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Are EV Fires Stories Being Covered Up?

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | January 1, 2024

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On Boxing Day, we passed this house on our way up to the common where we take the dogs. We go there most days, so were shocked to see this fire damage (photos taken today). On Boxing Day, there was a totally burnt out car on the drive, and also a gas van outside, presumably checking the mains were safe. The last time we went past was, I believe, Saturday, so the fire must have happened between then and Tuesday.

We could not identify the burnt out car at the time, as we did not stop. But there is often a Tesla parked on the driveway.

The fire obviously has all the classic trappings of an EV fire. Note how the right side of the house is hardly affected. The garage door must have been subjected to extreme heat, because it is hopelessly buckled out of shape.

This is not why I am making this post however.

For some reason, there seems to be no record or news at all of this locally. The South Yorkshire Fire Service keep a daily log of all incidents they have been called to, even down to wheelie bin fires. Yet they have no record at all of this fire. I have requested any information they have, but they have so far not responded.

The local newspaper, the Sheffield Star, also appears to have ignored the story, and there is no trace of the news on Google.

Is there some policy afoot to cover up stories of EV fires? It seems far fetched, but I can think of no other explanation.

January 1, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | | 1 Comment

PLEASE ENTER THE BOXCAR PEACEFULLY

tonyheller | September 27, 2023

Dennis Meadows of the Club of Rome wants to reduce the world’s population by almost 90%, without complaint or resistance from the people being eliminated.

January 1, 2024 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular, Video | | 1 Comment

Falling falling falling. The stock price of fake meat

Didn’t they say the substance derived from lab-grown blood that gives it a meat flavor was carcinogenic?

BY MERYL NASS | DECEMBER 27, 2023

The Impossible Burger company (Impossible Foods) has not gone public:

As of December 2023, Impossible Foods remains privately owned. Furthermore, while the company has stated that an IPO “will happen,” it seems not to be in a hurry, a state indicated by lukewarm statements and a lack of time references. Since the market curtailed its enthusiasm toward plant-based food alternatives during the second half of 2023, the current financial environment pushes the earliest likely Impossible Foods IPO date to 2024 or even 2025.

Beyond Meat isn’t worth much.

Even when its stock price was high, it never made any money. And now its cost of revenue exceeds its revenue. Better close up shop while it can.

December 27, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | | Leave a comment

Germany: “Renewable Energy Sector Facing The Abyss”… ”On The Brink” … Economy Breaking Up

By P Gosselin | No Tricks Zone | December 27, 2023

Germany’s Blackout News reports on how Germany’s move into renewable energies has gone from “a boom to crisis”.

The policies of (worst ever) Economics Minister Robert Habeck (Green Party) are leading the German economy to disaster. Photo: public domain.

It wasn’t long ago, when interest rates and inflation were low, and the economy and the business of renewable energies in Germany were booming.

But now, Blackout News reports how “the outlook for the renewable energy sector has deteriorated drastically” and affordable raw materials have become hard to get. Manufacturers are now reeling. “The renewable energy sector is facing the abyss” and is “on the brink.”

“The S&P Global Clean Energy Index, which monitors the performance of the sector, has fallen by 32% in the last 12 months, while the global stock markets have risen by 11%,” writes Blackout News. “These losses on the stock market not only affect the companies themselves, but also the investors and shareholders who have invested in renewable energies.”

Reduced work hours, job cuts

Blackout News also reports how the German economy in general, the biggest in Europe, is crumbling at its foundation. For example, construction equipment manufacturer Liebherr “is putting 1000 employees on short-time working for 9 months.”

Also Stiehl, Gardena and Hansgrohe, are “opting for short-time working and job cuts.”

Other famous German companies planning cuts include textile group Groz-Beckert in Albstadt-Ebingen, and chainsaw manufacturer Stihl,

“Rising inflation and the construction crisis are two of the main reasons for the current economic uncertainty. Rising inflation is putting a strain on households,” reports Blackout News.

The major driver of inflation and all the German economic misery? The rising cost of energy caused by the government’s incompetent energy policies.

December 27, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , | Leave a comment

Junk Science Alert: Met Office Set to Ditch Actual Temperature Data in Favour of Model Predictions

By Chris Morrison | The Daily Sceptic | December 23, 2023

The alternative climate reality that the U.K. Met Office seeks to occupy has moved a step nearer with news that a group of its top scientists has proposed adopting a radical new method of calculating climate change. The scientific method of calculating temperature trends over at least 30 years should be ditched, and replaced with 10 years of actual data merged with model projections for the next decade. The Met Office undoubtedly hopes that it can point to the passing of the 1.5°C ‘guard-rail’ in short order. This is junk science-on-stilts, and is undoubtedly driven by the desire to push the Net Zero collectivist agenda.

In a paper led by Professor Richard Betts, the Head of Climate Impacts at the Met Office, it is noted that the target of 1.5°C warming from pre-industrial levels is written into the 2016 Paris climate agreement and breaching it “will trigger questions on what needs to be done to meet the agreement’s goal”. Under current science-based understandings, the breaching of 1.5°C during anomalous warm spells of a month or two, as happened in 2016, 2017, 2019, 2020 and 2023, does not count. Even going above 1.5°C for a year in the next five years would not count. A new trend indicator is obviously needed. The Met Office proposes adding just 10 years’ past data to forecasts from a climate model programmed to produce temperature rises of up to 3.2°C during the next 80 years. By declaring an average 20-year temperature based around the current year, this ‘blend’ will provide ”an instantaneous indicator of current warming”.

