Finally we have a preprint paper assessing SARS2 as if it might have been an engineered product from a laboratory. We now know it was very likely a lab product and we can probably even name the tools that were used to tweak it.
The virus appears to be too clean, lacking in the noise that all its wild type cousins have. Random evolution in bats and pangolins just doesn’t work like this. SARS2 has the unmistakable fingerprint pattern of a virus that not-so-coincidentally is perfectly suited to being manipulated with two of the most common laboratory enzymes available available at a biolab near you for $150. (Shop here, here, or here).
The authors stress that even though their results strongly suggest this virus was a “synthetic” virus, that doesn’t tell us whether it was intended to harm, or was released deliberately. But their results do cast a very different light on the rush to declare the wet markets were to blame, and the too-fast calls, based on no evidence, that anyone who said otherwise was a conspiracy theorist. This kind of analysis could have been done in Feb-March 2020 and it wasn’t. How fast would nations have slammed the borders shut if they thought this was a lab accident?
“This has been an incredible project. Yet, for obvious reasons, this is the saddest paper I’ve ever written.” — Alex Washburne
*UPDATE added at the bottom as the debate over this paper progresses.*
So Valentin Bruttel, Alex Washburne, and Antonius VanDongen looked for evidence that the virus was manipulated to suit two of the most common gene-slicing tools for sale — called BsaIand BsmBI . As Alex says, when you walk into the store to buy enzymes, these are the top recommendations. What they found were that the target cutting sites for these were placed quite neatly separated, to produce workable size fragments of a similar size. They also found that important genes were not split — things like the key RBD code were neatly contained in one piece, rather than cut in the middle. (RBD means the Receptor Binding Domain — the key bit that sticks to ACE2). When they compare SARS2 to 37 other types of coronaviruses the mutations that produced these new target codes were conveniently “silent” mutations. They were neutral spelling changes in the code that don’t alter the final meaning. For example both CTC and CTA code for the same amino acid. So we can flip between the two and the end product made from this will be the same*. But change an ATG to a GTG and the shape of the protein made will be different. Obviously if a human brain was managing the code for some desired effect they would select the “silent” kind of mutations to either create new target sites or remove unwanted target code in the wrong spot.
This is a long post, but the era of bioweapons and genetic-engineering accidents is upon us whether we like it or not. These researchers conclude the SARS2 virus was likely synthetic but even if it wasn’t and someone comes up with a realistic criticism of the paper — the SARS2 virus could clearly have been made easily in many labs. Clearly we need to talk about this!
From the abstract:
Both the restriction site fingerprint and the pattern of mutations generating them are extremely unlikely in wild coronaviruses and nearly universal in synthetic viruses. Our findings strongly suggest a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV2.
To understand how genetic engineering works we need to know the basic tools
Once we know the basic gene editing techniques we can see how well adapted the virus is for lab work. So here is a ten-second instruction kit for genetic engineering. DNA is made a four letter code A, C, G, and T. It has two strands: the active code and the mirrored “back up” copy (something the computer coders will appreciate). Thanks to chemistry the A’s always pair with T’s, and the C’s pair with G’s. So, for example, the sequence of GGAA will “glue” itself to CCTT on the opposite paired strand. Our DNA is the ultimate chemical velcro. The chain of paired bases makes up the famous double helix.
We have a lot of off-the-shelf tools to slice up that double helix code, and each of these tools cuts only a certain sequence, say CGTCTC, which leaves handy “sticky ends” that can be glued back together. This short sequence will stay embedded in the code after the edit, which is a clue, but not much of one on its own, since these sort of short sequences can occur randomly too.
This is code ready to be cut into 3 parts with “sticky ends” that will reassemble back onto themselves (to loop) and then later reassembled back in a line. There are unique “sticky ends” so the loops only pair back to the right partner in the right order.
But the lack of these target sites is also a clue. In wild viruses these “target sites” will occur randomly in the wrong spots. So the first task of serious genetic engineers is to remove the badly placed target sites — if they don’t do that, the enzymes will chop up the DNA into odd sized fragments, too big and too small to work with. The code needs to be “clean”.
Hmm? Those fragment sizes in SARS2 are oddly “perfect”…
[EDITED] Here’s a graph of the number of fragments made from 70 different wild viruses which were chopped at all the wild target sites.The number of fragments is graphed against the size of the longest piece. The wild viruses produce the grey curve with a kind of random distribution of cutting sites. But synthetic viruses fall in the red box where 5 – 8 fragments of similar size is easier to work with.
All the fragment sizes are conveniently similar. Not too big and not too small.
Washburne explains this graph on his blog. To get the neat log curve they took 70 wild viruses and cut them up with 200 enzymes in 1,000 enzyme pairs. Engineered viruses end up in the red box. Wild viruses fall on the grey curve.
