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The clean green future doesn’t have much room for wilderness
By Jo Nova
John Constable puts some numbers on The terrifying scale of the green revolution in The Spectator this week.
Ponder just the scale of the Sophia Offshore industrial wind plant being built off the UK. The wind is free, but to collect enough of it to power 2% of the country, the UK will have to build 100 wind turbines, some 200 kilometers out in the North Sea. Each blade is 108m long and weighs 65 tons, or about as much as a semi-trailer. When the wind blows hard enough, about 200 tons of matter will rotate above the ocean. The box holding all the spinning parts together weighs another 500 tons and needs to be suspended 140 meters up in the air over the waves and during storms.
Each of the 100 turbines will reach 250 meters high, which is “only 60m short of Britain’s tallest building”. So much effort and so little to show for it.
To make sure the whole thing doesn’t fall in the drink with the first stiff breeze, the turbines need to be weighed down with more than a thousand […]
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
There’s a revolt in British politics
Conservatives-in-name-only have suffered the biggest wipe-out in 200 years. Reform UK has won four seats so far, with only about 11 seats not finalized. They’ve done this in a mere matter of weeks, with no funding, no branch structure and in a snap election. From nowhere they won 60% as many votes as the Conservative Party that was the UK government. That is really extraordinary. They are running second in “hundreds of seats” which means that in a first-past-the-post system, they could pick up as many as 6 million votes but only convert that into a small number of seats. But by polling so well across the UK, they represent a large political force. Both older establishment parties will be wary of losing more voters. As the third biggest force in British politics they will change the behaviour of the two major parties in a way that is not reflected in the seat tally.
Ponder that Reform UK won more votes than the Lib-Dems, but at the moment the Lib-Dems look like winning 70 seats, compared to the Reform tally of 4 seats. There is a huge unmet desire in British […]
By Jo Nova
Call it an anti-subsidy to kill the product the customers want, and call it an anti-tariff to help foreign manufacturers
The Suicide of The West continues apace.
All around the West governments are concocting rules that force car manufacturers to sell a certain ratio of EV’s to petrol cars. In the UK if they breach the ratio they’ll be fined a savage £15,000 for every petrol car. In other words, if customers don’t voluntarily want to buy as many EV’s as the government thinks they should, the rules will force the car manufacturers to restrict the petrol car sales. Obviously, what’s left of the free market will pay big money for the rare and desirable petrol cars that are permitted to be sold. Soon only the wealthy will be able to afford them, while the riff raff have to catch a bus.
One Ford manager is helpfully telling the world what these rules mean:
Ford threatens to restrict petrol car sales to meet the UK’s EV targets
By Tom Jervis, Auto Express
Introduced at the start of this year, the ZEV mandate requires manufacturers to ensure that a minimum percentage of their […]
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 […]
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 […]
By Jo Nova
The war on the poor has become a war on surveillance cameras
The ULEZ “Ultra Low Emission Scheme” in London will force drivers in outer London to pay a draconian £12.50 daily ULEZ fee when the scheme expands to their area from August 29th. But many of these people are poor and can’t afford to buy a new car or pay the fee. People who own diesel cars older than 2015 or petrol cars older than 2006 will have to pay the fees, so this will hurt the poorest people the most. Not surprisingly, this is very unpopular, as it has a large impact on some people’s lives. Tradies are wondering if they should give up their business, and older people are already being forced to sell their cars. Healthcare workers on late night shifts may end up trying to get home to outer suburbs in the dead of night on sparse bus routes. Everyone inside the ULEZ zone will also end up paying more to get tradies from outside the zone to come into it.
This affects a lot of people, and perhaps as many as 850,000 vehicles registered in London are not compliant. The RAC […]
By Jo Nova
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak
The seismic shift in UK politics that started with the Uxbridge byelection continues apace. It’s the dawning realization that anyone who tries to gift wrap Climate Pain at the election is a sitting duck if their opponents only oppose it. As fast as Rishi Sunak backtracks on Green sacred promises, the Labor Party is working out that their green flank is exposed to election winning missives.
