Utopia, you are standing in it!

Chengdu green apartment block [image credit: yahoo news]
Another green dream turns out to be a disaster.
– – –
An experimental green housing project in a Chinese megacity promised prospective residents life in a “vertical forest”, with manicured gardens on every balcony, says TechXplore.

All 826 apartments were sold out by April this year, according to the project’s estate agent, but instead of a modern eco-paradise, the towers look like the set of a desolate, post-apocalyptic film.

The problem? The mosquitoes love the plants too.

Only a handful of families have moved into Chengdu’s Qiyi City Forest Garden because of an infestation, state media have reported.

The project in the southwestern city was built in 2018, with every private balcony designed to provide space for plants to grow, according to local media reports.

Without any tenants to care for them, the eight towers have been overrun by their…

Your next car? NURPHOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES

Michael Lynch writes at Forbes  Peak Oil Demand! Again?  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Amid stubbornly low prices and lackluster demand we’re now seeing, on cue, a new round of predictions that oil demand has already or is about to peak (including even scenarios published by BP). These cannot be dismissed out of hand — as the peak oil supply arguments could, inasmuch as they were either based on bad math or represented assumptions that the industry couldn’t continue overcoming its age-old problems like depletion. (See my book The Peak Oil Scare if you want the full treatment.)

Now, the news is highlighting various predictions that the pandemic will accelerate the point at which global oil demand peaks, which is certainly much more sexy than business as usual. When groups like Greenpeace or the Sierra Club predict or advocate for peak…

I’ve just finished reading Steve Stewart-Williams’s recent book The Ape That Understood the Universe (Cambridge University Press, revised edition 2019). I recommend it highly as a good way to get not only an introduction to evolutionary psychology, but also to see why the discipline is worthwhile and why its detractors are often misguided. Click on the screenshot if you want to buy it from Amazon US.

I have to hedge my encomiums a bit, because while most of the book—the first part that deals with evolutionary psychology—is excellent, the second bit, only the last 64 pages, is weaker. That’s the bit that deals with memes, the popular but, I think, misguided view that we can understand human cultural evolution by assuming it’s propelled by memes, “units of culture” first dreamed up by Dawkins in The Selfish Gene. While memetics sounds good at first glance, and has become incorporated into…

Thousands of Germany’s wind turbines have reached the end of their economic lives; and replacing them is no simple matter. First, the costs of doing so are colossal. Secondly, the behemoths that might replace their ancestors are so large as to exceed the height limits placed on turbines by Germany’s planning rules.

Pierre Gosselin can barely conceal his delight with the fact that Germany’s wind industry is literally coming to a grinding halt.

Green Dream Arrives In Germany! But Repowering Obstacles Pose “Imminent Catastrophe” For Wind Power
No Tricks Zone
Pierre Gosselin
9 September 2020

All is not so wunderbar when it comes to Germany’s wind power outlook.

The green dream, with all its scenic beauty and nature conservation, has arrived in northern Germany. But now that green dream faces more obstacles.

Germany’s Renewable Energy Sources Act, passed in 2000, was intended to ensure the generation of “green” electricity. Operators…

Our blogging schedule has me signed up for artwork production on Saturdays. I’m currently working on a couple of drawings – some for a book, one for a text adventure, one piece of fanart for a Harry Potter fanfiction (which, I think, either I or Nick will most probably be talking about more), and a couple of ideas I had for a site banner for this blog. I’m going to kick things off by presenting one of the drawings I did for a banner:

The depiction is of Samuel Johnson’s famous refutation of Bishop Berkeley’s idealism. Berkeley, a prominent philosopher, maintained that the world around us existed only in perception: ours, and God’s – a position which made it seem as if the world itself were unreal (he named his philosophy “immaterialism”, which didn’t help; I believe it’s now considered a form of Idealism) and which could easily tip over…

I’ve written a couple of posts over the months drawing on work by Waikato economics professor John Gibson. Back in April there was this post, and then last month I wrote about an empirical piece Gibson had done using US county-level data suggesting that government-imposed restrictions in response to Covid may have made little consistent contribution to reducing death rates (in turn consistent with evidence suggesting that much of the decline in social contact, and economic activity, was happening anyway, in advance of government restrictions).

