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Looking For The Official Party Line On Energy Storage

By Francis Menton | Manhattan Contrarian | December 8, 2022

If you’ve read my energy storage report, or just the summaries of parts of it that have appeared on this blog, you have probably thought: this stuff is kind of obvious. Surely the powers that be must have thought of at least some of these issues, and there must be some kind of official position on the responses out there somewhere.

So I thought to look around for the closest thing I could find to the Official Party Line on how the U.S. is supposedly going to get to Net Zero emissions from the electricity sector by some early date. The most authoritative thing I have found is a big Report out in August 2022 from something called the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, titled “Examining Supply-Side Options to Achieve 100% Clean Electricity by 2035.” An accompanying press release with a date of August 30 has the headline “NREL Study Identifies the Opportunities and Challenges of Achieving the U.S. Transformational Goal of 100% Clean Electricity by 2035.”

What is NREL? The Report identifies it as a private lab “operated by Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC, for the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract.” In other words, it’s an explicit advocacy group for “renewable” energy that gets infinite oodles of taxpayer money to put out advocacy pieces making it seem like the organization’s preferred schemes will work.

Make no mistake, this Report is a big piece of work. The Report identifies some 5 “lead authors,” 6 “contributing authors,” and 56 editors, contributors, commenters and others. Undoubtedly millions of your taxpayer dollars were spent producing the Report and the underlying models (which compares to the zero dollars and zero cents that the Manhattan Contrarian was paid for his energy storage report). The end product is an excellent illustration of why central planning does not work and can never work.

So now that our President has supposedly committed the country to this “100% clean electricity” thing by 2035, surely these geniuses are going to tell us exactly how that is going to be done and how much it will cost. Good luck finding that in here. From the press release:

The study . . . is an initial exploration of the transition to a 100% clean electricity power system by 2035—and helps to advance understanding of both the opportunities and challenges of achieving the ambitious goal. Overall, NREL finds multiple pathways to 100% clean electricity by 2035 that would produce significant benefits, but the exact technology mix and costs will be determined by research and development (R&D), manufacturing, and infrastructure investment decisions over the next decade.

It’s an “initial exploration.” With the country already supposedly committed to this multi-trillion dollar project on which all of our lives depend, they’re just starting to think about how to do it. “The exact technology mix and costs” — in other words, everything important — “will be determined by research and development” — in other words, remain to be invented. But don’t worry, that will all be done over the next ten years, with plenty of time then remaining to get everything deployed at scale in the three years from then to 2035.

You won’t be surprised that there is a lot of wind and solar generation in this future. How much?

To achieve those levels would require an additional 40–90 gigawatts of solar on the grid per year and 70–150 gigawatts of wind per year by the end of this decade under this modeled scenario. That’s more than four times the current annual deployment levels for each technology.

So there will be an immediate ramp-up of solar and wind deployment to four times current annual levels. No problem! But what if somebody out there objects to having tens of thousands of square miles covered with these things?

If there are challenges with siting and land use to be able to deploy this new generation capacity and associated transmission, nuclear capacity helps make up the difference and more than doubles today’s installed capacity by 2035.

Oh, we’re going to double installed nuclear capacity by 2035. Did anybody tell these people that it takes more than 13 years lead time to build a nuclear plant? At present there are exactly two nuclear plants under construction in the U.S., both at the same site in Georgia. One of them started construction in 2009, and is supposed to enter service next year. That’s 14 years from when the first shovel went in the ground, and there are no other plants anywhere near putting a shovel in the ground.

Well, let’s get to the heart of things, namely the problem of energy storage. From page xii of the Report:

The main uncertainty in reaching 100% clean electricity is the mix of technologies that achieves this target at least cost — particularly considering the need to meet peak demand periods or during periods of low wind and solar output. The analysis demonstrates the potentially important role of several technologies that have not yet been deployed at scale, including seasonal storage and several CCS-related technologies. The mix of these technologies varies significantly across the scenarios evaluated depending on technology cost and performance assumptions.

Aha! This all requires some “seasonal storage” technology that “has not yet been deployed at scale.” (There’s an understatement!). Do they even have an idea of how that might be done?

Seasonal storage is represented in the modeling by clean hydrogen-fueled combustion turbines but could also include a variety of technologies under various stages of development assuming they achieve similar costs and performance. There is significant uncertainty about seasonal storage fuel pathways, which could include synthetic natural gas and ammonia, and the use of alternative conversion technologies such as fuel cells. Other technology pathways are also discussed in the report. Regardless of technology, achieving seasonal storage on the scale envisioned in these results requires substantial development of infrastructure, including fuel storage, transportation and pipeline networks, and additional generation capacity needed to produce clean fuels.

In other words, they have no clue. They’re wildly tossing out ideas of things that have never been tried or demonstrated, let alone costed — and supposedly we’re going to have our whole energy system transitioned to this in 13 years. No surprise that the best idea they have is hydrogen — which, as I describe thoroughly in my report, is a terrible idea. And all that infrastructure they talk about for the hydrogen — none of that currently exists, or is under construction, or is even in a planning stage.

