Month: February 2021

Via 21stCenturyWire.com,

Barely a week after Davos luminaries met with world leaders and Silicon Valley oligarchs to plot their latest phase of the Great Reset, the underlying provenance of their entire ‘climate emergency’ thesis is still struggling to correspond with reality.

Their much-celebrated “Zero Carbon” agenda which virtue-signaling leaders like Justin Trudeau, Boris Johnson and Joe Biden are currently advocating for – is proving to be a lot more difficult to achieve in reality than it is on their elaborate UN Agenda 2030 Powerpoint slides, computer modeled projections and Zoom calls.

No one is being hit with this sobering reality more than the Europe’s premier green trailblazer, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose country is currently in the grips of Europe’s record-breaking freeze this winter.

Stop These Things reports…

Germany’s held up as the world’s wind and solar capital. But, at the moment, the ‘green’ stuff can’t be purchased, at any price.

Its millions of solar panels are blanketed in snow and ice and breathless, freezing weather is encouraging its 30,000 wind turbines to do absolutely nothing, at all. [Note: don’t forget about the constant supply of electricity from the grid that these things chew up heating their internal workings so they don’t freeze up solid!]

So much for the ‘transition’ to an all wind and sun powered future – aka the ‘Energiewende’.

Despite being the object of consternation and much vilification over the last 20 years, Germany’s coal-fired plants are now being appreciated for what they are: truly meaningful power generation sources, available on demand, whatever the weather. With a Nationwide blackout a heartbeat away, the German obsession with unreliable wind and solar is like a time bomb set to explode.

Last month, Pierre Gosselin from No Tricks Zone explained how tradition energy sources like coal, nuclear and gas have bailed out Germany’s failing solar and wind green boondoggle…

Berlin On The Brink! Winter Blackouts Loom As Coal Plants Run At 100% Capacity, Struggle To Keep Lights On In

Wintertime wind and solar energy “between 0 and 2 or 3 percent – that is de facto zero,” says German power distribution professor. 

Berlin’s power supply severely strained:

Germany now finds itself in the dead of winter. Much of the country has seen considerable snowfall, meaning solar panels are often covered by snow and thus rendered useless. Even without snow cover, the weeks-long overcast sky prevents any noteworthy solar power generation.

Moreover, this winter there have been many long windless periods, and so Germany’s approx. 30,000 wind turbines have been largely out of operation. In a world 100% reliant on green energies, this would mean near 100% darkness at home.

Luckily Germany’s still existing coal and nuclear power infrastructure is (still) there to step in and keep the power on and the country running. This has been the case for Berlin this winter an RBB German television report reveals:

German RBB (Berlin-Brandenburg) public broadcasting recently aired a report (above) on the region’s winter energy woes titled: “Germany’s green energies strained by winter.”

Coal to the rescue

The report acknowledges that all the power is “currently coming mainly from coal, and the power plants in Lausitz” are now “running at full capacity”.

Strangely the RBB report has been taken down from the archives, yet is fortunately available on YouTube thanks to wind energy protest group Vernunftkraft.de.

In the report Daniel Bartig, a mechanic at the LEAG Lausitz plant, tells RBB he is skeptical that green energy can do the job, and says “the greatest share of power is currently coming from coal.”

Green energies will not keep pace with demand

Next in the report, RBB interviews Harald Schwarz, professor of power distribution at the University of Cottbus, who tells RBB he’s very skeptical of wind and solar energy doing the job. As Germany moves to shut down its reliable nuclear and coal power plants, the gap between supply and demand will grow dangerously wide.

Physical reality “totally neglected” by policymakers

According to Prof. Schwarz:

With this supply of wind and photovoltaic energy, it’s between 0 and 2 or 3 percent – that is de facto zero. You can see it in many diagrams that we have days, weeks, in the year where we have neither wind nor PV. Especially this time for example – there is no wind and PV, and there are often times when the wind is very miniscule.  These are things, I must say, that have been physically established and known for centuries, and we’ve simply totally neglected this during the green energies discussion.”

Will have to rely on foreign energy in the future

RBB then warns of the increased odds of blackouts for the region, like the blackout in Berlin in 2019.

So what will happen in the future?

The reporter says the plan is that Germany will have to rely more on natural gas (from Russia), coal power from Poland and nuclear power from France.

Green energy dumbness and obstinance on full public display.

