Utopia, you are standing in it!

By Paul Homewood

h/t Dennis Ambler

In a tumultuous year of change in the world, high impact drilling in 2022 remained at a similar level to 2021, with 81 high impact wells completing (Figure 1). Performance improved with discovered resource increasing from 7.4bnboe in 2021 to a preliminary estimate of 9.2bnboe in 2022, and the commercial success rate, i.e., the proportion of wells which may result in a potentially commercial development, increasing from 29% in 2021 to 36%, Westwood Energy authors wrote in their report this week.

In the last few years, the British Broadcasting Corp (BBC) has lost some of its credibility, but during World War II, it was a vital source of information for resistance groups in the Netherlands and other occupied countries.

The caption of the picture above said “January 4, 1944. Jammers and betrayal make listening to the B.B.C. not easy. We listen at night, 11:45 p.m., B.B.C.”

An employee of an illegal newspaper listening to the BBC.

The founders of the first illegal newspapers came to their initiative out of indignation about the German invasion and annoyance about what the equalized newspapers wrote. There was also a need to warn the population against National Socialism and to call for united opposition to the German measures. In 1940 there were about 62 underground magazines and within a year this number rose to 120. Some magazines had succeeded in finding printers and were, therefore…

Giant Tesla battery at Jamestown South Australia.

Rent-seekers would have us believe that battery storage will soon cure wind and solar’s hopeless intermittency, notionally smoothing out the highs and filling in the lows (aka sunset and calm weather).

The only thing wrong with that narrative is the fact that it is an outright lie.

Lithium-ion battery technology is probably as good as it will ever get; the natural limits on storing releasing electricity over time are best explained by the laws of physics, starting with thermodynamics.

However, it’s the law of economics that David Wojick deals with in his piece below.

Astronomical battery cost looms over “renewables”
CFACT
David Wojick
15 December 2022

The amount of storage needed to make renewables reliable is so huge that even if the cost dropped fantastically we still could not afford it.

We now know that the battery storage for the entire American grid…

By Paul Homewood

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The climate realists at Creative Society have put together a short video with pithy statements skewering the CO2 theory of climate change.  Above is the video and below a transcript with exhibits and the speakers’ identities.

Dr. Harold Burnett
Over time the atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide have radically fluctuated throughout the earth’s geologic history. They have been in the past as much as 5000 parts per million. Currently they are about 420 parts per million. So over long periods of time they have fluctuated, but in general they have fallen.

Gregory Wrightstone
There doesn’t seem to be any correlation whatsoever with increasing CO2 and temperature. And in fact one of the things we’re being asked to believe is that our modern temperatures are unusual and unprecedented, as thought we’ve never seen temperatures like this in thousands of years. That’s just not the case.

Prof. Ole Ellestad
We have a…

By Paul Homewood

A mass market in affordable electric cars will not happen soon because of the difficulty of producing them on a commercially viable basis, one of the largest makers of zero-emission vehicles for British drivers has warned.

Paul Philpott, UK chief executive of Kia, the fast-growing South Korean car company, said it had no immediate plans for a mass-market electric product.

Some fear there is a prospect of a society of haves and have-nots in the electric car revolution because of the sheer cost of buying or financing a zero-emission vehicle.

Philpott’s prediction also threatens to undermine the government’s ban on selling petrol and diesel vehicles by 2030.
With price inflation roaring ahead in the past couple of years, there are only a handful of electric cars available below £30,000, compared with the less than £20,000 that motorists would expect to pay for mass market or entry-level petrol…

By Paul Homewood

Norway’s Havila Krystruten is one of two shipping companies that sails between the coastal cities of Bergen and Kierkenes and says that it will no longer carry electric or electrified vehicles on its ships following the results of an external investigation.

The company mostly carries passengers and goods on the route, but now says that it will only carry private vehicles with internal combustion engines. Havila Krystruten cited fire safety as the main reason for its decision.

While it is not clear what led the company to run the external investigation, fears of fires on ships were stoked by a recent incident in the Atlantic. The Felicity Ace caught fire at sea last year and, although the cause of the fire has not been determined, there were vehicles with batteries aboard the ship, leading to speculation that they may have been responsible for the blaze.

While research…

A group of congressmen are (again) opposing raising the US debt ceiling, which (again) threatens to put the US government into default on a portion of the US debt. There is some uncertainty about the magnitude of the consequences of a US default, varying between very bad and globally catastrophic. Phrases like “taking hostage” and “political extortion” are thrown around too casually in the discourse when opportunities for politically leverage are taken advantage of, but in this case I think the scale of consequences makes it completely appropriate. A threat to force a US debt default through the mechanics of a mistake made when legislating bond issuance rules during World War I is an act of political extortion that holds the global economy hostage.

The obvious solution is to eliminate the debt ceiling, but we have failed to do so because of the same political incentives underpinning our problems today…

At the end of World War II, members of the film unit of the OSS — the Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the CIA — were put to work hunting down every scrap of film footage they could gather about Nazi Germany, the rise of the Third Reich, and the atrocities committed by officials who were to be put on trial at Nuremburg.

The officer that OSS film unit chief John Ford — yes THAT John Ford — assigned the job to was Budd Schulberg, son of pioneering screenwriter, film producer and studio executive B.P. Schulberg. Schulberg and his brother Stuart were sent to the ruins of Nazi Germany to find the filmed “proof” of who and what the Nazis were, film that would be used in court.

The idea, American prosecutor Judge Robert H. Jackson said, was “to convict” those charged “by using their very own words,”…