Recent Posts
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Snowy 2.0 is the Trillion dollar Black Hole of Australia — sucking in energy, money, land, industrial relations, the dollar, our lifestyle
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Winter Solstice
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Saturday
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We were throwing-renewable-energy away at record levels in 2025
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Friday
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Pauline Hanson, the centrist, just wants a free market in electricity, and an end to the renewable energy bribery
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Thursday
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Blame the Climate Yeti again for making your life more expensive! (It’s a smokescreen)
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Wednesday
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The Sunrise Project funneled $343 million from overseas to push net zero
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Sunday
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The US government has been secretly funding 120 dangerous biolabs around the world
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Saturday
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New report shows renewables are a drag on our national productivity
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Friday
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Thursday
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Well, how convenient. AI data centers have arrived to be the fall guy for the Energy Minister
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Wednesday
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Billionaires are leaving the room with excuses — Bezos says “AI will solve climate crisis”
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Sunday
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The Craziest eco laws against Farmers. Let’s check that science…
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Saturday
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China cooks the carbon accounting books by 400 million tons
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Friday
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The Wind Power Puzzle (add more wind turbines and get the same output)
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Thursday
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To save the world, Cement Australia stops burning coal and burns trees instead
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Wednesday
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On Fire! US hunger for gas power so large, wait time for turbines blows out to 5+ years
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Sunday
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Saturday
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Perth event Saturday May 30th: Green Greed and the Grid
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Catastrophic warming already happened in Antarctica 130,000 years ago
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Friday
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Suddenly the Paris Agreement grows teeth
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Thursday
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Australian renewable investments evaporate in 2025: reaching a ten year low
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Wednesday
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The Bubble Pops: Big Miner BHP quietly backs away from decarbonization
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Sunday
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Conservatives are tearing themselves apart over “The Paris Agreement”
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Saturday
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Image by MythologyArt from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
China wants to rule the world
And so the media circus continues. China’s new five year plans are out, and no matter what they are, the media has to pretend China is a good little carbon player like everyone else. No one can admit the truth, that China’s emissions are so big everyone else is irrelevant. That China breaks all the rules while cornering the market selling junk wind-and-solar-generators to an audience that doesn’t need them.
To say so would destroy the illusion — like turning up to a party with a carton of antimatter.
And now China wants to govern the vassal states (like Australia) presumably to make sure they continue to be forced to buy the junk generators, so they can’t compete with China in making real things.
Climate change is a racket that serves China and the UN.
[Bloomberg] China aims to “actively participate in and lead global climate governance,” according to a draft of the country’s 2026-2030 five-year plan published Thursday.
Nation will “uphold the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities” and “fully implement the United Nations Framework […]
By Jo Nova
Congratulations World!
Roger Pielke Jnr celebrates another great year where humanity had a near record low in deaths due to climate disasters.
He reminds us of a paper from a few years ago showing that the richer we all are, the less likely we are to die from floods, cold, drought and wind.
When we adjust against GDP per capita we find that GDP itself is the big protector of humanity.
The best thing we can do to help Africans defeat climate hazards is not to send them solar panels, but to help them get filthy rich.
And anyone who cares about vulnerable people will be protesting at the reckless destruction of what was a cheap, efficient electricity grid. We will surely kill more people by reducing our GDP with unreliable generators, than we will ever save with solar panels.
Once income is accounted for, the apparent relationship between climate hazards and mortality largely disappears. In other words, economic development—not renewable energy—dominates human survival outcomes.
Follow the Science, girls and boys,
If man-made emissions do anything at all, the more we emit the lower the death rates are. We can see that as man […]
By Jo Nova
Firstly, all that money we spent — it’s done nothing (shh!)
It turns out Australia’s economy has been decarbonising at the same rate for decades regardless of how many windmills and solar panels we install, or how many UN speeches we give. Carbon taxes can come and go, coal plants can close, and we can fill up the roof with pink batts. But in the end, the Australian economy, our GDP, is decarbonising at about 2% a year, and has been since 1992. All the frequent flyer carbon schemes, carbon certificates, waste management plans and electric cars amount to a cake decoration.
Roger Pielke Jnr, graphs 30 years of government failure.
