Energy minister declares UK fracking dead.

Utterly misguided and spineless UK Govt. decision.

UK consumers face £2-3bn annual bill to prevent green-energy blackouts

Price gouging on the grand scale to keep the ruinables show on the road, regardless of electricity grid stability. But our leaders love this fiasco and label it as climate policy, so that’s OK? No, but they seem to face few obstacles to their blinkered obsession, even though the problems look bound to get worse.
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Lockdown reveals the UK’s power grid is fragile, costly, and failing – because of renewables, says Dr. Benny Peiser @ Climate Change Dispatch.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) is today publishing a collection of papers by energy expert Dr. John Constable, documenting the rapid decay of the UK electricity system, with system balancing costs spiraling out of control over the last few weeks.

The cost of balancing the grid over the Bank Holiday weekend amounted to £50m, and National Grid has predicted additional costs of £700m from May to August alone.

Conservative Council Borrowed £1 Billion From Taxpayers To Bet On British Sunshine

Borrowed from ratepayers, strictly speaking. But there seems to be something rotten here anyway. Are solar farms an ‘investment’ of public money? Even if they are, they have an unfortunate reputation for going bust in some cases.
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A major investigation has revealed how Thurrock Council got into more than £1billion in debt, borrowing the money from around 150 local authorities across the UK, reports The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF).

But instead of funding council services, the council gambled at least £604million in solar farms located outside of the borough.

Among Thurrock’s rundown council estates and neglected public parks, typical of many towns after a decade of austerity, there is nothing to suggest that over the past three years the local council has borrowed and then invested hundreds of millions of pounds of other councils’ money.

Under the direction of a senior council officer Thurrock borrowed from about 150 local authorities across the UK with little public scrutiny. These loans were not for direct funding of council services, or investing in infrastructure – instead they financed solar farms more than a hundred miles away.

Spain seeks to pass new climate law to reach net zero by 2050

It looks as if most European countries intend to learn the hard way that industrial economies can’t run successfully on expensive and intermittent electricity supplies. If their governments are happy to de-industrialise they should say so, then voters working in power-hungry industries would know the score. The price of climate superstition could be high for a lot of people.
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Spain has announced it is seeking to pass a new climate law to ensure it can cut its emissions to net zero by 2050, reports Energy Live News.

The draft law proposals would ban all new coal, oil and gas projects with immediate effect in order to rapidly reduce Spain’s greenhouse gas emissions by a fifth before 2030, relative to 1990 levels, as well as increase the renewable share of the country’s energy mix from around 50% to 70% by this time.

COVID 19: Computer Models Reveal Their Limitations

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Relying on computer models to forecast events is a precarious business, as we’re now being reminded.

PA Pundits - International

By Peter Murphy~

Computer models compiled by scientists, statisticians and public health experts to predict the number of deaths resulting from COVID-19 have been drastically scaled back this past week. This is hopeful news, but has wider implications. There also should be a serious look-back, given the wildly inflated early predictions of numbers of deaths in the United States.

Computer models are only as good as the assumptions built into them. If the inputs are faulty, the predictions will have shown to be flawed based on real life outcomes. This is playing out with the coronavirus models, and wreacking economic havoc worldwide. This modeling problem has ample precedent.

Flawed computer models have long been rampant in predicting planetary global warming for at least the last 30 years, even as they continue to influence public policy. Perhaps the most famous falsehood was the “hockey stick” prediction of rapid…

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CLINTEL President Says Zero Carbon Is A Crime Against Humanity

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Making electricity unreliable and expensive when it used not be — sounds idiotic, but seems to be the norm with climate-obsessed governments these days.

PA Pundits - International

By David Wojick, Ph.D. ~

I recently got an intriguing email from Professor Guus Berkhout, president of the Climate Intelligence Foundation or CLINTEL. It contained this striking paragraph and the last sentence really got me thinking:

“The past 150 years show that affordable and reliable energy is the key to prosperity. The past 150 years also show that more CO2 is beneficial for nature, greening the Earth and increasing the yields of crops. Why do governments ignore these hard facts? Why do they do the opposite and lower the quality of life by forcing high-cost, dubious low-carbon energy technologies upon their citizens? The zero-emission act is a crime against humanity.” (Emphasis added.)

So I looked into the law on crimes against humanity and Professor Berkhout may have a strong case. At its simplest, a crime against humanity is a government policy that systematically and knowingly harms a specific group…

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Ben Pile: There’s nothing democratic about this ‘climate assembly’

The first two meetings of Climate Assembly UK, dubbed a ‘citizens’ assembly’ on climate change, have taken place in Birmingham over the course of a couple of weekends in January and February.

