Utopia, you are standing in it!

In Germany, real environmentalists are mounting a well-drilled revolt against the destruction of forests – the natural habitat of apex predators, like the endangered Red Kite. Environmentalists are also furious at the fact that Kites, Eagles and dozens of threatened bat species are being sliced and diced with impunity across Europe.

Rural residents, driven mad in their homes or driven out of them by practically incessant turbine generated low-frequency noise and infrasound have taken their cases to law seeking injunctions and damages.

The result being is that new wind farm construction in Germany has ground to a halt: so far this year a trifling 35 onshore wind turbines have been erected.

The fact that chaotically intermittent wind power can’t be delivered as and when power consumers need it means the wanton destruction of pristine wilderness, bucolic landscapes, rural communities, and millions of birds and bats (including plenty of species…

This question, which of course is fatuous, struck me because, owing to my recent flights and cruises, which exposed me to many safety demonstrations, I was struck by how calm people are in these videos and photos.

If you’ve ever seen a cellphone video of the interior of an airplane cabin in which people think they’re going to crash, it’s pandemonium. People are crying, screaming, making what they think are their last phone calls, and so on. That’s to be expected, especially if the plane is lurching, or an engine’s on fire, or the aircraft is plummeting downward.

But in the safety demonstrations, people putting on oxygen masks or bracing themselves or donning lifejackets are calm as cucumbers. They even look placid, and move with assuredness.

I can tell you, though, that if the eight-tone “abandon ship” signal sounded on this cruise, and I had to put on one of…

In his recent Guardian op-ed, US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders (“Fighting antisemitism is at the heart of the left’s struggle against oppression”, Nov. 12) aptly defines antisemitism thusly:

“it is important to understand that that is what antisemitism is: a conspiracy theory that a secretly powerful minority exercises control over society”.

Whilst Sanders, whose father left Poland at age 17 due to antisemitism, and who lost family in the Holocaust, clearly has a personal connection to the subject, he also seems to have a big blind spot, as he appears convinced that those who peddle Jewish conspiracy theories come entirely from the political right.

Like other forms of bigotry – racism, sexism, homophobia – antisemitism is used by the right to divide people from one another and prevent us from fighting together for a shared future of equality, peace, prosperity and environmental justice.

Conversely, he sees the left (progressiveness) as…

The hard part about being a libertarian is that there are endless opportunities to be frustrated. Especially if you’re job is trying to convince politicians to restrain the size and scope of government when that’s not in their self interest.

One of my special frustrations, though, is that many people don’t understand economic history.

• They blame the Great Depression on capitalism when it was largely the result of bad government policy.
• They blame the financial crisis on capitalism when it was largely the result of bad government policy.

Today, let’s talk about another example of bad economic history. Many people think corporations are rapacious entities that – in the absence of wise government – will create monopolies that screw workers with sweatshop conditions and screw consumers with ever-higher prices.

Much of this mythology goes back to the era of supposed “Robber Barons” in the late 1800s.

Fortunately…

By Paolo Malanima (University «Magna Graecia» in Catanzaro)

The full article from this blog post is scheduled to be published by the Economic History Review

Thomas Hair, “Percy Main Colliery”, Newcastle University Library. Available on Archives Portal Europe

In 2016 any human being consumed every day 57,000 kilocalories (kcal) on the average; but in western Europe he/she consumed more than 100,000 kcal, in USA and Canada 200,000 and in Africa 22-23,000 (Figure 1). The remarkable increase in the capacity to do work, due to the rise in the energy consumption, marked a discontinuity in the course of the World economy and was a decisive support of Modern Growth.

Figure 1. Per capita energy consumption per macroarea in 1820 and 2016 (kcal). Note: WE is Western Europe, EE is Eastern Europe, NA is North America, LA is Latin America, O is Oceania, As is Asia, ME is Middle East, and Af…

Earth and climate – an ongoing controversy
Below are a few quotes from the GWPF article. More discussion with graphics via the link. Is the handbrake about to be re-applied to so-called human-caused warming of the planet, in contradiction of alarmist ‘projections’?

Back around 2014 many people, me included, were commenting on the discrepancy between climate models and observations [writes Ross McKitrick].
. . .
The IPCC itself in the 5th Assessment Report (2013) noted that out of 114 model runs, 111 had overstated observed warming since the late 1990s.

by Judith Curry

My reflections on Climategate 10 years later, and also reflections on my reflections of 5 years ago.

This is an older video, but a very good one. Dr. Richard Lindzen is one of our most respected scientists, and this simple video does a good job of clarifying the situation.

Here’s another (also older) from”Conversations that Matter” with Dr. William Happer, from Princeton University.

Most of the warming, rise of the oceans, all the stuff you hear so much panic about is measured in millimeters. If you don’t have a ruler that includes millimeters look it up. And as to warming:

The world’s 76 best Tide gauges show a mean 0.34 mm per year rise. “negligible acceleration”. There is no sign of climate models predicting sharply warming acceleration or sea level rise.

There are now around 31 different climate computer programs (the serious ones). They put in what we know, and what we think maybe we know, and a bunch of intelligent guesses. And they especially don’t know…

Typical electric car set-up
Critics of fuel power speak of the finite nature of oil and natural gas discoveries. A reminder here that resources are far from unlimited for EVs, in the short term at least. No sign of much appetite for switching to smaller cars either, with SUV demand rising fast.

The current production of a number of critical metals is insufficient for the large-scale transition to electric vehicles.

This is the conclusion of a report by environmental scientists Benjamin Sprecher and organisations Copper8 and Metabolic, reports TechXplore.

As a solution, they advocate more electric car-sharing, cars with a smaller battery and improved recycling.

Small country, big impact

The Dutch Climate Policy aims for 1.9 million electric cars in the Netherlands by 2030, compared to 171,000 at this moment—a growth of more than 1000 percent in less than 11 years.

But according to the report “Critical Metals Demand…