Utopia, you are standing in it!

In my writings about “Great Moments in Foreign Government,” I’ve come across amazing examples of bone-headed and incompetent behavior by politicians and bureaucrats in other nations.

• The British government giving welfare to people with multiple wives.
• The German government having a jihadist working in one of its intelligence agencies.
• The Italian government appointing the wrong person for a job that shouldn’t exist.
• The Norwegian government financing friends for a mass murderer.
• The Greek government turning tourists into snoops for the tax police.
• The French government ordering trains that were too wide for railway stations.
• The Japanese government persecuting people for the horrible crime of giving unlicensed coffee enemas.
• The British government providing welfare payments for foreigners living in other countries.
• The German government spending more to administer a tax than it gets from collecting the tax.

Let’s add to this collection with three new stories about failures by foreign governments.

Where wind turbines are born: just one of China’s rare earth plants.

For the uninitiated, the sight of snow white wind turbines flailing in the breeze in some green field reinforces that feel-good notion that wind power is the crème de la crème of ‘green energy’.

For those in the know, whenever the term ‘green energy’ is trotted out by some starry-eyed hipster or sandal wearing troglodyte, a sense of wild frustration ensues, followed by an urge to throw something solid at their antagonist or to throw them off the top of one of their beloved windmills.

To maintain their faith, the wind worshipper avoids facts like the plague. Mathematics and meaningful statistics are shunned by cultists, too.

Here’s CFACT’s Paul Driessen laying out the numbers and reaching the obvious conclusion that – in relation to so-called ‘green energy’ – the numbers can never stack up.

Monumental, unsustainable environmental impacts

Summary: Professor Roger Pielke Jr. explains why such meager results from the three decades-long campaign for public policy action in America to fight climate change. Activists on both sides have brought Manichean paranoia to the debate. The results might have historic painful effects. And he shows how we can fix the debate, if we try.

“Sooner or later, everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.”
— Attributed to Robert Louis Stevenson.

This presentation posted with his generous permission.

The movement for massive US public policy action to fight climate change began (as an arbitrary date) with the testimony of James Hansen on 23 June 1988 in a sweltering (due to careful preparation) Senate conference room. During the following 29 years vast sums were spent to build public support for such measures. Academia, the news media, NGOs, and government agencies provided full spectrum support, laying down a barrage of propaganda —…

It is fair to say that the result of the United Kingdom’s Referendum on continued membership of the European Union is one of the most controversial and fiercely debated topics in modern English Legal History. Rafts of previously silent Constitutional Lawyers have entered the arena to voice their opinions.

This ferocity has been an enduring theme surrounding Referendums since the earliest discussions regarding their introduction. The central pillar of controversy is that Referendums are arguably contrary to the concept of Parliamentary Sovereignty. This is the principle that Parliament, acting by its Members and Lords, can make or unmake any law whatsoever. Theoretically, if Parliament wants to pass an Act that mandates the slaughter of all blue-eyed boys, Parliament can do so. Practically this might present difficulties, but it is correct as a matter of English Constitutional Law.

The greatest advocate of Parliamentary Sovereignty was Constitutional theorist Albert Venn Dicey in…

Fun. But not real…

After a generation of claiming to be not only competitive with, but cheaper than, every form of conventional generation there is, wind and large-scale solar generators are still unable to wean themselves off the massive stream subsidies that created their so-called ‘industries’ – simply because, without those subsidies – coupled with mandated targets and punitive fines on retailers forcing them to take their skittish wares – there is no market for power that cannot be delivered 24 x 365, on demand.

For want of a better phrase, attempting to run sunshine and breezes is patent nonsense.

In this short, sharp piece the Editor of America’s National Economics Editorial makes precisely that point.

72.8% Of World’s Renewable Energy Is Made By Burning Wood & Dung—20x More Than Wind & Solar Energy
National Economics Editorial
The Editor
28 June 2017

Renewable energy advocates have claimed for decades…