Mystery: Australians invest billions in free wind and solar, but prices rise another 20-30%

By Jo Nova

Last winter’s debacle in Australia could be repeated this year, but at even higher prices.

Despite adding more cheap renewables per person than nearly anywhere on Earth, for some inexplicable reason our retail electricity prices rose 18% last year and are set to rise another 20 to 30% this winter.

Last year was a bloodbath on the wholesale electricity market. Those costs have fed through to retail.

 

AER Australian wholesale electricity prices.

The Energy Minister Chris Bowen blames the Russians, and says we need more renewables.

Shock power bill jump to hammer households

Perry Williams, The Australian

Power bills for households will soar by hundreds of dollars a year from July 1, adding to soaring cost of living pressures as the regulator blamed supply challenges and volatility for the steep cost hit.

Customers in Victoria face a 30 per cent jump on ‘safety net’ prices while households in NSW, South Australia and southeast Queensland will see bills soar by up to 24 per cent.

The Victorian ruling by the Essential Services Commission estimates power costs will jump by $426 for residential customers to $1829 […]

“Climate change” suddenly seems irrelevant: Bank of England drops it, and Biden drills for Big-oil

By Jo Nova

Strange things are happening in the calm before the storm…

Thanks to NewZeroWatch

This week the financial world balances on the edge, and all the old rules have broken. Joe Biden is signing off on an oil drilling program on US soil which he said he’d never do — and it’s one of the largest ever — like building “66 new coal plants”. At the same time the Bank of England is apparently cutting the sacred climate change spending, and has leaked this news to the world.

As someone said on Twitter, “last week was a different country”.

After all these years, climate change has fallen out of the Weekly Hit Parade of Panic.

Bank of England Headquarters, London, photo by Елена Пехчевска

Bank of England Will Cut Spending for its Work on Climate Change

By Ellen Milligan and Philip Aldrick, Bloomberg

Climate programs will slip lower on the central bank’s agenda so officials can focus more on the core operations such as financial stability…

As Dr Benny Peiser of NetZeroWatch says “the risk of costly climate and Net Zero policies have become a bigger threat to the UK’s economy and […]

Silicon Valley Bank was a Big Green Government Ponzi Scheme

By Jo Nova

SVB or Silicon Valley Bank is the US’s 17th biggest bank, or it was until last week when it became the US’s second biggest bank failure instead.

Interest rate rises are supposed to squeeze out the dumbest investments, so it is fitting that one of the first casualties of this boom-bust cycle is a green banker, mostly doomed by loaning half their cash to the same bankrupt Big-Government that created the green improbable fantasy industries which SVB was largely serving.

SVB was a “Green” Banker. We know this, not because newspapers are saying that now, but because of the emergency flares released on behalf of the victims. The New York Times tells us that the collapse of SVB is going to hit green tech hard because SVB clients included 1,550 companies dedicated to “fighting climate change”.

If only SVB had served coal miners or gas frackers instead they might still be in business? The deposits they needed would have kept on coming as the profits flowed in.

David Gelles, New York Times, naturally, misses the whole point:

Silicon Valley Bank Collapse Threatens Climate Start-Ups

In reality, climate start-ups threaten the bank, and climate finish-ups threaten […]

The Censorship Industrial complex — the secret cabal of Big-Government, University, Media and NGO’s

By Jo Nova

Imagine if the national postal service had secret blacklists of people whose mail “should be lost”?

What if the FBI, CIA, or Department of Defence was talking to the postie, and the postie read your letters and threw some out, but not others, and none of the institutions told you they were doing this? Or perhaps the post-office told you point-blank you were banned from sending mail now “because your letters were wrong”.

In this case the “posties” are private organizations, but to all intents and purposes, their network connection and obedience to Big-Government made them, in effect, another branch of the government. The government wasn’t paying the postie direct, but it protected the monopoly of the corporate postie team and gave them a legal loophole to hide in, and the media outlets stopped anyone criticizing the government. It was a Pravda-KGB consortium with filters that worked at light speed, but hidden.

