Tesla picked up $595,000,000 in regulatory credits for Q1 2025
By Jennifer Mahorasy | April 25, 2025
Tesla had a 71% drop in first quarter profits compared to last year, but those losses were minimised because they picked up $595,000,000 US in regulatory credits for the quarter.
Indeed, according to Tesla’s Q1 2025 earnings, net income fell 71% to $409 million from $1.39 billion the previous year, driven by a 13% drop in vehicle deliveries (336,681 vehicles) and a 20% decline in automotive revenue to $14 billion.
Regulatory credits, however, did bring in $595 million, up from $442 million the prior year, which was critical—without those credits, Tesla would’ve posted a loss for the quarter.
So, the credits acted like a financial lifeboat, keeping Tesla in the black despite weak sales and operational challenges, like updating factory lines for the refreshed Model Y and lower average selling prices due to discounts.
What Are Regulatory Credits, and Are They “Free Cash Ripped Off” from Petrol Car Makers?
Regulatory credits aren’t exactly “free cash” handed to Tesla like a government cheque, but they’re not pure market magic either. Here’s how they work:
The System: In places like the U.S., EU, and China, governments set emissions standards for automakers. Companies that sell zero-emission vehicles (like Tesla’s EVs) earn credits. Automakers who miss emissions targets—often those heavily reliant on gas-powered cars—must buy credits to avoid fines or bans. Tesla, producing only EVs, generates surplus credits and sells them to legacy automakers (e.g., Stellantis, GM, or Volkswagen). In Q1 2025, Tesla earned $595 million this way.
All prefaced on the need for an energy transition because apparently we have a climate catastrophe.
Germany On the Path to Tyranny
By Jurij Kofner & Glenn Diesen
Glenn Diesen | May 2, 2025
AfD has polled as the most popular political party in Germany, and the political-media class has openly discussed banning the party. AfD as the main political opposition has now been designated as an “extremist organisation”, which opens up for the German intelligence service to surveil and crack down on the political opposition. This is reasonably interpreted as the first step to banning the main opposition party.
Both Marco Rubio and JD Vance have warned against Germany’s drift toward tyranny:
I discussed these issues with the economic advisor to AfD, Jurij Kofner.
Yet more legacy media deception on a vital issue
By Alex Berenson | Unreported Truths | April 29, 2025
I can’t believe I have to call out my old editors at the New York Times for running blatantly dishonest journalism for the second day in a row.1
But I do, so here goes.
Yesterday, just past noon local time, the electric systems in Spain and Portugal failed without warning.
Power remained out across both countries for much of the day and wasn’t fully restored until today. The disruption was profound. Subway riders evacuated stalled trains in darkened tunnels. Cellular service (which, unlike landlines, does not have backup batteries) went down. Elevators were stuck. ATMs and traffic lights went out.
Not across a city, or a state, but two nations that together have almost 60 million people. (Small parts of southern France were also affected.)
The outage attracted worldwide attention — and legacy media headscratching.
The usual explanations for blackouts were nowhere in sight. No earthquakes hit, no hurricanes or forest fires were raging. Even climate change, the usual media bugaboo for all disasters natural and manmade, couldn’t be blamed. It’s April, not July, and the weather was mild across the Iberian peninsula, in the 70s from Lisbon to Barcelona, 700 miles northeast. Nor was demand for power particularly high yesterday.
Just after the outage, Portugal’s electric network operator supposedly blamed “extreme temperature variations” in Spain for “induced atmospheric vibration.” Those led to “oscillations” on high voltage lines, according to several newspapers, including England’s Guardian.
“Millions without power in Spain, Portugal after ‘induced atmospheric vibration’,” a USA Today headline incoherently but confidently explained.
Of course. Induced atmospheric vibration. If that sounds like gobbledygook, it’s because it is. By Tuesday morning, the Guardian had disappeared those words, claiming the Portuguese company “said the statement was falsely attributed to it.”
Oh. Other unlikely explanations included cyber attacks and solar flares, eruptions of radiation from the sun that can disrupt powerlines. But solar flares are hard to miss, and none were a problem on Monday.
But even as the legacy media offered bizarre theories, power industry analysts and energy experts on X proposed a far simpler, more plausible explanation: Spain’s near-total reliance on green energy had left it very vulnerable to cascading blackouts.
For all its magic, electricity is actually relatively easy to understand at the theoretical level; it is the flow of electrons — negatively charged particles — that carry energy. Scientists began to understand this fact in the 1700s. A century later they had realized that swinging magnets along coils of wire would produce usable current. The energy to swing the magnets comes from steam heated in coal, oil, natural gas, or nuclear plants, or directly from the flow of water in hydropower dams. (I remember the basics from AP Physics, and Google confirms them.)
