Eco-warriors worried more about tailpipe emissions than the depleted uranium coming from the pipe at the front

“Who do you think you are kidding Mr Hitler“…remember the old ‘Dad’s Army‘ tune? Well, it seems that the UK military believes in order to recruit the next generation of soldiers it must take a new approach to appeal to the eco-credentials of those graduating. It is a touch odd to believe that any prospective new squaddies might hold grave concerns about what comes out of the tailpipe of their tank rather than the depleted uranium shells they might fire from the 120mm pipe at the front.

General Sir Mark Carleton-Smith said that “the challenge and genuine commercial opportunity is to aim high and lead the world in the development of military equipment which is not only battle-winning but also environmentally sustainable.”

Truth be told is that is unlikely that young, fresh out of school eco-warriors would be the types that would enlist in the first place.

CM is sure that Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping will be clamouring to follow the UK’s lead and invest in the next generation of solar-powered wafer-thin armoured tanks and carbon-free balloons which will drop virtue signalling leaflets printed in soy ink on recycled paper encouraging our enemy to embrace love, compassion, diversity and inclusion.

And student loans should be footed by the taxpayers?

OK, so University of California Berkeley is offering a course (that will be counted towards a degree) in The Right to be Lazy: shifts in Marxist thought

What better way to bash those capitalists than become even more lazy than they already are.

It is run by the University’s DeCal program which is run by students to offer classes that aren’t available in the school curriculum. De stands for ‘democratic education’

It notes,

“Each semester there are over 150 courses on topics ranging from Taiwanese Language to Simpsons and Philosophy. Around 3000-4000 UC Berkeley students take DeCals each semester. DeCals are an excellent way of meeting the University’s minimum unit requirement, developing a new or past interest, and meeting peers in a small, comfortable environment.“

CM never knew there were two philosophers named Homer.

Should we be surprised when students applying for jobs in the real world wonder why they can’t catch a break when prospective employers ask to see their academic transcripts littered with irrelevant subjects.

And the Democrats think Americans ought to foot the bill for student loans so they can learn about Homer Simpson when a Netflix subscription would be 1/100th the price?

Albo moves from dumb to dumber
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Oh boy! Here we go again. Adjusting targets to a pointless exercise to an even more irrelevant one, albeit at a massive net cost to all Aussies.
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This is the trend of Australian energy price inflation and manufacturing jobs over the last two decades. Notice anything? A correlation of about 90%. Energy prices go up, manufacturing comes down. We have shed 250,000 manufacturing jobs in the last two decades. Green jobs have not replaced them. Not even 1/10th of the jobs lost as this chart from the ABS shows.
The trend is the same in Denmark, which is an even big renewables user. The correlation is even higher. Denmark has shed 200,000+ jobs following green madness. No green jobs haven’t offset this either.
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Is it a surprise that prices, where more renewable energy is used, are higher than those places that don’t? If it weren’t for the weak $A, these numbers would look even worse.
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Labor leader Anthony Albanese thinks that shifting the focus away from 45% renewable by 2030 to net zero emissions by 2050 is a game-changer. Why can’t these politicians count or look at the experience at home and abroad? What is this obsession to take Australia’s 0.00001345% CO2 contribution to the atmosphere to zero? How many billions more should we spend for absolutely no return? Does he not realise that Australia has the third-highest clean energy spending per capita already? Why all the self-flagellation?

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Our per capita emissions are going down relative to many neighbours. Don’t be fooled by the Europeans either. Biomass (which is as dirty as lignite (brown coal)) gets special dispensation from the EU hacks if a tree is planted for every one burned. So even though the tree that is planted will take at least 50 years to be able to replace what was burnt, fear not, creative stats are ok in Brussels.
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Ahh, but Germany is the country we should all aspire to be, no? Well actually, no. In 2007 Germany forecast that 2020 residential electricity prices would be approximately 16 Eurocents. Today they trade at c.31 Eurocents. Merkel’s policies to phase out all nuke power after the Fukushima disaster. Der Spiegel, a normally left-leaning journal wrote in a two-part series. 

Part 1 – Germany Failure on the Road to a Renewable Future

“But the sweeping idea has become bogged down in the details of German reality. The so-called Energiewende, the shift away from nuclear in favour of renewables, the greatest political project undertaken here since Germany’s reunification, is facing failure. In the eight years since Fukushima, none of Germany’s leaders in Berlin have fully thrown themselves into the project, not least the chancellor. Lawmakers have introduced laws, decrees and guidelines, but there is nobody to coordinate the Energiewende, much less speed it up. And all of them are terrified of resistance from the voters, whenever a wind turbine needs to be erected or a new high-voltage transmission line needs to be laid out.”