 

“Undeniably, the making of such lists is a form of digital McCarthyism.”

 

Where would we be if Elon Musk hadn’t bought Twitter?

In the latest round of Twitter Files, Matt Taibbi shows how Twitter was not just censoring things that would later turn […]

Brown coal is so cheap AEMO forgets to mention it

By Jo Nova

Many Australians face a 20% rise in their electricity bill this coming winter, so it seems odd that the AEMO* forgot to put the price of the cheapest source of electricity in their last quarterly report. The bid-setting prices for brown coal have been some of my favourite graphs, but this quarter, for the first time a whole energy source disappeared. It would only be another 2 digit number in a 69 page report, yet the average winning bid of brown coal generators on our national grid last quarter is not even mentioned?

The nation faces major decisions about whether to continue to try changing global weather with our power plants. You would think Australians would like to know which fuel produces the cheapest electricity and by exactly how much? I mean, what’s the true cost of cooling Australia by a thousandth of a degree in 2100?

Perhaps the AEMO didn’t like that skeptics spread the message that brown coal could still generate electricity for less than 4c/KWh, or that hydro and gas were seven times more expensive? After all, the head of the AEMO — Daniel Westerman — says we must ramp up renewables to […]

Surprise! 1,000 Pacific and Indian Islands are still *not* shrinking due to climate change

By Jo Nova

A new paper shows islands are young, dynamic creatures, and mother nature is mean. And nothing we see today on Indian or Pacific Islands is unprecedented. All the panic about islands disappearing is nothing compared to what nature does all the time. Indeed, man-made climate change, if it has done anything at all — has been a boon for islands in the last fifty years.

Thanks to Kenneth Richard, at NoTricksZone for finding the paper: Recent Shoreline Changes To 1100 Pacific Islands ‘Dwarfed’ By Change Magnitudes Of The Past

The new paper by Kench et al looked at 1,100 islands across the Pacific and Indian oceans, and even though CO2 levels rose from 325ppm to an apocalyptic 420ppm, the average island got bigger instead of smaller, and only 3 small uninhabited islands completely disappeared. And when we say small, some of the islands we are tracking are mere 30m wide sand spits. Is it really fair to call that an “uninhabited island”?

The world may have Olympic-sized junkets every year because shorelines have moved 40m in the last fifty years, but it turns out that shorelines moved 200 meters before anyone built a coal plant.

This, below, […]

Tuesday Open Thread

9.8 out of 10 based on 11 ratings

Just another warm summer day made to look like hell on Earth 

By Jo Nova

Everything is a PsyOp now: even the weather maps are on fire

Australia has had a mild summer, a mild year, but that’s a reason for another meaningless “hottest” headline. “Millions across NSW suffering through hottest day over two summers“. So outback New South Wales finally gets an average warm summer day and the climate map makes it look like a nuclear meltdown. Since when was 35 degrees C a shade of heat so hot it was black? (That’s 95F).

To put this in perspective, the town of Cobar near the centre of the map made it to 37C today (98.6F). But a few years ago the average temperature for the whole month of February was 37C. Any Cobar resident who feels like 37C is unusually warm, moved there this morning.

If newspapers were not paid agents or religious acolytes for the cult of climate change the headlines would have said “finally a last blast of summer warmth after two cold years”. But that doesn’t sell solar panels.

Just another warm summer day made to look like hell on Earth

No heat? No problem…

Call it color inflation. The value of any color is […]

Free market wins: Subsidies end, and electric vehicle sales collapse

By Jo Nova

The magic of the free market was suddenly applied to EV sales last month. Tax credits and subsidies for electric cars in the EU and China ended on January 1, and sales promptly halved.

So half the entire EV market apparently only existed because governments took money from poor people to help rich people buy EV’s. Everyone wants nice weather in 100 years, but no one wants to pay for it.

Let’s all sing “equity”.

