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By Jo Nova
Thanks to Elon, many people are wondering “Why Mars?” and the answer might be “mining the asteroids”
Devon Eriksen has the best answer I’ve seen. He compares the race to space with the industrial revolution. Just as wood, coal and oil set us free of lives of manual labor, a whole new set of materials beckon… if minerals that are rare and expensive on Earth can be mined in the asteroid belt, and processed on Mars, all kinds of new tools and toys may follow the boom.
The Earth, Eriksen says, is like a jar that’s been shaken until most of the heavy stuff settles to the bottom. The heavy metals mostly end up in the Earths core, with the lighter stuff on top. But apart from the distance, asteroids have easy access goods, and are split already into handy size chunks, conveniently parked out in the open, far from gravity wells and not hidden under crustal plates, oceans and magma. The rocks under our feet are so much closer but there is a whole planet in the way. It might be a lot cheaper to get the rare metals we need on asteroids than out […]
By Jo Nova
What if a few gigawatts of solar power disappeared without a warning or a cloud in the sky?
Imagine a hostile force had control of half your national power generation at lunchtime and could just flip a switch to bring you to your knees? Or how about a crime syndicate wanting a ransom paid by 5pm?
Steve Milloy: Communist China is setting us up for solar panel-based disaster:
“Solar panels that make the electricity suitable for the power grid and which are usually connected to the web, can be “easily hacked, remotely disabled or used for DDoS [Distributed Denial of Service] attacks.” DDoS is one of the most common types of attacks, which basically try to overwhelm a system… Solar panels were outlined as a vulnerability in several scenarios, also due to the dominance of a single country, China, in the supply chain.”
It’s only a week without electricity…
Daniel Croft, CyberDaily (October 2023)
Cyber Security CRC chief executive Rachael Falk said… that an attack on the solar grid could spark a “black start” event, which could result in the entire power grid going down. … “This […]
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:
Image by yongbo zhu from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
China must be wishing CO2 caused some damn warming
Beijing this month has had the coldest December since they started measuring the cold in 1951. Obviously, this is because of climate change. Any day now newspapers will start to call this the tragic inevitable result of man-made climate change, reminding us of how we need to send money to renewables, and immediately, or we’ll face so much more of this.
Or maybe journalists will forget how they use every freak warm event as free-advertising for the climate religion:
Beijing breaks a seven-decade cold-weather record
BEIJING, Dec 24 (Reuters) – China’s capital Beijing has broken its record for hours of sub-zero temperatures in December dating back to 1951, after a cold wave swept swathes of the country and brought blizzards in its wake, sending temperatures towards historic lows.
As of Sunday, a weather observatory in Beijing had recorded more than 300 hours of below-freezing temperatures since Dec. 11, the most for the month since records began in 1951, according to state-backed Beijing Daily.
Naturally cold snaps are due to natural causes like a polar vortex. […]
By Jo Nova
Two and a half years ago President Xi promised to “strictly control coal-fired power generation projects” in China. Before this solemn pledge the CCP had approved a blockbuster 54 gigawatts of coal fired power plants in just two years. Afterwards, to show how committed they were to Net Zero principles and international agreements, they *only* approved 131 GW. As President Xi promised — he’s “strictly in control” (of a massive increase). He’s also strictly in control of the world’s manufacturing.
After being deceived, the UN, Greenpeace, and Joe Biden promptly did nothing at all — it’s not like the future of life on Earth is at stake. And John Kerry somehow saw only “agreement” and “hope”.
When faced with this environmental catastrophe, the BBC told the world about China’s green power surge instead, and only mentioned the coal in passing as an aside. China had spawned a world record in coal plant construction, but apparently these coal plants are not so bad because many are built on renewable parks, “partly as backup for all the new wind and solar farms”. As if CO2 emissions are neutralized just by the presence of the sacred talisman of “renewables”. It’s […]
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
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 […]
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
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
This is a pre-packed lesson in free speech:
#TheGreatTranslationMovement #大翻译运动 https://t.co/B6CkomLqoI
— The Great Translation Movement 大翻译运动官方推号 (@TGTM_Official) April 3, 2022
How do we know when it’s propaganda — when all the news readers speak with one voice.
What’s the difference between the Western doctors and the CCP-docs? About a year. AHPRA are the communist party of medicine in Australia. Instead of banning doctors who talked about a new form of pneumonia, AHPRA bans doctors who talk about cheap treatments or problems with vaccines. What’s the difference?
9.7 out of 10 based on 92 ratings
Even the worst imaginary scenarios for global warming are nothing compared to a year without electricity. Bunky Mortimer III thinks US priorities are screwed.
Get one at Indiamart perhaps?
The US will spend some $555b to prevent a theoretical warming of a degree or two. A warming which may not occur for a century, if at all, and about which the largest competitors to the USA are doing nothing.
In contrast, a solar Carrington event, one nuclear blast, or a cyber attack taking out just nine interconnector sites could collapse the entire US grid for 18 months.
Which environmental threat matters? The West is in apoplexy over the environmental degradation affecting polar bears, but the environment we need the most right now is the one with fresh water, edible food and a room temperature above freezing.
Securing the grid should be this country’s highest environmental priority
Taki’s Magazine
A prolonged collapse of this nation’s electrical grid—through starvation, disease, and societal collapse—could result in the death of up to 90% of the U.S. population. This figure has not been disputed, yet this prospect has received virtually no attention from policy makers or the media. The […]
Amazing what countries too poor to commit to Net Zero get up to
China’s EAST Tokamak Reactor in 2015
China is the fastest growing nuclear power in the world, poised to have the largest fission fleet by 2030. But it has just scored a bit of a leap forward in nuclear fusion:
China’s Artificial Sun Breaks Record by Hitting 120 Million F in Race for Nuclear Fusion
Robert Lea, Newsweek
The team at China’s “artificial sun” fusion facility—the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST)—have said that on December 30, 2021, they were able to generate 120 million degrees Fahrenheit plasma (around 70 million degrees Celsius) and hold it for 1,056 seconds.
