Quotulatiousness

July 17, 2023

The WEF considers whether to use the carrot or the stick next time

Filed under: Cancon, China, Economics, Environment, Europe, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Elizabeth Nickson on the World Economic Forum’s latest gathering in China:

Last week the WEFers held their summer camp in China. More to come, they warned us. More pandemics, more catastrophic global warming, more inflation, hell on wheels, they promise us, Armageddon is coming. Be very afraid.

The following was a particularly lovely event:

“How to Stay Within Planetary Boundaries — Carrot or Stick?” which focused on whether to incentivize or force compliance with “climate goals”. It was hosted by some joker who edits a magazine called Nature Energy, no doubt funded by the WEF and read by exactly nobody. And some very po-faced morons of various colors, paid in the six figures, cited a bunch of falsified statistics ending with these pretty little paragraphs:

    We are — broadly speaking — agreed that we need to get on track towards a net-zero, climate-safe and nature-positive future, but we know this will not be easy. And we’re going to need to change behaviours of both individuals but also the way that our industries and corporations and also our governments work and practices.

    We’re going to need to do this through a mixture of carrots and hopefully perhaps not so many sticks, in some kind of mix. And there is a very active and live debate as to how we go about this. But we’re likely to see an increasing move towards more stick-like interventions …

These guys, they make me laugh. Seriously? How stupid do they think we are? How hated are they? All over the world, they are loathed and laughed at. Every time one of them is taken out, we laugh and laugh and laugh. Larry Fink from BlackRock? Hiding, Scared. Mocked, publicly humiliated. We need a lot more of that.

[…]

They have to destroy western culture, because we middle-class-unnecessary-eaters are too damned uppity. They have stolen so much that when the tipping point arrives, and it will, they will be hung from the highest tree. “Better to ruin those likely to catch and imprison us, and feed on peasants and serfs, the desperate in the rest of the world.”

Proof?

OK, let’s review the Biden/Trudeau/Macron/Sunak economy shall we? Since the out-in-the-open globalist theft of elections during the past three years — Sunak was installed, Trudeau is the most hated man in Canada, Biden is gaga and Macron is just crazy — this is what the bottom 50% are experiencing. Short form, ground into the dirt.

Ninety percent of the jobs “created” were those gained back after the pandemic. Most jobs are going to the foreign born – they work cheap.

    Of the roughly 900 days Joe Biden has been in the White House, real wages have fallen for almost 700 days — about 75% of Biden’s time in office. All total, the collective drop in real wages has been 3% rather than the robust real wage gains workers deserve and expect.

Every single American has lost $36,000 to Biden’s inflation. It has crippled us, especially those working in the real (not digital) economy — Uber drivers, truckers, farmers, manufacturers, ranchers, the bottom 50% — gas prices have gone up 50%. Home heating up 23%, milk 16%, beef 25%, eggs 83%. Home prices 32%, rents 15%, electricity 21%.

Let’s not even talk about interest rates. Ten raises in the last 30 months. Last week the Bank of Canada gave its people $26 million in bonuses. Meanwhile, people are losing their houses.

How much more punishment are we expected to take? This is directly caused by their mad hatter spending during the pandemic — which was fake but for a few months in early 2020 — and their subsequent restriction of the energy supply. Restriction of energy causes prices to skyrocket because producing anything requires energy.

July 15, 2023

Environmental fanatics want to impose “austerity on steroids”

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Brendan O’Neill points out the hypocrisy of the progressives who protest against anything smacking of government austerity — often merely a slowing down in the rate of increase of funding that they condemn as “cuts” — yet fervently desire to impose a form of austerity that would literally lead to hundreds of thousands or even millions of deaths:

There are countless contradictions on what passes for the left these days. We’re against sexism, they cry, and then they’ll while away entire days hounding every uppity broad who dares to question the trans ideology. We’re anti-racist, they say, even as they yell “Uncle Tom” at any person of colour who deviates from their white liberal orthodoxies. Be kind, they tweet, in between their venomous crusades against TERFs, gammon, boomers, deplorables, “semi-fascists”, you name it.