Back to the press release:

A growing body of research has demonstrated that cost-effective high-renewable power systems are possible, but costs increase as systems approach 100% carbon-free electricity, also known as the “last 10% challenge.” The increase in costs is driven largely by the seasonal mismatch between variable renewable energy generation and consumption.

I’ve got news for them: they’re going to hit the wall long before getting to 90% from renewables. Just look at Germany or El Hierro Island to see how that happens. But assume they’re right, and the wall doesn’t come until renewable penetration hits 90%. They fully admit they have no answer at that point. Again from the press release:

Still, getting from a 90% clean grid to full decarbonization could be accelerated by developing large-scale, commercialized deployment solutions for clean hydrogen and other low-carbon fuels, advanced nuclear, price-responsive demand response, carbon capture and storage, direct air capture, and advanced grid controls. These areas are ripe for continued R&D.

Notice how this “demand response” thing gets suddenly slipped in there quietly, without any definition of what it means. Here’s what it means: if the system they create doesn’t work, they reserve the right to turn off your electricity any time they want. Or to jack up the price so high that you can’t afford to use your electricity.

The Report has a big section on cost/benefit analysis, where it is confidently concluded that the benefits far outweigh the costs under any of many scenarios. This is without the storage problem being solved or a solution demonstrated, or costs remotely known.

If you have the time and inclination, you can find the full Report at the link above. I would not really recommend wasting your valuable time on this, but readers who want to add further critiques have the opportunity to do so.

Your taxpayer dollars at work.

December 14, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Stephen Fry and the climate of hypocrisy

By Philip Patrick | TCW Defending Freedom | December 14, 2022

Stephen Fry has announced that he doesn’t understand ‘climate deniers’, implying that such people are selfish and uncaring. He delivered himself of this opinion in a puff piece for his new travel series, A Year on Planet Earth, due to drop on ITVX on December 22.

The series takes Fry to some of the most exotic and beautiful places in the world where he will emote about the flora and fauna. He hopes we will be sufficiently awestruck to help save the world from the ‘climate crisis’ but won’t be lecturing us, he says. This is a relief. But what exactly does he not understand about ‘climate deniers’?

Let’s take a quick look at the views of those crazy denialists. According to William Happer, one of the world’s most distinguished scientists and former adviser to two US presidents, anthropogenic climate change is real – we do have an impact on the climate, but it is small (nothing like a ‘crisis’) and in many ways beneficial (‘global greening’).

Happer and others argue that CO2 (the stuff of life, let us not forget) is a very minor greenhouse gas, and, due to the saturation effect, there is a limit to how much it can affect climate. He uses the analogy of painting a barn door: there are only so many coats you can apply before there is no further impact. In other words, China can build as many coal-fired power stations as it wants, and that may not be good at a surface level, but beyond a certain, not very scary, level, it won’t make any difference to global temperatures.

Added to this, there is the awkward fact that the world isn’t co-operating in the climate crisis narrative. The Arctic and Antarctic have failed to melt away; the Great Barrier Reef, for which an obituary was written in the Guardian, is flourishing, and those pesky polar bears, penguins and whales, just refuse to do the decent thing and disappear. So, to paraphrase Jim Callaghan, ‘Crisis? What crisis?’

Happer’s arguments, shared by many of the world’s most distinguished scientists, should, along with other sceptical viewpoints, certainly be subject to scrutiny. But they certainly shouldn’t be airily dismissed, particularly by someone who by his own admission knows nothing about science: ‘ . . . anything too scientific leaves me having to clutch at a table, feeling a bit weak and hopeless’.

Fry says he can’t understand the people who hold sceptical views on climate views. Can’t, or won’t? The first step to understanding something is wanting to understand it, and if you don’t want to, you never will. This seems to be Fry’s problem, as with many a climate zealot. It is a dangerous mindset, leading you to close your mind to uncomfortable information and denounce unbelievers as heretics.

Fry says in his article that climate deniers ‘now seem to be diminishing in numbers, thankfully’ suggesting these dreadful people are one species he would be glad to see become extinct. And yet this is manifestly untrue. The WCD (World Climate Declaration) is a campaign group of some 1,400 scientists, engineers and experts led by Nobel laureate Ivar Giaever. Hundreds are signing their declaration every day. These, their key points, even a science ‘illiterate’ should be able to understand:

·       Natural as well as anthropogenic factors cause warming

·       Warming is far slower than predicted

·       Climate policy relies on inadequate models

·       CO2 is plant food, the basis of all life on Earth

·       Global warming has not increased natural disasters

·       Climate policy must respect scientific and economic realities

As for other evidence of scepticism the Swedish government has just scrapped its environment ministry. Huge protests against compulsory farm closures have been happening in Holland. The Sri Lankan government fell after a popular uprising provoked by its climate policies. In the UK, the third highest polling party Reform UK promises a referendum on NetZero (‘Net Stupid’) suggesting considerable scepticism here.

