Major windfarms are again reneging on their promise to deliver power to the national grid at agreed prices.
A year ago, Net Zero Watch reported that the Moray East windfarm had become fully operational, but had refused to activate its Contracts for Difference (CfDs), under which it had promised to sell cheap power to the grid. This gaming allowed it to sell at elevated market prices instead, costing consumers hundreds of millions of pounds.
Last week the windfarm advised that it will put back the date for activation another 12 months. In addition, the CfD start date for Phase 1 of the Hornsea 2 windfarm, which became fully operational in August last year, has also been pushed back into 2024.
Delaying its CfD may have earned Moray East as much as half a billion pounds last year; putting it back another year could easily bring in another hundred million pounds at current market prices. Hornsea 2 could earn a similar amount in 2023/24.
Windfarms are entitled to do this under the CfD scheme rules, and there is scope for further delays. Moray East will be able to put off a final decision about whether to activate its CfD until March 2025. Some of the phases of Hornsea 2 will be able to delay until 2026.
Andrew Montford, Net Zero Watch deputy director, said:
How long do Government and civil service think they can go on pretending that these windfarms are going to deliver cheap power? It is a deliberate, cynical deception and it needs to stop now.
The results of Berlin’s Climate Neutrality By 2030 referendum tell us that FFF and Last Generation are fringe movements, remote of even Berlin’s mainstream.
It’ll take a longtime for the radical climate activists to recover from this major setback
The movement’s leaders reacted in disbelief and sourly to the defeat, as Twitter account holder Georg tweeted.
Crushing defeat
Last Sunday’s “Berlin Climate Neutrality By 2030” referendum failed resoundingly despite the more than a million euros spent in a massive run-up campaign that included plastering the city with posters, concerts by famous performers, huge support and propaganda by the media and hefty donations coming from left wing activists from the east and west coasts of USA.
Once the dust of the referendum had settled, it emerged that the “yes” side fell way short of the quorum 608,000 votes needed to pass the measure. Only 442,210 cast a vote in favor, which represents only 18% of Berlin’s eligible voters. The activists expected a far greater turnout. 82% refused to lend any support.
Berlin’s rejection of the climate neutrality by 2030 mandate is a massive body blow to the the radical Fridays for Future and Last Generation movement in Germany, and it will take months for the radicals to recover, it ever, from this setback.
The Berlin initiative to make the city climate neutral by 2030 was led by rich, upper class youths like Luisa “Longhaul” Neubauer. But Berliners, having been harassed for months by activists gluing themselves to the streets and blocking traffic, saw the folly of the initiative and the high costs it would entail politically and financially. They decided resoundingly they’d wanted no part of it.
Lashing out at the majority
The agony of referendum defeat was palpable as some of its leaders reacted by lashing out and insulting those who refused to vote “yes”, In a video, movement co-leader Luisa Neubauer sank into cynical accusations against the majority, even calling the uncooperative Berliners “fossil cynics” and “climate destroyers”.
Neubauer added: “There are forces in this city that are doing everything to get the last spark of climate destruction out.” In Neubauer’s view these forces include the vast 82% of Berliners who refused to vote “yes”. So troublesome democracy can be.
“Bubble has finally burst”
Germany’s Pleiteticker here commented on the Berlin referendum:
Social Democrat Dario Schramm wept on Twitter at the gloating that would now come from the other side. But he and other supporters of the green ban politics need not be surprised. For years they have been spreading their ideas of good politics for years in a self-righteous, arrogant and sometimes aggressive manner.
They, mostly members of the upper middle class, have declared war on the lower and lower middle class with their destructive climate measures. Outside the Berlin political bubble and the other urban feel-good oases of Germany, the Neubauers of this world never possessed much support. And now the bubble has finally burst. In the Marzahn, Köpenick and Lichtenberg districts, the majority of voters voted against the referendum. The normal working population of Berlin decided against the journalistic and political elite.”
But don’t expect the climate radicals to go away. They’ll be back at it soon enough.
Londoners have launched a war against the surveillance cameras being installed to monitor Ultra-Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) expansion in the city by covering the cameras with cardboard boxes and shopping bags, and plastic bags.
The aim of the ULEZ scheme is to reduce air pollution in the city but comes with invasive surveillance of vehicles. Drivers with vehicles that do not meet the minimum emission requirements would be charged £12.50 ($15.42) daily just for using ultra-low emission zones.
Critics have argued that the expansion of ULEZ would affect low-income households as it covers most of the neighborhoods within the M25, the highway that circles most of Greater London.
