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A Semi-Competent Report On Energy Storage From Britain’s Royal Society

By Francis Menton | Manhattan Contrarian | September 28, 2023

If you want to power our modern economy on intermittent renewables (wind and solar), and also banish the use of power from fossil fuels and nuclear, then the only option remaining to make the grid work reliably is energy storage on a massive scale. And then it turns out that energy storage on the scale needed is enormously costly — almost certainly so costly that it will in the end sink the entire “net zero” project.

Failure adequately to address the energy storage problem is the fatal defect of nearly all “net zero” plans that are out there. For an example of a thoroughly incompetent treatment of this problem, you might look at New York’s so-called “Scoping Plan” for its mandated “net zero” transition. This Scoping Plan was issued quite recently in December 2022. As examples of its stunning incompetence, it almost entirely discusses the storage problem in the wrong units (watts versus watt-hours), and regularly posits the imminent emergence of magical “dispatchable emissions-free resources,” that have not yet been invented, to cover the gaps in wind and solar generation. The people who issued this Plan have no idea what they are doing, and are setting up New York for an energy catastrophe some time between now and 2030.

But now along comes a report from Royal Society addressing this energy storage problem in the context of Great Britain. The Report came out earlier this month, and has been brought to my attention by my colleagues at the Global Warming Policy Foundation. The title is “Large-scale energy storage.”

Having now put some time into studying this Report, I would characterize it as semi-competent. That is an enormous improvement over every other effort on this subject that I have seen from green energy advocates. But despite their promising start, the authors come nowhere near a sufficient showing that wind plus solar plus storage can make a viable and cost-effective electricity system. In the end, their quasi-religious commitment to a fossil-fuel-free future leads them to minimize and divert attention away from critical cost and feasibility issues. As a result, the Report, despite containing much valuable information, is actually useless for any public policy purpose.

On the plus side of the ledger for this Report, the authors use the correct units to calculate the amount of energy storage needed to back up intermittent wind and solar generation; and their arithmetic appears correctly done as far as I have checked. Also a plus is that it takes them almost no time to conclude that there is essentially no possibility that battery technology will ever be able to solve the energy storage problem for a nation’s grid powered by intermittent sources, no matter how much the technology may improve and no matter how much its costs may decrease.

But then there are the negatives. The authors share the conceit of all green energy advocates — and of all central planners everywhere — that their models and projections have anticipated all costs and problems of their massive schemes. And thus, they think, they know all the answers to how this will work, and can dispense with the tiresome need for any physical demonstration project to prove function and cost. And then there is the discussion, or lack thereof, of ultimate cost to the consumer of these grand plans. The treatment of this subject is inadequate, and characterized by what appears to be an effort to divert the reader’s attention from the subject before too many questions are asked.

But let’s start with some pluses. This is from the “Major conclusions” section of the Executive Summary, page 5:

Wind supply can vary over time scales of decades and tens of TWhs of very long- duration storage will be needed. The scale is over 1000 times that currently provided by pumped hydro in the UK, and far more than could conceivably be provided by conventional batteries.

Go to the body of the Report, and you find that the authors have collected data on generation from wind and solar sources Great Britain over a 37 year period, 1980-2016. Those data show that the intermittency problems of wind and solar generation are far worse than even I had thought. In additional to diurnal and even annual cycles, there prove to be periods of relatively low wind that can persist literally for years. To deal with such situations requires putting huge amounts of energy in storage and then keeping it there for years, maybe decades, in anticipation of these low wind years.

Here is one of my favorite charts from the Report. It depicts the storage balance in a hypothetical 123,000 GWh storage facility for Great Britain over the 37 year period 1980 to 2016. The storage balance never goes much below about 80,000 GWh during the 23 year period 1984 to 2006 — which might have led the incautious to conclude that about half as much storage would be sufficient. But then there was a big low-wind period from 2009-2011:

The authors describe the situation as follows (page 31):

Figure 13 exhibits two striking features. First, a study of the 23 years 1984 – 2006 would have found a storage volume very much smaller than found by studying 1980 – 2016. Second, there is a very large call on storage in the period 2009 – 2011 which reflects persistently low wind speeds that lead to the large deficits seen in figure 2 (some of the energy that fills these deficits would have been in the store since 1980). These features reinforce the conclusion that it would be prudent to add contingency against prolonged periods of very low supply and the possible greater clustering of 2009 to 2011-like years.

As a result of observations like this, the authors, I think correctly, conclude that batteries are completely out of the question to solve this problem. The only storage medium that could conceivably work would be a combustible chemical substance that can be put in massive underground facilities for decades. Only two possibilities are out there — hydrogen and ammonia. And ammonia is far more expensive and far more dangerous. So that leaves hydrogen.

Since hydrogen is the one and only possible solution to the storage problem, the authors proceed to a lengthy consideration of what the future wind/solar/hydrogen electricity system will look like. There will be massive electroayzers to get hydrogen from the sea. Salt deposits will be chemically dissolved to create vast underground caverns to store the hydrogen. Hydrogen will be transported to these vast caverns and stored there for years and decades, then transported to power plants to burn when needed. A fleet of power plants will burn the hydrogen when called upon to do so, although admittedly they may be idle most of the time, maybe even 90% of the time; but for a pinch, there must be sufficient thermal hydrogen-burning plants to supply the whole of peak demand when needed.

I find the treatment of the potential cost of all of this to be totally inadequate. There is never a mention of the most relevant subject, which is how much electricity prices to consumers might increase. The closest thing I find is this chart on page 32:

This is cost “to the grid,” thus wholesale cost. Will there be a huge multiplication of final price to the consumer? At first glance this doesn’t look too bad. About 50 pounds/MWh for the wind/solar input, and then 60-70 pounds/MWh for the storage makes about 110-120 pounds/MWh total. Add about 33% to convert to dollars, and you would have about $143-156/MWh, or 14.3 to 15.6 cents per kWh. It’s high, but not completely in the stratosphere.

