Utopia, you are standing in it!

Banishing our good friends, logic and reason is essential to the notion of an ‘inevitable transition’ to an all wind and sun powered future. Ignorance of simple maths, the laws of physics, economics and meteorology helps, too.

Which explains why the naïve and gullible are merrily swallowing the story that we’re just a few mega-batteries away from our wind and solar powered Nirvana.

The ‘storage is a costless cinch’ is yet another myth peddled by those profiting handsomely from the greatest economic and environmental fraud, in history. And the need to spin the ‘batteries will save us’ story arises from the total and totally unpredictable collapses in wind power output and/or the inevitable daily solar power output collapse (aka ‘sunset’).

However, when we reengage our critical faculties, it’s pretty easy to see just how ludicrous the proposition being advanced is. To that end, here’s Willem Post attempting to bring us…

Biden, Harris and her Squad are itching to carpet the US in thousands of these things, with America’s birds and bats to join the list of casualties. Sure, rocketing power prices and unreliable power supplies are inevitable. So too, the destruction of once tranquil, peaceful and prosperous rural communities.

But where their hateful hypocrisy is most obvious, is in the environmental carnage wreaked by industrial wind turbines and large-scale solar plants.

American wind turbines and solar plants already exact a heavy toll on birds and bats; rare and endangered Vultures and Eagles are being slaughtered in their thousands each year.

However, with the imminent rollout of the Democrat’s Green New Deal, the scale of the avian onslaught will increase in orders of magnitude.

The American Bird Conservancy reckons that if America meets its 20% wind power target, by 2030, wind turbines will be killing over a million birds every year.

I have been following the debates on the minimum wage in view of the forthcoming increase of the federal minimum wage in the United States. And there is something that is bugging me to no end: the explanation provided by labor economist for why there’d be a limited employment effect.

Notice that I say employment effect and that I thus limit myself to the number of bodies hired. I am also not going to consider the distribution of elasticities found since the seminal work of Card and Krueger that tends to point to negative effects on employment and even clearer effects on hours of work. I am also not going to account for other adjustment channels like those that Brian Albrecht discusses here. I am especially going to discount issues of minimum wage enforcement.

I am just going to focus on the channel for why I’d be…

Wrong.  He has just appointed “a skilled and experienced group of people” as the newly established Oranga Tamariki Ministerial Advisory Board.

The group (an  all-Maori team) will begin work on 1 February and Davis expects an initial report (to add to the advice provided by the other reports) by 30 June.  

The board’s appointment was one of three fresh announcements from the Beehive.

The others were 

• Work begins today at Wainuiomata High School to ensure buildings and teaching spaces are fit for purpose; and 
• The green light for New Zealand’s first COVID-19 vaccine could be granted in just over a week.  

Despite claims by wind and solar acolytes that China is well on its way to an all renewables powered future, apparently, the black stuff still matters. A lot.

A month or so back, Beijing banned Australian coal imports (dozens of ships loaded with Australian coal are sitting stuck in harbours along China’s south-east coast). Blackouts and power rationing, soon followed.

That China’s rise out of agrarian poverty is miraculous, is undisputed. So is its status as the world’s largest factory; exporting all manner of manufactures around the planet. Central to that has been the growth in coal-fired power generation capacity.

David Wojick takes a detailed look at what’s really powering China’s economic growth and prosperity.

China loves coal far more than wind
CFACT
David Wojick
11 January 2021

We have all heard about China building a lot of coal plants, but the central role coal plays in their booming…

I rarely write about media bias, but I sometimes come across stories that cry out for correction because of blatant inaccuracies.

