Quotulatiousness

February 24, 2026

Canada’s climate follies, a brief update

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

On Substack, John Robson looks at the Canadian federal government’s lofty climate goals and their pathetic strategies to achieve those goals and the vast chasm between the two:

Chinese electric vehicles are likely coming to Canadian roads, like these BYD models.

Forgive us for being fixated on Canada’s climate follies just because we live here. But they are revealing, including the U-turn on EVs that we mentioned last week where the government yanked the steering wheel so hard they did a 360 from banning gasoline vehicles by law to banning them by regulation. Raising the question whether they actually know what they’re doing and, if so, whether they regard themselves as commendably devious or just way smarter than everyone else. We hope not the latter because the policy is going to fail big-time. As Randall Denley just warned in the National Post, “To summarize, the Carney plan relies on electric vehicles (EVs) that Ontario plants don’t produce, a sudden and dramatic new appetite for buying EVs and an imagined export market that doesn’t exist. To top it off, the federal government will provide $2.3 billion in EV rebates that will encourage Canadians to buy cars made elsewhere.” Apart from that, a stroke of genius of the sort that, through decades of diligent effort, has made the nation tragically poorer without hitting any of our targets including the one where they get more humble.

As a Globe & Mail news story blurted out:

    A new study published Friday by the Canadian Climate Institute says Canada is not on track to meet any of its climate targets – not the 2026 interim emissions reduction target, the 2030 Paris Agreement commitment, or even the long-term goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050.

Oh. Pretty hard to make that one sound like an achievement, isn’t it? Or to sound as if the people who pulled it off should be trusted with the next one.

Now as we’ve complained before, the “Canadian Climate Institute” bills itself as some sort of dispassionate neutral observer when in fact it’s a creature of the state. And, worse, one of those lavishly-funded outfits (we deniers may have all the money, but they got $30 million from the Canadian government and we did not … uh no, that was just one grant, the total’s higher) that exists to push the government to do things it wants to do anyway but needs the appearance of “civil society” support to pull off.

Thus, the Globe sonorously informs us, the problem isn’t that the targets were impractical or the politicians and bureaucrats inept. Heck no. As usual with Thomas Sowell’s “unconstrained vision” of public policy, all you need is love:

    The report suggests Canada has moved away from its climate goals thanks to “a slackening of policy effort over the past year, marked by the removal or weakening of climate policies across the country”.

Which gives the impression they had been on track to meet their goals up until some recent backsliding, whereas in reality they have never shown any sign of meeting them. After all, what policies have actually changed since Carney took over as Prime Minister in ways that could possibly affect long-term trends? And how close was Canada to meeting “its climate goals” before this disastrous swerve into the camp of the deniers?

It’s not even true that “Canada” as a collective has collective “climate goals”. The government has climate goals, and they come bundled with a host of other policies at election time, especially since even our “Conservative” party is terrified of challenging climate orthodoxy. Public support for those goals is weak, sporadic and prone to vanish when real costs hove into view. But ignoring that piece of typical collectivist prose, Mark Carney has spent most of his prime ministership flying around virtue-signaling in the presence of others doing the same. (No, really. It’s been less than a year and he’s taken almost three dozen flights.) He hasn’t been in the office shredding this and demolishing that.

July 23, 2025

Britain’s housing crisis has roots as far back as 1947

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Tim Worstall on the deep reasons Britain can’t seem to build any new housing:

Homes Fit for Heroes – Dagenham
“These are typical examples of the housing on the Becontree Estate. Initially 25000 homes were built by the London County Council between 1921 and 1934. These homes fit for the heroes of WW1 had all mod cons gas, water and electricity with inside toilets and bathrooms. A further 2000 homes were built before WW2. The Becontree estate was the biggest council estate in the world.”
Image and description from geograph.uk. Photo by Glyn Baker – CC BY SA 2.0

The real problem Britain faces is that it’s no longer legal to build the housing we thought was the bare minimum acceptable a century ago.

    The more apposite point is that a couple of hundred yards up the road are those post-WWI homes for heroes. Here. Semi detached, not huge to be fair. But kitchen, living room, parlour, 3 beds and indoor bathroom. They’re still highly desirable houses in fact. Note, they’ve front gardens. They’ve also back ones too.

    Now, we’ve heard this, even heard it from someone on Bath City Council (who had heard it, we’re not quite old enough to know anyone who was on BCC in the 1920s), and never, quite tracked it down officially. But the statement was made that the Homes for Heroes needed to be on 1/4 acre gardens. The working man needed the space to grow vegetables for his family and to keep a pig. These houses, the 1920s ones, do have substantial gardens as the 1960s ones don’t.

As I pointed out:

    But Homes for Heroes? We’ve done this before. And those Homes for Heroes? Right now, today, it’s illegal to build them. No, really. What was considered the basic minimum that the local council should provide to the working man is illegal to build now. Those decent sized houses were on those decent gardens d’ye see? You can get perhaps 9 dwellings with 1/4 acre gardens on a hectare of land. Last we saw the current insistence is that we must have no less than 30 dwellings per hectare in order to gain planning permission. Even though Englishcombe – as with so much other land – is there and ripe for the taking.

    It’s actually illegal to build houses that were regarded as the proper minimum a century ago.

The reason we cannot is that Green Belt, itself stemming from the Town and Country Planning Act 1947. The point of which — no, really, the stated purpose — was to make sure that no one would ever be allowed to build housing for proles — sorry, stout Britons — anywhere anyone ever wanted to live.

Which is a bit of a problem. For, outside my own head, there’s no constituency for repealing the TCPA and abolishing the Green Belt.

However, there is a large constituency for plastering farmland with solar cells.

    Waller-Barrett’s farm has been targeted for a massive solar plant, which will be called Glebe Farm, and now his landlord plans to take his land away, replacing potato crops with thousands of giant glass panels.

