Utopia, you are standing in it!

Prince George Frederick Ernest Albert was distinct in nearly every way from his wayward, philandering father. He was a slim man –shy, and abstemious– and he often wore the same elegant clothes to public events (despising most newfangled trends). Moral strength was paramount for George. A former navy man, Prince George was accustomed to unchanging daily routines and the peace of mind that came with country life. He was a luddite who refused to be driven in a car above 30 miles an hour and he despised trains and airplanes, but loved hunting and stamp collecting. In all things, he was an orderly and disciplined man with an unassuming nature.

In 1892, Prince George’s erratic and apparently perverted older brother Eddy died and thus George found himself in the unexpected position of inheriting the crown’s succession. He quickly left the Navy and began preparations to one day become king. Unlike…

With the magnitude of the renewable energy-driven disaster playing out in Europe hard to ignore, it seems incredible that American Green New Deal Democrats remain fixated on chaotically intermittent wind and solar. And yet, they show no signs of relenting on their determined path to inevitable energy insecurity; an approach that borders on National treachery.

Call it a cult, call it good old-fashioned lunacy, whichever way you slice it becomes hard to explain, let alone justify, policies quite obviously designed to drive American enterprise into the ground.

The only winners are, of course, the rent-seekers and crony capitalists who stand to profit from an endless stream of subsidies directed to the owners of bird-mincing turbines and weather-prone solar panels.

Paul Driessen focuses on Virginia as the perfect example of the clear and present danger subsidised wind and solar represent to America’s energy security.

Assessing Virginia’s Hidden Wind and Solar Costs

I wasn’t going to write anything here today, but I couldn’t let the final question and answer from this morning’s Finance and Expenditure Committee hearing on the Monetary Policy Statement go without record and comment.

Simon Bridges, National’s FInance spokesman, asked the Governor whether the current prohibition – agreed between the Governor, the Board and the Minister – on any (external) MPC member having any active, engaged (present or future) analytical/research interest in monetary policy was not “frankly simply daft”, and did it not “ruin the ability to have thought diversity”.

He might well have added, but time was short, “and without precedent anywhere else in the advanced world” (or quite probably in most of the less-advanced world). Ben Bernanke would be disqualified, Lars Svensson would be out, and one could run a very long list of the sort of people who’ve served with distinction on the MPCs of other…

Last week the Supreme Court rendered the much-awaited judgment in R (PRCBC and O (by her litigation friend AO)) v Secretary of State for the Home Department

(‘PRCBC’), upholding the capacity for the government to set the fees as it pleases (subject to approval by both Houses of Parliament) for citizenship applications under Section 1(4) of the British Nationality Act 1981 (‘the 1981 Act’), pursuant to Section 68 of the Immigration Act 2014 (‘the 2014 Act’). The Supreme Court appears to have taken an even more rigid stance – and with potential far-reaching implications – on the question of the legality of the Fees Order, by which the citizenship application fees are set, than the Court of Appeal, whose decision has already been critically analysed in an excellentposton this blog in May last year. In this respect, the decision of the Supreme Court is striking from more than…

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.

In short, the deliberate destruction of reliable and affordable power supplies has put their critical significance front and centre.

Energy is the most important issue in the world
Spectator
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
24 January…

Antarctic sea ice [image credit: BBC]
There’s a pattern here. How often do these gung-ho sea trips to polar regions by climate botherers — sorry, researchers — run into sea ice trouble, usually sooner rather than later?
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When Ernest Shackleton’s ship, Endurance, became trapped in Antarctic sea ice in 1915, the crew had no choice but to drift helplessly for nine months before their ship finally sank, says The Telegraph (via MSN News).

The expedition to find the Endurance’s wreck came close to the same fate late on Sunday.

But where Shackleton’s men could rely only on patience, the Agulhas II has 16,000 horsepower of propulsion, movable ballast, and a container full of aviation fuel.

If anything I came away from today’s Monetary Policy Statement and (the bulk of it that I saw) the Governor’s press conference more convinced that I was yesterday that the OCR should have been raised by 50 basis points today.

There were a couple of elements in the minutes that were a little more encouraging than one might have feared.

There was the fact that a 50 point increase was clearly seriously considered, and debated. There was the fact that that debate was actually disclosed in the minutes (I think that is a first). There was the explicit comment not ruling out 50 point increases in the future. And there was, at last, a slow start to the process of unwinding the huge punt on the future of bond rates taken on in the LSAP intervention of 2020 and 2021.

It could have been worse. There clearly is an element…

Today marks the 60th anniversary of Adolf Eichmann’s death sentence. I am not going too much in the history of Eichmann, there is not that much I can add to the narrative.

On December 11–12, 1961, Eichmann was convicted of crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and membership in a criminal organization. He was sentenced to death on December 15.

His defense was basically that he had only been following orders.

During World War I, Eichmann’s family moved from Germany to Linz, Austria. His pre-Nazi life was rather ordinary. He worked as a traveling salesman in Oberösterreich (Upper Austria) for an oil company but lost his job during the Great Depression. He had actually attended Kaiser Franz Joseph Staatsoberrealschule (state secondary school) in Linz. A certain Adolf Hitler had been a student in that same school 17 years prior.

Eichmann joined the Nazi Party in April…

Erie, Pennsylvania [image credit: UK Met Office]
Another modelling problem to add to the list: ‘The models reproduced decreasing snow depth trends that contradicted the observations’. Will any of this get a mention in next week’s new IPCC report?
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Seasonal snow cover plays an important role in the interactions between ground and atmosphere, including energy and hydrological fluxes, thus influencing climatological and hydrological processes, says Phys.org.

Researchers from the Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Lanzhou University evaluated the simulated snow depth from 22 CMIP6 models across high-latitude regions of the Northern Hemisphere over the period 1955–2014 by using a high-quality in situ observational dataset.

Related results were published in the Journal of Climate.