Farmers win: Major EU backdown on farming emissions and regulations

By Jo Nova

Farmers win the day after mass protests

Thousands of farmers in tractors and trucks protested in the Netherlands, Germany, France, Ireland, Sweden, Portugul, Greece and Spain. Farmers in Poland are planning to block the Ukrainian border. The French farmers held Paris under siege, blocking roads, pouring manure everywhere and leaving supermarket shelves empty, then after they won some concessions from President Macron, they kept on driving to Brussels and did it all again with help from farmers from other countries. The EU is the target.

The thing that made this so potent was not just that the farmers had heavy equipment that moved obstacles and drove over barriers, they also had huge public support. Something like 80 to 90% of French citizens supported the farmers and were willing to put up with the inconvenience. Then to cap it off, EU elections are coming in June, and they only happen once every five years. The Greens look like they will do badly. That people like Geert Wilders can win in national elections must have shocked the politerati class. But right wing governments have been elected in Italy, Sweden, and Finland too.

This looks like a major win. […]

“Shocked”: Far right climate deniers get more votes than any other party

By Jo Nova

Everywhere there are free and fair elections and a politically biased media, people will be shocked.

What does “far right” even mean when it applies to a quarter of the population?

. ..

It means name-calling is embedded in our vocabulary. Geert Wilder’s party has won 37 seats in the Netherlands election with 24% of the vote — more than any other party. There are 150 seats in total in the Dutch Parliament, so it’s not clear what the final winning coalition will look like. What is clear is that environmentalists hate it:

‘4 years of climate change denial’: Dutch environmental groups react to far-right election swing

by Ian Smith, EuroNews

Environmental groups have expressed shock and promised climate action in response to Dutch election results. Wednesday night saw the historic victory of the far right Party for Freedom (PVV).

“We are shocked,” Extinction Rebellion Netherlands says. “This outcome will likely mean a rollback of climate measures, new fossil investments, exclusion of marginalised groups, and more.”

If far-right applies to a quarter of the population, and the Greens appeal to a much smaller slice, it’s only fair they be […]

90% of new car sales in Norway are EV’s — but fuel demand has only fallen 10%

By Jo Nova

Yet another reason EV’s are a lousy way to “save the world”

The point of all the subsidies, the charging sites, the $3,000 parking fines, the extra generation, interrupted journeys, pot-holes, road-wear, tyre pollution, collapsing parking lots and random fires is supposedly so that we make the weather nicer by burning less fossil fuels. But in Norway where the biggest experiment in EV’s has produced an “idyllic” mass uptake of EV’s, the fuel use has hardly changed.

Rystad Energy says that this shows we *must* electrify the buses, tractors and trucks too, but really this just shows what a waste of money all the past subsidies were.

If the “low hanging fruit” subsidies didn’t achieve much, the next round of subsidies will have to waste stupendous amounts of money. Remember this doesn’t include fuel used to power the electricity cars, nor the fuel used to mine the lithium and build the EV, or to fill in the potholes and rebuild the bridges. No one even knows if EV’s will reduce carbon dioxide. “There’s no such thing as a zero emissions vehicle”.

This is just “road fuel” we’re talking about and it’s not reducing it much:

Is […]

To condition people to censor themselves…

Image by Gerd Altmann

By Jo Nova

Matt Taibbi talked in London about what he and Michael Shellenberger found in the Twitter files. He realized the free speech battle has evolved into something new — where reality is altered and people are coached into forgetting what they saw, and censoring themselves. A kind of mass digital brainwashing.

In the Twitter Files there was a sinister pattern of “deamplifying” people’s true stories, their experiences, and then deamplifying the person themselves. Running parallel with this was a program to reduce our language, our world into a polarized one-nil, good-bad, us-them division where all shades of complexity were extinguished — so people who had vaccines but didn’t like mandates were anti-vaxxers, and people who had some vaccines, the injured, the unvaccinated — were all “anti-vaxxers”. This was a dystopia George Orwell predicted — the binary existence where there are no shades of gray. There is no safe middle ground. There is only rightthink and wrongthink.

The Elite War on Free Thought

Matt Taibbi, Racket News

Michael and I are here to tell a horror story that […]

Sweden axes Renewable Energy Targets, shifts back to nuclear power

By Jo Nova

Sweden has thrown away the sacred renewables talisman and opened the escape valve from the Temple of WindySolar-Inc. They’ve done the obvious thing anyone who was worried about CO2 would have done in 1992 — aimed for nuclear.

They have switched their 100% “renewables” target by 2045 to a 100% fossil-free target. It’s still a pagan antipathy of the sixth element of the periodic table. But at least it’s a more pragmatic version.