We’re against austerity, they insist, and yet then they agitate for an austerity of apocalyptic proportions. This, surely, is the most stark incongruity of the modern left. They rail against every library closure or reform of welfare payments as an intolerable assault on people’s living standards, and then they take to the streets in their thousands in support of a degrowth agenda that would plunge vast swathes of humankind into penury. They’re far meaner than any right-wing penny-pincher they claim to oppose.

[…]

Environmentalism is austerity on steroids. Consider one of JSO’s key demands: “No new oil or gas”. This would be – there’s no other word for it – psychotic. Not only would such a crazed policy instantly throw hundreds of thousands of people out of work, by decommissioning the rigs and mines where they make their living – it would also make it all but impossible to keep society going. The infantile moralism of modern greens would have us believe that vile oil and gas are only used to propel 4x4s and airplanes packed with the rich and other “bad things”. In truth, every facet of our lives requires energy from oil and gas. The delivery of foodstuffs, house-building, schools, hospitals, life-support machines, heaters to protect the elderly from death in winter – all need energy derived from fossil fuels. Or consider libraries. The left wept when Osborne’s cuts led to library closures, but you try running a library in your post-fossil-fuel dystopia. Without oil, gas, electricity and trees torn down to make books, libraries would cease to exist.

As Alex Epstein argues, to “rapidly eliminate fossil-fuel use” would make the world “an impoverished, dangerous and miserable place for most people”. Fossil fuels provide 80 per cent of the world’s energy. Just three per cent comes from solar and wind power, so beloved of green anti-modernists. And even that measly slice of global energy production is, in Epstein’s words, “totally dependent on fossil fuels, especially natural gas, for 24/7 back-up”. That is, if the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, we have to crank up the fossil fuels. Ours is a world in which three billion people still use less electricity than your average American fridge. Agitating for less energy production in such a time is callous beyond belief. It would issue a death sentence on the world’s poor. George Osborne is Father Christmas in comparison with these crusaders against the gains and wonders of modernity.

July 13, 2023

QotD: The Annales school of history

Filed under: Economics, Environment, France, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The Annales school is a style of historical thinking that emerged in France in the early 1900s; at least for pre-modernists, the dominating figures here tend to be Marc Bloch and Fernand Braudel. It got its name because of its close association with Annales d’Historie Economique et Sociale. Fundamentally, what sets the Annales approach apart is first its focus and then the methods that focus demands.

The big shift in focus for the Annales school was an interest in charting the experience of society below the level of elites (though the elites are not abandoned either), what is sometimes termed “history from below”, as distinct from traditional elite-centered “great man” history or the more deterministic Marxist models of history at the time. You can see the political implications, of course, in the very early 1900s, of declaring the common man worthy of study; this is generally a history from the left but not the extreme left. That focus in turn demanded new approaches because it turned the focus of social history towards people who by and large do not write to us.

In reaching for that experience, Annales scholars tended to frame their thinking in terms of la longue durée (“the long run”); history was composed of three parts: événements (“events”), conjonctures (“circumstances”) and finally la longue durée itself. Often in English this gets rendered as a distinction between “events” (kings, wars, politics, crises) and “structures” (economics, social thought and at a deeper level climate, ecology, and geography). What Annales scholars tended to argue was that those structures were often more important than the events that traditional historians studied: the farmer’s life was far more shaped by very long-term factors like the local ecology, the organization of his farming village, the economic structure of the region and so on. And then the idea goes, that by charting those structures, you can figure things out about the lives of those farmers even if you don’t have many – or any – of those farmers writing to you.

Important to this was the idea of enduring patterns of thought within a society, what Bloch termed mentalités (“mentalities”, like longue durée, this is a technical term usually used in French to make that fact clear). Mentalités – Bloch’s original example was the idea that kings had a holy healing touch, but this could be almost any kind of social construct or pattern of ideas (indeed, one critique of it is that the notion of mentalités is broad and ill-defined) – can last a long time and can inform or constrain the actions of many actors within a society; think of how successive generations of kings can have their decisions shaped or constrained by their societies view – their own view – of kingship. That view of kingship might be more impactful than any one king and so pervasive that even a king would struggle to change it.

