Utopia, you are standing in it!

The wind and solar obsessed in the first world are quite prepared to ensure the World’s poorest stay that way. With economic development agencies peddling ridiculously expensive solar panels – seen as ‘fake electricity’ by those lumbered with it – and forcing tinpot governments to sign up to costly and pointless wind and/or solar power schemes, the ratio of haves to have-nots is likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future.

Eco-zealots have attempted to ram wind and solar power down the throats of Third World governments under the auspices of saving the planet and purportedly with the purpose of dragging millions out of poverty. But it never takes their targets long to work out that wind and solar power are both insanely expensive and hopelessly unreliable; sitting in the dark, night after night, generally does the trick.

Thomas Catenacci reports on another case where first-world virtue signallers found…

By Paul Homewood

Out of touch as ever, President Biden celebrated record-high gas prices Monday, gushing that the pump pain was part of “an incredible transition” of the US economy away from fossil fuels.

“[When] it comes to the gas prices, we’re going through an incredible transition that is taking place that, God willing, when it’s over, we’ll be stronger and the world will be stronger and less reliant on fossil fuels when this is over,” Biden said during a press conference in Japan following his meeting with Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.

https://nypost.com/2022/05/23/biden-praises-gas-prices-as-part-of-incredible-transition/?mc_cid=33bb78c805&mc_eid=4961da7cb1

Biden let’s the cat out of the bag!

Of course, it was always the intention to push up fossil fuel prices, in order to make low carbon alternatives more attractive.

That is precisely why we have carbon pricing, which is being steadily raised.

Earlier this year, I pointed out that President Biden should not be blamed for rising prices.

There has been inflation, of course, but the Federal Reserve deserves the blame. More specifically, America’s central bank responded to the coronavirus pandemic by dumping a lot of money into the economy beginning in early 2020.

Nearly a year before Biden took office.

The Federal Reserve is not the only central bank to make this mistake.

Here’s the balance sheet for the Eurosystem (the European Central Bank and the various national central banks that are in charge of the euro currency). As you can see, there’s also been a dramatic increase in liquidity on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

Why should American readers care about what’s happening with the euro?

In part, this is simply a lesson about the downsides of bad monetary policy. For years, I’ve been explaining that…

Putin’s Ukrainian adventure has Europeans talking about nuclear power as if their existence depends on it. Threaten to deprive people of access to reliable and affordable energy and the love affair with wind and solar is soon forgotten.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to explain the relationship between total collapses in wind and solar output and sunset and calm weather.

True enough the political intelligentsia have done all they can to have the masses believe otherwise but, anticipating that the mob will surely revolt if left freezing in the dark for any length of time, the focus is now on power that can be delivered on-demand, come what may.

Following Europe’s Big Calm, when wind power output barely registered for months, the French President announced a wholesale reversal of their anti-nuclear power plant policy, no doubt driven by the need to ensure that they will never suffer…

Shell Oil scientist M. King Hubbert made a remarkable prediction in 1956. He had analyzed the depletion patterns of various natural resources, and proposed that the production rates of a given resource from a given region would tend to follow a roughly bell-shaped curve. More specifically, he used what is now called the “Hubbert curve”, which is a probability density function of a logistic distribution curve. This curve is like a gaussian function (which is used to plot normal distributions), but is somewhat “wider”:

Normalized Hubbert Curve. Source: Wikipedia.

Hubbert used various reasonable assumptions (which we will not canvass here) in formulating this model curve. Notably, it predicts that the peak production rate will occur when the total resource from that region is 50% depleted, and that the fall in production on the back side of the curve will be as fast as the rise in production…

When the National-led government took office in late 2008, the government’s books were in something of a mess. The Treasury’s projections were for operating deficits of 2 to 3 per cent of GDP each year over the forecast horizon. Since the mid 1990s, under governments led successively by National and by Labour, there had been 14 years in succession of OBEGAL surpluses (a very very small one in the June 1999 year). After all those surpluses there was, of course, not much debt (the Decenber 2008 HYEFU shows net Crown debt for the just-completed year at 0.0% of GDP). It certainly wasn’t, in any substantive economic sense, a fiscal “crisis”, but it was pretty substantially unsettling, both politically and at The Treasury (where I was working at the time).

There was a great deal of rhetoric about Michael Cullen, Minister of Finance in the outgoing government, having squandered the fruits…