After the electricity is produced, grids of wires carry it to homes and businesses, where it makes lights, computers, and motors run.2 Here, the engineering gets complicated. Electric plants produce “alternating” current, because of the way the magnets spin, and most household devices run on it.3 Demand for electricity fluctuates by the second, and supply must exactly match demand to keep the grid functioning properly. Traditional power plants have several different ways to manage this task. Their success in doing so is a key reason that modern, wealthy countries almost never have widespread blackouts.
But solar plants produce direct current, which must be “inverted” into alternating current before it is added to the grid. Wind turbines have their own hurdles adding power. As a result, wind and solar plants cannot manage unexpected changes in frequency nearly as well as older sources.
This risk is not a secret to power companies — or renewable energy suppliers. In 2022, the consortium of companies that runs Europe’s electricity network released a 63-page report on the issue.
It is highly technical and obscure (perhaps deliberately so), but it notes that older plants “have traditionally provided various ‘inherent’ capabilities to the system critical to ensure the stable operation of the power systems…” and that wind and solar power have a “lack of these system capabilities.”
But in the rush last decade to pacify climate change activists and decarbonize the world (except, of course, for India and China), niceties like the realities of physics seem to have been overlooked. European countries have moved quickly away from boring, reliable sources of power generation and towards solar and wind.
No country has moved faster than Spain, which has sol to spare. In mid-April, Spain ran its electricity grid fully on renewable energy on a weekday for the first time.
Oh well. Renewable energy was fun while it lasted. Heck, I’ve got panels on my roof (the tax credit didn’t hurt).
But well-defined theoretical risks that are ignored for political reasons have a strange way of coming true. The strong consensus on X is that the lack of simple, reliable, fossil fuel or nuclear-powered baseload generation with high “inertia,” as the engineers say, is a big reason that Spain’s grid failed so fast and took nearly a day to reboot fully.
Meanwhile, the mainstream media keeps scratching its head and staring into the sun for solar flares. “The cause of the outage remained unclear,” the Times’s current headline explains helpfully.
If this were 2021, the Biden Administration would no doubt call blaming renewables “misinformation” and Twitter and Facebook would be censoring articles like this one as Russian propaganda or whatever. At least now the skeptics can call the media out without fear of being banned.
Progress, I suppose.
Though it doesn’t fix the underlying problem. After two decades of putting up solar and wind farms at massive taxpayer expense, Europe has turned electricity from cheap and reliable to the reverse. If the sun shines too brightly, the lights go out.
Congrats, Greta Thunberg!
I know, you can. As cynical as I’ve become, I guess I’m still not cynical enough.
Along the way the voltage – a measure of the “pressure” causing the electrons to move — is raised in order to reduce the energy wasted as the current flows, then lowered so it is safer for household use.
In Europe, alternating current is produced at 50 hertz, or cycles per second. In the United States, it’s produced at 60.
Net Zero Watch warns of growing grid instability
Net Zero Watch | April 29, 2025
With more than 50 million EU electricity consumers suffering blackouts yesterday, campaign group Net Zero Watch has reiterated its warning that the UK power grid is also becoming increasingly unstable.
Grid analysts have suggested a high likelihood that the extent of yesterday’s blackout in Iberia was a result of the Spanish grid operating almost entirely on renewables at the time. The stability of power grids depends on so-called ‘inertia’, a resistance to rapid change that is an inherent feature of large spinning turbines, such as gas-fired power stations, but not of wind and solar farms. Too much renewables capacity on a grid can therefore mean inadequate inertia. As a result, in grids dominated by wind and solar, faults can propagate almost instantaneously across grids, leading to blackouts.
In a recent Net Zero Watch paper, entitled Blackout Risk in the GB Grid, energy system analyst Kathyn Porter pointed out that Britain’s electricity system is also becoming increasingly unstable. Large fluctuations in grid frequency – the first sign of problems – are becoming much more common.
In the past four years, the upper operational [frequency] limit was breached around 500 times in each winter season… the number of such breaches has also been growing steadily, which is consistent with falling grid inertia… and a perception that the grid is becoming less reliable.
In addition, Ms Porter points out that the GB grid experienced a ‘near miss’ at the start of the year.
Net Zero Watch director Andrew Montford said:
For 20 years, every aspect of the grid has been subordinated to the concerns of the eco-warriors. It’s no surprise that our electricity system is now both unaffordable and dangerously unstable. We can no longer afford to have energy policy determined by fantastists.
Airbus pulls back on ‘green’ jet – WSJ
RT | April 21, 2025
European aircraft manufacturer Airbus is scaling back its hydrogen-powered jet project after spending nearly $2 billion, the Wall Street Journal has reported, citing sources.
The company announced in 2020 that it aimed to launch a zero-emission, H2-powered aircraft by 2035, calling it a potential breakthrough for aviation. Some industry executives had questioned whether the technology would be ready in time.
People familiar with the matter told the WSJ that Airbus had already spent more than $1.7 billion on the project, but concluded over the past year that technical hurdles and sluggish adoption of hydrogen across the economy would prevent it from meeting its target, according to a report on Sunday.