It will do no such thing. In the supplementary notes to the paper, the authors disclose that they have used a computer model ‘pathway’, RCP4.5, that allows for a possible rise in temperatures of up to 3.2°C within 80 years. Given that global warming has barely risen by much more than 0.2°C over the last 25 years, this is a ludicrous stretch of the imagination. Declaring the threshold of 1.5°C, a political target set for politicians, has been passed based on these figures and using this highly politicised method would indicate that reality is rapidly departing from the Met Office station.

Using anomalous spikes in global temperature, invariably caused in the short-term by natural variations such as El Niño, is endemic throughout mainstream climate activism. ‘Joining the dots’ of individual bad weather events is now the go-to method to provoke alarm. So easily promoted and popular is the scare that an entire pseudoscience field has grown up using computer models to claim that individual weather events can be attributed to the actions of humans. ‘Weather’ and ‘climate’ have been deliberately confused. Climate trends have been shortened, and the weather somehow extended to suggest a group of individual events indicates a much longer term pattern. Meanwhile, the use of a 30-year trend dates back to the start of reliable temperature records from 1900, and was set almost 100 years ago by the International Meteorological Organisation. It is an arbitrary set period, but gives an accurate temperature trend record, smoothing out the inevitable, but distorting, anomalies.

By its latest actions, the Met Office demonstrates that the old-fashioned scientific way lacks suitability when Net Zero political work needs to be done. Trends can only be detected over time, leading to unwelcome delays in being able to point to an exact period when any threshold has been passed. Whilst accepting that an individual year of 1.5°C will not breach the Paris agreement so-called guard-rail, the Met Office claims that its instant indicator will “provide clarity” and will “reduce delays that would result from waiting until the end of the 20-year period”. The Met Office looks forward to the day when its new climate trend indicator comes with an IPCC ‘confidence’ or ‘high likelihood’ statement such as, “it is likely that the current global warming level has now reached (or exceeded) 1.5°C”. In subsequent years, this might become, “it is very likely that the current global warming level exceeded 1.5°C in year X”.

Why is this latest proposal from the state-funded Met Office junk science-on-stilts? A variety of reasons include that climate models have barely an accurate temperature forecast between them, despite 40 years of trying. Inputting opinions that the temperature of the Earth might rise by over 3°C in less than 80 years is hardly likely to improve their accuracy. There are also legitimate questions to be asked about the global temperature datasets that record past temperatures. Well-documented poor placing of measuring devices, unadjusted urban heat effects and frequent retrospective warming uplifts to the overall records do not inspire the greatest of confidence. At its HadCRUT5 global database, the Met Office has added around 30% extra warming over the last few years.

December 24, 2023 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

The Impact Of Heat Pumps On Electricity Demand

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | December 22, 2023

Following on from the post about heat pumps, I thought I would have a look at their impact on electricity demand.

My analysis reckoned on a typical household consumption of 3857 KWh with a heat pump. If we assume that they will only be used for heating for six months every year, that equates to 643 KWh a month, or 21 KWh a day.

At the coldest times of year, that average will increase substantially, so we could well be looking at 30 KWh a day then, since the heat pump will have to work much harder.

Although heat pumps are designed to provide low level heat continuously, I suspect that many will turn them off at night because it is too warm to sleep. We usually have our bedroom windows open all winter at night!

If we assume then that the heat pumps are in use for 14 hours a day, that gives average hourly electricity demand of 2.1 KWh. This assumes that the heat pump runs at a constant power rating. In practice, the system would have to work harder in the early evening as temperatures drop.

There are about 24 million homes with gas and oil boilers, so a peak demand of 2.1 KW amounts to 50 GW for the country as a whole. To that we can add demand from offices, shops etc, which currently use gas and oil.

Along with demand from EVs, the UK would need well over 100 GW of capacity to meet peak demand.

This is all twenty years or more away. But if the government’s target of 600,000 heat pumps a year is met, even within the next ten years, we will be needing at least 13 GW of extra grid capacity, at a time when dispatchable power generation is being shut down.

December 23, 2023 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | | 2 Comments

How the cabal’s false narratives are used to gain their true objectives

BY MERYL NASS | DECEMBER 21, 2023

One Health issues a booklet and finally, kinda, sorta tells us what One Health is about.

“A guide to implementing the One Health Joint Plan of Action at national level”

See page 30:

I do the decoding [italics ].

  1. “Provide adequate guidance and tools for the effective implementation of One Health approaches to promote the health of humans, animals, plants and ecosystems and to prevent and manage risks at the human–animal–plant–environment interface.”

This drills into the reader’s brain the idea that the human-animal or human-environment interface is a dangerous place to be, that the risks must be acknowledged, and major efforts made to manage them. Note the absence of evidence supporting the assertion that major risk exist when humans are exposed to animals and nature.

  1. Reduce the risk and minimize local and global impacts of zoonotic epidemics and pandemics by understanding the linkages and drivers of emergence and spillover, adopting upstream prevention and strengthening One Health surveillance, early warning and response systems.

The concept that pandemics are caused by “spillover” from animals is asserted, as is the very shaky idea that one can prevent and identify pandemics early using “surveillance” “warning and response systems”—which tellingly are never defined in any detail since no methods have ever worked.

  1. Reduce the burden of endemic zoonotic, neglected tropical and vector-borne diseases by supporting countries in implementing community-centric, risk-based solutions, strengthening policy and legal frameworks from the local to the global level and across sectors, and increasing political commitment and investment.

