unaffordable renewables

Clive Palmer Triggers the Warmist’s Scream!

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment
Anguished cries in the global warming debate.

Anguished cries in the global warming debate.

TWO sentences neatly and completely capture the total irrationality and sheer, raging religious fervour of the global warming true, true believers.

They both came as deep primeval screams in delayed reaction to Clive Palmer’s climate change twostep with Mr Climate Hysteria himself, the man who used to be the next president of the US, until he found religion and fortune could be combined in very convenient climate untruths, Al Gore.

The initial reaction of true believers was one of almost euphoric rapture. Al and Clive had seemingly united to defeat the Climate Anti-Christ Abbott; Julia Gillard’s carbon tax and Gaia would be saved.

Nowhere was this reaction more extensive or ecstatic than at Climate Central Downunder, The Age. The paper revelled in the Anti-Christ’s coming discomfort.

Then as the truth sunk in that Gore had merely given cover to Palmer’s continued support for axing the tax, the scream erupted in The Age’s editorial on Friday. It included a delicious, utterly, if utterly unintentionally, revealing sentence.

The editorial noted that under the Palmer plan, while the scaffolding of an emissions trading scheme (ETS), would remain in place, the scheme would have no effect.

That’s actually not so, as we won’t even get that “scaffolding”. But returning to The Age, its lament was that such a scheme would have no effect because there’d be no price on carbon until Australia’s major trading partners implemented their own schemes.

Then the sentence: “That might occur next year, next decade, or never.”

A rational sentient human being would have then said; exactly, and thank you Clive. For there is absolutely no point in Australia going down the aggressive ETS path, cutting our emissions of carbon dioxide, unless precisely our major trading partners were doing the same.

To argue otherwise is to argue for Australia to unilaterally hurt both its industries and its citizens, to send industries and jobs to ‘our major trading partners,’ for absolutely no point. Our pain would have not the slightest effect on the global or even the local climate.

That lamenting sentence is so revealing; that to The Age rationality has absolutely nothing to do with the issue. It is all about religious fervour.

Quite irrespective of what the world does, quite irrespective of whether our CO2 cuts would achieve anything at all, we have to cut; we have to flagellate like a 12th century penitent, to exculpate our sins, to pay penance to Gaia.

The sentence is deeply revealing on another level. For The Age is also admitting that in its collective hearts of hearts, it really knows that the operative word in that sentence is ”never”.

Despite all the increasingly desperate propaganda nonsense pumped out that everyone else is taking big steps to cut emissions, and we are so laggard — including of course by The Age itself — the truth is the exact opposite.

Let a few more years run out, and apart from even more evidence that the planet, as opposed presumably to Gaia, ain’t warming as predicted, the emptiness of that claim will become almost undeniable.

And in its deepest, most inchoate scream, The Age is telling us that it just can’t bear that prospect.

The second primeval scream of pain and inchoate anger at Palmer assuaging the Climate Anti-Christ came from David Llewellyn-Smith on his MacroBusiness Blog.

Now LSD as we’ll call him, projects as at least a moderately intelligent human being. Yet he could come out with such a sentence, and more particularly one word, reveals an irrationality and stupidity so fundamental that it can only be explained by a religious belief. And a belief so fervent that a blinding curtain of rage isolates his brain.

LSD expressed sarcastic surprise that a hugely wealthy mining magnate would rubber stamp the end of a carbon price costing him millions of dollars per year for “tipping filth into the atmosphere”. Filth? FILTH?

Does LSD walk around all day in total self-hatred for doing exactly the same thing, pumping out his own filth with every exhaling breath?

Does he awake in complete despair every morning, at the prospect of another totally unavoidable day of exhaling filth? How many times a day does he flagellate himself, penitent-style if figuratively, or perhaps even literally?

For this is all we are talking about, whether it is Palmer’s business emissions or their shared personal emissions. CO2. Carbon dioxide. Plant food. The basis of life on Earth. And nothing else.

No, despite the best efforts of a battalion of modern day Goebbelian wannabes, from Gillard down, none of this — carbon tax or ETS — is about real pollution.

That’s the dirty bits of grit that used to come out of both power stations and home hearths and killed thousands, and will continue to kill thousands if people like The Age, LSD & Co succeed in denying Africa modern, clean, coal-fired power stations that would stop them relying on burning wood and dung.

Lamentably, the way pollution has been able to be attached to CO2 — presumably in time we’ll start renaming heavy rain as ‘water pollution’ — seems to have succeeded with people like LSD.

So when he thinks — more accurately, emotes — about emissions, cognitive dissonance, the disease of the modern intelligentsia, kicks in and he sees in his minds-eye, those dirty bits of grit, the ‘filth’ of modern civilisation.

So there you have it; the religion of global warming in two sentences.

No matter what anyone does, we must cut in self-flagellation for our sins against Gaia.

The self-hatred flowing from the original sin of personal exhalation of CO2 “filth” makes for even more aggressive warriors against business emissions of that same “filth”.

Originally published as Palmer triggers warmest screamCOMMENTS

Farmers in Sweden, Too Smart to Fall for Climate Alarmist B.S.!

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

Swedish farmers have doubts about climatologists

June 27, 2014 – 06:10

Farmers rely more on their own experiences with changing weather than on climatologists who have no agricultural experience, according to Swedish research.

By: Georg Mathisen

Climatologists are not often found in the Swedish countryside. So farmers have their doubts about climate predictions. (Photo: Microstock)

Researchers the world over almost unanimously agree that our climate is changing because of the increasing amounts of carbon dioxide humankind pumps into our fragile atmosphere. But many farmers – at least Swedish ones – have experienced mild winters and shifting weather before and are hesitant about trusting the scientists.

Surprised

The researcher who discovered the degree of scepticism among farmers was surprised by her findings.  Therese Asplund, who recently presented her PhD thesis at Linköping University, was initially looking into how agricultural magazines covered climate change.

