A Johannesburg man who tried to illegally reconnect electricity faced injuries after he allegedly opened an electricity substation and it blew up in his face.
The spokesperson revealed that there is a ‘serious problem’ of vandalism of infrastructure in the City. This includes incidents where residents attempt to illegally operate the electricity network – they are often aided by unqualified electricians and try to reconnect or make illegal connections.
We hope he is OK.
These are eight hour regular rolling blackouts. People have Apps on the phone to tell them when their next blackout starts. People on twitter are telling others to go home early from work so they can use electricity before it runs out. They say, don’t worry, your boss won’t mind, they need to get home early too!
According to CEO Andre de Ruyter the Board of Eskom (the main electricity network) has no engineer, no chartered accountant, and no experienced industrialist and businessman on the board. (Perhaps they have diversity instead, just not the right kind?)
To bridge the severe gap in supply, Eskom is relying on backup gas turbines that blast through 14 litres of diesel (3.7 gallons) per second. Seven of these turbines were in operation Friday. The cost of using diesel as a substitute fuel has been stratospheric. Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter said the company spent 1.54 billion rand ($93.8 million) in June alone — more than double its original budget. It has also spent more than double its annual budget for diesel only halfway into the year.
Meanwhile, not surprisingly mental health is not too chipper:
You can’t do your work because there’s no power. You eat late and bolt your food before the lights fail. And then to be at home, in the utter dark, gives you the creeps. As blackouts (popularly referred to as load shedding) unfurl across South Africa, triggered by problems that have overwhelmed its energy provider, stress is taking a mounting toll on mental health, experts say.
“People are frustrated, some (are) angry, some are experiencing symptoms” of post-traumatic stress disorder, said Sinqobile Aderinoye, a psychologist in Johannesburg. “The consistent on-and-off of the electric grid is creating an air of disillusionment.”
Anxiety, depression and other disorders were already up almost two-thirds since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, according to Cheryl Johnston, a Johannesburg-based psychologist
Officials are hinting that they might keep using some coal:
South Africa’s power utility Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd. could run coal-fired stations for years longer than originally planned to allow more renewable power to be built as the country transitions to a greener energy mix.
Here’s a heroic denial:
Its Camden plant in Mpumalanga province, one in a fleet of aging stations, could close in 2027 instead of 2025, Mandy Rambharos, head of Eskom’s Just Energy Transition department, said in an online presentation. Keeping the plant open longer would allow the development of more renewables and is “not a life extension,” she said.
So people are in hospital, can’t do their job, and are suffering depression and anxiety, but Reuters is worried that it might slow down the “transition”:
By Promit Mukherjee, ReutersJOHANNESBURG, July 21 (Reuters) – South Africa, where daily blackouts are a fact of life, knows better than most that it cannot rely on coal power.
Ganymede: I feel your stress. Last Thursday we had a “technical fault” that lasted 26 hours with us in the dark. When that was finally fixed, we’re due for loadshedding two hours from then. This country is rough now
Miguel Valdoleiros: @Eskom_SA How about actually leaving the power on when there is no load shedding. We had no power since 6 last night, came back for 2 hours this morning and then off again. Get your shit in order!
Mduduzi Ngwenya:
So I reside in Boksburg #WindmillPark . Our schedule shows we pending loadshedding from 16:00 today. Taking into account that we have not had electricity for almost an hour now, are we now going to also fall into the bracket of loadshedding when it starts?
In other South African news:
Javier Blas says: OIL MARKET: The only operating oil refinery in South Africa was forced to shut down this weekend after it **ran out of crude** (yes, you read that just fine: the refinery completely ran out of crude)
Another entirely unnecessary crisis. Everything about our energy system is running on the edge.
Despite sitting on a “lake of gas”, Victoria Australia is in danger of running out of usable gas midwinter. The AEMO is back in crisis mode (if it ever left). In Victoria gas supplies are so low, two gas power plants have been ordered to switch off to preserve some gas storage, and the AEMO is begging Queensland for extra gas supplies. There were even warnings yesterday that homes might run out of gas (though that doesn’t appear to have happened).
A bun-fight is breaking out between Australian states over gas supplies, with others grumpy that Victoria is buying their gas fired electricity, but is not exporting gas to make it. Notoriously, Victoria has also banned exploration for new gas wells, and most of its gas exports would come from offshore Commonwealth managed deposits, supposedly belonging to the whole nation, while Queensland and South Australia were digging up their own gas.
Homeowners are warned that if the gas storage underground (in a old reused gas field) falls too low, their home appliances might not work. Welcome to the first world!
