Rishi Sunak eases up on Climate action and suddenly is a lot more popular

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 […]

69% of Republican US voters think the election was stolen

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 […]

Founder says CIA & FBI control Wikipedia and made it “the most biased encyclopedia”

By Jo Nova

The perennial problem: Who watches the Watcher?

The Founder of Wikipedia reveals to Glenn Greenwald that he’s shocked at the bias and that CIA and FBI computers have been used to edit Wikipedia and that the intelligence agencies pay off “the most influential people to push their agendas” or they just develop their own talent within the [intelligence] community.

This is the problem: create something great, and powerful people can take it away, unless checks and balances stop them. But what stops the FBI and CIA — Who do the intelligence agents with guns fear?

Wikipedia Founder Larry Sanger to Glenn Greenwald: “CIA and FBI Use Wikipedia for Information Warfare”

Richard Abelson, Gateway Pundit

Speaking to Greenwald, Wikipedia founder Larry Sanger said that Wikipedia “used to be kind of anti-establishment” but “between 2005 and 2012 or so, there was this very definite shift to Wikipedia becoming an establishment mouthpiece. It was amazing. I never would’ve guessed that in 2001,” when he first founded the site, Sanger said.

Wikipedia became just another version of the left-wing media:

“By the time Trump became President it was almost as bad as it is now”, […]

Labor Party sells out Australia, panders to the UN, to avoid a naughty reef sticker

By Jo Nova

What looks, acts, and smells like an unelected World Government telling us what to do?

The Australian government bragged about getting a six month free-pass from the global UNESCO naughty corner but in reality they were craven patsies to an absurd unaudited, unaccountable foreign committee.

The UN was threatening, as it always does, to lumber The Great Barrier Reef with an “In-Danger” sticker, despite the coral on the largest reef in the world being healthier than it’s ever been since estimates began in 1986.

To avoid the dreaded sticker of reef sin, apparently Labor saved the day by putting in a 43% emissions cut which will kill eagles and bats with wind turbines, plaster the wilderness with high voltage towers, infect the alpine lakes with feral pests and threaten whales with off shore wind plants. (That’s just for starters).

The price to appease the UN apparently includes spending another $1.2 billion to “protect the reef” (which will expand the bureaucrat class) and twisting the thumb-screws of regulation on fishermen and farmers (thus punishing the workers). The UN gave the Australian government a pat on the back for canceling the Urannah and Hell’s Gate dams. Since when […]

Climate extremists go to Woodside CEO’s home to vandalise, intimidate and the ABC is there to help?

By Jo Nova

A local extreme protest has dragged in the national broadcaster to an embarrassing national debate.

Everyone wants to know why the ABC didn’t call the police…

The climate activists turned up at the family home of Meg O’Neill at 6:50 am on Tuesday morning in Perth, Western Australia. They had spray paint and padlocks because she’s the CEO of Woodside Energy which will, in their words “emit 6 billions tonnes of carbon over the next fifty years”. Police say CCTV footage shows they had already done surveillance on the house to find out what time she left for work. O’Neill lives with her partner Vicky Hayes* and teenage daughter and was described as “shaken” by the incident.

For some reason, the national public broadcaster, the ABC, was coincidentally also there to film the likely criminal activity at this unlikely hour, but having filmed it, for some other reason, they didn’t show the footage or even report the incident at all on the ABC News Tuesday night, while it made headlines around the state and was “the biggest news of the day”.

The Australian: ‘Please explain’ for ABC

Woodside on Tuesday pointed to the […]

The beginning of the end of Net Zero?

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 […]

Australians still don’t want to give up steak, cars, gas stoves, or pay much for NetZero

 

Freedom is steak and cars. Picnic at Albert Park Lake, Melbourne 1974 | by Rennie Ellis | NLA

By Jo Nova

How much is The Planet worth?

Polling shows Australians don’t believe there is much of a climate crisis. If they thought the planet would boil, they would surely be willing to spend more than $20 a week.

When it came to other climate-punishments to save the planet, the average person rated giving up meat as the worst option, followed by giving up petrol and diesel cars, and appliances.

The Greens were willing to pay more, but they weren’t so happy about giving up their overseas flights. Doesn’t that say everything? Which will it be, no more polar bears or no more skiing trips to Chamonix?

