Utopia, you are standing in it!

• Bryce Edwards writes – 

The Green Party should be very high in the opinion polls right now. Historically, when Labour is low in the polls the Greens tend to be the recipients of progressive voters looking for an alternative. A huge proportion of the 50 per cent vote Labour got in 2020 are now disillusioned with the Labour Government and casting around for another party to place their trust in at the election.

The current policy environment is also highly favourable to the Greens. Voters say that they are especially concerned with issues which the Greens have the ability to campaign strongly on: climate change, housing, inequality, tax reform, and the cost of living.

2023 should therefore be The Year of the Greens. Yet it’s not. Instead, the Greens are struggling in the polls – averaging only about nine per cent, well below where they’ve polled in the past. And…

Narratives matter in public policy, often in an unfortunate manner.

• People used to believe (and some still do) that the Great Depression was caused by capitalism and that President Roosevelt’s interventions rescued the economy. Those people arewrong.
• People used to believe (and some still do) that the 2008 financial crisis was caused by Wall Street “greed” and that laws such as Dodd-Frank will protect us in the future. Those people arewrong.

Another narrative is that the industrial revolution was a horrible period in American economic history that produced immense wealth for so-called robber barons while leading to suffering and deprivation for everyone else.

Today, we will look at why that is nonsense.

We’ll start with this chart from Oxford University’s Our World in Data. As you can see, per-capita GDP increased sharply in the latter part of the 19th century (the period most associated…

Nuclear power’s timely renaissance is being led by Canada and the US, with plenty of others following suit. Any country that’s serious about reliable and affordable electricity is getting serious about nuclear power.

Britain is crab-walking away from its offshore wind power disaster, with its government recently announcing plans to pump up nuclear power generation, including by investing heavily in Small Modular Reactor technology.

Nuclear power is the only, stand-alone generation source that can deliver reliable, affordable power without generating CO2 gas, in the process, which means nuclear should be the perfect candidate for those fretting about carbon dioxide gas emissions in the electricity generation sector.

Putting aside worries about the direction the weather might take in future, the self-inflicted wind and solar calamity playing out in Europe has focused attention on the need to have power around-the-clock, whatever the weather.

Australia’s Federal Shadow Minister for Climate Change and…

Charles III has now been formally crowned as Kingin a ceremony with deep historical roots that reflect the institution’s long history. But what about the monarchy’s future? Craig Prescott discusses whether the UK is willing to consider the major constitutional change of becoming a republic, and concludes that should such a change take place, it will need to coincide with an underlying change in political culture in order to be anything other than symbolic.

The British public, as Brexit underlined, is not necessarily averse to major constitutional change. The start of a new reign provides an opportunity to reappraise the monarchy. Such a reappraisal is already taking place in many of the 14 Commonwealth realms.

In June 2022, Australia appointed an Assistant Minister for the Republic, with the intention that Australia will move towards becoming a republic after the next election, due in 2025. Over the next few…

While waiting for Hansard’s official record of Meka Whaitiri’s personal statement to Parliament this afternoon, Point of Order found a press statement from New Zealand First.     

It was teasingly headed Whaitiri fiasco a multi-party deception. 

More teasingly, Winston Peters’ name was absent from the text which kicked off:

‘Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive’

The statement proceeded to say:

There was a great deal of debt defaulted on during the Great Depression.   Businesses failed, farms went bust, and some mortgage borrowers defaulted too.    But a huge number of governments also defaulted on their obligations, not just in places like Greece or Argentina which had form in that regard, but including many of the governments of the richest countries in the world.  You could read about the New Zealand episode here.   Most countries in Europe (including the UK and France) defaulted on their (substantial) war debts to the United States –  in fact, only Finland paid in full.  But even the United States government defaulted.

There is an interesting and accessible new book out about that experience, American Default.   It is written by UCLA Chilean academic Sebastian Edwards (who has been used as an adviser and author here, including this paper at a Treasury/Reserve…

Along with giant batteries and ‘green’ hydrogen, pumped hydro is touted as the solution to wind and solar power’s hopeless intermittency. Five years ago, Australia’s PM, Malcolm Turnbull pitched his very own mega-pumped hydro project, tagged Snowy 2.0.

The numbering was meant to be a nod to computer program upgrades and signal an improvement on the original Snowy scheme – without doubt – the single greatest renewable energy project ever built in Australia – with a mammoth 3,950 MW of capacity, which is available on-demand (unlike the pointless nonsense that is wind power). It cost $1 billion (in today’s money) to build.

Except that five years later the 0 in Snowy 2.0 looks more like a quantification of the amount of power the scheme is likely to deliver.

The plan never stacked up economically – see our posts here and here – and is never likely to.

