Utopia, you are standing in it!

Last week I reread Victoria University historian Jim McAloon’s history of New Zealand economic policymaking from 1945 to 1984, Judgements of all Kinds, first published a decade or so ago. Good works of economic history, let alone of the history of economic policymaking, aren’t thick on the ground in New Zealand, and as McAloon himself notes in a journal article published a year or two later:

“Economic history has a relatively low profile in New Zealand. Few economics programmes offer much in the way of economic history, and none of them offer courses in New Zealand economic history. Very few academics in New Zealand economics programmes publish in economic history. Victoria University, once boasting the only New Zealand chair in economic history,
has largely abandoned the field.”

(Actually, when I was at Victoria in the early 80s – and not wise enough myself to have done much economic history…

The wild claims about wind and solar replacing, coal, gas and nuclear power don’t stand first contact with reality.

Over the last 20 years, trillions of dollars have been squandered on subsidies, tax breaks, mandates, penalties, and other state-directed efforts to make chaotically intermittent wind and solar serious contenders on the world energy scene. Their combined contribution to world energy demand remains thoroughly underwhelming, as John Hinderaker highlights below.

$3.8 Trillion for Essentially Nothing
Powerline
John Hinderaker
26 October 2022

Jeff Currie, who is Global Head of Commodities Research for Goldman Sachs, describes the utter futility of “green” energy:

Here’s a stat for you, as of January of this year. At the end of last year, overall, fossil fuels represented 81 percent of overall energy consumption. Ten years ago, they were at 82. So though, all of that investment in renewables, you’re talking about $3.8 trillion, let me repeat that…

Before the obsession with intermittent wind and solar took hold, gas was rarely used to generate electricity if coal, nuclear or hydro sources were available. Gas-fired electricity, in the main, was simply too expensive, by comparison with coal-fired power.

Coal-fired generators are designed to run around-the-clock. Wind turbines and solar panels only run according to the dictates of the weather and, in the latter case, where the Sun sits in the sky.

The crazy and chaotic intermittency inherent in wind and solar has created a place for Open Cycle Gas Turbines and even piston-engined diesels, of the kind used in oceangoing vessels.

Both are referred to as ‘peakers’ in the electricity generation trade, because they’re designed to run for short bursts to pick up peaks in the load (ie rapid increases in demand). Their running costs are such that they were only ever meant to run at the margins…

It turns out all the panic mongers were wrong. Lockdowns etc worked worse than the Swedish approach, even without taking into account all the long term damage to life expectancy, educational outcomes, economic prosperity that the authoritarian states incurred.

As of reporting date June 19th 2022, of all the countries analysed by theOECD, Sweden has the lowest overall cumulative excess deaths tally.

And New Zealand took all that pain for long term damage rather than gain.

Yesterday’s announcement from the Minister of Finance that he was reappointing Adrian Orr as Governor of the Reserve Bank was not unexpected but was most unfortunate. I was inclined to think another commentator (can’t remember who, so as to link to) who reckoned that it may have been Robertson’s worst decision in his five years in office was pretty much on the mark.

When Orr was first appointed, emerging out of a selection process kicked off by the Reserve Bank’s Board while National had still been in office, it seemed to me it was the sort of appointment that could have gone either way. I captured some of that in the post I wrote the day after that first appointment was announced, and rereading that post last night it seemed to at least hint at many of the issues that might arise and come to render the appointment problematic at…

The Ardern government has reappointed Adrian Orr for a second five-year term as governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand.

Finance Minister Grant Robertson said the RBNZ board unanimously recommended his reappointment.

He said the central bank had been going through considerable change during Orr’s first term and his reappointment would make sure the changes were bedded in.

But the reappointment has brought a chorus of criticism from Opposition parties. National’s deputy leader Nicola Willis says

National is “appalled” by the Finance Minister’s decision to re-appoint Orr without first completing an independent review of the Bank’s performance.

“In recent years, Adrian Orr as the Chair of the Monetary Policy Committee signed off on an extraordinary programme of money printing and cheap lending that pumped tens of billions of dollars into the economy.That programme directly contributed to house prices rising 28% in one year, inflation rising to a 32-year high…

CO2 is not pollution
Without sufficient dispatchable electricity generation the UK could become a low-energy power on windless nights. Alarmist talk of ‘worst droughts in 500/1000 years’ begs the question: what caused those historical events? Demonising a vital atmospheric trace gas makes no sense.
– – –
UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is to call on global leaders to speed up the transition to renewable energy when he addresses the UN COP27 climate summit today, says Energy Live News.

