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By Jo Nova California was the Land of Solar Panels at the top of the Magic Subsidy Tree but that boom went bust
If solar panels were actually cheap and useful, everyone could have them, they’d pay for themselves, and there would be no point where the panel-party would grind to a halt. But if they were expensive, made something useless, and their product became toxic to the grid itself the government would have to artificially subsidize them to get them onto the grid in the first place, and then pop its own bubble before the bubble popped the grid. And so that time has arrived in California and there is carnage in the market.
The Duck has quacked
In a strange coincidence the Californian government cut the payments for solar-powered-electricity by 75% last year, and sales of solar panels fell to a quarter of what they were a year ago. That’s a “to” not a “by”. One in five solar contractors has already left the market. Careers and businesses — gone.
The new price for solar-powered-electricity is probably slightly closer to the true market value, which is almost zero, or even less for holy-green electricity at noon. The Duck […]
By Jo Nova
Strange sightings of Batman and Robin have been occurring in London
Thousands of ULEZ (Ultra Low Emission Zone) cameras have been installed to record numberplates of offending older cars so their owners can be charged £12.50 for daring to drive a non-compliant car in London. This usually means any diesel car made before 2014 or a petrol car made before 2006, so the fines especially hurt low paid workers, students and retirees.
The two masked crusaders have been seen helping the local bat population by installing homes for them in front of ULEZ cameras. Since bats are a protected species (unlike motorists) once the bat boxes are installed they can not be tampered with nor disturbed by law. Batman and Robin helpfully also place legal notices on the poles so workers coming to fix the cameras know they risk a six month jail sentence or an “unlimited” fine if they so much as touch the bat box.
The bat boxes cost £10.
Bat roosts have legal protection:
Vigilante anti-ULEZ campaigners hang bat boxes on cameras to stop engineers fixing them
By Adam Toms and Rom Preston-Ellis, The Mirror
The £10 animal homes […]
Youtube link
By Jo Nova
Trust us, Kids, We’re Climate ‘Educators’
Tony Thomas has uncovered a plot in Tasmania to turn our schools into leftist activist assembly lines (more than they already are). Luckily it appears to be so boring, no one is watching. (OK, that’s hardly luck, just a fact of life. Beating people up with propaganda is, by definition, and especially after 30 years, not that exciting.) But Curious Climate Schools is still harming children and teachers too, and wasting the taxes of bus drivers, builders and bakers.
In the end, publicly funded academics are shamelessly exploiting eight year olds. They work on their youthful anxiety and naivete (and their dreadful science education) to create political lobby groups which will help academics get more funding. Vote for Big Government! Vote for Climate Change Grants! Write letters to the M.P. you are too young to vote for! It is disgustingly self serving, though all the Doctors of Climate Trauma would be mortified to hear that. They are saving the world, after all. They are the saints who collect salaries. The prophets on academic pay scales.
It’s just Big Government advertising itself, but disguised as “education”:
The […]
By Jo Nova
Two years late: Two legal wins, and a Senate investigation
Two years after police and ambulance drivers were forced to get Covid injections, the Queensland Supreme Court has ruled that the vaccine mandates were unlawful. Because this decision is about human rights, it’s may also apply to other humans (we hope). So lawyers all over the country are sitting up and paying attention.
This follows on from a South Australian decision a few weeks ago where the Employment Tribunal found that an employer (the state government) was liable for any injuries caused to staff by mandatory injections required in the workplace.
And possibly related to all this, in 2022 10,000 Australians died above and beyond the normal rate and no one (officially) knows why. The Australian Senate has decided (on the fourth try, and only by one vote) they can say for sure someone should definitely look into this. This banal, but good outcome was possibly a parliamentary world first — which says a lot about the state of democracies around the world because the same odd patterns of deaths is occurring in pretty much every democracy.
The Labor Party and Greens voted against it, presumably being […]
By Jo Nova
One of the most extraordinary interviews I’ve ever heard. Take everything you thought you knew …
Tucker Carlson talks to Mike Benz who worked in the cyber portfolio at the US State Department. He calmly lays out the dark power of the US intelligence network. This is the inside story of how and why the military industrial censorship complex grew in the last thirty years.
It’s obviously hard to confirm what he says, but we already know Twitter and Facebook were effectively acting as arms of the US government. We’ve got the emails showing they were colluding with US state agencies and the legacy media on a daily basis to cover up government failures and corruption, and to censor Americans. We know the CIA withheld a report on China because it might have helped Donald Trump, and we know the CIA has been feeding the media “misinformation” for 50 years because another insider told us so.
Mike Benz seems to be able to explain so many details on the forces that shaped history.
