Weekend Unthreaded

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The security threats of Net Zero: One of 36 Stratagems to defeat the enemy

The GWPF have published a provocative piece by Professor Gwythian Prins, which I highly recommend. One chapter in particular captures the fragile moment around which global affairs is orbiting. The West, comfortable and corrupted, is only just starting to become aware of the duplicity and hostile intent of the Chinese Communist Party.

Excerpts from Chapter 3 below.

The Worm in the Rose
Gwythian Prins

War by other means is upon us:

 Part III: The security threats of Net Zero

The Chinese Communist Party’s Fifth Plenum text of October 2020, setting out the strategy to 2035, told the nation for the first time in decades to ‘prepare for war’(备战) – meaning in any and all forms. It is true that the Chinese military build-up since 2000 has been relentless and remarkable. However, as we will see, at present we do not face open war, but instead war by other means.

The West needs to be aware of the 36 Strategems from an Era of War

“To Loot A Burning House”

Xi’s tactics are also informed by The Thirty Six Stratagems from the era of the Warring States, a manuscript which is probably a little older than Sun Tzu’s. However, both emerged from periods of great internal turbulence. The Thirty Six are usually grouped into six chapters, and three – two ‘war winning’ strategies and one ‘enemy dealing’ strategy – are most apposite in framing Xi’s conduct.

The first is kill with a borrowed sword (借 刀殺人); in other words, to use our inventions to attack us.

China took Manufacturing, then Tech and the West gave them away. Now it’s come for biotech… and we gave the CCP “Gain of Function”.

The second is loot a burning house (趁火打劫); to take advantage of an enemy’s misfortune. This metaphor facilitates the principle of ‘ghost attack’ – the perpetration of hostile actions with plausible deniability, such that the attacked party is powerless to retaliate without seeming to be the aggressor. An example would be the current Covid pandemic.

A bioweapon released close to the Lab it came from could be an accident. It’s plausible…

It also encompasses the idea of creating adverse circumstances – setting the house on fire – and pushing the enemy into self-harming behaviour. The third is an ‘enemy dealing’ strategy: hide a knife behind a smile (笑裏 藏刀), the tactic of concealing hostile intent behind apparent co-operation. Conduct over energy and climate policy appears to be a leading arena for this stratagem, as we shall see in detail.

The fifth columnists, the Greens, the university “friends”:

The spear-point for Xi’s ghost attacks is China’s Ministry of State Security United Front Work Department (UFWD): a multiheaded hydra. Xi Jinping has described it as ‘…an important magic weapon for  strengthening the party’s ruling position…

The UFWD’s tactics towards us can also be seen to derive from long-standing Chinese strategies such as the Thirty Six. For example, employing the stratagem let the enemy’s own spy sow discord in the enemy camp (反間計), it has, with considerable success, ‘made friends for China’ within and across the western elite establishment. In the British case, that embraces the worlds of business (notably the 48 Group Club), of politics (green activists have been a particular focus for the UFWD54), and spans academia and universities, notably Cambridge under its current Vice-Chancellor, and Nottingham. Science and science publishing, where a naïve belief in the global community of science can, wittingly or not, be exploited to meet China’s objectives are especially targeted. Winning influential friends – ‘Fifth Columnists’ witting or unwitting – so as to destroy an enemy’s ability to resist is a classic indirect approach, straight from the pages of Sun Tzu, and conforming to the first of the ‘chaos strategies’ of the Thirty Six: ‘Remove the firewood from under the pot’ (釜底抽 薪). In western idiom, it is to draw the fires from the boilers to slow and eventually stop the engines.

Is it a coincidence that oil and gas prices are so high?

During 2020, in quick order, China made three long-term oil and gas agreements, with Iran, Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia.

If it’s a coincidence now, it won’t be in the future…

To hide a knife behind a smile

… China is currently building 250 GW of additional new coal-fired plant, more than currently exists in the entire USA (229 GW), and a 25% increase on current capacity. Alongside other conventional capacity, such as nuclear and gas, this will support a 50% increase in electricity consumption by 2040 (>10,000 TWh, as compared to 7,000 TWh today). Figure 7 shows China’s fuel mix trends, dominated by coal, and with ‘new renewables’ barely visible traces. We may therefore safely deduce that China has no intention of embracing western ‘green’ obsessions.

China's energy mix, graph, coal, gas, hydro.

But has Xi revealed the hostile intent too soon?

With AUKUS formed, the Quad alliance, and nuclear subs on the way for Australia, there are signs the West is waking up (finally).

The new-found resolve of the Anglosphere nations may reinforce the views of those in Peking who have been doubtful of the wisdom of Xi Jinping’s abandonment of the first of the Thirty Six Stratagems (Deceive the heavens to cross the sea), for it is a sign that open hostility has awakened the Five Eyes, as they warned and feared. All officers in the Queen’s navies – RN, RAN, RCN, RNZN – hold Crown Commissions, and her navies are already fully interoperable, and share a professional culture  those of the USA, India and Japan. Xi’s critics in Peking will fear that his aggression has prompted the making (or rather, remaking) of a global navy for the Free World, led by the English speaking peoples. We should not assume that his ascendancy is any more secure than that of previous emperors.

