Miliband Overrules His Inspectors to Approve Britain’s Second-Largest Solar Farm

 Ed Miliband has approved Britain’s second-largest solar farm on 4,000 acres of prime farmland after overruling opposition from his own inspectors. The Telegraph has the story.

The Energy Secretary on Wednesday said he had granted planning permission to the One Earth Solar Farm development to be built on prime farmland across Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire.

It comes despite a recommendation to block the development from Miliband’s own planning inspectors.

They warned that the scheme would be destructive for the environment, would put historic structures at risk, damage the health and well-being of local people and cause transport problems.

The controversial decision marks the third large solar farm approved by Miliband in recent days, coming a week after he backed two other large solar farms, Pear Tree Hill in East Yorkshire and Dean Moor in West Cumbria.

Sceptics suggest the Energy Secretary is trying to sign off as many such developments as he can before Andy Burnham takes office and potentially moves him to a new position.

One Earth has been cleared for construction on 4,000 acres of prime farmland near Bassetlaw, Newark and Sherwood and West Lindsey district council areas.

Besides the thousands of Chinese-made solar panels, the scheme will also include giant batteries to store surplus electricity.

It is set to be the second largest solar farm in the UK after the Springwell Solar Farm in Lincolnshire, an 800-megawatt project approved by the Government in April.

Confirming his decision, Miliband said: “The only way to have energy security is if we take a pro-growth approach to building more clean energy in Britain. For two years that is exactly what this Government has done.”

However, the new scheme is controversial because it will see several rural communities largely surrounded by solar panels covering what were once fields and hedgerows.

The village of North Clifton, around 10 miles from Lincoln, would have solar farms to the north, east and south, with some of the local farms being completely surrounded....<<<Read More>>>...

The Problem With ‘Extreme Weather’

 Each year, the 23-degree tilt of the planet we live on causes seasons to change as it orbits the Sun. We also know that on top of this regime, heat is moderated, and sometimes intensified by particular weather systems, to create ‘heatwaves’. For most of history, people had no explanation for either seasonal change or differences between a season from one year to the next, or even one week to the next. Now we do have explanations for such things, yet some people are still surprised to discover each year that we in Britain, at roughly 53 degrees latitude, occasionally experience weather that some find uncomfortable. Even more remarkably, and despite these explanations, some people think that warmer temperatures are a harbinger of doom. They are ‘extreme weather events’, such voices claim, and they are ‘getting more frequent and intense’, and soon they will rip society from its foundations – just you watch. But what is ‘extreme weather’, and is it really capable of destroying civilisation?...<<<Read More>>>...

£900,000 – The Price of An A-rated Energy Performance Certificate

 A well-heeled homeowner, who no longer has to work, has spent £900,000 converting his home so that it could achieve an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) with an ‘A’ rating. This effectively means it generates more energy than it uses. The Telegraph has the story.

On the day Simon Buck exchanged on his home in New Malden, south-west London, he stood across the road with a notepad and started to draw.

“I literally sketched the design of a new house that was in my head,” he says. “Then I spent the next two years going about researching and working out how I was going to do it.”

He had a clear goal: to upgrade the property into the ultimate eco-home that could generate more energy than it consumed.

This would be no easy feat. The house – which was built in the early 1950s – had an energy performance certificate (EPC) rating of ‘E’, placing it within the bottom 14% of English homes for energy efficiency.

EPCs aim to measure the energy efficiency of a property and are calculated based on the amount of energy used per square metre. Not only are more energy-efficient properties cheaper to run, they can also command higher house prices and may be eligible for ‘green mortgages’, which can come with preferential rates.

For Buck, it took almost two years from buying the home for a “bargain” £1 million in July 2023 before work on the project could begin.

“We ended up blowing the budget massively in pursuit of the best possible score,” says Buck, who spent £900,000 on the renovation. “There’s £100,000 worth of tech sitting in the plant room. I went over the top with everything.

“I could’ve built the house for a third of the price but it wouldn’t be the house that we have.”

