Conservationist warns Australia’s renewable energy push ‘fragmenting forests’ and wiping out wildlife, as new mapping exposes scale of land clearing for wind and solar projects - "Australia’s push to meet its net zero targets is fuelling a new wave of environmental destruction, according to conservationist and photographer Steven Nowakowski, who says pristine wilderness areas are being bulldozed for “so-called green energy”. Speaking to Sky News’ Chris Kenny on the Kenny Report, Mr Nowakowski said vast tracts of old-growth forest in Queensland are being cleared to make way for industrial-scale wind and solar farms, including the Lotus Creek Wind Farm in the state's central region... Mr Nowakowski described the destruction of the untouched bushland as “hypocrisy of the highest order”, arguing the same activists and politicians who once fought to protect these habitats were now endorsing projects which were tearing them apart. “It’s these areas that are now being targeted by the wind industry in Queensland because this is where there’s a scarcity of wind along the coastal ranges,” he said. “So, what we’re seeing is vast amounts right now being cleared for green energy. The hypocrisy is outstanding.” Mr Nowakowski, who helped develop the newly launched National Renewables Truth Map with Rainforest Reserves Australia, said the scale of the planned rollout was “beyond comprehension”. “We’ve done some recent mapping and, in the pipeline, we’re going to need around 31,000 wind towers, close to 500,000 hectares of solar, well over 500 million solar panels,” he said. “This is a reckless rollout, there is no transparency, and it’s about time that the Greens and also all the conservation groups start waking up to what’s going on and calling out some of these really shocking proposals.” According to the Truth Map, the projects would require 44,000 kilometres of new haulage roads - longer than Australia’s coastline - and tens of thousands of kilometres of new transmission lines, many cutting directly through national parks, farmland and coastal wilderness. Mr Nowakowski said the long-term ecological impact of the developments remains unknown, but evidence was already showing devastating consequences for wildlife. “I’ve ground-truthed the bases of many wind turbines in north Queensland and am guaranteed to see dead birds and bats,” he said. “In fact, on a number of occasions I’ve seen Pacific swifts under the turbines in Caban Wind Farm. These are critically endangered migratory birds.” He warned the construction and maintenance of these projects was “fragmenting forests”, introducing weeds and altering fire regimes across once-pristine landscapes. “What we don’t know is the cumulative impact of all this,” he said... Mr Nowakowski said the Truth Map aimed to expose the true environmental cost of the renewables transition and give Australians a chance to see what was being built “in their own backyard”. “After decades photographing Australia’s wild places, I have never seen a threat like this,” he said. “The Truth Map empowers every Australian to see what is really happening - zoom into your backyard and see what is coming.” The Lotus Creek project alone will see 46 turbines, each up to 230 metres tall, constructed across 3,000 hectares of previously untouched forest north-west of Rockhampton - land Mr Nowakowski says was once among the most pristine in the country. “This isn’t just about economics,” he said. “It’s about the kind of country that we leave for future generations.”"
How ignorant. Doesn't he know we need to destroy forests to stop climate change, which is bad because it will destroy forests?
Climate disaster science gets huge coverage. When it's found to be wrong... crickets - "In the world of climate politics, highly pessimistic scenarios can drive headlines and coverage, and so in turn have an impact on policy. Two recent unfortunate episodes show that the rush to shout “fire” means that some scenarios are gaining massive influence when they should instead be attracting sceptical reviews of the science used to construct them. Take wildfires. Despite repeated claims of a “world on fire”, data set after data set shows that the world burns ever less in terms of burned area. Disrupting this unhelpful reality, a splashy paper in Nature last year finally found a worrying narrative: “extreme wildfire events” had more than doubled globally over the past two decades. Using satellite data from 2003 to 2023, the authors clustered fire hotspots and tallied their “fire radiative power” – a proxy for intensity. Predictably, this ignited a media bonfire. Outlets from The New York Times to CBS News blared warnings of a planet ablaze, seeing fiercer fires as proof that we are hurtling toward a global inferno. Hold the extinguishers. New research indicates that the study was wrong. The new analysis shows that extreme fire is down by 35 per cent over the same period. The fires are burning less intensely, and we already knew that less area is getting burned as time goes by – but this contradicts the extreme climate script, so we heard crickets from major media outlets. There’s more good news we are not hearing much about: 2025 is shaping up as one of the least fiery years on record across most areas of the world. Total