Utopia, you are standing in it!

The truly deluded reckon that by adding a few giant lithium-ion batteries we’ll soon be running on nothing but sunshine and breezes. Those that (often grudgingly) concede wind and solar’s weather-driven (ie perfectly natural) unreliability, claim that storing wind and solar power when the sun’s up and the wind is blowing, just right, and releasing it when the sun sets or calm weather sets in, is a cinch.

The laws of physics and economics, say otherwise. As Van Snyder details below.

Adequate Storage for Renewable Energy is Not Possible
Substack
Van Snyder
15 January 2023

In Grid-Scale Storage of Renewable Energy: The Impossible Dream, Energy Matters (November 20, 2017), Euan Mearns used a full year of data from England and Scotland, with one hour resolution, to calculate that to have firm power, it would be necessary to have 390 watt hours of storage per watt of average demand.

In 

US Banks Have Over $620 Billion in Unrealized Losses According to FDIC:

I’ve long said that it is not the place of blogs to write about fast-moving news stories because that’s a different world from analysing them, and of course a lot of stories should be allowed to mature before being blogged – like developments in the post-C-19 medical world or the Twitter files revelations of US government attacks on free speech via private-sector groups.

But in writing about the failure of SVB (second largest bank failure in US history) and Signature Bank (third largest) the other day – GFC II – Banking Boogaloo – I find that I can’t resist writing about this developing catastrophe in real time. Credit Suisse in Switzerland is now in the firing line, months after unpublicised funds were sent their way by the Federal Reserve. And so…

According to FDIC Chairman Martin Gruenberg…

The New Zealand Initiative has a new report out this morning, written by Bryce Wilkinson, under the heading “Made by Government: New Zealand’s Monetary Policy Mess”. (Full disclosure: I provided fairly extensive detailed comments on an earlier draft.)

It is a curious report. There is a lot of detail that I agree with (and the report draws quite extensively on various criticisms I have made in recent years) but it ends up having the feel of a bit of a muddle.

(It is perhaps not helped by the Foreword from an Otago academic who seems wedded to a fiscal theory of the price level that doesn’t exactly command widespread support anywhere, and which would appear on the face of it to have predicted that New Zealand would have had one of the lowest inflation rates anywhere. His approach appears to absolve the Reserve Bank of responsibility for the high…

Only women can have babies. Right? WRONG! You bigot!

Two radio hosts have apologised on-air after saying that using the term “pregnant people” was “buying into bullshit”

TodayFM radio hosts Leah Panapaand Miles Davis apologised on Friday on-air for the comments they made around pronouns and inclusive language.

https://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/tv-radio/131496480/radio-hosts-apologise-for-toxic-onair-rant-about-pronouns-inclusive-language?cid=app-iPhone

That’s right – Leah Panapa and Miles Davis have been bullied into a grovelling apology by the grifting swindlers who bestow ‘Rainbow Tick’ on subservient compliant organisations, for a fee of course. Their sin was to mock the term ‘pregnant people’, a term so stupid it deserves nothing apart from withering scorn, contempt and constant derision. Their employers only care about looking like they aren’t modern-day heretics, and so they were swiftly thrown under the bus to repent and avoid being burnt at the stake:

Martin King, awards director ofthe rainbow excellence awards– in which MediaWorks, the owner…

After 30 years and plenty of talk about being ‘competitive’ with coal, gas and nuclear, wind and solar are still being treated like untamable toddlers. The subsidies they begged for in the beginning were meant to help so-called ‘infant’ industries get on their feet. But, even now, the mere mention of reducing subsidies turns them into bawling brats, furious at the prospect of ever having to make an honest dollar.

Even when the subsidy stream is flowing strong and steady, the rent-seekers that profit from the greatest economic and environmental scam of all time are always pressing for more. As John Constable explains below.

Demands for more subsidy expose the illusion of falling wind power costs
Net Zero Watch
John Constable
1 March 2023

Net Zero Watch is highlighting the fact that claims of falling wind power costs are contradicted by demands from wind power operators for additional subsidies on…

Although you’d be hard pressed to see much coverage in NZ media other than brief and superficial outlines, Australia, Britain and the US have now released more deals about AUKUS in San Diego this morning. It is actually Australia’s biggest spend on defence ever. Australia will initially home base, and then procure, five American Virginia-class nuclear-powered attack submarines over the next decade. Australia will then (from the 2040s onwards) take part in a combined Aus – UK – USA production of the new AUKUS SSNs. It will cost AUS $368 Billion over the next three decades.

Geoffrey Miller spoke to Rachel Smalley on the radio about this this morning before the deal was announced. The aim of the deal is very much as a response to growing militarisation of the Indo-Pacific region, all thanks to China flexing its muscles. Retired Australian Major General Mick Ryan analyses the…

Later yesterday morning, before major international markets opened for the week, the US authorities announced two steps in response to the failure of SVB Bank

• first, depositors not covered by the FDIC (amounts in excess of US$250000) would in fact be completely covered, with the costs to be covered by levies (taxes) on other US banks,
• second, a new Fed lending facility was set up, backed by the US Treasury, under which banks could borrow at market rate against securities that for these purposes would be valued at face value not market value.   For most longer-term securities issued in the last decade, market value is currently less than face value.

