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By Jo Nova
The great global carbon back-down continues:
The EU wants to keep their target while exploring every possible option not to keep it.
They’re contemplating a “non linear” path, meaning, a much slower approach now, while they think up excuses to bail out later.
EU exploring weaker 2040 climate goal
Politico, [Formerly paid by USAID]
The European Commission wants to keep a 90 percent emissions-cutting target but to change how countries calculate their progress.
To start, officials are contemplating a “nonlinear” path between the EU’s 2030 emissions-cutting target of 55 percent and its 2040 goal — rather than a straight line. That could mean slower emission cuts to start, compensated by rapid declines later in the 2030s. It would also mean more pollution in total over the decade.
But as well as the delayed plan, there is the cheap-foreign-escape clause, the forestry-option and domestic-swap games.
Now that everyone knows renewables are no good, and EVs won’t replace fuel cars, there are no end of creative accounting techniques to “meet targets” without spending much or admitting defeat.
The EU might return to letting European countries buy cheap international carbon credits. This […]
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
While careers and statues have died at the merest hint of not refuting slavery hard enough, the UK Labour Party will make sure slave-made-solar panels will still be imported to the UK, and the people exploiting the slaves will still be paid.
We have to ask, O’ Great Moral Guardians, was it because there aren’t enough solar panels that are not slave-made, and if we stop supporting the slavers, the only panels left will cost a fortune? Is the big fear that it will blow the climate budget, or make green electricity even more absurdly expensive?
Or are we saying that the lives of slaves in 2025 are not as important as cooling the world by 0.0001 degrees 100 years from now?
h/t Tom Nelson
Labour to block bid to ban solar panels made by SLAVES – so Ed Miliband can put them on schools and hospitals
By Harriet Line, The Daily Mail, UK.
Peers had sought to stop taxpayers’ cash from being used to buy products from a company where there was ‘credible evidence’ of modern slavery in its supply chain.
But the Government will whip its MPs […]
By Jo Nova
New “emission” rules for cars started in January, but EV sales are falling and manufacturers are starting to panic
If the Labor government said it was going to make us pay a $10,000 fee on a fossil fuel car so it could give $10,000 to our rich neighbor to buy an EV, there would be mayhem and outrage in the streets. So instead they’ve come up with* a tricky scheme to force car manufacturers to do something like that, and they hope the complexity will fool the people. The new car tax and forced subsidy payments are called the “New Vehicle Efficiency Standard” (NVES) which makes it sound nicer and less Soviet, but really, the scheme is pure politburo management.
The Soviets were infamous for making 800 million pairs of shoes of the wrong sort . Somehow the Russian people had to stand for hours in queues to get one pair that they wanted, and so it is that Commissar Albanese has decreed the kinds of cars Australians will want, whether they like it or not. Like the Russians, we too will pay extra, or wait for years to get what we want.
As of January […]
By Jo Nova
A jury in North Dakota has ordered Greenpeace to pay $660 milllion USD to a Texas pipeline company called Energy Transfer. Greenpeace will appeal, but the suit named both Greenpeace USA and also the international arm, and the damages are so large, if they survive the appeal they would bankrupt the US branch entirely and prevent Greenpeace operating in the USA.
The payment is to compensate for damages and losses from protests in 2015 and 2016 that damaged and delayed the North Dakota Access Pipeline. The protests were so large and so out of control, the clean up bill cost North Dakota $38 million dollars.
Perhaps most importantly, this case may inspire other corporations to fight back. Kelcy Warren, the magnate who owns Energy Transfer, said in 2017 “Everybody is afraid of these environmental groups and the fear that it may look wrong if you fight back with these people,”. “But what they did to us is wrong, and they’re gonna pay for it.” (– Wall Street Journal)
The 1,172 mile long pipeline did eventually start operation in 2017. It shifts about 5% of the daily oil production of the United States. Presumably every month it […]
By Jo Nova
Even as Elon Musk rescues astronauts abandoned in space, activists set fire to random Teslas.
Are these the same people who think we should ban gas stoves to save the world?
We are not the same. pic.twitter.com/2oiMDRGJd6
— Political Blasphememes (@PBlasphememes) March 18, 2025
It’s possible some indoctrinated teens want to save the world from fascists — or maybe the Blob strikes back — I mean, we have to ask who benefits from the circus distraction of anti-Musk confected hate? Obviously the millionaires in Congress with their hand in the jar benefit from a decoy story. “Look, a squirrel”! Those with something to hide would like it if Musk can be bullied, coerced or harassed into leaving DOGE alone. There might be some very nervous people in the Halls of Power who are afraid he’ll get the code crackers into the FBI and find the Epstein files, or the grants they arranged for their girlfriend. There may even be foreign interests who don’t want their web of influence and schemes exposed.
