This is Fall of Rome type stuff — everything is coming undone
National rolling blackouts have been occurring for days in South Africa and are forecast to continue for another week at least. One engineer warns they are just a step away from a total blackout and says it will be very difficult to reawaken the entire system. Traffic lights are failing, trains are stopping, and mobiles phones, ATMs and fuel pumps may not work. With unemployment at a shocking 35% already, the million dollar losses from blackouts make for a dark feedback loop.
The immediate cause is strikes for wage claims and terrible maintenance leading to major power outages lasting as long as nine hours. But Green targets and activism only makes it worse because there’s no interest in maintaining plants properly which are planned for closure. South Africa runs mostly on old coal plants, and one of the largest plants is closing (supposedly) as soon as September. And the wind and solar power they have often isn’t helping with the peak loads either.
There is vandalism from every direction. At the bottom end, apparently up to half the people in Soweto are not even paying for electricity — maybe because they don’t have jobs — but they jerry-rig connections to bypass the meters, and the illegal tampering causes more problems. The rolling blackouts cause some breakages and explosions as power comes back on. People who are connected may not pay their bills. Thieves are stealing copper wires, and the blackouts only make it easier for them because they don’t have to worry about being electrocuted.
Eskom has also been hit with major corruption scandals. Some during the Zuma era, led to delays in completing new power plants. Then there is the Chinese Belt and Road program too: In 2018 Eskom took a secretive 33b Rand debt from the Chinese Government (worth about $2b USD). There was word of another 25b Rand debt to China too, which apparently won’t be repaid “due to irregularities and corruption” involved in issuing it.
At the top end of town, the globalists are trying to force an expensive fashionable green transition on a country that can’t afford it. South Africa’s Integrated Resource Plan of 2019 – seeks to expand the share of renewables in the energy mix to 25% by 2030. The UK has offered a billion dollar loan for the transition to unreliable power when what South Africa really needs at the moment is dependable cheap energy.
Arnot Coal Power Station in South Africa was built in four years and finished in 1975. (2230MW)
Ominously, Eskom has apparently already lost 6GW of demand in the last year“…because many non-paying customers have been disconnected and several large clients, among them industrial users like mines, are now generating their own power.” So much for the efficiency of mass production eh? It’s every mine for itself, diesel gens to the left, and higher prices to the right… And so much for poor consumers cooking by candlelight.
The first power stations were built in South Africa in the 1920s but now, here we are 100 years later and wondering if South Africa can maintain them?
It’s all rather sad to see for our South African friends, and a rather sobering message of just how many things have to go right to run a modern civilization. A bit of corruption here, a few bad decisions there, a bit of pressure from foreigners, rinse, repeat and recycle and before you know it, a perfectly good civilization is going to waste.
Just as in Australia the demand for electricity peaks at dinner time and wind and solar are more useful at nearly every other hour. The Integrated plan to add 18GW of wind and 8GW of solar won’t solve anything.
Forget the weather forecast. South Africans these days are more interested in the outlook for rolling blackouts. One of the country’s most-downloaded apps provides alerts and schedules for power outages. Eskom, the state power monopoly, cannot generate enough electricity to meet demand, and is deploying a byzantine system of rotating outages known as “load-shedding”, so as to avoid the collapse of the entire grid. Last year saw the most blackouts in South African history, overtaking 2020; and this year is set to beat the record again. On June 28th, for only the second time, “stage 6” load-shedding was implemented, which would mean several outages over a 24-hour period.
Many businesses have bought generators or solar-power systems; others close during outages. In big cities, there is chaos at rush hour as traffic lights go dark. The blackouts suit copper-cable thieves, who can steal without fear of electrocution. And when the electricity is switched back on, substations sometimes explode, resulting in secondary outages.
Qithi said Eskom was dealing with an exponentially high number of failed mini-substations and transformers in Soweto.
This was due to the network becoming overloaded due to illegal connections; meter bypasses and tampering; unauthorised operations on the electricity network; vandalism and theft of electrical equipment; purchasing electricity tokens from ghost vendors; and non-payment of electricity, Qithi said.
“In most areas where customers are experiencing prolonged outages relating to failed or exploded electricity infrastructure, this is due to their resistance to the repair or replacement process.”
Qithi said in some instances communities would violently chase Eskom technicians from areas when they attempted to implement the replacement process as part of their operations.
We wonder how many other countries feel like they are being held to ransom by their national electricity provider? The situation at Eskom remains dire, after the utility plunged SA into Stage 6 load shedding on Tuesday. However, one senior expert now thinks a ‘total blackout’ is coming.
“It’s not looking good. The strike has come at the worst possible time. If you look at our coal fleet, it is not performing how it should. We are moving towards a total blackout. Essentially, Stage 6 is one step away from total blackout.”
“Once we get to that level, it’s going to be very difficult for us to reawaken the entire system we are sitting in a difficult situation as things stand. I feel sorry for the current leadership, because they are grappling with historic negligence.”
The Green international push is on, though workers at the coal plants call talk of a just energy transition is “a big ruse.”
As of September, 2022 Komati power station – one of South Africa’s oldest coal fired-power plants – is due for decommissioning as the first major milestone towards Eskom’s energy transition plans.
Born from agreements at an international level which recognise the urgency of mitigating the drivers of climate change, South Africa has set course to shift to a low-carbon economy.
However, for workers in Komati, talk of a just energy transition is a big ruse.What is actually at play is a neoliberal structural adjustment pacified by rhetoric of a green agenda.
