Utopia, you are standing in it!

Between them, China and India have already dragged hundreds of millions out of abject poverty, thanks to cheap and reliable coal-fired power. There’s no mystery to it; having electricity as and when households and businesses need it is central to an ordered, prosperous and civil society. Cheap power is at the heart of manufacturing and manufacturing is what’s driven the rise of China and India.

Woke Western wonks still spout drivel about the purported “death of coal”, but, in reality, the demand for the black stuff has never been stronger in the history of humankind.

Robert Bryce explains the relationship below.

India and China Coal Production Surging By 700M Tons Per Year: That’s Greater Than All U.S. Coal Output
Real Clear Energy
Robert Bryce
3 June 2022

If you think the world is moving beyond coal, think again. The post-Covid economic rebound and surging electricity demand have resulted in big…

The Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill continues its progression in Parliament, having initially been introduced in the House of Commons by the then-Education Secretary Gavin Williamson in May 2021, and recently “carried over” into the new (2022-23) parliamentary session; the Bill was debated at (and subsequently passed) Report stage and Third Reading in the House of Commons on Monday 13th June, and is due to be read a second time in the House of Lords today. (A useful summary of the Bill’s progress up to April 2022 can be found here.)

In this post, I argue, firstly, that the Bill appears to be addressing a “problem” that, in reality, is far smaller than the Government perceives it to be; and, secondly, it does so in a manner that fails to tackle the deeper issues that, if anything, may be harming free speech in practice. That is, the…

Humorous lessons too! He even looks a bit like Luxon.

Take it away Chief.

Image credit: livescience.com

In their computer model game they use the discredited RCP 8.5 formula that assumes a highly unlikely surface energy increase of 8.5W/m^2 by 2100 (not 2050). What’s the point?
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You may have seen some of our forecasts that look a little further ahead than you would usually expect, says the UK Met Office.

Although they use the same graphics as our normal weather forecasts, we’ve been producing theoretical ‘forecasts’ for 2050 to look at what conditions we could expect to see in the UK if global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.

One of the greatest challenges with communicating the risks of climate change is how to show, in a relatable way, how changes in our atmosphere could impact the weather we experience on the Earth’s surface.

Dr Andrew Thrush, editor of our Lords 1558-1603 section, discusses the thorny issue that faced Elizabeth I in the wake of the discovery of Mary Queen of Scots’ role in the Babington Plot of 1586…

On 1 February 1587 Sir Francis Walsingham and his fellow Secretary of State, William Davison, wrote on behalf of Elizabeth I to the privy councillor Sir Amias Paulet, one of the gaolers of the deposed Scottish queen, Mary Stuart, who had fled to England more than twenty years earlier and had recently been judged guilty of plotting to overthrow and murder Elizabeth. In this letter – perhaps the most extraordinary ever to have been written at the behest of an English monarch – Paulet was informed that Elizabeth ‘doth note in you a lack of that care and zeal of her service that she looketh for at your hands’. The Queen…

On Friday (1 July) the new Reserve Bank legislation comes fully into effect. The new Reserve Bank Board takes over from the Governor personally as the key governing body of the Bank, on all matters other than the conduct of monetary policy (but even there they have a big influence on the composition of the MPC). A member of the outgoing (advisory) Board told us – he sits on the RB pension fund trustees as, for my sins, do I – that the new Board is having its first meeting on Friday. And yet today is Tuesday and we still don’t know who is being appointed to this (on paper) powerful government board. Every Tuesday for the last couple of months I’ve checked Grant Robertson’s Beehive page, and still there is no announcement.

The Governor is a Board member ex officio. And several months the Bank slid onto their website…

The Bill of Rights Bill is framed by the Government as necessary to ensure ‘meaningful democratic oversight’ of human rights protection in the UK, with Conservative MPs keen to present the Bill as a means to restore sovereignty in the face of interfering judges – both at the level of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and UK courts.

However, as this post will argue, the Bill undermines sovereignty and meaningful democratic oversight of rights protection in at least three ways not acknowledged by the Government and the Bill’s supporters. These are in the Bill’s process, presentation and procedures. That is, sovereignty is undermined by, first, the Bill’s process through Parliament, second, its presentation to Parliament by the Government, and third, via the procedures contained in the Bill that facilitate executive interference with judicial scrutiny of human rights protection. As we will see, while the Government purports…

Buzz from the Beehive

The National Party’s strong objection to plans to overhaul New Zealand’s political donations regime, expressed in submissions on the Government’s proposed sweeping changes to electoral law, were reported in a Stuff report last week.

The changes would include lowering the threshold for political parties to disclose donors from $15,000 to $1500 and require political parties to make public their annual financial statements .

This would have a “chilling effect” on democracy, the Nats contended.

The Ardern government isn’t too fussed about protecting the country’s democratic electoral arrangements nowadays, of course, as has become glaringly obvious over the past year or so (see here,here and here for evidence)

And hey – if the Nats (a) are bleating about an electoral-reform proposal being disagreeable and (b) are warning about its chilling effect on democracy…

Well, let’s get on with it.

And sure enough, Justice Minister Kiri…

A piece of posting that will never be seen by almost each and every one of the vainglorious sycophants who decline in many special ways to inform themselves of the degree dysfunction as an integral part of the current bunch of student level politicians business practice exists.

Eric is a person who should be at or near the top of any list of go to persons for anyone of independent thought seeking enlightenment on almost any topic one might select. Of course for the main stream media such seeking is never an issue as their take on all matters comes from the weekly directives from the now expanded media persons who produce the word salads for those gobbing off from the Odium of struth and the avalanche of press releases that have replaced “Investigative Journalism”.

My first point of call to access Eric’s regular commentary is Offsetting Behaviour where this…