Utopia, you are standing in it!

Voters in the eastern German states of Saxony and Brandenburg head to the polls on 1 September for crucial state elections. The results could have an outsized impact on German climate policy for three reasons.

First, these states are home to many of the coal communities most affected by Germany’s coal phase-out and are therefore a testing ground for the government-driven change required to avert a climate crisis. Second, the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which is increasingly defining itself by its climate change denial, is near the top of the polls in both Brandenburg and Saxony. Third, if the Social Democrats (SPD) suffer—as expected—another defeat, it could hasten the end of the coalition government in Berlin. As the hottest summer on record comes to an end, Berlin and Brussels will be looking at…

Unions sometimes protect some workers – their members – but usually at the expense of other workers. Government protects its employees and special groups of workers at the expense of other workers.

Both unions and government restrict freedom. Friedman explains how the competition of employers for the talents of workers leads to the highest wages and best working conditions.

On August 12^th a report titled “The Kenyan dance parties where men are banned” appeared on the BBC News website’s ‘Africa’ page.

Readers of that sympathetic report were told that:

“The team behind a new event in Nairobi argues all-women’s dance parties can create safe nightlife spaces for women. […]

“You have to be so strict in a place with men. You just want to go out with your friends and men interfere,” says Jane, 26, who’s come to the party with her best friend Shani.

“So having a space where it’s all women immediately feels safe and you feel you are with people who understand you.””

And:

“Munira, 22 and Khadija, 25 are best friends. As practising Muslims, they often find themselves with minimal options when it comes to night life.

They say that, although women from all faiths attend the all-women parties, they particularly suit…

This week, I was asked to participate in a panel at ASA about scholar-activism. The panel was organized by Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra with panelists Daniel Laurison, Philip Cohen and ASA’s Margaret Vitullo. The whole panel was fascinating. Before we get to what I said, I just want to affirm the following so that people on don’t misconstrue what I said:

• I believe that activism is valuable.
• I believe that many scholars are great activists.
• I believe that it would be very good if social scientists contribute to the public.
• There are many excellent sociologists whose work has public impact.

So, then, what’s my beef? I have three points:

Scholar-activism can cheapen activism: This happens in a few ways. For example, some people might say, “everything we do is activism.” Or, people who aren’t activist are implicit activists because they reinforce the status-quo. With respect to scholars of color, some might…

[Update 8/15/2019: It seems appropriate to republish this post originally published about 40 days after I started blogging. I have made a few small changes and inserted a few comments to reflect my improved understanding of certain concepts like “sterilization” that I was uncritically accepting. I actually have learned a thing or two in the eight plus years that I’ve been blogging. I am grateful to all my readers — both those who agreed and those who disagreed — for challenging me and inspiring me to keep thinking critically. It wasn’t easy, but we did survive August 15, 1971. Let’s hope we survive August 15, 2019.]

August 15, 1971 may not exactly be a day that will live in infamy, but it is hardly a day to celebrate 40 years later.  It was the day on which one of the most cynical Presidents in American history committed one of his…

In my series on the impact of intermittent power sources, I got to the point where I was working with a unlimited battery capacity to find out how big that storage needs to be to fill in the gaps of less production with stored power from earlier excess production. I came to the (surprising) conclusion that almost 2,500 GWh was needed to fill in all the gaps. To recap, this is how the stored power looked like over the year:

Which I found an awful high number for storage. Therefor my question back then was: is it really necessary to store all that power? What would happen when storage is limited to a value below the optimal capacity?

Squandering other people’s money is what the wind and solar industries do best. Let’s face it, they wouldn’t exist without massive and endless subsidies.

The chaotic power they occasionally produce has no commercial value and as Warren Buffett put it “We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.” Buffett might have continued, that it’s the only reason anyone invests in them.

In the detailed analysis below, Larry Brown goes further to reach the conclusion that, with or without subsidies, these things make no sense at all.

Wind Farm Back-of-the-Envelope Economic Analysis
Larry F. Brown
Watts Up With That?
21 July 2019

We visited a wind farm in southern Utah recently. I’ve always been curious about the costs, profitability, and physical size of these things as well as the footprint and…

Did anyone watch “Save Money, Lose Weight” on ITV recently? Was anyone else SHOCKED how much money they spent in 28 days? Watch the episode HERE! 

Six overweight Brits were put through six off-the-shelf diets for 28 days. All of them successfully lost weight trying 6 different popular plans and were pleased with the results BUT HOLEY HELL – REALLY? How can someone afford a food bill for one person for one month of £400 – £500? Get real! In the real world many of us struggle and carefully budget so it did indeed seemed quite shocking to me the amount of money spent. Surely ongoing over a long period of time this wouldn’t be sustainable?

And then like a terrier down a rabbit hole I decided to break down my food budget based on rationing, and worked out how much it would cost to lose weight ration book style…

I am very pleased to be able to welcome my first “guest blogger” in the person of Professor Michael Quinlan, Dean of the University of Notre Dame’s Sydney-based Law School. Michael’s note on this important issue, which is now becoming more relevant in Australia in recent years, was originally published in “On the Case”, a series of notes on legal issues produced by the UND Sydney Law School. He has kindly agreed to me re-publishing it here.

Issue 9 of On the Case discussed the recent decision of the Supreme Court of the United States (the US Supreme Court) in relation to same sex marriage in Obergefell [1] and the implications for Australia of that decision.[2] The Obergefell decision received substantial media attention in Australia [3] although the legal position in the two countries is quite different. [4]

In this edition of On the Case Professor Michael Quinlan, the Dean of The…

Some years ago I attended seminars regarding efforts to achieve operational changes in organizations. The notion was presented that people only change their habits, ie. leave their comfort zone, when they fear something else more than changing their behavior. The analogy was drawn comparing to workers leaping from a burning oil platform, or tenants from a burning building.

Al Gore is fronting an agenda to unplug modern societies, and thereby the end of life as we know it. Thus they claim the world is on fire, and only if we abandon our ways of living can we be saved.

The big lie is saying that the world is burning up when in fact nothing out of the ordinary is happening. The scare is produced by extrapolating dangerous, fearful outcomes from events that come and go in the normal flow of natural and seasonal climate change. They can not admit that…