Like a cancer, big-government begets bigger-government — and failure is not something that gets in the way, it’s an essential ingredient. Failure is success, because if the bureaucrats accidentally solved the problem there would be no need for more funds, more staff and more rules, geddit?
The WHO is the greatest failed bureaucracy in the world
It’s an unholy alliance of unelected power-mongers with pharmaceutical giants, billionaires with God complexes, and military adversaries. What’s not to like if you are a Communist, a corporation, a psychopath or President Xi — who by the way isn’t signing anything. He doesn’t need to work for the UN. The UN works for him. Thank Tedros.
Meanwhile the election in Australia approaches with endless analysis on personality frou frou but nothing on whether the UN should control our borders, our health, our electricity, or get even one goddam red cent.
What’s a sovereign state anyway?
It’s hard to believe that a vote in Geneva would really have legal or constitutional shtick over a sovereign nation with an actual constitution, but the lines are getting blurry. Consider that for two years, unvaccinated Australians were banned from leaving our own country “because of a WHO treaty”. That’s what our Chief Health Officer told us. The truth is that the rules were enshrined in our The Biosecurity Emergency Declaration. But all that took — apparently — was for the WHO to declare a pandemic and then our Minister asked the Governor General to declare there was an emergency. The declaration even mentioned the WHO specifically — and gives the Minister the power to “implement a WHO Recommendation under the International Health Regulations.”
Many UN Treaties need local domestic laws, but as we know from the IPCC, the UN paperwork can be purely symbolic, but it becomes a weapon to create real legislation at home. And both major parties in Australia are gung ho for UN control. It’s someone else to blame, and a good career path for later. Our best hope on Saturday is a gridlocked Senate. Put the majors last! (Or just above the Teals and Greens.)
Having acquired a taste for globalised control during the Covid pandemic, the World Health Organisation has teamed up with vaccine manufacturers, philanthropic billionaires, and power-crazed world leaders to create a ‘Global Pandemic Treaty’ in Geneva.
It is set to form part of the ‘one health’ approach proposed by the WHO and has been pitched by its creators as a way to overcome the inconvenient battle between – as they put it – globalism and statism.
It’s a hell of a business model. The same group that keeps the borders open accepts funds from the people who sell the vaccines, and then lobbies the rich countries to buy lots, buy more, and buy for the poor too!
A more accurate reading of the situation comes from discussions had at the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations launched at the World Economic Forum in 2017, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust, and a consortium of nations that include Australia. The Liberal government pledged a further $100 million to CEPI in March, 2022 to add to the $1.5 billion it has raised from other governments. As explained in a previous Spectator Australia article, CEPI’s mission is to create ‘equitable access to vaccines’ because they do not like the volatility (and competition) of the free market. This is the same organisation that poured a fortune into RNA and mRNA vaccines for the WHO’s DiseaseX scenario which – less than a year later – was put into emergency production to combat Covid as a ‘proof of concept’ exercise. Their stated objective from the beginning, long before Covid, has been to find a way to force Western governments to purchase vaccines in bulk for the Third World under the banner of ‘equity’.
The handling of the Covid pandemic is being used as an excuse to justify what was already designed and publicised. In this light, the proposed Global Pandemic Treaty is – first and foremost – a trillion-dollar business deal.
The same group that keeps the doors open for germs is controlled by a man with a debt connection to the nation that wants the germs spread.
Worse, the nation that caused the pandemic – China – is one of the notable absences from the treaty. What is the point of enacting the treaty if Patient Zero refuses to come to the table? It’s a bit like the United Nations’ Climate Change promises that don’t include the world’s largest polluter.
Time to raise hell:
The vote for this dangerous Pandemic Treaty will be held in Geneva on May 22-28. Whoever the next Prime Minister of Australia is, they will be there will bells on, ready to sign and absolve themselves of the ‘bother’ of responsibility. It is a dream come true for weak leaders who would love nothing better than to let the blame for the next pandemic and the accompanying citizen outrage rest safely offshore.
While the UN may not command an army or police force, they can wave the IMF threateningly, call in their banker friends, hustle up hurtful press releases, cut off career prospects and make life hard for non-compliant politicians and states. In the end, only a celebrity billionaire commanding the largest military empire on Earth would dare suggest cutting their funding (which he did).