Blather about helping developing nations without saying anything specific, except that they need to strengthen “policy and legal frameworks”—such as implementing legislation for authorization of unlicensed, liability-free drugs and vaccines? They need more political commitment—commitment to what, exactly, is ominously left unsaid. And naturally more investment (and commissions) are needed.

  1. Promote awareness, policy changes and action coordination among stakeholders to ensure that humans, animals and ecosystems achieve health and remain healthy in their interactions with and along the food supply chain.

The ominous missing information about the policy changes and action desired should make you very nervous. Now the “food supply chain” is invoked, turning food and the methods by which it travels from farm to kitchen fair game for the purveyors of One Health.

  1. Take joint action to preserve antimicrobial efficacy and ensure sustainable and equitable access to antimicrobials for responsible and prudent use in human, animal and plant health.

It sounds like there is a plan to withhold antibiotics from us in the name of preserving their efficacy. Pharmacists were made to monitor azithromycin use as well as hydroxychloroquine, chloroquine and mefloquine use during the COVID time. Bacterial pneumonias were untreated until the victim’s lips turned blue. Expect more of this.

  1. Protect and restore biodiversity, prevent the degradation of ecosystems and the wider environment to jointly support the health of people, animals, plants and ecosystems, underpinning sustainable development.

This will be the justification to move people off the land in areas where species are said to be threatened. It may also lead to enforced changes in land use, based on my earlier readings of Daszak, Fauci and the Lancet One Health commission. And of course we must give up our simple pleasures in the name of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Who voted for them, and why are we being frog-marched into a SDG future, even though we don’t know where it is leading?

_________________

 

The cabal that delivered COVID and its pandemic response plan to us wants to solve the rest of the world’s problems for us, too. Will YOU let them?

December 22, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular | | 1 Comment

Britain’s Net Zero Disaster and the Wind Power Scam

By Rupert Darwall | RealClear Energy | December 20, 2023

“This is not about complicated issues of cryptocurrency,” assistant U.S. attorney Nicolas Roos declared in the Sam Bankman-Fried trial, after accusing the defendant of building FTX on a “pyramid of deceit.” Much the same can be said about the foundations of Britain’s net zero experiment. Energy is complicated, and electricity is essential to modern society and our quality of life, but as with FTX, the underlying story is straightforward: wind power and net zero are built on a pyramid of deceit.

Net zero was sold to Parliament and the British people on claims that wind-power costs were low and falling. This was untrue: wind-power costs are high and have been rising. In the net zero version of “crypto will make you rich,” official analyses produced by the Treasury and the Office for Budget Responsibility rely on the falsehood that wind power is cheap, that net zero would have minimal costs, and that it could boost productivity and economic growth. None of these has any basis in reality.

The push for net zero began in 2019, when the U.K.’s Climate Change Committee produced a report urging the government to adopt the policy. Part of the justification was historic climate guilt. In the words of committee chair Lord Deben, Britain had been “one of the largest historical contributors to climate change.” But the key economic justification for raising Britain’s decarbonization from 80% to 100% by 2050 – i.e., net zero – was “rapid cost reductions during mass deployment for key technologies,” notably in offshore wind. These illusory cost reductions, the committee claimed, “have made tighter emission reduction targets achievable at the same costs as previous looser targets.” It was green snake oil.

During the subsequent 88-minute debate in the House of Commons to write net zero into law, the clean-energy minister, Chris Skidmore, also asserted that net zero’s cost would be the same as the previous 80% target, which Parliament had approved in 2008. Challenged by a Labour MP on the absence of a regulatory-impact assessment, Skidmore misled Parliament, saying that there had been no regulatory-impact assessment in respect of raising the initial 60 percent target to 80 percent.

The regulatory-impact assessment that Skidmore says doesn’t exist gave a range of £324 billion to £404 billion when the target was raised to 80% – an estimate that excluded transitional costs – and cautioned that costs could exceed this range. Unlike today’s political pronouncements, the assessment was honest about the consequences of Britain acting if the rest of the world did not. “The economic case for the UK continuing to act alone where global action cannot be achieved would be weak,” it warned.

The Climate Change Act was passed to show Britain’s climate leadership and inspire the rest of the world to follow its example. How did that work out? In the 11 years that transpired from passing the Act to legislating net zero in 2019, Britain’s fossil fuel emissions fell by 180 million metric tons – a 33% reduction. Over the same period, the rest of the world’s emissions increased by 5,177 million metric tons – a rise of 16%. Put another way, 11 years of British emissions reduction were wiped out in around 140 days by increased emissions from the rest of the world.

Someone who claims that he’s a leader but who has no followers is typically regarded as a fool. It’s different with climate. Politicians parade their green virtue – Skidmore is to quit the House of Commons, and he teaches net zero studies at Harvard’s Kennedy School – while voters get mugged with higher energy bills. Analysis of Britain’s Big Six energy companies’ regulatory filings reveals that fuel-input costs for gas and coal-fired power stations were flat from 2009 to 2020. Still, the average price per kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity paid by households rose 67%, driven by high environmental levies to subsidize renewable-energy investors. Yet supposedly the cost of renewable energy has plummeted.

During Prime Minister’s Questions earlier this year, Rishi Sunak claimed the cost of offshore wind had fallen from £140 per megawatt hour (MWh) to £40 per MWh, numbers assiduously propagated by the wind lobby and the Climate Change Committee. His claim is flat-out false. The prime minister has been suckered by falling per MWh price bids made by wind investors in successive allocation-round bids for offshore wind subsidies.