Included in the exorbitant price were the solar panels, which – alongside a 20-kilowatt battery to store some of the electricity they produce – cost around £15,000.

Buck also installed a £30,000 state-of-the-art heat pump.

His home remains at a steady temperature throughout the year, with the thermostat hovering at a pleasant 23 degrees Celsius. The 46 year-old says he is able to walk around the house in the winter wearing only shorts and a T-shirt.

Obviously, that was well worth the £900,000 price tag. Buck is 46. Assuming he lives at least another 40 years that works out at £22,500 per annum to be able to wear shorts indoors in the winter. That’s roughly 10 times or more than the average household energy costs in the UK according to British Gas.

Unfortunately for the Government and its plans, Buck’s project only serves to demonstrate that the Net Zero dream is just that, way beyond the means of both most of the population and the public purse, especially given the age of most of Britain’s housing stock. As for Buck, he plans to sell up and start on a new-build project to create an even more efficient home. Whatever lights his fire, so to speak....<<<Read More>>>....

Relentless Drive to Net Zero is Trampling British Industry, Chemicals Plant Boss Warns

 British industry is being trampled underfoot as the country “gallops” to Net Zero, the head of a West Midlands chemicals plant, Adrian Hanrahan, has said. GB News has the story.

Adrian Hanrahan said that energy costs had been high since the Ukraine invasion and warned that green levies and the pressure to decarbonise were making the situation worse.

The Managing Director of historic chemicals company Robinson Brothers said the plant, along with other manufacturers, had taken huge strides in increasing energy efficiency.

But with prices soaring again as a result of the Iran war, the cumulative pressure on the chemicals industry was becoming too much, he said.

He said of the Net Zero demands: “We’re trying to run a marathon in a sprint format.”

The sector employs more than 150,000 people directly and supports half a million jobs in the wider economy. It has annual exports worth £61 billion.

Robinson Brothers was founded in 1869 and had weathered calamities including two world wars, the Great Depression, the financial crisis and the Covid pandemic.

But not once has the family-run firm considered leaving its West Midlands roots. After the 2008 crash, Hanrahan pointed out that China might prove more lucrative.

“I explained they’d make more money”, he said, as he showed GB News around the 14 acre site in West Bromwich....<<<Read More>>>...

Authoritarianism Doesn’t Arrive With a Coup. It Arrives With a Login

 Authoritarianism doesn’t usually arrive with a coup. It arrives with a login, a compliance form, a penalty notice for keeping records in the wrong format. It comes with a quietly extended electoral term, a cancelled bank account, a prison sentence for a social media post. Each measure has a reasonable-sounding justification. The problem is the direction — and how far it has already travelled.

Power is migrating from the visible arena of democratic politics to the less visible world of systems — compliance regimes, regulators with elastic mandates and an expanding mesh of rules governing more of daily life than most people have yet registered. No single measure looks like tyranny. The problem is the cumulative direction and the speed at which it is moving.

None of what follows was in any manifesto. All of it is happening.

Regulating what you may own, burn and keep

Consider what it now means to own a home in Britain. From 2030, landlords will be prohibited from letting properties that fail to meet the government’s Energy Performance Certificate band C standard, with fines of up to £30,000 for non-compliance. These are not derelict or dangerous buildings. They are perfectly habitable properties rendered unlettable not by any structural failure but by the Government moving the regulatory goalposts around them. The Government is consulting on extending the same requirements to owner-occupied homes by 2035, at which point the state would decide whether you may sell or mortgage your own home without first spending thousands on ‘improvements’ it has specified....<<<Read More>>>...

Scientists Pump 65,000 Litres of Chemicals into Ocean to “Stop Global Warming” in Geoengineering Project

 Scientists have pumped 65,000 litres of chemicals into the ocean off America in a controversial geoengineering experiment designed to “stop global warming”. The Mail has more.

Last August, 65,000 litres of bright red chemicals were pumped into the Gulf of Maine – yet this wasn’t an enormous industrial disaster.

Instead, it was a controversial geoengineering experiment that scientists claim could help to slow down global warming.