Sweden topped the EU list for renewables share of energy in the last tally — albeit with mostly biomass and hydropower. It was a star of the renewables set — number 1 on the Climate Council list of the “11 countries leading the way“. Yet here they are effectively giving up on the unreliable generators. Surely this must hurt?

The team at NetZeroWatch applaud the Swedish shift, and suggest the UK follow.

Sweden adopts new fossil-free target, making way for nuclear

Florence Jones, Power Technology

Sweden’s parliament adopted a change to its energy targets on Tuesday, which will see it become 100% fossil fuel-free by 2045.

The change means that nuclear generation can count towards […]

Bad news for electric planes — batteries only last “a few weeks”

By Jo Nova

Once again, batteries just aren’t living up to hopes and dreams. Only a year ago Rolls Royce were excited about the nine-seater P-Volt electric plane — forecasting that it would be carrying customers on ninety mile hops in 2025 and 250 miles by 2030. Alas, it must have been a sobering year. The developers of the P-Volt have pulled the pin indefinitely and decided to wait until battery capacity and weight improvements make it realistic.

The P-Volt made by Tecnam

Pioneering electric plane shelved as batteries only last a few hundred flights

Howard Mustoe, The Telegraph

A pioneering electric plane developer has shelved development of its new craft after discovering that its batteries will only last a few hundred flights before they need to be replaced.

Tecnam said its main challenge was the energy density of the batteries available today, which are relatively too heavy for the amount of power they can store.

The speed at which the batteries would lose charge would erode the nine-passenger craft’s value, ruining its commercial prospects, it added.

“Not commercially viable” could be name for most Green engineering.

What do we […]

Climate Lockdowns Begin for the workers: France bans short flights for passengers but not private jets

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 […]

UN NetZero cartel wants to make Insurance Firms into “Climate Police” but giants are fleeing

By Jo Nova

Make no mistake, the UN “finance” cartel is the supermassive black hole at the centre of the climate-mafia galaxy.

The UN Environment Programme brags that across insurance, banking and investing, it has over 450 members representing more than $100 trillion dollars worth of carrots and sticks to beat up politicians and businesses with. These are the cogs and levers of the halls of global power.

Image by Amy from Pixabay

It’s a UN programme, but the first “target setting” rules were launched at Davos at the latest World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting — the skiing holiday for corporate rulers and their celebrity minions. The Big unelected political powers holidaying with the richest people in the world. Democracy on a barbecue.

In 2021 many Insurance giants had rushed to join the global climate activist cartel designed for their industry — the Net Zero Insurers Alliance (NZIA) — which would have turned the insurance industry into another form of climate police answerable to the UN or the WEF. But it’s all coming undone now, thanks to the 23 US States who are pressing the Antitrust button. I mean, imagine if all the competitors in an industry got […]

How the foreign funded climate cabal bought Germany to its knees

By Jo Nova

Only two men were central to the Green policy stranglehold that cripples Germany today, and one has just been sacked. But look at how easy it was for foreign interests and activists to influence bizarrely suicidal national policies, and how they used the age old art of nepotism.

Eugyppius

A vast foreign-funded climate cabal with a death grip on policy is currently fighting hard to crash the Federal Republic of Germany with no survivors

The international press has maintained near-total silence on the escalating insanity of what is happening in Germany. Media outlets that routinely celebrate German progress towards energy transition don’t want you to know that Europe’s dominant industrial power has entered a deeply destructive political and administrative spiral from which it may never recover. The fault lies with the self-defeating and unworkable energy policies that have a death grip not merely on the Scholz government, but on the entire administrative state.

Germany leads the way in the big green experiment

At one point last winter 12% of the entire Germany GDP was being consumed in the energy crisis. Factories are leaving Germany because energy prices are unbearable, but […]

The French are leading a nuclear power alliance in Europe and threatens to block the Renewable Energy Directive

By Jo Nova

The EU is fracturing over energy, and not a day too soon…

Signs of hope. Just as Germany recently pulled the pin on the EU’s Electric Vehicle mandate, France is now threatening to scupper the EU’s new Renewable Energy Directive unless they include a role for nuclear power. It was supposed to be signed off on Wednesday. Despite nuclear being the only reliable baseload source of “Net Zero” energy, France has had to fight for its inclusion at every step.

France is gathering 16 European nations into a Nuclear Alliance

World Nuclear News:

France’s Minister for Energy Transition, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, brought together her counterparts from member countries of the Nuclear Alliance on 16 May at the Ministry for Energy Transition. A total of 16 countries were represented. In addition to the host country, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia and Sweden, plus Italy with observer status, were represented. The UK was present as a guest country.