“Germany’s Federal Court of Auditors is even more forthright about the failures. The shift to renewables, the federal auditors say, has cost at least 160 billion euros in the last five years. Meanwhile, the expenditures “are in extreme disproportion to the results,” Federal Court of Auditors President Kay Scheller said last fall, although his assessment went largely unheard in the political arena. Scheller is even concerned that voters could soon lose all faith in the government because of this massive failure.”

There is also such an irony when these mad green schemes encounter scourge from animal rights groups. Former Green’s leader Bob Brown knows the feeling,

“The bird of prey [red kite], with its elegantly forked tail, enjoys strict protection in Germany…Red kites are migratory, returning from the south in the spring, but they don’t return reliably every year. The mayor would have been happy if the bird had shown up quickly so its flight patterns could be analyzed and plans for the wind park adjusted accordingly. It would have been expensive, but at least construction of the project could finally get underway.

But if the bird doesn’t return, the project must be suspended. Spies has to wait a minimum of five years to see if the creature has plans for the nest after all. Which means the wind park could finally be built in 2024, fully 12 years after the project got underway.”

Part 2 – German Failure on the Road to a Renewable Future

“An additional factor exacerbating the renewables crisis is the fact that two decades after the enactment of the Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG), 20-year guaranteed feed-in tariffs will begin expiring next year for the first wind, solar and biomass facilities. Some of those who installed solar panels back then — often farmers and homeowners — are still receiving 50 cents for every kilowatt-hour they feed into the grid. Today, larger facilities receive just 5 cents per kilowatt-hour.

The state has redistributed gigantic sums of money, with the EEG directing more than 25 billion euros each year to the operators of renewable energy facilities. But without the subsidies, operating wind turbines and solar parks will hardly be worth it anymore. As is so often the case with such subsidies: They trigger an artificial boom that burns fast and leaves nothing but scorched earth in their wake.”

That doesn’t include the 360,000 German households in energy poverty.

As Australia continues to expand the renewables portion of our power grid, the lessons from the Germans couldn’t be clearer – market distortions and misguided investments only lead to marginal results on the back of massive investment to stop something that can’t be controlled. German taxpayers have been swindled and Aussies are sleepwalking down the same path.

So Albo, the solution is simple. Do the math. Read about Germany’s beta testing of renewables and stop this crusade to prevent something that no matter what target you pick, zero will be the output. Just look at the price of energy relative to core CPI since we went renewables mad in 2000. That chart is not a vote winner.

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The only hot air Albo needs to worry about is that emanating from the Labor Party policy room. Drop all of this group think.

Was the CIA too white at the time of 9/11?

Central Intelligence Agency

According to the BBC, it was. The UK taxpayer-funded broadcaster is buying into this hypothesis that the CIA may have been too “white” and not diverse enough to spot the terrorist activity around September 11, 2001. Weren’t the whites that founded the agency in 1947 the same thinkers who had the nous to use “diversity” (Navaho Native Americans) to devastating effect to transmit sensitive information during WWII? That was 54 years prior to the 9/11 attacks.

What a spectacular own goal. How could the BBC be so careless? It should be completely down to the CIA’s white supremacist backgrounds that led to an agency completely driven by irrational fear to facilitate any old excuse to bomb the crap out of shithole nations. Does CM need to do the BBC’s work for them?

Passing the CIA aptitude tests are bound to be pretty tough in the intelligence areas. The day the CIA starts to prioritise skin tones, sexual proclivity and what is between the legs of candidates as opposed to what is between their ears one should expect even more misses to result. It might be too late – find the CIA Diversity webpage here.

Diversity of thought is all that matters. The BBC would do well to seek introspection. If the CIA had been predominantly staffed by blacks and Hispanics, would this article have ever seen the light of day? Of course not. Good to know BBC practices racism. Or is the journalist gunning for a position on the NY Times editorial board alongside the sweet #cancelwhitepeople Sarah Jeong?

The profile of an arsonist

Well, well, well. Some school kids in Queensland have been busted for arson. While the “blame everything on climate change” brigade keeps making links to global warming and bushfires, the truth is that global area consumed by bushfire in the last 18 years has fallen 24%.

The Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) notes that 85% of fires are either accidentally, suspiciously or deliberately lit. The US Department of the Interior data shows 90%. So it is consistent with Aussie pyromania.

The AIC notes, “most arsonists are white male, mid-20s, patchy employment record, often above average intelligence, but poor academic achievement and poor social development skills…56% of convicted structural arsonists and 37% of bushfire arsonists in NSW had a prior conviction for a previous offence.“

The AIC might need to lower the age bracket to include brainwashed school kids spoon fed propaganda by activist teachers.

If the left really wanted to add to the list of climate change causality they could add white privilege to the growing excuses, sorry proof:

Pets

Cannibalism

Toxic Masculinity

Gender

Angela Merkel’s shakes

CM’s bus was late today. Maybe climate change is to blame. Or maybe Russian interference…both!?

