Utopia, you are standing in it!

Germany set the gold standard for idiotic renewable energy policies, although the Brits, Californians, Texans and South Australians are keen contenders for that glittering prize.

Thanks to its unhinged obsession with intermittent wind and solar, Germans are in the midst of a power pricing and supply calamity.

Suffering Europe’s highest power prices, is just the beginning.

In a don’t say we didn’t warn you piece, Pierre Gosselin spells out the consequences of running with the dumbest energy policy on earth.

Germany Electricity Prices Soar To World Record Highs After Years Of Energy Policy Folly…Expensive, Unreliable
No Tricks Zone
Pierre Gosselin
9 February 2022

Germany’s power supply, once mostly made up of a mixture of coal and nuclear power, used to be among the most stable and affordable in the world. Power outages were rare and grid interventions were infrequent.

Greens and socialists then tried electrical power engineering
But then in…

Is “austerity” a good thing?

Depends on how it is defined. Johan Norberg points out that spending restraint is the right approach.

Since I’m a fan of spending restraint, I obviously like the video.

But let’s expand on two points.

First, the definition of austerity is critical. Some fiscal policy folks (at the IMF and CBO, for instance) focus on deficits and debt. And this means they view spending restraint and tax increases as being equally desirable.

But that’s nonsense. As I’ve repeatedlyexplained, red ink is best viewed as a symptom. The real problem is excessive government spending.

Moreover, higher taxes usually exacerbate the spending problem since politicians can’t resist the temptation to spend at least a portion of any expected new revenue.

And since tax increases generally don’t collect as much money as politicians think they will, you can wind…

The carbon cycle [credit: laurencenet.net]
Nature’s carbon cycle already does this job. Why waste vast sums of money on dead-end technology ‘fixes’ that can achieve next to nothing in global terms?
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Most carbon capture and utilisation (CCU) technologies, which pull carbon dioxide from the air and use it for other emissions-lowering processes, emit more carbon than they capture, reports New Scientist.

This finding suggests that CCU projects, which have attracted billions of dollars in investment, won’t do much to achieve the Paris Agreement‘s emissions targets to prevent warming by more than 1.5°C.

CCU technologies take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, either capturing it directly from the air or absorbing it at polluting sources, and puts it to use in processes such as making fuel, plastics and concrete.

I write a lot here about issues around the Reserve Bank. Some of those issues are quite obscure or abstract, and I know some readers find some of those posts/arguments a bit of a challenge to grasp.

But yesterday we had as straightforward an example as (I hope) we are ever likely to find.

Inflation is very much in focus at present. Measure of inflation expectations get more attention than usual. There is a variety of measures, both surveys (in New Zealand mostly conducted for the Reserve Bank and for/by ANZ) and market prices. The Reserve Bank has been surveying households for 27 years, with a fairly consistent (although expanded on a couple of occasions) range of questions. At the Bank there was always a degree of scepticism about the survey – household respondents always seemed (eg) to expect inflation to be quite a lot higher than it actually was…

Tort law is interesting. You can argue that someone harmed you, and you can cite almost no legislation in the process. Torte law in the US uses case law – the precedent set by previous rulings in the context of social norms. But, what cases did the early cases cite? They also cited earlier cases and social norms, though we may no longer have a record. The beauty of tort law it allows for changing relative costs in prudence and negligence.

Can you imagine a legislature attempting to codify the appropriate amount of neglect by, say, a painter? The standards would quickly go out of date. The relative cost of resources including labor, communications, materials, and the price differences among competitors of differing quality all change over time. Multiply these factors by 20 and then again by the number of occupations and regions in a country. You will quickly see…

I’ve written columns about wonky economic concepts such as “deadweight loss” and “public goods.” Today’s topic is “rent seeking,” which is part of “public choice” and is described by Professor Alex Tabarrok of George Mason University.

To elaborate, here’s a video from Professor Michael Munger from Duke University.

The basic message of both videos is that “rent seeking” occurs when interest groups manipulate the political system to obtain undeserved riches.