EV sales collapse as subsidies and tax credits come to an abrupt halt

American Journal of Transportation

The global electric vehicle (EV) market is reeling from one of the most dramatic collapses in monthly sales to date, with Rystad Energy research showing that only 672,000 units were sold in January, almost half of December 2022 sales and a mere 3% year-on-year increase over January 2022. The EV market share among all passenger car sales also tumbled to 14% in January, well down on the 23% seen in December.

The US is a ray of hope for the industry. Not because American EV’s are necessarily better but because of “better” government interference:

EV subsidies in many […]

How Larry Fink turned your pension fund into leftist activist machine

 

By Jo Nova

By forcing people to put money into pension funds in a form of investment that they weren’t necessarily comfortable with, governments created vast piles of money that was essentially left unguarded on the beach in a bay with a hundred pirate ships. Sure, there were regulatory agencies and accountants up the kazoo, but money is also power: the paper dollar would get returned to the owner, but the whole time it was out of his hands, its power was being used against him.

In a free market, millions of voters can vote with their wallet. It’s a form of democracy. But for hapless sleepy investors in a pension plan — sometime in the 1980s that power to choose the kind of industries and values they wanted to support was silently given away to a guy called Larry Fink and a few of his colleagues.

Snoozing-at-the-wheel, citizens voted for cheap energy every two years, while their money voted for “ESG” every day. And ESG is the expensive Environmental, Social, Governance kind of electricity which freezes your peas AND corrects the weather (in theory).

The size of the pension funds managed by the likes of BlackRock, Vanguard […]

Hiding behind teenage girls again — so they can’t be ridiculed for saying silly things

By Jo Nova

The Pagan Witchdoctors send forth their girlie pawns

The science is so overwhelming they need 16 year old girls to evangelize for them. The girls are human shields sent to deliver the agitprop and protect it from scrutiny. If a man asks a girl a hard question they’re a misogynist, and if a women does, she’s rude. Grown-ups can’t even laugh at their transparent hypocrisy. That’s bullying you know, say the same people who call half the world “climate-deniers”.

Izzy Cook is the 16 year old version of Greta Thunberg in New Zealand. She unraveled spectacularly as a political leader and a climate star during a radio interview last September. Right after telling everyone that it wasn’t really necessary for people to travel to Fiji because of the climate crisis, Izzy Cook had to admit under questioning that she had just got back from a flight to Fiji. Interviewer Heather du Plessis-Allant laughed out loud at her vapor-thin dedication to the cause. As anyone would.

Apparently Izzy couldn’t really get out of the trip because her parents wanted her to go. Well, shucks.

But now some government Watchdog in New Zealand has declared it was an unfair […]

China approves two new coal plants every week to ensure stability “when renewables fail”

OWID

By Jo Nova

It’s the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth and one country is building six times as much new coal power as the rest of the world combined. But no one cares.

Sinful Australia hasn’t even built a coal plant in 12 long years, but Saint China is approving a new one every three and a half days. One nation is theoretically destroying the world’s corals, creating droughts, floods and bad storms, and making reef fish reckless but no one is gluing themselves to the Chinese Embassy. The same universities who lecture us on carbon pollution are not even boycotting Chinese students. We have to ask — do reef fish matter? Are floods a bad thing?

Either CO2 is just a shiny amulet or everyone who cares about it is functionally innumerate. It could be both.

CREA

Meanwhile on the cat-walks of intellectual fashion shows the Western world’s elite competes to be more concerned than the next guy about the dire problems of CO2. President Xi cheers them on, promises to act, then builds another coal plant.

Constructing 106 Gigawatts of coal power in 2023 doesn’t exactly sit well with President […]

Good News! Jo Nova wins the Dauntless Purveyor of Climate Truth Award 2023

By Jo Nova

What an honor. I am just so humbled to win the Dauntless Award of 2023. I mean apart from the towering giants of the Climate Skeptic world who have already won it, to be on the same page as Walt Cunningham, one of the three Apollo 7 astronauts, who risked their lives for science, is a career highlight. Walt Cunningham helped make NASA what it is, and he could have said nothing, but he became an outspoken skeptic of the way NASA was abusing the trust of the public, and abusing science. He was a fighter pilot and a physicist who flew on the first manned launch after the tragic fire that killed all three astronauts on Apollo 1. Sadly the world lost Walt only weeks ago.

