Utopia, you are standing in it!

Electric SUV concept car [image credit: motorauthority.com]
The report headline also claims this ‘is terrible news for the planet’, because they are obsessing about harmless trace gases in the atmosphere. But the motoring public don’t seem to share their misplaced concerns, as ever-popular SUVs outnumber electric vehicles by about 40 to 1 worldwide.

Sales of hefty and heavily-polluting SUVs have doubled in the last decade – outweighing the progress made from electric vehicles, says WIRED. Can cleaner SUVs offer a way out?

The phenomenal rise of the SUV all started with a squabble over chicken.

It was 1963 – the height of the Cold War – and US president Lyndon Johnson was fuming over a tax that France and West Germany had imposed on cheap, intensively-farmed US chicken flooding European supermarkets.

In December 1963, after months of failed negotiations, Johnson retaliated.

June 1958 – September 1962

Malthusianism does a pretty good job of capturing the facts of life for our species before the Industrial Revolution. For example, Malthus plus standard economics helps account for some of the historic differences between wheat and rice growing societies. And Darwinism suggests the reason why Malthusianism holds for living things in general: within a population, variants with a higher intrinsic rate of increase tends to replace those with a lower rate, even if the eventual outcome is overpopulation and misery for all. So the field of human behavioral ecology, based on the assumption that people try to maximize fitness, does pretty well in accounting for behavior in pre-modern societies.

But Malthusianism, and the assumption that people are fitness-maximizers, don’t work very well for modern societies. Even as life expectancies and standards of living have been increasing around the world, fertility rates have been declining…

So, what to make of the Governor’s final decisions on bank capital?

If you are a bank or bank shareholder, you are presumably just grateful for small mercies, the modest extent to which the Governor changed his mind and allowed the banks to use cheaper forms of capital to meet the new requirements.   Consistent with that, the share prices of the parent banks recovered some ground yesterday.

Since banks are scared of their regulators and –  both here and in Australia –  are very reluctant to seek judicial review, despite the very strong sense of pre-determination about this process, and the evident failure to engage seriously with substantive concerns raised by submitters, there isn’t much else they can do.  Their behaviour –  willingness to provide credit into this economy –  can, and probably will, adjust.  But if they won’t, or can’t, do anything more about the policy decision, grizzling…

Nice speech by Klaas Knot of Netherlands central bank.

He points how Bank of Amsterdam was doing similar things as today’s proposals for stablecoin:

On December 4^th a report titled “France anti-Semitism: Jewish graves defaced with Nazi swastikas” was published on the ‘Europe’ page of the BBC News website.

Towards the end of that report – throughout which the BBC once again used the wrong spelling of the word antisemitism – readers were told that: [emphasis added]

“On Tuesday night, France’s National Assembly passed a draft resolution that includes hatred of Israel as an example of anti-Semitism.

The definition, by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, has already been adopted by the European Parliament and several other countries.

A number of MPs from President Emmanuel Macron’s ruling party voted against the resolution.”

The IHRA definition of course does not include “hatred of Israel” as an example of antisemitism. It does include the following:

• • Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.
     

One for the ‘worse than we thought’ file. Anyone running out of power in an EV in winter due to sudden cold weather range reduction has no in-car way to keep warm while waiting for rescue.

Cold temperatures can sap electric car batteries, temporarily reducing their range by more than 40 percent when interior heaters are used, a new study found.

The study of five electric vehicles by AAA also found that high temperatures can cut into battery range, but not nearly as much as the cold, reports TechXplore. The range returns to normal in more comfortable temperatures.

Teslas in Norway [image credit: Norsk Elbilforening (Norwegian Electric Vehicle Association)]
EVs are looking like yet another ‘save the planet’ fiasco in the making. Some of the points made here were already known, but these studies reinforce them. As many EVs on the road are still relatively new, the full extent of any problems may not yet be clear. With the help of large subsidies and other incentives they sell well in Norway despite the cold winters there.

According to recent studies, cold temperatures significantly reduce the performance of electric cars, especially when it comes to battery life.

One study by AAA suggested that cold temperatures can reduce the range of the batteries in most electric cars by over 40 percent, reports Anonymous News.

It was also noted that the performance can be even worse when the interior heaters are used.

