Achieving Net Zero In The Graveyard Of The Failed Green Religion
03 Feb 2023 Leave a comment
Leaders posing as controllers of the weather demand impossible to achieve and damaging energy policies. Is this (cartoon) where net zero is taking us? Ignoring the sun won’t work.
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According to the clerics of the Green Cult, once we blow up our last coal mine, send all diesel engines to the wreckers, stop using concrete, reinvent sailing clippers, cover the grasslands and hills with solar clutter and wind machines, and then slaughter all of our cattle… global climate will become serene – not too warm, not too cold, writes Viv Forbes (via climate Change Dispatch).
Wild weather will cease, and there will be no more droughts, floods, cyclones, or snowstorms and no more plant and animal extinctions.
But the records written in the rocks tell a far different story about climate changes. Even when nature was in full control, it was not a serene place.
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Do we really need a racialised environment and resource management system?
03 Feb 2023 Leave a comment
A visitor to New Zealand who read the Natural and Built Environment and the Spatial Planning Bills would assume our country was populated largely by Māori tribes whose customs and traditional knowledge could solve resource management challenges. In reading the Bills in more depth she would infer the tribes were impeded in using their knowledge by a powerful, yet unhelpful entity termed “the Crown.” To her relief she would then “learn” that 183 years ago the tribes and Crown had signed a Treaty which stipulated principles and the Crown’s obligations in relation to Māori. Legislation based on these principles and obligations was being enacted to ensure Māori had adequate input into natural and built environment and spatial planning issues. So far, so good!
However, when reading the Bills in isolation she would not realise that self-identified Māori make up only about 16% of the New Zealand population, and almost…
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Economic Recovery from the Pandemic
02 Feb 2023 Leave a comment
How well have countries recovered from the declines in the pandemic? It’s actually a bit difficult to answer that question, because it depends on how you measure it. Even if we agree that GDP is the best measure, how do we measure recovery? One possibility is to simply ask whether the country has exceeded its pre-pandemic GDP level. Exactly which quarter to use as the baseline is debatable, but here is a chart that Joseph Politano made for G7 countries using the 3rd quarter of 2019 as the baseline.
But we know that absent the pandemic, most countries would have continued growing (absent a recession for some other reason), so just getting back to pre-pandemic levels isn’t necessarily a full recovery. But how much growth should we have expected? It’s a hard question, but here’s a chart along those lines from the Washington Post, using the CBO’s measure of…
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The nature of science
02 Feb 2023 Leave a comment
in economics of education Tags: conjecture and refutation, philosophy of science
Szasz Podcast
02 Feb 2023 Leave a comment
in health economics Tags: economics of mental illness
I just did a new podcast with Aaron Olson on the late great Thomas Szasz. Aaron is well-versed in my notorious article, “The Economics of Szasz: Preferences, Constraints, and Mental Illness… 166 more words
Szasz Podcast
Alec Baldwin’s Involuntary Manslaughter Charges: A Legal Analysis | @WSJ
01 Feb 2023 Leave a comment
in economics of crime, law and economics, movies
SMR Gold Rush: Smart Money Backing Small Modular Nuclear Reactors
01 Feb 2023 Leave a comment
Europe’s energy crisis is all down to its delusional reliance upon intermittent wind and solar, which is why the smart money is backing nuclear power, at any scale, including Small Modular Reactors.
The list of operators investing in SMR technology is growing at such a rate that could be described as an investor gold rush.
In the US, NuScale, based in Oregon, has cleared all of the regulatory hurdles and is ready to deliver 924MW reactors to those with the wit and temerity to acquire them (more on NuScale below).
Britain’s Rolls-Royce is well ahead of the curve, with a 470MW unit almost ready to roll.
Hot on the heels of NuScale and Rolls-Royce, UK Atomics – a subsidiary of Denmark’s Copenhagen Atomics, GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, Holtec International, BWX Technologies are on the process of designing, developing and improving on SMR technology.
There is little new about SMRs –…
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Massive Cover-up Exposed: 285 Papers From 1960s-’80s Reveal Robust Global Cooling Scientific ‘Consensus’
01 Feb 2023 Leave a comment
Palestine, Poverty, and Neoliberalism
01 Feb 2023 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, defence economics, development economics, discrimination, economic history, economics of bureaucracy, economics of crime, growth disasters, growth miracles, human capital, industrial organisation, labour economics, labour supply, law and economics, poverty and inequality, Public Choice, war and peace Tags: Middle-East politics
I came to know Luigi Achilli through his work on human smuggling, but he also spent a year living in a Palestinian refugee camp. What did he learn there? 644 more words
Palestine, Poverty, and Neoliberalism
2050: The never-ending nightmare of Net Zero
31 Jan 2023 Leave a comment
Classifying this as humour may not be appropriate, but we live in hope.
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IT IS the year 2050 and Britain, relentlessly driven by the governing Labour-Green coalition, has achieved Net Zero, imagines David Wright @ TCW (The Conservative Woman).
The nation is quite unrecognisable from the comfortable, well-fed country it was in the early part of the 21st century.
Massive wind turbines cover the landscape; the old ones built 25 years ago now knocked down and lying next to the new ones because it was uneconomic to remove them.
The whole country is covered in a dense spider’s web of power lines from the multitude of wind and solar farms miles from where the power is needed.
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