At first the agencies liked free speech
In 1991 the apparatus of the US State thought the internet and free speech was a […]
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:
The “hockey stick” graph as published in IPCC TAR (Figure 2-20, 2001)
By Jo Nova
Climate deniers must be punished
For newcomers: Michael Mann’s hockeystick graph was wildly different from hundreds of studies of other studies and instantly became the pet graph of the IPCC. It used the wrong proxy, the wrong tree, and the wrong type of averaging. Whole books were written on how bad it was. But when Mark Steyn called it fraudulent Mann sued.
Twelve long years after the case was launched, the six person jury decided that Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg have defamed Michael Mann, but awarded Mann one whole dollar in damages, because he hadn’t been able to prove he suffered any damage at all. Remarkably, though, the jurors felt the skeptics had been so malicious they added punitive damages too. Usually these are limited to a mere four or five times the compensatory damage, but this time it was decided Simberg should pay $1,000 and Mark Steyn $1 million. It sets a new record.
According to Law.com punitive or exemplary damages are saved for truly dreadful acts:
exemplary damages n. often called punitive damages… are damages requested and/or awarded […]
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. […]
By Jo Nova
Now that the Billionaire-Green mask is off, conservatives are getting serious
Scott Waldman at Politico outlines the nightmare scenario where if Trump wins, he might “rewrite federal climate reports” or “install loyalists atop key science agencies” without seeming to realize that’s the Democrats modus operandi of science for thirty years.
No more going wobbly in climate fight, Trump supporters vow
Trump’s campaign utterances, and the policy proposals being drafted by hundreds of his supporters, point to the likelihood that his return to the White House would bring an all-out war on climate science and policies — eclipsing even his first-term efforts that brought U.S. climate action to a virtual standstill. Those could include steps that aides shrank back from taking last time, such as meddling in the findings of federal climate reports.
“The approach is to go back to all-out fossil fuel production and sit on the EPA,” said Steve Milloy, a former Trump transition team adviser who is well known for his industry-backed attacks on climate science.
But as the GOP front-runner, he’s gone back to alleging that human-caused global warming is fake, is baselessly blaming whale deaths on […]
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. […]
Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
For three years they told us it was the most secure election in history, and only deniers would question the result, but a simple poll of voters by the The Heartland Institute shows cheating was widespread in mail-in voting.
In the contest to decide who would control the most powerful country on Earth, as many as 43% of voters cast ballots by mail. If the media pundits care so much about democracy, why didn’t they do a poll like this two years ago? Why didn’t the Republicans or the Democrats? Presumably they knew what they would find.
As David Evans points out, this adds up to 13 million fraudulent votes out of 158 million total, nearly double the difference between the Biden tally of 81 million and Trump result of 74 million. That alone could easily have swung things.
In terms of the future of Western Civilization, it’s hard to think of anything much more important than US election security. Almost all the other crimes depend on who’s writing the rules, or who has the power to set things straight. As Mark Steyn says he’s increasing weirded out […]
By Jo Nova
Our cities are more fragile than we imagine
During the winter storm called “Elliott” last Christmas, gas pipes came close to freezing in New York. The gas shortages are not just deadly themselves in cold weather, but more of the electrical network is dependent on gas now rather than coal, and therein lies double jeopardy. As the gas crisis escalated, so did the electrical one: at its worst there were “90,500 megawatts of coincident unplanned generation unit outages, derates and failures… “. This was on top of 37,000 megawatts of generation that was already out of service, so 127 gigawatts in toto*. Some 18% of the normal resources of the Eastern Interconnection was missing.
At 4:25am on Christmas Eve in North Eastern USA the grid frequency fell to 59.936 Hz, just below the trigger point of 59.95 Hz.
If the gas had stopped flowing completely during the big freeze that lasted five days, water pipes would have frozen, and not only would the water stop flowing out of taps, and toilets stop flushing, but pipes would have burst — rendering thousands of apartment blocks and offices unusable, and possibly water damaged too.
Somehow, like a disaster […]
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 […]
Image by Anwarul Quddus Sikder from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
The thrill of EV ownership in Australia has worn off before it even started
In news that will shock no one, except the Minister for Weather himself, Labor’s plan to have nine out ten new car drivers in an electric vehicle by 2030 has crashed into a mountain of apathy. The latest estimates from the Australian department in charge of guessing these things is that EVs will only be 27% of new car sales by then, not 89%. And the modeling assumes EV’s will be exempt from the usual tariffs and taxes, but finds most Australians would rather pay the extra taxes and get themselves a planet-wrecking petrol-head machine anyway.
Of course, in climate maths, 27% is practically the same as 89% because EV’s may not reduce emissions at all, but since the push to force them on us has nothing to do with carbon emissions, the theatrical chasm in their big plans is a major loss.
That and the dilemma of who will pay for the back up batteries to stabilize the windy wobbly national grid if car owners don’t?
By 2030, after years of propaganda and […]
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 […]
Jo Nova
It seems people only wanted renewable energy if they got cheap loans
Just as the quarterly reporting season revealed crippling losses for wind power and EV’s, so it is with Solar energy.