So how does this influence my work? I tend to be very much a “history from below” kind of historian, interested in charting the experience of regular farmers, soldiers, weavers and so on. The distinction between the long-term structures that shape life and the short-term events that populate our history is very valuable to think with, especially for identifying when an event alters a structure, because those tend to be very important events indeed. And I think a keen attention to the way people thought about things in the past and how those mentalités can be different than ours is very important.

That said, the Annales stress on mentalités has in some ways been overtaken by more data-driven historical methods on the one hand or a strong emphasis on local or individual experience (“microhistory”) on the other. Mentalités tend to be very big picture, asking how, say, “the French” thought about something over a period of decades or centuries and seeking to know how that shaped their experience. But archaeology, demographics or economic data can reveal patterns of behavior which might not correspond to the mentalités that show up in written texts; this is fundamentally the interaction that informs the “revenge of the archaeologists” in the study of the ancient economy, for instance. On the other hand, not everyone in that big group thinks the same and a microhistory of an individual or a single village might reveal telling local variations not captured in massive-scale structures.

Fortunately, historians do not need to be doctrinaire in our use of theory, we don’t have to pick one and stick to it. Different projects also lend themselves to different approaches. I think the Annales school offers a lot of really useful tools to have my historian’s toolbox, but they sit alongside military theory, archaeological material culture studies methods, philological approaches, a smattering of economic and demographic tools, etc.

Bret Devereaux, “Referenda ad Senatum: January 13, 2023: Roman Traditionalism, Ancient Dates and Imperial Spies”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-01-13.

July 11, 2023

Western legacy media is suffering from an overdose of Professionally Correct speech

Filed under: Environment, Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

David Friedman can’t help but notice this phenomenon:

When the question of alcohol and health came up on “Doctor Radio”, a satellite radio program, all of the participants agreed that evidence showed that consuming a moderate level of alcohol, something like one beer a day for a woman, one or two for a man, or the equivalent in other drinks, was good for you, better than no alcohol at all. All of them also agreed that they would not advise their patients to do so.

Why? They mentioned that there were problems with prescribing something that depended on the exact dosage and that a higher level of consumption was likely to lead to auto accidents, but distinguishing one beer a day from three is not a difficult problem even for those who are not doctors. My conjecture was that the real explanation was the reluctance of doctors to appear to be on the wrong side. Everyone knew that alcohol was a bad thing, a source of auto accidents and various medical (and other) problems. By giving a truthful account of the medical evidence the doctors on the program might appear to be pro-alcohol; all good people are anti. Hence they had to qualify their conclusion as a purely theoretical matter, not something that would affect what they told their patients. Think of it as a different version of PC — Professionally Correct speech.

A similar pattern exists for ice cream. Multiple independent studies have found evidence that consuming ice cream reduces the chance of getting diabetes — and found ways of explaining the evidence away. In several cases they have gone so far, in public statements, as to report that yogurt is protective against diabetes, other dairy products are not, when ice cream in their study showed as strong, in some studies a stronger, effect than yogurt.

Yogurt, as everyone knows, is a healthy food. Ice cream, as everyone knows, is bad for you.

From time to time I see a news story on some piece of scientific research that somewhat weakens the case for taking strong action against global warming. I believe that every time I have seen such a report it was accompanied by a quote from the researchers to the effect that global warming was a serious problem and their work should not be taken as a reason to be less worried about it. They almost certainly believed the first half of that, but their work was a reason to be less worried even if not to stop worrying.

Good people are on the side that believes that warming is happening, is anthropogenic, is a serious problem that needs to be dealt with immediately. Bad people deny one or more of those claims. If that is what all the people who matter to you, such as the fellow members of your profession, believe, and you are so unfortunate as to produce results that strengthen the bad people’s case, it is prudent to make it clear that you are still on the side of the angels. Just as, if you are so unfortunate as to be an honest doctor aware of the evidence in favor of alcohol, it is prudent to make it clear that you have not transferred your allegiance to demon rum.

