Utopia, you are standing in it!

I’ve been reading the papers released the other day by Treasury (in one case written jointly with IRD) on the Minister of Finance’s hankering to tax Australian banks more heavily, retrospectively.

There seem to be three such papers, a 10 February Treasury Report, a short 17 February Treasury aide-memoire, and a 10 March joint Treasury/IRD report. Nothing appears to have been withheld from the first two, but there are several, quite lengthy, bits withheld from the 10 March paper, in many cases apparently references to legal advice officials may have received.

The 10 February paper is titled “Windfall gains in the New Zealand banking sector, and responses”, apparently part of something called “Project Cricket”. Retrospective taxes targeted at companies the Minister of Finance doesn’t like and are just considered politically ripe for the plucking are…..really not cricket. But perhaps that irony escaped both the authors and the…

• Bryce Edwards writes –

The ultra-rich can breathe easy and progressive voters can scream into the void, because Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has ruled out any meaningful reform to our broken and unfair tax system. The Labour leader says it won’t happen on his watch.

Official documents were released on Wednesday showing the Government asked officials to draw up ideas for how a wealth tax might work. They then focused-grouped the idea and this exercise showed it wouldn’t be an easy win for Labour so, regardless of its merits, it was thrown on the bonfire.

Hipkins was then asked whether Labour might implement wealth taxes during its next term in government, and he categorically ruled out any such progressive reforms under his leadership.

The Progressive tax reforms that Labour rejected

We now know that Treasury put together a number of different models for how a major taxation reset could be…

Dare we hope that this strong feeling there’ll be a change of government will be what happens?

. . .Appearing on AM’s political panel, Newstalk ZB’s senior political correspondent Barry Soper and Newshub’s Patrick Gower from Paddy Gower Has Issues slammed the current Labour Government.

“Chris Hipkins, he’s liked by his caucus, there’s no doubt about that, but he can’t remove himself from all of the decisions that were made in Cabinet,” Soper said.

He might like us to see him as a new Prime Minister but Hipkins was a senior Minister and responsible for many of the failings under the previous PM.

“You can have as many bonfires as you like, it’s still, essentially, the same Government and when it comes to people getting thrown out like Michael Wood, all the portfolios where do they go? They go to overworked ministers.”

Soper said earlier this year he told Hipkins…

The wind and solar ‘industries’ always struggle with their neighbours, principally because they treat them as ‘roadkill’.

But that model doesn’t work when those neighbours are determined to fight back, using every legal means available.

Such is the case with Shaun and Amie Harris, who took a solar power outfit to court seeking damages for the nuisance that it had caused by polluting their land with silt and sediment.

The jury awarded them a cool US$10.5 million in damages, and whacked the solar generator and its construction contractors with a further US$125 million in fines for their egregious misconduct.

Bonner Cohen reports on the result below.

Solar farm runoff pollutes property, couple awarded $135 million
CFACT
Bonner Cohen
6 June 2023

Inflicting heavy fines on developers of a project billed as supplying clean, renewable energy, a federal jury has awarded a couple in southwest Georgia $135.5 million after runoff from…

Currently some Zero Carbon zealots are trying to discredit and disappear a peer reviewed study of CO2 atmospheric concentrations because its findings contradict IPCC dogma.  The paper is World Atmospheric CO2, Its 14C Specific Activity, Non-fossil Component, Anthropogenic Fossil Component, and Emissions (1750–2018). by Skrable et al. (2022).  The link is to the paper and also shows the comments recently addressed to the authors and the editor of the journal, as well as responses by both.

This came to my attention by way of a comment by one of the attackers on my 2022 post regarding this study.  Text is below in italics with my bolds.

D. Andrews 10/7/2023

This post is over a year old, but in the interest of correcting the record, please note the following:
1. Skrable et al. have conceded that the data they “guesstimated” bore little resemblance to actual atmospheric radiocarbon data.

2. In…

NYC going after pizza oven emissions. You’d have to burn a pizza stove 849 years to equal one year of John Kerry’s private jet

In his Master Resource article Energy Appliance Victory! (DC Circuit vs. DOE), Mark Krebs explains the DOE agency machinations targeting boilers as a case in point of government bureaucrats attacking everyone’s economic well-being in the name of saving the planet.  First, a contextual piece describes the game plan behind all this.  Later on, a synopsis of Kreb’s analysis of the tactics on the ground.

Background:  Why This Judgment Matters 

Biden’s Green Rules Make Appliances Cost More and Do Less

Authored by Kevin Stocklin at The Epoch Times, published at Planet Today.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The Biden administration announced in December 2022 its pledge to take “more than 100 actions” to impose significantly tighter environmental standards on consumer goods is…