Utopia, you are standing in it!

Wrong.  He has just appointed “a skilled and experienced group of people” as the newly established Oranga Tamariki Ministerial Advisory Board.

The group (an  all-Maori team) will begin work on 1 February and Davis expects an initial report (to add to the advice provided by the other reports) by 30 June.  

The board’s appointment was one of three fresh announcements from the Beehive.

The others were 

• Work begins today at Wainuiomata High School to ensure buildings and teaching spaces are fit for purpose; and 
• The green light for New Zealand’s first COVID-19 vaccine could be granted in just over a week.  

Despite claims by wind and solar acolytes that China is well on its way to an all renewables powered future, apparently, the black stuff still matters. A lot.

A month or so back, Beijing banned Australian coal imports (dozens of ships loaded with Australian coal are sitting stuck in harbours along China’s south-east coast). Blackouts and power rationing, soon followed.

That China’s rise out of agrarian poverty is miraculous, is undisputed. So is its status as the world’s largest factory; exporting all manner of manufactures around the planet. Central to that has been the growth in coal-fired power generation capacity.

David Wojick takes a detailed look at what’s really powering China’s economic growth and prosperity.

China loves coal far more than wind
CFACT
David Wojick
11 January 2021

We have all heard about China building a lot of coal plants, but the central role coal plays in their booming…

I rarely write about media bias, but I sometimes come across stories that cry out for correction because of blatant inaccuracies.

• The New York Times asserting that government schools are “starved of funding” when taxpayer subsidies actually have skyrocketed.
• The Washington Post claiming a GOP budget included “large cuts” when spending actually would grow 3.3 percent annually.
• The Economist writing about poverty in the United States, but then citing numbers that have nothing to do with poverty.
• The New York Times asserting that U.S. multinationals pay little tax on foreign-source income, but forgetting to include the taxes paid to foreign governments.
• A Washington Post column blaming problems in France on “austerity” when the nation has the biggest spending burden in Europe.
• The Atlantic reporting about “steady defunding” in Washington when the federal budget has tripled (adjusted for inflation) since 1980.
• A New York Times

Although they live in the ocean like fish, whales are clearly mammals. A reasonably complete series of intermediate fossils have been found for the evolution of whales from terrestrial mammals. A sampling of these transitional species is shown below:

Source: The evolution of whales , https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/evograms_03

Modern whales have no external hind limbs, and have their nostrils or blowholes on top of their heads. Pakicetus (shown in the figure) lived around 52 million years ago. Although it probably spent considerable time submerged in rivers hunting its prey, it was fully terrestrial. It had long, slender legs, and nostrils at the tip of its snout, like most mammals. Dorudon appeared about 12 million years later, and is maybe halfway to modern whales, being fully aquatic, with tiny vestigial hind limbs and nostrils halfway back on its snout. Whales largely similar to modern species appear after another 12 million years or so…

Some unions supported Donald Trump, such as the Pipeliners Local Union 798. Neal Crabtree, a Welding Foreman from Arkansas and a Pipeliners Local Union 798 member, was laid off after President Joe Biden signed an executive order during his first day in office halting construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline citing a climate crisis and not caring one bit about the crisis of people needing to work after the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.

How do we conduct cost-benefit analysis when different policies might harm some in order to help others? This question has become increasingly important in the Year of COVID.

In particular, it is possible that some interventions to prevent the spread of COVID may save the lives of the vulnerable elderly, but have the unfortunate effect of causing other harms and potentially deaths. For example, increased social isolation could lead to increased suicides among the young (we don’t quite have good data on this yet, but it’s at least a possibility).

If you don’t think any public policies will reduce COVID deaths, then the post isn’t for you. It’s all cost, no benefit!

But for those that do recognize the trade-offs, a common way to do the cost-benefit analysis is to look at “years of life lost” or YLL. This is a common approach on Twitter and blogs, but I’ve seen…