Utopia, you are standing in it!

Phurichai Rungcharoenkitkul of BIS in this paper gives an assessment:

This article provides an interim assessment of the macroeconomic consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic. Estimates suggest a median output loss of about 6.5% in 2020, a gap that is expected to narrow to around 4% of the pre-pandemic trend by the end of 2021. There is however a high dispersion of economic losses across economies, reflecting varying exposures to the pandemic and societies’ responses. High-frequency indicators and epidemiological models provide some insights into the interactions between the evolution of the pandemic and societies’ strategies for combating it, including the role of vaccination. The article draws lessons from experiences thus far and discusses challenges ahead.

In a related voxeu piece, Jean-Charles Bricongne and Baptiste Meunier point to five best policies to fight the pandemic

Greenpeace recently objected to the Philippine government’s recent approval for the country’s farmers to grow genetically modified golden rice. The rice variant will contain enough Vitamin A and beta-carotene that can feed andmnourish starving children in poverty that lack those vital nutrients.

Greenpeace, on the other hand, has long been involved in campaigns to demonize and slander any form of genetically modified foods. Consequently, people starve or even die because of the group’s opposition to GMO foods that give people the food they need to live. This PBS Newshour report from 2014 gives a very good overview of the controversy.

PHOTO CREDIT: Golden rice as compared to white rice. By International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) – https://www.flickr.com/photos/ricephotos/5516789000/in/set-72157626241604366, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14908001

I have seen the following figures at three different places this morning under three different posters and while it is very definitely possible that they all stem from the same source – in fact I know they do because these figures are said to be Labour internal polling – they are well worth further publication. Date of the poll is not known but I think I read somewhere that the main parties poll weekly so they are probably fairly current and later than the last Roy Morgan and Reid polls.

Labour 38

National 31

ACT 13

Green 8

NZ First 4 – Lazarus stirs again.

No mention of any other parties.

The removal of Winston Churchill from the public area of Parliament Buildings and Mallard sounding off about the Hurricanes owner can only help a worthy cause.

I bet the language on the 9th floor is colourful and I cannot…

Eric Hobsbawm (1917 to 2012) was one of Britain’s leading Marxist historians. Of Jewish parentage he spent his boyhood in Vienna and Berlin during the rise of the Nazis. With Hitler’s accession to power in 1933, the family moved to Britain in 1933, although his Wikipedia page is at pains to point out that, because his father was originally from London’s East End, he had always had British citizenship. Hobsbawm excelled at school and went to Cambridge where he joined the communist party in 1936.

Twenty-two when the Second World War broke out, Hobsbawm served in the Royal Engineers and the Army Educational Corps, though he was prevented from serving overseas due to his communist beliefs. In 1947 he got his first job as a lecturer in history at Birkbeck College, University of London, the start of a long and very successful career as a historian, which included stints teaching…

A superb interview of Daron Acemoglu of MIT. He picks 5 books on the subject (4 books and one paper actually).

His first pick is a book called  The Race between Education and Technology By Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz. The books explains how does inequality arise:

From the Emperor’s Desk: I have deleted my original blog entry for the origins of the Holy Roman Empire and will expand on it as a series.

Shortly after the Battle of Austerlitz where the French Army of Emperor Napoleon defeated Austria and Russia, 16 German states joined together in a confederation on July 26, 1806, with the signing the Treaty of the Confederation of the Rhine. The founding members of the confederation were German princes of the Holy Roman Empire. They were later joined by 19 others states, altogether ruling a total of over 15 million subjects.

This Confederation granted a significant strategic advantage to the French Empire on its eastern frontier by providing a separation between France and the two largest German states, Prussia and Austria (which also controlled substantial amounts of non-German lands).

The “Protector of the Confederation” was a hereditary office held by Napoleon, the Emperor…

“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue.
Even if the theory of global warming is wrong,
we will be doing the right thing in terms of
economic and environmental policy.“
–TimothyWirth
Fmr President of the UN Foundation

“The urge to save humanity is almost always a
false-front for the urge to rule it.”
–H.L. Mencken

•

No, it is not “code-red for humanity”.

Ergo, ‘DON’T PANIC’!

There’s no need to if you choose to follow known data, and not alarmist UN climate models that drive manufactured global-warming-hysteria.

In fact, the opposite of ‘hysteria’ is true if one is willing to acknowledge that thanks to technology (fossil fuels) and human ingenuity, we are ~99% less likely, now, to die from a climate related event than we were ~100 years ago.

Via Bjorn Lomborg:

BBC staffers were recently taught how best to push messages about climate doom. So much for impartiality. Licence payers never agreed to this condescending nonsense.
– – –
Climate change is once again dominating the news agenda, says The Spectator (via Climate Change Dispatch).

A report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that even if emissions are cut rapidly, the effects of global warming will be felt across the world.

The report – which Boris Johnson has declared sobering reading – leads the news today, with the BBC dedicating seven stories on its homepage today to climate change.

The true cost of chaotically intermittent wind power is staggering; the cost of offshore wind power is astronomical.

The capital cost of spearing these things offshore is multiples greater than doing so and some dimwitted farmer’s back paddock. Recouping that capital cost means that offshore wind power is 25 times more expensive than coal, gas or nuclear.

Jonathan Lesser runs the numbers below, in relation to a herd of colossal white elephants just waiting to be let loose along America’s Atlantic coast.

Offshore wind power vast boondoggle that New York can no longer afford
New York Post
Jonathan Lesser
30 July 2020

Offshore wind is the renewable-energy industry’s shiny new toy. Led by New York, seven Atlantic-coast states have now imposed mandates to expand offshore wind use over the next decade, with the Empire State last week soliciting bids for an additional 2,500 megawatts of offshore power, on…

The true cost of wind power is staggering – the cost of offshore wind power is astronomical: the latter is more than six times the cost of gas-fired power.

The operating cost of maintaining any industrial machine in a marine environment starts out high and only increases over time, thanks to the corrosive power of saltwater and salt-laden sea air.

Take a machine that, at best, has an economic lifespan of around 12 years and it doesn’t take long before the cost of operating a wind turbine offshore gets out of control.

Andrew Montford runs the numbers on what is a staggeringly expensive way of generating a trivial amount of sporadically delivered electricity.

The levelised cost of floating offshore wind
Global Warming Policy Forum
Andrew Montford
29 July 2021

We present what may be the first estimate of the levelised cost of floating offshore wind.

Last year, I wrote a…

The headlines said it all.

“High power demand forces blackouts in some areas”: Radio NZ.

“Things are running tight this morning: Transpower boss’ warning to Kiwis”: NZ Herald.

“’So Third World’ : Government faces pressure after power blackout” : Stuff

But doesn’t NZ have plenty of energy? After all, the Ardern government – in 2018 – could rule out any further offshore exploration for oil and gas.

And Energy Minister Megan Woods, more recently, has been complaining that wholesale power prices are too high.

It all hit home with dismaying force this week when – for the first time in several decades – NZ experienced enforced power blackouts.

As Stuff reported:

“The government is facing serious pressure after rolling power blackouts on one of the coldest nights of the year, with National saying the situation is ‘third world’.”