But wait a minute. Are these guys leaving anything out?

  • How about the new network of pipelines to transport the hydrogen all over the place?

  • How about the entire new fleet of thermal power plants, capable of burning 100% hydrogen, and sufficient to meet 100% of peak demand when it’s night and the wind isn’t blowing.

  • They use a 5% interest rate for capital costs. That’s too low by at least half — should be 10% or more.

  • And can they really build all the wind turbines and solar panels and electroayzers they are talking about at the prices they are projecting?

The whole thing just cries out for a demonstration project to prove feasibility and cost. I’m betting that that will never occur before the whole “net zero” thing falls apart from the disaster of skyrocketing electricity prices. Time will tell.

October 1, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , | Leave a comment

Britain is Leading the World in Committing Economic Suicide

BY DAVID CRAIG | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | SEPTEMBER 29, 2023

As our leaders bicker over how fast Britain should get to Net Zero, you’ll hear politicians, eco-zealots and media pundits claiming that Britain is leading the world in reducing our country’s CO2 emissions. This is one of the few statements about climate made by our ruling elites which does actually appear to be true. Since 1990, Britain’s CO2 emissions have almost halved from 604 million metric tons to just under 350 million tons by 2022. That equates to a drop from 10 metric tons per capita in 1990 to below five tons per capita:

While celebrating this great supposed ‘success’, our politicians, media and eco-activists often seem less keen to explain how this reduction in CO2 emissions was achieved.

Here’s another chart. It shows the share of the U.K.’s GDP made up by manufacturing:

Since 1990, the year U.K. CO2 emissions started falling, the percentage of U.K. GDP from manufacturing has also halved from just over 16% to around 8%.
Moreover, during the same period, the number of people employed in U.K. manufacturing has dropped from 4,963,000 to just 2,601,000. A cynic mighty be tempted to wonder what happened to all those hundreds of thousands of highly-skilled, highly-paid green jobs that our rulers promised us would be created in Britain by the energy transition away from fossil fuels to renewables.

For years the U.K. has had some of the world’s highest energy prices due to our replacement of cheap, reliable fossil fuels with expensive, unreliable and intermittent supposed ‘renewables’. In 2022, in the U.K., which gets only 42% of its electricity from fossil fuels, household energy cost $0.41/kWh. In France, where 70% of its electricity comes from cheap, reliable nuclear, electricity costs were just $0.21/kWh – almost half the U.K. price. In the U.S., which generates about 60% of its energy from fossil fuels, the price was $0.18/kWh – less than half the U.K.’s cost. In China, where 55% of electricity comes from coal and a total of 83% comes from fossil fuels, household electricity costs are only $0.08/kWh – a quarter of the U.K.’s cost. There is a similar picture in India, where over 75% of electricity generation is from fossil fuels, of which three quarters comes from cheap, energy-rich coal, household energy costs only $0.07/kWh – a sixth of the U.K. cost.

So, just to put all of this into context, we can look at how much of the U.K.’s GDP comes from manufacturing – making real things that people in Britain and abroad want to buy – compared to our major competitors. In 2022, 8% of the U.K.’s GDP came from manufacturing compared to 9% for France, 12% for the U.S.A., 13% for India, 14% for Italy, 18% for Germany and a massive 28% for China.

A picture is emerging which suggests that the more a country relies on renewables for its electricity, the higher are its energy costs and the lower is the percentage of its GDP made up by manufacturing.

Economist Richard Salsman wrote: “The science of economics is clear: the production of money and debt is not equivalent to the production of real wealth. To claim otherwise is to follow fantasy, not reality – or science.”

As we in Britain enthusiastically print money and increase national debt in pursuit of our Net Zero goals, we seem to be wrecking U.K. manufacturing with high energy prices thus committing economic suicide as U.K. manufacturing moves to countries with lower energy costs. It’s more than astonishing that not a single one of our politicians and media supposed ‘experts’ seem to understand or are willing to admit what is actually happening and how the U.K. is committing an extraordinary act of self-mutilation by cutting the country’s CO2 emissions.

If there really was a climate crisis, the U.K.’s economic suicide to supposedly save the planet might be justified. But as I try to explain in my most recent book There is No Climate Crisis, there is no emergency that warrants such extreme actions. Yes, the Earth has probably warmed up a little since the freezing 1960s and 1970s when many experts were panicking about global cooling and the advent of a new ice age, which experts predicted would cause crop failures, mass starvation, the migration of millions from the cooling North towards warmer countries and wars over scarce food supplies. But this warming is just part of a natural cycle of warming and cooling driven mainly by the Earth’s rotation, solar activity and cloud cover. Moreover, the ice caps aren’t melting, in spite of the Guardian and the New York Times regularly predicting their demise. The polar bears are doing fine. In fact there may be so many of them that they may have difficulty finding sufficient food. The Great Barrier Reef has record levels of coral. Around five times as much U.S. forest burned each year in the scorching hot 1920s and 1930s as is burnt now. Even the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) admits that there has been no acceleration in sea level rise for the last 100 years. And the number of people killed by extreme weather events has fallen by over 95% in the last 120 or so years in spite of the world’s population quadrupling from under two billion in 1900 to almost eight billion now.

It’s a pity that those dragging us towards their Net Zero nirvana aren’t a bit more forthcoming about the economic devastation that their deluded policies are inflicting upon us.

