Practical Engineering
Published 21 Oct 2025All the things I love about Niagara Falls
The same thing that makes Niagara Falls impressive for tourists (the big drop) makes it valuable for power and a major challenge for shipping. And out of that comes all kinds of fascinating infrastructure.
Practical Engineering is a YouTube channel about infrastructure and the human-made world around us. It is hosted, written, and produced by Grady Hillhouse. We have new videos posted regularly, so please subscribe for updates. If you enjoyed the video, hit that “like” button, give us a comment, or watch another of our videos!
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February 26, 2026
The Hidden Engineering of Niagara Falls
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February 24, 2026
Canada’s climate follies, a brief update
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.
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November 14, 2025
Isn’t it time we scrapped a temporary WW1 practice and stop moving the clocks back and forth?
I don’t know anyone who likes the twice-a-year exercise of resetting all the various clocks in the house, but we still end up doing it (I almost said “like clockwork”). Here in Ontario, we have a law on the books that allows us to dispense with the practice as soon as our immediate neighbours do (Quebec, Manitoba, New York, Michigan and Minnesota … not sure if Pennsylvania and Ohio are included). Mark Naylor says the pressure to get rid of it is certainly building in Europe:
Graphic originally from Quartz, 2013.
The debate about Daylight Saving Time (DST) has reignited in both Europe and the United States. Spain’s Socialist prime minister Pedro Sánchez is lobbying the EU to put an end to the bi-annual clock change, although he hasn’t stated whether he favors permanent summer (DST) or winter time (also referred to as Standard Time/ST) — which means more light in the evening or morning, respectively. It is a rare point of agreement between the Spanish premier and Donald Trump, who also wants to scrap the clock change, in his case to make summer time permanent.
Both leaders seem to have the public on their side. In a 2018 survey of 4.6 million European citizens, 84% favored abolishing the twice-yearly time changes (in Spain, that figure rose to 93%). A recent poll in the US found that just 12% are in favor of retaining the status quo; 47% are opposed to DST (including 27% who are “strongly opposed”), while 40% are neutral. Legislation passed in 1966 enabled individual states to choose whether or not to implement the practice; today, the only states that don’t are Arizona and Hawaii.
[…]
Sánchez has a strong case. Studies in the US and Europe have shown that the energy saved by DST is negligible. In the 1970s, the US Department of Transportation found that changing the clocks reduced the nation’s electricity consumption by just 1%. A report on Slovakia’s energy usage between 2010 and 2017 put that figure at 0.8%. In Indiana, which switched to DST in 2006, researchers found that the practice led to a 1% increase in consumption, as households used more power for air conditioning on summer evenings and heating on late fall and early spring mornings.
Studies have also linked clock-changing to an increased risk of mood disorders, heart attacks, strokes, and traffic accidents—all a result of the disruption caused to our internal circadian rhythms. “Left to themselves,” says David Ray, a professor of endocrinology at Oxford University, “[these] naturally align with the light–dark cycle, so the only problem comes when you start arbitrarily defining time based on a clock.” A new study by scientists at Stanford University has found that adopting permanent ST, or winter time, would be the best way for us to align with the sun’s cycle, preventing 300,000 strokes a year and resulting in 2.6 million fewer people with obesity.
Trump, meanwhile, has flagged the economic case against bi-annual clock changes. In April, he wrote on Truth Social that the idea of switching to permanent summer time is “Very popular and, most importantly, [there would be] no more changing of the clocks, a big inconvenience and, for our government, A VERY COSTLY EVENT!”
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September 20, 2025
QotD: Why modern dishwashers suck
The current standards for dishwashers took effect in 2013. The standards, which were based on a consensus agreement between manufacturers and efficiency advocates, specify minimum energy and water efficiency levels. The standards require that standard-size dishwashers use no more than 307 kWh per year and 5.0 gallons of water per cycle.