    The decision, backed by edicts from Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, favouring solar farms over food production on UK farmland, means his flourishing food business will shrink – and staff will be out of work.

    Meanwhile the distant landlord will be quids in, potentially quadrupling their rent with virtually no effort.

Oh.

And now one of those little wrinkles of the law. Those solar farms will last 20 years maximum. No, really, that’s tops. The wrinkle being that the land underneath them will be, in that 20 years’ time, defined as brownfield land. Been previously developed, see? And brownfield land to housing is usually pretty easy as a development path. Certainly wholly unlike greenfield (or even Green Belt) to housing.

The land area Ed wants to cover with these things is 2 to 3% of the land area of the country. Which, as it happens, is about the land area currently covered by housing — including their gardens.

So, therefore we can see that Ed is, in fact, playing the long game. He’s going to solve the housing problem by not having to take on the Campaign for the Preservation of Rural England and every LibDem middle-ager with too few grandchildren to occupy her time. He’s going to do an end run around that problem by building solar first.

April 30, 2025

Low-energy Europe

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Europe — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Depending on who you read, it appears that the massive power outage in southwestern Europe nearly expanded across the continent, as Spain and Portugal went dark taking parts of other neighbouring countries’ networks down as well. James Price explains that this sort of thing is likely to be a recurring phenomenon as Europe leans ever more heavily on unreliable sources of electricity:

In his 2017 book The Strange Death of Europe, Douglas Murray accused Western European nations of Geschichtsmüde, being weary of history. President Trump might translate this by recycling a sobriquet he used against Jeb Bush — being low-energy.

This is now literally the case in both the United Kingdom and Germany, who have the most expensive energy costs in the developed world. The consequences have been catastrophic, in economic, political, environmental, and even geostrategic terms.

The true tragedy is that so much of the pain is self-inflicted, the result of bad, rushed policy designed to make people feel warm and fuzzy inside, rather than actually keeping people warm.

Net Zero

The commitment in Britain to “net zero emissions by 2050” was signed into law in the dying days of Theresa May’s premiership, as an attempt to give her a “legacy” after three painful years as Prime Minister. That legacy is likely to be lost, like the works of Ozymandias, as the world comes crashing back to economic reality.

The debate over the introduction of net zero was conducted during the Conservative Party’s leadership contest to succeed May, and therefore all attention was away from what would prove to be the most impactful economic decision of the year. The debate lasted all of 90 minutes.

The results have been completely devastating for Britain’s economy in all sorts of corrosive ways. For one, 169 years after Henry Bessemer worked out how to mass-produce steel in Sheffield, Yorkshire, Britain almost lost its ability to make the stuff here in Britain. Global factors like Chinese dumping play a part, but the extent of environmental regulation on British industry is making it impossible to sustain any kind of heavy industry. And now, British Steel has been nationalized once more, lumping the taxpayer with the losses and liabilities, but without doing anything to address the root causes.

But the government meddling does not stop there. In agriculture, a cruel, ideological attack on farmers (over whether farms can be charged inheritance tax) is going to spur more prime farmland to be turned into solar panel fields in a country where the sun often doesn’t shine.

There are now many statutory requirements to push environmental policies in all sorts of areas, to the complete detriment of other requirements, namely economic prosperity, that would otherwise be carefully balanced. So new homes in Britain have to have small windows, to increase insulation efficiency.

HS2, a much delayed and hideously over-budget high speed rail line between London and Birmingham, is building a one-kilometer-long tunnel to prevent bats being harmed by high-speed trains. The tunnel will cost over £100 million to build. Not only is there no evidence that the trains would interfere with bats, but there is also some evidence that the bat tunnel may actually be a bat-killing tunnel.

Hinkley Point C, the only nuclear power station being constructed at the moment in Britain, is having to construct a “fish disco” at huge costs to push fish away from being sucked into the cooling system.

This kind of environmental “everythingism” is not just holding back progress, not just costing huge amounts; it is corrosive of every attempt by people who just want to get on with building and growing — even “green” enterprises. Orsted, an offshore wind company, had to fill in forms five times longer than Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and had to wait nearly three years for a decision to build one farm.

And specifically about the Spanish situation that nearly triggered a Europe-wide blackout, from the social media network formerly known as Twitter:

SPAIN BLACKOUTS: AN ANONYMOUS EXPERT VIEW

From a deep groupchat, last night, translated from Spanish, written by an expert in transmission and distribution of power. Not my words.

“What has happened on April 28 has a well-located origin: the Aragón-Catalonia corridor, which is one of the most important electric highways in Spain. There is not only the electricity produced by our solar and wind farms in the northeast, but also the electricity that we import from France. This international interconnection, although weak (it can only contribute 3% of our demand, well below the minimum of 10% that marks the EU), in times of stress is essential to balance the network.

“At 12:32 p.m., in that Aragón-Catalonia corridor there was an electric [shake]. What exactly does “shake” mean? It means that suddenly and abnormally, the power that flowed through those lines began to vary violently, rising and falling in a very short time. Such abrupt variability can be due to three main causes:

“1. That a relay or transformer on that electric highway detects an abnormal flow of current or voltage (higher or lower than expected) and automatically disconnected to avoid burning or [being] destroyed. This is called that “opens” a relay or switch: it jumps and cuts the passage of electricity to protect itself.

“2. That the enormous concentration of renewable energy in that area (mainly solar and wind) has created an electrical resonance: electronic inverters, which synchronize current, can sometimes be amplified between them if a small voltage alteration (for example, due to clouds, strong wind or a slight failure) extends like an echo to all devices, causing widespread oscillations.

“3. That a wrong control order has been sent (by mistake or attack) from the SCADA systems, disconnecting or reducing the generation of multiple hit plants. There is no confirmation of this possibility yet, but it is being investigated.