The climate assembly has brought together 110 randomly selected members of the public to discuss a range of climate issues and policies with a range of experts, including David Attenborough. The task of the assembly, which will meet over two more weekends this spring, is to decide on a set of recommendations for how the government can best meet its pledge to achieve Net Zero carbon emissions by 2050.

Lithium extraction for e-mobility robs Chilean communities of water

Salar de Atacama, Chile [image credit: Francesco Mocellin @ Wikipedia]

Wikipedia says: ‘Salar de Atacama is the world’s largest and purest active source of lithium, containing 27% of the world’s lithium reserve base…Extraction of lithium-rich brines is causing conflict with water use by local communities and is damaging the ecosystem, including the Andean flamingo.’ Do self-styled planet savers approve of this?

Global demand for lithium is expected to triple in six years.

But mining companies are increasingly coming into conflict with indigenous communities who are worried about the future of their ecosystems, says DW.com.

In the middle of the world’s driest desert is a vast expanse of turquoise basins, each one like a colossal swimming pool, up to 20 times the size of a football field.

The pools are filled with a salty brine pumped up from ancient reservoirs under the desert. It also contains lithium carbonate, the raw material for a light, silvery metal that happens to be a component of the batteries now used by virtually all computers, phones and electric cars.

Terrorism police list Extinction Rebellion as extremist ideology: But soon back down

After their unlawful antics costing taxpayers millions of pounds and disrupting thousands of people trying to go about their daily lives, anti-terrorism police included XR in a booklet they send to statutary partners.

UK energy firms to pay £10.5m over August power cut

Image credit: steelguru.com

Guess who ends up paying that bill? National Grid may yet be broken up as the inquest into the fiasco goes on, and a vague comment says wind power needs to be ‘more secure’.

Three energy firms are to pay a total of £10.5m following August’s power cut that left over a million people without electricity and caused travel chaos, reports BBC News.

Although the power cut lasted for less than an hour, it affected homes, businesses and hospitals, while rail services were disrupted for days.

RWE Generation, Orstead and UK Power Networks will pay into a redress fund run by the UK’s energy watchdog, Ofgem.

Ofgem says it will continue to look into the role National Grid played.

Goldman Sachs operative Carney slithers from BoE to UN climate con job.

Bank of England governor Mark Carney, who previously served as Canada’s top central banker, will be taking on a new role as the United Nations’ special envoy on climate action and climate finance.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres made the announcement while speaking to reporters in Madrid on Sunday, adding the move will take effect next year.

Quotes from COP25: It’s a nothing-burger

Here are key quotes from leaders, experts and activists on the UN Climate Change Conference (COP25) outcome.

Antonio Guterres, UN secretary general

“I am disappointed with the results of COP25. The international community lost an important opportunity to show increased ambition on mitigation, adaptation and finance to tackle the climate crisis.”

The U.N. is running out of money to pay it’s 40,000 bureaucrats with.

Facing a massive hole in its budget, the United Nations is implementing “emergency measures” to avoid missing payroll and other obligations before the end of the year. Unsurprisingly, UN bosses are demanding that taxpayers in America and other nations hand over more money now or face global catastrophe. Even UN officials and apologists, though, have blasted the “bloated” organization for squandering massive amounts of money on everything from luxurious air travel and fancy hotels to globalist propaganda promoting its own agenda. Trump reacted to the whining by calling on the UN to go look for money elsewhere.

National Grid open to giving up managing UK’s electricity

From the ‘Ok, you politicians have created this mess, you sort it out dept’:

National Grid would “absolutely consider” relinquishing its role managing Britain’s electricity system to an independent body if policymakers decided it was the “right thing to do”, according to the company’s chief executive. John Pettigrew told the Financial Times he would be likely to sit down with the UK government and Ofgem, Britain’s energy regulator, next year to look again at how the country’s electricity system is operated.

Since its privatisation in 1990, National Grid has been responsible for matching electricity supply with demand and keeping Britain’s lights on.  It faced questions over its management of the system after a blackout in August disrupted more than 1m homes and business in England and Wales, although the FTSE 100 company has maintained the incident was “extremely rare and unexpected”.

Green Scottish developments may no longer need planning permission

Image credit: BBC Scotland

Throwing out longstanding checks and balances that might stand in the way of the delusional goal of ‘tackling’ climate change, can hardly be called progress.

New developments that help reduce emissions and tackle climate change could no longer need planning permission under draft proposals considered by the Scottish Government, reports Energy Live News.