The oceans already hold around 38,000 billion tonnes of CO2, trapped as dissolved sodium bicarbonate, or baking soda.

The geoengineering method known as Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement (OAE) aims to speed up this natural process by resetting the ocean’s pH.

Over four days, scientists added vast quantities of sodium hydroxide – an alkaline chemical tagged with a red dye – to the waters off the coast of Boston.

Making the ocean more alkaline should encourage it to absorb even more CO2 from the atmosphere.

However, critics have warned that the potential effects on marine life remain uncertain.

Gareth Cunningham, Director of Conservation and Policy at the Marine Conservation Society, told the Daily Mail: “These approaches are resource-intensive and their ecological impacts are still poorly understood.”

For years, scientists have put forward OAE as one of the leading potential solutions to climate change.

In theory, the novel approach could solve two problems at once by locking away excess CO2 from the atmosphere and fixing the oceans’ rising acidity.

Without an ‘antacid’ like sodium hydroxide to react with, CO2 dissolving in the oceans forms a mild acid that has slowly but surely reduced the pH level.

This is already having catastrophic effects on sea life, as the acid dissolves marine creatures’ shells, damages coral, and even wears away sharks’ teeth.

The LOC-NESS (Locking Ocean Carbon in the Northeast Shelf and Slope) project is the first large-scale experiment to test the impact of OAE in an open water setting.

With approval from the US Environmental Protection Agency and engagement with local fishermen, scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution poured alkaline chemicals into the ocean 50 miles (80 km) off the Massachusetts coast.

They then used cutting-edge technology, including autonomous gliders, long-range autonomous underwater vehicles and shipboard sensors to track the spreading chemicals.

Over the next few days, the scientists measured 10 tonnes of carbon entering the water as the pH increased from 7.95 to 8.3 – matching pre-industrial levels.

In the best-case scenario, the researchers estimate that the sodium hydroxide would absorb about 50 tonnes of carbon over the next year, equivalent to the average yearly emissions of five UK citizens....<<<Read More>>>...

What happened to climate change?

Ten years ago, as the world's governments met in Paris and agreed to eventually force policies aimed at reducing carbon emissions on their respective populations, combating climate change was seen as a major political issue.

Then, when Trump and other populist right-wingers began finding political success, climate arguably became the primary issue that helped unify the establishment centrists, moderate left-liberals, and far-left progressives who made up the broad anti-Trump, anti-populist coalition.

Fanatical climate alarmism became a way to demonstrate one's anti-Trump credibility and a way for Trump's opponents in media, academia, and politics to portray the president as not just out of touch but as a significant threat to the survival of the human species.

The moral panic accelerated considerably during Trump's first term. A 2018 UN study reported that, unless there was a serious reduction in global emissions by 2030, the world would surpass the UN's 2015 goal of limiting warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

The media and politicians then stretched the findings of the study as much as they could get away with in order to convince everyday people that humanity would literally go extinct in a generation or two and nearly everyone below the age of sixty would die grisly, climate-related deaths unless we allowed the government the power to control nearly every aspect of our lives....<<<Read More>>>...

100,000 Amazon Trees Chopped Down to Build Road for COP30 Climate Conference

Spare a thought for the BBC’s Justin Rowlatt as he considers his upcoming trip to the Brazilian city of Belém to report on COP30. Saving the world and its environment is his gig so how will he face the prospect of travelling down a new four-lane highway cut through the dense Amazon rainforest to help speed him and his 70,000 other political activists to their luxury hotels? 

Based on trees per acre, an estimated 100,000 mature specimens have been chopped down and logged to build the eight-mile Avenida Liberdade causing untold disruption to local wildlife. 

Happily, all is not lost in despair. If he wishes, the BBC’s activist-in-chief can consider recent findings published in Nature Plants that increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide have led to substantial growth in the remaining Amazon forest, with mature trees growing by over 6% a decade. 

