Utopia, you are standing in it!

Virtue signalling with heavily subsidised and hopelessly intermittent wind and solar power comes with a staggering cost. Ask a virtue signalling victim from Germany, Denmark or South Australia where wind and solar obsessions have left them paying world’s highest power prices.

Like the aforementioned, Ontario is another place where ideologues destroyed a perfectly reliable and thoroughly affordable electricity supply; the economic consequences have been an unmitigated disaster.

Ontario’s Liberal government under Kathleen Wynne took the wind and solar obsession to extremes, driving power prices into orbit and well-paid manufacturing jobs offshore.

Wynne and her band of acolytes were shown the door, after an electoral drubbing at the hands of Doug Ford and his Progressive Conservatives in June 2019. However, as Parker Gallant details below, Wynne’s dismal legacy will haunt her compatriots for generations to come.

Ontario electricity ratepayers paid up big-time to reduce emissions
Energy Perspectives
Parker Gallant
10 February…

Cronkite in Vietnam, 1968

Fifty-two years ago tonight, CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite presented a prime-time report about the war in Vietnam and declared in closing that the U.S. military effort was “mired in stalemate” and that negotiations might eventually offer a way out.

It was a tepid analysis, hardly novel. But over the years, Cronkite’s assessment has swelled in importance, taking on the aura of a vital, media-inspired turning point. It is so singularly important in American journalism that it has come to be called the “Cronkite Moment.”

In reality it is a moment steeped in media myth.

Notable among the myths of the “Cronkite Moment” is that President Lyndon B. Johnson watched the program and, upon hearing the anchorman’s comment about “stalemate,” snapped off the television and told an aide or aides something to this effect:

“If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle…

As I’ve frequently noted, the misuse of RCP8.5 is pervasive. While there are some legitimate uses of high forcing levels in exploratory research, that is not what I am referring to here. Below, an example of RCP8.5 being put to use in a consulting sales pitch, which then finds its way to a Reuters news story about the real world, taking the misuse of RCP8.5-as-BAU into broader circulation. Posted here just so I have it …

Climate paranoia has hit the UK courts big-time. It now seems illegal not to obsess over trace gases in the atmosphere, due to the Paris climate agreement.

Heathrow Airport’s controversial plans to build a third runway have been thrown into doubt after a court ruling, reports BBC News.

The government’s Heathrow’s expansion decision was unlawful because it did not take climate commitments into account, the Court of Appeal said.

Heathrow said it would challenge the decision, but the government has not lodged an appeal.

The judges said that in future, a third runway could go ahead, as long as it fits with the UK’s climate policy.

Jude Clemente reports at Forbes The Obvious Reality Of More U.S. Oil And Natural Gas
Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Natural gas overwhelmingly dominates the U.S. electric power system, double second place coal. Gas is cleaner, cheaper, more flexible, and more reliable. Gas will supply over 40% of our power this summer and is racing toward being 50% of total generation capacity. Just think about the scale of that. For every 10o power plants in America that create electricity, 50 of them will run on natural gas (see Figure above). Further, the International Energy Agency has specifically credited the rise of gas in our power system as the reason why we are slashing CO2 emissions faster than any other country ever.

Understanding this reality, we must continue to resist growing “energy unrealism.” More bluntly, a fracking ban would be the worst policy for American economic, energy, and environmental security…

‘As polls have attested [traditional Labour voters] rejected Labour because it had become a party that derided everything they loved.’
(John Gray in The New Statesman)

As of January 2020, Labour has 580,000 registered members, giving it the largest membership of any party in Europe, and yet it has just suffered its worst election defeat since 1987. How do we reconcile these contradictory facts?

Trying to make sense of Labour’s catastrophic defeat in the 2019 General Election has prompted a flood of articles and analyses, most of which rightly focus on the distorting effects of Brexit. But I was fascinated to read several articles, by writers from the Left and the Right, which also attribute the defeat to more profound changes which have taken place in the Labour Party itself, that:

• The decline of the traditional, manual-labouring working class, the decline in Trades Union membership and the increasing diversity…

Calling It a Crisis and Covering It Like One – Public Citizen

“PEOPLE have been imagining that the climate is changing,
exaggerating every weather event, getting widespread press coverage,
and blaming it on man – for as long as there have been newspapers.”
– Tony Heller
Climate Change Insanity Never Changes

“IT is fortunate for the community’s peace of mind
that the Commonwealth Meteorological Office [BoM] exists as a
corrective to scare mongeringand shameless prophecy.”
– Mr. E. Bromley : Commonwealth Meteorological Office (BoM) 1923

***

DEEP within human nature there are certain types of people who yearn for catastrophe. They yearn to have significance in their lives believing that theirs is the time when the chickens are coming home to roost and everything is going to go tits up.

THE biggest selling environmental books in history, predict the mass destruction of the planet. Rachel Carson’s 1962 international bestseller

In their latest stunt, protestors from Extinction Rebellion have dug up the lawn at Trinity College, Cambridge. Presumably they think all publicity is good publicity, but this looks like yet another own goal.

Trinity appears to have been targeted for two reasons, both stupid. One is opposition to the college’s involvement in plans to redevelop farmland in Suffolk. Protestors don’t like the idea that this land might be used to build new homes, or a new logistics site (aka lorry park) that would ease congestion at the port of Felixstowe. As it happens, both options sound good to me. But we have a planning system to thrash out these issues, without the need to trash a garden.

The second reason is that Trinity is believed to be the largest Oxbridge investor in oil and gas companies, using the income to educate young people and fund research into, among other things…