The intent is so obvious when studied under the right lens:

Free World builds towards weaknesses, Communist China builds towards strength

China seeks to deny resources to the Free World

It is simply using our green obsessions to its advantage and against our interests. In the terms of the Thirty Six, Peking intends to loot a burning house: it will encourage its competitors (us) to use thermodynamically inferior fuels in order to build in economic weakness, and will assist us in compromising our transport and electricity infrastructures. It will ignore biomass, tidal, geothermal and hydro as strategically insignificant. Nor will it involve itself in hydrogen, recognising that both the current ‘green’ and ‘blue’ routes to its production, as explained earlier, are unviable economically. But it will happily continue to manufacture wind power components and solar panels for us, and it will use uncompetitive market practices to displace western (and Japanese) competitors, and so dominate the markets for these items. In this way, China will weaken our manufacturing bases, while indulging our ‘green’ and ‘Net Zero’ obsessions and it will thus control these markets – and hence us – for so long as we allow it to do so.

There is much to be pondered, and messages to share from The Worm in The Rose, published by Net Zero Watch. It can be downloaded here.

Hat tips to Jim Simpson, Paul Miskelly. Helen D.

GWPF ran a webinar on Tuesday: COP26 – What are China’s real intentions?

Professor Gwythian Prins is Research Professor Emeritus at the LSE and a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

9.9 out of 10 based on 80 ratings

Conservatives commit to hiding all their best election slogans: Net Zero mocking of witchdoctor policies

By Joanne Nova

Silencing Conservatives.

The Liberals doing their best to silence themselves.

Setting symbolic “targets” is not just a PR victory, and “jobs for the Green team” but a big blanket of silence conservatives stuck on themselves. By setting a public target, even if there is zero chance of it reducing CO2, being legislated, or reducing world temperatures by one thousandth of a degree, the most important win for the Green Blob is how it stops conservatives from pointing out the stupid flaws of the Carbonistas. By default it silences half the political machine in Australia and stops voters from getting a choice at the ballot box.  Let’s all vote for One Party Democracy comrades!

This announcement carefully deprives the Liberals and National Parties of a key weapon in the up-coming-election, making sure they can’t win another 90 seat majority like Tony Abbott did without being able to criticize the Labor policies with killer one-liners.

They can’t mock the delusions they are aiming for themselves.

Changing Global Weather isn’t free you know. But wait… now it is!

The Labor Party think they can use windmills to stop the storms, but Liberals do too. The sensible half can’t accuse the Labor party of having delusional fantasies of trying to control the weather because there is no sensible half. They can’t say the Climate Models are failing, the predictions are junk, or that Australia has always had fires, floods and droughts and heatwaves all through our history.

They also can’t say that great new technology will fund itself because it’s useful, efficient and competitive. Remember how the government had to put in a Mobile Phone Target in 1992 so everyone would give up their landlines? Yeah, me neither. Only junk new tech needs ongoing forced subsidies, symbolic fantasy targets and mandates.

It’s a small consolation that the Morrison Government won’t legislate the “Net Zero” fantasy, but possibly only because they couldn’t get that grandiose nonsense through the House. So a tiny sliver of democracy remains, thanks to the fear felt by Liberal and National members who may lose their seats to One Nation, United Australia Party and Katter.

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Thursday Open Thread

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We’ll spend $120 b because a foreign unaccountable committee says so, but we won’t spend 0.1% of that checking their science

By Joanne Nova

Scott Morrison will spend $120 billion of our money on technology  because it might solve a problem that a foreign unelected, unaudited committee says we need to solve. So we’ll spent $120 billion on a plan to change the weather on Planet Earth. But we won’t spend one thousandth of that to independently check what the committee says. Almost all the climate scientists who support the IPCC decision are ones whose income increases if they find a crisis.

All the people finding flaws are volunteers, or about-to-be volunteers involuntarily.

Scott Morrison’s $120bn new-tech plunge to hit net zero

The Australian

Scott Morrison has unveiled a “middle path” for Australia to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 which promises dramatic carbon reductions across the electricity and transport sectors and a massive investment of up to $120bn for emerging technologies to help achieve the Glasgow target.

The Prime Minister on Tuesday announced the government’s 126-page plan, promising it would not cause massive job losses and disruption to the regions and that Australians would be better off by $2000 on average by 2050 compared to taking no action.

Make no mistake, no Australian scientist is paid by the government to find holes or errors in the IPCC report

No university gets funding that depends on their success in making better climate predictions with space weather or solar factors and without CO2. No government funded research aims to find out if natural forces are more important than carbon dioxide. No team is offered two week foreign junkets 26 years in a row if they show that CO2 is largely beneficial and irrelevant and the IPCC is a one-sided propaganda tool of President Xi.

The ABC and the Nobel Prize committee are not interviewing people who question the IPCC’s conclusions unless they look like freaks with links to the Klan.

If a hapless researcher finds potential fraud in environmental science, they’re more likely to end up in the High Court themselves than on the 7:30 Report. Ask Peter Ridd whether he got rewarded for finding flaws in the same kind of “reef science” that the IPCC declares is expert research.

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Would Australia be Net Zero now if China wasn’t offering to send us nuclear missiles express?

Yet again Australians vote for something and get the opposite. Toss the idea out of the airlock that this has anything to do with science, trees or weird weather. In a world of corruption and superpowers there are bigger forces at work.

As I said a week ago —the Net Zero pledge was apparently tit-for-tat for nuclear submarines. We get their subs; they get our promise to cripple-our-grid. Which sounds bizarrely unlikely, as if we needed more solar panels to fry the foreign frigates, or more windmills to foil their radar. As if, lord help us, a 0.0001 degree cooler climate will make us harder to invade? Sure. No one ever went to war with a solar powered tank. (Though NATO is thinking about it.)