Asplund found after studying ten years of issues of the two agricultural sector periodicalsATL and Land Lantbruk that they present climate change as scientifically confirmed, a real problem.

But her research took an unexpected direction when she started interviewing farmers in focus groups about climate issues.

Asplund had prepared a long list of questions about how the farmers live with the threat of climate change and what they plan to do to cope with the subsequent climate challenges. The conversations took a different course:

“They explained that they didn’t quite believe in climate changes,” she says. “Or at least that these are not triggered by human activities.”

Used to changes

The climate of course has previously gone through natural spells, and the farmers tend to think in terms of their experiences in recent decades.

“Many have a lot of experience, for instance they recall the mild winters of the 1960s,” explains Asplund.

The farmers also distrust climatologists partly on the grounds of what they perceive of as too much concurrence.

“They think information about climate change is too uniform. Credibility would increase if more contrary perspectives were presented,” she says.

Office science

And above all: They think climatologists lack the experience they have living in keeping with the soil, weather and growth seasons.

The climate of course has previously gone through natural spells, and the farmers tend to think in terms of their experiences in recent decades. (Photo: Mary Evans Picture)

“Climate researchers also are given less credence by farmers because they think the scientists draw their conclusions from theoretical analyses rather than practical experience,” says Asplund.

She finds it hard to say how climatologists can make use of the farmers’ experiences:

“For the research of a scientifically trained climatologist, the opinions of farmers might not be all that essential.  But that does not necessarily make their views irrelevant. For a sociological approach to climate research the farmers’ opinions are highly relevant, on a par with those of other social groups,” asserts Asplund.

Information is not enough

She is concerned about understanding disparate ways of thinking and responding with regard to climate issues.

“With insufficient knowledge, we risk believing that information will readily alter human perceptions and behaviour. The example of climate communication in Swedish agriculture shows what challenges a climatological point of departure for communication can encounter,” says Asplund.

After talking with focus groups all over Sweden, she thinks that information alone cannot change attitudes and behaviour – no matter how well rooted it is in empirical science.

Does this mean it is harder than thought to get Swedish farmers to engage in climate-friendly agriculture? The researcher says both “yes” and “no”.

It will be hard as long as the implementation of improvements is voluntary. But in the discussions the farmers signal that they can adapt – if not to physical climate changes, at least to climate policy decisions. Thus it should be no harder to get them to adjust to climate measures as to other political mandates.

But there is one proviso: “This is a resistance to decrees which they think undermine competitive Swedish agricultural production,” says Therese Asplund.

————

Bad Investments in “Novelty Energy Sources” are a Burden for Ratepayers!

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

Power price hikes bite in Queensland

By AUSTRALIAN ASSOCIATED PRESS

PUBLISHED: 01:08 GMT, 1 July 2014 

Queenslanders face a dramatic hike in power bills with the start of the new financial year, and households with solar panels are also likely to take a hit to the hip pocket.

The average power bill is expected to rise by $191, or 13.6 per cent, pushed up by green policies and the increasing cost of poles, wires, and electricity generation.

However, prices will only go up by about 5.1 per cent if the federal government’s carbon tax is repealed.

Queensland’s Energy Minister Mark McArdle has blamed much of the hike on the former Labor government’s over-investment in the power distribution network.

“Every power bill that is issued, 54 per cent of that bill relates to the cost of poles and wires – the gold-plated legacy of Labor that we’re now having to unravel,” Mr McArdle told ABC radio.

Pensioners and seniors will be able to apply for an electricity rebate of $320 after the government upped concessions to $165 million for this financial year.

“The Queensland government promised to lower the cost of living wherever we could and we’re making sure that pensioners and other vulnerable Queenslanders get some relief on household costs,” Mr McArdle said.

Consumers are forking out 50 per cent more for electricity than they did three years ago, and shadow treasurer Curtis Pitt says price hikes under the Newman government total $560.

“Campbell Newman arrogantly promised to lower Queenslanders’ electricity bills, yet ever since he’s become premier they’ve just gone up and up and up,” he said.

This financial year, about 50,000 homeowners who have solar panels will no longer be guaranteed a feed-in tariff of eight cents.

Government-owned distributors will no longer be responsible for paying the tariff and households will have to negotiate directly with electricity retailers for the price they are paid for the solar power they generate.

The 44 cent tariff, paid to some 284,000 people who were first to sign up to the scheme, will remain unchanged.

Australian Solar Council chief executive John Grimes says consumers need to shop around, or join forces to negotiate as a block with electricity retailers.

“As an independent customer, with an average-size system on your roof, you really have little leverage when talking to a utility,” Mr Grimes told ABC radio.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/aap/article-2675908/Power-price-hikes-bite-Queensland.html#ixzz36B33NYym
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

This Article, written in May….hit the Nail, right on the head….Scary!

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

Warning: Reading about How the Ontario Liberals

Keep on Winning Might Make You Sick

by  on May 22, 2014 in Commentary

Enough is enough.

You would think the sheer waste of taxpayer dollars through scandals and mismanagement would be enough to hang the Liberals.

Especially since, at the same time your money swirls down the toilet, the Liberals continue to run deficits (seven in a row) andIllustration: Truth and Lie pile up debt that your grandchildren’s children will still be paying off.

Yet in spite of their mistakes and outright lies (the hit parade includes: the billion-dollar gas plant cancellation and the failure to provide proper oversight of Ornge air ambulance expenses and out-of-control spending at the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation and elsewhere) they’ve managed to hold onto power for 11 years. How is that?

I’ll give you three reasons. (Hold on, it’s a long explanation.)

1. They buy votes with big spending promises.

George Bernard Shaw got it right. “A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.”

When even the tax-the-rich NDP recognize that Ontarians are taxed to the hilt and refuse to put up with any “new taxes, tolls or fees that hit middle-class families,” you know Ontario must be in financial trouble.

