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By Jo Nova
And so we arrive, a nation of people looking at TikTok as they cruise down the freeway
This week, our national energy policy is an Agony-Aunt letter — poor Alexa, 21, has been suffering from ‘climate anxiety’ since she was 15. Instead of asking her grandparents (who don’t rate a mention) she dreams of telling her grandkids that she did “everything she could”. Everything, that is, except for talking to her own grandparents, listening to climate skeptics, or seeking alternative views.
Instead of doing her homework, she gate-crashed the PMs promo event so she could be used as emotional bait in a battle between the deep-state-banker-blob and the workers. She probably thinks she’s on the side of the workers (though she’s also probably never met one).
Channel Nine reports on her mental health disorder in the middle of an election campaign, not to help her heal, but to exploit her to push for the climate policies, and political winners that Nine shareholders probably want. See their first line. It’s not “news”, it’s political advertising.
Alexa, 21, has been suffering from ‘climate anxiety’ since she was a teenager. She’s not alone
Young voters are forming […]
By Jo Nova
“Follow the science” they say, right up until they destroy it
In August 2021, as the masses were being coerced and cajoled into vaccinations, the government announced a gigantic long term study with 10,000 Australians that would run for five years. They promised they would include the vaccinated and unvaccinated, and generate 100,000 samples, and 11 million datapoints. No stone would be left unturned to make sure the vaccines were safe and effective. “The Science” was being used to reassure the people.
Less than two years later the data must have looked terrible, because they suddenly stopped the study. They muttered something about archiving the data until more funding was available. (Sure, sure). Now, they want to quietly destroy the data and make sure no one can ever use it, or find out the secrets it hides with an FOI application. The cost of the entire project was $20 million, a pitifully small fraction of the $18 billion we spent on Australia’s Covid 19 treatment experiments, and it’s nothing compared to the human cost of suffering involved. Now, we’re trying to save a few dollars because the National Archives can’t afford to buy another 8 Tb […]
By Jo Nova
Trump switches on the giant dormant coal infrastructure of the US
In the last twenty years 770 coal turbines have been switched off in the US, and Donald Trump wants to turn as many back on as he can.
Any moment now President Trump is expected to sign an executive order that will boost coal mining, keep old coal power stations running and restart shuttered coal plants. The word is that the US government will define coal as a “mineral” which allows him to use presidential wartime authority to speed up approvals for coal mines, and to bypass environmental red tape and even prioritize exploration and mining on federal lands.
US agencies will be told to rescind any policies that aim to “transition away from coal” or “otherwise establish preferences against using fossil fuels”. The country with the largest known coal reserves in the world is now planning to increase coal exports.
Furthermore Trump will ask the Energy Department to consider whether coal should be listed as a ‘critical mineral’ — something described as a ‘coveted status’ which activates even more emergency powers.
Shares of coal companies in the US are up 11 to 18%, and […]
By Jo Nova
In a brave election promise, the Australian Labor Party want poor people to help pay for batteries for rich Australians.
The discount battery deals will only be suitable for people wealthy enough to own a home with solar panels, and who happen to have ten thousand dollars sitting around that they don’t want to use or expect any return on for nearly a decade. There can’t be too many of those.
The true cost of home batteries is about $13,000, so the $4,000 discount still leaves a big bill. And the savings for electricity bills are estimated to be around $1,100 per household each year. So no one comes out ahead for nine or ten years, and that’s assuming their battery is still useful at age ten or eleven, and their house hasn’t caught fire.
This policy isn’t a winner for the rich or the poor. Because batteries are essentially uneconomic, the policy screws the whole country. The only beneficiaries are the solar and battery installers and Chinese industrialists. Them, and the politicians who got us into this mess. To avoid admitting they were wrong, they’d probably like to trick Australians into buying the batteries that […]
By Jo Nova
All that stuff about a 1 in 100 year flood, they have no idea
It turns out the worst flood on the Rhine was not in 2024 but in 1374. On the Severn, in England the worst year for “climate change” was 250 BC. Obviously neither of them were due to man-made oil and gas.
A thousand news headlines have said modern floods were unprecedented, or were 1 in 1000 year events, or were caused by “climate change” and they were all based on just 120 years of data (or less), and they were all wrong.
For some reason, even though climate change is the most important thing on Earth, hardly any researchers were looking for evidence of long term extreme flood events. When researchers finally studied the sediments left at many sites — they found evidence that many ancient floods were just as bad or even worse. At least 12 times, ancient peak river flows were bigger than anything we’ve seen in the instrumental record. (And they’re just the ancient floods we know about, imagine if we put more scientists looking into fluvial sediments?).
The only thing unprecedented about modern floods is the gall of scientists […]
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 […]
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