Read Scott Morrison’s freaky words again. Join the dots. He told the party room that “climate change action had become a key pillar of the western alliance” which means AUKUS (or Australia-UK-US for foreign readers), and that “…there were economic and security imperatives in transitioning to a carbon neutral future.” He also said we need the western alliancenow more than ever”.  In the same flavour, just today we hear suddenly that taxpayers will spend $1.8b to buy up a South Pacific telco so the Chinese don’t get it first. The Quickening is here.

There is no mistaking that our PM came back from the US with the AUKUS deal and now suddenly, magically, and nonsensically we have to sabotage our grid in order to defend ourselves. So ponder that we wouldn’t have Net Zero if Donald Trump was still the US President, and we wouldn’t have Net Zero if China wasn’t targeting us aggressively with trade sanctions for daring to ask where the virus came from.

Everything looks different under the Sino red glare

China, emeishan lion statue.

Image by Chris Feser

There is bullying going on by some very big fish. Obviously Boris and Biden leaned on Scott Morrison. But who leaned on them? The list is long — China benefits if we cripple our industrial energy base, raise costs, are less competitive and “demand manage” factory blackouts and random time-off for smelters. A sick grid makes a sick competitor.

How much leverage does Xi have over Joe Biden. Just say Hunter. Or Swalwell or Mitch, or 2 million communists.

“Climate change is a wake-up call, says Xi Jinping” right on cue yesterday. He’s just worried about the pygmy possum, right? 

But there are so many other groups with their hand in this pot too. The crisis-scientists need “the crisis”, the UN needs a reason to be, the Bankers want their new Fiat Currency with billion dollar profits, and the EU wants others to wreck their grids so their own doesn’t look so bad. Bureaucrats need bureaucracies, and teenagers need a spirit to guide them and a mission that makes sense, but all they can find is Greta. And Big Business wants easy money from Big Bankers, and Big Government. (Customers are such a fickle demanding group.) Why target customers, when you can schmooze with Big Money and be treated like a rock-star by the media, — not to mention any names Andrew Twiggy Forrest.

Glasgow was looking like another complete flop as India, China, Brazil and Russia stay away. The political players needed to find a soft target to be leaned on to keep the PR moment going and apparently Australia was it. We’re the fourth biggest fossil fuel exporter in the world, but we’re a lot easier to push around that the three ahead of us.

As Terry McCrann says — it’s a unilateral energy disarmament

We’re breaking up our energy weapons while our adversaries are building theirs up.

“Our energy suicide note now on steroids

The Australian

… it is hard to avoid the comparison with the 1930s. That what almost the entirety of the world has embarked on is the energy equivalent of that decade’s appeasement.

Indeed, worse than appeasement: across the developed world, it’s unilateral energy disarmament in the face of the 2020s version of Hitler’s Germany – President Xi’s China. Back then, the political class turned a blind eye to Germany’s re-arming; now the far more numerous – and believe me, greater numbers do not spell greater cognisance – political class turns a similar blind eye to China’s energy re-arming.

This is a China which not only already has the world’s biggest ‘fossil fuel armoury’, so to speak – emitting close to 30 per cent of all global CO2 emissions. But a China which is intent on building its ‘fossil fuel armoury’ ever bigger; is embarked on building, according to Global Coal Plant Tracker’s mid-year analysis, a further 88GW of coal-fired power.

Not planning, not ‘thinking about’, but building, right now – more than three times the entire generation capacity of Australia’s brown and black coal fired power stations.

The hope is that the Nationals have done a deal involving nuclear power — for their sake as well as ours. If they don’t have a serious win up their sleeve from craven caving on “Net Zero” they will be toast at the next election.

It’s Defcon 1 time again for conservative Australians.

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It’s time Morrison and Hunt stopped Australians dying by denying them early treatment to Covid

Ultimately the Australian Government is responsible for the deaths of Australians, and the deaths of their businesses and jobs, due to the banning of a safe, cheap early treatment for Covid.

Scott Morrison, Prime Minister of Australia

Scott Morrison

The Prime Minister and the Minister of Health, could change this. But Scott Morrison and Greg Hunt hide behind The TGA as if an unelected, unaudited committee really rules Australia.

Ivermectin has not just saved lives, but virtually eliminated Covid-19 from  Uttar Pradesh, and Indonesia.  Some 3.8 billion doses of what’s been called a “wonder drug” have been used around the world. This is a drug is so safe we have fed it to school children in Canberra.
In the last three months Indonesian doctors used ivermectin to cut Covid cases by 98% but at the same time Australia banned ivermectin and relied on vaccination and oppressive lockdowns yet grew cases 500%. If countries larger, poorer and more densely populated can use Ivermectin why can’t Australian doctors prescribe it? Do we give Australian doctors the best education in the world so that they are nothing but robots controlled by an unaccountable committee, or will we allow Doctors to provide the best treatment they believe their patients need?
In 30 Random Controlled Trials, ivermectin prevented 84% of infections. In early treatment it helped 63% of people.  Instead of 160,000 cases in Australia, with widespread ivermectin use we could have reduced that just 25,000 and stopped the lockdowns after weeks instead of months.
Australia has no early treatment, we are abandoning people to a virus that almost certainly leaked from a Chinese laboratory.  The TGA did not even ban Ivermectin because Australians with prescriptions might be hurt by it, they banned a safe drug because “people might not get vaxed”. Are Australian lives the first concern of Morrison and Hunt, or are the profits of Big Pharmaceutical companies more important? Judge them by their actions.
Indonesia banned ivermectin then relented when a few key politicians championed the cause. Australia can do that too.