July 5, 2023

Why Engineers Can’t Control Rivers

Filed under: Environment, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Practical Engineering
Published 4 Apr 2023

💧 The unintended consequences of trying to change the course of rivers
(more…)

June 27, 2023

“People’s patience in the face of the daily elitist provocations of Just Stop Oil is nothing short of Herculean”

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The virtue-signalling lunatics of the various Extinction Rebellion sub-groups depend far more than they realize on the patience and tolerance of ordinary Britons who are just trying to get on with their daily lives. Wealthy, highly educated, privileged scions of the well-connected may very quickly learn that the well of tolerance they’re drawing from can run dry extremely quickly. Brendan O’Neill says even some of the movers and shakers of the donor class are starting realize the dangers their protest foot soldiers are running:

“Just Stop Oil Courtauld Gallery 30062022” by Just Stop Oil is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .

So even one of Just Stop Oil’s wealthy donors is tiring of its classist stunts. Trevor Neilson, a co-founder of the Climate Emergency Fund, which has pumped money into Just Stop Oil, says the eco-irritants’ funereal, road-blocking marches for Mother Earth increasingly come off as “disruption for the sake of disruption“. You have “working people that are trying to get to their job, get their kid dropped off at school [and] survive a brutal cost-of-living crisis”, he says, and then along comes a “pink-haired, tattooed and pierced protester standing in front of their car”. It pisses people off, he said.

He’s not wrong. Anyone with eyes in their head can see that Just Stop Oil, and its mother movement Extinction Rebellion, is riling the workers of Britain. Imagine you’re trying to get to work to earn a crust in tough times and up pops a privately educated, possibly non-binary loon with multi-coloured hair to tell you in a voice breaking with juvenile emotion that Judgement Day is coming. The fainthearts of the liberal media are always aghast when an angry scaffolder or stressed trucker drags one of the green hysterics off the road, but I’m blown away by the restraint of the British public. People’s patience in the face of the daily elitist provocations of Just Stop Oil is nothing short of Herculean.

It is “counterproductive”, says Mr Neilson, to have pink-haired sons and daughters of privilege inconveniencing workers during a “brutal” economic downturn. Again, he’s not wrong. The class-war streak in eco-activism is undeniable. Many Extinction Rebellion types are descendants of money. Writer Harry Mount calls them “Econians”, a green twist on “Etonians”. They’re the “public-school boys and girls who rule the wokerati world”. A survey of 6,000 XR activists who brought London to a halt in April 2019 found they were “overwhelmingly middle-class [and] highly educated”. Anyone who walked through London that month will have heard “Cut carbon emissions!” being cried in cut-glass tones and understood right away that our great city was under siege by vengeful aristocrats still smarting from the Industrial Revolution.

June 25, 2023

Workers will be forced to stop working to salve the consciences of university-educated elite wankers

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Europe, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Brendan O’Neill on the Climate Goblin’s latest stunt in Sweden:

Picture the daughter of an opera singer preventing working-class men from doing their jobs. A young woman so well-connected that she probably has presidents on speed-dial physically blocking truck drivers from doing what they do. A child of privilege gathering with her similarly comfortable pals to stop working people from working.

Well, shorn of all the fact-lite bluster about “saving the planet”, that’s exactly what Greta Thunberg’s latest eco-stunt adds up to. The pint-sized prophetess of doom is back in the headlines. This time for getting arrested in Malmo harbour in Sweden, where she and other members of the End is Nigh cult have been holding a sit-down protest to stop oil tankers from leaving and delivering their life-giving cargo to the good people of Sweden and beyond.

The photographs from this temper tantrum disguised as a political protest tell a fascinating tale of the classism and narcissism in green politics. In the middle of the road are the smug-looking youths. One has green hair. Others sport beanie hats. None has ever driven a truck, clearly. Their banners speak of defending Earth from man’s evil burning of the toxic sludge of oil. And in the background are the supposed agents of this evil – the truckers; working men idly standing by their tankers while the world’s media get shots of Greta looking sad for Gaia.