David Craig is the author of There is No Climate Crisis, available as an e-book or paperback from Amazon.

October 1, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | | Leave a comment

EU launches world’s first carbon border tax

RT | October 1, 2023

The EU launched the first phase of an emissions tariff scheme on Sunday, with a planned import tax on steel, aluminum, cement and fertilisers, as part of its bid to become a climate-neutral region.

During the first phase, until 2026, Brussels does not plan to collect any CO2 emissions charges at the border. Until then the system will collect data on carbon-intensive imports.

EU importers are now obliged to report the greenhouse gas emissions embedded in the production of imported iron, steel, aluminium, cement, electricity, fertilisers and hydrogen.

Starting on January 1, 2026, they will have to buy certificates to cover these CO2 emissions. This will inevitably increase the final cost of produce imported by the bloc, reducing their competitiveness compared to goods manufactured domestically.

The Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism is supposed to prevent more polluting foreign products from undermining the green transition. The measure will potentially protect local producers from losing out to foreign competitors, while they invest in meeting EU targets to cut the bloc’s net emissions by 55% compared to 1990 levels, by 2030.

According to European Economy Commissioner Paolo Gentiloni, the goal of the new policy is also to encourage a global shift to greener production and prevent EU producers from relocating to nations with a less strict environmental regulatory base.

The system has already faced criticism from the bloc’s major trading partners, who say it undermines free trade. It has also added to trade tensions between Brussels and Washington, with the latter asking earlier this year for US steel and exports to be exempt from tax.

October 1, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , | Leave a comment

US bent on creating insecurity for Afghanistan’s neighbors: Iran envoy

Press TV – October 1, 2023

Iran’s ambassador to Afghanistan says the United States’ main policy on Afghanistan is to create insecurity for the country’s neighbors.

Hassan Kazemi Qomi said on Sunday that the US is continuing to make troubles in Afghanistan two years after it was forced to withdraw its troops after the Taliban group took control of the country.

“(The US) is after creating anxiety and disturbance for countries in the region, including for Afghanistan’s neighbors,” Qomi was quoted as saying in an interview with the IRIB News.

The ambassador made the remarks in Kazan, in southwest Russia, where he attended a fifth regional consultation meeting on Afghanistan known as the Moscow Format.

He said the 13 countries attending the meeting were almost unanimous in their position that the security and economic challenges in Afghanistan are mainly the result of 20 years of occupation by the US and allied countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

He accused the US of providing indirect support to the so-called Daesh of Khorasan, which is the regional offshoot of the ISIS terrorist group, to create insecurity in Central Asia and to pave the way for setting up a military base in the region with the pretext of fighting terrorism.

“Neighboring countries (of Afghanistan) reached the conclusion that they should change the conditions in Afghanistan through a collective move and a regional initiative and with cooperation with the rulers in Kabul,” said Kazemi Qomi.

The long-serving Iranian diplomat said countries attending the Moscow Format meeting in Kazan also decided to form a regional contact group to coordinate their actions and policies on Afghanistan.

“With the formation of the contact group we can put into operation (the outcomes of) talks on Kabul and the economic and security cooperation around the borders and inside the Afghan territory,” he said.

October 1, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , | Leave a comment

Ambassador of Israeli Crimes: This is How Gilad Erdan Become a Defender of Women’s Rights in Iran

By Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | October 1, 2023

A new trend is emerging in the Israeli hasbara discourse targeting Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims: women’s rights.

The word ‘new’ is not exactly accurate. The misuse of the genuine struggle for women’s rights in the Arab and Muslim world is only new insofar as the increasing reliance on the tactic within the larger Israeli propaganda discourse.

This was demonstrated in a most bizarre way during the speech of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi on September 19, at the 78th Session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

The story was orchestrated by Gilad Erdan, a mediocre Israeli diplomat and Tel Aviv’s UN Ambassador.

Erdan’s real strength comes from the fact that he is supported by the same Western governments that continue to fund and defend Israel’s war machine and military occupation of Palestine.

Naturally, he is also given a disproportionate amount of media coverage by corporate Western mainstream media, when compared to any other UN diplomat.

Erdan’s work is predicated mostly on a single tactic: If he is not pleased by the conduct of his peers at the UN General Assembly, he simply accuses them of being ‘anti-Semitic’, as a matter of course.

At times, the entire UN political body is accused of being anti-Israel and anti-Semitic.

This Israeli strategy – defaming truth-sayers as anti-Semites – only succeeds because it is part of a massive political and intellectual discourse that is constantly fed by the media and accepted as a fact by Western politicians.

Indeed, if Erdan is judged as a diplomat, completely independent from the unquestionable support he receives by Western media and governments, he would have been forced to find another profession altogether.

His recent conduct at the UNGA was a perfect illustration. In a terribly choreographed gesture, he began walking up and down the Assembly Hall, raising a photo of Mahsa Amini, who died in Tehran last year. The placard said: “Iranian women deserve freedom now.”

Consistent with the rules of the UN, Erdan was eventually removed by security, which he must have anticipated.

For him, however, his charade was a success, as it created the needed distraction, not only from the speech of the Iranian President, but in the coverage of Raisi’s speech altogether.

Though some have suggested that Erdan had humiliated himself, namely because of his removal from the UNGA hall, I wonder if he was, in any way, surprised by the outcome of his behavior.

He wanted to be a star, at least for like-minded anti-Iranian governments and organizations; he wanted the conversation to shift from the rights of the Palestinians to that of Iranians. For him, the mission was accomplished.

Of the many articles and news coverage that followed Erdan’s display, a few, even in the Middle East, spoke about Israel’s war on Palestinian women: the killings, imprisonment, torture, denial of freedom of movement, daily humiliation, denial of life-saving medications, and much more.

