the last fifty years when we didn’t need it.
Unfortunately a 2,400 ton Tunnel Boring Machine called Florence is quite stuck under a cave-in. According to the ABC she started ten months ago, and is supposed to be digging her way through 15 kilometres (10 miles) of mountain. The stuck bore can’t go forwards, but she can’t go back the way she came in either. The team has installed concrete reinforcing behind Florence as she moved and the concrete reinforcing effectively locks her in. It’s meant to be a one way trip.
So we have the irony of a machine designed to carve through miles of rock trapped inside a pile of sand. But it gets worse.
Last month, the Snowy Hydro Corporation said it was monitoring a “surface depression” above the boring machine. So a local man decided to go looking for the hole. As he says “technically, [Florence] should be 9 kilometers in but I thought I’d start about 3 kilometers out and start walking my way back in,” Mr Anderson said.
He spent four days looking for the hole only to find it, wow, barely 150 meters from the entrance.
His big shock was not the hole, but that the tunnel borer had barely achieved anything at all. These machines are designed to travel 30 to 50 meters a day, so this short tunnel is effectively one week’s work. The Snowy 2.0 scheme is supposed to be finished by December 2026, (just revised a week ago to Dec 2027) but at the current rate of 60 centimeters (2ft) a day it will take about 70 years to finish.
Looks like we will need those old coal plants for a bit longer. This delay could affect the rollout of new renewables.
The hole is only 150m from the entrance.
Future options include jacking it up (described as “a huge task”) or disassembling Florence — all 143 meters and 2,400 tons — and extracting the machine in pieces. But if they do that, they will have to start the whole tunnel again. Still they hadn’t got very far…
You’d never know Australia was a top mining nation, eh?
Pumped Hydro is giant appliance that sucks electricity and gives you back some later. In a system with reliable baseload generators it is superfluous, redundant, and entirely unnecessary. It is an expense we don’t have to have, didn’t need, and don’t want to pay for. It can only make things more expensive than the system we used to have. Not only do we have to pay for the giant infrastructure, every day it operates we also throw away 20 – 30% of the electrons (so to speak) that go through it.
The mammoth pumped Hydro scheme is a $10 billion dollar disaster that will never pay for itself, is already being superseded by battery technology, and will scar the land, infect pristine alpine lakes, risk critically endangered species, damage fishing grounds, and breach the Biosecurity Act in a National park. (Where are the environmentalists, Tim Flannery? Does anyone care?)
Thanks to Steve Hunter
UPDATE: A net-zero grid (without nuclear power) needs 23 Snowy 2.0 schemes for storage:
The Australian Energy Market Operator estimates that by 2050, without coal power plants, the National Electricity Market will require 45 GW and 620 gigawatt-hours of storage in all its forms to manage variations in fast-growing wind and solar generation, and to keep the grid stable. The figure rises steeply the closer the grid gets to 100 per cent renewables.
Snowy chief commercial officer Gordon Wymer points to an old estimate from ITK Services that some 8000 GWh – 23 times the capacity of Snowy 2.0 – could be needed for a fully renewable NEM, while Snowy’s own estimates signal that three to five times the capacity of 2.0 is needed for a 50-60 per cent renewable grid. (ITK principal David Leitch says his estimate is out of date and refers back to AEMO’s estimates.)
Snowy 2.0 needs huge transmission line construction as well (Humelink and VNI West):
There’s another $6 billion in transmission lines that we didn’t need for a coal fired grid.
“The cost/benefit analyses undertaken by TransGrid and also by AEMO makes quite clear that HumeLink plus Snowy 2.0 – they go together, the one is useless without the other – will destroy the wealth of New South Wales electricity consumers and Australian taxpayers,” says Bruce Mountain, director of longstanding Snowy 2.0 critic, Victoria Energy Policy Centre at Victoria University.
He says findings by AEMO and TransGrid that HumeLink provides net benefits only get to that conclusion by ignoring the cost of Snowy 2.0.
Broad argues the new transmission was required as long as 10 years ago, pointing to the bottlenecks in the system that prevent even the existing Snowy hydropower output reaching Melbourne and Sydney during demand spikes on hot summer days. Lack of grid capacity is also crimping new wind and solar generation, he notes, saying the critics are “missing the point” and getting caught up in “the politics of who’s doing what”.
Broad fears the $3.3 billion HumeLink will slide into 2027, while the $3 billion VNI West, which three years ago was expected by 2028, is now pencilled in for July 2031 in AEMO’s latest draft grid blueprint but may slip into 2032.
In the next great environmental cult moment, “The Science” has a plan to explode a 10-billion-kilogram dust cloud off the moon between the Earth and the Sun. Shimmery white moon dust will dim the evil solar rays and “save us from our addiction to fossil fuels” (at least until we run out of Moon). The dust will disperse every couple of weeks, so we just need to keep topping up our global sunscreen by setting the explosives off. At least it probably won’t kill many whales.