When gas levels in storages fall too low, pressure may drop below the optimal range, air bubbles may form and customers may not receive their gas in a steady stream or at the correct pressure for their plant and appliances. — Australian Financial Review
If only Australia had some other energy sources to use?
It takes real genius to have an energy crisis in a nation which is the fifth biggest gas exporter in the world, the highest value coal exporter, and has the largest reserves of uranium. In the race to the bottom, Australia is burdened with more energy per capita than anywhere on Earth — and yet Big Government has succeeded, and wildly, showing that the richest nation on Earth can still be poor.
Australians are paying wildly high prices for electricity in order to stop the storms of 2100 by trying not to use two of the three assets above — while exporting all of them.
The Australian Energy Market Operator has activated its emergency gas supply guarantee mechanism for just the second time on record to help arrest shortfalls in Victoria as the nation’s electricity market lurches to a fresh crisis. Storage levels at Victoria’s underground gas storage plant, Iona, dropped to a record low and forced AEMO on Monday to put an official system security threat in place until the end of September.
Wattclarity has a graph that shows just how low the storage is at Iona — the fall from 23,000 to 10,000TJ took just ten weeks.
….
Yet strangely they didn’t see this coming until there is just two weeks to go?
The Iona gas storage facility in Victoria is on track to fall to an all-time low of just six petajoules by August 6, with the depletion of inventories leading to the risk of “total system” gas supply shortfalls for the state.
The AEMO chief will say gas storage was already rapidly depleting before winter started, with more LNG being exported from Queensland, which meant lower flows to southern states, triggering more gas to flow north to NSW sourced from Victoria’s offshore Bass Strait fields.
In a shock to bureaucrats, normal rules of supply and demand apply:
A rare cap on Victoria’s gas prices has been in place to calm the market but the move has -provided an incentive to producers to direct supplies to other states further exacerbating the tight market.
Who would have thought artificial price caps create shortages?
Victoria is relying on other states for electricity that often comes from gas even as new rules prevent the export of spot market gas from the state to other regions, industry sources have complained.
Under rules imposed by the Australian Energy Market Operator on Tuesday, gas processed in Victoria and purchased through the spot market cannot be sent outside the state to NSW or South Australia or Queensland amid a critical shortfall that threatens to destabilise the energy system.
… one gas industry executive accused Victoria of “playing politics with gas”, with the result that customers in Queensland and NSW were being hurt.
“I don’t think Queensland is going to tolerate it for much longer,” the executive said. “They will want to secure Queensland supplies, maintain LNG export volumes and investor confidence. They will want other states to play their part in bringing on supply in future years.”
For people in Brisbane, don’t miss Peter Ridd & Jennifer Marohasy this Sunday at 2pm. They will attend a premiere viewing of their new film “A Coral Bleaching Tragedy”.
It is now nine months since the High Court decision (Ridd v JCU) was handed down and I thought donors to that legal action might be interested in what has happened in the meantime.
As you will recall, the HC ruled that JCU acted unlawfully in censuring me for my comments on the Quality Assurance of Great Barrier Reef (GBR) science, but was allowed to fire me for speaking about JCU’s unlawful behaviour. I have been working with Morgan Begg from the IPA on a new volume that will analyse the case in detail. Contributors include Chris Merritt, legal correspondent for The Australian, James Allan (Law Professor at the University of Queensland), and Aynsley Kellow (Emeritus Professor at U. Tasmania). The aim is to make sure as much as possible is learned and documented for future work to improve academic freedom of speech.
This will draw a line under those legal proceedings.
The issue of quality assurance of GBR science, which sparked the legal action, is never far from my mind, and I have been assisting Jennifer Marohasy in making a couple of high-quality films about the GBR. You have doubtless heard about the latest bad news of the bleaching on the Reef. Do you ever wonder if there might be more to the story? Jennifer will be releasing her new film shortly and there is a premier viewing on Sunday for those living in Brisbane. 24 July 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm Newfarm Cinemas 701 Brunswick St.
(I will be there and would be delighted to meet if you can make it. It is nice to thank people in person.)
Right now, internal critics of these agencies are focused on one issue above all: Why did the FDA and the CDC issue strong blanket recommendations for Covid vaccines in children?
The calls and text messages are relentless. On the other end are doctors and scientists at the top levels of the NIH, FDA and CDC. They are variously frustrated, exasperated and alarmed about the direction of the agencies to which they have devoted their careers.
“It’s like a horror movie I’m being forced to watch and I can’t close my eyes,” one senior FDA official lamented. “People are getting bad advice and we can’t say anything.”
That particular FDA doctor was referring to two recent developments inside the agency. First, how, with no solid clinical data, the agency authorized Covid vaccines for infants and toddlers, including those who already had Covid. And second, the fact that just months before, the FDA bypassed their external experts to authorize booster shots for young children.