“What is known is that as a consequence of that shake, the interconnection with France jumped: we were isolated just at the worst time, when the peninsula needed external support to stabilize.

“Without that French help, the frequency of the peninsular network (which should always be 50 Hz exact) began to drop quickly. The frequency is like the heartbeat of the network: if it falls too much, the systems understand that the patient (the network) is collapsing and automatically disconnected so as not to self-destruct. Thus, in just five seconds, the solar and wind farms were turned off — [they are] very sensitive to frequency variations — 15 GW of power was lost suddenly (60% of all the electricity generated at that time), and the network could not take it anymore: it collapsed completely, showing the Redeia Platform (REE) a “0 MW” nationwide. That does not mean that all the turbines were physically turned off, but there was no generator synchronized at the common frequency of 50 Hz. It was, for practical purposes, a country [turned] off.

“To [restart] a completely dead network, one essential thing is needed: plants that can start in black, that is, without receiving energy from anywhere else. Spain has identified five large hydroelectric jumps capable of doing this. However, and here is one of the great negligences that are coming to light, three of those five groups were stopped in scheduled maintenance, by business decision supervised by the administration. Only two were operational. That made the recovery much slower and weaker than it should be in a normal contingency plan.

“The result is that, after almost 10 hours, only 35% to 40% of the national supply has been recovered, and there are still large areas in the dark or under scheduled cuts.

“The situation reveals a very serious underlying problem:

“Spain is still an energy island: it only has 3% foreign exchange capacity compared to its total demand.”

Part 2:

“The network depends a lot on variable renewables, which are disconnected quickly in the face of any instability.

“The lack of physical inertia reserves (i.e. large rotating masses such as thermal power plants or classic hydraulics) prevents the disturbances from damping.

“And poor maintenance planning left without enough hydraulic muscle to respond to a crisis.

“The most likely causes, with current data, are:

“A combination of technical failure in protection or in synchronization, added to a serious lack of operational forecast and maintenance (probability ≈ 40%).

“The possibility of an intentional cyber-physical attack remains in analysis (≈ 25% estimated probability).

“Other factors such as human error, punctual atmospheric phenomenon or mixed causes complete the rest.

“In short: an initial shake at the most sensitive point of the Spanish network — the Aragón-Catalonia corridor, door to Europe — left the peninsula isolated and vulnerable. The network could not sustain its own demand because it did not have sufficient assistance, nor stable physical reserve, nor enough bootable plants in black. Three of five hydroelectric jumps were out of service when they were most needed.

“For this reason, Spain went out in five seconds, and that is why it still continues to light little by little, fragile, slow and exposed.”

April 8, 2025

Mark Carney explained how he viewed the world in his book Values

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

It’s worth considering what Mark Carney wrote about his beliefs before becoming prime minister and how he’s campaigning right now:

For those who haven’t had the misfortune of parsing through Mark Carney’s Values, it reads like a sermon from a high priest of globalism — polished, preachy, and packed with ideas that should send shivers down the spine of anyone who cares about Canada’s economy, especially Western energy producers.

Writing as the former Bank of Canada governor and a darling of the Liberal elite, Carney pitches a vision of “sustainable finance”, net-zero absolutism, and heavy-handed regulation. To the National Citizens Coalition, it’s clear: this isn’t a roadmap to prosperity, it’s a wrecking ball aimed at the heart of Canada’s resource sector and the West’s economic lifeline.

Start with Carney’s obsession with “revaluing value”. In Values, he argues markets should prioritize climate goals over profit, pushing financial institutions to choke funding for oil and gas.

For Alberta and Saskatchewan, where energy employs tens of thousands and pumps billions into the economy, this is a death knell dressed up as virtue.

Western producers aren’t just businesses; they’re the backbone of communities, powering schools, hospitals, and homes. Carney’s disdain for fossil fuels ignores their role in keeping Canada competitive while our allies and adversaries keep drilling. His plan? Starve the sector, stranding assets and jobs, all to appease international green lobbyists in European nations with nationalized economies on the road to being as disastrous as Canada’s.

Then there’s his love affair with regulation. Values champions policies just like Bill C-69 — the “No More Pipelines Bill” — which Carney has refused to repeal. He sees it as a tool to enforce his net-zero utopia, but for the West, it’s a padlock on progress. Pipelines that could carry Canadian oil to global markets sit stalled, leaving producers at the mercy of low prices, foreign competitors, and now, tariff threats.

Carney’s mental framework both then and now doesn’t just stop projects, it signals to investors that Canada’s energy sector is a no-go zone. The result? Capital flees, jobs vanish, and the West pays the price for the lofty ideals of a London and Manhattan banker, who spends only part of his time in Canada — specifically, Ontario and Quebec.

Dan Knight on Carney’s swing through some British Columbia ridings this week:

A mock campaign sign for the Liberals spotted on social media.

Mark Carney rolled into Victoria this week with the swagger of a man who’s never missed a wine-and-cheese reception in his life and delivered what the Liberal brain trust likely considers a “bold vision” for Canada. But peel back the banker buzzwords and Churchill cosplay, and what you really got was a cringeworthy display of delusion, detachment, and recycled globalist dogma.

He opened his mouth and immediately signaled his marching orders: “clean energy”. Not once. Not twice. It was practically every other sentence. Because when you’re out of ideas, just say “green transition” on repeat and hope nobody checks the receipts.

He’s not just pushing the same failed Liberal climate ideology — he’s doubling down on it.

Carney promised to turn Canada into a “clean energy superpower” — without explaining how, exactly, we get there when his party has spent years shutting down oil and gas, blocking pipelines, and handing our resource wealth to the Americans.

This wasn’t new policy. It was the same Liberal fantasy that has already gutted Alberta, choked investment, and driven electricity prices through the roof — just ask Europe how that’s going. And when it comes to reopening auto plants or restoring manufacturing jobs? Nothing. Not a plan, not a word, not a clue.

