Utopia, you are standing in it!

No industrial economy has ever powered itself on sunshine and breezes; no country ever will.

Wherever in the world the subsidies begin to dry up, so too has investment in new wind and solar capacity. Nowhere has that collapse been more prominent than in China. Which doesn’t quite fit with the meme that’s been run by renewable energy zealots for years now, that China is hell-bent on a renewable energy future.

Instead, China is building coal-fired power plants, hand over fist.

At the official level the Chinese give a nod and a bow to meeting their purported “climate obligations” – which is simply code for preventing them from enjoying the same industrial and economic success as Europeans have done for the last two centuries – by promising (sometime between now and never) to slash their emissions of carbon dioxide gas.

Always inscrutable, the Chinese have incensed renewable energy rent seekers…

The Productivity Commission looks into topics the government of the day asks them to.  The current government asked for a report on issues around the “future of work” (a favoured topic of the current Minister of Finance when he was in Opposition) and the final report is due out next month.

The Commission has released a series of five draft reports looking at various aspects of the issue.  Late last year I wrote quite critically about one of those reports in which the Commission championed the case for a larger and more active welfare state, claiming that by adopting such policies New Zealand’s productivity performance might be improved.  As I noted

What it boils down to, amid various reasonable insights, is a push for a much bigger welfare state, allegedly in the cause of lifting average New Zealand productivity (and sustainable wages), without a shred of evidence or careful considered…

H/T The GWPF

The UK government seems to have a bad case of climate derangement syndrome at the moment, in the run-up to the COP26 conference in Glasgow this year. How much economic damage could its futile attempts to reduce the supply of essential carbon dioxide (CO2) to the Earth’s ecosystems do?
– – –
Homeowners could be forced to replace their gas boilers to ensure the UK meets its target to be carbon neutral by 2050, ministers are warning.

The Government will publish a White Paper later this year which will set out the “bigger decisions” that the UK has to make to meet the target, says the Sunday Telegraph.

Lord Duncan of Springbank, the Climate Change minister, said that the White Paper will consider whether the Government should ban gas central heating altogether from all homes.

by Peter Lang and Ken Gregory

A new paper ‘Economic impact of energy consumption change caused by global warming’ finds global warming may be beneficial.

Needless to say, this won’t please either the real or fake climate obsessives.
– – –
In his recent presentation to the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Professor Gautam Kalghatgi answers the question: ‘Is it really the end of internal combustion engines and petroleum in transport?’

Gautam Kalghatgi is currently a Visiting Professor at Imperial College London (Mechanical Engineering) and also at Oxford University (Engineering Science).

He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, Society of Automotive Engineers, Institute of Mechanical Engineers and the Combustion Institute and an Honorary Fellow of the International Society for Energy, Environment and Sustainability.

He worked for 31 years at Shell Research followed by 8 years in Saudi Aramco before retiring in June 2018.

Source: The GWPF

Mary I, Queen of Scots (December 8, 1542 – February 8, 1587), reigned over Scotland from December 8, 1542 to July 24, 1567.

Mary was born on December 8, 1542 at Linlithgow Palace, Scotland, to King James V and his French second wife, Mary of Guise. She was said to have been born prematurely and was the only legitimate child of James’ to survive him. She was the great-niece of King Henry VIII of England, as her paternal grandmother, Margaret Tudor, was Henry VIII’s sister. On December 14, six days after her birth, she became Queen of Scotland when her father died, perhaps from the effects of a nervous collapse following the Battle of Solway Moss or from drinking contaminated water while on campaign.

She spent most of her childhood in France while Scotland was ruled by regents, and in 1558, she married the Dauphin of France, François. Mary was…

Mountbatten-Windsor is the personal surname used by some of the male-line descendants of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Under a declaration made in Privy Council on February 8, 1960, the name Mountbatten-Windsor applies to male-line descendants of the Queen without royal styles and titles. Individuals with royal styles do not usually use a surname, but some descendants of the Queen with royal styles have used Mountbatten-Windsor when a surname was required.

The British monarchy asserts that the name Mountbatten-Windsor is used by members of the Royal Family who do not have a surname, when a surname is required. For example, Prince Andrew, Duke of York, and Anne, Princess Royal, children of the Queen, used the surname Mountbatten-Windsor in official marriage registry entries in 1986 and 1973 respectively. Likewise, Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, used the name when filing a French lawsuit related to the topless pictures…

I am presenting a paper on Feb 8, 2020 at the NCC National Conference 2020 “Strengthening Family, Faith, Freedom and Sovereignty in an ideologically hostile world”. The paper concerns the interaction between laws on “gender identity discrimination” and other basic freedoms, including freedom of speech and freedom of religion. The paper can be downloaded here:

Two cases have been highlight overseas recently where a Christian employee has been fired for declining to use the “preferred pronoun” of a person who identifies as a different gender to their biological sex. The cases illustrate that religious freedom, and free speech generally, in the workplace can be under challenge in circumstances involving “gender identity” issues. It is not clear how such cases would be resolved in Australia.

One of my friends was telling me the other day that she would never vote for Bernie Sanders, for she simply hated the guy. (This friend is a liberal and a Democrat.) She said that she wouldn’t vote for anyone if it came down to Sanders vs. Trump in November.  In response to my saying that that could be equivalent to a vote for Trump, she responded that she lived in a Democratic state anyway, so it didn’t matter.

So I sent her this article by Paul Krugman, which claims that, so long as the Senate becomes Democratic—and that’s a big if—it really doesn’t matter which of the Democratic candidates wins. (I would go further: if the Senate remains Republican, then it surely doesn’t matter which Democrat wins.)

Krugman uses as an example the fact that the lying scum Trump was elected on a platform that was itself a lie…