According to the United Nations, at least 253 women were killed in Gaza in the 2014 war alone.

These numbers are only the tip of the iceberg, as every single Palestinian woman living under Israeli occupation, anywhere in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza suffers daily. These women are hardly removed from the collective struggle and suffering of all Palestinians.

Erdan had no signs prepared for those women; neither do many mainstream, supposedly feminist organizations that continue to rally in solidarity with Iranian women, while ignoring the pain and humiliation of Palestinian women at the hands of the Israeli military and government.

Sadly, little action followed a damning report issued by Israel’s rights organization, B’Tselem on September 5, where Palestinian women from the Ajlouni family were humiliated and paraded completely naked in front of their children. This episode took place while the Ajlouni’s boys and men were handcuffed and blindfolded, and while Israeli soldiers stole the women’s gold and money.

This is, of course, the norm, not the exception. It seems that whatever Israel does to Palestinian women, little action, aside from that organized by Palestinians and their supporters, ever follows: No placards at the UNGA, no US State Department-led campaigns, no unique hashtags, no mass protests, nothing of the sort.

When advocacy for human and women’s rights only applies in situations where the culprit is an enemy of the US, one must question if human rights have anything to do with the discussion altogether.

The irony is that Israel has been one of the main political forces behind the deadly US-Western sanctions imposed on Iran for years, which devastating Iranian society and families – women and men alike.

That, too, was another missing context from the coverage following Erdan’s UN act.

But Erdan is not alone. Sheltering behind women’s rights in the Middle East is now the go-to tactic in many public conversations, conferences and media coverage of Israel and Palestine.

Even if the tactic fails to strike a major shift in the perception of the Israeli occupation and apartheid in Palestine, at least, in the minds of some, it does create a distraction.

I have personally experienced this during many of my tours in various parts of the world, from Vancouver Canada, to Madrid, to Nairobi. Sadly, often well-intentioned people engage in the side discussion, either defending Middle Eastern societies, or nodding in agreement with the self-proclaimed women’s rights ‘activists’.

But Israel did not invent the ‘liberation of women’ as a strategy aimed at deflecting or justifying its own war crimes against civilians. The US used it as a backbone of its massive propaganda that preceded the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

And, of course, once the invasions and subduing of these countries were completed, Iraqi and Afghani women disappeared from media coverage.

In both cases, tens of thousands of women were killed, raped and tortured by the US military. As for those ‘activists’ who had originally joined the initial US-championed women’s rights campaigns, they often disappear when women become victims of the US, the West and Israel.

While Arab and Muslim societies have their own social and political struggles, we must be wary not to allow Tel Aviv and Washington to hijack these struggles for their own politically sinister reasons.

It does not follow that, for women to be ‘freed’ from one society, the women of another society would have to live in perpetual bondage, of permanent occupation and racist apartheid.

This logic should apply to all situations of inequality, injustice, discrimination and racism, anywhere in the world.

And, a defender of war crimes, like Gilad Erdan, must not be allowed to serve two roles: an apologist for the mistreatment of women in Palestine, and a freedom fighter for women anywhere else.

October 1, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , | Leave a comment

Israeli forces assault Palestinian journalists, worshippers in Jerusalem

MEMO | October 1, 2023

Hundreds of Israeli settlers on Sunday forced their way into the flashpoint Al-Aqsa Mosque complex in occupied East Jerusalem to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Sukkot.

Sukkot is a week-long holiday, which started Sept. 29 and continues until Oct. 6, ending a season of Jewish holidays that started by observing the Rosh Hashanah (New Year) holiday on Sept.15.

In a statement, the Jordan-run Islamic Waqf Department said Israeli forces closed the Al-Mughrabi Gate, southwest of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, “after allowing 602 Jewish extremists” into the site.

According to witnesses, Israeli settlers entered the site in groups.

The Palestinian Jerusalem Governorate published a video on its Facebook account of Jewish settlers trying to enter animal sacrifices inside the complex.

Israeli police began allowing the settler incursions into the Al-Aqsa Mosque complex in 2003, despite repeated condemnations from Palestinians.

Al-Aqsa Mosque is the world’s third-holiest site for Muslims. Jews call the area the “Temple Mount,” claiming it was the site of two Jewish temples in ancient times.

Israel occupied East Jerusalem, where Al-Aqsa is located, during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. It annexed the entire city in 1980, a move never recognized by the international community.

October 1, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | , , | Leave a comment

German mayor calls concerns over child safety ‘unfounded’ amid plans to accommodate 80 asylum seekers at a primary school

BY THOMAS BROOKE | REMIX NEWS | OCTOBER 1, 2023

Outraged parents have condemned the local mayor’s decision to accommodate up to 80 asylum seekers in containers on the grounds of a primary school in the German town of Monheim am Rhein.

Dozens of local residents attended a recent question time of the local council to voice their displeasure over the controversial move proposed by Mayor Daniel Zimmerman’s administration and expressed their concerns for child safety, calling the plans both inappropriate and unacceptable.

Starting next spring, a cohort of migrants will reside in containers located on the school grounds, which are no longer used for educational purposes.

In response to the protestations of locals, the council cited economic factors as a primary reason for the move, insisting that the estimated €150,000 it would cost to convert the containers into housing was substantially lower than the cost of renting private accommodations, where around 80 percent of the migrants recently received by the municipality currently reside.

“We simply can’t keep up with renting anymore,” a city press spokesperson told parents at the meeting.

Concerned parents told the council meeting that the housing of traumatized refugees in the vicinity of young children was wholly irresponsible, and expressed worries of potential conflict between the new arrivals and their children including the danger of rape or abuse.

