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By Jo Nova
We’re on the precipice of a radical experiment with a national electricity grid
The AEMO (manager of the Australian grid) has finally released the major report on problems coming in the next ten years on our national grid, and it’s worse than they thought even six months ago. They euphemistically refer to the coming “reliability gaps”. They could have said “blackouts” instead, but a gap in reliability sounds so much nicer.
Bizarrely, the lead graph of the 175 page AEMO report goes right off the scale, mysteriously peaking in the unknown and invisible real estate off the top of the chart. And they’re not projecting troubles fifty years from now. Those cropped peaks of invisible pain hit from 2027.
And even the pain we can see is apparently quite bad. Two states are already likely to breach “the interim reliability measure” in this coming summer. Ominously, just one day after releasing the report, the AEMO is calling for tenders for “reliability reserves” in South Australia and Victoria. Apparently, they want offers of industries ready to shut down who aren’t already on the list, and they want spare generation too — get this — even asking […]
By Jo Nova
Suddenly a lot of people in London are realizing what “Net Zero” really means
Nigel Farage at the Ulez protests in London
This week many Londoners are waking up to the impact of living in an Ultra Low Emission Zone as the £12.50 daily charge for unfashionable cars begins in the outer poorer suburbs.
Normally “climate change” costs are secretly buried in bills, hidden in rising costs and blamed on “old unreliable coal plants”, inflation or foreign wars. Your electricity bill does not have a category for “subsidies for your neighbors solar panels”. But the immense pain of NetZero can’t be disguised.
For a pensioner on £186 a week it could be as much as an £87 a week penalty for driving their car — or £4,500 a year. The Daily Mail is full of stories of livid and dismayed people who served in the Navy or worked fifty years, who can’t afford to look after older frail Aunts or shop in their usual stores now, or who will have to give up their cars. People are talking about the “end of Democracy”. The cameras are expected to bring in £2.5 million a day in […]
By Jo Nova
Vivek Ramaswamy worked in the pharmaceutical industry. Now that he’s free to speak, he distills the utter corruption of the FDA in under four minutes, it is beyond redemption, rotten to the core. “That’s’s why I favor a dramatic drastic gutting of the FDA…” — he says. Exactly…
He’s a great speaker:
Seriously… How do you argue this? He’s right. https://t.co/pQHjerGzLl
— Shawn Ryan (@ShawnRyan762) August 29, 2023
From his Twitter feed: “The corrupt FDA says you don’t have the right to even *try* medicines that haven’t been through 10+ years of testing, yet the government *mandated* Covid vaccines that sailed through FDA approval in less than 1 year. You can’t believe both things at once. Countless FDA regulations and actions are hypocritical, harmful & unconstitutional. I will rescind them accordingly, using the Supreme Court’s holding in West Virginia vs. EPA as my legal basis for doing so. For years I was coached by industry veterans not to speak out against FDA. It’s well known that if you anger FDA, they will punish you by blackballing review of your drug review applications. “FDA never forgets” is a quietly-whispered, well-known pharma industry adage. […]
Written by Jo Nova
Would you like PFAS with that?
Wouldn’t you know — to make paper straws resistant to water, it seems we have to add Teflon type chemicals that stick around for thousands of years.
Researchers analyzed 39 brands of straws in Belgium and found two thirds contained PFAS, and the paper straws were the worst. Fully 90% of all the paper straws contained some form of PFAS. 80% of Bamboo straws did too, as did 75% of plastic straws. Even 40% of glass straws contained PFAS. The only type of straws that were free of it were steel.
The UK, Canadian, Belgium, New Zealand, and Australian governments banned plastic straws, as did some US States because “they were bad for the environment”.
Paper drinking straws may be harmful and may not be better for the environment than plastic versions
Science Daily
In the first analysis of its kind in Europe, and only the second in the world, Belgian researchers tested 39 brands of straws for the group of synthetic chemicals known as poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).
PFAS were found in the majority of the straws tested and were most common […]
Written by Jo Nova
Are we paying attention yet?
The BRICS nations (in red, below) have just accepted six new members — Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Argentina, Iran, Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates (green). The block now includes 46% of the population of Earth. They make 43% of the worlds oil, and about a quarter of the traded goods. The BRICS are going to abandon the US dollar and another 20 nations have expressed a desire to join. The India Narrative, called it “a new world order”.
In other news, the BRICS groups said they’d quite like the West to keep giving them money and free climate technologies to save the world from climate change, (while the West battles the climate demons and hobbles its own economies). The BRICS promise they will absolutely, definitely, maybe get serious too in a few decades.
