Utopia, you are standing in it!

Death and taxes are certainties, so too the wind and solar industry’s critical dependence on massive and endless subsidies.

Those pushing wind and solar keep telling us that the power they produce is ‘free’ and getting cheaper all the time.

Every so often, rent seekers and their political enablers are faced with the retort that, if wind and solar really are so cheap and, therefore, truly competitive with coal, gas and nuclear, then it’s surely time to do away with the $billions in subsidies directed at the unreliables?

Shortly after the stuttering and spluttering stops, wind and solar scammers then start waffling about subsidies to fossil fuels. For sport, try pressing them on the precise nature those subsidies and their total value, and they’ll flounder some more.

The producers of oil, coal and gas all pay royalties to governments based on the volumes extracted, as well as taxes on the…

Original Air Date: September 8, 1966
Stardate: 1513.1
Writer: George Clayton Johnson
Director: Marc Daniels

“The last of its kind. Earth history, remember? Like the passenger pigeon, or… the buffalo.”

The year is 2266. We are introduced to the USS Enterprise, a starship working under Starfleet of the United Federation of Planets. It is on a five-year mission “to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.” The ship arrives at a planet called M-113, a red and arid place inhabited by Dr. Robert Crater, an archaeologist (played by Alfred Ryder who actually suffered a severe arm injury just prior to filming this episode hence why he appears somewhat stiff if you pay close attention). Dr. Crater resides on this remote planet with his wife Nancy. They have been conducting a nearly five-year survey of the planet’s…

Photosynthesis: nature requires carbon dioxide
Another climate sucker falls for the idea that nature’s life giver carbon dioxide is a threat to human existence which can and should be controlled, when a lack of it would be the real problem.
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A deal between Sweden’s political parties positions the country to take responsibility for the carbon footprint of imported goods, says Climate Home News.

Sweden’s political parties agreed on Thursday to include consumption-based emissions within its climate targets, making it the first country in the world to make the leap into the complex realm of overseas emissions reporting.

National climate targets rely on reporting the emissions that are created on a country’s territory.

An aggressive and ambitious Russian has caused policymakers to reflect on the debacle that is subsidised wind and solar. National security is now taken to equate with energy security; a chap with an insatiable thirst for power has revealed what Europe’s renewable energy transition will ultimately mean for those still pretending an all wind and sun-powered future is in the offing.

Obsessive reliance on wind and solar (and the gas inevitably required to provide power when the sun sets and calm weather sets in) has left Europeans vulnerable to the dictates of an erstwhile dictator. As they say, be prepared to reap precisely what you sow.

Putin’s adventures in Ukraine have thrown up an opportunity for our political betters to get a grip and start unscrambling the suicidal energy policies that beset us, before the power pricing and supply calamity seen in Europe spreads further afield, and ruins us, too.

The availability of new hybrids after 2030 is also thrown into question, as the government puts its foot on the climate obsession accelerator. Sales figures of full EVs will now be part of that policy decision. Basically freedom of choice will end in 2027, well before the government’s latest energy strategy has had much chance to take any effect. This looks over-ambitious in terms of electricity supply, to put it mildly.
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More than half of all new cars sold in the UK must be fully electric by 2028, under detailed government proposals unveiled on Thursday to pave the way for phasing out the sale of traditional petrol and diesel vehicles by the end of the decade, says DUK News.

Ministers want to bring in a China-style sales mandate from 2024, which would force carmakers to increase the proportion of electric cars as a percentage of their…

Walpole secured the support of the people and of the House of Commons with a policy of avoiding war. He used his influence to prevent George II from entering the War of the Polish Succession in 1733, because it was a dispute between the Bourbons and the Habsburgs. He boasted, “There are 50,000 men slain in Europe this year, and not one Englishman.” By avoiding wars, Walpole could lower taxes.

After the general elections of 1734, Walpole’s supporters still formed a majority in the House of Commons although they were less numerous than before. He maintained both his parliamentary supremacy and his popularity in Norfolk, his home county.

In 1736 an increase in the tax on gin inspired riots in London. The even more serious Porteous riots broke out in Edinburgh after the King pardoned a captain of the guard (John Porteous) who had commanded his troops to shoot a…

The race to secure reliable and affordable power is on and nuclear power has already crossed the finish line.

2021 was the year when the inherent unreliability of wind and solar revealed how everything depends upon reliable and affordable power supplies.

The wind and solar ‘industries’ talk a big game; and in their wilder moments even claim to be capable of replacing conventional coal, gas and nuclear generators, altogether. Europe’s months-long wind drought in the last half of 2021 demonstrated otherwise. And the peculiar disappearance of solar power, every day is readily explained by that phenomenon known as “sunset”.

The mega-batteries touted as a solution are nothing but an expensive pipe dream.

Which is why the French, among others, are now talking about nuclear power as if it was their very first love.

Faced with the reality of actually trying to rely exclusively on wind and solar, even

Movie Review: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

In the world of spy fiction, there’s John le Carre, and legions of mere mortals, the men and women who give us “Bourne” this and “Bond” that.
And “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” le Carre’s spin on the days when Britain’s spy service was staggering from one “mole” scandal to another — almost fatally compromised for decades — is his masterwork, a subtle and somber thriller about realistic spies engaged in genuine spycraft.
The Oscar nominated film of it, by the Swedish director of “Let the Right One In,” glories in le Carre’s nuances, the intricate mental work of umasking a traitor. It revels in the long, studied pauses of its anti-hero, George Smiley, a disgraced spymaster working outside of the agency, nicknamed “The Circus,” trying to puzzle out/trip up whichever former colleague was actually working for the Soviets the whole time the rest…

Consumption is the largest component of GDP. In 2019, it composed 67.5% of all spending in the US. During the Covid-19 recession, real consumption fell about 18% and took just over a year to recover. But consumption of services, composing 69% of consumption spending, hadn’t recovered almost two years after the 2020 pre-recession peak. For those keeping up with the math, service consumption composed 46.5% of the economic spending in 2019.

We can decompose service consumption even further. The table below illustrates the breakdown of service consumption expenditures in 2019.

I argued in my previous post that the Covid-19 pandemic was primarily a demand shock insofar as consumption was concerned, though potential output for services may have fallen somewhat. When something is 67.5% of the economy, ‘somewhat’ can be a big deal. So, below I breakdown services into its components to identify which experienced supply or demand…