|
|
By Jo Nova
Does the planet matter or doesn’t it?
Today the headlines read “As the world sizzles, China says it will deal with climate its own way“, as if it made sense that the planet could be burning up and the largest emitter was clearly steaming ahead anyway. But no one got too upset in the Washington Post, or anywhere else either.
From a carbon-believer’s point of view this should be the main game, the big crisis, the drama to launch a thousand protests and fund-raisers. But there are no encampments outside the Chinese embassies, no one is calling for boycotts on Chinese goods “until they act”, and no people are gluing themselves to wharves to stop “the boats of doom” loading and unloading.
China’s intentions are pretty clear:
China’s output of carbon dioxide is set to reach a new record high in 2023. It grew 4 percent in the first quarter this year alone.
Apparently China is committed to deadlines but not to a path, or a tempo, or a public plan, or any kind of transparency:
China remained “unwaveringly” committed to reaching its peak in carbon emissions before 2030 and becoming […]
By Jo Nova
China is the leader in EV car production but it’s not quite the success you might think it is.
The CCP was apparently determined to claim that they are making more EV’s than Tesla. But in order to get the EV subsidies, companies are producing vast numbers of cars no one wants to buy. It seems these cars are registered, falsely listed as “sold” and driven 30 miles to a graveyard to presumably rot, or spontaneously combust, whichever comes first. After thirteen years of one particular subsidy, supposedly only worth 3-6% of the best selling car, the government has paid out nearly $15 billion, which seems like it would buy quite a few fields of Neta V EVs.
“China is the land of shortcuts and facades”
Winston Sterzel has an insiders view on China, and claims there are also fly-by-night investment schemes which appear, inflate and disappear, in get-rich-quick projects purely designed to scam investors out of their money. In 2018 bicycle sharing schemes led to mountains of rotting bikes, and so it is again — this time with glass, heavy metals and rare earths.
Who knows what the real price of an […]
By Jo Nova
Ten years of lies, deception, and dangerous experiments
Imagine if our adversaries were splicing together mutant viruses and testing them on humanized mice for years in order to make them more pathogenic, and our top researchers were helping them, our government was funding them, and we had years of warnings that the experiments were dangerous.
The Sunday Times says “bioweapon” very quietly, but it’s in print in a long feature article with plenty of ugly details. The headline is very sedate given the gravity. The world would have reacted very differently in January 2020…
An Act of War or an accident of war? What really went on inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid erupted
Johnathon Calvert and George Abuthnott, The Sunday Times
Fresh evidence drawn from confidential files reveals Chinese scientists spliced together deadly pathogens shortly before the pandemic, the Sunday Times Insight team report.
For starters — here’s a map of the places where people were reporting on social media that they had covid in January 2020. While everyone was talking about sea-food markets, the big clue was there all the time.
…
These hot spots were […]
By Jo Nova
In terms of civilization, Niall Ferguson is speaking simple maths. The arithmetic of resources. Something which is almost never said.
Niall Ferguson:
“For an enormous island that is thinly populated, with enormous resources — for such an island to be ill-defended seems like the most spectacular folly…
Empires, at some level, are about acquiring commodities at below market prices, or at least not trusting to the market to supply you — not to be at the mercy of the market, or the mercy of a navy, the US Navy, which China currently is.
To have security China cannot be dependent on imported commodities and market prices, when you think about what that implies for Australia, its really quite scary…
Australia is a prize…
“If you want Peace, prepare for War.
If you want War, act like it will never come. Allow your defense capability to atrophy.”
The lucky country needs to prepare
Alistair Rae, Stats Maps and Pix.
The rulers of China would be irrational not to want more land to feed people, and control of more resources. Australia has […]
By Jo Nova
Where do people live?
These marvelous spike maps mark out a 3D representation of the population density on each two-kilometer-square pixel of Earth’s surface. There are no outlines for countries, yet for the most part we can still see where the land meets the sea.
Credit goes to Alistair Rae, formerly a professor of urban studies and planning at the University of Sheffield. He used the EU’s population density data with the mapping tool Aerialod to create these glorious 3D maps.
And the map shouts “India”.
UPDATE: Do click to see the larger maps!
Alistair Rae, Stats, Maps n Pix Click to enlarge | CC 2.0
This is the global distribution of 8 billion people. The abundance of South East Asia is undeniable, as is the emptiness of the Sahara and the vacancy of Siberia. Antarctica is an invisible continent.
Australia and New Zealand are barely there. We can see how isolated Perth Australia is (where I live).
Annotated by Jo to show friends in the USA where Perth is.
Hawaii and Auckland likewise, stand apart.
