Category Archives: Environment

This YEAR in the New Normal, from Off-Guardian

Posted on January 3, 2022 | Leave a comment

A few minor stories in 2021 are set to become major stories in 2022. From off-guardian.org:

ur first “This Week” of 2022 doesn’t just look back over our shoulders, but forward too. What were the unfinished plotlines of 2021? What minor stories of last year could be major stories of this year?

This week we review what OffG will be on the lookout for in 2022.

1. Programmable digital currency

For the uninitiated, a programmable digital currency is a form of digital currency which can be programmed…I hope that clears up any confusion.

In all seriousness, central banks are researching the possibility of issuing their own digital currencies. These central-bank digital currencies (CBDCs) would be “programmable”, meaning either the bank issuing the currency, or the company paying it out as wages, have direct control over its use.

Banks (or employers) would have the power to set limits on the usage of the money they issue. They could limit how much of it can be spent, where it can be spent and what it can be spent on etc.

We published a long-form article on the possible abuses of such a controlling system of currency last summer. Since that article came out there have been further calls for its introduction, with Estonia and Ukraine both moving towards trialling the system soon, and Japan researching its feasibility.

Definitely a major concern for human freedom, and a major story to keep an eye on 2022.

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Posted in Banking, Business, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Currencies, Environment, Government, Medicine, Politics, Propaganda, Science

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Renewables’ Reckoning Is Long Overdue, by Bob Maistros

Posted on December 30, 2021 | Leave a comment

In environmentalists la-la land, solutions don’t have costs. In the real world they do, and people are finally starting to wake up to the costs of “Green.” From Bob Maistros at issuesinsights.com:

Airman 1st Class Nadine Y. Barclay

A long overdue legislative enactment and signing provides occasion for two equally long overdue observations on an I&I editorial regarding “pesky climate models.”

Citing a study on pre-carbon dioxide concentration Arctic Ocean warming, your friendly neighborhood editorialists concluded, “(W)e’re confident that eventually the (climate alarmists’) story will collapse.”

Observation No. 1 is that the case for renewables, climate alarmists’ chosen solution, is also folding like a house of cards in a Richter 9.5 earthquake.

It’s not just that renewables are so intermittent and unreliable that they must be legislated and subsidized; eat up land; will require more storage than physically possible; have nearly bankrupted and blacked out Germany with little emissions improvement; and are doing the same to California and other jurisdictions adopting mandates.

Despite these indisputable truths, the White House’s policy remains “a carbon pollution-free electricity sector” by 2035 and “net-zero emissions economy-wide” by 2050.

Yet three additional existential threats must and will lay the renewables narrative bare. The first was reflected in Joe Biden’s recent signing of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.

Forty-five percent of the worldwide supply of solar-grade polysilicon stems from China’s Xinjiang region, where it is reportedly largely produced by enslaved Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other Turkic Muslims. (China overall produces three-quarters of polysilicon and 95% of solar wafers.)

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Posted in Business, Economics, Economy, Energy, Environment, Governments, Politics, Propaganda

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Here’s How the Energy Crisis Turns Into Hunger and Then… War? By Chris MacIntosh

Posted on December 28, 2021 | Leave a comment

Most people don’t realize that petroleum prices feed into food prices. From Chris MacIntosh at internationalman.com:

Energy

We have previously warned about a whopping food crisis and supply problems in the fertilizer market. Well, now is worse because that was BEFORE we had the natural gas crisis. Why is that important?

Natural gas is THE critical input into making fertilizer. Urea is essentially ammonia in solid state, the process of which entails reacting ammonia with CO2. And we all now know — thanks to the climate nazis — that CO2 is currently the devil. The problem of course is that with no natural gas there is no urea, and with no urea there is no fertilizer. And with no fertilizer… well, we will eat each other.

Here are the spot urea prices.

Something else that we had noted some time back (in Korea) but which now seems like a larger problem.

Here is an article about an Australian farmer who warns the urea supply crisis could halt normal life within weeks.

Here’s what he says:

‘Not only will we not be able to grow cattle and we will not be able to grow food and we will not be able to grow grain or anything like that, but even if we could, we can’t move it, because we can’t turn a wheel in a truck because we have no Adblue,’ [AdBlue is needed for diesel vehicles — half of all trucks on Australian roads run on diesel

As of February we might not have a truck on the road in Australia, we might not have a train on the tracks.

‘So quite literally the whole country comes to a standstill as of February.’

