Utopia, you are standing in it!

Cross-country comparisons are often enlightening, even if they just throw up more questions. In matters economic I’ve often highlighted New Zealand/Australia comparisons – both distant, resource-dependent, economies, with a similar legal and political background, market-oriented economies etc.

Ever since the coronavirus issue started to come to the fore it has also seem natural to try to make a little more sense of the New Zealand experience by looking at what is happening in Australia.  After all, both countries took the China travel ban route (us dragged along a day later by the Australian choice), both are islands (to the extent that matters at a time of more generalised movement restrictions), both have just come off summer (to the extent that may, or may not, matter) and both typically prided themselves on being open and democratic societies.  In both countries, (lots of) returning travellers seem to have accounted for most confirmed…

As the Covid-19 pandemic plunges the  world  into a  recession – deeper probably   than the global  financial  crisis – thousands  of  New Zealanders are losing  their jobs  and the  country’s  economy is  already  under  enormous  pressure. Some authorities  predict  it will precipitate a  revolution in  how  we live.

What, then,  about that other revolution which climate change warriors insist is essential  if  we  are not to face  extinction? Can it be relegated in policy priorities as  the government  seeks   to  plot  a  way through the  human  and  economic  misery  of the pandemic?

Covid-19 has cleared the skies of pollution. Carbon emissions  from the worst polluters  (airlines and  land  transport)  have  shrunk  almost to  zero.   International  tourism has come to a  halt,  cruise  liners  are  being laid up, and the global  warming   which  appeared to be such a threat  only  weeks   ago  is  moving at a  much slower  pace.

Those  in…

H/T Sasha Via Bloomberg:

The world’s biggest developer of offshore wind farms issued a reality check to the industry, saying it has overestimated the amount of time its turbines are generating electricity.

Copenhagen-basedOrsted A/Sannounced that offshore wind farms wouldn’t produce quite as much power as previously forecast. The adjustment could shave millions of dollars of revenue a year off each project. It’s also a warning to other developers who may have used similar analysis to estimate the economics of their projects.

As soon as the government released its modelling of the pandemic a few days ago, I realised something was badly wrong. The modelling showed infections increasing even under lockdowns, which obviously wasn’t happening. The crucial parameter here is R, the number of new infections generated by each existing infection. If R is greater than 1, the number of infections grows exponentially, but if R is less than one, it declines, eventually approaching zero. The knife-edge case is R=1, when the number stays constant.

On checking the paper on which the modelling was based, I found that it did indeed assume R>1, even with social distancing. This was less surprising when I realized it was based primarily on data from the initial outbreak in Wuhan, before the lockdown in China had taken full effect. (I later discovered that the report had been given to the government in February, which makes its…

This story was originally published in the November, 2019 issue of Smithsonian magazine.

The fighting for Aachen was fierce. American planes and artillery pounded the Nazi defenses for days. Tanks then rolled into the narrow streets of the ancient city, the imperial seat of Charlemagne, which Hitler had ordered defended at all costs. Bloody building-to-building combat ensued until, finally, on October 21, 1944, Aachen became the first German city to fall into Allied hands.

Rubble still clogged the streets when U.S. Army Maj. Floyd W. Hough and two of his men arrived in early November. “The city appears to be 98% destroyed,” Hough wrote in a memo to Washington. A short, serious man of 46 with receding red hair…

A MILITARY HELICOPTERwas on the ground when Russell Guy arrived at the helipad near Tallinn, Estonia, with a briefcase filled with $250,000 in cash. The place made him uncomfortable. It didn’t look like a military base, not exactly, but there were men who looked like soldiers standing around. With guns.

The year was 1989. The Soviet Union was falling apart, and some of its military officers were busy selling off the pieces.

This article details one of the most ambitious—and secretive—cartographic endeavors of all time and how it came to light in the West. Continue reading at Wired, where it was originally published.

As night follows day, rocketing power prices are the inevitable consequence of the inevitable transition to subsidised and unreliable wind and solar.

The burden of all that glorious virtue signalling falls disproportionately on those on low and fixed incomes. Add the normal path of decrepitude, frailty and illness to impecuniousity and you’ve got a recipe for a national health disaster.