In early February, Airbus informed staff that the project’s budget would be cut and its timeline delayed, the sources said. A new schedule was not provided.
Later that month, CEO Guillaume Faury – who had initially described the hydrogen push as “a historic moment” – admitted the effort had not led to a commercially viable aircraft. Engineers would return to the drawing board in a second “development loop,” he reportedly said.
Airbus’s efforts to enlist a dozen airlines and more than 200 airports to explore hydrogen integration raised eyebrows, with airline and supplier executives privately doubting the 2035 target. At US rival Boeing – long skeptical of hydrogen – executives voiced concerns over safety and the technology’s readiness.
The EU has pushed aviation to decarbonize under its Green Deal, which aims to make the bloc climate-neutral by 2050. Airbus, partly owned by the French state, was required to channel part of a €15 billion (over $16 billion) Covid-era bailout into green aircraft development.
According to the WSJ report, the hydrogen program had helped Airbus unlock additional public and private green funding.
The retreat comes as wider enthusiasm for hydrogen fades, with companies like oil major BP and Finnish producer Neste scrapping plans for hydrogen projects. Some major European power companies have been rethinking amid high costs and difficulty transitioning away from fossil fuels, according to leading industry magazine Windpower Monthly.
Green Policies, Not Trump Tariffs, Killing British Steel
By Vijay Jayaraj | RealClear World | April 4, 2025
British Steel, the U.K.’s last bastion of primary steelmaking, announced plans to shutter its two blast furnaces at Scunthorpe, effectively ending 150 years of virgin steel production in Britain. Media outlets have rushed to pin the blame on U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent 25% tariffs on steel imports.
But this narrative is a convenient distraction from a far more insidious culprit: the U.K. government’s relentless pursuit of self-destructive green policies that have crippled British manufacturing for nearly a decade.
During the Industrial Revolution, Britain’s steel industry forged the island’s ascent as a global superpower. Steel was the sinew of progress, enabling the nation to outpace rivals and cement its economic and military supremacy well into the 20th century. Once the backbone of its industrial might, steel manufacturing has been suffocated by exorbitant energy costs and uncompetitive pricing – both direct consequences of a cult’s dogma that prioritizes reducing emissions of harmless carbon dioxide over economic survival.
Having produced over 20 million metric tons annually in the 1970s, output dwindled to a paltry 4 million tons by 2024. Meanwhile, imports have surged to 68% of domestic consumption, up from 55% in 2022, as cheaper foreign steel floods the market. The government’s pledge to “rebuild” the sector rings hollow when its own policies paved the way for this collapse.
British Steel’s owner, Chinese-owned Jingye, cited “highly challenging market conditions, the imposition of tariffs, and higher environmental costs” as reasons for the Scunthorpe closure, which threatens up to 2,700 jobs and could commence as early as June.
This shutdown is not a sudden reaction to external trade pressures but rather the inevitable outcome of a self-inflicted death spiral. While China and India make cheaper, carbon-intensive steel with no apparent “climate guilt,” the U.K.’s obsession with net-zero “virtue” turns its producers into sacrificial offerings at the green altar.
Green Policies: The Silent Assassin
Let’s dispense with the pleasantries: Britain’s green policies are more a national suicide than a noble crusade. For nearly a decade, successive governments have chased emissions targets with a zeal that ignores the realities of industrial survival. The Climate Change Act of 2008 set the stage, committing the U.K. to slash carbon dioxide emissions by 80% by 2050 – a hideous impossibility that was later tightened to the holy grail of the even more stringent “net zero.”
This ambition birthed a web of regulations, taxes, and subsidies that have jacked up energy costs to levels unmatched among Britain’s peers and made steel manufacturing impossible without incurring heavy losses.
One proposed solution was a shift to electric arc furnaces, which recycle scrap steel rather than producing it from raw materials with more carbon-intensive blast furnaces. However British Steel’s Chinese owner reportedly sought a $1.3 billion subsidy to fund the $2.6 billion change.
In addition, the U.K.’s industrial electricity prices are approximately 40% higher than France’s and about four times more than those of the U.S. For energy-guzzling steelmakers, such price differentials – a product of “green” energy choices – are a death sentence.
Adding to the pain of British Steel is the U.K. Emissions Trading Scheme that adds costs to the company’s emissions of carbon dioxide, a penalty largely evaded by Chinese and Indian rivals.
The world’s steel leader, China produces more than 1 billion metric tons annually – exceeding the U.K.’s total output over the past 47 years. India follows closely, churning out the metal at prices Britain can’t match.
The steel industries of China and India are fueled by cheap coal and minimal constraints on carbon dioxide emissions. Neither faces the punitive energy costs or emissions taxes that hobble British Steel. While the U.K. levies up to $103 on each ton of carbon dioxide emitted, China charges its manufacturers but a fraction of that. India has no national charge at all. The result? British Steel, saddled with green compliance costs, is priced out of the global market.
