Smart Meters, Watching Our Lives

Under the guise of climate change advocacy which pretends to save the planet from a non-existent anthropogenic global warming, people across the globe have been forced by utilities and their governments to accept smart meters as readers of their electricity consumption. I called these smart meters in my book, “U.N. Agenda 21: Environmental Piracy,” drones attached to our homes. http://www.amazon.com/U-N-Agenda-21-Environmental-Piracy-ebook/dp/B009WC6JXO/ref=sr_1_1_twi_kin_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1443973354&sr=1-1&keywords=UN+Agenda+21%3A+Environmental+Piracy

Smart meters are being deployed without debate and without the informed consent of homeowners. They inspect homes 24/7 through several pulses a minute and without a warrant, over-bill, cause home fires, result in environmental and health problems, are vulnerable to hacking, and data obtained from such smart meters are sold to third parties without homeowners’ consent.

During peak usage, the utility company can turn off the power several hours a day, adjust the thermostat from afar, or turn off entire grids in an “emergency” situation when they run short of electricity. It is too expensive to build excess capacity storage facilities.

Smart meter removal from one’s home may not be enough. Within a five square mile area there is a collecting point of information from all meters and a transmitter receives information from all the collecting points of information within 125 miles of its location. This transmitter sends all collected data to a master location, the “mother ship,” where everyone’s information is stored, analyzed, and sold to a third party who is interested in the household’s pattern of usage, consumption of electricity, or possibly “illegal” activity in that home.

In addition to electric bills doubling in many places even though consumption had remained the same or had been reduced, customers are being “nudged” via carefully crafted notes added to their monthly bills for their shameless and selfish use of the planet’s resources.

Some individuals and townships have gone to court and managed to obtain permission from their utilities to opt-out of the installation of smart meters, in exchange for a monthly reading fee which can be quite high in various places. Others were not successful and, after seeing their utility bills double, have filed a class action suit against their utilities. Such was the case of California.

In the Dominican Republic, angry customers of Edenorte have ripped their smart meters from their sockets because their electric bills have doubled even though they were sold a false bill of goods that digital meters would give them a more accurate reading of their usage. They were also unhappy that their “electricity was being cut off out of nowhere and they would have no power for a couple of hours every day, sometimes more.” Edenorte was a “free entity,” no longer under government regulation.

A video obtained by Josh Del Sol, the producer of the award-winning documentary, “Take Back Your Power,” shows the public outrage; people are turning over electric company trucks, slashing their tires, breaking windows, and piling up hundreds of removed smart meters in front of the electric company’s offices in the city of Peidro Blanca.

The residents complained that “the lower their consumption, the higher the bills.” The claim is not without merit as utility companies billing schemes tend to punish those who consume less and reward those who consume more. One of the protesters in the video asks, “How is it possible in X days for it to register 1041 kWh?” He continues, “This is why we say that they have rigged these meters to benefit them.” https://takebackyourpower.net/hundreds-of-angry-customers-pull-smart-meters-video/

In San Antonio, KENS 5 reported that “CPS Energy admitted to overcharging customers who recently have had smart meters installed,” affecting hundreds, possibly thousands of angry customers. http://www.kens5.com/story/news/2015/09/21/cps-energy-admits-overcharging-customers-smart-meters/72600652/

K.T. Weaver, of SkyVision Solutions, wrote about the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) Board meeting which took place on August 20, 2015, at which meeting, President Rob Kerth said, ”Any efforts or investments made to avoid smart meters are entirely wasted. I know that change can be unnerving, especially when it comes quickly, but giving into hysteria and falling victim to the alarmists and the charlatans of our era will not improve anyone’s lives.” http://smartgridawareness.org/2015/09/26/elected-official-who-dismisses-concerned-consumers-as-charlatans/

Failing to demonstrate how charging customers more for the same energy consumption and reducing their access to electricity, affecting their privacy and good health, is going to improve anyone’s lives, it is glaringly evident that smart meters are a convenient way to control our energy use and our independence.

Having attended a utility regulator hearing three years ago, I heard testimony after testimony of Americans who were made really sick by their smart meters, or their homes caught fire and went up in flames.

Smart meters, heavily subsidized by the government, are sold to the public under the false narrative of convenience, modernization, cheaper energy, expedience, and better service.

Smart meters are convenient ways to spy on citizens, charge more per kWh of consumption, reduce consumption by cutting power delivery, replace coal-generated and cheaper electricity with more expensive “renewable” energy, control the population and its health, reduce costs for utilities who no longer have to worry about storing excess capacity in additional storage plants, reduce costs of wire maintenance under and above ground, and eliminating jobs for meter readers.

Unbeknownst to most of us, homes are now fitted with smart water meters, smart gas meters, and smart appliances that communicate with each other and with the “mother ship.”

 

 

 

 

Willis Eschenbach and the Myth of the "Sixth Wave of Extinction"

North Carolina parakeet (Photo: Wikipedia)

Willis Eschenbach, who takes pride in saying that he is not a trained scientist but has logged thousands of hours of research on the subject, was the first person to file a FOIA request for the infamous data from the University of East Anglia CRU. Hackers downloaded emails from said university that had shown that scientists had manipulated the data to agree with the global warming theory.