One of…

Walk in the main entrance of the British Museum, go through the central courtyard past the great round building in the middle and walk on through the archway into room 24. This room is titled ‘Living and Dying’ and contains cases exploring ‘how people everywhere deal with the tough realities of life and death’. There’s a number of display cases looking at particular aspects of this (big) subject via the customs and artefacts of First Peoples from around the world, a lot of them from around the Pacific, although some are from Africa. But four or so big display cases are devoted to artefacts and explanations about the culture of indigenous Australians, or Aborigines as we used to call them.

Indigenous Australian beliefs

Indigenous Australians understand that ancestral beings created the land, the oceans and all living things, passing on knowledge of how to live from, and care for…

Andrew Doyle writes at Spiked The New Puritans must be stopped.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images

A regressive, authoritarian ideology is cannibalising public life.

My book, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World, is my attempt to grapple with this disturbing new reality. A new paperback edition has been published this week, and I had hoped that by this point, it would already have started to seem out of date. In truth, the problems I describe in the book are accelerating.Novels by Roald Dahl, PG Wodehouse and Agatha Christie have since been rewritten by ‘sensitivity readers’ (newspeak for ‘censors’). The Irish government is currently passing new hate-speech laws that are similarly draconian to those passed by the Scottish government in 2021. Prestigious scientific journals are publishing pseudoscience in order to uphold this new ideology, too. Only this week…

“Ireland’s far-left government is in the midst of passing some of the most extreme legislation on so-called hate speech that the Western world has ever seen. The Criminal Justice Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences bill would prosecute what even leftist politician Paul Murphy called “thought crimes.”

Should the bill become law, which seems likely, the government will possess unprecedented power to quash or silence peaceful protests and demonstrations, prosecute the makers and sharers of memes, and effectively ban opinions it doesn’t like. Even prejudice against a “protected characteristic” will become a crime, as will merely possessing material deemed hateful, like a history book or meme.”

We almost got this in New Zealand, and if a Labour-Green-Te Paiti Maori government wins power this year then it will be back.

Destroying coal-fired power plants is all part of the grand wind and solar ‘transition’ and precisely the point of the subsidies to wind and solar which are designed to allow the unreliables to undercut cheap and reliable coal-fired power, thereby driving coal-fired plants out of business. The inevitable consequences include rocketing power prices and rolling blackouts.

The Australian state of New South Wales has just shut Liddell (above) – a perfectly operable coal-fired plant, that once delivered 2,000MW to the grid, around-the-clock, whatever the weather.

Wholesale power prices jumped from $96 to $228 – almost overnight; an 80% increase within a week of the plant’s closure.

The loss of that volume of power to a grid already teetering on the brink of collapse, can only help ensure that result.

Liddell’s planned (yes, ‘planned’) closure was meant to be no big deal.

You see, back in March 2017 then PM, Malcolm…

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Whether it is Posie Parker, hate-speech laws or donations, the East Coast MP is completely out of her depth.   Graham Adams writes –

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Kiritapu Allan was appointed New Zealand’s 51st Minister of Justice on 14 June 2022. Her predecessors — nearly all men — include political heavyweights such as Jack Marshall, Ralph Hanan, Martyn Finlay, Geoffrey Palmer, Doug Graham and Annette King.

Less than a year into her tenure, Allan is looking more and more like a rube who lacks the gravitas and good judgment to hold such an important position in government.

The news that in 2020 she accepted a payment of $1500 and rent subsidies worth $9185 for a campaign office from Race Relations Commissioner Meng Foon and his wife but didn’t declare a conflict of interest when she became Minister of Justice was astonishing. Foon’s appointment was made by then Justice Minister Andrew Little in…

Jørgen Peder Steffensen, of Denmark’s Niels Bohr Institute, is one of the most experienced experts in ice core analysis, in both Greenland and Antarctica. In this video he explains a coincidence that has misled those alarmed about the warming recovery since the Little Ice Age.  And if you skip to 2:25, you will see the huge error we have made and the assumptions and extrapolations based on that error.  Transcript below is from closed captions with my bolds and added images. H/T Raymond

What do ice cores tell us about the history of climate change and the present trend? 

This ice is from the Viking age around the year one thousand, also called the medieval warm period. We believe that in Greenland the Medieval Warm Period was about one and a half degrees warmer on average than today

NorthGRIP the Greenland ice core project is being reopened to drill…

(British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher)

A few weeks ago, former President Bill Clinton visited Northern Ireland in commemoration of the 25^th anniversary of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that mostly ended the violence of the period known as “The Troubles” that had prevailed since the 1960s.  Clinton’s administration helped negotiate a multi-party agreement between most of Northern Ireland’s political parties, and the British-Irish Agreement between the British and Irish governments.  To this day the agreements have been held with a minimum of violence, but decades of ill-will between all sides and the January 2020 Brexit Agreement has created a series of obstacles which at times makes the situation tenuous.

For years, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and its splinter groups resorted to violence to achieve an independent republic free of British rule. One of the most violent attacks occurred on October 12, 1984, with an assassination attempt against Prime…