Such is the soft-power of centralized corruption — unelected, unaudited, and unaccountable. What career politician wouldn’t hanker for a sweet job, foreign travel, and no voters to get in the way?
More soon on the US Amendments.
Australians: check out Put majors last, with voting strategies by seat.
Another Project Veritas operation exposes what’s going on behind the lines at Twitter and the most astonishing thing is not the political censorship but how Twitter is run like a Day Care centre for student activists. It’s not a profit making business, so much as a university club with salaries for people who may only work 4 hours a week and brag about being “left left left” and as “commie as f**k”. If they need days off, they just don’t turn up to work. Sometimes they take months off. “Mental health is everything”.
No wonder Twitter employees hate Musk and are stress eating — They have jobs where they get paid to take a month off, and no one cares how efficient they are, or what their sales figures or expenses were. Nice work if you can get it.
Which begs the pointed question of who is paying for all this?
If Twitter isn’t there to make money, who is pouring the dollars in, and is the political censorship the whole point? And if that’s the case, and it sure looks like it is, TWTR is a listed trading stock and the words fraud and fiduciary duty seem apropos. If Twitter really is a communist megaphone, not a business, Elon Musk is exposing it, even if he doesn’t buy it. He’s pulling the capitalist-legal strings and if it’s an investment facade, it will unravel.
Project Veritas has a video of Twitter Senior Engineer, Siru Murugesan, explaining the work culture unwittingly to a hidden camera.
Wonder how the Twitter shareholders feel about this:
Twitter Sr. Engineer, Siru Murugesan
“Everyone gets to do what they want, no one really cares about OPEX (operating expenses), like capitalists [do], …they care about our health, In Twitter, mental health is everything. … Like if you are not feeling it, you can take a few days off. People have taken months off, — they will come back. But you always like, do your best at any time.”
Twitter culture (and free-paychecks) turn employees into communists:
“Like I started working for Twitter and became left. I think it’s just like the environment, like you, you’re there and you become like this commie — they call it Commiefornia for some reason.
But Elon is already getting to Siru and he surprisingly even admits it:
Elon makes some good points sometimes. I am slowly starting to buy his side a little bit.
Amazing the power of free speech.
That Twitter Culture:
The sad thing is that if Murugesan and other Twitter employees were educated in the West, they were never taught much about free speech, and were easy pickings for the weak excuses offered up in Twitter-world.
Suri openly says that “Twitter does not believe in free speech”. But he thinks that free speech is just whether you want to “bully and harrass people”.
“For example, like if you bully a transgender, the right thinks it’s okay. The left does not.”
Essentially the right tolerate bullying, he says, but the left “need it to be censored” or they will leave the platform, (making them sooky snowflakes in need of protection.) In snowflake world, it’s not that free speech is a quest for truth that may save lives and stop injustice, but that the worst thing in the world is to be bullied. All the gulags, slavery, death and disease is simply invisible.
The grand success of capitalism and free speech is to create people so protected from actual harm, hard work and pain that being bullied might be the worst thing that ever happened to them.
It’s too poor to do Net Zero, but it’s rich enough to buy off our Pacific neighbors, while we close factories so we can keep the lights on. China buys a belt and road while we buy off the Weather Gods with sacrificial Green electrons and try to to stop storms 100 years from now.
On Saturday Australia has an election where both major parties have Net Zero policies. But anything that Australia supposedly achieves with Net Zero, China wipes out in a couple of weeks. And everything Australia loses, like manufacturing, China gains.
China plans to dig up 4300 million tons of coal this year and use it all. Australia extracts about 500 million tons and exports most of it. With coal at phenomenal prices and a global energy crisis, Australia is looking at earning $100 billion dollars just from coal exports this year, which would pay for all the hospitals, schools and public housing we could want. We could be ramping up production but no one is even talking about that.
We are the most sparsely spread population living on the remotest continent, but none of our major political parties are bothering to even check the UN committee diktats that tell us to cancel our own coal industry and turn our electricity grid into a weather changing Voodoo machine.
“We see the idea that we go to net zero by 2050, when the communist Chinese say they will do nothing at all until 2030 and then maybe by 2060 they’ll do something,” [Craig Kelly] said.
“A policy of net zero, which we reject, will otherwise surrender an economic, political and military advantage to the communist Chinese and I as a member of parliament I am not going to stand by and let that happen and be silent about it.”
