Utopia, you are standing in it!

A U.S. military policeman prepares Corporal Wilhelm Schmidt, 24, for the firing squad. With two other German spies, Officer-Cadet Guenther Billing, 21, and Sergeant Manfred Pernass, 23, Schmidt was shot after a court-martial by American authorities in Belgium during the Ardennes offensives. Three Germans were captured wearing American uniforms, armed with American weapons and driving an American jeep during the ill-fated enemy offensive in December 1944. They failed to give the password of any proper identification when stopped and admitted that their mission was to locate and sabotage communications and reconnoitre bridges and roads over the Meuse. Specially trained for espionage, the men had familiarized themselves with the American accent by mingling with U.S. prisoners of war in Germany.

source

Have you seen this chart? I certainly have. It floats around on social media a lot. The chart seems to indicate that poor Americans are better off than the average person in most other rich countries. Roughly equal to Canada and France, and better off than Denmark or New Zealand.

When I’ve asked for sources in the past, people usually aren’t sure. They remember downloading it from somewhere, but they can’t recall where.

But I think I found the source: it’s this article from JustFacts. After seeing how they calculated it, I’m skeptical that it provides a good comparison of poor Americans to other countries.

Here’s what the chart does. For most countries, it uses a World Bank measure of consumption per capita. They then convert that to US dollars using PPP adjustments. For the poor in the US, they use a consumption estimate for the bottom 20%…

On Twitter, folks have been supporting and piling on to a guy whose bottom line was that we are able to afford much less now than we could in 1990 (I won’t link to it because he’s not a public figure). The piling on has been by economist-like people and the support has been from… others?

Regardless, the claim can be analyzed in a variety of ways. I’m more intimate with the macro statistics, so here’s one of many valid stabs at addressing the claim. I’ll be using aggregates and averages from the BEA consumer spending accounts.

LNG vessels [image credit: offshoreenergytoday.com]
Who knew? Just as night follows day, replacing on-demand power generation with intermittent sources can and does cause reliability and other issues of varying severity. Preferring imported gas to domestic sources was another avoidable mistake, leading to far more of the supposedly fearsome CO2 emissions than necessary. The climate excuse is wearing thin.
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The UK will be scrambling for highly expensive gas imports to meet its energy needs this winter to stave off blackouts whenever the wind doesn’t blow, warned a leading energy expert.

Ole Hansen, head of commodity strategy at Saxo Bank, told City A.M. that the intermittent performance of domestic renewable power is proving costly for the West.

He argued the country lacks a reliable alternative base-load of power aside from highly expensive natural gas.

By Paul Homewood

It will likely be coming out of the mouth of an environmental activist.

Although it could also be coming from a European Union official looking for yet another angle via which tariffs and other restrictions can be placed on imported food from far-flung places like New Zealand, Australia and Asia.

You response should be as follows from this article, Eating local is still not a good way to reduce the carbon footprint of your diet:

Transport isjust 5%of food emissions.2Here we’re talking about emissions from ‘food miles’
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The reason this number is so low is because most food that is transported internationally comes by boat. And, shipping isvery carbon-efficient. Per kilometre,it emits10 to 20 times less than trucks on the road. And around 50 times less than flying
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Surprisingly,more than 80%of the CO₂ from food transport is produced…