Elon Musk speaking on Hannity, Fox News talks
“I always thought that democrats were supposed to be the party of empathy […]
By Jo Nova
Hallelujah — Kemi Badenoch has thrown Net Zero under a bus
Finally, 8 weeks after Donald Trump was sworn in, the UK conservative party says what skeptics and many conservatives have been saying for ten or twenty years. Perhaps they were jolted into action by the shocking polls that showed — from out of nowhere, the Reform Party was polling just as well, or even better than the 200 year old Conservative party.
Conservatives supporting global weather witchcraft and UN fantasies are facing an existential threat.
The GWPF is delighted, of course, having warned about the dire Net Zero outcomes for 15 years. And Kemi Badenoch blasts the old policies, calling them “fantasy politics” that cost the Earth, drive up the cost of electricity, while “not really” protecting the environment. She’s realized no one had a detailed plan, and if they did, sensationally, she says they wouldn’t talk about it because it would reveal “just how catastrophic the actual costs will be for families, for businesses, and for our economy.” In a blockbuster moment, she even admits the futility of it all saying that the UK has done more on carbon emissions that anyone in the […]
By Jo Nova
Isn’t it time we talk about The attempted Coup (and the media)?
…
In the two weeks since Elon Musk spoke to Joe Rogan for three hours, the media has ignored it, trivialized it, or reduced it to “Elon tries to explain his Nazi salute”. Here was the richest man in the world, best friends with the most powerful man on Earth and he’s talking without an autocue, walking through the underbelly of the US government and describing the “greatest scam in human history” and the media are discussing the weather.
Thanks to DOGE we now know that the US government spent $270 million on 6,200 journalists, which presumably buys a lot of “Nothing to see here”. Which is exactly why I feel an urge to pass this on.
What Musk describes is the ultimate pork barrelling
Instead of giving our tax dollars to buy votes in marginal seats, it looks like the Democrats were giving away the country, to buy voters to fill marginal states, so they could stay in power. By offering up free houses, free healthcare and free citizenship to non-citizens, as Musk describes it, the Democrats (really, the whole Blob) […]
ESG Today/
By Jo Nova
Renewables are so over
Just like that — the renewables bubble went phht.
After twenty years of hailing wind and solar, suddenly the world’s tech giants are cheering for nuclear power. Worse — they don’t even mention the words carbon, low emissions or CO2. The new buzzwords are “safe, clean and firm“. They talk about needing energy “round the clock”, and they talk about “energy resilience” — but they don’t say nuclear is “low emissions”. It’s like they want everyone to forget their activism. Did someone say something about climate change?
Meta, Amazon, and Google have flipped like a school of barracuda. Five minutes ago, life on Earth depended on achieving Net-Zero with fleets of wind farms in the sunset, now, they just want energy and lots of it. The big tech fish and their friends have signed a Large Energy Users Pledge admitting that the demand for energy is rising rapidly, that nuclear should triple by 2050 and that large energy users depend on the availability of abundant cheap energy (Small energy users too, Mr Bezos-Zuckerburg-Pichai.) The closest they come to hinting at the ghost of renewables is when they say […]
By Jo Nova
Nishant Gupta set up a green energy hedge fund last year managing about $100m in assets, but he probably wishes he hadn’t.
His words are about as blunt as any hedge fund owner could possibly get.
Hedge Fund Built on Energy Bets Says ‘Clean Is Dead for Now’
Bloomberg
“The whole sector — solar, wind, hydrogen, fuel cells — anything clean is dead for now,” said Nishant Gupta, founder and chief investment officer at London-based Kanou Capital LLP.
Against a barrage of political headwinds in the US, a war-fueled energy crisis and stubbornly high interest rates, large parts of the clean-energy industry are stalling. In the past year, the S&P Global Clean Energy Index has lost 20%, a period during which the S&P 500 Index gained 16%. And with the Trump administration shredding climate policies in the world’s largest economy, many green investors are taking a timeout.
Over the last year clean energy stocks have lost 20% of their value, whereas stocks in fossil fuels are up 13%.
So after the last year, skeptical investors are 30% richer than their believer friends. As it should be.
S&P Global […]
By Jo Nova
The insatiable hunger for electricity
The world is about to flip from an energy diet to an electrical boom. Look at Texas.
Here in Australia our top Blob Scientists tell us it will take 15 years to build one nuclear plant. But in Texas, which has two nuclear plants already, the AI revolution is beating down the door, and it’s saying “Feed me 30 plants for breakfast ” — or at least by 2030. It’s like a different planet.
