Utopia, you are standing in it!

With the news that the Prince of Wales has COVID, I’ve been asked about who might step in for the Queen if she were to fall ill as well. Under section 6(1) of the Regency Act 1937, the Sovereign can delegate their functions to Counsellors of State in the event of illness or some other indisposition. Section 6(2) of the Act states that the Counsellors must be the Sovereign’s spouse and the four individuals who are next in line for the throne and are capable of serving as a regent.[1]

Since the Duke of Edinburgh is dead and the Duke of Cambridge’s children are too young to serve, this means the Counsellors would be Prince Charles, Prince William, the Duke of Sussex, and the Duke of York. But Prince Charles is self-isolating, Prince William is out of the country, Prince Harry lives in the US, and Prince Andrew…

Europe’s energy disaster proves, beyond doubt, that wind and solar are an abject failure, leaving the way clear for nuclear power and any other power generation source that can dish it up, on demand.

With numerous operators seeking or obtaining licences to build Small Modular Reactors, and numerous countries signing up to have them, SMRs are here to stay.

The wind and solar cult reckon SMRs are a pipe dream, cooked up by conservative reactionaries, conveniently overlooking the 200 small nuclear reactors that are presently powering 160 ships and submarines all around the world, of the kind that have been doing so for decades.

Nuclear power is safe, affordable, reliable and the perfect antidote to arguments about human-generated carbon dioxide gas posing a threat to life on Earth – because it doesn’t generate any, while generating power on demand, irrespective of the weather, unlike inherently unreliable wind and solar.

As…

In the last few years, ever more serious and powerful actors have begun investigating the fact of high American infrastructure construction costs. First it was Brian Rosenthal’s excellent New York Times exposé, and then it was the Regional Plan Association’s flop of a study. At the same time, I was aware that the congressional Government Accountability Office, or GAO, was investigating the same question, planning to talk to sources in the academic world as well as industry in order to make recommendations.

The GAO report is out now, and unfortunately it is a total miss, for essentially the same reason the RPA’s report was a miss: it did not go outside the American (and to some extent rest-of-Anglosphere) comfort zone. Its literature review is if anything weaker than the RPA’s. Its interviews with experts are telling: out of nine mentioned on PDF-p. 47, eight live in…

Ted Kennedy: A Life
by John A. Farrell
752 pages
Penguin Press
Published: Oct 2022

“Ted Kennedy: A Life” is John Farrell’s just-released biography of the youngest son of Joseph P. Kennedy.  Farrell is a former correspondent for The Boston Globe who has written biographies of Tip O’Neill and Richard Nixon (a Pulitzer Prize finalist and my favorite biography of Nixon among the twelve I read during my journey through the best presidential biographies).

Edward Kennedy (1932-2009) was the youngest of nine children and presumed to be the least likely of the four sons to achieve success or sustain the Kennedy brand. Although famously flawed, Ted was elected to the US Senate at the age of 30 and spent the next forty-seven years mastering its intricacies and advocating for social justice. He was the third longest-serving US senator in American history.

Like Farrell’s biographies of O’Neill and Nixon…

Way back in 1990 Parliament formally handed over the general responsibility for implementing monetary policy to the Reserve Bank. The government has always had the lead in setting the objectives the Bank is required to work to, and has the power to hire and fire if the Bank doesn’t do its job adequately, but a great deal of discretion has rested with the Bank. With power is supposed to come responsibility, transparency, and accountability.

And every so often in the intervening period there have been reviews. The Bank has itself done several over the years, looking (roughly speaking) at each past business cycle and, distinctly, what role monetary policy has played. These have generally been published as articles in the Bank’s Bulletin. When I looked back, I even found Adrian Orr’s name on one of the policy review articles and mine on another. It was a good initiative by…

Apogee = position furthest away from Earth. Earth. Perihelion = position closest to the sun. Moon. Perigee = position closest to Earth. Sun. Aphelion = position furthest away from the sun. (Eccentricities greatly exaggerated!)
Planetary cycles affecting climate. The study title: ‘Two annual cycles of the Pacific cold tongue under orbital precession’. Some real climate change theory to ponder.
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Weather and climate modelers understand pretty well how seasonal winds and ocean currents affect El Niño patterns in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean, impacting weather across the United States and sometimes worldwide, says Robert Sanders, University of California – Berkeley (via Phys.org).

But new computer simulations show that one driver of annual weather cycles in that region—in particular, a cold tongue of surface waters stretching westward along the equator from the coast of South America—has gone unrecognized: the changing distance between Earth and the sun.

The cold…

The UK electricity system’s so-called transition to renewables hits yet another bump in the road. The dream of guaranteed income was just an expensive illusion.
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One of the country’s largest solar farm owners has entered administration amid the fallout from a scandal that forced an Essex council leader to resign, reports The Guardian.

Administrators at Interpath Advisory have been appointed to Toucan Energy Holdings, which owns a portfolio of 53 solar parks with a combined capacity of 513 megawatts across England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

A recent investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that Thurrock council in Essex, Toucan’s main creditor, borrowed hundreds of millions of pounds to invest in the solar farm scheme run by globetrotting financier Liam Kavanagh.

On my Discord channel, I was reminded of the late-2000s work by some institutional American urbanists about the concept of megaregions. Wikipedia has a good summary of the late-2000s discourse on the subject. In short, there are linear ties across the East Coast from Boston to Washington (“BosWash”), with more or less continuous suburban development in between, and some urbanists tried to generalize this concept to other agglomerations of metropolitan areas, not usually successfully. The American work on this carved most of the country’s population into 10 or 11 megaregions, sometimes annexing portions of Canada, as in the Regional Plan Association’s America 2050 program:

There is a lot to critique about this map. Canada has a strong self-conception as a distinct entity from the United States; while there’s a case for lumping Vancouver with Seattle and Portland as the Pacific Northwest, lumping Toronto with the Midwest is irresponsible…

By Paul Homewood

h/t Richard

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https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/71491799?searchTerm=swiss%20glaciers%20melting

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https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/138381943?searchTerm=swiss%20glaciers%20melting