Sign the Petition and spread the word. Australians would be appalled if they knew.

Petition Reason

On 11th September 2021 the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) took the unprecedented step of effectively banning the prescribing of ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19 infection in Australia. Contrary to ill-informed media reporting, ivermectin is an important drug which has been used clinically worldwide for several decades, it is on the WHO list of Essential Drugs and has a wide margin of safety compared to most other drugs (including over the counter medications). This petition objects in the strongest possible terms to the banning of ivermectin prescribing for COVID-19 for the following reasons: (1) The banning of ivermectin prescribing ignores the wealth of published clinical trial safety and efficacy evidence in the medical literature supporting the use of ivermectin for the management of COVID-19; (2) The banning of ivermectin prescribing removes a potentially valuable early treatment option for symptomatic COVID-19-infected individuals, in contrast to current health policy of observing such individuals without active treatment until they either get better or worse (and are possibly hospitalized); (3) The banning of ivermectin prescribing for COVID-19 with the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship and the freedom of Australians to choose their own health solutions based on their doctor’s advice.

We therefore ask the House to ensure the immediate repeal of the TGA statement on Ivermectin, and to provide a firm assurance to the Australian people that overreach of this kind by a Federal Government agency will never again limit access to safe treatments in a non-consultative and unilateral manner.

Sign the Petition

Closing date for signatures:27 October 2021 11:59 PM (AEST) (3 days left)

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The wonder drug that disappeared

My ongoing summary of Ivermectin

Keep reading  →

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Monday Open Thread

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Australia is the Greatest Global Carbon Patsy– Is Scott Morrison the worst negotiator on Earth?

What’s the definition of The Greatest Global Pushover in the world?  How about the nation that is often the worlds top exporter of coal and fifth biggest for gas, with the biggest distances, the lowest population density, fastest population growth, in a land where electricity prices have doubled, but which has already cut emissions by a staggering 46% each while adding more renewable energy per capita than any nation on Earth. Yet we worry about being “left behind” or called a pariah?

To double the Patsy-points, we’re an agricultural nation spending billions reducing emissions of a plant fertilizer that boosts yields and crops and makes plants more drought tolerant.  Droughts aren’t getting worse (the Professors agree). Our worst drought was 100 years ago, or more likely 1,000. The worst fires were 4000 years ago. We reached 50 degrees Celsius in most states of Australia in the 1800s. Our rainfall trend is up. Our sea levels have dropped by two meters in the last 5,000 years, and the Great Barrier Reef survived just fine. The truth is that carbon is a net benefit, we’re a high energy, long distance, rapidly growing remote nation that’s already done far too much.

The hard numbers: Australian emissions have been cut 46% per capita, while the population grew 50% larger and the GDP grew 135%.

Scott Morrison might be the worst negotiator on Earth. He failed to explain our achievements, to defend Australian workers, farmers and households and the voters who voted for him, to reach a deal that’s remotely fair. Teenage girls are gaslighting him. Bullies who serve bankers, greens and China pretend that Australians past carbon dioxide reductions don’t count because we achieved them by Land Use and Forestry. Lordy — Australians grew trees.  The travesty! It only shows that the carbon game has nothing to do with the environment and nothing to do with carbon dioxide either. Do megatons of CO2 matter or don’t they?

Since 1990 — Every Australian has cut CO2 emissions by 46%

Australian emissions per capita. CO2, Graph. 2021.

Emissions per capita (grey line) are exceptional, but emissions per GDP dollar (orange line) are even better. Blakers, A., Stocks, M., and Lu, B. (2019) Australia: the renewable energy superstar, APO Analysis and Policy Observatory,  ANU, [PDF]

Australia installs more renewables than anywhere else per capita

Morrison and co are not even using the Blakers et al graph below.  In 2018 and 2019 Australians were installing renewable energy, faster than any place on Earth. Why don’t Australians know this?

Per capita, Australia (all shades of red) blitzed the field for installing renewables

Australia is more dependent on mining and resources than most other developed nations:

Fully fifty percent of Australian exports are from mining. These are the most energy intensive exports on Earth, and the world needs these resources. Someone has to dig them up somewhere around the world, yet Australians’ get lumbered with all the emissions accrued in getting these minerals out of the ground? We’ve shifted some of our Aluminium smelters overseas, and to what end? Their smelters are less efficient, carbon emissions have increased, Australian jobs and profits have gone. Who benefits from the rigged carbon shell game? Our competitors. 

Australia is not falling behind even by the normal EU-biased way of accounting

The idea that Australia lags behind is a nonsense-stick to beat good people with.  The usual way of comparing emissions reductions is per country, not per capita. This suits the EU. Even so Australia has set a similar target compared to everywhere else, which only goes to show how bad our negotiators were. A long time ago, in the first Kyoto agreement John Howard’s team negotiated an 8% increase in emissions for Australia which made some allowance for our rapidly growing population, distances, and energy dependent export industries.  Since then, Australian politicians have only managed to weekly, meekly, “join the pack” at our great disadvantage, and at the same time get harangued for not doing even more.

National emissions targets, Australia, USA, China, Canada, EU, Japan, Korea.

Australians have cut emissions by 46% each, added more renewables per capita than anywhere on Earth, all without Net Zero.

The net cost of Net Zero includes all the glorious subsidies, the extra transmission lines, the rising FCAS bill, the blackouts, the emergency demand management, the damage from surging voltages, the wasted capital expenditure, the squads of flying diesels, synchronous condensors, and the burden that unreliable energy dumps on the whole grid. In the US windpower makes gas power $30/MWh more expensive,  — the intermittent generators are vandals on the system, destroying productivity and profits of the good generators.

