Utopia, you are standing in it!

Here are the slides from a presentations I gave last week to A-level students of economics, politics and business studies…

It appears as if adults are finally taking charge of energy policy, wresting it from the hands of boffins and bureaucrats determined to have us freezing or boiling in the dark.

Germany has restarted its coal-fired power plants and looks unlikely to shut down its nuclear power plants as previously mandated; the French are determined to maintain their 56 nuclear plants and have plans to build 14 all new plants in the near future.

In the US, its Supreme Court has just crushed Joe Biden’s surreptitious efforts to destroy America’s coal-fired power plants by a mixture of underhanded stealth and unlawful regulation.

The Epoch Times had this report on Joe’s latest constitutional blow.

Supreme Court Narrows EPA’s Ability to Regulate Carbon Dioxide Emissions
Epoch Times
Matthew Vadum
30 June 2022

The Supreme Court ruled 6–3 on June 30 that the Clean Air Act doesn’t give the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency…

There was some controversy about Arctic sea ice in May of this year. Back then, I saw some (contradictory) messages in a quick succession. First, there was a tweet claiming that Arctic sea ice extent was the same as in 1989, followed by a fact-check claiming that this was just cherry-picking and that it in fact going steadily downhill, finally a reply that also the fact-check was cherry-picking and overall sea ice extent was just fine.

So, what is it? Is Arctic sea ice going to hell in a handbasket or is it doing just fine, already recovered to 1989 levels?

It is several years ago since I looked at Arctic sea ice extent data and at that time there was what seems to be a modest beginning of a pause, so I was curious how it evolved since then. Did that pause continue or is it straight down again?

One of the better sequences in Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” is recreating that sacred piece of Elvis lore, “Singer Presents…Elvis,” the Xmas season TV show labeled “The ’68 Comeback Special.”

Luhrmann does spectacle like few filmmakers working today.

But you might be surprised how impressive that analog live on videotape show was for its day, and remains. Here’s a favorite but featuring a song by Burt Reynolds ‘ future sidekick, Jerry Reed.

You can find the entire special on YouTube, in pieces and in complete form. Some of it is teeth grindlingly dated. But what worked still works.

The renewable energy pit deepens, but there’s no indication the dolts in charge will ever stop digging. The, by now obvious, consequences of attempting to rely on sunshine and breezes include another annual power price increase of over 20% this month and routine power rationing by postcode. In response, there’s a growing groundswell of hostility to the glib and superficial rhetoric that passes for energy policy debate in this country. Bewilderment is giving way to frustration and outright anger.

Australia’s new PM, Anthony Albanese and his gormless Energy Minister are odds-on to win the Dumbest Pair in Politics award, with their efforts to destroy what’s left of Australia’s reliable and affordable power generation system.

STT has consistently described the policies that got us here as “suicidal”. But the approach being taken now to double down on the debacle, evidences clearly murderous intent.

As Europe backtracks from its self-inflicted renewable energy…

For how much longer?
[image credit: thecostaricanews.com]
One of the many costs of carbon dioxide paranoia. How long do people want to go on paying, and allowing themselves to be bludgeoned into believing suspect climate theories while struggling to afford to run their own lives?
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Green fuels are adding nearly £10 to the cost of filling up an average family car, according to new analysis that will add more pressure on the Government to scrap their use, says the Daily Telegraph.

Petrol and diesel contain between five and 10 per cent biofuels, made mostly from wheat, maize and used cooking oil, the price of which has shot up since the war in Ukraine, even more than the cost of regular fuel.

As part of the Government’s net zero drive, E10 petrol was made the standard last summer, while B7 diesel was introduced in 2019.

The deluded few still promoting the total transition to wind and solar as ‘inevitable’ are being pounded by reality, on a daily basis.

Dead calm weather is a thing; sunset is a thing. Both phenomena are inevitable, ergo, there is no way wind and solar can ever amount to meaningful power sources.

Proponents have been reduced to babbling about mythical mega-batteries, non-existent pumped hydro and (equally non-existent) so-called ‘green’ hydrogen which, collectively, are meant to be a cheap as chips and practically instant fix to the hopeless intermittency of wind and solar power.

The argument appears to run along the lines that, had we only thought a little bit harder about it, we would have solved the problem from the outset by adding a little “storage”.

Here’s the news: there is no such thing as the grid-scale storage of electricity and the laws of physics and economics mean there never…

In a good development for religious freedom, the UK Employment Appeal Tribunal (“EAT”) in its decision in Mackereth v Department for Work and Pensions & Anor [2022] EAT 99 (29 June 2022) has ruled that a Biblical view of human sex and gender is “worthy of respect” and may be protected as a religious belief in an appropriate case. Unfortunately for Dr Mackereth, the outcome of the appeal was that the way he had been treated by the relevant Department in response to his protected belief was a “proportionate” and hence lawful action. As I will explain below, I think this part of the ruling may be challenged. But it is good to see common sense on the issue of the status of his belief, which is one that would be shared by many people in the community.

Verdict [image credit: coindesk.com]
Democracy overseeing the flow of EPA climate edicts? A ‘huge blow’, say alarmists, as over-the-top reactions from some of the usual suspects pour in.
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This means Congress will now have to pass off on any climate regulations, says Energy Live News.

In what’s been considered a blow to climate mitigation in the US, the Supreme Court has ruled against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

This means the EPA will now be limited in how it can regulate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and help stave off global warming in the country.

Eric Crampton had a post this morning drawing attention to recent posts on TPP by Brian Easton (“to the left of the NZ economist punditsphere”) and me (“to the right of the same”).

In our posts we primarily asked slightly different questions.  Brian posed the question “Can we afford not to adopt the TPPA?” .  He doesn’t express a strong view one way or the other on the economic merits of the deal itself (but, as Eric notes, he doesn’t come across as overly enthusiastic).  Instead, his focus is on the fact that the deal has already been agreed, and that if New Zealand were not to ratify it now, it could be deeply damaging to a range of international relationships.

The logic in this column is that we now do not have much choice about the TPPA. The government is trapped into agreeing to it because rejecting it has…

There has been much debate in recent years (on this blog and elsewhere) on the validity of a second referendum on an independent Scotland. Defence of the Union has often been by reassertion of the unitary nation-state model. Michael Keating argues that this demonstrates a fundamental misconception of what union means, and that the nationalism implied by the nature of a union maintained by law, rather than the consent of its people, represents a threat to the continuing Union of the United Kingdom.

In its 2020 White Paper on the Internal Market, the British government described the United Kingdom as a ‘unitary state’. Although, for many at Westminster, this might sound rather banal, it betrays a serious misunderstanding of what is, and always has been, a plurinational union. Such misunderstandings are pulling the Union apart.

Four dimensions

In my book State and Nation in the United…

Last year, our economics department launched a data analytics minor program. The first class is a simple 2 credit course called Foundations of Dats Analytics. Originally, the idea was that liberal arts majors would take it and that this class would be a soft, non-technical intro of terminology and history.

However, it turned out that liberal arts majors didn’t take the class and that the most popular feedback was that the class lacked technical challenge. I’m prepping to teach the class and it will have two components. A Python training component where students simply learn Python. We won’t do super complicated things, but they will use Python extensively in future classes. The 2nd component is still in the vein of the old version of the course.

I’ll have the students read and discuss “Big DataDemystified” by David Stephenson. He spends 12 brief chapters introducing the reader to…