However, Zimmerman called these fears “unfounded” and insisted that the migrants are “people like you and me” and are not dangerous.

“The safety of our children is the primary goal – I personally guarantee that,” the local mayor assured parents.

He explained that with the municipality receiving significantly more refugees from Ukraine, Syria, and Afghanistan, private accommodation in Monheim has become saturated and the town is reaching its acceptance limits. The council therefore needs to resort to alternative measures to accommodate further arrivals.

The mayor added that while he was open to discussing the matter further with concerned parents in the next few weeks, for instance at parent meetings, such correspondence will not change the city’s decision to repurpose the containers on the school grounds and considered the matter to be closed.

October 1, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | | Leave a comment

Ukraine’s Possible New Counteroffensive: ‘Camouflage’ for Zelensky to ‘Steal More Money From West’

By Oleg Burunov – Sputnik – 01.10.2023

Kiev’s alleged push for another counteroffensive, this time in the autumn, can be perceived as the West’s red herring, Scott Bennett, a former US Army psychological warfare officer and State Department counter-terrorism analyst, told Sputnik.

The Zelensky regime had elaborated a plan for a major offensive in the Kherson and Zaporozhye region in early October, securing the approval of Ukraine’s sponsors in Washington and London, an informed source told Sputnik earlier this week.

According to the source, Kiev’s special forces intend to seize control of the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) as part of the blueprint.

All this could be Western countries’ red herring, Scott Bennett suggested, pointing to the Ukrainian Army’s futile attempts to break through Russian defensive lines.

“As a result of the resounding defeat of Ukraine, the West is frantically searching for an opportunity to try and escape the coming judgement and potential crimes against humanity charges for the death and destruction the Biden Administration has recklessly unleashed. And the nearest opportunity for distraction may be the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant,” Bennett argued.

He recalled that many perceive this facility as “a target for destruction in a kind of ‘doomsday’ button that the US might try and push, in an attempt to generate sufficient chaos and destruction to distract the world away from the small scale battles of Ukraine, to the global implications of a nuclear disaster.” According to the former psychological warfare officer, the potential destruction of the Zaporozhye NPP would be the “ultimate expression” of this chaos.

He warned that if the facility is destroyed, “the resulting tsunami of social, political, economic disruption would disorganize opposition parties and protests against the current political elites in Europe and America, and justify a lockdown or martial law and police state mentality which could be endlessly extended.”

Bennett didn’t rule out that “the West will combine its best liars in the CIA, the Mossad, the MI6 to blame the event on Russia, and perhaps also simultaneously initiate some self-inflicted false flag attacks at the same time—such as assassinate Joe Biden and Zelensky at the same time and blame this on Russia in order to justify ‘police action’ and a drafting of Americans into the military for conflict with Russia.”

“We’ve seen it in Vietnam, and the 9/11 war on terror, so they may try and do it again, sad to say. The American media, the most professional liars and propagandists since Germany’s Goebbels, have already planted in the minds of Americans that ‘Trump supporters’ are becoming Russia-sympathizing domestic terrorists who may try and assassinate Biden, so the writing is on the wall,” the former State Department analyst added.

Commenting on how Zelensky’s alleged new advance can be explained, given the failure of Kiev’s summer counteroffensive, Bennett claimed that the Ukrainian president is “a madman, or being told what to do by madmen—or both. I suspect the latter.”

When asked if it’s safe to say that the alleged October counteroffensive plan is an attempt to appease the Ukrainian people and justify Western demands, Bennett said that it is “camouflage for Zelensky’s scheme to steal more money from the West, and show some kind of a “good faith effort” that would invite future ‘re-construction’ donations and investments by the West.

“The military reality is that Ukraine is destroyed, the war is essentially over, and the Russian military and people have prevailed and been victorious. Of course, the West is trying to distract away from this reality and create all kinds of miniature flash-points and terrorist attacks upon innocent civilians in Crimea and Moscow and elsewhere, but this too shall end,” the ex-State Department analyst asserted.

Russian President Vladimir Putin stressed last month that Ukrainian troops had failed to achieve any tangible results on all the frontlines since the beginning of their counteroffensive on June 4, something that he said had claimed the lives of more than 71,000 Ukrainian soldiers by the time.

October 1, 2023 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Nuclear Power | | Leave a comment

Slovakia elects party which promises to end Ukraine aid

RT | October 1, 2023

The Slovak Social Democracy (SMER-SD) party has won Saturday’s parliamentary election, with results from most districts giving it a 6 percentage point lead over its pro-Western rival, Progressive Slovakia.

The SMER-SD party is led by former prime minister Robert Fico, who has vowed to end military aid to Ukraine and publicly criticized the European Union’s sanctions on Russia as ineffective and harmful.

“We are a peaceful country,” Fico declared at a rally last week, adding that if his party wins it “will not send a single round [of ammunition] to Ukraine.”

The Progressive Slovakia party, a staunch supporter of EU policies, is the runner up with just over 17% of the vote, with 95% of ballots counted. Its 39-year-old leader Michal Simecka, a vice-president of the European Parliament, campaigned on promises to continue Slovakia’s support for Ukraine.

The pro-European HLAS (Voice) party, is polling third, just short of 15%. It’s leader Peter Pellegrini called it a victory and has not ruled out a possible coalition with Fico.

With no party set to win a majority of seats, Slovakia will need to form a coalition government. Other parties that made it over the threshold include the conservative Christian Democratic Movement (KDH), the liberal Freedom and Solidarity (SaS), as well as a conservative coalition of the Ordinary People and Independent Personalities (OL’aNO) with the Christian Union and For the People party.

