Utopia, you are standing in it!

The sweeping blackouts that struck California last summer are back with a vengeance; another heatwave, another scramble for reliable power.

The power rationing debacle that is plaguing Californians once again, is precisely what you’d expect when woolly-headed thinking overtakes sound engineering.

The state-wide blackout that struck in mid-August 2020, was put down by officials to an “unexpected loss of a 470-megawatt power plant Saturday evening, as well as the loss of nearly 1,000 megawatts of wind power,” the San Jose Mercury News reported. In addition, cloud cover over the desert meant solar energy was in short supply. For more see: Renewable Energy Reckoning: Wind & Solar Power Obsession Leaves Millions of Californians Sweltering In The Dark 

Having deliberately trashed its own power supply, California is haranguing its neighbours to obtain electricity it would have had, had it not pinned its hopes to sunshine and breezes.

California Begs For…

How Climate Scenarios Lost Touch With Reality

By Roger Pielke Jr. and Justin Ritchie

A failure of self-correction in science has compromised climate science’s ability to provide plausible views of our collective future.

The integrity of science depends on its capacity to provide an ever more reliable picture of how the world works. Over the past decade or so, serious threats to this integrity have come to light. The expectation that science is inherently self-correcting, and that it moves cumulatively and progressively away from false beliefs and toward truth, has been challenged in numerous fields—including cancer research, neuroscience, hydrology, cosmology, and economics—as observers discover that many published findings are of poor quality, subject to systemic biases, or irreproducible.

In a particularly troubling example from the biomedical sciences, a 2015 literature review found that almost 900 peer-reviewed publications reporting studies of a supposed breast cancer cell line were in fact based…

The amount of additional electricity required worldwide is more than any existing increase in output from renewables. As value-for-money fossil fuels – coal and gas mostly – fill the breach as it were, ‘decarbonisation’ is in effect going negative (if it was ever doing anything else). Let COP26 delegates chew on such ‘challenges’ as they’re called, in Glasgow later this year.
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The planet’s electricity demand is expected to rebound strongly this year and next after falling by around 1% in 2020, according to a new publication from the International Energy Agency.

Released on Thursday, the IEA’s electricity market report predicts that global demand for electricity will increase by nearly 5% in 2021 and 4% in 2022 as economies around the world seek to recover from effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, says France24.

The report from the Paris-based organization notes that although electricity production from renewable energies…

Cycling is popular in the Netherlands [image credit: expatica.com] There’s a reason why fixed solar panels should be, and usually are, angled at about 35-40 degrees in northern Europe. It’s called the optimal tilt angle. This cycle path with panels flat on the ground is so simple-minded it’s embarrassing, or ought to be.
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Authorities in a central Dutch province opened what they are billing as the world’s longest solar bicycle path Wednesday, mixing sustainable energy with emission-free travel, says TechXplore.

On a recent post Judith Curry challenged commenters with this question: 

How would you explain the complexity and uncertainty surrounding climate change plus how we should respond (particularly with regards to CO2 emissions) in five minutes?

 The video was an impressive offering from John Shewchuk, and I thought it worth sharing here.

Any Teslas round here? [image credit: Edal Anton Lefterov @ Wikipedia] A bit of light relief perhaps, unless you’re already one of the victims or could soon become one. Are electric cars more appealing than combustion-engined types to hungry rodents? Check those brake cables.
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Elon Musk may have a rat problem, says The New York Post.

Fans of the South African billionaire’s electric cars say rats, mice and rodents are chomping down on their Teslas.

And despite having dropped tens of thousands of dollars to buy the pricey vehicles, Tesla refuses to cover the damage.

Walter Williams passed away this morning. He was a well-known professor of economics at George Mason University, having written, lectured, and debated extensively in defense of libertarianism. His contributions to the movement were enormous, and all those who value freedom should be grateful for the ideas he spread and the people he inspired.

If you are not familiar with Williams, please take some time to read his writings and view his media appearances. And if you are familiar, please honor his memory by spreading his wisdom to friends and family.

Steven Landsburg, The Armchair Economist

Steven Landsburg‘s The Armchair Economist is a book that anarcho-capitalists will appreciate for two reasons.

First, as an outreach tool it provides a solid introduction to economic ideas from a free market perspective. The concepts covered are simple enough for anyone to understand, but remarkable enough to spark interest in economics and the dangers of government. With fun examples and amusing anecdotes, it will help find those who are curious, open-minded, and almost ready for more earth-shattering works by anarcho-capitalists.

Second, the book comes from a mainstream free-market perspective that will not only force ancaps to hone their thinking, but also teach them a few tricks that are not found in the works of Austrian School economists. Most ancaps will pick up new arguments for freedom that will resonate with regular people, and learn interesting points about economic history that they may not…

An interesting exchange has occurred between Will Wilkinson of the Niskanen Center and Ilya Somin writing for the Washington Post on the issue of the influence of libertarianism over the modern Republican Party’s erosion of liberal democratic norms. Inhis initial piece, Wilkinson seemed to argue that the Libertarian view of absolutism in regards to property rights which was a way to offer an emotionally gratifying alternative to socialist redistribution was responsible for the Right’s adoption of a populist outlook which eroded democratic norms, for example, policies like Voter ID and Gerrymandering. Ilya Sominresponded by pointing out that the libertarian “absolutist” conception of property rights had next to nothing to do with why many libertarians Wilkinson cites are skeptical of democracy. Wilkinsonresponded by saying his initial argument was confusingly stated, not that absolutist property rights is driving democratic erosion on the part of the right, by trying…

The wind and sun may be free, but wind and solar power are anything but. Hidden ‘green’ taxes, costs and charges, not to mention massive subsidies redirected from both taxpayers and power consumers to wind and solar generators are just the beginning.

The market distortions created by those subsidies have wrecked the ability of conventional generators to deliver power as and when we need it, at prices that we can afford. But that was precisely the point.

Francis Menton has been targeting the true costs of wind and solar, for years now. Here he is detailing the nightmarish cost of the unreliables.

Texas Starts Waking Up To The Issue Of The Full Costs Of “Renewables”
Manhattan Contrarian
Francis Menton
20 June 2021

The promoters of the climate scam have a variety of deceptions to get the gullible to accede to their socialist plans. Those deceptions range from the quite sophisticated…