Utopia, you are standing in it!

Guest post by Anna Boeles Rowland and Chanelle Delameillieure, 14 February 2020

“More things are necessary for a household than four naked thighs.”[1] In the middle ages the household was headed by a husband and his wife and was the centre of family life and economic productivity. So, in 1486 when John Wellis of London used the above retort upon hearing that his alleged betrothed Alice Billingham had publicly declared that they were married, he was chastising Alice for suggesting that they could legitimise their romantic relationship without the necessary social status and financial stability. Alice, however, had witnesses to the fact that John had asked her to be his wife on the feast of Saint Valentine that same year, asking for her hand so that she could be his “Valentyne for ever.”[2] Like today, the medieval feast day of the Roman martyr St Valentine was a celebration…

Mary of Teck (Victoria Mary Augusta Louise Olga Pauline Claudine Agnes; May 26, 1867 – March 24, 1953) was queen consort of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions and Empress consort of India as the wife of King George V.

Princess Victoria Mary (“May”) of Teck was born on May 26, 1867 at Kensington Palace, London, in the same room where Queen Victoria, her first cousin once removed, had been born 48 years earlier. Queen Victoria came to visit the baby, writing that she was “a very fine one, with pretty little features and a quantity of hair”. May would become the first British queen consort born in Britain since Catherine Parr.

Duke and Duchess of Teck with Princess Victoria Mary

Her father was Prince Francis, Duke of Teck, the son of Duke Alexander of Württemberg by his morganatic wife, Countess Claudine Rhédey von Kis-Rhéde (created Countess von Hohenstein…

The Endangered Species Act imposes significant regulatory burdens on anyone who owns land where endangered and threatened species or their habitats are found. The predictable result of such burdens is to discouragelandowners from accommodating rare species or maintaining habitat. A recent study confirms this prediction, finding that species already threatened with habitat loss have lost an additional 8.1% of their private-land habitat over the last 30 years.

Previously, this effect had been shown for individual species. For instance, a 2003 study by Dean Lueck and Jeffery A. Michael found that landowners accelerated timber harvesting in areas occupied by the red-cockaded woodpecker. To protect individual birds and habitat, the federal government limits timber harvesting in areas occupied by the species. However, red-cockaded woodpeckers prefer old-growth pine forests. Landowners who harvest their trees early can avoid creating these conditions and, therefore, avoid the federal regulations that accompany the bird’s presence. The…

In their sillier moments, renewable energy zealots pontificate about the end of fossil fuels, to be inevitably replaced by wind and solar (albeit, these days with the addition of $trillions worth of mythical mega-batteries).

No country has ever powered itself on wind and solar alone; no country ever will.

Instead, modern economies will continue to utilise thermal power and the more sensible ones, nuclear power.

Paul Driessen begs the question of how on earth they expect us to enjoy the benefits of reliable and affordable electricity by banishing fossil fuels, altogether.

How exactly do they plan to replace fossil fuels?
Watts Up With That?
Paul Driessen
16 March 2020

Berkeley, CA, Takoma Park, MD and other cities; California, Connecticut, New York, Virginia and other states; Germany, England and other countries; the European Union – all plan to banish oil, natural gas and coal within 10, 20 or 30 years. A number of…

The Coronavirus Bill introduced by the government last week will be debated by parliament in circumstances where it is harder for both Houses to meet, scrutinise and vote than at any time in recent memory. How should parliament respond to both the legislation and the crisis that prompted it? Former Clerk of the Commons David Natzler outlines the key issues facing MPs and peers as they consider how parliament should function in the coming months.

Just as the dust is settling on the first phase of the Brexit marathon, and the Constitution Unit and others are examining the role played by Parliament over the past three years, COVID-19 presents itself wholly unexpectedly as a challenge to all the nation’s institutions. Parliament was settling in for five years of single-party majority government and it looked as if, Brexit deal aside, it would be relatively smooth sailing. Now parliament faces…

MOST OF UShave a rough map of the world in our minds that we use any time we think about places. But these mental maps aren’t necessarily reliable. In fact, many of the maps in our heads share the same errors, some of which are quite large—and surprisingly resistant to correction.

For instance, we all know thatSouth Americais south ofNorth America, of course. But you may be surprised by the fact that virtually the entire South American continent iseastof Florida. There are lots of possible reasons for geographical misconceptions like this one, says cartographer John Nelson. Mental maps are necessarily simplifications, and Nelson suspects the misplaced Americas may be partly a result of their names. After all, it’s not calledSoutheastAmerica.

Nelson’s father, who was…

Mark Thoma directs us to David Warsh on Gorton and Holmstrom’s view of the role of banking. I’ve written about this view in severalplaces. My own view of banking is very different and here is a quick summary of my key points.

The source of Gorton and Holmstrom’s errors: Taking U.S. banking history as a model

In my view Gorton and Holmstrom err by basing their view of what banking is on the pre-Fed U.S banking system. Nobody argues that the U.S. represented a “state-of-the-art” banking system in the late 19th century. In fact, in the late 19th century the U.S. banking system was still recovering from the reputational consequences of the combination of state and bank defaults in the 1840s that had led many Europeans to conclude that American institutions facilitated fraud. By the end of the 19th century, however, the U.S. did have access to…

By Anton Lang ~

This Series of Posts will show the data for wind power in Australia.

This is the Permanent link to all those Posts in that Series.

The image you see immediately below is of the Macarthur Wind Plant in Victoria Australia, and this is the largest wind plant currently in Australia. It has a Nameplate of 420MW and has 140 of those huge towers, each with a nacelle on top which contains a 3MW generator.

Macarthur Wind Plant In Victoria Australia

I have recently completed a Series of Posts for electrical power generation from every source here in Australia, and that was a collection of data for every day in one complete year of consecutive days. Now while this collection of data was done on a manual basis, there are now sites which give those same details without my having to compile them manually in such a…

The Canadian government has often treated its indigenous people horribly, including taking kids from their family and sticking them in special residential “Indian schools” where they were forbidden to use their language or learn about their culture, and where they were often horribly abused. I saw one of these schools, now closed, when I was in Kamloops last year for the Imagine No Religion conference. Hearing the story, I was horrified.

So, in an admirable effort to make up for past misdeeds, Canada has made a number of accommodations to the people of the “First Nations”, as they call them. But this time they’ve gone too far, and have failed to remove children from their homes when they should have. These children are ill with cancer, and the government endorses “traditional” methods of healing, which inevitably lead to death. The government’s failure to insist on modern medical treatment for First Nations children has…

After writing previous post, I wondered how much impact the Tesla battery of the Hornsdale Power Reserve actually has on the South Australia grid. Just looking at the numbers (the battery has a capacity of 100 MW and can deliver 129 MWh), I expected it to be rather insignificant. In the meanwhile, I came across a heated discussion on a reblog of previous post on the blog “Utopia, you are standing in it!“. That post was about the Tesla battery of the Hornsdale Power Reserve in South Australia. The discussion started with the comment that South Australia is a net exporter and after the question how long the Tesla battery would last, this suprising claim was made:

Long enough to stop potential blackouts in Melbourne because of the unreliability of their coal fired power stations! […]