Net-Zero Will See Australia Surrender ‘Economic, Military’ Advantage to China: UAP Leader
The Epoch Times
Kelly, however, said that coal exports brought $100 billion of revenue into the country each year, and the wealth from Australia’s resources provided room for debate on social services like the health system and National Disability Insurance Scheme.
Do slaves lives matter? Not to the Greens
An investigative report from The Epoch Times has revealed that around six out of 10 Australian solar farms were sourcing panels from Chinese manufacturers likely to be using Uyghur forced labour in their production chain.
The Fake Green “independents” sponsored by a renewable billionaire investor, defend China all the way:
Meanwhile, Monique Ryan, the teal independent for Kooyong in east Melbourne, said Australia had handled its relationship with the CCP badly.
“China is our biggest trade partner, and the relationship with our biggest trade partner should be treated with respect and sensitivity, not with macho, breast-beating belligerence,” she said during a Sky News Australia-organised debate.
Yet China currently controls around 90 percent of the world’s supply chains for the precious resource, a situation that governments are pushing to change by establishing their own independent production chains.
*And David Archibald of course, long time skeptic, polymath, and running in Curtin in Western Australia. UPDATE: Apparently not running. Though still warning of these dangers, of course.
Four materials rank highest on the scale of necessity, forming what I have called the four pillars of modern civilization: cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia are needed in larger quantities than are other essential inputs. The world now produces annually about 4.5 billion tons of cement, 1.8 billion tons of steel, nearly 400 million tons of plastics, and 180 million tons of ammonia. But it is ammonia that deserves the top position as our most important material: its synthesis is the basis of all nitrogen fertilizers, and without their applications it would be impossible to feed, at current levels, nearly half of today’s nearly 8 billion people.
Does any other odd factoid capture the rise of China so well?
China now produces more than half of the world’s cement and in recent years it makes in just two years as much of it as did the United States during the entire 20th century.
Thanks to communist central planning much of that concrete may be mal-invested and mal-constructed and in need of demolition but that just needs even more fossil fuels.
Despite cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia being so different, they have three things in common, Smil says: they can’t be replaced by other things easily, we need more of them than ever, and they all absolutely have to have fossil fuels.
Ammonia synthesis uses natural gas both as the source of hydrogen and as the source of energy needed to provide high temperature and pressure. Some 85% of all plastics are based on simple molecules derived from natural gas and crude oil, and hydrocarbons also supply energy for syntheses. Production of primary steel starts with smelting iron ore in blast furnace in the presence of coke made from coal and with the addition of natural gas, and the resulting cast iron is made into steel in large basic oxygen furnaces. And cement is produced by heating ground limestone and clay, shale in large kilns, long inclined metal cylinders, heated with such low-quality fossil fuels as coal dust, petroleum coke and heavy fuel oil.
But if you think that’s demanding — look at the shopping list for Electric Vehicles:
A typical lithium car battery weighing about 450 kilograms contains about 11 kilograms of lithium, nearly 14 kilograms of cobalt, 27 kilograms of nickel, more than 40 kilograms of copper, and 50 kilograms of graphite—as well as about 181 kilograms of steel, aluminum, and plastics. Supplying these materials for a single vehicle requires processing about 40 tons of ores, and given the low concentration of many elements in their ores it necessitates extracting and processing about 225 tons of raw materials.
The only politically correct line in the whole article was one slipped in there about reducing fertilizer by eating less meat. But really, it was nothing compared to the ideological advertising we’ve come to expect and it was in a section quietly headlined “Ideas — Climate Change” ?
The Swamp is not even hiding the corruption, just the exact dollar figure
Anthony Fauci is effectively King of the National Institute of Health. He gets paid $450,000 a year — the highest paid public servant in the United States. In just one year alone the NIH dished out $30 billion to more than 50,000 recipients. And there are royalty payments that flow back the other way, which amounted to $350 million dollars over the decade from 2010-2020. And here’s the weird thing, most of those royalty payments are secret.
Thirty billion dollars is an awfully big carrot, and even though $350 million seems small in comparison, it’s awfully big compared to the salaries of the few key decision-makers. It’s an obvious conflict of interest, and lives are at risk, but it’s not even being disclosed.
If Big Pharma were paying off people to get their drugs approved, it would look a lot like this. And if Big Pharma (or the asset managers that own big pharma) were also paying off the media to silence reporting of NIH corruption would the media ignore this story — exactly like it does?