China and India didn’t need to lift a finger as Westminster policymakers chased a utopian vision that delivered industrial ruin. The media can spin its tariff tales, but the truth is plainer: Britain’s steel industry was slowly bled dry by a government too enamored with green dogma to see the carnage it wrought.
The demise of British Steel serves as a stark warning to manufacturing giants in Western Europe and the U.S. Trading cost-effectiveness for climate compliance is a Faustian bargain to be resisted by corporate executives and lobbyists.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India.
Saskatchewan becomes first Canadian province to fully eliminate carbon tax
Life Site News | April 1, 2025
Saskatchewan has become the first Canadian province to free itself entirely of the carbon tax.
On March 27, Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe announced the removal of the provincial and federal carbon tax beginning April 1, boosting the province’s industry and making Saskatchewan the first carbon tax free province.
“The immediate effect is the removal of the carbon tax on your Sask Power bills, saving Saskatchewan families and small businesses hundreds of dollars a year. And in the longer term, it will reduce the cost of other consumer products that have the industrial carbon tax built right into their price,” said Moe.
Under Moe’s direction, Saskatchewan has dropped the industrial carbon tax which he says will allow Saskatchewan to thrive under a “tariff environment.”
“I would hope that all of the parties running in the federal election would agree with those objectives and allow the provinces to regulate in this area without imposing the federal backstop,” he continued.
The removal of the tax is estimated to save Saskatchewan residents up to 18 cents a liter in gas prices.
The removal of the tax will take place on April 1, the same day the consumer carbon tax will reduce to 0 percent under Prime Minister Mark Carney’s direction. Notably, Carney did not scrap the carbon tax legislation: he just reduced its current rate to zero. This means it could come back at any time.
Furthermore, while Carney has dropped the consumer carbon tax, he has previously revealed that he wishes to implement a corporation carbon tax, the effects of which many argued would trickle down to all Canadians.
The Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities (SARM) celebrated Moe’s move, noting that the carbon tax was especially difficult on farmers.
“I think the carbon tax has been in place for approximately six years now coming up in April and the cost keeps going up every year,” SARM president Bill Huber said.
“It puts our farming community and our business people in rural municipalities at a competitive disadvantage, having to pay this and compete on the world stage,” he continued.
“We’ve got a carbon tax on power – and that’s going to be gone now – and propane and natural gas and we use them more and more every year, with grain drying and different things in our farming operations,” he explained.
“I know most producers that have grain drying systems have three-phase power. If they haven’t got natural gas, they have propane to fire those dryers. And that cost goes on and on at a high level, and it’s made us more noncompetitive on a world stage,” Huber decalred.
The carbon tax is wildly unpopular and blamed for the rising cost of living throughout Canada. Currently, Canadians living in provinces under the federal carbon pricing scheme pay $80 per tonne.
New York Takes A Stab At A Green New Deal Demonstration Project: The Case Of Ithaca
By Francis Menton | Manhattan Contrarian | March 20, 2025
Many political jurisdictions claim to be on a path to eliminating emissions of carbon dioxide from their energy systems. Notable examples include California and New York in the U.S., and the UK and Germany in Europe. The Biden administration during its term in office even claimed to have set the entire U.S. onto a path toward what they called “net zero.” But so far none of these places has gotten anywhere near the goal. Indeed, as of today, many hundreds of billions of dollars into the effort, not one of them has even issued a detailed engineering plan of how this is supposed to be accomplished.
For reasons expressed in some dozens of posts on this blog, with the exception of a vast expansion of nuclear energy, I don’t believe that this “net zero” thing can actually be done, at least without entirely impoverishing the people. However, I’m completely willing to be proved wrong. For many years, I have been calling for a Demonstration Project to prove whether or not an economically-developed community is capable of achieving zero carbon emissions, or anything close to that (example here from 2022). Surely, if the entire U.S. can be expected to accomplish “net zero” in response to a government command, then it should be simple to build a working “net zero” Demonstration Project for a small town of, say, a few tens of thousands of people.
I’ve even proposed the perfect place as my candidate to be the guinea pig for the “net zero” demonstration: Ithaca, New York. After all, Ithaca is the most exquisitely climate virtuous place in what is already a deep blue state. It is home to two thoroughly left-wing academic institutions (Cornell University and Ithaca College), with their thousands of radical left-wing climate activist faculty and students. These people should leap at the chance to show the rest of the world how this “net zero” thing can be done. Also, the population (approximately 50,000) is in about the right range for a net zero demonstration project. (Note that the 50,000 is the combined population of the City of Ithaca and Town of Ithaca. Yes, for reasons known only to the geniuses of New York State local governance, Ithaca consists of two independent adjoining municipalities, a City and a Town, sharing the same name.). If “net zero” doesn’t work in a small place like this, the loss of investment could be large, but not catastrophic.
