Month: January 2022

Daily News 2 Jan 2022

Energy crisis: Conservative MPs urge Boris Johnson to scrap taxes as bills rocket

Overcharged and overtaxed. UK energy customers are getting clobbered from all directions: the markets, the so-called climate levies, and taxes. The government is in disarray as its renewables-based policies force the pace of cost increases.
– – –
Energy bills have soared as global wholesale prices have risen rapidly – but some Tory MPs and peers say they have increased more in the UK because of taxes the government has the power to remove.

Twenty Conservative politicians have urged Boris Johnson to scrap energy taxes as bills continue to rocket, reports Sky News.

The MPs and peers have written a letter in the Sunday Telegraph to ask the prime minister and Chancellor Rishi Sunak to help consumers facing “fuel poverty”.

Energy prices in the UK are being forced up faster than any other comparable country due to “taxation and environmental levies”, they wrote.

“It would be easy to dismiss these as due entirely to international cost pressures that all economies are facing,” the letter said.

“However, we have almost uniquely caused our energy prices, through taxation and environmental levies, to increase faster than those of any other competitive country.

“High energy prices, whether for domestic heating or for domestic transport, are felt most painfully by the lowest paid.”

The politicians have asked the prime minister to remove the 5% VAT on energy bills and environmental levies that fund renewable energy schemes, which is 23% for electricity.

Doing so could save the average household £200 on their energy bill, they said.

Politicians who have signed the letter include Craig Mackinlay, chairman of the Net Zero Scrutiny Group of Tory MPs, former work and pensions secretary Esther McVey, and MPs Steve Baker and Robert Halfon.

They added that the Climate Change Levy on business energy use is “making UK energy-intensive businesses uncompetitive and again increases the costs to consumers on virtually everything”.

Full report here.

via Tallbloke’s Talkshop

https://ift.tt/3eJ6hwS

January 2, 2022 at 08:57AM

Daily News 2 Jan 2022

Reality Vs. Covidia

Rob Slane writes at his blog Reflections on Another Year of Covidian Lies and How the Truth Will Ultimately Prevail. H/T Tyler Durden Excerpts in italics with my bolds and some added images.

As we come to the end of the second year in Covidia, I reflect on just how much the instigators of the entire scam have managed to reshape reality in an amazingly short timeframe, such that what was considered normal 12 months ago is now considered abnormal, and what was considered abnormal 12 months ago is now seen as normal.

For instance, a person would have been called a Conspiracy Nut. had one predicted 12 months ago that after “vaccinating” the elderly and those considered vulnerable, which was the “route back to freedom”, the Johnson Regime and countless others around the world would:

Proceed to push the injection onto all adults
Move on to getting it into children
Make thousands jobless who do not wish to partake in the experiment
Begin the introduction of Vaccine Passports
Announce that the allegedly 95% effective products wane so quickly they’ll need to be taken every few months
Start talking about the possibility of mandatory jabs
Reintroduce the restrictions that these injections were supposed to do away with

Yet a year later the same person is called a Conspiracy Nut for opposing these very things they got called a Conspiracy Nut for predicting, but which are now reality.

There is something horribly ironic, and also deeply chilling about this. For it shows not only how easily manipulated so many people are, but also just how easy it has been for the Covidian Regimes to reshape reality such that millions have come to accept as normal the very things they would have dismissed just months earlier as the product of deranged minds.

The last two years has felt like people are living in parallel universes, so much so that it’s almost tempting to wonder whether Zuckerberg’s hideous Metaverse is already a thing, with millions having unwittingly entered it in early 2020 without noticing.

Metaverse Vs. Real World

In the Metaverse, SARS-CoV-2 is a new Black Death that kills indiscriminately no matter what age. In the real world, it is a virus that has a 99.9% Survivability Rate, and there are effective early treatments available to the 0.1% for whom it might potentially be lethal.

In the Metaverse, Lockdowns of healthy people are how we’ve always dealt with outbreaks of transmissible illnesses. In the real world, other than a hastily ended five-day trial in Mexico during the 2009 Swine Flu outbreak, the quarantining of the healthy was never been done before the Chinese Communist Party implemented it in early 2020, to be copied all over the world by Governments ignoring their own long existing pandemic preparedness plans.

In the Metaverse, masks are about loving your neighbour because wearing them stops you passing on the virus you don’t have to others. In the real world, masks do not and cannot stop viral transmission, and thus they are a not a health aid, but a political and psychological tool of subjugation and dehumanisation, designed to humiliate and perpetuate fear.