Perhaps he could start promoting on the BBC the enormous benefits of CO2, rightly known as the gas of life. He could front a campaign to assuage his dented COP conscience along the lines: ‘Forward with Carbon Dioxide, not Chainsaws.’...<<<Read More>>>....

Climate madness: Australian Human Rights Commission demands that speech about climate change be censored

 The Australian Human Rights Commission (“AHRC”) has recently submitted to a Senate inquiry that regulation is necessary to stop “misinformation” and “false narratives” about climate change.

The AHRC wants to prevent the spread of climate-related “misinformation,” citing the need to protect the human right to a healthy environment. This will lead to censorship of legitimate debate and views that do not align with the official narrative, and the removal of a fundamental human right – free speech.

A Senate inquiry run by the Greens is receiving lots of demands for censorship of climate sceptics. But the Australian Human Rights Commission (“AHRC”) submission really stands out. These reasonable climate change opinions could be silenced if the Human Rights Commission outlaws “misinformation.”

The powerful Australian Human Rights Commission is the latest in a long list of climate change preachers that believe you and I are too stupid to figure out what misinformation is, writes James Bolt...<<<Read More>>>...

Funerals Should Comply With Net Zero, Says Labour

 Labour wants to scrap gas cremations and make families say goodbye in eco-friendly wicker or bamboo coffins instead. The Telegraph has the story.

New rules for crematoria, drawn up by the UK environment department, are set to be upgraded to meet both new pollution standards and the UK’s commitment to reach the target of Net Zero by 2050 championed by Energy Secretary, Ed Miliband.

Under the plan, the Government will seek to cut emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants, including mercury from dental fillings, and airborne toxins from burning coffin glue and embalming fluid.

Draft rules also suggest crematoria burn bodies one after another, with no gap to retain heat and save on gas – a tough target for an industry that relies almost entirely on gas-fired ovens. …

Defra makes clear that the burning coffin and corpse will still generate emissions even if powered by green electricity.

There is, however, a downside to cremations powered by electricity which is that they take much longer. Cremations in gas ovens “range from as little as 50 minutes to more than two hours, depending upon body size”, but “cremation times on electric cremators are longer”, the guidelines warn.

Industry estimates suggest that cremating a large corpse would take up to three hours in a crematorium powered by low carbon electricity – twice as long as with gas. …

The costs could however be huge. [Mike Birkinshaw, of the Federation of Burial and Cremation Authorities] estimates it will cost the industry £18 million or £55,000 for each crematorium, just to fit equipment to remove nitrous oxides...<<<Read More>>>...

The FAKE NEWS New York Times continues to push their CLIMATE CULT PONZI SCHEME agenda with fake energy stats and climate lies

 While record-cool temperatures spread across the USA this August, the globalists and Leftists want everyone to keep the faith that the earth is burning up and we’ll all burst into flames next year if we don’t give all our money to the Climate Cult.

The New York Times (NYT), long regarded as a leading source of fact-checked journalism, has increasingly published inaccurate and misleading information on energy and climate issues. More troubling, when such errors are pointed out, the paper frequently refuses to issue substantive corrections or instead provides evasive revisions that obscure the truth. This pattern undermines the paper’s stated corrections policy and risks eroding readers’ trust across all coverage, not just energy and climate.

NYT publishes inaccurate energy and climate data – Multiple articles contained false claims, such as overstating China’s renewable transition, misidentifying the world’s top fossil fuel producer, and exaggerating U.S. renewable electricity generation.

Historical distortions weaken reporting – Coverage of electric vehicles misrepresented their early 20th-century decline, ignoring clear data that EVs were already obsolete well before oil tax policy changes of 1926.

Corrections policy is inconsistently applied – While the NYT quickly fixes minor errors (like names or dates), it often stonewalls or obfuscates when substantive factual inaccuracies are flagged, undermining trust in its reporting.

Erosion of journalistic integrity – By mixing opinion with misreported data and refusing to acknowledge major mistakes, the NYT damages its credibility on energy and climate topics, leaving readers misinformed and doubting the paper’s standards....<<<Read More>>>...