What an apt snapshot of the hierarchy of virtue in what passes for radical politics today. Working-class people reduced to background actors, non-player characters, in a drama feverishly focussed on the jumped-up angst of the privileged. Working men as mere backdrop to the eco-neuroses of the comfortably off. In the moral universe fashioned by eco-influencers and their legion fawners in the political and media elites, the irrational fears of the upper-middle class carry more weight than the living standards of the working class.

It’s a story we see repeated across every act of eco-agitation today. In the UK, the plummy activists of Just Stop Oil, all called Poppy or Edred, block roads and prevent builders, scaffolders, deliverymen, mums and others from carrying out their essential work. The fightback of working men against this imperious imposition on their right to earn a living – witness scaffolders pushing eco-irritants out of the road – has been heartening to see. As a worker at Smithfield meat market in London put it a few years back when Extinction Rebellion types stormed in to speak up for animal rights or something, why should I allow this “happy-clappy mob” to stop me from being “able to pay my bills”?

June 24, 2023

“… every time I see some fine new supercluster-aspirational buzzword-laden legislative boondoggle coming from our federal government I know that my life is going to get worse in some minor, petty, and yet measurable way”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jen Gerson is irked by the federal government’s latest petty diktat to “save the planet” from single-use plastic bags that bans the use of bags that are not made of plastic:

Those who follow my work will know that I am an unreformed Calgary evangelist. I like this city for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that I’m a member of the Calgary CO-OP, a chain of local grocery stores. For those who are lucky enough to enjoy something like this, a co-op offers particular advantages over their conventional counterparts; we get a small share of the profits that the chain earns every year, for example. The stores stock local produce, meats, grain, and processed foods from Calgary-based suppliers, and from nearby farms. CO-OP also provides a number of top-notch house brand supplies. National chains are simply not as nimble, nor as local. They can’t be.

But I admit that one of the things I enjoy most about CO-OP is its green grocery bags. When stores across Canada began to phase out the use of single-use plastic bags, I was despondent. The environmental rationale for the ban was thin, but mostly I was annoyed because I’m chronically disorganized and can never remember to bring reusable bags.

So when CO-OP replaced plastic bags with a fully compostable alternative, I was delighted. Granted, we would have to pay a small fee to purchase these bags, but the per-unit cost was actually less than what we would normally spend on a box of Glad compost-bin liners. So it all evened out.

To make matters even better, unlike paper straws, the compostable bags are superior to their plastic alternatives. CO-OP advertises this point on their site: “They are stronger than a plastic checkout bag. You can carry a medium-size turkey or three bottles of wine with no problem.”

I can also attest to this. The bags are an absolute win for everybody involved.

So when I discovered on Thursday that Ottawa plans to ban these items, considering them a “single-use plastic”, I lost my goddamn mind.

Not only will this represent a small inconvenience for me and my family, but it is also one of the laziest, most idiotic decisions issued from this remote, non-responsive federal government I have yet to encounter.

The bags do not contain plastic.

Let me say that again, because apparently the sound of western voices doesn’t quite travel all the way to the the slower bureaucrats in the back: “THE BAGS DO NOT CONTAIN PLASTIC”. You fucking muppets.

[…]

Look, Ottawa, are you there? Are any of you listening, or am I just screaming into the void? For the sake of the entire country, I hope, I pray that there is somebody with an IQ above 92 capable of not just reading this desperate missive, but of really, truly understanding it.

This shit — this, right here.

This. Shit.

This is why we hate you.

This is why we fucking hate you.

Nobody outside the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal triangle sees a headline like “New Initiative from Ottawa!” and thinks: “Oh, how exciting. I’m so keen to see what grand notion those crafty MPs in Ottawa have cooked up now! Come, Maude, let us settle ourselves before the The National at Six so we can understand how our fine federal government is working to make our lives better.”

