Utopia, you are standing in it!

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…

From the Vanderbilt Hustler, the student newspaper of that Nashville, Tennessee university, we learn that the demonized people subject to being deplatformed by the Left is—you guessed it—Steve Pinker. Read the article below, which describes a petition the students are putting together demanding that Pinker get booted from an upcoming panel on global issues. The reason is given in the sub-headline: Pinker’s “history of ties to Jeffrey Epstein.”

To be sure, there are only about 120 signatures on the petition, and the chances that it will work seem quite low. What’s important is that Pinker is increasingly regarded by the woke as ideologically polluted, regardless of the value of his books and works, because he had a tangential connection with Epstein—a connection that doesn’t implicate Pinker in any misconduct, sexual or otherwise.

Here’s a small excerpt from the Vanderbilt piece:

Junior Edie Duncan started a petition Nov. 25 to…

I am not opposed to scholars being politically active, nor using their scholarly skills to tackle public issues. Still, I am a proponent of the compartmentalization of scholarship and activism. Values are important, but so is science and that has to be done in a way that does not bias your research or undermine your claims to truth.

When you mix the two – activism and scholarship – you get some real problems. To illustrate, a series of questions:

1. Let’s say you are an activist-scholar and you are on a job search committee. Someone applies, has a strong CV, and says they are an activist-scholar… for the other side. Do you seriously consider them or toss the application?
2. Let’s say that you are on television defending your research and a critical journalist says, “Why should I believe what you say? Don’t ‘activist-scholars’ just dress up their opinions in data? They…

At Human Events, Gregory Wrightstone writes Principled Inaction in the Face of Climate Change Extremism. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

President Trump’s courageous commitment to America first on the issue of energy emissions.

The 2019 United Nations Climate Change Conference, “COP25,” began with a cryptic address by U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres: “By the end of the coming decade we will be on one of two paths, one of which is sleepwalking past the point of no return … Do we want to be remembered as the generation that buried its head in the sand and fiddled as the planet burned?”

According to Guterres, “What is still lacking is political will.” And yet, despite all this “lack of political will,” some 70 countries have pledged carbon neutrality by 2050. Conspicuously absent from the proceedings, however, is the Trump Administration. No senior member of President Trump’s administration is in attendance at…

by Judith Curry

The UN Climate Change Conference this week in Madrid provides an important opportunity to reflect on state of the public debate surrounding climate change.

David Graeber’s vitriolic essay “Against Economics” in the New York Review of Books has generated responses from Noah Smith and Scott Sumner among others. I don’t disagree with much that Noah or Scott have to say, but I want to dig a little deeper than they did into some of Graeber’s arguments, because even though I think he is badly misinformed on many if not most of the subjects he writes about, I actually have some sympathy for his dissatisfaction with the current state of economics. Graeber wastes no time on pleasantries.

There is a growing feeling, among those who have the responsibility of managing large economies, that the discipline of economics is no longer fit for purpose. It is beginning to look like a science designed to solve problems that no longer exist.

A serious polemicist should avoid blatant mischaracterizations, exaggerations and cheap shots, and should be well-grounded in…

A further referendum on Brexit is central to many parties’ general election pledges. Today, the Constitution Unit launches a new report examining how such a vote might come about and what form it might take. This updates previous work conducted last year. In this post, adapted from the report’s final chapter, Alan Renwick, Meg Russell, Lisa James and Jess Sargeant sum up the key conclusions. They find that, though it would not be without difficulties, a vote on Johnson’s deal may be the quickest option and the one most likely to command public legitimacy. 

The Constitution Unit’s latest report, The Mechanics of a Further Referendum on Brexit Revisited: Questions for the New Parliament, is published today. It significantly updates our previous analysis of the mechanics of a further Brexit referendum, exploring the circumstances that might lead to a further referendum on Brexit, and the form that such a referendum…

No time can be afforded in 2019 to respect the dead. Not when there’s an election at stake, and the tantalising prospect of scoring cheap political points winks coyly at you from a special advisor’s email. So it is that, within 24 hours after the killings by Usman Khan at London Bridge, politicians have lined up in descending order of deplorability to exploit the tragedy for their own ends. The Prime Minister obviously went first, leaping in front of Sky cameras last night to claim:

” I have long argued that it is a mistake to serious and violent criminals out of prison early and it is very important that we get out of that habit and that we enforce the appropriate sentences for dangerous criminals, especially for terrorists that the public want to see.”

This, one presumes, is a nod to his well-publicised manifesto pledges to “toughen up sentences”…