Prof. Norman Fenton discusses how speaking out against the narrative has made him a pariah

 Last week, Professor Norman Fenton joined the Climate Skeptic to discuss how he became a pariah after airing his scepticism about the covid and climate narratives.

In an article and subsequent email, he highlighted the 2015 BBC documentary ‘Climate Change by Numbers’. He also spoke about the cultural Marxist mindset, that has penetrated all institutions, is at the root of academic corruption....<<<Read More>>>...

Basic Physics All at Sea in Sky News Climate Scare Nonsense Story

Possibly one of the dumbest and most scientifically illiterate climate scare stories ever written has been published by the fast-fading UK Sky News. Climate reporter Victoria Seabrook notes that the sea ice on the Arctic “continent” is melting at 12% every decade but she backs it up by publishing a graph clearly showing it has been stable since 2007. She goes on to claim that the Arctic melt will push up sea levels around Britain and fuel worse coastal flooding, seemingly unaware that melting ice in liquid does not raise its level (suggested educational tip, check out ice in a gin and tonic glass). Just for good measure, her silly story throws in the wobbling jet stream and a “shocking” prediction that global temperature could rise by nearly 1°C in just five years.

This story is a classic of its kind – late climate psychosis folderol to back up the collapsing Net Zero fantasy. After decades of relentless mainstream gaslighting, mass audiences are still vaguely concerned that the climate is in some kind of ‘emergency’. Net Zero is retreating around the world, partly because it is increasingly understood that human civilisation cannot abolish the use of hydrocarbons without returning to the dark ages, and partly because nobody is prepared to pay for it when given a choice. But the great climate science con that is the foundation of the collectivist Net Zero lunacy continues, and, if Seabrook’s latest work is an example, it is getting more desperate by the day....<<<Read More>>>...

Daily Mail Misses the Real Story About Long-Term Stable Antarctica Ice in Dumb Quip About Climate ‘Deniers’

A remarkably silly headline appeared last week in the Daily Mail stating: ‘Shocking Antarctica discovery sends climate change deniers into mass celebration.’ It appears that 100 gigatonnes of ice has been added to the Antarctica ice sheet in a 21-month period to December 2023. 

Quite how joy will be unconfined in the ranks of the ‘deniers’ over an increase, or decrease, of 0.00041% is not clear. 

The amount is an ice sheet rounding error and it would be scientifically accurate to refer to it as zero. Even if the figure was a loss, it would take nearly half a million years for all the ice in Antarctica to melt and that does not include any allowance for glacial periods or indeed a new ice age. 

Unsurprising, in the haste to stick ‘denier’ into the mix, a far more important finding about Antarctica ice was missed. A recent paper undergoing peer review has calculated that around 2,546 gt of ice has been added every year since 1960 to the surface on Antarctica. This would almost certainly have been enough to stabilise any natural losses and it is possible that the ice sheet has been stable or even growing slowly over this period....<<<Read More>>>...

BBC Quietly Edits Question Time After Wrongly ‘Correcting’ Richard Tice on Key Net Zero Claim

 The BBC has quietly edited an episode of Question Time after wrongly ‘correcting’ Reform’s Richard Tice on a claim about CO2 emissions. Tice said humans are responsible for just 4% of emissions but Fiona Bruce falsely said it was a third. The Telegraph has the story.

Richard Tice, the Reform UK Deputy Leader, appeared on Thursday night’s panel show following his party’s sweeping gains in the local elections last week.

During the show, which was recorded before a live audience but broadcast later, he was asked about his party’s position on climate change policies, which he said was to “scrap Net stupid Zero”.

In the debate, Fiona Bruce, the host, intervened to correct Mr Tice on the proportion of carbon emissions that are man-made.

The MP for Boston and Skegness claimed that it was “about 3 or 4%” of all emissions, to which Bruce said that, according to Nasa, it was around a third.

Mr Tice claimed that he approached a BBC editor after the show to tell them that the statistic was a mistake, and was informed that the information had come from BBC Verify, the broadcaster’s fact-checking unit.