And don’t worry — when Trump’s tariffs hit our industries, Carney says we’ll respond with “retaliatory tariffs”. Sounds tough, until you remember who actually pays those. Working Canadians. Line workers. Parts manufacturers. People trying to keep the lights on while Ottawa plays global economic chicken.

Carney’s big idea for recovery? Just keep handing money to the Liberal-connected elite.

He promised to “give back” — and by that, he means pouring another $180 million into the CBC, the same taxpayer-funded mouthpiece that’s been running interference for the Liberals for nearly a decade. This comes after ArriveCAN, the $60 million QR code boondoggle funneled through Liberal contractors, and countless other slush funds masquerading as “public service”.

While the working class is bracing for a made-in-Ottawa recession, Carney’s pledging more green slogans, more centralized control, and more taxpayer money to keep the illusion alive.

November 6, 2024

Running out of minerals means we’re all going to dieeeeeeeeee!!

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

Tim Worstall responds to another pants-wetting panic attack that we’re running out of atoms and that means we’re all going to die unless we do this thing I wanted you to do anyway:

“Artisanal cobalt miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo” by The International Institute for Environment and Development is licensed under CC BY 2.5 .

There’s a guy working up in Finland who keeps trying to tell us that we’re all about to run out of lovely metals. Therefore — as with the Club of Rome beforehand, Blueprint for Survival and all those guys — we’re all gonna die.

Aiee, eh?

Now it is possible to work through all his assumptions and nip at them in detail. For example, he assumes we need about 20 million tonnes of lithium in order to replace the global internal combustion engine fleet with battery powered. Not a bad assumption. The Tesla Master Plan 3 comes to the same answer. But if we want to have weeks and weeks of battery power for the whole of society we’re going to need much more than that. Which is a problem, mineral resources are only around 90 million tonnes, so, we’re stuffed.

And, well. Here’s the problem. We’re all — including Michaux — using United States Geological Survey Numbers. In 2023 lithium:

    Owing to continuing exploration, identified lithium resources have increased substantially worldwide and total about 98 million tons.

In 2024:

    Owing to continuing exploration, measured and indicated lithium resources have increased substantially worldwide and total about 105 million tons.

Wait, what? We can get more mineral resources if we go looking for them? Well, if that’s true then the size of mineral resources cannot be the limitation on how much is out there, right?

This then brings us to the basic mistake that has been made here. We’ve been through this here a number of times.

It’s this:

    Figures 28 & 29 shows the needed quantity of metal to phase out fossil fuels (assuming all four power storage buffer capacities) is compared against the total metal content in the whole planetary environment, including the deep ocean polymetallic nodules under sea resources (Hein et al. 2020). So, Figure 28 shows reported mineral reserves plus estimated mineral resources on land plus estimated undersea mineral resources. This is the summation of mineral reserves, resources, on land and under the sea, in the planetary environment. Even with this extreme summation of conventional and unconventional sources, there was not enough copper, nickel, lithium, cobalt, or vanadium to manufacture even just the first generation of renewable technology to replace the existing fossil fuel industrial system.

That’s on page 240 and yes, I had to read (OK, speed read/skim) to get to his simple statement of his mistake. You owe me guys, 239 pages worth.

He’s right that mineral resources can be converted into mineral reserves by the application of time and effort — capital, really. But he thinks that mineral resources are the definition of the mineral deposits that exist. Which just ain’t true — mineral resources are mineral deposits that people have applied time and effort — capital really — to defining. That’s how mineral resources, as defined by our common source at USGS, can increase year on year.

October 26, 2024

Our solar energy future – “In September alone, Germany paid 2.6 billion Euro to renewables producers for electricity that had a market value of a mere 145 million Euro”

Filed under: Economics, Germany, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Checking in with what’s been happening in Germany, eugyppius explains why solar power is far from the cost-free energy source that politicians and scam artists try to claim:

Photovoltaic panels on a roof, 28 April, 2015.
Photo by Antonio Chaves, via Wikimedia Commons.

Climatism in Germany is attended by all manner of naive ideas and bright pink fairytale slogans. Among the latter is a dubious proverb proclaiming that “The sun doesn’t send any bills” (in German: “Die Sonne schickt keine Rechnung“). Such proverbs always seem initially plausible (is there anything freer and more democratic than sunshine?) while proving to be basically the opposite of the truth. In fact, the energy transition has landed German taxpayers in the position of paying billions of Euros for the sun to shine. It is becoming an unmitigated disaster, and what is worse, the more we expand solar capacity, the more we will have to pay. For something that does not send any bills, sunshine has sure become very expensive here in the Federal Republic.

Welt calls it “the solar trap,” and it works like this: Our Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) pledges to pay renewables producers fixed tariffs for every kilowatt hour of electricity their installations feed into the grid. Whether you are an ordinary climate-conscious person with solar panels on your house or you run massive solar farms, the EEG entitles you to receive these fixed “feed-in tariffs” for a period of twenty years. The EEG also requires grid operators to accept your electricity regardless of demand and to sell it on the electricity exchange.

Now the sun, although it may not charge for its services, turns out to have this naughty habit of shining in many places all at once. When this happens, electricity supply often exceeds electricity demand and exchange prices fall. They can fall all the way to zero, or in extreme situations of excessive sunshine they can even go negative. Negative prices mean that you have to actually pay “buyers” to take the excess power off your hands. Whether the prices are merely very low, or zero, or negative, the German taxpayer has obligated himself, via the EEG, to pay these producers of unwanted if extremely green and climate-friendly electricity their fixed feed-in tariffs anyway. That is, we are on the hook for the difference between the actual exchange value of excess electricity and the feed-in tariffs promised to producers. In this way we have ended up literally paying for the sun to shine.

