Utopia, you are standing in it!

Unforeseen? They must be joking. It has been painfully foreseeable for years to many of us, except maybe some of the more blinkered climate obsessives. The trouble is, as the article notes, ‘there is no silver bullet solution’ (except ones they don’t want to hear about).
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As the share of renewables in the EU energy mix increase, so do problems with grid overloads and blackouts, says OilPrice.com.

Earlier this month, something happened in Europe. It didn’t get as much media attention as the EU’s massive funding plans for its energy transition, but it was arguably as important, if not more.

A fault occurred at a substation in Croatia and caused an overload in parts of the grid, which spread beyond the country’s borders. This created a domino effect that caused a blackout and prompted electricity supply reductions as far as France and Italy.

I have been working on a paper tentatively titled “The Smithian and Humean Traditions in Monetary Theory.” One section of the paper is on the price-specie-flow mechanism, about which I wrote last month in my previous post. This section develops the arguments of the previous post at greater length and draws on a number of earlier posts that I’ve written about PSFM as well (e.g., here and here )provides more detailed criticisms of both PSFM and sterilization and provides some further historical evidence to support some of the theoretical arguments. I will be grateful for any comments and feedback.

The tortured intellectual history of the price-specie-flow mechanism (PSFM) received its still classic exposition in a Hume (1752) essay, which has remained a staple of the theory of international adjustment under the gold standard, or any international system of fixed exchange rates. Regrettably, the two-and-a-half-century life span of PSFM…

Toyota’s Prius model
The Toyota boss reckons hybrids are a better idea than all-electric since no expensive new power supplies or charging points are needed, with recharging built-in to the vehicle. Also, lifetime CO2 emissions are comparable to EVs when all factors are taken into account. (No range anxiety
either). As someone demanding realism, one suspects he’s not too impressed by on-off renewables either.
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In his first policy speech as prime minister last October, Yoshihide Suga pledged to reduce Japan’s greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050, thus giving substance to the government’s goal of eliminating the need for fossil fuels in the latter half of the 21st century, says the Japan Times.

Part of that goal is to ban new internal combustion engine cars by the mid-2030s, a pledge addressed by Akio Toyoda, the president of the world’s No. 2 automaker, Toyota Motor Corp., and…

Claims that 300 tonne wind turbines are safe as houses fall hollow with each self-immolation, total collapse and ‘component liberation’ event. Far from being safe, clean and green, this is an industry that has already killed 200 people.

By way of comparison, the French get 75-85% of their power from nuclear plants and haven’t suffered so much as a scratch since they started in 1962. By contrast, the wind industry (which really only got off the ground in the late 1990s and still generates a trifling amount of electricity) has clocked up around 220 fatalities – see the helpful collection of stats compiled by Caithness Windfarm Information Forum all available here: www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk

A fair proportion of those killed and injured are maintenance, transport and construction workers, crushed or maimed by runaway turbine blades or toppling towers. Of the currently recorded 218 fatalities:

125 were wind industry…

Point of Order has been consistent in anticipating an irritable post-Brexit relationship between Britain and the EU.  But who would have thought vaccine politics would develop as a major flashpoint, let alone a possible relationship breaker?

Even hyper-critical Brits have had to acknowledge that the UK government is a leader in the global vaccination rollout.  And as more background information seeps into the public arena, the British government’s decisiveness in supporting vaccine development, committing early to contracts and driving mass vaccination is looking better and better.

But the same comparisons spell political danger for European politicians. Co-ordination by the EU appears to have resulted in slowness: slowness in making commitments, in tweaking the production process and in approving the product.

Today is the anniversary of two deaths in European Royal history. The two royals are King George III of the United Kingdom and King Christian IX of Denmark.Today is the 115th anniversary of the death of King Christian IX of Denmark, Known as the ‘father-in-law of Europe’ and the ancestor of the monarchs of Denmark, Norway, the UK, Belgium, Luxembourg and Spain. The Duke of Edinburgh is one of his three surviving great-grandchildren.

Today I will highlight and focus on King George the third.

George III (George William Frederick; 4 June 1738 – 29 January 1820) was King of Great Britain and Ireland from 25 October 1760 until the union of the two kingdoms on 1 January 1801, after which he was King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland until his death in 1820. He was concurrently Duke and Prince-elector of Brunswick-Lüneburg (“Hanover”) in the Holy Roman…

Last week I wrote about the “marriage market“. In many ways, the marriage market is like a labor market: there are search costs, match quality, competition for mates, and so on. When one side of the market becomes more abundant, that side become less picky — their minimum willingness to accept goes down.

Today we examine war as a shock that makes women more abundant than men. The marriage market predicts this shock will mean a smaller fraction of women will marry but those that do receive a smaller share of the benefits from marriage. Also, a larger fraction of men will marry and receive a larger share of the benefits from marriage.

Ran Abramitzky, Adeline Delavande, and Luis Vasconcelos investigate marriage in pre-and-post World War 1 (WW1) France where an estimated 16.5 percent of the French male population died or were missing in WW1. You can see…

From out of the darkness of strife and civil war, late 15th century England emerged stable and filled with hope in the new ruling family: The Tudors. Thirty years of war, known as The Wars of the Roses, had torn the country apart in an unraveling a political struggle. At its height, the Plantagenets were the conquering victors at the battles of Crécy, Poitiers, and Agincourt. However, in its waning days, the Plantagenets had descended into madness and civil war. Two rival Plantagenet branches stemming from Edward III (the Houses of York and Lancaster) slaughtered each other mercilessly for decades until, in the end, the House of York under Richard III finally destroyed itself, and with it went the rule of the Plantagenets. It was a fitting end for the warrior kings of England.

The arrival of the Tudors promised a new path forward. It was the dawn of the…

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…