Mission Impossible
By Roger Pielke Jnr, The Honest Broker
For all of the sound and fury of Australian climate politics, which have claimed the careers of a few prime ministers, there is no evidence that Australia’s emissions reduction policies have done anything to meaningfully accelerate the rate of decarbonization over many decades.
We see how Labor, Liberal, makes no difference. The dinosaur era where we used mostly coal power had nearly the same reduction as the Rudd renewable era where we […]
By Jo Nova
Nearly all the “climate action” we’ve paid for in Australia has only reduced emissions by 3.9% in 20 years
Anthony Albanese is proud that Australia has reduced emissions by 28% since 2005, but doesn’t tell Australians that 24% of that was in land use, mostly because we let scrub and forests grow back. And now he’s talking of reducing emissions by 62% by 2035?
See: The National Greenhouse Gas Inventory: March 2025 Update
The elephant in the emissions kitchen is that only one kind of “carbon reduction” has achieved anything meaningful in Australia — and it’s not wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, fugitive emissions, EVs, batteries, pink batts, LED globes, cloth shopping bags, FOGO bins, paper straws, insulation, carbon taxes, carbon capture schemes, bug burgers, or feeding seaweed to cows to reduce their farts. The only thing that has reduced our emissions in any meaningful way is land use and forestry change (which officially goes by the delightfully-bureaucratic name, “land use, land-use change and forestry,” LULUCF).
We can see why they don’t want to talk about LULUCF!
Compare these two graphs below. Not only has all the money poured into emissions reduction been trivially effective, […]
By Jo Nova
The World’s Renewables Crash-Test-Dummy has officially set new magical emissions-reductions-targets. It’s just a different shade of impossible, so nothing’s changed. But the labels on the staircase to Green Heaven have switched from 43% to 62%. The UN and President Xi will be happy.
It won’t change world temperatures but it might be enough to bribe the UN with to “win” the Olympics of Climate Conferences — the junket to end all junkets. The annual private jet party of bureaucratic celebrities.
When our PM was asked why Australia should set targets for global weather control when the three biggest countries on Earth are not, he whipped out a “fun fact” to run a nation by — as Graham Lloyd noticed in The Australian.
[Anthony Albanese] hit out at Coalition MPs who argue Australia should not adopt ambitious targets when there was a lack of action from big emitters the US, China and India.
“The amount of wind and solar power under construction in China is now nearly twice as much as the rest of the world combined. Just a fun fact there,” he said.
It’s almost like the PM is managing the country […]
Image by Manuel Angel Egea from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
Welcome to Futility Island
Anthony Albanese was elected in May 2022 and set God-like new emissions targets in to legislation. Ponder the scale of the national achievements of the last three years. All that money, all the wind factories, the solar panels, the batteries, the holes bored in the Snowy Mountains, and this is all we have to show for it?
This is the graph from the latest Quarterly figures shown on the DCCEEW website (with added notation from me):
Poignantly, Mr Bowen, the Minister for Weather Changing and Energy said — “We’re turning around a decade of denial and delay, by setting serious climate targets in law and delivering the policy certainty to industry to bring down emissions”. Indeed. (Do tell us when you start Chris?)
The bump last year was because the clouds didn’t rain on the Tassie Hydro Scheme as much as we needed. And the wind didn’t blow anywhere much in Australia in Quarter 2 last year. Who can forget the calm days of April-May-June last year when the wind turbines on the continent stood still? At one point, $20 billion dollars worth […]
By Jo Nova
Nearly every plea for carbon subsidies depends on “the Social Cost of Carbon”, and it’s wrong
Every ton of carbon dioxide we emit is supposedly going to cause $220 USD in losses in the future, which justifies throwing lots of money at efforts to reduce emissions — like subsidizing EVs and solar panels, and inventing cricket burgers. This is called the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC). But half of that imaginary cost was the devastation higher temperatures would theoretically wreak on agriculture — which doesn’t make sense given that plants eat CO2 for breakfast. But for years bureaucrats and scientists have been telling us the damage in crops was going to cost $102USD per ton of carbon, and investors and politicians have been feeding that into their cash registers, and it’s all wrong.