Nobody does that. Because every time I see some fine new supercluster-aspirational buzzword-laden legislative boondoggle coming from our federal government I know that my life is going to get worse in some minor, petty, and yet measurable way.

June 22, 2023

Any news about weather or climate is bad news

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The transition of weather from merely reporting on weather conditions and relaying (somewhat) authoritative forecasts is pretty much complete, as now every change in the weather pretty much has to be linked to the dreaded anthropogenic climate change. New York City’s recent poor air quality due to Canadian wildfires highlights a change they haven’t been pushing — how much better air quality in major cities has become:

Earlier this month, as wildfires ravaged Canada, the Northeastern United States experienced heavy air pollution problems from the smoke.

The out of control fires and subsequent pollution is a tragedy, certainly. But the fact that a low-visibility New York City was national news highlights how much things have changed.

Pollution has dramatically declined over the past few decades. To get a clear picture of how much, look at this graph.

This shows the number of days air quality is considered to be at “unhealthy levels” by the US government in seven major metros in the U.S.

All seven metros have improved their air quality since 1980. This is good news!

In the NYC metro, nearly 300 days in 1980 had unhealthy air quality. Today it’s less than 50.

So what’s going on here? Well, some might argue regulation is the primary source. It’s certainly possible that environmental regulations in the end of the 20th century resulted in less pollution. As our technology has improved, we’ve gained the ability to police people polluting the air of their neighbors. But this isn’t the full story.

June 19, 2023

Why Rivers Move

Filed under: Environment, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Practical Engineering
Published 7 Mar 2023

The basics of fluvial geomorphology (the science behind the shape of rivers)

Errata: At 11:54, the slope equation is inverted.

We’ve teamed up with @emriver, a company that makes physical river models called stream tables, to create a two-part series on the science and engineering behind why river channels shift and meander and what tools engineers use to manage the process.
(more…)

June 4, 2023

“[T]he unspoken truth about the English and protesting. Reader, we are crap at it.”

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

William Atkinson has lost patience with the posh idiots who make up the useful idiot brigade of Just Stop Oil and other Extinction Rebellion spawn:

“Just Stop Oil Courtauld Gallery 30062022” by Just Stop Oil is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .

I’m sorry, readers, but Just Stop Oil have gone too far this time.

I’ve previously been pretty sanguine about the eco-loonies. I don’t drive a car, a decent number of my friends are w*ke, and as I am trying to market myself as Britain’s first pro-climate change commentator – all that sparkling wine! – anything that raises the issue’s salience is a bonus. Coppers standing limply by glue-enthusiasts is fine by me.

That was until this morning. But the decision of these pound-shop Rainbow Warriors to hold up the England team on their way to Lord’s is indefensible. If Just Stop Oil really claim to care about the future of the planet, they should surely want to protect the most beautiful thing on it: the glorious, sainted game of Test cricket? Arrest them all, throw away the key, and apologise profusely to Ben Stokes.

What is even more surprising about this act of sporting vandalism is that one would usually expect cricket to be something of which Just Stop Oil and other protestors are quite fond. They are, after all, rather conservative. That is not just in a historic sense – nobody was more reactionary than the Luddites! – but because they are made up of exactly the sorts of people one would expect to vote Tory.

A University of Exeter study showed that supporters of Extinction Rebellion in 2019 were overwhelmingly middle-class, highly-educated women from the South of England. Some 85% had degrees, two-thirds identified as middle-class, a high proportion were self-employed, and three-quarters lived in southern England – a third from the West Country. Surely the Blue Wall personified?

Why have Deborah from Totnes and Agnes from Frome decided to start gluing themselves to motorways and mistaking Heinz for Dulux? Professor Clare Saunders, whose analysis I just quoted, said that because these people are “not natural protestors” or “natural law-breakers”, it must show they were “already persuaded by the rightness of the climate cause”. Unsurprisingly, I disagree.

