Utopia, you are standing in it!

With the magnitude of the renewable energy-driven disaster playing out in Europe hard to ignore, it seems incredible that American Green New Deal Democrats remain fixated on chaotically intermittent wind and solar. And yet, they show no signs of relenting on their determined path to inevitable energy insecurity; an approach that borders on National treachery.

Call it a cult, call it good old-fashioned lunacy, whichever way you slice it becomes hard to explain, let alone justify, policies quite obviously designed to drive American enterprise into the ground.

The only winners are, of course, the rent-seekers and crony capitalists who stand to profit from an endless stream of subsidies directed to the owners of bird-mincing turbines and weather-prone solar panels.

Paul Driessen focuses on Virginia as the perfect example of the clear and present danger subsidised wind and solar represent to America’s energy security.

Assessing Virginia’s Hidden Wind and Solar Costs

I wasn’t going to write anything here today, but I couldn’t let the final question and answer from this morning’s Finance and Expenditure Committee hearing on the Monetary Policy Statement go without record and comment.

Simon Bridges, National’s FInance spokesman, asked the Governor whether the current prohibition – agreed between the Governor, the Board and the Minister – on any (external) MPC member having any active, engaged (present or future) analytical/research interest in monetary policy was not “frankly simply daft”, and did it not “ruin the ability to have thought diversity”.

He might well have added, but time was short, “and without precedent anywhere else in the advanced world” (or quite probably in most of the less-advanced world). Ben Bernanke would be disqualified, Lars Svensson would be out, and one could run a very long list of the sort of people who’ve served with distinction on the MPCs of other…

Last week the Supreme Court rendered the much-awaited judgment in R (PRCBC and O (by her litigation friend AO)) v Secretary of State for the Home Department

(‘PRCBC’), upholding the capacity for the government to set the fees as it pleases (subject to approval by both Houses of Parliament) for citizenship applications under Section 1(4) of the British Nationality Act 1981 (‘the 1981 Act’), pursuant to Section 68 of the Immigration Act 2014 (‘the 2014 Act’). The Supreme Court appears to have taken an even more rigid stance – and with potential far-reaching implications – on the question of the legality of the Fees Order, by which the citizenship application fees are set, than the Court of Appeal, whose decision has already been critically analysed in an excellentposton this blog in May last year. In this respect, the decision of the Supreme Court is striking from more than…

2021 was the year when the inherent unreliability of wind and solar revealed how everything depends upon reliable and affordable power supplies.

The wind and solar ‘industries’ talk a big game; and in their wilder moments even claim to be capable of replacing conventional coal, gas and nuclear generators, altogether. Europe’s months-long wind drought in the last half of 2021 demonstrated otherwise. And the peculiar disappearance of solar power, every day is readily explained by that phenomenon known as “sunset”.

The mega-batteries touted as a solution are nothing but an expensive pipe dream.

Which is why the French, among others, are now talking about nuclear power as if it was their very first love.

In short, the deliberate destruction of reliable and affordable power supplies has put their critical significance front and centre.

Energy is the most important issue in the world
Spectator
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
24 January…

Antarctic sea ice [image credit: BBC]
There’s a pattern here. How often do these gung-ho sea trips to polar regions by climate botherers — sorry, researchers — run into sea ice trouble, usually sooner rather than later?
– – –
When Ernest Shackleton’s ship, Endurance, became trapped in Antarctic sea ice in 1915, the crew had no choice but to drift helplessly for nine months before their ship finally sank, says The Telegraph (via MSN News).

The expedition to find the Endurance’s wreck came close to the same fate late on Sunday.

But where Shackleton’s men could rely only on patience, the Agulhas II has 16,000 horsepower of propulsion, movable ballast, and a container full of aviation fuel.

If anything I came away from today’s Monetary Policy Statement and (the bulk of it that I saw) the Governor’s press conference more convinced that I was yesterday that the OCR should have been raised by 50 basis points today.

There were a couple of elements in the minutes that were a little more encouraging than one might have feared.

There was the fact that a 50 point increase was clearly seriously considered, and debated. There was the fact that that debate was actually disclosed in the minutes (I think that is a first). There was the explicit comment not ruling out 50 point increases in the future. And there was, at last, a slow start to the process of unwinding the huge punt on the future of bond rates taken on in the LSAP intervention of 2020 and 2021.