Most maps originally came from Alastair Rae on Twitter in 2020 and later from the Visual Capitalist […]
A very rare chance means the extraordinary Steven Mosher will be speaking in Perth tomorrow (Sunday) for the CNI. Tickets are free. (He is presenting on other topics in Sydney and Melbourne.)
Australia on the Frontline
Why China’s Dream is the New Threat to World Order
2.30 – 4.30pm, Sunday 19th March
Royal Perth Yacht Club, Crawley, Perth, Western Australia.
Steven W. Mosher is the President of the Virginia based Population Research Institute (1995 to present) and the author of a number of books on China, including Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream is the New Threat to World Order, recently published in a new Australian edition by Wilkinson Press. His other books include Hegemon: China’s Plan to Dominate Asia and the World and China Misperceived: American Illusions and Chinese Reality.
9.4 out of 10 based on 38 ratings […]
OWID
By Jo Nova
It’s the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth and one country is building six times as much new coal power as the rest of the world combined. But no one cares.
Sinful Australia hasn’t even built a coal plant in 12 long years, but Saint China is approving a new one every three and a half days. One nation is theoretically destroying the world’s corals, creating droughts, floods and bad storms, and making reef fish reckless but no one is gluing themselves to the Chinese Embassy. The same universities who lecture us on carbon pollution are not even boycotting Chinese students. We have to ask — do reef fish matter? Are floods a bad thing?
Either CO2 is just a shiny amulet or everyone who cares about it is functionally innumerate. It could be both.
CREA
Meanwhile on the cat-walks of intellectual fashion shows the Western world’s elite competes to be more concerned than the next guy about the dire problems of CO2. President Xi cheers them on, promises to act, then builds another coal plant.
Constructing 106 Gigawatts of coal power in 2023 doesn’t exactly sit well with President […]
By Jo Nova
The cannons are all swinging around to point at Elon Musk. The former darling of the left is holding Kryptonite — today he recklessly encouraged people of different political views to engage in civil debate. He also promised to drop “The Twitter Files” soon, showing exactly how Twitter suppressed free speech, saying “The public deserves to know what happened”.
Twitter, after all, may have affected the 2020 US election by protecting Hunter Biden and the FBI. It also may have protected Big Pharma by suppressing bad news on vaccines and good news on cheap antivirals. There is a body count in this free speech debate… and Elon Musk recognises the gravity of the situation.
In reply to this dangerous free speech concept new signups at Twitter are at an all time high, but Apple has withdrawn advertising on Twitter. To which Elon Musk asks “Do they hate free speech in America?” And apparently they do, because they are also now threatened to withhold Twitter from their App Store and they’re not even trying to explain why.
Apple similarly deplatformed Parler from its App store in Jan 2021. Twitter had banned the President of the US and […]
By Jo Nova
Well that was lucky. Early reports suggest the Chinese space junk from the launch four days ago has crashed in the Pacific 1,000 km short of Mexico. However, if I am reading those maps (below) correctly, on this uncontrolled reentry it only missed Australia and New Zealand by half an hour, and just a few minutes later and it would have “landed” somewhere in Mexico or maybe Florida. (Now that would have been a November surprise).
Despite what China says, this is not what the rest of the world does:
China Lucks Out Again as Out-of-Control Rocket Booster Falls in the Pacific
Kenneth Chang, New York Times
It was China’s latest round of celestial roulette involving a deliberate uncontrolled atmospheric re-entry. The rocket stage, by design, did not include a system to guide it into a specific spot on Earth, far away from people.
“The thing I want to point out about this is that we, the world, don’t deliberately launch things this big intending them to fall wherever,” Ted Muelhaupt, a consultant for the Aerospace Corporation, a nonprofit group largely financed by the U.S. government that […]
By Jo Nova China emits more CO2 than first world combined, but tells the West to “do more” as it quietly sprints into the Space Race
…
China signed the Paris Agreement, which meant nothing at all. It is now building 60% of all the new coal plants in the world while the West does a kind of Tantric Energy Yoga — trying to run smelters with solar panels.
China’s emissions of CO2 exceed all developed nations combined, yet President Xi is not even attending COP27, and almost no one cares.
This is the luminous elephant floating in the kitchen at COP27:
If CO2 mattered, they would care. But the point of COP27 was never about the climate.
…
China absurdly mocks the moral carbon-beauty-contest of the west, while applauding us, and playing by its own rules
From the sidelines, the CCP berates and eggs on the West saying that “empty slogans are not ambition” and calling for the “UN climate summit to address the concerns of developing nations.”
Li Gao, director of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment’s climate change department… urged developed nations to meet their commitments on the US$100 billion […]
by Jo Nova
The scariest thing is that a communist dictator seems more sensible than any democratic one.
