Utopia, you are standing in it!

Since teacher unions care more about lining their pockets and protecting their privileges rather than improving education, I’ll never feel any empathy for bosses like Randi Weingarten.

That being said, the past couple of years have been bad news for Ms Weingarten and her cronies.

Not only is school choice spreading – especially in states such as Arizona and West Virginia, but we also are getting more and more evidence that competition produces better results for schoolkids.

In a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Professors David N. Figlio, Cassandra M.D. Hart & Krzysztof Karbownik found that school choice led to benefits even for kids who remained stuck in government schools.

They enjoyed better academic outcomes, which is somewhat surprising, but even I was pleasantly shocked to see improved behavioral outcomes as well.

School choice programs have been growing in the United States and worldwide over the…

With power consumers suffering the disastrous consequences of the wind and solar transition in Germany and Britain, the MSM are still doing their best to deflect attention from the obvious cause.

How we found ourselves in a world where power prices are simply unaffordable, and power can only be delivered according the vagaries of the weather, isn’t all down to rent-seeking crony capitalists and politicians on the take. No, the mainstream media have been in it, up to their necks. They still are.

Notwithstanding the renewable energy driven disaster unfolding in Europe, the MSM keep dishing up propaganda memes about wind power being cheaper than coal (it isn’t) or that the ‘transition’ to an all-wind and sun powered future is simply ‘inevitable’. Notwithstanding overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Another classic line is about such and such wind farm ‘powering’ 100,000 homes. Which is clearly meant to give the impression that…

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post here, prompted by a paper by the former Bank of England Deputy Governor Sir Paul Tucker. Tucker’s paper was written in the context of the huge losses central banks in many countries, including his own UK, have run up through their large scale asset purchase programmes, especially those undertaken in 2020 and 2021 when bond yields (actual and implied forwards) were already incredibly low. While central banks continue to hold the bonds, the losses are seen every year now as the funding costs on those bond positions (the interest paid on the resulting settlement cash balances) swamp the low earnings yields on the bonds themselves. Bond positions purchased at yields perhaps around 1 per cent are financed with floating rate debt now paying (in New Zealand) 3.5 per cent (a rate generally expected to rise quite a bit further).

Tucker explored…

Every country chasing the wind and solar ‘transition’ is suffering from a mix of power rationing and rocketing prices. There is no exception.

Which brings us to our sunny land, Australia.

Blessed with abundant reserves of coal, gas and uranium, it ought to enjoy the world’s cheapest power prices (20 years ago, it did).

Now, however, since the Federal government’s Renewable Energy Target ramped up in 2009, power prices have been increasing at double-digit rates, with much worse to come. Michael Crawford’s graph was drawn in 2018; retail power prices have close to doubled, since then.

Current predictions are that Australian retail power prices will jump a further 35%, next year, following the closure of more reliable coal-fired plants.

Just like California, Germany, Denmark and the UK Australia’s obsession with chaotically intermittent wind and solar has a price. And it’s hard-pressed households and battling businesses who end up paying it.

“Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work;
we need a fundamentally different approach.”
–Top Google engineers

“Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels
in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole
is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.
– James Hansen
(Former NASA-climate chief)

“It is so easy to be wrong
—and to persist in being wrong—
when the costs of being wrong are paid by others.
– Thomas Sowell

•

If there was ever a better (scientific) advertisement for the uselessness of UNreliables (wind and solar) then it is this.

According to economist Jeff Currie of Goldman Sachs, over the past decade, nearly four-thousand-billion-dollars of taxpayer money has been spent on windmills and mirrors to reduce fossil fuel energy consumptionby 1 percent from 82 to 81 percent of overall global energy consumption.

How…

The wind industry’s insatiable demand for the Planet’s (purportedly) dwindling resources has no apparent limit. Inside every giant industrial wind turbine, there’s a bevy of rare minerals which are fast becoming rarer. Then there are more mundane minerals like iron ore (used to make steel) and copper, critical to their generators, internal cabling and wine, and the transmission lines that connect them from the back of beyond.

The intelligentsia keeps telling us that we are well on our way to an all-wind and solar-powered future. But, as John Hinderaker documents below, with the wind industry’s demand for raw materials like copper fast outstripping supply, its purported progress is about to hit some very natural limits.