And there are all sorts of examples of policies that exist solely because interest groups get politicians to tilt the playing field – including trade barriers, farm subsidies, occupational licensing, and bureaucrat salaries.

As pointed out in the videos, these rent-seeking policies reduce prosperity.

But what’s the origin of the term? In the modern era, it’s often associated with Gordon Tullock, one of the founders of public choice…

A few days ago on Twitter, Nathan Robinson made the claim that global capitalism wasn’t reducing poverty. In fact, it appears that poverty, using the threshold of $10/day (rather than the usual lower numbers) has increased from 1981 to 2017:

While there were a lot of critical responses to him on Twitter, he’s not wrong about the data: in 2017, there were 1.3 billion more people living on less than $10 per day (we’re going to assume in this post that the underlying data is basically correct, and correctly…

Carpetbaggers profiting from hopelessly intermittent wind and solar still claim that mega-batteries are the solution to their obvious lack of reliability.

But it only takes a moment’s reckoning to appreciate that the grid-scale storage electricity generated by wind or solar is a perfect nonsense.

It hasn’t occurred anywhere in the world; nor will it.

David Wojick explains why below.

VCEA makes Virginia’s electric grid dangerously unreliable
CFACT
David Wojick
21 January 2022

The oddly named Virginia Clean Economy Act or VCEA mandates the phaseout of fossil fueled power generation by 2045, with deadlines all along the way. Dominion Energy, Virginia’s primary electric utility, recently filed what is called an Integrated Resource Plan. In their recent IRP, Dominion’s Alternative Plan C is designed to comply with the VCEA.

This design is not sufficient to maintain reliability. The inevitable result will be price spikes and blackouts.

The basic problem with the Plan…

I’m yielding to no one in my low view of the Reserve Bank Monetary Policy Committee. I’ve been writing about the problems – structural and personal – since the new Potemkin-village model (designed to look shiny and new, but to change little) was set up three years ago, and it was (for example) one of my Official Information Act requests that got the written confirmation that the Minister, Governor and the Bank’s Board had formally agreed that no one with ongoing expertise in monetary policy or macroeconomics, or likely future interest in researching such matters, would be appointed (as an external member) to the new Monetary Policy Committee (three relevant posts here, here, and here). It was a simply extraordinary exclusion, which reflected very poorly on all involved, but which never seemed to get the scrutiny from media or MPs that it deserved. In no other modern…

An immensely popular, chubby-cheeked, convivial man, Edward VII was in all truth a mostly unremarkable man with hardly a moral fiber in his insubstantial body. He was known as a frivolous “Prince of Pleasure,” a man all-too familiar with the sin of gluttony. His reign represented a minor nine-year epilogue to the Victorian Age, as if to offer the Ancien Régime one final sip of fine wine and a cigar before the long dark shadow of war crept over Europe. While personally he was a rather silly man, Edward VII still managed to transform the British monarchy from the cloistered and stoic brand of Queen Victoria, into the showy offering of public pageantry we see today.

Christened Albert Edward and known to his family as “Bertie,” the future Edward VII was a self-indulgent, intransigent young man. He rebelled against his father Albert’s strenuous educational curriculum and often landed himself in…

Following a Biden Executive Order, in April 2021 several states went to Louisiana District Court to stop implementation of Social Cost of Carbon with respect to federal regulations.  The Memorandum Ruling regarding that case is State of Louisiana et al Versus Joseph R. Biden Jr. et al.  The Plaintiff States are Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Dakota, Texas, West Virginia, and Wyoming. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.  H/T Francis Menton

The Issues

The Plaintiff States seek injunctive and declaratory relief on three grounds.First, they assert that the SC-GHG Estimates violate the procedural requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”) as a substantive rule that did not undergo the requisite notice-and-comment process. See 5 U.S.C. § 553.

Second, the Plaintiff States claim that President Biden, through EO 13990, and the IWG lack the authority to enforce the estimates as they are substantively unlawful under the…