Projects that could automatically get the go-ahead in Scotland include local renewable energy and electric vehicle (EV) charging points.

The Solar Panel Toxic Waste Problem

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‘Solar panels generate 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy than nuclear power plants’ – and in some parts of the world recycling rules can be sketchy, or worse.

PA Pundits - International

By Duggan Flanakin ~

For decades, the solar industry benefited from generous federal, state, and local subsidies to increase its footprint. Yet these generous subsidies ignore the costs of disposal of solar panel waste.

Things may be changing. In May 2018, Michael Shellenberger, a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment” and Green Book Award Winner, wrote in Forbes that the problem of solar panel disposal will explode with full force in two or three decades and wreck the environment because it is a huge amount of waste which is not easy to recycle.

Shellenberger was citing comments, published in the South China Morning Post, from Chinese solar expert Tian Min, general manager of Nanjing Fangrun Materials, a recycling company in Jiangsu province that collects retired solar panels. Tian called his country’s solar power industry “a ticking time bomb.”

This is not really news. The Associated Press had reported in 2013…

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UN Flies In 5,000 People To Salt Lake To Complain About Fossil Fuels

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Who in the end is paying for all these time-wasting, and – by their own definitions at least – polluting, freeloaders?

PA Pundits - International

From the team at CFACT ~

How does the United Nations convince people that they are super serious in their outrage about fossil fuels? How about flying 4,000 people from all over the world in fossil-fueled jet airplanes to isolated Salt Lake City to whine about it? Sounds like a good plan to the United Nations bureaucracy, which is sponsoring a sustainability and climate change conference this week in Salt Lake City.

The UN brags that up to 4,000 people are likely to attend, representing more 300 nongovernmental organizations (read, environmental activist groups) and more than 80 countries. There is no compelling agenda, no compelling actions items, and no expected meaningful outcome from the conference. It is simply an opportunity for leftist global activists to get together and express outrage about economic freedom and the existential global climate disruption that is the greatest crisis humanity has ever faced –…

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EU destroys 700,000 hectares of rainforest for biofuels

H/T The GWPF

All those trees would have absorbed large amounts of the carbon dioxide they claim to be so scared of. Somehow all this is deemed to be ‘sustainable’, using the climate excuse.

The EU wants to save our climate with supposedly green biofuels and has deemed palm oil “sustainable”. Yet on the other side of the globe, rainforests are being clear-cut to produce the 1.9 million tons of palm oil that end up in European fuel tanks every year, says Rainforest Rescue.

The European Union wants to protect the climate and reduce carbon emissions from motor vehicles by blending fuels with increasing shares of supposedly eco-friendly “biofuels”.

Last year, 1.9 million tons of palm oil were added to diesel fuel in the EU – in addition to millions of tons of equally harmful rapeseed and soybean oils.

The plantations needed to satisfy Europes’s demand for palm oil cover an area of 700,000 hectares – land that until recently was still rainforest and the habitat of 5,000 endangered orangutans. Despite the clear-cutting, the EU has classified palm oil as sustainably produced.

This policy has now blown up in the legislators’ faces, with scientists confirming what environmentalists and development experts have long asserted: biofuels help neither people nor the environment – and they are most certainly not climate-neutral, as even studies commissioned by the EU show.

CEI files formal complaint regarding NASA’s claim of 97% climate scientist agreement on global warming

Whatever exactly was supposed to have been agreed on, it must be difficult to show 97% support without any actual data to back it up. Is it any more than fake news?

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) petitioned NASA to remove from its website the claim that 97 percent of climate scientists agree humans are responsible for global warming, reports The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF).

The petition, filed under the Information Quality Act (IQA), points out the major flaws in the studies cited by NASA to substantiate its claim. 

It requests the agency remove the claim from its website and stop circulating it in agency materials.

The long march to #Brexit: Local election campaign update

Keep it simple: Window poster

Things are getting very busy for me over the next week so I thought I’d write this quick update now on the local election campaign where I’m standing for democracy and independence. I may be too engaged to get around to writing more posts before May 2nd.

7500 of my campaign leaflets have been pushed through letterboxes in my ward. Another 5000 arrive tomorrow for the final push when my team of volunteers (including Oldbrew, thanks mate!) will take to the streets this weekend and hand out more leaflets and window posters. During the weekend we’ll also be canvassing at addresses near polling stations and getting pro-brexit residents’ agreement to emplace signboards in their gardens in time for polling day next Thursday. The old V6 Ford will be dragging a trailer with large banners mounted around the local streets and carparks too.