Utopia, you are standing in it!

Summertime [image credit: BBC]
What evidence is there that such powers do exist? An air of unreality is palpable here, with talk of extreme dangers and use of decimal point temperature statements while brushing aside all uncertainties. Endless alarmism creates fatigue, not the fear they crave.
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UN scientists have unveiled a plan that they believe can limit the root causes of dangerous climate change, says BBC News.

A key UN body says in a report that there must be “rapid, deep and immediate” cuts in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

Global emissions of CO2 would need to peak within three years to stave off the worst impacts.

Even then, the world would also need technology to suck CO2 from the skies by mid-century.

All of a sudden, energy security and affordability is the new black. The Russian onslaught in Ukraine has focused thinking on energy supplies, like nothing before.

The West has taken its energy advantages for granted, for far too long. But, the energy pricing and supply calamity that’s followed Vlad’s aggressive bid for territorial expansion, has drawn attention to just how delusional is the claim that we’re well on our way to an all-wind and sun-powered future.

That purported ‘transition’ now looks more like a pre-determined pathway to abject poverty.

Viv Forbes spells it out for the uninitiated, below.

Power not poverty
Spectator Australia
Viv Forbes
16 March 2022

‘The past was green and fuzzy – the future is black and ominous.’ – Richard Sebrof

The green fairy-tale is over.

Even the green cheer squad in the bureaucracy and the media can sense the change. The sudden end was signalled by…

Next week, I am teaching collusive agreements in my price theory class. I decided to take a different approach to the discussion than the one usually found in textbook. The approach consists in showing how economic thought on a topic has evolved over time. For collusion, I decided to discuss George Stigler’s 1964 article on the theory of oligopoly published in the Journal of Political Economy.

Simply put, Stigler proposes a simple approach for stating how collusive agreements can break apart by asking how much extra sales a firm can obtain by cutting its prices without being detected by other firms. Stigler argued that detection got easier as the number of buyers increased or as concentration increased. He also argued that detection became harder if buyers do not repeat purchases and if there is growth in the market through the addition of new customers as firms are not able to…

Robert Walpole, 1st Earl of Orford, KG PC (August 26, 1676 – March 18, 1745) was a British statesman and Whig politician who is generally regarded as the de facto first Prime Minister of Great Britain.

Walpole was born in Houghton, Norfolk, in 1676. One of 19 children, he was the third son and fifth child of Robert Walpole, a member of the local gentry and a Whig politician who represented the borough of Castle Rising in the House of Commons, and his wife Mary Walpole, the daughter and heiress of Sir Geoffrey Burwell of Rougham, Suffolk. Horatio Walpole, 1st Baron Walpole was his younger brother.

As a child, Walpole attended a private school at Massingham, Norfolk. Walpole entered Eton College in 1690 where he was a King’s Scholar. He left Eton on April 2, 1696 and matriculated at King’s College, Cambridge on the same day.

Robert Walpole Prime Minister…

Anyone who still believes in an ‘inevitable’ transition to wind and solar, clearly hasn’t been paying attention.

The same crowd tells us that ‘coal is dead’, ignoring the fact that coal demand continues to rise and the record prices paid for the black stuff is through the roof.

The Russian advance on Ukraine has only added to the demand for coal, along with the demand for oil and gas; nuclear power is back in vogue, too. What Vlad’s attack hasn’t done is, create any additional demand for wind turbines and solar panels.

It seems like only yesterday that Elon Musk was telling us that, by adding a few trillion-terawatt hours’ worth of his lithium-ion batteries, the wind and solar transition was a shoe-in.

Now Musk and his rent-seeking buddies seem to be running a mile from their wilder claims about our wind and solar-powered future.

Paul Murray picks up the…

[image credit: latinoamericarenovable.com]
Re-writing the laws of physics is not an option. The only thing accelerating at the moment is the downward spiral into energy poverty for ever larger numbers of the population, in manic pursuit of the mystical ‘net zero’ climate target. Another trip to cloud cuckoo land beckons for these blinkered climate obsessives.
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The Environmental Audit Committee announced the inquiry in response to the rise in fossil fuel prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and continued speculation on what will be included in the government’s Energy Security Strategy, reports Energy Live News.

The Committee believes protecting consumers from high fossil fuel prices and fuel poverty while ensuring security of supply and continued progress towards net zero is critical for any strategy on energy security to be successful.

The idea that unreliable wind and solar can save the planet is one of the greatest lies, ever told.

In touting their purported environmental credentials, the crony capitalists, rent-seekers and fawning advocates never take into account any of the associated costs.

It’s all sunshine and suitably stiff breezes, as far as the wind and sun cult is concerned.

At the heart of economics is the need to account for all costs and weigh them against any purported benefits.

Then, and only then, can a net benefit of any chosen course of action be determined.

With the unreliables there are the obvious costs: the need for every single MW of wind or solar capacity to be backed up every single minute of the day by a MW of dispatchable power generation capacity (ordinarily coal, gas or nuclear); the need to build capacity and transmission network to bring wind and solar power…

With the world’s wind turbines slicing and dicing thousands of eagles, owls, hawks, and kites every day, wind farms are more slaughterhouses than power generators.

Millions of tonnes of beneficial bugs get splattered annually, along with millions of birds and bats, some of them being among the last of their kind. At the apex of the avian carcass heap are the thousands of eagles, wiped out in the blink of an eye.

Cars, cats and skyscrapers don’t kill Eagles – like the critically endangered Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle, but 60m wind turbine blades with their tips travelling at 350Kph routinely smash them out of existence. Although, as this story from the Netherlands details, the victims often die a slow and horrible death.

White-tailed eagle, once again tagged in the Netherlands, killed by wind turbine
News Fox-24
Stef van Rijn, Dirk van Straalen and Ralph Buij
4 February 2022

In the early…

The Alhambra Decree (also known as the Edict of Expulsion) was an edict issued on March 31, 1492, by the joint Catholic Monarchs of Spain (Isabella I of Castile and Fernando II of Aragon) ordering the expulsion of practising Jews from the Crowns of Castile and Aragon and its territories and possessions by July 31, of that year.

King Fernando II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile.

The primary purpose was to eliminate the influence of practising Jews on Spain’s large formerly-Jewish conversion New Christian population, to ensure the latter and their descendants did not revert to Judaism. Over half of Spain’s Jews had converted as a result of the religious persecution and pogroms which occurred in 1391.

Due to continuing attacks, around 50,000 more had converted by 1415. A further number of those remaining chose to convert to avoid expulsion. As a result of the Alhambra decree…