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Net Zero Promoters “Have No Idea What They Are Doing” Over Multi-Trillion Dollar Battery Costs, says New Report

BY CHRIS MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | DECEMBER 3, 2022

Evidence grows by the day that the Net Zero fantasy is a societal and economic disaster waiting to happen. Not only is it based on the giant propaganda lie of ‘settled’ science, but it is almost laughably unaffordable. On just one level around the storage of ‘green’ energy, a new report from the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) is scathing. Noting a “heads-in-the sand” approach by politicians, it says that “one would have to conclude that the entire effort is either wholly unserious or breathtakingly incompetent”.

For just one country alone, Germany, fully replacing natural gas back-up with battery storage “is a multi-trillion dollar project, likely costing a multiple of the country’s GDP, and thus completely infeasible”. Across the globe, existing plans to store energy, vital since wind and solar are highly intermittent, are producing only a “tiny fraction” of the capacity that will be required to avoid electricity blackouts. “It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the people planning the Net Zero transition “have no idea what they are doing”, states the report.

Political pressure to resist the imposition of the command-and-control Net Zero agenda is being increasingly targeted in the UK and elsewhere at the unrealistic costs involved. In the U.K. Parliament, a Net Zero Scrutiny Committee was recently formed and led by the Conservative MP Craig Mackinlay. For its part, the GWPF has started a Net Zero Watch unit. The GWPF’s battery storage report is the latest in a string of publications asking serious questions about the finances behind Net Zero. It is written by the American lawyer and mathematician Francis Menton, who also runs the Manhattan Contrarian site.

Menton writes that the push to Net Zero without a fully demonstrated and costed solution to the energy storage conundrum “is analogous to jumping out of an airplane without a parachute, and assuming that the parachute will be invented, delivered and strapped on in mid-air in time to save you before you hit the ground”. He continues:

“Now, before our advanced economies are destroyed, it is time to demand from our politicians and energy planners that they level with the public about the huge costs and the likely impossible technical requirements of the goals to which they have committed us.”

In a detailed report, the arithmetic behind Net Zero battery costings is laid out in detail. It is explained that no grid based on wind and solar is viable unless it has full back-up from another source. That source needs to provide 100% of power when the wind and sun stop blowing and shining. During calm periods in a cold winter, that could be a week or more. Remarkably, notes the author, none of the jurisdictions implementing crash Net Zero have paid much attention to storage programmes.

Storage demands for Net Zero are enormous. Five days without wind and solar require at least 120 Mega Watt hours (MWh) for each megawatt of average demand. But some calculations based on historical weekly and annual spikes suggest a requirement as high as 1,000 MWh to ensure reliability of a grid over a long time.

Truly scary is the work done by Ken Gregory who calculated that the United States would need an annual energy storage requirement of around 233,000 GWh. It is noted that a current lithium-ion battery installation is currently under construction in Australia for grid back-up with a storage capacity of 150MWh. Menton writes that 150MWh is 15% of one gigawatt hour, and 233,000GWh of storage would require some 1.55 million of these facilities.

Back in the real world, Menton reveals the planned battery storage capacity that will be delivered in many countries is “trivial” – typically from around 0.1% to at most 0.2% of the amount that’s necessary if Net Zero is to be achieved.

The figure is hardly surprising when the costs in battery storage are considered. Menton reviewed recent official cost reports and found that “even on the most optimistic assumptions” the cost could be as high as a country’s GDP. This was said to render the entire Net Zero project “an impossibility”. On less optimistic assumptions, the capital cost alone could be 15 times annual GDP. Even more impractical, it is noted that such batteries provide about four hours of discharge at maximum capacity, but weather patterns mean that grids need batteries that can store as much as a month’s demand, and then discharge that energy over the course of six months or more.

“Such ‘long duration’ batteries have not yet been invented,” he observes.

Last October, the Daily Sceptic reported on the findings of Associate Professor Simon Michaux who told the Finnish Government in no uncertain terms that there were not enough minerals in the world to supply all the batteries required for Net Zero. And this doesn’t even take into account that lithium-ion batteries need replacing every eight to 10 years. Michaux observed that the Net Zero project may not go fully “as planned”.

Those, less charitable, might ask: “what plan?”