With weeks to go until plant closure at the Komati coal-fired power plant in September, 2022 workers lament that they are yet to be consulted about Eskom’s transitional plans. This has emerged through workshops held with workers by the Institute for Economic Justice in collaboration with the NUM Komati branch.
Data presented to the paper showed that half of Eskom’s power stations break down again within nine months of being repaired, and some of the worst-performing stations are offline between 50% and 70% of the time.
This deterioration of the fleet was most apparent this past week when Eskom had to implement stage 6 load shedding for the longest time in its history to prevent a total blackout. While the group targets an energy availability factor (EAF) of 74%, it hit a low of 60% this week.
The deficit between supply and demand was between 5,000 and 6,000MW, necessitating the higher load shedding stages.
Energy experts told the Sunday Times that the repair work being done by Eskom is not enough – or even not correct. The group is repairing units to get them back into operation as quickly as possible, instead of addressing long-term problems that lead to their failure, they said.
The power utility is also putting its focus on new energy projects – many of which will not be online for several years. This means that things are unlikely to improve in the near-to-mid term, which will have a significant impact on the economy.
Generally, Eskom has stated it anticipates that load shedding should decrease in severity to Stage 2 by the weekend of 9-10 July. However, the schedule is subject to change at short notice, dependent on several factors.
Temporary commercial and communications disruptions are possible while load shedding and unscheduled disruptions are taking place; cellular and mobile services could be affected. Traffic disruptions and longer driving times are possible during these periods due to malfunctioning traffic signals. Trains may also experience delays if outages impact signaling devices or overhead wires. Power outages could also result in the temporary unavailability of essential services such as ATMs and filling stations. There is an increased security threat during power outages. Blackouts could adversely affect security protocols, including alarm systems and electronic fences; opportunistic criminal activity could increase during electricity outages.
Here in the United States, we’ve been so deeply engrossed in our own debates over whether men should be allowed to compete on girls swim teams or whether it’s immoral to carry our groceries in plastic bags that we’ve missed the fact that the government of China has been busy with its own agenda — taking over the world.
In the space of just 15 years, for example, the Chinese have succeeded in re-colonizing the entire continent of Africa. Didn’t think that could happen? Well, it is happening. In Africa, China now calls the shots and takes the natural resources for itself. Period. As of tonight, there is only one remaining African country that dares to recognize Taiwan, and it happens to be among the smallest countries in Africa, Swaziland. Everyone else on the continent obeys Beijing.
But wait a second. How can this be happening? Isn’t colonialism racist and bad? Yes, it is and no one’s worse and more racist than the Chinese. Go on Chinese social media sometime and see how they describe the Africans they’ve subjugated. It’s horrifying. So, why isn’t the New York Times writing stories about any of this? You know why – because the New York Times is on China’s side. That’s why they all but ignore the brutal Chinese colonization of Latin America, which is also in full swing right now.
Colonialism violates everything the New York Times once claimed to believe in, but that’s okay, because they never really believed any of it anyway. It was always about power. …
Bolsonaro!
One person who is emphatically not in favor of it is the president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro. So, of course, the American media hate him. … These are people whose research consists of three minutes on Wikipedia on the way to the studio. “He’s a racist. Of course, he is.” He “doesn’t want lockdowns.” There’s your proof.
But it is the last clip from plagiarist Fareed Zakaria that explains why they’re so mad at Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro … represents a “growing global threat to the ideas of liberalism” –– liberalism, meaning neoliberalism, meaning globalism.
And in fact, that is true. Bolsonaro is no Justin Trudeau. He’s not a low-IQ fascist who would be working as an Instagram influencer if he didn’t have his own army. He’s not the president of Ukraine who shuts down television stations that dare to criticize him and outlaws opposition parties and arms Nazis.
In conventional terms, Bolsonaro is, in fact, liberal. He has done nothing to stop civil liberties in Brazil. But at the same time, he is a nationalist. He cares about his country. He resists China. Therefore, he must be stopped. George Soros hates him and so does Joe Biden. He’s not with the program.
So naturally, we wanted to meet him. Yesterday we did. We sat with Bolsonaro for more than an hour and the first thing we learn is that the left in Brazil hates him very much. They tried to kill him when he first ran for president four years ago. With very little money in the backing of no party, he came out of nowhere to get 57 million votes.
But he almost didn’t survive to be elected. He was stabbed by a leftist almost to death at a rally, at which point the left funded lawyers to come in and rescue his attempted murderer — an amazing story that hasn’t gotten a ton of coverage in the United States.
Another bit of news the ABC, BBC, CBC etc forgot to mention.
Winning: The new Supreme Court decision is much bigger than the climate wars
Over the last 50 years the Deep State Bureaucrats had become Rulers-defacto and finally the Supreme Court has put the hand-brake on. Instead of unelected agencies deciding national policy, the Supreme Court said, rather radically, that Congress should make decisions of great political significance. Sounds awfully like “Democracy”.
But as far as the Environmental Protection Agency sees it, if the voters are too stupid to elect the correct people, then Congress can’t make the right laws, so it’s up to the EPA to save the people anyway.
It’s what you do when you are Omniscient.
Or as another Ian says: they are only doing “what God would have done if he had truly understood the situation”.
The Supreme Court Restores a Constitutional Climate
The Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
This has been an historic Supreme Court term, and the Justices kept it going to the end with a major 6-3 decision Thursday (West Virginia v. EPA) reining in the administrative state. The subject was climate regulation but the message should echo across the federal bureaucracy.