While they’re busy burning record amounts of coal, they oppose any trade barriers done by the developed world in the name of climate change. We wouldn’t want things like pollution, child labor or slavery to get in the way of a good trade would we?
When President Xi brags that they are the “global majority” it’s just […]
£9,500 for a 1970 Hillman Imp Super? | Photo by Riley from Christchurch, New Zealand
By Jo Nova
Say hello to the new ideal car for your ultra low emission city, not an EV but a fifty year old Hillman
Many Londoners are suddenly discovering how much they love old vintage cars, especially ones from the pre 1983 era, which just happen to be exempt from the £12.50 a day new carbon tax. The old cars are selling at a premium, and London may soon become the Old-Car-Mecca of the world. Who knows? This may not have been what Sadiq Khan was aiming for when he tried to force everyone to buy an EV or catch a bus. But it’s what happens when you bully people.
The much hated Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) starts on August 29th and people driving petrol cars older than 2006 or diesel cars from before 2015 are likely to end up paying £12.50 every day just to drive in London. Vintage cars older than 40 years are exempt.
h/t MrGrimNasty
Londoners snap up classic cars to dodge ULEZ
Eirian Jane Prosser, The Daily Mail
Londoners are snapping […]
By Jo Nova
The current state of the Renewable Crash Test Dummy Transition
Everyone who can add up in Australia knows it can’t work, but the climate of fear stops them saying so. Last month a senior energy industry executive told the Australian Financial Review quietly that everyone believes [the 2030 target] will be missed, but nobody wants to say it. Apparently, even executives are being coerced into silence for fear of retribution. The insider referred to the “discretion” Ministers have on project approvals. It’s like a national mafia racket: “Nice business you have there — shame if you couldn’t get the permit”. So the Labor Party sets itself up to fail by silencing the people it could be listening to — as if the electricity will still be there when the turbines stop turning.
To put the size of the moonshot in perspective, even Federal Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen himself said the nation must “install 22,000 500-watt solar panels every day for eight years along with 40 seven-megawatt wind turbines every month”. In toto, we are supposed to build 44GW of “renewables” by 2030.
Instead of this frenetic pace, renewable energy investment ground to […]
Fifty years of the French Nuclear Industry
By Jo Nova
The dismal, destitution of our national energy debate
You would think our former Chief Scientist would know how to do basic research before commenting in the national news?
Alan Finkel says Australia probably couldn’t build one nuclear plant in less than twenty years, because the UAE took fifteen years. But fifty years ago the French built 56 nuclear plants in just 15 years. Isn’t that relevant and shouldn’t we at least mention that? At the time, the population of France was 51 million — twice what Australia is today. So pro rata, Australia could be aiming for 26 reactors.
If we ask nicely, perhaps we could borrow the old 1973 plans? The Messmer plan was launched in response to the oil crisis and the French started construction on three plants in the same year. The slogan they used was “In France, we do not have oil, but we have ideas.”
In Australia, our slogan it seems, is we don’t have oil, but we buy solar panels from China.
In a similar vein, two weeks ago Sweden announced it would be building 10 new nuclear reactors by 2045. With […]
By Jo Nova
Now they tell us: …big spending on renewables needed, says report
Australia must find $1.5 trillion by the end of the decade to meet 2050 green targets in an effort experts say would need to mirror the reconstruction of Europe after World War II.
— By Nick Evans, The Australian
Until five minutes ago (or at least the last election), wind and solar power were the future — they were unstoppable because free energy paid for itself and was getting cheaper every year. (Cheaper than free!) Now, we’re out of the mists of the fairy garden, a few passengers on the top floor of the Carbon Bus can see the cliff coming. Suddenly we’ve gone from “it’ll save money” to needing $1,500 billion dollars or 1.5 million suitcases of a million dollars each, which is quite a lot in a land of 26 million people. It works out to be $57,000 each from every man, woman, pensioner and baby, and we need it in the next 7 years. So that’s a quarter of a million dollars from every family of four.
Nevermind about a house or a holiday, if we’re […]
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 […]
Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
The Government is not afraid of misinformation, they are afraid you will speak the Truth
Add your submission by August 20th
Misinformation is easy to correct when you own a billion dollar news agency, most academics, institutions, expert committees and 25% of the economy. The really hard thing, even with all that power and money is to defend an absurd lie and stop people pointing it out. Like for example if you want to spend a trillion dollars of taxpayer money using power stations, cars and steak sandwiches to change the global weather. For that, you need the Ministry of Truth to force the falsity on the serfs.