Tokamaks, like the donut-shaped EAST reactor, are often referred to as “artificial suns” as they are devices that replicate the fusion processes that occur within stars.
In the Sun, two hydrogen atoms are bashed together to make one helium atom, plus lots of energy. In stars the temperature only needs to be 60 million F (or 33 million degrees C) for that to be self sustaining, because the pressure is so much higher at the centre of the Sun. Here on Earth, […]
China’s Long March-5B launch*
This should rattle the Wokeness Cage: Russia and China are actively testing the US defences in space on a daily basis. US assets are being harassed with lazers, radio jammers, cyber attacks and even other satellites with robotic grappling hook arms. The Russians even launched a satellite into an orbit so close to a US Security satellite that from the ground people couldn’t tell if it was being attacked, then, in something like a James Bond movie stunt, the Russian satellite launched a little target and shot it, “dangerously close”. That was in 2019. We can see now why Trump set up “Space Force”.
Last week the news came out that China’s space program was going nuclear, and the 1MW reactor would be 100 times larger than the one NASA plans to put on the moon by 2030.
Gen. David Thompson from Space Force estimates China may overtake the US in space by the end of the decade.
So by 2030 the US hopes to reduce CO2 by 50% and China hopes it will command space.
Meanwhile, China is a developing nation that doesn’t need to reduce CO2 emissions at all, and in the […]
As David Rose so aptly puts it, China was digging out record amounts of coal and Xi Jinping did not even turn up to Glasgow but green evangelistas were shaming the West and praising China.
Photo by Christels
Western Environmentalists are being used by the CCP:
‘Useful idiots’ who let China off the hook: Why is there such an apparent lack of concern over their determination to keep burning coal, asks DAVID ROSE
The Daily Mail
Some campaigners even heap praise on China. So why is there such an apparent lack of concern? One answer lies in a book called Hidden Hand: Exposing How The Chinese Communist Party Is Reshaping The World, by Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg. Serialised in the Mail last year, it argues that China has extended its influence over certain institutions in Britain and other democracies in order to blind them to Beijing’s drive for supremacy.
Xie Zhenhua, China’s chief climate envoy worked for a commission in China accused of torture, detention and forced confessions. Did the Green care?
They include Xie Zhenhua, China’s chief climate envoy. Until 2012, he was a member of the central commission for discipline inspection, […]
The GWPF have published a provocative piece by Professor Gwythian Prins, which I highly recommend. One chapter in particular captures the fragile moment around which global affairs is orbiting. The West, comfortable and corrupted, is only just starting to become aware of the duplicity and hostile intent of the Chinese Communist Party.
Excerpts from Chapter 3 below.
The Worm in the Rose Gwythian Prins
War by other means is upon us:
Part III: The security threats of Net Zero
The Chinese Communist Party’s Fifth Plenum text of October 2020, setting out the strategy to 2035, told the nation for the first time in decades to ‘prepare for war’(备战) – meaning in any and all forms. It is true that the Chinese military build-up since 2000 has been relentless and remarkable. However, as we will see, at present we do not face open war, but instead war by other means.
The West needs to be aware of the 36 Strategems from an Era of War
“To Loot A Burning House”
Xi’s tactics are also informed by The Thirty Six Stratagems from the era of the Warring States, a manuscript which is probably a little older than Sun […]
Yet again Australians vote for something and get the opposite. Toss the idea out of the airlock that this has anything to do with science, trees or weird weather. In a world of corruption and superpowers there are bigger forces at work.
As I said a week ago —the Net Zero pledge was apparently tit-for-tat for nuclear submarines. We get their subs; they get our promise to cripple-our-grid. Which sounds bizarrely unlikely, as if we needed more solar panels to fry the foreign frigates, or more windmills to foil their radar. As if, lord help us, a 0.0001 degree cooler climate will make us harder to invade? Sure. No one ever went to war with a solar powered tank. (Though NATO is thinking about it.)
Read Scott Morrison’s freaky words again. Join the dots. He told the party room that “climate change action had become a key pillar of the western alliance” which means AUKUS (or Australia-UK-US for foreign readers), and that “…there were economic and security imperatives in transitioning to a carbon neutral future.” He also said we need the western alliance “now more than ever”. In the same flavour, just today we hear suddenly that taxpayers will spend […]
Were those hypersonic missiles carbon neutral?
Spot the odd one out: China has half of the worlds coal power fleet and the fastest growing nuclear power in the world. It is the world’s major manufacturing power, and has been for 11 years. It put a rover on Mars, has astronauts in its own space station (it’s third) and has flown to the far side of the moon.
But it’s a developing country and while all its largest competitors are giving up their cheapest electricity source, China isn’t even turning up in Glasgow and hardly anyone really cares.
China emissions exceed all developed nations combined.
“The country is currently running 1,058 coal plants”
BBC News
China says that missile was just a spacecraft:
Now China also has surprising weapons.
China tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic weapon two months ago, making strides with the technology that surprised and alarmed U.S. officials, according to a media report.
In August, China launched a Long March rocket topped with a hypersonic glide vehicle, which ended up missing its target by just 24 miles (39 kilometers) or so, The Financial Times reported on Sunday (Oct. 17).
The […]
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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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