Enduring frigid weather in unheated homes is one of the biggest killers of the elderly. With power prices now so prohibitive, the poor and vulnerable drop like flies every winter as they ration their power use or find themselves cut from the grid, incapable of paying for power, at all.

That first world countries now see hundreds of thousands of households suffering energy poverty as a new ‘normal’ is criminal. Particularly when all of this was perfectly predictable and perfectly avoidable.

As the elderly face the existential (passing) threat of COVID-19, spare…

After writing previous post, the RenewEconomy article kept going through my mind. The author of the article suggested that the response of the Hornsdale Power Reserve to a tripping coal fired power unit was extraordinary, when in reality it was insignificant in the grand scheme of things. I wondered why on earth the author was so lyrical about what was in fact a poor performance…

Then it suddenly struck me. It might well be a misinterpretation of how the event was represented.

Let me explain.

There were two graphs presented in the article. The first one is the frequency versus the response of the Hornsdale Power Unit and it stood central in previous post. There is however a second graph in the article and it is this graph that could easily lend itself to misinterpretation. It shows the sharp decline of the tripped coal unit combined with the response of…

Who’d have thought the Treasury’s ‘Ways and Means’ facility at the Bank of England could cause so much excitement? The two parties have agreed a temporary extension of what is, in effect, the government’s overdraft account with the central bank. Cue great delight from advocates of printing money to pay for higher public spending, such as Positive Money, and equal displeasure from opponents. In reality, both reactions are overdone.

For a start, the ‘Ways and Means’ (W&M) facility is nothing new. Usually the balance on this account is less than £400 million (peanuts in this context). But the government did make more use of it during the global financial crisis in 2008, when the balance hit its previous record high of just under £20 billion. The UK has therefore been here before, so a precedent has already been set.

What’s more, this is still only short-term borrowing that…

Parliament can do anything – except replace the House of Lords? For over a century, replacing the House of Lords has brooked no delay. Now, at last, the Government seems tempted to dam the brook, by substituting an elected Senate for the old Second Chamber. At first glance, this is constitutionally straightforward. Whatever Parliament enacts is law – so surely an Act of Parliament can lawfully replace the House of Lords? But such an Act may be open to challenge.

Traditionally, parliamentary sovereignty admits of one exception – ‘Parliament cannot … bind its successors by the terms of any statute‘ (Alpheus Todd, Parliamentary Government in the British Colonies (Boston, 1880), p.192). To use the technical jargon, Parliament has continuing sovereignty, which it cannot limit. A successful challenge, then, could only be mounted if (1) parliamentary sovereignty is continuing, and (2) replacing the House of Lords violates continuing sovereignty…

Daniel Baksa, Zsuzsa Munkacsi and Carolin Nerlich in this research:

Europe’s population is ageing, and this trend is expected to continue over the coming decades. The demographic changes are captured by the change in the old-age dependency ratio, which measures the size of the elderly population – defined as people aged 65 years and older – in relation to the working-age population – aged 15-64. According to Eurostat, between now and 2070 the ratio for the euro area will rise strongly from 30% to 52%, with considerable differences across countries. Two-thirds of this increase will be concentrated in the next decade and a half, as the large “baby boom” generation born 1955-70 will be over 65, while life expectancy will keep rising and the fertility rate will remain low or fall even further.

Ageing societies are facing major macroeconomic challenges. Labour forces are shrinking and precautionary savings are likely increasing, while…

NZ First leader Winston Peters today said he wants the election held on November 21,  Radio  NZ   reported.  He says he believes  the health system would be under the pump in September with the winter flu season and the country potentially still dealing with the impacts of Covid-19.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced the September election date before the Covid-19 pandemic began.

Peters said he had fought for the November date originally, because his party believed summer elections were better, but given the pressures of Covid-19 he will again raise delaying it by two months.

“Having a good look at it now and with the compounding problems of coronavirus and all the distractions and efforts going in elsewhere, perhaps the sound thing is to say November 21 is the right date and we should go ahead then,” he said.