Our education is the problem, not the climate

You know things have got to be bad when Zali Steggall OAM MP is launching The Australia Institute’s (TAI) ‘Climate of the Nation 2019‘ report which claims 81% of Aussies are concerned that climate change will impact droughts and flooding. Huh? The IPCC has already admitted, “available climate data do not show any increasing trend in extreme weather events (e.g. extreme precipitation, extreme drought, thunderstorms, winter blizzards) in any part of the world.”

Did TAI conduct the survey at the Australian Medical Association (AMA) which is now trying to dictate climate policy? Between the RBA, APRA and the AMA, we might need a beauty contest to see which of them takes over at the Department of Environment & Energy. CM is surprised that the AMA hasn’t demanded to take over the organization of the Royal Easter Show from the Royal Agricultural Society now they are experts in food security!

Why do people get so embroiled in talking about the “science being settled”. OK, let’s assume it is. We use all of the well publicized and peer-reviewed data scrapes from the IPCC reports, the EU’s in house statistics bureau, Eurostat, and the EIA.

We only need a basic Year 7 grasp of elementary mathematics to educate on the facts. The IPCC claim that CO2, as a proportion of the atmosphere, is 0.0415%. It also tells us that human-made CO2 is 3% of the total. 97% is natural. Australia for its sins is 1.08% of human-made global CO2 emissions.

So, 0.0415% x 3% x 1.08% = 0.00001345%. Let’s forget the science and say it was the interest earned on a 20-year compounding deposit of $10,000. If you doubled or halved the above percentage across that deposit you’d get virtually the exact same result in all three scenarios.

Farting cows are no different. Methane is an even smaller part of the atmosphere. 722 parts per billion. Animals (in total) make up 13% of the methane produced meaning that 0.00000939% of the atmosphere is down to animals. Angela Merkel was imploring Chinese don’t grow a meat habit so she can save the planet (aka justify a meat tax increase at home). By the way, Australia has 26mn cattle out of a total of 1 billion worldwide. So Australia is 2.6% of global head of cattle. So 2.6% x 0.00000939% = 0.00000024%. That is a disingenuous number because it doesn’t factor horses, ducks, sheep, household pets and budgies. Perhaps Africans need to educate lions to move to plant-based meat substitutes and leave water buffalo alone.

Do people realize that rice paddies account for more methane than cows? Where are the environmentalists and climate alarmists demanding that Asian nations, 40% of the global population, must cease eating rice? Better tell Mother Nature that she creates 45% of the methane out there through peat bogs and tundras.

How ironic that Zali Steggall, the Member for Warringah (home to the Northern Beaches Council (NBC)) is TAI’s champion. Did she read that NBC declared a climate emergency after having a sermon delivered by Tim Flannery, who has made countless dud predictions leading to the waste of billions of spending in desal plants?

In the  2017/18  NBC annual report it states the council saved 293 tons of CO2. Given that Australia produces around 561m tons, this amazing effort has meant a reduction of 0.0000522% of Australia’s total. Put it against Australia’s CO2 impact vs the entire atmosphere means that Northern Beaches have hammered home a mammoth 0.000000000699857% saving! Yes, 9 zeroes. C’mon Zali, you should be citing this impactless tokenism in your address. By the way, we’re still waiting for wind farms on Balmoral Beach.

The range of claims made in the TAI report speaks to little more than agenda based data gathering with leading questions.

For instance, if Labor was destroyed in the federal election over Adani, how could 73% of Queenslanders possibly want Australia’s coal-fired power stations phased out as soon as possible or gradually? Did the pollsters mistakenly manage to interview Bob Brown’s anti-Adani convoy which skewed the findings? If you want to get answers to questions that effectively make claims (climate change already causing) it is easy if it is written as though it is a fact to begin with,

“Melting of the Polar ice caps” (51%) – IPCC has already climbed down from such claims
“More heatwaves and extreme hot days” (48%) – no consistent data on this. 
“Destruction of the Great Barrier Reef” (44%) – it isn’t happening – just ask Peter Ridd or the Vice-Chancellor at James Cook University
“More droughts affecting crop production & food supply” (42%) – global crop yields growing
“More Bushfires” (36%) – fallen over time
“Water Shortages in the Cities” (30%) – haven’t experienced one 

Taking bushfires as an example. Facts from the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) show that 85% of bushfires are either deliberately, suspiciously or accidentally lit. The AIC sees that while the data is somewhat sketchy that the most common profile of arsonists was “white male, mid-20s, patchy employment record, often above average intelligence, but poor academic achievement and poor social development skills…56% of convicted structural arsonists and 37% of bushfire arsonists in NSW had a prior conviction for a previous offence. ”

In the US those figures are around 90%. A study in the journal Science determined the global burnt area from fires, rather than growing, had declined by roughly 25% from 1999 to 2017.