In September alone, Germany paid 2.6 billion Euro to renewables producers for electricity that had a market value of a mere 145 million Euro. Our sunny autumn is destroying our already-fragile government budget. Federal number-crunchers had originally allocated 10.6 billion Euros for feed-in tariffs in 2024, but already the government owes 15 billion and the year is not yet over. Scholz’s cabinet are thus trying to allocate an additional 8.8 billion Euro for the rest of the year. The parliament have yet to approve the additional funds, though, and also the damned sun will just not stop fucking shining, and so probably even this supplementary allocation won’t be enough. We’re bleeding money, all for a sun that doesn’t send any bills.

This problem will get worse before it gets better. The more solar panels we install, the greater oversupply we’ll face when the sun shines, and the larger the spread between the fixed feed-in tariffs and the actual market value of this green electricity. In 2024, as I said, the government projected that feed-in tariffs would cost 10.6 billion Euros, but they’ll probably end up costing 20 billion at least. Next year, the costs are projected to be even higher, and the year after that, they will be higher still. As Welt report, the German government plans to triple our solar capacity to 215 gigawatts over the next six years – “the equivalent of 215 nuclear power plants” every time the sun emerges from behind a blessed cloud.

The energy transitioners know they messed up. The new plan is to change the rules for solar subsidies. When prices go negative, larger producers won’t receive their fixed tariffs, and they’ll also have to sell their electricity themselves. In this way, they will become newly sensitive to market demand and stop overproducing electricity when nobody wants it. It is almost like creating a blind system totally oblivious to market incentives was a bad idea. Unfortunately, the new rules will apply only to new solar installations. The German government will still have to honour its insane agreement to pay the operators of older solar plants for years to come. We will light billions on fire for nothing.

October 4, 2024

You know the jig is up for “renewables” when even Silicon Valley techbros turn against it

Filed under: Economics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

JoNova on the remarkably quick change of opinion among the big tech companies on the whole renewable energy question:

Google, Oracle, Microsoft were all raving fans of renewable energy, but all of them have given up trying to reach “net zero” with wind and solar power. In the rush to feed the baby AI gargoyle, instead of lining the streets with wind turbines and battery packs, they’re all suddenly buying, building and talking about nuclear power. For some reason, when running $100 billion dollar data centres, no one seems to want to use random electricity and turn them on and off when the wind stops. Probably because without electricity AI is a dumb rock.

In a sense, AI is a form of energy. The guy with the biggest gigawatts has a head start, and the guy with unreliable generators isn’t in the race.

It’s all turned on a dime. It was only in May that Microsoft was making the “biggest ever renewable energy agreement” in order to power AI and be carbon neutral. Ten minutes later and it’s resurrecting the old Three Mile Island nuclear plant. Lucky Americans don’t blow up their old power plants.

Oracle is building the world’s largest datacentre and wants to power it with three small modular reactors. Amazon Web Services has bought a data centre next to a nuclear plant, and is running job ads for a nuclear engineer. Recently, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, spoke about small modular reactors. The chief of Open AI also happens to chair the boards of two nuclear start-ups.

February 11, 2024

Charlie Angus, Canada’s one-man campaign for struggle sessions, re-education, and prison for people who say things he doesn’t like

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post, Tristin Hopper imagines the inside thoughts of NDP MP Charlie Angus, who introduced a Private Member’s Bill this week to criminalize speech that even hints at not being fully onboard with Team Climate Catastrophe, especially anything supporting the use of fossil fuels:

“Charlie Angus at convention 2023 2 (cropped)” by DrOwl19 is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .

Monday
It’s an odd thing to work in the House of Commons; a place where the country’s most cynical, power-mad misanthropes are gathered together into one distilled mass of treachery.

This is why I aligned myself with the only true bastion of moral rectitude in this wretched, faithless town. The NDP does not court power, and thus remains untainted by it. Only by insulating ourselves against the corrupting lure of ambition can we truly know we are on the right side of history.

And today, more than ever, I know the only true moral course is to introduce a federal program of jailing any Canadian who expresses positive opinions of a non-renewable fuel source. Not every Canadian, mind you, just those who can’t provide evidence that an oil company doesn’t indirectly benefit them in some way.

Tuesday
As predicted, the usual agents of disinformation have libelled my bill as “illiberal” or “fascistic”. We’ll prescribe appropriate criminal consequences for this kind of mendacity in due course, but for now I would only ask these deceit-merchants to consider what we’re up against.

Oil companies are, quite literally, the knowing architects of the complete destruction of the human race. If the so-called “market” had been left to its own devices, the world would currently be a utopia of bottomless green energy. But instead, the oil and gas industry has tricked humanity into believing that fossil fuels are bringers of anything except slavery.

Against this kind of perfidy, I was forced to devise legislation that was broad enough to eliminate any conceivable loophole. If we banned pro-oil commercials, they would simply pour their advertising dollars into billboards. If we banned billboards, they would start embedding secret pro-gasoline messages in popular music. If we banned that, they would train armies of crows to attack e-cyclists while cawing the words “Suncor” and “pipelines”.

And you know what they would say when I tabled a bill to ban the attack crows? They would call it “illiberal”.

October 28, 2023

The transition from burning wood to burning coal

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Europe, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The latest Age of Invention newsletter touches on some of the details Anton Howes uncovered while researching some work on commission for Britain’s NESTA (formerly the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts):

An image of coal pits in the Black Country from Griffiths’ Guide to the iron trade of Great Britain, 1873.
Image digitized by the Robarts Library of the University of Toronto via Wikimedia Commons.