The Slovak National Party also made it past the 5%  threshold. Leader Andrej Danko expressed willingness to join a coalition with Fico to “compete with liberalism,” while comparing Simecka to a “hurt puddle.”

The prospect of a Fico-led government has set alarm bells ringing in the EU, where officials in Brussels fear he could join Hungary in challenging the EU consensus on supporting Ukraine, and veto future military aid or vote against additional anti-Russia sanctions packages.

NATO member Slovakia has supplied Kiev with armored personnel carriers, howitzers, and its entire fleet of Soviet-era MiG-29 fighter jets.

However, Fico has made it clear that it would not unquestioningly follow the US lead if elected. Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service claimed last week that to prevent this from happening, Washington was willing to go to any lengths, including blackmail and bribery, to ensure a win for the incumbent Slovak government.

October 1, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , | Leave a comment

Biden demands uninterrupted cash flow to Ukraine

RT | October 1, 2023

President Joe Biden has welcomed a bipartisan short-term budget deal that will keep the US government open for the next 45 days, but was disappointed that none of the billions of dollars in aid to Kiev that he had requested made it to the final bill.

“We cannot under any circumstances allow American support for Ukraine to be interrupted,” Biden said in a brief statement on Saturday night, shortly after Congress passed the measure.

Biden had requested an additional $24 billion for Ukraine, but critics argued that Washington has more important priorities and should have stronger safeguards against the misappropriation of the funds and supplies it sends to Kiev.

The US leader, however, blamed “extreme House Republicans” for causing a “manufactured crisis” and “demanding drastic cuts that would have been devastating for millions of Americans.”

“I fully expect the Speaker will keep his commitment to the people of Ukraine and secure passage of the support needed to help Ukraine at this critical moment,” the US president added.

Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy had to rely on Democrats in order to pass the bill and avert a government shutdown, as 90 Republicans opposed any short-term funding measures, denying him the much-needed votes. As a part of the deal, McCarthy increased federal disaster assistance by $16 billion, but had to forgo the border security provisions sought by the GOP.

After no new aid to Ukraine made it to the final bill, the House Democratic leadership said in a statement on Saturday that they expect McCarthy to bring a separate Ukraine aid package to vote when the House returns.

The Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin also welcomed the bill passing, but called on the Congress to “live up to America’s commitment to provide urgently-needed assistance” to Kiev. “America must live up to its word and continue to lead,” he added in a statement published on Saturday.

October 1, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

Have you heard dis information?

MEDIA LIES: Hunter Biden Laptop is “Russian Disinformation”!

Matt Orfalea | September 2022
Extra bonus:

October 1, 2023 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular, Video | | Leave a comment

CDC Awards $260 Million to Track Disease Outbreaks in Massive Surveillance Scheme

‘A Panopticon of Epic Proportions’

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 29, 2023

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to establish a national “public-private” network to sweep up unprecedented amounts of individual and community data and develop artificial intelligence (AI)-driven models to predict disease outbreaks.

That infrastructure will then help local, state and national health officials identify and implement appropriate “control measures” to manage potential disease outbreaks.

As part of this effort, the agency last week announced an estimated $262.5 million in grant funding over the next five years to establish a network of 13 infectious disease forecasting and analytics centers to coordinate this work across the U.S.

The funding provides roughly $20 million each to 11 universities that were actors in COVID-19 modeling and response. The list includes the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, which oversaw the Event 201 simulation and the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Public Health, where Ralph Baric initiated gain-of-function research.

Two of the centers will be private entities — Kaiser Permanente Southern California and a “disaster preparedness organization” called International Responder Systems LLC, whose relevant experience includes running tabletop exercises for weaponized Anthrax outbreaks and helping to manage the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

Some centers will work with U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) researchers and bioengineering firms to develop new AI and machine-learning-based modeling tools and platforms to track and predict disease outbreaks across the country.

Others will work with insurance companies, healthcare providers, local health departments and others to collect data from people’s search histories, personal communications, social media posts, wastewater, health records and more.

They will also pilot new tracking and prediction tools in adjacent neighborhoods or among specific demographic groups and scale up “successful” pilot projects.

The grantees will form the Outbreak Analytics and Disease Modeling Network (OADM) through cooperative agreements with the CDC, which will be an active partner in the work.

Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D., author of “Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom,” told The Defender :

“What they’re constructing is a panopticon of epic proportions, which will be inescapable in the future and will make for surveillance, not only of people’s behaviors, but also, as they’ve said themselves, of their very thoughts.”

He said the COVID-19 pandemic response provided a paradigmatic example of the dangers of predictive modeling.

“The use of modeling is a very poor predictor of infectious disease, and it has been abused in the past, in particular with reference to COVID-19.”

Rectenwald, who is also a presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party, cited the work of Neil Ferguson, the physicist at Imperial College London who, along with his team, created the epidemiological model in early 2020 that predicted the catastrophic global death toll from COVID-19.

Ferguson’s model was used to justify social distancing, masking and lockdowns.

But his predictions — which were criticized at the time by experts such as Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, Ph.D. — turned out to be wildly exaggerated in real-world tests.

“I would anticipate further abuses with this CDC modeling network being set up,” Rectenwald said.

‘A National Weather Service, but for infectious diseases’ 

The network is spearheaded by the CDC’s new Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics (CFA), set up by the Biden administration to model, predict and control the course of disease outbreaks across the country.

“We think of ourselves like the National Weather Service, but for infectious diseases,” Caitlin Rivers, Ph.D., a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist and associate director for science at CFA told The Washington Post last year when the White House formally launched the initiative.