Net debt is projected to climb to $269.2 billion for 2013–14 and hit $324.5 billion by 2017–18 (nearly 40% of Ontario’s economy). In fact, Ontario’s debt has more than doubled since the Ontario Liberals came to power in 2003–04 when the provincial debt stood at $138.8 billion (or 27.5% of the economy).

Interest payments are the third largest expense in the budget. And right now interest rates are low. When rates go back up, each point will add another $3 billion to our annual interest payment, points out economist Jack Mintz.

But in spite of repeated warnings about the need for spending cuts, from former Liberal finance minister Dwight Duncan (who conveniently woke up to the Ontario’s debt problem in his last few months in office) and public servants in Ontario’s finance ministry, what did the Liberals propose in the budget that forced an election?

Big spending promises, of course. Billions for schools and hospitals, roads and bridges, billions more for corporate grants, and millions for a smorgasbord of social services.

With this budget, the Liberals are in fact driving toward a deficit $2.4 billion higher(or 24% more) than they previously projected—in spite of hiking taxes by almost $1 billion. The deficits planned for 2015–16 and 2016–17 also increased by $1.7 billion and $1.8 billion.

In other words, the Liberals forecast spending to jump by $3.4 billion this year, $900 million more than projected in the 2013 budget, with program spending expected to climb by nearly $3 billion to $119.4 billion.

With Ontario already in a fiscal mess, the NDP (yes, the NDP, a party not known for financial responsibility), criticized the budget as “a mad dash to escape the scandals by promising the moon and the stars.”

2. They pander to unions, whose members make up a big chunk of the electorate.  

The real beneficiary of the tax-and-spend Liberals has been the unions.

For starters, over half of Ontario’s program spending goes to pay public-sector workers their salaries and pension benefits.

What’s more, when the Liberals came into power in 2003, only 14,926 public-sector employees were making $100,000 or more. Today, 97,796 Ontario public-sector workers are on the so-called Sunshine List, an increase of 655% in just 10 years.

But, really, who can be surprised when about 70 percent of public-sector employees are unionized (compare this to the roughly 15 percent unionization rate in the private sector)?

The fact is the Liberals have pandered to unions, especially teacher’s unions, handing out massive, unaffordable pay hikes.

From 2003 to 2011, the McGuinty Liberals increased education spending by 45%, hiring 14,000 more teachers (up 10%) and increasing salaries by 24%—all while student enrollment actually dropped by 6%.

And teachers repaid the favour, “volunteering and voting for McGuinty’s Liberals in huge numbers during the past three elections.”

But following a narrow election win in 2011 (voters were angry over broken promises and higher taxes), McGuinty shifted direction, proposing to freeze teacher wages for two years and curb benefits to reduce the government’s alarming $14.4 billion deficit.

The teachers reacted with predictable outrage.

So despite all their talk about austerity, the Liberals just couldn’t say “no” to their vote-rich cash cow.

While the McGuinty government was calling for wage freezes publicly, it secretly negotiated a three percent wage increase with the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, which represents 35,000 voters, er, government workers.

And forget about Kathleen Wynne taking a firm stance on public-sector wages and benefits.

In a clear bid to win back union support, one of her first moves as premier was to negotiate an LCBO contract that gave 7,000 unionized workers a $1,600 signing bonus over two years—about $9 million— and wage increases of two% in 2015–16.

Her education minister also renegotiated new contracts with the province’s two biggest teachers unions, the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation and the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario, offering better maternity benefits, fewer unpaid days off, and an improved “sick-day bank.”

And the quid pro quo?

Millions of dollars spent on attack ads directed exclusively against Tory leaders in Ontario’s 2003, 2007, and 2011 elections—by a powerful coalition of special interest unions that includes the Ontario English Catholic Teachers Association, the Canadian Auto Workers, and the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation and calling itself the Working Families Coalition.

The so-called Working Families coalition first “came together in 2003 to discredit then Tory premier Ernie Eves and get Dalton McGuinty elected.” Their ad campaigns had such a big impact on the election results, they followed up with more of the same in the 2007 and 2011 elections. For this campaign, they’re just getting started, but expect a barrage of attack ads aimed squarely at Tim Hudak.

The coalition’s negative ads effectively doubles the advertising budget of the Liberals at the expense of the Tories through loose election laws around third-party advertising. Unlike political parties, third parties “can spend as much as they want, take contributions as large as they want and keep their financial backers hidden until long after the campaign is over.”

In Ontario’s 2011 general election, Working Families spent $1.6 million to help the Liberals.

Other big spenders included the Elementary Teachers’ Federation—$2.6 million—and the English Catholic Teachers’ Association, which spent $1.9 million to help defeat the PC party. For comparison’s sake, out of 21 registered political parties, only two spent more than $2 million on advertising. The Elementary Teachers’ Federation, the biggest third-party advertiser, spent more on advertising than nineteen political parties combined.

Spending records for the 2007 election (the first year third parties had to register with Elections Ontario) show a similar story. A shocking “90 per cent of the $2.3 million raised by third-party advertisers for the 2007 campaign went to organized labour or groups opposed to specific Tory policy positions.”

Plainly, Ontario’s election laws are giving Liberals with their deep-pocketed union allies an unfair advantage.

3. They reward party insiders with lucrative contracts.

In Ontario, it’s not what you know, but who you know.

From eHealth Ontario and Cancer Care Ontario to the Local Health Integration Networks, the Liberals have a history of rewarding party loyalists with “cushy, untendered contracts” and well-paid appointments.

In 2004, Mike Crawley, the then-president of the Ontario Liberals, was awarded awind power contract that guarantees his company AIM PowerGen $66,000 a day for 20 years. That’s a total of $475 million dollars.

In 2010, nearly two-thirds of the $68 million of taxpayers’ money spent on the 14 LHINs went to cover the salaries and remuneration of government-appointed board members.