Here are a few key things that I hadn’t really fully appreciated until undertaking this particular commission, though each has provided even more threads I still need to pull on:

ONE. The transition to coal was started by finding ways to exploit the lower-grade, cheaper and more sulphurous coals: initially by finding ways to burn it in people’s homes that would not leave everyone crying and coughing from the stinking fumes; and then with the expanded supply of even the lowest-grade coals making it cost-effective to do things like boil seawater in pans to make salt. The very lowest-grade coal was termed simply “pan coal”. While I’m pretty certain that these innovations were responsible for much of the rise of coal — coal-fuelled salt pans were even the foundation of the Scottish Lowlands economy going into the eighteenth century — the actual inventors involved are still a bit of a mystery. It’s something I need to return to, as “lots of anonymous people just invented through trial and error and adaptation” just doesn’t cut it for me — I’ve never found such stories to be true upon closer investigation.

TWO. Nobody ever talks about lime! Lime was one of the few things burnt with coal since ancient times, but largely to produce mortar for building. The increased availability of cheaper coal in the sixteenth century, however, meant that lime also soon found much wider use as a soil acidity regulator, as well as to control some pests and improve the absorption of fertilisers. It was especially favoured for sandy soils, allowing the conversion of barren heaths to agricultural land by increasing the soil’s water retention.

Yet lime is a huge blind spot for economic historians, despite it increasing the productivity of what was still by far the largest portion of the economy: agriculture. I have a rough and ready test of whether economic historians are paying enough attention to an industry, which is to look up the word in Stephen Broadberry et al.’s British Economic Growth 1270-1870, most scholars’ go-to resource on how historical British output is estimated. Lime is mentioned only once, and only as an input to the construction industry, for mortar. We should know more about lime’s impact.

THREE. Coal, through its various effects on agriculture, also led to an increase in the availability of grain, in turn leading to an abundance of muscle power. Horses were the literal workhorses of industrial cities, grinding the pigments for dyes and paints, tobacco for snuff, charred bones for shoe polish, tannin-rich oak bark for leather, flint for glass and ceramics, and grain for flour, beer, and spirits. Horses fulled cloth, pounded rags into paper, flatted metal into sheets, and bored pipes, guns and even cannon. And of course they powered the transportation infrastructure, hauling the waggons and barges laden with goods.

A theme I keep coming across when I do my research is that there was a lot of effort put into what we might call the “improvement of animals”. I’ve touched on this briefly before, but I get a sense that there’s a whole lot of iceberg lying in wait under the surface for me to uncover. It likely extended to dogs, for example, who like horses were also often used for mechanical tasks. Just yesterday, for example, I read an account by a visitor to 1630s Bristol mentioning how the roasting spits at its inns were driven by dogs in treadwheels. At some point I need to go through all this evidence I’ve inadvertently collected.

FOUR. The Dutch Republic’s Golden Age did not fail because it lacked energy sources. I had already suspected this, as it never rang true, but had not quite appreciated the extent of the evidence: the fairly rapid collapse of so many Dutch industries in the 1650s-80s was, if anything, accompanied by a super-abundance of energy. Both peat and grain were in fact cheaper than ever, largely as a result of plummeting demand. Even the products made using wind —such as the timber sawn for ships along the windy banks of the Zaan river — failed to survive the general collapse in demand.

If energy had been lacking, we would have expected the prices of peat and grain to have been at all-time highs, not in a slump. Indeed, the lack of demand for peat and grain, by sapping demand for infrastructure projects like bog drainage and canal-building, is what led to the re-flooding of much of the Dutch countryside. The causes of the collapse are still something of a mystery to me, but I now feel very confident in ruling the energy theory out.

October 22, 2023

The “Green New Deal” is great … for the well-connected wealthy elites

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Elizabeth Nickson — who lives in British Columbia, hands-down the “greenest” province in Canada — somehow isn’t a fan of the way our kakistocratic “elites” are pushing us all toward their utopian “green” world:

A few years ago when I was building my house, I attended a “green” building conference in San Francisco. Gavin Newsom and Bobby Kennedy, Jr. were giving keynote addresses, and across the conference floor were strewn hundreds of booths of builders, engineers, architects, visionaries, and commercial interests selling every manner of material, equipment, skill sets, and propaganda. Buildings, I was told, emit 59 percent of carbon emissions, and green builders would shut that down. And it would be profitable.

At the time I was neutral but dubious. I had completed a “green” subdivision and had promised puzzlingly powerful members of “the community” that I would build a “green” house. It wasn’t a requirement but it was an acceptable challenge and I knew I would be fascinated by the exercise.

I followed the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) platinum template, contracted the job myself. I wanted to build a healthy house, which meant as little chemical off-gassing as possible. Despite my savings, which were considerable, it still cost 40 percent more than a traditional stick-frame. The geothermal system cost $35,000 more than traditional heating and no, I have not “made back that money.” Today that cost would be north of $150,000.

We’re all in this together, right?

The only reason I am not bankrupt is that where I live is so restricted as to land use, housing prices have skyrocketed. Only the rich can afford to live here. My property with its “improvements,” which is to say my money and labor, is now worth 30 times my initial investment. This is known as old-fashioned economics, wherein you restrict supply and prices, via demand, go up.

This too is a perfect micro-illustration of the “Green Economy” or the the “Green New Deal.” It is “green” only for the wealthy or privileged by virtue of education. It is very, very “green” for those who profit from it. The people who took my extra money, other than the giant suction hose of government, were mostly those demanded by “green” theology: engineers (5), lawyers (3), surveyors (2), wildlife consultants (2), and permitting bureaucrats. Those requirements have doubled in the intervening years.

Today, life is very green for the hosts of eager young professionals at that conference who have in the intervening years insinuated themselves into every government structure, inserting siphons whereby they literally suck money out of the system in torrents of green. When I think of that conference, full of bright-eyed (expensively educated) enthusiasts, who were hell-bent on selling their ideas to the wider culture, I think: who the hell brought you up? Because this is a moral question, a profoundly ethical question. And everything you do is profoundly immoral.

The U.S. Supreme Court recently rejected an appeal that would overturn the econometrics of carbon pricing, i.e. that the Biden administration is placing too high an estimate on the future social cost of carbon emissions. Who can know the social cost of carbon emissions? But it means shuttering 450,000 shale jobs because think of the future.