The explanation for this is to be found not in falling costs but in a flawed bidding process that rewards opportunistic bidding by wind investors. The government was giving away valuable options that commit the government to honor the prices paid for winning bids but commit investors to nothing. Because investors don’t pay anything for these options, the only way they can get them is by cutting the price they offer – but are not obliged to take – for their electricity unless they choose to exercise their options much later in the process.

Falling prices in successive allocation rounds are thus an artefact of moral hazard hardwired into the allocation mechanism; they reveal nothing about the trend in the costs of offshore wind. Analysis of audited financial data of wind farm companies undertaken by a handful of independent researchers comprehensively debunks the falling wind costs claim. The unavoidable move to deeper waters offset any cost reductions and operating costs per MWh of electricity for new offshore wind projects; the prices for the move are around double those assumed in the subsidy bids.

Preeminent among these researchers is Gordon Hughes, a former economics professor at Edinburgh University and adviser to the World Bank on power plant economics. Hughes’s analysis shows that by the twelfth year of operation, rising per MWh operating costs of deep-water wind turbines exceed their government-guaranteed prices, squeezing out their capacity to repay their capital and financing costs.

The intermittency and variability of wind and solar led the government to create a capacity market to pay for standby generation. In any economic appraisal of renewables, the costs of running the capacity market should be allocated to wind and solar as their intermittency and variability create the need for it. Electricity procured from the capacity market is not cheap. In 2020, German-owned Uniper’s thermal power stations obtained an average price of £224 per MWh, around four times the typical wholesale price.

Confirmation that offshore wind has huge, likely insuperable, cost and operating difficulties came in June, when Siemens Energy issued a shock profits warning and saw its shares plunge by 37 percent, in part because of higher-than-anticipated turbine failure rates. According to Hughes, the implication is that future wind operating costs will be higher, and output significantly lower, shortening the turbines’ economic lives. His conclusion is crushing:

The whole justification for the falling costs of wind generation rested on the assumption that much bigger wind turbines would produce more output at lower capex cost per megawatt, without the large costs of generational change. Now we have confirmation that such optimism is entirely unjustified . . .  It follows that current energy policies in the UK, Europe and the United States are based on foundations of sand – naïve optimism reinforced by enthusiastic lobbying divorced from engineering reality.

The British government has been conned into placing a massive bet on offshore wind and is forcing electricity consumers to spend billions of pounds on a dead-end technology.

The falling cost of wind deception contaminates official assessments of the macroeconomic consequences of net zero. The Office for Budget Responsibility claims that the cost of low-carbon generation has fallen so fast that it is now cheaper than fossil fuel generation. Similarly, the Treasury erroneously took falling prices in wind subsidy allocation rounds as indicating falling wind costs. Both see the economy riddled with multiple layers of market failures, while not recognizing the real danger of government policy being captured by vested interests, as, indeed, it has been. Taken to its logical conclusion, theirs is an argument for switching to central planning and a command-and-control economy.

The Treasury argues that “other things being equal,” the added investment required by renewable energy “will translate into additional GDP growth.” Other things, of course, are not equal. As recent history shows, there’s a world of difference between investors and politicians making capital-allocation decisions. The centrally planned economies of the former communist bloc squandered colossal amounts of capital, immiserating their populations. Few now believe that investment in those economies boosted growth.

We don’t need to hypothesize. Government data disprove the Treasury’s contention and demonstrate that increasing deployment of renewable capacity reduces the productivity of Britain’s grid. In 2009, 87.3 gigawatts (GW) of generating capacity, comprising only 5.1 percent of wind and solar, generated 376.8 terrawatt hours (TWh) of electricity. In 2020, 100.9 GW of generating capacity, with wind and solar accounting for 37.6 percent of capacity, produced 312.3 TWh of electricity. Thanks to renewables, 13.6 GW (15.6 percent) more generating capacity produced 64.5 TWh (17.1 percent) less electricity.

Those numbers are damning for renewables and demonstrate why they make electricity more expensive and people poorer. Before mass deployment of renewables, 1 MW of capacity in 2009 produced 4,312 MWh of electricity. In 2020, 1 MW of capacity generated 3,094 MWh, a decline of 28.3 percent. It’s as clear as can be: investment in renewables shrinks the economy’s productive potential. This is confirmed by the International Energy Agency’s net zero modelling. Its net zero pathway sees the global energy sector in 2030 employing nearly 25 million more people, using $16.5 trillion more capital and taking an additional land area the combined size of California and Texas for wind and solar farms and the combined size of Mexico and France for bioenergy – all to produce 7 percent less energy.

Britain’s energy-policy disaster has lessons for America. The physics and economics of wind power are not magically transformed when they cross the Atlantic. Whenever a politician or wind lobbyist touts wind as low-cost or says net zero will boost growth, they become accessories to the wind power scam. The data lead ineluctably to a decisive conclusion: net zero is anti-growth. It is a formula for prolonged economic stagnation. Anyone who wants the truth about renewables should look at Britain and the sorry state of its economy. For the last decade and a half, it has been going through its worst period of growth since 1780.

Unlike in business and finance, there are no criminal or civil penalties for those who promote policies based on fraud and misrepresentation. Rather, net zero is similar to communism. Like net zero, communism was based on a lie: that it would outproduce capitalism. But it failed to produce, and belief in communism evaporated. When the collapse came, it was sudden and rapid. The truth could not be hidden. A similar fate awaits net zero.

Rupert Darwall is a senior fellow of the RealClear Foundation and author of  The Folly of Climate Leadership: Net Zero and Britain’s Disastrous Energy Policies.