Fry’s most recent project was a three-part spoken word show based on Greek myths: ‘Gods’, ‘Heroes’ and ‘Men’. I suspect he most closely identifies with the first of these. That would explain his Olympian disdain, his effortless superiority, and his seeming imperviousness to accusations of hypocrisy. Like his friend Emma Thompson, Fry apparently sees no contradiction in flying around the world and then claiming to care deeply about climate change. There are, reputedly, 60 locations featured in his new series. Even the title A Year on Planet Earth is revealing, suggesting he has descended from a superterrestrial realm to lead us back on to the path of righteousness.

I’m just about old enough to remember when Fry not only made me laugh but made me think too. Fry was, once, an equal opportunities humorist. If there was a common denominator to his targets it was people who lacked self-awareness, were narrow minded, self-important, and intolerant – like Lord Melchett of Blackadder. If there was a message, it was to engage your intellect and to resist the lure of received ideas.

But that was before this avowed atheist found his religion. Sadly, Fry has gone awry. He is suffering the worst fate that can possibly befall a satirist. He has become an example of the very thing he used to make fun of.

December 14, 2022 Posted by | Film Review, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

And Just Like That… It Was All Gone

Zero Covid is deemed surplus to requirements

Health Advisory & Recovery Team | December 13, 2022

Newsflash from China: the world’s last bastion of Zero Covid has finally given up the pretence. “Covid China cracks”… this is a message that seems to have penetrated even the mainstream media’s coverage.

What is not, however, entirely clear is how brave BBC reporters can travel around the world to capture footage in the Far East, but were blind to peaceful protests closer to home. Those voices of reason who have been ignored for almost three years have found the cognitive dissonance more than a little unnerving. How can it simultaneously be true that lockdown sceptic protests and protestors in UK are bad, selfish and unscientific, while lockdown sceptic protests and protestors in China are brave and pushing back against regime oppression?

Even in their dissonant apostasy, the media cheerleaders still struggle with fundamental misconceptions due to their alignment with the crumbling narrative and blindness to the obvious: “the main challenge is ensuring the inevitable uptick in infections does not lead to mass deaths” claims the BBC. Really? With almost three years of data now to hand, is it now not blindingly obvious that the UK’s Chief Scientific Officer Patrick Vallance was absolutely correct when he stated on 16 March 2020 that “this is a mild disease in most people”?  If these brave reporters want to investigate ‘mass deaths’, how about some hard-hitting investigative reporting on iatrogenesis instead?

This unpalatable (and hard to ignore) charade aside, can we at least hope that this is the end of an era? Can the Zero Covid chapter be closed for good?

Let us hope so. Humanity may – finally – have rid itself of Zero Covid policies, but what of its erstwhile supporters – what new hair-brained schemes are they now supporting? Whether the chaos they were involved in creating was by accident or design is arguably immaterial: how can society protect itself against future periods of collective self-harm?

The precautionary principle “emphasises caution, pausing and review before leaping into new innovations that may prove disastrous”.

Winding back the clock almost three years, it was for this reason that many of us had a principled objection to draconian non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs, i.e. lockdowns) from before they were enacted. While this view is now fashionable, many supported these policies at the time and then did not want to back down from this shibboleth. But why was it ever acceptable to deploy this combination of hand grenades to crack a nut? Why did society go along with a perverse inversion of the anti-precautionary principle: “panic; shout ‘fire’, abandon detailed disaster planning and then implement the precise opposite, botch the implementation, shut down constructive debate and then vilify those that challenge the new orthodoxy”?

It is instructive to observe the flailing attempts by vocal proponents of Zero Covid and its associated policies (school closures, rules of six, masks, vaccine mandates) to post-rationalise and excuse their mistakes.  This is where lessons will be learned (and not, incidentally, from the preposterous attempts by those who piloted the ship onto the rocks to shift blame onto others or to claim that the right decisions were made “based on all the information available at the time”).

We have previously outlined clear evidence of what was common knowledge by mid-March 2020. Chief Scientific Advisor Vallance, quoted above, went on to state: “Epidemics are like a pole vaulter taking flight: the outbreak starts slowly, takes off rapidly, reaches a peak and then comes back down to earth”.  No different to what had happened in previous months on the Diamond Princess, in Wuhan and in Bergamo. This was a known quantity well before the UK launched itself, lemming-like, off the cliffs on 23 March 2020.

From hereon in it was one-way traffic for much of the next two years. Dissent was essentially criminalised, and the full force of far-from-benign authoritarian state machinery was turned against its citizens. Rational discourse was squashed (why would authorities collude with the media to stifle calm voices of reason such as Professor Jay Bhattacharya and instead promote shrill panic-mongers?); the media controlled via carrot (advertising) and stick (OFCOM diktat); dissenters were made an example of. None of this was necessary, and a normally-functioning society and fourth estate could have led us quickly back to balanced rationality, avoiding much of the human cost and unnecessarily-wrought collateral damage of the Coronapanic debacle.