Others have raised privacy concerns after it was revealed that the British Transport Police and the London Metropolitan Police would have access to the cameras.
300 Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR), referred to as Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) in America, cameras have recently been installed in the city. 2,750 more will be added before the ULEZ expansion deadline of August 29, 2023.
In some parts of the city, people have protested the expansion of the scheme by cutting wires to the cameras and painting the lenses with black paint. In other parts, the cameras were ripped out and thrown to the ground.
Since February, Londoners have been taking to the streets to call for a halt to the expansion of ULEZ, with some calling for the resignation of Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan.
The mayor has championed other eco-friendly measures like Lower Traffic Neighborhoods (LTNs), which ban vehicles from using backroads. Miles of bicycle lanes have also been added throughout the city.
Why does the Telegraph give publicity to nutters like this?
To claim that the impact of climate change meant that the construction and use of buildings are now a “bigger existential threat than nuclear war” is something that nobody in their right mind would say, and is an insult to those who lost their lives in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And he is not even right about “buildings accounting for 15% of emissions”. It is the people who live in them who need energy to live their lives.
And it is irrelevant how “green” you make buildings – their construction will still require concrete, metals and equipment, all of which involve large amounts of fossil fuels in their production, transportation and use. And I doubt whether his preference for refurbishing rather than new build will have much effect either, since new builds can be designed to be much more energy efficient.
The end logic of Mr Sturgis is that we should all go back to living in mud huts.
Unfortunately Sturgis is just another of those attention seekers, who want to push their extreme agendas onto the rest of us. Shame on the Telegraph for giving him the opportunity.
GLASGOW, SCOTLAND – NOVEMBER 08: Red Rebels join protesters from Extinction Rebellion for a “die in” outside the offices of American asset management firm Mercer on November 08, 2021 in Glasgow, Scotland. As World Leaders meet to discuss climate change at the COP26 Summit, many climate action groups have taken to the streets to protest for real progress to be made by governments to reduce carbon emissions, clean up the oceans, reduce fossil fuel use and other issues relating to global heating. (Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)
Michael Crowley has written a very interesting piece for Spiked about climate alarmism. I don’t necessarily go along with all the claims about Christianity, but I think we can all agree that Extinction Rebellion is “effectively an apocalyptic cult”. Here’s an excerpt:
Apocalypticism may have developed hand-in-hand with religion and Christianity in particular. But it has persisted as a mode of thinking among certain sections of society, even as Christianity’s influence has waned. Indeed, as societies have become more secular, so apocalyptic thinking has become more secular, too.
We see this today, above all, in the case of environmentalism. For it’s there that apocalyptic projections and predictions are now most at home. Greenism shares with its Biblical precursor an obsession with days of judgement, with vengeance upon the wicked and the dream of a redeemed world. But there’s a vital difference between the Biblical apocalypse and its green iteration. Those to be judged today are not a portion of sinful humanity. No, they are all of humanity. And the redeemed world dreamt of by climate activists is not the kingdom of God promised by earlier apocalyptic narratives. Instead, it is a kingdom of nature, and it is distinctly opposed to humanity. In short, the green End Times amount to a very anti-human apocalypse.
At the forefront of the arms race in catastrophic prophecies is Extinction Rebellion. Every page on its website itemises the scale of the climate crisis, and the dire impact that human development supposedly has on life on Earth. The extinction referred to in the movement’s title does not just include wildlife, but humanity itself. Activists claim that our extinction is just a generation away.
Here is a literally hopeless creed. XR and its apocalyptic ilk do not seem interested in climate change as a practical challenge – as something that can be addressed with technological and material development, as environmental problems have been mitigated in the past. Instead, they see climate change as a form of necessary punishment. As XR co-founder Roger Hallam puts it in one blog post, XR members must “understand that redemption only comes through suffering and the only honourable life is to move into that suffering in an act of faith that there will be another side to come out of, into a state of grace”.
As these words show, XR is effectively an apocalyptic cult. That’s why XR’s propaganda has more than a touch of the Book of Revelation about it. A 2021 XR video is titled ‘Advice to Young People as they face Annihilation’. One blogpost by Hallam begins “In these End Times…”. Another exclaims: “Only when we admit the utter destitution of our souls at this time of utter annihilation will we begin a journey we can be proud of, regardless of the outcome.” These are not the words of a political campaigner. They are the words of a self-styled prophet.