Coal gave us 30 years of falling prices, and renewables wiped all those gains out.

Keep reading  →

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Who loves coal? One week to Glasgow and China is suddenly digging up record amounts of coal

So much for the Clean Green Chinese Machine

Green paint for Chairman Mao

Green paint for Chairman Mao. ...by Daderot 

China is holding a busted flush in the Global Green Poker game. In late summer, local bureaucrats in two-thirds of China’s provinces started enforcing power-saving measures on companies, but after four weeks of rolling blackouts the middle kingdom is so desperate for coal it can’t keep pretending to be Green.  The Rust Belt factories were grinding down, homes were even losing power, winter is knocking at the door and the only thing with fuel in China were the prices.  It’s the worst energy crisis in a decade, and there’s no holding out for another three weeks to fool the rest of the world into thinking it cares about “carbon”.

Instead a national communist committee called the China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) has apparently ordered mines to go all out — and they are. The word is that China is now digging up nearly 12 million tons of coal each and every day. If they keep this up it will be a “One Billion Ton” quarter, and potentially nearly a 4-billion-ton year. That’s about 8 times Australias entire annual production and about six times the US’s.

It could have happened to a nicer government:

China’s desperate race to resolve its energy crisis

Japan Times:

“China could see its worst winter power shortage since 2010,” said Citigroup analyst Tracy Liao. “This would increase stagflation risks and growth pressure on the Chinese and the global economy over the coming winter, push energy prices higher and propel large-scale curtailments in commodity downstream sectors.”

It’s hard to overstate the squeeze on supply. Senior managers from State Power Investment Corp., one of the country’s largest power firms, and representatives from southern Guizhou province met late last month with key coal supplier China Shenhua Energy Co. A request for 3 million tons of the fuel ended with an agreement for only an additional 30,000 tons. The miner simply couldn’t guarantee production would rise enough to offer more.

The lurch to burn more coal comes despite President Xi Jinping’s commitment to reduce China’s consumption of the most-polluting fossil fuel from 2026. The nation was the only major polluter to record higher emissions in 2020 than a year earlier, and that annual volume is expected to rise again. It’s an awkward reality with global climate talks scheduled to open in the coming days.

Things are so bad China is buying electricity from North Korea, Russia, Myanmar in bid to ease power crisis

China is paying a price for smiting Australia through its  coal exports.

 China Launches ‘All-Out’ Coal Production Campaign

Breitbart

… Indonesia is now China’s biggest overseas coal supplier and last months’ shipments hit a record of 21 million tonnes. Indonesia’s coal is lower-grade and worse for the environment to boot.

China turned to Indonesia after coal from Australia was banned last year during Beijing’s ugly coronavirus feud with Canberra. China planned to make up for the shortfall by extracting more coal from Mongolia, but the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic hammered the Mongolian coal industry, leaving frustrated delivery drivers stranded in refugee camps without pay.

One enterprising Australian supplier, Coronado Global Resources Inc, got around the ban by selling coal from its mines in the United States to China. The Chinese are hungry enough for coal to play along.

h/t Scott of the Pacific

Imagine if it gets cold suddenly?

Real hockeysticks….

Prices gas,coal, energy crisis. Graph.

Imagine if it gets cold suddenly?

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Weekend Unthreaded

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Indonesia cut Covid by 98% with Ivermectin while Australia grew cases 500% with Lock-n-Vax

h/t To David Archibald

When we last looked at Indonesia their massive wave in Covid cases had just peaked after ivermectin was approved again on July 15th. Since then the cases have dropped from 50,000 a day to about 900. On a per capita basis today Indonesia is managing Covid about ten times better than Australia. Think about that.

Remember the reason for the Indonesian surge. In June, they had a controlled rolling caseload of 5,000 a day. It was not rising thanks to a philanthropist called Haryoseno who had been arranging for ivermectin supplies at low cost to help people. But in a fit of modern-medicine, in line with the deadly WHO recommendations,  the Indonesian government banned ivermectin on June 12th. Cases took off. Mayhem ensued.  And about 90,000 people died in the following surge.

By early July the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin was hot property in Indonesia, even if it was banned. A number of high-ranking politicians championed it, and people were flocking to buy it.

 Indonesians have ignored health warnings to stock up on a “miracle cure” for COVID-19 backed by leading politicians and social media influencers, as an out-of-control virus surge sweeps the country.”

—  July 8th, NDTV

By  July 15th the Indonesian government relented, and BPOM approved Ivermectin as Covid-19 Therapeutic Drug. By July 18th new daily cases peaked across Indonesia and now they are lower than they were before.  During the surge, at least two million Indonesians were infected.

Perhaps Governments shouldn’t run around banning a wonder drug so safe that researchers in Australia feed it to small children to kill head lice.

Indonesia, cases of Covid, 2021, ivermectin treatment.

All bell curves look the same, but some are bigger than others. Timing is everything.  OWID

 …

Google Trends show Indonesians were searching for ivermectin in early July. The average Indonesian apparently knows more about treating Covid than our Minister of Health. More even than our Chief Medical Officer.

Google Trends, Indonesia, Ivermectin

There was one popular search in Indonesia as cases rocketed.

Greg Hunt could have managed the Covid debacle so much better if he’d just phoned up a pharmacist in Bali. 

Compare the Rich-mans Vax plan

Australia, on the other hand, decided to vaccinate 15 million people or 70% of the entire population and still has twice as many cases as Indonesia does — even though Indonesia has ten times as many people and only on third of the government revenue.