May 30, 2023

It might be time to consider getting a home generator … while you still can

Filed under: Technology, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

J.D. Tuccille in today’s The Rattler newsletter suggests that if you’ve been considering getting a generator to power your house in case of blackouts, now might be a good time:

The regulatory body that oversees the nation’s power grid cast a bit of a chill over the coming warm months when, in mid-May, it cautioned that the country might not generate enough electric power to meet demand. Coming after multiple warnings from regulators, grid operators, and industry experts that enthusiasm for retiring old-school “dirty” generating capacity is outstripping the ability of renewable sources to fill the gap, the announcement is a heads-up to Americans that they may want to make back-up plans for a power grid growing increasingly unreliable. It’s also a reminder that green ideology is no substitute for the ability to flip a switch and have the lights come on.

Unreliable Energy

“NERC’s 2023 Summer Reliability Assessment warns that two-thirds of North America is at risk of energy shortfalls this summer during periods of extreme demand,” the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a nominally non-governmental organization with statutory regulatory powers, noted May 17. “‘Increased, rapid deployment of wind, solar and batteries have made a positive impact,’ said Mark Olson, NERC’s manager of Reliability Assessments. ‘However, generator retirements continue to increase the risks associated with extreme summer temperatures, which factors into potential supply shortages in the western two-thirds of North America if summer temperatures spike.'”

This is not the first time we’re hearing that the power grid isn’t up to meeting demand for electricity. Nor is it the first time we’re told that renewable sources such as wind and solar are coming online more slowly than power-generation capacity based on fossil fuels is being retired.

Dwindling Power Plants

“The United States is heading for a reliability crisis,” Commissioner Mark C. Christie of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) told the Senate Committee on Energy & Natural Resources during a May 4 hearing. “I do not use the term ‘crisis’ for melodrama, but because it is an accurate description of what we are facing. I think anyone would regard an increasing threat of system-wide, extensive power outages as a crisis. In summary, the core problem is this: Dispatchable generating resources are retiring far too quickly and in quantities that threaten our ability to keep the lights on. The problem generally is not the addition of intermittent resources, primarily wind and solar, but the far too rapid subtraction of dispatchable resources, especially coal and gas.”

The federal Energy Information Administration foresees almost a quarter of coal generating capacity being retired by the end of the decade — a process already in progress. Just this month it announced “the United States will generate less electricity from coal this year than in any year this century.” Non-hydropower renewables are the only generating capacity sources really seen growing in the short-term.

In February of this year, PJM Interconnection, which manages grid operations in much of the eastern United States, warned of “increasing reliability risks … due to a potential timing mismatch between resource retirements, load growth and the pace of new generation entry.”

April 29, 2023

Justin can’t let Joe steal his thunder on this critical issue!

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Justin Trudeau’s love of the vastly expensive and utterly useless virtue signal is almost unmatched among western leaders, but as Bruce Gudmundsson relates here, some of Joe Biden’s lower-echelon cronies in the Pentagram Pentagon have put up a virtue signal that will be very hard for Justin to top:

In the United States, the president enjoys the privilege of appointing 4,000 of his supporters to positions within the Executive Branch. When the president is a Democrat, the best connected of these invariably prefer perches in the vast social service bureaucracy, there to reign (but rarely rule) over like-minded civil servants.* Those with the fewest friends, alas, end up in the Pentagon.

I’m honestly surprised that the number of direct appointees is so low … I’d have guessed at least ten times that number. I was vaguely aware that the formal “spoils” system was broken up late in the 19th century, but the US federal government and its various arms-length agencies are several orders of magnitude larger than they were back then.

The appointees who suffer the latter fate know nothing of the work they supposedly supervise. Indeed, having been raised in homes in which there were “no war toys for Christmas”, they cannot distinguish a sailor from an airman, let alone explain the difference between a soldier and a Marine. What is worse, like impoverished Regency belles, obliged to spend the Season wearing last year’s frocks, Defense Department Democrats live in constant fear of losing caste.

With this in mind, it is not surprising that the aforementioned appointees embrace, with great enthusiasm, projects of the sort they can discuss at Georgetown cocktail parties. During the Obama years (2009-2017), many of these bore the brand of “green energy”. (No doubt, the appointees in question made much of the double entendre.) As might be expected, many of these programs went into hibernation during the presidency of Donald Trump (2017-2021), only to spring back to life after the inauguration (in 2021) of Joseph Biden.

In a recent post on his Substack, the indispensable Igor Chudov lays bare the folly of one of these initiatives. Part of the Climate Strategy unveiled by the US Army in 2022, this plan calls for the progressive replacement, over the course of twenty-eight years, of petroleum dependent cars, trucks, and tanks with their battery-powered counterparts.

I mean, on the plus side, it would mean that wars could only take place on sunny days (for solar-powered tanks) or windy days (for wind-powered tanks). The sheer stupidity of the notion would be laughable, except they really seem to be serious about military combat vehicles running on batteries recharged with solar cells, windmills, or unicorn farts. I’d call it peak Clown World, but it’s a safe bet that they can get even crazier without working up a sweat.

Searching for an appropriate graphic to go with this article, I found this gem at Iowa Climate Change from back in 2021:

    * Lest you think, Gentle Reader, that this post serves a partisan political purpose, I will mention that am convinced that the one Republican political appointee with whom I am well-acquainted is a knucklehead of the first order. Indeed, if I ever manage to locate the proper forms, I intend to nominate him for a place of particular honor in the Knucklehead Hall of Fame.

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 13, 2023

Old and tired – “Conspiracy Theories”. The new hotness – “Coming Features”

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Kim du Toit rounds up some not-at-all random bits of current events:

So Government — our own and furriners’ both — have all sorts of rules they wish to impose on us (and from here on I’m going to use “they” to describe them, just for reasons of brevity and laziness — but we all know who “they” are). Let’s start with one, pretty much picked at random.

