Utopia, you are standing in it!

As the wind and solar cult would have it, ‘coal is dead’ and wind and solar power are the gloating villains that killed it. Well, that’s the meme, anyway.

Back on Earth, coal-fired power and the coal industry that fuels it are in very robust health, indeed.

Outside of the virtue signalling Western nations that signed up to heavily subsidise the unreliables, demand for coal has never been stronger. And there are plenty of willing players eager to satisfy that demand.

Vladimir Putin is among them, with plans to increase, already surging, Russian coal production even further.

We’ll cross to the team at Jo Nova for the latest on coal’s Russian resurgence, and then we’ll take a look at the surge in global demand for coal, with the help of the Global Warming Policy Forum.

Russia bets big on coal, gas, fossil fuels, and not on renewables
Jo Nova Blog

Some climate theories aren’t plausible either, including the one that thinks that atmospheric goings-on are more important than ocean dynamics like El Niño and La Niña. But the fear show must go on.
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Today the Hamburg-based Cluster of Excellence “Climate, Climatic Change, and Society” (CLICCS) publishes a new, essential study on climate futures, reports Phys.org.

The study represents the first systematic attempt to investigate whether a climate future with net-zero carbon emissions is not only possible but also plausible.

The authors examine plausibility from a technical-economic perspective, but also with regard to the societal changes necessary for such a future.

They conclude that deep decarbonization by 2050 is currently not plausible—the current efforts to bring about societal transformation need to be far more ambitious.

Clearly ‘net zero’ is just a game that only a group of wealthy countries with more money than sense, and a deluded belief in ‘temperature targets’, think they can afford to play.
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Sharp divisions between the major global emitters have emerged at a series of meetings designed to make progress on climate change, reports BBC News.

India lambasted the richer world’s carbon cutting plans, calling long term net zero targets, “pie in the sky.”

Their energy minister said poor nations want to continue using fossil fuels and the rich countries “can’t stop it”.

Andrea Vance, writing at Stuff, has taken the Ardern government to task for its media “management,” how ministers evade questions, how they deflect interviews and questions all, of course, in the name of the PM’s much-vaunted transparency.

Well, it seems she has stumbled on to something bigger than her focus on journalists struggling to get information.  From our inquiries we have found that heads of departments, ministries and agencies are facing something of the same challenge.

Firstly, ministers are said to be keeping permanent heads at a distance. Some find it hard to secure scheduled appointments.

In the good old days, the permanent head of each department saw his or her minister before Monday Cabinet meetings – and frequently in between.

Now there is a layer of “advisers” between them.

Turns out offshore wind power is more financial heartbreak than cash cow. Thanks to the phenomenal cost of repairing its undersea cables, Denmark’s Orsted is literally bleeding cash. The cost of fixing faulty cables connecting their turbines to each other and transmission facilities onshore is already in the hundreds of $millions, and set to rise rapidly over the next couple of years – estimated to be in the order of a further 3 billion Danish Kroner (US 491,434,000 or £350m) between now and 2023.

And Orsted’s costly cabling calamity isn’t limited to its Danish operations. It’s just bought into another financial disaster off Rhode Island, where the cost of cable repairs to keep a measly five wind turbine operation up and running is already north of $US80 million, and rising fast.

William Butler makes the connection between a brewing financial disaster and the dashed hopes of offshore wind power…

I did have to laugh at the news the other day that workers at the famed magazine, The New Yorker, are going on strike for more money for themselves and their oppressed co-workers.

Here’s the link to the NewYorkerUnion home page, and the associated Tweet is a doozy from a graphics point of view.

I didn’t know there was such a group but I do love their attempt to convert the famous logo of The New Yorker into a symbol of The Workers.

Yeah.. Nah!

That symbol has been the magazine’s brand since it was launched almost one hundred years ago and it’s of a “dandy”:

A dandy, historically, is a man who places particular importance upon physical appearance, refined language, and leisurely hobbies, pursued with the appearance of nonchalance in a cult of self. A dandy could be a self-made man who strove to imitate an aristocratic…