In 2024, DOE finalized amended standards for dishwashers based on a joint recommendation from manufacturers and efficiency advocates. The new standards for dishwashers will cost-effectively reduce energy consumption by 15% relative to the current standards while also cutting water waste. Dishwashers
It is a general problem, but what started me thinking about it was being told by my dishwasher that it would take three and a half hours to wash the dishes. That seems, judging by a quick search online, to be longer than average but still within the normal range. I have not been able to find figures online for how long dishwashers took twenty or thirty years ago but, by what I remember, it was substantially less — and the dishes ended up dry, which ours don’t.
The explanation is in the final word of the quote above, “waste”. The owners of dishwashers pay for water and power, so if making them more efficient in those dimensions was costless, did not require giving up something else, there would be no need for the Department of Energy to make the manufacturers do it. I conclude that it was not costless, that it either made dishwashers cost more or do their job less well — take longer, not dry the dishes as well, not clean them as well. Using more power or water to do a better job is not waste.
David Friedman, “Optimizing On A Single Variable”, David Friedman’s Substack, 2025-06-02.
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September 13, 2025
“It was about control before green policy became popular, and it is about control now”
In the National Post, Carson Jerema identifies the common thread among all of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s efforts since becoming Liberal party leader:
Then-Governor of the Bank of Canada Mark Carney at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
WEF photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Prime Minister Mark Carney may not be as obnoxiously progressive as Justin Trudeau, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t stubbornly left wing in his own right, though he has managed to convince many critics otherwise.
Over the past decade, the Liberals were particularly self-righteous over climate policy, so much so that the deviations made by Carney since assuming office have been met with praise — or, on the left, with scorn — that he is somehow pro-business and represents the return of the centre-right Liberals. Some even think he’s a conservative. Others have suggested that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is now entirely redundant.
This narrative is just more proof of how utterly captured the media is in this country by the Liberal party. It is true that Carney gives the appearance that he is abandoning many of the government’s environmental policies. He set the carbon tax rate to zero, paused the EV mandate and, on Thursday, he refused to endorse his government’s own carbon-emissions targets.
None of this, however, should be taken as evidence that Carney represents some sort of rightward or pro-business shift in the Liberal party. He is not proposing to let markets determine what infrastructure projects get built. Nor is he proposing to minimize regulations to attract investment.
Instead, Carney wants to command the economy by himself, laying bare the reality that what attracts left-wing politicians to climate policy is not saving the planet from carbon, but using environmental objectives to manage the economy. It was about control before green policy became popular, and it is about control now. For Carney specifically, before he entered politics, “decarbonizing” markets was quite remunerative in his various banking roles.
Noticeably absent from the five infrastructure projects that the prime minister said on Thursday would be fast-tracked under the Major Projects Office was an oil and gas pipeline. Also noticeable was the fact that all five of the projects had already been approved, but the government tried to pass them off as something new anyway.
Even if the projects had been all brand new, the lack of a pipeline would still be of no surprise, as what private investor would be willing to back a pipeline when the Liberals’ Impact Assessment Act, tanker ban and emissions cap all exist to conspire against energy projects of any kind?
One thing that became incredibly obvious early in Justin Trudeau’s premiership was that the prime minister — and his ministers in general — really did seem to believe that talking about doing something was as effective in solving problems as actually doing the thing. Many had hoped that Mark Carney would be different … but as Dan Knight points out, he may actually be worse:
From there, [Poilievre] broadened the attack. He spoke of an entire generation priced out of homeownership, of immigration growing “three times faster than housing and jobs”, of crime rising, and of what he called “the worst economy in the G7”. And then he turned squarely on Carney: “Mr. Carney is actually more irresponsible than even Justin Trudeau was“, citing an 8% increase in government spending, 37% more for consultants, and 62 billion dollars in lost investment — the largest outflow in Canadian history, according to the National Bank.
The message was simple: Liberals talk, Conservatives build. Poilievre painted Carney as a man of speeches and promises, not results. “The mistake the media is making is they’re judging him by his words rather than his deeds“, he said.
It was an opening statement designed less to introduce policy — those details came later — and more to frame the battle. For Poilievre, Carney isn’t just Trudeau’s replacement. He’s Trudeau’s sequel, and in some ways worse.