In the Metaverse, a public health crisis caused by a virus has zero medical advice given out to people, but just a relentless barrage of talk about cases, hospitalisations and deaths, with all knowledge of effective early treatments ruthlessly suppressed. In the real world, a public health crisis caused by a virus would see Governments, health officials, and doctors recommending cheap and effective ways of boosting one’s immune system, such as Vitamin C and D, Zinc, Quercetin, sunshine and plenty of exercise and fresh air.

In the Metaverse, people who aren’t ill can spread the illness they don’t have, and so must take a test which cannot diagnose illness and which gives huge numbers of false positives, after which they must stay in their house for a prolonged period to stop the virus they don’t have from spreading. In the real world, if you’re well, you go about your daily life; if you have what are called “symptoms”, you stay home and rest.

In the Metaverse, the injection of billions of lipid nanoparticles containing mRNA, which has never been injected into people before, which tricks the cells into allowing it to enter, which then causes billions of cytotoxins to be produced in cells throughout every organ, and which the manufacturers have indemnity but no proper safety data for, is hailed as a saviour. In the real world, this is the most dangerous, reckless medical experiment ever performed on masses of people without their knowledge of what they are being given, and the long-term consequences could be unimaginably disastrous, as Professor Sucharit Bhakdi explains in this horrifying warning.

In the Metaverse, a product which doesn’t prevent infection, doesn’t provide immunity, and which requires top-ups every three months, is a vaccine, even if it needs the dictionary definition of what a vaccine is to be changed to accommodate it. In the real world, the Groucho Marx rule about ducks applies — if it looks, walks, and quacks like a duck then it probably is a duck. Thus if it doesn’t stop infection, doesn’t provide immunity, and wanes after 10 weeks, then it probably isn’t a vaccine.

In the Metaverse, willfully going along with abnormal, illegitimate and authoritarian rules & behaviours is the way back to normality and freedom. In the real world, willfully going along with abnormal, illegitimate and authoritarian rules & behaviours is about conditioning us to accept abnormality, the end of a law based society, and the long term loss of freedom.

In the Metaverse, bringing in Vaccine Passports for nightclubs and other large venues is about keeping people safe, and of course won’t be extended to other venues. In the real world, Vaccine Passports are a Trojan Horse, firstly to be extended into other venues of much smaller size (as has been the case in many European countries), but ultimately to facilitate the creation of a Digital ID Social Credit Hellhole where your every move and transaction can be tracked, you have credits not money, and freedom as we knew it is a thing of the past.

In the Metaverse, people who refuse to submit to the mass medical experiment only have themselves to blame if they find themselves excluded by law from entering certain venues, doing certain jobs, buying certain goods, and even being able to avail themselves of the basic necessities of life. In the real world, this unscientific, unholy, sinister apartheid system shows that we are edging eerily close to repeating the ugliness and depravity of certain 20th century regimes that we smugly told ourselves we were not capable of repeating, due to our apparent goodness.

It is baffling that people can view what’s going on so differently, but I would point out that all the views in the real world are derived from facts, data, reason, logic and historical examples, whereas all the views in the Metaverse are taken from Government and media propaganda.

One of the exasperating things in dealing with this is that whilst there are an endless potential number of lies that can be told, there is only one truth. And what the Government and media are very skillful at doing is layering lies upon lies upon lies, such that whilst the critical thinkers and data analysts are busy trying to debunk lie number one, lies number two, three, four and following are already being laid on that foundation so that by the time the original lie has been shown to be false, things have moved on and hardly anyone can remember, let alone care about the original claim.

However, the good news is that this is also the Achilles Heel of the Globalist’s narrative. Firstly, the more lies that are told, the harder it is to sustain the story because it can only be kept going by more lies, each of which tends to become increasingly blatant and absurd, such that even those who have been slumbering for two years begin to stir. For instance, if you try to assure the huge numbers of people that have had adverse events from the injection, or who know others that have suffered, that they must get the next one and it’s perfectly safe, clearly you are going to have your work cut out as stark reality highlights the lie in what is being told.