The question was whether the Environmental Protection Agency could invoke an obscure statutory provision to re-engineer the nation’s electric grid. Prior to the 2015 Obama rule, the EPA had used the provision only a handful of times to regulate pollutants from discrete sources. The rule would have effectively required coal and gas-fired generators to subsidize renewables.
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts relies on the Court’s “major questions” doctrine. This requires courts to look with skepticism when agencies claim “‘in a long-extant statute an unheralded power’ representing a ‘transformative expansion” in its power. That’s what the Obama EPA did.
Apparently it’s not OK to play legal word games with old subclauses in order to make your agency more powerful, rich, and likely to get grants and Nobel Prizes.
The Court is now placing guardrails on Chevron to prevent lower courts from going off the constitutional road. Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurrence, joined by Samuel Alito, is especially helpful in lighting the way for lower courts grappling with when and how to apply the major questions doctrine.
First, he writes, the doctrine applies when “an agency claims the power to resolve a matter of great ‘political significance.’” Second, an agency “must point to clear congressional authorization when it seeks to regulate ‘“a significant portion of the American economy.”’” Third, it may apply when an agency seeks to intrude “into an area that is the particular domain of state law.”
Contrary to their critics, the Justices aren’t blocking climate regulation. They are merely saying that the decision on whether and how to do it rests with Congress.
The EPA Gods are very annoyed
Everything about this response shows that Michael S. Regan, EPA chief, *knows* what is best, and democracy be damned — he will save those voters whether they like it or not.
Today, in response to the Supreme Court ruling in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan issued the following statement:
“As a public health agency, EPA’s number one responsibility is to protect people’s health, especially those who are on the front lines of environmental pollution. Make no mistake: we will never waver from that responsibility.
While I am deeply disappointed by the Supreme Court’s decision, we are committed to using the full scope of EPA’s authorities to protect communities and reduce the pollution that is driving climate change.
True believers:
At this moment, when the impacts of the climate crisis are becoming ever more disruptive, costing billions of dollars every year from floods, wildfires, droughts and sea level rise, and jeopardizing the safety of millions of Americans, the Court’s ruling is disheartening.
For tens of thousands of years, rain-dancing shamen said similar things. It was along the lines of Give me women and goats or there will be terrible storms. Now we have to chop down 120 million trees, or kill 200,000 bats, give up roast beef and then the WeatherMasters will give us nice weather.
The EPA just wants power over the national economy, energy systems, land, air and water. They already sound like they are a political party:
Ambitious climate action presents a singular opportunity to ensure U.S. global competitiveness, create jobs, lower costs for families, and protect people’s health and wellbeing, especially those who’ve long suffered the burden of inaction. EPA will move forward with lawfully setting and implementing environmental standards that meet our obligation to protect all people and all communities from environmental harm.”
Since when was the Environmental Protection Agency meant to create jobs, lower costs, and ensure US competitiveness, and if they can do that, who needs Congress?
Effectively — the AEMO (the Australian Energy Market Operator) is the taxpayer funded advertising agency for the Renewables Industry. The point of the latest AEMO super-report, apparently, is to get Australian taxpayers or consumers to foot the bill for the high voltage lines that the unreliable industry desperately needs but can’t pay for itself.
The AEMO has declared we need to rush to cough up $12.7 billion to build new interconnectors in Australia. That’s $500 from every man woman and child and let’s call it what it is, a Gift Card for the Renewables Industry. The net benefit of all that money will be to allow wind and solar industrial plants to connect their unreliable product to the grid we already have, and to the storage products that we still have to pay for, and all so that their green electrons will make the weather 0.0 degrees cooler in a hundred years. Australians alive today will pay now and basically get nothing but views of more criss-crossy-steel-wires and spires, and more wind towers too. Sing Hallelujah.
The 104 page Blueprint imagines all kinds of scenarios except for an actual free market, true competition, consumer choice, or whether it makes any sense to use our national grid as a global climatic weather controller. It’s a fantasy document which includes four flavours of future electrical icecream: “Slow”, “Progressive”, “Step” or “Hydrogen Superpower”. Will that be a double-scoop with Spiderman topping? Yes indeedy — and with $28 billion dollars of imaginary savings to go. The word blackout appears no times. Nor is there a scenario for a “Cost effective” electrical grid. (Remember them?)
The Hydrogen Superpower fantasy comes straight out of Marvel comic. Wait til you see Figure 12 — the Hulk Strikes the Australian grid, or at least scrawls wild lines on a graph. Is that a 500 gigawatt 100% renewable grid by 2050 or just Hopium I see…
It’s rare to see this much abject nonsense in a single story. Perry Williams at The Australian just took the junk prospectus and ran it:
Australia must accelerate a move away from coal to renewables and storage and urgently sanction more than $10bn of transmission projects to escape the ongoing threat of blackouts and high power prices amid a national energy crisis.
Follow the logic: if having a bit less coal causes a crisis, then how exactly, will having no coal solve it?
The Australian Energy Market Operator, which runs the national electricity network, said the country was undergoing a “complex, rapid and irreversible” change to its energy system…
Is this the same “irreversible change” that is currently reversing all over Europe? The one where Germany, France, the UK, Austria and Poland are all using more coal.
And isn’t the follow up just a tiny scary?
an irreversible” … that would need a nine-fold increase in wind and solar capacity by 2050 to meet the nation’s net-zero emissions targets.
Apparently this kind of “rapid” irreversible transition is only 11% of the way out of the starting gate, but already falling over, costing a bomb, and we have to do this nine times more.
But wait. Renewables will not only make floods nicer, and fish happier, it make us safer from enemies?
