Utopia, you are standing in it!

The obsession with chaotically intermittent and heavily subsidised wind and solar has few winners and plenty of losers. The latter include the householders and businesses being crushed by power price increases of a magnitude that few of them can afford, and none of them expected (having been consistently lied to by the politicos and MSM about the true and inevitable cost of attempting to run on sunshine and breezes).

The victors include the power generators and retailers (sometimes one and the same – referred to as ‘gentailers’) whose profits are inversely proportional to the pain being suffered by their customers.

While STT has reported on the upcoming 25-30% hike in retail power prices – set to take effect from 1 July – that staggering impost comes on top of increases of between 10-20% in retail power prices that have taken effect throughout the financial year. Which means that many households…

Oh, dear.  Our Maori people are being dealt another blow.

That’s the impression given by the headline on an article in The Post headed Carbon plan ‘damaging to Maori”.

The report by Glenn McConnell says the Government is about to release controversial plans to reform the carbon market,

“… which have already led to legal challenges and comparisons to the foreshore and seabed saga.”

What’s this struggle about?

A major legal battle has sparked up between the Government and Maori forestry companies over proposals to stop pine trees from earning carbon credits, which are then cashed in through the Emissions Trading Scheme.

Oh.  The carbon plan is not “damaging to Maori” , as the headline would have us believe – it is upsetting for Maori forestry companies.

The IMF says New Zealand is living beyond its means :

. . . the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) latest report on New Zealand’s economy warned the Government to rein in spending and for the Reserve Bank to prepare for further interest rate hikes, should they be needed. 

The financial agency on Wednesday said New Zealand’s economy was likely to continue slowing in the near term.

Inflation wasn’t expected to decline to the Reserve Bank’s target range of between 1 and 3 percent until 2025, the IMF warned.

It also warned New Zealand’s “current account balance (meaning the country is exporting less than importing) has deteriorated significantly, reflecting excess demand and one-off factors”. 

“For the first quarter, that [current account deficit] number came in at 8.5 percent [of GDP],” explained Mark Riggall, a portfolio manager at Milford Asset Management. “So it’s an improving situation – but it’s still pretty bad…

• Michael Bassett writes – 

As cabinet ministers traipse around the country, feverishly talking up Budget largesse in the hope it will help their re-election, they inadvertently let slip what Labour’s key priorities are. A recent senior citizens’ meeting was told that grants to Maori are top priority. Pasifika come in a distant second, with disadvantaged youth somewhat further behind.

Ordinary Europeans, Indians, Chinese and others, who together make up a big majority of our population, don’t get much of a look in.

So, let’s examine the legal definition of this government’s favourite citizens. Who is a Maori? Right up until passage of the Maori Affairs Amendment Act 1974, a Maori was anyone who had half Maori ethnicity or more. A half Maori could choose to be classified as a Maori or a non-Maori. Less than half, and the law said one could not legally claim to be Maori.

But, from…

The heroic attempt to increasingly rely on unreliable wind power ultimately reveals itself as suicidal.

Driving reliable conventional generators off the grid and hoping that they will be replaced (in substance) by chaotically intermittent wind power comes with a grab bag of consequences.

Rocketing power prices follow as night follows day; the result of incorporating the subsidies that led to wind power generation in the first place, and paying over the market prices for power generated using expensive gas or diesel fuel run through fast-start up Open Cycle Gas Turbines or even internal combustion ship engines, all of which are inefficient and costly to run.

Then come the blackouts, for the reasons laid out by John Hinderaker below.

Here Come the Blackouts
Powerline
John Hinderaker
22 May 2023

You can’t replace reliable energy (coal, nuclear, natural gas) with unreliable energy that most of the time produces nothing (wind and…

Continuing our series reflecting on the recent‘Politics before Democracy’conference,our assistant editor Dr Kathryn Rixlooks at the impact of the 1832 Reform Act on the personnel of the House of Commons.

In March 1833, two months after Parliament assembled following the first election held under the terms of the 1832 Reform Act, the cartoonist ‘H.B.’ (John Doyle) produced a cartoon depicting the ‘March of Reform’. Set in the lobby of the House of Commons, it showed four former Tory MPs – marshalled by Francis Williams, the under door-keeper – looking on with suspicion and dismay as three newly elected MPs walked into the chamber. While the effects of the 1832 Reform Act have been much debated by historians, for contemporaries, as Doyle’s image of the changing of the guard at Westminster encapsulated, it marked an important symbolic break with the past.

George I (May 28, 1660 – June 11, 1727) was King of Great Britain and Ireland from August 1, 1714 and ruler of the Electorate of Hanover within the Holy Roman Empire from January 23, 1698 until his death in 1727.

George was born on May 28, 1660 in the city of Hanover in the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg in the Holy Roman Empire. He was the eldest son of Ernst August, Elector of Hanover and Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, and his wife, Sophia of the Palatinate, daughter of Friedrich V, Elector of the Palatinate of the Rhine, a member of the House of Wittelsbach, and Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of King James I-VI of England, Scotland and Ireland and Princess Anne of Denmark and Norway.

George inherited the titles and lands of the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg from his father and uncles. A succession of European wars expanded his German domains during his…

Catherine of Aragon (December 16, 1485 – January 7, 1536) was Queen of England as the first wife of King Henry VIII from their marriage on June 11, 1509 until their annulment on May 23, 1533. Born in Spain, she was Princess of Wales while married to Henry’s elder brother, Arthur, Prince of Wales, for a short period before his death.

Infanta Catherine of Aragon was the daughter of Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Fernando II of Aragon. Infanta Catherine was three years old when she was betrothed to Prince Arthur, heir apparent to the English throne, eldest son of King Henry VII of England, Lord of Ireland and Elizabeth of York, daughter of King Edward IV of England, Lord of Ireland and Elizabeth Woodville.

Catherine and Arthur married in 1501, but Arthur died five months later. Catherine spent years in limbo, and during this time, she held…

Backing ideology over sound engineering was never the smartest ploy. Now the ideologues are in a flat panic as the public begins to realise that they’ve been lied to, all along.

The ‘renewables are cheap’ story doesn’t seem to cut it anymore, with Australian households and businesses set for 25-30% increases in their power bills next month. Australians have been hit with double-digit percentage increases in their power bills every year since the Green-Labor Alliance ramped up the Federal government’s Renewable Energy Target back in 2010.

Their ‘more giant batteries will fix it’ meme is struggling, too. There is no grid-scale power storage system using batteries operating anywhere in the world. Australia is no different. The reason batteries offer no solution is all down to physics and economics.

As the grand wind and solar ‘transition’ collapses around them, the zealots and rent-seekers are reduced to accusing Australia’s coal-fired power plants…

Edward the Confessor (c. 1003 – 5 January 1066) was an Anglo-Saxon English king and saint. Usually considered the last king of the House of Wessex, he ruled from 1042 until his death in 1066.

Edward was the seventh son of Æthelred the Unready, and the first by his second wife, Emma of Normandy daughter of Richard I the Fearless Duke of Normandy and Gunnor. The names of Gunnor’s parents are unknown, but Robert of Torigni wrote that her father was a forester from the Pays de Caux and according to Dudo of Saint-Quentin she was of noble Danish ancestry. Gunnor was probably born c. 950. Her family held sway in western Normandy and Gunnor herself was said to be very wealthy.

Edward was born between 1003 and 1005 in Islip, Oxfordshire, and is first recorded as a ‘witness’ to two charters in 1005. He had one full brother, Alfred, and…

I am not an ACT party voter. I disagree too strongly with their liberal stances on social issues, which in my opinion are at least as important as economic management.

But damn, they are tempting me to vote for them this time around. They’ve always had a much better understanding of their values and ideology than National, who have forgotten their values and see their purpose as keeping Labour out of power, but not necessarily their policies.

Their party conference was held over the weekend. One of the guest speakers was Professor Elizabeth, a sociologist of education in the School of Critical Studies, the Faculty of Education and Social Work at the University of Auckland (that’s a mouthful!). She is also infamously one of the seven signatories who sent the letter ‘In Defence of Science’ to the NZ Listener in July 2021, decrying the assessment of Maori customs as being…

When Colin Craig launched the Conservative Party back in 2011, I was cautiously optimistic – maybe, finally, here was a party that could see that our societal fragmentation and lack of values was the cause of many (not all) of our problems. Boy was I wrong. Crazy Colin Craig turned out to be a monster, which was obvious even before it came out that he was a sex pest.

I never held any faith in the loonies associated with that party after that debacle. I felt it was a pity that the large minority of NZers with strong social values did not have a political home. But unfortunately, rather than winding up and letting something else take their place, people just kept trying to resurrect the very dead corpse of that party.

The first person to try to really flog the dead horse was Leighton Baker, a builder from Rangiora…

Wind and solar generation spreads like cancer. Dilute and diffuse, intermittent and unreliable the wind and solar generators’ demand for land is insatiable. And because every single MW of wind or solar generation capacity has to be backed up by another MW of dispatchable power generation (coal, gas, diesel or hydro) to accommodate sunset and calm weather, the conventional generators will continue to occupy the space they always have.

Which brings us to nuclear. None of what appears in the paragraph above applies to nuclear power generation. Concentrated, persistent and reliable, nuclear power doesn’t need batteries and it doesn’t need backup. Moreover, it doesn’t need an endless acres of land, as Ronald Bailey explains below.

New Study: Nuclear Power Is Humanity’s Greenest Energy Option
Reason
Ronald Bailey
10 May 2023

Germany idiotically shut down its last three nuclear power plants last month. Until 2011, the country obtained one-quarter of its…