The Australian TGA committee banned ivermectin on Sept 11th, by the way, possibly to make sure we didn’t accidentally eliminate Covid, or Pfizer’s third quarter profits.  Who can tell?

That lockdown-and-vax plan and the roadmap to freedom doesn’t seem to be working too well.  In Australia billions of dollars were burnt at the stake, not to mention the health risks of using experimental prophylactics, while Indonesia reduced Covid cases by 98% for about point-one percent of the cost and the main side effects were the deaths of worms, lice and bed bugs.

If Gladys had just dished out the Ivermectin — Uttar Pradesh style — on July 5th, the outbreak would have been over in a few weeks.

Australia, Covid surge in 2021.

Australia  vaccinated 70% of the population and locked down its two largest states to control Covid and still hasn’t succeeded.   Source: OWID

Since July 18th when Indonesia cases peaked, Australian cases have grown from 31,000 to 150,000.

The only thing more scary than the Ministry of Health’s incompetence is that politicians and philanthropists in the third world have more freedom than Australian ones do. The Indonesian media is more worth watching than the Australian ABC.

At this point people are still dying who could be saved.

As David Archibald says “It means that Australia could end its covid problem anytime it wanted to at hardly any expense at all. Our government would be aware of what the Indonesians have achieved. It also means that any covid deaths from here on are state-sanctioned murder. “

 

 

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The wonder drug that disappeared

My summary of Ivermectin

Keep reading  →

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Anti Forced-Vaccine protest in Perth WA Friday 11am

Friday 11am, Anti Mandatory Vaccination Protest

Parliament House Western Australia 

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Western Australia, WA. Map.Coercion is not consent. 60% of the state is double vaccinated, and the deadline to comply with these new appalling rules announced yesterday will be Jan 31, 2022.  People who don’t obey will be fined an extraordinary $20,000 and their employers $100,000. This effectively gives people a “choice” (not) of Jab or Job and thus, I assume, legally they won’t be able to sue for wrongful dismissal. They will have to quit or get injected. New rules will prohibit the unvaccinated from travelling interstate, even though there are antivirals, and monoclonal antibodies that would make travel safer and be much more effective against transmission of SARS-2 than the current first generation leaky-vaccinations which will probably bring in the virus on the first week flights are allowed with no quarantine. (UPDATE: McGowan said it was an error that this was put on the website, but implies “it’s coming”).

There is Zero Covid in WA, the freedom has been extraordinary and fantastic. There are no chicomm bioweapons, no masks, no distancing, pubs are packed, we can dance and sing and visit our old folks, and there has only been a tiny 12 days of lockdowns in the last 15 months, for which we feel incredibly lucky and very grateful. We wish all our friends could live like this too — like Covid doesn’t exist. The lack of the virus, though, probably means vaccination rates have slowed and hence these new draconian rules are seen as the only way to raise the rates further. The ABC has a story with a headline saying “Around Five Percent” won’t get vaxxed, but the URL and text tells us the real number is 15%. More lies from the ABC.

Apparently that success has to end, not because the voters want that, because they don’t, but because Gladys infected the nation and other corporates, like Qantas, and other state and Federal governments are clamouring to open WA, and presumably NT, SA, QLD and Tasmanian borders too.

Most West Australians are happy to keep the border closed for a bit longer to see how well the experiments work out in other states. Recent opinion polls of West Australians showed that 67% felt States with no virus should be allowed to stay closed as long as they think is necessary. Only 1 in 6 felt that the state should open its border when the rest of the nation reached 80% vaccinated.

Does democracy mean anything anymore?

If these draconian rules start in WA they will surely spread to other states.

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*Best wishes to long suffering Victorians who will finally exit lockdown tonight. 

*Mandatory vaccination to be introduced for most WA workers, Mark McGowan says

Vaccination will become mandatory across a range of new industries covering about 75 per cent of WA’s workforce, with employers and employees facing fines if they do not comply.

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Thursday Open Thread

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Climate purity alarm goes ding! 99% of scientists “believe” because the others got sacked

The new Climate Consensus is just a junk keyword survey.

Climate change is a branch of science that’s immature, complex, and has error bars a hundred miles wide. If 99% of  scientists say the same thing, it’s a cult, not a science. The climate is not man-made but the irrelevant consensus surely is.

By studying words in industry publications, Mark Lynas thinks he’s discovered a scientific truth. Instead he has just shown that skeptics get purged from peer review. It’s official now, 99% of peer reviewed articles have to say they believe in order to get published.

He thought he was doing climate science but instead he studied sociology. If Mark Lynas proved anything it’s that he doesn’t know what science is, and only unskeptical papers pass peer review. It’s a sad sad statement about the state of the scientific-industry.

Hypothetically, if we cared at all  about  unscientific opinion-polling of climate scientists, we’d just opinion-poll them. He could run up a survey and email it out. It’d still be a fallacy, but at least it would tell us what scientists thought. Instead, Mark Lynas and co have taken a long roundabout route to poll them by proxy.  It’s the oddly hard-work-way to get an answer to a profoundly unscientific question that shouldn’t be asked in the first place. Science is not a democracy. No one votes for the Laws of Physics. They just are, and always were, whether or not the government funded the grant, the scientist wrote that up in an abstract, and some editor approved.