Genetic engineers need to play with nice medium length fragments
The basic technique for genetic engineering is below in the diagram. The virus is chopped up into separate bits. Each bit has a matching end that pairs up on itself to form a loop, which is easy for people to work with. Then after we have played games with the separate loops we can cut them open at the same target marks, put all the loops back together, and they will reassemble into the right order in the long chain. To make this work the fragments need be a workable length, and each “split” is unique so the chain will only form in the right order.
So we chop up DNA, roll it into little circles we can work with. Make the changes we want and the open the circles and reassemble them into one long chain of code.
It’s worth knowing that while SARS is a single strand RNA virus, to play games with it we convert it into DNA and use our DNA engineering tools. This is because in the world of chemistry — RNA is like a cheap photocopy of DNA. The molecules are nearly the same, but it has only one strand, and it’s so unstable and sticky that it’s very hard to work with. To engineer RNA, the lab techs convert it to DNA, then play games, then convert the end product back to RNA (click to expand the diagram of the process above). This is especially important with a large virus like the SARS-Cov-2 virus which has nearly 30,000 bases. (That’s one long strong of letters like… ACGTCCTGC… up to 30,000 “letters” in a row.)
So let’s imagine the target sites were placed randomly by mutation inside bats in a cave…
This below is an evolutionary branched tree of corona viruses with two kinds of SARS2 in the top two rows and compared to 37 other corona viruses below. As you can see, for some reason the bats that SARS2 came from have cleaned up the target sequences. Clever bats. The red and green dots are the target sites for our favorite genetic engineering tools. The spacings in the SARS 2 rows are oddly ideal. This is part of the fingerprint of a laboratory made virus.
Like wow: This table blew me away…
Note the striking even spacing of the cutting target sites in the top two SARS rows compared to the random pattern in all the other Coronaviruses.
There’s more to this to be a full fingerprint pattern of a lab virus:
On his blog Alex Washburne‘s describes a pattern that marks a virus as “lab made”. An “infectious clone” means a synthetic clone of a wild virus. It not only needs nicely spaced markers for enzymes available by mail order, but also the “sticky ends” must be unique so it can be reassembled in the right order, and the mutations must be silent, and the genes need to be contained neatly on single piece.
The Z-scores for 5 – 7 fragments suggest this was “more likely engineered”.
Your eyeballs knew it anyway…
Caption: A ranked plot of z-scores for all digestions creating 5-7 fragments, the idealized range for a CoV reverse genetic system. z-scores measure the standard deviations below the wild type expectation, correcting for the number of fragments. SARS-CoV-2 appears more likely to have been engineered for IVGA than several known CoV reverse genetic systems.
So this then is the final SARS2 compilation of fragments assembled
Here’s the assembly plan for the virus that held up the world. The lowest layer in the diagram below is the old SARS1. We can see the placement of target sites for the two common laboratory enzymes (marked in red). As we go up each layer (to a new different virus) things are cleaner than the layer before. The topmost layer is SARS2 itself. The RBD and FCS (Furin Cleavage site) are marked. Click to make this bigger.
This is the covid virus, at the top, in segments. Start with wild coronaviruses at the bottom, they have random spaced target sites. But the sites in Covid are neatly spaced just where an genetic engineer would want them to be.
All the clues point to a lab created virus:
What are the odds a million bats typing on typewriters could create this?
Washburne tries to calculate the odds of this pattern occurring naturally.
It turns out, the sticky ends produced by BsaI/BsmBI digestion of SARS-CoV-2 are all unique, non-palindromic, and all contain at least one A or T – all criteria either required or recommended for in vitro genome assembly.
It also turns out, the mutations separating SARS-CoV-2 BsaI/BsmBI sites from those of its close relatives are all silent. About 84% of mutations between SARS-CoV-2 and its two closest relatives (BANAL-20-52 and RaTG13) are silent. There are 14 distinct mutations separating SARS-CoV-2 BsaI/BsmBI sites, and all of them are silent. There’s a ~9% chance that 14 randomly drawn mutations are all silent.
Compared to the rest of the genomes, we found a significantly higher rate of silent mutations within BsaI/BsmBI sites. Between BANAL52 and SARS-CoV-2, there is a 5x higher rate of silent mutations within BsaI/BsmBi recognition sites than the rest of the genome (P=0.004). Between RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2, there’s a whopping 8x higher rate of silent mutations with 1/100 million odds of seeing as high or higher concentration of silent mutations within the BsaI/BsmBI restriction sites.