They want to end sales of vehicles powered by internal combustion engines, and make us all switch to electric-powered ones. Leaving aside the fact that as far as the trucking industry is concerned, this can never happen no matter how massive the regulation, we all know that this is not going to happen (explanation, as if any were needed, is here). But to add to the idiocy, they have imposed all sorts of unrealistic, nonsensical and impossible deadline to all of this, because:

There isn’t enough electricity — and won’t be enough electricity, ever — to power their future of universal electric car usage. Why is that? Well, for one thing, they hate nuclear power (based on outdated 1970s-era fears), are closing existing ones and will not allow new ones to be built by dint of strangling environmental regulation (passed because of said 1970s-era fears). Then, to add to that, they have forced the existing electricity supply to become unstable by insisting on unreliable and variable generation sources such as solar and wind power. Of course, existing fuel sources such as oil. coal and natural gas are also being phased out because they are “dirty” (they aren’t, in the case of natgas, and as far as oil and coal are concerned, much much less so than in decades past) — but as with nuclear power, the rules are being drawn up as though old technologies are still being used (they aren’t, except in the Third World / China — which is another whole essay in itself). And if people want to generate their own electricity? Silly rabbits: US Agency Advances New Rule Targeting Portable Gas-Powered Generators. (It’s a poxy paywall, but the headline says it all, really.)

So how is this pixie dust “new” electricity to be stored? Why, in batteries, of course — to be specific, in lithium batteries which are so far the most efficient storage medium. The only problem, of course, is that lithium needs to be mined (a really dirty industry) and even assuming there are vast reserves of lithium, the number of batteries needed to power a universe of cars is exponentially larger than the small number of batteries available — but that means MOAR MINING which means MOAR DIRTY. And given how dirty mining is, that would be a problem, yes?

No. Because — wait for it — they will limit lithium mining, also by regulation, by enforcing recycling (where have we heard this before?) and by reducing battery size.

Now take all the above into consideration, and see where this is going. Reduced power supply, reduced power consumption, reduced fuel supply: a tightening spiral, which leads to my final question:

JUST HOW DO THEY THINK THIS IS ALL GOING TO END?

If there’s one thing we know, it’s that increased pressure without escape mechanisms will eventually cause explosion. It’s true in physics, it’s true in nature and it’s true, lest we forget, in humanity.

Of course, as friend-of-the-blog Severian often points out, these people think Twitter is real life. Of course there’ll be enough pixie dust to sprinkle over all their preferred solutions to make them come true. Reality is just a social construct — they learned that in college, and believe it wholeheartedly.

March 27, 2023

The vicious – not virtuous – circle of green

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

Elizabeth Nickson thinks that our societal pursuit of green technology will be the undoing of everything we have built:

Some of us have been saying this for a very long time: green will bring down the world. Green creates a vicious circle, a term you may remember from Economics 101. It is when the serpent eats itself, no wealth is created and collapse results. That is what we are doing with ESG, with carbon taxes, with the forced adoption of unreliable vertiginously expensive green energy. It has skewed every single market. No one is investing in sound enterprise, and anything once sound is a Jenga tower, unstable, rotting from within. This. This is what threatens to bring down the world.

Green is built on subsidies. And not just government subsidy. Every mutual fund, every hedge fund, every multinational and every local or national corporation has a green monster within preventing innovative investments, sucking profits and growth. Every local, regional and state government leaks millions to green morons promising to “bring sustainable prosperity”. The only prosperity is theirs. They fiddle around in lakes and watercourses, producing “studies”, all of which are hysterical and exaggerated. They muck around in forests, buying as much as possible, shut them down, never visit again, leaving them to desertify. They buy farms and ranches, leaving them to rot. They are termites, eating us alive.

These outfits have burrowed into every level of government and every ministry. They are purely extractive. They do not produce anything of value. They leech. They move in and out of government. When in government, they identify sources of funds to plunder once out of government. In 2015, I did a cross-ministry analysis of just how much money these folks take from the government annually. It is in the hundreds of billions in the US alone. From private foundations they take more billions. All this money is used to shut down economic activity.

[…]

Here is the nasty little secret that lies at the heart of environmentalism. It has been long captured by plutocrats and WEFers, who use it to take resources once thought to belong to the people, to everyone, to use in order to innovate and develop. This freedom and access, and only this was the source of prosperity in the United States. It powered the entire world. It made America the beacon, the lighthouse of the world. It produced strong healthy brilliant young people who performed one feat of innovation, athleticism, and creation after another. All those kids today are working on ever more vicious ways to surveil, control and supress via AI.

And the interior is being cleared of people, businesses, farms, ranches, working forests, mines, and oil and gas installations.

In pursuit of 2030 goals, Biden’s agents are busily acquiring hundreds of millions of acres from private owners, from state and regional land banks, which they will then lock down. Many ranchers, including the heroic Wayne Hage, believe that government is taking that land to use as collateral for its massive debt to the Bank for International Settlements. The only people who will be able to use those resources are multinationals who pay a fee to government and to the BIS to pay down the loans. No citizens will be able to access those resources to make money for themselves, to build families and businesses and towns and cities. The environmental movement has, within 40 years, returned us to serfdom, where we eat what we are told to eat, go where we are told to go, take whatever medicine they want to give us, and eventually, fight when we are told to fight.

The environmental movement is so evil, it has twisted ethical standards to the point where we are able to kill each other with impunity. Their PR is so strong, so invasive, that every school child now believes there are too many people (this is nonsense), and population must be drastically drawn down (a genocide unrivalled in history). Every adult secretly fears this is true. This appalling lie has created a culture of death. What are the effects of this thinking, that life is no longer sacred, but a threat?

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