In a normal world this type of corruption would be front page news. There is no reason royalty payments should be secret.
The conflict of interest alone should have been enough to remove Dr. Anthony Fauci and others from positions inside the National Institutes for Health, the Food and Drug Administration and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Yet, here we are as a bombshell has been dropped unmasking that not only did Fauci and other bigwigs receive $350 million “royalty” payments from Big Pharma, but the NIH tried to hide those numbers.
OpenTheBooks filed some, wow, 47,000 FOIA requests last year. They have a federal lawsuit running against the NIH and are seeking those royalty payment details.
Dr. Anthony Fauci received 23 royalty payments, but the NIH has yet to disclose the sum total of those payments.
Recently, our organization at OpenTheBooks.com forced NIH to disclose more than 22,100 royalty payments totaling nearly $134 million paid to the agency and nearly 1,700 NIH scientists. These payments occurred during the most recently available period (September 2009 – September 2014).
What are they on? About twenty years of government funded propaganda and guilt.
Most Australian voters don’t have a clue — half of the nation thinks we make 10% of global emissions when the truth is more like 1%.
Climate change might be the greatest moral challenge of our lifetimes but most Australians are in the dark about what the real numbers are. They probably assumed that if we were only making one-tiny-percent, the government, the ABC, or even the education system might have told them. After all, we’re spending $13 billion dollars a year. What exactly are public universities for if not for letting Australians know this kind of data?
Where was the Government? The conservatives in charge keep throwing away their own best arguments. Almost like they want to hang on to a few wealthy seats while they miss the chance to ignite middle Australia.
But the ignorance is no accident. All the players — the politicians, the academics, the ABC, ANU, CSIRO, Schools, Universities, et al and all sundry, all profit from Big Government. They serve the government first, and not the people, and that’s the problem.
A survey this week by Compass Polling tested what percentage of global emissions people thought could be directly attributed to Australia. Astonishingly, the average answer was 10 per cent – 10 times higher than the reality. Half of all respondents put the figure at 10 per cent or higher. More than 10 per cent of respondents said Australia contributed 20 per cent or more of global emissions. And a slightly lower proportion got it right at around 1 per cent.
This level of ignorance is reprehensible when you consider the media, political and educational fixation with climate change over the past two decades.
Yet few people call it out; the major parties, most of the media, and academe, all constrain the debate within absurd boundaries of make believe – they all pretend our climate policies matter.
Wait til Chris Kenny finds out that we make 1% of human emissions which are only 4% of total emissions, so that’s 0.04% or 4 parts in ten thousand of all the CO2 emissions on Earth. And that’s assuming CO2 emissions matter in the first place, which they probably don’t given how the effect of CO2 is dwarfed by the effect of water, and the tiny warming (such as it is) is beneficial in any case.
So
But he’s spot on with the money. The only electorates where climate change matters are the ones that can afford Gucci:
It is no accident that the most prominent voices in the climate change policy debate are millionaires and billionaires, nor is it surprising that they find the most receptive audiences for their prognostications in the wealthiest postcodes.
These are not people who have lost their jobs because of the expensive transition to renewable energy – well, except for Turnbull and Rudd. Rather than fall victim to closed factories or skyrocketing power prices, these people have added to their wealth thanks to the taxpayer-subsidised renewable energy boom.
Spender’s campaign posters promise a “better climate for Wentworth”. I guess this must be what you give the voters who have everything.
How many votes would Scott Morrison win if he pointed out it was a rich man’s fantasy to change the worlds weather and the poor punters were the ones who would pay?
When the rich campaign to tax flights and fuel they are just clearing out some riff raff from the roads and airports, and lining their own pockets with government funded gravy.
Here’s a graphic that’s hard to find
Australia circled in red. New Zealand too (below Australia). Most graphs are done per capita, for obvious reasons, not per country. And of course the best graphic doesn’t exist. I want the one that shows all these countries next to “plants”, “oceans”, “animals” and “microbes”.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
If CO2 mattered at all, there are only a few players that count.
Stick with this — step over the cheap shots at Trump and predictable hits on conservatives — Bill Maher is doing a cracker job on a soft left audience. He’s packaged up a dose of medicine about how important free speech is. His is a rare voice on the left pointing out the hypocrisy and stupidity of censorship.