The plan involves getting man back on the moon for the first time in fifty years, setting up a moon base, and a permanent mining colony, but (guard your coffee) — it might be cost effective:
Squirting a carefully calculated stream of Moondust from a future lunar station at the right point between the Sun and Earth might bethe most cost-effective, risk-free means of keeping our cool until we come to our senses and cut emissions.
Bromley notes the proposal would mimic the scenario that occurred during the Little Ice Age, when Louis XIV reigned over France. You’d need a lot of dust but, provided you could get it into space, it would essentially work to reduce solar radiation, blocking around 1% to 2% of the light.
What luck, God made the moon out of just the right cheese?
“Lunar dust stood out for two reasons,” said Bromley “First, it can be pretty efficient at deflecting sunlight, and second, it turns out that the most efficient grain size is the most plentiful on the moon’s surface.” This, he notes, was a fun surprise and something they didn’t know going into the project. One of the problems, though, is just how much dust is required. It would be cost prohibitive to constantly send rockets full of space dust to a platform out at L1, so the moon provides a second advantage.
Exploding bombs on the moon will either waste a continent worth of money or — if it works — make the Earth less habitable, reduce crops, increase frosts, and shrink coral reefs. But it will apparently “buy us time to mature as a society”. Put yourself in the naughty corner.
People in 100 years are going to find this very funny. Why wait? Laugh now…
Desperate to avoid worst-case scenarios, researchers have proposed various measures that could, at the very least, buy us the time we might need to mature as a society and work to undo the damage.
Blasting a steady stream of dust from the surface of the Moon is the latest suggestion to get a solid scientific appraisal, with University of Utah computational astrophysicist Ben Bromley and computer scientist Sameer Khan and Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory astrophysicist Scott Kenyon giving the idea a tentative thumbs up.
UPDATE: Think of what a nice bureaucratic model this is. NASA / ESA / NOAA gets more money to do what they want to do anyhow, and they can tweak the program to suit the weather. If the world cools they claim “success”. If the world doesn’t cool, they can point to how essential this program is to stop extreme heat. Give me your money… Whatever happens to the weather, the climate modelers will tell us how useful the moon dust was and another international bureaucracy is born.
Science communicators have mastered the art of treating adults like 6 year olds. Logic?
The logical thing to do would be to work together to kick our nasty habit of smoking fossil fuels. Shocking as it seems, it could be faster and easier to engage in mammoth-scaled engineering projects that literally reflect a proportion of sunlight before it hits Earth and is converted into a form that’s likely to stick around as heat.
It was an act of terrorism that revolved around energy, but it’s also about free speech and the media. It’s a red-pill moment, and it was released on a blog, not in “the news”. Journalism lives — but it has moved.
Seymour Hersh is the same writer that broke the My Lai massacre and Abu Ghraib scandal. The veteran reporter won a Pulitzer prize and has an insider source and many details on his new substack blog. He claims The United States deliberately blew up the Nordstream pipes with help from Norway. The explosives were planted by divers in June under the cover of tine BALTOPS 22 NATO exercise. They were triggered by a sonar buoy dropped from a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane on Sept 26th, last year.
The WhiteHouse has flatly denied it, calling it “utterly false”, but the US always had the means, the motive and the opportunity, and we all remember the day when Joe Biden made the open threat “: “If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. … We will bring an end to it.” It turns out behind the scenes the people keeping secrets were “dismayed.”
So here we are, Energy is a national security thing, not a fairy wand to get nice weather. Gazprom’s gas and oil revenues “were estimated some years to amount to as much as 45 percent of Russia’s annual budget.” Wow.
By stopping Germany and Europe from getting access to cheap Russian gas, the US would be neutralizing Putin’s “weaponisation” of energy, though by weaponising it themselves. The US was afraid the Germans might be reluctant to send weapons to Ukraine if they also depended on Russia for gas. By helping the US, Norway would be happy to sell more gas itself. But how will cold Germans feel knowing that their electricity bills have skyrocketed? Likewise the rest of Europe. Will people in Britain connect those dots? For Europeans, their ally took away their sovereign choices.
Right now the German government could be using this news story for leverage behind the scenes. They could promise not to make a fuss if only the US does x, y and z? What’s the going price for terrorist strikes?
Will the US have to pay the carbon credits on half million tons of methane — the largest single methane leak ever? Does anybody even care enough to ask?
Will this be leading story in every news bulletin around the world, or will the headlines just read “White House forced to issue statement that the claims are utterly wrong”.
The original source is Seymour Hersch’s new blogging platform: Read it all, it’s quite the tale!
The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now
Two of the pipelines, which were known collectively as Nord Stream 1, had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade. A second pair of pipelines, called Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet operational. Now, with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border and the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945 looming, President Joseph Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions.