December 4, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | 4 Comments

The Agenda of the COP27 Climate Change Conference in Egypt

By Mateo Requesens | The Postil | December 1, 2022 

The EU is pursuing one of the most radical climate change policies of the major CO2 emitters, having committed itself to reducing its net greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by 2030, compared to 1990 levels, and to eliminating such emission by 2050. To achieve this, the EU, unlike China, India or Russia, is willing to sacrifice its economy, its industry and its middle classes to advance climate ideology. Reaching zero emissions by 2050 would require a decrease of 1.4 GtCO2 each year, comparable to the fall observed in 2020 emissions because of COVID-19, to achieve which would imply no more and no less than the paralysis of all Western economies.

At this COP27 climate summit, the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, once again resorted to his usual apocalyptic discourse to say that “we are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator.” With the gall of the best trickster at the carnival, Guterres said that “to avoid that terrible fate, all G-20 countries must accelerate their transition now, in this decade.” The same time span, a decade, in which the apostles of the climate religion went from talking about a new Ice Age to a dangerous warming of the planet, between the 1970s and 1980s.

Unmoved by the serious energy emergency we are experiencing, those attending COP27 did not spend a minute reflecting on the need for abundant and cheap energy to maintain the welfare states in developed countries and to promote economic progress in developing countries. Renewable energies today are neither the cheapest nor do they produce enough to supply the demand of homes and industry. What is urgent today is not to save the planet from a climate change whose origins and consequences are unknown. What is really urgent is to solve general inflation and, in particular, food and energy price rises to avoid a global recession.

Regardless, COP27 went ahead with what is undoubtedly the biggest scam in the history of mankind, declaring an emergency for something that is hardly changing our way of life, nor does it really affect our immediate future. The farce of the climate conference in Egypt has given birth to a pact to create a “loss and damage” fund, to repair the worst effects of extreme weather on the most vulnerable nations, spreading the deception that hurricanes, floods and other catastrophes that have always been recurrent throughout history are the result of man-made climate change.

To refute this fallacy that they make us swallow like fools, remember that the year 2021 was the year with the lowest number of hurricanes worldwide since 1980. However, the stupidity that these catastrophes are the planet’s response to our aggressions against the environment continues to circulate. It doesn’t matter that the prophecies of the climate religion have been unfulfilled for 30 years.

The needs and well-being of Europeans do not matter; they are not a priority, as announced by the new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Rishi Sunak: “As there are other priorities, we think that the climate can wait, but it can’t. The climate emergency is already here. The climate urgency is already here. We don’t have to wait for tomorrow.” We Europeans are guilty. That’s why we must pay the poorest countries for the damage caused by weather phenomena that climate change caused that is turned caused by our industries. Macron has already said that “we have to stand up and support the poorest countries with 100 billion dollars to fight against the climate crisis.”

The green policies promoted by the globalist elites through indirect carbon taxes and subsidies to things “eco,” to renewable energies and other ecological prohibitions and obstacles, are becoming another way of plundering the wealth of the Western middle classes. But if the climate change business has reached huge proportions in the developed world at the expense of consumers, in the third world it condemns thousands of people to remain in poverty and live a miserable life. When the IMF refuses to provide funds for coal-fired power plants in Africa or forbids the use of synthetic fertilizers in Sri Lanka, the poorest lose access to cheap energy and affordable food production.

After the pandemic, we have seen how science is easily manipulated and its empirical objectivity is easily corrupted to benefit the political and economic elites. When a hypothesis is elaborated by a group of researchers that can serve the purposes of these elites, the doors are opened to the financing of more studies in that direction, more publications, more papers in congresses, and in the end a semblance of scientific consensus. It is more profitable for any university department to focus its studies on the influence of climate change in a given area, than to explore other alternatives. If there is also the backing of supranational organizations and governments, the pressure becomes irresistible. Naturally, the mass media takes it upon itself to reaffirm the official doctrine and ostracize its detractors, while sowing alarm among the population.

The climate-belief apologists serve a more ambitious social engineering strategy, which aims to destroy the social, economic and political model in which we live, in order to replace it with the objectives that, under the label of Agenda 2030, are pursued by the globalist elites. They have given birth to hysterical teenagers like Greta Thunberg, who are followed as a model by brainless ecological activists, such as those who have dedicated themselves in recent weeks to attacking works of art in museums. But above all, they serve the goal of destroying the West as it had been configured up until the end of the Cold War.