Ten years ago Challinor et al did a big meta-review of crop changes with temperature, using 1,722 records, but many of these records had no figures for CO2 itself. And the whole point of calculating the social cost of carbon really depends on calculating what happens when CO2 rises, and supposedly causes temperatures to rise too. In 2017 Moore et al took those numbers […]
By Jo Nova
It’s something to be proud of: Russia, Australia and USA have the biggest Greenhouse Gas Export footprint on Earth. It’s a bizarrely contrived title though, where we have to ignore domestic emissions and blame countries instead for the fuels they dig up which someone else uses. (You know they want to).
We could play this game in so many ways. If China uses Australian coal to make a fridge, do those emissions belong to Australia, or China or to the Norwegian who bought the fridge? Correct answer: “all three”. The game of emissions mobile-blame means the shame can be applied to whichever patsy is the most useful. Double counting is not a mistake, it’s a marketing tool.
In a normal world, no one is responsible for what someone does with goods they sold, but in green economics, comrade, it all belongs to the Party.
You are supposed to badger and harass the people you sold the goods to, to ask them not to use it:
[Dr Gillian Moon] said if Australia was serious about its climate commitments, it should be doing more to encourage countries that bought its fossil fuels – particularly the developed economies […]
By Jo Nova
The World must act, The Science is clear say Google, but Armageddon will have to wait while they make money from AI
Saint Google’s climate piousness vanished the moment they had to give up something they cared about. The unwashed masses need to take cold showers, eat bugs and fly less often, but if those same people want artificial intelligence, who cares about the heat waves or the hurricanes? Do carbon emissions matter, or don’t they?
For three decades Saint Google strove to save the world from CO2 (and from skeptical opinions). Google were the first major company to become carbon neutral in 2007, the first to commit to operating 24/7 on carbon-free energy. They boast they’re helping 550 cities to reduce a gigaton of carbon emissions. Then opportunity knocked and set fire to those plans.
In 2020 they boldly set the goal of being 100% carbon-free by 2030, now three years later, their emissions are up 50% on what they were in 2019.
In September 2020, it was Google’s “Most Ambitious Decade” because the fires of climate change were already upon them:
Google announces it will run on carbon-free energy by 2030
“We […]
By Jo Nova
The deadliest climate question: How many degrees cooler will that be?
Ask it now, ask it later, before breakfast and while watching “the news”. Teach the children to ask in kindy.
We know the IPCC wildly exaggerates, but pretend they’re right and it still doesn’t make any sense. Richard Lindzen, Will Happer, and William van Wijngaarden took the IPCC at its word and calculate that even if we get to Net Zero by 2050, will only make the world a tiny bit cooler, assuming they’re right (which they’re not) and assuming the rest of the world joins in (which they aren’t).
Say we stop all coal, oil and gas, redesign our energy grids, cull the cows, give up our holidays, our cars and ride bikes to work, fill the oceans with windmills, and turn our thermostats down. We spend a quadrillion dollars on a Moonshot to stuff a perfectly good fertilizer in holes underground, and instead of getting to the moon, the world is barely 0.28 degrees C cooler. That’s a half of one lousy Fahrenheit less that it would have been. This ladies and gentlemen is the best case scenario for the global action plan […]
By Jo Nova
If coal is a planet wrecking problem, if it really mattered, about 30 countries are beating themselves up in acts of grandiose public flagellation, while one country is wrecking the planet and nobody cares. The truth is that no one is behaving like they think CO2 is causing a crisis. All over the West everyone wears the hippie-care coat while buying the cheapest fridges, phones and fashion they can get from the global coal furnace. And China nods the nod then keeps on adding coal power plants.
Climate change: China at risk of missing its goals unless it takes drastic action to rein in coal expansion, new research finds
Eric Ng, South China Morning Post
Last year, the Chinese energy sector’s carbon dioxide emissions increased 5.2 per cent, the same as gross domestic product, highlighting a failure to rein in energy-intensive growth, they estimated.
According to the Global Coal Plant Tracker 70 gigawatts of new coal power was built around the world in 2023. Of the 107 countries they tracked, one country built 47 gigawatts. The other 106 countries combined built 22 gigawatts. The distribution of new coal plants is thus:
By Jo Nova
It is in effect: If there is a train and it’s less than a 2.5 hour trip, in France you can’t fly — unless of course, you own your own private jet, the most “polluting” kind of plane (according to the EcoWorriers). How does that make “carbon sense”? Are we saving the planet, or just stopping the riff-raff from traveling?
It’s one rule for you, another for the Feudal overlords.
