Utopia, you are standing in it!

I’ve started a new column at Forbes on energy and climate. Here are my first four columns:

• When Is Climate Change Just Weather? What Hurricane Dorian Coverage Mixes Up, On Purpose (link)
• Democrat Climate Policies Are Ambitious But Fail The Reality Test (link)
• The Case for a Goldilocks Carbon Tax (link)
• The Yawning Gap Between Climate Rhetoric and Climate Action (link)

Comments welcomed and more to come!

The number of wildfires sparked by these things grows by the day. Contrary to their ‘super-safe’, ‘clean’, ‘green’ image, giant industrial wind turbines are the perfect incendiary device.

Around the world, hundreds have exploded into in palls of smoke and balls of flame – in the process – each one raining molten metal and over 1,000 litres of flaming gear oil and hydraulic fluid (see our post here) and burning plastic earthwards.

Wind turbine fires are ten times more common than the wind industry and its parasites claim (see our post here and check out this website: http://turbinesonfire.org).

The wind industry has been forced to concede that at least 4 bushfires were started by wind turbines in Australia, so far:

• Ten Mile Lagoon in Western Australia in the mid-1990s;
• Lake Bonney, Millicent (SA) in January 2006 (see the photo below);
• Cathedral Rocks Wind Farm, Port Lincoln (SA) in…

1. Responsible Government

Parliament is an institution of responsible government.  The essence of the common law principle of responsible government is the constitution of a regime of confidence: a government is required to carry the confidence of Parliament. This is the fundamental connexion of the executive (the Government) to the Parliament.

The European Union (Withdrawal) (No 2) Act 2019 does two main things.  It requires the Prime Minister to write a wholly dictated letter seeking a further extension of the Brexit date, and it requires from the executive certain reports to the Parliament as to progress in the Brexit negotiations.  The first I shall show is unconstitutional because it is (a) inconsistent with the principle of responsible governance, (b) it is undemocratic, and (c) it is not an Act of real legislation at all.  But the second is clearly valid: progress reports by the executive to the Parliament are a…

I wrote yesterday about the generic desire among leftists to punish investors, entrepreneurs, and other high-income taxpayers.

Today, let’s focus on one of the specific tax hikes they want. There is near-unanimity among Democratic presidential candidates for higher tax rates on capital gains.

Given the importance of savings and investment to economic growth, this is quite misguided.

The Tax Foundation summarizes many of the key issues in capital gains taxation.

…viewed in the context of the entire tax system, there is a tax bias against income like capital gains. This is because taxes on saving and investment, like the capital gains tax, represent an additional layer of tax on capital income after the corporate income tax and the individual income tax. Under a neutral tax system, each dollar of income would only be taxed once. …Capital gains face multiple layers of tax, and in addition, gains are not adjusted…

Richard Finlay and Anny Francis of RBA in this research note give a fascinating account of currency counterfeiting. They focus on Australia but pull examples from other countries too. Perhaps one of the best things that have read in this year so far.

Counterfeiting has a rich and varied history going back to the very earliest forms of money. It has been pursued for personal gain – although at the significant risk of jail time, or, in the past, death – as well as for economic and political destabilisation by hostile countries. Both high- and low-value denominations are liable to be attacked. Currency issuers and counterfeiters are, and always have been, locked in a battle of innovation, with government authorities adapting and innovating in order to deter counterfeiting. Acceleration in the rate of technological development, however, seems to have shortened the timeframe over which each new security feature remains counterfeit-resistant…

This policy was revised and updated and published in August 2019. You can read the full policy 👉   Here  

This was revised after the high profile cases of male rapists operating in the female estate.  There is no explicit reference to the cases though they do include  a warning about staff leaking information to the media.

The policy exposes how far  the, legally protected, characteristic of sex has been eroded by allowing anyone, regardless of biology, to declare they are a woman. The prison system is illustrative of just how far Gender Identity ideology is  embedded within our legislature and public policy.