See more of Pierre’s work at No Tricks Zone

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Are you satisfied with life in America right now?  Before you answer that question, consider more than just politics.  Taking an overall view that encompasses every aspect of our society, are you generally satisfied with how our society is functioning at this moment or not?  Needless to say, we are coming off a very tough year, and 2021 has not started smoothly either.  The COVID pandemic continues to drag on, we are mired in the worst economic downturn in more than 70 years, and there is civil unrest in our streets on an almost nightly basis. 

All of these trials and tribulations have taken a great toll on us emotionally, and so perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that a new Gallup survey has found that the American people are less satisfied with how our nation is functioning than they ever have been before…

Americans’ satisfaction with seven broad aspects of the way the country functions is collectively at its lowest in two decades of Gallup measurement. This includes satisfaction with the overall quality of life in the U.S., assessments of government, corporate and religious influence, and perceptions of the economic and moral climates.

The average percentage satisfied with these seven dimensions has plunged to 39% at the start of 2021. That compares with 53% a year ago, the highest average in more than a decade amid strong economic confidence and before the coronavirus pandemic took hold in the U.S.

For the survey, Gallup specifically asked Americans about the following seven areas…

• The overall quality of life

• The opportunity for a person in this nation to get ahead by working hard

• The influence of organized religion

• The size and power of the federal government

• Our system of government and how well it works

• The size and influence of major corporations

• The moral and ethical climate

Satisfaction for every one of those areas was way down.

In fact, for six of those categories the decline from last year was in double digits.  Shockingly, the only category that declined by just single digits was “the size and power of the federal government”.

Of course whenever economic conditions are harsh, the overall population is not going to be happy, and we have been through a really tough stretch economically.

According to Gary Halbert of Halbert Wealth Management, last year was the worst year for the U.S. economy in 74 years…

Last Thursday the Commerce Department released its first estimate of 4Q Gross Domestic Product showing the economy grew at an annual rate of 4.0% in the final three months of last year. That followed the 3Q record expansion of 33.4% (annual rate) as the economy rebounded strongly following the COVID-19 lockdowns.

2Q GDP plunged by a record-shattering 33.4% (annual rate) following the 1Q slide of 5% in the first three months of the year. For all of 2020 the economy shrank by 3.5%, the worst annual decline in 74 years (WWII).

Sadly, this year has not started very well either.  The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits each week continues to be at nearly four times the pre-pandemic level…

The number of Americans filing for first-time unemployment benefits last week edged down but remained elevated as the coronavirus pandemic continues to trigger a high number of layoffs.

Figures released Thursday by the Labor Department show that 779,000 Americans filed first-time jobless claims in the week ended Jan. 30, lower than the 830,000 forecast by Refinitiv economists.

And the percentage of those without jobs that are considered to be “long-term unemployed” is approaching a record high…

Almost 40% of jobless workers in January were long-term unemployed, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday.

The share has grown steadily since the spring and is approaching the record set in April 2010, in the aftermath of the Great Recession. At that time, nearly 46% of the unemployed were out of work at least six months.

Our system is supposed to provide a helping hand to those that are out of work, but the help doesn’t always get to those that need it.

Even though I write about our economic problems on a regular basis, even I was shocked by a brand new survey that discovered that “just 30% of unemployed individuals are being reached by the unemployment system”…

Congressional Democrats are trying to fast-track a nearly $2 trillion coronavirus relief proposal that would extend the existing supplemental unemployment benefits, but new research suggests that the jobless aid is not reaching millions of out-of-work Americans.

At most, just 30% of unemployed individuals are being reached by the unemployment system, according to a report published this week by Eliza Forsythe, a labor economist at the University of Illinois. That means roughly three out of every four jobless workers aren’t receiving aid — or about 8 million of the 11 million people counted as unemployed in December.

But for millions of deeply hurting Americans, there is good news in the short-term.  Congress is about to pass another COVID relief bill, and soon more stimulus payments will be going out to the American people.

Of course borrowing and spending another 1.9 trillion dollars that we do not have will make our long-term debt problems even worse and will push us even farther down a highway to hyperinflation.

In the end, most Americans don’t really care that we are literally committing national suicide.  They just know that they are in pain and they want some help as soon as possible.

If economic conditions begin to significantly improve in the weeks ahead, the American people will start to feel better about how the country is doing.

But even if there is some sort of a short-term boost, the long-term outlook is bleaker than ever, and the American people are not going to be able to handle the long-term pain that is coming very well at all.

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Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.