[…]
Pierre Poilievre didn’t hold back when asked about Mark Carney’s record. His words: “Mr. Carney is actually more irresponsible than even Justin Trudeau was“. That’s not a throwaway line, he backed it with numbers.
According to Poilievre, Carney inherited what he called a “morbidly obese government” from Trudeau and made it worse: 8% bigger overall, 37% more for consultants, and 6% more bureaucracy. He says Carney’s deficit is set to be even larger than Trudeau’s.
Then the jobs number: 86,000 more unemployed people under Carney than under Trudeau. That, Poilievre argued, is the real measure, not the polished speeches Carney gives. His line: “The mistake the media is making is they’re judging him by his words rather than his deeds“.
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September 4, 2025
Net Zero targets and Britain’s ever-declining car industry
At the Foundation for Economic Education, Jake Scott charts the decline of the British auto manufacturing centres and the government’s allegiance to its Net Zero programs:
Custom image by FEE
Britain was once a giant of car manufacturing. In the 1950s, we were the second-largest producer in the world and the biggest exporter. Coventry, Birmingham, and Oxford built not just cars, but the reputation of an industrial nation; to this day, it is a source of great pride that Jaguar–Land Rover, a global automotive icon, still stands between Coventry and Birmingham. By the 1970s, we were producing more than 1.6 million vehicles a year.
Today? We have fallen back to 1950s levels. Last year, Britain built fewer than half our peak output—800,000 cars, and the lowest outside the pandemic since 1954. Half a year later, by mid-2025, production has slumped a further 12%. The country that once led the automotive revolution is now struggling to stay afloat, and fighting to remain relevant.
This is why the news that BMW will end car production at Oxford’s Mini plant, shifting work to China, is so damning, bringing this decline into sharp focus. The Mini is not only a classic British car; Alec Issigonis’s original design made it an international icon. For decades, the Mini has been the bridge between British design flair and foreign investment. Its departure leaves 1,500 jobs at risk at a time when the government is desperate to fuel growth and convince a wavering consumer market that there is no tension between industrial production and Net Zero goals.
It’s a bitter reminder that we in Britain have been here before: letting an industrial crown jewel slip away.
The usual explanations will be offered: global competition, exchange rates, supply chains. All true, in the midst of a global trade war that is heating up and damaging major British exports. But such a diagnosis is incomplete. The truth is that Britain’s car industry is being squeezed by a mix of geopolitical realignment and government missteps.
The car industry has become the frontline of a new trade war. Washington has already moved aggressively to shield its own firms: the Inflation Reduction Act offers vast subsidies for US-made EVs and batteries, an unapologetic attempt to onshore production, and something that became a flashpoint of tension in Trump’s negotiation with the EU in the latest trade deal. On the production side, the Act has poured billions into US manufacturing: investment in EV and battery plants hit around $11 billion per quarter in 2024.
Ripples have been sent across the world in the US’s wake: Europe, faced with a flood of cheap Chinese EVs, has imposed tariffs of up to 35% after an anti-subsidy investigation. Talks have even turned to a system of minimum import prices instead of tariffs. Unsurprisingly, China has threatened retaliation against European luxury marques, while experts warn the tariffs may slow the EU’s green transition by raising prices.
This is no longer a free market: cars are treated as strategic assets, the 21st-century equivalent of shipbuilding or steel. Whoever controls the supply chains, particularly for EV batteries and the mining of lithium, controls not only the future of the industry but an important lever of national power.
The results are visible. In July 2025, Tesla’s UK sales collapsed nearly 60%, while Chinese giant BYD’s deliveries quadrupled. Europe responded by talking up new tariffs. Britain did nothing. In this asymmetric contest, our market risks becoming a showroom for foreign producers — subsidizing both sides of the trade war without defending our own.
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July 7, 2025
The federal government’s EV mandate cannot stand
Following its established pattern, the Canadian government will seek any possible path other than economic reality, especially when it comes to things like mandating that all vehicles sold in Canada must be EVs by 2035:
Nissan Leaf electric vehicle charging.