The odds of meeting any one of these criteria vary, from 1%-0.07% of having such a small maximum fragment length to 1/250 to 1/100 million odds of having such high concentration of silent mutations within BsaI/BsmBI recognition sites. The odds of meeting every single one of these criteria are even smaller. Much smaller.
As a result of this analysis, we theorize that SARS-CoV-2 was assembled in a lab via common methods used to assemble infectious clones pre-COVID.
It looks just like a common research product from a lab:
SARS could be an experiment that escaped, or it could be a bioweapon. This research does not differentiate, but obviously, if it’s a lab leak, that changes everything, and it also would have changed everything if this had been known in February 2020:
A synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t mean there was malicious intent. In fact, the location of BsaI/BsmBI site appear almost chimeric: some are shared with close relatives and others are shared with distant relatives, making us hypothesize that perhaps researchers just wanted to make chimeric viruses within this clade of relatively unstudied CoVs. Again, this is a common research project, much like that conducted at Boston University recently, and it is often done with noble intentions of learning about genotype-to-phenotype relationships and even preemptively designing vaccines against viruses that are most-likely to cause a pandemic. That would be tragically ironic if proven true.
Many labs could have done this kind of work says Washburne on his blog. The world needs to wake up to the ease with which this kind of dangerous work can be done:
We don’t identify who constructed the virus. Many people in the world could do this, although the origin of this outbreak in Wuhan does narrow the range of suspects considerably. The technology used to make infectious clones is relatively cheap, especially compared to making an atom bomb. Even if our theory is rejected by later tests, the ease of these experiments should scare the shit out of all of us enough to start talking about global biosafety.
We need to urgently discuss of how to prevent accidents
Perhaps all labs should have signature markers inserted in their work?
In addition to, I don’t know, regulating which sequences you can purchase online, we may also want to require some identifiability of chimeric experiments. As silencers for guns are illegal, we may be wise to require all chimeric viral research have clearly identifiable sequences that help us identify right away who did it and what was done, as such information may be relevant for preventing a lab accident from turning into a full-blown pandemic.
Washburne writes in beautifully dispassionate tones — always trying to figure out why he might be wrong:
As a scientist conducting this research, I did my best to ensure our methods were reproducible, our statistics conservative, and our presentation honest. We discovered SARS-CoV-2 was unusual, knew the massive stakes of our finding, and set out to disprove our hypothesis by looking closer at sticky ends, silent mutations, and analyses of the evolution of CoVs. Any one of these tests could’ve rejected our hypothesis and the world would never have seen this paper. We sought peer-reviews from world experts at every leading institution we could connect with, and we asked them to shake down our results. The pre-print is not exactly “not peer-reviewed”, as it is the product of rolling feedback from world experts and we did our best to incorporate all of their feedback, test all of their proposed tests, and include all of the limitations they identified in our manuscript.
The authors stress that “synthetic” means synthesized, and not necessarily a bioweapon, or “Gain of Function”. But even if SARS2 wasn’t a bioweapon we need to discuss these tools and techniques. There are other aspects outside this work that are relevant to the bioweapon question, and we’ll discuss those another day. For the moment, the citizens of the free world need to learn enough about genetic engineering to discuss what kind of world we want to live in.
___________
UPDATE: It’s great to see commentary on this paper starting. Alex Crits-Christoph has attacked the paper on a twitter thread, which Washburne has already responded to. The former points out that the the pattern in other enzyme targets in SARS2 are not unusual and claims this is cherry picking, but if a team did engineer the virus to suit one or two enzymes I don’t see why we wouldn’t see what Crit-Christoph finds? Washburne replies they didn’t cherry pick they just started looking at two of the most popular enzyme tools. They also used a long list of criteria.
Other critics are pointing out the the Golden Gate Assembly model would remove the “scars” (or traces) of the Golden Gate sequences. But are these scar or coding elements removed later, only at the end? Tony vanDongen (author) says it’s correct the process can be scarless with target sites removed, but then they can’t be used again. He implies SARS2 is a work in progress — “The BsaI/BsmBI fingerprint in SARS2 is indicative of a design where you could test many different iterations of the virus. Disassemble and reassemble the genome at your heart’s content.” That suggests SARS2 may have been a workhorse used to test many things in a lab?
EDITED: Washburne notes that “The most important tweak is that the exact method used to assemble CoVs isn’t best termed “Golden Gate“ but “Type IIS directional assembly”. So “Golden Gate was removed from the introduction paragraphs.
____________
REFERENCES
Valentin Bruttel, Alex Washburne, Antonius VanDongen (2022) Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2, doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.10.18.512756
The new glue trend in protests may suddenly be over. Just like that.
