Utopia, you are standing in it!

One straw, up one turtle’s nostril, and here we are, on the road to banning all plastics … Typical!

The activist feeding frenzy against plastic has been going on for decades but with the recent images being multiplied on social media and the BBC it has reached its hyperbolic zenith this year. The calls to do something – the sense of urgency – to ban plastic (from straws to bags to packaging to, well, … anything and everything) has come to encompass the latest social media episode of Age of Stupid insanity. You might go to prison in California for serving someone a straw.

The drive to ban plastics, now being spearheaded by those who should know better in the European Commission, has become a cause célèbre for all activists. What’s not to like about this latest attack on technology?

1. Plastic is not a natural product. Enough said…

Image credit: autocarbrands.com
H/T The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)

The public turns out not be persuaded by EU bureaucrats that expensive short-range BEVs with high depreciation, limited recharge options and uncertain battery life are the way to go. And the current virus situation only reduces spending power, leaving car makers with nowhere to go but down as massive fines for missing absurd CO2 targets begin to bite.
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The German car industry is calling for stricter EU climate requirements to be overturned or to be delayed as car sales plummet to lowest level in nearly three decades.

It has urged the government to back them in efforts to make the European Union drop a planned tightening of emission limits on cars, reports Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Weather-dependent wind power has no inherent commercial value, simply because it can’t be delivered as and when it’s needed. The only “value” is the massive and endless subsidies that it attracts.

The graph above depicts the output for the month of March, from every wind turbine connected to Australia’s Eastern Grid, with a total notional capacity of 6,960 MW. Those turbines are spread between Far North Queensland, all along the ranges of NSW, all over Victoria, the north coast of Tasmania and across the central parts of South Australia.

Collapses of anywhere between 2,000 to 3,000 MW over the span of an hour or less are matched sudden surges of equal magnitude.

If you were looking for a definition of “chaos”, what’s thrown out by Australia’s wind power fleet on a daily basis should do the trick.

Rafe Champion adds detail to that definition, with a little wind watching of…

STATEMENT BY DR SUCHARIT BHAKDI ON COVID-19 EPIDEMIOLOGY 

MARCH 2020

SOURCE DOCUMENT: [LINK]  THE VIDEO IN GERMAN:  [LINK]  

BELOW IS AN EDITED AND ABBREVIATED VERSION OF THE BHAKDI ANALYSIS

As Emeritus of the Johannes-Gutenberg-University in Mainz and long time
director of the Institute for Medical Microbiology, I feel obliged to critically
question the far-reaching restrictions on public life that we are currently taking
on ourselves in order to reduce the spread of the COVID-19 virus. It is expressly not my intention to play down the dangers of the virus or to spread a political message. However, I feel it is my duty to make a scientific contribution to put the current data and facts into perspective. In addition, to ask questions that are in danger of being overlooked in the heat of the debate. My concern is that unforeseeable socioeconomic consequences of the drastic containment measures which are…

Earlier this week the OECD put out a useful little note Evaluating the initial impact of COVID-19 containment measures on economic activity.  

It is less than five pages long, including a couple of charts, and isn’t even attempting to offer definitive answers.   And what it offers isn’t an assessment of the impact of the differing containment measures being adopted in each country, but of the likely impact of the initial economic structure of each country’s economy to a set of common assumptions about the extent of containment and associated changes in economic activity.   Thus when, as local media have reported, this chart shows that New Zealand is one of the most adversely affected economies

it isn’t telling you anything about the impact or intensity of New Zealand policies, but simply about the pre-existing structure, given the (common across countries) assumptions OECD staff make about which sectors…

Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse battled over whether America would run on DC or AC power, but they never had to battle with the chaotic intermittency of wind and solar.

Celebrated in the recently released film, The Current War, Westinghouse and Edison fought a pitched battle over technology, patents, media approval and the support of legislators in their efforts to dominate the generation and distribution of electricity across the USA. Spoiler alert: Westinghouse won and AC remains the delivery system of choice.

In wind and solar obsessed Australia, the battle raging today about power generation and delivery is simply about keeping the lights on.

Rafe Champion takes a look at how the chaotic delivery of heavily subsidised wind and solar is the real Current War.

How intermittent energy kills coal-fired power and the grid
Catallaxy Files
Rafe Champion
16 March 2020

The damage inflicted by a good wind day. The…

by Mario J. Rizzo and Glen Whitman

Book description

The burgeoning field of behavioral economics has produced a new set of justifications for paternalism. This book challenges behavioral paternalism on multiple levels, from the abstract and conceptual to the pragmatic and applied.

Behavioral paternalism relies on a needlessly restrictive definition of rational behavior. It neglects nonstandard preferences, experimentation, and self-discovery. It relies on behavioral research that is often incomplete and unreliable. It demands a level of knowledge from policymakers that they cannot reasonably obtain. It assumes a political process largely immune to the effects of ignorance, irrationality, and the influence of special interests and moralists.

Overall, behavioral paternalism underestimates the capacity of people to solve their own problems, while overestimating the ability of experts and policymakers to design beneficial interventions. The authors argue instead for a more inclusive theory of rationality in economic policymaking.