The sovereignty of nations has already been considerably reduced with the prominence of supranational organizations and the phenomenon of globalization, which no longer makes it possible to control national financial and economic flows in an interconnected world market. This allowed P. Bobbitt to speak of what he called the “market-State,” referring to a structure whose purpose consists exclusively in its economic functionality. But it is clear that with Agenda 2030, it is being transformed into something different, into another type of State, in which the protagonism of the national community has been replaced by the protagonism of the state bureaucracy—large corporations and globalist elites grouped around conferences, such as the one held in Egypt: the perfect breeding ground for the formation of the new world order.

Mateo Requesens is a judge in Spain. [This article appears courtesy of Posmodernia].

December 3, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | 1 Comment

Parent groups revolt over French power outage plan

RT | December 3, 2022

Closing schools to combat the energy crisis in France is unacceptable, French parents’ groups announced this week, after the government instructed regional authorities to brace for potential localized power outages.

Schools were not prioritized by planners in the event of limits to the energy supply network during the winter.

“Parents do not want school closures. We have seen the impact of closures on students,” Valerie Desouche, Deputy Secretary of the National Union of Autonomous Parents’ Associations (UNAAPE), told BFM TV on Thursday, referring to the lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic.

She added that it was “unthinkable” not to treat schools as a priority during the energy crisis.

“We want schools to be open at all costs,” Desouche said. “We can’t put children’s education second.”

Vice President of the Federation of Parents for Public Education (PEEP) Laurent Zameczkowski also urged that schools be prioritized, saying “During the health crisis, we did everything to keep the schools open, and now the energy crisis will be the reason [to shut them down]?”

The group released a statement on Wednesday, arguing that “energy austerity cannot be done at the expense of the health and the future of students.”

According to France Info radio, the government plan entails potential outages between 8am and 1pm and between 6pm and 8pm that could last for up to two hours. Priority sites include hospitals, police stations and fire stations, but not schools, which could be forced to cancel some lessons.

“We are not saying that there are going to be power cuts, but that it is not impossible,” government spokesman Olivier Veran said on Thursday. France, together with many other European countries, has been looking for ways to conserve energy and been bracing for possible outages as Western states try to curb Russian oil and gas exports as part of sanctions over the Ukraine conflict.

December 3, 2022 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Russophobia | | 1 Comment

Switzerland, Facing an Unprecedented Power Shortage, Contemplates a Partial Ban on the Use of Electric Vehicles

It turns out that you can have battery-powered cars, or you can have renewable energy, but you can’t have both.

eugyppius: a plague chronicle | December 1, 2022

The Swiss Confederation usually imports electricity from France and Germany to keep the lights on over the winter, but this year neither country has any power to spare. Many French nuclear power plants are down after years of postponed maintenance, while in Germany we suffer from a superfluity of idle wind turbines and a (self-imposed) shortage of natural gas.

The Federal Council of Switzerland has therefore published draft legislation, which outlines four tiers of escalating measures to conserve electricity and avert potential blackouts. The first prescribes a lot of temperature restrictions for things like refrigerators and washing machines. The second includes more unusual rules, such as the demand that heating in clubs and discotheques “be set to the lowest level or switched off completely,” and that “streaming services … limit resolution of their content to standard definition.” The third foresees cutting business hours, banning the use of Blue Ray players and gaming computers, and also limiting the use of electric cars, which should be driven only when absolutely necessary. A fourth and final tier mandates closure of ski facilities, casinos, cinemas, theatre and the opera.

A lot of these rules look unenforceable, but they said the same thing about contact restrictions during the pandemic. It turns out that the state really can prevent you from socialising with people in your own home if it wants to, especially when there’s no shortage of prying neighbours eager to snitch.

Feasibility isn’t the point, though. It’s the optics here that are most astounding. Electric vehicles, which politicians have heavily subsidised as one of their primary policy responses to climate change, are just now crashing against that other great arm of the green agenda, namely renewable energy. You can’t drive everyone into ever greater dependence upon the electrical grid, while also orchestrating an energy transition to wind (which hardly blows in Germany, except in the north) and solar (which generates no meaningful power in the depths of the Central European winter). Gas from Russia was the magic ingredient that kept the whole renewables charade going, and we’re out of that now. There’s no way to cover up the failure; not even the green-friendly German media has any excuse or messaging angle here.

