Utopia, you are standing in it!

June 6, 1944: D-Day

Allied troops landed on the beaches of Normandy, Operation Overlord, the biggest seaborne invasion in history, marking the start of the liberation of France, and beginning the final phase of WWII in Europe.

Around 150,000 troops from Britain, America, Canada, and other Allied countries landed on five sectors of Normandy beach. The victory was costly: over 10,000 Allied casualties, compared to an estimated 5,000 to 9,000 casualties for the Germans.

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Sign up for wind and solar and receive power supply chaos as just one of the added extras, along with rocketing power prices and a wave of social and environmental havoc.

Australia has been on the path since 2001 when Federal Liberal PM, John Howard introduced his Renewable Energy Target. The Target was greatly expanded by Labor in 2009, with the subsidies to wind and solar pumped up to cost Australian power consumers more than $4 billion a year.

But tonight’s post is about something that, barely a decade ago, was almost inconceivable in a country blessed with coal, gas and (completely ignored) uranium. That is, routine power supply disruptions in the form of widespread load shedding (when the grid manager is in control) and mass blackouts (when things get completely out of control).

At the heart of the debacle sits sunshine-dependent solar and weather-dependent wind.

Here’s Chris Kenny’s…

I have just finished reading ‘The Room Where it Happened’ … the story of John Bolton’s tenure as Trump’s National Security Advisor before he resigned. It is a weighty tome … 494 pages supported by extensive notes.

Bolton paints a picture of a wasted transitional period leading to an almost totally dysfunctional White House where policy was made and unmade on the whim of a President who didn’t ‘do’ mornings, didn’t read his briefing books, and who allowed foreign Heads of State (especially KIim Jong Un) to play him like a piano, appealing to his vanity in order to extract concessions from him. I was particularly fascinated to read the detail behind Trump’s abortive attempt to bring the Talaban to Camp David for one-on-one discussions three prior to the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks by al-Queda to which the Talaban had given aid and comfort. When it all went tits…

In January 1944 Tedder and Coningham were recalled to Britain to join Eisenhower for the countdown to D-Day. They brought with them enormous experience, the glow of victory and a shared outlook. The nature of the air war fought through North Africa, Sicily and Italy had to some extent been formed by Coningham’s ideas and leadership. In February 1943, he was given command of the British and American tactical forces in Tunisia. The team carried the Allies through the expulsion of the Axis forces from Tunisia, the Sicily landings and the invasion of Italy. At every stage lessons were learned and technologies and tactics were refined that would be applied triumphantly in the next stage of the air war.

On D-Day, 171 squadrons roamed over the troops toiling ashore. The almost total lack of opposition meant they were barely needed and hopes faded for a decisive first-day battle that would…

CO2 is not pollution

Yet another absurdity dreamed up from the foolish demonisation of a harmless trace gas essential to nature’s survival.
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Businesses bidding for major UK Government contracts will have to pledge to work towards a net zero carbon output by 2050 in order to be considered, in what is being touted as a world-first move, reports the Evening Standard.

The Cabinet Office said firms will have to publish “clear and credible carbon reduction” plans before seeking to become public sector contractors.

Officials said the measures, announced to coincide with World Environment Day on Saturday and coming before the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow in November, makes the UK Government the first in the world to put such a requirement in place.

California is synonymous with rocketing power prices and mass summer blackouts, courtesy of subsidised wind and solar.

Last summer, whenever periods of peak demand coincided with sunset and calm weather, millions were plunged into sweltering darkness.

But, for Californians, that indignity was simply a taste of things to come. That’s if California is truly serious about meeting a mandated target of 100% carbon-emissions-free electricity, while simultaneously shuttering every last nuclear power plant within the state.

Francis Menton takes a look at the colossal cost of chasing Utopia.

California’s Zero Carbon Plans: Can Anybody Here Do Basic Arithmetic?
Manhattan Contrarian
Francis Menton
11 May 2021

In California, as we all know, the inhabitants and their elected officials are far more sophisticated and virtuous than the rest of us rubes who inhabit the other parts of the country. This particularly goes for the arena of climate change, where California is leading…

While Paul Krugman sometimes misuses and misinterprets numbers for ideological reasons (see his errors regarding the United States, France, Canada, the United States, Estonia, Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom), he isn’t oblivious to reality.

At least not totally.

He’s acknowledged, for instance, that there is a Laffer Curve and that tax rates can become so onerous that tax revenues actually decline.

Now he’s had another encounter with the real world.

In a column that was mostly a knee-jerk defense of Biden’s class-warfare tax policy, Krugman confessed yesterday that big government ultimately means big tax increases for lower-income and middle-class people.

…is trying to “build back better” by taxing only the very affluent feasible? Is it wise? …There’s a good case that the kind of society progressives want us to become, with a very strong social safety net…

Wilhelm II (Friedrich Wilhelm Viktor Albert; January 27, 1859 – June 4, 1941) was the last German Emperor (Kaiser) and King of Prussia, ruling the German Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia from June 15, 1888 to his abdication November 9, 1918. He was the eldest grandchild of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and related to many monarchs and princes of Europe, most notably King George V of the United Kingdom and Emperor Nicholas II of Russia.

After abdicating at the end of World War I on the night of November 10th the Kaiser left Spa by train to seek asylum in the Netherlands. He was granted asylum by Queen Wilhelmina.

Wilhelm first settled in Amerongen, where on November 28, he issued a belated statement of abdication from both the Prussian and imperial thrones, thus formally ending the Hohenzollerns’ 500-year rule over Prussia. Accepting…

Once upon a time Aucklanders were musing on the merits of  a private-sector proposal aimed at satisfying the demands from the  lycra lobby for a tolled pedestrian and cycle path across Auckland Harbour Bridge.

Orewa-based Hopper Developments – with pioneering projects such as canal housing and marina schemes at Pauanui, Whitianga and Marsden Pt under its belt – had signed a heads of agreement to work with a walking and cycling charitable trust on a $16 million pathway over the bridge.

This  differed from a proposal by Transport Agency consultants, rejected by the agency’s board in 2008, for separate paths to be cantilevered at road level off each edge of the bridge for up to $43 million.

The SkyPath project since then has become, first, a privately funded project underwritten by the Auckland Council, and then a project to be paid for by taxpayers – and the costs have burgeoned.

Tyler Durden writes a zerohedge, Russia & OPEC Ministers Blast IEA’s ‘Net Zero By 2050’ Plan As “La-La-Land” Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

After in recent months crude oil prices have clearly recovered from their COVID-19 slump on steadily increasing demand, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak addressed the much anticipated decision-making at the upcoming OPEC+ conference set for August and the expectation that it will decide to raise output significantly beyond the current pandemic-induced strategy of gradually releasing more barrels into a strengthening oil market.

Novak said in his Thursday remarks at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum that while it remains “premature” to talk about output decisions for August, he affirmed “The current oil price is good enough for Russia,” adding: “Oil prices reflect the balance of supply and demand,” and noted it’s expected the seasonal oil demand will increase in the third quarter of the…