Utopia, you are standing in it!

Paul Collier, the controversial Oxford professor famous for his development work and his acclaimed books Exodus and The Bottom Billion, is back. But the author of Exodus and The Bottom Billion is long gone. The compelling writing and carefully reasoned world that made Bottom Billion impossible to put down has somehow disappeared. In The Future of Capitalism, Collier is tired. He is bitter. And he is sometimes quite mad – so mad that his disdain for this or that group of thinkers or actors in society consumes his otherwise brilliant analytical mind.

Instead of having his editors moderate those of his worst impulses, he doubles down on his polemic conviction. Indeed, he takes pride in offending people in all political camps, believing that it supports the book’s main intellectual point: ideologues of every persuasion are dangerous, one-size-fits-all too constricted for a modern society and we should rather turn…

Old-growth trees cut down for windfarm transmission corridor (Pic Source : The Australian)

“IF this had have been a transmission line connecting a coal power station,
 these far left brainwashed climate change believing nutters,
would have been there in their thousands.”
– John Clarkson

***

H/t @JohnClarksonGSM @MRobertsQLD

IN the good old days of ‘Greenism’, genuine environmentalists rallied against the wanton destruction of pristine flora and fauna.

IN the twisted age of Global Warming Climate Change hysteria, real environmentalists are failing us in the face of a global religion that has allowed the development of supposed ‘planet-saving’ ‘renewables‘ that wilfully destroy forests, animals and pristine environments. 

IN the latest example of ‘Green’ eco-hypocrisy, 200 years old rainforest trees have been cleared to make way for wind ‘farm’ transmission lines in Tasmania’s Tarkine.

THE obvious question is a simple one: Where are the @Greens or @Greenpeace or @GretaThunberg

A storm headed over our country at the end of last week. That inevitably means advocates of wind energy praising how wonderful wind energy is doing and how much electricity was produced by wind. That is exactly what happened and apparently we even have a new record…

It was Chris Derde (manager of energy provider Wase wind) who broke the news. He tweeted that wind energy had a new record production of 3 GW(h) and that nuclear power plants lowered their production by 0.5 GW(h). This was one of the two images that accompanied the tweet, illustrating the record:

This is an introduction to amazing graphics done by Eleanor Lutz (no relation) at her website Tabletop Whale, an original science illustration blog. Above is a data-based view of Earth’s seasons. If you watch in full screen, the four corners show views of the cycle from top, bottom, and sides. Below is her map of the solar system, showing how much scientific information is represented in the illustration (H/T Real Clear Science)

An Orbit Map of the Solar System
JUNE 10 2019 · Link to the Open-Source Code

This week’s map shows the orbits of more than 18000 asteroids in the solar system. This includes everything we know of that’s over 10km in diameter – about 10000 asteroids – as well as 8000 randomized objects of unknown size. This map shows each asteroid at its exact position on New Years’ Eve 1999.

All of the data for this…

I noticed in the Herald this morning Audrey Young’s article running the line that (a) it had been a good  –  in fact, exceptional – week for the government, which had (she claimed) been governing well, and (b) that one example of this was yesterday’s reopening of the Wairoa-Napier railway line.   There was a celebratory article on the reopening in this morning’s Dominion-Post, which might better have been labelled as advertorial, and could easily have been taken straight from Shane Jones’s press secretaries.  It was, after all, only reopened with the (as yet) rather small amount of the Provincial Growth Fund that has actually been spent.  For this particular project, $6.2 million of taxpayers’ money, given to a loss-making SOE that, even running losses, had not itself considered the project viable.

This project was first announced in February 2018 and then I wrote a post about it, under…

Pope Pompous III: Now all hail and worship me, the wind & sun.

Environmentalists ready to slam never reliable wind and solar and back ever reliable nuclear are rare birds, indeed. Michael Shellenberger is such an animal.

Lauded by environmentalists in the US, Shellenberger is not so much crusading for the environment, but waging a war against the hypocritical and pompous who drive global warming alarmism; a group of virtue signalling jetsetters, dedicated to their mission of depriving reliable and affordable energy to all but themselves and their filthy rich peers.

Last week, that sanctimonious windbag, Al Gore dropped in to Brisbane to berate Australia’s ‘truculent turds’ for rejecting the Green/Labor Alliance’s plans to crush reliable and affordable energy – with a ludicrous 50% RET and crippling CO2 tax – and to wipe out coal mining and coal-fired power and the entire Australian economy, along with it.

So, it was…