So do the stats support global warming or successful mainstream media coverage sensationalising the truth to feed narratives? Don’t get started on the Amazon fires. CM wrote about it here.

Energy source rank went Wind (76%), Solar (58%) & Hydro (39%) although nuclear power ranked above coal and gas. Surprise, surprise.  (p.11).

Apparently, 64% of Aussies want to be net-zero emissions by 2050. To do that we’d need to stop all mining, end farming and phase out all fossil-fuel power from transport to power generation. Just think of the UK’s plan to do this. Going to be a bit hard when 85% of British households rely on gas to heat their homes. Will the power grid hold up to a switch to electric heating?

On p.25, TAI makes reference to the Icelandic glacier, Ok, that lost its status 5 years ago. According to the UN Chronicle, “The sudden surging of glaciers is not related to climatic fluctuations, and surges can take place even at times when glaciers retreat. This is the usual behaviour of some glaciers and can not be evidence of an impending surge… unfortunately, direct observations of a change in the movement of a glacier at the onset of a surge are still very rare, and the causes for surges are not yet clear…It should be emphasized that the problem of climate change is extremely difficult to understand, and it has still not been possible to know what factors in the past decades — natural or anthropogenic — have caused the warming. There are still many uncertainties in solving this problem. IPCC estimates are rather wide in their range of accuracy and, therefore, cannot predict with confidence…at least not in the coming decades and centuries.”

Maybe we just need to accept that China produces more GHG in two weeks than we do in a year. At the rate it is going, by 2030 it will likely be closer to one week. Once again folks, education seems a bigger problem than climate change. Basic fractions are more valuable than deep knowledge of climate science. Even using numbers supplied by the organisations they constantly espouse as the oracle, the minuscule impacts we can have are never mentioned. Tokenism is somehow virtuous.

Long Way Up for Harley

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Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman are apparently planning to ride electric Harley-Davidson Livewire motorcycles from South America to Los Angeles. CM loved the first two series – even bought a BMW R1200GS Adventure in the knowledge of what the bike could do. CM rode to every prefecture in Japan on that bike which to date has been one of the fondest memories of living there 20 years. Experiencing different cultures and places that contrast the crowded cities of Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya.

The duo is looking to replicate the successful formula of ‘Long Way Round‘ (riding from London to NY) and its sequel ‘Long Way Down‘ (riding from John O’Groats to Cape Town). Unfortunately, the latest offering is unlikely to whip up the same cult status of the originals. Why?

The first two chapters focused on serious hardcore off-roading through the likes of Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Siberia and Africa with all manner of struggles, mishaps and adventures along the way. BMW’s GS series motorcycles did a roaring trade off the back of the success of this trip. It was beta tested to the extreme. It remains BMW’s best selling motorcycle even today.

Unfortunately, given the diabolical long term decline trend in unit sales at Harley-Davidson, it is unlikely that an electric bike with a limited range and next to no luggage carrying capability will make sense in resurrecting the former glories of Milwaukee’s divine franchise. Although it is in line with the rudderless board at H-D which CM has made reference to multiple times.

Harley is planning to launch an adventure bike to compete with the BMW GS, so why hasn’t it chosen that so the brand can promote capabilities which would bring far more attention to the brand’s new capabilities? Will it camp or just check into 5-star hotels with wall sockets?

Sorry, but a bulk of Harley owners want to be seen as leather-clad rebels, not soy latte sipping trendies. Harley-Davidson is probably one of the very few brands that customers are willing to tattoo to their bodies. That is brand power! Furthermore, the whole point of owning a Harley was to enable owners to hide in their mancaves looking and tinker for hours to get peace and quiet from the trouble and strife. Plugging in the Livewire to a wall socket is not the game-changer product Harley needs and will only force husbands to discuss for hours whether ivory or off-beige would be the best tile colour for the bathroom. It will be the worst decision of his life and force a trade-in to fossil-fuel power. 

Harley would be better off buying a scooter maker if it wants to go down the electric route. If Harley analysed its own history it would recall it tried to patent its distinctive sound. How soon it forgets.

The Long Way Up move looks like a massive marketing exercise whereby Ewan and Charley are getting a small fortune to promote a bike that won’t transform Harley in the slightest. CM understands Harley needs to totally revamp its approach to markets but electricity is as far removed from its core brand proposition as to beggar belief.

CM has always said that Harley needs to get back in touch and listen to its core customer base, the very thing Willie Davidson did in the dark days when Harley nearly went bust in the 1980s. That seminal but simple strategy by the founder’s grandson saved Harley.

Often the most sensible business strategies focus not around trying to be something they’re not but celebrating and embracing exactly what they are. Brands have spent a lifetime emulating Harley. Why channel a wonky Taiwanese white goods maker who dabbles in Uber Eats carrying commuter junk?