He’s a tyrant, true, but one that can add up numbers. So it has come to pass that the largest coal fired nation in the world will burn even more coal because energy security today is more important than theoretically slowing storms in 2100 AD. China makes no secret of it, but hardly anyone is even talking about it.
In other news from the CCP convention, unlike the West, China won’t blow up their coal plans until the new replacement energy is ready to use. Which is handy if the replacement turns out to be a trillion dollar lemon.
Rather soberingly, for transition-fans, China makes 80% of all the solar panels on Earth but that’s not enough to dent the growth of Chinese coal demands. If these solar panels were so cheap and effective China would ban the sale of them.
China boosts coal output as energy security trumps climate
Michael Smith, Australian Financial Review
China’s state planner, the National Development and Reform Commission, said while China would continue to invest heavily in wind and solar, annual coal […]
Chinese environmental care means spraying grass, trees, rocks oil paint “green”
Winston Sterzel (Serpentza) describes how in China people are paid to spray dead grass green, not with fertilizer or seed, but with oil paint. They even paint whole trees, rock faces and cliffs too. Sometimes the quickest way to keep the environmental inspectors happy at a mine site is by rolling out plastic “camo-net”. Sometimes they staple fake leaves to a tree. The government mandated that “we are going to care for the environment” and offered cash incentives from the local government.
It’s not just an environmental hazard, polluting the soil and water, but apparently emblematic of the kind of industrial grade absurdity that communist regimes do better than anyone. Sterzel used to live in China. He talks about the culture of “face” and the overriding importance of looking good. Many things about China, he says, are just a shortcut for appearances sake… everything about government propaganda works like “painting the grass green.” Lying becomes a way of life. Not that we in the West will get too high and mighty about this. There are worse lies, and we have them: like “Safe and Effective”.
Where are Greenpeace when […]
It’s like the West left their children alone in a room with The Chinese Communist Party
Is there a more perfect propaganda weapon?
The CCP own TikTok and they use it to serve up polarizing addictive trivia to Western teenagers while they serve up scientific achievements to Chinese youth. At the same time the CCP collects locations, contacts, files and aps. Frighteningly it can copy the content of the clipboard, even storing passwords.
It’s not just children but adults too. It is so addictive, there are claims it has a billion users. Many use it daily and for as much as 5% of all their waking hours. With algorithms to control the content delivered and an army of bots to amplify whatever sentiment they want, the CCP can shape public opinion, change norms, and feed dissatisfaction and even violent protest — as Kane points out, the #blacklivesmatter hashtag on TikTok generated a crazy 4.9 billion views.
Near the end of his time in office, Trump must have realized the grave threat it posed. He gave the owners of Tiktok just 45 days to spin it off to a US company or face being banned in the US. […]
Nearly every decision Joe Biden has made just happens to be the same as what President Xi would have preferred.
The keystone pipe, energy dependence, the Afghanistan debacle, the end of tariffs, jailing critics of China, and allowing Chinese companies strategic control and access. Then there’s the Hunter Biden laptop…
It’s excellent to see Tucker packaging this message so well.
Tucker Carlson rips the Biden family’s relationship with China and what it really means for global order
Partial transcript (full copy at the link above)
Last summer, a group of American intelligence analysts working for the U.S. government issued a report on the origins of COVID.These people work at CIA, NSA, a bunch of other agencies, and they concluded that the coronavirus may very well have been manufactured in a lab by the Chinese military.
America has been the dominant power in the world for more than 100 years, since the end of the First World War, when Europe destroyed itself. Empires destroying themselves always pave way for new empires, something we should keep in mind at the moment.
The coronavirus reshuffled the global order. It crushed the American economy. It […]
We wonder is the West so addicted to cheap, slave made goods they will accept deceit, bad practice, and bioweapons?
Then we look at the UN and we know the answer is “Yes”. We’ll accept all the lies, and we don’t even need the t-shirts.
China has helped spread four epidemics — and COVID’s not the last
Steven Mosher, New York Post
The Chinese Communist Party has a long history of covering up epidemics within China, and then carelessly — or deliberately — allowing them to spread around the world.
The fall of 1957 saw an outbreak of what came to be known as the Asian flu. It was first reported in the cities of Singapore and Hong Kong, but this new and deadly influenza soon went global.
…even as tens of thousands of Chinese lay dying, the epidemic was kept hidden from view by the Communist authorities.
