Utopia, you are standing in it!

Millions of Chinese are learning just how important coal-fired power is to their health, safety and comfort, thanks to Beijing’s ban on Australian coal imports.

High-quality Australian coal has helped fuel China’s miraculous industrial growth over the last generation. But the escalation of a trade spat between the PRC and the Morrison led Federal Government over the original source of the coronavirus has resulted in coal being added to a growing list of Australian exports which are no longer welcome in the Middle Kingdom.

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.

China shivers as coal ban sparks electricity shortages
The Australian
Will Glasgow
18 December 2020

Electricity shortages are worsening across China, forcing tens of millions of residents in large cities to ration heating, raising questions about how long Xi Jinping…

Solar power complex in California [USA. Gov – BLM – Bureau of Land Management]
Welcome to the inglorious green revolution, where the lives of ageing gas power plants have to be extended and various other mini ‘solutions’, some relying on equipment owned by individual citizens, have to be adopted in a frantic effort to keep the lights on. Of course none of this was necessary before renewables were deemed to be the future of electricity supply, in the vain hope of altering the climate. What’s next if these measures are not enough?
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Sometime next summer, there’s a decent chance a heat wave will bake the American West, and California’s power grid will again be stretched to its limits, says TechXplore.

As the sun sets, solar panels will start generating less electricity even as temperatures remain high.

Power plants that burn natural gas will fire up as…

The Setting is the Enemy

The peculiarities of the Finnish theater of war that caused the greatest combat difficulties were the absolute lack of roads and the close character of the terrain which, with its vest zone of virgin forests, is so very different from the European landscape in latitudes farther south. The Karelian woods are under no forestry management such as is commonly applied in central Europe. The primeval forest is the result of natural reseeding. Old and young stands of trees are intermingled and frequently give rise to impenetrable thickets. This boundless forest is virtually unexplored. Throughout the trackless, desolate region, deepest solitude and deathly silence reign supreme. Lakes, swamps, moors, and loose rock are characteristic of the Karelian landscape. Although on the Karelian Isthmus (the corridor between the Gulf of Finland and Lake Lagoda) and in the area between Lake Lagoda and Lake Onega the woods in…

It’s at least mildly intriguing to consider how international news outlets can be so eager to recite prominent myths about the American media.

Johnson: Not watching Cronkite

A few months back, for example, the Guardian of London invoked the heroic-journalist myth of Watergate, declaring that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein “brought down” Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency “with their reporting on Watergate nearly a half-century ago.”

Toronto’s Globe and Mail newspaper has been known to invoke the mythical “Cronkite Moment” to underscore how, in a splintered media environment, no single television anchor can project ousize influence. Not that Walter Cronkite, the CBS News anchorman, actually did so in editorializing about the Vietnam War — the occasion in late February 1968 that gave rise to what has become a hoary media myth.

Just the other day, La Razón, a newspaper in Madrid, conjured the “Cronkite Moment” in

The story of the Tudor dynasty has been told from many different angles. Each monarch has been explored through lenses like social and political history numerous times. However, there is a new approach that is coming into the forefront of historical research and that is the focus on the medical history of the Tudors. Each Tudor monarch, from Henry VII to Elizabeth I, had some sort of bout with illness that would drastically alter the course of their reigns and the future of the dynasty. In Sylvia Barbara Soberton’s latest book, “Medical Downfall of the Tudors: Sex, Reproduction and Succession”, she explores the more intimate aspects of this turbulent dynasty to discover the truth about why they fell.

I would like to thank Sylvia Barbara Soberton for sending me a copy of her latest book. I have talked to Sylvia in the past and I have hosted her on my…

New year, new lockdown. I’m instinctively sceptical that such severe restrictions on our lives can ever be justified, but two factors have surely tipped the balance in their favour.

The first, of course, is the far more rapid transmission of the new Covid variant. This has increased the benefits of locking down, as the risk of the NHS being overwhelmed by Covid patients is now much greater.