They might prefer us to forget, but we must not. Thankfully, public records exist that will serve as a salutary reminder to future generations of what our own home-grown Zero Covid zealots wanted to perpetrate. For example, in the dark days of February 2021, 47 MPs from Opposition parties tabled an Early Day Motion promoting Net Zero. This Motion – as well as its stated (and implicit) underlying assumptions – has not aged well, the most egregious claim being that harsher draconian measures might avoid “putting huge additional strain on the NHS” – tell that to those on the now-gargantuan waiting lists for essential treatment. Most of the 47 signatories on this Motion are Labour MPs… Labour is currently riding high in the polls. They might well now criticise the UK Government’s handling of the last few years, but it was Labour – and their union paymasters – who were consistently pushing for more and more restrictions. Voters should be careful what they wish for.

So good riddance to Zero Covid, but have we learned any lessons? Unfortunately, there is as yet little evidence to show that society has the strength to resist the siren calls of the next Zero Policy fiasco… for example, could it be that Net Zero is an unholy hysteria rather than a holy grail? We would do well to look a bit more closely before we leap into deindustrialised pauperisation.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and in the interests of protecting all that we hold dear, we can only encourage everyone to keep constructively challenging and critiquing the official narrative.

December 13, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

The Club of Rome at 50 years old

By Dalwhinnie | December 11, 2022

I used to believe the following tenets of the Club of Rome. I did so for about four years (from the age of 22 to 26) until I woke up from ecodoomism. It is apparent that millions have been sucked into this cult and have never found a way out. Yet. Indeed, eco-doomism is the world’s leading cause of depression, suicide, sexual ambiguity,  non-replacement and cultural anomie. It is immediately the cause of policies designed to immiserate the population (viz. Dutch government putting farms out of business to control world atmospheric nitrogen levels).

Here are the doctrines of the Club of Rome, circa 1972. Look familiar?

“The Limits to Growth” contains six main messages:

  1. Firstly, that the environmental impact of human society had become heavier between 1900 and 1972 due to both an increase in the number of humans and the amount of resources consumed and pollution generated per person per year.
  2. That our planet is physically limited, and that humanity cannot continue to use more physical resources and generate more emissions than nature is capable of supplying in a sustainable manner. In addition, it will not be possible to rely on technology alone to solve the problem as this would only delay reaching the carrying capacity of the planet by a few years.
  3. The authors cautioned that it is possible, and even likely, that the human ecological footprint will overshoot the carrying capacity of the planet, further explaining that this would likely occur due to significant delays in global decision making while growth continued, bringing the human footprint into unsustainable territory.
  4. Once humanity has entered this unsustainable territory, we will have to move back into sustainable territory, either through “managed decline” of activity, or we will be forced to move back through “collapse” caused by the brutal inherent processes of nature or the market.
  5. The fifth message is one of hope. The authors state that: “The challenge of overshoot from decision delay is real, but easily solvable if human society decided to “act”, meaning that forward looking policy could prevent humanity from overshooting the aforementioned planetary limits.
  6. Lastly, the authors advocated for an early start – in 1972 that was 1975 – to achieve a smooth transition to a sustainable world without needing to pass through the overshoot and contraction phases.

The World Economic Forum and Klaus Schwab have followed as night follows day. They key assumptions are that the current population/ resource consumption mix is unsustainable, and the second is that a process of managed decline can smooth the transition to sustainability. I am about to say something at once paradoxical and true:

Humans have more to fear from the managers of population reduction than we do of civilizational collapse.

Because the population reduction is being planned by people who think they are doing good  and the old adage of C. S. Lewis applies, that the robber barons might have their greed satiated, and stop, but the person who tortures for you own good does so with a clean conscience and will not stop. Hence Stalin. Hence Klaus Schwab, and his minions and acolytes.

Collapses are random and bring their own correctives. They are chaotic. If the Roman Empire has to fall, it is better that it occur without central planning, administered by mad tyrants. I realize this is offensive to those who believe that civilizational change can be planned, but it cannot.

The  assumption that needs to be challenged the most is that collapse is somehow inevitable because we have gone beyond limits set by Gaia, that this unsustainability is somehow new, and that we can plan our way out of it.

We went beyond the limits set by Gaia since we domesticated animals, invented agriculture and mined metals. I would not wish to say there are no limits, but I would say that the collective intelligence of mankind has continually found solutions to the problems we have ourselves created. We went into the realm of the “unsustainable” tens of thousands of years ago. We are still in “unsustainablity”. There is no stable state.

The Club of Rome published its manifesto in 1972. It had a tremendous negative effect over time. It resuscitated the idea of a centrally planned economy when the central conceit of Marxism had collapsed: that a planned economy could prevail over the chaotic forces of the market, or of nature.

The close relationship between the idea of sustainability and the tyranny of all-wise central planners needs to be made clear.

The population bomb is diffusing itself anyway…

Regarding solutions that appear without planning, population growth is collapsing through the very process of wealth generation that has come from burning fossil fuels. Women reach a level of prosperity where their kids will survive until adulthood, and – bingo! – they produce at most two children. It is enough to make the most hardened eco-doomist pause and reconsider.