As Twitchy and RedState report: Nine new protestors called “Scientist-Rebellion” turned up to the Volkswagon factory and glued themselves to the floor saying they were “on hunger strike until our demands to decarbonize the German transport sector are met.”. The normal response is to call the police and get the glue protestors arrested which gives them the attention they so desire. Instead, Volkswagon immediately decarbonized the factory — turned everything off including the heating and left the protestors there to figure out the scientific logistics of eating, drinking, and going to the toilet while glued to a cold floor.
You’ve nailed it mate. No heating, no lights. You’ve successfully decarbonised the hall that you are in. Let us know how it’s working out for you, and see if you can join the dots. https://t.co/0pcg3nqTSV
These people want to run the world but couldn’t plan their own lives 24 hours in advance:
Getting ready for first night of sleep inside the Porsche Pavillion @Autostadt to demand @VW to eventually act to decarbonise the transport sector.
These are our demands to the Volkswagen CEO, adapted from our general demands. (1) support introduction of speed limits on German motorways; (2) condone bonds held by @VW from Global South; (3) declare infeasibility of 1.5 goal.
@VW told us that they supported our right to protest, but they refused our request to provide us with a bowl to urinate and defecate in a decent manner while we are glued, and have turned off the heating. People in support can’t get out of the building.
Just a clarification: people in support can get out of the building but then they couldn’t get back in. We can’t order our food, we must use the one provided by Wolkswagen. Lights off. Random unannounced checks by security guards with bright torches. Police just came in.
His hand got swollen in 24 hours, and he’s now continuing his hunger strike “from hospital”.
“after 24 hours of remaining glued to the floor and a nearly sleepless night my hand got swollen. The Wolkswagen manager had initially refused to let a doctor in but eventually accepted. “
Doctors ascertained the possibility of life-threatening blood clots in my hand and recommended an immediate transfer to a hospital. My health is of course paramount. I accepted to leave this wonderful group and was taken to hospital, continuing my hunger strike.
BertyBollocks says: “I’m a serious scientist protesting against fossil fuels. Now turn the gas heating on and bring me my potty”
Private Domains: Loosing a hand for clima change is nothing, keep going
It’s a 2 Party system and We’re not Invited says: If you really want to send a message, glue your testicles to a car. Glueing hands to the floor is a half measure. Make this count!
SoloWingKiba: Bro this is why people don’t “trust the science” these days. You’re all scientists and not a single one of you know the effects of glue on skin, or how you planned to use the bathroom? If you’re making a sacrifice to protest, whining about it makes the sacrifice meaningless.
The scariest thing is that a communist dictator seems more sensible than any democratic one.
He’s a tyrant, true, but one that can add up numbers. So it has come to pass that the largest coal fired nation in the world will burn even more coal because energy security today is more important than theoretically slowing storms in 2100 AD. China makes no secret of it, but hardly anyone is even talking about it.
In other news from the CCP convention, unlike the West, China won’t blow up their coal plans until the new replacement energy is ready to use. Which is handy if the replacement turns out to be a trillion dollar lemon.
Rather soberingly, for transition-fans, China makes 80% of all the solar panels on Earth but that’s not enough to dent the growth of Chinese coal demands. If these solar panels were so cheap and effective China would ban the sale of them.
China’s state planner, the National Development and Reform Commission, said while China would continue to invest heavily in wind and solar, annual coal production would rise to 4.6 billion tonnes in 2025 compared to 4.1 billon tonnes last year.
Determined to avoid a repeat of last year’s crippling power shortages, China has abandoned previously stated targets to cap coal production at 4.1 billion tonnes by 2025 following the country’s economic slowdown and fears of a growing global energy crisis.
NDRC deputy director Ren Jingdong … described coal as the “ballast stone” of China’s energy needs and said the country would also boost oil and gas exploration and development.
To put that 4.6 billion ton target in perspective:
If the CDC puts a particular vaccine on the childhood vaccine schedule Big Pharma automatically is thereafter liability free “forever” for that vaccine. And that may happen in the next 24 hours. So this is a Platinum Jackpot moment for Pharmaceutical shareholders, but makes no medical sense at all. It’s the logical but absurd endpoint of a civilization run on bubble-money. If we print enough money from nothing to capture the agencies, buy off the media, and keep the politicians on a leash, we will get served a Plateful of Stupid. And so it is coming to pass…
Watch Tucker’s face as the good Doctor Makary explains the situation. I mean really, in serious straight tones we’re saying that 50 million American children will be told to take a vaccine that has only been tested on eight mice, for a disease that poses little known threat to them, with a vaccine that isn’t likely to help for long, and which has serious known side-effects, and, by the way, there’s no clinical data to assess. Big Pharma says they’ve done a study, but the data is so good it’s a secret. We’ve heard that story before.