Climate change poses a challenge to humanity. But green apocalypticism does not help anyone. It inspires panic in those who buy into it, especially young people. They then see it as their job to wake us all up, to make us see what they see, to reveal the coming Armageddon. As far as they are concerned, this righteous mission trumps everything else. And it culminates in ill-thought-out, knee-jerk actions, such as climbing the gantries on the M25 to bring traffic to a halt. After all, we must be made to see the error of our ways. And if we don’t, we deserve the punishment that is surely coming.
This is the second in a series tracing the history of population control through to present day depopulation ambitions and intent. You can read Part 1 here.
Henry Kissinger, one of the most influential politicians of the last 50 years, who said ‘the elderly are useless eaters’, considered the idea of using food to control the population. In his 1974 ‘National Security Study Memorandum 200’ he outlined a number of countries of strategic importance for the US that he claimed had problems with population growth that might give them more economic and military strength. He advocated birth control programmes for those countries and suggested that if they did not do this willingly, withdrawing food aid to them may act as an incentive to make them comply.
Using food as a weapon is not just an idea. Russia did it in Turkestan in 1917, where they took control of food production and distribution, resulting in starvation and a drastic reduction in the indigenous population. The US and Canadian governments slaughtered the buffalo population to starve the indigenous people into submission.
Now there is concern among many including economists, Wall Street veterans, farmers and citizen groups that controlling the food supply is once more being implemented to control and reduce the population. The FBI have warned that there are cyber-attacks designed to shut down farms.
It is claimed by powerful groups like the UK’s Climate Change Committee and the International Panel on Climate Change, and the governments they influence, that the main factor exacerbating the so-called ‘climate crisis’ is CO2. In reality, CO2 is essential to all life. If CO2 levels are drastically reduced, plant life, which requires CO2 for photosynthesis, will be reduced and therefore the whole food chain will be affected. In fact a recent report claims that pursuing Net Zero could lead to half the world suffering from starvation.
Is this why so many governments in the world are intent on achieving Net Zero?
In addition to the fake ‘climate crisis’, we now have the fake ‘nitrogen crisis’. Nitrogen is one of the main elements of commercial fertilisers and is an essential nutrient for plant growth but at excessive amounts can be a pollutant and, according to the climate crisis zealots, can cause global warming. The EU’s Integrated Nutrient Action Plan aims to reduce nitrogen fertiliser by 20 per cent. The UN want to reduce all nitrogen ‘waste’ by 50 per cent by 2030. Some of the people targeted by the plan to reduce fertiliser usage are the Dutch farmers. The tyrannical government in the Netherlands plans to compulsorily purchase up to 3,000 farms in order to reduce nitrogen emissions and to cut cattle numbers by 50 per cent. As the Netherlands is the biggest food exporter in Europe, it won’t affect only the Dutch but have a devastating impact on the food supply for the rest of Europe.
But is there actually a nitrogen crisis? Just like the so-called climate crisis, the evidence is ambiguous at best but the statistics are manipulated by those in power to suit their own ends. It’s not as if they aren’t aware of the consequences of drastically reducing the use of commercial fertiliser: they only have to look at Sri Lanka. Food prices rose by 80 per cent and there were massive shortages resulting in thousands of desperate people laying siege to the president’s palace and the president having to flee the country.
Analysing current events, is it all just due to a set of unrelated circumstances that there appears to be a threat to the availability and cost of our food, or is there something more disturbing going on?
It may be worth noting that as farmland is being forcibly sequestered from farmers, Bill Gates is now the single biggest owner of farmland in the US. As the elite are trying to reduce meat consumption, Gates has investments in synthetic meat. As the US suffered severe baby formula shortages, Gates had invested in artificially produced breast milk. It would certainly appear that the elite are determined to monopolise and therefore control the food supply.
Other events suggest a planned assault on the food supply. In the US, since 2021, 96 facilities involved in food production have been damaged or had their poultry or livestock destroyed. The destruction of food processing plants is not limited to the US. In the UK fires have broken out at facilities in Ealing, Gillingham, Bury St Edmunds, Bradford, Stoke-on-Trent, Harlow and Kilkeel, Northern Ireland. In fact, it appears to be a global phenomenon.
In addition, we have the UK and other governments ordering the slaughtering of millions of poultry due to alleged outbreaks of bird flu. Supposedly there have been 174 outbreaks of bird flu in the UK since October 2022. They are diagnosed using PCR tests that we know from the Covid era are totally unreliable. On the subject of Covid, the world’s government-imposed lockdowns also had a negative and totally foreseeable impact on the food supply chains.