Formerly great institutions are being eaten from the inside:
…
That doctor is hardly alone. At the NIH, doctors and scientists complain to us about low morale and lower staffing: The NIH’s Vaccine Research Center has had many of its senior scientists leave over the last year, including the director, deputy director and chief medical officer. “They have no leadership right now. Suddenly there’s an enormous number of jobs opening up at the highest level positions,” one NIH scientist told us. (The people who spoke to us would only agree to be quoted anonymously, citing fear of professional repercussions.)
The CDC has experienced a similar exodus. “There’s been a large amount of turnover. Morale is low,” one high level official at the CDC told us. “Things have become so political, so what are we there for?” Another CDC scientist told us: “I used to be proud to tell people I work at the CDC. Now I’m embarrassed.”
The data shows a 4% efficacy for Moderna in babies, nothing for Pfizer, and with no long term studies on side effects:
Using a three-dose vaccine in 992 children between the ages of six months and five years, Pfizer found no statistically significant evidence of vaccine efficacy.
Moderna’s results—they conducted a study on 6,388 children with two doses—were not much better. Against asymptomatic infections, they claimed a very weak vaccine efficacy of just 4% in children aged six months to two years. They also claimed an efficacy of 23% in children between two and six years old—but neither result was statistically significant.
Dr. Marty Makary is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, the author of The Price We Pay, and a medical advisor to Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin. Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg is an epidemiologist affiliated with The Florida Department of Health who has published research on Covid-19 in schools in the CDC’s journal MMWR.
None of this would have got this far, if it weren’t for the failing of the legacy media. The journalists are as scared as the family doctors are. None of them want to publicly disagree with the sacred scientists at the FDA and CDC — the same ones who are also too scared to speak up.
Deutsche Bank says Germans should use less gas any which way they can. Their new report suggests they use more hard coal and lignite for power stations, wood for home heating, and use oil in industry. That’s sparked a debate on the merits of using wood. (Nobody say the word “nuclear”.)
WOOD could be used to heat German homes this winter as the country grapples with a gas crisis.
Opinion is divided over the merits of using wood as a fuel with some saying doing so increases CO2 emissions and would unleash a logging boom, trashing biodiversity. Others argue wood is a renewable source of energy and expanding its use could prompt landowners to plant more trees, resulting in more carbon storage.
The Deutsche Bank analysis adds both savings and substitution have already led to a drop in German gas consumption by more than 14 percent year on year in the first five months of this year, largely driven by a mild winter.
Desperate: The European Commission suggests countries pay companies to use less gas, subsidize other fuels, and basically plan what they will have to shut down, and in what order, come the next emergency.
A European Commission plan due to be published on July 20 will suggest countries launch financial incentives for companies to cut gas use; use state aid to encourage industries and power plants to switch to other fuels and roll out campaigns to nudge consumers to use less heating and air conditioning.
Measures targeting industry could include auctions or tenders where large consumers would receive compensation for using less gas, according to a draft of the plan. It adds Governments should also decide the order in which they would force industries to close in a supply emergency.
Meanwhile NoTricksZone reports that the German people were far ahead of them and already bought out most of the wood.
As natural gas and oil for heating skyrockets, many Germans are now turning to firewood as a way to keep warm this coming winter. But now firewood is getting rare too, and prices are skyrocketing. The German online Merkur reports of “exploding demand”.
According to firewood dealer Konrad Kötterl. “Some people are panicking about not being able to get any more wood.” As a result, they’re stockpiling. Normally, he has three to four orders a day in the summer. “Right now, it’s 20 to 30.”
Personally, I called a local firewood dealer earlier in the week. They told me they have none left and that they could put me down on a waiting list.
If that comes to pass in Europe, this would not be the first time Germans and other Europeans would switch to wood for energy. During World War II, as many as a half million passenger cars were run on what is called “wood gas”, also called syngas or producer gas. Germany did not have sufficient supplies of petroleum for its military uses, so it developed synthetic fuels. General Patton even had some of the 3rd Army’s vehicles run on synthetic fuel that they drained from captured or abandoned German tanks.
In the 1920s, French chemist Georges Imbert invented a coal gasifier, later licensing the process to German firms.
Apparently wood gas is created with high temperature pyrolysis and conventional internal combustion engines will run on wood gas without many modifications though the 50-Gallon gasifier needs to be attached at the back or on a trailer. The problem may not be the lack of gasifiers, but the lack of forests to cut down.
