Utopia, you are standing in it!

Last week it was announced that Guardian journalist Seamus Milne was to become Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s new Director of Communications. A number of media reports remarked that Milne was once attached to the Communist Party factional journal Straight Left. However few, particularly in the mainstream media, know much about the Straight Left faction or its role in the final years of the Communist Party of Great Britain. I asked Lawrence Parker, an expert on the hardline oppositional and anti-revisionist groups that emerged from the CPGB, to write a little introduction to those unfamiliar with the history of the Straight Left faction.

Origins

Straight Left’s origins lie in the left pro-Soviet oppositions that emerged in the Communist Party of Great Britain in the 1960s. In this period, a definite ‘party within a party’ emerged, with figures such as Sid French, district secretary of Surrey CPGB, becoming key leaders…

If you want people to toe the line, make them afraid. It’s worked a treat for the anti-economic progress crowd in their campaign against nuclear power. It’s the same insidious force that has millions of Australians constantly locked down, cowering under their quilts, thanks to the threat of a virus that’s on a par with the common cold for lethality in a country with first world and first-rate hospitals and healthcare.

Likewise with nuclear power. Long on emotion and short on evidence, the anti-nuke activist has been working up a frenzy of baseless fear for generations.

As Michael Shellenberger outlines in this interview with Chris Kenny, it’s time to engage our critical faculties and stop listening to those who would merrily deprive us all of safe, reliable and affordable nuclear power.

There are ‘fear campaigns’ over nuclear energy
Sky News
Chris Kenny and Michael Shellenberger
28 June 2021

Environmental policy…

Every so often, I see visuals that do a great job of illustrating various economic principles.

This Wizard-of-Id parody contains a lot of insight about labor economics. As does this Chuck Asay cartoon and this Robert Gorrell cartoon.

If you want to understand Keynesian economics, this Scott Stantis cartoon is a gem, as is the house-on-fire image in this post.

Regarding tax policy, the philoso-raptor explains supply-side economics and Paul Bunyan helps to illustrate why double taxation is so destructive.

You can also get clear messages about why a welfare state is economically destructive in this classic from Chuck Asay, as well as these home-made cartoons on riding the wagon vs pulling the wagon.

Regarding the minimum wage, I think Henry Payne effectively shows – in this cartoon and this cartoon – how mandating above-market wages is…

At the end of the “February Revolution”, Nicholas II chose to abdicate on March 15, 1917. He first abdicated in favor of Alexei, but a few hours later changed his mind after advice from doctors that Alexei would not live long enough while separated from his parents, who would be forced into exile. Nicholas thus abdicated on behalf of his son, and drew up a new manifesto naming his brother, Grand Duke Michael, as the next Emperor of all Russias. He issued a statement but it was suppressed by the Provisional Government.

Grand Duke Michael declined to accept the throne until the people were allowed to vote through a Constituent Assembly for the continuance of the monarchy or a republic. The abdication of Nicholas II and Michael’s deferment of accepting the throne brought three centuries of the Romanov dynasty’s rule to an end. The fall of Tsarist autocracy brought joy…

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.