Our over-proliferation of graduates in recent decades, combined with the increasing tendency of women to vote for left-wing parties, was naturally going to produce some form of radicalisation. But add in Brexit, the possibility of blocking some houses, and the opportunity to reclaim some form of lost youth, and suddenly giving it the gilet jaune seems like a nice day out.

In that lies the unspoken truth about the English and protesting. Reader, we are crap at it. The French shut down Paris, lose lives, and burn down municipal buildings in protest at a raise in the pension age, all we can manage are posh girls mucking around with soup, blue-haired Oxford undergrads sticking themselves to a floor, or railwayman who now openly admit a year of strikes has been pointless.

H/T to Johnathan Pearce for the link.

April 27, 2023

It’s not environmentalism I object to, it’s environmentalists

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I thoroughly agree with Tom Knighton here:

I tend to be pretty critical of environmentalism. It’s not that I don’t value things like clean air, clean water, and pristine land free of pollution. I actually do value all of those things. I actually care about the environment.

What I don’t care about, though, are environmentalists.

Much of my issue with them is that they don’t seem to recognize reality or, if they do, they just want everyone to have to pay more and make do with less.

Most evironmentalists I’ve dealt with fail to understand one of the basic tenets of economics: There’s No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Yes, we can make certain changes to how we do things to reduce our impact on the natural environment, but such changes are almost never free and sometimes the potential cost is significantly higher than any rational expectation of benefit from changing. Economics — and life in general — is all about the trade-offs. If you do X, you can’t do Y. If you specialize in this area, you can’t devote effort in that area, and so on. Time and materials limit what can be done and require a sensible way of deciding … and most environmentalists either don’t understand or refuse to accept this.

For example, take the electric cars that are being pushed so hard by environmentalists and their allies in the government. They’re not remotely ready to replace gas- or diesel-powered vehicles by any stretch of the imagination. They lack the range to really compete as things currently stand, and yet, what are we being pushed to buy?

Obviously, little of this is new. I wrote that post nearly two years ago and absolutely nothing has changed for either better or worse. Not on that front.

But there have been some changes, and they really show me why I’m glad I don’t describe myself as an environmentalist.

Actually, I take back a bit of my accusation that environmentalists don’t see the trade-offs: they do see some of them. They see things that you will have to give up to achieve their goals. That’s the kind of trade-off they’re eager to make.

Even if you don’t think climate change is real and manmade — I don’t, for example — I like the idea of clean, cheap sources of energy. Solar and wind aren’t going to produce all the electricity we need, but nuclear can.

Yet why do so many environmentalists focus on wind and solar? It can’t make what we need. It won’t replace coal power plants, especially with regard to reliability. Coal creates power when it’s overcast and when there’s no wind to speak of.

Nuclear can.

Nuclear, in fact, could create power on a fraction of the footprint, minimize pollution due to power creation, and do it safely. For all the fearmongering over nuclear power, there have been only two meltdowns in history — both of which were at facilities with reportedly abysmal safety records and one of which still needed a massive earthquake and tsunami to trigger it.

But wind and solar don’t just create “clean” energy. They also require Americans to make do with less.

That is the heart of the environmental movement. It’s not so much about saving the planet. If it’s not about a cult of personality, as Lights encountered, it’s about making people step backward in their standard of living.

April 20, 2023

QotD: Food fascism

Filed under: Environment, Food, Health, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I think the liberal elite – which you don’t see bellying up to a creepy-crawly buffet – just likes the idea of not only nagging us but seeing how much they can make us humiliate ourselves by bending to their will. I can see a bunch of kale grazers in Brooklyn sitting around giggling about how they convinced those stupid rubes in gun/Jesusland to start chewing cicadas.

But the diet dictatorship craze is a real thing. You’ve seen the war on beef by the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Genius, who runs her oversized novelty mouth about how we have to stop cooking cows because doing so displeases the great and terrible climate goddess Gaia. See, cows may contribute to the world being slightly warmer in a century, so stop doing something you enjoy. Consider not eating beef as a sacrifice made on behalf of the weird weather cult.