Fascinating as I found that paper, I was never entirely convinced how far the point would generalise, It seemed implausible, for example, that government restrictions and “lockdowns” would never make much difference – even if, in practice, the particular ones used in US counties might, on average, not have. After all, at the extreme, if a population (wrongly) regarded the threat from a particular…

In July I wrote about a statement that the Department of English put on its webpage—a statement about social justice that, I thought, contravened the University of Chicago’s Kalven Principles by allowing an official unit of the University to espouse and adhere to ideological principles. (Kalven encourages individual faculty to state their views, but forbids the University, with a few narrow exceptions, from adhering to any political, moral or ideological principles.) Here’s the statement, which was not an expression of individual opinion but an official position of the faculty of the English department. There are no signatures, and no dissenters.

This, I thought, violated the Kalven dictum that the University must take no political positions lest it lead to a chilling of speech and quashing of free discourse—one of the pillars of the University of Chicago. Departmental statements are equivalent to official University statements because departments are not only official…

Having deliberately sidelined its reliable gas and nuclear plants, California is now stuck with sunshine and breezes. The results are as predictable as they were avoidable. Wind and solar obsessed policymakers have been begging the Feds to throw California a lifeline.

The Department of Energy has responded to the Californian government’s desperate pleas by declaring a state of emergency, thereby permitting the embattled state to fire up thousands of diesel generators and to even hook up to ships at harbour to get the benefit of the power they generate on board, too.

The Feds Just Threw a Lifeline to California During Energy Crisis
Townhall
Bronson Stocking
6 September 2020

The Department of Energy (DOE) announced on Sunday that Sec. Dan Brouillette, in response to an urgent request from the state of California,  issued a Section 202 (c) emergency order to help prevent California’s already-faltering power grid from being completely overwhelmed.

The Hornsdale Power Reserve is about to get an upgrade. The Hornsdale Power Reserve is a grid-sized battery build by Tesla in South Australia. It has a capacity of 100 MW and can deliver 129 MWh. I did a series on it back in March, starting with the claim that this battery could replace natural gas for peaking and gap-filling (which is not the case). The upgrade will add a capacity of 50 MW and it can deliver 64.5 MWh.

The pv-magazine article points out that the additional capacity will be put to use for frequency control and inertia. I could understand that, the main function of the original 100 MW battery is already frequency control and this service generated quite some money for its owner. There was also this claim (my emphasis):

ARENA, which contributed an AU$8 million grant toward the expansion, also believes the upgraded battery

California’s sweeping blackouts are a fair indication of what happens when sound engineering gets trumped by woolly-headed ideology. An obsession with intermittent wind and solar has left millions of Californians sweltering in the dark this summer.

With the blackout that struck in mid-August, officials blamed the “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 

Their witless politicos have doubled down on the delusion, meaning that the disaster has a long way to run, yet.

Cory Bernardi was, until recently, a Senator for South Australia – a State equally obsessed with wind and solar, so Cory knows…

Update September 13, 2020:  This reprint of a post two years ago shows nothing has changed, except for the worse.

It is often said that truth is the first casualty in the fog of war. That is especially true of the war against fossil fuels and smoke from wildfires. The forests are burning in California, Oregon and Washington, all of them steeped in liberal, progressive and post-modern ideology. There are human reasons that fires are out of control in those places, and it is not due to CO2 emissions. As we shall see, Zinke is right and Brown is wrong. Some truths the media are not telling you in their drive to blame global warming/climate change. Text below is excerpted from sources linked at the end.

1. The World and the US are not burning.

The geographic extent of this summer’s forest fires won’t come close to the aggregate record…