And in fact, when it comes to talking the talk, Ithaca would appear to be at the forefront of the green energy transition. Back in June 2019, the Ithaca City Common Council unanimously adopted what they called the “Ithaca Green New Deal.” A few months later, in March 2020, the Ithaca Town Council, also unanimously, adopted their own “Green New Deal Resolution.” Although there are differences, the Town’s Resolution incorporated much of the language of the City’s Resolution word-for-word. Not to be caught standing still, the next year, 2021, the City of Ithaca went a step further and announced that it would electrify all of its 6000 buildings. They didn’t actually use the words “demonstration project,” but clearly the key elements were now in place. Should we check in on how it’s going?
The short answer: It’s a complete joke.
First, let’s take note of some of the official goals. From the City of Ithaca Green New Deal resolution:
RESOLVED, That the City of Ithaca adopts a goal to meet the electricity needs of City government operations with 100% renewable electricity by 2025. . . . RESOLVED, That the City of Ithaca hereby adopts a goal of achieving a carbon neutral city by 2030. . . . RESOLVED, That the City of Ithaca endorses the following actions to achieve these goals: Create a climate action plan (CAP) in 2020 to provide details on how to achieve the Ithaca Green New Deal, and update the CAP regularly. . . .
And then there’s this, not found (at least today) on the City of Ithaca’s website, but reported on January 29, 2025 at the website of WSKG, the Ithaca PBS affiliate:
In 2021, the small city of Ithaca announced it would electrify all of its 6,000 buildings.
And how exactly was Ithaca going to electrify 6000 buildings within a few short years?
[Ithaca planned to achieve building electrification] with the help of one key partner: a technology company called BlocPower, whose then-CEO Donnel Baird said the company would make the mass electrification process fast and affordable. “There’s a lot of expensive engineering and financial and workforce development costs,” Baird told Ithaca’s common council in 2021, after it approved the mass electrification plan. “Our job is to remove all of that friction.”
OK, those were the goals. Now for the progress toward achieving them. If you go to the website of the City of Ithaca today, everything seems great:
Ithaca is leading the world. On June 5th, 2019, the City of Ithaca Common Council unanimously adopted the Ithaca Green New Deal resolution, a government-led commitment to community-wide carbon neutrality by 2030 that focuses on addressing historical inequities, economic inequality, and social justice. Two years after the resolution was signed, Ithaca established itself as a world-leader in climate mitigation planning and continues to pave the path forward as a blueprint for other cities across the U.S. and the globe.
But how about some actual facts on the ground. Let’s start with that building electrification thing. From that same January 25 WSKG piece:
[I]n recent months, BlocPower has quietly deserted its electrification and workforce training programs in Ithaca and several other cities, according to municipal leaders and organizations that worked with BlocPower. . . . In Ithaca, BlocPower ended its collaboration with the city after completing the electrification of only 10 buildings, according to Ithaca’s current sustainability director, Rebecca Evans. Last November, the company furloughed its Ithaca staff members and ended all partnerships in the city, Evans said.
6000 buildings, 10, whatever. Here is a picture from WSKG of “sustainability director” Rebecca Evans:
So, Ms. Evans, how about the big Climate Action Plan by which Ithaca will instruct the ignorant world how to get to carbon neutrality? Here’s another piece from WSKG, this one from several months ago (October 2024) reporting on recent revisions to the Plan. Excerpt:
The [Green New Deal] resolution . . . charged city staff with creating a formal climate action plan that would outline how the city would achieve those goals. Ithaca’s sustainability director, Rebecca Evans, wrote in a post on LinkedIn last month that she recently decided to scrap the version of that plan she had been working on. The decision, she said in an interview with WSKG, does not change the goals of the Green New Deal, but instead reframes the city’s approach of how it will achieve its commitments. Evans said that rather than prioritizing reducing emissions, the new plan will prioritize helping residents adapt to living in a warming world, while also working towards the city’s emissions-reduction goals. That could include providing residents with better access to social services, like housing and job training, and improving the city’s emergency response and electricity reliability.
Got it — They’ve given up on reducing emissions. And how about the City’s promise to get 100% of its own electricity from renewable sources by 2025? Are they really doing that right now? I can’t find a recent report, but there’s this from back in December 2011:
Beginning in January [2012], the City of Ithaca will purchase 100% of its electricity consumption from renewable sources. Under a new agreement with Integrys Energy Services of New York, Inc., Ithaca will purchase Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) certified by Green-e Energy for all of its electricity.
Aha! It’s the magic of “Renewable Energy Certificates.” Apparently, those make it possible to get your electricity from wind turbines and solar panels on completely calm nights. If you are willing to believe it. Al Gore would be proud.
In short, everything about Ithaca’s Green New Deal is either a scam, or has been quietly abandoned, or both.