The truth laid bare in this poll is that Australians have no idea what the real cost of NetZero fantasies are. If they had any idea what the true price was, they’d be livid.

The great success of the green parasites has been to hide the costs of wind and solar schemes

The big message here for the Coalition is that all they had to do to win the last election […]

Most of 667 Greek fires were lit by arsonists, not by your beef-steak, air-conditioner or SUV

By Jo Nova

How many solar panels does it take to stop an arsonist?

For two weeks the global media circus has been blaming climate change for the fires in Greece. But finally, belatedly we find out it’s arson (again) and not because Europe doesn’t have enough solar panels yet.

The way the Guardian reports this, it’s as if arsonists hit Greece every year, but this year was different because of “climate change.” So if your civilization has thrill-seekers running amok, laying waste to land and property, the problem is not law and order, unemployment, or a sense of community, it’s “coal fired power plants”.

Can we stop calling them wildfires when they are synthetic?

Thanks to NetZeroWatch

Most fires in Greece were started ‘by human hand’, government says

Helena Smith in The Guardian

Most of the 667 fires that have erupted across Greece in recent weeks were started “by human hand”, the country’s senior climate crisis official has said.

Kikilias said that, in certain places, blazes had broken out at numerous points in close proximity at the same time, suggesting the involvement of arsonists intent on spreading fires further.

Arsonists are […]

Don’t look now: Accounting trick destroys national economy

By Jo Nova

How to hide $100b storage, transmission lines, battery costs in a dodgy accounting trick

The cost for our whole national $100 billion dollar energy transition apparently rests on a CSIRO report that assumes we’ve already spent the infrastructure money “therefore” future costs after 2030 are almost nothing. It’s like a Nigerian email scam… except that it has fooled our Minister for Energy.

You have been selected to win a new national electricity grid, just give us your economy…

Chris Bowen, said Minister, thinks wind and solar will reduce the cost of electricity, despite them doing the opposite so far.

The CSIRO GenCost report says that renewables are cheap if we pretend we have already spent the money on the transmissions lines, the pumped storage, the “firming” of the grid. It’s like a used car salesman that says the second hand electric car will be cheap to run while hiding the twenty grand you have to spend on a new battery before it can move out the door…

There is a circular reasoning here that says we assume it’s worth spending bezillions now because renewables will be cheap after we have spent bezillions. […]

Silent mild heart damage found in 1 in 35 people who were vaccinated

By Jo Nova

This study could have been done two years ago…

Most of the victims had no idea they were affected and wouldn’t have gone to a doctor to get a blood test.

The new study shows the power of active surveillance for vaccine related injuries. The incidence of vaccine-induced myocardial injury (or heart damage) was estimated from hospitalization data to be 0.0035%. But a new trial which tested everyone who got an mRNA vaccine estimates it’s a thousand times higher or nearly 3%, and possibly much more common in young women than we thought.

As John Campbell says, “it’s off the scale risk in heathcare”. “I would have run a mile”. “The only way you’d take this kind of risk in heathcare is if you were avoiding certain death. It’s complete madness”. Campbell argues that from now on everyone being offered an injection should be warned that one study showed as many as 1 in 35 people got vaccine associated myocardial injury. Otherwise it’s not informed consent.

On the plus side, they told all the people with abnormally high scores not to do strenuous exercise which could put them at risk of a life-threatening arrhythmia. And the cases […]

Freighter with nearly 3,000 cars burns out of control near Dutch World Heritage area

By Jo Nova

Will EV’s cause more damage to the environment?

A freighter with nearly 3,000 cars on board is burning off the Netherlands. The Coastguard is working hard to try to stop the freighter sinking in a delicate environmental area. Only 25 cars are EV’s on a burning ship of 2,857 cars. No one is sure what started the fire, but a coastguard spokesperson told Reuters “it began near an electric car”. Firefighters estimate it may burn for days. Even if it didn’t start in an EV, the EV’s on board change the nature of the battle.

The fire spread so fast sadly one crew member was killed. Seven others leapt overboard and were rescued from the ocean. The ship carried a crew of 23.

UPDATE: As commenter James Murphy suggests — maybe they need to be transported like explosives can be – on the main deck, in a container that can be dumped overboard under its own weight. Just pull a pin or 2… more or less.

I’m thinking “ejection seats” for EV’s?