Reality Bites Wind
Powerline
John Hinderaker
27 September 2022

It is an article of faith among many governments that we are in the midst of a transition from fossil fuel energy to “renewable” wind…

In a previous post I looked at the disaster of a debate for the Democrat Senate Candidate for Pennsylvania, John Fetterman, whose cognitive problems from a stroke were finally made obvious.

How did it come to this? Fetterman had the stroke a week before the Democrat Primary vote and it’s been obvious that he’s not been the same since. In former days a candidate with these problems would have been told by the upper echelons of the Democrat Party that he needed to quit, winner or not. But the smoke-filled rooms of yore have been steadily replaced by the will of the Party voter since the upsets of 1968 – although Bernie Sanders would strongly disagree after his treatment in the 2016 and 2020 primaries. Jeff Goldstein had an even more cynical take:

Revealing though that is [from The Hill’s “Rising” co-anchor Briahna Joy Gray], given that most…

Stardate: 4040.7 (2268)
Original Air Date: March 15, 1968
Writer: Gene Roddenberry/Gene L. Coon
Director: Ralph Senensky

“Slaves and gladiators… what are we looking at? Twentieth Century Rome?”

Appropriately airing on the “Ides of March,” the Enterprise encounters space debris from a missing ship, the survey vessel S.S. Beagle, which has been missing for six years. Enterprise sensors pick up portions of the antimatter nacelles, personal belongings, but no signs of bodies. The S.S. Beagle was a small class-4 survey vessel with a crew of 47, commanded by R.M. Merik (William Smithers), a man Kirk whom once knew during his Academy days. However, Merik was dropped in his fifth year at the Academy so he entered the Merchant Service. The Enterprise traces the path of the Beagle’s debris which leads to a Class-M planet that Chekov notes is “somewhat similar to Earth” within “System 892.”

This…

Stardate: 4040.7 (2268)
Original Air Date: March 29, 1968
Writer: Art Wallace/Gene Roddenberry
Director: Marc Daniels

“I know this world needs help. That’s why some of my generation are kind of crazy and rebels, you know? We wonder if we’re gonna be alive when we’re thirty.”

Using the light speed break-away factor (or the “slingshot method” which was previously discovered in the Season 1 classic “Tomorrow Is Yesterday”), the Enterprise has once again moved backward through time to the 20^th century. In orbit around earth, the year is 1968 and the Enterprise is conducting “historical research” when suddenly an alert rings out as a transponder beam hits the Enterprise from 1,000 light years away.

A suit-wearing man with a black cat (named Isis) beams aboard the Enterprise asking “why have you intercepted me?” His name is Gary Seven (Robert Lansing), a human being from the 20

Cultists couldn’t care less about the environmental destruction that both wind and solar leave in their wake, merrily ignoring the thousands of wind turbine blades and millions solar panels already being dumped in landfills. Apparently, their mountainous toxic waste legacy will be something for future generations to deal with.

The same characters vilify fossil fuels of all descriptions, with particular fury reserved for coal – the black stuff that literally dragged us out of the Dark Ages.

Precisely what the world would do without coal, oil and gas remains a mystery.

In the ‘all or nothing’ worldview espoused by eco-religionists there is no room for reason or logic, when it comes to measuring the relative costs and benefits of any course of action.

When it comes to net environmental benefits, as Gregory Wrightstone explains below, on a pound-for-pound basis, fossil fuels win hands down.

Fossil Fuels Are the Greenest of…

The wind power cult have no difficulty in justifying the destruction of pristine landscapes; the dismemberment of once cohesive, rural communities; the creation of toxic waste lands in China (where the rare earths essential to wind turbines are processed); crushing power prices that punish the poorest and most vulnerable in society; and barely shrug at the slaughter of millions upon millions of birds and bats, across the globe.

The usual approach by wind power outfits is to get the state to sanction their inevitable bird and bat slaughter.

In the US, their licenses to kill rare and endangered Eagles are euphemistically called “take permits”. As if the holder of the licence was organising a payment-free collection of something from the corner store.

In Victoria, Australia, an outfit owned by the New Zealand government, Tilt Renewables has been challenged about the morality of wiping out rare and endangered…