Recently, UK supermarkets suffered from shortages of an ever-expanding list of fresh fruit and vegetables. The media initially tried blaming it on adverse weather in Spain and Morocco from where we import the produce. However, other reports have suggested it is also because UK farmers, who grow their produce in greenhouses, can’t afford to heat them because of the high cost of fuel. It’s interesting, therefore, that the government has been giving farmers lump sum payments to leave farming altogether and to give up their land so it can no longer be used for agricultural purposes – thereby reducing the amount of land available for food production – when they could have been offering more financial help to farmers and food producers to increase our food security.
We must also ask why the energy costs are so high. Contrary to the mainstream media blaming it and everything else on the war in Ukraine, it is because of the government’s obsession with Net Zero. They have been drastically reducing our coal production and planning to close all coal-fired electricity plants by October 2024, and no longer encouraging any investment in fossil fuels. Instead, we are relying ever more on the totally unreliable renewables sector.
Our coal production dropped by 44 per cent between the third quarter of 2021 and the third quarter of 2022 but our imports increased by 34 per cent. So the government are deliberately reducing our own coal supplies to reach Net Zero targets whilst importing more to make up the shortfall, making a mockery of their environmental claims while ensuring the British public pay more for their energy. For the same period, gas exports increased by 369 per cent: why wasn’t this used domestically instead to reduce the soaring energy bills everyone, included, food producers, faced last year? Moreover, our electricity exports increased by 771 per cent and yet we were being warned of potential blackouts, and electricity bills for both businesses and households were exorbitant.
The cost of energy is inextricably linked to the price of food as high energy costs for the farmers and transporters equals high food prices and now shortages. At this point it is worth highlighting another quote form Henry Kissinger: ‘Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.’
The question must be: are all these events that are negatively impacting the food supply being orchestrated? A recent paper published by Leeds University may be enlightening. It is entitled ‘Rationing and Climate Change Mitigation’. The authors suggest that rationing of both food and fuel would be helpful to prevent climate change. They praise how successful rationing was during the war and believe it would be a great idea to re-introduce it. They admit that the public are unlikely to go along with this idea if they think resources are plentiful, so what do they suggest? If there is no scarcity of resources then the illusion of scarcity of something else must be created. To this end they claim there is a scarcity of carbon sinks. So we won’t be permitted to use all our resources, not because they are not plentiful, but because our planet cannot absorb the carbon produced by humans utilising them.
The authors realise that the public will need to be re-educated to believe in this fake scarcity: ‘Rationing in this context may require a public information campaign to help people to recognise the scarcity of carbon sinks, to make it clear that we would not be introducing rationing-in-the-face-of-abundance.’
They will also need to make us feel guilty: ‘Second, this may also need to be supported by moral argument – highlighting the moral imperative to consider future generations or at least the current younger generations.’
It sounds suspiciously like the behavioural psychology from the Covid era. This time, though, instead of making us believe that we must comply with restrictions in case we kill granny, they want us to believe that carbon dioxide will kill everyone and if we don’t comply, we will kill young people.
Of course, their plan would be made a lot easier if the government created a real scarcity, which is what they go on to suggest. They want the government to close all coal mines, stop all oil exploration and severely restrict any sale of fossil fuels. They admit that this will cause scarcity and it will be a problem initially. To overcome this, they suggest the government resort to the usual propaganda about saving the lives of future generations and eventually the gullible public will buy it.
They also advocate deliberately creating food shortages: ‘In addition to stricter regulations on fossil fuels, regulation could also target other areas. For example, carbon-intensive farming methods and factory-farmed livestock could be banned – which would clearly have impacts on food supplies.’
Does this not sound more like our current reality than a mere suggestion for the future?
In Part 3 we will examine how vaccines are causing fertility issues.
This is the first in a series tracing the history of population control through to present day depopulation ambitions and intent.
Population growth and the consequent need for population control and even ‘depopulation’ has long been a concern of the elites. Thomas Malthus, an 18th century economist, was one of the first people to voice concerns that there was insufficient farmland and therefore insufficient means to grow enough food to feed the burgeoning population.
Ironically, as we shall see in part 2, today’s government policies could be making this scenario more likely with some academics even suggesting deliberately creating the scarcity that Malthus feared in order to alleviate the ‘climate crisis’.
The idea of population reduction was embraced by the eugenics movement who sought to improve the human race by eradicating undesirable characteristics. One of the main proponents of this was Sir Francis Galton. He was a Victorian polymath who believed intelligence was inheritable and resorted to meticulously taking body measurements, including skull size, in a failed attempt to find a defining characteristic which would be an indicator of intelligence. This pseudo-science of craniology was later adopted by the Nazis in their quest to prove they were the superior race.
