Utopia, you are standing in it!

We have a database of high-speed rail construction costs up.

Separately, because of Noah Smith’s opinions about high-speed rail, today there is going to be an event featuring me and him in which we are going to discuss the issue in an American context, alongside a presentation of the database and what lessons can be drawn from it. You can register here; it’s at 13:00 Eastern US Time, or 19:00 Berlin time.

A few notes regarding our database, because I’m being asked on Twitter, and also because it’s relevant for our research:

This is a well-studied topic

Literature on comparative HSR costs already exists, and some of our internal cost references are to studies on the subject. This is not like subway costs, where the biggest databases I know of prior to ours are a Flyvbjerg paper and a Spanish analysis each with a number of items in…

Following on from our recent events and blogs marking the 150th anniversary of the introduction of the secret ballot, Dr Philip Salmon explores some of the Act’s lesser known and unintended consequences.

The Ballot Act of 1872 sits alongside the three major Reform Acts of the 19th century (and various Corrupt Practices Acts) in helping to transform British elections into their recognisably modern form. As some of our earlier blogs have shown, it ended a system of open voting and public nominations that had become increasingly associated with bribery, the intimidation of voters and disorderly behaviour, often fuelled by drink.

The calmness and order of Britain’s new secret elections, by contrast, was striking. At the first by-elections to be held in Pontefract, Preston, Tiverton and Richmond, it was widely reported that there was none of the usual ‘horse play’ and ‘excitement’. Some…

Few regimes in the world are more despotic than the current rulers in Iran. Sadly, there is little sign yet that the Iranian population can be freed from it.

New Zealanders got a glimpse of the conditions under which Iranians are living when earlier this year two NZ travellers were detained by the regime, and were only freed after tense negotiations by NZ diplomats.

A deeper insight comes from Green MP Golriz Ghahraman who in an article that appeared in last week’s Guardian Weekly wrote that being an Iranian woman is a heavy birthright.

“It comes with knowing a true, deep, feminism,while also knowing violent oppression at the hand of the government ruling our homeland.

“And for millions of us, it means displacement”.

She goes on to relate how she and her parents were granted political asylum in Aotearoa New Zealand when she was 9 years old. “We were never…

At the end of June, Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon set out the Scottish Government’s roadmap for a referendum on Scottish independence. The centrepiece would be a Bill to be introduced into the Scottish Parliament to legislate for a referendum in like terms to the 2014 independence referendum, but absent an accompanying section 30 order giving the Scottish Parliament express competence to legislate for a referendum. In addition, Scotland’s Lord Advocate confirmed that she would be making a reference to the United Kingdom Supreme Court (‘UKSC’) for a determination of whether such a Bill, if introduced, would relate to a reserved matter. The rationale for the reference would be to provide definitive legal clarity as to the scope of the Scottish Parliament’s legislative powers.

On 23 November, the UKSC gives its response to the Lord Advocate’s request for legal clarity. In an earlier blog coinciding with the making of the…

We heard a lot in the last week about the 636 fossil fuel lobbyists who took over the COP27 process and were the main cause of the failure for the final agreement to have any teeth. The conclusion was obvious: We must prohibit industry from involvement in all policies! Mainstream media covered this NGO campaign, repeating the claims and target messages, amplifying the anti-industry dogma without actually going into the research to see if the numbers were correct. If journalists and political leaders had done some basic research (even just clicking on the link to the research data), they would have quickly discovered that the claims and the data were completely false, grossly exaggerated and contrived to create fear and outrage. Once again we have been hoodwinked by a group of unethical political opportunists preying on public vulnerability and fear in order to propagate their interests and spread their…

South Australia’s infamous Statewide blackout on 28 September 2016 was caused by wind turbines that couldn’t handle a vigorous spring storm front. Wind speeds exceeded 25m/s (90km/h), which meant turbines at the bulk of its (then 18) wind farms shut down automatically to protect themselves from catastrophic self-destruction.

Metropolitan Adelaide was without power for hours, regional centres without power for days and mines in the north of the state were without power for close to a fortnight. The cost to businesses and households – first estimated to be in the order of $367 million – was all thoroughly avoidable.

This is a state that trashed its perfectly reliable coal-fired power plants at Port Augusta, closed in May 2016, and blown up in November 2017, with its Labor Premier and MPs exultant at the result.

Well, in another ‘we told you so moment’, thousands of South Australians have been left without…

Photosynthesis: nature requires carbon dioxide
Still claiming a minor trace gas essential to nature causes ‘huge climate impacts’. Unbelievable.
– – –
A historic deal has been struck at the UN’s COP27 summit that will see rich nations pay poorer countries for damage and economic losses caused by climate change, claims BBC News.

It ends almost 30 years of waiting by nations facing huge climate impacts.

But developed nations left dissatisfied over progress on cutting fossil fuels.

“A clear commitment to phase-out all fossil fuels? Not in this text,” said the UK’s Alok Sharma, who was president of the previous COP summit in Glasgow.

Bjorn Lomborg and Jordan Peterson wrote in The Telegraph Pushing the same old climate policies at COP27 is simply insane.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

After decades of failure to curb emissions, let’s accept that capitalist investment is not the problem: it’s the solution

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” This famous quote – often misattributed to Albert Einstein – might very well become the unofficial motto of the UN Climate Change Conference in Egypt, the 27th session of the Conference of the Parties (Cop27).

Global CO₂ emissions have kept increasing since the world’s nations first committed to rein in climate change at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 – despite dozens of climate summits and the global climate agreements struck in Kyoto and Paris. This is the case, once again, in 2022, when…

The Reserve Bank’sMonetary Policy Committee has its final meeting for the year on Wednesday, and then they shut up shop. For a long time. The next scheduled announcement is not until 22 February, a full 13 weeks (3 months) away. Nice job if you can get it, and although I’m sure management and staff will still be working for much of the intervening period, the same is unlikely to be said for the three non-executive members, who are generously remunerated by the taxpayer, utterly invisible, and only need to show up when meetings are scheduled.

This strange schedule has been in place for quite a few years now, having been adopted at a time when the OCR wasn’t being moved much at all (and when the Bank was raising the OCR, it often proved to have been a mistake). But having been in place for a while does not…

Germans soon recognised the importance of their coal-fired power plants, forced to reopen them days after shutting them down in January 2021 because, surprise, surprise, the wind stopped blowing. And that big backpedal occurred long before Vlad Putin began putting the squeeze on the gas supplies needed to prop up those occasions when Germany’s 30,000 wind turbines decide to down tools.

In Dan Andrew’s People’s Republic of Victoria, a similar plotline has been laid out, where ideologues have managed to hijack its coal-fired power supply, with a view to shutting down its remaining plants in the very near future.

History may not repeat, but it often rhymes, which leads STT to predict that the Victorians, just like the Germans, will be forced into an embarrassing retreat if they truly are as foolish as they appear to be.

Daniel Wild from the Institute of Public Affairs takes a look at another moment…