The exchange with Bruce was then edited out of the programme, but the BBC has not reflected this in the show uploaded to its iPlayer....<<<Read More>>>...

Tory MP Esther McVey Thinks Net Zero is a “Dud” Having Spent Years Inflicting it On the British Public

 A person identifying as the Conservative MP Esther McVey told Mike Graham on his morning Talk show earlier this week that “Net Zero was a dud”. Surely this could not have been the Esther McVey who is a leading light in the Conservative Environment Network (CEN), a Green Blob-funded activist group promoting a no ifs, no buts 2050 Net Zero policy. This calls for “accelerating” the transition away from fossil fuels in the power, transport and heating sectors in order to deliver “lower, more stable bills for consumers and greater energy security”. Perhaps Talk’s strict vetting process to weed out imposters failed on this one occasion, or maybe McVey is just demonstrating how fluid opinions can be in the hands of a modern politician. Readers can decide after considering the thoughts of Groucho Marx: “Those are my principles and if you don’t like them, well I have others.”

Current events are making a mockery of every UK politician in the ‘Uniparty’ that supported the crazy hard Left New Zero fantasy over the last 20 years. The electricity blackout across Iberia last Monday, which experts have blamed on unreliable wind and solar energy, sent shock waves through the political class. The problem of fluctuating frequency gets worse the more renewable power is loaded onto the system and will not go away. Almost certain blackouts are on the way for any grid that follows the potentially catastrophic renewable policy. Now Conservative politicians like McVey are running for the hills since they suspect, rightly, that any UK blackouts will be blamed on them.

The wily politician Nigel Farage from Reform has already set the political trap by popularising the term Net Stupid Zero. McVey is suddenly speaking of the poverty that Net Zero will cause, shamelessly noting that for the Left the policy was one of “hope over reality”. It is as if McVey never sat in Cabinets run by Net Zero fanatics Theresa May and Boris Johnson, and hasn’t spent the last decade campaigning and voting for the whole ghastly collectivist project. Quite how she kept a straight face on Graham’s show and claimed the Right including herself was always sceptical about Net Zero and the costs it imposed on people will forever remain a mystery. She is still part of a Green Blob activist group that thinks, like the Mad Miliband, that Net Zero will somehow lower bills and provide a de-industrialised UK with energy security....<<<Read More>>>...

“Climate Change Reconsidered” offers fresh perspective in the climate change debate

 In the ongoing discourse surrounding climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has long been the authoritative voice, issuing dire warnings about the consequences of human-induced global warming. However, a 400-page report from the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), titled "Climate Change Reconsidered," offers a compelling counter-narrative that challenges the mainstream consensus. This 2011 interim report, authored by Dr. Craig D. Idso, provides a detailed examination of the scientific evidence and raises critical questions about the reliability of the IPCC's findings.

The NIPCC report begins by setting the stage for a more nuanced discussion of climate change. It highlights several key events that have shifted the conversation, including the publication of a book by Mike Hulme, a climate change professor at the University of East Anglia (UEA). Hulme's admission of uncertainties within the climate change research community underscores the complexity of the issue. However, the most significant turning point came with "Climategate," the 2009 leak of emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the UEA. These emails revealed efforts by leading scientists to hide flaws in their evidence, exclude skeptics from journals and withhold data from colleagues. This scandal raised serious questions about the transparency and credibility of the IPCC...<<<Read More>>>...

Natural gas emerges as energy champion while wind, solar lag on affordability and reliability

 As the world grapples with the competing demands of affordability, reliability and environmental sustainability in energy policy, two new independent analyses confirm a striking reality: natural gas leads as the most cost-effective and dependable energy source, while wind and solar rank as the least efficient—despite receiving disproportionate subsidies and political favor. Published separately by Northwood University and The Heartland Institute, both studies reveal that natural gas outperforms all alternatives, with nuclear, hydro and coal following closely, while wind and solar lag significantly in economic and operational viability.