This is an all new peak in Reductive Dystopia, where all roads lead to Big-Pharma profits. There has never been a vaccine added to the schedule without solid clinical data showing benefits. But no one is even pretending now. As Makary says “Why even have an FDA?” Why have clinical trials?
As with all good drugs tested on eight mice, the US government has already bought 170 million doses. But it’s only money and they’re only children, right?
If the CDC adds it to the schedule, children mayhave to take it in order to go to school. It will depend on the States to decide. Judging by Twitter comments, it could be the best thing that ever happened for home-schooling. That is unless people move to Florida.
A country can only handle so much dystopia. If the Federal government doesn’t rein in those Federal agents and agencies, soon the States will have to. A union can fall apart over something that matters — like children.
If 1 in 5,000 causes a severe adverse effect in Germany and there are 50 million school age children in the United States, that’s 10,000 children. (And it may be worse — in Norway it was estimated that 1 in 1,000 people were hospitalized or suffered a “life changing” event.). Who knows? Don’t ask the mice, they’re dead.
Dr. Makary is a surgical oncologist specializing in pancreatic surgery and serves as chief of Islet Transplantation Surgery at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. Dr. Makary is a frequent medical commentator and has testified to congress on the need for patient-centeredness in health care. He has published over 200 scientific publications and speaks nationally and internationally on quality and safety in health care.
There is extraordinary flooding across Victoria lately in the land of Droughts and Flooding Rains. The Australian ABC is telling us that “flooding in Victoria is uncommon“. But a ten second search on Trove Australia turned up the forgotten floods of 1870, just as one example, with these glorious drawings (below). Those floods 152 years ago seemed to affect many of the same places as the floods of 2022: the Murray River was a “vast inland lake” and almost the whole distance from Sandhurst to Echuca, about sixty miles, was underwater. Melbourne became an “antipodean Venice”. A rain-bomb dropped on the Keilor Plains and three feet of water fell “in minutes”. Train lines were left suspended in the air, and men, women, children, horses, cattle and sheep sadly drowned. And at Echuca, the water stayed high for two whole months, starting on Sept 9th but not peaking finally until November 7th.
Imagine what the ABC could do for Australia if it had a billion dollars and access to the internet?
Floods in Victoria — Sandhurst, from the top of Bridge Street | Click to enlarge
The Wharf’s Echuca, families retreating from the low grounds | Click to enlarge
I saw the Murray for the first time, the most important river in Australia; but its appearance was not that of a river, but a vast inland lake, overflowing its banks in all directions, carrying death and destruction wherever it stretched. The houses on the New South Wales bank were buried to the eaves. The palings surrounding the gardens were just perceptible.
Flood levels at Echuca on the Murray River came and went during September peaking two or three times at 32 to 34 feet. But that was not the end of it. Even more heavy rain arrived at the end of October, and the water rose again. The highest point did not occur until November 7th when the river reached 38 feet.
High Street in flood at Echuca in 1870 Source: Trove
Once more Victoria has been visited by very severe floods, and every part of the country has suffered more or less. In fact, since 1859, there has been no such destructive flood in the country districts as that which occurred on the 9th September. Almost the whole distance from Sandhurst to Echuca, about sixty miles, was laid under water, and of course a great deal of damage was done to property. In the Ballarat and Geelong districts there was also great loss. We present a series of illustrations, of which the first two are sketches taken at the Murray, where the extensive plains on either side of the river were suddenly converted into a vast lake. Another view represents the bridge near Rochester on the Echuca railway.
…
Melbourne became an “antipodean Venice”
A portion of the town was transferred for the nonce into an antipodean Venice, and boats might have plied along the main street. Our artist, …was despatched to Echuca:—”I left Melbourne with the River Yarra at flood height... hardly had I been seated in the train than the whole area between Spencer-street and the Saltwater River spread out before me as one vast sea,and as we neared Footscray no traces of the river could be seen but half buried houses, black chimneys rising isolated out of the water, and the bridge with hardly the shape of the arch visible. Further on to the right the bridge at the racecourse had floated away, and was leaning half over against some cottages, of which the roofs only could be seen.
Floods at Railway Bridge, near Runnymede | Click to enlarge
A primitive Rain Bomb: 3 feet of rain in “minutes”
…On the Keilor Plains, he said, the rain came down in a positive sheet of water, unlike anything he ever saw before, and as the wind was blowing hard as well it was impossible to face it.
In a few minutes the line was covered to the depth of [three an a half feet], caused entirely by the downpour. So terrible and overpowering was the effect that the workmen stood awe struck. One of his men, a Scotchman, he accosted with, “Well, Sandy, what do you think of this?” ”Eh, man,” he exclaimed, “surely the end o’ the world has come at last.”
