Utopia, you are standing in it!

A few days ago on Twitter, Nathan Robinson made the claim that global capitalism wasn’t reducing poverty. In fact, it appears that poverty, using the threshold of $10/day (rather than the usual lower numbers) has increased from 1981 to 2017:

While there were a lot of critical responses to him on Twitter, he’s not wrong about the data: in 2017, there were 1.3 billion more people living on less than $10 per day (we’re going to assume in this post that the underlying data is basically correct, and correctly…

Carpetbaggers profiting from hopelessly intermittent wind and solar still claim that mega-batteries are the solution to their obvious lack of reliability.

But it only takes a moment’s reckoning to appreciate that the grid-scale storage electricity generated by wind or solar is a perfect nonsense.

It hasn’t occurred anywhere in the world; nor will it.

David Wojick explains why below.

VCEA makes Virginia’s electric grid dangerously unreliable
CFACT
David Wojick
21 January 2022

The oddly named Virginia Clean Economy Act or VCEA mandates the phaseout of fossil fueled power generation by 2045, with deadlines all along the way. Dominion Energy, Virginia’s primary electric utility, recently filed what is called an Integrated Resource Plan. In their recent IRP, Dominion’s Alternative Plan C is designed to comply with the VCEA.

This design is not sufficient to maintain reliability. The inevitable result will be price spikes and blackouts.

The basic problem with the Plan…

I’m yielding to no one in my low view of the Reserve Bank Monetary Policy Committee. I’ve been writing about the problems – structural and personal – since the new Potemkin-village model (designed to look shiny and new, but to change little) was set up three years ago, and it was (for example) one of my Official Information Act requests that got the written confirmation that the Minister, Governor and the Bank’s Board had formally agreed that no one with ongoing expertise in monetary policy or macroeconomics, or likely future interest in researching such matters, would be appointed (as an external member) to the new Monetary Policy Committee (three relevant posts here, here, and here). It was a simply extraordinary exclusion, which reflected very poorly on all involved, but which never seemed to get the scrutiny from media or MPs that it deserved. In no other modern…

An immensely popular, chubby-cheeked, convivial man, Edward VII was in all truth a mostly unremarkable man with hardly a moral fiber in his insubstantial body. He was known as a frivolous “Prince of Pleasure,” a man all-too familiar with the sin of gluttony. His reign represented a minor nine-year epilogue to the Victorian Age, as if to offer the Ancien Régime one final sip of fine wine and a cigar before the long dark shadow of war crept over Europe. While personally he was a rather silly man, Edward VII still managed to transform the British monarchy from the cloistered and stoic brand of Queen Victoria, into the showy offering of public pageantry we see today.

Christened Albert Edward and known to his family as “Bertie,” the future Edward VII was a self-indulgent, intransigent young man. He rebelled against his father Albert’s strenuous educational curriculum and often landed himself in…

Following a Biden Executive Order, in April 2021 several states went to Louisiana District Court to stop implementation of Social Cost of Carbon with respect to federal regulations.  The Memorandum Ruling regarding that case is State of Louisiana et al Versus Joseph R. Biden Jr. et al.  The Plaintiff States are Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Dakota, Texas, West Virginia, and Wyoming. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.  H/T Francis Menton

The Issues

The Plaintiff States seek injunctive and declaratory relief on three grounds.First, they assert that the SC-GHG Estimates violate the procedural requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”) as a substantive rule that did not undergo the requisite notice-and-comment process. See 5 U.S.C. § 553.

Second, the Plaintiff States claim that President Biden, through EO 13990, and the IWG lack the authority to enforce the estimates as they are substantively unlawful under the…