Pat Dillon, the business manager of the Provincial Building and Construction Trades Council and the head of the infamous Working Families Coalition, has received a number of appointments—to Premier Wynne’s Transit Panel, the Ontario College of Trades, the WSIB Board, Infrastructure Ontario, and more.

The Globe and Mail recently reported that Ontario Liberal friends and allies were awarded millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded contracts because of loopholes in the rules surrounding government expenditures. The report goes on to say that, “while there is no indication that any of the transactions were illegitimate, the lack of transparency makes it difficult to determine what services were provided at taxpayers’ expense.”

The sad truth? It pays to be a friend of the Liberals. Ontario taxpayer, not so much.

The Ontario Liberals are long past their best-before date

After 11 years, it’s time to hold the Liberals to account.

Imagine if some pimply-faced thug robbed a gas station and got caught, he’d get what? A thousand dollars tops and some jail time.

But the Liberals who have “stolen” billions of taxpayer money through incompetence and cronyism remain unpunished.

It’s time to throw the Liberals out. They’ve inflicted enough damage on the province. It’s time they answered for their crimes against taxpayers.

 

What Sleep can do for us….and Lack of Sleep can do to us!

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

One of the Most Common Complaints, from Residents

near Wind Turbines, is lack of sleep!

The Miracle and Mystery of Sleep: 12 Remarkable Psychological Studies

Post image for The Miracle and Mystery of Sleep: 12 Remarkable Psychological Studies

“Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day.” ~Friedrich Nietzsche

What beautiful rewards sleep delivers– if you can get enough of it.

Sleep has profound effects on our memories, desires, self-control, learning, relationships and more.

Here are twelve studies which demonstrate some of the psychological benefits of sleep and a few of the dangers of not getting enough.

1. Placebo sleep

Sleep is slippery beast, not least in how it’s susceptible to our perceptions of its quality.

If we think we’ve had a wonderful sleep last night, we feel and perform better, even if our sleep was actually the same as usual.

This is what Draganich and Erdal (2014) found in a study which had participants hooked up to sensors which they were told were measuring the quality of their sleep.

Actually the sensors weren’t measuring anything. Instead the researchers randomly told some people they’d had better sleep than others.

When they were given a cognitive test the next day, those who’d been told they slept the best also did the best in the test.

Their self-reported sleep quality had little effect on the test results.

The researchers dubbed this ‘placebo sleep’.

2. Emotional sleep

During sleep our memories are reorganised and made stronger–in particular the emotional centres of the brain are highly active.

Psychologists have found that the mind is cataloguing our memories and deciding what to keep and what to throw away.

Sleep expert Elizabeth A. Kensinger explains:

“Sleep is making memories stronger. It also seems to be doing something which I think is so much more interesting, and that is reorganizing and restructuring memories.”

A review of studies on sleep found that we tend to hold on to the most emotional parts of our memories (Kensinger & Payne, 2010).

3. Blame bad sleep on the full moon

If your sleep wasn’t up to scratch last night, perhaps it was partly down to the phase of the moon.

People often complain of worse sleep around the full moon, but until recently scientists have been sceptical.

A study by Cajochen et al., 2013, though…

“…studied 33 volunteers in two age groups in the lab while they slept. Their brain patterns were monitored while sleeping, along with eye movements and hormone secretions.”

This is what they found:

“The data show that around the full moon, brain activity related to deep sleep dropped by 30 percent. People also took five minutes longer to fall asleep, and they slept for twenty minutes less time overall.

The researchers think it may be because we have a kind of ‘moon clock’ inside us that tracks its cycles and affects our hormone levels. This is in addition to the better known circadian rhythms which affect many bodily processes during the day.

→ Read on: Bad Night’s Sleep? Blame the Full Moon

sleeping29

4. Junk food cravings

One of the dangers of not getting enough sleep is craving junk food.

Recent research from UC Berkeley scanned the brains of 24 participants after both a good and a bad night’s sleep (Greer et al., 2013).

After disturbed sleep, there was increased activity in the depths of the brain, areas which are generally associated with rewards and automatic behaviour.

It seems a lack of sleep robs people of their self-control and so their good intentions are quickly forgotten.

Hence those junk food cravings get out of control.

→ Read on: Why the Sleep-Deprived Crave Junk Food and Buy Higher Calorie Foods

5. Learn in your sleep

It’s not possible to learn something new when you sleep, like a foreign language, but you can reinforce something you already know.

Gobel et al. (2012) found that students learned to play a series of musical notes better after listening to them during a 90-minute nap.

One of the authors, Paul Reber explained:

“The critical difference is that our research shows that memory is strengthened for something you’ve already learned. Rather than learning something new in your sleep, we’re talking about enhancing an existing memory by re-activating information recently acquired.”

→ Read on: Offline Learning: How The Mind Learns During Sleep

6. Benefits of a six-minute nap

Even tiny amounts of sleep can be beneficial.

A study by Lahl (2008) found that even a short six-minute nap was enough to measurably improve performance on a test of word recall.

Tell that to the boss the next time your caught ‘resting your eyes’ at work!

sleeping

7. Night owls have lower integrity white matter

Different neural structures have been discovered between people who are night owls and early risers.

Research on 59 participants, those who were confirmed night owls (preferring late to bed and late to rise) had lower integrity of the white matter in various areas of the brain (Rosenberg et al., 2014).

Lower integrity in these areas has been linked to depression and cognitive instability.

Unfortunately work, school and other institutions mostly require early rising, which, for night owls, causes problems.

As night owls find it difficult to get to sleep early, they tend to carry large amounts of sleep debt.

In other words, they’re exhausted all the time and their brains clearly show the consequences.

→ Read on: Like to Stay Up Late? Different Neural Structures Found in the Brains of Night Owls

8. Children’s sleep

Children are processing way more information than adults because everything is so new to them.

That is why irregular bedtimes at a young age can reduce their cognitive performance.

One study had children learning a task which had a hidden pattern. After a night’s sleep they were much more likely to guess the secret pattern without being told (Wilhelm et al., 2013).

