Utopia, you are standing in it!

One comes to take for granted the gross inadequacies of the Official Information Act, including the systematic under-resourcing of the Ombudsman’s office, which just reinforces the incentives on officials to play fast and loose with the spirit of the law, banking on the fact that if their agency ever loses at the Ombudsman it will be so far down the track that most people – possibly including the requester- will have lost interest in whatever it was the agency didn’t want to release.

But just occasionally it still gets to one. No doubt many requesters have this sort of experience.

I had an email this afternoon from the Ombudsman’s office

It didn’t sound like much of an update – “we are writing to tell you that we have still done nothing about your complaint and have no idea when we will”. I couldn’t even remember what I’d made a complaint…

Ideologues are quick to find a conspiracy, whenever their pet belief ultimately fails. So it is with the renewables cult – accusing mother nature of dishing up “dark doldrums”, or “dunkelflaute” (as the Germans call it) – with seemingly increasing regularity.

Cloudy, calm weather is seen as a curse, and the lengthy absence of suitably strong breezes now referred to despairingly as a “wind drought”. Not long ago, only sailors and kite flyers gave a hoot about wind strength and direction.

Of course, if you subscribe to the catastrophic climate change story, it’s no great leap to believe that the weather has it in for you; particularly when you’re pinning all your power supply hopes on sunshine and breezes.

As Rafe Champion reports below, the wind and sun cult in Australia are having to recalibrate their dreamy vision about an all wind and sun powered future, thanks to an uncooperative…

No civilised country has ever powered itself entirely with wind and solar; no country ever will. And yet the grand wind and solar ‘transition’ – being peddled by rent-seekers and crony capitalists – is still taken as an article of faith by the naïve and gullible.

What is evident is the direct and unassailable relationship between intermittent wind and solar, rocketing power prices, load shedding and, ultimately, mass blackouts.

In this piece from September last year, Isaac Orr, Mitch Rolling and John Phelan rich precisely that conclusion in relation to plans by Governor Tim Walz to permanently unhitch Minnesota from reality and reason.

The High Cost of 100 Percent Carbon-Free Electricity by 2040
American Experiment
Isaac Orr, Mitch Rolling, John Phelan
12 September 2022

The 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2040 mandate proposed by Minnesota Governor Tim Walz would cost the state $313.2 billion through 2050 and lead to devastating…

I have been very pessimistic in recent years about the United Kingdom. Now, having just finished giving speeches in Bristol and London, I’m even more pessimistic.

The core problem is that the burden of government spending has expanded dramatically in recent years, in part because of the pandemic.

But there’s been no move to undo the damage. Instead, the (supposedly) conservative governments of Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak have kept the spigots open.

So there’s a new spending baseline showing a permanent expansion in the fiscal burden.

And this does not even include all the additional spending that almost surely will get added because of demographic change.

Sadly, none of the experts I met with on my trip expressed much hope of reversing the nation’s fiscal decline.

Indeed, most of them have a a glum outlook. Including the ones I didn’t talk to. For instance, Fiona Bulmer authored some depressing…

This is mostly a follow-up to my post last Saturday on the LSAP losses.

In that post I noted that while the LSAP was still running, the monthly line item on the Reserve Bank balance sheet recording the Bank’s mark-to-market claim on The Treasury under the indemnity was a reasonable proxy, on prevailing market prices, of the direct fiscal losses the LSAP programme would result in. And it was an official number.

The Reserve Bank published its monthly balance sheet for the end of March. The Bank’s claim under the indemnity as at 31 March stood at $7821 million.

However, as I also noted in Saturday’s post, this number is no longer even an approximate estimate of the direct fiscal losses from the LSAP programme. It is still a best guess, on market prices, of the unrealised losses on the bonds the Bank is still holding.

But the Bank’s holding…

John Tamihere asks who owns the water? and answers: Maori do:

. . .What is bizarre to me is that people who have stolen an asset are now having a debate about the rights over it.

We reject co-governance because we want to have the appropriate conversation about the elephant in the room: how did Pākeha get to the table on a 100% Māori-owned asset? . . 

What is bizarre is thinking that anyone can own water.

When does he think the ownership starts and ends? Does it begin in the clouds from which rain and snow fall and end when fresh water turns to salt water in the Pacific ocean?

He is also confused about Three Five Waters which is about water infrastructure.

We’ve gone from calling it Three Waters to Affordable Water Reforms which is just changing the colour of the lipstick on the pig and distracting…

Europeans with any sense have woken up to the fact that the much-touted wind and solar ‘transition’ is a cruel hoax driven by cynical crony capitalists and their political enablers.

Driven by starry-eyed ideology, rather than sound engineering and economics, the great ‘green’ reset fell apart because households, businesses and industries aren’t prepared to limit their power use to occasions when the sun is up in a cloudless sky and the wind is blowing, just right.

No, modern civilisation is built upon having electricity as and when we need it, rather than according to the fickle whims of nature.

And therein lies the fundamental flaw in claims that we’ll all soon be powered by nothing more than sunshine and breezes. For a while that myth was sustained by an equally specious claim about giant lithium-ion batteries filling the gaps in wind and solar output, when sunset and/or calm weather sets…

Today (28 June) marks the 175th anniversary of Queen Victoria’s coronation at Westminster Abbey. Naturally this major national event was attended by members of both Houses of Parliament. Although it was members of the House of Lords who performed key roles in the ceremony, with peers paying homage to the new queen, MPs also had a privileged view of proceedings, with two of the three galleries above the altar being reserved for them. (The third gallery housed the trumpeters of the orchestra.)

On the morning of the coronation around 500 MPs assembled in the Commons chamber. One newspaper report recorded that

‘Some excellent scenes took place on the entrance of Members noted for carelessness in their dress on ordinary occasions, but who appeared upon this instance in splendid attire. Mr Fector and Mr Campbell, the former of whom wore a peach-coloured velvet Court dress, while the latter was attired in…

Recently in a post called Silence of Conservative Lambs I wrote:

The 1991 blockbuster movie revolved around meek, silent victims preyed upon by malevolent believers in their warped, twisted view of the world. A comparison can be drawn between how today’s conservative thinkers and politicians respond to advocates of the pernicious global warming/climate change ideology. Instead of challenging and pushing back against CO2 hysteria, and speaking out with a rational climate perspective, Republicans in the US, and Conservatives in Canada and elsewhere are meek and silent lambs in the face of this energy slaughter. Worse, when they do speak it is to usually to pander and try to appease offering proposals for things like carbon taxes or other non-remedies for a non-problem, essentially ceding the case to leftists.

So to be more constructive, let’s consider what should be proposed by political leaders regarding climate, energy and the environment. …

Buzz from the Beehive

Not for the first time, we have had to wait a few days for a minister to acknowledge that something vital was missing from a statement posted on the Government’s official website.

In this case, Local Government Minister Kieran McAnulty made no mention of “co-govern”, “co-governance” or “co-government” in the statement he issued last Thursday on a major shakeup which will see affordable water reforms led and delivered regionally.

The statement did set out plans to establish 10 new regionally owned and regionally led public water entities, to be owned by local councils on behalf of the public.  The entity borders would be based on existing regional areas, each entity would be run by a professional board, with members appointed on competency and skill, and strategic oversight and direction would be provided by local representative groups

“… with every local council in the country, as…