It could have been worse. There clearly is an element…

Today marks the 60th anniversary of Adolf Eichmann’s death sentence. I am not going too much in the history of Eichmann, there is not that much I can add to the narrative.

On December 11–12, 1961, Eichmann was convicted of crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and membership in a criminal organization. He was sentenced to death on December 15.

His defense was basically that he had only been following orders.

During World War I, Eichmann’s family moved from Germany to Linz, Austria. His pre-Nazi life was rather ordinary. He worked as a traveling salesman in Oberösterreich (Upper Austria) for an oil company but lost his job during the Great Depression. He had actually attended Kaiser Franz Joseph Staatsoberrealschule (state secondary school) in Linz. A certain Adolf Hitler had been a student in that same school 17 years prior.

Eichmann joined the Nazi Party in April…

Erie, Pennsylvania [image credit: UK Met Office]
Another modelling problem to add to the list: ‘The models reproduced decreasing snow depth trends that contradicted the observations’. Will any of this get a mention in next week’s new IPCC report?
– – –
Seasonal snow cover plays an important role in the interactions between ground and atmosphere, including energy and hydrological fluxes, thus influencing climatological and hydrological processes, says Phys.org.

Researchers from the Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Lanzhou University evaluated the simulated snow depth from 22 CMIP6 models across high-latitude regions of the Northern Hemisphere over the period 1955–2014 by using a high-quality in situ observational dataset.

Related results were published in the Journal of Climate.

In a word association game, you’ll never find ‘reliability’ paired up with ‘wind’ or ‘solar’. Sunset and calm weather are very real things and so is the idea that power consumers want power as and when they need it, not when the sun’s shining at its zenith in a bright blue sky or the wind is blowing “just right”.

Meaningful power generators know the drill: deliver the goods, all day, every day, whatever the weather, and customers will beat a path to your door.

Wind and solar outfits, on the other hand, couldn’t care less whether you had power, or not. Their only real interest in their occasional delivery of electricity is pocketing the endless subsidies that follow.

We recently posted a helpful analysis by David Wojick on why claims about the grid-scale storage of wind and solar power are the perfect nonsense. This time David provides further detail about…

The Reserve Bank and the MPC will tomorrow emerge from their long summer slumber to deliver a Monetary Policy Statement and OCR decision. It is quite extraordinary that in this period, of considerable volatility, uncertainty, and inflation surging above the target range (even on core measures) we’ve heard precisely nothing from any of them (individually or collectively), and had no policy actions, for three months.

But, at last, tomorrow we will hear. As I’ve said repeatedly here over the years, I’m not really in the business of trying to guess what the MPC will do. There are plenty of people with a strong interest in that, and banks have people who nurture every little contact or conversation they can secure with Reserve Bank officials, analysts, or policymakers. As the Bank says little in public, and isn’t that consistent through time in how it acts, all one can say is good…

Never short on audacity, Britain’s wind industry is now peddling the myth that it’ll soon be lighting up all of Europe. Notwithstanding the fact that it was forced to fire up its coal-fired power plants to overcome the Big Calm in the last months of 2021, when wind power output collapsed across the UK and most of Western Europe.

Absent imports of nuclear power from France and what’s produced by the remnants of its coal-fired power fleet, the Brits would have been left freezing in the dark for weeks on end.

However, the cold hard facts never stand between the renewable energy rent seeker and a bucket of taxpayer’s cash.

Paul Homewood zeroes in on the latest piece of piffle from Britain’s great ‘green’ blob.

Who Needs Russian Gas? We’ve Got Windmills!
Not a Lot of People Know That
Paul Homewood
7 February 2022

A rather dopey article, which is…

Back in mid-December, the Reserve Bank fronted up to Parliament’s Finance and Expenditure Committee for the Annual Review hearing on the Bank. I wrote about it here. You may recall that this was the appearance where (a) the Bank (unsuccessfully) tried to kept secret before the hearing the loss of another couple of senior managers, and (b) seemed to mislead the Committee on just how many of their senior managers had gone or were going. In the wake of it, the Governor forced the early departure of his deputy Geoff Bascand a couple of weeks before he was due to leave anyway, over unauthorised contact with the media [CORRECTION: “shared information to a third party”] (most likely over those two new senior management departures).

But towards the end of the hearing (about 50 minutes in here) there was a brief exchange on matters climate change, with an unusually…

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…