Utopia, you are standing in it!

Germany set the gold standard for idiotic renewable energy policies, although the Brits, Californians, Texans and South Australians are keen contenders for that glittering prize.

Thanks to its unhinged obsession with intermittent wind and solar, Germans are in the midst of a power pricing and supply calamity.

Suffering Europe’s highest power prices, is just the beginning.

In a don’t say we didn’t warn you piece, Pierre Gosselin spells out the consequences of running with the dumbest energy policy on earth.

Germany Electricity Prices Soar To World Record Highs After Years Of Energy Policy Folly…Expensive, Unreliable
No Tricks Zone
Pierre Gosselin
9 February 2022

Germany’s power supply, once mostly made up of a mixture of coal and nuclear power, used to be among the most stable and affordable in the world. Power outages were rare and grid interventions were infrequent.

Greens and socialists then tried electrical power engineering
But then in…

Is “austerity” a good thing?

Depends on how it is defined. Johan Norberg points out that spending restraint is the right approach.

Since I’m a fan of spending restraint, I obviously like the video.

But let’s expand on two points.

First, the definition of austerity is critical. Some fiscal policy folks (at the IMF and CBO, for instance) focus on deficits and debt. And this means they view spending restraint and tax increases as being equally desirable.

But that’s nonsense. As I’ve repeatedlyexplained, red ink is best viewed as a symptom. The real problem is excessive government spending.

Moreover, higher taxes usually exacerbate the spending problem since politicians can’t resist the temptation to spend at least a portion of any expected new revenue.

And since tax increases generally don’t collect as much money as politicians think they will, you can wind…

The carbon cycle [credit: laurencenet.net]
Nature’s carbon cycle already does this job. Why waste vast sums of money on dead-end technology ‘fixes’ that can achieve next to nothing in global terms?
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Most carbon capture and utilisation (CCU) technologies, which pull carbon dioxide from the air and use it for other emissions-lowering processes, emit more carbon than they capture, reports New Scientist.

This finding suggests that CCU projects, which have attracted billions of dollars in investment, won’t do much to achieve the Paris Agreement‘s emissions targets to prevent warming by more than 1.5°C.

CCU technologies take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, either capturing it directly from the air or absorbing it at polluting sources, and puts it to use in processes such as making fuel, plastics and concrete.

I write a lot here about issues around the Reserve Bank. Some of those issues are quite obscure or abstract, and I know some readers find some of those posts/arguments a bit of a challenge to grasp.

But yesterday we had as straightforward an example as (I hope) we are ever likely to find.

Inflation is very much in focus at present. Measure of inflation expectations get more attention than usual. There is a variety of measures, both surveys (in New Zealand mostly conducted for the Reserve Bank and for/by ANZ) and market prices. The Reserve Bank has been surveying households for 27 years, with a fairly consistent (although expanded on a couple of occasions) range of questions. At the Bank there was always a degree of scepticism about the survey – household respondents always seemed (eg) to expect inflation to be quite a lot higher than it actually was…