Even the Australian ABC was telling Australians with a straight face that the extreme heat in the UK was so dangerously bad that healthy young people might die in the heat. For most Australians, it’s not summer if it doesn’t hit 40. And for people with a sauna, it’s not fun if it’s not 60 degrees. People enjoy an hour at 60C all the time without dying. We are mammals, we just need to drink. (And make sure we never forget the kids in the car).
Toby Young at the Daily Sceptic found the perfect study released last week reminding us of how deadly UK heatwaves are:
According to a recent study in the LancetPlanetary Health, between 2000 and 2019, there were an average of 65,000 excess deaths per year in England and Wales associated with cold, but fewer than 800 a year associated with heat. In other words, roughly 80 times more deaths per year are associated with cold than heat.
When winter comes, if UK energy bills ‘hit more than £3,300 a year’, sadly, energy poverty will kill even more people than usual.
From the study we see that the Urban Heat Island effect is very real, and almost certainly saves many more people than it kills:
The team found that London had the highest heat-related mortality rate, with3.21 excess deaths per 100,000 people, which translates to 170 heat-related excess deaths each year. Heat-related risks were also much greater in urban areas across the two countries.
In contrast, the risk of death associated with the cold was highest in the North East of England and Wales, with an excess mortality rate of 140.45 deaths and 136.95 deaths per 100,000 people, respectively. London had the lowest risk associated with cold temperatures, with 113.97 deaths per 100,000 people (almost 5800 cold-related excess deaths each year).
The Red Extreme Heat warming might be a record new announcement — but when exactly, did the Bureau of Met first devise the Extreme Heat Warning scale? How many years has it sat there unused?
Both heat and cold increase risk of death in England and Wales but rates vary across geographical areas and population groups
Headlines like that hide the news in plain view. Imagine the blockbuster front page expositions if the result had showed heat was more deadly? Not only would it have been short and punchy and conveyed the message, but the study would have become a mantra on the Nine O’Clock News.
Lancet Planetary Health study here — even if they can’t do headlines, it sounds like a decent job with the data.
The researchers analysed 10.7 million deaths that occurred in England and Wales between 2000 and 2019 across over 37,473 small areas that include around 1,600 residents, also known as lower super output areas (LSOAs). They then linked these data with high-resolution gridded temperature maps and potential drivers of vulnerability to heat and cold, including demographic and socio-economic factors, health and disability, housing and neighbourhood, landscape, and climatological characteristics. This allowed the researchers to characterise differences across small areas and map variation in temperature-related mortality risks across the two countries.
Other posts on the deadly effect of moderately cold weather and the life saving use of fossil fuels
Dr Peter Rost explains that the Big Multinational Corporations buy influence from every angle. Firstly they pay out grants for research. They help develop the research with academics. They also pay individuals directly — they pay them a speakers fee, $1,000 – $2,000 a day.
You establish friends. You make them beholden to you…
You give them money for programs, educational programs, ones they make a profit from.
They are supposed to be third party and independent from the company, but everyone knows that the institutions that Big Pharma is more generous with are the same institutions that happen to say the things the company is happy about.
Even if you can officially claim — this is at arms length — they can do whatever they want with it. Reality is they are not going to continue to get money if they are not saying the things you want them to say.
They know it, you know it, it’s only maybe the public that doesn’t know it.
…
Thus do awkward experiments never get started and inexplicable results get left in the desk. Young researchers may not even be aware of the veil that filters the work. They come up with a great idea, the senior researcher pours cold water on it, because it sounds a bit risky, or controversial, and the real questions never get asked. And in the tea-rooms everyone else murmurs in agreement.
At best, our public institutions churn out press releases that are half the truth and mostly not what we really need to know.
At worst, they are disguised advertising machines. They appear to serve the public while they betray them. It is safe and effective.
The US will not be able to meet the 2030 targets without this legislation (and all those subsidies)
After seven months of negotiations, and the big plan being rejected then shaved and sliced and diced, Senator Manchin has rejected all climate and energy rules. Inflation is to high and too painful…
WASHINGTON — Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, pulled the plug on Thursday on negotiations to salvage key pieces of President Biden’s agenda, informing his party’s leaders that he would not support funding for climate or energy programs…
Without action by Congress, it will be impossible to meet Mr. Biden’s goal of cutting U.S. emissions roughly in half by the end of this decade. That target was aimed at keeping the climate stable at about 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming compared to preindustrial levels.
“Political headlines are of no value to the millions of Americans struggling to afford groceries and gas as inflation soars to 9.1 percent,” said Sam Runyon, a spokeswoman for Mr. Manchin….