Gerd Gigerenzer (Director of the…

Environment  Minister   David  Parker  has directed  officials to find ways  to fast-track consents  for infrastructure and  development  projects. He says   his  goal  is to  help create a pipeline of projects  so that some can  start immediately once  Covid-19 restrictions  are  lifted “so people can get back into work as fast as possible”.

Parker sees the Covid-19 pandemic as a serious global crisis that will have a wide ranging and lasting impact on almost every part of  the economy for some time.

He recognises many New Zealanders have lost their jobs, or may do so in coming months, and many businesses are doing it hard.

“These are extraordinary times that need extraordinary solutions. We need to support NZers through this crisis, and position our economy for recovery”.

 His  aim  is  to   short-circuit  the standard  Resource Management Act  consenting  processes  and  he wants   Cabinet to  put its stamp of approval on…

Choices that matter are often hard.  That is one of the messages of Matthew Hooton’s lengthy column in the Herald this morning, which people really should read if you possibly can.  It isn’t that Hooton is saying anything particularly new, but he is putting it firmly in a contemporary New Zealand context.  He poses the choices around handling the coronavirus pandemic as primarily those for the Prime Minister (and Cabinet), but really we should think of them as choices for New Zealanders as a whole, for which elected leaders –  none of whom here was seriously chosen for their ability to confront the gravest crisis in many many decades – really should primarily be there to facilitate and articulate, but perhaps help shape too, our collective view; the choices we wish to make on matters that affect life and death –  perhaps for many – and the functioning of our…

Good God, here we go again! Rowan Williams, formerly a “sophisticated” Archbishop of Canterbury, now bearing the appropriate title of Lord Williams of Mealymouth Oystermouth, is still kvetching about Richard Dawkins and his supposed New Atheist posse, and on two grounds.

First, Dawkins (and we) damaged Christianity, and it needs to be repaired.

Second, New Atheists don’t know jack about theology.

As to the first, I say “GOOD FOR US! Christianity needs to be damaged, for it’s harmful and delusional, and enables the vice of belief without evidence—in other words, faith. As to the second claim, I’ve dealt with it many times before (it’s gone under the name of “the courtier’s reply“), and address it here only briefly.

Here’s the short article from The Tablet. Click to read, and shake your head about the lucubrations of poor Lord Oystermouth:

A few short excerpts:

The former Archbishop of…

In the absence of endless subsidies there would be no wind or solar industries. Period.

The minute talk turns to cutting those subsidies, the rent-seekers profiting from the wind and solar scam scream ‘blue murder’.

In the USA, the greatest economic and environmental fraud of all time is on a scale and magnitude that would make Croesus turn green with envy.

If the wind and solar scam continues unabated, American taxpayers will be forced to fork out more than $120 billion, in the form of direct subsidies, tax credits, and mandates for the generation and transmission of chaotically intermittent wind and solar.

Bill Peacock takes a look at the staggering burden placed on American households and businesses for an obsession with sunshine and breezes.

Renewable Subsidies Leading America Toward European-Style Energy Poverty
RealClear Energy
Bill Peacock
3 March 2020

Recent headlines have touted the record $55 billion renewable sector investments…

‘Quarantine’ or mere ‘Restriction’?

In the post published yesterday, I explained that under Part 2A of the Public Health (Control of Diseases) Act 1984, UK and Welsh ministers can make regulations to protect public health that can impose ‘special restrictions’ on persons, things and premises.  They can impose such restrictions in the same way that Justices of the Peace may do against individuals and groups. However, there are four exceptions to that general rule (section 45D(3)).   The general regulation-making powers cannot be used to force a person to (a) submit to medical examination; be (b) removed to or (c) detained in a hospital or similar establishment, or, and mostly notably, (d) ‘be kept in isolation or quarantine.’   The rationale for the exclusions seems to be that these highly invasive things must be done on a case-by-case (i.e. person or group) instead of community-wide basis.

So, does the lockdown…

We’re staying inside, we’re social-distancing (or, more accurately, physical-distancing), we’re washing our hands over and over, we’re inventing new corona-words, we’re choosing new email signoffs (adieu, “Cheers!”, bonjour, “Be well”).

And here in the virtual Strong Language enclave, we’re thinking about illness-inspired swearing.

When the coronavirus began spreading, and I hadn’t heard much about India, I thought to myself, “My god, when it gets there it will be a debacle!” I’ve been all over India and love the country, but it’s an incubator just waiting for an injection of virus. The cities are terribly crowded and there’s virtually no opportunity (especially in those cities) to “self-segregate”—especially for the poor who are often jammed together in shantytowns. (Even in the country entire families occupy small spaces, often one room.)

And since many live hand to mouth, a shutdown of commerce would lead to starvation. To this add the sub-par medical care, with even that completely unavailable to the impoverished, i.e., most of the populace. Finally, the nature of the country, with a lot of independent people who have only the bare essentials (India is the world’s largest democracy) means that a draconian lockdown à…