“Nuclear power may provide up to 150 GW of electricity capacity by 2050 to the European Union (vs roughly 100 GW today),” the […]

A map that might change the way you think about the world

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 […]

Green revolution coming undone on the rocks of reality in Germany

Emden, Germany by Gritte, @gritte

By Jo Nova

Germany is at the leading edge of the climate wars and the Greens are starting to lose both in polling and policy. Despite the claims that the energy crisis will push everyone into renewables, one year later, the dominant energy source for German electricity is coal, up by eight percentage points to 33% of generation.

While the world is supposedly caught in a renewable rush to 2030, the German government just announced it will build 25 gigawatts of gas powered plants by 2030 so they are there when “when [the] wind and sun do not provide enough”. And this week Germany is doing a backflip on their recent EU deal to ban sales of petrol and gas powered cars by 2035. It appears now they will ban the ban, rather than the car, and Germany has the power in the EU to do that. Though it’s not freedom to buy any car you want, but quixotic car loophole.

It’s still a mess of awful, subsidized craziness in a futile quest to control the clouds — but there are signs it is getting less crazy.

Thanks to NetZeroWatch for the links:

[…]

Great Reset unravels? Germany is thinking of using Green subsidies on weapons of war instead

By Jo Nova Remember how the war with Ukraine was going to accelerate the green energy revolution?

The Flakpanzer Gepard needs more ammo, not solar panels. Photo By Hans-Hermann Bühling

For some reason, unreliable wind and solar power are not helping German industry build more tank ammunition. Instead, the federal government is allegedly talking to the state governments about taking green subsidies and spending the money on factories to build shells instead. And they are building those factories near the coal plants.

Just a couple of weeks ago, the chief of Germany’s army warned that sending weapons and arms to Ukraine has left military stockpiles “bare”.

Germany led the way in the great Green Energiewende transformation spending in the order of €32 billion a year, every year, in a quest for green electrons. Instead of creating peace on Earth and better weather, it just made the legendary economic powerhouse of Europe weak and vulnerable.

Tell the world, if the Germans can’t run a nation efficiently on “renewable” power, who can?

It’s perhaps not the Reset Klaus had in mind:

Great Reset Fail? Germany Mulls Diverting Green Agenda Cash Aimed at Killing Coal to Arms Industry

Kurt […]

What looks, acts and smells like a Global News Cartel and just got hit by an Antitrust lawsuit…

By Jo Nova

What if the news media formed a global monopoly to control the news?

Imagine if the media and tech giants of the world banded together behind-the-scenes to rule certain stories were “misinformation” and all their agencies thus reported the same “news”?

That’s what the Trusted News Initiative aimed to do — decide what ideas were and were not allowed to be discussed.

It’s like “free speech” but without the free part.

Not only could the media bury things but they could get away with it if no upstart competitor could red-pill their audience.

It would be the death of the Free Press

In a world like that the people would be ruled mostly by whomever it was that decided what was “misinformation”. Those controllers would be the defacto Ministry of Truth.

We all saw it happen over the last three years, so it’s good to put a name on the beast, but even better, Robert F Kennedy is suing them for anti-trust violation.

Trusted News Initiative, TNI,

The Trusted News Initiative is everything journalists should hate. It’s basically there to “protect” voters from hearing about things like the Hunter-Biden Laptop, good climate news and […]

Memo to Minions: You will be allowed to eat crickets to save the climate says EU

By Jo Nova

The headline is a PsyOp all on its own. You didn’t know you were not allowed to eat crickets and powdered mealworm larvae before. Rejoice in a freedom won:

Europeans now also allowed to eat cricket powder and small mealworms

Retail Detail

The European Commission declares new insect products safe for consumption. So from Tuesday, powdered house crickets and the small mealworm will also be allowed in food.

Back in February last year, the European Union announced that three species of insects would henceforth be allowed for human consumption: the migratory spider cricket, the yellow mealworm and the house cricket. Now the European Commission is adding several more insect products to the authorised list…

Insects, they tell us, are “highly nutritious” in a vague non-specific way that does not list a single nutrient which we can’t get enough of at the moment. Instead the main, “unique” selling point is that if we eat crickets we might slow storms eighty years from now:

Insects are also seen as part of the transition to a more environmentally friendly and plant-based food system. The creatures emit less greenhouse gases, have a lot […]

Record breaking DNA shows Mastodons roaming a hot North Greenland 2 million years ago

By Jo Nova

Kap København is almost the closest point there is to the North Pole on dry land.

The survival of some DNA for two million years is astounding all of itself — breaking the record for oldest known DNA by nearly a million years. Before this, the oldest DNA was thought to be 1.2 million years — beyond which all the global DNA of all the species that ever lived was assumed to be dissolved into unreadable mush.