There are already 340 datacentres in Texas which use 8GW of power, but new projects are so large, they are starting to ask for a whole gigawatt up front. And the sum total of requests for new electrical supply add up to 99 gigawatts — most of which have materialized in the last year. The new level of demand is so big, the grid managers are starting to worry that single new industrial loads are large enough to threaten the grid.
We’re talking of a seismic shift:
The ERCOT grid peak load last summer was 86 gigawatts. The new peak demand by 2030 is expected to be 75% bigger. It may not all be nuclear, ERCOT did […]
By Jo Nova
Without forced theft from the poor, Sunnova (and others in the solar industry) might disappear
Bloomberg writers call it “chaos” and Barrons blames Trump for “uncertainty”, but the truth is the value of solar was always a false bubble held up by forced payments, fantasy, or vicarious political whimsy that spread the costs onto other people. Trump has merely restored the certainty of real value in the free market. He hasn’t banned a single person from buying solar panels, it’s just that not many people want to spend their money on glass panels that make green expensive electrons. They don’t want to spend money on “cheap electricity” that only comes at lunchtime either.
The 70% fall in the stock price is just the last few days since Sunnova officially warned it might not be a “going concern”. The longer term figures are much worse.
On November 4th, when some investors though the word-salad-woman might win, the share price briefly spiked to $7. Right now it is 58 cents, meaning it has lost 92 percent of its value since Trump won the election. The entire $12 mini-boom peak in September last year, arguably, was a bet that […]
Henan S88 Expressway Photo by Windmemories
By Jo Nova
Does this look like a country that cares about carbon emissions?
President Xi said he would “strictly control” coal power from 2021 to 2025, and he has strictly controlled… a huge increase in coal power.
President Xi: — Reuters (April 2021) –“We will strictly limit the increase in coal consumption over the 14th five-year plan period (2021-2025) and phase it down in the 15th five-year plan period (2026-2030),” he said.
But nobody cares either:
China’s 2024 coal power construction hits 10-year high, researchers say
SINGAPORE, Feb 13 (Reuters) – China started construction on 94.5 gigawatts of coal-fired power in 2024, the highest volume of new builds since 2015, hampering the country’s transition away from fossil fuels, researchers said…
The surge came despite a record-breaking increase in renewable capacity last year and could make it harder to connect clean power to the grid, said the report, published by CREA and the Global Energy Monitor (GEM) think tank.
China also promised its emissions will peak in 2030, right when a whole squadron of these new plants will have barely started operation. But it’s OK because […]
..
By Jo Nova
The iconic 120 year old company shares fall as rumors of a takeover spread
BP has lost a quarter of its share value in the last two weeks. The fall started when company profits turned out to be just $9 billion, down from $14b a year ago and $28b in 2022. As The Telegraph reports, “BP’s shareholders had realized that the green spending they supported in 2020 had halved their dividends.” But Shell, Chevron, and Exxon — the other oil giants — they were all doing much better.
Twenty years ago BP changed its branding to “Beyond Petroleum”*. By 2020 the company was hellbent on getting there. Suicidally, the oil company pledged to reduce their own oil production by 40% by 2030, (which did nothing except help all their competitors) and promised to pivot into renewable power. BP set itself a target to increase renewables generation by a factor of twenty this decade. The media gushed — “BP Shuns Fossil Fuels“, said Politico. BP supposedly shone a light on “stranded oil and gas”!
Thus and verily, in mid 2020, with exquisite timing, BP management leapt headlong in the magical energy pit. They were […]
By Jo Nova
The Royal Society is thinking of chucking Elon Musk out of their exclusive club. The man who caught a falling rocket, who bought electric cars to the world, who is testing chips that may heal paralysis, and runs the first private company to put astronauts in space, is not good enough for the precious collective. One day, he may well get us to Mars. Which science club would look pretty silly then?
After all, it’s not like he faked data, wasted billions in grants, sold taxpayers a hundred dodgy weather-changing-schemes, or killed people with an experimental drug is it? (Though, if he had, they’d probably give him a medal.)
It’s all about The Money
The Royal Society was founded in 1660 and hasn’t chucked anyone out for 150 years, so you’d think his crime must be a serious failing in science. Supposedly, the mob say, he breached their code of conduct, was mean to other members and spread “conspiracy theories” and “misinformation”. But the real truth, as even Nature explains in their subheader, is that he committed the unforgivable sin of cutting off the grant money.
We know this because even though 74 members protested last August […]
……..
By Jo Nova
Another day, another racket
As Elon excavates the Motherlode of global funding, the pieces start to fit together.