But the other part of this Achilles Heel is this: The Truth will win because The Truth must win. It is The Truth. It cannot not win. Attempting to suppress it is like trying to hold a cork under water. It will always be wanting to get to the surface, and as soon as you tire of holding it and release your grip, that’s what it will do. And so although these lies will continue, and although they will appear to prevail for some time to come, there is coming a time when they will be defeated because The Truth, not lies, is the ultimate reality:

“Truthful lips endure forever, but a lying tongue is but for a moment.” (Proverbs 12:19)

As we look forward to 2022, although we do not know the details of what is to come, because it is very clear that the goal of the Covidian Regimes is to get everybody injected with their mRNA witches’ brew over and over again by carrot or by stick, by hook or by crook, we can be absolutely sure there will be many more lies, many more difficulties, and much more wickedness. Yet we can also be equally sure that these lies will ultimately be defeated, because he who is The Truth (John 14:6) is guaranteed the victory (Revelation 17:14), and he will suffer their lies only so far, until such time as he destroys their unholy, totalitarian, anti-human agenda. There will be a Reckoning. Just make sure that you are on the right side when it comes.

via Science Matters

https://ift.tt/348R99X

January 2, 2022 at 08:49AM

Daily News 2 Jan 2022

Renewable Obligation Certificates–The Looming Scandal

By Paul Homewood

London Array Wind Farm

I floated the idea yesterday of a windfall tax on recipients of Renewable Obligation Certificates. The whole system of ROCs, originally introduced by the Labour government, has all the makings of a massive scandal. Yet very few people are even aware of it.

To recap, ROCs are issued to many generators of renewable electricity. The system was closed to new entrants in 2017, when it was succeeded by Contracts for Difference. Suppliers of electricity have to possess a certain number of ROCs to cover their obligation each year, so either need to purchase renewable electricity or buy the ROCs. The market price set by OFGEM this year is £50.80.

Effectively therefore the value of ROCs is a subsidy to renewable generators, which comes on top of income from electricity sales. The cost of ROC’s, which is estimated at £6.4bn this year, is added to everybody’s electricity bills.

https://obr.uk/efo/economic-and-fiscal-outlook-october-2021/

As an example, onshore wind farms typically receive one ROC per MWh. Historically, the wholesale price of electricity has been around £50/MWH, so the wind farm would earn around £100/MWh.

Offshore wind farms usually get two ROCs per MWh, so would have income of £150/MWh.

Renewable generators not only benefit from the subsidy, they also gain from having guaranteed income each year, dependent on the actual amount of power produced. In other ROCs protect them from the vagaries of the market place.

However wholesale power prices rocketed last year, and now stand at £112/MWh:

https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/energy-data-and-research/data-portal/wholesale-market-indicators

The offshore wind farm, which might have earned £150/MWh a year ago, is therefore now getting around £212/MWh.

OK, you might say, markets have winners and losers. Sometimes prices go up, and sometimes they go down. However, these renewable generators are already being largely protected against market downsides, thanks to subsidies paid by consumers. Why then should they profit when the price rises?

A very good example is the London Array offshore wind farm. It is joint owned by Orsted, RWE, Masdar and Boreas:

Orsted London Array II was set up for this operation and nothing else, and we can check their Annual Accounts for 2020, when they made pre-tax profit of £25.1m. As Orsted’s share of the wind farm is 25%, we can assume a total profit for the London Array of £100m:

Turnover was £86.8m, but subsidies made up most of this, £66.3m:

Again, scaling up gives sales of £80m and subsidies of £265m for the London Array as a whole. According to the Renewable Energy Foundation, electricity generation totalled 2591 GWh in 2020, equating to sales at £31/MWh and ROCs at £102/MWh. (Wholesale power prices were depressed in 2020 because of lockdowns).

With market prices now running at £112/MWh, turnover will increase by £210m this year for London Array.

Across the board, generators covered by ROCs produced 80 TWh last year, so would stand to make an additional profit of about £4.8bn a year at current prices.

At a time when energy consumers are having to pay out hundreds of pounds a year more, it is intolerable that generators such as London Array should be allowed to reap billions extra in windfall profits, not least when they are already heavily subsidised.

via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

https://ift.tt/3pKhDqx

January 2, 2022 at 08:21AM

Daily News 2 Jan 2022

Colorado’s Marshall Fire: Has Funding Needs Corrupted Climate Science?

By Jim Steele

I was totally shocked to hear the claims by a fire scientist I had once admired and often quoted in my blog posts about wildfire. In a National Public Radio interview Jennifer Balch said, “Climate change has lengthened the state’s fire season”. Then she said “”Climate change is essentially keeping our fuels drier longer. These grasses that were burning, they’ve been baked all fall and all winter.”

Having studied fire ecology for 30 years and knowing her published science, I could only believe she had been corrupted by the need to attract large amounts of funding, and these days that comes to those who blame the climate crisis. And here’s why I now hold that opinion so strongly.