December 21, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular | | 2 Comments

Climate Advocacy: Incompetence Or Intentional Fraud?

By Francis Menton | Manhattan Contrarian | December 14, 2023

It’s the question that must always be front and center in your mind when you read anything generated by advocates of energy transition as a supposed solution to “climate change”: Is this just rank incompetence, or is it intentional fraud? (The third possibility — reasonable, good faith advocacy — can generally be ruled out in the first few nanoseconds.). As between the options that the advocate is completely incompetent or an intentional fraudster, I suppose it would be better to be merely incompetent. However, often the misdirection is so blatant that it borders on impossible to believe that the author could be so stupid as to actually believe what he or she is saying.

So let’s apply this inquiry to a piece that has come to my attention in the past few days.

From euronews.green we have a piece from November 12 with the headline “Powered by wind and water: The Canary Island proving it is possible to run on renewables.” The byline is Lauren Crosby Mendicott. Ms. Mendicott announces the exciting news that one of Spain’s Canary Islands, El Hierro, has recently reported that it ran its electricity system entirely on wind and water power for 28 consecutive days. Excerpt:

The smallest of the Canary Islands has achieved a record of only using wind and water power for 28 consecutive days. . . . [T]he 1.1 million-year-old volcanic island is on route to being 100 per cent energy self-sufficient through clean, renewable sources. Its 10,000 inhabitants and local government are equally committed to the sustainability of the island.

Wow, that’s great! But OK Lauren, tell us more. If the system ran on just wind and water power for 28 days, what happened on days 29, 30, 31 and thereafter? Can we expect that with just a few tweaks the system can get to running 365 days a year on its wind/water system without fossil fuel backup? Or is it in fact nowhere close to that goal? Unfortunately you will not find any information on those subjects in Ms. Mendicott’s piece.

As readers here know, I have been somewhat focused on the El Hierro project for several years, because it is the closest thing in the world to an attempt to build a demonstration project to show that wind power combined with energy storage can create a fully-functioning electricity grid without fossil fuel backup. I have had numerous pieces over the years dealing with the results of the El Hierro project, most recently this one on September 30, 2023. My conclusion from the data available at that time:

The Gorona del Viento project (wind turbines and a pumped storage reservoir) on El Hierro Island off Spain fails worse and worse every year.

The El Hierro system has wind turbines and energy storage from a pumped hydro system with nameplate capacity seemingly well in excess of peak electricity usage on the island. So theoretically they should have no problem getting all of their electricity from the wind/storage system — right? And yet, when you look at their annual data, somehow they only seem to average about 50% of annual electricity from the wind/storage system. Sometimes it gets to 70% or so for a few months, but then at other times it drops back to as little as around 30%. When I visited the Gorona del Viento website back in September, I found data for what it claimed as hours of operation on “100% renewable” generation for the years 2018, 2019 and 2020 — and nothing thereafter. For some reason, they had stopped reporting these data after 2020. The numbers were 2300 hours in 2018, 1905 in 2019, and 1293 in 2020 — a rather precipitous ongoing decline. Given that there are 8760 hours in a non-leap year (24 x 365 — likely beyond Ms. Mendicott’s math skills) these numbers represent shockingly small percentages of the annual operation of the system, declining from 26.3% in 2018 to only 14.7% in 2020 (a leap year with 8784 hours).

Going back to the Gorona del Viento web site today, I find the same figure of 1293 hours of “100% renewable” generation for 2020, and no subsequent data. Maybe those data are lurking somewhere in the Spanish-language portions of the site where I can’t find them. But somehow I think that if they had some great news to report on that subject, it would be front and center.

El Hierro is blessed with a rare near-perfect site for a pumped-storage hydro facility, with a volcano rising nearly straight up from the sea and a big crater on the top to store the water. Here is a picture of the shoreline, with the mountain rising nearly perpendicular out of the water:

And yet, despite having such a rare near-perfect site for a large pumped hydro storage facility, the El Hierro system does not have nearly the energy storage needed to provide full-time electricity from the wind/storage system. It would need to multiply its storage capacity by at least an order of magnitude to come close to 100% electricity from this system. Meanwhile, most of its electricity comes from a backup diesel generator — a fact nowhere mentioned in Ms. Mendicott’s piece.

So, is the piece mere incompetence, or intentional fraud? Several factors would seem to give strong support to the inference of intentional fraud — failure to mention the diesel backup at all; failure to mention the number of hours in each recent year where the diesel backup had to be called into activity to keep the lights on, and whether that number of hours was trending up or down; failure even to consider how much energy storage would be needed to enable the system to operate full time without the diesel backup, and whether there are any plans to provide that amount of storage or at what cost. Is it possible that someone could write a piece on this subject without even being aware of these issues? You be the judge!

December 17, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | 1 Comment

London’s spontaneous bus combustion: How is this being allowed to happen?

By Rhoda Wilson for The Exposé | December 14, 2023

Why are London’s buses spontaneously bursting into flames? And why are our politicians not addressing the problem?

In the past couple of years, two huge ships carrying thousands of cars have gone up in flames, apparently because of batteries in electric vehicles.  A fire on board car carrier Felicity Ace in February 2022 led to the vessel sinking in the Atlantic, along with its cargo of 4,000 vehicles. And cargo ship Fremantle Highway caught fire in the North Sea.

In India, a spate of electric scooters catching fire in early 2022 sparked safety concerns causing buyers to think twice.  Electric scooters bursting into flames hasn’t stopped. Fires are so commonplace that The Times of India now have a section dedicated to ‘Electric Scooter Fire News’.