“One source of energy that no geopolitical situation can interrupt in relation to our supply chains and that’s the sun to our land-mass and the wind on and off our shores. That’s good energy security and storing that is a matter of national security,” Mr Bowen told the National Press Club.
What if the enemy just attacks at night and when there is no wind? Except probably they won’t have to attack at all. As we go broke, they can just buy the nation out from under us.
There they go again: The AEMO calls coal and gas volatile, and renewables cheap
The energy supply crunch that forced the suspension of the country’s power market for the first time this month underscored the need for the Australian electricity grid to curb its exposure to the volatile commodities of coal and gas and fast-track cheap renewables backed up by storage, the AEMO said.
The price of coal and gas isn’t volatile, it’s not going up and down, it’s gone up and stayed up — because it’s so essential, everyone has to have it and they want more than they can get. And the true price of renewables isn’t cheap, it’s just hidden — like this giant report pretends to hide that twelve billion dollars worth of interconnectors are entirely frivolous parts of a good grid powered by centralized reliable power. We don’t need them: the Renewables Industry does.
It’s like a grab-bag of energy-platitudes
“I think recent events in Australia and overseas have really just underscored the need for urgent investment in renewables, firming and transmission so that we can de-link ourselves from these international factors and provide Australian homes and businesses with the most affordable, secure and reliable energy,” AEMO chief executive Daniel Westerman told The Australian.
Since when was coal and gas an “international factor” for a nation which is the worlds largest exporter of coal and third largest for gas?
The costs of these renewable-interconnectors are staggering
Just throw money:
The Marinus Link across the Bass Strait will cost at least $3.8 billion and generate zero watts of electricity. Theoretically it will allow 1.5 GW of electricity to slip through, but for the same price, we could build a whole new advanced coal plant instead. Various iterations of governments here have already spent $200 million just on the feasibility study. Ten years ago they could nearly build a whole gas plant for that, one that wouldn’t be essentially useless for five months in a row if a shark chewed on it.
The VNI link will cost $2 – $3 billion and make it possible for groups of renewable investors to make profits they otherwise couldn’t have. Humelink will be some kind of nightmare of $3b – $5 billion.
The unreliables are dead without these new transmission lines:
To put it in perspective a very annoyed high honcho at Snowy Hydro was not happy with the draft version of this document a few months ago and complained that the AEMO wasn’t pushing hard enough for faster “investment” in the VNI line which, ahem, just happens to be nearer to the Snowy Scheme, and which they wanted a lot more than the link to their competitors in Tasmania. In that complaint he quietly gave away that these transmission lines are essential in a life and death kind of way for renewables.
[Snowy Hydro] has previously warned the lack of transmission could kill the transition to renewables – with a string of major players weighing into the debate – and singled out concerns over infrastructure as a major issue that needs to be confronted to ensure supplies can flow to users.
Renewable developers and network operators are worried a pipeline of power generation and clean energy supplies faces delays or gridlock unless major electricity transmission projects are delivered across the national power system.
The people making wonder wind turbines are having a tough time. They thought they were picking the hottest new industry, saving the world, and expecting to make great money. Instead supply chains are in crisis, competition is fierce, and profit margins are razor tight. They know that the solar panel industry has largely gone to China, and worry that wind turbine manufacturing will do the same.
What they don’t seem to realize is that the reason the factories went to China is that the country isn’t powered by wind turbines. No country powered by unreliable power is also a growing manufacturing base. And as well as having cheap coal power, China also has the advantage of cheap slave labor, few environmental rules, no ethics and hardly any red tape. It’s a red-light flasher. About now, a wise investor might be wondering about the the odd disconnect in the idea of building devices to save the world while imprisoning people and polluting lakes. What if the environmental movement is a hollow geostrategic trojan fantasy serving Russians, Chicomms, socialists and investment banker cartels?
For Ben Hunt, the light-bulb moment isn’t there yet. These are the guys trying to make ends meet with real products for real consumers. But they haven’t done quite enough homework. Ben Hunt thinks carbon dioxide controls the climate and the world needs wind towers. He thinks “the message isn’t hitting home hard enough” as if showing people more climate-porn-storms will make their industry grow when they’re already at 130% saturation and have been for decades.
Former Siemens Gamesa insider says turbine manufacturers are in dire need of the bright future they were promised
Ben Hunt wrote to colleagues to say “it will get worse before it gets better”
One of the first responses I received was very instructive: “When I joined more than 15 years ago, I was told that I was joining the sector with the brightest and most promising future. The problem is that it is a future that seems never to come.”
The Wind Turbine OEM’s (Original Equipment Manufacturer) are struggling to turn a profit, and worry that they can’t compete with China:
It is fair to say that that sums up much of the prevailing mood in the wind turbine OEM sector right now with all the major western OEMs struggling to turn a profit. It is not unusual to hear senior industry figures raising the spectre of the fate of the European solar manufacturing industry, long ago lost to the east.
While everything should be going gangbusters for the highly fashionable, saintly industry, reality is no fun:
Instead the news is full of stories of lay-offs, factory closures and eye-watering financial losses. And the resources required for the necessary investments are in jeopardy.
The fantasy is alive and well even if the wheels are falling off:
Wind is a cost effective, inexhaustible and clean provider of secure energy that isn’t going to further poison the planet.
Somehow, however, that message isn’t hitting home anything like hard enough. At Davos late last month, the discourse turned back towards nuclear, shale and more large-scale fossil to overcome the energy crunch.
Many in the industry believed these arguments long since won, but the fight is ongoing, and I’m really not sure we are winning.
