Utopia, you are standing in it!

More target mania. The way things are going, or not going, the climate-obsessed UK government won’t be able to hurt the national economy with expensive and unreliable electricity as fast as planned.
– – –
With some offshore wind projects waiting years in the pipeline, a report commissioned by the government has called for an urgent upgrade to the UK’s National Grid in order to reach the 2030 target of installing 50GW of wind power, says Sky News.

The UK will miss a key target to install 50 gigawatts (GW) of wind power by the end of the decade unless major changes are made to the grid, according to a government-commissioned report.

The 50GW target is at the heart of the government’s plans to phase out more polluting types of electricity generation by 2035, while also boosting energy security.

Tim Pick, who was appointed last year as an “offshore wind…

Over at Kiwiblog the latest proposed reforms to the godawful Resource Management Act (RMA), were reviewed in terms of the massive attacks being made on them.

The three strikes against the RMA reform

Now I’ve long thought the RMA was a disaster area, and in this I’ve often drawn not just upon my personal experiences trying to get anything done in the face it, but on those of Peter Cresswell (Not PC), who has been banging the drum about the awfulness of the RMA for nigh on two decades:

But it was this comment from DPF that I thought notable, especially since National Party criticisms of Parker’s proposed “reforms” have made exactly the same point.

Even the Greens have worked out this new law is a dog. The renewable energy sector have said it will mean no new renewable energy project will get consented for ten years.

Oh…

Governments oftentimes are spectacularlyincompetent. And when thathappens, it creates an opening for the private sector to step up in rather unexpected ways.

I’ve even created a semi-serious, semi-satirical series to commemorate these examples.

• The libertarian paradise of Mexico
• The libertarian paradise of Nigeria
• The libertarian paradise of Somalia
• The libertarian paradise of Germany
• The libertarian paradise of Argentina
• The libertarian paradise of South Africa

None of these places are libertarian, of course, but each of them illustrate how markets can provide surprising benefits. In most of the examples, markets are even providing so-called public goods.

Today, we’re going to revisit South Africa because of a remarkable report in the Wall Street Journal.

Written by Alexandra Wexler, it shows how the private sector is providing road repair, fire protection, and traffic control.

South African insurers are joining other private companies in taking over public services…

Given events in France and other nations perhaps this should become a series.

It seems that the Rainbow Nation’s problems are escalating rapidly across many areas of society, with the latest one being their energy system, which this article argues is at the heart of things.

But I don’t think that’s true, especially when you track down the roots of their energy system woes, which is basically what a former CEO of the giant state-run energy company Eskom, Andre de Ruyter, said in an interview following his quitting the job in December, 2022.

But before getting into that, here’s a quick synopsis of the conditions, which only really grabbed the attention of people outside South Africa when this was announced:

On February 15, the U.S. embassy in PretoriaadvisedAmericans in South Africa to have at least seventy-two hours’ worth of food, water, medicine, and hygiene supplies in case…

Restructuring the health system during a pandemic was an act of madness.

Wasting money on a transition unit that did little, if anything useful makes it worse:

. . . It will take until next year’s Budget for the public to discover how the overhauled health sector will be funded, despite more than $30 million being spent on a “transition unit” within the Prime Minister’s own department.

That’s left health industry insiders and watchers worried about the time and energy required to establish the new system, while, at the same time, it’s struggling with workforce issues, Covid-induced backlogs, and creaking infrastructure. . . 

The Health and Disability System Review Transition Unit, within the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC), was established in August 2020.

The following month, then-minister Chris Hipkins announced former director-general of health Stephen McKernan, head of consultancy EY’s government and public sector practice, would lead…

The US government has granted America’s offshore wind industry a sweeping licence to destroy thousands of whales, dolphins, porpoises, seals and more – while permanently trashing critical marine environments in the process.

The damage done starts with seismic surveys carried out pre-construction and continues as hundreds of 240m high turbines are punched into the seabed and trenches are ripped up for transmission cabling.

The industry euphemistically calls the direct and indirect harm caused to marine mammals “harassment”, when ‘pointless slaughter’ would be a more accurate description.

Bear in mind there is no commercial value for electricity that cannot be delivered as and when consumers need it; the only ‘value’ attached to wind power is the massive taxpayer and power consumer subsidies collected by generators. Cut the subsidies and this so-called ‘industry’ would disappear in a heartbeat.

As Constance Gee explains below the US government is complicit in what, once upon…

The death of Queen Anne on 1 August 1714 heralded the arrival of a new dynasty in Britain – literally – the kingdom had to await the arrival of the new king from Hanover on 18 September. Continuing our Coronation blog series, Dr Stuart Handley examines the preparations for and proceedings of George I’s coronation in 1714.

Following the death of the queen, according to the Act of Regency of 1706, a group of regents, both appointed and ex officio, took over running the country. On 1 September the Privy Council set up a committee composed of 15 councillors (all members of the House of Lords except for the marquess of Annandale) to look into the Coronation. At their first meeting on the 3rd, there was discussion about the Coronation medal, with Master of the Mint, Sir Isaac Newton’s designs being rejected. The chosen design bore the inscription…

I obviously haven’t seen, or read, the best advice expert commentators have been providing to their wholesale market clients over the last 24 hours but in what I have heard and read I’ve been struck by how little attention seems to have been paid in the more popular/accessible part of the market to this from the MPC’s statement (emphasis added). Looking at some of the changes in market prices, it isn’t clear how much weight markets have put on it.