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Posted in Business, Economy, Energy, Environment, Governments, Politics, Religion

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European Firms Warn “Unbearably High Energy Costs” May Spark Wave Of Production Shutdowns, by Tyler Durden

Posted on December 23, 2021 | 2 comments

A preview of the Green New Deal from Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Years of mindless green energy policies across the European continent are about to unleash an economic crisis. Energy-intensive companies are paying “unbearably high energy prices” that may force them to shutter operations.

Eleven European associations (from steel to fertilizers to cement to paper mills) published a press release Wednesday that warned the energy crisis that plagues the continent has worsened over the few months and accelerated in the last several days as European natural gas hit a record high on Tuesday.

“The main reasons for this situation are the financial market speculation from financial players including hedge funds and commodity trading houses, the imbalances in the gas market, seasonally decreased renewable energy production, reduced nuclear energy production, coal mine closures, and increased carbon costs passed on in el

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Posted in Economics, Energy, Environment, Governments, History, Politics, Propaganda, Science, Technology

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Decarbonization Cannot Manufacture the Products Demanded by Civilization, by Ronald Stein

Posted on December 20, 2021 | Leave a comment

Getting rid of oil and gas would only set us back a century or two. From Ronald Stein at lewrockwell.com:

As late as the 1800’s, the world was “decarbonized” as there were no coal or natural gas power plants, and what the Beverly Hillbillies situation comedies of the 1960’s theme song called “oil that is, black gold, Texas tea”, had not been discovered as something that could be manufactured into usable products.

Before the 1900’s life was hard and dirty, and most people never traveled 100-200 miles from where they were born, and life expectancy was short. Today, crude oil is manufactured into all the products used in the medical industry, fertilizers, electronics and more than 6,000 other products that are the basis of lifestyles and economies.

Now, worldwide efforts are in place to have electricity generated by breezes and sunshine to decarbonize the electricity being generated by coal and natural gas. The “other” fossil fuel of crude oil is caught on the chopping block efforts to eliminate ALL 3 fossil fuels, but crude oil is seldom ever used for electricity generation!

Saule Omarova, who withdrew as Biden’s nominee for Comptroller of the Currency, wants coal, oil, and gas industries ‘to go bankrupt’ is a reflection that she is either oblivious or ignorant to how life and the economies of the world were before 1900. The world had no coal and natural gas generated electricity, nor any of the products, nor fuels manufactured from crude oil needed for airlines, ships, and militaries around the world, as none of those existed before 1900! Had she been confirmed Saule Omarova wanted to push the world back to those decarbonized days of the 1800’s.

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Posted in Business, Economics, Economy, Energy, Environment, Governments, History

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Net Zero by 2050? Here’s What It Takes To Get It, by Chris MacIntosh

Posted on December 11, 2021 | Leave a comment

Net zero by 2050 isn’t going to happen. From Christ MacIntosh at internationalman.com:

Net Zero by 2050

Here is what a reasonably objective study from the Geological Survey of Finland concludes on just how much more electricity generation will be required to retire natural gas and coal…

The answer: a stink load!

But you need batteries to provide power when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. Here is an indication of just how much materials would be required to produce all these batteries:

We won’t hold these estimates against the author as there are a number of variables involved. But you get the basic point: there aren’t enough materials on the planet to achieve this dream. It’s a grand absurd delusion!

We wouldn’t worry about natural gas and coal being phased out just yet.

The Net Zero is Just Plain Virtue Signaling.

What is virtue signaling? A form of moral grandstanding in which a viewpoint or answer is calculated to “look good,” thereby making the object or speaker appear virtuous to others, rather than being chosen because it is strictly honest.

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A Contrarian View of the Virus Hoax, by Hardscrabble Farmer

Posted on November 29, 2021 | Leave a comment

Viruses find fertile territory in the physically unfit and otherwise unhealthy. From Hardscrabble Farmer at theburningplatform:

I am neither a doctor nor a scientist and nothing I write should be taken as medical advice.

Good, now that we’ve dispensed with the obvious, let me share my perspective on the collective insanity I have witnessed over the course of the last two years.

I do not know what a virus is, although I have my own thoughts on it, but I reject completely the explanations that have been offered by the scientific establishment. The only facts I have to rely on are those of personal experiences over the course of my lifetime, so these too are merely anecdotal, but still they fit nicely in the scientific model which begins with observation.

A virus is- if nothing else- a variable and imprecise form of pathogen. Its effects are notorious for being wildly erratic. If you were to shoot a hundred people with a small caliber weapon, there would be a hundred different wounds, but every single victim would suffer the effects of the projectile. It has- in short- an efficacy rate of 100%. Viruses on the other hand do not seem to affect people in a uniform fashion. We are told that viruses are airborne bits of pathogen- not unlike a lead projectile- yet when they make contact with the victim, some are affected while others are not.

