Utopia, you are standing in it!

Last week, a nominee to lead the Federal Emergency Management Agency generated fireworks when, during his confirmation hearing, he said he does not know the cause of climate change. The comment reignites the debate over how FEMA, which provides subsidized flood insurance and disaster relief, should respond to the risk climate change poses for both functions. Fortunately, given FEMA’s role, the cause of this increased risk shouldn’t matter. If FEMA recognizes the risk, the only question is figuring out whether and how to respond to it.

Climate change, to the extent it increases the risk of sea level rise and destructive natural disasters, substantially affects FEMA programs. It increases the National Flood Insurance program’s liabilities, if the risks are not appropriately priced (as they’re usually not). And it may increase the frequency and costs of FEMA disaster responses. But that climate change may pose risks that FEMA should account for…

Prof Geoff Jones of HBS has recently written a case on role of IBM in Nazi Germany.

He discusses the case and its broad lessons in this superb interview:

It is rare that you pick up a book and just say, ” wow, this is an achievement.” For the last five years or so, Bryan Caplan has immersed himself in the extremely large social science literature on immigration and its impacts. You would expect a 300 page academic monograph. But that’s not what you get. Instead, he teamed up with Zach Weinersmith of SMBC fame to write a graphic novel. Open Borders: The Science and Ethnics of Immigration is truly something else. It’s a slim tome that lays out the argument for unrestricted migration. It’s joyful , it’s beautiful, and most importantly, it’s right.

Not unlike the OECD, our Productivity Commission tends to lean left.  Not usually in some overtly partisan sense, but in a bias towards government solutions, a disinclination to focus on government failures as much as “market failures”, and a mentality that is often reluctant to look behind symptoms (which government action can sometimes paper over) to look at deeper causes and influences.

Sometimes the cheerleading for the left becomes more overt.   There was a streak of that evident in their climate change report a year or two back, but it seems particularly evident in their latest draft report out this morning.    Reflecting the change of government, the political complexion of key personnel of the Commission, the Commissioners –  while each individually capable –  appears to have shifted leftwards.

The Productivity Commission’s inquiries are into topics selected by the government of the day.  The current Minister of Finance has…

The wind cult works overtime to avoid the bloody reality that their beloveds are responsible for millions of bird and bat deaths, every year. Lying, dissembling and attempting to bury the evidence is just the start. There follows a game of moral equivalence, asserting that more bats and birds are clobbered by cars, cats and tall buildings.

Cars, cats and skyscrapers don’t kill healthy Eagles – like the critically endangered Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle, but 60 m wind turbine blades with their tips travelling at 350 Kph routinely smash them out of existence.

As part of the same race to the periphery, wind worshippers also spin the line that evil fossil fuels are responsible for even more avian carnage. Except, as James Taylor points out below those claims ring just a little hollow.

Wind apologists laughably claim fracking harms wildlife
CFACT
James Taylor
3 November 2019

Apologists for wind power…