At Luton Airport at least 125 flights were cancelled after a huge fire, which started on level three of the airport’s multi-storey car park.  It caused the entire £20 million structure to collapse. Up to 1,500 vehicles were unlikely to be salvageable, according to estimates at the time. Authorities said the blaze “appeared to have been accidental and began in a parked car, believed to be a diesel vehicle.”

Well, not according to one witness, The Telegraph pointed out.  The eyewitness managed to snap a picture of the vehicle suspected of causing the fire, which looked very like a Range Rover Evoque. There was none of the thick black smoke you would expect with a diesel fire. Instead, the blaze was focused on the front left seat of the car under which – well, I never! – the lithium-ion battery happens to be located in some hybrid Range Rovers.

Data from the London Fire Brigade for 2019 showed an incident rate of 0.04% for petrol and diesel car fires, while the rate for plug-in vehicles is more than double at 0.1%. But vested interests are creating as much smoke as possible to obscure the cause of these fires. Why? Because meeting the notably insane and economically disastrous net zero target by 2050 is predicated on the UK giving up fossil fuels.

The real danger with electric vehicles is the lithium-ion batteries, which are prone to catching fire unexpectedly or exploding and the ensuing inferno is very hard to put out.

Professor Peter Edwards, chair in inorganic chemistry at the University of Oxford, told The Telegraph: “Lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles can develop unstoppable so-called ‘thermal runaway’ fires which burn uncontrollably.”

“As well as intense heat, during a battery fire, numerous toxic gases are emitted, such as hydrogen cyanide and hydrogen fluoride. The emission of these gases can be a larger threat than the heat generated,” he said.

Prof. Edwards is also raising the alarm about a pending “potential catastrophe” with all the large-scale lithium-ion battery storage sites sprouting up all over the UK, especially on solar farms.

There’s also a looming potential catastrophe in Sadiq Khan’s London bus fleet.

As of 31 March 2023, approximately 56% of London’s bus fleet is “environmentally friendly.”  Out of a total bus fleet of 8,643, there are 3,835 hybrid buses, 950 battery electric buses, and 20 hydrogen fuel cell buses operating in London.

Below we have gathered incidences of buses spontaneously bursting into flames during 2022 and 2023.  To find these, we conducted an internet search for the term “London bus fire,” while we came across some incidences in other locations along the way, we very much doubt the following is an extensive record of incidences in the past couple of years.

Buses carry many people at any one time, including schoolchildren.  As an urgent matter of public safety, we must ask: What is causing these buses to spontaneously burst into flames?

In May 2022, six electric buses were destroyed in a bus garage in Potters Bar, Hertfordshire.  At the height of the blaze, eight engines were in attendance and six Transport for London (“TfL”) buses – two hybrid electric and four diesel-powered – were on fire. The first bus caught fire while it was charging, before causing the other five to become engulfed.

According to Hertfordshire Live, an unnamed bus driver said that the fire was believed to have been caused by a battery exploding in one of the electric buses while it was charging – but, the Daily Mail said, this had not yet been confirmed.

Hertfordshire Fire and Rescue Service said at the time that “The cause and origin of the fire is currently under investigation and is yet to be established.”

After the fire in Potters Bar depot, TfL recalled 90 electric buses. “The precautionary measure has been decided while the company investigates causes of the blaze,” media outlet Sustainable Bus said.

Also in May 2022, Paris’s transport operator withdrew 149 electric buses made by Bolloré Group’s Bluebus from operation after two ignited on separate occasions.

Damaged electric vehicle batteries pose a risk of “thermal runaway” where energy stored in the battery releases rapidly, creating temperatures of up to 400oC.

 

Dramatic images on social media showed a double-decker bus on fire on Brixton Hill, south London, on 17 June 2022. The driver and passengers left the bus before firefighters arrived. Thankfully, there were no injuries and the blaze was under control in 30 minutes.

Never letting a good crisis go to waste, the Mirror added a climate twist to its reporting of the incident: “The incident comes on what is touted to be the hottest day of the year, with temperatures expected to peak at 34oC this afternoon.”

GB News ran with the same insinuations, implying a link between the ambient temperature and the cause of the blaze in the title of its article: ‘London bus bursts into flames as heatwave causes mayhem on hottest day of year’.

It is not the first time that climate science deniers have used the fabricated “climate change crisis” to explain spontaneous combustion.  In July 2021, IFL Science used the dramatic title ‘The UK Is So Hot That A Bus Stop Reportedly Burst Into Flames’ to describe a passenger bus shelter catching fire in Solihull, West Midlands, UK.

IFL Science went on to say: “The extreme heat is leading to some unlikely (and disastrous) events. On 19 July [2021], the powerful sun bearing down on an unsuspecting bus stop in Solihull reportedly caused it to spontaneously burst into flames.”

The Guardian refuted a link between ambient temperature and the cause of the bus bursting into flames on 17 June 2022. “The Guardian understands that the extreme heat in London was not believed to be the cause of the fire,” it said.

The Guardian: London bus bursts into flames in Brixton, 17 June 2022

London bus passengers managed to escape a large fire that engulfed the rear of a vehicle on Baker Street near Portman Square in Marylebone, London on 10 January 2023.

All passengers had fled the bus before firefighters arrived, the London Fire Brigade said, and there were no reports of injuries. However, one man was being treated for smoke inhalation.

The fire was believed to have been accidental but the exact cause was recorded as undetermined.

