Utopia, you are standing in it!

Wind industry shills still make ludicrous claims about turbines running on the smell of an oily rag and lasting for 25 years or more, needing little more than a hug from time to time. They never talk about the operations and maintenance costs which – as reported by one Australian outfit Infigen – runs at around AUD$25 per MWh (which undermines the myth about wind power being generated with zero marginal cost).

Then there’s the incontrovertible fact that industrial wind turbines are lucky to have an economic life of anything beyond a decade.

As it approaches its 10^th birthday, a wind turbine has often had its blades, generator, bearings and/or gearbox replaced – see our post here – as well as undergoing routine service and maintenance, the need for which only increases, over time.

As with any industrial machine, operation and time conspire to cause wear and tear of…

That’s the face of our star, the Sun, based on a collection of pictures from NASA’s Solar Observing spacecraft, SOHO.

Right now it’s a very turbulent star as it approaches its Solar Maximum in 2025/2026. This is the 25th Solar Cycle since regular observations and recordings began in 1755, and it was expected to be as weak SC 24.

Wrong.

Sol has been going apeshit recently, with solar flares and CME’s (Coronal Mass Ejections) that have been lighting up the skies with the Northern and Southern lights pushing beyond their usual, visual areas. It seems to have effected the Northern Lights more, with them being seen as far south as the Shenendoah Valley in Virginia, in a replay of scenes from 1862 after the Battle of Fredericksburg:

Befitting scene! Who would die a nobler death, or dream of more glorious burial? Dead for their country’s honor, and lighted…

I’m a great fan of nature, but our friends on the left seem a bit extreme.

• Self-styled environmentalists assert that you’re racist if you oppose their agenda.
• Some of them don’t believe in bathing.
• Or consider the ones who produce/use hand-cranked vibrators to reduce their carbon footprint.
• There are also self-proclaimed environmentalist who claim that climate change causes AIDS.
• Or that it causes terrorism.
• And some of them put together a ranking implying that Cuba is better than the United States.
• Others even want to start wars.

Today, though, let’s analyze the the supposed environmentalists who think children are a net minus to society.

A professor of history at the University of Chicago, Peggy O’Donnell Heffington, has a column in the Washington Post about this topic. Here are some excerpts.

There is no such thing as a ‘free’ lunch, some one always pays. Wind and sun may be free, the occasional power they produce is anything but.

The economic choices we make (and the policies that surround, support or reflect them) are driven by a simple equation: that the economic cost should be outweighed by the benefits on offer. And, until very recently, that equation applied with equal force to energy use and production.

As Euan Mearns puts it: “The Energy Return on Energy Invested (ERoEI or EROI) of any energy-gathering system is a measure of that system’s efficiency. The concept was originally derived in ecology and has been transferred to analyse human industrial society. In today’s energy mix, hydroelectric power ± nuclear power have values >50. At the other end of the scale, solar PV and biofuels have values <5. It is assumed that ERoEI >5 to 7 is…

The COVID vaccine mandate for the NZDF is rearing its head again. It was last in the news in February last year, when the group ‘United we Stand NZ’, represented by lawyer Matthew Hague of Frontline Law fought against the mandate instituted in the Police and Defence Force:

On 6 January [2022], three unvaccinated staff sought a judicial review of the mandate.

They were supported by affidavits from 37 of their colleagues in the same situation.

Justice Cooke today released his decision which upheld their claims the vaccination order breached their rights under the Bill of Rights Act.

While the judge did not accept some of the applicants’ arguments, he agreed the mandate infringed on section 11 and section 15 of the Act.

“The order limits the right to be free to refuse medical treatment recognised by the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act (including because of its limitation on…

I shared a clever video in 2011 exposing the hypocrisy of rich leftists. They claimed to support higher taxes, but refused to put their money where their mouths were.

Now we have a new version.

One difference is that the first video asked them on the spot to pay more tax. This time, Steve Moore merely asked them to pledge to voluntarily cough up some extra cash to the IRS.

And they refused. How predictable.

Steve should have further exposed their hypocrisy by directing them to Uncle Sam’s website that exists to accept voluntary payments.

Not that it would have made a difference. These leftists are engaged in moral preening, not serious policy.

Incidentally, I have debated rich statists on TV, telling them not to make the rest of us victims of their neurotic guilt feelings.

For what it’s worth, if they feel guilty having so…

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…