Fifty shades of nonsense

So Lynas et al, took 88,125 papers and randomly picked 3,000 of them, because they didn’t know enough climate science to pick out the 100 papers that matter instead. Having picked out 3,000 random papers they hunted for keywords in the abstracts to “find” skeptical papers. But there are human hands all over this gonzo chain of cause and effect. In the glorious age of Climate Witchcraft good scientists want to hide their opinions because they don’t want to be excommunicated, hounded, ignored, and never given a government grant again. Who wants a RICO? And if a scientist hid their skepticism in subclauses, tables, graphs or the 90% of the paper that isn’t the abstract, the dumb-word finder isn’t going to find them. Indeed the authors could hide their opinions just with novel keywords and the computer would miss that too.

So if Governments only gave grants to find a crisis, they’d create a market for crisis science and crisis journals. And if counter opinions were sacked, exiled, mocked and ignored, and their papers were delayed, rejected, or just edited to bury awkward results, how exactly would a keyword survey of their abstracts prove anything about upper tropospheric moist adiabatic lapse rates? At best, it’s only telling us about moist bureaucratic grant rates.

Most of these papers were not even about “attribution” or cause and effect, they were about the impacts of climate change which means the scientists who wonder if future spotted froglets will sit on smaller lilypads, or eat more striped dragonflys in 2060.  These are Pollenologists who study whether flowers will bloom earlier, or petals will fall off faster in a warmer world. These are biologists and psychologists who never got past first year physics and who never looked under the bonnet of a climate model.

The researchers know that but insist that the opinion of Frog psychologists tells us something about radiative physics on the third rock from the sun because, yeah, it “Seems unlikely” that biologists given golden gravy would still publish on spotted frogs if they were skeptical of models they never looked at.

For example, a majority of the papers we categorized as being about ‘impacts’ of climate change did not state a position on whether the phenomenon they were studying— the changing climate—was human-caused. It seems highly unlikely that if researchers felt sceptical about the reality of ACC they would publish numerous studies of its impacts without ever raising the question of attribution. In other words, given that most 4a (‘no position’) ratings do not either explicitly or implicitly differ from the consensus view of GHG emissions as the principal driver of climate change it does not follow in our view that these analyses should be a priori excluded from the consensus.

What seems highly unlikely is the idea that skeptical scientists would still want to work at most universities where they will get treated like dirt.

And what skeptical scientist would want to publish in IOP Science when it publishes junk like this?

Lynas is just adopting the role of the media in the Circle of Science (below). His role is to use a mountain of papers that teach us nothing-much about the real world.  Through a magical process of crystal word hunting he can find the secret signal showing that CO2 controls the climate.

The Circle of Science, funding, media, papers, role, taxpayers.

The Circle of Science. The Government pays money to produce the papers it wants and the media uses the paper to scare more money out of the public.

If climate scientists knew how the climate worked they wouldn’t need junk keyword surveys, they’d just predict the climate instead. We’d all know they knew what they were talking about because they wouldn’t keep making mistakes like telling us the Antarctic would warm twice as fast as the equator, that the hot spot existed, that storms would get worse, that the pause wasn’t real, the snow wouldn’t fall, and the droughts wouldn’t end.

And they wouldn’t keep cooling the past, deleting their emails, their data and their prophecies of doom.

h/t Raven, Simon.

GRRREFERENCE

Lynas et al (2021) Greater than 99% consensus on human caused climate change in the peer-reviewed scientific literature,  Environ. Res. Lett. 16 114005. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2966/pdf

 

 

 

 

 

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Too poor to cut coal use but rich enough to launch hypersonic weapons?

Were those hypersonic missiles carbon neutral?

Spot the odd one out: China has half of the worlds coal power fleet and the fastest growing nuclear power in the world. It is the world’s major manufacturing power, and has been for 11 years. It put a rover on Mars, has astronauts in its own space station (it’s third) and has flown to the far side of the moon.

But it’s a developing country and while all its largest competitors are giving up their cheapest electricity source, China isn’t even turning up in Glasgow and hardly anyone really cares.

China emissions exceed all developed nations combined.

“The country is currently running 1,058 coal plants”

China says that missile was just a spacecraft:

Now China also has surprising weapons.

China tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic weapon two months ago, making strides with the technology that surprised and alarmed U.S. officials, according to a media report.

In August, China launched a Long March rocket topped with a hypersonic glide vehicle, which ended up missing its target by just 24 miles (39 kilometers) or so, The Financial Times reported on Sunday (Oct. 17).

The newspaper cited five unnamed people familiar with the launch, two of whom “said the test showed that China had made astounding progress on hypersonic weapons and was far more advanced than U.S. officials realized.”

If someone had tried to set up a global scheme to cripple The West while helping China — it would have looked like the UNFCCC. China may not have started this off, and the West may be capable of suicidal self sabotage,  but the CCP would be crazy if they weren’t funding green groups.

Or even Green Parties:

Greens Pledge to Cancel AUKUS, Cut Australian Defence Spending Amid China Tensions

The Australian Greens have pledged to push for sweeping changes to the Australian Defence Force if they hold the balance of power at the next election, including cuts to defence spending and cancellation of the AUKUS alliance.

What more could President Xi want? Adversaries with a weaker industrial base and a weaker military.

The Greens are the CCP’s best friends.

China is rehearsing an invasion of Taiwan, and the West is planning to use our electricity plants to hold back the oceans.

China is not even trying to reduce carbon emissions:

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Tuesday Open Thread

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Australians voted for “No Carbon Tax” but may get Net Zero deal anyhow. Thank China, and US Voters (who probably didn’t vote for it either)

Hello Nuclear Subs means Hello Net Zero Targets?