After 30 years of the media doing nothing but glowing soft agitprop for the wind industry, blaming fossil fuels just doesn’t cut it.
..it is time to take the gloves off in the lobbying area. The fossil industry is more established, better resourced and more aggressive. The case for wind and renewables needs to be more forceful and more focused. We have been guilty of being too polite and too naïve, perhaps believing the overwhelming weight of argument is enough. It clearly isn’t.
What part of BP being Beyond Petroleum, and Royal Dutch Shell lobbying the World Bank against coal doesn’t make sense? The gas industry has been trying to demonize coal and CO2 just as much as the renewables industries have. And so have the bankers — the Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Barclays, Morgan Stanley –they’re all fans of wind farms. But in the end, the world is paying $400 a ton for coal.
Last month UK Ministers were warned that six million households could enjoy blackouts for dinner this winter. To try to stave off disaster, the UK Business Secretary has already written to the owners of the last three remaining coal fired power plants to ask them to stay running through winter. This is despite them being set to close in September.
Given the dire shortage of cheap energy, another plan is to pay British households up to £6 for each kilowatt-hour they don’t use at peak time. While a normal kilowatt-hour would cost 28p, the blistering premium price shows how desperate the National Grid planners must be. The last thing they want is everyone to come home, turn on the oven and washing machine and plug in their scooters and EV’s at 6pm.
So now possibly in a grand experiment, as well as trying to control the weather with windmills, millions of families may try to reschedule body clocks somehow, eating later, doing laundry later, watching the melatonin-destroying blue-screens-of-insomnia after 10pm and running the drier while they sleep. Maybe it won’t be so bad, or maybe people will be more sleep deprived and less productive, fatter, or crash their cars on the A6 as they drive right over 200 trillion cubic feet of gas in Lancashire that could have easily kept the lights on. Hopefully the drier won’t catch fire at night.
Sometime 20 years from now, people at Oxford will get a nice grant to study what happened to the lifespan and health of the working class and the poor during the winter of the Energy Crisis. They may not find a conclusive link with house fires, car accidents, falls or school performance, but that’s OK, there’s always another grant for that.
Families are struggling with energy bills that have jumped by 54 per cent (an average of £693) this year.
It [National Grid ESO] is believed to have written to suppliers last week asking them to assess how much less energy their customers could be persuaded to use at peak times.
Ultimately everyone who uses electricity at dinnertime will pay more so other people can have less.
The cost of the scheme would be added onto energy bills but the National Grid is said to believe the additional charge would be less than the cost of paying power plants to increase supply.
Look at that evening Peak of maximum power consumption, and last night that was at 6.05PM. Incidentally, it’s at that same time year round day in day out, 365 days a year, and has been at that same time forever. In Summer it might be somewhat hidden by HVAC (air conditioning) power consumption, which is so much higher, but the evening Peak has always been at that time, you know the time the power retailers charge the most for, telling the gullible gulls people that they can avoid the peak cost by moving their power consumption to cheaper times, you know come home from school and work some other time. Have your main evening family meal at some other time, watch TV etc at some other time. Live without lighting till some other time. Tell you children to do their homework some other time. Charge your phones at some other time. Move the habits of everyone of many many many lifetimes to ….. some other time.
So let’s utilise that known for Centuries time of day and change the cost to a higher rate, eh!
Countries where energy consumption is plummeting don’t feel much pain … yet. And there is a good reason for that. One country is increasing its energy use, propping up Western consumption with exports and giving us a false sense of well-being. That country is, of course, China.
Since the West began its energy starvation diet, Chinese energy consumption has increased by over 50 per cent and its electricity consumption has increased by 200 per cent, overtaking the U.S. by a large margin. China, unlike the EU, U.K. and U.S., is still 90 per cent reliant on fossil fuels and nuclear. What’s more, only some of the immense wealth these fuels are generating is being exported. What is China doing with the rest? Time will tell.
But right now, as a matter of urgency, we must reverse the decline in Western energy quality and consumption by ending impoverishing renewable subsidies and clearing the path for fossil fuels and nuclear. Toying with low-density, thermodynamically incompetent renewables is an indulgence we cannot afford. With the Chinese economy on an energetically sound footing and those in the West not, the world has turned upside down. The economic consequences of this reversal are serious, the security implications terrifying. Our energy blindness is both costly and dangerous.
Energy Starvation costs a lot
Energy demand is falling because of environmental policies, including subsidies to modern renewables such as wind and solar. As distasteful as this might sound, it is nonetheless true. So far, both the U.S. and Canada are relatively minor players, the U.S. having spent a mere US$125 billion between 2008-2018, and while Canadian national totals are lower, the province of Ontario alone is reported to have spent about US$30 billion in the period 2006 to 2014. But the EU, where the biggest energy collapse is observed, has spent a staggering US$800 billion since 2008, a total that has been increasing at $US70 billion a year. And the U.K., a country of 65 million people, is shelling out well over US$10 billion every year.
The intention of these subsidies was to reduce costs, but the gamble has not paid off — nor will it so long as Mother Nature and her laws of physics are at the table. Wind and solar remain stubbornly expensive for consumers in spite of a blizzard of misinformation and propaganda claiming otherwise.
Some sources of energy are disordered from the start — doomed by entropy
Moreover, energy varies in quality, not just quantity. To support complex society a fuel must be of high quality, that is, structured so that it has the potential to do a lot of work. In thermodynamics, this is referred to as a fuel’s degree of “disorder” or “entropy.” Greater disorder equals greater entropy equals less work. But our “energy-blindness,” the inability to easily grasp thermodynamic principles, means that we must rely on physics to see — and what it reveals is that fossil fuels and uranium are highly ordered and rich in their potential to do work, making them cheap, while wind and solar are the reverse.