See Bricker and Ibbetson’s Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline, or more brutal yet, try David Goldman’s (known as Spengler) How Civilizations Die.

About the author

Dalwhinnie

Retired, sometime civil servant, sometime consultant, active intellectual, former lawyer, active property manager, and on rare occasions in the past a political activist. He has recovered from the experience.

December 12, 2022 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

World Health Organization’s Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response Treaty

These proposals are a major threat to our sovereignty and democracy

Health Advisory & Recovery Team | December 11, 2022

The WHO has been flexing its muscles for several years but Covid-19 has provided a huge opportunity for mission creep. The latest in its quest for  ever-increasing power is the proposed legally binding Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response Treaty.  Without even waiting for the dust to settle and for countries to undertake their own inquiries into what went well and what mistakes were made, there is a clear intention to force every nation into a straight-jacket of centralised pandemic management with the WHO at its heart. No Anders Tegnell or Ron de Santis to instil a modicum of common sense or proportionality, we would all be hurtling into masks and testing at the first hint or droplet of ‘concern’, and doubtless another rushed mRNA vaccine.

In March 2021, Boris Johnson was centre stage in publishing an article laying out the route to this new international treaty. By December 2021, an intergovernmental negotiating body was established and a Zero Draft report was published in May 2022. It was a number of African nations who called a halt. But undaunted, the WHO this week held another 3-day session and issued the following news release.

 “Member States of the World Health Organization today agreed to develop the first draft of a legally binding agreement designed to protect the world from future pandemics. This “zero draft” of the pandemic accord, rooted in the WHO Constitution, will be discussed by Member States in February 2023.”

‘Zero draft’ is worryingly reminiscent of ‘Zero-Covid’, a policy which has been causing havoc in China. There is also an extraordinary degree of mission creep evident, with a newly established subgroup, the One Health High-Level Expert Panel (OHHLEP), which:

“will also have a role in investigating the impact of human activity on the environment and wildlife habitats, and how this drives disease threats. Critical areas include food production, urbanization and infrastructure development, international travel and trade, activities that lead to biodiversity loss and climate change, and those that put increased pressure on the natural resource base — all of which can lead to the emergence of zoonotic diseases.”

Shiraz Akram, of the Thinking Coalition, drafted an extremely detailed analysis of the proposals and a number of like-minded groups have endorsed his open letter. Thinking Coalition, the Freedom Alliance, HART, Not Our Future, Time for Recovery and the Together Declaration have all submitted this letter to members of the House of Lords International Agreements Committee, the House of Lords Constitution Committee and the Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee.

It is vital that our Parliamentarians take a serious interest in this. Both the Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee and the Constitution Committee have previously reported on the numerous problems related to the way in which treaties are ratified in the UK, with the latter stating that “the powers available to Parliament to scrutinise Ministers’ actions are anachronistic and inadequate”.

These committees have only a few weeks to scrutinise the proposals and prevent a lurch into a legally binding agreement at the diktat of the totally unelected WHO.

December 11, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Peak Demands For Natural Gas

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | December 11, 2022

Natural gas accounts for 43% of the UK’s primary energy consumption. In comparison, renewable energy only supplies 4%.

Our reliance on gas though is much greater in winter months:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/total-energy-section-1-energy-trends

And if you look at hour-by-hour data, the peaks are greater still, as the National Grid chart below shows:

https://mip-prd-web.azurewebsites.net/

This graph is for yesterday, Dec 10th. Demand for gas ramps up from around 310 mcm at night to 430 mcm in the early evening. One mcm = approximately 11 GWh.

So a rate of 430 mcm/day equates to 4730 GWh, or 197 GWh per hour.

While supply remains relatively constant, these peaks in demand are met by reducing what is known as the linepack – effectively the amount of gas within the gas distribution network. This, of course, is something that the electricity grid cannot do.

In comparison with the daily peaks and troughs of gas, electricity storage is miniscule. Pumped storage capacity is 2.8 GW, with the biggest, Dinorwig, rated at 1.7 GW with storage of 9.1 GWh. Battery storage is much tinier still.

Based on the decline in linepack, we would need about 70 mcm each day to top up at peak demand – that is 770 GWh.

In any event, all of the electricity storage we have will all be needed just to balance peaks in electricity demand.

Yet our policymakers continue down the road of electrification, seemingly oblivious to the realities.

December 11, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | | Leave a comment

Alberta passes ‘Sovereignty Act’ despite backlash from leftists, mainstream media

Alberta Premier leadership candidate Danielle Smith – Dave Cournoyer / Wikimedia Commons
Life Site News – December 9, 2022

EDMONTON — Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s “Sovereignty Act” legislation was passed Thursday in the province’s legislature, despite pushback from left-wing critics including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

United Conservative Party (UCP) MLAs under Smith put their full support behind the bill to quicken its passage, which will now become law once it receives Royal Assent.

The act was passed with minor amendments made to it by the UCP, namely to make sure that Alberta’s regular legislative process is followed should a resolution be brought forth under the act. 