Because Democrats hold the Senate by a bare 50-50 majority, Mr. Manchin has been able to effectively exercise veto power over the domestic policy package, which the party had planned to move under a special fast-track budget process that would allow it to bypass a filibuster and pass with a simple majority. With Democrats bracing for losses in midterm elections this fall, the package could be the party’s last chance to enact substantial spending and tax legislation while it still holds the White House and both houses of Congress.
Subsidies and boondoggles are also known as “federal investments”:
In rejecting any climate and energy provisions, Mr. Manchin appeared to have single-handedly shattered Mr. Biden’s ambitious climate agenda and what would have been the largest single federal investment in American history toward addressing the toll of climate change.
Here come the snowflakes:
…it was particularly devastating for those who had championed the climate and energy provisions. In calls to various climate activists on Thursday night, Mr. Schumer and his staff sounded shellshocked and said they believed until just a few hours before that a deal was still possible, said one person who spoke with Mr. Schumer.
Leah Stokes, a professor of environmental policy at the University of California Santa Barbara who has advised congressional Democrats on climate legislation, sobbed on Thursday night as she described the months of work she and other activists, scientists and legislative staff had poured into negotiations. “The stakes are so high,” she said. “It’s just infuriating that he is condemning our own children.”
It’s just an investment: Big Pharma spends twice as much on advertising as it does on developing cancer drugs.
Think about that. Most drugs are only prescribed by doctors so why advertise on TV at all? It’s not like patients are wandering through Walmart looking for a Pfizer. Should I get the Glaxo instead?
It turns out that the advertising money is not buying customers it’s buying the media. And it’s not paying to show the world something, but to hide it instead.
As Mark Steyn says, for the first time in history every person on Earth needs the same medicine, and four doses of it, no questions asked. The silence is complete: There are $15,000 million reasons why MSNBC, CNN, and all the rest didn’t ask the FDA or the TGA to “show us the data”, or even to explain why the data had to be hidden for 55 years or even 75 years. When politicians signed secret deals on our behalf the media didn’t demand to see the contracts, they wanted to know why it wasn’t done sooner. It’s the same reason they mock cheap drugs that reduce Covid by 63% but get excited about every new patented wonder-drug which just reduces hospitalization by a couple of days:
When people say the media loves scandal and sensationalism they’re wrong. The media loves money:
Maybe the silence comes from the fact that the pharmaceutical industry spends more on lobbying than any other industry group. In 2020 big pharma spent over $300 million lobbying officeholders and government officials. It clearly pays off. The research to develop the COVID-19 vaccines was nearly all funded by taxpayers. The distribution of the vaccines, once developed, was further funded nearly entirely by taxpayers. The record-keeping and reporting on the vaccines is also at the expense of taxpayers, and the new repurposed Pfizer drug Paxlovid, used to treat COVID, has been paid for by taxpayers.
This total of nearly $15 billion spent by Big Pharma on advertising is more than twice what is spent on new cancer drug research. In fact, nine out of 10 of the largest pharmaceutical companies in America spend more on advertising than on research and development.
But there is more. The U.S. government is pushing COVID-19jabs harder than the companies would ever likely choose to do on their own. This might be the reason: Almost half of the funding that supports the U.S. Food and Drug Administration comes from the very industries it is mandated to oversee.
This isn’t speculation, it’s big money. Consider: Pfizer expects $32 billion in COVID vaccine sales in 2022. Moderna is forecasting $19 billion in COVID sales with the vaccine being its only current commercial product. Moderna had never produced a vaccine before it developed its COVID shots. Pfizer, BioNTech, and Moderna are reported to be making $1,000 in profit every second of every business day
Mark Steyn gives a voice to the people who don’t exist: the Victims of the Vax
After the intro he starts at 8:20. There are some truly shocking stories.
The UK is now offering compensation.
The Wall-of-Pharma-Silence is built on more than just adverts and sponsorships, otherwise the BBC, ABC and CBC might have even been useful. The Big-Pharma financial octopus is so much more than just ad money. There are research deals with universities and medicos, and royalties for researchers. And behind the scenes, there are conflicts of interest, like the way Alphabet owns Youtube, Google and 12% of company that makes AstraZeneca Vax. And Big Pharma also spent $4.7b lobbying Big Government. Lucky that never affects rules, regulations or drug prices, right?
Whether the news is about vitamins, sunshine or Sudden Adult Death Syndrome, don’t ask if the media is interested and the audience wants to know — just ask if it will help Pfizer.
The threat of the Russians cutting off gas completely through Nord stream 1 has focused Europe on the blessings of coal and the reality of surviving winter with only windmills and solar panels to keep warm.
Germany, France, Austria, Netherlands, and the UK have already changed plans to shut coal plants or have plans to revive old ones. Poland is buying coal directly for homes. Hungary has now also declared a state of emergency and said it will boost gas production and stop exports. No sharing allowed now.