burned area in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe is dramatically down compared to previous years – potentially the lowest in the 21st century if the trend holds. We should celebrate this as evidence that adaptation and better land management are working. Instead, such news is buried because it doesn’t align with the orthodoxy of economy-crushing climate policies. The biggest advert for those policies was last year’s bombshell study – also in Nature – claiming that global real income will be 19 percent lower by 2050 than it would have been with no climate change and 62 per cent lower by 2100. Alarmingly, the research became the go-to damage estimate for the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS), a powerhouse coalition of central banks and regulators spanning the US, EU, Japan, and beyond. For decades, solid economics – from Nobel laureate climate economist William Nordhaus and others – has painted a clear picture: climate change is a serious but manageable economic issue, costing 2-3 per cent of global GDP by century’s end. That is the same as enduring one or two recessions over 75 years – hardly societal collapse. But the new research seemed to indicate that the economic damage caused by climate change would be far worse than had been thought. The UK Office for Budget Responsibility and others cited it in important ways because it aligned with their bias toward the narrative of apocalypse. Now, several peer-reviewed takedowns – again published in Nature itself – are ripping the new science to shreds, as even the Wall Street Journal has acknowledged. Errors abound: most of the suggested economic damage disappears once data from Uzbekistan is removed from the calculations. The estimated climate impact, correctly analysed, is statistically indistinguishable from zero. But the damage is already done. The NGFS, which was co-founded by former Bank of England governor and now Canadian prime minister Mark Carney, has the important role of stress-testing financial systems, and it has been using these unfounded disaster costs to regulate banks, potentially triggering unnecessary regulations that could stifle growth. As climate researcher Roger Pielke Jr. notes, the NGFS has a history of cherry-picking outlier damages over sober estimates – suggesting that the NGFS needs a root-and-branch overhaul of its approach to climate science. Scientific publishing itself needs to take a look in the mirror. The key takeaway from the two episodes is that it’s important to turn to comprehensive data – and that goes for the media, too... Unfortunately, today’s popular climate policies would instead squander 5-20 per cent of GDP while only cutting emissions marginally. "
Left wingers want to destroy the economy, so this is a feature and not a bug
Accused Palisades firebug Jonathan Rinderknecht has outburst in court over 'detainment' - "The deranged firebug accused of igniting the devastating Palisades Fire interrupted his federal arraignment in California to grill the judge about his “detainment” — as new videos surfaced showing his past run-ins with cops. Jonathan Rinderknecht, 29, pleaded not guilty Thursday afternoon in a Los Angeles courtroom for the first time since being slapped with federal charges for sparking the raging inferno that leveled 7,000 homes and businesses, caused $150 billion in damages and left 12 people dead."
Turns out 'climate change' has a name, besides bad forest management
A Global Perspective on Local Sea Level Changes - "In 2021, the IPCC published new sea level projections. For the first time, the projections gave insight into expected relative sea level rise locally. A prudent designer of coastal infrastructure will want to know how the local projections compare to local observations. That comparison, to date, has not been made. We compared local projections and observations regarding the rate of rise in 2020. We used two datasets with local sea level information all over the globe. In both datasets, we found approximately 15% of the available sets suitable to establish the rate of rise in 2020. Geographic coverage of the suitable locations is poor, with the majority of suitable locations in the Northern Hemisphere. Latin America and Africa are severely under-represented. Statistical tests were run on all selected datasets, taking acceleration of sea level rise as a hypothesis. In both datasets, approximately 95% of the suitable locations show no statistically significant acceleration of the rate of sea level rise. The investigation suggests that local, non-climatic phenomena are a plausible cause of the accelerated sea level rise observed at the remaining 5% of the suitable locations. On average, the rate of rise projected by the IPCC is biased upward with approximately 2 mm per year in comparison with the observed rate."
Weird. We keep being told that climate change studies are super accurate and reliable and if anything underestimate climate change
TheRealMrBench on X - "How will Canada become the super power in energy within the G7? Liberal Energy Minister Tim Hodgson explains. Get businesses and residents to put solar panels on their roof. Have on-site batteries to store the electricity. Use AI to sell it back to the grid during peak times."