“Keeping you safe and sorting out the lies is your job” (not Twitters)
We always focus on the producers and never the consumers, as if we’re all helpless dumb blondes ready to believe everything…
People lie, that’s what people do. Every age is the misinformation age, and whenever a new means of communication comes along some reach for the censor button. In 1858 the New York Times thought we couldn’t handle the Transatlantic Telegraph. “It was superficial and too fast for the Truth”…
He also tosses a cold bucket or two on the lefty willingness to believe the Covid stats, and effectively calls all the censors “assholes”.
In America you have the right to say what you think, to be wrong, and to be an asshole.
And if you think you know everything and no one else could possibly have another truth you should be glad of that protection — because you’re an asshole.
Ron DeSantis announces that November 7th will be a day to honor the Victims of Communism
A true leader:
“I notice, that people who escape communism for free societies never choose to go back…”
“There are probably more Marxists on college faculties in the United States than there are in all of Eastern Europe combined.”
“The body-count of Mao is something that everybody needs to understand.”
The key parts are from 2:30 – 5:00.
Students will learn what Marxism does:
Beginning in the 2023-2024 academic year, high school students enrolled in US government courses will get at least 45 minutes of instruction each November 7 describing how “victims suffered under these regimes through poverty, starvation, migration, systemic lethal violence, and suppression of speech.” – New York Post:
The legislation means students will learn about Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot
Market traders will be sweating. Today in the green-star renewable state of South Australia there won’t be much wind blowing, they’re weeks away from the lowest solar insolation of the year, and the extension cord to the coal plants in Victoria is limited for some reason.
This below is the remarkable AEMO prediction for South Australian for wholesale electricity today. Note the scale on the left hand side. The flat tops on the price peaks mark the cap at $15,000 per megawatt hour. The sheer width of those spike predictions is awesome — potentially nearly ten hours of the day above $10,000. Demand is only 1,500 – 1,800MW but that’s still a bill of $15 million dollars an hour for a small state.
Note the size of those peaks…
The first peak is forecast from 6.30-10am, and the second batch pretty much stretch from 6pm to midnight. Wow.
The AEMO is handing out LOR (Lack of Reserve) notices. Watch the Market Notices here. Watch prices here. For those so inclined.
We proved you can scale a Lake District Mountain (3100ft Helveylln) in 3mins 30 seconds, despite very poor visibility that would have grounded a HEMS Helicopter. The Mountain Rescue foot response is over 70 minutes typically. The route was 1.2 miles and 2200ft of height gain.
India needs a billion tons of coal a year, and digs up about 770 million tons. Suddenly the plan is to increase that to 1.2 billion tons “in the next two years” and if that means opening 100 old mines and throwing away the green tape, so be it.
Phys-Org
Soaring temperatures have prompted higher energy demand in recent weeks and left India facing a 25-million-tonne shortfall…
The government hopes to woo private mining giants—like Vedanta and Adani—to revive more than 100 dormant coal mines previously deemed too expensive to operate, using new technology and fresh capital. …the Environment Ministry said it has allowed a “special dispensation” to the Ministry of Coal to relax certain requirements—like public consultations—so mines could operate at increased capacities. Coal mining projects previously cleared to operate at 40-percent capacity may now increase capacity to 50 percent without undertaking fresh environment impact studies, the authority said.
Benjamin Parkin and Chloe Cornish, Financial Times
About two-thirds of 21,500 people recently surveyed by pollster LocalCircles reported they had suffered power outages. One in 10 said the blackouts lasted between four to eight hours.
India is the world’s second-largest coal producer and consumer and depends on the fossil fuel for about 70 per cent of power generation. But the combination of surging demand as economic activity rebounds after Covid restrictions were eased and supply chain bottlenecks, such as a lack of rail cars to transport coal, have left many plants plagued by shortages.
The ‘little ice age’ of the 14th to the 19th centuries brought cold winters to Europe and unusual weather globally. Studying how humans adapted could be valuable.
The story isn’t entirely settled, but researchers are increasingly confident about the initial trigger: volcanoes.
“You have these eruptions that are happening in clusters,” says Degroot. A 2015 study used data from ice cores to identify 25 major eruptions from the past 2,500 years. Between 1200 and 1400, there were huge eruptions of the Samalas volcano in Indonesia, Quilotoa in Ecuador and El Chichón in Mexico.