• The New York Times asserting that government schools are “starved of funding” when taxpayer subsidies actually have skyrocketed.
• The Washington Post claiming a GOP budget included “large cuts” when spending actually would grow 3.3 percent annually.
• The Economist writing about poverty in the United States, but then citing numbers that have nothing to do with poverty.
• The New York Times asserting that U.S. multinationals pay little tax on foreign-source income, but forgetting to include the taxes paid to foreign governments.
• A Washington Post column blaming problems in France on “austerity” when the nation has the biggest spending burden in Europe.
• The Atlantic reporting about “steady defunding” in Washington when the federal budget has tripled (adjusted for inflation) since 1980.
• A New York Times

Although they live in the ocean like fish, whales are clearly mammals. A reasonably complete series of intermediate fossils have been found for the evolution of whales from terrestrial mammals. A sampling of these transitional species is shown below:

Source: The evolution of whales , https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/evograms_03

Modern whales have no external hind limbs, and have their nostrils or blowholes on top of their heads. Pakicetus (shown in the figure) lived around 52 million years ago. Although it probably spent considerable time submerged in rivers hunting its prey, it was fully terrestrial. It had long, slender legs, and nostrils at the tip of its snout, like most mammals. Dorudon appeared about 12 million years later, and is maybe halfway to modern whales, being fully aquatic, with tiny vestigial hind limbs and nostrils halfway back on its snout. Whales largely similar to modern species appear after another 12 million years or so…

Some unions supported Donald Trump, such as the Pipeliners Local Union 798. Neal Crabtree, a Welding Foreman from Arkansas and a Pipeliners Local Union 798 member, was laid off after President Joe Biden signed an executive order during his first day in office halting construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline citing a climate crisis and not caring one bit about the crisis of people needing to work after the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.

How do we conduct cost-benefit analysis when different policies might harm some in order to help others? This question has become increasingly important in the Year of COVID.

In particular, it is possible that some interventions to prevent the spread of COVID may save the lives of the vulnerable elderly, but have the unfortunate effect of causing other harms and potentially deaths. For example, increased social isolation could lead to increased suicides among the young (we don’t quite have good data on this yet, but it’s at least a possibility).

If you don’t think any public policies will reduce COVID deaths, then the post isn’t for you. It’s all cost, no benefit!

But for those that do recognize the trade-offs, a common way to do the cost-benefit analysis is to look at “years of life lost” or YLL. This is a common approach on Twitter and blogs, but I’ve seen…

Brits expecting their thousands of wind turbines to deliver the goods this winter have been disappointed, yet again.

While Boris Johnson peddles his delusional plan to run the UK entirely on breezes and bluster, the typical (and wholly expected) collapse in wind power output across Britain this winter provides a taste of things to come.

Wind power acolytes run the line that their groovy ‘green’ product is free. But, Britain’s winter wind power drought, is a reminder that you only get what you pay for.

As the doldrums drove wind power output through the floor, the owners of what remains of Britain’s conventional, dispatchable power generators cashed in. Big-time! With the average wholesale price rocketing from £40 to £4,000 per MWh.

The obscene and endless subsidies siphoned off to wind power outfits – allowing them to undercut everyone else – have driven large volumes of reliable capacity out of the…

Soviet shortages led to the gag about “what has 100 legs and eats cabbage?” 50 Muscovites lining up to buy sausage.

Wind and solar obsessed Germans must feel a little like the USSR’s (unwilling) vegetarians at the moment.

Their endless seas of solar panels are plastered thick with snow and ice and, accordingly, producing two fifths, of five eighths of very little.

And their 30,000 wind turbines have downed tools, too. With bitterly cold, dead calm conditions across the country, wind power output has been reduced to an occasional trickle.

Power rationing is the only thing that’s preventing a total collapse of Germany’s grid; during the first week of January the country narrowly avoided widespread blackouts following the total collapse in wind and solar output.

But, if you relegate engineers to the status of well-meaning idiots, and supplant them with green ideologues with gender studies degrees, get ready for…

The moment Joe and Jill Biden were left awkwardly standing in the cold outside White House on Inauguration Day when doors to their new residence didn’t open because chief usher had been FIRED five hours earlier.

(hattip Daily Mail)