“Much like our ability to forecast the severity and landfall of hurricanes, this network will enable us to better predict the trajectory of future outbreaks, empowering response leaders with data and information when they need it most,” the CDC said in its funding announcement for the initiative.

Just as the weather forecast helps people to decide whether to take an umbrella with them when it predicts rain, for example, a disease forecast can help people decide if they should bring a mask, or have a birthday party inside or outside, Rivers told the Post.

In July, Eric Rescorla, former chief technology officer at Mozilla who was tapped to be chief technologist for CFA, told Politico it is “a startup in government” that will need a lot of government funding and that will work very closely with private industry.

The surveillance ‘the American people want and deserve’?

CFA was formally established as part of the CDC in January of this year, but it has been in the works at least since January 2021, when Biden announced plans for the agency in the administration’s first national security memorandum.

CFA received its first $200 million in August 2021 from the American Rescue Plan Act.

Then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, who consistently pushed for legislative and other changes to “modernize the public health data policy framework” when she was in office, said at the time:

“This new center is an example of how we are modernizing the ways we prepare for and respond to public health threats. I am proud of the work that has come out of this group thus far and eager to see continued innovation in the use of data, modeling, and analytics to improve outbreak responses.”

CFA began making grants in Oct. 2021, awarding $21 million to five academic institutions — including Johns Hopkins and Harvard — and $5 million to the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy to develop disease modeling capabilities.

CFA worked with academic partners to model, predict and “warn” the government of the omicron spread from November to December 2021.

In December 2022, the CDC renewed its partnership with Peter Theil’s CIA-linked data mining firm Palantir, signing a $443 million contract “to employ scalable technology to plan, manage, and respond to future outbreaks and public health incidents” — an award meant, in part, to “help support innovation” for CFA.

Earlier this year a GOP House subcommittee tried to cut funding to the center, but CDC Director Mandy Cohen told STAT News she was fighting for the funding. She said:

“Folks want us to be ready to know of threats and to respond quickly. Well, we need data and visibility to do that. And so that is money that will help us to see threats and respond to threats faster. And that’s what I think the American people want and deserve.”

But Rectenwald warned that rather than protecting people this system will be a threat to anyone who doesn’t comply with coercive public health directives. He said:

“The surveillance that they’re unrolling here has great potential for infringement on privacy and also for targeting individuals and groups for non-compliance, and as such, abuses of their civil rights and liberties.

“This system will be capable of locating individuals and communities that are not abiding by the coercive measures being ‘recommended.’ And then they can impose even harsher restrictions on these same people. So this is a very, very pernicious prospect.”

CFA reveals ‘a revolving door’ between biotech, government health agencies and the DOD

Rectenwald told The Defender that the CFA collaboration reveals a revolving door phenomenon that we see in government more generally.

“We have government officials being drawn from the private sector and then granting awards that go back to the companies for which they worked, or to which they’re headed. There’s a lot of collusion underway here,” he said.

CFA is headed by Dylan George, Ph.D., who has spent his career moving between U.S. government health agencies, and the DOD and just prior to being tapped to head up CFA, he had a five-month stint at biotech firm Ginko Bioworks.

Ginkgo Bioworks is one of the only private firms explicitly named as a partner on one of the CFA grant awards, with Northeastern University. It is also a key partner in developing other global pandemic surveillance and predictive programs, such as the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute.

Besides Ginko and Palantir, CFA’s website indicates it partners with “many” public and private organizations. In April 2022, CFA convened a conference called “CFA: 101 for Industry.”

At the conference, George, along with representatives from Databricks, Peraton, Microsoft, RTI, Dell Technologies Redhat/Carahsoft, Optum Serve and Maximus Public Health Analytics, gave presentations on the importance of “public-private partnerships” to CFA’s work.

The industry representatives also discussed their current and past collaborations with CDC to develop the tracking and analytic tools and platforms CFA hopes to ramp up.

Panelists included Michelle Holko — formerly of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), principal architect scientist at Google Cloud for healthcare and life sciences at the time of the conference in 2022, and currently chief strategist for Defensive BioTech — who spoke on the origins of CFA’s disease forecast research in DARPA.

Holko, also a former fellow at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Johns Hopkins Center for Biosecurity, talked about the value of Google search histories and personal digital interaction data to affect public health outcomes.

They provide key information, she said, “because, you know, a person’s desire and willingness to get vaccinated has a huge impact on what’s to happen with a public health crisis,” she said.

‘A new age of public health’: example data collection, prediction and control projects

Data can be used to understand people’s desire, but also “everything that’s going on in their environment, and in their thoughts and in their circle,” Holko said, which has serious implications for public health.

To illustrate how such data could be used, she explained how Google collaborated with the state of California during the COVID-19 pandemic to mine people’s search data and other personal data. They developed a “vaccine willingness score” for each individual person whose data they analyzed.

Then they positioned mobile vaccine vans in neighborhoods with low vaccine rates but some willingness to be vaccinated.

“They were able to take a 25% gap between the lowest quartiles of the Healthy Places index and the highest quartiles and just flip that right upside down,” she said, adding that such targeting addresses a health equity issue.

Holko also talked about the value of wearables in capturing biological data, which, she said, might make it possible to detect a pathogen inside of a person’s body even if they aren’t experiencing symptoms.

Rivers added that it would be important for public health agencies like CFA to get the things they need — like the ability to go out and swab anyone whose data they need directly — rather than having to depend on other adjacent data sources like biometric data, social media data, etc.

Researchers at RTI presented their RTI Synthetic Population project where they have modeled a “synthetic population” of over 300 million individuals, each representing a U.S. person, with their attributes, age, race gender, income, education attainment, job and whatever other data they can glean, which they then use to project epidemiological events.