Thanks to Ric Werne for the photo. Click to Enlarge.

 

Other Dauntless winners include Dr Jay Lehr (who helped set up the US EPA fifty years ago and then spent decades working to undo that) and legends like Marc Morano (Climate Depot), Professor Fred Singer, and Christopher Monckton. People who I have learnt so much from.

Craig Rucker announces the award from 25.20. From 28 minutes Heartland […]

Livestreamed Part 2: The True Crisis, Climate Change or Climate Policy?

UPDATE: Jo Nova honoured to be awarded the Dauntless Purveyor of Climate Truth Award for 2023. Previous winners include NASA Astronaut Walter Cunningham (Apollo 7), Dr Jay Lehr, Marc Morano, Christopher Monckton and Prof Fred Singer. More information soon!

___________________

More Presentations Livestreamed from Florida thanks to Heartland and CFACT



Breakfast Keynote – 8:00am – 9:45am ET

Marc Morano is the founder and publisher of ClimateDepot.com. He is expected to give an address about how the global elites are exploiting fears about the climate to gain more power and control over our lives.

Lunch Keynote – 1:00pm – 2:10pm ET

U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) a member of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) is a member of the House Resources Committee.

Dinner Keynote – 6:30pm – 8:00pm ET

This is planned as an “Oxford Style Debate” on the question: “This House Believes There Should Be a Tax on Carbon Dioxide Emissions.” Dr. Peter Hartley will begin with the argument in the affirmative, and Dr. William Happer will bring the argument in the negative. There will be opportunities for rebuttals and questions, and then a vote of […]

Livestreamed: The True Crisis, Climate Change or Climate Policy?

Watch the 15th International Climate Change Conference Live Streamed from Florida

Amazing that with so many billion dollar Science Institutes, free market think-tanks run the best science conferences in the world.

Breakfast Keynote – 8:00am – 9:45am ET Watch Patrick Moore ‘s breakfast keynote speech.

Lunch Keynote – 1:00pm – 2:10pm ET Ian Plimer is a geologist and will give a science presentation. Marlo Oaks is the treasurer of the state of Utah. He will be speaking about his efforts in his state to fight ESG (Environment, Social, Governance) efforts.

Dinner Keynote – 6:30pm – 8:00pm ET Alex Epstein will speak about energy policy. Ken Haapala of SEPP will present the Frederick Seitz Memorial Award to Christopher Essex. Craig Rucker of CFACT will present the Dauntless Purveyor of Climate Truth Award to a mystery guest.

Schedule Below

9.7 out of 10 based on 41 ratings […]

The ecologist who says we *need* huge herds of cows and sheep to stop desertification?

By Jo Nova

Can cows shrink deserts?

Allan Savoury is a farmer from Zimbabwe who used to believe that livestock were destroying the land. He still believes the CO2 scary narrative, but even despite all that, he’s an ecologist who now argues we need large herds moving nomadically to stop desertification.

Years ago he was one of the scientists advising the Zimbabwe government to get rid of lifestock to save the land. In a great moment of ecology they even shot 14,000 elephants for land restoration which didn’t work. That was the saddest blunder of my life, he says. And when he went to the US he found national parks were desertifying too even though they had not had livestock on them. “Clearly we didn’t understand what was driving desertification”. He now claims that the soil of grasslands ends up encrusted with algae, which leads to water runoff and evaporation “and that is the cancer that leads to desertification”.

I’m sure cows don’t change the climate either way, but this sure flies in the face of the idea that livestock create deserts and eating meat destroys the land.

h/t to Notalotofpeopleknowthat

Cows are the missing link?

He points out […]

Net Zero by 2050? We need about 10,000 years of current Lithium production to get there first

By Jo Nova

So much for Net Zero by 2050

Simon P. Michaux calls it “Minerals Blindness” — the inability to see that there are just not enough metals to get to Net Zero.