Cars and homes on a residential road in Hackney, east London were left damaged after a school bus for pupils with special needs was engulfed in flames on 20 January 2023.

The children were inside the bus when it caught fire.  The bus was carrying three primary school children and was forced to stop after smoke was detected from the front of the vehicle. It was quickly evacuated with no injuries, The Telegraph reported.

The Daily Mail reported that a witness who lived nearby said as soon as the bonnet caught fire, everyone was evacuated off the bus – and she believes people were also evacuated from their houses.

Six other vehicles were also damaged.

The Independent: Hackney school bus fire leaves surrounding cars and homes damaged, 20 January 2023

White smoke was seen billowing out from a London double-decker bus after it broke down in south London, The Independent reported. The bus was stationed near West Croydon Bus Station when it began to emit smoke onto the street.

The Independent: Clouds of white smoke seen billowing from London bus in Croydon, 19 May 2023

A double-decker bus was destroyed by a huge fire on Bradford Broadway, London on 9 October 2023. First Bus said no passengers were on board when the incident started.

A spokesperson said: “One of our buses on the 607 service was involved in a fire incident on the upper deck … We do not know what caused the fire and will assist in the investigation including a review of CCTV footage.”

It’s not only passengers and nearby road users that are in danger from exploding buses.

In October 2023, The Telegraph reported that residents are fighting to block plans to build an electric bus garage under the development of thousands of new flats amid fears battery fires could cause a “volcano.”

Labour-run Barnet Council were in talks with TfL and developer Ballymore about the joint £1.7bn project to build 25 tower blocks on top of a proposed underground electric bus depot in Edgware town centre.

However, Save Our Edgware, a community group, warned that residents would be at “severe risk” from electric vehicle batteries igniting, leading to explosive combustion and multi-vehicle fires.

Other forms of electric-powered transport pose a risk to homes as well. On Monday, the London Fire Brigade had this warning for Christmas:

Why?  Because e-bikes and e-scooters also spontaneously burst into flames.  The London Fire Brigade warned a few months ago that e-bike fires are up 60% this year. Firefighters have been called to an e-scooter or e-bike fire every two days since the start of 2023. Since 2020, at least 12 people have died and a further 190 have been injured in the UK in suspected e-bike and e-scooter blazes, The Telegraph reported.

In one instance, an e-bike left charging is believed to have caused the house fire that tore through a maisonette in Cambridge, UK, over the summer, killing a mother and her two young children.

On the other side of the pond, firefighters are seeing the same problems.   In Montgomery County, Maryland a fire broke out on 28 October 2022, on the 14th floor of the high-rise apartment building called ‘Twin Towers’. (ER: Hmm.) Fire officials said an e-scooter battery malfunctioned while charging.

According to New York City Fire Department in September 2022, electric battery-related fires were up a whopping 233% in two years.  The fires have resulted in 163 injuries and 10 deaths, including a 5-year-old girl who was killed in an apartment building fire.

Inside Edition: Why Are Some Electronic Bikes and Scooters Catching Fire? 22 September 2022 (2 mins)

Featured image: The remains of the school bus after the blaze in Hackney on 20 January 2023. Source: The Telegraph

December 16, 2023 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Why is the Government Paying Farmers to Stop Farming?

Inside the UK’s “food security” report

By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | December 14, 2023

On November 29th, the British Parliament’s cross-party Environmental Audit Committee published a new report on “Environmental change and food security”.

The timing of the report is more than interesting, considering the UN’s COP28 summit published its own “Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems and Climate Action” (which the UK signed) just two days later. But I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.

The report claims – amongst many other things – that we…

need to adapt our food and farming system to become more resilient to the effects of climate change and biodiversity loss.

This is actually an inversion of the usual argument. The standard line is that we should change our eating habits to prevent climate change (the report still claims this too), but now we are being told that we must change our eating habits or climate change will cause us to starve to death.

Just like the push to change climate into a public health crisis, inverting this argument is about creating a sense of threat, about scaring people. It’s always about scaring people.

But, you’ll be pleased to know, while the reason we need to change may have altered, what we actually have to do remains the same: Eat less meat. A lot less meat.

The report repeats, countless times, the Climate Change Committee’s recommendation that the UK “reduces its meat and dairy consumption by 20% by 2030, and by 35% by 2050”

In a blatant rhetorical trick, it tries to make this figure into some kind of compromise by pointing out that some of their witnesses (eg. noted lunatic George Monbiot) advocated eating zero meat or animal products of any kind.

The report is full of this kind of manipulative language.

For example, on page 48, the authors claim that “the Government does not believe it has a role to tell people what to eat”, but then proceed to quote testimony from “experts” who tell them they have a responsibility to tell people what to eat (even though they really don’t want to).

Sue Pritchard argues people aren’t informed or sensible enough to make these decisions, while Professor Tim Lang essentially argues what we eat is chosen for us anyway:

Everyone thinks they choose their diet. We don’t, actually; we choose it by race, by class, by family, by gender, by culture, by when we were brought up, by the power of advertisers and their expenditure. Nearly £1 billion is spent on advertising food in Britain and it is overwhelmingly the ultraprocessed foods that get that advertising. There is very little advertising, let alone national guidance, for eating more appropriately.

“It’s OK to tell people what to do because choice is an illusion”. Beautiful.

The whole report is basically 90 pages of this kind of sophistic nonsense. If you’ve got a strong stomach and a lot of free time, you can read it all here.

We’re just going to focus on the “recommendations” at the end.

There’s this one…

The Government must show its leadership by upholding standards for the environmental impacts of food production in its trading relationships with other countries.