Here’s a locust. Now, don’t you feel better about your slightly reduced carbon footprint?

What do you think the chances are that the di Caprios and the Gores and the rest of the climate hucksters won’t be dining on filet mignon in their private jets flying from their mansions to Davos to save the planet from your carbon crimes, while you pedal your bike in the rain back to your unheated 500 square foot apartment to gnaw on a dinner of arugula and raw moths?

Remember, food fascism is for your own good, since you are evidently unable to make decisions about what you put in your mouth for yourself. You see, if you are allowed to make your own choices about your body you might make the wrong ones – with “wrong” being defined as choices Michael Bloomberg or the other members of Team Helper would not make.

Kurt Schlicter, “Tell The Nags To Go Pound Sand”, Townhall.com, 2019-11-19.

April 3, 2023

The poison garden of Alnwick

Filed under: Britain, Environment, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tom Scott
Published 29 May 2017

Inside the beautiful Alnwick Garden, behind a locked gate, there’s the Poison Garden: it contains only poisonous plants. Trevor Jones, head gardener, was kind enough to give a guided tour!

For more information about visiting the Castle, Garden, and poison garden: https://alnwickgarden.com/

(And yes, it’s pronounced “Annick”.)
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March 30, 2023

“Food insecurity” – one of the neat new benefits of our over-regulated economy

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Environment, Food, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Elizabeth Nickson on how western governments (in her case, the provincial government of British Columbia) are working hand-in-glove with environmental non-governmental organizations to create “food insecurity”:

Original image from www.marpat.co.uk

In Canada, the British Columbia government in order to increase “food security” is handing out $200,000,000 to farmers in the province. Food insecurity, which means crazy high food prices, comes to us courtesy of the sequestration of the vast amounts of oil and gas in the province and the ever increasing carbon tax, which (like a VAT in Europe), as you probably know, is levied at every single step in food production. Add the hand-over-fist borrowing in which the government has indulged for the last 20 years, and you have created your own mini-disaster.

Ever since multinational environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) took over public opinion in the province, our economy has been wrenched from resource extraction to tourism. Tourism is, supposedly, low-impact. The fact that it pays $15 an hour instead of $50 an hour and contributes very much less to the public purse than forestry, mining, farming, ranching, oil and gas, means we have had borrow to pay for health care and schooling. This madness spiked during Covid, and, as in every “post-industrial” state, has contributed to making food very, very much more expensive, despite the fact that British Columbia where I live, is anything but a food desert. We could feed all of Canada and throw in Washington State.

Inflation comes from a real place, it has a source, it is not mysterious and arcane. Regionally, it comes from “green” government decisions. I pay almost 70 percent more for food now than I did five years ago. Of course one cannot know with any confidence how much the real increase is. The Canadian government was caught last week hiding food price statistics and well they might. The Liberal government leads with its “compassion”, blandishing the weak and foolish, hiding the fact that in this vast freezing country they are trying to make it even colder by starving and freezing the lower 50 percent of the population.

Even the Wasp hegemony that ran this country pre-Pierre Elliot Trudeau knew not to try that. But not this crew! It doesn’t touch them. They don’t see and wouldn’t care if they did, about the single mother working in a truck stop on the Trans-Canada Highway, who steals food for her kids because all her money is going towards keeping them warm.

[…]

The region in which I live used to grow all the fruit for the province, now, well good luck with that buddy. Last year under the U.N. 2050 Plan, local government tried to ban farming and even horticulture. That was defeated so hard that the planner who introduced it was fired and the plan scrubbed from the website. Inevitably it will come again in the hopes that citizens or subjects, as we in Canada properly are, have gone back to sleep. U.N. 2050, an advance on 2030, locks down every living organism, and all the other elements that make up life, assigns those elements to multinationals, advised by ENGOs, which can “best decide” how to use them.

If the only tool you have is a hammer, it’s tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail. It is only the most arcane and numerate think tanks who bang on and on about over-regulation and how destructive it is. Regulation is so complex that most people would rather do anything than think about it, much less deconstruct it.

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