But now we have found enough of the ancient code to identify a whole ecosystem on the northern edge of Greenland that no one expected to find. Apparently giant elephant-like Mastodons were wandering the far northern parts of Greenland — practically as close as they could get to the North pole without swimming.

At the time, the world was not just 1.5 catastrophic degrees warmer than today, but a full nuclear 10 to 17 degrees hotter.

Strangely life on Earth wasn’t suffering the sixth mass extinction.

Discovery of world’s oldest DNA breaks record by one million years

ScienceDaily

The incomplete samples, a few millionths of a millimetre long, were taken from the København Formation, […]

NetZero impossibility point? Europe’s renewable wonderland now can’t make solar, wind, batteries or EV’s

By Jo Nova

The impossible conundrum: Going Netzero cancels your ability to get to Netzero

The industrial death spiral grows: Europe is the king of renewables and it’s also got the most expensive energy in the world making it impossible for the EU to make the things it needs to get to NetZero.

The EU lost their solar panel factories to China years ago, and the wind industry was worried they were going the same Sino way the solar industry went. A few months ago, the Vestas chief admitted that they were losing money on every wind turbine they sell. (Good thing their orders were collapsing, eh?)

Now the Volkswagen chief warns that things are so expensive, it soon won’t be viable to make electric cars and batteries in Europe either — which must be a bit of nasty surprise given that they just started building the first of six planned battery factories in Europe.

How fast those balance sheets change…

Naturally, the whole industry is calling for more subsidies. Obviously they can’t ask for what they really need, cheap energy.

‘We are treading water:’ An energy crisis is grinding European industry to a halt as the U.S. and […]

Twitter is back: Accounts start being reinstated, Trump, Peterson

Far from being destroyed overnight as the Australian ABC told was possible, Twitter has come to life. Banned Twitter accounts are reappearing like Jordan B Peterson.

Elon Musk ran a poll on reinstating Donald Trump which was pulling in a million votes an hour at one point. Elon Musk then declared that Donald J Trump’s account will be restored. And it appears to be live, though missing 75 million followers, and Trump himself, who still says he’ll stay on Truth Social.

Elon Musk tweeted, “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” which means “the voice of the people is the voice of God.’

….

It’s is encouraging the vote was evenly split. It suggests Twitter might be able to be able to be a “town square”.

However the Corruptocracy that depends on censorship are not finished yet, and an EU spokesman said Musk will have to open his algorithms (did the EU demand this of the last owners?). Thierry Breton the EU’s internal market commissioner said Musk will have to “fly by our rules” and that he will have to increase the number of moderators in Europe. Breton said “we will have control, we will have access, people will no longer […]

Now they tell us: Wind power giant says it was a mistake to say renewables would only get cheaper

by Jo Nova

For years they told us that the green transition would deliver cheap energy, and that if we just subsidized them enough, prices would keep falling. The promise of free energy on the horizon led whole nations (stupidly) to believe that closing coal plants was viable. But now that damage is done, suddenly the Vestas chief admits that telling people that wind can only get cheaper “was a mistake”.

“Vestas CEO says industry went too far with cheap-energy pledge”

Vestas Wind Turbine

There is carnage in Europe. Orders and profits are collapsing. The largest wind turbine manufacturer in the world has already raised prices by more than 30% this year but despite that, expects its profit margins to shrink to “minus five percent”.

Lucky their orders are down since they are losing money on every turbine.

The fall in sales landed as inflation bites, supply lines are squeezed and their costs are rising. (After all, wind turbine factories can’t run off wind turbines, they’re paying for expensive electricity too). So suddenly Vestas need to raise their prices even more, and their CEO is hoping a belated apology will somehow bring their market back.

Renewable […]

Nordstream gas pipeline apparently sabotaged with “explosions” and three huge leaks

“It’s difficult to imagine it could be accidental”

The leaks are massive

Indeed “leak” does not seem like the right word.

@JavierBlas

The explosions are marked with stars.

The sites are 75 kilometers apart just outside official Danish territory.

Euronews –– Swedish national broadcaster SVT reported that national seismologists had registered “two clear explosions” around the area, first at 2:03 AM and then at 7:04 PM (CET) on Monday.

Hours after the explosions, coincidentally, Gazprom also warned that one of the two remaining major pipelines to Europe was at risk due to a legal dispute over fees. Gazprom was refusing to pay a transit fee that the Ukrainian energy firm said it was supposed to pay.

At this stage everyone is saying the leaks are sabotage, but no one is claiming to know anything for sure. The US government has said it is ‘ready to provide support’ to Europe.

So, below, this is quite an awkward flashback, to say the least. It’s from February when Joe Biden was trying to talk Russia out of invading Ukraine:

Biden: “If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream […]