Utopia, you are standing in it!

Australian voters just rejected a massive increase in wind and solar, relegating Bill Shorten and his 50% RET to the dusty pages of history.

Having had 20 years or so to convince Australians of the purported ‘merits’ of throwing more than $4,000,000,000 in subsidies at chaotically intermittent wind and solar each year, the rent seekers behind those ‘industries’ are struggling to gain traction these days. And they’re struggling to remain relevant, sane and upbeat about their future, when the subsidies inevitably run out or get scrapped, whichever occurs first.

The “shock” election result has left many of them suicidal, which probably has something to do with the fact that they went after the Liberal Energy Minister, Angus Taylor before the election, haranguing him about his personal vendetta against subsidies for wind power. Now that he’s back in power, they understand that their nightmare has only just begun. Oops!

As to…

Gabriel Chodorow-Reich, Loukas Karabarbounis, Rohan Kekre in this NBER paper analyse the Greek depression:

The Greek economy experienced a boom until 2007, followed by a prolonged depression resulting in a 25 percent shortfall of GDP by 2016. Informed by a detailed analysis of macroeconomic patterns in Greece, we develop and estimate a rich dynamic general equilibrium model to assess quantitatively the sources of the boom and bust.

Lower external demand for traded goods and contractionary fiscal policies account for the largest fraction of the Greek depression. A decline in total factor productivity, due primarily to lower factor utilization, substantially amplifies the depression.

Given the significant adjustment of prices and wages observed throughout the cycle, a nominal devaluation would only have short-lived stabilizing effects.

By contrast, shifting the burden of adjustment from taxes toward spending or from capital taxes toward other taxes would generate significant longer-term production and consumption gains.

A few years ago, I found myself subbing for the teacher of an urban sociology class. It was the last day so we covered the last chapter in the text book, which talked about policy reforms. The book covered some reasonable topics, such as the need to have better regional government in the US to help coordinate things like transportation.

To spice things up, I added four intentionally provocative proposals that might improve urban life. I want you to guess which proposal triggered the most violent reaction:

1. End the over-policing of neighborhoods by decriminalizing narcotics.
2. Revive dying cities, such as the Rust Belt, by liberalizing immigration. A lot of poor people in developing nations would love to live in Detroit or St. Louis.
3. Deregulate housing construction, so we can have higher density and cheaper homes for working class people. San Francisco – I’m looking straight at you!
4. Surge pricing for…

From JoNova:

A big new study by electricity grid nerds (and I mean that in the nicest possible way) shows that after all the money and pain of 20 years of forced transition Australia’s electricity has shifted from 85% coal powered to 75% coal powered, which cost billions and as a bonus, made electricity more expensive and unstable. We drove out some brown coal, but swapped it for black coal. Instead of ousting coal power, the extra solar and wind power replaced some gas and hydro.

The authors are genuine independent experts, and the report is incredibly detailed — so this is rare — but still suffers from serious drawbacks:

1) The team doesn’t question the need for an artificial expensive transition. Almost all the problems they describe are caused by government policies that task our grid with changing the climate as well as producing cheap and reliable electricity.

Robert P. Murphy writes at Mises Wire Economists Have Been “Useful Idiots” for the Green Socialists. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

In the old Soviet Union, the Communists allegedly used the term “useful idiot” to describe Westerners whose naïve political views furthered the Soviet agenda, even though these Westerners didn’t realize that they were being exploited in such fashion. It is in this context that I confidently declare that American economists have been useful idiots for the green socialists pushing extreme climate change policies. The radical environmentalists were quite happy to embrace the economic concepts of “Pigovian negative externalities” and a carbon tax in the past, but now that it is impossible for economic science to endorse their desired agenda, the activists have discarded the entire field as hopelessly out of touch. Economists who still support a carbon tax and other climate “mitigation policies”…

WHEN will the CSIRO, Australia’s premier ‘scientific’ body retract their 2001 “no snow by 2020” prediction?

SNOWFALL will become “A very rare and exciting event…
Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.”
Dr David Viner – Senior scientist, climatic research unit (CRU)

“Good bye winter. Never again snow?” Spiegel (2000)

“Milder winter temperatures will decrease heavy snowstorms” IPCC (2001)

“End of Snow?” NYTimes (2014)

“Good bye winter. Never again snow?” Spiegel (2000)

“The high impact scenario for 2020 leads to reductions of 30-40 days in average season lengths. At higher sites such as Mt Hotham, this can represent reductions in season duration of about 25%, but at lower sites such as Mt Baw Baw the reduction can be more significant (up to 60%)” CSIRO (2003) (Kevin Hennessy, Penny Whetton, Ian Smith, Janice Bathols, Michael Hutchinson and Jason Sharples)

“We must face up to the fact that if our societies…

Australian voters just shredded the notion that the proletariat is wedded to heavily subsidised and chaotically intermittent wind and solar.

Labor’s Bill Shorten sought to ram a 50% Renewable Energy Target down voter’s throats; a concept which the vast majority of them duly rejected.

Sure, there were plenty of other issues that sank the Green/Labor Alliance. However, it should be remembered that 2019 was billed as the ‘Climate Change Election’, with wind and solar pitched up as the only panacea to what has now become a ‘climate emergency’.

Pundits professed, with great certitude, the notion that the Australian public just can’t get enough intermittent, unreliable and unaffordable electricity. Well, that didn’t quite pan out. Bill Shorten slunk off the political stage, a wounded and embittered hero of renewable energy zealots and rent seekers, alike.

Another part of the meme was that the markets had already turned their back on fossil…

Several readers sent me this hit piece on Pinker in Current Affairs, written by Nathan J. Robinson, a Ph.D. student at Harvard in sociology and social policy. He also happens to be the editor in chief of the magazine, which explains how this profanity-laced piece got published.

Click on the screenshot below to read it.  One person also sent it to me because I am quoted in it, though the quote is used in a misleading way (more below). I suggest you read it yourself, and compare Robinson’s characterization of Pinker with what you know of Steve’s last two books, The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now. For if you haven’t read either or both of those books, you won’t be able to judge Robinson’s jeremiad.

The title alone tells you where the piece is going. Regardless of what you think of Pinker, he’s…