The general US S&P shares index gained 15% this year but The Invesco Solar ETF (Fund) which invests in solar energy stocks around the world — fell by a dire 40%. Even the US “Inflation Reduction Act” couldn’t save the solar sector. As finances tighten with rising interest rates, apparently solar panel orders are among the first to be cancelled.
Some of the worst performers in the whole US share market are solar shares, with SolarEdge and Enphase losing 70% each this year. A few weeks ago, the CEO of SolarEdge said revenues this quarter were about half of what was expected. He blamed “unexpected cancellations” from European distributors. But US demand was down too. Indeed, the bad news started in California, the largest market in the US, when the government slashed home solar “net metering” payments in April by about 75%. Suddenly, it was going to take 10 years to pay off the panels. Solar panels were a luxury item.
If only solar panels […]
By Jo Nova
Shh! The Monster Banker Funds are secretly saving the World
By sheer coincidence the same day the Australian Treasurer said we’d have to pump up the subsidies on climate targets, a group of largely foreign bankers called for the Australian government to “hurry up with emissions reduction plans “.
The foreign investment bankers market themselves as “Australian and New Zealand investors” but boast they have $30 trillion in assets, which is a bit of a red flag when the GDP of both nations together is $2 trillion USD. It turns out the blandly named Investor Group on Climate Change (IGCC) is only 10% Australasian:
IGCC represents investors with total funds under management of more than $3 trillion in Australia and New Zealand and $30 trillion around the world. Investors welcome the development of internationally aligned climate risk disclosure requirements in Australia. —IGCC Submission to the Australian Treasury Feb 2023
But being 90% foreign doesn’t stop them putting in submissions to Parliament or pretending to be locals. Even The Australian thinks they are Australian:
An Australian investor group representing members with more than $30 trillion in assets says plans being developed by the […]
ABC News
By Jo Nova
It’s just emblematic of your Clean Green Future
Complexity and false hope is eating the crown of Australia’s Net Zero transition — the Snowy 2.0 Pumped Hydro scheme. Things have gone from “debacle” to Soviet Grade Industrial Fiasco. After Florence-the-tunnel-borer got stuck and created a sinkhole, workers spent seven months trying to shore up the ground, playing God against the mountain — pumping in grout, cement and polyurethane foam. But the foam made a gas so toxic the tunnel had to be evacuated. To make things worse the workers were originally told the gas was water vapor but it turned out to be isocyanate. At every point the Snowy Hydro team hid the bad news and issued propaganda, and it’s only taken the ABC a year to tell us the workers predicted the sinkhole, and three months to investigate the safety breach.
Still, that’s better than the NSW regulator who knows all the other safety breaches but won’t even share them, because it’s so bad ” it may affect the contractor’s reputation.” (Which it surely just did anyway.)
This is your low-carbon future. It was supposed to cost $2 billion but the bill […]
By Jo Nova
Just view the BBC as the promotional wing of the Crony-Corporate Deep-State Cartel and it all makes sense
Andrew Montford lays bare the hypocrisy: The BBC won’t call Hamas “terrorists”, even though they kill babies and are legally classified as terrorists. Apparently it’s not accurate and impartial enough for them, and they say it’s a “barrier to understanding”. But the same BBC calls scientists and engineers climate deniers as if it’s the golden path to knowledge.
The BBC are expert namecallers, they know the power of labels and brands, and that’s exactly why they do it. Calling people “deniers” is a barrier to understanding. It stops the public from listening to the scientists the BBC don’t like. The BBC have essentially admitted it in their own words. They won’t use emotive terms like “terrorists” on Hamas because they want the public to hear every excuse those-who-murder-babies say, but they will use emotive, meaningless terms like Denier when it suits them.
The BBC don’t want the public to understand skeptical scientists. That is the point.
Their hypocrisy is deliberate
The science debate can’t even start until the namecalling ends:
…
Andrew Montford: The […]
Like a Brexit moment for the nation.
UPDATE: Australia overwhelmingly votes for No Segregation. 60:40
UPDATE: New Zealand votes to throw out the Labor Government. It’s a good day!
The Labor Government wants to make some changes to the Constitution but they won’t tell us what they are what’s in the legislation that flows from the vaguely worded changes*. Presumably they know we won’t like it, and presumably, most Australians seem to have figured that out.
How, under the sun, did a nation of adults get to a point where we are being asked to effectively sign legal documents that no one has read?
FocalData
Polling from FocalData suggests that the people who live in the high density inner city locations, furthest from disadvantaged Aboriginal communities, are the ones voting Yes. It’s like a fashion accessory. And for Big Business and washed up celebrities too.
FocalData also said: “… our estimates point to a significant loss, and the potential for a realignment in Australian politics that looks quite a lot like the US and UK realignment.”
h/t Neville
*Amended: It’s a blank cheque. The wording of the constitutional change is listed here, giving Parliament and 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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The nerds have the numbers on precious metals investments on the ASX
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