Private planes make 5 to 14 times as much CO2, but they are “good to go”?
by Valentina Morando, Impakter
… numerous studies demonstrate that private jets are much more impactful to the environment than other modes of transportations.
They are about “5 to 14 times more polluting than commercial planes (per passenger),” a report published by the Transport and Environment group in 2021 states.
According to a recent study, “only 1% of the population causes 50% of global aviation emissions.”
Right now there are only three routes in France that will be banned, Paris-Orly to Bordeaux, Nantes and Lyon affecting only 2.5% of all domestic flights. The original plan was to ban five more routes, but the […]
What are they on? About twenty years of government funded propaganda and guilt.
Most Australian voters don’t have a clue — half of the nation thinks we make 10% of global emissions when the truth is more like 1%.
Climate change might be the greatest moral challenge of our lifetimes but most Australians are in the dark about what the real numbers are. They probably assumed that if we were only making one-tiny-percent, the government, the ABC, or even the education system might have told them. After all, we’re spending $13 billion dollars a year. What exactly are public universities for if not for letting Australians know this kind of data?
Where was the Government? The conservatives in charge keep throwing away their own best arguments. Almost like they want to hang on to a few wealthy seats while they miss the chance to ignite middle Australia.
But the ignorance is no accident. All the players — the politicians, the academics, the ABC, ANU, CSIRO, Schools, Universities, et al and all sundry, all profit from Big Government. They serve the government first, and not the people, and that’s the problem.
Liberals playing politics with pretence Australia can change global climate […]
PRE NOTE: Obviously Australian emissions of free aerial fertilizer are a net benefit to the world, and we should be paid for them, not charged. But in this world of witchcraft, and lacking a billionaire celebrity who can win elections and face down the media mob — this post is about the obvious, immediately doable ways to reduce the burden of being the worlds Global Patsy. Read it in that spirit. Even within a game with stupid rules, it’s time to go on the attack..
Suddenly the Australian government uses the magic term “Per Capita” and baffles the commentariat
While the rest of the world revels in their glorious fantasy future carbon “targets” the Australian government has finally realized that the measurement units “per country” suited the European overlords, and it was time to reframe the debate.
I have been saying for years, years and years, that Australia has been the Star Global Patsy, doing more per capita than any other nation despite being the fastest growing, furthest, remotest, sparsest and most dependent economy on coal. This is despite most nations of Earth not even pretending to meet their targets. In a quiet moment, even believers in the […]
More ironies. One fifth of all soil carbon is stored in peat bogs. Unfortunately when industrial wind turbines are built on them, the damage turns them from carbon sinks to carbon sources thus neutralizing the point of building the wind farm.
The headline evokes some supernatural power:
Wind farms built on carbon-rich peat bogs lose their ability to fight climate change
As if the magical whirly totem stick loses the gift of weather control when placed on a peat bog?
But the real damage is not just to wallets for another pointless windfarm. Peat bogs are so much more than carbon sinks — they are also an archive of paleohistory and the ancient climate. Indeed, even though cattle, wind and rain can damage the bogs, the researchers now say the wind farms now pose the “most serious risk” of all. Apparently the vehicle access tracks create artificial streams that drain the peat. The drainage changes are pervasive and “affect the whole peatland” not just the part near the track.
The “blanket bogs” are rare, but occur from Spain to Norway in Europe as well as in Canada, New Zealand and Korea.
The paper is a thinly disguised plea from bog […]
The new figures from the Mauna Loa Observatory show humans are irrelevant
Despite the Ultra-Revolutionary-Carbon-Reduction-Program far beyond anything the UN has every dreamed of, Global CO2 hit 417ppm. This is a record high since humans discovered test tubes but the 300 millionth time since life on Earth evolved.
It shows how all plans for carbon reduction known to mankind are futile. Obviously Ecoworriers want to take that failure and do more of it.
The world just broke a disturbing trend despite the global lockdown
Tracey Keeling
…the data reveals that two months of significantly reduced human activity did not make a dent in the damage we’ve done to the planet. It ultimately confirms that nothing short of wholesale systemic change will do – with the rejection of fossil fuels at the heart of that transformation.
“Surprised” is not the word. When the punters realize that empty streets and skies makes no difference, there could be a monumental crisis of motivation coming. Games up?
