Showing posts with label England. Show all posts
Showing posts with label England. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 6, 2024

The UK rioting is being blamed on free speech, so PM Keir Starmer aims to end it with . . . totalitarianism

 From UK Riots: The agenda becomes clear…


Whatever the truth of this latest incident, and whatever long term aims it might be used to further, this “strategy of tension” has an immediate political agenda already becoming clear – and it’s as predictable as ever.

  1. Further limit social media/free speech
  2. Normalise constant surveillance

Attacking free speech is the ever-present, eternal agenda that comes before everything else and it’s been a real pile-on the last few days. ...

You cannot begin to fathom how irritating it is to the ruling class that ordinary people are allowed to just say whatever they want whenever they want – including having the audacity to fact check the media in real time, with no repercussions at all. ...

... it fell to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer to formally lay it out in his address yesterday afternoon [transcript].

Pledging to counter the “far-right” with a new police division, and increased use of surveillance and facial recognition technology to “limit their movements”:

Wider deployment of facial recognition technology…And preventive action – criminal behaviour orders…To restrict their movements…

And firing a warning shot across the bows of social media:

And let me also say to large social media companies and those who run them…Violent disorder clearly whipped up online…That is also a crime. It’s happening on your premises. And the law must be upheld everywhere.

He even pointedly made clear his response wasn’t just about now or about countering the “far-right”, rather it was about ALL civil disobedience, for any reason:

A response both to the immediate challenge which is clearly driven by far-right hatred. But also “all violent disorder that flares up […] whatever the apparent cause or motivation – we make no distinction…Crime is crime.”

That means everything.

 

Thursday, July 18, 2024

UK climate lunatics from Just Stop Oil jailed for years for blocking traffic in four-day incident in November 2022

 Five environmental activists who organised protests that brought part of the M25 to a standstill over four days have been jailed.

Forty-five Just Stop Oil protesters climbed gantries on the motorway in November 2022, forcing police to stop the traffic, in an attempt to cause gridlock across southern England.

Judge Christopher Hehir said Roger Hallam, 58, Daniel Shaw, 38, Louise Lancaster, 58, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu, 35, and Cressida Gethin, 22, had "crossed the line from concerned campaigner to fanatic".

At Southwark Crown Court, Hallam was sentenced to five years' imprisonment while the other defendants each received four-year jail terms. ...

Hallam, a veteran environmental campaigner, was described as the "ideas man" of the movement, while the judge said Shaw was "up to his neck" in the planning of the protest.

More.

Sunday, July 7, 2024

Macron loses nearly 100 seats in the French National Assembly and Drudge calls it a win lol, Le Pen gains many seats despite Macron deal with left to pull hundreds of candidates

 MACRON GAMBLE PAYS OFF

Macron has gone from 350 seats in 2017 to 251 in 2022 to a projected 160 now.

Macron calling this snap election in France when he didn't have to was just as dumb as Sunak calling one in the UK. Sunak had to resign as the left clearly won, but Macron will wish he had to resign as he faces three years of a hung parliament divided by left, middle, and right, each with 140-200 seats and no clear winner.

289 seats are needed for an absolute majority.

Le Pen's party increased its presence in the assembly from 88 seats to 140 to 160, depending on who you read tonight. Her influence is steadily growing while Macron's is withering.

The plot to sabotage Le Pen was hatched immediately in the wake of her party's stunning performance in the first round on Jun 30.

Everyone's pretending to be shocked by today's results because they don't want to admit what just happened.

Macron sold out to the left.

 


 

Friday, July 5, 2024

Labour sweeps to UK victory on minor improvement to support as disaffected pro-Brexit and anti-immigration voters abandon feckless Conservatives for Nigel Farage's Reform Party

Keir Starmer to become PM. Have fun stormin' the castle!

Liberal Democrats and Greens made relatively huge gains while the Scottish National Party took it up the kilt. Sinn Fein utterly collapsed lol.

Turnout was low at 60%, the post-war low being 59.4% in 2001.

It's ludicrous. The UK Reform Party got all of four seats for all that damage done to Conservatives. Nigel Farage, 60, is gearing up to make his next big impact in 2029, when he'll be 65. Whoop-dee-doo. 