Climate alarmism is misleading the public - spiked - " The British public has been subject to a consistent diet of climate alarmism for years. So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that just 8.8 per cent of the general public are aware of the truth about so-called extreme-weather events: namely, that the number of people dying from such events has fallen by 95 per cent since the 1920s, as data from the OFDA/CRED International Disaster Database shows. This revelation about public perception of climate change comes from new polling by Savanta, commissioned by my organisation, the Global Warming Policy Foundation. The polling certainly shredded a few of the green lobby’s favourite myths, including showing that the young are, in general, less worried than the old about climate change. In fact, one in four Brits is ‘not concerned’ about the climate, contrary to claims of complete consensus on the issue (or ‘crisis’, as greens call it). But, as indicated above, the polling did show that 12 per cent of Brits thought extreme-weather deaths had increased by a massive 95 per cent, and that 42 per cent thought they had increased by a quarter. Why were they so mistaken? Maybe it has something to do with scaremongering headlines... In fact, in decades gone by, deaths from natural disasters and floods were in the millions. Now they are in the tens of thousands. In 1931, for example, an estimated three million people died due to flooding. In 2019, just 11,000 deaths were attributable to all natural disasters. But the huge progress we’ve made does not get mentioned in the numerous reports on the threat of extreme-weather events. Take the terrible bushfires in Australia last year. You would think, given the borderline apocalyptic coverage of them, that they were proof of an increase in the threat posed by wildfires. Yet while there is evidence to suggest ‘fire weather’ is becoming more common in certain areas, overall human-fire suppression efforts are working. They have led the annual global burnt area since 2003 to shrink by up to a quarter, as shown by NASA satellites. The public understandably had no awareness of this fact, given it was rarely reported. Indeed, 39 per cent thought the total land area affected by wildfires had actually increased by a quarter since 2003. Only 16 per cent gave the correct answer of a decrease by a quarter. Human intervention is working to counter other forms of disaster, too. Entire cities used to be wiped from the face of the earth by volcanoes, earthquakes and floods. Once upon a time, famines might wipe out whole villages without the outside world ever knowing or being able to help. Now, seismologists and volcanologists give us warnings. Rescue workers in helicopters and excavators pluck the unlucky from the water and the rubble. And aid workers bring food and relief over great distances in an instant. Human striving, ingenuity and advancement should provide the context within which climate change is reported. But it almost never does. Those pushing the alarmist narrative need us to be frightened and thinking the worst. They need us to believe that humans cannot overcome the challenges facing us. The green industry depends on such alarmism. The final question in our survey concerned the good news about global food production increasing by more than a third since 2005, according to the UN. We’re making more with less land and the apocalyptic predictions of global starvation made in the 1970s look increasingly fantastical. Yet, while two fifths of respondents correctly said food production had increased since 2005, one fifth thought food production had actually gone down, despite humanity’s immense technological progress. The climate has always changed, due to natural and man-made reasons. But never before have we been better equipped to deal with such change. Alarmism and increasing censorship (in the media, online and from the government) around the climate means we are making decisions based on misconceptions and emotion rather than on facts and reason. The danger is that the resulting green medicine could well turn out to be much, much worse than the disease. Net Zero is already negatively impacting on the economy, and the fear spread by the green doom-mongers is harming our mental health and faith in the future. Hopefully this polling can begin to expose the danger that alarmist reporting poses to the public and policymaking alike."