Writers in both The Telegraph and The Financial Times in the UK are suggesting it’s “the end” — the political collapse of the open support for a reckless race to NetZero from both sides of politics. CNN reports that Rishi Sunak is “stoking a culture war on Green policies”. Hallalujuh. Since Uxbridge, “leading Conservatives have gleefully picked up the anti-green baton.” They’re taking a “populist approach to the climate”. Glory be! How dare they, in a democracy, do something that’s popular?
Thanks to NetZeroWatch
Starmer is about to be humiliated by the global retreat from Net Zero
SHERELLE JACOBS, The Telegraph
Tories aren’t just playing politics. The geopolitical ground is shifting beneath the eco fanatics’ feet
This […]
By Jo Nova
UK surprise byelection “shows why conservatives must stand against NetZero”
The Telegraph UK
Suddenly conservative Cabinet Ministers, who formerly cheered on green policies are telling Rishi Sunak, the British PM, to back off a bit on Net Zero. This phase shift is so deep, even the leader of the Labor Opposition is warning his Labor counterpart Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London to “reflect” on his expansion of the ULEZ car tax zone to outer London.
ULEZ is the Ultra Low Emission Zone, where a tax of £12.50 a day applies to high emission cars. Naturally, this hurts poor people with old cars living in outer suburbs much more than the inner city cafe latte set who can afford an EV and luxury religions.
The key point, perversely, is that Conservatives managed to barely hold onto Boris Johnson’s old seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip. What apparently astonished the political masters was that the campaign to protect car drivers from the Mayor of London’s NetZero punishment was much more popular than they expected. The Uxbridge win plays against the backdrop of two whopping losses in other seats. The message is that salvation may yet arrive […]
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 […]
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 […]
By Jo Nova
People are waking up to the dark side of the Absolute Zero plan
The totalitarian wet dreams of a UK government consortium of academics are lighting up the internet. As Benny Peiser and Andrew Montford from NetZeroWatch say — people are starting to pay attention in a big way:
The realities of Net Zero are also hitting home for the general public. The threat that the project represents to livelihoods and liberties is becoming more evident by the day. Recently, the mathematician Norman Fenton tweeted an excerpt from a Government-funded report that set out what Net Zero U.K. might look like: no airports, no shipping, no beef and lamb to eat, and most food imports eliminated. Sounds grim, doesn’t it? Lots of people thought so, and the tweet went viral, garnering over three million views.
The Prof Norman Fenton thread that got 3.4 million views on Twitter is, would you believe, about a 2019 UK Government funded research report. Who knew the masses could get that excited about a 31 page prehistoric report on energy policy, but holy-cajoley: it’s a wake up call of just how savage the Absolute Zero plan aims to be. […]
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 […]
By Jo Nova
Wade Allison has done a short but devastating analysis for the GWPF. The take home message is that the energy contained in the wind is diabolically more erratic than most people realize. It’s just basic physics and almost no one in politics seems able to comprehend just how impossible these numbers are. If only they would “follow the science” eh?
Thanks to Paul Homewood at Notalotofpeopleknowthat.
The exponential death of affordable electricity
It’s just physics. The power of the blowing wind increases by the speed of those particles cubed which produces a twin engineering nightmare. If the wind doubles in speed, the energy goes up by a factor of 8 (or 2 × 2 × 2, and we need to spell it out), and if it slows by half, the energy drops eight-fold. It’s bad both ways. At high speeds, the mechanical engineers have to turn off the turbines to protect them, and at low speeds the electrical engineers have to ramp up power stations that may not exist, or pray to Gaia for batteries that will never exist.
Allison has a graph showing the total output of all the wind turbines in the UK and Europe […]
By Jo Nova
Arecleoch Wind Farm | Mary and Angus Hogg.
While British people can’t afford to warm their own homes in winter some Scottish wind turbines are being rotated and de-iced with warmth from diesel generators which also leaked some 4,000L of diesel. Since this was due to a cabling fault, presumably the other shivering wind turbines are maintained with mains power?
