Utopia, you are standing in it!

There have been a few posts here recently about Professor Caroline Saunders, whose initial term on the Reserve Bank MPC expired at the end of March and who was eventually, belatedly, and with no announcement at all, appointed by the Minister of Finance to a short second (and final) term on the MPC. The most recent of those posts was here.

When there was no announcement before the Saunders term expired, I had lodged OIA requests with both the Reserve Bank and the Minister of Finance for material relating to her reappointment (or otherwise). Responses to both emails have now come back.

If it is now clear that the bottom line reason why Saunders was not reappointed before her term was expired was administrative slackness (between the Minister’s office and Treasury mainly), the documents that were released don’t put any of those involved in a particularly good light.

My…

Serfs attacking Climate Establishment

Phys.org sounds the alarm: Meteorologists targeted in climate misinfo surge.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Once trusted faces on the news, meteorologists now brave threats, insults and slander online from conspiracy theorists and climate change deniers who accuse them of faking or even fixing the weather.

Users on Twitter and other social media falsely accused Spain’s weather agency of engineering a drought, Australia’s of doctoring its thermometers and France’s of exaggerating global warming through misplaced weather stations.

“The coronavirus is no longer a trend. Conspiracy theorists and deniers who used to talk about that are now spreading disinformation about climate change,” Alexandre Lopez-Borrull, lecturer in Information and Communication Sciences at the Open University of Catalonia, told AFP.

“These scientific bodies are seen as part of the establishment, so anything they say may get disputed on social networks.

“They are providing…

As wind and solar capacity increases, it becomes increasingly evident they are hopelessly incapable of delivering power as and when we need it.

Back in January 2021, Germany shut down 11 coal-fired power plants (with a total capacity of 4.7 GW). That shutdown lasted eight days, with most of the plants up and running by February that year.

Australia is hellbent on committing the same form of suicide; ideologues cheered as another large, perfectly operable 2,000 MW coal-fired power plant (Liddell in NSW) was shut down earlier this month. Power consumers were less enthusiastic, as wholesale power prices jumped 80%, almost overnight.

Australia’s big pumped hydro scheme, Snowy 2.0 has turned into a ludicrously costly fiasco, which is unlikely to be completed anytime between now and kingdom come. Snowy 2.0 was meant to act like a big battery and make up for routine total collapses in wind and…

Back in 2020 and 2021, in and around the straight economics and economic policy posts, there were quite a few on aspects of the Covid experience in New Zealand, particularly in a cross-country comparative light.

More recently, you see from time to time suggestions that New Zealand’s experience may have been so good that in fact excess mortality here since Covid began might actually have been negative (in which case, fewer people would have died than might have been expected had Covid never come along.

A couple of alternative perspectives on that caught my eye in the last couple of months, both from academics, one from a physicist and one from an economist.

The first was a very very long Twitter thread from Professor Michael Fuhrer at Monash in Melbourne. His thread starts with this tweet

and after reviewing the evidence, and granting that

he concludes that

All of which…