 

The UK Guardian


Sunday, June 30, 2024

Missing us by 180k miles yesterday, asteroid 2024 MK was only discovered on June 16 and was one of the 60% larger than 140 meters still unknown


 

Gee that's . . . not a happy thought.

The asteroid, named 2024 MK, is estimated to measure about 480 feet (146 meters) across, which is greater than the height of a 40-story building or the Great Pyramid of Giza.

More

A sucker that size could destroy London, England:

"If [an asteroid as big as Dimorphos] were to fall on the city of London, windows would break over the whole south east of England and the damage in [the Greater London] area would be very extreme," Collins said. "There would be no survivors in the center of London because of the impact itself and also because of the severity of the air blast." ...

While asteroids of this size crossing the path of our planet are rare, astronomers estimate that 60% of near Earth asteroids larger than 140 meters are still unknown. 

NASA said it came in at 152.4 meters.

European Space Agency said it came as close as 180k miles.

Talk about giving two weeks notice.

Wednesday, March 6, 2024

California is the poster child of failed democracy

 The primary was yesterday.

The UK, with a population more than twice the size of California, would have had the entire vote for any race counted within hours.

But California has made no progress since this morning.

In the crucial race for US Senate, California has made almost ZERO progress after twelve hours.

This is how you create the conditions to tamper with the vote. You get people accustomed to delays like today time after time so that people tire of raising any objections. And then boom! you steal the election when you need to because it took forever last time, why not THIS time?

At 8:34am, the New York Times reported 48% of the vote counted in the US Senate race:


 



 

 

 

 

 

 

Tonight, at 8:53pm, they've made it up 1 point to 49% counted:

 



Thursday, January 18, 2024

Peter Thiel is so mistaken about homeownership in his interview with John Gray

 Peter Thiel says "To unshackle ourselves economically, one should start by attacking the extraordinarily distorted real estate market", but never once mentions how the prime culprits of the distortion were and are all Federal.

These were the commoditization of housing by the so-called Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 under Clinton and Gingrich, followed by Federal Reserve interest rate suppression under Obama after the collapse of the ensuing housing bubble it caused, re-inflating that bubble.

To Thiel "interest rates went steadily down", as if by the influence of some mysterious force. What could it be? He is not i n t e r e s t e d.

Nor does he mention a third Federal culprit, how the demand side for housing was and is distorted by 15% of the population swelling with foreign born in the UK and the US as a direct result of legally admitting millions of immigrants since 1990 in the US and since 1994 in the UK.

These are the legacies of the Bushes, Bill Clinton, John Major, and Tony Blair, now augmented by deliberate non-enforcement of the border in America by the likes of Obama and Biden, turbo-charging the demand side for housing, and prices with it, by flooding the country with illegal aliens.

Thiel observes that culturally "We became too risk-averse, too bureaucratic, too reliant on peer review in the sciences" somehow, but doesn't connect this to the aging demographics, even though he is aware of it. Not re-inflating the prices of homes of Baby Boomers would have been political suicide. He fancies this is now "over", but misses that the heirs of all this property are voters too.

This is not over.

Thiel is essentially a radical, as was Ronald Reagan and also Margaret Thatcher. He completely misses how the libertarian impulse to deregulate under Reagan and Thatcher led in a straight line to the housing catastrophe we all live with these many years later. His libertarianism is myopic.

John Gray: "The difference is that this Truss wing of the Conservative Party wants to go back to Thatcher because they see that as a radical moment and they want to repeat the radical moments. But radical moments are very hard to keep repeating."

Peter Thiel: "They’re hard to repeat by doing the same thing. It was a one-time move to deregulate and lower taxes and then it’s not clear that doing it the second time does much good. ... The Reagan and Thatcher administrations ... allowed more companies to be acquired, more M&A activity to happen. It was a somewhat brutal but very powerful reorganization of society that was possible and in fact the right thing to do in the 1980s."

Incessant headlines about deep American discontent tell us we don't particularly like this now reorganized society. The new world order means your kid is saddled with horrible college debt, can't find a decent job, has to live at home with you, can't buy a house, can't get married, can't have children. 