Children also outperformed adults, suggesting that sleep was more important to them for this task.

9. Adolescents need more sleep

Adolescents typically require an hour or two more sleep than adults.

If so, why do we make them get up so early for school?

One study has delayed the waking up time of adolescents at a boarding school by just 25 minutes (Boergers et al., 2013).

They found that afterwards the number of students getting more than 8 hours sleep a night jumped from 18% to 44%.

On top of this, the students experienced less daytime sleepiness, were less depressed, and found themselves using less caffeine.

→ Read on: Later School Start Times Improve Sleep and Daytime Functioning in Adolescents

10. Consolidate motor skills

When we are learning a motor skill, like playing the piano, our brains continue to process the information after we’ve finished.

In research by Allen (2012), musicians who practised a new song had improved in speed and accuracy compared with before a night’s sleep.

Like memory, a good night’s sleep can also improve motor performance.

sleeping19

11. Relationship damage

People are usually at their worst after a bad night’s sleep, but what does that do to their intimate relationships?

A new study finds that even one bad night’s sleep can be surprisingly damaging to a relationship (Gordon & Chen, 2013).

They found that even for those who were good sleepers, just a single night’s poor sleep was associated with increased relationship conflict the next day.

→ Read on: How Just One Night’s Poor Sleep Can Hurt a Relationship

12. Hidden caves open up during sleep

If sleep has such amazing restorative powers then what is going on physiologically?

New research has discovered “hidden caves” inside the brain, which open up during sleep, allowing cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) to flush out potential neurotoxins, like β-amyloid, which has been associated with Alzheimer’s disease (Xie et al., 2013).

The flushing out of toxins by the CSF may be central to sleep’s wondrous powers.

→ Read on: Hidden Caves in the Brain Open Up During Sleep to Wash Away Toxins

Last word

Last word to the playwright Wilson Mizner who said:

“The amount of sleep required by the average person is five minutes more.”

Quite right.

 

Wind Turbines are Useless, and Destructive. What were they thinking? Oh ya….$$$$$

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

Alan Moran: Wind Power FAILS on all Scores

June 28, 2014

report-card

Renewable energy as a means of reducing emissions fails two key tests
Herald Sun
Alan Moran
26 June 2014

REGULATORY change will always disadvantage some while advantaging others. But the benefits of deregulation far outpace the costs and Australia carries a weighty regulatory burden, one that has deprived us of enjoying the world’s highest living standards.

The most costly regulations are the ever-mounting environmental red tape and Australia’s unique union-dominated controls over employment conditions. The deleterious effects of these have been somewhat offset by deregulatory progress in import tariffs, for example, and in opening up areas such as ports, travel and telecommunications to greater competition. Privatisation has also helped in this regard.

Unfortunately we have gone backwards in energy supply policy with the carbon tax and forced substitution of cheap coal-generated electricity for expensive renewables. These government measures have resulted in Australian electricity prices being transformed from among the world’s lowest into one of the highest.

This has contributed to placing intense competitive pressure on industry and commerce over the past few years; households have as a result incurred higher prices for the goods and services they buy, as well as taking a direct hit from skyrocketing electricity bills.

While the Palmer United policy remains unclear it seems that the carbon tax is likely to be removed with the new Senate. The future of the other strings to these regulatory bows is less certain. Chief among these is the Renewable Energy Target (RET) under review by a panel chaired by leading businessman Dick Warburton.

The RET forces all electricity consumers to incorporate a proportion of wind and solar energy into their electricity supply. This renewable energy is three times as costly as the energy it displaces and will soon comprise 20 per cent or more of total supply. At that stage it will add 30-50 per cent to total wholesale electricity costs. The RET alone will mean household electricity bills go up by 7 per cent and those of industrial users by 10 per cent. Other state-based measures add to this cost.

The RET review has attracted some 24,000 submissions, mostly from green zealots regurgitating slogans offered up by their leaders. This group is unaware or uncaring that the renewable energy scheme means a considerable increase in electricity costs for industry and households.

Some claim the subsidies help consumers since they drive down electricity prices. But any such price reduction is similar to that which would follow from government supplying cheap bread. The price might fall but not enough to pay for the costs involved and the price falls would result in commercial suppliers ceasing to operate, creating future shortages.

Also supporting green subsidies are a number of publicly-financed bodies. Many of these, such as the cities of Melbourne and Sydney, have no expertise on the matter but their councils’ irresponsible approach to spending involves employing green personnel for vanity purposes.

Others like Climateworks and the Grattan Institute were given taxpayer funding by Labor-Greens government to promote renewable energy.

A second group of submissions is businesses and their representatives who have made investments in subsidised renewables and are keen to protect those investments and even to create additional subsidies.

The third is specific business interests, largely in aluminium, which recognise the deadly costs of the RET scheme and seek to quarantine themselves from its effects.

The IPA mining representatives and the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry form a fourth group, which notes that the renewable scheme is a horrendous waste of resources, needlessly drives up electricity costs, and finances lobbying activity that pollutes the political process. These bodies argue that the scheme should be axed immediately and all subsidy payments terminated.

Twenty years ago, the two green technologies favoured by subsidies — wind and solar — were touted as being on the verge of becoming competitive with coal, gas and oil. Almost no serious analyst nowadays believes this.

That bold but discredited technological optimism was joined with a rationale that subsidies to green energy would reduce carbon emissions. As a policy, renewable energy as a means of reducing emissions fails two key tests. It founders on the shoals of adamant refusals by other countries to embark on serious carbon emission reductions and on clear evidence that renewable policies only reduce emissions at a very high cost.

To date, Australia has wasted $20 billion in worthless renewable energy investments, mainly on windfarms but also on solar, including the rooftop panels. Just to put that in perspective, $20 billion would build 100,000 new houses. According to modelling undertaken by Acil Tasman for the RET review, unless the program is stopped immediately a further cost of $13 billion will be incurred. Of course, if we also provide subsidies to new renewable facilities, many more billions will be wasted.