Just 25 EV’s among 3,000 cars

A freighter carrying nearly 3,000 cars catches fire in the North Sea and […]

European heatwaves: Soldiers died in the heat in 1160, Rivers ran dry in 1303, animals fell dead in 1393

By Jo Nova

Medieval “climate change” was filled with heatwaves, droughts, and crop failures

One thousand years ago, “rivers ran dry under the protracted heat, the fish were left dry in heaps and putrefied in a few hours.” Men and animals venturing in the sun in the summer of 1022 fell down dying.”

It was so hot in 1132 that the rivers ran dry and “the ground was baked to the hardness of stone”. Around 1200 at the Battle of Bela “there were more victims made by the sun than by weapons”. In 1303 and 1304, the Seine, the Loire, the Rhine, and the Danube could all be crossed with dry feet, and they dried up again in 1538-1541. In 1393 and 1394 the crops were “scorched up” and “great numbers of animals fell dead”. In 1625 in Scotland, it was so hot “meat could be cooked merely by exposing it to the Sun.”

And so it goes — history that was known in the 1800’s appears to be disappearing, leaving us with a generation of snowflakes who think they are the only humans who ever faced hot weather. They with their air-conditioned bedrooms, mobile phones and filtered water.

[…]

Feel the panic. Something big has shifted in UK politics

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 […]

The Lancet stretches half the axis and then heat deaths look worse…

By Jo Nova

What do you do when not enough people die to suit your religion? Distort the axis and hope no one notices.

Welcome to government-science, where one of top journals in the world uses graphic design tricks for political convenience. In this graph from the paper, 10 excess deaths from the heat looks “bigger” than 50 excess deaths from cold. Isn’t the whole point of a graph so we can compare the bars “at a glance”?

Björn Lomborg corrected this with chart on right. Doesn’t that tell a different story?

Thanks to Patrick Moore @EcoSenseNow:

The journal “Lancet” published the chart on left with unequal X-Axis* to downplay fact that cold causes 10X more deaths than heat in Europe. …This is disgraceful for a supposedly scientific journal.

Click to enlarge

Björn Lomborg‘s version shows us exactly how important heat deaths are. It’s no small thing. The news outlets are filled with heatwave porn trying to scare people about normal weather, while politicians try to justify spending billions to “cool” the world. These graphs hide the crime — increasing the cost of energy will kill far more than mythical cooling could ever save.

[…]

The Spy problem with not-so-smart solar inverters

….

By Jo Nova

Soon we may have hackable transmitters and receivers on every roof…

When storms hit Adelaide last November the first thing the AEMO did was ask people to switch off their own solar panels so they didn’t swamp and crash the fragile wounded grid. Some 400MW of rooftop PV was also remotely shut down through the combination of smart inverters and voltage controls. Imagine if a foreign power could launch a cyber attack — one that switched a large energy source on or off at the wrong moment?

Last year “a hacker gained access to PV systems in the Netherlands that were operated via a monitoring tool from China’s Solarman“. That meant a Dutch government agency was suddenly called on to investigate and report on the risks. According to PV magazine:

“The hacker was able to view the personal data of Dutch customers, create new customers and delete existing users,” reported Tweakers. “He was also able to find out how much electricity customers’ solar panels generate via GPS coordinates, and download, adjust and upload inverter firmware.”

In May this year a report by the Dutch National Digital Infrastructure Inspectorate (RDI) found that many […]

The cars are winning against the 15 Minute Cities in the UK

Late night road protestor pouring concrete in a former bollard-hole | Youtube

By Jo Nova

Build Back Worse suffers a set-back

It’s hard to believe someone thought that adding artificial blockages to roads would free people from their vehicle-addiction. As if making car trips artificially long, circuitous and inconvenient would teach people to love walking?

It’s part of the 15 minute city plan, where everything was supposed to be within a heavenly short walk from home, so we could give up cars, save the planet, change the atmosphere and get fit too. But the Deplorables didn’t like it.

The idea of a Low Traffic Network (LTN) sounded so apple-pie. Everyone wants fewer cars on the road. So when pollsters asked deliberately ambiguous questions, people would say “yes” they liked the idea. But living with LTN’s wasn’t much fun when it turned out it was their car the overlords wanted to get rid of. And so the protests and petitions began. Under the cover of darkness, people set bollards on fire, attacked them with chainsaws, and even poured concrete in the anchor holes so it was harder to replace them.