The now-passed Sovereignty Act intends to prevent “unconstitutional” federal government overreach into matters of provincial jurisdiction, including but not limited to “firearms, energy, natural resources and COVID healthcare decisions.” 

Smith had introduced the legislation, formally named Bill 1: Alberta Sovereignty within a United Canada Act, just nine days before its passing. 

The bill will most notably help the province push back against federally-imposed rules that impact the region’s oil and gas sector, a major backbone of the western Canadian economy.   

At the time of its introduction, the government explained that the act “will be used to push back on federal legislation and policy that is unconstitutional or harmful to our province, our people and our economic prosperity,” with Smith herself explaining that there is a “long and painful history of mistreatment and constitutional overreach from Ottawa has for decades caused tremendous frustration for Albertans.”   

The bill was opposed by Alberta’s opposition party, the New Democratic Party (NDP), under former Premier Rachel Notley. The NDP claimed Smith’s Sovereignty Act was dangerous but did not bring forth any amendments to the bill.   

Trudeau also took issue with the bill, threatening to take action against the Albertan government, saying all options remain on “the table.”

After the act passed yesterday, Trudeau slightly changed his tune and said his government would now work with Smith, but once again warned of Alberta’s efforts to “push back at the federal government.”  

“We are not going to get into arguing about something that obviously is the Alberta government trying to push back at the federal government,” said Trudeau. “We are going to continue to work as constructively as possible.”

While many on the political left provided pushback, former Canadian Supreme Court justice John C. Major put his support behind the Sovereignty Act, rhetorically asking, “what’s so terrible about the province saying, ‘if you want to impose on us, you better be sure you’re doing it constitutionally?’”

Smith’s Sovereignty Act was a trademark of her campaign for leader of the UCP and premier of Alberta, promising throughout her run that if elected, she would table legislation to help make Alberta as independent from Ottawa as possible while staying in the Confederation.   

Many have pointed out that Trudeau’s opposition to provincial autonomy, particularly with respect to the overseeing of natural resources in the western provinces, seem to mirror aspects of his own father’s policies. 

In 1980, Trudeau’s father, then-Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, famously attacked Alberta’s oil and gas sectors by introducing the much-hated national energy program (NEP), which severely hampered Alberta’s and other provinces’ energy industries.  

December 10, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , | Leave a comment

Steeply falling birthrates worldwide

Free West Media | December 9, 2022

Climate fanatics demand that we stop driving, flying on holidays, eating meat and completely change our lives. But it’s not enough. We must have fewer children and decrease in numbers overall to save the planet, these self-proclaimed world-improvers claim. Otherwise, we are all threatened by overpopulation, despite the fact that in the West and large parts of the world we have a population decrease.

Their demands seem to be met when the number of new-born children has suddenly begun to drop dramatically and alarmingly.

We have all heard about the climate and overpopulation threat. But those who preach this rarely talk about the fact that it is almost only in Africa that there is a very large population growth, while in the West and large parts of the rest of the world there is a de facto population decrease.

We can expect this milestone to be used extensively in the globalists’ propaganda going forward. It is important then that we remember that countries like Japan can barely take care of their many elderly people and that millions of empty houses are now standing and decaying there. Or that rural areas are being depopulated in Sweden and other developed countries, so that in many places it is no longer possible to get even basic services. This despite the fact that the long-term trend of moving to the cities has reversed in many countries.

In Sweden, fertility has slowly fallen from 1.91 children per woman in 2012, to 1.67 children per woman in 2021. Each woman must have 2.1 children on average to keep the population stable. So despite mass immigration for a long time, also of predominantly fertile groups, the net birth rate in Sweden continues to shrink year by year. This is how it looks throughout the Western world. But despite that, we will be forced to change our lives and give birth to fewer children. The propaganda for this and other things that achieve the same result, such as abortion or same-sex relations, is much stronger in the West than in Africa. The globalists’ dream now seems to be coming true.

Sweden’s low birth rate, which had a stable downward trend over time, has suddenly collapsed this year. In Stockholm, the number of births has decreased by 14 percent in the first quarter of 2022, compared to 2021. And it’s not just in Stockholm, fertility has dropped all over Sweden.

– It is a drastic and remarkable reduction beyond the ordinary. We have never seen anything like this before, that the bottom completely disappears in just one quarter, Gunnar Andersson, professor of demography at Stockholm University, told Dagens Nyheter in July.

On 28 October, Åland’s Statistics and Investigations Agency presented a report called “Population movements in the third quarter of 2022”. Already in the subtitle we can read that “Fewer births and more deaths have reduced this year’s population growth”. From the statistics we can then deduce that the number of births has decreased by 15.6 percent compared to the same time last year and that 13.3 percent more have died.

