Utopia, you are standing in it!

Can they be reinstated or was that why Vlad waited so long?

France meanwhile enjoys 70% of it’s energy from Nuclear, and people suggest Germany is pragmatic, smart and efficient while laughing at the garlic munchers.

The inmates running asylums and who knew?

Australia’s power pricing and supply calamity is the product of policies deliberately designed to wreck reliable and affordable power supplies. Massive and seemingly endless subsidies to chaotically intermittent wind and solar have done what they were designed to do: drive the owners of reliable coal-fired power generators to the wall, by allowing wind and solar generators to occasionally deliver power to the market ahead of the cheap and reliable stuff.

The relationship between weather-dependent wind/sunshine dependent solar and rocketing power prices is crystal clear; see above the trend identified by Dr Michael Crawford a couple of years back, a trend which continues mercilessly upwards (read on).

Thanks to the erratic and occasional delivery of wind and solar, wholesale power prices are surging out of control and major energy users are simply being chopped from the grid when wind and/or solar output hits the floor. And this is just…

Driven by climate alarmists and rent seekers ready to profit from the wind and solar subsidy scam, net zero carbon dioxide emissions targets are just the latest woke wheeze to grip our political betters.

The idea that modern economies can function without the energy generated by fossil-fuels (whether consumed by motorcars or in power generation) is up there with living on Mars and perpetual motion machines.

In a move that first perplexed and then thoroughly alienated those who voted for him in May 2019, Australia’s PM, Scott Morrison signed Australia up to a net-zero carbon oxide gas emissions target to be reached by 2050.

At Australia’s polling booths today, the big winners from that move will be Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party and Big Clive’s United Australia Party who will attract plenty of disgruntled former Liberal voters.

The Liberals, once a notionally conservative party, have not only abandoned their base…

The Transit Costs Project adjusts all construction costs for purchasing power parities. This means that, for example, a Chinese subway is converted into dollars not at the exchange rate of $1 = 6.7¥, but at the PPP rate of $1 = 4.2¥; this means that present-day Chinese subways look 1.5 times more expensive in our analysis than in analyses that use exchange rate values, and projects from 10 years ago look twice as expensive. I believe our choice is correct, and would like to explain why, since it has gotten some criticism from serious people, who’s prefer exchange rates.

Local costs

I started this comparing mature developed countries. The US and Europe have largely separate markets for construction, and so American work is almost entirely done in dollars and European work in euros (or pounds, or kronor, etc.). Japan is likewise very local and so is China. In that…

I have written many postsaboutinternationaldifferencesin subwayconstructioncosts. They’ve gotten a lot of media attention, percolating even topoliticians and to a team of academics. Against this positive attention, there have been criticisms. Three come to mind: the numbers are incorrect, costs do not matter, and the comparisons are apples-and-oranges. The first criticism depends entirely on whether one disbelieves figures given in high-quality trade publications, government websites, and mass media. The second criticism I addressed at the beginning of the year, comparing the extent of subway construction in Sweden and the US. Today, after hearing people invoke the third criticism on social media to defend Ed Glaeser’s remark that it’s possible to cut US construction costs by 10% but not 75%, I want to explain why the comparisons I make do in fact involve similar projects. Some of the specific criticisms that I’m…

The most persistent criticism I have heard of my writingsonconstructioncosts, coming from YIMBY Princeton, is the importance of gradual expertise and experience. Against my claim that Americans build subways for higher costs than the rest of the world due to poor management practices, regulations, and procurement, and scope creep, YIMBY Princeton says that high costs are a result and not a cause of the rarity of American subway investment. I believe that high US costs are endogenous and therefore the US is reluctant to fund rail transit; he believes that disinterest in transit is endogenous and if the US were willing to build more rail lines, then construction costs would naturally go down through economies of scale and steady accumulation of project management expertise. I promised last year that I would go over his argument more carefully, and am going to do so in this post.