But Thiel is still dreaming the pipe dream of "exponential growth" to solve these problems. He hopes technology will come to the rescue in the form of remote work:

"Is there some way to reopen a frontier in real estate? The possibility where I think the jury is very out, though it doesn’t look that promising in 2023, would be remote work. Could the internet be a way that people are not stuck in these cities? And that would reset all these real estate values tremendously because even in a rather densely populated country like England, there is plenty of space if you’re not forced to be within the green belt of London itself. And in the United States even more so."

The interview is here.  


Saturday, October 7, 2023

Um, excuse me, America was founded by people who had given up . . .

. . . on England, and on Ireland, Germany, Italy, and the rest.


The libertarian impulse to go Galt, to run away, is a feature of America, not a bug, a built-in self-destruct mechanism which went off most spectacularly and destroyed the root in 1861.

The rest of the plant has been withering and dying on the vine ever since, overtaken by tenacious weeds.

Freedom for Christian religion combined with plenty of Lebensraum, home country memory, and time made it seem otherwise in the face of the steady decline, but here we are with Scylla and Charybdis for choices come November 2024.

The Declaration of Independence was a repudiation of politics. Two thirds of the country was not down for the struggle. Secession was a repudiation of politics. There was resistance to military conscription everywhere, but especially in the Confederacy. We were content to let the world burn for more than two years before the Japs forced our hand on December 7, 1941. We have right now the unthinkable European land war in its 20th month and sports is what trends on Twitter day in and day out. Mao killed by the tens of millions during The American Century. Americans quietly go to church every Sunday while tens of millions are aborted. It all began with migration, the most basic form of repudiating politics.

We do not need, in short, to relearn to think politically. Most of us have never thought politically in the first place. Apolitics is our politics, but this horror vacui is why the left seems to have won and why we hate them. We hate politics. As polarized as we think we are, as rigged as our politics is, 100 million eligible Americans still did not vote in 2020.

You do not get political blood from this turnip.

Ultimately, nothing could be more un-American than to give up on America.

The American idea, alas, is precisely to stay out of it. 

Here

Tuesday, August 29, 2023

National Archives admits it has thousands of VP Joe Biden emails in which he used aliases to communicate with many including Hunter Biden about both government and family business

 

National Archives reveals it has 5,400 Biden emails in which the president potentially used FAKE NAMES to forward government information and discuss business with son Hunter
 

President Joe Biden may have used pseudonyms in nearly 5,400 emails, electronic records and documents when he was vice president, a bombshell letter from the National Archives and Records Administration reveals.

The trove of communications was confirmed after the Southeastern Legal Foundation (SLF) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) for emails connected to aliases allegedly used by Biden, including Robin Ware, Robert L. Peters, and JRB Ware.

Republicans have been demanding the release of the emails they say could show Biden used the names to discuss foreign business with his son and share information on countries where he was doing deals.

The White House has insisted Biden was never in business with his son, and vice presidents and high-level government officials often use pseudonyms to prevent being inundated with spam and emails from the public.

At the time, the Obama administration dismissed criticism the communications were 'secret' because they were all archived.

But the sheer volume of emails raises questions over whether then-VP Biden broke the 'absolute wall' he said he maintained between the 'the personal and private, and the government'. 

Emails from Hunter's laptop also reveal business partners referred to Biden as the 'big guy'.

The SLF submitted the FOIA request in June 2022 and the results appear to confirm that Biden was using the emails connected to the aliases.

Biden used various private email addresses from which he sometimes sent, received and forwarded government correspondence.

The names are all pseudonyms that Biden was known to use while he served as Vice President under Barack Obama from 2009 to 2017 and were used on emails that were about both official and family business.

The Southeastern Legal Foundation took legal action against NARA on Monday to secure the records' release. 

The Foundation alleges that the documents might potentially demonstrate instances where President Biden forwarded government information and discussed government matters with his son, Hunter Biden, together with other individuals.

'All too often, public officials abuse their power by using it for their personal or political benefit. When they do, many seek to hide it. The only way to preserve governmental integrity is for NARA to release Biden's nearly 5,400 emails to SLF and thus the public. 

'The American public deserves to know what is in them,' Kimberly Hermann, SLF general counsel, said in a statement. 