But what really seems to have got the attention […]

Greatest emitter in world says it will “follow it’s own path” which means, emissions-on-a-rocket, and no one cares

By Jo Nova

Does the planet matter or doesn’t it?

Today the headlines read “As the world sizzles, China says it will deal with climate its own way“, as if it made sense that the planet could be burning up and the largest emitter was clearly steaming ahead anyway. But no one got too upset in the Washington Post, or anywhere else either.

From a carbon-believer’s point of view this should be the main game, the big crisis, the drama to launch a thousand protests and fund-raisers. But there are no encampments outside the Chinese embassies, no one is calling for boycotts on Chinese goods “until they act”, and no people are gluing themselves to wharves to stop “the boats of doom” loading and unloading.

China’s intentions are pretty clear:

China’s output of carbon dioxide is set to reach a new record high in 2023. It grew 4 percent in the first quarter this year alone.

Apparently China is committed to deadlines but not to a path, or a tempo, or a public plan, or any kind of transparency:

China remained “unwaveringly” committed to reaching its peak in carbon emissions before 2030 and becoming […]

The sudden axing of the 2026 Commonwealth Games probably suits the CCP and the EU

By Jo Nova

Is the Commonwealth Games just another target of the Culture Wars?

The Commonwealth is the largest cultural union of nations across the globe. It includes one third of the world’s population in a group of 56 nations with 2.4 billion people. It could also be the largest trading block in the world, if only member nations wanted it to be that way. And who wouldn’t — well, obviously the EU and the Chinese Communist Party wouldn’t. For them, The Commonwealth is a threat, a club they can’t control, a sleeping giant. It’s kind of an inverse “Belt and Road” — but one that spread democracy and human rights.

Maybe its nothing, but Dan Andrews (premier of Victoria) who signed up to host the 2026 Commonwealth Games, then abruptly sank it, also once signed the state up for the Belt and Road program, which the Federal government blocked.

So we have to ask — who benefits from the shock announcement to cancel the Commonwealth Games?

Why suddenly was an athletic carnival not worth doing for anything less than $7 billion dollars? As The Australian points out, The Gold Coast hosted the Games in 2018 for $1.8 […]

Germany — big and middle size companies leaving renewables paradise

By Jo Nova

Germany is a lesson for the rest of the world

Few countries have placed a bigger bet on “renewables” than Germany, which installed some 28,443 wind turbines, and at its peak in 2016, employed 160,000 people just in the wind industry. But the effect on the rest of the economy is devastating.

The Energiewende Green program was estimated to have cost €520 billion plus and after 20 years of subsidies and effort, reduced fossil fuel use from 84% of primary energy “all the way” down to 78%. And those presumably were the easy wins.

The cost of expensive electricity vandalizes the rest of the economy. The Green policy gamble may change Germany forever. The former economic powerhouse of Europe is coming undone — losing iconic parts to the US and Asia.

BASF — the German historic giant founded in 1865, is the largest chemical producer in the world. In 1913 it bought the new Haber Bosch process that creates ammonia for fertilizer, and thus changed the world — making billions of lives possible. But now, BASF is shifting out of Germany — spending $10 billion on a new plant in China.

Then there is Linde, an industrial […]

Models wrong again: Looks like Climate Change is making rainfall *less* intense globally

By Thomas K

By Jo Nova

Despite twenty years of media stories telling us how every rain-bomb was “climate change” a new satellite study of rainfall suggests that in the last 20 years the intensity of rainfall has mysteriously declined a little in most places. This is despite predictions it would increase, and CO2 itself rising by 41ppm globally during the same period. In terms of total emissions released by humans since the stone age, it’s been a bonanza — in this 20 year period we emitted 38% of all the emissions we ever emitted.

So humans put out 656,000 Mt of CO2 and there’s been either a decline or no trend at all in rainfall intensity.

Is 38% of all human CO2 emissions enough of a test? The satellites cover all the Earth, including the oceans which the met bureau gauges don’t.

Thanks to Kenneth Richards at NoTricksZone for finding this paper:

New Study: 21st Century Precipitation Trends Have Become Less Intense Globally

Hydrological processes were expected to intensify with warming. The opposite has happened.

Per a new study, global precipitation intensity, measured in mm/hour per century, has exhibited flat (large precipitation systems) to declining (medium and […]