The Scientists Just Told Us Coronavirus Won’t Save Us from Climate Change
The National Interest
“People may be surprised to hear that the response to the coronavirus outbreak […]
Australians are installing renewable energy, per capita, faster than any place on Earth, or at least we were until 2020 when the subsidies and schemes ran out.
Per capita, Australia (all shades of red) is installing renewables
The Quarterly update for the Greenhouse Gas inventory is out and we can see just how much difference all those renewables make, which is almost nothing. Emissions have flatlined.
Australians are paying record prices, risking blackouts, buying batteries and synchronous condensors, building new billion dollar interconnectors, losing companies overseas, and suffering voltage spikes. We’re playing chicken with our smelters, and party games with PeakSmart timers and extra domestic circuits so that electricity companies can manage our pool pumps and our air conditioners.
And this is all we get?
Per capita, Australia (all shades of red) is installing renewables
After adding so many wind farms and solar panels the electricity sector decreased emissions by only 1.2% on the year before.
Electricity sector emissions decreased 1.8 per cent in the June quarter of 2019 on a ‘seasonally adjusted and weather normalised’P 8 P basis (Figure 6). This reflected strong increases in hydro and wind generation (42.0 and 14.8 per cent) […]
Mysterious CO2 activity in New Zealand shows Phytoplankton at work
Tom Quirk both finds a mystery and solves it.
Emiliania huxleyi coccolithophore | Alison Taylor.
Carbon dioxide is a “well mixed gas” yet CO2 levels over New Zealand start rising there each year in March — a whole month before we see it CO2 start to rise over Tasmania. Air over Cape Grim in Tasmania will be blown by the prevailing wind over to New Zealand about five days later. So these two stations should be showing similar numbers throughout the year. Instead some process in NZ is pushing up CO2 early. Levels also peak earlier in New Zealand, and by September, in early spring, some process around NZ is pulling the CO2 out of the sky. Both NZ and Tasmania share large forested areas, so that wouldn’t explain the difference.
Quirk wondered if it had something do with phytoplankton, so he searched for satellite data that measures chlorophyll in the ocean and shows, voila, that there is major activity right around the Baring Head station at the same time as CO2 levels are falling. Indeed, the station is smack in the middle of a mass phytoplankton bloom.
He […]
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Look out, another knot of tortured researchers just went past. All this time we’ve been pouring money into planting trees and stealing land from farmers because we were sure that trees would cool the world. (Just like solar panels do, yeah?) But life is so complicated — for years now some researchers have been quietly wondering if more trees were actually going to warm the planet instead, but they didn’t want to say much. It turns out that while trees absorb the sacred CO2 (that’s cooling!) they also emit methane (that’s warming!), and terpenes (cooling) and isoprene (warming and cooling!) If that’s not complicated enough, then there is the albedo effect. Trees are dark, they absorb more sunlight than bare ground and snow. So depending on where they are planted, that makes for “warming”. Then some VOCs or volatile organic compounds also seed clouds.
So what’s the net effect? Who knows, it’s not like there are whole industries dependent on it…
Now they ask?
How much can forests fight climate change? Trees are supposed to slow global warming, but growing evidence suggests they might not always be climate saviours. Gabrielle Popkin, Nature
As usual, the debate is based […]
Australia Wins The Global Patsy Award 2019
The Brookings Institute released a report that claims everyone is better off economically by sticking to Paris, but check out the devastating graphs. Economically, everyone is a loser, but the three biggest losers are Australia, Russia and OPEC.
Australia is doing more, paying more, suffering more and yet will make almost no difference to the global emissions tally in anything other than a purely symbolic impress-your-dinner–guests kind of way.
If Australia left the Paris Agreement, even the left leaning Brookings Institute can’t find much difference in total global man-made emissions. Australia is forcing the renewables transformation faster than anywhere else, it will lose GDP, wages, jobs, investment, and the dollar will fall. All that, and no one could even tell the difference between Paris with Australia, and Paris without.
Clearly Australian negotiators at the UN are incompetent on a whole new scale. If they had Australian’s interests at heart, even a little bit, they would have done this study themselves, and gone to Paris with some realistic comparative data to argue that we are cutting too fast and paying too much. Finalists for most useless Global Negotiator of the Decade are Kevin Rudd, […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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The nerds have the numbers on precious metals investments on the ASX
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