Beneficiaries of the subsidies argue that unless they are maintained, Australia will suffer adversely by being regarded as a nation imposing “sovereign risk” on investors. This, so it is said, will discourage future investments. Sovereign risk is where governments seize property without proper compensation.

But changing a tax or subsidy can hardly be considered an imposition of sovereign risk. Such changes happen all the time and invariably mean losses to somebody.

Moreover we have seen policy changes in recent years that have very severe repercussions on investments.

Take the automotive industry, where reductions in industry protection, changes to industrial relations laws and the energy price hikes have caused investment write-offs amounting to billions of dollars. Or the “alcopops” industry, severely impaired by a sudden and unexpected 70 per cent tax increase. Or cigarette manufacturing, hounded from Australia by tax hikes and restraints to marketing.

We also saw the former Commonwealth government, in response to claims by the ABC about animal cruelty, dramatically close the live beef trade to Indonesia. Many graziers had to shoot their stock and average prices fell by a third.

The victims of these government activities got no compensation. Importantly, nor did the measures bring a rise in investment risk.

While the less government meddling there is in the economy the better, the fact is taxes, subsidies and tax rates do change. No government can reasonably expect to bind its successors to paying a worthless subsidy for 15 years as is nominally the case with the RET. And no investor would sensibly expect this.

The renewable energy scam, alongside the carbon tax, was one of the many targets of the late Ray Evans, whose funeral is today. He was a co-founder of the Lavoisier Group established to combat misinformation about climate change. The current Shadow Resources Minister, Gary Gray, was a former member. Ray did not live to see the costly green edifices of economic self-harm dismantled. But the new Senate, in spite of resistance from the Greens and Labor’s leadership, will begin the necessary economic repairs next week.

Alan Moran is the Director, Deregulation at the Institute of Public Affairs
Herald Sun

In addition to the fine analysis above, Alan also had this to say on the Catallaxy blog:

Many governments are seeking ways of escaping the wanton cost impositions irresponsible green predecessors have bequeathed them.  None more so than Spain, the former poster child of green energy.  Following its election the current Spanish Government has wound-back previously agreed green energy subsidies.  This has prompted claims of retrospectivity and sovereign risk, including anappeal to Brussels.

The Spanish risk premium seems unaffected by this and has in fact been declining.

Australia’s renewables rort, with seemingly guaranteed high returns, has provided a bonanza for many union pension funds, but these have mainly provided the capital and sold back the forecast stream of electricity.  Those most at risk from a termination of the scheme are the electricity retailers, who have taken long-term contracts on the wind power as part of the portfolio of forward buying to cover the requirements imposed by the current legislation.

Renewables and climate change matters were among the many issues of government imposed costs and liberty curtailments addressed by the late Ray Evans whose funeral is today.
Catallaxy Files

In his Herald Sun piece, Alan refers to modelling by “Acil Tasman”. The firm is now called ACIL Allen and it produced modelling which is fundamentally flawed – grossly underestimating the impact of the mandatory RET on retail power prices – simply because it failed to consider the impact of the Power Purchase Agreements struck between wind power generators and retailers that sets the price paid for wind power at rates 3-4 times the average wholesale price for power (see our post here).

Alan refers to the risk faced by Union Super Funds and retailers. He could have also included the major banks who have lent to wind power outfits (see our post here).

Any banker, Union Super fund manager or retailer who thinks they can safely rely on Clive Palmer’s current “support” for the mandatory RET as a sound basis for their future financial health should think again. Big Clive took the Greens and their acolytes for fools over his brief brush with an Emissions Trading Scheme – which blasted like a comet across the night sky – but went straight to the political dustbin. Anyone betting the house on Clive Palmer’s next move is a very brave punter, indeed.

clive palmer sleeping

Scottish Government Rejects Appeals for 2 Wind Projects….Sanity Returning?

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

Shawpark & Brunta Hill wind farm appeals rejected

Despite an appeal by PNE Wind UK, two proposed wind farms in the Scottish Borders have been rejected by the Scottish Government.

Wind Farm Appeals Rejected - Westruther 

The planned wind farms at Shawpark near Stow  and Brunta Hill near Westruther (with a total of 17 turbines) was initially rejected by Scottish Borders Council. PNE Wind UK, as expected, declined to accept this ruling and raised an appeal knowing that the odds were in their favour as, historically, most appeals have been upheld.

This time, however, the result of the Scottish Government reporter’s examination has been the ruling that the plans for both schemes have been turned down.

Councillors refused the Brunta Hill development due to its “significant and unacceptable” impact on the area and, fortunately, the Scottish Government has agreed the wind farm locations were inconsistent with the local development plan.

Commenting on behalf of PNE Wind UK, Gemma Hamilton project development manager, said the company was “extremely disappointed” by the decision.

At least this section of the Borders can still lay claim to having the Southern Upland Way as a tourist attraction…………… Rather than the Southern Turbine Way that exists to the west.  I am very happy to see that these wind farms have been refused along with the other recent refusals in the Borders but I have to ask why there have been no successes of this kind in Dumfries and Galloway.  Is it that D&G are too far away from Edinburgh and not on any of the scenic access routes to the capitol?  Answers on a postcard please………………….

Those Brilliant Aussies, Deliver the Final Death Blow to the Wind Industry!

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

Wind Industry Doomed as Smokin’ Joe Hockey Shuts Down CEFC Lending for Wind Farms

June 29, 2014 by  Leave a Comment

gore and palmer

Having killed the “carbon” tax in an eye-blink – a business killing and family punishing $23 a tonne tax on carbon dioxide gas – Clive Palmer vowed to use his ability to block legislation proposed by the Coalition in the Senate to prevent any changes to the mandatory Renewable Energy Target; and the abolition of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.

Retaining the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the mandatory RET makes no sense for a political party which helped to kill the “carbon” tax because of the punishment it caused to businesses and households through spiralling power bills. Since big Clive’s announcement, The Australian has produced a plethora of articles to much the same effect.