It looks similar or worse across Europe and large parts of the world. In the Netherlands and Germany, for example, the negative figures for the number of births this year are 11 and 12 percent, respectively. Taiwan saw an alarming 27.7 percent drop – over a quarter – in birth rates for the month of June this year. At the beginning of October, Taiwan’s Ministry of the Interior released statistics for the month of September, where it appeared that the country’s population decreased by 1 percent since September 2021. It is almost a doubling compared to the previous year, September 2020 to September 2021.

Newly released data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics ABS shows that from October to November 2021 there was a 21 per cent drop in the number of births compared to the ten-year average. From November to December 2021, just one month later, the figure was a frightening 63 percent. The information is said to be preliminary and may therefore be revised, but it nevertheless shows that something is not right. The December figure also coincides with the fact that approximately nine months have passed, the time for a pregnancy, since the corona vaccine was given on a larger scale in Australia.

MISCARRIAGE AND STILLBIRTH IN THE US between the years 1990 and 2022 where a reaction to a vaccine is listed as the cause. The increase is dramatic after mass vaccinations for the corona began around the turn of the year 2020-2021. There are fewer this year, because the statistics are lagging. There are also significantly fewer who took booster injections this year than those who received the first two doses in 2021, something some believe could possibly come into play. Systematic underreporting also means that there are usually at least 100 times more cases in reality. Source & graphics: OpenVAERS

A chart (above) is circulating on social media showing the number of miscarriages and stillbirths in the United States between the years 1990 and 2022 where a reaction to vaccines is listed as the cause. This is a dramatic increase over the past two years. Globalist-sponsored “fact checkers” quickly pounced, describing the chart as “misleading.” Reuters’ main argument for it was that it “contradicts the growing evidence that vaccines are safe during pregnancy”, something that goes completely against all the statistics that are starting to come out this year around the world. They then make a point of the graph coming from a “privately run website”, without mentioning that it is about OpenVAERS – a site that takes raw data directly from authority-run VAERS and gives the public the opportunity to use a simplified interface to search otherwise difficult-to-access government statistics.

Reuters then says that there were not 3 500 miscarriages and stillbirths at all in 2021, but they find in VAERS only 2 608 such cases linked to “vaccinations”. However, Reuters only finds 53 miscarriages and stillbirths for 2019. We can state that the “fact checkers” themselves thus admit an increase of 4 820 percent when comparing the years 2019 and 2021.

As final “proof” that the corona vaccine has nothing to do with the dramatic increase in miscarriages and stillbirths, they point out that the data in VAERS is only reported, but not investigated. However, they omit that several research reports over the years – such as the well-known Lazarus report – concluded that “less than 1 percent of all vaccine adverse events are reported”. This means that the already terrifying numbers are at least 100 times higher in reality. However, the reports were made before the alleged pandemic, so it can be assumed that health professionals, after the aggressive vaccine propaganda, are even more reluctant to report suspected vaccine injuries.

If the Corona vaccine is so “safe”, then why is this suddenly happening all over the world? And why is it so important for the establishment and its media to cover up everything that shows that vaccines are harmful, from clear statistics and new reports to scientists and doctors sounding the alarm? Shouldn’t it be natural for the authorities, with demands from massive drives in the media, to investigate what is happening and the bad wit? But the media is not doing its job, and neither are the regulatory agencies that exist solely to protect us from this very thing. If they do not do their duty, the alternative media and the people remain. It is high time to demand answers from politicians and the health establishment, especially those who have pushed for vaccinations – not infrequently in such a way that people felt forced to be inoculated against their will.

December 9, 2022 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

UK city defends new ‘climate lockdown’ policy

RT | December 7, 2022

The city of Oxford has embraced the concept of limiting citizens’ personal travel to fight climate change, an idea once dismissed as a conspiracy theory.

The Oxfordshire County Council’s so-called ‘traffic filter’ system, adopted last week, has gone viral, denounced as the first step toward “climate lockdowns” by climate skeptics and civil liberties activists.

The city will be divided into six “15-minute neighborhoods,” containing all local necessities, with residents required to register their cars so their comings and goings can be tracked by a network of cameras. They are allowed unlimited movement in their own neighborhood, but in order to drive through the filters, they must apply for a permit.

Even then, they are only granted access to other neighborhoods for an average of two days per week. Those who exceed their travel allotment will be fined.

Thousands of residents have expressed concern about the project, which has previously been rejected under a different name – including 1,800 who signed a single petition over worries it would actually increase congestion. However campaign director for Oxfordshire Liveable Streets, Zuhura Plummer, claimed that the initiative would “save lives and make our city more pleasant now and for future generations,” citing an “official analysis” that projected 35% less traffic, 9% fewer road casualties, 15% faster bus times, and 91% less air pollution.

The city will also benefit financially, with any driver caught passing through a filter without an exemption or a permit being charged a £70 penalty (just over $85) per violation. Planners expect the city could make as much as £1.1 million per year from fines.

Climate skeptics have attempted to raise the alarm about the measure since its passage, describing it as the first step toward the kind of “climate lockdowns” media outlets like The Guardian warned about at the height of the pandemic.