Kanekoa the Great wonders why USAID gave $68 million dollars to the World Economic Forum — a group of networking billionaires who meet in January each year to ski in Davos. They turn up in private jets to discuss how they can stop the average man flying. You ‘vill own nothing!
Jo Nova wonders why no media outlet on Earth seemingly figured this out for themselves. Perhaps it was the millions in funding the government paid some media outlets, presumably, to say nothing at all the right moments?
USAID: taking money from poor Americans to give to rich Marxists to plot in Davos, Switzerland—about how to take more money from poor Americans
Trust people
Be skeptical of government https://t.co/o4fYdQxn7k
— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) February 6, 2025
It’s almost like we already had One World Government all along, we just didn’t know it.
As Mike Benz said we’ve lived our whole life in “the Truman show”. We think we have free press. We think US foreign aid buys tents for refugees and food for starving […]
By Jo Nova
It turns out the Non-Government Organizations were really The Government
The word for that is GONGO — a government organised non-government organization — at once, an impossible thing and also a tautology.
Hands up who is still reeling with the news that USAID had 50 thousand million dollars of political and media influence? The annual budget of $50 billion dollars in the hands of unaccountable activist NGOs buys a lot of “journalists”, editors and teenage protestors. Suddenly a lot of odd repeated patterns around the world make more sense. Why were all governments suddenly worried about disinformation, or the rights of transexuals?
Today we found out that news outlets like Politico, and the New York Times were being given millions of dollars from the US government.
Benny Johnson says:
This is the biggest scandal in news media history: No employee at Politico got paid yesterday. First time ever the company missed a pay period. This is a crisis. Now we learn Politico — a “news company” — which spent the last 10 years trying to destroy the MAGA Movement was being massively funded by USAID.
It seems some $27 million dollars went to Politico […]
Post-modern temples to the Sun God
By Jo Nova
It was supposed to last 50 years…
The PR writers want us to believe the legendary Ivanpah has been beaten out by better cheap solar, and that this is somehow a “success”. But the truth is, it’s been killed by the same subsidies and crooked market that birthed it.
The Big Government Blob distorted the free market, and created a boom in solar power. But the business case was not that good, there was no miracle in the storage of electricity, nobody wanted fried birds, and the subsidies kept forcing more solar power generation in at the same useless time of day.
Since there were too many generators at lunchtime and not enough customers, the last surviving part of the free market has solved the imbalance.
Just another artificial boom and bust
In 2014, the project cost $2.2 billion dollars. Ivanpah has 173.000 heliostats, and theoretically could make 390 megawatts in a perfect moment. But no one in their right mind would have spent so much to get so little, so the government spent $1.6 billion taxpayer dollars as a “loan guarantee”.
I wonder how that is working out […]
By Jo Nova
Such is the network of the Blob, even here in the last outpost of Western Civilization, in the city furthest on Earth from Washington DC, The ABC Blob TV news made sure we knew that Robert F Kennedy Jnr was a “headache” for Donald Trump, and a guy who believed wild conspiracy theories and hung out with quacks. Yesterday they prepared us for his confirmation hearings by interviewing his cousin. She called him a predator.
What they would not show Australians is a few minutes of Kennedy speaking for himself, discussing medical studies in intricate detail. Apparently Australians don’t need to know that not even one US childhood vaccine was pretested in a long term placebo controlled trial. They just need the family gossip about the man who might be a health minister soon in a foreign country.
This was our national prime time news.
Our ABC Blob TV, paid by us, replayed the Congressional critics, hid Kennedy’s replies, and also hid that Big Pharma money was greasing the palms of most of the critics. RFK Jnr is roughly the Antichrist to Big Pharma, so looking for Big Pharma influence among his critics is the obvious […]
The Guardian
By Jo Nova
The Blob are afraid they will lose even more followers to social media…
Academics and the old dying media have produced a study that “shows” people who believe social media posts are bad people. The message here for believers is that only horrible people get their news from sites like X or TikTok. Those selfish people score badly on civic values.
The trick in this “peer reviewed” propaganda is how they define civic values. You might think it means checking on elderly neighbors, donating to charity, or volunteering at the Scouts, but actually “Civic values were defined as an individual’s belief in democratic institutions “. So if you question parliament or universities you are not a good citizen. The institutions are sacred!
This transparent paper is just a get-out-of-jail free card for sloppy, self serving academics. Mike Benz warned us that the Blob redefined “democracy” as “democratic institutions” in 2016, which meant people could be tarred with the “anti-democratic” brush if they criticized the “essential institutions” of democracy, like elections, insurrections, vaccines, or senile Presidents.
The left destroy the meaning of words to deceive their flock. The right let them get away with […]
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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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