December 3, 2022 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | | 4 Comments

Germany has no alternatives to Russian gas – MP

RT | November 29, 2022

Germany still has no way of completely replacing Russian natural gas, even after reaching a supply agreement with Qatar, the chairman of the Bundestag committee on energy, Klaus Ernst, warned on Tuesday.

A long-term energy agreement was announced earlier in the day, under which the Gulf state will ship up to two million tons of liquefied natural gas (LNG) a year to Germany, starting from 2026. The deal will reportedly last at least 15 years.

“The federal government celebrates its LNG deal with Qatar and boasts big numbers. The fact is, these two million tons of LNG correspond to three percent of German gas consumption. There are still no real alternatives to Russian gas!” the politician from The Left party wrote on Twitter.

According to Bloomberg, the deal with Qatar equates to about 6% of the volume of Russian gas Germany imported in 2021. The fuel will come from ConocoPhillips’ joint ventures in Qatar, and will be delivered to the Brunsbuttel floating import terminal, which is under construction.

The news agency specified that the five import facilities chartered by the German government will cost a total of €6.5 billion ($6.7 billion) over the next 10 to 15 years. There is also one privately chartered terminal planned. Once operational, they will be able to cover around one third of Germany’s current gas demand, according to a government estimate, cited by Bloomberg.

Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, relies mainly on natural gas to power its industry, and has pledged to replace all Russian energy imports by as soon as mid-2024.

November 29, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | | 1 Comment

Creepy “Blue Whale” Suicide Symbol is Openly Glorified In Canada

Canadian Retailer Lambasted for Ad Promoting Assisted Suicide

Samizdat – November 29, 2022

A clip promoting the “beauty” of euthanasia sparked outrage online, as Canada plans to expand the application of medical assistance in dying (MAID) next year.

Retailer Simons has shocked Canada by releasing a commercial dubbed “All Is Beauty” supporting assisted suicide. The clip features a woman named Jennyfer Hatch who opted to end her life in October – reports suggest she suffered from Ehlers Danlos syndrome.

Many users called the ad “dystopian”, with some warning that Canadian authorities would force it onto people who are too poor to pay their medical bills.

The controversy regarding euthanasia regulations escalated in 2021 when Canada adopted bill c-7, making several crucial changes to the procedure’s requirements: the new law erased a safeguard that stipulated that people seeking assisted suicide need have a terminal illness, making their death reasonably foreseeable.

Starting next year, Canada will allow individuals suffering from mental illness to ask for euthanasia too.

Orchestrated Campaign to make Vulnerable “Useless Eaters” Kill Themselves

By Igor Chudov – November 28, 2022

What is this blue whale? Why is it important? … Read on

November 29, 2022 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | 6 Comments

Gazprom to mothball Nord Stream pipelines – Kommersant

RT | November 28, 2022

Russian energy major Gazprom is planning to shutter the Nord Stream gas pipelines and compressor stations, the Kommersant newspaper reported on Monday citing company sources. In September, both strings of Nord Stream 1 and one string of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline were damaged by explosions and are currently inoperable.

According to the report, gas-pumping equipment will not be moved from the Portovaya and Slavyanskaya compressor stations and will remain on site. This will help re-launch flows at short notice once the pipelines are restored.

Analyst Sergey Kondratyev of the Institute of Energy and Finance told the news outlet that the decision has merit, as it is now difficult to assess the timing of the repairs. Also, the transfer of equipment to other compressor stations is not viable, since Portovaya uses unique equipment. According to the expert, the work may take from three to five months and cost up to three billion rubles (around $50 million).

It is also unclear whether Gazprom will restore the pipelines at all. Machinery at the Portovaya compressor station was out of service long before the explosions due to a lack of proper maintenance amid Western sanctions on Russia.

“There is no answer to the question of how and why to restore the strings of Nord Stream if the pumps at Portovaya station are out of service,” Gazprom head Alexei Miller said last month.

