Utopia, you are standing in it!

Dare we hope that this strong feeling there’ll be a change of government will be what happens?

. . .Appearing on AM’s political panel, Newstalk ZB’s senior political correspondent Barry Soper and Newshub’s Patrick Gower from Paddy Gower Has Issues slammed the current Labour Government.

“Chris Hipkins, he’s liked by his caucus, there’s no doubt about that, but he can’t remove himself from all of the decisions that were made in Cabinet,” Soper said.

He might like us to see him as a new Prime Minister but Hipkins was a senior Minister and responsible for many of the failings under the previous PM.

“You can have as many bonfires as you like, it’s still, essentially, the same Government and when it comes to people getting thrown out like Michael Wood, all the portfolios where do they go? They go to overworked ministers.”

Soper said earlier this year he told Hipkins…

The wind and solar ‘industries’ always struggle with their neighbours, principally because they treat them as ‘roadkill’.

But that model doesn’t work when those neighbours are determined to fight back, using every legal means available.

Such is the case with Shaun and Amie Harris, who took a solar power outfit to court seeking damages for the nuisance that it had caused by polluting their land with silt and sediment.

The jury awarded them a cool US$10.5 million in damages, and whacked the solar generator and its construction contractors with a further US$125 million in fines for their egregious misconduct.

Bonner Cohen reports on the result below.

Solar farm runoff pollutes property, couple awarded $135 million
CFACT
Bonner Cohen
6 June 2023

Inflicting heavy fines on developers of a project billed as supplying clean, renewable energy, a federal jury has awarded a couple in southwest Georgia $135.5 million after runoff from…

Currently some Zero Carbon zealots are trying to discredit and disappear a peer reviewed study of CO2 atmospheric concentrations because its findings contradict IPCC dogma.  The paper is World Atmospheric CO2, Its 14C Specific Activity, Non-fossil Component, Anthropogenic Fossil Component, and Emissions (1750–2018). by Skrable et al. (2022).  The link is to the paper and also shows the comments recently addressed to the authors and the editor of the journal, as well as responses by both.

This came to my attention by way of a comment by one of the attackers on my 2022 post regarding this study.  Text is below in italics with my bolds.

D. Andrews 10/7/2023

This post is over a year old, but in the interest of correcting the record, please note the following:
1. Skrable et al. have conceded that the data they “guesstimated” bore little resemblance to actual atmospheric radiocarbon data.

2. In…

NYC going after pizza oven emissions. You’d have to burn a pizza stove 849 years to equal one year of John Kerry’s private jet

In his Master Resource article Energy Appliance Victory! (DC Circuit vs. DOE), Mark Krebs explains the DOE agency machinations targeting boilers as a case in point of government bureaucrats attacking everyone’s economic well-being in the name of saving the planet.  First, a contextual piece describes the game plan behind all this.  Later on, a synopsis of Kreb’s analysis of the tactics on the ground.

Background:  Why This Judgment Matters 

Biden’s Green Rules Make Appliances Cost More and Do Less

Authored by Kevin Stocklin at The Epoch Times, published at Planet Today.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The Biden administration announced in December 2022 its pledge to take “more than 100 actions” to impose significantly tighter environmental standards on consumer goods is…

I was about five minutes into re-watching “The Cincinnati Kid” when it struck me that I needed to read or re-read director Norman Jewison’s autobiography, or hunt down the recent biography of the Canadian director.

He’s not exactly an obscure filmmaker, with seven Oscar nominations and films like “Moonstruck” and “The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming” in his extensive filmography.

But his fifth feature film, his first “serious” movie, has threads that turn up so often in his later work that one wonders, “What made him such a righteous dude?”

The Toronto native who made the groundbreaking “In the Heat of the Night,” “A Soldier’s Story” and the very impressive bio-pic “The Hurricane” was astutely in touch with America’s shifting attitudes on race. And he made sure his films were ahead of the curve in that regard.

Jewison, a child of the Great Depression, took over a 1930s…

This blog has been a bit quiet in recent weeks (if anyone has insights on what sections 15D and 98 of the Government Superannuation Fund Act do and don’t allow I’ll be happy to hear from you) but I hope to make up for it this week.

In the 4+ years the statutory Monetary Policy Committee has been in existence, there has been not a single public speech given by any of the three external members. There have been no serious interviews either, just one petulant and testy set of responses to some emailed questions late last year, responses that I characterised at the time this way:

At times, Harris displays all the grace and constructive open and engagement we might expect in a rebellious 15 year old told they have to make conversation with Grandma at the family Christmas celebrations. If the answers aren’t quite monosyllabic grunts. most of…

After a  succession of ministerial stumbles, some of them fatal for the respective political careers of the stumblers, the  Labour  government is still  buoyed by its own polling.  And even independent  commentators think the parties  of the  left are level-pegging  with  those on the right.

How  could  this  be?  There  is little  argument  NZ has been hit by a  cost-of-living crisis,  families are going hungry, hospital emergency departments are overflowing.  Others cite ministerial fumbling for the failure  to deliver on policy announcements. Economists  point to  the deficits in the public accounts getting worse and net debt  climbing. 

Wherever voters look,  the Labour government has  a  dismal story  to present.

So why aren’t Opposition parties racing ahead?