For our overseas followers, Clive’s 3 PUP Senators – plus their ally, Ricky Muir of the Motoring Enthusiasts’ Party – are able to block any legislation put up by the Coalition in the Senate, where Labor and the Greens oppose it; or, conversely, to side with the Coalition and get legislation passed where Labor and the Greens choose to block it, with the support of 2 of the cross-benchers, like John Madigan and Nick Xenophon. That leaves Palmer with the ability to throw his considerable weight against or behind Coalition backed legislation. On that matrix, with Palmer’s support, any attempt to kill the CEFC – a Green/Labor created renewables slush fund – is bound to fail.

But – in politics – there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

Treasurer, Joe Hockey and Finance Minister, Mathias Cormann had planned to sell off the CEFC to the private finance sector. The loans written by the CEFC amount to assets on its books which could be sold, at a price, to any financial institution ready to take on the risk. No doubt, the sale price would be at a considerable discount to the current face value of the loans, but Hockey and Cormann apparently took the view that it was better that some other sucker take the risk; rather than leave the Australian taxpayer exposed to the CEFC’s reckless approach to lending. A sale would have also prevented any further risk exposure.

Big Clive’s declaration that he would prevent the abolition of the CEFC has thrown a spanner in the works; but only briefly. Hockey and Cormann have identified that the Coalition has the power to direct the CEFC to lend to certain types of projects and, more importantly, to prevent it from lending to others.

Hockey has already declared his hatred of “utterly offensive” wind farms and is hip to the fact that wind power is inefficient, insanely expensive and fails in its principal claim of reducing CO2 emissions in the electricity sector (see our posts here and here).

No prizes, then, for guessing which “renewable” generation source won’t be getting any more funds from the CEFC. Here’s The Australian on the Hockey/Cormann wind farm attack.

Direct action to benefit from Clean Energy Finance Corporation funds
The Australian
Sid Maher
28 June 2014

THE Clean Energy Finance Corporation is likely to be directed away from lending to wind farms in favour of programs that support the Coalition’s “direct action” plan such as energy-efficiency schemes and leasing for solar hot water systems.

In the wake of Clive Palmer’s declaration this week that his senators will vote to retain the CEFC, it has emerged that Joe Hockey and Finance Minister Mathias Cormann have the power to alter the CEFC’s investment mandate without parliament being able to reverse the move.

Senior government sources have told The Weekend Australian the CEFC could be instructed to favour direct action-style programs such as providing leasing for households to install solar hot water systems and for energy-efficiency programs instead of wind farms. Twenty-two per cent of the CEFC’s loans in its first year were for wind projects.

The likely change of direction for the CEFC comes as funding for the $2.55 billion Emissions Reduction Fund, the centrepiece of the Coalition’s direct-action policy, was contained in an appropriation bill that passed both houses of parliament this week.

However, the mechanism for distributing the funds is contained in amendments to the Carbon Farming Initiative, which is yet to pass the Senate.

Government sources remain hopeful of having the bill passed, despite Mr Palmer’s announcement that he would not support direct action because it was a “waste of money’’.

If direct action is blocked, with the money already allocated in an appropriation bill, an alternative plan is to distribute money to the states for carbon abatement programs under Section 96 of the Constitution.

Under Section 96, the federal government is able to provide tied grants to the states.

This would enable direct-action funding to be paid to the states for programs addressing energy efficiency, boosting soil carbon initiatives and increasing the take up of solar hot water systems.

In the wake of Mr Palmer’s announcement this week that he would support the abolition of the carbon tax, it is likely to be abolished either on July 14 or soon after.

The Palmer United Party leader’s call for an emissions trading scheme rated at zero appears doomed after failing to gain government support.

Mr Palmer is also backing the retention of the CEFC and the Climate Change Authority and will not support changes to the Renewable Energy Target before 2016 – after the next election is due.

Environment Minister Greg Hunt on Thursday split the CEFC repeal bill from the main body of the carbon tax repeal bills. The former appears set to be debated by the Senate after the main carbon tax repeal bills.

Under the legislation establishing the CEFC, the Treasurer and Finance Minister can provide direction on matters of risk and return, eligibility criteria for investments, allocation of investments between different types of clean-energy technologies, the types of financial instruments that may be invested in and “broad operational matters’’.

While the government can alter the investment mandate of the CEFC, existing legislation guarantees the CEFC the ability to write up to $10 billion in loans over the next five years.

The CEFC legislation allows the corporation to write $2bn of loans every year and, if it fails to reach the ceiling, the unused portion can be carried over to the next year.

As the political debate over its future has raged, the CEFC has written to all sides of parliament, including the crossbench senators, arguing its case for survival. It has also had meetings with MPs on its operations.

While the government can change the investment mandate, its ability to change the CEFC board, whose members have been given five-year terms, is limited.

Since it began operating from July last year, the CEFC has written $700 million in loans and has mobilised more than $1.8bn of private sector investment, for a total of $2.5bn in projects.

It argues its abolition would cost the government $100m a year in lost revenue.
The Australian

STT hears that Al Gore’s presence on the podium alongside Clive Palmer last week was orchestrated (and paid for) by our favourite whipping boys over at Infigen (aka Babcock and Brown) – Gore’s “stunned-fish-out-of water” performance was heralded by Infigen’s spin masters as a propaganda coup.

After the Gore/Palmer circus of the bizarre died down – the wind industry and its parasites were crowing about their “political masterstroke” in having Palmer announce his support for the mandatory RET and the CEFC.

Talk about your all-time backfires.

The Hockey/Cormann manoeuvre could well be the killer blow we’ve been looking for.

It’s other peoples’ money that started the great wind power fraud; and its depriving wind power outfits of access to other peoples’ money that will end it.

The CEFC represents the ONLY source of funds available to wind farm developers.