Russia condemned the explosions that damaged the pipelines as an “act of international terrorism.” The Russian Defense Ministry said last month it suspects the British Navy to be involved, but London has denied the accusation. After their own probes, Sweden and Denmark both reported that the fractures in the pipelines were caused by explosions, but have not made suggestions as to who might be responsible.

November 28, 2022 Posted by | Economics, False Flag Terrorism, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

How Blackrock Investment Fund Triggered the Global Energy Crisis

“Adherence to UN 2030 Sustainability Agenda”. Colossal disinvestment in the trillion-dollar global oil and gas sector.

By F. William Engdahl | Global Research | November 16, 2022

Most people are bewildered by what is a global energy crisis, with prices for oil, gas and coal simultaneously soaring and even forcing closure of major industrial plants such as chemicals or aluminum or steel. The Biden Administration and EU have insisted that all is because of Putin and Russia’s military actions in Ukraine. This is not the case. The energy crisis is a long-planned strategy of western corporate and political circles to dismantle industrial economies in the name of a dystopian Green Agenda that has its roots in the period years well before February 2022, when Russia launched its military action in Ukraine.

Blackrock pushes ESG

In January, 2020  on the eve of the economically and socially devastating covid lockdowns, the CEO of the world’s largest investment fund, Larry Fink of Blackrock, issued a letter to Wall Street colleagues and corporate CEOs on the future of investment flows. In the document, modestly titled “A Fundamental Reshaping of Finance”, Fink, who manages the world’s largest investment fund with some $7 trillion then under management, announced a radical departure for corporate investment. Money would “go green.” In his closely-followed 2020 letter Fink declared,

“In the near future – and sooner than most anticipate – there will be a significant re-allocation of capital…Climate risk is investment risk.” Further he stated, “Every government, company, and shareholder must confront climate change.” [i]

In a separate letter to Blackrock investor clients, Fink delivered the new agenda for capital investing. He declared that Blackrock will exit certain high-carbon investments such as coal, the largest source of electricity for the USA and many other countries. He added that Blackrock would screen new investment in oil, gas and coal to determine their adherence to the UN Agenda 2030 “sustainability.”

Fink made clear the world’s largest fund would begin to disinvest in oil, gas and coal.  “Over time,” Fink wrote, “companies and governments that do not respond to stakeholders and address sustainability risks will encounter growing skepticism from the markets, and in turn, a higher cost of capital.” He added that, “Climate change has become a defining factor in companies’ long-term prospects… we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance.” [ii]

From that point on the so-called ESG investing, penalizing CO2 emitting companies like ExxonMobil, has become all the fashion among hedge funds and Wall Street banks and investment funds including State Street and Vanguard. Such is the power of Blackrock. Fink was also able to get four new board members in ExxonMobil committed to end the company’s oil and gas business.

The January 2020 Fink letter was a declaration of war by big finance against the conventional energy industry. BlackRock was a founding member of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (the TCFD) and is a signatory of the UN PRI— Principles for Responsible Investing, a UN-supported network of investors pushing zero carbon investing using the highly-corrupt ESG criteria—Environmental, Social and Governance factors into investment decisions. There is no objective control over fake data for a company’s ESG. As well Blackrock signed the Vatican’s 2019 statement advocating carbon pricing regimes. BlackRock in 2020 also joined  Climate Action 100, a coalition of almost 400 investment managers  managing US$40 trillion.

With that fateful January 2020 CEO letter, Larry Fink set in motion a colossal disinvestment in the trillion-dollar global oil and gas sector. Notably, that same year BlackRock’s Fink was named to the Board of Trustees of Klaus Schwab’s dystopian World Economic Forum, the corporate and political nexus of the Zero Carbon UN Agenda 2030. In June 2019, the World Economic Forum and the United Nations signed a strategic partnership framework to accelerate the implementation of the 2030 Agenda.  WEF has a Strategic Intelligence platform which includes Agenda 2030’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

In his 2021 CEO letter, Fink doubled down on the attack on oil, gas and coal. “Given how central the energy transition will be to every company’s growth prospects, we are asking companies to disclose a plan for how their business model will be compatible with a net zero economy,” Fink wrote. Another BlackRock officer told a recent energy conference, “where BlackRock goes, others will follow.” [iii]

In just two years, by 2022 an estimated $1 trillion has exited investment in oil and gas exploration and development globally. Oil extraction is an expensive business and cut-off of external investment by BlackRock and other Wall Street investors spells the slow death of the industry.

