Utopia, you are standing in it!

Here are the slides from a virtual talk I gave today to a group of students from years 10 to 13…

Having got things admirably correct with his opinion as Attorney-General on the wretched Rotorua local body bill being promoted by Tweaker Coffey,  it looked  like David Parker had stumbled as Revenue Minister

The impression of a stumble was given by a Stuff headline which read   Revenue Minister David Parker lashes very wealthy for being undertaxed, calls for new tax principles

But if someone is being undertaxed, very wealthy or not, shouldn’t someone at the Inland Revenue Department be hauled into the Minister’s office to explain what’s going on?

And if it turns out that the undertaxed individual is breaking the law, then the next step is clear. Prosecution is the path to be taken.

If the fault lies with the law, then the next step is clear, too, albeit on a different path.  In this case, the law must be changed.

Rent-seekers would have it that giant lithium-ion batteries are the simple answer to wind and solar’s hopeless intermittency, but that notion doesn’t stand first contact with the wind and solar industry’s nemesis: arithmetic.

The wishful claim that we’ll all soon be powered by nothing but wind and solar is, of course, utter nonsense. And, as Francis Menton details, big talk about big energy storage systems is just that.

Report On The Status Of The U.S. Energy Storage Project
Manhattan Contrarian
Francis Menton
7 April 2022

As you likely know, on April 22, 2021 the “United States” “set a goal” of reaching “100 percent carbon pollution-free electricity by 2035.” You know that because on that date (Earth Day!) President Biden issued a press release so announcing, although the document does not inform us how Biden was able to commit the “United States” to such an ambitious goal by the device of…

Photosynthesis: nature requires carbon dioxide
A Climate Overshoot Commission (COC?) will try to dream up ways of altering nature’s carbon cycle. The mind boggles at the futility.
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Fifteen former leaders and ministers are set to address sensitive questions on the role of CO2 removal and geoengineering in climate action, reports Climate Home News.

The chances of keeping global temperature rise below 1.5C, the toughest goal of the Paris Agreement, are increasingly slim. “Well below 2C” is a stretch.

Yet there has been little discussion at an international level on how to handle “overshoot” of those goals. A high-powered commission due to launch in May aims to break the silence.

Climate diplomats are finalising a 15-strong lineup of former presidents, ministers and representatives of international organisations to explore options for deep adaptation, carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and geoengineering, Climate Home News can reveal.

Renewable energy rent-seekers are clearly rattled by the Supreme Court decision, that forced a wind farm operator to shut down all of its turbines at night-time and ordered substantial damages in favour of the plaintiffs for the pain and suffering, already caused to its victims.

Being forced to limit the operation of wind turbines to the daytime only, has wrecked the wind industry’s business model in Australia by preventing them from collecting Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) around-the-clock, a permanent loss in the order of tens of $millions, annually. It’s also opened them up to criminal prosecutions for defrauding the Australian Commonwealth; including obtaining $millions in RECs by deceptively claiming to be compliant with the noise conditions of their planning permits.

Predictably, the big end of town law firms that act for these villains, have been forced to recalibrate their advice. Until the Bald Hills decision, firms like Herbert Smith Freehills (HSF) gave their wind…

The world is teetering on the brink of multiple food security crises which will lead to famines, political and social unrest and economic collapse across a wide range of regions. A perfect storm of war in the Ukraine (leading to lost food exports and reduced planting this spring), high energy costs, export restrictions on a large number of fertilisers, food commodity price speculation, logistic bottlenecks, financial and economic vulnerabilities following two years of a global pandemic and persistent droughts in many key agricultural regions means that food stresses are baked into world markets before the first crop failure of 2022.

Against this backdrop, the European Commission produced a document last month: “Safeguarding food security and reinforcing the resilience of food systems“. This EU strategy on how to mitigate the coming food security crisis, famines and increased malnutrition is to promote more organic food production, agroecology, reduced fertiliser use…