Colorado’s Marshall Fire was a grassfire that happened with temperatures hovering around freezing. All fire experts and fire managers know grasses are 1-hour lag fuels. That means in dry conditions grasses can become flammable within hours. Attempting to link CO₂ global warming, she and other alarmists were now blaming the Boulder area’s grass flammability on the warm dry conditions from July through November. But dry conditions in the past months are totally irrelevant. Those months could have also been cold and wet, but just one day of dry conditions is all that is needed for grasses to burn.

To minimize recklessly set fire that often occur as people burn away unwanted dead vegetation,the Nova Scotia government felt the need to counterthe Myth that “It’s safe to burn grass as long as there is still some snow on the ground.”

The Fact is: “Within hours of snow melting, dead grass becomes flammable, especially if there have been drying winds. Grass fires burn hot and fast and spread quickly around, and even over, patches of snow.” That’s a fact that Balch and every other fire expert should know!

Apparently, Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Los Angeles and the Nature Conservancy and acolyte of climate alarmist Michael Mann and Noah Diffenbaugh, also failed to understand grasses are 1-hour fuel. He stated in an interview for NBC’s article How climate change primed Colorado for a rare December wildfire that “Climate change is clearly making the pre-conditions for wildfires worse a cross most fire-prone regions of the world,”

But dry grasses are not the pre-condition to be worried about. The pre-conditions that neither Swain nor Balch shared with the public is well known: Boulder County’s invasive grasses increase fire danger. The “main offender is cheatgrass, which was likely introduced to the area alongside agriculture and ranching” and “is increasing fire danger by 29%”

In fact, in 2013 Balch published, Introduced annual grass increases regional fire activity across the arid western USA (1980–2009), writing “Cheatgrass was disproportionately represented in the largest fires, comprising 24% of the land area of the 50 largest fires” and that “multi-date fires that burned across multiple vegetation types were significantly more likely to have started in cheatgrass.”

It was also very disingenuous for Balch to say ““Climate change has lengthened the state’s fire season”. It is the very same meme that every climate alarmist regurgitates that climate change has made “a year-long fire season the new normal”. But in 2017 Balch published in Human-started wildfires expand the fire niche across the United States thathuman ignitions “have vastly expanded the spatial and seasonal “fire niche” in the coterminous United States, accounting for 84% of all wildfires”. Balch’s published graph clearly shows that human ignitions have extended fire season all year long. Based on her own research, a more relevant comment would have mentioned that Louisville, Colorado’s population had jumped 10-fold; from 2,000 in 1950 to about 20,000 today. Does a 10-fold increase in population create a 10-fold increase in fire probability. The Marshall Fire was not naturally started by Lightning.

In 2015, Balch created the Earth Lab program at Colorado University. In 2017 it became part of CIRES, a partnership of NOAA and CU Boulder. Earth Lab, got increasing attention from mass media that’s always seeking click-bait. As Earth Lab’s team began blaming more fires on climate change, it got more attention and Balch got more interviews.

Earth Lab hired Natasha Stavros as Earth Lab’s Analytics Hub Director. In videos posted by the Washington Post, she claimed climate change causes “longer, hotter, and drier fire seasons” reflecting Balch’s conversion to a climate crisis narrative. To get around Balch’s earlier scientific research Stavros deflected, “We are not talking about the ignition source” or the “availability of fuels”, “what we are talking about are the conditions of those fuels”. But in the case of the Marshall Fire, 1-hour grass fuels have nothing to do with climate change. It only takes a few hours to be in highly flammable conditions. That’s weather, not climate!

Although lacking in scientific integrity, pivoting to a climate crisis narrative worked in Balch’s favor. The U.S. Geological Survey has selected the University of Colorado Boulder to host the North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center (NCCASC) for the next five years. Balch, as director of CIRES’ Earth Lab, and now NCCASC Director had attracted $4.5 million in funding. Universities around the country similarly create such centers to attract such major funding. Certainly, blaming fires on a climate crisis attracts more funding than if its director sounded like a “denier” blaming invasive grasses and human ignitions.

The politics of funding research requires a major level of group think. Daniel Shechtman won the Nobel Prize for discovering quasi-crystals that are now used in surgical instruments. But when he first announced his observations, he was kicked out of his lab by his colleagues. They saw him as a threat to the lab’s prestige and funding because observing quasi-crystals contradicted the consensus that was enforced by Linus Pauling that quasi-crystal did NOT exist.

