Utopia, you are standing in it!

Figure 1. Graph showing the number of volcanoes reported to have been active each year since 1800 CE. Total number of volcanoes with reported eruptions per year (thin upper black line) and 10-year running mean of same data (thick upper red line). Lower lines show only the annual number of volcanoes producing large eruptions (>= 0.1 km3 of tephra or magma) and scale is enlarged on the right axis; thick red lower line again shows 10-year running mean. Global Volcanism Project Discussion

Update April 28, 2023

I am prompted by a discussion at WUWT regarding the role of SO2 in causing climate variabiity.  There are some voices claiming that reduced SO2 from smaller vocanic activity in the Middle Ages caused warming, leading to droughts, crop failures, etc.  And that we could be causing global warming by removing SO2 from the air in modern times.  As the research cited below explains…

Anyone with a basic knowledge of maths understands that people who earn more pay more tax.

To illustrate that, let’s keep it simple and work off a theoretical 10% rate.

Someone who earned $50,000 would pay $5,000; someone who earned $500,000 would pay $5,ooo,000 and someone who earned $5,000,000 would pay $500,000.

Of course the one who earned more would have a lot more left after paying their tax and would be much more likely to have investments that gain in value, at least on paper,  but don’t incur tax.

The government might calls that economic income. Most of that is more commonly known as unrealised capital gains, the taxing of which would be very unfair.

That doesn’t bother the government which set the IRD the task of researching high wealth individuals.

There is no surprise in what the research found:

The Government has wasted $5 million dollars…

Did you know that the Education and Workforce select committee is considering the Education and Training Amendment Act (3)?

And did you know that it includes this requirement for appointments to school boards?

• updating the criteria for co-opting and appointing board members to reflect today’s school communities, by adding the genders, sexualities and sexes of the school’s students and of the school community, and disabled students at the school and the school’s disability community. 

Education Minister Jan Tinetti mentioned this while speaking on the first reading of the Bill:

The bill also expands and modernises the school board member co-option criteria. School boards must have regard for these criteria when deciding to co-opt a board member. The bill updates the criteria to ensure that boards take into account the genders, sexualities, and sexes of students and school community, as well as the disabled students and the school’s disability…

Recent years have been very depressing for supporters of free trade.

Trump pushed protectionist policies.

Now Biden is pushing protectionist policies.

And the European Union is pushing protectionist policies using global warming as an excuse.

More specifically, EU politicians and bureaucrats in Brussels have rammed through a so-called Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), which is euro-speak for a new protectionist tax on imports that are not sufficiently green.

The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial summarizes some of the problems.

The European Parliament this week pulled the trigger on the opening shot in a new climate trade war. …Foreign companies that haven’t paid for carbon emissions at home will have to pay a tariff when exporting goods to Europe. …Climate coercion advocates say a tariff is needed to avoid “carbon leakage,” which is their term for the flight of manufacturing to countries with less onerous emissions restrictions.

Joel Kotkin explains in his Spiked article The inhumanity of the green agenda.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The ‘sustainability’ regime is impoverishing the world.

In recent years, the overused word ‘sustainability’ has fostered a narrative in which human needs and aspirations have taken a back seat to the green austerity of Net Zero and ‘degrowth’. The ruling classes of a fading West are determined to save the planet by immiserating their fellow citizens. Their agenda is expected to cost the world $6 trillion per year for the next 30 years.

Meanwhile, they will get to harvest massive green subsidies
and live like Renaissance potentates.

In Enemies of Progress, author Austin Williams suggests that ‘the mantra of sustainability’ starts with the assumption that humanity is ‘the biggest problem of the planet’, rather than the ‘creators of a better future’. Indeed, many climate scientists and…