John Constable is energy director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London and author of its forthcoming study Europe’s Green Experiment: A costly failure in unilateral climate policy. Debra Lieberman is a professor of psychology at the University of Miami and author of Objection: Disgust, Morality, and the Law (OUP, 2018).
The Greens must be having apoplexy. In Glasgow last year everyone was signing climate agreements with no idea that by June they would be signing 15 year new deals for gas with the U.S., the Middle East and Africa. Germany is pouring $3b into floating LNG import platforms. The Germans are also suggesting that the G7 now allow funding for fossil fuel projects, presumably to allow new gas or even coal projects to solve the energy crisis. Meanwhile Boris Johnson is cutting net-zero targets and suggests maybe in the face of food shortages we should feed food to people instead of cars. Starving people to save the world was never going to sell well. Especially when the UK was getting 20% of the ethanol for the biofuel program from Ukraine.
Some of these changes, like the gas contracts and national security issues, are going to leave a mark for years, but back-flipping again on things like biofuels and combustion engines will be done in a flash if they can get away with it. The pushback is coming.
Germany is pushing for Group of Seven nations to walk back a commitment that would halt the financing of overseas fossil fuel projects by the end of the year, according to people familiar with the matter. That would be a major reversal on tackling climate change as Russia’s war in Ukraine upends access to energy supplies.
A draft text shared with Bloomberg would see the G-7 “acknowledge that publicly supported investment in the gas sector is necessary as a temporary response to the current energy crisis.”
The whole world wants coal now but there is no spare capacity anymore, so coal shortages are not going away
The price is record high for coal but investors don’t have faith that there will still be a market in five years time, so there is little investment. Meanwhile in South Africa people have stolen and vandalized the rail lines so it’s hard to move coal. Australia has had flooding which has slowed production, Colombia has elected an anti fossil fuel leader, and India and China are both digging as much out of the ground as they can already.
The long-term pressure to move away from coal also means there is limited spare capacity, and investors are unlikely to try and pump cash into alleviating what may only be a short-term demand surge.
“Coal markets have been burned so many times [..] and you’ve still got a very drastic retirement schedule in Europe,” says Natalie Biggs, global head of thermal coal markets research at Wood Mackenzie. “What’s the purpose of opening new mines and rushing out into the market when that market disappears in the next five years?
Europe is scrambling to set up gas infrastructure to replace the Russia piped supplies, but these new capital project come with long term contracts that are making the greens very nervous:
Suddenly the warning lights flashing in Germany. The message is to go easy on the gas, but ultimately even if the national storage tanks were completely full, the largest economy in the EU would only have ten weeks of gas without supplies from Russia. It’s summer and they’ve already hit stage 2 of the 3 stage emergency plan.
It was all totally avoidable. A wholly Green-made crisis. They could have gone nuclear, kept using coal, and explored for more gas and then they could have laughed at GazProm. Instead talk of rationing has already started, and the event horizon now includes the possibility of mass industrial shutdowns and recession.
Germany has been so suddenly crippled it’s almost as if an enemy force had infiltrated the activist soul and culture of the nation and duped it with a magic spell.
Germany says that its citizens may have to ration the use of natural gas this winter as the country faces an energy “crisis” due to Russia reducing its supplies last week.
Germany is facing a “Lehman Brothers” collapse in its energy market that could spark a domino effect leading to a severe recession should the gas-addicted economic powerhouse of the European Union be fully cut off from Russian energy supplies.
Economy Minister and Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck said on Friday that Europe’s largest economy could be forced to shut down certain industries should gas supplies run think by the winter.
“Companies would have to stop production, lay off their workers, supply chains would collapse, people would go into debt to pay their heating bills, that people would become poorer,” he said according to DW.
The Green Party politician warned that there could be “a kind of Lehman-Brothers effect in the energy market,” spreading through municipal utilities, industrial and commercial companies, “And then you have a domino effect that would lead to a severe recession.”
Müller predicted on Thursday that the country could only live off reserves for less than three months without Russian gas over the Winter, saying: “If the storage facilities in Germany were mathematically 100% full… we could do without Russian gas completely… for just about two-and-a-half months and then the storage tanks will be empty.”
Tucker Carlson savages the UniParty and talks about the disarray in voters, the sea change sweeping parts of the US in political alliances. The Great Replacement and influx of new democrat voters has run out of steam.
The old coalitions are crumbling before our eyes. Suddenly we’re seeing Hispanic voters, African and Middle Eastern immigrants, as well as huge numbers of American-born young men, all running at remarkable speed from Joe Biden and the anti-human corporate neoliberalism he represents. …
Joe Biden’s support among Hispanics has dropped to a stunning 24%. That’s the lowest among any ethnic group in America. …
…
At the very moment that Joe Biden is at his weakest, months before a pivotal midterm election, Republicans are propping him up. They are saving Biden from himself.
Since the day Biden was elected, Republicans in Washington have taken Biden’s side on virtually every significant item in his policy agenda. That would include: COVID restrictions, vaccine mandates, transgender ideology in school, sanctions against China, the January 6 charade, free speech, civil liberties, spying by the Intel agencies, preserving the big tech monopolies, the anti-White race politics of CRT and Juneteenth, border enforcement and energy policy, and above all, the administration’s signature issue: its lunatic and reckless support for the war on Ukraine. Republicans are all-in.
Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer are united in their fear of populism and in their gut-level loathing of the American public and they’re not alone. What Washington fears most is democracy — that is letting voters have what they want. That’s not allowed. Republicans and Democrats have formed a uniparty specifically to prevent it. You see this everywhere, but you see it most clearly in the gun control legislation that’s in the Senate right now. …
Just in case anyone can’t think of 25 million reasons why Mitch McConnell might feel inclined to serve other agendas than his voters, read what I wrote in January last year describing Mitch McConnell’s very strange rich connection with China. The corruption is not even hidden…
McConnell’s wife is a Chinese-American and also happens to be The Transportation Secretary of the US Government (!). Since Elaine Chao took up that job four years ago, her fathers company has expanded rapidly and has added 40 percent more ships. Her father, James Chao, is a shipping magnate that gave his daughter and her husband McConnell a gift of at least $5 million in 2008. That’s the conservative estimate — it might have been worth as much as $25 million dollars. (Nice in-laws if you can get them.) The largess was legally disclosed. The net worth of the political couple went from $3m in 2004 to something between $9 and $36m by 2018.
The Chinese Ship building company is called CSSC Holdings. McConnell’s wife’s family is so close to it that both her father and her sister sit on the Board of the financial arm of this Chinese company they buy boats from. It’s odd, stacked on weird, wrapped up in long explanations. CSSC is not just a boat building company, it’s the Chinese government’s military contractor. Indeed, the letters CSSC stand for the China State Shipbuilding Corporation. Get it?
Speaking of signs of decay: Who IS in Charge?
President Biden on Thursday inadvertently held up a comically detailed cheat sheet prepared by his staff instructing the gaffe-prone leader of the free world to “take YOUR seat” and to limit his remarks to “2 minutes.” — New York Post
YOU take YOUR seat’: Very specific cheat sheet reminds Biden how to act. By Steven Nelson.
Who writes these notes for the Leader of the Free World?
h/t Old Ozzie, Scott of the Pacific, Bill who moved from AZ.
A new study shows natural protection still good at 50% after ten months, while vaccination protection waned after 4 months
The utter scandal here is that all those people who had natural protection were being forced to take vaccines to protect them from Omicron, when the vaccines were providing only a fairly limited benefit or no advantage at all.
A new study was based on the whole population of Qatar. It shows that people who caught the original older variants had about 50% immunity to catching Omicron — even ten months later. Those who were double vaccinated had so little protection six months later, it was effectively zero. Indeed, if they had Pfizer their effectiveness was minus 3.4% meaning they were ever so slightly more likely to catch Omicron that if they hadn’t had any vaccines. For moderna it was minus 10% at the six month mark, which sounds, well, not good.
Ten months later, those who had caught earlier variants of Covid still had 50% protection against Omicron:
The authors of the study found that those who had a prior infection but no vaccination had a 46.1 and 50 percent immunity against the two subvariants of the Omicron variant, even at an interval of more than 300 days since the previous infection.
Immunity levels for two COVID-19 vaccines fell to negative figures 270 days after the second dose of vaccine. These numbers predict a trend of more rapidly waning immunity for vaccines compared to immunity from infections.
The findings are supported by another recent study from Israel that also found natural immunity waned significantly more slowly compared to artificial, or vaccinated, immunity.
The study found that both natural and artificial immunity waned over time.
Individuals that were previously infected but not vaccinated had half the risks of reinfection as compared to those that were vaccinated with two doses but not infected.
Natural protection was as good as three doses for outcomes that mattered
From the paper, the first box below compares people taking Pfizer or catching old versions of Covid and their later likelihood of catching Omicron BA1. Basically two doses were useless and once someone had caught covid they’d need at least three doses before there was much benefit above and beyond what they already had, and when we say “benefit” we’re only talking about a reduction in symptomatic Covid.
The box on the right shows just how useful any kind of protection was against severe, critical or deadly outcomes. Remarkable stuff. 100% everywhere.
Bear in mind that the third dose “boosted” people were usually were still in the seven week honeymoon period. If this study were done now, a few months later, the 3 doses numbers here might not look much different to the other options, or possibly, might resemble the “2 dose” poor results. We can’t tell from this study.
The numbers are similar for the newer variant of Omicron called BA2 but protection was a bit lower (below). Meaning the the newer Omicron version which took over the world in January was slightly better at evading protection than the December one. BA2 was definitely a bit nastier for some people though. And protection against severe, critical or fatal BA2 infection was lower from natural infection, though monster error bars neutralize all simple statements.
All the figures are slightly out of date though. We’re now up to Omicron 4 or 5 or so.
Tracking the slide
The honeymoon period for vaccination lasts for three months and then wears off quickly to the point where at six months the injectee might as well not have had a dose at all.
It also has to be said we don’t know if catching Omicron protects a lot against catching Omicron. It does for a while, but we don’t know how long. It’s possible that a mild case of Omicron doesn’t set people up for long term great protection, which is what happens with other normal mild coronaviruses at the moment.
ENSO is playing games with climate scientists — mocking their ability to predict the single greatest natural short term climate swing factor. The El Niño–Southern Oscillation drives floods, droughts, bushfires, and essentially pushes the planetary temperatures up and down on a year by year basis. Nothing determines the year’s climate headlines more than this one thing, yet climate scientists haven’t the faintest idea what drives it.
Imagine what it would look like if they could? They’d be able to say … blah… solar wind changes driven by, say, solar barycentric dynamics will lead to El Ninos in 2023, and ’25, a weak one in 2026. Farmers could plan ahead. Dam managers would know when water would be scarce. The UN would know which years to ask for even more money.