There were many such presentations.

The overall takeaway was that the contemporary availability of massive amounts of data has created a “new age of public health” and a mandate for new tools to capture and analyze data using novel applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence.

George said many of the people in the room had been dreaming of a forecasting network like CFA for almost a decade, and they had been “right to be opportunistic” about the “window of opportunity” that presented itself for them to finally set it up.

The ‘extremely ironic’ list of grantees

The OADM is the first major initiative by CFA and sets up its infrastructure across the country. The 13 centers in the network will act as networks themselves.

As the CDC put it:

“In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, CDC has worked collaboratively with state, local, tribal, and territorial health departments, public health organizations, academia, and the private sector to improve and scale outbreak response and provide support to leaders to prevent infections and save lives.

“This national network will build on these collaborations and improve outbreak response using data, modeling, and advanced analytics for ongoing and future infectious disease threats and public health emergencies.”

Awardees include:

  • Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security received $23.5 million for its project, “Toward Epidemic Preparedness: Enhancing Public Health Infrastructure and Incorporating Data-Driven Tools.” It will create partnerships with “public health stakeholders” and it will train students, practitioners and modelers — including meteorologists — to use modeling and analytic tools.
  • The University of North Carolina Gillings School of Public Health was awarded $22.5 million to support the creation of the Atlantic Coast Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics and Analytics, which will develop methods, tools and platforms for disease modeling and coordinate them among the 13 funded partners in the network.
  • Northeastern University won $17.5 million for an “innovation center” called “Epistorm: The Center for Advanced Epidemic Analytics and Predictive Modeling Technology.” Epistorm will coordinate efforts among ten healthcare systems, research organizations and private companies to use data from wastewater surveillance, social media, and hospital admissions and apply AI and machine learning tools and other predictive analytics. The consortium’s academic members include Boston University, Indiana University, the University of Florida and the University of California at San Diego. Other members include Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, MaineHealth, Northern Light Health and Concentric Ginkgo Bioworks.
  • The University of California at San Diego (UCSD) won $17.5 million to “develop innovative tools and networks” that analyze data sources to determine their predictive power. Data sources will include molecular epidemiological data, wastewater and air surveillance; exposure notification systems (smartphones and contact tracing), internet searches and posts, “legally available clinical data,” and scenario-based simulations. The team will pilot test their innovations among vulnerable populations in San Diego, including homeless people and drug users. UCSD will also partner with other California universities and LANL.
  • A team of researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and University of Massachusetts Amherst was awarded $27.5 million to scale up decision-support tools that have been used in previous outbreaks. They will partner with two dozen other entities, including local public health agencies. Northwestern University received $1.7 million in funding to support these efforts.
  • Carnegie Mellon University will receive $17.5 million to expand on work it did during the COVID-19 pandemic, gathering daily data “from health care systems, technology companies, medical test results, insurance claims and surveys” to steer policy and public health decisions by applying machine learning and AI tools. It will work with public health agencies and with healthcare providers like Optum to make healthcare data available to researchers.
  • The University of Michigan School of Public Health won approximately $17.5 million to establish the Michigan Public Health Integrated Center for Outbreak Analytics and Modeling, which will develop modeling and data analytics tools and pipelines to be integrated into the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services systems.
  • The University of Minnesota School of Public Health and the Minnesota Department of Public Health (MDH) will receive $17.5 million to develop predictive tools by surveying individual community interactions and developing machine-learning algorithms to identify symptom clusters. They will work closely with the Minnesota Electronic Health Record Consortium, a partnership between the MDH and the 11 largest health systems in the state.
  • A team of researchers at Emory University will receive $17.5 million to “innovate” new analytical methods, tools and platforms to inform public health decisions.
  • Clemson University will work with the University of South Carolina, Medical University of South Carolina, Prisma Health, South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control, Clemson Rural Health, and South Carolina Center for Rural and Primary Health Care to integrate forecasting and decision-making tools.
  • The University of Utah received $17.5 million for its new ForeSITE (Forecasting and Surveillance of Infectious Threats and Epidemics) center, which will “provide data and tools” to guide decisions about emerging public health threats. It will do this through partnerships with the national Veterans Affairs health system and hospitals and health departments in Utah, Washington, Idaho and Montana.
  • Kaiser Permanente Southern California will work in partnership with academic modeling teams based at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, San Francisco, using its 4.7 million members as a basis to “develop and test strategies to improve use of public health data.”
  • International Responder Systems will work with the University of California, Los Angeles, and Primary Diagnostics “to deliver an enhanced outbreak analytics diagnostic system and a continuous education program to upskill our public health workforce.

Rectenwald said:

“It’s extremely ironic that these universities and institutions have been chosen to undertake the research and modeling. For example, the University of North Carolina Gilling School of Global Public Health initiated gain-of-function research, which was then undertaken in Wuhan, but funded by the NIH through EcoHealth Alliance.

“So isn’t it ironic that this school, the university research center that had a great deal to do with the gain-of-function research that led to COVID-19, is now getting 4.5 million annually for five years?

“It’s an outrage.

“And the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security is receiving $23.5 million from the CFA to conduct its project. Curiously, the same center was also the host and organizer of two major events, the CLADE X simulation and the Event 201 simulation, both of which forecasted, in advance of COVID-19, almost the exact scenario that unfolded.

“I wouldn’t trust that Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins with this kind of money and this kind of power to direct the behavior of governments, health organizations, localities, and states in response to anything because they forecasted the kinds of draconian lockdowns, masking, and forced vaccinations that took place in response to COVID-19.

“Likewise, in this scenario, I would expect them to advocate the exact same kinds of measures.”

Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

September 30, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

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