If giant turbine blades sit still too long, the bearings can generate permanent Brinelling damage. Alternately micro-oscillations or vibrations can cause False Brinelling. Small metal fragments then grind more of the metal around it, reduce efficiency, and increase the friction, the heat and the fire risk. It’s a couple of the hidden costs of maintaining a vast network of infrastructure to collect low density energy. Coal turbines must be slowly rotated too, to avoid the shaft bending, but coal turbines run for months at a stretch without stopping. One coal turbine can weigh up to 600 tons, but wind turbines nacelles usually weigh 100-300 tons, but can weigh up to 700 tons)*. The largest wind turbine blades can weigh 35 tons each. The power-to-maintenance ratio of wind turbines is absurd.
The wind turbine industry today […]
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 […]
By Jo Nova
Zion Lights
If we don’t teach our children how to spot cults and con artists they might grow into adults who lie on roads, tie themselves to cranes, and throw soup on a Van Gogh. Those who benefit from Climate “action” are exploiting mentally ill people.
A lady with the unlikely name of Zion Lights was once a spokeswoman for Extinction Rebellion but quit and is now speaking out about their brainwashing, destructive behaviour, and the way they never seemed to want to solve climate change.
“The whole thing was a masterclass on how to manipulate emotions”, she says. She was told to “cry on TV” and bring her children to protests. Fellow activists there were so brainwashed some were sure they were going to die before thirty, and the leader of the movement, Roger Hallam offered them salvation, preyed on their guilt, compared himself to Gandhi and MLK and called himself a prophet. But was rude to followers, wouldn’t listen, and really didn’t care about “the people” at all. Ultimately, while he talked about armageddon, “he did nothing to prevent it” she said.
The hypocrisy finally got to her. Ms Lights wanted to talk […]
By Jo Nova
The core baseload of the European grid is in trouble, and there is no back up. If the rest of Europe had enough coal or nuclear power, this wouldn’t be so bad, but they were all too worried about heatwaves in 2100 they forgot…
Half the French Nuclear Fleet will not be back in time for winter and there is no other nation that fill the gap. | Photo by Spiritrespect.
This is bad news for Europe. Half of France’s nuclear power fleet were already out of action and EDF was hoping to bring “all of them” back online for winter. But they’ve just announced that at least four plants they planned to restart will suffer a major delay. France’s electricity prices have hit €1,000 per MWh for January delivery. (Which is a blockbuster $1,500 AUD).
France’s large nuclear fleet is normally a major exporter of electricity, referred to as the “backbone” of the whole European grid. Blackouts are not only being forecast in France, but there is growing recognition that they are now more likely in the UK too. Where else will this spread?
To make matters worse, a week ago, a pipe ruptured […]
By Jo Nova Just as Joe Biden cancelled Keystone on his first day, the new UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak canned Fracking on Day one. He was appointed on Tuesday and the fracking ban was reinstated Wednesday. It tells us exactly what his top priorities are, and perhaps also tells us what the real unforgivable sin was that Liz Truss committed. There are a lot of vested interests that would hate to see fracking start in the UK. The horror, after all, would be if that cheap gas started to flow and people in the UK got used to it, and realized micro earthquakes were, well, nothing. How would anyone cork up those wells after the war? If a few old coal plants restart it’s no big deal, they can be shut down again. But if shale gas “was trialled” there’d be no going back.
Fracking shale gas turned the US back into an energy giant. For the last month or so, there was the stark danger that the UK might get energy independence too, but then Rishi Sunak arrived to save the day, or rather to save a few houses from theoretical seismic events so small that people would […]
By Jo Nova
Give this man a medal. Prof Norman Fenton explains this so well. If this technique is widely used, then it is a scandal. It is so utterly dishonest, so obviously wrong. If groups really are using this to report “efficacy” where were all the Professors and medical agencies we pay to protect us? Perhaps there were other efficacy studies which didn’t do this? Shouldn’t our universities, the FDA, the CDC, the TGA, and the Chief Medical Officers be the ones to point out this problem, and in real time, not 18 months later…
As a piece of science communication this short video is excellent. The only thing lacking is the list of where exactly this technique is used.
In the first two weeks after vaccination researchers call people “unvaccinated” which leaves room for all kinds of naughty statistical games. By switching infected people from the vaccinated group to the unvaccinated group, or reclassifying them, they introduce a selective bias which will “show” that the vaccinated are less likely to catch Covid, even if they are exactly as likely to catch it.
UPDATE: How many studies misclassify the vaccinated in the first two weeks? […]
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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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