Photo by Nissan UK
It’s not always the unexpected that gets governments in trouble — often enough it’s their own bad judgement, poor timing or general clumsiness that gets in the way. But the unanticipated does happen a lot.
Parties and politicians put time and effort into concocting a set of policies aimed at winning votes by proposing remedies to problems identified as occupying top rungs of current voter concern. If they’re lucky they get elected, presumably intending to put those policies into effect at the earliest opportunity. Then the world shifts and pulls the rug from under them.
Former prime minister Justin Trudeau was a big fan of the attention-getting promise. Especially if it was a pledge timed well into the future when he was unlikely to still be around to be held responsible. Carbon reductions too ambitious to be realistic. Budget targets too unlikely to be believed. Statist planning projects that tended increasingly to the surreal.
Mark Carney is left with the detritus and the problem of what to do about it. As prime minister he’s already acted on a few of the problematic leftovers, ditching the carbon tax even though he’d previously supported it as a good idea; scrapping an increased tax on capital gains although the Treasury could certainly use the money; “caving,” as the Trump administration so tastefully put it, on a digital services tax that was a bad idea to begin with but pushed through by the Trudeau government anyway.
There’s an argument to be made, and not a bad one, that each retreat was the right move for the moment. And if there are mistakes that need abandoning, the early days of a new government is proverbially the best time to do it.
But righting wrongs has confronted Carney with a new predicament, in that there are so many Trudeau-era wrongs that need righting. Washington was still in the midst of its victory dance over its digital tax triumph when Canada’s auto industry came along to plead for similar treatment from Ottawa, insisting automakers couldn’t possibly meet previously-set electric vehicle targets and urging the new Liberal government to backtrack post haste.
Carney hosted the session with Canada’s chief executives for Ford, Stellantis and General Motors. Brian Kingston, chief executive of the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers Association, was blunt in identifying the targets set for electric vehicle (EV) production as the main topic.
“The EV mandate itself is not sustainable. The targets that have been established cannot be met,” he said on arriving for the meeting. Afterwards he told Politico‘s online news site, “At a time when the industry is under immense pressure, the damaging and redundant ZEV mandate must be urgently removed”.
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April 30, 2025
Low-energy Europe
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.”
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April 9, 2025
“South Africa is what happens when a country becomes ungovernable”
Niccolo Soldo’s weekend roundup includes some quotes from Lawrence Thomas on what he terms a “racketeer party state“, what the “Rainbow Nation” of South Africa has degenerated into since the end of Apartheid:
South Africa is what happens when a country becomes ungovernable. From endemic sexual crime to farm murders, rolling blackouts, and expropriation, the rest is just the details. What has come to be termed “South Africanization” is not the failed development of a Third-World nation such as Afghanistan or Somalia, but the structural de-development of a once fully modern state that had its own nuclear weapons program. President Trump’s support of Afrikaner farmers has brought global attention to the decaying state of the country and is perhaps the most high-level recognition yet that the 1990s “Rainbow Nation” dream is dead. What’s strange about it all is how much of it happened on purpose.
What may be worse is that the very system of law and government itself has become an instrument to be captured and used to further the mass looting of the country. South Africans of all races inherit a Western political culture and economy. The average South African experiences a strong civic identity, highly active political parties, popular national media networks, a market economy, and a parliamentary constitutional order. The last thirty years saw a coalition of political actors, patronage networks, and organized criminal gangs seize control of and use all the infrastructure of modern government for their own ends.
[…]
While songs like “Kill the Boer” at rallies tend to grab headlines, the most consequential development of late is the passing of expropriation without compensation into law by the supposedly moderate President Cyril Ramaphosa. In addition to further eroding property rights, it emboldens a widespread movement that sees land redistribution as the sole resolution to the country’s racial conflict and views the presence of any white population as fundamentally illegitimate. The radicalization of race politics is the means through which political fights are won, since it plays on the country’s major divides and wins over those who feel left out of the spoils.