Legislative changes after 2008/09 were supposed to make bailouts much harder and less likely, but at the first real test – in respect of one failed bank that was 16th largest in the US (and another a bit smaller still)…

Share your favorites in ‘comments.’

Gough Whitlam, to a heckler in Forrest place:

‘Don’t call me a bastard, you bastard.’

Bill Hayden:

‘They could have won the election with a dead dog’s donger for a leader and they did.’

David Lange:

‘Mr Peters has been delayed by a full length mirror.’

Robert Muldoon:

‘He’s like a shiver looking for a spine to run down.’

Winston Churchill, to Bessie Braddock who accused him of being drunk in parliament:

‘Yes, I am and you are ugly but tomorrow I’ll be sober.’

Winston Churchill, to George Bernard Shaw:

‘Cannot possibly attend your first night; will attend second—if there is one.’

Ronald Reagan:

‘I’ve noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born.’

Paul Keating, on Peter Costello:

‘He’s all tip and no ice berg.’

Paul Keating, on a speech by John Hewson:

‘It was like being flogged with a warm lettuce.’

Sometimes spotting potential bank failures must be hard. One might think of really serious undiscovered fraud, or the weak controls that enabled a rogue trader such as Nick Leeson (who brought down Barings).

But if you were given the following set of facts about a bank:

• very rapid growth over a short period
• a heavy reliance on deposits withdrawable on demand,
• perhaps especially a heavy reliance on uninsured deposits or similar funding,
• a huge (and unusually large) share of the asset portfolio made up of long-term fixed rate bonds,
• a position greatly expanded at a time when short and long term interest rates were at record lows.
• no sign of any extensive use of interest rate risk hedging.

then even if you had reason to believe that the quality of the loans the bank had made were fine, the alarm bells should have been ringing very loudly.   It was a…

One of Labour’s worst legacies will be the decline in educational standards.

The Government must rule out lowering the standards required to obtain the NCEA literacy and numeracy co-requisites, National’s Education spokesperson Erica Stanford says.

“Revelations that the Government is considering lowering standards to help students pass shows an astounding lack of ambition from Labour.

“Two-thirds of New Zealand students failed to pass the new minimum literacy and numeracy standards for NCEA.

“Instead of simply dumbing down the tests to make them easier to pass, the Government could actually consider teaching kids more maths, reading and writing before they start secondary school.

“The Royal Society has already recommended that kids spend at least one hour a day learning maths. Why has the Government not acted on this advice?

“Rather than focusing on what students need in primary and…

By Dr. John Happs ~

According to Wikipedia the scientific method involves careful observation, rigorous scepticism about what is observed … formulating hypothesis … testing and refinement etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method

A number of entries in Wikipedia appear to display an absence of the above principles when it comes to reporting about climate change, with little criticism of the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) narrative. Thus, we have excellent examples of why this online source should be closely examined for possible bias when providing information about climate change and influencing factors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_conspiracy_theory

Close inspection suggests that Wikipedia has deleted a list of the many well-qualified scientists who have rejected the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming meme:

http://joannenova.com.au/2020/03/wikipedia-deletes-the-list-of-scientists-who-are-skeptics-of-the-sacred-consensus/print/

William Connolley was noted for promoting Wikipedia’s climate alarmist views whilst suppressing any rational, skeptical information that he didn’t like. Lawrence Solomon noted how:

“He rewrote Wikipedia’s articles on global warming, on the greenhouse effect…

Industrial scale wind and solar are world leaders when it comes to wrecking communities and destroying the environment.

Heavily subsidized, chaotically intermittent and an environmental nightmare, there’s a veritable smorgasbord of arguments against returning to the Dark Ages. A time when daily life was dictated by the seasons and the weather. The reason that human beings developed, harnessed and perfected thermal power was because they could. And (until now) we never looked back.

The Industrial Revolution, Space Race and the Internet Age would have been impossible without (respectively) coal, gas and, later, nuclear power.

No modern economy has ever powered itself in any meaningful way using wind and solar power. No country ever will.

Notwithstanding the reality, in the present Age of Morons, there’s an unhealthy stock of cynical rent-seekers dedicated to convincing gullible politicians that we’re only a technological heartbeat away from an all wind and sun powered future.

Never stand between rent seekers and a fat pile of taxpayers’ money. The wind and solar industries were built on lies and myth, but they can only survive when there’s a steady stream of massive and endless subsidies. Cut the subsidies and rent seekers disappear in a heartbeat.

BP was once the head of the ‘renewable’ energy rent-seeking queue. However, as Paul Homewood explains below, its management has seen the writing on the wall.

The climate scaremongers: BP gets real about Net Zero illusions
Conservative Woman
Paul Homewood
10 February 2023

IN LAST week’s column, I wrote about BP’s warning that the world would still be needing fossil fuels in three decades’ time. The Telegraph reported the claim of their Chief Economist Spencer Dale that the world would still be reliant on fossil fuels for a fifth of its energy in 2050, despite adopting radical climate policies, according to BP’s…