He is an Australian working for the Geological Survey of Finland. He’s an Associate Professor of Mineral Processing and Geometallurgy, and has added up the tonnage required to convert the first generation of the fleet needed (theoretically) to get to Net Zero. So that’s just 25 years worth of wind turbines, solar panels and batteries.

And then we need to do it all again?

Michaux estimates that we need 944 million tons of lithium alone to go Net Zero (the first time). But at the moment every year we dig up about 100,000 tons a year, or 0.01% of what we need to reach the Net Zero target. Current total known reserves of lithium throughout the world in 2022 are just 26 million tons. Total known (best guess) resources are 98 million tons).* Obviously as the price of lithium rises, we will find a lot more. We haven’t been looking for lithium very long so we may even find ten times as much. But at our […]

Snowy 2.0 could win Prize for Most Globally Stupid Green Engineering Project

By Jo Nova

Tantangara Resevoir: A whole ecosystem to fill with invasive feral fish and a necrosis virus too.

The Snowy 2.0 Pumped hydro scheme will cost families big money, spread pests, endanger fish, and kill trees but it will allow some renewables investors to make a profit, and that’s all that matters right?

Overseas readers are invited to submit more stupid schemes, with points for delays, cost, incompetence, environmental damage and sheer lack of any public benefit.

Ted Woodley does the best synopsis of the Snowy 2.0 debacle I’ve seen, pointing out how it sets all the worst kinds of records, being delayed 300% with costs up 1000%. It was supposed to be built in four years and cost $2 billion, but will end up taking 12 years (at least) and probably cost $20 billion by the time the cost of the extra transmission lines is added in. As readers here know, the boring machines are the slowest on Earth, one having made it only 200m and being paused for months under a pile of sand.

It was supposed to pay for itself, and make electricity cheaper, but is already chewing through a $1.4 billion taxpayer “injection”, […]

Half of Americans believe the media is trying to mislead them, and the people running the USA are “unknown” to voters

By Jo Nova

Most people know

It’s an extraordinary poll and a nation unravelling.

Two thirds of American’s don’t trust the media. Half even think they are actively lying, and don’t care about their audience. Nine out of ten people think the media is politically biased. As the trust evaporates, people are switching off the national news. A vast majority of people on one side of the political spectrum now view the media unfavorably, and while that number had jumped in Republican and Independent voters in the last three years — it is even rising in Democrat voters too.

The Knight/Gallup — Trust in Media and Democracy poll reveals, bizarrely, that more than half of the nation thinks the people who really “run” the country are not known to voters. I don’t think I’ve even seen pollsters ask that question before. Effectively then, it follows that nearly six out of ten people think that Joe Biden is not the one running the country, and the same goes for Congress. Barely one person in five thinks voters are choosing the decision-makers.

It’s not just trust in the media that’s collapsing, but trust in the government, and even faith in the workings […]

University Experts say climate change causes Earthquakes. Let’s stop quakes with solar panels then?

By TheMartian

By Jo Nova

Blame Exxon for the dead children of Turkey, eh? It’s not the corrupt building codes, the crustal plates, or the solar magnetic field. Climate change sets off earthquakes, you know.

A High Priest Ecologist has read the chicken entrails and prophesies that things will get worse. Your car creates earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis — unless it’s an EV. It’s hard to satirize this, it’s too stupid.

Climate change is triggering more earthquakes. Big Oil’s interests are a factor

By Prof İbrahim Özdemir, UN advisor, Euronews

It’s not just earthquakes — it’s tsunamis and volcanoes too:

We do not know for sure what triggered this horrific natural disaster, but we do know there is growing scientific evidence that climate change increases the risk of such tremors, together with tsunamis and volcanic eruptions.

Here comes Occult Science:

“If a fault is primed or ready to rupture, all that is needed is the pressure of a handshake to set if off […] Environmental changes associated with rapid and accelerating climate breakdown could easily do the job,” professor of geophysics and climate hazards at University College London Bill McGuire pointed out […]