On the ground, reports tell of ANC officials tacitly allowing invasions of private and public land by squatters. Occupations of this sort have sometimes preceded the farm murders which have gained media attention internationally, and squatters have now begun to invoke the Expropriation Act. Such groups become the shock troops of political pressure: they can harass and pressure the occupants of the lands they occupy, or worse, while becoming a media story about the “landless oppressed” used to justify broader government action. The broad facilitation of ground-level conflict and crime by those with political power is the defining feature of South Africanization.
[…]
In other words, decay is a burden without benefit. There is no “rock bottom”. Business, political organization, social fabric, and all other forms of Western cultural life just face increasing costs. Some are direct, while others are opportunity costs: how much doesn’t happen because almost no one can guarantee electricity? In a relatively developed country, there’s still much more to break down and expropriate.
The combination of social progressivism with an economic model of managed decline has become orthodoxy in many establishment parties across the developed world. South Africa is a study of the political phenomenon in its advanced stage and a demonstration of what is at stake in defeating it in the rest of the Western world. Flip Buys, leader of the Afrikaner trade union Solidariteit, was likely prophetic when he foresaw that South Africa would become home to the “first large grouping of Westerners living in a post-Western country”.
Emphasis from Niccolo’s excerpts.
February 12, 2025
Electric vehicles and cold Canadian weather
The Canadian government has been a noisy proponent for Canadians replacing their internal combustion vehicles with electric-powered alternatives, but unlike places like California it gets cold in Canada … very cold indeed at times. The CAA conducted some tests on popular EVs to find out how typical cold conditions impact the range of the cars:
Nissan Leaf electric vehicle charging.
Photo by Nissan UK
CAA is out with the results from their first ever road tests of how electric vehicles (EV) charge and perform in a Canadian winter.
They tested out 14 electric vehicles which included seven of the top 10 sellers in Canada. They were driven from Ottawa to Mont Tremblant and the temperatures during the drive ranged from -7 to -15 degrees Celsius.
Each vehicle was driven until the battery completely died to determine the range in winter conditions. The results were compared to the estimated driving range published by Natural Resources Canada. CAA says officially posted EV ranges (below) in Canada are based on overall, year-round numbers.
“CAA is responding to a top concern of Canadians when it comes to EVs,” said Ian Jack, vice-president, public affairs, CAA National. “We measured the effective range of electric vehicles in cold weather and how quickly they charge. These insights are critical for both current EV owners and those considering making the switch.”
The association says a recent poll revealed more than two-thirds of Canadians say the drop in driving range during winter is the top barrier to purchasing an EV. Out of those who own an EV, 65 per cent said they experienced a lower battery range in extreme cold weather.
The rest results showed the vehicles drove 14 to 39 per cent less than their official range.
“The vast difference in results really highlights the importance in truth and advertising when it comes to EV range and making sure that Canadians are comparing numbers when it comes to winter performance,” said Kristine D’Arbelles, Senior Director of Public Affairs for CAA National.
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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”
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.
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October 5, 2024
Scary words of 2024 – “Luckily, FEMA is on the case”
As I recounted a few days back, I was relieved to hear from my friend in the Asheville NC area after the region absorbed the damage from Hurricane Helene. Tom Knighton had a similar experience:
A friend of mine lives at the edge of where Helene did her worst. He just got power back on yesterday and was finally able to let me know he was OK. I was worried for obvious reasons.
In the deepest, worst parts of where the storm ripped things to shreds, they’re trying to just make it to the next day. They’re struggling to find clean drinking water, food, shelter, the works.
Luckily, FEMA is on the case.
They took to social media yesterday and posted this crap.
That’s right. People who don’t have internet, phone service, or electricity should call, download an app, or log onto the FEMA website.
I won’t ask how stupid can the federal government be, but I’m worried they’d take it as a challenge.
Back in the day, FEMA would roll into a disaster area with paper applications and facilitate all of that right there. While the internet and smartphones are glorious things, this is a prime example of when they’re a terrible option for people.
Right now, American citizens are struggling. They’re thankful to be alive and are working their butts off to keep themselves alive. They’ve paid taxes their entire lives, and now that they need some of theirs back, their federal government is telling them to do what is physically impossible for many of them.