Economics professor Mariana Mazzucato outlined a grim future in which people would be required to submit to “climate lockdowns” for part of the year, barred from using personal vehicles and consuming red meat, while fossil fuel companies would be prohibited from drilling – all in the name of warding off catastrophic global warming.

When the essay was met with widespread public backlash, mentions of the phrase ‘climate lockdown’ were promptly scrubbed from news headlines, and the very notion of a government-mandated climate lockdown was declared a conspiracy theory.

December 9, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , | Leave a comment

ENERGY CRISIS: THE LOWERING OF LIVING STANDARDS

Computing Forever | December 5, 2022

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December 9, 2022 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Video | Leave a comment

One Health: what is it and why is it important?

One Health is being embedded into the WHO’s International Health Regulations (IHRs) and Pandemic Treaty/Accord

By Meryl Nass | December 5, 2022

First, what is One Health? It is essentially a meaningless concept that is important to the WHO, CDC and the new pandemic regulations being negotiated, as I heard it mentioned several times by country representatives discussing the new IHR amendments. My best guess is that One Health will be invoked as the justification to move people off the land in certain rural communities. The authors of a June 2019 article titled “The One Health Approach—Why Is It So Important?” provide 3 definitions and a graphic to try and explain the term:

The most commonly used definition shared by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the One Health Commission is: ‘One Health is defined as a collaborative, multisectoral, and transdisciplinary approach—working at the local, regional, national, and global levels—with the goal of achieving optimal health outcomes recognizing the interconnection between people, animals, plants, and their shared environment’. A definition suggested by the One Health Global Network is: ‘One Health recognizes that the health of humans, animals and ecosystems are interconnected. It involves applying a coordinated, collaborative, multidisciplinary and cross-sectoral approach to address potential or existing risks that originate at the animal-human-ecosystems interface’. A much simpler version of these two definitions is provided by the One Health Institute of the University of California at Davis: ‘One Health is an approach to ensure the well-being of people, animals and the environment through collaborative problem solving—locally, nationally, and globally’. Others have a much broader view, as encapsulated in Figure 1.

I hope you agree that these definitions shed no light on the meaningfulness of this concept, nor how it might be relevant to public health. However, the definitions seem to rope a lot of other things into a consideration of “health” which I fear is its main objective—eventually to justify social engineering under the rubric of health, or rather ‘One Health.’

The authors of the piece cited above note that they have not gotten buy-in from the medical community:

“Interdisciplinary collaboration is at the heart of the One Health concept, but while the veterinarian community has embraced the One Health concept, the medical community has been much slower to fully engage, despite support for One Health from bodies such as the American Medical Association, Public Health England, and WHO. Engaging the medical community more fully in the future may require the incorporation of the One Health concept into the medical school curricula so that medical students see it as an essential component in the context of public health and infectious diseases.”

And so cheap fixes are being applied. November 3 has been designated “One Health Day” since 2016 by the One Health Commission, the One Health Platform Foundation, and the One Health Initiative. One Health Day is celebrated through One Health educational and awareness events held around the world. Students are especially encouraged to envision and implement One Health projects, and to enter them into an annual competition for the best student-led initiatives in each of four global regions.

After titling their article as if it was going to explain why One Health is important, in the end all we get is a spurious sentence asserting that it is so:

Today’s health problems are frequently complex, transboundary, multifactorial, and across species, and if approached from a purely medical, veterinary, or ecological standpoint, it is unlikely that sustainable mitigation strategies will be produced.

I went to the WHO website to see if I could get a more satisfying explanation of this concept, but was left with the same sense—that it was simply an attempt to throw every living thing, plus every ‘ecosystem’ on the planet into the One Health basket, where pretty much everything might in future be manipulated under the guise of public health. See if you get a different take:

https://www.who.int/health-topics/one-health#tab=tab_1

One Health is an integrated, unifying approach that aims to sustainably balance and optimize the health of people, animals and ecosystems.

It recognizes that the health of humans, domestic and wild animals, plants, and the wider environment (including ecosystems) are closely linked and interdependent.

While health, food, water, energy and environment are all wider topics with sector-specific concerns, the collaboration across sectors and disciplines contributes to protect health, address health challenges such as the emergence of infectious diseases, antimicrobial resistance, and food safety and promote the health and integrity of our ecosystems.

By linking humans, animals and the environment, One Health can help to address the full spectrum of disease control – from prevention to detection, preparedness, response and management – and contribute to global health security.

The approach can be applied at the community, subnational, national, regional and global levels, and relies on shared and effective governance, communication, collaboration and coordination. Having the One Health approach in place makes it easier for people to better understand the co-benefits, risks, trade-offs and opportunities to advance equitable and holistic solutions.

It matters because One Health appears to be a necessary part of the globalist, WEF plan to corral the earth’s people, akin to vaccine passports. Please help educate those who have ears to hear and eyes to see. This needs to be stopped. The best way is by exiting the WHO. Trump started the process, which was immediately reversed by the Biden administration. We can do it again. Or they will keep coming up with cockamamie programs designed to control us under the guise of health.

December 6, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , , | Leave a comment

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