… which, loosely translated, means charging more import taxes on foods that aren’t “environmentally responsible” (or some other buzzphrase). This would mirror legislation in the EU, where the “Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism” has been in place since earlier this year.

Of course, the unwritten consequence of this would be higher prices for ordinary consumers. Oops.

Then there’s this one…

The Government’s plans for a strong food curriculum in schools should include science-based education about the environmental impacts of food production, including food waste.

Which doesn’t need to be translated. It’s about indoctrinating – sorry, educating – children.

Or this one, promoting diet-related propaganda:

We recommend… that the Government should publish national guidance on sustainable diets

And there’s this one, which is my favourite [emphasis very much added]:

The Government does not want to tell people what to eat BUT from its plans to encourage people to eat more healthily it clearly understands its role in helping people make better choices.

Other recommendations call for more “Highly Protected Marine Areas (HPMAs)” to limit fishing in some areas of the sea as well as lowering maximum yield limits.

Still more suggest “sustainability ratings” being made a mandatory part of food labeling, and it’s not hard to see how rating all food purchases on a “sustainability” scale can be parlayed into social credit systems or the like.

Another includes a demand to “designate food security a public good”, like education, infrastructure, and national defense (which I imagine would grant some more powers under some act or other).

It goes on and on.

So, for anyone keeping score at home, the report recommends…

  • Using taxpayer money to create and distribute anti-meat propaganda
  • Educating children that eating meat is wrong
  • Publishing “government recommended diets”
  • Controlling where people fish and what they are allowed to catch
  • Using taxes to raise the prices of foods that are “bad for the environment”

Don’t worry though, “the Government does not believe it has a role to tell people what to eat”. Honest.

The truth is it goes well beyond simply telling people what to do. Perhaps the most concerning issue in the report is the much-praised “Environmental Land Management” schemes, described as:

a critical lever in incentivising a shift towards achieving food security in the context of environmental change

Here’s how they work…

Environmental Land Management schemes pay farmers to do certain things with their land… including to improve the environment”

You’ll notice it says “including” to improve the environment, not only to improve the environment. They never say what else is included, or what it might be in aid of.

Also, “Paying farmers to do certain things” ? That’s very vague, isn’t it?

What exactly are these “certain things” ?

Well, there’s a short list included but it doesn’t get much less vague. It mentions:

  • “undertaking certain environmentally beneficial actions”
  • “activities that support local nature recovery and meet local environmental priorities”
  • and “long-term projects that support landscape and ecosystem recovery.”

All of which can be fairly accurately summed up as “not farming”.

Yes, the British government is actively paying farmers not to farm, and – in truly Orwellian fashion – are doing it in the name of “promoting food security”. (You can read about similar schemes in the US and UK here.)

It goes beyond “telling people what to eat”, into the realm of making sure they don’t eat at all.

December 14, 2023 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | | 1 Comment

Former Federal German Minister Under Merkel Warns: Germany Heading To A Climate Tyranny

“Basic rights in crisis mode” in Germany. The real threat to democracy.

By P Gosselin | No Tricks Zone | December 12, 2023

“How we live, heat, get around, travel and what we eat could soon no longer be an individual decision, but increasingly be dictated by the state,” a former German federal minister warns.

Kristina Schröder, who served as the Federal Family Minister from 2009 to 2013 in the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel, recently commented that Germany currently finds itself on a dangerous environmentally dogmatic path under the current leadership.

Pandemic as the blueprint

In a commentary published at Der Pragmaticus, she writes: “The pandemic has provided a blueprint for the climate movement on how to enforce fundamental restrictions on basic rights.”

“Germany is heading in the direction of a radical climate protection dogma that almost completely ignores the costs of the path taken. And once again, the two predominant patterns of argumentation in the pandemic can be observed: A refusal to weigh things up and an ends-justify-the-means mindset,” Schröder adds. “I am convinced that large sections of the climate protection movement are also fighting our way of living and our economy at least as much as they are fighting climate change.”

CO2 as the virus to fear

Schröder adds that it is easy to see that CO2 is being viewed as a virus and to imagine future measures to curb it: “there is a threat of regulations affecting our most private lifestyles. How we live, heat, get around, travel and what we eat could soon no longer be an individual decision, but increasingly be dictated by the state.”

Schellnhuber “3 tonnes per year”

She also speaks critically of Prof. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the former director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) who proposes “every citizen could be given a CO2 budget of three tons per year.” The average German emits 11 tons per year, and thus getting down to just 3 would certainly entail draconian restrictions and regulations.

But so far many Germans have been acting complacently about such drastic proposals, Schröder notes, adding: “This eager willingness to relinquish fundamental freedoms is all the more disturbing as a crucial question is hardly being asked, let alone answered: Does effective climate protection really have to mean such losses of freedom and prosperity?”

Schröder, who contributes regularly to Welt, also wonders why in Germany there’s  such a “blindness to the costs” of reducing CO2. “Why this indifference to the loss of freedom and prosperity?” And: “Why this longing for bans, renunciation and penance?”

“Powerful lever” against capitalism

In Schröder’s view, for the activists, climate protection is “a powerful lever to push back the hated capitalist system.”

She concludes:

“I am certain that if a technical solution were to be found tomorrow that would allow us to render CO2 harmless overall, large sections of the radical climate protection movement would not be relieved, but disappointed.”

For the greens and the many activists, it’s follow our politics! It’s not about science.

Read Kristina Schröder’s full commentary here (German). 

December 13, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

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