Here in New York City we have our own building electrification mandate called “Local Law 97” that is said to require some 50,000 buildings to convert to electric heat and cooking by 2030. Does anybody really think we can make any more progress toward such a goal than Ithaca?
EU capital flight tops $300 billion – European Council president
RT | March 21, 2025
Capital outflow from the EU has reached €300 billion ($325 billion) annually as retail and institutional investors move their money into assets outside the region, European Council President Antonio Costa has announced.
The statement comes as the bloc is considering doubling its military aid to Ukraine and continues to pledge billions of euros in financial assistance to Kiev.
Speaking to reporters following the EC meeting on Thursday, Costa said that officials in Brussels are seeking to avoid capital flight by reducing energy costs that have already soared to their highest level in two years, hitting major industries and companies.
“As of today, around €300 billion of EU families’ savings flow out of European Union markets each year,” Costa said, acknowledging that business as usual is no longer an option for the bloc. “There is €300 billion that don’t fund businesses in the European Union.”
Among the steps aimed at luring investors back to the bloc, Costa mentioned slashing what Brussels calls “unnecessary” red tape by 25% for all EU companies and by 35% for small and medium-sized businesses.
The multibillion-dollar capital outflow comes at a time when the EU is pushing to maintain funding for Ukraine. The effort is driven by growing concerns in Brussels that US President Donald Trump could stop the flow of American arms to the government of Vladimir Zelensky.
Earlier this week, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas proposed a hawkish plan that would double the bloc’s cashflow to Kiev for the year, making it €40 billion ($43.7 billion).
On Thursday, Hungary, which has long been critical of EU military assistance to Ukraine, refused to sign a joint EU communique calling for increased funding for Kiev.
Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban said that the EU is broke, as it has spent “all of its money” and realistically “doesn’t have a single penny left” to support Ukraine amid its conflict with Russia.
‘Death blow for the euro’ – AfD’s Weidel slams Germany’s massive new debt package
Remix News | March 19, 2025
The German Bundestag passed a historic debt package for defense and infrastructure yesterday, effectively changing the constitution to allow a suspension of the debt brake. However, a number of top German opposition politicians are making dire predictions about what this nearly €1 trillion in new debt will mean for Germany and Europe.
The largest opposition party to emerge from national elections, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), was perhaps the most vehemently opposed to the package. However, the BSW, the Left Party and the Free Democrats (FDP) all filed lawsuits against the deal and fought tooth and nail to stop it, but all of those lawsuits failed.
The co-leader of the AfD, Alice Weidel, is calling the debt a “death blow for the euro.” She said the debt will have a negative impact on future generations, consumers and taxpayers. Furthermore, she believes there will be massive disruptions in the credit markets in the future, rising interest rates, and a “spillover effect on the other eurozone countries.” Already, interest rates on European debt have risen sharply, and the fear is that periphery countries could see their borrowing costs skyrocket. In such a scenario, the euro could be significantly weakened.
She said Merz broke his election promises in dramatic fashion. In fact, the promise to keep the debt brake was even contained within the party election program of the CDU. There is already a sharp backlash amongst the party’s members to the betrayal, with some Germans already canceling their membership to the party.
“This is nothing less than the worst voter deception I have ever seen in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany,” said Weidel.
There was no significant dissent within the parties that passed the new debt package, with only Jan Dieren (SPD), Mario Czaja (CDU), and Canan Bayram (Greens) voting “no” to the package. In the end, the new debt package passed with a comfortable margin above the two-thirds majority required to change the constitution, with 513 for the deal and 206 against.
Of course, the opposition parties are outraged. The law passed under the old Bundestag, the one that had just been voted out of power. It was championed by Friedrich Merz, who promised his CDU would keep the debt brake in place. It represents a historic spending spree, but one with many handouts to the Green Party, including a commitment to “climate neutrality by 2045” enshrined in the constitution.
Among the speakers featured in the debate in the Bundestag was AfD MP Alexander Gauland, who was also a co-founder of the party.
“A lot of right and wrong things have been said in the course of this debate, both last Thursday and today. I would therefore like to make a few personal comments. Mr. Merz and I were in the same party for many years. I left because I could no longer tolerate Angela Merkel’s destruction of the CDU as a conservative-liberal bourgeois alternative to the left-green mainstream. Mr. Merz became a victim of her will to power,” he said.
Gauland also said he had high hopes for Merz at first, with a potential turnaround on immigration and a return to center-right policy, but instead, Merz has allied with the left and blocked a deal with the AfD.
“You sacrificed everything that was still conservative or middle-class in the CDU in order to become chancellor,” said Gauland. “Mr. Merz, you will probably become Federal Chancellor with the kind of policies we have seen in recent years. This policy will fail in the same way as the previous traffic light system. Not even their transatlantic ally in Washington supports their desperate endeavors to solve today’s problems with yesterday’s answers.