Meteorologists are forecasting a third consecutive year of La Niña. Some researchers say similar conditions could become more common as the planet warms.
On ongoing La Niña event that has contributed to flooding in eastern Australia and exacerbated droughts in the United States and East Africa could persist into 2023, according to the latest forecasts. The occurrence of two consecutive La Niña winters in the Northern Hemisphere is common, but having three in a row is relatively rare. A ‘triple dip’ La Niña — lasting three years in a row — has happened only twice since 1950.
Get ready: Matthew England predicts more triple events:
This particularly long La Niña is probably just a random blip in the climate, scientists say. But some researchers are warning that climate change could make La Niña-like conditions more likely in future. “We are stacking the odds higher for these triple events coming along,” says Matthew England, a physical oceanographer at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. England and others are now working to reconcile discrepancies between climate data and the output of major climate models — efforts that could clarify what is in store for the planet.
“Working to reconcile discrepancies” is climate-scientist-speak for “working to fix our broken models”. We note the get-out-of-jail clause on most climate news reporting, some scientists say this, some say that, so some climate scientists are always right.
How useful, exactly, are those models that predict a 51% chance of a La Nina seven months from now?
The latest forecast from the World Meteorological Organization, issued on 10 June, gives a 50–60% chance of La Niña persisting until July or September. This will probably increase Atlantic hurricane activity, which buffets eastern North America until November, and decrease the Pacific hurricane season, which mainly affects Mexico. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Centre has forecast a 51% chance of La Niña in early 2023.
When it comes to predicting what climate change will actually do to ENSO events — for years most scientists hedged and only say that both La Ninas and El Ninos may get more extreme, but not necessarily that one or the other will become more common.
Review says the models of an increase in extreme weather events are agreeing.
According to Cai, extreme El Niño events happened roughly once every 20 years in the 20th century, but they’re now increasing in frequency. “It will almost double, to one in 11 years or so.”
He adds that there’s more consensus among the models they’ve examined than in previous studies, such as one he authored in 2015. “More models are saying the same thing. I think that it’s because we are now able to get more realistic models.”
Cutting-edge models predict that El Niño frequency will increase within 2 decades because of climate change, regardless of emissions mitigation efforts.
Now, new research published in Nature Climate Change has used cutting-edge climate models to predict that by 2040, El Niño events will become more frequent because of changes to the climate. These events are already in motion and will happen regardless of short-term emissions mitigation efforts, according to the authors.
“This [finding] is another layer on a growing pile of work that is pointing quite conclusively to ongoing changes to ENSO related to greenhouse gases,” said Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology who was not involved in the new research.
Admiral Chris Barrie will be paid to worry about how seas rising by 1mm a year might affect our supply chains, but not about how making electricity ten times more expensive might destroy manufacturing in Australia.
If we had to actually build our own nuclear submarines will China still be happy to sell us the steel? Will we have an aluminum smelter left in the nation, and how long can we run that on solar panels and batteries? Are 2,000 kilometer long high voltage lines an easy target for hostile forces? Will electric vehicles be easier targets for cyber hackers or EMF weapons? Could dust bombs sabotage 2GW of solar panels? Would paint bombs be worse?
If we managed to build one nuclear submarine by 2040, will it be the most reliable baseload generator left in the national energy market and should we plug it back into the grid so we can build another sub?
Anthony Albanese will ask Australia’s most senior intelligence chief, Andrew Shearer, to personally lead a review of the security threats posed by the climate crisis.
In a document submitted to the UN outlining Australia’s new 2030 emissions target, the Albanese government confirmed it would order “an urgent climate risk assessment of the implications of climate change for national security, which will be an enduring feature of Australia’s climate action”.
The exact scope and terms of reference are currently being drawn up, but the assessment was expected to consider options such as setting up an Office of Climate Threat Intelligence. If created, that office would update the threat assessments on a rolling basis.
Threats will be updated as funds roll in. Imagine if someone was paid to find out if unreliable expensive energy made us an easy target?
Former Australian defence force chief, retired Admiral Chris Barrie… said climate threats and costs would affect Australia in many ways, including disruptions to vital import and export markets and supply chains. He also cited increasing demands on the health system, degraded and lost natural systems, and escalating adaptation needs.
“Globally there will be regional conflicts over shared resources, climate-change enhanced famine, breakdown in social cohesion, forced displacement of populations, and state failure, including in our region,” Barrie said.
These small wins matter. Cancel Culture is about shutting people up — and even if it’s just a dumb joke being cancelled, the danger is that each minor win gives power to self-annointed Thought Police. The Grand Sacred Cows of our culture are created through a thousand irrelevant outrages.
Bill Maher, comedian, savages The Washington Post and Felecia Somnez and half the Millennial Gen:
For the Australians who missed it in our election week:
Nina Jankowicz just quit and the Disinformation Governance Board is dead. It’s the best possible ending to a move that was demented from the start.
Whatever the Department of Homeland Security thought the DGB would do, the board’s ham-handed launch (and very name) could only feed the direst suspicions. The US government has no business determining what’s “disinformation” — certainly not via an Orwellian shadow department, housed within a national security agency.
.svg)
Last month UK Ministers were warned that six million households could enjoy blackouts for dinner this winter. To try to stave off disaster, the UK Business Secretary has already written to the owners of the last three remaining coal fired power plants to ask them to stay running through winter. This is despite them being set to close in September.
Recent Comments