Below, by contrast, are the “bias statements” (comments about what might happen next) from the OCR decisions back to August 2021. Yesterday’s statement – for all the gung-ho 50 basis point move – ends on a very different note. They seem genuinely open minded on whether the next move might be up or down, and whether any such move might be soon or far away. The MPC are no better…

Now that was a boring title wasn’t it?

There was a mistake in Monday’s post about the Reserve Bank’s MPC external member Caroline Saunders’ term (and I am grateful to Brad Olsen of Infometrics, on Twitter, for pointing me back in the right direction).

Saunders’ 4 year term, from 1 April 2019, expired last Friday. She is eligible to be appointed for one more term (the law sensibly limits external members to no more than two four-year terms) but she has not, it appears, been reappointed (by contrast, the other two externals were reappointed when their first terms expired this time last year).

As I noted in Monday’s post, the Minister of Finance has the ability to extend the term of an MPC member (each of the clauses referred to here are from Schedule 3 of the Reserve Bank Act)

Any such extension to a first term sensibly counts against…

For over 700 years London was the scene of public executions, a practice which wove itself into the city’s history and popular culture. This excellent and imaginatively designed exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands explores all aspects of public executions in London, using a combination of artifacts, letters, informative videos, songs and voices, paintings, engravings and caricatures, and some really gruesome exhibits.

Above all, it is amazingly comprehensive – it touches on all the aspects of the subject I’d expected beforehand but goes on to explore all kinds of nooks and crannies I’d never have thought of. I’d never thought about the effort some condemned prisoners put into being well dressed for their trip to the gallows. Well, the exhibition tells the stories of condemned men and women who went to great lengths to look their best on their death day, and even has the fine dress and fancy…

On any reckoning, wind power is an abject failure. Dilute and diffuse, chaotically intermittent, insanely costly (when backup costs are included) and a wholesale environmental disaster, wiping out millions of birds, bats and beneficial bugs, and wrecking the livability the rural communities, nothing stacks up apart from the massive and endless subsidies upon which the whole fiasco depends.

A report from an Oxford scientist, Professor Emeritus Wade Allison dumps a bucket on the wind industry and its wild claims about powering the world and saving the planet, as Naveen Athrappully reports below.

‘Wind Power Fails on Every Count’: Oxford Scientist Explains the Math
Epoch Times
Naveen Athrappully
27 March 2023

Wind power has been historically and scientifically unreliable, claims an Oxford University mathematician and physicist, with his calculations revealing the government to be pursuing a “bluster of windfarm politics” while discarding numerical evidence.

After the decision to cut…

The Reserve Bank of Australia yesterday left its policy rate unchanged at 3.6 per cent. The Reserve Bank of New Zealand’s MPC is generally expected to today raise its OCR by another 25 basis points to 5 per cent.

In the broad sweep of decades it isn’t an unusually large gap. Most of the time, New Zealand short-term nominal interest rates are at least a bit higher than those in Australia (Australia’s inflation target is a little lower than New Zealand so the real interest differential tends to be a bit larger).

Sometimes economic circumstances in the two countries are very different. Thus, that period a decade or so ago when the RBA cash rate was higher than the RBNZ OCR coincided with the later stages of the Australian mining investment boom, for which there was nothing comparable in New Zealand.

But over the last two or three years, the…

Just as Europe reverses course on its wind and solar-powered energy calamity, in Australia, the lunatics in charge of the asylum are determined to double down and destroy what remains of this country’s once reliable and affordable power supplies.

With policies directed at wiping reliable coal-fired power plants off the map and rewarding the unreliables with even more subsidies, soft loans and mandated targets, Australians might well wonder where their next watt might be coming from, and how on Earth they will afford to pay for power when their bills rocket once again – in July retail prices are set to jump by 20-30% depending on the state you’re in [Note to Ed: a state of poverty, most likely].

Peta Credlin poses that very question with Terry McCrann in this Sky News interview.

‘Mad rush’ to renewable energy is ‘Total Insanity’: Terry McCrann
Sky News
Terry McCrann and Peta Credlin

Napoleon Bonaparte (August 15, 1769 – May 5, 1821), later known by his regnal name Napoleon I, was a Corsica-born French military commander and political leader who rose to prominence during the French Revolution and led successful campaigns during the Revolutionary Wars.

He was the de facto leader of the French Republic as First Consul from 1799 to 1804, then Emperor of the French from 1804 until 1814 and again in 1815. Napoleon’s political and cultural legacy endures to this day, as a highly celebrated and controversial leader. He initiated many liberal reforms that have persisted in society, and is considered one of the greatest military commanders in history. His campaigns are still studied at military academies worldwide. Between three and six million civilians and soldiers died in what became known as the Napoleonic Wars.

War of the Sixth Coalition

Napoleon assumed command in Germany and inflicted a series of…

Edward the Confessor (c. 1003 – January 5, 1066) was an Anglo-Saxon King of the English. Usually considered the last king of the House of Wessex, he ruled from 1042 to 1066.

Edward was the seventh son of Æthelred the Unready, and the first by his second wife, Emma of Normandy, daughter of the Norman Duke Richard the Fearless and Gunnora (c. 950 – c. 1031). The names of Gunnor’s parents are unknown, but Robert of Torigni wrote that her father was a forester from the Pays de Caux and according to Dudo of Saint-Quentin she was of noble Danish ancestry.

Edward was born between 1003 and 1005 in Islip, Oxfordshire, and is first recorded as a ‘witness’ to two charters in 1005. He had one full brother, Alfred, and a sister, Godgifu. In charters he was always listed behind his older half-brothers, showing that he ranked beneath them.

During his childhood…