I can’t help but see this and think that their claims of having enough money in spite of spending hundreds of billions on illegal immigrants ring a tad hollow.
If they have the money, why not put boots on the ground getting people signed up for any assistance they may be entitled to?
Honestly, while I’ve commented before about the gross incompetence of the government in disaster response — and I’ll agree that maliciousness is most definitely a possibility, if not a probability in these instances — this is just weapons-grade … whatever, be it stupidity, meanness, or a combination of both.
Heads should roll.
Update: David Warren notes that it’s not merely FEMA incompetence, it’s active deterrence for private relief efforts by all federal agencies.
From the Internet (for instance updates from Elon Musk), we note that non-governmental charitable efforts are not merely “discouraged”. The government is seizing and impounding desperately-needed local goods and services. The rest of the federal bureaucracy is also “chipping in”, to stifle relief efforts. The FAA, for instance, is restricting private aircraft with supplies, and making it almost impossible to fly drones, demanding that flights be individually approved by their slothful trolls. Those who wish to bring help to the survivors have both the wreckage of the storm, and government agents to block them.
This is how things work in this world, and have worked, since the Reformation, when the state took over welfare, hospitals, schools, and all other eleemosynary institutions. Rather than allow inspiring expressions of Christian charity, they became the means for cynical political posturing and control. And with “democracy”, we have detailed laws and policies, to prevent the people from helping themselves — as they would do, by laws of nature.
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October 4, 2024
You know the jig is up for “renewables” when even Silicon Valley techbros turn against it
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.
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October 1, 2024
Devastation in the Carolinas
My oldest friend moved to the United States many years ago, moving around the country as his job dictated, but a few years back he and his wife found their perfect house near Asheville, NC. We had emailed to see how they were doing, but got no answer. Yesterday, I got a call from my friend’s cell phone to say that he and his wife were fine and they’d taken in an elderly neighbour until things get back to normal, but they currently don’t have electricity, land line telephone, or municipal water, but they’re otherwise fine. Their house is well above flood level, and he has sufficient camping supplies to keep them going for a while. He loaned his chainsaw to another neighbour who was trying to organize work parties to cut away fallen trees and branches and get more of the local roads open again (my friend recently had lyme disease and doesn’t want to trust his hands doing something as risky as running a chainsaw). We kept the call as short as possible, as he’ll have to manually recharge his phone until power is restored.
Virginia Postrel is originally from that same area of western North Carolina and northwestern South Carolina and reports on how her family in the area is doing in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene:
One of the many examples of the “horizontal forest” on nearly every road in Greenville, SC.
Photo by Virginia’s brother Sam M. Inman IV.
If you read my autobiographical reminiscences, you may have realized that I have family in Upstate South Carolina and western North Carolina, which have been hit hard by the unexpected ferocity of Hurricane Helene. Power has been out in Greenville, SC, for days and roads are nearly impassable because of downed trees on nearly every block.
My brother Sam, who went out in a truck on Friday to buy gasoline for his generator, said only about half the stations that had working pumps and were running out of gas quickly. “Lines of cars around the block … reminiscent of the 1970s”, he texted. He went out again today and found a stark difference between local QuikTrip stations and others. At QT, the lines were longer but flowed faster because stations had closed all but a single entrance and exit. Elsewhere, stations were chaotic traffic jams. At one point, he found himself unable to exit after fueling up because the cars behind and in front of him left no to maneuver room. (He persuaded the one behind him to ease away from his bumper.)
The assisted living place where my mother lives has a generator and at first continued to operate its kitchen and elevators. By today, however, the generator had become unreliable, the lights were flickering, few employees could get to work, and the kitchen was offering dry Cheerios for breakfast. Sam brought our mom to his house, which has no power. He later realized that he needed to return to get her medicine, which usually is delivered daily. I can only imagine how residents who don’t have local family — or who are in the memory care wing! — are managing.
Even people who were prepared with generators, many bought after a blizzard 20 years ago, needed gasoline to power them and, they soon realized, adapters to connect them to household appliances. The adapter aisle at Home Depot was quickly depleted.