The motive:
America’s political fears were real: Putin would now have an additional and much-needed major source of income, and Germany and the rest of Western Europe would become addicted to low-cost natural gas supplied by Russia—while diminishing European reliance on America. In fact, that’s exactly what happened. Many Germans saw Nord Stream 1 as part of the deliverance of former Chancellor Willy Brandt’s famed Ostpolitik theory, which would enable postwar Germany to rehabilitate itself and other European nations destroyed in World War II by, among other initiatives, utilizing cheap Russian gas to fuel a prosperous Western European market and trading economy.
The direct route, which bypassed any need to transit Ukraine, had been a boon for the German economy, which enjoyed an abundance of cheap Russian natural gas—enough to run its factories and heat its homes while enabling German distributors to sell excess gas, at a profit, throughout Western Europe. Action that could be traced to the administration would violate US promises to minimize direct conflict with Russia. Secrecy was essential.
Norway were the obvious collaborators:
Back in Washington, planners knew they had to go to Norway. “They hated the Russians, and the Norwegian navy was full of superb sailors and divers who had generations of experience in highly profitable deep-sea oil and gas exploration,” the source said. They also could be trusted to keep the mission secret. (The Norwegians may have had other interests as well. The destruction of Nord Stream—if the Americans could pull it off—would allow Norway to sell vastly more of its own natural gas to Europe.)
With a last minute change Joe Biden called for the charges not to go off with just a two-day timer, but to sit there ready underwater on the pipe and be triggered at some later date. This caused quite a stir and much frustration. It was a much more difficult requirement:
The C4 attached to the pipelines would be triggered by a sonar buoy dropped by a plane on short notice, but the procedure involved the most advanced signal processing technology. Once in place, the delayed timing devices attached to any of the four pipelines could be accidentally triggered by the complex mix of ocean background noises throughout the heavily trafficked Baltic Sea—from near and distant ships, underwater drilling, seismic events, waves and even sea creatures. To avoid this, the sonar buoy, once in place, would emit a sequence of unique low frequency tonal sounds—much like those emitted by a flute or a piano—that would be recognized by the timing device and, after a pre-set hours of delay, trigger the explosives. (“You want a signal that is robust enough so that no other signal could accidentally send a pulse that detonated the explosives,” I was told by Dr. Theodore Postol, professor emeritus of science, technology and national security policy at MIT. Postol, who has served as the science adviser to the Pentagon’s Chief of Naval Operations, said the issue facing the group in Norway because of Biden’s delay was one of chance: “The longer the explosives are in the water the greater risk there would be of a random signal that would launch the bombs.”)
On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission. Within a few minutes, pools of methane gas that remained in the shuttered pipelines could be seen spreading on the water’s surface and the world learned that something irreversible had taken place.
How useless were the media?
FALLOUT
In the immediate aftermath of the pipeline bombing, the American media treated it like an unsolved mystery. Russia was repeatedly cited as a likely culprit, spurred on by calculated leaks from the White House—but without ever establishing a clear motive for such an act of self-sabotage, beyond simple retribution. A few months later, when it emerged that Russian authorities had been quietly getting estimates for the cost to repair the pipelines, the New York Times described the news as “complicating theories about who was behind” the attack. No major American newspaper dug into the earlier threats to the pipelines made by Biden and Undersecretary of State Nuland.
Asked why he thought the Russians failed to respond, he said cynically, “Maybe they want the capability to do the same things the U.S. did.
“It was a beautiful cover story,” he went on. “Behind it was a covert operation that placed experts in the field and equipment that operated on a covert signal.
See the videos below of all the US officials calling for action against the pipeline — looking for sanctions. Many interests in the US wanted to stop this pipeline.
In light of the Seymour Hersh bombshell on the U.S. and Norway blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline, let’s recall how U.S. officials openly incited against it for months, then blamed… Russia.https://t.co/qp1d7Jx9rypic.twitter.com/V0Cy2JPSXI
UPDATED: Ian Rons disagrees, and is very unimpressed with the Hersch uncorroborated story. Worth reading it. Though it smelled like a weak effort with “legal” and political points at the top. (As if any government seems bound by law these days). But one point struck — he queries whether it was necessary to hide under the BALTOPS war games, as submarines could get in there anytime. And the delayed triggering by sonar drop does sound complicated.
I also have deep reservations about the remotely-triggered detonators that were apparently designed and manufactured for this one operation on short notice, that survived over three months submerged under battery power in the cold Baltic Sea, vulnerable all the time to discovery, and which were apparently triggered by a single sonar buoy dropped from a Norwegian(!) aircraft, despite the fact that the explosions happened about 50 miles and precisely 17 hours apart. Every detail of that story raises a number of questions, but perhaps Sweden (which is carrying out the investigation) can tell us whether evidence of these sophisticated trigger devices has been found.
Nonetheless, the debunking is not a heavyweight performance. Just points worth discussing.
h/t Another Ian, Krishna Gans, Scott of the Pacific, Tony Thomas, Bill in AZ.
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