Wind power outfits have been unable to obtain funds from commercial lenders, simply because retailers stopped signing Power Purchase Agreements over 18 months ago (see our post here).

In the absence of a PPA, a wind farm developer has nothing to offer by way of valuable security for their loan with a bank: commercial banks will simply not lend in the absence of the security provided by a long-term (15-25 year) PPA. That, rather significant, detail has never troubled the CEFC, which is prepared to lend on unsecured terms at rates far below those which would be demanded by commercial banks lending on the same terms (see our post here).

By preventing the CEFC from lending to wind power outfits, the Coalition have virtually guaranteed that no new wind farms will be built in the foreseeable future; at least where the wind power outfits involved do not hold a PPA.

Now that’s a “coup”!

Joe Hockey and Mathias Cormann

 

Faux-green Eco-fanatics are bad for our Environment, and everything in it!

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

Never-Ending Green Disasters.

Newton’s 3rd law of motion, if applied to bureaucracy, would state: “Whenever politicians attempt to force change on a market, the long-big-govtterm results will be equal and opposite to those intended”.

This law explains the never-ending Green energy policy disasters.

Greens have long pretended to be guardians of wild natural places, but their legislative promotion of ethanol biofuel has resulted in massive clearance of tropical forests for palm oil, sugar cane and soy beans.  Their policies have also managed to covert cheap food into expensive motor fuel and degraded land devoted to bush, pastures or crops into mono-cultures of corn for bio-fuel. This has wasted water, increased world hunger and corrupted the political process for zero climate benefits.

Greens also pretend to be protectors of wildlife and habitat but their force-feeding of wind power has uglified wild places and disturbed peaceful neighbourhoods with noisy windmills and networks of access roads and transmission lines. These whirling bird-choppers kill thousands of raptors and bats without attracting the penalties that would be applied heavily to any other energy producers – all this damage to produce trivial amounts of intermittent, expensive and blackout-prone electricity supplies.

Greens have long waged a vicious war on coal, but their parallel war on nuclear power and the predictably intermittent performance of wind/solar energy has forced power generators to turn to hydro-carbon gases to backup green power. But Greens have also made war on shale-gas fracking – this has left countries like Germany with no option but to return to reliable economical coal, or increase their usage of Russian gas and French nuclear power. Their war on coal has lifted world coal usage to a 44 year high.

Greens also say they support renewable energy, but they oppose any expansion of hydro-power, the best renewable energy option. For example, they scuppered the Gordon-below-Franklin hydro-electric project, which would have given Tasmania everlasting cheap green electricity. But they never mention their awkward secret – the Basslink under-sea cable goes to Loy Yang power station in Victoria and allows Tasmania to import coal-powered electricity from the mainland.

Robbie Burns warned us over 200 years ago:

“The best laid schemes of Mice and Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!”

Climate Alarmists Try to Push Their “Religion”, on the Rest of Us! Just Say NO!

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

CO2 GOOD; CLIMATE CHANGE BUNK;

GREENS ARE RAGING EXTREMISTS,

SAYS GREENPEACE CO-FOUNDER

by  19 Jun 2014

“Climate change” is a theory for which there is “no scientific proof at all” says the co-founder of Greenpeace. And the green movement has become a “combination of extreme political ideology and religious fundamentalism rolled into one.”

Patrick Moore, a Canadian environmentalist who helped found Greenpeace in the Seventies but subsequently left in protest at its increasingly extreme, anti-scientific, anti-capitalist stance, argues that the green position on climate change fails the most basic principles of the scientific method.

“The certainty among many scientists that humans are the main cause of climate change, including global warming, is not based on the replication of observable events. It is based on just two things, the theoretical effect of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, predominantly carbon dioxide, and the predictions of computer models using those theoretical calculations. There is no scientific “proof” at all.”

Moore goes on to list some key facts about “climate change” which are ignored by true believers.

1. The concentration of CO2 in the global atmosphere is lower today, even including human emissions, than it has been during most of the existence of life on Earth.

2. The global climate has been much warmer than it is today during most of the existence of life on Earth. Today we are in an interglacial period of the Pleistocene Ice Age that began 2.5 million years ago and has not ended.

3. There was an Ice Age 450 million years ago when CO2 was about 10 times higher than it is today.

4. Humans evolved in the tropics near the equator. We are a tropical species and can only survive in colder climates due to fire, clothing and shelter.

5. CO2 is the most important food for all life on earth. All green plants use CO2 to produce the sugars that provide energy for their growth and our growth. Without CO2 in the atmosphere carbon-based life could never have evolved.

6. The optimum CO2 level for most plants is about 1600 parts per million, four times higher than the level today. This is why greenhouse growers purposely inject the CO2-rich exhaust from their gas and wood-fired heaters into the greenhouse, resulting in a 40-80 per cent increase in growth.

7. If human emissions of CO2 do end up causing significant warming (which is not certain) it may be possible to grow food crops in northern Canada and Russia, vast areas that are now too cold for agriculture.

8. Whether increased CO2 levels cause significant warming or not, the increased CO2 levels themselves will result in considerable increases in the growth rate of plants, including our food crops and forests.

9. There has been no further global warming for nearly 18 years during which time about 25 per cent of all the CO2 ever emitted by humans has been added to the atmosphere. How long will it remain flat and will it next go up or back down? Now we are out of the realm of facts and back into the game of predictions.

Moore makes his remarks in the foreword to a new book by bestselling Australian geologist Dr Ian Plimer called Not For Greens. The book describes the various, complex industrial processes which go into the making of just a single teaspoon, starting with the mining of various metals.

If Greenpeace’s membership remained true to their principles they would have to eat with their bare hands because, as Moore notes, they are opposed to mining in all its forms.

“If you ask them for the name of any mine that is operating in an environmentally acceptable standard you will draw a blank. They have become so cornered by their own extremism that they must deny their daily use of cell phones, computers, bicycles, rapid transit, and yes, the simple teaspoon.