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Here Come the Climate Change Lockdowns, by Simon Black

Posted on November 21, 2021 | Leave a comment

Simon Black’s weekly chronicle of the absurd, from sovereignman.com:

Here’s our Friday roll-up of the most ridiculous stories from around the world that are threats to your liberty, risks to your prosperity… and on occasion, inspiring poetic justice.

Cities in India Will Lockdown Over Air Pollution

The Supreme Court of India has ordered India’s capital, New Delhi, and the surrounding regions to lockdown— but not because of COVID.

This time, the lockdown is due to air pollution.

The Supreme Court said authorities must temporarily force people to work from home, close schools, and halt building projects in the city, due to the city’s terrible air quality.

The Supreme Court said that this is just a temporary solution to their newest public health emergency… sort of like the original two weeks to control the spread of COVID-19.

Last week we mentioned a doctor who diagnosed his patient with “climate change.”

We then speculated that public health officials would use climate change to find new ways to exercise the powers they claimed during the COVID pandemic.

But even we were surprised that it only took one week before that actually happened…

Click here to read the full story.

UK Company Will Harvest DNA from COVID Tests

A UK government-approved COVID testing company called Cignpost has administered up to three million tests at 71 walk-in locations across the UK.

What customers didn’t know is that when they agreed to the company’s 4,876 word privacy policy, they gave permission for Cignpost to harvest their DNA.

Cignpost says it “may receive compensation” for sharing—or more accurately, selling—your DNA samples to other research companies and universities.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Education, Environment, Governments, Politics

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Net-Zero Policies: Taking From The Poor And Giving To The Rich, by Clan Hussey

Posted on November 21, 2021 | Leave a comment

Don’t be too surprised, but the new green economy that’s part of the Great Reset will benefit its wealthy proponents and hurt those at the bottom of the economic ladder. From Clan Hussey at The Epoch Times via zerohedge.com:

It is too often overlooked in all the discussions about the “transition” to a net-zero emissions economy that the most consequential transition is that from democratic capitalism to feudal serfdom.

This is the conclusion of American demographer and “blue-collar Democrat” Joel Kotkin, who has highlighted that the supposedly well-intentioned green policies being adopted across the West come at enormous expense to the working- and middle-classes.

As Kotkin wrote in ‘Spiked’ earlier this year, “extreme climate measures have driven the loss of traditional blue-collar jobs in manufacturing, construction and energy, while other environmental regulations have boosted housing prices.”

Kotkin’s thesis is that the West is on the road to serfdom. Rather than maintaining our capitalist societies where a large, asset-owning middle-class underpin a stable democratic system, we are becoming stratified feudal societies.

Home and small business ownership are declining, especially among the young and the less well-off, a group of technocratic elites are establishing themselves as permanent rulers in the apparatus of the administrative state, and corporate oligarchs are coming to dominate both the economy and broader society.

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Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Economics, Economy, Energy, Environment, Governments, Politics, Propaganda, Tyranny

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Electrification Irony . . . Or Is It? By Eric Peters

Posted on November 20, 2021 | Leave a comment

Electric cars are all well and good if they’re freely chosen in a free market for automobiles. That’s not what the climate commissars have in mind, but what if the masses they presume to direct can’t afford electric cars, even with subsidies? From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

Electrification requires one thing to succeed – assuming the objective isn’t to impoverish everyone.

It must be  . . . affordable.

The range-recharge issues – and the fire issue – are important functional issues but at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how far an EV can go nor how long (or little) it takes to recharge if most people cannot afford it.

The EV, that is.

Private jets are neat. They are something most of us would love to have. But most of us can’t afford one, so we fly commercial – assuming we can endure that.

Fewer people can afford a private jet right now – or for that matter, a ticket on a commercial airplane – precisely because of the economic catastrophe created by the very regime that is pushing electric cars as hard as it is pushing drugs.

The entry-level electric car that cost $40,000 last year costs substantially more this year even if its sticker price hasn’t changed because the cost of everything else has increased by roughly 20 percent over the course of this year. Very few people are making 20 percent more to make up for it. Rough math, they therefore have about 20 percent less in the way of spending power, courtesy of the very regime that is pushing everyone to pay twice as much for their next car, the mandated electric car.

The regime, of course, is not very good at math – or rather, at balancing books – because it isn’ obliged to balance them. Unlike us – the people being forced to pay 20 percent more for everything and who are thus obliged to find ways to get by with 20 percent less of everything – the regime simply prints (digitizes) another 20 percent, for itself – or takes another 20 percent off the top.

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Posted in Business, Economics, Energy, Environment, Government, Politics, Propaganda, Technology

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