Biden—A BlackRock President?

Early in his then-lackluster Presidential bid, Biden had a closed door meeting in late 2019 with Fink who reportedly told the candidate that, “I’m here to help.” After his fateful meeting with BlackRock’s Fink, candidate Biden announced, “We are going to get rid of fossil fuels…” In December 2020, even before Biden was inaugurated in January 2021, he named BlackRock Global Head of Sustainable Investing, Brian Deese, to be Assistant to the President and Director of the National Economic Council. Here, Deese, who played a key role for Obama in drafting the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, has quietly shaped the Biden war on energy.

This has been catastrophic for the oil and gas industry. Fink’s man Deese was active in giving the new President Biden a list of anti-oil measures to sign by Executive Order beginning day one in January 2021. That included closing the huge Keystone XL oil pipeline that would bring 830,000 barrels per day from Canada as far as Texas refineries, and halting any new leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Biden also rejoined the Paris Climate Accord that Deese had negotiated for Obama in 2015 and Trump cancelled.

The same day, Biden set in motion a change of the so-called “Social Cost of Carbon” that imposes a punitive $51 a ton of CO2 on the oil and gas industry. That one move, established under purely executive-branch authority without the consent of Congress, is dealing a devastating cost to investment in oil and gas in the US, a country only two years before that was the world’s largest oil producer.[iv]

Killing refinery capacity

Even worse, Biden’s  aggressive environmental rules and BlackRock ESG investing mandates are killing the US refinery capacity. Without refineries it doesn’t matter how many barrels of oil you take from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. In the first two years of Biden’s Presidency the US has shut down some 1 million barrels a day of gasoline and diesel refining capacity, some due to covid demand collapse, the fastest decline in US history. The shutdowns are permanent. In 2023 an added 1.7 million bpd of capacity is set to close as a result of BlackRock and Wall Street ESG disinvesting and Biden regulations. [v]

Citing the heavy Wall Street disinvestment in oil and the Biden anti-oil policies, the CEO of Chevron in June 2022 declared that he doesn’t believe the US will ever build another new refinery.[vi]

Larry Fink, Board member of Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum, is joined by the EU whose President of the EU Commission, the notoriously corrupt Ursula von der Leyen left the WEF Board in 2019 to become EU Commission head. Her first major act in Brussels was to push through the EU Zero Carbon Fit for 55 agenda. That has imposed major carbon taxes and other constraints on oil, gas and coal in the EU well before the February 2022 Russian actions in Ukraine. The combined impact of the Fink fraudulent ESG agenda in the Biden administration and the EU Zero Carbon madness is creating the worst energy and inflation crisis in history.

*

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics.

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Notes

[i] Larry Fink, A Fundamental Reshaping of Finance, Letter to CEOs, January, 2020, https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/investor-relations/2020-blackrock-client-letter

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Tsvetana Paraskova,  Why Are Investors Turning Their Backs On Fossil Fuel Projects?, OilPrice.com,

March 11, 2021, https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Why-Are-Investors-Turning-Their-Backs-On-Fossil-Fuel-Projects.html

[iv] Joseph Toomey, Energy Inflation Was by Design, September, 2022, https://assets.realclear.com/files/2022/10/2058_energyinflationwasbydesign.pdf

[v] Ibid.

[vi] Fox Business, Chevron CEO says there may never be another oil refinery built in the US, June 3. 2022, https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/chevron-ceo-oil-refinery-built-u-s

Copyright © F. William Engdahl, Global Research, 2022

November 21, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , , | 2 Comments

OVERPOPULATION AND CLIMATE CHANGE

OffGuardian | November 21, 2022

The big population news, reported late last month, is that we just crossed 8 billion humans on the planet.

This week, to coincide with the COP27 and G20 meetings, this news was parlayed into a climate change narrative.

DW asks “How can 8 billion people sustainably share a planet?” while Reuters reports that a population of 8 billion makes “climate justice harder”.