“Even if I have had doubts about my own party from time to time in recent years. Today, I am proud and happy to have launched it together with others in 2013. Because as of this week, the Merz CDU is the continuation of the Merkel CDU. Keep it up, Mr. Merz, and you will have to take responsibility for Germany’s decline in the future.”
Meanwhile, the CDU, CSU and Social Democrats (SPD) were triumphant.
Merz said that the financial package opens up “a perspective for our country that is urgently needed in the times we live in today.”
“Today’s decision is an unmistakable signal of Germany’s assumption of responsibility for a secure Europe and an economically stable Germany,” said CSU state group leader Alexander Dobrindt.
SPD leader Lars Klingbeil described the financial package as a “historic compromise” between the SPD, CDU/CSU, and the Greens. He said the debt would help rebuild Germany and beef up the military.
“The world is currently being re-measured; no one is waiting for Germany and no one is waiting for Europe,” said Klingbeil.
FDP parliamentary group leader Christian Dürr slammed Merz, saying he will lead “the first debt-ridden coalition in the Federal Republic of Germany.” He accused Merz of wanting to lead a government “that is prepared to sacrifice tomorrow’s prosperity for short-term election gifts.”
BP in crisis — The oil industry’s biggest loser on renewable energy
The iconic 120 year old company shares fall as rumors of a takeover spread
By Jo Nova | February 25, 2025
BP has lost a quarter of its share value in the last two weeks. The fall started when company profits turned out to be just $9 billion, down from $14b a year ago and $28b in 2022. As The Telegraph reports, “BP’s shareholders had realized that the green spending they supported in 2020 had halved their dividends.” But Shell, Chevron, and Exxon — the other oil giants — they were all doing much better.
Twenty years ago BP changed its branding to “Beyond Petroleum”. By 2020 the company was hellbent on getting there. Suicidally, the oil company pledged to reduce their own oil production by 40% by 2030, (which did nothing except help all their competitors) and promised to pivot into renewable power. BP set itself a target to increase renewables generation by a factor of twenty this decade. The media gushed — “BP Shuns Fossil Fuels“, said Politico. BP supposedly shone a light on “stranded oil and gas”!
Thus and verily, in mid 2020, with exquisite timing, BP management leapt headlong in the magical energy pit. They were sure that after the pandemic the world would ‘build back better’ with renewables “so their economies would be more resilient”... CEO Bernard Looney actually said that (probably while reading from the WEF handbook of “What to Wear for Billionaires”).
So BP flagged a write-down of $18 billion dollars in fossil fuel assets and talked of “accelerating” it’s green investments. Then everything went wrong. Just after BP bet the house on renewables, the Ukraine war broke out and everyone needed oil and gas and no one needed another wind farm. There was a bonanza selling fossil fuels as prices lifted off (seen in the BP income in 2022) but suddenly no one could afford to buy real energy to make solar panels and turbines, and no one had much cash left to buy randomly-failing generators either. It’s been all downhill in renewables ever since.
Prior to this, BP operated Australia’s largest oil refinery for 66 years in Kwinana, Western Australia until it closed in 2021. Until a few weeks ago, BP was planning to launch a $600 million biofuel project on the same site, and the Australian government was thinking of tossing $1 billion dollars at a hydrogen project there too. They were supposed to turn cooking oil into av-gas and renewable diesel, and be a hub for hydrogen. It’s sadly pathetic and unravelling at warp speed.
The Telegraph has all the sordid details as British Petroleum fights for life.
BP faces ‘existential crisis’ after ruinous attempt to go green
The energy giant has vowed a ‘fundamental reset’ after its costly foray into net zero
Johnathon Leake and Ben Marlow, The Telegraph
Five years on from that speech in February 2020, the company is beleaguered by a ruthless activist investor, under pressure to boost its flatlining share price and considering a return to the oil and gas exploration that made it so successful to begin with.
The abrupt turn follows decades of crisis at one of Britain’s most venerable institutions. Today, its future is more uncertain than ever.
To win round doubters, he is expected to announce a major break with the last five years – shifting away from net zero and back towards its oil and gas heritage.
Pushed by analysts, Auchincloss, Looney’s replacement, confirmed a halt to all investment in wind and solar. “We have completely decapitalised renewables,” he said.
We can blame management, who had been on the fruity green path since 1997, and screwed up majorly, but oddly, 88% of BP shareholders also voted in favor of cutting oil and growing renewables which doesn’t make much sense. Not unless the rank and file votes were unknowingly cast-by-proxy through their hedge funds and pension accounts. Were 88% of British Petroleum investors really fooled into thinking oil was “bad” — or was BP quietly undermined by the big banker blob cartel who may have bossed all the pension funds into voting for Hari Kari? Larry Fink, head of BlackRock, pumped up the whole renewables bubble in 2020, and the bankers were known to boss around whole countries with threats of high interest rates if they didn’t behave.
