Utopia, you are standing in it!

Voters get the governments are to serve, so it’s said, which means that sympathy for their current energy woes runs thin. Voters who walked into a booth thinking they would save the planet by backing candidates and parties who promised to go all in on the grand wind and solar ‘transition’, might be suffering a little buyer’s remorse, right now. Particularly as they struggle to pay power and gas bills that have shot into orbit, and particularly so the next time they’re boiling (or freezing) in the dark, when the sun sets and/or calm weather sets in and there aren’t enough coal-fired plants left to meet their immediate power needs.

Sooner or later, we all sit down to a banquet of consequences.

As Stuart Ballantyne outlines below, if voters keep ticking the box in favour of deluded lunatics who are hellbent on destroying Western civilisation from within (see above), they…

… is the best argument against democracy.”

So, it is often claimed, did Winston Churchill pronounce upon our system of government – his system of government – as one of his famous quotes.

Except it’s not.

As the International Churchill Society points out on their wonderful website with Red Herrings: Famous Quotes Churchill Never Said:

No attribution. Though he sometimes despaired of democracy’s slowness to act for its preservation, Churchill had a more positive attitude towards the average voter.

I often find myself in need of such positive attitudes when looking at the state of politics in this country and across the Western world, particularly in the wake of the results of the US Mid-term elections.

No, I do not say that because the GOP did less well than they should have, or because they lost some key races. I’m not a doppelgänger for the shrieking hysterics of the…

(Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and President John F. Kennedy)

Vladimir Putin’s ill-advised invasion of Ukraine last February has not produced the results that he expected.  As the battlefield situation has degenerated for Russian army due to the commitment of the Ukrainian people and its armed forces, along with western assistance the Kremlin has resorted to bombastic statements from the Russian autocrat concerning the use of nuclear weapons.  At this time there is no evidence by American intelligence that Moscow is preparing for that eventuality, however, we have learned the last few days that Russian commanders have discussed the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons.  The conflict seems to produce new enhanced rhetoric on a daily basis, and the world finds itself facing a situation not seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 amidst the Cold War.

(A map of Cuba annotated by former U.S. President John F. Kennedy…

Last week I reread Victoria University historian Jim McAloon’s history of New Zealand economic policymaking from 1945 to 1984, Judgements of all Kinds, first published a decade or so ago. Good works of economic history, let alone of the history of economic policymaking, aren’t thick on the ground in New Zealand, and as McAloon himself notes in a journal article published a year or two later:

“Economic history has a relatively low profile in New Zealand. Few economics programmes offer much in the way of economic history, and none of them offer courses in New Zealand economic history. Very few academics in New Zealand economics programmes publish in economic history. Victoria University, once boasting the only New Zealand chair in economic history,
has largely abandoned the field.”

(Actually, when I was at Victoria in the early 80s – and not wise enough myself to have done much economic history…

The wild claims about wind and solar replacing, coal, gas and nuclear power don’t stand first contact with reality.

Over the last 20 years, trillions of dollars have been squandered on subsidies, tax breaks, mandates, penalties, and other state-directed efforts to make chaotically intermittent wind and solar serious contenders on the world energy scene. Their combined contribution to world energy demand remains thoroughly underwhelming, as John Hinderaker highlights below.

$3.8 Trillion for Essentially Nothing
Powerline
John Hinderaker
26 October 2022

Jeff Currie, who is Global Head of Commodities Research for Goldman Sachs, describes the utter futility of “green” energy:

Here’s a stat for you, as of January of this year. At the end of last year, overall, fossil fuels represented 81 percent of overall energy consumption. Ten years ago, they were at 82. So though, all of that investment in renewables, you’re talking about $3.8 trillion, let me repeat that…