Utopia, you are standing in it!

This is a 2007 essay economist Don Boudreaux wrote that was published during 2007 in the Pittsburgh-Tribune Review. It is now posted at Mr. Boudreaux’s website.

The Environmental Creed

Careful observers often and correctly note that, for many of its adherents, environmentalism is a religion.

Too many environmentalists disregard inconvenient truths that would undermine their faith that calamities are percolating just over the horizon. It might well be that humans’ “footprint” on the Earth is larger than ever; it might even be true that this larger footprint creates some health risks for us modern humans that our pre-industrial ancestors never encountered.

But it is undeniably true that we denizens of industrial, market economies live far better and far healthier than did any our pre-industrial ancestors.

Compared to those ancestors, our life expectancies at birth today are about three times higher. Our bodies are cleaner and more free of disease…

I’m on my way back to the United States from England. My election-week coverage (starting here and ending here) is finished, but I’m still in the mood to write about the United Kingdom.

Yesterday, I shared some “Great Moments in British Government” and today I want to look at the U.K.’s single-payer health scheme.

The National Health Service (NHS) is inexplicably popular. Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn basically competed over who would dump the most money into the system.

This near-universal affection is a mystery. There’s a lot of data suggesting the system doesn’t work.

Consider these details from a column by a British doctor.

One of the most curious political phenomena of the western world is the indestructible affection in which the British hold their National Health Service. No argument, no criticism, no evidence can diminish, let alone destroy, it. …Yet again, however, the NHS is…

The Labour Party’s reluctant acceptance of the IHRA Working Definition of antisemitism in 2018 didn’t occur without a fight.  There was one notable dissenter to the proposal to adopt, in full, the IHRA definition: Jeremy Corbyn, who claimed that it would stifle criticism of Israel.

As we noted at the time, the Guardian shared Corbyn’s dishonest interpretation of IHRA, in the following sentences of an official editorial:

The Palestinian narrative of dispossession and expulsion could be stifled, if not outlawed, by interpretations of the IHRA. Punishing political speech would stir more discord. If Jews have a right to define what oppresses them then Palestinians should also have the same right.

They’re at it again.

The Guardian, which recently endorsed Corbyn for prime minister, published an article by US correspondent Ed Pilkington (“Trump signs antisemitism order amid concerns it targets critics of Israel”, Dec. 12) that includes a…

One of the things that became abundantly clear in a previous post is how incredibly easy it is replace past failed predictions by a brand new one, even when incompatible with the failed prediction. There was the example of a Belgian activist who in 2008 claimed that we only had ten year left to avert tipping points by limiting the temperature increase to 2 C, but in 2018 -when we horribly failed to reach that target- he made a new prediction that we now had another ten years to prevent tipping points by limiting the temperature increase to … 1.5 C.

In that post, I also noticed the similarity between this prediction and the prediction by Andrew Simms and his onehundredmonths campaign. Both claimed that 2 C had to be averted otherwise we were in for tipping points, pointed to the authority of the IPCC to justify their claim…

Add heavily subsidised and chaotically intermittent wind and solar to your grid and rocketing prices are guaranteed. The Danes know it, the Germans know it and South Australians became the butt of international jokes, because of it.

The relationship couldn’t be clearer: see above the pertinent little graphic from Dr Michael Crawford, which says it all, really.

For, try as they might, Australia’s renewable energy rent seekers are stuck with the fact that despite sunshine and wind being ‘free’, subsidised wind and solar power, anything but.

Some of the more deluded among them have even gone so far as to claim that South Australian power prices have actually fallen thanks to wind and solar. Tackling the truth has never been their strong point – eg: South Australia’s 50% Renewable Energy Fail: World’s Highest Power Prices Caused by Subsidised Wind & Solar

With a warm week coming up across the southern…

A new study has found winters in northern China have been warming since 4,000BC – regardless of human activity – but the mainland scientists behind the research warn there is no room for complacency or inaction on climate change, with the prospect of a sudden global cooling also posing a danger.

The study found that winds from Arctic Siberia have been growing weaker, the conifer tree line has been retreating north, and there has been a steady rise in biodiversity in a general warming trend that continues today. It appears to have little to do with the increase in greenhouse gases which began with the industrial revolution, according to the researchers.

by Judith Curry

“I genuinely have the fear that climate change is going to kill me and all my family, I’m not even kidding it’s  all I have thought about for the last 9 months every second of the day. It’s making my sick to my stomach, I’m not eating or sleeping and I’m getting panic attacks daily. It’s currently 1 am and I can’t sleep as I’m petrified.”  – Young adult in the UK

Rupert Darwall writes from Madrid to Real Clear Energy The Business of Climate Change. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Open image in new tab to enlarge. Details at Follow the money.

Saving the planet takes money, and lots of it. Money is both the theme and the subtext of the latest round of UN climate talks being held here—a vast river of cash flows through the UN climate process. Formally, the meeting is about nailing down one of the more obscure provisions of the Paris Agreement: Article 6, which provides for market-based instruments so that countries can trade their way out of their decarbonization commitments. Billions of cross-border dollars and transaction fees hang on the outcome.

With the negotiations concerning mind-paralyzing definitions of interest only to the most intrepid climate geeks, business and finance leaders could wind up taking center stage. When they first started…