But the volcanoes reasoning is a bit hand-wavy and vague, so Michael Marshall knows he needs other reasons. He considers the sun as a ball-of-pure-light for a few paragraphs, ignoring that it might have a magnetic field 12,000 times bigger than Earths, or a solar wind that buffets Earth at a million miles an hour. Thus, on the basis of ignoring most solar physics, he rules it out as a big contender. Which leaves him free to fill in the gaps in his theory with the two most fashionable Voodoo dolls of Postmodern Witchcraft — White Men and CO2.
… this cold spell was caused by humanity – in a truly horrible way.
The great dying
In 1492, Christopher Columbus reached the Americas. Over the following decades, Europeans began colonising them. In the process, they fought with Indigenous Americans, often killing them. But even more lethally, they brought diseases. One of the worst was smallpox, which killed millions.
As well as being a genocide and a tragedy, this may have had an impact on the climate. Many Indigenous Americans were farmers who had cleared forests for their crops and when they died the trees grew back, drawing carbon dioxide out of the air and cooling the planet.
So White men killed the nice native farmers, and that meant the forests grew back, which was terrible, by the way, and the naughty trees ate up all the CO2 from the Sky-Princess, and thus the world mostly, sorta got cooler. See how this works?
Not that I’m mocking the devastating effect of smallpox, just the cult-like unfalsifiability of the Climate Religion. All roads lead to white men and CO2.
And of course, like all ideological fantasies, it raises more questions than it solves: if forests are that dangerous, should we be replanting them hither thither? What if we get carried away with the carbon credit schemes and trigger another ice age? And doesn’t this destroy the whole HockeyStick Graph? How can there be both a global little ice caused by volcanoes and then by Christopher Columbus AND also a flat line for the last thousand years of history? Besides, doesn’t extra CO2 cause the ice caps to melt which slide off the polar crustal plates, leading to more volcanoes?
But of course, the shifting narrative has its own uses. Should the world cool now, instead of warm, volcanoes make a handy back door escape route. The climate models will never be wrong — it’s just bad luck. Someone will get a good grant and find volcanoes got bigger, or more clustered, or spewed different particulates, or in different jet streams.
Still not wrong:
The “hockey stick” graph as published in IPCC TAR (Figure 2-20, 2001)
Coming soon: how the Medieval Warm Period was caused by the Russians.
Just another week in the Transition we (Don’t) have to have
With 65 Glorious Gigawatts the Australian grid system has a vast excess (theoretically) of generation capacity, yet it’s so fragile that the loss of an interconnector, normal maintenance and a few coal turbines down — has triggered $100 million dollar price spikes. These burning pyres of money are so savage the average cost of wholesale electricity — across a whole day — is lately in the realm of $200- $700 per megawatt hour over most states for 24 hour periods. For the last week, daily prices have been ten times the “old normal”.
And it comes on the back of the most expensive April in the Australian grid history in every mainland state on the National Electricity Market.
Autumn and spring are supposed to be easy days in Australia with peak demand only running at 27,000 MW. Because things are lighter, generators do normal maintenance at this time of year, but at the moment, there doesn’t seem to be any room for that in the network. In summer, demand is often 5,000MW higher. Where’s that going to come from?
Factories are shutting down for fear of burning through their cash balance
Business in RenewableWorld means being ready to drop everything and switch off the lights, but it might stop storms a hundred years from now, so it’ll be worth it…
Soaring wholesale electricity spot prices have sparked warnings of factory shutdowns as big power users struggle with extreme volatility amid a growing number of outages and high fuel costs.
Sell & Parker, a scrap metal buyer in Banksmeadow that supplies to BlueScope Steel, said it had to curtail production over the last three days due to huge price volatility for its electricity supplies.
“Prices are jumping up 45-fold in a matter of minutes and we are being forced to shut down production,” Sell & Parker director Morgan Parker said. “It just kills you to run at those sort of prices.”
The company shuts off its metal shredder, one of only three in the state, during high price events and said it was being handicapped in comparison to international competitors operating in the same business.
Big grid users can hedge against that volatility, but hedges have their own costs (which must surely be rising) and smaller victims with wholesale spot contracts must be sweating on every five minute contract in the late afternoon.
On Sunday the AEMO (Australian Energy Market Operator) was already forecasting a drop in wind power on Thursday so severe that will leave South Australia at risk of rolling blackouts. The AEMO forecast a rare LOR3 (Lack of Reserve Class 3) though hours later resolved it. It seems the Heywood interconnector that South Australia relies on to get coal fired power from “next door” in Victoria will be limited on Thursday. The combination of low wind and little back up from interstate coal puts the South Australian RenewableWorld at risk of running out of power.