The best way to deal with misinformation is to speak better information.
Let the court of public opinion decide. There is something profoundly arrogant about the assumption that 26 million brains are too stupid to figure out the truth when left to their collective free debate.
The proposed Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) misinformation bill is truly the draft that Mao or the Politburo would have admired. Effectively if you are government “approved” (institutional, […]
By Jo Nova
Any which way you look at global drought measures in the last 120 years this is not the CO2 doom scenario of the IPCC prophesies either in rainfall patterns or in water supplies. The graphs below show rainfall trends shifting slightly due to unknown forces and looking for all the world, like CO2 is irrelevant. Despite the scare campaigns about floods and droughts, and the threats of climate wars over dwindling rivers, there has been no trend in hydrological droughts since the Wright Brothers first flew a plane.
Kenneth Richards at NoTricksZone reported on Shi et al, a paper which looked at trends from 1902 to 2014 in all nine climate zones of the world.
The first graph shows a mixed bag of trends in Meteorological Droughts, none of which are obviously linked to human emissions of CO2. Remember, half of all human emissions since we crawled out of caves has been emitted after 1995. According to CDIAC fully 250,000 Mt of CO2 was emitted up to that year, then we have doubled that in the years since then. If CO2 was a planet transforming molecule, surely we’d see something in the last 25 years?
The […]
By Jo Nova
The plan: The hapless homeowners will buy the back up battery for the grid and install it in their garage. Sometimes they might drive it too.
Instead of solar and wind investors paying for the storage they need to produce useful reliable electricity, the plan, apparently, is to force the people to buy electric cars then use their batteries to save the grid instead. When someone plugs their car in to charge, the grid or their house might draw electricity out instead. It’s called two-way-charging, bi-directional charging, Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) or Vehicle-to-Home.
There are moves to make this happen in California, Australia and Europe. There have already been 170 trials around the world costing millions of dollars to try to figure out how to do this. Clearly it’s a big agenda.
Repeated charges and discharges must shorten the life of the battery, and possibly inconvenience car owners too if they get caught without the fuel in the tank. What if there is family emergency at 11pm? (Well, you can catch a cab.) As well as this, every EV added to the grid is like adding “3 to 20 new houses“. Energy losses with batteries are around 20% […]
Photo by Toby Elliott on Unsplash
By Jo Nova
We need to know: Can We Stop Volcanoes with Solar Panels?
Quick set up a summit. Give me a grant. Climate Change causes more rain (except when it causes more drought), and apparently the weight of “up to” four meters of monsoon rainfall can compress a crustal plate leading to earthquakes.
Now, four meters of rain means a lot to a pitiful 1.8 meter homo sapiens, but it’s hard to believe a plate of rock 30 kilometers thick would care less or even notice. It’s all absurd.
The whole article, written by a “Reader in Physical Geography” at Coventry Uni makes out the climate change is all around us, but unwittingly depends on the idea that the Sun is just a big torch shining on Earth, and not a raging nuclear magnetic dynamo 300,000 times bigger than the planet, blasting us with charged particles at a million miles an hour and with a magnetic field that stretches past Pluto. Poor Dr Blackett with his 20 years of university education was never taught about the Sun. He has a pretty graph pointing out some correlation between earthquakes and monsoons but […]
By Jo Nova
A second big Australian “Pumped Hydro” scheme is crashing on economic rocks…
The Marinus Link cable was meant to spark a glorious renewables boom and make Tasmania “The Battery of the Nation”, instead it will cost more than a new advanced coal fired plant, provide no energy at all, and currently even the thought of it is causing chaos. New projects are on hold, factories can’t expand and Tasmania is held hostage to visions of an electricity grid designed to stop storms instead of generate energy.
The Marinus Link is a 255km cable that was supposed to be the second interconnector from Tasmania to the mainland. In theory it would cost $3 billion and carry 1.5GW of electricity. But the costs have blown out to $5.5 billion and the State Premier is balking at the new bill.
However, most of the new wind power projects in the state are awaiting the magic cable before they commit — without it, they can’t reach the real market, which is mainland Australia. But without them, the local grid doesn’t have enough surplus capacity to cover the lean times (or rather, without the cable, they can’t get access to more reliable […]
By Jo Nova
Whatever you do, don’t let the punters know the corals aren’t collapsing.
Wise Hok Wai Lum
Last year, the Great Barrier Reef had blockbuster levels of coral cover, and this year it’s the same, even though global carbon dioxide levels rose 1%, and China probably installed another 100 coal fired plants. The corals, apparently, don’t care.
The Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) issued a press release, calling this repeat record a “pause”.
“A pause in recent coral recovery across most of the Great Barrier Reef” — AIMS
Last year only 3% of Australians knew the Great Barrier Reef was in record good health, and AIMS seemingly wants to keep it that way.
If this survey showed the reef was in record poor cover for a second year, would they call it a pause in recent damage? The lies-by-omission are still lies. AIMS is deceiving the taxpayers who pay for AIMS.
AIMS
It’s a disaster, again. How will scientists get research grants to manage a reef that looks after itself?
Peter Ridd is scathing:
“The fabulous condition of the reef demonstrates that the public has been systematically misled by many […]
BohunkaNika
By Jo Nova
Imagine giving an enemy the ability to track your VIPs movements and listen to their conversations in the car? Adversaries could learn national secrets, play mayhem on the markets with insider tips or just figure out who was having an affair with a view to blackmail and extortion. Worse, what if your adversaries could electronically upload software to your vehicles and shut down even 1 car in 100 on the major national highways — bringing the road network to a grinding halt?
Where is James Bond when you need him? This would have been a great script.
Thanks to NetZeroWatch:
China To Crash EV Market and Paralyse Motorists in UK
Michael Curzon, European Conservative
A new report warns of a major impending security risk in handing Beijing the power to immobilise thousands of cars owned by Britons—and many others across Europe. Professor Jim Saker of the Institute of the Motor Industry, quoted in The Times, said “the threat of connected electric vehicles flooding the country could be the most effective Trojan horse that the Chinese establishment has.” There would, he added, be no way to prevent Chinese state-owned manufacturers from […]
By Jo Nova
The man is a soldier — Ian Plimer has put out three new books at once, written in three different styles at three different levels.
Volume 1 is written for primary school children and uses body functions such as food and farts to show the carbon cycle and demonstrates that net zero and carbon neutral are impossible. Volume 2 is for secondary school children and deals with the basics of climate change, renewable energy and EVs in a humourous, irreverent, slightly seditious and entertaining style whereas Volume 3 for post-secondary school children deals with the history of the planet’s climate changes and how climate policy will have a profound negative effect on their generation.
The book is aimed at parents and grandparents all over the world who might want to deprogram children from the barrage of propaganda that children are exposed to at school, in the mainstream media and on social media.
Order through Connor Court
9.8 out of 10 based on 80 ratings […]
By Jo Nova
It’s like a light has switched on in UK politics
Who would have guessed that voters like their gas guzzling cars? Well everyone would, of course. Which is why it defies explanation that both sides of politics ignored this for so long. But a phase change is underway…
After the Uxbridge by-election surprise, Rishi Sunak suddenly talked about being pragmatic on the road to Net Zero and said he would “Max Out” the North Sea Oil reserves. He vowed to review the “low traffic neighborhoods” (the bossy bollard program) and said he was on the side of the motorists. Since then he’s apparently leapt from -2.7 in net satisfaction polls among Tory members to +20.7, a leap of 23%.
Thanks to NetZeroWatch for keeping us informed:
Rishi Sunak’s popularity surges as he toughens net zero stance
Jack Maidment, The Telegraph
Last month, Mr Sunak’s popularity among the Tory grassroots sunk to its lowest level since he took over at No 10. He received a net satisfaction rating of -2.7 – …But the premier has bounced back in the latest survey of party members, with a score of 20.7 …
A separate […]
By Jo Nova
We’re at an extraordinary moment in history. Of Republicans, 69% now believe Biden’s win was illegitimate. In spite of a relentless propaganda campaign, as many as 38% of all US voters think that “Biden did not legitimately win enough votes to win the presidency”. Think about how devastating that is to a democracy. Rather than dealing with this, CNN calls four out of ten Americans “election deniers” which perversely works to endorse Trump’s claims of the “Fake News Media”.
Despite the censorship, despite the indictments, or actually because of them, the deep pervasive sense that democracy itself is broken is widespread.
Campaign ads like this will not only tap into that but grow it.
This Trump campaign ad is pure Fire. 🔥🔥🔥
Vote for Trump and Stop Globalism. 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/2fjxYymjfV
— Freedom 🇺🇸🦅 (@PU28453638) August 4, 2023
…
This ad is a call to arms to face down the name-calling, the bullying and intimidation. It’s a great strategy to undermine one of the biggest tools in the Big-Government program:
Never give up.
*Headline corrected from Six out of ten Voters to 69% of Republicans.
9.9 out of […]
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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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