The good news is that food is available. Grocery stores are operating more or less as normal, assuming you can get to them. When you sell frozen food, you apparently install large, reliable generators.
Meanwhile, my cousin in Asheville finally got weak cell signal back today. We’d been unable to communicate with her before now. With her husband, pets, and 95-year-old mother, she’s evacuating to Winston-Salem through the weekend, hoping Duke Power will live up to promises that power will be restored by Friday but preparing in case it takes a few days longer.
Although terrible in some areas, the flooding isn’t as bad as it might be, thanks to the region’s many man-made lakes. They absorbed water that otherwise would have flowed into populated towns.
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September 29, 2024
The “Foundations” essay could apply equally to Canada’s doldrums as it does to Britain
Earlier this week, I linked to the “Foundations” essay by Ben Southwood, Samuel Hughes, and Sam Bowman and it struck me that so much of what they discuss about Britain’s stagnation applied at least as well to Canada. In the National Post, John Ivison concurs:
The “Foundations” essay pointed to moribund GDP per capita growth, among other data points, to make the argument that Britain is standing still economically. (Britain’s economy grew 0.7 per cent a year between 2002 and 2022, Canada’s increased 0.6 per cent a year in the same period, while U.S. output swelled 1.16 per cent a year.)
In relative terms, both countries are getting poorer: in 2002, Canada’s GDP per person was 81 per cent of the U.S.; in 2022, it was 72 per cent. The same figures for the U.K. against the U.S. are 78 per cent in 2002 and, 70 per cent in 2022.
The reason for Britain’s stagnation, the authors argue, is that it has effectively banned investment in transportation, energy and housing — “the foundations it needs to grow.”
Sound familiar?
“The most important economic fact about modern Britain is that it is difficult to build almost anything, anywhere. This prevents investment, increases energy costs and makes it harder for productive economic clusters to expand,” the authors write, saying the result is lower productivity, incomes and tax revenues.
They argued that Britain needs a program of reform with the scale and ambition of the liberalization of the 1980s that focused on cutting taxes, curbing union power and privatizing state-run industries.
“This time we must focus on making it easier to invest in homes, labs, railways, roads, bridges, interconnectors and nuclear reactors,” they write.
That’s a difficult proposition for politicians who are able to resist anything except the temptation to use resources for immediate electoral gratification, rather than investing for a time after they have left office.
Both Canada and Britain are laggards when it comes to investment in infrastructure. While China spent more than five per cent of its GDP on roads, bridges and other infrastructure in 2021, Canada invested just 0.5 per cent (down from 1.3 per cent in 2010) and the U.K. 0.9 per cent.
But the lack of dynamism is not simply political expediency. Rather, it is motivated by an indifference, even a hostility, toward building critical infrastructure.
The Foundations report noted that Britain has not built a reservoir for 30 years, yet faces chronic water shortages in the east of England. Its environmental agency has blocked new development on the basis that it could only be supplied with water by draining environmentally valuable chalk streams. The result is that England’s innovation hub, Cambridge, is barred from expanding, which threatens to strangle the country’s life-sciences industry.
Similar impulses are at work in Canada. Federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault said in February that Ottawa would stop investing in new road infrastructure — a position he later clarified to say meant the federal government would not fund large projects like a highway tunnel connecting Quebec City and Levis, Que.
That same sentiment is reflected in the federal Liberal government’s Impact Assessment Act, passed in 2019, which slowed the pace and increased the cost of major project approvals.
On the housing front, a generation of activists emerged who were intent on preventing urban sprawl yet were also opposed to building mid-rise buildings of the kind that eased housing pressures in continental Europe. Constraints on approval are a major contributor to the 3.5-million-unit housing gap because supply has not kept pace with demand.
The consequence of Canada’s regulatory sclerosis is what business veteran Paul Deegan and former clerk of the Privy Council Kevin Lynch in an FP Comment article earlier this year referred to as “an insidious stealth tax on Canadian jobs and growth“.
Taking each of the “foundations” in turn, the depth of the problem becomes clearer — but so do the solutions.
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