Whereas these early proponents of population control targeted races and other minority groups to promote their racist ideas, today’s advocates for depopulation target the whole of humanity to promote their environmental ideology. One of the favoured options of the eugenicists was forced birth control or sterilisation of the undesirables. It may just be that today’s environmental zealots, who appear to have their hands on all the levers of power, and who view us all as undesirables, will have their dreams fulfilled as birth rates are falling dramatically in many countries. This is hardly surprising as vaccines, food, water and the air around us are laden with anti-fertility substances, as will be explored in parts 3 and 4.
Just as the anti-human, pseudo-scientific ideas of the net-zero zealots are accepted by our so-called ‘educated’ class today, the unscientific and racist theories of yesterday’s eugenicists were once common among the intellectual classes, particularly after Charles Darwin, the cousin of Galton, gave them a gloss of scientific responsibility when he developed the idea of the ‘survival of the fittest’.
In his 1871 book The Descent of Man Darwin wrote: ‘Thus, the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.’
Julian Huxley, whose great-grandfather was a friend of Darwin, was president of the British Eugenics society and was embraced by academia and the elites, being a Fellow of the Royal Society and president of UNESCO. In 1944 he wrote: ‘The lowest strata are reproducing too fast. Therefore . . . they must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilisation.’
George Bernard Shaw, another favourite of the intelligentsia, was an admirer of Stalin and a rabid eugenicist. He frequently advocated the extermination of those who did not benefit society proclaiming that the only justification needed was their ‘incorrigible social incompatibility’-
He re-iterated this philosophy when he said: ‘If people are fit to live, let them live under decent human conditions. If they are not fit to live, kill them in a decent, human way.’
H G Wells, beloved by the intellectuals of his day, promoted the killing of alcoholics, people with physical and mental illness and sterilisation of ‘inferior’ people.
Wells was a friend of Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, an organisation founded on eugenics. Her contempt of people she deemed inferior is well known. She said: ‘The most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.’ Another one of her many sickening quotes is: ‘Feeble-minded persons, habitual congenital criminals, those afflicted with inheritable disease, and others found biologically unfit by authorities qualified judge should be sterilised or, in cases of doubt, should be so isolated as to prevent the perpetuation of their afflictions by breeding.’
Planned Parenthood is a ‘pro-choice’ advocate that performs over 350,000 abortions every year. It was recently found to be selling aborted baby parts for profit, which tells you all you need to know. To emphasise how important this group is, one has only to see the companies that donate to it – Microsoft, General Electric, Bank of America, Shell, Pfizer, Starbucks, American Express, PayPal, Boeing and the Temple of Satan. The last of these organisations openly supports abortion because it is part of their satanic rituals. Planned Parenthood is also a big hit with celebrities, receives vast amounts of money from the US government and one of its previous board members was Bill Gates’s father.
After the Second World War, eugenics could not be openly embraced so another reason to justify depopulation had to be created – the environment.
The clarion call for the elites to promote their depopulation agenda came in 1972. That year, the Club of Rome, founded by David Rockefeller and consisting of world leaders and businessmen, had a meeting with the purpose of uniting the world behind a common crisis that could be solved only by the globalist elite and, at the same time, would advance their depopulation plans. After the meeting they said: ‘In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.’
Thus was born the global warming myth, promulgated with the assistance of the mainstream media and used to justify depopulation, with the whole of humanity now the target.
Prince Philip was a big supporter of culling the population. He said: ‘In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.’
Paul Ehrlich, an environmentalist renowned for making apocalyptic predictions about the end of the world due to overpopulation, wrote in his 1968 book The Population Bomb: ‘We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.’
Ted Turner, founder of CNN, is another great fan of depopulation and once said: ‘A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95 per cent decline from present levels, would be ideal.’
Jacques Cousteau, the oceanographer and film-maker was another supporter of wiping out vast swathes of humanity. In a 1991 interview he proclaimed: ‘World population must be stabilised and to do that we must eliminate 350,000 people per day.’ The following year he was invited to the Rio Earth Summit and became a consultant for the United Nations.
John Holdren, President Obama’s Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, is a staunch supporter of forced sterilisation, even advocating putting sterilising chemicals in our drinking water. This is interesting as fluoride and chlorine, already introduced to the water supply in various parts of the world, do cause fertility issues as will be discussed in part 4.