The Southeastern Legal Foundation also accuses NARA of using delaying tactics ever since the initial FOIA request was filed more than 14 months ago.

No specific emails have been provided despite NARA acknowledging their existence.

'We have performed a search of our collection for Vice Presidential records related to your [June 9, 2022] request and have identified approximately 5,138 email messages, 25 electronic files and 200 pages of potentially responsive records that must be processed in order to respond to your request,' Stephannie Oriabure, director of NARA's archival operations division, wrote to the Southeastern Legal Foundation on in June  2022, the lawsuit revealed. 

Earlier this month, Kentucky Republican James Comer, Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, demanded unredacted records from NARA, that similarly showed President Biden's use of a pseudonym during his vice presidency.

On that occasion, the purpose was to look into the role the former vice president played in his son's international business dealings.

Previously released emails from Hunter Biden's laptop indicated President Biden used the email address 'Robert.L.Peters@pci.gov' during his time as Vice President.

The emails also revealed correspondence between his aide and Hunter Biden over Joe Biden's daily schedule.

For at least four weeks in 2016, a worker in the Office of the Vice President, John Flynn, would send Biden his daily schedule to his private email address,  Robert.L.Peters@pci.gov while copying in Hunter.

There were 10 such e-mails which were copied to Hunter between May 18 and June 15, 2016.   

The Robert Peters e-mail address used a @pci.gov domain. The service had been labeled as problematic by the DNS Institute's Domain Name System security report in 2020.

One email from Flynn to being sent to Joe, a.k.a Robert Peters, from May 2016 which was also cc'd to Hunter schedules '8.45am prep for 9am phonecall with Pres Poroshenko' who was the Ukrainian president. 

At the time, Hunter was being paid $83,333 a month to sit on the board of corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings Ltd. 

He had started working for Burisma in 2014 and finally departed two months after his father left the office of vice president.

Just months earlier, in December 2015, Biden had threatened Poroshenko that he would withhold $1 billion in US aid unless he fired Ukraine's top prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was investigating the owner of Burisma,  Mykola Zlochevsky. 

Shokin was widely accused of corruption and removed from office in March 2016.

State Department officials are said to have attempted to raise concerns with directly with Biden about Hunter's involvement with Burisma but the complaints were rebuffed. 

Another forwarded email from Joe Biden using one of his alias private emails, RobinWare456@gmail.com, saw him write to both Hunter and his brother Beau, who was the Delaware attorney general, on March 26, 2012. 

The forwarded e-mail was from Deputy Secretary of State (and now current Secretary of State) Antony Blinken.

The email was from the US Ambassador to Ukraine John Tefft: 'Beau visited Kyev [Ukraine] on the Friday and gave a talk on corruption at the Hyatt . . . then attended reception at the residence where he met many young Ukrainian lawyers. We received many compliments on his presentation and for simply a frank discussion of a problem that still bedevils this country.' 

Hunter started working for Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas company, in 2014. 

He earned $83,333-a-month from Burisma until two months after Biden left office. 

He was referred to as 'the big guy' and described in an email from a Ukrainian executive at Burisma which suggested he'd gotten access to him through Hunter. 

It raised serious questions because the executive was also being investigated by a Ukrainian prosecutor who was ousted after Joe leveraged $1billion in American aide money to get him out.

President Biden has in the past denied ever offering access to him or the White House to any of Hunter's business associates. 

Biden has long claimed there was complete separation between his family's business activities and his vice presidential responsibilities but Rep. Comer said that evidence appears to suggest otherwise. 

'Joe Biden has stated there was 'an absolute wall' between his family's foreign business schemes and his duties as Vice President, but evidence reveals that access was wide open for his family's influence peddling,' Comer said in a statement on August 17.

'The National Archives must provide these unredacted records to further our investigation into the Biden family's corruption,' he added.

One concerning May 2016 email referenced in Comer’s letter and previously reported by DailyMail.com shows White House staffers sent Joe’s schedule, including a call with then-Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, to Joe’s secret email ‘Robert L. Peters’.

The staffer, John Flynn, also inexplicably copied Hunter, who was working for allegedly corrupt Ukrainian gas firm Burisma at the time, on the email.