As usual, the most brazenly anti-human nonsense comes from the Guardian, whose environmental editor has a long piece headlined: “It should not be controversial to say a population of 8 billion will have a grave impact on the climate”

Which includes this paragraph:

So of course the rich must change their behaviour. But making climate breakdown all about consumption has become an excuse for countries to do nowhere near enough to reduce their populations.

How exactly countries should go about “reducing their population” is left delightfully vague.

What’s brilliant about all this is the sheer lack of reality behind every single aspect of the story.

  • The world is not over-populated, that is a myth.
  • Climate change “science” is a scam.
  • They don’t even know how many people there really are, the global population figure is a guess based on modelling and old census data.

But the most fun article on this story is from Reuters, who actually fact-checked a viral social media post claiming overpopulation is a myth, and every human on earth could fit in a square 50 miles across.

They don’t fact-check the guys math, they even admit he’s completely correct, but then they say the figures “lack context”, and ask the opinion of an “expert” who reassures everyone “nowhere on earth could support that population density”.

No kidding guys.

More This Week In The New Normal.

November 21, 2022 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , | 3 Comments

As Green Policies Cause Energy Prices To Explode, Deforestation In Europe Accelerates

Skyrocketing fossil fuel energy prices are are driving the deforestation of Europe as citizens try to keep warm

By P Gosselin | No Tricks Zone | November 18, 2022

It’s easy to argue that the “green” movement is causing much more environmental harm than good. High energy costs are leading to poverty, which in turn leads to less investment in environmental protection and nature conservation.

Biodiversity-rich forests are being cleared away to make room for wind parks and people are increasingly burning wood to stay warm as an alternative to natural gas and heating oil.

Blackout News reports on how forests in Romania have been falling victim to illegal logging as the energy crisis has propelled the demand for firewood and pellets to rocket speed. “In Romania, entire nature reserves are disappearing as a result.”

“The sharp increase in demand for firewood, wood chips and pellets has also caused prices for these fuels to rise sharply, making them extremely lucrative for the illegal trade,” writes Blackout News. A lack of transparency and traceability are making the problem impossible to manage.

Blackout News cites a 2021 European Commission study showing Europe’s wood industry lacks transparency and that the demand for wood for heating has more than doubled in the past twenty years. Austria alone is reported to have imported approximately 120,000 tons of pellets from Romania last year. Europe’s CO2 reductions through the burning of biomass are costing its biotope dearly. Few are talking about this. What good will reaching zero CO2 emissions be if Europe’s forests end up being sacrificed and barren?

Greenpeace Romania says illegal logging is particularly bad in Romania and that more than half of the wood processed into pellets there comes from illegal logging in Natura 2000 areas. While authorities record an annual logging volume of 18 million cubic meters, “experts assume that another 20 million cubic meters of wood are illegally felled there each year and disappear without any evidence.”

One problem hindering the crackdown on illegal logging in Romania is rampant corruption in control bodies and government agencies. Penalties for the import of illegally logged timber “are also shockingly low”.

As long as Europe continues its efforts to eliminate fossil fuels and create energy shortages, prices will skyrocket and keep boosting the demand for wood as a source of energy.

November 19, 2022 Posted by | Environmentalism, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , | 2 Comments

German producers warn of meat shortages

RT | November 19, 2022

Germany may face a meat shortage and a subsequent surge in prices within the next four to six months, Die Welt reported this week, citing the German Meat Industry Association (VDF).

“In four, five, six months we will have gaps on the shelves,” Hubert Kelliger, the head of group sales at meat marketer Westfleisch and a VDF board member, told the news outlet.

According to Kelliger, the worst shortages are expected in the supply of pork. He says Berlin insists on reducing the number of livestock by half in order to protect the climate. However, experts say this would lead to mass shutdowns of meat-producing companies, which in turn would result in a 40% increase in the price of meat.

Cutting livestock numbers could also lead to a decrease in the supply of natural fertilizer, resulting in a drop in vegetable yields or a surge in the cost of production due to the high prices of artificial fertilizers. Either situation would worsen the food crisis in Germany.

While meat industry representatives note that vegetarianism and veganism have become increasingly popular in the country over the last few years, they say that over 90% of the people still buy and eat meat.

Germany has been relying more and more on meat imports rather than domestic production. The share of beef and pork products from abroad has risen in recent months, and the country is currently the biggest meat importer in Europe, according to VDF.