Labour’s rating  with  voters has  dropped   to its lowest in  two  years, according to  the  latest  Colmar  Brunton  poll.   This has provoked a  flurry of  action  by   ministers,   with  a  $400m  new spend on  schools  and  promises  of   big  infrastructure  projects  to  be  announced  in the  half-year  fiscal  update.

Finance  Minister  Grant Robertson    is sticking to his mantra  that the   economy  continues to grow at faster rates than the countries it compares  itself    with, notably  Aust, the UK    and   the  US—even though the Treasury   says  overall NZ GDP growth  is likely to  fall below Budget forecasts.

Two  per cent  GDP  growth  is  hardly  likely  to  create  any  surge of  enthusiasm,  especially if it keeps trending down.  For the  man and woman in the street,   cost of living  inflation  is  eroding  the impact of   any  recent  wage  increases.

As  for  the  politics,   the  government’s  claim  for its performance  in  what was  …

Proving, yet again, that the absence of mandates, targets and massive subsidies the wind industry would disappear in a heartbeat, the decision to cancel hundreds of government contracts with wind power developers in Ontario has left rent seekers furious, and wondering where their next meal might come from?

Ontario’s Premier Doug Ford couldn’t conceal his delight in announcing the demise of hundreds of projects, thereby avoiding thousands of these things being speared across Ontario’s rural heartland. Not to mention saving power consumers hundreds of millions of dollars, over the long haul.

Doug Ford ‘proud’ of decision to tear up hundreds of green energy contracts
The Canadian Press
Shawn Jeffords
21 November 2019

Premier Doug Ford said Thursday he is “proud” of his decision to tear up hundreds of renewable energy deals, a move that his government acknowledges could cost taxpayers more than $230 million.

Ford dismissed criticism that his Progressive…

The law of unintended consequences rears its ugly head.

Christian Britschgi | 12.2.2019 – Reason

The results of plastic bag bans and restrictions are frequently disappointing, and occasionally counter-productive. Take the United Kingdom, where a country-wide bag fee is encouraging consumers to switch from single-use bags to thicker, reusable bags that use more plastic.

Last Thursday, Greenpeace and the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), a non-profit, released a report on the plastic consumption of British grocery stores that found they were actually using more plastic even as customers switch from using thin, disposable plastic bags to thicker reusable “bags for life.”

The report found that use of these “bags for life” increased from 960 million in 2018 to 1.5 billion in 2019. That’s a big single-year increase and well above the 439 million reusable plastic “bags for life” dispensed by the seven largest British grocery stores in 2014, according to a…

Did the UK Supreme Court enforce a constitutional convention in Miller (No 2)? Most writers say no. I say yes.

Miller (No 2)

I won’t go through the case in detail. For my purposes three points matter.

First, the UKSC says that there is a constitutional ‘principle of Parliamentary accountability’. It gives three examples of ministerial accountability in practice: (1) ministers’ duty to answer questions in Parliament; (2) ministers’ duty to appear before Parliamentary committees; and (3) Parliament’s opportunity to scrutinise delegated legislation.

Second, the court says that this principle imposes a ‘legal limit’ on the power to prorogue. Specifically, a decision to prorogue or to advise the monarch to prorogue Parliament is unlawful if it frustrates or prevents Parliament’s ability to carry out its function as the the body responsible for supervising the executive, without reasonable justification. By ‘supervising’ it is clear the Court means to include holding…

In an op-ed at The Times, Gabrielle Rifkind, a psychotherapist and “Middle East specialist in conflict resolution”, argues that British Jews and Jeremy Corbyn need to “reconcile” their ‘differences’.

The piece, “We need a path towards reconciliation for Labour and British Jews”, Dec. 3, includes the following:

There is now a need to hold morally complex ideas together that both abhor antisemitism but are also even-handed and capable at looking at constructive solutions and outcomes to the Palestine-Israel conflict. The election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader has exacerbated the problem as his sympathies lie with the Palestinians. Whilst it is understandable that one identifies with the weaker party, to resolve conflict it is essential to engage with all sides to find solutions.

Jeremy Corbyn is seen as hostile to the state of Israel. More accurately, he is a critic of the current Likud government. He had a close…