Around 12.30 am, an attempt was made to rescue residents on the low ground, including those at the residence of Robert Wright, the brickmaker on the banks of the creek, and dressmaker Betsy Gillies. In the nick of time, the Wright family got themselves across the deluge to safe ground. Miss Gillies was woken from her slumber and also escaped. In both cases, another few minutes, and the outcome would have been disastrous.
Attention then turned to the two cottages behind the Albion office, that of the Drummonds and Lairds. By now, the water was knee-deep and the current was too fast to safely cross. Constable James Mahon made a dash for it but was carried away. Fortunately, he managed to land on top of a pigsty and was able to get back to safety. He tried again and was able to save one of the children. Storekeeper Louis Lesser also headed across the water and rescued another child. He was also able to lift Mrs Margaret Drummond out of the water and on to the roof of a cowshed. Her husband, David Drummond got three children to safety and went back for three more, James and Margeret Jr and his niece Janet. He had one on his back and one in each arm as he made his way across. Suddenly, the current caught him, and all four were swept away.
Charles Loxton, the young accountant from the National Bank of Australasia (below). attempted to cross on his horse. They were both swept away, and it was then the rescue was abandoned.
…But looking around the town, it was anything but normal. It was devastating. “The scene when morning dawned was heartrending. Men, women, and children were found on chimneys and housetops; and all sorts of property was floating about”.
In Melbourne CBD, people used ferries to get around, factories were underwater:
…the central parts of the city were speedily deluged, and the torrents which swept down Elizabeth and Swanston streets stretched across the roadway, and reached the door steps on both sides of the street. The St. Kilda and Sandridge roads were both submerged several feet in places, and all approaches to Emerald hill for a time disappeared. From the railway to the Immigrant’s Home in the one direction, and from the Botanical Gardens to beyond Emerald-hill in the other, all the flats were covered with a sheet of water. Ferry boats were in requisition, and without the aid of these all pedestrian communication across Prince’s-bridge was entirely cut off. The whole of the low-lying land between the river and Clarendon-street, Emerald- hill, was entirely covered. The factories on the flats all suffered severely, while many of the small manufacturers have sustained losses which, in some cases, may cripple them in their operations.
Make no mistake, the story of our lifetimes is that we got wildly lucky. It’s not just that most our economy is no longer dedicated to finding fuel (for our corporeal bodies or our machines) but that a vast share of our lives is not consumed with collecting wood or dung, rolling up hay, or gathering berries.
The graph below shows a remarkable transformation from a lifestyle where 80% of all the work done was just the daily task of finding fuel. The advent of the industrial revolution cut that effort in half, but the wild success of coal power and technology in the 1800s cut it by factor of ten. It almost appears as if coal did not just fuel the 19th Century, but created the 20th Century too. It was the great disruptor…
The real energy transition in the last 700 years
This was the economic transformation of the United Kingdom
By the 1990s the hunt for all the energy we needed was just a tiny 7% of the economy. And the most remarkable thing about that which is not shown in the graph, was that the total energy consumed had not shrunk at all, it had exploded.
Four hundred years ago a person in the UK would expect to use about 20KWh each day. Today each person consumes nearly 200kWh of energy. And the whole population was about 4 million people then, so there are 15 times as many people, all using ten times as much energy. How rich we are…
Prior to the mid-seventeenth century, British society spent between 50 and 80% or more of GDP to obtain basic energy to survive. MacKay (2009) estimates that an affluent Briton currently consumes approximately 195 kWh per day per person while the average American consumes 250 kWh per day per person. He reckons that 400 years ago, in Europe, the average person sustainably consumed about 20 kWh per day per person, primarily from food and wood, which required approximately one hectare of forest per person. Obviously, not nearly enough forest exists now to support present population densities (Field et al. 2008).
“Trust the science” has morphed into “attention-seeking children toss soup on 8o million dollar painting”. This can happen when a generation is taught that their own culture is worthless, that weather is controlled by light bulbs, and that vandalism is an achievement.
This is end stage absurdity in the climate religion. Their words don’t even make sense:
“Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting or the protection of the planet and our people.” “The cost of living crisis is part of the cost of oil crisis. Fuel is unaffordable. To millions of cold hungry families, they can’t even afford to heat a tin of soup…”
Someone needs to explain supply and demand to the people at Just Stop Oil. If fuel is unaffordable the solution is morefuel. Drill for Oil baby, make civilization great again so people can heat up their soup.
I think the main message is: “don’t let anyone in wearing “Just Stop Oil t-shirts”.
Apparently the painting is covered with glass. To protect our national treasures perhaps it’s time we stopped rewarding vandals with prime time TV spots? Ten thousand farmers can protest for two months and they don’t get even 2 seconds of fame, so why should two teenagers with a soup tin get attention unless you want to encourage more people to defile national art?
