Utopia, you are standing in it!

Wind and solar are said to be ‘cheap’, but then so’s talk. 2021 was the year when wind and solar were revealed to be thoroughly useless, thanks to their inherent intermittency and general lack of reliability.

Starting in September last year, for months on end, Europe’s wind power fleet struggle to produce any consistent power of any value, at all. Week after week, wind power output barely registered in Germany and the UK.

Unable to deliver even occasional bursts of power, Europe’s wind industry was relegated to the status of a laughingstock, while Germans and British fired up their old coal-fired power plants, the only thing preventing a wholesale grid collapse.

The renewable energy debacle wasn’t confined to Europe, as Robert Bryce details below.

Seven Top Energy Stories of 2021
Forbes
Robert Bryce
31 December 2021

It has been a chaotic year in the energy sector. And with just a…

One of the (many) unfortunate tendencies of politicians is that they focus on the short run (i.e., their upcoming reelection battles).

Why is this unfortunate? Because there are some policy changes that may be costly in the short run, but they are nonetheless very worthwhile because they generate big long-run benefits.

• Shifting to a system of personal retirement accounts means trillions of dollars of near-term “transition costs” in order to protect current retirees and older workers, but reform will solve the program’s long-term $40 trillion-plus unfunded liability.
• Messy fights over the debt limit create (almost certainly exaggerated) concerns about potential default, but that potential cost would be trivial compared to the long-run benefits of figuring out how to limit the growing burden of federal spending.
• When bad monetary policy causes a financial bubble or housing bubble, shifting to good monetary policy presumably will…

According to legend Carthage was founded in 814 BC. Its history came to an end in 146 BC, the year in which Rome defeated and utterly destroyed it. Richard Miles is a young historian whose book, Carthage Must Be Destroyed, sets out to record everything we know about Carthage, from the legends of its founding, through its umpteen wars, up to the final catastrophe.

Carthage Must Be Destroyed is long, 373 pages of text, 77 pages of notes, 34 page bibliography and a 66-page index = 521 pages.

It is not a social or political history. There is hardly anything about Carthage’s form of government, a reasonable amount about its economy (trade and some agriculture), a surprising amount about the evolving design and metallurgy of its coinage (in the absence of other evidence, coins are a good indicator of cultural changes and economic success), and quite a lot about…

Outfits like the Sierra Club ought to be charged with High Treason, for trying to destroy reliable and affordable power supplies – supplies critical to peace, prosperity and the survival of Western civilisation.

As to defence, in a high-tech world of internet surveillance, satellite reconnaissance and remotely controlled drones, try protecting the Realm without electricity available around-the-clock.

Over the last 20 years, so-called ‘green’ groups have given up on saving the environment and have directed their hate towards reliable and affordable power.

Openly committed to the destruction of power sources generated with fossil fuel and fervently dedicated to resisting the CO2 emissions-free nuclear power that ought to placate their doom and gloom forecasts about the climate, it’s as if these characters are intent on destroying their own societies, from within.

With the hapless Joe Biden in the White House, and Bernie Sanders and his Squad intent on directing energy policy…

Some medieval English kings have unfairly gotten a bad rap. Others are deservedly vilified (Richard III, I’m talking to you).

Our modern-day perception of English kings is largely constructed from only a few sources. Of course, we have the writings of Shakespeare which were generally based on the real events of English monarchs but had lots of extra drama added in to spice things up. We also have the writings of chroniclers who actually lived in the middle ages, but they aren’t always reliable. Just imagine if you were hired by Henry VIII to write the history of his reign. You would definitely write it in a way that reflected very well on the king. And we have modern-day historians who try to bring the past to life with new interpretations of English monarchs and their new explanations of their controversial actions.

One of the English kings who has received very…

It is two years today since my first post about pandemics (and the economy). Rereading it, and another the following week, over the weekend and it was interesting to reflect on what issues had (and hadn’t) sprung to mind. But back then, however fearful people might or might not have been initially, few would have supposed that two years on we’d be labouring under new, and even more onerous, restrictions, and that for the best part of two years few of us would have been able to travel.

I was quite supportive of the need for restrictions, especially at the border, for quite a long time. Even last year, when the government was so slow to roll out the vaccine, doing everything possible to keep the virus out would have seemed appropriate (ie more than the government actually did). As for domestic restrictions, in both 2020 and 2021 the…