He has also said: ‘The development of a long-term sterilising capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births.’
David Brower, founder of various environmental movements and three times nominated for the Nobel peace prize, suggested that only the select few should be allowed to have children: ‘Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government licence . . . All potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.’
The following is one of the most horrific and disturbing quotes of all, from a 2012 paper by Italian professors published in the British Medical Journal. The authors propose that murdering new-born infants is totally acceptable as they are not really human: ‘By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled. ‘
It would appear that California is now wanting to make this scenario a reality. A recently created Bill would allow the mother of an unwanted baby to kill it up to a number of weeks after birth without fear of prosecution. In Maryland, a similar Bill would prohibit any investigation into a baby’s death is if it born healthy but is allowed to die by starvation or by freezing to death for example within the first few weeks after birth.
And it’s not just infants they want to kill. The authors of a Lancet report claim that ‘death is healthy’ and want to let people with life-threatening illness die to reduce their carbon footprint. Naturally, the elderly are also targets. Recently a Yale professor has suggested that elderly Japanese should commit suicide to stop them being a burden on society.
As previously stated, Thomas Malthus feared food scarcity due to overpopulation. Part 2 will examine how government policies may lead to this very eventuality.
Europe has made it through the winter largely without incident: there were no major blackouts or power outages, and fears of large-scale civil unrest did not come to pass. What’s more, the price of natural gas – which in August was more than 18 times higher than its recent historical average – is now a mere 2.5 times higher.
That’s the good news.
Here’s the bad. We didn’t avoid catastrophe thanks to wise and far-sighted choices on the part of our leaders. We basically got lucky. The winter of 2022/23 was one of the warmest in recorded history, dramatically reducing the demand for natural gas. Had the temperature been normal, things could have gotten fairly dicey.
There’s more bad news. Keeping the lights on and the gas burning didn’t come cheap. As of September last year, European countries had earmarked €768 billion for energy subsidies. OECD countries (of which Europe comprises the lion’s share) spent about 18% of GDP on energy in 2022, compared to only 10% the year before.
As an apocryphal quote has it, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.” Just how much is €768 billion?
One potential yardstick is the cost of reconstruction for Ukraine, which in December was estimated at €500 billion and may now be as high as €600 or €700 billion. To be clear: this isn’t some estimate of the ‘total cost of the war’ – which would be far, far higher. It’s just the cost of reconstruction.
Nonetheless, it implies that the amount European countries have earmarked for energy subsidies would be enough to repair all the damage to Ukraine’s buildings and infrastructure that’s been sustained since the start of the war – a war that has seen whole towns reduced to rubble.
As the analyst Ralph Schoellhammer notes, European countries imported more LNG last year than Japan, South Korea and China combined. Yet this is set to change as China’s economy comes roaring back after the lockdown hiatus.
While the creeping global recession may temper demand for LNG, rising industrial activity in China will have the opposite effect. Keeping a lid on European gas prices thus requires ongoing ‘demand destruction’ – a fancy way of saying that factories will have to make do with less. (As of December, industrial gas demand is about 25% below the 2013–2019 average.)
Europe’s energy crisis still isn’t over. But we’re admittedly in a better position than I’d thought we’d be – owing mainly to warmer weather.
If Berliners think protesters obstructing traffic by gluing themselves to the streets are a nuisance, just wait until what could be the case after March 26, when Berliners vote on climate referendum.
If the climate referendum is successful, a radical amendment to the current climate protection and energy transition law will be enacted. The online German Pleiteticker.de exclusively has an internal paper and reports of an “empowerment paragraph” in the proposed amended law.
The aim of the referendum is to amend the existing Climate Protection and Energy Transition Act (EWG Bln) in order to force the city of Berlin to achieve climate neutrality by 2030 instead of 2045.
The vote will be binding, which means that if the referendum is successful, the amendment will be enacted into law. The amendment is being pushed by the Green Party and radical groups like Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion.
Targets would become legal obligations
The amendment would be so radical that even Berlin SPD socialists consider it dangerous and speak of an “empowerment paragraph” in the law that would transfer immense power to a small group of unelected people, namely a Climate Protection Council appointed by the Berlin Senate.
Concerning paragraph 6 of the new amendment, “Immediate program in the event of non-fulfillment of obligations”, the SPD explicitly warns that climate targets have been changed to “obligations”, which would mean the Berlin Senate probably would have to implement immediate radical measures to achieve the obligations, even by court order.
