Utopia, you are standing in it!

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?
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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?
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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…

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…