Utopia, you are standing in it!

As California tries to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire, the state has run into an unexpected obstacle: air pollution regulation. The New Yorker reports on how this regulation has paradoxically blocked prescribed burns and other risk-reduction methods, even though they reduce air pollution overall:

The California Air Resources Board restricts prescribed burns to days when pollution is at acceptable levels and the weather likely to disperse emissions from fire. In practice, this means that burning can occur only during a few weeks in the spring. In summer and autumn—the seasons when forests would burn naturally—the state’s air usually falls foul of the Clean Air Act. These are also the months that are most prone to uncontrollable wildfires, whose smoke is far more damaging to human health than that from prescribed fire. But, perversely, because wildfires are classified as natural catastrophes, their emissions are not counted against legal quotas.

This…

This is the first of a two-part discussion of this theme. This first part addresses the obligations under the Benn Act and the legal response to attempts to frustrate it; the second part will address non-confidence motions, resignation and change of Government.

There has been significant confusion about options open to Government and the opposition parties after the enactment of the European Union (Withdrawal) (No.2) Act 2019 (the “Benn Act”). Prime Minister Boris Johnson (the PM) has affirmed repeatedly that he would neither breach the Act nor send the request for an extension of the negotiating period that it straightforwardly requires. This raises concerns about whether the Government has a clever plan to evade or neutralize the requirements of the Benn Act. It also has invited speculation about the possible role of a vote of non-confidence, prime ministerial resignation, and an early election.  All of these issues depend to a…

Radio New Zealand journalist Meriana Johnsen – without any hint of a blush, we imagine – reported that “Gisborne iwi are setting the record straight on Captain James Cook…”

In other words, we have been told this is what really happened when Cook and his crew first  arrived in New Zealand.

These Gisborne iwi – and Johnsen perhaps – will now be awaiting their invitations to contribute to the history books to be introduced to our schools.

Johnsen’s report is headlined “Gisborne iwi on British ‘collisions’: ‘They started swimming away but Cook started shooting’.”

Cook started shooting?

Not his crewmen?

I reckon today should have been a public holiday, to mark 250 years –  quarter of a millennium –  since these remote islands had opened to the world.  That is something to celebrate.

Maori had, of course, been here for perhaps 500 years prior to the arrival of Lt James Cook and Endeavour.   But it seems that they’d then become cut off from the rest of the world, with little or no evidence of any ongoing contact with anything or anyone beyond these shores.  Material living standards were low.   Abel Tasman had come by a bit of the coast 137 years earlier, and had given the name New Zealand, but after the killing of several of his crew, he didn’t land and soon went away again, initiating no ongoing contact.

But after Cook, and the other European explorers around these shores at much the same time, the…

Lamenting their rocketing power bills and dreading mass blackouts this coming summer, Australians can be forgiven for their sense of despair.

Australians once enjoyed the world’s cheapest power, reliably delivered, just like running water. No one talked about their power bills at backyard barbecues, or kept promising themselves that must have diesel generator to keep the lights on and freezers working.

But, like most things taken for granted, reliable and affordable electricity is only missed when it’s gone. And in Australia’s case, thanks to an obsession with chaotically intermittent and heavily subsidised wind and solar, it’s gone for good.

Wrecking an entire power generation and distribution system takes effort, but it can be done: ask a South Australian. Their self-inflicted renewable energy calamity didn’t start in earnest until 2002, when a bunch of ex-Enron crooks lobbed into town: How a Band of Criminals, Shysters & Chancers Conjured Up the Wind…

It’s all over the news. The spontaneous protests in the streets of London to urge the government to act now to save humanity and the planet. The emotion behind the seriousness of the threat to humanity from catastrophic climate change. The celebrity pronouncements to act (lest we be judged by future generations). The chilling horror of die-ins and hunger strikes to balance the joyful carnival nature in the streets as “the people” rise up.

They are comparing themselves to Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

To a passive observer, this looks like humanity at its best and people who resist them, their message, the science and their hope for the future are merely ignorant climate deniers (old white men who are so emotionally weak that they need to “attack” a young Swedish girl). If I were a journalist, I would get my teeth into this polemic – the story writes itself.

Introduction

Reading the recent Miller No. 2 decision you would be forgiven in thinking that Boris Johnson had the chutzpah to advise the Queen to unilaterally decree a whole range of new criminal offences (Proclamations) – all under the guise of the prorogation power.

Indeed, the Miller No. 2 decision paints itself as pure orthodoxy. We are reminded that it is the emphatic duty and quintessential task of a law court to define the scope of a prerogative power, clearly a justiciable matter. And the scope of the prorogation power, so it turns out, is now limited by this rather innocuous-sounding principle (at para [50]):

A decision to prorogue Parliament (or to advise the monarch to prorogue Parliament) will be unlawful if the prorogation has the effect of frustrating or preventing, without reasonable justification, the ability of Parliament to carry out its constitutional functions as a legislature and…

As usual, YouTube is a black hole, for when I watch one video, a bunch of other ones “recommended for you” pop up on the right side. And how well they know me! Yesterday this 27-minute video of Paul McCartney appeared, and I had no choice but to click on it.

It’s a fascinating soliloquy by McCartney on how he (with John Lennon, of course) wrote some of the biggest hits of his career,  including mostly Beatles songs but a few solo songs. They include  I Lost My Little Girl, Yesterday, I Saw Her Standing There, And I Love Her, Eleanor Rigby, A Day in the Life, Hey Jude, Helter Skelter, Blackbird, Let It Be, Hi Hi Hi, Here Today, Jet and I Don’t Know.

Since the Beatles are the greatest rock group of all time, and I brook no dissent on this issue, you might enjoy it, too. If…

In order to improve conditions in the environment we need to protect nature from what has proven to be its greatest threat: Green activists and environmentalists.

While this may seem counter-intuitive, in the 25 years I have been involved in discussions on environmental-health concerns, I have understood how the complexity of the issues, the increasingly more accurate data and the speed of emerging technologies require a flexibility and an open-mindedness to adapt to the best available knowledge, technologies and tools at our disposal. In such situations, the biggest obstacle to protecting the environment is the dogmatic fundamentalism widely expressed by most green cultists, zealots and ideologues.

Over that quarter century I have had my fair share of
confrontations with a wide range of “environmentalists” – from
activists to gurus to politicians (to sisters-in-law). Two common threads in
many of these interactions with activists became evident:

• Their inherent cynicism – that…

It didn’t seem like the best weekend for Reserve Bank Governor Adrian Orr.

First, there was Radio New Zealand’s Insight documentary on the Governor’s bank capital plans, and other possible new regulatory burdens.  I was impressed with the huge amount of time and energy that was put into the programme, although inevitably there are limitations in what a programme designed for a mainstream Sunday morning audience can deal with.     In some ways, the best public service now would be if Radio New Zealand and/or the Reserve Bank agreed to release the full interview Guyon Espiner did with the Governor –  we were told it was an hour long, but no more than five minutes would have been used in the programme (I presume this was par for the course on Espiner’s background work, as I did an interview with him that went for perhaps 40+ minutes).

In commenting…