But then again, the more people who see this protest and think it’s climate activists at work, the better. Who would look at this think “That’s it. I need an EV”. Just Stop Oil could be the dumbest science protest movement ever.
It makes more sense if this is actually a placement marketing campaign by Heinz:
BarronsNews: Just Stop Oil said in a statement its activists threw two cans of Heinz Tomato soup over the painting to demand the UK government halt all new oil and gas projects.
Just Stop Oil later tweeted: “Keep giving us new oil and gas, and you will keep getting soup.”
And the London Police said, “and we will arrest you”:
London’s Metropolitan Police said officers arrested two protesters from the organisation for criminal damage and aggravated trespass after they “threw a substance” at the painting in the gallery and glued themselves to a wall, just after 11 am (1000 GMT).
Philip Oldham @MrPhilipOldham says: That’s it. I’m going for a pointless drive.
For three years the workers of France revolted in Yellow Vestprotests week after relentless week, even though the media ignored them, they kept returning. President Macron had to do something that looked like he was listening. So 150 people won the lucky dip draw to be the actors in a show pretending to be “the People’s Government of France”. Only they, apparently, thought they were doing something important. For nine months these 150 people were supposed to learn climate science and figure out what the other 65 million French citizens would have chosen had they been there. Naturally, they were marinated and baked in approved ClimateThink, and no dissenting scientists or citizens were invited.
After this intense love in, they came up with a list of policies as big as a phone book, the government picked the ones they were probably going to do anyway, and flicked the ones they weren’t and then proclaimed the citizens had spoken! In theory there was supposed to be a Referendum option at the end, but this, well, nevermind, became just another round of votes in Parliament.
The 150 were selected from a pool of 225,000 to represent an illusory “cross-section of the French population across their age, gender, education level, socio-professional category, etc etc. ” But if half the population of France are skeptics, no one selected them. Thus we get a pseudo “mini-democracy” where we can avoid all those messy public debates, and 150 people can save the world while the 65 million sleep through it. Turn on the TV, and turn off your brain.
The Australian ABC loves it of course, and despite getting $3 million dollars to spend yesterday (like every day), it couldn’t find anyone who thought the Citizens Assembly was not wonderful.
For thirty years the Experts were the only people that mattered, but now the Permitted-Amateurs are here to save the day:
Asking “amateurs” for policy advice has one big advantage over the standard route of going to the experts, said Professor Curato.
Non-experts can encounter a problem without preconceived ideas – and this can lead to unexpected new solutions.
“If you’re a climate economist, you will only see the problem from an economic perspective. If you’re a climate scientist, you only see the problem from a scientific perspective,” she said.
“Experts don’t have the monopoly of good answers.”.
Of course, Permitted Amateurs were only taught permitted thoughts:
It started with a crash course in climate change, presented by the best French experts, [who hadn’t already been sacked, thinks Jo]… to get all the citizens up to speed on the latest science.
There was also the inevitable conversion of the rare short-lived B-meson subatomic skeptic that only seems to exist in high speed press releases:
Just like any cross-section of society, their knowledge of climate change varied across the group, and Dr Giraudet said these lectures had an immediate impact on the group. “These were a big shock for many of the participants. Some claim that they came as climate sceptics and after these lectures, they completely changed their mind.”
Everywhere else in the real world the conversions all go the other way from believer to skeptic, and usually just as they retire.
The Selected Permitted Amateurs did such a good job they came up with ideas so outlandish they could make Macron look like a sensible man of the centre as he vetoed them or wound them back. They wanted to reduce speed limits, tax big corporations, and stop everyone flying anywhere that wasn’t at least four hours away. Instead it’s just become a ban on trips under two-and-a-half hours.
Lucky French citizens will now get health warnings on their car adverts. What like, Driving Renaults Melts Glaciers?
Ecocide is a magic wand that stops all environmental crime
They also wanted to introduce the crime of Ecocide. Imagine if you could just make a law over highly complex international scientific issues with error bars larger than Antarctica and six dimensions of moving parts? What could possibly go wrong, apart from turning it into a supra-national unelected government body with corrupt scientists, corrupt judges, and working like the WHO does in the service of President Xi?
France would have been the first country in the world to make ecocide a crime. Instead, Macron promised to make ecocide a less-serious “offence”.
As wikipedia says: “Ecocideis human impact on the environment causing mass destruction to that environment.” Making it about as amorphous, unmeasureable, infinite and endless as any container-ship of unemployed lawyers and scientists could want.
France, no doubt, already has specific laws about measurable pollution. But that isn’t enough to be able to sue political targets for sins against our grandchildren that can’t be measured yet, except with computer models.
