JoNova

New report shows renewables is a drag on our national productivity

Jo Nova — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 17:00:54 +0000

By Jo Nova

For some reason the pursuit of global teenage-girly weather-control has meant Australian workers are less productive. Who could have guessed that attempts to stop storms, floods and droughts in a hundred years would not make us richer today? I mean, apart from everyone?

“Australians are working harder for less”

In the last 25 years we’ve spent 126% more on capital costs but only improved output by 14%.

Now even the Productivity Commission is warning that renewable green investment is holding back the nation.

Australian productivity was rising until it suddenly fell off a cliff around May 2022 (see the graph below). Coincidentally this was the moment the moment the Albanese Labor Party first got elected and went gangbusters with renewable energy. It seemed to be worthy of an annotated arrow, so I added that in…

Productivity Commission: Quarterly productivity bulletin June 26

From The Australian:

Renewables and green spending drag down productivity, PC warns

By Matthew Cranston, The Australian

Australia’s falling productivity levels have been driven down by the replacement of coal-fired power plants with billions of dollars in renewable energy projects, the Productivity Commission has declared, as it warns [...]

Friday

Jo Nova — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:40:00 +0000

0 out of 10 based on 0 rating

Thursday

Jo Nova — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 17:13:00 +0000

8.8 out of 10 based on 9 ratings

Well, how convenient. AI data centers have arrived to be the fall guy for the Energy Minister

Jo Nova — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 17:18:29 +0000

AI eats energy for breakfast.

By Jo Nova

If the grid breaks, remember it’s all AI’s fault!

New data centers in Australia may use as much as 6% of the electricity demand by 2030. (That’s a whole six percent increase in demand four years from now. Call the ambulance, eh!).

But the thing is, our fragile grid already has these odd jiggly voltage and frequency spikes now that we’ve blown up all the spare coal plants, and any one of these jiggles may trigger a cluster of data centers to trip out at the same time to protect themselves. If a large load disappears off the grid simultaneously, it could set off a cascading chain of failures causing a widespread blackout. (A bit like the wind farms did in the Great South Australian Blackout of 2016).

So the manager of our forced fantasy transition is lining up the excuses to cover for his own failures. If there’s a blackout, it’s AI’s fault he says. And if prices rise, it’s AI’s fault too claims Minister Chris Bowen — who says that “Wholesale electricity prices could jump by a quarter in NSW and Victoria if data-centre growth is not matched [...]

Wednesday

Jo Nova — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 15:27:00 +0000

Apologies. We have an internet outage tonight and I will be unable to publish anything new tonight.

Comments will keep flowing, though moderation may be slower. Sorry. — Jo

10 out of 10 based on 17 ratings

Billionaires are leaving the room with excuses — Bezos says “AI will solve climate crisis”

Jo Nova — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 20:06:06 +0000

By Jo Nova

Back in 2020 nothing was more important than climate change. Swept away by the crisis, Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos set up a $10,000 million dollar fund to ‘fight climate change and protect nature’. It was the largest piece of atmospheric philanthropy known to mankind. But it’s become a bit of a ghost account.

The money was supposed to be spent by 2030, but six years in, 72% of the funds still haven’t been allocated.

Bezos Earth Fund Is Off Pace to Meet $10 Billion Climate Giving Pledge

By Ben Elgin and Sophie Alexander, Bloomberg

Officials at the Bezos Earth Fund said they remain committed to disbursing $10 billion by 2030. With four years left on the timeline, however, only 28% of the promised funds have been allocated so far.

In interviews and statements, Earth Fund executives reaffirmed their plan to spend $10 billion by the end of the decade. “Many of our strategies remain the same,” a spokesperson said…

Now that Trump sucked the government subsidies away from pet climate projects, you’d think the Bezos funding would be more “needed” than ever.

It’s not just Bezos who is backing away [...]

Tuesday

Jo Nova — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 17:07:00 +0000

10 out of 10 based on 6 ratings

Monday

Jo Nova — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 17:23:00 +0000

9.1 out of 10 based on 19 ratings

Sunday

Jo Nova — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 17:27:00 +0000

9.2 out of 10 based on 18 ratings

The Craziest eco laws against Farmers. Let’s check that science…

Jo Nova — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 20:55:46 +0000

The Burnett River Catchment opens to the south of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.

By Jo Nova

Below is the craziest environmental rule Peter Ridd has come across, and below that, a strategy to deal with it.

Queenslanders please sign this Petition!

For some reason no one can explain, the catchments for the Burnett and Mary rivers are included in the Great Barrier Reef protection legislation. These rivers don’t even flow into the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, they empty to the south of it, and get swept away by the giant East Australian Current which heads south away from the reef.

The amount of water moving there is so vast that the entire annual flow of the Burnett and Mary Rivers passes in just two minutes.

Any runoff the rivers add to that flow will have to do a full lap of the Pacific Ocean to Peru and back before they get to the Great Barrier Reef.

We’re being so precious about the reef, but there are also eddy currents and gyres in the area that stir up the ocean floor and add a rich nutrient mix to the water. One near Fraser Island is so [...]

Saturday

Jo Nova — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:18:00 +0000

10 out of 10 based on 14 ratings

China cooks the carbon accounting books by 400 million tons

Jo Nova — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 18:56:04 +0000

Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash

By Jo Nova

We’re facing the sixth mass extinction but carbon accounting games are a performance art and almost no one cares that the largest emitter on Earth has gaping holes in their numbers.

One reader in The Wall Street Journal, pointed out that The Onion saw this coming years ago:

“China Vows to Begin Aggressively Falsifying Air Pollution Numbers.” (2014)

We live in an era where satire became the news.

The Paris Agreement allows everyone to set their own targets, and to define their own terms (and retrospectively as well). So China decided it would count “carbon intensity”, rather than carbon output. But it didn’t define carbon intensity. Normally it means the amount of CO2 emitted per unit GDP — which would work well for China with its rapidly growing economy. But something else is going on.

In the last five years China had promised to cut emissions by 18%, but all the official statistics suggested it was only getting 12% of the way there. Then a miracle happened and suddenly China leapt to a 17.7% reduction, just in the nick of time.

The Ecoworriers team [...]

Friday

Jo Nova — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 16:07:00 +0000

10 out of 10 based on 8 ratings

The Wind Power Puzzle (add more wind turbines and get the same output)

Jo Nova — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 19:45:04 +0000

by Lieven

By Jo Nova

The bottomless pit of public spending strikes again

Germany added 14 gigawatts of wind power in the last 5 years, however the total amount of electricity produced is still around 106 Terawatt hours.

Imagine how much money they could have saved if they hadn’t bothered to add more wind turbines?

Wind power is like a perpetual public money vacuum.

From Pierre Gosselin at No Tricks Zone:

Germany’s Die Welt: “Too Much Is Too Much” … Green Energies Are Cannabalizing Each Other!

Wetzel describes this as a ‘wind power puzzle’ and discusses several possible causes:

Several years with weak wind conditions, More frequent curtailments of wind turbines due to grid bottlenecks, The expansion of wind farms at weaker inland locations, So-called shading or ‘wind theft’ effects between wind turbines.

Australia has already done the same experiment. No matter how much wind power we add to the grid we can’t seem to get the bare minimum to increase, (the dark green columns at the bottom).

ie. Wind power remains 95% Useless.

The Australian experiment thanks to WattClarity

The maximum amount of wind power increases but the part we [...]