Utopia, you are standing in it!

I don’t know who is advising Ed Miliband but “public spending back to 1930s levels” wasn’t a good line.

It’s true that the Conservative’s proposed cuts take public spending to its lowest percentage of GDP since the ONS records began but it has been at similar levels in the recent past, notably under Tony Blair in 2000.

Inevitably, therefore, people would say “Well it was like that under your lot and the world didn’t fall apart.” That’s pretty much what Robert Peston skewered him with in an interview yesterday and what John Rentoul was tweeting all afternoon.

The combination of rising electricity prices and plummeting oil prices has finished off the fake green energy market. I saw gasoline for $1.79/gallon in Albuquerque yesterday.

It is cheaper to drive a gasoline powered vehicle than a useless electric vehicle.

The complete list of faltering or bankrupt green-energy companies:

Evergreen Solar ($25 million)*
SpectraWatt ($500,000)*
Solyndra ($535 million)*
Beacon Power ($43 million)*
Nevada Geothermal ($98.5 million)
SunPower ($1.2 billion)
First Solar ($1.46 billion)
Babcock and Brown ($178 million)
EnerDel’s subsidiary Ener1 ($118.5 million)*
Amonix ($5.9 million)
Fisker Automotive ($529 million)
Abound Solar ($400 million)*
A123 Systems ($279 million)*
Willard and Kelsey Solar Group ($700,981)*
Johnson Controls ($299 million)
Schneider Electric ($86 million)
Brightsource ($1.6 billion)
ECOtality ($126.2 million)
Raser Technologies ($33 million)*
Energy Conversion Devices ($13.3 million)*
Mountain Plaza, Inc. ($2 million)*
Olsen’s Crop Service and Olsen’s Mills Acquisition Company ($10 million)*
Range Fuels ($80 million)*
Thompson River Power ($6.5…

In 1981, NASA showed the 1930’s as the warmest decade globally.

http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1981/1981_Hansen_etal_1.pdf

That didn’t suit the global warming narrative, so by 1999 they had almost erased the warm 1930’s

 http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_07/

However, the small bit of warming from 1940 to 2000 didn’t suit the needs of the Hockey Stick, so NASA has since completely erased the warm 1930’s

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.A.gif

The animation below shows the changes NASA made to the global surface temperature record between 1981 and 1999, and then from 1981 to 2014.

From: Tom Wigley <wigley@ucar.edu>
To: Phil Jones <p.jones@uea.ac.uk>
Subject: 1940s
Date: Sun, 27 Sep 2009 23:25:38 -0600
Cc: Ben Santer <santer1@llnl.gov>

It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip, but we are still left with “why the blip”.

di2.nu/foia/1254108338.txt

Earlier in the week, Paul Krugman wrote about the Volcker disinflation of the 1980s. Krugman’s annoyance at Stephen Moore (whom Krugman flatters by calling him an economist) and John Cochrane (whom Krugman disflatters by comparing him to Stephen Moore) is understandable, but he has less excuse for letting himself get carried away in an outburst of Keynesian triumphalism.

Right-wing economists like Stephen Moore and John Cochrane — it’s becoming ever harder to tell the difference — have some curious beliefs about history. One of those beliefs is that the experience of disinflation in the 1980s was a huge shock to Keynesians, refuting everything they believed. What makes this belief curious is that it’s the exact opposite of the truth. Keynesians came into the Volcker disinflation — yes, it was mainly the Fed’s doing, not Reagan’s — with a standard, indeed textbook, model of what should happen. And events matched…

Giant fans next door? No deal …

Wherever giant fans have gone up – or are threatened to go up – neighbouring homeowners are finding that the value of their properties is being slashed in half – if they can find a willing buyer at all.

Scottish real estate agents trying to sell homes situated anywhere near giant fans are finding the task almost impossible, one of them, Iain Robb stating that:

“Properties next to sites where a planning application for a windfarm has been lodged are virtually unsellable.” (see our post here)

A while back we covered a report on the impact giant fans have on Australian rural property prices – put together by highly experienced property valuer, Peter Reardon. Reardon compiled a 30-page dossier on the impacts of wind farms on adjoining or nearby rural farms and found that having fans as neighbours led to discounts…

by Mario Rizzo

I consider myself both a libertarian and a classical liberal. I have been teaching a seminar in classical liberalism at the NYU Law School for six semesters. I am always asked about the difference.  My answer is basically this. Classical liberalism is the philosophy of political liberty from the perspective of a vast history of thought. Libertarianism is the philosophy of liberty from the perspective of its modern revival from the late sixties-early seventies on.

The philosophy of liberty has always admitted of gradations or degrees. Consider that in the nineteenth century there were such thinkers as Lysander Spooner, Auberon Herbert, and Benjamin Tucker. These thinkers are sometimes called “individualist anarchists.” Clearly, they espouse a political philosophy that would anathema to most who call themselves “classical liberals.” Yet they do begin from many of the same premises as mainline liberals. They disagree with those who advocated a…

By Mario Rizzo

A philosopher, Amia Srinivasan, fellow in philosophy at All Souls College, University of Oxford, writing in the New York TimesOpinionator (online commentary) says that in order to be a consistent defender of Robert Nozick, the free market and classical liberalism, one must answer “yes” to all four questions below. And she believes that such consistent yes answers are not plausible. She is wrong that we are required to answer yes to all four and she is wrong that yes answers on any are implausible. She also misconceives the task of liberalism as a political philosophy.

Let us start with the last point. As Ludwig von Mises constantly reminded us, liberalism is not a philosophy of life. It does not deal with the ultimate questions of man’s place in the universe and the full range of choices human beings must make both in dealing with others…