Nuclear Submarine, HMS Ambush, Nuclear Submarine

HMS Ambush

As I suspected, the whole Net Zero witchcraft push is being driven by our defense partners, and has nothing much to do with Australian voters. That explains why the government that won The Climate Election with a skeptical stance are now pushing blindly for “Net Zero targets”. It also explains why the public debate has shifted since the AUKUS deal just in time for Glasgow and has no content, apart from the insistence that we don’t want to be “left behind” in some global fashion race to wreck our electricity infrastructure faster than everyone else.  Kudos to The Nationals who are still trying to respond to both The Voters, and the Science. Send them your support.

With this admission from inside Cabinet, we see that the AUKUS sub deal was probably quietly loaded with a climate deal too. If you want our subs, and our protection, you need to obey the carbon cult. Translated —  “the Western Alliance” means nuclear subs from the US and UK. The veil is pulled back on the illusion of Democracy.

So now it’s “Build solar farms, and windmills, sign up for carbon credits or the US and UK won’t defend you?”

Scott Morrison’s national security argument for net zero

by Greg Brown, The Australian

Scott Morrison told Liberal MPs that climate change action had become a key pillar of the western alliance as he declared his intention to adopt both a plan and a formal target to reach net zero emissions by 2050.

So the reason we may get “Net Zero Targets” and more expensive and unreliable electricity is because China is belligerently threatening us, and because the US Election was done with mass mail in votes, no security, no ID, and electronic voting machines that were hooked up to the internet.

carbon credits

Mr Morrison told MPs the plan included a “nationally determined commitment” net zero by 2050, declaring there were economic and security imperatives in transitioning to a carbon neutral future.

He said Australia needed to rely on the western alliance “now more than ever” and a net zero commitment was important for Australia’s standing in the international community.

Sources said Mr Morrison told Liberal MPs they needed to be aware Australia would be “drawing down on a lot of historical capital” if the government did not make the commitment to net-zero.

So we are being bullied into it by UK and US forces, but perhaps they are being bullied too? After all,  Joe Biden was “the Big Guy” in China CCP dealings. Perhaps that matters?

Who benefits? Follow the money — ultimately this serves China and Big Bankers: 

Our weakened industrial might serves China, but the fake currencies serve Big Bankers, and big unaccountable government bodies (like the UN) serve both:

Liberal MPs were left with the impression the government would expand the trading of international carbon credits, with Mr Morrison and Mr Taylor saying the system would be used by Pacific nations.

“They said if we don’t buy (carbon credits from Pacific nations), if we don’t draw them into our ecosystem so to speak, then other nations will buy them and they will get dragged into their sphere of influence,” a Liberal MP said, who believed the “other nations” referred to China.

We can speculate — the real powerbrokers here may be the CCP and the Big Bankers.

Big Money, Stratospheric spending.We’ve known for years now that the biggest lobbyists for “carbon markets” were the giant financial houses, as I have reported since 2008, the most committed fans of international carbon markets are  caring green groups like Deutsche Bank, Bank of America, HSBC, JP Morgan, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs . They’re the ones that benefit from a new fiat currency based on government rules and created from thin air —  the brokers of an international currency profit from every deal, no matter who buys or who sells, and no matter what the price is, as long as “We the People” are forced to buy these credits.

The Carbon Market is forecast to be the largest single commodity market in the world — bigger than oil, gas and gold. And it’s a market that has no connection to reality, no natural limits, and it can be used to favour compliant industries and companies with the right “tailored” loop-holes. If you annoy your rulers, they will arrange for your carbon punishment.

And the people of those little Pacific Nations would rather we just gave them foreign aid direct. But if the money is funnelled through the UN, it makes the UN stronger, and if the CCP are allowed to keep using the UN as their lap dog (as they did with the WHO ensuring the spread of Covid) presumably that’s a good thing for the CCP too. We buy useless windmills for the islands which quickly fail, while the CCP funds coal fired plants and infrastructure that is worth something and will last for years.

We are sacrificing our electricity grids and President Xi is here to help us.

China, dragon flag.

So we, as skeptics, have two choices — one is to support every last democratically elected representative and to protest, protest, protest! If there were giant marches in the streets it gives Scott Morrison more ammunition to take to Boris and Biden and point out how hard it is for Australia to comply. We stopped the trainwreck in 2009 with a mass email campaign in the weeks after ClimateGate and before Copenhagen.

The other choice in the New Corrupt Order is to do what every other nation is, mostly pandering to symbolic targets while increasing their coal use. We could copy China which has put brakes on wind and solar subsidies,  is going nuclear and in a massive wayChina only ever agrees to make unenforceable long term commitments with no consequences. Nukes cost more than coal, but if we have to go “Net Zero” at least with uranium we aren’t adopting more of what surely IS a national security risk — more unreliable, grid destroying wind and solar “farms”.

Some people wondered why I viewed the US election as more important than our Australian one, but this admission from Scott Morrison shows exactly why.  The US election controls Australian policy too. 

This is a harsh lesson that we should always have been able to defend ourselves. Without a good defense force, Scott Morrison had to sell our soul to the team with bigger guns, more boats and bombs.

This post marks the coming together of so many threads that I’ve been writing on for thirteen years. Here are some of those posts:

All those caring Bankers want you trade Carbon. They just want to save the world right?

Carbon credits are just another “fiat” currency that make the rich richer: 

Big Governments get bigger when they have to control the weather too: 

The renewables industry is 100% dependent on the myth that “carbon” matters:

China is not even trying to reduce carbon emissions:

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