The second, more positively, is the rollout of the new vaccines, which has reduced at least some of the costs of locking down. This is because there is now light at the end of the tunnel, and households and businesses can be more confident that this is the final push.

Here we can take some comfort from the strong public support for the new lockdown, and the relative sanguine response in financial markets. In particular, the FTSE has continued to grind higher. Even…

Guy Caruso writes at Real Climate Energy Supreme Court Hearing Should Signal Shift From Baseless Lawsuits to Realistic Climate Solutions  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

For years, energy manufacturers have helped drive down U.S. carbon emissions by unleashing a flood of home-grown, low-carbon natural gas, reducing America’s carbon footprint even as we use more energy. At the same time, despite emissions reduction progress, a handful of cities and counties including Baltimore, New York City, and Washington, DC among others have sued energy manufacturers in the name of climate change, spurred on by ambitious trial attorneys and imaginative legal theories.

Federal law is clear, though, with the Supreme Court clearly ruling in American Electric Power v. Connecticut in 2011 that it’s EPA’s job to regulate carbon emissions. That’s why trial attorneys have fought so hard to move climate lawsuits to state courts and that’s why a January…

We’ve already talked about different methods for distributing the vaccine in the face of limited supply on this blog (see my post and Doug Norton’s post). But today I want to talk about something different: the speed at which this vaccine was developed. It is truly amazing.

This chart from Nature (adapted from the fantastic Our World in Data) dramatically shows just how quickly the COVID-19 vaccine was developed compared with past vaccines. What used to take decades or even a century was done in mere months (yes, even with all the regulatory barriers today).

Exactly how we developed this vaccine so quickly is a complex story that involves the advanced state of modern science, incentives offered by concerned governments, and the harnessing of the profit motive to advance the public good. We don’t know all the details yet, and likely won’t for a long time since, like…

“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish” (opening line).

The Old Man and the Sea is a rich and deep novella about an old fisherman named Santiago and his Herculean effort to overcome a fishing dry-spell. Much like the character, Ernest Hemingway was also going through a dry-spell. The Old Man and the Sea was written at a time when Hemingway was considered a writer in decline. His last critically praised work was more than a decade old: For Whom The Bell Tolls in 1940 – read my reflections on For Whom The BellTolls and its Pulitzer controversy here. Hemingway had published Across The River And Into The Trees in 1950, the first book he had published post-World War II, and it was panned by critics. In a word,

The case of Taylor v Jaguar Land Rover has been trumpeted as a “landmark”  employment tribunal decision recognising that people who identify as non-binary or gender-fluid can be covered by the Equality Act protected characteristic of “gender reassignment”.  

The case concerns Mr/Ms Taylor, a man who began to wear women’s clothing to work in 2017 as part of a process of exploring his gender. He now identifies as a transwoman. He can be seen here being interviewed by Pink News at the time:

The tribunal seemed particularly keen on inhabiting the role of landmark decision-makers, going into a soliloquy about individuals who make a difference including Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King and Ruth Bader-Ginsberg (“The Notorious RBG”, as they noted).

But there is a lot less to the landmark part of the decision than has been promoted. It was already clear that the protected characteristic of “gender reassignment” in the…

On 28 September 2016, the automatic shutdown of wind turbines in South Australia during a spring storm delivered a statewide ‘system black’.

South Australia’s hapless Premier, Jay Weatherill led the wind industry’s propaganda charge, pointing the finger at the collapse of a couple of power pylons in the state’s mid-North as the cause of a statewide calamity that left 1.6 million people powerless; and parts of the State without electricity for more than a week. BHP Billiton’s Olympic Dam mine in South Australia’s far north was without full power from September 28 to October 13.

The collapse of a few power pylons occurred late in the day, and affected a single transmission line that could not have caused the collapse of the State’s entire power supply. The rest of the State’s transmission lines remained untroubled by the strong winds. But the power pylons collapse is still touted by renewables advocates…