Utopia, you are standing in it!

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…

It must be relatively unusual for a political party in office to change tax law, and provide extra budget funding, to enable research to be done towards that party’s next campaign manifesto. But such it appears to be with the High-wealth Individuals research project, the report on which was released yesterday, loudly championed by the Minister of Revenue, David Parker. Not many government department research papers – and that, we are told, is all it is – get a Foreword from a senior Cabinet minister.

Whether or not there was a strong case for doing the research in the first place using the coercive powers of the state, and whether there is – in the broad – anything very surprising in the report (I don’t think I’ve yet seen/heard anything), no doubt there will interesting tables and charts that flesh out our understanding of the selected facts at least a…

Robert Saunders argues that the UK cannot rely on a ceremonial monarchy that seeks to remain apart from politics to protect the constitution from attack in times of crisis. For that, he concludes that other instruments will be needed, without which both monarchy and the constitution will suffer.This post is based on material from the Unit’s new report,The British Monarchy, co-published yesterday by the Unit and the UK in a Changing Europe.

For much of British history, it was hard to imagine a constitutional crisis without the monarch at its core. From the barons at Runnymede imposing Magna Carta on King John to the expulsion of James II in 1688, the English (and, later, British) constitution was forged in the collision between Crown and parliament. As late as the nineteenth century, suspicion of royal power pulsed through progressive politics. Victorians may have revered ‘Her Little Majesty’, but…

Denver Business Journal reports US Supreme Court rejects Boulder’s $100M climate lawsuit against Suncor, Exxon.  That headline is misleading in that SCOTUS declined to rule on the motion to restrict such lawsuits to federal courts.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The United State Supreme Court on Monday declined to take up a lawsuit Boulder and two other local governments filed against oil refiners Suncor Energy and ExxonMobil and deemed similar climate change-related lawsuits matters for state courts.

The nation’s highest court issued orders Monday rejecting oil companies’ request to take up the Boulder case and similar lawsuits filed against other oil industry giants such as BP, Sunoco and Shell by the governments of Baltimore, Maryland; San Mateo County, California; and Honolulu, Hawaii.

Boulder city and county governments and San Miguel County, home to Telluride, joined together in 2018 and sued Calgary-based Suncor Energy and Irving, Texas-based ExxonMobil. The…