Utopia, you are standing in it!

Oil extraction [image credit: ewg.org]
A recent energy conference was told: “The world will attain the 100 million barrels a day mark of [oil] consumption later this year, much sooner than we all earlier projected.” This report notes that petrochemicals ‘are required to manufacture many parts of the modern energy system, including solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, thermal insulation and electric vehicles’.

Petrochemicals are set to account for more than a third of the growth in world oil demand to 2030, and nearly half the growth to 2050, adding nearly 7 million barrels of oil a day by then, reports Green Car Congress.

They are also poised to consume an additional 56 billion cubic meters (bcm) of natural gas by 2030, and 83 bcm by 2050.

The Institute for Energy Research (IER) has a comprehensive database detailing environmentalist groups nationwide and the millions (if not billions) of dollars they funnel to different causes, such as anti-fossil fuel campaigns. The Energy Editor of The Daily Caller reviewed IER’s information and here is some of what he has uncovered:

The Energy Foundation handed out $444 million in grants and the Sea Change Foundation doled out $373 million. The Energy Foundation got funding from liberal billionaire Tom Steyer’s charitable trust from 2009 to 2013, the group disclosed on its website.

Steyer, a deep-pocketed environmental activist, is leading an effort to impeach President Donald Trump. The former Hillary Clinton campaign bundler has poured millions of his own fortune into his “Need To Impeach” campaign.

The Sea Change Foundation has been targeted by Congress over potential ties to Russian oligarchs. House lawmakers asked the Department of the Treasury to investigate a…

You don’t need to be a journalist, Mid-East analyst or expert of any kind to come up with a list of practical steps ‘protesters’ participating in the Hamas organised Great Return March can take to save Palestinian lives.

Here are just a few: 

1. Stop firing at soldiers on the border.
2. Stop throwing grenades and other explosive devices at soldiers on the border.
3. Stop attempting to damage the security fence and infiltrate into Israel in order to kill Jews.

We don’t mean to be cheeky, but to introduce a larger point: that the Guardian’s coverage of the region is characterised, as much as any other factor, by the denial of Palestinian agency, with reports invariably describing the cause of Gaza’s woes as some sort of act of nature or, much more often, the result of Israeli malevolence. 

Reports on Palestinian deaths and injuries during the Gaza border riots which have taken…

Before exposing his moral indignation about the Taxpayers’ Union using false names to file Official Information Act requests, Radio New Zealand’s Guyon Espiner should have consulted  the publisher of No Right Turn.

This blog and the Taxpayers Union are poles apart, ideologically.

But political commentator Malcolm  Harbrow – who blogs under the nom-de-plumeIdiot/Savant – is an indefatigable champion of the public’s right to request information from public agencies under the OIA and a stern critic of agencies which fail to meet their legal obligations to provide the information requested.

He was astonished by the thrust of an article, published by the New Zealand Herald under the byline of one David Fisher and beguilingly headed How right-wing lobby group NZ Taxpayers’ Union used false identities to make OIA request – and how it got caught.

This article was the prompt for Espiner, on Morning Report today, grilling Taxpayers Union chief…

Credit: NASA
Meet ‘The Goblin’. This body’s maximum distance from the Sun is a massive 2300 times further out than Earth’s.

A newly spotted dwarf planet, 2015 TG387, adds to the mounting evidence that an unseen super-Earth prowls the edge of the solar system, reports Cnet.

Astronomers have found a small object far beyond Pluto that orbits the sun in a lonely, oblong loop, a discovery that supports the notion of a larger, more distant planet — often referred to as Planet X — wandering the edge of our solar system.

The September 22^nd edition of the documentary series ‘Our World’ aired on the BBC World News channel and the BBC News channel was titled ‘Gaza Dreams’.

“With nearly two million people living in miserable conditions in Gaza, the Israeli blockade has taken its toll on mental health there. 
Against the backdrop of the border clashes earlier this year this film goes deep inside the minds of the people of Gaza to explore the mental health issues affecting many there.”

Produced by Christine Garabedian of BBC Arabic, the film is remarkable for the fact that it fails to mention the all-important context of Hamas terrorism even once – despite opening by telling viewers that:

“Gaza has been under a strict blockade for eleven years. Israel and Egypt say that the blockade is in place for their security.”

Garabedian, however, failed to provide audiences with the information which would help them…