Only two years ago Greece was going green — phasing out brown coal but now the Greek power corporation has been told to stop the phase out of coal. Last year lignite provided only 5% of the electricity in Greece, now the aim is 20%.
Budapest says it will boost its annual production of natural gas from 1.5 billion cubic metres to 2 billion cubic metres. The EU member state also plans to increase the extraction of coal and restore an offline lignite-fired power plant in Matra.
Energy exports will be banned, and Hungary’s only nuclear power plant will extend its operating times to increase production, Gulyás said on Wednesday. Citizens have also been ordered to “moderate their consumption or pay the surplus at the market price”. The measures — which go against Hungary’s climate commitments — are set to go into effect in August.
Earlier on Wednesday, Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó also announced that Hungary would seek to buy an additional 700 million cubic metres of gas from an unknown country.
Greece is planning to ramp up the use of lignite as an alternative power source to natural gas, which has become extremely expensive in the wake of the war in Ukraine. Lignite, or brown coal, is formed from naturally compressed peat and has a carbon content of around 35 percent. Greece is the tenth largest producer of lignite while Germany is the first. In 2020, Mitsotakis announced a plan to cease the burning of lignite in all of the country’s power plants by 2023, save for at the Ptolemaida 4 power plant, which would be shut down by 2028.
Yet, the Greek Public Power Corporation (DEH) has already been asked to stop its efforts of phasing out lignite, and Mitsotakis himself ordered lignite mining to be ramped up by 50 percent in April. Kostas Skrekas, Greek Minister of the Environment and Energy, told DEH to up the percentage of lignite in its electricity source to 17 to 20 percent from 5 percent, as it was last year.
Australian exports account for 58 per cent of the global seaborne trade or metallurgical coal, a vital ingredient in steelmaking. China meanwhile loves to make steel, accounting for 57 per cent of world steel production in 2020. However, there are rumours that China may be preparing to reverse its unofficial ban on Australian coal imports in August or September.
Nearly every decision Joe Biden has made just happens to be the same as what President Xi would have preferred.
The keystone pipe, energy dependence, the Afghanistan debacle, the end of tariffs, jailing critics of China, and allowing Chinese companies strategic control and access. Then there’s the Hunter Biden laptop…
It’s excellent to see Tucker packaging this message so well.
Last summer, a group of American intelligence analysts working for the U.S. government issued a report on the origins of COVID.These people work at CIA, NSA, a bunch of other agencies, and they concluded that the coronavirus may very well have been manufactured in a lab by the Chinese military.
America has been the dominant power in the world for more than 100 years, since the end of the First World War, when Europe destroyed itself. Empires destroying themselves always pave way for new empires, something we should keep in mind at the moment.
The coronavirus reshuffled the global order. It crushed the American economy. It made China preeminent. If China takes over the world and that appears to be coming, COVID will be one of the main reasons it was able to. So, by definition, you would think we would want to know where COVID came from. That’s a meaningful question, but Joe Biden doesn’t want to know. He ignored the report he ordered. He ignored the findings of his own intelligence agencies. That’s bizarre when you think about it and if you think that’s weird, how about this?
This February, Biden canceled a counter-espionage program called the China Initiative. Now, the point of that program was stopping the rampant threat of our national security secrets by the government of China. But the White House decided to very little fanfare that somehow that program was racist and therefore it had to end. That means the Chinese government can now spy and steal with impunity. Not since Franklin Roosevelt colluded with Joseph Stalin has an American president done anything like that, but Joe Biden didn’t hesitate. And then he kept doing things like this. Now, Biden says he plans to end tariffs against China, tariffs that Donald Trump put in place and that China has been complaining about ever since. And not only is Joe Biden ending tariffs against China, Joe Biden’s Justice Department has just arrested the man responsible for those tariffs. His name is Peter Navarro.
He was the most effective China hawk in the Trump administration. Last month, Peter Navarro was handcuffed at a Washington, D.C. airport and dragged to jail in leg irons. Why? Supposedly because of January 6, but Peter Navarro had literally nothing to do with January 6. He wasn’t even there, but Joe Biden didn’t stop there. Steve Bannon was the other notable voice in the Trump administration, warning about the growing power and malicious intent of the Chinese government. In November of last year, Steve Bannon was also arrested by the Biden Justice Department, also on absurd pretexts. So, take a step back. What’s the message here? Well, it’s unmistakable. Don’t criticize the Chinese government, or we will throw you in jail.