Bad mobile signal holding back EV roll-out
‘I’m giving up my electric car because I can’t find anywhere to charge it’ - "As he set out on the 70-mile journey from Warrington to Mansfield, Lee Davey did not anticipate that it would end up taking two days, cost him more than £100 and leave him at risk of getting stranded. But while passing through Buxton, his all-electric Porsche Taycan began to run low on battery and it then started snowing heavily. Having driven an electric car for the last couple of years, Davey immediately knew that the icy conditions spelt bad news. “With an electric car if it’s snowing, forget it – you’re not charging anywhere,” he says. “Unlike a petrol station, there’s no canopies over [EV chargers] and there’s nobody serving those stations. So it’s impossible when it snows to get to a charging point – and that’s a massive issue.” Despite this, with the snow around his car getting deeper by the minute, he made several frantic attempts to hook up to a charging point at Morrisons and another at BP Pulse. Both were out of service. With daylight fading and just 3pc battery left, Davey was forced to “limp” to a hotel where he booked a night’s stay for £100 and hooked his car to the hotel’s slow charger, which took 20 hours to fully charge his car. For Davey, the ordeal was the final straw – he has vowed that as soon as the lease runs out on the Porsche in the summer, he will switch back to a petrol car. It’s not the car itself that is the problem, but the charging infrastructure that is forcing him to give up on electric. “It’s just been a nightmare,” he says. “I dread to think how many hours I’ve wasted charging my car – it must be hundreds of hours over the last four years.”... According to a 2024 survey by Which?, almost three quarters of EV drivers say they have experienced a faulty public charger at least once in the last 12 months, while 37pc have found it difficult to find a working charger at all. Some areas of the UK have reported up to 30pc of chargers being out of service, according to the Electrical Times, with problems ranging from network failures to broken connectors... Britain’s electricity network simply isn’t ready to host as many chargers as the Government’s lofty net zero ambitions demand. “The UK’s electrical infrastructure is too old and too limited to support this quick an expansion,” he says. “Ultimately there isn’t enough power to go around.” Davey recently experienced the fallout from the grid’s overwhelmed network when, during a stop, another driver asked him to unplug from a charger so that the others had sufficient power to charge their cars. Along with his other experiences, this confirmed to him that the infrastructure could not be relied on, no matter how many hiccups he anticipated... He was travelling along the A9, a major road that connects Inverness with Perth, when he realised he would have to stop to top up the battery. Pulling in at the first opportunity in Newtonmore, his heart sank when he found none of the three machines worked. After receiving assurances over the phone from ChargePlace Scotland, the national charging network, that the chargers in the next town north would work he set off – only to find they too were out of service. “By this time, I’m 40 miles from home, it’s midnight and I have no way of charging the car,” Petrie says. In the end, his wife was forced to head out at 1am to do an 80-mile round trip to rescue them. Like Davey, he was able to leave his car at a hotel charger and pick it up the next morning – but not before resolving to switch back to petrol for good... On a separate occasion, the maps on his phone led him to a charging station located in the darkest corner of a deserted car park late at night. “It was like something out of Death Wish – you expected Pierce Brosnan to appear around the corner,” he says. “I said to my son, ‘it’s lucky it’s me who’s with you because there’s no way your mum would come in here’.”"
Why big fleet buyers are going into reverse on electric cars - "Rental companies and taxi operators across the world are backing away from electric cars amid low uptake from drivers and losses caused by plummeting used car prices. Hertz recently announced plans to sell-off 20,000 electric cars and buy petrol and diesel-powered vehicles instead, while Uber has admitted it is struggling to get drivers to adopt EVs in the numbers it expected. The collective change in attitude towards EVs threatens to send used prices tumbling as the market is flooded with stock and means manufacturers may struggle to meet ambitious government targets on electric car sales. As well as ID4s, Addison Lee spent £30m on new Volkswagen Multivans, which are plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. However, it soon ran into issues with drivers not having access to public charging. “Less than 20pc of our drivers have got off-street parking and have the ability to charge overnight,” Griffin says. “For those that don’t, they have got to seek the alternative and that’s when things start to unravel.” Addison Lee tried to install its own bank of chargers to help drivers. However, “red tape and bureaucracy” meant it took 18 months to install a set of fast chargers at its depot in West Drayton, Griffin says. So-called “range anxiety” about how far EV batteries will take a driver between charges was a serious concern, compounded by a lack of public charging infrastructure. “We have the issue of what jobs you may be able to do, because if you’ve only got half a charge and you suddenly decide you want to go to Manchester then are you going to want to take it?,” says Griffin... US rental giant Hertz announced it would replace 20,000 EVs with petrol cars, taking a $245m (£193m) hit as it sold the plug-in vehicles because of a rapid depreciation in their value. Three years ago, Hertz announced plans to buy 100,000 Teslas to electrify its fleet. But the company said renting out electric cars had proved to be less popular and profitable than traditional vehicles and the cars had also come with higher repair costs. Europe’s biggest car rental company, Sixt, announced in December that it would be phasing out Teslas altogether, however a spokesman said this was part of its “regular de-fleeting process”... Used electric car prices in Britain have fallen by 23pc in the last year alone, according to Auto Trader, as thousands of EVs bought on car finance were released back into the market. The company has warned of “unsustainable levels of depreciation”... The car hire and taxi industry’s decision to u-turn on electric vehicles is bad news for manufacturers. More than three quarters of battery electric vehicles registered last year were bought by businesses and fleets, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, an increase from previous years when it was nearer two-thirds. Commercial buyers have made up a growing proportion of the market as ordinary motorists have cooled on EVs and instead shifted back to petrol and diesel... “If you turn up at Heathrow to rent a car and you have never driven an EV before, and you’re worrying about things like whether you have to pay congestion charge, or emission zones, the last extra thing you want to worry about is how you charge the car. “They have to be explained. Often with car rentals they have such a fast turnover they don’t have the time to explain the nuances of an EV and their customers are put off.”"