White House staffers copied Hunter on a total of 10 emails to Joe’s alias addresses, records from his laptop show.

Joe and Hunter appeared to use the then-VP’s secret email to discuss government business in another incident in June 2014.

Hunter used his Rosemont Seneca consultancy email address to write to his father on June 23, 2014 about the employment of then-deputy White House counsel John McGrail.

‘Before you fill position pls talk to me — J. McGrail very much wants to serve as detail fr treasury,’ Hunter wrote.

‘Re Johnny call me right away Dad,’ Joe wrote back from the email robinware456@gmail.com.

McGrail was promoted to VP’s counsel the following year, then got his desired move to the Treasury as Senior Counsel in January 2017. He is currently Counselor to the Under Secretary for Domestic Finance at the department, according to his LinkedIn account.

Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson have been asking for unredacted records from NARA regarding Joe’s alias emails since 2021.

In their letters they cited the Presidential Records Act which requires POTUS to provide copies of all communications involving government business, whether on personal email addresses or not, to the National Archives.

Comer has now also joined the push. In his August 17 letter to NARA, he pointed out that the emails challenge Joe’s previous claim that while VP he had ‘an absolute wall between the personal and private, and the government’.

‘Evidence reveals that access was wide open for his family’s influence peddling,’ Comer said in a statement last week.

‘We already have evidence of then-Vice President Biden speaking, dining, and having coffee with his son’s foreign business associates. We also know that Hunter Biden and his associates were informed of then-Vice President Biden’s official government duties in countries where they had a financial interest.

‘The National Archives must provide these unredacted records to further our investigation into the Biden family’s corruption.’

Other emails show Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrote to Joe using his alias addresses while acting as National Security Advisor to then-VP Joe.

Blinken forwarded a March 26 2012 email from Ukraine ambassador John Tefft to Joe’s ‘Robin Ware’ address, describing a speech given by Beau to Ukrainian members of parliament in Kyiv on the topic of corruption.

Saturday, June 24, 2023

IRS team investigating Hunter Biden's alleged crimes never investigated the Ukraine-Burisma bribes allegations

Jerry Dunleavy, here:

Mykola Zlochevsky, the Ukrainian owner of Burisma, was the "foreign national" involved in the alleged "criminal bribery scheme" aimed at shaking an alleged investigation into Burisma by then-Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, according to sources familiar with the FBI record who described its contents to the Washington Examiner.

The sources said Zlochevsky said he believed it would be difficult to unravel the alleged bribery scheme for at least 10 years because of the number of bank accounts involved.

Amid the threat of being held in contempt of Congress, FBI Director Christopher Wray allowed members of the GOP-led House Oversight Committee to review an FD-1023 form this month that contained redacted versions of the allegations from the paid FBI informant.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, repeatedly claimed following a late May FBI briefing that Barr and his “hand-picked prosecutor” — Scott Brady, then the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania — ended the investigation into the bribery claims in 2020. But Barr quickly said that is false.

“It’s not true,” Barr soon told multiple outlets in early June. “It wasn’t closed down. On the contrary, it was sent to Delaware for further investigation.”...

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) also revealed this month that a less redacted version of the form he has viewed says Zlochevsky claimed to have 17 recordings of his conversations with Joe Biden and Hunter Biden (two of the former and 15 of the latter) as an "insurance policy." 

Zlochevsky’s alleged reference to Joe Biden as the “big guy” appears independent of the apparent reference to the now-president as the “big guy” by a Hunter Biden business associate during negotiations with Chinese intelligence-linked businessmen. The China-related reference occurred in a May 2017 email not made public until October 2020.

Shapley said that Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf instructed FBI and IRS investigators not to ask witnesses about “dad” (Joe Biden) or about “the big guy.”

Hunter Biden reached a plea deal on federal charges related to tax crimes and the illegal purchase of a handgun, Weiss’s office revealed in a court filing on Tuesday.

The IRS whistleblower claims detailing the politicization and slow-walking of the Justice Department investigation were made public on Thursday, including allegations that Weiss had sought special counsel status from the DOJ and sought to file charges in California and in the nation’s capital but was repeatedly denied. The whistleblowers also pointed to new apparent links between Joe Biden and his son’s China deals and that the FBI authenticated Hunter Biden’s laptop by November 2019.