He travelled to Egypt yesterday after a U-turn on his earlier decision to not attend the event, attracting much criticism from environmental activists and political opponents.

Mr Sunak will also tell politicians and business leaders that Britain will work with international allies and be at the “forefront of this global movement” towards clean energy.

In a recent interview with the Financial Times, former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney made the striking claim that ‘in 2016 the British economy was 90% the size of Germany’s. Now it is less than 70%’. This claim is garbage, for two reasons. Unfortunately, it is just one of a tsunami of fake statistics which is helping to turn public opinion against Brexit.

Indeed, Mr Carney went even further on the Radio 4 Today programme last Friday, when he appeared to blame the current surge in UK inflation and the latest increase in interest rates on the decision to leave the EU.

Let’s start with the Germany comparison. Mr Carney has attempted to contrast the sizes of the two economies over time using the prevailing market exchange rates. This in itself is dodgy. But even his own numbers are wrong, because he has mistakenly compared real…

With the debacle playing out in Europe and the UK, it takes a special brand of delusion the claim that increasing reliance on wind and solar will inevitably result in falling power prices.

And delusion, in that respect, is very much the order of the day amongst Australia’s Green/Labor Alliance.

When it comes to anything like sensible energy policy, Anthony Albanese, the PM (above left) and his witless Energy Minister, Chris Bowen (above right) are so far out of touch with reality, it’s frightening. Especially frightening for any energy-hungry businesses or industry, and terrifying for households already dealing with double-digit inflation and rising interest rates.

Brushed off as ‘cost of living pressures’, the predicted (by ALP modellers) 56% increase in electricity prices over the next two years, will wipeout hundreds of thousands of jobs in manufacturing and mineral processing (aluminium smelters we will be the first to go) and destroy…

Stardate: 5027.3 (2268)
Original Air Date: September 27, 1968
Writer: D.C. Fontana
Director: John Meredyth Lucas

“It is not a lie to keep the truth to oneself.”

Dr. McCoy records something unusual in his medical log (a rare log entry from the good doctor) –Captain Kirk has been unusually irritable lately. Is it because the Enterprise has spent too much time on patrol? Or is something else agitating the captain? Kirk makes a seemingly erratic order for the Enterprise to enter the Romulan Neutral Zone. In “Balance of Terror” we learned what a volatile situation this can lead to. Suddenly, three Romulan ships de-cloak and surround the Enterprise as it sits in forbidden territory (apparently, the Romulans are now using technology borrowed from the Klingons).

Subcommander Tal of the Romulan fleet (Jack Donner) appears onscreen and demands the immediate surrender of the Enterprise. He gives…

In my post last Friday I highlighted how the Governor of the Reserve Bank had just been making up stuff, and apparently knowingly misleading Parliament, to distract from the Bank’s own responsibility for New Zealand’s current very high core inflation. There may well be a case to be made that central banks did about as well as could reasonably be expected over the last couple of years – “reasonably be expected” here set by reference to the general views at the time of other expert observers (none of whom, admittedly, had chosen to take on statutory responsibility for inflation) but simply making stuff up blaming the Moscow bogeyman helps no one, and detracts from any serious conversation about what went on with inflation – core and headline – and why. To put my own cards on the table, there are many reasons why Adrian Orr should not be reappointed, but…

The misanthropes who glue themselves to roads and berate us about the ‘horrors’ of nuclear, coal and gas-fired power aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed, to be sure.

Living in a fact and consequence free zone, they’ve never stopped to think for a moment what life would be like without light, heat and power.

There are plenty of factors at play; an education system gutted of any rigourous content and filled with resentment-filled emotional claptrap; a mainstream media that simply parrots whatever crony capitalists tell them to write and say; cynical elites profiting from collective fear and ignorance generated by the press; and a political class who seem to think (with some justification) that the proles are simply too stupid to know or care.

But, leave hundreds of thousands freezing or boiling in the dark, and/or keep presenting them with power bills that they simply can’t afford, and the…