The Government bribed us to drive electric. Now it’s punishing us for complying - "It was bound to happen. The aggressive campaign by successive governments to convert drivers from petrol to electric cars has resulted in collapsing fuel duty receipts for the Treasury. And so, the taxman has now set his sight on the owners of electric vehicles (EV)... One has to admire the chutzpah of politicians who are attempting to frame the policy in terms of fairness. It was a political decision to relentlessly promote the adoption of EVs as a social good, with administrations of all colours zealously pursuing their Net Zero agenda. It is impossible to work out how many would have opted for EVs had these vehicles – and the concept of “going green” – not been massively incentivised by the Government. In January 2024, with the Conservatives in power, the Department for Transport and the Office for Zero Emission Vehicles announced that “the UK now has the most ambitious regulatory framework for the switch to electric vehicles of any country in the world”. This was no mere policy; it had been enshrined in law and declared “the largest carbon saving measure in government’s net zero strategy”. That new law would enforce the Government’s plan for a “zero emission vehicle transition” by 2035. The first step would mean 80pc of new cars and 70pc of new vans sold in Britain were to be zero emission by 2030. By 2035 that would be 100pc. No new petrol or diesel vehicles could legally be sold beyond this date. The Labour Party, not to be outdone by the Tories, pledged to bring this ban on new sales of petrol and diesel vehicles forward to 2030. We were told that £2bn had been “invested by government to expand charging infrastructure and incentivise zero emission vehicles”. Virtue signalling comes at a price, and it is almost always borne by taxpayers. From developing charging infrastructure to offering discounts through schemes such as the £650m electric car grant, it is taxpayers – including drivers of petrol and electric vehicles alike – who have been funding our politicians’ green dream of no more petrol cars. Fuel duty, in the meantime, has taken on the role of a sin tax to penalise those who are either unable or unwilling to participate in the EV revolution. While it is pitched as a means of deterring fuel consumption, it’s clearly a nice revenue earner for the Treasury at its heart. Now those same motorists who have been taxed and penalised and bribed into buying EVs are being lectured on the fairness of the Government’s lopsided, short-sighted policy. Having successfully brought about an EV revolution, the Government has now realised it has killed off an important source of revenue. To make an honest case for this new pay-for-mile tax, the Chancellor needs to acknowledge the role of green ideology in creating the mess in which she now finds herself. The system as it stands may well be unfair, but it cannot be right to hold owners of EVs responsible for it."
Eric Nuttall on X - "As a country, aren't we tired yet of losing??? Oil is Canada's largest export ($100BN/year, 15%-20% of total exports). How can building a steel tube that would allow us to live better be contentious?!? More oil pipelines = higher quality of living for all!"
Eric Lombardi 🇨🇦🚀🏗️ on X - "Oil pipelines would be less controversial if proponents were capable of acknowledging that climate change is a real and serious issue."
Brian Lilley on X - "This is such a dense and stupid take. Oil companies have spent billions trying to show that they take climate change seriously. It has meant nothing. If you are posting this then you haven't been paying attention for 20 years and aren't attached to reality."
Chris Martz on X - "25 years ago, experts said “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past” thanks to global warming. Now, experts say global warming causes heavy snowfall. Is there anything global warming cannot do?"
Proof that climate change is just that powerful! Trust the Experts!
‘The math doesn’t add up’: Former environment minister says 2030 emissions targets now not possible : r/canada - "If we go down to 0% while maintaining our current lifeway it will teach the world how to legitimately decarbonize while decoupling from growth. That's worth way more than the nominal emissions goal. But that's not going to happen because the (modern) Canadian lifeway is not up for negotiation."
Climate change hysteria is about virtue signalling. "If" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Of course there were the usual deluded people claiming green energy is cheaper
Richard Hanania on X - "Woman can’t afford to heat her home in the winter because the UK cut fossil fuel use. She blames “corporate greed” for high costs instead of environmentalists. Humans never learn even when directly suffering the consequences of their views."