Now, if you happen to be watching all this from Beijing, as Chinese leaders definitely have been, you would be applauding. Joe Biden just arrested your loudest critics. How gratifying is that? Things are going well for you. You already control Canada, whose brain dead, prime minister is effectively a Chinese lackey. Now the most powerful country in the world is doing exactly what you want it to do. You’d be thrilled by this. You’d be especially thrilled to see Joe Biden destroy America’s single greatest asset, which is its domestic energy supply, and make the United States entirely dependent on Chinese technology for wind and solar projects. If you’re the Chinese government, this is the masterstroke. This is the checkmate. Once you control a country’s energy grid, you control that country. And you would know that because you didn’t go to Yale Law School and you know something about reality as a result and by the way, if you’re watching all this from Beijing, you would find it especially amusing to have the president of the United States sell you his country’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve, even as he declared oil and gas off-limits to his own population.
The West’s green fixation, and crippled scientific and media organisations are just part of a deep decay.
Australia has added more unreliable wind and solar than anywhere on Earth but when an energy crisis strikes, and those prices are still on fire, the solution is more of the same.
Perhaps Australia’s broken electricity system is due to this mad rush towards renewable energy? No, according to our energy regulator, “Recent international events and Australian market events have further strengthened the case for the shift to renewables.”
The renewable energy investments must continue until morale improves.
[The energy regulator’s] recent analysis shows that Victoria could experience a “renewable drought” of 1 terawatt hour of electricity over just one week in the future.
How much is 1TWh? Well, the South Australian big battery can produce 130 megawatt hours, so we would need more than 7500 of these to keep the Victorian lights on. At about $100m a pop, that is a total cost of more than $700bn, or more than Victoria’s total annual economic output.
This winter’s energy shortfalls came just after the Liddell coal-fired power station in NSW’s Hunter Valley shut a 400MW unit in April. Its other three units (a total of 1200MW) will shut next April. Then, in 2025, Australia’s largest coal-fired power station, Eraring, also in the Hunter, is due to shut.
By the end of the decade, our energy regulators warn, almost two-thirds of our coal-fired power could shut.
And Victoria is just one state.
Indeed, across the world there are 345 new coal-fired power stations being built. What is the argument against Australia building just a few to guarantee our energy supplies?
A new ultra-supercritical coal-fired power station built in Australia would increase our emissions by about five million tonnes a year. That would mean global emissions would go up by 0.014 per cent. The world has warmed around 1C after 600 billion tonnes of emissions. So this new coal-fired power station may increase the temperature by 0.0001 of a degree over its life.
Yet we are told a new coal-fired power station would worsen climate change and create more bushfires, floods and all manner of other natural disasters. These arguments are nonsensical yet go unchallenged in polite society.
Matt Canavan is a Liberal National Party senator for Queensland and deputy leader of the Nationals in the Senate.
Starfish Prime was the largest Nuclear test conducted in space. The 1.4 megaton explosion at 250 miles above Johnson Atoll was a US mission that launched on July 9th 1962. The Electromagnetic pulse (EMP) it generated was much bigger than expected, and knocked out a few satellites, which presumably wasn’t part of the plan. (Future tests were smaller.) The explosion and the aurora it generated was visible nearly 900 miles away in Hawaii where some street lights were blown, some phone lines went down and surges were recorded on planes. Apart from war, it’s hard to imagine this experiment could be done ever again.
The aurora itself lasted less than 15 minutes, but created a belt of MeV electrons. And as many as five years later some of those electrons were still being detected in the atmosphere.
On July 9, 1962, the US military detonated a thermonuclear warhead 250 miles above the Pacific Ocean–a test called “Starfish Prime.” What happened next surprised everyone. Witnesses from Hawaii to New Zealand reported auroras overhead, magnificent midnight “rainbow stripes” that tropical sky watchers had never seen before. Radios fell silent, then suddenly became noisy as streetlights went dark in Honolulu.
From a Spaceweather post last year:
A new paper just published in the research journal Earth and Space Science .. (by) Love et al describe how a high-altitude nuclear blast jerks Earth’s magnetic field. First, the EMP ionizes a layer of air underneath the bomb. This layer presses downward, pinning Earth’s magnetic field lines in their pre-blast locations. Next, as the ionization subsides, the magnetic field springs back. It’s a sort of heaving, lurching geomagnetic storm.
Handy for finding submarines too apparently?
At twilight after the burst, resonant scattering of light from lithium and other debris was observed at Johnston and French Frigate Shoals for many days confirming the long time presence of debris in the atmosphere. An interesting side effect was that the Royal New Zealand Air Force was aided in anti-submarine maneuvers by the light from the bomb. — Wikipedia
As Earth’s magnetic field caught ionized radiation from the Starfish Prime test, it created a new artificial radiation belt that was stronger and longer lasting than scientists had predicted. This unexpected “Starfish belt,” which lingered for at least 10 years, destroyed Telstar 1, the first satellite to broadcast a live television signal, and Ariel-1, Britain’s first satellite.
