Utopia, you are standing in it!

Back in 1983 the American Wind Industry Association claimed that solar and wind would be “competitive and self-supporting on a national level by the end of the decade if assisted by tax credits and augmented by federally sponsored R&D”. That was over 37 years ago. And there was no lack of assistance in the form of tax credits and federally sponsored R&D, along with a whole bunch of other punitive mandates and targets designed to cripple conventional generators and favour chaotically intermittent wind and solar.

Wind and solar don’t run on sunshine and breezes, they’re powered by massive and endless subsidies. Remove the subsidies and both so-called ‘industries’ would disappear in a heartbeat.

The perpetual claims about wind and solar competing with dispatchable generation sources, such as coal, gas and nuclear, ring hollow when talk turns to reducing the subsidies and forcing the unreliables to face true competition – unleashed…

Mary Tudor was England’s first queen regnant. As mentioned in the initial post announcing the series, Mary I of England is acknowledged as the first Queen to reign in her own right despite the brief, disputed reigns of the Empress Matilda and Lady Jane Grey.

In 1554, Mary married the future King Felipe II of Spain, becoming queen consort of Habsburg Spain on his accession in 1556. He was the eldest son of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who is also Carlos I of Spain, and Eleanore of Portugal.

Felipe’s father arranged this marriage to 37-year-old Queen Mary I of England, Charles’ maternal first cousin. Charles V ceded the crown of Naples, as well as his claim to the Kingdom of Jerusalem, to Felipe in order to give his son equal status to his wife upon their marriage.

Their marriage at Winchester Cathedral on July 24, 1554 took place just…

The Catholic King James II had fled his throne, and a favored Protestant Dutchman named William of Orange had roused the people in what became known as the “Glorious Revolution.” It was a moment of extraordinary growth and opportunity for England under the governance of a foreign king. William, perhaps more than anyone, transformed the fractious English monarchy into a dominant imperial power. England was now to be regarded as a significant European power, on par with France, in alliance with the Netherlands, a hegemonic influence over the aging Spanish Empire. David Starkey calls William one of England’s greatest monarchs.

William of Orange was a tenacious yet somewhat sickly figure. As a child he was asthmatic and partly crippled with a tubercular lung. “But within this emaciated and defective frame there burned a remorseless fire, fanned by the storms of Europe, and intensified by the…

As a parent I find it particularly disheartening to observe the near-complete indifference of governments and major political parties that might hope to form governments to the atrocious productivity performance of the New Zealand economy. If the last National government was bad, the Labour or Labour-led governments since 2017 have been worse. It is hard to think of a single thing they’ve done to improve the climate for market-driven business investment and productivity growth, and easy to identify a growing list of things that worsen the outlook – most individually probably quite small effects, but the cumulative direction is pretty clear. Before I had kids I used to idly talk about not encouraging any I had to stay in New Zealand, so relatively poor were the prospects becoming. It is harder to take that stance when it is real young people one enjoys being around, but…..at least from an economic…