I’ll be discussing the absurdity of Destroying Perfectly good Electricity Grids in Australia with the Friends of Science in Calgary, Canada with a presentation then Q&A. It will be live 7pm MDT Monday evening in Canada/USA and Tuesday 10th morning in Australia (11am EST, 9am WST). It will be available to watch afterwards as the wonderful Ian Plimer’s is now from last week.
“Australia – Crash Test Dummy of Renewable Energy” with Joanne Nova
But even the ABC admits no one is really talking about it — apparently Australians are secretly thinking about climate change at home on their computer:
Discussion of climate policy may be conspicuously absent this federal election campaign, but Google search data suggests the warming of the planet is weighing on voters’ minds — at least more so than in 2019.
But strangely, they don’t report actual google search results for “climate change” — instead they quote some focus groups, and talk about 5000% increases in obscure questions like “What is climate change meaning?” which no one except 12 year olds doing high school assignments probably wants to know.
So here’s the last 18 years of actual Google data on Australian searches for “climate change”:
Holy Smoke!
Google Trends: Australia searches for “climate change” hits record high| Click to enlarge
But, wait, really? Is this year really that much more exciting for “climate change” than the uber hot duo of Copenhagen and ClimateGate in 2009, or Al Gore’s Nobel winning Documentary in 2007, or the massive bushfires of Dec 2019 when the whole continent was on fire?
It turns out that all the frantic interest in “climate change” in Australia happened in just one week. No, wait, it was all in just one day!
And that day Australians were interested in climate change was April 22.
What freak event would that be, that I can’t remember from three weeks ago?
…
But wait — the same effect happened on the exact same day in the USA, and the UK, and New Zealand, and Canada. And tripping off the Radar of Weirdness, the one-day wonder effect happened even in China and Afghanistan too?
Bizarrely, the whole world woke up on April 22 and decided to search for “climate change”.
Google Trends searches for Climate Change 2022
Even people fighting a war in Russia and Ukraine stopped to look up “climate change” too. Though for the latter two countries, unlike many places, it wasn’t an all time highest ever record. But that did occur and by a wild margin in the West. What was going on?
The big event, apparently on April 22 was “Earth Day 2022”
Remember it? Me neither. Apparently Joe Biden gave a speech, and the whole world got excited, and more people than ever before searched for “climate change” on their computer, even in the back-blocks of Brazil, and the far reaches of Poland. And then it was gone. The record hit was a One Day Wonder. Either that or it was a fake “bot” at work, rigging results — but you’d have to ask, why bother? If the aim was to create a hit for PR purposes, why that day? Why not every day? And where were all the stories — Did I miss them?
The whole world was searching for climate change on April 22?
There was one lame UK story that capitalized on the trendy spike – but it was hardly a big event worthy of coordinated cyber bot campaign.
At the 3-million-dollar-a-day ABC not one journalist — apparently — bothered to do a google Trends search on “climate change” for the latest story. They’re activists — all of them, and rather pathetic ones. Consider how lame this is — not only is there no rising trend, and not much discussion of climate policy a bare two weeks before an election but the journalists are trying to convince themselves that Australians care about climate change and are really too scared to mention it.
So Australians are googling climate change, even if they’re not talking about it.
And in areas where they’re talking about it least, they may be googling it even more than elsewhere. “Maybe they can ask Google when they can’t ask their neighbour,” Dr Huntley said. “It’s not a surprise to me that people in small farming communities, where they don’t necessarily feel like they can have this conversation at the pub, are places where people are googling it.”
The WHO wants a Pandemic Treaty like an IPCC committee for viruses. And both sides of politics in many Western lands will likely be quietly signing away sovereign control from May 22 – 28.
In 1492, Christopher Columbus reached the Americas. Over the following decades, Europeans began colonising them. In the process, they fought with Indigenous Americans, often killing them. But even more lethally, they brought diseases. One of the worst was smallpox, which killed millions.
Autumn and spring are supposed to be easy days in Australia with peak demand only running at 27,000 MW. Because things are lighter, generators do normal maintenance at this time of year, but at the moment, there doesn’t seem to be any room for that in the network. In summer, 
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