 

Friday, March 24, 2023

King of France cancels King of England's visit lol

 The French are rioting because Macron, who lost his parliamentary majority last summer, decided to ram through his changes to the retirement system without a vote of the National Assembly.

In other words, he thinks he's king.

 



Wednesday, March 15, 2023

GOP candidate positions on Ukraine demonstrate nothing but groveling to the anti-war right

 And the kernel there is pretending things that are not true, the mark of an unserious country.

Nikki Haley is simply incoherent. She says we have to win this war, but without more financial assistance. 

“I don’t think we need to put money in Ukraine,” Haley said last week before an audience in Iowa. ... “This is not a war about Ukraine, this is a war about freedom—and it’s one that we have to win,” Haley said. “If we win this war, this will send a message to China, it will send a message to Iran, it will send a message to North Korea, it will send a message to Russia. If we lose this war… they said Poland and the Baltics are next, and you’re looking at a world war.”

Ron DeSantis pretends Russia never invaded and simply has a territorial dispute with Ukraine.

“While the U.S. has many vital national interests—securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness within our military, achieving energy security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural, and military power of the Chinese Communist Party—becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them,” DeSantis told Fox News host Tucker Carlson this week.

And The Daily Beast isn't wrong about Donald Trump's position, who to this day touts the myth that he is some great deal-maker who can untie the Gordian Knot:

Former President Donald Trump has said he would have let Russia “take over” parts of Ukraine if he were still in the White House.

It is also the case that there is plenty of pretending on the other side, that the West wasn't responsible for the Ukrainian revolution of 2014 which ultimately provoked the current conflict.

Statesmen tell hard truths to their people. But none of ours seem capable of telling even the simple ones, including Joe Biden.

Wednesday, January 11, 2023

LOL: Not only 10-year old classified documents found in VP Biden's drawers marked "personal", but "three or four boxes containing papers that fall under the Presidential Records Act"

 CNN, the first name in news!, here:

Among the items from Joe Biden’s time as vice president discovered in a private office last fall are 10 classified documents including US intelligence memos and briefing materials that covered topics including Ukraine, Iran and the United Kingdom, according to a source familiar with the matter. ...

The classified documents were dated between 2013 and 2016, according to the source familiar. They were found in three or four boxes also containing unclassified papers that fall under the Presidential Records Act. ...

The documents were discovered on November 2, just six days before the midterm elections, but the matter only became public Monday due to news reports. ...

The lawyer saw a manila folder that was labeled “personal,” opened the envelope and noticed there were classified documents inside.





Sunday, January 1, 2023

Germany boosts electricity from coal to 10 gigawatts, a drop in the bucket

 Bloomberg, here:

Germany now generates more than a third of its electricity from coal-fired power plants, according to Destatis, the federal statistical office. In the third quarter, its electricity from the fuel was 13.3% higher than the same period a year earlier, the agency said.  

Germany as recently as 2019 still had 40 gigawatts of electricity capacity from coal, and planned to reduce that to 27 by 2022, so obviously Germany has much more capacity available than 10 gigawatts during its present natural gas supply crisis caused by the Ukraine war.

But Germany's more serious mistake than reducing its coal capacity was its voluntary and hysterical reduction of nuclear generation capacity by 40% in the wake of the Fukushima disaster in 2011. Now it's got just 3 reactors left out of the 17 it had back in the day. 

Meanwhile US electric capacity from coal in 2021 dwarfed the German, at about 210 gigawatts, but that is way down from almost 318 in 2011, a similarly ideologically driven, self-imposed, and illogical reduction of 108 gigawatts, or 33% in ten years.

The foolish growing reliance on unreliable "green energy" in the US and the turn away from coal which began in earnest under Obama has meant increasing unreliability of electric resources during extreme events, and a huge increase in the duration of power outages experienced by customers.

The average customer outage was just north of 8 hours in 2020 vs. about 3.5 hours in 2013, an increase of over 130%.

This will only get worse if America tries to rely on wind and solar at the expense of fossil fuels and nuclear.