Utopia, you are standing in it!

So-called green groups that help cover up the wind industry’s rampant slaughter of birds and bats are just as guilty as those who directly profit from the carnage.

A fair proportion of their practised acquiescence is explained by bags of cash – aka helpful “donations” from outfits such as NextEra to the likes of the Sierra Club. But not all. Running silent is one thing, running interference is something altogether more sinister.

Robert Bryce lists the lid on a particularly toxic brand of virtue signalling hypocrisy.

America’s Biggest ‘Green’ Groups Love Wind Turbines, Not Eagles
Real Clear Energy
Robert Bryce
20 April 2022

I’m old enough to remember when environmentalists cared about protecting our birds, bats, and whales. Alas, concern about protecting our wildlife has been lost amid the headlong rush to cover the countryside with oceans of solar panels and forests of wind turbines in the hope that they…

There are many reasons to admireSwitzerland.

• The nation’s very effectivespending cap.
• The nation’s libertarian-leaninggovernance.
• The nation’s system of private pensions.
• The nation’s genuine decentralization.
• The nation’s support for gun rights.
• The nation’s high public sector efficiency.

For today, let’s focus on how tax competition is one of the benefits of Swiss decentralization.

More specifically, most fiscal policy (both taxes and spending) takes place at the cantonal and municipal level. And this means that the Swiss can vote with their feet if they want more government or less government.

Not surprisingly, they tend to move to lower-tax areas. In a summary for VoxEU, Isabel Martínez shares some of her research on the impact of tax cuts and tax competition in the canton of Obwalden.

…economic research has made important contributions, showing that top earners indeed relocate across borders for…

The latest CPI inflation report didn’t have a huge surprise in the headline number, with 8.3% being very similar to last month. But with the two most recent months of data, we can now see something very unfortunate in the data: cumulative inflation during the pandemic as measured by the CPI-U (11.6%) has now almost matched average wage growth (12.0%), as measured by the average wage for all private workers. I start in January 2020 for the pre-pandemic baseline.

What this means is that inflation-adjusted wages in the US are no greater than they were before the pandemic. They are almost identical to what they were in February 2020 (just 2 cents greater). But as regular readers will know, the CPI-U isn’t the only measure of inflation, and there’s good reason to believe it’s not the best. One alternative is the Personal Consumption Expenditures price index. Cumulative inflation…

Net-zero carbon dioxide gas emissions targets are designed to destroy the reliable and affordable power supplies that have brought prosperity to billions around the globe. Dressed up in marketing blurb, net-zero targets sound cheap, but with energy supplies there is no such thing as a free lunch. Plenty of household and businesses have already worked out that the great wind and solar scam brings with it rocketing power prices and routine power rationing.

But that is precisely what punitive mandated renewable energy targets and massive subsidies to wind and solar were designed to do.

On 21 May, Australians will line up to vote for candidates who might form a Federal government later this month. However, what’s on offer is like choosing between swallowing a string of razorblades and jumping into a pool filled with starving saltwater crocs.

Both main parties, the once conservative Liberals, and the once worker’s champion, Labor…

Intermittent wind and solar are a natural guarantee of grid chaos and rocketing power prices. every single country that’s chased the wind and solar pipe dream has watched their power prices go through the roof, with no exception.

Don’t say we didn’t warn you. STT has been banging on about this since December 2012. The graphic above from Dr Michael Crawford spells it out: add massively subsidised and chaotically intermittent wind and solar to your power grid and watch power prices spiral out of control.

As STT has pointed out a number of times, the gaming that’s the subject of the ACCC’s interest is a natural consequence of a very natural set of phenomena: wind and solar power output collapses, that occur whenever the sun sets and/or calm weather sets in:

Wind Power Output Collapses Send Power Prices into Orbit: The World’s Biggest Joke Just Got Serious

and

South Australia’s Unbridled…

By Paul Homewood

Extreme Weather during the Maunder Minimum (1645–1715 A.D.)

The region around the eastern Mediterranean (the Ottoman Empire) was severely affected by adverse climate during the Maunder Minimum.

Most areas suffered drought and plague in the 1640’s, the 1650’s and again in the 1670’s, while the winter of 1684 was the wettest recorded in the eastern Mediterranean during the past five centuries, and the winters of the later 1680’s were at least 3° C cooler than today.

In 1687 a chronicler in Istanbul, Turkey reported ‘This winter was severe to a degree that had not been seen in a very long time. For fifty days the roads were closed and people could not go outside. In cities and villages, the snow buried many houses. In the Golden Horn [major urban waterway and the primary inlet of the Bosphorus in Istanbul], the…

(Written on 2 May) Ouch! It looks increasingly likely that the headline measure of consumer price inflation is going to start with a ‘9’ in April (official data will be released on 18 May).

Most economists had expected a jump from 7pc in March to around 8.5pc. This assumed that the price increases we already know about – notably the 54pc hike in the Ofgem cap on domestic energy bills – would be at least partly offset by slower inflation elsewhere.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t appear to have happened. In particular, petrol and diesel prices have edged up further, despite the 5p cut in fuel duty, and food price inflation is continuing to rise. These pressures have been compounded by the geopolitical risks that Liam Halligan explained well in the Sunday Telegraph.

I have therefore upped my own forecast to 9pc for consumer price index (CPI) inflation in April, with the…

On 21April 2021 Minister of Health Andrew Little announced a major restructuring of Aotearoa New Zealand’s health system involving three main changes to take effect on 1July 2022. Better understanding the third of these changes is helped by drawing upon Baldrick of the Blackadder television comedy.

The first two changes are commendable; the establishment of the Maori Health Authority (MHA) and the new crown public health agency (located within the Ministry of Health). They both have the potential to sharpen the effectiveness of addressing the impact of external social determinants of health, wellbeing, and access to quality patient care treatment.

Establishing these two new entities does not of themselves disrupt or destabilise the health system. Both new entities could established without any other restructuring, aside from transferring some functions to them presently performed by the health ministry.

Removing the ‘point of connection’

But the third change does disrupt and destabilise…

By Ronald Stein ~

China and Russia are great War historians of WWI and WWII, and know that the countries that controls the minerals, crude oil, and natural gas, controls the world! Biden has done an excellent job of relinquishing “CONTROL” for the “green” materials to China, and relinquishing “CONTROL” of the crude oil to OPEC and Russia! God help America!

How is it possible that America has allowed itself to become so dependent on authoritarian countries like China, Russia, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia over the 30 years since the end of the Cold War? The weaponization of energy by China and Russia have been extensively discussed in the three books co-authored by Ronald Stein and Todd Royal, including the 2022 Pulitzer Prize nominated book “Clean Energy Exploitations – Helping Citizens Understand the Environmental and Humanity Abuses That Support Clean Energy.

America is in a fast pursuit toward…

The relationship between rocketing power prices and heavily subsidised and chaotically intermittent wind and solar couldn’t be clearer. Every country that’s embarked on the so-called ‘inevitable transition’ to an all wind and sun powered future is suffering from surging power prices.

Add wind and solar generating capacity and watch power prices go into orbit, as night follows day. The Danes know it, the Germans know it and South Australians became the butt of international jokes, because of it.

STT has been spelling out the connection for the best part of a decade, now. But, as more and more countries fix their energy hopes on the unreliables, the volume of mounting data they provide leads to an incontrovertible truth, not just the hint of a causal connection.

Kathryn Porter digs into a couple of datasets to reach the inevitable conclusion about the ‘inevitable’ transition.

Addressing the high real cost of renewable…