VDF experts say Berlin is making the same mistake in turning to meat imports as it did with energy – increasing dependence on imports could lead to the risk of a food crisis along with the energy crisis. Kelliger says the only way to avoid this is to be self-sufficient in meat production.

November 19, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , | Leave a comment

Lab-grown meat & nuclear yeast vats: COP27 reignites the war on food

By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | November 13, 2022

We’re a week into this year’s UN climate summit, COP27, and the various agenda planned to roll out on the back of it are coming into focus.

None more so than the autumn offensive in the establishment’s war on food. There’s a big push on that front.

Today was “Adaptation and Agriculture” day at COP27, and you probably don’t need me to tell you what was on the agenda – a lot of talk of “sustainability”, “innovation”, “climate-friendly production” and so on.

As usual with these global meetings, the closed-door discussions and po-faced newspeak presentations are accompanied by a wave of synchronized propaganda.

One angle this propaganda is taking is that COP27 “refused to discuss” meat or farming in general, and therefore those people insisting we should kill all the cows in the world and eat lab-grown paste instead are somehow rebels speaking truth to power.

That’s how George Monbiot is arranging the narrative for his piece in the Guardian.

It’s nonsense, of course. COP27 literally had an entire day dedicated to discussing farming, “food security” and “innovations” to “reduce methane” (that’s code for “getting rid of cows” by the way).

Further, COP27 is being used to launch the UN’s new Food and Agriculture for Sustainable Transformation (FAST) initiative. Which, according to Forbes, will promote:

[A] shift towards sustainable, climate-resilient, healthy diets would help reduce health and climate change costs by up to US$ 1.3 trillion while supporting food security in the face of climate change.

As well as the AIM initiative, which intends to channel 8 BILLION dollars into “farming innovations”.

But, in another example of the fake binary, while COP27 members were inside discussing “adapting agriculture”, “protestors” were outside demanding they discuss adapting agriculture.

The protesters even used the platform to announce the launch of a new campaign “Reboot Food” which assures us that all we need to feed the world is giant nuclear-powered fermenting vats:

The cornerstone idea is swapping animal agriculture, where possible, for a technology called precision fermentation, which would involve brewing yeasts and bacteria to make protein. It could create biologically identical animal proteins using genetically engineered micro-organisms fermented in tanks. These factories would be powered by solar, wind and nuclear.

That’s just the broadest most ambitious “food reform” propaganda coming out in the last few days though, there’s a lot more where that came from.

Earlier this week it was announced that synthetic meat company GoodMeat would be unveiling their new lab-grown meat products at the COP27 summit.

On a similar theme, EuroNews asks:

Companies are making slaughter-free meat – so why isn’t it for sale in shops?

It’s not just lab-grown meat or nuclear-powered yeast paste hitting the headlines either, edible insect stories are suddenly all over the news again.

The I has a piece from a “journalist” who didn’t like the idea of eating insects, but then tried it for a week and found out it was actually great.

The academic journal PNAS published an article unsubtly titled “How to convince people to eat insects”, which suggests we need to “create a new norm”.

Healthline News has an article “What Science Says About Eating Insects”. Spoiler alert – “science” says that eating insects is great and everybody should do it as much as possible. Who knew, right?

At the same time, the UK’s Food Standards Agency published a startingly well-timed report on the safety of edible insects (turns out they’re safe, shocking isn’t it?)

But the prize of the clumsiest propaganda of the week goes to the Independent, which boasts an article with the headline:

Eww world order: How the right-wing became obsessed with eating bugs

This opens with a screed about how lunatic right-wing conspiracy theorists think we’re all being programmed to eat insects… and then seamlessly blends into half-a-dozen paragraphs about how eating insects is actually really good for you though, and good for the planet too:

The reality is that there are a multitude of good reasons to eat insect protein, not least the environmental impact. Breeding insects such as crickets and grasshoppers requires less feed, land and water than farming traditional livestock like pigs and cows, and results in the production of much less greenhouse gas.

Great job guys, real smooth.

UN summits – especially climate summits – always provide a little sneak preview of the upcoming narratives. And while “food reform” may not be the only, or even the biggest, item on the agenda… it’s definitely a major part of the plan. And it’s probably coming soon.

November 13, 2022 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | | 3 Comments

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