There were problems everywhere but the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) got the first mention on the “Six Takeaways” list of government corruption. Who would have thought that a public body holding the purse-strings to the rest of the economy, with vague ill-defined, unmeasurable long term goals would become so corrupt. More to the point, who would have thought they wouldn’t?
With so many public officials making out like bandits the point of carbon credits is not to change the weather, it’s a Bureaucrat Investment Tool. With the power to ban or gift exemptions to favoured firms, bureaucrats can insider trade their way to retirement.
Numerous federal officials owned shares of companies lobbying their agencies:
More than 200 senior officials at the Environmental Protection Agency, or nearly one in three, reported that they or their family members held investments in companies that were lobbying the agency. EPA employees and their family members collectively owned between $400,000 and nearly $2 million in shares of oil and gas companies on average each year between 2016 and 2021.
An EPA official reported purchases of oil and gas stocks. The Food and Drug Administration improperly let an official own dozens of food and drug stocks on its no-buy list. A Defense Department official bought stock in a defense company five times before it won new business from the Pentagon.
Cocky, What? This is really blatant:
Some officials traded ahead of regulatory actions:
More than five dozen officials at five agencies reported trading stocks of companies shortly before their departments announced enforcement actions against those companies, such as charges or settlements.
Not only did a lot of people have snouts in the trough, but there must have also been a lot of blind eyes to avoid seeing all that insider trading. And some numbers were surprisingly large for people earning an hourly wage. In some cases the individual trades were between “$5 million and $25 million”.
People say that the Tech Giants are private, but in some sense Big Gov privately owns Big Tech.
Federal officials are big technology investors:
While the government was ramping up scrutiny of large technology companies, more than 1,800 federal officials reported owning or trading at least one of four major tech stocks: Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook, Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc.
There are around 1,800 people employed by the government who have less than no interest in launching an anti-trust suit.
On the plus side, at least we know there is still a news agency left which has some journalists. And that’s a big deal.
As for the cause of the wave of self serving cheatery, we could do cultural psychoanalysis, but as I keep saying, it starts with fake money. Inflating the currency works like cancer on the delicate network of incentives. First people feel happy, more confident, and more willing to take risks. Things work out, especially for those at the head of the rocket. But pretty soon, things escalate — and before you know it, crazy-land is here, all traffic lights are stuck on Green, and one guy has a plan to hold back the sea and a ten trillion dollar fund to do it.
Somewhere along the way, desk clerks get an investment portfolio, and investment sharks get a job at the EPA. At some point half the population knows someone who’s on the take and getting away with it, and the next day nearly everyone is.
A report by Mark Mills called the The “Energy Transition” Delusion came out in August with some killer statistics. Despite the rampant glorious uptake of sparkling renewables, wind and solar provide less than 5% of the total global energy demand while the hated hydrocarbons still provide 84%. And that energy demand is growing relentlessly and with no end in sight.
Global economies are facing a potential energy shock—the third such shock of the past half century. Energy costs and security have returned to center stage, as has the realization that the world remains deeply dependent on reliable supplies of petroleum, natural gas, and coal.
It’s a hi-tech energy blackhole
As James Freeman at the Wall Street Journal, noted, some of the most game-changing statistics in the report are about mobile phones. Our need for gadgets, phones and the internet means we need more energy than ever:
Historically, the energy costs of manufacturing a product roughly tracked the weight of the thing produced. A refrigerator weighs about 200 times more than a hair dryer and takes nearly 100 times more energy to fabricate. But it takes nearly as much energy to make one smartphone as it does one refrigerator, even though the latter weighs 1,000 times more. The world produces nearly 10 times more smartphones a year than refrigerators. Thus, the global fabrication of smartphones now uses 15% as much energy as does the entire automotive industry, even though a car weighs 10,000 times more than a smartphone. The global Cloud, society’s newest and biggest infrastructure, uses twice as much electricity as the entire nation of Japan.
Most of the world doesn’t own a car (yet)
Advocates of a carbon-free world underestimate not only how much energy the world already uses, but how much more energy the world will yet demand. There are more people, more wealth, and more kinds of technologies and services than existed when President John F. Kennedy faced the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, and 60 years later, global energy consumption has risen more than 300%. In the future, there will be yet more innovations and more people, many of whom will be more prosperous and want what others already have, from better medical care to cars and vacations. In America, there are nearly as many vehicles as people, while in most of the world, fewer than 1 in 20 people have a car. More than 80% of the world population has yet to take a single flight.[25] Drug manufacturing is far more energy-intensive than fabricating cars or aircraft, and hospitals use 250% more energy per square foot than commercial buildings.
No matter the will to get pink-batts in the roof, the global numbers are colossal, and only at the start of the exponential curve.
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