Utopia, you are standing in it!

No industrial economy has ever powered itself on sunshine and breezes; no country ever will.

Wherever in the world the subsidies begin to dry up, so too has investment in new wind and solar capacity. Nowhere has that collapse been more prominent than in China. Which doesn’t quite fit with the meme that’s been run by renewable energy zealots for years now, that China is hell-bent on a renewable energy future.

Instead, China is building coal-fired power plants, hand over fist.

At the official level the Chinese give a nod and a bow to meeting their purported “climate obligations” – which is simply code for preventing them from enjoying the same industrial and economic success as Europeans have done for the last two centuries – by promising (sometime between now and never) to slash their emissions of carbon dioxide gas.

Always inscrutable, the Chinese have incensed renewable energy rent seekers…

The Productivity Commission looks into topics the government of the day asks them to.  The current government asked for a report on issues around the “future of work” (a favoured topic of the current Minister of Finance when he was in Opposition) and the final report is due out next month.

The Commission has released a series of five draft reports looking at various aspects of the issue.  Late last year I wrote quite critically about one of those reports in which the Commission championed the case for a larger and more active welfare state, claiming that by adopting such policies New Zealand’s productivity performance might be improved.  As I noted

What it boils down to, amid various reasonable insights, is a push for a much bigger welfare state, allegedly in the cause of lifting average New Zealand productivity (and sustainable wages), without a shred of evidence or careful considered…

H/T The GWPF

The UK government seems to have a bad case of climate derangement syndrome at the moment, in the run-up to the COP26 conference in Glasgow this year. How much economic damage could its futile attempts to reduce the supply of essential carbon dioxide (CO2) to the Earth’s ecosystems do?
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Homeowners could be forced to replace their gas boilers to ensure the UK meets its target to be carbon neutral by 2050, ministers are warning.

The Government will publish a White Paper later this year which will set out the “bigger decisions” that the UK has to make to meet the target, says the Sunday Telegraph.

Lord Duncan of Springbank, the Climate Change minister, said that the White Paper will consider whether the Government should ban gas central heating altogether from all homes.

by Peter Lang and Ken Gregory

A new paper ‘Economic impact of energy consumption change caused by global warming’ finds global warming may be beneficial.

Needless to say, this won’t please either the real or fake climate obsessives.
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In his recent presentation to the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Professor Gautam Kalghatgi answers the question: ‘Is it really the end of internal combustion engines and petroleum in transport?’

Gautam Kalghatgi is currently a Visiting Professor at Imperial College London (Mechanical Engineering) and also at Oxford University (Engineering Science).

He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, Society of Automotive Engineers, Institute of Mechanical Engineers and the Combustion Institute and an Honorary Fellow of the International Society for Energy, Environment and Sustainability.

He worked for 31 years at Shell Research followed by 8 years in Saudi Aramco before retiring in June 2018.

Source: The GWPF