Utopia, you are standing in it!

“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the
equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”
– Prof Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the
industrialized civilizations collapse?
Isn’t it our responsiblity to bring that about?”
– Maurice Strong,
founder of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP)

February 4, 2014

Viv Forbes

Germany’s wind and solar power generation came to a standstill in late 2013. More than 23,000 wind turbines ran out of wind and most of the one million photovoltaic systems ran out of sunlight. For a whole week, coal nuclear and gas-powered plants generated an estimated 95 percent of Germany’s electricity.

Britain has 3,500 wind turbines, but during a period of extreme cold they produced just 1.8% of UK’s electricity. But, gluttons for punishment, politicians intend building more.

When electricity demand peaked at the height of the recent heatwave in…

In the history of commerce, there’s never been a financial scam that comes anywhere near rivalling subsidised wind power.

In the past, sharp, entrepreneurial types have made plenty of easy money from ‘selling’ the London Bridge and the Eiffel Tower to unwitting dupes.

But scamming fools with too good to be true offers is nothing compared to what’s up for grabs in the so-called wind ‘industry’.

There aren’t many businesses where a major source of revenue is being paid to not produce what it is that your business is meant to produce.

STT is at a loss to find many other current examples that match the profligacy of paying what are called “constraint payments” to wind power outfits, so that they won’t deliver power to the grid when the wind is blowing.

And were not talking small beer, either. Over the last decade, British wind power outfits have collected over…

On the last day of 2019, I reported on a new way of hiring faculty at the University of California. It has already started on the Berkeley campus, and is poised to begin at both the Santa Cruz and Davis campuses.

The method, as implemented at Berkeley, is to require candidates for faculty jobs—not all of them yet, just those applying to some selected departments in the life sciences—to submit “diversity statements” with their applications. These statements require three features: they must express your philosophy of diversity, they must recount your past efforts to promote diversity, and they must describe your plans to increase diversity at the UC campus where you’re applying.

The invidious aspect of this process at Berkeley is that the diversity statements were vetted by a committee, not the department itself, and they were scored on a scale that goes from 1 (worst) to 5 (best) in…

A decade from now, New Yorkers will rue the day that Andrew Cuomo determined to run their state on chaotically intermittent wind and solar.

Like everywhere else that’s attempted to run on sunshine and breezes, New York’s power prices are bound to rocket out of control and its enviable grid reliability will soon become a thing of the past.

That wind and solar obsessed South Australia, Denmark and Germany fight for line honours in the world’s highest power prices stakes is no surprise.

But the fact that power prices will inevitably rise to unaffordable levels hasn’t deterred New York’s Governor, who seems hellbent on following those dismal examples.

A gobsmacked Roger Caiazza sets out to tally up the staggering price tag attached to Cuomo’s wind and solar obsession, which may well reach a breathtaking $47,000,000,000.

New York Energy Bill from Cuomo to Consumers Could Top $47 Billion!
Natural Gas Now

The Labour Party is currently engaged in picking a new leader. In recent years greater and greater powers have been given to party members in such elections, at the cost of parliamentarians. Meg Russell argues that these changes have destabilised the dynamics of parliamentary democracy, weakening essential lines of accountability. She suggests that there is a need to properly review these effects. In the meantime she proposes some short-term solutions for Labour.

Labour’s leadership election is underway, with a final decision due after a ballot of party members and affiliated supporters on 4 April. Currently, four candidates are pursuing nominations from constituency parties and affiliated organisations, following an initial round of nominations by Labour MPs (and MEPs). Under Labour’s present system, the party’s MPs have relatively little control over the outcome – serving solely as ‘gatekeepers’ to the ballot. As occurred in 2015, a leader could hence emerge who has…

On this date, February 6, 1952, George VI of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland died and was succeeded by his elder daughter as Queen Elizabeth II. This marks her 68th year on the throne.

The stress of the World War II had taken its toll on the King George VI’s health, made worse by his heavy smoking and subsequent development of lung cancer among other ailments, including arteriosclerosis and Buerger’s disease. A planned tour of Australia and New Zealand was postponed after the King suffered an arterial blockage in his right leg, which threatened the loss of the leg and was treated with a right lumbar sympathectomy in March 1949.

His elder daughter, Elizabeth, Duchess of Edinburgh and the heir presumptive, took on more royal duties as her father’s health deteriorated. The King was well enough to open the Festival of Britain in May 1951, but…

In an amazing display of incompetence, we still don’t know whether Bernie Sanders or Pete Buttigieg won the Iowa caucus.

This has created some opportunities for satire, with people asking how a political party that can’t properly count 200,000 votes somehow can effectively run a healthcare system for 340 million people.

That’s a very good point, but today let’s focus on a contest that does have a clear winner.

As explained in this video, John Stossel and his team crunched the numbers and they have concluded that “Crazy Bernie” wins the free-stuff primary.

Senator Sanders doubtlessly will be very happy with this victory, especially since he trailed Kamala Harris when Stossel did the same calculations last summer.

America’s taxpayers, however, might not be pleased with this outcome. Especially if Bernie Sanders somehow gets to the White House.

Last week, I shared new numbers from the Congressional Budget Office…

On standard tests of empathy, libertarians score very low. Yet, the world’s “well-known libertarian bias” coupled with many people’s unwarranted pessimism makes us seem like starry-eyed optimists (“how could you possibly believe things will just work themselves out?!”).

Under the Moral Foundations framework developed and popularized by Jonathan Haidt, he and his colleagues analyzed thousands of responses through their YourMorals.orgtool. Mostly focused on what distinguishes liberals from conservatives, there are enough self-reported libertarians answering that the questionnaire to draw meaningful conclusions. The results, as presented in TED-talks, podcast interviews and Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religioncontains a whole lot of interesting stuff.

First, some Moral Foundations basics: self-reported liberals attach almost all their moral value to two major categories – “fairness” and “care/harm.” Some examples include striving for equal (“fair”) outcomes…

Here’s a long episode of Jonathan Pie (the alter ego of comedian Tom Walker), playing, as he often does, a reporter. But this time the story is about him, a “documentary” of Pie covering pro- and anti-Brexit marchers. (For Americans: “UKIP” is the UK Independence Party, a prime mover of the Brexit initiative that has, says Matthew, “mutated into a far-right home for Nazis.”)

The conceit is although Pie is a liberal, he’s taken down by social media, who decides to take his words and actions out of context and portray him as both a “Leave-r” and an “alt-righter”. And this is after he extols social media for being a boon to journalism (“journalism for toddlers”), enabling reporters to find just the right quote they want instead of having to interview a bunch of wankers.

In the end, Pie comes a cropper, and the coppers come for him—for perpetrating “hate…