Here is a clip from James Morton of the Scottish Trans Alliance which shows that Female prisoners are the subjects of a  dangerous laboratory experiment.  James is listed as an author of the Scottish Prisons Policy which deals with Transgender Prisoners. As James is a lobbyist…

Funny how it’s the dire predictions that turn out to be overheated, but the climate…not so much. That doesn’t deter self-styled ‘campaigners’ from spouting the same kind of nonsense ad infinitum though. Doomsayers have been claiming time is running out for humanity since the 1970s at least, and the media still lap it up.

Think tank compiles decades’ worth of failed climate predictions
– – –
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently suggested Miami would disappear in “a few years” due to climate change, says Fox News (via The GWPF).

The United Nations is convening a “Climate Action Summit” next week. And climate activist Greta Thunberg is on Capitol Hill this week telling lawmakers they must act soon.

But while data from NASA and other top research agencies confirms global temperatures are indeed rising, a newly compiled retrospective indicates the doomsday rhetoric is perhaps more overheated.

The case of Gina Miller v the Prime Minister and Others (‘Miller 2’) is presently being heard by the Supreme Court and the issue of justiciability is central. Some commentators have sought to defend the claimant’s submission that no exercise of a prerogative power is completely immune from judicial review. But the Supreme Court, like the Divisional Court, may not be ready to accept that this general proposition accurately reflects the current state of the law. In this post, I put forward an interpretation that salvages the general doctrine of non-justiciability, while departing from the conclusion that the High Court reached. Even if the Supreme Court is minded to accept the traditional doctrine of non-justiciability, it would still not follow that the specific prorogation before the Court is non-justiciable.

Justiciability as a threshold issue

The High Court treated justiciability as a threshold issue: if prorogation, as a subject-matter of executive…

It goes without saying that intelligence gathering during the American Civil War was an inexact science.  Information was derived from a myriad of sources that included; newspaper articles, railroad passengers and riders, free blacks, runaway slaves, deserters, prisoners of war, local farmers and other non-combatants along with the Union’s use of hot air balloons during the first half of the war.  This menagerie of sources produced a great deal of conflicting information that needed to be sifted through and analyzed.  The key information rested on how many troops each side possessed and their location.  The end result was a decision-making process that at times was flawed and battlefield decisions that rested on a weak foundation.  If one was to compare the intelligence strengths of the Union and the Confederacy, the northern spy network had major advantages and, in the end, would create an…

By Judy Stephenson (University College London)

The full paper that inspired this blog post will be published on The Economic History Review and is currently available on early view here

St Paul’s Cathedral – the construction of the Dome. Available at <https://www.explore-stpauls.net/oct03/textMM/DomeConstructionN.htm>

How many days a year did people work in England before the Industrial Revolution? For those who don’t spend their waking hours desperate for sources to inform wages and GDP per capita over seven centuries, this question provokes an agreeable discussion about artisans, agriculture and tradition. Someone will mention EP Thompson and clocks or Saint Mondays. ‘Really that few?’ It’s quaint.

But, for those of us who do spend our waking hours desperate for sources to inform wages and GDP per capita over seven centuries the question has evolved in the last few years into a debate about productivity and when modern economic growth began in…

In the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump as US president a cartoon in The New Yorker (by @WillMcPhail and shown above) went viral. It shows passengers on a plane voting to replace the smug, out of touch pilot with a regular passenger, more like us.

The cartoon is fantastic, the type of thing that a political scientist like me could use as the basis for an in-depth discussion of the challenges of expertise and democracy in a 3-hour graduate seminar. But if you aren’t enrolled in a graduate course on contemporary politics, you are in luck.

I review The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells in The Financial Times this weekend. Here is how it starts:

In 1842 the German writer Heinrich Heine cautioned that “wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent new beasts” in order to capture our attention. In his book The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells describes a new apocalypse accompanied not by four horsemen but by 12 “elements of climate chaos”.

The book expands on Wallace-Wells’ widely read New York Magazine article of the same title from the summer of 2017. That article, and the book, briefly catalogue a litany of calamities now and in the future that might be associated with climate change — disease, disasters, war and more.

Read the whole thing here.