This revelation comes at a critical time, as global energy demands surge and policymakers face mounting pressure to balance climate goals with real-world feasibility. With President Trump’s recent executive order revitalizing coal production and natural gas expansion, these findings underscore a fundamental debate: Should nations double down on proven energy solutions or continue pouring taxpayer dollars into unreliable renewables?...<<<Read More>>>...

Massive stretch of Amazon rainforest destroyed for upcoming COP30 climate summit’s 4-lane highway: ‘This is a loss’

 This proves what the Elite really think about the earth plane ....

+++++++++++++++++++

Somebody get Greta on the horn!

Tens of thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest are being cleared and paved over to build a new four-lane highway for, of all things, the upcoming COP30 climate summit in Brazil.

The eight-mile stretch of new highway — dubbed Avenida Liberdade, or Avenue of Liberty — has gouged a deep gash through a large swath of Amazon rainforest just in time for world leaders to convene to discuss how much they care about the Amazon rainforest.

Photos published by the BBC show the bare corridors where heavy machinery ripped through the lush, unspoiled landscape now littered with log piles — the sounds of insect chirps and birdsongs replaced by a chorus of rumbling diesel engines and the whine of hydraulic excavators gutting the forest floor.

More than 50,000 people are expected for the 30th annual UN climate summit in Belém, in November, including a number of world leaders.

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silv boasted that this year’s event will be “a COP in the Amazon, not a COP about the Amazon.”

The state government of Pará initially hatched the idea for the thoroughfare in 2012, but it was repeatedly put on hold after concerns were raised over its environmental impact.

The state government has repeatedly insisted the highway is “sustainable” — but that rings hollow to locals and conservationists who are condemning the project.

“Everything was destroyed,” said Claudio Verequete, who lives about a quarter-mile from the roadway in progress and used to make a living harvesting açaí berries from trees near his land which are no longer standing.

“Our harvest has already been cut down. We no longer have that income to support our family,” he told the outlet, noting he has not received any compensation from the government and is keeping his finances afloat by dipping into savings.

Even worse, Verequete said he’s afraid now that the once-unspoiled rainforest has been marred, future incursions further into the land could be imminent.

“Our fear is that one day someone will come here and say: ‘Here’s some money. We need this area to build a gas station, or to build a warehouse.’ And then we’ll have to leave.”

“We were born and raised here in the community. Where are we going to go?”

The highway will effectively bifurcate a large section of rainforest, raising concerns among scientists about the effects on wildlife in the area....<<<Read More>>>...

Mad Ed’s Net Zero plan is so expensive that the UK economy cannot survive it

 Because Ed Miliband refuses to produce an estimate of how much his Net Zero plan will cost, Gordon Hughes, former Professor of Economics at the University of Edinburgh, has had to produce his own cost estimates.

Writing for The Telegraph, Hughes said, “On average my calculations show that the Net Zero grid would be a remarkable £15 billion per year more expensive than our current one … It is clear that Net Zero is a voyage that the United Kingdom simply can’t afford to take. We will have to turn back if our economy is to survive.”

The UK government’s plan to achieve Net Zero, as outlined in the Clean Power 2030 document, is highly unlikely to become a reality on the proposed timescale due to the lack of access to the necessary capital and engineers to build the required generation plants and grid connections.

Ed Miliband, the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, has refused to produce a credible estimate of the costs of the Net Zero electricity system. He has also cancelled a system costing commissioned by his predecessor, Claire Coutinho. Frustrated by Miliband’s inadequacies, Hughes has had to do his own calculations to fill the gap. His calculations reveal the true expense of Miliband’s plan.

The plan will be extremely expensive, with Hughes’ calculations indicating that the Net Zero grid would cost approximately £15 billion per year more than the current grid, which translates to an extra £925 per year for every household, likely paid through higher electricity bills, potentially forcing consumers to reduce their energy consumption either voluntarily or through compulsion.

The high cost of decarbonising the grid is not due to the cost of generating wind and solar power, which is relatively low, but rather the need to build, maintain and replace a large amount of machinery and grid connections, as well as the extra costs associated with balancing the grid....<<<Read More>>>...