Paragraph 14 provides for a “Climate Protection Council” to monitor compliance. It would be appointed by the Berlin Senate and not made up by democratically elected officials.
Good bye to cars in Berlin?
“There is a danger that the possibility of immediate measures – which, according to the SPD, are not democratically legitimized – will be used excessively”, Pleiteticker warns. “If the climate referendum is successfully implemented, it will therefore not only be expensive for Berliners, but there will be many more restrictions on freedom than under the previous the Socialist-Green Senate – Berliners may then have to say goodbye to their cars completely.”
Reducing flights at Berlin’s BER airport?
According to paragraph 3 on “Climate Protection Obligations”, CO2 reduction should be 70 percent by 2025 and 95 percent by 2030 compared to 1990 levels! “The previous regulation has been changed so that the time periods are dramatically shortened,”
According to Clause 2, even the Berlin airport would be a part of the climate budget. Pleiteticker warns: “So there is a risk that an immediate measure for emissions reduction could be to reduce the number of flights.”
Property owners would be forced to make major renovations
The amendment also calls on the mandatory energy refurbishment of all public buildings by 2030 and the entire state administration would have to be CO2-neutral by 2030.
“Where the money is to come from remains a mystery once again,” Pleiteticker comments.
Paragraph 19, “Use of Renewable Energy”, could also mean the mandatory installation of solar panels for all homeowners. Again, no one knows how all of this would be paid for. Owning a home and property would certainly become unaffordable for many private owners.
Looking at it from a different angle, Berlin could serve as a pilot that would in all likelihood expose the shear folly of rapid climate neutrality once and for all. Maybe a “successful” referendum would be a good lesson for the rest of the world.
Now that they’ve stopped telling the public to constantly cover their mouths, Japan’s government and media have moved on to telling the public to put bugs into them. And who better to advocate for people to put insects down their throats than the man who advocated most actively for people to put mRNA injections into their veins, former Vaccine Minister and current Digital Minister Taro Kono?
Taro Kono tries crickets at a venture firm exhibition, Says they are “delicious”.
Here’s a better look at the “delicious” crickets Mr Kono pulled his mask down to taste.
But since about 90% of Japanese are resistant to the idea of eating bugs, Japan’s politicians and propaganda apparatus will have to work harder at pushing crickets than they did pushing Covid jabs. Reworking some of its greatest hits from the Covid era, the media has declared “neophobia” to be the new “vaccine-hesitancy”.
Is revulsion to edible crickets due to neophobia (fear of new things)?
So are the neophobes selfishly preventing the creation of a “sustainable” society with their anti-cricket stance? Or do they have a point in sticking to foods humans have actually evolved to consume? Let’s ask the science.
In an 2018 article entitled “Novel foods: a risk profile for the house cricket”, Jannson et al. conducted a literature review to present a risk profile of house crickets as food. They found four potential concerns.
(1) high total aerobic bacterial counts; (2) survival of spore-forming bacteria following thermal processing; (3) allergenicity of insects and insect-derived products; and (4) the bioaccumulation of heavy metals (e.g. cadmium).
The aim of this study was to identify and evaluate the developmental forms of parasites colonizing edible insects in household farms and pet stores in Central Europe and to determine the potential risk of parasitic infections for humans and animals. The experimental material comprised samples of live insects (imagines) from 300 household farms and pet stores, including 75 mealworm farms, 75 house cricket farms, 75 Madagascar hissing cockroach farms and 75 migrating locust farms. Parasites were detected in 244 (81.33%) out of 300 (100%) examined insect farms. In 206 (68.67%) of the cases, the identified parasites were pathogenic for insects only; in 106 (35.33%) cases, parasites were potentially parasitic for animals; and in 91 (30.33%) cases, parasites were potentially pathogenic for humans. Edible insects are an underestimated reservoir of human and animal parasites.
Among the various parasites potentially pathogenic for humansfound in cricket samples were the following.
Isospora spp. [found in 2.67% of samples from cricket farms] are cosmopolitan protozoa of the subclass Coccidia which cause an intestinal disease known as isosporiasis. These parasites pose a threat for both humans (in particular immunosuppressed individuals) and animals. The host becomes infected by ingesting oocytes, and the infection presents mainly with gastrointestinal symptoms (watery diarrhea).
Physaloptera spp. [found in 1.33% of samples from cricket farms] form cysts in the host’s hemocoel approximately 27 days after ingestion.