“It came as a surprise how bad it was, and how long it lasted, and how damaging it was to satellites that flew through that area and died,” Sibeck says.
In the latest news the Cities and Municipalities Association is urging local officials to plan for public halls to be used as emergency “warm up spaces” when winter comes. With families needing to find an extra €3,800 to pay the energy bills many people won’t be able to afford electricity or gas.
Welcome to the renewables future where lights are dimmer, there’s no hot water at schools and public swimming pools are closed, but town halls are open so people can survive the night.
Germany’s Center for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Württemberg (ZSW) and the Federal Association of Energy and Water Management (BDEW) said on Monday that renewables had covered around 49% of gross domestic electricity consumption over the period.
The claim of “half” is still inflated. If we remove hydroelectricity and biomass, in the last six months all forms of wind and solar power have produced 35% of the electricity (on a random come-and-go basis).
Cities across Germany are planning to use sports arenas and exhibition halls as ‘warm up spaces’ this winter to help freezing citizens who are unable to afford skyrocketing energy costs.
Bild newspaper reveals how the the nation’s Cities and Municipalities Association has urged local authorities to set aside public spaces to help vulnerable citizens in the colder months.
Germany has already seen its gas supply from Russia significantly restricted as a result of its support for sanctions and the war in Ukraine.
“We are currently preparing for all emergency scenarios for autumn and winter,” Jutta Steinruck, the city mayor of Ludwigshafen told Bild, where the Friedrich-Ebert-Halle arena is about to be converted into a warm up hall.
Meanwhile in Australia the CSIRO has modelled the long term energy costs and concludes that wind and solar are the cheapest and getting cheaper too!.
The Chinese Communist Party has a long history of covering up epidemics within China, and then carelessly — or deliberately — allowing them to spread around the world.
The fall of 1957 saw an outbreak of what came to be known as the Asian flu. It was first reported in the cities of Singapore and Hong Kong, but this new and deadly influenza soon went global.
…even as tens of thousands of Chinese lay dying, the epidemic was kept hidden from view by the Communist authorities.
When infected travelers from China later carried it to Hong Kong and Singapore, the World Health Organization and other public health authorities were caught flatfooted. Thanks to Beijing’s perfidy, quarantines and vaccines came too late. Before the Asian flu had run its two-year course, it had killed well over a million people.
The same scenario played out again 10 years later. In 1968, an unknown influenza had quickly spread throughout the world. It came to be known as the Hong Kong flu, infuriating that city’s Chamber of Commerce, the members of which knew quite well that an epidemic was raging in Mainland China just across the border. Once again, the Communist authorities had refused to alert the world, and another million people died.
SARS-1 was the prequel:
But the Communist regime lied about the disease for months, silenced whistleblowers, doctored data, duped global health authorities, and even accused “outside forces” of carrying out a “bioterrorist” attack.
They did not inform the WHO about the outbreak until February 2003, three months later, and only after Canadian intelligence had already detected and publicly reported on a “flu outbreak” in progress in China.
Like the Spanish flu, SARS could easily have killed tens of millions worldwide had the Canadians not forced Beijing to reveal its existence before it had spread outside of its borders. Its containment was aided by the fact that, while it was highly infectious, it was not airborne. As a result of its early detection and relatively low transmissibility, by the time the SARS epidemic ended in June of 2003, there had been a total of only 8,469 cases reported.
But the lethality of SARS impressed China’s bioweapons experts, and they began discussing how to genetically engineer a SARS-like coronavirus that could easily be transmitted from person to person. The kind where a single sneeze can infect an entire roomful of people.
Steven W. Mosher is the President of the Population Research Institute. This New York Post piece was adapted from his new book, “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Pandemics” (Regnery), published on July 26.
Readers may recall his (horrifying) field research on China’s one-child policy for his book Broken Earth (1984). He was condemned by the Chinese government and expelled from his Ph.D. program at Stanford in 1983 just short of achieving his doctorate. The Washington Post covered the story here and here.
PS: The China expert Steven Mosher is not the climate commentator some people may know from other debates. Two different men.
WASHINGTON — Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, pulled the plug on Thursday on negotiations to salvage key pieces of President Biden’s agenda, informing his party’s leaders that he would not support funding for climate or energy programs…
Think about that. Most drugs are only prescribed by doctors so why advertise on TV at all? It’s not like patients are wandering through Walmart looking for a Pfizer. Should I get the Glaxo instead?
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