Utopia, you are standing in it!

For those still reaching to raise their bat for a half century the Erebus disaster is a relic of history that happened over forty years ago, like the Wahine Ferry sinking after hitting rocks at the entrance to Wellington Harbour another decade earlier also labelled a disaster both events had more rumour than fact about cause and blame. With potential costs to central government corporates spent considerable effort to obscure what happened. With Erebus it was simpler with both the Pilot and his Right seat companion both dead it was not long before Pilot Error gained currency as the Cause.

Because over two hundred and fifty perished on the slopes of Mt Erebus the Government was eventually in the position of reluctantly creating a Royal Commission to investigate. Of course that action is normally set up with terms of reference as to what the government wants as an outcome and…

Irish wind farm [image credit: RTG @ Wikipedia]
Climate virtue signalling comes back to bite vote-chasing politicians, who expected they could dump many of the potentially unpopular decisions on taxes and spending arising from their 2015 law onto a later government. They now have to lay out plans for the next 30 years, long after their mandate to govern.
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Judges ruled the government’s national mitigation plan fell “well short” of what was needed to meet Ireland’s climate commitments, ordering a more ambitious strategy, as Climate Home News reports.

The Irish government has been ordered to take more aggressive action on climate change, following a ruling by the country’s top judges.

In a judgment published today [31/07/2020], the supreme court said Ireland’s existing emission cutting plans fell “well short” of what was required to meet its climate commitments and must be replaced with a more ambitious strategy.

By Pei Gao (NYU Shanghai) & Eric B. Schneider (LSE)

The full article from this blog is forthcoming in the Economic History Review and is currently available on Early View.

HMS Indefatigable with HMS Diadem (1898) in the Gulf of St. Lawrence 1901. Available at Wikimedia Commons.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, the average height of adult British men increased by 11 centimetres. This increase in final height reflects improvements in living standards and health, and provides insights on the growth pattern of children which has been comparatively neglected. Child growth is very sensitive to economic and social conditions: children with limited nutrition or who suffer from chronic disease, grow more slowly than healthy children. Thus, to achieve such a large increase in adult height, health conditions must have improved dramatically for children since the mid-nineteenth century.

Our paper seeks to understand how child growth changed over time…

Last week and with another hat of mine on I was engaged on some case work for the Ministry of Social Development. The departmental officials I was working with were bemoaning the dearth of private rental accommodation in Northland. They said there was an increasing trend that saw private landlords selling up and exiting the market.

And then over at Kiwiblog today a guest post on the Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill being pushed through parliament this week under urgency so I decided to have a look at the Bill. You can access it at http://legislation.govt.nz/bill/government/2020/0218/latest/LMS294929.html Two observations …

Clause 36 amends Section 51 of the principal Act and provides that a landlord may only seek to terminate a tenancy if the tenant has been in at least five working days in arrears the rent over three separate occasions in a period of 90 days.

Clause 37 inserts a new Section…

Having lost the un-loseable election in May last year, an angry rump of Labor backbenchers is keen to ditch the party’s suicidal renewable energy policies, with a view to recovering the ground they lost trying to win the sandalista vote in the inner city goat’s cheese circle.

Australia’s economic future depends, in no small part, on getting the ALP to decouple itself from the lunatic fringes of the hard-green left, and to start thinking about reliable and affordable power, of the kind that fuels industry growth and jobs.

Whatever policies are directed at recovering from the coronavirus lockdown, without reliable and affordable power Australia’s energy hungry businesses are doomed. With rocketing power prices, and an intermittent supply, mineral processors and manufacturers are terminal, and have been for years.

Politicians and academic boffins have been giving lip service to improving Australia’s “resilience” and “self-sufficiency”, resulting in the renaissance of Australian…