Although both above-mentioned papers point to various potential issues, they admit there isn’t enough evidence yet to draw conclusions about the health effects of mass-production and mass-consumption of crickets. And I’d say we’re better off keeping it that way, no matter what names the globalist overlords call us.
“Stranded assets.” You know what those are. Probably you’ve read a hundred or more articles over the past few years confidently proclaiming that oil and gas fields and coal mines owned by large energy companies will soon become worthless, as production of energy shifts to “cleaner” and “cheaper” things like wind and solar. The owners of the fossil fuel properties won’t be able to sell them for even a dollar. The assets will thus be “stranded.”
The “stranded assets” predictions unsurprisingly come from the same crowd who are also ordering up the electric car future. For just a tiny sample of recent pieces making the stranded assets point, check out this from Nature Climate Change, May 26, 2022 (“The transition to a global low-carbon economy entails . . . the fast phase-out of fossil-fuel production, which will necessitate the write-down of major, functioning capital assets and reserves reflected as assets on fossil energy companies’ balance sheets.”); or this from MIT News, August 19, 2022 (“As the world transitions away from greenhouse-gas-emitting activities, . . . fossil fuel companies and their investors face growing financial risks (known as transition risks), including the prospect of ending up with massive stranded assets.”); or from the Guardian, November 4, 2021 (“Half world’s fossil fuel assets could become worthless by 2036 in net zero transition.”).
Lynch’s piece is somewhat long (14 pages), and filled with decades’-old super-confident predictions of our energy future, all of which failed. I’ll give you just a sample:
Rawleigh Warner, CEO of Mobil, 1977: “The oil business has come to maturity, and with this maturity comes a new set of challenges… oil companies have no other choice. They must diversify or go the way of the buggy-whip makers.”
Standard & Poors, 1980: “Diversification [by oil majors] into alternative energy fields should offer promising new opportunities for increasing profitability.”
Standard & Poors, 1984: “Diversification out of the oil business has been disastrous for most of the majors…”
Ford Chairman William Clay Ford, Jr., 2000: “I believe fuel cells will finally end the 100-year reign of the internal combustion engine . . . Fuel cells could be the predominant automotive power source in 25 years.”
Jurgen Schrempp, Chairman of the Board of Management of Daimler-Chrysler said the company would be a market leader and later predicted sales of 100,000 hydrogen fuel cell vehicles in 2005.
Lynch on hydrogen fuel cell vehicles: “[T]oday, a quarter century later, sales are in the four figures.”
Senator Richard Lugar and R. James Woolsey, 1999: “Cellulosic ethanol is a first-class transportation fuel, able to power the cars of today as well as tomorrow, use the vast infrastructure already built for gasoline, and enter quickly and easily into the transportation system.”
Lynch on cellulosic ethanol: “[C]urrent production of cellulosic ethanol is so low data is not reported by the government.”
It goes on and on from there. There’s one very safe bet on the energy future, and that is that the utopian dreams of would-be central planners will fail. The $300-400 billion of subsidies said to be in the “Inflation Reduction Act” for “renewable” energies is not nearly enough to enable those things to prevail over fossil fuels in the market for energy. The energy supply will inexorably move to whatever best supplies consumer needs at the lowest cost.
The food supply is under attack. But by whom? And for what purpose? Find out the dirty truth about the global food crisis and how the powers-that-shouldn’t-be are trying to use this crisis as an opportunity to usher in the Great Food Reset on today’s fast-paced edition of The Corbett Report podcast.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that Israel felt threatened by Iran’s growing influence in the Middle East. Netanyahu expressed his Iranophobic view in a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Russia’s Black Sea resort of Sochi on Wednesday. Press TV has asked Scott Rickard, former American intelligence linguist from Tampa, Florida, and Brent Budowsky, a columnist at The Hill from Washington, to give their thoughts on the issue.
Rickard said Tel Aviv is concerned about the fact that the regime could not carry out its old project to spread sectarian divisions and pave the way for dismemberment of the countries in the Middle East region because of the Iranian-led resistance against Israeli policies, not only in the occupied territories of Palestine but also in the whole region.
“Iran is not a threat to Israel whatsoever. The threat that Israel sees is the fact that their Oded Yinon Plan is being put to a hold by Iran,” the intelligence linguist said on Thursday night.
“They (the Israelis) look at Iran as a threat only because they have no influence on their governments and Iran is autonomous and is not under the Zionist influence,” he added.
Since the victory of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, Tehran has been critical of Israel’s policies in the region, whereas “no leaders [of other states] even dared to speak out against Zionism,” Rickard argued. … continue
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