Similarly, esteemed atmospheric scientist Dr Cliff Mass was criticized by Washington University administrator’s for detailing how an episode of problematic acidic waters that had been pumped into the state’s oyster’s hatcheries, was due to natural upwelling events, not climate change. But contradicting the climate crisis angle threatened funding to WU’s Ocean Acidification Center. Up until then Mass had been the Seattle Times go-to person for all weather events, but that stopped when his one analysis didn’t support climate crisis groupthink. Dr Peter Ridd was fired for presenting evidence showing his colleague’s claims of coral reef destruction were exaggerated. So, all savvy university professors know you can’t contradict the meme if you want funding, or worse, keep your job.

Climate crisis groupthink, also ignores natural climate change, as did Balch and Swain. But one meteorologist confidently blamed the lack of snow and dryness on a natural La Nina. The science is well established that depending on how colder Pacific surface waters set up during a La Nina, atmospheric currents can carry higher or lower amounts of moisture to different regions. California had record snowfall this December while Colorado snowfall was very low. And if the Marshall Fire had been ignited just 2 days later, there would have been a snowfall to suppress the fire.

However too often, alarmists scientists cherry-pick one-year events. They weaponized this year’s low snowfall while ignoring that last year’s Colorado snowfall was far above normal. In November last year, Fort Collins received more than 15 inches of snow on its way to 80 inches, which is 25 inches more than normal. Again, such variations in snowfall are weather, not climate.

Alarmists also weaponized the dry conditions as solely due to global warming drought. They ignored the drying and warming effects of the Chinook winds that are very common in Colorado. Chinooks are known as “snow eaters” because as the winds pass over the mountains of the western USA they are forced upward and precipitate all their moisture. When those winds descend from the Rockies down to Boulder, temperatures rise adiabatically (due to pressure not added heat) and the warm dry air quickly removes moisture or snow from the surface. Southern California’s Santa Anna winds are similar and drive large fires.

Sometimes Boulder’s winds reach speeds of 100+ mile per hour. NOAA reported The Chinook Wind Events Winter of 1982 during which peak wind gusts more than 100 mph damaged areas around Boulder. Weatherwise journal reported 100+MPH winds over Boulder on January 7, 1969, which snapped power poles and toppled planes as seen in the photographs below. In November 2021 the weather service gave a red flag warming due to the high winds from a Chinook event. But without a coinciding human ignition, there was no rapidly spreading fire.

I would like to believe that Balch’s Earth Lab scientists have been campaigning for the housing developments in Boulder’s suburbs of Louisville and Superior to create a system of firebreaks and defensible space. Those suburbs had built into easily ignited grassland in a region where fires are rapidly spread by the dry Chinooks descending from the Rockies. Such natural fire danger is not always obvious to the public looking for affordable housing. But it is not obvious that was ever done, at least not as obvious as faulty climate change narratives.

Fire experts should have pushed for building codes, requiring adequate spacing between new houses. As a story in Wildfire Today reported today, one common feature of the surviving homes was they were more distant from neighboring homes. Many houses in the devastated subdivisions were only 10 to 20 feet apart. Without adequate fire breaks or defensible space, if just one house allowed the fire to reach it, the heat of that burning house is enough to ignite any house next to it. Similar dynamics were seen in California’s Tubbs and Camp Fires that demolished neighborhoods.

But perhaps local governments were greedy. Eager to build a tax base a growing Louisville population was most important. Politicians had worked hard to present Louisville as one of the top 10 most livable little cities. Putting natural fire danger front and center, might put a damper on the city’s attractiveness. And not surprisingly the Denver Democrats didn’t waste time to capitalize on the Marshall Fire devastation. The released a statement claiming “This fire has also punctuated our climate crisis and made abundantly clear the need for bold action. The science is clear, and the impacts are very real. We will continue to work with our community and legislators to ensure climate change is treated with the urgency and attention it deserves.”

But the science does not show a connection between the Marshall Fire and Climate Change. And due to the greed of the media, politicians, and selfish scientists, only scientific integrity is facing a real crisis.

Finally, it is worth noting that some scientists are acutely aware of the increasing fire danger presented by the build-up of dead vegetation. To remove that hazard prescribed burns are being performed. But sometimes prescribed burns get away and burn down people’s homes. So prescribed burns are carefully planned for times when fires are most easily controlled. So, one must wonder just how unusually dangerous local conditions were if the City of Boulder planned a prescribed burn on Monday, December 13, 2021, just 2 weeks before the Marshall Fire. Had climate change really made conditions so dangerous?

Jim Steele is Director emeritus of San Francisco State University’s Sierra Nevada Field Campus, authored Landscapes and Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism, and proud member of the CO2 Coalition.

4.5
2
votes

Article Rating

via Watts Up With That?

https://ift.tt/3FSyaOX

January 2, 2022 at 08:18AM