Eschenbach lectured an audience in California about the “Myth of Species Extinction,” more specifically, the legend that humans have caused the disappearance of countless birds and mammals with their existence and industrial activity.

A popular myth states that “we are in the sixth wave of extinction,” said Eschenbach.  It appears that life on Earth experienced five mass extinctions due to natural disasters but some biologists are talking about a sixth wave of extinction caused by humans. The top five extinctions are:

-          Ordovician-silurian extinction (small marine organisms disappeared)

-          Devonian extinction (tropical marine species died out)

-          Permian-triassic extinction (“largest mass extinction which included many vertebrates”)

-          Triassic-jurassic extinction (“vertebrate species on land allowed dinosaurs to flourish”)

-          Cretaceous-tertiary extinction

http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/past-exhibitions/dinosaurs-ancient-fossils-new-discoveries/extinction/mass-extinction

E.O. Wilson, a biologist from Harvard, said that there were 27,000 species going extinct each year for over twenty years at least, that’s over half a million species. If that is so, “what are the species, where are the corpses,” asked Eschenbach?

"We're in the end game all around the world," said the Pulitzer-Prize winning biologist. E. O. Wilson, described as “one of the world's most influential and eloquent thinkers on endangered species issues,” said "’hot spots’ for biological diversity tend to be in the same parts of the developing world where poverty has created ‘oppressed, land-hungry people with no other place to go.’"

“In The Skeptical Environmentalist, statistician Bjorn Lomborg has disputed Wilson's claim that 27,000 to 100,000 species are becoming extinct every year.” http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/08/0809_wireowilson.html

Slender-billed grackle (photo: Wikipedia)

 

Eschenbach said that he decided to check the causes of extinction looking at species-area relationships. An article in Nature stated that “species-area relationships always overestimate extinction rates from habitat loss” and admits that estimating extinction rates is still “highly uncertain because no proven direct methods or reliable data exist for verifying extinctions.” But somehow, “extinction from habitat loss is the signature conservation problem of the twenty-first century.”

Atitlan grebe (photo: Wikipedia)

 

“The most widely used indirect method is to estimate extinction rates by reversing the species-area accumulation curve, extrapolating backwards to smaller areas to calculate expected species loss. Estimates of extinction rates based on this method are almost always much higher than those actually observed.” http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v473/n7347/full/nature09985.html

Eschenbach looked first at the Red List which “hypes the extinction” of birds. He then looked at the list from the American Museum of Natural History (New York) which covers mammals. The problem was to actually determine what constitutes an extinction, its taxonomy, specimens, DNA, to show that they are a species, how we look for it, and the criteria for extinction.

E. O. Wilson talked about extinctions due to habitat loss each year, more specifically, loss of forests. Eschenbach found that there were several waves of extinctions. There was a wave in the 1500s, one wave in the 1700s, and a third wave into the 1800s and 1900s. Eschenbach discovered that the number of birds and animals that had gone extinct in the last 500 years was actually 190, sixty-one mammals and 129 birds. So much for the infamous Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s book, that started the green revolution against DDT and its eventual banning. Springs are never silent in our forests; there are plenty of birds chirping year round.

He also found that, from these 190 species, many island species had gone extinct from “introduced species.” When he excluded those species, to his surprise, in the last 500 years there had been only 9 species that had disappeared, 3 mammals and 6 birds.

Eschenbach enumerated the nine species that had vanished and perhaps why they no longer exist:

1. An antelope hunted by European settlers around the 1800s

2. Labrador duck (shooting and trapping, overharvest of eggs)

3. Algerian gazelle (“extinction was assumed from a single skin purchased in a market place in North Africa in 1894 and from an adult male skull; we know nothing else about it”)

4. North Carolina parakeet (hunted to death for food, for their prized feathers worn on hats; beekeepers also hunted the parakeets because they ate bees)

5. Slender-billed grackle (lived in marshes of Mexico that were drained; total destruction of habitat, any species would go extinct from that)

6. Passenger pigeon (the most prolific birds in the U.S.; extinct from extensive hunting and disease; we hunted them on a large scale, “thousands were brought by trainloads to shoot them where they roosted”)

7. Colombian grebe (predation by introduced rainbow trout)

8. Atitlan Grebe (predation by the large-mouth bass)

9. Cotton tail rabbit (“three specimens collected in 1991 in a small area in Mexico, when they looked back, there were none; nobody knows why they were extinct”)

Based on this record, the conclusion that can be drawn is that when “European species met native species, native species usually died.” Predation by another species is the number one cause of extinction. For example, 95 percent of bird species on islands were killed by alien species. When European species met with Australian species, there was a massive die-off but it was a one-time event, said Eschenbach. Only one bird went extinct from habitat destruction that can be pinpointed to draining a marsh. “Wilson said that 39 extinctions a year occur from habitat loss,” added Eschenbach. Taking his formula into account, we should have seen during “the last century over 1,000 extinctions.”

Eschenbach continued that Wilson explained why his formula was not accurate at all – “50 years must pass before we know that a species is extinct.” His second explanation was that “species don’t go extinct immediately,” they may take up to 100 years to happen due to “exponential decay.” The problem with that theory is that “we still should have seen 600 extinctions by now and we’ve seen none,” Eschenbach concluded.