When infected travelers from China later carried it to Hong Kong and Singapore, the World Health Organization and other public health authorities were caught flatfooted. Thanks to Beijing’s perfidy, quarantines and vaccines came too late. Before the Asian flu had […]
Given the advantage of controlling essential strategic resources, China would be crazy if they weren’t:
Pro-China group running online campaign against US rare-earths industry, says cybersecurity firm
Raghav Bikhchandani, ThePrint
A report released Tuesday by Mandiant says a pro-China group named Dragonbridge has been using “nuanced tactics” against firms like Lynas, Appia, and USA Rare Earth. These included posing as local residents online to drum up protests against the construction of a Lynas rare-earths processing facility in Texas. The facility’s development is the result of an agreement signed between the US Department of Defense and Lynas to boost America’s rare-earths domestic industry.
“The accounts claimed that by placing the Lynas plant in Texas, the Biden administration would expose the area to irreversible environmental damage and the local population to radioactive contamination and adverse health effects such as cancer risks, gene mutation, and deformities in newborns,” the Mandiant report said.
‘Tactics to manipulate public discourse’
Elaborating on its claims, Mandiant also shared several screenshots of purported sockpuppet Twitter and Facebook accounts dating from April and May that called for a boycott and shared concerns over Lynas and its rare-earths plant. Mandiant also found […]
While Western cultural warriors are bravely destroying statues of dead colonialists, one kind of modern colonialist gets a free pass.
China gets away with nearly everything: climate crimes, bioweapons accidents, IP theft, and slave labor camps. Maybe spending $100,000 a month on New York Times ads is all it takes to bury unfavourable stories in Western media outlets. But then there are also friends like Mitch McConnell in the US Senate, two million communist party members spread throughout the West, all the universities dependent on Chinese students, and Western academics with jobs for China on-the-side. The West might be quite cheap to buy off really.
Bolsonaro from Brazil warns that China has re-colonized nearly all of Africa
Tucker Carlson:
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 […]
EnergyAustralia is 100% owned by China Light and Power (CLP Group) and owns a suite of generators that include coal, gas, wind farms and battery storage in Australia. It was sold by the NSW government for $1.4 billion in 2011. According to Wikipedia, the mothership company, CLP, owns “a number of power stations in Asia” and most are either coal-fired or fossil fuel power stations. It also owns Hong Kong Nuclear Investment Company.
Yallourn Power Plant, | Malcolm Paterson, CSIRO
A year ago the same company that announced it was speeding up the closure of Yallourn coal power plant to 2028 instead of 2032, now warns the transition “may not be smooth” and the governments plan to pay incentives to keep them open “may not be enough”. But back in March last year, when EnergyAustralia said it wanted to close Yallorn, it also said that it wanted to show that the transition is possible “without disruption”. In fact the Managing Director raved at the time “”We are determined to show Australia, that it is possible to move from the old to the new in a way that does not leave people behind.”. Blah Blah Blah, eh?
The […]
Bless Craig Kelly for saying the obvious that hardly anyone else will say*
The faster Australia gets to Net Zero the more we surrender to China. | Photo by Christels
China is too poor to rush to Net Zero but it cheers us on. It calls itself a developing nation while it develops a nuclear fusion plant, launches hypersonic weapons, runs a shadow war in space “every day”, and landed a rover on the far side of the moon (which has been cruising around now for a full year).
It’s too poor to do Net Zero, but it’s rich enough to buy off our Pacific neighbors, while we close factories so we can keep the lights on. China buys a belt and road while we buy off the Weather Gods with sacrificial Green electrons and try to to stop storms 100 years from now.
China is digging up more coal than any nation on Earth, but it didn’t even turn up to Glasgow. One year ago China suddenly cut its wind and solar subsidies, and reduced it’s carbon trading scheme back by two thirds. Yet Australia is going double gangbusters to install more renewable watts per capita than […]
A week ago our newspapers were full of dire warnings that the Australian coal mining industry was going to be left in the lurch by declining orders from China. “The End of Australia’s coal export boom is Imminent” said the AFR — parroting a report by a group that includes Alex Turnbull, someone known to profit from renewables.
What none of the headlines mentioned was that China is set to hit a new all time record of coal use this year.
China now wants to boost coal production by 300m tons —six times* as much coal as Australia uses each year
China already burns 32 82 times as much coal each year as Australia does. Soon that will be 34 88 times as much. But who’s counting?
China promotes coal in setback for efforts to cut emissions
By Joe McMoncald, AP Business Writer, 25th April 2022
Official plans call for boosting coal production capacity by 300 million tons this year, according to news reports. That is equal to 7% of last year’s output of 4.1 billion tons, which was an increase of 5.7% over 2020.
Chinese officials are blunt about why they need more coal:
|
JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
Jo appreciates your support to help her keep doing what she does. This blog is funded by donations. Thanks!
Follow Jo's Tweets To report "lost" comments or defamatory and offensive remarks, email the moderators at: support.jonova AT proton.me
Statistics
The nerds have the numbers on precious metals investments on the ASX
|
Recent Comments