Hypothetically if the Big Bankers were heavily invested in renewable stocks (which they were), then during a bubble, it would work out well for them if one of the largest oil and gas companies performed a large public flip to renewables. And as a bonus, if BP shareholders were stiffed in the process, the wreckage of a great company could be picked up cheaply a few years later…
So management were crazy, but they probably had help from The Blob Bankers and the Blob Media to really screw things up.
Like dropping napalm on the whole Climate Blob: US EPA recommends dropping ‘endangerment finding’
If CO2 isn’t endangering lives, legally, there’s no reason to outlaw oil and gas
By Jo Nova | February 27, 2025
Marc Morano of ClimateDepot calls this the “holy grail” of the climate agenda. Most of the climate policies of the United States depend on “the Endangerment Finding”– so President Trump asked the new EPA head to look closely at it. This is the “finding” in 2009 that CO2 endangers the public, and that in turn means the EPA must regulate this “pollutant”. Thereby becoming the perfect excuse to allow the bureaucrats to regulate cars, trucks, planes, gas stoves and anything from hair dryers to home insulation.
The new EPA head just finished his 30 day consideration and recommends the Whitehouse rewrite the past conclusion entirely.
Ann Carlson of LegalPlanet says undoing the Endangerment Finding …”would mean full-blown warfare against all things climate.” She describes how the entire bureaucratic edifice crumbles if CO2 is not a pollutant:
If the Administration were to reverse the endangerment finding, greenhouse gases would no longer need to be regulated under the Clean Air Act. Presumably, EPA would then simply move to revoke all of Biden’s major climate rules regulating cars, trucks, power plants, and oil and gas operations. As Joe Goffman, former Assistant Administrator for Air and Radiation under President Biden, told Politico, recently, “taking away the 2009 endangerment finding would really make it almost a virtual formality to take down all the greenhouse rules for CO2 and methane,”
This great news, of course, blows some minds
From Bloomberg :
“There is a lot of shocking stuff happening now, but to completely deny climate change and any federal obligation to control the pollution that’s driving it would be shocking and irresponsible,” said David Doniger, senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Environmental advocates contend it also would be illegal. “Climate pollution is air pollution, and it is fueling a crisis,” said Margie Alt, director of the Climate Action Campaign. “There is no scientific basis – none – to claim otherwise.
Ann Carlson of LegalPlanet explains, bless her, that the EPA did all “the Science” and public consultation (after twenty years of indoctrination) to get this endangerment “finding” through in the first places so if Trump doesn’t follow the same process, they’ll get sued. She’s sure Trump would lose “because the science is… overwhelming”. Clearly, she has no idea ten times as many people die of the cold, (or even twenty times as many) or that the entire causal “evidence” for the dangers of CO2 depends on models that pretend the Sun is just a big light-globe. These models ignore the solar-electric field, the magnetic field, UV changes and the solar wind, and then, surprise, get nearly every prediction wrong.
Global warming saves 166,000 lives a year. It’s just a shame CO2 doesn’t cause more warming.
We’re just getting started
Believers are telling themselves all kinds of lies at the moment just to cope with the shock. They’re hoping that individual states will still be able to make self defeating climate rules, they’re warning it could take years for the EPA to get through the proper rule-making process. They’re comforting themselves that other legal doors will open if this one closes: even though teenagers might not be able to sue essential corporations for doing their jobs, “it could revive public nuisance laws” against oil producers. Praise the Lord!
Trump should not only set up a scientific group to investigate whether CO2 causes any harm, he should follow the evidence all the way. If the scientists consider the total cost-benefits of CO2, they’d easily show CO2 is an asset that feeds the poor, restores the forests, and improves life on Earth. Obviously, those companies and countries emitting CO2 are doing the world a favor. Coal, oil and gas plants should get tax deductions for their contributions.
Indeed, airconditioners save 20,000 lives in USA each year, so any products that increase the cost of electricity are the ones endangering lives…
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China and India have ‘low intellectual potential’ – top Zelensky aide
RT | September 13, 2023
The people leading India and China lack the ability to predict the long-term consequences of their policies, a senior aide to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has claimed.
Mikhail Podoliak pointed to what he called “the problem of the modern world,” singling out India and China, in an interview with Ukrainian media on Tuesday.
“The problem with these countries is that they do not analyze the consequences of their own moves. These countries, unfortunately, have low intellectual potential,” he said.
Podoliak suggested that even though India has a lunar exploration program, it “does not mean that this nation understands what the modern world precisely is.”
The dismissive remarks were in the context of Beijing and New Delhi’s refusal to support Kiev in its conflict with Moscow. Podoliak complained that India, China and Türkiye were “profiting” from the war by maintaining trade with Russia.
“Technically, it is in their national interests,” he acknowledged, before presenting his view of what would benefit China in the long-run.
“China should be interested in Russia disappearing, because it is an archaic nation that drags China into unnecessary conflicts,” he claimed. … continue
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